The Interview

A little after new years day I saw The Interview was uploaded to youtube, originally when the trailer came out I was going to give it a miss since most comedy trailers nowadays put their best jokes in them and I didn't laugh once. But thanks to craziness about Kim Jong Un supposedly not being a fan (I wonder if he got a preview screening) and hacking and alarmist comments that this could somehow provoke a war

A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said in state media that the movie's release would be an "act of war".
He did not mention the title, but a Hollywood movie called The Interview with a similar plot is due in October.

 I decided why not? After all it wasn't costing me anything, and I could always click onto something else if it was awful. I watched the whole thing which honestly surprised me, I didn't like any of the films big jokes but a few quick gags were amusing, and I was genuinely interested to see where the plot was going. Its got quite a few problems besides jokes that go on to long, James Franco seems to be doing an impression of Jack Nicholson's Joker, "First you eat your vegetables, then you get to eat your STEEEEEEAAAAKK!" which I found very distracting. And I don't really care for Seth Rogen, he's one of those actors who seems to be playing himself in every role, just with a different job and circle of friends. I don't dislike him or anything, I think he has the best lines of the two, but I don't think he adds much.

Randall Park (pictured) the guy they got to play Kim Jong Un is very good though, in some scenes he does look very similar to the Great Leader, and his acting is very convincing. He's jokey and charming when the plot needs him to be, and he can snap into sinister viciousness when that's required too. Other than that, its well made, all the sets look convincing except for one though the fake set and dodgy props are deliberate ass they're part of the plot.

Now onto the juicy stuff, the political fallout. First a disclaimer I have absolutely no idea who was behind the Sony Hack and I don't really care, its completely irrelevant to anyone who isn't attached to Sony. Now the only reason I did bother to watch The Interview was because of the absurd political clashes over it. I was surprised by how surprised quite a few media personalities were about the denunciations by the North Korean government, plenty of government officials the world over have shown they have no sense of humour and the DPRK isn't usually considered an exception. I mean just saying you're going to kill the President of the US gets you investigated by the Secret Service so I don't think anyone has the moral high ground in this fight.

And its not like North Korea is unique in attacking media that revolves around killing a head of state, the 2004 game JFK: Reloaded a game about assassinating JFK was denounced by at least two Senators; Ted Kennedy and Joe Lieberman.

Like I was saying I was taken aback by the number of times I saw variations of "haven't they got something better to do?" -the they referring to the North Korean Foreign affairs and diplomats- in western media. I can only assume this stems from unfamiliarity with politicians who work in international affairs, which is kinda worrying since "knowing things"  is the main requirement of news media. Diplomats and Foreign Secretaries are living breathing propaganda machines, their one and only job is to represent their nation in the best possible light, that includes refuting and stifling criticism. Furthermore The Interview was made by Americans in the USA, a nation that North Korea has no official ties or business with, so they really don't have anything better to do there. If it was Russia or China or Iran, you know nations that North Korea does have a working relationship and economic ties, then yes they probably would have better things to do, like investments and rocket sales. Though personally speaking I think the North Korean government should be more worried about what the film has to say about assassinating Kim Jong Un, they outright state that killing him won't solve anything since they'll just replace him with another brother or just another General. You have to expose and publicly challenge the regime to have a chance at fundamental change.

If you were even a little curious I recommend giving the film a watch though feel free to skip the first bit its just "hilarious" buddy antics.

Chapter 9

YEGOR, lying on his belly crosswise on the big bed, considered Danil, straddling a chair in front of him. Yegor was wearing a blue blouse belted at the waist by a silk chord and a pair of long sailor’s trousers. He was beating time on a pillow with his feet, which were clad in simple red leather Turkish slippers. His head appeared enormous. Nose sniffing for a fight. Wide, fresh mouth, high forehead topped by blond tufts. A soft drunkenness, which wasn’t drunkenness but rather an inner instability pregnant with storms about to break, stagnated in his eyes, in the sharp curve of his mouth, in the quick pulse of the veins in his neck.
Danil, seeing his expression harden into that of a high-powered gambler about to stake his bet, sensed an obscure danger approaching. He had come to ask this bandit for arms, munitions, money for the Green partisans hiding out in the forests.

“Your Greens,” Yegor said heavily at last, “are too green. Understand?”
Golden candelabra standing on the piano threw the saffron light of twelve candles into the room. Open tins yawned up from the deal table. There was black bread, bits of dried fish spread out on crumpled newspaper, cigarette boxes full of butts, and little crystal glasses decorated with vine-leaf tracings. Discarded cigarette butts studded the floor on every side. Rifles were stacked against the back of a brocade armchair over which a long black silk stocking lay like a serpent. An enamel washbasin full of toilet water was standing on the white marble mantelpiece. The windows, boarded up on the outside and hung with Bokhara rugs on the inside, gave no clue as to whether it was day or night. Seen from without, the big dead house must seem abandoned. The red seals of the Special Commission covered the doors. The only way in was through deserted, disreputable back courts or a secret opening in the wall of the neighbouring house.
“No,” said Danil. “You…”
Yegor stared into space. His feet beat the pillow more rapidly. He was groping for an idea as, in a fight, he would have groped for something to throw – a glass, an inkpot, a knife. In a different voice, he called: “Shura!”
Shura entered. Noiselessly she appeared at the foot of the bed, a woman wearing a long silk Turkoman dress with wide red-and-blue stripes.
“What?”
“Take off my shoes and socks. Quick.”
he continued to tap his foot nervously against the rug which covered the bed while she removed his slippers and silk stockings in heavy silence. A bare foot, red, with flat toenails, buried itself in the pillow. Yegor withdrew behind his eyes. Danil felt vaguely chilly.
“Anything else?” asked Shura, who seemed to be unaware of the presence of another man three feet away. She had a thickset face, broad through the cheeks; eyes which slanted toward her temples; thick painted lips whose crimson suggested a scream crushed against that mouth; black hair plastered down on both sides of her forehead; bare arms. She was from Asia.
“Cognac.”
He swallowed the liquor in one gulp.
“Anything else?”
“Sit there.”
Seated on the side of the bed, the woman at last turned a soft glance on Danil. Yegor seized her knee in a grip like a pincers. “Do you see,” he said to Danil, “how I hold this knee? I felt like grabbing you by the neck that way. You would have removed my slippers, you would have poured me a drink, and if I had s[it in your face you would have wiped it off without a word. Some of them even smile when I do it to them. Enough! Remember that Yegor is in a good mood tonight. You picked a good time to come and tell him lies to his face. I know what your Greens are worth. To hell with them and you too. Now, let’s drink. Pour, Shura. Not those glasses…”
A little crystal glass shattered somewhere across the floor. Shura filled some tea glasses with cognac. In profile, a tall bizarrely striped form, a bare arm, smooth and tawny, a low Chinese forehead under jet-black braids. “You drink too!” Yegor told her. She drank slowly with one elbow lifted the way teamsters drink in cabarets. An ambiguous half smile creased her face. Danil saw warm golden sparks in her pupils. Perhaps it was only the reflection of the candles. Yegor resumed his monologue.
“What were you Greens doing when I was taking the Palace? I may well have been the first man in there, rifle butt forward. You can still see the mark of my rifle on the wall panelling. I shot Paul I in effigy. You can still see the holes in his white breeches. That’s where I aim. You don’t like that?”
“It’s all the same to me.”
“Ah, very well. I took Pavlograd; me, do you understand?”
The dull anger building up inside him vanished instantly, carried away by a sort of fond merriment.
“What’s your name? Danil? Listen, Danil, I set fire to Pavlograd prison. That was a pleasure… Hey, Shura, do you remember back in December, the way we worked in the square at night? That was another good time.”
On those nights their jolly band moved into a huge square bounded by a half-moon of buildings whose windows suggested blind eyes. The arch of Army Headquarters, surmounted by an invisible four-horse chariot, opened like a triumphal gate into a deeper darkness. The breeze blew up a snowy powder which suddenly began to sparkle, suspended within the limits of visibility, when the broad straight beam of a searchlight rose over the Winter Palace. This huge luminous sword cut uselessly through the polar sky. At the bottom of the square, the old Foreign Ministry building bent sharply toward Cantors’ Bridge like a cardboard stage setting. The gang proceeded to the foot of the tall granite column, erected in memory of a forgotten victory, in order to saw off the bronze grillwork. The copper was excellent! Fences were offering a good price for them. Yegor had also thought of stealing the Turkish cannon planted muzzle-down at the corners, but they weren’t offering enough for them. The lights were burning in the windows of the militia post a hundred yards away. A few good pals were inside. – Yegor yawned.

