HIS PAPERS, beautiful job, read: Danil X ----------, company
commander in the 1st Kuban Regiment, sent to the centre by division
headquarters to procure maps of the field of operations. Signed, for
Regimental Commander Shapochnikov; Adjutant Shutko. The misspelled words
were there, too, they had a good laugh over them. They authenticated a
document better than any seals… His real mission, typewritten in code on
a piece of silk, without any spelling errors, was sewn, along with
other messages, in the lining of his tunic collar. He was also carrying,
at the bottom of an apparently untidy pocket among shreds of tobacco
and bits of string, a precious little ball of crumpled paper.
As soon as he left the October Station, which everyone still called –
thank God!- the Nicholas Station, Danil rediscovered the city,
magnificent after so many devastated villages and provincial towns
through which had passed endless hurricanes of cavalry, bombardments,
epidemics, and the terrible chill of executions. The third-class waiting
rooms spilled over into the corridors, and the station halls were like a
nomads’ camp. The masses of people living there were so compressed that
aisles formed of themselves between the piles of bodies sitting, lying,
and squatting on shapeless bundles, which were less shapeless than the
half sleeping forms of the people. Through the acrid brown air you could
see mothers suckling their squalling children; mothers with flaccid
breasts, cradling sallow children with inflamed red lids closed over
their eyes and greenish scabs clinging to their tiny heads among the
patches of gold or black hair; mothers singing lullabies to put to sleep
these little bits of flesh who clung to life with such inexplicable
power, singing lullabies whose rhythm was so sweet that their voices,
embittered by anger and unfathomable sadness, rekindled some ember of
charm amid all that squalor and animal stench. There were bearded
peasants who had been waiting for weeks for God knew what train. Others
seemed to be waiting for their neighbour, delirious with Typhoid fever,
to die; but every time they got near him he would recover enough of a
glimmer of consciousness to swear, with vile curses, that,
Name-of-God-of-Holy-Name-of-God, dirty bastards 9and so on), they’d
never take him to the station infirmary alive; he knew ll about those
miserable hospitals, Name-of-a- Name-of-God, full of dirty sons of
bitches who thought of nothing but stealing a poor man’s boots. Thus he
was settling his account with that sacred thing called life – which so
many great poets have sung – right here. His perspiration-soaked head
was thrown back over his sack (flour and salt), his body curled up in
the manner of sleeping animals or the young of humans sleeping on the
maternal breast. He drooled and groaned in his last agony. His
neighbours, a whole family from Kaluga with beautiful grimy children,
poured boiled water into his mouth three times a day. “He’s got to
drink, poor man!” said the wife. “Ah, how the Evil One torments him!
Lord have pity on us!” The father carefully pushed away the hairy,
louse-infested head which he sometimes found lolling against the thigh
of his oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Marusia, asleep with her rag
doll clutched in her arms. – “What beautiful boots!” observed the sick
man’s neighbours, promising themselves to remove them when he died, so
as to keep the damned city folk from taking advantage.
The nauseating atmosphere in the darkness suggested a cave of primitive
men. Sixteen dialects were spoken there: Polish, White Russian,
Karelian, Mari, Mordvian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Chuvash, Tartar,
Ukrainian, Georgian, Kazakh, Aissor, Gypsy, Yiddish, German. The Gypsies
– those horse thieves!-were universally regarded with mistrust (but
where were the horses?); they jealously guarded their corner over which
reigned a beautiful dark-gold girl and a magnificent bearded man who
must have been a bandit. They sent out their old witches and ragged
little girls to tell fortunes in the marketplaces. People whispered that
they robbed the crypts in cemeteries. – In that crowd you could buy
salt, lard from Little Russia, salt butter marvellously preserved in
indescribable rags, grain, rifles with sawed-off barrels and stocks for
easy concealment under one’s clothing, identity papers. At night the men
mated joylessly with their women: sounds of stirrings, and pantings –
procreations of misfortune for the future. One out of a hundred
survives, but who can know if he is not the one for whom millions of men
are waiting? Never, since the mass migrations invading the old Slavic
cities surrounded by palisades of pointed sticks, had such crowds been
gathered in such misery – and within each heap of mortal beings, the
eternal will to live!
Danil moved toward a door at the far end of the encampment. There, a
tattered calico banner proclaimed: “HE WHO WORKS DOES NOT EAT,” for they
had cut out the negation “DOES NOT” from “HE WHO DOES NOT WORK.” Danil
smiled with satisfaction. AGITATION BUREAU. TRAVEL ORDERS. REGISTRATION.
“Where from?” a man in black leather barked at him.
“From Armavir.”
