by Victor Serge
When he was under great pressure of work, Rachevsky often slept at Government House. There he had the use of a small, plainly furnished apartment, which was crammed with dossiers. He did a great deal of work himself, since he did not know how to use secretaries and trusted no one. Sixty cases of sabotage, treason, espionage, which he must look into before he went to bed, were scattered over various articles of furniture. The most secret were in a small safe at the head of his bed. Rachevsky stopped in front of the safe and, to shake off his sluggishness, elaborately wiped his glasses. “Obviously, obviously.” His usual supper was brought in, and he devoured it standing by the window, without being aware of the suburban view, in which innumerable golden sparks were kindling into light. “It is the only thing to do, the only thing …” Of the thing as such, he thought hardly at all. Present within him, it offered no real difficulty. To blow out his brains — what could be simpler? No one suspects how simple it is. He was a rudimentary man, who feared neither pain nor death since he had been present at a number of executions. There is probably no real pain, only a shock of infinitesimal duration. And materialists like ourselves have no need to fear nothingness. He longed for sleep and for darkness, which gives the best idea of nothingness, which does not exist. — Let me be, let me be! He would write nothing. It would be better for his children. As he was thinking of his children, Masha called him on the telephone: “You won’t be home tonight, Papa?” — “No.” — “Papa, I got very good today in history and political economy … Tiopka got a cut finger cutting out decalcomanias, Niura bandaged it the way it says to in the First Aid Manual. Mama’s headache is better. All well on the Interior Front! Sleep well, Comrade Papa-Prosecutor!” — “Sleep well, all of you,” Rachevsky answered.
Oh, God. He opened the cupboard in the little bureau, took out a bottle of brandy and drank from it. His eyes dilated, a warmth ran through him, it was good. He slammed the bottle down and it rocked back and forth on the table. Will you fall or won’t you? It did not fall. He banged at the table on either side of the bottle, but keeping one hand open, ready to catch the bottle if it should start to fall. “You won’t fall, damn you — ha-ha-ha-ha!” He was laughing and hiccuping. “A-bullet-in-the-brain — poo-poo-poo-poo! A-bullet-in-the-bottle — poo-poo-poo-poo!” Leaning so far to one side that he almost toppled over, he tried to get his fingers on a blue dossier which lay on a stand against the wall. The effort made him groan. “So you won’t let me catch you, damn you … damn you!” He worked his fingers to the edge of the dossier, drew it toward him craftily, caught it in the air while other papers showered onto the carpet, put it on the table, flung his glasses into a corner over his shoulder, licked his forefinger and, drawing it clumsily along under the words on the cover, began spelling them out: Sa-bo-tage in the Chemical Industry, Armolinsk Case. The syllables overlapped, ran after each other, and each letter, written in black ink in a big round hand, was fringed with fire. His finger captured the syllables, but they got away like mice, like rats, like the little lizards which, when he was a boy in Turkestan, he used to catch with a noose made from a blade of grass — ha ha ha! “I was always a specialist in nooses!” He tore the dossier across and then across again. Come here, bottle, come here, damn you — hurrah! He drank till he lost breath, the desire to laugh, consciousness …
When he arrived at his office on the afternoon of the next day, Popov was waiting for him, surrounded by the department heads, whom he dismissed with a wave. Popov looked bored, yellow, and ill. The Prosecutor sat down under the great portrait of the Chief, opened his brief case, assumed a pleasant look, but a headache pressed down on his eyelids, his mouth was woolly, he breathed laboriously. “Had a bad night, Comrade Popov, attack of asthma, my heart, I don’t know what to make of it, haven’t had time to see a doctor … At your service!”
Popov asked softly:
“Have you read the papers, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?”
“Haven’t had time.”
He had not read his mail either, since the unopened envelopes lay there on his desk. Popov rubbed his hands. “So … so … Well, Comrade Rachevsky, it is just as well that I should tell you the news …” It couldn’t be easy, because he looked in his pockets for a newspaper, opened it, found an item toward the middle of the third page. “There, read that, Ignatii Ignatiyevich … In any case, everything has been arranged, I saw to it this morning …”
“By decision of… and so on … Comrade Rachevsky, I. I., Prosecutor to the Supreme Tribunal, is relieved of his functions … in view of his appointment to another post …”
“It stands to reason,” said Rachevsky, without emotion, for he saw quite a different reason.
Weakly, using both hands, he pushed the heavy brief case toward Popov. “There you are.”
