by Victor Serge
“Certainly.”
Incomparable dawns rose for Ryzhik from the profound indifference of desert lands. He lived in the last of the five houses which made up the hamlet of Dyra (Dirty Hole), at the junction of two icy rivers lost in solitude. The houses were built of unhewn logs which had come down in the spring drives. The landscape had neither bounds nor landmarks. At first, when he still wrote letters, Ryzhik had named the place the Brink of Nothing … He felt that he was at the extreme limit of the human world, at the very verge of an immense tomb. Most of the letters he wrote never reached any destination, of course, and none came from anywhere. To write from here was to shout into emptiness — which he sometimes did, to hear his own voice; and the sound of it intoxicated him with such violent grief that he would begin yelling insults at the triumphant counterrevolution: “Criminals! Drinkers of proletarian blood! Thermidorians!” The stony plain sent him back only a vague, murmuring echo, but birds of which he had been unaware flew up in terror and their panic spread from one to another until the whole sky was alive with them — and Ryzhik’s absurd rage dissolved, he began swinging his arms in circles, trotted straight ahead until he had to stop for lack of breath, his heart beating violently, his eyes moist.
There in Dyra five families of fishermen — Old Believers, of Great Russian ancestry, but more than half adjusted to Ostiak ways of life — wore out a destiny from which there was no escape. The men were stocky and bearded, the women squat, with flat faces, bad teeth, small bright eyes under heavy lids. They spoke little, laughed not at all, they smelled of fish fat, they worked unhurriedly, cleaning the nets which their grandfathers had brought in the days of the Emperor Alexander, drying fish, preparing tasteless foods for the winter months, weaving wickerwork, mending faded clothes made of cloth from the previous century. From the end of September, a bleak whiteness blanketed the flat landscape to the horizon.
Ryzhik shared the house of a childless couple, who disliked him because he never crossed himself, pretending not to see the icon. So taciturn were these two dull-eyed beings that a silence as of an unfertile field seemed to emanate from them. They lived in the smoke from a dilapidated stove, fed by scrawny brushwood. Ryzhik occupied a nook which had a tiny dormer window three quarters covered over with boards and stuffed with rags, because most of the glass was gone. Ryzhik’s chief treasure was a small cast-iron stove, which had been left by some previous deportee. The chimney ran to one of the upper corners of the window. Thus Ryzhik could have a little fire, provided that he would get wood for it himself in the coppice on the other side of the Bezdolnya (“the Forsaken”) and two miles upstream. Another envied treasure was his clock, which people sometimes came from the neighboring houses to see. When a Nyenets hunter crossed those plains, the people explained to him that there was a man living among them who was being punished, and that he owned a machine that made time, a machine that sang all by itself, without ever stopping, sang for invisible time. And in fact the obstinate nibbling of the clock devoured a silence as of eternity. Ryzhik loved it, having lived almost a year without it, in pure time, pure motionless madness, earlier than creation. To escape from the silent house, Ryzhik would set off across the waste. Whitish rocks broke the soil; the eye clung hungrily to the few puny, bristling shrubs, part rust-colored, part an acid green. Ryzhik would shout to them: “Time does not exist! Nothing exists!” Space, beyond the limits of human time, swallowed the small, unusual sound of his voice — not even the birds were frightened. Perhaps there were no birds beyond time? On the occasion of a great Socialist victory, the Yeniseisk colony of deportees succeeded in sending him presents, among which he found a concealed message: “To you whose fidelity is a pattern to us all, to you, one of the last survivors of the Old Guard, to you who have lived only for the cause of the international proletariat …” The carton also contained unbelievable treasures: three ounces of tea and the little clock, procurable for ten rubles in city co-operatives. That it gained an hour in twenty-four when he forgot to hang his penknife on the weight that made it run, was really of no importance. But Ryzhik and Pakhomov never tired of their joke. It consisted in one of them asking the other: “What time is it?” “Four …” “With or without the penknife?” — “With the clog,” Ryzhik once answered very seriously, for he had been reading last month’s Pravda. Bearing their half century of masterless servitude, Ryzhik’s host and his wife — he stroking his rough beard, she with her hands clasped in her sleeves — had come to look at the wonder and they had spoken in its presence, saying only one word, but a profound word, risen from the depths of their souls (and how had they come to know that word?):
“Beautiful,” he said, shaking his head.
