The Case of Comrade Tulayev (27 page)

“Take the controls,” he called to the sailor.

Sitting in the stern, suddenly tired, his hands crossed on his knee, the ghosts gone, he thought: Done for. The launch plowed toward the city through that dark certainty. Done for like the city, the Revolution, the republic, done for like so many comrades … What could be more natural? A turn for each, a way for each … How had he managed not to be aware of it until now, how had he lived in the presence of that hidden revelation without divining it, without understanding it, imagining that he was doing things that were important or things that were unimportant, when actually there was nothing left to do? The launch came alongside in the dark port amid a chaos of scattered stone. A swinging lantern preceded Kondratiev into a low, ruined building, its roof full of holes, where militiamen were playing dice by the light of a candle … Part of a torn poster above them displayed emaciated women at last victorious over poverty, on the threshold of the future promised them by the C.N.T.… At eleven o'clock Kondratiev had himself driven to a government building for a fruitless conversation with the officials in charge of munitions. Too much ammunition to yield, not enough to win. A member of the government had arranged a midnight supper for him. Kondratiev drank two large glasses of champagne with a minister of the Catalan Generalidad. The wine, sprung from French soil and impregnated with gentle and joyous sunlight, sent flakes of gold running through their veins. Kondratiev touched one of the bottles and, without in the least thinking what he was going to say, brought out:

“Why don't you keep this wine for the wounded, señor?”

The minister looked at him with a fixed half-smile. The Catalan statesman was tall, thin, and stooped: sixty, elegantly dressed; a severe face lighted by kind, shrewd eyes; a university professor. He shrugged his shoulders:

“You are absolutely right … And it is one of the small things we are now dying of … Too little ammunition, too much injustice …”

Kondratiev opened the second bottle. Ladies and gentlemen in broad plumed hats, hunting the stag to bay in the forests of another century, looked down on him from the tapestries. Again the old Catalan university professor clinked glasses with him. An intimacy drew them together, they were disarmed before each other, as if they had left their hypocrisy in the cloakroom …

“We are beaten,” the minister said pleasantly. “My books will be burned, my collections scattered, my school closed. If I escape, I shall be simply a refugee in Chile or Panama, speaking a language that no one will understand … With an insane wife, señor. There it is.” He did not know how it happened, but the most incongruous, the most outrageous question escaped him:

“My dear sir, have you any news of Señor Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom I esteem most highly?”

“No,” Kondratiev answered tonelessly.

“Is it true that … that he has been … that they … that …”

Kondratiev was so close to him that he saw the greenish streaks in the old man's dark pupils.

“… that he's been shot?” Kondratiev supplied quietly. “We use the word quite frequently, you know. Well, it is probably true, but I don't know for certain.”

An odd silence — voicelessness or discouragement — fell between them.

“He has sometimes drunk my champagne with me in this very room,” the Catalan minister resumed confidentially.

“I shall probably end as he did,” Kondratiev answered, equally confidentially and almost gaily.

Before the half-open gold and white door they shook hands warmly, resuming their conventional roles but with more life than usual. One said: “Have a good trip,
querido señor
.” The other, shifting from foot to foot, repeated his thanks for the warm reception he had been given. They felt that their farewells were taking too long, yet they felt too that, the moment their hands let go of each other, an invisible and fragile link, like a golden thread, would break, never to be restored between them.

Taking the bull by the horns, Kondratiev caught the plane for Toulouse the next morning. He must reach Moscow before the arrival of the secret reports which, distorting his slightest gestures, would show him interceding for a Trotskyist-Terrorist — what madness it all was! He must get there in time to propose the final measures which would turn the tide, a substantial shipment of arms, a purge of the services, immediate cessation of crimes behind the lines … He must arrange for an interview with the Chief before the enormous, crushing mechanism of government traps had been set in motion; he must see him face to face and stake his life on the risky trumps of a comradeship begun on the cold Siberian plains in 1906, of an absolute loyalty, of a controlled but cutting frankness, of the truth — after all, there is such a thing as truth.

