The Case of Comrade Tulayev (36 page)

The five households watched them set out on a day of low-hanging clouds pierced by feeble glimmers of silver. The universe seemed forgotten. The smallest children, muffled in furs, were brought out in their mothers' arms. Thirty short figures dotted the dull whiteness around the sleigh. The men gave advice and looked to see that the reindeer were properly harnessed. Now that they were about to vanish, Pakhomov and Ryzhik became more real than they had been the day before; discovering them roused a slight emotion. It was as if they were going to die. They were setting off for the unknown, one guarding the other, for freedom or for prison, God alone knew. Eyno, the Nyenets, the Samoyed, who had come for furs and fish, took them in his sleigh. Dressed in wolfskins, his face bony and brown, with slit eyes and scanty beard, he looked like a Mongol Christ. Green and red ribbons decorated his boots, his gloves, his cap. He pushed the last yellow strands of his beard carefully into his collar, studied the whole extent of the heavens and the earth in one sweeping look, roused the reindeer with a click of his tongue. Ryzhik and Pakhomov stretched out side by side, wrapped in furs. They carried a store of dried bread, dried fish, vodka, matches, and alcohol in tablet form to make a fire. The reindeer gave a little leap and stopped. “Go with God!” said someone. Pakhomov answered, with a laugh: “Our kind gets along better without.”

Ryzhik shook all the hands that were held out to him. They were of all ages. There were old hands, rough and callused, strong hands, tiny hands, delicately formed. “Good-by, good-by, comrades!” Men and women who did not love him said: “Good-by, Comrade Ryzhik, a good journey to you!” and they looked at him with new, kindly eyes. The new eyes followed the sleigh all the way to the horizon. The reindeer leaped forward into space; a sleeping forest appeared in the distance, recognizable by its purplish shadows. Above, the sky cleared in silvery lacework. Eyno leaned forward, watching his animals. A haze of snow surrounded the sleigh, shimmering with rainbows.

“It's good to get away,” Pakhomov repeated joyously. “I've had my bellyful of this hole. I can't wait to see a city!”

Ryzhik was thinking that the people of Dyra probably would never get away. That he himself would never return here, nor to Chernoe, nor to the cities he had known, nor, above all, to the days of strength and victory. There are moments in life when a man may hope everything, even in the depths of defeat. He lives behind the bars of a county jail, and he knows that the Revolution is coming; that, under the gallows, the world lies before him. The future is inexhaustible. Once a solitary man has exhausted his future, every departure becomes the last. Almost at the end of his journey — his cross-checkings made it clear enough. His mind had long been made up, he felt himself available. The chill in his stomach bothered him. He drank a swallow of vodka, covered his face with furs, and gave himself up to torpor, then to sleep.

He did not wake again until night. The sleigh was gliding swiftly over the nothingness which was the world. The night had a greenish transparency. In the sky reigned stars which as they twinkled changed from lightning blue to a soft glacial green. They filled the sky; he felt that convulsions raged beneath their apparent immobility, that they were ready to fall, ready to burst on the earth in tremendous flames. They enchanted the silence; the snow-crystal world reflected their infinitesimal and sovereign light. The one absolute truth was in them. The plain undulated, the barely visible horizon heaved like a sea and the stars caressed it. Eyno kept watch, crouched forward; his shoulders swayed to the rhythm of their journey, to the rhythm of the revolving world; they hid and then revealed entire constellations. Ryzhik saw that his companion was not asleep either. His eyes open as never before, his eyeballs glinting gold, he breathed in the magical phosphorescence of the night.

“Everything all right, Pakhomov?”

“Yes. I'm fine. I don't regret anything. It's marvelous.”

“Marvelous.”

The gliding sleigh lulled them in a common warmth. A slight chill stung their lips and nostrils. Freed of weight, of boredom, of nightmare, freed of themselves, they floated in the luminous night. The least stars, those that they had thought almost invisible, were perfect; and each was inexpressibly unique, though it had neither name nor form in the vast glitter.

“I feel as if I were drunk,” Pakhomov murmured.

“My head is clear,” Ryzhik answered, “and it's exactly the same thing.”

He thought: “It is the universe that is clear.” It lasted several minutes or several hours. Around the brightest stars appeared huge shining circles, visibly immaterial. “We are beyond substance,” murmured one. “Beyond joy,” murmured another. The reindeer trotted briskly over the snow; it looked as if they were hurrying to meet the stars on the horizon. The sleigh sped dizzily down slopes, then climbed again with a vigor that was like a song. Pakhomov and Ryzhik fell asleep, and the wonder continued in their dreams, continued when they woke to find dawn breaking. Pillars of pearly light rose to the zenith. Ryzhik remembered that in his dream he had felt himself dying. It had been neither frightening nor bitter, it was as simple as the end of night; and all lights, the brightness of the stars, the brightness of suns, the brightness of Northern Lights, the more remote brightness of love, continued to pour endlessly down upon the world, nothing was really lost. Pakhomov turned to him and said, strangely:

“Ryzhik, brother, there are the cities … It is incomprehensible.”

And Ryzhik answered: “There are the executioners,” just at the moment when unknown colors flooded the sky.

“Why do you insult me?” asked Pakhomov, after a long silence during which the sky and the earth became one sheet of white.

“I was not thinking of you, brother, I was only thinking of the truth,” said Ryzhik.

It seemed to him that Pakhomov was weeping without tears, his face almost black, although they were being carried through an unbelievable whiteness. If it is your black soul, poor Pakhomov, rising into your face, let it suffer from the cold daylight, and if it dies, die with it — what have you to lose?

They made a halt under the high red sun, to drink tea, stretch their legs, and let the reindeer search for their diet of moss under the snow. After lighting the stove and bringing the kettle to a boil, Pakhomov suddenly squared up as if to fight. Ryzhik stood before him, legs apart, hands in his pockets, straight, firm, silently happy.

“How do you know, Comrade Ryzhik, that I have that yellow envelope?”

“What yellow envelope?”

Looking straight into each other's eyes, alone in the midst of the magnificent wilderness, in the cold, the light, with the good hot tea they were about to share, they could tell no lies … Thirty paces away, they heard Eyno talking to his team. Perhaps he was humming.

“Then you don't know?” asked Pakhomov blankly.

“Are you going out of your head, brother?”

They drank tea in little sips. The liquid sunshine flooded through them. Pakhomov spoke heavily:

“The yellow secret service envelope — it is sewed into my tunic. I put that tunic under me when I go to sleep. I have never been parted from it. The yellow envelope — it is there against my chest … I wasn't told what's in it, I haven't the right to open it except if I receive an order in writing or code … But I know that it contains the order to shoot you … You understand — in case of mobilization, in case of counterrevolution, if the powers decide that you must not go on living … It has often kept me awake, that envelope. I thought of it when we drank together … When I watched you starting off toward the Bezdolnya for firewood … When I played gypsy songs to you … When a black dot appeared on the horizon, I said to myself, ‘The damned mail, what is it bringing me, small man that I am?' You understand, I'm a man who does his duty. Now I've told you.”

“I never even thought of it,” said Ryzhik. “Though I certainly should have suspected it.”

They played a strange game of chess. Little by little, the chessboard was buried under a dust of beautifully wrought crystals. Ryzhik and Pakhomov strode up and down on the rock, which at that point had only a light covering of snow. Their boots left rounded marks in it, like the prints of gigantic beasts. They moved a piece, and walked away, thinking or dreaming, drawn by horizons which, a few minutes later, they would renounce. Eyno came and crouched by the board, playing both sides in his mind at once. His face had a look of concentration, his lips moved. Slowly the reindeer came wandering back, from far away, and they too looked on with their great opaque eyes, watching the mysterious game, until miniature snow squalls, trailing along the ground, finally buried it in crystal whiteness. The black and white chessmen had ceased to exist except in the abstract, but through the abstract the small, strict powers of the mind continued their combat. Pakhomov lost, as usual, full of admiration for Ryzhik's ingenious strategy.

“It is not my fault if I won,” Ryzhik said to him. “You have a lot to lose yet, before you will understand.”

Pakhomov did not answer.

The dazzling journey brought them to landscapes covered with starved bushes. Blotches of green grass emerged from the snow. The same emotion seized all three men when they saw in the grass the ruts of a wagon road. Eyno muttered an incantation against bad luck. The reindeer began to trot jerkily. The sky was dull, a leaden sky.

Ryzhik felt his sadness return, the sadness which was the texture of his life and which he despised. Eyno left them at a kolkhoze where they procured horses. Life there must have been a picture in earthy colors, washed over by the dawns which poured azure on the world. The roads wandered away into woods filled with birds. Brooks ran through singing coppices; the light was reflected from the water-spangled soil, rock, and roots. They forded rivers on which clouds floated. They traveled through this region in peasant carts, whose drivers hardly ever spoke a word and, full of suspicion, came out of their torpor only when they had drunk a little vodka. Then they hummed endless songs.

Parting came to Ryzhik and Pakhomov in the single street of a straggling market town, among large dark houses standing well apart, on the threshold of the building which housed both the Soviet and Security, a wood-and-brick building with broad shutters. “Well,” said Pakhomov, “our journey together is over. I have orders to turn you over to the Security post. The railroad is only about sixty miles from here. I wish you luck, brother. Don't hold a grudge against me.” Ryzhik pretended an interest in the street, in order not to hear the last words. They clasped hands. “Good-by, Comrade Pakhomov, I wish you understanding, dangerous though it be …” In the Security office two young fellows in uniform were playing dominoes on a dirty table. The unlighted stove sent out a wretched chill. One of the two glanced at the papers which Pakhomov had brought. “State criminal,” he said to his companion, and both of them looked at Ryzhik hostilely. Ryzhik felt the white hair on his temples bristle, an aggressive smile uncovered his purplish gums, and he said:

“You can read, I suppose. That means: Old Bolshevik, faithful to Lenin's work.”

