Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

He was now on the left bank, being interrogated in the Special Section at Front HQ.

The painted floor, the pots of flowers by the window, the pendulum-clock on the wall, all seemed calm and provincial. The rattling of the window-panes and the rumble of bombs from Stalingrad seemed pleasantly humdrum.

How little this lieutenant-colonel behind the wooden kitchen-table corresponded to the pale-lipped interrogator of his imagination.

But the lieutenant-colonel, one of his shoulders smudged with whitewash from the stove, walked up to the man sitting on the wooden stool – an expert on the workers’ movement in the colonies of the Far East, a man with a commissar’s star on the sleeves of his uniform, a man who had been brought up by a sweet, good-natured mother – and punched him in the face.

Krymov ran his hand over his lips and nose, looked at his palm and saw a mixture of blood and spittle. He tried to move his jaw. His lips had gone numb and his tongue was like stone. He looked at the painted floor – yes, it had just been washed – and swallowed his blood.

Only during the night did he begin to feel hatred for his interrogator. At first he had felt neither hatred nor physical pain. The blow on the face was the outward sign of a moral catastrophe. He could respond only with dumbfounded amazement.

The lieutenant-colonel looked at the clock. It was time for lunch in the canteen for heads-of-departments.

Krymov was taken across the dirty, frozen snow that covered the yard towards a rough log building that served as a lock-up. The sound of the bombs falling on Stalingrad was very clear.

His first thought as he came to his senses was that the lock-up might be destroyed by a German bomb . . . He felt disgusted with himself.

In the stifling, log-walled cell he was overwhelmed by despair and fury: he was losing himself. He was the man who had shouted hoarsely as he ran to the aeroplane to meet his friend Georgiy Dimitrov, he was the man who had borne Clara Zetkin’s coffin – and just now he had given a furtive glance to see whether or not a security officer would hit him a second time. He had led his men out of encirclement; they had called him ‘Comrade Commissar’. And now a peasant with a tommy-gun had looked at him – a Communist being beaten up and interrogated by another Communist – with squeamish contempt.

He had not yet taken in the full meaning of the words ‘loss of freedom’ . . . He had become another being. Everything in him had to change. He had lost his freedom . . .

He felt giddy . . . He would appeal to Shcherbakov, to the Central Committee! He would appeal to Molotov! He wouldn’t rest until that scoundrel of a lieutenant-colonel had been shot. ‘Yes – pick up that phone! Ring up Krasin! Stalin has heard my name. He knows who I am. Comrade Stalin once asked comrade Zhdanov: “Is that the same Krymov who used to work in the Comintern?”’

Then Krymov felt the quagmire beneath his feet: a dark, gluey, bottomless swamp was sucking him in. He had come up against something insuperable, something more powerful than the German Panzer divisions. He had lost his freedom.

Zhenya! Zhenya! Can you see me? Zhenya! Look at me – I’m in trouble, terrible trouble! I’m alone and abandoned. You too have abandoned me.

A degenerate had been beating him. His head span; his fingers were almost in spasm: he wanted to throw himself at the security officer.

Never had he felt such hatred towards the Tsarist police, the Mensheviks or even towards the SS officer he had once interrogated.

No, the man now trampling over him was not someone alien. Krymov could see himself in this officer, could recognize in him the same Krymov who as a boy had wept with happiness over those astonishing words of the Communist Manifesto: ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ And this feeling of recognition was appalling.