by Victor Serge
“Everything all right, Pakhomov?”
“Yes. I’m fine. I don’t regret anything. It’s marvelous.”
“Marvelous.”
The gliding sleigh lulled them in a common warmth. A slight chill stung their lips and nostrils. Freed of weight, of boredom, of nightmare, freed of themselves, they floated in the luminous night. The least stars, those that they had thought almost invisible, were perfect; and each was inexpressibly unique, though it had neither name nor form in the vast glitter.
“I feel as if I were drunk,” Pakhomov murmured.
“My head is clear,” Ryzhik answered, “and it’s exactly the same thing.”
He thought: “It is the universe that is clear.” It lasted several minutes or several hours. Around the brightest stars appeared huge shining circles, visibly immaterial. “We are beyond substance,” murmured one. “Beyond joy,” murmured another. The reindeer trotted briskly over the snow; it looked as if they were hurrying to meet the stars on the horizon. The sleigh sped dizzily down slopes, then climbed again with a vigor that was like a song. Pakhomov and Ryzhik fell asleep, and the wonder continued in their dreams, continued when they woke to find dawn breaking. Pillars of pearly light rose to the zenith. Ryzhik remembered that in his dream he had felt himself dying. It had been neither frightening nor bitter, it was as simple as the end of night; and all lights, the brightness of the stars, the brightness of suns, the brightness of Northern Lights, the more remote brightness of love, continued to pour endlessly down upon the world, nothing was really lost. Pakhomov turned to him and said, strangely:
“Ryzhik, brother, there are the cities … It is incomprehensible.”
And Ryzhik answered: “There are the executioners,” just at the moment when unknown colors flooded the sky.
“Why do you insult me?” asked Pakhomov, after a long silence during which the sky and the earth became one sheet of white.
“I was not thinking of you, brother, I was only thinking of the truth,” said Ryzhik.
It seemed to him that Pakhomov was weeping without tears, his face almost black, although they were being carried through an unbelievable whiteness. If it is your black soul, poor Pakhomov, rising into your face, let it suffer from the cold daylight, and if it dies, die with it — what have you to lose?
They made a halt under the high red sun, to drink tea, stretch their legs, and let the reindeer search for their diet of moss under the snow. After lighting the stove and bringing the kettle to a boil, Pakhomov suddenly squared up as if to fight. Ryzhik stood before him, legs apart, hands in his pockets, straight, firm, silently happy.
“How do you know, Comrade Ryzhik, that I have that yellow envelope?”
“What yellow envelope?”
Looking straight into each other’s eyes, alone in the midst of the magnificent wilderness, in the cold, the light, with the good hot tea they were about to share, they could tell no lies … Thirty paces away, they heard Eyno talking to his team. Perhaps he was humming.
“Then you don’t know?” asked Pakhomov blankly.
“Are you going out of your head, brother?”
They drank tea in little sips. The liquid sunshine flooded through them. Pakhomov spoke heavily:
“The yellow secret service envelope — it is sewed into my tunic. I put that tunic under me when I go to sleep. I have never been parted from it. The yellow envelope — it is there against my chest … I wasn’t told what’s in it, I haven’t the right to open it except if I receive an order in writing or code … But I know that it contains the order to shoot you … You understand — in case of mobilization, in case of counterrevolution, if the powers decide that you must not go on living … It has often kept me awake, that envelope. I thought of it when we drank together … When I watched you starting off toward the Bezdolnya for firewood … When I played gypsy songs to you … When a black dot appeared on the horizon, I said to myself, ‘The damned mail, what is it bringing me, small man that I am?’ You understand, I’m a man who does his duty. Now I’ve told you.”
“I never even thought of it,” said Ryzhik. “Though I certainly should have suspected it.”
They played a strange game of chess. Little by little, the chessboard was buried under a dust of beautifully wrought crystals. Ryzhik and Pakhomov strode up and down on the rock, which at that point had only a light covering of snow. Their boots left rounded marks in it, like the prints of gigantic beasts. They moved a piece, and walked away, thinking or dreaming, drawn by horizons which, a few minutes later, they would renounce. Eyno came and crouched by the board, playing both sides in his mind at once. His face had a look of concentration, his lips moved. Slowly the reindeer came wandering back, from far away, and they too looked on with their great opaque eyes, watching the mysterious game, until miniature snow squalls, trailing along the ground, finally buried it in crystal whiteness. The black and white chessmen had ceased to exist except in the abstract, but through the abstract the small, strict powers of the mind continued their combat. Pakhomov lost, as usual, full of admiration for Ryzhik’s ingenious strategy.
“It is not my fault if I won,” Ryzhik said to him. “You have a lot to lose yet, before you will understand.”
Pakhomov did not answer.
The dazzling journey brought them to landscapes covered with starved bushes. Blotches of green grass emerged from the snow. The same emotion seized all three men when they saw in the grass the ruts of a wagon road. Eyno muttered an incantation against bad luck. The reindeer began to trot jerkily. The sky was dull, a leaden sky.
Ryzhik felt his sadness return, the sadness which was the texture of his life and which he despised. Eyno left them at a kolkhoze where they procured horses. Life there must have been a picture in earthy colors, washed over by the dawns which poured azure on the world. The roads wandered away into woods filled with birds. Brooks ran through singing coppices; the light was reflected from the water-spangled soil, rock, and roots. They forded rivers on which clouds floated. They traveled through this region in peasant carts, whose drivers hardly ever spoke a word and, full of suspicion, came out of their torpor only when they had drunk a little vodka. Then they hummed endless songs.
Parting came to Ryzhik and Pakhomov in the single street of a straggling market town, among large dark houses standing well apart, on the threshold of the building which housed both the Soviet and Security, a wood-and-brick building with broad shutters. “Well,” said Pakhomov, “our journey together is over. I have orders to turn you over to the Security post. The railroad is only about sixty miles from here. I wish you luck, brother. Don’t hold a grudge against me.” Ryzhik pretended an interest in the street, in order not to hear the last words. They clasped hands. “Good-by, Comrade Pakhomov, I wish you understanding, dangerous though it be …” In the Security office two young fellows in uniform were playing dominoes on a dirty table. The unlighted stove sent out a wretched chill. One of the two glanced at the papers which Pakhomov had brought. “State criminal,” he said to his companion, and both of them looked at Ryzhik hostilely. Ryzhik felt the white hair on his temples bristle, an aggressive smile uncovered his purplish gums, and he said:
“You can read, I suppose. That means: Old Bolshevik, faithful to Lenin’s work.”
“An old story. Plenty of enemies of the people have used the same camouflage. Come, citizen.”
Without another word, they led him to a small dark room at the end of the hall, closed the door on him, and padlocked it. It was hardly more than a cupboard, it stank of cat urine, the air was heavy with mold. But from behind the wooden wall came children’s voices. Ryzhik heard them with delight. He made himself as comfortable as possible, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out. His old tired flesh groaned despite itself and wished that it could lie down on clean straw … A little girl’s voice, refreshing as a trickle of water over the rocks of the taiga, came from the other side of the world, solemnly reading Nekrasov’s Uncle Vlass, no doubt to other children:
&nbs
p; “With his bottomless sorrow, — tall, straight, his face tanned, — old Vlass walks unhurried — through cities and villages.
“Far places call him, he goes, — he has seen Moscow, our mother, — the sweep of the Caspian — and the imperial Neva.
“He goes, carrying the Sacred Book, — he goes, talking to himself, — he goes and his iron-shod stick — makes a little sound on the ground.”
