by Victor Serge
“If it is to kill somebody, I have something better …”
“Better?” Romachkin asked, gasping for breath …
On the table, between their glasses, lay a Colt revolver with a short barrel and a black cylinder — a forbidden weapon, the mere presence of which was a crime — a fine clean Colt, calling the hand, fortifying the will.
“Four hundred, my friend.”
“Three hundred,” said Romachkin unconsciously, already filled with the Colt’s spell.
“Three hundred — take it, my friend,” said Akhim, “because my heart trusts you.”
It was only as he went out that Romachkin noticed how strangely neglected and disorderly Akhim’s quarters looked. It was not a place where anyone lived, it was a place where someone was waiting to vanish, in a confusion like a station platform during the rout of an army. Under the white birches, Akhim smiled at him mildly. Romachkin set out through the peaceful little streets. The heavy Colt lay against his chest, in the inside pocket of his coat. From what robbery, what murder on the distant steppe, did it come? Now it lay against the heart of a pure man whose one thought was justice.
He stopped for a moment at the entrance to a huge construction yard. There was a wide view under the liquid blue of the moon. In the distance, through scaffolding and the rubble of demolished buildings, he could see the waters of the Moskva, as through the crenelations of a ruined fortress. To the right was the scaffolding of an uncompleted skyscraper; to the left rose the citadel of the Kremlin, with the heavy flat façade of the Great Palace, the tall tower of Czar Ivan, the pointed turrets of the enclosing wall, the bulbous domes of the cathedrals rising against the starry sky. Here searchlights reigned, men ran through a zone of harsh white light, a sentry ordered back a crowd of gapers. The wounded mass of the Cathedral of St. Saviour occupied the foreground; the great gilded cupola that had crowned it was gone like an ancient dream, the building rested heavily on the beginning of its own ruins; a dark crack a hundred feet long split it from top to bottom, like a dead lightning bolt in the masonry. “There it goes!” someone said. A woman’s voice murmured, “My God!” Thunder burrowed through the ground, shook the ground, made the whole moonlit landscape rock fantastically, set the river sparkling, set people shuddering. Smoke rose slowly, the thunder rolled over the ground and vanished in a silence like the end of the world; a deep sigh rose from the mass of stone, and it began to sink in upon itself with a snapping of bones, a cracking of beams, a desolate look of suffering. “That’s done it!” cried a little bareheaded engineer to several dust-covered workmen who, like himself, had emerged from the cloud. Romachkin, having read it in the papers, thought that life progressed through destruction, that things must perpetually be torn down so that things could be built, that the old stones must be killed so that new buildings, better ventilated and worthier of man, might rise; that on this spot would one day stand the beautiful Palace of the Peoples of the Union — in which perhaps iniquity would no longer reign. A slight unacknowledged grief mingled with these grandiose ideas as he resumed his walk toward the place where he could catch Streetcar A.
He put the Colt on the table. Bluish-black, it filled the room with its presence. Eleven o’clock. He bent over it in thought for a moment before he went to bed. On the other side of the partition Kostia moved; he was reading, from time to time he looked up at the radiant miniature. The two men felt each other’s nearness. Kostia drummed gently against the partition with his fingertips. Romachkin answered in the same fashion: Yes, come! Should he hide the Colt before Kostia came in? His hesitation lasted only a hundredth part of a second. The first thing Kostia saw as he entered was the magical blue-black steel on the white paper tablecloth. Kostia picked up the Colt and bounced it happily up and down in his hand. “Magnificent!” He had never held a revolver before, he felt childishly happy. He was rather tall, with a high forehead, unruly hair, and sea-green eyes. “How well you hold it!” said Romachkin admiringly. And in fact the Colt increased Kostia’s stature, giving him the look of a proud young warrior. “I bought it,” Romachkin explained, “because I like firearms. I used to hunt, but a shotgun is too expensive … A double-barreled Winchester costs twelve hundred — think of it!” Kostia only half listened to the embarrassed explanation: that his timid neighbor should own a revolver amused him, and he made no attempt to hide his amusement — his whole face lit up with a smile … “You will certainly never use it, Romachkin,” he said. Romachkin answered warily: “I don’t know … Of course I have no use for it. What should I use it for? I have no enemies … But a firearm is a beautiful thing. It makes you think …”
“Of assassins?”
“No. Of just men.”
Kostia suppressed a guffaw. A fine hero you’d make, my poor friend! — A good sort, though. The little man was looking at him quite seriously. Kostia feared that he would hurt him if he joked. They chatted a few minutes just as usual. “Have you read Issue 12 of Prison?” Romachkin asked before they separated. — “No — is it interesting?” — “Very. It has the story of the attempt on Admiral Dubassov in 1906 …” Kostia took Issue 12 with him.
