by Victor Serge
Kondratiev went on, in the same melancholy, persuasive tone:
“You will be alone under the avalanche, with the country in its last agony behind you and a host of enemies around you … No one will forgive us for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity … That your shoulders are strong, I know … As strong as ours: ours carried you … Only — we have the place of the individual in history … not a very big place, especially when a man has isolated himself at the peak of power … I hope that your portraits, as big as buildings, have not given you any illusions on the subject?”
The simplicity of his speech performed a miracle. They walked up and down together over the white carpet. Which led the other? They stopped before the Mercator’s projection: oceans, continents, frontiers, industries, green spaces, our sixth part of the earth, primitive, powerful, threatened … A heavy red line, in the ice-floe region, indicated the great Arctic road … The Chief studied the relief of the Ural Mountains: Magnitogorsk, our new pride, blast furnaces as well equipped as Pittsburgh’s. That’s what counts! The Chief half turned to Kondratiev, his gestures were clearer, his voice more relaxed. His eyes grew less impenetrable:
“Always the writer! You ought to go in for psychology …”
An amused gesture of his forefinger completed the word: twisting and untwisting an imaginary skein … The Chief smiled:
“In our day, old man, Chekhov and Tolstoi would be genuine counterrevolutionaries … Yet I like writers, though I don’t have time to read them … Some of them are useful … I see that they are very well paid … One novel sometimes brings them in more than several proletarian lives. Is that just or not? It is something we need … But I don’t need your psychologizing, Kondratiev.”
A rather strange pause followed. The Chief filled his pipe. Kondratiev looked at the map. The dead can no longer fill their pipes or feel proud of Magnitogorsk, which they built! There was nothing more to add, everything had been set forth under an impersonal light which permitted neither maneuvering nor fear. The consequences would be what they must be: irrevocable.
The Chief said:
“Do you know that you have been denounced? That you are accused of treason?”
“Naturally! What should all those vermin do but denounce me? That’s what they live on. They gobble denunciations day and night …”
“What they affirm seems not unlikely …”
“Of course! They know how to cook these things up. In our day what is easier? But whatever stinking nonsense they may have sent you …”
“I know. I have gone into it. A piece of stupidity, or worse, in Spain … You were wrong to get yourself mixed up in it, there’s no doubt of that … I know better than anyone how many vile things and stupid things have been done there… That fool of a prosecutor wanted to have you arrested … Once let them get started and they’d arrest all Moscow. He is a brute we shall have to get rid of someday. A sort of maniac.
“Enough of that. I have made my decision. You will leave for eastern Siberia, you will receive your appointment tomorrow morning. Do not lose a day … Zolotaya Dolina, the Valley of Gold — do you know what it is? Our Klondike, production increasing from 40 to 50 per cent every year … Splendid technicians, a few cases of sabotage as is to be expected …”
Pleased with himself, the Chief began to laugh. He was not good at joking, and the fact sometimes made him aggressive. He would have liked to be jovial. His laugh was always a little forced.
“We need a man there who has character — sinew, enthusiasm, the Marxist instinct for gold …”
“I loathe gold,” said Kondratiev, almost angrily.
Life? Exile in the mountains of Yakutia, in the white brushland, among secret placers, unknown to the universe? His whole being had prepared itself for a catastrophe, hardened itself by expecting it, accustomed itself to bitterly wishing for it, as a man seized with vertigo above a chasm knows that a double within him longs for the relief of falling. And now? You let me off after what I came here to say to you? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Am I not going to disappear at the first corner I come to after I leave here? It is too late to restore our confidence, you have killed too many of us, I no longer believe in you, I don’t want any of your missions which turn out to be traps! You will never forget what I have said to you, and if you let me off today, it will be to order my arrest six months from now, when remorse and suspicion have gone to your head … “No, Yossif, I thank you for granting me life, I believe in you, I came here to find my salvation, you are great despite everything, you are sometimes blind when you strike, you are perfidious, you are eaten by bloody jealousies, but you are still the leader of the Revolution, we have no one but you, I thank you.” But Kondratiev restrained both protest and effusion. There was no pause. The Chief laughed again:
“I told you that you were always the writer. As for me, I have no feeling about gold one way or the other … Excuse me — this is audience day. Get the dossier on Gold from the secretariat, study it. Your reports you will send to me directly. I count on you. A good journey, brother!”
“Right. Keep in good health! Good-by.”
The audience had lasted fourteen minutes … A secretary handed him a leather brief case on which, in letters of gold, stood the magical words: East Siberian Gold Trust. He passed blue uniforms without seeing them. The daylight seemed pellucid. He walked for a while, mingling with the people in the street and thinking of nothing. A physical happiness grew in him, but his mind did not share it. He also felt a sadness which was like a sense of uselessness. He sat down on a bench in a square, before disinherited trees and lawns of a green which meant nothing. An old woman was watching her grandchildren making mud pies. Farther away rolled long yellow streetcars; their clatter rebounded from the front of a recently constructed office building of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Eight floors of offices: a hundred and forty compartments, each containing the same portrait of the Chief, the same adding machines, the same glasses of tea on directors’ and accountants’ desks, the same worried lives … A beggarwoman passed, leading several small children. “For the love of Christ …” she said, holding out a pretty brown hand. Kondratiev put a handful of small change into it. On each of the little coins, he remembered, you could read the words: Proletarians of all countries, unite! He passed his hand over his forehead. Could the nightmare be over? Yes, over, for a time at least — my small, personal nightmare. But all the rest goes on, nothing is clarified, no dawn rises on the tombs, we have no real hope for tomorrow, we must still travel through darkness, ice, fire … Stefan Stern is doubtless dead. For his sake, I must hope so. Kiril Rublev has disappeared; with him the line of our theoreticians of the great days is extinguished … In our schools of higher education we have nothing left but teachers as contemptible as they are insipid, armed with an inquisitorial dialectic that is three-fourths dead. As usual, names and faces crowded into his memory. What a peaceful motion — the motion of those militiamen by the Ebro, covering their comrades in that mass grave with heavy shovelfuls of earth! The same men, in the grave and beside the grave — buried and buriers the same. They were covering themselves with earth, yet they had not lost heart to live and fight. The thing is to keep on, comrades, obviously. To wash gold-bearing sand. Kondratiev opened the Gold Trust brief case. Only the maps interested him, because of their peculiar magic — an algebra of the earth. With the map of the Vitim district open on his knees, Kondratiev looked at the hatchings which signified elevations, patches of green which indicated forests, the blue of watercourses — No villages, stern solitudes, brush on rock, cold streams which absorbed the colors of sky and stone, shining mosses clothing rock, the low, tenacious vegetation of the taiga, indifferent skies. Among the gaunt splendors of that world, man feels himself delivered over to a glacial freedom which has no human meaning. The nights glitter, they have an inhuman significance, sometimes their brightness sends the weary sleeper to sleep forever. Bodaibo is doubtless only an administrative settlemen
t surrounded by clearings, in the heart of the forested wilderness, under a metallic brightness like a perpetual lightning bolt. “I’ll take Tamara Leontiyevna with me,” Kondratiev thought, “she’ll come. I’ll say to her: You are as straight as the young birches in those mountains, you are young, I need you, we shall fight for gold, do you understand?” Kondratiev’s eyes turned from the map to pursue a joy beyond visible things. And he discovered a pair of worn-out shoes, laced with string, a dusty trouser cuff. The man had on only one sock, which hung around his ankle like a dirty rag. His feet expressed violence and resignation, a desperate determination — to do what? To walk through the city as through a jungle, seeking the pittance of food, the knowledge, the ideas, by which to live the next day, blind to the stars which the electric signs drive back into their immensities. Kondratiev slowly turned to look at his neighbor on the bench, a young man whose hands clutched an open notebook full of equations. He had stopped reading, his gray eyes were exploring the square with intense and idle attention. On the hunt, always prey to the same desolate bitterness? “In this distress and apathy, no one whose hand I can take,” says the poet, but the wandering Maxim the Bitter, Gorki, amends: “no one whose jaw I can break …” An obstinate forehead under the visor of the cap, which he wears tipped back, guttersnipe fashion. Irregular features, tormented from within by an anemic violence; chalky complexion. Clear eyes — not an alcoholic. Movements still lithe and flexible. Were he ever to sleep on the naked soil of the Siberias, no glitter of stars would kill him, because his desperate determination would never go to sleep. Kondratiev forgot him for the moment.
Such should be those who prowl the taiga around the Upper Angara, in Vitim, around Chara, in the Zolotaya Dolina, the Valley of Gold. They follow wild beasts by invisible signs, they foretell the storm, they fear the bear, they say “thou” to him, as to an elder brother whom it is wise to respect. It is they who come to the solitary posts, bringing silvery furs and bulging leather purses filled with grains of gold — for the war chest of the Socialist Republic. A minor official, silent because he has lost the habit of speech, who lives alone with his wife, his dog, his machine pistol and the birds of the air, in an isba of heavy blackened logs, weighs the grains of gold, counts rubles, sells vodka, matches, gunpowder, tobacco, the precious empty bottle, makes notes on the work card issued by the Gold-Seekers’ Co-operative. He smiles and swallows a glass of vodka, does some figuring, says to the man from the taiga: “Comrade, it’s not enough. You are 8 per cent behind your Plan quota … Won’t do. Make it up, or I can’t sell you any more vodka …” He says it in a toneless voice, and adds: “Palmyra, bring us tea …” because his wife is named Palmyra, but he has no idea that it is the magical name of a vanished city in another world, a world of sand and palms and sun … Those hunters, those prospectors, those gold washers, those engineers, Yakuts, Buriats, Mongols, Tungus, Oirads, Great Russians from the capitals, Young Communists, Party members initiated into the sorceries of shamans, those clerks half mad with solitude, their wives, their little Yakut girls from obscure villages who sell themselves in a dark corner of the house for a pinch of yellow grains or a package of cigarettes, the Trust’s inspectors, ambushed on the road by sawed-off shotguns, the engineers who know the latest statistics from the Transvaal and the new methods of hydraulic drilling to work deep-lying auriferous strata — all of them, all of them live a magnificent life under the twofold sign of the Plan and of glittering nights, in the vanguard of forward-marching mankind, in communion with the Milky Way! — The preamble to the Report on Socialist Emulation and Sabotage in the Zolotaya Dolina Gold Placers contained these lines: “… As our great Comrade Tulayev, traitorously assassinated by Trotskyist terrorists in the service of world imperialism, recently said, workers in gold production form an elite contingent at the spearhead of the Socialist army. They fight Wall Street and the City with capitalism’s own weapons …” Ah, Tulayev, the stupid fool, and this verbiage of public prosecutors intoxicated with vileness … Prosaically put, but, so far as gold was concerned, true enough … The icy winds of the North carry violet snow-laden clouds down to that country. Behind them whiteness covers the universe, which has relapsed into a sort of void. Before them flee such multitudes of birds that they hide the sky. At sunset faraway flocks of white birds trace gilded snakes in the upper air. The Plan must be carried out before winter.
Kondratiev rediscovered the string-laced shoes of the poverty-stricken walker.
“Student?”
“Technology, third year.”
Kondratiev was thinking of too many things at once. Of the winter, of Tamara Leontiyevna, who would come, of life beginning again, of the prisoners in the prison where he had expected to end this day, of the dead, of Moscow, of the Valley of Gold. Without looking at the young man — and what did that thin, bitter face matter to him, after all? — he said:
“Do you want to fight with winter, with the wilderness, with solitude, with the earth, with night? To fight — understand? I am the head of an enterprise. I offer you work in the Siberian brush.”
Without taking time to reflect, the student answered:
“If you really mean it, I accept. I have nothing to lose.”
“Neither have I,” Kondratiev murmured cheerfully.
