The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “Is there a heading, ‘Collective Crimes?’”

  “No,” said the Jew. “I call your attention to the fact that the deceased has already been examined by the medical expert and shows neither ecchymoses nor signs of strangulation.”

  “Suicide,” Kostia interrupted furiously.

  He pushed through the drizzle, his right shoulder forward. If he could have fought somebody, broken somebody’s nose, or taken a straight right on the jaw — for you, poor Marussia, you sweet little nitwit — it would have done him good. You big fool, why let yourself get so desperate? Everybody knows that men are bastards. Nobody pays any attention to the Wall Gazette, it’s only fit to wipe your arse with! How could you be so dumb, you poor baby, oh for God’s sake, oh hell! — The whole thing had been perfectly simple. The horror-stricken Y.C. secretary kept her brief statement to himself. It was written on a page from a school notebook and solemnly signed “Maria” (and her family name):

  “As a proletarian, I will not live with this filthy dishonor. Accuse no one of my death. Farewell.”

  And that was that! On orders from the Y.C. Central Committee, the branch committees were making a campaign “for health, against demoralization.” How should the campaign be conducted? The five young men who made up the Bureau had beaten their brains, until one of them had said: “Outlaw venereal diseases.” It seemed like a brilliant idea. Of the five, two were probably V.D. cases themselves, but they were clever enough to take their treatments in distant clinics. “There’s Maria, the redhead.” — “Perfect!” — A strange girl — she never said anything at meetings, she was always clean and tidy, she repulsed any advances, frightened to death, yet flared up when she was pinched — where had she ever caught her case? Not in the organization, that was certain. Then it must have been from the demoralized petty-bourgeois element? “She has no class instinct,” said the secretary severely. “I propose that we publish her expulsion in the yard Wall Gazette. We must make an example.” The Wall Gazette, illustrated with caricatures in water colors which showed a Maria recognizable only by her holiday blouse and her red hair, and grotesquely loaded with a pair of rhinestone earrings, tumbling out of a door from which projected the shadow of an enormous broom — the typewritten Wall Gazette was still posted in the vestibule of the shanty. Kostia calmly took it down, tore it into four pieces, and put the pieces in his desk drawer, because they might be used as evidence in court …

  Autumn and the rains carried away the insignificant episode of Maria’s suicide. Submitted to the Branch Committee for a recommendation, the case disappeared under the directives for an urgent and immediate campaign against the Right opposition, which was followed by incomprehensible expulsions; then under another campaign, slower in getting started but actually far more drastic, against corruption among Y.C. and Party officials. Under the whirlwind, the yard Y.C. secretary sunk into an abyss of opprobrium — exclusion, derision, Wall Gazette (the broom reappeared, driving him out with his hair standing on end and his papers swirling over the dump heap), and, finally, dismissal for having granted himself two months’ vacation in a rest house whose dazzling white walls rose among the rockslides and bursting flowers of Alupka in the Crimea.

  Kostia, accused of “having demonstratively torn up an issue of the Wall Gazette (a serious breach of discipline) and having attempted to exploit the suicide of an excluded member as part of an intrigue to discredit the Young Communist Bureau,” was “severely censured.” What did he care? Every night — after the yard, the city, his suppressed rages, his sole-less shoes, the sour soup, the icy wind — he returned to the soothing eyes of his miniature. He knocked at Romachkin’s door — Romachkin had aged a good deal only recently, and read strange books of a religious tendency. Kostia warned him: “Watch out, Romachkin, or you’ll find yourself a mystic.” “Impossible,” the shriveled little man answered. “I am so profoundly a materialist that …”

  “That?”

  “Nothing. I believe it is always the same unrest in contradictory forms.”

  “Perhaps,” said Kostia, struck by the idea. “Perhaps the mystic and the revolutionary are brothers … But one has to extirpate the other …”

  “Yes,” said Romachkin.

  He opened a book — Isolation, by Vladimir Rozanov. “Here — read this. How true it is!” His yellow fingernail pointed to the lines:

  “The hearse moves slowly, the road is long. ‘Well, farewell, Vassili Vassilievich, it’s bad underground, old man, and you lived a bad life; if you had lived better, you would rest easier underground. Whereas, with iniquity …’

  “My God, to die in iniquity …

  “And I am in iniquity.”

