Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “I’ll be stopping here a week or so. I want you with me during that time.”

  “If it’s possible, Klim. That’ll depend on the service.”

  * * *

  Daria was discovering a fantastic city, although the objects and beings it contained were of heartbreaking ordinariness. The Baltic sky covered it with a low ceiling of gray snows. The diminished light seemed to be on the verge of exhaustion. The broad straight avenues lay crushed by whiteness. The snow was banked into little odd-shaped mountains, around which a few rare pedestrians made their painful way along cleared paths. The buildings had aged by a couple of centuries in a few short seasons, just as men and women looked decades older in only a few months; the children had aged a lifetime before knowing what life was. People wrapped up in rags and tatters over furs showed plastery faces. The first glances Daria met disturbed her. Nowhere in the world had she come across this precise variety of human gaze. She clearly remembered the famine of her adolescent years, during the revolution, and yet this look was inexpressibly different from the looks of the past. She hadn’t known that eyes could change so, and cry out so loudly in silence something intolerable. It was neither pain nor hallucination. What, then? Daria plumbed each gaze, feeling guilty about her own well-being, because it must be plain to everyone that she’d just breakfasted on a can of pork and beans, and massaged her body with a flannel soaked in spirits and ice water. Her flesh still bore the imprint of love, she was heading for her work, and she was proud of this city, our invincible city, our granite stronghold! But neither the gladness to be alive nor the pathos of history and fine-sounding slogans could withstand the tiny blows dealt by the looks in those eyes. To be in good health, walking around in a clean, hale, supple body under the unforgiving sky, wearing a thick reindeer coat and new felt boots among so many rags brought a discomfort that shaded into guilt. The sullenness of the women and children planted motionless before a boarded-up cooperative, was that it? What were all these eyes saying? That they had weathered, day and night, indefinitely, the storms of snow and terror, of filth, exhaustion, cold, hunger, fright, sickness, with no hope of escape, no hope of healing … That they were watching life die away within themselves. One neighbor eyeing another: She won’t last three weeks. And I … The neighbor shiftily looking back: He’ll hold on longer than me, he’s a tough old bird! A small girl reckoning how long her mother and aunt were good for — maybe a month? The librarian on the third floor had those very same yellowish blotches around her mouth when she dropped on the stairs without a word and never moved again. The small girl’s name was Tonya and she was scared, she loved her mother and aunt, of course she did, but she also knew that by selling their clothes she could buy a few more weeks for herself. She’d heard the sisters whispering: “Much better for the little one if we can both die at the same time, so there’s only one funeral …” The mother added, “I’ve left instructions. I don’t want Tonya going hungry just to pay the gravedigger … Let’s be put out on the snow with the others, what’s it to us, eh, Nissia?”

  There were ways and ways of dying slowly while remaining partly alive, getting dressed, walking down the street, doing the day’s work, eating tasteless food, submitting to the ceaseless assaults of the belly and its deliriums during sleep. Some shrank till they were nothing but insubstantial bags of skin over the knobs of their bones, with dreadful ball-like eyes … Others swelled up. Others became hollowed from within, pretending to be fit until the day they collapsed against the wall, saying, like Valentinov the schoolmaster: “Here we go, I’m dying … Twenty-three years in the teaching profession … Please doctor, put a little piece of sugar on my tongue. Ah, so good, thank you … And tell the principal from me that …” This man expired in a sigh of euphoria, but was it really wise to lavish sugar upon the dying? Doctor and nurse shook their heads uncertainly, one cube the poorer. You can’t be rational to the bitter end. The doctor could always tell the ones who were faking it, both men and women, even military officers, even technicians! They had themselves brought in on a toboggan dragged by a woman, feigning to be at death’s door, all to obtain a drop of glucose. Once he found an old friend reduced to this ploy, a professor of mathematics named Aristi Petrovich. “You, my dear friend, and in such a state!” The doctor was playacting too, as though he had been taken in. He rummaged in his precious store cupboard for an onion (but not the largest, to be fair): “Here, Aristi Petrovich, it’ll do you good, you must eat it in three stages to avoid a stomach upset …” (That old Aristi, he got around me!)

