On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  I arrived too late. I should have hurried more or not at all – the dead are in no hurry. I was suppressing my anxieties about her – certain of her good sense, thinking of her survival against greater odds. I heard a shot when I was but five paces from the prison door. I continued in a daze. And there she lay in a pool of blood, while no one knew what to do. This was not just another corpse; something of her nobility made her dead body unapproachable. No, I’m not talking about aristocratic nobility – that’s a false coin she had rejected unreservedly – I’m talking about human nobility which can be found in any class and in any people and in any part of the globe. She lay dead as she had lived, utterly coherent with her own invented values, a lesson to us all. This was not the way it was supposed to be: she was to get the White bullet and I the Red. I’ll get myself transferred permanently to the front. That’ll please the Polish count: I met him on the stairs shortly after Nadya’s death and challenged him about it. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his forearms with hands upturned, as though to say, “What can you do, these things happen,” but what he actually said was more dismissive: “I must have forgotten. We’re at war, if you haven’t noticed, and I’ve got a lot on my mind.” Yes, I need to get to the front and stay there, chasing a White bullet so that we can give things their proper balance. And while I’m doing it, I’ll chase those Whites as hard as I can and make the bastards pay. They’re the ones who tore the heart from our revolution.

  How did it happen? I spoke to everyone who witnessed her death, including the culprit, Boris Fyordorovich. The hero was defensive, clearly ashamed in my presence and perhaps a little fearful of his colleagues. No one justified what he did.

  She arrived in a fury and confronted him. “Boris Fyordorovich Bogdanov, how could you kill a comrade who’s fighting the Whites? Won’t you need him tomorrow or the day after when we return to the front?” There was nothing of the weeping woman in the way she approached him. She had left that person behind in my room and had no intention of revealing her to Boris Fyordorovich.

  “It was the decision of the court,” he replied, reasonably enough.

  “Indeed, but why is that silly grin of yours still on your face?” she said. Others told me that this was unfair; at that stage he was still a little defensive in her presence. She appeared to be set upon provoking him, and that’s not difficult to do.

  He composed himself and straightened his back even more than usual. He looked her in the eye and said with the crassness so typical of him, “He broke the law and paid the price.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Boris, let’s all go and drink a glass or two of vodka and celebrate our wonderful republic. You know I killed a man – I killed a wounded White officer.”

  “Well, at least you’ve achieved something in this war,” he said, already more antagonistic.

  “And that officer called our leader a disturbed fanatic and scoffed at our ideals.”

  “It would be surprising if he’d behaved in any other fashion. We’re well rid of him.”

  “And are you well rid of Alexei Konstantinovich? A proletarian. A Bolshevik. A soldier who fought valiantly …”

  “Valiantly, Nadya? You cannot believe …”

  “Oh Boris Fyordorovich Bogdanov, you think yourself the only hero in the Red Army.” Apparently he took this very badly. He was uncharacteristically lost for words, and she exploited her advantage. “The White officer said that we can’t run a country by waving flags and marching the streets. I sneered at him, but when I look at you, Boris Fyordorovich, I have this horrible doubt that he could have been right.”

  “Nadya, does it look like we’re just waving flags and marching the streets?”

  “Boris Fyordorovich, yours is not a subtle mind. Where rhetoric prevails, the complexities of life are forgotten. A system that has so little flexibility that it shoots one of its own soldiers for a few knives and forks is a system that has lost its judgement.”

  “It’s not the knives and forks,” Boris said, having now regained his jocular superiority, “it’s how he bought them. He must have accumulated quite a bit from his little transactions. And come to that, where did he get those boots from?”

  There are many ways he might have got them, but Nadya was not interested in these legalistic arguments. She was concerned with her own concept of justice, which was as complex as it was absolute. In a time of rigid categories and simple absolutes, she held to a measured and flexible understanding of duty and personal responsibility that was a humanistic labyrinth, a culture. We loved her because she did not judge, and gave us her understanding of human weakness and generosity, but did not impose it on us.

  “Boris Fyordorovich, I shot a man through the heart in cold blood – no, I did worse, I shot him while his blood was draining from his body. It seemed part of this terrible struggle for a just future. It made sense then; I don’t know that it does any more. I realise now that when we kill, no matter how noble the cause, we diminish our souls …”

  “Souls? Do we still believe in such things?” Boris laughed and turned quizzically to those around him. They avoided his glance, tense and embarrassed – wishing to defuse the compelling scene that unfolded before them, and not knowing how to intervene.

  “Yes, souls. We diminish our souls and can never restore what we have lost, any more than we can restore an amputated leg. But a leg is not a soul – a soul is where we store our essence, our relationship with our fellow humans. It is what makes and unmakes us. To live with an amputated limb is noble, but to drag one’s body through life with a soul from which much has been severed is ignoble in the extreme.”

  “The ramblings, I would say, of a deranged religious fanatic,” Boris smiled at each in turn, but his smile was not returned.

