by Victor Serge
“He is mad,” Daria whispered, her face white.
The colonel was not feeling very sane himself. “Make him shut up,” he said, shoving the gun back into its holster. “If he’s playacting, he’s damn good. But for pity’s sake, shut the bastard up.” The prisoner was gabbling in German, staccato. A blanket was thrown over his head; muffled yells came from beneath the hood. It took several men to restrain him, momentarily turning the shelter into a grotesque wrestling ring. Finally the prisoner was hustled away, bound with straps, to be thrown into the snow. “Sitkin is badly wounded … Allow me to replace him for the time being.” Major Vosskov’s day-old stubble was brilliant with ice crystals, as were his eyelashes and the hairs in his nose. “Good,” the colonel said. “Send the lunatic to division …” “What lunatic?” The earth trembled, lifted on a swell. Fontov shrugged. Daria heard him answer, “No, do not open fire until I give the order …” She groped her way out of the shelter, the cold earth vibrating against her hands. It was like emerging from a grave. Suddenly, as night faded, gray snow was slowly swirling … .It was like entering a vast tomb.
* * *
The officers’ club was nothing but a small, uncomfortable room, but it was heated and ornamented with pine branches and red banners. The busts of the Leaders lined up on the mantelpiece contributed no more than a pale plaster presence. Next to them, but smaller, stood a bust of the perfect poet: Pushkin, daubed with blacking, did more to inspire reverie. Officers who were hard up came here to play checkers and listen to bombs falling on the city … Daria took a magazine from the table, most likely The New World, October, or The Star ; its cover was missing but it made no difference. The format, the paper, the crabbed grayish print, the content, all were the same from journal to journal, with as much variation as you’d discover within a regiment on the march. At first the ranks seem composed only of faded uniforms, but on closer inspection you start to notice the uniqueness of faces, you realize that humanity endures here, that man survives in solitude, perhaps, at the core of the multiple being, under his serial number, and that he may well be what gives it strength … Man, the atom of military power.
For this war, we need a mobilized, disciplined soul, the collective soul of a patient army. So let the imagination of poets and novelists put on a uniform and obey orders — but let each retain his gnarled or stony visage, as each wages war in his own way. The population of a rational society in danger must necessarily concentrate on the moment’s task. Not everything can be indulged at all times, not everything has to be expressed … If hypnosis is a weapon, another means of fortifying our resolve, of winning, then let hypnosis serve our ends! The ideal would be a hypnotic literature of endurance, willpower, obedience, sacrifice, of determination to survive beyond sacrifice. In modern warfare, the writer plays the part of the tribe’s witch doctor who praises the courage of warriors, conveys auspicious oracles, unleashes the communal visionary trance to the hoarse, hollow beating of the drums … The great brain that is the State assigns to the writer the duty of preparing souls for the ordeal, whether it be retreat or attack, and the writer sits down at his typewriter as though before a magic apparatus …
Daria could not conceive of literature as anything but an organized service, attuned to the needs of psychological strategy, military administration, resupply, the care of the wounded, and the reeducation of the mutilated. It was obvious that there had to be at least one decent novel and several slim volumes of verse on the topic of ambulances, triage centers, hospitals, and the nurses’ duty. A story by a lady writer dwelled on the enemy’s unspeakable cruelty and the edifying grandeur of our hate; then finding within herself extraordinary resources of love, she made stricken readers shed tears over the pages in which a wife worships her amputated and disfigured war hero, as a hundred cannon and a hundred searchlights turn Moscow’s skies into a cosmic extravaganza of victory. Lovingly she kisses the crushed face, and whispers, “You are the one who has achieved this, my darling! It is for you the hundred cannon boom in triumph! For you, the savior of us all!” A story that provided a much-needed support to the morale of amputees’ wives. Daria felt able to become such a wife, she almost wished it, and the image of a blinded Klim, shattered features seamed with pink welts, hobbling along on crutches, drifted before her mind’s eye and sickened her. Better for him to be killed outright! Better a grave on which to plant a young fir tree; better to brood over a grave, or before a horizon without a grave, than that! For love of you, Klim!
