The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  And indeed it could be read in his puffy face, in his red-rimmed eyes, in his precipitate speech. Philippov said:

  “I am afraid too, of course — but it doesn’t do any good. I have grown used to it. One lives with fear as one lives with a hernia.”

  Kiril Rublev slowly pulled off his gloves and looked at his hands, which were long and strong, a little hairy between the joints — “hands still full of vitality,” he thought. And, picking up some snow, he began kneading it violently.

  “Everyone is an ignoble coward,” he said, “it’s an old, old story. Courage consists in knowing that fact and, when necessary, acting as if fear did not exist. You are wrong, Wladek, in thinking that you are different from anyone else. However, it is hardly worth our meeting in this magnificent landscape if we are only going to make useless confessions to one another …”

  Wladek did not answer. His eyes searched the deserted, barren, luminous landscape. Ideas as slow-moving as the flight of the crows in the sky passed through his mind: Whatever we say is useless now … I wish I had a glass of hot tea … Kiril, suddenly dropping the burden of his years, jumped back, raised his arm — and the hard snowball he had just finished making struck an astonished Philippov square on the chest. “Defend yourself, I attack,” Kiril cried gaily and, his eyes laughing, his beard askew, he grabbed up handfuls of snow. “Son of a seacook,” Philippov shouted, transfigured. And they began to fight like two schoolboys. They leaped, laughed, sank into snow up to their waists, hid behind trees to make their ammunition and take aim before they let fly. Something of the nimbleness of their boyhood came back to them, they shouted joyous “ughs,” shielded their faces with their elbows, gasped for breath. Wladek stood where he was, firmly planted, methodically making snowballs to catch Rublev from the flank, laughing until the tears came to his eyes, showering him with abuse: “Take that, you theoretician, you moralist, to hell with you,” and never once hitting him …

  They got very hot, their hearts pounded, their faces relaxed. From a sky which had imperceptibly grown gray, night suddenly fell on lustreless snow, on misty and petrified trees. Breathing hard, the three started back in the direction of the railroad. “How about that one I landed on your ear, Kiril,” said Philippov, chortling. “How about the one I landed on the back of your neck?” Rublev retorted. It was Wladek who returned to serious matters:

  “You know, my nerves are all to pieces, I admit — but I am not as afraid as I might be. Come what may, my death will fertilize Socialist soil, if it is Socialist soil …”

  “State Capitalism,” said Philippov.

  Rublev:

  “… We must cultivate consciousness. There is sure progress under this barbarism, progress under this retrogression. Look at our masses, our youth, all the new factories, the Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, Kirovsk … We are all dead men under a reprieve, but the face of the earth has been changed, the migrating birds must wonder where they are when they see what were deserts covered with factories. And what a new proletariat! Ten million men at work, with machines, instead of three and a half million in 1927. What will that effort not accomplish for the world in half a century!”

  “… When nothing of us will remain, not even our smallest bones,” Wladek chanted, perhaps without irony.

  By way of precaution, they parted before they reached the first houses. “We must meet again,” Wladek proposed. And the other two said, “Yes, yes, absolutely,” but none of them believed that it would really be possible or of any use. When they parted they all shook hands warmly. Kiril Rublev skiied rhythmically to the nearest station, following the silent forest where darkness seemed to grow out of the ground like an imperceptible mist. A thin, blue, terribly sharp crescent moon, curved like an ideal breast, rose into the sky. Rublev thought: “Ill-omened moon. Fear comes exactly like night.”

  One evening as the Rublevs were finishing dinner, Xenia Popova came to tell them a great piece of news. On the table there were a dish of rice, a sausage, a bottle of Narzan mineral water, gray bread. The primus stove hissed under the kettle. Kiril Rublev was sitting in the old armchair, Dora in the corner of the sofa. “How pretty are you,” Kiril said to Xenia affectionately. “Let me see your big eyes.” She turned them toward him frankly — wide, well-shaped eyes, fringed with long lashes. “Neither stones, nor flowers, nor the sky have that color,” said Rublev to his wife. “It is the eye’s own miracle. You can be proud, child.”

  “You’ll have me embarrassed soon,” she said.

  The clear features, the high forehead, the little rolls of blond hair above the ears, the eyes that always seemed to be smiling at life — Rublev scanned them almost maliciously. So purity was born of dirt, youth of attrition. He had known Popov for more than twenty years — an old fool who, because he could not understand the a-b-c of political economy, had specialized in matters of Socialist ethics. In pursuit of his specialty, he had buried himself in the dossiers of the Central Control Commission of the Party, and now his entire life was devoted to the adulteries, lies, drinking bouts, and abuses of power perpetrated by old revolutionaries. It was he who found grounds for reprimands, distributed warnings, prepared indictments, planned executions, and proposed rewards for the executioners. “Many vile tasks must needs be performed, so there must needs be many vile beings,” as Nietzsche said. But how, by what miracle, did the rancid flesh and the rancid spirit of a Popov produce this creature, Xenia? So life triumphs over our base clay. Kiril Rublev looked at Xenia with a delight in which there was both hunger and malice.

  Sitting with her knees crossed, the girl lit a cigarette. She was so happy that she had to do something — anything — to keep it from showing. Making a very unsuccessful attempt to look detached, she said:

  “Papa is having me sent abroad — a mission to Paris — six months — for the Central Textile Bureau. I’m to study the new technique for printing cloth … Papa knew that I had been wanting to go abroad for years … I jumped for joy!”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” said Dora. “I’m terribly glad. What are you going to do in Paris?”

  “It makes me dizzy to think of it. I’ll see Notre-Dame, Belleville. I’m reading a biography of Blanqui and the history of the Commune. I’ll go to see the Faubourg-St.-Antoine, the Rue St.-Merri, the Rue Haxo, the Wall of the Confederates … Bakunin lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, but I haven’t been able to find out the number. Anyway, the number may have been changed. Do you know where Lenin lived?”

  “I went to see him in Paris,” said Rublev slowly, “but I have no idea where it was …”

  “Oh!” said Xenia reproachfully. How could anyone forget such things? Her big eyes opened wide. “Really? You knew Vladimir Ilich? What luck!”

  “What a child you are!” Rublev thought. “But you are right.”

  “And then,” she said, overcoming a slight hesitation, “I mean to get some clothes. Pretty French things — is that wrong, do you think?”

  “Not a bit,” said Dora. “It’s a fine idea. I wish all our young people could have lovely things.”

  “That’s what I thought — just that! But my father is always saying that clothes ought to be practical, that elaborate clothes are a survival from barbaric cultures, that fashion is a characteristic of the capitalist mentality …” The incomparably blue eyes smiled.

  “Your father is a damned old puritan … What is he doing these days?”

  Xenia chattered on. Sometimes, at the bottom of a clear stream flowing over pebbles, a shadow appears, troubles the eye for a moment, and vanishes, leaving one wondering what it was, what mysterious life was following its destiny in those depths. Suddenly the Rublevs found themselves listening intently. Xenia was saying:

  “… Father has been very busy with the Tulayev case, he says it is another plot …”

  “I had some contact with Tulayev in the past,” said Rublev in a subdued voice. “I spoke against him in the Moscow Committee four years ago. Winter was coming on, and of course there was a fuel shortage. Tulayev pr
oposed that the directors of the Combustibles Trust be brought to trial. I got his idiotic proposal turned down.”

  “… Father says that a great many people are compromised … I think — don’t repeat this, it’s very serious — I think Erchov has been arrested … He was recalled from the Caucasus, but he has never showed up anywhere … I happened to overhear a telephone conversation about his wife … She has apparently been arrested too …”

  Rublev picked up his empty glass from the table, held it to his lips as if he were drinking, and set it down. Xenia watched him in amazement. “Kiril,” Dora asked, “what have you been drinking?” “Why, nothing,” he said with a bewildered smile.

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Xenia bowed her head. The useless cigarette burned out between her fingers.

  “And our Spain, Kiril Kirillovich,” she asked at last, with an effort … “do you think it can hold out? … I should like …” She did not say what she would like.

  Rublev picked up the empty glass again.

  “Defeated. And it will be partly our doing.”

  The end of their conversation was labored. Dora tried to start other subjects. “Have you been to the theater lately, Xenia? What are you reading?” Her questions found no answers. A damp, chill mist irresistibly invaded the room. It dimmed the lamp. Xenia felt a stab of cold between her shoulder blades. Rublev and Dora rose as she did. Standing there, they overcame the mist for a moment.

  “Xenia,” said Dora gently, “I wish you every happiness.”

  And Xenia felt a little sad — it was like a good-by. How was she to return their good wishes? Rublev affectionately put his arm around her waist.

  “You have shoulders like an Egyptian statuette, wider than your hips. With those shoulders and those bright eyes of yours, you must take very good care of yourself, Xeniuchka!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only too much. Someday you’ll understand. Bon voyage.”

  At the last moment, in the narrow vestibule cluttered with heaps of newspapers, Xenia remembered something important that she could not leave unsaid. Her eyes clouded; she spoke in a low voice.

  “I heard my father say that Ryzhik has been brought back to a prison in Moscow, that he is on a hunger strike and very ill … Is he a Trotskyist?”

  “Yes.”

  “A foreign agent?”

  “No. A man as strong and pure as crystal.”

  There was terror in the helpless look Xenia gave him.

  “Then why …?”

  “Nothing happens in history that is not, in some sense, rational. The best sometimes have to be broken, because they do harm precisely by being the best. You cannot understand that yet.”

  Something in her carried her toward him; she almost fell on his chest.

  “Kiril Kirillovich, are you an Oppositionist?”

  “No.”

  On that word, after a few caressing gestures, a few swift kisses on Dora’s unhappy lips, they parted. Xenia’s youthful footfalls grew fainter down the hall. To Kiril and Dora, the room looked larger, more inhospitable. “So it goes,” said Kiril. “So it goes,” said Dora with a sigh.

  Rublev poured himself a big drink of vodka and swallowed it down.

  “And you, Dora, you who have lived with me for sixteen years — do you think I am an Oppositionist? Yes or no?”

  Dora preferred not to answer. He sometimes talked to himself like that, asking her questions with a sort of fierceness.

  “Dora, I’d like to get drunk tomorrow, I think I should see more clearly afterward … Our Party can have no Opposition, it is monolithic because we reconcile thought and action for the sake of a higher efficiency. Rather than settle which of us is right and which wrong, we prefer to be wrong together because in that way we are stronger for the proletariat. And it was an old mistake of bourgeois individualism to seek truth for the sake of conscience, one conscience, my conscience. We say: To hell with my and me, to hell with self, to hell with truth, if the Party can be strong!”

  “What Party?”

  Dora’s two words, spoken in a low, cold voice, reached him at the instant when the pendulum within him began its swing in the opposite direction.

  “… Obviously, if the Party is betrayed, if it is no longer the Party of the Revolution, that position of ours is ridiculous and meaningless. We ought to do exactly the opposite — in that case, each of us should recover his conscience … We need unfailing unity to hold back the thrust of hostile forces … But if those forces exercise themselves precisely through our unity … What did you say?”

  He could not sit still in the huge room. His angular frame moved across it obliquely. He looked like a great emaciated bird of prey shut up in a cage that was quite large but still too small. So Dora saw him. She answered:

  “I don’t know.”

  “The conclusions reached concerning the Opposition from seven to ten years ago and formulated between 1923 and 1930 would have to be revised. We were wrong then, perhaps the Opposition was right — perhaps, because no one knows if the course of history could be different from what it is … Revise our conclusions concerning a time now dead, struggles that are ended, outworn formulas, men sacrificed in one way or another?”

