THIRTY-THREE
The Essential Thing
OUR FOOTSTEPS SINK INTO THE SOFT SNOW. WE ARE ENTERING A NEW NIGHT, biting with cold, transparent as if under a totally black crystal dome. Our convoy moves ahead by groups, loaded down with packages, tripping over invisible obstacles under the snow. Children are crying, terrified by such deep darkness, their fingers frostbitten. We are being escorted by gaunt shadows. They move about lightly at the dividing line between reality and the bottomless darkness which begins at either edge of the road under the dense blackness of tall pines. I know that they are blond Finns, dressed in long overcoats, armed with the short carbines of border guards. Their eyes, in which the image of cold lakes is reflected, have been watching over us for two days with an impassable hostility. They are mute. They move forward, opening up the night. They halt. The darkness slowly engulfs them. We are still moving ahead into a sort of glacial no man’s land … A motionless shape emerges suddenly from the night, so close when we notice it that we can touch it. It is a soldier, standing stock-still, leaning with both hands on his rifle, covered with earth, wearing an astrakan hat, bearded up to his glowing wolf-like eyes—an emaciated muzhik. The red star incrusted in the fur above his forehead glows black like a fantastic wound on an animal skin. We greet him in a low voice, with an exalted, but curiously heavy heart. “Greetings, brother!” Our brother, this soldier, stares at us severely … Brothers? brothers? Are we really brothers? What man is not a threat to another man? Karl plants himself in front of him and his resonant voice, dispelling all unreality, cuts through the night. The no man’s land has been crossed.
“Greetings, comrade. What’s the news?”
“Nothing … Hunger … Nothing.”
What is nothing? Hunger?
“Do you have any bread?”
We have some. Take, Comrade. Bread, that is the essential thing.
Lanterns ran up and down the tracks. A dark shape counted us without seeming to see, us as we moved by. We might have thought we were in a hostile desert. The locomotive whistled. The coaches were dark and frozen, but inside them we found straw on the long lateral bunks, a good cast-iron stove and piles of cordwood. The fire sparkled; the glow of candles surrounded us, in this encampment on wheels, with a primitive intimacy.
We passed slowly through a strange, black and white lunar landscape. Not a single light. The train rolled through this frozen desert until dawn, which rose over the crystalline, iridescent snows, as pure as on mountaintops. Little wooden houses appeared, grouped around the blue bulbs of a church. Fields of snow were stretched out to either side, piled up in oddly shaped drifts: we perceived at last that it was a deserted station. The sky had a blue, near-white, unutterable purity. The first houses of the city appeared in absolute silence, immobile, peaceful. Our hearts were more and more constricted. Not a soul. Not a noise. Not a tuft of smoke. This implacable splendor of the snow, the polar limpidity of the sky. The dead houses were terrifying.
Ah!
A thin line of smoke rose above a chimney. And all at once, a marvelous apparition, a golden-haired young woman, wearing a red kerchief on her head, doming out of a gray hovel with a hatchet in her hand, began to chop wood, some hundred yards off. We listened avidly to that rhythmic sound, we admired the virile curve of her bare arms. Dmitri, whose last strength was waning, forced a smile.
“We are out of the darkness at last,” he said.
