by Victor Serge
“There are motors . . .” he began enthusiastically, but he didn’t know exactly what motors, only that they existed, simply marvellous ones, ready to liberate men . . .
“Shut up,” yelled a smut-grimed devil. “A plague on your motors. It’s because they don’t want to produce anything anymore but machines that there’s no more bread. Men will end up starving under machines, for sure. And as for you, you’d do better to learn how to make love.”
Furious laughter shook the stall, plunging Rodion into confusion. The fact is that he didn’t know how to dance or to woo the girls on the Ivanskaya who laughingly toss peppery quatrains in your face—or how to get himself to ask them for the least of their favours. The girls he had walked to the Marat Garden, while talking about “the fundamental transformation of relations between the sexes” had found him duller than most agitators. Only one expressed interest in an important subject, and that was to ask him: “You’re educated, Rodion, so explain to me what a jazz is? People are talking about it . . .” Rodion didn’t know. Rodion asked Ryzhik, who didn’t know either, then Elkin, who put on his most mocking expression and proclaimed:
“Technique of Negro music exploited by the bourgeois decadence of the music-hall”—which could only be a joke.
Rodion knew the torment of thinking—he never stopped thinking. As he re-tinned cooking-pots his lips murmured: “The iron law of wages . . .” He had more ideas than he had words; he muddled, confused, and jumbled formulas and texts, never sure if it was Engels or Lenin who had said a certain thing, aghast and bewildered by it, discovering glimmers of light in it, tripping into its pitfalls, trying to grasp the mist. Obsessed by problems, and above all by the problem of the worker. Without a commodity-equivalent for real wages, without a full wage corresponding to the actual product of labour, minus a necessary quantity set aside for the expansion of production, there is no socialism: therefore . . .
Here, Rodion felt the strength that comes from grasping a truth, but how to tie it in with the dialectic of history, the period of transition, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the degeneration of the Party, the dictatorship of the Georgian over an exhausted proletariat? How to explain, by the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, the law of August 7, 1932, made for shooting starving peasants, since socialist and cooperative property is sacred and the workers are thus the owners of everything—everything—even and including the grain they steal to keep from starving to death, and the bullet fired into the backs of their necks because they stole their own wheat? What connection between all of this and the plan of Go-El-Ro (State Electrification) which is nevertheless being carried out? For Lenin said: “Socialism equals Soviet power plus electrification”—and we have electrification: the Volkhovstroy, Shatura, Kashira, the Zagess, the Dnieprostroy, the most powerful turbines in the world. We have power—it’s still the dictatorship of the proletariat, however sick it may be—but we don’t have electric light bulbs in the big centres, no kerosene, no candles in Chernoe. We no longer have Soviets, we don’t have socialism because . . . Is the bureaucracy a class? A subclass? A caste? A corrupted element of the conscious proletarian vanguard? A fraction of the middle classes? The involuntary instrument of international capitalism? Is it . . .
People who understand don’t know how happy they are, how bitter it is to live without really understanding, feeling your way, half-blind. And how to serve the workers’ cause then? How? For thirty roubles a month, Rodion rented a corner with a mattress on some planks, at the Kurochkins’, who lived—the four of them—in a low room under fishing-nets, strings of dried fish, and odd objects hanging from smoke-blackened beams. Rodion came home one evening, sat down in the corner, and opened a metropolitan newspaper in which Kaganovich, a Politburo member, dealt with the immediate tasks of the shock-brigades in the mines. Kurochkin was once again mending his boots with wooden pegs, which he was pounding into the leather of an old transmission-belt with sharp little hammer blows. The mother was wringing out grey diapers in a tub. Nina was rocking the cradle of the last-born with a rough movement, and the purple-faced baby was crying softly, endlessly, from an unknown hurt.
Rodion thought about the life of a human being—about what is called fate, but does fate exist? Since no doctor would agree to do the abortion for less than forty roubles and the hospital refused to admit the wife of an artisan who worked for himself, this child was born to die, soon probably, or to live, to live in spite of everything, until it saw the dawn of a classless society—where there will be no more poverty. But what will there be, then? What will there be? How to imagine the colour of a life without poverty. Rodion thought the child would die; and the mother thought so too; and the father thought so too (“let him go quickly, at least there’ll be one less hapless wretch”) and Rodion threw his newspaper onto the bed and went out.
