by Victor Serge
“I never blow my nose,” the boy declared proudly.
The sunlight streamed down on them, on the town, on the women waiting for the bread of famine, on those who would wait for fuel until the next day (the sorrow of the day is sufficient unto itself), on the grey newspapers pasted on the wall to proclaim the triumphs of industrialization, on the emaciated, long-haired, chestnut ponies, who passed with lowered heads dragging jolting carts. The sunlight.
* * *
Varvara carried her package home from the post office herself, a small crate weighing ten kilos. She was obliged to halt every hundred metres because of the weight. Avelii arrived just in time to help her pull the nails out of the lid. Avelii’s long fingers preserved a manifest elegance in every kind of work, touching, pressing, bending, folding with powerful grace. Varvara watched them pulling out the nails, which he had not entirely removed with the pincers, perhaps to give himself the pleasure of that agile little movement. She thought hazily that these hands were made many lives ago (the same lives extinguished and rekindled) to weave supple wicker, to glaze pottery, carve silver, notch arrows onto bows, tease the falcon perched on the left fist . . .
“What are you dreaming of Varvara?” asked Avelii. He saw in her eyes that look, at once absent and intimate, that we have when, perhaps unawares, we reach out so intensely toward another person—toward the deep, multiple self within his parcel of eternity—that we stop noticing him in the present.
“Nothing. It’s nothing, Avelii, I just can’t understand why they sent me this package. It’s not the right date. They said they were sending books. What does it mean?”
Avelii’s eyes were also intent. He looked as a brown-turbaned falconer, lips drawn back over clear white teeth, would look at the flight of his hunting bird. Except that Avelii was following, through spaces interior to his own mind, a straight path of reflection to which he had been trained in the best schools of political imprisonment.
“You know, Varvara, as soon as you showed me that postcard, I thought we’d be getting some mail.”
The slight stress placed on that word gives it a peculiar, almost magical quality.
There is dried black bread, sugar, lard, cigarettes, a picture of Katia, stained by the lard. Three-year-old, fat-cheeked Katia, an adorable little Kalmuck with an embroidered cap and curls. The packing has obviously been unwrapped, then redone by the secret Inspector.
“That new man, Fedossenko, takes care of it himself, I’ll bet,” mutters Avelii. “That fat lout sitting in his office makes me think of a hunter lying in wait—and we’re his prey. A jailer’s soul in a bear-hunter’s body.”
There are books: Volume II of the beautiful Academia Edition of The Arabian Nights, a Pilniak novel, a slim volume of Pasternak, opened immediately, and on a page over which hovers a luminous trail:
The five mirrors have the face
of the storm shedding its mask . . .
Varvara reads aloud, smiling, looks at Katia’s picture, puts the poetry book down on the bread. “And yet I don’t understand.”
Lightning-bolts, forever momentary.
Come illuminate these bright recesses of the mind . . .
Take up each object, prod it shrewdly. Let it reveal itself. No signs on the oily paper or on the scraps of newsprint used to wrap the bread. Avelii examines it line by line: there might be nearly invisible dots sown among the letters of the text. Sometimes pencil marks, sometimes pin pricks, spaced out among the letters to form a text. They know that trick. They know almost every trick. But if it wasn’t for their stupidity, their negligence, the impossibility of checking everything, no mail would be possible. The tears in the newspaper might contain a clue. Nothing.
“You know, Varvara, they often change the wrapping on packages as a precaution. A poor method.”
Varvara leafs through The Arabian Nights, disappointed by the illustrations which imitate old Persian manuscripts. The eyes of the beautiful Sultanas are quite as inexpressive as their round breasts. “It’s a good edition,” she says. Avelii takes the book from her hands, tests its weight, prods the ornamented cover.
“If there’s any mail, Varvara, it must be in here. That’s what I think. And there must be mail, for we can’t go on living like this. My God! Five months without news. Rodion has begun to think all by himself. He needs ideas so badly that he invents them. You can imagine what he invents. Pass me the scissors, will you? To Hell with their Academia bindings created to corrupt the taste of the proletariat. And if it doesn’t contain anything, don’t make long faces at me, O.K.?”
Nothing in the outer cardboard box. “Neither theses nor counter-theses. If that’s the way it is, dear comrade, I really feel like tearing your book into tiny shreds which we will burn later.” It’s not a pretty sight, a new book, a precious object, at the mercy of scissors.
