by Victor Serge
“Captain Pakhomov, commanding the building police, happy to be of service to you, Comrade Makeyev.”
Flattered at being recognized, Makeyev felt like embracing him. His strange solitude vanished.
“Ah, so you have just arrived, Comrade Makeyev,” said Pakhomov slowly, as if he were thinking; “then you haven’t seen our new scene-shifting machines, bought in New York and installed last November. You ought to take a look at them — they made Meyerhold open his eyes! Shall I expect you after the third act, to show you the way?”
Before answering, Makeyev nonchalantly inquired:
“Tell me, Captain Pakhomov — the little dancer in the green turban, the one who’s so graceful — who is she?”
Pakhomov’s owl face and nocturnal eyes brightened a little:
“Very talented, Comrade Makeyev — getting a great deal of notice. Paulina Ananiyeva. I’ll introduce you to her in her dressing room, Comrade Makeyev — she will be very happy to meet you — oh, certainly …”
And now good riddance to you, Popov, you old moralist, you old crab — you and your antique wife who looks like a plucked turkey. What do you know about the life of strong men, builders, outdoor men, men who fight? Under floors, in cellars, rats gnaw at strange fodder — and you, you eat dossiers, complaints, circulars, theses, which the great Party throws at you in your office, and so it will go on until you are buried with greater honors than you ever knew in your miserable life! Makeyev leaned forward and almost turned his back on the disagreeable couple. Where should he take Paulina? To the Metropole bar? Paulina … nice name for a mistress. Paulina … Would she let herself be tempted tonight? Paulina … Makeyev’s feeling, as he waited for the intermission, was almost blissful.
Captain Pakhomov was waiting for him at the turn in the great staircase. “First, Comrade Makeyev, I’ll show you the new machines; then we’ll go to see Ananiyeva — she’s expecting you …”
“Splendid, splendid …”
Makeyev followed the officer through a maze of corridors, each more brightly lighted than the last. Pushing back a curtain to his left, the officer pointed to mechanics busy around a winch; young men in blue blouses were sweeping the stage; a technician appeared, pushing a little searchlight on wheels. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” said the owl-faced officer. Makeyev, his head empty of everything except the expectation of a woman, said: “The magic of the theater, my dear comrade …” They went on. A metal door opened before them, closed behind them, they were in darkness. “What’s this?” the officer exclaimed. “Stay where you are, just for a moment, Comrade Makeyev, I …” It was cold. The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but when a wretched little backstage bulb came on, like the light in a forsaken waiting room or in the antechamber of a dilapidated Hell, Pakhomov was no longer there; instead, several black overcoats detached themselves from the opposite wall, someone rapidly advanced on Makeyev — a thickset man with his overcoat collar turned up, his cap pulled down to his eyes, his hands in his pockets. Very close now, the voice of the unknown murmured, distinctly:
“Artyem Artyemich, we don’t want any scenes. You are under arrest.”
Several overcoats surrounded him, pressed against him; skillful hands ran over him, pushed him about, fished out his revolver … Makeyev gave a violent start which almost freed him from all the hands, from all the shoulders, but they closed in, nailed him to the spot:
“We don’t want any scenes, Comrade Makeyev,” the persuasive voice repeated. “Everything will be all right, I am sure — there must be some misunderstanding. Just obey orders …” Then, to the others: “No noise!”
