by Victor Serge
This question was tied to the shadow of Sacha. The thought of being back in the office the next day among military men who ate their fill, strutted their medals, computed the precise amount of shed blood, projected foreseeable casualties from hunger, cold, and fire, making this work into a rather placid profession, never uttering a living word, filled Daria with revulsion. Because I belong to the generation of those who were shot, the unadaptable generation! she said bitterly. What if I applied for an intelligence assignment with one of the partisan units operating behind enemy lines, in the snow-blanketed forest? Farewell, Klim. After the war, Klim. After death, Klim.
And Klim appeared to her under formless trees thickly veiled in purest white. “Come with me,” he said, “I’ll light us a big fire. Come and be happy … Tomorrow we’ll begin killing, because we love the earth, mankind, and life. Come, I love you …” “You mustn’t love me,” Daria answered through gathering mists of sleep, “I am a half-dead woman. I mean yes, you must love me … I’m a half-dead woman.” A wolf cub with a gallant plume of a tail and strangely understanding little eyes watched her from behind a screen of green-needled pine boughs, the kind that are placed on coffins with red ribbons.
1 Written by Josef Utkin (1903–1944) for Sergei Esenin (1895–1925).
2 “Okay” is spoken in English in the original French text.
III. Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs
And still the habit of believing
more in the earth than in the grave …
IF THERE ever had been, if there ever were, somewhere in the world, another reality, it now remained in human memory as no more than a recollection, tinged more by doubt and sadness than by nostalgia. The past marked the older people most deeply, and some of them needed no prompting to talk about it, harping ad nauseam on the good old days. It was understandable that they could not avoid being intoxicated by the past, and that it pained them even more than it pained the people who wished they would shut up. In their chatter, periods and wars got mixed up: Let’s see, was that before the first war or the second? Was that under the Kaiser, the Revolution, Weimar, Versailles, under Brüning or the Führer? Explain yourself! How many wars have there been, sir? The revolution was also a war, you must realize that! The clearest answers — coming from people who seemed to have lived through so many events in the half century that they were probably exaggerating — remained obscure; and the price of a good dinner or the comfort of a railway journey came to sound like preposterous yarns or, more exactly, the gibberish of half-wits. So when Frau Krammerz, down in the bomb shelter below Kellerman’s Rathskeller under vaults glistening with saltpeter, took to reminiscing about how life used to be — the Sundays in the country, the exquisite pastries one could order from the cake shop, the party for Gertrude’s first communion — some of the adults looked at her with hatred; and they were delighted when a little girl took her grubby fingers out of her mouth to declare, with withering finality: “S’not true.” “Quiet, you snot-nose little guttersnipe …” The child went on with her irresistible “s’not true.” Nobody got up to give her a smack, in part because the ground was shaking (bombs were raining down on the other side of the canal, there being nothing left to flatten on this side, the connoisseurs explained, so it would be murderous bad luck if … ), but mostly because she was, quite obviously, right. Frau Krammerz suddenly realized it herself. Her face, more wrinkled than an empty bottle, skin crudely decorated by primitives, crumpled as she brushed away her tears and admitted, with a pitiable attempt at a laugh, “No, it’s not true, mein Gott!”
Thunderclaps sent huge waves through the earth; crackling outbursts transmuted into great surges of heat, as though invisible ripples of fire were pulsing outward from a fiery oven, somewhere nearby, to one side, deep underground. “We’re going to be baked like potatoes in ashes,” an old man calmly remarked. Fits of helpless whimpering started up in the children’s corner. “Can’t the little snots get used to it? Pipe down, it’s over, stop bawling and wipe your noses!” Brigitte made her way across the cellar toward the children, holding a cloth-wrapped object. It was her find of the morning, the reward of hours spent picking through the fresh rubble, and aroused much excitement among the small-fry. There was barely any light to see by, as the electric bulbs had just died and the shelter had fallen back on candles, but their eyes, accustomed to the dark, discerned everything in rich detail. Brigitte unrolled a doll wearing an old-fashioned military outfit, with a tall bearskin calpac, a green tunic, a white plastron and buckled gaiters, a soldier of Frederick the Great’s at Rossbach — that’s a glorious piece of History, the Seven Years’ War! Whereas these days, it feels more like the Thirty Years’ War … “For me, for me! Here, Brigitte!” chorused high voices which a string of massive but distant impacts could not drown out. (“You see, they’re going away now … all gone … finished …”) “Not for you and not for you either,” said the young woman. “We’ll hold a draw.”
“S’not real.”
“Not real, what do you mean, you silly minx?”
