Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “They’ve got ammunition to spare, the bastards! It’s the same thing night after night.”

  Her three documents were in order, unambiguously so, yet tainted by a whiff of mystery and prison. The man looked her coldly up and down, not without sympathy. People so rarely emerge from mysteries and prisons these days … Then again, it seems it’s possible to survive and that nearly everyone will have his turn …

  “You won’t be able to report to military headquarters until tomorrow … Do you want to spend the night here in the barracks? You’re welcome to my bunk, Citizen. It’s all right as shelters go. I’m on duty till dawn.”

  Klimentii stepped in and Daria realized that he was waiting for her. “The citizen can easily spend the night at my place …” The checkpoint corporal stared at them. He was around twenty years old, extremely skinny, with scarcely more than a glimmer, an indomitable spark, of vitality left in him.

  “Been at the front long?”

  “Oh, about a hundred years.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Not enough in your opinion? Try it.”

  Embarrassed at seeming to rebuff a kindness, Daria said, “Thanks all the same, Comrade.” He threw a black look at before resuming his businesslike manner. “Four hundred yards to the truck. Compulsory wearing of shrouds. And no smoking!” One swoops down from the sky, having vanquished distance and danger, and then one puts on a shroud to go into the city at night … The conceit pleased Daria as she got into the loose, hooded overgarment of white canvas. The twenty-year-old NCO sang under his breath:

  “For whom the cups, the cups, the cups,

  The cups drained of wine?”

  He walked ahead of the new arrivals through the swarm of gray flakes that softly buried everything around. Their shrouded forms, resembling dim cutouts of fog, were invisible at more than three paces. Klimentii was silent. Daria continued the poem in her mind, lines once written by a poet (who had recently died or been killed at the front) for another poet, who had killed himself.1 So it goes with our poets, Old Russia, Young Russia!

  The terror of pathless plains

  Where horses lose their way!

  Brother, I accuse you not,

  I accuse you of nothing!

  Frustrated at being unable to recall more than that one quat-rain, she racked her brain for other important lines, those two lines that say it all — how do they go? She stumbled in the pathless snow, dark as cinders. Klim’s arm held her up firmly as she was about to fall, and Daria regained her balance like a dancer on her partner’s arm. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “Nothing, I was remembering two lines of poetry …” But he had already let go, and the two meaningful lines shone for her alone, unspoken:

  There is the right to live

  And the right to die.

  She almost bumped into the ghostly truck. The journey was slow, guided by phosphorescent signals that moved along the ground. The invisible convoy traveled through a shifting, milky gloom of formless shadows. A desperate cold penetrated the flesh. The suffering was one of organic extinction and it effectively extinguished all thoughts apart from the craving for deliverance, the craving for warmth. Klim, Daria, and three shapeless, faceless soldiers squeezed together into a human heap at the back of the truck so as to conserve their meager supply of warmth. At times all that Daria could see were a pair of slanted eyes, green as a cat’s, seemingly full of quiet anger. It went on forever. Toward the end, a hand crawled between the compacted furs and bodies to find Daria’s gloved hand as though by instinct, squeezed it, and she returned the friendly pressure. Klim said, “We’re entering the city …” How did he know? They couldn’t see a thing. But through the gash in the mica window black walls slid by. The truck was weaving slowly, no doubt to avoid the potholes. Melodious night-watchmen’s whistles rang out. Klim extracted himself from the huddle. “Ahoy, comrade chauffeur! Stop your dreadnought. I’ve reached port.” The driver was clearly in no hurry to oblige, either because he was hanging on to the wheel half asleep or because he had no sympathy for someone who thought he’d reached port: you’re never home safe in this bloody life, or when you are, it blows up in your face. No such thing as a port! Not even a berth in the cemetery, unless you can produce half a loaf for the grave-digger! Barely raising his voice, Klim displayed his cursing abilities with contained fury in a barrage of the filthiest army swearwords combined with imperious supplication. The truck hiccupped to a halt, like a drunken mastodon. Klim helped Daria to get down. All that could be seen of the driver was his bearish bulk as he hopped up and down on the ground to get his circulation going and to shake off the cold. (The dancing bear, the fossil mastodon … ) It was no longer snowing; there was not a spark of life in the night.

  “I couldn’t stop before, idiot, it’s not a good place. Bombs fall on it. I don’t give a fart for your skin, but I’m responsible for the vehicle, you jackass.”

  “My skin, your skin, and your rolling rat-trap, add ’em all up and the price is still cheap,” observed Klim sagely. “Here, take a swig.”

  He passed his canteen to the dancing-bear man.

  “That’s better,” the driver said, after drinking. “Thanks, brother. Six months I’ve been driving this piece of shit over this god-damn road, and still not a scratch! Can’t last, can it?”

  “Sure it can, brother. The road can last.”

  “Wiseass!” said the other, chuckling.

  “There is no right to live and no right to die,” thought Daria, who had grown so stiff with cold and immobility that she found it hard to walk. “Klim, where are we?” “Near the Tauride Palace.” A handsome, wealthy district in its time, built around a little palace with a cupola and white peristyle; a poem of a park with pond, willows, silver birches; the history of the heady days of 1917. And now there was nothing left but the towering cliffs of a dead city. Yet there were watchful souls in this necropolis, since suddenly, inexplicably, one was beside them, and a ragged voice was saying, “Your papers, please, Citizens.” The watchful soul played its torch beam over the frame of a door where the wind gusted malignantly through two gaping holes. “These are not permits to circulate at night, Citizens.” Now it was a woman’s voice, cracked and hoarse. “Orders to complete mission. Valid twenty-four hours,” explained Klim. Swaddled in sheepskin to the eyes, to the mouth, the woman leveled her short carbine at them. “Drink,” said Klim, proffering the canteen. Before accepting she shone her light into their two faces and was reassured. “Show us your face too,” Daria said gently. The woman with the carbine turned a furtive beam onto herself. Her hard features seemed molded out of gray clay, nostrils like flared dark holes, tiny penetrating black eyes. “Look at me,” she cackled, comforted by a draft of alcohol, “a beauty, right?” Her laugh was bitter, cut off abruptly. “Now don’t take that street, you’d be stopped by the artillery gang, real pains in the ass … Go around by the demolition site, and watch out for the crater, it’s a nasty one …” One arm pointing the way through nothingness, she guided them on for a while. “I know my way around here, thanks,” Klim began to say; at that moment he tripped and nearly fell over something like a flabby stone. Stooping, he whispered, “It’s someone,” having bitten back the words “a corpse.” All three knelt down to touch the elongated human form. “Wasn’t there when I made my rounds,” grumbled the militiawoman. “Always the same thing …” The flashlight revealed the supine body of a woman in a cavalry greatcoat, whose open eyes inertly reflected the light playing over them. “Dropped dead,” said the militiawoman. “No mistaking those eyes … They go out without a permit and drop dead in a vacant lot.” “Dropping dead without a permit,” commented Klim. The pocket lamp threw the dead woman’s hands into momentary relief. The right was still clasped around an end of twine, leading to a small sled piled with broken boards and a saucepan full of ice. “She’s from the neighborhood, for sure …” the woman said ruminatively. “Was it hunger?” Daria asked. “What d’you think? Ah, well. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. O
ur daily bread, as you might say.”

  And the right to die … “Klim,” asked Daria, pressing into the young soldier’s side as they walked, “is suicide punished, in the army?” “Obviously, if you bungle it … And it should be. Selfishness must be punished — so must incompetence.” They circled the massive crater: at the bottom, under fissured ice, they half glimpsed the murkiness of water with eyes that had grown accustomed to unrelieved night. A street welcomed them, petrified but intact. “Home!” Klim announced. “Be the welcome guest, Daria Nikiforovna, I offer thee bread and salt.” She looked up at the strangely smooth wall, four stories high, which seemed to be — no, was — swaying with a faraway deadened crackle, as of winds in sails. “Unusual architecture, hmm? You can admire it in the morning. Canvas, light wood frames, some paint, and you’d be fooled at a hundred yards. Well, no one is fooled anymore … The wall collapsed six months ago under a bomb. Four picturesque and habitable apartments survived …” He knocked on a rickety door, sending waves up the façade. “Who’s there?” Klim spoke his name, a small grill half opened, and someone could be heard dislodging the timbers that braced the entrance. It was a grizzled old man whom nothing could surprise, of that race of solitary hunters from the forests of the north who have preserved the same beard, the same eyes, the same attire, the same gait since Scythian times. “Still alive and kicking, then, Frol!” “Yes, God forgive me,” quavered Frol into his beard with unexpected meekness. “How about the tenants?” The reply came vaguely: “To each his fate …” “When’s this filthy war going to end, Uncle?” They had begun speaking by the light of a match, now they could not see one another. Idly the old Scythian cracked his joints. “Never, my boy, never. Good night.” He began to re-barricade the entrance.