The train came to a halt. We had spent the day rolling through the deserts of the outlying railroad yards. The Internationale broke out in a din of brasses. A long red banner, running across the fronts of the wooden shelters, cried out: “WELCOME TO THE CAPTIVES OF IMPERIALISM!” The snow-covered wooden platform seemed deserted, however. We saw only about thirty people huddling under a wide calico banner (THE REIGN OF THE WORKERS WILL LAST FOREVER!), the band, and a few men dressed in black leather and carrying heavy Mausers in wooden holsters at their waists. The brasses fell silent; a tall devil sheathed in a reversed sheepskin, but wearing a light English cap on his head, jumped up on a bench. He had a resounding voice, made for dominating crowds, which flowed over our little group and carried off into the distance in the vast empty station. He began to speak all at once, without looking at us, his eyes circled by little silver-rimmed glasses, his chin black, his mouth enormous. While he was talking, we noticed the motionless musicians, a dozen yellowed faces, bony noses, beards like burnt grass—faces lined with deep fatigue. They were wearing old, unmatched uniforms, all equally gray, and various forms of headgear: huge white fur bonnets, astrakan hats, the flat caps of the old army. The trombone player had put on a pair of magnificent green gloves. Others had red hands, stiffened by the cold. Some wore old gloves, of leather or cloth and full of holes. They were of every age, from eighteen to sixty. An old man who might once have been fat, now flabby with hanging cheeks, stared stupidly at us next to a skinny kid, blowing on his fingers. By their indifferent expressions, their undernourished looks, the incongruousness of their dress, high boots, Belgian uniform leggings, civilian trousers falling over down-at-heel rubbers—by their hunched shoulders, their weary and detached attitudes—they expressed only hunger and fatigue. They were freezing. Never could the idea come to anyone to rush toward them with outstretched hand saying Brothers! for they belonged entirely to a world where words, feelings, fine sentiments shed their prestige immediately on contact with primordial realities. One could only have talked to them about a fire in front of which you could warm up; about shoes to be mended, about flannels to keep your empty stomach warm, about hot soup with which to fill it. I stared intensely at these silent men, standing there in such great distress. I thanked them for teaching me already about true fraternity, which is neither in sentiments nor in words, but in shared pain and shared bread. If I had no bread to share with them, I must keep silent and take my place at their side: and we would go off somewhere to fight or to fall together, and would thus be brothers, without saying so and perhaps without even loving each other. Loving each other, what for? It is necessary to stay alive. At that instant the Agitator’s words came through to me. Endlessly he was repeating the same gesture of hammering a nail into hard wood with sharp blows. He was giving all the capitals of the world to the Revolution: Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Rome, Calcutta. He cried: “Liebknecht!” and
“… we have taken Revel! We have taken Riga! We have taken Ufa! We have taken Minsk! We will take Vilna! We will conquer famine, typhus, lice, imperialism! We will not stop, neither on the Vistula nor on the Rhine! Long live …”
He stopped short and disappeared into the group, now revivified by the explosion of the brasses. The Agitator, without looking back at us, crossed the deserted rooms with broad strides. He had to be at the Baltic factory at five o’clock to give a report on the international situation at the workers’ conference where the Mensheviks were cooking something up. And we had nothing to teach him. He was suffering from a stomach virus; his boots were leaky.
Who is that other fellow?
Why it’s Fleischmann! Of course!
He has hardly changed, only his clothing: black leather, worn out at the elbows and pockets, the jacket pockets stuffed full, as in Paris. He is still wearing his striped trousers, he has the same look of a preoccupied old night bird …
“Greetings. How are you? A letter for you sent through the Danish Red Cross. I’ve been here six months already. I’ve just come back from the Front. We took Riga. I hope it holds! Where is Potapenko!”
“Here I am,” said Sam, appearing. “Hello.”
Fleischmann shakes hands with him perfunctorily, staring at the others—He takes a stack of lodging papers out of his pocket. There. There. “Potapenko, you come with me; I have a car. Let’s go.”
“See you later,” Sam told us.
THIRTY-FOUR
Balance Due
THE AUTO, AN OLD FORD WITH A GRAY CANVAS TOP AND ISINGLASS WINDOWS had probably not been washed since an apprentice drove it to the Soviet of
the Second District saying: “The boss has run out. I am nationalizing the machine. I place it in the service of the revolution.” (Which was, by the way, a good way of not having to leave for the Front.) Fleischmann opened the door for Sam. There was already someone in the car.
“What, Fleischmann, you’re not coming?”
“No. I’ll meet you later. This comrade will drive you.”
The door slams; he moves off, in such a hurry that he doesn’t say good-by. The auto rolls over the snow with a clanging of hardware and wild backfires.
