Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  The nervous, anemic Dr. Heiderman nodded eagerly in approval, having no other course. But he was sick with foreboding, and it showed; Koppel’s gaze slid over him with polite disdain. “Erna will address herself to me concerning the two parachutists as soon as the evacuation order has been given.” “And if you should be absent, Captain?” The nurse put just enough stress on the word absent to imbue it with the notion of death. A good officer never knows when he may be putting on his gloves for the last time. If you happen to be killed tonight, Captain? Koppel deemed it a reasonable, if distasteful, query; he affected to ignore the doctor. “In that case you yourself will be the judge, Erna, do whatever you think best.” Dr. Heiderman’s trim mustache quivered pitifully, and Koppel saw chaos begin. What connection is there between the muffled buzz of a bell, a cravenly quivering upper lip, and the immense disorder closing over one’s head? The futility of it all was blinding, especially the futility of refusing to look things squarely in the face. Koppel, old chap, you’ll be killed one of these evenings, sooner rather than later, and it’ll be for nothing. Your resolve not to be taken alive serves no purpose whatsoever. The scientific inventions will come afterward, if at all; too late for you, too late for everything. As he was leaving, Koppel turned once, intending to say, “Execute the prisoners!” — and let a few more of those who will kill me meet their end before I do! But the disorder was already taking effect. Koppel shrank from letting a woman perceive the clouding he felt at the back of his own eyes. He did not say the words he wanted to say. Dr. Heiderman let out a sigh. “Asthmatic, are we?” the captain said insultingly, with the unspoken thought: “You’ll be killed too, you repulsive coward!” That’s defeat all over: you feel it as the tooth feels the cavity, it poisons your very breath. The monstrous disorder was rising, drowning out the sounds of water faucets, bells, motors in the courtyard, injured men groaning, and ideas as sonorous as the smash of a boxer’s fist. Koppel pulled off his gloves, just for the sake of pulling off his gloves, made the nurse and the doctor sit down again, and listened to himself speak.

  “I’m waiting on the miracle of our technical genius. We may shortly be in a position to blow up half the planet. From what I hear, the tests are proceeding with considerable success …”

  A door banged, a furious voice shouted, “Erna! For God’s sake get over here, are you deaf? You too, Doctor, on the double.” The bell was still vibrating. When all is lost, a mindless bell will keep on ringing through whitewashed basements, and glasses will stand empty on tables long after our mouths have rotted … Quick march! Tonight Koppel was expected to lead a special unit, reduced to a third of its strength, into the breach opened by the sacrifice of the elite division. Away he strode like a energetic sleepwalker. Under the arch at the entrance of the former tourist hotel, he saluted the last batch of mangled bodies from the division. Blood-soaked men were stretched out against the embankment of the road as if it were a litter. Repulsive stretchers moved hurriedly back and forth carried by medics with dark rings under their eyes. The workers of the last day! In the center of the courtyard, like a hatless white-maned puppet stuffed with the sawdust of dignity, the chief medical officer was directing the traffic in person. “Immediate surgery, I’ll be there in five minutes, this one to the barn, nothing doing, this one simple: amputation — don’t give me a hard time; this one’s a problem, check him later, get a move on Loschek, no not him, the other one! You there, phone the auxiliary hospital and say I refuse — I refuse — to take the sixty they want to send! No! What are you saying? Idiot! To the cemetery, that’s right. Short of bandages, are you? Anesthetics? I don’t give a … Tell Herr Brückmeister from me, if he hasn’t supplied them by six o’clock, I’ll have him court-martialed … Watch out, gently. Immediate double amputation, Yes, Doctor … Blithering idiots! Can’t you see he’s dead! Not my line of business!” With sarcasm: “Forgotten the difference between fainting and death, have you, young man? What do you mean, no Herr Brückmeister? He’s deserted? The dog, the stinking dog!”

  This was neither the place nor the job for a chief medical officer, and he was courting reproof from his superiors. To the colonel approaching through the crush of stretchers and bearers, he addressed a lugubrious salute and looked away. The colonel’s crimson head, squat on his shoulders, suggested the onset of apoplexy. If you want to establish order here, honorable Colonel, try not to burst like a skin full of beer and shit. As for your reproofs, your dressing-downs, your orders, I wipe my a … with them. The colonel was speaking to him confidentially; the doctor caught sight of a gaping, mud-smeared thigh, a pearly gleam of femur deep inside … “No. I’m the boss here. A written order, in writing please! Bring on the badly wounded ones, over there! Idiots! Wake up, man, keep ’em moving … I’ll see you in the operating room …” The red-faced colonel was gazing glassily at another, green-faced colonel being stretchered past. “What’s wrong with him?” “The colonel has been eviscerated, Colonel …” “Quite so, quite so. Keep up the good work.” Above the milling of vertical and horizontal bodies stood huge white clouds. The chief medic ran to the courtyard entrance and with one glance took in the clouds, the banks of the road lined with pale beeches, and the multitude of the wounded emitting what sounded like a harmonious chorus of pain. The white coat and white mane were seen to charge, flailing, at a truck: “Go to blazes! You can’t unload them here! No more! Full up!” A hum was floating on the air: Planes, planes! Hurry up!

