Life and Fate Page 25

  The crowd of people by the exit parted as Perekrest came in. He had to bend as he came through the doorway: camp ceilings were not designed for men of his height.

  ‘Today’s my birthday,’ he said to Abarchuk. ‘Come and join us. We’ve got some vodka.’

  It was terrible. Dozens of people must have heard last night’s murder, must even have seen the man walking up to Rubin’s place. It would have been easy for one of them to jump up and raise the alarm. Together they could have dealt with the murderer in no time. They could have saved their comrade. But no one had looked up; no one had called out. A man had been slaughtered like a lamb. And everyone had just lain there, pretending to be asleep, burying their heads in their jackets, trying not to cough, trying not to hear the dying man writhing in agony.

  How vile! What pathetic submissiveness!

  But then he too had been awake, he too had kept silent, he too had buried his head in his jacket . . . Yes, there was a reason for this submissiveness – it was born of experience, of an understanding of the laws of the camp.

  They could indeed have got up and stopped the murderer; but a man with a knife will always be stronger than a man without a knife. The strength of a group of prisoners is something ephemeral; but a knife is always a knife.

  Abarchuk thought about the coming interrogation. It was all very well for the operations officer to ask for statements. He didn’t have to sleep in the hut at night, he didn’t have to wash in the hallway, leaving himself open to a blow from behind, he didn’t have to walk down mine-shafts, he didn’t have to go into the latrine where he might get jumped on and have a sack thrown over his head.

  Yes, he had seen someone walk up to Rubin. He had heard Rubin wheezing, thrashing his arms and legs around in his death-agony.

  The operations officer, Captain Mishanin, called Abarchuk into his office and closed the door. ‘Sit down, prisoner.’

  He put the usual initial questions, questions the political prisoners always answered quickly and precisely.

  He then looked up with his tired eyes, and knowing very well that an experienced prisoner, afraid of the inevitable reprisals, would never say how the nail had come into the murderer’s hands, stared at Abarchuk for a few seconds.

  Abarchuk looked back at him. He scrutinized the captain’s young face, looking at his hair and his eyebrows, and thought to himself that he could only be two or three years older than his own son.

  The captain then asked the question which three prisoners had already refused to answer.

  Abarchuk didn’t say anything.

  ‘Are you deaf or something?’

  Abarchuk remained silent.

  How he longed for the man to say to him, even if he weren’t sincere, even if it were just a prescribed interrogation technique: ‘Listen, comrade Abarchuk, you’re a Communist. Today you’re in the camp, but tomorrow we’ll be paying our membership dues together. I need your help as a comrade, as a fellow Party member.’

  Instead the captain said: ‘So you’ve gone to sleep, have you? I’ll wake you up.’

  But it wasn’t necessary. In a hoarse voice Abarchuk said: ‘Barkhatov stole the nails from the storeroom. He also took three files. The murder was, in my opinion, committed by Nikolay Ugarov. I know that Barkhatov gave him the nails and that he threatened Rubin several times. Yesterday he swore he would kill him – Rubin had refused to put him on the sick-list.’

  He took the cigarette that was offered him. ‘I consider it my duty to the Party to inform you of this, comrade Operations Officer. Comrade Rubin was an old Party member.’

  Captain Mishanin lit Abarchuk’s cigarette, then took up his pen and began to write.

  ‘You should know by now, prisoner,’ he said gently, ‘that you have no right to talk about Party membership. You are also forbidden to address me as “comrade”. To you I am “citizen director”.’

  ‘I apologise, citizen director,’ replied Abarchuk.

  ‘It will be several days before I finish the inquiry,’ said Mishanin. ‘Then everything will be set straight. After that, well . . . We can have you transferred to another camp.’

  ‘It’s all right, citizen director, I’m not afraid,’ said Abarchuk.

  He went back to the storeroom. He knew that Barkhatov wouldn’t ask him any direct questions. Instead, he would watch him unrelentingly, squeezing out the truth from his movements, from his eyes, from the way he coughed . . .

  He was happy. He had won a victory over himself.

  He had won back the right to pass judgement. And when he thought about Rubin now, it was with regret that he’d never have the chance to say what he’d thought of him the other day.

  Three days went by and there was still no sign of Magar. Abarchuk asked about him at the mines administration, but none of the clerks he knew could find his name on their lists.

  That evening, just as Abarchuk had resigned himself to the fact that fate had kept them apart, a medical orderly called Trufelev came into the hut. Covered in snow and pulling splinters of ice from his eyelashes, he said to Abarchuk: ‘Listen, we had a zek in the infirmary just now who wanted to see you. I’d better take you there straight away. Ask leave from the foreman. Otherwise . . . you know what our zeks are like. He might snuff it any moment – and it will be no good talking to him when he’s in his wooden jacket.’

  Footnotes

  fn1 A barrack in a prison camp inhabited (solely or mainly) by professional criminals.

  41

  Trufelev led Abarchuk down the corridor of the infirmary. It had a foul smell of its own, quite distinct from that of the hut. They walked in semi-darkness past heaps of wooden stretchers and bundles of jackets waiting to be disinfected.

  Magar was in the isolation ward, a cell with log walls containing two iron bedsteads standing side by side. This ward was usually kept for goners and people with infectious illnesses. The thin legs of the two bedsteads seemed to be made of wire, but they weren’t in the least bent – no one of normal weight ever lay there.

  ‘No, no, the bed on the right!’ came a familiar voice. Abarchuk forgot about the camp and his white hair. It was as though he had found once again what he had lived for during so many years, what he would gladly have sacrificed his life for.

  He stared into Magar’s face. ‘Greetings, greetings, greetings . . . ,’ he said very slowly, almost ecstatically.

  Afraid of being unable to contain his excitement, Magar spoke with deliberate casualness. ‘Sit down then. You can sit on the bed opposite.’

  Noticing the way Abarchuk looked at the bed, he added: ‘Don’t worry – you won’t disturb him! No one will ever disturb him now.’

  Abarchuk bent down to take a better look at his comrade’s face, then glanced again at the corpse draped in blankets.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘It’s two hours since he died. The orderlies won’t touch him till the doctor comes. It’s a good thing. If they put someone else there, we won’t be able to talk.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Abarchuk.

  Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to ask the questions he so desperately wanted to: ‘Were you sentenced along with Bubnov – or was it the Sokolnikov case? How many years did you get? Which isolation prison were you in – Vladimir or Suzdal? Were you sentenced by a Special Commission or a Military Board? Did you sign a confession?’

  ‘Who was he?’ he asked, indicating the draped body. ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘He was a kulak. He’d just had too much of the camp. He kept calling out for some Nastya or other. He wanted to go away somewhere . . .’

  Gradually, in the half-light, he made out Magar’s face. He would never have recognized him. It wasn’t that he’d changed – it was that he was an old man who was about to die.

  He could feel the corpse’s hard, bony arm against his back. It was bent at the elbow. Sensing that Magar was looking at him, he thought: ‘He’s probably thinking the same thing – “Well, I’d never have recognized him.”’

&nbs
p; ‘I’ve just realized,’ said Magar. ‘He kept muttering something: “Wa . . . wa . . . wa . . . wa . . .” He wanted water. There’s a glass right beside him. I could have carried out his last wish.’

  ‘It seems as though he can interrupt us even now.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising,’ said Magar. Abarchuk could recognize the excitement in his voice. Magar had always begun serious conversations in this tone.

  ‘It’s not really him we’re talking about,’ Magar continued. ‘We’re talking about ourselves.’

  ‘No!’ said Abarchuk. ‘No!’

  He caught hold of Magar’s hot hand, squeezed it, put his arms round his shoulders and then began to choke, sobbing silently and trembling.

  ‘Thank you,’ Magar murmured, ‘my comrade, my friend.’

  They both fell silent, breathing heavily. They were breathing in time with one another. To Abarchuk, it was not only their breathing that was united.

