Pavlyukov cast a sidelong glance at Chernetsov.
'Forty men from our barracks have already signed up.'
'Why?'
'For a bowl of soup. And a warm greatcoat. And because they don't want to be worked to death.'
'Any other reasons?'
'Some of them have ideological reasons.'
'What exactly?'
'Oh, various ones. The people killed in the camps. The poverty in the villages. They just can't stand Communism.'
'No,' said Chernetsov, 'that's not right. It's despicable.'
The Soviet citizen looked at the émigré with half-mocking, half-bewildered curiosity.
'It's just not right,' repeated Chernetsov. 'It's dishonourable. This is no time to settle scores. And it's the wrong way to go about it. You're not being fair to yourself or to your country.'
He stood up and rubbed his buttocks.
'No one could accuse me of sympathy for the Bolsheviks,' he said. 'But believe me – now's not the time to settle accounts. Don't do it. Don't join Vlasov!' In his excitement he had begun to stammer. 'Listen to me, comrade,' he repeated, 'don't do it!'
Pronouncing the word 'comrade' took him back to the days of his youth. 'Oh God,' he muttered, 'oh God, could I ever…?'
… The train drew away from the platform. The air was thick with dust and carried a variety of disparate smells – lilac, fumes from the kitchen of the station restaurant, smoke from the locomotives, the smell that comes from rubbish-dumps in the spring.
The lantern drew slowly further away. In the end it was just a still point among the red and green lights.
The student stood for a while on the platform and then went out through the gate beside the station. As she said goodbye, the woman had flung her arms round his neck and kissed his hair and forehead, overwhelmed – like he was – by a sudden surge of emotion… He walked away from the station. His head span and a new happiness welled up inside him; it was as though something were beginning that would eventually fill his whole life.
He remembered that evening when he finally left Russia. He remembered it as he lay in hospital after the operation to remove his eye. He remembered it as he walked through the cool, dark entrance to the bank where he worked.
The poet Khodasevich, who had also left Russia for Paris, had written about just this:
A pilgrim walks away in the mist: It's you who comes into my mind. On a fume-filled street a car drives past: It's you who comes into my mind. I see the lamps come on at six, But have only you in my mind. I travel west – your image picks Its endless way through my mind.
He wanted to go back to Mostovskoy and ask:
'You didn't ever know a Natasha Zadonskaya, did you? Is she still alive? And did you really walk over the same earth as her for all those decades?'
69
Keyze, a burglar from Hamburg who wore yellow leggings and a cream-coloured check jacket with outside pockets, was in a good mood at roll-call that evening. Mispronouncing the words, he sang quietly: 'Kali zavtra voyna, yesli zavtra v pokhod. ..'
There was a good-humoured expression on his yellow, wrinkled face. He clapped the other prisoners on the back with a puffy, hairless, snow-white hand whose fingers were strong enough to strangle a horse. He didn't think twice about killing; it was no more difficult than pulling out his knife in jest. He was always rather excited after he had killed someone, like a kitten that has been playing with a may-bug.
Most of the murders he committed were on the instructions of Sturmfuhrer Drottenhahr, the director of the medical section of the eastern block. The most difficult part was carrying the corpses to the crematorium, but Keyze didn't have to do this himself and no one would have dared ask him. Nor were people allowed to get so weak they had to be taken to the place of execution on stretchers; Drottenhahr knew his job.
Keyze never made rude remarks or hurried the people who were to be operated on; he never pushed them or hit them. Although he had climbed the two concrete steps more than four hundred times, he felt a real interest in his victims – an interest aroused by the mixture of horror, impatience, submissiveness and passionate curiosity with which they looked at their executioner.
Keyze could never understand why the very mundaneness of his job so appealed to him. There was nothing special about the special cell; it was just a stool, a grey stone floor, a drain, a tap, a hosepipe, and a writing desk with a notebook on it.
The operation itself was equally mundane. If he had to shoot someone, Keyze called it 'emptying a coffee-bean into someone's head'; if he had to give someone an injection of carbolic acid, he called it 'a small dose of elixir'.
The whole mystery of human life seemed to lie in the coffee-bean or the elixir. Really this mystery was astonishingly simple.
Keyze's brown eyes simply weren't those of a human being; they seemed to be made of plastic or some yellowish-brown resin. When they took on an expression of merriment, they inspired terror -probably the same terror a fish feels when it swims up to a snag half-covered in sand and suddenly discovers that the dark mass has eyes, teeth and tentacles.
Keyze was well aware of his own superiority over the artists, revolutionaries, scholars, generals and members of religious sects in the barrack-huts. It wasn't just a matter of the coffee-bean or the elixir; it was an innate feeling of superiority that brought him real joy.
Nor was it a matter of his huge physical strength, his ability to brush obstacles aside, to knock people off their feet or smash through steel with his bare hands. No, what he admired in himself were the complex enigmas of his own soul. There was something very special in his anger, something in the play of his moods that transcended logic. On one occasion a group of Russian prisoners picked out by the Gestapo was being taken to the special barracks; Keyze had asked them to sing some of their favourite songs.
Four Russians with swollen hands and sepulchral expressions struck up 'Where Are You Now, My Suliko?' Keyze listened sorrowfully, glancing now and again at the man with high cheekbones who was standing furthest away. He respectfully refrained from interrupting, but at the end of the song he told this man that since he hadn't sung with the group he must now sing a solo. He looked at the dirty collar of his tunic and the remnants of his torn-off major's tabs and said: 'Verstehen Sie, Herr Major? Do you understand, swine?'
The man nodded. Keyze picked him up by the collar and gave him a little shake; he might have been shaking an alarm-clock that had gone wrong. The newly-arrived prisoner punched Keyze on the cheekbone and cursed him.
Everyone thought that would be the end of the prisoner. But instead of killing Major Yershov there and then, Keyze simply led him to a place in the corner, beside the window. It had been lying unoccupied, waiting for the appearance of a prisoner Keyze took a liking to. Later that day Keyze brought Yershov a hard-boiled goose-egg and said with a laugh: 'Ihre Stimme wird schon!'[35]