  Nurse Erna contemplated the chaos from an upstairs window in the officers’ wing. There was Koppel disappearing around the corner with small reluctant steps, on the way to his destruction, no doubt about it! The red-faced colonel was climbing back into his tiny green car, with a boa constrictor painted in yellowish gray on it; swallowed by a boa. A truck blocked his path, the colonel emerged from the boa’s stomach waving a stubby arm: no one saw or heard him. The muffled noise of the alert continued to crackle obstinately through the halls because a plane suddenly appeared, skimming the treetops. Erna picked up the internal telephone: “Turn off that stupid racket, you morons! It’s useless.” She recognized the enemy insignia on the monster’s underwing. It ground sinisterly over their heads, ignoring the Fourth Hospital, but seconds later a slow explosion made the remaining windowpanes vibrate loudly (the less glass there is, the more noise it makes). The heavenly thunderbolt had scored a bull’s-eye on the motor fleet reserved for their evacuation. She looked at her watch. It was time for the kid’s dressing.

  The blinded boy endured his darkness fairly well, but he still had a suppurating wound in the groin, threaded with catheters which were torture to replace. “Is that you, Erna?” he asked in an imposingly quiet voice. “It’s not just for show out there, right? Talk to me. I can hear all the sounds. I feel so much better, you know. I was thinking about you. What’s going on?” “Nothing new, Tony … Here, drink this.” The scarred and voided sockets no longer tortured him. Without the bandage, his head was hideously alluring: thick chestnut locks swept the domed forehead, the nose was straight, the mouth full and serious, but the outsize hollows of the eyes, pale as gold in places, devastated a face condemned to the night. “If only I could believe in God!” she thought. She would give the blind boy a final, pacifying injection, as soon as she could arrange it. “Let Tony sleep, let him sleep for good.” If she still loved anyone in this world it was him, this big kid lost in the dark between nothingness and the bitter drink of life to come … His file, penned by someone with a twisted sense of humor, read: “twenty-two years old … draftsman … outstanding performance in the field.”

  Once they had conversed as follows: “Do you trust me, Tony?” “Yes.” “How do you imagine me?” (Erna avoided any references to sight.) He reflected for a moment, his features bizarrely illuminated by a smile in which the eyes played no part. “Young, very young …” (Erna felt herself aging; thank you, blind man!) “And tall and slim … with long soft tresses, all gathered up. Loyal and understanding. Straightforward.” (Erna’s frizzy hair wa
s turning gray. Loyal, that was true, mortally so, and yet the word was like a slap. Understanding, indeed, knowing that the deepest grief is to understand. Straightforward, yes, as a string of infernal knots … ) “You’re a little off the mark, Tony. No tresses, not soft hair …” But let him think that I’m young! “May I touch you?” he said, moving a translucent hand toward her. She clasped it between her own. “And I’m tough.” “One’s got to be,” the invalid said, with conviction. “So be tough, Tony, and answer me, your friend. Do you want to live — or — ” (warming these words with her voice) “would you prefer not to?” She saw the almost imperceptible tightening of his nostrils, his lips, the premature lines around his mouth. “But do you think I can live, Erna?” (No reprieve from lies and treachery!) “Yes, I do.” “Then I want to live.” And pity, which is the last form of love, must also be betrayed. The nurse knew she was lying again. “And so you will, I know you will.” She forced a tinkling laugh (the sound of laughter a lie) and added, “I’ve never been wrong before …” The ward doctor was taking a twenty-four-hour leave, she could do it then. She was sorry she’d put it off.

  Tony ground his teeth while she removed the antiseptic dressings and replaced the catheters. A testicle was turning blue beneath the shrunken member. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much, Tony?” He smiled, beads of sweat under his nostrils. “Not too much. Just a little … You’re so good! I get the feeling you’re pleased, too. Are you?”

  If only he didn’t ask why!

  “I am, it’s true. Rest now. I’ll drop in later.”

