The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “No indeed,” said the comrade he had addressed. “Odd that you should think so.”

  Makeyev looked at him, seized with a vague terror. “He is making a fool of me …” The two men blushed, equally embarrassed.

  “You were most eloquent, Artyem Artyemich,” said the Committee member, to break the uncomfortable silence. “You read the address to the Political Bureau with magnificent fervor …”

  Makeyev became completely confused. His thick lips moved silently. He made a wild effort to keep from saying, “Blücher, Blücher, Blücher, do you hear me? I named Blücher!” The other became uneasy:

  “Don’t you feel well, Comrade Makeyev?”

  “A touch of dizziness,” said Makeyev, swallowing saliva.

  He got over the crisis, he conquered his obsession, Blücher did not reappear, it was a little more ended every day. There were further disappearances, but of less importance. Makeyev made up his mind to ignore them. “Men like myself have to have hearts of stone. We build on corpses, but we build.”

  That year the purges and personnel replacements in the Kurgansk district were not over until the middle of winter. Just before spring, one night in February, Tulayev was killed in Moscow. When Makeyev heard the news, he shouted for joy. Alia was playing solitaire, her body outlined in clinging silk. Makeyev threw down the red “Confidential” envelope.

  “There’s one that deserved what he got! The fool! It had been coming to him for a long time. A plot? Not much — somebody whose life he was ruining let him have it on the head with a brick … He certainly went out looking for it, with that character of his — a snarling dog …”

  “Who?” said Alia, without raising her head, because for the second time the cards had brought the queen of diamonds between herself and the king of hearts.

  “Tulayev. I’ve just heard from Moscow that he has been murdered …”

  “My God!” said Alia, preoccupied by the queen of hearts, doubtless a blond woman.

  Makeyev said sharply:

  “I’ve told you a hundred times not to call on God like a peasant!”

  The cards snapped under the pretty, red-nailed fingers. Irritation. The queen of diamonds confirmed the treacherous hints dropped by the wife of the president of the Soviet (Doroteya Guermanovna, a big, soft woman of German extraction who knew all the scandal of the city for the last ten years) … and the manicurist’s skillful reticences … and the fatally precise information that had arrived in the form of an anonymous letter laboriously pieced together out of big letters cut from newspapers — at least four hundred of them had been pasted down one after the other to denounce the ticket girl of the Aurora Cinema, who had previously slept with the director of the municipal services department and who, a year ago, had become Artyem Artyemich’s mistress, as witness the fact that she had had an abortion at the G.P.U. clinic last winter, being admitted on a personal recommendation, and then had been given a month’s paid vacation, which she spent at the Rest House for Workers in Education, also on special recommendation, and as witness the fact that Comrade Makeyev had twice visited the Rest House during that period and had even spent the night there … The letter went on in this fashion for several pages, all in overlapping, ill-assorted letters which made absurd patterns. Alia looked at Makeyev out of eyes so intent that they became cruel.

  “What is it?” asked the man, vaguely uneasy.

  “Who was killed?” asked the woman, her face ugly with tension and distress.

  “Tulayev, I told you, Tulayev — are you deaf?”

  Alia came so close to him that she touched him, and stood pale and straight, her shoulders set, her lips trembling.

  “And that blond ticket girl — who’s going to kill her? Tell me, you traitor, you liar!”

  Makeyev had barely begun to realize what a serious shock the Party was in for: revamping the C.C., accounts to be settled in the bureaus, full-scale attacks on the Right, deadly accusations against the expelled Left, counterattacks — what counterattacks? A vast, whirling wind out of the night drove the quiet daylight from the room, wrapped itself about him, made cold shivers run through his very marrow … Through those terrible, dark gusts, Alia’s shaken words, Alia’s poor shattered face, hardly reached him. “Get out of here and leave me alone!” he shouted, beside himself.

  He was incapable of thinking of big things and little things simultaneously. He shut himself up with his private secretary, to prepare the speech which he would deliver that evening at the extraordinary meeting of Party officials — a bludgeoning speech, shouted from the bottom of his lungs, punctuated with his clenched fist. He spoke as if he were fighting, then and there, singlehanded, against the Enemies of the Party. Men who were Creatures of Darkness; the world Counterrevolution; Trotskyism, its brazen snout branded with the swastika; Fascism; the Mikado … “Woe to the stinking vermin who have dared to raise a hand against our great Party! We shall wipe them out forever, even to the last generation! Eternal remembrance to our great, our wise comrade, Tulayev, iron Bolshevik, unswerving disciple of our beloved Chief, the greatest man of all the centuries! …” At five in the morning, dripping with sweat and surrounded by exhausted secretaries, Makeyev was still correcting the typescript of his speech, which a special messenger, starting two hours later, would carry to Moscow. When he went to bed, bright daylight flooded the city, the plains, the building yards, the caravan trails. Alia had just fallen into a doze after a night of torture. Feeling her husband’s presence, she opened her eyes to the white ceiling, to reality, to her suffering. And, almost naked, she got quietly out of bed, and saw herself in the mirror: her hair in disorder, her breasts sagging, herself pale, faded, forsaken, humiliated, looking like an old woman — because of that blond ticket girl at the Aurora. Did she know what she was doing? What did she want in the drawer where the trinkets were kept? She found a short bone-handled hunting knife there, and took it. She went back to the bed. Lying with the sheets thrown off and his dressing gown open, Artyem was sound asleep, his mouth shut, his nostrils ringed with beads of sweat, his big body naked, covered with reddish hair, abandoned … Alia stared at him for a moment, as if it astonished her to recognize him, astonished her even more to discover something utterly unknown in him, something which incessantly escaped her, perhaps an unwonted presence, a soul that was kindled in him in sleep, like a secret light, and which his awakening extinguished. “My God, my God, my God,” she repeated mentally, sensing that a power in her would raise the knife, clench her hand, stab down into that outstretched male body, the male body which she loved in the very depths of her hate. Where aim? Try to find the heart, well protected by an armor of bones and flesh, difficult to reach? Pierce the unprotected belly, where it is easy to make a mortal wound? Tear the penis lying in its fleece of hair — soft flesh, loathsome and touching? The idea — but it was not an idea, it was already the adumbration of an act — traveled darkly through her nerve centers … The dark current encountered another: fear. Alia turned her head, and saw that Makeyev had opened his eyes and was watching her with terrifying sagacity.

  “Alia,” he said simply, “drop that knife.”

  She was paralyzed. Sitting up in a single motion, he caught her wrist, opened her helpless little hand, flung the bone-handled knife across the room. Alia collapsed into shame and despair, great bright tears hung from her lashes … She felt like a naughty child caught doing something wrong; there was no help anywhere, and now he would cast her off like a sick dog … you drown sick dogs …

  “You wanted to kill me?” he said. “To kill Makeyev, secretary of the Regional Committee — and you a member of the Party? Kill the Builder Makeyev, you miserable creature? Kill me for a blond ticket girl, fool that you are?”

  Anger rose in him with every clearly spoken word.

  “Yes,” said Alia feebly.

  “Idiot! They’d have shut you up underground for six months — have you thought of that? Then one night, about 2 A.M., they’d have taken you out behind the station and put a
bullet there, right there!” (He hit her hard on the back of the neck.) “Don’t you know that? Do you want a divorce this morning?”

  She said furiously:

  “Yes.”

  And at the same time, more softly, her long eyelashes lowered: “No.”

  “You are a liar and a traitor,” she repeated almost automatically, trying to collect her thoughts. Then she went on:

  “Tulayev was killed for less, and you were glad. Yet you helped him to organize the famine — you’ve said so often enough! But perhaps he didn’t lie to a woman, like you!”

  They were such terrible words that Makeyev looked at his wife with panic in his eyes. He felt desperately weak. Only his fury saved him from collapsing. He burst out:

  “Never! I never said or thought a word of your criminal ravings … You are unworthy of the Party … Bitch!”

  He strode about the room, now this way, now that, waving his arms like a madman. Suddenly he came back to her, carrying a leather belt. He gripped the back of her neck with his left hand and struck with his right, beating, beating the almost naked body which writhed feebly under his hand, beating so hard that he panted … When the body stopped moving, when Alia’s whimpering breathing seemed to have ceased, Makeyev turned away, pacified. He went for a wad of cotton, soaked it in eau de cologne, came back, and began gently rubbing her face with it — her ravaged face which, in a few moments, had become ugly with a pitiful, little-girl ugliness … Then he went for ammonia, he dampened towels, he was as diligent and skillful as a good nurse … And, when Alia came to, she saw Makeyev’s green eyes leaning over her, the pupils narrowed like a cat’s eyes … Artyem kissed her face heavily, hotly, then turned away. “Get some sleep, little fool. I’m going to work.”

  Life became normal again for Makeyev, between a silent Alia and the queen of diamonds, whom, for safety’s sake, he had sent to the construction yard for the new electric plant, between the plain and the forest, where she was put in charge of handling the mail. The yard operated twenty-four hours a day. The Secretary of the Regional Committee frequently appeared there to stimulate the efforts of the elite brigades, to oversee the execution of the weekly plans in person, to receive reports from the technical personnel, to countersign the daily telegrams to the Center … He came back exhausted, under the clear stars. (Meanwhile, somewhere in the city, unknown hands, laboring in profound secrecy, obstinately cut alphabets of all dimensions from the papers, collected them, aligned them on notebook sheets: it would take at least five hundred characters for the contemplated letter. This patient labor was carried on in solitude, in silence, with every sense alert; the mutilated papers, weighted with a stone, went to the bottom of a well, for burning them would have made smoke — and where there’s smoke there’s fire, don’t they say? The secret hands prepared the demonic alphabet, the unknown mind collected the evidence, the scattered clues, the infinitesimal elements of several hidden and unavowable certainties …)