  “Quite,” she snapped, “there is a part of religion we should not have dumped so hastily; I see that now. I shot a man who writhed in pain, and now I pay the price. Revolutions must live by higher morals or die, and die they usually do. I shot a man through the heart without a sense of guilt, and now my heart longs for the Red bullet in your gun. Could you do that, Boris? – kill a woman who writhes in pain?” She pointed to her chest.

  For an impulsive man like Boris Fyordorovich, who had killed many people on the battlefield and a few at firing squads like the one he had just commanded, this was an opportunity that anger and bravado would not let him pass by. Two of the five witnesses I interviewed told me that he then laughed again, while three of them had no recollection of this. In this Manichaean conflict between equality and hierarchy, it appears that we smile and laugh not for humour, joys or social niceties, but out of a dark and grieving bitterness. When we joke amicably, our expressions are often ironic deadpan.

  Whether or not he laughed, he apparently said, “You mean like this?” and raised his pistol from the desk until it was level with her heart.

  His hand was steady and his expression jocular. Hers was icy and unflinching. Some said that she was willing him to do it; others that she looked calm and apparently uninterested in how this encounter would end. They all agreed that fear was entirely absent. The shot I heard killed her instantly, and when I entered everyone stared as though they’d seen a crucifixion. In death she seemed more vibrant than they – like a Roman republican unwilling to live with the empire, she had fallen on her sword, and the sword she’d used was Boris Fyordorovich, a man predictable in his ambitions and reactions. A man of the future, no doubt.

  I had him put in a cell for the moment – more for his own protection than anything else. Who should we blame for her death? Boris, the brutalised captain who can barely remember the ideals he first decided to give his life for? For still he risks his life, now less driven by his love of humanity than by his hatred of the many foes foreign and White, who would now restore every last indignity of the former regime and wash the country clean with the blood of those who should have never dared to speak up, let alone act. Or should we blame the gods – those eternal truths: capitalism, communism, Christian
ity, nation and history? These are the names we have for the winds of change that blow away the lighter, more intimate thoughts that circle in our brains. They leave us bereft of hope, even when they were the original source of it.

  When on 25 October 1917 according to the old calendar we overthrew Kerensky’s provisional government and sang the Internationale, we thought we had started to free the world. Now I understand that we had opened the door to a new era of struggle in which language and lies are the important weapons. This century will be fought over not only with the machinery of war – machine guns, tanks, planes, gas, wire and cheap industrial brandy – but also with lies. There were always lies, just as there were always spears, arrows and other instruments for ripping human flesh apart, but the new machinery of government will fire lies like a machine gun fires bullets. So we’ll need new machinery to protect ourselves against the disseminators of lies, and that machinery will be run by people like the Polish count and Boris Fyordorovich, but eventually the disseminators and those who fight them off will become indistinguishable.

  Dimitry Gregorevich was right about faux demotic language. The people are susceptible to it, recognising it as their own. But it isn’t, because they have no control over it. It is a caricature of themselves, written by people who speak in a different manner, and it controls them. The Italian Fascists have led the way in this, and they will probably take power. Their usage is still crude and bombastic, but the Europeans will hone these new weapons over the coming decades. We’ll always be at a disadvantage, because truth should be on our side, but this battle of sly words hurled into the wind will corrupt us.

  Dimitry was a good man, if I may use such a dated and unscientific term, but his goodness was never of the emotional and impractical kind. During our retreat when General Yudenich first invaded, we were sent off on a reconnoitre to check the enemy was not trying to outflank us. We were deep in the forest and we found a soldier seated on a fallen trunk whose aged bark could no longer resist the damp and was prey to lichen and mould. He wept unceasingly. Silently and to himself. His uniform showed him to be one of ours. I was moved to help him and addressed him in a soft and, I thought, friendly voice. I shuddered at his reaction and it taught me more about the nature of war than any speech by general or politician, or any bloody encounter with the enemy in which the outcome of conflict was plainly evident to my eyes. It told me of the measureless affliction of all war, not just the deaths they count – however dizzying in their finitude – but also the chain of unnumbered consequences that ripple out across the nation and down through generations yet to come. It tells me now in the darkest moment of my life that whatever I have suffered is as nothing compared to his unknown anguish. He turned and looked at me with disdain, but his weeping became audible – horribly audible. The sound was not so much infantile as feral – a deep uncalculated protest at the calculated cruelty of our species – which outstrips the random, insensitive cruelty of nature.

  I wanted to help him back to our camp, but Dimitry dissuaded me. “Be sensible,” he said, “he needs food and perhaps he can survive. If we take him back, we may do him no favour. He’s probably a deserter and who knows what story lies behind his presence here in the forest. He’s as far away from the armies as we can get him; it’s the safest place for him to be.”

  “Can we pass him by, like the priest and the Levite?” I objected with a frown of dismay that reflected my muddled thinking.

  “You have to,” he replied, “the Good Samaritan lived long before the advent of twentieth-century warfare and its excesses. But I like your source – was that for me?”

  “Not at all, weren’t those the stories they brought us up with, and its meaning is clear enough to me.”