  Footsteps were running up the stairs. Someone was whimpering wretchedly. “Erna, come quickly to the operating room …” Pleased by the breakdown, the demise of an entire world, pleased! You should never say the word “good” again, Tony, it’s a meaningless word, a blind word … The old rafters of the operating room were black. White-shrouded forms were stooping and shifting around prostrate forms. The lamps created a mist of asphyxiating brightness surrounded by visceral penumbras. Scissors could be heard snipping through cloth and leather to expose wounds. Three surgeons, their faces partly masked, stoked with Benzedrine to keep them awake, worked amid raw flesh, pus, gangrene, dying flesh, hallucination. Their shining steel instruments, wondrously pure and cruel, preserved an impenetrable yet intelligent disorder from one torture to the next. Basins filled up with reddened cotton swabs mixed with scraps of flesh. In the bucket by the door, a pink, bristly male ear was resting on dark and light tufts of hair, beside some severed fingers. Rubber tubes and electric cables curved gracefully through the foggy glare … Erna, at a sign, clamped a man’s head between both hands. His throat was an open wound, and she immediately felt the death tremors through her palms. Dr. Felix put down the scalpel, gazed hypnotically into the gray face, and clicked his tongue: “Done for. Take him away …” And he turned aside wearily. On the neighboring table a colossus with an uncovered belly, starred with wounds, had fallen into an incoherently euphoric delirium: “Ha ha, ha ha, La Chênaie … four thousand … three thousand six hundred marks … Snapdragons! Mama …” A long bout of groaning, then he launched into a verse from the Ninth Symphony: “We enter, drunk with joy, Thy bright sanctuary … Drunk with joy.” Gently Erna fitted the anesthetic mask onto a feverish head like a ball of roots pulled out of the soil.

  The day staff usually partied through the night, for life is short, death easy (in a certain sense), and joy fleeting, so

  the boy he’s for the girl,

  and the girl she’s for the boy!

  The demolished city was preparing for sleep. Patrols were following perilous itineraries which intersected with those of lucky pass holders who were out looking for a good time. Muted singing could be heard deep in the charred ruins, in alcoves like the dens of shipwreckers, around daintily embroidered tablecloths, with plentiful quaffing of that delectable scotch someone swiped after an American retreat, or the last of the champagne from the plunder of France, or the sweet Rhineland wine they call liebsfraumilch, Milk of the Beloved Woman, or the chiefs’ coffee filched from the storeroom; and every bottle, if its story could be known, would relate a gory melodrama full of episodes of the last days of a civilization. “The trophies most prized by victorious armies,” Conrad once remarked, “are the ones they treasure up to the very last minute of their own defeats, are the bottles …” The heroic survivors of slaughtered units organized group-sex parties, for lack of privacy and anyway the proud but not-too-proud depravity of warriors is more fun. Couples entwined wherever they could, mingling lips, breasts, hips, and groins, bursts of laughter and tears, rage and joy. All together now, softly, allegretto:

  Let’s make love

  On top of the grave,

  The common grave

  That is our fate!

  You’ll be my grave,

  Adelina!

  The worms will have to wait till after,

  After, after, after, after, after!

  Come Herminia, Adelina!

  Or suddenly switching to a mode of lyrical lamentation so touching that the eyes of the Adelinas became moist and it took five men to prevent a pilot from emptying his revolver on everyone:

  Sweet young maiden, fair of breath,

  Marlene with hips to die for,

  What do you wait for ’neath the crescent moon?

  Nevermore will he return!

  O Marlene Marleeeene!

  “I find myself wondering,” confessed a grenadier of the Battalion of Death, “whether I shall ever again be able to sleep with a woman in private and without beating her; I actually tried it the other day, with a classy, good-looking one — between clean sheets if you can imagine that — and I couldn’t get it up! Me!” Someone shot back gaily, “You won’t have that problem much longer!” Indeed (in aparte):

  Long live endless war!

  Empire of the World,

  End of the World,

  Great universal grave!

  Sung to the tune of a lively march, the words were Conrad’s, disseminated thanks to the Secret Service, which was hell-bent on arresting the author. Under cover of such fraternal orgies of boozing and brawling (after which the corpse, thrown into the street, would be attributed to Polish outlaws), Erna met with Conrad, a volunteer on the night security shift with perforated lungs; skinny, properly helmeted and shined, the young man looked shy — and resolute. People imagined that they enjoyed having their pleasure in the open air, pressed up against derelict walls like homeless animals, and this was the subject of a good deal of joking speculation.