  Each corpse was firmly tied to a sled pulled on a string by its next of kin; a new breed of resourceful specialists earned their food by sewing discarded sheets or squares of sackcloth around the remains: There, look, isn’t that nice, almost as snug as a coffin! Daria passed several such mummies on the street, rigid pods floating just above the trodden snow. A living man or woman to pull the string and sometimes a child behind, steering the mummy so as to spare it too many knocks and jolts — a somewhat superfluous solicitude … Inclined like a figurehead, a solitary form was plowing toward you, in a fading halo of snow. Her shawl framed the slightly scary face of a wizened child, and what she was pulling could not have weighed much — a small form neatly parceled in tar paper and string, with some naïvely cut-out cloth flowers pinned to its breast. Daria greeted her. “Going far, Citizen?” “Too far by half! The Smolenskoe cemetery …” “That’s on my way,” Daria said, “give me the string for a bit.” No, not heavy at all, not even with the weight of a question … The young woman was explaining nonetheless. “There used to be four of us and now I’m all alone in the world. It’s probably for the best, don’t you think? … If I can hang on for another three months, the factory’s promised me an evacuation permit. I’m still meeting my production quotas, though!” “I’m going too fast, sorry,” Daria said, “you’re out of breath.” “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m always out of breath!” The young survivor halted, with a brief smile of distress. The cold was gentle …

  There were caved-in roofs, whole stories exposed to the air and clogged with snow, gaping bays, stage-set façades of wood and sailcloth with rows of windows painted sketchily across them. A faded inscription read INTREPID CITY! TOMB OF — — . As the banner was torn, its last words missing, the city could be the tomb of whoever you liked … Daria noticed the absence of huge pictures of the Chief, and indeed it was hard to imagine one. How would he look? Standard confident smile, full cheeks, bushy mustache? No portraitist would dare to give him the only face appropriate for this city — hollow as a death’s-head, wet with tears. The only things that must remain officially foreign to a nation’s Leader are tears, desperate suffering, the most human of human things … So how is it that leaders do not go mad? “Perhaps they are mad,” Daria answered herself.

  A tram, looking out of place on these streets, clanged slowly past a rubble of white armor platings, snow-caked sandbags, the burned-out carcass of another tram. “Their artillery often targets this crossroads, once they got sixty people in one hit, a whole tramload …” It was by the public library that used to house the books of Voltaire. The streets were punctured with what looked like wells dug into the cemented snow, boreholes over burst pipes, where women and children and people recovering from their wounds lined up with listless discipline to lower a saucepan, a jug, a can on the end of a wire hook, down into the greenish sludge. An icing of snow lay over the mountains of human waste scraped together in the center of vast square courtyards; what a festering would be released by the thaw, what epidemics would steam from the ground poisoned by rotting shit! But that’s the least of our worries, for spring is an age away, and who knows which of us will live to see it! The squares stood triumphant as ever, lined with colonnaded palaces, dominated by golden spires, gigantic and deserted. The empire of cold whiteness. To cross them was to plunge into implacable solitude; and should some bomb land just then, its nearby explosion was endowed with a natural solemnity that in no way disturbed the dignity of these
spaces and architectures. A cupola that once had shone pale gold, now dull, reigned over the iceberg city.

