The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  Weeks passed, during which he was not allowed to see a glimpse of the sky. Then came interrogation after interrogation — conducted in the adjoining cell, so that a walk of thirty steps along a subterranean corridor gave him no bearings on his prison. Men who were of high rank, but whom he did not know, questioned him with a mixture of deference and harsh insolence. “Did you check on the use made of the 344,000 rubles allocated for reconstructing the offices of the prison administration at Rybinsk?” Stupefied, Erchov answered: “No.” A smile which was perhaps sarcastic, perhaps pitying, creased the hollow cheeks of the high official whose round spectacles gave him the look of a deep-sea fish … And the session was over … At the next session: “When you signed the appointment of Camp Commandant Illenkov, did you know the past record of that enemy of the people?” — “Which Illenkov?” The name must have been submitted to him in a long list. “But this is ridiculous! Comrade, I …” — “Ridiculous?” said the other in a threatening voice. “On the contrary, it is most serious, it is a matter of a crime against the security of the State committed by a high official in the exercise of his office, and punishable, under Article … of the Penal Code, by death …” This one was aging — sandy hair, coppery flecks in his face, his eyes hidden behind gray lenses. “Then you claim that you did not know, defendant Erchov?” — “No.” — “As you please … But you are well aware that in our country confessing errors and crimes is always a better choice than resisting … I am not telling you anything new …” Another interrogation revolved around the sending to China of an agent who had turned traitor. Erchov answered sharply that the Organization Bureau of the Central Committee had made the appointment. The thin inquisitor, whose long nose and dark mouth made as it were a cross on his face, replied: “You are making a clumsy attempt to elude your responsibilities …” Other subjects brought up were the price of Valia’s furs, perfumes which he had taken for her from the stock of contraband articles, the execution of a confessed counterrevolutionary, a former officer in Baron Wrangel’s army: “No doubt you will claim that you did not know he was one of your most devoted agents?” — “I did not know it,” said Erchov, who, to tell the truth, remembered nothing. The meaninglessness of the inquiry restored his confidence a little — if they really had only these small things against him? — at the same time that it gave him a feeling of increasing danger. “In any case, I shall probably be shot …” A sentence heard long ago at the War Academy haunted his memory: “Within the radius of the explosion, the destruction of human life is instantaneous and complete …” We are all soldiers. He grew thin, his hands trembled. Write to the Chief? No, no, no …

  Prisoners in solitary gradually sink into a state that is pure prolongation. If an event suddenly awakens them, it has the intensity of a dream. Erchov saw himself entering the spacious offices of the Central Committee. He advanced, almost as if he were floating, toward a group of half a dozen men seated around a table covered with a red cloth. Street sounds, oddly muffled, reached his ears. Erchov did not recognize a single face. The man at the right, ill-shaven, with a profile like a fat rodent, might be the new prosecutor, Rachevsky … Six official faces, abstract and impersonal, two uniforms … “How weak I’ve become, I am afraid, terribly afraid … What shall I say to them? … What shall I try? I am going to hear everything, it will be overwhelming … It is not possible that they won’t shoot me …” A heavy head seemed to lean toward him: slightly moonlike, slightly shining, entirely without hair, a tiny round nose, an absurdly small mouth. A eunuch’s voice proceeded from it, saying almost amiably:

  “Erchov, sit down.”

  Erchov obeyed. There was one unoccupied chair behind the table. — Tribunal? Six pairs of eyes studied him with great severity. Tired, pale, dressed in a tunic from which the insignia had been removed, he felt dirty. “Erchov, you have belonged to the Party … Here, you must understand, all resistance is useless … Speak … Unburden yourself … Confess everything to us, we know it all already … Go down on your knees before the Party … There lies salvation, Erchov, there lies the only possible salvation … We are listening …” The man with the moonlike face, with the eunuch’s voice, emphasized his invitation by a gesture. Erchov looked at him for a few seconds in bewilderment, then rose and said:

  “Comrades …”