  It was Magar who broke the silence.

  ‘Listen now,’ he said, sitting up in bed. ‘Listen, my friend. This will be the last time I call you like this.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Abarchuk. ‘You’re going to live!’

  ‘I’d sooner undergo torture, but I have to say this . . . You listen too,’ he added, turning to the corpse. ‘What I’m going to say has to do with you and your Nastya . . . This is my last duty as a revolutionary and I must fulfil it . . . You’re someone very special, comrade Abarchuk. And we met at a very special time – our best time, I think . . . Let me begin now. First. We made a mistake. And this is what our mistake has led to. Look! You and I must ask this peasant to pardon us . . . Give me a fag. What am I saying? No repentance can expiate what we’ve done. I have to say this . . . Secondly. We didn’t understand freedom. We crushed it. Even Marx didn’t value it – it’s the base, the meaning, the foundation that underlies all foundations. Without freedom there can be no proletarian revolution . . . Thirdly. We go through the camp, we go through the taiga, and yet our faith is stronger than anything. But this faith of ours is a weakness – a means of self-preservation. On the other side of the barbed wire, self-preservation tells people to change – unless they want to die or be sent to a camp. And so Communists have created idols, put on uniforms and epaulettes, begun preaching nationalism and attacking the working class. If necessary, they’ll revive the Black Hundreds . . .fn1 But here in the camp the same instinct tells people not to change, not to change during all the decades they spend here – unless they want to be buried straight away in a wooden jacket. It’s the other side of the coin.’

  ‘Stop!’ screamed Abarchuk, raising his clenched fist to Magar’s face. ‘They’ve broken you. You weren’t strong enough. What you’re saying is all lies. You’re raving.’

  ‘I’m not. I wish I were. I’m calling you to follow me! Just as I called you twenty years ago. If we can’t live the life of true revolutionaries, then the best we can do is die.’

  ‘I’ve had enough! Stop!’

  ‘Forgive me. I know. I’m like an old prostitute weeping over her lost virtue. But I’ll say it again: remember! Forgive me, friend . . .’

  ‘Forgive you! I wish one of us were lying here like this corpse, that we’d never lived to meet . . .’

  Abarchuk was standing in the doorway when he finished.

  ‘I’ll come and see you again. I’ll put you right. I’ll be your teacher now.’

  Next morning Abarchuk came across Trufelev outside in the compound. He was pulling a sledge with a churn of milk tied across it. It was odd, deep inside the Arctic Circle, to see someone with his face covered in sweat.

  ‘Your friend won’t be drinking any of this milk,’ he said. ‘He hanged himself during the night.’

  It’s always nice to pass on some surprising news. Trufelev gave Abarchuk a look of friendly triumph.

  ‘Did he leave a note for me?’ asked Abarchuk, gulping at the icy air. Magar must have left a note. What had happened yesterday was nothing. He hadn’t been himself – something had come over him.

  ‘What do you mean – a note? Anything you write goes straight to the operations officer.’

  That night was the most painful Abarchuk had ever known. He lay there quite still, clenching his teeth, gazing with wide-open eyes at the hut wall and its dark smears of squashed bed-bugs. He turned then to his son, the son he had once denied the right to bear his surname, and called out: ‘Now you’re all I have left. You’re my only hope. Do you understand, my friend? My teacher, Magar, wanted to strangle me, to strangle my mind and my will – and now he’s hanged himself. Tolya, Tolya, you’re all I have, all I have left in the world. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Will you ever know that during this long night your father never stooped, never wavered?’

  And next to him, all around him, the camp slept, heavily, noisily and uglily; the thick, stifling air was full of snores, sleepy cries, protracted groans and the sound of teeth being ground together.

  Suddenly Abarchuk sat up. He thought he had seen a shadow close by in the darkness.

  Footnotes

  fn1 One of the ultra-reactionary and anti-Semitic organizations responsible for the pogroms at the beginning of the century.

  42

  In late summer 1942 Kleist’s Army Group in the Caucasus seized the most important of the Soviet oilfields, near Maykop. German troops had reached Crete and North Cape, Northern Finland and the shores of the Channel. The desert fox, Marshal Erwin Rommel, was eighty kilometres from Alexandria. Chasseurs had hoisted the swastika over the peak of Mount Elbruz. Manstein had received orders to train giant cannons and Nebelwerfer rocket-launchers on Leningrad itself, the citadel of Bolshevism. The sceptical Mussolini was drawing up plans for his advance into Cairo and learning to ride an Arab stallion. Dietl was advancing over the snow in northern latitudes never before fought over by any European army. Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities.

  The time had come for National Socialism to realize its cruellest designs against human life and freedom. It is a lie that it was the pressures of the war that forced the Fascist leaders to undertake these measures. On the contrary, danger and a lack of confidence in their own power were what most served to restrain and temper them.

  If Fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint: the greatest enemy of Fascism is man.

  In the autumn of 1942, during the apogee of National Socialism’s military success, the government of the Reich announced a series of cruel and inhuman decrees: under one of these, that of 12 September, European Jewry was removed from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and transferred to that of the Gestapo.

  Adolf Hitler and the Party leadership had decided upon the final destruction of the Jewish nation.

  43

  From time to time Sofya Osipovna Levinton remembered her old life: her five years at Zurich University, the summer holiday she had spent in Paris and Italy, the concerts she had been to at the Conservatory, the expeditions to the mountains of Central Asia, her thirty-two years as a doctor, her favourite dishes, the friends whose lives, with all their ups and downs, had been intertwined with her own, her frequent telephone calls, the odd phrases of Ukrainian she had always used, her games of cards, the belongings she had left in her room in Moscow.

  She also remembered her time in Stalingrad – together with Alexandra Vladimirovna, Zhenya, Seryozha, Vera and Marusya. The closer people had been to her, the further away they now seemed.

  Early one evening, while their train stood in a siding somewhere near Kiev, she was searching her collar for lice; two middle-aged women beside her were chattering away, very quietly, in Yiddish. She suddenly realized with absolute clarity that all this really was happening to her – to Sonechka, Sonka, Sofya, Major Sofya Osipovna Levinton of the Medical Service.

  The most fundamental change in people at this t
ime was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.

  ‘Who am I? In the end, who am I?’ Sofya Osipovna wondered. ‘The short, snotty little girl afraid of her father and grandmother? The stout, hot-tempered woman with tabs of rank on her collar? Or this mangy, lice-ridden creature?’

  She had lost any hope of happiness, but many different dreams had appeared in its place: of killing lice . . . of reaching the chink in the wall and being able to breathe . . . of being able to urinate . . . of washing just one leg . . . And then there was thirst, a thirst that filled her whole body.

  She had been thrown into the wagon. In the gloom, which had seemed like complete darkness, she had heard the sound of quiet laughter.

  ‘Is that a madman laughing?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ answered a man’s voice. ‘We’re just telling jokes.’

  Someone else said in a melancholy tone of voice: ‘One more Jewess on our ill-fated train.’

  Sofya Levinton stood by the door and answered people’s questions, frowning as she tried to get used to the darkness. She felt suddenly overwhelmed, not only by the stench and the noise of people crying and groaning, but by the sound of words and intonations she had last heard in childhood.

  She wanted to step further inside, but found this impossible. Feeling a thin little leg in short trousers, she said: ‘Forgive me, son; did I hurt you?’

  The boy didn’t answer.

  ‘Mother,’ said Sofya into the darkness, ‘perhaps you could move your dumb little boy. I can’t stand here for ever.’

  ‘You should have sent a telegram in advance,’ said a hysterical voice from the corner. ‘Then you could have reserved a room with a private bath.’

  ‘Fool!’

  A woman whose face she could now just make out, said: ‘You can sit down beside me. There’s plenty of room here.’

  Sofya could feel her fingers trembling. Yes, this was a world she had known since childhood, the world of the shtetl – but very changed.