I, too, sometimes crossed the frozen river on those Arctic nights.
The pathway was silent underfoot. It was like moving through the void. I
reflected that only yesterday we were nothing. Nothing: like the
nameless men of the forgotten village which had vanished from these
banks. Between that yesterday and the present centuries seemed to have
passed, or between the times of those men and our own. Only yesterday
countless lights were burning along these banks inside rooms where the
power, the wealth, and the pleasure of others reigned. We put out those
lights, brought back primordial night. That night is our work. That
night is us. We have entered it in order to destroy it. Each of us has
entered it, perhaps never to leave it So many harsh, terrible tasks must
be done; tasks which demand the disappearance of their performers. Let
those who come after us forget us. Let them be different from us. Thus
what is best in us will be reborn in them.
Yesterday, we only counted as statistics: labor force, emigration,
death rate, crime rate, suicide rate. The best of us also counted In the
records: file B, wanted lists, political police, reports, prison rolls.
This is no metaphysical void! No commodity is more common and more
depreciated than man. Is he even worth the weight of his flesh? They
wouldn’t let a draft animal starve in the gray autumn fields. But a man
in a big city? As far back as I search in my memory, I find not theories
but images, not ideas but impressions, brutally imprinted in my nerves
and soul, reminding me that we were nothing. Childhood moments in
London. There are two of us kids: one will later more or less starve to
death. We are playing in the lamplight at building an Angkor Temple.
Strident whistle blasts explode in the street, like lightning flasbing
in all directions in the darkness, crisscrossing through the sky.
Because a dark shape, more furtive than a shadow, had spun past the
window. The street is an abyss, the windows of the poor open onto
infinity. Downstairs some bobbies, carefully avoiding getting
bloodstains on their trouser cuffs, are bending over a pile of old rags
and flesh. “It’s nothing, children. Be still now!” But we had overheard
whispering, we discovered a dark infinity in the windows, we sensed the
profundity of the silence.
... And that hunted Jewish couple, in another city, with whom the
child died on a happy June evening. There were no more candles, there
was no more money, the room was bare. We had gone without eating in
order to pay for the doctor’s useless final visit. Reflected light from a
café across the street projected the backward silhouette of a sign on
the ceiling.
We don’t need gas explosions burying miners, communiqués from quiet
sectors where thirty men spill out all the blood of their bodies
(nothing worth reporting), memories of executions, the history of
crushed insurrections, memoirs of deportees and prisoners, we need no
naturalist novels to understand our nothingness. But b of us has all
that behind him.
The snow track faded on the river bordered by dark granite. The dark
shape of the Winter Palace stood out vaguely among the shadows. In that
corner – I knew without thinking – between two bay windows dominating a
wide panorama of river and town, stood the Autocrat’s desk, on which his
cigarette holder was lying.
A buddy’s jibe: “Man. The thinking reed! They taught him to stop
thinking years ago. Today they dry him out; soften him up~ and weave
baskets out of him for every use, my friend, including the least
appetizing. Pascal didn’t think of that?”
Now things will change. Now we are all: dictatorship of the
proletariat. Dictatorship of those who were nothing the day before. I
break out laughing, alone in the dark, to think that my papers are in
order, that I am using my name – that in my pocket I have an order in
the name of the Federated Republic enjoining
“all revolutionary authorities to lend aid and assistance to Comrade —— in the performance of his functions.”
and that I am a member of the governing party which openly exercises a
monopoly of power, unmasks every lie, holds the sword unsheathed, ideas
out in the open.
I laugh climbing the hard snowbank up to the embankment. I trip over
black potholes which I know to be white – thus black and white can be
one and the same.
A harsh voice, piercing the night hails me:
“Hey, there! Come out in the open!”
Then, more slowly, as I approach the invisible shouter:
“What do you think you’re doing here?”
A ruddy glow spills out from behind the sharp corner of a woodpile. I
perceive a heap of glowing coals and, near the coals, a soldier
freezing in his long overcoat, which skirts the ground. The man is
standing guard over this precious wood, which people come to steal, log
by log, from the riverside.
“You got a permit to go around at night?”
I have one. He examines it. Either he doesn’t care or can’t read. It
is a typewritten permit. The typist mistakenly put her carbon wrong side
up, and the writing on the back is illegible. It suddenly reminds me of
those advertising handbills which, folded, look like halves of bank
notes. If I closed my eyes, I could see a piece of the sidewalk at the
corner of the Place de la République and Boulevard du Temple again. The
soldier hands me back my paper. We are cold. We are both dressed in the
same rough gray cloth which looks so much like the Russian soil. We are
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
He says:
“They steal the wood; it’s incredible how they steal. I’m sure that
if I walked around the stock, I’d find somebody on the other side
handing logs down to the Neva. There’s a hole on the ice out there. A
while ago the man on guard finally fired a shot, to scare the thief. He
was a twelve-year-old kid, whose mother sent him out every night She
waited for him under one of the gates on the embankment, No. it The kid
got scared. He fell right into the hole with a log on his head. He was
never seen again. I pulled the log out when I got there. I found a
wood-soled shoe at the edge of the hole. Look.”
There, in the snow turned gold by the glow of the coals, was the dark print of a little schoolboy’s foot.
“There’s always a strong current under the ice,” said the soldier.
*
He had taken me for another wood thief at first. I could have been
one. People steal the wood that belongs to everyone, in order to live.
Fire is life, like bread. But I belong to the governing party and I am
“responsible,” to use the accepted term, that is to say, when all is
said and done, in command. My ration of warmth and bread is a little
more secure, a little larger. And it’s unjust I know It And I take it It
is necessary to live in order to conquer; and not for me, for the
Revolution. A child was drowned today for the equivalent of my ration of
warmth and bread. I owe him its full measure in human weight: flesh and
consciousness. All of us alike. And he who is dishonest with himself,
who takes it easy, holds back, or takes advantage, is the lowest of
swine. I know some. They an useful, nonetheless. They also serve.
Perhaps they even serve better, with their oblivious way of profiting
from the new inequality, than those who feel guilty. They pick out
furniture for their offices; they demand automobiles, for their time is
precious; they wear Rosa Luxembourg’s picture on medallions an their
lapels. I console myself by thinking that history naturally turns these
people, despite themselves, into martyrs quite as good as the others.
When the Whites capture Reds, they hang the phonies from the same limbs
as the genuine articles.
I move on through the night: on the left I should soon see, through
this crosshatching of spindly branches, the vast horseshoe of Uritski
Square with its granite column and its four-home chariot surging forward
atop Headquarters Arch in a motionless gallop. I think about those
bronzes in the same way as I would place my hand on them, to refresh my
soul. I too need all my lucidity in order to find my own way through
another darkness. On the right, pale lights flicker under a row of high
windows, glimpsed slantwise between white columns. The Special
Commission works day and night. That is us too. The implacable side of
our face we turn to the world. We, the destroyers of prisons, the
liberators, freedmen, yesterday’s convicts, often marked indelibly by
our chains, we who investigate, search out, arrest we, judges, jailers,
executioners, we!
We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our
grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared
peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have
proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an “iron”
discipline – yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen molds in order
to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength – and we are the
bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is
“fraternity and death” in reality. We have founded the Republic of
Labor, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards. We
wanted each to give according to his strength and each to receive
according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of
generalized misery, since we are less hungry than others!
Will we succeed in overthrowing the ancient law which bends us to its
will at the very moment when we believe we are escaping it?
The Gospel said “Love one another” and “I have not come to bring
peace, but a sword.” Nothing but the sword is left under the crucifix.
“Whoever would save his soul will lose it ...” Well, I’ll be glad to
lose my soul. Who cares? It would be a strange luxury to worry about it
today. Old texts, old, old inner captivity. What haven’t they built on
the Gospel! Destroy! Destroy! The main thing is to destroy thoroughly.
To be afraid of words, of old ideas, of old feelings, those feelings
that are so firmly riveted into our beings, by which the old world still
holds us. A poor fighter he who holds back thinking, when it is
necessary to reload your rifle and shoot with the greatest concentration
– like shooting at dummies on a rifle range – at the men climbing that
hill over there. Simple truths, sure, hard as granite, formulated with
algebraic clarity; that is what we need. We are millions: the masses.
The class which, owning nothing, has nothing to lose but its chains. The
world must be made over. For this: conquer, hold on, survive at any
cost. The tougher and stronger we are, the less it will cost. Tough and
strong toward aura selves first. Revolution is a job that must be done
without weakness. We are but the instruments of a necessity which
carries us along. drags us forward, lifts us up, and which will
doubtless pass over our dead bodies. We are not chasing after some dream
of justice – as the young idiots who write in little magazines say-we
are doing what must be done, what cannot be left undone. The old world
dug its own grave: it is now falling in. Let’s give it a little shove.
Millions of men who were nothing are rising into life: they are unable
not to rise. We are those millions. Our only choice is to understand
this and to accomplish our task with our eyes open. Through this
consent, through this clear-sightedness, we escape from blind fate. All
that was lost will be found again.
The square is lined with dark old palaces. At the bottom, the Maria
Palace, that low edifice with an ill-defined shape. The Imperial Council
used to meet there. There’s a big Repin painting showing that council:
busts of bemedaled old men posing around a semicircular table. They
appear through a yellow-green aquarium light which makes them all look
dead. At the center, the Emperor, the portrait of an obliterated face.
Those thick necks resting on embroidered collars have all been smashed
by bullets. If any one of these great dignitaries still escapes us, it
is probably that old man with the big bony nose drooping over flabby
lips who sells his daughters’ old shawls in the mornings at the Oats
Market ... Thick peasant fingers test and fondle the beautiful
cashmeres.
On the right in the indistinct light falling from the windows of the
Astoria, the former German Embassy stands behind its massive columns
which support no pediment. There used to be some bronze horses on top.
During the first days of the war, furious crowds toppled these statues,
threw them down to the pavement from their high granite perch, and
dragged them to the neighboring canal where they are still under the
ice. Behind the embassy’s barred windows there remains only the simple
desolation of places long since plundered. Bandits get in through the
courtyards and live there, careful that no light can be seen from
outside to betray their presence. They play cards, drinking old cognac
swiped from the cellars of great houses or fiery brandy fabricated in
secret stills on the outskirts of town. Girls with lips painted fiery
red, with names like Katka-Little-Apple, Dunya-the-Snake,
Shura-Slant-Eyes (also known as The Killer), and
Pug-Nose-Maria-Little-Cossack, who wear luxurious dirty underwear and
dresses by the great couturiers, taken from empty apartments, sometimes
peer out, invisible, from behind the dark windows of the great hail of
the embassy, at our lighted windows across the way.
“The commissars live good,” says Katka.
“They sure live it up,” says Dunya, “with their short-haired whores, partying every night of the week.”
“I know one of them,” says Shura, “what a pervert.”
Her bitter laughter flashes through the darkened hail. A thin ray of
light slides across the floor. A triumphantly masculine voice calls out:
“Hey, girls, we’re waiting!”
Another voice, a bass, is humming Stenka Razin’s Complaint.
There is also the huge dark mass of St. Isaac’s with its massive
columns, its enormous archangels spreading their wings at each corner to
the four corners of the earth, its steeples, its gold-plated cupola
visible from far out at sea ...
The windows of the Astoria burn until dawn. They are the only lighted
ones in town, along with those of the Special Commission and the
Committees. Nocturnal labor, danger, privilege, power. The powerful
façade repels the darkness like a shell of light. People crossing the
square in the evening on the way back home to their airless hovels cast
hate-filled looks at the hotel of the commissars (“naturally most of
them Jewish”) where it is warm and light and where there is food to eat,
it’s certain, where no one fears house searches, where no one’s heart
leaps into his mouth at the first sound of a doorbell ringing at night,
where no one ever hears rifle butts falling on the doorsteps ...
Passers-by murmur: “A fine trap. You could catch the whole lot of them
at once!”
First House of Soviets. I push through the revolving door. From the
hotel desk the single eye of a machine gun fixes its infinite black gaze
on me. The machine gunner dozes, his sheepskin hat pulled down to his
eyes.
This is the threshold of power. All who cross over this doorstep know
what they want, what is necessary, and feel themselves under the great
shadow of the Revolution; armed, carried forward, disciplined, by the
structure of the Party. Droning voices trail out from the guardroom. A
gilded plaque fastened to the open door reads (in French): Coiffeur à
l’entresol. Another sign in black ink: Present your papers when
requesting your pass. You need a pass, which you return on the way out,
to get in to the people who live in this building; these little papers
are then sent on to the Special Commission. Somebody collects them.
Somebody has to know who comes to see me at what time. We must not be
allowed to be killed with impunity; we must not be allowed to destroy,
we must not be allowed to know strangers, for we have power, and the
power belongs to the Revolution.
“Evening, Ryjik.”
He comes out to meet me, carefully carrying his tin teapot from which
scalding steam is escaping. Ruddy stubble covers his face up to his
eyes. He is in slippers: the broad folds of a magnificent pair of
cavalry breeches (raspberry colored) float around his hips. Why do they
call these breeches gallifets? Ryjik wears a satisfied smile.
“You’re looking at my gallifets? What material! Take a look, feel it.
A real find, eh? And a love letter in the pocket my friend ... Come up
to my room, you’ll see Arkadi: I have your newspapers.”
Red carpets muffle our steps. This is a huge stone ship, am pointed
like a luxury liner anchored in the polar city. Wide corridors, oak
doors marked with discreet gold numbers. The calm is profound, the
warmth – after the nocturnal cold – like a hothouse. Isn’t one of these
doors going to open on a haughty couple? She, shapely in furs crackling
with electricity, her mouth a purple-blue line; he, slender, high
cheekboned, a flash of light dancing off his monocle.
... A champagne bucket behind then in the room leaves a silver glow.
They pass like phantoms: I wouldn’t even turn around ... A door has
opened quietly, the phantoms vanish.
“Come on in,” says Ryjik, appearing in the doorway.
I can already see Arkadi’s oriental profile in a mirror. Shapely in
his close-fitting black uniform, his waist cinched by narrow Montagnard
belt with sculptured silver pendants, a large metal insignia – silver
and red – on his right breast, like a commander’s star; he is smoking,
leaning back on the divan. Without smiling, he shows his handsome white
teeth. Ryjik pours us tea.
“Here are your newspapers,” Arkadi says to me. “From now on they’ll be a hundred and twenty rubles a copy.”
(A hundred and twenty czarist rubles, out of circulation.)
“Your smugglers are too much. It was eighty three weeks ago.”
The package, tied with heavy twine, smells of printers’ ink.
L’Intransigent, Le Matin, the Manchester Guardian, Corriere della Sera,
bought in Vyborg ... Men, eyes peering out of white furs, ears straining
to hear the slightest crackle of branches, cross the front lines bent
under the weight of these bundles. Sometimes explosions shatter the
absurd silence around them; running, they pull long-range Mausers out of
their frozen wooden holsters and crouch even closer to the snow; inside
their chests, startled-beast terror changes into the will to kill, and
an extraordinary lucidity bursts inside their skulls.
“They’re still expensive,” I say.
“They say two of their men got killed during the past two weeks:
that’s certainly worth two raises of twenty rubles a copy. And it’s
true. Jurgensohn knows that two bodies were picked up in the zone. The
place is getting hot.”
Ryjik says:
“They haven’t delivered any bread for the last three days in the
Moscow-Narva district. Ataev claims that the trains take twenty days to
reach us instead of eight Nothing to burn. There’s gonna be trouble in
the factories.”
“Rather!” snapped Arkadi between his white teeth.
“I think we should put out emergency calls for special conferences of
non-Party people, or the discontent will break out by itself. I
suggested it at Smolny.”
“... better lock up the Left Social Revolutionaries first ...
According to our informers, they’re cooking up something. Goldin has
arrived, it must be for a putsch.”
“Indeed,” I say, “I’d like to see him.”
“He’s staying here, Room 120.”
The comrade who’s preparing a putsch against us is right downstairs.
Handsome, daring, and sensual, he seems to have been playing with death –
his own and other people’s – for years.
“I suggested,” resumed Arkadi, “arresting him tonight if not sooner:
better before than afterward. The Commission wouldn’t hear of it.
Misplaced scruples.”
The conversation breaks off. Three o’clock sounds. Ryjik wipes his lips with the back of his hand and asks:
“Do you know how people in town spell out S.B.N.E. [Supreme Board for National Economy]?”
A great guffaw is already stretching his jolly red cheeks.
“No? Well, it seems it stands for ‘Slave But Never Eat.’ Not bad, eh?”
We laugh. Arkadi yawns. He spends his days and part of his nights at
the Special Commission. He does everything himself, with precise
movements, a clipped voice designed for command, and shining teeth.
Difficult raids, arrests of men who must be taken by surprise before
they can fire their Browning; complicated investigations, and probably
also automobile rides through the rising mist at dawn down lanes lined
with dark pines and spindly bushes fleshed with white, toward that
little wood located seven vents out on the Novgorod road where ... In
the back seat of the Renault, opposite two silent Latvians, sit two pale
handcuffed passengers chain-smoking – impatiently lighting a fresh
cigarette with slightly trembling bands from the dying one as if it were
essential that this infinite dying fire should be kept going ... An
aura surrounds them. Their sprouting beards (depending on which way the
shadows fall) give them faces like evil Christs or pure-browed
criminals. They say that it’s cold; they converse about indifferent
matters in hoarse cracking voices ... Back in his room – a room
identical to this one, except for a portrait hanging above the couch:
Liebknecht’s head [1], thrown back with a horrible red carnation
blooming at the temple – Arkadi pours himself a big glass of confiscated
samogon (Russian “moonshine”), a fiery brew that rasps the throat and
numbs the brain. And so he will be able to sleep until it’s time for
interrogations. He has the regular features, narrow, fleshy eagle nose,
and green eyes flecked with yellow and white of a falconer of
Adjaristan, his native land. Adjaristan wit its hot rains pelting the
red earth with liquid hail. Adjaristan with its mimosas blooming in the
damp shadows, its tea bushes on pyramidal hills, the palm-lined walks of
Batum, its little Greek cafés, rows of scorched mountains, white
minarets towering over flat roofs, brown tobacco leaves drying on racks;
Adjaristan with its veiled women who are submissive, beautiful, and
industrious.
I open the newspapers: Le Journal, wire dispatch in Le Matin: Tragedy
on Rue Mogodor: “She was cheating on him; he kills her and then commits
suicide.” Do they think they’re alone in the world? Rue du Croissant at
this hour: presses rolling breathlessly in the print shops; bicycle
delivery men brush past night revelers as they slip away on their silent
machines. Old Fernand, the good, melancholy hobo, wanders along the
sidewalk headed God knows where ... Terror in Petrograd. “Bolshevism is
at bay; only its Chinese praetorians still defend it ...” Arkadi! Ryjik!
Listen to what they are saying about us! Apoplectic Socialists, seeing
the inadequacy of the blockade, whose inhumanity they condemn, pronounce
themselves, with words of triple meaning, in favor of military
intervention, on the condition (for Woodrow Wilson is a prophet) that
the sovereignty of the Russian people will not be impaired ... They
dream of bayonets which respect the law. We sense fear, stupidity,
hatred sweating through these printed lines. How they long for our death
back there, for the death of the Republic whose insignia you wear on
your chest, Arkadi, for which we do every sort of job, which we want to
see survive because it is still the greatest hope, the birth of a new
kind of justice, honesty in deeds and words – implacable deeds and
truthful words! – the work of those who have always been vanquished,
always duped first and then massacred, who were nothing yesterday, who
are still nothing in the rest of the world!
Footnote
1. Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919), German revolutionary and martyr. He
was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against the war in 1914 and
was jailed for pacifism in 1916. Freed in 1918, he founded the
Spartacus League and was shot in the head during the workers’ uprising
of 1919, along with his collaborator, Rosa Luxembourg. – Trans.
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