“Danil, you can go tell your people that Yegor says, “up your ass.” He’s with the Revolution, Yegor is. Not the commissars’ Revolution but his own, his very own, which still has some good days and fine nights ahead of it. Pour him another drink, Shura, and then to hell with him.
Danil left. Shura walked ahead, carrying a candlestick. Huge shadows danced noiselessly around them. The young woman drew the light close to her lips, whose irritating red was like a scream. The flame went out, the cold night blew in with a sudden glitter of starlight.
“What stars!” said Danil in spite of himself.
“What stars!” murmured distinctly the irritating lips which had just disappeared behind him.
Stormy chords banged out on a piano were exploding somewhere like an underground symphony.
Yegor paced the room, his hips rolling slightly, gesticulating. And, speaking aloud, he muttered, “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
Yeah, I took Pavlograd. I set fire to the prison. A little orange cat was caught in the guardhouse. So we dashed up the smoke-filled stairs, Brik and I, and we pulled the poor animal out of the flames, yeah. And then I worked a whole morning behind the wall of a little station – but what station! What station? – shooting the officers who had surrendered the night before. How tired we were afterward! I swam across the Dnieper. They killed Brik. What was the name of that nice old mujik who fed me, dried me, dressed me, hid me? A funny name, a mare’s name… We crashed two locomotives together to block the right of way. That was at Matveevka, yes. What a magnificient thing that was, the crash of those two machines, the speed, the momentum, the power, the screaming boilers and that explosion – black, red, white! I jumped out of the cab just in time, yeah. The precise second! I felt the hot breath of the explosion on my back, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Suddenly he thought:
If they had hold of you now, you’d get a bullet in the back of the neck and it would be all over for you, Yegor.
He cried out in the middle of a lengthy yawn – the yawn of a caged beast.
“Shura, I’m bored…”
Half consciously he opened the piano. His head was ready to explode, it was full of things. How to say them? How to silence them? What to yell? What to smash? He struck the keyboard with both hands, seeking deep rumbling notes, unleashing wild chords, a raging battle, a fantastic storm mingled with inarticulate melodies, ecstacies, and sobs.
With the firm tread of a drunk he walked down the long dark corridor toward the women’s room – the “Bitches’ Barracks” – which was at the end. Whispers were audible through the half-open door.
“Didja hear that?” asked Dunya-the-Snake.
Katka-Little-Apple sighed:
“That’s Yegor going off his rocker. I feel bad for him, poor Yegor, with those restless eyes. Oh, Manya, Manya, he feels the end coming, I tell you, and I feel sorry for him, really sorry…”
The three women were probably squatting, as they always did, on pillows around the little stove. Between the two young ones sat old Manya, wrinkled hands under the candle spreading out toward solitaire cards: Manya reeking of lod age with century – old lizard eyes and an obstinate will to live – eh, why go on living, old witch? Yegor would have wanted to grab his own life full of red strength in both hands and wring it out like a discarded rag and throw it in the face of… in whose face, for Christ’s sake?
Old Manya’s answer filtered out of the room along with a faint ruddy glow:
“Don’t worry about him, Katka. Men are all swine. Spit on them. And then, he’s got his Shura. Too bad for her. God bless her.”
Yegor smiled, relaxed, shoulder blades flat against the wall, body heavy.
“Manya,” interjected Dunya-the-Snake, “tell us about Nice.”
“Another time. Those were different times, my girls, the good old days… But we manage to get along, don’t we? Do you know what Tata is doing? She can’t sleep with the commissars, not with a broken nose and a voice like an old worn-out shoe. But she found herself a racket. She undresses little kids. “Here, little boy, come here. I’ve got something interesting to show you….” – she takes the kid by the hand, all sweet and nice, and leads him into a hallway. Two slaps across his little face and Tata collects his coat, his hat, his gloves, a good day’s work.”
“That turns my stomach,” said Katka. “Poor little kids.”
“They’re gonna croak one way or another,” said Manya softly.
“These days.”
“And anyway,” ventured Dunya-the-Snake, “if they’re the kids of the bourgeois, too bad for them.”
“Shut up, you stupid little Agit-Prop. You know that big building they’re putting up over the canal? Well, a whole gang of kids is holed up there, with Olenka-the-Runaway as their chief. What do you say to that? Ah, now there’s a somebody for all her thirteen years. Looks like a little lamb; sweet, well-mannered and all that, but cunning. I’m sure she’s the one who killed that little boy by the Oats Market. You know what they thought up? They catch cats, they eat them, and sell the skins to the Chinese… They also work poor boxes in the churches and ration cards in the food lines….
“Tell us about Nice, sweet Manya, tell us about Nice,” begged Dunya.
Yegor moved away noiselessly, his head bowed.
It was very late when Stassik arrived. Icicles clung to his burgeoning beard. His old soldier’s coat was stiff with the cold. They sat across from each other leaning on their elbows and drank tea and cognac. Stassik brought the latest issues of the Tocsin published in a Ukrainian village during the passing of a singing army which moved in carts – a machine gun and an accordion in each cart – under black banners.

Yegor glanced at a headline:
RESOLUTIONS OF THE SPECIAL CONFERENCE OF THE CONFEDERATION..
More resolutions, more organisations, more conferences even under these midnight banners! Yegor drank, and this last swig of burning liquor seemed in a strange way to sober him at the same time as it made him entirely drunk.
“Put away your papers, Stassik,” he said. “I don’t want to see them. I’m not a believer. All I know about is one thing: the melting snows, the great spring waters, the flooding rivers carrying along granite-hard ice blocks, dead dogs, last year’s garbage, old pranks… it’s a flood, understand, and we’re all rolling down to the sea: ah! How beautiful it is to be carried along and to carry off everything before you! A block of ice, that’s what I am. I’ve got to crash into arches and bridges. I’ve got to hear the barge hulls resounding under my blows.”
“And afterward?” said Stassik.
“Afterward, I don’t give a fuck. Put away your pamphlets, Stassik, I don’t believe in them.”
He took another drink.
“I’m bored, Stassik. Do you believe?”
“In what?”
“In what do you say.”
Yegor’s head felt heavy, ready to fall. He was holding it up with both hands. Wouldn’t it fall anyway, roll across the floor, bounce up like a great soccer ball, and smack its brow against the black-and-white keyboard, there to unleash storms and perish? Stassik, sitting stiffly, black and white, black beard and white skin like the piano keys, was certainly not drunk. Stassik’s hands lay flat on the table, sharp and clear amid the general disorder. He answered with words as blunt as deeds.
“You’ve got a child’s brain in an athlete’s skull, Yegor. “Believe” is an old word, Yegor. I know. I know that man will be free on a free earth. I know that we will all be killed long before that. I know that we will be forgotten. I know that the future will be magnificent. I know it’s time to begin.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Yegor, “you’re right. I believe, too, Stassik.”
He burst out laughing.
“So long as we’re killed beforehand. Are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure of it,” Stassik answered gravely.
Yegor thought his forehead had hit the keyboard. A splendid storm thundered around him. He was smiling, ecstatic, into an immense certainty. Like the sun over the Baltic in July, bursting through the clouds and making waves of light ripple suddenly across the sea. Certainty. He was searching for something in this chaos, as he had been searching in his memory across this seascape: the near-forgotten name of a woman.
“Stassik, do you want some money for the organisation? Take.”
The money was in the drawer of the table. Tea had spilled over the stacks of banknotes, which were mingled with dirty postcards. Stassik began methodically to sort out the dry bills.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter. 
Index

