The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “Xenia, I have come for you on your father’s behalf. A car is waiting at the door for you. Come.”

  “And if I don’t wish to?”

  “I give you my word that you shall do as you please. You have not been a traitor, you will never be a traitor, I am not here to use force on you. The Party trusts in you as it trusts in me. Come.”

  In the car Xenia rebelled. Half facing her and pretending to be busy with his pipe, Krantz felt the storm coming. The car was going down the Rue de Rivoli. Jeanne d’Arc, with her gilt dull and peeling off, but still very beautiful, brandished a childish sword on her little pedestal. “I want to get out,” Xenia said firmly, and she half rose. Krantz caught her arm and forced her to sit down.

  “You shall get out if you wish, Xenia Vassilievna, I promise you; but not as simply as that.”

  He lowered the window on Xenia’s side. The Vendôme Column disappeared down a perspective of arches, in the pale light.

  “Do not be impulsive, I beg of you. Whatever you do, do it deliberately. We shall pass a number of policemen on the way. We are not going fast. You can call out if you wish, I will not stop you. You, a Soviet citizen, will put yourself under the protection of the French police … I will be asked for my papers. You will go your way. Afternoon extras will announce your escape — that is, your treason. Throw your little handful of mud on the embassy, on your father, on our Party, on our country. I will take Wednesday’s plane alone and I will pay for you — with Popov. You know the law: close relatives of traitors must at least be deported to the most distant parts of the Union.”

  He drew away a little, admired the white meerschaum mermaid which formed the bowl of his handsome pipe, opened his tobacco pouch, said to the driver:

  “Fedia, be so good as to slow down whenever you pass a policeman.”

  “At your orders, Comrade Chief.”

  Xenia’s hands clenched painfully. She looked at the policemen’s short capes almost with hatred. She said:

  “How strong you are, Comrade Krantz, and how despicable!”

  “Neither as strong nor as despicable as you think. I am loyal. And you too, Xenia Vassilievna, you must be loyal, no matter what happens.”

  They took Wednesday’s plane from Le Bourget together. The Eiffel Tower dwindled, glued to the earth, the severe design of the gardens opened around it, the Arc de Triomphe was only a block of stone at the center of radiating avenues. The marvel of Paris vanished under clouds, leaving Xenia regretting a world which she had scarcely touched and had not understood, which perhaps she would never understand. “I have accomplished nothing toward saving Rublev, I will fight for him in Moscow, if only we arrive in time! I will make my father act, I will ask for an audience with the Chief. He has known us for so many years that he will not refuse to listen to me, and if he listens to me, Rublev will be saved.” In her waking dream Xenia imagined her interview with the Chief. Confidently, without fear and without humility, well knowing that she was nothing and he the incarnation of the Party for which we must all live and die, she would be brief and direct, for his minutes were precious. He had all the problems of a sixth of the world to solve every day; she must speak to him with her whole soul, that she might convince him in a few moments … Krantz considerately left her to her thoughts. He occupied his time reading, alternating between stupid magazines and military reviews in several languages. The poem of the clouds unrolled above the moving earth. Rivers flowing from their distant springs enchanted the eye. — They dined almost gaily in Warsaw. It seemed an even more elegant and luxurious city than Paris, but from the sky you saw that it was surrounded and, as it were, menaced by a poverty-stricken terrain. Presently, through rents in the clouds, appeared great somber forests … “We are nearly home,” Xenia murmured, flooded with a joy so poignant that she felt a momentary sympathy for her traveling companion. Krantz leaned toward the porthole; he looked tired. With gloomy satisfaction he said: “We’re already over kolkhoze land — see, there are no more small strips …” Infinite fields of an indefinable color, something between ocher and grayish brown. “We shall reach Minsk in twenty minutes …” From under the French Infantry Review he drew a copy of Vogue and turned the glossy pages.

  “Xenia Vassilievna, I must ask you to excuse me. My instructions are definite. I request you to regard yourself as under arrest. From Minsk on, your journey will be managed by Security … Don’t be too uneasy, I hope that it will all come out all right.”

