Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  In a word, she was happy. The frenzied weeks of preparation, the lies she was forced to sow around her, the masks she had to wear, the sleepless nights, the crises of conscience in which true conscience played no part — usurped as it was by fear and a childish docility — all this was blown away by the sea air. She couldn’t stop smiling. Mr. Winifred, a businessman from Oslo, complimented her on her eyes: “They have the very hue of water at the crest of a wave …” “You’re being rather poetical,” she replied inanely, with a pointless laugh that made her look fifteen years younger — younger by one shipwrecked revolution, several descents into hell, and a universal war. Mr. Winifred said there was a poetry of destiny in business; that he had begun to write a play when he was twenty, that he would visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Was it Shakespearian, your early drama?” “No … Closer to Ibsen.” He relished the opportunity to pronounce, for the benefit of the traveler with the eyes (that was it! Ibsen eyes!), a roster of potent names: Brancusi, Archipenko, Chagall, Henry Moore — the very latest in ultramodern moderns, and you’ll never guess the sums they go for! Mr. Winifred confided that, thanks to the war, art was acquiring new value. “I dare say it is,” exclaimed Daria warmly, “a profound value of creation and reconciliation …” Mr. Winifred listened distractedly to things said by women. He was listening to himself. Pillaging had given rise to a black market of minor masterpieces; under the auspices of this trade, the production of forgeries registered an unexpected increase; and some forgeries are themselves masterpieces! The Latin American market lapped up everything indiscriminately, for newly acquired or expanded wealth appreciates old masters and dependable moderns. Mr. Winifred, a specialist in the minerals trade, was expanding for pleasure his collection of mostly religious works from Eastern Europe. Under the Nazi occupation, old families were forced to sell their heirlooms, while representatives of the Great Reich conducted a roaring trade in the spoils of confiscation. Knowledgeable dealers combed the terrain from the mouth of the Danube to the Baltic, swiping the aristocracy’s every precious icon, seventeenth-century portrait, landscape, and battle scene. The treasures of the old worlds are being carried away in the deluge, to the profit of the quick-witted denizens of the new world — a thought that made Mr. Winifred smile slyly, for he was of the new world, and nothing if not quick-witted.

  Mr. Ostrowieczki joined them from the bar, and the three of them leaned their elbows on the iron rail over the heavy, lava-slow seas. Mr. Ostrowieczki, an engineer on a government mission, had a broad, pale, fleshy face, a shaved scalp in the Russian style, a taciturn disposition, and pearl-gray irises so pale that they sometimes seemed white. Daria disliked him and he ignored her, preferring to flirt (like a bear in a tweed jacket) with a member of the Women’s Corps of an army that had covered itself in glory. The notion of the wealth of the old and new worlds merging under the pressure of merciless events provoked in him laughter more sarcastic than porcine. His tiny pearly pupils contemplated the waves as he said — congenially, for he too was half drunk — ”Ha! Ha! Lots of artworks will be drowned, not that it matters to me. It’s only old art perishing …” Daria felt a secret jolt. “What do you mean?” she demanded point-blank. “Old feudal art, old religious art, old bourgeois art … I am an engineer, Madame, and for me there’s nothing more beautiful than a turbine.” Daria threw him a sharp look which unsettled him. “The wind is coming up,” he went on, “how about something to warm us up, below?” Daria acquiesced. The technocrat’s bare, high cranium preoccupied her. She was all too familiar with this summary ideology, these doctrines set in polished stone — invented during the age of Einsteinean relativity! Mr. Ostrowieczki avoided speaking to her again, wisely, for she would have found him out. In the mess, they played gramophone records while the sunset glowed through the window frames like a memory of horizons set on fire.