Chapter 8

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.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter.  
Index

Darkness at Noon

 

I recently got round to reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, now I'd been interested in reading Darkness for a little while, and by little while I mean a little under ten years. You see back when I was still in the Comp taking GCSE History my history teacher Mr Davies told the class during the Soviet Union module about an account of Stalin's purges. I couldn't remember the name but I remembered two scenes that took place in the book. One involves a conversation in a prison exercise yard, the protagonist (who I couldn't remember either) is talking to a cell mate, asking why he's in prison. His new companion replies that he is a peasant from a province far away, and when a female Doctor came to prick the children of his village for vaccinations he didn't killed her. It seems he didn't understand what was happening and panicked, in trying to protect his children he became a murderer and a "reactionary".

The other part I remembered clearly was an argument during one of the main characters many interrogations. The argument turns to the protagonists watch, the interrogator wants to know when the protagonist received his first watch, the protagonist answer provokes a confession of sorts from the interrogator that he grew up in a village where they still do not know the day is divided into hours and says something like "if you tell the people of my village, the train will arrive to collect the grain at 11am tomorrow the only word they'll understand is tomorrow. They will go to the train station the next morning and just wait for a train to arrive,all day if need be and sleep on the platform floor" These scenes have stuck in my mind ever since and I've now finally been able to lay this demon to rest. It was worth the wait.

The author Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Communist, after joining the German Communist party in 1931 he soon worked for the Comintern in several roles revolving writing. He wrote a book on the Five Year Plan but didn't get approval so the Russian version was scrapped and the published German version heavily censored. During the Spanish Civil War he became a spy for the Soviet Union using a cover as a journalist for the British newspaper the News Chronicle, he got access to Franco's headquarters in Seville and uncovered direct evidence of the early involvement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

After that he returned to Spain as a news correspondent but was in Malaga when it fell to Franco's forces, as a result he was held for several months in Seville awaiting execution but a prisoner exchange saved his life. Because of these experiences amongst others, Koestler had direct experience of espionage (coded messages and underground cells) prisons with their interrogations and midnight executions, and the absurdity of Comintern policy during the 1930's and how it dealt with the unorthodox and ignored its history.

The 1930's were probably the most confused period for the Soviet Union and its western parties, in the early thirties Stalin encouraged western parties to focus on attacking left wing rivals, Trotskyists and Socialists mainly. He was not above using tricks and pressure to get his way and could topple CP leaders as far away as the USA (see Jay Lovestone) however once Hitler came to power in Germany to complement Mussolini and disproved the assertion that Fascism was a uniquely Italian phenomenon, that quickly changed.

From left to right: Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, Harpo

The mid to late thirties was the period of Popular Front, now the CP a bitter sectarian in most nations had become an eager facilitator for an alliance of convenience with anyone willing to work with them. And I do mean anyone in Spain the Communist Party worked with POUM a coalition of Trots and Bukharinists both Stalin's main rivals for the leadership of Soviet Union, and Anarchists. In Britain the CPGB publicly supported Churchill and his "Progressive Tories" totally ignoring his bloody past, his Imperialist views and his attempt at the time to build a partnership with the Fascist sympathising Edward VIII.

And in 1939 it changed yet again with the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which meant that officially the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were neutral and hostilities between the two had ceased.


I'm pretty sure everybody knows what happened next. These changes weren't easy or without cost, every time the Soviet Union made a switch and forced its little brothers to come along for the ride they paid quite a price. Many senior figures and activists wouldn't or couldn't make so radical a change and either left or were forced out. The lack of direction and confusion led to a loss of support and faith in some quarters, and the focusing of resources on what was basically Soviet foreign policy killed any chance a Western Communist party had of growing to the point it could seriously threaten their national bourgeoisie or emancipate the working class. Only in Spain were the Communists strong enough to rule, and that was thanks to Soviet Military support, which enabled them to crush their left wing rivals, but even that proved useless since they then lost the war to Franco anyway.

All of this is reflected in Darkness at Noon, while Rubashov is in his cell reflecting on things he recalls his own part in these intrigues and the actions he has done that help cement the rot in the Revolution. As an old Bolshevik he was one of the senior figures sent out into Europe to enforce the will of the party abroad. He also refused to speak out and merely made sure that his outlook matched the Parties at all times. Rubashov isn't an innocent martyr being turned on by a monster, he's partly to blame for this state of affairs and now his creation is turning on him for failing to live up to its exacting if fluid standards. Its an examination of the Russian Revolution and the role of a powerful Party Apparatus, and looks at collective psychology.
 
Arthur Koestler was himself disillusioned with the Soviet Union and left the Communist party in 1938, Darkness at Noon was published in 1941, and it caused quite a stir at the time making him world famous. Since Stalin is dead and the Soviet Union is gone the book has lost some of its appeal, but its still a fascinating look into the mind of a Comintern member and a reminder of the chaos of the 30's that's often overlooked despite being very important. For example had the Soviet Union left the German Communists to make up their own minds, opposition to the Nazi's which had been quite fierce may well have taken precedence over squabbling with the Social Democrats, which may have prevented Hitler from coming to power, or at the least presented his unstable regime with a serious internal opposition that if nothing else would delay his foreign ambitions.

To take another example had the Soviet Union restricted its role in Spain to military assistance, then the Anti-Fascist alliance might of survived, it broke down because the Spanish Communist party attacked the other factions, something they wouldn't have dared to do without backing from the USSR. An independent Spanish Communist party may also have been more willing to grant independence to Spanish Morocco, an important point since Franco depended upon the troops stationed there and the Moorish regiments. Granting independence to a colony that gave them nothing would have meant the Moorish soldiers were unlikely to fight and Franco would have had to keep most of his forces across the sea to prevent an uprising. I could go on, and I know these are speculation on what if, but they do make quite a bit of sense and were at least viable alternatives. 

