by Victor Serge
“I spit on all that,” said the soldier: “I don’t need your explanations. Orders are orders, old brother. You gotta come with me . . .” They went off among the dark pines, the broken old man, head lowered, silently preceding the sullen horseman. The horse also lowered its head, in order to browse the moss along the ground, and the rider, sitting listlessly with his hands hanging slack, let himself be carried along. The forest, around them, was desolate.
For Rodion, the underbrush was bathed in warm green light. Rodion replaced the old deportee in a crew of woodcutters. “We’re lucky,” said the crew chief. “We’ll make our quota by nightfall.” They made it. Toward noon, when the sun speckled the pointed tops of the pines with diamonds, the men, stripped to the waist, were struggling along bitterly amid the pools of light which lay on the red-brown earth. Axes thudded furiously against the tree-trunks, opening wounds whose delicate coloration no one noticed. The fresh resin lay beaded there like fat tears. Its odour mingled with the odour of sweat. A saw rhythmically cried out its two monotonous notes like the wail of some unknown beast. Toward the end of the afternoon, the loggers ate bread and dried fish on which crystals of salt were shining. When there was nothing left of the sun but an incandescent ball hanging over the lacy edge of the tree tops, work suddenly stopped. Too exhausted to curse, the men now had the sunken glossy eyes of sick people and heavy, charred hands with veins bulging out like bizarrely knotted ropes under their skin. With some difficulty, Rodion stood up erect. He was tormented by splinters and his shoulders and legs were bruised by the branches of a pine whose fall had nearly crushed him.
“Well!” he said joyfully, ‘we’re alive!”
No one echoed him. He remembered that he alone was escaping, that the others would return tomorrow and on every succeeding day, perhaps every day of their lives, to this forest humming with silence in order to fulfill this impossible quota. They would go on indefinitely, from their hovels to the old condemned trees, from sleep to work, obsessed by the idea of the quota and by hunger, for the quota is bread and bread demands the quota and neither bread nor the quota have any end . . . Rodion left them in the purple evening shadows. No one thought of him as he lingered behind, the last, on the homeward path. Slaves! slaves! comrades! . . . Rodion bade them fare-well inside himself with a sigh of deliverance. He found his way by the stars, his limbs exhausted, his head ardent, his steps stumbling and deliberate like those of a drunken man. The pines surrounded him with their tall, motionless silhouettes. Suddenly outcroppings of rock burst through the soil; he slipped, fell, got up again and went on, panting, through the darkness, which was now blue, now spangled, for it was raining stars. In reality—if there was a reality realer than his half-delirious flight—thirst and fever were the cause of the silver disks which danced before his pupils, dilated in the night. Thirst and hunger now prevented him from thinking, but he walked on, walked on, lacerating his feet against roots and rocks, into the depth of the night, the madness of thirst, the exaltation of escape, the proximity of death . . .
It was probably the next day or the day after. All at once the stars froze, the sharp outline of the trees burst open across the sky, and Rodion fell over backwards. A single thought crossed his mind, creeping across his brain like a tiny blue flame on the ground: “I’m drowning . . .” Was this the fourth or the fifth day of his new life? How did he drag himself, appeasing his hunger by chewing pine leaves and green moss, which had the taste of damp stone and under which tiny, salty worms still wriggled between his teeth—how did he drag himself out of the woods, into the full pale light, toward the stream whose murmuring he could hear distinctly, the stream he could glimpse from a hundred yards away, flowing among the roots, the stream which didn’t exist? How?
Then, suddenly, the landscape opened out in two great folds: the woolly flocks of pine trees huddled back into a huge past; an immobile avalanche of rocks and scrabble toppled down toward the wide milky ribbon of a river on the far shore of which lay a golden sandy beach. And Rodion’s excessive joy was overpowered by a fear: “I’m done for, it’s a mirage . . .” Despairing, he made his way down toward the mirage. He spent his very last strength in economical movements so as to avoid falling (perhaps he would never have got up again), to find handholds, footholds, to get closer to the mirage. His whole mind, awakening from silence, fever, thirst, delirium, even from the will to live which engenders delirium and mirage, was concentrated on that miraculous water, spread like a sheet of sky, drawing nearer and nearer. It wasn’t a mirage, since it was drawing nearer, since he could make out tufts of grass right on its bank, but why shouldn’t there be tufts of grass on the bank of a mirage? He began to believe in the reality of that water only when he had quenched his thirst in it.
One more day slipped past outside measurable time between the vanquished mirage, the reality of the water, and the icy sadness of evening. Rodion was getting some of his strength back. The sun licked the wounds on his bare feet. He no longer felt his hunger. He had to swim across those three hundred metres of real water, tomorrow, when the sun reached its zenith. The night was polar, illuminated by an enormous moon. Bats fluttered nearby. Rodion felt himself come suddenly awake, but he had merely emerged from an extremely lifelike dream, only to drift back into chilled somnolence. The teeth-chattering morning was longer than the night; then the sun climbed into the pure solitude of the sky. When the earth and the river were all aglow with it, Rodion took off his clothes, made a bundle of them which he hung behind his neck, carefully observed the sandy bank on the opposite side, and slowly entered the water, which was so cold that all his flesh bristled. Another step and he fell in—the rock ended there. The cold penetrated him through and through, but he swam calmly across that white, gilded, liquid ice whose current deflected his course slightly. Every ten seconds, he raised his head toward the sun, mouth open, eyes dazzled, to snatch the warm air. So careful was he to conserve his strength that he refused to turn around in order to see how far he had come. And the farther he swam, the wider grew that sparkling sheet. A million needles tore his skin. He swam with frenzy, his guts convulsing with strange cramps. But the warm golden sand which at last shimmered before his eyes was only a mirage . . . His muscles clenched violently, his mouth, open in order to drink in air, breathed in water, water. A dull thunder rumbled in his ears, then exploded like a peal of bells. In his frenzied effort to overcome the pain and asphyxiation he turned himself around and the last thing he saw on earth was the high wall of the bluff crowned by pine trees . . . The vast forest climbed inexorably higher, filling the sky, swinging out over the land to come crashing down on the lost swimmer. With extraordinary detachment, the drowned man saw the river close over his head—clear, without a ripple, abstract.
* * *
A man was squatting in front of a fire of twigs cooking some sizzling, red meat hanging from a sort of tripod. As his eyes opened, Rodion saw that man from behind. On his head he wore a fur cap made of a bristly animal-skin. Rodion’s first thought was mingled with saliva, for the grilled meat was giving off its pungent smell in the sunlight. Rodion recognized the golden sand on which he was lying—naked, exhausted, in a vast warmth. The man, as if sensing that glance on the back of his neck, spun around on his bare heels. Rodion saw a low forehead over which hung curly hair the colour of dirty straw, a wide mouth, a fleshy nose marked by a scar, and crafty, little pointed eyes as blue as the sky.
“So you’re back?”
Rodion recognized the sing-song accent of the Black-Lands folk in the man’s speech.
“Thank you,” he said simply, and he added, after a pause, “comrade.”
“You can take your comrades and shove ‘em up your arse. What kind of comrade are you to me, you poor half-drowned fool? What makes you think I’m not going to turn you in to earn the bounty? You think it’s not obvious you escaped from the camp? Which brigade were you in? The Yagoda Brigade? The Enthusiasts’ Brigade? Triumphant Socialism? Screw the lot of them, citizen. If you don’t want me
to chuck your arse back in the water, you better not call me comrade. In this country, you’ll learn there’s no more anything: neither socialism, nor capitalism, bunch of syphilitic whores. There’s only you and me, and if that makes one too many, the question will be easy to settle without consulting the masses . . .”
As he delivered this half-mocking, half-angry monologue, the man was carefully broiling the meat. Rodion, comforted by his deep bass voice, tried his limbs: they were working, almost painful. A sudden confidence in the universe made him cordial.
“I’m sorry. Thank you anyway. That smells good.”
“That smells of broiled wolf-cub,” explained the man. “I killed it this morning in its lair. It bit me on the thumb, the little rascal. I didn’t think it was so quick. There are lots of them here. I’m a wolf to the wolves, I am. I catch their scent, I lie in wait for them, I know all their tricks, and they haven’t learned mine yet. You see, I’m the more cunning in this class struggle . . . So I eat them. (His eyes were laughing.) I spot the lair. When the she-wolf goes off to hunt, I sneak up. Gotta work fast. I whistle, I imitate the little growling sounds the she-wolf makes, like this, listen . . . I don’t know whether it makes them nervous or charms them. The wolf-cub comes up; he shows the end of his snout, all pink and grey, then a suspicious puppy eye. I whistle again to give them confidence. I let him see my left hand, that intrigues him. He’s never seen a human hand, he can’t suspect that it is made to kill in a thousand ways. They’re innocent, wolf-cubs, they’re fools, and my hand looks like a harmless animal, it’s pink. So he licks his chops and he jumps at it; to play, I think, for he’s not yet strong enough to be mean; but I’ve got another hand, I have, and I break the wolf-cub’s neck with this . . .”
This: a piece of flint similar in every respect to the weapons of prehistoric cave-men.
“That’s my productive system. I don’t need any cooperatives, I don’t.”
With his fingers the man took a pinch of coarse salt and sprinkled it over a slice of meat which he practically threw in Rodion’s face. “There, eat.” Rodion was so weak that he attacked that sand-covered meat with his teeth, right on the sand, without even trying to take it in his hands, so as to move as little as possible . . . Time passed, perhaps a long time. The wolf-cub’s flesh had a delicious taste of blood, a taste of sunlight, a taste of life.
“How did you pull me out of the water?” asked Rodion at last.
Sitting with his legs tucked under him, Samoyed-fashion, the man went on devouring broiled meat, which he held with both hands. Bones cracked under his teeth. His hair was hanging over his forehead and eyes. His eyes sparkled with good humour: less, though, than his teeth. He replied only after a long while, after he had spat onto the sand some chewed tendons and some little crunched bones whose marrow he had sucked.
“First ask why,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe I was more interested in your bundle than your pretty face. If you had had a good pair of boots I’m not sure I wouldn’t have thrown you back into the water. What is your life going to be good for? I don’t need it, and the entire world doesn’t give a damn, believe me, just like I don’t give a damn. I really don’t know why I didn’t just let you sink and drift slowly down to the White Sea. Maybe that would have been better for you, one more drowned man never hurt anybody. And nobody will ever ask him for his passport. Maybe I needed your company, arsehole. Not for long.”
Rodion was listening in a dream. Such utter translucence reigned on the green fringe of the bushes. He asked:
“What’s your name?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. “Ivan.”
“Ivan Nobody?”
“Exactly.” Ivan got up, sated, smiling a funny smile of well-being. He walked around for a while between sand and sky. He filled the vast landscape: his low forehead, his rounded shoulders, his heavy jaw, his vigilant little eyes, their blue cheerfulness sharpened by slyness. Stockily built, broad and heavy, giving an impression of enormous strength now that he was standing up, dressed more or less like a hunter from the Taiga. He returned toward Rodion, who lay naked, limbs outstretched, shivering. From his full height he looked down at Rodion and suddenly declaimed in a joking schoolboy’s voice:
Diadia! diadia! our nets
Have pulled in the body of a drowned man. . . .
“That’s from Pushkin,” said Rodion, at the edge of unconsciousness.
“And Shakespeare?” said Ivan, with an imperceptible trace of mockery, “do you know that name?”
“No . . . I’ve only read Hegel, Hegel . . .”
“Possible. But you have fever, my drowned man.”
How much warmth there was in his voice now . . . Rodion, feeling faint, closed his eyes. The man kneeled down next to him and with both hands began covering the lad’s naked body with sand. Rodion felt that material warmth over all his flesh. His features relaxed. His childish face emerged from the sand. The light, passing through his eyelids and his sleep, extinguished all thought within him. He was coming back to life.
. . . He spent several days with the man, Ivan, who said he did not know the name of the river nor that of the other river whose junction Rodion had to find, a two or three day’s walk upstream. There, big rafts loaded with logs were always floating downstream; by riding on one for three days you get to a town, a town without a name or memories either, for this man was wary of men, of language, of numbers, of memories. “Rivers have no names in nature,” he said mischievously. “Drowned men don’t have names at the bottom of the water, and they all have the same blue faces. The wolves don’t know that they are wolves. That’s the way things are . . .” He led Rodion to his lair, a comfortable burrow, large and quite dry, which had been dug right into the earth of the steppe. It was well exposed to the sun, yet well hidden by the bushes, and it was so well laid out that Rodion thought several men must have worked on it. Two cavalry coats and two heavy winter quilts made a comfortable bed. As he fell asleep there for the first time, Rodion felt a fear: why shouldn’t Ivan smash my head in tonight? And he immediately answered himself: a refugee from a firing-squad and a refugee from a drowning—we were made to sleep together underground. What good would my death be to him? What good is my life to me? Nothing has any importance. No more problems. The simplicity of things made him slightly dizzy. The earth was vast, vast . . .
