Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  Noémi rejoined lightheartedly, “The great mystical count professed the philosophy of a petty vegetarian rentier. At least that’s what they taught me. Don’t sulk, my last-minute Tolstoyan, I love to hear you talk like that.”

  It was their last morning in Europe. They spent it walking on a wet stony beach at the edge of the cold sea, making fun of the ugly villas that dotted the shoreline, houses as tawdry and pretentious as the stunted lives within. And oddly touching, all the same, for even this second-rate architecture had something to say about man’s resistance to the destruction of the best in him. An aspiration to adventure, to aesthetics, translated as plaster busts of Second Empire demimondaines protruding from the rocaille of gardens no bigger than the exercise yard of a prison cell; the love of light, of the purity of the heavenly spheres, was expressed in arrangements of tinted glass balls over fountains kept dry out of thrift. There were villas trying to look like Scottish castles, Bavarian chalets, Turkish pavilions, or Gothic piles; they looked like toys for overgrown children whose imaginations were waging a losing battle against extinction.

  Beyond loomed the noble form, gray and tormented, of the cliffs. All the forms of the earth are great and noble. Have you noticed how no terrestrial thing is ridiculous? Ridicule and meanness appear in the works of men. They are defeats … We are all limited and ridiculous … Yellow grasses tousled the cliff top; below, birds nested in the holes and there was a great palaver of beating wings to deter nest-robbers. The toylike cannons of a fort poked over the summit; its blue-white-red flag waved innocently in the wind … The Battistis were forced to skirt a recent cave-in. As they contemplated this display of ruined might, they were accosted by a woman with a shopping basket on her arm, returning to some isolated cottage on the beach, curious about this pair of bad-weather walkers.

  “It came crashing down a month ago,” she said. “Quite a fall!”

  “No one killed, I hope?” Bruno asked out of politeness, naturally assuming that no one would be killed out in this lonely place.

  “No, no! People only come here on Sundays, during the good weather. It was a weekday and out of season … Just a dog trainer who lived in a hut.”

  “Of course,” said Nadine, as if in agreement. “That doesn’t count. Good day, Madame.”

  They retraced their steps, feeling sobered and yet amused. A cliff battered by the tides cracks open, starts to shift, becomes treacherous moving earth of unstable times, begins to slide; a distant rumbling gathers force, a keening, a subterranean chant, a song! A hunk of chalk and clay, long accustomed to the blistering winds, breaks off and pitches forward slowly like an instantaneous murder. Insignificant catastrophes are prepared and consummated much like those of whole societies, heralded by a mounting murmur that can be heard, provided one has one’s ear to the ground rather than listening to jazz. “Nothing to worry about,” is the complacent response, “we’ve heard such noises before, the world is perfectly stable, the proof, look how healthy we are …”

  “I can still hear that stupid lady saying ‘Oh no, no one was killed … ’ ” began Noémi. “ ‘Nobody but a dog trainer.’ Think of him, patiently building his shack out of bits of wreckage, sleeping alone under the fissured cliff to the sound of the tides, waking up to this bleak landscape … I wonder what he trained his dogs to do? Fetch starfish? Beg on their hind legs for a lump of sugar? How many contingencies had to come together for him to die here with his dogs!”

  She sized up the cliff face with a glance.

  “Do you know, I wouldn’t mind living here myself. It looks solid enough. I’d happily run the risk … Then if one night we were buried under tons of rock, so what? It’d be natural. No one else, just us …”

  Bruno said, “Soon they’ll be writing, ‘just’ a town, ‘just’ an army, ‘just’ a people, ‘just’ a country … A little country under a collapsing cliff … In a time of wholesale collapse. Professionally trained military staffs are this minute working out the figures for the whole of Europe, in accordance with various scenarios. The first year of the war will cost X million young lives, resulting in an X percent fall in the birthrate and having X impact upon production. Not unlike planning for the annihilation of, say, Belgium — machines, bodies, and souls under a toppling Himalaya … It’s only a matter of time. Our calculations are as precise about the initial time frame as in predicting an eclipse … The latest possible date is already settled, though events may well jump the gun. The madman-god of history is in a hurry …”

  A nippy salt-sea wind had risen against them. Noémi turned around, the better to be enfolded by it. She saw Bruno trudging toward her, hunched, bareheaded, his hands stuffed into his pockets. His determined tread over the slippery stones, his wrinkled brow, the bitter set of his mouth, made her shout, “What did you say? I could hardly hear … the wind … Sacha …”

  “Nothing … nothing.”

