THERE were funerals and
celebrations. They dug up the hardened earth of the Field of mars in order to
lower red coffins, covered with ribboned wreaths and borne on gun carriages,
into wide common graves. From atop the granite ramparts, the President of the
Executive affirmed the immortality of the working class. A scarlet banner
suspended above the mounds crackled in the cold wind. ETERNAL COMMUNIST MEMORY
FOR THOSE WHO FELL. Johann Appolinarius Fuchs found this Elzevirian
inscription, on which he had worked for three days, rather beautiful. The
oppressive cadences of the funeral marches marked the rhythm of the passing
troops. The morning was damp; an invincible gloom came out of the earth. The victors marched past. They didn’t appear
to be passing into glory but rather to be returning, exhausted, from regions of
misfortune. The men saw war naked, without parades and lies, as it appears to
those who fight and want no more of it. Yet they would march with the same firm
step to the end of the earth in order to put an end to it. Four thousand men
filled the white-and-gold hall of the Opera that evening.
A bitter smell of warmth earth rose up from their grey ranks toward the white
goddesses of the vaulted ceiling who held garlands out into the smoky blue. The
hands of four thousand men were draped over the armrests of loges and balconies
– hands of Riazan farmers, Bashkir shepherds, northern fishers, weavers who had
become machine gunners. These clumsy hands knew nothing of eloquent, refined
gestures; they were happy to be doing nothing and to possess things peacefully at
last for one evening. The stage was brilliant, with a beautiful golden backdrop
of painted cardboard. Chaliapin appeared in tails and white gloves, just as he
had before the Emperor not long ago, greeting this audience as he had the other
(the audience which had passed before the firing squad) with a deep bow and the
smile of a masterful charmer. Voices cracked through the hall: “The Knout! The Knout!” Love songs are
beautiful, doubtless, but what this audience, this army crowded into a concert
hall, likes is “The Song of the Knout.” They know the Knout! Its taste on your
back, its taste across your face; and also how to apply the knout, the
capitalists know a few things about that! Sing us that one, comrade, and you’ll
hear bravos the like of which that other audience- the one that will never
return, the one you miss perhaps deep down in your soul, the other audience
with its low-cut dresses and its monocles- never gave you! Hands which have
moved stones, earth, manure, metals, fire, and blood will applaud you! – And
the perfect voice sang out “The Song of Knout.” That’s a song, brothers!
The singer was bowing his way out, wreathed in luxuriant smiles. Encore! Encore! He was about to return
to the front of the stage and to give in again to the enthusiasm of the crowd
when, from out of the wings, a simian hand grabbed his arm. “Wait, comrade.”
With a flick of the wrist, he repaired the crease in his cuff, crumpled by the
ungainly grasp of this little, faceless, sunburned old soldier whose eyes were
nothing more than dull brown spots. The surprised hall saw a little man dressed
in the long coat of the Bashkir Division appear in the place of the great
actor. Someone exclaimed: “Kara Galiev!” The soldier advanced upstage with a
heavy tread and stopped at the prompter’s box. There, he raised his arm; at its
end the hand was wound with white bandages. He was muddy to the waist. It never
occurred to him to remove his cap, which was scrunched down as far as his
eyebrows. He shouted:
“Comrades!”
What now? Another disaster?
“… Gdov is ours!”
A new acclamation burst from the warm darkness of the hall. On the stage the
handsome singer reappeared behind the messenger from the front. Bowing
slightly, sparkling with whiteness, ebony blackness, grace and smiles, he too
applauded this obscure victory snatched from the mud of the Esthonian border.
Snow covered the fresh graves which were
already half forgotten. Life is for the living and they have trouble staying
alive. Once again the long nights seemed reluctant to abandon the city. For a
few hours each day a grey light of dawn or dusk filtered through the dirty
white cloud ceiling and spread over things like the dim reflection of a distant
glacier. Even the snow, which continued to fall, lacked brightness. This white,
silent, weightless shroud stretched out to infinity in time and space. By three
in the afternoon it was already necessary to light the lamps. Evening darkened
the snow with hues of ash, deep blue, and the stubborn grey of old stones.
Night took over, inexorable and calm: unreal. In the darkness the delta
reverted to its geographical configurations. Dark cliffs of stone cut at right
angles lined the frozen canals. A kind of dark phosphorescence emanated from
the broad river of ice.
