Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  Erna cut in, her voice level: “In the interests of unity, best to abstain from political psychologizing. Broadly, what do people think?”

  “They think they’re in hell, that tomorrow will be worse than today, that there’s nothing left to believe in or to hope for, but still, they’d rather not all be wiped out just yet …”

  Ignacio remarked fliply, “They do display a healthy philosophy of nature. Lacking a political psychology they have a zoological mentality … And I couldn’t agree with you more, Erna, providing we could forget an awful lot of things … I’m all for unity, no one keener, but I won’t hide from you that if I were in the east and the CP took over, I would adopt a few personal precautions pronto: Underground zwei, number two!”

  Bartek concurred, with a pained grimace. Alain shrugged grumpily. The Pole distracted the committee by tiptoeing up to one of the safes and gluing his ear to the side. “Something is up,” he said. “I have had eighteen long hours to study the hard heart of these financial idols, and I’ve found it reacts to the great emotions of the earth. My reading is, major artillery offensive west by northwest …”

  Conrad led Erna out by the other exit: a good meeting place must have two exits. The pair of them emerged on what used to be a commercial thoroughfare, strangely well preserved and animated. Large clumps of splintered buildings remained upright around their blacked-out display windows and vacant interiors; this architecture was vaguely reminiscent of the badlands of Colorado or Afghanistan as seen in geography books: vertical mountains chiseled into castles … A procession of trucks straggled down the cleared roadway like a giant snake of black vehicles, hissing and growling, guided onward by obscure glimmers of light. A youth tightly belted into leathers checked Erna’s pass and Conrad’s registration card, zealous enough to play his flashlight over their faces. “Where have you come from?”

  “Bed,” answered Erna, smiling. “Does that tempt you?”

  “No thanks, Fraülein, move along. No loitering in this zone.”

  The last motorized infantry were crammed into the squat personnel carriers — a conglomeration of heads massed together with slim barrels. All of a sudden, one hundred yards ahead, a white star was born in the inky sky releasing an unbearable brilliance floating to the ground among the convulsed buildings, highlighting the marquee of a cinema … The fez, thick mustache, and smoke rings of Khedive cigarettes loomed over the startled convoy from the center of this inhuman glare.

  “Precise targeting,” muttered Conrad. “Let’s hurry.”

  The star faded, having broken the silence of the sky where now a hum of engines could be heard far above. The star flared once more in the form of a scream, a sudden demented howl that rippled heavily over the convoy, echoing through a thousand thunderstruck spines. The human mass smothered the cry beneath its weight as one smothers remorse, as one would want to smother fear …

  Conrad slipped his arm around Erna’s waist for appearances, for invisible eyes were watching.

  “Sometimes I feel I could let rip like that madman … That madman who had already been killed, I think. I’m disciplined enough to stop myself, but which is the crazier, I wonder, to be disciplined or to scream? You, Erna, you put up a great show of being the woman with nerves of steel, but you’re as bad as I am. And all those poor bastards riding off to the slaughterhouse without a peep, how they’d love to howl their guts out. It would be an overwhelming relief, the convoy would stop, the Special Troops would go wild, then join in three minutes late: AAAAGGHH! The battle would be over before it began. The victors would quake to enter such a madhouse. It could mean the return of sanity …”

  “Shut up,” Erna said stiffly. “Shut up or I’ll scream.”

  The first deep thumps of an artillery barrage resounded somewhere. The ruins shook. Immense veils were ripped asunder in the night. There was silence among men.

  * * *

  The importance that explosives have acquired in people’s lives is equal only to that of papers. With barely a glance at the man, the robot on guard before some trapdoor peruses “your papers,” die Dokumenten; his decision is the result of a series of dates, rubber stamps, and itemized rules interlocking like cogwheels in his head at roughly an inch below the helmet. The robot pronounces: “Not in order, come this way.” This may be the beginning of the end of one’s own small but cherished world, within the larger end of the world … Alain naturally attempted to argue with the robot; he very nearly groveled. “Mein Kamerad, sehen Sie doch! Just look!” I’m almost in order, surely, hardly out at all, look, lovely blue card, pink card, travel permit (expired), crucial other paper here … ! The man-robot of the final hour, pumped up with a zeal that would make as much difference as the flight of a gnat in a cordite explosion, was impervious to argument. He had the build for the job — a big brute with watery eyes. The well-worn record spun in his larynx to produce the stock response under every clime, still changeless amid pan-destruction: “Tell it to the sergeant.” But where was the robot sergeant? A hundred marks might have nuanced his sense of responsibility, oiled the rusty wheels of his mental clockwork — after all, banknotes are also made of paper, that’s why the magic sometimes works … Alain started playing his own record, stuck on a single word: “Shit shit shit shit shit!” What could be more infuriating than to be shot by mistake or misplaced zeal on the eve of deliverance, to be the last casualty of a lost war, minutes before the cease-fire? But until this happens there’s always the luck factor, you never know. If you made a list of the ways luck has shepherded you — defenseless, trembling, and alive — through a global massacre, there’d be no choice but to accept the complete randomness of the universe, its sovereign absurdity, the existence of an unimaginably insane God.

