by Victor Serge
“Woe unto you! May my blood bring retribution on you all! I am innocent! Innocent! Innocent!”
Nothing—neither the years in prison, crushing this old man under the weight of a life sentence, the dungeons, the hunger, nor even the illness that had chained him to this bed for the last forty months—nothing had silenced that voice of vengeance. His metallic eye cast the same dagger-glint; his wrathful voice, now hoarse, flung the same furious protest at all who approached him. (And yet in the depths of that cold eye a certain unease betrayed his guilt.) The whole infirmary called him “The Poisoner.”
“I’m out of paper,” he said to Ribotte. “Ask the Warden for some more immediately. I still have thirty pages to write.”
He pulled out a stack of manuscripts, covered with corrections, from under the sheets.
“O.K., O.K.,” said Ribotte. “Right away. Only don’t tire yourself out writing too much, eh?”
Horta caught a glimpse of me through the half-opened door. With the dignity of an old caged lion he raised his great, heavy body.
“Eight years! For eight years now I haven’t got tired! You, the new man! Ninety-six months, two thousand nine hundred and forty-five days …”
The words, the numbers, had lost all meaning.
“How long are you in for? Ten years? For me, it’s forever, do you understand, forever! … The grave. If I live for a century it will still be the same, do you understand?”
He rarely spoke this much, weary of seeing the same faces every day; of feeling his cries fading into the general indifference and—worse than death—feeling his own inability to move the souls of others. But, as he glared at the, his blue eye hardened, his voice rang out with conviction:
“Listen! I don’t know who you are. It doesn’t matter. Don’t ever forget what you have seen, you who are young … I am seventy-eight years old. They have been torturing me for eight years, and I’m alive, alive! And every day I shout at them: You have condemned an innocent man! … me, I’m innocent! Perhaps you have murdered or robbed, eh? Me, I’m innocent! Innocent! Innocent!”
“Be quiet,” said Ribotte. “They’ll hear you.”
He seemed to lose track of himself. With enormous effort, he sat straight up in his bed. This movement made him wince, for his disease had immobilized both his knees, swathed in bandages, for the past three years:
“Me? Be quiet? Let ‘em hear, let ‘em hear! Murderers!”
The silent quai under the tall, green poplars, the shimmering water where trees trembled in reflection among patches of sky, the path along the bank where a child was running: This peaceful vision of life, glimpsed suddenly through the window, calmed him.
“I’m finishing my brief,” he said. “Thirty pages more. This time I haven’t left anything out” (the blue eye glittered with pride once again). “My innocence is proven ten times over.”
The manuscripts piled up under his hand, close-written line upon line, quite legible, crisscrossed with references and ironical or emphatic exclamation points. Factual arguments—discussed, analyzed, reduced to irrefutable syllogisms—analogies, artfully exploited inductions, brilliant dialectics, subtle, specious arguments which suddenly ensnared the unwary mind like a net, made this a strange and powerful book; and this man must, really have believed at times that his book—which no one would ever read—could and would destroy what he had doubtless never been able to extinguish entirely in himself: memory.
Perhaps even at the very moment when, terrible as an avenger, he thundered his innocence, an image still haunted his brain: his hands calmly uncorking a little octagonal phial and pouring a few colorless drops into the tea, steaming next to a little Japanese ashtray. The young bride came in, resembling one of the white birds gliding across her kimono, golden hair hanging over her temples. Absent-mindedly, she asked, in English:
“How are you today, my dear?”
He watched her sip the amber tea which would snuff out the light in her eyes. The wide falling sleeve of the kimono revealed one delicate bare arm, up to her shoulder.
A thin partition separated Horta from Abbé Nicot, a skinny little man, long emasculated by chastity, worn down by a narrow little existence in a provincial vicarage. White-haired at fifty, mouth drawn tight in senility over rotting teeth, low forehead lined with deep wrinkles. Rain-gray eyes, always a little frightened, behind his rimless glasses. Always very neat, retaining a sort of propriety in his prisoner’s uniform, he was pitiful and helpless, overwhelmed, submissive, humble, defeated without knowing why.
