Life and Fate Read online

  He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons. He never once caught cold, even though he would go to bed without taking off his rain-soaked clothes. And surely only the voice of a madman could be so clear and ringing.

  He had first introduced himself by walking up to Mostovskoy and staring silently into his face. ‘What’s the good news then?’ Mostovskoy had asked. Then he had smiled mockingly as Ikonnikov said in his sing-song voice: ‘Good? But what is good?’

  These words took Mostovskoy back to his childhood, to the days when his elder brother would come home from the seminary and discuss questions of theology with their father. ‘That really is a hoary old question,’ he said. ‘People have been puzzling over it ever since the Buddhists and the early Christians. And we Marxists have pondered it too.’

  ‘And have you found any answer?’ asked Ikonnikov in a voice that made Mostovskoy laugh.

  ‘The Red Army are finding an answer right now,’ said Mostovskoy. ‘But there’s something rather unctuous, if I may say so, in your tone of voice. You sound like a priest or a Tolstoyan.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising,’ said Ikonnikov. ‘I used to be a Tolstoyan.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ exclaimed Mostovskoy. The strange man had begun to interest him.

  ‘Do you know something?’ said Ikonnikov. ‘I’m certain that the persecution of the Church by the Bolsheviks was beneficial to the Christian ideal. The Church was in a pitiful state before the Revolution.’

  ‘You’re a true dialectician!’ said Mostovskoy. ‘I too in my old age have been allowed to witness the miracle of the Gospel!’

  ‘No,’ replied Ikonnikov with a frown. ‘For you, the end justifies the means – and the means you employ are inhuman. I’m no dialectician and you’re not witnessing a miracle.’

  ‘So what can I do for you?’ snapped Mostovskoy.

  ‘Don’t make fun of me.’ Ikonnikov was standing to attention and his mournful voice now sounded tragic. ‘I didn’t come over here just to make you laugh. On the fifteenth of September last year I watched twenty thousand Jews being executed – women, children and old men. That day I understood that God could not allow such a thing and that therefore he did not exist. In the darkness of the present day I can see your power and the terrible evil it’s fighting . . .’

  ‘All right then,’ said Mostovskoy, ‘let’s talk!’

  Ikonnikov worked in the marshland not far from the camp. Huge concrete pipes were being laid – to channel the river and its streams, and so drain the low ground. The men sent to work here – for the most part those who had incurred the disapproval of the authorities – were called ‘the bog soldiers’.

  Ikonnikov had small hands with fine fingers and the fingernails of a child. He would return from work, soaked to the bone and smeared with clay, walk up to Mostovskoy’s place on the boards and say: ‘Can I sit with you for a moment?’

  Without looking at Mostovskoy, he would sit down, smile and draw his hand across his forehead. He had a very strange forehead: it was quite small, bulging, and so bright that it seemed to exist independently of his dirty ears, his dark brown neck and his hands with their broken nails.

  The other Soviet prisoners-of-war, men with straightforward personal histories, considered him dubious and untrustworthy.

  Since the days of Peter the Great, generation after generation of his ancestors had been priests. It was only the last generation that had followed a different path: at their father’s wish, Ikonnikov and his brothers had received a lay education. He had been a student at the Petersburg Institute of Technology. During the final year, however, he had been converted to the teachings of Tolstoy; he had left the Institute and become a people’s teacher in a village to the north of Perm. After eight years he had gone to Odessa. There he had been taken on as an engine-room mechanic in a merchant ship and had travelled to India and Japan. He had lived for a while in Sydney. After the Revolution he had returned to Russia and joined a peasant commune. This was a long-cherished dream: he had believed that communist agricultural labour would bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

  During the period of all-out collectivization he had seen special trains packed with the families of kulaks. He had seen exhausted men and women collapse in the snow, never to rise again. He had seen ‘closed’ villages where there wasn’t a living soul in sight and where every door and window had been boarded up. He remembered one ragged peasant woman with an emaciated neck and swarthy hands. Her guards had been staring at her in horror: mad with hunger, she had just eaten her two children.

