Chapter 12

“IT’S the end. Kronstadt in flames. Regiments going over to the enemy one after another. The city is living on hay. No anaesthetics at the main military hospital! While you were busy talking about the society of the future, you have slipped down to the bottom of the pit. The soldiers don’t want to fight any more, do you understand? You dream of self-sacrifice because you are the daughter of a bourgeois, raised on bourgeois idealism, on that stupid idealism we cultivate so well and which teaches you to turn around and strangle us with innocent eyes and clear consciences… Get yourself sent to the front, you little fool; go tell those flea-bitten mujks, those Ivans, those Timochkas, those Matveis who have been fighting for five years against the Germans, the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Austrians, the Czechoslovaks, the Poles, the English, the Serbians, the Romanians, the Japanese, and against other Matveis, other Timochkas, other Ivans, conscripts just like themselves, go tell them they should go on living like this for another two years or ten years, without bread or shoes, in order to bring socialism to the world! And that when they have to dig a bullet out of Ivan’s thigh they won’t be able to put him to sleep for lack of chloroform! And that when winter returns he’ll freeze like his brother froze last year. I’ve seen frozen corpses stacked like firewood! All Ivans, Timochkas, Matveis, fair or dark, with broad noses like young Tolstoys.”
Xenia buckled her belt with clenched teeth. The sky was heavy with a cheerless light. At the back of the room under the icon (before which, when Xenia was absent, a little red lamp was kept burning) her mother pretended to sleep, lying on the couch, her face against the leather. Andrei Vassilievich continued his monologue in a low voice; his words, muffled in his beard, sounded like an incantation.

“Your Revolution is a corpse. There’s nothing left to do but cart it away.”
Going out after eight in the evening without special permission prohibited. Mandatory guard duty at  the doors of dwellings. Mandatory labour. Mandatory surrender of all arms, even processional ones (it would have been too easy to invoke processions) within twenty-four hours under pain of death. Telegraphed order from the President of Revolutionary War Council prescribing the establishment of lists of relatives of former officers serving with the Red Army, these families to be considered responsible for the loyalty of the officers. Arrest of hostages. Special surveillance of automobile and motorcycle traffic. House-by-house searches. Identity checks. Arrest of suspects. Division of the city into internal defensive sectors. Mobilisations of Communist battalions. Death penalty for speculators. Death for spies. Death for traitors. Death for deserters. Death for misappropriators of public funds. Death for spreaders of false reports. Death.

“Andrei Vassilievich, they just posted a list of seventeen men who were shot. I read Aaron Mironovich’s name on it.”
She saw Andrei Vassilievich’s image reflected in the glass over a large picture of a child (her portrait as a little girl). She wished never to see it again, after having said these words. This trembling bearded spectre had dark holes in the place of eyes. His hands clenched his collar like someone being asphyxiated; his necktie, always correctly adjusted, was pulled to one side; he looked like that same Aaron Mironovich whose features had been reflected so many times in that same picture.
“Enough!” said Xenia sharply to herself in the stairway. The familiar image of a potbellied, bearded Jew with an unctuous smile floated in front of her, unsubstantial and persistent. His convulsed smile faded into a pool of blood. Xenia stopped in the grey stairway, her hand tightly clutching the bannister. Her throat was parched. She made a great effort to coldly, clearly. We are in the right. I want what must be. I will do what must be done. It was a relief for her to add mentally: Whatever that may be and whatever the outcome.
It was two in the morning. In the ashy white street the forms of sentinels appeared at intervals in doorways. A militia-woman paced up and down at the corner, her rifle barrel planted straight against her shoulder. Xenia felt hostile glances spying on her. These were enemy houses. The faraway gasps of cannon vibrated almost imperceptibly in the cool air.
…The Timochkas, the Matveis, the Ivans are perfectly right, poor souls, not to want to fight any more. It is their Revolution that we are making; it is to end war forever that we are fighting, that their blood must still flow. They suffer, they want to live, they have their eyes wide open and can’t see what human necessity makes them bow down. We see for them, but the law is too hard, the rebel against us, they flee. Their weakness turns against them. (Thus, in Leonid Andreev’s play, crowned Hunger, who reigns over the poor, pushes the plebs in revolt, then betrays them and bow down to the rich, for she is always in any case their servant.) The Ivans don’t know what history is. Nonetheless history pushes them forward, drags them along, grinds them down, pulls them by the millions out of their thatched huts to the sound of tocsin, of mobilisations, piles them into cattle cars, puts repeating rifles into their hands (hands which guided wooden ploughs or turned over haystacks with slow movements consecrated since the peopling of Eurasia), throws these human masses against Europe in Prussia, against Asia in Armenia, parades them through French port towns and scatters their bones in Champagne, lines them up – Ivan, Matvei, Timochka- alongside helmeted Senegalese, turbaned Sikhs, and Tommies with pipes in their teeth, against methodical Germans whose leaders are all doctors and who go into battle wearing piglike masks preceded by waves of gas… Who will save them if they don’t save themselves? Tomorrow, if we are defeated, they will become brutes again. They will give back the land. They will be hanged, whipped, and mobilised. Newspapers and schools will be founded to teach them that such is the eternal law. They will be lined up, like mechanical soldiers, in the squares of workers’ cities, and when the red flags appear the Ivans will shoot. – They will shoot at us, who are them.