 
You can read a PDF version of Darkness at Noon here,  

Chapter 7

Arkadi awoke later, at sunset. Scraps of blue showed through a sky closed in by white and leaden clouds scuttling off to the west. A difficult case had kept him sitting up until dawn opposite silent, tight-mouthed Maria Pavlovna, whose glance was direct when it fell on you, yet evasive when you tried to catch her eye, and that brute Terentiev, with his fat blond face and his disgusting way of licking his chops and of pulling his upper lip back over his bright red gums when he laughed. The file on the Schwaber case had been passed on from one hand to another. Terentiev indicated the examining magistrate’s conclusion with the black-rimmed nail of his sausage-like finger: “guilty and dangerous.” But what if they were telling the truth, these Schwabers? The father, the mother, the older son and daughter all stubbornly gave the same story, which sometimes seemed strikingly sincere and at other times like an absurd denial in the face of the obvious. The spy had lived with them. They had passed on letters to third parties, received messages for him, lied to cover his indiscretions, kept a suitcase containing his code. They insisted they knew nothing about it; that it was all simple; that they had thought they were dealing with an ordinary, rather pleasant man. Who were they? None of the three judges had ever seen them. Arkadi pored over their signatures with a strange inner tension. Under hers, the girl had written in a schoolgirl scrawl: “I swear before the Virgin we are all innocent, Olga Schwaber.” This evocation of the Virgin made Terentiev’s lip curl.
“So,” he said, “that would make four coincidences!”
“Four coincidences,” repeated Maria Pavlovna with raised eyebrows.
“They were duped,” said Arkadi.
“One coincidence per head: nineteen years old, twenty-one (student at the Institute of Technology, Catholic), forty-four (graduate of the school for the Daughters of the Nobility, religious, monarchist), fifty-three (noble, rentier, former landlord, member of the Constitutional-Democratic Party…).” Rich religious nobles, “class enemies throughout every fibre of their beings,” wrote the examining magistrate. “By the way, who was the magistrate?” “Zvereva.”
“Ah, yes, that ugly little woman – still young, always well dressed, zealous.”
“But atill,” replied Arkadi, “the suitcase with the code, without which there would be no case: they brought it out themselves at the end of the search. Babin was ready to leave, without having seized anything.”
Terentiev broke out in a deep loud laugh:
“But that was their ultimate ploy! They were convinced we knew everything from Procope. How do you explain Procope’s report?”
“Procope is an interested party.”
Here Maria Pavlovna broke in. Her voice was thoughtful, almost distant:
“Procope is a swine, that’s true. But up to now he has always been a reliable agent. And he is supervised by Zachary.”
“You know very well that Zachary is a bigger swine.”
It was the eleventh case to be judged that night. Dawn showed at the window. Maria Pavlovna said:
“I’m calling for a vote. Terentiev?”
“Death.”
“Arkadi?”
Arkadi stared down at the blue-covered file and felt the weight of two pairs of eyes pressing in on him – one glance was sensual, mocking, revolting, like a rude nudge; the other cold, severe sad – detecting, perhaps in his indecision, a sign of weakness, of nervous fatigue, of unconscious revulsion against the task. The word was wretched out of his mouth before he was fully conscious of it and fell onto the file like an invisible seal:
“Death.”
“Death.” Said Maria Pavlovna impassively.
“I’ll sign.”
Terentiev countersigned.
It was over, the inner nightmare subsided. Maria Pavlovna proposed adjourning the next cases until Wednesday’s meeting. They rose. Terentiev, apathetic again, was now nothing more than a big red-faced slob with sparse, nearly colourless eyebrows. He appeared to droop slightly, staring out the window at the white roofs and, in answer to Maria Pavlovna’s friendly inquiring glance, he murmured: “My youngest boy has scarlet fever.”
Arkadi, before going home, wandered for a short while around the vast deserted square, bathed in a strange, extremely pale blue dawn glow. The great calm of the stones, the snow, and the dawning day seemed to enter him from every pore. Like the cool of the water when the swimmer dives in, his skin burning. Reassured, he thought: Tomorrow I’ll go see Olga. Then he realised that a coincidence of names had weighed on his powers earlier. Olga. He thought about her as he got into bed in his messy room where Daghestan weapons with beautifully etched silver scabbards lay tossed on the divan. Olga. He had only to close his eyes and she was present. This was a different freshness than that of the dawn in the square: a bland freshness as calm and luminous as the late-afternoon sun reflected on the windowpanes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Olga clapped her hands when he entered.
“I knew you would come today. I knew it! See, I was waiting.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and said:
“I woke up at four o’clock last night. I felt you were thinking about me. Tell the truth: did you think about me at four o’clock?”
It was too dark for her to be able to detect the somewhat forced smile with which he answered, believing he was lying:
“Yes.”
Olga clapped her hands again.
“I knew it! I knew it!”
He held her off with a gesture as she was about to throw herself into his arms. She could see his smile better. She felt his suppleness and his toughness. His soul as strong as his muscles, whose least movement had a masterful precision. He dropped himself onto the divan, crossed his legs – tall boots glistening- and said:
“Let me look at you, I feel so good.”
“I’ll make some tea,” she answered.
She was happily aware of the red glow of his cigarette in the semidarkness. She loved to move about in the invisible light of eyes following her from the far end of a dimly lighted room. Nowhere in the world could anyone ever give this man a greater feeling of calm, a more secure rest, a surer joy. She knew this. And the warmth of his gaze resting on her, soft at first, then imperious like a magnet, enveloped her wholly, imparted new suppleness to her movements. Somewhere, deep inside, her whole being cried out that this was an immense happiness. When she was sure that he couldn’t make out her face, she laughed silently with all her pretty teeth, with her depthless, shining eyes. Then she shut them for a moment, motionless, content with the single thought – he is here- ecstatic in delicious anticipation of hands ready to touch her.
She was tall and lissom, glowing all over with the multiple lustre of her eyes, whose long golden lids were always blinking as if to veil the brilliance of her gaze, of her sleek hair in which a touch of sunlight seemed to be captured forever, of her slender neck. Arkadi smoked. This female form filled his eyes and, far beyond his eyes, his mind, which forgot itself. And within him a wild-animal heat slowly came to life.
For her, he emerged from a darkness too frightening even to think about. There reigned a law of blood, incomprehensible yet necessary, since he was fulfilling it; he who was so pure, so strong, so calm after the mysterious labour of his nights. (She had only tried to question him once. He took her head between his hands: “Not a word about all that, my dove. Never. We are making Revolution. It’s a great, great thing…” Olga repeated: “A great, great thing.” Those words were engraved on her mind. Whatever she learned, whatever anyone told her, she repeated it to herself to regain her confidence. There was great deal of silence between them…)
“I promised Fuchs we would see him together. He has drawn a huge map, imagine…”
“Let’s go,” he said joyfully.
Arkadi was feeling light and vibrant, as when, at eighteen, in his village of Adjaris-Tskhahi, he would bound into the circle of clapping hands, one hand on his hip, the other on the back of his neck, with his dagger held tight at his waist, and dance – lighter, nimbler, and with greater endurance than anyone else.
The visiting card tacked to the door of the neighbouring room read:
JOHANN APPOLINARIUS FUCHS
ARTIST
Under the ancien regime, old Fuchs had lived rather well by his modest talents. The best dealers knew their way to his studio. His works could be found in the homes of patrons of the arts. Rasputin had liked them. Fuchs was the originator of those bathing girls with airy gestures who moved in or out of the waves as if offering themselves to love, wearing just enough to be more naked than they would have been if entirely nude, borne on the light, smiling and sensual. He had spent twenty years painting them over and over again, aware of his mediocrity and good workmanship, conscious that the shoulder which he finished off with a last touch would hold the eye and kindle, in older men, certain furtive sparks whose appearance he watched for, in the prudent gaze of his visitors. “Ah, signore,” he would say to himself, rubbing his hands together, “this too is an art.”
