Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  * * *

  There were daylight raids, nighttime raids, twilight raids, dawn raids, and errors in the warning system, which announced a bombing raid when it had already begun and sounded the all clear as it was starting over again … The city was simultaneously subsisting and disappearing, yet its new, protean physiognomy imposed itself so perfectly that the old was obliterated forever: the cruel curves of twisted rafters appeared more natural than a stupefying, pristine mailbox that had been left untouched by the arcane physics of two deflagrations canceling each other out over precisely that spot. Had the city’s inhabitants possessed the leisure or the inclination to found a philosophy, it would have been a philosophy of the End of the World and personal survival (albeit painful and provisional) — survival barely explicable without evoking the activity of completely irrational good genies or the instinct of self-preservation combined with luck, as well as black markets, esoteric frauds, providential larcenies, influential patrons, the connivance of all and sundry, and a handful of good-luck charms. Each explosion was like a throw of the dice, and people grew accustomed to winning, since the losers never got a chance to voice their disappointment. Everybody clung to their precious little suitcase containing their last riches and dressed as smartly as possible, as though every day were Sunday, to avoid — by having their prettiest dress or best topcoat on them all the time — being robbed during a panic; as a result, there was a certain air of elegance and good taste on the breadline and some of the men even still looked dapper. Everyone had survived several times over by now, and they were all beginning to believe (or ended up believing) in their lucky star, though this did not cure them of worrying. Two voices dueled deep inside, one said: You will die without knowing how, killed like all the rest who hoped against hope as you are doing; the other: You will live, since you are yourself, the living person par excellence — if not, why are you still here, condemned to life? Such people exist, after all, men, women, and children condemned to life, before whom the speeding bullet fractionally alters course, and the pestilent miasmas of stricken cities recede …

  Professor Schiff was developing a theory around this topic, based on the great fourteenth-century epidemics of the Black Death, during a period when neither hygiene nor antiseptics existed. The plague came to Altstadt and carried off two-thirds of the population; modern knowledge would lead us to expect all of the population to have succumbed, for the known natural causes are all working in that direction with the inflexibility of a celestial clockworks. But Bishop Othon had known better, as it turned out: the scourge was turned away by prayers and penance, and the final third of the population was saved. This carpet bombing, however meticulously planned by the most expert — to do them justice — high commands, could scarcely be more effective than a medieval plague! Here the good professor’s interlocutor demurred, in view of the mathematical perfection of modern inventions … We’ll soon see! Some attacks were rather entertaining, like the plucky little airplane that would zoom in one morning, drop a few bombs, incendiaries it was thought, and hightail it away with a distant mosquito whine … Pierced by sky and breeze, the wonderfully tenacious spire of the cathedral ascended into the blue, much more sharply visible than it was a moment ago, for the last of the historic old quarter had just crumbled around its feet, raising billows of dust that had quickly blown away. If one ventured closer, pink tongues of flame could be seen to palpitate under a low, stagnant lid of grayish smoke. Nothing else had changed.

  Brigitte’s roost defied every calamity. Now that the hurricanes of war had blurred the calendar, jammed the sclerotic clockworks of the administration, and filled the world with horribly banal horrors, Frau Hoffberger had left. All that remained of the building where that lady had occupied a third-floor apartment overlooking the street was a rack of window frames standing about fifteen yards high at the corner, between two eerily empty spaces, one of which contained an unexploded bomb. ACHTUNG! CAUTION! Curious passersby, sidling up gingerly to inspect the tip of a green fin, took this opportunity to launch into a rant against the Security Service — too busy with its special rations of Spam to bother about a bomb stuck between the school and the single local water pump, and in the middle of a hundred middle-class dwellings! Brigitte was living in a nearby building, which, though badly damaged, was listed as forty-seven percent habitable. Why not forty-six or forty-eight percent? — No one would ever know. The upper stories swayed gently at the slightest impact to the ground, whether at night from a convoy rumbling past or by day from a collapsing wall (walls, peculiarly enough, only fell during the day, usually under the caress of the sun’s warmth). The way to Brigitte’s second-story room was via a ladder, for the stairwell had been gutted by fire and any remaining planks had gone to feed the neighbors’ hearths. “The enchanted roost of the fairy,” as Franz Minus-Two referred to it with a snicker. “Why are you making fun of me?” asked Brigitte, startled. “But I swear to God, you are a fairy, Fraülein, and your roost is enchanted or it would have vanished long ago, and you with it … But maybe fairies are immortal?” This was his way of joking by acting the delicate suitor. Brigitte’s face fell. Immortal? Me? What a frightful curse! Mortal, mortal, I’ll prove it. Die? She was as scared of immortality as she was of death, except that her fear of death was nothing but a small fear of the flesh mingled with a great longing, whereas the other fear was becoming a vague, insurmountable dread. “Why must you always say such mean things to me, Franz?” He was genuinely stung.

