VASILY GROSSMAN
27
de; watching him cry, they had started to cry themselves. And then
that frightened, pitiful look of his at the end -like a little boy turning
to his mother.
Then the station buildings had come into view. The locomotive,
with its tall funnel, had seemed even blacker against the snow.
Lenin's comrades - Rykov, Kamenev and Bukharin - had
walked just behind the sledge, their beards white with hoar-frost.
From time to time they had glanced absent-mindedly at a swarthy,
pock-marked man wearing a long greatcoat and boots with soft tops.
They had always felt a contemptuous scorn for his Caucasian style of
dress. And had he been a little more tactful, he wouldn't have come
to Gorki at all; this was a gathering for Lenin's very closest friends
and relatives . None of them understood that this man was the true
heir of Lenin, that he would supplant everyone of them, even Krup–
skaya herself.
No, it wasn't Bukharin, Rykov and Zinoviev who were the
heirs of Lenin. Nor Trotsky . They were all mistaken. None of them
had been chosen to continue Lenin's work. But even Lenin had failed
to understand this.
Nearly two decades had passed since that day, since the body of
Lenin - the man who had determined the fate of Russia, of Europe,
of Asia, of humanity itself-had been drawn through the snow on a
creaking sledge.
Krymov couldn't stop thinking about those days. He remem–
bered the bonfires blazing in the night, the frost-covered walls of the
Kremlin, the hundreds of thousands of weeping people, the heart–
rending howl of factory hooters, Yevdokimov's stentorian voice as he
stood on a platform and read an appeal to the workers of the world,
the small group who had carried the coffin into the hastily-built
wooden mausoleum.
Krymov had climbed the carpeted steps of the House of Unions
and walked past the mirrors draped in black and red ribbons; the
warm air had been scented with pine needles and full of mournful
music. He had gone into the hall and seen the bowed heads of the
men he was used to seeing on the tribune at the Smolny or at Staraya
Ploshchad. In 1937 he had seen the same bowed heads in the same
building. As they listened to the sonorous, inhuman tones of Pros–
ecutor Vyshinsky, the accused had probably remembered how they
had walked behind the sledge and stood beside Lenin's coffin, listen–
ing to that mournful music.
Why, on this anniversary of the Revolution, had he suddenly
