by Victor Serge
He looked away at the ceiling, at nothingness. Zvyeryeva put up her hand and patted her hair into place. Gordeyev took out a handsome lacquered cigarette case, with a design of a troika dashing through snow, and held it out toward Ryzhik:
“You have suffered a great deal, Comrade Ryzhik, we understand you …”
His answer was a look so scornful that he lost his composure, pocketed the cigarette case, looked at Zvyeryeva for help, only to find her as abashed as himself. Ryzhik half smiled at them, calmly insulting.
“We have ways of making the most hardened criminals talk …”
Ryzhik spat heavily on the floor, rose, muttered, “What stinking vermin!” for his own ears, turned his back on them, opened the door, and said to the three waiting special service men: “Take me to my cell!” and returned to his cell.
No sooner was he gone than Gordeyev took the offensive. “You should have prepared this examination in advance, Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Thus he declined all responsibility for the setback. Zvyeryeva stared stupidly at her painted fingernails. Half of the trial swept away? “With your permission,” she said, “I will break him. I have no doubt of his guilt. His attitude alone …” Her words placed Gordeyev face to face with his responsibility again. “If you do not give me carte blanche to force this man whose confession we must have, it will be you who has scuttled the trial …”
“We’ll see,” Gordeyev murmured evasively.
Ryzhik threw himself on the cot. He was shaking all over. He could feel his heart beating heavily in his chest. Thoughts in shreds, like rags scorched in a fierce fire, fragments of broken syllogisms whose edges momentarily glittered and hurt, swirled in his brain — yet he felt no need to put them in order. Everything was probed, weighed, concluded, finished. This tempest within him had arisen despite himself. It began to die away when he noticed his daily ration on the table — the black bread, the mess-tin of soup, two lumps of sugar … He was hungry. Tempted to get up and smell the soup (sour cabbage and fish, no doubt!), he restrained himself. For a moment he felt a desire to eat for the last time, the last time! … It would do him good … No. Get it over with! It was that act of will which restored him to complete self-control, which brought him to a decision, irrevocably. A stone slides down a slope, reaches the edge of a precipice, drops — there is no comparison between the slight impulse which first set it in motion and the depths to which it falls. Calmed, Ryzhik shut his eyes, to think. Several days would probably pass before these vermin made their intentions clear. How long shall I hold out? At thirty-five, a man can still be somewhat active between the fifteenth and the eighteenth days of a hunger strike, provided that he drinks several glasses of water each day. At sixty-six, in my present condition — chronic undernourishment, fatigue, will to nonresistance — I shall go into the final phase in a week … Without water, a hunger strike brings death in from six to ten days, but is extremely difficult to keep up after the third day because of hallucinations. Ryzhik decided to drink in order to suffer less and to keep his mind clear, but to drink as little as possible in order to shorten the process. The great difficulty would be to cheat the vigilance of his guards in the matter of destroying his rations. At all costs he must avoid the loathsome business of forced feeding … The flushing apparatus of the toilet worked well; Ryzhik found no difficulty until it came to destroying the bread, which he had to crumble up, and it took a long time, the smell of fermented rye rose into his nostrils, the feeling of that doughy substance which was life itself entered into his fingers, into his nerves. In a few days it would be a trial which his weakening fingers, his overstrained nerves, would find it more and more difficult to surmount. The thought that that filthy creature Zvyeryeva and the vermin with the greased hair had not foreseen this made Ryzhik burst out laughing. (And the guard on duty, who had orders to look at him every ten minutes through the bull’s-eye glass in the door, saw his pasty face lit up by a great laugh and instantly transmitted his report to the assistant warden in charge of Corridor II: “The prisoner in Cell 4 is lying on his back, laughing and talking to himself …”) Usually a hunger striker remains lying down, since every movement means an expenditure of strength … Ryzhik decided to walk as much as he could.
