Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

There was a good-humoured expression on his yellow, wrinkled face. He clapped the other prisoners on the back with a puffy, hairless, snow-white hand whose fingers were strong enough to strangle a horse. He didn’t think twice about killing; it was no more difficult than pulling out his knife in jest. He was always rather excited after he had killed someone, like a kitten that has been playing with a may-bug.

Most of the murders he committed were on the instructions of Sturmführer Drottenhahr, the director of the medical section of the eastern block. The most difficult part was carrying the corpses to the crematorium, but Keyze didn’t have to do this himself and no one would have dared ask him. Nor were people allowed to get so weak they had to be taken to the place of execution on stretchers; Drottenhahr knew his job.

Keyze never made rude remarks or hurried the people who were to be operated on; he never pushed them or hit them. Although he had climbed the two concrete steps more than four hundred times, he felt a real interest in his victims – an interest aroused by the mixture of horror, impatience, submissiveness and passionate curiosity with which they looked at their executioner.

Keyze could never understand why the very mundaneness of his job so appealed to him. There was nothing special about the special cell; it was just a stool, a grey stone floor, a drain, a tap, a hosepipe, and a writing desk with a notebook on it.

The operation itself was equally mundane. If he had to shoot someone, Keyze called it ‘emptying a coffee-bean into someone’s head’; if he had to give someone an injection of carbolic acid, he called it ‘a small dose of elixir’.

The whole mystery of human life seemed to lie in the coffee-bean or the elixir. Really this mystery was astonishingly simple.

Keyze’s brown eyes simply weren’t those of a human being; they seemed to be made of plastic or some yellowish-brown resin. When they took on an expression of merriment, they inspired terror – probably the same terror a fish feels when it swims up to a snag half-covered in sand and suddenly discovers that the dark mass has eyes, teeth and tentacles.

Keyze was well aware of his own superiority over the artists, revolutionaries, scholars, generals and members of religious sects in the barrack-huts. It wasn’t just a matter of the coffee-bean or the elixir; it was an innate feeling of superiority that brought him real joy.

Nor was it a matter of his huge physical strength, his ability to brush obstacles aside, to knock people off their feet or smash through steel with his bare hands. No, what he admired in himself were the complex enigmas of his own soul. There was something very special in his anger, something in the play of his moods that transcended logic. On one occasion a group of Russian prisoners picked out by the Gestapo was being taken to the special barracks; Keyze had asked them to sing some of their favourite songs.

Four Russians with swollen hands and sepulchral expressions struck up ‘Where Are You Now, My Suliko?’ Keyze listened sorrowfully, glancing now and again at the man with high cheekbones who was standing furthest away. He respectfully refrained from interrupting, but at the end of the song he told this man that since he hadn’t sung with the group he must now sing a solo. He looked at the dirty collar of his tunic and the remnants of his torn-off major’s tabs and said: ‘Verstehen Sie, Herr Major? Do you understand, swine?’

The man nodded. Keyze picked him up by the collar and gave him a little shake; he might have been shaking an alarm-clock that had gone wrong. The newly-arrived prisoner punched Keyze on the cheekbone and cursed him.

Everyone thought that would be the end of the prisoner. But instead of killing Major Yershov there and then, Keyze simply led him to a place in the corner, beside the window. It had been lying unoccupied, waiting for the appearance of a prisoner Keyze took a liking to. Later that day Keyze brought Yershov a hard-boiled goose-egg and said with a laugh: ‘Ihre Stimme wird schön!’fn1

From then on Yershov remained a favourite of Keyze’s. The other people in the barracks also treated him with respect; his unbending severity was tempered with gentleness and gaiety.

Brigade Commissar Osipov, one of the men who had sung ‘Suliko’, was furious with Yershov after the incident with Keyze. ‘A very tricky customer indeed!’ he said of him. Mostovskoy, on the other hand, soon christened him ‘the Master of Men’s Minds’.

Another man to dislike Yershov was Kotikov, a silent fellow who seemed to know everything about everyone. Kotikov was colourless; everything about him – his eyes, his lips, even his voice – was colourless. The lack of colour was so pronounced that it became a colour in its own right.

Keyze’s gaiety during roll-call that evening made the prisoners tense and frightened. They were always expecting something bad to happen; day and night their anxious premonitions waxed and waned.

Towards the end of roll-call eight kapos came into the special barracks. They wore ridiculous, clown-like peaked caps and a bright yellow band on their sleeves. You could tell from their faces that they didn’t fill their mess-tins from the general cauldron.

The man in command, König, was tall, fair-haired and handsome. He was dressed in a steel-coloured greatcoat with torn-off stripes; beneath it you could glimpse a pair of brilliantly polished boots that seemed almost white. A former SS officer, he had lost his commission and been imprisoned for various criminal offences. He was now head of the camp police.

‘Mütze ab!’ he shouted.fn2

The search began. With the trained, habitual movements of factory workers, the kapos tapped tables for hollow spaces, shook out rags, checked the seams of people’s clothes and looked inside saucepans . . . Sometimes, as a joke, they kneed a prisoner in the buttocks and said: ‘Your good health!’

Now and again they turned to König with something they had found: a note, a razor-blade, a pad of paper. With a wave of his glove, König let them know whether or not it was of interest. Meanwhile the prisoners remained standing in ranks.

Mostovskoy and Yershov were standing next to each other, glancing at König and Keyze. The faces of the two Germans looked as though they had been cast from metal.

Mostovskoy swayed on his feet; he felt dizzy. He pointed at Keyze and said: ‘A fine individual!’

‘A truly splendid Aryan,’ replied Yershov. Not wishing to be overheard by Chernetsov, he whispered: ‘But some of our lads aren’t much better.’

Keen to join in the conversation he couldn’t hear, Chernetsov said: ‘Every people has a sacred right to its own heroes, saints and villains.’

Mostovskoy turned towards Yershov, but what he said was also addressed to Chernetsov: ‘Of course we’ve got our share of scoundrels too, but still, there’s something unique about a German murderer.’

The search came to an end and the command was given to go to bed. The prisoners began to climb up onto the boards.

Mostovskoy lay down and stretched out his legs. Then he realized he hadn’t yet checked to see if his belongings were all in place. He sat up with a wheeze and began to go through them. At first he thought he must have lost his scarf or his gingham foot-cloths. In the end he found them, but his feeling of anxiety remained.

Yershov came over and said in an undertone: ‘Kapo Nedzelsky’s been gossiping. He says our block’s being split up. A few of us are being kept for further interrogation; the rest are being sent to general camps.’

‘What does it matter?’ asked Mostovskoy.

Yershov sat down.

‘Mikhail Sidorovich!’ he said in a very clear whisper.

Mostovskoy raised himself up on one elbow and looked at him.

‘I’ve been thinking about something important, Mikhail Sidorovich. I need to talk to you. If we’re going to die, I think we should do it in style.’

Yershov went on in a whisper. As he listened, Mostovskoy grew more and more excited. It was as though some magical wind was blowing on him.

‘Time is precious,’ said Yershov. ‘If the Germans ever take Stalingrad, then everyone will just sink back into apathy. You only have to look at someone like Kotikov to see that.’

Yershov’s plan was to form a military alliance of prisoners-of-war. He went through this plan point by point, as though he were reading from notes.

‘ . . . The imposition of discipline and solidarity on all Soviet citizens in the camp. The expulsion of traitors. Sabotage. The setting-up of action committees among the Polish, French, Yugoslav and Czech prisoners . . .’

He glanced up at the dim light and said: ‘There are some of our own men in the munitions factory. They trust me. We can start hoarding arms. Then we can widen our horizons. Three-men cells. An alliance with the German underground. The use of terror against traitors. Our final goal – a general uprising, a united free Europe.’

‘A united free Europe! Oh Yershov, Yershov . . .’

‘I’m not just talking. I mean business.’

‘Well then,’ said Mostovskoy, ‘you can count on me.’ He shook his head and repeated, ‘A free Europe . . . Now we’ve even got our own section of the Communist International here in the camp . . . With two members, one of them not even a Communist.’

‘With your knowledge of English, French and German we’ll be able to make thousands of contacts,’ said Yershov. ‘What price your Comintern now? “Prisoners of the world unite!”’

Looking at Yershov, Mostovskoy pronounced a phrase he thought he had forgotten long ago: ‘The Will of the People!’ He felt quite surprised at himself.