Low-ceilinged, the floor unswept, Room III is peopled mostly by Russian Jews. It has its own grimy “café,” where you can get credit; the patrón, a man with a bizarre yellow mane, wears a blue suit which was once well cut, lapels now shiny with grease spots. A pair of pincenez—of which one of the lenses is cracked inside the gold frame, causing his melancholy glance to deviate to one side—is perched on his fleshy nose. Goldstein is not, appearances to the contrary, the unhappiest of men. What possessed him to put his two cents in one day, in a crowd on the rue de Rambuteau, maintaining that, after all, the Huns are men like the rest of us and that everyone will have to admit it, sooner or later, when all the bleeding people go home to lick their wounds, like dogs after a frenetic battle? He can’t forgive himself for this. The bailiffs auctioned off his shop: I. GOLDSTEIN, watchmaker. His wife is barely keeping alive, consumed by cancer. He serves us doses of chicory for one sou; and, after sundown, leaving the Argentinean to watch over the business (this is when the Argentinean pinches sugar and soap from him), passes into the next room, a nice quiet corner inhabited by old Ossovsky, and draws from his marvelous flute (“Ah, what an instrument, my friend!”) long, long, heart-rending melodies. “Would you be so kind,” suggests Ossovsky sweetly, “as to play the Frug aria?” Sobs, fleeing like ripples, escape from the ebony pipe (and, in the garden, a taciturn soldier, gassed in the Artois, pacing along the barbwire, feels himself overcome by the unknown sadness of the world, shudders, and understands vaguely how poignant things are …” Oh, shit—what blues …”).
Ossovsky lives alone in a monastic cell, entirely white. Meticulously clean, very stiff, with the square, shoulders of an old officer and a faded face encircled by a light silvery beard. His voice is an enveloping smile, for he speaks with great delicacy; his piercing glance dissects things with the sweetness of a well-honed scalpel. Some walnuts spread over the title page of L’Oeuvre are drying on the windowsill. Ossovsky rolls a cigarette, murmuring Frug’s lines: “Carry my soul into those blue horizons, / where the steppe stretches out to infinity, / wide like a great sadness, / wide like my hopeless pain …” and suddenly raises his eyes toward the flute player in an empty half-smile:
“The suffering of Israel.”
And it is impossible to say whether he is mocking or serious. He comes from a prison. They say he stole a pearl necklace, seven years ago in a palace in Nice, from a neurotic Brazilian woman.
Squatting on their beds, two tailors are sewing. One, a marionette in a frock coat, says of himself: “Zill is not a man; nothing but a tailor.” What does he read, in the evening by the glow of a candle, with his spectacles off and his nose in the book? The Key to Dreams. The other, gray tufts at his temples, a collector of anecdotes and gossip with an endless gift of gab, sleeps on three little white cushions, sent from home. Almost every week he makes a tragic scene, to the great delight of the whole room, to his son, the rascally Yanek, played out according to ancient family rites. He is seen pointing a menacing finger at the mocking adolescent: “Your father disowns you, do you understand me? You are no longer my son! Begone, you good-for-nothing!” The biblical fury of this “Begone, you good-for-nothing!” sends all the neighbors guffawing into their pillows. Far into the night, the father and son will be heard insulting each other in whispers. But when, one day, they had to lay the father down in his bed, long and pale like a cadaver, his heart sounding the toxin of agony in his chest, we saw the son trembling in earnest like a dry leaf in the wind.
There is also Professor Alschitz. “Teacher of poise and of Spanish,” he says, introducing himself with an exaggerated bow and a curious glance, at once pressing, as if the better to raise your inevitable doubts, and furtive, for he is a visionary who lies even to himself—as well as a sly devil well disposed to swindling you. His slight shoulders are hunched under a decent looking jacket; he has a blue chin, strong features, and great bovine eyes; poise—learned in provincial theaters—and nervous hysteria. He flies into a passion, taps his foot like a spoiled child and, after having talked about his myocarditis or the lesions he has in his right lung or flaring up angrily, dissolves in self-pity and cries shamelessly. At these moments he paces up and down the room, mopping his eyes with his batiste handkerchief. Once a young Russian soldier who was more naïve than should be allowed took him seriously, and the professor won all his linen at cards in eight days. Since we have formed a group, Alschitz pretends to be a “defeatist”; but we are learning little by little that at the beginning of the war he pretended to volunteer for the Legion, and that he was arrested in a Montmartre bar on the eve of his departure for Argentina where he placed housemaids in houses of assignation.