Not an inscription on the freshly repainted walls. Ryzhik sent for the assistant warden and asked for books. “Presently, citizen.” Later he came back and said: “You must make your request to the examining judge at your next hearing …” “I shall read no more,” thought Ryzhik, surprised that his farewell to books left him so indifferent. What were needed today were books like thunderbolts, full of an irrefutable historical algebra, full of merciless indictments, books which should judge these days, every line of which should breathe implacable intelligence, be printed in pure fire. Such books would be born later. Ryzhik tried to call to mind books which, for him, were connected with his sense of being alive. The grayish newsprint of the papers left him only a memory of insipidity. From a very distant past there came back to him with great intensity the image of a young man stifling in his cell, pulling himself up on the window grating to a position from which he saw three rows of barred windows in a yellow façade, a courtyard in which other prisoners were sawing wood, a beautiful sky which he longed to drink … That faraway prisoner (myself, a self which I really don’t know if it is alive or dead, a self which is actually more of a stranger to me than many of the men who were shot last year) one day received certain books which made him joyfully renounce the call of the sky — Buckle’s History of Civilization, and a collection of decorous Popular Tales which he looked through with irritation. But toward the middle of the volume the type changed, and it was Historical Materialism by G. V. Plekhanov. Until then, he thought, that young man had been nothing but primitive vigor, instincts, trained muscles which effort tempted, he had felt like a colt in the fields; and the sordid street, the workshop, fines, lack of money, worn-out shoes, prison, had held him like a tethered animal. He suddenly discovered a new capacity for living, something inexpressibly greater than what was commonly called life. He read the same pages over and over, pacing up and down his cell, so happy to understand that he wanted to run and shout, that he wrote to Tania: “Forgive me if I hope I shall stay here long enough to finish these books. At last I know why I love you …” What is consciousness? Does it appear in us like a star in the pale twilight sky, invisibly, undeniably? He who, the day before, had lived in a fog now saw the truth. “It is that, it is contact with truth.” Truth was simple, near as a young woman you take in your arms and say “Darling!” and then you discover her eyes, where light and darkness blend. He possessed truth forever. In November ’17 another Ryzhik — yet was it the same? — went to a great printing plant in Vasili-Ostrov with the Red Guard, and requisitioned it in the name of the Party. Before the great machines which produce books and papers he exclaimed: “Now, comrades, the days of falsehood are done! Mankind will print nothing but the truth!” The owner of the plant, a fat, pale, yellow-lipped gentleman, cruelly put in: “That, gentlemen, I defy you to do!” and Ryzhik wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were not bringing barbarism, we were putting an end to war and murder, we were bringing proletarian justice. “We shall see, citizen; in any case, I inform you that there are no more gentlemen, now or henceforth …” The man he had been in those days was over forty, a hard age for a worker, but he felt himself an adolescent again: “Coming into power,” he said, “has made us all twenty years younger …”
The first three days that he spent without food caused him hardly any suffering. Was he not drinking too much water? His hunger was only an intestinal torment, which he appraised with detachment. Headaches forced him to lie down, then they passed off, but attacks of giddiness suddenly sent him staggering to the wall in the midst of his walking. His ears hummed like the sound in a sea shell. He brooded more than he thought, but both his broodings and his thoughts on the subject of death were absurdly superficial. “A purely negative concept, a minus sign; only life exists …” It was obvio
usly true, it was horrifyingly false. The truth and the falsehood were both stupid … Lying under the blanket and his heavy winter overcoat, he felt cold. “It is the warmth of life leaving me …” He shivered for a long time, shaking like a leaf in a gale — no, it was more like an electric bell vibrating, ting-ting-ting-ting … Great bands of color, like Northern Lights, filled his eyes; he also saw dark lights fringed with fire: flashes, disks, extinguished planets … Perhaps man can glimpse many mysterious things when his cerebral substance begins to disintegrate? Is it not made of the same matter as the worlds? A sumptuous warmth flowed into his limbs, he rose, economizing his movements, to force his aching fingers to crumble the black rye, which must be destroyed, destroyed at all costs, comrades, despite its intoxicating smell.
The day came when he no longer had the strength to get up. His jaws were decomposing, they would burst like an abscess — what a relief, to burst like a great bubble of flesh, a great bubble of transparent soap in which he recognized his face, an absurd, grimacing sun. He laughed. The glands under his ears were swelling, painful as aching teeth … A nurse came, addressed him affectionately by the first name he used to have, and he sat up to tell her to go away, but he recognized her: “You, you, you have been dead for so long, and here you are, and it is I who am dying, because it must be, darling. Let’s take a little walk, shall we?” They followed the Neva as far as the Summer Garden, walking through the white night. “I am thirsty, thirsty, darling, incredibly thirsty … I am delirious … it’s all right so long as they don’t notice it too soon. A big glass of beer, my friend, quick!” His hand shook so as it reached for the glass that the glass rolled over the floor tinkling like little bells, and beautiful blue and gold spotted cows with wide, transparent horns breasted the grass in a Karelian field; the birches grew taller second by second, waving leaves that signaled, better than hands could do: Here is the stream, here is the pure spring, drink, you splendid beasts! Ryzhik lay down on the grass to drink, drink, drink …
“Do you feel ill, citizen? What is the matter?”
The warden laid a hand on his forehead, a cool, refreshing hand, an immense hand of clouds and snow … The day’s ration untouched on the floor, a fragment of bread in the toilet bowl, those enormous eyes glittering from dark sockets, that long body trembling so that the cot shook, the prisoner’s fetid breath … The warden understood instantly (and saw himself ruined: what criminal negligence!):
“Arkhipov!”
Arkhipov, soldier in the special battalion, walked in with a heavy tread; it echoed in Ryzhik’s head like clods of earth on his coffin — that’s odd, is it so simple to have died, but where are the comets?
“Arkhipov, pour a little water into his mouth — gently …”
The warden spoke over the telephone: “Comrade Chief, I report: Prisoner 4 is dying …” From telephone to telephone, the death of Prisoner 4, who was still alive, traveled through Moscow, spreading panic as it went; it hummed in the Kremlin receiver, it raised a shrill little voice in the telephones of Government House, the Central Committee, the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, it assumed a man’s voice, simulating firmness, to announce itself in a villa surrounded by idyllic silence in the heart of the Moskva woods; there its aggressive murmur outweighed other murmurs which were announcing a skirmish on the Chinese-Mongolian frontier and a serious breakdown in the Chelyabinsk factory. “Ryzhik dying?” said the Chief in the low voice of his repressed angers. “I order him saved!”
Ryzhik was quenching his thirst with a delicious water that was mingled snow and sunshine. “Together, together,” he said joyfully, because all his comrades, arm in arm as at the revolutionary funerals of long ago, the Older Generation, the men of energy and will, were pulling him over the ice … Suddenly a crevasse opened at their feet, clean-cut as a lightning flash; at the bottom of it plashed dark smooth glinting water. Ryzhik cried: “Comrades, look out!” A tearing pain, that was like a lightning flash too, flickered in his chest. He heard brief explosions under the ice … Arkhipov, soldier of the special battalion, saw the prisoner’s smile writhe over his teeth, their chattering stopped at the edge of the glass. The delirious eyes ceased to see.
“Citizen, citizen!”
Nothing moved in the heavy face with its bristling white beard. Arkhipov slowly put the glass on the table, fell back a step, came to attention, and froze in terror and pity.
No one even noticed him when the important people came hurrying in — the doctor in his white smock, an officer of very high rank with perfumed hair, a little woman in uniform, so pale that she had no lips, a little old man in a frayed overcoat, to whom the officer himself, for all his general’s insignia, spoke only with a bow … The doctor waved his stethoscope courteously: “Excuse me, comrades, science can do no more here …” and assumed an ostentatiously annoyed air, because he felt that he was safe: Why was I called in so late? No one knew what to say. Arkhipov, the soldier, remembered that in churches they chant for the dead, in tones of supplication: “Forgive him, Lord!” An atheist, as a man should be in our day, he instantly reproached himself for the recollection, but the liturgical chant continued to surge into his memory despite himself. Was it so wrong after all? No one would know. “Forgive him, Lord! Forgive us!” For a moment the silence of the prison fell upon them all. The important people were calculating the consequences: responsibility to be established, the investigation to be begun over again from a different angle, the Chief to be told — what was the Tulayev case to be tied to now?
“In whose charge was the prisoner?” Popov asked, without looking at anyone — because he knew very well.
“In Comrade Zvyeryeva’s,” answered the Deputy High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev.
“Did you have him given a medical examination when he arrived, Comrade Zvyeryeva? Have you been receiving daily reports on his condition and his attitude?”
“I thought … No …”
Popov’s reproach burst out:
“Do you hear that, Gordeyev, do you hear that?”
Swept on by his anger, he was the first to hurry out of the cell. He almost ran, feebly, like an overlarge puppet; but it was he who dragged along the imposing Gordeyev by an invisible thread. Zvyeryeva was the last to leave. As she passed Arkhipov, the soldier, she felt that he gave her a look of hatred.