The ranks were forming in front of the District Committee, a princely little town house now stuffed full of files, typewriters, machine guns, and armed men sleeping on straw mattresses. There were jostling crowds around the secretaries’ desks in rooms hung in white silk dotted with cornflowers. – “The comrades from the Meyer Factory, second company, in front of the church.” – “Kostrov Factory and waterworks people across the street.” – “Stack your arms, at ease!” An astonishing calm reigned over the activity of this anthill in the square.
The District Commanders – a man in black leather, an old woman who seemed radiant because of her halo of white hair, and a stocky man in a jacket and cap with cartridge belts across his chest – approached the special company. Men and women of all ages stood there in formation. Most of them were poorly clothed. A few soft felt hats. Caps pushed flat across the backs of heads. Women workers in overcoats with kerchiefs tied around their heads. A few pince-nez. Some detachable collars. An artist’s mane. Hands resting on rifles.
“Squad leaders fall out to the right.”
Xenia followed the movement and found herself in a crowded courtyard. Three gilded domes surmounted by finely wrought openwork crosses – the cross victorious over the prostrate crescent- stood out against the deepening blue of the sky. The stones had a bright sheen. The crosses floated through a singular serenity. Faces expressed concern; there was little talking. Everyone signed and received his papers in the corridor. Warrant: Instructions for house-to-house searches. Descriptions (secret).
“Give special attention to the dwellings of intellectuals.”
“X., military man, aged 22-24, chestnut hair, medium build, thick eyebrows, laughs easily, habit of folding his arms across his chest, Muscovite accent, recently arrived from the south. Long scar on outside of left wrist. First name begins with D.”

A tall old workman with dirty linen, tallow skin, and some wasting disease whispered into Xenia’s ear:
“Seems like we’ll get half a pound of bread and a herring. I guess we’ll develop a taste for these searches, eh?”
Kondrati appeared standing on a chair. His voice rang out in the crystal crispness of the morning air as sharply as the three crosses standing out against the sky above his head.
“… disarm the enemy within. Order, discipline, firmness… Our sailrs are launching an assault on Fort Hill at this very moment… Decisive days… The Proletariat… We will hold on, we will hold on; woe to those who…”
“Some of them are shits. In my squad yesterday one little guy swiped a gold watch from a lawyer’s place. I had him searched. I smashed his face in, personally. You should have seen how he thanked me afterward.”
“And the watch.”
“In the fund for the wounded. I don’t give a damn for the bourgeois, you see.”
“Remember,” hammered Kondrati, “the thirty thousand who died in the Paris Commune! Remember the fifteen thousand who died in the Finnish Commune! Remember the three hundred who were hanged in Yamburg! Not one of us, not one…”
Xenia left, carrying bread and herring for her people. The squads were assembling on the square in an apparent disorder which was the birth of order. In hers, Xenia found a sailor from the Vulture, a tired woman worker of about thirty with hair gracefully arranged in a cluster behind at the back of her head, a sullen redheaded young soldier with a big mouth, a flat nose, and jutting brows whose name she asked and who answered “Matvei”; and two young workers from the Meyer Factory, both beardless, one with a deformed shoulder and a limp. This group went off through the empty streets. The sailor smoked in silence. The soldier carried his rifle by the strap, muzzle down; the strap was made of rope anyway. The woman worker said: “Four hours? We won’t be finished before seven o’clock.” She explained: “I’d like to be home in time to feed my husband. He’s a non-Party member, but a good worker – what a life!”