  “Dying in iniquity is no use,” Kostia answered; “the thing is to fight while we are alive …”

  He was surprised to have thought so clearly. Romachkin observed him with the keenest attention. The conversation shifted to the issuing of passports, the stricter enforcement of discipline among workers, the Chief’s edicts, the Chief himself.

  “Eleven o’clock,” said Kostia. “Good night.”

  “Good night. What have you done with the revolver?”

  “Nothing.”

  One February night, about ten o’clock, the snow stopped falling on Moscow; a mild frost draped everything in sparkling crystals. The lifeless branches of trees and shrubs in the gardens were magically covered with them. Crystals full of a secret light flowered on stones, covered the house fronts, clothed monuments. You walked on powdered stars through a stellar city: myriads of crystals floated in the globes of light around the street lamps. Toward midnight the sky became incredibly clear. The smallest light shot skyward like a sword. It was a festival of frost. The silence seemed to scintillate. Kostia became aware of the enchantment only after he had been walking through it for several minutes, after a Y.C. meeting devoted, like so many before it, to discussing the relaxation of discipline at work. The month was drawing to its close; Kostia, like many others, was going without food. At the meeting he had said nothing, knowing that his formula would be inacceptable: “For more discipline, more food. Soup first! Good soup will put a stop to drinking.” What was the use of saying it? The magic of the night laid hold of him, lightened his stride, cleared his mind, made him forget his hunger, even made him forget the execution of six men the night before, though it had made an unusual impression on him. “Food supply saboteurs,” said the curt official announcement. No doubt they stole, like everybody else — but could they help stealing? Could I — in the long run? The pillars of light above the street lamps tapered upward, very high into a darkness filled with minute frost crystals.

  Kostia was going down a narrow street, on one side of which was a row of small private houses from the previous century, on the other a row of six-story apartment buildings. Here and there a discreet light showed through a window. Odd how everybody leads his own individual life! The snow crackled softly under his feet, like rustling silk. A powerful black car, slipping silently over the snow, stopped a few paces ahead of him. A stout man in a short fur-lined coat and an astrakhan cap got out, with a brief case under his arm. As Kostia came almost abreast of him, he saw that the man had thick down-turning mustaches, full cheeks, and a broad flat nose. He thought he vaguely recognized the face. The man said something to his chauffeur, who answered deferentially:

  “Very good, Comrade Tulayev.”

  Tulayev? Of the Central Committee? Tulayev, of the mass deportations in the Vorogen district? Tulayev of the university purges? Curious, Kostia turned to get a better view of him. The car disappeared down the street. Walking quickly and heavily, Tulayev overtook Kostia, passed him, stopped, looked up at a lighted window. Fine frost crystals fell on his raised face, powdering his eyebrows and mustache. Kostia came up behind him, Kostia’s hand remembered the Colt, Kostia’s hand drew it out of his pocket, and — —

  The explosion was deafening and brief. Deafening in Kostia’s soul, like a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Incredible in th
at boreal night. Kostia saw the thunder burst within him: it was a cloud which swelled, became an enormous black flower fringed with flames, and vanished. A piercing whistle signal whipped the night, very near. Another answered from farther away. The night filled with an invisible panic. Whistles cut across one another, wildly, precipitately, sought one another, collided, cut through the aerial pillars of light. Kostia fled over the snow through small quiet streets, running with his elbows close to his sides, as he ran at the Youth Stadium. Round a corner, now another — he told himself that it was time to walk without any show of hurry. His heart was beating very hard. “What have I done? Why? It was madness … I acted without thinking … Without thinking, like a man of action …” Like snow squalls, fragments of ideas chased one another through his mind. “Tulayev certainly deserved to be shot … Was it my business to know it? Am I sure of it? Am I sure of justice? Am I mad?” A sleigh appeared — could anything be more fantastic? — the driver thrust his crafty eyes and snow-covered beard toward Kostia as he passed.

  “What’s going on back there, young fellow?”

  “I don’t know. Drunks fighting again, I suppose. Devil take them!”

