by Victor Serge
“… your government’s province to treat or to continue fighting. I consider your language unwarranted, comrade.”
The Socialist drew himself up, adjusted his khaki necktie, showed his yellow teeth in a wide smile.
“In that case excuse me, my dear comrade. Perhaps this is really all a farce which I fail to understand, but which is costing my people dearly. In any case, I have told you the absolute truth, General. Good-by …”
He held out a long, supple, dry, simian hand, clicked his heels German fashion, bowed, and left … “Defeatist,” Kondratiev thought angrily. “A bad element … Yuvanov was right …” The first visitor on the following morning was a hirsute Syndicalist, with a very large nose compressed into a triangle, and eyes that alternately glowered or shone. His answers to Kondratiev’s questions were delivered with a look of intense concentration. His two fat hands laid one on the other, he seemed to be waiting for something. At last, the silence having become embarrassing, Kondratiev began to rise, to indicate that the audience was over. At that moment the Syndicalist’s face suddenly became animated, his two hands darted eagerly forward, he began talking very fast, fervidly, in clipped French, as if he wanted to convince Kondratiev of something mortally important:
“As for me, comrade, I love life. We Anarchists are the party of men who love life, the freedom of life, harmony … A free life! I’m no Marxist, I am anti-state and antipolitical. I disagree with you about everything, from the bottom of my soul.”
“Do you think there can be such a thing as an Anarchist soul?” asked Kondratiev, amused.
“No. Blast the soul! But I am willing to be killed, like many before me, if it is for the Revolution. Even if we have to win the war first, as you people say, and have the Revolution only afterward — which seems to me a fatal mistake, because if people are to fight they need something to fight for … You think you can take us in with your nonsense about winning the war first — you’d be damn well taken in yourselves if we won it! But that is not what I have to say … I’m perfectly willing to get my skull broken open — but to lose the Revolution, the war, and my own skin at the same time is a little too much for me, damn it! And that is just what we are doing with all this skulduggery. You know what skulduggery is? For example: Twenty thousand men behind the lines, magnificently armed, all in new uniforms, guarding ten thousand anti-fascist revolutionaries, the best of the lot, in jails … And your twenty thousand stinkers will run at the first alert, or go over to the enemy. For example: This policy of feeding Comorera — the storekeepers making a good thing of the last potatoes and the proletarians pulling in their belts! For example: All this business about Poumists and Canallerists — I know them both, sectarians like all Marxists, but more honest than your lot.”
Across the table which separated them, his hands sought Kondratiev’s, seized them, crushed them affectionately. His breath came nearer, his hirsute face with the shining eyes came nearer, he said:
“You were sent by your Chief? You can safely tell me. Gutierrez is a tomb for secrets. Listen! Doesn’t your Chief know what is going on here, what his idiots, his toadies, his lame ducks have done? He wants us to win, doesn’t he? He is sincere? If so, we can still be saved, we will be saved, won’t we?”
Kondratiev answered slowly:
“I was sent by my Party’s Central Committee. Our great Chief desires the good of the Spanish people. We have helped you, we shall continue to help you with all our strength.”
It was icy. Gutierrez drew back his hands, his hirsute face, the flame of his eyes; thought for a few moments, then burst out laughing.
“Bueno, Comrade Rudin. When you go to see the subway, remind yourself that Gutierrez, who loves life, will die there two or three months from now. We have made up our minds. We will go down into the tunnels with our machine pistols and fight our last battle, and it will cost the Francists dear, I assure you.”
Kondratiev would have liked to reassure him, to speak to him as a friend … But he felt something inside him harden. When they parted, he could find only meaningless words, which he knew were meaningless. Gutierrez walked heavily out, rolling from side to side; their handshake had ended in a sort of shock.