  Makeyev was planning to go to Moscow to thrash out the question of material shortages with the directors of electrification; at the same time he would inform the C.C. and the Central Executive of the progress made during the last six months in road-improvements and irrigation (thanks to cheap convict labor); perhaps this progress would compensate for the dwindling supply of skilled labor, the crisis in livestock, the poor condition of industrialized agriculture, the production slowdown in the railway workshops … With pleasure he received the brief message from the C.C. (“Confidential. Urgent.”) inviting him to attend a conference of regional secretaries from the Southwest. Leaving two days early, Makeyev sat in his blue sleeping-car compartment, contentedly making abstracts of the reports from the regional Economic Council. The specialists of the Central Plan Commission would find he was a man worth talking to! Endless fields of snow, dotted with ramshackle houses, fled past the windows; the wooded horizon was melancholy under the leaden sky, the light filled the white spaces with an immense expectancy. Makeyev looked at the rich black fields which an early thaw had scattered with standing pools that reflected the hurrying clouds. “Indigent Russia, opulent Russia,” he murmured, because Lenin had quoted those two lines of Nekrassov’s in 1918. The Makeyevs, by working those fields, made opulence come out of indigence.

  At the station in Moscow, Makeyev had no difficulty in getting a C.C. car sent for him, and it was a big American car, strangely elongated and rounded — “streamlined,” explained the chauffeur, who was dressed much like a millionaire’s chauffeur in a foreign movie. Makeyev found that many things had changed for the better in the capital since he had been there seven months earlier. Life bustled through a gray transparency, over the new asphalt pavements which were relentlessly cleared of snow day in and day out. The shop-windows made a good impression. At the Central Plan Commission, in a building made of reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, and containing from two to three hundred offices, Makeyev, in accordance with his rank, was received as an extremely important person by elegant officials who wore big spectacles and suits of British cut. He found no difficulty in obtaining what he wanted: materials, additional credits, the return of a dossier to the Projects department, authority to build an additional road. How could he have known that the materials did not exist, and that all these impressive personages no longer had anything but a sort of ghostly existence, since the P.B. had just decided “in principle” upon a purge and complete reorganization of the Plan offices? Well satisfied, he became more important than ever. His plain fur coat, his plain fur cap contrasted with the careful attire of the technicians and made him look all the more the provincial builder. “We who are clearing virgin soil …” He slipped little phrases like that into the conversation, and they did not ring false.

  Of the few old friends whom he tried to find the second day, none could be reached. One was ill in a suburban hospital, too far from town; telephoning to two others, he received only evasive answers. On the second occasion, Makeyev got angry. “Makeyev speaking, I tell you. Makeyev of the C.C., do you understand? I want to know where Foma is; I have a right to be told, I imagine …” The man at the other end of the wire answered, in a doubtful voice: “He has been arrested …” Arrested? Foma, Bolshevik of 1904, loyal to the general line, former member of the Central Control Commission, member of Security’s special college? Makeyev gasped for breath, a spasm passed over his face, for a moment he felt stunned. What was happening now?

  He decided to spend the evening alone, at the opera. Entering the great government box (once the imperial box) soon after the curtain went up, he found no one there but an old couple, sitting at the left in the first row of chairs. Makeyev discreetly greeted Popov, one of the Party’s directors of conscience, an untidy little old man with a vague profile and a yellowish straggling beard. He had on a gray tunic that sagged around the pockets. His companion looked amazingly like him; it seemed to Makeyev that she barely returned his greeting and even avoided looking at him. Popov crossed his arms on the velvet of the balustrade, coughed, thrust out his lips, entirely absorbed by the performance. Makeyev sat down at the other end of the row. The empty chairs increased the distance between himself and the Popovs; even if they had sat close together, the huge box would have surrounded them with solitude. Makeyev could not make himself take an interest either in the stage or the music, though music usually intoxicated him like a drug, filling his whole being with emotion, filling his mind with disconnected images, now violent, now plaintive, filling his throat with abortive cries, with sighs or a sort of wailing. He assured himself that all was well, that it was one of the finest spectacles in the world, even though it belonged to the culture of the old regime — but we are the legitimate heirs of that culture, we have conquered it. Then, too, those dancers, those lovely dancers — why should he not desire them? (Desire was another of his ways of forgetting.)

  When the intermission began, the Popovs left so discreetly that only his increased solitude in the huge box made him aware that they had gone. For a moment he stoo
d looking at the house, brilliant with lights and evening dresses and uniforms. “Our Moscow, capital of the world.” Makeyev smiled. As he made his way to the lobby, an officer — spectacles, neat square-cut mustache, a little curved nose like an owl’s beak — bowed to him most respectfully. Makeyev returned his bow, then stopped him with a gesture. The officer introduced himself: