by Victor Serge
“Answer questions? After this illegal kidnaping? Without knowing who you are — or knowing it only too well? Without guarantees of any kind?”
The lion tamer’s massive head swayed slightly over the tie: wide, yellow teeth appeared … So the brute was trying to smile too. What he muttered must have been intended to mean: “We have ways of making you answer.” Of course. With a low-tension electric current, a human being can be made to twist and writhe, sent into convulsions, driven insane, of course, and I know it. But Stefan saw a desperate chance for salvation.
“… But I have a lot to tell you. I’ve got you, too.”
The sad-eyed man spoke, in French:
“Go ahead. Do you want a glass of wine first? Something to eat?”
Stefan was staking his life. He would strike with the truth as his weapon. Rush in among them — the half that were implacable beasts, ready for anything, the half that were genuine revolutionaries perverted by a blind faith in a power that kept no faith. The two men before him seemed representative. To trouble at least one of them might mean salvation. He would have liked to observe their reactions as he spoke, study their faces, but his weakness made him strangely vague, affected his vision, made him speak excitedly and jerkily. “I’ve got you. Do you by any chance believe in the plots you invent? Do you think you are winning victories, or saving something for your master in the midst of your defeat? Do you know what you have done up to now?” He lost his temper; he leaned toward them, his hands found the edge of the couch, he had to grip it from time to time, with all his remaining strength, to keep from falling over backward against the wall or forward onto the blue carpet which heaved like the sea, whose blueness was beginning to make him dizzy. “If you have only the shadow of a soul, I’ll get to it, I’ll get hold of it, I’ll make it bleed, your dirty little soul. It will cry out despite you that I am right!” He spoke fiercely, violently, and he was persuasive, subtle, stubborn, without clearly knowing what he was saying; it came out of him as blood spurts out of a deep wound (the image flitted through his mind). “What have you done, you vermin, with your faked trials? You have poisoned the most sacred possession of the proletariat, the spring of its self-confidence, which no defeat could take from us. When the Communards were stood up and shot in the old days, they felt clean, they fell proudly; but now you have dirtied them one with another, and with such dirt that the best of us cannot comprehend it … In this country you have vitiated everything, corrupted everything, lost everything. Look, look …” Stefan let go of the couch, the better to show them the defeat which he held out in his two bloodless hands, and he almost toppled over.
As he spoke, he watched the two men’s faces. The younger man’s remained impassive. The face of the man who might be fifty-five sank into a gray fog, disappeared, reappeared, deeply lined. Their hands assumed different expressions. The younger man’s right hand, resting flat on the mahogany of a small table, lay like a sleeping animal. The older man’s hands, tightly clasped, perhaps expressed a tense expectancy.
Stefan stopped, and heard the silence. Disconnected from him, his voice expired, leaving him extraordinarily alert in a ringing silence that became an eternity …
“Nothing that you have said,” calmly answered the big head with the pomaded hair, “is of the slightest interest to us.”
The door opened and closed; someone helped the tottering Stefan to lie down again. I am done for, done for. — On the bridge of the ship the two men who had just been listening to Stefan were walking up and down in silence. It was night, but not a dark night: a night that made one feel the presence of the stars, of summer, of the nearby land with its horde of living creatures and green things and flowers. The men stopped, then turned and faced each other. The younger, who was the sturdier of the two, had all the rigging of the ship behind him; the other, the one who might be fifty-five, leaned against the rail; behind him were the open sea, night, the sky.
“Comrade Yuvanov,” he said.
“Comrade Rudin?”
“I cannot understand why you had that young man kidnaped. Another ugly business that will raise a fiendish row even in the Americas. He impresses me as a romanticist of the worst sort, a muddlehead, a Trotskyist, half an Anarchist, et cetera … We’re pretty much at the end of our rope here … I advise you to have him taken ashore and set free as soon as possible, perhaps with some appropriate little stage business, before news of his disappearance gets around …”
“Impossible,” Yuvanov said curtly.
“Why impossible?”
In his anger, Kondratiev lowered his voice. His words almost whistled:
“Do you think I am going to let you get away with committing crimes under my eyes? Don’t forget that I have a mandate from the Central Committee.”
“The Trotskyist viper in whose favor you are interceding, Comrade Rudin, is implicated in the plot which cost the life of our great comrade Tulayev.”
Ten years earlier that sentence out of a newspaper, spoken with such assurance, would have sent Kondratiev into a fit of laughter in which surprise, scorn, anger, derision, and even fear would have mingled; he would have slapped his thigh: Come now, you top everything — I can’t help it, I admire you, your malicious idiocies really reach the point of genius! And indeed, somewhere inside him there was a chuckle, but sober cowardice instantly stifled it.
“I am not interceding for anyone,” he said. “I merely gave you a piece of political advice …”
“I am a coward.” The ship pitched gently in the starry night. “I am letting myself get bogged in their dirt …” The open sea was behind him, he felt as if he were leaning against the emptiness of it, against its immense freshness.
“Besides, Comrade Yuvanov, you have simply been taken in. I know the Tulayev case backward and forward. There’s not a clue worth considering in the whole six thousand pages of the dossier, not a single one, I tell you, that justifies indicting anybody …”
“With your permission, Comrade Rudin, I shall continue to be of a different opinion.”
Yuvanov bowed and left. Kondratiev became aware of the night horizon, where sea and sky mingled. Emptiness. From the emptiness there issued a confusion which was not yet oppressive, which was even attractive. Clouds split the constellations. He went down the rope ladder into the launch, which lay in the darkness against the Kuban’s rounded hull … For a moment, suspended over the lapping water, he was suddenly alone between the huge black shape of the freighter, the waves, the almost invisible launch below: and he went down into the moving shadows alone — calm, and wholly master of himself.
In the launch the hand, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian, gave him a military salute. Acting upon a joy which he felt in his muscles, Kondratiev waved him away from the controls and started the engine himself. “I haven’t lost my hand for these things, brother. I’m an old sailor, you know.”
“Yes, Comrade Chief.”
The light launch skittered along the surface like a creature with wings — in fact, two great wings of white foam spread on either side. There are great red lions with golden wings at the entrance to a footbridge over a canal in Leningrad, there are … What else is there? There is the open sea! Oh, to plunge out into it, irretrievably, into the open sea, the open sea! The engine roared, the night, the sea, the emptiness, were intoxicating, it was good to dash straight ahead, not knowing where, joyously, endlessly, good as a gallop over the steppe … Nights like this (but the best ones were darker, because that meant less danger) long ago before Sebastopol, when we mounted guard on our peanut-shell boats against the squadrons of the Entente. And because we sang hymns of the World Revolution softly to ourselves, the admirals of the powerful squadrons were afraid of us. Past, past, it is all the past, and this moment, this marvelous moment, will be the past in an instant.
Kondratiev speeded up, heading for the horizon. How wonderful to be alive! He breathed deeply, he would have liked to shout for joy. A few motions would carry him out of the cockpit, a lunge would throw him f
orward, and he would dive through the beating wing of foam, and then — and then it would all be over in a few minutes, but they’d probably shoot the little Ukrainian.
“Where do you hail from, lad?”
“From Mariupol, Comrade Chief … From a fishermen’s kolkhoze …”
“Married?”
“Not yet, Comrade Chief. When I get back.”