And the third of the ill-omened visitors was shown in: Claus, noncommissioned officer in the International Brigade, seasoned militant in the German C.P., once involved in the Heinz Neumann deviation, sentenced in Bavaria, sentenced in Thuringia … Kondratiev had first known him in Hamburg in 1923: three days and two nights of street fighting. A good shot, Claus, always cool. They were glad to see each other; they remained standing, face to face, their hands in their pockets — friends. “You are really getting somewhere with building Socialism back there? Better standard of living? How about the youth?” Kondratiev raised his voice, with a joy which he felt was artificial, to say that everything was flourishing. They discussed the defense of Madrid, professionally; the morale of the International Brigades (excellent). “You remember Beimler — Hans Beimler?” said Claus. “Of course,” Kondratiev answered. “Is he with you?”
“Not any longer.”
“Killed?”
“Killed. In the front line, at the University City, but from behind, by our own people.” Claus’s lips trembled, his voice trembled. “That’s why I wanted so much to see you. You’ll make an investigation, I’m sure. An abominable crime. Killed because of some vague rumor or other, some nonsensical suspicion. That pimp-faced Bulgarian I saw on the way in here must know something. Question him.”
“I’ll question him,” said Kondratiev. “Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
When Claus had gone, Kondratiev instructed his orderly to let no one else in, closed the door onto the patio, and for some minutes walked up and down the room, which seemed to have become as stifling as a cell. What answer was he to give these men? What was he to write to Moscow? The official declarations showed up in a sinister light each time they were confronted with the facts. Why did the D.C.A. not go into action until after the bombardments — too late? Why was the fleet inactive? Why was Hans Beimler killed? Why the lack of ammunition at the most advanced positions? Why had general staff officers gone over to the enemy? Why were the poor starving in the country? He was well aware that these definite questions screened a far greater evil, about which it was better not to think … His meditation did not last long; Yuvanov knocked on the door. “Time to leave for the conference of political commissars, Comrade Rudin.” Kondratiev nodded. And the investigation into the death of Hans Beimler, killed in action in the lunar landscape of Madrid’s University City, was immediately closed.
“Beimler?” said Yuvanov indifferently. “Ah, yes. Brave, a little on the rash side. Nothing mysterious about his death — these advance-post inspections cost us a man or two every day; he was warned not to go. His political behavior had caused some dissatisfaction in the Brigade. Nothing serious — conversations with Trotskyists, which showed he rather condoned them, comments on the Moscow trials which showed he misunderstood them completely … I had all the details of his death from a reliable source. One of my friends was with him when he was hit …”
Kondratiev insisted:
“Did you go into it?”
“Go into what? The source of a bullet in a no man’s land swept by thirty machine guns?”
Ridiculous even to try, of course.
As the car started, Yuvanov resumed:
“Good news, comrade Rudin! We have succeeded in arresting Stefan Stern. I’ve had him taken on board the Kuban. A real blow to the Trotskyist traitors … It is worth a victory, I assure you.”
“A victory? Do you really think so?”
Stern’s name appeared in a great many reports on the activities of heretical groups. Kondratiev had paused over it a number of times. Secretary of a dissident group, it appeared; more a theoretician than an organizer; author of tracts and of a pamphlet on “International Regrouping.” A Trotskyist engaged in a bitter polemic with Trotsky.
“
Who arrested him?” Kondratiev went on. “We? And you have had him put on board one of our ships? Were you acting under orders or on your own initiative?”
“I have the right not to answer that question,” Yuvanov answered firmly.
Not very long before, Stefan Stern had crossed the Pyrenees without a passport and without money, but carrying in his knapsack a precious typewritten manuscript: “Theses on the Motive Forces of the Spanish Revolution.” The first dark, golden-armed girl he had seen at an inn near Puigcerda intoxicated him with a smile more golden than her arms and said: “Aquí, camarada, empieza la verdadera revolución libertaria [Here, comrade, begins the real libertarian revolution].” That was why she let him touch her breasts and kiss the little red curls on the back of her neck. She existed wholly in the flame of her tawny eyes, the whiteness of her teeth, the keen odor of her young flesh that knew the earth and beasts; in her arms was a bundle of freshly washed and wrung clothes, and the coolness of the well hung about her. A whiteness dyed the distant summits, beyond a tracery of apple boughs. “Mi nombre es Nievo,” she said, amused by the mingled excitement and shyness of the young foreigner, with his big, green, slightly slanting eyes and his forehead covered with disorderly rust-brown hair. And he understood: her name was “Snow.” “Snow, sunny Snow, pure Snow,” he murmured with a sort of exaltation, in a language which Snow did not understand. And though he went on caressing her distractedly, he seemed no longer to be thinking of her. The memory of that moment, a memory of simple, incredible happiness, never quite died in him. At that moment, life divided: the miseries of Prague and Vienna, the activities and schisms of small groups, the tasteless bread on which he had lived in little hotels that smelled of stale urine, in Paris, behind the Panthéon, the solitude of the man laboring with ideas — all that disappeared.
In Barcelona, at the end of a meeting, while the crowd sang in honor of those who were setting out for battle, under the huge portrait of Joaquin Maurin, killed in the Sierra (but actually alive, confined anonymously to an enemy prison), Stefan Stern met Annie, whose twenty-five years seemed hardly more than seventeen. Legs bare, arms bare, throat exposed, a heavy brief case dangling from one arm. — A steadfast passion had brought her here from the faraway North. The theory of permanent revolution once understood, how could one live, why should one live, except to accomplish high things? If someone had reminded Annie of the great drawing room at home, where her father, the shipowner, received the pastor, the burgomaster, the doctor, the president of the Charity Society; had reminded her of the sonatas which an earlier Annie, an obedient little girl with her hair in neat buns over her ears, played for the ladies on Sunday afternoons in that same drawing room — Annie, according to her mood, would have made a wry face and declared that it was a nauseating bourgeois swamp, or, suddenly provocative, with a strident laugh that did not quite belong to her, would have said something like this: “Shall I tell you how I learned love in a cave in Altamira with C.N.T. soldiers?” She had already worked with Stefan Stern occasionally, taking dictation from him; as they left the meeting with the surging crowd, he suddenly put his arm around her waist (he had not thought of it the moment before), drew her close, and simply said: “You’ll stay with me, Annie? I get so bored at night …” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, divided between annoyance and a sort of joy, wanted to answer him angrily: “Go get yourself a whore, Stefan — like me to lend you ten pesetas?” but she waited an instant, and then it was her joy which spoke, with a touch of bitter defiance:
“Do you want me, Stefan?”
“Damn right I do,” he said decisively, stopping and facing her, and he pushed his rusty curls back from his forehead. His eyes had a coppery glint.
“All right. — Now take my arm,” she said.
Then they discussed the meeting, and Andrés Nin’s speech: too muzzy on certain points, inadequate as regarded the central problem — “He should have been much more forthright, not have given in an inch on the power of the committees,” said Stefan. “You’re right,” Annie answered eagerly. “Kiss me; but please don’t recite me any bad poetry …” They kissed awkwardly under the shadow of a palm in the Plaza de Cataluña, while a defense searchlight raked the sky, then stopped, pointing straight to the zenith like a sword of light. On the question of the revolutionary committees, they were in full agreement — they should not have been dissolved by the new government. From their agreement a warm friendship was born. After the days of May ’37, the abduction of Andrés Nin, the outlawing of the P.O.U.M., the disappearance of Kurt Landau, Stefan Stern lived with Annie at Gracia, in a one-story pink house surrounded by an abandoned commercial garden, where choice flowers, reverting to an astonishing wildness, grew in disorder, mingled with nettles and thistles and a strange plant with big velvety leaves … Annie’s shoulders were straight, her neck was as straight as a rising stem. She carried her head high. It was narrow across the temples and her eyebrows were delicate and so pale that they were almost invisible. Her straw-blond hair was drawn back from a smooth, hard little forehead, her slate-gray eyes looked at things coolly. Annie went marketing, cooked at the hearth or on an alcohol stove, washed the linen, corrected proofs, typed Stefan’s letters and articles and theses. They lived almost in silence. Stefan would sometimes sit down across from Annie while her fingers danced on the typewriter keys, watch her with a wry smile, and simply say:
“Annie.”
She would answer: “It’s the message to the I.L.P., let me finish … Have you got an answer ready for the K.P.O.?” — “No, I haven’t had time. I found a lot of points to raise in the Bulletin of the IVth.” There, as everywhere, error flourished, overwhelming the victorious doctrine of 1917, which he must try to preserve through today’s troubles for the struggles of the future, because clearly only the doctrine was left to save before the last days would be upon them.
Comrades came every day, bringing news … Jaime told the oddest story — the story of three men who were being shaved at a barbershop during a bombardment and whose throats were cut simultaneously by the three barbers, who had jumped when a bomb exploded. Talk about movie effects! A streetcar loaded with women carrying their morning groceries had suddenly gone up in flames for no reason; the breath of the conflagration stifled their cries in an enormous crackling; and the raging hell had left a metallic skeleton behind, to stand in the square under the shattered windows … “The cars had to be detoured.” People who had failed to get their precious potatoes had walked slowly away, each toward his own life … Again the sirens bellowed, the women crowding around the shop door did not scatter, for fear of losing their turns and, with them, their quota of lentils. For death is only a possibility, but hunger is certain. When houses fell, people rushed into the ruins to pick up wood — something to boil the pot with. Bombs of a new pattern, manufactured in Saxony by conscientious scientists, let loose such cyclones that only the skeletons of big buildings remained standing, reigning over islands of silence that were like volcanic craters suddenly extinguished. No one survived under the ruins except, by a miracle, a little girl with short black curls, whom her companions found unconscious under fifteen feet of rubble in a sort of niche; their movements as they carried her away were inconceivably gentle, they were in ecstasies because they could hear her peaceful breathing. Perhaps she was only asleep? She came out of her faint the moment the full sunlight fell on her eyelids. She revived in the arms of half-naked, smoke-blackened beings whose eyes rolled with insane laughter; down they went into the heart of the city, into the banality of every day, from the summit of some unknown mountain … The old women insisted that they had seen a decapitated pigeon drop from the sky in front of the rescued girl; from the bird’s pearl-gray neck jetted a copious red spray, like a red dew … “You don’t mean to say you believe in pious ravings like that?” — You walked for a long time, beyond human endurance, through the cold darkness of a tunnel, skinning your fingers against sharp and slimy rock walls, stumbling over inert bodies which perhap
s were corpses, perhaps exhausted people who would soon be corpses, you thought you were escaping, making your way up where it would be less dangerous, but there was not a house left unscathed, not a corner in a cellar where you could live — “Wait till someone dies,” people said, “you won’t have long to wait, Jesus!” Always their Jesus! — The sea poured into a huge shelter excavated in rock, fire descended from heaven into prisons, one morning the morgue was filled with children in their Sunday clothes; the next, with militiamen in blue tunics, all beardless, all looking strangely like grown men; the day after that, with young mothers nursing dead babies; the next, with old women whose hands were hardened by half a century of toil — as if the Reaper enjoyed choosing his victims in successive series … The placards kept proclaiming, THEY SHALL NOT GET THROUGH — NO PASARAN! — but we, shall we get through the week? Shall we get through the winter? Get through, get on, Only the dead Sleep sound in bed. Hunger stalked millions, contending with them for the chick-peas and rancid oil and condensed milk that the Quakers sent, the soya chocolate sent by the Donets unions, hunger molded children’s faces into the likenesses of little dying poets and murdered cherubs which the Friends of New Spain exhibited in windows on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Refugees from the two Castilles, the Asturias, Galicia, Euzkadi, Malaga, Aragon, even families of dwarf Hurdanos, stubbornly survived day after day, contrary to all expectations, despite all the woes of Spain, despite all conceivable woes. Belief in the miracle of a revolutionary victory was still held by only a few hundred people, divided into several ideological families: Marxists, Liberals, Syndicalists, Marxist Liberals, Liberal Marxists, Left Socialists tending toward the extreme Left — most of them shut up in the Model Prison, hungrily eating the same beans, furiously raising their fists in the ritual salute, living in a devastating state of expectation, between assassination, execution at dawn, dysentery, escape, mutiny, insanity, the work of a single scientific and proletarian reason revealed by history …