Forty men, mostly Jews, sleep in this room. Some, nameless and faceless, talkative however, grimy, famished, fill the corners with a swarm of voices and gestures, and are forgotten as soon as they are no longer there, as soon as one has turned his back. Two Zionists with the oriental ugliness of pyramid builders and high, red, sugar-loaf skulls shaved like those of fellahs, argue, argue, and argue, tirelessly entangling and untangling the skein of their subtleties. They are, nonetheless, fine fellows.
We assemble here, in the late afternoon, a few from every room. The comrades form a circle around the reader in front of whom the open newspapers are spread out. An embryonic crowd, thirty to fifty silent men, huddle around listening. The reader translates the dispatches: “Congress of the Soviets … Trotsky assassinated…. The Germans in the Ukraine …” At times his voice trembles with emotion. One evening, when he had announced the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly, the group split, leaving two bitter handfuls of men clinging to each other in a violent debate. “They’re madmen. They’re ruining Russia. They’re ruining the revolution. You’ll see!”—“Yes, we’ll see, we’ll see. They’re a thousand times right. That’s how you have to deal with parliaments: a boot in the tail.”—“We can see that our country’s blood doesn’t cost you anything, snotnose!”—“What? What?”—“A fine invention: socializing poverty! Let’s pool all our lice and debts together, eh, comrades? Plekhanov said …”—“Your Plekhanov is a fraud. Let him make war to the bloody end safe in his library.”—“The revolution should stop at nothing. Socializing poverty is better than exploiting it …”
At other times a dreamy group would hang back by the open window. Dmitri, a thin sailor coughing out his lungs, would propose:
“‘Transvaal?’”
The whole room struck up this hymn, full of allusions, which was often sung in the provincial towns of Russia during the years when the only freedom people were permitted to exalt in the Empire was a South African freedom crushed by the English. “Transvaal, Transvaal, O my country, all ablaze in flames …” Singing unites men like shared struggle, suffering, or exaltation. We felt like brothers. Our prisoners’ voices floated, supreme, over the darkened orchards of that Normandy countryside, calling up long-silent voices from the depths of a revolutionary past and perhaps reaching out across thousands of miles to choruses of soldiers of a living revolution resting on the banks of wide rivers.
TWENTY-SIX
Us
SUCH WAS THE SLOW-MOTION EXISTENCE OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS: HUNGER doled out with indifference by commissions that probably believed that these people were already much too well off at a time when so many others worth infinitely more were being killed. Each day this collection of suspects, undesirables, and subversives was given a three-hundred-gram slice of bread, soup, and beans; and they had nothing to do but wait for the end of the cataclysm under which empires and cathedrals crumbled. Mail call every morning: newspapers, letters, practical jokes like the following fake answer from a lawyer-deputy which staggered Alschitz for several evenings:
“Monsieur,
Your case appears very interesting to me. Your dossier, which I have examined with the permission of Monsieur the Prime Minister, contains documents on which full light must be shed. Please let me know, with the greatest possible accuracy, your whereabouts on the night of
the 17th to the 18th of August 1914; between seven and nine in the evening …”
The professor of poise and Spanish searched desperately through his past, at a distance of years. “I think,” he said at last, “that I was in Nancy …”—“In Nancy!” exclaimed Sam. “In the east! Oh, my poor friend!”