  He must cry out his innocence, and he realized that he could not, that he felt obscurely guilty, justly condemned in advance, though he could not say why; and it was as impossible for him to confess anything whatever as to defend himself. All he could do was to pour out a flood of words before these unknown judges, words which he felt were lamentably confused. “I have loyally served the Party and the Chief … ready to die … I have made mistakes, I admit … the 344,000 rubles for the Rybinsk Central, the nomination of Illenkov, yes, I agree … Believe me, Comrades … I live only for the Party …”

  The six did not listen to him, they rose as one man. Erchov came to attention. The Chief appeared, without a look toward him, silent, gray, his face hard and sad. The Chief sat down and bent his head over a sheet of paper, read it attentively. As one man, the six sat down again. There was a moment of absolute silence, even in the city. “Go on,” the eunuch voice resumed, “tell us about your part in the plot which cost the life of Comrade Tulayev …”

  “… but that is absolutely insane,” Erchov cried. “It is sheer madness, no, no, I mean it’s I who am going mad … Give me a glass of water, I’m stifling …”

  Then the Chief raised his wonderful and monstrous head, the head of all his numberless portraits, and said exactly what Erchov would have said in his place, what Erchov, in his despair, ought to be thinking himself:

  “Erchov, you are a soldier … Not a hysterical woman. We ask the truth from you … The objective truth … This is not the place for scenes …”

  The Chief’s voice was so like his own inner voice that it restored Erchov to complete lucidity, and even to a sort of assurance. Later he remembered that he had argued coolly, gone over all the essential factors in the Tulayev case, quoted documents from memory … yet feeling clearly all the while that nothing could be of any use to him. Accused men who had disappeared long, long ago had argued in just the same fashion before him; and he had not been taken in, he knew what the wretches were concealing. Or he knew why words were superfluous. The Chief cut him off in the middle of a sentence.

  “Enough. We are wasting our time with this cynical traitor … Have you sunk so low that you accuse us? Go!”

  He was led away. He had only glimpsed the angry gleam in the russet eye and the guillotine motion of a paper knife brought down on the table. Erchov spent that night walking up and down his cell — his mouth tasted bitter, his breathing was labored. Impossible to hang himself, impossible to open his veins, ridiculous to fling himself at the wall headfirst, impossible to let himself die of starvation, he would be fed by force, through a tube (he had himself signed orders for cases of the sort). The Orientals say that you can die if you will to die, it is not the pistol that kills, it is the will … Mysticism. Literature. Materialists know very well how to kill, they do not know how to die at will. Poor creatures that we are! — Erchov understood everything now.

  … Was it four weeks, or five, or six, that passed? What connection did measurements of time based on the rotation of the earth in space have with the fermentation of a brain between the concrete walls of a secret prison in the age of the rebuilding of the world? Erchov underwent twenty-hour interrogations without flinching. Amid a mass of questions which apparently had no connection with one another, there were three which were asked again and again: “What did you do to prevent the arrest of your accomplice Kiril Rublev? What did you do to conceal the past of the Trotskyist Kondratiev on the eve of his mission to Spain? What messages did you give him for the Spanish Trotskyists?” Erchov explained that Kondratiev’s personal dossier had been sent to him by the Political Bureau at the very last moment; that the dossier contained nothing unusual; that he had seen Kond
ratiev only for ten minutes and only to advise him about trustworthy agents … “And who were these trustworthy agents?” When he returned to his cell after these interrogations, he slept like a stunned animal, but talked in his sleep, because the interrogation went on and on in his dreams.

  During the sixteenth hour (but, for him, it could as well have been the hundredth; his mind dragged through weariness like an exhausted horse through mud) of his seventh or eighth interrogation, something fantastic happened. The door opened. Ricciotti walked in, quite simply, holding out his hand. “Glad to see you, Maximka.”

  “What’s this? What? I’m so tired, damn it, that I don’t know if I’m dreaming or awake. Where did you come from, brother?”

  “Twenty hours of good sound sleep, Maximka, and everything will become clear, I promise you. I’ll manage it for you.”