  Alain continued his meditation in a prison that looked like nothing known, while being essentially the same as every other prison. Comforting sunshine, pouring like warm water over his dirty, aching body, warmed the rear playground of this shattered school, whose ground floor and basement had been converted into a holding pen for prisoners. Rumor had it that Altstadt’s jail, symbolically spared by the fires of heaven and earth, was full to bursting with enemies of the people, traitors, suspects, and foreigners; one privileged wing — with rations of meat and dried fruits — was reserved for unworthy Party members, or perhaps not so unworthy, who could say? They may have sold army tires and provisions, changed their names, burned their uniforms, denied the Race and the Führer, yet no sooner did they feel the robot’s iron grip on their scruffs than repentance gushed touchingly forth, the faith returned, the selfless service of the past was brought to bear so earnestly that it was hard to know what to do with them, despite the implacable orders from above … Especially as the judges themselves … Here, barbed wire enclosed a makeshift jail as provisional as life itself; from a catwalk of rickety planks, with a sentry box on top, the guard could see down into the yards, the doorways, the windows, and the latrines dug here and there behind broken-down walls.

  Alain lay on his belly under the sun, watching the man with the submachine gun trudge back and forth on his aerial gangway; from behind he looked massive in his forest-green cloak, but on turning he showed the fretful face of a convalescent. The Italian was stretched out opposite the Frenchman. The Croat, lounging against the wall of the pisshouse, had stuck his legs out wide apart, trousers rolled above the knee to expose his shins and naked feet to the sunshine. His feet were mottled, swollen, blackened lumps that seemed to be going rotten beneath the skin. The Croat: a hirsute giant built for strength, now sucked dry, sunk in a permanent stupor. The Italian — short, with bright eyes and hands that seemed agile even at rest — said, “Only four soldiers, and at least seventy of us.”

  The Frenchman looked skeptical.

  “The wire is pretty well laid out. If they rained a few more bombs over this corpse of a town, I might have an idea.”

  “Can’t count on that,” the Italian said glumly. He winked in the direction of the bushy-haired Croat. “A goner
, that one. Don’t worry, he only understands his own lingo and a few words of Hun, especially Schwein! Did you see the soles of his feet, the veins on his calves? He took a beating last night, he was hollering like ten stuck pigs. It was in the store cupboard to the right, with the iron-trellis window. They’ll bump him off tonight or tomorrow when they have the time or the inclination, you know how they are. There’s no gallows so they can’t hang him. There’s no ammo, no firing squad, they’ll just dish him a bullet or two in the gut so he can watch himself die … The executioner is Henschel, the fat one who looks like Göring with fangs. Eunuch voice, eyes drowned in blubber, chestful of decorations he must have stolen … He’s off duty this morning.”

  “And you?” asked Alain without curiosity.

  “Might be down for the same treatment. I was caught crossing over the lines, my job was pouring concrete for the artillery. I might just have a chance.”

  “Fascio?”

  “Barely. My ass was in it, but I kept my head cool.”

  The sickly guard’s gaze wandered reproachfully in their direction. Grinning, the Frenchman raised his hand in a cordial wave, laughing Heil! The man with the submachine gun jumped, thrust the weapon aggressively forward, answered Schweigen! Silence! like an automaton, and resumed his pacing. The prisoners had a clear view of his pinched face — a child sapped by a tapeworm.

  “Don’t know what he’s been marinating in,” Alain said, “but if it wasn’t his superiors’ latrine, then it must have been in a pusfilled hospital.”

  The Italian sniggered, showing a mouthful of broken teeth.

  “I reckon we’re in T section: condemned to death, probably. Henschel came around and gave me a funny look from over the wall. I’d never forgive myself for getting knocked off during the last three days of the Great Reich.”

  “Me neither.”