“I have seen all that too,” Ryzhik thought. “Trudge on, old Vlass, we are not through trudging … Only, our sacred books are not the same …”
And, before he sank under weariness and discouragement, he remembered another line of Nekrasov’s: “Oh my Muse, scourged to blood …”
Nothing but worry and work, these transfers! There are no prisons within the Arctic Circle; jails appear with civilization. District Soviets sometimes have at their disposal an abandoned house that no one wants because it has brought people bad luck or because it would need too much repairing to make it habitable. The windows are boarded up with old planks on which you can still read TAHAK-TRUST, and they let in wind, cold, dampness, the abominable bloodsucking midges. There are almost always one or two wrong letters in the chalked inscription on the door: RURAL PRISON. Sometimes the tumble-down hovel bristles with barbed wire; and when it lodges an assassin, an escaped prisoner who wears glasses and has been recaptured in the forest, a horse thief, the director of a kolkhoze the order for whose arrest came from a high source, the door is guarded by a sentry, a Young Communist of seventeen — preferably one who is good for nothing — with an old rifle slung from his shoulder — a rifle which is good for nothing either, be it understood … On the other hand, there are freight cars armored with scrap iron and big nails; excrement has dribbled under the door; they are shabbily sinister; they have the look of an old, disinterred coffin … The extraordinary thing is that you can always hear sounds coming from them — the groaning of sick men, vague moans, even songs! Are they never emptied? They never reach the end of their journey. It would take forest fires, showers of meteors, cities overthrown, to abolish their kind … Through a green path which the white bark of birches brightened like laughter, two naked sabers conducted Ryzhik toward one of these cars, which stood on a siding among fir trees. Ryzhik laboriously climbed in, and the rickety door was padlocked behind him. His heart was pounding from the effort he had made; the semidarkness, the stench which was like a fox’s earth, stifled him. He stumbled over bodies, groped for the opposite wall with both hands out-stretched, found it by the light from a crack, through which he could see the peaceful bluish landscape of firs, stowed his sack, and crouched in stale straw. He became aware of movement around him, saw a score of young, bony faces supported by half-naked, emaciated bodies. “Ah,” said Ryzhik, recovering his breath. “Greetings, chpana! Greetings, comrade tramps!” And he began by making a well-calculated statement of principles to the children of the roads, the oldest of whom might be sixteen: “If anything disappears from my bag, I’ll bloody the noses of the first two of you I can lay my hands on. I’m like that — nothing mean about me. Be that as it may, I have six pounds of dry bread, three cans of meat, two smoked herrings, and some sugar — government rations — which we will share fraternally but with discipline. The watchword is ‘conscious’!” The twenty ragged children smacked their tongues joyously before giving a feeble “Hurrah!” “My last ovation,” thought Ryzhik. “At least it’s sincere …” The children’s shaven skulls were like the heads of plucked birds. Some of them had scars that went down to the bone; a sort of fever burned in them all. They sat down in an orderly circle, to talk to the enigmatic old man. Several began delousing themselves. They crunched the lice between their teeth, Kirgiz fashion, muttering: “You eat me and I eat you” — which is said to comfort the soul. They were being sent to the regional Tribunal for having looted the commissary of a penal “colony for rehabilitation through work.” They had been traveling in the same car for twelve days, the first six without ever getting out of it, and had been fed nine times. “We used to shit under the door, Uncle, but at Slavianka an inspector came by, our delegates complained to him in the name of hygiene and the new life, so now they come and let us out twice a day … No danger that we’ll escape into a forest as thick as this one — did you see it?” The same inspector — an ace — had got them fed immediately. “Except for him, some of us would be dead, sure thing. Must have been through the same mill himself, he looked like an old hand — otherwise it would never have happened …” They looked forward to the prison to which they were bound as to salvation, but they wouldn’t get there in much less than a week, because of the munitions trains that had to be let by … a modern prison, with heat, clothes, radios, movies, baths twice a month, if you could believe what you heard. It was worth the trip, and the older ones, once they had been sentenced, might have the luck to stay there.
A ray of moonlight fell through the slit in the roof. It fell on bony shoulders, was reflected in human eyes that were like the eyes of wildcats. Ryzhik portioned out some of his dry bread and divided two herrings into seventeen pieces. He could hear the children’s mouths salivating. The joy of the feast brightened the beautiful moonbeam. “How good I feel!” exclaimed the one who was called “the Evangelist” because he had been adopted for a time by Baptist or Mennonite peasants (then they had been deported themselves). He purred with satisfaction, lying stretched out at full length on the floor. The ashy light touched only the top of his forehead; below, Ryzhik saw his little dark eyes gleaming. The Evangelist told a good transfer story: Gricha-the-Pockmarked, a little boy from Tyumen, died just like that, without a word, rolled up in his corner. Nobody cared until he began to stink, and they decided to keep it quiet as long as possible so that they could share his rations. The fourth day they couldn’t stand it any longer — but they’d had that much more to eat — talk about a show! …
Kot-the-Tomcat, the Pimp — face tilted up, mouth open, showing carnivorous teeth — studied Ryzhik benevolently and almost guessed: “Uncle, you an engineer or an enemy of the people?”
