Life and Fate Read online

  ‘Don’t take offence – but I wouldn’t award medals just for shooting down a Junkers.’

  ‘Why should I take offence? You can’t take my medal away from me now.’

  ‘I wonder what our squadron leader’s going to do with his cow and his chickens. Is he going to put them in a Douglas and take them with him?’

  ‘They’ve already had their throats cut. Now they’re being cured.’

  ‘Right now I’d be too shy to take a girl out to a club. I’ve forgotten what it’s like.’

  ‘Solomatin wouldn’t be.’

  ‘Are you jealous, Lenya?’

  ‘Yes, but not concerning the girl in question.’

  ‘I see. Faithful unto the grave.’

  Their talk turned again to the combat over Rzhev, their last before being sent to the rear; seven of their fighters had encountered a large group of Junkers on a bombing raid, with an escort of Messerschmidts. Each pilot seemed to be blowing his own trumpet, but really they were talking about what they had achieved together.

  ‘I could hardly make them out against the forest – but it was another matter once they began to climb. Ju-87s – I could tell at once by their yellow noses and their trailing undercarriage. “Well,” I thought to myself, “things are going to get hot!”’

  ‘For a moment I thought we were being fired on by our own anti-aircraft guns.’

  ‘The sun certainly helped, I’ll admit that. I dropped down on him with the sun right behind me. I was leading the left wing. And then my plane must have jumped a good thirty metres . . . I pulled back the stick – she was still listening . . . ! I opened fire on the Junkers. She was on fire. And then I saw a Messer banking towards me – like a long pike with a yellow head. But he was too late. And I could see his blue tracer bullets.’

  ‘And I could see I was hitting the bull’s-eye every time!’

  ‘Now, now, let’s not get carried away!’

  ‘As a kid, I was always flying kites. My father used to thrash me for it. And when I was at the factory, I used to walk seven kilometres to the flying club after work. I was dead beat. But I didn’t miss a single lesson.’

  ‘Listen to me! He set me on fire – the oil-tank, the feed-pipes, even the fuselage itself. He even managed to smash the windshield and my goggles. There was glass everywhere, and tears in my eyes. Well, I dived beneath him and tore off my goggles. Solomatin covered me. I was on fire, but I didn’t have time to feel frightened. Somehow I managed to land. The plane was in flames, my boots got burnt – but I was all right!’

  ‘I could see my mate was almost down. I made two more turns. He dipped his wings at me to tell me to leave. Then I was on my own. I just gave a hand to anyone who needed it.’

  ‘I was well and truly shot to pieces – as full of holes as an old grouse.’

  ‘I went for that Messer twelve times. In the end I singed him. I could see him shaking his head and I knew that was my chance. I shot him down with my cannon at twenty-five metres.’

  ‘They’re not happy fighting in the horizontal. They’re always more at home in the vertical.’

  ‘Now that really is news!’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Everyone knows that – even the girls in the village.’

  After a moment of silence, a voice said: ‘We’ll be off at dawn – and Demidov will be left on his own.’

  ‘Well, my friends, you can do as you please, but I’m off to the village.’

  ‘A parting visit? Let’s go then!’

  Everything – the river, the fields, the forest – was so beautiful, so peaceful, that hatred, betrayal and old age seemed impossible; nothing could exist but love and happiness. The moon shone down through the grey mist that enveloped the earth. Few pilots spent the night in their bunkers. On the edge of the village you could glimpse white scarves and hear quiet laughter. Now and then a tree would shake, frightened by a bad dream; the water would mumble something and return to silence.

  The bitter hour of parting had come. One pilot would forget his girl in a couple of days; another couple would be separated by death; another would be allowed to meet again.

  The morning came. Motors roared, their wind flattened the grass and thousands of dew-drops trembled in the sun . . . One by one, the fighters took off, circled, waited for their comrades and settled into formation . . .

  What had seemed so infinite during the night was now dissolving in the blue of the sky . . . Houses like little grey boxes, small rectangular gardens, slipped by under their wings . . . They could no longer see the overgrown path, they could no longer see Demidov’s grave . . . They were off! The forest slid past under their wings.

