30
PARTISAN REVIEW
age and enter a dark room, soldiers go into battle, a young man can
leap into an abyss with only a parachute to save him. But what about
this other fear, this fear that millions of people find insuperable, this
fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow
- this terrible fear of the State . . . ?
No, no! Fear alone cannot achieve all this.
It
was the revolu–
tionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of
morality, that justified today's pharisees, hypocrites and writers of
denunciations in the name of the future, that explained why it was
right to elbow the innocent into the ditch in the name of the hap–
piness of the people. This was what enabled you to turn away from
children whose parents had been sent to camps. This was why it was
right for a woman - because she had failed to denounce an innocent
husband - to be torn away from her children and sent for ten years
to a concentration camp.
The magic of the Revolution had joined with people's fear of
death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of
the camps blew on their faces.
Once, if you took up the cause of the Revolution, you could ex–
pect prison, forced labor, years of homelessness, the scaffold ... But
now - and this was the most terrible thing of all- the Revolution
paid those who were still faithful to its great ideal with supplemen–
tary rations, with dinners in the Kremlin canteen, with special food
parcels, with private cars, trips to holiday resorts and tickets for first–
class coaches.
"Are you still awake, Nikolay Grigorevich?" asked Spiridonov
out of the darkness.
'Just," said Krymov. "I'm just falling asleep."
"Oh! I'm sorry. I won't disturb you again."
* * *
It
was over a week since the night when Mostovskoy had
been summoned by Obersturmbannfiihrer Liss . His feeling of ten–
sion, of feverish expectancy, had been replaced by a heavy depres–
sion. There were moments when he began to think he had been
completely forgotten by both his friends and his enemies; that they
looked on him as a weak, half-senile old man, a goner.
One clear still morning he was taken to the bath-house. This
time the SS guard sat down on the steps outside, putting his tommy–
gun down beside him, and lit a cigarette. The sky was clear and the
