Four paces across the carpet and the décor changes. Décor, for here everything is as in a stage play, from the sober politeness of the officer offering us his leather armchairs with a gesture to our circumspect manner. The officer listens to us amicably, his gaze gliding over my necktie and Fleischmann’s in turn, which probably remind him of the realistic details in naturalist novels. A handsome chronometer marks the times of his appointments on his wrist. The harmony of style between his silver epaulets and his American-style mustache, trimmed every morning, is obvious. St. George Cross. Harmonious timbre of a charming conversationalist’s voice: “Gentlemen, or rather comrades …” (The mocking tone echoes inside me against El Chorro’s rough voice: compañeros … ) Here it is: our case is a difficult one. England, exercising control of the seas, is not overly willing to authorize the return of repatriated people. Fleischmann and I, in these leather armchairs, confront the great power on which the sun never sets. “We have no intention, I say, of forcing Admiral Beatty’s lines …” The best advice this comrade can give us is to have ourselves inducted into the corps fighting in Champagne: it shouldn’t be too difficult. With what prepossessing airs you open the door of the trap for us, Comrade Do-nothing, Comrades-with-handsome-silver-epaulets! Let’s stay serious, however. “I’ll think about it …”
Fleischmann rises, adjusts his pince-nez, pushes back the armchair—so comfortable that it seems to incline the unwary sitter to compromise—and stuffing the half-head of Holland cheese back into his right pocket with an angry fist, goes one notch past the point of absurdity.
In the middle of his tirade, the result of which is that he is going to telegraph to the Executive Committee of the Soviets, this grand phrase stands out:
“But we are the revolution, do you understand!”
Fleischmann, me, many others—and millions of unknown mugs. “The Provisional Government owes,” owes us. We face the officer with the protracted stare of poor relations who have suddenly turned out to be creditors. He shakes his head. Yes. Yes. Of course. He understands very well. He is all acquiescence in principle, but there are practical difficulties. Very great ones. Besides—and “I cannot say whether this is a cordial digression, a diversion, or a veiled recall to order—he too (including the epaulets?) belongs totally to the revolution. He bears the name of a barrister who, in 1907, was nearly exiled. Fleischmann’s anger dies down, neatly parried. There is no longer any adversary and all of this, from beginning to end, is like a joke.—“Think about it, comrades. Good-by.”—“Good-by.”
“Wait a minute,” murmurs Fleischmann in the corridor, “I know an orderly here …” He turns out to be a young muzhik from Riazan, wide cheekbones and horizontal eyes. Soft blond fuzz covers his upper lip. His strong peasant’s hands hold a silver tray on which, next to the Echo de Paris, a glass of tea trembles.
… Telegram from Petrograd: REPRESS BY FORCE AFTER ULTIMATUM.
This telegram was received yesterday. If they don’t surrender today, the mutineers in the camp at La Courtine will be bombarded tomorrow in the name of the faraway revolution they acclaim.
“Do you think they will give the order to fire?” asks the big blond boy.
And the glass of tea trembles a little more.
Fleischmann points his bristly chin at the door which has just closed behind us.
“Those phony Comrades?”
Obvious conclusion as crushing as the shrapnel which will send fountains of blood spurting forth tomorrow, making rows of corpses of blond soldiers just like this one in the barracks rooms the day after …
From a distance of two thousand miles as the crow flies we can sense the sleek, fat vermin of smiling traitors crawling over the revolution. Behind this door, the “Comrade” is adding notes to our dossiers: suspicious (confidential).
Sam confirms the news. He has just come from Champagne; his division is in the second line. They call him Sam because he landed one day from the other side of the Atlantic, tall, thin, hollow-cheeked, with a silky beard and a crooked smile revealing a set of cannibal teeth. Uncle Sam, born of real Cossacks in a village of Little Russia, tempered by the penitentiary at Orel (Great Russia), escaped from Sakhalin (at the far end of the greatest Russia, on the border of the lands of the Rising Sun), transformed by a few years at a good job in the factories of Pittsburgh (Pa., U.S.A.). The Russian soldier’s forest-green tunic hangs loosely over his bony shoulders. His cold look and his large, slightly twisted mouth suggest a mocking attitude. “Let’s not be in such a hurry,” he says. “We’ll arrive just in time to occupy the cells of Kresty or to be shot by the Republic with bullets inherited from the Empire.”