“And what do you call an enemy of the people?”
Answers began coming out of an embarrassed silence. “Men that derail trains … The Mikado’s agents … The people that start fires underground in the Donets … Kirov’s assassins … They poisoned Maxim Gorki …” — “I knew one once — president of a kolkhoze, he killed the horses by putting spells on them … He knew a trick to bring drought …” — “I knew one too, a rat, he was head of the penal colony, he sold our rations in the market …” — “Me too, me too …” They all knew wretches who were responsible, enemies of the people, robbers, torturers, fomenters of famines, despoilers of prisoners — it’s right to shoot them, shooting’s not bad enough for them, they ought to have their eyes put out first, have their balls torn off with a string, the way the Koreans do, “I’d make them do some telegraphing, I would! A bit of a buttonhole right here — see, Murlyka? — in the middle of his belly and you get hold of his guts, they unwind like a spool of thread, you hook them onto the ceiling, there are yards of them, more than you know what to do with, and the man squirms around and you tell him the best thing he can do is telegraph to his fools of a father and mother, may the devil roast them …” The invigorating thought of torture aroused them all, made them forget Ryzhik, the pale, square-jawed old man, whose face grew hard as he listened.
“Little brothers,” Ryzhik said at last, “I’m an old partisan from the days of the Civil War, and I tell you I have seen much innocent blood spilled …”
From the darkness, through which the shaft of moonlight pierced like a dagger, a discordant chorus answered him: “Innocent blood, you’re right about that …” They had known plenty of bastards, but they had known even more victims. And sometimes the bastards were victims too — what could you make of it all? They discussed it late into the night, until the moonbeam withdrew into the innocent sky — but principally among themselves, because Ryzhik lay down with his head on his s
ack and fell asleep. Bony bodies huddled against him. “You’re big, you have clothes on, you stay warm …” The slumber of the moon-drenched forest finally impregnated the old man and the grown-up children with such vast quiet that it seemed to cure all ills.
Ryzhik shunted from prison to prison, so tired that he could no longer think. “I am a stone carried along by a dirty flood …” Where did his will power end, where did his indifference begin? At certain dark moments he was so weak that he could have wept: This is what it means to be old, your strength goes, your mind flickers like the yellow lanterns trainmen carry up and down the tracks at unknown stations … His sore gums indicated the beginning of scurvy, his joints ached, after resting he could hardly straighten up his tall body, it was so stiff with rheumatism. Ten minutes of walking exhausted him. Shut up in a huge barracks with fifty human specters, some of whom were peasants (officially: “special colonists”), others old offenders, he felt almost glad when his fur cap and his sack were stolen. In the sack was the clock from the brink of silence. Ryzhik came out of there with his hands in his pockets and his head bare, bitterly erect. Perhaps he was no longer waiting for anything but the chance to spit his disgust for the last time into the face of some anonymous sub-torturer who was not worth the effort? Perhaps he had lost even that useless passion? Police, jailers, examiners, high officials — all climbers who had climbed aboard at the eleventh hour, ignorant, their heads stuffed with printed formulas — what did they know about the Revolution, had they ever known anything about it? Between him and their kind, no common language remained. And anything written vanished into secret files which would never open until the earth, shaken to its bowels, should gape under the palatial government buildings. What use would anyone have for the last cry of the last Oppositionist, crushed under the machine like a rabbit under a tank? He dreamed stupidly of a bed with sheets, a quilt, a pillow for his head — such things existed. What has our civilization invented that is better? Socialism itself will not improve the modern bed. To lie down, to fall asleep, never to wake again … The rest are all dead, all of them, all of them! How much time will this country need before our new proletariat begins to become conscious of itself? Impossible to force it into maturity. You can’t hurry the germination of seeds under the ground. You can kill it, though … Yet (reassuring thought!) you can’t kill it everywhere or kill it always or kill it completely …