by Victor Serge
“Then the crisis will soon be upon us,” Fleischman thought.
They conferred in Gordeyev’s office on the thirteenth floor of a tower that overlooks the principal streets of the city. Fleischman, having taken a drink of brandy, felt well. Leaning toward the window, he watched the human swarm in the street below, the line of parked cars in front of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, peered at the show windows of the bookstores and co-operatives. To wander around down there for a while, go into an antique shop, stare into windows, follow a pretty girl — what a joy that would be! A hell of a life! Even when you manage not to think of the danger. Stout, decorated, with flabby jowls, tired eyelids, yellow blotches under his eyes, thinning hair, he had lately begun to age quite obviously. He thought: “I shall be absolutely impotent in another year or two …” no doubt because his eye had been caught by a group of students, with their caps and books, who were roughhousing cheerfully as they crossed the street between a black prison van, a shining diplomatic Fiat, and a green bus.
Meanwhile, Prosecutor Rachevsky’s eyes had fallen on a small landscape by Levitan which hung on the wall. A blue Ukrainian night, a thatched roof, the ashy curve of a road, magic of the plains under dim stars. Without looking away from that road into the unreal, he said:
“Comrades, I think it is time we produced results.”
“Obviously,” Gordeyev thought, warily. “It’s high time. But what results, may I ask?” Gordeyev believed that he knew very well what results, but he refrained from coming to a conclusion. The slightest error in such a matter is like a misstep by a man putting in rivets on a skyscraper, three hundred feet above the sidewalk. Falling knows no mercy. Impossible to get a definite directive. They left him to his own devices, encouraged him, spied on him, and reserved the right to reward him or disown him. What Prosecutor Rachevsky had said made it likely that there would be a revelation, since he had been closeted with the Boss. Scales burst out at the other end of the apartment: Ninelle beginning her piano lesson.
“I am of the same opinion, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” said Gordeyev with a broad, sugary smile.
Fleischman shrugged his shoulders.
“Certainly, let’s get it over with. This preliminary investigation can’t go on forever. But what would be the proper way to close it?” (He looked straight at Rachevsky.) “The case is definitely political …”
Treacherously, or nonchalantly, he made a little pause before he went on:
“… though the crime, to tell the truth …”
To tell the truth, what? Fleischman turned to the window without finishing his sentence and stood there, intolerably fat, round-shouldered, his chin overflowing the collar of his tunic. Zvyeryeva, who never risked herself first, said starchily:
“You didn’t finish your sentence, I believe?”
“On the contrary.”
Among the students grouped at the edge of the sidewalk, an amazingly blond and beautiful girl was explaining something, gesturing vividly with both hands; at that distance her fingers seemed to hold the light, and she threw her head back a little to laugh more freely. Distant as a star, inaccessible and real as a star, her head did not feel Fleischman’s dull eyes staring at it. The Deputy High Commissar for Security, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Tribunal, the Investigatress appointed to the most serious cases, waited for Fleischman to express his opinion. Aware of their expectation, he resumed firmly:
“The preliminary investigation must be closed.”
Turning until he almost faced them, he looked at the three, one after the other, giving each a pleasant nod, as if he had just said something most important — three repugnant, corrupt faces, composed of some horrible gelatinous substance … And I am ugly too, my complexion is greenish, I have a bestial jowl and puffy eyelids … We ought to be put out of the way … And now you are in a fine fix, my dear comrades, because that is all I intend to say. It’s up to you to motivate our decision or to put it off, I’ve taken enough responsibility as it is … The students had gone, and so had the prison van and the bus … Other pedestrians passed, a baby carriage maneuvered across the street, under the heavy snouts of trucks. Of all that crowd in the street, not one knows the name of Tulayev … In this city, in this country of 170,000,000 inhabitants, not a single person really remembers Tulayev. Of the big, genial man with his mustaches, his clumsiness, his easy familiarity, his trite eloquence, his occasional drinking bouts, his sordid loyalty to the Party, who was aging and growing ugly like all the rest of us, nothing remained but a handful of ashes in an urn and an uncordial and unvalued memory in the minds of a few exhausted and half-mad inquisitors. The only living beings for whom he had really been a man, the women whom, after an evening of drinking, he undressed to an accompaniment of throaty laughter, stammered endearments, obscene jokes, and bursts of taurine violence, would perhaps for a while preserve secret images of him completely different from the portraits of him which still hung in some offices because no one had thought to take them down. But did they know his name? Both memories and portraits would soon vanish … Nothing in the dossier, not a clue worth considering, nothing to implicate anyone. Tulayev had simply disappeared, carried off by the wind, the snow, the darkness, the bracing cold of a night of hard frost.
“Close the preliminary investigation?” said Zvyeryeva interrogatively.