9. Let Purity Be Treason
On his desk Prosecutor Rachevsky found a foreign newspaper which announced (the item was carefully circled in red pencil) the imminent trial of Comrade Tulayev’s assassins. “From our special correspondent: Informed circles are discussing … — the principal defendants — the former High Commissar for Security, Erchov; the historian Kiril Rublev, former member of the Central Committee; the Regional Secretary for Kurgansk, Artyem Makeyev; an immediate agent of Trotsky’s, whose name is still a secret … — are said to have made complete confessions … — it is hoped that this trial will cast light on certain points which the preceding trials left obscure …” The Foreign Affairs Commissariat’s press bureau added a request for information concerning the source of this item. Originally emanating from the Supreme Court, the request had been officially communicated by the press bureau itself … Calamity. Toward noon the Prosecutor learned that the audience for which he had been asking for several days was granted.
The Chief received him in a small anteroom, before a glass-covered table. The audience lasted three minutes and forty-five seconds. The Chief seemed preoccupied. “Good day. Sit down. Well?” Discommoded by his thick glasses, Rachevsky could not see the Chief well. The lenses broke his image into absorbing details: wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, bushy black eyebrows in which there was a sprinkling of white hairs … Leaning slightly forward, his two hands resting on the edge of the table (because he did not dare to gesticulate), the Prosecutor made his report. He did not know quite what he was saying, but professional habit made him brief and precise: 1. Complete confessions from the principal defendants; 2. the unexpected death of the person who appeared to be the soul of the conspiracy, the Trotskyist Ryzhik, a death due to the unpardonable negligence of Comrade Zvyeryeva, who had been in charge of the preliminary investigation; 3. the very strong presumptive evidence collected against Ryzhik, whose guilt, if proven, would show the connection between the conspirators and foreign powers … In principle, a doubt must be admitted until Kondratiev should be questioned … However …
The Chief interrupted:
“I have investigated the Kondratiev matter. It is of no further interest to you.”
The Prosecutor bowed, choking. “Ah, so much the better. Thank you …” Why was he saying thank you? He felt as if he were falling, falling straight down. It was thus that one would fall from the skyscrapers of some inconceivable city, past oblongs of window, oblongs, oblongs, five hundred stories …
“Go on.”
Go on with what? The Prosecutor gropingly returned to the “complete confessions of the principal defendants …”
“They have confessed? And you have no doubts?”
A thousand fl
oors, the sidewalk below him. His head hitting the sidewalk at meteor speed.
“… No,” said Rachevsky.
“Then apply the Soviet law. You are the Prosecutor.”
The Chief rose, his hands in his pockets. “Good-by, Comrade Prosecutor.” Rachevsky walked away like an automaton. No question presented itself to him. In the car he gave himself up to stupor — the stupor of a man stunned. “I will see no one,” he told his secretary, “leave me to myself …” He sat down at his desk. The huge office offered nothing to hold his eyes (the life-size portrait of the Chief was behind the Prosecutor’s chair). “I am so tired,” he said to himself, and put his head in his hands. “When all is said and done, there is only one way out for me: to shoot myself …” The idea came to him of itself: there it was in his mind, quite simply. A telephone buzzed — direct wire from the Commissariat for the Interior. As he took up the receiver, Rachevsky became aware what a languor there was in his limbs. There was absolutely nothing in him but that one idea, reduced to an impersonal force, without emotion, without images, without argument, obvious. “Hello …” It was Gordeyev, inquiring into “this deplorable indiscretion which has communicated a so-called rumor to certain European newspapers … Do you know anything about it, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?” Excessively polite, Gordeyev — using circumlocutions to avoid saying: “I am making an investigation.” Rachevsky began by spluttering. “What indiscretion? What did you say? An English newspaper? But all communications of that nature go through the Foreign Affairs press bureau …” Gordeyev insisted: “I think you don’t quite understand, my dear Ignatii Ignatiyevich … Allow me to read you this paragraph: From our special correspondent …” Rachevsky hastily interrupted: “Ah, yes, I know … My secretariat issued a verbal communication … at the suggestion of Comrade Popov …” Gordeyev appeared to be embarrassed by the unexpected precision of this answer. “Right, right,” he said, lowering his voice. “The point is” — his voice rose an octave: Perhaps there was someone with Gordeyev? Perhaps their telephone conversation was being recorded? — “have you a written memorandum from Comrade Popov?” — “No, but I am sure he remembers it very well …” — “Thank you very much. Excuse me now, Ignatii Ignatiyevich …”