by Victor Serge
The directors avoided him, he himself avoided the bureau heads, who were always preoccupied by insignificant matters. The president of the Trust came out of his office just as Kondratiev rang for the elevator. They had to go down together in the dark mahogany box, whose mirrors multiplied their two bulky reflections. They spoke to each other almost as usual, but the president did not offer Kondratiev a lift in his car, he bolted into it after a hasty handshake which was so unpleasant that, a moment afterward, Kondratiev rubbed his hands together to get rid of the feeling of it. How could that fat, hog-jowled creature have guessed? How had Kondratiev guessed himself? There was no reasonable answer to the question, but Kondratiev knew, and the others, everyone with whom he came into contact, knew, too. At a lecture at the Agronomic Institute, the lecturer, a very gifted and very ambitious young man, whose name was being mentioned for the post of assistant director of the Transbaikalian Forests Trust, discreetly escaped by the back door, quite obviously in order not to have to talk for a few minutes to Kondratiev, whose protégé he had been. Kondratiev had sat down alone in a corner of the room, and no one had come to sit beside him. To avoid his comrades’ curt, embarrassed greetings, he had joined some half-grown girl students after the lecture — only they did not know, it was obvious, they still looked at him pleasantly and naturally, they still saw in him an important personage, an old Party man, they even rather admired him because, rumor had it, he was close to the Chief, he had been to Spain on a mission, he was a man of a special breed, a convict under the old regime, a hero of the Civil War, with a baggy suit, an awkwardly knotted necktie, kindly and tired eyes (really quite a handsome man); but why has the girl from the Polytechnic — the one we saw the other night at the Grand Theater — left him? The two girls wondered as he moved slowly away, square-shouldered, walking heavily. “He must have a bad disposition,” said one, “did you notice the wrinkles on his forehead and the way he frowns? God knows what is in his mind …” There was nothing in his mind except: “How do they all know, how do I know myself, but do I really know, isn’t it that people read a neurotic anxiety in my face?”
A bus full of people whom he did not see carried him to Sokolniki Park. There he walked in the solitary darkness, under great cold trees, went into a tavern where workmen who looked like tramps, and thugs who looked like workmen, were drinking beer and smoking. From a corner came angry outbursts of an interminable quarrel: “You’re a rat, brother, and I don’t see why you won’t admit it. Don’t get mad, I admit I’m just as much of a rat myself …” From another part of the room a youthful voice called: “That’s the truth, citizen!” and the drunken man answered: “You bet it’s the truth, we’re all rats …” Then he got up — thickset, red-haired, shiny-faced, in coarse coolie clothes not suitable for the time of year — and led away his staggering companion: “Let’s go, brother, we’re still Christians and I’m not going to break open anybody’s head today … And if they don’t know they’re rats, better not tell them and make them sore …” He saw Kondratiev, a strong, sad-faced stranger in a European tailored suit, staring vaguely into space, his elbows on the wet table. The drunken man stopped, puzzled. Then, speaking to himself: “Is he a rat too? Hard to say … Excuse me, citizen, I’m only looking for the truth.” Kondratiev showed his teeth in an amused half-smile: “I am almost like you, citizen, but it is not easy to judge …” He had spoken in an earnest voice, which produced an effect. He felt that he had drawn too much attention to himself; he got up and left. In the darkness outside, a sinister-looking man wearing a cap turned a flashlight on him, abruptly asked for his papers, and, seeing the Central Committee pass, fell back as if to disappear into the shadows: “Excuse me, comrade, duty …” “Get along,” Kondratiev grumbled, “and be quick about it.” The sinister-looking man, on the edge of absolute darkness, gave him a military salute, raising his hand to a shapeless cap. And Kondratiev, resuming his walk along the dark path with a lighter step, knew two incontrovertible facts: that doubt was no longer possible, it was not worth going over the fragments of evidence; and that he would fight.
He knew, and everyone who came into contact with him must know, because the subtle revelation proceeded from himself, that a dossier, KONDRATIEV, I. N., was making its way from office to office, in the illimitable domain of the most secret secrecy, leaving unspeakable anxiety in its wake. Confidential messengers laid the sealed envelope on the desks of the General Secretariat’s secret service; there, attentive hands picked it up, opened it, jotted notes on the new document added by the High Commissar for Security; the open envelope made its way through doors which were exactly like any doors anywhere, in the limited region where all secrets revealed themselves, naked, silent, often mortal, mortally simple. The Chief looked over the sheets for a moment — he must have the same old gray fleshy face, the low, deeply lined forehead, the small russet eyes with the uncompromising look, the hard look, of a forsaken man. “You are alone, brother, absolutely alone, with all the poisoned documents that you have ordered into existence. Where are they leading you? You know where they lead us, but you cannot know where they are leading you. You will drown at the end of the road, brother, I pity you. Terrible days are coming, and you will be alone with millions of lying faces, alone with huge portraits of yourself placarded over the fronts of buildings, alone with ghosts whose skulls show the round hole of a bullet, alone at the summit of the pyramid of their bones, alone with this country which has forsaken itself, which has been betrayed by you, you who are loyal as we too are loyal, you who are mad with loyalty, mad with suspicions, mad with jealousies you have repressed all your life … Your life has been black, you alone see yourself approximately as you are, weak, weak, weak, driven mad by problems, weak and loyal, and evil because, under the armor that you will never take off, in which you will die, taut with will, you are feeble, you are nothing. That is your tragedy. You would like to destroy all the mirrors in the world, so that you would never see yourself in them again, and our eyes are your mirrors and you destroy them, you have had heads shot open to destroy the eyes in which you saw yourself, in which you judged yourself, just as you are, irremediably … Do my eyes trouble you, brother? Look me in the face, drop all the documents manufactured by our machine for crushing men. I do not reproach you with anything, I assess all the wrong you have done, but I see all your solitude and I think of tomorrow. No one can raise the dead nor save what has been lost, what is already dying, we cannot slow down this slide toward the abyss, jam the machine. I am without hate, brother, I am without fear, I am like you, I fear only for you, because of the country. You are neither great nor intelligent, but you are strong and loyal like all those who were better men than you and who you have made to disappear. History has played us this rotten trick: we have only you. That is what my eyes say to you, you can kill me, you will only be the more defenseless, the more a nullity, and perhaps you will not forget me, as you have not forgotten the others … When you have killed us all, brother, you will be the last, brother, the last of us all, the last for yourself, and falsehood, danger, the weight of the machine you have set up will stifle you …”
The Chief raised his head slowly, because everything about him was heavy, and he was not terrifying, he was old, his hair getting white, his eyelids swollen, and he asked, simply, in a voice as heavy as the bones of his shoulders: “What is to be done?”
“What is to be done?” Kondratiev repeated aloud in the chilly darkness. He strode quickly toward a vaguely swaying red dot in the middle of the road. Stars rose above the brick buildings of Spartacus Place; to the right, the dark square, with its sickly trees.
“What is to be done, old man? I do not ask you to confess … If you were to begin confessing, everything would go to pieces. You have your own way of holding a world in your hands: saying nothing …”
A few steps beyond the little red lantern, from a tar vat that was doubtless still warm, tousled heads protruded side by side, each with a glowing cigarette; and from the vat came a murmur of
excited voices. His hands in his pockets, his head bowed, Kondratiev stopped in the face of his problem, because a rope barred the road, because of the red lantern marking the spot where the pavement had been torn up. He could see perfectly well, but he looked only within himself and far beyond himself. From the warm vat, heads were raised, turned toward the stranger, who did not look like a policeman, besides everyone knows that those loafers are never around at 3 A.M. So he must be a drunk, with pockets to be emptied, Hi there, Yeromka-the-Sly, it’s your turn and you’re the specialist on that kind of citizen, he looks rugged, watch out … Yeromka straightened up, thin as a girl, but all steel, his knife ready in his rags, and through the darkness he looked at the man — fifty-five, square-shouldered and square-jawed, well-dressed, mumbling away to himself. “Hi, uncle!” said Yeromka, in a hissing voice, which could perfectly well be heard where it ought to be heard but which was then swallowed up in the darkness. “’Smatter, uncle? Drunk?” Kondratiev became aware of the group of children, and, cheerfully:
“Greetings! Not too cold?”