  On the cover of the magazine, elegant faces, eyeless under wide hatbrims, displayed lips rouged in different shades to match their complexions. Fifteen hundred feet below, between newly plowed fields, peasants dressed in earth-colored rags followed a heavily loaded cart. You could see them urging on the exhausted horse, pushing at the cart when the wheels sank into the mud.

  “So I can do nothing for Rublev,” thought Xenia desolately. They could do nothing for anyone in the world, those peasants with their bogged wagon, and no one in the world could do anything for them. They disappeared, the bare ground gradually approached.

  Since he had received his daughter’s criminally insane telegram, Comrade Popov had been in a state between uneasiness and prostration, besides being really tortured by his rheumatism. There was no mistaking the coldness people showed him. The new Prosecutor, Atkin, who was investigating his predecessor’s activities, carried his veiled insolence to the point of twice excusing himself when Popov invited him or went to call on him. Stopping in at the General Secretariat to test the atmosphere, Popov found only preoccupied faces which gave him an impression of hypocrisy. No one came hurrying to meet him. Gordeyev, who usually consulted him on current matters, did not show himself for several days. But he came on the fourth day, about six in the evening, having learned that Popov was not well and was staying at home. The Popovs lived in a C.C. villa in Bykovo Forest. Gordeyev arrived in uniform. Popov received him in a dressing gown; he walked across the room to meet him, supporting himself on a cane. Gordeyev began by asking about his rheumatism, offered to send him a doctor who was said to be exceptionally good, did not insist, accepted a glass of brandy. The furniture, the carpets, everything in the quiet room, which gave the impression of being dusty without being so, was slightly antiquated. Gordeyev coughed to clear his throat.

  “I have news of your daughter for you. She is very well … She … She is under arrest. She did some foolish things in Paris — have you heard about it?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Popov, utterly crushed. “I can imagine, it’s possible … I received a telegram, but is it serious, do you think?”

  Coward that he was, what he most wanted to know was whether it was serious for himself.

  Gordeyev looked doubtfully at his fingernails, then at the faded half-tints of the room, the black firs outside the window. “What shall I say? I do not know yet. Everything will depend on the inquiry. Theoretically it can be quite serious: attempted desertion in a foreign country, during a mission, activities contrary to the interests of the Union … Those are the terms of the law, but I certainly hope that, in actual fact, it is only a matter of ill-advised, or let us say unconsidered, acts, which are reprehensible rather than culpable …”

  Shivering into himself, Popov became so old that he lost all substance.

  “The difficulty, er, Comrade Popov, is that … I find it most awkward to explain it to you … Help me …”

  He wanted help, the creature!

  “It puts you, Comrade Popov, in a delicate situation. Aside from the fact that the relevant articles of the Code — which, of course, we shall not apply in all their rigor, without definite orders from above — that the law provides for … for measures … concerning the relatives of guilty parties, you certainly know that Comrade Atkin has opened an inquiry… which is being kept secret … into the case of Rachevsky. We have established that Rachevsky — it is incredible, but it is a fact — Rachevsky destroyed the dossier on the Aktyubinsk sabotage affair … We have sought for the source of the most unfortunate
indiscretion which caused the announcement abroad of a new trial … We even thought it might be a maneuver on the part of foreign agents! Rachevsky, with whom it is very difficult to talk since he appears to be always drunk, admits that he ordered the preparation of a dispatch on the subject, but he claims that he acted on verbal instructions from you … As soon as he is arrested, I shall question him myself, you may be sure, and I shall not allow him to elude his responsibilities … The coincidence between this fact and the charge that hangs over your daughter remains, however — how shall I put it? — most unfortunate …”

  Popov answered nothing. Twinges of pain shot through his limbs. Gordeyev tried to read him: a man at his last gasp, or an old fox who would still find a way out? Difficult to decide, but the former hypothesis seemed more likely. Popov’s silence invited him to come to a conclusion. Popov was looking at him with the piercing eyes of a beast tracked to its lair.

  “You can have no doubt, Comrade Popov, of my personal feelings …”

  The other did not flinch: Either he doubted them or he didn’t give a damn for them, or else he felt too badly to consider them of the slightest importance. What his feelings were, Gordeyev did not feel called upon to say.

