by Victor Serge
“Has this splendid escapade lightened your mood, Nadine? Shall we go?”
They left the cellar. The street was deep in its midnight reverie. They paused at the gates of the Luxembourg to look in at the sleeping garden, utterly different from its luminous or hazy daytime self. A whiff of decay drifted from piles of dead leaves. Bare boughs peopled the darkness, striking motionless poses without shadow or duration.
“The future,” Nadine said.
D seized her brusquely by the wrists.
“I didn’t know you were so weak. I forbid you to be like this. What are you afraid of? Being killed, like so many others? It would only be a relief. I tell you we’re starting our life over again — blindly. All we ever worked for was life, in the end, we’ve got a right to it.”
Emerging out of the asphalt and the shadows a shuffling form approached: it was an old man in a dented felt hat, leaning on a cane. A hoarse voice spoke to them softly from the depths of weariness: “Ya’ shounna make a scene ’frunna the little lady, M’sieur. What can she do about it? Don’t you agree?”
“Hear that?” D exclaimed, “the night itself is speaking to us … What can you do about it?”
The limping form passed on, leaving a trail of words waning behind. “Course night shpeaks sometimes, why shounna it shpeak, night? Gotta be …”
Nadine and D burst into laughter together. Let’s go home. The cafés threw their cozy glow across the intersection. At the end of rue Soufflot, the peristyle of the Panthéon guarded a necropolis eerily blanketed in mists, but life, simple and unadorned, retained its usual charm along the boulevard Saint-Michel.
* * *
Precaution might be regarded as an abstract, practical science, analogous to geometry (the non-Euclidean kind, needless to say). Given irregular surface A, bounded by mobile straight and curved lines D (for danger), insert point Z, likewise mobile, into one or more zones W (work) at the greatest possible distance from lines D … Bear in mind as you perform this exercise that the dynamics of the problem include unknown quantities O and I, pertaining to a fourth dimension that corresponds to enemy levels of organization and intelligence. Further bear in mind the fifth dimension P, for psychology: nerves, fear, betrayal; and, lastly, random elements X. To all these oppose dimension U (us), comprised of our own organization, our own intelligence, our own nerve. From now on, as far as D was concerned, the seventh dimension U was coterminous with the fourth, fifth, and sixth! Point Z was left with nothing to guide his movements but a demagnetized compass. No support from any quarter, and everything to fear from the services to which he so recently belonged. As days went by they were regrouping, positioning their guns, spreading their nets. It was impossible to guess what they knew, what orders they would receive, how they would plan to strike. The hypothesis of calculated inaction, however implausible, could not be ruled out. In formal terms, D’s resignation infringed none of the articles of the special law that entailed the death penalty; but resignation was not envisaged by any of them. An unwritten law dictated the elimination of agents who were guilty of grave disobedience, and disapproval of the regime was the worse disobedience of all, implying the revolt of that metaphysical X — personal conscience — whose mere existence could not be brooked, for it would pull down the whole edifice of what we called “iron discipline” and others called, “corpse’s discipline.” As a citizen, D came within the scope of legal provisions for the punishment (death, without trial, on simple proof of identity) of soldiers deserting abroad, even in peacetime. He knew all about the ruling psychoses, for he was standing up against them. The notion that a man might bow out without betraying, as faithfully as it were humanly possible (the vagueness of that formula!), faithful to the extreme of objecting to the intolerable, and its destruction of us; that a man might withdraw only to vanish into insignificance, well, any of his chiefs willing to believe that would be deemed a lunatic, or an accomplice to be liquidated without delay.
