by Victor Serge
“The structure of the universe,” Kostia repeated in a singsong voice. Too big for the cramped little room, he kept turning round and round.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Romachkin. I bet the same anemic fleas feed on you at night.”
“You’re right,” said Romachkin, with a happy little laugh.
Kostia pushed him back against the wall and sat down on the bed. His tousled hair, in which the chestnut lights looked russet, his aggressive dark eyes, his big, slightly asymmetrical mouth, bent over Romachkin.
“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going somewhere. If the coming war doesn’t change us all into carrion, old man, I don’t know what we are going to do, but it will be fabulous. If we die, we’ll make the earth bear such a crop as was never heard of. I haven’t a kopeck, of course; my soles are worn through and more, of course … And so on. But I am happy.”
“Love?”
“Of course.”
Kostia’s laughter shook the bed, shook Romachkin from his toes to his eyebrows, made the wall tremble, echoed through the room in golden waves.
“Don’t let it frighten you, old brother, if I seem drunk. I’m drunker yet when I haven’t had anything to eat, but then I sometimes go mad …
“You remember, I walked out on the subway and working like an industrialized mole under the streets of Moscow, between the Morgue and the Young Communist Bureau. I wanted air. I was fed up with their discipline. I have discipline enough of my own to set up shop with, it’s inside me, my discipline. I got out. At Gorki I worked in the automobile factory: seven hours in front of a machine. I was willing to become a beast in the long run, to give the country trucks. I was going to see fine cars come out, all shiny and new — it’s prettier and cleaner than the birth of a human being, I assure you. When I told myself that we had built them with our own hands and that perhaps they would eat up the roads in Mongolia bringing cigarettes and rifles to oppressed peoples, I felt proud, I was glad to be alive. Good. Dispute with a technician, who wanted to make me clean my tools after hours. ‘What do you think?’ I said to him. ‘That the wage earner doesn’t exist? The worker’s nerves and muscles have to be kept up just as much as the machines do. So long.’ I took the train, they were going to accuse me of Trotskyism, the idiots, but you know what that means: three years in the Karaganda mines, no thank you! Have you ever seen the Volga, old man? I worked on board a tug, fireman first, then mechanic. We towed barges as far as the Kama. There the rivers are full, you forget cities, the moon rises over steep forests, an immense vegetable army stands guard day and night, and you hear it calling to you insidiously: Ours is the true life — if you do not drink a cup of silence with the beasts of the forest, you will never know what a man ought to know. I found a substitute in a Komi village and went to work for the regional Forest Trust. ‘I’ll do anything, as far away as possible, in the most out-of-the-way forests,’ I said to the provincial bureaucrats. It pleased them. They put me to inspecting foresters’ posts, and the militia took me on for the fight against banditry. In a forest at the end of the earth, between the Kama and the Vychegda, I discovered a village of Old Believers and sorcerers who had fled from statistics. They had taken the great census for a diabolic maneuver, they had convinced themselves that their lands were going to be taken from them once more, their men sent to war, their old women forced to learn to read and then to study the science of the Evil One. They recited the Apocalypse at night. They also proclaimed that everything on earth was corrupt and that nothing remained for the pure in heart except patience — and that their patience would soon be exhausted! ‘And then what will happen?’ I asked them. ‘It will be the return of the millennium.’ They offered to let me live with them, I was tempted to on account of a beautiful girl, she was as vigorous as a tree, exciting and pure as forest air, but she told me that what she most wanted was a child, that I had seen too much of machines to live long with her, and that she did not trust me … I left there, Romachkin, to get away before their Last Judgment arrived, or I became a complete imbecile … Through brothers of theirs in the city, the Elders asked me to send them recent papers, a treatise on agronomy, and to write and tell them if ‘the census had gone by’ without wars, floods, or plunder … Shall we go and live with them, Romachkin? I am the only man who knows the paths through the forests along the Sysola. The forest animals don’t harm me, I’ve learned to rob wild bees’ hives for honey, I know how to set traps for hares, to set traps in rivers … Come on, Romachkin, you will never think of your books again and when someone asks you what a streetcar is you will explain to the little children and the white-haired old men that it is a long yellow box on wheels which carries men and is made to move by a mysterious force that comes out of the bowels of the earth over wires. And if they ask you why, you will find yourself hard put to it for an answer …”
“I am willing,” said Romachkin weakly. Kostia’s story had enchanted him like a fairy tale.
