The Case of Comrade Tulayev (44 page)

He slept in the C.C. Lincoln. Somewhere on the road, just before dawn, a jolt waked him. The landscape was beginning to emerge from darkness — black fields under pale stars. A few hours later Kondratiev saw the same dark desolation in a woman's face, in the depths of Tamara Leontiyevna's eyes. She had come into his office at the Combustibles Trust to report. He felt in a good humor, he made a healthy man's ordinary gesture, he took her arm with a smile, and instantly he felt a vague terror enter into him. “This matter of the Donets Syndicate is in fine shape, it will be all settled in twenty-four hours, but what's the trouble, Tamara Leontiyevna, are you ill? You shouldn't have come in this morning if you didn't feel well…” — “I would have come at any cost,” the girl murmured, her lips pale, “excuse me, I have, I have to warn you…” She was desperate, finding no words. Then: “Go away, Ivan Nicolayevich, leave at once and never come back. I involuntarily overheard a telephone conversation between the Director and… I don't know who … I don't want to know, I have no right to know, I have no right to tell you either, what am I doing, my God!” Kondratiev took her hands — they were as cold as ice. “There, there, I know all about it, Tamara Leontiyevna, calm yourself … You think that I am going to be arrested?” She barely nodded. “Go away, quick, quick!”

“No indeed,” he said. “Not under any circumstances.”

He freed himself from her, became again the distant assistant director in charge of special plans:

“I am much obliged to you, Tamara Leontiyevna, please have the documents on the Yuzovka Refineries ready by two o'clock. Meanwhile, get the General Secretary of the Party on the telephone for me. Use my name, and insist on getting through to the General Secretary's office. At once, if you please.”

Could this light be the light of the last day? One chance in a thousand that he would be granted an audience … And once there? The beautiful fish, armed all over with scales each one of which reflects the whole light of an asphyxiating universe, struggles in the net, struggles in utter impossibility, suffocating — but I am ready. He smoked furiously, taking two puffs from a cigarette, then crushing it out on the edge of the desk and flinging it on the floor. He instantly lighted another, and his jaws clenched, he forgot himself in his director's chair, in this absurd office, antechamber to a place of unforeseeable tortures. Tamara Leontiyevna came back without knocking. “I didn't call you,” he said crossly, “leave me alone…Ah, yes, put the call on my line here …” To escape — perhaps there actually was a slight possibility that he could? “What now? The Gorlovka Refineries?” — “No, no,” said Tamara Leontiyevna, “I asked for an audience for you,
He
expects you at three sharp at the Central Committee…”

What, what! You did that? But who gave you permission? You are mad, it is not true! I tell you, you are mad! “I heard HIS VOICE,” Tamara went on, “HE came to the telephone HIMSELF, I assure you…” She spoke of him with terrified reverence. Kondratiev turned to stone — the great fish beginning to die.

“Very well,” he said dryly. “Keep after the reports on the Donets, Gorlovka, and so on … And if you have a headache, take aspirin.”

Ten minutes to three, the great reception room of the General Secretariat. Two presidents of Federated Republics were conversing in low tones. Other presidents of Republics had disappeared, it was said, after leaving here … Three o'clock. The void. Steps in the void.

“Go in, please…”

Go into the void.

The Chief was standing in the attenuated whiteness of the huge office. Tensely collected. He received Kondratiev without a gesture of welcome. His tawny eyes were impenetrable. He murmured: “Greetings” in an indifferent voice. Kondratiev felt no fear; his feeling was more one of surprise at finding himself almost impassive. Good — now we are face to face, you, the Chief, and I who do not know whether I am a living man or a dead one — leaving out of account a certain period of minor importance. Well?

The Chief took two or three steps toward him, without holding out his hand. The Chief looked him up and down, from head to foot, slowly, harshly. Kondratiev heard the question, too serious to be spoken: Enemy? and he answered in the same fashion, without opening his lips: Enemy, I? Are you mad?

The Chief quietly asked:

“So you are a traitor too?”

Quietly, from the depths of an assured calm, Kondratiev answered:

“I am not a traitor either.”

Each syllable of the terrible sentence stood out like a block of ice in Arctic whiteness. There was no going back on such words. A few more seconds, and all would be over. For such words in this place, one should be annihilated on the spot, instantaneously. Kondratiev finished them firmly:

“And you must know it.”

Would he not summon someone, give orders in a voice so furious that it would sound stifled? The Chief's hands, still hanging at his sides, sketched several little incoherent movements. Were they looking for the bell? Take this creature out of here, arrest him, do away with him! What he says is a thousand times worse than treason! A calm and completely disarmed resolve forced Kondratiev to speak:

“Don't get angry, it will do no good. All this is very painful to me… Listen…You can believe me, or you can not believe me, I hardly care, the truth will still be the truth. And it is that, despite everything…”

Despite EVERYTHING?

“…I am loyal to you… There are many things that escape me. There are too many that I understand. I am in agony. I think of the country, of the Revolution, of you, yes, of you — I think of
them
… Of them above all, I tell you frankly. Their end has left me with an almost unbearable regret: what men they were! What men! History takes millenniums to produce men so great! Incorruptible, intelligent, formed by thirty or forty decisive years, and pure, pure! Let me speak, you know that I am right. You are like them yourself, that is your essential worth…”

(So Cain and Abel, born of the same womb under the same stars …)

The Chief swept away invisible obstacles with both hands. With no apparent emotion, looking away, and even giving himself an air of detachment, he said:

“Not another word on this subject, Kondratiev. What had to be had to be. The Party and the country have followed me… It is not for you to judge… You are an intellectual …” A malevolent smile appeared in his leaden face. “I, as you know, have never been one…”

Kondratiev shrugged his shoulders.

“What has that to do with us? … This is hardly the moment to discuss the failings of the intelligentsia… The intelligentsia did a lot of useful work, though, eh? … We shall soon be at war … Accounts will be settled, all the dirty old accounts, you know it better than I do … Perhaps we shall all perish, even to the last — and drag you down with us. Let us put the best face on things: you will be the last of the last. You will hold out an hour longer than we do, thanks to us, on our bones. Russia is short of men, men whose brains know what ours know, what theirs knew… Who have studied Marx, known Lenin, lived through October, gone through all the rest, the best of it and the worst! How many of us are left? You know the figure, you are one of them yourself… And the earth is going to begin shaking, as when all volcanoes come to life at once, from continent to continent. We shall be under the ground at the dark hour — and you will be alone. That's it.”

Kondratiev went on, in the same melancholy, persuasive tone:

“You will be alone under the avalanche, with the country in its last agony behind you and a host of enemies around you … No one will forgive us for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity … That your shoulders are strong, I know … As strong as ours: ours carried you … Only — we have the place of the individual in history … not a very big place, especially when a man has isolated himself at the peak of power … I hope that your portraits, as big as buildings, have not given you any illusions on the subject?”

The simplicity of his speech performed a miracle. They walked up and down together over the white carpet. Which led the other? They stopped before the Mercator's projection: oceans, continents, frontiers, industries, green spaces, our sixth part of the earth, primitive, powerful, threatened … A heavy red line, in the ice-floe region, indicated the great Arctic road … The Chief studied the relief of the Ural Mountains: Magnitogorsk, our new pride, blast furnaces as well equipped as Pittsburgh's. That's what counts! The Chief half turned to Kondratiev, his gestures were clearer, his voice more relaxed. His eyes grew less impenetrable:

“Always the writer! You ought to go in for psychology …”

An amused gesture of his forefinger completed the word: twisting and untwisting an imaginary skein … The Chief smiled:

“In our day, old man, Chekhov and Tolstoi would be genuine counterrevolutionaries … Yet I like writers, though I don't have time to read them … Some of them are useful … I see that they are very well paid … One novel sometimes brings them in more than several proletarian lives. Is that just or not? It is something we need … But I don't need your psychologizing, Kondratiev.”

A rather strange pause followed. The Chief filled his pipe. Kondratiev looked at the map. The dead can no longer fill their pipes or feel proud of Magnitogorsk, which they built! There was nothing more to add, everything had been set forth under an impersonal light which permitted neither maneuvering nor fear. The consequences would be what they must be: irrevocable.

The Chief said:

“Do you know that you have been denounced? That you are accused of treason?”

“Naturally! What should all those vermin do but denounce me? That's what they live on. They gobble denunciations day and night …”

“What they affirm seems not unlikely …”

“Of course! They know how to cook these things up. In our day what is easier? But whatever stinking nonsense they may have sent you …”

“I know. I have gone into it. A piece of stupidity, or worse, in Spain … You were wrong to get yourself mixed up in it, there's no doubt of that … I know better than anyone how many vile things and stupid things have been done there… That fool of a prosecutor wanted to have you arrested … Once let them get started and they'd arrest all Moscow. He is a brute we shall have to get rid of someday. A sort of maniac.

“Enough of that. I have made my decision. You will leave for eastern Siberia, you will receive your appointment tomorrow morning. Do not lose a day … Zolotaya Dolina, the Valley of Gold — do you know what it is? Our Klondike, production increasing from 40 to 50 per cent every year … Splendid technicians, a few cases of sabotage as is to be expected …”

Pleased with himself, the Chief began to laugh. He was not good at joking, and the fact sometimes made him aggressive. He would have liked to be jovial. His laugh was always a little forced.

“We need a man there who has character — sinew, enthusiasm, the Marxist instinct for gold …”

“I loathe gold,” said Kondratiev, almost angrily.

Life? Exile in the mountains of Yakutia, in the white brushland, among secret placers, unknown to the universe? His whole being had prepared itself for a catastrophe, hardened itself by expecting it, accustomed itself to bitterly wishing for it, as a man seized with vertigo above a chasm knows that a double within him longs for the relief of falling. And now? You let me off after what I came here to say to you? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Am I not going to disappear at the first corner I come to after I leave here? It is too late to restore our confidence, you have killed too many of us, I no longer believe in you, I don't want any of your missions which turn out to be traps! You will never forget what I have said to you, and if you let me off today, it will be to order my arrest six months from now, when remorse and suspicion have gone to your head … “No, Yossif, I thank you for granting me life, I believe in you, I came here to find my salvation, you are great despite everything, you are sometimes blind when you strike, you are perfidious, you are eaten by bloody jealousies, but you are still the leader of the Revolution, we have no one but you, I thank you.” But Kondratiev restrained both protest and effusion. There was no pause. The Chief laughed again:

“I told you that you were always the writer. As for me, I have no feeling about gold one way or the other … Excuse me — this is audience day. Get the dossier on Gold from the secretariat, study it. Your reports you will send to me directly. I count on you. A good journey, brother!”

“Right. Keep in good health! Good-by.”

The audience had lasted fourteen minutes … A secretary handed him a leather brief case on which, in letters of gold, stood the magical words:
East Siberian Gold Trust.
He passed blue uniforms without seeing them. The daylight seemed pellucid. He walked for a while, mingling with the people in the street and thinking of nothing. A physical happiness grew in him, but his mind did not share it. He also felt a sadness which was like a sense of uselessness. He sat down on a bench in a square, before disinherited trees and lawns of a green which meant nothing. An old woman was watching her grandchildren making mud pies. Farther away rolled long yellow streetcars; their clatter rebounded from the front of a recently constructed office building of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Eight floors of offices: a hundred and forty compartments, each containing the same portrait of the Chief, the same adding machines, the same glasses of tea on directors' and accountants' desks, the same worried lives … A beggarwoman passed, leading several small children. “For the love of Christ …” she said, holding out a pretty brown hand. Kondratiev put a handful of small change into it. On each of the little coins, he remembered, you could read the words: Proletarians of all countries, unite! He passed his hand over his forehead. Could the nightmare be over? Yes, over, for a time at least — my small, personal nightmare. But all the rest goes on, nothing is clarified, no dawn rises on the tombs, we have no real hope for tomorrow, we must still travel through darkness, ice, fire … Stefan Stern is doubtless dead. For his sake, I must hope so. Kiril Rublev has disappeared; with him the line of our theoreticians of the great days is extinguished … In our schools of higher education we have nothing left but teachers as contemptible as they are insipid, armed with an inquisitorial dialectic that is three-fourths dead. As usual, names and faces crowded into his memory. What a peaceful motion — the motion of those militiamen by the Ebro, covering their comrades in that mass grave with heavy shovelfuls of earth! The same men, in the grave and beside the grave — buried and buriers the same. They were covering
themselves
with earth, yet they had not lost heart to live and fight. The thing is to keep on, comrades, obviously. To wash gold-bearing sand. Kondratiev opened the Gold Trust brief case. Only the maps interested him, because of their peculiar magic — an algebra of the earth. With the map of the Vitim district open on his knees, Kondratiev looked at the hatchings which signified elevations, patches of green which indicated forests, the blue of watercourses — No villages, stern solitudes, brush on rock, cold streams which absorbed the colors of sky and stone, shining mosses clothing rock, the low, tenacious vegetation of the taiga, indifferent skies. Among the gaunt splendors of that world, man feels himself delivered over to a glacial freedom which has no human meaning. The nights glitter, they have an inhuman significance, sometimes their brightness sends the weary sleeper to sleep forever. Bodaibo is doubtless only an administrative settlement surrounded by clearings, in the heart of the forested wilderness, under a metallic brightness like a perpetual lightning bolt. “I'll take Tamara Leontiyevna with me,” Kondratiev thought, “she'll come. I'll say to her: You are as straight as the young birches in those mountains, you are young, I need you, we shall fight for gold, do you understand?” Kondratiev's eyes turned from the map to pursue a joy beyond visible things. And he discovered a pair of worn-out shoes, laced with string, a dusty trouser cuff. The man had on only one sock, which hung around his ankle like a dirty rag. His feet expressed violence and resignation, a desperate determination — to do what? To walk through the city as through a jungle, seeking the pittance of food, the knowledge, the ideas, by which to live the next day, blind to the stars which the electric signs drive back into their immensities. Kondratiev slowly turned to look at his neighbor on the bench, a young man whose hands clutched an open notebook full of equations. He had stopped reading, his gray eyes were exploring the square with intense and idle attention. On the hunt, always prey to the same desolate bitterness? “In this distress and apathy, no one whose hand I can take,” says the poet, but the wandering Maxim the Bitter, Gorki, amends: “no one whose jaw I can break …” An obstinate forehead under the visor of the cap, which he wears tipped back, guttersnipe fashion. Irregular features, tormented from within by an anemic violence; chalky complexion. Clear eyes — not an alcoholic. Movements still lithe and flexible. Were he ever to sleep on the naked soil of the Siberias, no glitter of stars would kill him, because his desperate determination would never go to sleep. Kondratiev forgot him for the moment.