  “It has been decided … provisionally … to ask you to remain at home and to make no telephone calls …”

  “Except to the Chief of the Party?”

  “It is painful to me to insist: To anyone whomsoever. It is not impossible, in any case, that your line has been cut.”

  When Gordeyev was gone, Popov did not stir. The room grew darker. Rain began falling on the firs. Shadows lengthened across the forest roads. There in his armchair, Popov became one with the darkness of things. His wife entered — stooped, gray-haired, walking noiselessly, she too a shadow.

  “Shall I turn on the light, Vassili? How do you feel?”

  Old Popov answered in a very low voice:

  “All right. Xenia is under arrest. We are both under arrest, you and I. I am infinitely tired. Don’t turn on the light.”

  10. And Still the Floes Came Down …

  The life of the “Road to the Future” kolkhoze was really like an obstacle race. Definitely set up in 1931, after two purges of the village — marked by the deportation (God knows where!) of the well-to-do families and a few poor families who had shown a wrong spirit — by the following year the kolkhoze was without cattle and horses, since the farmers had contrived to destroy their livestock rather than turn it over to collective enterprise. The fodder shortage, carelessness, and epizootic diseases carried off the last horses just at the moment when a Machine and Tractor Station (M.T.S.) was finally set up at Molchansk. The arrest of the township veterinary, probably guilty because he belonged to the Baptist sect, caused no improvement. The difficulties of travel by road between Molchansk and the regional center immediately caused the M.T.S. to suffer from lack of motor fuel and parts for repairs. Situated on the Syeroglazaya (the Gray-eyed River), the old village of Pogoryeloye (so named to perpetuate the memory of ancient fires), being one of the farthest villages from the M.T.S., was one of the last to be served. The village, consequently, was without motors; and the muzhiks put little effort into sowing fields which they no longer considered to be their own, under the supervision of the president of a Communist kolkhoze, a workman from the bicycle factory at Penza who had been mobilized by the Party and sent by the Regional Center. They strongly suspected that the State would take almost all of the harvest away from them. Three harvests were short. Famine came nearer and nearer, a considerable group of men took refuge in the woods, where they were fed by relatives whom, this time, the authorities did not dare to deport. The famine carried off the small children, half the old men, and even a few adults. A president of the kolkhoze was drowned in the Syeroglazaya with a stone around his neck. The new law, several times revised by the C.C., restored a precarious peace by re-establishing family properties in the collective enterprise. The kolkhoze was inspected by a good agronomist and received selected seed and chemical fertilizers, there was an unusually hot and wet summer, and magnificent wheat flourished despite the rages and quarrels of men; there was a shortage of hands at harvesttime, and half the crop rotted in the fields. The bicycle-factory worker, tried for carelessness, incapacity, and abuse of power, was sentenced to three years at hard labor. “I hope my successor has a very good time,” he said simply. The management of the kolkhoze passed to President Vaniuchkin, a native of the village and a Communist recently demobilized from military service. In 1934-35 the kolkhoze rose from the depths of famine to a state of convalescence, thanks to the new C.C. directives, to the beneficent rhythm of rain and snow, to mild seasons, to the energy of the Young Communists, and — in the opinion of the old women and two or three bearded Believers — thanks to the return of the man of God, Father Guerassim, amnestied after three years of deportation. The seasonal crisis continued nevertheless, although it could not be denied that the sowing cycle, the selected seed, and the use of machines markedly increased the productivity of the soil. To retrieve the situation “definitely,” there appeared on the scene, first, Agronomist Kostiukin, a curious character; then a militant from the Young Communists, who had been sent by the Regional Committee, and whom everyone was soon familiarly calling “Kostia.” Not long before the autumn sowing, Agronomist Kostiukin observed that a parasite had attacked the seed (a part of which had been previously stolen). The M. and T. Station delivered only one tractor instead of the two which had been promised and the three which were absolutely necessary; and for the one and only tractor there was no gasoline. When the gasoline arrived, there was a breakdown. The plowing was done with horses, laboriously and late, but since the horses now could not be used to bring supplies from the township cooperatives to the kolkhoze with any regularity, the kolkhoze suffered from a shortage of manufactured articles. Half the trucks in the district were immobilized by lack of gasoline. The women began muttering that we were heading for a new famine and that it would be the just punishment for our sins.