“Orders?”
A green stamp crashed down on his orders. Good.
“The situation out there?”
“Could be a lot better.”
“Same old story, eh?”
The man yawned.
“Four dead from typhus in the main waiting room since yesterday. One
hooligansmothered under his blankets by his pals, near the lavatory.”
From a poster on the wall above, a soldier in a scarlet tunic and a sort
of pointed cloth helmet (whom the artist had drawn to look like the
Chief of the Army) pointed an imperious hand and face toward every
newcomer. “HAVE YOU ENLISTED IN THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ ARMY?”
“Are they enlisting?”
“They enlist. Especially the young ones. The army eats, you see. And
then they keep the boots and the rifle and go over the wall.”
The vast circular plaza was nearly deserted. At the far end, near the
low domes of a little white church, it opened out into the central
prospect, empty of vehicles, extending in a straight line into the
distant haze… Vagabonds in dirty rags wandered about in front of the
station dragging little sleds behind them. The dirty fog blurred the
outlines of objects. A sledge stood waiting hitched to a black horse
with protruding ribs. Danil saw a well-dressed sailor emerge from the
station, disdainful of the impoverished throng, carrying a red leather
briefcase with a silver monogram; a woman was on his arm, dressed in a
cloth coat with a wide mink collar, but wearing light-coloured high
suede boots and a woollen shawl around her head like a peasant. This
couple pushed its way brutally through the throng. Emaciated women, worn
to the very soul, turned on them with envious looks. “Go ahead and act
haughty, sailor’s girl, we know what you are!”
“Ira, Iris, Odaliska!” cried a shivering urchin wrapped in an old soldier’s coat.
His dark fingers proffered two packs of cigarettes and a little box of
candy to the passerby. Next to him, a stiff, skeletal old lady in an old
braided hat, both her hands stuffed inside a hairless muff, offered
three cubes of sugar, in a saucer attached to the muff.
“How much, madam?” Danil asked her.
As she answered she looked only at the passerby’s hands, for customers
would sometimes try to swipe a third of her merchandise in one quick
movement.
“Forty.”
As Danil moved on, he heard the urchin say to the old lady:
“Open your old peepers there, Grandma, and take a gander. You didn’t see
many like that in the salons of your booge-wazee. That’s Yegor you
know. The man who escaped.”
Danil turned around quickly. The sledge was already sliding off,
carrying away the sailor and his companion. She looked toward him for a
brief instant, and Danil saw that she had long, well-shaped, slanted
eyes whose warm caressing brown glance was like a ray of sunlight
filtering through closed shutters. In the middle of the plaza, on a huge
rectangular granite pedestal, sat a square-shouldered, square-bearded
emperor, massive from boots to neck, cap screwed down heavily over his
bovine brow, fist on one hip; he slouched heavily in the saddle, astride
a monstrous beast with a lowered brow, and seemed to contemplate, while
digesting his dinner, a world forever limited, while his horse,
untroubled, stared into the abyss below. The weight of their power
implied an unlimited impotence.
The train from Moscow had been about six hours late. The afternoon was
fading. Danil walked up Nevsky Prospect, on which he hadn’t set foot in a
year – of course, since the day after his arrest. Czar Peter’s city, he
thought, a window opened on Europe. What grandeur is yours, and what
misery, what misery…
Nobility and grandeur still showed through the rags and tatters. Laundry
hanging from dirty windows right on the main boulevard. Windows broken
to allow for the passage of chimney pipes of little iron stoves,
spitting out their puffs of dirty black smoke against the facades of
buildings. Mud-spattered shop fronts, crumbling facades, shop windows
full of bullet holes and held together with tape, splintered shutters;
watchmaker’s shop windows displaying three watches, an old alarm clock,
and one fancy pendulum clock; unspeakable grocery stores; herb teas
packaged to look like real tea, as if there were still fools so stupid
as to be taken in by these labels, tubes of saccharine, dubious vinegar,
tooth powder – brush your teeth carefully, citizens, since you have
nothing to use them on! – A nasty joyful feeling awakened within Danil.
Ah, what they’ve done to you, Czar Peter’s city, and in such a short time!
Here had stood Café Italien, the Salzetti quartet; to the right of the
entrance, on the mirrored corner, the prettiest prostitutes had sat
smiling out with painted eyes from under their gorgeous hats; some of
them spoke French with a funny accent and played the Parisienne even in
bed… Half the metal shutters were lowered, the pretty white door smudged
with black under the press of dirty hands. HEADQUARTERS, IIND SPECIAL
BATTALION, TRANSFERRED TO KARL LIEBKNECHT STREET. CONSUMERS’
COOPERATIVE, 4TH CHILDREN’S DINING HALL.
