by Victor Serge
The red-eyed Owl thrust his kepi — peaked like the crest of a silver cock — between their heads; as he whispered, the two commanders stared at the two prisoners. “Very good,” Gutapfel said to the Owl, “I approve!” From the next room came the exhausted sobs of a woman punctuated by cries of “I won’t! I won’t!” A male voice rapped “Silence, whores!” just as the artillery salvos appeared to be moving closer. “Those are our big guns,” Fauckel hoped, sweaty browed. After reaming out his nostrils with a pudgy finger, Gutapfel assumed the impassivity of a younger Hindenburg. Next door the weeping ceased for a moment, then broke out afresh. “I’m the wife of an unimpeachable Party member! You have no right!” The callow and pomaded Hindenburg turned into a bulldog about to bite. “Silence those hysterical females! Not another sound!” “Straightaway, Commander.” Clicked heels and ramrod shoulders, even if they were only the Owl’s, provided a heartening reminder of the existence of discipline. The cannon to the north emitted a prolonged hoo-hoo-hoo that was crushed flat by a baoom-rrh at the very instant at which the wailing — next door — was cut off. “Explain yourself!” Fauckel demanded of the Frenchman. “Pitelli, deserted to the enemy,” Gutapfel read out in quiet voice. “Do you admit the charges?” The accusation — death penalty — had become so commonplace that it impressed him no more than the theft of a can of beans, red-handed pillaging, unpatriotic talk, or the fornication of a refugee’s daughter with some Polish worker; if the laws were actually to be enforced in our demolished cities it would require execution squads working around the clock (when the manpower is badly needed elsewhere) and a limitless concentration camp. Fauckel listened as Alain, standing at attention, recited a string of explanations that formed an irrefutable argument like a madman’s closed system. Fauckel studied this dirty, determined, reasonable young man with grudging interest, for the French were beginning to regain, in his esteem, something of the prestige of the victors of 1918. He well remembered the occupation of the Rhineland, and de Gaulle was undeniably a character to be reckoned with. Alain was breezing through a faultless enumeration of the blown-up bridges, obstructed railway lines, barred roads, and broken-down trains, the orders from one checkpoint and counterorders from the next that all together had combined to make his progress so tortuous; he did not omit to relate what he had seen at the third checkpoint — sergeants hacked to pieces in a tiny guardroom drenched from ceiling to floor in blood. Blut, Blut, Blut everywhere, it was terrifying, and the corpses were minus their heads! “That’s quite enough,” Fauckel interrupted. Due to these contretemps, the honest truth was that while Altstadt was not perhaps on the prescribed route for this prisoner-of-war-cum-voluntary-worker-on-sick-leave, he simply could not have gone anywhere else, given his firm and loyal undertaking never to infringe regulations. For some time now, Fauckel had been unable to tolerate the sight, the very idea, of blood, “our blood.” He returned the Frenchman’s papers, supplemented with a new violet card on which he stamped his stamp. “You will report to Workforce Center at headquarters …” Alain’s heart leaped. Was there still a Workforce Center at headquarters? You’ve got a bad case of the runs, Commandant.
A smartly dressed housewife had already pushed past him to the desk, invoking the authority of some Oberleutnant and waving a paper that was not in her name but in that of a dead woman. Distracted by the pounding cannon fire, Fauckel struggled to grasp that she had been signing in the deceased’s name in order to obtain her rations. “It was my sister-in-law, I’ve taken in her daughter, Grete, her husband’s disappeared and the Oberleutnant assured me that …”
“Of what did he assure you, the Oberleutnant? That I can resurrect a sister-in-law?” He continued: “And that a forgery is not a forgery?”
His fit of bluster subsided into throat-clearing, because the paper he was reading had caught his attention.
“So your husband is in the Party, an army chauffeur?”