  Ricciotti turned to the two examiners behind the big desk, as if he had been their superior: “Leave us now, comrades … Tea, cigarettes, a little vodka, please …”

  Erchov saw that, under the abundant white tangled hair, Ricciotti’s face was bloodless like an old prisoner’s, that his violet mouth was disagreeably lined, that his clothes were shapeless. The flame of intelligence in Ricciotti’s eyes was still alight, but it shone through a cloud. Ricciotti forced a smile. “Sit down, we have plenty of time … You’re done in, eh?”

  He explained:

  “The cell I’m in is probably not far from yours. But in my case, the little formalities are all over … I sleep, I walk in the courtyard … I get jam with every meal, I even read the papers …” His eyelids blinked, he went through the gesture of snapping his fingers, soundlessly. “Sickening, the papers … It’s curious how different panegyrics look when you read them in an underground prison … We’re going down like a ship that …” He pulled himself together. “I’m getting a good rest, now, you see … Arrested about ten days after you …”

  The tea, the cigarettes, and the vodka were brought in. Ricciotti opened the window curtains wide, on a great square courtyard in bright daylight. In the offices opposite, stenographers moved past the windows. Several young women, who must have been standing on a stair landing, were talking animatedly; you could even see their painted nails, see that one of them wore her hair just following the shape of her ears.

  “It is strange,” said Erchov half aloud.

  He swallowed down a big glass of steaming tea, then a stiff drink of vodka. He was like a man beginning to come out of a fog.

  “My insides were cold … Do you understand what is going on, Ricciotti?”

  “The whole thing. I’ll explain it all to you. It is as clear as a chess game for beginners. Check and mate.”

  His fingers gave a decisive little tap on the table.

  “I committed suicide twice, Maximka. At the time of your arrest, I had an excellent Canadian passport, with which I could have cleared out … I learned what had happened to you, I expected it, I told myself that they would come for me within ten days — and I was right … I began packing. But what was I to do in Europe, in America, in Constantinople? Write articles for their stinking press? Shake hands with crowds of bourgeois idiots, hide in dirty little hotels, or in palaces, and finally catch a bullet as I came out of the toilet? As for the West, I loathe it. And I loathe our world, this world here, too; but I love it more than I loathe it, I believe in it, I have all our poisons in my veins … And I am tired, I’ve had enough … I returned my Canadian passport to the Liaison office. It amazed me to walk through the streets of Moscow like a real living person. I looked at everything and told myself that it was for the last time. I took leave of women I didn’t know, I suddenly felt like kissing children, I found an extraordinary charm in sidewalks scrawled over with chalk for a little girls’ game, I stopped in front of house windows that interested me, I couldn’t sleep, I went with whores, I got drunk. If by some chance they don’t come for me, I asked myself, what will become of me? I’m good for nothing any more. I woke with a start, from sleep or drunkenness, to think up preposterous schemes which intoxicated me for half an hour: I’d go to Vyatka, get a job as foreman of a lumbercutting gang under a false name … become Kuzma, woodcutter, illiterate, not a member of the Party, not a member of a union — why not? And it was not entirely impossible, but at bottom I did not believe it, I did not even want it myself … My second suicide was the Party cell meeting: The speaker sent by the Central Committee was obviously going to talk about you … The room was full, everyone in uniform, everyone green, green with fear, my friend, everyone silent, but waves of coughing and sniffling spreading over the room … I was afraid myself, yet I wanted to shout: ‘Cowards, you cowards, aren’t you ashamed to be so afraid for your dirty little hides?’ The speaker was discreet, his speech all slimy circumlocutions, he didn’t mention your name until the end, and referred to ‘extremely serious professional errors … which might justify the gravest suspicions …’ We didn’t dare look at one another, I felt that everyone’s face was sweating, that chills were running up and down everyone’s spine. Because it wasn’t you he was sparing when he talked about you. Even your wife … Arrests were still going on. After all, twenty-five members of your confidential entourage were there, all with their revolvers and all knowing very well what it was all about … When the speaker stopped, we dropped into a pocket of silence. The Central Committee’s envoy himself dropped into it with us. Those who sat in the first row, under the Bureau’s eyes, were the first to recover themselves, naturally; they began the applause, it became frenzied. ‘How many dead men are applauding their own end?’ I asked myself, but I did as the rest did, to avoid calling attention to myself; we all applauded like that, under one another’s eyes … Are you falling asleep? …”

  “Yes … No, it’s nothing, I’m awake … Go on.”