  It is a flat, slightly rolling country, severe in line under the clouds, among which you can distinctly see troops of white archangels pursuing one another from horizon to horizon. By the soft roads, muddy or dusty according to the season, Molchansk, the township, is some thirty-eight miles away; the railroad station is ten miles from the township; the nearest large city, the regional center, a hundred miles by rail. In short, a rather privileged location with regard to means of communication. The sixty-five houses (several of them unoccupied) are made of logs or planks, roofed with gray thatch, set in a half circle on a hill at a bend in the river: surrounded by little yards, they straggle out like a procession of tottering old women. Their windows look out on the clouds, the soft gray water, the fields on the farther shore, the somber mauve line of the forests on the horizon. On the paths that lead down to the river there are always children or young women carrying water in battered little casks hung from the two ends of a yoke which they carry on their shoulders. To keep the motion from spilling too much of the water, you float a disk of wood in each cask.

  Noon. The rusty fields are hot under the sun. They are hungry for seed. You cannot look at them without thinking of it. Give us seed or you will go hungry. Hurry, the bright days will soon be over, hurry, the earth is waiting … The silence of the fields is a continual lament … Flakes of white cloud wander lazily across an indifferent sky. Two mechanics are exchanging advice and despairing oaths over a disabled tractor behind the house. President Vaniuchkin yawns furiously. The waiting fields cause him pain, the thought of the Plan harasses him, it keeps him awake at night, he has nothing to drink, the stock of vodka being exhausted. The messengers he sends to Molchansk come back covered with dust, exhausted and crestfallen, bringing slips of paper with penciled messages: “Hold out, Comrade Vaniuchkin. The first available truck will go to you. Communist greetings. Petrikov.” It means exactly nothing. I’d like to see what he’ll do with the first available truck, when every kolkhoze in the
township is hounding him for the same thing! Besides: Will there be a first available truck? — The only piece of furniture in his office was a bare table, littered with papers which were turning yellow like dead leaves. The open windows gave onto the fields. At the other end of the room a portrait of the Chief contemplated a sooty samovar perched on the stove. Under it slumped sacks, piled one on another like exhausted animals and not one containing the prescribed amount of seed. It was contrary to the instructions of the regional Directorate for Kolkhozes, and Kostia, checking the weight of the sacks, emphasized the fact with a sneer. “It’s not worth putting a crick in my back to find out whether somebody’s been sending out short-weight sacks, Yefim Bogdanovich! If you think the muzhiks won’t know it just because they haven’t a pair of scales! You don’t know them, the devils, they can weigh a sack by looking at it — and you’ll see what a howl they’ll set up …”

  Vaniuchkin chewed on an extinguished cigarette:

  “And what do you think you can do about it, know-it-all? All right, we’ll make a little trip to the township tribunal. It’s not up to me …”

  And they saw Agronomist Kostiukin coming across the fields in their direction, walking with a springy stride, his long arms swinging as if they were flapping in the wind. “Here he comes again!”

  “Like me to tell you everything he’s going to say to you, Yefim Bogdanovich?” Kostia proposed sarcastically.

  “Shut up!”

  Kostiukin entered. His yellow cap was pulled down over his eyes; drops of sweat stood on his sharp red nose; there were wisps of straw in his beard. He began complaining immediately. “We’re five days behind the Plan.” No trucks to bring the clean seed that had been promised from Molchansk. The M. and T. Station had given their word, but they would not keep it. “You’ve seen how they keep their promises, haven’t you?” As for the spare parts for emergency repairs, the Station would not receive them for ten days, in view of the congestion on the railroad — “I’m sure of that. And there we are! It’s all up with the sowing plan … just as I told you it would be. We’ll be short 40 per cent if everything goes well. Fifty or 60 if the frost…”