He discovered that the absolute of trust no longer existed for him. Without that unshakable feeling, clandestine work would be impossible. Trust that the Organization would never let you down; that no matter what the crisis, no matter how acute, the Organization would never cease to weave its tight defensive web around you; that each and every member of the Organization, regardless of personal feelings, would accomplish his anonymous duty toward you; that the top of the hierarchy was staffed by leaders wielding infinite powers of secrecy and authority to ensure that no one came to grief, save at the behest of the most supreme necessity; the confident knowledge of these things endowed one, amid all the risks of the profession, with a victorious sense of security. (“None of us will perish, except by his own fault or at our hands!” one chief had proclaimed. “There is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle!”) And D had served some fifteen years in a dozen countries, including that terrifying wasps’ nest, the Third Reich, where all the sappers were themselves sapped with diabolical meticulousness …
Now his rendezvous with Daria was causing him small but insoluble problems. He had no doubt that she could be trusted, that she must be going through a phase of deep distress, that she was bound to him by a friendship more definitive than love. But, for those very reasons, she might herself be caught in an invisible net. Behind a front of desperate hypocrisy she too had begun to break away. They suspected it, because no serious assignments had been entrusted to her for six months. “Take some time off,” they said, “you deserve it after all you went through in Spain …” Eventually he settled on a plan. He would telephone Daria and give her fifteen minutes to get to an address on the reliably uncrowded rue des Saints-Pères. We’ll synchronize our watches and I’ll pick her up in a taxi and take her … where? The most convenient place would be a room in a discreet hotel. But though she’s no prude, Daria might well feel offended by the awkward pretense of a lovers’ tryst. And chambermaids have been known to eavesdrop, and walls have peepholes, cleverly drilled by silent voyeurs … We’d look like the most suspicious old couple, drawn by neither pleasure nor vice, brother and sister, ravaged by mutual confessions … Paris, for all its bottomless resources, had no haven to offer to a farewell meeting that boded nothing but desolate frankness.
D ruled out museums, churches, railway stations, squares, parks, both the Buttes-Chaumont and Monceau, tempting though they were; it might rain and the November cold was biting; it would be so melodramatically glum that they might just as well go to PèreLachaise, or make one last pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés — fortunate Communards, to die with all the future before them! Hang the weather and what it might do. He wanted the open air. We’ll go to the Jardin des Plantes. The small cafés around the botanical gardens have quiet back rooms that are often sought by troubled couples. The most dramatic marital scenes, played out in low voices, shock neither the waitress nor the patronne who keep a sly watch on the proceedings, hoping for another banal tragedy to be splashed over next day’s paper: STAR-CROSSED LOVERS SINK IN SEINE or AFTER SHOOTING FAITHLESS LOVER, WOMAN TURNS GUN ON SELF. The headlines come to life when you recognize the photos. That’s them, they were at the far table, remember? The dark-haired girl, with the cruel lips, “I said to myself at the time …” Such strokes of luck are rare. Most couples make up, or annihilate each other in ways that provide no pickings for crime reporters.
Narrow walks sprinkled with clean gravel stretched through the Ornamental Shrub Nursery, the Pod-Bearing Trees Nursery … The rusted shrubs, white sky, and rectilinear lines enclosed a shrunken landscape. Daria said, “I’ve brought you a message from Krantz.”
Unexpected. Terrible. Had Daria appealed to him on orders, rather than in distress? Was he walking into a trap?
“Krantz? He’s in Paris?”
“Don’t worry, just a tour of inspection. It was him who got your letter.”
(“He had no right to open it … Or every right, perhaps …”)
“I work with him. He knows we’re friends. He was so understanding about it … I didn’t k
now there was such kindness in him. He said to me, ‘Poor fellow! His service record is outstanding, we’ll fix him up with a special posting in the Far East. The war is coming, and we lack men of his caliber. Find him if it’s the last thing you do … Tell him he has nothing to fear for the moment, I have a lot of pull and I’ll stand up for him. His nerves have given way. Do you think mine are in good shape? And I won’t inquire after the state of yours … These are terrible times we’re living in, rife with wickedness, we need blind faith and boundless energy or else we’re lost, I mean all is lost, because him or you or me, we hardly matter! I can still burn his letter and persuade them to be lenient. He can’t remain abroad of course, but I promise him a challenging job in strategic economics, good hard work a long way away. They’ll forget all about him, and then they’ll reward him, and one day he’ll thank me for having saved him from himself … ’ So there you are. Krantz begs you to meet him, just for an hour. I believe he means it …”
“You do … ?”