“Beautiful,” his wife repeated.
“When the two hands are here,” Ryzhik explained to them, “in the daytime it means that it’s noon, at night it means that it’s midnight.”
“By God’s grace,” said the man.
“By God’s grace,” said the woman.
They crossed themselves and left, shuffling awkwardly, like a pair of penguins.
As Pakhomov was in Security, he lived in the most comfortable room (requisitioned) in the best of the five houses. It stood two thirds of a mile away, in front of the hamlet’s three fir trees. The only representative of the government in a region almost as extensive as a state of old Europe, he was decidedly well off: among his possessions were a sofa, a samovar, a chessboard, an accordion, some odd volumes of Lenin, last month’s papers, tobacco, vodka. What more does a man need? Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, although a nobleman and a mystic (that is to say, benighted), carefully calculated just how much ground a man, with all his avidity, required: A little short of six feet long, by sixteen inches wide, by a yard deep, for a shipshape grave … “Right?” Pakhomov would ask, sure of assent. He had a wry humor, in which there was nothing malicious. If, coming to the end of the snowy track that led to the house on which a sign: POST OFFICE — CO-OPERATIVE hung askew, he saw a tired team — reindeer or shaggy horses — he joked with them fondly: “Be glad you’re alive, you are useful creatures!” Deputed to watch Ryzhik, he had conceived a reserved but warm affection for his deportee, an affection which kindled a timid little light in his prying eyes. He would say to him: “Orders are orders, brother. We do as the service tells us. We are not expected to understand, all we have to do is obey. Me — I’m a very small man. The Party is the Party, it is not for me to judge men of your stamp. I have a conscience, a very small conscience, because man is an animal that has a conscience. I can see that you are pure. I can see that you are dying for the world Revolution, and if you are wrong, if it doesn’t come, if Socialism has to be built in a single country with our little bones, then, naturally, you are dangerous, you have to be isolated, that’s all, and here we are, in this backwater that might as well be the North Pole, each doing his duty — and, as long as I have to be here, I am glad I’m here with you.” He never got thoroughly drunk, perhaps to keep alert, perhaps out of respect for Ryzhik, who, because he dreaded arteriosclerosis, drank little — just enough to keep his courage up. Ryzhik explained it to Pakhomov: “I want to be able to think for a while yet.” “Quite right,” said Pakhomov. Tired of the bare walls of his lodging, Ryzhik often took refuge in his guardian’s room. Pakhomov’s face always wore an expression of suspicious humility, as if his features and his wrinkles had frozen at a moment when he wanted to cry and would not let himself. His complexion was reddish and rough, his eyes russet, his nose flat and turned up; he never quite smiled, his lips opened on rusty stumps of teeth. “Like some music?” he asked when Ryzhik had stretched out on the sofa. “Have a swallow of vodka …” Before he drank, Ryzhik munched a pickled cucumber. “Play.” Pakhomov drew heart-rending wails from his accordion, and also bright notes that made one want to dance. “Listen to this, it’s for the girls back home!” He dedicated his passionate music to the girls of a faraway region. “Dance, girls, dance again! Come on, Mafa, Nadia, Tania, Varia, Tanka, Vassilissa, dance, litt
le golden-eyes! Hip-hop, hip-hop!” The room filled with movement, with joyous phantoms, with nostalgia. Next door, bowed in their perpetual semidarkness, an old woman untangled fish nets with rheumatic fingers, a young woman with a round Ostiak face full of an animal gentleness busied herself at the fire; the little girls left their work to hold each other awkwardly and spin around between the table and the stove; the blackbearded face of St. Vassili, lit from above by a little lamp, sternly judged the strange joy which yet had made its entrance there without sin … Through the old woman’s hands, through the young woman’s hands, the blood flowed with new vigor, but neither said a word, there was more discomfort than anything else in the feeling. In the fenced yard, the reindeer raised their heads, fear was born in their glassy eyes. And suddenly they began running from fir tree to fir tree, from the trees to the house. Endless white space absorbed the magical music. — Ryzhik listened with a colorless smile. Pakhomov drew the fullest tones from his instrument, as if he wanted to send one yet stronger cry, and yet another, into emptiness — and having drawn it forth, he flung his instrument on the bed. Silence fell implacably, like a weight, on space, the reindeer, the house, the women, the children. (The old woman, mending broken cords on her knees, asked herself if his music did not come of the Evil One? For a long time her lips continued to move, repeating an exorcism, but she had forgotten why.)
