On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  She admitted it was a stupid argument, but one she wanted to pursue. They shared a past, but their dreams could never be reconciled. He was losing blood and becoming weaker. She didn’t know what to do. She was not a pitiless woman, but she was a soldier and this was war. Every minute she persisted with that pointless discussion increased the chances of her death and his rescue. In the end he cursed her. She told me it was a good old-fashioned Russian curse, as fierce as the zamet, the wind that stirs the winter snows of the steppes. It resolved her and she shot him through the heart.

  She closed the barn door, and took out a match. And the barn stood tall in the dark, its heavy timbers must once have been some peasant’s proud possession. Only close to the former capital do you find barns as formidable as these. Many men would have laboured for weeks on end to build it, and it could still serve our future state. Yet she was prepared to burn it down for no apparent reason. The matchbox was slightly damp, so she heaped straw against the wall. The first match that lit would have to do its job. Was she ashamed of what she had done? In a way, she was. She could never see anyone from her past again. Unsurprisingly, she would never be able to look Nikolai’s father in the face. He was a kindly man of liberal views – very different from his son, and yet clearly of the same slightly feeble-minded mould. She hadn’t known the old man well, but every time they met, his face would light up in friendly, almost loving, recognition. What shocked her more was her realisation that she would never speak to her own brother again. He was a White officer. This she had heard from a source she could no longer remember. She hadn’t wanted to believe, but of course it was true. Her brother had never questioned anything, and despised their father’s domestic servants, let alone the anonymous masses whose labours dressed him in the finest clothes and fed him with the best food. The rift was now utterly complete.

  In spite of the damp, the first of her last four matches caught. The flames quickly climbed the wall and an explosion of light flooded into the night, whose darkness she immediately sought at a brisk trot. She moved her now heavy body with a soldier’s gait, her rifle in her hand and her greatcoat flapping as a light but bitterly cold wind entered her bones and tugged at her bewildered soul. He was not a bad man, she thought. Perhaps I should have shot him through the head at the start and that would have been that. All that talk, what good could it do – especially if you’re talking to a dead man? Why did I want to speak to him? Because he was from my past? Was I wanting to remonstrate with my father’s people? She slackened her pace, and guilt descended on her. Then she remembered that he had wanted to rape her when he thought her to be a peasant girl. She turned and spat towards the burning wreck of the barn. “You got what you deserved, mudak.” She ran on, determined to forget that spectre from her past.

  She didn’t see Alexei until the following evening, and he immediately sensed that something was wrong: “Anything happen last night, Nadya?”

  “Nothing much. I shot dead a White officer.”

  “Not to be sneezed at,” he replied. “Things could have gone worse for you, if he’d caught you.”

  They certainly could, she thought, but she couldn’t tell him what had really happened, as it would have emphasised her previous life, which she wanted to forget. She just smiled enigmatically. He was curious, but too tired to pursue the matter.

  And so she still came to me either to confess or to argue. Not an hour after she told me of that incident, I too came across an apparition from my past – my distant past. I suppose these wars are shuffling Russians as though we were a pack of cards, and you never know where you’ll end up or who you’ll meet. She spoke to me just before sunrise as we came to the end of our guard duty. Afterwards I walked back into the city, and, on approaching the first houses, came across a party of conscripted, middle-class men digging trenches – relaxed and seemingly still bemused that they were required to carry out such tasks. On the whole, their manner was good-natured and relations with the two militiamen in command appeared to be good. Perhaps they were confident that in the next few days the Whites would break through and restore them to their former wealth and position. More likely they knew that the Whites would bring no respite, but had decided to look on their current trials philosophically and adopt an outlook of benign and slightly superior neutrality. Not “seize the day” but “accept the day and whatever horrors it might bring”. Then I stopped, incredulous to see that my brother Lev was one of the party. We greeted each other more warmly than we’d done in years. We embraced and smiled at each other like ghosts meeting up in another world. So much had happened, and each would have assumed the other to be either dead or abroad. I would have expected him to have appeared more crestfallen, and he probably expected me to appear more triumphant, standing there in my uniform of the Red Army – his superior at last, and capable of commanding the militiamen who commanded him. And there was so much between us.