At five thousand feet, in a sky that was pure light, the most sun-drenched catastrophe in history was no longer visible. The Civil War vanished at just the altitude at which the bomber pilots prepared to fight. The ground was like a map — so rich in color, so full of geological, vegetable, marine, and human life that, looking at it, Kondratiev felt a sort of intoxication. When at last, flying over the forest of Lithuania, an undulating, dark mossiness which struck him as looking pre-human, he saw the Soviet countryside, so different from all others because of the uniform coloring of the vast kolkhoze fields, a definite anxiety pierced him to the marrow. He pitied the thatched roofs, humble as old women, assembled here and there in the hollows of almost black plowlands, beside gloomy rivers. (Doubtless at bottom he pitied himself.)

The situation in Spain must have appeared so serious that the Chief received him on the day he arrived. Kondratiev waited only a few moments in the spacious anteroom, from whose huge windows, which flooded the room with white light, he could see a Moscow boulevard, streetcars, a double row of trees, people, windows, roofs, a building in course of demolition, the green domes of a spared church … “Go in, please …” A white room, bare as a cold sky, high-ceilinged, with no decoration except a portrait of Vladimir Ilich, larger than life, wearing a cap, his hands in his pockets, standing in the Kremlin courtyard. The room was so huge that at first Kondratiev thought it empty; but behind the table at the far end of it, in the whitest, most desert, most solitary corner of that closed and naked solitude, someone rose, laid down a fountain pen, emerged from emptiness; someone crossed the carpet, which was the pale gray of shadowed snow, someone came to Kondratiev holding out both hands, someone, He, the Chief, the comrade of earlier days — was it real?

“Glad to see you, Ivan, how are you?”

Reality triumphed over the stunning effect of reality. Kondratiev pressed the two hands which were held out to him, held them, and real warm tears gathered under his eyelids, only to dry instantly, his throat contracted. The thunderbolt of a great joy electrified him:

“And you, Yossif? … You … How glad I am to see you … How young you still are …”

The short graying hair still bristled vigorously; the broad, low, deeply lined forehead, the small russet eyes, the stiff mustache, still held such a compact charge of life that the flesh-and-blood man shouldered away the image presented by his innumerable portraits. He smiled, and there were smiling lines around his nose, under his eyes, he emanated a reassuring warmth — would he be as warm and kind as he looked? But how was it that all the mysterious dramas, the trials, the terrible sentences pondered in the Political Bureau had not exhausted him more?

“You too, Vania,” he said (yes — it was the old voice). “You've stood up well, you haven't aged much.”

They looked at each other, relaxed. How many years, old man! Prague, London, Cracow years ago, that little room in Cracow where we argued so fiercely all one evening about the expropriations in the Caucasus; then we went and drank good beer in a
Keller
, with Romanesque vaulting, under a monastery … The processions in '17, the congresses, the Polish campaign, the hotels in the little towns we captured, where fleas devoured our exhausted revolutionary councils. Their common memories came back in such a crowd that not one became dominant: all were present, but silently and unobtrusively, re-creating a friendship beyond expression, a friendship which had never known words. The Chief reached into the pocket of his tunic for his pipe. Together they walked across the carpet, toward the tall bay windows at the farther end of the room, through the whiteness …

“Well, Vania, what's the situation now, down there? Speak plainly, you know me.”

“The situation,” Kondratiev began with a discouraged look and that gesture of the hands which seems to let something drop, “the situation …”

The Chief seemed not to have heard this beginning. His head bowed, his fingers tamping tobacco into the bowl of his short pipe, he went on:

“You know, brother, veterans like you, members of the old Party, must tell me the whole truth … the whole truth. Otherwise, who can I get it from? I need it, I sometimes feel myself stifling. Everyone lies and lies and lies! From top to bottom they all lie, it's diabolical … Nauseating … I live on the summit of an edifice of lies — do you know that? The statistics lie, of course. They are the sum total of the stupidities of the little officials at the base, the intrigues of the middle stratum of administrators, the imaginings, the servility, the sabotage, the immense stupidity of our directing cadres … When they bring me those extracts of mathematics, I sometimes have to hold myself down to keep from saying, Cholera! The Plans lie, because nine times out of ten they are based on false data; the Plan executives lie because they haven't the courage to say what they can do and what they can't do; the most expert economists lie because they live in the moon, they're lunatics, I tell you! And then I feel like asking people why, even if they say nothing, their eyes lie. Do you know what I mean?”

Was he finding excuses for himself? He lighted his pipe furiously, put his hands in his pockets, squared his head and shoulders, stood firmly on the carpet in the harsh light. Kondratiev looked at him, studying him sympathetically, yet with a certain basic suspicion, considering. Should he risk it? He risked an unemphatic:

“Isn't it a little your own fault?”

The Chief shook his head; the minute wrinkles of a warm smile flickered about his nose, under his eyes …

“I'd like to see you in my place, old man — yes, that's something I'd like to see. Old Russia is a swamp — the farther you go, the more the ground gives, you sink in just when you least expect to … And then, the human rubbish! … To remake the hopeless human animal will take centuries. I haven't got centuries to work with, not I … Well, what's the latest news?”

“It's execrable. Three fronts barely holding out — a push, and collapse … They haven't even dug trenches in front of essential positions …”

“Why?”

“Lack of spades, bread, plans, officers, discipline, ammunition, of …”

“I see. Like the beginning of '18 with us, eh?”

“Yes … On the surface … But without the Party, without Lenin” — Kondratiev hesitated for a fraction of a second, but it must have been perceptible — “without you … And it's not a beginning, it's an end —
the
end.”

“The experts have prophesied it — three to five weeks, don't they say?”

“It can last a long time, like a man taking a long time to die. It can be over tomorrow.”

“I need,” said the Chief, “to keep the resistance going for a few weeks.”

Kondratiev did not answer. He thought: “That is cruel. What's the use?”

The Chief seemed to divine his thought:

“We are certainly worth that,” he resumed. “And now: Our Sormovo tanks?”

“Nothing to boast about. Armor plate passable …” Kondratiev remembered that the builders had been shot for sabotage, and felt a momentary embarrassment. “Motors inadequate. Breakdowns in combat as high as 35 per cent …”

“Is that in your written report?”

“Yes.” Embarrassment. Kondratiev was thinking that he had laid the foundation for another trial, that his “35 per cent” would burn in phosphorescent characters in brains exhausted by nightlong interrogations. He resumed:

“In point of defectiveness, the human matériel is the worst …”

“So I've been told. What is your explanation?”

“Perfectly simple. We fought, you and I, under other conditions. The machine pulverizes man. You know I am not a coward. Well, I wanted to see — I got into one of those machines, a No. 4, with three first-class men, a Catalan Anarchist …”

“… a Trotskyist, of course …”

The Chief had spoken with a smile, out of a cloud of smoke; his russet eyes twinkled through almost closed lids.

“Very likely — I didn't have time to go into it … You wouldn't have either … Two olive-skinned peasants, Andalusians, wonderful marksmen, like our Siberians or Letts used to be … Well, there we are, rolling along an excellent road, I try but can't imagine what it would be like if we were on bad terrain … There are four of us inside there, dripping sweat from head to foot, stifling, in the darkness, the noise, the stench of gasoline, we want to vomit, we're cut off from the world, if only it were over! There was panic in our guts, we weren't fighters any longer, we were poor half-crazed beasts squeezed together in a black, suffocating box … Instead of feeling protected and powerful, you feel reduced to nothing …”

“The remedy?”

“Better planned machines, special units, trained units. Just what we have not had in Spain.”

“Our planes?”

“Good, except for the old models … It was a mistake to unload so many old models on them …” The Chief gave a decided nod of approval. “Our B 104 is inferior to the Messerschmitt, outclassed in speed.”

“The maker was sabotaging.”