Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “Out with her lover, by Jove! … Have a seat, you’re charming. Not feeling so well? Make yourself comfy and tell me all about it. You can trust me, you know. My head hurts, but that’s what a fine wine will do …”

  “Who are you?” the intruder repeated in so penetrating a tone that she found her answer. “You’re French, aren’t you? An artist? But what is that for?” She was pointing at the meat cleaver. He cried out in a low voice, “Touch that and I’ll …” It almost sobered him. Damn the whole pack of you, don’t think I won’t put up a fight! Brigitte said, “You’re drunk. You can’t stay here. Come to my house, where you can sleep. Come on, get up.”

  He smiled, beatifically compliant. Young, clear-featured, staggering with tiredness. “Your word is my command, Empress. You’re superb. Have another swig to please me, and I’ll finish the bottle …” Brigitte took a few swallows of the cheerful wine.

  “Give me your arm. No one will ask any questions. Minus-Two knows me.”

  “Minus what?”

  (The algebraic X, the dot, the reduction to the abstract, to nonexistence. Minus times minus equals plus … )

  “Franz. He lost a leg and an arm, so we call him Minus-Two. He’s a very good man.”

  “What if I finished him off? Then he’d be minus everything. Zero. The ideal point.”

  Alain spun the cleaver into the air and caught it like a juggler, nearly falling over in his exuberance.

  “But there’s no ideal point,” she said mournfully, “and nothing is ever finished.”

  He stuffed the cleaver into his clothing and took the Botticelli book under his arm. Under the arch of a bridge, blown there by the wind perhaps, he searched for a glimpse of water. There was none. Brigitte helped him up a ladder. “Lie down. Go to sleep.” Alain dropped onto the bed, opened the art book. The book fell from his hands. How good it is to fall asleep at last, how …

  * * *

  Every morning Herr Schiff the schoolmaster paid a visit to his lilac bushes. Neither the heat of the fires nor the cement dust in the air had deterred them from flowering. The force of simple vegetal vitality. His shrubs enjoyed more space and light, now that there were no houses around. Schiff pruned a few deviant spears, for the plant will be hardier if it concentrates its sap in a few well-proportioned branches. Then he noticed the silence. A blissful silence. Suspiciously so. What did it mean? The gravel crunched under the uneven step of Franz the cripple.

  “Good day, Herr Professor. How are your lilacs doing? You’re a happy man, Herr Professor, to have such splendid blooms … Donnerwetter! Always so pleasant in your domain.”

  The little garden measured less than eight yards square. Its wrought-iron railings, uprooted in some places, ballooned like a metallic sail in others. The neatly raked walk was the more enticing for the fact that it led nowhere: intimacy without issue. The diabolical stone lacework all around was kept at bay by this smooth path with its reminder that humble toil, order, and perseverance existed, and might still (albeit exceptionally) claim their reward from the very jaws of pan-destruction. To build and rebuild without tiring, without end, was that not man’s mission? Or not so much his mission as his chore. How many times was Rome rebuilt? Some nod of providential approval, Herr Schiff was sure of it, had spared this tiny corner of the world for the benefit of three lilac bushes, one of them stunted … A bomb could so easily have fallen here; flames had licked at the bushes, the smoke could have suffocated them, but Schiff, his gravel, his flowers, and his gardening shears had pulled off a gentle and astounding victory.

  “My congratulations, Herr Professor,” said Franz.

  The amputee was looking white and chapped, as though his skin were encrusted with lime scale. His voice sarcastic, slightly breathless. The hook where his hand used to be gleamed like the part of some bizarre machine. Herr Schiff felt vaguely uneasy.

  “To what do I owe this compliment, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?”

  “To your lilacs. Are there still any birds about, Herr Professor?”

  “Yes. Look up there, a new swallows’ nest, up in the corner of the third window of Herr Kettelgruber’s apartment.”

  Of course, neither Herr Kettelgruber nor his apartment existed, but the nest was there among the ruddy stones. With swallows dashing in and out, veering through the wide bays filled with sky.

  “Marvelous,” said Franz.

  “Indeed it is! Divine nature! What is new, Herr Noncommissioned Officer? Those swallows have returned from Egypt.”

  “A lot of our boys won’t be returning from Egypt.”

