'Sixty,' said the old man. 'I was transferred from the workers' militia.'
He turned to the soldier again. 'Is Seryozha with you?'
'No, he's not in our regiment. He must have ended up with our neighbours.'
'That's bad,' said the old man. 'God knows what will become of him there.'
Krymov greeted various people and looked round the different parts of the cellar with their half-dismantled wooden partitions. In one place there was a field-gun pointing out through a loophole cut in the wall.
'It's like a man-of-war,' said Krymov.
'Yes, except there's not much water,' said the gunner.
Further on, in niches and gaps in the wall, were the mortars. Their long-tailed bombs lay on the floor beside them. There was also an accordion lying on a tarpaulin.
'So house 6/1 is still holding out!' said Krymov, his voice ringing. 'It hasn't yielded to the Fascists. All over the world, millions of people are watching you and rejoicing.'
No one answered.
Old Polyakov walked up to him and held out the tin hat full of potato-cakes.
'Has anyone written about Polyakov's potato-cakes yet?' asked one soldier.
'Very funny,' said Polyakov. 'But our Seryozha's been thrown out.'
'Have they opened the Second Front yet?' asked another soldier. 'Have you heard anything?'
'No,' said Krymov. 'Not yet.'
'Once the heavy artillery on the left bank opened up on us,' said a soldier with his jacket unbuttoned. 'Kolomeitsev was knocked off his feet. When he got up he said: 'Well, lads, there's the Second Front for you!''
'Don't talk such rubbish,' said a young man with dark hair. 'We wouldn't be here at all if it wasn't for the artillery. The Germans would have eaten us up long ago.'
'Where's your commander?' asked Krymov.
'There he is – over there, right in the front line.'
Grekov was lying on top of a huge heap of bricks, looking at something through a pair of binoculars. When Krymov called out his name he turned his head very slowly, put his fingers to his lips and returned to his binoculars. After a few moments his shoulders started shaking; he was laughing. He crawled back down, smiled and said: 'It's worse than chess.'
Then he noticed the green bars and commissar's star on Krymov's tunic.
'Welcome to our hut, comrade Commissar! I'm Grekov, the house-manager. Did you come by the passage we just dug?'
Everything about him – the look in his eyes, his quick movements, his wide, flattened nostrils – was somehow insolent and provocative.
'Never mind,' thought Krymov. 'I'll show you.'
He started to question him. Grekov answered slowly and absent-mindedly, yawning and looking around as though these questions were distracting him from something of genuine importance.
'Would you like to be relieved?' asked Krymov.
'Don't bother,' said Grekov. 'But we could do with some cigarettes. And of course we need mortar-bombs, hand-grenades and- if you can spare it – some vodka and something to eat. You could drop it from a kukuruznik.' [43] As he spoke, Grekov counted the items off on his fingers.
'So you're not intending to quit?' said Krymov. In spite of his mounting anger at Grekov's insolence, he couldn't help but admire the man's ugly face.
For a brief moment both men were silent. Krymov managed, with difficulty, to overcome a sudden feeling that morally he was inferior to the men in the encircled building. 'Are you logging your operations?'
'I've got no paper,' answered Grekov. 'There's nothing to write on, no time, and there wouldn't be any point anyway.'
'At present you're under the command of the CO of the 176th Infantry Regiment,' said Krymov.
'Correct, comrade Battalion Commissar,' replied Grekov mockingly. 'But when the Germans cut off this entire sector, when I gathered men and weapons together in this building, when I repelled thirty enemy attacks and set eight tanks on fire, then I wasn't under anyone's command.'
'Do you know the precise number of soldiers under your command as of this morning? Do you keep a check?'
'A lot of use that would be. I don't write reports and I don't receive rations from any quartermaster. We've been living on rotten potatoes and foul water.'
'Are there any women in the building?'
'Tell me, comrade Commissar, is this an interrogation?'
'Have any men under your command been taken prisoner?'
'No.'
'Well, where is that radio-operator of yours?'
Grekov bit his lip, and his eyebrows came together in a frown.
'The girl turned out to be a German spy. She tried to recruit me. First I raped her, then I had her shot.'
He drew himself up to his full height and asked sarcastically: 'Is that the kind of answer you want from me? It's beginning to seem as though I'll end up in a penal battalion. Is that right, Sir?'
Krymov looked at him for a moment in silence.
'Grekov, you're going too far. You've lost all sense of proportion. I've been in command of a surrounded unit myself. I was interrogated afterwards too.'
After another pause, he said very deliberately:
'My orders were that, if necessary, I should demote you and take command myself. Why force me along that path?'
Grekov thought for a moment, cocked his head and said:
'It's gone quiet. The Germans are calming down.'
20
'Good,' said Krymov. 'There are still a few questions to be settled. We can talk in private.'
'Why?' asked Grekov. 'My men and I fight together. We can settle whatever needs settling together.'
Although Grekov's audacity made Krymov furious, he had to admire it. He didn't want Grekov to think of him as just a bureaucrat. He wanted to tell him about his life before the war, about how his unit had been encircled in the Ukraine. But that would be an admission of weakness. And he was here to show his strength. He wasn't an official in the Political Section, but the commissar of a fighting unit.
'And don't worry,' he said to himself, 'the commissar knows what he's doing.'
Now that things were quiet, the men were stretching out on the floor or sitting down on heaps of bricks.
'Well, I don't think the Germans will cause any more trouble today,' said Grekov. He turned to Krymov. 'Why don't we have something to eat, comrade Commissar?'
Krymov sat down next to him.
'As I look at you all,' he said, 'I keep thinking of the old saying: 'Russians always beat Prussians'.'
'Precisely,' agreed a quiet, lazy voice.
This 'precisely', with its condescending irony towards such hackneyed formulae, caused a ripple of mirth. These men knew at least as much as Krymov about the strength of the Russians; they themselves were the expression of that strength. But they also knew that if the Prussians had now reached the Volga, it certainly wasn't because the Russians always beat them.
Krymov was feeling confused. He felt uncomfortable when political instructors praised Russian generals of past centuries. The way these generals were constantly mentioned in articles in