  How easy it had become not to question herself about anything without blaming herself for egotism! The vastness of the waves filled the terrestrial half of space; the rocking of the world lulled the soul into a sleepy sense of liberation … Daria mingled sociably, to the point where a lady drew her aside and prayed to be allowed to divine the secrets of her palm. Its lines spelled a shattered destiny (hardly difficult to read, in the palms of our time!). “Ah, my dear! If only you would dare speak to me openly! And you could, I assure you, for I understand every sin, every crime …”

  “Do you see many crimes in my hand?” Daria asked curiously.

  “Heavens, no! I didn’t say that! I didn’t say anything of the sort, now did I?”

  The lady was a young fifty, reading a Charlotte Brontë novel; she was petite, carefully made up, decorated with several ribbons of merit; she was on her way to join her husband, a civil servant posted in the West Indies. (There are dozens of islands in the West Indies, however the lady didn’t name hers.)

  “Yes, you did, you were talking about crimes.”

  “Oh dear, I didn’t really mean that at all … You’re so nice, so reserved, so silent …”

  “Are those the marks of criminality? Or of capital sins?”

  “Perhaps,” the lady replied. “To each his marks … Look at that black bird, there, following the ship … Isn’t it romantic?”

  A solitary bird alone in the middle of the ocean was “romantic” indeed. For the second time, Daria felt pangs of foreboding; but then dismissed them, charmed by the gentle rocking of the waves and rediscovering through it a love for all things, a deliverance. Daria pushed her anxieties aside. “We’ll see when we arrive.” Everything was simple, in reality; the little social menagerie on board, elementary; Daria did not think she was being followed.

  * * *

  She had to keep moving to economize her dollars. The American cities she glimpsed might well have struck her with awe, had she not settled into a contented torpor, with no other lucidity than the practical — tensed toward the goal … This giant civilization, these vertical cities where the pedestrian feels insignificant, sees himself numberless, suddenly realizes that the real world is his and that nothing is his since he himself is nothing … An atom is all and nothing in the universe; these crowds, so well dressed, so busy, so cheerful, so callous … Atoms are unaware of themselves and unaware of each other, even in the densest steel … Daria kept moving. Mr. Winifred said hello to her on Broadway; hours later, Mr. Ostrowieczki was standing ten feet from her in the subway, though he did not see her. These chance collisions of atoms were enough to make her tremble. The traveler took obsessive precautions, vanished into elevators, fled, alone, quickstep down corridors on sixtieth floors and at one point looked down on the prodigious stalagmite city from a rooftop terrace: this was the wide gateway to a continent into which all of unfortunate Europe would pour if it could … The sky and the sea were as gray as tears. If the shaved head of Mr. Ostrowieczki had chosen that moment to appear on her crag of reinforced concrete, Daria would have vaulted the parapet and dropped into the vast human emptiness. Alone among the rain-swept pedestrians, she felt herself buoyed by an enthusiasm that was stronger than despair. The power of mankind rivaled that of the ocean. All that was needed was to heal mankind …

  She saw plains, the empire of wheat; at the smallest bus terminals, the restrooms were luxuriously clean; the newspapers ran to forty pages, offering comfort-enhancing gadgets at bargain prices (sums which elsewhere would represent years of toil or self-denial), the opulence of standardized apparel, the hum of classified ads alongside detailed reports on the famines and massacres which were the dreary staple of other continents … That this could appear normal, acceptable to one who had just changed hemispheres, was disconcerting; but no more mysterious, perhaps, than the physical well-being of a people emerging from the home where someone very dear, someone very great, someone irreplaceable has just died after a long and painful agony … Or was it evidence of total absurdity? Of the irreparable disequilibrium of our souls thirsty for justice, fairness, kindness — concepts alien to the gyrations of oceans and planets
? But would there be oceans and planets without equilibrium, necessary rhythm, and musical harmony? What would intelligence, what would pity be, divorced from the quest for a luminous equilibrium expressed by the stars themselves, the structure of molecules, the graceful proportions of a bridge flung over a river? Several times, on buses racing along sleek highways, laundry flapping from the upper stories of tenements, Daria had to hold herself in to keep from laughing and crying, inconceivably happy, suppressing her angry distress, and finding within herself only a childish answer: “They’re alive! Alive! It’s splendid how millions of people are alive while …”

  All she had to pin her hopes on were two addresses in the United States. If both of these spider threads broke, what then? Then nothing! Having preserved them in her mind for years, she now fretted over the accuracy of her recall until one morning her memory was a blank. It was only to tease herself, for they were also written down: in code in a notebook and plain but scrambled in the double sole of a shoe. The first, in Brooklyn, had already been ruled out — a wisp of smoke long since dispelled into the steaming plumes of New York. She was all the more happy, if the state of tragic, spellbound euphoria in which she moved could be called happiness. “I consent to my disappearance …” No one needs me over here, I very nearly no longer need myself. To disappear in a world where nothing could disappear, where a suicide’s gunshot was equal in insignificance to the striking of a match, to disappear into this outpouring of plethoric energy might be a bitter outcome, yet not altogether desperate.

  None of this slowed her down. The second address led Daria to a small town in Virginia and to a white colonnaded porch that reminded her of the dachas of small Russian landowners in the old days, in Chekhov’s time. She pressed the bell as blithely as a gambler throwing the dice for the last time, nearly certain of losing, having lost everything. A colored butler let her into a vestibule which was overbright, overdecorated, apparently purposeless. The thread is about to break, everything is meaningless. Daria inquired after a certain lady, but instead of answering her: “Nothing left for you but suicide, Ma’am, in approximately four weeks …” the black man inquired, “Are you expected, Ma’am? Whom shall I announce?”

  I’m completely unexpected and don’t announce anyone! “Just a minute,” Daria said. She got out her notebook, wrote “D sent me,” and slipped the page into an envelope. “Please give this to the lady of the house …” Good domestics never betray surprise. A woman with over-dyed red hair received her immediately in a small sitting room cluttered with cushions and floral arrangements. Visibly flustered, she was crumpling Daria’s note in one hand while the other plucked nervously at the blue beads of her necklace. Her pupils were enlarged by as if by fright.

  “What do you want from me? Who are you?”

  “Please forgive my turning up like this … There’s no danger.”

  “And who is this D? I don’t know any D.”

  What a stupid lie, Daria nearly said aloud. You must know several names beginning with D … Just stupidity. “You’re my prisoner,” Daria thought spitefully, for she hated the cushions, the bouquets, the showy lampshade … The woman tore up the envelope and its contents, brushing the pieces into an ashtray. “You’d be wiser to burn them,” Daria advised hypocritically. Her hostess was pink and blowsy, a shapely little gourmande.

  “If you didn’t know D, you wouldn’t have invited me in. There’s nothing to fear, at least not from me … You’ve got his instructions. All I need is his address.”

  “This is ridiculous! It’s a mistake! Who are you?”

  Daria, as if looking for something, opened the leather-bound book she held pressed against her bag: Leaves of Grass.

  “Ah,” her hostess said, her face clearing, “you’re reading Whitman?”

  Never, perhaps nowhere, did the poet of “Salut au Monde!” ever dispel such dark suspicions as he did then. The two women looked at each other simply. “Actually, I’ve been out of touch with him for years …” said the red-haired lady. “Take this down. He’s in Mexico … Throw the address away when you’ve memorized it …”

  The spider’s thread had held against the storms of earth and history! “I don’t have to write it down,” said Daria, “my memory is good.” She tried to spark a contact. “So is yours, I dare say …” — meaning, we are alike somewhere, we know what no one can know or understand without having ventured down certain dark pathways …

  “Are you going to join him?” asked the auburn lady, confidentially.

  “Yes.” “For the same reasons?” “Could there be others?” The two women felt that the passing years diminished the reasons for assassination. The red-haired woman took Daria’s dry hands between her satiny palms. A current of intimacy shot between them. The woman began to speak in a low, feverish voice: “How terrible the world is … I used to believe with all my heart and soul … Don’t mention me to him, I’m of no interest now. Do you need funds? Are you sure? Really and truly? Are you sure you haven’t been followed by … by anyone?” “As sure as I can be …” “Well, if ever … you’ll say you only know me from Paris, from the Sorbonne. I’m so scared … !”

