A staff officer with a captain's green stripes on his greatcoat called out his name. He had followed him from the command-post.
Krymov gave him a puzzled look.
'This way please,' the captain said quietly, pointing towards the door of a hut.
Krymov walked past the sentry and through the doorway. They entered a room with a large desk and a portrait of Stalin on the plank wall.
Krymov expected the captain to say something like this: 'Excuse me, comrade Battalion Commissar, but would you mind taking this report to comrade Toshcheev on the left bank?' Instead, he said:
'Hand over your weapon and your personal documents.'
Krymov's reply was confused and meaningless.
'But what right…? Show me your own documents first…!'
There could be no doubt about what had happened – absurd and senseless though it might be. Krymov came out with the words that had been muttered before by many thousands of people in similar circumstances:
'It's crazy. I don't understand. It must be a misunderstanding.'
These words were no longer those of a free man.
2
'You're playing the fool. I want to know who recruited you when your unit was surrounded.'
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.
3
Darkness fell. Intermittently, the rumble of Stalingrad boomed through the close, evil air of the prison. Perhaps the Germans were going for Batyuk and Rodimtsev.
From time to time there were movements out in the corridor. The doors of the general cell – for deserters, traitors to the Motherland, looters and rapists – opened and closed. When the prisoners asked to go to the lavatory, the sentry would argue for a long time before opening the door.
Krymov himself had been put in the general cell after being brought over from Stalingrad. No one had paid any attention to the commissar with the red star still sewn on his sleeve: all the men cared about was whether he had any paper for rolling their dusty tobacco.
All they wanted was to be able to eat, smoke and carry out their natural functions.
Who had denounced him? What a torment it was: to know that he was innocent and yet to suffer from this chilling sense of irreparable guilt. Rodimtsev's conduit, the ruins of house 6/1, the White-Russian bogs, the Voronezh winter, the rivers they'd had to ford – everything light and joyful was lost for ever.
How he wanted simply to go out onto the street, stroll around, crane his neck and look up at the sky… And then buy a newspaper, have a shave, write a letter to his brother. He wanted a cup of tea. He had to return a book he'd borrowed for the evening. He wanted to look at his watch, go to the bath-house, take a handkerchief out of his suitcase. But he couldn't do anything. He had lost his freedom.
Then he had been taken out into the corridor. The commandant had shouted at the guard:
'I told you in plain Russian! Why the hell did you go and put him in the general cell? And don't just stand there gaping! Do you want to be sent to the front line?'
When the commandant had gone, the guard had complained:
'It's always the same. The solitary cell's occupied. He told us to keep it for people sentenced to death. If I put you there, what can I do with the fellow who's already there?'
Soon Krymov saw the firing-squad taking the man out to be executed. His fair hair clung to the narrow, scrawny nape of his neck. He could have been anything from twenty years old to thirty-five.
Krymov was then transferred to the solitary cell. In the semi-darkness he made out a pot on the table. Next to it he could feel a hare moulded from the soft inside of a loaf of bread. The condemned man must have just put it down – it was still soft. Only the hare's ears had had time to grow stale.
Krymov, his mouth hanging open, sat down on the plank-bed. He had too much on his mind to be able to sleep. Nor could he think. His temples were throbbing. He felt deafened. Everything was whirling around in his head. There was nothing he could catch hold of, no firm point from which to begin a line of thought.