The general looked through the papers spread out in front of him.
'Zakabluka's having a hard time. Yesterday he lost his commissar and today he's lost two pilots.'
'I've just phoned his HQ, comrade General,' said the duty-officer. 'Comrade Berman's going to be buried tomorrow. The Member of the Military Soviet has promised to fly in and give a speech.'
'He does like giving speeches,' said the general with a smile.
'As for the pilots, comrade General, Lieutenant Korol was shot down over the area held by the 38th division. And Senior Lieutenant Viktorov was set on fire over a German airfield. He couldn't get back to our lines – he came down on a hill in no man's land. The infantry tried to get him out, but the Germans stopped them.'
'Yes, yes…,' said the general, scratching his nose with a pencil. 'I know what: you phone Front Headquarters and remind them that Zakharov promised us a new jeep. Soon we won't be able to get about at all.'
The dead pilot lay there all night on a hill covered with snow; it was a cold night and the stars were quite brilliant. At dawn the hill turned pink – the pilot now lay on a pink hill. Then the wind got up and the snow covered his body.
PART THREE
1
A few days before the beginning of the Stalingrad offensive Krymov arrived at the underground command-post of the 64th Army. Abramov's aide was eating a pie and some chicken soup.
He put down his spoon; you could tell from his sigh that it was good soup. Krymov's eyes went moist; he desperately wanted a bite of cabbage-pie.
Behind the partition, the aide announced his arrival. After a moment's silence Krymov heard a familiar voice; it was too quiet for him to make out the words.
The aide came out and announced:
'The member of the Military Soviet is unable to receive you.'
Krymov was taken aback.
'But I never asked to see him. Comrade Abramov summoned me himself.'
The aide just looked at his soup.
'So it's been cancelled, has it? I can't make head or tail of all this,' said Krymov.
He went back up to the surface and plodded along the gully towards the bank of the Volga. He had to call at the editorial office of the Army newspaper.
He felt annoyed by the senseless summons and by his sudden greed for someone else's pie. At the same time he listened attentively to the intermittent gunfire coming from the Kuporosnaya ravine.
A girl walked past on her way to the Operations Section. She was wearing a forage cap and a greatcoat. Krymov looked her up and down and said to himself: 'She's not bad at all.'
The memory of Yevgenia came back to him, and as always his heart sank. As always he immediately reproved himself: 'Forget her! Forget her!' He tried to call to mind a young Cossack girl he had spent the night with in a village they had passed through. Then he thought of Spiridonov: 'He's a fine fellow-even if he isn't a Spinoza!'
For a long time afterwards Krymov was to remember these thoughts with piercing clarity – together with the gunfire, the autumn sky and his irritation with Abramov.
A staff officer with a captain's green stripes on his greatcoat called out his name. He had followed him from the command-post.
Krymov gave him a puzzled look.
'This way please,' the captain said quietly, pointing towards the door of a hut.
Krymov walked past the sentry and through the doorway. They entered a room with a large desk and a portrait of Stalin on the plank wall.
Krymov expected the captain to say something like this: 'Excuse me, comrade Battalion Commissar, but would you mind taking this report to comrade Toshcheev on the left bank?' Instead, he said:
'Hand over your weapon and your personal documents.'
Krymov's reply was confused and meaningless.
'But what right…? Show me your own documents first…!'
There could be no doubt about what had happened – absurd and senseless though it might be. Krymov came out with the words that had been muttered before by many thousands of people in similar circumstances:
'It's crazy. I don't understand. It must be a misunderstanding.'
These words were no longer those of a free man.
2
'You're playing the fool. I want to know who recruited you when your unit was surrounded.'
He was now on the left bank, being interrogated in the Special Section at Front HQ.
The painted floor, the pots of flowers by the window, the pendulum-clock on the wall, all seemed calm and provincial. The rattling of the window-panes and the rumble of bombs from Stalingrad seemed pleasantly humdrum.
How little this lieutenant-colonel behind the wooden kitchen-table corresponded to the pale-lipped interrogator of his imagination.
But the lieutenant-colonel, one of his shoulders smudged with whitewash from the stove, walked up to the man sitting on the wooden stool – an expert on the workers' movement in the colonies of the Far East, a man with a commissar's star on the sleeves of his uniform, a man who had been brought up by a sweet, good-natured mother – and punched him in the face.
Krymov ran his hand over his lips and nose, looked at his palm and saw a mixture of blood and spittle. He tried to move his jaw. His lips had gone numb and his tongue was like stone. He looked at the painted floor – yes, it had just been washed – and swallowed his blood.
Only during the night did he begin to feel hatred for his interrogator. At first he had felt neither hatred nor physical pain. The blow on the face was the outward sign of a moral catastrophe. He could respond only with dumbfounded amazement.
The lieutenant-colonel looked at the clock. It was time for lunch in the canteen for heads-of-departments.
Krymov was taken across the dirty, frozen snow that covered the yard towards a rough log building that served as a lock-up. The sound of the bombs falling on Stalingrad was very clear.
His first thought as he came to his senses was that the lock-up might be destroyed by a German bomb… He felt disgusted with himself.
In the stifling, log-walled cell he was overwhelmed by despair and fury: he was losing himself. He was the man who had shouted hoarsely as he ran to the aeroplane to meet his friend Georgiy Dimitrov, he was the man who had borne Clara Zetkin's coffin – and just now he had given a furtive glance to see whether or not a security officer would hit him a second time. He had led his men out of encirclement; they had called him 'Comrade Commissar'. And now a peasant with a tommy-gun had looked at him – a Communist being beaten up and interrogated by another Communist – with squeamish contempt.
He had not yet taken in the full meaning of the words 'loss of freedom'… He had become another being. Everything in him had to change. He had lost his freedom…
He felt giddy… He would appeal to Shcherbakov, to the Central Committee! He would appeal to Molotov! He wouldn't rest until that scoundrel of a lieutenant-colonel had been shot. 'Yes – pick up that phone! Ring up Krasin! Stalin has heard my name. He knows who I am. Comrade Stalin once asked comrade Zhdanov: 'Is that the same