Even today, in this humble little room where a few carpets and some unsalable knickknacks in the worst of Viennese taste barely recalled better times, ex-dealers, ruined naturally, living off illicit trafficking, still sometimes came to ask him for “a red-haired bather, something a la Rubens, you understand?” for a mysterious client. – For, on the other side of the river, at the end of an empty street, in a vast frozen apartment, an aged man who, in order to feed the last of his great Danes, the only living being he had left with him, was selling his ex-mistress’ old-fashioned dresses, was waiting anxiously for “the red-haired bather a la Rubens” as formerly he waited for a living woman.
Fuchs, who had been busy painting the emblem of Labour surmounted by a figure of “Revolution” with the straight nose of a Greek goddess for the flag of the Porcelain Makers’ Union, immediately changed easels. He painted from memory now. One of his models had had precisely the Rubens complexion, but he had seen her for the last time back in 17, stouter and sunburned, wearing the uniform of the Women’s Battalion whose sorry end at the hands of the sailors on the night of the victorious insurrection is now legend. – Another, a thin brunette who used to pose for his Sevillanas, walked the central prospect every night, between the Fontanka Bridge, guarded by its noble horse tamers, and Caravan Street. She was often alone on that little-used sidewalk. On the other side you could see the red, rectilinear façade of Anichkov Palace, its corner topped by the delicious golden bulb of its chapel.
Fuchs accosted her as she strolled along, kissing her hand a little farther up than necessary. She lived in a small inside room on the top floor of an ordinary biggish apartment house. The furniture was covered with worn lace. Pictures of young officers leaned against empty cologne bottles. She still had fairly clean underthings, which she herself washed in the kitchen; she didn’t remove her high-laced boots to make love – that would take to long; on the other hand, she was good at spurring her males gently above the calf… Fuchs rather fancied this Lyda.
A knock came at the door. Fuchs quickly turned the Rubens-skinned girl to the wall. Olga and Arkadi filled the room with a virile grace. Arkadi, completely relaxed, a friendly smile revealing his fine teeth, scrutinised the fussily attentive old man. Short in stature, small-featured, a white goatee like an old faun.
“This comrade,” said Olga, “is interested in your chronicle of the Revolution…”
“I’m thinking of the future,” said Fuchs seriously.
Each day he would go out and get the newspapers, which was not an easy task since very few were for sale. Crafty and cautious like a thief, he sometimes had to peel the freshly posted pages off the walls, a risky undertaking. He studied them. It was his favourite job each day, the one which gave meaning to his daily existence. He cut out clippings, underlining with a ruler and red and blue pencils the significant parts of his chosen passage, which he then pasted into the large pages of his monthly classifiers.
Fuchs had to stoop to retrieve his clipping books from a trunk. Olga and Arkadi exchanged identical amused smiles. The little man stood up again and said, all of a sudden:
“The greatest happiness for a man is to live during a great epoch.”
“That is true,” said Arkadi.
“That is true, “ repeated Olga more quietly.
“…even,” Fuchs continued, “if it’s hard, even…”
Three minds stopped short on the threshold of something repeating that uncompleted “even…”
“That is true,” said Arkadi in the serious voice he used for passing sentence at the Special Commission.
“Here’s my new map,” said Fuchs.
Europe was divided between two colours, white and red. Red Europe was spilling over into white Europe. Red pincers encircled the Mediterranean. Italy, still white, was crisscrossed with red arrows; red arrows in Morocco, Algeria, Triplo, Egypt – red arrows!
“The arrows,” Fuchs explained, “indicate revolutionary movements which have not yet triumphed.”
Red countries covered the whole east, from the mouth of the Pechora on the White Sea to the gates of the Crimea, to Odessa, reconquered from the French and Greeks, to Daghestan, divided down the middle by a border of blood. The red countries, each bearing its date, spread out to the heart of Europe. Bavaria, a Socialist republic since April 7, 1919. Galicia, Soviet republic since April 25, 1919. Hungary, Soviet republic since March 22, 1919. Serbia – Serbia cut into the Balkans like a tooth- Socialist republic since April 14, 1919. Asia Minor pushed forward its red head like a snub-nosed pachyderm: Turkey, Socialist republic since April 19, 1919.
“Look here,” observed Arkadi, “the island of Crete is red too.”
“There has been a telegram from the Rosta Agency!”
Red arrows were exploding in Germany. Scattered red arrows were pointed at Paris, Lyon, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Barcelona.
“How beautiful!” exclaimed Fuchs.
Arkadi answered:
“I don’t think Bavaria will hold much longer. They say Toller has been killed at an outpost.”
Fuchs flipped through a stack of clippings.
“What about this?” he said triumphantly.
Istanbul, April 27. The Executive Central Committee of the Moslem Revolutionaries of Turkey, Arabia, Persia, Hindustan, Algeria, Morocco, and Constantinople announce with profoundest joy that the Republic of the United States of the East will soon be proclaimed in Constantinople. The struggle is being carried forward vigorously. A soviet revolutionary corps of 2,000 men has been formed in Odessa.
The Turkish Consul at Odessa
Akhu-Ato-Bakh-Eddin
Arkadi burst into laughter.
“Your Akhu-Ato-Bakh-Eddin looks like a joker to me. I think…. I think the wisest thing would be to lock him up.”
“Really?”
J.A.Fuchs’s eyes went back and forth from his visitor to the map, whose veracity was suddenly being undermined. “So you think I should erase all this?”
“All of this” meant the red arrows piercing Mediterranean Africa from Suez to Casablanca.
“No. No. There’s no doubt about the revolutionary ferment in the colonies. See the Manifesto of the Third International.”
When his visitors had departed, Fuchs wrote (in pencil so as to be able to erase it later) in the corner of the map, in neat little characters:
“Cf. Manifesto of IIIrd Intern.”
They had only a few steps to take to be back in their room. But even before, in the dark corridor, as Olga turned toward Arkadi to say “He’s a character, isn’t he?” she felt his masculine breath against her lips, and he did not answer. He enveloped her waist in an iron grip. She melted against him and it was as if he was carrying her away toward an unknown happiness.
Arkadi could never stay long. His nights of work began early. He departed, leaving behind him, in the room still full of the odour of his cigarettes, a cloudy wake of joy, confusion, and strength; but in that wake Olga’s soul and flesh felt emptied. A strange desert of worn lips and slack nerves… she dozed. The bell rang twice. “For me!... Who could it be?”
She felt, as the tanned young soldier entered, a mixture of surprise and unease:
“You? You? How is it possible?”
Nonetheless they kissed each other’s cold cheeks.
“Little sister, I’m exhausted. I’ve come from Rostov, the long way round. Makhno’s men took me prisoner on the way. I told them I was practically an anarchist. They only took my fur coat and a thousand rubles. No importance.”
“… You’re a soldier? A major?...”
On his shoulder, a red star.
“No. Yes. Whatever you like. How’s Mama? Can I sleep at your place? Is this house safe? My papers aren’t in order.”
“…not in order? Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand, little sister. Don’t worry about it. Where do you think I could stop for a few days?”
“I don’t know, Kolia. Maybe at Andrei Vassilievich’s. Or at Professor Lytaev’s.”
“How things change, little sister. My name is now Danil…”
He sat. He drank the tea which Arkadi had not touched. How mature he had become. His hands were those of a worker. As Olga listened to him laughing and talking, her uneasiness grew.
“I’m dirty, huh? What you smell on me is the peculiar odour of trains. Yet I’ve washed. Four weeks on trains, little Olga. And what trains, you couldn’t imagine. No windows, smashed in on every side, stinking like pigsty’s…. I even rode on the roof! Listen to this one, little sister, you’ll laugh. In Kharkov, in a little hotel full of fat bedbugs (they were fat from their habitual diet of government officials), I ran into some Frenchmen coming from God knows where, an old Socialist crank, Durand-Pepin, bringing us his life’s work, a complete outline for the organisation of the new society….”
The idea made him laugh so hard that he had to put down his teacup and bend over choking.
“He wanted to teach rational culture to the Ukrainian peasants by showing them little coloured pictures….”
Olga laughed too, infected. “When he saw that the peasants were more interested in stopping trains to at night to rob the passengers and hang the Jews, he declared he had to leave for home right away because of his heart disease. But they made him a member of a non-existent Academy, and gave him a set of Aluminium cookware, so he stayed… And his pretty niece, little sister, was worried whether she had enough dresses to appear in Kharkov society! Kharkov society! The biggest collection of bandits you could ever find…”