Kostia jerked him out of his dream:
“Too late, old man. There are no more Holy Scriptures or Apocalypses for you and me. If the millennium is ahead of us, we cannot know it. We belong to the age of reinforced concrete.”
“And your love affair?” asked Romachkin, feeling strangely at ease.
“I got married at the kolkhoze,” Kostia answered. “She is …”
His two hands began a gesture intended to express enthusiasm. But they remained suspended for a fraction of a second, then dropped inertly. Even as he spoke, Kostia’s eyes had fallen on Romachkin’s long, feeble hand, spread out on a page of a newspaper. The middle finger seemed to be pointing to an impossible paragraph:
The case of the assassins of Comrade Tulayev, member of the C.C. Having confessed that they were guilty … Erchov, Makeyev, Rublev … have been executed …
“What is she like, Kostia?”
Kostia’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you remember the revolver, Romachkin?”
“I remember it.”
“Do you remember that you were looking for justice?”
“I remember. But I have thought a great deal since then, Kostia. I have become aware of my own weakness. I have come to understand that it is too early for justice. What we have to do is work, believe in the Party, feel pity. Since we cannot be just, we must feel pity for men …”
A fear of which he did not dare to think would not let his lips utter the question: “What did you do with the revolver?” Kostia spoke angrily:
“As for me, pity exasperates me. Here you are” — Kostia pointed to the paragraph in the paper — “take pity on those three, if that makes you feel any better, Romachkin — they are beyond needing anything now. As for me, I have no use for your pity, and I have no wish to pity you — you don’t deserve it. Perhaps you are guilty of their crime. Perhaps I am the author of your crime, but you will never understand it or anything about it. You are innocent, they were innocent …”
With an effort, he managed to shrug his shoulders. “I am innocent … But who is guilty?”
“I believe that they were guilty,” Romachkin murmured, “since they were found guilty.”
Kostia gave a leap that shook the floor and the walls. His hard laugh rattled against things.
“Romachkin, you win all prizes! Let me explain to you what I guess. They were certainly guilty, they confessed, because they understood what you and I do not understand. Do you see?”
“It must be true,” said Romachkin gravely.
Kostia paced nervously between the door and the window. “I am stifling,” he said. “Air! What is wanting here? Everything!
“Well, my old friend Romachkin, good-by. Life is a sort of delirium, don’t you think?”
“Yes, yes …”
Romachkin was going to be left there alone, he had a wretched, worn face, wrinkled eyelids, white hairs around his mouth, so little vigor in his eyes! Kostia thought aloud: “The guilty are the millions of Romachkins on this earth …”
“What did you sa
y?”
“Nothing, old man, I’m just maundering.”
There was empty space between them.
“Romachkin, this place of yours is too gloomy. Here!”
From his inside blouse pocket Kostia drew a rectangular object wrapped in an India print. “Take it. It’s what I loved the most in the world when I was alone.” Romachkin’s hand held a miniature framed in ebony. In the black circle appeared a woman’s face — magically real, all sanity, intelligence, radiance, silence. With a sort of amazed terror, Romachkin said: “Is it possible? Do you really believe, Kostia, that there are faces like this?”
Kostia flared up:
“Living faces are much more beautiful … Good-by, old man.”
As he hurried down the stairs Kostia had a blissful sensation: He seemed to be falling, the material world dissolved before him, things became aerial. He followed the streets with the light step of a runner. But in his mind anxiety loosed a sort of thunder. “It was I who … I …” He began running as he approached the house where Maria lay sleeping — running as he had run one night long ago, that Arctic night, when the thing had suddenly exploded at the end of his hand, making a black flower fringed with flame, and he had heard the police whistles all around him … The dark staircase was aerial too. Apartment No. 12 housed three families and three couples in seven rooms. A 25-candle-power bulb burned in the hall, looped up close to the ceiling so that it could not easily be unscrewed. The walls were sooty. A sewing machine, fastened to a heavy chest by a chain and padlock, was reflected in the cracked mirror of the coat stand. Irregular snores filled the half-darkness with a bestial vibration. The door of the toilet opened, the figure of a man in pajamas hovered indistinctly at the end of the hall and suddenly stumbled noisily into something metallic. The drunken man bounced back against the opposite wall, striking his head against a door. Angry voices came through the darkness — a low voice saying “Shhhhh,” and a high voice showering insults: “… gutter rat …” Kostia went to the drunken man and caught him by the collar of his swaying pajamas.
“Quiet, citizen. My wife is asleep next door. Which is your room?”
“Number 4,” said the drunk. “Who’re you?”
“Nobody. Stay on your feet! Don’t make any noise or I’ll give you a friendly poke in the jaw.”
“Good of you … Have a drink?”
Kostia pushed the door of No. 4 open with his elbow and flung the drunk inside, where he gently collapsed among overturned chairs. Something made of glass rolled across the floor before breaking with a crystalline tinkle. Kostia groped his way to the door of No. 7, a triangular closet with a low slanting ceiling in which there was a round dormer. The electric bulb, at the end of a long cord, lay on the floor between a pile of books and an enamel basin in which a pink chemise was soaking. The only furniture was a chair with the seat broken and an iron bed, on which Maria lay sleeping, stretched out straight on her back, her forehead lifted, vaguely smiling. Kostia looked at her. Her cheeks were pink and hot, she had wide nostrils, eyebrows like the outline of a pair of slim wings, adorable eyelashes. One shoulder and one bare breast were uncovered; on the amber-colored flesh of the breast lay a black braid with coppery lights. Kostia kissed her bare breast. Maria opened her eyes. “You!”
He knelt beside the bed, took both her hands.
“Maria, wake up, Maria, look at me, Maria, think of me …”
No smile came to her lips, but her whole being smiled.
“I am thinking of you, Kostia.”
“Maria, answer me. If I had killed a man, ages ago or a few days or a few months ago, on a night of unbelievable snow, without knowing him, without a thought of killing him, without having wanted to, but voluntarily just the same, with my eyes wide open, my hand steady, because he was doing evil in the name of ideas that are right, because I was full of the sufferings of others, because, without knowing it, I had pronounced judgment in a few seconds — I for many others, I who am unknown, for others who are unknown and nameless, for all who have no names, no will, no luck, not even my rag of a conscience, Maria, what would you say to me?”
“I would tell you, Kostia, that you ought to keep your nerves under better control, know exactly what you’re doing, and not wake me up to tell me your bad dreams … Kiss me.”
He went on in an imploring voice:
“But if it was true, Maria?”
She looked at him very hard. The chimes on the Kremlin rang the hour. The first notes of the “International,” airy and solemn, drifted for a moment over the sleeping city.
“Kostia, I have seen enough peasants die by the roadside … I know what it is to struggle desperately. I know how much harm is done involuntarily when the struggle is desperate … Just the same, we are going forward, aren’t we? There is a great and pure force in you. Don’t worry.”
Her two hands plunged into his hair, she drew the vigorous and tormented head toward her.
Comrade Fleischman spent the day finding their final places in the files for the dossiers in the Tulayev case. There were thousands of pages, gathered into several volumes. Human life was reflected in them just as the earth’s fauna and flora are to be found, in tenuous and monstrous forms, in a drop of stagnant water observed through a microscope. Certain documents were to go to the Party Archives, others to complete dossiers in the files of Security, the C.C., the General Secretariat, the foreign branch of Secret Service. A few were to be burned in the presence of a representative of the C.C. and Comrade Gordeyev, Deputy High Commissar for Security. Fleischman shut himself up alone with the papers, about which there hung an odor of death. The memorandum from the Special Operations Service on the execution of the three convicted criminals gave only one precise detail, the time: 12:01, 12:15, 12:18 A.M. The great case had culminated at the zero hour of night.
