The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “Yes. Imagine! During 1924–25 he was Bukharin’s chauffeur for seven months; four letters of recommendation from Bukharin were found in his Moscow dossier. The latest was dated only last year! There is more besides: While serving as a battalion commissar on the Volhynia front in 1921 he was accused of insubordination. The man who got him out of it was Kiril Rublev!”

  Another slap! By what inconceivable negligence could such facts have escaped the commissions whose duty it was to investigate the past careers of agents attached to the persons of C.C. members? The responsibility was the High Commissar’s. What were the commissions under his orders doing? Who were their members? Bukharin, onetime ideologist of the Party, “Lenin’s favorite disciple,” whom Lenin called “son,” was now the incarnation of treachery, espionage, terrorism, the dismemberment of the Union. And Kiril Kirillovich Rublev, his old friend — was he still alive after so many proscriptions? “Yes indeed,” Gordeyev bore witness. “He is at the Academy of Sciences, buried under tons of sixteenth-century archives. I have someone watching him …”

  A few days later, one of Erchov’s recent appointees went insane. The First Examining Magistrate of the Forty-first Bureau was a conscientious ex-soldier, taciturn-looking, with a high, deeply lined forehead. Erchov had just approved his promotion, despite the cautious hostility of the Cell secretary, a Party member. Erchov’s appointee suddenly turned on a high Party official and drove him out of his office. He was heard shouting:

  “Get out, stool pigeon, informer! I order you to keep your mouth shut!” He locked himself in his office. Several revolver shots rang out. The magistrate appeared in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, his hair rumpled, the smoking revolver in his hand. He shouted: “I am a traitor! I have betrayed everything! Gang of beasts!” — and, to the general consternation, it was seen that he had riddled the Chief’s portrait with bullets, shooting out the eyes, making a gaping hole in the forehead … “Punish me!” he went on shouting. “Eunuchs!” It took six men to subdue him. When they had tied him up with their belts, he shook with laughter, inextinguishable, grating, convulsive bursts of laughter. “Eunuchs! Eunuchs!” Erchov, preyed on by an unspoken fear, went to see him. He was tied to a chair, which had fallen over backward, so he lay with his boots in the air and his head on the carpet. At sight of the High Commissar he foamed: “Traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor! I see the depths of your soul, hypocrite! So you’ve been gelded too, eh?”

  “Shall we gag him, Comrade Chief?” an officer asked respectfully.

  “No. Why isn’t the ambulance here yet? Have you called the hospital? What are you thinking of? If an ambulance is not here in fifteen minutes, you will consider yourself under arrest!”

  A short, extremely blond clerk, with irritating side curls, who had entered out of curiosity, papers in hand, looked at them both — Erchov and the lunatic — with the same horror, and did not recognize the High Commissar. Erchov drew himself up, squared his shoulders. He felt the slight giddiness and nausea he used to feel when he was obliged to be present at executions. He left the room without a word, got into the elevator … The departmental heads were obviously avoiding him. Only one of them came to meet him — an old friend who had shared his sudden rise and who was now in charge of the foreign department.

  “Well, Ricciotti, what is it?”

  Ricciotti’s Italian name was a legacy from a childhood spent on the shores of a picture-postcard bay, as was the useless, Neapolitan-fisherboy beauty which he still possessed, the touch of gold in the eyes, the warm guitar player’s voice, an imagination and a loyalty so unusual that — on due consideration — they seemed feigned. The general opinion was that he “aimed to be original.”

  “Oh, the daily ration of troubles, my dear Maximka.”

  Ricciotti took Erchov familiarly by the arm and accompanied him into his office, talking fluently all the while: about the secret service at Nanking which had been abominably taken in by the Japanese; the work of the Trotskyists in Mao Tse-tung’s army; an intrigue in the White military organization at Paris, “where we now hold all the cards”; things in Barcelona, which were going as badly as possible — Trotskyists, Anarchists, Socialists, Catholics, Catalans, Basques being all equally ungovernable — a military defeat there was inevitable, no use blinking the fact; the complications which had arisen in connection with the gold reserve; five or six different sets of spies all operating at once … A ten-minute talk with him, as he strode up and down the office, was worth many long reports. Erchov admired and slightly envied the supple intelligence which embraced all things at once and yet remained singularly unencumbered. Lowering his voice, Ricciotti led him to the window. It offered a view of Moscow — a vast white open space, over which human ants hurried in all directions, following dirty paths in the snow; a mass of houses; and, still towering over all, the bulbous domes of an old church, painted an intense blue fretted with golden stars. Erchov would have thought it beautiful if he had been able to think.