  With all his strength, he wanted to shout, “Nothing … I announce Nothing! Cruelty, destruction, madness, nothingness … Nothing!” For this long-ripened vision burst within him with the impersonal clarity of a mathematical formula explaining the past, the murders, the future. “I have to stay … To defend … What? You’d defend nothing, you’d disappear before you could move. Nothing is possible … The magic word, the keyword of our time: Nothing.

  “If only I could be one of those industrious ants who will soon be trying absurdly to rescue a child, an injured man, a tool, a book from the rubble of some flattened city … One of the infinitesimal brains working underground in enemy strongholds, tirelessly sapping the bureaus of the planners of destruction … The final justification of life: to destroy the destroyers without knowing whether one is not, in reality, finishing the job for them.”

  He cried out into the wind, with a bitter joy, “Nadine-Noémi, I’ve found the formula …” (A gulp of salt air made him cough and spit, touched by the thought of poison gas attacks.) “Here’s the formula: the destroyers … will be destroyed … destroyed!”

  The wind suddenly dropped. Noémi let him catch up, and he put his arms around her.

  “What were you shouting, Sacha? You looked half insane. It suited you, actually.”

  “Nothing.” (Is that word to come up again and again of its own accord, is it my answer to everything?) “I was thinking we should stay, whatever happens. I’m fond of this world, and we should stand up for it. I’m ashamed to be running away …”

  “Stay, where, old friend? Doing what? You know what would happen … It hurts me as much as you.”

  Disheveled, he shook his head, losing his excited grip on the vision, annoyed to be showing his weakness.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be boarding ship in a little while. I’m tense and I’m depressed, that’s all. I need rest. It’s nothing.”

  Nothing. Another discovery of lucidity. If you were fully conscious of it, could you go on living? You always return, without knowing how, to your own reasonable normality. That’s better.

  They boarded the liner quietly in the afternoon. Unimpeachable passports, the real thing at last, and the right nationality — Blackshirt Italy inspires such confidence, not like the travel passes of stateless aliens or Spanish Republicans! There were no obviously suspicious characters among the groups lining the quay (or there were nothing but). D felt almost disappointed at things proceeding so smoothly. They took possession of their cabin which was decorated in two colors, cream and blue. D asked the purser about their neighbors and any notables among the passengers: there was Herr Schwalbe, the diamond magnate, and his lady wife; Pastor and Mrs. Hooghe and their small son; Monsieur Gilles Gurie, French vice-consul at … ; Miss Gloria Pearling, the dancer, and her secretary. “Excellent,” said Mr. Battisti, “I see we shall be traveling in good company …” “Most emphatically, Monsieur. We also have Crown Prince Ouad and his court, and the American philanthropist, Mrs. Calvin H. W. Flatt …”

  “Oh là là!” commented D, in a vulgar voice that contrasted with his manner and diction.
r />   The purser disappeared down a staircase leading to the bowels of the ship. So one is saving his diamonds in time; another has religiously wound up his European tour with its museum visits, evangelical dinners, and surreptitious, burning glances at the perdition of Paris; the third is off to his pleasant sinecure overseas, congratulating himself on dodging the prospective mobilization, at least for the moment; while the platinum-haired dancer drawls to her copper-haired secretary — chosen for contrast. “Alone at last, darling!” crude as the hand she claps on a dusky breast. And who’s this prince? An Egyptian? An Iraqi? Awash in dollars stained by the sweat of Bedouins and fellahin? Does he go around in a burnoose, for photogenic effect, or as an habitué of Monte Carlo? Is he interested in oil? Will he seduce the philanthropist from Chicago or be seduced by the dancer? Our purser seems to have taken his cast from a penny novelette. So it goes. To each his checkbook, and may the world go to hell! The joke is that in all probability these are people — possibly excepting the prince — who are innocent of the least villainy and who would be amazed to learn that they have no more notion of what’s happening in the world than do moths crackling blindly into lanterns in a garden … At the end of a chic garden party, of course. The only counterfeit in this company is myself, for I am fully authentic. The only one who knows what he is running from, and wishes he were not fleeing … Or else I have too much trite imagination.