  A quarter of a century ago we argued and swore never to speak to each other again. But we did – after a fashion. The last time we met was by chance in a Petrograd restaurant in the first year of the war. He laughed about the miseries the conflict was inflicting on the peasantry, and was unconcerned that his country was losing ground to the Central Powers. His engineering works were doing great business and in the end the royal families of Europe would sort things out. Nothing would change. And here he was, six years later, dressed as a worker and digging for an army he must despise. Still with our arms about each other but our heads held back to focus better, we searched each other’s face for clues about who our brother was or had become. I suspect that he discovered as little as I did.

  We released each other from our embrace – a mix of ancient familial warmth and residual cool distrust. I was the first to speak, partly to overcome the embarrassment I felt about Lev’s hard times. “I thought you’d have left the country with the others.”

  “What others?” he laughed. “I’m not an aristocrat who’ll always find a comfortable bed, however many times he goes into exile. What could war-torn Europe do with yet another destitute Russian? Force me into the ranks of an exhausted army reduced to aimless savagery, no doubt. When peace came to Europe, there was little work and no money. I stayed here and held on at the works until the workers took it over. A year later, the lathes fell idle.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said rather oddly. I have requisitioned more than a few factories in the last couple of years.

  “Why? Once the worst has happened, it’s amazing how quickly we learn to live with our new reality. My wife fled taking all the liquid assets she could lay her grasping peasant hands on.” The two militiamen straightened their backs disapprovingly when they heard his remark. But he had a point; Katya, his wife, did suffer from the kind of acquisitiveness only peasants display when drunk on prosperity. “If the revolution hadn’t come along, our unhappy marriage would have continued into the years of our dotage. This has given me another life – not one I would have ever wanted, but then we never know what we want or should I say what would be best for us. I do not refer, in time-worn way, to our supposed intellectual ineptitude, the folly of our greed or the tyranny of our desires, because how can we possibly know what kind of society given changes will bring? We cannot be blamed for not knowing, when we have no evidence to go by. That was always my argument against people like you: how could you know that society could be improved? There is, you’ll have to grant me, a little intellectual arrogance in that certainty of yours.”

  “And how can you be so blind, Lev? How could you be so blind to the suffering of our people?”

  “And how can you be so blind to the possible suffering unleashed by sudden change – wrought, mind, by people certain of what they’re doing even when they’ve never done it before. Would you have your barn built by someone who’d never built a barn? And come to think of it, would you knock down your old barn before you’d built the new one? That way lies starvation. I’ve no idea what the future brings and I’ve no reason to be hopeful,
but I can’t say that I dislike the present. I have experienced kindness in the last few months – both kindness given and kindness received. I realise now with great regret that I wasted the years in which I could have and should have shown kindness. I could have saved lives and enhanced others, and yet I did nothing. I have no right to fear the future.”

  “Do you need any help?” I asked and felt like a potentate. If ever I had wished for a reversal of our fortunes, I knew in that moment that it brought no pleasure; it only revealed that all power is misplaced, even the tottering power I temporarily hold and paid for in my youth with years in prison.

  “I did, but I no longer do, thank you. I am getting along just fine at the moment.”

  “But this!” I cried, and felt quite angry about my brother’s treatment now it was clear that he had lost his hubris.

  “This? Oh don’t worry about this. It keeps me warm in a city where everyone is freezing to death. At least I’m not at the front. On either side! My life was a nonsense; I see that now. God knows where it’ll all end up. We had it coming, I’ll give you that.”

  Suddenly I found him less convincing. It occurred to me that the entire conversation might be an act for the two militiamen. They were leaning on their rifles and staring at him with expressions that betrayed disbelief and puzzlement. I had an advantage over them; I knew that my brother had always thought it unmanly to complain and possessed an innate talent for creating a fog of misinformation. What was he cooking up?

  He must have read something in my expression, because he then demonstrated an acuteness that startled me, and I, the courageous bigmouth, have become so conditioned by our current morality that his intelligence made me think him dangerous. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said ominously with a dramatic sweep of his arm, which showed that he also knew what the effect of his words would be, “you’re thinking that I haven’t changed – that I am trying to manipulate you. I can understand that. I remember very well how I behaved last time we met. I was an arrogant fool, laughing at other people’s misfortunes and feeling so secure. Never before had I felt so secure and close to where power lies. That contagious self-importance that comes from mixing with millionaires and a few minor politicians. Isn’t that strange? You see, we Jews yearn for security and that too is understandable. But who has it? Not the Tsar. Not the generals. No one’s safe.

  “We’re sons of an illiterate country miller, who slaved away for a few kopecks, and what little he had, he spent on giving us a half-decent education. I could never understand why you wanted to squander that small achievement on a lost cause. All that internationalist fervour and belief in a better world – silly, that’s what I thought it, just plain silly. You brought yourself misery and you upset our parents. For what? A daydream.”

  “Hold on,” I said, slightly piqued.

  “But you were right all along – that’s what I was about to say – you were absolutely right, Abram. You knew what you were talking about. And even if this revolution of yours goes belly-up,” he smiled at me, damn it, “you’ll still have done a great thing; you’ll have shown there is another way. If you fail now or you fail in seventy years, you’ll have shown that there is another way, and that’ll make them change their ways – not very much perhaps, but nothing will be the same, and not only here in this starving city.”

  And I was none the wiser. I believe in the new morality, so I had no intention of recruiting my brother. I could slip him into the party, but who knows what mischief he might get up to. I never believe in anything wholeheartedly, so I decided to break the rules a bit: I would keep an eye on him from afar, and make sure nothing bad happened to him. After all he is my brother.

  I thought about what my brother had said: that we don’t know what we want. And he also implied that we discover who we are not by success or by imposing our will on people or the elements. No, we discover who we are and how to enjoy life by dealing with what life throws at us. It is our passivity that is creative; our passivity that makes us human. We Russians are eastern enough to know that, and western enough to worry about whether we got it right. We have a stupid inferiority complex in relation to the West. We should shoulder this task we’ve been given by history and creatively let it take us wherever it’s going. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we’re in control of our destiny – we should merely wonder at and delight in who we have become – the explorers of a future whose culture is as foreign to us as that of any distant land. Part of ourselves is our eternal garrulousness, our endless chatter about things that matter. That really shows that we’re not a Western people; they dress up nicely to talk about the weather. Talking about abstract things is for them a waste of time and, in some cases, can damage material interests. They talk to get things done and then they talk about nothing, like peacocks on display, to reassure themselves about their precious hierarchies. The first is called “business” and the second sociability, which is amusing because their main purpose is to give away as little of themselves as possible. In the old Russia, on the other hand, there were only two kinds of person: the Tsar and the non-Tsars – or everybody else. We Russians talk to reveal ourselves and our ideas. The foreigner might think it impractical, but I think it is a kind of wealth – the best kind. Besides, what do Europeans know about the weather? They should come over here and try ours. Then they’d have something to talk about.

