The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “We’ll soon see them escaping across the Pyrenees — all the fine soldiers and ministers and politicians and diplomats ready to sell themselves, fake Stalinized Socialists, fake Socialists got up as Communists, fake governmental Anarchists, fake brothers and pure totalitarians, fake Republicans sold out beforehand to the dictators — we shall see them making themselves scarce before the red flags — it will be a fine day of revenge, comrade. Patience!”

  A festive sun lit this universe, which was simultaneously being born and ending, an ideally pure sea bathed it, and the Savoia bombers, arriving from Majorca to sow death in the lower districts of the port, hung between heaven and earth like floating gulls, in cloudless sunlight. No ammunition on the northern front; at Teruel, the federated divisions melted away in useless battles, like fat on the fire, but they were men, and men recruited by the C.N.T. in the name of Syndicalism and Anarchy, they were men in thousands who, setting out for the blast furnaces with some woman’s tense farewell in their hearts, would never come back — or would come back on stretchers, in dirty noisy trains painted with red crosses and emitting a horrible smell of dressings, pus, chloroform, disinfectants, malignant fevers. Who wanted Teruel? Why Teruel? To destroy the last workers’ divisions? Stefan Stern asked the question in his letters to his comrades from abroad, Annie’s long fingers copied the letters on the typewriter, and already Teruel meant nothing but the past, the fighting moved toward the Ebro, crossed the Ebro, what could be the meaning of the slaughters ordered by Lister or El Campesino in accordance with some obscure plan? Why the premeditated retreat of the Karl Marx Division, if not to save it for a final fratricide behind the lines, to have it ready to shoot down the last men in the Lenin Division? — Standing behind Annie, behind Annie’s straight, strong neck, Stefan Stern could follow his own thoughts better through Annie’s obedient mind, through Annie’s fingers, the typewriter keys.

  They sometimes talked with comrades from the clandestine Committee until late into the night, by candlelight, drinking a crude dark-red wine … President Negrin had delivered the gold reserve to the Russians, it had been sent to Odessa; the Communists held Madrid, with Miaja in supreme command ( — just you watch: they’ll give in at the last minute!), with Orlov and Gorev actually commanding, Cazorla in Security, and teams of inquisitors, secret prisons, they held everything in a tight net of intrigue, fear, blackmail, favor, discipline, devotion, faith. The Government, which had taken refuge in the monastery of Montserrat, a place surrounded by bristling rocks, could do nothing more. The Communists were making a bad job of holding the city, their organizers were already mortally hated.

  “The day will soon come, I tell you, when they will get themselves torn to pieces in the streets by the people. Their nests of spies will be burned like monasteries. But I am very much afraid that it will be too late, after the last defeat, during the final rout.”

  Stefan answered:

  “They live by the most enormous and most revolting lie history has known since the cheat of Christianity — a lie which contains a great deal of truth … They call their completed revolution to witness, and it’s true that it is completed; they fly the red flag, and so they appeal to the strongest and rightest instinct of the masses; they catch men by their faith, and then cheat them out of their faith, turn it into an instrument of power. Their most terrible strength lies in the fact that they themselves believe they are continuing the Revolution, while they are serving a new counterrevolution, a counterrevolution such as has never existed before, and set up in the very rooms where Lenin worked … Think of it: a man with yellow eyes stole the Central Committee keys, walked in and sat down at old Ilich’s desk, picked up the telephone, and said: ‘Proletarians, it’s Me.’ And the same radio which the day before repeated: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite,’ began shouting: ‘Listen to us, obey us, we can do anything, we are the Revolution …’ Perhaps he believes it, but in that case he is half insane, probably he only half believes it, because mediocrities reconcile their conviction with the situations in which they find themselves. Behind him, like a swarm of rats, rise the profiteers, the right-thinking cowards, the frightened, the new ‘ins,’ the careerists, the would-be careerists, the camp followers, those who praise the strong, those who are sold beforehand to any and every power, the old gang that seeks out power because power is the good old way of taking your neighbor’s work and the fruits of his work, his wife if she’s pretty, his house if it’s comfortable. And the whole crowd begins howling, in the most unanimous chorus in the world: ‘Long live our beefsteak, long live our Chief, we are the Revolution, it is for us that the ragged armies won the victory, admire us, give us honors, jobs, money, glory to Us, woe to those who oppose Us!’ What is the poor people to do? What are we to do? … Marx and Bakunin lived in the age of simple problems; they never had enemies behind them.”

  Jaime said, “The worst thing is that people are fed up with everything. We’ll swallow defeat, we’ll swallow anything, they think, if only it will stop. They no longer know what the Republic is fighting for. They’re not wrong. What Republic? For whom? They don’t know that history never runs out of ideas, that the worst is always yet to come … They think they have nothing more to lose … And there is a direct relation between starvation to the present degree and the darkening of people’s minds; when bellies are empty the little spiritual flame flickers and goes out … By the way, I ran into an ugly looking German on my way here, I can’t seem to place him. You haven’t noticed anything? The place is still safe?”

  Annie and Stefan looked at each other searchingly. “No, nothing …”

  “You’re taking every precaution? You don’t go out?”

  They counted up the number of comrades who knew the refuge: seven.

  “Seven,” said Annie musingly, “is too many.”

  They had omitted two, it was really nine. Absolutely trustworthy, but nine. “We must think about sending you to Paris,” Jaime concluded. “There’s where we need a good international secretary …” Jaime readjusted his belt and the heavy pistol that hung from it, put on his military cap, walked across the garden between them, stopped at the door: “Get up an outline of a moderate answer for the English — they have a way of their own of understanding Marxism — they see it through Positivism, Puritanism, Liberalism, ‘fair play,’ and whisky and soda … And I think you had better sleep out on the hill tonight, in any case, while I get some information from the Generalidad.” Jaime left an unspoken anxiety behind him in the weedy garden where the crickets raised their faint metallic chirping. At thirty-five, Stefan Stern had survived the collapse of several worlds: the bankruptcy of a proletariat reduced to impotence in Germany, Thermidor in Russia, the fall of Socialist Vienna under Catholic cannon, the dislocation of the Internationals, emigrations, demoralizations, assassinations, Moscow trials … After us, if we vanish without having had time to accomplish our task or merely to bear witness, working-class consciousness will be blanked out for a period of time that no one can calculate … A man ends by concentrating a certain unique clarity in himself, a certain irreplaceable experience. It has taken generations, innumerable sacrifices and defeats, mass movements, immense events, infinitely delicate accidents of his personal destiny, to form him in twenty years — and he stands at the mercy of a bullet fired by a brute. Stefan Stern felt that he was that man, and he feared for himself, especially since a number of others had ceased to exist. Two Executive Committees of the Party thrown into prison successively, the members of the third, the best who could be found among seven or eight thousand militants, thirty thousand registered members, and sixty thousand sympathizers, were mediocrities full of good will, of unintelligent faith, of confused ideas which were often no more than elementary symbols … “Annie, listen to me. I am afraid of becoming a coward when I think of all that I know, all that I understand, and that they don’t know, don’t understand …” Lacking time to think, he put nothing clearly … “Listen, Annie. There are not more than fifty men on earth
who understand Einstein: If they were shot on the same night, it would be all over for a century or two — or three, how do we know? A whole vision of the universe would vanish into nothingness … Think of it: Bolshevism raised millions of men above themselves, in Europe, in Asia, for ten years. Now that the Russians have been shot, nobody can any longer see from inside what was the thing by which all those men lived, the thing which constituted their strength and their greatness; they will become indecipherable and, after them, the world will fall below them …” Annie did not know if he loved her; she would have been willing to know that he did not love her, barely glimpsing love without having time to pause there; she was indispensable to him in his work, she brought a presence to his side, a proffered and reassuring body to his arms. When she was there, he did not need to feel under his pillow for his revolver in order to get to sleep.