But Romachkin himself did not want to reread any accounts of those red-letter days of the Revolution. They were too discouraging. Those historic assassinations had required meticulous preparation, disciplined organization, money, months of work, of watching, of waiting, courage linked with courage; besides, they had often failed. If he had really thought about it, his plan would have appeared completely visionary. But he did not think — thoughts formed and dissolved in him without control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life in that fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accurately, more clearly, but that such thinking is a strange labor which one performs almost in spite of oneself and which often results in a bitter pleasure, beyond which there is nothing. Whenever he could — whether in the morning, afternoon, or evening — Romachkin explored a certain locality in the center of the city: Staraia Place, an old square on which stands a sort of bank building in gray freestone; at the entrance there is a black glass plate with gold lettering: Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the U.S.S.R., Central Committee. A guard silhouetted in the hall. Elevators. Across the narrow square, the old white crenelated wall of Kitai-Gorod, the “Chinese City.” Cars drew up. There was always someone smoking thoughtfully at the corner … No, not here. Impossible here. Romachkin could not have said why. Because of the white crenelated wall, the severe gray freestone blocks, the emptiness? The ground was too hard, it bewildered his feet, he felt that he had neither weight nor substance. In the vicinity of the Kremlin, on the other hand, the breezes that swept through the gardens carried him across Red Square in all his insignificance, and when he stopped for a moment before Lenin’s tomb, he was as anonymous as the gaping provincials who stopped with him; the faded, twisted domes of St. Vasili the Blessed dwarfed him even more. It was not until he had mounted the three steps of the Place of Execution that he felt himself again. It had been there for centuries, surrounded by a small circular stone balcony. How many men had died there? Of them all, nothing survived in the souls of the passers-by — except in his. Just as simply would he have laid himself on the wheel that should break his limbs. The mere thought of the atrocious torture set his skin shivering. But what else was there to do when one had come thus far? From that day on, he carried the Colt whenever he went out.
Romachkin liked the public gardens that border the outer wall of the Kremlin on the side toward the city. He gave himself the pleasure of walking there almost every day. It was there that the thing hit him between the eyes. He was walking in the gardens eating a sandwich (it was between 1:15 and 1:50), instead of chatting with his colleagues in the Trust restaurant. As usual, the central walk was almost deserted; the streetcars, making the turn outside the fence, rattled and clanged their bells. Where the walk curves in the direction of the rusty foliage that borders the high wall of the Kremlin, a man in uniform appeared. Two men in civil
ian clothes followed him, smoking. Tall, almost gaunt, the visor of his military cap pulled down over his eyes, his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual, the man stepped out of the portraits published in the papers, displayed four stories high on buildings, hung in offices, impressed, day after day, on the minds of the nation. There was no possible doubt: it was He. The air of authority, the hands — the right in the pocket, the other swinging … As if in final proof of his identity, the Chief drew a short pipe from his pocket, put it between his teeth, and walked on. Now he was only thirty feet from Romachkin. Romachkin’s hand flew into his coat pocket, groping for the butt of the Colt. At that moment the Chief, still walking, drew out his tobacco pouch; less than six feet from Romachkin he stopped, daring him; his cat eyes shot a little cruel gleam in Romachkin’s direction. His mocking lips muttered something like, “You abject worm Romachkin,” with devastating scorn. And he passed by. Demolished, Romachkin stumbled over a stone, tottered, almost fell. Two men, sprung from nowhere, caught him in time. “Do you feel ill, citizen?” They must be members of the Chief’s secret-police escort. “Let me alone!” Romachkin shouted at them, beside himself with rage — but actually he barely breathed the words, or other words, in a despairing whisper. The two men, who were holding him by the elbows, let him go. “Don’t drink when you don’t know how, idiot,” muttered one. “Damned vegetarian!” Romachkin sank onto a bench beside a young couple. A voice of thunder — his own — rang in his head: “Coward, coward, coward, coward …” The couple, paying no attention to him, went on quarreling.
“If you see her again,” the woman said, “I …” (the next words were inaudible) “I’ve had enough. I’ve suffered too much, I …” (more inaudible words). “I beg you …”
An anemic creature, hardly more than a girl — lifeless blond hair, a face covered with pink pimples. The fellow answered:
“You make me tired, Maria. Stop it. You make me tired.” And he stared into the distance.
It was all relentlessly logical. Romachkin rose as if pushed up by a spring, looked at the couple implacably, and said:
“We are all cowards — do you hear me?”
It was so obvious, that the tension of his despair snapped; he was able to get up, to walk as he had walked before, to reach the office without being a minute late, go back to his graphs, drink his glass of tea at four o’clock, answer questions, finish his day’s work, go home … Now, what should he do with the Colt? He could not bear to have the useless weapon in his room any longer.
It was lying on the table, the blue-black steel gleaming with a coldness that was an insult, when Kostia came in and seemed to smile at him. Romachkin was sure he saw him smile. “Do you like it, Kostia?” he asked. Around them spread the peace of evening. Kostia, with the revolver in his hand and smiling at him quite openly, became a young warrior again. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said.
“I have no use for it,” said Romachkin, torn with regret. “You can have it.”
“But it’s worth a lot,” the young man objected.
“Not to me. And you know I can’t sell it. Take it, Kostia.” Romachkin was afraid to insist, because suddenly he so much wanted Kostia to take it. “Really?” Kostia spoke again. And Romachkin answered: “Yes, really. Take it.” Kostia carried away the Colt, put it on his own table, under the miniature, smiled once more at the faithful eyes that looked out of the frame, then at the clean weapon — mortally clean and proud it was! He did a few gymnastics for very joy. Romachkin enviously heard his joints crack.
