Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

His soul was inspired by a great vision. The work of thousands of underground agitators and heroic saboteurs would culminate in an armed take-over of the camps. The men involved in the uprising would need to capture the camp anti-aircraft guns and convert them to weapons that could be used against tanks and infantry. He would have to pick out the prisoners who had experience of anti-aircraft guns and form them into gun-crews.

Major Yershov knew what camp life was like; he was aware of the power of fear, bribery and the desire for a full stomach. He had seen how many people had exchanged honest soldiers’ tunics for the epaulettes and light-blue overcoats of Vlasov’s volunteers. He had seen apathy, betrayal and grovelling obsequiousness. He had seen people’s horror at the horrors inflicted on them. He had seen them petrified with fear before the officers of the dreaded SS.

Yes, ambitious though he was, he was no mere dreamer. During the black days of the German blitzkrieg he had been able to rally men whose stomachs were distended with hunger; his boldness and enthusiasm had been a source of encouragement to all his comrades. He was a man whose contempt for violence was passionate and unextinguishable.

Everyone could feel the bright warmth that emanated from Yershov. It was the same simple, necessary warmth that comes from a birch log in a Russian stove. It was this good-hearted warmth – not just the power of his intellect and his fearlessness – that had made him the acknowledged leader of the Soviet officers in the camp.

He had long known that Mostovskoy was the first person he would reveal his plans to . . . Now, more than ever before in the thirty-three years of his life, he had a sense of his own strength. Here he was, lying on the bedboards and gazing up at the rough planks of the ceiling. He felt as though he were looking up at the lid of a coffin, his heart still beating . . .

His life before the war had been difficult. His father, a peasant in the oblast of Voronezh, had been dispossessed in 1930 after being denounced as a kulak. At that time Yershov had been doing his military service.

He had refused to break with his father. He was turned down by the Military Academy – even though he had passed the entrance exams with the grade ‘excellent’. After graduating from military school with considerable difficulty, he was posted to a district recruiting office. Meanwhile his father and the rest of his family had been deported to the Northern Urals. Yershov applied for leave and set off to visit them. From Sverdlovsk he travelled two hundred kilometres on the narrow-gauge railway. On either side of the line were vast expanses of bog and forest, together with stacks of dressed timber, barbed wire, barrack-huts, dug-outs and tall watch-towers that looked like toadstools on giant legs. The train was delayed twice – a posse of guards was searching for an escaped prisoner. During the night they waited in a passing-loop for a train coming from the opposite direction. Yershov was unable to sleep for the whistles of sentries and the barking of OGPU dogs – close to the station was a large camp.

It took Yershov over two days to reach the end of the line. He had a lieutenant’s tabs on his collar and his documents were in order; nevertheless, each time they were checked, he expected to be packed off to a camp with the words: ‘Come on, get your things together.’ It was as though even the air in this region had barbed wire round it.

He travelled the next seventy kilometres in the back of a lorry; once again there were bogs on either side of the road. The lorry belonged to the OGPU farm where Yershov’s father was working. It was jammed with deported workers being sent to fell trees. Yershov questioned them, but they were afraid of his uniform and answered only in monosyllables.

Towards evening the lorry reached a small village squeezed in between the edge of the forest and the edge of the bog. Yershov was to remember the gentle calm of that sunset in the Northern wastes. In the evening light the huts looked quite black, as though they had been boiled in pitch.

When he entered the dug-out, bringing with him the evening light, he was met by the smell of poverty, by miserable food, miserable clothes and miserable bedding, by a warm, suffocating dampness that was filled with smoke.

Then his father emerged from the darkness. The expression on his thin face, in his handsome eyes, was indescribable.

He flung his thin arms around his son’s neck. There was such pain in this plea for help, such trust, that Yershov could find only one response: he burst into tears.

Soon afterwards they visited three graves. Yershov’s mother had died during the first winter, his elder sister Anyuta during the second winter, and Marusya during the third.

Here, in this world of camps, the cemeteries and villages merged together. The same moss grew on the walls of wooden huts, on the sides of dug-outs, on the grave-mounds and on the tussocks in the bogs. Yershov’s mother and sisters would remain for ever beneath this sky – through dry winter frosts, through wet autumns when the soil of the cemetery swells as the dark bog encroaches.

Father and son stood there in silence, side by side. Then the father glanced up at his son and spread his hands helplessly as though to say: ‘May I be pardoned by both the living and the dead. I failed to save the people I loved.’

That night his father told his story. He spoke calmly and quietly. What he described could only be spoken about quietly; it could never be conveyed by tears or screams.

On a small box covered with newspaper stood some food and a half-litre of vodka Yershov had brought as a present. The old man talked while his son sat beside him and listened. He talked about hunger, about people from the village who’d died, about old women who had gone mad, about children whose bodies had grown lighter than a chicken or a balalaika.

He described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled on alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of the forest where there wasn’t a single hut or dug-out; in the depths of winter they had begun a new life, building camp-fires, making beds out of spruce-branches, melting snow in saucepans, burying their dead . . .

‘The will of Stalin,’ he said without the least trace of anger or resentment. He spoke as simple people speak about a force of destiny, a force that knows no weakness or hesitation.

Yershov returned from leave and sent a petition to Kalinin, begging him to act with supreme, unprecedented mercy, to pardon an innocent old man and allow him to come and live with his son. Before his letter even reached Moscow, Yershov was summoned before the authorities; he had been denounced for making his journey to the Urals.

After being discharged from the army, he went to work on a building-site. He wanted to save some money and then join his father. Very soon, however, he received a letter from the Urals informing him of his father’s death.

On the second day of the war, Lieutenant Yershov was called up.

During the battle for Roslavl his battalion commander was killed; Yershov took command. He rallied his men, launched a counterattack, won back the ford and secured the withdrawal of the heavy artillery belonging to the General Staff reserves.