“Yes it is real, look, I’m playing with it …”
“Listen all to the song of glory!” proclaimed the amiable, if strident, voice of the disabled veteran, for the sirens were sounding the all clear. That sardonic voice always brought peculiar results: now one of the lightbulbs went back on, spreading sepulchral cheer. The invalid was crutching his way over to the stairway, humming to himself. “I’m off for a breath of air …” he called. “Excellent for the health. A poetic night, my friends. I’ll try to bring back some water for the sick …” The water can jangled against the complicated prostheses whose manufacturer, according to him, deserved to be summarily hanged. He had lost his left foot and right arm in some insignificant battle on the eastern front, but he managed nimbly enough on one foot, two contraptions, and a stick salvaged from the rubble that did excellent duty as a crutch, just the right length and burned to a convenient lightness. He even attended sessions at the Vocational Rehabilitation Center, charming but compulsory charades … The sick no longer left the basement shelter. They groaned for a moment, then fell quiet. During the bombing they remained silent, except for chattering teeth; the minute it was over they fell to tossing, spitting, coughing, pissing, and wanting a modicum of attention — but not for long. The disciplined character of the average man who knows there’s nothing to be done about it soon reasserted itself. Besides, this beer cellar made an agreeable shelter with its tapestried walls and elegant furniture, and there were sheets on the mattresses.
Franz, the disabled vet known as “Minus-Two,” hauled himself up the stairs, limped along a narrow corridor, skirted a bulwark of sandbags, struck the high notes of a piano keyboard with his prosthesis as he went by, making it blurt out a cracked lament, listened to this fragment of lied fade away, and continued on, with a little apprehension now because there was always a risk that the entrance to the underground system might be blocked by fresh debris. It wasn’t: silvery clouds opened against a dusting of stars. Minus-Two whistled between his teeth the triumphal march of King Frederick’s fifes. A steel-sharp sickle of moon illuminated the becalmed street, that is to say the line of building façades behind whose gaping windows lay a deepening void, some mounds of collapsed masonry like fossilized monsters, and the dark black outline of a tall, thin slice of building still standing around the axis of its chimney. The four jag-toothed floors of this tilted saw leaned fifteen or twenty degrees south by southwest; if they ever collapsed, they would fall on the uninhabitable rubble of the White Hunter Inn. If the collapse were gentle enough, someone might be able to grab that fine gold-knobbed metal bedstead clinging to the parquet of the fourth floor; as for the oval mirror framed with brass bows on which rays of sunlight sometimes played, there’d be nothing left of it but the frame, and in a sorry state at that. Broken mirror, bad omen! We can expect yet another bad omen … For now, the mirror up there was merely the augury of a bad omen. Minus-Two pondered how nothing changed: order.
Out
of idle curiosity he cocked an ear to the noises of the city. A few searchlights were still crisscrossing the sky. Keep searching, keep searching, my friends, for something that leaves no trace, according to Solomon’s proverb: a fish in the sea, a man in a woman, a plane in the sky. They’re far away now. From somewhere a final, bad-tempered burst of antiaircraft fire spat out it’s flak flak flak drak drak drak. “Stupid idiots!” muttered the crippled vet. He heard ambulance sirens and motorcycle engines yapping brokenly, way over in the new part of town, where the no-go underground factories and the model workers’ housing and the railway junctions were; there can’t be much left of all that, at least not above ground; below, they can still hold out. Under the ground or otherwise, the Third Reich will hold out to the end of the millennium, that’s certain.
Minus-Two halted before a stretch of wall that had been cleanly sheared off as though there had never been anything above it; new grass was sprouting on top of the neatly raked rubble of Billingen’s Pharmacy! He practiced writing with his left hand in the moonlight, tracing each word in block letters with a piece of chalk: “One Führer, One Volk, One Tomb! Heil Death!” (This to enrage Herr Blasch.) He judged his calligraphy to be improving; faster too, I’m making progress … If only I had a cigarette butt left! Whose head would I most gladly give for a butt? There was no shortage of choices. In his book, the number-one hateful head still belonged to a tank captain he’d run into around Poznan, a rattlesnake head — monocled, helmeted, shaved, and powdered with gray, rapping out completely unfulfillable orders like: “Take out that machine-gun nest with silver tweezers for me, no getting your fingers dirty, then goose-step across that river for me, keeping dry on the tiptoes of your boots; the valiant soldier scorns all obstacles or I’ll have him court-martialed!” The Russians must have already ground that head into head cheese for the worms long ago … It’s sweet to amuse oneself with private jokes, isn’t it, Captain? Me Minus-Two, you Zero-Minus-a-Thousand, honorable Captain-Baron-Minus-Head, Minus-Balls, Minus-Joke, Minus-Everything! But if I ever learned that you didn’t get blown away by a 177 shell up your ass, I’d have to conclude that not even the shadow of one-eyed justice remains here below …
“But that’s impossible!” cried Minus-Two into the soft transparent night.
