by Victor Serge
someone lied to me, I lied right back,
we smiled,
and I was paid for the pointless wear and tear on my brain.
I took leave of a dead man. It was raining lightly
on the cheap, red wooden coffin.
Some drunks were singing.
You were still alive.
We must be strong, we must be hard,
we must go on,
I will go on,
but really, that’s hard.
And always having to understand!
Enter my eyes, peace of a summer evening,
I need it badly.
—The train stopped and it was night
and it was midnight.
Detskoye Selo, leaves at the windows,
the house asleep,
these two breaths mingling,
electric light,
this absurd sorrow that had to be shaken off,
nerves, fatigue, we let ourselves go.
And it was over, some lines written,
it was midnight, it was one o’clock
—I will go on—
the hour of your death.
Brother and comrade, they killed you last night,
at this very hour.
The transparent night caressed the steppe,
stars rained down on the cornfields.
Enormous black wounds in the sky frightened you.
Kurgannya Road,
Armavir District,
Kuban Region,
red wheat land,
26 August 28.
Farewell, everything is ending, world, brothers, plains,
eyes,
snow, cities, stars,
International,
farewell, it’s crazy, why, why,
we are men,
I don’t want to—
Immense fear.
Sawed-off rifle, dumdum bullet,
pierced heart,
smashed forehead, the rifle butt is heavy,
death is light.
Silence.
Brother, your thoughts vanished
through the black wound of the sky.
26–30 August [19]28.
Death of Panait
Finished—the Mediterranean, finished Paris, finished, finished,
finished, that corner of Alexandria where you almost died of hunger,
of cholera,
of despair
—does anyone know what he dies of?
Finished—the romances, dark lips and golden eyes
in the back of some dive, in the ports,
in the depths of the night.
Finished—the bitter,
intoxicating
temptations of the sea.
The Andros is underway for Piraeus,
the Santa Mercedes for Brindisi, the Indies,
Insulindia,
but you remain, eager and sad and penniless on the edge of a hotel bed where dark braids drift
across breasts whose moonlight your hands caress …
You chew yourself out and you love her, it’s stupid, your poem,
Angelica, Genevieve, you sweet, sweet little whore …
Finished—the women, the innocent, the consenting, the repentant, the betrayed, the abandoned,
the forgiven,
and the most purely loved! —So desirable, those maids
at the Salt Lake Inn …
Finished—the paprika dishes and that slightly rough red wine
shared with rogues as you swapped stories …
But maybe they were good men,
and maybe they were saints,
your pals
in the little café in Brăila
where tough customers
smuggled contraband
at the Paradise.
“Not one, you see, not one of them
would’ve left the other in the lurch.
They weren’t writers.”
Finished—the books you admire
the way a child admires the marvelous
little stones
found at the seashore,
thrown up from the seafloor …
Finished—the books you write …
Good Lord, the copies! People who haven’t done it don’t know what’s involved
and how fed up you can get!
The pages sold, the pages lost, truth, falsehood,
this pile of big and little lies, all those words
that are traps, junk, trickery—
and the celebrity!
The sad pages you are ashamed of having written,
and those you could not extract from your brain …
The tiring, discouraging, exhausting pages that suddenly come to life
where Nerrantsoula struts, more beautiful and proud of herself and happier to be alive than in real life
—where Nerrantsoula walks off, swinging her hips, and dives into the Danube under the open sky,
oh pale swimmer, in love with the water …
The heart of hearts of men that you spit out in your work.
Is all that printed paper at Rieder’s
still selling?
Finished—the insults,
They spared you none.
They got fat stuffing them down your throat until your death, and even after.
So
thanks to you a lot of people ate better than you did.
They said you were a traitor, that you sold out, my poor friend!
You, the faithful one, betraying all those phrasemongers,
you, a sellout, who had nothing to sell, and yourself unsalable!
You lay upon your press clippings, like Job upon his filth,
gently spitting up the last remnant of your lungs
into the faces of the hacks,
the glorifiers of profitable massacres,
the profiteers of disfigured revolutions …
Finished—even the wish to die
when only bastards are left in this vale of promotional tears.
For you botched it earlier because you loved the earth too much.
You were left with a scar across the carotid
and your suicide attempt made it hard to wear detachable collars.
Your last unfinished pages pull away from you
like a flight of doves,
darkness and ashes, return to darkness, return to ashes—
you’d like to cry, but that’s not possible, oh sure, cry, you must be joking!
You stumble, the road’s burning stones slip from under your feet,
“hold me up, gracious friends!”—Hold him up, gracious friends, hold him up,
the sky is blinding, ah, what heartbreak!
You go off between two goddesses, they reassure you, they lead you away,
consoling you:
solitude, friendship.
No more will I see you going from room to room
stirring your black mood
into your cup of black coffee.
No more will I calm your vehement rages.
No more will I see your veiny Balkan hands,
your big, gold-filled mouth,
your hunter’s nose, your eyes of a sly old child,
a cynic among the cunning …
And we won’t go to Provence with packs on our backs and taking pictures
as if we were twenty,
no charge for the beautiful girl and the madman, the bride-to-be and the anarchist …
Those were the days.
I have sighed over you so often at night
that this evening, in this desert, I feel close to you,
closer than to the living.
The same winds blow across my steppe and your Baragan,
the same storms …
The Great Bear sparkles in my window; and behind the house stretches the plain, so vast and barren it seems like the end of the world,
a young woman is asleep here, exhausted from work, calm in her giving.
The fresh sadness
of your death torments me and soothes me.
All this is your gravestone and it will be mine and it is already ours,
our continued life.
I am listening in your stead
to such a radiant silence falling upon the clamor.
O[renburg], [19]35.
Why Inscribe a Name?
In the Koktebel cemetery in the Blue Mountains,
the Tartars put only a stone on their graves,
not even cut, with no inscription.
Why inscribe a name when the man is no more?
For us? Then, they ask, do you believe that we could forget him?
For God? But God has known him for all eternity.
These wise people thus know nothing of the administration
and its profitable little traffic in thirty-year concessions
or of the bourgeois pleasure of buying oneself a monumental vault
more expensive
than a poor person’s fate or a proletarian’s house.
Cassiopeia
You told me, Oxana, that he died this morning
despite you,
despite your youth, despite your grace, your pity, your hands,
your care,
you told me of your distress at the death of this stranger,
nameless, ageless, faceless,
who from a distance resembled Christ on the torture tree, but more naked,
who for years sipped from his cup between temperature charts and banishment orders.
“Ah, if only I could have tried those last injections,” you were saying,
“but I didn’t come on duty till eleven o’clock,
his heart had already failed,
I only found him at the morgue, with his fine features.”
The names of diseases, Oxana, are words
we throw at the ailments, wounds, deaths at work inside us.
That relentless old organ the heart gets carried away, plays sly tricks, gets abused,
what could your little vials and aseptic needles do
when the whole exhausted planet was collapsing in there?
Tracked down, this dead man I never saw
is with us, now that he no longer exists, he has followed us through this holiday.
And when I put my hand on Tatiana’s shoulder, the Other who is inside me, who is bigger and better than I, and who knows the secret, said to the dead man so near:
This hand belongs to you, and I give you this shoulder.
Young woman, you must give him your shoulder—let him lean on it—you must give him everything, you understand: he is dead,
now he has only our warmth, now he has only my arms to embrace you,
and no one else in the world but you, since I am the only one who knows.
The bands have passed, the rather grotesque floats have passed,
the flags, the processions, the soldiers
singing of towns taken on the shores of the Pacific,
the athletes have passed, the blue clouds that caressed the steppe have passed.
There was a barefoot little Mongol shepherd in a felt hat who merrily followed the snapping flags like a praise singer’s musician,
he has gone past,
you remain.
The day has passed, with its clamor, its blaring brass bands, its radiant sun,
all alone with you, I am given this shoulder, this naked breast, this consenting mouth, this forgiven soul, close to me, close to you
and all your past warmth is inside me.
My dead stranger, have I not misjudged, despised, insulted you in our separate lives,
our helpless lives,
now,
you, frozen, under the earth, and us, upright upon the earth, nothing separates us anymore, reunited as we are
by the risen stars and this sign between us: the high glittering triangles of Cassiopeia.
O[renburg], Summer [19]35.
Song
Destins, destins impénétrables …
—Apollinaire
Destinies impenetrable destinies
cities are built on sand
but the deserts will bloom again
oh heart of the inexhaustible world
hope refuses to perish
this hard will my precious delirium
suffering you must smile suffering
whether the wound bleeds or cries out
the gods have nothing more to tell you
the jungle is your only home
the earth has the eyes of panthers
do you truly feel love for the earth
sky rent by comets
absurd child in despair
are you the victim of poets
archer who keeps watch and forgives
oh you who never give up
welcome this shade born for you
does she not surrender all her pride
to every passerby sent by you
the archer succumbs the stone splits
the flower is a cry of triumph
do you want us to be brothers
I bring a glimmer into this void
nothing will tarnish this spark
Imagine if you found peace again
that slack water beneath the palms
flesh is in need of the knife
have you betrayed the dawn of peace
night devours the torches
let a solitary blaze remain to me
I am standing nothing else will die
totter oh Cordillera of the Andes
Elbrus pure snows of fervor
join your ardent heights
divine spinning planet
your Eurasias your singing seas
the simple scorn for executioners
and here we are merciful thought
almost like heroes
Trust
I have seen the steppe turn green and the child grow up,
My eyes meet the human gaze
of Toby, a good dog who trusts me.
Azure touches the earth, we breathe in the sky.
Red cows graze under glorious clouds,
and from afar the slender Kirghiz girl who tends them
seems delivered from all misery.
Setting sun, behold our hearts, take them!
Behold our bodies which you fill with radiance,
Behold us washed,
purified,
liberated,
pacified
at the point where river, plain, and sky meet.
Nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost, we are
true,
truly men, men true to men
regardless of the moment, the risk, the burden, the punishment,
the hatred,
true and trusting.
My son, my grown son, we are going to cleave the water
with slow strokes.
Let’s trust in the river pierced by sunbeams,
trust in these waters drunk by our brothers, the drowned.
Trust in the frail, supple muscles of the child
who dives from the steep bank, then cries out:
“Oh Father, it’s terrible and good, I’m touching bottom,
Daylight is mixed with darkness, and it’s shivery, shivery …”
Grace of the slender body darting through the air, through the water,
trust with eyes closed, trust with eyes open.
What more perfect parabolas than in the flight of birds?
My thought follows it, just as quick, just as sure,
an arrow through the nonextended,
laden with moving images by all that has been,
ethereal and prodigal,
offering the unique future many a possible future.
The beetle rests on the wild rose,
our shadows have scared off the tadpoles in the pond,
it is a magnificent, peaceful day and the earth rolls on,
sweeping along day, night, dawns, evenings,
tropics, poles, deserts,
cities
and our thoughts,
our shared journey through the infinite,
the eternal,
and our eyes,
toward the constellation of Hercules, itself swept along
by such floods of stars that all darkness vanishes
—defeat swept away …
O[renburg], [19]34.
Sensation
For L …
(“Don’t be sad …”)
After that splendid Notre Dame inverted
in a Seine pure of the clochards’ remorse,
after that trembling rose window abloom in the dark water
where the stars spin out their inconceivable threads
across profiles of sea horses and foliage as real as mirages,
what remains, oh my madly reasonable spirit,
what still remains inaccessible to the wide-awake sleeper
who follows down these dark quays, from one Commune to the next,
the hope-filled cortege of his executed brothers?
Paris, [19]38.
II. Messages
In Paris, in December 1938, I published a collection of poems called Resistance, which was dedicated to my brothers and comrades in Russia, without my knowing whether they were alive or dead.
I did not foresee the fortunes of this word and that mankind’s Resistance to the powers of annihilation would become the essential spiritual fact of our times. I used these lines from Péguy as the epigraph:
Another will smash the prison register.
Another will smash the doors of the jail.
Another will wipe from our thin shoulders
The dust and blood fallen from our necks.
Let them also accompany the messages of this new collection, which I dedicate in loyalty to my surviving friends and comrades from the black years and to our dead, too numerous to name …
V. S., Mexico City, April [19]46.
Sunday
The singer was singing oh life is so beautiful
The singer was not at all beautiful
She couldn’t shut up she couldn’t go away
She was singing oh it’s so beautiful
A corpse in a fedora was staggering in the revolving door
With his calamitous overcoat he dared not enter this overpriced café
In that greenhouse heat what would have become of him just up from underground
He might have lost his lower jaw his teeth the blue marbles of his eyes
They might have rolled under the banquette among the cigarette butts
So waiter pick up the gentleman’s eyes don’t be afraid they won’t burn you
People took him for a pauper still among the living since he knew how to say excuse me madam thank you sir when they put fifty centimes in the palm of his decomposed hand