  ‘Greetings, Vera!’ said Viktorov.

  39

  The prisoners were woken by the orderlies at five in the morning. It was still pitch dark; the barrack-huts were lit by the merciless light that is common to prisons, railway stations and the waiting-rooms of city hospitals.

  Thousands of men coughed and spat as they pulled on their padded trousers, wound their foot-cloths round their feet and had a good scratch. Sometimes the men on the upper tier of bedboards gave the men getting dressed down below a kick on the head; the latter just quietly pushed their feet out of the way.

  There was something profoundly unnatural about the glaring electric light, the general bustle and the thick tobacco smoke. Hundreds of square miles of taiga lay frozen in icy silence – but the camp was crowded with people, full of noise, movement and light.

  Snow had fallen during the first half of the night. Drifts had blocked the doors of the huts and covered the track to the mines . . .

  Sirens began to howl in the mines; somewhere in the taiga the wolves howled out an accompaniment. The dogs were barking on the main square, the guards were shouting at one another and you could hear the tractors clearing the tracks outside.

  In the light of the searchlights the dry snow seemed innocent and tender. Roll-call began on the main square, to the accompaniment of incessant barking; the voices of the guards sounded hoarse and irritated. Then a swollen river of people flowed out towards the mines. The snow creaked under thousands of leather and felt boots. The watch-tower stared after them with its single eye.

  Throughout the North, sirens continued to howl. The same orchestra struck up over Krasnoyarsk, over the Autonomous Republic of Komi, over Sovietskaya Gavan, over the snows of Kolyma, the Chukotsk tundra and the camps of Murmansk and Northern Kazakhstan . . .

  To the accompaniment of the sirens or the blows of a crowbar against a metal rail, prisoners set off to mine the potassium of Solikamsk, the copper of Ridder and the shores of Lake Balkash, the nickel and lead of Kolyma and the coal of Kuznetsk and Sakhalin. They set off to build a railway line along the shore of the Arctic Ocean, to clear roads through the tundra of Kolyma, to fell trees in the forests of Siberia, Murmansk, Archangelsk and the Northern Urals . . .

  Day began at the same hour of night, amid the same snow, in every one of the camps and sub-camps of the vast network of Dalstroy.fn1

  Footnotes

  fn1 Dalstroy: the Far Eastern Construction Trust, i.e. the network of prison camps that covered thousands of miles of the far North-East of the Soviet Union.

  40

  During the night Abarchuk had a fit of despair. Not just the usual sullen despair of the camps, but something fierce and burning like malaria, something that made him scream out loud, fall off the bedboards and beat his fists against his skull.

  In the morning, when the prisoners were reluctantly but hurriedly getting ready for work, Abarchuk’s long-legged neighbour, Nyeumolimov, a gas foreman who had commanded a cavalry brigade during the Civil War, asked: ‘What were you tossing about like that for during the night? Did you dream of a woman?’

  ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’

  ‘I thought you were crying in your sleep. I wanted to wake you up,’ said Monidze, another of Abarchuk’s neighbours, who had once been on the Presidium of the Communist Youth Inte
rnational.

  Another friend of Abarchuk’s, Abrasha Rubin, a medical orderly, hadn’t noticed anything. All he said, as they went outside into the dark and frost, was: ‘Guess what? I dreamed Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin had come to visit us at the Institute of Red Professors. He was very bright and lively. Yenchman’s theory created a tremendous stir.’

  Abarchuk worked in the tool store. While his assistant, Barkhatov, a man who had once knifed a family of six during a robbery, was lighting the stove and stoking it with left-over cedar-logs, Abarchuk went through the tools in the drawers. The biting sharpness of the files and chisels, impregnated with the icy cold, seemed to embody the way he had felt during the night.

  This day was exactly the same as every day that had gone before. The accountant had sent Abarchuk the requests from the distant sub-camps, already approved by the technical department. Now he had to get out the right tools and materials, pack them into boxes and draw up the accompanying documents. Some of the packages were incomplete; this necessitated the drawing up of special documents.

