“So somehow he got hold of diamonds on the black market.”
“No, he couldn’t find any or, more probably, he couldn’t find any he could afford.”
“Thank God for that! But what was he thinking?”
“This is the really humiliating part of the story: he wanted a gift worthy of a princess. I lost my temper with him – told him that I was a princess and that the rest of my life will be about shaking myself free of that odious title.”
“But he didn’t mean ‘princess’ in that sense,” in my relief I wanted to come to Alexei’s rescue; “he meant ‘my loved one’, ‘my treasure’.”
“You never called me any of those things.”
“Not my style… You have to understand that for Alexei, a working-class boy from Orenburg, the word ‘princess’ has no reality outside a fairy tale and fairy tales were not part of his upbringing. He would have bought you diamonds if you were a peasant’s daughter, and he’d still have called you ‘princess’,” I laughed. “Is that all you came to tell me?”
“Of course not. He’s been arrested. He may have given up on the diamonds, but he bought some silver cutlery – you know the kind, French eighteenth-century…”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t care.”
She blushed. “It’s all so stupid. I told him, ‘What do I have to do with silver cutlery? Can these knives peel potatoes or cut our heavy rye bread? Won’t this exquisite spoon argue with the tin bowl I use for soups? Will this delicate fork pierce the occasional cut of tough meat that happens our way? These things are not just for another time; they are for another society – one that we have overthrown and should erase from our minds.’
“And he replied, ‘Why? Is it illegal to be fascinated by the intricacies of beautiful objects? I’m not asking you to eat with them; I’m asking you to put them away for better times. Why should we erase our past; it belongs to us. We may despise Tsarist society, but it’s part of us and will stay with us for as long as we live. Besides, bad societies create good things as a reaction against them. We may create a fairer society, but will we be better people? Will the plenitude of our Soviet society create the ‘new man’, the new selfless man? More probably it will produce a race of self-confident and selfish people. We have overthrown Tsarist society. Good. But we’ll always be its children, the last of its children.’ What can I do with silver cutlery in the middle of a war – even if I wanted to?”
“Probably sell them on. There’s a whole economy of currently worthless things circulating around the city, and mainly they are a means of storing one’s wealth, when most things can’t keep their worth. The more useless they are, the more useful they become for storing one’s wealth in portable form, although a few silver spoons aren’t going to get you across many borders.”
“Exactly, so why arrest him?”
“Because it’s the law.”
“And shoot him?”
I jumped off the bed and stared at her, as the horror worked through my limbs and insinuated itself like a nauseous disease. I wanted to hold her, but was frozen by a state of despair that will never wholly leave me. For her to lose Alexei at the front would have been hard, but also half expected. To lose him in this way – I knew what pain that would cause her.
She started to cry, but immediately felt ashamed of her tears. “I wouldn’t cry, if it weren’t so silly…”
I now knew why she was here in this building: “I’ll speak to Dzerzhinsky as soon as I can. Don’t hope too much of that man, but I’m sure he’s not a monster.” I put my hand on her shoulder at last, but I knew that those words of mine were all she wanted and then for me to act on them.
I left the room without saying another word and leaving her with her tears.
Dzerzhinsky’s office was not large, and two of his assistants were at work there too. He greeted me very cordially and listened to my story. “Strictly speaking,” he said, “your friend has broken the law, and should be punished.”
“That severely?” I protested, “after fighting bravely to defend our city?”
“Listen, Abram Davidovich, I have just recommended the death sentence for an old comrade of mine. We were picked up in Warsaw together, spent time in prison there and then a terrible period in Siberia. He fell for a woman who works for a White spy ring in this city. He was absolutely loyal, but his indiscretions have cost lives. An affair of the heart. Very sad. But the law is the law. We can’t make exceptions for our friends and relations.”
“Of course not, but a few knives and forks?”
“I understand your argument,” he relaxed and smiled at me, “and it seems unduly harsh, but the black market is a serious problem for us. Abram Davidovich, I admire you as a loyal comrade of many years’ standing; I have to listen when you speak. Indeed, you can tell … what was the name of the lady comrade involved?”
“Nadezhda Alexeyevna Trubetskoy.”
“Isn’t that an aristocratic name.”
“I think it may be, Felix Edmundovich,” I replied without mention of his own aristocratic blood.
“No matter, you can tell her that I will sort this one out. Let’s see if we can resolve it with a happy ending. So many deaths, so much misery.”
Again I jumped to my feet, this time with joy, and I shook his damp hand energetically. That was one of my many errors in this whole affair. I should not have let him see my emotional attachment to those young people – or to Nadya really. Perhaps he smelt a rat. It is his job to have a suspicious mind.
Nadya was delighted and abashed – the affair had undermined her identity as a soldier in the Red Army. She had been dazed by the turn of events, but now he was safe, she found room in her heart to be furious with Alexei. “There is something profoundly petit bourgeois about Comrade Alexei,” she said to me stiffly. “I can’t thank you enough Abram; you’ve always been such a good friend …”
In that moment it felt like we were two people who had never made love. Strangely that didn’t matter to me. I felt her pain as though it were my own, and although such pain is real enough, it is accompanied by a slight exhilaration at that momentary escape from oneself. But my relief was qualified by my reliance on the Polish count. She, the dedicated communist who generally thought only of the war, was now completely consumed by her desire to be reunited with her lover – presumably to start with a vicious scolding. I felt once more that my presence was not required and left like a theatregoer numbed by a particularly effective tragedy.
The snow was thick underfoot and it slowed my pace. Then I realised that I was hurrying without any great purpose. Yes, there were things to be done at the Comintern office, but I had no desire to do them. I relaxed into the slow trudge the snow imposed on me, and made my way there primarily for the relative warmth, though we rarely remove our coats. I felt the cold in my lungs and I felt the number of my years. The exertions of army and administration on a poor diet with little sleep were ageing me. The shock of Alexei’s arrest seemed to be draining my last reserves and demolishing my hopes. Those hopes had started in my youth along with my outrage against the times: I joined Emancipation of Labour in 1887, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 and the Bolshevik faction in 1903, shortly before I was imprisoned for treason. I was restricted to minor duties, in spite of my long service. No surprise there: I was always a faction of one, disdaining to exchange my intellectual independence for a career. The 1905 Revolution led to my being amnestied by the regime, and my arrest in 1910 on conspiracy charges was rewarded with detention in Siberia until my escape in 1913. And in all those long years, I have worked and struggled with barely a thought for myself, and always always I have been talking about a possible future that seemed as real and feasible as it often felt distant, but now we have a victory that we must defend at any cost – and that victory, more than Lenin or Trotsky, is our harsh dictator. We have to keep fighting, not so much to move forward, but to avoid falling into the abyss of the past.
Rarely do our lives enmesh with our tim
es and the past is like a continuously changing vanishing point swallowed or reduced to nothing by the lines of perspective. Our finite and travailed stories cannot cohere with the endless unfolding of history, the god that never fails never to feel. Perhaps, I thought, the young – like Alexei and Nadya, if they survive – will live to see our economy improve and real benefits for our working people, but I will not. Perhaps the Whites will win and cobble together a dictatorial state run by one of their monstrous generals, who after victory will fight amongst themselves. Blood will flow and the muzhik will pay for his disobedience to established order. Suppose they forget to imprison me, will I in twenty years be trudging these same streets through the winter snow in a White capital, and muttering to myself about half-forgotten ideals no one dare mention? Passers-by will laugh and some fat bourgeois will press a few kopecks into my hand on his way to church to thank the Lord for supporting the righteous. Worse: I will accept the paltry sum, my spirit broken by hunger and want – the two devils by which the rich hold their power while telling you you’re free.
The next two days passed quickly, like most others. We are accustomed to dropping one task and rushing to another. We’re building a new world, but we’re doing it on a shoestring. The Frenchman came in and I gave him the good news. He smiled and said, “Abram, you have a good heart.”
“No more than you,” I replied.
“Oh I don’t know. I feel they’ve drawn me in too far. Things are happening that shouldn’t.”
“That’s war – even war to free mankind.”
He didn’t seem very happy with my answer – or even interested in it. “Of course, we have to continue, but this war is changing us. Is it changing us forever?”
“Possibly.”
“Could it be that in these wars, winners could be losers and losers winners?”
“Not exactly. But it’s true that in victory the victor always has to concede something to the defeated.”
“Such as?”
“Not only will we have to grant jobs and privileges to much of that great mass of Tsarist officials the Whites recruit from, we will also have to allow the peasantry to be peasants – to own their land and sell their produce, because they know how to do it and we haven’t even invented the replacement system. In the meantime we have to eat.”
“Never. I cannot accept either of those things.”
“That’s because you’re an ex-anarchist, and have never understood the very practical necessity of creating another state.”
“You’re a bit of an apparatchik, Abram.”
“Not at all, Victor Lvovich, apparatchiks repeat the current fashionable truth – not next year’s and not last year’s.”
“I take it back, Abram Davidovich, you’re an excellent political commissar. Would there were more like you. We’re stifling the revolution and the war provides a good excuse.”
“Wars always do. It’s sad, though, to see that we act like any other state.”
“Abram, I’m losing my conviction that we can ever be free. If such a revolution as ours has already …”
“Ah freedom again,” I said wearily. “We all know what it is, but no one can define it.”
“This is true of most important things. Often we can only define them by what they’re not.”
“So I’ve heard, but however elusive its definition, we all feel we would recognise its physiognomy, if it appeared before us. We’re probably wrong. We want a world in which things are consistent with the categories we have invented for them. For us, communism means freedom and social justice, and for the Whites, it means disorder and denial of the natural hierarchy of human society, but we have to admit that communism is not wholly freedom and social justice, just as the Whites have to admit that we’re not disorder, as we’re proving on the battlefield, and sadly we’re not entirely devoid of hierarchy. We and the Whites are radically different forms of order, but we both contain within us a chaos of different personalities, visions, rivalries, hatreds, ambitions, opportunism, hopes, courage, generosity, inconsistency and all other human foibles. There is something heroic in our attempt to go beyond ourselves and control our fate, and there is also something vain and foolish. I would like to think that in us communists there is more of the former and less of the latter, while in the Whites there is almost only the latter. They’re desperate to recreate an ideal past they can never return to, and we’re desperate to create an ideal future we will perhaps never reach.”
“Abram, are you a dreamer or a cynic? What you’ve just said is cynical in the extreme.”
“Not cynical, just realistic. To desire the good of humanity is noble, but to think it easy to define that good is foolish and to consider the achievement of that good, once defined, to be something routine and painless would be almost criminally insane.”
The Frenchman smiled and said, “We mustn’t lose heart. There can be no progress until this damn war is over. Then things will change, you’ll see.”
“I hope so, Victor Lvovich.”
In that moment one of the Frenchman’s secretaries ran in. “Alexei Konstantinovich has been shot.”
We didn’t move as we struggled to understand.
“By firing squad,” she clarified.
Still we didn’t reply.
“But there’s worse for you, Abram Davidovich. Nadezhda Alexeyevna knows and is at this very moment rushing to prison. She’s not in control of herself. Only you can calm her.”
“You’d better go,” the Frenchman told me.
“I don’t need you to tell me,” I rose wearily from my chair, still vainly trying to comprehend Alexei’s death – hardly an event in a world where so many die needlessly, inexplicably and unnoticed.
