by Victor Serge
His tablecloth was a newspaper. He laid out bread, salted cucumbers, butter. He worked the portable stove on the window-sill in order to stand in front of the expanse. The tin kettle purred. Outside, cows were passing by. A little girl ran from one to the other spurring their indolent progress. All at once three water-carriers came along the edge of the crest, three young women shouldering yokes, swinging the old wooden casks in rhythm with each step. Elkin heard them talking back and forth in loud voices. The last in line appeared to stand still for a very brief moment at the entrance of the path, a dark silhouette, erect, almost glowing against a background of empty sky: Galia. Elkin was staring at her so intensely that she was tempted to turn around. He was waiting for this movement, calling it forth. She did not make it, because of the yoke. She didn’t know why she held herself so straight, so proudly, as she descended the steep path, why the purplish-blue line of woods against the evening sky seemed enticing, vaguely poignant to her.
Elkin felt cold. There is a being on the earth from whom one waits for a gesture, less than a gesture, a glance, and who refuses it, without knowing. And all at once there is emptiness. The great strength we possess seems useless. Something within it is drained, for at the bottom of all strength there is apprehension. Elkin drank his flavourless tea while pacing from one corner to the other, a hunk of bread in his fist. At times he stopped at the table to rearrange some newspaper clippings, marked in red and blue, with his fingertip. Yield of arable land by acre . . . Canada . . . Australia . . . Denmark . . . the Ukraine . . . Black Lands . . . Western Siberia . . . Years . . . Gross figures and percentages . . .
At bottom, everything is contained in that.
* * *
On the other side of the river, snow still remained in hollow places among the rocks. The shrubs were turning green, a hue so undecided and light that you might have called it a glimmer of sunlight shining through the burgeoning shoots.
“I’m telling you it’s yellow and not green,” affirmed Avelii, “but since you’re used to thinking that bushes are supposed to be green, you no longer really see them. If you were a painter, you’d have a mighty big Right Deviation in your eye.” He was talking to Rodion as they both made their way along the bare rock between the bare trees, the sky, and the water. Rodion replied: “Don’t rely on your eyes. They don’t think.” Sometimes Rodion said intelligent things without really knowing it.
Avelii, a Georgian from Megrelia with perfectly-drawn features whitened by the North, a young, well-modulated voice which rang clear. “Eyes,” he said gaily, “eyes don’t need to think. They grasp and understand without it. I don’t like thinking, brother, I like seeing and touching. I’m breathing in this freshness. I don’t want anything more . . .” He stretched his neck and sniffed, smiling at everything.
Rodion looked at him sidewise, lowered his heavy forehead, a sad, hesitant little laugh in the depths of his eyes. Rodion: an unattractive face lit up by sea-green pupils. “Breathe all you like, comrade, that won’t teach you the sense of things.” Under his wolf-skin cap, his head was tortured by questions. He tried to find answers to them in books, but they prevented him from reading. His anxiety blurred the printed lines, henceforth unintelligible and useless. On one point, he saw clearly, and that was in his discussions with Elkin, on the river-bank, about State Capitalism, “a sort of enormous tank, old man, covering the whole horizon, which is going to crush everything.”
Avelii: student at the Industrial College of Baku, member of the youth organization, compromised for having questioned a lesson on Party history about the first divergences between the majority and the minority in 1904. Note in his file: “By his insidious questions attempted to discredit the leaders of the Party among the students.” Rodion: truck driver at the Penza bicycle factory compromised for having questioned the inequality of wages. Note in his file: “Pernicious agitator, dangerous demagogue, Trotskyist. Knows how to make the masses listen to him.” Because it happened that he couldn’t sleep for a whole long evening, his brain churning with statistics and ideas more difficult to steer than the heaviest trucks. And the next day, at the Party meeting, he reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out newspaper clippings in the margins of which he had scribbled equations in pencil. “Here, comrades, is the equation for the life of a worker in our factory: I call labour-time h, wages w, rent r, and I say that . . .”
At first they listened to him with indulgence, then with boredom. But his thinking made a breach in the general torpor, his voice grew passionate, his x’s suddenly transformed themselves into kilos of bread and meat, into roubles and kopecks, and they saw him, swaying from side to side, standing on a platform draped with red calico in front of a puny little black bust of Lenin, a stubborn kid with his head pulled into his neck, who was demonstrating by algebra, by Marx, by Lenin, by the day-before-yesterday’s Pravda, by Stalin’s own six points, that “the worker in our factory is hungry, dear comrades, and that’s the problem of problems—it’s the very meaning of life. Hegel said . . .”
He stopped short, unable to recapture the idea which had come to him out of the heap of words in a pamphlet on Hegel. “Hegel said: the worker in our factory can’t live on wages like these, that’s all.” His face beamed with satisfaction while the Party activists, following each other to the platform at a signal from the cell secretary, called him a demagogue, a careerist, an egotist who thought only of filling his belly, a Trotskyite, and a panic-monger. The truth was buzzing inside his skull; he didn’t understand a word of the arguments they were assaulting him with. Only at the end of the meeting, amid the scraping of benches, did he stand up to say loudly—and everybody heard him—with a broad smile, “Talk all you like! You know very well I’m right.”