“This is the place,” said Xenia. The sleeping house was not expecting them. A white cat with red markings dived into a cellar at their approach. In the sky, rosy shadows were warring with turquoise hues. A splendid day was rising over the city, the estuary, the sea, the forts, and the enemy columns on the march. A very old man stood guard at the door of this big house with windows dead behind drawn blinds. On this June morning he stood muffled in an ancient greatcoat which had turned green at the shoulders. His wizened face, elongated by a goatee, was half hidden in the fur collar.
“They should have left him in his mothballs,” joked the worker with a limp.
The Privy Councillor from apartment 26 waited to be spoken to, his hands in his pockets. The smaller carnivores have that watchful. Sharp. Spiteful look when taken by surprise in front of their lairs/
“Come on, open up” ordered the Vulture sailor, “you know who I am.”
“Kindly present your warrants,” answered the Privy Councillor without emotion.
  Xenia showed her paper. Seal of the Special Committee of Three Valid for six persons. – “Good. Enter.” When they had passed, the old man shuddered. Inside the courtyard, the squad divided up into three couples. Xenia took the soldier, Matvei, with her.
They knocked on doors among hostile shadows. They knocked at length, for the people were either sleeping or pretended out of anxiety to be asleep. At last bare feet ran toward them down the corridor. Fearful voices asked, “Who’s there?” They answered imperiously, “Open up!” Iron bars and chains were lifted, bolts were pulled back. Keys grated, and they entered. The bad air inside caught in their throats after the vivifying crispness of the clear night. The relative misery of comfort of these dwellings was soon patent to these intruders – a sailor, a woman worker, a young hunchbacked man, Xenia… Here, sleeping in a camp bed, lay a skeletal man of about fifty with a smooth skull of old copper. Huge unlaced shoes gaped up from under the bed; on the windowsill a hot plate, a potted cactus, a vial of poison: a skull on the label. The man resembled that skull.
“Who are you?”
“Physician attached to Typhus Clinic No.4.”
Papers in order.
“Excuse us, citizen.”
“It’s okay.”
At the head of his bed, a little icon, a very old Virgin with Child dressed in sculpted silver, painted by the first master miniaturists of Palekh. In the next rooms terrified women, a mother and a daughter with long tresses hanging over dressing gowns, trembled as they revealed their treasure: sixty pounds of potatoes in the bathtub. Then, in the living room, while their papers were being checked, the daughter lymphatically raised her blue-veined arms to adjust her hair while keeping one eye on her diamond-studded earrings on the shelf.
Matvei stood motionless among the rooms, curiously considering the unfamiliar objects. They paused for breath in a stairway that smelled of wine. A sepulchral silence hung behind the door they had just knocked at. All Matvei said was:
“Let’s get this over with.”
At around five o’clock in the morning they arrived at Professor Vadim Mikhailovich Lytaev’s. Danil, Smiling, arms folded across his chest, stood in front of a wide-open window interrogating Matvei, who was now weighted down with an old cavalry sabre seized at the apartment of a paralytic old lady on the floor below:
“How’s it going, little brother?”
At that instant Xenia, who was about to leave, remembered a phrase she had read or heard, a long while ago, long before the lassitude of these hours and the blue splendour of the sky in this window. An important phrase nonetheless, which characterised someone: “The habit of folding his arms across his chest.” Who, then? Kondrati, perhaps. Xenia was struggling against a sort of intoxication resulting from nervous tension, tiredness, and a vague sense of physical well-being instilled by more and more iridescent glare of the morning light as the sun rose higher in the sky. – Kondrati, his fresh complexion, his wheat-coloured hair, his orator’s mouth with its healthy teeth; - and the three svelte onion domes floating high above that tribune’s head. He was unaware of them as he spoke, his hand outstretched; but the sky, deeper than any thought, and those brilliant crosses nonetheless hung over him, as necessary as his gesture, necessary in fact to his gesture, for there is no such thing as chance. We move through life without ever knowing all the riches, all the power, all the beauty which lies around us.
“What a fine morning coming up,” said Matvei in the dreamy voice of a prisoner. “It must be nice in the fields right now.”
Danil let out a big jovial laugh/ “You bet! Listen to those birds!” They heard them peeping, thousands of them, in the garden of the school next door. Xenia, too, listened for a moment. Then she briskly held her hand out to Danil – “Good-bye, Comrade!” – nodded farewell to the Lytaevs, whom she glimpsed in the next room, a really nice old couple, and left.
Behind her, Maria Borissovna Lytaeva said:
“How nice she was, that little Communist. I felt reassured as soon as I saw her. Aren’t you coming back to bed, Vadim?
“No. This unexpected visit has done me good. And it’s really morning already. My head is full of ideas, I’m going to write. Try to go back to sleep, Maria.”

When the searches were completed Xenia decided to drop by at the Committee in order to prolong her walk through the city in the burgeoning light. New vistas opened before her at every street corner. A pair of crouching red lions spread their fiery gold wings along the entrance of a delicate bridge suspended by cables over a bend in the canal. Father on, the green freshness of trees burst forth bathed in transparent shadows. The white columns of a little palace were mirrored in the canal, their shapes undisturbed by the shimmering water. A single white cloud floated in the sky of that water as if above the city.

When we are dead, thought Xenia, when everything is finished, perhaps a similar cloud will pass through a similar sky at this very spot. What eyes will see it reflected in this water, eyes that will have known neither war, nor famine, nor fear, nor anguish, nor night patrols, that will not have seen man strike down man? I can’t even imagine it. I can see nothing of that future. I am like a person emerging from a cave. The light at the mouth is dazzling. He cannot see the brilliant landscape before him. I must learn. Perhaps I will learn if I live. But must I live? We must smash everything. Purify everything by fire. I saw fear trembling a little while ago in an old woman’s eyes when I entered. I felt pity. I crushed my pity like someone crushing a worm into the earth after a rain. The highest love excludes pity. Make way for men, old woman; men are rising up! The workers are changing the world just as they demolish, build, forge, throw bridges across rivers. We will throw a bridge from one universe to the other. Over there: the black and yellow peoples, the brown peoples, the enslaved peoples…
Words no longer followed her thoughts in their ineffable flight. The shimmering crosses of the churches attracted her eyes. Old faith, we will break you too. We will take the Crucified One down off the cross. We want people to forget him. No more symbols of humiliation and suffering on the earth, no more blindness; knowledge, the clear eye of man, the master of himself and of things, rediscovering the universe afresh.