  So instead of driving off the bloody Whites, we sometimes gather with the casualness of starlings at the guardroom or in an empty building, and just natter. This happened last Friday after a lull in the fighting. The commander-in-chief had been down at the front, as had the Frenchman and his pregnant wife who slept in the back of an ambulance. The casualties on the other side were heavy, but we realised that the balance was turning in our favour. We were buoyed up, but conscious that victory was not yet ours. We went back into the city and wandered into the first empty building. A White shell had landed nearby, shattering quite a few of the windows, but it would do. We found a flat in reasonably good order and lit the stove. Some of the furniture had to be broken up to feed it, and we knew that we needed warmth if we were to maintain our exuberance. Some vodka was produced but not everyone was drinking. Alexei was, and staring absentmindedly at his boots when he felt so inclined. He sat comfortably in this existence, thinking the best of everyone as the fool he was. A handsome fool, damn it – the most dangerous thing to be. There was Boris Fyodorovich, a true hero of our youthful republic and a little less handsome than Alexei, I think. Smart, in a solid kind of way, and orthodox, but not one of those who would shun you for a trivial remark. He knows what war is about, and war primarily leaves no room for sentimentality. No matter what the cause, war is war, and the misery it inflicts entirely random. Boris is a profoundly honest man, and when he puts his energy into something, others immediately feel the weight lift off them. He took out one of the British tanks, leading an attack in which many men died, but not as many men as would have died if the tank had remained in action. Each tank is like a battalion, and now there were none: two had been destroyed by us, three had broken down and one had fallen into a river. He’s educated but not really an intellectual; when it comes to making a decision that turns on a fraction of a second, then his mind is one of the best. The powerful who dream up future history rely on people like Boris Fyodorovich to implement it for them. In spite of all that has happened since, I still think him a decent man, but one who has lost his soul for this cause. When all this is over and he sees it is not perfect, he will become either a drunk or an odious apparatchik. Sitting quietly in the corner was Dimitry Gregorevich, who in the past had been a Tolstoyan and then a Socialist-Revolutionary. He is a self-educated peasant and one of the soldiers I most respect, but he is marked down for his chequered career, which I believe to be entirely coherent. Nadya was there, but acting in a more reserved way as she distrusted Boris Fyodorovich.

  Initially we gossiped a bit to remind ourselves there was life beyond politics and war, and then Di
mitry said in his quiet way, “We’re going to rid ourselves of the Whites, you know. Their line will break soon and we’ll chase them all the way to the Estonian border. Then we’ll find out what we’ve been fighting for: freedom or dictatorship.”

  “And what exactly do you mean by freedom, comrade?” said Boris in the superior way he always speaks to Dimitry. “The freedom to enslave or the freedom to cast off our chains?”

  We all laughed at Boris’s simplicity. “Come, come,” said Alexei provocatively, “you’ll have to do better than that. Dimitry Gregorevich wants to ask whether we are building a society in which there is honest and open debate in the soviets or just rubber-stamping of decisions by a new elite. It’s a good question. Given that every day we risk our lives for this new society, why shouldn’t we ask ourselves about what it will be like?”

  Now Boris laughed and he has a brash sarcasm: “Comrade Alexei risk his life? He would have to risk his boots first.”

  Now we were laughing at poor Alexei, but he didn’t seem perturbed. Boris, now on the attack, thought he would have a go at me. “Why don’t we ask the political commissar?” he said. “Surely it’s his job to know these things.”

  I wasn’t rattled, of course, although aware that Boris would monitor my words. These things are meat and drink to me; I talk of little else. “The definition of freedom changes from one society to another, as Boris implies in his very cursory analysis, but it’s not just about the constrictions imposed on us by organised societies. Freedom in capitalist society is the freedom of money to circulate primarily in its own interest, that is its value as signifier. The workers and peasants know they’re not free under capitalism, because every day they experience the brutality of its limitations. The middle classes delude themselves that they are free, but they’re only free to spend their mediocre wealth which never satisfies their oppressive desires and ambitions. They’re no more free than a cow chewing grass in a field. The animal thinks it’s free as it endlessly repeats that action of noisily tearing up a hundred blades of grass with each bite of a powerful mouth that conceals a bloated, calloused tongue. The cow doesn’t know that its life is predestined. The peasant is its god who organises which meadows it must graze, where it must roam and which bull will service it. The cow has no consciousness of its lack of freedom, so it has perhaps a happy existence. That is until the peasant wields his heavy axe, the one that cuts deep into the back of the cow’s neck, dispatching it almost painlessly to the dinner table.”