  Without leaving the commune, he had begun preaching the Gospel and praying to God to take pity on the dying. In the end he was sent to prison. The horrors of these years had affected his reason; after a year’s internment in the prison psychiatric hospital he had been released. He had then gone to Byelorussia to live with his elder brother, a professor of biology who had managed to find him a job in a technical library.

  Then the war had begun and Byelorussia had been invaded. Ikonnikov had witnessed the torments undergone by the prisoners-of-war and the executions of Jews in the towns and shtetls.fn1 He began to approach people, in a state of near-hysteria, begging them to give sanctuary to the Jews. He even tried to save the lives of Jewish women and children himself. Escaping the gallows by a miracle, he had ended up in the camp.

  The ideas of this dirty, ragged old man were a strange hotchpotch. He professed a belief in an absurd theory of morality that – in his own words – ‘transcended class’.

  ‘Where acts of violence are committed,’ he explained to Mostovskoy, ‘sorrow reigns and blood must flow. I saw the sufferings of the peasantry with my own eyes – and yet collectivization was carried out in the name of Good. I don’t believe in your “Good”. I believe in human kindness.’

  ‘So you want us to be horrified when Hitler and Himmler are strung up on the gallows in the name of Good? You can count me out!’

  ‘You ask Hitler,’ said Ikonnikov, ‘and he’ll tell you that even this camp was set up in the name of Good.’

  During these arguments Mostovskoy felt like a man fighting off a jellyfish with a knife. The thrusts of his logic were powerless.

  ‘The world has progressed no further,’ repeated Ikonnikov, ‘than the truth spoken by a sixth-century Christian: “Condemn the sin and forgive the sinner.”’

  There was another old Russian in the hut, a one-eyed man called Chernetsov. One of the guards had smashed his glass eye and the gaping red socket stood out against his pale face. When he was talking to someone, he covered it over with the palm of his hand.

  A former Menshevik, he had escaped from Soviet Russia in 1921. For twenty years he had worked as a bank clerk in Paris. He had been sent to the camp after calling upon his fellow employees to disobey the orders of the new German administration.

  Mostovskoy had as little to do with Chernetsov as possible. Chernetsov, for his part, was clearly deeply upset by the popularity of the Old Bolshevik. Somehow everyone in the hut was drawn to him; the Spanish soldier, the Belgian lawyer, the Norwegian owner of a stationery shop would all come to him with their questions.

  One day, Major Yershov, who was something of a hero to the Russian prisoners-of-war, had been sitting beside Mostovskoy. He was leaning towards him, one hand on his shoulder, speaking quickly and excitedly. Mostovskoy had suddenly looked round and seen Chernetsov staring at them from his place in the far corner. The anguish in his seeing eye had seemed more terrible than the gaping bloodshot socket. ‘Yes, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes,’ Mostovskoy had said to himself.

  It certainly wasn’t mere chance that everyone was constantly asking after Major Yershov. ‘Where’s Yershov? You haven’t seen Yershov, have you? Comrade Yershov! Major Yershov! Yershov said . . . Ask Yershov . . .’ People from the other huts would come to see him; there was always a constant bustle around his place on the boards.

  Mostovskoy had christened him ‘The Master o
f Men’s Minds’. The 1860s and 1880s had both had their ‘masters of men’s minds’. First there had been the Populists; then Mikhailovsky had come and gone. Now this Nazi concentration camp had its own ‘master of men’s minds’.

  Whole decades had gone by since Mostovskoy had first been imprisoned in a Tsarist jail. That had been in another century.

  There had been occasions in the last few years when Mostovskoy had taken offence at the lack of confidence in his practical abilities shown by some of the Party leaders. Now he again felt conscious of his own power; every day he saw how much weight his words carried with General Gudz, with Brigade Commissar Osipov, with the sad and depressed Major Kirillov.