Feeling let down, as much by herself as by the lady writer, Daria was turning through the pages. She came across a dramatic piece whose title should really have been The Heroic Children; she remembered a play she’d seen in Paris about naughty ones, Les Enfants terribles. The characters were a couple of selfish, twisted little monsters, and there was a sequel, Les Parents terribles, about the same characters in middle age when they had become even more selfish and twisted, but rendered cowardly by what they called “experience.” And didn’t I once read a novel deserving of the title The Spoiled Children? Our managed literature is superior to the other, its children are more wholesome … The play was well written, full of poetic verve. One child, twelve-year-old Zina, has chestnut pigtails and toils away at her homework in a bombed-out house. Zina is passionately keen to become class leader, “because my big brother’s fighting the invaders, and this, Mother, is my way of fighting!” The siren wails, Zina shuts her exercise books and stuffs them under the floorboards, into the dirt, to preserve them from the flames, before contending with a classmate for another privilege — the job of helping the spotters out under the death-dealing sky. “It’s not fair, Irina, your class has already lost three pupils, and ours is still whole!” Daria began to chafe with annoyance, and skipped the rest of Act One. Around the middle of Act Two, here was little Vanya telling how he was tortured by the Nazis. He didn’t cry once, he scorned them, he hated them, he drew strength from hatred, he swore he would live to destroy them, he solemnly vowed as much to the Leader of the Fatherland, “and I didn’t tell them anything, I ran away!” “Me too, me too,” chirps Zoë, thirteen, “they beat me and burned my lips, look at the scars, and I didn’t tell them anything … The village was on fire, the sky was on fire and so was I …” In unison the children sing “The Fatherland loves us, now let us love the Fatherland.” Tossia declares she wants to be a schoolteacher, because there are millions of people to teach who are thirsty for knowledge …
Daria flung the magazine down on the straw. The lamp gave off a feeble glow, the earthen walls were animated by trickles of water. Some of the men were asleep, rolled up in their furs. The bearded telephonist said softly, “Careful with that paper, Comrade. It mustn’t get wet, it’s all there is to smoke.” Daria retrieved the magazine and put it on the stool next to the lamp. “Do you have any children?” she asked. “Three,” he said in his singsong brogue, “three little cherubs. Hah, what’s become of them …” “I didn’t mean to remind you,” Daria apologized. The bearded man said, “Makes no difference if I talk about it or I don’t, God will protect them if that is His will …”
Whoever wrote this play? Who was this author, who apparently had never met a child? Our children are heroic, or some of them are, but not like that. Funny how real heroes never talk the way they do in plays. What’s wrong with the genuine article, why fabricate a travesty when we are up to our eyes in authentic heroism, through no choice of our own? The author’s name was Anna Lobanova.
Daria’s memory of her was precise. In her mid-fifties, with beautiful white hair and a sad, square-jawed kind of pluck, Lobanova had been living in Moscow at a Writers’ Union house; she used to speak her mind quite freely, and once was arrested for several days. Her reputation rested on a powerful novel about the Yakuti penal colonies — those of the former regime, of course. However gritty and sincere the story, it was set in 1907: the old dodge of escaping into the past. Could she possibly be as sincere now, with this turgid rehash of official heroics? Daria asked aroun
d. The woman lived in the besieged city, that was something, it gave her the right to speak of courage … So many others had evacuated to Alma-Ata, to the very frontiers of China! Under orders, to be sure; you just have to pull a few strings to get your orders. Out there you can write great war scenarios while watching the apple trees blossom in peace …
On her way home to Klim, she stopped by an old mansion house in what used to be Basseynaya Street, a writers’ hive since the time of Dostoyevsky. A little girl who was brushing snow and excrement in the square courtyard directed her to staircase C, “third floor on the right, yes she’s there, she nearly never goes out …” Daria offered a dry biscuit, receiving a startled glance in exchange. The child stuffed the prize into her clothes. Daria edged through a half-open door into a hallway lined with bookshelves. Dusty volumes were piled one on top of the other, abandoned, sprawling, and, she guessed, decimated by the needs of the stove. A pale man with a cough pointed her to a door. The apartment smelled of manure, but the hum of a sewing machine could be heard and a gas ring with a saucepan on top was alight in a recess of the passage. Daria knocked at the left-hand door. “Come in?” The ceiling was tarred by smoke. Good pieces of mahogany furniture from the time of mad, murdered Czar Paul were buried under rancid clothes, broken-backed books, crumbs of food. The writer Anna Lobanova, looking paler and more creased than she remembered her — altogether a shriveled old woman — lay on the bed under a rug, holding a bound book between hands encased in gray wool. “Oh! Who are you?”
Daria said, “You might remember me, we met, years ago … Permit me to give you these.”
The white hair had lost its sheen but the eyes lit with childish avidity. The visitor pushed vials, ashtray, and candle stump aside to make room on the bedside table for some biscuits, a pack of cigarettes, and a jar of American vitamins.
“Thank you very much,” Anna Lobanova said with a broad smile. “It’s my legs, you know, what with no food — first-degree malnourishment — and the cold … You in the army? Can’t quite place you.”
“Think back. We met several times at Illarionov’s in Moscow; I was with …”
Daria stopped short in discomfiture, with a name on the tip of her tongue that must on no account ever be pronounced, a presence-absence that did not exist. It had been crossed from the record of the living and the dead: D. “Indeed,” the writer filled in quickly, lashes fluttering with the same embarrassment, “perhaps, perhaps … Hardly knew Illarionov, of course …”
Daria adopted a casual tone to say, “I’ve not read anything of his for ages. I have so little time for reading! I did like his style … An extraordinary stylist, don’t you agree? Any idea of what he’s up to, these days?”
The old lady’s face hardened with hostility and alarm. Her gaze became clouded and at the same time more piercing. The effect was so incongruous that Daria understood: Illarionov was now beyond the pale as well. Anna Lobanova said, “Oh, I’ve heard nothing of him for years … Never interested me. It’s wrong of you to like his style, it was mannered and reactionary … Yes, I don’t mind calling it what it was. Counter-revolutionary.”
Silence divided them. Daria was taking it in — no more Illarionov. The man, the work, both gone: the name, to be erased from memory. Should she make her excuses and go? Leaving the other sick with foreboding …
“I read your play at the front. The Heroic Children.”
“It’s not by me.”
“Sorry, I meant A Tale of Red Children …”
The writer would not be drawn out. Her silence seemed to shout: Clear off! You’ve nothing to say to me, why should I trust you! Daria lied: “I thought it was rather powerful …”
The old lady stared straight ahead. The skin around her mouth was pursed into wrinkles; the aquiline nose remained plump, but only because of the unhealthy puffiness of the flesh. The mouth looked like a stitched wound. It added up to a noble profile, made ugly by sourness and morose affliction. Anna Lobanova pulled off a glove, fished under the rug for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke through her nostrils. At last, unwillingly, she spoke.
“I disagree with you there. A Tale of Red Children is terrible, a complete disgrace. Who ever saw children like those!”
“Surely,” mumbled Daria, “the main episodes were true to life …”
“Documentary authenticity has nothing to do with literary creation. Didn’t you read the reviews in the Literary Gazette? Bochkin pulled it to pieces and Pimen-Pashkov wiped the floor with them. So there we are. Nor did you read my open letter to the editor, I take it. In which I said that Bochkin and PimenPashkov were justified in their opinion and that it was a piece of agitprop garbage. Subjectively honorable, objectively detestable.”
Daria wanted to laugh, but felt inhibited by Lobanova’s prickly solemnity.
“A writer is a craftsman who must be able to recognize a botched job.”
“And what are you working on now?” Daria asked, in order to change the subject.
“Not very easy to write, with these clumsy gloves and swollen joints … I’m working on a novel about Berezina in 1812 … I don’t understand the youngsters of today. Mine grew up in another era.”
“How are they?” (She felt idiotic saying this.)
“My son was killed at Smolensk. No news of my daughter or the grandchildren …”
A small voice shrilled behind the door: “Auntie Aniushka! The soup’s boiling!” “Then turn off the gas!” the writer called back tartly. Daria offered: “Shall I bring you your meal? I’d like to do something …”
“Nothing for you to do. I’m very well where I am.”
“I work for one of the staff services … I could get you evacuated, perhaps a kinder climate …”
“No. I’m not leaving this city, or my books and papers.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t. You can’t.” Lobanova relented a fraction. “You’re too young.”
There was nothing to say. This room embodied the utter extinction of all things. Lobanova chewed emptiness between her soft gums and said, “I never read the papers anymore. They annoy me. Think we have a chance?”
“Haven’t you heard, we’re saved? They’ll never take Leningrad …”
As Daria talked on, Lobanova listened with inquisitorial attention. Don’t even think of lying to me. I know so much. I smell out falsehood and I despise it. I need no consoling pieties to help me either die or live. I need good reason, at its just measure! She must have been satisfied, because she nodded approvingly once or twice.
“May God hear you!” she concluded, with a wry grimace. “You’re no airhead, I’ll give you that. Women have come on a great deal since the revolution … Now leave me alone, I’m tired.”
Daria stood up, buttoning her sheepskin uniform cloak. “So there’s nothing that you need? Or that I can do?” “No, nothing. But thanks for your visit! A bad play earning me a good visit … That’s nice … And after, there will be room for great literature, real literature.”
After us …
Daria asked affectionately, “How old are you?”
“Sixty-two … But I plan to go on working for at least five years. We writers receive good rations. And so we should. Someone has to defend the brain …”
Out of the blue, Daria thought back to Illarionov, whose name could not be spoken, to D (in a small tan café in Paris), to some of the dead. Killed: worse than dead.
“Real literature,” she echoed, “without fear or lies …”
The aged, exhausted face blanched with something like fright. In a different voice, as though speaking in public, Lobanova pronounced: “In my opinion, the wartime labor of the Writers’ Union has been exemplary … Always inspired by the directives of the Party and the Party’s Leader.”
Daria nodded vigorously at this. She managed a diffident smile.
“May I come and see you again?”
“If you like. There’s no need. I’m sure you have better things to do. Tell that child out t
here to bring me my soup.”
* * *
That morning, she’d had a curious interview with Major Makhmudov. This fat man with an ivory-pink cranium addressed her politely, coolly, not unaffably but with authority: “Are you married?” “De facto, yes.” “So I’ve discovered. It is not in your dossier. I should reprimand you. The personnel in this service are expected to apply for a marriage license, and to inform me of any changes to their civil status … However, your husband is a very highly regarded element among the subaltern cadres. I wish you both the best. Have you told him of your past?” “No.” “I see …” He surveyed her heavily. “I needn’t remind you of the rules of discipline …” “No, Comrade Major.” Daria looked squarely back at him. This is how things stand. “Very good, dismissed …”
She spent the day in the office. Some shells landed not far away. At dusk she set off home via a long detour, feeling obscurely anxious but telling herself it was nothing. The frozen Neva appeared wider than usual. People followed paths over the ice like columns of slow, dull, plodding ants. The snow turned dark beneath their footfalls. Everything was sluggish, low, muted, dingy, and white. The sporadic explosions likewise. The tall gilt spires of the old imperial fortress, built level with the white river, had lost their shine. Women clustered lethargically here and there around holes in the ice; some were staggering away under buckets and jerry cans of green water strewn with floating frost needles. The sky was bluish-yellow above these open stretches. Daria realized she barely had strength enough to think, that her ideas were unraveling into wisps the color of this sky and that some of them were oppressive, to be pushed back … So Illarionov is dead. A despicable character, though he had tremendous gifts … Sacha used to say: “As a human being he’s a nonentity, with next to no inner life, he’s heavy, he’s common: a bank account and a digestive tract. As a writer he might well be great, the remarkable parasite on vegetative man … Prisoner of the man, the writer tries his utmost to be a coward — he would like to specialize in novels written to order, fitting the ideological requisites of the season. And he writes them superbly, but here’s where the real plot thickens. The parasite writer is far more intelligent and less groveling than the vegetative host; he is even prone to bursts of bold, sentimental, convoluted genius, and likes to imagine that the authorities don’t really understand what he’s doing. Even his most official works contain a subtle undercurrent of vitality, making them suggestive of something other than their apparently orthodox line … The bureaucrats at the Literature Office tear at their hair over them. They implore our Illarionov to change twenty-seven passages, and he does, goddamn it — by getting totally drunk! And there are still bits that get away, overlooked by the censors … The censors are afraid of him. He’s undermined the careers of some of their top men. Illarionov is trembling as well, he drinks to reassure himself, but then in his cups he says things that could get him deported for life. After the hangover he’ll dash off a raft of mean, vacuous articles against all and sundry: colleagues whom he accuses of lukewarm ideological commitment, or blindness to the times we live in, or not admiring him enough. His friends no longer know whether they should shake his hand or not; but being the champion of political orthodoxy, it’s not a good idea to fall out with him. ‘You sure come off as some strange kind of bastard!’ I once told him fondly at the end of a gala dinner. Illarionov began whining, with tears in his eyes, that the essence of the old man is the old bastard … We were both drunk.”