“So what kind of gas do you use?” Sam asks his neighbor, to break the ice.
“Whatever kind we have,” grumbles the other man.
All Sam can see of him is a long, regular profile and a clear complexion. Probably a Lett. The isinglass sheets jumble the streets together, all alike under the snow with their closed store fronts and shop windows full of spidery bullet holes. The machine bounces, pants, and pitches through the ruts of hardened snow. Sam, overcome by the cold, wishes he could shake off this fogginess. Carelessly, but with a secret anxiety, he asks his companion:
“Where are we going?”
“Here we are.”
Through the half-open door, the Lett holds out his pass. A triangular bayonet scratches against the isinglass. The Ford turns into a narrow little courtyard where there is nothing but a broken-down truck, covered with snow.
“To the rear, on the right,” says the Lett.
Sam moves ahead, with the man behind him, strangely troubled. A typewriter is crackling somewhere. The narrow corridors, intersected by sharp corners, are deserted, badly illuminated by feeble electric lights. They form a labyrinth; you go down one flight of stairs only to climb another. A woman with her hair cut short on the back of her neck passes by very rapidly, carrying some blue files. Finally a rather large waiting room opens up, poorly lighted by an electric bulb covered with flyspecks, hanging, shadeless, from a huge chandelier. Some worn blotters, covered with those mechanical drawings that preoccupied people put on paper with such childish attention, are lying about on tables. Sam collapses into a green leather couch, whose arms are supported by naiads carved in oak. The broken springs squeak; the leather is cracked. Opposite, a double door.
“Well?” Sam hesitantly asks at last of the Lett, who, sitting crosswise on a fluted chair of gilded wood, has pulled a crust of black bread out of his pocket and is getting ready to have supper.
“Wait,” says the Lett in a low voice.
Sam comes rapidly to his feet.
“Come on now. What is this? Am I under arrest?”
“Not so loud,” says the Lett. “I don’t know anything about it.”
Sam flops down on the couch again. The fogginess, the silence, the presence of this man whose regular chewing is all he can hear, the dilapidation of this ruined former salon, slowly fill him with a foreboding.
Finally one of the leaves of the door at the rear opens, and someone calls:
“Potapenko.”
Sam enters like an automaton powered by a spring. An enormous fear possesses him, he feels an indistinct anxiety in his chest, his stomach, his bones, and a tightness in his skull. Through a sort of foggy glass he can see three austere faces turned toward him: a dry old woman with grizzled hair gathered in a bun, an ageless man with a bulldog face who seems to be struggling with great effort against sleep, a big tall fellow with ruffled hair perched on the window sill in a cloud of smoke. The latter is the only one in uniform: bristling with braids, a huge red and gold insignia plastered across the right-hand pocket of his tunic. The tired bulldog, having puffed his sagging cheeks full of air, interrogates:
“How much a month did they pay you for your services, Le Matois?”
Potapenko, feeling the triple stare fixed on him, does not flinch, in spite of the shudder which passes from the small of his back to his throat. Behind these men, on a mahogany console, a gilded Empire clock marks the time: 11:20. Cupid and Psyche … Above, a portrait of Lenin. Potapenko takes a deep breath.
“I don’t understand.”
“We don’t have any time to waste,” resumes the bulldog, unmoved; and his eyelids droop shut, in spite of himself (he hasn’t slept for twenty hours). “Embassy Secretary Droujin used to send you eighty rubles a month from Washington. On June 27, 1913, Police Captain Kügel, on mission; raised your salary to one hundred rubles a month. Here is the note written in his hand: ‘A good, conscientious agent who knows emigré circles extremely well …’ You thanked him by letter on July 4. Here is your letter.” (His eyes are now entirely closed, he feels his head ready to fall down over agent Le Matois” blue dossier.) “Do you have any statement to make to us?”
Everything staggers around the dumb struck man standing there. This little room seems to be pitching like a cabin aboard the Andros. Everything is finished. He nods No.
