9. A ‘WOLF’S TICKET’

I HAD to find work quickly. I could not continue to live off my mother. She earned a trifling salary and the price of everything was tremendously high. My first problem was to obtain documents; without them no one would even talk to me.

After a long wait the police gave me a certificate of lost passport. They instructed me to register immediately for the draft. The head of the local military commissariat questioned me. At the end he asked, ‘Have you ever been sentenced by the Soviet authorities? If so, when and for what?’

‘I have. I was sentenced by the Tribunal of the Leningrad Military District, in 1935, to six years’ imprisonment for anti-Soviet propaganda,’ I answered promptly.

The officer put down his pen and looked at me.

‘So? Well, that complicates the situation in your case. Frankly, I wanted to send you directly to the front. We’ve got more demands for men than we can handle. But the fact that you were sentenced complicates matters. Do you want to go to the front?’

‘In general, yes. Of course, I’d like to stay with my mother for a while, but if I’m needed, Comrade Commander—’

‘See here, don’t call me “comrade”; that isn’t proper. Personally I don’t care, but you might run into trouble if you do it in the future. Former prisoners are not our comrades. Say “citizen”, that would be better. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait a minute. I’ll talk it over with – the proper authorities.’

The officer left by the side door. A minute later a man I didn’t know opened the door, looked at me silently, and then closed the door again. The officer who had interviewed me returned.

‘According to law, you are eligible for service only in construction battalions,’ he said, handling me my card. ‘But there are no requisitions at this time for such organizations. It’s your good luck. When you are needed you’ll be called. That’s all.’

I left the office and in the corridor looked at my draft card. In the upper right-hand corner there was a zero. This was the category to which I had been assigned for political reasons. It meant I did not have the honour of defending my country with arms. It also meant I would be drafted into an auxiliary battalion where soldiers swell up from hunger, where only the worst equipment, often taken from corpses, is issued, and where more people perish from typhus than from enemy shells.

‘Well, we’ll see about that, dear comrades,’ I thought as I left the commissariat building.

Immediately after this I began to look for work. In the first organization to which I applied there were ten vacancies, any one of which I could easily have filled. Many of the employees had recently been drafted. I was received cordially, and the director of the personnel office asked me to fill up a form.

I sat down at a table and filled up the first form. At the bottom of the sheet there was the question: ‘Have you ever been sentenced by the Soviet authorities? If so, when and for what?’

I wrote the truth without hesitation. Sooner or later it would come out anyway. I handed the form to the director.

He read it, nodding his head approvingly until he got to the last question. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me.

‘Is this true?’

‘Yes.’

‘We have no work for you here. We don’t take counter-revolutionaries into our organization,’ he said sharply.

The blood surged to my face.

‘You have no reason to talk this way. In the first place you don’t know under what circumstances I was arrested. In the second place, I have served out my term and have received all my rights as a citizen again.’

‘All your rights?’ He laughed sarcastically. ‘You’d better save that story for your grandmother, my dear sir. I’ve told you: we have no work for you, now or in the future. Good-bye.’

I left and slammed the door. He jumped out after me.

‘Hey, you! Be careful how you slam doors, or I’ll send you right back where you came from!’

I kept on walking and did not turn around.

I spent almost a month visiting half of the offices in the city, and everywhere, with small variations, it was the same. People were needed everywhere and everyone wanted to hire me, but the desire disappeared the moment I spoke of my past.

One middle-aged engineer with whom I talked, said:

‘We can’t take you. Not because we don’t want to. We have a great deal of work and no one to do it. Six more men were taken for the army yesterday. But we can’t take you. The personnel department won’t approve it. Their instructions are very specific on this point. You’re outside the law. And the sooner you realize it the better it will be for you. You’ll get fewer blows to your pride. There’s only one place you can go – to a collective farm. Or you could get a job as an unskilled labourer working for the city, as a street sweeper for instance. You’re not the first to be on this spot. We’ve had others. Remember, the Soviet Government never forgives anyone for anything!’

This I understood a long time before, and my sympathies for the Soviet regime had not grown as a result. What should I do? Go to a collective farm where, after all the horses, cars, and tractors had been mobilized for war, all three were replaced by human beings? It’s true that you could eat fairly well there – I had already investigated the subject. But you had to work fifteen hours a day under the watchful gaze of members of the party and Komsomols who had been sent to the farms especially to hurry up the work and oversee it.

And somehow I didn’t want to be a street sweeper—

At last fortune smiled on me. Thanks to one of my father’s friends who still had an important position, I was hired by the Industrial Bank as a junior inspector of construction. The director made me promise that I would never reveal my past.

‘I’m risking a great deal, taking you. But we live under one God and none of us is insured against a fate such as you have suffered. Maybe something of the kind will happen to me some day. Then you can remember me!’

I had to do the work of two men, sometimes three. I did not complain. I was happy. I was used to work and I appreciated having such a job. It was no collective farm.

Summer was approaching, and heavy fighting was renewed along the entire front. The Germans were obviously trying to break through in the south, toward the Caucasus. But there was no change in our lives. Money for construction was still being granted by the central office of the bank, which had been evacuated from Moscow and was now somewhere in the Urals.

Yet a feeling of alarm pervaded the city. Highly placed officials, using various excuses, were sending their families away, to Tiflis or even to Central Asia. Party and Komsomol organizations were forming groups and training somewhere outside the city. Rations for the population suddenly increased. The contents of several big warehouses, which the railroads were unable to evacuate to the south, were given out to the populace.

In May all the offices and schools in the city were empty. Almost everyone had been sent to collective farms for work which was described as ‘weeding’. A mere handful remained in the offices. In the city the periodical registration for the draft was taking place. I registered again myself, and two days later received instructions to report to the military commissariat for a medical examination, taking with me all the things a soldier needed on the march.

I went to the commissariat but without any belongings, so that I would have an excuse to return home and say good-bye.

In the commissariat I was led into a big room, told to undress, and take my place at the end of a line of naked men. The line was moving quickly. On one side of the room there was a long table at which there were several army medics in white coats. Each man’s card was located quickly. Each of the medics asked one question and noted the answer on the man’s card.

‘Have you had tuberculosis?’

‘Have you had any venereal disease?’

‘Have you any physical defects?’

‘Any complaints?’

At the end of the table stood a man with a stethoscope. Poking his stethoscope into the chest of each naked man and examining him quickly, this doctor made the last mark on the card, which was then handed to the commissar, seated at a separate table. He would put his own mark on the card and say: ‘Go to table 8,’ or ‘Go to table 6,’ or ‘Go to table 3.’

Table 3 was mentioned more than the others and this was where I was told to report.

A man with a roster sat there. He found my name immediately and said, ‘Get dressed quickly, take all your things and go to room 20, the orderly room of the construction battalion. Ask for the first sergeant and give him your draft card. Next!’

I got dressed quickly, but I did not go to the construction battalion orderly room. Some time before I had decided that if they sent me to a line unit I would go, but not to a construction battalion. I was not that much of a fool!

I went down into the yard and toward the gate, on the other side of which there was a crowd of women who had come to say good-bye to their men. They kept asking the sentries for permission to see their husbands and sons. The sentries did not answer them. Sometimes they would shout something like ‘Go away, aunties! You’re not going to see anyone. This isn’t a jail, it’s the army! Scram!’

Someone tried to leave the commissariat through the gate. He was rudely pushed back.

‘No one gets out! If you go in you can’t come out!’

‘But they’ve let me go. Look, I’ve got three fingers missing on this hand,’ the man tried to explain.

‘The hell with your hand. Get yourself a permit to leave from the commissar!’

The situation was bad. I stood in a dark doorway trying to figure out how to get out into the street. Suddenly some of the women tore past the sentries and entered the yard of the commissariat building. The rest began to push in after them. For a few moments there was complete chaos in the yard. The sentries shot their rifles into the air trying to restore order, and I managed to slip out into the street.

Back at the bank the director said to me, ‘Did they really release you again?’

‘Yes, for bad eyesight and a weak heart.’

‘Amazing! Yesterday they drafted a neighbour of mine. He’s got a terrible heart, is lame in both feet, and can’t even see the door of the room he’s in without glasses. You’re pretty lucky.’

‘Are you displeased?’

‘Oh, on the contrary, I’m very happy about it. You know how much work there is.’

Strictly speaking, I was a deserter. My conscience did not trouble me. I was ready to go into the army proper, although there was very little that I wanted to defend. But to die from typhus and convict-like labour in a construction battalion was something else.

Two weeks later when there was another draft registration in the city, I reported as if nothing had happened. With great difficulty my card was finally located – filed among the cards of the men who had been sent to the front. Again I was threatened by the draft.

Then I decided on a doubtful step. I wrote a letter to Stalin in which I related my story, complained about the fact that I was not trusted and that they would not let me go into a line unit in the army, and requested that he intervene in my case.

I knew that the letter would go no farther than the local committee of the Communist party. But perhaps they would do something there when they had seen how patriotic I was.

The letter brought results in two days. I was summoned to see the chairman of the city soviet.

‘Your profession?’ he asked.

‘Construction engineer,’ I answered, without blinking an eye.

‘Are you familiar with earthworks?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘As of today you are drafted by the city soviet. You will direct a section of the entrenchments that are being dug around the city. Report to the commissar.’

The commissar told me to come and see him the next morning.

In the morning about thirty of us, together with the commissar and two army officers, drove out beyond the city in two trucks. Our mission was explained to us. The city was to be surrounded by an anti-tank ditch five yards deep. A section of it was assigned to each of us. The shovels had already been delivered and were stacked in piles, waiting for the workmen to arrive.

The following morning about three thousand workers appeared at my section: city employees, schoolboys, high-school students, and others. I set them along the line which had been traced out the day before, picked out a few assistants, and the work began.

An army major appeared to show me where the other emplacements were to go: artillery, machine guns, mortars. We paced around the field together and he began to explain what was needed. When we reached a clump of bushes he said, ‘Let’s sit down and rest a while.’ He wiped his forehead. We began to smoke.

‘When may the Germans be here?’ I asked him.

‘Probably in a week or so.’

‘But we won’t be able to finish all this work in a week!’

‘Well, why don’t you send a telegram to Hitler and tell him to wait until we do?’ the major said angrily.

‘Well, if it’s the way you say,’ I asked, after a silence. ‘Why are we all here? What are we digging this ditch for?’

‘So that the population will know that the government is here and that it’s strong. If we slacken up on the reins, these locals will immediately begin shooting at everyone they don’t like from around corners.’

‘Well, what about the war? Do you think we’ll lose it?’

‘No, I don’t. In order for the Red Army to win, all these peaceful citizens and the soldiers who desert to the enemy have got to have discipline in the areas just behind the front. We’ve got to shoot everyone who retreats on the spot.’

‘Who’s going to do the shooting?’

‘We have enough experts at that sort of thing,’ said the major, getting up. ‘Go on digging your ditch, or if you don’t want to, go on back to town. You’re planning to evacuate?’

‘So far, no.’

‘So far? Well, you won’t later either, I’m sure of it. You’re all like that.’

He went across the field to his car, forgetting about the locations of the rest of the emplacements.

The commissar no longer appeared at our project. It was rumoured that he had already gone away. Only a few hundred people still came out to my section. The ditch was finished in several places, but there were still large untouched spaces between sections.

‘That’s all right,’ an officer who had come out to see how the work was progressing told me, ‘the Germans will go across the ditch anyway. They’ll think the untouched parts are mined.’

I stopped going to this job because my mother fell ill. To safeguard her I also arranged to change my address and move in temporarily with a friend of mine, Nikolai Volkov, a military engineer who was engaged in dismantling the oil refinery and shipping the equipment south. Once I went to see the director of the bank I had worked in. He was sitting in his office with his secretary, almost buried in papers.

‘It’s good that you’ve come. You can give us a hand.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Take all these papers downstairs to the furnace room. There’s good fire there. Throw them all in the burner.’

Until late that evening we burned the files, covering years of the bank’s activities. Finally only a few folders of current business were left.

‘Well, that does it,’ said the director with relief. ‘Thanks for your help. Incidentally, can you use some money?’

‘Naturally! There never was a time when I couldn’t.’

‘Here, take some!’ He opened his briefcase which was stuffed with big bills and handed me a stack of them. ‘Here’s 5,000. Is that enough? I’ve already settled with the others.’

‘Thanks, that’s plenty,’ I said. Five thousand rubles was a half year’s salary for me.

‘Are you evacuating or not?’ asked the director.

‘I haven’t decided yet. I probably will.’

‘You mean you probably won’t. You’d be a fool if you did. Stay here, you’ll get along with the Germans. But I’ll give you an evacuation certificate anyway. You can get rations on it.’

Late that night, with money and a certificate that I was to accompany the bank’s valuables to Tiflis, I returned to Nikolai’s apartment.

Nikolai was indignant.

‘It’s a disgrace what’s going on. Everyone who has anything to do with money is stealing hundreds of thousands of rubles. The banks are handing it out to directors and head book-keepers for the asking. Workers and employees get chicken feed: two months’ pay. They’re looting the warehouses of shoes, clothing, everything.’

This was actually true. The population of the city, which for so long had not seen good food or new clothes, had suddenly become rich. If you knew someone, or had evacuation certificates, you could get ham, preserves, butter, and other things which only the old folks remembered and which the young had never even seen because under the Soviet they benefited only a few privileged officials. People with packages and pails filled the streets, happy and smiling, loaded as they had not been for years.

Meanwhile the evacuation was proceeding very slowly. The important people had sent their families as far away as possible long before. Almost all the N.K.V.D. people had left, as well as a large part of the Communists and most of the city’s Jewish families.

At home my mother was ecstatic as she showed me her booty for the day: several quarts of oil, a large jar of jam, some margarine, and a pair of shoes. The neighbours gave us a bag of flour in addition to all this. They had taken several right from the mill on a wheelbarrow.

The last evening of Soviet control over the city came. In the distance was the sound of cannonading. Groups of soldiers passed through the city. The streets were full of people; nobody wanted to stay home. Suddenly there was a distant but very loud explosion. The sky in the south grew red.

‘What is it?’ we kept asking each other.

Explosions began to come from various parts of the town. People ran through the streets.

‘They’ve blown up the station and the power plant!’ someone yelled on the run.

‘Fill up on water right away!’ one of us shouted, dashing to the tap in the yard. Everyone disappeared to look for buckets. But it was too late; the water was not running any more.

‘We’ll have to clean out the well,’ someone lamented. ‘No water’s been drawn from it for ten years; it’s full of dirt.’

I went to the centre of town. It was almost light because of the fires. Suddenly there was a roar not far off and another building crumbled; it was the headquarters of the city committee of the party. People were chasing about and shouting. Someone was calling for help, saying that there were dead and injured in the near-by houses.

I had reached the outskirts of the city without noticing it. A mill was burning with a bright flame which lit up a crowd of hundreds, many of whom were running into the fire at the risk of their lives to get a bag of flour for their hungry children.

When I got home I found Nikolai, in uniform, packing some things in a bag.

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘I’m going east. The cars are gone and the railroad has been cut. So I’m going on foot.’

‘Have you blown up your plant already?’

‘Don’t talk to me in that tone!’ he snapped. ‘I didn’t blow up anything. Those God-damned N.K.V.D. men did all the blowing up. It’s lucky we found a couple of the charges; at least half the plant is still standing.’

‘What are you going for? Following the N.K.V.D.?’

‘I’ve decided to go, Vladimir, and you shouldn’t blame me for it any more than I blame you for staying.’

I was silent. He finished packing and we went out into the street together. The night sky was blazing. The sounds of artillery had obviously come much closer. Soldiers and officers were still running through the town. The local people were all on the street too.

‘Come with me as far as the bridge,’ Nikolai said. ‘You won’t sleep anyway.

‘Don’t be surprised that I’m leaving with the Soviets. There are a lot of reasons for it. In the first place I don’t believe Germany will beat Russia. Sooner or later the Germans will lose the war and I don’t want to tie myself to a lost cause. In the second place I believe – I’m absolutely convinced, do you hear – that after the war the air in Russia will become cleaner and we’ll get our freedom. Please don’t laugh. Stalin will give us our freedom whether he wants to or not. Don’t forget that the people are armed now and if the Communists won’t give them their freedom they’ll take it themselves. And we’ll have a new life.

‘I’m not trying to convince you. I’d be very surprised if you decided to go with me. Your accounts with Stalin are too involved and you’ll never make your peace with him. You are an enemy of the Soviet system. Forgive me, this is the first time I have talked to you frankly about this, but I know it. You are an irreconcilable foe of everything Soviet. That’s why your place will always be among the enemies of Bolshevism.

‘I’m no friend of Stalin’s either, although I’m a Communist. But I hate the Germans more, and only Stalin has the power to organize a defence against our enemies. The Americans and the English will help him. They have a common enemy. And we’ll win, I know it.’

At that moment flames suddenly shot up from a three-story building on the corner. There was a short, dull report. We took cover in a doorway from the flying bricks. Two minutes later we went on again.

‘And you justify everything, forgive everything?’ I asked.

‘No. There will be a reckoning for everything. For the thousands and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives that have been destroyed, for these demolitions here – but not now. This isn’t the time to settle the bill with Stalin. Today I support him, but after the war I will demand a reckoning as the price of my support.’

‘The devils in the other world will give you a reckoning with hot coals,’ I said, ‘or you’ll rot somewhere behind barbed wire. I’ve seen people who believed in fantasies before.’

‘Well, what of it? If I rot, that means it’s my fate to rot. But I’ve chosen my path and I’m going to stick to it.’

We continued to walk in silence. The city was behind us, lit up by dozens of fires. The road which led to the bridge was getting more and more jammed with people. Most of them were soldiers, but there were some civilians and even some women and children. Sometimes tanks and mechanized artillery drove through the crowd. At last the road was so packed that I suggested a detour along the river bank.

Climbing over several fences we reached the river. Loud noises and shouts were coming from the bridge. Apparently the crowd was enormous there.

A few shots rang out; we could see the flashes. They were mostly on the city side of the bridge. We went down to the bank and walked along the river. Something floated by, not far from us.

‘Crushed,’ Nikolai said, not looking at me, ‘or shot while crossing.’

‘Is that necessary too? To strengthen discipline?’ I asked.

Nikolai did not answer. We were near the bridge now.

With a loud roar a streak of flame shot upward in the centre of the bridge. One span sagged toward the water. We could see the people on the bridge by the light of the flames. They were shouting and waving their arms.

‘The bastards!’ said Nikolai. ‘They’ve blown up the bridge before all these people got across.’

‘Well, how are you going to cross now? Swim?’ I asked him.

He looked at me oddly and said, ‘That’s an idea. The water’s warm and I’m not a bad swimmer, you know.’

He sat down and began to undress. Then he tied his clothes in a knot and gave me his bag.

‘Take it if you want it; I won’t need it.’

‘I won’t either; let it stay here. Well, goodbye, Nikolai. Maybe we’ll see each other some day, but more likely we won’t.’

‘Goodbye, Vladimir. Try to understand me, just as I understand you!’

We embraced. Then he jumped into the water.

‘Toss me my stuff!’ he shouted. I threw him his clothes.

‘Goodbye!’ His head disappeared into the darkness.

I returned to my mother’s house as fast as I could. She was waiting for me anxiously, wondering why I had been gone so long. I persuaded her to go to bed and went out in the street myself.

Dawn was coming. The sounds of rifle and machine-gun fire came from the north-east. The artillery had stopped. The streets were almost deserted.

Here and there a soldier was running toward the river. An armoured car rumbled past. I could hear the occasional whistle of a bullet, and I turned into an entry where a few people stood huddled against the door.

The sound of firing was very near.

Suddenly a light tank came into sight around the corner, with its top open, followed by a second and a third. Painted on the side of each was a black cross.

A motor cycle with two Germans on it drove up to us. One of them shouted, ‘ Wo ist die Brücke?’

No one answered him, and the motor cycle roared off.

The Soviets were gone.

The German occupation was beginning.