by Victor Serge
He was tormented by lice. In the glass doors of railroad carriages he saw himself looking exactly like an old tramp still in fairly vigorous health. Now he was in a third-class compartment, surrounded by a noncommissioned officer and several soldiers in heavy boots. It was pleasant to see people again. But people hardly noticed him — “You see so many prisoners.” This one might be a great criminal, since he was so heavily escorted, yet he didn’t look it, could he be a believer, a priest, a man under persecution? A peasant woman with a child in her arms asked the noncom for permission to give the prisoner some milk and a few eggs, because he looked ill — “in a Christian spirit, citizen.” — “It is strictly forbidden, citizen,” said the soldier. “Go along, citizen, or I’ll have you put off the train …” — “Thank you a thousand times, citizen,” said Ryzhik to the peasant woman, in a strong deep voice which made every head in the corridor turn. The noncom, blushing crimson, intervened: “Citizen, you are strictly forbidden to speak to anyone …”
“To hell with that,” Ryzhik said quietly.
“Shut up!”
One of the soldiers, who was lying in the upper berth, dropped a blanket over him. A great pushing and tussling followed, and when Ryzhik got rid of the blanket he saw that the corridor had been cleared. Three soldiers blocked the compartment doorway. They were looking at him with rage and terror. Across from him, the noncom intently watched his every movement, ready to fling himself on him to gag him, to manacle him (even to kill him?) — anything to prevent him from uttering another word.
“Idiot,” said Ryzhik, looking straight at him. He felt no anger — only a desire to laugh, which was overcome by nausea.
Calmly, his elbows resting on the window sill, he watched the fields fly past. Gray and sterile they looked at first, but they were not really so, for soon he could see the first green shoots of wheat. As far as the horizon, and beyond it, the plains were sown with seeds of vegetable gold, weak but invincible. Toward evening, smokestacks appeared in the distance, belching black smoke. A big factory was alight with concentrated red flame. He was in the Ural industrial district. He recognized the outlines of mountains. “I came through here on horseback in 1921, it was a wilderness … What an accomplishment!” The little local prison was clean, well lighted, painted sea green like a hospital. Ryzhik took a bath, was given clean linen, cigarettes, a passably good hot meal … His body felt small pleasures of its own, independently of his mind — the pleasure of swallowing hot soup and finding the flavor of onion in it, the pleasure of being washed clean, the pleasure of stretching itself comfortably on the new mattress … “Now,” murmured his mind, “we are back in Europe, it’s the last lap …” A great surprise awaited him. The dimly lighted cell to which he was taken contained two beds, and on one of them a man lay sleeping. The noise of the bolts being opened and closed wakened him. “Welcome,” he said in a friendly voice.
Ryzhik sat down on the other bed. Through the dimness, the two prisoners looked at each other with instantaneous sympathy. “Political?” Ryzhik asked. “Just like yourself, my dear comrade,” replied the man who had been asleep. “I know already, you see — I’ve acquired an infallible nose for that sort of thing … Isolator — most likely Verkhne-Uralsk or Tobolsk, possibly Suzdal or Yaroslavl? One of the four, I am certain. After that, the Far North. Right?” He was a short man with a little beard; his wrinkled face looked like a baked apple, but was lighted by kindly round owl eyes. His long fingers — the sort of fingers a wizard might have — drummed on the blanket. Ryzhik nodded his assent, though he felt a little hesitant about trusting this stranger. “The devil take me! How have you managed to keep yourself alive all this time?”
“I really don’t know,” said Ryzhik. “But I don’t think I have much time left.”
