The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “It is appallingly wrong,” said Erchov.

  “Keep your mouth shut on the subject. No member of the Party has a right to say such things. If you were sent against Japanese tanks as the head of a division, you wouldn’t argue, you’d go, even though you knew that not a man would come back. Tulayev is only an accident or an excuse. For my part, I am even convinced that there is nothing behind the case, that he was killed by chance, if you please! You must see, nevertheless, that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people’s soul … The Chief has been in an impasse for a long time. Perhaps he’s losing his mind. Perhaps he sees farther and better than all the rest of us. I don’t believe he is a genius, I believe he has decided limitations, but we have no one else, and he has only himself. We have killed off all the others, allowed them to be killed off, that is; and he is the only one left, the only real one. He knows that when somebody shoots Tulayev, it is himself that was aimed at, because it can’t be otherwise, there is no one but himself that anyone either can hate or has to hate …”

  “You think so?”

  Ricciotti said lightly:

  “Only the rational is real, according to Hegel.”

  “I cannot,” said Erchov, with an effort. “It is beyond my strength …”

  “Empty words. Neither you nor I have any strength left. And afterward?”

  Half the offices in the building they could see through the window were closed and empty now. To the right, a few floors were lighted up, where people would be working all night … The green light through the window shades brightened the twilight. Erchov and Ricciotti were enjoying a singular freedom: they went and washed their faces in the toilet room, they were brought a reasonably good supper and plenty of cigarettes. They glimpsed faces that looked almost friendly … Erchov stretched out on the sofa, Ricciotti wandered around the room, straddled a chair:

  “I know all that you are thinking, I have thought it all myself, I still think it. Point 1: There is no other solution, old man. Point 2: This way, we give ourselves a very slim chance, say one half of one per cent. Point 3: I would rather die for the country than against it … I will admit to you that, at bottom, I no longer believe in the Party, but I believe in the country … This world belongs to us, we belong to it, even to the point of absurdity and abomination … But it is all neither so absurd nor so abominable as it seems at first sight. It is more by way of being barbarous and clumsy. We are performing a surgical operation with an ax. Our government holds the fort in situations that are catastrophic, and sacrifices its best divisions one after the other because it doesn’t know anything else to do. Our turn has come.”

  Erchov put his face in his hands.

  “Stop, I can’t follow you.”

  He raised his head, he seemed able to think clearly again, he looked angry.

  “Do you believe one fifth of what you’re telling me? What are they paying you to convince me?”

  The same furious despair set them one against the other; their heads close together, they saw each other — unshaven for a week, their faces bloodless, their eyelids netted with wrinkles, their features blurred by a weariness without end. Ricciotti answered, without heat:

  “No one is paying me anything, you idiot. But I don’t want to die for nothing — do you understand that? That chance — one half of one per cent, of one thousand per cent, yes, of one thousand per cent — I mean to take it — do you understand that? I mean to try to live, cost what it may — and then, that’s that! I am a human animal that wants to live despite everything, to kiss women, work, fight in China … Dare to tell me that you are any different! I want to try to save you, do you understand? I am logical. We used this move on others, now it’s being used on us — they know the game! Things have overtaken us and we must keep going to the end. Don’t you see that? We were made to serve this regime, it is all we have, we are its children, its ignoble children, all this is not a matter of chance — can I ever make you understand? I am loyal — don’t you see? And you are loyal too, Maximka.” His voice broke, changed tone, acquired a shade of tenderness. “That’s all, Maximka. You are wrong to revile me. Think it over. Sit down.”

  He took him by the shoulders and pushed him toward the sofa. Erchov let himself drop onto it limply.

  Night had fallen, steps sounded in a distant corridor, mingled with the tapping of a typewriter. The scattered sounds, creeping into the silence, were poignant.

  Erchov was still rebellious:

  “Confess that I am complete traitor! That I was a party to a crime against which I have fought with all my strength! … Let me alone, you’re mad!”

  His comrade’s voice came to him from very far away. There were icy distances between them, in which dark planets revolved slowly … There was nothing between them except a mahogany table, empty tea glasses, an empty carafe of vodka, five feet of dusty carpet.

  “Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will ever go over to the enemy … And if you consider yourself innocent, you are absolutely wrong. We innocent? Who do you think you’re fooling? Have you forgotten our trade? Can Comrade High Commissar for Security be innocent? Can the Grand Inquisitor be as pure as a lamb? Can he be the only person in the world who doesn’t deserve the bullet in the neck which he distributed, like a rubber-stamp signature, at the rate of seven hundred per month on the average? Official figures — way off, of course. No one will ever know the real figures …”

  “Shut up, will you?” cried Erchov. “Have me taken back to my cell. I was a soldier, I obeyed orders — that’s all! You are torturing me for no purpose …”

  “No. Your torture is only beginning. Your torture is yet to come. I am trying to keep you from going through it. I am trying to save you … To save you, do you understand?”

  “Have they promised you something?”