  “Wait here for me,” Bruno said to Noémi. He prowled the ship, scrutinizing forms and faces, and returned from his inspection content — which proved nothing. Nothing at all.

  The last scattered points of light on the coast of Europe disappeared over the horizon. The ship’s hull was plowing through a resisting mineral sea at the end of which, perhaps, lay nothing.

  1 Alexander Blok, 1914

  2 André Salmon, 1919.

  II. The Flame Beneath the Snow

  All the cities I have known, all the cities unknown

  Adrift, sheared glaciers, fissured icebergs drifting toward naked

  dawns …

  THE ANTIQUATED bomber banked ponderously through the freezing mist. “Difficult zone … Tara-ta-ta …” breathed Klimentii. The cold cut through his furs because the cold was already in his bones. To make a joke of it, he joyfully exaggerated the chattering of his teeth. He said, “I’ve gone through it so often, nothing can happen to me now. Only trouble is, Comrade, I know that’s a superstitious idea … so it bothers me just a bit. What if luck were a superstition, when luck is all a man has left?” Daria said, “You’re not superstitious, you’re healthy as a wolf … You look like a wolf … True luck is courage, when it comes down to it. Nothing more real.”

  “But I’m permanently scared stiff!”

  “Well, that’s real courage, to be always scared and still do what has to be done …”

  Klimentii glanced around the inside of the plane. It was cluttered but comfy, like a sturdy tent in the snow, where in spite of the cold you feel good. “It would take so little,” he murmured, “and then …” Daria understood, she shrugged her shoulders, said, “And then what?” She tucked the bearskin she’d slept in more snugly around her. The plane’s hold made her think of a metal tunnel crammed with parcels and people. The glacial air stank of the excretions of one desperately wounded man. Daria rubbed her face with her fingers, as she often did on waking. “Want to see the earth?” Klimentii offered. The metal body, punctured by shrapnel, had been hurriedly and badly patched up. The soldier shifted a metal plate that was blocking a crescent-shaped hole next to his knee. Daria gasped with pleasure as a jet of damp, cold, but fresh air hit her full in the face. “See the front line? They always take potshots at us around here.” But the fog was milky and opaque. “It’ll be touch and go landing …” In a low, amused voice he told the story of the luckless VIPs whose plane had strayed off course in this cursed Baltic fog, and landed smoothly, obeying all the usual signals … behind Finno-German lines. All of them shot after a week’s interrogation. “Tara-ta-ta, one day the happy life will come, Comrade!”

  “Are you trying to scare me, you moron?” said the woman, her eyes pale as the fog.

  “Whoa, don’t get mad, Daria Nikiforovna! I’ll never be cured of fear, no one will, but I don’t care, it hardly bothers me anymore. I put up with it like a chronic bellyache, that’s all. Man is such a small thing … We don’t matter, you, me, whoever, it’s the country that counts … I really did mean the happy life, the one in which man will count, will be built one day over our graves. This city is one big graveyard. And I love it. You can’t help but love it. I promise you a glass of firewater, you’ll see …”

  “Is your wife waiting for you?”

  “Faithfully, below ground. No carbohydrates, no vitamins, thirteen-hour days at the plant, she went out in six months like a lamp starved of oil … I applied to have her evacuated, but the wives of technicians, officers, and heroes come first. As they should. By the time I got my medal, it was too late. I’m cold to the marrow, no one’s waiting for me, I’m the one waiting — waiting for what luck will bring. The epilogue, or another attachment … It’s always the same warm rush between two people, isn’t it? The warmth of the past is never completely dead, while I’m alive … I won’t remarry until after our victory, though. ‘Togetherness without tears,’ that’s my motto.”

  “And quite right too, Klim,” Daria said.

  He concluded, proudly or mockingly, it was hard to tell with him: “I’ve learned.”

  The whitish mist was thinning under the bomber’s belly, allowing glimpses of flat black country marbled with white veins. A wide dark loop sliced through it, like a fissure in the earth’s crust. They haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet, but they will at the rate we’re going … “The Neva!” Klimentii cried.