Varvara Platonova received him gladly. It felt nice at her place. A white tea-cloth over the boxes she used as a table, a white cover on the boxes she used for a bed. In the evening, a candle placed nicely on a saucer. Varvara, with clean hands and worn fingers, exhaling the smoke of her Tractor cigarettes through her nostrils. She served Rodion herb-tea, with sweetish cakes she fried herself. “What do you think, comrade,” asked Rodion. “Is there such a thing as fate or is it only a word and whatever must happen, happens?” That was not at all what he meant to say, it was more or less the opposite. “No, Varvara Platonova, wait . . .” He corrected himself laboriously, but since Varvara was unable to make out among his confused words the feverish little mask of the Kurochkin’s last-born crying its unknown hurt at that moment, she didn’t know what to answer him. And he felt for himself pity mixed with anger, gulped down his glass of burning-hot tea, said “Thank you, comrade, I want to go home and work a bit,” and left—but where to go?
He wandered over the bluff where the wooden houses, set at intervals, stared out into empty space. Peasants sheltering in the hollows among the rocks had fires going there. Women were dandling infants on their knees. Men with red beards were cooking something in pots hanging from wire tripods. Rodion felt pity for the infants. Why for the infants and not for the mothers? Why for the little ones—and not for the swarthy urchins with worried eyes he met—why? The view of the horizon, which the coming nightfall tinted with mauve, made him feel better, but it didn’t last—why, why? He went up Red Army Street (a gloomy street with dilapidated fences) in order to avoid the tavern, and arrived behind the church with its ruined dome. Not too long ago there had been a garden there enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Now the fence was being used to divide the first women’s prison from the third section of the men’s prison. The trampled garden was no more than a vacant lot bristling with shrubs and bushes. When the grass grew tall during the hot months, lovers and drunks found a certain charm in that neglect. Rodion would have liked to see order, lines tracing clear paths of obedience and neatness.
Some trucks pulled up on the right, at the bottom of Lenin Square, in front of the Party Committee or State Security—basically the same thing. He shrugged his shoulders—but where to go? His unhandsome face floated a moment over the curtains of the restaurant reserved for responsible officials: an odour of buttered noodles reminded him that he was hungry. The sentry in front of State Security was eyeing him hostilely from the other sidewalk. Go ahead and look me over, you poor dumb slob, you don’t even know what you’re doing, you’ll probably never know. The sentry gave a short blast on his whistle: no loitering around here. Rodion, chased off, moved away, shoulders drooping. Soldiers on leave, wearing fresh uniforms, walked past him. He heard some girls laughing; an urchin in a big sheepskin which hung down to his feet offered to sell him some cigarettes or, furtively, a glass of vodka: “Just come under the porch across the way.”
(Yes, it would be good to take a drink—but he had promised himself, he had promised the comrades . . .) “Beat it, scram!” he grumbled. “Scram yourself, intellectual!” the kid snapped back. Intellectual, me?—if only I knew . . .
/> In the tavern an accordion was playing; a heavy male voice could be heard over the murmurs in the cavernous hall . . . “Sing gypsy chorus / weep my guitar / she will never forget . . .” Who, she? And what is impossible to forget? Are there really things worth never forgetting? Rodion entered like a ship capsizing. Rodion staggered through the groups seated around tables. They thought he was drunk: a waiter took his arm and sat him down unceremoniously. “Beer?” The beer was lousy and expensive. Tomorrow Rodion would go without eating. The singer’s voice brought him to the point of total despair. Whom to talk to? He nearly reached out his hand towards his neighbour, but the man had a narrow-minded, brutal expression. “No consciousness,” thought Rodion, “but strength and the will to live. And what can he do? What can anyone do for him? Nothing.” His neighbour’s murky eyes noticed him. “Do you know how to read, citizen?”
