by Victor Serge
“Magnificent. How about you?” He kissed her. “You know, I’ve just made my first drawing. It’s years since I held a pencil. A madman’s drawing, naturally … I was shouting with fury over it. But it wasn’t bad …” He was exultant. “How lovely it is around here … The war’s over.”
“Nearly,” Erna said. “And the consequences are about to begin.”
“What consequences? What do you mean?”
Thus began a long, digressive exchange between them which resembled the sparring of masked antagonists who were deeply fond, deeply mistrustful of each other and delighted by every sudden chance to face each other, for a moment, with their guard down. “Erna, you’re worth several men,” said Alain. “I see through you, more than you think. You are strong and full of faith.” (“Less than you imagine,” thought Erna.)
Alain, lying against a tree stump, looked up to where she sat, sharp-kneed, too preoccupied to reassure him.
“Don’t think too much, Erna, it drives you off the track. It becomes unlivable. The good thing about war is that it leaves no time for thinking. All you care about is not getting killed, finding something to eat, killing someone else, destroying something, and holding out another day. It puts your consciousness at ease, by suppressing it. The misfortune of prisoners is that they have time … I’ve just spent two extraordinary days, Erna, windows flying open inside my skull, my skull was like the ruins, with empty casements gaping on all sides, the sky pouring in, and the winds, the memories, the future, all this in the form of ideas without form. I couldn’t sleep, nor could I make any order out of the mess in my mind. I let it go, I thought: Either I hang myself tomorrow, singing ‘Why do you tarry under the moon, Marlene, Marlene?’ or else the mess will settle, I’ll see things more clearly, decisions will have been made … It’s now been proved, Erna; I’m not destined to hang myself. I’ve decided.”
The nurse found him childish.
“And what have you decided?”
“I’m changing my life, changing my soul. I’ve realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking … I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life — my own to start with, the only one I’ve got.”
“But your life will no longer be of any use,” Erna objected.
“Say rather that it will no longer be of any use even to me? That I won’t be able to forget and that I’ll be a mere ectoplasm in the ruins or join the rodent band of schemers and survivors? I was afraid of that. But no. I am alive. I am the proof that some such remain! I take things in my hands and I work and I make something exist that didn’t before. I’m nothing, you might say? I take destruction, suicide, folly, grief, and joy and I create something new and meaningful out of them, I restore meaning to the corpses of men, cities, and ideas, to the thistles growing over them, to the stars that rise in the sky despite everything, to the lovers who walk over the earth or lie decomposing beneath it … From all this I knead an unknown substance which is my gift to all eyes, or to some eyes …”
“Art?”
“Yes, art, though I think I despise that word. I know too much about its impotence. I’ve witnessed the exhibitionism of those greater or lesser swindlers who are more con than artist, I know all about the scams of dealers and merchants, the publicity circus and the snobs in New York or elsewhere who gush — whether it’s a piece of shit, a bloody marvel, or a dark conundrum — ‘Too too fantastic, darling!’ Art be damned, if that’s all it is! But who is to bring the first hint of order to chaos, of light to the caverns, of hope to the graveyards, of balm to the wounds, who is to place a love incarnate among broken beings, an irrefutable reason beneath the cataracts of absurdity? Who else but the artist? Tell me who!”
Erna answered feebly: “The revolutionary.”
“Oh, really? Show me one, give me one name — a living one, mind you, because we could make up a dazzling catalogue of dead ones. I’ve been through the east, between escapes and arrests, I went over the lines with some German refugees. I was robbed, beaten up, and what have you by the comrades, I don’t hold that against them. I know what they’ve suffered and are still suffering, and I know what man is now. I sought among them men of faith, men of ideas, men of justice. At first my fresh illusions were protected by an elephant’s skin of ideology. Then I found the men I was looking for. They were all convicts. Every machine rolled over them. Little lieutenants who were big brutes would blow their brains out as an example, to scare the rest. I remember one of these killers shouting: ‘I need to speed up the pace here, work faster!’ I watched the road crews hacking away, nothing but women, children, old men, and I don’t know what else, not to speak of enemy prisoners. I saw them bogged down, squelching half starved through the Lithuanian mud, first-class mud it was too. It was easy for them to escape by burrowing into the mud, at the risk of getting buried and of getting your companions shot for it … I was working there too. One day on a slippery, disintegrating embankment I met an ex-sailor who spoke French, knew Marseille, who had just returned from the penal colony at Kamchatka and was nostalgic for the fisheries there. ‘So how many of you are behind the great Fatherland’s barbed-wire fences?’ I asked him. ‘Millions,’ he answered, without appearing to say anything sensational. This made me furious. ‘You’re lying! Someone should have perforated your counter-revolutionary brain long ago!’ ‘You have a point there,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why I’m still trying to hang on … They promise us pardons and bonuses … But listen to me, brother, before you condemn me out of ignorance.’ We spent an hour together in the rain working out the rough statistics, by social class and by region across Eurasia … He’d been expelled from the Party, a militant from 1920 who had heard Lenin speak in the factories … A patriot and a socialist in spite of it all! Tell me it isn’t true!”
“It’s true,” said Erna. “I know it better than you.”
Alain seemed sadly satisfied.
“Once I knew a man who was authentic. A man who served. Who probably carried out his fair share of dirty work as well. A man of knowledge and will. He was strong. I believed in him. And I believed he betrayed us. I would happily have killed him. Now I understand. The traitor was myself, who understood nothing. There’s a truth about man and a truth for man, don’t you see?”
“Quite so,” said Erna dryly. “Who was he?”
He told the story as though he were sketching successive images on a pad. Erna saw a familiar face come together in the silky river dappled with leaf fronds and patches of sky. It was exactly the feeling she had experienced, in another universe, when writing the rigorous, nebulous text of a private diary whose every line was surrounded with blank spaces, silences, shadows, secret lights. She tasted sand on her lips. There is no escape from oneself or from numbers. Numbers are what give rise to chance, and this can be a prodigiously significant flash of light: the thing that counts.
By breaking the rule of secrecy, Erna unconsciously made a decision without which she could never have pronounced the syllable formed by a single initial.
“D,” she said. “I knew him too.”
Alain felt no surprise. The nature of his astonishments had changed. An exploding bomb would have startled him, but only out of instinct … But that there should be virginal grass, a simple possible future, this troubled and confused him.
“Well,” he said simply, “then you know what kind of man he was.
“Peace must be declared to the world, and at long last all the victims must be told that it’s over, over for good. That we will reconstruct with justice, after a ruthless cleansing, without forgetting that it’s the most wretched who have the greatest need of justice … Proclaim freedom, even in the midst of abysmal poverty
. They hardly go together, true freedom and miserable poverty amid the rubble and tombstones; you don’t need much Marxism to see that. But the match is necessary if moral poverty is not to be added to the other kind. How can the survivor be consoled, how can he regain hope and courage if he’s not allowed to have his say — and if he stammers, that’s his right! — and to shoot his mouth off if he feels the urge? It’s a relief to mouth off when you’re backed into a corner. How can we reconstruct without first constructing a new chaos, but a chaos this time of ideas, utopias, vengeance, and generosity, an unheard-of freedom — which would be quite simple in reality?”
“Yes, but how?” wondered Erna.
Alain continued slowly, as though groping for something in the dark.
“But where are the men? Where are the grand ideas? Perhaps ideas are nothing but ephemeral stars. They point the way while they last, and then they go out, and other stars should flare up … But they haven’t yet. And everything has been done to stamp out the light of minds. The old revolution is dead, I say. We need another, completely different revolution, and I don’t see it anywhere. Are you angry with me?”
Erna felt more nauseous than she ever had in the field hospital’s operating room.
“No,” she said, “go on.”
It was a superhuman effort not to implore him to stop. “You must hear this voice, Erna. You must.
“It’s a great thing to have won, but victory is hollow if it isn’t the beginning of something else … Wild beasts have always known how to vanquish. What will victory bring us? A tiny drop of equity, a tiny extra drop of humanity in an ocean clogged with dead bodies? Or the most highly mechanized secret and visible police forces?
“What about you, Erna, what will you do?” Erna was taking stock of her problem. Return to the great land of mute suffering? Already, while writing her latest report, she had felt uncertain about what political orientation to adapt to. Once the official line was established, this ignorance might become suspect in itself. She wished she could say, “Just let me go back to Ak-Aul, let me be a desert recluse again, writing my notebooks and burning them afterward.” Unthinkable words. Her one glimmer of a chance lay in feigning mindless zeal. Get an interview with the chief of the service, seduce him not so much by her devotion as by her willingness, quickly accept an assignment in Paris, Rome, or Trieste and resume her clandestine activities. During wartime, it was facts about the enemy that were wanted, the stark truth about resources, risks, losses, hopes. And there was no ambiguity as to the enemy’s identity or the necessity of destroying him, no doubt about the action to be undertaken which — transcending crime — became the saving exploit. Now, already, the smokescreens of doubt and deceit were spreading irresistibly. H, the liaison officer, had told her: “Your memorandum must stress what people think about us: the populations, the women, the Jews, the Americans, the prisoners, don’t leave anyone out … That’s essential …” Essential, ha! But how to say it? How to report the rumors of terror seeping from the liberated countries, the comments upon the rumors, the despair of so many comrades? It would be criminal not to record the truth. To record it would be worse … H also said, “For us, esteemed Comrade, the war continues … Indeed who knows if … Can two such different worlds coexist? We are the stronger by virtue of planning, realism, and discipline, and we have hidden allies all over the world … Our opponents enjoy technological superiority, for the time being, and wealth. But technology can be learned and wealth can be conquered. There are no clear boundaries between war and peace nowadays … Wars may be waged almost invisibly. Be very careful.” Wisely feigning to agree, Erna had stocked up on dollars and was close to obtaining an excellent passport … Years passed, wars passed, crushing millions of innocents, cities crumbled, a civilization was dying, and the same problems were rearing their heads … The river shimmered.
“It’s four o’clock,” said Erna. “I must be off. Will you go back to Paris?”
“Straight through the Porte de Bagnolet, the fastest way … But you, come on, you’re not going to remain in these graveyards, are you? Save yourself. We’ve every right to put life first, when what reigns is death.”
These words revolted her. (We have no life beyond working for a great common destiny. And what work is that, Alain might retort — is it humane and decent, is it liberating? By saving ourselves, we attempt to save what little we can save …)
“So this is where we’ve come to,” she said.
“Where? You look like you’re talking to yourself. Your face is all twisted. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing in particular. Goodbye.”
She thought: Farewell.
1 The following exchange is conducted in English in original French text.
2 In English.
3 In English.
IV. Journey’s End
And let fall the smoking rains
over the cerebral forest!
So many funeral masks
lie preserved in the earth
that nothing yet is lost.
THE PASSENGERS on the first ship to leave port the day after the end of a cataclysm in no way resemble the passengers escaping on the last ship … The refugees of the recent past carried the mark of defeat but also the joy of surviving in the middle of the storm. Some of them escaped with nothing but a shirt and a few papers, enriched — as well as ravaged — by ideas. Of another breed altogether were the two dozen passengers of the Swedish freighter Morgenstern (Morning Star). Outwardly, they belonged to a vanished or vanishing world, to a stable world impervious to apocalypses in which bank accounts, business deals, government ministries, compliant women, expensive liquors sufficed to make human existence bearable. A mix of businessmen and envoys, of women, middle-aged and younger — many of the latter sporting rank in various armies. One guessed the women had lovers doubly influential — in the bureaucracy and in semi-legal businesses … The gentlemen, frequently drunk, bandied stories about their times in Cairo, Bombay, Moscow, São Paulo, Ottawa, Tunis, or Sidney as though the globe of the earth were a ball for them to play with. They paid court to a chestnut-haired woman dressed in vibrant colors, who had been parachuted into Lombardy … Now the parachutist exhibited a coarse laugh, a worn-out voice, an athletic bust, and the inability to stand alone at the rail or suffer more than three minutes of conversation if it did not include open allusions to her femininity or valor.
Very different, this crowd, from the people at the front — or for that matter at the rear in the hospitals and shelters, in the railway stations and on the roads. As different as show dogs are different from the cringing, abandoned curs of blasted cities; as different as stallions on a stud farm from the sturdy ponies with matted coats and penetrating eyes patiently pulling an ambulance cart through the mud of the Ukraine under gray lowering clouds. “Domestic animals,” Daria reflected, “also participate in our sociology of iniquity, but they have no choice …” She was thinking too that the organization of today’s world has attained a perfection singularly hostile to men who suffer as well as to better men. The glaciers of the Himalayas, the jungles, deserts, and oceans have been conquered by motors more magical than any flying carpet; but this has not made escape, or the fulfillment of dreams, in any way easier. In order to cross borders, however fluid, you need to possess the mystic bureaucratic passwords of secret services and government stamps — those ridiculous, often sinister talismans; this magic can only be countered by the science of connections and checkbooks. Ordinary people — people, simply — can no longer move from one continent to another, as nineteenth-century emigrants used to do; neither flight nor discovery is open to them, neither enterprise nor mission. The pioneer life is denied them, although half the earth’s surface is waiting to be cleared … If Europeans were permitted to colonize the poles, Uganda, Rhodesia, the Ubanghi, the Matto Grosso, millions of eager daredevils would sign up with a fierce acquiescence — of which perhaps three-quarters would perish; still in a hundred years, the poles and the equator would be ri
ch in scientists, philosophers, and artists, richer than golden-age Greece (which was an age of slavery). A cynical mystification presides over the captivity of peoples and individuals. The barriers against mobility are counterproductive, patently designed to be outwitted by their proper targets. These nets trap none but the anonymous irregular, the stateless refugee, the veteran of selfless struggles (for what could be more suspect than the generosity of idealists?), the fugitive from persecution whose papers were lost somewhere between a lake of blood and a penal colony, the good European thrilling to the call of distant lands, the Jew unnailed from his unimaginable cross. After the barracks of torture and humiliation, who wouldn’t appreciate a vista of palm trees over blue water? It should be an inalienable right … But the pillagers of the wrecks that were once sovereign states, the painted-over citizens of the sham democracies, the traffickers entrusted with profitable economic missions, the spies and the disinformation merchants, these by contrast know all the rules of the game. They fly at whim across the oceans as though the laws of mechanics and the strategic map of the world were theirs by rights (which they probably are). In this still-mysterious mutation of a civilization, it may be that such hybrid beings, their vitality all the more exacerbated in its final upsurge, will prevail for some time …
The freighter was making its way through the unstable element, cleaving the green seas. How many similar freighters and handsome steel submarines lay at the bottom? No one seemed to care … Daria was traveling on her last passport, her last money; outside every law, very possibly pursued, free, free! — but distraught. The last passport, as authentic as it was fake, delivered by her liaison officer, would within weeks be transformed (if it were not already) into a pass into deadly traps. The last dollars were barely sufficient to cover the expenses of this complicated journey, and would run out in three months. If she failed to locate D on the other side of the Atlantic, there was one final resort: a painless injection. Reassuring thought. Because, you see, there’s the philosophical “why live” and the concrete why (and how to) live; there’s the hunted individual, his unfailing will to live, his goals, infinitely greater than himself, his impasse at the end of a barren wasteland, his solitude there, the impossibility of scraping a hundred dollars together … Though not afraid of nothingness in itself, Daria felt unsettled by its approach, for she was delighting in being alive ever since the high seas had filled her lungs with bracing salt air and her senses and mind with an immense, intelligible poem. Suicide is often an act of vitality, and even — if it is not the result of neurosis — the act of a person who is powerfully attached to life. Eminent psychologists might dispute this, but only because they know nothing of the scientific experience of their colleagues who committed suicide in the ghettos … Daria clung to this argument, because she felt attached to too many things.