  Before the war, he had consoled himself with the thought that his removal from posts of responsibility at least meant that he was less involved with matters that aroused his misgivings: Stalin’s autocratic rule, the bloody trials of the Opposition, the lack of respect shown towards the Old Bolsheviks. The execution of Bukharin, whom he had known and loved, had upset him deeply. He had known, however, that if he opposed the Party in any one of these matters, he would turn out, against his will, to have opposed the very cause to which he had devoted his life: the cause of Lenin. At times he had been tormented by doubt. Was it just cowardice that stopped him from speaking out? There had been many terrible things at that time. Yes, he would have given anything to talk once again to his friend Lunacharsky – they had always understood one another so quickly, so easily.

  In this terrible camp he had recovered his self-confidence, but there was one uneasy feeling that never left him. He was unable to recover his former sense of clarity and completeness, of being a friend among friends and a stranger among strangers.

  An English officer had once suggested that in Russia the censorship of anti-Marxist views might stand in the way of his philosophical work. But this wasn’t what troubled him.

  ‘It might inconvenience other people,’ he had replied. ‘But it doesn’t inconvenience a Marxist like myself.’

  ‘It’s precisely because you’re an old Marxist that I asked the question,’ the Englishman had retorted.

  He had winced with pain, but had been able to come out with an answer.

  Nor was it that he sometimes felt irritated with people as close to him as Osipov, Gudz and Yershov . . . No, what troubled Mostovskoy was that many things in his own soul were now foreign to him.

  He could remember times when he had felt overjoyed at meeting an old friend – only to find that he was now a stranger. But what could he do now it was a part of himself that had become alien, that was out of place in the present day? He could hardly break with himself . . .

  He often got annoyed with Ikonnikov. He would be rude and sarcastic. He would call him feeble-minded, a wet rag, a half-wit. But if they didn’t meet for some time, he missed him.

  Yes, this was the main difference between the present and the years he had spent in prison as a young man: in those days he had been able to understand and love everything about his friends and comrades, while the least word or thought of his enemies had seemed alien and monstrous; now, however, he would sometimes glimpse in the thoughts of an enemy what he had once found important himself, and discover something strangely alien in the thoughts of his friends.

  ‘I must just be getting old!’ he said to himself.

  Footnotes

  fn1 The Jews of the Russian Empire, who were forced to live in special zones of residence, lived in small towns, shtetls, where they made up the majority of the population.

  5

  The American colonel had an individual cell in the special block. He was allowed to leave the hut during the evening and was given special meals. Rumour had it that the King of Sweden had intervened on his behalf, at the request of President Roosevelt himself.

  This colonel had once given Major Nikonov a bar of chocolate when he was ill. He was very interested in the Russian prisoners-of-war and was always trying to start up conversations with them about German tactics and the causes of the disasters of 1941.

  He would often talk to Yershov. Sometimes he looked into his bright, thoughtful eyes and forgot that he couldn’t speak English. He found it hard to believe that a man with such an intelligent face could fail to understand him – especially when what they were saying was of such consuming interest.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ he would say. ‘You really don’t understand?’

  And Yershov would answer in Russian: ‘The old sergeant had a fine command of every kind of language – except foreign ones.’

  Nevertheless, in a language composed of smiles, glances, slaps on the back and ten or fifteen words of atrociously mangled Russian, French, German and English, the Russians were able to discuss comradeship, solidarity, fellow-feeling, love of one’s home, love of one’s wife and children, with people from dozens of different countries.

  Kamerad, gut, Brot, Suppe, Kinder, Zigarette, Arbeit and another dozen words that had originated in the camps themselves, Revier, Blockälteste, Kapo, Vernichtungslager, Appell, Appellplatz, Waschraum, Flugpunkt, Lagerschütze,fn1 were enough to express everything of real importance in the simple yet bewildering life of the prisoners.

  There were also several Russian words – rebyata, tabachok, tovarischfn2 – that were also used by other nationalities. As for the word dokhodyaga – meaning a prisoner who was on his last legs – this had been accepted by all fifty-six nationalities.