  The staircase mounted steeply toward the sky whose cloudy vastness was visible. To the right, on the very edge of the drop, Klim unlatched a door which he closed behind Daria. The air, though it felt less icy cold in this obscurity, was rank and stagnant, clammy with slumber: a glow between his fingers revealed two blond infants, packed side by side into a sort of basket. The skin lay so gray over their bones that they might have been dead. At last he undid the padlock to his room. He lit a church candle which yielded but a tiny flame, joyful after so much night. He rubbed his hands, dropping satchels, muster bag, and parcels to the floor. “Make yourself at home, Daria Nikiforovna, we’re going to make a fire …” They were in a storage closet measuring some six feet square. It contained only a mattress covered by a knot of grubby blankets, a small brick stove whose pipe vanished through a clumsily hacked hole in the wall, and a splendid armchair with green velvet upholstery. Designed for the soft white ass of some high-ranking functionary, preserved through wars, revolutions, industrializations, and bombardments, this old-fashioned armchair provoked a half-crazed squeal of laughter in Daria. In a corner lay some gas masks and a German helmet. The fire, already built up with splintered parquet for kindling, burst into life at once. Klim went to wake the neighbors and scrounge a little water; he put the kettle on. “Whenever I go away,” he explained, “I build a fire. It’s my love of comfort. And if one day I don’t return, the citizen who takes over the room will know I was someone who thought ahead. That’s all he’ll know of me …” He looked frail with his sheepskin off, “almost an adolescent,” Daria thought, but he was wearing the epaulettes of an NCO and two medals. “How old are you, Klim?” He clicked his heels, snapped to attention, and introduced himself. “Sublieutenant Gavrilovich Rybakov, twenty-three years of age, eighteen months at the front, three times wounded, three citations, ex-would-be teacher, bedrock optimist, some reservations about human nature.” “Me,” Daria said, “I’m an optimist about human nature, but over the very long term …” The young man was applying his army knife to a can of American corned beef. “Would a thousand years do for you, dear Comrade?”

  “Perhaps, but I can’t guarantee it.”

  “With good psychological techniques, in well-planned societies … Help yourself.”

  Daria contentedly unwrapped a piece of slightly moldy black bread. Klim was a young athlete without a trace of fat. His nose made a straight line down the middle of his face and his slash of a mouth drew a horizontal line below, as if nature were experimenting with a diagram; but nature’s plan had been foiled by large deep-socketed eyes, resembling the eyes of visionary saints drawn by the ancient icon painters … The soul trumps the diagram. No doubt Klim didn’t believe in the soul … The soul has every right to deny itself.

  “Your name should be Cyril or Glaebius or Dimitri — ” Daria said, interrupting herself because she had just thought of Saint Dimitri the Assassinated.

  “Why, don’t you like Klim?”

  “Oh yes, I do!” she exclaimed, conscious of blushing like a fifteen-year-old.

  “Names don’t matter, anyway. We’re all nameless. Incomplete.”

  This was so true that they fell into a pensive, companionable silence. The smoking stove made the room feel like a nomad’s yurt. “Well then,” Klim said at last, “how shall we sleep, Daria Nikiforovna? We can make another mattress with our fleeces …”

  “Together,” she said softly.

  He answered without looking at her, “We’ll be warmer.”

  They suddenly became aware of such overwhelming fatigue that their movements were slowed by it, the candlelight was dimmed, and nothing was able any longer to be thought or uttered, as though fatigue itself had taken over; and it was not the fatigue of the journey but a different kind, vaster, more penetrating, more irrevocable. The black bread, the knife, the tin of corned beef, the white cup in which they had taken turns drinking their murky brew of tea leaves were pitiful. Klim went out to shake the dusty blankets over the sheer drop, then spread them to form a bedding the color of earth. Lumpy pillows were improvised by stuffing bags and haversacks under the mattress. “Like sleeping on the bare ground,” Daria thought. My first night in the city of a million dead, our lovely victorious city! (So is victory the same as death?) She took her clothes off unselfconsciously, tingling with the cold, unable to see Klim but trying to picture him: the face that floated at the back of her brain was clean-cut, impersonal, and compelling, detached from everything, as singular as a new abstract sign. “We’re going to make love,” she thought, frozen. She tried to arouse something in herself. A man over a woman, the great shared upsurge of heat, both exhilarating and soothing … so many lackluster notions, devoid of desire. “Am I half dead already? Just us, joined together, the only reality in the universe for a moment, ourselves alone, in our intensity of life … And the rest, the fighting and the dying, those things will be as real as ever … But the dead aren’t real anymore … There will only be us …”

  Notwithstanding the cold, playing for time, she tidied her clothes, casting about for an idea that would warm her. “Men at war are hungry for a woman, one has to give oneself, one must, so they can have at least that cry of joy …” But what if the cry contained no joy? The stove had gone out, but Daria naked did not feel the cold. She was not ashamed of her sagging breasts. She felt herself. A statue of flesh, straight-backed, resilient, nervous, nurturing, pale-faced, dry-eyed. The eyes that watched her from under the covers shone with dark brilliance.

  “Put out the candle,” Klim said. “Light’s a limited commodity.”

  “No, I’ll give you one, I’ve got some. I don’t like the dark.”

  First she knelt on the bed, and as she did so uncovered, in one pull, the whole of Klim’s face; she was smiling, and the brightness of her smile seemed to reach to her shoulders because of the idea that was dawning on her. He’s a big child, a man-child from the dark of the war. How desperately they need to be enfolded between soft arms, soft legs, to be bathed in tenderness! They are chilled to the bone. How many youngsters just like this boy have fallen, never to know another second of tenderness! How many? Klim’s eyebrows rose into arcs of quizzical amusement. “You said how many, Dacha, how many what, or who? What are you counting
now?”

  “How many dead,” said Daria, still bending over him. He lost his temper.

  “Strange woman! Don’t bother me with the dead. We’ll never finish counting them. We happen to be alive. Come to bed. I’m not one of your mystics.”

  Her arms at her sides, eyelids half closed, Daria made no move to touch him; but listening to his breathing, she was aware through and through of Klim’s presence, like an inconceivable warmth about to break over her, a lulling that would bring her to rest. “I’ve been alone so long,” she whispered, “and now I’m cold …” The hard bar of an arm pinioned her neck, a scorching body pressed against hers. And the narrow boyish virile face dominated her from a great height; thus does the hawk dive from the heavens onto its earthbound prey … His lips tasted sour, his teeth were dry. Rapture is like that, bitter and violent, it hurtles out of a black sky onto the helpless creature and spears it … “Beautiful Daria, dear one,” Klim was mumbling, grateful and sloe-eyed. She started — “Don’t lie …” — but shaken as she was by the carnal storm, and full, so full of happiness, she might in truth have been beautiful …

  Later, relaxed, hugging her close and stroking her — those calloused palms — he said, “You are good … Who are you? Tell me something about yourself … Me, I’m just another fighter, one of the lost generation; one who’s been lucky. I haven’t seen or done anything the others haven’t … Nothing interesting. I’m not at all interesting.”

  “And I’m not anything, Klim. Nothing, do you hear? No one. A being, for work. A woman, for you … I’m not interesting either.”

  That “for you” was subtly hurtful to both of them, because it could mean “for you just now” or “for you, or any other man.” Either way they couldn’t change it, whatever they might wish. War is a time for submission, for being rational; one can’t want anything for oneself beyond the fleeting moment. Klim spoke reasonably.