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter.  
Index

Chapter 6

COLD WINDS blew in from regions where absolute winter reigned – passing over the pearly steppes of Lapland, over the lakes and dark forests of Finland, over the border of Karelia harrowed with white trenches and mantraps- and dispersed the Baltic fogs. Perfect clear days followed. The air was so transparent that the laws of perspective seemed somehow altered. Looking across the Neva, you could make out the tiniest details of buildings, the silhouettes of pedestrians, the forms of sphinxes brought over from Memphis and erected on the edge of the river by emperors, only to witness after four thousand years the fall of new empires. The slim white columns crowned with statues and the tall golden spire of the Admiralty stood out at the hub of deserted avenues stretching toward stations oppressed by shimmering silence. Trams with grey swarms of passengers clinging to their sides moved slowly over the bridges through the infinite light composed of pale, pure blue of the sky, the gold of a cold sun intellectual in its clarity, and reflected snow. Looking out through the windows of the old Senate, where anaemic scholars were shifting through the archives of the Czarist Secret Police, we contemplated the iridescent white square, dominated by Falconet’s bronze: the Emperor Peter, draped in Roman garb, rearing his horse on the edge of a precipice overlooking the future or the abyss… And, farther on, the university embankment lined with neat old houses – red, white, and yellow- which reminded you of an archaic Holland.

“Look outside,” Professor Lytaev said to me, “and preserve the memory; you are more likely to live through these times than I am. The air of Venice does not possess this transparency, for the activity of men disturbs it, and the heat rising from the old stones makes it tremble. Nothing trembles here, the air is crystal. No smoking chimneys, no busy tumultuous plazas. I have only seen such transparency and calm on the high plateaus of Mongolia. That is where I came to understand why the Chinese artists are able to draw such pure close horizons.”
All this beauty was perhaps the sign of our death. Not a single chimney was smoking. The city was thus dying. And, like shipwrecked men on a raft devouring each other, we were about to fight among ourselves, workers against workers, revolutionaries against revolutionaries. If Great Works succeeded in carrying along the other factories, we would witness a general strike pitting the populace of the dead factories against the Revolution. It would be the revolt of despair against the stubborn, wilful, organized revolt which still had hope. It would be fervid and unthinking treason of some of the best, ready to ally themselves with the famine against the dictatorship because they couldn’t understand that the faith of millions of men can also die for lack of bread, that we are less and less free men, more and more, in an exhausted, besieged city, an army in rags whose safety lies in terror and discipline.

Low crooked wooden houses, each leaning a different way, lined both sides of the alley. Plants were visible in the windows. The alley seemed wide because the houses were so small. It could have been a street in an ancient town had it not ended in a red-brick wall surmounted by tall, blackened glass panes, broken in places. A few paces on stood a chimney, black against the sky, just turning blue. The light was getting brighter, objects began to stand out more and more sharply from one instant to the next. At the corner of the street, huddling against the old, blackened wood houses, you could see a long line of women. Even before the first blast of the whistle, they stood there. They were waiting for the bread for which they waited long hours in vain yesterday, outside in a blizzard. The shutters of the store at last opened when it was broad daylight. Did these women’s eyes derive any joy from this marvellously open sky, from the perfect sharpnes of forms, lines, and colours, from the soft, nuanced sparkle of the snow? “What beautiful weather,” murmured some voices. “Yes,” bitterly answered others, “but are they going to keep us waiting a long time again?” Hours passed despairingly. They discussed the news, their troubles, rumours, ideas… “Het, remember before the war the price of eggs?” – “He beats her, I tell you, she’s a martyr. Patient as a saint.” – “So they requisitioned his house, and the flour, aand everything. There’s nothing left. Nothing but to go out into the world like a poor wanderer, my God, my God…” – “If the English come, you’ll see. Everybody who raised his hand for the Communists even once will be hanged…” – “Everybody, then?” – “Yes, everybody, everybody…” – “Do you remember nice old fat Mikhei Mikheich…?”
Communal Bakery No. 60, near the Great Works, occupied the former shop of that nice fat old fellow, who some said had been killed by his workers and whom others claimed to have seen in town, looking important, with a briefcase under his arm. In his place, behind the bare counter, in the cold airless store where the odours of badly cooked bread, dead rats rotting under the floorboards, and bitter sweat fermenting under sheepskins mingled, stood two skinny clerks, who took ration cards, cut off one square tab, and heaved a hunk of black bread as soggy as clay into gnarled outstretched hands. One woman suddenly burst into tears: “Someone stole my card, someone stole it. I had it right here a second ago…” The women who were already on their way out with their bread gathered around her, the others brushed past, pushing and shoving, the precious paper with the stamp of the Commune clutched in their fists. Eddies of unrest moved through the line. “What? What?” The anxiety spread from one person to another. “Citizeness!” cried one of the clerks inside. Those waiting outside saw a despairing group flowing back toward them. “There’s no more bread.” – “When will there be any?” – “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the clerk, who now stood in the door wiping his nose with his fingers. “Go ask the Commissars.” The store remained open, empty, for the two boys had to put in their hours. They sneered. “What can we do, little citizenesses? We’re no different than you.” In the background, over the bare counter, hung a red calico banner covered with white lettering:

THE WORKERS WANT BREAD, PEACE, AND FREEDOM

The motionless snow covered factory buildings of the Great Works spread for miles, all the way from the workers’ quarter to the sea. Drafts of cold air whistled through the skeletons of its workshops. Strewn in this dessert lay piles of tip-trucks lying on their backs, old, twisted, resembling tangles of petrified snakes under the snow, loaded flatcars covered by white carapaces, small locomotives forgotten on sidings, and piles of scrap metal. The chimneys, nonetheless, still intermittently belched forth some astonishing black smoke. Life was concentrated in a few shops full of an odour of soot, cold oil, and neglected metal. Arc lamps hung like big pale moons; grey daylight filtered in through high dirty skylights in whose broken panes jagged patches of blue sky appeared suddenly. The muzzles of the 70-mm. cannon seemed to be pointing out through them. Drive shafts spun with a weary sound like out-of-breath hearts. The men on the job were lost among the machines, reduced to a sort of insignificance, pursued by cold and hunger, right up to their workbenches, heartsick at the emptiness around them.

“They call this a factory?” they said. “Ut’s more like a cemetery,,, We don’t know who the hell we are anymore. We’re no longer worker: starvelings, worthless beggars, good-for-nothing goldbricks, slobs, that’s what we are… Some of these men dismantle the machinery to make cigarette lighters. Other steal brass wire to build themselves rabbit cages. Some steal coal, machine oil, kerosene. Some of them doing that kind of work and never even held a job before. Look what’s become of us. Terrific.”
Groups would swarm around the locomotives in fits and starts, working furiously. They were the same men. They stole like the rest of them. They nursed a dark fury against themselves, against fate, against the Commissars, the Entente, everything which, by killing the factory, was killing them. They sent delegations to the President of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of the Northern Commune. Gaunt proletarians in old boots full of holes wound through the narrow halls of Smolny like exhausted soldiers. Inside the dictator’s huge office, surrounded by rugs, leather-covered furniture, shiny telephones, and walls covered with maps showing the blood-red line of the front drawn around the Republic, a cowardly timidity overcame even the most vehement among them. What to do? The fronts are there. No bread, paper money, peasants refusing to deliver grain. Hold out, hold out, or die by God! But didn’t we just say precisely that we can’t hold out any longer?...
“Sit down, comrades,” said the President quietly.
The delegation broke up, dispersed onto the sofa, too far away, onto armchairs too soft. The men remained fiercely silent, embarrassed.
“So, things are going badly?”
An old man who had marched behind Father Gapon in 1905, face wrinkled like a Chinese mask, stood up to regain his confidence and finally burst out:
“Bad? Impossible! No way to hold out anymore. Everybody’s going under. The factory doesn’t look like a factory any longer.”
The President also stood up, attentive, knowing all, knowing too that it was necessary to listen all the way through, then to show the maps, give out the figures, promise, telephone to the Commune and that, in the end, there was absolutely nothing to be done. (But you can always hold on for another hour, another day, another week; and perhaps that hour, that day, that week will be the decisive one.) He answered in a low voice, very different from the one people were used to hearing at big meetings. He talked about starving, ransomed Germany, about Liebknecht’s fresh blood, about the revolution ripening in Europe… Which of these men would come to his aid? What was the composition of this delegation? They had told him that it did not contain any adversaries, just non-party members, one or two sympathisers… Who?
His man was revealed in a youngish, heavy-jawed fellow who spoke in a studied manner, the way they do at meetings. The working class could fight to the end! Every man would do his duty for the International! As long as the food supply improved; and the factory received the special rations they had been promised for a month… What he said sounded strangely false – even though it was profoundly true and necessary to say it – you could feel he was lying in telling the truth. (“So you want to get yourself promoted onto the Factory Committee…”)
The same day the women went home without bread, after waiting all morning in front of the bakeries, a Council of Delegates, whose identity was secret, plastered some rather well-printed leaflets on the walls appealing to the proletarians of the factory to take their fate into their own hands. The strike was in the air. The news went out in every direction by telephone from the various Committees. Out of 3,700 registered workers, less than two thousand had begun work at seven o’clock. The chief mechanic, Khivrin, had gone up to the manager’s office, his cap over one ear, a cigarette in his teeth, and announced in a nasty voice that his machines weren’t working anymore. “Some kind of breakdown. I can’t figure out. Send over the engineers.” He announced this as if it were good news. Groups of Mensheviks and left SRs had held secret meetings during the night.
“Let’s get this over with.”
A thousand men filled the workshop. A platform with a length of rail for a balustrade was raised above people’s heads. The Assembly Committee was seated at on side, around a slightly raised table covered with red cloth. Timofei rang the chairman’s bell. “Kuriagin has the floor.” The meeting had already been going on for two hours, dragging and chaotic. The secretary of the Communist cell had been hooted down. “Give us bread! Bread! No speeches! We’ve heard all your bullshit before.” As he was stumbling down from the shaky rostrum, some big guys had grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him. He looked thin and defeated in his military tunic.
“Say it! Tell us you didn’t phone the Special Comission. Go ahead if you dare.”
Timofei, who was delighted by the incident because it heated up the atmosphere, had controlled the tumult with his long outstretched arms and his emaciated face.
“Don’t get excited, comrades! We’re the strong ones!”
Kuriagin succeeded in dispelling the anger of these thousand men by telling an awkward, embarrassing story, saying all the wrong things, and relaxing them by making them laugh. He told of his trip to the countryside near Tver and how his three sacks of flour had been seized on his arrival home. His buddies assumed he had been on sick leave.