  Old Herr Schiff’s head wobbled erratically, as if about to lose its balance and fall off a neck which had been sliced through long ago.

  “It’s the end, Herr Professor, and the beginning, for as I’ve heard you say, an end is always a beginning … Only one never knows if the new beginning won’t be worse than the end … The Americans, the British, the New Zealanders, the Kaffirs, and the Patagonians are in the city. Another hour or so and you’ll be able to show them your lilacs, assuming they are fond of flowers.”

  “What? What? Ah yes, I understand.”

  But Schiff did not understand. He groped for his stick with a doddering hand. Unable to find it, he leaned against the contorted fence.

  “It was only to be expected,” he said after a few seconds. “Germany is finished for the next fifty years … Fifty years, I tell you, Herr Noncommissioned Officer!”

  “As little as that? And when the fifty years are up, our grandchildren will pick up the noble dance right where we left off, I suppose!”

  Seeing the papery old face turn haggard with bewilderment and dismay, Franz toned down his teasing.

  “You are a peaceful citizen, Herr Professor. I suggest that you hang a white rag out the window. Then call your pupils together. Keep them from hanging about anywhere near the tanks. Very inconsiderate, tanks, they crush things and spit bullets just like that, for the hell of it.”

  “You’re right, Herr Franz. I am a peaceful citizen, I have been so all my life. The true human ideal is one of orderly concord … No, I swear that Germany will never initiate another war, never … There will be no revenge, there will never be a just revenge … I say to you: Enough!”

  He was rambling. He was thinking. An old schoolteacher who couldn’t prevent himself from rambling when he thought he was thinking.

  “How about a sprig of lilac,” Franz said, “for my buttonhole?”

  Lilac does not suit a buttonhole, but the unfortunate cripple is a bit touched in the head, it’s common knowledge. The teacher selected a good thick spray. “Here you are, my friend. A dreadful day lies ahead …”

  “Thank you. And no, not half as bad a day as some others … Good day, Professor. Lots to attend to. I fancy killing someone to round off my war … Can’t decide who.”

  “Oh, Herr Franz, don’t whatever you do shoot at the Americans! Innocent hostages would pay the price … I beg you!”

  As he hobbled away, the cripple with the flowered breast threw back: “First: those innocents of yours might be the worst kind of culprits. Second: I don’t mean the Americans, I mean the intolerable scum …”

  “Ah yes,” babbled Schiff, “I understand” — for he less and less understood.

  Schiff went back into the house, took from the linen cupboard a worn-out pillowcase, tied it to a school ruler, and went outside to hang the white flag above his door. Already white rags were flocking across the ruins, some floating with the gay flutter of doves. As far as the eye could see, the whole city was covering itself with white birds, captives who would never take wing. The dead birds were born out of a humming silence, in whose depths you could make out the breathing of death throes. The teacher cupped a hand to his ear and listened: convoys on the march, here and there loud cries diminished by distance to the point of insignificance, sounds of weeping, of singing, of sharp gunshots like pinholes in space … This neighborhood seemed completely quiet. The cripple’s wife, Ilse, came along with her bucke
t, heading for the pump. Schiff whistled like a blackbird. Ilse put down the bucket and tramped over to the window, rested her forearms on the sill in front of the professor.

  “Are you not frightened, Ilse?”

  “No, Herr Schiff. What should I be afraid of?”

  “Are you upset?”

  “No, Herr Schiff. Why be upset?”

  Schiff recognized the same dusty film over the young woman’s homely face and ugly yellow hair tied with a blue ribbon — a think layer of limestone dust that was probably coating every face at present, even the faces of portraits in their frames. Ilse’s meaty, thick-veined fists. Her discolored nails, cut too short, exposing the animal pads of her fingertips.

  “You know the city has fallen, Ilse?”

  “Yes, Herr Schiff. So the war’s over for us. And not a day too soon, Herr Schiff.”

  “Aren’t you sorry at all, then, that the war has been lost?”

  “Everything has been lost for ages, Herr Schiff.”

  So many white doves in the broken window frames of the city … Ilse could see the lilacs beyond the professor’s old white petit-point waistcoat; she spoke to them rather than to him.