Varvara begins to banter sarcastically: “You see, that’s what they do to people. They suddenly pluck out their little soul, with all its little freshly imprinted stories. They slice through the middle and they see there’s nothing inside. They even realize that it wasn’t a soul but something entirely material, useless and empty.”
Avelii answers: “Don’t talk nonsense. There’s nothing apart from the body. But the body is damned intelligent. And clean inside, full of marvellously beautiful blood.”
He was about to throw the massacred book away. He removed the back cover, which seemed too thick to him. “Well, what was I telling you?” From the torn linen emerged, folded lengthwise, the thin slips which Ivanov had covered with microscopic calligraphy in Projects Office No. 4 of the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp, on Kola Peninsula. Avelii could not have felt more joy watching his trained falcon swoop down on a hare in the sweet-smelling grass.
“What were you saying, Varvara: Lightning bolts, forever momentary . . .”
“I can’t believe my eyes,” said Varvara sadly.
She had been standing; she seemed to fold, sat down, hands gripping the table edge. And what little colour she had in her cheeks vanished. Her face became ashen. The mail, yes, the incredible mail which had stopped coming months ago. Since the latest betrayals. Those little transparent slips covered by carefully aligned grains of sand, which were letters, which were words, thoughts, truths for the Revolution. The meaning of our lives, since nothing else is left. Not even the child, not even the man, not even hope, the least hope, for oneself. I will grow old like this. Almost ugly already. A woman only by the misery that no one knows. There is nothing left but our defeat, firmly accepted since it must be. For we can neither separate ourselves from the proletariat, nor disobey the truth, nor ignore the course of history. And for the moment the dialectic of history has placed us under the wheel. Life goes on, thanks to us. The victories will begin again when we are no more. And now here it all is. The comrades, the theses of the Tobolsk Isolator, the statement of the Central Committee of the Tara exiles, a resumé of the latest issues of the Opposition Bulletin published in Berlin, edited in Prinkipo.
The clandestine pages murmured: prison, prison, prison, prison, endless prison. Bars, fences, windows sealed with iron mesh. Regulations, barracks, conflicts, hunger strikes. Mail passed through toilet pipes, through holes pierced in walls, from window to window hanging by a thread over the sentry’s head. (And the condemned men awaiting death in the room below, carefully keep it for a while. They’re good lads, you can trust them.) Mail written while your ears are cocked and you pretend to read. Then you get a migraine. You despair because of the disagreements, the irreducibly opposed viewpoints. Splits are ripening. You can see repudiations coming. Years pass. You wrench yourself away from the barracks, the bars, the comrades. You’re free, yet it’s another form of captivity. You have air, health, people’s bread to weigh—almost a nostalgia for prison. Avelii asked:
“You’re not pleased?”
“On the contrary, I’m happy.”
He did not recognize happiness in this naked, smooth face, drained of colour. Her hair—fl
at, pulled back, cut short—surrounded it with a black frame. She had hollow eyes, pretty nostrils—small and grey. “Of course I’m happy. It’s wonderful. We’re going to live again. We must tell the comrades. Go on, right now, Avelii.” Her eyes were dry, yet she seemed to be on the verge of tears.
* * *
On the square, Avelii ran into Ryzhik, who was on his way home from the Special Service. “They’re giving me the sack too,” he said, “eliminating my position. The Salvageable Rubbish Co-op no longer needs to draw up plans, it seems. Fedossenko coolly told me that he could do nothing about it. Is the rubbish escaping you, I asked him, or are you drowning in it? Ah! What idiots.” Tired contempt altered his voice. (Living with the contempt of the powerful puts a good deal of strain on one’s inner strength.) When he heard the news he shook his head. “Be careful. Whom are you thinking of telling? Kostrov? I’m against it, categorically. To have held out in Moscow until last year is a certificate of cowardice, take my word for it.”
Rodion was reading on the step of Kurochkin’s house. Avelii sat down next to him, put his arm affectionately around his waist, spoke into his ear. And they looked at each other, laughing, eyes sparkling. Elkin, at the Fisheries Trust, was filling in a blank chart a metre long, divided into sixty-five columns. “As a sign of celebration,” he said, “I’ll put in the highest possible co-efficient here. Tomorrow I’ll work out how many tons of fish this will add to those useless estimates. The trouble is that I’m running the risk of winning a bonus from the Director.”