To an accompaniment of hand-rubbing, little coughs, and vaguely pleasant smiles — none of which had any meaning — Popov said: “You understand, do you not, Ignatii Ignatiyevich? … You have carried out a task … a superhuman task … Mistakes were inevitable … We have thought of a post which will give you a chance to take some rest … Your appointment is” — From the depths of his torpor, Rachevsky pricked up his ears — “is … Director of the Tourist Bureau … with two months’ leave in advance … which, as a friend, I advise you to spend at Sochi … or at Suk-Su — they are our two best rest houses … Blue sea, flowers, Alupka, Alushta, views, Ignatii Ignatiyevich! You will come back renewed … ten years younger … and tourist travel, you know, is far from a negligible matter!”
Former Prosecutor Rachevsky appeared to wake up. He gesticulated. The thick lenses of his glasses flashed lightning. A laugh made a horizontal gash in his concave face.
“Delighted! Travel, touring, the dream of my life! Little birds in the woods! Cherry trees in flower! The Svanetia highway! Yalta! Our Riviera! Thank you, thank you!” His two gnarled, hairy hands seized Popov’s flabby ones. Popov drew back a little, his eyes uneasy, his smile fading.
The office staff saw them come out, arm in arm like the good old friends they were. Rachevsky showed all his yellow teeth in a smile, and Popov appeared to be telling him a good story. Together they got into a Central Committee car. Rachevsky had the driver stop for a moment in Maxim Gorki Street in front of a large grocery store. He came back from the store with a package which he carefully placed in Popov’s lap. He was his old serious self again. “Look, old man!” The neck of an uncorked bottle protruded from the wrapping. “Drink, my friend, drink first,” Rachevsky said amiably, and his arm went around Popov’s puny shoulders. “No, thank you,” said Popov coldly, “furthermore, I advise you …” Rachevsky burst out:
“You advise me, my dear friend! How nice of you!”
And he drank greedily, his head thrown back, the bottle held high in a firm hand, then licked his lips. “Long live tourist travel, Comrade Popov! Do you know what I regret? I regret having begun my life by hanging lizards!” After that he said nothing, but he unwrapped the bottle to see how much was left in it. Popov took him all the way home — his house was in the outer suburbs. “How is your family, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?” — “All right, very well,” he said. “This news will make them terribly happy. And yours?” Was he sneering? — “My daughter is in Paris,” said Popov, with a hint of uneasiness. He watched the former Prosecutor get out of the car in front of a villa surrounded by faded shrubs. Rachevsky stepped heavily into a muddy puddle, which made him laugh and swear. The bottle protruded from his overcoat pocket, he felt of it with a hand that was like a big crab. “Good-by, old man,” he said cheerfully, or sarcastically, and ran toward the gate of the little garden.
“He’s done for,” Popov thought. And what of it? He was never good for much.
Paris was not at all as Xenia had vaguely imagined it. Only at moments and by chance did she find it resembling the twofold city she had expected — the capital of a decaying world, the capital of workers’ risings … It had all been built so many centuries ago, and so much rain, so much daylight, so much darkn
ess, had impregnated the old stones, that the idea of a unique achievement forced itself upon her mind. Turbid yet bluish, the Seine flowed between scattered, ancient trees, between stone quays whose exact color was indeterminable. The stone seemed to have no consistency, the water, polluted by the huge city, could be neither ill-tasting nor dangerous — and nowhere else could drowned bodies evoke more simple tears. The tragedy of Paris was clothed in a worn, almost fragile splendor. It became a delight to stop before a bookstall, under the skeleton of a tree, and take in the prospect with one sweeping look: the books before her (hardly alive, yet not quite dead, soiled with the fingerprints of unknown hands), the stones of the Louvre across the river, the Belle Jardinière’s sign farther on, beside a square full of ant-like motion, the arching span and the equestrian statue of the Pont-Neuf, with, below it, that strange little triangular park almost at water level, and then, among the distant rooftops, the dark, fretted spire of the Sainte Chapelle. The sordid old quarters, seared with the leprosy of a civilization, attracted and horrified Xenia; they called for dynamite; where they had stood there should rise great blocks of houses into which air and sunlight should stream. Yet it would be pleasant to live there, even the poverty-stricken life of the little hotels, of lodgings partitioned off in very old houses, reached by dark stairways, but whose pots of flowers on a window sill were as surprising as a smile on the face of a sick child. Exploring districts of ancient poverty and humiliation through the late afternoons, Xenia conceived a strange tenderness for these abandoned cities within the giant city, far from the wide avenues, the royal quays, the nobly architectural squares, the triumphal arches, the opulent boulevards … At the end of a sloping street, the high, creamy cupolas of Sacré-Coeur caught all the evening light. It gilded even their soulless ugliness. In this street, women, infinitely remote from all pity, whether Christian or atheist, watched at the doors or from behind dirty windowpanes, in the poisonous half-darkness of shabby rooms. Seen across the width of the street, with their shawls drawn tight or their arms crossed over dressing gowns, they looked pretty; but close to, they all had the same ravaged faces, lithographs in make-up, crudely and melodramatically drawn. “They are women and I am a woman …” Xenia found it difficult to judge this truth. “What have we in common, what is the difference between us?” It was so easy to answer herself: “I am the daughter of a people which has accomplished the Socialist revolution and they are the victims of age-old capitalist exploitation” — so easy that it became almost an empty formula. Were there not such women in certain streets in Moscow too? What was she to think? Curious eyes followed the obviously foreign girl in her white jacket and white beret as she went up the steep street — what on earth could she be looking for in this quarter? Not her happiness — that was certain — nor “bizness,” nor a man — so what, then? — vice? — a neat little package, though, d’y’a see those ankles, I had ankles like that when I was seventeen, no kidding! Xenia passed a dreary-looking Oriental, like a Crimean Tatar, who was peering furtively into windows and doorways, and she saw that he was driven by a kind of hunger more pitiful and keener than hunger. The most wretched little shops, next door to the brothels, displayed flyspecked chocolate bars, cigarette papers, cheeses, imported fruits. Xenia remembered the poverty of our co-operatives in the Moscow suburbs. How could it be? — are they so rich that even their poverty can wallow in a sort of abundance? The fetid horror of these sloughs spread over a base and hoggish ease full of food and drink, of charming dress prints, of sentimental love-making and sexual irritants.