The Frenchman’s secretary touched me on my back – a slight and timorous act of solidarity, a gesture of compassion, where compassion seems a luxury. I had lost many friends in this war, and Alexei was not a real friend; he was however something more, a member of a fragile ménage of emotions whose purity kept me sane. I stumbled into the street and had to force myself to quicken my pace towards the prison. Driven by duty, I dreaded my arrival.
On my way, I saw my brother’s work party sauntering off towards their duties. I put my head down, intending to hurry by, but Lev broke out from their ranks and rushed over to me. He hugged me more forcefully than at our last meeting – with a needy intensity. I understood the difference: the other day his embrace had been one of genuine fraternal warmth on seeing a familiar face, while this was not so much an embrace as an attempt to grasp onto a means to physical safety – I was his life-belt. Why the change of mood since our last meeting, I asked myself. Most probably, Lev being Lev, he had been organising some kind of deal. Wherever he goes, he leaves a trail of financial transactions that usually leave him the richer and others he’s met the poorer. This one was probably predicated on his absolute belief that before long the Whites would be in the city. “Comrade,” he said, and that word made me shudder, “I was most affected by our recent conversation.”
“Did we say that much?” I kept my distance.
“Oh yes, we said a lot of things and, besides, I have been thinking about them for a very long time. A man can realise that he was wrong, you know. I’m not as stubborn as you think. I have expertise – I know how the system works.”
It was all a little garbled, but garbled statements often give you a very clear idea of where a conversation is going. I felt tired, overwhelmed by my own troubles, but this man’s presence had just enough pull on me to keep me standing there. “So what have you decided?”
“I must join the party I should have joined decades ago. Abram, you must forgive me for all the foolish, arrogant things I’ve said in the past. But at least you have the pleasure of hearing me say this – your brother pleading and admitting the error of his ways.”
“There’s no pleasure in that,” I said, “I can assure you. For a couple of decades, your ‘error’, as you call it, saved you from acquaintance with the inside of a stin
king Tsarist prison. There’s no need for you to join any party, you understand. As long as you haven’t done anything illegal, you’ve nothing to worry about. And you haven’t done anything illegal, have you?”
“No,” he said, and the disappointment in his voice was like an accusation.
“Not playing the black market, for instance?”
“No, absolutely not,” he said with even less conviction.
“Then you’ve absolutely nothing to worry about. Incidentally, if you have, joining the party would only make your position worse. You understand that, don’t you?” By now, I was almost certain he was guilty of something, but I would not report him. There was still part of me that felt sorry for him, but others, in that moment, were placing greater demands on my compassion and my feelings.
“Of course,” he replied curtly, already moving away to rejoin his work unit. I let him go, and we hurried in our different directions and towards different fates. I doubt we’ll ever meet again. Of course, whatever he’s guilty of will be a much bigger crime than trading a few pieces of antique cutlery – the misguided but ultimately harmless act of a man who could not live without his lover’s smile, her subtle smile that expressed an intelligence he believed in like a religion. And I, too, had fallen in love with that smile and knew its power – all the more powerful because its wearer was never conscious it was there.
Boris Fyordorovich had commanded the firing squad, so Alexei died heroically at a hero’s hand for a foolish gesture not devoid of extravagant generosity. The physicality of the lovemaking transcended the madness and cruelty of war. Change hurts and heartlessly destroys the most tender and beautiful things. And nature in such unforgiving times, always in search of balance and the indestructibility of every energy, allows us to display even greater acts of generosity and sacrifice. Pain gives rise to glory – not that of the battlefield, but of the stubborn goodness of many in the face of the terrible evil of the few. When so many drink to numb their nerves, why shouldn’t he have got drunk on love, a less lonely intoxication. How many lives? How many questions? And still we’ll fight, but without him. He was willing to fight our enemies and perhaps his, and offer his life, which we ended on a whim, a scruple and a fear of the insidious enemy – fear that like a mirror reflects the vicious foe.
On the Heroism of Mortals Page 8