Not drunk, strangely cordial, an assured voice: suspicious. Yeromka slowly pulled himself out of the vat and came forward, limping a little (a trick he had to make himself look weaker than he was; iron wire, acrobat, broken puppet with metal joints — he suggested them all). Separated only by the rope and the red lantern, Yeromka and Kondratiev studied each other in the darkness and the silence. “Here are our children, here are our abandoned children, Yossif, I present our children to you,” Kondratiev thought, and it brought a dark smile to his dark lips. “They have knives in their lousy rags, that is all we have known how to give them. I know that it is not our fault. And you, you have all the revolvers of your special troops, and you haven’t known how to give yourself anything either, you who had all our wealth in your hands …” Yeromka looked him up and down, studying him with his dangerous eyes, which looked like a girl’s. He said: “Uncle, get along, you haven’t lost anything here … We’re holding our local conference here, see? We’re busy; get along.” — “Right,” said Kondratiev, “I’ll be going. Greetings to the conference.” — “A lunatic,” Yeromka reported to the tight circle of his comrades in the vat, “nothing to worry about, go ahead, Timocha …” Kondratiev walked on toward the towers of the three railway stations: October, Yaroslavl, Kazan — the station of the Revolution, the station of the city where we had eighteen shot and three hundred and fifty captured together, the station of Kazan, where, on a fire ship, with Trotsky and Raskolnikov, we set fire to the White fleet … It is astonishing how we were victorious, how we are victorious, how we are abandoned and conquered (Yaroslavl suggests nothing now but a secret prison), like those little thugs who are perhaps conferring on a crime or on the best way to organize begging and thefts in the region of the three stations — but they live, they fight, they are right to beg and kill and steal and hold conferences, they are fighting … Kondratiev talked to himself heatedly, waving his open hand just as he used to on the platform.
When he reached home the cocks were crowing in far-off courtyards, it must be in streets that had a provincial look, with little houses of wood and brick, overcrowded and disorderly, with old-fashioned trees in wretched little gardens, piles of refuse in the corners, and in each room a family slept warmly, with the children at the foot of the bed, under patchwork quilts made of little squares of bright-colored cloth sewed together. There were icons in the ceiling corners, and children’s drawings pinned to the yellowed wallpaper, and poverty-stricken victuals on the window sills. Kondratiev envied these people, sleeping the sleep of their lives, husband and wife side by side, in the animal odor of their mingled bodies. His room was cool, clean, and empty; the ash tray, the writing paper, the calendar, the telephone, the books from the Institute of Plan Economy — they all seemed useless, nothing in the room was alive. He looked at his bed with gloomy apprehension. To lie down once again between sheets (sheets like a shroud), to struggle with a useless and powerless thought, to know that presently there will come the utterly black hour of lucidity in a pure void, when life has no more meaning; and if life is no longer anything but that vain anguish, that vacillating consciousness of “what is the use,” how could he flee himself? The searching eyes rested for a moment on the Browning that lay on the bed table … Kondratiev came back from the window to the alcove, picked up the Browning, happily felt the weight of it in his hand. What happens inside us to make us feel suddenly and absurdly strong again? He heard himself mutter: “Certainly.” Morning brightened at the window, the street along the Moskva was still deserted, a sentry’s bayonet moved between the crenelations of the outer Kremlin wall, a wash of pale gold touched the faded dome on the tower of Ivan the Terrible, it was a barely perceptible light, but already it was victorious, it was almost pink, the sky was turning pink, there was no boundary line between the pink of dawn and the blue of the vanishing night, in which the last stars were about to be extinguished. “They are the strongest stars, and they are going out because they are outshone …” An extraordinary freshness radiated from the landscape of sky and city, and the