Makeyev let himself be led, almost carried. They put on his overcoat, two men took him by the arms, others preceded and followed him, and so they walked through formless semidarkness, like a single creature clumsily moving a profusion of legs. The narrow corridor squeezed them together, they stumbled over each other. Behind a thin partition the orchestra began to play with miraculous sweetness. Somewhere in the meadows, beside a silvery lake, thousands of birds greeted the dawn, the light increased instant by instant, a song rose into it, a pure woman’s voice sounded through the unearthly morning … “Easy there, watch out for the steps,” someone whispered into Makeyev’s ear … and there was no more dawn, no more song, there was nothing … nothing but the cold night, a black car, the unimaginable …
5. Journey into Defeat
Before reaching Barcelona, Ivan Kondratiev underwent several standard transformations. First he was Mr. Murray Barron, of Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A., photographer for the World Photo Press, traveling from Stockholm to Paris by way of London … He took a taxi to the Champs-Elysées, then, carrying his little brown valise, strolled about for a while between the Rue Marbeuf and the Grand Palais; he was seen to stop before the Clemenceau disguised as an old soldier who trudges along a block of stone at the corner in front of the Petit Palais. The bronze froze the old man’s drive, and it was perfect: so a man walks when he is at the end of his resources, when all his strength is gone. “For how much longer has your stubbornness saved a dying world, old man? Perhaps you only bored a deeper hole in the rock for the mine that will blow it up?” — “I messed things up for the bastards for fifty years,” the man of bronze muttered bitterly. Kondratiev looked at him with secret sympathy. Two hours later Mr. Murray Barron came out of a monastic-looking house near St.-Sulpice, still carrying his brown valise but now transformed into Mr. Waldemar Laytis, Latvian citizen, on a mission to Spain from his country’s Red Cross. From Toulouse an Air-France plane, flying over landscapes bathed in happy light, the rusty summits of the Pyrenees, sleeping Figueras, the hills of Catalonia tanned like a beautiful skin, carried Mr. Waldemar Laytis to Barcelona. The officer representing the International Non-Intervention Board, a meticulous Swede, must have thought that the Red Cross organizations of the several Baltic States were displaying a laudable activity in the Peninsula: Mr. Laytis was certainly the fifth or sixth delegate they had dispatched to observe the effects of bombing on open cities. Ivan Kondratiev, noticing that the officer looked rather hard at his passport, merely made a mental note that the liaison office must be overdoing the trick. At the Prat airfield a podgy colonel, wearing glasses, complimented Mr. Laytis in unctuous tones, led him to a handsome car which displayed a few elegant shot scratches, and said to the driver: “Vaya, amigo.” Ivan Kondratiev, emissary of a strong and victorious revolution, felt that he was entering a very sickly one.
“The situation?”
“Fair. I mean, not entirely desperate … We are counting heavily on you. A Greek ship under British colors sunk last night off the Balearic Islands: munitions, bombings, artillery fire, the usual confusion … No importa. Rumors of concentrations in the Ebro region. Es todo.”
“Internal affairs? The Anarchists? The Trotskyists?”
“The Anarchists are ready to listen to reason — probably on the way out …”
“Since they will listen to reason,” Kondratiev said mildly.
“The Trotskyists are practically all in prison …”
“Very good. But you took a long time about it,” said Kondratiev severely, and something in him became tense.
Illuminated with sumptuous softness by a late-afternoon sun, a city opened before him, stamped with the same banally infernal seal as many other cities. The plaster of the low pink or red houses was scaling off; windows yawned, their glass gone; here and there were bricks smudged with black from fires, shopwindows barricaded with planks. Fifty patient chattering women waited at the door of a wrecked store. Kondratiev recognized them by their earthy complexions, their drawn faces — he had seen them before, equally wretched, equally patient and talkative, on sunny days and gray days, at shop doors in Petrograd, Kiev, Odessa, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Leipzig, Hamburg, Canton, Chang-sha, Wu-han. Women waiting for potatoes, sour bread, rice, the last sugar, must be as necessary to the social transformation as the speeches of leaders, the secret executions, the absurd passwords. Overhead expenses. The car j
olted as if they were on a street in Central Asia. Villas among gardens. Through the trees, a view of a white façade pierced by great holes through which the blue sky showed …
“What percentage of houses damaged?”
“No sé. Not so many,” the podgy colonel answered nonchalantly; he appeared to be chewing gum, but he was chewing nothing — it was a nervous habit.
In the patio of a once-luxurious mansion in Sarria, Ivan Kondratiev smilingly distributed handshakes. The fountain seemed to be softly laughing to itself, squat columns supported vaults under which the cool shade was blue. A little stream trickled through a marble channel, a faint, distant rapping of typewriters mingled with its silken rustle, and left it unperturbed. Close-shaven and dressed in a brand-new Republican uniform, Kondratiev had become General Rudin. “Rudin?” exclaimed a high Foreign Affairs official. “But haven’t I met you before? At Geneva, perhaps, at the League of Nations?” The Russian unbent a little, but very little. “I have never been in Geneva, señor, but you may have encountered a person of the same name in one of Turgenev’s novels …” “Of course,” said the high official. “Turgenev is almost a classic in Spain, you know …” “I am delighted to hear it,” Rudin answered politely. He was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
These Spaniards shocked him. They were likable, childish, full of ideas, plans, complaints, confidential information, unconcealed suspicions, secrets scattered to the four winds by warm, musical voices. And not one of them had actually read Marx (a few had the effrontery to say that they had, knowing so little about Marxism that they were unaware that three sentences were enough to prove them liars), not one of them would have made even a mediocre agitator in a second-rate industrial center like Zaporozhe. Furthermore, they considered that Soviet matériel was arriving in insufficient quantities, that the trucks were badly built. According to them, the situation was becoming untenable everywhere, but then the next minute they proposed a plan for victory; some advocated a European war; Anarchists insisted upon restoring discipline, establishing the sternest order, provoking foreign intervention; bourgeois Republicans thought the Anarchists too moderate and obliquely accused the Communists of being too conservative; the Syndicalists of the C.N.T. said that the Catalan U.G.T. (Communist controlled) had been stuffed with at least a hundred thousand counterrevolutionaries and semi-fascists; the leaders of the Barcelona U.G.T. declared that they were ready to break with the Valencia-Madrid U.G.T., they saw Anarchist intrigues everywhere; the Communists despised every other party, at the same time treating all the bourgeois parties with the greatest politeness; they seemed to fear the phantom organization of the Amigos de Durutti, yet insisted that there was no such thing; neither were there any Trotskyists, but they were always being hunted down, they rose inexplicably from the most thoroughly trodden ashes in secret prisons; general staffs rejoiced over the death of some Lerida partisan shot from behind on the firing line, on his way to get rations for his comrade; a captain of the Karl Marx Division was congratulated on his loyalty when he skilfully invented a pretext for executing an old workman who belonged to the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista — that pestilential organization. Accounts were never settled; it took years to get up a shaky case against generals who, in the U.S.S.R., would have been instantly shot without a trial; and, even so, there was never any certainty of finding a sufficient number of understanding judges who, after examining a set of false documents manufactured with incredible carelessness, would send the culprits to end their days in the moats of Montjuich at the shining hour when bird songs fill the new morning. “It is our own staff of forgers who should have been shot to begin with,” said Rudin angrily as he looked through the dossier. “Can’t these fools understand that a false document must at least look like a real document? Stuff like this will never convince anybody but intellectuals who have already had their pay …”
“The forgers we had at the beginning have almost all been shot, but it didn’t do any good,” replied the Bulgarian Yuvanov, in the extremely discreet voice which was one of his characteristics.
He explained, with profound irony, that, in this country of brilliant sunlight, where nothing is ever quite precise, where burning facts are modified in accordance with their degree of heat, forgeries never quite jelled; unexpected obstacles were always turning up; the dregs of the earth would suddenly be smitten with consciences that raged like the toothache, sentimental drunkards suddenly blabbed, the general lack of order would bring the authentic documents out of the general hodgepodge, the examining magistrates would blunder, the excise officer would blush and hide his face from an old friend who called him a swindler, and, to top it all, a deputy from the Independent Labour Party would arrive from London, dressed in a very old gray suit, thin, bony, ugly as only the British can be ugly, clamping his pipe between pure Stone Age jaws, and obstinately, automatically demanding “What has come of the investigation into the disappearance of Andres Nin?” The ministers — a strange lot too! — would earnestly implore him, before a dozen people, to deny “these calumnious rumors which outrage the Republic,” and when they were alone with him would clap him on the back and say: “Those bastards got him, but what can we do about it? After all, we can’t fight without the arms Russia is sending. Do you think we are safe ourselves?” Not one of these governmental dignitaries would have been worthy of a minor job in secret service, not even those who were Party members: they talked too much. A Communist minister, using a transparent pseudonym, wrote a newspaper article accusing a Socialist colleague of being sold to the London bankers … At a café the old Socialist commented on his skulking colleague’s prose. His ponderous triple chin, his heavy jowls, and even his dark eyelids shook with laughter: “Sold, yo! And the blind dupes have the gall to say so when they are sold to Moscow themselves — and paid with Spanish money, by the way!” The remark struck home. Yuvanov concluded his report: “They are all incapable. The masses are magnificent, nevertheless.” He sighed: “But what trouble they cause!”