Danil pushed open the door, but all he could see through the herring
fumes and the darkness were some broken mirrors. Farther along was the
street of women’s hat shops: MARIE-LOUISE, ELAINE, MADAME SYLVIA,
SELYSETTE, aristocratic names taken from novels or the noms de guerre of
courtesans. It had been a charming street, inhabited morning and
evening by pretty errand girls and elegant ladies. Now sinister, piled
high with snowbanks.
Here’s Leger’s, the goldsmith. Why in the Devil’s name have they stuck
their bearded Marx in here? (A piss-coloured plaster bust, ghostly
behind the half-frozen window.) CLUB OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S COMMITTEE OF
THE 1ST DISTRICT.
Not a single car. And yet what a beautiful city it still is! The
Alexandra theatre showed its noble colonnades. Anyhow, they didn’t
topple the tall silhouette of Empress Catherine in court dress holding
the sceptre; but some idiot had scaled the bronze figures and attached a
red rag on the sceptre – a red rag which was now blackened to the
colour of old blood, the true colour of their red.
The tattered elegance of a slim brunette appealed to Danil. She had the
eyes of a sad gazelle; her voice was more common than her appearance.
Danil took her arm. They walked up the dilapidated street of hat shops.
“What’s your name?”
“Lyda.”
In her cramped little room on the sixth floor of a big white house there
were worn lace doilies on the furniture. Pictures of young officers
were leaning against empty cologne bottles. For months this man had not
embraced a pretty, willing woman with clean underwear, lying on a bed
with proper sheets. The narrow iron bed with its gilded balls reminded
him of another such bed; but one which had been covered only by a pink,
badly stained mattress with holes in it, in that pillaged villa on the
outskirts of Krasnodar, where a stale odour of rot oozed up from the
cellars which nonetheless had been carefully boarded shut. Dunya, a
little Cossack girl with warm dry skin, used to come there to meet him,
barefoot, naked underneath an old red sarafan with blue flowers. The
window was wide open to the soft nights with thin showers of shooting
stars. The cool marble hall: vague anxiety of doors ripped from their
frames. The voices of buddies, drinking nearby at the Georgian’s tavern,
burst in with snatches of the dirty songs which the drunken squadrons
sometimes sang at the top of their lungs as they trotted into conquered
towns whose silence resembled that of cemeteries.
Where, where, where do we get the clap?
From Seraphita, Se-ra-phi-ta!
“All my white eagles are blennorrheal!” said a jovial colonel. Linked to
this memory was a taste of fresh watermelon in the mouth.
“You won’t mind if I don’t take off my boots?” asked Lyda. “See how long they would take to unlace.”
Absently, he shook his head, no. Other images rose up into his
consciousness, emerging from depths thick with slime heavier than
stones. Even the frenzy of the next moments failed to drive them away.
Lyda saw a terrible, absent young face, closed off in an inner
convulsion, driving into her, and she was afraid. At last the big male
body, with its animal armpit odour, sank down next to her, emptied; but
no peace returned to that face. “Where do you come from?” she asked to
break the silence.
“From the south.”
He talked in snatches, little by little, into the air. Us. Them. Who?
The Reds? The Whites? In war they’re all the same: brutes. Listen to
this. What an awful memory: they captured this man in a secret room
hidden between walls. A member of the Committee, understand? They tied
him to a stake, in the square. The crowd was watching, calm, like him,
thinking he was going to be shot. A thick rope was passed around his
head; then, from behind, it was slowly tightened like a vice, with the
help of an axe handle. Then only, the man understood; in a desperate
effort, he nearly broke his bonds; his neck strained and turned blue
with the struggle. The rope tightened heavily around his forehead.
“Slower,” cried fat Shutko, steady in his saddle, albeit drunk. A
curious fellow, Shutko: he could sit his horse perfectly even when
unable to stand… The skull broke open like a nut, the rope was red, the
body collapsed into its bonds, like a limp sack. An uproar broke out in
the square. Everyone ran, the long piercing screams of the women scared
the horses… “My horse…”
“You were there?”
Lyda was reminded that she was naked, naked in front of a man who had
seen these things, and that the traces of this man’s arms and lips, the
seed of his flesh, were on her, in her: it was as if she suddenly felt
soiled with blood, brains, body fluids – a dizzying physical revulsion.
She reached for her coat and covered herself with it, shuddering, her
eyes wide open, no longer brown but black.
If, on the third landing of this stairway, behind a door like any
other, the leather trench coats appeared – “Your papers!” “Hands up,”
whatever they say – it would be all over, irremediably. All. Every step
thereafter would be a step toward… toward what? Better face it, or
you’re no good for anything. Toward a revolver held in a monstrous fist
in the grim light of a cellar where you enter naked, shivering a last
shudder. It took them to think up that one: undressing you. They are
shameless. They don’t hesitate to commit any disgrace. – Clothing is
precious, of course. And are our sabre executions in front of
two-foot-deep trenches dug by tottering prisoners any less abominable?
Less. Our bullets are precious. The sabres glittering in the sun recall
the massacres of antiquity…. And what if there is no sun, phrasemaker?
Danil was still arguing with himself in front of the door which was
about to open onto his fate: the end of an adventure or the end of
everything.
The rites unfolded simply. Ask for Comrade Valerian: American-style
moustache, fleshy nose, close-cropped hair. Say “Prokhor sent me.” Once
inside, add: “Allow me to light a cigarette,” and, getting out the
cigarettes, drop a wad of crumbled newspaper. Wait.
Valerian carelessly flicked the wad into an ashtray, which a moment
later he carried into the next room. Then he reappeared smiling, having
matched up the two fragments of a newspaper headline on the open pages
of a book.
“Is it true that Kazan has fallen?”
It seemed likely. On the black stock market the value of shares had been
rising since the fall of Perm and the defeat of the workers’ councils
of Bavaria. The rumour of Lenin’s assassination, followed by a denial,
had recently enriched some smart operators for a few days. Shares in
societies anonymes, although fallen into the triple anonymity of
illegality, emigration, and anonymous death in prisons, still persisted
in representing the value of nationalised factories, long-pillaged
inventories, and phantom capital. Gamblers with less to lose than those
who commit suicide outside casinos still placed bets at each new
rumour, on the sticky guards of the Civil War.
An idea cut through Danil’s brain like a knife. We are spilling blood
and these people are speculating on every battle, on the firing squads
and the hangings, on… And, since he had to answer himself at that very
moment, he finished out his thought – but they don’t even know how to
speculate they pillage.
He made his report to the Three: Valerian, the Professor, Nikita. The
samovar was humming on the table, which was spread as for a feast. –
“How many trains did you say?” The Professor was repeating his question;
he was a little deaf; gold-rimmed pince-nez, the heavy features of an
aging billy goat. Could this asthmatic bureaucrat be one of the leaders
of the liberation movement here? - “How many airplanes did you say?”
Wasn’t he just asking these questions to give the impression that he
understood? They might be the sign of infantile incomprehension. What
importance did he attach to these uncertain figures? Just a moment
before, the Professor had mentioned “the Yids” in a voice thick with
scorn.
Nikita, close-shaven, with a high smooth forehead and porcelain eyes,
was smoking as he took notes. The Three spoke little, but Danil learned
a great deal. An Esthonian regiment had gone over to the Whites. The
fleet on lake Peipus as well. Other great blows would soon be struck: a
fortress - another fortress – a regiment – a heavy cruiser… Valerian was
examining old railroad maps, on which rivers, as blue as fresh ink, and
the straight lines of tracks stood out against the white background.
Then, by the Professor’s way of inclining his wooden face with its
prematurely detached chin and sharp nostrils over Russia, Danil
discovered in him an ancient hidden power which must make him precious
to the others. He understood that the figures fell necessarily into
place in his mind the way crystals form around a first crystal. No
doubt, no hesitation, no error was possible for this man. No sophism
could influence him. No truth other than his own. Danil thought: If I
were to cry out to him: “Look at what they are doing, look at what we
ourselves are doing. Here’s what I saw. I saw a man’s head split open
under the cord. That form of execution has been extinct since 1650! Are
we really any better than they are?” – he would merely reply in an
absolutely neutral voice: “Second Lieutenant, I believe your tunic is
missing a button. Be more careful of your appearance.” And this would be
more crushing than any vehement reply.
“We have them at bay,” the Professor concluded.
“No bread. No metal. No combustibles. No cloth. No medicine. In the
north, the Americans, the English, the Serbs, the Italians. Here the
Finns, the Esthonians, the Whites. To the east, the Supreme Commander.
To the west, the Poles. To the south, the Whites. Us – everywhere: in
the army, in the fleet, in the economic councils, in the cooperatives.
Behind us, the powers. With us, the people, all who are not the dregs of
the ignorant masses. Us, the only hope.
“They nationalised the notions business. You stand in line for seventeen
hours in four different places to get your seventh and final piece of
paper: a ticket good for four spools of thread. And when you get to the
store there is no more thread because the last of the stock has been
stolen during the night, ha, ha, ha!- Do you know why they made the
mails free? Because it cost too much to print up stamps!
“They instituted a free food program for children, but small coffins are
at a premium on the market and there’s a line at the cemetery! – and
how they ape us! In their trenches the soldiers no longer salute their
officers with “Your Honour,” but they cry out in the same voice by God,
“In the service of the Revolution!” Jolly service! Every night groups of
men desert by fleeing forward toward the enemy, who has bread.”
The conversation had become animated. The Professor was explaining to
Nikita that when order was re-established there would be a ticklish
problem facing jurists. Which laws to apply to the ringleaders?
Common-law crimes, sacrileges, they have plenty to answer for; but in
their case the exercise of power has created a new juridical situation.
Usurpation.
Valerian began to laugh:
“Martial law, by God! The fewest possible formalities.”
The Professor raised his wooden face, the two sides of which were
multiplied into geometrical reflections in the lenses of his lorgnon,
and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“The state is based on the notion of right. Regicides, parricides, and
the sacrilegious have a right to the safeguard of the laws. According to
Roman law…”
Nikita thought about forests. Last year he had walked for five weeks
through the forests of the Dvina, sometimes following the trails of
great hungry bears in the fresh snow, listening to the wolves howling at
sundown, resting under the pines in the awful cold, building himself a
fire a rare treat (a dangerous treat, for fire could attract man),
learning how to devour the raw flesh of wolves and crows. The silence of
the forest was so immense that it seemed to cover the whole earth, to
blot out all memory; the pines under first snows seemed in turn white,
dappled, blue, dark, darker than night, depending on the hour and the
light. The sounds of flapping wings and indistinct animal cries, of
broken branches falling, of faint breathing, lingered momentarily and
vanished, leaving a sharp, delicate imprint on the man’s soul like the
snowy footprints of an emaciated old wolf who passed by a while ago with
his tongue hanging out between sharp fangs, making his own mysterious
way through the woods, through the cold, through hunger toward his prey
or toward death. The man stooping attentively over his trail knew
trigonometry and recited Andre Chenier’s poems by heart in the
clearings. On the seventeenth day, in the middle of a mortally cold
frost, with only seven cartridges left, Nikita saw lines of smoke rising
straight up over grey huts squatting like moles on the Russian earth.
He turned back with hurried steps, skis sinking into the soft deep snow.
Better to stretch out alone beneath one of those ancient pyramidal
pines sparkling with diamonds under the rays of the moon and die in
peace, of slow exhaustion – better this end than encountering man. And
yet he did encounter a man, being unable to avoid him, and the encounter
was a fortunate one: they came upon each other, inexplicably,
face-to-face in the middle of the forest, two rifles, two wary instincts
overcome by surprise, sniffing each other out at a distance of twenty
yards like two beasts of the forest. The other man was a forgotten old
woodsman who knew nothing about the war, nothing about the Revolution,
nothing of the death of the Czar, nothing about anything. Every summer
he travelled one hundred versts to the northwest, to a Komi village, to
get powder, brandy and matches. Arriving home, alone as always with the
silent female who slept at the back of his hut, he would drink for days
on end. During these times he would talk out loud, volubly and
disconnectedly, dreaming, attempting to sing but remembering only the
opening words of the Lord’s Prayer – “Our Father who art in heaven” –
and snatches of a sad prison ballad – “Open up the prison door for me…”
The female, too, her spirits warmed by the alcohol, would begin singing
languorous lullabies in her Komi language. Then they would fall asleep
huddled next to each other on the beaten earth. The door of the hut was
open to the green vastness. Birds hopped in and out. Red squirrels
plumed with magnificent tails came to stare with their bright little
eyes at the strange disarmed sleep of the two human beings. The man had
been living this way – nameless, ageless- for years. He barely knew to
talk anymore. He didn’t know what a newspaper was. The sight of a
lighter impressed him so much that for an instant Nikita feared that he
might kill him from behind as they slid along single file on their skis,
just to possess this marvellous object which could give birth to fire
at the flip of a fingernail. But this solitary figure had lived away
from men too long to think anymore of striking his own kind. He tamed
squirrels. He derived great joy from spending warm afternoons frolicking
with these intelligent little animals. “So intelligent,” he declared,
that thanks to them he still retained the idea of intelligence. From him
Nikita learned that he had come the wrong way. Snenkursk, the British
outpost, was still distant by twenty days’ march that way, toward those
constellations, then following the course of the river: watch out for
bears… In these forests you needed to get your bearings by sextant, as
on the high seas. Nikita went back the way he had come. Now he no longer
knew whether it had been a nightmare or a rare burst of sunlight in his
life.
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