Kondratiev swung the launch around and headed for the city. The rock hill of Montjuich emerged from space, dense black against the transparent black of the sky. Kondratiev thought of the city which lay under that rock, a city torn by bombings, fallen asleep hungry, in danger, betrayed, forsaken, three quarters lost already, a dead city still believing that it would live. He had not seen it, he would not see it, he would never know it. Conquered city, lost city, capital of defeated revolts, capital of a world in birth, of a lost world, which we took, which is dropping from our hands, is escaping us, rolling toward the tomb … Because we, we who began the conquest, are at our last gasp, are empty, we have gone mad with suspicion, gone mad with power, we are madmen capable of shooting ourselves down in the end — and that is what we are doing. Too few minds able to think clearly, among the horde of Asiatics and Europeans whom a glorious calamity led to accomplish the first Socialist revolution. Lenin saw it from the very beginning, Lenin resisted so high and dark a destiny with all his power. In school language, you would have to put it that the working classes of the old world have not yet reached maturity, whereas the crisis of the regime has begun; what has happened is that the classes which are attempting to go against the stream of history are the most intelligent — ignobly intelligent — are the best educated, those which put the most highly developed practical consciousness in the service of the most profound lack of consciousness and of the greatest egotism … At this point in his meditation, Kondratiev remembered Stefan Stern’s contorted face, seemed to see it borne along on the great wings of foam … “Forgive me,” Kondratiev said to him fraternally. “There is nothing more I can do for you, comrade. I understand you very well, I was like you once, we were all like you … And I am still like you, since I am certainly done for, like you …” He had not expected his thought to arrive at this conclusion, it surprised him. The phantom of Stefan, with his sweating forehead, his curly copper-red hair, his grimacing mouth, the steady flame of his eyes, mingled as in a dream with another phantom. And it was Bukharin, with his big, bulging forehead, his intelligent blue eyes, his ravaged face, still able to smile, questioning himself before the microphone of the Supreme Tribunal, a few days before his death — and Death was there already, almost visible, close to him, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding the pistol: it was not the Death Albrecht Dürer had seen and engraved, a skeleton with a grinning skull, wrapped in the homespun and armed with the scythe of the Middle Ages — no: it was death up-to-date, dressed as an officer of the Special Section for Secret Operations, with the Order of Lenin on his coat and his well-fed cheeks close-shaven … “For what reason am I to die?” Bukharin asked himself aloud, then spoke of the degeneration of the proletarian party … Kondratiev made an effort to shake off the nightmare.
“Take the controls,” he called to the sailor.
Sitting in the stern, suddenly tired, his hands crossed on his knee, the ghosts gone, he thought: Done for. The launch plowed toward the city through that dark certainty. Done for like the city, the Revolution, the republic, done for like so many comrades … What could be more natural? A turn for each, a way for each … How had he managed not to be aware of it until now, how had he lived in the presence of that hidden revelation without divining it, without understanding it, imagining that he was doing things that were important or things that were unimportant, when actually there was nothing left to do? The launch came alongside in the dark port amid a chaos of scattered stone. A swinging lantern preceded Kondratiev into a low, ruined building, its roof full of holes, where militiamen were playing dice by the light of a candle … Part of a torn poster above them displayed emaciated women at last victorious over poverty, on the threshold of the future promised them by the C.N.T.… At eleven o’clock Kondratiev had himself driven to a government building for a fruitless conversation with the officials in charge of munitions. Too much ammunition to yield, not enough to win. A member of the government had arranged a midnight supper for him. Kondratiev drank two large glasses of champagne with a minister of the Catalan Generalidad. The wine, sprung from French soil and impregnated with gentle and joyous sunlight, sent flakes of gold running through their veins. Kondratiev touched one of the bottles and, without in the least thinking what he was going to say, brought out:
“Why don’t you keep this wine for the wounded, señor?”
The minister looked at him with a fixed half-smile. The Catalan statesman was tall, thin, and stooped: sixty, elegantly dressed; a severe face lighted by kind, shrewd eyes; a university professor. He shrugged his shoulders:
“You are absolutely right … And it is one of the small things we are now dying of … Too little ammunition, too much injustice …”
Kondratiev opened the second bottle. Ladies and gentlemen in broad plumed hats, hunting the stag to bay in the forests of another century, looked down on him from the tapestries. Again the old Catalan university professor clinked glasses with him. An intimacy drew them together, they were disarmed before each other, as if they had left their hypocrisy in the cloakroom …
“We are beaten,” the minister said pleasantly. “My books will be burned, my collections scattered, my school closed. If I escape, I shall be simply a refugee in Chile or Panama, speaking a language that no one will understand … With an insane wife, señor. There it is.” He did not know how it happened, but the most incongruous, the most outrageous question escaped him:
“My dear sir, have you any news of Señor Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom I esteem most highly?”
