Everything he remembered only added to the torture. There was no peace anywhere. Everything he did, even his smiles and gestures, no longer seemed a part of him; they were alien, hostile. Nadya had looked at him that evening with an expression of pitying disgust.
Only Lyudmila – who in the past had annoyed him and ticked him off more than anyone – had been of any comfort. She had simply said: 'Don't torture yourself, Viktor. To me you're the most intelligent and honourable man in the world. If that's what you did, then it's what you had to do.'
Why did he always want to approve of everything? Why had he become so accepting of things he had never been able to tolerate before? Why, whatever people were talking about, did he always have to be the optimist?
The recent military victories had corresponded to a change in his own life. He could see the power of the army, the grandeur of the State; there was light at the end of the tunnel. Why had Madyarov's thoughts come to seem so banal?
He had refused to repent when they threw him out of the Institute. How happy, how full of light he had felt. And what joy he had felt then in the people he loved! Lyudmila, Nadya, Chepyzhin, Zhenya… But what would he say now to Marya Ivanovna? He had always been so arrogant about Pyotr Lavrentyevich and his timid submissiveness. And now! As for his mother, he was afraid even to think of her. He had sinned against her too. He was afraid even to touch that last letter of hers. He realized with sorrow and horror how incapable he was of protecting his own soul. The power that had reduced him to slavery lay inside him.
How base he had been! Throwing stones at pitiful, defenceless people who were already spattered with blood!
All this was so painful. He could feel it in his heart. And there were beads of sweat on his forehead.
How could he have been so arrogant? Who had given him the right to boast of his purity and courage, to set himself up as a merciless judge of the weaknesses of others?
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
Viktor had been so proud of his courage and uprightness; he had laughed at anyone who had shown signs of weakness or fear. And now he too had betrayed people. He was ashamed of himself; he despised himself. The house he lived in, its light and warmth, had crumbled away; nothing was left but dry quicksand.
His friendship with Chepyzhin, his affection for his daughter, his devotion to his wife, his hopeless love for Marya Ivanovna, his human sins and his human happiness, his work, his beloved science, his love for his mother, his grief for her – everything had vanished.
Why had he committed this terrible sin? Everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man – even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself.
Then he realized that it still wasn't too late. He still had the strength to lift up his head, to remain his mother's son.
And he wasn't going to try to console himself or justify what he had done. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself. No, no, no! He didn't want to strive to be a hero – and then preen himself over his courage.
Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn't be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man.
'Well then, we'll see,' he said to himself. 'Maybe I do have enough strength. Your strength, Mother…'
56
Evenings in a hut near the Lubyanka…
Krymov was lying on his bunk after being interrogated – groaning, thinking and talking to Katsenelenbogen.
The amazing confessions of Bukharin and Rykov, of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the trials of the Trotskyists, of the Right Opposition and the Left Opposition, the fate of Bubnov, Muralov and Shlyapnikov – all these things no longer seemed quite so hard to understand. The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
Stalin! The great Stalin! Perhaps this man with the iron will had less will than any of them. He was a slave of his time and circumstances, a dutiful, submissive servant of the present day, flinging open the doors before the new age.
Yes, yes, yes… And those who didn't bow down before the new age were thrown on the scrapheap.
He knew now how a man could be split apart. After you've been searched, after you've had your buttons ripped off and your spectacles confiscated, you look on yourself as a physical nonentity. And then in the investigator's office you realize that the role you played in the Revolution and the Civil War means nothing, that all your work and all your knowledge is just so much rubbish. You are indeed a nonentity – and not just physically.
The unity of man's physical and spiritual being was the key to the investigators' almost uninterrupted run of successes. Soul and body are two complementary vessels; after crushing and destroying a man's physical defences, the invading party nearly always succeeded in sending its mobile detachments into the breach in time to triumph over a man's soul, to force him into unconditional capitulation.
He didn't have the strength to think about all this; neither did he have the strength not to think about it.
Who had betrayed him? Who had informed on him? Who had slandered him? Somehow these questions no longer interested him.
He had always been proud of his ability to subordinate his life to logic. But now it was different. Logic said that Yevgenia Nikolaevna had supplied the information about his conversation with Trotsky. But the whole of his present life – his struggle with the investigator, his ability to breathe and to remain himself, to remain comrade Krymov -was founded on one thing: his faith that she could not have done this. He was astonished that he could have lost this certainty for even a few minutes. Nothing on earth could have made him lose faith in Zhenya. He believed in her, even though he knew very well that no one else had known of his conversation with Trotsky, that women are weak and treacherous, and that she had abandoned him at a critical period in his life.
He described his interrogation to Katsenelenbogen, but without making any mention of this incident.
Now Katsenelenbogen no longer clowned and made jokes.
Krymov had been right about him. He was intelligent. But what he said was often both strange and terrible. Sometimes Krymov thought it quite just that the old Chekist should now himself be in a cell in the Lubyanka. He couldn't imagine it otherwise. Sometimes he thought Katsenelenbogen was mad.
Katsenelenbogen was a poet, the laureate of the State security organs.
He recounted with admiration how, during a break at the last Party Congress, Stalin had asked Yezhov why he had carried punitive measures to such extremes; Yezhov, confused, had replied that he had been obeying Stalin's own orders. Stalin had turned to the delegates around him and said, 'And he's a Party member.'
He talked about the horror Yagoda had felt…