The other hummed:
“Life fleets like the wave,
Pour me the wine of comfort…
“But in fact all this unpleasant business is not as fleeting as they say. Allow me to introduce myself: Makarenko, Boguslav Petrovich, professor of agricultural chemistry at the University of Kharkov, member of the Party since 1922, expelled in ’34 — Ukrainian deviation — Skrypnik’s suicide, and so on …”
Ryzhik introduced himself in turn: “… former member of the Petrograd Committee, former deputy member of the C.C.… Left Opposition …” The little man’s blankets rose like wings, he jumped out of bed — nightshirt, waxy body, hairy legs. His absurd face puckered with smiles and tears. He waved his arms, embraced Ryzhik, tore himself away from him, came back, finally stood in the middle of the cell jerking like a puppet.
“You! Amazing! Your death was discussed last year in every prison … Dead from a hunger strike … Your political testament was discussed … I read it — not bad at all, although … You! I’ll be damned! Well, I congratulate you! It’s terrific!”
“I did go on a hunger strike,” said Ryzhik, “and changed my mind at the last moment because I believed that the regime would be going into its crisis almost immediately … I did not want to desert.”
“Naturally … Magnificent! Amazing!”
His eyes misty, Makarenko lit a cigarette, swallowed smoke, coughed, walked up and down the concrete floor barefoot.
“I have had only one other meeting as strange as this. It was in the prison at Kansk. An old Trotskyist — think of it! — on his way from a secret isolator, who knew nothing about the trials, nothing about the executions, who had no suspicions whatever, can you image that? He asked me for news of Zinoviev, of Kamenev, of Bukharin, of Stetsky … ‘Are they writing? Does their stuff get printed in the papers?’ At first I said ‘Yes, yes’ — I didn’t want to kill him. ‘What are they writing?’ I played dumb — theory is not in my line, and so on … At last I said to him: ‘Prepare for a shock, esteemed comrade, and don’t think I have gone mad: They are all dead, they were all shot, from the first to the last, and they confessed.’ ‘What could they possibly have confessed?’ … He started calling me a liar and a provocateur, he even went for my throat — oh God, what a day! A few days later he was shot himself, fortunately, on an order telegraphed from the Center. I still feel relieved for him when I think of it … But you — it’s amazing!”
“Amazing,” Ryzhik repeated, and leaned against the wall. His head suddenly felt heavy.
He began to shiver. Makarenko wrapped himself in his blanket. His long fingers played with the air.
“Our meeting is absolutely extraordinary … An inconceivable piece of negligence on the part of the services, a fantastic success commanded by the stars … the stars which are no longer in their courses. We are living through an apocalypse of Socialism, Comrade Ryzhik … Why are you alive, why am I — I ask you! Why? Magnificent! Staggering! I wish I might live for a century so that I could understand …”
“I understand,” said Ryzhik.
“The Left theses, of course … I am a Marxist too. But shut your eyes for a minute, listen to the earth, listen to your nerves … Do you think I am talking nonsense?”
“No.”
Ryzhik clearly deciphered the hieroglyphics (perhaps he was the only person in the world to decipher them, and it gave him an agonizing feeling of vertigo) — the hieroglyphics which had been branded with red-hot iron into the very flesh of the country. He knew, almost by heart, the falsified reports of the three great trials; he knew all the available details of the minor trials in Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Krasnoyarsk, trials of which the world had never heard. Between the hundreds of thousands of lines of the published texts, weighted down with innumerable lies, he saw other hieroglyphics, equally bloody but pitilessly clear. And each hieroglyphic was human: a name, a human face with changing expressions, a voice, a portion of living history stretching over a quarter century and more. Such and such an answer of Zinoviev’s at the trial in August ’37 was connected with a sentence spoken in ’32 in the courtyard of an isolator, with a speech full of double meanings (seemingly cowardly, but unyielding with a tortuous, ca