“The world will be a good place to live in, in a hundred years.” Pakhomov once said at such a moment.
“A hundred years?” Ryzhik calculated. “I’m not sure a hundred years will be enough.”
From time to time they took guns and went hunting on the farther side of the Bezdolnya. The landscape was strangely simple. Rounded and almost white rocks rose out of the ground in groups, as far as the eye could see. You vaguely felt that they were a people of giants surprised by a flood, frozen and petrified. Dwarfed trees spread their slender network of branches. To find themselves lost after an hour’s tramping and climbing would have been easy. It was difficult to manage skis, and they encountered few animals, and those few were wary, hard to surprise, they had to run them down, track them, lie in wait for them for hours, lying half buried in the snow. The two men passed a flask of vodka back and forth. Ryzhik stared admiringly at the pale blue sky. At times he would even say to his companion, inexplicably: “Look at that sky, brother. It will soon be full of black stars.”
The words brought them together again after a long silence; Pakhomov felt no surprise. He said:
“Yes, brother. The Great Bear and the Pole Star will be black. Yes. I’ve seen just that in a dream.”
There was nothing more they could say to each other, even with their eyes. Frozen stiff, after an exhausting journey, they brought down a flame-colored fox, and the dead beast’s slim muzzle, contorted in a feminine rictus as it lay on the snow, made them uncomfortable. They did not express their feeling. Joylessly they started back. Two hours later, as they glided down a white slope in the livid twilight toward the red ball of the sun, Pakhomov let Ryzhik catch up with him. His expression showed that he had something to say. He murmured:
“Man is an evil beast, brother.”
Ryzhik forged ahead without answering. The skis bore him through a sort of irreality. More hours passed. Their weariness became terrible, Ryzhik was on the verge of collapse, the cold crept into his guts. In his turn, he let his companion catch up with him, and said:
“Nevertheless, brother …”
He had to gather strength to finish his sentence, he had almost no breath left:
“… we will transform man.”
At the same moment he thought: “This has been my last hunt. Too old. Farewell, beasts that I shall not kill. You are one of the fascinating and cruel faces of life, and life is passing away. What must be done will be done by others. Farewell.”
Ryzhik spent several days lying on his furs by the warm stove, under the nibbling clock. Pakhomov came to keep him company. They played cards — an elementary game which consisted in cheating. Pakhomov usually won. “Of course,” he said. “I have a low streak in me.” So life passed during the long, nocturnal winter. The reddish ball of the sun dragged along the horizon. Mail arrived by sleigh once a month. A little ahead of schedule, Pakhomov wrote reports for his superiors on the deportee under his surveillance. “What am I to write them about you, old man?” — “Write them,” said Ryzhik, “that I shit on the bureaucratic counterrevolution.”
“They know that already,” Pakhomov answered. “But you ought not to tell me about it. I am doing my duty. There’s no call for you to make me angry.”
The day always comes when things end. No one can predict it, though everyone knows that come it must. The silence, the whiteness, the eternal North, will go on endlessly, that is to say until the end of the world — and perhaps even after that, who knows? But Pakhomov came into the hovel where Ryzhik sat rereading old newspapers in a nightmare as diffuse as a fog. Redder than usual, the Security man, beard twisted, eyes sparkling:
“We’re leaving here, old man. We’re through with this dirty hole. Get your stuff together. I have orders to take you to the city. We’re in luck.”