  Several days passed — Moscow days, crowding on each other, crowded with events, cluttered with things to do, then suddenly interrupted by limpid moments when you forget yourself in the street to stare at the colors and the snow under a cold bright sky. Healthy young faces pass, and you wish you could know the souls behind them, and you think that we are a people numerous as grass, a mixture of a hundred peoples, Slavs, Finns, Mongols, Turks, Jews, all on the march and led by girls and youths whose blood runs golden. You think of the machines waking to strength in the new factories; they are agile and shining, they contain the power of millions of insentient slaves. In them the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever. This new world is arising little by little out of evil — and its people lack soap, underwear, clothes, clear knowledge, true, simple, meaningful words, generosity; we hardly know enough to animate our machines; there are sordid hovels around our giant factories, which are better equipped than the factories of Detroit or the Ruhr; in those hovels men bowed under the relentless law of toil still sleep the sleep of animals; but the factory will conquer the hovel, the machines will give these men — or the men who will follow them, it matters little — an astounding awakening. This unfolding of a world — machines and masses progressing together, inevitably — makes up for many things. Why should it not make up for the end of our generation? Overhead expenses, an absurd ransom paid to the past. Absurd — that was the worst part of it. And that the masses and the machines should still need us; that, without us, they might lose their way — that was dismaying, it was horrible. But what are we to do? To accomplish things consciously, we have only the Party, the “cohort of iron.” Of iron and flesh and spirit. None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of innumerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspiration, of other yet greater masses — Proletarians of all countries, unite! The spirit became confused, the flesh decayed, the iron rusted, because the cohort — chosen by successive trials of doctrine, exile, imprisonment, insurrection, power, war, work, fraternity, at a moment perhaps unique in history — wore away, gradually invaded by intruders who spoke our language, imitated our gestures, marched under our banners, but who were utterly different from ourselves — moved by old appetites, neither proletarians nor revolutionaries — profiteers … Enfeebled cohort, artfully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us, then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to submit. Would our resistance do anything but make bad worse? If — as they could have done at any instant — a Bukharin, a Piatakov had suddenly risen in the dock to unmask t
heir poor comrades lying through their last hours by command, the fraudulent prosecutor, the abetting judges, the double-dealing inquisition, the gagged Party, the stupid and terrorized Central Committee, the devastated Political Bureau, the Chief ridden by his nightmare — what demoralization there would have been in the country, what jubilation in the capitalist world, what headlines in the fascist press! “Read all about it — The Moscow Scandal, The Bolshevik Sink, The Chief Denounced by his Victims.” No, no — better the end, any end. The account must be settled between ourselves, in the heart of the new society preyed on by old ills …

  In that iron circle Rublev’s thoughts never ceased to travel.

  One evening after dinner he put on his short overcoat and his astrakhan cap, said to Dora, “I’m going up for a breath of air,” took the elevator, and got out on the terrace roof above the eleventh floor. An expensive restaurant occupied it in summer; and the diners, as they listened vaguely to the violins, looked at the innumerable lights of Moscow, spellbound despite themselves by those terrestrial constellations, whose tiniest lights guided lives at work. The place was even more beautiful in winter, when there were neither diners, nor flowers, nor colored lamp shades on the little tables, nor violins, nor odors of broiled mutton, champagne, and cosmetics — only the vast calm night over the vast city, the red halo of Passion Square, with its electric signs, its snow stained by black ruts and footpaths, its swarm of people and vehicles under the arc lights, the discreet, secret glow of its windows … At that height, the electric lights did not interfere with vision, the stars were clear and distinct. Fountains of reddish light in the midst of the dense black of buildings indicated the squares; the white boulevards disappeared into darkness. His hands in his pockets, Rublev made the circuit of the terrace, thinking nothing. A faint smile came to his lips. “I should have made Dora come up to see this — it is magnificent, magnificent …” And he stopped short, surprised — for a couple with their arms around each other’s waists were swiftly bearing down on him, leaning forward in a graceful attitude of flight. Skating alone on the terrace, the two lovers swept up to Kiril Rublev, their ravished faces shone on him, they smiled at him, leaned into a long airy curve, and were off toward the horizon — that is, toward the other end of the terrace, from which there was a view of the Kremlin. Rublev watched them stop there and lean on the railing; he joined them and leaned on the railing too. They could clearly see the high crenelated wall, the heavy watchtowers, the red flame of the flag, lit by a search-light, on the cupola of the Executive offices, the domes of the cathedrals, the vast halo of Red Square.