The Case of Comrade Tulayev (33 page)

Kiril Rublev refused to answer his examiners' questions. (“If they need me, they will give in. If they only intend to get rid of me, I am shortening the formalities …”) A high official came to inquire into his demands. “I do not wish to be treated worse in a Socialist prison than in a prison under the old regime … After all, citizen, I am one of the founders of the Soviet State.” (As he spoke, he thought: “I am being ironical despite myself … Integral humor …”) “I want books and paper …” He was given books from the prison library and notebooks with numbered pages … “Now, leave me in peace for three weeks …” He needed the time to clarify his thought. A man feels singularly free when all is lost, he can at last think in a strictly objective fashion — to the extent, that is, to which he overcomes the fear which, in a living being, is a primordial force comparable to the sex instinct … Both the instinct and the force are almost insurmountable; it is a matter of inner training. Nothing more to lose. A few gymnastic exercises in the morning: naked, loose-limbed, sharp-faced, he found it amusing to imitate the supple movement of the reaper in the wheat field — the upper body and both arms swinging vigorously forward and to the side. Then he walked a little, thinking; sat down and wrote. Interrupted himself to meditate on another theme: on death, from the only rational point of view, that of the natural sciences: a field of poppies. The thought of Dora often tormented him, more often than it ought. “We had been prepared for so long, Dora …” All her life, all their life, their real life, seventeen years, since the hardships and enthusiasms of the Revolution, Dora had been strong, under a defenseless gentleness, a scrupulous gentleness that was full of hesitancies and doubts. There are plants like that, plants which under their delicate tracery of leaves have such a resistance and vitality that they survive storms, that, seeing them, we divine the existence of a true and admirable strength entirely different from the mixture of instantaneous ardor and brutality which is commonly called strength. Kiril talked to Dora as if she had been present. They knew each other so well, they had so many thoughts in common, that when he wrote she sometimes foresaw the sentence or the page that was to follow. “I thought you would go on like that, Kiril,” she would say; and looking up, he would see her, pale and pretty, her hair brushed away from her forehead and drawn into tresses that lay piled above either temple. “Why, you're absolutely right!” he would marvel. “How well you read me, Dora!” In the joy of their mutual understanding they sometimes kissed each other over his manuscripts. Those were the days of the Cold, of the Typhoid, of the Famine, of the Terror, of the War Fronts which were always being broken through but which never quite gave in, the days of Lenin and Trotsky, the good days. “What luck if we had died together then, Dora!” This conversation between them took place fifteen years later, when they were struggling in the grip of night-mare as suffocating miners struggle in a doomed mine. “We even missed the chance, you remember: you had typhoid, and one day the bullets made a perfect half-circle around me …” — “I was delirious,” said Dora, “I was delirious and I saw everything, I understood everything, I had the key to things, and it was I who kept the bullets from your head by moving my hand, and I touched your hair … My hallucination was so real that I almost believed it, Kiril. Afterward I had a terrible period of doubt — what was I good for if I could not keep the bullets away from you, had I a right to love you more than the Revolution, for I knew very well that I loved you more than anything in the world, that if you disappeared I could not go on living, even for the Revolution … And you scolded me when I told you, you talked to me so well in my delirium, that was the first time I came to really know you …” Kiril put both his hands on Dora's hips and looked into her eyes; they smiled only with their eyes now, and they were very pale, very much older, very much troubled. “Have I changed much since?” he asked in a strangely young voice. “You are amazingly the same,” Dora answered, stroking his cheeks. “Amazingly … But as for me, who have always told myself that you must go on living because the world would be a lesser place if you were not in it, and that I must go on living with you … I begin to believe that we missed that chance to die, really I do … Perhaps there are whole periods when, for men of a certain kind, it is no longer worth while to live …” Kiril answered slowly: “Whole periods, you say? You are right. But since, in the present state of our knowledge, no one can foresee the duration or the succession of periods, and since we must try to be present at the moment when history needs us …” He would have talked like that in his course on “Chartism and the Development of Capitalism in England” … Now he squeezed into the right-hand corner of his cell, directly against the wall; and, raising his Ivan the Terrible profile toward the window at the precise angle which allowed him to see a lozenge of sky a foot square, he murmured: “Well, Dora, well, Dora, now the end has come …”

His manuscript progressed. In a swift hand, a little unsteady at the beginning of each day's first paragraph, but firm after twenty lines, he went over the history of the last fifteen years, wasting no words, with the concision of an economist, quoted figures from the secret statistics (the correct ones), analyzed the decisions and acts of those in power. He achieved a terrifying objectivity, which spared nothing. The confused battles for the democratization of the Party; the first debates of the Communist Academy on the subject of industrialization; the real figures on goods shortages, on the value of the ruble, on wages; the growing tension of the relations between the rural masses, a weakling industry, and the State; the NEP crisis; the effects of the world crisis on Soviet economy, shut up within its own borders; the gold crisis; the solutions imposed by a power which was at once farsighted (in matters of danger which threatened it directly) and blinded by its instinct for self-preservation; the degeneration of the Party, the end of its intellectual life; the birth of the authoritarian system; the beginnings of collectivization, conceived as an expedient to avoid the bankruptcy of the directing group; the famine which spread over the country like a leprosy … Rublev knew the minutes of the meetings of the Political Bureau, he quoted the most forbidden passages from them (passages probably now destroyed); he showed the General Secretary daily encroaching upon all powers; he followed the intrigue in the lobbies of the Central Committee; against it as a background, the figure of the Chief began to appear, still hesitantly, between resignation, arrest, the violent scene at the end of which two equally pale members of the P.B. faced each other among the overturned chairs and one said: “I will kill myself so that my corpse will denounce you! But as for you, the muzhiks will rip your guts out one day, and more power to them — but the country, the Revolution …” And the other, his face closed as the grave, murmured: “Calm yourself, Nicolas Ivanovich. If you will accept my resignation I tender it …” It was not accepted, there were no more successors.

When he had written page after page, written freely, as he had not written for more than ten years, Kiril Rublev would walk up and down his cell, smoking. “Well, Dora, what do you think of it?” Dora invisibly turned over the written sheets. “Good,” she said. “Firm and clear. Yourself. Go on, Kiril.” Then he returned to that other necessary meditation, his meditation on the poppy field.

Early morning. A field of red flowers on a gentle slope, undulating like flesh. Each flower is a flame, and so frail that a mere touch makes the petals fall. How many flowers are there? Impossible to count them. Every instant one withers, another opens. If you were to cut down the tallest ones, those that had made the best growth — whether because they sprang from more vigorous seed or because they had found some elements unequally distributed through the soil — neither the appearance nor the nature nor the future of the field would be changed. Shall I give a name, shall I vow a love, to one flower among them all? It seems to be a fact that each flower exists in itself, is unique and solitary in its particular kind, different from all the others, and that, once destroyed, that flower will never be born again … It seems so, but are we sure? From instant to instant, the flower changes, it ceases to be like itself, something in it dies and is reborn. The flower of this instant is no longer the flower of the instant before. Is the difference between its successive selves, in time, really less than the present difference between itself and many others which closely resemble it, which are perhaps what it was an hour before, what it will be an hour hence?

A rigorous investigation thus abolished in reverie the boundaries between the momentary and the enduring, the individual and the species, the concrete and the conceptual, life and death. Death was completely absorbed into that marvelous field of poppies, sprung perhaps from a mass grave, perhaps fed by decomposed human flesh … A different and vaster problem. Studying it, would one not likewise see the boundaries between species abolished? “But that would no longer be scientific,” Rublev answered himself, who considered that, outside of purely experimental syntheses, philosophy does not exist or is only “the theoretical mask of an idealism which is theological in origin.”

As he was brave, lyrical, and a little tired of living, the poppies helped him to grow accustomed to a death which was not far distant, and which had been the death of so many of his comrades that it was no longer strange or too terrifying. Besides, he knew that men were seldom executed while an investigation was in process. So the threat — or the hope — was not immediate. When he should have to go to sleep with the thought of being waked only to be shot, his nerves would undergo another trial … (But weren't there executions in the daytime too?)

Zvyeryeva sent for him. She tried to give the examination the tone of a familiar conversation.

“You're writing, Comrade Rublev?”

“Yes, I am writing.”

“A message to the Central Committee, I take it?”

“Not exactly. I don't really know whether we still have a Central Committee in the sense in which we used the term in the old Party.”

Zvyeryeva was surprised. Everything that was known about Kiril Rublev suggested that he was “in line,” docile — not without inward reservations — disciplined; and inward reservations strengthen acceptances in practice. The investigation was in danger of failing.

“I don't quite understand you, Comrade Rublev. You know, I believe, what the Party expects of you?”

Prison had made the less change in his appearance because he had always worn a beard. He did not look depressed, though he looked tired: dark circles under his eyes. The face of a vigorous saint, with a big bony nose, such as are to be seen in certain icons of the Novgorod school. Zvyeryeva tried to decipher him. He spoke calmly:

“The Party … I know more or less what is expected of me … But what Party? What is now called the Party has changed so much … But you certainly cannot understand me …”

“And why, Comrade Rublev, should you think that I cannot understand you? On the contrary, I …”

“Don't go on,” Rublev interrupted. “What is on your tongue is an official phrase that no longer means anything … I mean to say that you and I probably belong to different human species. I say it without the slightest animosity, I assure you.”

What might be offensive in his remark was lessened by his objective tone and the polite look he gave her.

“May I ask you, Comrade Rublev, what you are writing, and to whom, and for what purpose?”

Rublev shook his head and smiled, as if one of his students had asked him an intentionally embarrassing question.

“Comrade Examining Judge, I am thinking of writing a study on the machine-smashing movement in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century … Please don't protest, I am seriously thinking of it.”

He waited to see what effect his joke would produce. Zvyeryeva was observing him too. Small, shrewd eyes.

“I am writing for the future. One day the archives will open. Perhaps my memorial will be found in them. The work of the historians who are studying our period will thereby be lightened. I regard that as much more important than what you are probably commissioned to ask me … Now, citizen, permit me to ask a question in turn: Of what, precisely, am I accused?”

“You will learn that before long. Are you satisfied with your living conditions? The food?”

“Passable. Sometimes not enough sugar in the preserves. But many Soviet proletarians, who are accused of nothing, are less well fed than you and I are, citizen.”

Zvyeryeva said dryly:

“The session is over.”

Rublev returned to his cell in excellent humor. “I sent that hideous cat running, Dora. If one had to explain oneself to such creatures … Let them send me someone better, or let them shoot me without any explanations …” The field of poppies appeared on a distant slope, through a veil of rain. “My poor Dora … Am I not even now tearing their entire scaffolding down?” Dora would be glad. She would say: “I am certain that I shall not survive you long, Kiril. Show me the way.”

Rublev did not always turn around when the door opened. This time, after he had distinctly heard the door close, he had the feeling of a presence behind him. He went on writing — he did not intend to let his nerves get the better of him.

“Good day, Rublev,” said a drawling voice.

It was Popov. Gray cap, old overcoat, bulging brief bag under his arm, just the same as ever. (They had not seen each other for years.)

“Good day, Popov, sit down.”

Rublev gave him the chair, closed his notebook, which lay open on the table, and stretched out on the bed. Popov examined the cell — bare, yellow, stifling, surrounded by silence. He obviously found it unpleasant.

“Well, well,” said Rublev, “so they've locked you up too! Welcome, brother, you have more than deserved it.”