The peculiar sensitivity of the official was always wide awake in her. Intuitions that were almost infallible gave her a presentiment of plans which were silently and doubtfully being matured in high places. With her chin in her hand, her shoulders hunched, her waved hair, her eyes that were gimlets, or rather less like gimlets than augurs, she was an incarnate question. Fleischman yawned behind his hand. Gordeyev, to cover his embarrassment, got brandy from a cupboard and began setting out small glasses. “Martel or Armenian?” Prosecutor Rachevsky, realizing that no one would say anything more before he spoke, began:
“This case, which is indeed purely political, can have only a political solution … The results of the preliminary investigation are, in themselves, of only secondary interest to us … According to the criminologists of the old school, with whom in this case we are in agreement, the quid prodest…”
“Quite right,” said Zvyeryeva.
Prosecutor Rachevsky’s face appeared to be sculptured in two opposite curves out of a resistant and unhealthy flesh. Concave in general effect from the bulging forehead to the gray bulbous chin, a curving nose, swollen at the base, with dark hairy nostrils, made it a strong face. In color it was sanguine, with blotchy areas of violet. Large chestnut-brown eyes, like opaque marbles, gave it a dark expression. He had emerged but a few years since, during a terrible period, from the depths of a dismal destiny made up of obscure, difficult, and dangerous tasks, accomplished for no reward, with the plodding stubbornness of a beast of burden. Suddenly raised to greatness, he had stopped indulging in drinking bouts, for fear of talking too much. Because there had been times when, in the soothing warmth of a good drunk, he had said of himself: “I am a work horse … I pull the old harrow of justice. All I know is my furrow, ha-ha! I hear Gee, and I pull. A click of the tongue, and I stop. I am the beast of revolutionary duty, I am; get on, old beast — ha-ha!” Toward the friends who had heard him say such things, he felt an undying resentment afterwards. His rise dated from a sabotage trial — terrorism, treason — staged at Tashkent against men of the local government, his masters the day before. Without even an explicit order, he built up a complicated structure of false hypotheses and bits of fact, spread a net of tortuous dialectic over the laboriously worked-up declarations of a score of defendants, took it upon himself to dictate the implacable sentence which his superiors hesitated to communicate to him, delayed the transmission of the petitions for reprieve … Then he went to the Grand Theater and spoke before three thousand workers. This episode decided his advancement. He wrapped perfectly clear thinking in halting phrases, which groped and tumbled over each other. Only his parentheses were more or less
grammatical. Thus his voice shed a sort of fog over the minds of his hearers, yet through the fog certain threatening outlines became visible, always the same. “You argue,” a defendant said to him one day, “like a hypocritical bandit who talks to you with pacific gestures and all the time you see that he has a knife up his sleeve …” — “I scorn your insinuations,” the prosecutor answered calmly. “And the whole room can see that my sleeves are tight-fitting.” In private conversation he lacked assurance. He found Zvyeryeva’s encouragement so timely that he acknowledged it with a half-smile: the three caught a glimpse of his teeth, which were yellow and irregularly set. He discoursed:
“There is no occasion for me to set forth the theory of plots to you, comrades. The word, in law, can have either a restricted or a more general meaning, and, I will add, yet another, which accords much better with our revolutionary law, which we have restored to its original purity by rescuing it from the pernicious influence of the enemies of the people who had succeeded, here in Russia, in distorting its meaning to the extent of subjugating it to the outworn formulas of bourgeois law which rests upon a static establishment of fact whence it proceeds to seek out a formal guilt considered as effectual by virtue of pre-established definitions …”
The stream of words flowed for nearly an hour. Fleischman looked into the street, and felt disgust rising in him. What creatures without an ounce of talent make a career nowadays! Zvyeryeva blinked her eyes, pleased as a cat in the sun. Gordeyev mentally translated the discourse from the agitator’s terms in which it was delivered into more intelligible ones, because somewhere in it, like a weasel crouched in a thicket, lay the Chief’s directive. “In short: we have lived at the heart of an immense and infinitely ramified plot, which we have succeeded in liquidating. Three fourths of the leaders of the previous periods of the revolution had ended by becoming corrupt; they had sold themselves to the enemy, or if not, it was the same thing, in the objective meaning of the word. Causes: the inner contradictions of the regime, the desire for power, pressure from surrounding capitalism, intrigues of foreign agents, the demoniac activity of Judas-Trotsky. The high foresight, the truly inspired foresight of the Chief has made it possible for us to thwart the machinations of innumerable enemies of the people who frequently held in their hands the levers which control the State. Henceforth no one must be considered above suspicion except for the entirely new men whom history and the genius of the Chief have summoned up for the salvation of the country … In three years, the battle for public security has been won, the conspiracy has been reduced to impotence; but in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the street, men yet survive who are our last internal enemies, and the most dangerous because they are the last, even if they have done nothing, even if they are innocent according to formal law. Their defeat has taught them a more profound hatred and dissimulation, so dangerous that they are even capable of taking refuge in a temporary inactivity. Juridically innocent, they may have a feeling of impunity, believe that they are safe from the sword of justice. They prowl around us like hungry jackals at twilight, they are sometimes among us, hardly betray themselves by a look. By them and through them, hydra-headed conspiracy may be born anew. You know the news from the rural areas, with what we are faced in regard to harvests, there have been troubles in the Middle Volga, a recrudescence of banditism in Tadjikistan, a number of political crimes in Azerbaijan and in Georgia! Strange incidents have taken place in Mongolia in the field of religion; the president of the Jewish republic was a traitor, you know the role that Trotskyism has played in Spain; a conspiracy against the Chief’s life was hatched in the suburbs of Barcelona, we have received an astounding dossier on the case! Our frontiers are threatened, we are perfectly aware of the deals between Berlin and Warsaw; the Japanese are concentrating troops in Jehol, they are building new forts in Korea, their agents have just maneuvered a breakdown of turbines at Krasnoyarsk …”
The prosecutor drank another brandy. Zvyeryeva said enthusiastically:
“Ignatii Ignatiyevich, you have the material for a tremendous indictment!”
