by Victor Serge
The girl looked toward Rublev, in whom she recognized the old and influential Bolshevik for whom a Central Committee car came every morning — last year. She half turned to him. Her companion stroked the back of her neck with his fingers.
“Is that where the Chief of our Party lives?” she asked, looking off toward the towers and crenelations bright against the night.
“He has an apartment in the Kremlin, but he doesn’t often stay there,” Rublev answered.
“Is that where he works? Somewhere under the red flag?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
The young face was thoughtful for a moment, then turned to Rublev:
“It is terrible to think that a man like him has lived for years surrounded by traitors and criminals! It makes you tremble for his life … Isn’t it terrible?”
Rublev echoed her hollowly: “… terrible.”
“Come on, Dina,” the young man murmured.
They put their arms around each other’s waists, became aerial again, leaned forward, and, borne by a magic power, set off on their skates toward another horizon … A little tense, Rublev made his way to the elevator.
In the apartment he found Dora sitting opposite a young well-dressed man whom he did not know. Her face was pale. “Comrade Rublev, I have brought you a message from the Moscow Committee …” A big yellow envelope. Merely a summons to discuss urgent business. “If you could come at once, there is a car waiting …”
“But it is eleven o’clock,” Dora objected.
“Comrade Rublev will be back in twenty minutes, by car. I was told to assure you of that.”
Rublev dismissed the messenger. “I’ll be down in three minutes.” His eyes upon hers, he looked at his wife: her lips were colorless, her cheeks yellowish, it was as if her face were disintegrating. She murmured:
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It happened once before, you remember. A little peculiar, even so.”
No light anywhere. No possible help. They kissed hurriedly, blindly, their lips were cold. “See you later.” — “See you later.”
The Committee offices were deserted. In the secretary’s office a stout, bemedaled Tatar, with cropped skull and a thin fringe of black hairs on his upper lip, was reading the papers and drinking tea. He took the summons. “Rublev? Right away …” He opened a dossier in which there was only a single typewritten sheet, read it, frowning, raised his face — the puffy, opaque, heavy face of a big eater.
“Have you your Party card with you? Please let me see it.”
From his pocketbook Rublev took the red folder in which was written: “Member since 1907.” Over twenty years. What years!
“Right.”
The red folder disappeared into a drawer, the key turned.
“You are charged with a crime. Your card will be returned to you, if necessary, after the investigation. That is all.”
Rublev had been waiting for the blow too long. A sort of fury bristled his eyebrows, clenched his jaws, squared his shoulders. The secretary slid back a little in his revolving chair:
“I know nothing about it, those are my orders. That is all, citizen.”
Rublev walked away, strangely light, borne by thoughts like flights of birds. So that’s the trap — the beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you … And we’re all in it, all in the trap … Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere? Scoundrels, scoundrels! An empty hall, rawly lighted, the great marble stairway, the double revolving door, the street, the dry cold, the messenger’s black car. Beside the messenger, who was smoking while he waited, someone else, a low voice saying thickly: “Comrade Rublev, be so good as to come with us for a short conversation …” — “I know, I know,” said Rublev furiously, and he opened the door, flung himself into the icy Lincoln, folded his arms, and summoned all his will power to hold down an explosion of despairing fury …
The snow-white and night-blue of the narrow streets passed over the windows in parallel bands. “Slower,” Rublev ordered, and the driver obeyed. Rublev let down the window — he wanted a good look at a bit of street, it did not matter what street. The sidewalk glittered with untrodden snow. A nobleman’s residence of the past century, with its pillared portico, seemed to have been sleeping for the last hundred years behind its ornamental iron fence. The silvery trunks of birches shone faintly in the garden. That was all — forever, in a perfect silence, in the purity of a dream. City under the sea, farewell. The driver pushed down the accelerator. — It is we who are under the sea. It doesn’t matter — we were strong men once.
4. To Build Is to Perish
Makeyev was exceptionally gifted in the art of forgetting in order to grow greater. Of the little peasant from Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, Tula Government — a country of green and brown valleys, dotted with thatched roofs — he preserved only a rudimentary memory, just enough to make him proud of his transformation. A little reddish-haired lad like a million others, like them destined to the soil, the village girls would have none of him — they called him “Artyomka the Pockmarked” with a shade of mockery. Rickets in childhood had left him with awkward bowlegs. Nevertheless, at seventeen, in the Sunday evening fights between the lads of Green Street and the lads of Stink Street, he brought down his enemy with a blow of his own invention which landed between neck and ear and caused instantaneous dizziness … After these rough-and-tumble fights, since even now no girl would have him, he sat on the dilapidated steps of his house, chewing his nails and watching his big strong toes wriggling in the dust. If he had known that there are words to express the vicious torpor of such moments, he would have muttered, as Maxim Gorki muttered at his age: “What boredom, what loneliness, what a desire to smash someone in the face!” — not for the pleasure of victory this time, but to escape from himself and an even worse world. In 1917 the Empire made Artyem Makeyev a soldier under its double eagles — a passive soldier, as dirty and with as little to do as all his fellows in Volhynia trenches. He spent his time marauding through a countryside which had already been visited by a hundred thousand marauders just like himself; laboriously delousing himself at twilight; dreaming of raping the peasant girls — they were few and far between — whom night caught on the roads, and who, incidentally, had been frequently raped before by many another … As for him, he did not dare. He followed them through a chalk countryside of shattered trees and fields full of shell holes; suddenly the ground would hold up a clutching hand, a knee, a helmet, a jagged tin can. He followed them, his throat dry, his muscles painfully thirsting for violence; but he never dared.
A curious strength, which at first made him uneasy, awoke in him when he learned that the peasants were taking possession of the land. Before his eyes hung the manor of Akimovka, the manor house with its low portico on four white columns, the statue of a nymph beside the pool, the fallow fields, the woods, the marsh, the meadows … He felt an inexpressible hatred for the owners of that unknown universe, which was really his, his from all eternity, his in all justice, but which had been taken from him by a nameless crime perpetrated long before his birth, an immense crime against all the peasants on earth. It had always been thus, though he had not known it; and that hatred had lain asleep in him always. The gusts of wind that blew at evening over fields which the war had disinherited brought him intelligible sentences, revealing words. The people of the manor — “Sir” and “Madam” — were “blood-drinkers.” Private Artyem Makeyev never having seen them, no human image disturbed the image which the words called up in him. But blood he had seen often enough — the blood of his comrades after a burst of shrapnel, when the earth and the yellowed grass drank it — very red at first, so red it turned your stomach, then black, and, very soon, the flies settled on it.
About this period Makeyev thought of his life for the first time. It was as if he had started talking with himself — and he almost laughed, it was funny — he was making a fool of himself! But the words that arranged themselves in his min
d were so serious that they killed his laughter and made him screw up his face like a man who tries to raise a weight too heavy for his muscles. He told himself that he must get away, carry grenades under his greatcoat, get back to his village, set fire to the manor house, take the land. Where did he hit on the idea of fire? The forest sometimes catches fire in summer, no one knows how. Villages burn and no one knows where the fire started. The idea of the fire made him think further. A shame, of course, to burn down the beautiful manor house, it could be used for — what? What could it be made into for the peasants? To have the clodhoppers in it themselves — no, that would never do … Burn the nest and you drive away the birds. Burn the manorial nest, and a trench full of terror and fire would separate past from present, he would be an incendiary, and incendiaries go to jail or the gallows, so we must be the stronger — but this was beyond Makeyev’s reasoning ability, he felt these things rather than thought them. He set out alone, leaving the louse-infested trench by way of the latrines. In the train he found himself with men like himself, who had set off like himself; when he saw them his heart filled with strength. But he told them nothing, because silence made him strong. The manor house went up in flames. A troop of Cossacks rode through the green roads toward the peasant uprising: wasps buzzed around their horses’ sweating flanks; mottled butterflies fled before the mingled stench of human sweat and horse sweat. Before they reached the offending village, Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, telegrams mysteriously reached the district, spreading good news: “Decree concerning the seizure of lands,” signed, “The People’s Commissars.” The Cossacks had the news from a white-haired old man who popped out from among the roadside shrubbery, under the silver-scaled birches. “It’s the law, my lads, the law, you can’t do anything about it. It’s the law.” The land, the land, the law! — there was an astonished murmuring among the Cossacks, and they began to deliberate. The stupefied butterflies settled in the grass, while the troop, restrained by the invisible decree, halted, not knowing whether to go forward or back. What land? Whose was the land? The landlords’? Ours? Whose? Whose? The amazed officer suddenly felt afraid of his men; but no one thought of stopping him from escaping. In Akimovka’s single street, where the mud-daubed log houses leaned each its own way in the center of a little green enclosure, heavy-breasted women crossed themselves. This time there could be no mistake — the days of Antichrist were really come! Makeyev, who still clung to his beltload of grenades, came out onto the stairs of his house, a ruinous isba with a leaky roof, and shouted to the old witches to shut up, God damn it, or they would soon see, God damn it — his face growing more and more crimson … The first assembly of the poor peasants of the district elected him president of its Executive Committee. The first DECREED which he dictated to his scribe (who had been clerk to the district justice of peace) ordered that any woman who spoke of Antichrist in public should be whipped; and the text of it, written in a round hand, was posted in the main street.