They parted without shaking hands or pronouncing any useless phrases. Both were taciturn, probably because the sky was white and heavy that day. Nothing to say to each other on the edge of the beach where a gloomy heath began. Rodion set off toward the dark line of distant mountains. Ivan was holding a stump of a carbine with a sawed-off barrel and a sawed-off stock, which dangled at the end of his arm. When Rodion was about a hundred metres away, Ivan raised up that mutilated weapon and shook it up and down over his head for a long while. He seemed to be sending incomprehensible signals. Rodion, who was walking rapidly, turned around several times to answer him by waving his cap.
* * *
The other nameless river was wider. A stunning breadth of heavenly blue flowed between sheer cragged cliffs of purplish-blue rocks. Tree trunks were floating in it. A wisp of smoke curled up over a patch of woods. From that point on, Rodion’s whole being was expectant, on the lookout. Hidden on the bank, which was covered with tall reeds pointed like swords, he watched the majestic passage of a huge, well-constructed raft carrying a complete building made of logs. The men aboard were talking very loudly in a language he didn’t understand, Finnish, or Samoyed or Syzran or Mari. They were blond men, rather well dressed in sweaters and old rusty leather—probably Communists. The next raft appeared several hours later, just before sunset, through a cloud of gnats. It was small, less heavily laden. Two young lads were steering it, standing, with long poles. Rodion hailed them; they came in to shore with a sort of indifference, welcomed him aboard without saying a word, and handed him a pole. All this took place automatically. As soon as the sun had set, the rocks took on the colour of blackened blood; the river
became hostile, the gnat-bites painful. Then the two lads broke into an old convicts’ song:
We go on. dragging our chains
Down the road of sorrows
We go on. dragging our hearts
To the end of our bitter fate
One night we will escape
Beautiful girl, you will love us
And then they will pinch us again
Beautiful girl, you will cry for us
They kept repeating this stanza—the only one they knew—until they could no longer go on: from fatigue, from dull sadness. Rodion sang along with them as he worked his pole, for they needed to pay strict attention in order to prevent the current from dashing them against the rocks. At critical moments the three lads, leaning out over the dark waters, would arch their backs, absorbing the impact against their chests with a single gasp, and one of them swore. When the moon rose they again took up the song of chains and sorrows, of love and heartbreak, until the hour when, exhausted, they moored in a sort of creek in order to sleep. At dawn, Rodion told the two lads he had money, and they sold him a hunk of black bread for three roubles. As a precaution he left them a few hours upstream from the town. He leaped adroitly onto the bank. The two lads, having turned their backs, never saw him again. The surface of the water was shimmering, totally calm, and the motionless shrubs were reflected in it, emerald green.
“An escaped man,” said one, “God go with him.”
“An escaped man,” echoed the other in reply, “The Devil take him.”
The town began with a row of poor log houses standing in little yards enclosed by dilapidated fences. A little girl bounded out, barefoot. Her feet were black. Rodion halted, enchanted. He felt naïve joy, tinged with another feeling—bitter, almost terrible—as he gazed at those familiar houses, always the same, with thatched or planked roofs so weather-beaten that you could see daylight through them. What town was this? He didn’t dare ask. He mingled with the crowd, searching for a street-sign, a notice posted by the local Soviet. But this was a town without street-signs, without posters, perhaps without a name, an ordinary little town with ruined churches: the same empty cooperatives as everywhere, a line of people in front of the closed shop of the Tabak-Trust, a miserable market-place where everything—the horses’ long drooping heads, the people’s faces, the rare sacks of grain—had the same colour of dried mud . . . On the red gauze banner strung across the main street, Rodion, who did not wish to read them, made out two faded rain-washed words: Enthusiasm, Industrialization . . .