The prosecutor thanked her by dropping his eyelids. “Let us not, furthermore, conceal from ourselves that the preceding great trials were insufficiently prepared in certain respects, and hence have left the Party’s cadres relatively disoriented. The conscience of the Party turns to us, asking for explanations which we can only furnish during the sessions of a trial which will be, as it were, complementary …”
“Complementary,” Zvyeryeva repeated. “That is exactly what I was thinking.”
She beamed discreetly. The burden of doubt fell from Gordeyev’s shoulders. Phew! “I agree with you entirely, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” he said loudly. “Permit me to leave you for a moment; my little girl …” He hurried down the white hall, because Ninelle’s scales had stopped and because he needed to take the precaution of a moment’s solitude. He took Ninelle’s bony buttocks between his flat hot hands. “Well, darling, did your lesson go all right?” Sometimes he looked at the dark-haired child, with her green-flecked eyes, as he was no longer capable of looking at anyone else in the world. The music mistress was putting away her music, there was the snap of a brief case. “And now,” Gordeyev thought, “the traps are in the list of indictments … We’ll have to dig up at least one genuine ex-Trotskyist, one genuine spy … Dangerous business …”
“Papa,” said Ninelle uncomfortably, “you were so sweet and now you look angry …”
“Business, darling.”
He kissed her on both cheeks, quickly, but felt none of the happiness the pure caress should have given him — the ghosts of too many tortured men were astir in him, though he was not conscious of it. He returned to the conference. Fleischman sighed strangely: “Music … what music …”
“What do you mean?” Zvyeryeva asked. Fleischman bent his pale forehead a little, thus spreading even more of his double chin over his tunic collar, and became stickily amiable: “It’s so long since I’ve heard any music … Don’t you ever long for it?”
Zvyeryeva murmured something and looked bland.
“The list of indictments,” said Gordeyev …
No one answered him.
“The list of indictments,” repeated Prosecutor Rachevsky, firmly resolved to say no more.
Imagine a hippopotamus at the zoo suddenly sliding into his little concrete pool … Fleischman had the pleasant sensation of producing precisely the same effect as he brought out: “It is for you, my esteemed comrades, to propose it …” Everyone has his responsibilities, so assume yours!
Erchov was gallingly aware that his preparation for the shock had been complete. Nothing surprised him, except not recognizing the place where he was taken. “I had so many prisons to supervise, all more or less secret!” The Ex-High Commissar made the excuse to soothe his conscience. Yet this particular prison — new, modern, built of concrete, and located somewhere underground — should not have escaped his attention. The effort of memory which he made to recover some mention of it in the reports of the Prisons department or the Building department was unavailing. “Perhaps it was under the sole jurisdiction of the Political Bureau?” He shrugged and abandoned the problem. The heating was adequate, the lighting soft. Cot, bedclothes, pillows, a swivel chair. Nothing else, nothing. — Even the fate of his wife troubled Erchov less than he had expected. “We are all soldiers …” That meant: “Our wives must expect to become widows …” Essentially, the transposition of another idea, which it was harder to admit: “A dying soldier doesn’t feel sorry for his wife …” Little elementary formulas like that satisfied his mind; there was nothing to be done about them, as there was nothing to be done about orders. He waited, going through his setting-up exercises every morning. He asked for a daily shower and was granted it. He walked endlessly between the door and the window, his head bowed, frowning. All his reflections ended in a single word, a word that forced itself on him from outside, despite his soundest arguments: “Shot.” Suddenly he felt sorry for
himself, almost fainted. “Shot.” He recovered without much effort, though he turned pale (but he could not see that he was pale): “Well, we’re all soldiers, aren’t we? …” His male body, well rested, demanded a woman, and he remembered Valia with anguish. But was it really Valia he remembered, or was it his own bodily life, now over? If the burning cigarette butt a man crushes underfoot could feel and think, it would experience the same anguish. What could he do to get it over with sooner?