From the mouth of a pink street surged trucks, bristling with bayonets. They came bounding out, shaking the ground, jolting and pitching over the broken pavement, huge meteors made up of a human mass and a heavy tired-out machine fed on the filthiest oil. Each carried sixty broad chests washed by the sea air, sixty heads ready to burst open like futile pomegranates under a hail of shrapnel, sixty heads readier still to plunge forward, death and victory in their eyes, sixty rifles topped with glistening steel like cold rays of light, nine hundred cartridges belted across warm stomachs and male chests. The ribbons attached to their black sailors’ berets danced around their heads. The silence continued to tremble long after these meteors had disappeared.
Xenia listened as the intense clamour of the passing masses of men and machines subsided within her. The same will that carried them off on their inevitable trajectory toward obstacles and dangers kept her walking, alone, her task completed. The same imperious soul coordinated every gesture, repressing weaknesses, stifling hesitations, reducing all forces to a common denominator, enlisting man in a sort of legion which was much more flexible and impassioned than any army. Stay at your post, do your job; we are multitudes animated by a single thought, which is the very law of history discovered by the surest science. We are accomplishing that which cannot not be accomplished. Still greater masses are behind us, whose dim consciousness we embody, who think, will, and act through us and who cannot act otherwise. If we go under, the laws which regulate the development of man will not be modified because it; the same struggle will continue to set the same classes against each other; the same conquest will be prepared for tomorrow. The waves can take centuries to undermine a cliff.  Anyone who understands the process of the slow movement of continents, although he cannot predict which particular effort of the waves will give the final shove to the rocks loosened by seepage, does not doubt that the cliff must crumble. Each of us, and you too, Xenia, is only a droplet participating in the sweep of the waves; a droplet in which, before it dissolves, is reflected a whole vast strip of landscape, skies, rocks, ground swells, powdering spray, rainbows.
How clear it all is, when you think it through. I am glad to be a mere drop in the wave which is beating against old overturned stones here. I consent to everything. Here I am.

At the Committee, the stale smell of cigarette butts filled the messy rooms. The man on guard was sleeping, his rifle between his knees, seated on a step of the great marble staircase. Stuffed bears snickered on the landing. Ryzhik, alone, was pacing back and forth in front of the windows, which were open onto the sun-filled garden. They saw the joy in each other’s eyes.
“The fort has been retaken.” Said Ryzhik.
And he opened his arms; he never knew how it happened, but he took her in his arms and their mouths met joyfully. Then he asked – in order to dissipate the growing embarrassment between them, the blush rising to the top of his head along with the desire to slake his thirst totally in that spring of joy:
“No suspects?”
“No,” she said, “no.”
Her childish brow wrinkled; her whole face screwed up in painful concentration. “Yet it seems to me…yes!” She fished the identification sheet out of her pocket. “…laughs easily, habit of folding his arms across his chest, Moscow accent, first name D…” – “How could I have?... Ryzhik, we must telephone right away.”

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Chapter 11

THE 1^ST Esthonian Regiment went over to the Whites on May24. The 3^rd Infantry of the Second Brigade turned traitor on May 28. This 3^rd Battalion, accompanied by the brigade commissar, Rakov, was bivouacking in Vyra. At dawn, a former guards officer (now a Communist Party member) backed by a detachment of soldiers, had all the Communists arrested. Rakov defended himself alone in a thatched hut, fought desperately, and saved the last bullet from himself. The other Communists were massacred. Five women were later shot in a damp field in their nightgowns. A general arrived in the morning. After the killings, the men had taken an hour to remove their red stars and sew on nationalist cockades. Then they paraded behind the band for their new commanders like troops in a military tableau. A few days passed. Below Gatchina, at the gates of the city, a defensive front was established by one regiment. Hastily called reinforcements gradually filed up, without ammunition, without food, without shoes, without clothes. An inspection team was sent out from Fort Hill, which rounds out the Kronstadt defence perimeter on the south side of the Finnish Gulf, and made a most reassuring report: “Conscious and disciplined garrison, no sign of mutiny.” The starving troops, the huge, restless factories, the population decimated by typhus and cholera (which the newspapers were under orders not to mention) all needed to be fed. The announced supply trains never arrived, either because they had never left or because they were stopped by the starving cities along the way. The Council of Defence unofficially authorised requisitioning of food in the surrounding countryside. The peasants armed themselves with scythes, unearthed old machine guns, brought sawed-off rifles out of hiding, and chased away the detachments of workers when they didn’t disembowel the agitators during the night. The priests announced the end of the Anti-Christ. People gathered at evening vigils to read appeals from the White Army, which promised order, peace, respect for property, punishment for the Jews, and hand outs of white bread. Round white loaves brought back from the front passed from hand to admiring hand. Lists of suspects to be denounced on the arrival of the Whites were drawn up in every village. Anyone who had accounts to settle with a neighbour made sure his name was set down. The Greens controlled whole regions. They obeyed a single headquarters, manned by trained commanders. These deserters, who refused to fight for either party, and, being neither Whites nor Reds, took the colour of the forest, their refuge, had managed to form an army as regular as the others and tended to coordinate their actions with the Whites against the Reds, since the former were still stronger. Four thousand Greens occupied the Velikiye Luki region. There were probably 15,000 in the region around Pskov. They engaged in full-scale battles. Naturally they executed the Communists.