8. The Road to Gold
Since his return from Spain, Kondratiev had been living in a sort of vacuum. Reality fled him. His room, on the fifteenth floor of Government House, was a chaos of neglect. Books piled up on the little desk, open one on top of another. Newspapers cluttered the couch on which he suddenly flung himself, his eyes on the ceiling, his mind empty, with a faint feeling of panic in his heart. The bed seemed always unmade, but in some strange fashion it no longer looked like the bed of a living man, and Kondratiev did not like to look at it, did not like to undress and lie down in it, did not like to sleep … To think that tomorrow he would have to wake again, see the same white ceiling, the same rather elaborate hotel curtains, the same ash tray full of unfinished cigarettes, forgotten almost as soon as they were begun, the same snapshots, once cherished, now almost meaningless … Astonishing, how images fade away! He could bear nothing in his apartment except the window which looked out on the great Palace of the Soviets (in course of construction), the curve of the Moskva, the superimposed towers and buildings of the Kremlin, the square barracks of the last tyrannies (before our own), the domes of the ancient churches, the white tower of Ivan the Terrible … There were always people walking by the river, an official’s car overtook a shaky brickmaker’s cart from the previous century — the perpetual coming and going, as of busy ants with draft animals and motors, fascinated him. So the ants imagine they have something to do, that there is a meaning to their minute existences? A meaning other than statistical? But what has got into me to give me these morbid ideas? Have I not lived consciously, steadfastly? Am I becoming neurotic? He knew very well that he was not becoming neurotic, but his only way of escapi
ng from the sickness of that room was the window. The sharp-pointed towers preserved the severity of ancient stone, the sky was vast, the feeling of an immense city flowed into him, bringing comfort. Nothing could end, what did a man’s end matter? Kondratiev went out, took a streetcar to the end of the line in a suburb where no man of his rank ever went, wandered through wretched streets bordered by empty lots and wooden houses with blue or green blinds. There were pumps at the corners. His pace slackened before windows behind which a warm domesticity appeared to reign, because they had clean crisp curtains, flowers on the inner sill, little casseroles set among the flowerpots to cool. If he had dared, he would have stayed there to watch the people live: People live, that’s odd, they live simply, this vacuum does not exist for them, they could not imagine that there are men who walk through a vacuum, right beside them, in a wholly different world, men who will never know any other road. Shake it off, my lad, you’re getting sick! He forced himself to show up at the Combustibles Trust, since he was supposed to be in charge of carrying out the special plans of the Central Bureau for Military Supplies. Other men did the work, and they looked at him strangely, with the usual respect, but why did they have that distant and rather frightened attitude? His secretary, Tamara Leontiyevna, came into the glass-partitioned office too silently, her mute lips were outlined in too harsh a red, her eyes looked frightened, and why did she lower her voice like that when she answered him, and never smile? The thought came to him for a moment that perhaps he was like that himself, and that his expression, his coldness, his own anxiety (it was really anxiety) were apparent at first glance. Can I be contagious? He went to the washroom to look at himself in the mirror and stood there before himself for a long moment, almost without thinking, in a forsaken immobility. Absurd, really, how interesting we are to ourselves! That tired man is myself, that sallow face, that ugly mouth, those rust-red lips tinged with gray, myself, myself, myself, that human apparition, that phantom in flesh! The eyes recalled to him other Kondratievs, whose disappearance roused no regrets in the Kondratiev he now was. Ridiculous to have lived so much, only to have come to this! Shall I be very different when I am dead? They probably don’t take the trouble to close the eyes of executed men, I shall stare like this forever, that is to say for a little while, until the tissues decompose or are cremated. He shrugged his shoulders, washed his hands, lathering them automatically, too long, combed his hair, lit a cigarette, drifted into reverie. What am I doing here? He smoked in front of the mirror, looking at nothing, thinking of nothing. He went back to his office. Tamara Leontiyevna was waiting for him, pretending to read over the day’s mail. “Please sign …” Why didn’t she call him “comrade,” or, more intimately, “Ivan Nicolayevich?” She avoided his eyes, apparently she didn’t want him to see her hands, the nakedness of her simple, delicate hands. The nails were not painted; she kept them hidden behind papers. Would not people fear a dying man’s eyes in the same way? “Stop hiding your hands, Tamara Leontiyevna,” Kondratiev said angrily, and immediately excused himself, frowning and gruff: “I mean it’s all the same to me, hide them if you like, excuse me; we cannot send this letter to the Malakhovo Collieries, it is not at all what I told you to write!” He did not hear her explanations, but answered with relief: “That’s it, that’s it — write the letter over again from that angle …” The astonishment in the brown eyes, which were so close to him, malignly close, questioning or terrified, gave him a slight shock, and he signed the letter, assuming an offhand air: “After all, it will do as it is … I shan’t come in tomorrow …” — “Very well, Ivan Nikolayevich,” his secretary answered, in a voice that sounded kind and natural … “Very well, Tamara Leontiyevna,” he repeated gaily, and dismissed her with a pleasant nod, at least he thought he did, but in reality his face remained terribly sad. Left alone, he lit a cigarette and watched it burn itself out between his fingers as they rested on the desk.