On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “Your mother couldn’t keep him, then?”

  She laughed contemptuously, “My mother would never have wanted to keep anyone. It was not just that intellectually she abhorred the concept of possession; it simply wasn’t in her nature.”

  “But clearly he didn’t want to stay.”

  “Clearly. My mother loved him, she says, but he needed her resources, which were probably being diverted in my direction. He was an unemployed artist. He had ambitions. It’s an old story – but they parted amicably. She would have liked to have heard from him now and then. Maybe something happened to him. Our lives are not solid things, you know; it must be difficult for a man in your position to know that.”

  Once again the normally loquacious man appeared to have used up his stock of words. He studied her, and considered briefly the fluidity of relationships in the modern world. He failed to formulate a precise vision of it: he was English, middle-class, male, wealthy, surrounded by a subservient family, and part of a network that went back to childhood and a school tie with narrow strips of red and white alternating with a thick band of blue on which a silver canon was embossed at regular intervals. Who could be more solid than that?

  “I understand,” he said finally, “that I may have expressed myself badly. Of course there can be exceptions – although not many, if you want my opinion. You, on the other hand, must learn not to take things so personally and not to perceive offence where none was intended.”

  “No, you didn’t express yourself badly.” This time, she was the one who smiled with a slight air of superiority, or was it impatience? “You have, in fact, made yourself very clear. You feel that my people are inferior to your people, and that your ways of doing things are the only ones to be prized. I could not disagree more. You, no doubt, pity us and feel that we’re unable to discern the deficiencies in our lives. But you see I feel exactly the same way about your lifestyle: how are your children going to be influenced by their upbringing? Here is your family,” she copied his gesture when he introduced them to her, “and they revolve around you like small planets orbit the sun. One planet is slightly bigger and that one represents your silent wife.”

  The silent wife was silent no longer. She sprang from her chair with a leap so unexpected that everyone else jumped in theirs. “How dare you!” she cried. “How can you come into our house as a guest and insult us? It isn’t always those who speak up most who think the most – and feel. You two speak of things that concern us as though we weren’t here.” And then the mother lunged at her across the table, only just failing to grab the younger woman by her shirt. She had avoided further humiliation by shifting her chair backwards barely half a foot.

  Tears were in the mother’s eyes, and he, now standing to his full height, had rediscovered the gallant gentleman in himself – the one he had only recently mislaid. He grabbed his wife in a restraining embrace which was not devoid of genuine affection. “She is our guest, as you have rightly pointed out. We must always maintain our civilised standards. We must never be dragged down to the level of those who unfortunately cannot share them.”

  His magnanimous speech was only partially successful in abating his wife’s fury, although it did deflect whatever part of her criticism had been directed at him.

  “She was attacking you, Dick,” she said querulously. “She despises everything we stand for – the way we live and the way we think. She’s perfectly entitled to her opinions, but would I go to her mother’s house and say such things?”

  Now he was enjoying his role of bounteous arbitrator. “Miss Kristina is our guest,” he repeated, “and we must not only allow her to speak, but also listen and try to understand her point of view, however intolerant she is of us. Children, please take note – this will be an important lesson for you. We are a liberal nation, and if that means we’re occasionally put upon, then so be it. It’s a price worth paying.”

  “Enough,” she said, having finally suppressed the agitation caused by the mother’s failed attack. “Maybe I was too personal about you and your children, and I apologise for that, but your husband infuriated me with his insinuations.”

  “Mum, what’s wrong with being a planet?” asked the eldest girl, and a titter communicated itself around the table, leaving a smile and alert eyes with each child. The adults, however, had broken through too many of their taboos to reconcile themselves because of childish ingenuousness. There was a long silence interrupted only by the occasional suppressed but expectant giggle.

  She was the one who eventually broke it. Never given to talking down to children, she was utterly rational in her explanation: “It’s a matter of relativity. Planets are huge, but relative to the sun they are small and dependent. That is why your mother took offence. And she was right to do so. I apologised.”

  There were half-smiles and exchanges of glances, as the children assessed the peculiar situation they found themselves in. They sensed the tension, but equally felt that this was a much more interesting lunch than usual. It was then that she realised that she may very well have missed out on something in her small family: not the father but the siblings. She may have missed the complicity and rivalry of childhood – the sheer emotive nonsensicality of growing up with dissimilar creatures sharing an identity and a roof. Parents would be like gods who intervene randomly and arbitrarily in the lives of children, distant figures who must be placated, humoured and very occasionally remonstrated with. So different from the very close and intense but also coldly rational relationship she had had and indeed continued to have with her mother.