He most certainly is, and very well regarded, ask anyone in the twelfth sector … When evacuation orders are imminently expected, it’s sound policy to do favors for the drivers, especially those of the twelfth sector. “Very good, you’re free to go while inquiries proceed. Send your husband to see me …”
The Italian, Giacomo Pitelli, was explaining to Commander Gutapfel that he’d momentarily lost his head under the bombardment; his chiefs and supervisors had vanished, and there was only one way to get out, in the direction of the enemy as it happens, but he didn’t realize, he thought he was catching up with what was left of the company. “Couldn’t you see where the firing was issuing from?” “Apparently from the sky, sir, I swear, all hell was crashing down on top of us …” “That’s enough,” said Gutapfel, energetically scratching his thigh. “Court-martial, transfer him …” The Owl did not dare to mention that there was nowhere to transfer him to, and that the courts-martial were no longer functioning … After eighty minutes of business the commanders called it a day. Standing by their motorcycles, they conferred, stiff with mutual mistrust. “Not very promising,” Fauckel said. “Should I evacuate the archives on my own initiative?” “Your archives are your responsibility … I’m against evacuation.” Gutapfel shrugged a padded shoulder. “I’m staying, unless ordered personally.” The small vial of poison, hanging from a cord against the fleece of his chest, steeled him while burning a hole in his heart. (He was counting on receiving that personal order … ) What titans were about to fall! Germany would never recover. But having served in an extermination camp for Jewish vermin in Poland, he did not greatly rate his chances of “crossing over” in the event of a capitulation. This abject colleague was the last person he could tell of his decision not to be hanged by a cabal of New York Jews, now that everything was hopeless. “What about you people?” he inquired unpleasantly. “The pullback of our offices has been postponed for the moment, in view of the imminent counteroffensive, I understand.” “Oh?” Fauckel had evoked this counteroffensive merely to infuriate the fanatical dullard before him, the kind of maniac who would like nothing better than to drag a whole people to suicide. “But your department is hardly essential to the front line!” Gutapfel objected, in a derogatory tone which Fauckel chose to overlook, edging closer to speak privately — for there were other motorcyclists nearby, who might have read derision or defeatism into a perfectly reasonable remark: “Whatever may lie in store, I have faith in the genius of the Führer.” (If that’s of any consolation to you, my friend!) “Don’t we all!” cried Gutapfel angrily. You fraud, he thought, if you haven’t already wangled yourself an Alsatian passport, I’ve lost my nose for cowards and quitters. They parted with a exchange of rigid salutes.
* * *
The Frenchman was wandering through the ruins. He would go up to policemen, waving his violet card and asking for the new address of the Workforce Center for Foreign Defense Workers, apparently no longer at the address marked. They answered him politely, with dazed incomprehension. Panic was rising. He drank a cup of potato-flour broth. He was hungry. His fountain pen and half of his cash had been retained by the Owl, that was inevitable. To unstitch his jacket collar and remove a banknote, he would need some privacy. Breaking in somewhere and stealing things he could sell on the black market seemed simpler and, above all, more attractive. On pain of death, of course, but then the Todestrafe stared you in the face every hundred yards in the form of laughable notices, treacherous holes in the road, collapsing walls, dangling power lines, uniforms of every stripe, informers without uniforms, marauders on the prowl — and it could also drop on you by the purest of chance, like a meteor. Best to not be entirely innocent, you’ll feel less of a fool when you get caught.
Toward the end of the afternoon Alain’s attention was caught by the shuttered prow of a house in a badly damaged neighborhood; the tradesmen’s entrance was masked by a pair of tall thin walls, leaning toward each other like parodies of the Tower of Pisa, the sparse bricks sagging until the tops nearly touched, a truly comic sight … No imagination, however wild or drunk, could ev
er conceive the wealth of fantastical architectural effects to be found in bombed-out cities. Kids growing up in them may someday, as these visions mature within them, create a new art that will be neither realistic nor surrealistic, for destruction nurtures a special reality basically close to the unreal. The bogus reality of civilization reverted back to first principles, violent death, the dissolution of beings and works, the anxious persistence of a life force free of justification … Paintings of individual psychological terrors would seem ridiculous here. Start expressing the Great Authentic Terror, or buzz off … You’re still busy thinking, my boy, as though it were of any use, as though there were avant-guard journals to …
Anyway, let’s go inside! Alain tapped with sly insistence at a the obviously locked door. What if someone were taking a nap inside? I’d say, “Please excuse me, madame, sir, or would you rather I crushed your larynx and jugular with these fingers here?” Silence. The kitchen shutter was easily prized off. Alain stepped over sacks, mattresses, and broken glass to reach a small room furnished in light-colored wood, presumably occupied, for it was as cluttered with odds and ends as a fairground cart. Shiny tins ranged on a shelf contained some sourdough and bitter herbal tea. “How little it takes to reawaken my good intentions! If my unknown host turns up, I’ll be all apologies. I was terribly hungry, madame or sir, and it’s time you knew you’ve lost the war … Whereas I am winning it, so, though I may not look much like a conqueror, allow me to offer my protection …” All the same he picked up the meat cleaver, an excellent means of persuasion. If they come back in a group of two or three, I’m done for. Death is the penalty, my friend. A coin tossed in the air for the hundred-thousandth time. You can’t win every time, but maybe the hundred-thousand-andfirst time. Let’s win!