  “Listen, Maximka, watch out …”

  “For what?”

  “I have been told that the agents sent to Spain were an unfortunate choice. Of course, so far as appearances go, the remark was aimed at me. But it is you they are after.”

  “Right, Sacha. Don’t worry. He has confidence in me, you know.”

  The hands of the clock were circling inexorably. Erchov and Ricciotti parted. Four minutes to run through Pravda. What’s this? — The front-page picture: Erchov should be in it — second to the left from the Chief, among the members of the Government; the photograph had been taken two afternoons ago in the Kremlin, at the reception for Elite women textile workers … He unfolded the paper: instead of one picture there were two, and they had been trimmed in such a way that the High Commissar for Security appeared in neither. Amazement. Telephone. The editorial office? The High Commissar’s office calling … Who made up the first page? Who? Why? You say the pictures were supplied by the General Secretariat at the last moment? Yes — very well — that is what I wanted to know … But the truth was that he had learned too much.

  Gordeyev came in and amiably informed him that two of the three men who made up his personal escort had had to be replaced — one was ill, the other had been sent to White Russia to present a flag to the workers of a frontier military-agricultural group. Erchov refrained from remarking that he might have been consulted. In the courtyard three men came to attention beside his car and received him with a single “Greetings, Comrade High Commissar,” irreproachably released from three arching chests. Erchov answered them pleasantly and, pointing to the steering wheel, nodded to the only one of the three whom he knew — the one who would doubtless soon be relieved of his job, leaving the High Commissar thenceforth to travel surrounded by strangers, who would perhaps be under secret orders, obeying a will that was not his own.

  The car emerged from under a low archway, passed between iron gates guarded by helmeted sentries, who presented arms; the car leaped into a square at the gray hour of twilight. Blocked for a moment between a bus and the stream of pedestrians, it slowed down. Erchov saw the unknown faces of people who did not signify: clerks, technicians still wearing their school caps, a melancholy old Jew, graceless women, hard-faced workmen. Preoccupied, silent, insubstantial against the snow, they saw him without dreaming of recognizing him. How do they live, what do they live on? Not one of them, not even those who read my name in the papers, imagines or can imagine what I am. And I — what do I know of them, except that I do not know them, that though their million names are filed somewhere, can be catalogued and classified, each of their identities is a different unknown, each a mystery that will never wholly be solved … The lights were going on in Theater Square, up and down the steep slope of Tverskaya Street surged the evening crowds. Stifling, swarming city — raw lights slashing across patches of snow, fragments of crowd, rivers of pavement, rivers of mud. The four uniformed men in the high-powered government car were silent. When at last, after circling a ponderous triumphal arch
which resembled the door of a huge prison, the car picked up speed down the long perspective of Leningrad Boulevard, Erchov bitterly remembered that he loved driving — the road, the speed, his own quick perception governing speed and motor. They objected to his driving these days. In any case he was too nervous, too preoccupied with work, to drive. A fine stretch of road — we know how to build. A road like this paralleling the Trans-Siberian — that’s what we need to make the Far East secure. It could be done in a few years if we put five hundred thousand men to work on it, and four hundred thousand might well be drafted from prisons. Nothing impractical in the idea — I must give it further consideration. The image of the lunatic, bound to an overturned chair in a wrecked office, suddenly hung floating over the magnificent road whose precise black length was bordered on either side by immaculate white. “Well, it’s enough to drive anyone mad …” The lunatic laughed derisively, the lunatic began: “You’re the one who’s mad, not me, it’s you, not me, you’ll see …” Erchov lit a cigarette, he wanted to see the flame of the lighter flickering between his gloved hands. And the touch of nightmare yielded and was gone. His nerves were ragged … he must take a whole day off, rest, get out in the fresh air … The street lights became fewer, a sky of stars flooded the woods with pale light. Erchov stared at it. Deep within him there was a reverent joy — but he was not conscious of it, his mind pondered figures, intrigues, plans, aspects of cases. The car passed into the shadow of tall spruces covered with snow like shaggy fur. It was very cold. The car turned on smooth snow. The pointed Norwegian gables of a large house stood densely black against the sky — Villa No. 1 of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.