  The sleigh turned slowly around in the street, to avoid trouble. The exchange of ordinary words had completely sobered Kostia and made him feel extraordinarily calm. Crossing a well-lighted square, he passed a sentry at his post. Had he not been dreaming? In his pocket the barrel of the Colt was still devastatingly hot. In his heart, joy grew inexplicably. Pure joy. Luminous, cold, inhuman, like a starry winter sky.

  There was a thread of light under Romachkin’s door. Kostia went in. Romachkin was reading — in bed, because of the cold. Gray heather covered the windowpanes. “What are you reading, Romachkin? It’s cold in here. It’s wonderful outdoors, you have no idea!”

  “I wanted to read something about the happy life. But there are no books on the subject. Why have none been written? Don’t writers know any more about it than I do? Don’t they want to know what it is, as I do?”

  Kostia was amused. What a man!

  “All I could find was this — in a secondhand bookstore. It’s a very old book and very beautiful … Paul and Virginia. It happens on an island full of happy birds and plants; they are young and pure and love each other … It’s unbelievable.” He noticed Kostia’s exalted face. “But, Kostia, what has happened to you?”

  “I’m in love, Romachkin, my friend — it’s terrible.”

  2. The Sword Is Blind

  The papers briefly announced “the premature death of Comrade Tulayev.” The first secret investigation produced sixty-seven arrests in three days. Suspicion at first fell on Tulayev’s secretary, who was also the mistress of a student who was not a Party member. Then it shifted to the chauffeur who had brought Tulayev to his door — a Security man with a good record, not a drinker, no questionable relations, a former soldier in the special troops, and a member of the Bureau of his garage cell. Why had he not waited until Tulayev had entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immediately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk? Why? The entire mystery of the crime seemed to center in these two unknowns. No one was aware that Tulayev had hoped to spend a few minutes with the wife of an absent friend; that a bottle of vodka and two dimpled arms, a milky body, warm under a house dress, were waiting for him … But the fatal bullet had not been shot from the chauffeur’s pistol; and the fatal weapon remained undiscoverable. Interrogated for sixty consecutive hours by inquisitors who themselves became exhausted and relayed each other every four hours, the chauffeur sank to the verge of insanity without changing his declarations, except insofar as he finally lost the power of speech, the faculty of reason, and even the use of the facial muscles which the nerves must activate in order to produce speech and expression. After thirty-four hours of questioning, he was no longer a man but a lay figure of suffering flesh and shapeless clothes. They dosed him with strong coffee, brandy, as many cigarettes as he wanted. They gave him an injection. His fingers dropped the cigarettes, his lips forgot to drink when a glass was held to them; every hour two men from the special detachment dragged him to the washroom, held his head under the faucet, doused him with ice-cold water. He scarcely moved, limp in their hands even under the icy water, and the men thought that he took advantage of these moments of respite to sleep while they held him up; handling that human rag demoralized them after a few hours, and they had to be replaced. They held him in his chair to keep him from falling onto the floor. Suddenly the examining judge hammered the butt of his revolver on the table and roared:

  “Open your eyes, prisoner. I forbade you to sleep! Answer! After you fired, what did you do?”

  At this three hundredth repetition of the same question, the man from whom all intelligence, all resistance had been drained, the man who had no self left, his eyes bloodshot, his sagging face horribly scarred, began to answer:

  “I …”

  Then he collapsed onto the table with a sound like a snore. Foamy saliva ran from his mouth. They sat him up. They poured a drink of Armenian brandy between his teeth.

  “… didn’t fire …”

  “Liar!”

  The judge was so exasperated that he slapped him with all his strength; and the judge felt as if he had hit a swinging manikin. The judge swallowed a half a glass of tea at one gulp — but the tea was really warm brandy. A sudden chill seized him. Low voices crept behind him. The partition was merely a curtain drawn across a darkened room, six feet away. From behind it, everything that went on in the lighted room was clearly visible. Several persons had silently entered the darkened room, all respectfully following the first. Tired of picking up the telephone and asking “What about the plot?” only to hear the High Commissar’s unstrung voice repeat the idiotic formula, “The investigation is being pursued without yielding any substantial results” — the Chief had come himself. Boots, short coarse tunic, bare head, low brow, tense face, bushy mustache — from the invisible hide-out he had avidly fixed his eyes on the eyes of the chauffeur — who did not see him, who could no longer see anything. He had listened. Behind him stood the exhausted High Commissar, straight as a sentry; behind them again, nearer to the door, in complete darkness, other gold-braided personages, mute and petrified. The Chief turned to the High Commissar and, in a very low voice, said:

  “Have this useless torture stopped instantly. You can see for yourself that the man knows nothing.”