Out in the street—a dismal street of perpetual mud, lined with picket fences which people were tearing down piece by piece each night to keep warm—an old worker put his hand on Rodion’s shoulder and, in a friendly voice, said, “You’re lost, comrade, that’s for sure, but you’re right. You’re great.”
“That’s right,” said Rodion warmly.
In reality, Rodion had both lost himself and found himself. He came to know the cellars of State Security, new faces, Northern skies. With the first half-pint of alcohol in him, problems appeared clearer, he began to feel intelligent. Then everything got cloudy again, and he felt like splitting wood with an axe, like he used to when he lived at home; or like grabbing young birch-trees in both hands to break them, uproot them and feel strong and victorious in the end. Then he could be heard to say, alternatively, “I’m nothing but a brute” or “Comrade Gorky is right. It’s a fine thing to be a man.” During these periods when he crashed, shattered, soared and suffered confusedly, the thing Rodion feared most was meeting up with Comrade Elkin.
They were arriving at the meeting place, a sort of rocky clearing under the slate cliff on the bank of the Black-Waters. It was a good spot, for you could see the approaching paths without being seen. A clump of birches filled a whole piece of universe there. The trees were waking back to life, their thin trunks all covered with silver whiteness and coolness. The sky filled their tracery of branches: the inescapable sky which cast its blue hues over the rock and over the dark, clear waters. Between the rock and the trees appeared a head, white mane blowing in the breeze. Avelii shouted: “Greetings, Ryzhik!” And the man, whose face was clean-shaven and wrinkled, raised his voice a little to reply. “The springtime, comrades! It’s magnificent.” He was talking with Elkin, who was seated comfortably on the stone, his cap skewed sideways over his temple: “An invention of the pre-industrial ages,” said Elkin in that solemn voice he liked to use when he made outlandish statements. “Doubtless you will explain it in terms of natural economy.”
“On the Yenisey,” said Ryzhik, “it was even more beautiful than here. The earth seemed to light up from within. Even before the snows had melted the grasses came to life and light filtered into the tiniest twig, the tiniest streamlet. You walked on light. The flowe
rs burst out of the ground overnight. Those flowers have cool, light colours. Only the stars resemble them. You leave the house one morning, you go out onto the plains, straight ahead, for there’s nothing anywhere, nothing but the horizon and the same horizon beyond the horizon. You’re alone, alone like . . . Ah! I can’t really say like whom, like what. Well, like a stone at the bottom of a well, and you don’t know what’s happening to you. You want to sing, you feel the earth is on a spree. It’s something marvellous, unique: anything might happen. That’s it, you’re going to turn around, just like that, and there right in front of you, in the emptiness, will be a great happiness. What kind? You have no idea, but its possible, that’s sure. And you do turn around and you see birds arriving. They’re coming through the sky in clouds. They’re coming with great flapping wings, and the light is climbing, the stones have a luminous polish, there are flowers, the steppe is singing in silence. Nothing happens to you, of course, but everything is possible.”
Elkin said: ‘Ryzhik, you missed your calling. You should be turning out octosyllables at three roubles a line. Why did you have to get mixed up in the Revolution? Today, you would be an official of the Pastoral Poets’ Division of the Union of Soviet Writers. You would be inundating the gazettes with organized, ideologically correct, and profitable lyricism. Pushkin would turn green with envy on his pedestal.”
“Go to Hell. I would never have seen the amazing flowers of the North. And you see, nothing in the world would make me want to cross them out of my life. Around the time when the ice began to break up, the children would go up the hill to keep watch. There was always a whole gang of observant children up there, and they never took their eyes off the river. In the evening they would report on the events of the day: ‘the first crevasse has enlarged, a pool has formed on the surface, a new crevasse is starting, you can hear cracking . . .’ They reckoned the dates of preceding years, observed the flight of birds. When the cracked ice finally began to move, when the first clear waters opened up, those children would come bounding down to the houses with shouts of joy. They were carriers of joy. The doors would fling open, people dropped everything: ‘It’s here!’ They brought accordions, and all the young people, boys and girls, set off for the hill to greet the real Spring. We would go there, too, little Nikolkin and I. (Did you know him, little Nikolkin from the Donetz? He had done four years in the isolators; he died in Perm). Nikolkin, who used to say: ‘Let me live long enough to see a single socialist prison dynamited, just one. That’s all I ask of the permanent revolution.” ’
A feminine form, swollen by old felt boots, furs, an old cloak, appeared at the turning in the rocks. “Greetings, greetings.” Varvara was the last to arrive, for she worked at the fishermen’s cooperative distributing four hundred grams of black bread per work-card, salt, rough-cut tobacco, matches, and nothing more. (The promised sugar is two months late, the coupons for it are apparently going to be voided. As for soap, the Regional Centre has been announcing a case of it for seven weeks, let’s keep hoping.) The grey fur of her old wolf-skin cap blended with her hair. Yet her face retained a touch of beauty which was almost invisible, superfluous.