lculating devotion), delivered before the Central Committee in ’26; and the thought behind that speech was connected with such and such a declaration by the president of the International, made in ’25, with such and such a remark at a dinner in ’23 when the democratization of the dictatorship was first being discussed … Beyond that, the thread of the idea ran back to the Twelfth Congress, to the discussion on the role of syndicates in ’20, to the theories of war Communism debated by the Central Committee during the first famine, to differences of opinion just before and just after the insurrection, to brief articles commenting on the theses of Rosa Luxemburg, the objections of Yuri Martov, Bogdanov’s heresy … If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thousands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory, now perhaps reflected only in his own mind as in a thousand-faceted mirror … All snuffed out, those brains; all disfigured, those faces, all smeared with blood. Even ideas were swept into a convulsive dance of death, texts suddenly meant the opposite of what they stated, a madness carried away men, books, the history that was supposed to have been made once and for all; and now there was nothing but aberration and buffoonery — one man beating his breast and crying, “I was paid by Japan,” another moaning, “I wanted to assassinate the Chief whom I worship,” yet another accompanying a scornful “Come now!” with a shrug that suddenly opened a hundred windows on an asphyxiated world … Ryzhik could have produced a set of biographies, with an appendix of documents and photographs, covering the public, private, and ideological lives of five hundred men who had been executed, three hundred who had disappeared. What could a Makarenko add to such a detailed picture? So long as he had retained the slightest hope of surviving usefully, Ryzhik had continued his investigations. From sheer force of habit, he asked questions: “What happened in the prisons? Whom did you meet? Tell me, Comrade Makarenko … Give me your story, Comrade Makarenko …”
“The November seventh and May first celebrations gradually died out during those black years. A deadly certainty lighted the prisons, as with the blaze of salvos at dawn. You know of the suicides, the hunger strikes, the final, despicable — and useless — betrayals, which were suicides too. Men opened their veins with nails, broke bottles and ate the glass, flung themselves on guards so that they would be shot down … you have heard of all that. The custom of calling on the dead in the isolator courtyards. On the eves of the great anniversaries, the comrades formed a circle during the exercise period; a voice hoarse with distress and defiance called out the names, the greatest first, the rest in alphabetical order — and there were names for every letter of the alphabet. And each man present answered in turn: ‘Dead for the Revolution!’ Then we would begin singing the hymn to the dead ‘fallen gloriously in the sacred struggle,’ but we could not often sing it through because the guards would be summoned and come running like mad dogs; the comrades made a chain to receive them, and so, arm linked in arm, they held together through the scuffle; under the blows and the curses and the icy water from the fire pumps, they went on shouting in rhythm: ‘Glory be to them, glory be to them!”’
“Enough,” said Ryzhik, “I can see what came next.”
“These demonstrations died out within eighteen months, although the prisons were more jammed than ever. Those who maintained the tradition of the old struggles disappeared underground or into Kamchatka, we never knew exactly; the few survivors were lost in the new crowds. There were even opposing demonstrations — prisoners shouting, ‘Long live the Party, long live our Chief, long live the Father of his Country!’ It did them no good, they were doused with icy water too.”
“And now the prisons are quiet?”
“They are thinking, Comrade Ryzhik.”
Ryzhik formulated “theoretical conclusions, the chief thing being not to lose our heads, not to let our Marxist objectivity be perverted by this nightmare.”
“Obviously,” said Makarenko in a tone which perhaps meant exactly the contrary.
“First: Despite its internal regression, our state remains a factor of progress in the world because it constitutes an economic organism which is superior to the old capitalist states. Second: I maintain that, despite the worst appearances, there is no justification for classifying our state with fascist regimes. Terror is not enough to determine the nature of a regime, what is basically significant is property relations. The bureaucracy, dominated by its own political police, is obliged to maintain the economic regime established by the Revolution of October ’17; it can only increase an inequality which, in its own despite, becomes a factor in the education of the masses … Third: The old revolutionary proletariat ends with us. A new proletariat, of peasant origin, is developing in new factories. It needs time to reach a certain degree of consciousness and, by its own experience, to overcome the totalitarian education it has received. To fear that war will interrupt its development and liberate the confused counter-revolutionary tendencies of the peasantry … Do you agree, Makarenko?”
Lying on his bunk, Makarenko nervously tugged at his little beard. His owl eyes were dimly phosphorescent.
“Of course,” he said, “on the whole … Ryzhik, I give you my word of honor that I shall never forget you … See here, you must try to get a few hours’ sleep …”
Awakened at dawn, Ryzhik had a few moments in which to say good-by to his companion of the night: they kissed each other. A detachment of special troops surrounded Ryzhik in the open truck, so that no one should see him; but there was no one in the street. At the station he found a well-equipped Prisons Service car awaiting him. He surmised that he was probably on the main line to Moscow. The basket of provisions which was put on the seat beside him contained luxurious foods that he had long forgotten — sausage and cream cheese. He could think of little else, because he was very hungry; his strength was ebbing. He decided to eat as little as possible, only enough to sustain himself; and, because he was something of a gourmet, to confine himself to the more delectable and uncommon viands. Lying on the wooden seat amid the clattering of the express train, he savored them pleasurably and thought, without the least feeling of fear, and indeed with a certain relief, that he was soon to die. It was a restful journey. Of Moscow, Ryzhik saw only a freight station by night. Distant arc lights lit the network of rails, a vague red halo hid the city. The police van traveled through sleeping streets, in which Ryzhik heard only the hum of the motor, drunkards quarreling drearily, the magical chimes of a clock letting a few musical, shattering notes fall into the silence. Three A.M. Some indefinable atmosphere enabled him to recognize one of the courtyards of the Butirky prison. He was taken into a small building which had been recently made over and then into a cell painted gray up to six feet from the floor, as cells were painted under the old regime — why? There were sheets on the cots, the electric bulb in the ceiling gave a weak light. It is nothing, it is only the real Brink of Nothing …
He was taken to be examined early in the morning. It was only a few steps down the corridor. The doors of the adjoining cells stood open — an unoccupied building. In one of these cells, which was furnished with a table and three chairs, Ryzhik immediately recognized Zvyeryeva, whom he had known for twenty years, since the days of the Petrograd Cheka, the Kaas plot, the Arkadi case, the Pulkovo battles, the commercial maneuverings at the beginning of the N.E.P. Hysterical, crooked to the marrow, devoured by unsatisfied desires, had she outlived so many valiant men? “I might have known it,” Ryzhik thought. “The last touch!” It brought a wry smile to his face. He did not greet her. Beside her, a round face with oily, carefully parted hair. “The dirty bureaucrat who keeps tabs on you, you old whore?” Ryzhik said nothing, sat down, and looked at her calmly.
“You recognize me, I suppose,” said Zvyeryeva quietly, with a sort of sadness.
Shrug.
�
�I hope that your transfer was effected under not too uncomfortable conditions … I had given orders. The Political Bureau does not forget your service records …”
Another shrug, but less pronounced.
“We consider your period of deportation finished …”
He did not stir. His face became ironical.
“The Party expects you to display a courage which will be your own salvation …”
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” said Ryzhik with disgust. “Look at yourself in a mirror tonight — I am sure you will vomit. If it were possible to die of vomiting, you would die …”
He had spoken in an undertone: a voice from a tomb. White hair, pale face, shaggy beard — weak as an invalid and hard as an old lightning-blasted tree. For the baby-faced high official with the pomaded hair, he had only a brief look, a scornful curl of the nostrils.
“I should not allow myself to become angry — you are not worth it. You are below shame. At most, you are worth the proletarian bullet that will shoot you one day if your masters do not liquidate you beforehand, tomorrow for example …”
“In your own interest, citizen, I beg you to restrain yourself. Here insult and violence serve no purpose. I am doing my duty. You are charged with a capital crime, I offer you a way to exonerate yourself …”
“Enough. Take due note of this: I am irrevocably resolved neither to enter into any conversation with you nor to answer any questions. That is my last word.”