  We gave him most of our food, and Dimitry exchanged his coat with the man. He was so stiff with cold and hunger that we had to help him remove his ragged old one and replace it with Dimitry’s. Dimitry put on his, which was next to useless. Dimitry sat with him for half an hour and talked of how to live in the forest. What to eat and how to keep dry. He explained that safety could be achieved by walking towards the north in search of a remote village, and more rashly he gave him our compass. Never did the man speak, but he did occasionally nod to show that he understood.

  Alexei is dead, and he was shot for his humanity. I do not speak of the grand humanity that talks of ideals and power. I speak of that quotidian humanity that delights in a good meal or a fine pair of boots. Nor do I speak of ambitious materialism, but of Alexei’s innocent and entirely balanced appreciation of the materiality of life. No wonder Nadya preferred him to me and my intellectualised asceticism. I cannot conceive of a society that only thinks about material things and economic self-interest. It is a fanciful idea and would certainly be a very unhappy society, but a society that denies these for everyone and for all natures would be equally unhappy.

  And Nadya is now dead. For me the Revolution died with her. For me her death and the manner of it deny the justice of our bloody cause. For me she still rises over the barricade and leads us fearlessly in a war that must go on. Whatever comes out of this will be neither fish nor fowl. At best, it will be a stepping stone to something better.

  After I had informed Boris that I would have to take him down to a cell, and the room had filled with people, I had my last conversation with him: “There’s a fundamental truth that you’ve got to learn, Boris Fyodorovich. At some stage in your life, you’ll learn it – you’ll be obliged to learn it. That may be in two months’ time – I hope for your sake that it will – or it may be two minutes before you die at the age of eighty-three in your comfortable dacha. In that case, you’ll have only two minutes to sweat the regrets of thirty thousand days – your soul will scream and your eyes will roll – and time itself will still, so that it can observe the horrible sight of a moribund struggling with the realisation that he’s wasted his life.”

  “Really,” said Boris – but this time he had difficulty in smiling the thin smile that died on his lips. “What is this profound truth you wish to reveal to me? It had better be good after such an introduction.”

  “Not profound, Boris Fyodorovich: this is not a debating hall. I’m not interested in sounding clever. Clever talk rarely gets close to the truth, although it does bring its own pleasures. No, not profound at all – trite, perhaps.”

  “Then say it. Speak as you eat, like a man who goes about his business.”

  “If a man has no humanity, then he is a man no more. And when he dies, he dies like a dog.”

  “Is that it, Abram Davidovich?” Boris laughed the most genuine laugh I ever heard resonate from his mouth. It tinkled, and I could feel it freeze the blood of everyone in that room. It spoke of our future – one I mustn’t live to see. I will fight on and seek out a White bullet to pierce my broken heart.

  I, the Statue

  The Art of Nothingness. What can the non-statue people know of my inspiration? They are too unfeeling, too hardened in their own knowledge of life to understand the beauty of emptiness. But theirs is another kind of emptiness, now I think about it. Thinking about things is, however, something a human statue should avoid doing if at all possible. It is wasted energy. The really clever thing is to train the brain to empty itself of everything – of all the noise, anger and desire of the modern city when you’re in the midst of it. Those who shout and scream their troubles to the world cannot understand the subtle sensitivity required for inanimation. The art of nothingness is the true art of being.

  The equipment. Like the painter, I too have my brushes: five of them of varying sizes arrayed upon my dresser. I love these tools of my trade. They are the first things I touch when I get up in the morning. Before I shake muesli into a bowl and pour skimmed milk over it, before I put three-quarters of a teaspoon of Nescafe into a mug and switch on the kettle, and before I undress and go into the bathroom for my morning shower, I sit down in front of my dresser and count my brushes. Yes, I actually count them, as though some malign spirit, conscious
of how dear they are to me, might come in the night to steal one from me out of pure, impassioned malice, which is a distillation of ambition. This is the one emotional perturbation I allow myself each day. It is like a homeopathic medicine: a tiny drop of poison that inoculates me against whatever slights the non-statue people might heap on me during my working day.

  I import the makeup from Hertford University Services in America. All those who follow my trade know of this institution, which also supplies Hollywood. Little do they know as they pass us in the street and jeer, that we’re using the same products as their most favoured film stars!

  But I don’t apply the make-up until after breakfast. My first act in the morning is not work; it is more a prayer or homage to my metier. Once I have refreshed and restored myself with food, drink and ablutions, I return immediately to the dresser. I look into the oval mirror and study my face as though it weren’t my face, but a canvas, shall we say? A canvas that has to be covered with a uniform layer of creams and powders to create a very particular visual effect. That of granite rock.

  Becoming a statue. Most people think granite is grey. That is because they have never really looked at granite. They are in such a hurry to do whatever they do, that they cannot look at all the things around them. I see them every day as they rush. That is all they seem to do. Are they happy? I cannot say that they aren’t, because I cannot possibly know, but if they are happy, then I am quite sure they are deluded. Yes, that is the one thought I allow to cross my brain unresisted. Even when I’m at work, I permit such things to happen, but no more than once in a shift. It’s like a spark in a light bulb that immediately fuses. That thought does not clutter my brain or agitate it. No, it empties it like a vacuum. It virtually kills my brain or stuns it. My passivity requires less concentration, and my being attains a state of beautiful numbness.