fingers always looked as though they hadn't been washed; Khmelkov didn't even like to take a piece of bread from the same basket as Zhuchenko.
Zhuchenko looked happy and excited as he went out to work in the morning and waited for the column of prisoners from the railway-line. But the slow progress of the column seemed to incense him; he would twitch his jaws and make a thin, complaining sound in his throat – like a cat watching sparrows from behind a pane of glass.
Khmelkov found Zhuchenko very disturbing. Not that he himself was above having a few drinks and then going off for a bit of fun with one of the women in the queue. There was a little door through which members of the special unit could go into the changing-room and pick out a woman. A man's a man, after all. Khmelkov would choose a woman or a girl, take her off to an empty corner, and half an hour later hand her back to the guard. Neither he nor the woman would say anything. Still, he wasn't in this job for the wine or the women, for gabardine riding-breeches or box-calf boots.
Khmelkov had been taken prisoner in July 1941. He had been beaten over the head and neck with a rifle-butt, he had suffered from dysentery, he had been forced to march through the snow in tattered boots, he had drunk yellow water tainted with fuel-oil, he had torn off hunks of black, stinking meat from the carcass of a horse, he had eaten potato peelings and rotten swedes. All he had asked for, all he had wanted, was life itself. He had fought off dozens of deaths – from cold, from hunger, from bloody flux… He didn't want to fall to the ground with nine grams of metal in his skull. He didn't want to swell up till his heart choked in the water rising from his legs. He wasn't a criminal – just a hairdresser from the town of Kerchi. No one – neither his relatives, his neighbours, his fellow workers or the friends with whom he drank wine, ate smoked mullet and played dominoes – had ever thought badly of him. There was a time when he thought he had nothing whatever in common with Zhuchenko; now, though, he sometimes thought that the differences between them were insignificant and trifling. What did it matter what the two of them felt? If the job they did was the same, what did it matter if one felt happy and the other felt sad?
What Khmelkov didn't understand was that it wasn't Zhu-chenko's greater guilt that made him so disturbing. What was disturbing was that Zhuchenko's behaviour could be explained by some terrible, innate depravity – whereas he himself was still a human being. And he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival – death.
43
The director of the complex, Sturmbannfuhrer Kaltluft, had arranged for the controller's office to provide him each evening with a schedule of the next day's arrivals. He was able to inform his workers in advance of the number of wagons and the quantity of people expected. Depending what country the train was from, the appropriate auxiliary units would be called up – barbers, escort-guards, porters…
Kaltluft disliked slovenliness of any kind. He never drank and was furious if he found any of his subordinates the worse for drink. Only once had anyone seen him bright and animated: sitting in his car, about to go and stay with his family over Easter, he had beckoned to Sturmfuhrer Hahn and showed him photographs of his daughter – a little girl with large eyes and a large face like her father's.
Kaltluft enjoyed work and disliked wasting his time; he never went to the club after supper, he never played cards and he never watched films. At Christmas the special unit had had their own tree and arranged for a performance by an amateur choir; a free bottle of French cognac had been given out to every two men. Kaltluft had dropped in for half an hour and everyone had seen the fresh ink-stains on his fingers – he had been working on Christmas Eve.
He had grown up in his parents' old home in the country. He wasn't afraid of hard work and he enjoyed the peace of the village; it had seemed he would live there for ever. He had dreamed of increasing the size of the holding, but – no matter what he earned from his wheat, swedes and pigs – he had expected to stay on in the quiet, comfortable house. His life, however, had followed a different course: at the end of the First World War he had been sent to the front. It seemed as though nothing less than fate itself had decreed his progression from the village to the army, from the trenches to HQ company, from clerk to adjutant, from the central apparatus of the RSHA to the administration of the camps – and finally to his appointment as commander of a Sonderkommando in an extermination camp.
If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces – the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father's house. He hadn't walked -he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand… And if they had been called upon, Kaltluft's superiors and subordinates would have justified themselves in almost the same words.
But Kaltluft was not asked to justify himself before a heavenly court. Nor was God asked to reassure him that no one in the world is guilty.
There is divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man's will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltluft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from being a man-in-the-street to being a member of the National Socialist Party – bore the imprint of his will. A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.
The man who pronounces judgment will be neither a pure and merciful heavenly being, nor a wise justice who watches over the interests of society and the State, neither a saint nor a righteous man -but a miserable, dirty sinner who has been crushed by Fascism, who has himself experienced the terrible power of the State, who has himself bowed down, fallen, shrunk into timidity and submissiveness. And this judge will say:
'Guilty! Yes, there are men in this terrible world who are guilty.'
44
It was the last day of the journey. There was a grinding of brakes and the wagons squealed to a halt. A moment of quiet was followed by the rattle of bolts and the order
They began to make their way out onto the platform. It was still wet from the recent rain.
How strange people's faces seemed in the light!
Their clothes had changed less than the people themselves. Coats, jackets and shawls called to mind the houses where they had been put on, the mirrors in front of which they had been measured.
The people emerging from the wagons clustered in groups. There was something familiar and reassuring in the closeness of the herd, in the smell and the warmth, in the exhausted eyes and faces, in the solidity of the vast crowd emerging from the forty-two goods wagons.
Two SS guards walked slowly up and down the platform, the nails of their boots ringing on the asphalt. They seemed haughty and thoughtful, looking neither at the young Jews carrying out the corpse of an old woman with streaks of white hair over her white face, nor at the curly-headed man on all fours drinking from a puddle, nor at the hunch-backed woman lifting up her skirt to adjust the torn elastic of her knickers.
Now and again the SS guards glanced at each other and exchanged a few words. Their passage along the platform was like the sun's through the sky. The sun doesn't need to watch over the wind and clouds, to listen to the sound of leaves or of a storm at sea; it knows as it follows its smooth path that everything in the world depends on it.
Men in caps with large peaks and blue overalls with white bands on the sleeves chivvied on the new arrivals, shouting at them in a strange mixture of Russian, Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian. They organized the crowd quickly