feeling of a power as limitless as that sky came from the stones, the sidewalks, the walls, the building yards, the carts which appeared and moved slowly along the street, following the pink-and-blue river. Millions of indestructible, patient, tireless beings were going to rise from sleep and from the stones, because the sky was bright, were going to set out again on their millions of roads, which all led to the future. “Well, comrades,” Kondratiev said to them, “I have made my decision. I am going to fight. The Revolution needs a clean conscience …” The words almost plunged him back into despair. A man’s conscience, his own, worn and paralyzed — what use was it any longer, clean or not? Broad daylight brought forth clear ideas. “Though I am alone, though I am the last, I have only my life to give, I give it, and I say NO. Too many have died in falsehood and madness, I will not further demoralize what is left to us of the Party … NO. Somewhere on earth there are young people whom I do not know but whose dawning consciousness I must try to save. NO.” When one thinks clearly, things become as limpid as the sky of morning; one must not think as intellectuals think, the brain must feel that it is acting … Though it was quite cold, he undressed in front of the open window so that he could watch the growing light. “I shan’t be able to sleep …” It was his last gleam of thought, he was asleep already. Enormous stars of pure fire, some copper-colored, others transparent blue, yet others reddish, peopled the night of his dream. They moved mysteriously, or rather they swayed; the diamond-studded spiral of a nebula appeared out of darkness, filled with an inexplicable light, it grew larger, Look, look, the eternal worlds! — to whom did he say that? There was a presence too; but who was it, who? The nebula filled the sky, overflowed onto the earth, now it was only a great, bright sunflower, in a little courtyard under a closed window, Tamara Leontiyevna’s hands made a signal, there were stone stairs, very wide, which they climbed at a run, and an amber torrent glided in the opposite direction, and in the eddies of the torrent big fish jumped, as salmon jump when they go up the rivers …
When he shaved, about noon, Kondratiev found fragments of his dream floating in his mind; they did him good. Old crones would say … But what would a psychoanalyst say? To hell with psychoanalysts! The summons from the Party Committee aroused no emotion in him. And in fact it turned out to be nothing — merely a matter of an unimportant mission, a celebration over which he was to preside, at Serpukhov, on the occasion of the presentation of a flag to a tank battalion by the workers in the Ilich factory. “The tank boys are splendid, Ivan Nikolayevich,” said the Secretary of the Committee, “but there has been some trouble in this battalion, a suicide or two, an incapable political instructor, we need a good speech … Talk about the Chief, say that you have seen him …” To avoid any misunderstanding, he was given an outline of topics. “Count on me for a good speech,” said Kondratiev. “And I’ll say a few well-chosen words to the fellow who tried to commit suic
ide and failed!” He thought of the unknown lad with love and anger. At twenty-five, with this country to be served, aren’t you crazy, my boy? He went to the buffet to buy the most expensive cigarettes, a luxury which he rarely allowed himself. A delegation of working women from the Zamoskvoryechie were having tea with the Director of Production Cadres and the women organizers of the Women’s Section. Several tables had been drawn together. Geraniums made vivid spots of red above the tablecloths; other and more beautiful spots of red were provided by the kerchiefs on young foreheads. One of the organizers whispered: “There’s Kondratiev, deputy member of the C.C.…” and several faces turned toward the aging man, who was opening a box of cigarettes. The words “Central Committee” made the circuit of the tables. The aging man was a part of power, of the past, of loyalty, of secrecy. The buzz of conversation subsided, the Director of Production Cadres called in his loud, cordial voice: “Hi, Kondratiev, come and take tea with the rising generation from the Zamoskvoryechie!” At that moment Popov, his cap on his gray head, came hobbling up to put both hands on Kondratiev’s shoulders. “Good old brother, what a time since we’ve met! How goes it?”