Almost every evening they talked for a few minutes before they went to bed — the one ponderously insidious, returning to the same ideas over and over, again and again, like a plow ox making one furrow, then beginning again, to plow one beside it, again and yet again; the other mocking, attracted despite himself, sometimes leaping out of the invisible circle that had been drawn around him, only to find himself unwittingly back in it again. “What do you think, Romachkin?” he asked at last. “Who is guilty, guilty of it all?”
“Obviously it is whoever has the most power. If there were a God, it would be God,” Romachkin said softly. “That would be very convenient,” he added, with a little devious laugh.
Kostia felt that he had understood too many things at once. It made his head spin. “You don’t know what you are saying, Romachkin. And it’s a good thing for you that you don’t! Good night.”
From nine in the morning to six in the evening, Kostia worked in the office of a subway construction yard. The rhythmic and raucous throb of the excavating machine was communicated to the planking of the shanty. Trucks carried away the excavated earth. The first layers appeared to be composed of human debris, as humus is composed of vegetable debris; they had an odor of corpses, of the decaying city, of refuse long fermented under alternate snow and hot pavements. The truck engines, fed on an inconceivable gasoline, filled the yard with staccato explosions so violent that they drowned out the swearing of the drivers. A thin board fence separated Yard No. 22 from the bustling, klaxoning street, with its two surging streams flowing in opposite directions, its hysterically ringing streetcars, brand new police vans, ramshackle hackney carriages, swarming pedestrians. The shanty, the center of which was occupied by a stove, housed the timekeeping department, the accounting department, the technicians’ office, the desk reserved for the Party and the Young Communists, with its file cases, the corner allocated to the Secretary of the Syndical Cell, the office of the yard chief — but the latter was never there, he ran from one end of Moscow to the other looking for materials, with the Control Commissions running after him. So his space could be used. The Party secretary took it as of right: from morning to night he received the complaints of mud-covered workers, male and female, who descended into the earth, then came up out of the earth — one because he had no lamp, the second because he had no boots, the third no gloves; the fourth had been hurt; the fifth, fired for arriving drunk and late, furious because he was not allowed to go now that he had been fired: “I demand that the law be obeyed, Comrade Part.-Org. (Party Organizer). I came late, I was drunk, I made a row. Throw me out — it’s the law!” The Part.-Org. burst out, turning crimson: “In the name of God and all the stinking saints, you rub your dirty nose in the law because you want to quit, eh? Think you’ll get yourself some more work clothes somewhere else, eh? Damned dirty …” — “The law’s the law, Comrade.” Kostia checked the timecards for absences, went down into the tunnel with messages, helped the organizer of the Young Communists in his various educational, disciplinary, and secret-service duties. A short, dark, bobbed-haired, energetic eighteen-year-old girl with rouged lips and small acid eyes passed. He waved to her. “So your little pal Maria hasn’t showed up for two days? I’ll have to take it up with the Y.C. office.”
The girl stopped short and pulled up her skirt with a masculine gesture. A miner’s lamp hung from her leather apron. With her hair hidden under a thick kerchief, she looked as if she were wearing a helmet. She spoke passionately, slowly, in a low voice:
“You won’t see Maria again. Dead. Threw herself in the Moskva yesterday. She’s in the morgue this minute. Go take a look at her if you feel like it. You made her do it — you and the Bureau. And I’m not afraid to tell you so.”
The edge of her shovel gleamed evilly over her shoulder. She pushed her way into the gaping elevator. Kostia telephoned to the department, the police, the Y.C. secretary (private wire), the secretary of the yard newspaper, and even others. Everywhere the same news echoed back to him — numbing, and now banally irreparable. At the morgue, on the marble slabs, in a lugubrious gray chill riddled with electric bulbs, lay a nameless boy who had been run over by a street-car. He lay sleeping on his back, his skin white as wax, his two hands open as if they had just dropped two marbles. There was an old Asiatic in a long overcoat, hooknosed, blue-lidded, with his cut throat gaping and black (his face had been crudely painted for a photograph). He looked like an actor
made up as a corpse — greenish, the high cheekbones rose-pink. There was Maria, with her blue and white polka-dot blouse, her thin neck horribly blue, her little snub nose, her red curls plastered to her skull, but with no eyes at all, no eyeballs, only those pitiable folds of torn flesh, strangely sunk into the eye sockets. “Why did you do it, poor Marussia?” Kostia asked stupidly, while his unhappy hands kneaded his cap. This was death, the end of a universe. But a red-haired girl wasn’t the universe? The guardian of the morgue, a morose Jew in a white blouse, came up:
“You know her, citizen? Then there’s no use staying here any longer. Come and fill out the questionnaire.”
His office was warm, comfortable, full of papers. Drownings. Street Accidents. Crimes. Suicides. Doubtful Cases. “Under what heading should we put the deceased, in your opinion, citizen?” Kostia shrugged his shoulders. Then he asked angrily: