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 all: 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 tete-a-tete 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…'
Katsenelenbogen listened to him absent-mindedly.
'That's all very true. That's how it will be. All you need add is that once this radiant dossier has been gathered together, you'll be brought here, to the big house, and beaten up the same as always.'
He looked searchingly at Krymov. He couldn't understand how a man with Krymov's yellow, sallow face, a man with hollow sunken eyes and clots of black blood on his chin, could possibly be smiling so calmly and happily.
44
Paulus's adjutant, Colonel Adam, was standing in front of an open suitcase. His batman, Ritter, was squatting on the floor and sorting through piles of underwear that had been spread out on newspapers. They had spent the night burning papers in the field-marshal's office. They had even burnt Paulus's own large map, something Adam looked on as a sacred relic of the war.
Paulus hadn't slept at all that night. He had refused his morning coffee and had watched Adam's comings and goings with complete indifference. From time to time he got up and walked about the room, picking his way through the files of papers awaiting cremation. The canvas-backed maps proved hard to burn; they choked up the grate and had to be cleared out with a poker.
Each time Ritter opened the door of the stove, Paulus stretched out his hands to the fire. Adam had thrown a greatcoat over Paulus's shoulders, but he had shaken it off irritably. Adam had had to hang it up again on the peg.
Did Paulus imagine he was already in Siberia, warming his hands at the fire together with all the other soldiers, wilderness ahead of him, wilderness behind?
'I ordered Ritter to put plenty of warm underclothes in your suitcase,' said Adam. 'When we were children and we tried to imagine the Last Judgment, we were wrong. It's got nothing to do with fire and blazing coals.'
General Schmidt had called round twice during the night. The cables had all been cut and the telephones had fallen silent.
From the moment they had first been encircled, Paulus had seen very clearly that his forces would be unable to fight. All the conditions – tactical, psychological, meteorological and technical – that had determined his success during the summer were now absent; the pluses had turned into minuses. He had reported to Hitler that, in his opinion, the 6th Army should break through the encircling forces to the South-West, in liaison with Manstein, and form a corridor for the evacuation of the troops; they would have to reconcile themselves to the loss of a large part of their heavy armaments.
On 24 December Yeremenko had defeated Manstein's forces near the Myshovka River; from that moment it had been obvious to anyone that further resistance in Stalingrad was impossible. Only one man had disputed this. He had begun referring to the 6th Army as the advance post of a front that stretched from the White Sea to the Terek; he had renamed it 'Fortress Stalingrad'. Meanwhile the staff at Army Headquarters had begun referring to it as a camp for armed prisoners-of-war.
Paulus had sent another coded message to the effect that there was still some possibility of a break-out. He had expected a terrible outburst of fury: no one had ever dared contradict the Supreme Commander twice. He had heard the story of how Hitler, in a rage, had once torn the Knight's Cross from Field-Marshal Rundstedt's chest; Brauchitsch, who witnessed this scene, had apparently had a heart attack. The Fuhrer was not someone to trifle with.