We stride along the Paris sidewalk on a sunny afternoon. BOUSSARD ET PIGNOTEL FILS: Flags, Banners, and Pennants of Every Kind. Established in 1876, gold medal at expositions … Here’s what we need, Sam. These “purveyors to H.M. the King of Belgium” can purvey to us in our turn. Turn about is fair play! Ecclesiastical ornaments and multicolored silks fringed with gold fill the window with the sacred emblems of every creed in the universe. The Virgin’s banner, the oriflamme of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Stars and Stripes, the black, yellow, and red of the lack-land King of Furnes, the red crescent of Tunisia and even the celestial sphere of Brazil on which a white ribbon encompasses the star-studded heavens the better to proclaim that the coffee planters’ motto is the very law of the universe: Ordem e progresso. Boussard, bald, with round owl eyes red-rimmed from chronic conjunctivitis, greets his customers at the threshold of a shop bathed in the discreet half-light of a sacristy. Some gilded halberds make one look forward to the entrance of a solemn Swiss Guard. Then enters Pignotel the Younger, the most jaded of the patriots of the class of 1919: horn-rimmed glasses and the look of a collegian dulled by nights spent in brothels. Boussard and Pignotel purvey to every fatherland. Men of every race bleed under silks embroidered in their workshops by women on piecework, the prettiest of whom spread their docile slaves’ knees to Pignotel the Younger. Sam has come here on behalf of soldiers far from home to look for the emblem of a new fatherland.
“We should like a flag, gentlemen, and as rapidly as possible …”
“Russian, no doubt?”
Seen from the side, Sam’s polite smile adds a mocking grimace to his Notre-Dame gargoyle’s profile.
“Precisely, monsieur.”
The white, blue, and red silks are ready. Here are the styles. All prices, like wholesale oils. The firm also prepares special orders. Sam’s slender hand pushes the samples disdainfully aside.
“I beg your pardon, monsieur. There is a misunderstanding. We would like, for the Russian 10th Division, a red flag bearing these words in two languages: Russian Republic … Fringes will not be necessary.”
For an instant the nocturnal Boussard and Pignotel the Younger are round-eyed, like fish being pulled out of a fish tank.
We do not know, gentlemen, if we will be able to furnish the article for you. You would be very kind, gentlemen, if you would come by again tomorrow or this evening, this evening between six and seven … Gentlemen …
The Rear smiles at the war—this lie covering everything, emptier than a Detaille painting—with the smiles of all its Home Front soldiers, of all its profiteers, of all its general staffs, of all its journalists, of all its little chippies so well appreciated by clean warriors from overseas, of all its tipsy men on furlough who don’t understand anything (“… and anyway, it’s better not to understand”). Astonishing frivolity of life a hundred miles behind the firing, lines in this age of mass slaughters stage-managed like scenic effects on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet: (“Around Verdun, or Eighty Thousand Dead?”) Loungers, joy girls, autos, cafés, newspapers. In the distance the towers of the Trocadéro rise up over the Seine against a pink sky imperceptibly tinged with hazy blue, horizon-blue. Paris abandons herself to life under a Watteau sky. Our people are being fired on at La Courtine. A camp, somewhere in Creuse, surrounded by cannon in the middle of peaceful farmland. A shred o
f the revolutionary throng snatched from our revolution: peasants from Perm, workers from Tula, fishermen from arctic shores …
“There were too many men,” said a drunkard whose gestures seemed to be sending lyric message to the stars in a dark street yesterday. “There was no room left on the earth. Can you feel how well off we are in the Rear? We’re really living now that the war has made some room for us …”
Scientists could prove it better, with the help of graphs. “They’re firing on our people at La Courtine, do you hear, Sam?”
“No,” says Sam seriously, “I don’t hear anything, unless it’s the noise of the bus and the voices of two Canadians talking about rugby.”
A soldier’s voice:
“What’s the big fuss about? They’re lucky if you ask me. They still won’t be as bad off as we are where come from, over near Berry-au-Bac.”
One gentleman’s opinion:
“Discipline is the law of armies. Besides, monsieur [this is not spoken aloud, for decorum’s sake, but addressed to me in an aside which I can hear quite clearly], I find your indignation most displeasing. What are you doing here anyway? The Rear must be purged.”
It is being purged. Denunciations, suspicions, that peculiar second sight that spots the spy, that marvelous, sharp hearing which can hear—through hotel room walls—defeatist talk mingled with the sighs and groans—send police sleuths scurrying out on countless leads. Men in dinner clothes, soon to be tied to posts at Vincennes, are holding forth in salons. A rare gourmet with a triple chin and greasy neck, who collects erotic etchings in the evening, demands the establishment of a Patriotic Inquisition every morning in his newspaper. Someone enters furtively into a prison cell where a strange sick man with enormous Creole eyes dreams distractedly, speaks softly to him, raises his curly head, passes a noose around his neck with lulling gestures, and tightens … tightens. “More arrests are imminent.” The beauty of Paris smiles on implacably like summer.
TWENTY
Meditation During an Air Raid
WHEN THE SIRENS, ANNOUNCING THE APPROACH OF ENEMY SQUADRONS, BEGIN to shriek into the night, and footsteps hurry down the stairway under the furtive glow of candles, we sit down at the window. Broux carefully hides the bowl of his pipe under his hand, and I’m not entirely certain that it’s in jest. “You ought to go down,” he told me the first time. “Personally I’d just as soon not bother. All those half-dressed people in the cellar are not exactly pretty. You’ll see the little old lady from the fourth floor in her bathrobe and curlers hugging a horrible poodle with an almost human expression in her witch’s arms; you’ll see my pretty neighbor, with hardly any clothes on, fresh from her bed but wearing lipstick, her nose powdered. Perhaps you will dream of how in forty years her desirable arms will be as fleshless as those of the witch with the poodle. What finer theme for meditation, down at sewer level, during an air raid?” He talks this way sometimes, in an even voice, and the words of his sentences fall into place with a muffled rhythm. I can see that he must be capable of writing beautiful letters in which round phrases fall nicely into place and where the ideas rise up with a serenity mingled with irony and finesse. “I only went down there once, and then only to climb back up four steps at a time at the end of the alert. You see I feel so good here, among my books, that even for being killed in the place would not be a bad one …”
There are only two portraits, side by side, between the bookcase and the bed—two fraternal old men: the great Walt, white and hoary, of Sands at Seventy; Elisée Reclus, high brow crowned with white ash, stern look like a fine ray of light penetrating from across vast spaces. Broux says:
“If by chance a bomb were to destroy all this”—with a wave of his hand he designates the books squeezed into their bookcase, the two portraits, a pile of notebooks bound in black oilcloth over in one corner—“frankly, I’d just as soon not outlive it. This is all I have in the world. It is my refuge. I am attached to it. Whereas life …”
We philosophize. The sirens have stopped wailing. The night—like other nights. Gray clouds move slowly across a background of stars. Explosions crackle on endlessly. We see nothing out of the ordinary. Yet somewhere, up there above these clouds, among the phosphorescent shadows crossed by fresh gusts from distant continents, men dressed in leather are trying to fix this city in their bombsights. And explosive blossoms, forming concentric circles in the middle of the sky, search for them—hunters made prey—in turn. This game lasts about thirty minutes.
Broux is talking about his former shopmates (he is a cabinetmaker); about the duties, totally ridiculous duties, which he performs at Vincennes; about the manifesto, To Mothers, published by a few comrades who have just been arrested, a rather mediocre piece of work. “As if the mothers could do something about it!” And, suddenly uncovering the glowing bowl of his pipe, he concludes:
“It is impossible to escape.”
A prison, this city, this country, the war, Europe.
“And America, Japan, New Zealand, Mozambique, Borneo! A prison—the universe. Even in the brush, in the untamed jungle, they count out money, bend men’s backs under the rod, obey orders, go about their dirty jobs. Everywhere it is necessary to undergo fourteen hours of pain, of servitude, or of degradation each day, depending on the circumstances, in order to reach the fifteenth, which may be spent with the great Walt or old Elisée. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” says Broux, “for the intensity of the work is less crushing in the workshops than in the factories. I am not totally brutalized in the evening. Those who work in factories, on the line, come out exhausted in the evening, good for the movies, old boy … And all washed up at the age of forty: good for the little café …”
He who tries to save his life will lose it. A handful, out of thousands, get rich, discover the other side of the world through the windows of sleeping cars. The money costs them dearly, and there is always the risk of never making it. To step over the bodies of a hundred others in order to become one of those thickheaded scum, the nouveau-riche? To grab up sous, then francs, then gold louis out of the misery of other men and then to say that the world is well made, when everyone who fills his lungs with the fresh air of the beach is followed by an invisible train of men and women bent under their tasks, imprisoned by the machines as in a vise, imprisoned by hunger, by love, by the wish to live, for the wheels are grinding perfectly when all a man’s desires fall back on him with the weight of chains?
Civilization reaches its high point in this senseless combat above the Louvre, which bombs that are in no sense “strays” may very well be destroying at this very moment. The bombing plane closes the cycle that began with the victory at Samothrace. Masterpieces of ingenuity, summing up the work of all races in all times—millions of men suffering, striving, daring—seek each other out, with the greatest human lucidity, in order to destroy each other; yet it’s only an artillery duel. And the essential business of this city consists in turning out shells.
“It’s a question to ask ourselves if we’re not mad. But who are the madmen, in God’s name? Those who wonder about it, or the others? If we ever began to speak out loud, what would they do with us, tell me?”
Broux has stopped believing in rebellion since he saw rebels gouging their money out of the blood of old landladies and then being pushed off to the guillotine like the monsters who strangle little girls.9 “There are stray forces, like your friend from Haiti, the landowner at Grande Saline. They are wasted forces. It’s mathematical: either they adjust or they will be cut down. Your Negro was born to leave his skull, more or less full of holes, among a whole pile of other skulls, under a monument to be erected by the cannon makers later on …”
The working class does every kind of job, except its own, without, when all is said and done, being aware of its own existence. How can you expect it to emerge from this nullity when every morning they measure out the fodder for its belly and the fodder for its mind: so much bread and meat on the ration card, so much poison for the mind. Tell me,
do you remember the myth of the general strike? A real myth, right? And of the “insurrection against the war?” Those who used to demand it are now demanding that they bomb Munich to wreak vengeance on the Pinacothek for the risks run by the Louvre, about which they don’t give a damn anyway. The Kaffir warrior who lay sleeping within their souls has awakened: “An eye for an eye …” We will all end up blind, for they will put out our eyes too.
Birth of Our Power Page 15