Among the unimportant documents added to the Tulayev dossier since the end of the investigation (reports on conversations in public places, during the course of which Tulayev’s name was alleged to have been mentioned; denunciations concerning the murder of a certain Butayev, an engineer at the waterworks in Krasnoyarsk; communications from the criminal police concerning the assassination of a certain Mutayev at Leninakan; and other documents which flood, wind, or the stupidity and uninspired folly of the law of averages seemed to have swept together), Fleischman found a gray envelope, postmarked “Moscow-Yaroslavl Station” and merely addressed: “To the Citizen Examining Magistrate conducting the Tulayev case investigation.” An attached memorandum read: “Transmitted to Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Another memorandum added: “Zvyeryeva: under strict arrest until further order. Transmit to Comrade Popov.” Administrative perfection would, at this point, have demanded a third memorandum concerning the as yet unsettled fate of Comrade Popov. Some prudent person had merely written on the envelope, in red ink: “Unclassified.” “That’s myself — unclassified,” thought Fleischman with a shade of self-contempt. He nonchalantly cut open the envelope. It contained a letter, written by hand on a folded sheet of school notebook paper and unsigned.
“Citizen! I write to you from compulsion of conscience and out of regard for the truth …”
Ah! — somebody else denouncing his neighbor or happily giving himself up to his idiotic little private delusion … Fleischman skipped the middle of the letter and began again toward the end, not without noticing that the writing was firm and young, as of an educated peasant, that there was no attempt at style, and very little punctuation. The tone was direct, and the Security official found himself gripped.
“I shall not sign this. Innocent men having inexplicably paid for me, there is no way left for me to make amends. Believe me if I had known of this miscarriage of justice in time I would have brought you my innocent and guilty head. I belong body and soul to our great country, to our magnificent Socialist future. If I have committed a crime almost without knowing it which I am not sure of because we live in a period where the murder of man by man is an ordinary thing and no doubt it is a necessity
of the dialectics of history and no doubt the rule of the workers which sheds so much blood, sheds it for the good of mankind and I myself have been only the less than half-conscious instrument of that historical necessity, if I have led into error judges better educated and more conscientious than myself who have committed an even greater crime while believing that they too were serving justice, I can now only live and work freely with all my powers for the greatness of our Soviet fatherland …”
Fleischman went back to the middle of the letter:
“Alone, unknown to the world, not even knowing myself the moment before what I was going to do I fired at Comrade Tulayev whom I detested without knowing him since the purge of the higher schools. I assure you that he had done immeasurable harm to our sincere young generation, that he had lied to us incessantly, that he had basely outraged the best thing we possess our faith in the Party, that he had brought us to the brink of despair …”
Fleischman bent over the open letter and sweat bathed his forehead, his eyes blurred, his double chin sagged, an expression of utter defeat twisted and ravaged his fat face, the innumerable pages of the dossier floated before him in a choking fog. He muttered: “I knew it,” annoyed because he found himself having to restrain an idiotic impulse to burst into tears or to flee, no matter where, instantly, irrevocably — but nothing was possible any more. He slumped over the letter, every word of which bore the stamp of truth. There was a mouselike scratching at the door, then the voice of his maid asked: “Would you like some tea, Comrade Chief?” — “Yes, yes, Lisa — make it strong …” He walked up and down the room for a little, read the unsigned letter over again, standing this time, the better to confront it. Impossible to show it to anyone, anyone. He half opened the door to take the tray on which stood two glasses of tea. And, within himself, he talked to the unknown man whom he glimpsed behind the folded sheet of ruled paper. “Well, young man, well, your letter is not bad at all … Never fear, I am not going to start a hunt for you at this point. We of the older generation, you see, we don’t need your erratic and self-intoxicated strength to stand condemned … It is beyond us all, it carries us all off …”