Yuvanov’s square shoulders were surmounted by the face of a dangerously serious fop: wavy hair plastered down on a thick skull, the crafty eyes of a lion tamer, a mustache carefully trimmed to meet the upper lip, accentuating it in bold black. Kondratiev felt an inexplicable antipathy to him, which grew more definite as they went over the list of visitors to be received. The Bulgarian several times indicated his disapproval by slightly shrugging his shoulders. And the three whom he wanted to strike from the list turned out to be the most interesting — at least it was from them that Kondratiev learned the most.
For several days he never left his two white, sparsely furnished rooms except to walk up and down in the patio consuming cigarettes — especially after dark, under the stars. The stenographers, relegated to the annex, continued clattering at their typewriters. Not a sound came from the city, the bats circled noiselessly in the air. Wearied with reports on supplies, fronts, divisions, air units, plots, the personnel of the S.I.M., of the censorship bureau, of the navy, of the presidential secretariat, reports on the clergy, Party expenditures, personal cases, the C.N.T., the machinations of English spies, and so forth, Kondratiev became aware of the stars, which he had always wanted to study but even the names of which he did not know. (Because, during the only periods in his life when he had had time to study and think — in sundry prisons — he had been debarred both from books on astronomy and from nocturnal walks.) Yet, properly considered, the stars in their multitudes have no names as they have no number, they have only their faint mysterious light — mysterious because of human ignorance. I shall die without ever knowing more about them. Such are men in this age, “divided from themselves,” torn, as Marx put it — even the professional revolutionary in whom consciousness of the historical process attains its most practical lucidity. Divided from the stars, divided from themselves? Kondratiev refused to consider the strange formula which had come into his mind in the midst of useful thinking. As soon as you relax a little, your mind starts wandering, your old
literary education revives, you could easily become sentimental, even though you are over fifty. He went in, returned to the artillery invoice, the annotated list of nominations for the Madrid Military Investigation Service, the photostats of the personal letters received by Don Manuel Azaña, President of the Republic, the abstract of the telephone conversations of Don Indalecio Prieto, Minister of War and the Navy, a most embarrassing person … By candlelight, during a power breakdown caused by a night bombing of the port, he received the first of the visitors whom Yuvanov had wanted to strike from the list, a Socialist lieutenant colonel, a lawyer before the Civil War, of bourgeois background — a tall, thin young man with a yellow face which his smile etched into ugly lines. He spoke intelligently, and his remarks were full of unequivocal reproaches.
“I have brought you a detailed report, my dear comrade.” (In the heat of conversation, he sometimes let fall a perfidious “my dear friend.”) “In the Sierra we never had more than twelve cartridges per man … The Aragon front was not defended; it could have been made impregnable in two weeks; I sent out twenty-seven letters on the subject, six of them to your compatriots … Air arm entirely insufficient. In short, we are losing the war — make no mistake about that, my dear friend.”
“What do you mean?” interrupted Kondratiev, chilled by the precise statement.
“What I say, my dear comrade. If we are not to be given matériel to fight with, we must be allowed to treat. By negotiating now, between Spaniards, we might even yet avoid a total disaster — which it is not to your interest to court, I imagine, my dear friend.”
It was so brutally insolent that Kondratiev, feeling anger flare up in him, answered in a voice changed beyond recognition: