Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  His musical voice always made the same reply, gravely reciting, “Water refreshes the wise man, the rose, the beloved …”

  This did not bode well for its capacity to refresh me, but I delighted in its taste of melted snow. Wryly, because solitude is a souring experience, I paraphrased the versicle to myself: “The same water refreshes the poisonous plant, the syphilitic woman, the traitor, and the torturer,” four classes of being I did my best to avoid.

  On a crate within reach of N’ga’s tapered fingers lay a curved dagger and a revolver.

  I followed a narrow alleyway of a uniform ocher color, reddened as the sun went down. Old low walls punctuated by rare, cramped openings onto other walls. The universe was made of petrified sand, drenched long ago in a deluge of blood. During the hot season, the air was rough and papery; when the wind picked up, the sand whipped the eyeballs, crunched between the teeth, adhered to the skin beneath one’s clothing. The alleyway petered out abruptly into a dry streambed. Strange, stunted cacti, robbing the aridity of some vital substance they defended with militant spines, burgeoned between purplish stones, the refuge of scorpions. Some undetectable calamity had recently exterminated the lizards — or they had scampered, sensing the approach of calamity. And this was the Year of the Lizard! Above the line of the horizon rose a marvelous transparency of sky. There were cold days when you could make out every detail of a distant rider’s dress with the naked eye, from several miles away … I was going toward the ruins. What ancestor, what descendant of Tamerlane had decided one day to raise a pile of severed heads in the long-gone oasis as a testimony to his greatness? Nomad civilization destroyed the farmers and their crops in order to re-establish the old grazing grounds … The ruins bristled forlornly in an expanse that had only just ceased to be scorching, and still gave off an insidious heat. A town, a fortress, a graveyard? It is often tombs which stand up best to time, for they have time, and speak to men through time, to tell them of the tomb. Some crumbling stands of blue- and rusty-colored masonry seemed older than the desert. The ruins spoke in a stifled, stifling language to me, like a waking dream. They came alive in my nocturnal dreams, encircled by poplars from Europe, as structures multiplied in eerie slow motion, portals swung open, and a rushing river glistened beyond. Valentine bounding lightly down the black marble staircase, a gaiety soft as shadow floating over her, before the trac-tac-tac of a machine gun mowed down her smile and I came awake. I believe this dream visited me more than once … It was, in psychological terms, a wish-fulfillment dream, and perhaps this impelled me to return to the ruins in search of a precise reminiscence which I could never find. The uncanniness of the space was deepened by a square doorway, half buried in the sand. I wanted to pass through it, but would have had to wriggle, and run a gauntlet of snakes and scorpions; my life was not mine to gamble with, I was being childish. What possible thing could lie beyond this door that I was stumbling my way around? I laughed at myself as one does in delirium or fright, or again, in the presence of some completely meaningless revelation. Were these ruins pre-Turkish, pre-Mongolian, perhaps more recent? What is time, what are ages? If I’d had a work of archaeology handy I would have reveled in tearing it up on the spot, page by page, and scattering the pieces to the wind of the ruins.

  Returning from my accustomed stroll, the bullet of a Mongol or Turk grazed my breast. The gunman scurried off down the riverbed, swiveling nervously like a hunted fox. I felt neither pain nor anger. I could have shot back, I didn’t care to do so. I pressed down against the scratch with my handkerchief. N’ga dressed it with the pretty hands he then laid, joined together, under the wound to gauge the beating of my heart. “A strong heart!” I told him, for I was proud of it and N’ga’s damsel eyes pleased and repelled me in the same second by their meekness. I collapsed with exhaustion. It had been a sweltering day. I fell asleep with two cool hands over my heart.