“Yes . . .” The neighbour opened his clenched fist over a crumpled paper which he unfolded on the table. “So, tell me, citizen?” He wasn’t brutal, just sorrowful, not narrow-minded, just oppressed. The paper certified delivery of a certain quantity of fish to the Regional Fisheries Centre. “There’s nothing about a horse in here,” said Rodion, annoyed. The boy from the street was tugging on his sleeve. “Just a little bottle,” he whispered. “I won’t take hardly anything as commission.”
“Give it here,” said Rodion, relieved. He took the little bottle under the table, paid, hunched over to drink, to drink: warmed, illuminated, reassured, with a mute need to cry, another need to sing along with that drawling voice which was there, present, everywhere, around him, within him, stirring sleigh-bells, shawls, bobbing hair, amazing unreal hands in whirlwinds of soft snow.
Maybe he did sing. Someone pushed him roughly outside, into the darkness. In the distance, flood-lights illuminated the facade of the Security building, the sentry with the whistle. A yellow and red glow fell onto the wooden sidewalk from the windows of the movie-theatre. Nobody. Rodion raised his head, stretched out his arms, fingers spread, at once so heavy and so light under that pure black sky. He fell into some mud, picked himself up, walked a little more, floating along, through the harsh light of the floodlamps, then plunged into the dazzling shadows of the square.
“Rodion!”
That curt voice pulled him out of a sort of warm emptiness. Elkin took him under the arm, dragged him away, puppet following man. Elkin scolded:
“Again? Aren’t you ashamed? Right under their windows? You pig! Go sleep it off, but don’t smear us with your filth. Go tell them you’re with them, we don’t want you anymore. Go tell them first thing tomorrow morning, do you hear me? You have no right to discredit us.”
Elkin seized Rodion, who was blubbering, and propped him up against the church wall.
“Don’t be angry, Dimitri, Comrade Elkin.” Rodion stammered through a broad embarrassed grin. “I’m not as drunk as I look, it’s these problems . . .” The pressure of the brick against his shoulders and the fact of standing upright gave him some self-assurance. Elkin whistled cuttingly.
“If it happens to you again, we’re kicking you out. Do you hear me? We’ll boycott you, do you understand?”
Rodion was humming, rocking his head from side to side. He understood nothing until the moment he was slapped hard across the face—and slapped again, again—but at that instant he understood everything. The ground under his feet regained its firmness, the shapes of the buildings across the square were sharp like the sharp, childish humiliation which made him say softly, without a reflex of resistance, his chin on his chest:
“Enough, Elkin. You’re right.”
“Come.”
They walked side by side, one supporting the other. Rodion at once man and puppet, legs rubbery and head more or less clear. Golden circles glittered around the stars, the ground was hard as stone underfoot, then oddly elastic. A nightlight was burning at the Kurochkins’. The feverish child had fallen asleep. The father was sleeping on the iron-hooped trunk, the mother and the little girl on the bed. The baby’s wheezing was sharply audible over the breathing, groans, and snores of the others. Rodion found his corner and collapsed full-length on his mattress, his face in the red cushion. His bruised lower lip was swelling. What to do? Where to find a bit of real clarity? Whom to ask for an answer? How to become—truly—men?
Roosters crowed, a marvellous whiteness filled the dormer-window. Rodion opened his eyes. In the yard, Kurochkin, up since before dawn, was splitting pine logs which he went upstream to fish out of the river at night, risking jail and perhaps worse, for this wood belonged to the State Forest Trust of the North. With each axe-blow the ground reverberated dully. Rodion imagined, in the fresh morning light, the man’s compressed movement. Launched by his fist, the powerful bluish blade completed its short arc, the wood opened, drops of sap moistened the grain like an inner dew. Rodion was no longer thinking, no longer suffering. He knew that daylight was spreading—a calm joy which nothing could resist—over the plains, the tundra, the woods in which the last routed shadows were fleeing. There were voices in the yard. Who would come at this hour? Rodion felt neither fear nor surprise. Rather a sort of contentment that there were voices there, close by—friendly voices—for voices are friendly in themselves, when they spring to life out of a unique morning, whatever voices they may be, whatever they may say. But that idea was practically inexpressible.
Kurochkin stuck his head through the half-open door, saw that Rodion was no longer asleep, and said quietly:
“Rodionich, someone has come for you.”
Through the night, the dawn, the spaces, all this aerial blue, through the sounds and silences scattered around the world, someone had come . . . Rodion noticed that he had slept without undressing, that his hands were dirty and his boots covered with dried mud. He washed rapidly in the tin basin and, hands clean, eyes rinsed, went outside in a joyous mood. Someone with a thick beard was waiting on the stoop, standing in the middle of the grey fields and the pure white sky. The visitor was carrying several knapsacks hanging from his body by straps and ropes. A bundle lay at his feet. He said:
“Is it you?”
Rodion smiled broadly: “It’s me.” Rodion recognized the newcomer by his worn face, the shaggy beard under his chin, the deep lines in his cheeks. “Much prison?” he asked.
“Eight months,” said the other man. “Moscow, then Perm . . . Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, member of the Party since 1917, professor of Hist-Mat (Historical Materialism), Left Opposition; haven’t slept all night, got in at two a.m. The transfer cars in this country beggar description.”
“Well,” said Rodion. “You are welcome, Comrade Kostrov. I’ve finished sleeping, go to bed. Don’t make a noise, the landlady and the kids are still asleep.”
Rodion was looking at him intensely and behind him, beyond the thatched roofs of colourless straw, into distances so sharply outlined and so pure they seemed accessible, and even farther off, beyond, into the other world, the inner steppes, sharply illuminated at that moment.
Do you bring me the answers I seek, comrade? The answers I wait for, that I feel I can grasp as soon as the night vanishes? He who knows them should arrive like this, simply, stars forgotten, through the dawn. He who knows them should be like you, heavy with fatigue and conquered pain. In our day he can only come from prison . . .
“You’re not hungry?”
“No. They weren’t too rotten at Security. They gave me some herring and bread.”
“They’re not too rotten here,” said Rodion. “It’s slowly, gently that they tighten the noose around our necks. It’s possible to live.”
Without exchanging a word, they shared a big half-loaf of rye bread which Kostrov pulled out of a knapsack and which must have weighed three pounds. Rodion went to get some onions: “They’re marvellous for preventing scurvy.” Then Kostrov moved in. He was so tired he no longer felt his body; but the fresh air of the night and the morning—after the jolting box cars, after Chaos, after the slow burial of solitary,
after the nauseating cellars of the little prisons along the way—cleansed him, like a bath, to his very soul. Even the poverty of the shack, with its oppressive human odour, felt good to him: the sight of the feverish child revived a mute tenderness in him. As he took off his quilted fatigue-jacket, like the ones worn by workers building new industries and by Moukden coolies, he was surprised to find himself humming deep inside:
In the heart there remained
one hundred twenty beats
one hundred twenty beats
At that moment his mind was so clear that he smiled through his beard:
“Stay calm, old heart, I still need you.”
But as he lay down on Rodion’s still-warm mattress, he nonetheless felt embarrassed, disconcerted, thinking of that young hospitable comrade. Why did I lie to him? Shouldn’t I have told him right off. “I’ve given in my submission. Capitulated. I’m nothing but the shadow of a Communist any more, half-comrade half-swine, for I know what I’m doing as well as I know what I think. I’m unworthy of any confidence. Are you still willing to let me sleep on your mattress and share my bread?” Slowly his shoulders squared. Lied? Lied? But it’s to them, to all those evil-minded inquisitors, that I am lying, that everyone lies, as they lie to themselves in everything they say, everything they do. What truth do I owe them? He was glad he was no longer looking into Rodion’s clear eyes.
Rodion was walking down toward the ford, by Fisheries Street. There was nothing along that street but decrepit fences of old ashen-grey planks. Almost as dark as the ground. Not a single colour; but at the bottom of the hill the green grass was springing back to life. How ridiculously weak and vile we are! As vile as the earthworms which an iron heel crushes and which survive, cut in two. But what ardent, buoyant strength can well up in a man’s chest! When he reached the bank of the Black-Waters, which flowed limpidly over its bed of pebbles, Rodion lay down on the rocks to drink right out of the stream—deeply. The coolness of the water quenched his whole being.