D’s blood ran cold. He shouldn’t have met with her! Pure sentimentality — idiotic — the memories, the heroic years, and the rest, a quagmire. How many times has Krantz delivered himself of similar speeches? And how many dupes and dead men does that make? And if he does mean it, which he might, is the system equally sincere? The system doesn’t give a hoot for the sincerity of a Krantz, it goes its own way. Good job I only gave Daria twenty minutes to get dressed and meet me, or she could have alerted the whole pack for all I know. She did have time to phone … A stooped figure turning the corner into their path riveted D’s attention, until he saw the small boy who caught up and clung to his grandfather’s hand. D’s ideas went off on a new tack. Informed by Krantz, Daria is now hopelessly compromised and she knows it. What fate can she expect? Unless she moves against me, no-holds-barred. That would be her only lifeline, and a precarious one at that. D feigned assent.
“Krantz is a very fine comrade.” (To himself: How has he survived so long?) “I don’t have to tell you, Dacha, how hard these last days have been …”
He turned toward her with a wry smile on his face. “You know, I was in a cabaret the other night, and there was this big girl singing a soppy love song:
It hurt me so bad
My heart’s going mad …
“Somehow it stuck with me — though I’m not the sentimental type — and I sent her a bouquet, with a card from my next-to-last alias. Red roses, naturally.”
He couldn’t meet her steady gray eyes.
“I’ll see Krantz, he’ll burn my letter, and I’ll go home. If I’m brought before the disciplinary council, I can bank on ten years — without the letter. Rehabilitation through labor, that’s what I’d like. If Krantz is as influential as he claims, I’ll put in for a navigational job on some great Arctic shipping route …”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. This garden’s like a cemetery. Let’s go a café downtown. No need to hide anymore. You’re my salvation, Dacha, and I’m glad it was you. You, the same as in Feodossia … I’m very tired, you know …”
“Don’t do it,” said Daria sharply.
The same, indeed, as in the old days. Her child-nun face scarcely marked around the eyes and the corners of the lips by the hardship of living. Hardening.
“Krantz can’t help you — no one can. If you go home you’re lost … You’d be lost even if you’d done nothing. And I’m probably as doomed as you are.”
They were face-to-face and he impulsively moved closer.
“Then let me be the one to save you. Come to us. Wherever we find a safe haven, I’ll call you.”
“You do me so much good,” she said, enlightened.
D was already regretting his impulse. His apprehensions had been turned around too simply. How to see into the true depths of another person? He had flipped from humiliating mistrust into effusive fondness.
Boulevard de l’Hôpital has little character. One trudges past drab buildings, factories, the Salpêtrière, to the noise of locomotive whistles from the nearby station. There are brewery trucks, cement mixers, Maggi dairy vans, railroad trucks; a Cadillac, here, would stand out like a lady in a haute couture outfit from the place Vendôme. The space is vast and colorless. Events there must be commonplace, like registered trademarks, without the pathos of luxury. There Daria and D found a secluded café with tan leather upholstery, brightened by blue piping. “When, if ever,”Daria wondered, “will there be bars like this at home, so cozy and unpretentious that you don’t even notice?”
“When we’re dead. We had not the faintest inkling of the sweat, blood, and shit that go into forging a people’s well-being …”
“Careful. You’re sounding like a big capitalist. Don’t you think what’s needed is a greater effort of generosity and intelligence? The days of primitive accumulation are behind us.”
“Not in our country. And the days of destruction lie ahead.”
Thus they embarked on the double monologue around a common obsession they share with other troubled minds. “For two years now, I’ve been living in a kind of dark hallucination,” Daria said. “Me too …” “You know that business of the embezzlement of Forest Trust funds, part of some dirty scheme, I forget which? Well, I happened to be involved, I carried a part of the funds, I know where they were going and on whose orders! And there was the Fat Man confessing his head off, spewing his poisonous drivel left, right, and center, poor fellow, what they reduced him to! I read the papers, listened to the radio, heard his voice, plausibly delirious, began to doubt reality, I couldn’t look people in the face, I went through the streets covered in shame … I tried so hard to understand. Is it possible to understand? Please, Sacha, don’t put on that hangdog suicidal look.”
“Suicidal, did you say? On the contrary, I’m fighting to stay alive in order to understand, to witness the next chapter and the epilogue … Could we have got it horribly wrong on some hidden point? I don’t think so. The planned, centralized, rationally administered economy is still superior to any other model. Thanks to that, we survived in circumstances that would have made short work of any other regime … But a rational administration must be humane. Can inhumanity be rational?”
“Sacha, I’m going to ask you a question that might seem thoughtless or infantile, but listen to it anyway. Didn’t we forget man and the soul? Which are perhaps the same thing …”
“We did, because first we forgot our own selves. Individualism — once you get beyond the crude Darwinian law of the war of all against all — is no more than a sorry delusion. And by overcoming it, we were able to raise up a heavy piece of the world, able to become better, more energetic people. That’s why my heart is with those who have forgotten their very names and won’t appear in the history books, either, after serving as the catalyst for events that will never be fully understood, since the people who brought them about will remain unknown … Our unpardonable error was to believe that what they call soul — I prefer to call it conscience — was no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism. If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience. You don’t have to tell me about the deformed or rotten or spineless consciences, the blind consciences, the half-blind consciences, the intermittent, flickering, comatose consciences! And spare me the conditioned reflexes, glandular secretions, and assorted complexes of psychoanalysis: I’m all too aware of the monsters swarming in the primeval slime, deep inside me, deep inside you. There’s a stubborn little glimmer all the same, an incorruptible light that can, at times, shine through the granite that prison walls and tombstones are made of; an impersonal little light that flares up inside to illuminate, judge, refute, or wholly condemn. It is no one’s property and no machine can take the measure of it; it often wavers uncertainly because it feels alone — what brutes we’ve been, to let it die in its solitude!”
“This little light of yours has been around a long time, in literature. Tolstoy says something about ‘the light shini
ng through the darkness … ’”
“Wrong, Dacha. the Apostle John said it before him, and he can’t have been the first … I’m going off the rails into metaphysics and mysticism, aren’t I? Go on, say it, your eyes are laughing at me … We committed a mortal error, materially mortal I mean, leading to countless heads blown apart by executioners’ bullets, when we forgot that only this form of conscience can accomplish the reconciliation of man with himself and with others, and keep a watch on the old beast that’s ever ready to be reborn, equipped with the latest political machinery … Our language has separate words to denote objective consciousness and moral conscience — as though the one could subsist without the other! I’ve boned up on the relevant literature. Some scholarly authors define such phenomena as a superego that precedes the individual. Let’s not be afraid of psychological definitions, anymore than we are of ghosts. We successfully blasted the social superego with the existing artillery; empire, property, money, dogma, oppression, all were blown away. It should have meant the release of what is best in man, but that got smashed along with everything else, I fear. And we’ve become the captives of a new prison, more rationally conceived in appearance but more crushing in reality, because its foundations are firmer … Empire, dogmas, and all the rest were soon reconstructed on planned machinery, while conscience died out … I’m getting out. I’m escaping. You must escape too.”
“Be still for a moment, I beg you,” Daria whispered, “people are looking.”
D was speaking this way for the first time in his life, and it helped him to see more clearly; he felt new strength surging through him. But anxiety transmits itself in subtle ways, and he was as quickly overtaken by despondency. “What are we escaping to? I’m talking as though one could escape into space. The whole edifice is collapsing, and the only certainty is the coming war which will be continental, intercontinental, chemical, satanic. We’ll be left to ruminate sullenly in our corner, isolated, unknown, and useless, muzzled by what cannot be told, as the catastrophes move closer …”