  Stupidly, like a schoolchild, Daria found herself imagining that intelligent sadistic brute Czar Peter, pacing the moors on the banks of this river and suddenly pulling his sickly-soft, wrinkled, feline face into a mask of will, saying, “On this spot I will build a city!” Asia will open a window on the West here, we will no longer be Asia … His inspired folly aimed at our escape from Asia. Then he had the severed head of his wife’s young lover preserved in a jar which he put on the mantelpiece under the great mirror so his wife, Empress Catherine, could join the three-headed tête-à-tête supper … We have good examples to follow.

  * * *

  When I came through this city four years ago, Daria was thinking, we were coming back to life. The passably well-dressed crowd of the privilegentia ambled down the central prospect in soft spring sunshine. Our dead shivered within me, but the crowd was indifferent to them. It only wanted to live its own life; there was a lot of dancing … I was aghast at the nightmare of the coming war, of which the crowd knew nothing because the papers were full of the peace policy and how it would prevail, if it meant a pact with the Devil himself. Let the Devil take his hellfire elsewhere, we just want to live in peace and quiet, and we’ve earned the right having suffered so much more than the egotistical, degenerate bourgeois West … It’s the West’s turn to pay for a change: let it learn that life’s not just about a good meal, a good roll in the hay, and a good night’s sleep but something ferocious, so ferocious there’s no name for it. We know that, don’t we — for having tried to change the world (and no doubt too for failing to put a more human world in its place, or to prevent the return of the cruel ones … ). On the broad sidewalk with its leisurely succession of palaces, where bronze horse trainers rear over the four entrances to a bridge, I met corps-de-ballet starlets who were more or less the mistresses of influential men; writers doing their best to produce a felicitous page in spite of the censor, and spending more time censoring themselves than writing; engineers released from concentration camps with medals; historians fresh from prison who were busy tracing the glorious continuity between Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and socialism with all the rigor they once applied to demonstrating the same thing between Gracchus Bab
euf, the Paris Commune, Karl Marx, and ourselves … “But, you see,” a fat academician assured me, “it’s all true, we’re just widening the scope of historical continuity …” He may have been right. Dramatists were writing plays about betrayal, and I met one who had hastily adapted his epic for the treason market so that in Act Five, the hero is unmasked as an enemy agent. It was the hit of the season.

  They flirted, they talked books, they led silky hounds on leashes. The cathedral colonnade of Our Lady of Kazan seemed svelte, white clouds were reflected in the dark water of the canal, the church of the Holy Savior on the Blood (an emperor’s blood) was as vividly colored as an illuminated manuscript, for blood causes color to blossom from stone … A group of us went to look at the gilded, winged lions of a small Chinese bridge, and I was pestered for news about Paris fashions and the bombing of Madrid, rather more about the fashions than about the bombing (though it was good form to seem concerned about the demise of Spain). There were finely bound books for us to leaf through. I went to admire the vertical waves of pink granite of the security building, erected on the site of the small old law court burned down in 1917 … Fifteen stories high, how many offices! A towering proof of progress. The prison next door looked unchanged … Painful topics were never broached, out of understandable caution or as a kindness to me. No one seemed to doubt the future … I listened politely to the views of a man of letters. “Tragedy is just one of history’s overhead costs … Paris frolicked while Robespierre’s men were being killed. Paris was right. The true, the lasting revolution was never about extreme issues, the justice or otherwise of the guillotine, the victories in rags. It was all about vitality, the Parisian flair for l’amour, its lust for life in spite of everything, its rich exuberance … I’m going to write a novel about Madame Récamier. Marvelous character!” “What about Madame Rolland?” I demanded. “Wasn’t she quite a character too?” “Dear me no, she’s a bore. So pedantic, up to the very last minute! And a Girondist. I can’t bear the Girondists.” This scribbler was installing his porcelain collection in a villa on the gulf, and pressed me to visit: “I have some extraordinary Meissen!” I promised, cravenly, without mentioning that at least the Girondists had given up fine china … His gaze was keen and melancholy. I nearly asked him, Why do you always lie? But that would have sent him off drinking for a week. He was killed at the front. His last war dispatches were completely worthless … He had a sentimental kindness. He cried like a child over calves killed in the fields, so whenever he had to interview some optimistic general, his attempts at valiant patriotism gave off a hollow ring …