Enemy aircraft flew over Kronstadt, dropping pretty glistening bombs ringed with red copper. Huge white flowers of explosions burst out of the ground and in the May sky. A big British submarine attacked some Red torpedo boats on June 4 and was sunk. Fifty men in Davy Jones’s locker – Olde England- and among them jolly Ted, who sang so merrily to a Negro melody:

“Every ship will go to the bottom
Sixty fathoms deep!
Who gives a damn! Who gives a damn!”

The incident was completely hushed up. It spoiled the Lord High Admiral’s breakfast one morning. The city learned mysteriously that Fort Grey Horse, Fort Obruchev, and Fort Hill had gone over. The breeze carried gasps of cannon fire in from the sea. Alongside little white posters announcing free rations for children appeared brief placards signed by the head of internal defence.
OUTLAWED – Under Pain of Death- Will Be Shot Without Trial. Death crept into every dwelling. Men bowed their heads before these fresh placards, sensing rifles lowering slowly over them. The commander of the place, surrounded by telephones, called his staff assistant to report in. Comrade Valerian – peppery moustache cut American-style, fleshy nose, close-cropped hair – aimed a frank gaze into the eyes of the commander (“pretty clever, nonetheless, for an ex-machinist promoted to non-com after fifteen months at the front”) and recited:
“Two cruisers returning enemy fire at the front. The Communist battalions are confined to barracks. The Committees of Three and of Five of the Evacuation and Destruction Services are in permanent session. The aircraft factory can be destroyed in seven hours. I will supervise that operation personally.”

A note bearing the seal of the Central Special Commission brought news of the greatest gravity. The counterrevolutionary Centre Right organization could count on 146 confederates in the city, organised in groups of five, and a thousand sure sympathisers. These forces could be mobilized in a single night.  According to a plan marked with blue circles seized during a raid in Moscow, the organisation planned to occupy about twenty strategic points from within as soon as the Whites outside were ready to threaten the city directly. The Regional Committee of the Centre Right was allegedly presided over by an older man, known as the Professor, perhaps an actual professor (check university circles and the former Theology Academy). An intercepted letter indicated that an emissary had arrived from the south with important messages and was still in the city.
File No. 42, the Centre Right case, was in the hands of Comrade Zvereva, a rather ugly little woman, always well dressed, under the supervision of Special Commission members Terentiev and Arkadi. At two in the morning, as Zvereva was getting undressed in front of the mirror, as was her custom, caressing her flabby breasts with a distracted smile, the telephone on her night table began ringing insistently:
“Hello! The President here. You’re not in bed? Can you come over here, Room 12?”
Never before had the President spoken directly to Zvereva. She snapped to attention, overwhelmed by self-esteem mingled with anxiety. This narrow-eyed, broad-hipped little woman, tormented by desire, pride, and scruples, saw every man as a male, didn’t know how to give herself to anyone of them, and lived by haunted carnal hunger. She powdered herself quickly but lightly, so that it wouldn’t show, checked the finishing touches on the imperceptible dark traces lining her eyelids, hesitated a moment between her black dress with the straight pleats, which made her look thin, and the military tunic she put on for interrogations, but decided on the dress. She was sorry she didn’t meet anyone in the long red-carpeted hallway, for no one could have failed to realise from her mien that affairs- secret affairs- of the highest importance still occupied her at this hour of the night.

The President was wearing an old smoking jacket, worn at the elbows. Thick strands of pearl silk hung from the collar of his broad-checked shirt. From close up, his head appeared very large and swollen. He had puffy eyes with thick lids, and a little pink pimple on the edge of one nostril.
“Sit down, Comrade. You’re in charge of the Centre right case? Well, what about this plot?”
His voice was low and casual, as was his glance, which wandered around the little white sitting room. He had the air of someone getting on with a bit of unimportant business. The chandelier was burning, although it was broad daylight on the square outside, where an equestrian statue with a winged helmet was visible.
“All right. Get this case moving. You know the situation. Bring me a detailed report on Monday at four o’clock.”
Zvereva bent forward, her eyes shining, happy to shake that flabby hand. “Very well, very well. It will be taken care of, comrade.”