He was winning! Bottles, poorly hidden under the couch behind books and boxes, their sealed necks protruding. Wonderful, stupendous, incredible! To be shot after getting wasted, at least that would be a worthy end. Alain popped a cork (with one blow of the cleaver) and greedily drank the Moselle, a pert little vintage ripened beneath the tender rays of peacetime which brightened your mind, revived your optimism, and reburnished the shine of your lucky star … He must have drunk too much, for fatigue began to sway in him, leaden and yet weightless. It would be risky to sleep here. The alarm clock marked five, and night would be a long time coming. The clock ticked away like all the timepieces in the world, indifferent to the colicky burpings of the cannon. They don’t bother me either, my plucky little robot, so tell me, what do you have to say about the flow of time? Imbecile, you count the minutes without knowing what they are, the miser counts his pennies, the general counts his bombs, the refugee counts his fleas, the executioner counts his victims, no one knows what it is …
One more little glass of wine
A glass to get us feeling fine …
Good song, that! Alain smashed the neck of another bottle and drank.
Clock! Sinister, dread, impassive God …
Remember! Souviens-toi! Squanderer! Esto memor …
Off the mark, Baudelaire! Better not to remember. Esto memor, pain of death. I’m good, that is to say drunk, wine is good. The Solitary’s Wine, The Murderer’s Wine. We’re all solitaries and murderers, old boy. I’m as drunk as a drunken mule. I’ll piss on the carpet, can’t expect me to go hunting for a nonexistent toilet. Carpets, lieber Herr, gnädige Frau, are made to be pissed on the day of victory and if today isn’t the day of victory, I’ll piss as though it were the day of victory. And if you don’t like it, landlord, I’ll smash your face in, drink more of your wine, and piss again if I please.
The cleaver gleamed, last weapon of the last fighter of the last hour of the last battle of the last city … And the drunken man’s eyes widened, the scenery changed. Life is continuity, death is rupture, and between the two lies w-w-war — the whoosh of shells, the towers of mounting smoke, the mushrooms of clouds, the stupefaction of finding myself intact, in one piece, little me, in my own home on the rue de Fleurus. The proof? All I need is to put out my hand — really must wash my hands, so tired, I have the hands of a road worker! — and reach over to the bookshelf, like so, and pull out my Botticelli, here it is, and open it …
Good Lord, or is it Lucifer, I no longer believed it possible. Mathilde will have a fit when she sees me here. “Get those muddy shoes off the sofa!” she’ll scold. “You’re priceless, Tilde …” He opened a large, coffered book. Botticellian figures of long-necked women with candid eyes, wreathed in leaves and flowers, were coming toward him. Look, Tilde! What a draftsman … that loving vigor in every stroke, that clear-eyed vision elevated to the highest degree of purity. Real vision, ideally superior to reality, just as the essential and the eternal are superior to contingency. Is it Lionello Venturi’s book, or Jacques Mesnil’s? Both those writers understood him. It would have taken your sad-day pencil, Botticelli, to do the portrait of a Jacques Mensil … Mesnil is dead, Sandro. Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Botticelli, a name like a beautiful line of poetry. His power was not to express dreams but to achieve the synthesis of a golden-age dream and a purified reality: thus he encountered the marvel of truth. Faces tend to fulfill an archetype bequeathed by the millennia which themselves refined our human features. Material faces, asserting themselves in space, pick up all the bruises, deformations, blemishes, and blurrings that our flesh of clay is prone to, and every expression of misery adheres to them. They are more carnal, more social, than truthful. Sandro restores them to an eternally adolescent oval, youth knowing neither regret nor repression, with eyes slightly enlarged for the right visual effect, because Sandro is aware of the infirmity of our eyes which he heals. Learn to see in this way, love the healer of our eyes! The eyes of Botticelli’s figures bring peace — like the charm of flowers. His slim women remind us of tall young trees, pushing upward under the caress of sun and wind. No trickery here: Sandro draws his eyes by the rules, much more accurate than sight; he withdraws it from the flesh and from the abstract, this geometric magician! He puts true freshness into them, but rinsed off; he washes out your eyes from inside. Their expression is limpid, direct, they have the courage to live, they have the firmness of crystal and also a crystalline anxiety, for they have seen the mists of falsehood dispersed. They smile gravely, with darkness hidden beneath their clarity; they can look upon the tragic without blinking because spring lives inside them, their eyes untroubled by the tragedy they reflect. The fear that has been overcome but still lingers at the back of their pupils comes from knowledge and secrecy mastered by innocence.
