by Victor Serge
“Got anything to eat?”
“No.” said Kostrov.
“What day is it? What’s the date?”
“The 16th . . .”
“Ah!” said the human form, “already. Shit!”
It sank back into itself and merged with the straw, the ground, the black stones, the silence. Kostrov wondered simply if this time it was the beginning or the end . . .
* * *
The Runt, instead of placing the official stamp on Ryzhik’s identity certificate, put that paper away in a drawer.
“Yes,” he said, as if in an aside, “it’s too bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Citizen, you’re under arrest.”
Ryzhik was not excessively surprised. Deep inside him, a bitter inner voice exclaimed: “Finally!” His hard white head, carved with nearly geometric regularity out of petrified flesh, recoiled as he raised it. He looked at the puppet in uniform across the desk with undisguised disgust.
“Good. I see that that old swine Koba has remembered me. That red-eyed swine . . .” (He was talking to himself, but out loud.)
“What? What did you say? Who?”
“Koba. The chief of the ruling faction of the Party. The gravedigger of the Revolution. The swine whose arse you lick . . .”
The instantaneous release of a totally mechanical spring placed somewhere between his seat and his neck made the Runt leap up, beside himself:
“I forbid you, citizen . . .”
But Ryzhik also exploded, all white, shoulders heavy, back heavy, filled with a definitive resolve. And perhaps for the last time in his life—uselessly, preposterously—he said what little he said with such authority that the Runt sat down again.
“Nothing, you are nothing, citizen. I won’t argue with the counter-revolution here. If one day I spit in its face, I won’t aim any lower than the General Secretary’s ugly mug. Inform your chiefs that I won’t answer any questions. You get the point, I hope?”
He leaned violently toward the Runt, and the Runt felt afraid. Hunched over, hands on the edge of the table, the Runt replied with cowardly politeness.
“I will transmit your statement exactly . . . I’m going to try to give you a clean cell . . .”
“Member of the Party since 1904, met Lenin at the Prague Conference, ex-member of the Revolutionary Council of the VIth, VIIth, and VIIIth Armies,” Ryzhik obviously had the right to a clean cell. He almost shouted, “Clean or not, I don’t give a good goddam, it’s all the same to me.” But his will-power was too strong. His useless anger subsided. Everything seemed perfectly clear. Impossible to get on with spring planting without making a few concessions to the peasants. Consequently, a shift to the Right. The Georgian is going to sacrifice his underlings of yesterday. To cover this manoeuvre, repression on the Left (first movement), then a campaign within the Party against the Right (second movement). So they’re going to manufacture “cases” and send the people released last year back to jail again—always the same ones. Since I’ve already done three years, then two: five, (seven including deportation) I can count on the maximum. The bureaucratic counter-revolution is rising with all the energy it has stolen from the proletariat. It has just achieved its victory and it will take long years before the proletariat begins to think, to move . . . And me, I’m sixty-one years old. Since Ryzhik had known all of this for a long time, this moment failed to surprise him, despite its inexpressible weight.
The Runt came out from behind his desk, tiptoed around Ryzhik, and retired to the corridor. Ryzhik’s eyes, full of hate, followed the back of his blue-shaved neck topped by a small, round skull. Ryzhik picked up a bronze inkwell from the desk, hefted it in his hand like a weapon, eyes hooded, mouth bitter. “No, really, not worth it . . .” (“It’s not the right time . . . and when the time comes, I’ll be done for . . .”) He put the bronze back in its place and, violently flinging open the door, found himself face to face with the Runt.
“I’ve had enough. Take me wherever you wish. I don’t want to wait another second. Let’s go.”
Impetuously, whether by chance or intuition, he turned the right way, toward the reserved cells on the second floor, and strode off. The Runt went limping along ahead of him like a jerky puppet. Only Ryzhik’s angry steps were audible.
“Here it is,” said the Runt, almost obsequiously, in front of a door. “Excuse me, citizen, but I don’t have a better cell. We’re too crowded. You’ll be all right anyway . . .”
In front of Ryzhik the door opened into the stark whiteness of beyond the grave or of a limestone crypt. Yet it was only an empty room. He entered it, prodigiously free, holding his destiny well in hand, to be greeted by the familiar voice of Elkin:
“Hello, old fellow. Delighted to see you . . . So, we’re back to this again?”
* * *
Ryzhik paced from wall to wall, and his voice bounced from wall to wall too. And his thoughts collided with invisible walls every four steps . . . Then, captives, they followed the same path in the opposite direction.
“That’s it, Dimitri: an impasse. These things happen in nature when you’re at the end of your strength. Suddenly a mountain blocks the horizon—and there is no longer any future. I was alone with my men, my horses, myself. Alone like a child. I stared stupidly at the little red-dotted lines of trails on the map. Then I stared at the mountain. I read off the altitude of the peaks in the hatchings: two thousand four, two thousand seven . . . If ‘Death, Death’ had been written there, it couldn’t have been any clearer. No way to cross over in the state we were in. ‘Comrades, we won’t make it. Impossible.’ You understand: the animals exhausted, the men exhausted, thirst, trails that climb, climb along the edge of precipices, through the dizziness . . . On the other side of the crest there may have been the most beautiful valley in the world. At that point, in any case, we could believe it without any fear of being disappointed since we wouldn’t reach it. Behind us the Turgai Desert with the skeletons of Kazakhs and camels on its yellow trails—its stunted, thorny bushes, its scorpions, its sun of blazing brass—and the heights of Kara-Tagh, and the apricot orchards of Fergana. We were at the end of our strength. We needed twenty less hours of thirst to keep up the effort. Then anything would have been possible. At dusk, the hyenas circled within rifle-range, for they could already smell fresh corpses in us. Filthy beasts. That’s exactly it, brother. Today I would need to be fifteen years younger to get over the crest . . .”
“If the end were really like that, old man, I’d find it magnificent. We would stretch out on the scorched grass, the pebbles, the sand. We’d be thirsty, hungry, cold, feverish. Our teeth would chatter. We would see the whole, green, cruel earth again in our delirium. We would still say to ourselves: Oh! God! How enraging it is to die like this, but how beautiful the earth, life, the Revolution! And in the end, maybe we’d pull through. You pulled through that time. All you had to do was cross the Pamirs. Today, we’d have to climb down through chasms of baseness, without maps or compasses, with little hope of climbing out. Maybe we’ll still be there in ten years, arguing, while awaiting our hundred and eighth socialist prison . . . Who caused us to be born under such a calamitous star? Answer, Herr Doktor Faust!”
“Don’t joke, Dimitri. Maybe you will be there in ten years, talking with someone the way you’re talking with me today, but certainly not with me. History moves slowly, it only produces hurricanes every hundred and twenty years or so. Kropotkin gave that approximate figure for the periodic cycle of great revolutions, but that old Utopian didn’t understand anything about Marxism. In any case, decades will pass before our Russia starts to move again. Think of this old agricultural country, of its old, exhausted, depleted proletariat devoured by new ideas and new machines, of its young peasant proletariat which knows nothing about itself yet . . . Don’t delude yourself, you’ll be living with a gag in your mouth a long time from now, if you live, if that mob of parvenus, which betrays everything so as not to betray its belly, doesn’t end up getting rid of you by drilling a
bit of lead into your troublesome brain so full of scarlet memories . . . They know what we are and what they are themselves! There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface at the end of revolutions, when the lava has hardened over the fire, when everybody’s revolution turns into the counter-revolution of a few against everybody. It forms a new petty-bourgeoisie with itching palms which doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience, doesn’t give a damn about what it doesn’t know, lives on steel springs and steel slogans, and knows perfectly well it stole the old flags from us. It is ferocious and base. We were implacable in order to change the world; they will be implacable in order to hold onto their loot. We gave everything, even what wasn’t ours—the blood of others with our own—for an unknown future. They say that everything has been achieved so that no one will ask them for anything. And for them, everything has been achieved since they have everything. They will be inhuman out of cowardice.
“I want to tell you about my meeting with Fleischman. Yes, Fleischman of the VIth Army, of the Petrograd Cheka, of the General Staff Academy, of the Manganese Trust, of the Tula scandal. You remember how he looks—like a shaved rabbi. I had known him when he was thin, when he arrived from Paris in 1919. Well, when I was called for interrogation, in the inner prison of the Lubianka, who do I find waiting for me but Fleischman—in uniform, with insignia on his collar: a bigshot. That fat pig wanted to interrogate me himself. ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘you’re crawling, eh? Up to your double-chin in sewage, eh?’ In 1919 we were together before Yamburg, side by side in a flooded trench with a company of shock-troops made up of workers from the porcelain factory. Shit was pouring in from both sides, corpses were moving under-foot. Whenever we stepped on one, big green bubbles of nauseating gas came out of its stomach. A machine gun was cutting swaths eight inches above our heads. Those who stood up—the brave and the asphyxiated—were instantly shot in the head. I gave the order: Forward! Flat on your bellies! and I advanced. Fleischman followed me, setting the example. Our elbows were touching. Every two yards we turned to look at each other in that sewer, covered with filth up to our eyebrows, and one of us would ask the other: ‘Are you crawling?’ and the other, gasping would answer, in a glorious voice: ‘In the Service of the Revolution . . .’ When they saw us stand up at the other end of the trench like horrible stinking mannikins, those quondam Imperial Guard officers must have thought the rotted corpses were rising up . . . Ten years later, Fleischman, covered with stripes and decorations, was preparing to interrogate me: me with my railwayman’s mug and an empty belly. ‘Still crawling, eh?’ I say to him. ‘Your whole reptilian life? In the service of what? Poor old fellow!’
“ ‘I’ll crawl as long as it’s necessary,’ Fleischman answers me, thick-tongued, ‘and you, you idiot, will die a useless death!’ Then, in an official voice, ‘Citizen accused . . .’ So then I understood that he was in his element there, that from that point on it was his very nature to crawl in the mud of Thermidor, that he was even getting fat off of it now that it was no longer dangerous, that types like him were legion. Fleischman was still one of the better ones, for he had some good moments in his life. He would certainly have preferred something different, and deep down in his little soul, under the rancid fat of the high official, he probably retains some shred of socialist consciousness. I understood that after him come others who are worse, for they never knew what he has such trouble forgetting, never knew that they are greedy reptiles, never breathed anything but lies, immune to asphyxiation from even the worst stink. Those people don’t understand either of us, me or Fleischman. They fear us as incomprehensible intruders in a world they are in the process of building. They will have my hide, and probably Fleischman’s as well, now that he’s fat. ‘David,’ I cried, ‘stop acting your part. You’re something more than just that. Let me speak.’ He let me speak. In the end he was shaken to the core. We stood in front of the window like in the old days at the end of Revolutionary Committee meetings. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he answered me, ‘but I still think the wisest thing is to keep crawling a while more . . .’ ”
“I bet,” said Elkin, “that that confession didn’t stop him from interrogating you . . .”
“Naturally. It was even on account of him that I got sent to Suzdal. But what else could he do? Since somebody had to do the job, it might just as well have been him as anyone else, right? That’s what he said to me as he shrugged his shoulders . . . I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Dimitri. To each his own way of drowning in the deluge. I doubt they’ll leave us together more than twenty-four hours, and I have two important things to tell you. Here they are: You must cling stubbornly to life, in prison or anywhere else, whatever the cost, do you understand? Don’t get carried away in stupid hunger strikes. Their job is to suppress us noiselessly; ours is to survive. History is pursuing its course. What they sow, they will reap one hundredfold. When that day comes, we will be extremely useful.”
“I agree on every point.”