“No,” Kondratiev answered tonelessly.
“Is it true that … that he has been … that they … that …”
Kondratiev was so close to him that he saw the greenish streaks in the old man’s dark pupils.
“… that he’s been shot?” Kondratiev supplied quietly. “We use the word quite frequently, you know. Well, it is probably true, but I don’t know for certain.”
An odd silence — voicelessness or discouragement — fell between them.
“He has sometimes drunk my champagne with me in this very room,” the Catalan minister resumed confidentially.
“I shall probably end as he did,” Kondratiev answered, equally confidentially and almost gaily.
Before the half-open gold and white door they shook hands warmly, resuming their conventional roles but with more life than usual. One said: “Have a good trip, querido señor.” The other, shifting from foot to foot, repeated his thanks for the warm reception he had been given. They felt that their farewells were taking too long, yet they felt too that, the moment their hands let go of each other, an invisible and fragile link, like a golden thread, would break, never to be restored between them.
Taking the bull by the horns, Kondratiev caught the plane for Toulouse the next morning. He must reach Moscow before the arrival of the secret reports which, distorting his slightest gestures, would show him interceding for a Trotskyist-Terrorist — what madness it all was! He must get there in time to propose the final measures which would turn the tide, a substantial shipment of arms, a purge of the services, immediate cessation of crimes behind the lines … He must arrange for an interview with the Chief before the enormous, crushing mechanism of government traps had been set in motion; he must see him face to face and stake his life on the risky trumps of a comradeship begun on the cold Siberian plains in 1906, of an absolute loyalty, of a controlled but cutting frankness, of the truth — after all, there is such a thing as truth.
At five thousand feet, in a sky that was pure light, the most sun-drenched catastrophe in history was no longer visible. The Civil War vanished at just the altitude at whic
h the bomber pilots prepared to fight. The ground was like a map — so rich in color, so full of geological, vegetable, marine, and human life that, looking at it, Kondratiev felt a sort of intoxication. When at last, flying over the forest of Lithuania, an undulating, dark mossiness which struck him as looking pre-human, he saw the Soviet countryside, so different from all others because of the uniform coloring of the vast kolkhoze fields, a definite anxiety pierced him to the marrow. He pitied the thatched roofs, humble as old women, assembled here and there in the hollows of almost black plowlands, beside gloomy rivers. (Doubtless at bottom he pitied himself.)
The situation in Spain must have appeared so serious that the Chief received him on the day he arrived. Kondratiev waited only a few moments in the spacious anteroom, from whose huge windows, which flooded the room with white light, he could see a Moscow boulevard, streetcars, a double row of trees, people, windows, roofs, a building in course of demolition, the green domes of a spared church … “Go in, please …” A white room, bare as a cold sky, high-ceilinged, with no decoration except a portrait of Vladimir Ilich, larger than life, wearing a cap, his hands in his pockets, standing in the Kremlin courtyard. The room was so huge that at first Kondratiev thought it empty; but behind the table at the far end of it, in the whitest, most desert, most solitary corner of that closed and naked solitude, someone rose, laid down a fountain pen, emerged from emptiness; someone crossed the carpet, which was the pale gray of shadowed snow, someone came to Kondratiev holding out both hands, someone, He, the Chief, the comrade of earlier days — was it real?
“Glad to see you, Ivan, how are you?”
Reality triumphed over the stunning effect of reality. Kondratiev pressed the two hands which were held out to him, held them, and real warm tears gathered under his eyelids, only to dry instantly, his throat contracted. The thunderbolt of a great joy electrified him: