Each day the sun rose slowly, late, at an hour when in other cities
of the world, of whose existence people here were abstractly aware, the
pulse of life was already beating ardently. London, Paris, Berlin,
Vienna. Did they really exist? London Bridge with its river of humanity
crossing the Thames furrowed in the fog by dark tugboats with lingering,
hoarse whistles? Was it possible? Were there still crowds in Piccadilly
as in the old days, crowds on the corner of the Rue du Faubourg
Montmartre, armies of ants going about their mysterious business around
the Porte St. Denis, on the Alexanderplatz – long since washed clean of
the blood of the Spartacists – in the great Gothic shadow of St.
Stephen’s and the despair of Austria! Phantom capitals belonging to the
past and to another world which could only be glimpsed through the new
prisms of this city: expected uprisings, outcome always in suspense,
dispatches, stunning as blows, from the Rosta win services proclaiming
endless crises, the collapse of old nations, thrilling upheavals. Gaudy
posters attacked the counterrevolutionary alliances: Lloyd George and
Clemenceau, potbellied, wearing top hats, personally aiming battleship
deck guns at the Revolution. Night came, merging bit by bit into the
stones, the dwellings, the great empty courtyards, the cellars, leaving
imperceptible traces of shadow behind; and on the walls gray sheets of
newsprint announcing:
Leaving or entering the city without speclal permission prohibited.
Cloth coupons to be distributed in the near future: one for every 8 people.
Extra requisition of matresses for the Red Army.
Nationalization of bathhouses. (Closed, in any case, for lack of fuel)
Mobilization of Latvian Communists.
NO ONE WILL ESCAPE
THE INEVITABLE
“... verdict of history, verdict of the masses ... riots in Milan ...
Today Italy, tomorrow France, the next day the universe ... (A white
flame of unstuck paper flapped against the wall in the cold wind.)
Signed, Kuchin.
Dance Lessons, from 4 to 8. Modern interpretive and ballroom dancing,
waltz in a few days. Moderate prices. Tel. 22.76. Madame Eluse,
certified graduate.”
The street ran straight, all white. Night stretched out over
damp-stained building façades and lingered in dark windowpanes. People
still stood guard in doorways. They were mostly women, hands buried
inside the sleeves of old cloaks, wizened faces wrapped in woolen
scarves. Some of them emerged from the stones and moved slowly through
the snow like little old ladies in paintings by the elder Breughel, feet
laden by rubber boots, toward Communal Store No.12. There they gathered
like woodlice in a hole.
Around ten o’clock the street took on a feeble animation. People
suddenly rushed by on urgent necessary, imperious, deadly tasks. They
moved quickly, similar in their diversity – uniforms and black leather –
men and women alike, young or ageless, carrying overstuffed briefcases
under their arms: dossiers, decrees, transcripts, theses, orders,
mandates, absurd plans, grandiose plans. senseless paperwork and the
quintessence of will, intelligence, and passion, the precious first
drafts of the future, all this traced in little Remington or Underwood
characters, all this for the task, for the universe; plus two potato
pancakes and a square of black bread for the man carrying these burdens.
This was also the hour when those who had accomplished the tasks of the
previous night returned homeward, chilly and agitated with oddly
wrinkled yellowed faces, yet feeling a final rush of energy mixed with
their fatigue.
*
This was the hour when Xenia went home. She found an old woman, in a
room filled with bitter smoke, kneeling on a floor covered with scraps
of bark, ashes, and wood. A square stove of freshly laid unfaced bricks,
which occupied the whole middle of the room, proclaimed the intrusion
of primitive poverty into this ravaged household. Unmade bedding had
been left lying on the couch. The old woman half rose and turned toward
the tall blond girl with a fresh, erect body who came in from the night,
from the committee, from the unknown, with revolting words on her lips
and criminal theories under her high forehead. (Only yesterday, it
seemed, that brow had shown between the twin ornaments of flaxen
braids.)
“Well, well, well, look at your mother, look at her, kneeling in
ashes and filth, hands all black, eyes watering from smoke. The chimney
won’t draw, can’t you see? And you won’t be able to make it work with
all your ideas about the new life! Lovely, the new life. Filimochka
won’t take money for his milk any more; ‘I’ve got a trunkful,’ he says,
‘of those worthless bills. I’m going to have my isba wallpapered with
‘em,’ he says, ‘give me some cloth.’ ... Well, answer me, answer, Won’t
you!”
Mother and daughter stared at each other, enemies; the one, her
gentle face distorted by desperate anger, the other turned in on
herself, feeling the excitement of her walk through the snow suddenly
fall away from her and fatigue weigh down her thoughts. (Inside her mind
a little voice, clear, yet barely audible, was whispering: “I see you
dearly enough. You are my mother and you are nothing; and I am nothing.
You are incapable of understanding us, you are blind. You can’t see that
the Revolution is a flame, and the flame will burn us – you: full of
pain and spite in this misery; me: anywhere, happy and consenting.”)
She said:
“Let me help you, Mama, I’m not tired ...”
Then, sharply:
“... And you know, if this is new for you, it’s because we were privileged. Millions of women have never known any other life?”
The mother kept silent, blowing on the fire, in the age-old pose of
women before the hearth. Heavy blue curls of smoke floated through the
room, as in a nomad’s tent when the wind is bad. A breath of frozen air
came in from above the window through a vent which opened out on a
morning as vast as a steppe.
Undressed and in bed, the girl once more became the smooth-browed
child she had always been; her close-cropped hair added a bright touch.
The mother brought her a bowl of warm milk and watched her drink,
softened, recognizing the greedy pout of lips that used to take her
breast.
Xenia listened to the noises of the house dying away inside her. The
fire caught at last, the window was pulled shut. Someone knocked. It was
the secretary of the Poor People’s Committee of the House; he asked for
Andrei Vassilievich: another registration of ex-officers bad been
posted.
With the communicating door open you could just hear Andrei
Vassilievich’s bass voice arguing, in the next room, with his habitual
visitor, Aaron Mironovich, who also wore a beard but was
round-shouldered, fat, and smiling. The secretary of the Poor People’s
Committee was speaking too softly. “Speak louder,” said AndreI
Vassilievich, “she’s asleep. She came home exhausted?” “All right. So
yesterday we moved out the general’s furniture; the clubroom of the
house is being set up in his place?” “And the comrades stole everything,
eh?” Andrei Vassilievich asked gleefully. “No, not everything, for the
sailor from the Vulture stayed until nightfall. But I can sell the old
oak dining-room set: Grichka took the Karelian birchwood bed ...” The
muffled laughter, muffled perhaps by the sleep weighing on these voices,
drifted slowly off. These scum should have been arrested a long dine
ago, and Uncle Andrei with them ...
“How much?”
“Six thousand?”
They were seated around the samovar, huddled in their furs, sipping
tea through tiny pieces of sugar held between their teeth. Happy not to
be under arrest, they discussed the news of the day while carrying on
business. “Did you read, Aaron Mironovich, that they are nationalizing
the news dealers’ business, now that there is no more paper, no more
newspapers, and no more business?” Andrei Vassilievich’s hands were
holding a miniature composed entirely of hues of blue, gray, and pink –
you might have thought it was painted with colors borrowed from the
flowers of the field – depicting a young officer. “Come, four hundred;
take it, Aaron Mironovich, and I’ll leave you half the butter.” Without
us, they told each other, the city would die of hunger: and how many art
treasures would be lost! What they call speculation is the heroic
struggle of energetic and competent men against famine. What they call
looting the national wealth, in this great anarchic looting known as
expropriation, is in fact the rescue of the treasures of civilization.
Whatever is stolen is saved. Whenever Andrei Vassilievich expressed
these ideas in front of Xenia, he would draw himself up in his chair,
his voice trembling with bitterness:
“When Razuniuskoe was sacked, the mujiks carried off Chinese vases in
their carts because they were handy for salting down cucumbers .... I
have seen Mordvins sharing out a chandelier, pendant by pendant I have
seen drunken soldiers smash a Gardner porcelain for fun ... And you
don’t even know what a Gardner is!”
“We would smash all the porcelains in the world to transform life. You love things too much and men too little ...”
Then he would turn around so thick-necked, so sure of himself, that his power nearly cut into the other truth:
“Men? But look what you’re doing to them ...”
(It is necessary to burn. Burn. That’s what he can’t understand.)
“You love men too much, men and things, and Man too little?”
*
The previous year, before the Austrian socialist leader had
disappointed two revolutions, the old Horse Guards Street had been
called Friederick Adler Street. Few people knew its present name,
Barricades Street; the habit of a century was too heavy for it.
Number 12 was a tall commonplace dwelling with crumbling court.
yards, crushed under the desperate grayness of old apartment buildings.
There, for sixty years, meticulous lives had followed their
inconspicuous courses. They kept the saints’ days there. They ate well
there. They slept warmly there under feather beds. There money flowed
quietly in from the countryside, from factories, from unknown obscure
offices through underground rivulets like sewers. On a blue enamel
plaque screwed over the main archway was written: Property of the
Insurance Building Corp. By order of the Soviet of the and District, a
sailor from the Vulture had come one December evening and tacked a
handwritten paper bearing the seal of the Poor People’s Committee lower
down on the door: “... has been proclaimed national property.” Sad-faced
businessmen in worn overcoats – the type seen prowling around the
consulates carrying property deeds as obsolete as sixteenth-century
patents of nobility – still sold and resold that building every two
weeks in Helsingfon restaurants, it still brought a fairly good price,
but in czarist rubles, which were out of circulation everywhere except
among smugglers and traitors.
On the ground floor the frosted glass store windows, now covered with
dust and frost, half revealed tarnished mirrors. Celine, modes
parisiennes. These words were written in gilt script flaring to a
flourish at the bottom. Piss-stained curtains were hanging above the
bright metal stands designed to show off the latest model hats imported
from the Rue de la Paix. A Jewish family was living there. Sometimes,
though a crack in the curtain, you could see a dark graceful
eight-year-old slip of a girl rocking a bizarre rag doll with a
beautifully painted face. An old man emerged every morning; you could
only make out a long, drooping profile, flaccid cheeks, and rheumy eyes
under his winter cap. He went to sell God knows what in a market place.
The other shopwindow, which used to be a bootmaker’s, now belonged to
a half-deserted grocery: little tubes of saccharine, flower tea wrapped
to look more or less like the genuine Kuznetzov tea of old, coffee made
of some kind of anonymous evil-tasting beams. A few sprouting potatoes
placed on a porcelain plate attracted the eye like rare out-of-season
fruits. What kind of phantom commerce was bidden behind this shadowy
merchandise? The Vulture sailor talked to the Poor People’s Committee
about turning the whole shop inside out, as it was certainly full of
stolen sugar and flour. Then the committee secretary, a busy little
loudmouth with a limp, who claimed to have been wounded in Carpathia and
was surely lying, calmed him down without appearing to by reassuring
him that he was personally keeping an eye on “that highly suspicious
place.”
Sometimes you could see an extremely old man in a gray greatcoat
sweeping the morning snow in the courtyard; and when another old man in
an astrakhan hat passed stiffly by with jerky steps, the two old men
exchanged a long angry look. The privy councilor couldn’t forgive the
regular state councilor for having entered the service of “those
bandits” in an office that was certainly run by an illiterate brute.
They also met at the Communal Store, where they both went to get their
bread ration. The privy councilor, classified in the Fourth Ca gory
(non-workers), slowly wrapped his fifty grams of black dough in a cloth
which resembled a dirty handkerchief; he waited until the other man,
that scum placed in the Third Category (intellectual workers), had
picked up his ration, the double, in order to show him, with a sneer
which he thought full of irony, the scorn he felt far this traitor’s
reward. But the privy councilor’s toothless grin, intended to express
sarcasm, hardly changed the habitual grimace on his sagging, swollen
face; and the privy councilor’s glance, which fell on the regular state
cauncilor’s ration, revealed itself to be charged not with severity but
with bleak animal greed.
Punctually at nine o’clock the regular state councilor appeared at
the office – Ah! what personnel! – of the district council. He found
only the old woman who swept the rooms. The employees came late and the
director the latest of all. After going through the newspapers with deep
sighs, the regular state councilor opened his files: Municipal
Properties: Habitations To Be Razed (firewood) ... Around noon the
director, a short fellow with a harsh, blond peasant’s face, had them
bring him some tea made of carrot parings and gave his signatures. Since
he could barely decipher handwritten script and often got the meaning
mixed up, they had to read the propositions written in red ink in the
margins of typewritten reports aloud to him. He rarely said no, probably
only when he had been paid for it. He almost always signed, with a
dissatisfied expression.
“House in good repair,” quietly explained the regular state councilor
standing deferentially next to the director’s chair. “Lodging for
twelve persons. To be razed in accordance with the decree.”
“I do my duty,” he would sometimes explain to his neighbor Andrei
Vassilievicb, in the evening. “I am serving my country. A government,
even one composed of madmen and bandits, nonetheless represents the
country; and the people who live under it only get what they deserve.
We’re tearing down the city, my friend. We’re creating a pickle of a
housing shortage for the future, let me tell you! When all this business
is over with, I tell you, the value of real estate will triple.”
He was the best expert in the district.
*
The whole house took an interest in the newborn baby in apartment 15.
He had emerged from a tired womb in a fireless maternity ward because
they hadn’t been able to get rid of him in time; and he had been
clinging tenaciously to life for weeks now, contrary to all
expectations. He inhaled the ammonia stench of his urine under a heap of
old furs. He sucked implacably at the exhausted breast of a woman whose
face had the radiance of the dying and who told her visitors, opening
her large, slightly croaked eyes over her boy:
“He’s alive, he’s alive! Look at that ...”
People were amazed by this triumphant obstinacy.
People brought logs, grain, and lamp oil to apartment 15. They knew
the husband was at the front; and the wife of an officer who was also at
the front (but on the other side, so that if these two men met one
would kill the other or, a prisoner, would put him coldly to death) went
to get the mother’s bread. These two neighbor women read together, with
the same anxiety, the names of cities lost or taken.
A little girl in a red beret still went every morning to the ballet
school to learn the arts of toe dancing and leaping. The hurricane will
pass, no? But the dance will remain; and the child has talent. When the
weather permitted, she would read Andersen’s fairy tales on the way,
wondering why no magic carpet ever appeared over the bleak housetops.
She also read, and carefully repeated when she got home, the penciled
notices posted at the Communal Store: “The Third Category will receive
two herrings for coupon No.23 on the ration card ...” How sad life is
without flying carpets!
Some workers, who were ready to move out at the first alert to avoid
having their throats cut in this house where they felt like intruders,
occupied the apartment of a lawyer who had disappeared. They had quickly
bartered the salable furniture for foodstuffs from some marauding
peasants, and they used the rest to keep warm. They had gutted the safe
with an oxyacetylene torch but all they found were some ripped-open
files from which the sheaves of documents had been torn by the handful.
The gaping wound of the safe, which had been turned into a larder, was
visible behind the great office desk, on which a lathe operator from the
shipyard kept his tools; for as soon as he came home from the factory,
where he mostly stood on line for his grain ration, the man fabricated
pocket knives out of stolen machine parts which he later bartered for
flour. The water pipes, which froze early in the winter, had burst.
Their wives went down two floors to get their water at Professor
Lytaev’s; loudly they longed for their warm old wooden cottage in the
old neighborhood with its evening streets bathed in the yellow light of
tavern windows. “That was the good life,” they said bitterly. “We’ll all
croak, you’ll see. Hard times,” they added.
*
A poster announced that the Poor People’s Committee was opening the
house clubroom with a lecture on the Paris Commune. A blue Vendôme
column, broken in half, was falling into scarlet flames. DANCING WILL
FOLLOW!!! The lecturer sent by the Central Club Service, a thin
archivist with a faded goatee, spoke for an hour without raising his
voice, which fell like a fine rain.
The poor man dealt with the history of “all that political butchery
pitiably rewritten to suit the mood of the times, only because it fed
him, and with him an ugly wife who suffered with rheumatism.
It didn’t interest him any more than had, formerly, the genealogical
research he did for new-rich families. And he sometimes had to restrain
himself so as not to suddenly break out of this obstinate bad dream,
wake up, interrupt himself, and say in a rejuvenated voice with the
weight of twenty years lifted from his brow:
“... But let us leave all these terrible and futile things. The work
of a poet is much more precious to humanity than all these massacres!
Let us speak then of Pushkin’s youth ...”
At these moments he blinked his eyes strangely, like a dazzled man
emerging from the dark; he was afraid of himself and searched the
audience for some enemy face in order to surrender to it. Suppressed,
his voice rose an octave for no apparent reason: “... the evacuation of
the Fort of Vanves ...”
The hall was a ravaged former drawing room, ornamented in the corners
by fat-cheeked cherubs made of gilded plaster holding candelabra, and
furnished with leather armchairs, prettily fluted and embroidered
boudoir chairs, and heavy dirty wooden benches from the neighboring
barracks, On the walls hung photographs of the leaders, as they did
everywhere. One appeared to be squinting: beneath his huge, balding
forehead appeared a crafty, vaguely cruel expression, due to the
photographer who, unable to comprehend his real greatness, had tried to
give this simple man what he imagined to be the face of a statesman.
(“... It wasn’t easy, I assure you,” this former court photographer
repeated long afterward.) Another darted a brilliant glance into the
abstract, through his rimless glasses; and this head, despite its
gracious smile and the impression of irony created by its strong lips,
thick mustache, and comma-like goatee, made you think of Draconian
orders, of telegrams announcing victories, of proscriptions, of a
conquering, exalting, and implacable discipline. There was also the
unruly hair and flabby smile of a clean-shaven dictator who still
appeared slightly overweight through these famine times. There were only
a dozen people in this room, but a good wood fire gave it a feeling of
well-being that evening. When the lecturer had finished, the Vulture
sailor asked if anyone in the audience had questions to ask the
reporter? As the hour for the dance was near, the hall was filling bit
by bit. Heads turned toward the harmonica player who was sitting near
the door with his instrument on his knees. But a soldier who looked like
a clay figure from a shooting gallery rose heavily from his leather
armchair at the back of the hail. His commanding voice could be heard
very easily as he murmured:
“Tell the story of Dr. Millière’s execution?”
Standing massively with his head bowed, so that all you could see of
his face were his heavy bearded cheeks, his sullen lips, and his
wrinkled bumpy forehead (he resembled certain masks of Beethoven), he
listened to this story:
... Dr. Millière, in a dark blue frock coat and a top hat, dragged
through the streets of Paris under the rain, forced to kneel on the
steps of the Pantheon, crying, “Long live humanity!” The remark of the
Versailles guard leaning on the grill a few steps away: “We’ll give you
humanity up the ass ...”
In the dark night out in the lightless street the clay figure joined
the lecturer. The sounds of the harmonica faded behind them, devoured by
the darkness.
“Here, you must be hungry.”
The archivist felt a hard package being thrust into his hands.
“They’re English biscuits I brought back from Onega. Those bastards eat, it’s not like us?”
The archivist took the biscuits. “Thank you. ... So you’ve come from
Onega?” He spoke out of politeness. Onega, Erivan, Kamchatka, what
difference did it make? But the man who had come from Onega had a secret
on his lips. His momentary silence was charged.
“I was also in the government at Perm, last year, when the Kulaks
rebelled. They cut open the stomachs of supply commissars and stuffed
them with grain.
“On the road I had read Arnould’s pamphlet, The Dead of the Commune.
I was thinking of Millière. And I avenged Millière, citizen! It was a
beautiful day in my life, and I haven’t had many. Point by point, I
avenged him. I shot the richest landowner in the area, on the steps of
the church, just like that – I don’t remember his name, and I don’t give
a damn!”
After a short silence he added:
“But I was the one who shouted, ‘Long live humanity.’”
“You know,” said the archivist, “basically Millière wasn’t a real Communard. He was only a bourgeois republican.”
“It’s all the same to me,” said the man who had come back from Onega.
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