“Eat-it-all by yourself! You bastard!” cried a voice. The epithet seemed to stick to this red-faced sweaty loudmouth, who was floundering through a tirade against imperialism. Timofei was suffering. A thousand men and not one voice! So much suffering, so much revolt and not one voice! The arc lamps hanging from the metal skeleton of the roof cast a gloomy light over the thousand heads, some covered by old fur hats and others by shapeless caps. Hard faces, bony noses, ashy complexions, soiled garments: this was in appearance the same human mass (yet poorer, shrunken somehow) as during the February Days when the three-hundred-year-old autocracy crumbled under their pressure (because then, as now, there was no bread in these neighbourhoods; only people somehow lived much better in those days); the same mass as in July, when they poured through the city like a flood ready to carry everything away; the same mass as in October, when Trotsky’s voice swept them on to the conquest of power… The same, and yet not the same; altered, inconsistent now, disoriented, without heart: like an old acquaintance known for his firm jaw, determined gait, and direct way of speaking who suddenly appears spineless, flabby, shifty-eyed, and tongue-tied when you meet him after an absence. Timofei bit his lip. This crowd is spineless. The best among them have left. Some are dead. Eight hundred mobilised in six months. Not one voice. Naturally. Leonti had a voice and, what is more, a head; they say he died in the Urals. Klim is fightuing on the Don. Kirk is head of something. Lukin, what happened to Lukin? Timofei could still visualise these veterans standing in this very shop, three or four ranks of men, successive generations who had come up and disappeared within a year. Gone. At the head of the army, at the head of the state, dead: heads riddled with holes, lowered into graves in the Field of Mars to the sound of funeral marches. The Revolution is devouring us. And those who remain are without a voice, for they are the least courageous, the most passive, the followers, the ones who…
“Enough! Enough!” someone shouted at Kuriagin. “We’ve seen enough of you. That’s it.”
Timofei didn’t know how to speak to mass meetings himself. His pale blue eyes fogged up as soon as he mounted the rostrum, and all he could see ahead of him was a whirling, pulsating mist which lured him like an abyss. His voice was too weak to carry far; his thoughts came out in tight formulas that didn’t make complete sentences; people’s ears were still straining to hear him when he had already finished all he had to say; and since his mind was very sharp, he seemed to lack the breath to make a speech; he resolved every problem he posed before the audience even heard it.
Everything seemed lost to him, when a door opened at the rear and Goldin entered. Timofei, relieved, rang his bell vigorously to get the attention of the restless, murmuring audience.
“Put a time limit on the speakers!”
Timofei pretended not to hear. This was surely not the moment!
He rose.
“Goldin has the floor.”
Some hands clapped. A strident whistle blast sounded and then broke off sharply. Head, fists, shoulders shook awkwardly. Goldin seized the length of the rail before him with both hands – the cold felt good on his palms- and took possession of the rostrum. He leaned out toward the crowd, his head hunched into his shoulders; his glance sought out people’s eyes, held them for a moment, like a black flash, moved on, leaving a burning trace behind. His hot voice exploded, impassioned from the start.
“Do you remember, people without bread? How we drove out the Czar and his little ones, the ministers, the generals, the capitalists, the police? Tell me!”
“We remember,” replied a choked voice.
“When was that? Say it! Yesterday!
“What we could do yesterday, we can do today. What is the Revolution? This Revolution which shoots the bourgeois, conquers the Ukraine, makes the wide world tremble? – The Kremlin? Smolny? Decrees? People’s Commissars? Come now!” His huge blazing mouth split into a wide grin at this idea; and this infectious smile, which vanished instantly from his lips, spread from mouth to mouth, illuminating each man’s soul with the clarity of his thought. “The Revolution is us! You and me! What we want, the Revolution needs. Do you understand?”
Then a thundering apostrophe:
“… You, out there! You who manufacture laws and decrees!”
(The men were beginning to feel powerful. They were coming out of their torpor, electrified, awakening to new dreams of exploits.) “The Ukraine is in flames. Its fire will never go out. We don’t even know what the power of the people is yet! But it must not be emasculated by laws and decrees. We fear neither privations nor sacrifices; we will overthrow those who would snuff our fires. We demand workers’ freedom, decentralization, equality of all workers, individual provisioning, fifteen days paid leave for every worker to go ask his peasant brother for food! What we demand we are strong enough to take…”
A roar rose in the hall under the steel-beamed roof. Hands applauded frantically. Showers of cries exploded round this dark, bony, shaggy-haired man in a black blouse whose long sinuous hands were kneading the steel bar. All that remains is to put the general strike to the vote, thought Timofei… Two newcomers were pushing their way through the crowd toward the rostrum.
Arkadi sat down on the steps so as to be able to keep his head above the crowd without, however, being too conspicuous. He immediately tried to pick out the faces of outside agitators among the crowd of faces. He found one, which amazed him.
Antonov climbed ponderously up the rickety wooden stairs. His thick neck topped off by small, squarish, ruddy head emerged above the crowd. At first he was taken for a worker in the factory.
“I want the floor.”
His powerful sonorous voice carried all the way to the back of the hall.
“Comrades..”
“Hey! You don’t have the floor yet,” interjected Timofei. Goldin shrugged his shoulders. Antonov appeared to bow to the will of the chair but his heavy presence on that platform already defied it. Waiting patiently to be allowed to speak, he studied the audience. His narrow grey eyes searched out expressions and gestures; he could practically read the words on people’s lips. His impression was favourable. He became much mire self-assured. The chair decided that it was impossible to prevent him from talking: the crowd wasn’t sufficiently worked up. So he started in again:
“Comrades!” He wisely skipped the usual salutation “in the name of the Party Committee.” “It’s obvious that” – and his thick red neck, his broad shoulders under heavy furs, his huge stonecutter’s hands resting on the railing emphasized his point – “the condition of the working class is becoming intolerable…”
A vague murmur of approval came from the back rows of the audience. Son of a gun! So they finally noticed! You better believe it; it sure is intolerable!
“… We’re starving. The bakeries haven’t distributed bread for three days. It’s a disgrace! What good are paper salaries? We all have pockets full of rubles, but something to eat would be much more to the point. The roadblocks set up to prevent individual supply hunting have done more harm than good in many cases… Things have got to change! They will change if we have the will. We didn’t make the Revolution in order to end up like this.”
No one knew anymore if he was talking for or against the strike, for or against the government. He was repeating the previous harangues almost word for word, but in a more orderly form. Sure of himself now, his voice coming strong, his torso erect, he denounced hunger and poverty along with these thousand men. Goldin blacked in checker squares in his notebook. What a demagogue! He thought. The mistake was to give him the floor…
“This morning the Executive Committee decided to call upon you to form new supply detachments, on the basis of five to ten men for every two hundred and fifty, and prepared to leave within three days. There’s wheat at Saratov. Go take it! Don’t lose an hour.” Heads moved in all directions in agitated confusion: conflicting winds blowing through wheat before a storm.
“The Commune is sending you four boxcars of provisions: canned goods, sugar, rice, and white flour: supplies taken from the imperialists by the glorious Workers’ and Peasants’ Army.”
(-“What?”- “What did he say?” – “Four boxcars?” – “Rice?” – “Yes, rice and canned goods, you hear!” – “Listen, listen!”)
“Tomorrow, this very evening, you must organise teams to handle the distribution… Make sure that not a single pound of rice gets stolen by the bureaucrats and profiteers!”
(- “When are the cars arriving?” – “Let him talk!” – “No interruptions!”)
“… I said tomorrow! But there has been talk of a strike from this platform. Comrades, seven locomotives and thirty cannon are being repaired in your workshop. Each day’s delay in delivering the locomotives adds to the famine. Each day’s delay in delivering the cannon increases the danger. Where is the fool who can’t understand this? Let him show himself!”
Antonov took a breath. His temples were damp with sweat. He tore open his collar, popping the buttons. Triumphant – with those four carloads of provisions behind him – standing erect, he defied an invisible enemy in hall:
“Let him show himself!”
He threw back his sheepskin-lined coat, showing himself dressed in a faded blouse with a hole at one elbow, identical with these men. He knew it was necessary to bawl out crowds that might get away from you, to shout into their faces the things they would like to shout at you, to identify with them – against them – through anger and invective. Now was the moment to bear down.
“There are cowards, slackers, swine, traitors, tools of the Allies, henchmen of the generals, scoundrels who think only of their skins and their stomachs, who want to stuff their bellies when the whole beleaguered Republic is hungry! Let them remember that proletarian bullets have been cast for their heads!”
Having proffered a threat at the end of his diatribe, he stopped short, concluding rapidly with an affirmation which nearly brought on applause – he could see it:
“But I swear, there’s not a single traitor among us!”
Arkadi listened with admiration. Antonov pushed his advantage to the limit:
“Did you know that this week we discovered fifty rifles in the cellars of the Church of St. Nicholas?”
( They were old ceremonial weapons which had been placed among the tombs at the time of the first Turkish campaign.)
“… That Allied agents are planning to blow up the Kronstadt forts?”
(They would have liked to; but the only evidence of a plot was the self-interested report of a double agent)
“… that the Special Commission has just discovered a new conspiracy?”
(The Special Commission was, it is true, looking for this conspiracy.)
The meeting was ending in confusion and defeat. A worker read out the text of a resolution in a rasping voice: “… the powerful hands of the proletariat will mercilessly crush…” Always these clichés, thought Timofei. Boosted onto the shoulders of two men whom the human waves rocked gently, he shouted: “Workshop B is meeting separately” – for it was necessary, despite this debacle, to try to tally those men who were still dependable. Goldin led the way.
The night was about to waylay them on the border between the hubbub and the silence when a bearded giant with blue-veined neck and temples came running up to them, gesticulating. You might have thought him drunk. Bare-chested, teary-eyed, he held up a pair of black hands like hard roots – ready to grasp anything.

“Look at us!” he shouted. “We’re like dogs. The belly’s empty, they growl. Throw em a bone, they shut up. Look at me, comrades, little brothers. I’m like that too. Don’t hold it against us, little brothers, poverty made us this way!”
He clung to Goldin’s lapels with both hands. His despair was like rage. His powerful clouded eyes were like ponds whose bottom has been disturbed, as he stared into the dark eyes opposite him.
“And yet,” he stammered, suddenly releasing his grip, “if you knew what they have done, these hands. If you knew what they are still capable of, comrade…”
For a brief instant all that the three men could see in front of them were those two hands: dreadful, yet trembling with fatigue, hands which appeared to be charred.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter.
Index