Long walks in the yard, to kill the time. Rare were those, in this forced leisure, who still knew the value of time, who read, who sketched, who studied. Equally rare the obstinate ones who refused to let themselves go. Shaving every day, washing thoroughly at the pump, then deep-breathing exercises, brushing your clothes, polishing your shoes, were, however, sure signs of victory over demoralization. This self-discipline kept a man upright, full of simple confidence, among the flabby.
The regulations weren’t hard. It was only isolation from the outside world, idleness, hunger, captivity without any reason or definite limit, the loaded rifles aimed at our windows. From reveille to taps we were free. And the days floated by as empty as in a prison, but filled with a distracting hum of talk, of laughter, of walks, of unimportant tasks, of card games or checkers. Maerts was getting richer. Faustin II washed the gentlemen’s laundry. The Argentinean ran unseemly errands from one room to another and mingled with the orderlies. Alschitz gave lessons (six sous a visit). Ossovsky, that saintly old thief, read by his window; old Kostia told his black beads, Antoine wandered along the walls, staggering a little, face turned toward the ground, as if drunk—drunk perhaps from hunger; the others, four hundred others, in the end just like these, four hundred prisoners, imagined they were killing the time that was slowly killing them … The sick lived face to face with their disease, like Krafft; with his wrinkled cheeks—in whose garret room we used to gather—who would turn aside in order to spit into his handkerchief and then count up the threads of blood in his sputum. Stool pigeons wrote down things overhead among the groups in childishly scrawled penciled notes, and in the evening Richard, the gendarme, would pass under our windows inside the stockade and pick up the wads of paper weighted with pebbles. There were two old men, completely white, one Alsatian, the other Belgian, both equally broken, walking with the aid of the same crutches, nourished on the same scraps, smoking the same butts, rooming together under the stairway of the unused infirmary, who hated each other with a deadly hatred. We used to go to listen to them at the pharmacy, for they slept under the neighboring loft. Jean, the male nurse, made them retire an hour before taps and locked them in. You could hear them grumbling, moaning, stirring up the straw in their mattresses, undressing slowly. Powerless oaths fell about them like flaccid globs of spit. Then each curled up on his mattress, they would resume their old quarrel, repeated each day, and their voices alternated, so similar that it took a practiced ear to distinguish between them, coming together in a single litany of invective. “Filthy carrion, eh, filthy carrion, species of dirty camel, camel—God’s name if you’re not a misery …” they continued insulting each other in this manner until grogginess overcame them; then they would fall asleep, openmouthed, with the greenish faces of the asphyxiated, and their breath continued to mingle.
The infirmary was deserted, since the sick preferred to remain in the barracks. The male nurse Jean lived alone in a suite of empty rooms. He had a quiet corner smelling of carbolic, a window (barred) looking out on the garden, and as much ether, cocaine, and morphine as he wanted. This chubby lad, pale and fat-cheeked, with round eyes like bubbles of Japanese porcelain ready to leap out of their sockets, constantly drugged himself. “I’m a happy man,” he used to say. “I’m the dispenser of dreams, the warden of the keys to Paradise, Saint Jean of the Charitable Syringe. Let all the good fellows looking for a good time come unto me.” And, cordially, putting a brotherly arm around his visitor, he would blow a breathful of ether in his face: “A little drink, or an injection? An injection, old boy, there’s nothing like it … And now listen …”
And if you listened he would tell you endlessly about his loves with Stéphanie: Stéphanie, a cute kid with green eyes, as spiteful and as affectionate as a cat; Stéphanie, who was “under my skin, in my blood”; Stéphanie who cheated on him (“Believe me, I’ll kill her some day!”); Stéphanie who still wrote him a four-page letter every day full of profound double meanings, read between the lines, reread, learned by heart from one evening to the next; Stéphanie, exasperating and ravishing bitch: “Ah, if only you could see her arms, her neck …
“Ah, her letters. Oh, baby, when I think of you I almost want to forget you, to tear you out of here, yes, tear you out …”
His tone would suddenly become excruciating. He would open the poison drawer, always kept locked, and pull out a packet of bizarre, crosshatched letters, written over, you might think, several times.