“As for the rest of what I have to say, I’m not asking your opinion. I’ve got it all thought out. I’m leaving. I’m finished. I’ve had enough. Don’t object, don’t say anything. You’ll see I’m not quitting. For a long while now I haven’t had anything or needed anything. No longer any need for myself. Anyway, I never needed myself. I used to tell myself: I am a human tool in the hands of the Party. Ah! what marvellous times they were! One night my throat was choking with sorrow, a thousand bells were tolling in my head because they had just killed a woman whom I had not allowed myself to love. Then I wondered if I hadn’t somehow forgotten to live, and the answer suddenly echoed inside me in the middle of that mad carillon: we must forget ourselves so that the proletariat may live! How it lived in those times . . . Don’t smile if I seem to be wandering from the point. You know, I have nothing but contempt for people who kill themselves out of cowardice or because a universe in the throes of labour denies them the little toy that would console them a while for their own emptiness. Despite them, I recognize the right to leave. There is revolutionary courage in shooting yourself. You’re not good for anything any more, old brother, so leave. Your nerves, your muscles, your marrow, your chops still aspire to life. You’d like to take a little drink and stretch out on the grass in the sunshine, because you’re an animal. To conquer the zoological being within you, if this is useful, then becomes a final act of consciousness. I think I’m ready for it. No pistol, unfortunately. It will take a long time, with a lot of unpleasantness. No way around it. Keep still, I tell you. We don’t have much time. I won’t begin my hunger-strike until I get to Moscow, when I’ll be sure my last glob of spit will hit Koba in the eye.
“Between now and then, and afterwards, I need your help. You’re going to learn my last declaration by heart and publish it in whatever prison you’re in exactly one year from today unless you learn of my death first, from a reliable source. Don’t change a single syllable, for I don’t trust your theories.”
Elkin, who had also begun pacing back and forth between the walls (so that the two men were animating the cell with strange oscillations like pendulums gone wild) answered, frowning:
“Naturally . . . I’ll publish my ideological reservations later. It seems to me you’re right. Your departure will produce a certain effect within the Party . . .” (he rubbed his hands forcefully together) “a certain effect.”
“Good,” said Ryzhik. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
Varvara was cutting bread. Faces floated by her in the half-light, all alike. They came and went, like the hands, with the hands . . . Hands holding bread cards from which she had to cut off the number 26. Hands reaching for the hastily weighed loaves of rye. Life smelled of damp rye, slightly fermented. The fishermen’s wives brought in the smell of fish. A little girl clutched her three rations of bread against her chest and lingered. She pressed her whole body against the counter an
d looked up at Varvara with big secretive eyes. Varvara read something in those eyes. “Do you need something else, little girl?” Varvara was cutting out the next card as she leaned down toward the child, and the child said quickly:
“Galia sent me. They came for her Dimitri last night. Don’t go there today. They’re going to get all of you. . . .”
The secretive eyes brightened. The little girl smiled: “I don’t think I forgot anything . . . Goodbye, comrade.”
“Goodbye.”
If only Avelii . . .! So love is also a bad thing, since it can push everything else out of its way with this unscrupulous brutality? Varvara felt a great cry echoing inside her—Avelii! Avelii! But her hands, trembling a bit, still tossed the bread onto the scale. Someone spoke to her and she answered; and if anyone had been watching her, they would have seen the skin of her face become drawn, smooth at the temples, her features narrow, her eyes grow veiled, her lips darken. For love must be pushed aside; if this is the way things are, if in times of danger you think of him rather than think of the comrades . . . They’re probably going to arrest us all, this very day. 1) Destroy the messages. 2) Prepare the youth, Avelii, Rodion, for this trial. (They’ll hold firm . . .) 3) Write to Katia. 4) Write to Moscow. Warn them. Change the handwriting and the address to prevent them from intercepting the card.
The rest of her day flowed by on three different levels. The automaton did her job, served the bread, didn’t lose a single number. Behind her everyday mask, two beings lived their separate and intermingled lives: one thinking, the other suffering. It might not amount to anything: the usual springtime persecutions, three months to spend in the cellars of Security, perhaps a transfer afterwards . . . But what if they transfer Avelii somewhere else? Avelii! How to live without Avelii? That apprehension brought up an uncontrollable sob; Varvara swallowed it back with a mouthful of saliva.