  Barkhatov, as always, did nothing, and it was impossible to make him do anything. From the moment he arrived at the store, he concerned himself only with matters of nutrition; today he was boiling a small pot of cabbage and potato soup. A professor of Latin from the Kharkov Pharmaceutical Institute, now a messenger in the first section, rushed in for a moment to see him; with trembling red fingers he poured some dirty grains of millet onto the table. Barkhatov was evidently blackmailing him.

  That afternoon Abarchuk was called to the accounts department; apparently his figures didn’t tally. The deputy director shouted at him and threatened to report him to the director. Abarchuk felt sick. It was impossible for him to cope with the work by himself and he didn’t dare complain about Barkhatov. He was tired, afraid of losing his job in the store, afraid of having to go out logging or being sent down the mines. His hair had already turned grey, he didn’t have much strength left. Yes, that must be the reason for the despair he had felt during the night – his life had vanished beneath the ice of Siberia.

  When he came back from the accounts department, he found Barkhatov asleep. His head was pillowed on a pair of felt boots he must have been given by one of the criminals. Beside it stood the empty cooking-pot; some of the millet was sticking to his cheek.

  Abarchuk knew that Barkhatov sometimes stole tools from the store. He might, in fact, have bartered some for this very pair of felt boots. Once, Abarchuk had found three planes missing and had confronted his assistant.

  ‘Stealing scarce metal during the War for the Fatherland! You should be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ Barkhatov had retorted. ‘Or else . . .’

  Abarchuk did not dare wake Barkhatov directly; instead he coughed, banged the saws about and dropped a hammer on the floor. Barkhatov woke up. He gave Abarchuk a look of cool displeasure. After a while, he said very quietly: ‘Someone from yesterday’s transport told me that there are worse camps than these ones here in the lakes. The prisoners wear fetters and have their heads shaved. Surnames aren’t used at all: they just have numbers sewn on their chest and their knees, and an ace of diamonds on their back.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Abarchuk.

  ‘That’s where you Fascist politicals should be sent,’ Barkhatov continued thoughtfully. ‘You first of all, you swine – so you can’t wake me up.’

  ‘Forgive me, citizen Barkhatov, for having disturbed your rest.’ Although he was very frightened of Barkhatov, sometimes Abarchuk was unable to control his anger.

  At the end of the shift, Nyeumolimov came in, black with coal-dust.

  ‘Well,’ asked Abarchuk, ‘how’s the work going? Are people entering into the spirit of competition?’

  ‘Little by little. The coal’s a military necessity – at least everyone understands that. Today the Culture and Education Section received some posters: “Let us help the Motherland with our shock labour!”’

  Abarchuk sighed. ‘You know what, someone ought to write a treatise on despair in the camps. There’s a despair that crushes you, another that attacks you suddenly, another that stifles you and won’t let you breathe. And then there’s a special kind that doesn’t do any of these things but somehow tears you to pieces from within – like a deep-sea creature brought suddenly up to the surface.’

  Nyeumolimov smiled sadly. His rotten teeth were almost the same colour as the coal-dust on his face.

  Barkhatov came up to them. Abarchuk looked round and complained: ‘You walk so quietly you make me jump. All of a sudden I find you right beside me.’

  A man of few smiles, Barkhatov said very seriously: ‘You don’t mind if I go to the food store?’

  He left.

  ‘During the night I remembered the son I had by my first wife,’ Abarchuk said to his friend. ‘He’s probably at the front now.’

  He leant towards Nyeumolimov.

  ‘I want the lad to grow up a good Communist. I was thinking to myself that if I met him, I’d say: “Remember, your father’s fate doesn’t matter. That’s just a detail. But the cause of the Party is something holy! Something that conforms in the highest degree to the Law of the Epoch!”’

  ‘Does he have your surname?’

  ‘No,’ answered Abarchuk. ‘I was afraid he’d grow up to be a bourgeois.’