Sometimes the north winds blowing in from Spitsbergen and farther still- from
Greenland perhaps, perhaps from the pole by way of the Arctic Ocean, Norway,
and the White Sea- gusted across the bleak estuary of the Neva. All at once the
cold bit into the granite; the heavy fogs which had come up from the south
across the Baltic vanished, and the denuded stones, earth and trees were
instantly covered with crystals of frost, each of which was a barely visible
marvel composed of numbers, lines of force, and whiteness. The night changed
its aspect, shedding its veils of unreality. The North Star appeared, the
constellations opened the immensity of the world. The next day the bronze
horsemen, covered with silver powder on their stone pedestals, seemed to step
out of a strange festival; from the tall granite columns of St. Isaac’s
Cathedral to its pediment peopled with saints and even to its massive gilded
cupola- all was covered with frost. The red granite facades and embankments
took on a tint of pink and white ash under this magnificent cloak. The gardens,
with their delicate filigree of branches, appeared enchanted. This
phantasmagoria delighted the eyes of people emerging from their stuffy
dwellings, just as millennia ago men dressed in pelts emerged fearfully in
wintertime from their warm caves full of good animal stench.
Not a single light in whole quarters. Prehistoric gloom.
The red flags over the gates of
the old palaces were turning black. Ryzhik no longer kept track of the time.
His day had neither beginning nor end. He slept whenever he could, by day, by
night, sometimes at the beginning of meetings, when the speaker was longwinded.
– Toward midnight, Justas he was getting worried, a hushed voice in the ear
trumpet of the telephone communicated to him the results of the Aronsohn raid.
“Hello, Ryzhik? That you, Ryzhik? Raid over; picked up three bundles of letters
and documents; seized twelve pounds of butter, seventy pounds of floor, two
dozen cakes of soap…. Wait a minute, what else, yes, photos, and cans, eighteen
of them… - No, no arrests. The bastards flew the coop. they fired a few shots….
- Xenia/ Xenia got two bullets in the belly…” These last two words took on
their full meaning in his mind only slowly. They exploded and went out. They
lit up again in the depth of his consciousness like the little blue safety
lamps in boiler rooms which sometimes indicate that the pressure has gotten too
high; danger – then there was the
carnal image of a wounded belly. Ryzhik went down to the library. His jaw was
rigid, his eyes vague.
Two soldiers were chatting by the light of a night lamp next to the big Dutch
earthenware stove. Ryzhik, his back against the stove to let the heat penetrate
him, closed his eyes. The night reigned, magnificently silent, over the snow,
the ice, the city.
“You look awful, Ryzhik,” said one of the men. “I’m beat myself. Flour was up
to one hundred rubles today.”
In the silence which followed, Ryzhik heard bells ringing – bells, bells,
bells- jangling, far off, grating, hectic, exasperating, comforting… He ought
to say that Xenia… but he didn’t want to say it, and he lent his ear to the
bells, the bells…
“We’re in bad shape, with these prices,” continued the heavy voice which had
just spoken. “Listen to what this guy’s telling, Ryzhik.”
They listened without seeing each other, for their eyes fixed involuntarily on
the flame of the night lamp: a little wick floating in oil in a tin trefoil…..
The other man, a foreigner, spoke the mutilated language of an ex-prisoner of
war; and he was saying mutilated things, too, of another age, another world.
Europe, comrades…. The silent dead factories of Vienna, the poor quarters
swarming with rachitic children, the crippled decorated veterans selling
matches outside nightclubs on Kaerntnerstrasse. And the execution of the
Hunchback, no, not in Vienna, in Budapest, between the Christmas and New Year’s
celebrations, a celebration just as brilliant for which they fought over
invitations… Ah, the Hunchback was magnificent! Even the newspapers said so.
The others sang as they waited their turn, you could hear them easily, they
didn’t dare shut them up. The society people gave the executioner an ovation.
Here.
The man got up and looked inside his tunic for a shapeless billfold from which
he removed a piece of paper on which was written a single pencilled line.
“Here’s one of the last lines written by the Hunchback:
“Ich gehe mit einer Alle umfassenden
Liebe in das Nichts [I enter with an immense love into the night].”
Ryzhik said harshly:
“Too lyrical. Everything is much simpler. It’s easier to die than…”
And he walked out. He was suffocating. The freezing night cooled his face.
Crystal-like bells continued to jingle in the distance, far off. Ryzhik said
aloud the three magic words: “It is necessary. It is necessary.” The bells
covered them. It is necessary. It is necessary… the world was empty like a
great glass bell.
That night only twenty-one
carloads of food supplies arrived in the city (three of them were pillaged).
Just as long as we hold out until spring! The European proletariat….
Martyshkino, Leningrad, Moscow
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