Every morning, before the attendant got up, sure of not being observed, Abbé Nicot would kneel on the floor, join together his tiny, manicured, old lady’s hands, close his eyes, and, in the silence of his cell, alone in the world, pray. Then his chest would heave a deep sigh as he returned to his usual view: the white sky through the bars on the window, the landscape of tall poplars, the books on their shelf.
When he thought of his seventeenth-century Latin Bible, bound in buff leather and bearing the signature “Joseph Tommasi, Dauffmann, Dordrecht, Anno Domini 1685,” of his breviaries which he had kept since adolescence and which reminded him of the great seminary courtyard, of his History of the Holy Church which he had read for ten years without exhausting it, Abbé Nicot felt his eyes growing moist. He owned a Bible yellowed by the touch of countless careless hands, a brand-new Imitation of Christ made even more vulgar by its pretentious boxing and the red outline on its tiny pages, and Bossuet’s Funeral Orations, which had come to the prison from a convent library. And no one could imagine what phantasmagoric visions filled his cell at night! The saints, the elect, the martyrs, the blessed dead, the angels, Jesus haloed in silver, God himself at the dazzling summit, Hell with the endless cries of the damned, the dark and bestial Devil with his horned forehead, surrounded Abbé Nicot’s puerile soul with endless enchantments. That was what gave him his absent expression, as if things only seemed only partially real to him.
“Good morning, Abbé!” said Ribotte, jovial. “The Devil didn’t visit you last night, eh? old brother?”
The Abbé blushed in answering, flustered and embarrassed. “Good morning, Monsieur Ribotte. Always in high spirits?”
He didn’t like the blasphemous joke about the Devil. Every one laughed at his simple faith. He used to tell his neighbor, Ollivier, who sometimes visited him in late afternoon: “They laugh at the Devil, and the Devil is waiting for them. No one escapes him, my friend, not one! I am sorry for them.”
“How is Perchot?” he asked. “Did he spend a quiet night?”
“Perchot?” answered Ribotte. “Then you don’t know he kicked off?”
The Abbé bit his lips. He had prayed for Perchot that night, he was hoping. But he said nothing, so as not to appear foolish.
When the attendant had left, the Abbé removed his spectacles, wiped them absent-mindedly on his big blue prisoner’s handkerchief, and laid them on his Bible, which was opened to the prophecies of Isaiah. He quietly closed the glass door and cocked his ear for a moment: The footsteps were moving away. Then, his mind at ease, he sat down on his bed where he couldn’t be seen through the glass door, and joined his hands. The sky’s whiteness seemed to enter his myopic eyes. “Poor, poor Perchot!”
A sardonic apparition interrupted his meditation. Madré burst in on him, waggish, a feather duster in his hand. “Dusting” was a pretext for him to wander around the corridors. His old Pulchinello’s greenish face mocked him in silence.
“Pax! Oh holier-than-holy Father of charlatans! And how’s your itty-bitty health today? Still dreaming of them, eh? those pretty little girls? Go on! They’ll be back! You’ll see their pink little feet, their pink titties, their pretty little bottoms …”
How comical he was, that crestfallen little priest! Madré was laughing with all his might.
Impotent anger made the Abbé’s lips tremble. He hissed like a furious cat.
“Don’t get mad!” said Madré. “That would be a sin. I only dropped in to say hello
.”
In the old days the Abbé liked to entertain the parish children in his vicarage garden. He was hardly bigger than the tallest of his little girls or certain little boys with long bare legs. Sometimes he would hold a young head, with silky blond or dark curls, between his hands for a moment, the better to gaze at it; and his old hands would run gently down along those slender bodies, perhaps retaining in their caress some of the heat of the flesh which he had overcome so long ago. He had let them convict him almost without an argument, overwhelmed by the scandal and the damning, irrefutable accusation of the children.
“He’s a nice old nut,” Ribotte used to say. “But after all, what a dirty old pig!”
THIRTY-FOUR
The Voice of the Living
IN THE LITTLE INFIRMARY GARDEN, THE SUN HAS DRAWN TOGETHER EVERYone who can move or be moved. The word “garden” is used here in its most perfunctory sense. A barren, circular pond, usually dry. Four stunted trees forming a square; four cropped bushes, in a diamond shape; four triangular grass plots separating the gravel paths where we hunt for the little white quartz pebbles, so velvet, so soft to the touch, so white that they bring to mind many forgotten things.
This could be the square of some mining village in the North. The survivors sitting here could be victims of the mine gas. After all, one form of suffocation is much like another. We are allowed to walk up and down these paths at will. Divine freedom of the body! We meet, we talk; divine freedom of the soul! The trees are no longer part of the motionless, abstract world of the round: They are real, accessible trees whose bark we love to touch, and on which we watch the ants climbing.
A skeletal young consumptive, half-hidden under his blankets, had been placed to one side on an old deck chair held together with string. Beneath a thin layer of skin, his skull smiles up at life’s last sun. Not far off a broken old man, squatting on the ground, lifts a cracked, toothless face with red-rimmed eyes toward the sun. He sits there like a bit of debris. Tonnelier, known as “Chemin-des-Dames,” is facing him. Expert surgeons, using a triangular silver plate, have patched up his skull, into which a piece of shrapnel bored a hole at Chemin-des-Dames. But three quarters of his intelligence seems to have run out through that hole. He’s an idiot. Whatever you ask him, his thick-tongued answer always begins with “Chemin-des-Dames.”
Madré, seated on the stone stoop in front of a door, breathes in the warm air. He looks like a Chinese gargoyle. His cheeks puff out one after the other, for he has taken up the habit of chewing tea leaves … Little George, with his pointed chin, looks as slender as an anemic, overworked young factory girl. On his arm is young Antoine des Tailleurs—“Toinette.” Antoine’s head is swathed in bandages; he has a chubby face with beautiful, full lips and long, velvety eyes like a Berber’s. A man slashed open his forehead with a pair of scissors. The man is in the “hole”: Toinette-Antoine has the blues “something awful.” He and Little George walk arm in arm, talking quietly and confidentially like two young girls.
Abbé Nicot is trying to read. In the narrow garden path, cut sharply into sunshine and shade, the gravel crunches loudly under the feet of two men. Laurent, his face tattooed, his neck bandaged, is supporting Filot, the blind man, who walks along stiffly, tapping the ground with his cane. Filot has a strangely frozen face, which seems to be covered with a thin, dull film. His whole face moves in one piece; it is quite large, reddened in the cheeks and around the mouth. A reddish mustache makes an inverted V under his nose, stuck like a peg between two deep furrows. The eyes are glassy. Filot has been blind for two years; he went blind here. Doomed to total paralysis, his legs sometimes give way. He is eligible for parole in two months.
“I don’t know what will become of me,” he says. “I’ll be dragging a paralytic carcass home to my old lady. Sometimes I’d like to put an end to the whole mess. But sometimes I tell myself that my legs are already getting better and that maybe there’s hope …”
“We’re just like lizards in the sun, eh, Father?” Laurent asks Abbé Nicot politely.
“Yes, yes,” says the Abbé smiling. “We’re really just like lizards … Sit down, Filot.”
Filot sits down. It’s not easy. Laurent and I have to give him a hand; his blindness and the stiffness of his legs have made him quite helpless. Once seated, Filot turns his dead eyes toward the sunlight. The Sun burns in a cloudless sky, and these sightless eyes are the only ones that can gaze full upon it.
“Feels good,” says Filot.
I admire the industrious activity of the ants in the cracks of the pavement.
Madré calculates aloud:
“Perchot is only the twelfth this year. Last year at this time there were already seventeen.”
Everyone understands that he is talking about deaths. Just above our heads, behind the half-open window, Number 4627 has entered his death throes.
Someone says:
“Prison is made to kill.”
Filot, who has become a deep thinker since the death of his eyes, lets fall some weighty words:
“We are made to die.”
That’s his way of talking. He speaks only in general terms now. He says “we” as if he no longer wishes to isolate himself from the crowd, whose common suffering he has discovered through his long meditations in the darkness. His thought, in search of the larger truths, moves ponderously along like the leaden clouds of a November sky. When he gives voice to his thought, it seems to project patches of light and shadow.
“Don’t we all die a little bit every day, from the first to the last?”
Madré calculates:
“With six hundred inmates, that makes nearly two years of human life every day; in a fortnight, thirty years, a man’s life. Altogether, I figured out that we are doing something like three thousand five hundred years.”
He bursts out laughing:
“Who wants to count the days?”
“We have plenty of men and plenty of days, all right!” says Laurent. “Just sitting here, what don’t we have?”
His restless eyes, dark as murky water, run around our group, pleased to find here men from every kind of background, every kind of struggle, every kind of suffering. Filot raises his hand. We wait for his words. He declares:
“All men are here. Prison is made for all men.”
He adds, as if confessing a secret:
“This I know.”
And no one smiles.
“All men are here, and all crimes.”
“First the thieves,” said Madré. “Those who steal in the street, from shop windows; purse snatchers, pickpockets, hotel rats. Burglars: professionals and amateurs. Con men, swindlers, crooked stockbrokers, bigshots who go bankrupt in style. Forgers and fortune hunters. Dumb, half-starved beggars who smash shop windows. Highway robbers, who shake down countryfolk to find out where the loot is stashed. We have thieves, all right!”
“You can see,” said someone, “that prisons are necessary!”
“It’s too bad,” Said Laurent, “that you forgot all the thieves who will never be here, all the ones who don’t look like thieves and are the biggest thieves of all.”
“Then the murderers. With all the blood they’ve spilled, you could paint a road from here to Paris …”
“With the blood the others have spilled, you could go around the world more than once, eh?”
“The assassins: the ones who kill old rentiers in their beds, or stab a fat passer-by near a vacant lot … The ones who wait for the bank boy to take out the day’s receipts and knock him over the head … The ones who kill out of passion, the jealous ones, the mad lovers, the sadists who strangle whores … The abortionists … The poachers, the smugglers who “pick off” a cop. The unionized miners who want to flood the mines, like you, Thomas. The strikers who kill a scab … We have ‘em, we have ‘em! … The firebugs; your type, Citizen van Hoever; the ones who set fire to the store just before inventory … Ah là, là!”
“Prisons are necessary,” some one else continued. “Pri
sons are necessary.”
“I haven’t finished,” said Madré. “There are more. The pimps, the white slavers, the dirty old men who do nasty things to little girls, the ecclesiastics—I pronounced it right, didn’t I, Father? We even have a lawyer who seduced a twelve-year-old kid. Ah, humanity! Beautiful humanity!”
He turned toward Thomas, the syndicalist miner:
“And, frankly, you’re really something, getting yourself thrown into prison for God-knows-what, for God-knows-who, for a gang of brutal bastards they call men.”
And, like the blind man a moment before, he added: “Me, I know them. I’m one of ‘em!”
Van Hoever, glancing obliquely at Thomas, whispered to Abbé Nicot:
“They want you to share everything you have. Gotta be pitiless with them. It’s not enough to send them to the islands where they couldn’t escape … better …”
“You’re right,” the Abbé approved quietly. “They attack the social order.”
The other old man didn’t understand those words, but their gravity pleased him because he detected in them a more well-founded condemnation.
Laurent cried out:
“But how stupid can you get? Haven’t you learned anything? You talk like the newspapers, like the cream of honest society that you are. Jerks! A bunch of jerks! Have you ever taken a good look at them, at the guys who judge us, who guard us, who go off and live in style in gay Paree? All of ‘em, all, from the first to the last? Have you looked at them? Tell me?”
An answer came:
“Yeah, it’s true. Like I once knew a judge who …”
“Take a look at the guards first …”
The blind man stood up, because the ray of sunlight had moved. He longed for its golden warmth. He could feel that the shadows had just reached him. His frozen face sought the light. You could see too, by something straining within him, that his mind sought the truth.
“You can blame it on bad luck.”
The miner answered:
“Bad luck is only another name for poverty. And rich people make poverty.”