Ryzhik turned a petrified face toward him, with eyes that were terribly cold.
“What’s the matter?” Pakhomov asked kindly. “Aren’t you glad?”
Ryzhik shrugged his shoulders. Glad? Glad to die? Here or somewhere else? He felt that there was hardly enough strength left in him for change, for struggle, for the mere thought of struggle; that he no longer genuinely felt fear or hope or defiance, that his courage had become a sort of inertia …
The five households watched them set out on a day of low-hanging clouds pierced by feeble glimmers of silver. The universe seemed forgotten. The smallest children, muffled in furs, were brought out in their mothers’ arms. Thirty short figures dotted the dull whiteness around the sleigh. The men gave advice and looked to see that the reindeer were properly harnessed. Now that they were about to vanish, Pakhomov and Ryzhik became more real than they had been the day before; discovering them roused a slight emotion. It was as if they were going to die. They were setting off for the unknown, one guarding the other, for freedom or for prison, God alone knew. Eyno, the Nyenets, the Samoyed, who had come for furs and fish, took them in his sleigh. Dressed in wolfskins, his face bony and brown, with slit eyes and scanty beard, he looked like a Mongol Christ. Green and red ribbons decorated his boots, his gloves, his cap. He pushed the last yellow strands of his beard carefully into his collar, studied the whole extent of the heavens and the earth in one sweeping look, roused the reindeer with a click of his tongue. Ryzhik and Pakhomov stretched out side by side, wrapped in furs. They carried a store of dried bread, dried fish, vodka, matches, and alcohol in tablet form to make a fire. The reindeer gave a little leap and stopped. “Go with God!” said someone. Pakhomov answered, with a laugh: “Our kind gets along better without.”
Ryzhik shook all the hands that were held out to him. They were of all ages. There were old hands, rough and callused, strong hands, tiny hands, delicately formed. “Good-by, good-by, comrades!” Men and women who did not love him said: “Good-by, Comrade Ryzhik, a good journey to you!” and they looked at him with new, kindly eyes. The new eyes followed the sleigh all the way to the horizon. The reindeer leaped forward into space; a sleeping forest appeared in the distance, recognizable by its purplish shadows. Above, the sky cleared in silvery lacework. Eyno leaned forward, watching his animals. A haze of snow surrounded the sleigh, shimmering with rainbows.
“It’s good to get away,” Pakhomov repeated joyously. “I’ve had my bellyful of this hole. I can’t wait to see a city!”
Ryzhik was thinking that the people of Dyra probably would never get away. That he himself would never return here, nor to Chernoe, nor to the cities he had known, nor, above all, to the days of strength and victory. There are moments in life when a man may hope everything, even in the depths of defeat. He lives behind the bars of a county jail, and he kn
ows that the Revolution is coming; that, under the gallows, the world lies before him. The future is inexhaustible. Once a solitary man has exhausted his future, every departure becomes the last. Almost at the end of his journey — his cross-checkings made it clear enough. His mind had long been made up, he felt himself available. The chill in his stomach bothered him. He drank a swallow of vodka, covered his face with furs, and gave himself up to torpor, then to sleep.
He did not wake again until night. The sleigh was gliding swiftly over the nothingness which was the world. The night had a greenish transparency. In the sky reigned stars which as they twinkled changed from lightning blue to a soft glacial green. They filled the sky; he felt that convulsions raged beneath their apparent immobility, that they were ready to fall, ready to burst on the earth in tremendous flames. They enchanted the silence; the snow-crystal world reflected their infinitesimal and sovereign light. The one absolute truth was in them. The plain undulated, the barely visible horizon heaved like a sea and the stars caressed it. Eyno kept watch, crouched forward; his shoulders swayed to the rhythm of their journey, to the rhythm of the revolving world; they hid and then revealed entire constellations. Ryzhik saw that his companion was not asleep either. His eyes open as never before, his eyeballs glinting gold, he breathed in the magical phosphorescence of the night.