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‘That’s nothing,’ said Nadya. ‘Alka Postoeva told me, “Your papa’s become a genius.”’ ‘No,’ said Viktor, ‘I’m not yet a genius.’ He went off to his room. A moment later, however, he came back and said: ‘I just can’t get this nonsense out of my head. Two dozen eggs for Svechin! It’s amazing what ways they find to humiliate people.’ To Viktor’s shame, what hurt him most was being put on the same level as Sokolov. ‘Yes, they should have recognized my merits by allowing me at least one extra egg. They could have given Sokolov fourteen – just as a symbolic distinction.’
The presence of the Gestapo could be felt everywhere – in universities, in the signature of the director of a children’s nursing-home, in auditions for young opera-singers, in the jury’s choice of pictures for the spring exhibition, in the list of candidates for elections to the Reichstag. It was the axis around which life turned. It was thanks to the Gestapo that the Party was always right, that its philosophy triumphed over any other philosophy, its logic – or lack of logic – over any other logic. Yes, this was the magic wand. If it were dropped, a great orator would be transformed into a
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He had some ideas of his own about personal relations within the State. Life in a National Socialist State couldn’t just be allowed to develop freely; every step had to be directed. And to control and organize factories and armies, reading circles, people’s summer holidays, their maternal feelings, how they breathe and sing – to control all this you need leaders. Life no longer has the right to grow freely like grass, to rise and fall like the sea.
Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.
At the same time anti-Semitism is an expression of the lack of consciousness of the masses, of their inability to understand the true reasons for their sufferings. Ignorant people blame the Jews for their troubles when they should blame the social structure or the State itself.
Immigrants ???
When the Renaissance broke in upon the Catholic Middle Ages, the forces of darkness lit the bonfires of the Inquisition. These flames, however, not only expressed the power of evil, they also lit up the spectacle of its destruction.
‘Hm! He’s not up to real bombing any more.’ He began to curse the now feeble Germans, his voice suddenly becoming clear and ringing.
Ran out of ammo?
There is divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man’s will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltluft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from
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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.’
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.
This silence was like the mute, turbid, primeval sea . . . How joyful, how splendid, to fight in a battle that would decide the fate of your motherland. How appalling, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run towards death rather than away from it. How terrible to die young . . . You want to stay alive. There is nothing stronger in the world than the desire to preserve a young life, a life that has lived so little. This desire is stronger than any thought; it lies in the breath, in the nostrils, in the eyes, in the muscles, in the haemoglobin and its greed for oxygen. This desire is
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Churchill and Roosevelt trusted him; but he knew that their trust was by no means unconditional. What annoyed him most was the way, although they were only too willing to confer with him, they always first discussed everything between themselves. They knew very well that wars came and went, but politics remained politics. They admired his logic, his knowledge, the clarity of his reasoning; but he knew they saw him as an Asiatic potentate, not as a European leader.
What was at stake was the fate of the Jews saved by the Red Army: on the tenth anniversary of this victory Stalin was to raise over their heads the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.
The war accelerated a previously unconscious process, allowing the birth of an overtly national consciousness. The word ‘Russian’ once again had meaning. To begin with, during the retreat, the connotations of this word were mainly negative: the hopelessness of Russian roads, Russian backwardness, Russian confusion, Russian fatalism . . . But a national self-consciousness had been born; it was waiting only for a military victory. National consciousness is a powerful and splendid force at a time of disaster. It is splendid not because it is nationalist, but because it is human. It is a
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State nationalism.
There was a woman here the other day whose elderly husband, an important engineer and designer, had been arrested. Apparently he’d had a brief affair in his youth and gone on sending the woman alimony for a son he’d never even set eyes on. The son, now adult, had deserted to the Germans. And the old man had got ten years for fathering a traitor to the Motherland
Viktor talked about himself greedily and at length. He was like an invalid who thinks of his illness day and night.
Marya Ivanovna sat there, as thin and grey as a little sparrow. Her forehead was slightly protuberant, she had a hairdo like a village schoolteacher’s, and she wore a woollen dress patched at the elbows. To Viktor every word she spoke seemed full of intelligence, kindness and sensitivity; every movement she made was an embodiment of sweetness and grace. Instead of talking about the meeting of the Scientific Council, she asked after Nadya. She asked Lyudmila if she could borrow The Magic Mountain.
Suddenly the road and the ruined house were caught in the rays of the setting sun. The empty eye-sockets of the burnt-out building seemed to fill with frozen blood. The ploughed-up, soot-covered snow turned golden. The dark red cave of the horse’s innards was lit up. The snow eddying across the road turned into a whirl of bronze.
‘What do you expect me to do about it?’ Bach had said in exasperation. ‘In any case, Russians and Germans have always been trading partners.’
And all this hadn’t been a pose; it had been a part of his inner nature, infused into all his thoughts. He was quite unconscious of it; it could no more be separated from him than salt can be filtered out of sea-water.
Magadan,
‘Lyuda, Zhenya! I’ve just heard on the radio. We’ve set foot once more in the Ukraine!’
‘I think you’re working in a very interesting field,’ said Stalin.
‘Goodbye, comrade Shtrum, I wish you success in your work.’ ‘Goodbye, comrade Stalin.’
Paulus’s adjutant, Colonel Adam, was standing in front of an open suitcase.
Gogol’s ‘The Portrait’.
as someone remarkably intelligent and altogether
Viktor wasn’t aware that his intelligence was now merely the obedient servant of his emotions and that there was only one way of escaping from this circle of confusion – by using the knife, by sacrificing himself rather than others.
For a while after Stalin’s telephone call, he had thought that he need never know fear again. But it was still there; only its outer trappings had changed. Now it was simply a more aristocratic fear, a fear that travelled by car and was allowed to use the Kremlin telephone switchboard.
‘What’s happened,’ Shishakov began, ‘is that a disgusting campaign’s been started up abroad, mainly in England. In spite of the fact that we’re bearing nearly the whole weight of the war on our own shoulders, certain English scientists – instead of demanding the immediate opening of a Second Front – have begun an extraordinary campaign with the aim of arousing hostility towards the Soviet Union.’
Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
the camps, Katsenelenbogen went on, the criminals wielded power over the political prisoners. Unruly, ignorant, lazy and corrupt, all too ready to engage in murderous fights and robberies, they were a hindrance both to the productivity of the camps and to their cultural development. But then, even on the other side of the wire, the work of scholars and important cultural figures was often supervised by people of poor education and limited vision.
For all its inadequacies, the system of camps had one decisive point in its favour: only there was the principle of personal freedom subordinated, clearly and absolutely, to the higher principle of reason.
Yes, she admired the obstinate birds who went on singing no matter how bad the weather.
see at once that her father had had too
‘That’s the way things are, Vera. There’s nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you’ve suffered.’