  All through the previous evening and during the night he had thought of Lyudmila. He wanted to see her. He had been looking at pages torn from the Moscow papers, expecting all of a sudden to read: ‘Lieutenant Anatoly Abarchuk’. He would know then that his son had wanted to bear his father’s surname.

  For the first time in his life he wanted someone to feel sorry for him. He imagined himself walking up to his son, gasping, hardly able to breathe, pointing to his throat and saying: ‘I can’t talk.’

  Tolya would embrace him. Abarchuk would put his head on his son’s chest and burst out crying, bitterly and unashamedly. They would stand like that for a long time, his son a head taller.

  Tolya was probably thinking about him all the time. He would have searched out his old comrades and learned about the part his father had played in the battle for the Revolution. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ he would say, ‘your hair’s turned quite white. How thin and lined your neck looks. You’ve been struggling all these years. You’ve been carrying on a great struggle, all on your own.’

  For three days during the investigation he had been given salty food without water. He had been beaten . . . He had realized that it wasn’t simply a matter of wanting him to sign confessions of sabotage and espionage or to make accusations against people. Most of all, they wanted him to doubt the justice of the cause to which he had devoted his life. During the investigation itself, he thought he must have fallen into the hands of a bunch of gangsters. He thought that if he could only obtain an interview with the head of the department, he would be able to have his thug of an investigator arrested.

  But as time passed he realized it wasn’t just a matter of there being a few sadists around.

  He had learned the laws that applied on convict trains and in the holds of convict ships. He had seen criminals gambling away other people’s belongings at card-games, even their lives. He had seen pitiable debauchery and betrayal. He had seen the criminal ‘India’,fn1 bloody, hysterical and impossibly cruel. He had seen terrible battles between the ‘bitches’, who agreed to work, and the orthodox ‘thieves’, who refused to work.

  He had repeated, ‘You don’t get arrested for nothing,’ believing that only a tiny minority, himself among them, had been arrested by mistake. As for everyone else – they had deserved their sentences. The sword of justice was chastising the enemies of the Revolution.

  He had seen servility, treachery, submissiveness, cruelty . . . And he had referred to all this as ‘the birthmarks of capitalism’, believing that these marks were borne by people of the past – White officers, kulaks, bourgeois nationalists . . .

  His faith was unshakeable, his devoti
on to the Party infinite.

  Just as he was about to leave, Nyeumolimov said: ‘Oh, I forgot to say, someone was asking about you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone from yesterday’s transport. They were being assigned work. One of them asked about you. I said, “Yes, I do know him, I happen to have slept next to him for the last three years.” He told me his surname, but it’s gone clean out of my head.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Well, rather shabby – and he had a scar on his temple.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Abarchuk. ‘You don’t mean Magar?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘But he’s my very oldest comrade, my teacher, the man who introduced me into the Party. What did he say? What did he ask about?’

  ‘Just the usual question: the length of your sentence. I said you’d asked for five years and been given ten. I said you were beginning to cough and that you’d be released early.’

  But Abarchuk was no longer listening.

  ‘Magar, Magar . . . ,’ he repeated. ‘At one time he used to work in the Cheka. He was someone special, you know, very special. He’d give anything of his to a comrade. He’d take off his overcoat for you in the middle of winter, give you his last crust of bread. And he’s intelligent, well-educated. And a true proletarian by birth, the son of a fisherman from Kerch.’

  He glanced round and then bent towards Nyeumolimov.

  ‘Do you remember? We used to say that the Communists in the camp should set up an organization to help the Party. Abrasha Rubin asked, “Who should we choose as secretary?” Well, he’s the man.’

  ‘I’ll vote for you,’ said Nyeumolimov. ‘I don’t know him. Anyway, how are you going to find him? Ten lorries have left for the sub-camps by now. He was probably in one of them.’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll find him. Magar . . . Well, well. And he asked after me?’

  ‘I almost forgot why I came here,’ said Nyeumolimov. ‘Give me a clean sheet of paper. My memory’s going.’