She put on the uniform tunic which moulded her figure and ran to the Commission. The great palace-lined square was immense at that hour. Every paving stone stood out with perfect sharpness like a piece of inlaid parquetry. Footsteps rang out. Their echo was strangely loud. A group of Communists, doubtless on their way to a house-by-house search, turned the corner. A sailor walked at the head, talking animatedly to a working girl in a white kerchief. Then came an old man in a sport coat, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a rifle slung over his shoulder. A couple of young men brought up the rear. Zvereva was struck by their apparent gaiety. Rosy hues spread across the sky above the huge gilt dome of St. Isaac’s. a magnificent purity descended over the city.

The electric lights were nonetheless burning at Commission Headquarters. A few decrepit trucks, some motorcycles, and a black limousine were lined up at the entrance. Two soldiers passed Zvereva in the stairway; they were leading out a tearful old lady whose hair had come undone. At the end of a hall there was a mound of typewriters piled one on top of another. Some were upside down like huge crustaceans lying on their backs, showing the bizarre mechanism of their bellies. An odour of phenol floated in the air; a wounded man emerged from Room 25 and made his way toward the toilet, leaning on the wall for support. Through the window Zvereva noticed white coffins lined up in a courtyard. She opened the safe and took out File No.42.
Almost no hard facts. The Central Commission didn’t know what it was reporting. – A decentralised organisation. A first-class double agent had failed to get beyond the lowest echelon. He only knew three men, who were as ignorant as he was – two ex-officers, a druggist, and their group leader, whom he thought it would be useless to arrest: he was too firm a character and wouldn’t spill anything unless he were put to torture. Zvereva had suggested the latter method to Terentiev, who passed it on to the Commission: in vain, prejudice was too strong. – What else? At most two new pieces of information might be placed in File No. 42: the report of another informer who, on the say-so of his mistress, a prostitute, announced the presence in the city if a young officer recently arrived from the south where he had witnessed horrible executions of Red prisoners. The description of this officer was fairly precise. His name began with a D. a denunciation signed by “Johann Appolinarius Fuchs, artist loyal to the Revolution,” gave details which agreed in every particular, obviously taken from the same source. “D: Damien, Daniel, David, Demid, Denis, Dimitri, Dosifei…”
Arkadi, consulted, smiled at the name of Fuchs. “Have the group we know about arrested tomorrow at the latest. I will sit in on the interrogations. Try to find this D., even though the information doesn’t seem very solid. No lead should be neglected. Send his description to every reliable man on the House Committees, and get it out to the leaders of the house-by-house search patrols.”

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Chapter 10

DANIL lived in a maid’s room at Professor Lytaev’s. Evenings, before going to sleep, he read love notes that had been left in the night table drawer by a brunette. Some of them were formal, written on paper decorated in the upper corner with coloured flowers: “Dear Mademoiselle Agrafena Prokhorova, allow your most obedient servant...,” ending with a contorted invitation to a birthday party. “With respect, your sincere perpetual admirer…” The writing was that of one of those public stenographers who used to keep stands in the market places.
When Danil came home early enough he would find two old men absorbed in their spoken meditation before a window which was still milk-white. The tea in the glasses took on a tint of wine; Vadim Mikhailovich Lytaev was saying:
“…Peter’s mount has got back into stride. Russia is beginning her revolution again. After Peter, she drifts slowly back into her past again. The Czars only borrow two things from the West: uniforms and money. Behind their false front the old Russia subsists: superstitious, bent under the yoke, floating her huge rafts down the Volga with the same songs as in the sixteenth century, still dragging the wooden swing plough through the fields, building the same houses as a thousand years ago, getting drunk the same way, Christianity celebrating pagan festivals during Easter, making love to fat, painted women and beating them from time to time, deporting or immuring heretics… This old country is still there, deep down, under a thin layer of burning lava.”

The historian, Platon Nikolaevich, answered:
“That is so. And the lava will cool. And when the lava is cool, the old earth by its fermentation alone will crack open the thin layer and once again push its old, eternally young green blades into the sunlight. Ashes make good fertiliser. After each era of disturbances, Russia begins living again according to her inner law like the plants which spring back after a storm. This land “Where Christ trod on every clod of earth” binds her wounds and continues her mission, which is neither that of the West nor that of the East, but hers alone. Even in those disturbances, which are alike from one century to another, old Russia remains faithful to her law…”
 “Platon Nikolaevich! This year, while Lenin was speaking in the assemblies, they burned a witch alive a hundred and eighteen versts from Moscow. Two hundred and thirty versts away, in order to protect a village from an epidemic, naked virgins were harnessed to a plough, following a custom which may go back to the Scythians, and dug a furrow around the fields and dwellings. We are darkest Asia. We can only be pulled out of ourselves by an iron fist. Peter is the model and precursor of the Revolution. Remember this: “Constraint makes all things happen.” He founded industries, ministries, an army, a fleet, a capital, customs, by means of edicts and executions. He gave the order to cut off the beards, to dress European-style, to open this window on Europe in the Ingrian swamps. The earth was bare, but he said “Here will rise a city.” He caned his courtiers, drank like a trooper, and ended his life full of suspicion, doubt, and anguish, smelling treason everywhere (and it was everywhere, like today), trusting no one but his grand inquisitor, thinking even of striking the Empress. And he was right. He left a country depopulated in places, bleeding and moaning under the effort, but St. Petersburg was built! And he is still the Great, the greatest, because he hounded the old Russian, even his own son, because he wrenched this ignorant, passive, bloated old country around toward the future the way you pull up a restive horse with bit and spurs. I hear an echo of his edicts in today’s decrees. All this can even be expressed in Marxist terms: the rise of new classes.”

Platon Nikolaevich resembled Lytaev in a multitude of contrasts: in his immobility; in his face, which was as full as the other man’s was sharp; by his faith, which was as solid as the other’s was anxious. The mould of a face mask resembles the face because it reproduces its harmonies in reverse… Platon Nikolaevich answered slowly, for they spoke to each other mainly to affirm a living thought which, though expecting nothing from men, still felt the need for the ephemeral finality of expression.
“No, Vadim Mikhailovich; Peter, like the people in the Kremlin, is only an accident – perhaps a necessary one in the accomplishment of certain developments – in the history of Russia. It is Alexis who is right against Peter, just as Christ on the cross is eternally right against the eternally vanquished Anti-Christ. Peter is only great to the degree that in spite of himself he becomes the instrument of a cause which is not his own – when he renews the reasons for living of the old Russia he attacks. This time of troubles will end. The southern Slavs, who have remained healthier, closer to the soil, will re-create order and unity in the faith against the sick cities. We are passing through a sort of dark age and we will be reborn. And we will once again bring light to the West.”
“The question,” said Danil, “will be decided by the sword.”
“No, by the spirit.”
It was their common thought, so much so that of the two historians neither was quite sure who had answered.
“But what is the spirit without the sword?”
“But what is the sword without the spirit?”
Danil saw the same indulgent irony in the eyes of the two scholars. He looked at the books lining their shelves, old books full of facts, of ideas, of things so useless when it is a question of bread, of lice, of blood. In the drawer of a mahogany secretary manuscripts lay sleeping. History: that vile scholar’s lie among whose printed lines not a drop of spilled blood can be found, where nothing remains of the passion, the pain, the fear, and the violence of men! He felt a kind of hatred for these two old mandarins who knew so many dates and theories but hadn’t the least idea of the stench of a sacked town or the look of an open belly full of fat green flies over which poppies droop their heads.
“Dostoyevsky…” began Platon Nikolaevich.
“I don’t read him. No time, you understand. The Karamazovs split hairs with their beautiful souls; we are carving flesh itself, and the beautiful soul doesn’t mean a thing to us. What is serious is to eat, to sleep, to avoid being killed, and to kill well. There’s the truth. The question has already been decided by the sword and the spirit. A sword which is stronger than ours, a spirit we don’t understand. And we don’t need to understand in order to perish. We will all perish with these books, these ideas, Dostoyevsky and the rest; precisely, perhaps, on account of these books, of these ideas, of Dostoyevsky, of scruples, and of incomplete massacres. And the earth will continue to turn. That’s all. Good evening.”

The days got longer, heralding white nights. The snow melted on the steppes, revealing patches of black earth and pointed yellow grasses. Streamlets ran in every direction, babbling like birds. They glistened in every fold of earth. Swollen rivers reflected pure skies of still frigid blue. Scattered bursts of laughter hung in the woods among the slim white trunks of birches. Specks of dull silver seemed to hang in the air. The first warm days were tender, caressing. The pedestrian in the damp streets offered them his face and his soul. His glance clung to pretty white clouds which passed above like cares carried off by a great gust of confidence. The charm of life revived with the little children playing on street corners; it hovered over an empty square above a horse carcass devoured by stray dogs. The animal’s skull emerged, a fresh ivory colour, from a burrow of melting snow. Shreds of hairy brown skin, laundered by the frosts, clung to the crushed rib cage. The five little golden onion domes of a rococo church pierced the pale sky, azure turned white, but an airy white of limpid freshness. One could no longer believe that there was still war, death, hunger, fear, lice. The river, immensely free between its granite banks, carried along huge blocks of ice. The floes moved with soft crunching sounds downstream from northern lakes toward the sea now reopened to the lapping waves, to the living lights beading the foam, to the warm Gulf Stream breezes which, starting from Yucatan and the Floridas, passed over the Atlantic, the fjords of Norway and the plains of Sweden, and came to rest on our icy shores. Atop the golden spire of the Admiralty Building a tiny gilded ship, as light and distinct as an idea, sailed through the sky. The colours of the red flags revived.