Makeyev began a rather dizzying career. He became Artyem Artyemich, president of the Executive, without exactly knowing what the Executive was, but with eyes that were deeply set under arching brows, shaven head, shirt freed of vermin, and, in his soul, a will as tough as knotted roots in a rock crevice. He had people who regretted the former police turned out of their houses; other police, who were sent into the district, he had arrested, and that was the last that was seen of them. People said that he was just. He repeated the word from the depths of his being, with a subdued fire in his eyes: Just. If he had had time to watch himself live, he would have been astonished by a new discovery. Just as the faculty of reason had suddenly revealed itself to him so that he could seize the land, another more obscure faculty, which sprung inexplicably to life in his muscles, his neck, his viscera, led him, roused him, strengthened him. He did not know its name. Intellectuals would have called it will. Before he learned to say It is my will, which was not until several years later when he had grown accustomed to addressing assemblies, he instinctively knew what he had to do in order to obtain, dominate, order, succeed, then feel a calm content almost as good as that which comes after possessing a woman. He rarely spoke in the first person, preferring to say We. It is not my will, it is our will, brothers. His first speeches were to Red soldiers in a freight car; his voice had to rise above the rattle and clank of the moving train. His faculty of comprehension grew from event to event, by successive illuminations. He saw causes, probable effects, people’s motives, he sensed how to act and react; he had a hard time reducing it all to words in his mind, and then reducing the words to ideas and memories, and he never wholly succeeded.
The Whites invaded the district. The Makeyevs met with short shrift from these gentry, who hanged them as soon as they captured them, pinning insulting inscriptions on their chests: Brigand or Bolshevik or both together. Makeyev managed to join comrades in the woods, seized a train with them, left it at a steppe city which greatly delighted him, for it was the first large city he had ever seen and it lived pleasantly under a torrid sun. In the market big juicy melons were sold for a few kopecks. Camels paced slowly through the sandy streets. A few miles from the city, Makeyev shot down so many white-turbaned horsemen that he was made a deputy chief. A little later, in ’19, he joined the Party. The meeting was held around a fire in the open fields, under glittering stars. The fifteen Party members were grouped around the Bureau of Three, and the Three crouched in the firelight, with notebooks on their knees. After the report on the international situation, given in a harsh voice which imparted an Asiatic flavor to strange European names — Cle-mansso, Loy-Djorje, Guermania, Liebkneckt — Commissar Kasparov asked if anyone raised any objection to the admission of candidate Makeyev, Artyem Artyemiyevich, into the Party of the Proletarian Revolution? “Stand up, Makeyev,” he said imperiously. Makeyev was already on his feet, straight as a ramrod in the red firelight, blinded by it and by all the eyes that were fixed on him at this moment of consecration, blinded too by a rain of stars, though the stars were motionless … “Peasant, son of working peasants …” “Son of landless peasants!” Makeyev proudly corrected. Several voices approved his membership. “Adopted,” said the Commissar.
At Perekop, when, to win the final battle in the accursed war, they had to enter the treacherous lagoon of Sivash and march through it in water up to their waists, up to their shoulders in the worst places — and what awaited them ten paces ahead, if not the end? — Makeyev, Deputy Commissar with the Fourth Battalion, had more than one fierce struggle to save his life from his own fear or his own fury. What deadly holes might lie under that water which spread so dazzlingly under the white dawn? Had they not been betrayed by some staff technician? Jaws clenched, trembling all over, but resolute and cool to the point of insanity, he held his rifle above his head at arm’s length, setting the example. He was the first out of the lagoon; the first to climb a sand dune, to lie down, feeling the sand warm against his belly, to aim and begin firing from ambush on a group of men, taken by surprise from the rear, whom he distinctly saw scurrying around a small fieldpiece.… On the evening of the exhausting victory, an officer dressed in new khaki stood on the same fieldpiece to read the troop a message from the Komandarm (Army Commander), to which Makeyev did not listen because his back was broken with stooping and his eyes gummy with sleep. Toward the end of it, however, the harsh rhythm of certain words penetrated his brain: “Who is the brave combatant of the glorious Steppes Division who …” Mechanically, Makeyev too asked himself who the brave combatant might be and what he might have done, but to hell with him and with all these ceremonies because I’ll die if I don’t get some sleep, I’m done in. At that moment Commissar Kasparov looked at Makeyev so intently that Makeyev thought: “I must be doing something wrong. I must look as if I were drunk,” and he made an immense effort to keep his eyes from closing. Kasparov called:
“Makeyev!”
And Makeyev staggered from the ranks, amid a murmur: “It’s him, him, him, Artyemich!” The Artyomka
whom the village girls once despised entered into glory covered to the neck with dried mud, drunk with weariness, wanting nothing in the world but a bit of grass or straw to lie down on. The officer kissed him on the mouth. The officer’s chin was stubbly, he smelled of raw onion and dried sweat and horse. Then, for a brief instant, they looked at each other through a fog, as two exhausted horses reconnoiter each other. Their eyes were wet. And Makeyev came to, as he recognized the partisan of the Urals, the victor of Krasni-yar, the victor of Ufa, the man who turned the most desperate of retreats, Blücher. “Comrade Blücher,” he said thickly, “I’m … I’m glad to see you … You … You’re a man, you are …” It seemed to him that Blücher was reeling with sleep, like himself. “You too,” Blücher answered with a smile, “you’re a man, all right … Come and drink some tea with me tomorrow morning, at Division Headquarters.” Blücher had a tanned face, with deep perpendicular lines and heavy pockets under the eyes. That day was the beginning of their friendship, a friendship between men of the same stuff who saw each other for a brief hour twice a year, in camps, at ceremonies, at the great Party conferences.