The greater the burden, the stronger his shoulders became. He didn’t know his own strength. Submissiveness just wasn’t a part of his nature. The stronger the force against him, the more furious his determination to fight.

Sometimes he wondered why it was he felt such hatred for the Vlasovites. What Vlasov said in his appeals to the prisoners was exactly what he had heard from his father. He knew it was true. But he also knew that on the tongues of the Germans and Vlasovites this truth turned into a lie.

He was certain that he was not only fighting the Germans, but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over the death camps where his father, his mother and his sisters had perished.

Now that his background was no longer relevant, Yershov had proved himself a true leader, a force to be reckoned with; this realization was at once pleasant and bitter. High rank, decorations, the Special Section, personnel departments, examination boards, telephone calls from the raykom, the opinion of the deputy chief of the Political Section – none of this meant anything any more.

Mostovskoy once told him: ‘In the words of Heinrich Heine, “we’re all of us naked beneath our clothes.” But while one man looks miserable and anaemic when he takes off his uniform, another man is disfigured by tight clothing – you only see his true strength when he’s naked.’

His dreams had become a concrete task. He was constantly going over everything he knew about people, weighing up their good and bad points, wondering whom he should recruit, whom he should entrust with what position. Who should he include in his underground staff? There were five names that came to mind. Petty human weaknesses and eccentricities suddenly took on a new importance; trivial matters were no longer trivial.

General Gudz had the authority of his rank, but he was weak-willed, cowardly and obviously uneducated; he must have needed a good staff and an intelligent second-in-command. He took it for granted, never showing the least gratitude, that the other officers should do him favours and give him presents of food. He seemed to remember his cook more often than his wife and daughters. He was always talking about hunting, about ducks and geese; all he appeared to remember about the years he had served in the Caucasus was the wild goats and boar he had hunted. From the look of him he had drunk a lot. And he boasted. He often talked about the defeats of 1941: everyone else, including his neighbours on either side, had made countless mistakes – while he himself had always been right. But he never blamed the top brass for the disasters of that year . . . He had seen a lot of service. Yes, and he knew how to get on with the right people . . . If it had been up to him, Yershov wouldn’t have trusted Gudz with a regiment, let alone a whole corps.

Brigade Commissar Osipov, on the other hand, was a very intelligent man. One moment he would crack a joke about how they had expected an easy war on the enemy’s territory; an hour later he would be giving a sermon to someone who had shown signs of faint-heartedness, ticking him off with stony severity. And the next day he would be announcing in his lisping voice: ‘Yes, comrades, we fly higher than anyone else, further than anyone else and quicker than anyone else. Just look how far we’ve managed to fly.’

He spoke very lucidly about the defeats of the first months of the war, but with no more regret than a chess-player who has lost a piece. He talked freely and easily to people, but with a bluff comradeliness that seemed affected and false. What he enjoyed most was talking to Kotikov . . . Why was it he was so interested in Kotikov?

Osipov had vast experience; he knew people. This was very important for Yershov’s underground staff, even essential. But it might also turn out to be a hindrance.

Osipov liked to tell amusing anecdotes about important military figures, referring to them familiarly as Semyon Budyonniy, Andryusha Yeremenko . . .

Once he told Yershov: ‘Tukhachevsky, Yegorov and Blücher were no more guilty than you or me.’

Kirillov, however, had told Yershov that in 1937, when Osipov had been Deputy Director of the Military Academy, he had mercilessly denounced dozens of men as enemies of the people.

He was terrified of being ill, constantly prodding himself or sticking out his tongue and squinting at it in case it was furred over. But he clearly wasn’t afraid of death.

Colonel Zlatokrylets was very gloomy, but a straightforward man and a real soldier. He blamed the High Command for 1941. Everyone could sense his strength as a commanding officer. He was equally strong physically. He had a powerful voice, the kind of voice one needs to rally fugitives or lead an attack. And he swore a lot.

He found it easier to give orders than explanations. But he was a true comrade, someone who would give a soldier soup from his own mess-tin.

No, there were certainly no flies on Zlatokrylets. He was a man Yershov could work with. Even if he was coarse and boorish.

As for Kirillov, he was intelligent, but somehow very weak. He noticed every trifle; his tired, half-closed eyes saw everything. He was cold, misanthropic, but surprisingly ready to forgive weakness and cowardice. He wasn’t afraid of death; indeed, there were times when it seemed to attract him.

His view of the retreat was more intelligent than that of any of the other officers. Not a Party member himself, he had once said: ‘I don’t believe the Communists can make people better. It just doesn’t happen. Look at history.’

No, he certainly didn’t want Kirillov. How could he lead others if it was all he could do to keep going himself?

But as for Mostovskoy! He was astonishingly well-educated and he had an iron will. People said he’d been like granite under interrogation. Still, there was no one Yershov couldn’t find fault with. The other day he’d said to Mostovskoy: ‘Why do you waste so much time gossiping with riff-raff, Mikhail Sidorovich? Why bother with that gloomy Ikonnikov-Morzh and that one-eyed scoundrel of an émigré?’

‘Are you afraid I’ll waver in my convictions?’ asked Mostovskoy teasingly. ‘Do you think I’ll become an evangelist or a Menshevik?’

‘Who knows?’ said Yershov. ‘If you don’t want to smell, you shouldn’t touch shit. That Ikonnikov of yours was in our camps once. Now the Germans are dragging him off for interrogation. He’ll sell himself, he’ll sell you and he’ll sell whoever’s close to you . . .’

No one was ideal. Yershov simply had to weigh up everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. That was easy enough. But it was only from a man’s spirit that you could judge his suitability. And this could be guessed at, but never measured. He had begun with Mostovskoy.