  The night that followed Jaime’s warning they spent on the hill, rolled up in blankets among the dense shrubbery. The moon was shining. They stayed awake late, in a strange intimacy, happy to find themselves suddenly brought infinitely close together by the limpid sky. Dawn banished their fears, for the day broke bright and pure, restoring their customary outlines to things, their familiar appearance to plants, stones, insects, the distant mass of the city. As if blind danger, having brushed against them, had withdrawn. “Jaime must be seeing things!” Stefan mocked. “How can they have traced us here? It’s impossible to shadow anyone on the road without being seen … Let’s go in.” The house awaited them, unchanged. They washed at the well; the water was icy. Then Annie took the milk jug and went running up the path to the farm, springing like a goat. At the farm Battista, who was a sympathizer, sold her bread, milk, and cheeses, for friendship’s sake. She did her errand happily; it took her about twenty minutes. Why, when she came back, was the ancient wooden door in the garden wall half open? As soon as she noticed it, four paces away, the half-open door sent a little shock to her heart. Stefan was not in the garden. At that hour he was usually shaving in front of a mirror hung from the window latch, leaning over some open magazine on his desk while he shaved. The mirror hung from the latch; his shaving brush, white with suds, stood on the sill, with his razor beside it; there was an open magazine on the table, the bath towel was draped over the back of the chair … “Stefan,” Annie called, terrified. “Stefan …” Nothing in the house answered her; but her whole being was irremediably aware that the house was empty. She rushed into the next room, where the bed was still made; to the well, through the garden paths, to the hidden door that gave onto the hill. It was closed … Annie whirled around, seized with a feeling of calamity, her eyes sunken, staring wildly, trying to see everything quickly, quickly, relentlessly quickly … “It’s impossible, it’s impossible …” A core of anguish formed in her chest, she felt the violent beating of her heart, like troops on the march, reeling heavily. “Oh, come back, Stefan! Stop playing with me, Stefan, I’m afraid, Stefan, I’m going to cry …” It was senseless to talk to him like that, she must act instantly, telephone … The telephone gave no sound; the wires were cut. Silence fell on the empty house in solid masses, like inconceivable clods of earth falling into an immense grave. Annie stared stupidly at the suds-filled shaving brush, the safety razor fringed with tiny bits of hair and soap. Wouldn’t Stefan suddenly come up behind her, put his arms around her, say, “I’m sorry if I’ve made you cry …” It was madness to think it. Sunlight poured down on the garden. Annie went up and down the paths, looking for impossible footprints in the grassy gravel. Six feet from the entrance something significant made her open her eyes wide: the end of a half-smoked cigar, crowned with its ash. Busy ants crossing the path made their way around the unfamiliar obstacle. For months there had been no cigarettes in the city, neither Jaime nor Stefan smoked, no one had smoked there for a long time, the cigar revealed the presence of rich, powerful foreigners — the Russians, my God! Annie set out at a run over the hot stony road to the city. The road burned, the heated air vibrated around the rocks. Several times she stopped to press both hands against her temples, where the blood was throbbing too fast. Then she set off for the city again, running over suddenly petrified lava.

  Stefan began to recover consciousness a long minute before he opened his eyes. His vague feeling of nightmare lessened, he was going to wake, it would end; the feeling of nightmare returned, clearer and more overwhelming; no, perhaps it wasn’t going to be the end, but a fresh beginning of the blackness, the entrance into a tunnel that might have no end. His shoulders rested on something hard, the curious feeling of well-being that comes with wakening spread through his limbs, conquering a cramp and a sense of fear. What had happened? Am I sick? Annie? Hey, Annie! His eyelids lifted heavily, then he felt afraid to open his eyes wide, he could not understand at first, because his whole being shrank from the terrible necessity of understanding, he saw nevertheless, for a fraction of a second, and, this time by an effort of will, closed his eyes again.

  A man with a yellowish complexion, shaven skull, prominent cheekbones, and receding temples was bending over him. Officer’s insignia on his collar. A strange room, small and white, where other faces floated here and there in a hard light. Terror caught Stefan by the throat, terror like icy water flooded slowly to the ends of his limbs. Yet under that chill he continued to feel that his being was bathed in a comforting warmth. “They must have given me an injection of morphine.” His eyelids clung together of themselves. To go back to sleep, to avoid this awakening, to go back to sleep …

  “He is conscious again,” said the man with the receding temples. And then he said, or else he thought it very distinctly: “He’s faking now.”