Where’s my Etruscan Art? In God’s name what have they done with my Etruscan Art? I forbade these books to be lent, because who’d be fool enough to return them! He foraged among the spines, irritated, with stumbling fingers. Here was Kandinsky’s book, Abstract Art. Kandinsky begins by lifting from reality its colors, lights, and volumes, its essential substance, and that is doubtless a process of abstraction — but it’s even more a process of reduction to a concrete, rather than abstract, symbol, resulting in a densely simplified landscape. Pushing this procedure to the limit, Kandinsky arrives at a purely mental sign, as conventional as the algebraic X, which might with no loss of meaning be replaced by a triangle, an asterisk, or a dot, yes, a dot, the perfect unknown reduced to a minimum of visible existence. Abstraction, destruction. Straining to see beyond the visible, the artist is left with nothing at his disposal but a set of signs, no longer images or symbols, on their way to becoming number; hold it there, friend, you’re turning away from the earth, the lovely, living earth, you’re squandering the gifts of form, you’re betraying the real, you’re losing the eyes which Sandro had healed … Abstraction culminates in the black-on-white grids of Mondrian: straight lines, right angles, ingenious variations on the prison-bar theme. Then poor old Mondrian remembers about color, and fills in a corner of his jail with a minute square of wash, better than nothing, to be sure; but after that, how gorgeous, how unforgettable a red blouse looks or a richly patterned s
carf! All that remains of art is an imprisoned whiteness. You’ll say it’s powerful, and I won’t deny it. Very powerful and very dead.
Prison for prison, allow me to prefer that painting by Raphael, the martyrdom of … who was it now? Here we go, this good wine is mixing up my martyrdoms and my deliverances, much the same thing as it may be, doesn’t martyrdom begin again after deliverance? That’s it, The Deliverance of Saint Peter, in the Vatican apartments — if the Vatican has not been bombed to smithereens in a hail of deliverance … In the foreground, the bars, the only part Mondrian would have thought worth keeping! Behind the bars, the group of warriors, jailers, and the angel, the source of celestial radiance, and old man Peter in chains, drooping, not understanding that deliverance is at hand; or understanding that it is darker than martyrdom in prison …
Where’s that bottle? There were still a few dregs from the source in it. I drink to the source, to the archangel, to the breeze beating the bushes, and no more bars, oops someone’s coming. A woman, Mathilde, not Mathilde, it can’t be, I hear her stepping down from a leafy grove by Botticelli …
He shouted, “Who’s there?”
He grabbed the meat cleaver. The kitchen door was opening … “It’s me, Brigitte … Is Gertrude out? Who are you?” Alain put down the bottle, empty, saw the art books lying open, the matt blade in his hand. Waves pulsed through his head. “What? Who? Let’s see, Alain. I saw you at my show, at Fortuné’s, right?”
The intruder, in narrow jacket and white beret, slender-necked, was in truth Botticellian — but that poor lopsided face, those enormous twelve-year-old’s eyes seared by the fires of hell, you’re ill, tell me. You look crazy, that’s natural, it will happen or it won’t happen, keep drinking, there’s more left. Alain smashed the neck of another bottle and held it out to Brigitte, golden bubbles splashing onto the books and foaming all over his hand, my hands are incredibly filthy, I’m going to disgust you, Mademoiselle. Don’t drink it all, I’m thirsty too. The intruder asked, “Did Gertrude go out?”