  Her mother was her friend and they shared everything, including their most intimate thoughts. When she was very small, things had been difficult financially, and her mother could not afford to return to Sweden. Her mother was determined not to work full-time, but they managed. Once she went to school, her mother returned to her career as a research chemist and was thereafter committed to staying on in southern England. Interesting people started to visit their small flat: artists, writers, actors, musicians, free spirits, incomprehensible drunks and the occasional academic. Her mother was involved in none of these activities, but acted as a conduit between them, always smiling, always open to new ideas, always wanting to help these people make their careers. And she was at the centre of it all, because everyone sensed the mother’s priorities: no one was more important than the daughter, not even those of them who became her mother’s lovers. They, in particular, understood that the daughter tacitly exercised some kind of veto. She grew, therefore, in the midst of ideas and love, both genuine and interested. What more could a child want? Whatever she lost was more than compensated for. And yet she noted his children’s camaraderie and it pleased her.

  “Do you often get into trouble?” the same girl said. Clearly she provided the entertainment.

  “All the time,” she laughed, “it’s my profession. You can get all kind of jobs these days.”

  “Shut up, Pandora,” said the mother, angered by her daughter’s fraternising, “I’ll speak to you later.”

  He, who could have made a career on stage, had adopted the posture of an imperial leader negotiating with quarrelsome natives. “Kristina, I invited you here because I was thinking about funding your play. A few niggles needed to be discussed in an open and friendly fashion. Particularly your characterisation of the single mother – of course, I didn’t know when we started our conversation that you are in fact the product of that kind of ‘family’, as they like to define it now. So anything I said at the beginning was quite innocent and there was no intention to offend – in any way whatsoever. I hope you understand. Unfortunately, you have hurt my wife with your incautious talk and ill-considered ideas, and have created a scene that can only have been damaging to my children. It will, of course, be difficult for you to understand this, but I am the kind of father who is deeply attached to his family. I’m afraid, Kristina, that I will have to ask you to leave.”

  “I very much doubt you ever intended to fund the play.
I believe you invited me here to show off your wealth and archetypal bourgeois family, and to give me a lecture. Well, you got more than you bargained for.” With that she turned and walked to the door, and no one said a word. Both sides were now beyond words.

  And so Kristina closed the door behind her and felt not anger but relief, and a sense of being a fortunate young woman who had a life she was free to do a great deal with. She felt the smoothness of the breeze, which contrasted with the stuffiness of that great house. She breathed it too and sensed her oneness with a world she felt no need to dominate, as obviously he did. Or was he dominated by that need? Did he live, or did life’s leaden desires lead him?

  Living with the Polish Count

  The author of this account, Abram Davidovich Geller, fought until the end of the Civil War and did not fulfil his wish to find his White bullet until 1922, when he was fighting in the Siberian region of Priamurye. In all probability it was not a White but a foreign bullet that killed him, as Japan was withdrawing the last of its soldiers after its failed and costly attempt to secure a White puppet enclave in Eastern Russia. Dimitry Gregorevich flourished after the Civil War, and became the Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Murmansk. He disappeared during the purges of 1938 and unusually we can find no further record of him. Boris Fyodorovich Bogdanov received the Order of Lenin in 1934. The citation vaguely refers to long service to the USSR and military missions abroad, mainly in China, and also states that he was going into early retirement, which suggests possible medical problems or political disaffections. Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, survivor of French and Soviet prisons, amongst others, became a prolific writer, although some of his manuscripts were destroyed (or lie undiscovered in a Soviet archive). In 1947, he died while taking a taxi ride in Mexico City. Though isolated and purposefully discredited in left-wing circles by Soviet agents, he continued to write and participate in the muddied politics of the time. His son, the artist Vlady Kibalchich Russakov, was born in June 1920, the year after the events Geller describes, and in the forties settled with his father in Mexico, where his murals in part celebrate communist struggles around the world, but particularly those in Russia and Mexico. He died in 2005.

  For most of the year our immoderate sun of the north is parsimonious with both its light and heat, and then for a short while it blazes. During the long periods, wood in the stove is as essential as the air we breathe. Our coats are never off, and our malnourished bodies rarely washed. And yet we move and struggle and talk incessantly, unsmilingly perhaps but not without humour. “We will survive and we will rebuild,” said Nadezhda Alexeyevna. Yes, we will survive, but what will we build? She was almost sure of our success; I wished that I could be.

  She looked like a peasant in her soldier’s uniform. This would have surprised many who had seen her presented at her first Saint Petersburg ball at the age of sixteen, four years earlier. But in effect she could have been a peasant girl. Why not? Her hands were not manly, but nor were they bony, pasty-white fingers fit only for holding the finest porcelain and pointing an accusatory finger at the timorous servitude of others. Her hands were at home holding a rifle and darkened by long exposure to the wind and sun. She was short, even stocky, but she moved with a grace that excited men. Some of her comrades-in-arms, who really did come from peasant families, had been recruited under the tsar and had stayed with their units when the army turned on him. They were not alone in being unsure as to why so much had changed and unclear about what they were fighting for. She differed from them in one other respect: their eyes were tired and seemed to be focused on a landscape far from Petrograd where family and routine, however harsh, had been left behind.