Xenia made her way back to the Left Bank. The Châtelet marked the end of a commercial city whose bustle was purely elemental — bellies and guts to be fed. The animality of the crowds sought its ends on the spot. The Tour St.-Jacques, surrounded by a sorry oasis of greenery and two-sou chairs, was only a useless poem in stone. “A vestige of the theocratic age,” Xenia thought, “and this city is in the mercantile age …” She had only to cross a bridge and — between the Préfecture, the Conciergerie, and the Palais de Justice — she would reach the administrative age. The prisons dated back seven hundred years, their round towers, facing the Seine, were so nobly proportioned that they made you forget their ancient torture chambers. The courts nourished a people of scribes, but there was a flower market there too.
Another bridge over the same waters, and books lived on the stalls, students walked bareheaded with notebooks under their arms, in the cafés you glimpsed faces bent over texts which were simultaneously the Pandects of Justinian, Caesar’s Commentaries, Sigmund Freud’s Book of Dreams, and surrealist poems. Life surged along the café terraces toward a garden laid out in quiet lines; and the garden ended, among bourgeois apartment houses, in an airy bronze globe supported by human figures, like a thought bound to the earth, metallic but transparent, terrestrial but proudly aloof. Xenia preferred to go home through this square, where the sky was wider than elsewhere. The printed fabrics which the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Textile Trust wanted required little of her time — one conference a week on submitted samples. She let herself live, an unimaginable thing, but so easy.
To stop before a sixteenth-century doorway in the Rue St. Honoré and remember that Robespierre and Saint-Just had passed it on their way to the guillotine, to discover beside it a shopwindow displaying cloths from the Levant, to ask the price of a bottle of perfume, to wander through the Eiffel Tower gardens … Was it beautiful or ugly, that metal skeleton which rose so high into the sky above Paris? Lyric in any case, moving, unique in the world! What esthetic emotion was involved in the feeling with which Xenia saw it from the heights of Ménilmontant, on the horizon of the city? Sukhov explained that our Palace of the Soviets would raise a steel statue of the Chief yet higher into the sky above Moscow, would be of another order of greatness and symbolism! Their little Eiffel Tower, an outmoded monument to industrial technique at the end of the nineteenth century, made him laugh. “How can you find that thing interesting?” (The word moving was not in his vocabulary.) “You may be a poet,” Xenia answered, “but you have less intuition about certain things than a plant has”; and since he had no idea what she meant, he laughed, sure of his superiority … So Xenia preferred to go out alone.
Having waked late, about nine o’clock, Xenia dressed, then opened her window, which looked out on the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard de Montparnasse. Happy to be alive, she contemplated the scene as if it were a landscape — houses, cafés with their chairs still upside down on the tables, pavements, sidewalks. A subway station: Métro Vavin. The oyster and shellfish stand, still closed; the woman who kept the newsstand, unfolding her campstool … Nothing changed from one day to another. Xenia ate breakfast in the hotel café, and it was a pleasant interlude. The matutinal rites of the establishment brought her a feeling of peaceful security. How could these people live without anxiety, without enthusiasm for the future, without thinking of others and of themselves with anguish, pity, sternness? From whence did they draw this plenitude in a sort of emptiness? Hardly had Xenia (already falling a victim, she too, to the beginning of a habit) sat down at her usual table close to the curtains behind which the boulevard was visible in shades of stone, unconcernedly beginning its daily life over again — hardly had she settled herself there, before Madame Delaporte came silently in, like a large and very dignified cat. Cashier of the café-restaurant for twenty-three years, Madame Delaporte quite simply felt herself the queen of a realm from which uneasiness was banished — like a Queen Wilhelmina of Holland reigning over fields of tulips. Even the unpaid bills of several old clients inspired confidence too. The house extends credit, sir — why not? That Dr. Poivrier, who owned a house in the Rue d’Assas besides holding stock in the Bon Marché, owed five hundred francs — why, it was money in the bank! Madame Delaporte considered that the respectable and reglar clientele which patronized the establishment was her own handiwork. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted the Gioconda, Madame Delaporte had created that clientele. Other, less privile
ged women have children who grow up and marry, who get divorced, whose children fall ill, whose businesses fail, and all the rest of it, in short! “As for me, sir, I have this establishment, it is my home, and as long as I am here, things will be as they should be!” Madame Delaporte would bring out the last words with a modest assurance which left no doubts in her hearer’s mind. She began the morning by opening the cash drawer, then put within easy reach her knitting, her spectacles, a book from the lending library, the illustrated magazine in which, at slack times, she would read, with a pitying and skeptical half-smile, Aunt Solange’s advice to “Myosotis, eighteen years old,” “Blondinette, Lyons,” “Unhappy Rose”: “Do you think he really loves me?” Madame Delaporte patted her hair with her fingers to make sure that each prettily waved gray strand was properly in place. Then she took her first comprehensive look at the café. Unchanging order still reigned. Monsieur Martin, the waiter, was just putting the last ash trays on the last tables; then, with an excess of conscientiousness, he rubbed at the blurred outline of a wet stain until the wood shone irreproachably. He smiled at Xenia, and Madame Delaporte smiled at her too. Together the two friendly voices wished her good morning: “Everything to your liking, mademoiselle?” The phrases seemed to be uttered by things themselves — things happy to exist, and sociable by nature. Between ten and ten-fifteen the first regular client, Monsieur Taillandier, came in, to lean on the counter by the cash register and take a coffee with kirsch. Cashier and client exchanged remarks which varied so little that Xenia thought she knew them by heart … For twelve years Madame Delaporte had been taking medicines for various stomach ailments — flatulence, acidity … Monsieur Taillandier was preoccupied by his diet for arthritis. “There you are, madame — both coffee and kirsch are on my forbidden list, and yet — you see … I don’t deny myself the pleasure of them, not I, madame! What doctors say has to be taken with a grain of salt; the only guide I trust is my instinct! Why, in ’24, when I was with my regiment …” — “As for me, monsieur” — at this point Madame Delaporte’s long knitting needles began their ballet — “I have tried the most expensive preparations, I have consulted the greatest specialists without a thought for the cost, I beg you to believe me, yes, monsieur … Well, I have come back to plain, homely remedies; what does me the most good is a herb tea that a herborist in the Marais compounds for me, and you can see that I don’t look too badly after all …” Sometimes at about this time the elegant Monsieur Gimbre arrived. He knew all about the races: “Be sure to bet on Nautilus II! And in the next race, Cleopatra!” Peremptory on this subject, Monsieur Gimbre sometimes ventured into politics if he could find anyone to sustain a dialogue with him; he spoke disapprovingly of the Czechoslovaks, whom he even pretended to confuse with the Kurdo-Syriacs, and revealed the exact prices of the châteaux Léon Blum had bought. Xenia looked at him over her newspaper. His self-importance, his contemptible viewpoint, irritated her, and she asked herself: What meaning can the life of such a creature have? Full of tact, Madame Delaporte quickly managed to change the subject. “Is Normandy still your sales territory, Monsieur Taillandier?” and the discussion immediately turned to Norman cooking. “Ah, yes,” the cashier sighed inexplicably. Monsieur Taillandier left, Monsieur Gimbre shut himself up in the telephone booth, Monsieur Martin, the waiter, took his stand in front of the open door between the grass plots, whence, without appearing to, he could watch the modistes across the way, Chez Monique. An old, gray, terribly egotistic tomcat glided among the tables without deigning to see anyone. Madame Delaporte called him discreetly: “Here, here, Mitron.” Mitron went his own way, probably flattered by the attention. “Ungrateful beast!” Madame Delaporte would murmur, and if Xenia looked up, she would go on: “Animals, mademoiselle, are just as ungrateful as people. If you take my advice you won’t trust either!” It was a minute and peaceful universe, where people lived without discussing Plan quotas, without fearing purges, without devoting themselves to the future, without considering the problems of Socialism. That morning Madame Delaporte had been just about to launch one of her usual aphorisms when, instead, she dropped her knitting, climbed down from her high stool, drew the waiter’s attention by a nod, and, her face full of interest, advanced toward the corner where Xenia, her elbows on the table, sat before coffee, croissants, and a newspaper.