  Here, over objects plain or flamboyantly colored, but all contributing harmoniously to the decorative scheme, a sound-proofed silence reigned. No visible telephone, no newspapers, no official portraits (it was a daring thing to exclude them), no weapons, no administrative memo pads. Erchov would have nothing that reminded him of work: when the human animal puts forth its maximum effort, it requires complete rest: the highly responsible official has a greater right to it than anyone else. Here there should be nothing but his private life — our private life, Valia, you and I. A portrait of Valia as a proper little schoolgirl hung in a cream-white oval wooden frame with a sculptured knot of ribbon at the top. Valia … Valentina. The tall mirror reflected warm Central Asiatic colors. Nothing suggested winter — not even the miraculous snow-laden branches which were visible through the windows. They were only a magnificent stage-set, a piece of white magic. Erchov went to the phonograph. There was a Hawaiian blues record on the turntable. No — not that! Not today! The poor wretched lunatic had cried: “Traitors, we are all of us traitors!” But did he really say “all of us?” — or did I add that? Why should I add it? The professional investigator found himself considering an odd problem. Would the most humane thing be to do away with the insane?

  Valentina came out of the bathroom in a peignoir. “Hello, darling.” Hours devoted to caring for her body, and an intense well-being, had transformed the Valia he had first known as a typical young provincial woman from the Yeniseisk; her whole supple, radiant being proclaimed that it was good to live. Yes, when Communist society was at last firmly built up, after many difficult but enriching transition periods, all women would develop as fully … “You are a living anticipation, Valia” — “Thanks to you, Maximka, who work and fight, thanks to men like you …” They sometimes said such things to each other — doubtless to justify their privileges in their own eyes; thus privilege conferred a mission. Their union was clean and uncomplicated — like the union of two healthy bodies which are attracted to each other. Eight years previously, during a tour of inspection in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk, where he commanded a division of special Security troops, Erchov stopped at the house of a battalion commander in a military city deep in the forest. When his subordinate’s young wife entered the room, Erchov found himself dazzled by her innocent and self-assured animality. It was the first time a woman had ever affected him so powerfully. Her presence evoked forests, the chill waters of untamed brooks, the pelts of suspicious beasts, the taste of new milk. She had prominent nostrils which seemed to be perpetually scenting something, and big, feline eyes. He desired her instantly — not for a chance hour, not for a night — he wanted to possess her wholly, forever, proudly. “Why should she belong to someone else, when I want her?” The “someone else,” an officer of low rank, with no future, absurdly deferential to his chief, had a ridiculous way of using shopkeepers’ expressions in his speech. Erchov loathed him. To get him out of the way, he sent him off to inspect posts in the forest. When Erchov was alone with the woman he wanted, he first smoked a cigarette in silence; he had given himself that much time to summon up his courage. Then: “Valentina Anisimovna, I have something to say to you … listen carefully. I never go back on my word. I am as straightforward and trustworthy as a good cavalry saber. I want you to be my wife …” Ten feet away, firmly planted in his chair, he looked rather as if he had given a command, as if she must inevitably obey — and the young woman was attracted. “But I don’t know you,” she said, desperately frightened — and it was as if she had fallen into his arms. “That doesn’t matter. I knew you through and through the first minute I saw you. I am trustworthy and plain, I give you my word that …” — “I don’t doubt it,” Valentina murmured, not aware that she was already consenting, “but …” — “There are no buts. A woman is free to choose.” He refrained from adding: “I am chief of the division, your husband will never get anywhere.” She must have thought the same thing, for they looked at each other in embarrassment, with such a feeling of complicity that they both blushed for shame. Erchov turned her husband’s portrait to the wall, took her in his arms, and kissed her eyelids with a sudden strange tenderness. “Your eyes, your eyes, you are all sunlight, my …” She made no resistance, wondering dully whether this important official — quite handsome, too — was going to take her then and there, on the uncomfortable little sofa — luckily she had no underwear on, luckily … He did nothing of the sort. He merely said, in the clipped tones of a man making a report: “You will leave with me day after tomorrow. As soon as Battalion Commander Nikudychin returns, I shall explain matters to him as man to man. You will get your divorce today — have the papers by five o’clock.” What could the battalion commander say to the division commander? Woman is free, and Party ethics prescribe respect for freedom. Battalion Commander Nikudychin (whose name means, approximately, “Good-for-nothing”) stayed drunk for a week before he visited the Chinese prostitutes of the city for another sort of forgetfulness. Informed of his misconduct, Erchov treated his subordinate indulgently, for he understood his grief. Nevertheless, he had the Party secretary read him a lecture … A Communist must not lose his moral equilibrium because his wife leaves him — obviously …

