'My Angelina's no fool. She knows how to look after herself.'
He seemed to understand everything but feel nothing. Simple things like parting, suffering, freedom, love, grief, the fidelity of a woman, were mysteries to him. It was only when he spoke about his early years in the Cheka that you could sense any emotion in his voice. 'What a time that was! What people!' He dismissed Krymov's own beliefs as mere propaganda. He once said about Stalin:
'I admire him even more than I admire Lenin. He's the one man I truly love.'
But how could this man – someone who had taken part in the preparations for the trial of the leaders of the Opposition, someone whom Beria had put in charge of a colossal camp construction project inside the Arctic Circle – feel so unperturbed about having to hold up his buttonless trousers as he was taken along at night to be interrogated in his own home? And why, on the other hand, was he so upset by the punishment of silence inflicted on him by the old Menshevik?
Sometimes Krymov himself began to doubt. Why did he turn hot and cold, why did he break out in sweat as he composed a letter to Stalin? The Moor has ta'en his pay and may depart. All this had happened to tens of thousands of Party members in 1937 – men as good as him or better than him. The Moor has ta'en his pay and may depart. Why was he so appalled now by the word 'denunciation'? Just because he himself was in prison as a result of a denunciation? He himself had received political reports from his informers in the ranks. The usual thing. The usual denunciations. 'Soldier Ryaboshtan wears a cross next to the skin and refers to Communists as atheists.' Did he survive long after being transferred to a penal battalion? 'Soldier Gordeev doesn't believe in the strength of the Soviet armed forces and considers Hitler's final victory to be inevitable.' Did he survive long in a penal company? 'Soldier Markeevich said: "The Communists are just thieves. One day we'll prong the whole lot of them on our bayonets and the people will be free."' He had been sent to a firing squad by a military tribunal. And he had denounced people himself. He had denounced Grekov to the Political Administration of the Front. If it hadn't been for the German bombs, Grekov would have been shot in front of the other officers. What had all these people felt, what had they thought when they had been transferred to penal companies, sentenced by military tribunals, interrogated in Special Departments?
And how many times before the war had he done exactly the same? How many times had he listened calmly while a friend said: 'I informed the Party Committee about my conversation with Peter'; 'Like an honest man he summarized the content of Ivan's letter to the Party meeting'; 'He was sent for. As a Communist he had to tell all. He said how the lads felt and he mentioned Volodyas's letters'?
Yes, yes, yes.
And had any of his written or oral explanations ever got anyone out of prison? Their only purpose had been to help him keep his distance, to save him from the quagmire.
Yes, Krymov had been a poor defender of his friends – even if he had hated these affairs, even if he had been afraid of them, even if he had done all he could not to get entangled in them. What was he getting so worked up about now? What did he want? Did he want the duty-officers in the Lubyanka to know about his loneliness? Did he want his investigators to commiserate with him about being abandoned by the woman he loved? Did he expect them to take into consideration that he called out for her at night, that he had bitten his hand, that his mother had called him Nikolenka?
Krymov woke up during the night, opened his eyes and saw Dreling standing beside Katsenelenbogen's bunk. The glaring electric light shone down on the old jailbird's back. Bogoleev had woken up too; he was sitting on his bunk with a blanket round his legs.
Dreling rushed to the door and banged on it with his bony fists. He shouted in his bony voice:
'Quick! Send us a doctor! One of the prisoners has had a heart attack.'
'Quiet there! Cut it out at once!' shouted the duty-officer who had come running to the spy-hole.
'What do you mean?' yelled Krymov. 'There's a man dying.'
He jumped up from his bunk, ran to the door and banged at it with his fists. He noticed that Bogoleev was now lying down again under the blankets, evidently afraid of playing an active role in this sudden emergency.
Soon the door was flung open and several men came in.
Katsenelenbogen was unconscious. It took the men a long time to lift his vast body onto the stretcher.
In the morning Dreling suddenly asked Krymov:
'Tell me, did you, as a Communist commissar, often hear expressions of discontent at the front?'
'What do you mean?' demanded Krymov. 'Discontent with what?'
'With the collectivization policy of the Bolsheviks, with the military leadership – any expression of political discontent.'
'Not once. I never came across the least hint of any such attitude.'
'Yes, yes, I see. Just as I thought,' said Dreling with a satisfied nod of the head.
7
Two hammers, one to the north and one to the south, each composed of millions of tons of metal and flesh, awaited the signal to advance.
It was the forces to the north-west of Stalingrad that launched the attack. On 19 November, 1942, at 7.30 a.m., a massive artillery bombardment began along the entire length of the South-Western and Don Fronts; it lasted for eighty minutes. A wall of fire came down over the positions held by the 3rd Rumanian Army.
The tanks and infantry went into the attack at 8.50 a.m. The morale of the Soviet troops was exceptionally high. The 76th Division went into the attack to the strains of a march played by its brass band.
By the afternoon they had broken through the enemy front line. Fighting was taking place over an enormous area.
The 4th Rumanian Army Corps had been smashed. The 1st Rumanian Cavalry Division near Krainyaya had been isolated from the remaining units of the Army.
The 5 th Tank Army advanced from the heights thirty kilometres to the south-west of Serafimovich and broke through the positions held by the 2nd Rumanian Army Corps. Moving quickly towards the south, it had taken the heights north of Perelasovskaya by midday. The Soviet Tank and Cavalry Corps then turned to the south-west; by evening they had reached Gusynka and Kalmykov, sixty kilometres to the rear of the 3rd Rumanian Army.
The forces concentrated to the south of Stalingrad, in the Kalmyk steppes, went into the attack twenty-four hours later, at dawn on 20 November.
8
Novikov woke up long before dawn. His excitement was so great he was no longer aware of it.
'Do you want some tea, comrade Colonel?' asked Vershkov solemnly.
'Yes,' said Novikov. 'And you can tell the cook to do me some eggs.'
'How would you like them, comrade Colonel?'
Novikov didn't answer for a moment. Vershkov imagined he was lost in thought and hadn't even heard the question.
'Fried,' said Novikov. He looked at his watch and added: 'Go and see if Getmanov's up yet. We'll be starting in half an hour.'
He wasn't thinking – or so at least it seemed to him – about the artillery barrage that would be starting in an hour and a half, about the bombers and ground-support aircraft that would be filling the sky with the roar of their engines, about the sappers who would creep forward to clear the barbed wire and the minefields, about the infantry who would soon be dragging their machine-guns up the misty hills he had looked at so often through his binoculars. He was no longer conscious of any link with Byelov, Makarov and Karpov. He seemed to have forgotten the tanks to the north-west of Stalingrad that had already penetrated the breach in the enemy front opened up by the infantry and artillery, that were already advancing rapidly towards Kalach; he seemed to have forgotten that soon his own tanks would advance from the south to meet them and surround Paulus's army.