  The uniforms drew to either side before him. He strode toward the elevator — alone, jaws clenched, frowning — followed by a single absolutely trustworthy guard, of whom he was fond. “Don’t come with me,” he had said to the High Commissar severely. “Attend to the plot.”

  Terror and feverish activity reigned in the building, concentrated in the story where, at twenty tables, interrogations were being carried on without a break. In the private office which he had reserved for himself on the spot, the High Commissar stupidly opened a pointless dossier, then another even more pointless. Nothing! He felt sick. He could have vomited like the chauffeur, who, his mouth ringed with foam, was at last being carried away on a stretcher — to sleep. For a time the High Commissar wandered from office to office. In No. 266, the chauffeur’s wife was weeping as she admitted that she often consulted fortunetellers, that she had secretly attended religious services, that she was jealous, that … In No. 268, the sentry who had been on duty at the time and place of the assassination repeated again that he had gone into the court to warm himself at the brazier, because Comrade Tulayev never came home before midnight; that, hearing the shot, he had rushed out into the street; that at first he had seen no one because Comrade Tulayev had fallen against the wall; that he had only been intensely surprised by the peculiar light …

  The High Commissar entered. The sentry was testifying standing at attention, calmly, in a voice that showed emotion. The High Commissar asked:

  “What light are you referring to?”

  “An extraordinary light
, a supernatural light — I can’t describe it — there were pillars of light up to the sky, glittering, dazzling …”

  “Are you a Believer?”

  “No, Comrade Chief, member of the Society of the Godless for four years, dues paid up.”

  The High Commissar turned on his heel, shrugging his shoulders. In No. 270 a thick market woman’s voice was relating, with many interpolated sighs and exclamations of “Oh Jesus, my God,” that at the Smolensk market everyone said that poor Comrade Tulayev, beloved of the great Comrade Chief, had been found at the gate of the Kremlin with his throat cut and his heart pierced by a dagger with a triangular blade, like poor little Czarevich Dimitri long ago, and the monsters had gouged out his eyes, and she had cried over it with Marfa who sells grain, with Frossia who resells cigarettes, with Niucha who … Her intolerable and endless chatter was being patiently recorded by a young officer in a tight uniform and eyeglasses, with a medal bearing the Chief’s profile on his chest — he wrote it all down rapidly on long sheets of paper. He was so occupied that he did not look up at the High Commissar, who stood framed in the door and who left without uttering a word.

  On his own desk the High Commissar found a red envelope from the Central Committee, General Secretariat, Urgent Strictly Confidential … Three lines, ordering him to “follow the Titov matter with the greatest attention and report to us personally on it.” Very significant, that! Bad. So the new Deputy High Commissar was spying without even trying to save appearances. Only he could have informed the General Secretariat (and without the knowledge of his superior) of the Titov matter — the mere mention of which made you want to spit with disgust! An anonymous denunciation, in big schoolboy handwriting, which had arrived that morning: “Matvei Titov said that it’s Security that had Comrade Tulayev killed because there’s a long reckoning between them. He said: Me, I feel it in my bones that it’s the Gepeous, I tell you. He said that in front of his servant Sidorovna, and Palkin the coachman, and a clothes seller who lives at the corner of Ragman Alley and Holy Field Street, at the end of the court, one flight up, on the right. Matvei Titov is an enemy of the Soviet government and our beloved Comrade Chief and an exploiter of the people who makes his servant sleep in the hall with no fire and has got the poor daughter of a collectivized peasant pregnant and refuses to pay the food allowance for her child who will come into this world in pain and misery …” And twenty more lines of the same. Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev was having this document photographed and typewritten for immediate transmission to the Political Bureau!