  “Scared of what?” Daria said casually, not really asking. She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly withdrawn, overcome with distaste for the expensive comfort of the room, the heavy drapes, the Skye terrier that trotted in twitching its ears. What would be so scary if you lost your cozy decorations, your husband or lover or both, if even you found yourself in jail, Madame? The contact was broken. The woman saw Daria to the door. Outside, cars slid over the damp pavement. Tall yellow trees arched elegantly over the avenue; politely inclining their branches, natural conformists, they appeared to following the autumn fashion; the homes spaced at intervals amid shrubberies looked as blandly identical as the different guests at a dinner party.

  At the corner of the drive, a young woman was leaning against the door of her car. Had Daria done more than register her without seeing her, she might have detected in this American girl’s eyes the impassioned gaze of her own twentieth year. But Daria only noticed a gray suede jacket, the cut of which she appreciated. The thing we least recognize in the eyes of others is the flame of our own youth …

  * * *

  The white floor of clouds ripped open like magic disclosing sun-gilded hills, the whole living map tilted beneath the plane, a city spread around pink cathedrals, marooned in the arid land — a city like nowhere else on earth, drowsy with sunset, flushed as the sunset, fringed by the desert, abandoned to the sweetness of existence … Donkeys laden with heavy baskets stepped delicately down streets of earth between pastel-washed walls. Windows framed by wrought iron, awnings sloping over narrow sidewalks … Old cobblestones, and every door gave onto another sculpted door, holding back a mass of greenery. Enchanted city. The meat displayed on the counter at the back of a shadowy butcher’s shop exuded a charm of dark blood: the butcher’s shop was called the Flower of Paradise. A small black-haired boy was carrying Daria’s suitcase on his shoulder. He might have been a dark angel, an un-washed cherub with tough little muscles and a little heart that was very violent, very pure … Humble and proud: so must the angels be, who walk on earth as Indian children.

  The large rectangular plaza was strung with white bulbs, span-gling the blue translucence as though for a fete of long ago. Stately trees loomed over it, and above them rose the old towers of the cathedral, bathed in a fading radiance that would never wholly fade, it was so pure, so richly infused with the expiring colors of the sky. A chattering broke out as legions of wings, excited by some infinitesimal disturbance, described an aerial arc from one canopy to the next … Cheap bars turned on a rainbow of lights which did not clash with the sunset. Brown heads floated aureoled in wide pale sombreros, black hair cascaded over young girls’ shoulders. Barrows of fruits and sweets trundled by, like displays of massive gems formed by the genius of color itself for caressing the eye … In front of a rudimentary grill heaped with dark organ meats glistening with greas
e, three hatless men stood in a row. All three curiously shapeless; the first olive-faced, the second lemon-faced, and the last with a solemn death’s-head perched on his neck; violet glints fell as three pairs of sticks flew up and down the wooden keyboard of the marimba and crystalline music poured out. The little dark angel glanced longingly at the marimba. Daria signaled him to stop. They listened for a moment, the visitor from another world of cruelty and the Indio child caked up to the eyes in dirt — to wide eyes as dark as agate, as expressionless as polished agate. The music cradled a canoe floating invisible among festoons of creepers, long ghostly lizards lay in wait beneath tepid waters in darkness … “What’s your name?” Daria asked the dirty angel, to break the spell. “Jesús Sánchez Olivares, at your service.” She heard only his first name of Jesús. Listen to the music of innocence, Jesús, if you can … The boy added in dignified tones, “You may call me Chucho, Señora” — that being the diminutive of Jesús. When the music stopped, Chucho produced a copper coin from a pocket of his torn pants and put it into a musician’s hand.