  “Well?” Erna questioned anxiously, when Conrad had come for her and they were standing outside under the portico of a bank that still lorded over the surrounding devastation.

  “The committee has found a new meeting place,” he said.

  “And the voice, do we know who?”

  “No, but I suspect an amputee who ran into Corporal Boehm’s patrol about twenty minutes later. I’ll find out. Come along. Careful. There are six steps down, then a gap to hop over, it’s got water in it. Hold on to my arm, we can’t use the light.”

  Conrad did not switch on his flashlight until they were crawling over a rubble of cement dust and burned paper. The candlelit vault was genuinely pleasant and clean, though chill as the grave. Erna shook hands with Bartek the Polish delegate, Alain from France, and the Spaniard Ignacio before glancing around her. There were separate piles of weapons, canned food, and clothes. More surprising was the presence of a pair of massive strongboxes, tilted toward each other, intact.

  “How about it, we’ve infiltrated the very foundations of capitalism,” said Conrad, the German delegate. “Now for the super-structure!”

  He went straight on to the technical specifications.

  “The volume of air and the seriously inadequate ventilation limit us to a maximum of ten people staying here. There’s a risk of flooding if bombed. Extremely unlikely to be detected, though, save through our own carelessness. The two schoolboys who found it have been evacuated to Thur
ingia. They used it for hiding potatoes …”

  Bartek the shoemaker, based on his experience as a staff officer, predicted that the Americans would capture the city within the week; much given to making solemn prognostications, his rate of accuracy was as high as fifty percent, if he said so himself — a not dishonorable record for a tactician trained by ignoramuses who understood nothing of warfare … Apart from two groups of armaments workers, his Polish contingent was proving hard to discipline. They got into fights every night: yesterday, seven were shot! Alain reported the formation of a tolerable resistance committee within the most privileged — that is, the most corrupt — French commando. Alain was afraid of gangsters, informers, anti-Semitism, the radio, dirty deals. He asked for two guys with guts, dressed as petty bourgeois, to carry out a delicate assignment. “Got them for you,” Ignacio said. “Myself and a Trotskyite from Madrid I know …” Erna shot him an arch look. “You heard right, dear lady,” Ignacio said teasingly. “Right,” said Alain.

  Conrad briefed them on the latest developments. The elite division — it was discussed all over the town — had melted away under a storm of sulfurous bombs and the like, ground into pulp by the Shermans, the last survivors machine-gunned from the air by well-targeted fire, for lack of air cover. Formed of veterans and recently drafted young replacements, half fanatics and the other half chickenshits, marching toward the firing line like condemned men to the scaffold, encouraged by summary executions. The division was not at its full complement, either. “So which half were chicken?” Bartek wanted to know, moved by a professional interest in the behavior of fighters under pressure. “Both,” smiled Conrad. As for the population, it was on its knees. “The petty bourgeois is skidding on the vomit of its own abjectness …” “Ugh!” Ignacio winced. “Nobly put!” “Factual. They’ve always been that way.” The Volkssturm was thoroughly demoralized, save for one ravening company of Young Wolves packed with the teenage scions of Nazi families. “So anyone who hasn’t deserted already will be chopped into little pieces, which is fine by me. Good riddance. Seventeen-year-old brain matter is so damn malleable, it’s enough to put one off youth forever …” A surprisingly healthy black market, Gott sei Dank!, kept supplied by the quartermaster general. Prices for civilian clothing rising, identity papers, ration cards, and certificates declining: the colossal demand stimulated wholesale production, and the supply of forgeries nearly outstripped the demand. The Party was on its last legs. The hard-line faction was contemplating suicide or possible resistance from mountain redoubts (“That’s a laugh!” said Bartek). There was some acknowledgment of ideological and political blunders; the military caste ought to have been purged long ago. The hard-liners, though numerically insignificant, might still pull off some desperate coup. The bulk of the Party, stupefied and discouraged; but there’s no shortage of smart thinkers discreetly getting rid of their Führer portraits, calf-bound Mein Kampfs, uniforms, and armbands, which means we can get hold of some. Those rats think only about leaving the ship, the trouble is they have a deadly fear of salt water! As for the old working class, all but a handful of true stalwarts have become disoriented by the bitterness they feel. “You can see their point. Two wars, a revolution, waves of inflation, crises, persecutions, unemployment, demagogy, anti-Bolshevism, pact with Bolshevism, war on Bolshevism, a whirlwind of traumatic events, all in one generation! The worst of it is, these used to be men with sound heads on their shoulders …” “Come to the point,” said Alain. “Right. The Communists are more active than the Social Democrats, the Social Democrats more reliable …”