  “The SS are still holding out in the underground factories … They raped the female workers last night, since today they’d be dead or prisoners, they were saying … Lennchen was roughed up. Those poor men … The Poles killed several officers … Frau Hinck says they’re committing suicide, lots of suicides everywhere, the Party leaders are all killing themselves … Frau Hinck says it’s very grand of them, but I’m not sure. Why kill yourself? If someone else kills you, that’s their business, but you yourself? … And Brigitte is dead. She spent the night before with a French prisoner … Then this soldier came last night and strangled her. She can’t hardly have suffered, such a thin little neck she had … So she’s at peace now, Herr Schiff.”

  Schiff started. “What’s that you say? Strangled?” The white stitches of his waistcoat formed diamonds, the lilacs shimmered and Ilse smiled stupidly at them. The sun enveloped her shoulders in warmth.

  “She’s like a happy little girl on her cot. Give me some lilacs for her, Herr Schiff, lots of lilacs. It’s for Brigitte.”

  Schiff had lost his fear of war, doubtless a great crime; but a crime in a neighboring house made him shudder. And no more policemen!

  “You are out of your mind, Ilse, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

  Ilse ignored the rebuke, she looked away, and insisted without raising her voice — her thick fingers were unpleasant to look at, as if they had the power in them to strangle.

  “Give me the lilacs, Herr Schiff, or I’ll have to help myself: quick, so I can fetch my water and take the lilacs to Brigitte’s bedside. I’m glad for her. I really must get on now, Herr Schiff, there’s the soup to cook, seeing as there’s no food distribution today because of the Americans.” (All at once, in the middle of her chatter, an inflexible note.) “The flowers, Herr Schiff, they’re for Brigitte, and you don’t need them anymore!”

  “In truth, I don’t,” thought the schoolmaster, enlightened by an unaccustomed lucidity. “I don’t need them anymore. Do I need anything, anymore?” “Right away, Ilse.” He drew his reading glasses from their case and with great slashes of scissors cut a sumptuous armful of blossoms. Ilse went off, vanishing like a heavy apparition carrying off the last flowers on earth. If anything can still stir up some pride in an ossified old brain stuffed with cliché and vaporized by the heat of events, it’s rhetoric. Schiff looked at his devastated bushes and told himself that he had offered up their flowers for the ravaged Fatherland. “But how did that female know I no longer needed them, when I didn’t know it myself?” So many suicides, so many deaths, as simple as that! Frau Hinck is right about the greatness of the vanquished. What is greatness? Tonight, yes, tonight … Finish the day. Which of the Stoics said, “The sage finishes his day without complaining about the gods”? “Each seed falls at its appointed time,” that was Marcus Aurelius. With a serene heart like Marcus Aurelius, Schiff sat in his study before a volume of The History of War, by the great German scholar Hans Delbrück. Lately, it was true, the sense of most of what he read escaped him; but being incapable of inattention, the mechanical act of reading acted upon him like a sedative. His cheek cupped in his hand, he reread the works he admired out of duty. Out of duty he slept, or tried to sleep, or thought he was asleep. Was he falling short of his duty at this time? He would not call the schoolchildren together. Goodbye, children. The murky swirling of the end of a world perceived through the end of a life filled him with dismal reveries on which he brooded in a state of bearable affliction, even contentment. Tonight, thirty barbiturate pills …

  * * *

  A tank moved rapidly over the paths of solitude. Hidden eyes were watching. The enemy. White signals fluttered to meet it, lifted on the breeze. The tank detoured around the fallen granite blocks of the bank, and plunged out of sight into a colossal brush pile of steel girders. The emptiness in its wake merely condensed an unknown expectancy. Then a jeep approached, moving slowly. You could see it coming from afar, then it vanished behind some stumps of dead houses, reappeared in the vicinity of Schiff’s lilac bushes, and advanced toward the pump. Suddenly there were children running to meet it, waving white flags … They were overcome with curiosity, avid anticipation of violence and handouts. The enemy was not scary close up. The enemy was distinguishable only by small differences in the color of his equipment and the shape of his helmet; under a coating of chalky dust, such differences were less noticeable. The jeep driver’s ugly face looked comical and fierce, but he was laughing. The jeep pulled up by the pump. A fat man got out and splashed water on his hands and face. Another fat man, platinum-blond hair surmounted by an undersize overseas cap, stood squarely, legs spread, hands on hips, surveying his surroundings. His was wearing beautiful boots and green sunglasses. No one had ever seen a big bushy mustache like the one he sported. Probably some big shot. The driver was busy with his motor.