Elkin said:
“Comrade Ryzhik’s report on the joys of boreal springtime is adopted without debate, unanimously with one abstention: mine. I have ideological reservations. Let’s proceed with the agenda. Reports on the Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator, the agrarian question, the United Front in Germany. You have the floor, Varvara.”
* * *
“In a few months the Left-Communist Sector of the Verkhne-Uralsk Central Prison has grown from 45 to 96, an increase in strength of more than 100% due to the arrests carried out in the large centres on the eve of the XVIth Anniversary of the October Revolution. On the other hand, the unorganized Party sector has gone up from 8 to 160. These are the orthodox people under suspicion who don’t realize what’s hit them and still keep on with their stupid platitudes. This twenty-fold increase shows us the rising curve of repression directed against the unstable elements of the ruling bureaucracy. These two figures, of which the first is the index of the resistance of the conscious proletarian vanguard to the Bonapartist dictatorship and the second that of the accelerated liquidation of the Party, together demonstrate . . .”
“What do these figures demonstrate together, that each of us doesn’t already know? We live on that knowledge alone, that’s the reason we’re here, and knowing it has lead us to this slow death. The Revolution is showing a false face which is no longer its own. It is refuting itself, negating itself, cutting us down, killing us. You see it, but can you believe it? We used to feel infallibly victorious. Where’s the mistake? Everything we loved is now reduced to a despicable sham. I ask you to weigh the thesis and the antithesis, to think through every word. Be careful not to underrate the dictatorship of the proletariat even if it is sick, if it loses its head, if it is iniquitous.”
“Be careful of yourself, comrade, your illusions are quite understandable, but you’re getting drunk on words. Are we Enragés, Equals, or proscripts of Prairial?”
“Drop your historical analogies, old man: They have nothing to do with Marxism. It’s Lenin’s ‘Who will carry if off’ that is the point today; and it’s not settled yet.
“In this connection, comrades, I request a three-second recess for Karl’s latest revelation (may his revolutionary’s soul rest in peace: his body is rotting slowly in the toilet of the General Secretary’s office). The ‘who will carry it off’—we’ve known that for a long time. The ‘who will carry it off to the grave’—we know that, too. But ‘when will his turn come?’ That’s what we don’t know . . .”
“. . . The Left-Communist sector of the prison has established fraternal ties with the Anarchists, who joined them during last year’s second hunger strike and this year’s first. The June strike was lost through a miscalculation. Scurvy had been rife during the winter; they should have taken the weakness brought on by the terrible cold into consideration. Several comrades were very ill by the seventh day. The strike committee proposed calling off the strike on their own responsibility, but they themselves were removed that night by surprise and taken off to the detention centre.”
“Removed? Why didn’t they resist?”
“Summoned separately to the prison office for negotiations around two in the morning, assaulted in the corridor, gagged, bound, kidnapped, what . . . The second committee, set up the following day, was unable to assume its functions because it was sequestered in a distant building and kept under surveillance. At six in the evening the commandant of the prison received telegraphed orders to resort to forced feeding. Old Kikvadze resisted. They sent to the madhouse for a strait-jacket to control him. His lips were in shreds from the food-pipe. He finally fainted, so that they couldn’t feed him. The other sick people decided to resist by force. Then a character from Moscow arrived, sent by the Special Collegium, who asked to meet with delegates.
“ ‘The Special Collegium of the State Political Administration,’ he says ‘has decided at this time to refrain from increasing by administrative sanction the sentences of prisoners who have served their terms. Your demands are satisfied, your strike is thus pointless.’
“The comrades answer him: ‘You’re giving in today because you’re afraid of our deaths. We don’t believe a word out of your mouth. We got your number a long time ago. What guarantees will you give us for the future?’ He was a real bastard, decorated with three Orders of the Red Flag won in the offices of concentration camps. He puts on a dignified expression and: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat keeps its hands free.’
“ ‘That’s a fact,’ says Grisha, who was swimming in slow exasperation, ‘and here’s the proof!’ With that he gives him a slap in the face but stumbles (you don’t hand out slaps very well on the ninth day of a hunger-strike) and misses him—luckily, for it would have caused us a fresh lot of trouble.
“The sick were extremely low. Four barracks declared an immediate end to the str
ike. The Far Left put out a protest bulletin in order to link this ‘shameful surrender’ to ‘centrist hesitations.’ The Left decided to form an organizing committee responsible for the preparation of a general movement to continue to the end at any price. The strike strategy shows the necessity for simultaneous actions in all the prisons, but it will take at least a year to perfect, if it can be managed. A young mechanic from Tver (an ex-member of the Worker’s Opposition won over to Trotskyism who then joined the Democratic Centralist group—I can’t recall his name) refused to recognize the decision that was taken, continued the strike on his own for several days, then tried to slash his wrists. What became of him? I don’t have any idea . . .”
“When all is said and done, it’s always the same story, for years now: only the dates and names change. Do you remember Tobolsk Central Prison, Ryzhik? Do you remember the Ufa Prison, Elkin?”
“Those were blessed days. I had promised the warden to have him made Director of all the Sanatoria in Crimea. He let my mail through and brought me brandy. There’s one fellow whom History cheated . . .”