  [ ................................................................................ ]fn3

  The Soviet prisoners-of-war were unable even to agree among themselves: some were ready to die rather than betray their country, while others considered joining up with Vlasov.fn4 The more they talked and argued, the less they understood each other. In the end they fell silent, full of mutual contempt and hatred.

  And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.

  Footnotes

  fn1Comrade, good, bread, soup, children, cigarettes, work . . . sickbay, block orderly, military police, extermination camp, roll-call, roll-call square, ablutions, flight point, camp guards.

  fn2Lads, tobacco, comrade.

  fn3 Passage missing in the original text.

  fn4 General A. A. Vlasov was a Red Army officer who, after being captured by the Germans in 1942, formed an army of Russian prisoners to fight against the Soviet Union.

  6

  The conversations of the Russian prisoners-of-war were particularly sad on the evening after the first snowfall. Even men as energetic and self-disciplined as Colonel Zlatokrylets and Brigade Commissar Osipov had fallen into a gloomy silence. Major Kirillov was sitting beside Mostovskoy; his shoulders were drooping and his head was nodding slowly up and down. The whole of his vast body seemed filled with melancholy. As for his dark eyes, they were like the eyes of someone with terminal cancer. Looking into such eyes, even a man’s nearest and dearest would hope that his sufferings would soon be over.

  Pointing at Kirillov, the ubiquitous Kotikov whispered to Osipov: ‘Either he’s about to hang himself or he’s going to join up with Vlasov.’

  Mostovskoy rubbed the grey stubble on his cheeks and said: ‘Listen, cossacks! Everything’s fine! Can’t you see that? Every day that the State created by Lenin continues to exist is a death-blow to Fascism. Fascism has no choice: it must either destroy us or perish. The hatred Fascism bears us is yet another proof – a far-reaching proof – of the justice of Lenin’s cause. The more the Fascists hate us, the more certain we can be of our own rightness . . . And in the end we will defeat them.’

  He turned to Kirillov.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember that story of Gorky’s? How he was walking up and down the prison courtyard and a Georgian shouted out: “Hold your head up! You look like a bedraggled chicken!�
��’

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  ‘And he was quite right! We must hold our heads high! Just think – the Soviet State is defending the ideals of Communism! Do you think Hitler can get the better of that . . . ? Stalingrad is still holding out. It may have seemed before the war that we were going too far, that we had really tightened the screws . . . But now even a blind man can see that the end justifies the means.’

  ‘We certainly did tighten the screws,’ said Yershov. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘We didn’t tighten them enough,’ said General Gudz. ‘We should have gone further still. Then Hitler wouldn’t have reached the Volga.’

  ‘It’s not for us to give lessons to Stalin,’ said Osipov.

  ‘True enough,’ said Mostovskoy. ‘And if we perish in prisons or damp mines, then that’s that. We must just think of something else.’

  ‘Such as?’ asked Yershov loudly.

  Everyone exchanged glances, looked away again and fell silent.

  ‘Oh Kirillov! Kirillov!’ said Yershov abruptly. ‘The old man’s quite right. We should rejoice that the Fascists hate us. We hate them and they hate us. Right? But just imagine being sent to a Russian camp! That really would be hard. But as for this . . . ! We’re stout-hearted lads! We’ll give the Germans a run for their money!’

  7

  General Chuykov, the commander of the 62nd Army,fn1 had lost all contact with his troops. Most of the wireless sets had gone dead and the telephone cables had all been severed.

  Sometimes it seemed as though the gently rippling Volga was something fixed and stable, and that the quaking earth was huddling against its still margins. From the left bank, hundreds of pieces of Soviet heavy artillery kept up a constant barrage. Round the German positions on the southern slopes of Mamayev Kurgan, the earth whirled into the air like smoke. These clouds of earth then passed through the sieve of gravity, the heavier lumps falling straight to the ground, the dust rising into the sky.