“Why did you return?” asks the woman with the smoothed-back hair whom you might mistake for an old governess in a great house.
He answers in a whisper, surprised by his own answer because it comes from deep within him:
“I couldn’t live otherwise.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
“Go.”
All at once Sam feels curiously lightheaded. He recovers his slightly twisted, ironical smile. He makes a sign to the tousled-haired smoker, a Georgian or Turkistani with a ravenous profile: “A cigarette?” The colorful box bears a woman’s name: Ira. Diminutive: Irotchka … She would be a tall, auburn-haired girl …
Sam is gone. The bulldog places a blank form on the table in front of him: “Your opinion, Arkadi: on the debit side?”—“On the debit side.”—“Yours, Maria Pavlovna?”
“… Naturally.” Four lines in an uneven handwriting, signed forcefully, run across the form. “What’s next, Arkadi?”—“That business at the Whal factory …”
Sam found the waiting room empty. The other door open … Open! The narrow corridor is empty. He moves forward, on tiptoe, tense all over, unthinking, raised up by a senseless hope …” Where are you going?” Where has he come from, that damned Lett? The magic thread snaps …
“To the bathroom.”
“In the corner on the right.”
This boxlike room smells of urine. The electricity fills it with a feeble light. Having pulled the cord, Sam feels himself sinking. His elbow against the wall, his face in the hollow of his arm, he bites into the cloth to keep from sobbing. No more salvation, no more hope, no more anything. Ira. Irotchka. No one. No one will know that this sharp-featured man is there, like a terrified child, in complete collapse …
The Lett has heard nothing. Sam reappears, aged, thinned in four minutes, but straight, hard. As he is about to retrace his steps, the Lett says:
“Don’t bother. Pass this way.”
“Where are we going?”
The Lett answers with terrible solicitude:
“Please be patient a few moments longer.”
These stifling corridors are like the galleries of an underground city. A door, at the bottom of a stairway, and then the good feeling of the cold fresh air right on one’s face, the soft crackling of the snow, glimmering with silver flakes, under the feet. It is a little courtyard between tall buildings with black windows, like a mineshaft, but crudely illuminated by an electric bulb. Some stars shine high above. Sam, as if he knew this road which no one ever travels twice, moves toward a high rectangular pile of logs covered with snow. The trampled snow has taken on a brown tinge here; it gives off a stale odor. Some birch chips glisten on the edge of the bark, sliced off with an ax. The ax … Here they use a Nagan revolver, made in Seraing. Sam closes his eyes, shuddering. Someone comes up behind him. It must be 11:30.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Laws Are Burning
THE CENTRAL OFFICE OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND REFUGEES WOULD ONLY AGREE to lodge us, in its barracks where typhus was raging, for a few days, for Circular 3499 of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars of the Northe
rn Commune had just limited its prerogatives. They advised us to address ourselves, to simplify the formalities, to the Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Soviet. This Secretariat directed us—Sonnenschein and myself, who had taken charge of securing housing for the families as rapidly as possible—to the Repatriation Service of the Commissariat for Social Aid. From this Commissariat we obtained an imperative directive (two signatures and a seal on paper with a rubber-stamped letterhead, and crosswise, in huge letters, underlined in blue pencil: “URGENT!” … ) to the Housing Subsection of the Soviet for the Second District. This Soviet had just moved out of a building where the firewood had been used up and into another one where there was still some left; their offices occupied several luxurious apartments which looked as if they had been visited by a tornado the day before. Not only had the Housing Subsection got lost in the process of moving, but its leader (who, according to one version, had gone off to the front in the latest draft call, known as the Five Hundreds, or according to another, been arrested while returning from the country with a sack of flour in spite of the prohibition on transporting foodstuffs individually) had disappeared several days ago. Night was falling and we were dead with fatigue when a typist—seated before her machine smoking, in a delicious pink boudoir, between rolls of carpeting stamped with the seal of the Extraordinary Commission and rifles stacked against an Empire commode—dissipated our last hopes.
Birth of Our Power Page 24