During the night there was a commotion in the corridor. The guards called the corporal. There was a tramping of boots. The commandant – Krymov recognized his voice – said: 'To hell with that battalion commissar. Put him in the guard-room.' Then he added: 'What a story! I bet it'll get to the CO.'
The door of his cell opened and a soldier shouted: 'Out!'
Krymov went out. In the corridor stood a bare-footed man in his underwear.
Krymov had seen many terrible things in his life, but nothing so terrible as this small, dirty yellow face. Its lips, wrinkles, and trembling cheeks were all crying; everything was crying except for the eyes; and so terrible was the expression in those eyes, it would have been better never even to have glimpsed them.
'Come on, come on!' said the guard.
When Krymov was in the guard-room, he learned what had happened.
'They keep threatening to send me to the front, but this place is a thousand times worse. Your nerves get worn to a frazzle… A soldier's to be executed for self-mutilation – he'd shot himself in the left hand through a loaf of bread. They shoot him, cover him over with earth – and during the night he comes to life again and finds his way back!'
The guard avoided addressing Krymov directly – so as not to have to choose between the polite and impolite forms of the second person.
'They make a hash of everything they set their hands to. It wears your nerves to a frazzle. Even a pig gets slaughtered better than that! What a mess! The ground's frozen – so they rake up some weeds, sprinkle them over him and off they go. And then he gets up. What do you expect? He couldn't have done that if he'd been buried according to the rule-book.'
Krymov – who had always answered questions, given explanations, set people back on the true path – was bewildered.
'But why did he come back here?'
The guard laughed.
'And now the sergeant-major wants him to be given some bread and tea while they sort out his papers. The head of the catering section's raising hell. How can they give him tea when they've already written him off? And why should the sergeant-major be allowed to bungle everything and then expect the catering department to bail him out?'
'What did you do before the war?' Krymov asked suddenly.
'I was a beekeeper on a State farm.'
'I see,' said Krymov. At that moment everything – both inside him and outside him – was equally incomprehensible.
At dawn Krymov was taken back to the solitary cell. The hare was still standing beside the pot; its skin was now hard and rough. Krymov could hear a wheedling voice in the general celclass="underline"
'Come on, comrade guard! Take me along for a piss.'
A reddish-brown sun was rising over the steppe. It was like a frozen beetroot with lumps of earth still clinging to it.
Soon afterwards Krymov was taken out and put in the back of a truck. A young lieutenant sat down beside him, the sergeant-major handed over his suitcase and the truck set off for the airfield, grinding and jolting over the frozen mud.
Krymov took a deep breath of cool, damp air. His heart filled with faith and light. The nightmare seemed to be over.
4
Krymov got out of the car and looked round at the narrow grey passage leading into the Lubyanka. His head was buzzing, full of the roar of aeroplane engines, of glimpses of streams, forests and fields, of moments of despair, doubt and self-assurance.
The door opened. He entered an X-ray world of stifling official air and glaring official light. It was a world that existed quite independently of the war, outside it and above it.
He was taken to an empty, stifling room and ordered to strip. The light was as dazzling as a searchlight. A man in a doctor's smock ran his fingers thoughtfully over Krymov's body. Krymov twitched; it was clear that the war and all its thunder could never disturb the methodical work of these shameless fingers…
A dead soldier, a note in his gas-mask that he'd written before the attack: 'I died for the Soviet way of life, leaving behind a wife and six children…' A member of a tank-crew who had burned to death – he had been quite black, with tufts of hair still clinging to his young head… A people's army, many millions strong, marching through bogs and forests, firing artillery and machine-guns…
Calmly and confidently, the fingers went on with their work… They were under enemy fire. Commissar Krymov was shouting: 'Comrade Generalov, do you not want to defend the Soviet Motherland?'
'Turn round! Bend down! Legs apart!'
He was photographed in a soldier's tunic with its collar unbuttoned, full-face and in profile. With almost indecent diligence he pressed his fingerprints onto a sheet of paper. Someone bustled up, removed his belt and cut off his trouser buttons.
He went up in a brightly lit lift and walked down a long carpeted corridor, past a row of doors with round spy holes. They were like the wards of a cancer clinic. The air was warm. It was government air, lit by a mad electric light. This was a Radiological Institute for the Diagnosis of Society…
'Who had me arrested?'
He could hardly even think in this blind, stifling air. Reality and delirium, past and future, were wrestling with each other. He had lost his sense of identity… Did I ever have a mother? Maybe not, maybe I never had one. Zhenya no longer mattered. Stars caught in the tops of pine-trees, the ford over the Don, a green German flare, Workers of the World Unite, there must be people behind each door, I'll remain a Communist to my death, my head's buzzing, did Grekov really fire at me? Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, the President of the Comintern, walked down this same corridor, what close, suffocating air, damn this blinding light… Grekov fired at me, the man from the Special Section punched me in the jaw, the Germans fired at me, what will happen tomorrow, I swear I'm not guilty, I need a piss, the old men singing songs at Spiridonov's were quite splendid, the Cheka, the Cheka, the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky had been the first master of this house, then Heinrich Yagoda, then Menzhinsky, then that little proletarian from Petersburg, Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov with the green eyes – and now kind, intelligent Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria… Yes, we've already met – greetings to you! What was it we sang? 'Stand up, proletarian, and fight for your cause!' But I'm not guilty, I need a piss, they're not really going to shoot me, are they…?
How strange it was to walk down this long, straight corridor. Life itself was so confusing – with all its winding paths, its bogs, streams and ravines, its dust-covered steppes, its unharvested corn… You squeezed your way through or made long detours – but fate ran straight as an arrow. Just corridors and corridors and doors in corridors.
Krymov walked at an even pace, neither quick nor slow – as though the guard was walking in front of him, not behind him.
Something had happened. Something had changed the moment he set foot in this building.
'A geometrical arrangement of points,' he had said to himself as he had his fingerprints taken. He hadn't understood these words, but they expressed what had happened.
He was losing himself. If he had asked for water, he would have been given something to drink. If he had collapsed with a heart attack, a doctor would have given him the appropriate injection. But he was no longer Krymov; he didn't understand this yet, but he could feel it. He was no longer the comrade Krymov who could dress, eat lunch, buy a cinema ticket, think, go to bed – and remain the same person. What distinguished him from everyone else was his soul, his mind, his articles in The Communist International, the fact that he had joined the Party before the Revolution, his various personal habits, the different tones of voice he adopted when he talked to Komsomol members, secretaries of Moscow raykoms, workers, old Party members, friends of his and petitioners. His body was still like any other body; his thoughts and movements were still like anyone else's thoughts and movements; but his essence, his freedom and dignity had disappeared.