VASILY GROSSMAN
21
honorable in him . . . ? And he just crushed them, pushed them aside,
hated them! What if they contained the seed of revolutionary truth?
The dynamite of freedom!
All he need do to defeat Liss , to push aside his sticky, slippery
fingers, was stop hating Chernetsov, stop despising that holy fool
Ikonnikov! No , no , he had to do more than that! He had to renounce
everything he had stood for; he had to condemn what he had always
lived by.
No , no, he had to do more than that! With all the strength of
his soul, with all his revolutionary passion , he would have to hate the
camps, the Lubyanka, bloodstained Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! More
than that .. . ! He would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship!
More than that! He would have to condemn Lenin ... ! This
really was the edge of the abyss .
Yes, this was Liss's victory - not in the war running its course
on the battlefields, but in the war of snake venom, the war without
gunfire he was waging against him in this office.
For a moment Mostovskoy thought he was about to go mad.
Then he let out a sudden joyful sigh of relief. The thought that had
horrified and blinded him had turned into dust.
It
was absurd and
pathetic. The hallucination had lasted only a few seconds ... But
still, how was it that for even a second - a fraction of a second - he
could have doubted the justice of a great cause?
Liss looked at him and pursed his lips .
"Do you think the world looks on us with horror and on you
with hope and love?" he asked. "No, the world looks on us both with
the same horror!"
Mostovskoy was no longer afraid of anything. Now he knew
where his doubts led: they didn't lead into a swamp - they led to the
abyss.
Liss picked up Ikonnikov's papers.
"How can you have anything to do with people like this? Every–
thing's been turned upside down by this accursed war . ..
If
only I
could unravel this tangle!"
There is no tangle, Herr Liss . Everything's very simple and
very clear. We don't need to ally ourselves with Chernetsov and
Ikonnikov to overpower you. We can deal with both them and you ...
Mostovskoy realized that everything dark and sinister was em–
bodied in Liss. All rubbish heaps smelled the same ; there was no dif–
ference between one lot of splintered wood and crushed brick and
another. One shouldn't look to garbage and debris in order to under-