  Ilse came out of her room, lugging her pail again. At the sight of the newcomers she caught her breath, hesitated for a quarter of a second, and walked up to the pump. “Guten Morgen,” she said, fixing the enemy with a long frosty stare. The driver rolled his shoulders. “Guten Tag,” he replied caustically from beneath his helmet. He was holding a shiny metal wrench in his fist. Ilse wondered whether he might not crack her on the back of head with it as she bent over the tap. She reckoned it wouldn’t be enough to kill her, but then there was the cooking and the housework … The sound of Franz’s crutch making pebbles fly was audible close by as he labored up a low rampart of rubble. He surged into view in front of a bearded officer, who lowered his revolver when he saw him. “Okay!”1 greeted Franz cordially. “Hello!” said the bearded officer, sounding perplexed. Instead of looking at the conquerors, Franz turned his attention to their machine, making small clucks of appreciation through pursed lips. “Well, well,” he coughed, in a bid to get maximum mileage from his ten words of English. With his good hand, he took the liberty of prodding one of the tires. Superb piece of manufacturing! Synthetic? The guy with the beard offered him a cigarette. “Thank you.” “Speak English?” “No.” The crippled vet’s face split into an friendly grin. Herr Schiff was approaching with measured step, leaning on the antler handle of his cane. The Schulzes all emerged from their lair together, the wife, the children, the man in his cap and sweater. Other people were appearing across the ruins like larvae emerging from the soil — and they were indistinguishable, on the whole, from the inhabitants of Chicago’s slums or any other poverty-stricken corner of the world. A rather elegant woman, wearing a Red Cross armband on her jacket sleeve, climbed down from a sort of chicken coop stuck to the side of a blasted building. A thin, hairy young man, lost in an outsize tramp’s overcoat on which he had pinned a red, white, and blue ribbon, jumped off the ladder and loped unsteadily toward the jeep. His wild eyes and big, gesticulating hands would have made him quite frig
htening, had this been the time for fear. Everyone stared at him. On his way, he knocked over a little Schulze, pushed Ilse aside, blurted “French war prisoner!”2 in a voice from the other side of the grave, and opened his arms wide … One of the Americans punched him lightly in the ribs, made him stagger, caught him in a bear hug, and the two men clung to each other as though wrestling, about to collapse in a heap. “Christ almighty!” gasped Alain. “I don’t believe it!” Someone was slapping him on the back hard enough to dislodge his lungs. Someone else stuck a cigarette between his chattering teeth. There were friendly faces in broad daylight, USA insignia, a genuine jeep, white rags snapping in the sunshine as far as you could see, an emaciated Brigitte smiling for eternity on her schoolgirl bed, with something of Botticelli about the hardened oval of her chin; there was a hail of luminous stones falling overhead, each stone an idea, an unbreakable reality, an incredible certainty, a grenade of rapture which could never explode … We’re alive, rescued, delivered, how hollow the words sounded! Victorious, does that make me a victor? Shivering, gripped by a burning chill, Alain chewed on his cigarette. “Speak French,3 anybody? Quick! Schnell, schnell!” The fat important one with the green sunglasses said, “Je parle fran-çais … Journalist. Paris.” Alain drew himself up before him like a marionette, like remorse itself, crying in a low voice, “The hell with Paris! The guys in jail … Did you think about the jail?” “It’s bound to be occupied by now,” said the journalist, who had no idea. Alain’s vehemence was spent. The nurse took his arm. “We thought of that too,” she said gently. “Oh, you did …” Alain tensed again. We the impotent, we the moles under the ground, we the less than nothings! “You’re special, Erna,” he said, spitting shreds of tobacco. The green sunglasses turned to Erna Laub with amusement. Heavily powdered, her lips rouged, the nurse looked almost insolent, as if wearing a Prussian mask. Make mental note of this vignette. “Health service, Fraülein?” “Underground,” the woman replied. “What?” “You understood me perfectly, I hope.”