Life And Fate

Lyudmila's father and mother and about Viktor's grandfather and grandmother-where they had been born, where they had died, where they had been buried. In what connection had Viktor Pavlovich's father, Pavel Iosifovich, travelled to Berlin in 1910? There was something sinister about the State's anxious concern. Reading the questionnaire, Viktor began to doubt himself: was he really someone reliable?

1. Surname, name and patronymic… Who was he, who was this man filling in a questionnaire at the dead of night? Shtrum, Viktor Pavlovich? His mother and father had never been properly married, they had separated when Viktor was only two; and on his father's papers he had seen the name Pinkhus – not Pavel. So why was he Viktor Pavlovich? Did he know himself? Perhaps he was someone quite different – Goldman… or Sagaydachny? Or was he the Frenchman Desforges, alias Dubrovsky?

Filled with doubt, he turned to the second question.

2. Date of birth… year… month… day… (to be given according to both old and new styles). What did he know about that dark December day? Could he really claim with any confidence to have been born at that precise moment? To disclaim responsibility, should he not add the words, 'according to'?

3. Sex… Viktor boldly wrote, 'Male'. Then he thought, 'But what kind of man am I? A real man would never have kept silent after the dismissal of Chepyzhin.'

4. Place of birth… (according to both old and new systems of administration – province, county, district, village and oblast, region, rural or urban district). Viktor wrote, ' Kharkov '. His mother had told him he had been born in Bakhmut, but she had filled in his birth certificate two months later, after moving to Kharkov. Should he be more precise?

5. Nationality… Point five. This had been so simple and insignificant before the war; now, however, it was acquiring a particular resonance.

Pressing heavily on his pen, Viktor wrote boldly and distinctly, 'Jew'. He wasn't to know what price hundreds of thousands of people would soon have to pay for answering Kalmyk, Balkar, Chechen, Crimean Tartar or Jew. He wasn't to know what dark passions would gather year by year around this point. He couldn't foresee what fear, anger, despair and blood would spill over from the neighbouring sixth point: 'Social origin'. He couldn't foresee how in a few years' time many people would answer this fifth point with a sense of fatedness -the same sense of fatedness with which the children of Cossack officers, priests, landlords and industrial magnates had once answered the sixth point.

Nevertheless, Viktor could already sense how the lines of force were shifting, how they were now gathering around this point. The previous evening, Landesman had phoned; Viktor had told him of his failure to secure his nomination. 'Just as I expected!' Landesman had said angrily and reproachfully. 'Is there something awkward in your background?' Viktor had asked. Landesman had snorted and said, 'There's something awkward in my surname.'

And while they were drinking tea that evening, Nadya had said:

'Do you know, Papa, Mayka's father said that next year they're not going to accept a single Jew in the Institute of International Relations.'

'Well,' thought Viktor, 'if one's a Jew, then one's a Jew – and one must say so.'

6. Social origin… This was the trunk of a mighty tree; its roots went deep into the earth while its branches spread freely over the spacious pages of the questionnaire: social origin of mother and father, of mother's and father's parents… social origin of wife and wife's parents… if divorced, social origin of former wife together with her parents' occupation before the Revolution.

The Great Revolution had been a social revolution, a revolution of the poor. Viktor had always felt that this sixth point was a legitimate expression of the mistrust of the poor for the rich, a mistrust that had arisen over thousands of years of oppression.

Viktor wrote, 'Petit bourgeois'. Petit bourgeois! What kind of petit bourgeois was he? Suddenly, probably because of the war, he began to doubt whether there really was such a gulf between the legitimate Soviet question about social origin and the bloody, fateful question of nationality as posed by the Germans. He remembered their evening discussions in Kazan and Madyarov's speech about Chekhov's attitude towards humanity.

He thought to himself: 'To me, a distinction based on social origin seems legitimate and moral. But the Germans obviously consider a distinction based on nationality to be equally moral. One thing I am certain of: it's terrible to kill someone simply because he's a Jew. They're people like any others – good, bad, gifted, stupid, stolid, cheerful, kind, sensitive, greedy… Hitler says none of that matters -all that matters is that they're Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle: what matters is whether or not you're the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son of a kulak; and whether you're good-natured, wicked, gifted, kind, stupid, happy, is neither here nor there. And we're not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats themselves – but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one's veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity? Nonsense! Sofya Perovskaya was the daughter of a general, the daughter of a provincial governor. Have her banished! And Komissarov, the Tsarist police stooge who grabbed Karakozov, would have answered the sixth point: 'petit bourgeois'. He would have been accepted by the University. Stalin said: 'The son isn't responsible for the father.' But he also said: 'An apple never falls far from the tree…' Well, petit bourgeois it is.'

7. Social position… White-collar worker? But clerks and civil servants are white-collar workers. A white-collar worker called Shtrum had elaborated the mathematics of the disintegration of atomic nuclei. Another white-collar worker called Markov hoped, with the aid of their new apparatus, to confirm the theories of the white-collar worker called Shtrum.

'That's it,' he thought. 'White-collar worker.'

Viktor shrugged his shoulders and got up. Making a gesture as if to brush someone off, he paced around the room. Then he sat down and went on with the questionnaire.

29. Have you or your closest relative ever been the subject of a judicial inquiry or trial? Have you been arrested? Have you been given a judicial or administrative sentence? When? Where? Precisely what for? If you were reprieved, when?

Then the same question regarding Viktor's wife. Viktor felt his heart miss a beat. They showed no mercy. Different names flashed through his mind. I'm certain he's innocent… he's simply not of this world… she was arrested for not denouncing her husband, I think she got eight years, I'm not sure, I don't write to her, I think she was sent to Temniki, I found out by chance, I met her daughter on the street… I don't remember exactly, I think he was arrested in early 1938, yes, ten years without right of correspondence…'

My wife's brother was a Party member, I met him only occasionally… my wife and I don't write to him… I think my wife's mother visited him, yes, long before the war… his second wife was exiled for failing to denounce her husband, she died during the war, her son volunteered for the front, for the defence of Stalingrad… my wife separated from her first husband… her son by that marriage – my own stepson – died during the defence of Stalingrad… her first husband was arrested, my wife has heard nothing of him from the moment of his arrest, I don't know the reason for his arrest, I've heard vague talk of his belonging to the Trotskyist opposition, but I'm not sure, I wasn't in the least interested…

He was seized by a feeling of irreparable guilt and impurity. He remembered a meeting at which a Party member, confessing his faults, had said: 'Comrades, I'm not one of us.'

Suddenly Viktor rebelled. No, I'm not one of the obedient and submissive. I'm all on my own, my wife is no longer interested in me, but so what…? I won't renounce those unfortunates who died for no reason.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, comrades! How can you bring up such things? These people are innocent – what can their wives and children be guilty of? It's you who should repent, you who should be begging for forgiveness. And you want to prove my inferiority, to destroy my self-confidence – simply because I'm related to these innocent victims? All I'm guilty of is failing to help them.

At the same time, another, quite opposite train of thought was running through Viktor's mind… I didn't keep in touch with them, I never corresponded with enemies of the Party, I never received letters from camps, I never gave them material help, I met them only infrequently and by chance…

30. Do any of your relatives live abroad? (Where? Since when? Their reasons for emigrating?) Do you remain in touch with them?

This question increased Viktor's depression.

Comrades, surely you understand that emigration was the only possible choice under the Tsarist regime? It was the poor, the lovers of freedom, who emigrated. Lenin himself lived in London, Zurich and Paris. Why are you