  The guard was walking over again, without looking at them, head down. The Frenchman uttered softly: “Blut und Tod! ” The guard stopped short and they heard him cock his weapon. “Don’t move!” whispered the Frenchman to the Italian. The Croat flexed his feet in the sun. Suddenly, piteously, he bellowed over and over: “Nein! Nein! Nein! ” Above them the guard was shaking in a fury, or a nervous fit. Nothing happened. The Croat relapsed into lethargy. Then a small man in a big peaked cap appeared in a gap in the wall and stood staring. He looked like a sun-dazzled owl. The guard trudged along the gangway. The Owl vanished, then reappeared through the pale wooden door of the yard. He hopped toward the Croat and looked him over impassively. A short length of something hard bounced repeatedly off the prisoner’s bushy head, making a thick, deadened sound. The prisoner turned on his side with a groan and lay doubled up in an odd position. Black rivulets of blood trickled down his forehead. The man in the high kepi decorated by a silver eagle turned toward the other two in the yard. His boots creaked, he was trim and elegant, cinched by a black leather belt. Slope-shouldered. The Italian turned the other way and played dead. The Frenchman, without rising, executed a crisp military salute. The Owl was swinging a piece of iron pipe at the end of his fist. The moment darkened. The Owl turned on his heel. They heard him lock the door.

  “Phew!” said Alain.

  The Italian opened his tunic a fraction to reveal the handle of a tool.

  “I had this, but we were fucked. Now shut up. There’s nothing to do but stick it to them between the shoulder blades from behind, round midnight. Only snag is, we’d need to be outside.”

  The sun shone mildly. Now every time the guard passed by them, he slowed down. He seemed hypnotized by the expanding puddle of the Croat’s blood. Alain was biting his lips. He began speaking under his breath, as if to himself, offering the back of his head to the submachine gun: “Blut, Blut, Blut, Tod, Tod, und Tod! Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death!”

  “Shut the fuck up, you’ll get us killed!” the Italian hissed.

  “Possibly,” said Alain.

  The obsessive litany ticked on: Blood, blood, blood, and death, death, blood and death, blood …

  The forest-green cape halted above them, dark against an azure sky in the full glare of noon. In a low, personal voice, imitating the Frenchman’s, he ordered: “Schweigen! Silence!”

  The Frenchman merely lowered his own voice further, and it was still audible, an obedient muttering: “Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death, blood, blood, blood …”

  It went on for seconds or minutes, in a sluggish interval that clotted like blood. The blackish puddle spread outward. The guard walked jerkily on, boards squeaking under his weight. The incantation continued. The squeaking stopped. There was an abrupt thump, followed by a sun-drowned stillness. The guard had collapsed at the foot of the sentry box; his helmet had come off, and the childish head with its shaven skull was lolling against the boards.

  “Got him,” breathed Alain, his forehead dripping. “I knew it.”

  A whistle blew in another sentry post, rapid footsteps thudded along the boards. Some figures bustled around the fallen guard before bumping him down the ladder like a sack of potatoes. A beardless youth in a policeman’s cap, with bunches of grenades attached to his belt, paced the catwalk nervously.

  “Now we’re fucked,” the Italian said.

  “Yes,” said Alain.

  The chain of events progressed in broad daylight as though in a madman’s nightmare. The new guard looked at the coagulating pool under the Croat’s thatch of hair. Alain struck up his muted litany once more: Blood, blood, blood, death. The boy in the policeman’s cap burst out laughing. His laughter was answered from the remote horizon by great rumbling, like air coming out of a tire, deepening into a hurricane roar, the distant sabbath of the big guns. The laughter of the grenade-belted boy broke off in a kind of hiccup. Two important commanders were coming into the main yard; Alain could see them through the gap in the wall. The Italian rolled over onto his back, arms flung out, laughing with all of his broken teeth, all of his arched spine, his eyelids fluttering against the sun. His head lay close to the black puddle, so that in laughing he, too, seemed to bleed. The litany of blood continued, the distant booming of the sabbath continued, the placid sunshine continued, guttural commands raked the air.

  The Italian and the Frenchman appeared together before the two commanders, in a spotless office with potted geraniums flowering on the windowsills. They performed the ritual salute in style. The chief of the subdivision for guest workers attached to the Extraordinary Security Service of the (et cetera), Fauckel by name, questioned the Frenchman at the same time as Gutapfel, the joint subdirector of Civil Defense under the Department for Emergency Mobilization of the Counterespionage Corps of the State Secret Police (or whatever it was) questioned the Italian — thus expediting the proceedings. Fauckel had stiff, brush-cut hair and appeared to be chewing gum, but it was only a facial tic. Gutapfel had slicked-down hair, a starched collar, a bulging tunic, and a blunt nose, like a pig’s snout. The eyes of the first were tiny, creased, and watery, the eyes of the second bulged dully. Neither trusted the other. “Listen to that,” said Fauckel into Gutapfel’s ear, “they’re going at it hammer and tongs to the north.” “The north, you think so?” In the direction of our one single decent supply or evacuation route? Are we to being sacrificed like lambs, or will the evacuation orders come through in time? It’s all very well to hold out and die standing fast, but who will save the nation then? We are the flower of the nation, after all. The gauleiter’s last remarks were inspired by the field marshal’s “Order of the Day” — as if this were a time for epic literature!