- Cross: There's a room just down the hall from McLeod's office where grown men play a game. It's a bit like Monopoly, only more people get hurt. There's no good and no bad. The object is not to win, but not to lose - and the only rule is to stay in the game.
- Cross: You still don't have any questions?
- Zemetkin: What answers could you have that would make any difference?I love you, Cross.
- Cross: And I you, Max. That's why I must tell you there could be pain in this.
- Zemetkin: I have been inoculated. You know, Cross, I used to think that the only music I would ever hear, no matter what I was really playing, was the music we played each morning when the others went out to work. Or the music for the selection, when the lucky ones went into the showers. Now I can hear Brahms... And not crying. But one image has never blurred. Cross, you coming through that gate and taking me home.
- Cross: What about the trials? The purges?
- Zharkov: Trials, purges, they are words you have read somewhere, Cross. My trial was so grotesque, my hours of interrogation so terrible that I was numb. It was a kind of frontal lobotomy without anesthetic. And the labor camps, where men, good communists' old fighters, men who believed in the dignity of man above all else, were used as drought animals to pull logs on frozen feet. That this could be the result of all I had committed my life to.
- Cross: But, baby, at that moment, didn't you realize what was happening?
- Zharkov: At that moment I tried to understand what had happened to me. Most of us there were communists, not Stalinists. That is why we were there. Nothing had happened to make me renounce myself. I was still a communist. Stalin couldn't take it away from me. And now the dull, gray stupidity that sends the tanks into Prague because it has no imagination, it can't take it from me either. I am still a communist.
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