The day was nearing its end. Avelii went down toward the Black-Waters and had himself taken over to the other side by the ferryman, a Special Deportee, who, as he rowed, murmured things in a bitter-sweet voice, punctuated by sighs: “Like that, my son, it’s like that, tak to . . .” The other bank was flat at that spot. Ahead to the North lay the far-off line of the woods, with a gap in the middle opening out to limitless space. Farther, much farther, the sea, the ice. Avelii walked toward an encounter with space. Startled titmice came out of the sky to alight a few steps from him, watch him pass, fly off as he approached, making big circles over his head and then waiting for him again in the grass, as if to guide him. He was grateful to them for not being afraid of him and for correctly guessing the way he was going without knowing it. They surrounded him with light benevolent presences. He walked, shoulders high, lungs expanded, not a single image remaining in his eyes, nothing left before him but the reality of earth and space, tinged with gladness. And all at once he sang, amazed at his own voice, a Georgian song whose words had never had a precise meaning for him. But it was full of male strength and sadness, with bursts of joy like cymbal-clashes.
He didn’t return to town until well after nightfall. He lived in a loft above an empty store where the rats running around at night made a noise like marbles rolling across the floor. The worm-eaten old building was sinking into the ground. A family was living in the cellar whose windows, with their cracked panes held together with putty, looked as if they were covered with thick spider webs. A reddish glow shone through. Nothing was left of the staircase but two steps, the highest, which the neighbourhood children had not yet torn away. Avelii hoisted himself up and squatted against the door, barred across by the trunk of a young birch. Across the way he saw the roof of another low building silhouetted in black against the sky, and just above that roof, a star, on which he fixed his gaze. He noticed that its twinkling immobility was a perceptible motion. He alone saw that motion. It filled him with a grave joy, at the very bottom of which he felt a stab of anxiety. The frogs were beginning to croak. Somewhere dogs were barking at each other. There were sounds of animals moving in the darkness close by. A crowd of beings was alive in this silence and the star continued on its unimaginable course. Avelii cracked his knuckles. A muted song filled his chest and his skull. Words sprang to life. Avelii reached out his arm into the solitude, murmuring: “Rodion, brother, it’s so simple. I, who don’t like to think, understand so well what it is to live.”
His body was unwilling to shut itself up in the loft above the rats. His legs still wanted to walk. Man’s lodging resembles a tomb. Avelii rebelled at the idea of lying there like a dead man on this eventful evening. “It’s not too cold, I’ll go out and sleep on the steppe.” He moved through wide black streets, turning round from time to time to locate the star, whose motion his own petty movements prevented him from observing. Just so the birds, a little earlier, had turned toward him. He finally stopped in front of a fence, reduced to a few boards and enclosing a yard. In the house a lamp was burning behind a white curtain. Avelii slipped between two boards, crossed the yard, joyously touched the curved front-runner of an overturned sled with his fingertips and knocked very softly on a door robed in darkness.
“Here you are again,” said Varvara without any surprise. “I haven’t stopped reading since you left. It’s hardly prudent . . .”
She pulled back a sheet of newspaper and the messages spread their fine sand of words and ideas.
“We must hide this, Varvara. Why shouldn’t those vigilant scoundrels come today? Let me take care of it.”
They went to bury the precious papers under the sled, in the yard. Together, fingers touching, they covered them with earth. Later, the room felt singularly empty. The narrow bed, the table, the child’s picture on the wall—Katia—the books on the floor, the portable stove, shoes in a corner, abandoned objects in the cold. Varvara crossed her arms over her chest, closing the little summer coat she used as a dressing gown. They were standing in the emptiness close enough to touch and she broke the short, embarrassed silence.
“Won’t you sit down for a moment, Avelii?”
“No, I’m leaving, it’s late. Go to bed.”
That neck, those clean-lined temples, those dusky eyes, that sombre thin mouth half open in expectation—he suddenly saw them against the background of the heath where birds were flying at dusk, the music of the night, the amazing path of a star beyond the horizon, and something else still which was all of that and himself, like the feeling of wings about to spread.
“Well, goodnight Varvara,” he said as he took both her hands in his. He thought he was going to leave, step through the door, walk off into the night in complete solitude. Alone, between earth and sky. But he remained there, holding those inert hands in his. Varvara looked at him with great seriousness, considering him from a great distance.
“You’re a good comrade, Varvara, and I . . . No, I assure you, it’s not love, not at all, or desire. It’s . . .”
“And that’s what you came back to tell me, Avelii?”
The words meant nothing, perhaps, but the voice was inviting. Sleep and vertigo are like that: you fall into them. Varvara bowed her head slightly and in a hushed voice:
“Well, if you like, Avelii, don’t go.”
They rediscovered the objects around them. Avelii showed his teeth. Something inside him was laughing, but he didn’t laugh. He noticed the narrow bed made up on some packing cases. Varvara had had the same thought, “I’ll make up the bed on the floor,” she said. They did it together, bumping into each other. Almost playing like children. On top of open newspapers they spread some old furs, a piece of carpet, some winter clothing taken from a trunk in the hall.
Lying next to her, he seemed taller, his flesh rough, his movements unexpected; considerate yet heavy, sure. A gentleness at the bottom of which lay violence. “Don’t bruise me,” murmured Varvara, seeking a tender word for him and not finding one. A hot wave carried her off, teeth chattering. They didn’t go to sleep until they had talked for hours about so many things that it later seemed to them that they had tried to empty their lives in order to mingle them. They would never remember everything. These words exchanged, breath to breath, bodies entwined, hands seeking hands, would always yield new aspects, poignant and revealing. Like clouds scattered by a strong wind into momentary and never quite graspable shapes. At last she sank toward sleep, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, warmed
, small, smooth and radiant. Just on the edge of sleep a warm tear formed under her eyelid and rolled down her cheek to the edge of her lip. She dried it with the tip of her tongue. The tear was salty like sea-water, like the man’s skin . . . salty, tonic.
Avelii emerged for a moment from the void at the break of dawn. The little room was suffused with a nameless blue, still nocturnal. Next to him that dark hair, that astonishing profile, that soft breathing. Heavy clouds covered a slumbering earth, valleys, precipices, rushing streams, villages with square towers, haystacks on hillsides, the ruins of one of Tamara’s castles, the murmurs of a forest through which does followed velvety trails, single-file. The clouds parted at the instant when the does saw their reflections in the river. A fragment of pure blue pierced the sky. The white tooth of Mount Kasbek displayed its rose-tinted glaciers. Avelii contemplated the peak and saw the sleeping woman with her luminous Asiatic face. You are such a trust-worthy comrade, dear . . . “But perhaps that’s what love is,” he thought distinctly, with great surprise. The peak brightened, a glint of glaciers and azure caressed Varvara’s profile, from her unwrinkled brow to her closed mouth to her boyish chin. And the clouds closed up again over the tall mountain. Specks of gold flowed through the purple night of the man’s veins. He fell asleep again, completely entwined with the soft body which continued to abandon itself in sleep.
* * *
The case of the twelve hundred notebooks burst on the scene at the same time as the affair of the seven pound loaf. Bread was delivered to the cooperatives in carts with wooden covers. A militia-man kept the people at a distance while they unloaded it, counting and weighing the round loaves one by one. To speed things up, they got some help from a girl with a kerchief, dumpy in her old winter jacket, and some honest-looking lads. The cart driver would throw out the loaf, which passed from hand to hand until it reached the scale on the counter of the store, where perpetual shadows reigned. Varvara checked the weight. The Manager made a mark in his notebook for each loaf. He moistened the indigo point with his tongue so that his lips and teeth were smeared with ink. His shaved skull rose above a furrowed brow. He was full of a strained attention which resembled repressed anger. His little eyes would have liked to watch over every hand, touch the scale, foil the malice of numbers. He couldn’t, and this cast a grimace of dissatisfaction across his pink face. Of his predecessors in the shop, both appointed like him by the Party Committee (for, according to the directives of the Chief, it is fitting to give responsible positions to workers taken from the ranks), one had been sentenced to three years of forced labour and the other was awaiting trial in the old prison, six hundred metres from here. The Manager was a wood sawyer, an elite member of a shock brigade, a Party member for the past two years, a former fisherman, son of a fisherman. Whenever he sealed a sack, especially the sack of bread he sent to the Special Section of the prison (the one for Communist officials) an involuntary smile relaxed his grimace as he knotted the rope with the skill of a weaver of nets. Once this knot was tied, there was no way to get even a crumb out of the sack, unless it was cut open! He wrote his signature legibly on the receipt: Miorzly, Piotr—Peter the Frozen—handed it over to the carter, signalled to Gavril, the wounded veteran, who restrained the crowd outside: “Stand at the door, don’t let more than ten people in at a time . . .” Then he made a sign to Varvara: ready?