  Stefan felt a muscular hand grasp his wrist and take his pulse. He made an effort to collect himself; he must master the icy flood which devastated his being. He succeeded, though the chill did not go away. The memory of what had happened returned, with irremediable clearness. About nine in the morning, when he was getting ready to shave, Annie said: “I’m going for food — don’t open the door to anyone.” After the garden door closed on Annie, he walked for a while through the overgrown paths, feeling strangely depressed, finding no comfort in either the flowers or the fresh morning air. The hill beyond was already beginning to flame under the torrid sun. The white rooms were unfriendly; Stefan checked his Browning, slipped the magazine in and out; he tried to shake off his uneasiness, went to the typewriter, finally decided to shave as usual. “Nerves, good God …” He was standing there wiping his face and trying to read a magazine that lay open on the desk, when the sand of the walk squeaked under an unfamiliar tread; the prearranged whistle sounded too — but how had whoever it was got the garden door open? Could it be Annie back already? But she wouldn’t whistle. Stefan flung himself into the wild garden, pistol in hand. Someone was coming toward him, smiling — someone whom he did not recognize at first — a comrade who sometimes came in Jaime’s place, but not often. Stefan did not like his big, flat face — it was like the face of a powerful ape. “Salud! I frightened you, did I? I have some urgent letters for you …” Reassured, Stefan held out his hand. “Hello …” And that had been the beginning of unconsciousness, of nightmare, of sleep; he must have been hit on the head (an indistinct memory of a blow rose out of the forgotten past, a dull pain awoke in his forehead). The man — comrade, damn him! — had knocked him out, he had been dragged off, kidnaped — yes, obviously by the Russians. The icy water in his guts. Nausea. Annie. Annie, Annie! At that moment Stefan’s collapse was complete.

  “He is no longer unconscious,” said a calm voice, very close to him.

  Stefan felt that they were looking at him, bending over him, with an attentiveness that was almost violent. He thought that he must open his eyes. “They gave me a shot in the thigh. Ninety to a hundred I’m done for … Ninety to a hundred … I may as well admit it anyway …” Resolutely he opened his eyes.

  He saw that he was lying on a couch in a comfortable ship’s cabin. Light woodwork. Three attentiv
e faces leaning toward him.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “I’m all right,” said Stefan. “Who are you?”

  “You have been arrested by the Military Investigation Bureau. Do you feel able to answer questions?”

  So that was how these things were done. Stefan saw everything with a sort of remote detachment … He did not answer; he studied the three faces, his whole being tense in the effort to decipher them. One immediately dismissed itself as uninteresting and vague — doubtless the face of the ship’s doctor, the man with the receding temples … In any case, it rose into the air, retreated in the direction of the wall, and vanished. A breath of salt air refreshed the cabin. The two other faces seemed the most real things in this half-reality. The younger was strong and square: the hair slick with pomade, the mustache neatly trimmed, the features strong, the velvety eyes unpleasantly insistent. An animal trainer, a brave and vain man whom beating tigers had turned into a fear-ridden coward … Or a white slaver … It was an animally hostile face that Stefan saw above the bright, striped tie. The other aroused his curiosity, then woke a wild gleam of hope in him. Fifty-five, thin gray strands of hair above a calm forehead, a mouth framed in bitter lines, tired eyelids, dark, sad, almost suffering eyes … “Done for, absolutely done for” — through all he was able to grasp and to think, Stefan heard the words sounding dully somewhere inside him — “done for.” He moved his arms and legs, glad to find that he was not fettered, slowly sat up, leaned against the wall, crossed his legs, made an effort to smile, thought he had succeeded, but only produced a strange contorted expression, held out his hand toward the dangerous one: “Cigarette?” — “Yes,” said the other, surprised, and began looking through his pockets … Then Stefan asked for a light. He must be very, very calm, deathly calm. Deathly — it was certainly the right word.