  Daria walked into a nondescript house where she found a guardroom scrupulously swept of dust, but brown with ingrained dirt from floor to ceiling. She showed her papers and was given a pass for the second floor. A man with a bayonet opened a door onto an expanse of freezing corridors, there was a marble staircase, a warm whiff of cabbage soup, and an anteroom full of captains having a smoke; then the astounding office of Major Makhmudov. Astounding in that it was spacious, heated, with green filing cabinets and leather armchairs, tastefully adorned with drapery and plants; in short, a proper office in a city whose apartments were now little more than lairs for beasts. Telephones, the Leader’s picture (he was looking well), maps, calendar — this was no painted scenery, the presence of Major Makhmudov testified to that. At first all she saw was a razored, greeny-pink scalp. “Sit,” he said, without looking up. Burly, almost fat, how strange. His blue pencil was underlining words on an arcane mottled document. “Well, what?” he said. “Your report?” The voice was neutral, too low for that polished-stone dome. Daria pushed her papers across. He went “Ah!” A round face, two yellowish chins, a blob of a nose, puffy eyelids, no neck; he lacked the infernal eyes of the street people, but the erratic gaze was animal in its own way … The upper lip peeled back, presumably in lieu of a smile. “Four years in Kazakhstan … Cured of a few errors, are we, Comrade? Serious medicine. Well, you come recommended by Krantz, that’s good enough for me. Speak German? Sehr gut. You’re assigned to office 5 downstairs, room 12, under Captain Potapov. On the front line. Here the front line is everywhere, I warn you …” (As though to confirm this, an emphatic explosion resounded some hundred yards away … A blinding idea: that it was supposed to land here, between the telephone and the winged chair, no it couldn’t land here … ) “Dismissed.” He called her back with a short cluck of the tongue. “The rule is discipline and silence, understood?” “Understood, Comrade Major.” He dialed a number, pressing his foot on a bell button hidden beneath the carpet, and a door swung open to the right. Through it came a young soldier in green, pistol in hand, followed by a bespectacled man with a beard, clad in the tunic of a Wehrmacht officer. Makhmudov began shouting, “So, Herr Dingel, you lied to me!” Daria caught the German’s muffled, shaky reply: “It was my duty …”

  In room 12, Captain Potapov asked his secretary, a small ugly woman in uniform, to leave them. Daria guessed that this old officer had not had an easy time of it; he seemed browbeaten, chastened, secretly discouraged despite his ramrod figure, buttoned into a relatively neat uniform made from cheap material. His epaulettes did not shine. Aged about fifty, he had spare features and excessively shiny glasses covering the opacity of his eyes. Nothing alive in this tiny office except the ferns of crystalline frost that curled over the panes of a double window. Potapov questioned her laconically, with an absent air. Then: “Quite right. Our work consists in deciphering enemy intentions, through enemies who are often themselves ignorant of them … Let me put it this way: the average prisoner is in possession of, at best, one letter of the coded alphabet. Are you with me?” The old officer was not as insignificant as he looked.

  “War is a great game of psychology. The enemy calculates and so do we. Strength only enters as a function of these calculations. An error is sometimes the product of a flawless but excessively linear calculation which fails to allow for the unstable, the unknowable, the irrational, call it energetic or mindless folly … Hence reverses and defeat are the penalty of error. This enemy is conducting a technicians’ war. He is convinced of his superiority, and with good cause. His machines are better and more numerous, his special forces are better trained, more numerous and organized than ours, its officer class more highly educated. I would even grant that its winter equipment makes a mockery of ours … But winter is on our side. We are winter men …”

  Daria took pleasure in listening to the veteran captain, who must have few opportunities to hold forth; strange of him to open up so on their first meeting. (Was he aware of her history as a deportee? Or perhaps he was steeling her for the task ahead?) She asked with concern, “Do you think, then, they might take Leningrad and win the war?”

  “I do not. Beware of false deductions, they lie at the end of the shortest line of reasoning. The world is only logical in appearance, on the lower scale of perception; in reality, it is rather mad … I am persuaded that, for precisely the reasons I have listed — and several more besides — the Germans will never take Leningrad, and the Germans will lose the war.”

  “A brilliant paradox, Captain. Perhaps you’re counting on the Allies?”

  He looked bored and dull for a few seconds, before rousing himself to pick up the thread of his ideas.

  “The art of war, as I understand it, excludes paradox, the better to comprehend facts that are hidden or contradictory. Although it cannot exclude what the Americans call wishful thinking, passionate thought that wills itself into truth … How can any side prevail without passionate thinking? I am not interested in the Allies. Above all they need the blood of our muzhiks, as we used to call them, for they are economical with their own; they loathe us, and would perhaps be only too pleased to postpone victory until five minutes after we were crushed. They’re mistaken on that score, and will be thwarted. I understand Russia. I know Russia’s wars, this being my fourth …”

  “Your fourth? How is that?”