Sam crushed him one evening.
“Tell me, Jean,” he asked him quietly, “does it really amuse you to write yourself letters from Stéphanie every day? You end up believing in them, eh?”
Jean seemed to emerge from a dream or to awaken; a clear, white glimmer passed over his pasty face. And went out. He seemed to grow larger, harder, heavier; perhaps stunned; perhaps on the point of charging forward like a brute beast. He walked ponderously up to my comrade and whispered:
“Get out.”
Sam turned his back on him, out of bravado, drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, and left. Never again did Jean talk to us of Stéphanie …
We stayed alive. The days passed by. The weeks, the months, the seasons, the battles, the revolution, the war passed by. Life passed by.
We formed a world apart within this city. It sufficed for one of us to call the others together with that magic word “Comrades,” and we would feel united, brothers without even needing to say it, sure of understanding each other even in our misunderstandings. We had a quiet little room with four cots, the walls papered with maps, a table loaded with books. There were always, a few of us there, poring over the endlessly annotated, commented, summarized texts. There Saint-Just, Robespierre, Jacques Roux, Baboeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin were spoken of as if they had just come down to take a stroll under the trees. Robespierre’s error, “decapitating the Parisian masses themselves when he struck at the enragés of the Commune,” exasperated our old Fomine, who would thunder—his white mustache bristling, his eyebrows and mane in battle array, leonine despite his provincial’s frock coat—that the Incorruptible One had doomed the Revolution by cutting off too many heads. “As long as he guillotined to the right, he was correct; the day he began guillotining to the left, he was ruined. That’s my opinion.” It was the opinion of a fine old man, astonishingly young, always ready to fly off the handle, susceptible, irritated by trifles—his face abruptly screwed up like a bulldog’s at these moments—but devoured by a need for activity, for solidarity, for struggle, for passionate affirmation. Expelled from England, expelled from France long ago—“Under another name, they don’t know anything about it!”—interned at the age of sixty. The misfortune of Blanqui, a prisoner during the Commune, the head of the revolution cut off and preserved in the Château du Taureau at the very moment when the Parisian proletariat lacked a real leader, still troubled us as the worst kind of ill luck. Krafft, the chemist, member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Bolsheviks), a sickly, tidy little man, sharp profile, thin lips, would explain in his extremely gentle voice—a copy of Karl Marx’s Civil War in France covered with penciled notes in hand—that a firm offensive by the Communards against Versailles could probably have changed the course of history …
This past is not all we have: we also have the world and the future. Three syndicalist sailors, Wobblies, have arrived, two from the United States, one from Australia; if they can’t delve profoundly into history, they still have some great stories to tell. Dmitri, a Little Russian who had been an athlete, now lanky, hollow-chested, wrinkled on the neck and face, almost succeeded in causing the incredibly ill-nourished crew of an English steamer to mutiny. A commonplace incident of a howl of wormy soup thrown
into the face of the first mate earned him long days in irons, tormented by the cold, in the brig where the water was sometimes up to his knees; then, passing through the Red Sea in the deadly furnace heat. The result is that he is dying, his lungs consumed. But he would still like to see the Don again. “There perhaps …” But he has hardly proffered these words when a doubt of living (already a certainty of death) pierces through him and he bravely shrugs his shoulders. After all, here or there, a grave is a grave. His two pals from America, Karl and Gregor (in whose bunks leaflets were discovered during a search aboard the Theodore Roosevelt) were happier men: calm Vikings, joyful boxers in the morning at the pump, mending their clothes in the afternoons, waiting serenely. Admirable in appearance: that golden, flaxen beard—Karl; and that other massive, almost square head, the head of a Reiter practicing physical culture, bending over the needle, the thread, the cloth—Gregor. Gregor, the elder, can still remember the days when, as a boy, he used to take long walks through the forests of the Düna, alone, carrying messages to the Brothers of the Forest in the depths of their hidden glades. “I once met Yann the Great,” he said, “Yann the Great who was shot down at Wenden …”
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