So whose head could he offer up to the Great God of Universal War so as to ensure finding tomorrow a juicy stub of genuine tobacco, the kind your Party higher-ups sometimes throw away? Crescent moon, inspire me! The head of Herr Blasch, sergeant of the elite corps’ home guard, in charge of security of recovered dwellings, Führer of the neighborhood lout patrol … Tac-tac-trac-tac, the music of machine-gun fire rang out in the distance among the fresh or refreshed ruins. Herr Blasch and his henchmen — on orders from above — were busy liquidating the seriously wounded, or looters caught red-handed, or some crazed old granny who started mouthing off … I’m a lucky bugger to have only two limbs left, thought Minus-Two.
And for a little shot of schnapps, what would you give for that, Franz? For a cheery draught of Pomeranian brandy? Your Iron Cross? Oh la la! I’ll throw in the colossal Stone Cross they’ll be raising over the tomb of the German people, and the columns of the imperial chancellery for good measure …
“What’s impossible?” From behind came a voice as bubbly as a lovely brook running through green grass — if there still were such things as brooks, grass, cows, pearly green horizons.
“Princess!” Minus-Two exclaimed as he swung around. “You’re incredible.”
“It’s true,” said Brigitte.
She came closer, belted into her white coat, her curls blond in daylight, now the shade of metallic ash, her neck slender, her gaze unfocused. She was always looking elsewhere or beyond, so that Minus-Two had come to conceive of her eyes on the model of classical statuary. He leaned conveniently against a tidy stack of bricks made by the Schools Reconstruction Organization (thanks to Strength through Joy, of course).
“Come here, closer, white fairy.” Brigitte came. With his living arm he pulled her toward him, heatedly. “When this war is over, Brigitte, I’m going to marry a rich woman, a very rich woman. We won’t have kids. Because of the next war, d’you see. My wife will look like you.”
“I am rich,” Brigitte said gently, “but I won’t get married.”
The crippled vet’s horsey head, with its hairy nostrils and soft angry mouth, was calling. They kissed, mouth to mouth until they ran out of breath, their breath returning as one single breath.
“Why won’t you get married, Brigitte?”
“Because of love. It would be too hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m going home. Good night, Franz.”
“I’ll go get some water for the sick, see you later,” the man said, or didn’t say, perhaps only thinking the words, suddenly knocked down by exhaustion, like a human animal concussed in the vicinity of an exploding mine. It erases you in an instant and you come to dazed, drained, unable to grasp that life is continuing, or yours is at least, with a frenzied carillon of blood booming in your temples, your rib cage, your limbs, your skull scoured by a wind of fire … With the metal pincer of his right hand, he held the can under the spigot while pumping energetically with his left, it worked, hallelujah! Good old pump, it was holding up better under the circumstances than the western front, the eastern front, the Italian, the oceanic, and the home fronts! The water of this well seemed to have remained pure, even though twenty feet away the sewers were vomiting up stinking slime through a large crack in the asphalt. Some rats scurried up and began lapping at the puddles around the pump; they grew strangely thirsty after each bombardment. Drink your fill, nasty animals, brother rats, you are like us, we are like you.
* * *
If there had ever existed, if there still were, some other place, another reality, the children had no way of knowing it. They grew, they played, they died (in large numbers, with even larger numbers surviving, the scientists couldn’t understand it) in a ghostly city bristling with the skeletons of churches lashed by sky, wind, rain, and fire. Oases of habitation robbed the destruction of a few torn, eerie patches of domesticity … Wherever life could take hold, whether in basements or in bedrooms carefully refurbished in the very heart of chaos, some on higher floors propped up by what looked like concrete stilts, households restored a sense of intimacy: pictures and portraits on the wall, doilies on broken-legged furniture, makeshift brick ovens standing on the buckling parquet, access ladders with rope handholds, trunks and bed linen, maxims embroidered by an aged aunt, since evacuated: “Do Good and Thy Soul Shall Leap for Joy.”