  “Those who owed you the most, and who were consequently in the greatest danger, spoke of you with the greatest treachery … They asked themselves if the discreet C.P. orator was not setting a trap for them. It was pitiful. I got up on the platform, like the others, without much idea of what I was going to say, I began like everyone else with empty phrases about the Party’s vigilance. A hundred asphyxiated faces looked up at me, openmouthed; they impressed me as slimy and dried up, asleep and vicious, distorted by colic. The Bureau dozed on, what I might say to denounce you interested no one, it was an old story that wouldn’t save me; and no one was thinking of anything but himself. And I found myself absolutely calm again, my friend, I had a tremendous desire to joke, I felt that my voice was clear and assured, I saw gelatinous faces moving feebly, I was beginning to make them uneasy. I calmly said unheard-of things, which froze the audience, the Bureau, the man from the Central Committee. (He was taking notes as fast as he could, he would have liked to sink into the ground.) I said that mistakes, under our overwhelming load of work, were inevitable, that I had known you for twelve years, that you were loyal, that you lived only for the Party and that everyone knew it, that we had very few men like you and a great many rats … The chill that rose around me might have come from the Great Ice Barrier. At the back of the room a strangled voice cried: ‘Shame!’ It woke the terror-stricken ghosts: ‘Shame!’ — ‘Shame on you,’ I said, stepping down from the platform, and I added: ‘You are fools if you think you’re any better off than I am!’ I walked the whole length of the room. They were all afraid I would come and sit down beside them, they shrank into their chairs as I approached — every one of my colleagues. I went out to the buffet, smoked a cigarette, and flirted with the waitress. I was satisfied, and I was trembling all over … I was arrested the next morning.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Erchov vaguely. “What were you going to say about my wife?”

  “Valia? She had just written to the cell Bureau to say that she wanted a divorce … That she wanted to wash away the involuntary dishonor of having, unknowingly, been the wife of an enemy of the people … And so forth … You know the formulas. And she was right, she wanted to live, Valia did.”


  “It doesn’t matter.”

  In a lower voice, Erchov added:

  “Perhaps she was right … What has become of her?”

  Ricciotti made a vague gesture: “I have no idea … In Kamchatka, I suppose … Or the Altai …”

  “And now?”

  Through their weariness, they looked at each other, and the colorless daylight revealed in each of them the same bleak astonishment, the same stricken and simple calm.

  “Now,” Ricciotti answered, “it is time to give in, Maximka. Resistance serves no purpose … you know that better than anyone. You can force yourself to suffer the tortures of the damned, but the end will be the same, and furthermore it will be useless. Give in, I tell you.”

  “Give in to what? Admit that I am an enemy of the people, a traitor, that I killed Tulayev, and I don’t know what else? Repeat that hodgepodge which sounds as if it had been spouted by drunken epileptics?”

  “Confess, brother. That or something else, anything they want you to. In the first place, you’ll sleep; in the second, you’ll have a slim chance … A very slim chance, almost no chance in my opinion, but there’s nothing left that anyone can do about it … Maximka, you are a stronger man than I am, but I have better political judgment, you must admit … That’s how it is, I assure you. They need just that, and they order it as they order a turbine destroyed … Neither the engineers nor the workers discuss the order, and no one worries about the lives it will cost … I had never even thought of it before … The last trials did not produce the political results that were expected of them, and the conviction now is that there must be a new demonstration and a new cleanup … You understand that they can’t leave any veterans anywhere … It is not up to us to decide if the Political Bureau is wrong or not …”