  I must have slept a long time, and did not wake once. In sleep I slid into fever, into visions, into the other delirious reality that had been lying in wait for me. It was magnificent. Heat weighed upon the ancient bricks and insinuated itself into the white room; together sun, desert, and sickness consumed me upon a calm white bonfire; and I felt, at times, bathed in freshness, pure joy, friendship, unselfish love — all the things I had never really known. If I passed my memories in review, scant happiness was there, no serenity, much harshness, steely exaltation, labor, hunger, filth, danger, and moments torn as if slashed by knives; a host of cherished dead whose faces memory averts (because they were often worth more than I was), the women of a night or of a season, the one I thought I loved who betrayed me while I was in prison, and the one who was faithful but died of typhus during a winter of famine, and I arrived too late to see her again, having crossed three hundred miles of snow; there was nothing left for me to keep of her, the neighbors had filched the sheets from the deathbed, the bed boards, the four books we owned, the toothbrush. I called together the taciturn bearded men, the women whose faces were stiff with guilt, the nail-biting children. “Citizens!” I said. “You have stolen nothing from us. You have taken what is yours. The belongings of the dead are for the living, and for the poorest first. And we are scarcely the living! We live for the men of the future …” I was a bad speaker in those days. Some of them came up and shook my hand, saying, “Thanks, Citizen, for your kind words, your human words. What do you want us to give back?” I cried: “NOTHING!” It was then that I understood the grandeur of the word nothing. All words are human, I reflected, even the ugliest of them, and nothing is left. I flew into a hopeless rage against inhuman death. “A biological fact!” I kept telling myself. “Valentine, where are you?” I yearned for church singing, the biology of the void! I was raving. I opened heavy dictionaries at the entry for Death. The Encyclopedia said: “Cessation of the functions of life, disintegration of the organism …” The printed paragraphs were dead themselves. Materialist that I am, I leafed forward, full of guilt, to look up Eternity. A definition as lifeless as the other … This was what I was carrying inside of me, in the neurological crannies where memories endure. And yet the days of fever had a prodigious clarity filled, thanks to a past free of death, with natural resurrection, with clarity, true thoughts, clear streams, comforting shade — all in disorder. Valentine was present whenever I wished for her, we were fused impossibly into a single joyous vibration that was calm, calm! The delirium soothed me for having lived. I don’t know how long it lasted; I existed beyond time. There were moments when I recognized the reality around me, but it was suspect, fragile, I felt for the case of secret documents under my pillow, I asked if the water was pure, and listening to the reply — “the wise man, the rose, the beloved” — I realized with no dismay that I was dying. I questioned N’ga: “Have the planes passed over yet?” “Seven,” signed his white fingers. Seven were sufficient for the operation under way. N’ga held a mirror over me and I saw, from my detachment, the chest wound that had blown huge and crimson, like a rose, a beloved, a wise man — a suppurating flower of hideously decomposed flesh, eating into me … No, eating into someone else, the rose, the beloved, death, biology, eternity, the encyclopedia! “What mysterious bliss,” I thought, and by simply closing my eyes I could summon up the delirium.

  I opened my eyes. Or perhaps they were already open, and I merely forced myself to return to the other reality, now ending its useless existence, finite, pointless reality. The low ceiling, veined with green streaks … A basin full of bandages. A gangly spider on the wall … A stocky serving woman entered, braids coiled over her ears, silver hoops knocking against her cheeks. She moved about the room, I could perceive the attention in her gaze, focused on what? The spider watched her. I wanted to call N’ga, but I could not move or speak. Why was I fretting, about what, since I had nothing more to fear or to desire? The servant was nudging my suitcase, softly, softly toward the door, the suitcase that contained my most precious things, tea, sugar, matches, cigarettes, soap, a scholarly edition of the Manifesto
… “Thief! Thief! Bitch!” I screamed and the stocky woman heard nothing, I knew that my brain alone was screaming and that its scream was nothing. So then, thought and will were participants in nothingness? The revolver under the pillow — my brain was seizing it, but a brain without hands is nothing, I was a part of nothing. Before pushing the suitcase through the doorway, the servant looked shrewdly straight at me. Her little eyes were as sharp and alert as a foraging rodent’s. My anger subsided. Take the suitcase, sneaky creature, weasel woman, if you want it to winter more snugly in your den, the spider won’t tell. I turned away, toward the places of my childhood: the tall reeds where my father hid his dinghy to wait for wild duck.

  Anton emerged from the ruins, clad in gold-embroidered white silk, like a Persian prince in an illuminated manuscript. His horse’s hooves gamboled so lightly over the dead city, wasn’t it a wingèd charger? Anton on a wingèd charger! I laughed. Ha, you didn’t think it was possible? Neither did I, Anton. Then I saw him differently, with his flat face, funny diamond-shaped spectacles, hospital coat, and a syringe between his fingers. N’ga was holding a flaming-red object with both hands, a captive bird — hallo, they’ve dug my heart from my chest! No, it was a flask. Anton said, “Saved in the nick of time. You’ve really put me through it, you louse. Bloody hell! Time you came around. The melodrama’s over, or d’you want my fist in your face?”

  “I don’t have a face … What’s the matter? Where did you come from?”

  “You’re the one coming back from a long way off, brother. I got off a plane four days ago. Have some of this iced coffee. I bring you messages from on high. You’ve got a medal, you skunk.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re behind with your work.”

  I was still suspended between two realities. “Behind with my work” brought me to earth with a bump. Clever, Anton. “Tell me about Mania,” I said feebly.

  “Mania has remarried for the third time since she left you. Getting uglier by the minute. A veritable camel, my brother. More coffee?”

  At university, I had adored Anton. We never stopped bickering. He was inventing biological Marxism or Marxist biology or was it dialectical biology … He had no time for old-world romantics who believe in love. “The couple,” he would say, in the insufferable tone he adopted to emit verdicts beyond appeal, “is necessarily nothing but a two-bit drama determined by physio-psychological, not to say social, misunderstandings … Most women are garrulous vaginas with the brains of a sparrow … The outcome of a hundred thousand years of domestic exploitation.” A textbook case of the believer with a cynical veneer. I wonder what happened to him? Back then he was a favorite of men in high places; he must have followed them to the grave, as he foresaw. “We have built” — it was one of his sarcastic sayings — “a colossal infernal machine of stupendous perfection, and we’ve settled down for a nice snooze on top of it, wearing shiny red-paper laurel crowns on our heads. There!” Nothing left of him but this memory of mine … (There’ll be time to spare for sorting out memories. Anton lecturing about how we should only preserve useful ones: “To forge a living memory, in the service of an active present …” What use is your memory now, dear Anton?)

  This unease that recalls you to me, Anton, comes from Nadine. Nadine is straight as a die, mettlesome, instinctual. She’s right, I’m wrong: instincts are always right in the end. We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned …

  * * *

  Nadine lit a big fire in the fireplace and the room filled with well-being. She threw in some letters, photos, several passports. Her devastation had attained a calm of utter catastrophe. It was compounded of two disasters, one trivial, the other almost inconceivable, and it was the trivial one that caused the most pain, like an open wound. “Sacha only made up his mind at the end of the twelfth hour, because we were in Hell …” For two years now Nadine had been afraid to open a newspaper, receive a letter, speak a name, think of a person, let slip the least doubt concerning the totally absurd accusations that were universally proclaimed, to seem not to be applauding the unforgivable with all her heart and soul. Conspiracies whirled around like a witches’ sabbath … At first she’d believed in them, like everyone; then she’d willed herself to believe the unbelievable; then she’d feigned belief and, lately, she’d been smothering fits of sobbing under her pillow. Sacha, who feared being alone with her — Sacha whom she pictured all alone with his opaque tragedy — packed her off to Mont Saint-Michel, to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins on the least pretext: “Go look after your nerves, darling, I feel better facing all these worries alone …” Nadine at the seaside tried her best to read Proust, such penetrating novels, but what was the goal in life of all those people? She strolled along the beaches in the company of American ladies, an English boxer, flirtatious gentlemen dressed like fashion plates — and these people too had no goal in life, they served no purpose whatsoever, and the sight of them would have been demoralizing had it not been so ridiculous. She was invited to a pigeon shoot. Rigging yourself out in white flannels to perform serial execution on birds — how perverted! It made her sick. Only in small fishing ports, reading Zola, did she feel good.

  Sacha withdrew from her so as not to see in her eyes the anguish that tormented him too. “What’s going on? Weren’t all of these disgraced men trustworthy, intelligent, incorruptible? Where is this leading us? I can’t understand it anymore. I’ll soon stop believing in anything …” He’d only said that much, but with a look on his face that she would never forget. It was during their dismal night in Juan-les-Pins. Sacha had kept her away from Paris. “Keep as far from the job as you can, we’re going through a very bad moment,” which clearly meant “I don’t want you to die,” not that it would prevent anything … From time to time he telegraphed to arrange a meeting: two or three days of fresh air, two or three nights of lovemaking. The news must have been dire, because he was unable to unwind in Juan-les-Pins and when she came to bed beside him, naked, he noticed neither her new perfume nor her white enamel earrings — not even that her breasts were the firmer after a regime of massages and cold showers. Instead of making love, they conducted a frosty, fitful conversation — all in veiled allusions. “No, I’m not in a bad mood, darling …” “Then look at me, Sacha, and stop glowering. Do you love me?” Nadine felt ashamed of the breasts he didn’t see. “Yesterday I learned of three disappearances …” He gave three names. “Executed?” “Obviously, ah, you want me to dot the i’s …” “But why, why? Is it going to continue?” Nadine yanked the sheet over her shoulders, ashamed of her why’s which no longer made sense. He stubbed his cigarette out on the pillow where it made a small black hole, like a bullet’s, and stared at the mark with a strange laugh. “Why? You silly girl. Because they were old, well-known, and battle-hardened. Because they were in the way, because they knew as much as I do …” He swigged some whiskey straight from the bottle. Their bodies moved closer without heat, Nadine suppressed a shiver; they did not desire each other. Sacha was ruminating stolidly, eyes on the ceiling. Nadine thought (she was sure she only thought), “What about you? What about us?” and he answered her, “We’ll go the way of the others. The avalanche rolls onward, and we’re in its path. We count for nothing.” Nadine let the shivers overcome her. “Then let’s run, Sacha, escape anywhere!” There was an interminable lull before he shot back: “Stop talking drivel! It’s treason to run away. Me, a traitor? To save my own miserable skin, or your pretty skin, eh? And then what would we be left with? This old world we execrate? Pass the whiskey.” They took pills to be able to sleep … And now she was feeding the postcards from Juan-les-Pins into the fire.

  The other disaster, trifling by comparison, sliced into an open wound. No meeting with him tomorrow, no meeting ever again with those boyish clever eyes, that somewhat hard mouth, that wiry athlete’s body, those clumsy nimble hands, that lively voice, its flatness rendered abruptly tender under the impulse of a
sharp organic impulses … There were so few problems for him, everything was what it seemed, so few backstage machinations in his world constructed out of a succession of planes each of which negates and destroys the previous one! It says in books that it is simple to surrender to a man who attracts you — who needs love? — that the moment’s pleasure can be savored like a glass of champagne. And I don’t really love him, that overgrown boy who thinks he’s a man, I don’t love him, I couldn’t live with him for a week without finding his naïveté stupid … And so what? It would be a simple kind of love, like a ramble on a heath. But we’re not cut out for healthy outdoor rambles, are we, we’re better at creeping through tunnels! Tear him out, leaving a throbbing wound behind: the amputated arm still feels pain. Nadine’s eyes swam with tears. All she had of him was two notes in his sprawling script, signed with a trenchant Y: Yours. She put them to her lips before casting them into the fire. She was packing a small suitcase with what she would take when a knock came at the locked door. Immediately the intrusive rat-tat-tat brought her back to earth. Like a cat she reached the door in two swift bounds, pressing herself against it.