  “They have us so in their hands that they don’t need to promise us anything … We know what promises are worth … Popov has been to see me — you know, that blithering old fool … When his turn comes, I’ll be very happy, even in the next world … He said to me: ‘The Party demands much of you, the Party promises nothing to anyone. The Political Bureau will decide in accordance with political necessities. The Party can also shoot you without trial …’ Make up your mind, Maximka, I am as tired as you are.”

  “Impossible,” said Erchov.

  He covered his face with his hands and crumpled over. Perhaps he was crying. His breath came wheezily. There was a shattering interval.

  “It would be a pleasure to blow out my own brains,” Erchov muttered.

  “Of course,” said Ricciotti.

  Time — sheer, colorless, deadly time stretching on and on — with nothing at the end. To sleep …

  “One chance in a thousand,” Erchov muttered, out of a calm from which there was no appeal. “Very well! You are right, brother. We have to stay in the game.”

  Ricciotti pressed a frenzied finger on the bell push. Somewhere the bell rang commandingly … A young soldier of the special battalion half opened the door. “Tea, sandwiches, brandy! Quick!” Bluish daylight dimmed the lights in the windows of the Secret Service, which was deserted at that hour. Before they parted, Erchov and Ricciotti embraced each other. Smiling faces surrounded them. Someone said to Erchov: “Your wife is well. She is at Viatka, she has a job in the communal government …” In his cell, Erchov was amazed to find newspapers on the table. He had read nothing for months, his brain had worked in a vacuum, at times it had been very hard. Exhausted, he dropped onto the bed, unfolded a copy of Pravda to a benevolent portrait of the Chief, looked at it for a long minute, laboriously, as if he were trying to understand something, and fell asleep just as he lay, with the printed image covering his face.

  Telephones transmitted the important new
s. At 6:27 A.M. Zvyeryeva, who had herself been waked by her secretary, called Comrade Popov by direct wire and informed him: “Erchov has confessed …” Lying in her big bed of gilded Karelian wood, she laid the receiver down on the night table. A polished mirror, hung so that it tilted toward the bed, sent her back an image of which she never tired: herself. Her long, straight, dyed hair framed her face in an almost perfect oval. “I have a tragic mouth,” she thought, seeing the yellowish curve of her lips, which expressed both shame and rancor. Complexion the color of old wax, wrinkles painstakingly massaged — there was nothing in that face human except the eyes. Soot-colored, without lashes or brows, in everyday life their opaque darkness expressed nothing but an ultimate dissimulation. But when she was alone with her looking glass they expressed a ravenous bewilderment. Brusquely she threw off the bedclothes. Because her breasts were aging, she slept in a black lace brassière. Her body appeared in the looking glass, still pure in line, long, supple, lusterless, like the body of a slim Chinese girl, “like the Chinese slaves in the brothels at Harbin.” Her dry palms followed the curve of her hips. She admired herself: “My belly is tight and cruel …” On the mount of Venus there was only an arid tuft; below, the secret folds were sad and taut, like a forsaken mouth … Toward those folds her hand glided, while her body arched, her eyes clouded, the mirror expanded, became full of vague presences. She caressed herself gently. Above her, in a loathsome emptiness, floated the forms of men mingled with the forms of very young women brutally possessed. Her own tranced face — the eyes half closed, the mouth open — rose before her for an instant. “Ah, I am beautiful, ah, I …” A violent trembling shook her from head to foot, and in it she sank into her solitude. “Ah, when will I have …” The telephone squeaked. It was old Popov’s insipid mumbling:

  “My con-con-gratulations … The investigation has made a great step … Now, Comrade Zvyeryeva, get the Rublev dossier ready for me …”

  “You shall have it this morning, Comrade Popov.”