  “Mean things? Me?”

  “Oh, you don’t understand. Such a lovely morning, and you’ve spoiled it for me. I’m going out, I have to get my food card stamped.”

  A bony young girl strode up to them. Braids coiled over ears, short rubber boots, satchel on hip, armband — she must have been fifteen or sixteen, and she surveyed Minus-Two with equal measures of respect and pitying condescension. A hero; a sad reject of a man whom no one could love, unable to fertilize a woman for the virile perpetuation of the Race. On second thought … The tall young girl’s pale, sharp face grew pink. She said, “Heil Hitler! Civil Defense Evacuation and Reinscription Control and Verification Service for the …” (et cetera).

  Minus-Two answered jovially, “Heil Heil! Bugles and kettle-drums! Glory!”

  “Checking the papers of all non-evacuees by reason of special dispensation or overriding circumstances to be specified …”

  Her pencil between her teeth, she consulted a typed list of names. To Brigitte, “Your name, Comrade of the People?”

  “Brigitte.”

  That was the only name Brigitte could remember, unique, inseparable from herself, like a tiny blue candle burning in the depths of a vast darkness. Franz filled in discreetly. “Very well,” said the girl. “Fraülein, you missed the third evacuation column, illness or reason unknown. You’ve failed to report to the Recovered Auxiliaries Workshop … You’re not in order.”

  Minus-Two rounded on her. “What! Young Comrade of the People! I think I know rather better than you do who’s in order and who isn’t around here. Talking about the third evacuation column, what about Counterorder Number Two Amended? As for your precious workshop for the ugly, the maimed, the skewed, and the screwed, that went up in smoke, like the boxes of matches we so lack these days. And the directress took off, or didn’t you know? Brush up on the facts before throwing your rules and regulations around … Mistress Fairy here is a registered C-category exemption on grounds of nervous illness, curable, with care and respect. Brigitte, show her your papers. And you, adorable zealot, make a note of it. There’s no mistake. D’you realize who’s talking to you? Iron Cross, three citations, seriously wounded, that’s who. I’ll answer for everything.”

  To himself, he added, gaily, “Because I don’t answer for anything, you skinny little goose on stilts! I’d like to know who does answer for something anymore! One less limb and I’d have been given a merciful injection and right now I’d be rotting underground, or a pinch of ashes in a one-mark urn, and even then tho
se goddamn idiots would put the wrong name on the urn, and I wouldn’t be able to give a damn …”

  “Very well,” said the teenager, somewhat worried to see that the hero displayed no Party insignia, “I have confidence in you. Your papers, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?”

  And splendid papers they were too, covered with emblems, seals, stamps, and signatures … Up to date. Civil Defense Volunteer, specially enrolled by virtue of paragraph G of ordinance number … “Not that one,” said Minus-Two carelessly. “Secret.”

  The girl shifted into conspiratorial mode. Her eyes, amusingly blue, seemed to glow red. Franz felt like asking her whether she still liked to play with dolls, or if she already knew how to make love. With a jerk of the chin she indicated a building some distance away, hollowed out but with one gable still standing. “It seems there’s a nest of dangerous elements in there, enemies of the people perhaps. Have you noticed anything, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?” “Dangerous as a litter of white rabbits. I know this neighborhood.” In the most depopulated section, to the west, gangs of outlaws crept out after dark from beneath the earth and its tombs … The quieter stretches of every night were interrupted by bursts of gunfire and brief, inconsequential explosions. The special security forces combed through the ruins neighborhood by neighborhood, shooting Russian, Polish, Mongolian, or Yugoslav refugees on the spot, along with army deserters and unidentified strangers who might be enemy parachutists … Other fugitives, not so easily disposed of — Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Czechs — were marched away under heavy escort, probably to be shot the next day. Minus-Two reflected on this. “All the same, don’t go there, Comrade of the People. Or I’d better go with you.”

  “Oh, I’ve no intention. The Special Troops had planned to raid it tonight, but they won’t get to it till tomorrow, there’s so much to be done around the cathedral!”

  “I can imagine,” said Minus-Two, and he contemplated the low cloud, darker now, that crawled under the flayed spire.

  There was lots of horizon. The city was full of horizons.

  * * *

  Brigitte stood engrossed in the play of light and shade. The city was dappled with it, as though covered by a fantastic lacy veil. Sunbeams shining through rows of high windows projected a brilliant checkerboard on the white dust of streets and cleared rubble. The shredded, gaping masonry threw down the queerest shadows whose contours spoke of mythic monsters, Eastern temples, works of art no artist could ever imagine, born of the amorous fray between a tangle of bared rafters and the sun. Schoolboys and People’s Defense teams were working to reinstall the telephone lines and other cables lying on the ground, sometimes marked with warnings: ACHTUNG! HAZARD. LETHAL DANGER. They’ve got to be kidding, just another little lethal danger! Day after day these diligent spiders rewove the torn web, and now they were mounting a loudspeaker against what was left of the beer hall … Soon the news will be broadcast, sibylline communiqués on lost battles in the east, the west, the south, and every other point of the compass, reports on the destruction of London which weren’t of much comfort (and “How are we going to pay for that?”), along with marches and fanfares (apparently good for morale) and occasional snippets of grand opera: The Twilight of the Gods …

  Brigitte climbed the ladder to her roost and spread out some gritty bread, a sausage, a dollop of sweet fruit paste, and some wrinkled prunes on the white tabletop. A childish order reigned over this room, hanging over several voids: she was fond of it. The fancy stores downstairs had been burned out; then the side walls, brought slithering down by furious thunderbolts, had blocked up the shop spaces, warping the parquet here above and spearing it through the middle with the end of a beam. There were corpses in the last stages of decomposition in the cellars giving off, through the cracks in the floor, sudden whiffs of sickly, fetid odor, more marshy than human, but corpses are everywhere, and there’s so little difference between them and us! They don’t bother anybody anymore, no longer provoke embarrassing pity, they are there, we are here, we’re all together, the least we can do is try to feel homey at home, or no more uncomfortable than we have to be. The stench didn’t linger in Brigitte’s room because the cracks in the walls allowed for good ventilation and insured a permanent connection with the great outdoors, the rain, the wind, as if under a golden tent in the middle of a verdant meadow. The daffodil-yellow muslin curtains at the window framed a picturesque field of rubble in shades of rose, white, and black. The next-door house, painted pink, had crumbled into the little garden, the flames had smudged the broken walls with charcoal and half consumed a young oak tree, whose other half was turning green; a square of wallpaper still cheered the eye, turquoise sprigged with gladioli. “My garden the air,” thought Brigitte … Her possessions included a sturdy virginal bedstead, a round iron table scavenged from the garden, and a little rusty mirror, strangely cracked in a way that unsettled her. In it she looked quite unlike herself. Can this be me, this girl with a livid, greenish complexion, lips swollen with dark blood, cavernous cheeks, bulging eyes too deeply ensconced in their dark-shadowed sockets, dilated pupils half open onto the night within? The planes of this face had slipped out of line, the smile itself was crooked, the left side remaining stern as the right softened. Only the hair, in tight tresses rolled into a low bun on the nape, seemed not to have changed or been betrayed … “Lying mirror, shame on you!” It had been a present, hadn’t it, but from whom? Given when? Brigitte’s forehead crinkled in a helpless effort to remember. She saw herself fleeing through a tempest of ashes with the mirror under her arm, afraid of tripping, it would break if she fell. There was only one thought in her head: save it. Now what should she do with it, break it? You don’t break a mirror. There were women in the market square who’d gladly pay for it. It was worth, said Franz, “at least four slices of pressed horse, dog, rat, or other novelty meats …” Should she perhaps give the lying thing away? That would be wrong. “Some night I’ll have to bury it,” she decided, “deep enough so that neither the children nor the cleanup squad can uncover it.” Suddenly the mirror brightened, Brigitte recognized herself and pealed with laughter, unreasonable joy bubbling from her heart into her throat, what in heaven’s name came over me? Laughing to herself, she searched through the drawer for her embroidered blouse, hummed a tune as she made herself up with lipstick and powder; some artistes put golden glitter on their eyelids, now that would look lovely on you, Brigitte … She ate quickly, holding an intimate, sparkling conversation with herself throughout the meal. Then she sat straight-backed upon the bed, her face upturned, her eyes half shut, picturing the notes of a score, while her lively hands played a keyboard of air and the charm of a Mozart concerto vibrated softly through her, bathed in silence; the strains of music drowning the thunders reverberating throughout the world. Brigitte’s eyes opened again, her hands sank to rest on her knees, her shoulders drooped forward as though with lassitude. A stealthy tremor was starting up at the base of her being, like the buzzing of malevolent insects in the gloom, like the approach of a solitary bomber in the sky. It was only the approach of the nameless terror, senseless, bottomless, lightless, lifeless and deathless, unspeakable, unendurable, ungraspable, imponderable; a wave rising from the very depths of darkness … Brigitte was tearing something to pieces, trying to rip the smallest shreds between sore fingers until her nails were tearing at one another. What more to destroy, how to sleep, where to disappear? She began reeling about the narrow room in short, crazed lunges.

  Night fell. There was a tap at the door.

  “Who is it?”

  The terror was ebbing away. A man’s voice said, “It’s me … Günther.”

  Brigitte opened the door. The penumbras of inside and out coalesced over a helmeted figure erect on the ladder, tall and braced, yet seeming to sway.

  “Oh, so it’s you,” she said without surprise. “At last.”

  A flurry of gunshots rang out and died into the unknown. A screech, nipped off like that of a slaughtered animal, fell into the emptiness.<
br />
  “Who are you? What do you want?” she said in a sharp voice.

  Was he real, did he have eyes under that helmet? With a careful forefinger, she touched his chest. She thought she discerned a reflection in the shape of a skull.

  “Ah, it is you …” she said dreamily. “I’ve been waiting so long. Come in.”

  He stepped up and over, lifted by the emptiness beyond; lithe, solid, remote.

  “Is there no light in here, Fraülein?”

  “Light? You know very well there’s no more light. No sun, no electricity.” (She giggled.) “You mean the candle?”

  And by the light of the candle, she recognized him: a tank corpsman, sunburned, with a scar across his jaw and unruly, fireflecked hair. He was holding his helmet between large coppery hands.

  “I’m the one who brought you the letters from …”

  “What letters? There’s no one to write to me anymore.”

  He repeated uneasily, “Well, I … it was me.”

  “Of course it was. I was waiting for you. Sit down.”

  The only place to sit was this schoolgirl bed. He hesitated.

  “You are Fraülein Brigitte W — ?”

  “Leave me alone. I don’t know. I’m Brigitte.”

  He nodded slowly. Strident whistles slashed the darkness around them.

  “I was his friend,” he said in a muffled voice. “He was my only friend.”

  “Who was?”

  He showed a flash of strong teeth. His breath felt good.

  “I beg your pardon. I’ll go. Please excuse me for …”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Brigitte, and gripped his arm. “Stay. I was waiting. I haven’t changed. I’ve been so frightened, if only you knew … Sit down, I say. Are you hungry?”

  Bed and floor sagged under the visitor’s weight. Brigitte, thin, her blouse splashed with embroidered flowers like flowers of blood, smiled at him serenely. “Listen to me, Fraülein. I was his friend. I came back to this city, from the eastern front to the western front … if fronts still exist … I looked for you. The house has gone, but they directed me here …”