'Yes.'
The old man nodded and stared at his book.
'It's because I let the two of them down,' Krymov's kindly neighbour explained. 'I said I didn't smoke. Otherwise they could have had my ration themselves. But tell me – how long is it since you left Stalingrad?'
'I was there this morning.'
'I see,' said the giant. 'You were brought here by Douglas?'
'That's right.'
'Tell us about Stalingrad. We haven't managed to get any papers yet.'
'You must be hungry,' said Krymov's neighbour. 'We've already had supper here.'
'I don't want anything to eat,' replied Krymov. 'And the Germans aren't going to take Stalingrad. That's quite clear.'
'That always was clear,' said the giant. 'The synagogue stands and will continue to stand.'
The old man closed his book with a bang.
'You must be a member of the Communist Party?'
'Yes, I am a Communist.'
'Sh! Sh! You must always whisper,' said Krymov's neighbour.
'Even about being a Party member,' added the giant.
The giant's face seemed familiar. Finally Krymov remembered him. He was a famous Moscow compere. He and Zhenya had once seen him on stage during a concert in the Hall of Columns.
The door opened. A guard looked in.
'Anyone whose name begins with K?'
'Yes,' answered the giant. 'Katsenelenbogen.'
He got up, brushed back his dishevelled hair with one hand and walked unhurriedly to the door.
'He's being interrogated,' whispered Krymov's neighbour.
'Why "Anyone whose name begins with K"?'
'It's a rule of theirs. Yesterday the guard called out, "Any Katsenelenbogen whose name begins with K?" It was quite funny. He's a bit cracked.'
'Yes, we had a good laugh,' said the old man.
'I wonder what they put you inside for,' thought Krymov. And then: 'My name begins with too.'
The prisoners got ready to go to sleep. The light continued to glare down; Krymov could feel someone watching through the spy-hole as he unwound his foot-cloths, pulled up his pants and scratched his chest. It was a very special light; it was there not so that they could see, but so that they could be seen. If it had been found more convenient to observe them in darkness, they would have been kept in darkness.
The old man – Krymov imagined him to be an accountant – was lying with his face to the wall. Krymov and his neighbour were talking in whispers; they didn't look at one another and they kept their hands over their mouths. Now and again they glanced at the empty bunk. Was the compere still cracking jokes?
'We've all become as timid as hares,' whispered Krymov's neighbour. 'It's like in a fairy-tale. A sorcerer touches someone – and suddenly he grows the ears of a hare.'
He told Krymov about the other two men in the cell. The old man, Dreling, turned out to be either a Social Revolutionary, a Social Democrat or a Menshevik. Krymov had come across his name before. He had spent over twenty years in prisons and camps; soon he'd have done longer than the prisoners in the Schlusselburg in the last century. He was back in Moscow because of a new charge that had been brought against him: he'd taken it into his head to give lectures on the agrarian question to the kulaks in his camp.
The compere's experience of the Lubyanka was equally impressive. Over twenty years before, he'd begun working in Dzerzhinsky's Cheka. He had then worked under Yagoda in the OGPU, under Yezhov in the NKVD and under Beria in the MGB. Part of the time he had worked in the central apparatus; part of the time he had been at the camps, in charge of huge construction projects.
Krymov's neighbour was called Bogoleev. Krymov had imagined him to be a minor official; in fact he was an art historian who worked in the reserve collection of a museum. He also wrote poetry that was considered out of key with the times and had never been published.
'But that's all finished with,' whispered Bogoleev. 'Now I'm just a timid little hare.'
How strange it all was. Once there had been nothing except the crossing of the Bug and the Dnieper, the encirclement of Piryatinsk, the Ovruch marshes, Mamayev Kurgan, house number 6/1, political reports, shortages of ammunition, wounded political instructors, night attacks, political work on the march and in battle, the registration of guns, tank raids, mortars, General Staffs, heavy machine-guns…
And at the same time there had been nothing but night interrogations, inspections, reveilles, visits to the lavatory under escort, carefully rationed cigarettes, searches, personal confrontations with witnesses, investigators, sentences decreed by a Special Commission…
These two realities had co-existed.
But why did it seem natural, even inevitable, that his neighbours should be confined within a cell in the Lubyanka? And why did it seem senseless, quite inconceivable that he should be confined in the same cell, that he should now be sitting on this bunk?
Krymov wanted desperately to talk about himself. In the end he gave in and said:
'My wife's left me. No one's going to send me any parcels.'
The bunk belonging to the enormous Chekist remained empty till morning.
5
One night before the war, Krymov had walked past the Lubyanka and tried to guess what was going on inside that sleepless building. After being arrested, people would be kept there for eight months, a year, a year and a half – until the investigation had been completed. Their relatives would then receive letters from camps and see the words Komi, Salekhard, Norilsk, Kotlas, Magadan, Vorkuta, Kolyma, Kuznetsk, Krasnoyarsk, Karaganda, Bukhta Nagaevo…
But many thousands would disappear for ever after their spell in the Lubyanka. The Public Prosecutor's office would inform their relatives that they had been sentenced to 'ten years without right of correspondence'. But no one in the camps ever met anyone who had received this sentence. What it meant was: 'shot'.
When a man wrote to his relatives from a camp, he would say that he was feeling well, that it was nice and warm, and could they, if possible, send him some garlic and onions. His relatives would understand that this was in order to prevent scurvy. Never did anyone write so much as a word about his time in the Lubyanka.
It had been especially terrible to walk down Komsomolskiy Alley and Lubyanka Street during the summer nights of 1937…
The dark, stifling streets were deserted. For all the thousands of people inside, the buildings seemed quite dead; they were dark and the windows were wide open. The silence was anything but peaceful. A few windows were lit up; you could glimpse faint shadows through the white curtains. From the main entrance came the glare of headlights and the sound of car-doors being slammed. The whole city seemed to be pinned down, fascinated by the glassy stare of the Lubyanka. Krymov had thought about various people he knew. Their distance from him was something that couldn't even be measured in space -they existed in another dimension. No power on earth or in heaven could bridge this abyss, an abyss as profound as death itself. But these people weren't yet lying under a nailed-down coffin-lid – they were here beside him, alive and breathing, thinking, weeping.
The cars continued to bring in more prisoners. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of prisoners disappeared into the Inner Prisons, behind the doors of the Lubyanka, the Butyrka and the Lefortovo.
New people came forward to replace those who had been arrested – in raykoms, Peoples' Commissariats, War Departments, the office of the Public Prosecutor, industrial enterprises, surgeries, trade-union committees, land departments, bacteriological laboratories, theatre managements, aircraft-design offices, institutes designing vast chemical and metallurgical factories.
Sometimes the people who had replaced the arrested terrorists, saboteurs and enemies of the people were arrested as enemies of the people themselves. Sometimes the third wave of appointments was arrested in its turn.