The first buds opened in the gardens. Then there was an explosion of fresh green foliage over the rivers and canals cutting through the city. The pleasure of life, suddenly recalled, had an acid taste. The evenings were cold under skies tinted steel blue as from the distant reflection of huge icebergs. There was no more night; dusk dragged on grey, blue, mauve, ashy, pearly, brighter and brighter, to midnight. The sky glowed white until sunrise, captivating every glance, at the end of the sparkling canals, through the black arching branches, above the heads of century-old riders holding in their rearing horses… Couples roamed the riverbanks. The sky poured its brightness down on them, the river encompassed them with solitude. They met with ghostly smiles. They paused before rotting barges abandoned by the boatmen last autumn when the river transports were nationalised. Soon they would be dismantled to make firewood; it would be a rough job. The Poor People’s Committees were struggling bitterly over a possession of these hulks.

A blond adolescent girl with deep blue eyes shimmering like rivulets of melting snow questioned her lover, who wore the ragged uniform of a vanished academy:
“Will you help me?”
He whispered yes as he kissed her ear, for she had given herself to him on one of these days, naïve and willing, bewildered and feverish, in a cosy nook of this rotting barge; the stale smell of the river pervaded the silvery grey of the endless evening. The waterlogged planks yielded under their footsteps. They had come there out of curiosity, unmindful of their joy since their joy carried them along. She had nearly fallen into a dark square hole at the bottom of which the water was lapping. “You see! You see!” he said, alarmed. She laughed. “If you had to count every near miss!” They found themselves suddenly alone. Nothing but the vast empty sky over their heads and the watery ripples below, reflecting through a wide gap in the disjointed planks. “How nice it is,” she said, offering him her lips, and the idea came to her simply that in love you have to give your body; it has to hurt and you feel a little ashamed, but you have to, with eyes closed and lips entwined, and you shudder with happiness afterward just thinking about it… But how do you do it? The books don’t explain it very clearly. – “I don’t know, I’m all embarrassed, forgive me, do what you will with me, I love you, I love you…”
Now her rosy petal-shaped lips mingled ordinary things with important preoccupations:
“We’ll set aside a provision of wood for the winter… Listen, I want to become more conscious; tell me what to read.”

Another couple. She: close-cropped hair under a brown leather cap which gave her small head a sporty appearance; gilded temples and eyebrows and gold-flecked eyes. He: a soldier, the red star encrusted in black leather over his brow. She had just left the District Committee, he had come from the political bureau of the 23^rd Regiment; they met on a bench in the Summer Garden, a few steps from the Dutch House built by Czar Peter as a temporary residence while this city was emerging from the swamps and forests, with wooden sidewalks running along muddy streets, huge empty tracts, and parks which were in reality the edges of the forest. The graceful gestures of Diana and Artemises hovered beneath the trees. The severely wrought grille of the garden stood out black against the great pale light of the north. There flowed the river.
Their handclasp was firm. Without apparent tenderness. Nearly the same height, the two breathed the same strength. Her eyes followed the hopping sparrows as she said:  “I’ve been thinking over the theory of imperialism. You were right the other evening. All you have to do is read Chapter Four in Hilferding. But on the problem of freedom I’m the one who’s right. Here…”

She pulled a sheaf of notes out of a pamphlet whose coloured cover showed a globe of the earth covered with chains broken by a red lightning bolt dropping from the milky Way.
“Marx writes: “Value transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic… For those who exchange their products, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” They believe themselves to be free because they are subject to the action of anonymous objects and not to men. They believe themselves free because they see no master over them. But “the reciprocal independence of person is achieved through a system of universal material dependence.””
“That was valid for the past. By becoming conscious of necessity we become free. Read Chapter XI of Anti-Duhring. By its understanding of necessary historical development, the proletariat, accomplishing what must be accomplished, passes from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. Read Chapter II and Part III.”
“Xenia!”
She knew what he was going to say, but with what words? She waited for these words and it seemed to her that her chest was bursting with joy.
“Xenia, we are necessary to each other, and we are free because…”
They kept silent until they reached the part of the garden where a great porphyry vase stands on a grey pedestal. Only there did he dare to ask her with awkward detachment:
“Will you come, Xenia?”
She nodded yes, simply, and, so that he wouldn’t see the joy laughing in her eyes, looked into the distance toward the varicoloured bulbs of the Church of the Saviour on the Blood. In preparation for this nod, she had spent a long time this morning washing and decking herself out in fine linen, hesitating whether to take along the vial of French Perfume. Was the use of these luxuries invented by the depravity of the rich not unworthy? Yet the District Committee distributed perfumes impounded by customs to the women activists with the most important jobs. She made up her mind on the basis of this specious argument: it was not a luxury nut a matter of hygiene. Wouldn’t he be angry at this bit of refinement in her? But how he breathed in the fresh smell of her bare arms…
They were leaving the garden. An auto, having passed them, stopped short. A high-booted man with a revolver at his side ran to meet them. Ryzhik was only three paces away when Xenia recognised him.

“You’re taking a stroll? You don’t know what’s going on? Come over to the Department right away. Everyone is mobilised.”
Ryzhik climbed back into the car. Only there did he feel, as one feels a bullet only the instant after it hits you, what a sharp jab had pierced his heart at the sight of that couple. Sprawled on the greasy old upholstery of the Ford, instead of thinking of the Revolution he thought that he was too old and that it was irreparable.

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