  “Carpathian campaign in ’17; two civil wars, Comrade: a year with Denikin’s Volunteer Army, against the revolution, and that’s where I came to understand Russia, because the revolution was Russia, apparently senseless and beyond that highly reasonable, exceedingly logical in order to master and exploit her deep incoherence … Then three years with the Red Armies, Volga, Urals, Baikal, Crimea … Remember: we never wage anybody’s war but our own, which is selfish and messianic — messianic in the service of a boundless selfishness, the selfishness we need to survive. We have plenty of wombs in production — God bless the women! — plenty of men, and so much space that we can afford to lose territory and troops in the interests of gaining time; we can inflict on our foes the weariness and despair of expanses without roads, victories without solutions … Indeed that’s all we can do — at first: suffer more than they do. But before overpowering us, the Germans would have to reach Tobolsk, Novosibirsk, the Yenisey; and by then they would be falling prey to our distances and our winters, and still wondering how to reach Vladivostok, how to take the Arctic … And since we should be incapable of capitulating in good faith, their task would be interminable. You see, this old Mother Russia of ours is providentially blessed with a most rudimentary organism. Cut her into six pieces, and the six will live on … We cannot be invaded, and this is something intuited by the rudest yokel of the Irtysh, confusedly and then with sudden clarity while defending a wood with his trusty automatic rifle and nimble legs, always quick to run away, but only so as to turn and charge again. His tactics are all in his nerves, without quixotism or panache: only by killing the enemy can he lay hands on enemy boots and vitamin pills, and thus our very deprivation becomes a source of strength, a primordial strength as irrational as life, and imperfectly understood by the strategists of the old industrial empires … If the enemy high command were staffed by genuine Nazis, that is, by a gang of déclassé adventurers, it would be far more deadly, for those are people who know how to unleash instinct along with tanks, shrewd calculation, and a hefty pinch of absurdity … But it is made up of generals of my generation or older, formed in the days of bourgeois reason and the equations of profit; thrifty, sober, cautious planners for whom each operation must yield at the very least a tactical benefit, just as each commercial transaction must be seen to pay off at least in terms of publicity. It is only the primitive energies of man that are invincible, and they are indifferent to waste; material gain counts, certainly, but in a peculiar, non-mercantile way; it may be more important to capture a stockpile of potatoes th
an an oil field … Our Field Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov was one of the first to grasp this, precisely because he was somewhat stupid. He pitted our instinctive, sometimes blockheaded, common sense against the genius of Napoleon, and Napoleon paid dearly for the superfluity of his genius. Go back to Tolstoy, who knew nothing about war but understood the Russian land and its people …”

  He had pronounced Kutuzov’s name with dry gravity, as though from a lectern; professorially.

  “Have you ever taught, Comrade Captain?”

  “I have. Even in the concentration camp … But please refrain from interrupting. I am speaking to you because I must …” (Here he managed a faint smile). “I do so with pleasure. I have faith, and you must have it also. Without faith, it’s the end of Leningrad, the end of Russia, do you understand? A reasoned faith, no more farfetched than that of the baby which never doubts its mother’s breast. Axiom: Russia will only lose a war when she loses faith in herself, or when she feels at odds with her faith, God forbid …”

  Why did he speak in the future tense rather than the conditional? Daria thought she heard a bitter undertone of menace in his voice. She shivered. Captain Potapov went on.

  “So we find ourselves at a disadvantage, half beaten, yet doubly invincible since we cannot be beaten further without succumbing, and it is absolutely impossible for us to succumb. Concretely speaking, however, we do find ourselves in a fairly desperate predicament. Any technician worth his salt, steeped in Clausewitz, Moltke, Schlieffen, Ludendorff, and Foch, would come up with twenty-seven irrefutable reasons for concluding that the war is lost. But from our point of view, the only conclusion is to go on the offensive, beginning with retreat, if necessary. Usually it is. I give you a principle of our military art: retreat is the preparation for a counterattack, flight is the opportunity to regroup, and defeat is fundamentally a maneuver. Another principle: strategy is not a game of chess played with a quantity of machines, it is above all a duel of wills. The enemy is so technically ferocious that we must humanly outdo him, be harder and more ruthless, toward ourselves in the first instance. Okay?”2