The Case of Comrade Tulayev (17 page)

He could not sit still in the huge room. His angular frame moved across it obliquely. He looked like a great emaciated bird of prey shut up in a cage that was quite large but still too small. So Dora saw him. She answered:

“I don't know.”

“The conclusions reached concerning the Opposition from seven to ten years ago and formulated between 1923 and 1930 would have to be revised. We were wrong then, perhaps the Opposition was right —
perhaps
, because no one knows if the course of history could be different from what it is … Revise our conclusions concerning a time now dead, struggles that are ended, outworn formulas, men sacrificed in one way or another?”

Several days passed — Moscow days, crowding on each other, crowded with events, cluttered with things to do, then suddenly interrupted by limpid moments when you forget yourself in the street to stare at the colors and the snow under a cold bright sky. Healthy young faces pass, and you wish you could know the souls behind them, and you think that we are a people numerous as grass, a mixture of a hundred peoples, Slavs, Finns, Mongols, Turks, Jews, all on the march and led by girls and youths whose blood runs golden. You think of the machines waking to strength in the new factories; they are agile and shining, they contain the power of millions of insentient slaves. In them the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever. This new world is arising little by little out of evil — and its people lack soap, underwear, clothes, clear knowledge, true, simple, meaningful words, generosity; we hardly know enough to animate our machines; there are sordid hovels around our giant factories, which are better equipped than the factories of Detroit or the Ruhr; in those hovels men bowed under the relentless law of toil still sleep the sleep of animals; but the factory will conquer the hovel, the machines will give these men — or the men who will follow them, it matters little — an astounding awakening. This unfolding of a world — machines and masses progressing together, inevitably — makes up for many things. Why should it not make up for the end of our generation? Overhead expenses, an absurd ransom paid to the past. Absurd — that was the worst part of it. And that the masses and the machines should still need us; that, without us, they might lose their way — that was dismaying, it was horrible. But what are we to do? To accomplish things consciously, we have only the Party, the “cohort of iron.” Of iron and flesh and spirit. None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of innumerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspiration, of other yet greater masses — Proletarians of all countries, unite! The spirit became confused, the flesh decayed, the iron rusted, because the cohort — chosen by successive trials of doctrine, exile, imprisonment, insurrection, power, war, work, fraternity, at a moment perhaps unique in history — wore away, gradually invaded by intruders who spoke our language, imitated our gestures, marched under our banners, but who were utterly different from ourselves — moved by old appetites, neither proletarians nor revolutionaries — profiteers … Enfeebled cohort, artfully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us, then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to submit. Would our resistance do anything but make bad worse? If — as they could have done at any instant — a Bukharin, a Piatakov had suddenly risen in the dock to unmask their poor comrades lying through their last hours by command, the fraudulent prosecutor, the abetting judges, the double-dealing inquisition, the gagged Party, the stupid and terrorized Central Committee, the devastated Political Bureau, the Chief ridden by his nightmare — what demoralization there would have been in the country, what jubilation in the capitalist world, what headlines in the fascist press! “Read all about it — The Moscow Scandal, The Bolshevik Sink, The Chief Denounced by his Victims.” No, no — better the end, any end. The account must be settled between ourselves, in the heart of the new society preyed on by old ills …

In that iron circle Rublev's thoughts never ceased to travel.

One evening after dinner he put on his short overcoat and his astrakhan cap, said to Dora, “I'm going up for a breath of air,” took the elevator, and got out on the terrace roof above the eleventh floor. An expensive restaurant occupied it in summer; and the diners, as they listened vaguely to the violins, looked at the innumerable lights of Moscow, spellbound despite themselves by those terrestrial constellations, whose tiniest lights guided lives at work. The place was even more beautiful in winter, when there were neither diners, nor flowers, nor colored lamp shades on the little tables, nor violins, nor odors of broiled mutton, champagne, and cosmetics — only the vast calm night over the vast city, the red halo of Passion Square, with its electric signs, its snow stained by black ruts and footpaths, its swarm of people and vehicles under the arc lights, the discreet, secret glow of its windows … At that height, the electric lights did not interfere with vision, the stars were clear and distinct. Fountains of reddish light in the midst of the dense black of buildings indicated the squares; the white boulevards disappeared into darkness. His hands in his pockets, Rublev made the circuit of the terrace, thinking nothing. A faint smile came to his lips. “I should have made Dora come up to see this — it is magnificent, magnificent …” And he stopped short, surprised — for a couple with their arms around each other's waists were swiftly bearing down on him, leaning forward in a graceful attitude of flight. Skating alone on the terrace, the two lovers swept up to Kiril Rublev, their ravished faces shone on him, they smiled at him, leaned into a long airy curve, and were off toward the horizon — that is, toward the other end of the terrace, from which there was a view of the Kremlin. Rublev watched them stop there and lean on the railing; he joined them and leaned on the railing too. They could clearly see the high crenelated wall, the heavy watchtowers, the red flame of the flag, lit by a search-light, on the cupola of the Executive offices, the domes of the cathedrals, the vast halo of Red Square.

The girl looked toward Rublev, in whom she recognized the old and influential Bolshevik for whom a Central Committee car came every morning — last year. She half turned to him. Her companion stroked the back of her neck with his fingers.

“Is that where the Chief of our Party lives?” she asked, looking off toward the towers and crenelations bright against the night.

“He has an apartment in the Kremlin, but he doesn't often stay there,” Rublev answered.

“Is that where he works? Somewhere under the red flag?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

The young face was thoughtful for a moment, then turned to Rublev:

“It is terrible to think that a man like him has lived for years surrounded by traitors and criminals! It makes you tremble for his life … Isn't it terrible?”

Rublev echoed her hollowly: “… terrible.”

“Come on, Dina,” the young man murmured.

They put their arms around each other's waists, became aerial again, leaned forward, and, borne by a magic power, set off on their skates toward another horizon … A little tense, Rublev made his way to the elevator.

In the apartment he found Dora sitting opposite a young well-dressed man whom he did not know. Her face was pale. “Comrade Rublev, I have brought you a message from the Moscow Committee …” A big yellow envelope. Merely a summons to discuss urgent business. “If you could come at once, there is a car waiting …”

“But it is eleven o'clock,” Dora objected.

“Comrade Rublev will be back in twenty minutes, by car. I was told to assure you of that.”

Rublev dismissed the messenger. “I'll be down in three minutes.” His eyes upon hers, he looked at his wife: her lips were colorless, her cheeks yellowish, it was as if her face were disintegrating. She murmured:

“What is it?”

“I don't know. It happened once before, you remember. A little peculiar, even so.”

No light anywhere. No possible help. They kissed hurriedly, blindly, their lips were cold. “See you later.” — “See you later.”

The Committee offices were deserted. In the secretary's office a stout, bemedaled Tatar, with cropped skull and a thin fringe of black hairs on his upper lip, was reading the papers and drinking tea. He took the summons. “Rublev? Right away …” He opened a dossier in which there was only a single typewritten sheet, read it, frowning, raised his face — the puffy, opaque, heavy face of a big eater.

“Have you your Party card with you? Please let me see it.”

From his pocketbook Rublev took the red folder in which was written: “Member since 1907.” Over twenty years. What years!

“Right.”

The red folder disappeared into a drawer, the key turned.

“You are charged with a crime. Your card will be returned to you, if necessary, after the investigation. That is all.”

Rublev had been waiting for the blow too long. A sort of fury bristled his eyebrows, clenched his jaws, squared his shoulders. The secretary slid back a little in his revolving chair:

“I know nothing about it, those are my orders. That is all, citizen.”

Rublev walked away, strangely light, borne by thoughts like flights of birds. So that's the trap — the beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it's you … And we're all in it, all in the trap … Didn't we all go absolutely wrong somewhere? Scoundrels, scoundrels! An empty hall, rawly lighted, the great marble stairway, the double revolving door, the street, the dry cold, the messenger's black car. Beside the messenger, who was smoking while he waited, someone else, a low voice saying thickly: “Comrade Rublev, be so good as to come with us for a short conversation …” — “I know, I know,” said Rublev furiously, and he opened the door, flung himself into the icy Lincoln, folded his arms, and summoned all his will power to hold down an explosion of despairing fury …

The snow-white and night-blue of the narrow streets passed over the windows in parallel bands. “Slower,” Rublev ordered, and the driver obeyed. Rublev let down the window — he wanted a good look at a bit of street, it did not matter what street. The sidewalk glittered with untrodden snow. A nobleman's residence of the past century, with its pillared portico, seemed to have been sleeping for the last hundred years behind its ornamental iron fence. The silvery trunks of birches shone faintly in the garden. That was all — forever, in a perfect silence, in the purity of a dream. City under the sea, farewell. The driver pushed down the accelerator. — It is we who are under the sea. It doesn't matter — we were strong men once.

Makeyev was exceptionally gifted in the art of forgetting in order to grow greater. Of the little peasant from Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, Tula Government — a country of green and brown valleys, dotted with thatched roofs — he preserved only a rudimentary memory, just enough to make him proud of his transformation. A little reddish-haired lad like a million others, like them destined to the soil, the village girls would have none of him — they called him “Artyomka the Pockmarked” with a shade of mockery. Rickets in childhood had left him with awkward bowlegs. Nevertheless, at seventeen, in the Sunday evening fights between the lads of Green Street and the lads of Stink Street, he brought down his enemy with a blow of his own invention which landed between neck and ear and caused instantaneous dizziness … After these rough-and-tumble fights, since even now no girl would have him, he sat on the dilapidated steps of his house, chewing his nails and watching his big strong toes wriggling in the dust. If he had known that there are words to express the vicious torpor of such moments, he would have muttered, as Maxim Gorki muttered at his age: “What boredom, what loneliness, what a desire to smash someone in the face!” — not for the pleasure of victory this time, but to escape from himself and an even worse world. In 1917 the Empire made Artyem Makeyev a soldier under its double eagles — a passive soldier, as dirty and with as little to do as all his fellows in Volhynia trenches. He spent his time marauding through a countryside which had already been visited by a hundred thousand marauders just like himself; laboriously delousing himself at twilight; dreaming of raping the peasant girls — they were few and far between — whom night caught on the roads, and who, incidentally, had been frequently raped before by many another … As for him, he did not dare. He followed them through a chalk countryside of shattered trees and fields full of shell holes; suddenly the ground would hold up a clutching hand, a knee, a helmet, a jagged tin can. He followed them, his throat dry, his muscles painfully thirsting for violence; but he never dared.

A curious strength, which at first made him uneasy, awoke in him when he learned that the peasants were taking possession of the land. Before his eyes hung the manor of Akimovka, the manor house with its low portico on four white columns, the statue of a nymph beside the pool, the fallow fields, the woods, the marsh, the meadows … He felt an inexpressible hatred for the owners of that unknown universe, which was really his, his from all eternity, his in all justice, but which had been taken from him by a nameless crime perpetrated long before his birth, an immense crime against all the peasants on earth. It had always been thus, though he had not known it; and that hatred had lain asleep in him always. The gusts of wind that blew at evening over fields which the war had disinherited brought him intelligible sentences, revealing words. The people of the manor — “Sir” and “Madam” — were “blood-drinkers.” Private Artyem Makeyev never having seen them, no human image disturbed the image which the words called up in him. But blood he had seen often enough — the blood of his comrades after a burst of shrapnel, when the earth and the yellowed grass drank it — very red at first, so red it turned your stomach, then black, and, very soon, the flies settled on it.