Soon Krymov was back at the desk, listening to the investigator's wise exhortations.
'We can sit like this for a week, a month, a whole year… Let me put things very simply for you. You may not be guilty but you can still sign what I tell you to. Then you won't be beaten up any more. Is that clear? You may be sentenced by the Special Commission but you won't be beaten up again – and that's quite something! Do you think I enjoy seeing you being beaten up? And we'll let you sleep. Do you understand?'
Time passed; the interrogation dragged on. It seemed as though nothing would be able to shock Krymov out of his stupor now. Nevertheless, the investigator did once make him jerk back his head and gape at him in astonishment.
'These are all things that happened a long time ago,' said the investigator, pointing at Krymov's file. 'We can forget about them. But what we cannot forget is your base treachery towards the Motherland during the battle for Stalingrad. Our witnesses and documents all say the same thing. You tried to weaken the political consciousness of the soldiers in the surrounded house 6/1. You incited Grekov, a true patriot, to treachery: you tried to make him go over to the enemy. You betrayed the trust shown in you both by the Party and by your commanding officers when they chose to send you to this house as a military commissar. How did you behave when you got there? Like an enemy agent!'
Krymov was beaten up again in the small hours. He seemed to be drowning in warm black milk. Once again the man with the narrow epaulettes nodded as he wiped the needle of his syringe. Once again the investigator said: 'Well then, thanks to medical science…'
They were sitting opposite one another again. Krymov looked at the investigator's tired face and felt surprised at his own lack of anger. Could he really have seized this same man by the tie and tried to strangle him? Now he was beginning to feel quite close to his investigator again. The desk no longer separated them from one another: they were two comrades, two disappointed men.
Suddenly Krymov remembered how the man in bloodstained underwear who hadn't been shot properly had come back from the steppe at night, back to the Front Special Section.
'That's my fate too,' he thought. 'I've got nowhere to go. It's too late.'
Later he asked to go to the lavatory. The captain from the previous day appeared again. He raised the blind, turned out the light and lit a cigarette.
Once again Krymov saw the light of day, a sullen light that seemed to come not from the sun, or even the sky, but from the grey brick of the Inner Prison.
43
The other bunks were all empty: his neighbours must have been transferred to another cell, or else they were being interrogated.
He lay there, frayed. He was quite lost; his whole life had been smeared with filth. He had a terrible pain in the small of his back; they must have injured his kidneys.
At this bitter moment, his whole life shattered, he understood the power of a woman's love. A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more they lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in the queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary-fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil-stove; she would give whole years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour…
Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.
The despair that cut into him like a knife made him want to reduce someone else to despair.
He composed several lines of a letter to her: 'Doubtless you were glad to hear what has happened, not because I have been crushed, but because you managed to run away from me in time; you must be blessing your rat's instinct that made you desert a sinking ship… I am alone…'
He glimpsed the telephone on the investigator's desk… a great lout was punching him in the side, under his ribs… the captain was raising the blind, turning out the light… he could hear the rustling of the pages of his file…
He was just falling asleep with that sound in his ears when someone drove a crooked, red-hot cobbler's awl into his skull. His brain seemed to smell of burning. Yevgenia Nikolaevna had denounced him!
'Marble! Pure marble!' The words spoken to him one morning in the Znamenka, in the office of the chairman of the Revolutionary War Soviet of the Republic… The man with the pointed beard and sparkling pince-nez had read through Krymov's article and talked to him in a quiet, friendly voice. He remembered it alclass="underline" that night he had told Zhenya how the Central Committee had recalled him from the Comintern in order to edit booklets for Politizdat. 'Once he was a human being,' he had said of Trotsky as he described how the latter had read his article 'Revolution and Reform – China and India ', how he had said, 'That's pure marble.'
These words had been spoken tête-à-tête and he had never repeated them to anyone except Zhenya. The investigator must have heard them from her lips. She had denounced him.
He no longer even felt his seventy hours without sleep; he was already quite recovered. Perhaps she had been coerced? What if she had? Comrades, Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy, I am dead! I've been killed. Not by a bullet from a pistol, not by someone's fist, not even by being deprived of sleep. Zhenya has killed me. I'll testify and confess to anything. But on one condition: you must confirm that it was she who denounced me.
He got out of bed and started to bang on the door with his fist. The sentry immediately looked in through the spy-hole and Krymov shouted: 'Take me to the investigator! I'll sign everything!'
The duty-officer appeared and said: 'Stop that noise. You can give your testimony when you're called.'
He couldn't just stay here alone. It was easier to be beaten up and lose consciousness. That was much better. Thanks to medical science…
He hobbled to his bed. Just as it seemed he was unable to endure another moment of this torment, just as his brain seemed on the point of bursting open and sending out thousands of splinters into his heart, throat and eyes, he understood: it was quite impossible that Zhenechka had denounced him. He coughed and began to shake.
'Forgive me, forgive me. I wasn't destined to be happy with you. That's my fault, not yours.'
He was gripped by a wonderful feeling, the kind of feeling that had probably never been experienced by anyone in this building since Dzerzhinsky had first set foot in it.
He woke up. Opposite him sat the vast bulk of Katsenelenbogen, crowned by his mop of dishevelled curls.
Krymov smiled and a frown appeared on his neighbour's low, fleshy forehead. Krymov understood that Katsenelenbogen had seen his smile as a symptom of madness.
'I see they gave you a hard time,' said Katsenelenbogen, pointing at Krymov's bloodstained shirt.
'They did.' Krymov grimaced. 'What about you?'
'I was having a rest in hospital. Our neighbours have left. The Special Commission has given Dreling another ten years, which makes thirty in all. And Bogoleev's been transferred to another cell.'
'I…'
'Go on, say what you want to say.'
'I think that under Communism the MGB will secretly gather together everything good about people, every kind word they ever say. Their agents will listen in on telephone cells, read through letters, get people to speak their minds – but only in order to elicit everything to do with faithfulness, honesty and kindness. All this will be reported to the Lubyanka and gathered into a dossier. But only good things! This will be a place where faith in humanity is strengthened, not where it is destroyed. I've already laid the first stone… I believe. Yes, I have conquered in spite of every denunciation and lie; I believe, I believe…'