  In these rooms, Valentina liked to pass the days almost naked, wearing only the gauziest of materials. Always her body was as completely present as her eyes, her voice. Her big eyes looked as golden as the curls that tumbled over her forehead. She had full lips, prominent cheekbones, a clear pink complexion, a figure as supple and fresh as a good swimmer’s. “You always look as if you had just come bounding out of cold water into the sun,” her husband said to her one day. She glanced into the mirror and answered with a proud little laugh: “That’s what I am — cold and full of sunlight. Your little golden fish.”

  Tonight she held out her beautiful bare arms to him:

  “Why so late, darling? What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Erchov said with a forced smile.

  At that moment he became clearly aware that, on the contrary, there was something, something enormous; it was here, and it would be wherever he went — an infinite threat to himself and to this woman. Perhaps she was too beautiful, perhaps too privileged, perhaps … Footsteps measured the hall — the night guard going to check on the service entrance.

  “Nothing. Two of my persona
l guards have been changed. It annoys me.”

  “But you’re the master, darling.” She stood there before him very straight, her peignoir half open over her breasts.

  She finished filing a lacquered fingernail. Erchov knit his brow and stared dully at a fine firm breast, tipped with a lavender nipple. Still frowning, he met her untroubled eyes, beautiful as a field of flowers. She went on:

  “… Don’t you do as you please?”

  Really, he must be very tired, or such a trifling phrase could never have produced such a strange effect on him … When he heard her casual words, Erchov became aware that actually he was master of nothing, that his will determined nothing, that any attempt he made to fight would fail. “Only lunatics do as they please,” he thought. Aloud he answered with a bitter smile:

  “Only lunatics imagine that they do as they please.”

  It came to her: “Something is up …” And she was so certain of it, and it made her so afraid, that her impulse to throw her arms around him died. She forced herself to be vivacious. “Isn’t it time we kissed each other, Sima?” He picked her up, putting his hands under her elbows as he always did, and kissed her — not on the mouth, but between her mouth and her nose and on the corners of her lips, sniffing to catch the odor of her skin. “Nobody else kisses like that,” he had said to her when he was courting her — “just us.”

  “Go take a bath,” she said.

  If he did not believe in cleansing the soul — what old-fashioned jargon! — he believed in the blessing of a clean body — soaped, rinsed, doused with cold water after a warm bath, massaged with eau de cologne, admired in the mirror. “Damned if the human animal isn’t a beautiful thing!” he would sometimes exclaim in the bathroom. “Valia, I’m beautiful too.” She would come running, and they would kiss in front of the mirror — he naked and solidly built, she half-naked, supple in some vividly striped peignoir … Those were dim memories now, dating from a distant past. In those days, as chief of secret operations in a district on the Far Eastern frontier, Erchov himself tracked down spies in the forest, directed silent man hunts, dealt with double-crossing agents, shuddered in sudden anticipation of the bullet that strikes you down from the brush, and no one ever finds out who fired it … He loved the life, not knowing that he was destined for the heights … The warm water showered over his shoulders. All he could see of himself in the mirror was a drawn face, with anxious eyes between puffy lids. “I look like a man who’s just been arrested, damn it!” The bathroom door was open; in the next room Valia put on a Hawaiian record — steel guitar and a Negro or Polynesian voice: “I am fond of you …”