The earth shuddered, smoke crept across it, people dwelt in a volcanic realm of sudden explosions, smoldering dormant fires, smoky eddies of soot, dust clouds, the stench of reeking corpses, charred and splintered trees that persisted in budding and even put out, here and there, tender pale-green leaves as though nothing were amiss. Squads of women or schoolboys cleared the ghostly path of streets where no street remained, restoring empty grids like the layout of an archaeological excavation, shoveling human debris from under a mangle of timbers to be borne away on dirty stretchers toward tumbrels disinfected by men in face masks … The children could not have dreamed that another urban landscape was possible, and they found this one simple: terrifying by night, terrifying by day when the routine horrors occurred, pleasant and packed with surprises at other times … On sunny mornings the children emerged in their clean clothes like baby scorpions scuttling out from under a stone to bask in the heat; out came the children to roll marbles, throw balls, skip rope, and play war. They played at escaped prisoners, who were chased, caught, and solemnly shot, yet despite the inevitability of this outcome they all wanted to be the prisoner … Their playground encompassed the deep rubbly crater that yawned behind the little olive-and-yellow house, almost intact, that belonged to the post office subdirector, and a mountainous redoubt they called the Sierra, a mysteriously vast domain where apartment blocks owned by the Patria Life Insurance
Company used to stand. The treasure hunters struck out into the Sierra, careless of the official ban, to climb the Himalayas and Chimborazos of destruction; they posted a lookout in the Mount Rose hidey-hole to watch out for the little policemen in the green uniform or the more formidable guard with the white armband; a discreet birdcall was enough to make the energetic heads of girls and boys duck down behind the spurs of Kazbek or Popocatepetl … Because Professor Schiff, skipping the chapters on cosmology and basic physical geography, lectured his pupils passionately on the geological cataclysms that gave birth to mountain chains, on subterranean fire, on earthquakes, on the submersion of entire continents beneath the seas: for example Atlantis, mentioned by the divine Plato, northern Laurentia, Gondwanaland to the southeast … The earth was replete with lost continents.
Schiff was a very old man. He wore a frock coat singed rusty from the time his house caught fire; the atlases he brought to class were singed around the edges like old books from a corsair’s booty; during breaks darkened by rain (or when he felt like it), Herr Schiff told stories about the end of the world, the Flood and Noah’s ark, the San Francisco earthquake, the annihilation of Saint-Pierre de la Martinique under sulfurous clouds that melted the very bronze of the church bells, so imagine what it did to soft human flesh, meine liebe Kinder, my dear children! They were beautiful tales and easy to understand. “Remember when the dike broke, sir, it was like Atlantis in the shelters around there, wasn’t it? Like a flood! And three families got away in an ark, sir, people saw them!” The teacher suspected that the boy who had spoken with such aptness was a Jew hidden by a Catholic family, and felt a combination of pitiful sympathy and insurmountable repugnance toward him but reacted benevolently in appreciation of the boy’s correct understanding. “You have a point,” he said, inclining his head to rest it against his open palm, “but of course the end of Atlantis was the end of an entire world. All the towns, all the fields, even the high mountains, and all the people of twenty tribes … It’s rather hard to imagine.” He was a splendid teacher of drawing, writing, and discipline, who greeted his classes of ten- to fourteen-year-olds with martially outstretched arm and a resounding Heil Hitler! that could compete with the great rallies in Nuremberg. As a result his classes performed the smartest, proudest salute of any school in town. It was common knowledge that his two sons had died like heroes, one in the Libyan desert, the other in the forests of Courland, and hence every pupil was familiar with the location of these important countries, justly conquered … Schiff interrupted the writing lesson to demand in stentorian tones: “Hans Büttel! What is the one and only immortal power?” Hans stood up obediently to recite a formula no one quite understood, inspiring hilarious parodies by wise guys, but which brought a look of peace onto the master’s fraught countenance. “Sir, each of us is merely mortal, but the Aryan Race, is im-mor-tal!” Instructed by his mother, wan little Claudius plunked himself in front of Professor Schiff’s desk, between the color poster of cereals and the portrait of the Leader-of-the-Party-and-the-People-who-is-guiding-us-to-Victory, and asked, “My mother wanted to know, sir, is victory near?” “My dear boy, fetch your pencil and write.” Professor Schiff dictated: “Our victory does not reside in earthly space or time, but in the deathless principle of the Race.” Frau Sonnecker framed these lines in gold paper and hung them above her son’s bed … It was a pleasant schoolroom, lacking only one corner of the roof; the hole had been patched with corrugated iron. Six gilt chairs from the confectioner’s shop added a touch of glamour, but they were not to be sat on, the school will return them to Frau Deinecke when that lady comes back, after the war.