“An old story. Plenty of enemies of the people have used the same camouflage. Come, citizen.”

Without another word, they led him to a small dark room at the end of the hall, closed the door on him, and padlocked it. It was hardly more than a cupboard, it stank of cat urine, the air was heavy with mold. But from behind the wooden wall came children's voices. Ryzhik heard them with delight. He made himself as comfortable as possible, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out. His old tired flesh groaned despite itself and wished that it could lie down on clean straw … A little girl's voice, refreshing as a trickle of water over the rocks of the taiga, came from the other side of the world, solemnly reading Nekrasov's
Uncle Vlass
, no doubt to other children:

“I have seen all that too,” Ryzhik thought. “Trudge on, old Vlass, we are not through trudging … Only, our sacred books are not the same …”

And, before he sank under weariness and discouragement, he remembered another line of Nekrasov's: “Oh my Muse, scourged to blood …”

Nothing but worry and work, these transfers! There are no prisons within the Arctic Circle; jails appear with civilization. District Soviets sometimes have at their disposal an abandoned house that no one wants because it has brought people bad luck or because it would need too much repairing to make it habitable. The windows are boarded up with old planks on which you can still read TAHAK-TRUST, and they let in wind, cold, dampness, the abominable bloodsucking midges. There are almost always one or two wrong letters in the chalked inscription on the door: RURAL PRISON. Sometimes the tumble-down hovel bristles with barbed wire; and when it lodges an assassin, an escaped prisoner who wears glasses and has been recaptured in the forest, a horse thief, the director of a kolkhoze the order for whose arrest came from a high source, the door is guarded by a sentry, a Young Communist of seventeen — preferably one who is good for nothing — with an old rifle slung from his shoulder — a rifle which is good for nothing either, be it understood … On the other hand, there are freight cars armored with scrap iron and big nails; excrement has dribbled under the door; they are shabbily sinister; they have the look of an old, disinterred coffin … The extraordinary thing is that you can always hear sounds coming from them — the groaning of sick men, vague moans, even songs! Are they never emptied? They never reach the end of their journey. It would take forest fires, showers of meteors, cities overthrown, to abolish their kind … Through a green path which the white bark of birches brightened like laughter, two naked sabers conducted Ryzhik toward one of these cars, which stood on a siding among fir trees. Ryzhik laboriously climbed in, and the rickety door was padlocked behind him. His heart was pounding from the effort he had made; the semidarkness, the stench which was like a fox's earth, stifled him. He stumbled over bodies, groped for the opposite wall with both hands out-stretched, found it by the light from a crack, through which he could see the peaceful bluish landscape of firs, stowed his sack, and crouched in stale straw. He became aware of movement around him, saw a score of young, bony faces supported by half-naked, emaciated bodies. “Ah,” said Ryzhik, recovering his breath. “Greetings,
chpana!
Greetings, comrade tramps!” And he began by making a well-calculated statement of principles to the children of the roads, the oldest of whom might be sixteen: “If anything disappears from my bag, I'll bloody the noses of the first two of you I can lay my hands on. I'm like that — nothing mean about me. Be that as it may, I have six pounds of dry bread, three cans of meat, two smoked herrings, and some sugar — government rations — which we will share fraternally but with discipline. The watchword is ‘conscious'!” The twenty ragged children smacked their tongues joyously before giving a feeble “Hurrah!” “My last ovation,” thought Ryzhik. “At least it's sincere …” The children's shaven skulls were like the heads of plucked birds. Some of them had scars that went down to the bone; a sort of fever burned in them all. They sat down in an orderly circle, to talk to the enigmatic old man. Several began delousing themselves. They crunched the lice between their teeth, Kirgiz fashion, muttering: “You eat me and I eat you” — which is said to comfort the soul. They were being sent to the regional Tribunal for having looted the commissary of a penal “colony for rehabilitation through work.” They had been traveling in the same car for twelve days, the first six without ever getting out of it, and had been fed nine times. “We used to shit under the door, Uncle, but at Slavianka an inspector came by, our delegates complained to him in the name of hygiene and the new life, so now they come and let us out twice a day … No danger that we'll escape into a forest as thick as this one — did you see it?” The same inspector — an ace — had got them fed immediately. “Except for him, some of us would be dead, sure thing. Must have been through the same mill himself, he looked like an old hand — otherwise it would never have happened …” They looked forward to the prison to which they were bound as to salvation, but they wouldn't get there in much less than a week, because of the munitions trains that had to be let by … a modern prison, with heat, clothes, radios, movies, baths twice a month, if you could believe what you heard. It was worth the trip, and the older ones, once they had been sentenced, might have the luck to stay there.