  Not Nadezhda’s eyes: they burnt with excitement but not fanaticism, which she disdained. There’s enough of it on all sides. It was not the certainty of revolution that attracted her, but its opportunities, the most important of which was a negative one: not having to play out the pantomime of being chosen for marriage by some narcissistic prince or count whose passions went no further than hunting and getting drunk at the officers’ mess. It’s her tragedy I want to speak of – not her death, mind you. She was resigned to that, just as I am now to my own. I want it. To live when hope is dead would be to fall short of her great values; that’s the lesson of her death, that’s what makes it tragic.

  I often used to ask myself whether I would survive this era of war and terror. Would I complete the full semicircle of human experience we call a generation? I doubted it, but part of me wanted to see how all this will turn out. The White bullets are many and the Whites have all the latest equipment. In my line of work, a Red bullet can be as dangerous. Of course, I scribble too much and my syntax is subversive to them all. Who knows if these words will survive in some court archive? – for bureaucrats rarely throw anything away. They delight in recording the history they think they control.

  This interesting talk about the colour of bullets reminds me of our conversation some months before her death. I was explaining the problems of our revolution in a disorderly, backward and individualistic country like Russia. As usual, she found my views outrageous and fascinating at the same time. She always enjoyed our little talks.

  “The problem,” I said, “is that we’re governed by Nature, and Nature, like the powerful, thinks in big numbers while every one of these Ivans, Matveis and Timochkas thinks like an individual.”

  “Does Lenin think like Nature?” Nadezhda asked.

  “Of course.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she gave nothing more away.

  “That’s what they always do,” I continued, sensing I had gone too far. “Even if at first they don’t like to, they soon pick up the habit. They do things that would have outraged them when they were opponents of the regime. Necessity, like Nature, has stronger arms than Morality.”

  “Dearest Abram,” she smiled, “you say interesting things, but this is not the time to say them.”

  “It’s never the time, but someone has to act the gadfly. Gadflies serve their purpose. There’s never too many of them, and they can’t swat them all.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I don’t. Neither of us is going to see the end of this war. You – with all your running around and crazy heroics – will catch a White bullet sooner or later. And I – with my big mouth and crazy ideas – will catch a Red one. Probably in a yard not far from here after a beating routinely dispensed by my neighbour’s boys. But that doesn’t make me any less of a communist than you are, Nadya. I was in a Tsarist prison when you were going to society balls.”

  “I know, I know,” she replies, free from any bitterness at my reference to her aristocratic past. Middle-class communists are more easily offended by such things. “Who do you think will win, Abram?”

  “The Reds, of course. But in a way, the Whites too.”

  “More of your riddles, Abram. Are you going to explain?”

  “Our armies will defeat theirs, but their officers and officials will become our officers and officials.”

  “How come?”

  “Simple: power and the acquisition of power comes from individual psychology. A certain kind of person will always rise to the top. And another kind of person is always going to question everything.”

  This time she wasn’t laughing. “So it’s all a waste of time, according to you. You’re a cynic, Abram Davidovich, and you could destroy our morale.”

  “Well, I hope they put you in charge of the firing squad.”

  “Don’t be silly, Abram. But this is not a time for doubts.”

  “Nadya, there were never so many doubts as we have now. Look at our soldiers: one day they’re defecting from the Reds to the Whites, and the next day they’re coming back again. Why do they do that if they’re not uncertain? But in the end they’ll stick with us, because our arrogance is not as bad as White arrogance. They’re stupid, these Whites. They don’t have to say now that they’ll take back the land, punish the peasants and work t
hem like dogs. They don’t have to say that they’ll restore the Tsar. They don’t have to flog their soldiers for every little misdemeanour. The Whites will lose because they’re incapable of making the slightest compromise with modernity. It is the backwardness of Russia that’s driving it forward.”

  “Oh Abram, how can a clever man like you be such a fool? You think it’s a game, but it’s not.”

  “I don’t think it’s a game, my girl,” I cried sharply, wounded and resorting to condescension. “In a time of doubts and chaos such as this, every word is deadly serious, even when we joke – especially when we joke.”

  “So it’s all for nothing?”

  “Not at all. Perhaps if all these foreign powers had not invaded, and Russia, poor Russia, had been left alone to develop the socialist experiment with its limited resources, it would have built something more enlightened and free, but History doesn’t allow such luxuries. It insists on progress and then makes it so difficult.”

  “It too thinks in big numbers,” her eyes brightened and her mouth implied a smile.

  “Exactly,” I confirmed, “the insensitivity of the abstract.”

  “So where’s the abstract going to take us?”

  “Towards a communist society of course. A better society eventually. Our sacrifices will be worthwhile, but we do need to soften the blows our leaders inflict on the people; we must tell them how the people suffer.”

  “But what if our leaders turn on each other as they did in the French Revolution? What if rivalries between those who lead us destroy this successful revolution of ours? Can progress be assured?”

  “Nadya, the French Revolution came out of nowhere and it made its leaders after it had started. Our leaders have been working and suffering together for decades. They have been moulded into one by years of humiliations. They could never turn on one another.”