  For almost ten full years Makeyev’s life had consisted in inflicting or swallowing humiliation. The only art of government that he knew was to abolish every objection by repression and humiliation. At first, when some comrade stood on the platform before an ironical audience, struggling to admit his errors of yesterday, to abjure his companions, his friendships, his own thoughts, Makeyev used to feel uncomfortable. “Son of a bitch,” he would think, “wouldn’t you do better to let them beat you up?” After the arguments of 1927–28, he brought a scorn heavily weighted with mockery to bear on the great veterans who had recanted to avoid being expelled from the Party. In a confused way, he felt that he was called to share their heritage. His monumental scoffing influenced audiences against the militants of 1918, who, suddenly stripped of their halos, stripped of their power, were seen to humiliate themselves before the Party — and in reality it was before mediocre men and women united by but one preoccupation: discipline. His whole head purple, Makeyev thundered: “No, it is not enough! Less beating around the bush! Tell us about the criminal agitation you took part in at the factories!” His interruptions — like blows from a blackjack full in the face — contributed largely to opening the path of power before him. He followed it as he had risen to it: persecuting his vanquished comrades; insisting on their repeating — over and over, and each time in blunter and more revolting terms — the same abjurations, because it was the only way left them to withdraw their claims to power (which, it seemed, was always about to fall into their hands, because actually they were free from the errors of the present); insisting that his subordinates should take the responsibility for his own errors, because he, Makeyev, was of more value to the Party than they were; hurrying to humiliate himself in turn, when someone bigger than himself demanded it. Prison plunged him into an animal desperation. In his dark, low cell he was like a steer which the slaughterer’s hammer has not hit hard enough. His powerful muscles became flabby, his hairy chest caved in, a beard the color of weather-beaten straw grew up to his eyes, he became a big, bent muzhik, round-shouldered, with sad and timid eyes … Time passed, Makeyev was forgotten, no one answered his protestations of loyalty. He himself did not dare to claim an innocence which was as imprudent as it was doubtful, if not more so. The reality of the outside world came to an end, he could no longer picture his wife to himself, even at the moments when a sexual frenzy seized him and prostrated him on his cot, his flesh throbbing, an edge of foam in the corners of his mouth … When his questioning began, he felt a great relief. Everything would come out all right, it was only a broken career, it couldn’t call for more than a few years in an Arctic concentration camp, and even there you can show that you are zealous, that you have a sense of organization, there are rewards to be won … There are women too … He was called upon to agree that he had carried the May directives too far and, on the other hand, had consciously neglected to apply those of September; to admit that he was responsible for the decrease in sown fields in the region; to admit that he had appointed to the agricultural directorate officials who had since been sentenced as counterrevolutionaries (he had denounced them himself); to admit that he had diverted for his personal use, specifically for the purchase of furniture, monies earmarked for a Rest House for Agricultural Workers … The point was arguable, but he did not argue, he agreed, it was all true, it could be true, it must be true … as you see, comrades, if the Party demands it, I am more than ready to take everything on myself … A good sign: none of the accusations rated capital punishment. He was allowed to read old illustrated magazines.

  Wakened one night from the deepest of sleep, led to his interrogation by a different route — elevators, courtyards, well-lighted basements — Makeyev suddenly found himself facing new dangers. A terrible severity made everything clear:

  “Makeyev, you admit that it was you who organized the famine in the district which the Central Committee entrusted to you …”

  Makeyev made a sign of assent. But the formula was startlingly disquieting — it was reminiscent of recent trials … But what else could they ask of him? Of what could he reasonably accuse himself if not of that? No one at Kurgansk would doubt his guilt. And the Political Bureau would be freed of responsibility.

  “The time has come for you to make us a fuller confession. What you are hiding from us shows what an indomitable enemy of the Party you have become. We know everything. We have proof of everything, Makeyev, irrefutable proof. Your accomplices have confessed. Tell us what part you played in the plot which cost the life of Comrade Tulayev …”

  Makeyev bowed his head — or, more precisely, his strength failed him and his head dropped on his chest. His shoulders sagged, as if, while he had listened to the examiner’s words, the very substance of his body had drained away. A black hole, a black hole before him, a vault, a grave, and there was nothing more he could say. He could neither speak nor move, he stared stupidly at the polished floor.

  “Answer to the accusation, Makeyev! … Do you feel ill?”

  If they had beaten him they could have got nothing from him, his big body appeared to have no more substance than a sack of rags. He was led away, doctored; a shave gave him back something of his usual appearance. He talked to himself ceaselessly. His head looked like a skull — high, conical, with prominent jawbones and carnivorous teeth. One night when he had recovered from the first nervous shock, he was led out to be questioned again. He walked totteringly, his heart sank, what little strength he had left failed him the nearer he came to the door …

  “Makeyev, we have an overwhelming deposition against you in the Tulayev case — your wife’s statement …”

  “Impossible.”

  The curiously unreal image of the woman who had been real to him in another life, one of those former lives which had become unreal, brought a flash of firmness into his face. His teeth gleamed balefully.

  “Impossible. Or else she is lying because you have tortured her.”

  “It is not for you to accuse us, criminal. Yo
u still deny the charge?”

  “I deny it.”

  “Then listen and be abashed. When you learned that Comrade Tulayev had been assassinated, you exclaimed that you had expected it, that it served him right, that it was he, and not you, who had organized the famine in the district … I have your actual words, do I need to read them to you? Is it true?”

  “It is false,” Makeyev murmured. “It is all false.”

  And the memory emerged mysteriously from his inner darkness. Alia, her face miserably swollen from crying … She held the queen of hearts in a trembling hand, she was shouting, but her wheezy breathless voice could hardly be heard: “And you, traitor and liar, when will someone kill you?” What could she have thought, what could they have suggested to her, the poor simpleton? Was she denouncing him to save him or to ruin him?

  “It is true,” he said. “I ought to explain to you that it is more false than true, false, false …”

  “That would be wholly useless, Makeyev. If you have the remotest chance of salvation, it lies in a complete and sincere confession …”

  The urgent memory of his wife had revived him. He became like himself again, grew sarcastic: