The Case of
Comrade
Tulayev
by Victor Serge
Digitalized by
RevSocidlist
for
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Contents
1.	 Comets Are Born at Night, 1
2.	 The Sword Is Blind, 27
3.	 Men at Bay, 54
4.	 To Build Is to Perish, 79
5.	 Journey into Defeat, 108
6.	 Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning, 143
7.	 The Brink of Nothing, 180
8.	 The Road to Gold, 211
9.	 Let Purity Be Treason, 248
10. And Still the Floes Came Down . . . , 277
vii

This novel belongs entirely to the domain of literary
fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any
degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler. Any
attempt to establish a precise connection between characters or episodes
in this book and known historical personages and events would therefore
be without justification.

1 • Comets Are Born at Night
For several weeks Kostia had been thinking about buy-
ing a pair of shoes. But then a sudden impulse, which surprised even
himself, upset all his calculations. By going without cigarettes, movies,
and lunch every other day, he would need six weeks to save up the one
hundred and forty rubles which was the price of a fairly good pair of
shoes that the salesgirl in a secondhand store had kindly promised to
set aside for him “on the q.t.” Meanwhile, he walked cheerfully on card-
board soles, which he replaced every evening. Fortunately the weather
remained fair. When Kostia had accumulated seventy, rubles he gave
himself the pleasure of going to see the shoes that would one day be his.
He found them half hidden on a dark shelf, behind several old copper
samovars, a pile of opera-glass cases, a Chinese teapot, and a shell box
with a sky-blue Bay of Naples. A magnificent pair of boots, of the softest
leather, had the place of honor on the shelf—four hundred rubles, imag-
ine! Men in threadbare overcoats licked their lips over them. “Don’t
worry,” the little salesgirl said to him. “Your boots are still here, don’t
worry . . .” She smiled at him, and again he noticed her brown hair,

her deep-set eyes, her irregular but pretty teeth, her lips—but what
was the right adjective for her lips? “Your lips are enchanted,” he
thought and looked straight into her face, hut never, never would he
dare to say what he was thinking! For a moment her deep-set eyes held
him, with their color between green and blue—just the color of those
Chinese jades he had noticed under the glass top of the counter! Then his
eyes wandered on over the jewels, the paper cutters, the watches, the
snuffboxes, until, quite by chance, they fell on a little ebony-framed por-
trait of a woman, so small that he could have held it in his hand . . .
“How much is that?” Kostia asked in a startled voice.
“Sixty rubles—it’s expensive, you know,” said the enchanted lips.
Hands that were no less enchanted dropped a piece of red-and-gold
brocade, reached under the counter, brought out the miniature. Kostia
took it. It was a shock to find his big, grimy fingers holding the little
portrait. How alive it was! And how strange! It was the strangeness of
it that he felt the most. The little black rectangle framed a blond head
crowned with a tiara; alert yet sweet, penetrating yet mild, the eyes were
an unfathomable mystery . . .
“I’ll take it,” Kostia said, to his own surprise.
He had spoken so quietly, the voice had seemed to come from such
depths of his being, that the salesgirl did not dare to protest. She looked
furtively to right and left, then murmured:
“Don’t say anything . . . I’ll make out the slip for fifty rubles. Just
don’t let the cashier see what it is when you pay for it.”
Kostia thanked her. But he hardly saw her. “Fifty or seventy—what
do I care, girl? The price has nothing to do with it—can’t you see
that?” A fire burned in him. As he walked homeward he felt the little
ebony rectangle in his inside coat pocket cling gently to his breast; and
from the contact there radiated a growing joy. He walked faster and
faster, ran up a dark flight of stairs, hurried down the hall of the col-
lective apartment—today it smelled rankly of naphthaline and cabbage
soup—entered his room, switched on the light, looked ecstatically at his
cot bed, the old illustrated magazines piled on the table, the window with
the three broken panes replaced by cardboard—and felt embarrassed to
hear himself murmur: “What luck!” Now the little black frame stood on
the table, tilted against the wall, and the blond woman saw only him,
as he saw only her. The room filled with an indefinable brightness.
Kostia walked aimlessly from the window to the door—suddenly he felt
imprisoned. On the other side of the partition Romachkin coughed softly.
“What a man!” Kostia thought, suddenly amused by the recollection

of the bilious little fellow. He never went out, he was so neat and clean—
a real petit bourgeois, living there alone with his geraniums, his gray-
paper-bound books, his portraits of great men: Ibsen, who said that the
solitary man is the strongest man; Meqhnikov, who enlarged the bound-
aries of life; Darwin, who proved that animals of the same species do
not eat each other; Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and
loved the forest. Romachkin still wore old coats made in the days of the
war that preceded the revolution that preceded the Civil War—in the
days when the world swarmed with inoffensive and frightened Romach-
kins. Kostia gave a little smile as he turned toward his half-a-fireplace—
because the partition which separated his room from Assistant Clerk
Romachkin’s room exactly divided the handsome marble fireplace of
what had once been a drawing room.
Poor old Romachkin! you’ll never have any more than half a room,
half a fireplace, half a life—and not even half of a face like that . . .
(The face in the miniature, the intoxicating blue light of those eyes.)
“Your half of life is the dark half, poor old Romachkin.”
Two strides took Kostia into the hall and to his neighbor’s door, on
which he rapped the customary three little knocks. A stale odor of
fried food, mingled with talk and quarreling voices, wafted from the
other end of the apartment. An angry woman—who was certainly thin,
embittered, and unhappy—was clattering pots and saying: “So he said,
‘Very well, citizen, I’ll tell the manager.’ And I said, ‘Very well, citizen,
I’ll’ ” A door opened, then instantly slammed shut, letting a burst
of childish sobs escape. The telephone rang furiously. Romachkin came
to the door. “Hello, Kostia.”
Romachkin’s domain was nine feet long by eight feet wide, just like
Kostia’s. Paper flowers, carefully dusted, decorated the half-a-mantel-
piece. His geraniums bordered the window sill with reddish purple. A
cold glass of tea stood on the table, which was neatly covered with white
paper. “I’m not interrupting, I hope? Were you reading?” The thirty
books stood ranged on the double shelf over the bed.
“No, Kostia, I wasn’t reading. I was thinking.”
The faded wall, the portraits of the four great men, the glass of tea,
and Romachkin sitting there thinking with his coat buttoned. “What,”
Kostia wondered, “does he do with his hands?” Romachkin never put
his elbows on the table; when he spoke, his hands usually lay spread flat
on his knees; he walked with his hands behind his back; he sometimes
folded his arms over his chest, timidly raising his shoulders. His shoul-
ders suggested the humble patience of a beast of burden.

“What were you thinking about, Romachkin?”	,
“Injustice.”
A vast subject, you certainly didn’t exhaust it, my friend. Odd—it was
chillier here than in his own room. “I came to borrow some books,” said
Kostia. Romachkin’s hair was neatly brushed, his face was sallow and
aging, his lips were thin, his eyes fastened on you, yet they looked afraid.
What color were they? They didn’t seem to have any color. No more,
indeed, did Romachkin—at first you thought gray, and then not even
that. He studied his shelves for a moment, then took down an old paper-
bound volume. “Read that, Kostia. It’s the stories of brave men.” It was
issue Number 9 of Prison, “official organ of the Association of Former
Convicts and Life-Exiles.” Thank you, good-by. Good-by, my friend.
Would he go back to his thinking now, the poor creature?
Their two tables exactly faced each other on the two sides of the
partition. Kostia sat down, opened the magazine, and tried to read. Now
and again he looked up at the miniature, each time with the happy cer-
tainty that he would find the greenish-blue eyes fixed on his. Spring
skies, pale above the snow, had that light when the river ice went out and
the earth began to live again. Romachkin, in his private desert on the
other side of the partition, had sat down again with his head in his hands
—solitary, absorbed, convinced that he was thinking. Perhaps he really
was thinking.
For a long time Romachkin had been living in solitary communion
with a depressing thought. His job as assistant clerk in the wages de-
partment of the Moscow Clothing Trust would never be made permanent,
since he was not a member of the Party. On the other hand, unless he
should be arrested or die, he would never be replaced because, of all the
117 employees of the central office who, from nine to six, filled forty
rooms under the Alcohol Trust and over the Karelian Furs Syndicate
and next door to the Uzbekistan Cottons Agency, he alone knew every
detail of the seventeen categories of wages and salaries, in addition to
the seven types of remuneration for piecework, the possible combina-
tions of basic wages with production bonuses, the art of reclassifications
and paper raises which had no upsetting effect on the total salary budget.
“Romachkin,” the order would come, “the director wants you to prepare
the application of the new circular from the Plan Committee in con-
formity with the Central Committee’s circular of January 6, of course
taking into consideration the decision of the Conference of Textile
Trusts—you know the one?” He knew. The head of his office, former

capmaker and member of the Party since last spring, knew nothing—he
couldn’t even add. But he was said to he connected with the secret
service (supervision of technical personnel and manual lahor). He
spoke with the voice of authority: “Understand, Romachkin? Have it
ready by five o’clock tomorrow. I am going to the board meeting.” The
office was in the third court of a brick building in St. Bamaby Alley;
a few sickly trees, half killed by rubble from a demolished building, made
a touching spot of green under his window.
Romachkin immersed himself in his calculations. And after a time
it appeared that the 5 per cent increase in the basic wage published by
the Central Committee, combined with the reclassifications whereby
certain workers in Category 11 were transferred to Category 10, and
certain workers in Category 10 to Category 9, thus improving the condi-
tion of the lowest wage groups (as not only justice but also the directive
of the Council of Syndicates demanded), resulted in a 0.5 per cent reduc-
tion in the total wage budget if the regulations were applied with the
utmost strictness. Now, the workmen in the two mills earned between
110 and 120 rubles, and the new rent increase became effective at the
end -of the month. Romachkin sadly turned his conclusions over to be
typed. Every month he went through some similar operation (though
the pretext for it was always new), brought his explanatory tables for the
accounting office up to date, waited until quarter to five before he went
to wash his hands, which he did slowly, humming “tra-la-la, tra-la-la”
or “mmmm-mmmmm” like a melancholy bee ... He dined hurriedly
in the office restaurant, reading the leading article in the paper, which
always announced, in the same tone of authority, that the country was
progressing, was making rapid strides, that there had never been any-
thing to compare with it, that despite all opposition history was being
made for the glory of the Republic, the happiness of the working masses
—witness the 210 factories opened during the year, the brilliant success
in creating a grain reserve, and ...
“But I,” Romachkin said to himself one day as he swallowed his last
spoonful of cold semolina, “am squeezing the poor.”
The figures proved it. He lost his peace of mind. “The trouble is that
I think . . . or rather, there is a being in me that thinks without my
being aware of it, and then suddenly raises its voice in the silence of my
brain and utters some short, acid, intolerable sentence. And after that,
life can’t be the same.” Romachkin was terrified by his twofold dis-
covery—that he thought, and that the papers lied. He spent evenings at
home, making complex calculations, comparing millions in goods rubles

with millions in nominal rubles, tons of wheat with masses of human
beings. He went to libraries and opened dictionaries and encyclopedias
to Obsession, Mania, Insanity, Mental Diseases, Paranoia, Schizophrenia,
and concluded that he was neither paranoid nor cyclothymic nor schizo-
phrenic nor neurotic, but at most suffering from a slight degree of hyster-
omaniacal depression. Symptoms: an obsession with figures, a propensity
to find falsehood everywhere, and an idea which was almost an obsession,
an idea which was so sacred that he feared to name it, an idea which solved
all intellectual problems, which put all falsehood to flight, an idea which
a man must keep perpetually in his consciousness or he would cease to
be more than a miserable wretch, a sub-human paid to nibble at other
men’s bread, a cockroach snug in the brick building of the Trusts . . .
Justice was in the Gospels, but the Gospels were feudal and pre-feudal
superstition; surely Justice was in Marx, though Romachkin could not
find it there; it was in the Revolution, it watched in Lenin’s tomb, it
illuminated the embalmed brow of a pink and pallid Lenin who lay
under crystal, guarded by motionless sentries; in reality they were
guarding eternal Justice.
The doctor whom Romachkin consulted at the neuropsychiatric clinic
at Khamovniki said: “Reflexes excellent, nothing to worry about, citi-
zen. Sex life?” “Not much, only occasionally,” Romachkin answered,
blushing. “I recommend intercourse twice a month,” said the doctor
dryly. “As to the idea of justice, don’t let it worry you. It is a positive
social idea resulting from the sublimation of the primitive ego and the
suppression of individualistic instincts; it is called upon to play a great
role in the period of transition to Socialism . . . Macha, call in the next
patient. Your number, citizen?” The next patient was already in the
room, his number in his fingers—fingers of paper, shaken by an inner
storm. A being disfigured by an animal laugh. The man in the white
blouse, the doctor, disappeared behind his screen. What did he look like?
Romachkin had forgotten his face already. Satisfied with his consulta-
tion, Romachkin was in a mood to joke: “The patient is yourself, Citizen
Doctor. Primitive sublimation—what nonsense! You have never had the
least notion of justice, citizen.”
He emerged from the crisis strengthened and illuminated. As a result
of the doctor’s advice on sexual hygiene he found himself, one cloudy
evening, on a bench on the Boulevard Trubnoy, haunt of painted girls
who ask you, in soft, alcoholic voices, for a cigarette . . . Romachkin
did not smoke. “I am very sorry, mam’selle,” he said, trying to sound
lewd. The prostitute took a cigarette from her pocket, lit it slowly to

display her painted nails and her charming profile—then crushed her
body against his: “Looking for something?” He nodded. “Come over
on the other bench, it’s farther from the light. You’ll see what I can
do . . . Three rubles, right?” Romachkin was overwhelmed by the
thought of poverty and injustice; yet what connection was there be-
tween such thoughts and this prostitute, and himself, and sexual hygiene?
He said nothing. Yet he was half aware of a connection, as tenuous as
the silvery rays that on clear nights link star to star. “For five rubles, I’ll
take you home,” said the girl. “You pay in advance, darling—that’s the
rule.” He was glad that there was a rule for this sort of transaction. The
girl led him through the moonlight to a hovel almost indistinguishable
in the shadow of an eight-story office building. Discreet knocking on a
windowpane brought out a poverty-stricken woman clutching a shawl
over her sunken chest. “It’s comfortable inside,” she said, “there’s a little
fire. Don’t hurry, Katiuchenka, I’ll be all right here smoking a butt while
I wait. Don’t wake the baby—she’s asleep on the far side of the bed.”
In order not to wake the baby, they lay down on the floor on a quilt
which they took from the bed, in which a little dark-haired girl lay
sleeping with her mouth open. A single candle gave the only light.
Everything, from the dirty ceiling to the cluttered corners, was sordid.
The iniquity of it went through Romachkin like a cold that freezes to
the bone. He too was iniquitous, an iniquitous brute. In his person,
iniquity itself writhed on the body of a miserable, anemic girl. Iniquity
filled the huge silence into which he plunged with bestial fury. At that
instant, another idea was born in him. Feeble, faraway, hesitant, not
wanting to live, it yet was bom. Thus from volcanic soil rises a tiny
flame, which, small though it be, yet reveals that the earth will quake
and crack and burst with flowing lava.
Afterwards, they walked back to the boulevard together. She chat-
tered contentedly: “Still got to find one more tonight. It’s not easy. Yes-
terday I hung around till dawn, and then didn’t get anyqne but a drank
who didn’t have quite three rubles left. What do you think of that?
Cholera! People are too hungry, men don’t think about making love
these days.” Romachkin politely agreed, preoccupied with watching the
struggles of the new little flame: “Of course. Sexual needs are influenced
by diet . . .” Thus encouraged, the girl talked of what was happening
in the country. “I just got back from my village, oh cholera!” Cholera
must be her favorite word, he thought. She said it charmingly, now
blowing out a straight stream of cigarette smoke, now spitting sidewise.
“The horses are all gone, cholera! What will people do now? First they

took the best horses for the collective, then the township co-operative
refused to furnish fodder for the ones the peasants had been left or had
refused to give up. Anyway, there wasn’t any more fodder because the
army requisitioned the last of it. The old people, who remembered the
last famine, fed them roof thatch—imagine what fodder that makes for
the poor beasts after it’s been out under rain and sun for years!
Cholera! It made you weep to see them, with their sad eyes and their
tongues hanging out and their ribs sticking through their sides—I swear
they really came through the hide!—and their swollen joints and little
boils all over their bellies and their backs full of pus and blood and
worms eating right into the raw flesh—the poor creatures were rotting
alive—we had to put bands under their bellies to hold them up at night
or they’d never have been able to get back on their legs in the morning.
We let them wander around the yards and they licked the fence palings
and chewed the ground to find a scrap of grass. Where I come from,
horses are more precious than children. There are always too many chil-
dren to feed, they come when nobody wants them—do you think there
was any need for me to come into the world? But there are never
enough horses to do the farm work with. With a horse, your children
can grow up; without a horse a man is not a man any more, is he? No
more home—nothing but hunger, nothing but death. . . . Well, the
horses were done for—there was no way out. The elders met. I was in
the comer by the stove. There was a little lamp on the table, and I had
to keep trimming the wick—it smoked. What was to be done to save the
horses? The elders couldn’t even speak, they were so sunk. Finally my
father—he looked terrible, his mouth was all black—said: ‘There’s
nothing to be done. We’ll have to kill them. Then they won’t suffer any
more. There’s always the leather. As for us, we will die or not, as God
pleases.’ Nobody said anything after that, it was so quiet that I could
hear the roaches crawling under the stove bricks. My old man got up
slowly. ‘I’ll do it,’ says he. He took the ax from under the bench. My
mother threw herself on him: ‘Nikon Nikonich, pity . . .’ He looked as
if he needed pity himself, with his face all screwed up like a murderer.
‘Silence, woman,’ says he. ‘You, girl, come and hold a light for us.’ I
brought the lamp. The stable was against the house; when the mare
moved at night we heard her. It was comforting. She saw us come in
with the light, and she looked at us sadly, like a sick man, there were
tears in her eyes. She hardly turned her head because her strength was
nearly gone. Father kept the ax hidden, because the mare would surely
have known. Father went up to her and patted her cheeks. ‘You’re a

good mare, Brownie. It’s not my fault if you have suffered. May God
forgive me ’ Before the words were out of his mouth Brownie’s
skull was split open. ‘Clean the ax,’ Father said to me. ‘Now we have
nothing.’ How I cried that night!—outside, because they would have
beaten me if I’d cried in the house. I think everybody in the village hid
somewhere and cried . . .” Romachkin gave her an extra fifty kopecks.
Then she wanted to kiss him on the mouth—“You’ll see how, darling”
—but he said “No, thank you,” humbly, and walked away among the
dark trees, his shoulders sagging.
All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the
office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of
idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to
avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty
Boxes. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales.
Romachkin bought some pickled mushrooms and reserved a place in a
line that was forming for sausage. From a comparatively well-lighted
street he turned into another that was dark, and walked up it. Electric
signs, themselves invisible, filled the end of it with an orange glory.
Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal
masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman’s voice rose, rapid and
vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human
guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from
a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful—that voice
without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the
unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly
cold. The woman’s voice clamored: “In the name of the four thousand
women workers . . Romachkin’s brain passively echoed: In the
name of the four thousand women workers in this factory ... And
four thousand women of all ages—seductive women, women prematurely
old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women
of whom he dared not dream—were present in him for an incalculable
instant, and they all cried: “We demand the death penalty for these vile
dogs! No pity!” (“Can you mean it, women?” Romachkin answered
severely. “No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of
us . . .”) “To the firing squad with them!” Factory meetings con-
tinued during the trial of the engineers—or was it the economists, or the
food control board, or the Old Bolsheviks, who were being tried this
time? Romachkin walked on. Twenty steps farther he stopped again,
this time in front of a lighted window. Between the curtains he saw a
table set for supper—tea, plates, hands, only hands on the checked

linoleum: a fat hand holding a fork, a gray slumbering hand, a child’s
hand ... A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry
of the meetings: “Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them!” Who? It didn’t
matter. Why?
Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inex-
plicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers. “Good eve-
ning, Comrade Romachkin. Have you heard? Marfa and her husband
have been refused passports because they were disenfranchised as arti-
sans formerly working on their own account. Have you heard? Old
Bukin has been arrested, they say he had hidden dollars sent him by his
brother, who is a dentist in Riga . . . And the engineer has lost his job,
he’s suspected of sabotage. Have you heard? There is going to be a fresh
purge of employees, get ready for it, I heard at the house committee
meeting that your father was an officer . . .”—“It’s not true,” said
Romachkin, choking, “he was only a sergeant during the imperialist war,
he was an accountant . . .” (But since that right-thinking accountant
had belonged to the Russian People’s Union, Romachkin’s conscience
was not entirely at ease.)—“Try to produce witnesses, they say the com-
missions are severe . . . They say there is trouble in the Smolensk
region—no more wheat . .	—“I know, I know . . . Come and play
checkers, Piotr Petrovich . . They went to Romachkin’s room, and
his neighbor began telling his own troubles in a low voice: his wife’s
first husband had been a shopkeeper, so it was more than likely that her
passport for Moscow would not be renewed. “They give you three days
to get out, Comrade Romachkin, and you have to go somewhere at least
two hundred miles away—but will they give you a passport there?” If
it turned out that way, their daughter obviously couldn’t enter the
Forestry School. Gilded by the lamplight, the ax came down on the head
of a horse with human eyes, voices lashed through fiery darkness de-
manding victims, stations were filled with crowds waiting almost hope-
lessly for trains which crawled over the map toward the last wheat, the
last meat, the last combines; a prostitute from the Boulevard Trubnoy
lay gaping wide open on a pallet beside a sleeping child pink as a sucking
pig, pure as the innocents Herod slaughtered, and a prostitute cost
money, five rubles, a day’s pay—yes, he must find witnesses to face the
new purge with, was the new rent scale going into effect? If in all this
there was not some immense wrong, some boundless guilt, some hidden
villainy, it must be that a sort of madness filled everyone’s brain. The
game of checkers was over. Piotr Petrovich went home, thinking of his
troubles: “Most serious, the matter of the interior passport . .

Romachkin turned down his bed, undressed, rinsed out his mouth, and
lay down. The electric light burned on his bed table, the sheet was white,
the portraits mute—ten o’clock. Before he went to sleep, he read the
paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it
did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech: Our
economic successes . . . Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen peo-
ple, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises,
unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages,
as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise
of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since
production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skep-
tics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent
of Opposition in their secret hearts!—It was set forth in angular periods,
numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now
fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six com-
mandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic cer-
tainty . . . Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp
eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages
was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real
wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in
prices. . . . But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a
mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of
Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. “Continued ap-
plause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for minutes. Salvos of
shouts: ‘Long live our unconquerable Chief! Long live our great Pilot!
Long live the Political Bureau! Long live the Party!’ The ovation is re-
sumed. Numerous voices: ‘Long live the Secret Police!’ Thunderous
applause.”
Feeling unfathomably sad, Romachkin thought: How he lies!—and
was terrified at his own audacity. No one, fortunately, could hear him
think; his room was empty; somebody came out of the toilet, walked
down the hall dragging his slippers—no doubt it was old Schlem, who
had stomach trouble; a sewing machine purred softly; before getting
into bed, the couple across the hall were quarreling in little sentences
that hissed like lashes. He felt the man pinching the woman, slowly twist-
ing her hair, making her kneel down, then hitting her across the face
with the back of his hand; the whole hall knew it, the couple had been
reported, but they denied it and were reduced to torturing each other
without making any noise, as, afterward, they cohabited without making
any noise, moving like wary animals. And the people listening at the

door heard almost nothing, but sensed everything.—Twenty-two people
lived in the six rooms and the windowless nook at the back: twenty-two
people, all clearly recognizable by the most furtive sounds they made in
the stillness of night. Romachkin turned out the light. The feeble glow
of a street light came through the curtain, tracing the usual pictures on
the ceiling. They varied monotonously from day to day. In the half-
light, the Chief’s massive profile was superimposed on the figure of the
man who was silently beating his wife in the room across the hall. Would
she ever escape from her bondage? Shall we ever escape from falsehood?
The responsibility was his who lied in the face of an entire people. The
terrible thought which, until now, had matured in the dark regions of a
consciousness that feared itself, that pretended to ignore itself, that
struggled to disguise itself before the mirror within, now stripped off its
mask. So, at night, lightning reveals a landscape of twisted trees above
a chasm. Romachkin felt an almost visual revelation. He saw the crim-
inal. A translucent flame flooded his soul. It did not occur to him that
his new knowledge might avail him nothing. Henceforth it would pos-
sess him, would direct his thoughts, his eyes, his steps, his hands. He
fell asleep with his eyes wide open, suspended between ecstasy and fear.
Romachkin took to haunting the Great Market—sometimes before
the office opened in the morning, sometimes late in the afternoon after
his work was done. There, from dawn to dark, several thousand human
heings formed a stagnant crowd which might almost have appeared mo-
tionless, so patient and wary were their comings and goings. Patches of
color, human faces, objects, were all overwhelmed by the uniform gray
of the trodden muddy ground which never dried out; misery marked
every creature there with its crushing imprint. It was in the suspicious
eyes of market women swathed in shapeless wool or prints, in the earthy
faces of soldiers who could no longer really be soldiers, though they
still wore vague uniforms that had been in battle only to flee; it was in
the frayed cloth of overcoats, in hands that held out unexpected wares:
a Samoyed reindeer glove fringed with red and green and lined inside—
“Soft as down, citizen, just feel it”—a solitary glove, as it was the soli-
tary merchandise the little Kalmuck thief had to offer today. Difficult to
tell sellers from buyers, as they stood shifting their feet or prowled
slowly around one another. “A watch, a watch, a good Cyma watch—
buy it?” The watch ran only seven minutes—“What a movement, listen,
citizen!”—just long enough for the seller to pocket your fifty rubles and
vanish. A sweater, worn at the collar and patched in the body, ten rubles
—done! A man dead of typhoid had soaked it with his sweat?—Cer-

tainly not, citizen, that’s only the smell of the trunk it was in. “Tea, real
caravan tea, t’ai, t’ai” The slant-eyed Chinaman chants the magic sylla-
bles over and over, looking at you hard, then passes on; if you answer
him with a wink he half pulls out of his sleeve a tiny, square painted
packet in which Kutzetsov tea used to come in the old days. “It’s the
real thing. From the Gepeou co-op.” Is he sneering, the Chinese, or is it
the shape of his mouth, with those greenish teeth, that makes him look as
if he were sneering? Why does he mention the Gepeou? Can he belong
to it? Strange that he’s not arrested, that he’s there every day—but they
are all there every day, the three thousand speculators, male and female,
between the ages of ten and eighty—no doubt because it’s impossible to
arrest them all at once, and because, no matter how many raids the
police make, the creatures are legion. Among them too, their caps pulled
down to their eyes, stalk the police detectives in search of their prey:
murderers, escaped convicts, crooks, renegade counterrevolutionaries.
This swarming mass of human beings has an imperceptible structure, like
an ancient bog. (Watch your pockets and shake yourself well when you
leave, you will certainly have picked up some lice; and beware of those
lice, they come from the country, from prisons, from trains, from the
huts of Eurasia—they carry typhus; you can pick them up from the
ground, you know; people that have them sow them as they walk, and
the filthy little insect, who’s looking for a living too, climbs up your legs
till it gets to the warm place—they know what they’re doing, the little
beasts! What—you really believe that the day will come when men won’t
have lice? True Socialism—eh?—with butter and sugar for everybody?
Maybe, to increase human happiness, there’ll be soft, perfumed lice that
caress you?) Romachkin vaguely listened to the tall bearded man who
was discussing lice with evident enjoyment. He followed “Butter Alley,”
where of course there was no alley and no butter to be seen, but simply
two'lines of standing women, some of them holding lumps of butter
wrapped in cloths; others, who had not paid the inspector for their
places, kept their butter hidden in their bodices, between waist and
breasts. (Now and again one of them was arrested: “Aren’t you ashamed
of yourself, speculator!”) Farther on was the section of illegally slaugh-
tered cattle, meat brought in the bottoms of sacks, under vegetables,
under grain, under anything, and which the sellers scarcely showed.
“Good fresh meat—buy it?” From under her cloak the woman produced
a shin of beef wrapped in a bloodstained newspaper. How much? Just
feel it! A sinister fellow with an epileptic tic held a peculiar piece of
black meat in his crooked sorcerer’s claws, saying not a word. You can

even eat that, it’s cheap, all you have to do is cook it well, and the only
way to cook it, of course, is in a tin dish over a fire in some empty lot!
Do you like stories about women who have been dismembered, citizen?
I know some interesting ones. A small boy went by, carrying a kettle and
glasses, selling boiled water at ten kopecks a glass. Here began the legally
constituted market, with its wares duly displayed on the ground. But
what wares! An incredible juxtaposition of dark glasses, oil lamps,
chipped teapots, old snapshots, books, dolls, scrap iron, dumbbells, nails
(the big ones were sold by the piece, the small ones, which you ex-
amined one by one to make sure the points weren’t broken, by the
dozen), china, bibelots from the old days, shells, spittoons, teething
rings, dancing slippers still vaguely gilt, a top hat which had belonged
to a circus rider or a dandy under the old regime, things impossible to
classify, but which could be sold because they were sold, because peo-
ple lived by selling them—flotsam from innumerable wrecks battered by
the waves of more than one flood. Not far from the Armenian theater,
Romachkin at last found himself interested in someone, in something.
The Armenian theater was composed of a number of large boxes covered
with black cloth and pierced with a dozen oval holes, into which the
spectators put their faces—thus their bodies remained outside while
their heads were in wonderland. “Still three places free, comrades, only
fifty kopecks, the show is about to begin—The Mysteries of Samarkand
in ten scenes with thirty actors in real colors.” Having found his three
clients, the Armenian disappeared behind the curtain to pull the strings
of his mysterious marionettes and make them all talk himself, in thirty
different voices—houris with long eyes, wicked old women, servants,
children, fat Turkish merchants, a gypsy fortuneteller, a thin devil with
a beard and horns—imitating the fire-eating assassin, the amorous tenor,
the brave Red soldier . . . Not far away a squatting Tatar watched over
his merchandise: felt hats, carpets, a saddle, daggers, a yellow quilt cov-
ered with strange stains, a very old fowling piece. “A good gun,” he said
soberly as Romachkin bent over it. “Three hundred.” Thus they became
acquainted. The fowling piece was useless, except to attract the danger-
ous client. “I have another one at home that’s brand new,” the Tatar—
Akhim—finally said at their fourth meeting, after they had drunk tea
together. “Come and see it.”
Akhim lived at the end of a courtyard surrounded by white birches,
in the district of quiet, clean little alleys around Kropotkin Street (they
had to go through Death Street to reach it). There, in a cavern dark-
ened by the hides and felts that hung from the ceiling, Akhim displayed
a magnificent Winchester with two shining hlue barrels—“twelve hun-

dred rubles, my friend.” That was Romachkin’s salary for six months,
and the gun was not at all the weapon for what he had in mind—only
two shots, clumsy to transport. Well, by sawing off part of the barrel and
two thirds of the stock, it could be carried under an ordinary suit.
Romachkin hesitated, weighing the pros and cons. By going into debt,
by selling everything he owned which was salable, and even stealing a
few things from the office besides, he could not get together six hundred
... A series of dull explosions shook the walls and rattled the window-
panes. “What’s that?”—“Nothing, my friend, they’re dynamiting St.
Saviour’s Cathedral.” They dropped the subject. “No, really,” Romach-
kin said, “I can’t, it’s too expensive. Besides . . .” He had said that he
was a hunter, a member of the official hunter’s association, and conse-
quently had a permit . . . Akhim’s face changed, Akhim’s voice
changed, he went for the singing teakettle, poured tea into their glasses,
sat down opposite Romachkin on a low stool, and drank the amber bev-
erage with relish; doubtless he was getting ready to say something im-
portant, perhaps his final price, nine hundred? Romachkin could no
more get together nine hundred than twelve hundred. It was devastating.
After a long silence he heard Akhim’s caressing voice mingling with the
distant boom of an explosion:
“If it is to kill somebody, I have something better . .
“Better?” Romachkin asked, gasping for breath ...
On the table, between their glasses, lay a Colt revolver with a short
barrel and a black cylinder—a forbidden weapon, the mere presence of
which was a crime—a fine clean Colt, calling the hand, fortifying the
will.
“Four hundred, my friend.”
“Three hundred,” said Romachkin unconsciously, already filled with
the Colt’s spell.
“Three hundred—take it, my friend,” said Akhim, “because my heart
trusts you.”
It was only as he went out that Romachkin noticed how strangely
neglected and disorderly Akhim’s quarters looked. It was not a place
where anyone lived, it was a place where someone was waiting to vanish,
in a confusion like a station platform during the rout of an army. Under
the white birches, Akhim smiled at him mildly. Romachkin set out
through the peaceful little streets. The heavy Colt lay against his chest,
in the inside pocket of his coat. From what robbery, what murder on the
distant steppe, did it come? Now it lay against the heart of a pure man
whose one thought was justice.
He stopped for a moment at the entrance to a huge construction yard.

There was a wide view under the liquid hlue	of the moon.	In	the	dis-
tance, through scaffolding and the rubble of demolished buildings, he
could see the waters of the Moskva, as through the crenelations of a
ruined fortress. To the right was the scaffolding of an uncompleted sky-
scraper; to the left rose the citadel of the Kremlin, with the heavy flat
facade of the Great Palace, the tall tower of Czar Ivan, the pointed
turrets of the enclosing wall, the bulbous domes of the cathedrals rising
against the starry sky. Here searchlights reigned, men ran through a
zone of harsh white light, a sentry ordered back a crowd of gapers. The
wounded mass of the Cathedral of St. Saviour occupied the foreground;
the great gilded cupola that had crowned it was gone like an ancient
dream, the building rested heavily on the beginning of its own ruins;
a dark crack a hundred feet long split it from top to bottom, like a dead
lightning bolt in the masonry. “There it goes!” someone said. A woman’s
voice murmured, “My God!” Thunder burrowed through the ground,
shook the ground, made the whole moonlit landscape rock fantastically,
set the river sparkling, set people shuddering. Smoke rose	slowly,	the
thunder rolled over the ground and vanished	in a silence like	the	end
of the world; a deep sigh rose from the mass of stone, and it began to
sink in upon itself with a snapping of bones, a cracking of beams, a
desolate look of suffering. “That’s done it!” cried a little bareheaded
engineer to several dust-covered workmen who, like himself, had emerged
from the cloud. Romachkin, having read it in the papers, thought that
life progressed through destruction, that things must perpetually be torn
down so that things could be built, that the old stones must be killed so
that new buildings, better ventilated and worthier of man, might rise;
that on this spot would one day stand the beautiful Palace of the Peoples
of the Union—in which perhaps iniquity would no longer reign. A slight
unacknowledged grief mingled with these grandiose ideas as he resumed
his walk toward the place where he could catch Streetcar A.
He put the Colt on the table. Bluish-black, it filled the room with its
presence. Eleven o’clock. He bent over it in thought for a moment before
he went to bed. On the other side of the partition Kostia moved; he was
reading, from time to time he looked up at the radiant miniature. The
two men felt each other’s nearness. Kostia drummed gently against the
partition with his fingertips. Romachkin answered in the same fashion:
Yes, come! Should he hide the Colt before Kostia came in? His hesita-
tion lasted only a hundredth part of a second. The first thing Kostia saw
as he entered was the magical blue-black steel on the white paper table-
cloth. Kostia picked up the Colt and bounced it happily up and down in

his hand. “Magnificent!” He had never held a revolver before, he felt
childishly happy. He was rather tall, with a high forehead, unruly hair,
and sea-green eyes. “How well you hold it!” said Romachkin admir-
ingly. And in fact the Colt increased Kostia’s stature, giving him the look
of a proud young warrior. “I bought it,” Romachkin explained, “be-
cause I like firearms. I used to hunt, but a shotgun is too expensive . . .
A double-barreled Winchester costs twelve hundred—think of it!” Kostia
only half listened to the embarrassed explanation: that his timid neigh-
bor should own a revolver amused him, and he made no attempt to hide
his amusement—his whole face lit up with a smile . . . “You will cer-
tainly never use it, Romachkin,” he said. Romachkin answered warily:
“I don’t know ... Of course I have no use for it. What should I use it
for? I have no enemies . . . But a firearm is a beautiful thing. It
makes you think . . .”
“Of assassins?”
“No. Of just men.”
Kostia suppressed a guffaw. A fine hero you’d make, my poor friend!
—A good sort, though. The little man was looking at him quite seriously.
Kostia feared that he would hurt him if he joked. They chatted a few
minutes just as usual. “Have you read Issue 12 of Prison?” Romachkin
asked before they separated.—“No—is it interesting?”—“Very. It has
the story of the attempt on Admiral Dubassov in 1906 . . Kostia took
Issue 12 with him.
But Romachkin himself did not want to reread any accounts of those
red-letter days of the Revolution. They were too discouraging. Those
historic assassinations had required meticulous preparation, disciplined
organization, money, months of work, of watching, of waiting, courage
linked with courage; besides, they had often failed. If he had really
thought about it, his plan would have appeared completely visionary.
But he did not think—thoughts formed and dissolved in him without
control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life' in that
fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accu-
rately, more clearly, but that such thinking is a strange labor which one
performs almost in spite of oneself and which often results in a bitter
pleasure, beyond which there is nothing. Whenever he could—whether in
the morning, afternoon, or evening—Romachkin explored a certain local-
ity in the center of the city: Staraia Place, an old square on which stands
a sort of bank building in gray freestone; at the entrance there is a black
glass plate with gold lettering: Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the
U.S.S.R., Central Committee. A guard silhouetted in the hall. Elevators.

Across the narrow square, the old white crenelated wall of Kitai-Gorod,
the “Chinese City.” Cars drew up. There was always someone smoking
thoughtfully at the corner . . . No, not here. Impossible here. Romach-
kin could not have said why. Because of the white crenelated wall, the
severe gray freestone blocks, the emptiness? The ground was too hard,
it bewildered his feet, he felt that he had neither weight nor substance.
In the vicinity of the Kremlin, on the other hand, the breezes that swept
through the gardens carried him across Red Square in all his insignifi-
cance, and when he stopped for a moment before Lenin’s tomb, he was
as anonymous as the gaping provincials who stopped with him; the
faded, twisted domes of St. Vasili the Blessed dwarfed him even more.
It was not until he had mounted the three steps of the Place of Execution
that he felt himself again. It had been there for centuries, surrounded by
a small circular stone balcony. How many men had died there? Of them
all, nothing survived in the souls of the passers-by—except in his. Just
as simply would he have laid himself on the wheel that should break his
limbs. The mere thought of the atrocious torture set his skin shivering.
But what else was there to do when one had come thus far? From that
day on, he carried the Colt whenever he went out.
Romachkin liked the public gardens that border the outer wall of the
Kremlin on the side toward the city. He gave himself the pleasure of
walking there almost every day. It was there that the thing hit him
between the eyes. He was walking in the gardens eating a sandwich (it
was between 1:15 and 1:50), instead of chatting with his colleagues in
the Trust restaurant. As usual, the central walk was almost deserted; the
streetcars, making the turn outside the fence, rattled and clanged their
bells. Where the walk curves in the direction of the rusty foliage that
borders the high wall of the Kremlin, a man in uniform appeared. Two
men in civilian clothes followed him, smoking. Tall, almost gaunt, the
visor of his military cap pulled down over his eyes, his uniform bare of
insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual,
the man stepped out of the portraits published in the papers, displayed
four stories high on buildings, hung in offices, impressed, day after day,
on the minds of the nation. There was no possible doubt: it was He. The
air of authority, the hands—the right in the pocket, the other swinging
... As if in final proof of his identity, the Chief drew a short pipe
from his pocket, put it between his teeth, and walked on. Now he was
only thirty feet from Romachkin. Romachkin’s hand flew into his coat
pocket, groping for the butt of the Colt. At that moment the Chief, still
walking, drew out his tobacco pouch; less than six feet from Romachkin

he stopped, daring him; his cat eyes shot a little cruel gleam in Romach-
kin’s direction. His mocking lips muttered something like, “You abject
worm Romachkin,” with devastating scorn. And he passed by. Demol-
ished, Romachkin stumbled over a stone, tottered, almost fell. Two men,
sprung from nowhere, caught him in time. “Do you feel ill, citizen?”
They must be members of the Chief’s secret-police escort. “Let me
alone!” Romachkin shouted at them, beside himself with rage—but actu-
ally he barely breathed the words, or other words, in a despairing whis-
per. The two men, who were holding him by the elbows, let him go.
“Don’t drink when you don’t know how, idiot,” muttered one. “Damned
vegetarian!” Romachkin sank onto a bench beside a young couple. A
voice of thunder—his own—rang in his head: “Coward, coward, cow-
ard, coward . . The couple, paying no attention to him, went on
quarreling.
“If you see her again,” the woman said, “I . . .” (the next words
were inaudible) “I’ve had enough. I’ve suffered too much, I . . .”
(more inaudible words). “I beg you . . .”
An anemic creature, hardly more than a girl—lifeless blond hair, a
face covered with pink pimples. The fellow answered:
“You make me tired, Maria. Stop it. You make me tired.” And he
stared into the distance.
It was all relentlessly logical. Romachkin rose as if pushed up by a
spring, looked at the couple implacably, and said:
“We are all cowards—do you hear me?”
It was so obvious, that the tension of his despair snapped; he was able
to get up, to walk as he had walked before, to reach the office without
being a minute late, go back to his graphs, drink his glass of tea at four
o’clock, answer questions, finish his day’s work, go home . . . Now,
what should he do with the Colt? He could not bear to have the useless
weapon in his room any longer.
It was lying on the table, the blue-black steel gleaming with a coldness
that was an insult, when Kostia came in and seemed to smile at him.
Romachkin was sure he saw him smile. “Do you like it, Kostia?” he
asked. Around them spread the peace of evening. Kostia, with the re-
volver in his hand and smiling at him quite openly, became a young
warrior again. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said.
“I have no use for it,” said Romachkin, torn with regret. “You can
have it.”
“But it’s worth a lot,” the young man objected.
“Not to me. And you know I can’t sell it. Take it, Kostia.” Romachkin

was afraid to insist, because suddenly he so much wanted Kostia to take
it. “Really?” Kostia spoke again. And Romachkin answered: “Yes,
really. Take it.” Kostia carried away the Colt, put it on his own table,
under the miniature, smiled once more at the faithful eyes that looked
out of the frame, then at the clean weapon—mortally clean and proud it
was! He did a few gymnastics for very joy. Romachkin enviously heard
his joints crack.
Almost every evening they talked for a few minutes before they went
to bed—the one ponderously insidious, returning to the same ideas over
and over, again and again, like a plow ox making one furrow, then
beginning again, to plow one beside it, again and yet again; the other
mocking, attracted despite himself, sometimes leaping out of the invisible
circle that had been drawn around him, only to find himself unwittingly
back in it again. “What do you think, Romachkin?” he asked at last.
“Who is guilty, guilty of it all?”
“Obviously it is whoever has the most power. If there were a God, it
would be God,” Romachkin said softly. “That would be very convenient,”
he added, with a little devious laugh.
Kostia felt that he had understood too many things at once. It made
his head spin. “You don’t know what you are saying, Romachkin. And
it’s a good thing for you that you don’t! Good night.”
From nine in the morning to six in the evening, Kostia worked in the
office of a subway construction yard. The rhythmic and raucous throb
of the excavating machine was communicated to the planking of the
shanty. Trucks carried away the excavated earth. The first layers ap-
peared to be composed of human debris, as humus is composed of vege-
table debris; they had an odor of corpses, of the decaying city, of refuse
long fermented under alternate snow and hot pavements. The truck
engines, fed on an inconceivable gasoline, filled the yard with staccato
explosions so violent that they drowned out the swearing of the drivers.
A thin board fence separated Yard No. 22 from the bustling, klaxoning
street, with' its two surging streams flowing in opposite directions, its
hysterically ringing streetcars, brand new police vans, ramshackle hack-
ney carriages, swarming pedestrians. The shanty, the center of which
was occupied by a stove, housed the timekeeping department, the ac-
counting department, the technicians’ office, the desk reserved for the
Party and the Young Communists, with its file cases, the corner allocated
to the Secretary of the Syndical Cell, the office of the yard chief—but
the latter was never there, he ran from one end of Moscow to the other

looking for materials, with the Control Commissions running after him.
So his space could be used. The Party secretary took it as of right: from
morning to night he received the complaints of mud-covered workers,
male and female, who descended into the earth, then came up out of the
earth—one because he had no lamp, the second because he had no boots,
the third no gloves; the fourth had been hurt; the fifth, fired for ar-
riving drunk and late, furious because he was not allowed to go now
that he had been fired: “I demand that the law be obeyed, Comrade
Part.-Org. (Party Organizer). I came late, I was drunk, I made a row.
Throw me out—it’s the law!” The Part.-Org. burst out, turning crimson:
“In the name of God and all the stinking saints, you rub your dirty nose
in the law because you want to quit, eh? Think you’ll get yourself some
more work clothes somewhere else, eh? Damned dirty . . .”—“The
law’s the law, Comrade.” Kostia checked the timecards for absences,
went down into the tunnel with messages, helped the organizer of the
Young Communists in his various educational, disciplinary, and secret-
service duties. A short, dark, bobbed-haired, energetic eighteen-year-old
girl with rouged lips and small acid eyes passed. He waved to her. “So
your little pal Maria hasn’t showed up for two days? I’ll have to take it
up with the Y.C. office.”
The girl stopped short and pulled up her skirt with a masculine ges-
ture. A miner’s lamp hung from her leather apron. With her hair hidden
under a thick kerchief, she looked as if she were wearing a helmet. She
spoke passionately, slowly, in a low voice:
“You won’t see Maria again. Dead. Threw herself in the Moskva yes-
terday. She’s in the morgue this minute. Go take a look at her if you
feel like it. You made her do it—you and the Bureau. And I’m not afraid
to tell you so.”
The edge of her shovel gleamed evilly over her shoulder. She pushed
her way into the gaping elevator. Kostia telephoned to the department,
the police, the Y.C. secretary (private wire), the secretary of the yard
newspaper, and even others. Everywhere the same news echoed back to
him—numbing, and now banally irreparable. At the morgue, on the
marble slabs, in a lugubrious gray chill riddled with electric bulbs, lay
a nameless boy who had been run over by a streetcar. He lay sleeping on
his back, his skin white as wax, his two hands open as if they had just
dropped two marbles. There was an old Asiatic in a long overcoat, hook-
nosed, blue-lidded, with his cut throat gaping and black (his face had
been crudely painted for a photograph). He looked like an actor made
up as a corpse—greenish, the high cheekbones rose-pink. There was

Maria, with her blue and white polka-dot blouse, her thin neck horribly
blue, her little snub nose, her red curls plastered to her skull, but with
no eyes at all, no eyeballs, only those pitiable folds of tom flesh, strangely
sunk into the eye sockets. “Why did you do it, poor Marussia?” Kostia
asked stupidly, while his unhappy hands kneaded his cap. This was
death, the end of a universe. But a red-haired girl wasn’t the universe?
The guardian of the morgue, a morose Jew in a white blouse, came up:
“You know her, citizen? Then there’s no use staying here any longer.
Come and fill out the questionnaire.”
His office was warm, comfortable, full of papers^ Dr ownings. Street
Accidents. Crimes. Suicides. Doubtful Cases. “Under what heading
should we put the deceased, in your opinion, citizen?” Kostia shrugged
his shoulders. Then he asked angrily:
“Is there a heading, ‘Collective Crimes’?”
“No,” said the Jew. “I call your attention to the fact that the deceased
has already been examined by the medical expert and shows neither
ecchymoses nor signs of strangulation.”
“Suicide,” Kostia interrupted furiously.
He pushed through the drizzle, his right shoulder forward. If he could
have fought somebody, broken somebody’s nose, or taken a straight
right on the jaw—for you, poor Marussia, you sweet little nitwit—it
would have done him good. You big fool, why let yourself get so des-
perate? Everybody knows that men are bastards. Nobody pays any at-
tention to the Wall Gazette, it’s only fit to wipe your arse with! How
could you be so dumb, you poor baby, oh for God’s sake, oh hell!—
The whole thing had been perfectly simple. The horror-stricken Y.C.
secretary kept her brief statement to himself. It was written on a page
from a school notebook and solemnly signed “Maria” (and her family
name):
“As a proletarian, I will not live with this filthy dishonor. Accuse no
one of my death. Farewell.”
And that was that!. On orders from the Y.C. Central Committee, the
branch committees were making a campaign “for health, against demor-
alization.” How should the campaign be conducted? The five young
men who made up the Bureau had beaten their brains, until one of them
had said: “Outlaw venereal diseases.” It seemed like a brilliant idea. Of
the five, two were probably Y.D. cases themselves, but they were clever
enough to take their treatments in distant clinics. “There’s Maria, the
redhead.”—“Perfect!”—A strange girl—she never said anything at
meetings, she was always clean and tidy, she repulsed any advances,

frightened to death, yet flared up when she was pinched—where had she
ever caught her case? Not in the organization, that was certain. Then it
must have been from the demoralized petty-bourgeois element? “She has
no class instinct,” said the secretary severely. “I propose that we publish
her expulsion in the yard Wall Gazette. We must make an example.”
The Wall Gazette, illustrated with caricatures in water colors which
showed a Maria recognizable only by her holiday blouse and her red
hair, and grotesquely loaded with a pair of rhinestone earrings, tumbling
out of a door from which projected the shadow of an enormous broom—
the typewritten Wall Gazette was still posted in the vestibule of the
shanty. Kostia calmly took it down, tore it into four pieces, and put the
pieces in his desk drawer, because they might be used as evidence in
court ...
Autumn and the rains carried away the insignificant episode of
Maria’s suicide. Submitted to the Branch Committee for a recommenda-
tion, the case disappeared under the directives for an urgent and imme-
diate campaign against the Right opposition, which was followed by in-
comprehensible expulsions; then under another campaign, slower in
getting started but actually far more drastic, against corruption among
Y.C. and Party officials. Under the whirlwind, the yard Y.C. secretary
sunk into an abyss of opprobrium—exclusion, derision, Wall Gazette
(the broom reappeared, driving him out with his hair standing on end
and his papers swirling over the dump heap), and, finally, dismissal for
having granted himself two months’ vacation in a rest house whose
dazzling white walls rose among the rockslides and bursting flowers of
Alupka in the Crimea.
Kostia, accused of “having demonstratively torn up an issue of the
Wall Gazette (a serious breach of discipline) and having attempted to
exploit the suicide of an excluded member as part of an intrigue to
discredit the Young Communist Bureau,” was “severely censured.” What
did he care? Every night—after the yard, the city, his suppressed rages,
his soleless shoes, the sour soup, the icy wind—he returned to the sooth-
ing eyes of his miniature. He knocked at Romachkin’s door—Romachkin
had aged a good deal only recently, and read strange books of a religious
tendency. Kostia warned him: “Watch out, Romachkin, or you’ll find
yourself a mystic.” “Impossible,” the shriveled little man answered. “I
am so profoundly a materialist that ...”
“That?”
“Nothing. I believe it is always the same unrest in contradictory
forms.”

“Perhaps,” said Kostia, struck by the idea. “Perhaps the mystic and
the revolutionary are brothers . . . But one has to extirpate the
other ...”
“Yes,” said Romachkin.
He opened a book—Isolation, by Vladimir Rozanov. “Here—read
this. How true it is! ” His yellow fingernail pointed to the lines:
“The hearse moves slowly, the road is long. ‘Well, farewell, Vassili
Vassilievich, it’s bad underground, old man, and you lived a bad life; if
you had lived better, you would rest easier underground. Whereas, with
iniquity . .
“My God, to die in iniquity . . .
“And I am in iniquity.”
“Dying in iniquity is no use,” Kostia answered; “the thing is to fight
while we are alive . . .”
He was surprised to have thought so clearly. Romachkin observed
him with the keenest attention. The conversation shifted to the issuing of
passports, the stricter enforcement of discipline among workers, the
Chief’s edicts, the Chief himself.
“Eleven o’clock,” said Kostia. “Good night.”
“Good night. What have you done with the revolver?”
“Nothing.”
One February night, about ten o’clock, the snow stopped falling on
Moscow; a mild frost draped everything in sparkling crystals. The life-
less branches of trees and shrubs in the gardens were magically covered
with them. Crystals full of a secret light flowered on stones, covered the
house fronts, clothed monuments. You walked on powdered stars through
a stellar city: myriads of crystals floated in the globes of light around
the street lamps. Toward midnight the sky became incredibly clear. The
smallest light shot skyward like a sword. It was a festival of frost. The
silence seemed to scintillate. Kostia became aware of the enchantment
only after he had been walking through it for several minutes, after a
Y.C. meeting devoted, like So many before it, to discussing the relaxa-
tion of discipline at work. The month was drawing to its close; Kostia,
like many others, was going without food. At the meeting he had said
nothing, knowing that his formula would be inacceptable: “For more
discipline, more food. Soup first! Good soup will put a stop to drinking.”
What was the use of saying it? The magic of the night laid hold of him,
lightened his stride, cleared his mind, made him forget his hunger, even
made him forget the execution of six men the night before, though it had

made an unusual impression on him. “Food supply saboteurs,” said the
curt official announcement. No doubt they stole, like everybody else—
but could they help stealing? Could I—in the long run? The pillars of
light above the street lamps tapered upward, very high into a darkness
filled with minute frost crystals.
Kostia was going down a narrow street, on one side of which was a
row of small private houses from the previous century, on the other a
row of six-story apartment buildings. Here and there a discreet light
showed through a window. Odd how everybody leads his own individual
life! The snow crackled softly under his feet, like rustling silk. A power-
ful black car, slipping silently over the snow, stopped a few paces ahead
of him. A stout man in a short fur-lined coat and an astrakhan cap got
out, with a brief case under his arm. As Kostia came almost abreast of
him, he saw that the man had thick down-turning mustaches, full cheeks,
and a broad flat nose. He thought he vaguely recognized the face. The
man said something to his chauffeur, who answered deferentially:
“Very good, Comrade Tulayev.”
Tulayev? Of the Central Committee? Tulayev, of the mass deporta-
tions in the Vorogen district? Tulayev of the university purges? Curious,
Kostia turned to get a better view of him. The car disappeared down the
street. Walking quickly and heavily, Tulayev overtook Kostia, passed
him, stopped, looked up at a lighted window. Fine frost crystals fell on
his raised face, powdering his eyebrows and mustache. Kostia came up
behind him, Kostia’s hand remembered the Colt, Kostia’s hand drew it
out of his pocket, and——
The explosion was deafening and brief. Deafening in Kostia’s soul,
like a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Incredible in that boreal
night. Kostia saw the thunder burst within him: it was a cloud which
swelled, became an enormous black flower fringed with flames, and van-
ished. A piercing whistle signal whipped the night, very near. Another
answered from farther away. The night filled with an invisible panic.
Whistles cut across one another, wildly, precipitately, sought one an-
other, collided, cut through the aerial pillars of light. Kostia fled over the
snow through small quiet streets, running with his elbows close to his
sides, as he ran at the Youth Stadium. Round a corner, now another—
he told himself that it was time to walk without any show of hurry. His
heart was beating very hard. “What have I done? Why? It was madness
. . . I acted without thinking . . . Without thinking, like a man of
action . . .” Like snow squalls, fragments of ideas chased one another
through his mind. “Tulayev certainly deserved to be shot . . . Was it

my business to know it? Am I sure of it? Am I sure of justice? Am I
mad?” A sleigh appeared—could anything he more fantastic?—the
driver thrust his crafty eyes and snow-covered heard toward Kostia as
he passed.
“What’s going on back there, young fellow?”
“I don’t know. Drunks fighting again, I suppose. Devil take them!”
The sleigh turned slowly around in the street, to avoid trouble. The
exchange of ordinary words had completely sobered Kostia and made
him feel extraordinarily calm. Crossing a well-lighted square, he passed
a sentry at his post. Had he not been dreaming? In his pocket the barrel
of the Colt was still devastatingly hot. In his heart, joy grew inex-
plicably. Pure joy. Luminous, cold, inhuman, like a starry winter sky.
There was a thread of light under Romachkin’s door. Kostia went in.
Romachkin was reading—in bed, because of the cold. Gray heather
covered the windowpanes. “What are you reading, Romachkin? It’s cold
in here. It’s wonderful outdoors, you have no idea!”
“I wanted to read something about the happy life. But there are no
books on the subject. Why have none been written? Don’t writers know
any more about it than I do? Don’t they want to know what it is, as ■
I do?”
Kostia was amused. What a man!
“All I could find was this—in a secondhand bookstore. It’s a very old
book and very beautiful . . . Paul and Virginia. It happens on an island
full of happy birds and plants; they are young and pure and love each
other . . . It’s unbelievable.” He noticed Kostia’s exalted face. “But,
Kostia, what has happened to you?”
“I’m in love, Romachkin, my friend—it’s terrible.”

2 * The Sword Is Blind
The papers briefly announced “the premature death
of Comrade Tulayev.” The first secret investigation produced sixty-seven
arrests in three days. Suspicion at first fell on Tulayev’s secretary, who
was also the mistress of a student who was not a Party member. Then
it shifted to the chauffeur who had brought Tulayev to his door—a
Security man with a good record, not a drinker, no questionable rela-
tions, a former soldier in the special troops, and a member of the
Bureau of his garage cell. Why had he not waited until Tulayev had
entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immedi-
ately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk? Why? The
entire mystery of the crime seemed to center in these two unknowns. No
one was aware that Tulayev had hoped to spend a few minutes with the
wife of an absent friend; that a bottle of vodka and two dimpled arms, a
milky body, warm under a house dress, were waiting for him . . . But
the fatal bullet had not been shot from the chauffeur’s pistol; and the
fatal weapon remained undiscoverable. Interrogated for sixty consecu-
tive hours by inquisitors who themselves became exhausted and relayed

each other every four hours, the chauffeur sank to the verge of insanity
without changing his declarations, except insofar as he finally lost the
power of speech, the faculty of reason, and even the use of the facial
muscles which the nerves must activate in order to produce speech and
expression. After thirty-four hours of questioning, he was no longer a
man but a lay figure of suffering flesh and shapeless clothes. They dosed
him with strong coffee, brandy, as many cigarettes as he wanted. They
gave him an injection. His fingers dropped the cigarettes, his lips forgot
to drink when a glass was held to them; every hour two men from the
special detachment dragged him to the washroom, held his head under
the faucet, doused him with ice-cold water. He scarcely moved, limp in
their hands even under the icy water, and the men thought that he took
advantage of these moments of respite to sleep while they held him up;
handling that human rag demoralized them after a few hours, and they
had to be replaced. They held him in his chair to keep him from falling
onto the floor. Suddenly the examining judge hammered the butt of his
revolver on the table and roared:
“Open your eyes, prisoner. I forbade you to sleep! Answer! After you
fired, what did you do?”
At this three hundredth repetition of the same question, the man from
whom all intelligence, all resistance had been drained, the man who had
no self left, his eyes bloodshot, his sagging face horribly scarred, began
to answer:
«T	99
X « • •
Then he collapsed onto the table with a sound like a snore. Foamy
saliva ran from his mouth. They sat him up. They poured a drink of
Armenian brandy between his teeth.
. . didn’t fire . .
“Liar!”
The judge was so exasperated that he slapped him with all his
strength; and the judge felt as if he had hit a swinging manikin. The
judge swallowed a half a glass of tea at one gulp—but the tea was really
warm brandy. A sudden chill seized him. Low voices crept behind him.
The partition was merely a curtain drawn across a darkened room, six
feet away. From behind it, everything that went on in the lighted room
was clearly visible. Several persons had silently entered the darkened
room, all respectfully following the first. Tired of picking up the tele-
phone and asking “What about the plot?” only to hear the High Com-
missar’s unstrung voice repeat the idiotic formula, “The investigation is
being pursued without yielding any substantial results”—the Chief had

come himself. Boots, short coarse tunic, bare head, low brow, tense face,
bushy mustache—from the invisible hide-out he had avidly fixed his eyes
on the eyes of the chauffeur—who did not see him, who could no longer
see anything. He had listened. Behind him stood the exhausted High
Commissar, straight as a sentry; behind them again, nearer to the door,
in complete darkness, other gold-braided personages, mute and petrified.
The Chief turned to the High Commissar and, in a very low voice, said:
“Have this useless torture stopped instantly. You can see for yourself
that the man knows nothing.”
The uniforms drew to either side before him. He strode toward the
elevator—alone, jaws clenched, frowning—followed by a single abso-
lutely trustworthy guard, of whom he was fond. “Don’t come with me,”
he had said to the High Commissar severely. “Attend to the plot.”
Terror and feverish activity reigned in the building, concentrated in
the story where, at twenty tables, interrogations were being carried on
without a break. In the private office which he had reserved for himself
on the spot, the High Commissar stupidly opened a pointless dossier,
then another even more pointless. Nothing! He felt sick. He could have
vomited like the chauffeur, who, his mouth ringed with foam, was at last
being carried away on a stretcher—to sleep. For a time the High Com-
missar wandered from office to office. In No. 266, the chauffeur’s wife
was weeping as she admitted that she often consulted fortunetellers, that
she had secretly attended religious services, that she was jealous, that
... In No. 268, the sentry who had been on duty at the time and place
of the assassination repeated again that he had gone into the court to
warm himself at the brazier, because Comrade Tulayev never came
home before midnight; that, hearing the shot, he had rushed out into
the street; that at first he had seen no one because Comrade Tulayev had
fallen against the wall; that he had only been intensely surprised by the
peculiar light . . .
The High Commissar entered. The sentry was testifying standing at
attention, calmly, in a voice that showed emotion. The High Commissar
asked:
“What light are you referring to?”
“An extraordinary light, a supernatural light—I can’t describe it—
there were pillars of light up to the sky, glittering, dazzling . . .”
“Are you a Believer?”
“No, Comrade Chief, member of the Society of the Godless for four
years, dues paid up.”
The High Commissar turned on his heel, shrugging his shoulders. In

No. 270 a thick market woman’s voice was relating, with many interpo-
lated sighs and exclamations of “Oh Jesus, my God,” that at the
Smolensk market everyone said that poor Comrade Tulayev, beloved of
the great Comrade Chief, had been found at the gate of the Kremlin
with his throat cut and his heart pierced by a dagger with a triangular
blade, like poor little Czarevich Dimitri long ago, and the monsters had
gouged out his eyes, and she had cried over it with Marfa who sells
grain, with Frossia who resells cigarettes, with Niucha who . . . Her
intolerable and endless chatter was being patiently recorded by a young
officer in a tight uniform and eyeglasses, with a medal bearing the Chief’s
profile on his chest—he wrote it all down rapidly on long sheets of
paper. He was so occupied that he did not look up at the High Commis-
sar, who stood framed in the door and who left without uttering a word.
On his own desk the High Commissar found a red envelope from the
Central Committee, General Secretariat, Urgent Strictly Confidential
. . . Three lines, ordering him to “follow the Titov matter with the
greatest attention and report to us personally on it.” Very significant,
that! Bad. So the new Deputy High Commissar was spying without even
trying to save appearances. Only he could have informed the General
Secretariat (and without the knowledge of his superior) of the Titov
matter-—the mere mention of which made you want to spit with disgust!
An anonymous denunciation, in big schoolboy handwriting, which had
arrived that morning: “Matvei Titov said that it’s Security that had
Comrade Tulayev killed because there’s a long reckoning between them.
He said: Me, I feel it in my bones that it’s the Gepeous, I tell you. He
said that in front of his servant Sidorovna, and Palkin the coachman,
and a clothes seller who lives at the comer of Ragman Alley and Holy
Field Street, at the end of the court, one flight up, on the right. Matvei
Titov is an enemy of the Soviet government and our beloved Comrade
Chief and an exploiter of the people who makes his servant sleep in the
hall with no fire and has got the poor daughter of a collectivized peasant
pregnant and refuses to pay the food allowance for her child who will
come into this world in pain and misery . . .” And twenty more lines
of the same. Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev was having this docu-
ment photographed and typewritten for immediate transmission to the
Political Bureau!
At that moment, Gordeyev came in: stout, blond, his hair pomaded,
round face, a suspicion of downy mustache, big tortoise-shell spectacles.
There was something porcine about him, and with it the servile insolence
of a domestic animal too well fed by its human masters.

“I fail to understand you, Comrade Gordeyev,” the High Commissar
said carelessly. “You have communicated this absurd statement to the
Political Bureau? To what end?”
Gordeyev looked offended. “But, Maxim Andreyevich,” he protested,
“there is a C.C. circular which prescribes that all complaints, denuncia-
tions, and even allusions to which we are subjected shall be submitted to
the P.B. Circular dated March 16 . . . And the Titov matter is hardly
to be called absurd—it reveals a state of mind among the masses of
which we should he more fully informed ... I have had Titov arrested,
together with a number of his acquaintances . . .”
“Perhaps you have even interrogated him yourself by now?”
The High Commissar’s mocking tone appeared to escape Gordeyev,
who thought it his best tactics to appear stupid:
“Not personally. My secretary was present at the interrogation. It is
extremely interesting to trace the origins of the myths which get into
circulation about us. Don’t you think so?”
“And have you found the origin of this one?”
“Not yet.”
On the sixth day of the investigation, High Commissar Erchov, sum-
moned by telephone to present himself at the General Secretariat imme-
diately, waited in an anteroom there for thirty-five minutes. Everyone in
the Secretariat knew that he was counting the minutes. At last the tall
doors opened to him, he saw the Chief at his desk, before his telephones—
solitary, graying, his head bowed. It was a massive head; and seen, as
Erchov saw it, against the light, it looked somber. The room was large,
high-ceilinged, and comfortable, but almost bare . . . The Chief did
not raise his head, did not hold out his hand to Erchov, did not ask him
to sit down. To maintain his dignity, the High Commissar advanced to
the edge of the table and opened his brief case.
“The plot?” the Chief asked, and Erchov saw that his face had the
concentrated look, the hard lines, of his cold rages.
“I am inclined to accept the view that the assassination of Comrade
Tulayev was the act of an isolated individual . . .”
“Very efficient, your isolated individual! Remarkably well organized!”
Erchov felt the sarcasm in the back of his neck, the place where the
executioner’s bullet lodges. Could Gordeyev have sunk so low as to carry
on a secret investigation of his own and then conceal the results? It would
have been almost impossible. In any case, there was nothing to an-
swer ...
The silence which followed annoyed the Chief.

“Let us accept your view provisionally. By the decision of the Political
Bureau, the case will not be closed until the criminals have been pun-
ished . .
“Exactly what I was about to propose,” said the High Commissar,
playing up.
“Do you propose any sanctions?”	1
“I have them here.”
The sanctions filled several typewritten sheets. Twenty-five names. The
Chief glanced over them.
“You are losing your mind, Erchov,” he said angrily. “This doesn’t
sound like you! Ten years for the chauffeur! When it was his duty not
to leave the person entrusted to him until he had seen him safely home?”
To the other proposals he said nothing. On the other hand, his out-
burst caused the High Commissar to increase all the suggested sentences.
The sentry who had been warming himself at the brazier during the
assassination would be sent to the Pechora labor camp for ten years
instead of eight. Tulayev’s secretary and her lover, the student, would
be deported—the woman to Vologda, which was mild, the student to
Turgai, in the Kazakstan desert—for five years each (instead of three).
As he handed the revised sheet to Gordeyev, the High Commissar allowed
himself the pleasure of saying:
“Your proposals were considered too mild, Comrade Gordeyev. I
have corrected them.”
“Thank you,” said Gordeyev, with a polite bow of his pomaded head.
“For my part, I have permitted myself to take a step which you will
certainly approve. I have had a list made of all persons whose antecedents
might make them suspect of terrorism. So far we have found seventeen
hundred names of persons still at liberty.”
“Very interesting . . .”
(He hadn’t thought that up himself, the greasy-headed stool pigeon!
Perhaps the idea had come from high up, from very high up . . .)
“Of these seventeen hundred persons, twelve hundred are Party
members; about a hundred still hold important offices; several have
repeatedly occupied positions in the immediate circle of the Chief of the
Party; three are actually in Security . . .”
He had spoken with assurance but without emotion, and every sentence
had told. What are you doing, who are you after, you climber? You have
your sights on the very heart of the Party! The High Commissar re-
membered that, during the trouble in Tashkent in 1914, he had fired on
the mounted militia, and as a result had been imprisoned in a fortress for

eighteen months . . . Then am I suspect? Am I one of the three “ex-
terrorists,” “members of the Party,” with jobs in Security?
“Have you informed anyone whomsoever of your researches in this
direction?”
“No, naturally not,” the pomaded head replied suavely, “certainly
not. Only the General Secretary, who made the necessary arrangements
for me to obtain certain dossiers from the Central Control Commission.”
This time, the High Commissar felt definitely caught in the meshes of
a net that was closing about him for no reason at all. Tomorrow or next
week, on one pretext or another, they would finish the process of re-
moving the last colleagues in whom he could trust: Gordeyev would
replace them by men of his own . . . For years this same office had been
occupied by someone else—a man whose figure and voice, whose
peculiarities of speech, whose trick of clasping his hands, of frowning
and holding his pen suspended over a document he was to sign, Erchov
knew intimately; a man who had worked zealously and conscientiously
ten or twelve hours a day . . . Around that obedient, skillful, and
implacable man, too, the net had closed; he had struggled in its inextri-
cable meshes, refusing to understand, to see, yet feeling more defeated
day by day, growing visibly older; in a few weeks he had acquired the
look of a little clerk who had taken orders all his life; he had let his
subordinates make his decisions for him; he had spent his nights drink-
ing with a little actress from the Opera, his days thinking of blowing
out his brains—until the evening when they had come and arrested
him . . . But perhaps he was actually guilty, whereas I . . .
Gordeyev said:
“I have made a selection from the list of seventeen hundred—some
forty names for the present. Some of them are very highly placed. Do you
care to go over it?”
“Have it brought to me immediately,” said the High Commissar in a
tone of authority, while an uncomfortable chill crept through his limbs.
Alone in his huge office, communing with the dossiers, with suspicion,
fear, power, powerlessness, the High Commissar became his simple
self—Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, a man forty years old, in vigorous
health, prematurely wrinkled, with puffy eyelids, a thin-lipped mouth,
and uneasy eyes . . . His predecessors here had been Henri Grigorye-
vich, who had breathed the air of these offices for ten years and was
executed after the trial of the Twenty-one; then Piotr Eduardovich, who
had disappeared—that is to say, who was confined on the second floor of

the subterranean prison under the particular supervision of an official
appointed by the Political Bureau. What admission did they want from
him? Piotr Eduardovich had been fighting for five months—if “fight-
ing” was the proper term for turning gray at thirty-five and repeating
“No, no, no, it is not true,” with no hope except to die in silence—unless
solitary confinement had driven him mad enough to hope for anything
else.
Erchov, recalled from the Far East, where he had thought himself
happily forgotten by the Personnel Service, had been offered an unpar-
alleled promotion: High Commissar for Security in conjunction with
Commissar of the People for Internal Affairs, which practically carried
with it the rank of marshal—the sixth marshal—or was it the third, since
three of the five had disappeared? “Comrade Erchov, the Party puts its
confidence in you! I congratulate you!” The words were spoken, his
hand shaken, the office (it was one of the Central Committee offices, on
the same floor as the General Secretariat) was full of smiles. Unan-
nounced, the Chief entered quickly, looked him up and down for a split
second—a superior studying an inferior; then, so simply, so cordially,
smiling like the others and perfectly at ease, the Chief shook Maxim
Andreyevich Erchov’s hand and looked into his eyes with perfect
friendliness. “A heavy responsibility, Comrade Erchov. Bear it well.”
The press photographer flashed his magnesium lightning over all the
smiles . . . Erchov had reached the pinnacle of his life, and he was
afraid. Three thousand dossiers, of capital importance because they
called for capital punishment, three thousand nests of hissing vipers,
suddenly descended like an avalanche upon his life, to remain with him
every instant. For a moment the greatness of the Chief reassured him.
The Chief, addressing him as “Maxim Andreyevich” in a cordial tone,
paternally advised him “to go easy with personnel, keeping the past in
mind yet never failing in vigilance, to put a stop to abuses.”—“Men have
been executed whom I loved, whom I trusted, men precious to the Party
and the State!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Yet the Political Bureau cannot
possibly review every sentence! It is up to you,” he concluded. “You
have my entire confidence.” The power that emanated from him was
spontaneous, human, and perfectly simple; the kindly smile, in which
the russet eyes and the bushy mustache joined, attested it; it made you
love him, believe in him, praise him as he was praised in the press and
in official speeches, but sincerely, warmly. When the General Secretary
filled his pipe, Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, High Commissar for Interior
Defense, “sword of the dictatorship,” “keen and ever-wakeful eye of the

Party,” “the most implacable and the most human of the faithful collab-
orators of the greatest Chief of all times” (these phrases had appeared
in the Political Service Schools Gazette that very morning)—Maxim
Andreyevich Erchov felt that he loved the man and that he feared him
as one fears mystery. “No bureaucratic delays, now!” the Chief added.
“Not too much paper work! Clear, up-to-date dossiers, with no official
rigmarole and no missing documents—and action! Otherwise you will
find yourself drowned in work.”—“An inspired directive” was the sober
comment of one of the members of the Special Commission (composed
of the heads of bureaus) when Erchov repeated it to them word for
word.
Nevertheless, the swarming, proliferating, overflowing, all-conquering
dossiers refused to relinquish the most minor memorandums; on the
contrary, they continued to swell. Thousands of cases had been opened
during the first great trial of traitors, a trial “of world-wide importance”;
thousands more had been opened, before the original thousands had been
disposed of, during the second trial; thousands during the third trial;
thousands during the preliminary investigations for the fourth, fifth, and
sixth trials, which never came into court because they were suppressed.
Dossiers arrived from the Ussuri (Japanese agents), from Yakutia
(sabotage, espionage, and traitors in the gold placers), from Buriat-
Mongolia (the case of the Buddhist monasteries), from Vladivostok (the
case of the submarine fleet command), from the construction yards of
' Komsomolsk, City of the Young Communists (terrorist propaganda,
demoralization, abuse of power, Trotskyism-Bukharinism), from Tsing-
kiang (smuggling, contacts with Japanese and British agents, Moslem
intrigues), from all the Turkestan republics (separatism, Pan-Turkism,
banditry, foreign intelligence services; Mahmudism—but who on earth
was Mahmud?—in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Kazakstan,
Old Bokhara, Syr Darya); the Samarkand assassination was connected
with the Aim Ata scandal, the Aim Ata scandal with the case of espionage
(aggravated by the kidnaping of an Iranian national) at the Ispahan
Consulate; forgotten cases came to life again in concentration camps
in the Arctic, new cases were born in prisons; memorandums in code,
dated from Paris, Oslo, Washington, Panama, Hankow, Canton in
flames, Guernica in ruins, bombed Barcelona, Madrid desperately
surviving under a succession of terrors (and so on—consult a map of the
two hemispheres) demanded investigations; Kaluga announced suspi-
cious epidemics among livestock, Tambov agrarian discontent, Leningrad
presented twenty dossiers simultaneously—the Sailors’ Club case, the

Red Triangle Factory case, the Academy of Sciences case, the Former
Revolutionary Prisoners case, the Leninist Youth case, the Geologic
Committee case, the Free Masons case, the matter of homosexuality in
the Fleet ... Now here, now there, a succession of shots traversed this
mass of names, documents, figures, mysterious lives whose mystery was
never entirely laid bare, supplementary investigations, denunciations,
reports, insane ideas. Several hundred uniformed men, ranked in a strict
hierarchy, dealt with these papers day and night, were dealt with by
them in their turn, suddenly vanished into them, passing the perpetual
labor on to other hands. On the summit of the pyramid stood Maxim
Andreyevich Erchov. What could he do?
From the P.B. meeting which he had attended he brought hack an oral
directive which the Chief had repeated several times: “You must make
good your predecessor’s errors!” Predecessors were never mentioned
by name; Erchov felt grateful to the Chief (but why, after all?) for not
having said, “the traitor’s errors.” From every branch of the Central
Committee arrived complaints concerning the disorganization of person-
nel, which had been so affected by purges and repressive measures in the
last two years that instead of being rejuvenated it was melting away; the
result had been fresh cases of sabotage, clearly due to the muddleheaded-
ness, incompetence, insecurity, and pusillanimity of industrial personnel.
Without arousing the Chief’s disapproval, a member of the Organization
Bureau had emphasized the urgent necessity of restoring to productive
employment those who had been wrongfully sentenced, upon calumnious
denunciations, as a result of mass campaigns, and so forth, and even of
guilty persons toward whom indulgence seemed feasible. “Are we not,”
he had cried, “the country which remakes men? We transform even our
worst enemies . . .” This oratorical sally had fallen into a sort of void.
For a second the High Commissar’s mind dwelt on an annoying counter-
revolutionary joke: “Remaking men consists in reducing them, by per-
suasion, to the condition of corpses . . .” Precisely at that moment the
Chief’s kindly eyes looked meaningfully at Erchov. Erchov put his entire
staff on their mettle: within ten days, ten thousand dossiers, preferably
those of industrial administrators (Communists), technicians (non-Party
members), and officers (Communists and non-Party members), were
carefully reviewed, which made possible 6,727 releases, of which 47.5
per cent resulted in rehabilitations. The more thoroughly to overwhelm
his “predecessor”—whose chief assistants had just been executed—the
papers announced that, during the late purges, the percentage of inno-
cent persons sentenced had risen to over 50; this seemingly produced a

good effect; but the C.C. statisticians responsible for the figures, and the
assistant press director who had authorized their publication, were
immediately dismissed when it was learned that an emigre newspaper
published in Paris had perfidiously commented upon the facts thus
revealed. Erchov and his staff fell upon yet more mountains of dossiers,
working day and night. At this point two pieces of news threw them into
confusion. An ex-Communist, expelled from the Party on the basis of an
undeniably calumnious denunciation which accused him of being a
Trotskyist and the son of a priest (the documents proved that he had been
conspicuous in the campaigns against Trotskyism from 1925 to 1937, and
that he was the son of a mechanic in the factory at Bryansk), having
been released from the “special cases” concentration camp at Kem, on
the White Sea, returned to Smolensk and there killed a member of the
Party Committee. A woman doctor, released from a work camp in the
Urals, was arrested as she attempted to cross the border into Estonia.
Seven hundred and fifty new denunciations against recently released
persons appeared; in thirty instances the supposedly innocent turned
out to be undeniably guilty—or at least so divers committees affirmed.
A rumor gained headway: Erchov was not doing the job. Too liberal,
too hasty, not sufficiently versed in the technique of repression.
Then came the Tulayev case.
Gordeyev was still following it, in accordance with special instructions
from the Political Bureau. When Erchov questioned him about the
chauffeur’s execution, he answered, with offensive reserve:
“. . . Night before last, with the four Fur Trust saboteurs and the
little music-hall actress condemned for espionage . . .”
Erchov flinched—but imperceptibly, for he made every effort to keep
his feelings concealed. Was it chance, coincidence, or a slap? He had
admired the little actress—her lithe body leaping onto the stage, more
attractive in the yellow-and-black tights than if it had been naked!—had
admired her enough to send her flowers. Gordeyev went on (was it a
second slap?):
“The report was submitted to you . .
So he didn’t read all the reports that came to his desk? . . .
“It is most unfortunate,” Gordeyev resumed innocuously, “because,
only yesterday, we found material which throws quite a new light on the
chauffeur’s personality . . .”
Erchov raised his head, obviously interested.
“Yes. Imagine! During 1924^-25 he was Bukharin’s chauffeur for
seven months; four letters of recommendation from Bukharin were

found in his Moscow dossier. The latest was dated only last year! There
is more besides: While serving as a battalion commissar on the Volhynia
front in 1921 he was accused of insubordination. The man who got him
out of it was Kiril Rublev!”
Another slap! By what inconceivable negligence could such facts
have escaped the commissions whose duty it was to investigate the past
careers of agents attached,to the persons of C.C. members? The responsi-
bility was the High Commissar’s. What were the commissions under his
orders doing? Who were their members? Bukharin, onetime ideologist
of the Party, “Lenin’s favorite disciple,” whom Lenin called “son,” was
now the incarnation of treachery, espionage, terrorism, the dismember-
ment of the Union. And Kiril Kirillovich Rublev, his old friend—was he
still alive after so many proscriptions? “Yes indeed,” Gordeyev bore
witness. “He is at the Academy of Sciences, buried under tons of six-
teenth-century archives. I have someone watching him ...”
A few days later, one of Erchov’s recent appointees went insane. The
First Examining Magistrate of the Forty-first Bureau was a conscientious
ex-soldier, taciturn-looking, with a high, deeply lined forehead. Erchov
had just approved his promotion, despite the cautious hostility of the
Cell secretary, a Party member. Erchov’s appointee suddenly turned on
a high Party official and drove him out of his office. He was heard
shouting:
“Get out, stool pigeon, informer! I order you to keep your mouth
shut!” He locked himself in his office. Several revolver shots rang out.
The magistrate appeared in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, his hair
rumpled, the smoking revolver in his hand. He shouted: “I am a traitor!
I have betrayed everything! Gang of beasts!”—and, to the general
consternation, it was seen that he had riddled the Chief’s portrait with
bullets, shooting out the eyes, making a gaping hole in the fore-
head . . . “Punish me!” he went on shouting. “Eunuchs!” It took six
men to subdue him. When they had tied him up with their belts, he shook
with laughter, inextinguishable, grating, convulsive hursts of laughter.
“Eunuchs! Eunuchs!” Erchov, preyed on by an unspoken fear, went
to see him. He was tied to a chair, which had fallen over backward, so
he lay with his boots in the air and his head on the carpet. At sight of
the High Commissar he foamed: “Traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor! I see
the depths of your soul, hypocrite! So you’ve been gelded too, eh?”
“Shall we gag him, Comrade Chief?” an officer asked respectfully.
“No. Why isn’t the ambulance here yet? Have you called the hospital?

What are you thinking of? If an ambulance is not here in fifteen minutes,
you will consider yourself under arrest!”
A short, extremely blond clerk, with irritating side curls, who had
entered out of curiosity, papers in hand, looked at them both—Erchov
and the lunatic—with the same horror, and did not recognize the High
Commissar. Erchov drew himself up, squared his shoulders. He felt the
slight giddiness and nausea he used to feel when he was obliged to be
present at executions. He left the room without a word, got into the
elevator . . . The departmental heads were obviously avoiding him.
Only one of them came to meet him—an old friend who had shared his
sudden rise and who was now in charge of the foreign department.
“Well, Ricciotti, what is it?”
Ricciotti’s Italian name was a legacy from a childhood spent on the
shores of a picture-postcard bay, as was the useless, Neapolitan-fisherboy
beauty which he still possessed, the touch of gold in the eyes, the warm
guitar player’s voice, an imagination and a loyalty so unusual that—on
due consideration—they seemed feigned. The general opinion was that
he “aimed to be original.”
“Oh, the daily ration of troubles, my dear Maximka.”
Ricciotti took Erchov familiarly by the arm and accompanied him into
his office, talking fluently all the while: ah out the secret service at
Nanking which had been abominably taken in by the Japanese; the work
of the Trotskyists in Mao Tse-tung’s army; an intrigue in the White mili-
tary organization at Paris, “where we now hold all the cards”; things in
Barcelona, which were going as hadly as possible—Trotskyists, An-
archists, Socialists, Catholics, Catalans, Basques being all equally un-
governable—a military defeat there was inevitable, no use blinking the
fact; the complications which had arisen in connection with the gold
reserve; five or six different sets of spies all operating at once ... A
ten-minute talk with him, as he strode up and down the office, was worth
many long reports. Erchov admired and slightly envied the supple intelli-
gence which embraced all things at once and yet remained singularly
unencumbered. Lowering his voice, Ricciotti led him to the window. It
offered a view of Moscow—a vast white open space, over which human
ants hurried in all directions, following dirty paths in the snow; a mass
of houses; and, still towering over all, the bulbous domes of an old
church, painted an intense blue fretted with golden stars. Erchov would
have thought it beautiful if he had been able to think.
“Listen, Maximka, watch out ...”
“For what?”

“I have been told that the agents sent to Spain were an unfortunate
choice. Of course, so far as appearances go, the remark was aimed at me.
But it is you they are after.”
“Right, Sacha. Don’t worry. He has confidence in me, you know.”
The hands of the clock were circling inexorably. Erchov and Ricciotti
parted. Four minutes to run through Pravda. What’s this?—The front-
page picture: Erchov should be in it—second to the left from the Chief,
among the members of the Government; the photograph had been taken
two afternoons ago in the Kremlin, at the reception for Elite women
textile workers . . . He unfolded the paper: instead of one picture there
were two, and they had been trimmed in such a way that the High Com-
missar for Security appeared in neither. Amazement. Telephone. The
editorial office? The High Commissar’s office calling . . . Who made
up the first page? Who? Why? You say the pictures were supplied by
the General Secretariat at the last moment? Yes—very well—that is what
I wanted to know . . . But the truth was that he had learned too much.
Gordeyev came in and amiably informed him that two of the three men
who made up his personal escort had had to be replaced—one was ill, the
other had been sent to White Russia to present a flag to the workers of a
frontier military-agricultural group. Erchov refrained from remarking
that he might have been consulted. In the courtyard three men came to
attention beside his car and received him with a single “Greetings, Com-
rade High Commissar,” irreproachably released from three arching
chests. Erchov answered them pleasantly and, pointing to the steering
wheel, nodded to the only one of the three whom he knew—the one who
would doubtless soon be relieved of his job, leaving the High Commissar
thenceforth to travel surrounded by strangers, who would perhaps be
under secret orders, obeying a will that was not his own.
The car emerged from under a low archway, passed between iron gates
guarded by helmeted sentries, who presented arms; the car leaped into
a square at the gray hour of twilight. Blocked for a moment between a
bus and the stream of pedestrians, it slowed down. Erchov saw the un-
known faces of people who did not signify: clerks, technicians still
wearing their school caps, a melancholy old Jew, graceless women, hard-
faced workmen. Preoccupied, silent, insubstantial against the snow, they
saw him without dreaming of recognizing him. How do they live, what
do they live on? Not one of them, not even those who read my name in
the papers, imagines or can imagine what I am. And I—what do I know
of them, except that I do not know them, that though their million names
are filed somewhere, can be catalogued and classified, each of their

identities is a different unknown, each a mystery that will never wholly
be solved . . . The lights were going on in Theater Square, up and
down the steep slope of Tverskaya Street surged the evening crowds.
Stifling, swarming city—raw lights slashing across patches of snow,
fragments of crowd, rivers of pavement, rivers of mud. The four uni-
formed men in the high-powered government car were silent. When
at last, after circling a ponderous triumphal arch which resembled the
door of a huge prison, the car picked up speed down the long perspective
of Leningrad Boulevard, Erchov bitterly remembered that he loved
driving—the road, the speed, his own quick perception governing speed
and motor. They objected to his driving these days. In any case he was
too nervous, too preoccupied with work, to drive. A fine stretch of road—
we know how to build. A road like this paralleling the Trans-Siberian
—that’s what we need to make the Far East secure. It could be done
in a few years if we put five hundred thousand men to work on it, and
four hundred thousand might well be drafted from prisons. Nothing im-
practical in the idea—I must give it further consideration. The image
of the lunatic, bound to an overturned chair in a wrecked office, suddenly
hung floating over the magnificent road whose precise black length was
bordered on either side by immaculate white. “Well, it’s enough to drive
anyone mad . . .” The lunatic laughed derisively, the lunatic began:
“You’re the one who’s mad, not me, it’s you, not me, you’ll see . . .”
Erchov lit a cigarette, he wanted to see the flame of the lighter flickering
between his gloved hands. And the touch of nightmare yielded and was
gone. His nerves were ragged ... he must take a whole day off, rest,
get out in the fresh air . . . The street lights became fewer, a sky of
stars flooded the woods with pale light. Erchov stared at it. Deep within
him there was a reverent joy—but he was not conscious of it, his mind
pondered figures, intrigues, plans, aspects of cases. The car passed into
the shadow of tall spruces covered with snow like shaggy fur. It was very
cold. The car turned on smooth snow. The pointed Norwegian gables of a
large house stood densely black against the sky—Villa No. 1 of the
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
Here, over objects plain or flamboyantly colored, but all contributing
harmoniously to the decorative scheme, a soundproofed silence reigned.
No visible telephone, no newspapers, no official portraits (it was a daring
thing to exclude them), no weapons, no administrative memo pads.
Erchov would have nothing that reminded him of work: when the human
animal puts forth its maximum effort, it requires complete rest: the

highly responsible official has a greater right to it than anyone else. Here
there should be nothing but his private life—our private life, Valia,
you and I. A portrait of Valia as a proper little schoolgirl hung in a
cream-white oval wooden frame with a sculptured knot of ribbon at the
top. Valia . . . Valentina. The tall mirror reflected warm Central Asiatic
colors. Nothing suggested winter—not even the miraculous snow-laden
branches which were visible through the windows. They were only a
magnificent stage-set, a piece of white magic. Erchov went to the phono-
graph. There was a Hawaiian blues record on the turntable. No—not
that! Not today! The poor wretched lunatic had cried: “Traitors, we are
all of us traitors!” But did he really say “all of us”?—or did I add that?
Why should I add it? The professional investigator found himself
considering an odd problem. Would the most humane thing be to do
away with the insane?
Valentina came out of	the	bathroom	in a	peignoir. “Hello,	darling.”
Hours devoted to caring	for	her body,	and	an intense well-being, had
transformed the Valia he had first known as a typical young provincial
woman from the Yeniseisk; her whole supple, radiant being proclaimed
that it was good to live. Yes, when Communist society was at last firmly
built up, after many difficult but enriching transition periods, all women
would develop as fully .	. .	“You are	a living anticipation,	Valia”—
“Thanks to you, Maximka,	who work	and	fight, thanks to	men like
you . . .” They sometimes said such things to each other—doubtless
to justify their privileges in their own eyes; thus privilege conferred a
mission. Their union was clean and uncomplicated—like the union of
two healthy bodies which are attracted to each other. Eight years
previously, during a tour of inspection in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk,
where he commanded a division of special Security troops, Erchov
stopped at the house of a battalion commander in a military city deep
in the forest. When his subordinate’s young wife entered the room,
Erchov found himself dazzled by her innocent and self-assured animality.
It was the first time a woman had ever affected him so powerfully. Her
presence evoked forests, the chill waters of untamed brooks, the pelts
of suspicious beasts, the taste of new milk. She had prominent nostrils
which seemed to be perpetually scenting something, and big, feline eyes.
He desired her instantly—not for a chance hour, not for a night—he
wanted to possess her wholly, forever, proudly. “Why should she belong
to someone else, when I want her?” The “someone else,” an officer of low
rank, with no future, absurdly deferential to his chief, had a ridiculous
way of using shopkeepers’ expressions in his speech. Erchov loathed him.

To get him out of the way, he sent him off to inspect posts in the forest.
When Erchov was alone with the woman he wanted, he first smoked a
cigarette in silence; he had given himself that much time to summon up
his courage. Then: “Valentina Anisimovna, I have something to say to
you . . . listen carefully. I never go back on my word. I am as straight-
forward and trustworthy as a good cavalry saber. I want you to be my
wife . . .” Ten feet away, firmly planted in his chair, he looked rather
as if he had given a command, as if she must inevitably obey—and the
young woman was attracted. “But I don’t know you,” she said, des-
perately frightened—and it was as if she had fallen into his arms. “That
doesn’t matter. I knew you through and through the first minute I saw
you. I am trustworthy and plain, I give you my word that . . .”—“I
don’t doubt it,” Valentina murmured, not aware that she was already
consenting, “but . . .”—“There are no buts. A woman is free to
choose.” He refrained from adding: “I am chief of the division, your
husband will never get anywhere.” She must have thought the same
thing, for they looked at each other in embarrassment, with such a
feeling of complicity that they both blushed for shame. Erchov turned
her husband’s portrait to the wall, took her in his arms, and kissed her
eyelids with a sudden strange tenderness. “Your eyes, your eyes, you are
all sunlight, my . . .” She made no resistance, wondering dully whether
this important official—quite handsome, too—was going to take her then
and there, on the uncomfortable little sofa—luckily she had no under-
wear on, luckily ... He did nothing of the sort. He merely said, in the
clipped tones of a man making a report: “You will leave with me day
after tomorrow. As soon as Battalion Commander Nikudychin returns, I
shall explain matters to him as man to man. You will get your divorce
today—have the papers by five o’clock.” What could the battalion com-
mander say to the division commander? Woman is free, and Party ethics
prescribe respect for freedom. Battalion Commander Nikudychin (whose
name means, approximately, “Good-for-nothing”) stayed drunk for a
week before he visited the Chinese prostitutes of the city for another
sort of forgetfulness. Informed of his misconduct, Erchov treated his
subordinate indulgently, for he understood his grief. Nevertheless, he
had the Party secretary read him a lecture ... A Communist must not
lose his moral equilibrium because his wife leaves him—obviously . . .
In these rooms, Valentina liked to pass the days almost naked, wearing
only the gauziest of materials. Always her body was as completely present
as her eyes, her voice. Her big eyes looked as golden as the curls that

tumbled over her forehead. She had full lips, prominent cheekbones, a
clear pink complexion, a figure as supple and fresh as a good swimmer’s.
“You always look as if you had just come bounding out of cold water
into the sun,” her husband said to her one day. She glanced into the
mirror and answered with a proud little laugh: “That’s what I am—cold
and full of sunlight. Your little golden fish.”
Tonight she held out her beautiful bare arms to him:
“Why so late, darling? What is it?”
“Nothing,” Erchov said with a forced smile.
At that moment he became clearly aware that, on the contrary, there
was something, something enormous; it was here, and it would be
wherever he went—an infinite threat to himself and to this woman.
Perhaps she was too beautiful, perhaps too privileged, perhaps , . .
Footsteps measured the hall—the night guard going to check on the
service entrance.
“Nothing. Two of my personal guards have been changed. It annoys
. 9?
me.
“But you’re the master, darling.” She stood there before him very
straight, her peignoir half open over her breasts.
She finished filing a lacquered fingernail. Erchov knit his brow and
stared dully at a fine firm breast, tipped with a lavender nipple. Still
frowning, he met her untroubled eyes, beautiful as a field of flowers. She
went on:
“ . . . Don’t you do as you please?”
Really, he must be very tired, or such a trifling phrase could never have
produced such a strange effect on him . . . When he heard her casual
words, Erchov became aware that actually he was master of nothing, that
his will determined nothing, that any attempt he made to fight would
fail. “Only lunatics do as they please,” he thought. Aloud he answered
with a bitter smile:
“Only lunatics imagine that they do as they please.”
It came to her: “Something is up . . .” And she was so certain of it,
and it made her so afraid, that her impulse to throw her arms around him
died. She forced herself to be vivacious. “Isn’t it time we kissed each
other, Sima?” He picked her up, putting his hands under her elbows
as he always did, and kissed her—not on the mouth, but between her
mouth and her nose and on the comers of her lips, sniffing to catch the
odor of her skin. “Nobody else kisses like that,” he had said to her when
he was courting her—“just us.”
“Go take a bath,” she said.

If he did not believe in cleansing the soul—what old-fashioned jargon!
—he believed in the blessing of a clean body—soaped, rinsed, doused
with cold water after a warm bath, massaged with eau de cologne, ad-
mired in the mirror. “Damned if the human animal isn’t a beautiful
thing!” he would sometimes exclaim in the bathroom. “Valia, I’m
beautiful too.” She would come running, and they would kiss in front
of the mirror—he naked and solidly built, she half-naked, supple in
some vividly striped peignoir . . . Those were dim memories now, dat-
ing from a distant past. In those days, as chief of secret operations in a
district on the Far Eastern frontier, Erchov himself tracked down spies
in the forest, directed silent man hunts, dealt with double-crossing agents,
shuddered in sudden anticipation of the bullet that strikes you down
from the brush, and no one ever finds out who fired it ... He loved
the life, not knowing that he was destined for the heights . . . The warm
water showered over his shoulders. All he could see of himself in the
mirror was a drawn face, with anxious eyes between puffy lids. “I look
like a man who’s just been arrested, damn it!” The bathroom door was
open; in the next room Valia put on a Hawaiian record—steel guitar
and a Negro or Polynesian voice: “I am fond of you . . .”
Erehov exploded.
“Valia, do me the favor of breaking that record this minute!”
The record cracked in two, the cold water came down on his neck
like a solace.
“I broke it, Sima darling. And I’m tearing up the yellow cushion.”
“Thank you,” he said, straightening up. “You’re as good as cold
water.”
The cold water came from under the snow. Somewhere wolves
quenched their thirst in it.
They had sandwiches and sparkling wine brought to the bedroom.
His apprehension had faded . . . better not to think about it or it would
come back. There was not much of tenderness between them; theirs was
an intimacy of two very clean and intelligent bodies profoundly delighted
by each other. “Want to go skiing tomorrow?” Valia asked, and her eyes
opened wide, her nostrils opened wide. He almost knocked over the low
table in front of them, so instantaneous was the reflex that carried him
to the door. He flung it open—and a woman’s voice in the hall cried:
“What a fright you gave me, Comrade Chief!” He saw the chambermaid,
bent over the carpet, picking up towels. “What are you doing here?”
Erchov could hardly articulate for anger. “I was just going by, Comrade
Chief. You frightened me . . .” He closed the door and came back to

Valia, his face sullenly angry, his mustache bristling. “That bitch was
listening at the keyhole!” This time Valia felt definitely frightened.
“Impossible, darling, you’re overtired, you don’t know what you’re say-
ing.” He crouched bn the floor at her feet. She took his head in both
hands and rocked it on her lap. “Stop saying such foolish things, darling.
Let’s get some sleep.” He thought: “Do you think it’s so easy to sleep?”
and his hands moved up her thighs to her warm belly.
“Put on a record, Valia. Not Hawaiian, or Negro, or French . . .
Something of our own . . .”
“How about ‘The Partisans’?”
He walked up and down the room while, from the phonograph, came
the masculine chorus of Red Partisans riding across the taiga: “They
conquered the Atamans—they conquered the Generals—they won their
last victories—on the shores of the sea . . .” Columns of gray-cloaked,
singing men marched through the streets of a small Asiatic city. It was
late in the afternoon. Erchov stopped to watch them. A strapping fellow
sang the first lines of each stanza alone, then they were repeated in well-
disciplined chorus. The rhythmic tread of boots on the snow made a
muffled accompaniment. Those conscious voices, those mingled and
powerful voices, those voices with the strength of the earth in them—
that is what we are . . . The song ended. Erchov said to himself: “I’ll
take a little gardenal . . .” and there was a knock at the door.
“Comrade Chief, Comrade Gordeyev wishes to speak to you on the
telephone.”
And Gordeyev’s calm voice came over the wire, announcing new leads
on the assassination, discoveries only just made—“so I had to disturb
you, please excuse me, Maxim Andreyevich. There is an important
decision to be made . . . Very strong evidence pointing to the indirect
complicity of K. K. Rublev.” Which would establish a curious connec-
tion between this case and the two previous trials . . . “As K. K. Rublev
is on the special list of former members of the Central Committee, I did
not wish to assume the responsibility ...”
So you want me to take the responsibility of ordering his arrest or
leaving him at liberty, you vermin . . . Erchov curtly asked:
“Biography?”
“I have it before me. In 1905, medical student at the University of
Warsaw; Maximalist in 1906, fired two bullets from a revolver at
Colonel Golubev, wounding him—escaped from military prison in 1907
. . . member of the Party, 1908. Intimate with Innokentii (Dubrovin-
sky), Rykov, Preobrazhensky, Bukharin” (and the names of these

men, who had been shot as traitors after having been leaders of the
Party, seemed enough to condemn Rublev), “Political Commissar with
the Nth Army, special mission in the Baikal district, secret mission in
Afghanistan, president of the Chemical Fertilizers Trust, instructor at
Sverdlov University, member of the C.C. until . . . member of the
Central Control Commission until . . . Censured and warned by the
Moscow Control Commission for factional activity. Request for his ex-
pulsion on the grounds of Right Opportunism . . . Suspected of having
read the criminal document drawn up hy Riutin . . . Suspected of hav-
ing attended the clandestine meeting in Zyelony Bor forest . . . Suspected
of having helped Eysmont’s family when Eysmont was imprisoned . . .
Suspected of having translated a German article by Trotsky, which was
found when the premises of his former pupil B. were searched.” (From
all directions, suspicion pointed at the man who now supervised the
general history section of a library.)
Erchov listened with increasing irritation. We knew all this before,
you rat. Suspicions, denunciations, presumptions—we’ve had our fill
of them! There is not a shadow of a connection between all this and the
Tulayev case, and you’re only trying to set a trap for me, you want me
* to arrest an old member of the C.C. If he has heen let alone up to now, it
must be because the Political Bureau wants him let alone. Erchov said:
“Very well. Wait till you hear from me. Good night.”
When Comrade Popov, of the Central Control Commission—a figure
unknown to the general public but whose moral authority was of the
highest (especially since the execution for treason of two or three men
even more respected than himself)—when Comrade Popov sent in his
name to the High Commissar, the latter had him ushered in imme-
diately, and not without a decided feeling of curiosity. It was the first
time Erchov had ever seen Popov. On very cold days Popov wore a cap
over his thick dirty-gray head of hair—a workman’s cap, for which he
had paid six rubles at Moscow Ready-to-Wear. His faded leather over-
coat had been new ten years ago. Popov had an aging, deeply-lined face,
pimply from bad health, a thin faded beard, steel-rimmed spectacles. So
he entered—the cap on his gray head, a bulging brief case under his
arm, a strange little half-smile in his eyes. “Everything going well, I
hope, my dear comrade?” he asked, as if he were an old friend; and,
for a fraction of a second, Erchov was taken in by the old fox’s guile-
less manner. “Very happy to meet you at last, Comrade Popov,” the
High Commissar answered.

Popov unbuttoned his overcoat, dropped heavily into 'a chair, mur-
mured: “I’m tired out, damn it! Nice place you have here—well de-
signed, these new buildings,” and began filling his pipe. “It wasn’t like
this in my day. I was in the Cheka at the very beginning, you know—
with Felix Edmundovich Djerzhinski. No, there was nothing like the
comfort, the system you have today . . . The land of the Soviets is
progressing by leaps and hounds, Comrade Erchov. You’re lucky to
be young . .
Erchov politely let him take his time. Popov raised a flabby, earth-
colored hand with cracked and dirty nails.
“But to come to the point, my dear comrade. The Party has you in
mind. It has us all in mind, the Party. You work long hours, you work
hard, the Central Committee knows your worth. Of course you have had
almost too much on your hands, what with straightening out the situ-
ation you inherited” (the allusion to his predecessors was discreet), “the
period of plots through which we are passing ”
What was he getting at?
“History proceeds by stages—during one period there are polemics,
during another there are plots ... To come to the point—you are
obviously tired. This matter of the terrorist attack on Comrade Tulayev
seems to have been a little beyond you ... You will excuse me for
saying this to you with my usual frankness, absolutely between ourselves,
my dear comrade, and as man to man—just as once in ’eighteen Vladi-
mir Ilich himself said to me . . . Well, because we know your
worth . . .”
What Lenin may have said to him twenty years earlier, he had not
the least intention of relating. It was his way of talking—a counterfeit
vagueness, with a liberal sprinkling of “well nows,” a quavering voice—
how old I’m getting, one of the oldest members of the Party, always in
the breach . . .
“Well now, you must take a rest—just a couple of months in the coun-
try, under the Caucasian sun . . . Taking the waters, comrade—how
I envy you! Ah—Matsesta, Kislovodsk, Sochi, Tikhes-Dziri, what won-
derful country ... You know Goethe’s poem:
“Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluhn?
“. . . don’t you know German, Comrade Erchov?”
A chill ran through the High Commissar. At last he was beginning to
grasp the meaning of Popov’s chatter.

“Excuse me, Comrade Popov, I am not sure that I quite understand
you. Is this an order?”
“No, my dear comrade. We are simply giving you a word of advice.
You are overtired—just as I am. Anyone can see it. We all belong to
the Party, and we are responsible to the Party for our health. And the
Party looks out for us. The old stalwarts have thought of you, your name
has been mentioned in the Organization Bureau.” (He used the term to
avoid naming the Political Bureau). “It has been decided that Gordeyev
shall replace you during your absence . . . We know how well you
and he get on together ... so it will be a colleague in whom you have
complete confidence who . . . yes, two months . . . not a day more
.... the Party cannot give you longer, my dear comrade . . .”
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Popov uncrossed his legs and
stood up: rancid smile, muddy complexion. Benevolently he held out his
hand. “Ah—you aren’t old enough yet to know what rheumatism is . . .
Well, when will you be off ?”
“Tomorrow evening—for Sukhum. I shall begin my leave of absence
this afternoon.”
Popov seemed delighted.
• “Good! That’s what I like—military promptness in making decisions
. . . Even I, old as I am . . . Yes, yes . . . Get a good rest, Comrade
Erchov ... A magnificent country the Caucasus—the jewel of the
Union . . . Kennst du das Land . . ”
Erchov firmly shook a slimy hand, saw Popov to the door, shut the
door, and stood helplessly in the center of his office. Nothing here was
his any longer. A few minutes of hypocritical conversation had been
enough to remove him from the controls. What did it mean? The tele-
phone buzzed. Gordeyev asked at what time he should summon the
department heads for the projected conference?
“Report to me for orders,” said Erchov, controlling himself with diffi-
culty. “No—cancel that. No conference today.”
He drank down a glass of ice water.
He did not tell his wife that he was taking this sudden vacation by
order. At Sukhum (palms beside an unimaginably blue sea, hot summer
weather), the “strictly secret” envelopes reached him for a week—then
stopped. He did not dare to ask for more. Instead he spent his time in
the bar, with several taciturn generals on their way back from Mon-
golia. Whisky gave them a common mentality—fiery and ponderous. The
news that a member of the Political Bureau had come to stay in a
nearby villa sent Erchov into a panic. Suppose he should ignore the

High Commissar’s presence? “We’ll take a trip to the mountains, Valia.”
Under a blazing sun the car climbed a zigzag road: dazzling rocks,
ravines, the immense enamel beaker that was the sea. Blindingly blue,
the sea’s horizon rose higher and higher. Valia began to be afraid. She
sensed flight, but a flight that was ridiculous, impossible. “Don’t you
love me any more?” she asked him at last. They had reached four
thousand feet and still there was nothing but rocks, sea, and sky. He
kissed her fingertips, not knowing if his sickening fear left him capable
of desiring her. “I am too afraid to think about love now ... I am
afraid—what nonsense! . . . No, it’s not nonsense—I am afraid be-
cause it is my turn to die . . .” The landscape of sun-drenched rocks
was deliciously fatiguing—and the sea, the sea, the sea! “If I must die,
let me at least enjoy this woman and these colors!” It was a brave
thought. Avidly he kissed Valia on the mouth. The purity of the land-
scape filled them with an ecstasy that was like light. They spent three
weeks in a chalet high in the mountains. An Abkhasian couple dressed
in white (husband and wife were equally beautiful) served them in
silence. They slept on a terrace in the open air, their bodies clothed in
silk; and, after making love, they were together again as they gazed up
at the stars. Once Valia said: “Look, darling, we’re going to fall into
the stars . . .” So, occasionally, he tasted peace. But all the rest of the
time he was obsessed by two thoughts—one rational and reassuring, the
other disguised and perfidious, following its own obscure course, tena-
cious as decay in a tooth. The first was clearly formulated: “Why
shouldn’t they retire me for just long enough to get this accursed case
settled, since I seem to have made a mess of it? The Chief has shown
that he is favorably disposed toward me. After all, all they have to do
is send me back to the army. I can’t have offended anyone, because I have
no past. Suppose I ask to be sent back to the Far East?” The second, the
insidious one, murmured: “You know too much—they’re never going to
believe you’ll keep your mouth shut. You will be made to disappear as
your predecessors disappeared. Your predecessors went through all this
—work, clues, anxiety, doubt, leaves of absence, irrational flight, resigna-
tion, and return—and they were shot.”—“Valia,” he suddenly called,
“come hunting with me!” He took her on long climbs to inaccessible
spots, from which, suddenly, the sea would be visible, fringing an im-
mense map; capes and rocks jutted out into a whirlpool of light. “Look,
Valia!” On a rock peak rising from the sunny scree an ibex stood against
the blue, horns lifted. Erchov handed Valia the rifle; she put it cau-
tiously to her shoulder; her arms were bare, beads of sweat gleamed on

the back of her neck. The sea filled the cup of the world, silence reigned
over the universe, the creature stood tense and alive, a golden silhouette.
“Aim carefully,” Erchov whispered into her ear. “And above all, darling,
miss him. . . .” Slowly the rifle rose, rose; Valia’s head dropped back;
when the barrel pointed straight up into the sky, she fired. Valia was
laughing, her eyes were full of the sky. The report faded to a faint rasp
like tearing cloth. Calmly the ibex turned its slim head toward the two
distant white figures, stared at them for a moment, bent its hocks,
bounded gracefully toward the sea, and disappeared. ... It was that
evening, when they got back, that Erchov found a telegram summoning
him to Moscow immediately.
They traveled in a private railway car. On the second day the train
stopped at a forgotten station in the middle of snow-covered cornfields.
An impenetrable gray mist darkened the horizon. Valia was sulking a
little, with a cigarette between her lips and a book of Zoschenko’s in her
hands. . . . “What do you find to interest you,” he had asked, “in that
sort of sour humor which is a libel on us?” She had just answered,
angrily, “Nowadays you never say anything that isn’t official. . .
Going back to everyday life had set them both on edge. Erchov began
, looking through a newspaper. The orderly officer entered, announcing
that Erchov was wanted on the telephone in the station—a defect in the
equipment made it impossible to connect the through wire with the
private car. Erchov’s face darkened: “When we reach Moscow, you will
have the rolling-stock supervisor put under arrest for a week. Telephones
in private cars must function ir-re-proach-ab-ly. Make a note of it.”
“Yes, Comrade High Commissar.”
Erchov put on his overcoat, which bore the emblems of the highest
power, stepped down onto the wooden platform of the deserted little
station, noticed that the train was only three cars long, and strode
rapidly toward the only visible building. The orderly officer followed
him respectfully, three paces behind. Security, Railway Supervision.
Erchov entered; several soldiers came to attention and saluted. “This
way, Comrade Chief,” said the orderly officer, blushing oddly. In the
little back room, overheated by an iron stove, two officers rose as he
entered, puppets jerked by the strings of discipline, one tall and thin, the
other short and fat, both smooth-faced and of high rank. A little sur-
prised, Erchov returned their salute. Then curtly:
“The telephone?”
“We have a message for you,” the tall, thin one answered evasively.
He had a long wrinkled face and gray eyes that were absolutely cold.

“A message? Let me have it.”
The tall, thin one reached into his brief case and drew out a sheet of
paper on which were a few typewritten lines. “Have the goodness . . .”
“By decision of the Special Conference of the People’s Commissariat
for Internal Affairs . . . dated . . . concerning Item No. 4628g . . .
order for the preventive arrest . . . ERCHOV, Maxim Andreyevich,
forty-one years of age . .
A sort of cramp settled on Erchov’s throat, yet he found the strength to
read it all through, word by word, to examine the seal, the signatures—
“Gordeyev,” countersigned Illegible—the serial numbers . . . “No one
has a right,” he said absurdly after a few seconds, “I am . . .” The short,
fat one did not let him finish:
“You are so no longer, Maxim Andreyevich. You have been relieved
of your high office by a decision of the Organization Bureau.”
He spoke with unctuous deference.
“I have a copy of it here ... Be so good as to surrender your weap-
ons ...”
The table was covered with black oilcloth; Erchov laid his regulation
revolver down on it. As he reached into his back pocket for the little
spare Browning he always carried, he felt an urge to send a bullet into
his heart; imperceptibly, he forced his hand to move more slowly, and
he thought that he let no expression appear in his face. The gilded ibex
on the pyramid of rock, between sea and sky. The gilded ibex threat-
ened by the hunter’s gun; Valia’s teeth, her straining neck, the blueness
... it is all over. The tall thin one’s transparent eyes never left his,
the short fat one’s hands gently grasped the High Commissar’s hand and
secured the Browning. An engine gave a long whistle. Erchov said:
“My wife . . .”
The short, fat one broke in cordially:
“Set your mind at ease, Maxim Andreyevich, I shall look out for her
myself ...”
“Thank you very much,” said Erchov stupidly.
“Be so good as to change your clothes,” said the tall, thin one, “be-
cause of the insignia . . .”
Ah yes, his insignia ... A military tunic without insignia, a military
overcoat much like his own, but without insignia, lay over the back of a
chair. It had all been carefully thought out. He dressed like a somnambu-
list. Everything was becoming clear—first of all, certain things that he

had done himself . . . His own portrait, yellowed by the sun and dirtied
with flyspecks, looked at him. “Have that portrait taken down,” he said
severely. The sarcasm did him good, but it was received in silence.
When Erchov came out of the little back room, walking between the
tall, thin officer and the short, fat one, the outer room was empty. The
men who had seen him come in wearing the stars of power on collar and
sleeves did not see him walk out disgraced. “Whoever organized this
deserves to be complimented,” thought the ex-High Commissar. He did
not know whether the idea had come to him from force of habit, or
whether he was thinking ironically. The station was deserted. Black
rails against the snow, empty space. The special train was gone—carry-
ing away Valia, carrying away the past. A hundred yards away another
car waited—an even more special car. Toward it Erchov strode, between
the two silent officers.

3 * Men at Bay
Born in the Arctic, sweeping across the sleeping forests
along the Kama, slow-falling, eddying snowstorms, before which packs
of wolves fled here and there, bore down on Moscow. They seemed to
be torn to shreds over the city, worn out by their long journeyings
through the air, suddenly blotting out the blue sky. A dull milky light
spread over the squares, the streets, the little forgotten private houses in
ancient alleys, the streetcars with their frost-traced windows ... Life
went on in a soft swirling and eddying that was like a burial. Feet trod
on millions of pure stars, fresh every instant. And suddenly, high up,
behind church domes, behind delicate crosses springing from inverted
crescents and still showing traces of gilt, the blue reappeared. The sun
lay on the snow, caressed dilapidated old fagades, shone in through
double windows . . . Rublev never tired of watching these changes. Deli-
cate, bediamonded branches appeared in the window of his office. Seen
from there, the universe was reduced to a bit of forsaken garden, a wall,
and, behind the wall, an abandoned chapel with a greenish-gold dome
growing pink under the patina of time.

Rublev looked up from the four books which he was simultaneously
consulting: the same series of facts appeared in them under four unde-
niable but unsubstantiated aspects—whence the errors of historians,
some purposeful, others unconscious. You made your way through error
as you did through snowstorms. Centuries later, the truth became appar-
ent to someone—today it is to me—out of the tangle of contradictions.
Economic history, Rublev made a note, often has the deceitful clarity of
a coroner’s report. Something, fortunately, escapes them both—the
difference between corpse and living man.
“My handwriting looks neurotic.”
Assistant Librarian Andronnikova came in. (“She thinks that I look
neurotic . . .”) “Be so good, Kiril Kirillovich, as to look over the list
of banned books for which special permissions have been re-
quested . . .” Usually Rublev carelessly OK’d all such requests—
whether they came from idealistic historians, liberal economists, social-
democrats with a tinge of bourgeois eclecticism, cloudy intuitionists ...
This time he gave a start: a student at the Institute of Applied Sociology
had asked for The Year 1905 by L. D. Trotsky. Assistant Librarian
Andronnikova, with her small face framed in a foam of white hair, had
expected that Rublev would be surprised.
“Refused,” he said. “Tell him to apply to the Library of the Party
History Commission . . .”
“I did,” Andronnikova answered gently. “But he was very insistent.”
Rublev thought he read a childish sympathy in her eyes, the sympathy
of a weak, clean, and good creature.
“How are you, Comrade Andronnikova? Did you find any cloth at the
Kuznetsky-most Co-op?”
“Yes, thank you, Kiril Kirillovich,” she said, a restrained warmth
coloring her voice.
He took his overcoat down from the coat stand, and, as he put it on,
joked about the art of life:
“We lie in wait for luck, Comrade Andronnikova, for our friends and
for ourselves . . . We are living in the jungle of the transition period,
eh?”
“Living in it is a dangerous art,” thought the white-haired woman, but
she merely smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. Did this
singular man—scholarly, keen-minded, passionately fond of music—
really believe in the “twofold period of transition, from Capitalism to
Socialism and from Socialism to Communism,” about which he had
published a book in the days when the Party still allowed him to write?

Citizenness Andronnikova, sixty, ex-princess, daughter of a great liberal
(and monarchist) politician, sister of a general massacred by his soldiers
in 1916, widow of a collector of pictures the only loves of whose life had
been Matisse and Picasso, deprived of the ballot because of her social
origins, lived by a private cult whose saint was Wladimir Soloviev. The
philosophy of mystical wisdom, if it did not help her to understand the
species of men called “Bolsheviks”—men strangely stubborn, hard,
limited, dangerous, yet some of whom had souls of unequaled richness—
helped her to regard them with an indulgence in which, of late, there was
an admixture of secret compassion. If the worst were not also to be loved,
what place would there be for Christian charity here below? If the worst
were not sometimes very near to the best, would they really be the
worst? Andronnikova thought: “They certainly believe what they write
. . . And perhaps Kiril Kirillovich is right. Perhaps it really is a period
of transition . . .” She knew the names, faces, histories, smiles, charac-
teristic gestures, of several prominent Party members who had recently,
disappeared or been executed in the course of incomprehensible trials.
They were true brothers of the man before her; they all called each other
by nicknames; they all talked of a “period of transition,” and no doubt it
was because they believed in it that they had died . . . Andronnikova
watched over Rublev with an almost painful anxiety, though he did not
suspect it. She repeated the name of Kiril Kirillovich in her mental
prayers at night, before she went to sleep with the covers pulled up to her
chin, as she had at sixteen. Her room was tiny and full of faded things—
old letters in elaborate boxes, portraits of handsome young men, cousins
and nephews, most of them buried no one knew where, in the Car-
pathians, at Gallipoli, before Trebizond, at Yaroslavl, in Tunisia. Two
of these aristocrats were presumably still alive—one a waiter in Con-
stantinople, the other, under a false name, a streetcar motorman in
Rostov. But when Andronnikova managed to get hold of some half-
decent tea and a little sugar, she still found a certain pleasure in life . . .
As a means of getting a few minutes’ conversation with Rublev every
day she had hit on the idea of searching the shops for dress goods, letter
paper, choice foods, and telling him the difficulties she encountered.
Rublev, who liked to walk the streets of Moscow, went into shops to get
information for her.
Since he enjoyed breathing the cold air, Rublev went home on foot
through the white boulevards. Tall, thin, and broad-shouldered, he had
begun to stoop during the last two years, not under the burden of years
but under that heavier burden, anxiety. The little boys chasing each other

on skates over the snowy boulevard knew his old fur-lined coat, much
faded about the shoulders, the astrakhan cap which he wore pulled down
to his eyes, his scanty beard, his big bony nose, his bushy eyebrows, the
bulging brief case he carried under his arm. As he passed he heard them
call: “Hi, Vanka, here’s Professor Checkmate,” or “Watch out, Tiomka,
here comes Czar Ivan the Terrible.” The fact is that he both looked like
a schoolmaster who was a champion chess player and resembled the
portraits of the Bloody Czar. Once a schoolboy who had come whizzing
along at top speed on a single skate and had crashed into him muttered
this odd apology: “Excuse me, Citizen Professor Ivan the Terrible”—
and could not understand the strange fit of laughter with which the
stern old codger answered him.
He passed the ironwork gateway of No. 25 Tverskoy Boulevard,
“Writers’ House.” On the fagade of the little building a medallion
displayed the noble profile of Alexander Herzen. Out of the basement
windows wafted the odors of the “Writers’ Restaurant”—or rather of the
scribblers’ trough. “I sowed dragons,” said Marx, “and reaped fleas.”
This country is forever sowing dragons, and in times of stress it produces
them, strong with wings and claws, furnished with magnificent brains,
but their posterity dies out in fleas, trained fleas, stinking fleas, fleas,
fleas! In this house was born Alexander Herzen, the most generous man
in the Russia of his time, and therefore driven to live in exile; and
because he had perhaps exchanged messages with him, a man of the high
intelligence of Chernyshevski was manhandled by the police for twenty
years. Now in this house the scribblers filled their bellies by writing, in
verse or prose, and in the name of the Revolution, the stupidities and
infamies which despotism ordered them to write. Fleas, fleas. Rublev still
belonged to the Writers’ Syndicate, whose members, who not long ago
sought his advice, now pretended not to see him in the street for fear of
compromising themselves ... A sort of hate came into his eyes when
he saw the “poet of the Young Communists” (forty years old) who had
written, for the executed Piatakov and certain others:
Shooting them is little,
Is too little, is nothing!
Poison carrion, profligates,
Imperialist vermin,
Who soil our proud Socialist bullets!
All in double rhymes. There were a hundred lines of it. At four rubles a
line, it came to a skilled workman’s wages for a month, a ditchdigger’s

for three months. The author of it, dressed in a sport suit made of good
brown German cloth, displayed a rubicund face in editorial offices.
Strastnaya Square—Square of the Monastery of the Passion. Pushkin
meditated on his pedestal. May you be forever blessed, Poet of Russia,
because you were not a rat, because you were only a little of a coward,
just enough, probably, to save your neck under an enlightened tyranny,
when they hanged your friends the Decembrists! The little monastery
tower across the square was being gradually demolished. The reinforced
concrete Izvestia building, distinguished by a clock, rose above the
gardens of the old monastery. At the four corners of the square: a little
white church, movie theaters, a bookstore. People in single file waited
patiently for a bus. Rublev turned right, into Gorki Street, looked idly
into the windows of a big grocery store displaying fat fish from the
Volga, magnificent fruits from Central Asia, de-luxe viands for hand-
somely paid specialists. He lived in an eleven-story apartment building
in the next little side street. The spacious halls were scantly lighted.
Slowly the elevator rose to the eighth floor. Rublev went down a dark
gloomy corridor, knocked softly at a door. It opened, he entered and
kissed his wife on the forehead:
“Any heat today, Dora?”
“Not much. The radiators are barely warm. Put on your old field
jacket.”
Neither meetings of the tenants of Soviet House nor the annual arrest
and trial of the technicians of the Regional Bureau of Combustibles did
anything to improve the situation. The cold brought a sort of desolation
into the big room. Touched by the twilight, the whiteness of roofs filtered
through the window. The green leaves of the plants seemed to be made
of metal, the typewriter displayed a dusty keyboard that looked like a
fantastic set of false teeth. The strong radiant human bodies which
Michael Angelo had painted for the Sistine Chapel, reduced to black
and gray by photography, had become uninteresting blotches on the wall.
Dora lit the lamp on the table, sat down, crossed*her arms under her
brown woolen shawl, and looked up at Kiril out of her calm gray eyes.
“Did you have a good day?” She kept down her joy at having him back,
as a moment earlier she had kept down her fear that he would not come
back. It would always be like that. “Have you read the papers? ... I
ran through them ... A new People’s Commissar for Agriculture has
been appointed in the R.S.F.S.R.; the one before has disappeared. And
this one will disappear before six months are out, Dora, I assure you.
And the one who follows him too! Which of them will make things any

better?” They talked in low voices. If there had been any occasion to
draw up a list of tenants of this very building, all influential people, who
had disappeared in the last twenty months, they would have discovered
surprising percentages, would have concluded that certain floors were
unlucky, would have seen twenty-five years of history under more than
one murderous aspect. But the list was there—it was in them, obscurely.
That was what was aging Rublev. It was the only way in which he
yielded.
In that same room, between the plants with their metallic leaves and
the dim reproductions of the Sistine frescoes, they had listened all day
and late into the night to the senseless, demonic, inexorable, incredible
voices that poured from the loud-speaker. Those voices filled hours,
nights, months, years, they filled the soul with delirium, and it was
astonishing that one could go on living after having heard them. Once,
Dora had stood up, pale and shattered, her hands hanging limp, and said:
“It is like a snowstorm covering a continent. No roads, no light, no
possible way of traveling, everything will be buried ... It is an ava-
lanche coming down on us, carrying us away ... It is a horrible
revolution ...”
Kiril was pale too, tlie room flickered with white light. From the
varnished case of the radio came a slightly hoarse, shaky, hesitating
voice, with a heavy Turkish accent—the voice of an ex-member of the
Turkmanistan Central Committee, who, like everyone else, was confess-
ing to unending treason. “I organized the assassination of ... I took
part in the attempt on . . . which failed ... I prevented the irrigation
plans from succeeding ... I incited the revolt of the Basmachi . . .
I dealt with the British Intelligence . . . The Gestapo sent me ... I
was paid thirty thousand . . .” Kiril turned a knob and stopped the
flood of insanity. “Abrahimov on the stand,” he murmured. “Poor
devil!” He knew him—an ambitious young fellow from Tashkent who
liked to drink good wine, hard-working, not stupid . . . Kiril rose to
his feet and said solemnly:
“It is the counterrevolution, Dora.”
The voice of the Supreme Prosecutor went dismally on and on, rehash-
ing conspiracies, assassinations, crimes, destruction, felonies, treason; it
became a sort of weary barking, heaping insults upon men who listened,
their heads bowed, desperate, done for, under the eyes of a mob, between
two guards: among those men there were several who were spotless, the
purest, the best, the most intelligent men of the Revolution—and pre-
cisely for that reason they were undergoing martyrdom, they accepted

martyrdom. Hearing them over the radio, he sometimes thought: “How
he must be suffering! . . . But no—that is his normal voice—what is it?
Is he mad? Why is he lying like that?” Dora walked back and forth
across the room, bumping against the walls, Dora collapsed onto the bed,
shaken by dry sobs, choking. “Wouldn’t it be better if they let them-
selves be torn to pieces alive? Don’t they realize that they are poisoning
the soul of the proletariat? That they are poisoning the springs of the
future?”
“They do not realize it,” Kiril Rublev said. “They believe that they
are still serving Socialism. Some of them hope that they will be allowed
to live. They have been tortured . . .”
He wrung his hands. “No, they are not cowards; no, they have not
been tortured. I do not believe it. They are true, that is it, still true to
the Party, and there is no more Party, there are only inquisitors, execu-
tioners, criminals . . . No, I’m talking nonsense, it is not so simple.
Perhaps I would do as they are doing if I were in their place . . .”
At that instant he thought, perfectly clearly: “Their place is mine, and
some day I shall be there, infallibly . . .” and his wife knew, perfectly
clearly, that he was thinking it.
“They assure themselves that it is better to die dishonored, murdered
by the Chief, than to denounce him to the international bourgeoisie . . .”
He almost screamed, like a man crushed in an accident:
“And in that, they are right.”
For a long time they returned to this obsessing thought again and
again, discussed it again and again. Their minds worked on nothing else,
they scrutinized this single theme from every standpoint, because in that
part of the world—the Great Sixth—history had nothing to work on but
this darkness, these lies, this perverse devotion, this blood that was shed
day in and day out. Old Party members avoided one another—so that
they should not have to meet each other’s eyes, or lie ignobly to each
other’s faces out of a reasonable cowardice, so that they might not stum-
ble over the name of a comrade who had disappeared, not have to
compromise themselves by a handshake, or disgust themselves by not
giving it. Nevertheless, they came to know of the arrests, the disappear-
ances, the fantastic sick leaves, the ill-omened transfers, bits of secret
interrogations, sinister rumors. Long before a member of the General
Staff—ex-coal miner, a Bolshevik in 1908, once famous for a campaign
in the Ukraine, a campaign in the Altai, a campaign in Yakutsk, thrice
decorated with the Order of the Red Flag—long before this general
disappeared, a perfidious rumor followed him everywhere, making the

women whom he met look at him with eyes that were strangely wide,
emptying the antechambers of the Defense Commissariat when he passed
through them. Rublev saw him one evening at Red Army House: “Imag-
ine it, Dora. The reception line was not ten feet from him . . . Those
who found themselves face to face with him smiled sweetly and too
politely, and disappeared ... I watched him for twenty minutes. He
sat all alone, between two empty chairs—brand-new uniform, all his
decorations, looking like a wax doll as he watched the dancing. Fortu-
nately some young lieutenants, who knew nothing, danced with his wife
. . . Arkhinov came up, recognized him, hesitated, pretended to look
for something in his pockets—and slowly turned his back on him . . .”
A month later, when he was arrested as he left a committee meeting at
which he had not opened his mouth, the general felt relieved; in fact,
everyone felt the relief that comes at the end of a long wait. When the
same icy atmosphere began to surround another Red general, sum-
moned to Moscow from the Far East to receive mythical orders, he blew
out his brains in the bathtub. Contrary to all expectations, the Artillery
Command gave him a handsome funeral; three months later, in accord-
ance with the decree providing that the families of traitors must be
deported to “the most remote districts of the Union,” his mother, his
wife, and his two children were ordered to set forth into the unknown.
News of such cases—and they were many—came to people by chance,
confidentially, in whispered conversations, and the details were never
fully known. You knocked at a friend’s door,, and the maid looked at
you in terror when she opened it. “I don’t know anything about it, he is
not here, he will not be back, I have been told to go to the country . . .
No, I don’t know anything, no . . .” She was afraid to say another word,
afraid of you as if danger were at your heels. You telephoned to a
friend—from a public booth, by way of precaution—and the voice of an
unknown man asked, “Who is calling?” very clearly, and you understood
that a spy had been posted there and you answered mockingly, though
you felt disturbed, “The State Bank, on business,” and then you got away
as fast as you could because you knew that the booth would be searched
within ten minutes. New faces appeared in offices instead of the faces you
had known; you felt ashamed when you mentioned the former incum-
bent’s name, and ashamed when you did not mention it. The papers
published the names of new members of the federated governments with-
out saying what had become of their predecessors—which was obvious
enough. In communal apartments, occupied by several families, if the
bell rang at night, people thought: “They’ve come for the Communist”—

as in earlier days they would immediately have thought it was the tech-
nician or the ex-officer who was being arrested. Rublev checked over the
list of his earlier comrades and found only two still alive with whom he
was more or less intimate: Philippov, of the Plan Commission, and
Wladek, a Polish emigre. The latter had once known Rosa Luxembourg,
had belonged, with Warsky and Waletsky, to the first Central Commit-
tees of the Polish C.P., had done secret-service work under Unschlicht
. . . Warsky and Waletsky, if perhaps they were still alive, were alive
in prison, in some secret isolator reserved for those who had once been
influential leaders of the Third International; the corpulent Unschlicht,
with his big face and spectacles, was generally supposed to have been
executed—it was almost a certainty. Wladek, holding an obscure post
in an Institute of Agronomy, did his utmost to remain forgotten there.
He lived some twenty-five miles from Moscow in a dilapidated villa in
the heart of the forest; he came to the city only for his work, saw no one,
wrote to no one, received no letters, and made no telephone calls.
“Perhaps in that way they will forget me? Do you understand?” he
said to Rublev. “There were some thirty of us Poles who belonged to the
old Party cadres; if four are still alive, it is surprising.”
Short, almost bald, bulb-nosed, extremely shortsighted, he surveyed
Rublev through extraordinarily thick glasses; yet his expression re-
mained cheerful and young, his thick lips were playful.
“Kiril Kirillovich, all this nightmare is basically very interesting and
very old. History doesn’t give a damn for us, my friend. ‘Ah-ha, my
little Marxists,’ she says, like one of Macbeth’s witches, ‘you make plans,
you worry over questions of social conscience!’ And she turns Little
Father Czar Iohan the Terrible loose on us, with his hysterical fears and
his big ironshod stick . . .”
They were whispering together in a dim antechamber lined with
showcases containing an exhibition of grains. Rublev answered with a
faint laugh:
“You know the schoolboys think that I look like Czar Iohan . . .”
“We are all like him in one way or another,” said Wladek, half serious,
half joking. “We are all of us professors descended from the Terrible
Czar . . . Even I, despite my baldness and my Semitic ancestry—even
I feel a little frightened when I look inside myself, I assure you.”
“I cannot in the least agree with your bad literary psychology,
Wladek. We must talk seriously. I will bring Philippov.”
They arranged to meet in the woods, on the bank of the Istra, because
it would not have been prudent to meet either in the city or at Philip-

pov’s, whose neighbors were railwaymen. “I never let anyone come to my
place,” said Philippov. “That is the safest way. Besides, what is one to
talk about?”
Without in the least knowing why, Philippov had survived several sets
of economists on the Central Plan Commission. “The only plan which
will be completely carried out,” he said lightly, “is the plan of arrests.”
Member of the Party since 1910, president of a Siberian Soviet when the
spring floods of March, 1917, carried away the double-headed eagles
(thoroughly worm-eaten), later commissar with little troops of Red
partisans who held the taiga against Admiral Kolchak, he had for almost
two years been collaborating on plans for the production of goods of
prime necessity—an incredible task, enough to get a man thrown into
prison instantly, in a country where there was a simultaneous lack of
nails, shoes, matches, cloth, et cetera. However, since he was a man to
fear because of his long connection with the Party, directors who wanted
primarily to keep out of trouble had set him to work on the plan for the
distribution of popular musical instruments—accordions, harmoniums,
flutes, guitars, and zithers and tambourines for the East (the equipment
of orchestras being undertaken by a special bureau, orchestral instru-
ments did not fall within his province). This appointment provided an
oasis of safety, since the supply always exceeded the demand in almost
all markets, except those of Buriat-Mongolia, Birobidjan, the Autono-
mous Region of Nakhichevan, and the Autonomous Republic of the
Karabakh Mountains, which were regarded as of secondary importance.
“On the other hand,” Philippov commented, “we have introduced the
accordion into Dzungeria . . . The shamans of Inner Mongolia de-
mand our tambourines . . .” He scored unexpected successes. As a
matter of fact everyone knew that the thriving trade in musical instru-
ments was due to the lack of more useful goods, and that their produc-
tion in sufficient quantities was partly due to the labor of artisans
refractory to co-operative organization, partly to the uselessness of the
instruments themselves . . . But that was the responsibility of the
higher echelons of the Central Plan Commission . . . Philippov, with
his round head, his freckled face, his straight black mustache, trimmed
very short, his big sagacious eyes which shone from between puffy lids,
arrived at the meeting place on skis, as did Rublev. Wladek came from
his villa in felt boots and a sheepskin coat, like a fantastic and extremely
shortsighted woodcutter. They met under pines whose straight black
trunks rose forty feet above the bluish snow before branching. Under the
wooded hills, the river traced slow curves of gray-pink and pale azure

such as are to be found in Japanese prints. The three men had known
each other for many years. Philippov and Rublev had slept in the same
room in a wretched hotel on the Place de la Contrescarpe, in Paris, shortly
before the Great War; in those days they lived on brie and blood pud-
ding; at the Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve they commented scathingly on
the insipid sociology of Dr. Gustave Le Bon; together they read the
accounts of Madame Caillaux’s trial in Juares’s newspaper; they shopped
at the stalls in the Rue Mouffetard, looking with delight at the old houses
which had seen the revolutions, amusing themselves by recognizing
Daumier’s types in the figures they saw emerging from corridors and
halls that were like vaults . . . Philippov sometimes slept with little
Marcella, chestnut-haired, smiling, and serious, who was generally to be
found at the Taverne du Pantheon. There, late at night, she and her girl
friends danced lusty waltzes in the small rooms downstairs, to the music
of violins. They went to the Closerie des Lilas to see Paul Fort, sur-
rounded by admirers. The poet always got himself up to look like a
musketeer. In front of the cafe, Marshal Ney, on his pedestal, marched
to his death, brandishing his saber—and Rublev insisted that he must
be cursing: “Swine, swine!” Together they recited poems by Constantin
Belmont:
Be we like the sun! . . .
They quarreled over the problem of matter and energy, which was
being restated by Avenarius, Mach, and Maxwell. “Energy is the only
cognizable reality,” Philippov asserted one evening. “Matter is only an
aspect of it . . .”—“You are nothing but an unconscious idealist,”
Rublev retorted, “and you are turning your back on Marxism ... In
any case,” he added, “the petty bourgeois frivolity of your private life
had given me due warning . . .” They shook hands coldly at the corner
of the Rue Soufflot. The ponderous black silhouette of the Pantheon rose
from the wide deserted street with its lines of funereal street lamps. The
paving stones gleamed, a solitary woman, a prostitute who kept her veil
down, waited in the darkness for an unknown man. The war aggravated
their long disagreement, although they both remained internationalists;
but one of them had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, the other was in-
terned. They met again at Perm in ’18, and were too busy to be sur-
prised or to celebrate the occasion for more than five minutes. Rublev
was bringing a detachment of workers into the city to suppress a mutiny
of drunken sailors. Philippov, a muffler around his neck, his voice a whis-
per, one arm wounded and in a sling, had just escaped by the merest

chance from the clubs of peasants in revolt against requisitionings. Both
of them were dressed in black leather, armed with Mausers sheathed in
wood, carrying urgent orders, living on boiled groats and pickled cu-
cumbers, exhausted, enthusiastic, radiating a somber energy. They held
a council of war by candlelight, guarded by proletarians from Petrograd
with cartridge belts over their overcoats. Inexplicable shots sounded in
the dark city; its gardens were full of excitement under the stars.
Philippov spoke first: “We have to shoot people or we’ll get nothing
done.”
One of the men on guard at the door said soberly: “By God, you’re
right!”—“Shoot who?” Rublev asked, overcoming his fatigue, his desire
to sleep, his desire to vomit.
“Some hostages—there are officers, a priest, manufacturers . . .”
“Is it really necessary?”
“I’ll say it is,” growled the man at the door, “or we’re done for.” And
he came toward them, holding out his black hands.
And Rublev rose, seized by wild anger. “Silence! There will be no
interrupting the deliberations of the Army Council! Discipline!” Philip-
pov put his hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair.
Then, to end the quarrel, he whispered ironically: “Do you remember
the Boul’ Miche’?”
“What?” said Rublev in amazement. “Not another word, you Tatar, I
beg of you. I am absolutely against the execution of hostages. Let us not
become barbarians.”
Philippov answered: “You have to consent to it. First, our retreat is
cut off on three sides out of four. Second, I absolutely must have several
carloads of potatoes and I can’t pay for them. Third, the sailors have
behaved like gangsters, and it’s they who ought to be shot; but we can’t
shoot them, they’re splendid physical specimens. Fourth, as soon as our
backs are turned, the whole countryside will rise ... So sign.”
The order for execution, written in pencil on the back of a receipt,
was ready. Rublev signed it, muttering: “I hope we have to pay for this,
you and I; I tell you we are besmirching the Revolution; the devil
knows what all this is about . . .” They were still young then. Now,
twenty years later, growing fat and gray, they glided on their skis
through the admirable Hokusai landscape, and wordlessly the past re-
awoke within them.
Philippov lengthened his stride and shot ahead. Wladek came to meet
them. They set their skis up in the snow and followed the edge of the
wood, above a river of ice fringed with astonishing white shrubbery.
“It’s good to meet again,” said Rublev.

“It’s wonderful that we are alive,” said Wladek.
“What are we going to do?” asked Philippov. “ ‘That is the ques-
tion.’ ”
Space, the woods, the snow, the ice, the blue, the silence, the clarity
of the cold air surrounded them. Wladek spoke of the Poles, all vanished
into prisons—the Left, led by Lensky, after the Right, led by Koschewa.
“The Jugoslavs, too,” he added, “and the Finns ... It happens to the
whole Comintern . . .” He studded his narrative with names and faces.
“Why, it’s even worse than at the Plan Commission!” Philippov
exclaimed cheerfully.
“As for me,” Philippov said, “I’m quite sure that I owe my life to Bruno.
You knew him, Kiril, when he was legation secretary at Berlin—can you
see his Assyrian profile? After Krestinsky’s arrest, he expected to be
liquidated too and, incredible as it may seem, he had been appointed
assistant director of a central bureau in Internal Affairs—which gave
him access to the master files. He told me that he hoped he had managed
to save a dozen comrades by destroying their cards. ‘But I am done for,’
he said. ‘There are still the dossiers, of course, and there is the Central
Committee file, but one, doesn’t show up so much there, sometimes names
are hard to find . .	”
“And then?”
“Finis—I don’t know how or where—last year.”
Philippov repeated: “What is to be done?”
“For my part,” said Wladek, searching his pockets for a cigarette,
and looking more than ever like a mocking, prematurely old child, “if
they come to arrest me, I will not let them take me alive. No, thanks.”
“But there are people,” said Philippov, “who are released or deported.
I know of cases. Your solution is not reasonable. Besides, there is some-
thing about it I don’t like. It smacks of suicide.”
“Have it your own way.”
Philippov went on:
“If I am arrested I shall politely tell them that under no circumstances
will I enter into any scheme, either with a trial or without. Do as you
please with me . . . Once that is absolutely clear, I think one has a
chance of getting out of it. You go to Kamchatka or you draw up plans
for timber cutting. I’m willing. How about you, Kiril?”
Kiril Rublev took off his fur cap. His high forehead, under curls that
were still dark, stood bare to the cold.
“Ever since they shot Nicolai Ivanovich, I have sensed that they were
prowling around me, imperceptibly. And I am waiting for them. I

haven’t told Dora, but she knows. So, in my case it is a very practical
question, which I may have to answer any day . . . And ... I don’t
know ...”
They began to walk, sinking in the snow to their calves. Above them,
crows flew from branch to branch. The light was charged with wintry
whiteness. Kiril was a head taller than either of his companions. He
differed from them in spirit as well. He spoke in a calm voice:
“Suicide is only an individual solution—therefore not Socialist. In
my case it would set a bad example. I don’t say this to shake your reso-
lution, Wladek: you have your reasons, and I believe that they are valid
for you. To say that one will confess nothing is courageous, perhaps
overly courageous: no one knows precisely how strong he is. And then,
it is all more complex than it appears.”
“Yes,” said the other two, stumbling through the snow.
“One has to become conscious of what is going on . . . become
conscious . . .”
Rublev, repeating his words in a doubtful voice, wore an expression
which was often seen on his face—the look of a preoccupied pedant.
Wladek flew into a rage, turned purple, waved his short arms:
“Damned theoretician! There’s no curing you! I can still see the
articles in which you cut up the Trotskyists in ’27 by maintaining that the
proletarian party cannot degenerate . . . Because if it degenerates,
obviously it is not the proletarian party ... You casuist! What is
going on is as clear as daylight. Thermidor, Brumaire, and all the rest
of it, on an unheard-of social scale and in the country where Genghis
Khan has the use of the telephone, as old Tolstoi put it.”
“Genghis Khan,” said Philippov, “is a great man not properly appre-
ciated. He was not cruel. If he had his servants build pyramids of
severed heads, it was not out of cruelty nor to satisfy a primitive taste
for statistics, hut to depopulate the countries which he could not other-
wise dominate and which he intended to bring back to a pastoral econ-
omy, the only economy which he could understand. Already, it was
differences in economies which made heads fall . . . Note that the only
way he could assure himself that the massacres had been properly car-
ried out, was to collect the heads. The Khan distrusted his man-
power ...”
They walked a little while longer in deeper snow. “A marvelous
Siberia,” murmured Rublev, whom the landscape had calmed. And
Wladek turned abruptly toward his two companions, planted himself in
front of them in comic exasperation:

“What eloquence! One of you lectures on Genghis Khan, the other
advocates becoming fully conscious! You are making a mock of your
own selves, my dear comrades. Permit me to reveal something to you!
It’s my turn, my turn . . .”
They saw that his thick lips were trembling, that there was mist on the
lenses of his glasses, that straight lines cut horizontally across his cheeks.
For several seconds he kept muttering “my turn, my turn” almost unin-
telligibly.
“But doubtless I am of a grosser constitution, my dear comrades. As
for me—the fact is—I am afraid. I am deathly afraid—do you hear me?
—whether it is worthy of a revolutionary or not. I live alone like an
animal among all these woods and all this snow, which I loathe—
because I am afraid. I live without a wife, because I don’t want two of us
waking up at night to ask ourselves if it is the last night. I wait for
them every night, all by myself, I take a bromide, I go to sleep in a
stupor, I wake with a start, thinking they’ve come, crying out ‘Who’s
there?’ and the woman next door answers, ‘It’s the blind banging,
Vladimir Ernestovich, sleep well,’ and I can’t get back to sleep. I am
afraid and I am ashamed, not of myself, but of all of us. I think of those
who have been shot, I see their faces, I hear their jokes, and I have
migraines that medicine has not yet named—a little pain the color of
fire fixes itself in the back of my neck. I am afraid, afraid, not so much
afraid of dying as of nothing and everything—afraid to see you, afraid
to talk to people, afraid to think, afraid to understand . . .”
And indeed it could be read in his puffy face, in his red-rimmed eyes,
in his precipitate speech. Philippov said:
“I am afraid too, of course—but it doesn’t do any good. I have grown
used to it. One lives with fear as one lives with a hernia.”
Kiril Rublev slowly pulled off his gloves and looked at his hands,
which were long and strong, a little hairy between the joints—“hands
still full of vitality,” he thought. And, picking up some snow, he began
kneading it violently.
“Everyone is an ignoble coward,” he said, “it’s an old, old story.
Courage consists in knowing that fact and, when necessary, acting as if
fear did not exist. You are wrong, Wladek, in thinking that you are dif-
ferent from anyone else. However, it is hardly worth our meeting in this
magnificent landscape if we are only going to make useless confessions
to one another . . .”
Wladek did not answer. His eyes searched the deserted, barren, lumi-
nous landscape. Ideas as slow-moving as the flight of the crows in the

sky passed through his mind: Whatever we say is useless now ... I
wish I had a glass of hot tea . . . Kiril, suddenly dropping the burden
of his years, jumped back, raised his arm—and the hard snowball he
had jUst finished making struck an astonished Philippov square on the
chest. “Defend yourself, I attack,” Kiril cried gaily and, his eyes laugh-
ing, his beard askew, he grabbed up handfuls of snow. “Son of a sea-
cook,” Philippov shouted, transfigured. And they began to fight like two
schoolboys. They leaped, laughed, sank into snow up to their waists,
hid behind trees to make their ammunition and take aim before they
let fly. Something of the nimbleness of their boyhood came back to them,
they shouted joyous “ughs,” shielded their faces with their elbows,
gasped for breath. Wladek stood where he was, firmly planted, method-
ically making snowballs to catch Rublev from the flank, laughing until
the tears came to his eyes, showering him with abuse: “Take that, you
theoretician, you moralist, to hell with you,” and never once hitting
him ...
They got very hot, their hearts pounded, their faces relaxed. From a
sky which had imperceptibly grown gray, night suddenly fell on lustre-
less snow, on misty and petrified trees. Breathing hard, the three started
back in the direction of the railroad. “How about that one I landed on
your ear, Kiril,” said Philippov, chortling. “How about the one I landed
on the back of your neck?” Rublev retorted. It was Wladek who returned
to serious matters:
“You know, my nerves are all to pieces, I admit—but I am not as
afraid as I might be. Come what may, my death will fertilize Socialist
soil, if it is Socialist soil . . .”
“State Capitalism,” said Philippov.
Rublev:
“. . . We must cultivate consciousness. There is sure progress under
this barbarism, progress under this retrogression. Look at our masses,
our youth, all the new factories, the Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, Kirovsk
. . . We are all dead men under a reprieve, but the face of the earth has
been changed, the migrating birds must wonder where they are when
they see what were deserts covered with factories. And what a new prole-
tariat! Ten million men at work, with machines, instead of three and
a half million in 1927. What will that effort not accomplish for the world
in half a century!”
“. . . When nothing of us will remain, not even our smallest bones,”
Wladek chanted, perhaps without irony.
By way of precaution, they parted before they reached the first houses.

“We must meet again,” Wladek proposed. And the other two said, “Yes,
yes, absolutely,” hut none of them believed that it would really he
possible or of any use. When they parted they all shook hands warmly.
Kiril Rublev skiied rhythmically to the nearest station, following the
silent forest where darkness seemed to grow out of the ground like an
imperceptible mist. A thin, blue, terribly sharp crescent moon, curved
like an ideal breast, rose into the sky. Rublev thought: “Ill-omened moon.
Fear comes exactly like night.”
One evening as the Rublevs were finishing dinner, Xenia Popova
came to tell them a great piece of news. On the table there were a dish
of rice, a sausage, a bottle of Narzan mineral water, gray bread. The
primus stove hissed under the kettle. Kiril Rublev was sitting in the old
armchair, Dora in the corner of the sofa. “How pretty you are,” Kiril
said to Xenia affectionately. “Let me see your big eyes.” She turned
them toward him frankly—wide, well-shaped eyes, fringed with long
lashes. “Neither stones, nor flowers, nor the sky have that color,” said
Rublev to his wife. “It is the eye’s own miracle. You can be proud,
child.”
“You’ll have me embarrassed soon,” she said.
The clear features, the high forehead, the little rolls of blond hair
above the ears, the eyes that always seemed to be smiling at life—Rublev
scanned them almost maliciously. So purity was born of dirt, youth of
attrition. He had known Popov for more than twenty years—an old fool
who, because he could not understand the a-b-c of political economy,
had specialized in matters of Socialist ethics. In pursuit of his specialty,
he had buried himself in the dossiers of the Central Control Commission
of the Party, and now his entire life was devoted to the adulteries, lies,
drinking bouts, and abuses of power perpetrated by old revolutionaries.
It was he who found grounds for reprimands, distributed warnings,
prepared indictments, planned executions, and proposed rewards for the
executioners. “Many vile tasks must needs be performed, so there must
needs be many vile beings,” as Nietzsche said. But how, by what miracle,
did the rancid flesh and the rancid spirit of a Popov produce this crea-
ture, Xenia? So life triumphs over our base clay. Kiril Rublev looked
at Xenia with a delight in which there was both hunger and malice.
Sitting with her knees crossed, the girl lit a cigarette. She was so
happy that she had to do something—anything—to keep it from showing.
Making a very unsuccessful attempt to look detached, she said:
“Papa is having me sent abroad—a mission to Paris—six months—for

the Central Textile Bureau. Pm to study the new technique for printing
cloth . . . Papa knew that I had been wanting to go abroad for years
... I jumped for joy!”
“Why shouldn’t you?” said Dora. “Pm terribly glad. What are you
going to do in Paris?”
“It makes me dizzy to think of it. I’ll see Notre-Dame, Belleville. Pm
reading a biography of Blanqui and the history of the Commune. I’ll go
to see the Faubourg-St.-Antoine, the Rue St.-Merri, the Rue Haxo, the
Wall of the Confederates . . . Bakunin lived in the Rue de Bourgogne,
but I haven’t been able to find out the number. Anyway, the number may
have been changed. Do you know where Lenin lived?”
“I went to see him in Paris,” said Rublev slowly, “but I have no
idea where it was ...”
“Oh!” said Xenia reproachfully. How could anyone forget such
things? Her big eyes opened wide. “Really? You knew Vladimir Ilich?
What luck!”
“What a child you are!” Rublev thought. “But you are right.”
“And then,” she said, overcoming a slight hesitation, “I mean to get
some clothes. Pretty French things—is that wrong, do you think?”
'“Not a bit,” said Dora. “It’s a fine idea. I wish all our young people
could have lovely things.”
“That’s what I thought—just that! But my father is always saying
that clothes ought to be practical, that elaborate clothes are a survival
from barbaric cultures, that fashion is a characteristic of the capitalist
mentality . . .” The incomparably blue eyes smiled.
“Your father is a damned old puritan . . . What is he doing these
days?”
Xenia chattered on. Sometimes, at the bottom of a clear stream flowing
over pebbles, a shadow appears, troubles the eye for a moment, and
vanishes, leaving one wondering what it was, what mysterious life was
following its destiny in those depths. Suddenly the Rublevs found them-
selves listening intently. Xenia was saying:
“. . . Father has been very busy with the Tulayev case, he says it is
another plot ...”
“I had some contact with Tulayev in the past,” said Rublev in a
subdued voice. “I spoke against him in the Moscow Committee four
years ago. Winter was coming on, and of course there was a fuel
shortage. Tulayev proposed that the directors of the Combustibles Trust
be brought to trial. I got his idiotic proposal turned down.”
“. . . Father says that a great many people are compromised ... I

think—don’t repeat this, it’s very serious—I think Erchov has been
arrested . . . He was recalled from the Caucasus, but he has never
showed up anywhere ... I happened to overhear a telephone conver-
sation about his wife . . . She has apparently been arrested too . . .”
Rublev picked up his empty glass from the table, held it to his lips as
if he were drinking, and set it down. Xenia watched him in amazement.
“Kiril,” Dora asked, “what have you been drinking?” “Why, nothing,”
he said with a bewildered smile.
An uncomfortable silence followed. Xenia bowed her head. The useless
cigarette burned out between her fingers.
“And our Spain, Kiril Kirillovich,” she asked at last, with an effort
. . . “do you think it can hold out? ... I should like . . .” She did
not say what she would like.
Rublev picked up the empty glass again.
“Defeated. And it will be partly our doing.”
The end of their conversation was labored. Dora tried to start other
subjects. “Have you been to the theater lately, Xenia? What are yoti
reading?” Her questions found no answers. A damp, chill mist irresistibly
invaded the room. It dimmed the lamp. Xenia felt a stab of cold between
her shoulder blades. Rublev and Dora rose as she did. Standing there,
they overcame the mist for a moment.
“Xenia,” said Dora gently, “I wish you every happiness.”
And Xenia felt a little sad—it was like a good-by. How was she to
return their good wishes? Rublev affectionately put his arm around her
waist.
“You have shoulders like an Egyptian statuette, wider than your hips.
With those shoulders and those bright eyes of yours, you must take very
good care of yourself, Xeniuchka!”
“What do you mean?”
“Only too much. Someday you’ll understand. Bon voyage.”
At the last moment, in the narrow vestibule cluttered with heaps of
newspapers, Xenia remembered something important that she could not
leave unsaid. Her eyes clouded; she spoke in a low voice.
“I heard my father say that Ryzhik has been brought back to a prison
in Moscow, that he is on a hunger strike and very ill . . . Is he a
Trotskyist?”
“Yes.”
“A foreign agent?”
“No. A man as strong and pure as crystal.”
There was terror in the helpless look Xenia gave him.

“Then why . . . ?”
“Nothing happens in history that is not, in some sense, rational. The
best sometimes have to be broken, because they do harm precisely by
being the best. You cannot understand that yet.”
Something in her carried her toward him; she almost fell on his
chest.
“Kiril Kirillovich, are you an Oppositionist?”
“No.”
On that word, after a few caressing gestures, a few swift kisses on
Dora’s unhappy lips, they parted. Xenia’s youthful footfalls grew fainter
down the hall. To Kiril and Dora, the room looked larger, more inhospi-
table. “So it goes,” said Kiril. “So it goes,” said Dora with a sigh.
Rublev poured himself a big drink of vodka and swallowed it down.
“And you, Dora, you who have lived with me for sixteen years—do
you think I am an Oppositionist? Yes or no?”
Dora preferred not to answer. He sometimes talked to himself like that,
asking her questions with a sort of fierceness.
“Dora, I’d like to get drunk tomorrow, I think I should see more
cle'arly afterward . . . Our Party can have no Opposition, it is mono-
lithic because we reconcile thought and action for the sake of a higher
efficiency. Rather than settle which of us is right and which wrong, we
prefer to be wrong together because in that way we are stronger for the
proletariat. And it was an old mistake of bourgeois individualism to seek
truth for the sake of conscience, one conscience, my conscience. We say:
To hell with my and me, to hell with self, to hell with truth, if the Party
can be strong!”
“What Party?”
Dora’s two words, spoken in a low, cold voice, reached him at the
instant when the pendulum within him began its swing in the opposite
direction.
“. . . Obviously, if the Party is betrayed, if it is no longer the Party
of the Revolution, that position of ours is ridiculous and meaningless.
We ought to do exactly the opposite—in that case, each of us should
recover his conscience ... We need unfailing unity to hold back the
thrust of hostile forces . . . But if those forces exercise themselves pre-
cisely through our unity . . . What did you say?”
He could not sit still in the huge room. His angular frame moved
across it obliquely. He looked like a great emaciated bird of prey shut

up in a cage that was quite large but still too small. So Dora saw him. She
answered:
“I don’t know.”
“The conclusions reached concerning the Opposition from seven to
ten years ago and formulated between 1923 and 1930 would have to
be revised. We were wrong then, perhaps the Opposition was right—per-
haps, because no one knows if the course of history could be different
from what it is . . . Revise our conclusions concerning a time now
dead, struggles that are ended, outworn formulas, men sacrificed in one
way or another?”
Several days passed—Moscow days, crowding on each other, crowded
with events, cluttered with things to do, then suddenly interrupted by
limpid moments when you forget yourself in the street to stare at the
colors and the snow under a cold bright sky. Healthy young faces pass,
and you wish you could know the souls behind them, and you think that
we are a people numerous as grass, a mixture of a hundred peoples, Slavs,
Finns, Mongols, Turks, Jews, all on the march and led by girls and
youths whose blood runs golden. You think of the machines waking to
strength in the new factories; they are agile and shining, they cotitain
the power of millions of insentient slaves. In them the old suffering of toil
is extinguished forever. This new world is arising little by little out of
evil—and its people lack soap, underwear, clothes, clear knowledge,
true, simple, meaningful words, generosity; we hardly know enough to
animate our machines; there are sordid hovels around our giant facto-
ries, which are better equipped than the factories of Detroit or the Ruhr;
in those hovels men bowed under the relentless law of toil still sleep the
sleep of animals; but the factory will conquer the hovel, the machines
will give these men—or the men who will follow them, it matters little—
an astounding awakening. This unfolding of a world—machines and
masses progressing together, inevitably—makes up for many things.
Why should it not make up for the end of our generation? Overhead
expenses, an absurd ransom paid to the past. Absurd—that was the
worst part of it. And that the masses and the machines should still need
us; that, without us, they might lose their way—that was dismaying, it
was horrible. But what are we to do? To accomplish things consciously,
we have only the Party, the “cohort of iron.” Of iron and flesh and spirit.
None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we
thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of in-
numerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspira-

tion, of other yet greater masses—Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The spirit became confused, the flesh decayed, the iron rusted, because
the cohort—chosen by successive trials of doctrine, exile, imprisonment,
insurrection, power, war, work, fraternity, at a moment perhaps unique
in history—wore away, gradually invaded by intruders who spoke our
language, imitated our gestures, marched under our banners, but who
were utterly different from ourselves—moved by old appetites, neither
proletarians nor revolutionaries—profiteers . . . Enfeebled cohort, art-
fully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could
be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our
lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us,
then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to
submit. Would our resistance do anything but make bad worse? If—as
they could have done at any instant—a Bukharin, a Piatakov had sud-
denly risen in the dock to unmask their poor comrades lying through
their last hours by command, the fraudulent prosecutor, the abetting
judges, the double-dealing inquisition, the gagged Party, the stupid and
terrorized Central Committee, the devastated Political Bureau, the Chief
ridden by his nightmare—what demoralization there would have been in
the country, what jubilation in the capitalist world, what headlines in
the fascist press! “Read all about it—The Moscow Scandal, The Bol-
shevik Sink, The Chief Denounced by his Victims.” No, no—better the
end, any end. The account must be settled between ourselves, in the
heart of the new society preyed on by old ills . . .
In that iron circle Rublev’s thoughts never ceased to travel.
One evening after dinner he put on his short overcoat and his
astrakhan cap, said to Dora, “I’m going up for a breath of air,” took the
elevator, and got out on the terrace roof above the eleventh floor. An
expensive restaurant occupied it in summer; and the diners, as they
listened vaguely to the violins, looked at the innumerable lights of Mos-
cow, spellbound despite themselves by those terrestrial constellations,
whose tiniest lights guided lives at work. The place was even more beauti-
ful in winter, when there were neither diners, nor flowers, nor colored
lamp shades on the little tables, nor violins, nor odors of broiled mutton,
champagne, and cosmetics—only the vast calm night over the vast city,
the red halo of Passion Square, with its electric signs, its snow stained
by black ruts and footpaths, its swarm of people and vehicles under the
arc lights, the discreet, secret glow of its windows ... At that height,
the electric lights did not interfere with vision, the stars were clear and
distinct. Fountains of reddish light in the midst of the dense black of

buildings indicated the squares; the white boulevards disappeared into
darkness. His hands in his pockets, Rublev made the circuit of the
terrace, thinking nothing. A faint smile came to his lips. “I should have
made Dora come up to see this—it is magnificent, magnificent . .
And he stopped short, surprised—for a couple with their arms around
each other’s waists were swiftly bearing down on him, leaning forward in
a graceful attitude of flight. Skating alone on the terrace, the two lovers
swept up to Kiril Rublev, their ravished faces shone on him, they smiled
at him, leaned into a long airy curve, and were off toward the horizon—
that is, toward the other end of the terrace, from which there was a view
of the Kremlin. Rublev watched them stop there and lean on the railing;
he joined them and leaned on the railing too. They could clearly see the
high crenelated wall, the heavy watchtowers, the red flame of the flag,
lit by a searchlight, on the cupola of the Executive offices, the domes of
the cathedrals, the vast halo of Red Square.
The girl looked toward Rublev, in whom she recognized the old and
influential Bolshevik for whom a Central Committee car came every
morning—last year. She half turned to him. Her companion stroked the
back of her neck with his fingers.
“Is that where the Chief of our Party lives?” she asked, looking off
toward the towers and crenelations bright against the night.
“He has an apartment in the Kremlin, but he doesn’t often stay there,”
Rublev answered.
“Is that where he works? Somewhere under the red flag?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
The young face was thoughtful for a moment, then turned to Rublev:
“It is terrible to think that a man like him has lived for years sur-
rounded by traitors and criminals! It makes you tremble for his life . . .
Isn’t it terrible?”
Rublev echoed her hollowly: “. . . terrible.”
“Come on, Dina,” the young man murmured.
They put their arms around each other’s waists, became aerial again,
leaned forward, and, borne by a magic power, set off on their skates
toward another horizon ... A little tense, Rublev made his way to the
elevator.
In the apartment he found Dora sitting opposite a young well-dressed
man whom he did not know. Her face was pale. “Comrade Rublev, I have
brought you a message from the Moscow Committee ...” A big yellow
envelope. Merely a summons to discuss urgent business. “If you could
come at once, there is a car waiting . . .”

“But it is eleven o’clock,” Dora objected.
“Comrade Rublev will be back in twenty minutes, by car. I was told
to assure you of that.”
Rublev dismissed the messenger. “I’ll be down in three minutes.” His
eyes upon hers, he looked at his wife: her lips were colorless, her cheeks
yellowish, it was as if her face were disintegrating. She murmured:
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It happened once before, you remember. A little
peculiar, even so.”
No light anywhere. No possible help. They kissed hurriedly, blindly,
their lips were cold. “See you later.”—“See you later.”
The Committee offices were deserted. In the secretary’s office a stout,
bemedaled Tatar, with cropped skull and a thin fringe of black hairs on
his upper lip, was reading the papers and drinking tea. He took the
summons. “Rublev? Right away . . .” He opened a dossier in which
there was only a single typewritten sheet, read it, frowning, raised his
face—the puffy, opaque, heavy face of a big eater.
“Have you your Party card with you? Please let me see it.”
from his pocketbook Rublev took the red folder in which was written:
“Member since 1907.” Over twenty years. What years!
“Right.”
The red folder disappeared into a drawer, the key turned.
“You are charged with a crime. Your card will be returned to you, if
necessary, after the investigation. That is all.”
Rublev had been waiting for the blow too long. A sort of fury bristled
bis eyebrows, clenched his jaws, squared his shoulders. The secretary
slid back a little in his revolving chair:
“I know nothing about it, those are my orders. That is all, citizen.”
Rublev walked away, strangely light, borne by thoughts like flights
of birds. So that’s the trap—the beast in the trap is you, the trapped
beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you . . . And we’re all in it, all in the
trap . . . Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere? Scoundrels,
scoundrels! An empty hall, rawly lighted, the great marble stairway, the
double revolving door, the street, the dry cold, the messenger’s black car.
Beside the messenger, who was smoking while he waited, someone else,
a low voice saying thickly: “Comrade Rublev, be so good as to come with
us for a short conversation . . .”—“I know, I know,” said Rublev
furiously, and he opened the door, flung himself into the icy Lincoln,

folded his arms, and summoned all his will power to hold down an ex-
plosion of despairing fury . . .
The snow-white and night-blue of the narrow streets passed over the
windows in parallel bands. “Slower,” Rublev ordered, and the driver
obeyed. Rublev let down the window—he wanted a good look at a bit of
street, it did not matter what street. The sidewalk glittered with untrod-
den snow. A nobleman’s residence of the past century, with its pillared
portico, seemed to have been sleeping for the last hundred years behind
its ornamental iron fence. The silvery trunks of birches shone faintly
in the garden. That was all—forever, in a perfect silence, in the purity
of a dream. City under the sea, farewell. The driver pushed down the
accelerator.—It is we who are under the sea. It doesn’t matter—we were
strong men once.

4 * To Build Is to Perish
Makeyev was exceptionally gifted in the art of forget-
ting in order to grow greater. Of the little peasant from Akimovka near
Kliuchevo-the-Spring, Tula Government—a country of green and brown
valleys, dotted with thatched roofs—he preserved only a rudimentary
memory, just enough to make him proud of his transformation. A little
reddish-haired lad like a million others, like them destined to the soil, the
village girls would have none of him—they called him “Artyomka the
Pockmarked” with a shade of mockery. Rickets in childhood had left
him with awkward bowlegs. Nevertheless, at seventeen, in the Sunday
evening fights between the lads of Green Street and the lads of Stink
Street, he brought down his enemy with a blow of his own invention
which landed between neck and ear and caused instantaneous dizzi-
ness . . . After these rough-and-tumble fights, since even now no girl
would have him, he sat on the dilapidated steps of his house, chewing his
nails and watching his big strong toes wriggling in the dust. If he had
known that there are words to express the vicious torpor of such
moments, he would have muttered, as Maxim Gorki muttered at his age:

“What boredom, what loneliness, what a desire to smash someone in the
face!”—not for the pleasure of victory this time, but to escape from him-
self and an even worse world. In 1917 the Empire made Artyem Makeyev
a soldier under its double eagles—a passive soldier, as dirty and with as
little to do as all his fellows in Volhynia trenches. He spent his time
marauding through a countryside which had already been visited by a
hundred thousand marauders just like himself; laboriously delousing
himself at twilight; dreaming of raping the peasant girls—they were
few and far between—whom night caught on the roads, and who, inci-
dentally, had been frequently raped before by many another ... As
for him, he did not dare. He followed them through a chalk countryside
of shattered trees and fields full of shell holes; suddenly the ground
would hold up a clutching hand, a knee, a helmet, a jagged tin can. He
followed them, his throat dry, his muscles painfully thirsting for
violence; but he never dared.
A curious strength, which at first made him uneasy, awoke in him
when he learned that the peasants were taking possession of the land.
Before his eyes hung the manor of Akimovka, the manor house with its
low portico on four white columns, the statue of a nymph beside the pool,
the fallow fields, the woods, the marsh, the meadows . . . He felt an
inexpressible hatred for the owners of that unknown universe, which was
really his, his from all eternity, his in all justice, but which had been
taken from him by a nameless crime perpetrated long before his birth,
an immense crime against all the peasants on earth. It had always been
thus, though he had not known it; and that hatred had lain asleep in
him always. The gusts of wind that blew at evening over fields which the
war had disinherited brought him intelligible sentences, revealing
words. The people of the manor—“Sir” and “Madam”—were “blood-
drinkers.” Private Artyem Makeyev never having seen them, no human
image disturbed the image which the words called up in him. But blopd
he had seen often enough—the blood of his comrades after a burst of
shrapnel, when the earth and the yellowed grass drank it—very red at
first, so red it turned your stomach, then black, and, very soon, the flies
settled on it.
About this period Makeyev thought of his life for the first time. It was
as if he had started talking with himself—and he almost laughed, it was
funny—he was making a fool of himself! But the words that arranged
themselves in his mind were so serious that they killed his laughter and
made him screw up his face like a man who tries to raise a weight too
heavy for his muscles. He told himself that he must get away, carry gre-

nodes under his greatcoat, get back to his village, set fire to the manor
house, take the land. Where did he hit on the idea of fire? The forest some-
times catches fire in summer, no one knows how. Villages burn and no one
knows where the fire started. The idea of a fire made him think further.
A shame, of course, to burn down the beautiful manor house, it could be
used for—what? What could it be made into for the peasants? To have
the clodhoppers in it themselves—no, that would never do . . . Burn the
nest and you drive away the birds. Bum the manorial nest, and a trench
full of terror and fire would separate past from present, he would be an
incendiary, and incendiaries go to jail or the gallows, so we must be the
stronger—but this was beyond Makeyev’s reasoning ability, he felt these
things rather than thought them. He set out alone, leaving the louse-in-
fested trench by way of the latrines. In the train he found himself with
men like himself, who had set off like himself; when he saw them his
heart filled with strength. But he told them nothing, because silence
made him strong. The manor house went up in flames. A troop of
Cossacks rode through the green roads toward the peasant uprising:
wasps buzzed around their horses’ sweating flanks; mottled butterflies
fled before the mingled stench of human sweat and horse sweat. Before
they reached the offending village, Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring,
telegrams mysteriously reached the district, spreading good news: “De-
cree concerning the seizure of lands,” signed, “The People’s Commis-
sars.” The Cossacks had the news from a white-haired old man who
popped out from among the roadside shrubbery, under the silver-
scaled birches. “It’s the law, my lads, the law, you can’t do anything
about it. It’s the law.” The land, the land, the law!—there was an
astonished murmuring among the Cossacks, and they began to deliberate.
The stupefied butterflies settled in the grass, while the troop, restrained
by the invisible decree, halted, not knowing whether to go forward or
back. What land? Whose was the land? The landlords’? Ours? Whose?
Whose? The amazed officer suddenly felt afraid of his men; but no
one thought of stopping him from escaping. In Akimovka’s single street,
where the mud-daubed log houses leaned each its own way in the center
of a little green enclosure, heavy-breasted women crossed themselves.
This time there could be no mistake—the days of Antichrist were really
come! Makeyev, who still clung to his beltload of grenades, came out
onto the stairs of his house, a ruinous isba with a leaky roof, and shouted
to the old witches to shut up, God damn it, or they would soon see, God
damn it—his face growing more and more crimson . . . The first
assembly of the poor peasants of the district elected him president of its

Executive Committee. The first DECREED which he dictated to his
scribe (who had been clerk to the district justice of peace) ordered that
any woman who spoke of Antichrist in public should be whipped; and
the text of it, written in a round hand, was posted in the main street.
Makeyev began a rather dizzying career. He became Artyem Artyem-
ich, president of the Executive, without exactly knowing what the Execu-
tive was, but with eyes that were deeply set under arching brows, shaven
head, shirt freed of vermin, and, in his soul, a will as tough as knotted
roots in a rock crevice. He had people who regretted the former police
turned out of their houses; other police, who were sent into the district,
he had arrested, and that was the last that was seen of them. People said
that he was just. He repeated the word from the depths of his being, with
a subdued fire in his eyes: Just. If he had had time to watch himself live,
he would have been astonished by a new discovery. Just as the faculty of
reason had suddenly revealed itself to him so that he could seize the land,
another more obscure faculty, which sprung inexplicably to life in his
muscles, hi? neck, his viscera, led him, roused him, strengthened him. He
did not know its name. Intellectuals would have called it will. Before he
learned to say It is my will, which was not until several years later when
he had grown accustomed to addressing assemblies, he instinctively
knew what he had to do in order to obtain, dominate, order, succeed,
then feel a calm content almost as good as that which comes after
possessing a woman. He rarely spoke in the first person, preferring to
say We. It is not my will, it is our will, brothers. His first speeches were
to Red soldiers in a freight car; his voice had to rise above the rattle and
clank of the moving train. His faculty of comprehension grew from event
to event, by successive illuminations. He saw causes, probable effects,
people’s motives, he sensed how to act and react; he had a hard time
reducing it all to words in his mind, and then reducing the words to ideas
and memories, and he never wholly succeeded.
The Whites invaded the district. The Makeyevs met with short shrift
from these gentry, who hanged them as soon as they captured them,
pinning insulting inscriptions on their chests: Brigand or Bolshevik or
both together. Makeyev managed to join comrades in the woods, seized
a train with them, left it at a steppe city which greatly delighted him, for
it was the first large city he had ever seen and it lived pleasantly under a
torrid sun. In the market big juicy melons were sold for a few kopecks.
Camels paced slowly through the sandy streets. A few miles from the
city, Makeyev shot down so many white-turbaned horsemen that he was
made a deputy chief. A little later, in ’19, he joined the Party. The

meeting was held around a fire in the open fields, under glittering stars.
The fifteen Party members were grouped around the Bureau of Three,
and the Three crouched in the firelight, with notebooks on their knees.
After the report on the international situation, given in a harsh voice
which imparted an Asiatic flavor to strange European names—Cle-man-
sso, Loy-Djorje, Guermania, Liebkneckt—Commissar Kasparov asked
if anyone raised any objection to the admission of candidate Makeyev,
Artyem Artyemiyevich, into the Party of the Proletarian Revolution?
“Stand up, Makeyev,” he said imperiously. Makeyev was already on his
feet, straight as a ramrod in the red firelight, blinded by it and by all
the eyes that were fixed on him at this moment of consecration, blinded
too by a rain of stars, though the stars were motionless . . . “Peasant,
son of working peasants . . .” “Son of landless peasants!” Makeyev
proudly corrected. Several voices approved his membership. “Adopted,”
said the Commissar.
At Perekop, when, to win the final battle in the accursed war, they
had to enter the treacherous lagoon of Sivash and march through it in
water up to their waists, up to their shoulders in the worst places—and
what awaited them ten paces ahead, if not the end?—Makeyev, Deputy
Cojnmissar with the Fourth Battalion, had more than one fierce struggle to
save his life from his own fear or his own fury. What deadly holes might
lie under that water which spread so dazzlingly under the white dawn?
Had they not been betrayed by some staff technician? Jaws clenched,
trembling all over, but resolute and cool to the point of insanity, he
held his rifle above his head at arm’s length, setting the example. He
was the first out of the lagoon; the first to climb a sand dune, to lie down,
feeling the sand warm against his belly, to aim and begin firing from am-
bush on a group of men, taken by surprise from the rear, whom he dis-
tinctly saw scurrying around a small fieldpiece. . . . On the evening of
the exhausting victory, an officer dressed in new khaki stood on the same
fieldpiece to read the troop a message from the Komandarm (Army
Commander), to which Makeyev did not listen because his back was
broken with stooping and his eyes gummy with sleep. Toward the end of
it, however, the harsh rhythm of certain words penetrated his brain:
“Who is the brave combatant of the glorious Steppes Division who . . .”
Mechanically, Makeyev too asked himself who the brave combatant might
be and what he might have done, but to hell with him and with all these
ceremonies because I’ll die if I don’t get some sleep, I’m done in. At that
moment Commissar Kasparov looked at Makeyev so intently that
Makeyev thought: “I must be doing something wrong. I must look as if I

were drunk,” and he made an immense effort to keep his eyes from
closing. Kasparov called:
“Makeyev!”
And Makeyev staggered from the ranks, amid a murmur: “It’s him,
him, him, Artyemich!” The Artyomka whom the village girls once
depised entered into glory covered to the neck with dried mud, drunk
with weariness, wanting nothing in the world hut a bit of grass or straw
to lie down on. The officer kissed him on the mouth. The officer’s chin
was stubbly, he smelled of raw onion and dried sweat and horse. Then,
for a brief instant, they looked at each other through a fog, as two
exhausted horses reconnoiter each other. Their eyes were wet. And
Makeyev came to, as he recognized the partisan of the Urals, the victor
of Krasni-yar, the victor of Ufa, the man who turned the most desperate
of retreats, Bliicher. “Comrade Bliicher,” he said thickly, “I’m . . . I’m
glad to see you . . . You . . . You’re a man, you are . . .” It seemed
to him that Bliicher was reeling with sleep, like himself. “You too,”
Bliicher answered with a smile, “you’re a man, all right . . . Come and
drink some tea with me tomorrow morning, at Division Headquarters.”
Blucher had a tanned face, with deep perpendicular lines and heavy
pockets under the eyes. That day was the beginning of their friendship,
a friendship between men of the same stuff who saw each other for a
brief hour twice a year, in camps, at ceremonies, at the great Party
conferences.
In 1922, Makeyev returned to Akimovka in a jolting Ford marked
with the initials of the C.C. of the C.P.(b.) of the R.S.F.S.R. The village
children surrounded the car. For some seconds Makeyev stared at them
with a terrible intensity of emotion: really, he was looking for himself
among them, but too awkwardly to recognize how much several of
them resembled him. He threw them his whole stock of sugar and
change, patted the cheeks of the little girls who were timid and hung
back, joked with the women, went to bed with the merriest one—she
had full breasts, big eyes, and big teeth—and installed himself, as Party
organizing secretary for the district, in the best house. “What a back-
ward place!” he said. “We have to begin at the very beginning. Not a
ray of light!” Sent from Akimovka to eastern Siberia to preside over a
regional Executive. Elected an alternate member of the C.C. the year
after the death of Vladimir Ilich . . . Each year new distinctions were
added to the service record in his personal dossier as a member of the
Party in the most responsible category. Honestly, patiently, with sure
tread, he climbed the rungs of power. Meanwhile, as he lost all distinct

memories of his wretched childhood and adolescence, of his life of
humiliations during the war, of a past without pride and without power,
he began to feel himself superior to everyone with whom he came into
contact—always excepting men whom the C.C. had appointed to posi-
tions of greater power. These he venerated, with no jealousy, as creatures
of a nature that was not yet his but which was bound to be his some day.
He felt himself, like them, possessed of a legitimate authority, integrated
into the dictatorship of the proletariat like a good steel screw set in its
proper place in some admirable, supple, and complex machine.
As Secretary of the regional Committee, Makeyev had governed Kur-
gansk (both the city and the district) for a number of years, with the
proud but unspoken thought of giving it his name: Makeyevgorod or
Makeyevgrad—why not? The simplest form—Makeyevo—reminded him
too much of peasant speech. The proposal, broached in the lobbies of a
regional Party conference, was about to pass—by unanimous vote, ac-
cording to custom—when, suddenly doubtful, Makeyev himself changed
his mind at the last moment. “All the credit for my work,” he cried from
the platform, under the huge picture of Lenin, “belongs to the Party.
The Party has made me, the Party has done all.” Applause. But already
Makeyev was terrified by the thought that his words might be construed
as containing unfortunate allusions to the members of the Political
Bureau. An hour later, he mounted the platform again, having mean-
while run through the last two issues of The Bolshevik, the magazine
devoted to theory, where he found several phrases which he distributed
to his audience, pounding them home with short jabs of his fists. “The
highest personification of the Party is our great, our inspired Chief. I
propose that we give his glorious name to the new school we are about
to build!” His audience applauded confidently, as they would confidently
have voted for Makeyevgrad, Makeyevo, or Makeyev City. He came
down from the platform wiping his forehead, glad that he had been wise
enough to refuse fame for the moment. It would come. His name would
be on maps, among the blue curves of rivers, the green blotches of
forest, the crosshatched hills, the sinuous black railroad lines. For he had
faith in himself as he had faith in the triumph of Socialism—and doubt-
less it was the same faith.
In this present, which was the only reality, he no longer distinguished
between himself and the country which—as big as centuries-old England
—lies three quarters in Europe and one quarter in an Asia of plains and
deserts still furrowed by caravan routes. A country without a history:

the Khazars had passed that way in the fifth century on their little long-
haired horses, as the Scythians had passed that way centuries before
them, to found an empire on the Volga. Where did they come from?
Who were they? Came too the Pechenegs, Genghis Khan’s horsemen,
Kulagu Khan’s archers, the Golden Horde’s slant-eyed administrators
and methodical headsmen, the Nogai Tatars. Plain upon plain—migra-
tions vanished in them as water vanishes in sand. Of that immemorial
legend, Makeyev knew only a few names, a few scenes; but he knew and
loved horses as the Pechenegs and the Nogai did, like them he understood
the flight of birds, like them he could find his way through blizzards by
signs which men of other races could not discern. If by some miracle the
weapon of past centuries, a bow, had been placed in his hands, he could
have used it as skillfully as the divers unknown tribes whom that soil had
nourished, who had died upon it and been absorbed into it . . . “All
is ours!” he said, sincerely, at public meetings of the Railwaymen’s Club,
and he could easily have substituted “All is mine,” since he was only
vaguely aware where “I” ended and “we” began. (The “I” belongs to
the Party, the “I” is of value only inasmuch as, through the Party, it
incarnates the new collectivity; yet, since it incarnates it powerfully and
consciously, the “I,” in the name of the “we,” possesses the world.)
Makeyev could not have worked it out theoretically. In practice, he
never felt the slightest doubt. “I have forty thousand head of sheep in
the Tatarovka district this year!” he cried happily at the regional Pro-
duction conference. “Next year I shall have three brickworks operating.
I told the Plan Commission: ‘Comrade, you must give me three hundred
horses before fall—or you’ll hold up the plan for the year! You want to
put my only electric power station under the Center? Not if I can stop
you, it’s mine, I’ll use every measure, the C.C. will decide.’ ” (Instead of
“measure” he said “resource,” or rather he thought he was saying “re-
source” but he actually said “recourse.”)
Two Narychkins successively exiled to Kurgansk—one, at the end of
the eighteenth century, for misappropriations considered excessive when
he fell into disfavor with an aging and obese empress; the other, early in
the nineteenth, for some witty remarks on the Jacobinism of Monsieur
Bonaparte—built a little square palace there in the Neo-Greek style of
the Empire, with a peristyle and columns. On either side of this palace
extended the wooden houses of the merchants, the low-walled caravan-
sary, the gardens of the more luxurious dwellings. Makeyev set up his
office in one of the drawing rooms of the old-regime governors-general,
the very drawing room to which the liberal Narychkin, waited on by

indolent servitors, had been wont to retire to reread Voltaire. A local
antiquarian told Comrade Artyem Artyemiyevich about it. “He was a
Freemason too—belonged to the same lodge as the Decembrists.”—“Do
you really believe any of those feudal dogs could be sincerely liberal?”
Makeyev asked. “Anyway, what does liberal mean?” A copybook con-
taining a part of the family journal, odd volumes of Voltaire, a copy
of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws annotated in the nobleman’s own
hand, were still in the attic, together with odd pieces of old furniture and
some family portraits, one of which, signed by Madame Vigee-Lebrun,
a French Revolutionary emigree, represented a stout dignitary of fifty,
with penetrating brown eyes and an ironic and sensual mouth . . .
Makeyev had it brought down, contemplated Narychkin for a moment,
looked sourly at the glittering cross on his chest, touched the frame with
the toe of his boot, and pronounced judgment: “Not bad. A real feudal
mug. Send it to the regional museum.” The title of Montesquieu’s book
was translated for him. He sneered: “Spirit of exploitation! . . . Send
it to the library.” “I should suggest the museum,” the antiquarian ob-
jected. Makeyev turned on him and, in a crushing voice (because he did
not understand), said: “Why?” The frightened antiquarian made no
•answer. On the double mahogany door a sign was tacked: Office of the
Regional Secretary. Inside: a large desk; four telephones, one of them a
direct wire to Moscow, the C.C., and the Central Executive; dwarf palms
between the tall windows; four big leather armchairs (the only ones in
the district); on the right-hand wall, a map of the district especially
drawn by a deported ex-officer; on the left-hand wall, a map from the
Economic Plan Commission indicating the sites of future factories, of a
projected railway and a projected canal, of three workers’ housing de-
velopments to be built, of baths, schools, and stadiums to be brought into
existence in the city . . . Behind the Regional Secretary’s comfortable
armchair hung a large portrait in oils of the General Secretary, supplied
for eight hundred rubles by the Universal Stores in the capital—a slick
and shining portrait, in which the Chief’s green tunic seemed to be cut
out of heavy painted cardboard and his half-smile miscarried into abso-
lute nullity. When the office was completely furnished, Makeyev entered
it with suppressed delight. “Wonderful, that portrait of the Chief. That’s
real proletarian art!” he said expansively. But what was lacking in the
room? What was this strange, irritating, improper, inconceivable blank?
He turned on his heel, vaguely displeased, and the people around him—
the architect, the secretary of the city Committee, the commandant of
the building, the chief clerk, his private stenographer—all felt the same

discomfort. “And Lenin?” he said at last; then added, with almost thun-
derous reproach: “You have forgotten Lenin, comrades! Ha, ha, ha!”
His laughter rang out insolently amid the general confusion. The secre-
tary of the city Committee was the first to regain his self-possession:
“Not at all, Comrade Makeyev, not at all. We hurried to get things
finished this morning and there wasn’t time to put in the bookcase—
there’s where it will stand—with Ilich’s Complete Works, in the Institute
edition, and the little bust that goes on top of it, just like in my place.”
“That’s better,” said Makeyev, his eyes still gleaming with mockery.
And, before dismissing them, he announced sententiously:
“Never forget Lenin, comrades—that is the Communist’s law.”
Left alone, Makeyev sat squarely down in his revolving chair, turned
it happily back and forth, dipped the new pen into the red ink, and wrote
a large signature, complete with flourishes—A. A. MAKEYEV—on the
memorandum pad with its printed heading: C.P. of the U.S.S.R. Kur-
gansk Regional Committee. The Regional Secretary. After admiring it
for a while, he looked at the telephones, and his full cheeks creased in a
smile. “Hello, operator. Seven-six.” His voice became soft: “Is that you,
Alia?” Half mockingly, half caressingly: “Nothing, nothing. Everything
going all right? Yes, of course, pretty soon.” He turned to the second
telephone: “Hello, Security? The Chief’s office. Hello, Tikhon Alexeyich
—come about four o’clock. Is your wife feeling better? Yes—yes—all
right.” Great stuff! He looked long and eagerly at the direct Moscow
connection, but could think of nothing urgent to tell the Kremlin; yet he
put his hand on the receiver (suppose I call the Central Plan Commission
about trucks?), but then did not dare. In times past the telephone had
been a wonder to him, a magical instrument; awkward about using it, he
had long feared it, losing far too much of his self-assurance in the pres-
ence of the little black cylinder of the receiver. Now that all its terrifying
magic was placed at his service, he saw it as a symbol of power. The little
local committees came to fear his calls. His imperious voice burst from
the receiver: “Makeyev speaking.” It was an almost unintelligible roar.
“That you, Ivanov? More lapses, eh? I won’t have it . . . immediate
sanctions . . . Give you twenty-four hours! . . .” He preferred to act
these scenes before a few deferential colleagues. The blood rose to his
heavy face, his broad, conical, shaven skull. The reprimand delivered,
he slammed down the receiver, stared into space like an angry beast of
prey, pretending to see no one, opened a dossier, ostensibly to calm him-
self. (But it was all only an inner rite.) Woe to the Party member under
investigation whose personal dossier fell into Makeyev’s hands at such

a moment! In less than a minute he infallibly discovered the weak point
in the case: “Claims to he the son of poor peasants, was actually the son
of a deacon.” The genuine son of landless peasants laughed harshly, and
wrote in the column reserved for suggested action: “exp.” (expulsion)
followed by an implacable M., all in heavy blue pencil. He had a discon-
certing faculty of remembering such dossiers, fishing them out from
among a hundred others to confirm his decision a year and a half later,
when the file, swelled by a dozen reports, came back from Moscow. If the
Central Control Commission happened to favor keeping the poor wretch
in the Party “with a solemn warning,” Makeyev was even capable of
renewing his opposition with Machiavellian ingenuity. The C.C.C. was
well aware of these cases, and indulgently supposed that Makeyev was
settling personal accounts—no one had the least idea of the absolute
impartiality of the rages which he put on for the sake of his prestige.
Only one of the C.C.C. secretaries occasionally permitted himself to
override these decisions of Makeyev’s—Tulayev. “One down for
Makeyev,” he muttered into his thick mustache as he ordered the rein-
statement of the expelled member whom neither he nor Makeyev had ever
seen or would ever see. On the rare occasions when they met in Moscow,
•Tulayev, who was a bigger man than Makeyev, addressed him genially
in the familiar form, though at the same time calling him “comrade,” to
indicate that not all Bolsheviks were equal. Tulayev discerned Makeyev’s
value. Basically the two men were much alike, though Tulayev was bet-
ter educated, more adaptable, and more blase about exercising power (as
chief clerk to a substantial Volga merchant, he had taken courses at a
commercial school). Tulayev was embarked on a bigger career. He once
plunged Makeyev into unbearable embarrassment by reporting to a meet-
ing that the last May Day procession at Kurgansk had included no less
than 137 large or small portraits of Comrade Makeyev, Regional Secre-
tary, and then going on to mention the official opening of a Makeyev
Day Nursery in a Kazak village which had soon after emigrated in a
body to newer pastures . . . Crushed by the laughter, Makeyev rose
and stood looking into the sea of hilarious faces, his eyes full of tears,
his voice half choked, demanding the floor ... He did not get it, for
a member of the Political Bureau came in, wearing an elegantly tailored
workman’s blouse, and the whole assembly rose for the ritual seven-to-
eight-minute ovation. After the meeting Tulayev sought out Makeyev:
“That was a pretty good trouncing I gave you, eh, brother? But don’t
let a little thing like that make you angry. If you get the chance, come

back at me as hard as you like. Have a drink?” Those were the good old
times of rough-and-ready brotherhood.
In those days the Party was turning over a new leaf. No more heroes—
what was needed was good administrators, practical unromantic men.
No more venturesome spurts of international or planetary or name-your-
own-adjective revolution—we must think of ourselves, build Socialism
for ourselves, in our own country. A renovation of cadres, opening the
way to second-rank men, rejuvenated the Republic. Makeyev took part in
the purges, acquired a reputation as a practical man devoted to the
“general line,” learned the official phrases which bring peace to the
soul, and was able to recite them for an hour by the clock. It was with
strange emotion that he one day received a visit from Kasparov. The
former Commissar of the Steppes Division, the leader of the fiery Civil
War days, quietly entered the Regional Secretary’s office, without knock-
ing or sending in his name, about three o’clock one torrid summer after-
noon. A Kasparov who had aged and grown thinner, in a white blouse
and cap. “You!” Makeyev exclaimed, and flew to embrace his visitor,
kissed him, clasped him to his chest. Kasparov gave the impression of
being light. They sat down facing each other in the deep armchairs, and
now a feeling of uneasiness extinguished their joy. “Well,” said Makeyev,
who did not know what to say, “where are you bound in that outfit?”
Kasparov’s face looked tense and severe, as it used to look when they
camped on the Orenburg steppes, or during the Crimean campaign, or at
Perekop ... He looked at Makeyev impenetrably; perhaps he was
judging him. Makeyev felt uncomfortable. “Appointed by the C.C.,” said
Kasparov, “to be director of river transport in the Far East . . .”
Makeyev instantly computed the extent of this disgrace: distant exile, a
purely economic position, whereas a Kasparov could have governed
Vladivostok or Irkutsk, at the very least.
“And you?” said Kasparov, with something of melancholy in his tone.
To shake off his uneasiness, Makeyev stood up—herculean, massive,
shaven-skulled. Sweat stains showed on his blouse.
“I’m building,” he said cheerfully. “Come and see.” He took Kasparov
to the Plan Commission’s map—irrigation canals, brickworks, railway
yard, schools, baths, stud farms. “Just look at that—you can see the
country growing under your eyes, in twenty years we’ll be up with the
U.S.A. I believe it because I am in the thick of it.” His voice rang a
little false and he noticed it. It was the voice in which he made official
speeches . . . With a barely sketched gesture, Kasparov waved aside

the vain words, the economic plans, his old comrade’s simulated joy—
and that was just what Makeyev obscurely feared. Kasparov said:
“All that is fine. But the Party is at the crossroads. The fate of the
Revolution is being decided, brother.”
By the greatest of luck, the telephone began buzzing shrilly at that
moment. Makeyev gave some orders relative to nationalized trade. Then,
taking his turn at dismissing what he preferred to overlook, he spread his
broad, plump hands in a conclusive gesture, and, with a guileless look:
“In this country, old man, everything has been decided once and for
all. The general line—I don’t see any other way. I’m going ahead. Come
back here in two or three years, and you won’t recognize the town or
the district. A new world, old man, a new America! A young Party
that doesn’t know what fear is, full of confidence. Will you come and
review the Young Communist sports parade with me this evening?
You’ll see!”
Kasparov shook his head evasively. Another played-out Thermidorian,
a fine administrative animal who could glibly recite the four hundred
current ideological phrases that obviated thinking, seeing, feeling, and
even remembering, even suffering the least remorse when you did the
•vilest things! There were both irony and despair in the little smile that
lighted Kasparov’s lined face. Makeyev bristled in the presence of feel-
ings utterly foreign to his nature but which he nevertheless divined.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Kasparov in a peculiar tone. He appeared
to make himself at ease, unbuttoned the neck of his shirt, threw his cap
into one of the armchairs, sat down comfortably in another with his
legs crossed:
“A nice office you have here—for whatever that’s worth—very nice.
But beware of bureaucratic comfort, Artyemich. It’s a slough—a man
can drown in it.”
Was he trying to be deliberately disagreeable? Makeyev lost a little
of his assurance. Kasparov looked at him judicially out of his strange
gray eyes, which were calm in danger, calm in excitement.
“Artyemich, I have been thinking things over. Our plans are 50 to 60
per cent impossible to carry out. To carry them out to the extent of the
remaining 40 per cent, the real wages of the working class will have to
be reduced below the level they reached under the Imperial Government
—far below the present level even in backward capitalist countries . . .
Have you thought about that? I fear not. In six months at most, we shall
have to declare war on the peasants and begin shooting them down—as
sure as two and two make four. Shortage of industrial goods, plus de-

preciation of the ruble—or, to put it frankly, hidden inflation; low grain
prices imposed by the state, natural resistance oh the part of grain owners
—you know how it goes. Have you considered the consequences?”
Makeyev had too much sense of reality to demur, but he was afraid
someone in the hall might hear such words spoken in his office—words
of sacrilege, challenging the Chief’s doctrine, challenging everything!
They cut him, they troubled him: he became aware that it required his
most conscious effort to keep himself from speaking the same terrible
language. Kasparov went on:
“I am neither a coward nor a bureaucrat, I know what duty to the
Party is. What I am saying to you, I have written to the Political
Bureau, with figures to support it. Thirty of us signed it—all survivors
of Czarist prisons, of Taman, Perekop, Kronstadt . . . Can you guess
how they answered us? As for me, I was first sent to inspect the schools
in Kazakistan, which have neither teachers nor buildings nor books nor
pencils . . . Now I am being sent to count barges at Krasnoyarsk—
which is all the same to me. But that this criminal stupidity should be
continued for the pleasure of a hundred thousand bureaucrats too lazy
to realize that they are headed for their own destruction and are drag-
ging the Revolution with them—that is not all the same to me. And you,
old man, hold an honorable rank in the hierarchy of those hundred
thousand. I rather suspected it. I sometimes asked myself: What is
going to become of old Makeyich, if he isn’t a down-and-out drunk by
now?”
Makeyev walked nervously back and forth from map to map. Kas-
parov’s words, his ideas, his very presence, were becoming intolerably
distressing—it was as if he suddenly felt dirty from head to foot because
of those words, of those ideas, of Kasparov. The four telephones, the
smallest details of the office, began to look odious. And anger was no
way out—why? In a tired voice he answered:
“Let’s talk about something else. You.know I am not an economist. I
carry out the Party’s directives, that’s all—today, just as I used to in
the army with you. And you taught me to obey for the Revolution. What
more can I do? Come and have dinner at my house later. I have a new
wife, you know—Alia Sayidovna, a Tatar. You’ll come?”
Under the indifferent tone, Kasparov read an entreaty: Show me that
you still think enough of me to sit down at my table with my new wife—
that’s all I ask of you. Kasparov put on his cap, stood at the window for
a moment humming to himself and looking out into the public garden
(a gravel disk flooded with sunshine; a little dark bronze bust exactly

in the center of it). “Right—see you this evening, Artyemich. A fine
town you have here . .	—“Isn’t it?” Makeyev answered quickly, feel-
ing intensely relieved. Below them Lenin’s bronze cranium gleamed like
polished stone. It was a good dinner, nicely served by Alia. She was
short and plump, with a sleek animal grace: clean, well-fed; bluish-black
hair twined over her temples, doe eyes, a profile of soft curves, all the
lines of her face and body melting into each other. Ancient Iranian gold
coins hung at her ears, her fingernails were painted pomegranate red.
She served Kasparov to pilau, juicy watermelon, real tea—“you can’t
find it anywhere any more,” she said pleasantly. Kasparov refrained
from confessing that he had not eaten such a good meal for six months.
He exhibited himself in his most amiable light, told the only three
stories he knew (which he privately referred to as his “three little stories
for inane evenings”) and showed none of the exasperation aroused in
him by her little laugh, which displayed her white teeth and arched her
round breasts, and by Makeyev’s self-satisfied guffaws; he even went
so far as to congratulate them on their happiness. “You ought to have
a canary, in a big, pretty cage—it’s just the thing for a nice, homelike
place . . .” Makeyev was very nearly aware of the sarcasm, but Alia
exploded: “Just what I’ve been saying, comrade. Ask Artyem if I
haven’t!” When they parted, the two men sensed that they would not
meet again—unless as enemies.
An ill-omened visit: for soon after it, troubles began. The Party and
administrative purges were just completed, under Makeyev’s energetic
leadership. In the offices of Kurgansk there remained but a small per-
centage of old-timers—that is, of men formed in the storms of the past
ten years. Tendencies—whether Left (Trotskyist), Right (Rykov-Tomsky-
Bukharin), or Pseudo-Loyalist (Zinoviev-Kamenev)—appeared to be
thoroughly wiped out, though actually they were not entirely so, for
wisdom advised laying something aside for the future. But grain was not
coming in satisfactorily. In accordance with messages from the C.C.,
Makeyev visited the villages, broadcast promises and threats, had himself
photographed surrounded by muzhiks, women, and children, got up
several parades of enthusiastic farmers who were turning over all their
wheat to the state. The carts entered the city in procession, laden with
sacks and accompanied by red flags, transparencies proclaiming a single-
hearted devotion to the Party, portraits of the Chief and portraits of
Comrade Makeyev, carried like banners by the village lads and girls.
There was a fine holiday feeling about these manifestations. The Exec-

utive of the regional Soviet sent the orchestra of the Railwaymen’s Club
to meet the parades; moving-picture photographers, summoned from
Moscow by telephone, arrived by plane to film one of the Red convoys,
and the entire U.S.S.R. later saw it on the screen. Makeyev received it,
standing on a truck, shouting sonorously: “Honor to the farmers of a
happy land!” The evening of the same day he stayed in his office late
into the night, conferring with the President of the Executive of the
Soviet and an envoy extraordinary from the C.C. The situation was be-
coming serious: insufficient reserves, insufficient receipts, the certainty
of a reduction in cropping, an illicit rise in market prices, a wave of
speculation. The envoy extraordinary announced draconian measures to
be applied “with an iron hand.” “Certainly,” said Makeyev, afraid to
understand.
So began the black years. First expropriated, then deported, some
seven per cent of the farmers left the region in cattle cars amid the cries,
tears, and curses of urchins and disheveled women and old men mad
with rage. Fields lay fallow, cattle disappeared, people ate the oil cake
intended for the stock, there was no more sugar or gasoline, leather or
shoes, cloth or clothes, everywhere there was hunger on impenetrable
white faces, everywhere pilfering, collusion, sickness; in vain did Security
decimate the bureaus of animal husbandry, agriculture, transport, food
control, sugar production, distribution . . . The C.C. recommended
raising rabbits. Makeyev had placards posted: “The rabbit shall be the
cornerstone of proletarian diet.” And the local government rabbits—his
own—were the only ones in the district which did not die at the outset,
because they were the only ones which were fed. “Even rabbits have to
eat before they are eaten,” Makeyev observed ironically. The collectiv-
ization of agriculture extended over 82 per cent of family units, “so
great is the Socialist enthusiasm among the peasants of the region” wrote
Pravda and at the same time published a picture of Comrade Makeyev,
“the fighting organizer of this rising tide.” No one stayed out of the
kolkhozes except isolated peasants whose houses slumbered far from
roads, a few villages populated by Mennonites, a village where there was
resistance from an old partisan from the Irtysh, who had twice been
decorated with the Order of the Red Flag, had known Lenin, and for that
reason was not arrested ... Meanwhile a meat-canning factory was built,
equipped with the latest-model American machinery and supplemented
by a tannery, a shoe factory, and a factory to make special leathers for
the army: it was finished the year meat and hides disappeared. Further
building included comfortable houses for the Party leaders and tech-

nicians and a workers’ garden city not far from the lifeless factory . . .
Makeyev faced everything, actually fought “on three fronts” to carry out
the C.C.’s orders, fulfill the industrialization plan, keep the earth from
dying. Where to find seasoned wood for building, nails, leather, work
clothes, bricks, cement? There was a perpetual lack of materials, the
starving workmen were perpetually stealing or running away—the great
builder found himself with nothing on hand but papers, circulars, re-
ports, orders, theses, official predictions, texts of denunciatory speeches,
motions voted by the shock brigades. Makeyev telephoned, jumped into
his Ford (now as battered as a General Staff car in the old days), ar-
rived unheralded at a building site; counted the barrels of cement and
sacks of lime himself, frowning fiercely; questioned the engineers: some
of whom defied truth by swearing to build even without wood and
bricks, others by demonstrating that it was impossible to build with such
cement. Makeyev wondered whether they were not all in a conspiracy
to destroy himself and the Union. But basically he knew, he felt, that all
they said was true. His brief case under his arm, his cap on the back
of his head, Makeyev had himself driven at full speed through woods and
plains to the “Hail Industrialization” kolkhoze, which had not a horse
left, where the last cows were dying for lack of fodder, where thirty
bales of hay had recently been stolen at night, perhaps to feed horses
which had been reported dead but were really hidden in the dreaming
forest of Chertov-Rog, “The Devil’s Horn.” The kolkhoze looked de-
serted, two Young Communists from the city lived there amid general
hostility and hypocrisy; the president, so helpless that he blurted unin-
telligibly, explained to “Comrade Secretary of the Regional Committee”
that the children were all sick from undernourishment, that he must
have at least a truckload of potatoes immediately so that field work could
be resumed, since the rations allocated by the State at the end of the
previous year (a year of scarcity) had been two months short—“just as
we said, don’t you remember?” Makeyev grew angry, promised, threat-
ened, both uselessly, overwhelmed by a dull despair . . . The same old
story, over and over, over and over—it kept him awake at night. The
land was going to ruin, the livestock was dying, the people were dying,
the Party was suffering from a sort of scurvy, Makeyev saw even the
roads dying—the roads over which no wagons any longer passed, the
roads over which grass was spreading . . .
So hated by the inhabitants that he never went out on foot in the city
except when he was forced to, and then accompanied by a guard who
walked three feet behind him with his hand on his holster, he carried a

cane himself to ward off aggressors. He had a fence built around his
house, had it guarded by soldiers. Things suddenly came to a head in the
third year of scarcity, the day when Moscow telephoned him a confi-
dential order to begin a new purge of the kolkhozes before the autumn
sowing, in order to cut down secret resistance. “Who signed this deci-
sion?”—“Comrade Tulayev, third secretary of the C.C.” Makeyev dryly
said: “Thank you,” hung up, and struck the desk with his fist. Into his
brain rose a wave of hate against Tulayev, Tulayev’s long mustaches,
Tulayev’s broad face, Tulayev the heartless bureaucrat, Tulayev the
starver of the people . . . That evening Alia Sayidovna opened the door
to a surly Makeyev, a Makeyev who looked like a bulldog. He very
seldom talked to her about business; but he often talked aloud to him-
self, because under emotional pressure silent thinking was difficult for
him. Alia, with her soft sleek profile, with the gold coins dangling from
the lobes of her pretty ears, heard him muttering: “I won’t stand for
another famine—not me. We’ve paid our share, old man, and that’s
enough. I won’t play up any longer. The district can’t stand any more.
The roads are dying! No, no, no, no! I’ll write to the C.C.”
He did write, after a sleepless night, a night of agony. For the first
time in his life, Makeyev refused to carry out an order from the C.C.,
denounced it as error, madness, crime. He felt he was saying too much,
then again that he was saying too little. When he reread what he had
written, terrified at his own audacity, he told himself that he would
have demanded the expulsion and arrest of anyone who dared to criticize
a Party directive in such terms. But the fields overrun with weeds, the
roads overrun with grass, the children with their bellies swollen from
starvation, the empty shops of nationalized retail commerce, the black
looks of the peasants, were there, really there. One after the other he tore
up several drafts. Hot and uneasy, Alia tossed feverishly in the big bed;
she attracted him only rarely now, a little female who would never
understand. His memorandum on the necessity for postponing or annul-
ling the Tulayev circular regarding the new purge of kolkhozes was dis-
patched the next morning. Makeyev had a violent headache, drifted from
room to room, in his slippers and half-dressed, behind the wooden blinds
which were closed against the torrid heat. Alia brought him small glasses
of vodka, pickled cucumbers, tall glasses of water so cold that vapor con-
densed on them in drops. He was red-eyed from lack of sleep, his face
was unshaven, he smelled of sweat . . . “You ought to take a trip some-
where, Artyem,” Alia suggested. “It would do you good.” He became
aware of her; the hallucinating midafternoon heat made a furnace of

the city, the plains, the surrounding steppes, poured through the walls of
the house, flamed in his numb veins. Hardly three steps separated him
from Alia, who fell back, tottered beside the divan, was thrown down,
felt Artyem’s dry hands knead her fiercely from neck to knees, felt his
suffocating mouth press down on her mouth, felt him rip her silk kaftan,
which would not unfasten quickly enough, felt him bruise her legs,
which had not opened quickly enough . . . “Alia, you are as downy as
a peach,” said Makeyev as he rose refreshed. “Now the C.C. will see
who’s right, that numskull Tulayev or me!” For a moment, possessing his
wife gave him the feeling of conquering the universe.
Makeyev fought a losing battle with Tulayev for two weeks. Accused
by his powerful antagonist of tending toward the “Right opportunist
deviation,” he saw himself on the brink of the abyss. Figures and several
sentences from his memorandum, quoted to denounce “the incoherencies
of the Political Bureau’s agrarian policy” and the “fatal blindness of
certain functionaries,” appeared in a document probably drawn up by
Bukharin and delivered to the Control Commission by an informer.
Makeyev, seeing that he was lost, abjured instantly and passionately. The
Politburo and the Orgburo (Organization Bureau) decided to maintain
him in his position since he had renounced his errors and was devoting
himself to the new purge of kolkhozes with exemplary energy. Far from
sparing his own henchmen, he regarded them with such suspicion that
several of them found themselves on their way to concentration camps.
Putting the burden of his own responsibility upon them, he harshly
refused to see them or intercede for them. From the depths of prisons,
some of them wrote that they had merely carried out his orders. “The
counterrevolutionary irresponsibility of these demoralized elements,”
Makeyev commented, “deserves no indulgence. Their only aim is to dis-
credit the Party.” In the end he believed it himself.
Would not his disagreement with Tulayev be remembered during the
election for the Supreme Council? A certain vacillation in the Party
committees made Makeyev uneasy. Many voices were raised in favor of
candidates who were high Security officials or generals, rather than
Communist leaders. Happy day! Official rumor repeated a remark by
a member of the Political Bureau: “Makeyev’s is the only possible
candidacy in the Kurgansk region . . . Makeyev is a builder.” Imme-
diately transparencies appeared across the streets, urging: Vote for the
Builder Makeyev—who, in any case, was the only candidate. At the first
session of the Supreme Council, held in Moscow, Makeyev, at the peak

of his destiny, ran into Bliicher in the anterooms. “Greetings, Artyem*”
said the commander-in-chief of the valorous Special Army of the Red
Flag in the Far East. Intoxicated, Makeyev answered: “Greetings,
Marshal! How are you?” They went to the buffet together, arm in arm
like the old comrades they were. Both of them were heavier, their faces
full and well-massaged, with fatigue pouches under the eyes, both wore
well-cut clothes of fine material, both were decorated—Bliicher wore
four brilliant medals on his right breast, three Orders of the Red Flag
and one Order of Lenin; Makeyev, less heroic, had only one Red Flag
and the Medal of Labor . . . The strange thing was that they had
nothing to say to each other. With sincere delight they exchanged
phrases from the newspapers: “So you’re building, old man? Things
going well? Happy? Healthy?”—“So, Marshal, you’re keeping the little
Japs in order, eh?”—“Right—they can come whenever they’re ready!”
Deputies from the Siberian North, from Central Asia, from the Caucasus,
in their national costumes, flocked to stare at them. In the soldier’s
reflected glory, Makeyev admired himself. He thought: “We’d make a
fine snapshot.” The memory of that memorable moment went sour some
months later when, after the fighting in Chang-Ku-Feng, the Army of
the Far East regained two hills overlooking Possiet Bay from the Japa-
nese (the two hills turned out to be of enormous strategic importance,
though it had never been mentioned before). The message from the C.C.
detailing these glorious events did not mention Bliicher’s name. Makeyev
understood, and a chill came over him. He felt himself compromised.
Bliicher, Bliicher—it was his turn to go down into subterranean dark-
ness! Inconceivable! . . . What luck that no snapshot had immortalized
their last meeting!
Makeyev lived quite calmly through the proscriptions, because they
wrought havoc chiefly among the generation of power which had pre-
ceded his own and among generations even earlier. “By and large,
socially the old generation is worn out . ... So much the worse for them,
this is no time for sentiment . . . Heroes yesterday, failures today—
it’s the dialectic of history.” But his unspoken thoughts told him that
his own generation was rising to replace the generation which was going
out. Ordinary men became great men when their day arrived—was that
not justice? Although, when they had been in power, he had known and
admired a number of the defendants in the great trials, he accepted their
end with a sort of zeal. Incapable of comprehending anything but the
baldest arguments, he was not troubled by the enormity of the accusa-

tions. (We have no time for subtleties!) And what was more natural
than to use lies to overwhelm an enemy who must be put out of the way?
The demands of mass psychology in a backward country must be met.
Called to rule by the subalterns of the one and only Chief, integrated into
the power behind the proscriptions, Makeyev had never felt that he was
threatened. But now he felt the wind of the inevitable scythe that had
mowed down Bliicher. Had the Marshal been relieved of his command?
Arrested? Would he reappear? He was not being tried, which perhaps
meant that all was not over for him. However that might be, no one ever
mentioned his name now. Makeyev would have liked to forget it; but the
name, the image of the man, pursued him—at work, in his moments of
silence, in his sleep. He found himself fearing that, speaking at some
meeting of district officials, he would suddenly utter the obsessing name
in the middle of a sentence. And the more he put it out of his mind, the
more it rose to his lips—to the point where he thought that, reading a
message aloud, he had inserted Bliicher’s name among the names of the
members of the Political Bureau . . . “Didn’t I make a slip of the
tongue?” he asked one of the Regional Committee members lightly.
Inside, he was writhing with anguish.
■ “No indeed,” said the comrade he had addressed. “Odd that you
should think so.”
Makeyev looked at him, seized with a vague terror. “He is making a
fool of me . . .” The two men blushed, equally embarrassed.
“You were most eloquent, Artyem Artyemich,” said the Committee
member, to break the uncomfortable silence. “You read the address to
the Political Bureau with magnificent fervor . . .”
Makeyev became completely confused. His thick lips moved silently.
He made a wild effort to keep from saying, “Bliicher, Bliicher, Bliicher,
do you hear me? I named Bliicher!” The other became uneasy:
“Don’t you feel well, Comrade Makeyev?”
“A touch of dizziness,” said Makeyev, swallowing saliva.
He got over the crisis, he conquered his obsession, Bliicher did not
reappear, it was a little more ended every day. There were further dis-
appearances, but of less importance. Makeyev made up his mind to
ignore them. “Men like myself have to have hearts of stone. We build on
corpses, but we build.”
That year the purges and personnel replacements in the Kurgansk
district were not over until the middle of winter. Just before spring, one
night in February, Tulayev was killed in Moscow. When Makeyev heard

the news, he shouted for joy. Alia was playing solitaire, her body out-
lined in clinging silk. Makeyev threw down the red “Confidential” en-
velope.
“There’s one that deserved what he got! The fool! It had been coming
to him for a long time. A plot? Not much—somebody whose life he was
ruining let him have it on the head with a brick ... He certainly went
out looking for it, with that character of his—a snarling dog . . .”
“Who?” said Alia, without raising her head, because for the second
time the cards had brought the queen of diamonds between herself and
the king of hearts.
“Tulayev. I’ve just heard from Moscow that he has been mur-
dered . . .”
“My God!” said Alia, preoccupied by the queen of hearts, doubtless
a blond woman.
Makeyev said sharply:
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to call on God like a peasant! ”
The cards snapped under the pretty, red-nailed fingers. Irritation. The
queen of diamonds confirmed the treacherous hints dropped by the wife
of the president of the Soviet (Doroteya Guermanovna, a big, soft
woman of German extraction who knew all the scandal of the city for
the last ten years) . . . and the manicurist’s skillful reticences . . .
and the fatally precise information that had arrived in the form of an
anonymous letter laboriously pieced together out of big letters cut from
newspapers—at least four hundred of them had been pasted down one
after the other to denounce the ticket girl of the Aurora Cinema, who
had previously slept with the director of the municipal services depart-
ment and who, a year ago, had become Artyem Artyemich’s mistress, as
witness the fact that she had had an abortion at the G.P.U. clinic last
winter, being admitted on a personal recommendation, and then had
been given a month’s paid vacation, which she spent at the Rest House
for Workers in Education, also on special recommendation, and as wit-
ness the fact that Comrade Makeyev had twice visited the Rest House
• during that period and had even spent the night there . . . The letter
went on in this fashion for several pages, all in overlapping, ill-assorted
letters which made absurd patterns. Alia looked at Makeyev out of eyes
so intent that they became cruel.
“What is it?” asked the man, vaguely uneasy.
“Who was killed?” asked the woman, her face ugly with tension and
distress.
“Tulayev, I told you, Tulayev—are you deaf?”

Alia came so close to him that she touched him, and stood pale and
straight, her shoulders set, her lips trembling.
“And that blond ticket girl—who’s going to kill her? Tell me, you
traitor, you liar!”
Makeyev had barely begun to realize what a serious shock the Party
was in for: revamping the C.C., accounts to be settled in the bureaus,
full-scale attacks on the Right, deadly accusations against the expelled
Left, counterattacks—what counterattacks? A vast, whirling wind out
of the night drove the quiet daylight from the room, wrapped itself
about him, made cold shivers run through his very marrow . . .
Through those terrible, dark gusts, Alia’s shaken words, Alia’s poor
shattered face, hardly reached him. “Get out of here and leave me
alone!” he shouted, beside himself.
He was incapable of thinking of big things and little things simul-
taneously. He shut himself up with his private secretary, to prepare the
speech which he would deliver that evening at the extraordinary meeting
of Party officials—a bludgeoning speech, shouted from the bottom of
his lungs, punctuated with his clenched fist. He spoke as if he were
fighting, then and there, singlehanded, against the Enemies of the Party.
Men who were Creatures of Darkness; the world Counterrevolution;
Trotskyism, its brazen snout branded with the swastika; Fascism; the
Mikado . . . “Woe to the stinking vermin who have dared to raise a
hand against our great Party! We shall wipe them out forever, even to
the last generation! Eternal remembrance to our great, our wise com-
rade, Tulayev, iron Bolshevik, unswerving disciple of our beloved Chief,
the greatest man of all the centuries! . . .” At five in the morning, drip-
ping with sweat and surrounded by exhausted secretaries, Makeyev was
still correcting the typescript of his speech, which a special messenger,
starting two hours later, would carry to Moscow. When he went to bed,
bright daylight flooded the city, the plains, the building yards, the
caravan trails. Alia had just fallen into a doze after a night of torture.
Feeling her husband’s presence, she opened her eyes to the white ceiling,
to reality, to her suffering. And, almost naked, she got quietly out of bed,
and saw herself in the mirror: her hair in disorder, her breasts sagging,
herself pale, faded, forsaken, humiliated, looking like an old woman—
because of that blond ticket girl at the Aurora. Did she know what she
was doing? What did she want in the drawer where the trinkets were
kept? She found a short bone-handled hunting knife there, and took it.
She went back to the bed. Lying with the sheets thrown off and his
dressing gown open, Artyem was sound asleep, his mouth shut, his

nostrils ringed with beads of sweat, his big body naked, covered with
reddish hair, abandoned . . . Alia stared at him for a moment, as if it
astonished her to recognize him, astonished her even more to discover
something utterly unknown in him, something which incessantly escaped
her, perhaps an unwonted presence, a soul that was kindled in him in
sleep, like a secret light, and which his awakening extinguished. “My
God, my God, my God,” she repeated mentally, sensing that a power
in her would raise the knife, clench her hand, stab down into that out-
stretched male body, the male body which she loved in the very depths
of her hate. Where aim? Try to find the heart, well protected by an armor
of bones and flesh, difficult to reach? Pierce the unprotected belly, where
it is easy to make a mortal wound? Tear the penis lying in its fleece of
hair—soft flesh, loathsome and touching? The idea—but it was not an
idea it was already the adumbration of an act—traveled darkly through
her nerve centers . . . The dark current encountered another: fear.
Alia turned her head, and saw that Makeyev had opened his eyes and
was watching her with terrifying sagacity.
“Alia,” he said simply, “drop that knife.”
She was paralyzed. Sitting up in a single motion, he caught her wrist,
opened her helpless little hand, flung the bone-handled knife across the
room. Alia collapsed into shame and despair, great bright tears hung
from her lashes . . . She felt like a naughty child caught doing some-
thing wrong; there was no help anywhere, and now he would cast her
off like a sick dog . . . you drown sick dogs . . .
“You wanted to kill me?” he said. “To kill Makeyev, secretary of the
Regional Committee—and you a member of the Party? Kill the Builder
Makeyev, you miserable creature? Kill me for a blond ticket girl, fool
that you are?”
Anger rose in him with every clearly spoken word.
“Yes,” said Alia feebly.
“Idiot! They’d have shut you up underground for six months—have
you thought of that? Then one night, about 2 a.m., they’d have taken
you out behind the station and put a bullet there, right there!” (He hit
her hard on the hack of the neck.) “Don’t you know that? Do you want
a divorce this morning?”
She said furiously:
“Yes.”
And at the same time, more softly, her long eyelashes lowered: “No.”
“You are a liar and a traitor,” she repeated almost automatically,
trying to collect her thoughts. Then she went on:

“Tulayev was killed for less, and you were glad. Yet you helped him
to organize the famine—you’ve said so often enough! But perhaps he
didn’t lie to a woman, like you!”
They were such terrible words that Makeyev looked at his wife with
panic in his eyes. He felt desperately weak. Only his fury saved him from
collapsing. He burst out:
“Never! I never said or thought a word of your criminal ravings . . .
You are unworthy of the Party . . . Bitch!”
He strode about the room, now this way, now that, waving his arms
like a madman. Suddenly he came back to her, carrying a leather belt.
He gripped the back of her neck with his left hand and struck with his
right, beating, beating the almost naked body which writhed feebly under
his hand, beating so hard that he panted . . . When the body stopped
moving, when Alia’s whimpering breathing seemed to have ceased,
Makeyev turned away, pacified. He went for a wad of cotton, soaked it
in eau de cologne, came back, and began gently rubbing her face with it
—her ravaged face which, in a few moments, had become ugly with a
pitiful, little-girl ugliness . . . Then he went for ammonia, he dampened
towels, he was as diligent and skillful as a good nurse . . . And, when
Alia came to, she saw Makeyev’s green eyes leaning over her, the pupils
narrowed like a cat’s eyes . . . Artyem kissed her face heavily, hotly,
then turned away. “Get some sleep, little fool. I’m going to work.”
Life became normal again for Makeyev, between a silent Alia and the
queen of diamonds, whom, for safety’s sake, he had sent to the construc-
tion yard for the new electric plant, between the plain and the forest,
where she was put in charge of handling the mail. The yard operated
twenty-four hours a day. The Secretary of the Regional Committee
frequently appeared there to stimulate the efforts of the elite brigades, to
oversee the execution of the weekly plans in person, to receive reports
from the technical personnel, to countersign the daily telegrams to the
Center . . . He came back exhausted, under the clear stars. (Meanwhile,
somewhere in the city, unknown hands, laboring in profound secrecy,
obstinately cut alphabets of all dimensions from the papers, collected
them, aligned them on notebook sheets: it would take at least five hun-
dred characters for the contemplated letter. This patient labor was
carried on in solitude, in silence, with every sense alert; the mutilated
papers, weighted with a stone, went to the bottom of a well, for burning
them would have made smoke—and where there’s smoke there’s fire,
don’t they say? The secret hands prepared the demonic alphabet, the

unknown mind collected the evidence, the scattered clues, the infinitesi-
mal elements of several hidden and unavowable certainties . . .)
Makeyev was planning to go to Moscow to thrash out the question of
material shortages with the directors of electrification; at the same time
he would inform the C.C. and the Central Executive of the progress made
during the last six months in road-improvements and irrigation (thanks
to cheap convict labor); perhaps this progress would compensate for
the dwindling supply of skilled labor, the crisis in livestock, the poor
condition of industrialized agriculture, the production slowdown in the
railway workshops . . . With pleasure he received the brief message
from the C.C. (“Confidential. Urgent.”) inviting him to attend a con-
ference of regional secretaries from the Southwest. Leaving two days
early, Makeyev sat in his blue sleeping-car compartment, contentedly
making abstracts of the reports from the regional Economic Council.
The specialists of the Central Plan Commission would find he was a man
worth talking to! Endless fields of snow, dotted with ramshackle houses,
fled past the windows; the wooded horizon was melancholy under the
leaden sky, the light filled the white spaces with an immense expectancy.
Makeyev looked at the rich black fields which an early thaw had scat-
tered with standing pools that reflected the hurrying clouds. “Indigent
Russia, opulent Russia,” he murmured, because Lenin had quoted those
two lines of Nekrassov’s in 1918. The Makeyevs, by working those fields,
made opulence come out of indigence.
At the station in Moscow, Makeyev had no difficulty in getting a C.C.
car sent for him, and it was a big American car, strangely elongated and
rounded—“streamlined,” explained the chauffeur, who was dressed much
like a millionaire’s chauffeur in a foreign movie. Makeyev found that
many things had changed for the better in the capital since he had been
there seven months earlier. Life bustled through a gray transparency,
over the new asphalt pavements which were relentlessly cleared of snow
day in and day out. The shopwindows made a good impression. At the
Central Plan Commission, in a building made of reinforced concrete,
glass, and steel, and containing from two to three hundred offices,
Makeyev, in accordance with his rank, was received as an extremely
important person by elegant officials who wore big spectacles and suits
of British cut. He found no difficulty in obtaining what he wanted:
materials, additional credits, the return of a dossier to the Projects de-
partment, authority to build an additional road. How could he have
known that the materials did not exist, and that all these impressive
personages no longer had anything but a sort of ghostly existence, since

the P.B. had just decided “in principle” upon a purge and complete
reorganization of the Plan offices? Well satisfied, he became more im-
portant than ever. His plain fur coat, his plain fur cap contrasted with
the careful attire of the technicians and made him look all the more the
provincial builder. “We who are clearing virgin soil . . .” He slipped
little phrases like that into the conversation, and they did not ring false.
Of the few old friends whom he tried to find the second day, none
could be reached. One was ill in a suburban hospital, too far from town;
telephoning to two others, he received only evasive answers. On the
second occasion, Makeyev got angry. “Makeyev speaking, I tell you.
Makeyev of the C.C., do you understand? I want to know where Foma
is; I have a right to be told, I imagine . . .” The man at the other end
of the wire answered, in a doubtful voice: “He has been arrested . . .”
Arrested? Foma, Bolshevik of 1904, loyal to the general line, former
member of the Central Control Commission, member of Security’s
special college? Makeyev gasped for breath, a spasm passed over his
face, for a moment he felt stunned. What was happening now?
He decided to spend the evening alone, at the opera. Entering the
great government box (once the imperial box) soon after the curtain
went up, he found no one there but an old couple, sitting at the left in
the first row of chairs. Makeyev discreetly greeted Popov, one of the
Party’s directors of conscience, an untidy little old man with a vague
profile and a yellowish straggling beard. He had on a gray tunic that
sagged around the pockets. His companion looked amazingly like him;
it seemed to Makeyev that she barely returned his greeting and even
avoided looking at him. Popov crossed his arms on the velvet of the
balustrade, coughed, thrust out his lips, entirely absorbed by the per-
formance. Makeyev sat down at the other end of the row. The empty
chairs increased the distance between himself and the Popovs; even if
they had sat close together, the huge box would have surrounded them
with solitude. Makeyev could not make himself take an interest either in
the stage or the music, though music usually intoxicated him like a
drug, filling his whole being with emotion, filling his mind with dis-
connected images, now violent, now plaintive, filling his throat with
abortive cries, with sighs or a sort of wailing. He assured himself that
all was well, that it was one of the finest spectacles in the world, even
though it belonged to the culture of the old regime—but we are the
legitimate heirs of that culture, we have conquered it. Then, too, those
dancers, those lovely dancers—why should he not desire them? (Desire
was another of his ways of forgetting.)

When the intermission hegan, the Popovs left so discreetly that only
his increased solitude in the huge box made him aware that they had
gone. For a moment he stood looking at the, house, brilliant with lights
and evening dresses and uniforms. “Our Moscow, capital of the world.”
Makeyev smiled. As he made his way to the lobby, an officer—spectacles,
neat square-cut mustache, a little curved nose like an owl’s beak—bowed
to him most respectfully. Makeyev returned his bow, then stopped him
with a gesture. The officer introduced himself:
“Captain Pakhomov, commanding the building police, happy to be
of service to you, Comrade Makeyev.”
Flattered at being recognized, Makeyev felt like embracing him. His
strange solitude vanished.
“Ah, so you have just arrived, Comrade Makeyev,” said Pakhomov
slowly, as if he were thinking; “then you haven’t seen our new scene-
shifting machines, bought in New York and installed last November.
You ought to take a look at them—they made Meyerhold open his eyes!
Shall I expect you after the third act, to show you the way?”
Before answering, Makeyev nonchalantly inquired:
“Tell me, Captain Pakhomov—the little dancer in the green turban,
the one who’s so graceful—who is she?”
Pakhomov’s owl face and nocturnal eyes brightened a little:
“Very talented, Comrade Makeyev—getting a great deal of notice.
Paulina Ananiyeva. I’ll introduce you to her in her dressing room, Com-
rade Makeyev—she will be very happy to meet you—oh, certainly . . .”
And now good riddance to you, Popov, you old moralist, you old
crab—you and your antique wife who looks like a plucked turkey. What
do you know about the life of strong men, builders, outdoor men, men
who fight? Under floors, in cellars, rats gnaw at strange fodder—and
you, you eat dossiers, complaints, circulars, theses, which the great
Party throws at you in your office, and so it will go on until you are
buried with greater honors than you ever knew in your miserable life!
Makeyev leaned forward and almost turned his back on the disagreeable
couple. Where should he take Paulina? To the Metropole bar? Paulina
. . . nice name for a mistress. Paulina . . . Would she let herself be
tempted tonight? Paulina . . . Makeyev’s feeling, as he waited for the
intermission, was almost blissful.
Captain Pakhomov was waiting for him at the turn in the great stair-
case. “First, Comrade Makeyev, I’ll show you the new machines; then
we’ll go to see Ananiyeva—she’s expecting you ...”
“Splendid, splendid . . .”

Makeyev followed the officer through a maze of corridors, each more
brightly lighted than the last. Pushing back a curtain to his left, the
officer pointed to mechanics busy around a winch; young men in blue
blouses were sweeping the stage; a technician appeared, pushing a little
searchlight on wheels. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” said the owl-faced officer.
Makeyev, his head empty of everything except the expectation of a
woman, said: “The magic of the theater, my dear comrade . . .” They
went on. A metal door opened before them, closed behind them, they
were,in darkness. “What’s this?” the officer exclaimed. “Stay where you
are, just for a moment, Comrade Makeyev, I . . .” It was cold. The
darkness lasted only a few seconds, but when a wretched little backstage
bulb came on, like the light in a forsaken waiting room or in the ante-
chamber of a dilapidated Hell, Pakhomov was no longer there; instead,
several black overcoats detached themselves from the opposite wall,
someone rapidly advanced on Makeyev—a thickset man with his over-
coat collar turned up, his cap pulled down to his eyes, his hands in his
pockets. Very close now, the voice of the unknown murmured, distinctly:
“Artyem Artyemich, we don’t want any scenes. You are under arrest.”
Several overcoats surrounded him, pressed against him; skillful hands
nan over him, pushed him about, fished out his revolver . . . Makeyev
gave a violent start which almost freed him from all the hands, from all
the shoulders, but they closed in, nailed him to the spot:
“We don’t want any scenes, Comrade Makeyev,” the persuasive voice
repeated. “Everything will be all right, I am sure—there must be some
misunderstanding. Just obey orders . . .” Then, to the others: “No
noise! ”
Makeyev let himself be led, almost carried. They put on his overcoat,
two men took him by the arms, others preceded and followed him, and
so they walked through formless semidarkness, like a single creature
clumsily moving a profusion of legs. The narrow corridor squeezed
them together, they stumbled over each other. Behind a thin partition
the orchestra began to play with miraculous sweetness. Somewhere in
the meadows, beside a silvery lake, thousands of birds greeted the dawn,
the light increased instant by instant, a song rose into it, a pure woman’s
voice sounded through the unearthly morning . . . “Easy there, watch
out for the steps,” someone whispered into Makeyev’s ear . . . and there
was no more dawn, no more song, there was nothing . . . nothing but
the cold night, a black car, the unimaginable . . .

5 ’ Journey into Defeat
Before reaching Barcelona, Ivan Kondratiev underwent
several standard transformations. First he was Mr. Murray Barron, of
Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A., photographer for the World Photo Press, travel-
ing from Stockholm to Paris by way of London ... He took a taxi to
the Champs-Elysees, then, carrying his little brown valise, strolled about
for a while between the Rue Marbeuf and the Grand Palais; he was seen
to stop before the Clemenceau disguised as an old soldier who trudges
along a block of stone at the corner in front of the Petit Palais. The
bronze froze the old man’s drive, and it was perfect: so a man walks
when he is at the end of his resources, when all his strength is gone. “For
how much longer has your stubbornness saved a dying world, old man?
Perhaps you only bored a deeper hole in the rock for the mine that will
blow it up?”—“I messed things up for the bastards for fifty years,”
the man of bronze muttered bitterly. Kondratiev looked at him with
secret sympathy. Two hours later Mr. Murray Barron came out of a
monastic-looking house near St.-Sulpice, still carrying his brown valise
but now transformed into Mr. Waldemar Laytis, Latvian citizen, on a

mission to Spain from his country’s Red Cross. From Toulouse an Air-
France plane, flying over landscapes bathed in happy light, the rusty
summits of the Pyrenees, sleeping Figueras, the hills of Catalonia tanned
like a beautiful skin, carried Mr. Waldemar Laytis to Barcelona. The
officer representing the International Non-Intervention Board, a meticu-
lous Swede, must have thought that the Red Cross organizations of the
several Baltic States were displaying a laudable activity in the Peninsula:
Mr. Laytis was certainly the fifth or sixth delegate they had dispatched
to observe the effects of bombing on open cities. Ivan Kondratiev, notic-
ing that the officer looked rather hard at his passport, merely made a
mental note that the liaison office must be overdoing the trick. At the
Prat airfield a podgy colonel, wearing glasses, complimented Mr. Laytis
in unctuous tones, led him to a handsome car which displayed a few
elegant shot scratches, and said to the driver: “Vaya, amigo.” Ivan Kon-
dratiev, emissary of a strong and victorious revolution, felt that he was
entering a very sickly one.
“The situation?”
“Fair. I mean, not entirely desperate . . . We are counting heavily on
you. A Greek ship under British colors sunk last night off the Balearic
Islands: munitions, bombings, artillery fire, the usual confusion . . .
No importa. Rumors of concentrations in the Ebro region. Es todo.”
“Internal affairs? The Anarchists? The Trotskyists?”
“The Anarchists are ready to listen to reason—probably on the way
out ...”
“Since they will listen to reason,” Kondratiev said mildly.
“The Trotskyists are practically all in prison . . .”
“Very good. But you took a long time about it,” said Kondratiev
severely, and something in him became tense.
Illuminated with sumptuous softness by a late-afternoon sun, a city
opened before him, stamped with the same banally infernal seal as many
other cities. The plaster of the low pink or red houses was scaling off;
windows yawned, their glass gone; here and there were bricks smudged
with black from fires, shopwindows barricaded with planks. Fifty patient
chattering women waited at the door of a wrecked store. Kondratiev
recognized them by their earthy complexions, their drawn faces—he had
seen them before, equally wretched, equally patient and talkative, on
sunny days and gray days, at shop doors in Petrograd, Kiev, Odessa,
Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Leipzig, Hamburg, Canton, Chang-sha, Wu-han.
Women waiting for potatoes, sour bread, rice, the last sugar, must be as
necessary to the social transformation as the speeches of leaders, the

secret executions, the absurd passwords. Overhead expenses. The car
jolted as if they were on a street in Central Asia. Villas among gardens.
Through the trees, a view of a white fagade pierced by great holes
through which the blue sky showed ...
“What percentage of houses damaged?”
“No se. Not so many,” the podgy colonel answered nonchalantly; he
appeared to be chewing gum, but he was chewing nothing—it was a
nervous habit.
In the patio of a once-luxurious mansion in Sarria, Ivan Kondratiev
smilingly distributed handshakes. The fountain seemed to be softly
laughing to itself, squat columns supported vaults under which the cool
shade was blue. A little stream trickled through a marble channel, a faint,
distant rapping of typewriters mingled with its silken rustle, and left it
unperturbed. Close-shaven and dressed in a brand-new Republican uni-
form, Kondratiev had become General Rudin. “Rudin?” exclaimed a
high Foreign Affairs official. “But haven’t I met you before? At Geneva,
perhaps, at the League of Nations?” The Russian unbent a little, but very
little. “I have never been in Geneva, senor, but you may have encoun-
tered a person of the same name in one of Turgenev’s novels . , .” “Of
course,” said the high official. “Turgenev is almost a classic in Spain,
you know . . .” “I am delighted to hear it,” Rudin answered politely. He
was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
These Spaniards shocked him. They were likable, childish, full of
ideas, plans, complaints, confidential information, unconcealed suspi-
cions, secrets scattered to the four winds by warm, musical voices. And
not one of them had actually read Marx (a few had the effrontery to say
that they had, knowing so little about Marxism that they were unaware
that three sentences were enough to prove them liars), not one of them
would have made even a mediocre agitator in a second-rate industrial
center like Zaporozhe. Furthermore, they considered that Soviet materiel
was arriving in insufficient quantities, that the trucks were badly built.
According to them, the situation was becoming untenable everywhere,
but then the next minute they proposed a plan for victory; some advo-
cated a European war; Anarchists insisted upon restoring discipline,
establishing the sternest order, provoking foreign intervention; bour-
geois Republicans thought the Anarchists too moderate and obliquely
accused the Communists of being too conservative; the Syndicalists of
the C.N.T. said that the Catalan U.G.T. (Communist controlled) had
been stuffed with at least a hundred thousand counterrevolutionaries and
semi-fascists; the leaders of the Barcelona U.G.T. declared that they were

ready to break with the Valencia-Madrid U.G.T., they saw Anarchist
intrigues everywhere; the Communists despised every other party, at the
same time treating all the bourgeois parties with the greatest politeness;
they seemed to fear the phantom organization of the Amigos de Durutti,
yet insisted that there was no such thing; neither were there any Trot-
skyists, but they were always being hunted down, they rose inexplicably
from the most thoroughly trodden ashes in secret prisons; general staffs
rejoiced over the death of some Lerida partisan shot from behind on the
firing line, on his way to get rations for his comrades; a captain of the
Karl Marx Division was congratulated on his loyalty when he skilfully
invented a pretext for executing an old workman who belonged to the
Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista—that pestilential organization.
Accounts were never settled; it took years to get up a shaky case against
generals who, in the U.S.S.R., would have been instantly shot without a
trial; and, even so, there was never any certainty of finding a sufficient
number of understanding judges who, after examining a set of false
documents manufactured with incredible carelessness, would send the
culprits to end their days in the moats of Montjuich at the shining hour
when bird songs fill the new morning. “It is our own staff of forgers who
shtould have been shot to begin with,” said Rudin angrily as he looked
through the dossier. “Can’t these fools understand that a false document
must at least look like a real document? Stuff like this will never con-
vince anybody but intellectuals who have already had their pay . . .”
“The forgers we had at the beginning have almost all been shot, but it
didn’t do any good,” replied the Bulgarian Yuvanov, in the extremely
discreet voice which was one of his characteristics.
He explained, with profound irony, that, in this country of brilliant
sunlight, where nothing is ever quite precise, where burning facts are
modified in accordance, with their degree of heat, forgeries never quite
jelled; unexpected obstacles were always turning up; the dregs of the
earth would suddenly be smitten with consciences that raged like the
toothache, sentimental drunkards suddenly blabbed, the general lack of
order would bring the authentic documents out of the general hodge-
podge, the examining magistrates would blunder, the excise officer would
bltish and hide his face from an old friend who called him a swindler,
and, to top it all, a deputy from the Independent Labour Party would
arrive from London, dressed in a very old gray suit, thin, bony, ugly as
only the British can be ugly, clamping his pipe between pure Stone Age
jaws, and obstinately, automatically demanding “What has come of the
investigation into the disappearance of Andres Nin?” The ministers—a

strange lot too!—would earnestly implore him, before a dozen people, to
deny “these calumnious rumors which outrage the Republic,” and when
they were alone with him would clap him on the back and say: “Those
bastards got him, but what can we do about it? After all, we can’t fight
without the arms Russia is sending. Do you think we are safe ourselves?”
Not one of these governmental dignitaries would have been worthy of a
minor job in secret service, not even those who were Party members:
they talked too much. A Communist minister, using a transparent pseudo-
nym, wrote a newspaper article accusing a Socialist colleague of being
sold to the London bankers ... At a cafe the old Socialist commented
on his skulking colleague’s prose. His ponderous triple chin, his heavy
jowls, and even his dark eyelids shook with laughter: “Sold, yo! And the
blind dupes have the gall to say so when they are sold to Moscow them-
selves—and paid with Spanish money, by the way!” The remark struck
home.- Yuvanov concluded his report: “They are all incapable. The
masses are magnificent, nevertheless.” He sighed: “But what trouble they
cause!”
Yuvanov’s square shoulders were surmounted by the face of a dan-
gerously serious fop: wavy hair plastered down on a thick skull, the
crafty eyes of a lion tamer, a mustache carefully trimmed to meet the
upper lip, accentuating it in bold black. Kondratiev felt an inexplicable
antipathy to him, which grew more definite as they went over the list of
visitors to be received. The Bulgarian several times indicated his dis-
approval by slightly shrugging his shoulders. And the three whom he
wanted to strike from the list turned out to be the most interesting—at
least it was from them that Kondratiev learned the most.
For several days he never left his two white, sparsely furnished rooms
except to walk up and down in the patio consuming cigarettes—espe-
cially after dark, under the stars. The stenographers, relegated to the
annex, continued clattering at their typewriters. Not a sound came from
the city, the bats circled noiselessly in the air. Wearied with reports on
supplies, fronts, divisions, air units, plots, the personnel of the S.I.M., of
the censorship bureau, of the navy, of the presidential secretariat, reports
on the clergy, Party expenditures, personal cases, the C.N.T., the machi-
nations of English spies, and so forth, Kondratiev became aware of the
stars, which he had always wanted to study but even the names of which
he did not know. (Because, during the only periods in his life when he
had had time to study and think—in sundry prisons—he had been de-
barred both from books on astronomy and from nocturnal walks.) Yet,
properly considered, the stars in their multitudes have no names as they

have no number, they have only their faint mysterious light—mysterious
because of human ignorance. I shall die without ever knowing more
about them. Such are men in this age, “divided from themselves,” torn,
as Marx put it—even the professional revolutionary in whom conscious-
ness of the historical process attains its most practical lucidity. Divided
from the stars, divided from themselves? Kondratiev refused to consider
the strange formula which had come into his mind in the midst of useful
thinking. As soon as you relax a little, your mind starts wandering, your
old literary education revives, you could easily become sentimental, even
though you are over fifty. He went in, returned to the artillery invoice,
the annotated list of nominations for the Madrid Military Investigation
Service, the photostats of the personal letters received by Don Manuel
Azana, President of the Republic, the abstract of the telephone conversa-
tions of Don Indalecio Prieto, Minister of War and the Navy, a most em-
barrassing person . . . By candlelight, during a power breakdown caused
by a night bombing of the port, he received the first of the visitors whom
Yuvanov had wanted to strike from the list, a Socialist lieutenant colonel,
a lawyer before the Civil War, of bourgeois background—a tall, thin
young man with a yellow face which his smile etched into ugly lines. He
spoke intelligently, and his remarks were full of unequivocal reproaches.
“I have brought you a detailed report, my dear comrade.” (In the heat
of conversation, he sometimes let fall a perfidious “my dear friend.”)
“In the Sierra we never had more than twelve cartridges per man . . .
The Aragon front was not defended; it could have been made impreg-
nable in two weeks; I sent out twenty-seven letters on the subject, six of
them to your compatriots ... Air arm entirely insufficient. In short, we
are losing the war—make no mistake about that, my dear friend.”
“What do you mean?” interrupted Kondratiev, chilled by the precise
statement.
“What I say, my dear comrade. If we are not to be given materiel to
fight with, we must be allowed to treat. By negotiating now, between
Spaniards, we might even yet avoid a total disaster—which it is not to
your interest to court, I imagine, my dear friend.”
It was so brutally insolent that Kondratiev, feeling anger flare up in
him, answered in a voice changed beyond recognition:
“. . . your government’s province to treat or to continue fighting. I
consider your language unwarranted, comrade.”
The Socialist drew himself up, adjusted his khaki necktie, showed his
yellow teeth in a wide smile.
“In that case excuse me, my dear comrade. Perhaps this is really all a

farce which I fail to understand, but which is costing my people dearly.
In any case, I have told you the absolute truth, General. Good-by . . .”
He held out a long, supple, dry, simian hand, clicked his heels German
fashion, bowed, and left . . . “Defeatist,” Kondratiev thought angrily.
“A bad element . . . Yuvanov was right . . .” The first visitor on the
following morning was a hirsute Syndicalist, with a very large nose com-
pressed into a triangle, and eyes that alternately glowered or shone. His
answers to Kondratiev’s questions were delivered with a look of intense
concentration. His two fat hands laid one on the other, he seemed to be
waiting for something. At last, the silence having become embarrassing,
Kondratiev began to rise, to indicate that the audience was over. At that
moment the Syndicalist’s face suddenly became animated, his two hands
darted eagerly forward, he began talking very fast, fervidly, in clipped
French, as if he wanted to convince Kondratiev of something mortally
important:
“As for me, comrade, I love life. We Anarchists are the party of men
who love life, the freedom of life, harmony ... A free life! I’m no
Marxist, I am anti-state and anti-political. I disagree with you about
everything, from the bottom of my soul.”
“Do you think there can be such a thing as an Anarchist soul?” asked
Kondratiev, amused.
“No. Blast the soul! But I am willing to be killed, like many before me,
if it is for the Revolution. Even if we have to win the war first, as you
people say, and have the Revolution only afterward—which seems to me
a fatal mistake, because if people are to fight they need something to fight
for ... You think you can take us in with your nonsense about win-
ning the war first—you’d be damn well taken in yourselves if we won it!
But that is hot what I have to say . . . I’m perfectly willing to get my
skull broken open—but to lose the Revolution, the war, and my own skin
at the same time is a little too much for me, damn it! And that is just
what we are doing with all this skulduggery. You know what skulduggery
is? For example: Twenty thousand men behind the lines, magnificently
armed, all in new uniforms, guarding ten thousand anti-fascist revolu-
tionaries, the best of the lot, in jails . . . And your twenty thousand
stinkers will run at the first alert, or go over to the enemy. For example:
This policy of feeding Comorera—the storekeepers making a good thing
of the last potatoes and the proletarians pulling in their belts! For ex-
ample: All this business about Poumists and Canallerists—I know them
both, sectarians like all Marxists, but more honest than your lot.”
Across the table which separated them, his hands sought Kondratiev’s,

seized them, crushed them affectionately. His breath came nearer, his
hirsute face with the shining eyes came nearer, he said:
“You were sent by your Chief? You can safely tell me. Gutierrez is a
tomb for secrets. Listen! Doesn’t your Chief know what is going on here,
what his idiots, his toadies, his lame ducks have done? He wants us to
win, doesn’t he? He is sincere? If so, we can still be saved, we will be
saved, won’t we?”
Kondratiev answered slowly:
“I was sent by my Party’s Central Committee. Our great Chief desires
the good of the Spanish people. We have helped you, we shall continue to
help you with all our strength.”
It was icy. Gutierrez drew back his hands, his hirsute face, the flame of
his eyes; thought for a few moments, then burst out laughing.
“Bueno, Comrade Rudin. When you go to see the subway, remind
yourself that Gutierrez, who loves life, will die there two or three months
from now. We have made up our minds. We will go down into the tunnels
with our machine pistols and fight our last battle, and it will cost the
Francists dear, I assure you.”
Kondratiev would have liked to reassure him, to speak to him as a
friend . . . But he felt something inside him harden. When they parted,
he could find only meaningless words, which he knew were meaningless.
Gutierrez walked heavily out, rolling from side to side; their handshake
had ended in a sort of shock.
And the third of the ill-omened visitors was shown in: Claus, non-
commissioned officer in the International Brigade, seasoned militant in
the German C.P., once involved in the Heinz Neumann deviation, sen-
tenced in Bavaria, sentenced in Thuringia . . . Kondratiev had first
known him in Hamburg in 1923: three days and two nights of street
fighting. A good shot, Claus, always cool. They were glad to see each
other; they remained standing, face to face, their hands in their pockets
—friends. “You are really getting somewhere with building Socialism
back there? Better standard of living? How about the youth?” Kondra-
tiev raised his voice, with a joy which he felt was artificial, to say that
everything was flourishing. They discussed the defense of Madrid, pro-
fessionally; the morale of the International Brigades (excellent). “You
remember Beimler—Hans Beimler?” said Claus. “Of course,” Kondra-
tiev answered. “Is he with you?”
“Not any longer.”
“Killed?”
“Killed. In the front line, at the University City, but from behind, by

our own people.” Claus’s lips trembled, his voice trembled. “That’s why I
wanted so much to see you. You’ll make an investigation, I’m sure. An
abominable crime. Killed because of some vague rumor or other, some
nonsensical suspicion. That pimp-faced Bulgarian I saw on the way in
here must know something. Question him.”
“I’ll question him,” said Kondratiev. “Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
When Claus had gone, Kondratiev instructed his orderly to let no one
else in, closed the door onto the patio, and for some minutes walked up
and down the room, which seemed to have become as stifling as a cell.
What answer was he to give these men? What was he to write to Mos-
cow? The official declarations showed up in a sinister light each time
they were confronted with the facts. Why did the D.C.A. not go into
action until after the bombardments—too late? Why was the fleet inac-
tive? Why was Hans Beimler killed? Why the lack of ammunition at the
ifiost advanced positions? Why had general staff officers gone over to the
enemy? Why were the poor starving in the country? He was well aware
that these definite questions screened a far greater evil, about which it
was better not to think . . . His meditation did not last long; Yuvanov
knocked on the door. “Time to leave for the conference of political com-
missars, Comrade Rudin.” Kondratiev nodded. And the investigation
into the death of Hans Beimler, killed in action in the lunar landscape of
Madrid’s University City, was immediately closed.
“Beimler?” said Yuvanov indifferently. “Ah, yes. Brave, a little on the
rash side. Nothing mysterious about his death—these advance-post in-
spections cost us a man or two every day; he was warned not to go. His
political behavior had caused some dissatisfaction in the Brigade. Noth-
ing serious—conversations with Trotskyists, which showed he rather
condoned them, comments on the Moscow trials which showed he mis-
understood them completely ... I had all the details of his death from
a reliable source. One of my friends was with him when he was hit . . .”
Kondratiev insisted:
“Did you go into it?”
“Go into what? The source of a bullet in a no man’s land swept by
thirty machine guns?”
Ridiculous even to try, of course.
As the car started, Yuvanov resumed:
“Good news, comrade Rudin! We have succeeded in arresting Stefan
Stern. I’ve had him taken on board the Kuban. A real blow to the Trot-
skyist traitors ... It is worth a victory, I assure you.”

“A victory? Do you really think so?”
Stern’s name appeared in a great many reports on the activities of
heretical groups. Kondratiev had paused over it a number of times.
Secretary of a dissident group, it appeared; more a theoretician than an
organizer; author of tracts and of a pamphlet on “International Re-
grouping.” A Trotskyist engaged in a bitter polemic with Trotsky.
“Who arrested him?” Kondratiev went on. “We? And you have had
him put on board one of our ships? Were you acting under orders or on
your own initiative?”
“I have the right not to answer that question,” Yuvanov answered
firmly.
Not very long before, Stefan Stern had crossed the Pyrenees without a
passport and without money, but carrying in his knapsack a precious
typewritten manuscript: “Theses on the Motive Forces of the Spanish
Revolution.” The first dark, golden-armed girl he had seen at an inn near
Puigcerda intoxicated him with a smile more golden than her arms and
said: “Aqui, camarada, empieza la verdadera revolution libertaria [Here,
comrade, begins the real libertarian revolution].” That was why she let
him touch her breasts and kiss the little red curls on the back of her neck.
She existed wholly in the flame of her tawny eyes, the whiteness of her
teeth, the keen odor of her young flesh that knew the earth and beasts; in
her arms was a bundle of freshly washed and wrung clothes, and the
coolness of the well hung about her. A whiteness dyed the distant sum-
mits, beyond a tracery of apple boughs. “Mi nombre es Nievoshe said,
amused by the mingled excitement and shyness of the young foreigner,
with his big, green, slightly slanting eyes and his forehead covered with
disorderly rust-brown hair. And he understood: her name was “Snow.”
“Snow, sunny Snow, pure Snow,” he murmured with a sort of exaltation,
in a language which Snow did not understand. And though he went on
caressing her distractedly, he seemed no longer to be thinking of her. The
memory of that moment, a memory of simple, incredible happiness, never
quite died in him. At that moment, life divided: the miseries of Prague
and Vienna, the activities and schisms of small groups, the tasteless bread
on which he had lived in little hotels that smelled of stale urine, in Paris,
behind the Pantheon, the solitude of the man laboring with ideas—all
that disappeared.
In Barcelona, at the end of a meeting, while the crowd sang in honor
of those who were setting out for battle, under the huge portrait of
Joaquin Maurin, killed in the Sierra (but actually alive, confined anony-

mously to an enemy prison), Stefan Stern met Annie, whose twenty-five
years seemed hardly more than seventeen. Legs bare, arms bare, throat
exposed, a heavy brief case dangling from one arm.—A steadfast passion
had brought her here from the faraway North. The theory of permanent
revolution once understood, how could one live, why should one live,
except to accomplish high things? If someone had reminded Annie of the
great drawing room at home, where her father, the shipowner, received
the pastor, the burgomaster, the doctor, the president of the Charity So-
ciety ; had reminded her of the sonatas which an earlier Annie, an obedi-
ent little girl with her hair in neat buns over her ears, played for the
ladies on Sunday afternoons in that same drawing room—Annie, accord-
ing to her mood, would have made a wry face and declared that it was a
nauseating bourgeois swamp, or, suddenly provocative, with a strident
laugh that did not quite belong to her, would have said something like
this: “Shall I tell you how I learned love in a cave in Altamira with
C.N.T. soldiers?” She had already worked with Stefan Stern occasion-
ally, taking dictation from him; as they left the meeting with the surging
crowd, he suddenly put his arm around her waist (he had not thought of
it the moment before), drew her close, and simply said: “You’ll stay with
me, Annie? I get so bored at night . . .” She looked at him out of the
corner of her eye, divided between annoyance and a sort of joy, wanted
to answer him angrily: “Go get yourself a whore, Stefan—like me to lend
you ten pesetas?” but she waited an instant, and then it was her joy
which spoke, with a touch of bitter defiance:
“Do you want me, Stefan?”
“Damn right I do,” he said decisively, stopping and facing her, and he
pushed his rusty curls back from his forehead. His eyes had a coppery
glint.
“All right.—Now take my arm,” she said.
Then they discussed the meeting, and Andres Nin’s speech: too muzzy
on certain points, inadequate as regarded the central problem—“He
should have been much more forthright, not have given in an inch on the
power of the committees,” said Stefan. “You’re right,” Annie answered
eagerly. “Kiss me; but please don’t recite me any bad poetry . . .” They
kissed awkwardly under the shadow of a palm in the Plaza de Cataluna,
while a defense searchlight raked the sky, then stopped, pointing straight
to the zenith like a sword of light. On the question of the revolutionary
committees, they were in full agreement—they should not have been dis-
solved by the new government. From their agreement a warm friendship
was born. After the days of May ’37, the abduction of Andres Nin, the

outlawing of the P.O.U.M., the disappearance of Kurt Landau, Stefan
Stern lived with Annie at Gracia, in a one-story pink house surrounded
by an abandoned commercial garden, where choice flowers, reverting to
an astonishing wildness, grew in disorder, mingled with nettles and
thistles and a strange plant with big velvety leaves . . . Annie’s shoul-
ders were straight, her neck was as straight as a rising stem. She carried
her head high. It was narrow across the temples and her eyebrows were
delicate and so pale that they were almost invisible. Her straw-blond hair
was drawn back from a smooth, hard little forehead, her slate-gray eyes
looked at things coolly. Annie went marketing, cooked at the hearth or on
an alcohol stove, washed the linen, corrected proofs, typed Stefan’s letters
and articles and theses. They lived almost in silence. Stefan would some-
times sit down across from Annie while her fingers danced on the type-
writer keys, watch her with a wry smile, and simply say:
“Annie.”
She would answer: “It’s the message to the I.L.P., let me finish . . .
Have you got an answer ready for the K.P.O.?”—“No, I haven’t had
time. I found a lot of points to raise in the Bulletin of the IVth.” There,
as everywhere, error flourished, overwhelming the victorious doctrine of
1917, which he must try to preserve through today’s troubles for the
struggles of the future, because clearly only the doctrine was left to save
before the last days would be upon them.
Comrades came every day, bringing news . . . Jaime told the oddest
story—the story of three men who were being shaved at a barbershop
during a bombardment and whose throats were cut simultaneously by the
three barbers, who had jumped when a bomb exploded. Talk aboiut
movie effects! A streetcar loaded with w6men carrying their morning
groceries had suddenly gone up in flames for no reason; the breath of the
conflagration stifled their cries in an enormous crackling; and the raging
hell had left a metallic skeleton behind, to stand in the square under the
shattered windows . . . “The cars had to be detoured.” People who had
failed to get their precious potatoes had walked slowly away, each toward
his own life . . . Again the sirens bellowed, the women crowding
around the shop door did not scatter, for fear of losing their turns and,
with them, their quota of lentils. For death is only a possibility, but
hunger is certain. When houses fell, people rushed into the ruins to pick
up wood—something to boil the pot with. Bombs of a new pattern, manu-
factured in Saxony by conscientious scientists, let loose such cyclones
that only the skeletons of big buildings remained standing, reigning over
islands of silence that were like volcanic craters suddenly extinguished.

No one survived under the ruins except, by a miracle, a little girl with
short black curls, whom her companions found unconscious under fifteen
feet of rubble in a sort of niche; their movements as they carried her
away were inconceivably gentle, they were in ecstasies because they
could hear her peaceful breathing. Perhaps she was only asleep? She
came out of her faint the moment the full sunlight fell on her eyelids. She
revived in the arms of half-naked, smoke-blackened beings whose eyes
rolled with insane laughter; down they went into the heart of the city,
into the banality of every day, from the summit of some unknown moun-
tain . . . The old women insisted that they had seen a decapitated
pigeon drop from the sky in front of the rescued girl; from the bird’s
pearl-gray neck jetted a copious red spray, like a red dew . . . “You
don’t mean to say you believe in pious ravings like that?”—You walked
for a long time, beyond human endurance, through the cold darkness of a
tunnel, skinning your fingers against sharp and slimy rock walls, stum-
bling over inert bodies which perhaps were corpses, perhaps exhausted
people who would soon be corpses, you thought you were escaping,
making your way up where it would be less dangerous, but there was not
a house left unscathed, not a corner in a cellar where you could live—
“Wait till someone dies,” people said, “you won’t have long to wait,
Jesus!” Always their Jesus!—The sea poured into a huge shelter exca-
vated in rock, fire descended from heaven into prisons, one morning the
morgue was filled with children in their Sunday clothes; the next, with
militiamen in blue tunics, all beardless, all looking strangely like grown
men; the day after that, with young mothers nursing dead babies; the
next, with old women whose hands were hardened by half a century
of toil—as if the Reaper enjoyed choosing his victims in successive
series . . . The placards kept proclaiming, THEY SHALL NOT GET
THROUGH—NO PASARAN!—but we, shall we get through the week?
Shall we get through the winter? Get through, get on, Only the dead
Sleep sound in bed. Hunger stalked millions, contending with them for
the chick-peas and rancid oil and condensed milk that the Quakers sent,
the soya chocolate sent by the Donets unions, hunger molded children’s
faces into the likenesses of little dying poets and murdered cherubs which
the Friends of New Spain exhibited in windows on the Boulevard Hauss-
mann in Paris. Refugees from the two Castilles, the Asturias, Galicia,
Euzkadi, Malaga, Aragon, even families of dwarf Hurdanos, stubbornly
survived day after day, contrary to all expectations, despite all the woes
of Spain, despite all conceivable woes. Belief in the miracle of a revolu-
tionary victory was still held by only a few hundred people, divided into

several ideological families: Marxists, Liberals, Syndicalists, Marxist
Liberals, Liberal Marxists, Left Socialists tending toward the extreme
Left—most of them shut up in the Model Prison, hungrily eating the
same beans, furiously raising their fists in the ritual salute, living in a
devastating state of expectation, between assassination, execution at
dawn, dysentery, escape, mutiny, insanity, the work of a single scientific
and proletarian reason revealed by history ...
“We’ll soon see them escaping across the Pyrenees—all the fine sol-
diers and ministers and politicians and diplomats ready to sell them-
selves, fake Stalinized Socialists, fake Socialists got up as Communists,
fake governmental Anarchists, fake brothers and pure totalitarians, fake
Republicans sold out beforehand to the dictators—we shall see them
making themselves scarce before the red flags—it will be a fine day of
revenge, comrades. Patience!”
A festive sun lit this universe, which was simultaneously being born
and ending, an ideally pure sea bathed it, and the Savoia bombers, arriv-
ing from Majorca to sow death in the lower districts of the port, hung
between heaven and earth like floating gulls, in cloudless sunlight. No
ammunition on the northern front; at Teruel, the federated divisions
melted away in useless battles, like fat on the fire, but they were men, and
men recruited by the C.N.T. in the name of Syndicalism and Anarchy,
they were men in thousands who, setting out for the blast furnaces with
some woman’s tense farewell in their hearts, would never come back—or
would come back on stretchers, in dirty noisy trains painted with red
crosses and emitting a horrible smell of dressings, pus, Chloroform, dis-
infectants, malignant fevers. Who wanted Teruel? Why Teruel? To de-
stroy the last workers’ divisions? Stefan Stern asked the question in his
letters to his comrades from abroad, Annie’s long fingers copied the
letters on the typewriter, and already Teruel meant nothing but the past,
the fighting moved toward the Ebro, crossed the Ebro, what could be the
meaning of the slaughters ordered by Lister or El Campesino in accord-
ance with some obscure plan? Why the premeditated retreat of the Karl
Marx Division, if not to save it for a final fratricide behind the lines, to
have it ready to shoot down the last men in the Lenin Division?—Stand-
ing behind Annie, behind Annie’s straight, strong neck, Stefan Stern
could follow his own thoughts better through Annie’s obedient mind,
through Annie’s fingers, the typewriter keys.
They sometimes talked with comrades from the clandestine Committee
until late into the night, by candlelight, drinking a crude dark-red wine
. . . President Negrin had delivered the gold reserve to the Russians, it

had been sent to Odessa; the Communists held Madrid, with Miaja in
supreme command (—just you watch: they’ll give in at the last min-
ute !), with Orlov and Gorev actually commanding, Cazorla in Security,
and teams of inquisitors, secret prisons, they held everything in a tight
net of intrigue, fear, blackmail, favor, discipline, devotion, faith. The
Government, which had taken refuge in the monastery of Montserrat, a
place surrounded by bristling rocks, could do nothing more. The Com-
munists were making a bad job of holding the city, their organizers were
already mortally hated.
“The day will soon come, I tell you, when they will get themselves torn
to pieces in the streets by the people. Their nests of spies will be burned
like monasteries. But I am very much afraid that it will be too late, after
the last defeat, during the final rout.”
Stefan answered:
“They live by the most enormous and most revolting lie history has
known since the cheat of Christianity—a lie which contains a great deal
of truth . . . They call their completed revolution to witness, and it’s
true that it is completed; they fly the red flag, and so they appeal to the
strongest and Tightest instinct of the masses; they catch men by their
faith, and then cheat them out of their faith, turn it into an instrument
of power. Their most terrible strength lies in the fact that they them-
selves believe they are continuing the Revolution, while they are serv-
ing a new counterrevolution, a counterrevolution such as has never
existed before, and set up in the very rooms where Lenin worked . . .
Think of it: a man with yellow eyes stole the Central Committee keys,
walked in and sat down at old Ilich’s desk, picked up the telephone,
and said: ‘Proletarians, it’s Me.’ And the same radio which the day
before repeated: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite,’ began shout-
ing: ‘Listen to us, obey us, we can do anything, we are the Revolu-
tion . . .’ Perhaps he believes it, but in that case he is half insane,
probably he only half believes it, because mediocrities reconcile their
conviction with the situations in which they find themselves. Behind him,
like a swarm of rats, rise the profiteers, the right-thinking cowards, the
frightened, the new ‘ins,’ the careerists, the would-be careerists, the
camp followers, those who praise the strong, those who are sold before-
hand to any and every power, the old gang that seeks out power because
power is the good old way of taking your neighbor’s work and the fruits
of his work, his wife if she’s pretty, his house if it’s comfortable. And the
whole crowd begins howling, in the most unanimous chorus in the world:
‘Long live our beefsteak, long life our Chief, we are the Revolution, it is

for us that the ragged armies won the victory, admire us, give us honors,
jobs, money, glory to Us, woe to those who oppose Us!’ What is the poor
people to do? What are we to do? . . . Marx and Bakunin lived in the
age of simple problems; they never had enemies behind them.”
Jaime said, “The worst thing is that people are fed up with everything.
We’ll swallow defeat, we’ll swallow anything, they think, if only it will
stop. They no longer know what the Republic is fighting for. They’re not
wrong. What Republic? For whom? They don’t know that history never
runs out of ideas, that the worst is always yet to come . . . They think
they have nothing more to lose . . . And there is a direct relation be-
tween starvation to the present degree and the darkening of people’s
minds; when bellies are empty the little spiritual flame flickers and goes
out ... By the way, I ran into an ugly looking German on my way
here, I can’t seem to place him. You haven’t noticed anything? The place
is still safe?”
Annie and Stefan looked at each other searchingly. “No, nothing . . .”
“You’re taking every precaution? You don’t go out?”
They counted up the number of comrades who knew the refuge: seven.
“Seven,” said Annie musingly, “is too many.”
They had omitted two, it was really nine. Absolutely trustworthy, but
nine. “We must think about sending you to Paris,” Jaime concluded.
“There’s where we need a good international secretary . . .” Jaime re-
adjusted his belt and the heavy pistol that hung from it, put on his mili-
tary cap, walked across the garden between them, stopped at the door:
“Get up an outline of a moderate answer for the English—they have a
way of their own of understanding Marxism—they see it through Posi-
tivism, Puritanism, Liberalism, ‘fair play,’ and whisky and soda . . .
And I think you had better sleep out on the hill tonight, in any case,
while I get some information from the Generalidad.” Jaime left an un-
spoken anxiety behind him in the weedy garden where the crickets raised
their faint metallic chirping. At thirty-five, Stefan Stem had survived the
collapse of several worlds: the bankruptcy of a proletariat reduced to
impotence in Germany, Thermidor in Russia, the fall of Socialist Vienna
under Catholic cannon, the dislocation of the Internationals, emigra-
tions, demoralizations, assassinations, Moscow trials . . . After us, if
we vanish without having had time to accomplish our task or merely to
bear witness, working-class consciousness will be blanked out for a
period of time that no one can calculate ... A man ends by concen-
trating a certain unique clarity in himself, a certain irreplaceable experi-
ence. It has taken generations, innumerable sacrifices and defeats, mass

movements, immense events, infinitely delicate accidents of his personal
destiny, to form him in twenty years—and he stands at the mercy of a
bullet fired by a brute. Stefan Stern felt that he was that man, and he
feared for himself, especially since a number of others had ceased to
exist. Two Executive Committees of the Party thrown into prison suc-
cessively, the members of the third, the best who could be found among
seven or eight thousand militants, thirty thousand registered members,
and sixty thousand sympathizers, were mediocrities full of good will, of
unintelligent faith, of confused ideas which were often no more than
elementary symbols . . . “Annie, listen to me. I am afraid of becoming
a coward when I think of all that I know, all that I understand, and that
they don’t know, don’t understand .-. .” Lacking time to think, he put
nothing clearly . . . “Listen, Annie. There are not more than fifty men
on earth who understand Einstein: If they were shot on the same night, it
would be all over for a century or two—or three, how do we know? A
whole vision of the universe would vanish into nothingness . . . Think
of it: Bolshevism raised millions of men above themselves, in Europe, in
Asia, for ten years. Now that the Russians have been shot, nobody can
any longer see from inside what was the thing by which all those men
lived, the thing which constituted their strength and their greatness; they
will become indecipherable and, after them, the world will fall below
them . . .” Annie did not know if he loved her; she would have been
willing to know that he did not love her, barely glimpsing love without
having time to pause there; she was indispensable to him in his work, she
brought a presence to his side, a proffered and reassuring body to his
arms. When she was there, he did not need to feel under his pillow for his
revolver in order to get to sleep.
The night that followed Jaime’s warning they spent on the hill, rolled
up in blankets among the dense shrubbery. The moon was shining. They
stayed awake late, in a strange intimacy, happy to find themselves sud-
denly brought infinitely close together by the limpid sky. Dawn banished
their fears, for the day broke bright and pure, restoring their customary
outlines to things, their familiar appearance to plants, stones, insects, the
distant mass of the city. As if blind danger, having brushed against them,
had withdrawn. “Jaime must be seeing things!” Stefan mocked. “How
can they have traced us here? It’s impossible to shadow anyone on the
r<jad without being seen . . . Let’s go in.” The house awaited them,
unchanged. They washed at the well; the water was icy. Then Annie took
the milk jug and went running up the path to the farm, springing like a
goat. At the farm Battista, who was a sympathizer, sold her bread, milk,

and cheeses, for friendship’s sake. She did her errand happily; it took
her about twenty minutes. Why, when she came hack, was the ancient
wooden door in the garden wall half open? As soon as she noticed it,
four paces away, the half-open door sent a little shock to her heart.
Stefan was not in the garden. At that hour he was usually shaving in
front of a mirror hung from the window latch, leaning over some open
magazine on his desk while he shaved. The mirror hung from the latch;
his shaving brush, white with suds, stood on the sill, with his razor beside
it; there was an open magazine on the table, the bath towel was draped
over the back of the chair . . . “Stefan,” Annie called, terrified.
“Stefan . . .” Nothing in the house answered her; but her whole being
was irremediably aware that the house was empty. She rushed into the
next room, where the bed was still made; to the well, through the garden
paths, to the hidden door that gave onto the hill. It was closed . . .
Annie whirled around, seized with a feeling of calamity, her eyes sunken,
staring wildly, trying to see everything quickly, quickly, relentlessly
quickly . . . “It’s impossible, it’s impossible . . .” A core of anguish
formed in her chest, she felt the violent beating of her heart, like troops
on the march, reeling heavily. “Oh, come back, Stefan! Stop playing with
me, Stefan, I’m afraid, Stefan, I’m going to cry . . .” It was senseless to
talk to him like that, she must act instantly, telephone . . . The tele-
phone gave no sound; the wires were cut. Silence fell on the empty house
in solid masses, like inconceivable clods of earth falling into an immense
grave. Annie stared stupidly at the suds-fill.ed shaving brush, the safety
razor fringed with tiny bits of hair and soap. Wouldn’t Stefan suddenly
come up behind her, put his arms around her, say, “I’m sorry if I’ve
made you cry . . .” It was madness to think it. Sunlight poured down
on the garden. Annie went up and down the paths, looking for impossible
footprints in the grassy gravel. Six feet from the entrance something
significant made her open her eyes wide: the end of a half-smoked cigar,
crowned with its ash. Busy .ants crossing the path made their way around
the unfamiliar obstacle. For months there had been no cigarettes in the
city, neither Jaime nor Stefan smoked, no one had smoked there for a
long time, the cigar revealed the presence of rich, powerful foreigners—
the Russians, my God! Annie set out at a run over the hot stony road to
the city. The road burned, the heated air vibrated around the rocks.
Several times she stopped to press both hands against her temples, where
the blood was throbbing too fast. Then she set off for the city again,
running over suddenly petrified lava.

Stefan began to recover consciousness a long minute before he opened
his eyes. His vague feeling of nightmare lessened, he was going to wake,
it would end; the feeling of nightmare returned, clearer and more over-
whelming; no, perhaps it wasn’t going to be the end, but a fresh begin-
ning of the blackness, the entrance into a tunnel that might have no end.
His shoulders rested on something hard, the curious feeling of well-being
that comes with wakening spread through his limbs, conquering a cramp
and a sense of fear. What had happened? Am I sick? Annie? Hey,
Annie! His eyelids lifted heavily, then he felt afraid to open his eyes
wide, he could not understand at first, because his whole being shrank
from the terrible necessity of understanding, he saw nevertheless, for a
fraction of a second, and, this time by an effort of will, closed his eyes
again.
A man with a yellowish complexion, shaven skull, prominent cheek-
bones, and receding temples was bending over him. Officer’s insignia on
his collar. A strange room, small and white, where other faces floated
here and there in a hard light. Terror caught Stefan by the throat, terror
like icy water flooded slowly to the ends of his limbs. Yet under that chill
he continued to feel that his being was bathed in a comforting warmth.
“They must have given me an injection of morphine.” His eyelids clung
together of themselves. To go back to sleep, to avoid this awakening, to
go back to sleep ...
“He is conscious again,” said the man with the receding temples. And
then he said, or else he thought it very distinctly: “He’s faking now.”
Stefan felt a muscular hand grasp his wrist and take his pulse. He
made an effort to collect himself; he must master the icy flood which
devastated his being. He succeeded, though the chill did not go away.
The memory of what had happened returned, with irremediable clear-
ness. About nine in the morning, when he was getting ready to shave,
Annie said: “I’m going for food—don’t open the door to anyone.” After
the garden door closed on Annie, he walked for a while through the over-
grown paths, feeling strangely depressed, finding no comfort in either
the flowers or the fresh morning air. The hill beyond was already begin-
ning to flame under the torrid sun. The white rooms were unfriendly;
Stefan checked his Browning, slipped the magazine in and out; he tried
to shake off his uneasiness, went to the typewriter, finally decided to
shave as usual. “Nerves, good God . . .” He was standing there wiping
his face and trying to read a magazine that lay open on the desk, when
the sand of the walk squeaked under an unfamiliar tread; the prear-
ranged whistle sounded too—but how had whoever it was got the garden

door open? Could it be Annie back already? But she wouldn’t whistle.
Stefan flung himself into the wild garden, pistol in hand. Someone Was
coming toward him, smiling—someone whom he did not recognize at
first—a comrade who sometimes came in Jaime’s place, but not often.
Stefan did not like his big, flat face—it was like the face of a powerful
ape. “Salud! I frightened you, did I? I have some urgent letters for
you . . .” Reassured, Stefan held out his hand. “Hello . . .” And that
had been the beginning of unconsciousness, of nightmare, of sleep; he
must have been hit on the head (an indistinct memory of a blow rose out
of the forgotten past, a dull pain awoke in his forehead). The man—
comrade, damn him!—had knocked him out, he had been dragged off,
kidnaped—yes, obviously by the Russians. The icy water in his guts.
Nausea. Annie. Annie, Annie! At that moment Stefan’s collapse was
complete.
“He is no longer unconscious,” said a calm voice, very close to him.
Stefan felt that they were looking at him, bending over him, with an
attentiveness that was almost violent. He thought that he must open his
eyes. “They gave me a shot in the thigh. Ninety to a hundred I’m done
for . . . Ninety to a hundred ... I may as well admit it anyway . . .”
Resolutely he opened his eyes.
He saw that he was lying on a couch in a comfortable ship’s cabin.
Light woodwork. Three attentive faces leaning toward him.
“Do you feel better?”
“I’m all right,” said Stefan. “Who are you?”
“You have been arrested by the Military Investigation Bureau. Do you
feel able to answer questions?”
So that was how these things were done. Stefan saw everything with a
sort of remote detachment . . . He did not answer; he studied the three
faces, his whole being tense in the effort to decipher them. One immedi-
ately dismissed itself as uninteresting and vague—doubtless the face of
the ship’s doctor, the man with the receding temples ... In any case, it
rose into the air, retreated in the direction of the wall, and vanished. A
breath of salt air refreshed the cabin. The two other faces seemed the
most real things in this half-reality. The younger was strong and square:
the hair slick with pomade, the mustache neatly trimmed, the features
strong, the velvety eyes unpleasantly insistent. An animal trainer, a brave
and vain man whom beating tigers had turned into a fear-ridden coward
... Or a white slaver ... It was an animally hostile face that Stefan
saw above the bright, striped tie. The other aroused his curiosity, then
woke a wild gleam of hope in him. Fifty-five, thin gray strands of hair

above a calm forehead, a mouth framed in bitter lines, tired eyelids,
dark, sad, almost suffering eyes . . . “Done for, absolutely done for”—
through all he was able to grasp and to think, Stefan heard the words
sounding dully somewhere inside him—“done for.” He moved his arms
and legs, glad to find that he was not fettered, slowly sat up, leaned
against the wall, crossed his legs, made an effort to smile, thought he had
succeeded, but only produced a strange contorted expression, held out his
hand toward the dangerous one: “Cigarette?”—“Yes,” said the other,
surprised, and began looking through his pockets . . . Then Stefan
asked for a light. He must be very, very calm, deathly calm. Deathly—it
was certainly the right word.
“Answer questions? After this illegal kidnaping? Without knowing
who you are—or knowing it only too well? Without guarantees of any
kind?”
The lion tamer’s massive head swayed slightly over the tie: wide,
yellow teeth appeared ... So the brute was trying to smile too. What
he muttered must have been intended to mean: “We have ways of making
you answer.” Of course. With a low-tension electric current, a human
being can be made to twist and writhe, sent into convulsions, driven
insane, of course, and I know it. But Stefan saw a desperate chance for
salvation.
“. . . But I have a lot to tell you. I’ve got you, too.”
The sad-eyed man spoke, in French:
“Go ahead. Do you want a glass of wine first? Something to eat?”
Stefan was staking his life. He would strike with the truth as his
weapon. Rush in among them—the half that were implacable beasts,
ready for anything, the half that were genuine revolutionaries perverted
by a blind faith in a power that kept no faith. The two men before him
seemed representative. To trouble at least one of them might mean salva-
tion. He would have liked to observe their reactions as he spoke, study
their faces, but his weakness made him strangely vague, affected his
vision, made him speak excitedly and jerkily. “I’ve got you. Do you by
any chance believe in the plots you invent? Do you think you are win-
ning victories, or saving something for your master in the midst of your
defeat? Do you know what you have done up to now?” He lost his
temper; he leaned toward them, his hands found the edge of the couch,
he had to grip it from time to time, with all his remaining strength, to
keep from falling over backward against the wall or forward onto the
blue carpet which heaved like the sea, whose blueness was beginning to
make him dizzy. “If you have only the shadow of a soul, I’ll get to it, I’ll

get hold of it, I’ll make it bleed, your dirty little soul. It will cry out
despite you that I am right!” He spoke fiercely, violently, and he was
persuasive, subtle, stubborn, without clearly knowing what he was say-
ing; it came out of him as blood spurts out of a deep wound (the image
flitted through his mind). “What have you done, you vermin, with your
faked trials? You have poisoned the most sacred possession of the pro-
letariat, the spring of its self-confidence, which no defeat could take from
us. When the Communards were stood up and shot in the old days, they
felt clean, they fell proudly; but now you have dirtied them one with
another, and with such dirt that the best of us cannot comprehend it . . .
In this country you have vitiated everything, corrupted everything, lost
everything. Look, look . . .” Stefan let go of the couch, the better to
show them the defeat which he held out in his two bloodless hands, and
he almost toppled over.
As he spoke, he watched the two men’s faces. The younger man’s
remained impassive. The face of the man who might be fifty-five sank
into a gray fog, disappeared, reappeared, deeply lined. Their hands as-
sumed different expressions. The younger man’s right hand, resting flat
on the mahogany of a small table, lay like a sleeping animal. The older
man’s hands, tightly clasped, perhaps expressed a tense expectancy.
Stefan stopped, and heard the silence. Disconnected from him, his
voice expired, leaving him extraordinarily alert in a ringing silence that
became an eternity ...
“Nothing that you have said,” calmly answered the big head with the
pomaded hair, “is of the slightest interest to us.”
The door opened and closed; someone helped the tottering Stefan to
lie down again. I am done for, done for.—On the bridge of the ship the
two men who had just been listening to Stefan were walking up and
down in silence. It was night, but not a dark night: a night that made
one feel the presence of the stars, of summer, of the nearby land with its
horde of living creatures and green things and flowers. The men stopped,
then turned and faced each other. The younger, who was the sturdier of
the two, had all the rigging of the ship behind him; the other, the one
who might be fifty-five, leaned against the bail; behind him were the
open sea, night, the sky.
“Comrade Yuvanov,” he said.
“Comrade Rudin?”
“I cannot understand why you had that young man kidnaped. Another
ugly business that will raise a fiendish row even in the Americas. He
impresses me as a romanticist of the worst sort, a muddlehead, a Trots-

kyist, half an Anarchist, et cetera . . . We’re pretty much at the end of
our rope here ... I advise you to have him taken ashore and set free as
soon as possible, perhaps with some appropriate little stage business,
before news of his disappearance gets around . . .”
“Impossible,” Yuvanov said curtly.
“Why impossible?”
In his anger, Kondratiev lowered his voice. His words almost whistled:
“Do you think I am going to let you get away with committing crimes
under my eyes? Don’t forget that I have a mandate from the Central
Committee.”
“The Trotskyist viper in whose favor you are interceding, Comrade
Rudin, is implicated in the plot which cost the life of our great comrade
Tulayev.”
Ten years earlier that sentence out of a newspaper, spoken with such
assurance, would have sent Kondratiev into a fit of laughter in which
surprise, scorn, anger, derision, and even fear would have mingled; he
would have slapped his thigh: Come now, you top everything—I can’t
help it, I admire you, your malicious idiocies really reach the-point of
genius! And indeed, somewhere inside him there was a chuckle, but
sober cowardice instantly stifled it.
“I am not interceding for anyone,” he said. “I merely gave you a piece
of political advice ...”
“I am a coward.” The ship pitched gently in the starry night. “I am
letting myself get bogged in their dirt . . The open sea was behind
him, he felt as if he were leaning against the emptiness of it, against its
immense freshness.
“Besides, Comrade Yuvanov, you have simply been taken in. I know
the Tulayev case backward and forward. There’s not a clue worth con-
sidering in the whole six thousand pages of the dossier, not a single one, I
tell you, that justifies indicting anybody . . .”
“With your permission, Comrade Rudin, I shall continue to be of a
different opinion.”
Yuvanov bowed and left. Kondratiev became aware of the night hori-
zon, where sea and sky mingled. Emptiness. From the emptiness there
issued a confusion which was not yet oppressive, which was even attrac-
tive. Clouds split the constellations. He went down the rope ladder into
the launch, which lay in the darkness against the Kuban’s rounded
hull . . . For a moment, suspended over the lapping water, he was
suddenly alone between the huge black shape of the freighter, the waves,
the almost invisible launch below: and he went down into the moving
shadows alone—calm, and wholly master of himself.

In the launch the hand, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian, gave him a mili-
tary salute. Acting upon a joy which he felt in his muscles, Kondratiev
waved him away from the controls and started the engine himself. “I
haven’t lost my hand for these things, brother. I’m an old sailor, you
know.”
“Yes, Comrade Chief.”
The light launch skittered along the surface like a creature with wings
—in fact, two great wings of white foam spread on either side. There are
great red lions with golden wings_ at the entrance to a footbridge over a
canal in Leningrad, there are . . . What else is there? There is the open
sea! Oh, to plunge out into it, irretrievably, into the open sea, the open
sea! The engine roared, the night, the sea, the emptiness, were intoxicat-
ing, it was good to dash straight ahead, not knowing where, joyously,
endlessly, good as a gallop over the steppe . . . Nights like this (but the
best ones were darker, because that meant less danger) long ago before
Sebastopol, when we mounted guard on our peanut-shell boats against
the squadrons of the Entente. And because we sang hymns of the World
Revolution softly to ourselves, the admirals of the powerful squadrons
were afraid of us. Past, past, it is all the past, and this moment, this
marvelous moment, will be the past in an instant.
Kondratiev speeded up, heading for the horizon. How wonderful to be
alive! He breathed deeply, he would have liked to shout for joy. A few
motions would carry him out of the cockpit, a funge would throw him
forward, and he would dive through the beating wing of foam, and then
—and then it would all be over in a few minutes, but they’d probably
shoot the little Ukrainian.
“Where do you hail from, lad?”
“From Mariupol, Comrade Chief . . . From a fishermen’s kol-
khoze . . .”
“Married?”
“Not yet, Comrade Chief. When I get back.”
Kondratiev swung the launch around and headed for the city. The
rock hill of Montjuich emerged from space, dense black against the trans-
parent black of the sky. Kondratiev thought of the city which lay under
that rock, a city torn by bombings, fallen asleep hungry, in danger,
betrayed, forsaken, three quarters lost already, a dead city still believing
that it would live. He had not seen it, he would not see it, he would never
know it. Conquered city, lost city, capital of defeated revolts, capital of a
world in birth, of a lost world, which we took, which is dropping from
our hands, is escaping us, rolling toward the tomb . . . Because we, we

who began the conquest, are at our last gasp, are empty, we have gone
mad with suspicion, gjone mad with power, we are madmen capable of
shooting ourselves down in the end—and that is what we are doing. Too
few minds able to think clearly, among the horde of Asiatics and Euro-
peans whom a glorious calamity led to accomplish the first Socialist
revolution. Lenin saw it from the very beginning, Lenin resisted so high
and dark a destiny with all his power. In school language, you would
have to put it that the working classes of the old world have not yet
reached maturity, whereas the crisis of the regime has begun; what has
happened.is that the classes which are attempting to go against the
stream of history are the most intelligent—ignobly intelligent—are the
best educated, those which put the most highly developed practical con-
sciousness in the service of the most profound lack of consciousness and
of the greatest egotism ... At this point in his meditation, Kondratiev
remembered Stefan Stern’s contorted face, seemed to see it borne along
on the great wings of foam . . . “Forgive me,” Kondratiev said to him
fraternally. “There is nothing more I can do for you, comrade. I under-
stand you very well, I was like you once, we were all like you . . . And I
am still like you, since I am certainly done for, like you . . .” He had
not expected his thought to arrive at this conclusion, it surprised him.
The phantom of Stefan, with his sweating forehead, his curly copper-red
hair, his grimacing mouth, the steady flame of his eyes, mingled as in
a dream with another phantom. And it was Bukharin, with his big, bulg-
ing forehead, his intelligent blue eyes, his ravaged face, still able to
smile, questioning himself before the microphone of the Supreme Tri-
bunal, a few days before his death—and Death was there already, almost
visible, close to him, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding the
pistol: it was not the Death Albrecht Diirer had seen and engraved, a
skeleton with a grinning skull, wrapped in the homespun and armed with
the scythe of the Middle Ages—no: it was death up-to-date, dressed as an
officer of the Special Section for Secret Operations, with the Order of
Lenin on his coat and his well-fed cheeks close-shaven . . . “For what
reason am I to die?” Bukharin asked himself aloud, then spoke of the
degeneration of the proletarian party . . . Kondratiev made an effort
to shake off the nightmare.
“Take the controls,” he called to the sailor.
Sitting in the stern, suddenly tired, his hands crossed on his knee, the
ghosts gone, he thought: Done for. The launch plowed toward the city
through that dark certainty. Done for like the city, the Revolution, the
republic, done for like so many comrades . . . What could be more

natural? A turn for each, a way for each . . . How had he managed not
to be aware of it until now, how had he lived in the presence of that hid-
den revelation without divining it, without understanding it, imagining
that he was doing things that were important or things that were unim-
portant, when actually there was nothing left to do? The launch came
alongside in the dark port amid a chaos of scattered stone. A swinging
lantern preceded Kondratiev into a low, ruined building, its roof full of
holes, where militiamen were playing dice by the light of a candle . . .
Part of a torn poster above them displayed emaciated women at last
victorious over poverty, on the threshold of the future promised them by
the C.N.T. ... At eleven o’clock Kondratiev had himself driven to a
government building for a fruitless conversation with the officials in
charge of munitions. Too much ammunition to yield, not enough to
win. A member of the government had arranged a midnight supper for
him. Kondratiev drank two large glasses of champagne with a minister
of the Catalan Generalidad. The wine, sprung from French soil and
impregnated with gentle and joyous sunlight, sent flakes of gold running
through their veins. Kondratiev touched one of the bottles and, without
in the least thinking what he was going to say, brought out:
“Why don’t you keep this wine for the wounde„d, sefior?”
The minister looked at him with a fixed half-smile. The Catalan states-
man was tall, thin, and stooped: sixty, elegantly dressed; a severe face
lighted by kind, shrewd eyes; a university professor. He shrugged his
shoulders:
“You are absolutely right . . . And it is one of the small things we
are now dying of ... Too little ammunition, too much injustice . . .”
Kondratiev opened the second bottle. Ladies and gentlemen in broad
plumed hats, hunting the stag to bay in the forests of another century,
looked down on him from the tapestries. Again the old Catalan uni-
versity professor clinked glasses with him. An intiihacy drew them
together, they were disarmed before each other, as if they had left their
hypocrisy in the cloakroom . . .
“We are beaten,” the minister said pleasantly. “My books will be
burned, my collections scattered, my school closed. If I escape, I shall be
simply a refugee in Chile or Panama, speaking a language that no one
will understand . . . With an insane wife, senor. There it is.” He did
not know how it happened, but the most incongruous, the most out-
rageous question escaped him:
“My dear sir, have you any news of Senor Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom
I esteem most highly?”

134 The Case of Comrade Tulayev
“No,” Kondratiev answered tonelessly.
“Is it true that . . . that he has been . . . that they . . . that . . .”
Kondratiev was so close to him that he saw the greenish streaks in the
old man’s dark pupils.
“. . . that he’s been shot?” Kondratiev supplied quietly. “We use the
word quite frequently, you know. Well, it is probably true, but I don’t
know for certain.”
An odd silence—voicelessness or discouragement—fell between them.
“He has sometimes drunk my champagne with me in this very room,”
the Catalan minister resumed confidentially.
“I shall probably end as he did,” Kondratiev answered, equally con-
fidentially and almost gaily.
Before the half-open gold and white door they shook hands warmly,
resuming their conventional roles but with more life than usual. One
said: “Have a good trip, querido senor.” The other, shifting from foot
to foot,' repeated his thanks for the warm reception he had been given.
They felt that their farewells were taking too long, yet they felt too that,
the moment their hands let go of each other, an invisible and fragile link,
like a golden thread, would break, never to be restored between them.
Taking the bull by the horns, Kondratiev caught the plane for Toulouse
the next morning. He must reach Moscow before the arrival of the secret
reports which, distorting his slightest gestures, would show him inter-
ceding for a Trotskyist-Terrorist—what madness it all was! He must get
there in time to propose the final measures which would turn the tide, a
substantial shipment of arms, a purge of the services, immediate cessation
of crimes behind the lines . . . He must arrange for an interview with
the Chief before the enormous, crushing mechanism of government traps
had been set in motion; he must see him face to face and stake his life
on the risky trumps of a comradeship begun on the cold Siberian plains
in 1906, of an absolute loyalty, of a controlled but cutting frankness, of
the truth—after all, there is such a thing as truth.
At five thousand feet, in a sky that was pure light, the most sun-
drenched catastrophe in history was no longer visible. The Civil War
vanished at just the altitude at which the bomber pilots prepared to
fight. The ground was like a map—so rich in color, so full of geological,
vegetable, marine, and human life that, looking at it, Kondratiev felt a
sort of intoxication. When at last, flying over the forest of Lithuania, an
undulating, dark mossiness which struck him as looking pre-human, he
saw the Soviet countryside, so different from all others because of the

uniform coloring of the vast kolkhoze fields, a definite anxiety pierced
him to the marrow. He pitied the thatched roofs, humble as old women,
assembled here and there in the hollows of almost black plowlands, be-
side gloomy rivers. (Doubtless at bottom he pitied himself.)
The situation in Spain must have appeared so serious that the Chief
received him on the day he arrived. Kondratiev waited only a few
moments in the spacious anteroom, from whose huge windows, which
flooded the room with white light, he could see a Moscow boulevard,
streetcars, a double row of trees, people, windows, roofs, a building in
course of demolition, the green domes of a spared church . . . “Go in,
please ...” A white room, bare as a cold sky, high-ceilinged, with no
decoration except a portrait of Vladimir Ilich, larger than life, wearing a
cap, his hands in his pockets, standing in the Kremlin courtyard. The
room was so huge that at first Kondratiev thought it empty; but behind
the table at the far end of it, in the whitest, most desert, most solitary
corner of that closed and naked solitude, someone rose, laid down a
fountain pen, emerged from emptiness; someone crossed the carpet,
which was the pale gray of shadowed snow, someone came to Kondratiev
holding out both hands, someone, He, the Chief, the comrade of earlier
days—was it real?
“Glad to see you, Ivan, how are you?”
Reality triumphed over the stunning effect of reality. Kondratiev
pressed the two hands which were held out to him, held them, and real
warm tears gathered under his eyelids, only to dry instantly, his throat
contracted. The thunderbolt of a great joy electrified him:
“And you, Yossif? . . . You . . . How glad I am to see you . . .
How young you still are ...”
The short graying hair still bristled vigorously; the broad, low, deeply
lined forehead, the small russet eyes, the stiff mustache, still held such
a compact charge of life that the flesh-and-blood man shouldered away
the image presented by his innumerable portraits. He smiled, and there
were smiling lines around his nose, under his eyes, he emanated a re-
assuring warmth—would he be as warm and kind as he looked? But
how was it that all the mysterious dramas, the trials, the terrible sen-
tences pondered in the Political Bureau had not exhausted him more?
“You too, Vania,” he said (yes—it was the old voice). “You’ve stood
up well, you haven’t aged much.”
They looked at each other, relaxed. How many years, old man! Prague,
London, Cracow years ago, that little room in Cracow where we argued
so fiercely all one evening about the expropriations in the Caucasus;

then we went and drank good beer in a Keller, with Romanesque vault-
ing, under a monastery . . . The processions in ’17, the congresses, the
Polish campaign, the hotels in the little towns we captured, where fleas
devoured our exhausted revolutionary councils. Their common mem-
ories came back in such a crowd that not one became dominant: all were
present, but silently and unobtrusively, re-creating a friendship beyond
expression, a friendship which had never known words. The Chief
reached into the pocket of his tunic for his pipe. Together they walked
across.the carpet, toward the tall bay windows at the farther end of the
room, through the whiteness ...
“Well, Yania, what’s the situation now, down there? Speak plainly,
you know me.”
“The situation,” Kondratiev began with a discouraged look and that
gesture of the hands which seems to let something drop, “the situ-
ation . . .”,
The Chief seemed not to have heard this beginning. His heat) bowed,
his fingers tamping tobacco into the bowl of his short pipe, he went on:
“You know, brother, veterans like you, members of the old Party, must
tell me the whole truth . . . the whole truth. Otherwise, who can I get
it from? I need it, I sometimes feel myself stifling. Everyone lies and lies
and lies! From top to bottom they all lie, it’s diabolical . . . Nauseating
... I live on the summit of an edifice of lies—do you know that? The
statistics lie, of course. They are the sum total of the stupidities of the
little officials at the base, the intrigues of the middle stratum of admin-
istrators, the imaginings, the servility, the sabotage, the immense stu-
pidity of our directing cadres . . . When they bring me those extracts
of mathematics, I sometimes have to hold myself down to keep from
saying, Cholera! The Plans lie, because nine times out of ten they are
based on false data; the Plan executives lie because they haven’t the
courage to say what they can do and what they can’t do; the most expert
economists lie because they live in the moon, they’re lunatics, I tell you!
And then I feel like asking people why, even if they say nothing, their
eyes lie. Do you know what I mean?”
Was he finding excuses for himself? He lighted his pipe furiously, put
his hands in his pockets, squared his head and shoulders, stood firmly on
the carpet in the harsh light. Kondratiev looked at him, studying him
sympathetically, yet with a certain basic suspicion, considering. Should
he risk it? He risked an unemphatic:
“Isn’t it a little your own fault?”

The Chief shook his head; the minute wrinkles of a warm smile
flickered about his nose, under his eyes ...
“I’d like to see you in my place, old man—yes, that’s something I’d like
to see. Old Russia is a swamp—the farther you go, the more the ground
gives, you sink in just when you least expect to . . . And then, the
human rubbish! ... To remake the hopeless human animal will take
centuries. I haven’t got centuries to work with, not I . . . Well, what’s
the latest news?”
“It’s execrable. Three fronts barely holding out—a push, and collapse
. . . They haven’t even dug trenches in front of essential positions . . .”
“Why?”
“Lack of spades, bread, plans, officers, discipline* ammunition,
of . .
“I see. Like the beginning of ’18 with us, eh?”
“Yes . . . On the surface . . . But without the Party, without Lenin”
—Kondratiev hesitated for a fraction of a second, but it must have been
i perceptible—“without you . . . And it’s not a beginning, it’s an end—
the end.”
“The experts have prophesied it—three to five weeks, don’t they say?”
“It can last a long time, like a man taking a long time to die. It can
be over tomorrow.”
“I need,” said the Chief, “to keep the resistance going for a few
weeks.”
Kondratiev did not answer. He thought: “That is cruel. What’s the
use?”
The Chief seemed to divine his thought:
“We are certainly worth that,” he resumed. “And now: Our Sormovo
tanks?”
“Nothing to boast about. Armor plate passable . . .” Kondratiev re-
membered that the builders had been shot for sabotage, and felt a
momentary embarrassment. “Motors inadequate. Breakdowns in combat
as high as 35 per cent . .
“Is that in your written report?”
“Yes.” Embarrassment. Kondratiev was thinking that he had laid the
foundation for another trial, that his “35 per cent” would burn in
phosphorescent characters in brains exhausted by nightlong interroga-
tions. He resumed:
“In point of defectiveness, the human materiel is the worst . .
“So I’ve been told. What is your explanation?”

“Perfectly simple. We fought, you and I, under other conditions. The
machine pulverizes man. You know I am not a coward. Well, I wanted
to see—I got into one of those machines, a No. 4, with three first-class
men, a Catalan Anarchist . . .”
“. . . a Trotskyist, of course . . ”
The Chief had spoken with a smile, 0ut of a cloud of smoke; his russet
eyes twinkled through almost closed fids.
“Very likely—I didn’t have time to g0 into it . . . You wouldn’t have
either . . . Two olive-skinned peasants, Andalusians, wonderful marks-
men, like our Siberians or Letts used to be . . . Well, there we are, roll-
ing along an excellent road, I try but can’t imagine what it would be like
if we were on bad terrain . . . Thete are four of us inside there, drip-
ping sweat from head to foot, stifling, in the darkness, the noise, the
stench of gasoline, we want to vomit, we’re cut off from the world, if
only it were over! There was panic in our guts, we weren’t fighters any
longer, we were poor half-crazed beast? squeezed together in a black,
suffocating box . . . Instead of feeling protected and powerful, you
feel reduced to nothing . . .”
“The remedy?”
“Better planned machines, special units, trained units. Just what we
have not had in Spain.”
“Our planes?”
“Good, except for the old models ... It was a mistake to unload
so many old models on them . . .” The Chief gave a decided nod of
approval. “Our B 104 is inferior to the Messerschmitt, outclassed in
speed.”
“The maker was sabotaging.”
Kondratiev hesitated before answering, for he had thought a great deal
on the subject, convinced that the disappearance of the Aviation Experi-
ment Center’s best engineers had unquestionably resulted in poorer
quality products.
“Perhaps not . . . Perhaps it is only that German technique is still
superior . . .”
The Chief said:
“He was sabotaging. It has been proved. He confessed it.”
The word confessed produced a distinct feeling of discomfort between
them. The Chief felt it so clearly that he turned away, went to the table
for a map of the Spanish fronts, and began asking detailed questions
which could not really have been of any significance to him. At the point
which things had reached, what could it matter to him whether Madrid’s

University City was more or less well supplied with artillery? On the
other hand, he did not discuss the shipping of the gold reserves, prob-
ably having been already informed of it by special messenger. Kon-
dratiev passed over the subject. The Chief made no reference to the
changes in personnel suggested in Kondratiev’s report . . . On a clock
in the faraway bay window, Kondratiev read that the audience had al-
ready lasted more than an hour. The Chief walked up and down, he had
tea brought, answered a secretary, “Not until I call you . . .” What was
he expecting? Kondratiev became tensely expectant too. The Chief, his
hands in his pockets, took him to the bay window from which there was
a view of the roofs of Moscow. There was only a pane of glass between
them and the city, the pale sky.
“And here at home, in this magnificent and heart-rending Moscow,
what is not going right, do you think? What isn’t jelling? Eh?”
“But you just said it, brother. Everyone lies and lies and lies. Servility,
in short. Whence, a lack of oxygen. How build Socialism without
oxygen?”
“Hmm . . . And is that all, in your opinion?”
Kondratiev saw himself driven to the wall. Should he speak? Should
he risk it? Should he wriggle out of it like a coward? The tension in him
prevented him from reading the Chief’s face clearly, though it was only
two feet away. Despite himself he was very direct, and therefore very
clumsy. In a voice that was emphatic though he tried to make it casual:
“The older generation is getting scarce . . .”
The Chief put aside the outrageous allusion, pretending not to notice
it:
“On the other hand, the younger generation is rising. Energetic, prac-
tical, American style . . . It’s time the older generation had a rest . . .”
“May they rest with the saints”—the words of the Chant for the Dead
in the liturgy . . .
Tensely, Kondratiev changed his tack:
“Yes, the younger generation, of course . . . Our youth is our
pride . . .” (“My voice rings false, now I’m lying too . . .”)
The Chief smiled curiously, as if he were laughing at someone who
was not present. And then, in the most natural tone:
“Do you think I have many faults, Ivan?”
They were alone in the harsh white light, with the whole city before
them, though not a sound from it reached them. In a sort of spacious
courtyard below and some distance away, between a squat church with
dilapidated towers and a little red-brick wall, Georgian horsemen were

at saber practice, galloping from one end of the courtyard to the other;
about halfway they stooped almost to the ground to impale a piece of
white cloth on their sabers . . .
“It is not for me to judge you,” said Kondratiev uncomfortably. “You
are the Party.” He observed that the phrase was well received. “Me, I’m
only an old militant”—with a sadness that had a shade of irony—“one
of those who need a rest . . .”
The Chief waited like an impartial judge or an indifferent criminal.
Impersonal, as real as things.
“I think,” said Kondratiev, “that you were wrong in ‘liquidating’
Nicolai Ivanovich.”
Liquidating: the old word that, out of both shame and cynicism, was
used under the Red terror for “execute.” The Chief took it without flinch-
ing, his face stone.
“He was a traitor. He admitted it. Perhaps you don’t believe it?”
Silence. Whiteness.
“It is hard to believe.”	*
The Chief twisted his face into a mocking smile. His shoulders
hunched massively, his brow darkened, his voice became thick.
“Certainly . . . We have had too many traitors . . . conscious or
unconscious ... no time to go into the psychology of it . . . I’m no
novelist.” A pause. “I’ll wipe out every one of them, tirelessly, merci-
lessly, down even to the least of the least ... It is hard, but it must be
. . . Every one of them . . . There is the country, the future. I do what
must be done. Like a machine.”
Nothing to answer?—or to cry out? Kondratiev was on the point of
crying out. But the Chief did not give him time. He returned to a con-
versational tone:
“And in Spain—are the Trotskyists still intriguing?”
“Not to the extent that some fools insist. By the way, I want to talk
to you about a matter that is of no great importance but which may
have repercussions . . . Our people are doing some stupid and danger-
ous things . . .”
In a few sentences Kondratiev set forth the case of Stefan Stern. He
tried to divine whether the Chief had already been told of it. Natural and
impenetrable, the Chief listened attentively, made a note of the name,
Stefan Stern, as if it were new to him. Was it really new to him?
“Right—I’ll look into it . . . But about the Tulayev case, you are
wrong. It was a plot.”
“Ah!”

“Perhaps, after all, it was a plot . . Kondratiev’s mind gave a
halting assent . . . “How accommodating I’m being—the devil take
me!”
“May I ask a question, Yossif ?”
“Of course.”
The Chief’s russet eyes still had their friendly look.
“Is the Political Bureau dissatisfied with me?”
That really meant: “Are you dissatisfied with me, now that I have
spoken to you freely?”
“What answer can I give you?” said the Chief slowly. “I do not know.
The course of events is unsatisfactory, there is no doubt of that—but
there was not much you could do about it. You were in Barcelona only
a few days, so your responsibility does not extend far . . . When every-
thing is going to the dogs, we have no one to congratulate, eh? Ha-ha.”
He gave a little guttural laugh, which broke off abruptly.
“And now what shall we do with you? What work do you want?
Would you like to go to China? We have fine little armies there, a trifle
infected with certain diseases . . He gave himself time to think. “But
probably you’ve had enough of war?”
“I’ve had enough of it, brother. No, thank you—so far as China is
concerned, spare me that, please. Always blood, blood—I am sick of
it . . .”
Precisely the words he ought not to have spoken, the words that had
been in his throat since the first minute of their meeting, the weightiest
words in their secret dialogue.
“I see,” said the Chief, and suddenly the bright daylight became
sinister. “Well, what then? A job in production? In the diplomatic
corps? I’ll think about it.”
They crossed the carpet diagonally. Sleepwalkers. The Chief took Ivan
Kondratiev’s hand.
“I have enjoyed seeing you again, Ivan.”
Sincere. That spark deep in the eyes, that concentrated face—the aging
of a strong man living without trust, without happiness, without human
contacts, in a laboratory solitude . . . He went on:
“Take a rest, old man. Have yourself looked after. At our age, after
our lives, it has to be done. You’re right, the older generation is getting
scarce.”
“Do you remember when we hunted wild ducks on the tundra?”
“Everything, everything, old man, I remember everything. Go and take
a rest in the Caucasus. But I’ll give you a piece of advice for down there:

let the sanatoriums look out for themselves, and you go climb as many
mountain trails as you can. That’s what I’d like to do myself.”
Here there began, within them and between them, a secret dialogue,
which they both followed by divination, distinctly: “Why don’t you go?”
Kondratiev suggested. “It would do you so much good, brother.”—
“Tempting, those out-of-the-way trails,” mocked the Chief. “So I’ll be
found one day with my head bashed in? I’m not such a fool as that—I’m
still needed . . .”—“I pity you, Yossif, you are the most threatened, the
most captive of us all . . .”—“I don’t want to be pitied. I forbid you to
pity me. You are nothing, I am the Chief.” They spoke none of these
words: they heard them, uttered them, only in a double tete-a-tete—
together corporeally and also together, incorporeally, one within the
other.
“Good-by.”
“Good-by.”
Halfway across the huge anteroom Kondratiev encountered a short
man with shell-rimmed glasses, a thick, curving nose, and a heavy brief
case which almost dragged along the carpet: the new Prosecutor of the
Supreme Tribunal, Rachevsky. He was going in the opposite direction.
They exchanged reticent greetings.

6 • Every Man Has His Own Way
of Drowning
For six months a dozen officials had been turning over
the one hundred and fifty selected dossiers of the Tulayev case. Fleisch-
man and Zvyeryeva, as “examiners appointed to follow the most serious
cases,” followed this one from hour to hour under the immediate super-
vision of Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev. Fleischman and Zvyeryeva,
both formerly Chekists—that is, in the old heroic days—should have
been under suspicion; they knew it, and hence they could be counted
on to show the utmost zeal. The case ramified in every direction, linked
itself to hundreds of others, mingled with them, disappeared in them,
re-emerged like a dangerous little blue flame from under fire-blackened
ruins. The examiners herded along a motley crowd of prisoners, all ex-
hausted, all desperate, all despairing, all innocent in the old legal mean-
ing of the word, all suspect and guilty in many ways; but it was in vain
that the examiners herded them along, the examiners always ended up in
some fantastic impasse. Common sense suggested dismissing the confes-
sions of half a dozen lunatics who all told how they had murdered Com-
rade Tulayev. An American tourist, a woman who was almost beautiful

and completely mad, though her self-control was an impenetrable
weapon, declared: “I know nothing about politics, I hate Trotsky, I
am a Terrorist. Since childhood I have dreamed of being a Terrorist. I
came to Moscow to become Comrade Tulayev’s mistress and kill him.
He was so jealous; he adored me. I should like to die for the U.S.S.R. I
believe that the love of the people must be spurred by overwhelming
emotions ... I killed Comrade Tulayev, whom I loved more than my
life, to avert the danger that threatened the Chief ... I can’t sleep
for remorse—look at my eyes. I acted from love ... I am happy to
have accomplished my mission on earth ... If I were free, I’d like to
write my reminiscences for the papers . . . Shoot me! Shoot me!”
During her periods of depression she sent her consul long messages
(which of course were not transmitted), and she wrote to the examining
judge: “You cannot shoot me because I am an American.”—“Drunken
trollop,” Gordeyev cursed, when he had spent three hours studying her
case. Wasn’t she simulating insanity? Hadn’t she actually thought about
committing a murder beforehand? Didn’t her declarations contain some
echo of plans ripened by others? What was to be done with her, mad as
she was? An embassy was taking an interest in her, news agencies on
the other side of the globe distributed pictures of her, described the
tortures which they claimed the examiners were inflicting on her . . .
Psychiatrists in uniform, still faithful to the rite of question-and-answer,
applied suggestion, hypnotism, and psychoanalysis in turn, to persuade
her to admit her innocence. She exhausted their patience. “Well then,”
Fleischman suggested, “at least persuade her that she killed somebody
else, anybody . . . Have you no imagination! Show her photographs
of murder victims, give her details of sadistic attacks, and let her go
to the devil! The witch!” But in her waking dream she would only con-
sent to murder prominent people. Fleischman hated her, hated her voice,
her accent, her yellowish-pink complexion ... A young doctor assigned
to the investigation spent hours with the madwoman, stroking her hands
and knees while he made her repeat: “I am innocent, I am inno-
cent . . .” She repeated it perhaps two hundred times, gave a beatific
smile, and said softly: “How sweet you are . . . I’ve known for a long
time that you love me . . . But it was I, I, I who killed Comrade Tula-
yev ... He loved me as you do.” The same evening the young doctor
made his report to Fleischman. A sort of bewilderment clouded his eyes
and troubled his speech. “Are you quite sure,” he asked at the end of the
interview, with a strange seriousness, “that she has no connection with
the case?” Fleischman angrily crushed out his cigarette. “Go take a

shower, my boy—right away!” The young doctor was sent to rest his
nerves in the forests of northern Pechora. Five sets of detailed con-
fessions were thus classed as products of insanity—yet it took cour-
age to dismiss them. Gordeyev sent the suspects back to the doctors. The
doctors went mad in their turn ... So much the worse for them! “To
the insane asylum under a strong guard,” Fleischman proposed with his
soft smile. Zvyeryeva smoothed her dyed hair with her slim fingers, and
answered: “I consider them extremely dangerous . . . Antisocial
mania . . .” Face massages, creams, and make-up kept her face an
irritating, ageless mask of blurred features and indistinct wrinkles. The
hard, restless look in her eyes aroused uneasiness. It was she who told
Fleischman that Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev expected them in
his office at one-thirty for an important conference. She added, in a sig-
nificant tone: “Prosecutor Rachevsky will be there. He has had an inter-
view with the Boss ...”
“Then the crisis will soon be upon us,” Fleischman thought.
They conferred in Gordeyev’s office on the thirteenth floor of a tower
that overlooks the principal streets of the city. Fleischman, having taken
a drink of brandy, felt well. Leaning toward the window, he watched the
human swarm in the street below, the line of parked cars in front of the
People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, peered at the show windows
of the bookstores and co-operatives. To wander around down there for
a while, go into an antique shop, stare into windows, follow a pretty girl
—what a joy that would be! A hell of a life! Even when you manage not
to think of the danger. Stout, decorated, with flabby jowls, tired eyelids,
yellow blotches under his eyes, thinning hair, he had lately begun to age
quite obviously. He thought: “I shall be absolutely impotent in another
year or two . . .” no doubt because his eye had been caught by a group
of students, with their caps and books, who were roughhousing cheer-
fully as they crossed the street between a black prison van, a shining
diplomatic Fiat, and a green bus.
Meanwhile, Prosecutor Rachevsky’s eyes had fallen on a small land-
scape by Levitan which hung on the wall. A blue Ukrainian night, a
thatched roof, the ashy curve of a road, magic of the plains under dim
stars. Without looking away from that road into the unreal, he said:
“Comrades, I think it is time we produced results.”
“Obviously,” Gordeyev thought, warily. “It’s high time. But what
results, may I ask?” Gordeyev believed that he knew very well what
results, but he refrained from coming to a conclusion. The slightest
error in such a matter is like a misstep by a man putting in rivets on a

skyscraper, three hundred feet above the sidewalk. Falling knows no
mercy. Impossible to get a definite directive. They left him to his own
devices, encouraged him, spied on him, and reserved the right to reward
him or disown him. What Prosecutor Rachevsky had said made it likely
that there would be a revelation, since he had been closeted with the Boss.
Scales burst out at the other end of the apartment: Ninelle beginning her
piano lesson.
“I am of the same opinion, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” said Gordeyev with
a broad, sugary smile.
Fleischman shrugged his shoulders.
“Certainly, let’s get it over with. This preliminary investigation can’t
go on forever. But what would be the proper way to close it?” (He
looked straight at Rachevsky.) “The case is definitely political . .
Treacherously, or nonchalantly, he made a little pause before he went
on:
“. . . though the crime, to tell the truth . .
To tell the truth, what? Fleischman turned to the window without
finishing his sentence and stood there, intolerably fat, round-shouldered,
his chin overflowing the collar of his tunic. Zvyeryeva, who never risked
herself first, said starchily:
“You didn’t finish your sentence, I believe?”
“On the contrary.”
Among the students grouped at the edge of the sidewalk, an amazingly
blond and beautiful girl was explaining something, gesturing vividly
with both hands; at that distance her fingers seemed to hold the light,
and she threw her head back a little to laugh more freely. Distant as a
star, inaccessible and real as a star, her head did not feel Fleischman’s
dull eyes staring at it. The Deputy High Commissar for Security, the
Prosecutor of the Supreme Tribunal, the Investigatress appointed to the
most serious cases, waited for Fleischman to express his opinion. Aware
of their expectation, he resumed firmly:
“The preliminary investigation must be closed.”
Turning until he almost faced them, he looked at the three, one after
the other, giving each a pleasant nod, as if he had just said something
most important—three repugnant, corrupt faces, composed of some hor-
rible gelatinous substance . . . And I am ugly too, my complexion is
greenish, I have a bestial jowl and puffy eyelids . . . We ought to be
put out of the way . . . And now you are in a fine fix, my dear com-
rades, because that is all I intend to say. It’s up to you to motivate our
decision or to put it off, I’ve taken enough responsibility as it is . . .

The students had gone, and so had the prison van and the bus . . .
Other pedestrians passed, a baby carriage maneuvered across the street,
under the heavy snouts of trucks. Of all that crowd in the street, not one
knows the name of Tulayev . . . In this city, in this country of 170,-
000,000 inhabitants, not a single person really remembers Tulayev. Of
the big, genial man with his mustaches, his clumsiness, his easy familiar-
ity, his trite eloquence, his occasional drinking bouts, his sordid loyalty
to the Party, who was aging and growing ugly like all the rest of us,
nothing remained but a handful of ashes in an urn and an uncordial and
unvalued memory in the minds of a few exhausted and half-mad inquis-
itors. The only living beings for whom he had really been a man, the
women whom, after an evening of drinking, he undressed to an accom-
paniment of throaty laughter, stammered endearments, obscene jokes,
and bursts of taurine violence, would perhaps for a while preserve secret
images of him completely different from the portraits of him which still
hung in some offices because no one had thought to take them down.
But did they know his name? Both memories and portraits would soon
vanish . . . Nothing in the dossier, not a clue worth considering, noth-
ing to implicate anyone. Tulayev had simply disappeared, carried off by
the wind, the snow, the darkness, the bracing cold of a night of hard
frost.
“Close the preliminary investigation?” said Zvyeryeva interrogatively.
The peculiar sensitivity of the official was always wide awake in her.
Intuitions that were almost infallible gave her a presentiment of plans
which were silently and doubtfully being matured in high places. With
her chin in her hand, her shoulders hunched, her waved hair, her eyes
that were gimlets, or rather less like gimlets than augurs, she was an
incarnate question. Fleischman yawned behind his hand. Gordeyev, to
cover his embarrassment, got brandy from a cupboard and began setting
out small glasses. “Martel or Armenian?” Prosecutor Rachevsky, realiz-
ing that no one would say anything more before he spoke, began:
“This case, which is indeed purely political, can have only a political
solution . . . The results of the preliminary investigation are, in them-
selves, of only secondary interest to us . . . According to the crim-
inologists of the old school, with whom in this case we are in agreement,
the quid prodest ...”
“Quite right,” said Zvyeryeva.
Prosecutor Rachevsky’s face appeared to be sculptured in two oppo-
site curves out of a resistant and unhealthy flesh. Concave in general
effect from the bulging forehead to the gray bulbous chin, a curving nose,

swollen at the base, with dark hairy nostrils, made it a strong face. In
color it was sanguine, with blotchy areas of violet. Large chestnut-
brown eyes, like opaque marbles, gave it a dark expression. He had
emerged but a few years since, during a terrible period, from the depths
of a dismal destiny made up of obscure, difficult, and dangerous tasks,
accomplished for no reward, with the plodding stubbornness of a beast
of burden. Suddenly raised to greatness, he had stopped indulging in
drinking bouts, for fear of talking too much. Because there had been
times when, in the soothing warmth of a good drunk, he had said of
himself: “I am a work horse ... I pull the old harrow of justice. All I
know is my furrow, ha-ha! I hear Gee, and I pull. A click of the tongue,
and I Stop. I am the beast of revolutionary duty, I am; get on, old beast
—ha-ha!” Toward the friends who had heard him say such things, he
felt an undying resentment afterwards. His rise dated from a sabotage
trial—terrorism, treason—staged at Tashkent against men of the local
government, his masters the day before. Without even an explicit order,
he built up a complicated structure of false hypotheses and bits’ of fact,
spread a net of tortuous dialectic over the laboriously worked-up declara-
tions of a score of defendants, took it upon himself to dictate the impla-
cable sentence which his superiors hesitated to communicate to him,
delayed the transmission of the petitions for reprieve . . . Then he went
to the Grand Theater and spoke before three thousand workers. This
episode decided his advancement. He wrapped perfectly clear thinking in
halting phrases, which groped and tumbled over each other. Only his
parentheses were more or less grammatical. Thus his voice shed a sort of
fog over the minds of his hearers, yet through the fog certain threatening
outlines became visible, always the same. “You argue,” a defendant said
to him one day, “like a hypocritical bandit who talks to you with pacific
gestures and all the time you see that he has a knife up his sleeve . . .”—
“I scorn your insinuations,” the prosecutor answered calmly. “And the
whole room can see that my sleeves are tight-fitting.” In private conversa-
tion he lacked assurance. He found Zvyeryeva’s encouragement so timely
that he acknowledged it with a half-smile: the three caught a glimpse of
his teeth, which were yellow and irregularly set. He discoursed:
“There is no occasion for me to set forth the theory of plots to you,
comrades. The word, in law, can have either a restricted or a more
general meaning, and, I will add, yet another, which accords much better
with our revolutionary law, which we have restored to its original purity
by rescuing it from the pernicious influence of the enemies of the people
who had succeeded, here in Russia, in distorting its meaning to the ex-

tent of subjugating it to the outworn formulas of bourgeois law which
rests upon a static establishment of fact whence it proceeds to seek out a
formal guilt considered as effectual by virtue of pre-established defini-
tions . .
The stream of words flowed for nearly an hour. Fleischman looked
into the street, and felt disgust rising in him. What creatures without an
ounce of talent make a career nowadays! Zvyeryeva blinked her eyes,
pleased as a cat in the sun. Gordeyev mentally translated the discourse
from the agitator’s terms in which it was delivered into more intelligible
ones, because somewhere in it, like a weasel crouched in a thicket, lay the
Chiefs directive. “In short: we have lived at the heart of an immense and
infinitely ramified plot, which we have succeeded in liquidating. Three
fourths of the leaders of the previous periods of the revolution had ended
by becoming corrupt; they had sold themselves to the enemy, or if not, it
was the same thing, in the objective meaning of the word. Causes: the
inner contradictions of the regime, the desire for power, pressure from
surrounding capitalism, intrigues of foreign agents, the demoniac ac-
tivity of Judas-Trotsky. The high foresight, the truly inspired foresight of
the Chief has made it possible for us to thwart the machinations of in-
numerable enemies of the people who frequently held in their hands the
levers which control the State. Henceforth no one must be considered
above suspicion except for the entirely new men whom history and the
genius of the Chief have summoned up for the salvation of the coun-
try .. . In three years, the battle for public security has been won, the
conspiracy has been reduced to impotence; but in the prisons, in the
concentration camps, in the street, men yet survive who are our last in-
ternal enemies, and the most dangerous because they are the last, even if
they have done nothing, even if they are innocent according to formal
law. Their defeat has taught them a more profound hatred and dissimu-
lation, so dangerous that they are even capable of taking refuge in a
temporary inactivity. Juridically innocent, they may have a feeling of
impunity, believe that they are safe from the sword of justice. They prowl
around us like hungry jackals at twilight, they are sometimes among us,
hardly betray themselves by a look. By them and through them, hydra-
headed conspiracy may be born anew. You know the news from the rural
areas, with what we are faced in regard to harvests, there have been
troubles in the Middle Volga, a recrudescence of banditism in Tadjiki-
stan, a number of political crimes in Azerbaijan and in Georgia! Strange
incidents have taken place in Mongolia in the field of religion; the presi-
dent of the Jewish republic was a traitor, you know the role that Trot-

skyism has played in Spain; a conspiracy against the Chief’s life was
hatched in the suburbs of Barcelona, we have received an astounding
dossier on the case! Our frontiers are threatened, we are perfectly aware
of the deals between Berlin and Warsaw; the Japanese are concentrating
troops in Jehol, they are building new forts in Korea, their agents have
just maneuvered a breakdown of turbines at Krasnoyarsk . .
The prosecutor drank another brandy. Zvyeryeva said enthusiastically:
“Ignatii Ignatiyevich, you have the material for a tremendous indict-
ment!”
The prosecutor thanked her hy dropping his eyelids. “Let us not,
furthermore, conceal from ourselves that the preceding great trials were
insufficiently prepared in certain respects, and hence have left the Party’s
cadres relatively disoriented. The conscience of the Party turns to us,
asking for explanations which we can only furnish during the sessions of
a trial which will be, as it were, complementary . . .”
“Complementary,” Zvyeryeva repeated. “That is exactly what I was
thinking.”
She beamed discreetly. The burden of doubt fell from Gordeyev’s
shoulders. Phew! “I agree with you entirely, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” he
said loudly. “Permit me to leave you for a moment; my little girl . . .”
He hurried down the white hall, because Ninelle’s scales had stopped and
because he needed to take the precaution of a moment’s solitude. He took
Ninelle’s bony buttocks between his flat hot hands. “Well, darling, did
your lesson go all right?” Sometimes he looked at the dark-haired child,
with her green-flecked eyes, as he was no longer capable of looking at
anyone else in the world. The music mistress was putting away her music,
there was the snap of a brief case. “And now,” Gordeyev thought, “the
traps are in the list of indictments . . . We’ll have to dig up at least one
genuine ex-Trotskyist, one genuine spy . . . Dangerous business . . .”
“Papa,” said Ninelle uncomfortably, “you were so sweet and now you
look angry ...”
“Business, darling.”
He kissed her on both cheeks, quickly, hut felt none of the happiness
the pure caress should have give^ him—the ghosts of too many tortured
men were astir in him, though he was not conscious of it. He returned
to the conference. Fleischman sighed strangely: “Music . . . what
music ...”
“What do you mean?” Zvyeryeva asked. Fleischman bent his pale
forehead a little, thus spreading even more of his double chin over his

tunic collar, and became stickily amiable: “It’s so long since I’ve heard
any music . . . Don’t you ever long for it?”
Zvyeryeva murmured something and looked bland.
“The list of indictments,” said Gordeyev . . .
No one answered him.
“The list of indictments,” repeated Prosecutor Rachevsky, firmly
resolved to say no more.
Imagine a hippopotamus at the zoo suddenly sliding into his little
concrete pool . . . Fleischman had the pleasant sensation of producing
precisely the same effect as he brought out: “It is for you, my esteemed
comrades, to propose it . . .” Everyone has his responsibilities, so
assume yours!
Erchov was gallingly aware that his preparation for the shock had
been complete. Nothing surprised him, except not recognizing the place
where he was taken. “I had so many prisons to supervise, all more or less
secret!” The Ex-High Commissar made the excuse to soothe his con-
science. Yet this particular prison—new, modern, built of concrete, and
located somewhere underground—should not have escaped his attention.
The effort of memory which he made to recover some mention of it in the
reports of the Prisons department or the Building department was un-
availing. “Perhaps it was under the sole jurisdiction of the Political
Bureau?” He shrugged and abandoned the problem. The heating was
adequate, the lighting soft. Cot, bedclothes, pillows, a swivel chair. Noth-
ing else, nothing.—Even the fate of his wife troubled Erchov less than he
had expected. “We are all soldiers . . .” That meant: “Our wives must
expect to become widows . . .” Essentially, the transposition of another
idea, which it was harder to admit: “A dying soldier doesn’t feel sorry
for his wife . . .” Little elementary formulas like that satisfied his mind;
there was nothing to be done about them, as there was nothing to be done
about orders. He waited, going through his setting-up exercises every
morning. He asked for a daily shower and was granted it. He walked
endlessly between the door and the window, his head bowed, frowning.
All his reflections ended in a single word, a word that forced itself on him
from outside, despite his soundest arguments: “Shot.” Suddenly he felt
sorry for himself, almost fainted. “Shot.” He recovered without much
effort, though he turned pale (but he could not see that he was pale):
“Well, we’re all soldiers, aren’t we? . . His male body, well rested,
demanded a woman, and he remembered Valia with anguish. But was it

really Valia he remembered, or was it his own bodily life, now over? If
the burning cigarette butt a man crushes underfoot could feel and think,
it would experience the same anguish. What could he do to get it over
with sooner?
Weeks passed, during which he was not allowed to see a glimpse of the
sky. Then came interrogation after interrogation—conducted in the ad-
joining cell, so that a walk of thirty steps along a subterranean corridor
gave him no bearings on his prison. Men who were of high rank, but
whom he did not know, questioned him with a mixture of deference and
harsh insolence. “Did you check on the use made of the 344,000 rubles
allocated for reconstructing the offices of the prison administration at
Rybinsk?” Stupefied, Erchov answered: “No.” A smile which was per-
haps sarcastic, perhaps pitying, creased the hollow cheeks of the high
official whose round spectacles gave him the look of a deep-sea fish . . .
And the session was over ... At the next session: “When you signed
the appointment of Camp Commandant Illenkov, did you know the past
record of that enemy of the people?”—“Which Illenkov?” The name
must have been submitted to him in a long list. “But this is ridiculous!
Comrade, I . . .”—“Ridiculous?” said the other in a threatening voice.
“On the contrary, it is most serious, it is a matter of a crime against the
security of the State committed by a high official in the exercise of
his office, and punishable, under Article ... of the Penal Code, by
death . . .” This one was aging—sandy hair, coppery flecks in his face,
his eyes hidden behind gray lenses. “Then you claim that you did not
know, defendant Erchov?”—“No.”—“As you please . . . But you are
well aware that in our country confessing errors and crimes is always
a better choice than resisting ... I am not telling you anything
new . . .” Another interrogation revolved around the sending to China
of an agent who had turned traitor. Erchov answered sharply that the
Organization Bureau of the Central Committee had made the appoint-
ment. The thin inquisitor, whose long nose and dark mouth made as it
were a cross on his face, replied: “You are making a clumsy attempt to
elude your responsibilities . . .” Other subjects brought up were the
price of Valia’s furs, perfumes which he had taken for her from the stock
of contraband articles, the execution of a confessed counterrevolutionary,
a former officer in Baron Wrangel’s army: “No doubt you will claim that
you did not know he was one of your most devoted agents?”—“I did not
know jt,” said Erchov, who, to tell the truth, remembered nothing. The
meaninglessness of the inquiry restored his confidence a little—if they
really had only these small things against him?—at the same time that it

gave him a feeling of increasing danger. “In any case, I shall probably be
shot ...” A sentence heard long ago at the War Academy haunted his
memory: “Within the radius of the explosion, the destruction of human
life is instantaneous and complete . . .” We are all soldiers. He grew
thin, his hands trembled. Write to the Chief ? No, no, no ...
Prisoners in solitary gradually sink into a state that is pure prolonga-
tion. If an event suddenly awakens them, it has the intensity of a dream.
Erchov saw himself entering the spacious offices of the Central Commit-
tee. He advanced, almost as if he were floating, toward a group of half a
dozen men seated around a table covered with a red cloth. Street sounds,
oddly muffled, reached his ears. Erchov did not recognize a single face.
The man at the right, ill-shaven, with a profile like a fat rodent, might be
the new. prosecutor, Rachevsky . . . Six official faces, abstract and im-
personal, two uniforms . . . “How weak I’ve become, I am afraid, ter-
ribly afraid . . . What shall I say to them? . . . What shall I try? I
am going to hear everything, it will be overwhelming ... It is not
possible that they won’t shoot me ...” A heavy head seemed to lean
toward him: slightly moonlike, slightly shining, entirely without hair, a
tiny round nose, an absurdly small mouth. A eunuch’s voice proceeded
from it, saying almost amiably:
“Erchov, sit down.”
Erchov obeyed. There was one unoccupied chair behind the table.—
Tribunal? Six pairs of eyes studied him with great severity. Tired, pale,
dressed in a tunic from which the insignia had been removed, he felt
dirty. “Erchov, you have belonged to the Party . . . Here, you must
understand, all resistance is useless . . . Speak . . . Unburden your-
self . . . Confess everything to us, we know it all already ... Go down
on your knees before the Party . . . There lies salvation, Erchov, there
lies the only possible salvation . . . We are listening . . .” The man
with the moonlike face, with the eunuch’s voice, emphasized his invita-
tion by a gesture. Erchov looked at him for a few seconds in bewilder-
ment, then rose and said:
“Comrades . . .”
He must cry out his innocence, and he realized that he could not, that
he felt obscurely guilty, justly condemned in advance, though he could
not say why; and it was as impossible for him to confess anything what-
ever as to defend himself. All he could do was to pour out a flood of
words before these unknown judges, words which he felt were lament-
ably confused. “I have loyally served the Party and the Chief . . . ready
to die ... I have made mistakes, I admit . . . the 344,000 rubles for

the Rybinsk Central, the nomination of Illenkov, yes, I agree . . . Be-
lieve me, Comrades ... I live only fbr the Party ...”
The six did not listen to him, they rose as one man. Erchov came to
attention. The Chief appeared, without a look toward him, silent, gray,
his face hard and sad. The Chief sat down and bent his head over a sheet
of paper, read it attentively. As one man, the six sat down again. There
was a moment of absolute silence, even in the city. “Go on,” the eunuch
voice resumed, “tell us about your part in the plot which cost the life of
Comrade Tulayev . . .”
. . but that is absolutely insane,” Erchov cried. “It is sheer mad-
ness, no, no, I mean it’s I who am going mad . . . Give me a glass of
water, I’m stifling . . .”
Then the Chief raised his wonderful and monstrous head, the head of
all his numberless portraits, and said exactly what Erchov would have
said in his place, what Erchov, in his despair, ought to be thinking
himself:
“Erchov, you are a soldier . . . Not a hysterical woman. We ask the
truth from you . . . The objective truth . . . This is not the place for
scenes ...”
The Chief’s voice was so like his own inner voice that it restored
Erchov to complete lucidity, and even to a sort of assurance. Later he
remembered that he had argued coolly, gone over all the essential factors
in the Tulayev case, quoted documents from memory ... yet feeling
clearly all the while that nothing could be of any use to him. Accused
men who had disappeared long, long ago had argued in just the same
fashion before him; and he had not been taken in, he knew what the
wretches were concealing. Or he knew why words were superfluous. The
Chief cut him off in the middle of a sentence.
“Enough. We are wasting our time with this cynical traitor . . . Have-
you sunk so low that you accuse us? Go!”
He was led away. He had only glimpsed the angry gleam in the russet
eyes and the guillotine motion of a paper knife brought down on the
table. Erchov spent that night walking up and down his cell—his mouth
tasted bitter, his breathing was labored. Impossible to hang himself, im-
possible to open his veins, ridiculous to fling himself at the wall head-
first, impossible to let himself die of starvation, he would be fed by force,
through a tube (he had himself signed orders for cases of the sort). The
Orientals say that you can die if you will to die, it is not the pistol that
kills, it is the will . . . Mysticism. Literature. Materialists know very
well how to kill, they do not know how to die at will. Poor creatures that
we are!—Erchov understood everything now.

. . . Was it four weeks, or five, or six, that passed? What connection
did measurements of time based on the rotation of the earth in space
have with the fermentation of a brain between the concrete walls of
a secret prison in the age of the rebuilding of the world? Erchov under-
went twenty-hour interrogations without flinching. Amid a mass of ques-
tions which apparently had no connection with one another, there were
three which were asked again and again: “What did you do to prevent
the arrest of your accomplice Kiril Rublev? What did you do to conceal
the past of the Trotskyist Kondratiev on the eve of his mission to Spain?
What messages did you give him for the Spanish Trotskyists?” Erchov
explained that Kondratiev’s personal dossier had been sent to him by the
Political Bureau at the very last moment; that the dossier contained
nothing unusual; that he had seen Kondratiev only for ten minutes and
only to advise him about trustworthy agents . . . “And who were these
trustworthy agents?” When he returned to his cell after these interroga-
tions, he slept like a stunned animal, but talked in his sleep, because the
interrogation went on and on in his dreams.
During the sixteenth hour (but, for him, it could as well have been the
hundredth; his mind dragged through weariness like'an exhausted horse
through mud) of his seventh or eighth interrogation, something fantastic
happened. The door opened. Ricciotti walked in, quite simply, holding
out his hand. “Glad to see you, Maximka.”
“What’s this? What? I’m so tired, damn it, that I don’t know if I’m
dreaming or awake. Where did you come from, brother?”
“Twenty hours of good sound sleep, Maximka, and everything will
become clear, I promise you. I’ll manage it for you.”
Ricciotti turned to the two examiners behind the big desk, as if he had
been their superior: “Leave us now, comrades . . . Tea, cigarettes, a
little vodka, please . . .”
Erchov saw that, under the abundant white tangled hair, Ricciotti’s
face was bloodless like an old prisoner’s, that his violet mouth was dis-
agreeably lined, that his clothes were shapeless. The flame of intelligence
in Ricciotti’s eyes was still alight, but it shone through a cloud. Ricciotti
forced a smile. “Sit down, we have plenty of time . . . You’re done in,
eh?”
He explained:
“The cell I’m in is probably not far from yours. But in my case, the
little formalities are all over ... I sleep, I walk in the courtyard ... I
get jam with every meal, I even read the papers . . .” His eyelids
blinked, he went through the gesture of snapping his fingers, soundlessly.

“Sickening, the papers . . . It’s curious how different panegyrics look
when you read them in an underground prison . . . We’re going down
like a ship that . . .” He pulled himself together. “I’m getting a good
rest, now, you see . . . Arrested ahout ten days after you . . .”
The tea, the cigarettes, and the vodka were brought in. Ricciotti
opened the window curtains wide, on a great square courtyard in bright
daylight. In the offices opposite, stenographers moved past the windows.
Several young women, who must have been standing on a stair landing,
were talking animatedly; you could even see their painted nails, see that
one of them wore her hair just following the shape of her ears.
“It is strange,” said Erchov half aloud.
He swallowed down a big glass of steaming tea, then a stiff drink of
vodka. He was like a man beginning to come out of a fog.
“My insides were cold . . . Do you understand what is going on,
Ricciotti?”
“The whole thing. I’ll explain it all to you. It is as clear as a chess
game for beginners. Check and mate.”
His fingers gave a decisive little tap on the table.
“I committed suicide twice, Maximka. At the time of your arrest, I had
an excellent Canadian passport, with which I could have cleared out . . .
I learned what had happened to you, I expected it, I told myself that they
would come for me within ten days—and I was right ... I hegan pack-
ing. But what was I to do in Europe, in America, in Constantinople?
Write articles for their stinking press? Shake hands with crowds of
bourgeois idiots, hide in dirty little hotels, or in palaces, and finally
catch a bullet as I came out of the toilet? As for the West, I loathe it. And
I loathe our world, this world here, too; hut I love it more than I loathe
it, I believe in it, I have all our poisons in my veins . . . And I am tired,
I’ve had enough ... I returned my Canadian passport to the Liaison
office. It amazed me to walk through the streets of Moscow like a real
living person. I looked at everything and told myself that it was for the
last time. I took leave of women I didn’t know, I suddenly felt like kissing
children, I found an extraordinary charm in sidewalks scrawled over
with chalk for a little girls’ game, I stopped in front of house windows
that interested me, I couldn’t sleep, I went with whores, I got drunk. If
by some chance they don’t come for me, I asked myself, what will be-
come of me? I’m good for nothing any more. I woke with a start, from
sleep or drunkenness, to think up preposterous schemes which intoxi-
cated me for half an hour: I’d go to Vyatka, get a job as foreman of a
lumber-cutting gang under a false name . . . become Kuzma, wood-

cutter, illiterate, not a member of the Party, not a member of a union—
why not? And it was not entirely impossible, but at bottom I did not
believe it, I did not even want it myself . . . My second suicide was the
Party cell meeting: The speaker sent by the Central Committee was ob-
viously going to talk about you . . . The room was full, everyone in
uniform, everyone green, green with fear, my friend, everyone silent, but
waves of coughing and sniffling spreading over the room ... I was
afraid myself, yet I wanted to shout: ‘Cowards, you cowards, aren’t you
ashamed to be so afraid for your dirty little hides?’ The speaker was
discreet, his speech all slimy circumlocutions, he didn’t mention your
name until the end, and referred to ‘extremely serious professional errors
. . . which might justify the gravest suspicions . . .’ We didn’t dare
look at one another, I felt that everyone’s face was sweating, that chills
were running up and down everyone’s spine. Because it wasn’t you he
was sparing when he talked ahout you. Even your wife . . . Arrests
were still going on. After all, twenty-five members of your confidential
entourage were there, all with their revolvers and all knowing very well
what it was all about . . . When the speaker stopped, we dropped into a
pocket of silence. The Central Committee’s envoy himself dropped into it
with us. Those who sat in the first row, under the Bureau’s eyes, were the
first to recover themselves, naturally; they began the applause, it became
frenzied, ‘How many dead men are applauding their own end?’ I asked
myself, but I did as the rest did, to avoid calling attention to myself; we
all applauded like that, under one another’s eyes . . . Are you falling
asleep? . .
“Yes . . . No, it’s nothing, I’m awake ... Go on.”
“Those who owed you the most, and who were consequently in the
greatest danger, spoke of you with the greatest treachery . . . They
asked themselves if the discreet C.P. orator was not setting a trap for
them. It was pitiful. I got up on the platform, like the others, without
much idea of what I was going to say, I began like everyone else with
empty phrases about the Party’s vigilance. A hundred asphyxiated faces
looked up at me, openmouthed; they impressed me as slimy and dried
up, asleep and vicious, distorted by colic. The Bureau dozed on, what I
might say to denounce you interested no one, it was an old story that
wouldn’t save me; and no one was thinking of anything but himself. And
I found myself absolutely calm again, my friend, I had a tremendous
desire to joke, I felt that my voice was clear and assured, I saw gelatinous
faces moving feebly, I was beginning to make them uneasy. I calmly said
unheard-of things, which froze the audience, the Bureau, the man from

the Central Committee. (He was taking notes as fast as he could, he
would have liked to sink into the ground.) I said that mistakes, under
our overwhelming load of work, were inevitable, that I had known you
for twelve years, that you were loyal, that you lived only for the Party
and that everyone knew it, that we had very few men like you and a great
many rats . . . The chill that rose around me might have come from the
Great Ice Barrier. At the back of the room a strangled voice cried:
‘Shame!’ It woke the terror-stricken ghosts: ‘Shame!’—‘Shame on you/
I said, stepping down from the platform, and I added: ‘You are fools if
you think you’re any better off than I am!’ I walked the whole length of
the room. They were all afraid I would come and sit down beside them,
they shrank into their chairs as I approached—every one of my col-
leagues. I went out to the buffet, smoked a cigarette, and flirted with the
waitress. I was satisfied, and I was trembling all over ... I was ar-
rested the next morning.”
“Yes, yes,” said Erchov vaguely. “What were you going to say about
my wife?”
“Valia? She had just written to the cell Bureau to say that she wanted
a divorce . . . That she wanted to wash away the involuntary dishonor
of having, unknowingly, been the wife of an enemy of the people . . .
And so forth ... You know the formulas. And she was right, she
wanted to live, Valia did.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
In a lower voice, Erchov added:
“Perhaps she was right . . . What has become of her?”
Ricciotti made a vague gesture: “I have no idea . . . In Kamchatka, I
suppose ... Or the Altai . . .”
“And now?”
Through their weariness, they looked at each other, and the colorless
daylight revealed in each of them the same bleak astonishment, the same
stricken and simple calm.
“Now,” Ricciotti answered, “it is time to give in, Maximka. Resistance
serves no purpose . . . you know that better than anyone. You can force
yourself to suffer the tortures of the damned, but the end will be the
same, and furthermore it will be useless. Give in, I tell you.”
“Give in to what? Admit that I am an enemy of the people, a traitor,
that I killed Tulayev, and I don’t know what else? Repeat that hodge-
podge which sounds as if it had been spouted by drunken epileptics?”
“Confess, brother. That or something else, anything they want you to.
In the first place, you’ll sleep; in the second, you’ll have a slim

chance ... A very slim chance, almost no chance in my opinion, but
there’s nothing left that anyone can do about it . . . Maximka, you are
a stronger man than I am, but I have better political judgment, you must
admit . . . That’s how it is, I assure you. They need just that, and they
order it as they order a turbine destroyed . . . Neither the engineers
nor the workers discuss the order, and no one worries about the lives it
will cost ... I had never even thought of it before . . . The last trials
did not produce the political results that were expected of them, and the
conviction now is that there must be a new demonstration and a new
cleanup ... You understand that they can’t leave any veterans any-
where . ... It is not up to us to decide if the Political Bureau is wrong
or not . . .”
“It is appallingly wrong,” said Erchov.
“Keep your mouth shut on the subject. No member of the Party has a
right to say such things. If you were sent against Japanese tanks as the
head of a division, you wouldn’t argue, you’d go, even though you knew
that not a man would come back. Tulayev is only an accident or an
excuse. For my part, I am even convinced that there is nothing behind
the case, that he was killed by chance, if you please! You must see, never-
theless, that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver
shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the
people’s soul . . . The Chief has been in an impasse for a long time.
Perhaps he’s losing his mind. Perhaps he sees farther and better than all
the rest of us. I don’t believe he is a genius, I believe he has decided
limitations, but we have no one else, and he has only himself. We have
killed off all the others, allowed them to be killed off, that is; and he is
the only one left, the only real one. He knows that when somebody shoots
Tulayev, it is himself that was aimed at, because	it can’t	be	otherwise,
there is no one but himself that anyone either	can	hate	or has to
hate ...”
“You think so?”
Ricciotti said lightly:
“Only the rational is real, according to Hegel.”
“I cannot,” said Erchov, with an effort.	“It	is	beyond my
strength <. . .”
“Empty words. Neither you nor I have any strength left. And after-
ward?”
Half the offices in the building they could see through the window were
closed and empty now. To the right, a few floors were lighted up, where
people would be working all night . . . The green light through the

window shades brightened the twilight. Erchov and Ricciotti were enjoy-
ing a singular freedom: they went and washed their faces in the toilet
room, they were brought a reasonably good supper and plenty of ciga-
rettes. They glimpsed faces that looked almost friendly . . . Erchov
stretched out on the sofa, Ricciotti wandered around the room, straddled
a chair:
“I know all that you are thinking, I have thought it all myself, I still
think it. Point 1: There is no other solution, old man. Point 2: This way,
we give ourselves a very slim chance, say one half of one per cent. Point
3: I would rather die for the country than against it ... I will admit to
you that, at bottom, I no longer believe in the Party, but I believe in the
country . . . This world belongs to us, we belong to it, even to the point
of absurdity and abomination . . . But it is all neither so absurd nor so
abominable as it seems at first sight. It is more by way of being bar-
barous and clumsy. We are performing a surgical operation with an ax.
Our government holds the fort in situations that are catastrophic, and
sacrifices its best divisions one after the other because it doesn’t know
anything else to do. Our turn has come.”
Erchov put his face in his hands.
“Stop, I can’t follow you.”
He raised his head, he seemed able to think clearly again, he looked
angry.
“Do you believe one fifth of what you’re telling me? What are they
paying you to convince me?”
The same furious despair set them one against the other; their heads
close together, they saw each other—unshaven for a week, their faces
bloodless, their eyelids netted with wrinkles, their features blurred by a
weariness without end. Ricciotti answered, without heat:
“No one is paying me anything, you idiot. But I don’t want to die for
nothing—do you understand that? That chance—one half of one per
cent, of one thousand per cent, yes, of one thousand per cent—I mean to
take it—do you understand that? I mean to try to live, cost what it may
—and then, that’s that! I am a human animal that wants to live despite
everything, to kiss women, work, fight in China . . . Dare to tell me that
you are any different! I want to try to save you, do you understand? I
am logical. We used this move on others, now it’s being used on us—they
know the game! Things have overtaken us and we must keep going to the
end. Don’t you see that? We were made to serve this regime, it is all we
have, we are its children, its ignoble children, all this is not a matter of
chance—can I ever make you understand? I am loyal—don’t you see?

And you are loyal too, Maximka.” His voice broke, changed tone,
acquired a shade of tenderness. “That’s all, Maximka. You are wrong to
revile me. Think it over. Sit down.”
He took him by the shoulders and pushed him toward the sofa. Erchov
let himself drop onto it limply.
Night had fallen, steps sounded in a distant corridor, mingled with the
tapping of a typewriter. The scattered sounds, creeping into the silence,
were poignant,
Erchov was still rebellious:
“Confess that I am complete traitor! That I was a party to a crime
against which I have fought with all my strength! . . . Let me alone,
you’re mad!”
His comrade’s voice came to him from very far away. There were icy
distances between them, in which dark planets revolved slowly . . .
There was nothing between them except a mahogany table, empty tea
glasses, an empty carafe of vodka, five feet of dusty carpet.
“Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it
after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can
resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will
ever go over to the enemy . . . And if you consider yourself innocent,
you are absolutely wrong. We innocent? Who do you think you’re fool-
ing? Have you forgotten our trade? Can Comrade High Commissar for
Security be innocent? Can the Grand Inquisitor be as pure as a lamb?
Can he be the only person in the world who doesn’t deserve the bullet in
the neck which he distributed, like a rubber-stamp signature, at the rate
of seven hundred per month on the average? Official figures—way off, of
course. No one will ever know the real figures . . .”
“Shut up, will you?” cried Erchov. “Have me taken back to my cell. I
was a soldier, I obeyed orders—that’s all! You are torturing me for no
purpose . . .”
“No. Your torture is only beginning. Your torture is yet to come. I am
trying to keep you from going through it. I am trying to save you . . .
To save you, do you understand?”
“Have they promised you something?”
“They have us so in their hands that they don’t need to promise us
anything . . . We know what promises are worth . . . Popov has been
to see me—you know, that blithering old fool . . . When his turn
comes, I’ll be very happy, even in the next world . . . He said to me:
‘The Party demands much of you, the Party promises nothing to anyone.
The Political Bureau will decide in accordance with political necessities.

The Party can also shoot you without trial . . .’ Make up your mind,
Maximka, I am as tired as you are.”
“Impossible,” said Erchov.
He covered his face with his hands and crumpled over. Perhaps he was
crying. His breath came wheezily. There was a shattering interval.
“It would be a pleasure to blow out my own brains,” Erchov muttered.
“Of course,” said Ricciotti.
Time—sheer, colorless, deadly time stretching on and on—with noth-
ing at the end. To sleep ...
“One chance in a thousand,” Erchov muttered, out of a calm from
which there was no appeal. “Very well! You are right, brother. We have
to stay in the game.”
Ricciotti pressed a frenzied finger on the bell push. Somewhere the hell
rang commandingly ... A young soldier of the special battalion half
opened the door. “Tea, sandwiches, brandy! Quick!” Bluish daylight
dimmed the lights in the windows of the Secret Service, which was de-
serted at that hour. Before they parted, Erchov and Ricciotti embraced
each other. Smiling faces surrounded them. Someone said to Erchov:
“Your wife is well. She is at Viatka, she has a job in the communal
government . . .” In his cell, Erchov was amazed to find newspapers on
the table. He had read nothing for months, his brain had worked in a
vacuum, at times it had been very hard. Exhausted, he dropped onto the
bed, unfolded a copy of Pravda to a benevolent portrait of the Chief,
looked at it for a long minute, laboriously, as if he were trying to under-
stand something, and fell asleep just as he lay, with the printed image
covering his face.
Telephones transmitted the important news. At 6:27-a.m. Zvyeryeva,
who had herself been waked by her secretary, called Comrade Popov by
direct wire and informed him: “Erchov has confessed . . .” Lying in
her big bed of gilded Karelian wood, she laid the receiver down on the
night table. A polished mirror, hung so that it tilted toward the bed, sent
her back an image of which she never tired: herself. Her long, straight,
dyed hair framed her face in an almost perfect oval. “I have a tragic
mouth,” she thought, seeing the yellowish curve of her lips, which ex-
pressed both shame and rancor. Complexion the color of old wax, wrin-
kles painstakingly massaged—there was nothing in that face human
except the eyes. Soot-colored, without lashes or brows, in everyday life
their opaque darkness expressed nothing but an ultimate dissimulation.
But when she was alone with her looking glass they expressed a ravenous

bewilderment. Brusquely she threw off the bedclothes. Because her
breasts were aging, she slept in a black lace brassiere. Her body appeared
in the looking glass, still pure in line, long, supple, lusterless, like the
body of a slim Chinese girl, “like the Chinese slaves in the brothels at
Harbin.” Her dry palms followed the curve of her hips. She admired
herself: “My belly is tight and cruel . . .” On the mount of Venus there
was only an arid tuft; below, the secret folds were sad and taut, like a
forsaken mouth . . . Toward those folds her hand glided, while her
body arched, her eyes clouded, the mirror expanded, became full of
vague presences. She caressed herself gently. Above her, in a loathsome
emptiness, floated the forms of men mingled with the forms of very
young women brutally possessed. Her own tranced face—the eyes half
closed, the mouth open—rose before her for an instant. “Ah, I am beau-
tiful, ah, I ...” A violent trembling shook her from head to foot, and in
it she sank into her solitude. “Ah, when will I have . . .” The telephone
squeaked. It was old Popov’s insipid mumbling:
“My con-con-gratulations . . . The investigation has made a great
step . . . Now, Comrade Zvyeryeva, get the Rublev dossier ready for
me . . .”
“You shall have it this morning, Comrade Popov.”
For almost ten full years Makeyev’s life had consisted in inflicting or
swallowing humiliation. The only art of government that he knew was to
abolish every objection by repression and humiliation. At first, when
some comrade stood on the platform before an ironical audience, strug-
gling to admit his errors of yesterday, to abjure his companions, his
friendships, his own thoughts, Makeyev used to feel uncomfortable. “Son
of a bitch,” he would think, “wouldn’t you do better to let them beat you
up?” After the arguments of 1927-28, he brought a scorn heavily
weighted with mockery to bear on the great veterans who had recanted to
avoid being expelled from the Party. In a confused way, he felt that he
was called to share their heritage. His monumental scoffing influenced
audiences against the militants of 1918, who, suddenly stripped of their
halos, stripped of their power, were seen to humiliate themselves before
the Party—and in reality it was before mediocre men and women united
by but one preoccupation: discipline. His whole head purple, Makeyev
thundered: “No, it is not enough! Less beating around the bush! Tell us
about the criminal agitation you took part in at the factories!” His in-
terruptions—like blows from a blackjack full in the face—contributed
largely to opening the path of power before him. He followed it as he had

risen to it: persecuting his vanquished comrades; insisting on their re-
peating—over and over, and each time in blunter and more revolting
terms—the same abjurations, because it was the only way left them to
withdraw their claims to power (which, it seemed, was always about to
fall into their hands, because actually they were free from the errors of
the present); insisting that his subordinates should take the responsi-
bility for his own errors, because he, Makeyev, was of more value to the
Party than they were; hurrying to humiliate himself in turn, when some-
one bigger than himself demanded it. Prison plunged him into an animal
desperation. In his dark, low cell he was like a steer which the slaugh-
terer’s hammer has not hit hard enough. His powerful muscles became
flabby, his hairy chest caved in, a beard the color of weather-beaten
straw grew up to his eyes, he became a big, bent muzhik, round-shoul-
dered, with sad and timid eyes . . . Time passed, Makeyev was for-
gotten, no one answered his protestations of loyalty. He himself did not
dare to claim an innocence which was as imprudent as it was doubtful, if
not more so. The reality of the outside world came to an end, he could no
longer picture his wife to himself, even at the moments when a sexual
frenzy seized him and prostrated him on his cot, his flesh throbbing, an
edge of foam in the corners of his mouth . . . When his questioning
began, he felt a great relief. Everything would come out all right, it was
only a broken career, it couldn’t call for more than a few years in an
Arctic concentration camp, and even there you can show that you are
zealous, that you have a sense of organization, there are rewards to be
won . . . There are women too ... He was called upon to agree that he
had carried the May directives too .far and, on the other hand, had con-
sciously neglected to apply those of September; to admit that he was
responsible for the decrease in sown fields in the region; to admit that he
had appointed to the agricultural directorate officials who had since been
sentenced as counterrevolutionaries (he had denounced them himself) ;
to admit that he had diverted for his personal use, specifically for the
purchase of furniture, monies earmarked for a Rest House for Agricul-
tural Workers . . . The point was arguable, but he did not argue, he
agreed, it was all true, it could be true, it must be true ... as you see,
comrades, if the Party demands it, I am more than ready to take every-
thing on myself ... A good sign: none of the accusations rated capital
punishment. He was allowed to read old illustrated magazines.
Wakened one night from the deepest of sleep, led to his interrogation
by a different route—elevators, courtyards, well-lighted basements.—

Makeyev suddenly found himself facing new dangers. A terrible severity
made everything clear:
“Makeyev, you admit that it was you who organized the famine in the
district which the Central Committee entrusted to you ...”
Makeyev made a sign of assent. But the formula was startlingly dis-
quieting—it was reminiscent of recent trials . . . But what else could
they ask of him? Of what could he reasonably accuse himself if not of
that? No one at Kurgansk would doubt his guilt. And the Political
Bureau would be freed of responsibility.
“The time has come for you to make us a fuller confession. What you
are hiding from us shows what an indomitable enemy of the Party you
have become. We know everything. We have proof of everything,
Makeyev, irrefutable proof. Your accomplices have confessed. Tell us
what part you played in the plot which cost the life of Comrade Tula-
yev ...”
Makeyev bowed his head—or, more precisely, his strength failed him
and his head dropped on his chest. His shoulders sagged, as if, while he
had listened to the examiner’s words, the very substance of his body had
drained away. A black hole, a black hole before him, a vault, a grave,
and there was nothing more he could say. He could neither speak nor
move, he stared stupidly at the polished floor.
“Answer to the accusation, Makeyev! . . . Do you feel ill?”
If they had beaten him they could have got nothing from him, his big
body appeared to have no more substance than a sack of rags. He was led
away, doctored; a shave gave him back something of his usual appear-
ance. He talked to himself ceaselessly. His head looked like a skull—high,
conical, with prominent jawbones and carnivorous teeth. One night when
he had recovered from the first nervous shock, he was led out to be ques-
tioned again. He walked totteringly, his heart sank, what little strength
he had left failed him the nearer he came to the door . . .
“Makeyev, we have an overwhelming deposition against you in the
Tulayev case—your wife’s statement ...”
“Impossible.”
The curiously unreal image of the woman who had been real to him in
another life, one of those former lives which had become unreal, brought
a flash of firmness into his face. His teeth gleamed balefully.
“Impossible. Or else she is lying because you have tortured her.”
“It is not for you to accuse us, criminal. You still deny the charge?”
“I deny it.”
“Then listen and be abashed. When you learned that Comrade Tulayev

had been assassinated, you exclaimed that you had expected it, that it
served him right, that it was he, and not you, who had organized the
famine in the district ... I have your actual words, do I need to read
them to you? Is it true?”
“It is false,” Makeyev murmured. “It is all false.”
And the memory emerged mysteriously from his inner darkness. Alia,
her face miserably swollen from crying . . . She held the queen of
hearts in a trembling hand, she was shouting, but her wheezy breathless
voice could hardly be heard: “And you, traitor and liar, when will some-
one kill you?” What could she have thought, what could they have sug-
gested to her, the poor simpleton? Was she denouncing him to save him
or to ruin him?
“It is true,” he said. “I ought to explain to you that it is more false
than true, false, false ...”
“That would be wholly useless, Makeyev. If you have the remotest
chance of salvation, it lies in a complete and sincere confession . . .”
The urgent memory of his wife had revived him. He became like
himself again, grew sarcastic:
“Like the others, you mean?”
“To what are you alluding, Makeyev? What is it that you presume to
think, counterrevolutionary Makeyev, traitor to the Party, murderer of
the Party?”
“Nothing.”
Again he collapsed.
“In any case, this may be your last interrogation. It may be your last
day. A decision may be reached this very evening, Makeyev—did you
hear me? Take the prisoner back to his cell.”
... At Kurgansk the man was taken from the prison in a van. Some-
times he was informed of his sentence, sometimes he was left in doubt—
and that was better, because occasionally men who had no doubts left had
to be carried, tied, helped along, gagged. The others walked like broken-
down automatons, but they walked. A few miles from the station, at a
place where the tracks make a shining curve under the stars, the van
stopped. The man was led toward the underbrush . . . Makeyev at-
tended the execution of four railwaymen who had stolen parcel-post
packages. Traffic was being disorganized by such larcenies. At the re-
gional Committee, Makeyev had demanded capital punishment for the
proletarians turned brigands. The bastards! He held a grudge against
them for forcing him into a hideous severity. The four still hoped for a
transfer. “They won’t dare shoot workers for so little . . .” seven thou-

sand rubles’ worth of merchandise . . . Their last hope vanished in the
underbrush, under an ugly yellow moon whose sickly light filtered
through little leaves. Standing at a turn in the path, Makeyev watched to
see how the men would behave. The first walked straight on, his head
held high, his step firm, charging forward toward the open grave (“the
stuff of a revolutionary . . .”). The second stumbled over roots, jerked
epileptically, hung his head—he looked as if he were plunged in deep
thought, but when he came nearer Makeyev saw that, for all his fifty
years, the man was crying silently. The third was like a drunken man
with sudden intervals of clearheadedness. He dragged along, then ran a
few steps (they were going in single file, followed by several men with
rifles). The last, a lad of twenty, had to be supported. He recognized
Makeyev, fell to his knees, and cried: “Comrade Makeyev, beloved
father, pardon us, have mercy on us, we are workers . . .” Makeyev
sprang back, his foot struck a root, he felt a stab of pain, the silent sol-
diers dragged the boy on ... At that moment the first of the four
turned his head and said calmly, in a voice perfectly distinct in the
moonlit silence: “Keep quiet, Sacha, they are not men any more, they are
hyenas . . . We ought to spit in his dirty face . . .” Four reports, quite
close together, reached Makeyev in his car. A cloud darkened the moon,
the driver almost drove the car into the ditch. Makeyev went straight to
bed, put his arms around his sleeping wife, and lay so for a long time, his
eyes open on darkness. Alia’s warmth and her regular breathing calmed
him. Since it was easy for him not to think, he was able to escape from
himself. The next morning, seeing a brief notice of the execution in the
paper, he was almost glad to feel that he was “an iron Bolshevik” . . .
Makeyev lived but little by his memories; rather, his memories lived a
life of their own, an insidious and awkward life, in him. That one had
appeared on the luminous screen of consciousness while he was being led
toward his cell, toward . . . And, horribly, it brings another with it: In
those days, Makeyev felt that he belonged to a different race from that of
men who walked such paths at night, under the yellow moon, toward
graves dug by soldiers of the Special Battalion. No conceivable event
could cast him down from the summits of power, make him in turn one
of the disinherited. Even disgraces would leave him in the files of the
Central Committee. Nothing short of expulsion from the Party, and that
was impossible . . . He was loyal, body and soul! Adaptable, too, and
he knew very well that the Central Committee was always right, that the
Political Bureau was always right, that the Chief was always right, be-
cause might is right; the errors of power compel recognition, become

Truth; just pay the overhead, and a wrong solution becomes the right
solution ... In the little elevator cage Makeyev was pressed against the
wall by the massive torso of a noncommissioned officer who might be
forty and who looked like him—that is to say, who looked like the
Makeyev of former days. The same rugged head and chin, the same
stubborn eyes, the same broad shoulders. (But neither of them was aware
of the resemblance at the time.) The guard fixed his prisoner with an
anonymous eye. Man-pincers, man-revolver, man-password, man-might
—and Makeyev was in the power of such men, from henceforth he be-
longed to the other race . . . He had a momentary vision of himself
walking through a wood, under a patchwork of yellow moonlight and
leaf shadows, with rifles following him at the ready . . . And the same
man was waiting for Makeyev at a turn in the path, he was dressed in
leather, his hands were in his pockets; and when Makeyev should be no
more, the same man would go calmly home and climb into a wide, warm
bed, beside a sleeping woman with burning breasts . . . The same man,
or another, but with the same anonymous eyes, would come for Makeyev,
perhaps that very night . . .
Yet another somber image rose from the past. At the Party club a new
moving picture in honor of Soviet aviation, Aerograd, was being shown.
In the Siberian forest, in the Far East, bearded peasants who had been
Red partisans were standing up against Japanese agents . . . There
were two old trappers who were like brothers, and one of them discov-
ered that the other was a traitor. Face to face under the great grim trees,
in the murmuring taiga, the patriot disarmed the traitor: “Walk ahead!”
The other walked, bent toward the ground, feeling himself sentenced to
death. Again and again, the two almost identic&l faces alternated on the
screen—the face of an old bearded man, stricken with terror, and the
face of his comrade, his like, who had judged him, who cried to him:
“Prepare yourself! In the name of the Soviet people . . .” and who
raised his carbine . . . Around them the maternal forest, the inescap-
able forest. Close-up: the enormous face of the guilty man baying at
death ... It disappeared at last in the welcome roar of a shot. Makeyev
gave the signal for applause . . . The elevator stopped, Makeyev would
have liked to bay at death. Yet he walked uprightly enough. When he
reached his cell he sent for a sheet of paper. Wrote:
“I cease all resistance in the face of the Party. I am ready to sign a
complete and sincere confession . . .”
Signed it: Makeyev. The M was still strong, the other letters looked
crushed.

Kiril Rublev refused to answer his examiners’ questions. (“If they
need me, they will give in. If they only intend to get rid of me, I am
shortening the formalities . . .”) A high official came to inquire into his
demands. “I do not wish to be treated worse in a Socialist prison than in
a prison under the old regime . . . After all, citizen, I am one of the
founders of the Soviet State.” (As he spoke, he thought: “I am being
ironical despite myself . . . Integral humor . . .”) “I want books and
paper . <. .” He was given books from the prison library and note-
books With numbered pages . . . “Now, leave me in peace for three
weeks . . .” He needed the time to clarify his thought. A man feels
singularly free when all is lost, he can at last think in a strictly objective
fashion—to the extent, that is, to which he overcomes the fear which, in a
living being, is a primordial force comparable to the sex instinct . . .
Both the instinct and the force are almost insurmountable; it is a matter
of inner training. Nothing more to lose. A few gymnastic exercises in the
morning: naked, loose-limbed, sharp-faced, he found it amusing to imi-
tate the supple movement of the reaper in the wheat field—the upper
body and both arms swinging vigorously forward and to the side. Then
he walked a little, thinking; sat down and wrote. Interrupted himself to
meditate on another theme: on death, from the only rational point of
view, that of the natural sciences: a field of poppies. The thought of Dora
often tormented him, more often than it ought. “We had been prepared
for so long, Dora . . .” All her life, all their life, their real life, seventeen
years, since the hardships and enthusiasms of the Revolution, Dora had
been strong, under a defenseless gentleness, a scrupulous gentleness that
was full of hesitancies and doubts. There are plants like that, plants
which under their delicate tracery of leaves have such a resistance and
vitality that they survive storms, that, seeing them, we divine the existence
of a true and admirable strength entirely different from the mixture of
instantaneous ardor and brutality which is commonly called strength.
Kiril talked to Dora as if she had been present. They knew each other so
well, they had so many thoughts in common, that when he wrote she
sometimes foresaw the sentence or the page that was to follow. “I thought
you would go on like that, Kiril,” she would say; and looking up, he
would see her, pale and pretty, her hair brushed away from her forehead
and drawn into tresses that lay piled above either temple. “Why, you’re
absolutely right!” he would marvel. “How well you read me, Dora!” In
the joy of their mutual understanding they sometimes kissed each other
over his manuscripts. Those were the days of the Cold, of the Typhoid, of
the Famine, of the Terror, of the War Fronts which were always being

broken through but which never quite gave in, the days of Lenin and
Trotsky, the good days. “What luck if we had died together then, Dora!”
This conversation between them took place fifteen years later, when they
were struggling in the grip of nightmare as suffocating miners struggle
in a doomed mine. “We even missed the chance, you remember: you had
typhoid, and one day the bullets made a perfect half-circle around
me . . .”—“I was delirious,” said Dora, “I was delirious and I saw
everything, I understood everything, I had the key to things, and it was
I who kept the bullets from your head by moving my hand, and I touched
your hair . . . My hallucination was so real that I almost believed it,
Kiril. Afterward I had a terrible period of doubt—what was I good for if
I could not keep the bullets away from you, had I a right to love you
more than the Revolution, for I knew very well that I loved you more
than anything in the world, that if you disappeared I could not go on
living, even for the Revolution . . . And you scolded me when I told
you, you talked to me so well in my delirium, that was the first time I
came to really know you . . .” Kiril put both his hands on Dora’s hips
and looked into her eyes; they smiled only with their eyes now, and they
were very pale, very much older, very much troubled. “Have I changed
much since?” he asked in a strangely young voice. “You are amazingly
the same,” Dora answered, stroking his cheeks. “Amazingly . . . But as
for me, who have always told myself that you must go on living because
the world would be a lesser place if you were not in it, and that I must go
on living with you ... I begin to believe that we missed that chance to
die, really I do . . . Perhaps there are whole periods when, for men of a
certain kind, it is no longer worth while to live . . .” Kiril answered
slowly: “Whole periods, you say? You are right. But since, in the present
state of our knowledge, no one can foresee the duration or the succession
of periods, and since we must try to be present at the moment when
history needs us . . .” He Would have talked like that in his course on
“Chartism and the Development of Capitalism in England” . . . Now he
squeezed into the right-hand corner of his cell, directly against the wall;
and, raising his Ivan the Terrible profile toward the window at the pre-
cise angle which allowed him to see a lozenge of sky a foot square, he
murmured: “Well, Dora, well, Dora, now the end has come . . .”
His manuscript progressed. In a swift hand, a little unsteady at the
beginning of each day’s first paragraph, but firm after twenty lines, he
went over the history of the last fifteen years, wasting no words, with the
concision of an economist, quoted figures from the secret statistics (the
correct ones), analyzed the decisions and acts of those in power. He

achieved a terrifying objectivity, which spared nothing. The confused
battles for the democratization of the Party; the first debates of the
Communist Academy on the subject of industrialization; the real figures
on goods shortages, on the value of the ruble, on wages; the growing
tension of the relations between the rural masses, a weakling industry,
and the State; the NEP crisis; the effects of the world crisis on Soviet
economy, shut up within its own borders; the gold crisis; the solutions
imposed by a power which was at once farsighted (in matters of danger
which threatened it directly) and blinded by its instinct for self-preserva-
tion; the degeneration of the Party, the end of its intellectual life; the
birth of the authoritarian system; the beginnings of collectivization, con-
ceived as an expedient to avoid the bankruptcy of the directing group;
the famine which spread over the country like a leprosy . . . Rublev
knew the minutes of the meetings of the Political Bureau, he quoted the
most forbidden passages from them (passages probably now destroyed);
he showed the General Secretary daily encroaching upon all powers; he
followed the intrigue in the lobbies of the Central Committee; against it
as a background, the figure of the Chief began to appear, still hesitantly,
between resignation, arrest, the violent scene at the end of which two
equally pale members of the P.B. faced each other among the overturned
chairs and one said: “I will kill myself so that my corpse will denounce
you! But as for you, the muzhiks will rip your guts out one day, and
more power to them—but the country, the Revolution . . .” And the
other, his face closed as the grave, murmured: “Calm yourself, Nicolas
Ivanovich. If you will accept my resignation I tender it . . .” It was not
accepted, there were no more successors.
When he had written page after page, written freely, as he had not
written for more than ten years, Kiril Rublev would walk up and down
his cell, smoking. “Well, Dora, what do you think of it?” Dora invisibly
turned over the written sheets. “Good,” she said. “Firm and clear. Your-
self. Go on, Kiril.” Then he returned to that other necessary meditation,
his meditation on the poppy field.
Early morning. A field of red flowers on a gentle slope, undulating like
flesh. Each flower is a flame, and so frail that a mere touch makes the
petals fall. How many flowers are there? Impossible to count them.
Every instant one withers, another opens. If you were to cut down the
tallest ones, those that had made the best growth—whether because they
sprang from more vigorous seed or because they had found some ele-
ments unequally distributed through the soil—neither the appearance
nor the nature nor the future of the field would be changed. Shall I give a

v name, shall I vow a love, to one flower among them all? It seems to he a
fact that each flower exists in itself, is unique and solitary in its particu-
lar kind, different from all the others, and that, once destroyed, that
flower will never be born again ... It seems so, but are we sure? From
instant to instant, the flower changes, it ceases to be like itself, something
in it dies and is reborn. The flower of this instant is no longer the flower
of the instant before. Is the difference between its successive selves, in
time, really less than the present difference between itself and many
others which closely resemble it, which are perhaps what it was an hour
before, what it will be an hour hence?
A rigorous investigation thus abolished in reverie the boundaries be-
tween the momentary and the enduring, the individual and the species,
the concrete and the conceptual, life and death. Death was completely
absorbed into that marvelous field of poppies, sprung perhaps from a
mass grave, perhaps fed by decomposed human flesh ... A different
and vaster problem. Studying it, would one not likewise see the boun-
daries between species abolished? “But that would no longer be scien-
tific,” Rublev answered himself, who considered that, outside of purely
experimental syntheses, philosophy does not exist or is only “the theo-
retical mask of an idealism which is theological in origin.”
As he was brave, lyrical, and a little tired of living, the poppies helped
him to grow accustomed to a death which was not far distant, and which
had been the death of so many of his comrades that it was no. longer
strange or too terrifying. Besides, he knew that men were seldom exe-
cuted while an investigation was in process. So the threat—or the hope—
was not immediate. When he should have to go to sleep with the thought
of being waked only to be shot, his nerves would undergo another
trial . . . (But weren’t there executions in the daytime too?)
Zvyeryeva sent for him. She tried to give the examination the tone of a
familiar conversation.
“You’re writing, Comrade Rublev?”
“Yes, I am writing.”
“A message to the Central Committee, I take it?”
“Not exactly. I don’t really know whether we still have a Central
Committee in the sense in which we used the term in the old Party.”
Zvyeryeva was surprised. Everything that was known about Kiril
Rublev suggested that he was “in line,” docile—not without inward
reservations—disciplined; and inward reservations strengthen accept-
ances in practice. The investigation was in danger of failing.

“I don’t quite understand you, Comrade Rublev. You know, I believe,
what the Party expects of you?”
Prison had made the less change in his appearance because he had
always worn a beard. He did not look depressed, though he looked tired:
dark circles under his eyes. The face of a vigorous saint, with a big bony
nose, such as are to be seen in certain icons of the Novgorod school.
Zvyeryeva tried to decipher him. He spoke calmly:
“The Party ... I know more or less what is expected of me . . .
But what Party? What is now called the Party has changed so much ...
But you certainly cannot understand me . . .”
“And why, Comrade Rublev, should you think that I cannot under-
stand you? On the contrary, I . . .”
“Don’t go on,” Rublev interrupted. “What is on your tongue is an
official phrase that no longer means anything ... I mean to say that
you and I probably belong to different human species. I say it without
the slightest animosity, I assure you.”
What might be offensive in his remark was lessened by his objective
tone and the polite look he gave her.
“May I ask you, Comrade Rublev, what you are writing, and to whom,
and for what purpose?”
Rublev shook his head and smiled, as if one of his students had asked
him an intentionally embarrassing question.
“Comrade Examining Judge, I am thinking of writing a study on the
machine-smashing movement in England at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century . . . Please don’t protest, I am seriously thinking of it.”
He waited to see what effect his joke would produce. Zvyeryeva was
observing him too. Small, shrewd eyes.
“I am writing for the future. One day the archives will open. Perhaps
my memorial will be found in them. The work of the historians who are
studying our period will thereby be lightened. I regard that as much
more important than what you are probably commissioned to ask me
. . . Now, citizen, permit me to ask a question in turn: Of what, pre-
cisely, am I accused?”
“You will learn that before long. Are you satisfied with your living
conditions? The food?”
“Passable. Sometimes not enough sugar in the preserves. But many
Soviet proletarians, who are accused of nothing, are less well fed than
you and I are, citizen.”
Zvyeryeva said dryly:
“The session is over.”

Rublev returned to his cell in excellent humor. “I sent that hideous cat
running, Dora. If one had to explain oneself to such creatures . . . Let
them send me someone better, or let them shoot me without any explana-
tions . . .” The field of poppies appeared on a distant slope, through a
veil of rain. “My poor Dora . . . Am I not even now tearing their en-
tire scaffolding down?” Dora would be glad. She would say: “I am
certain that I shall not survive you long, Kiril. Show me the way.”
Rublev did not always turn around when the door opened. This time,
after he had distinctly heard the door close, he had the feeling of a
presence behind him. He went on writing—he did not intend to let his
nerves get the better of him.
“Good day, Rublev,” said a drawling voice.
It was Popov. Gray cap, old overcoat, bulging brief bag under his
arm, just the same as ever. (They had not seen each other for years.)
“Good day, Popov, sit down.”
Rublev gave him the chair, closed his notebook, which lay open on the
table, and stretched out on the bed. Popov examined the cell—bare,
yellow, stifling, surrounded by silence. He obviously found it unpleasant.
“Well, well,” said Rublev, “so they’ve locked you up too! Welcome,
brother, you have more than deserved it.”
He laughed to himself, heartily. Popov threw his cap on the table,
dropped his overcoat, spat several times into a gray handkerchief.
“Toothache. The devil take . . . But you are mistaken, Rublev, I have
not been arrested yet . . .”
Rublev flung his two long legs into the air in a jubilant caper. And,
talking to himself and laughing uncontrollably: “Old Popov said not yet.
Not yet! Freud would give three rubles spot cash for that lapsus linguae.
. . . Seriously, Popov, did you hear yourself say not yet? Not yet!”
“I said not yet?” Popov stammered. “Not yet what? What can it mat-
ter? What do you mean by ... by picking on words like that? What is
that I am not yet?”
“. . . arrested, arrested, arrested, not yet arrested!” Rublev cried,
with wild mockery in his eyes, in the reddish tangle of his eyebrows, in
his bristling beard.
Wall, window with dirty panes, iron grating . . . Popov stared at
them stupidly. This insane reception staggered him. He let silence grow
between them until it became almost uncomfortable. Rublev crossed his
arms under his neck.
“Rublev, I have come to decide your fate with you. We expect much

of you . . . We know what an intensely critical mind you have . . .
but we know too that you are loyal to the Party . . . The men of the
older generation, like myself, know you ... I have brought you some
documents ... Read them . . . We have confidence in you . . . Only,
if you don’t mind, let’s change places—I’d rather lie down . . . My
health, you know—rheumatism, myocarditis, polyneuritis, et cetera . . .
You’re lucky to be healthy, Rublev . . .”
Spilled water spreads, but the very obstacles it encounters give it a
definite outline. So Popov regained the advantage. They changed places,
Popov lay down on the cot, and he really looked like a sick old man—
his teeth gray, his skin muddy, his few strands of hair a sorry white and
absurdly ruffled. “Will you hand me my brief bag, please, Rublev? You
don’t mind if I smoke?” He extracted a sheaf of papers from his bag.
“There, read those . . . Don’t hurry . . . We have plenty of time . . .
It is serious, everything is extremely serious.” His short sentences ended
in little coughs. Rublev settled down to read. Resume of the reports of
the military attaches at . . . Report on the construction of strategic
roads in Poland . . . Fuel Reserves ... The London Conversations
. . . Long minutes passed.
“War?” said Rublev at last, wholly serious.
“Very probably war, next year . . . mmmm . . . Did you see the
figures on transport?”
“Yes.”
“We still have a slight chance of shifting the war toward the
West ...”
“Not for long.”
“Not for long . . .”
They discussed the danger as if one of them were calling on the other
at his house. How long would it take to mobilize? Cover troops? There
would have to be a second oil refinery, in the Far East, and the Kom-
somolsk road system would have to be developed at top speed. Was the
new railroad in Yakutia really finished? How did it stand up under
winter conditions?
“We count on the probability of extremely high troop losses . . .”
said Popov in a clear voice. “All those young fellows . . .” thought
Rublev. He had always enjoyed watching parades of athletes; his eyes,
as he walked through the streets, would follow the strapping young men
from different parts of Russia: Siberians with broad noses and hori-
zontal eyes set deep under stern foreheads, Asiatics with broad, flat faces,
and certain Mongols with delicate features, products of fine races civ-

ilized long before white civilization. Their young women went through
life with them, shoulder to shoulder (he was perhaps visualizing these
images from recollections of moving pictures), and all together they
moved through crumbling cities, under the bombers; and our new
square reinforced-concrete buildings, the work of so many famished
proletarians, became burning skeletons, and all those young men, all
those young women, millions of them, splattered with blood, filled
hideous pits, hospital trains, ambulances stinking of gangrene and
chloroform—we shall certainly have a shortage of anesthetics . . .
Slowly, there in the hospitals, they continued their transformation into
corpses ... “I must stop thinking in images,” he said, “it becomes
unbearable.”
“Unbearable indeed,” Popov answered.
Rublev nearly cried out: “You still here! What are you doing here?”
But Popov attacked first:
“We count on losses which may reach several millions of men during
the first year . . . That is why . . . mmmm . . . the Political Bureau
has adopted the . . . mmm . . . unpopular measure . . . forbidding
abortion. . . . Millions of women are suffering under it . . . We no
longer count in anything less than millions . . . We must have millions
of children, and have them now, to replace the millions of young men
who will perish . . . mmmm . . . and you, meanwhile, sit here writing
. . . may the devil take . . . take what you are writing, Rublev . . .
mmmm . . . and all this paltry business of your resisting the Party . . .
Knee and jaw at once . . .”
“What jaw?”
“The upper . . . Pain here, pain there . . . Rublev, the Party asks
you, the Party orders you ... I am not the Party.”
“Asks what? Orders what?”
“You know as well as I do . . . It is not for me to go into details . . .
You can arrange things with the examining judges . . . they know the
scenario . . . that’s what they’re paid for . . . mmm . . . some of them
even believe it, the young ones, the stupid ones . . . mmm . . . they’re
the most useful ... I pity the suspects who fall into their clutches . . .
mmm ... You still resist? . . . You’ll be made to stand up in front
of a roomful of people—all the diplomats, the official spies, the foreign
correspondents, the ones we pay, the opes who are on more than one
payroll, the scum of the earth, all hungry for just that, you will be put in
front of the microphone, and you’ll say, for example, that you are
morally responsible for the assassination of Comrade Tulayev . . .

That, or something else . . . mmm . . . how should I know what? You
will say it because the Prosecutor, Rachevsky, will make you say it,
word by word and not once but ten times over . . . mmm . . . he’s
patient, Rachevsky, like a mule ... a filthy mule ... You will say
whatever they want you to say, because you know the situation . . . be-
cause you have no choice: obey or betray ... Or we will call upon
you to stand in front of the same microphone and dishonor the Supreme
Tribunal, the Party, the Chief, the U.S.S.R.—everything at once, to pro-
claim . . . the devil take me . . . my knee ... to proclaim what you
call your innocence . . . and what a pretty spectacle your innocence
will make at that moment! ...”
It had grown dark. Rublev walked up and down his cell in silence. The
voice that sometimes rose out of Popov’s mutterings, sometimes was
lost in them, showered him with little muddy words; he did not hear
them all, but he had the feeling that he was walking on spit, and little
gray splatterings of spit kept raining around him, and there was nothing
to say in answer, or what he could say in answer was of no use . . . “And
it is on the eve of war, in this hour of danger, that you have destroyed the
cadres of the country, decapitated the army, the Party, industry—you
immitigable idiots and criminals . . .” If he cried that, Popov would
answer: “My knee . . . mmm . . . perhaps you are right, but what good
does it do you to be right? It is we who are the power, and even we can
do nothing about it. You are being asked for your own head now; and
you aren’t going to announce the fact before the international bour-
geoisie, are you? Even to avenge your precious little head, which will
soon be cracked open like a nut . . . mmmm ...” A despicable person
—but what way was there out of this infernal circle, what way?
Dressed in an old tunic and shapeless trousers, his hands crossed on
his chest, Popov continued his monologue, with short pauses. Rublev
stopped beside him as if he were seeing him for the first time. And now
he addressed him in the familiar form—sadly at first:
“Popov, old man, you look like Lenin ... It is striking . . . Don’t
move, let your hands stay just as they are ... Not like Ilich alive, not
a bit ... You look like his embalmed body . . . the way a rag doll
looks like a living being . . .” He studied him with an attention that was
at once dreamy and intense. “You look like him in gray crumbling stone,
or after the fashion of a sow bug ... the bumps on your forehead, your
miserable little beard, poor, poor old man . . .”
There was sincere pity in his voice. On his side, Popov was watching

him with the most intense attention. Rublev read something in his eyes
which was at once veiled and unmistakable: danger.
“. . . poor bastard that you are, poor old wreck . . . Cynical and
foul-smelling . . . Ah!”
With a look of despairing disgust, Rublev turned away and went to
the door. The cell seemed too small for him. He thought aloud:
“And this graveyard maggot has brought me word of the war . . .”
Popov’s muttering and spluttering began behind him again—spite-
fully perhaps?
“Ilich said that there’s always some use around a house for a cleaning
rag . . . mmmm ... a slightly dirty rag, naturally, since it is in the
nature of cleaning rags to be slightly dirty ... I am willing ... I am
no individualist . . . mmmm ... It is written in the Bible that a liv-
ing dog is better than a dead lion ...”
Popov rose, put away the papers he had brought, and laboriously got
into his overcoat. Rublev stood with his hands in his pockets, not offer-
ing to help him. He murmured, for himself:
“Living dog, or plague-bearing, half-dead rat?”
Popov had to pass in front of him to get the guard to open the door.
They did not take leave of each other. Before he crossed the threshold,
Popov shoved his cap on his head with a quick gesture, visor tilted up
and at a slight angle. At seventeen, just before his first taste of prison,
in the days of the first revolutionary enthusiasm, he had enj oyed giving
himself the same sort of underworld air. Framed in the metal doorway,
he turned, his chest brushing against the square double tooth of the
lock, and looked straight at Rublev with eyes that were clear and still
vigorous.
“Good-by, Rublev. I don’t need your answer ... I know what I
needed to know . . . mmmm . . . Basically, we understand each other
perfectly . . .” He lowered his voice because of the uniforms outside
the door. “It is hard, certainly ... mmmm . . . for me too . . . But
. . . mmm . . . the Party has confidence in you . . .”
“Go to hell!”
Popov took two strides back into the cell and, without any stammer-
ing, as if the hideous fog of his life had cleared around him, asked:
“What answer shall I take from you to the Central Committee?”
And Rublev, erect too, said firmly:
“That I have lived my whole life only for the Party. Sick and degraded
though it may be, our Party. That I have neither thought nor conscience
outside of the Party. That I am loyal to the Party, whatever it may be,

whatever it may do. That if I must perish, crushed by my Party, I con-
sent . . . But that	I	warn the villains who are killing us that	they	are
killing the Party .	.	.”
“Good-by, Comrade Rublev.”
The door closed, the well-oiled bolt slipped gently into the socket. The
darkness was almost complete. Rublev rained smashing blows on the
sepulchral door. Muffled steps hurried along the corridor, the wicket
opened.
“What is it, citizen?”
Rublev thought that he roared, but actually his voice was only an
angry breath:
“Turn on the light!”
“Sh . . . sh . .	.	There you are, citizen.” The electric bulb	went	on.
Rublev shook the pillow on which his visitor’s head had left	a hollow.
“He is unspeakable, Dora, he is filthy. It would he a pleasure to drop
him over a cliff, into a well, into a black abyss, provided that he would
stay under forever and neither his cap nor his brief bag would float to
the surface of any water ever again . . . One would go away afterward
with a feeling of relief, the night air would seem purer . . . Dora,
Dora . . .” But—as Rublev very well knew—it was Popov’s flabby
hands which were pushing him insidiously toward the black abyss. . . .
“Dialectics of the relation between social forces in periods of reac-

7 * The Brink of Nothing
Deportee Ryzhik presented insoluble problems to nu-
merous offices. What could one think of an engine driver who had
escaped unscathed from thirty telescoped locomotives? Of his fellow
combatants, not one had survived. Prison had providentially protected
him for over ten years, from 1928 on. A series of pure chances, such as
save a single soldier out of a destroyed battalion, kept him out of the
way of the great trials, of the secret investigations, and even of the
“prison conspiracy”! At time of the latter, Ryzhik was living absolutely
alone, under surveillance from the highest quarters, on a kolkhoze in the
middle Yenisei; during the progress of the investigation, which should
have disclosed him to be a political witness of the most dangerous sort,
one of those who are instantly inculpated because of their moral solidarity
with the guilty, he was in solitary confinement near the Black Sea, under
absolutely secret orders! Yet his dossier left the directors of purges with
no excuse. But the very outrageousness of his situation saved him, from
the moment when prudence advised not paying too much attention to
him for fear of involving too many people in responsibility. The offices

finally became accustomed to this strange case; certain heads of bureaus
began obscurely to feel that the old Trotskyist was under some high and
secret protection. They had vaguely heard of similar cases, precedents.
Through Prosecutor Rachevsky, the Acting High Commissar for Se-
curity, Gordeyev, and Popov (delegated by the Central Committee to
supervise “judicial inquiries into the most serious cases”), the Bureaus
received an order to add to the dossier of the Erchov-Makeyev-Rublev
case (assassination of Comrade Tulayev) that of an influential Trot-
skyist (which meant a genuine Trotskyist), whatever his attitude might
be. Rachevsky, contrary to Fleischman’s opinion, held that to make the
case more convincing to foreigners, one of the accused might this time be
allowed to deny all guilt. The Prosecutor undertook to confound him by
testimony which could easily be worked up. Popov casually added that
the verdict might take into consideration the doubt raised by his denials,
it would produce a goo'd effect, if the Political Bureau considered it
worth while. Zvyeryeva volunteered to bring together the secondary testi-
mony which would overwhelm the denials of the as yet unknown de-
fendant. “We have such a mass of material,” she said, “and the con-
spiracy had so many ramifications, that no resistance is possible. The
guilt of these counterrevolutionary vermin is collective ...” A search
of the files brought to light a number of dossiers, only one of which
perfectly suited the end in view: Ryzhik’s. Popov studied it with the
caution of an expert faced with an infernal machine of unknown con-
struction. The successive accidents which explained the survival of the
old Oppositionist were revealed to him in their strict concatenation.
Ryzhik: erstwhile worker in the Hendrikson Pipe and Tube Works,
St. Petersburg, member of the Party since 1906, deported to the Lena
in 1914, returned from Siberia in April 1917; had several conversations
with Lenin immediately after the conference of April ’17; member of the
Petrograd Committee during the Civil War; defended the Workers’ Op-
position before the Petrograd Committee in ’20, but did not vote for it.
Commissar of a division during the march on Warsaw, worked at that
time with Smilga, of the C.C., Rakovsky, head of the government of
Ukrainia, Tukhachevsky, commandant of the army, three enemies of the
people too tardily punished in 1937 . . . expelled from the Party in ’27,
arrested in ’28, deported to Minusinsk, Siberia, in July ’29, condemned
by the secret collegium of Security to three years of penal internment,
sent to the isolator of Tobolsk, there became the leader of the so-called
“Intransigents” tendency, which published a manuscript magazine en-
titled The Leninist (four issues attached). In 1932, the secret collegium

gave him an additional sentence of two years (upon decision of the
Political Bureau), to which he answered: “Ten years if it amuses you,
for I very much doubt if you will remain in power more than six months
with your blind starvation policy.” Author, during this same period, of
an “Open Letter on the Famine and the Terror,” addressed to the C.C.
Refuted the theory of state capitalism and maintained that of Soviet
bonapartism. Liberated in ’34 after an eighteen-day hunger strike. De-
ported to Chernoe, arrested at Chemoe with Elkin, Kostrov, and others
(the “deportees’ Trotskyist center” cases). Transferred to Butirky prison,
Moscow, refused to answer questions, went on two hunger strikes, trans-
ferred to the special infirmary (cardiac deficiency) . . . “To be de-
ported to the most distant regions ... No letters . . .” More than a
hundred names appeared in the 244 pages of the dossier and they were
the terrifying names of men cut down by the sword of the Party. Sixty-
six—a bad age, either the will stiffens for the last time or it suddenly
collapses. Popov decided: “Have him transferred to Moscow . . . See
that he travels under good conditions . . .” Rachevsky and Gordeyev
answered:
“Certainly.”
Incomparable dawns rose for Ryzhik from the profound indifference
of desert lands. He lived in the last of the five houses which made up the
hamlet of Dyra (Dirty Hole), at the junction of two icy rivers lost in
solitude. The houses were built of unhewn logs which had come down
in the spring drives. The landscape had neither bounds nor landmarks.
At first, when he still wrote letters, Ryzhik had named the place the
Brink of Nothing ... He felt that he was at the extreme limit of the
human world, at the very verge of an immense tomb. Most of the letters
he wrote never reached any destination, of course, and none came from
anywhere. To write from here was to shout into emptiness—which he
sometimes did, to hear his own voice; and the sound of it intoxicated him
with such violent grief that he would begin yelling insults at the tri-
umphant counterrevolution: “Criminals! Drinkers of proletarian blood!
Thermidorians! ” The stony plain sent him back only a vague, murmur-
ing echo, but birds of which he had been unaware flew up in terror and
their panic spread from one to another until the whole sky was alive with
them—and Ryzhik’s absurd rage dissolved, he began swinging his arms
in circles, trotted straight ahead until he had to stop for lack of breath,
his heart beating violently, his eyes moist.
There in Dyra five families of fishermen—Old Believers, of Great
Russian ancestry, but more than half adjusted to Ostiak ways of life—

wore out a destiny from which there was no escape. The men were stocky
and bearded, the women squat, with flat faces, bad teeth, small bright
eyes under heavy lids. They spoke little, laughed not at all, they smelled
of fish fat, they worked unhurriedly, cleaning the nets which their grand-
fathers had brought in the days of the Emperor Alexander, drying fish,
preparing tasteless foods for the winter months, weaving wickerwork,
mending faded clothes made of cloth from the previous century. From
the end of September, a bleak whiteness blanketed the flat landscape to
the horizon.
Ryzhik shared the house of a childless couple, who disliked him be-
cause he never crossed himself, pretending not to see the icon. So taciturn
were these two dull-eyed beings that a silence as of an unfertile field
seemed to emanate from them. They lived in the smoke from a dilapi-
dated stove, fed by scrawny brushwood. Ryzhik occupied a nook which
had a tiny dormer window three quarters covered over with boards and
stuffed with rags, because most of the glass was gone. Ryzhik’s chief
treasure was a small cast-iron stove, which had been left by some pre-
vious deportee. The chimney ran to one of the upper comers of the
window. Thus Ryzhik could have a little fire, provided that he would get
wood for it himself in the coppice on the other side of the Bezdolnya
(“the Forsaken”) and two miles upstream. Another envied treasure was
his clock, which people sometimes came from the neighboring houses to
see. When a Nyenets hunter crossed those plains, the people explained
to him that there was a man living among them who was being punished,
and that he owned a machine that made time, a machine that sang all by
itself, without ever stopping, sang for invisible time. And in fact the
obstinate nibbling of the clock devoured a silence as of eternity. Ryzhik
loved it, having lived almost a year without it, in pure time, pure motion-
less madness, earlier than creation. To escape from the silent house,
Ryzhik would set off across the waste. Whitish rocks broke the soil; the
eye clung hungrily to the few puny, bristling shrubs, part rust-colored,
part an acid green. Ryzhik would shout to them: “Time does not exist!
Nothing exists!” Space, beyond the limits of human time, swallowed the
small, unusual sound of his voice—not even the birds were frightened.
Perhaps there were no birds beyond time? On the occasion of a great
Socialist victory, the Yeniseisk colony of deportees succeeded in sending
him presents, among which he found a concealed message: “To you
whose fidelity is a pattern to us all, to you, one of the last survivors of
the Old Guard, to you who have lived only for the cause of the inter-
national proletariat . . .” The carton also contained unbelievable treas-

ures: three ounces of tea and the little clock, procurable for ten rubles in
city co-operatives. That it gained an hour in twenty-four when he forgot
to hang his penknife on the weight that made it run, was really of no
importance. But Ryzhik and Pakhomov never tired of their joke. It con-
sisted in one of them asking the other: “What time is it?” “Four . . .”
“With or without the penknife?”—“With the clog,” Ryzhik once an-
swered very seriously, for he had been reading last month’s Pravda.
Bearing their half century of masterless servitude, Ryzhik’s host and his
wife—he stroking his rough beard, she With her hands clasped in her
sleeves—had come to look at the wonder and they had spoken in its
presence, saying only one word, but a profound word, risen from the
depths of their souls (and how had they come to know that word?):
“Beautiful,” he said, shaking his head.
“Beautiful,” his wife repeated.
“When the two hands are here,” Ryzhik explained to them, “in the
daytime it means that it’s noon, at night it means that it’s midnight.”
“By God’s grace,” said the man.
“By God’s grace,” said the woman.
They crossed themselves and left, shuffling awkwardly, like a pair of
penguins.
As Pakhomov was in Security, he lived in the most comfortable room
(requisitioned) in the best of the five houses. It stood two thirds of a
mile away, in front of the hamlet’s three fir trees. The only representative
of the government in a region almost as extensive as a state of old
Europe, he was decidedly well off: among his possessions were a sofa,
a samovar, a chessboard, an accordion, some odd volumes of Lenin, last
month’s papers, tobacco, vodka. What more does a man need? Leo
Nikolayevich Tolstoi, although a nobleman and a mystic (that is to say,
benighted), carefully calculated just how much ground a man, with all
his avidity, required: A little short of six feet long, by sixteen inches
wide, by a yard deep, for a shipshape grave . . . “Right?” Pakhomov
would ask, sure of assent. He had a wry humor, in which there was
nothing malicious. If, coming to the end of the snowy track that led to
the house on which a sign: POST OFFICE—CO-OPERATIVE hung
askew, he saw a tired team—reindeer or shaggy horses—he joked with
them fondly: “Be glad you’re alive, you are useful creatures!” Deputed
to watch Ryzhik, he had conceived a reserved but warm affection for
his deportee, an affection which kindled a timid little light in his prying
eyes. He would say to him: “Orders are orders, brother. We do as the
service tells us. We are not expected to understand, all we have to do is

obey. Me—I’m a very small man. The Party is the Party, it is not for me
to judge men of your stamp. I have a conscience, a very small con-
science, because man is an animal that has a conscience. I can see
that you are pure. I can see that you are dying for the world Rev-
olution, and if you are wrong, if it doesn’t come, if Socialism has
to be built in a single country with our little bones, then, naturally,
you are dangerous, you have to be isolated, that’s all, and here we
are, in this backwater that might as well be the North Pole, each doing
his duty—and, as long as I have to be here, I am glad Pm here with
you.” He never got thoroughly drunk, perhaps to keep alert, perhaps out
of respect for Ryzhik, who, because he dreaded arteriosclerosis, drank
little—just enough to keep his courage up. Ryzhik explained it to Pakho-
mov: “I want to be able to think for a while yet.” “Quite right,” said
Pakhomov. Tired of the bare walls of his lodging, Ryzhik often took
refuge in his guardian’s room. Pakhomov’s face always wore an expres-
sion of suspicious humility, as if his features and his wrinkles had frozen
at a moment when he wanted to cry and would not let himself. His com-
plexion was reddish and rough, his eyes russet, his nose flat and turned
up; he never quite smiled, his lips opened on rusty stumps of teeth.
“Like some music?” he asked when Ryzhik had stretched out on the
sofa. “Have a swallow of vodka . . .” Before he drank, Ryzhik munched
a pickled cucumber. “Play.” Pakhomov drew heart-rending wails from
his accordion, and also bright notes that made one want to dance.
“Listen to this, it’s for the girls back home!” He dedicated his passionate
music to the girls of a faraway region. “Dance, girls, dance again!
Come on, Mafa, Nadia, Tania, Varia, Tanka, Yassilissa, dance, little
golden-eyes! Hip-hop, hip-hop!” The room filled with movement, with
joyous phantoms, with nostalgia. Next door, bowed in their perpetual
semidarkness, an old woman untangled fish nets with rheumatic fingers,
a young woman with a round Ostiak face full of an animal gentleness
busied herself at the fire; the little girls left their work to hold each
other awkwardly and spin around between the table and the stove; the
black-bearded face of St. Vassili, lit from above by a little lamp, sternly
judged the strange joy which yet had made its entrance there without
sin . . . Through the old woman’s hands, through the young woman’s
hands, the blood flowed with new vigor, but neither said a word, there
was more discomfort than anything else in the feeling. In the fenced
yard, the reindeer raised their heads, fear was born in their glassy eyes.
And suddenly they began running from fir tree to fir tree, from the trees
to the house. Endless white space absorbed the magical music.—Ryzhik

listened with a colorless smile. Pakhomov drew the fullest tones from
his instrument, as if he wanted to send one yet stronger cry, and yet
another, into emptiness—and having drawn it forth, he flung his instru-
ment on the bed. Silence fell implacably, like a weight, on space, the
reindeer, the house, the women, the children. (The old woman, mending
broken cords on her knees, asked herself if his music did not come of
the Evil One? For a long time her lips continued to move, repeating an
exorcism, but she had forgotten why.)
“The world will be a good place to live in, in a hundred years,” Pakho-
mov once said at such a moment.
“A hundred years?” Ryzhik calculated. “I’m not sure a hundred years
will be enough.”
From time to time they took guns and went hunting on the farther side
of the Bezdolnya. The landscape was strangely simple. Rounded and
almost white rocks rose out of the ground in groups, as far as the eye
could see. You vaguely felt that they were a people of giants surprised
by a flood, frozen and petrified. Dwarfed trees spread their slender net-
work of branches. To find themselves lost after an hour’s tramping and
climbing would have been easy. It was difficult to manage skis, and they
encountered few animals, and those few were wary, hard to surprise, they
had to run them down, track them, lie in wait for them for hours, lying
half buried in the snow. The two men passed a flask of vodka back and
forth. Ryzhik stared admiringly at the pale blue sky. At times he would
even say to his companion, inexplicably: “Look at that sky, brother. It
will soon be full of black stars.”
The words brought them together again after a long silence; Pakho-
mov felt no surprise. He said:
“Yes, brother. The Great Bear and the Pole Star will be black. Yes.
I’ve seen just that in a dream.”
There was nothing more they could say to each other, even with their
eyes. Frozen stiff, after an exhausting journey, they brought down a
flame-colored fox, and the dead beast’s slim muzzle, contorted in a
feminine rictus as it lay on the snow, made them uncomfortable. They
did not express their feeling. Joylessly they started back. Two hours later,
as they glided down a white slope in the livid twilight toward the red
ball of the sun, Pakhomov let Ryzhik catch up with him. His expression
showed that he had something to say. He murmured:
“Man is an evil beast, brother.”
Ryzhik forged ahead without answering. The skis bore him through
a sort of irreality. More hours passed. Their weariness became terrible,

Ryzhik was on the verge of collapse, the cold crept into his guts. In his
turn, he let his companion catch up with him, and said:
“Nevertheless, brother ...”
He had to gather strength to finish his sentence, he had almost no
breath left:
. . we will transform man.”
At the same moment he thought: “This has been my last hunt. Too
old. Farewell, beasts that I shall not kill. You are one of the fascinating
and cruel faces of life, and life is passing away. What must be done will
be done by others. Farewell.”
Ryzhik spent several days lying on his furs by the warm stove, under
the nibbling clock. Pakhomov came to keep him company. They played
cards—an elementary game which consisted in cheating. Pakhomov
usually won. “Of course,” he said. “I have a low streak in me.” So life
passed during the long, nocturnal winter. The reddish ball of the sun
dragged along the horizon. Mail arrived by sleigh once a month. A little
ahead of schedule, Pakhomov wrote reports for his superiors on the
deportee under his surveillance. “What am I to write them about you, old
man?”—“Write them,” said Ryzhik, “that I shit on the bureaucratic
counterrevolution.”
“They know that already,” Pakhomov answered. “But you ought not
to tell me about it. I am doing my duty. There’s no call for you to make
me angry.”
The day always comes when things end. No one can predict it, though
everyone knows that come it must. The silence, the whiteness, the eternal
North, will go on endlessly, that is to say until the end of the world—
and perhaps even after that, who knows? But Pakhomov came into the
hovel where Ryzhik sat rereading old newspapers in a nightmare as
diffuse as a fog. Redder than usual, the Security man, beard twisted, eyes
sparkling:
“We’re leaving here, old man. We’re through with this dirty hole. Get
your Stuff together. I have orders to take you to the city. We’re in luck.”
Ryzhik turned a petrified face toward him, with eyes that were ter-
ribly cold.
“What’s the matter?” Pakhomov asked kindly. “Aren’t you glad?”
Ryzhik shrugged his shoulders. Glad? Glad to die? Here or some-
where else? He felt that there was hardly enough strength left in him for
change, for struggle, for the mere thought of struggle; that he no
longer genuinely felt fear or hope or defiance, that his courage had
become a sort of inertia ...

The five households watched them set out on a day of low-hanging
clouds pierced by feeble glimmers of silver. The universe seemed for-
gotten. The smallest children, muffled in furs, were brought out in their
mothers’ arms. Thirty short figures dotted the dull whiteness around the
sleigh. The men gave advice and looked to see that the reindeer were
properly harnessed. Now that they were about to vanish, Pakhomov and
Ryzhik became more real than they had heen the day before; discover-
ing them roused a slight emotion. It was as if they were going to die.
They were setting off for the unknown, one guarding the other, for free-
dom or for prison, God alone knew. Eyno, the Nyenets, the Samoyed, who
had come for furs and fish, took them in his sleigh. Dressed in wolf-
skins, his face bony and brown, with slit eyes and scanty heard, he
looked like a Mongol Christ. Green and red ribbons decorated his boots,
his gloves, his cap. He pushed the last yellow strands of his beard care-
fully into his collar, studied the whole extent of the heavens and the
earth in one sweeping look, roused the reindeer with a click of his
tongue. Ryzhik and Pakhomov stretched out side by side, wrapped in
furs. They carried a store of dried bread, dried fish, vodka, matches,
and alcohol in tablet form to make a fire. The reindeer gave a little leap
and stopped. “Go with God!” said someone. Pakhomov answered, with
a laugh: “Our kind gets along better without.”
Ryzhik shook all the hands that were held out to him. They were of all
ages. There were old hands, rough and callused, strong hands, tiny hands,
delicately formed. “Good-by, good-by, comrades!” Men and women
who did not love him said: “Good-by, Comrade Ryzhik, a good journey
to you!” and they looked at him with new, kindly eyes. The new eyes
followed the sleigh all the way to the horizon. The reindeer leaped for-
ward into space; a sleeping forest appeared in the distance, recognizable
by its purplish shadows. Above, the sky cleared in silvery lacework.
Eyno leaned forward, watching his animals. A haze of snow surrounded
the sleigh, shimmering with rainbows.
“It’s good to get away,” Pakhomov repeated joyously. “I’ve had my
bellyful of this hole. I can’t wait to see a city!”
Ryzhik was thinking that the people of Dyra probably would never
get away. That he himself would never return here, nor to Chernoe, nor
to the cities he had known, nor, above all, to the days of strength and
victory. There are moments in life when a man may hope everything,
even in the depths of defeat. He lives behind the bars of a county jail,
and he knows that the Revolution is coming; that, under the gallows, the
world lies before him. The future is inexhaustible. Once a solitary man

has exhausted his future, every departure becomes the last. Almost at
the end of his journey—his cross-checkings made it clear enough. His
mind had long been made up, he felt himself available. The chill in his
stomach bothered him. He drank a swallow of vodka, covered his face
with furs, and gave himself up to torpor, then to sleep.
He did not wake again until night. The sleigh was gliding swiftly over
the nothingness which was the world. The night had a greenish trans-
parency. In the sky reigned stars which as they twinkled changed from
lightning blue to a soft glacial green. They filled the sky; he felt that con-
vulsions raged beneath their apparent immobility, that they were ready
to fall, ready to burst on the earth in tremendous flames. They enchanted
the silence; the snow-crystal world reflected their infinitesimal and sov-
ereign light. The one absolute truth was in them. The plain undulated,
the barely visible horizon heaved like a sea and the stars caressed it.
Eyno kept watch, crouched forward; his shoulders swayed to the
rhythm of their journey, to the rhythm of the revolving world; they hid
and then revealed entire constellations. Ryzhik saw that his companion
was not asleep either. His eyes open as never before, his eyeballs glinting
gold, he breathed in the magical phosphorescence of the night.
“Everything all right, Pakhomov?”
“Yes. I’m fine. I don’t regret anything. It’s marvelous.”
“Marvelous.”
The gliding sleigh lulled them in a common warmth. A slight chill
stung their lips and nostrils. Freed of weight, of boredom, of nightmare,
freed of themselves, they floated in the luminous night. The least stars,
those that they had thought almost invisible, were perfect; and each was
inexpressibly unique, though it had neither name nor form in the vast
glitter.
“I feel as if I were drunk,” Pakhomov murmured.
“My head is clear,” Ryzhik answered, “and it’s exactly the same
thing.”
,He thought: “It is the universe that is clear.” It lasted several minutes
or several hours. Around the brightest stars appeared huge shining
circles, visibly immaterial. “We are beyond substance,” murmured one.
“Beyond joy,” murmured another. The reindeer trotted briskly over the
snow; it looked as if they were hurrying to meet the stars on the horizon.
The sleigh sped dizzily down slopes, then climbed again with a vigor that
was like a song. Pakhomov and Ryzhik fell asleep, and the wonder con-
tinued in their dreams, continued when they woke to find dawn breaking.
Pillars of pearly light rose to the zenith. Ryzhik remembered that in his

dream he had felt himself dying. It had been neither frightening nor
bitter, it was as simple as the end of night; and all lights, the brightness
of the stars, the brightness of suns, the brightness of Northern Lights,
the more remote brightness of love, continued to pour endlessly down
upon the world, nothing was really lost. Pakhomov turned to him and
said, strangely:
“Ryzhik, brother, there are the cities ... It is incomprehensible.”
And Ryzhik answered: “There are the executioners,” just at the
moment when unknown colors flooded the sky.
“Why do you ihsult me?” asked Pakhomov, after a long silence dur-
ing which the sky and the earth became one sheet of white.
“I was not thinking of you, brother, I was only thinking of the truth,”
said Ryzhik.
It seemed to him that Pakhomov was weeping without tears, his face
almost black, although they were being carried through an unbelievable
whiteness. If it is your black soul, poor Pakhomov, rising into your face,
let it suffer from the cold daylight, and if it dies, die with it—what have
you to lose?
They made a halt under the high red sun, to drink tea, stretch their
legs, and let the reindeer search for their diet of moss under the snow.
After lighting the stove and bringing the kettle to a boil, Pakhomov
suddenly squared up as if to fight. Ryzhik stood before him, legs apart,
hands in his pockets, straight, firm, silently happy.
“How do you know, Comrade Ryzhik, that I have that yellow
envelope?”
“What yellow envelope?”
Looking straight into each other’s eyes, alone in the midst of the
magnificent wilderness, in the cold, the light, with the good hot tea they
were about to share, they could tell no lies . . . Thirty paces away, they
heard Eyno talking to his team. Perhaps he was humming.
“Then you don’t know?” asked Pakhomov blankly.
“Are you going out of your head, brother?”
They drank tea in little sips. The liquid sunshine flooded through
them. Pakhomov spoke heavily:
“The yellow secret service envelope—it is sewed into my tunic. I put
that tunic under me when I go to sleep. I have never been parted from it.
The yellow envelope—it is there against my chest ... I wasn’t told
what’s in it, I haven’t the right to open it except if I receive an order
in writing or code . . . But I know that it contains the order to shoot
you ... You understand—in case of mobilization, in case of counter-

revolution, if the powers decide that you must not go on living ... It
has often kept me awake, that envelope. I thought of it when we drank
together . . . When I watched you starting off toward the Bezdolnya
for firewood . . . When I played gypsy songs to you . . . When a
black dot appeared on the horizon, I said to myself, ‘The damned mail,
what is it bringing me, small man that I am?’ You understand, I’m a
man who does his duty. Now I’ve told you.”
“I never even thought of it,” said Ryzhik. “Though I certainly should
have suspected it.”
They played a strange game of chess. Little by little, the chessboard
was buried under a dust of beautifully wrought crystals. Ryzhik and
Pakhomov strode up and down on the rock, which at that point had only
a light covering of snow. Their boots left rounded marks in it, like the
prints of gigantic beasts. They moved a piece, and walked away, thinking
or dreaming, drawn by horizons which, a few minutes later, they would
renounce. Eyno came and crouched by the board, playing both sides in
his mind at once. His face had a look of concentration, his lips moved.
Slowly the reindeer came wandering back, from far away, and they too
looked on with their great opaque eyes, watching the mysterious game,
until miniature snow squalls, trailing along the ground, finally buried
it in crystal whiteness. The black and white chessmen had ceased to
exist except in the abstract, but through the abstract the small, strict
powers of the mind continued their combat. Pakhomov lost, as usual,
full of admiration for Ryzhik’s ingenious strategy.
“It is not my fault if I won,” Ryzhik said to him. “You have a lot to
lose yet, before you will understand.”
Pakhomov did not answer.
The dazzling journey brought them to landscapes covered with
starved bushes. Blotches of green grass emerged from the snow. The same
emotion seized all three men when they saw in the grass the ruts of a
wagon road. Eyno muttered an incantation against bad luck. The rein-
deer began to trot jerkily. The sky was dull, a leaden sky.
Ryzhik felt his sadness return, the sadness which was the texture of
his life and which he despised. Eyno left them at a kolkhoze where they
procured horses. Life there must have been a. picture in earthy colors,
washed over by the dawns which poured azure on the world. The roads
wandered away into woods filled with birds. Brooks ran through singing
coppices; the light was reflected from the water-spangled soil, rock, and
roots. They forded rivers on which clouds floated. They traveled through
this region in peasant carts, whose drivers hardly ever spoke a word

and, full of suspicion, came out of their torpor only when they had
drunk a little vodka. Then they hummed endless songs.
Parting came to Ryzhik and Pakhomov in the single street of a strag-
gling market town, among large dark houses standing well apart, on the
threshold of the building which housed both the Soviet and Security,
a wood-and-brick building with broad shutters. “Well,” said Pakhomov,
“our journey together is over. I have orders to turn you over to the
Security post. The railroad is only about sixty miles from here. I wish
you luck, brother. Don’t hold a grudge against me.” Ryzhik pretended
an interest in the street, in order not to hear the last words. They clasped
hands. “Good-by, Comrade Pakhomov, I wish you understanding, dan-
gerous though it be . . .” In the Security office two young fellows in
uniform were playing dominoes on a dirty table. The unlighted stove
sent out a wretched chill. One of the two glanced at the papers which
Pakhomov had brought. “State criminal,” he said to his companion, and
both of them looked at Ryzhik hostilely. Ryzhik felt the white hair on his
temples bristle, an aggressive smile uncovered his purplish gums, and
he said:
“You can read, I suppose. That means: Old Bolshevik, faithful to
Lenin’s work.”
“An old story. Plenty of enemies of the people have used the same
camouflage. Come, citizen.”
Without another word, they led him to a small dark room at the end
of the hall, closed the door on him, and padlocked it. It was hardly more
than a cupboard, it stank of cat urine, the air was heavy with mold. But
from behind the wooden wall came children’s voices. Ryzhik heard them
with delight. He made himself as comfortable as possible, his hack
against the wall, his legs stretched out. His old tired flesh groaned
despite itself and wished that it could lie down on clean straw ... A
little girl’s voice, refreshing as a trickle of water over the rocks of the
taiga, came from the other side of the world, solemnly reading
Nekrasov’s Uncle Vlass, no doubt to other children:
“With his bottomless sorrow,—tall, straight, his face tanned,—old
Vlass walks unhurried—through cities and villages.
“Far places call him, he goes,—he has seen Moscow, our mother,—
the sweep of the Caspian—and the imperial Neva.
“He goes, carrying the Sacred Book,—he goes, talking to himself,—he
goes and his iron-shod stick—makes a little sound on the ground.”

“I have seen all that too,” Ryzhik thought. “Trudge on, old Vlass, we
are not through trudging . . . Only, our sacred books are not the
same ...”
And, before he sank under weariness and discouragement, he remem-
bered another line of Nekrasov’s: “Oh my Muse, scourged to blood . . .”
Nothing but worry and work, these transfers! There are no prisons
within the Arctic Circle; jails appear with civilization. District Soviets
sometimes have at their disposal an abandoned house that no one wants
because it has brought people bad luck or because it would need too
much repairing to make it habitable. The windows are boarded up
with old planks on which you can still read TAHAK-TRUST, and they
let in wind, cold, dampness, the abominable bloodsucking midges. There
are almost always one or two wrong letters in the chalked inscription on
the door: RURAL PRISON. Sometimes the tumble-down hovel bristles
with barbed wire; and when it lodges an assassin, an escaped prisoner
who wears glasses and has been recaptured in the forest, a horse thief,
the director of a kolkhoze the order for whose arrest came from a high
source, the door is guarded by a sentry, a Young Communist of seven-
teen—preferably one who is good for nothing—with an old rifle slung
from his shoulder—a rifle which is good for nothing either, be it under-
stood . . . On the other hand, there are freight cars armored with scrap
iron and big nails; excrement has dribbled under the door; they are
shabbily sinister; they have the look of an old, disinterred coffin . . .
The extraordinary thing is that you can always hear sounds coming from
them—the groaning of sick men, vague moans, even songs! Are they
never emptied? They never reach the end of their journey. It would
take forest fires, showers of meteors, cities overthrown, to abolish their
kind . . . Through a green path which the white bark of birches bright-
ened like laughter, two naked sabers conducted Ryzhik toward one of
these cars, which stood on a siding among fir trees. Ryzhik laboriously
climbed in, and the rickety door was padlocked behind him. His heart
was pounding from the effort he had made; the semidarkness, the stench
which was like a fox’s earth, stifled him. He stumbled over bodies,
groped for the opposite wall with both hands outstretched, found it by
the light from a crack, through which he could see the peaceful bluish
landscape of firs, stowed his sack, and crouched in stale straw. He be-
came aware of movement around him, saw a score of young, bony faces
supported by half-naked, emaciated bodies. “Ah,” said Ryzhik, recover-

ing his breath. “Greetings, chpana! Greetings, comrade tramps!” And he
began by making a well-calculated statement of principles to the children
of the roads, the oldest of whom might be sixteen: “If anything disap-
pears from my bag, I’ll bloody the noses of the first two of you I can
lay my hands on. I’m like that—nothing mean about me. Be that as it
may, I have six pounds of dry bread, three cans of meat, two smoked
herrings, and some sugar—government rations—which we will share
fraternally but with discipline. The watchword is ‘conscious’!” The
twenty ragged children smacked their tongues joyously before giving a
feeble “Hurrah!” “My last ovation,” thought Ryzhik. “At least it’s sin-
cere . . .” The children’s shaven skulls were like the heads of plucked
birds. Some of them had scars that went down to the bone; a sort of
fever burned in them all. They sat down in an orderly circle, to talk to the
enigmatic old man. Several began delousing themselves. They crunched
the lice between their teeth, Kirgiz fashion, muttering: “You eat me and
I eat you”—which is said to comfort the soul. They were being sent to
the regional Tribunal for having looted the commissary of a penal
“colony for rehabilitation through work.” They had been traveling in
the same car for twelve days, the first six without ever getting out of it,
and had been fed nine times. “We used to shit under the door, Uncle, but
at Slavianka an inspector came by, our delegates complained to him in
the name of hygiene and the new life, so now they come and let us out
twice a day ... No danger that we’ll escape into a forest as thick as
this one—did you see it?” The same inspector—an ace—had got them
fed immediately. “Except for him, some of us would be dead, sure thing.
Must have been through the same mill himself, he looked like an old
hand—otherwise it would never have happened . . .” They looked for-
ward to the prison to which they were bound as to salvation, but they
wouldn’t get there in much less than a week, because of the munitions
trains that had to be let by ... a modern prison, with heat, clothes,
radios, movies, baths twice a month, if you could believe what you heard.
It was worth the trip, and the older ones, once they had been sentenced,
might have the luck to stay there.
A ray of moonlight fell through the slit in the roof. It fell on bony
shoulders, was reflected in human eyes that were like the eyes of wildcats.
Ryzhik portioned out some of his dry bread and divided two herrings
into seventeen pieces. He could hear the children’s mouths salivating.
The joy of the feast brightened the beautiful moonbeam. “How good I
feel! ” exclaimed the one who was called “the Evangelist” because he had
been adopted for a time by Baptist or Mennonite peasants (then they

had been deported themselves). He purred with satisfaction, lying
stretched out at full length on the floor. The ashy light touched only the
top of his forehead; below, Ryzhik saw his little dark eyes gleaming.
The Evangelist told a good transfer story: Gricha-the-Pockmarked, a
little boy from Tyumen, died just like that, without a word, rolled up
in his comer. Nobody cared until he began to stink, and they decided to
keep it quiet as long as possible so that they could share his rations.
The fourth day they couldn’t stand it any longer—but they’d had that
much more to eat—talk about a show! ...
Kot-the-Tomcat, the Pimp—face tilted up, mouth open, showing car-
nivorous teeth—studied Ryzhik benevolently and almost guessed: “Uncle,
you an engineer or an enemy of the people?”
“And what do you call an enemy of the people?”
Answers began coming out of an embarrassed silence. “Men that
derail trains . . . The Mikado’s agents . . . The people that start fires
underground in the Donets . . . Kirov’s assassins . . . They poisoned
Maxim Gorki . . .”—“I knew one once—president of, a kolkhoze, he
killed the horses by putting spells on them ... He knew a trick to
bring drought . . .”—“I knew one too, a rat, he was head of the penal
colony, he sold our rations in the market . . .”—“Me too, me too . . .”
They all knew wretches who were responsible, enemies of the people,
robbers, torturers, fomenters of famines, despoilers of prisoners—it’s
right to shoot them, shooting’s not bad enough for them, they ought to
have their eyes put out first, have their balls torn off with a string, the
way the Koreans do, “I’d make them do some telegraphing, I would! A
bit of a buttonhole right here—see, Murlyka?—in the middle of his belly
and you get hold of his guts, they unwind like a spool of thread, you
hook them onto the ceiling, there are yards of them, more than you know
what to do with, and the man squirms around and you tell him the best
thing he can do is telegraph to his fools of a father and mother, may the
devil roast them . . .” The invigorating thought of torture aroused them
all, made them forget Ryzhik, the pale, square-jawed old man, whose
face grew hard as he listened.
“Little brothers,” Ryzhik said at last, “I’m an old partisan from the
days of the Civil War, and I tell you I have seen much innocent blood
spilled ...”
From the darkness, through which the shaft of moonlight pierced like
a dagger, a discordant chorus answered him: “Innocent blood, you’re
right about that . . .” They had known plenty of bastards, but they
had known even more victims. And sometimes the bastards were victims

too—what could you make of it all? They discussed it late into the
night, until the moonbeam withdrew into the innocent sky—but prin-
cipally among themselves, because Ryzhik lay down with his head on his
sack and fell asleep. Bony bodies huddled against him. “You’re big, you
have clothes on, you stay warm . . .” The slumber of the moon-
drenched forest finally impregnated the old man and the grown-up
children with such vast quiet that it seemed to cure all ills.
Ryzhik shunted from prison to prison, so tired that he could no longer
think. “I am a stone carried along by a dirty flood . . .” Where did his
will power end, where did his indifference begin? At certain dark mo-
ments he was so weak that he could have wept: This is what it means to
be old, your strength goes, your mind flickers like the yellow lanterns
trainmen carry up and down the tracks at unknown stations . . . His
sore gums indicated the beginning of scurvy, his joints ached, after
resting he could hardly straighten up his tall body, it was so stiff with
rheumatism. Ten minutes of walking exhausted him. Shut up in a huge
barracks with fifty human specters, some of whom were peasants (offi-
cially: “special colonists”), others old offenders, he felt almost glad
when his fur cap and his sack were stolen. In the sack was the clock
from the brink of silence. Ryzhik came out of there with his hands in
his pockets and his head bare, bitterly erect. Perhaps he was no longer
waiting for anything but the chance to spit his disgust for the last time
into the face of some anonymous sub-torturer who was not worth the
effort? Perhaps he had lost even that useless passion? Police, jailers,
examiners, high officials—all climbers who had climbed aboard at the
eleventh hour, ignorant, their heads stuffed with printed formulas—
what did they know about the Revolution, had they ever known anything
about it? Between him and their kind, no common language remained.
And anything written vanished into secret files which would never open
until the earth, shaken to its bowels, should gape under the palatial
government buildings. What use would anyone have for the last cry of
the last Oppositionist, crushed under the machine like a rabbit under a
tank? He dreamed stupidly of a bed with sheets, a quilt, a pillow for
his head—such things existed. What has our civilization invented that
is better? Socialism itself will not improve the modern bed. To lie down,
to fall asleep, never to wake again . . . The rest are all dead, all of them,
all of them! How much time will this country need before our new pro-
letariat begins to become conscious of itself? Impossible to force it into
maturity. You can’t hurry the germination of seeds under the ground.

You can kill it, though . . . Yet (reassuring thought!) you can’t kill it
everywhere or kill it always or kill it completely . . .
He was tormented by lice. In the glass doors of railroad carriages he
saw himself looking exactly like an old tramp still in fairly vigorous
health. Now he was in a third-class compartment, surrounded by a non-
commissioned officer and several soldiers in heavy boots. It was pleasant
to see people again. But people hardly noticed him—“You see so many
prisoners.” This one might be a great criminal, since he was so heavily
escorted, yet he didn’t look it, could he be a believer, a priest, a man
under persecution? A peasant woman with a child in her arms asked the
noncom for permission to give the prisoner some milk and a few eggs,
because he looked ill—“in a Christian spirit, citizen.”—“It is strictly
forbidden, citizen,” said the soldier. “Go along, citizen, or I’ll have
you put off the train . . .”—“Thank you a thousand times, citizen,”
said Ryzhik to the peasant woman, in a strong deep voice which made
every head in the corridor turn. The noncom, blushing crimson, inter-
vened: “Citizen, you are strictly forbidden to speak to anyone . . .”
“To hell with that,” Ryzhik said quietly.
“Shut up!”
One of the soldiers, who was lying in the upper berth, dropped a blan-
ket over him. A great pushing and tussling followed, and when Ryzhik
got rid of the blanket he saw that the corridor had been cleared. Three
soldiers blocked the compartment doorway. They were looking at him
with rage and terror. Across from him, the noncom intently watched his
every movement, ready to fling himself on him to gag him, to manacle
him (even to kill him?)—anything to prevent him from uttering another
word.
“Idiot,” said Ryzhik, looking straight at him. He felt no anger—only a
desire to laugh, which was overcome by nausea.
Calmly, his elbows resting on the window sill, he watched the fields fly
past. Gray and sterile they looked at first, but they were not really so, for
soon he could see the first green shoots of wheat. As far as the horizon,
and beyond it, the plains were sown with seeds of vegetable gold, weak
but invincible. Toward evening, smokestacks appeared in the distance,
belching black smoke. A big factory was alight with concentrated red
flame. He was in the Ural industrial district. He recognized the outlines
of mountains. “I came through here on horseback in 1921, it was a wil-
derness . . . What an accomplishment!” The little local prison was
clean, well lighted, painted sea green like a hospital. Ryzhik took a bath,
was given clean linen, cigarettes, a passably good hot meal . . . His

body felt small pleasures of its own, independently of his mind—the
pleasure of swallowing hot soup and finding the flavor of onion in it, the
pleasure of being washed clean, the pleasure of stretching itself comfort-
ably on the new mattress . . . “Now,” murmured his mind, “we are
back in Europe, it’s the last lap ...” A great surprise awaited him. The
dimly lighted cell to which he was taken contained two beds, and on one
of them a man lay sleeping. The noise of the bolts being opened and
closed wakened him. “Welcome,” he said in a friendly voice.
Ryzhik sat down on the other bed. Through the dimness, the two pris-
oners looked at each other with instantaneous sympathy. “Political?”
Ryzhik asked. “Just, like yourself, my dear comrade,” replied the man
who had been asleep. “I know already, you see—I’ve acquired an in-
fallible nose for that sort of thing . . . Isolator—most likely Verkhne-
Uralsk or Tobolsk, possibly Suzdal or Yaroslavl? One of the four, I am
certain. After that, the Far North. Right?” He was a short man with a
little beard; his wrinkled face looked like a baked apple, but was lighted
by kindly round owl eyes. His long fingers—the sort of fingers a wizard
might have—drummed on the blanket. Ryzhik nodded his assent, though
he felt a little hesitant about trusting this stranger. “The devil take me!
How have you managed to keep yourself alive all this time?”
“I really don’t know,” said Ryzhik. “But I don’t think I have much
time left.”
The other hummed:
“Life fleets like the wave,
Pour me the wine of comfort . . .
“But in fact all this unpleasant business is not as fleeting as they say.
Allow me to introduce myself: Makarenko, Boguslav Petrovich, profes-
sor of agricultural chemistry at the University of Kharkov, member of
the Party since 1922, expelled in ’34—Ukrainian deviation—Skrypnik’s
suicide, and so on . . .”
Ryzhik introduced himself in turn: “. . . former member of the
Petrograd Committee, former deputy member of the C.C. . . . Left
Opposition . . .” The little man’s blankets rose like wings, he jumped
out of bed—nightshirt, waxy body, hairy legs. His absurd face puckered
with smiles and tears. He waved his arms, embraced Ryzhik, tore himself
away from him, came back, finally stood in the middle of the cell jerking
like a puppet.
“You! Amazing! Your death was discussed last year in every prison
. . . Dead from a hunger strike . . . Your political testament was dis-

cussed ... I read it—not bad at all, although . . . You! I’ll be
damned! Well, I congratulate you! It’s terrific.”
“I did go on a hunger strike,” said Ryzhik, “and changed my mind at
the last moment because I believed that the regime would be going
into its crisis almost immediately ... I did not want to desert.”
“Naturally . . . Magnificent! Amazing!”
His eyes misty, Makarenko lit a cigarette, swallowed smoke, coughed,
walked up and down the concrete floor barefoot.
“I have had only one other meeting as strange as this. It was in the
prison at Kansk. An old Trotskyist—think of it!—on his way from a
secret isolator, who knew nothing about the trials, nothing about the
executions, who had no suspicions whatever, can you image that? He
asked me for news of Zinoviev, of Kamenev, of Bukharin, of Stetsky . . .
‘Are they writing? Does their stuff get printed in the papers?’ At first I
said ‘Yes, yes’—I didn’t want to kill him. ‘What are they writing?’ I
played dumb—theory is not in my line, and so on ... At last I said to
him: ‘Prepare for a shock, esteemed comrade, and don’t think I have
gone mad: They are all dead, they were all shot, from the first to the last,
and they confessed.’ ‘What could they possibly have confessed?’ . . .
He started calling me a liar and a provocateur, he even went for my
throat—oh God, what a day! A few days later he was shot himself, for-
tunately, on an order telegraphed from the Center. I still feel relieved for
him when I think of it . . . But you—it’s amazing!”
“Amazing,” Ryzhik repeated, and leaned against the wall. His head
suddenly felt heavy.
He began to shiver. Makarenko wrapped himself in his blanket. His
long fingers played with the air.
“Our meeting is absolutely extraordinary . . . An inconceivable
piece of negligence on the part of the services, a fantastic success com-
manded by the stars . . . the stars which are no longer in their courses.
We are living through an apocalypse of Socialism, Comrade Ryzhik . . .
Why are you alive, why am I—I ask you! Why? Magnificent! Stagger-
ing! I wish I might live for a century so that I could understand . . .”
“I understand,” said Ryzhik.
“The Left theses, of course ... I am a Marxist too. But shut your
eyes for a minute, listen to the earth, listen to your nerves ... Do you
think I am talking nonsense?”
“No.”
Ryzhik clearly deciphered the hieroglyphics (perhaps he was the only

person in the world to decipher them, and it gave him an agonizing feel-
ing of vertigo)—the hieroglyphics which had been branded with red-hot
iron into the very flesh of the country. He knew, almost by heart, the
falsified reports of the three great trials; he knew all the available details
of the minor trials in Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Kras-
noyarsk, trials of which the world had never heard. Between the hun-
dreds of thousands of lines of the published texts, weighted down with
innumerable lies, he saw other hieroglyphics, equally bloody but piti-
lessly clear. And each hieroglyphic was human: a name, a human face
with changing expressions, a voice, a portion of living history stretching
over a quarter century and more. Such and such an answer of Zinoviev’s
at the trial in August ’37 was connected with a sentence spoken in ’32 in
the courtyard of an isolator, with a speech full of double meanings
(seemingly cowardly, but unyielding with a tortuous, calculating devo-
tion), delivered before the Central Committee in ’26; and the thought
behind that speech was connected with such and such a declaration by
the president of the International, made in ’25, with such and such a
remark at a dinner in ’23 when the democratization of the dictatorship
was first being discussed . . . Beyond that, the thread of the idea ran
back to the Twelfth Congress, to the discussion on the role of syndicates
in ’20, to the theories of war Communism debated by the Central Com-
mittee during the first famine, to differences of opinion just before and
just after the insurrection, to brief articles commenting on the theses of
Rosa Luxembourg, the objections of Yuri Martov, Bogdanov’s heresy
... If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik
would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of
that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thou-
sands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now
destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory, now perhaps
reflected only in his own mind as in a thousand-faceted mirror . . . All
snuffed out, those brains; all disfigured, those faces, all smeared with
blood. Even ideas were swept into a convulsive dance of death, texts
suddenly meant the opposite of what they stated, a madness carried away
men, books, the history that was supposed to have been made once and
for all; and now there was nothing but aberration and buffoonery—one
man beating his breast and crying, “I was paid by Japan,” another
moaning, “I wanted to assassinate the Chief whom I worship,” yet an-
other accompanying a scornful “Come now!” with a shrug that suddenly
opened a hundred windows on an asphyxiated world . . . Ryzhik could
have produced a set of biographies, with an appendix of documents and

photographs, covering the public, private, and ideological lives of five
hundred men who had been executed, three hundred who had disap-
peared. What could a Makarenko add to such a detailed picture? So long
as he had retained the slightest hope of surviving usefully, Ryzhik had
continued his investigations. From sheer force of habit, he asked ques-
tions: “What happened in the prisons? Whom did you meet? Tell
me, Comrade Makarenko . . . Give me your story, Comrade Maka-
renko . . .”
“The November seventh and May first celebrations gradually died out
during those black years. A deadly certainty lighted the prisons, as with
the blaze of salvos at dawn. You know of the suicides, the hunger strikes,
the final, despicable—and useless—betrayals, which were suicides too.
Men opened their veins with nails, broke bottles and ate the glass, flung
themselves on guards so that they would be shot down . . . you have
heard of all that. The custom of calling on the dead in the isolator court-
yards. On the eves of the great anniversaries, the comrades formed a
circle during the exercise period; a voice hoarse with distress and defi-
ance called out the names, the greatest first, the rest in alphabetical order
—and there were names for every letter of the alphabet. And each man
present answered in turn: ‘Dead for the Revolution!’ then we would
begin singing the hymn to the dead ‘fallen gloriously in the sacred strug-
gle,’ but we could not often sing it through because the guards would be
summoned and come running like mad dogs; the comrades made a chain
to receive them, and so, arm linked in arm, they held together through
the scuffle; under the blows and the curses and the icy water from the fire
pumps, they went on shouting in rhythm: ‘Glory be to them, glory be to
them!”’
“Enough,” said Ryzhik, “I can see what came next.”
“These demonstrations died out within eighteen months, although the
prisons were more jammed than ever. Those who maintained the tradi-
tion of the old struggles disappeared underground or into Kamchatka, we
never knew exactly; the few survivors were lost in the new crowds. There
were even opposing demonstrations—prisoners shouting, ‘Long live the
Party, long live our Chief, long live the Father of his Country!’ It did
them no good, they were doused with icy water too.”
“And now the prisons are quiet?”
“They are thinking, Comrade Ryzhik.”
Ryzhik formulated “theoretical conclusions, the chief thing being not
to lose our heads, not to let our Marxist objectivity be perverted by this
nightmare.”

“Obviously,” said Makarenko in a tone which perhaps meant exactly
the contrary.
“First: Despite its internal regression, our state remains a factor of
progress in the world because it constitutes an economic organism which
is superior to the old capitalist states. Second: I maintain that, despite
the worst appearances, there is no justification for classifying our state
with fascist regimes. Terror is not enough to determine the nature of a
regime, what is basically significant is property relations. The bureauc-
racy, dominated by its own political police, is obliged to maintain the
economic regime established by the Revolution of October ’17; it can
only increase an inequality which, in its own despite, becomes a factor in
the education of the masses . . . Third: The old revolutionary prole-
tariat ends with us. A new proletariat, of peasant origin, is developing in
new factories. It needs time to reach a certain degree of consciousness
and, by its own experience, to overcome the totalitarian education it has
received. To fear that war will interrupt its development and liberate the
confused counterrevolutionary tendencies of the peasantry . . . Do you
agree, Makarenko?”
Lying on his bunk, Makarenko nervously tugged at his little beard. His
owl eyes were dimly phosphorescent.
“Of course,” he said, “on the whole . . . Ryzhik, I give you my word
of honor that I shall never forget you . . . See here, you must try to get
a few hours’ sleep ...”
Awakened at dawn, Ryzhik had a few moments in which to say
good-by to his companion of the night: they kissed each other. A detach-
ment of special troops surrounded Ryzhik in the open truck, so that no
one should see him; but there was no one in the street. At the station he
found a well-equipped Prisons Service car awaiting him. He surmised
that he was probably on the main line to Moscow. The basket of provi-
sions which was put on the seat beside him contained luxurious foods
that he had long forgotten—sausage and cream cheese. He could think of
little else, because he was very hungry; his strength was ebbing. He de-
cided to eat as little as possible, only enough to sustain himself; and,
because he was something of a gourmet, to confine himself to the more
delectable and uncommon viands. Lying on the wooden seat amid
the clattering of the express train, he savored them pleasurably and
thought, without the least feeling of fear, and indeed with a certain relief,
that he was soon to die. It was a restful journey. Of Moscow, Ryzhik saw
only a freight station by night. Distant arc lights lit the network of rails,

a vague red halo hid the city. The police van traveled through sleeping
streets, in which Ryzhik heard only the hum of the motor, drunkards
quarreling drearily, the magical chimes of a clock letting a few musical,
shattering notes fall into the silence. Three A.M. Some indefinable atmos-
phere enabled him to recognize one of the courtyards of the Butirky
prison. He was taken into a small building which had been recently made
over and then into a cell painted gray up to six feet from the floor, as
cells were painted under the old regime—why? There were sheets on the
cots, the electric bulb in the ceiling gave a weak light. It is nothing, it is
only the real Brink of Nothing . . .
He was taken to be examined early in the morning. It was only a few
steps down the corridor. The doors of the adjoining cells stood open—an
unoccupied building. In one of these cells, which was furnished with a
table and three chairs, Ryzhik immediately recognized Zvyeryeva, whom
he had known for twenty years, since the days of the Petrograd Cheka,
the Kaas plot, the Arkadi case, the Pulkovo battles, the commercial
maneuverings at the beginning of the N.E.P. Hysterical, crooked to the
marrow, devoured by unsatisfied desires, had she outlived so many
valiant men? “I might have known it,” Ryzhik thought. “The last
touch!” It brought a wry smile to his face. He did not greet her. Beside
her, a round face with oily, carefully parted hair. “The dirty bureaucrat
who keeps tabs on you, you old whore?” Ryzhik said nothing, sat down,
and looked at her calmly.
“You recognize me, I suppose,” said Zvyeryeva quietly, with a sort of
sadness,
Shrug.
“I hope that your transfer was effected under not too uncomfortable
conditions ... I had given orders. The Political Bureau does not
forget your service records . . .”
Another shrug, but less pronounced.
“We consider your period of deportation finished . . .”
He did not stir. His face became ironical.
“The Party expects you to display a courage which will be your own
salvation . . .”
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” said Ryzhik with disgust. “Look at
yourself in a mirror tonight—I am sure you will vomit. If it were pos-
sible to die of vomiting, you would die . . .”
He had spoken in an undertone: a voice from a tomb. White hair, pale
face, shaggy beard—weak as an invalid and hard as an old lightning-

blasted tree. For the baby-faced high official with the pomaded hair, he
had only a brief look, a scornful curl of the nostrils.
“I should not allow myself to become angry—you are not worth it.
You are below shame. At most, you are worth the proletarian bullet that
will shoot you one day if your masters do not liquidate you beforehand,
tomorrow for example ...”
“In your own interest, citizen, I beg you to restrain yourself. Here
insult and violence serve no purpose. I am doing my duty. You are
charged with a capital crime, I offer you a way to exonerate your-
self ...”
“Enough. Take due note of this: I am irrevocably resolved neither to
enter into any conversation with you nor to answer any questions. That is
my last word.”
He looked away—at the ceiling, at nothingness. Zvyeryeva put up her
hand and patted her hair into place. Gordeyev took out a handsome
lacquered cigarette case, with a design of a troika dashing through snow,
and held it out toward Ryzhik:
“You have suffered a great deal, Comrade Ryzhik, we understand
you ...”
His answer was a look so scornful that he lost his composure, pocketed
the cigarette case, looked at Zvyeryeva for help, only to find her as
abashed as himself. Ryzhik half smiled at them, calmly insulting.
“We have ways of making the most hardened criminals talk . . .”
Ryzhik spat heavily on the floor, rose, muttered, “What stinking ver-
min!” for his own ears, turned his back on them, opened the door, and
said to the three waiting special service men: “Take me to my cell!” and
returned to his cell.
No sooner was he gone than Gordeyev took the offensive. “You should
have prepared this examination in advance, Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Thus
he declined all responsibility for the setback. Zvyeryeva stared stupidly at
her painted fingernails. Half of the trial swept away? “With your per-
mission,” she said, “I will break him. I have no doubt of his guilt. His
attitude alone . . .” Her words placed Gordeyev face to face with his
responsibility again. “If you do not give me carte blanche to force this
man whose confession we must have, it will he you who has scuttled the
trial . . .”
“We’ll see,” Gordeyev murmured evasively.
Ryzhik threw himself on the cot. He was shaking all over. He could
feel his heart beating heavily in his chest. Thoughts in shreds, like rags

scorched in a fierce fire, fragments of broken syllogisms whose edges
momentarily glittered and hurt, swirled in his brain—yet he felt no need
to put them ih order. Everything was probed, weighed, concluded, fin-
ished. This tempest within him had arisen despite himself. It began to die
away when he noticed his daily ration on the table—the black bread, the
messtin of soup, two lumps of sugar ... He was hungry. Tempted to
get up and smell the soup (sour cabbage and fish, no doubt!), he re-
strained himself. For a moment he felt a desire to eat for the last time,
the last time! ... It would do him good ... No. Get it over with! It
was that act of will which restored him to complete self-control, which
brought him to a decision, irrevocably. A stone slides down a slope,
reaches the edge of a precipice, drops—there is no comparison between
the slight impulse which first set it in motion and the depths to which it
falls. Calmed, Ryzhik shut his eyes, to think. Several days would prob-
ably pass before these vermin made their intentions clear. How long shall
I hold out? At thirty-five, a man can still be somewhat active between the
fifteenth and the eighteenth days of a hunger strike, provided that he
drinks several glasses of water each day. At sixty-six, in my present con-
dition—chronic undernourishment, fatigue, will to nonresistance—I
shall go into the final phase in a week . . . Without water, a hunger
strike brings death in from six to ten days, but is extremely difficult to
keep up after the third day because of hallucinations. Ryzhik decided to
drink in order to suffer less and to keep his mind clear, but to
drink as little as possible in order to shorten the process. The great diffi-
culty would be to cheat the vigilance of his guards in the matter of
destroying his rations. At all costs he must avoid the loathsome business
of forced feeding . . . The flushing apparatus of the toilet worked well;
Ryzhik found no difficulty until it came to destroying the bread, which
he had to crumble up, and it took a long time, the smell of fermented rye
rose into his nostrils, the feeling of that doughy substance which was life
itself entered into his fingers, into his nerves. In a few days it would be a
trial which his weakening fingers, his overstrained nerves, would find it
more and more difficult to surmount. The thought that that filthy crea-
ture Zvyeryeva and the vermin with the greased hair had not foreseen
this made Ryzhik burst out laughing. (And the guard on duty, who had
orders to look at him every ten minutes through the bull’s-eye glass in the
door, saw his pasty face lit up by a great laugh and instantly transmitted
his report to the assistant warden in charge of Corridor II: “The pris-
oner in Cell 4 is lying on his back, laughing and talking to him-
self . . .”) Usually a hunger striker remains lying down, since every

movement means an expenditure of strength . . . Ryzhik decided to
walk as much as he could.
Not an inscription on the freshly repainted walls. Ryzhik sent for the
assistant warden and asked for hooks. “Presently, citizen.” Later he came
back and said: “You must make your request to the examining judge at
your next hearing . . .” “I shall read no more,” thought Ryzhik, sur-
prised that his farewell to hooks left him so indifferent. What were
needed today were books like thunderbolts, full of an irrefutable histori-
cal algebra, full of merciless indictments, books which should judge these
days, every line of which should breathe implacable intelligence, be
printed in pure fire. Such books would be born later. Ryzhik tried to call
to mind books which, for him, were connected with his sense of being
alive. The grayish newsprint of the papers left him only a memory of
insipidity. From a very distant past there came back to him with great
intensity the image of a young man stifling in his cell, pulling himself up
on the window grating to a position from which he saw three rows of
barred windows in a yellow fagade, a courtyard in which other prisoners
were sawing wood, a beautiful sky which he longed to drink . . . That
faraway prisoner (myself, a self which I really don’t know if it is alive or
dead, a self which is actually more of a stranger to me than many of the
men who were shot last year) one day received certain books which
made him joyfully renounce the call of the sky—Buckle’s History of
Civilization, and a collection of decorous Popular Tales which he looked
through with irritation. But toward the middle of the volume the type
changed, and it was Historical Materialism by G. V. Plekhanov. Until
then, he thought, that young man had been nothing but primitive vigor,
instincts, trained muscles which effort tempted, he had felt like a colt in
the fields; and the sordid street, the workshop, fines, lack of money,
worn-out shoes, prison, had held him like a tethered animal. He suddenly
discovered a new capacity for living, something inexpressibly greater
than what was commonly called life. He read the same pages over and
over, pacing up and down his cell, so happy to understand that he wanted
to run and shout, that he wrote to Tania: “Forgive me if I hope I shall
stay here long enough to finish these books. At last I know why I love
you . . .” What is consciousness? Does it appear in us like a star in the
pale twilight sky, invisibly, undeniably? He who, the day before, had
lived in a fog now saw the truth. “It is that, it is contact with truth.”
Truth was simple, near as a young woman you take in your arms and say
“Darling!” and then you discover her eyes, where light and darkness
blend. He possessed truth forever. In November ’17 another Ryzhik—yet

was it the same?—went to a great printing plant in Vasili-Ostrov with
the Red Guard, and requisitioned it in the name of the Party. Before the
great machines which produce books and papers he exclaimed: “Now,
comrades, the days of falsehood are done! Mankind will print nothing
but the truth!” The owner of the plant, a fat, pale, yellow-lipped gentle-
man, cruelly put in: “That, gentlemen, I defy you to do!” and Ryzhik
wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were not bringing barbarism, we
were putting an end to war and murder, we were bringing proletarian
justice. “We shall see, citizen; in any case, I inform you that there are no
more gentlemen, now or henceforth . . .” The man he had been in those
days was over forty, a hard age for a worker, but he felt himself an ado-
lescent again: “Coming into power,” he said, “has made us all twenty
years younger . . .”
The first three days that he spent without food caused him hardly any
suffering. Was he not drinking too much water? His hunger was only an
intestinal torment, which he appraised with detachment. Headaches
forced him to lie down, then they passed off, but attacks of giddiness
suddenly sent him staggering to the wall in the midst of his walking. His
ears hummed like the sound in a sea shell. He brooded more than he
thought, but both his broodings and his thoughts on the subject of death
were absurdly superficial. “A purely negative concept, a minus sign;
only life exists . . .” It was obviously true, it was horrifyingly false. The
truth and the falsehood were both stupid . . . Lying under the blanket
and his heavy winter overcoat, he felt cold. “It is the warmth of life
leaving me . . .” He shivered for a long time, shaking like a leaf in a
gale—no, it was more like an electric bell vibrating, ting-tirig-ting-ting
... Great bands of color, like Northern Lights, filled his eyes; he also
saw dark lights fringed with fire: flashes, disks, extinguished planets
. . . Perhaps man can glimpse many mysterious things when his cere-
bral substance begins to disintegrate? Is it not made of the same matter
as the worlds? A sumptuous warmth flowed into his limbs, he rose,
economizing his movements, to force his aching fingers to crumble the
black rye, which must be destroyed, destroyed at all costs, comrades,
despite its intoxicating smell.
The day came when he no longer had the strength to get up. His jaws
were decomposing, they would burst like an abscess—what a relief, to
burst like a great bubble of flesh, a great bubble of transparent soap in
which he recognized his face, an absurd, grimacing sun. He laughed. The
glands under his ears were swelling, painful as aching teeth ... A
nurse came, addressed him affectionately by the first name he used to

have, and he sat up to tell her to go away, but he recognized her: “You,
you, you have been dead for so long, and here you are, and it is I who am
dying, because it must be, darling. Let’s take a little walk, shall we?”
They followed the Neva as far as the Summer Garden, walking through
the white night. “I am thirsty, thirsty, darling, incredibly thirsty ... I
am delirious . . . it’s all right so long as they don’t notice it too soon. A
big glass of beer, my friend, quick!” His hand shook so as it reached for
the glass that the glass rolled over the floor tinkling like little bells, and
beautiful blue and gold spotted cows with wide, transparent horns
breasted the grass in a Karelian field; the birches grew taller second by
second, waving leaves that signaled, better than hands could do: Here is
the stream, here is the pure spring, drink, you splendid beasts! Ryzhik
lay down on the grass to drink, drink, drink ...
“Do you feel ill, citizen? What is the matter?”
The warden laid a hand on his forehead, a cool, refreshing hand, an
immense hand of clouds and snow . . . The day’s ration untouched on
the floor, a fragment of bread in the toilet bowl, those enormous eyes
glittering from dark sockets, that long body trembling so that the cot
shook, the prisoner’s fetid breath . . . The warden understood instantly
(and saw himself ruined: what criminal negligence!) :
“Arkhipov! ”
Arkhipov, soldier in the special battalion, walked in with a heavy
tread; it echoed in Ryzhik’s head like clods of earth on his coffin—that’s
odd, is it so simple to have died, but where are the comets?
“Arkhipov, pour a little water into his mouth—gently . . .”
The warden spoke over the telephone: “Comrade Chief, I report:
Prisoner 4 is dying . . .” From telephone to telephone, the death of
Prisoner 4, who was still alive, traveled through Moscow, spreading
panic as it went; it hummed in the Kremlin receiver, it raised a shrill
little voice in the telephones of Government House, the Central Com-
mittee, the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, it assumed a man’s voice,
simulating firmness, to announce itself in a villa surrounded by idyllic
silence in the heart of the Moskva woods; there its aggressive murmur
outweighed other murmurs which were announcing a skirmish on the
Chinese-Mongolian frontier and a serious breakdown in the Chelyabinsk
factory. “Ryzhik dying?” said the Chief in the low voice of his repressed
angers. “I order him saved! ”
Ryzhik was quenching his thirst with a delicious water that was min-
gled snow and sunshine. “Together, together,” he said joyfully, because
all his comrades, arm in arm as at the revolutionary funerals of long ago,

the Older Generation, the men of energy and will, were pulling him over
the ice . . . Suddenly a crevasse opened at their feet, clean-cut as a
lightning flash; at the bottom of it plashed dark smooth glinting water.
Ryzhik cried: “Comrades, look out!” A tearing pain, that was like a
lightning flash too, flickered in his chest. He heard brief explosions under
the ice . . . Arkhipov, soldier of the special battalion, saw the prisoner’s
smile writhe over his teeth, their chattering stopped at the edge of the
glass. The delirious eyes ceased to see.
“Citizen, citizen!”
Nothing moved in the heavy face with its bristling white beard.
Arkhipov slowly put the glass on the table, fell back a step, came to
attention, and froze in terror and pity.
No one even noticed him when the important people came hurrying in
—the doctor in his white smock, an officer of very high rank with per-
fumed hair, a little woman in uniform, so pale that she had no lips, a
little old man in a frayed overcoat, to whom the officer himself, for all his
general’s insignia, spoke only with a bow . . . The doctor waved his
stethoscope courteously: “Excuse me, comrades, science can do no more
here . . .” and assumed an ostentatiously annoyed air, because he felt
that he was safe: Why was I called in so late? No one knew what to say.
Arkhipov, the soldier, remembered that in churches they chant for the
dead, in tones of supplication: “Forgive him, Lord!” An atheist, as a
man should be in our day, he instantly reproached himself for the recol-
lection, but the liturgical chant continued to surge into his memory
despite himself. Was it so wrong after all? No one would know. “Forgive
him, Lord! Forgive us!” For a moment the silence of the prison fell upon
them all. The important people were calculating the consequences: re-
sponsibility to be established, the investigation to be begun over again
from a different angle, the Chief to be told—what was the Tulayev case to
be tied to now?
“In whose charge was the prisoner?” Popov asked, without looking at
anyone—because he knew very well.
“In Comrade Zvyeryeva’s,” answered the Deputy High Commissar for
Security, Gordeyev.
“Did you have him given a medical examination when he arrived,
Comrade Zvyeryeva? Have you been receiving daily reports on his
condition and his attitude?”
“I thought . . . No . . .”
Popov’s reproach burst out:
“Do you hear that, Gordeyev, do you hear that?”

Swept on by his anger, he was the first to hurry out of the cell. He
almost ran, feebly, like an overlarge puppet; but it was he who dragged
along the imposing Gordeyev by an invisible thread. Zvyeryeva was the
last to leave. As she passed Arkhipov, the soldier, she felt that he gave
her a look of hatred.

8 ' The Road to Gold
Since his return from Spain, Kondratiev had been liv-
ing in a sort of vacuum. Reality fled him. His room, on the fifteenth floor
of Government House, was a chaos of neglect. Books piled up on the
little desk, open one on top of another. Newspapers cluttered the couch
on which he suddenly flung himself, his eyes on the ceiling, his mind
empty, with a faint feeling of panic in his heart. The bed seemed always
unmade, but in some strange fashion it no longer looked like the hed of a
living man, and Kondratiev did not like to look at it, did not like to
undress and lie down in it, did not like to sleep . . . To think that
tomorrow he would have to wake again, see the same white ceiling, the
same rather elaborate hotel curtains, the same ash tray full of unfinished
cigarettes, forgotten almost as soon as they were begun, the same snap-
shots, once cherished, now almost meaningless . . . Astonishing, how
images fade away! He could bear nothing in his apartment except the
window which looked out on the great Palace of the Soviets (in course of
construction), the curve of the Moskva, the superimposed towers and
buildings of the Kremlin, the square barracks of the last tyrannies (be-

fore our own), the domes of the ancient churches, the white tower of
Ivan the Terrible . . . There were always people walking by the river,
an official’s car overtook a shaky brickmaker’s cart from the previous
century-—the perpetual coming and going, as of busy ants with draft
animals and motors, fascinated him. So the ants imagine they have some-
thing to do, that there is a meaning to their minute existences? A mean-
ing other than statistical? But what has got into me to give me these
morbid ideas? Have I not lived consciously, steadfastly? Am I becoming
neurotic? He knew very well that he was not becoming neurotic, but his
only way of escaping from the sickness of that room was the window.
The sharp-pointed towers preserved the severity of ancient stone, the sky
was vast, the feeling of an immense city flowed into him, bringing com-
fort. Nothing could end, what did a man’s end matter? Kondratiev went
out, took a streetcar to the end of the line in a suburb where no man of
his rank ever went, wandered through wretched streets bordered by
empty lots and wooden houses with blue or green blinds. There were
pumps at the corners. His pace slackened before windows behind which
a warm domesticity appeared to reign, because they had clean crisp
curtains, flowers on the inner sill, little casseroles set among the flower-
pots to cool. If he had dared, he would have stayed there to watch the
people live: People live, that’s odd, they live simply, this vacuum does
not exist for them, they could not imagine that there are men who walk
through a vacuum, right beside them, in a wholly different world, men
who will never know any other road. Shake it off, my lad, you’re getting
sick! He forced himself to show up at the Combustibles Trust, since he
was supposed to be in charge of carrying out the special plans of the
Central Bureau for Military Supplies. Other men did the work, and they
looked at him strangely, with the usual respect, but why did they have
that distant and rather frightened attitude? His secretary, Tamara Leon-
tiyevna, came into the glass-partitioned office too silently, her mute lips
were outlined in too harsh a red, her eyes looked frightened, and why did
she lower her voice like that when she answered him, and never smile?
The thought came to him for a moment that perhaps he was like that
himself, and that his expression, his coldness, his own anxiety (it was
really anxiety) were apparent at first glance. Can I be contagious? He
went to the washroom to look at himself in the mirror and stood there
before himself for a long moment, almost without thinking, in a forsaken
immobility. Absurd, really, how interesting we are to ourselves! That
tired man is myself, that sallow face, that ugly mouth, those rust-red lips
tinged with gray, myself, myself, myself, that human apparition, that

phantom in flesh! The eyes recalled to him other Kondratievs, whose
disappearance roused no regrets in the Kondratiev he now was. Ridicu-
lous to have lived so much, only to have come to this! Shall I be very
different when I am dead? They probably don’t take the trouble to close
the eyes of executed men, I shall stare like this forever, that is to say for a
little while, until the tissues decompose or are cremated. He shrugged his
shoulders, washed his hands, lathering them automatically, too long,
combed his hair, lit a cigarette, drifted into reverie. What am I doing
here? He smoked in front of the mirror, looking at nothing, thinking of
nothing. He went back to his office. Tamara Leontiyevna was waiting for
him, pretending to read over the day’s mail. “Please sign . . .” Why
didn’t she call him “comrade,” or, more intimately, “Ivan Nicolaye-
vich”? She avoided his eyes, apparently she didn’t want him to see her
hands, the nakedness of her simple, delicate hands. The nails were not
painted; she kept them hidden behind papers. Would not people fear a
dying man’s eyes in the same way? “Stop hiding your hands, Tamara
Leontiyevna,” Kondratiev said angrily, and immediately excused him-
self, frowning and gruff: “I mean it’s all the same to me, hide them if you
like, excuse me; we cannot send this letter to the Malakhovo Collieries, it
is not at all what I told you to write!” He did not hear her explanations,
but answered with relief: “That’s it, that’s it—write the letter over again
from that angle . . .” The astonishment in the brown eyes, which were
so close to him, malignly close, questioning or terrified, gave him a slight
shock, and he signed the letter, assuming an offhand air: “After all, it
will do as it is . . . I shan’t come in tomorrow . . .”—“Very well, Ivan
Nikolayevich,” his secretary answered, in a voice that sounded kind and
natural . . . “Very well, Tamara Leontiyevna,” he repeated gaily, and
dismissed her with a pleasant nod, at least he thought he did, but in
reality his face remained terribly sad. Left alone, he lit a cigarette and
watched it burn itself out between his fingers as they rested on the desk.
The directors avoided him, he himself avoided the bureau heads, who
were always preoccupied by insignificant matters. The president of the
Trust came out of his office just as Kondratiev rang for the elevator.
They had to go down together in the dark mahogany box, whose mirrors
multiplied their two bulky reflections. They spoke to each other almost as
usual, but the president did not offer Kondratiev a lift in his car, he
bolted into it after a hasty handshake which was so unpleasant that, a
moment afterward, Kondratiev rubbed his hands together to get rid of
the feeling of it. How could that fat, hog-jowled creature have guessed?
How had Kondratiev guessed himself? There was no reasonable answer

to the question, but Kondratiev knew, and the others, everyone with
whom he came into contact, knew too. At a lecture at the Agronomic
Institute, the lecturer, a very gifted and very ambitious young man,
whose name was being mentioned for the post of assistant director of the
Transbaikalian Forests Trust, discreetly escaped by the back door, quite
obviously in order not to have to talk for a few minutes to Kondratiev,
whose protege he had been. Kondratiev had sat down alone in a corner
of the room, and no one had come to sit beside him. To avoid his com-
rades’ curt, embarrassed greetings, he had joined some half-grown girl
students after the lecture—only they did not know, it was obvious, they
still looked at him pleasantly and naturally, they still saw in him an im-
portant personage, an old Party man, they even rather admired him
because, rumor had it, he was close to the Chief, he had been to Spain on
a mission, he was a man of a special breed, a convict under the old re-
gime, a hero of the Civil War, with a baggy suit, an awkwardly knotted
necktie, kindly and tired eyes (really quite a handsome man); but why
has the girl from the Polytechnic—the one we saw the other night at the
Grand Theater—left him? The two girls wondered as he moved slowly
away, square-shouldered, walking heavily. “He must have a bad disposi-
tion,” said one, “did you notice the wrinkles on his forehead and the way
he frowns? God knows what is in his mind . . .” There was nothing in
his mind except: “How do they all know, how do I know myself, but do I
really know, isn’t it that people read a neurotic anxiety in my face?”
A bus full of people whom he did not see carried him to Sokolniki
Park. There he walked in the solitary darkness, under great cold trees,
went into a tavern where workmen who looked like tramps, and thugs
who looked like workmen, were drinking beer and smoking. From a
corner came angry outbursts of an interminable quarrel: “You’re a rat,
brother, and I don’t see why you won’t admit it. Don’t get mad, I admit
I’m just as much of a rat myself . . .” From another part of the room a
youthful voice called: “That’s the truth, citizen!” and the drunken man
answered: “You bet it’s the truth, we’re all rats . . .” Then he got up—
thickset, red-haired, shiny-faced, in coarse coolie clothes not suitable for
the time of year—and led away his staggering companion: “Let’s go,
brother, we’re still Christians and I’m not going to break open anybody’s
head today . . . And if they don’t know they’re rats, better not tell them
and make them sore . . .” He saw Kondratiev, a strong, sad-faced
stranger in a European tailored suit, staring vaguely into space, his
elbows on the wet table. The drunken man stopped, puzzled. Then, speak-
ing to himself: “Is he a rat too? Hard to say . . . Excuse me, citizen,

I’m only looking for the truth.” Kondratiev showed his teeth in an
amused half-smile: “I am almost like you, citizen, but it is not easy to
judge . . .” He had spoken in an earnest voice, which produced an
effect. He felt that he had drawn too much attention to himself; he got up
and left. In the darkness outside, a sinister-looking man wearing a cap
turned a flashlight on him, abruptly asked for his papers, and, seeing the
Central Committee pass, fell back as if to disappear into the shadows:
“Excuse me, comrade, duty . . .” “Get along,” Kondratiev grumbled,
“and be quick about it.” The sinister-looking man, on the edge of abso-
lute darkness, gave him a military salute, raising his hand to a shapeless
cap. And Kondratiev, resuming his walk along the dark path with a
lighter step, knew two incontrovertible facts: that doubt was no longer
possible, it was not worth going over the fragments of evidence; and that
he would fight.
He knew, and everyone who came into contact with him must know,
because the subtle revelation proceeded from himself, that a dossier,
KONDRATIEV, I. N., was making its way from office to office, in the
illimitable domain of the most secret secrecy, leaving unspeakable anxi-
ety in its wake. Confidential messengers laid the sealed envelope on the
desks of the General Secretariat’s secret service; there, attentive hands
picked it up, opened it, jotted notes on the new document added by the
High Commissar for Security; the open envelope made its way through
doors which were exactly like any doors anywhere, in the limited region
where all secrets revealed themselves, naked, silent, often mortal, mor-
tally simple. The Chief looked over the sheets for a moment—he must
have the same old gray fleshy face, the low, deeply lined forehead, the
small russet eyes with the uncompromising look, the hard look, of a
forsaken man. “You are alone, brother, absolutely alone, with all the
poisoned documents that you have ordered into existence. Where are they
leading you? You know where they lead us, but you cannot know where
they are leading you. You will drown at the end of the road, brother, I
pity you. Terrible days are coming, and you will be alone with millions
of lying faces, alone with huge portraits of yourself placarded over the
fronts of buildings, alone with ghosts >vhose skulls show the round hole
of a bullet, alone at the summit of the pyramid of their bones, alone with
this country which has forsaken itself, which has been betrayed by you,
you who are loyal as we too are loyal, you who are mad with loyalty, mad
with suspicions, mad with jealousies you have repressed all your life
. . . Your life has been black, you alone see yourself approximately as
you are, weak, weak, weak, driven mad by problems, weak and loyal, and

evil because, under the armor that you will never take off, in which you
will die, taut with will, you are feeble, you are nothing. That is your
tragedy. You would like to destroy all the mirrors in the world, so that
you would never see yourself in them again, and our eyes are your
mirrors and you destroy them, you have had heads shot open to destroy
the eyes in which you saw yourself, in which you judged yourself, just as
you are, irremediably ... Do my eyes trouble you, brother? Look me
in the face, drop all the documents manufactured by our machine for
crushing men. I do not reproach you with anything, I assess all the
wrong you have done, but I see all your solitude and I think of tomorrow.
No one can raise the dead nor save what has been lost, what is already
dying, we cannot slow down this slide toward the abyss, jam the ma-
chine. I am without hate, brother, I am without fear, I am like you, I fear
only for you, because of the country. You are neither great nor intelli-
gent, but you are strong and loyal like all those who were better men than
you and whom you have made to disappear. History has played us this
rotten trick: we have only you. That is what my eyes say to you, you can
kill me, you will only be the more defenseless, the more a nullity, and
perhaps you will not forget me, as you have not forgotten the others . . .
When you have killed us all, brother, you will be the last, brother, the last
of us all, the last for yourself, and falsehood, danger, the weight of the
machine you have set up will stifle you . .
The Chief raised his head slowly, because everything about him was
heavy, and he was not terrifying, he was old, his hair getting white, his
eyelids swollen, and he asked, simply, in a voice as heavy as the bones of
his shoulders: “What is to be done?”
“What is to be done?” Kondratiev repeated aloud in the chilly dark-
ness. He strode quickly toward a vaguely swaying red dot in the middle
of the road. Stars rose above the brick buildings of Spartacus Place; to
the right, the dark square, with its sickly trees.
“What is to be done, old man? I do not ask you to confess ... If you
were to begin confessing, everything would go to pieces. You have your
own way of holding a world in your hands: saying nothing . . .”
A few steps beyond the little red lantern, from a tar vat that was
doubtless still warm, tousled heads protruded side by side, each with a
glowing cigarette; and from the vat came a murmur of excited voices.
His hands in his pockets, his head bowed, Kondratiev stopped in the face
of his problem, because a rope barred the road, because of the red lan-
tern marking the spot where the pavement had been torn up. He could
see perfectly well, but he looked only within himself and far beyond him-

self. From the warm vat, heads were raised, turned toward the stranger,
who did not look like a policeman, besides everyone knows that those
loafers are never around at 3 a.m. So he must be a drunk, with pockets to
be emptied, Hi there, Yeromka-the-Sly, it’s your turn and you’re the spe-
cialist on that kind of citizen, he looks rugged, watch out . . . Yeromka
straightened up, thin as a girl, but all steel, his knife ready in his rags,
and through the darkness he looked at the man—fifty-five, square-shoul-
dered and square-jawed, well-dressed, mumbling away to himself. “Hi,
uncle!” said Yeromka, in a hissing voice, which could perfectly well be
heard where it ought to be heard but which was then swallowed up in the
darkness. “ ’Smatter, uncle? Drunk?” Kondratiev became aware of the
group of children, and, cheerfully:
“Greetings! Not too cold?”
Not drunk, strangely cordial, an assured voice: suspicious. Yeromka
slowly pulled himself out of the vat and came forward, limping a little (a
trick he had to make himself look weaker than he was; iron wire, acro-
bat, broken puppet with metal joints—he suggested them all). Separated
only by the rope and the red lantern, Yeromka and Kondratiev studied
each other in the darkness and the silence. “Here are our children, here
are our abandoned children, Yossif, I present our children to you,”
Kondratiev thought, and it brought a dark smile to his dark lips. “They
have knives in their lousy rags, that is all we have known how to give
them. I know that it is not our fault. And you, you have all the revolvers
of your special troops, and you haven’t known how to give yourself any-
thing either, you who had all our wealth in your hands . . .” Yeromka
looked him up and down, studying him with his dangerous eyes, which
looked like a girl’s. He said: “Uncle, get along, you haven’t lost anything
here . . . We’re holding our local conference here, see? We’re busy;
get along.”—“Right,” said Kondratiev, “I’ll be going. Greetings to the
conference.”—“A lunatic,” Yeromka reported to the tight circle of his
comrades in the vat, “nothing to worry about, go ahead, Timocha . .
Kondratiev walked on toward the towers of the three railway stations:
October, Yaroslavl, Kazan—the station of the Revolution, the station of
the city where we had eighteen shot and three hundred and fifty cap-
tured together, the station of Kazan, where, on a fire ship, with Trotsky
and Raskolnikov, we set fire to the White fleet . . . It is astonishing how
we were victorious, how we are victorious, how we are abandoned and
conquered (Yaroslavl suggests nothing now but a secret prison), like
those little thugs who are perhaps conferring on a crime or on the best
way to organize begging and thefts in the region of the three stations—

but they live, they fight, they are right to beg and kill and steal and
hold conferences, they are fighting . . . Kondratiev talked to himself
heatedly, waving his open hand just as he used to on the platform.
When he reached home the cocks were crowing in far-off courtyards, it
must be in streets that had a provincial look, with little houses of wood
and brick, overcrowded and disorderly, with old-fashioned trees in
wretched little gardens, piles of refuse in the corners, and in each room a
family slept warmly, with the children at the foot of the bed, under patch-
work quilts made of little squares of bright-colored cloth sewed together.
There were icons in the ceiling corners, and children’s drawings pinned
to the yellowed wallpaper, and poverty-stricken victuals on the window
sills. Kondratiev envied these people, sleeping the sleep of their lives,
husband and wife side by side, in the animal odor of their mingled
bodies. His room was cool, clean, and empty; the ash tray, the writing
paper, the calendar, the telephone, the books from the Institute of Plan
Economy—they all seemed useless, nothing in the room was alive. He
looked at his bed with gloomy apprehension. To lie down once again
between sheets (sheets like a shroud), to struggle with a useless and
powerless thought, to know that presently there will come the utterly
black hour of lucidity in a pure void, when life has no more meaning;
and if life is no longer anything but that vain anguish, that vacillating
consciousness of “what is the use,” how could he flee himself? The
searching eyes rested for a moment on the Browning that lay on the bed
table . . . Kondratiev came back from the window to the alcove, picked
up the Browning, happily felt the weight of it in his hand. What happens
inside us to make us feel suddenly and absurdly strong again? He heard
himself mutter: “Certainly.” Morning brightened at the window, the
street along the Moskva was still deserted, a sentry’s bayonet moved
between the crenelations of the outer Kremlin wall, a wash of pale gold
touched the faded dome on the tower of Ivan the Terrible, it was a barely
perceptible light, but already it was victorious, it was almost pink, the
sky was turning pink, there was no boundary line between the pink of
dawn and the blue of the vanishing night, in which the last stars were
about to be extinguished. “They are the strongest stars, and they are
going out because they are outshone . . .” An extraordinary freshness
radiated from the landscape of sky and city, and the feeling of a power as
limitless as that sky came from the stones, the sidewalks, the walls, the
building yards, the carts which appeared and moved slowly along the
street, following the pink-and-blue river. Millions of indestructible, pa-
tient, tireless beings were going to rise from sleep and from the stones,

because the sky was bright, were going to set out again on their millions
of roads, which all led to the future. “Well, comrades,” Kondratiev said
to them, “I have made my decision. I am going to fight. The Revolution
needs a clean conscience . . .” The words almost plunged him back into
despair. A man’s conscience, his own, worn and paralyzed—what use
was it any longer, clean or not? Broad daylight brought forth clear ideas.
“Though I am alone, though I am the last, I have only my life to give, I
give it, and I say NO. Too many have died in falsehood and madness, I
will not further demoralize what is left to us of the Party ... NO.
Somewhere on earth there are young people whom I do not know but
whose dawning consciousness I must try to save. NO.” When one thinks
clearly, things become as limpid as the sky of morning; one must not
think as intellectuals think, the brain must feel that it is acting . . .
Though it was quite cold, he undressed in front of the open window so
that he could watch the growing light. “I shan’t be able to sleep . . .” It
was his last gleam of thought, he was asleep already. Enormous stars of
pure fire, some copper-colored, others transparent blue, yet others red-
dish, peopled the night of his dream. They moved mysteriously, or rather
they swayed; the diamond-studded spiral of a nebula appeared out of
darkness, filled with an inexplicable light, it grew larger, Look, look, the
eternal worlds!—to whom did he say that? There was a presence too;
but who was it, who? The nebula filled the sky, overflowed onto the
earth, now it was only a great, bright sunflower, in a little courtyard
under a closed window, Tamara Leontiyevna’s hands made a signal,
there were stone stairs, very wide, which they climbed at a run, and an
amber torrent glided in the opposite direction, and in the eddies of the
torrent big fish jumped, as salmon jump when they go up the rivers . . .
When he shaved, about noon, Kondratiev found fragments of his
dream floating in his mind; they did him good. Old crones would
say . . . But what would a psychoanalyst say? To hell with psycho-
analysts! The summons from the Party Committee aroused no emotion
in him. And in fact it turned out to be nothing—merely a matter of an
unimportant mission, a celebration over which he was to preside, at
Serpukhov, on the occasion of the presentation of a flag to a tank bat-
talion by the workers in the Ilich factory. “The tank boys are splendid,
Ivan Nikolayevich,” said the Secretary of the Committee, “but there has
been some trouble in this battalion, a suicide or two, an incapable politi-
cal instructor, we need a good speech . . . Talk about the Chief, say
that you have seen him . . .’’To avoid any misunderstanding, he was
given an outline of topics. “Count on me for a good speech,” said Kon-

dratiev. “And I’ll say a few well-chosen words to the fellow who tried to
commit suicide and failed!” He thought of the unknown lad with love
and anger. At twenty-five, with this country to be served, aren’t you
crazy, my boy? He went to the buffet to buy the most expensive ciga-
rettes, a luxury which he rarely allowed himself. A delegation of working
women from the Zamoskvoryechie were having tea with the Director of
Production Cadres and the women organizers of the Women’s Section.
Several tables had been drawn together. Geraniums made vivid spots of
red above the tablecloths; other and more beautiful spots of red were
provided by the kerchiefs on young foreheads. One of the organizers
whispered: “There’s Kondratiev, deputy member of the C.C. . . .” and
several faces turned toward the aging man, who was opening a box of
cigarettes. The words “Central Committee” made the circuit of the tables.
The aging man was a part of power, of the past, of loyalty, of secrecy.
The buzz of conversation subsided, the Director of Production Cadres
called in his loud, cordial voice: “Hi, Kondratiev, come and take tea with
the rising generation from the Zamoskvoryechie!” At that moment
Popov, his cap on his gray head, came hobbling up to put both hands on
Kondratiev’s shoulders. “Good old brother, what a time since we’ve met!
How goes it?”
“Not too badly. And you? How’s your health?”
“Nothing to boast about. I’m overworked. And the devil take the An-
thropological Institute for not yet having invented a way to make us
young again!”
They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled cordially. Together they
sat down at the textile workers’ big table. Chairs were cheerfully shifted.
Some of the women wore insignia, there were several charming faces
with broad cheekbones and big eyes, welcoming faces. A young woman
immediately asked for their opinion: “Decide between us, comrades, we
are discussing the production index. I was saying that the new rationali-
zation has not been pushed far enough . . .” She was so full of what she
had to say that she raised both hands and blushed, and since she had a
very fair complexion, full lips, eyes that were the gray green of leaves
in frosty weather, and a red kerchief over her hair, she became almost
beautiful, though she was only commonplace, a daughter of the soil
transformed into a daughter of the factory with a passion for machines
and figures ... “I am listening, comrade,” said Kondratiev, rather
amused, but at the same time pleased. “Don’t pay any attention to her,”
interrupted another woman, who had a thin stern face under tightly
rolled dark hair. “Efremovna, you always exaggerate, the quota was

more than met—to the extent of 104 per cent, but we had twenty-seven
loom breakdowns, that is what really set us back . . .” Old working-
women, wearing decorations, became excited: No, no, no, that was not it
either! Popov’s hands, earthy as an old peasant’s, called for silence and
he explained that old Party members . . . mmm . . . were not quali-
fied in matters of the textile industry, hum, mmm, it is you young people
who are qualified, with the engineers, however, mmm, the Plan directives
demand good will, mmm, I was saying, resolution, mmm, we must be a
country of iron, with a will of iron . . . mmm. “Right! Right!” said old
and young voices, and there was a murmured chorus: “Will of iron, will
of iron . . .” Kondratiev looked at their faces one after the other, esti-
mating how much of what they said was official, how much sincere, cer-
tainly the greater part of it was sincere, and a conventional phrase is
sincere too, basically. A will of iron, yes. His face hardened as he looked
at Popov’s gray profile. We shall see!
A moment later Popov and Kondratiev found themselves alone, sitting
in deep leather armchairs in an office. “Let’s talk a little, Kondratiev,
shall we?”—“Certainly . . .’’ The conversation drifted on. Kondratiev
became suspicious. What did the old man have in mind? What was he
trying to get at with his puerilities? He is in the Political Bureau’s confi-
dence, he performs certain duties . . . Was it really by chance that we
met here? Finally, after discussing Paris, the French C.P., and the agent
who directed it—not up to snuff, mmm, I believe he will be replaced—
Popov asked:
“. . . and what impression . . . mmm . . . would you say the trials
produced abroad? Mmmmm ...”
“Ah,” thought Kondratiev, “so that’s what you’ve been getting at?”
He felt as well, as calm, as he had that morning in his cool, dawn-flooded
room, when he had held the Browning a foot from an available, vigorous,
courageous brain, while the pink light outshone the last stars, the bright-
est stars, reduced to white points absorbed by the sky. A strange ques-
tion, which was never asked, a dangerous question. You ask it, brother?
Perhaps you were waiting here just to ask me that question? And now
you’re going to make your report, eh, old rat? And it is my head that I
stake when I answer you? Very well, I’m on.
“The impression? Deplorable, couldn’t be more demoralizing. Nobody
could make head or tail of them. No one believed in them . . .Not even
the best paid of our paid agents believed in them . . .”
Popov’s little eyes looked terrified. “Shh, speak lower . . . No, it is
impossible . . .”

“It is the truth, brother. Reports that tell you otherwise lie abomi-
nably, idiotically ... I’d like to send the General Secretariat a memo-
randum on the subject ... to supplement the one I prepared on some
stupid crimes committed in Spain . .
Have you got what you wanted, old Popov? Now you know what I
think. Not me—you can’t make anything out of me—that is, you can
always make a corpse out of me, but that’s all. Nothing doing, I’m not
budging, the dossier can go where it pleases, I’m not budging, that’s
settled.
He had only thought it, but Popov understood it perfectly, thanks to
Kondratiev’s tone, his firm jaw, his unflinching eyes. Popov rubbed his
hands softly and studied the floor:
“Well, then . . . mmmm . . . It’s very important, what you’ve just
told me . . . Don’t write that memorandum—no, better not ... I
. . . mmm . . . I’ll bring it up . . . mmm . . .” Pause. “You’re being
sent to Serpukhov, for a celebration?”
“For a celebration, yes.”
The answer had been made with such sarcastic sternness that Popov
suppressed a grimace. “I wish I could go myself . . . mmm. This
damned rheumatism . . .” He fled.
Better than any of the other insiders, Popov knew the secret journey-
ings of the Kondratiev dossier, enlarged during the last few days by
several embarrassing documents: Report of the doctor attached to the
Odessa secret service concerning the death of prisoner N. (picture at-
tached) on board the Kuban, the day before the freighter docked: cere-
bral hemorrhage apparently due to a constitutional weakness and
overstrained nerves, and perhaps accelerated by emotion. Other docu-
ments disclosed the identity of prisoner N., which had been twice dis-
sembled, with the result that you began to doubt whether he really was
the Trotskyist Stefan Stern, though the fact was attested by two agents
home from Barcelona, but their testimony might be doubted because they
were obviously frightened and had denounced each other. Stefan Stern
disappeared in these dubious documents as completely as he had dis-
appeared at the secret service morgue in Odessa, when an official at the
military hospital ordered the preparation for export of “a male skeleton
in perfect condition, delivered by the autopsy service under the number
A4-27.” What idiot had included even that document in the K. dossier?
The report from an agent of Hungarian origin (suspect because he had
known Bela Kun) contradicted the information in the Yuvanov report on
the Trotskyist conspiracy in Barcelona, the role of Stefan Stern, and the

possibility that K. was a traitor, since it revealed the identity of an air-
force captain with whom Stefan Stern was supposed to have had two
secret meetings and whom the Yuvanov documents confused with
“Rudin” (K.). An attached document, included by mistake, but ex-
tremely useful, showed that Agent Yuvanov had been taken ill on board,
had misused his authority to leave the ship at Marseilles, and was now
marking time in a hospital at Aix-en-Provence . . . Kondratiev’s memo-
randum, directed against Yuvanov, thus became incriminating—which
was perhaps the meaning of a blue-pencil mark beside a discreet
note by Gordeyev, which opened the door to two accusations, one of
which excluded the other ... In any case, the original minutes showed
beyond doubt that it was not true that Kondratiev had voted for the
Opposition in 1927 as member of the Foreign Commerce party cell; on
this point the Archives secret service had made a gross error by confus-
ing Kondratenko, Appollon Nicolayevich, an enemy of the people executed
in 1936, with Kondratiev, Ivan Nicolayevich! Attached: a note dictated
by the Chief demanding a severe inquiry into “this criminal confusion of
names” . . . The implication was that the Chief . . . ? The Chief said
nothing when he handed the dossier to Popov, he did not commit himself,
his brow was dark, deeply lined, his eyes expressionless; he appeared not
to have made up his mind, but he probably wanted a good trial demon-
strating the connection between Tulayev’s assassins and the Trotskyists
in Spain, a trial the reports of which could be translated into several lan-
guages with fine prefaces written by some of those foreign jurists who
will prove anything for you, sometimes even for little or no compensa-
tion. Through these documents, which were like a series of nets, ran the
life line of Ivan Kondratiev, a strong line which neither prison in Orel
nor exile to Yakutia nor a jail term in Berlin for possessing explosives
had snapped, a line which seemed to vanish, on the eve of the Revolution,
in the swamp of private life, somewhere in Central Siberia, where, hav-
ing married, Kondratiev the agronomist allowed himself to be forgotten,
although he kept up an occasional correspondence with the regional
Committee. “No revolutionist without a revolution,” he would say in
those days, cheerfully shrugging his shoulders. “Perhaps we shall amount
to nothing, and I shall end my life testing seeds and publishing little
monographs on fodder parasites! But if the Revolution comes, you’ll see
whether I have settled down or not!” They did see—when he trans-
formed himself into a cavalryman, put himself at the head of the Middle
Yenisei partisans, and, with old fowling pieces for armament and plow
horses for mounts, swept down as far as Turkestan in pursuit of the

national and imperial bandits, made his way back to Baikal, attacked a
train bearing the flags of three Powers, capturing Japanese, British, and
Czech officers, checkmated them on several occasions, almost cut off
Admiral Kolchak’s retreat . . .
Popov said:
“I ran across an old magazine the other day and reread your recol-
lections ...”
“What recollections? Pve never written anything.”
“Yes, you have. The case of the archdeacon, in ’19 or ’20 . . .”
“Of course. Those numbers of the Party Historical Review have obvi-
ously been withdrawn from circulation?”
“Obviously.”
He was giving blow for blow! It must mean that he was either boiling
with rage inside or had made a disconcerting decision . . . The case of
Archdeacon Arkhangelsky, in ’19 or ’20: Taken prisoner during the
rout of the Whites, whom he hlessed before battle. A hale old man,
bearded and hairy, with a healthy complexion, at once a mystic and a
charlatan, who carried in his knapsack a packet of obscene postcards, a
copy of the Gospels with the pages yellowed by his tobacco-stained
fingers, and the Apocalypse annotated in the margins with symbols and
exclamations: God forgive us! May the hurricane cleanse this infamous
world! I have sinned, I have sinned, miserable slave that I am, criminal
a thousand times damned! Lord, save me! Before a village Soviet, Kon-
dratiev opposed shooting him: “They are all the same ... In this part
of the country everyone is a good Christian . . . We don’t want to
exasperate them . . . We need hostages for exchanges . . .” He took
him onto a barge with seventy partisans, of whom ten were women. And
so they set off down a river which flowed between deep forests, from
which, at dawn or twilight, rifles fired devastatingly accurate bullets at
the men who were above decks maneuvering the craft. They had to
travel at night and, by day, moor their craft against some small island
or anchor in shallow water. The wounded lay in rows below decks, they
never stopped groaning and bleeding, cursing and praying, they were
hungry, the men chewed the leather of their belts which had been cut in
pieces and boiled, the nightly fishing yielded only a small catch which
had to be divided among the weakest, who devoured them raw, guts and
all, under the avid eyes of the stronger men . . . They were nearing the
rapids, they had to fight, they could not fight; through the long days
they felt as if they were in a stinking coffin, not a head dared show itself
above deck, Kondratiev watched the banks through peepholes, the im-

placable forest rose above purple or copper-red or golden-yellow rocks,
the sky was white, the water white and cold, it was a mortally hostile
universe. Night brought respite, fresh air, the stars, but climbing the
ladder had'become more and more tiring. Then the secret counsels
began, and Kondratiev knew what was said at them: Surrender is the
only thing left, we must hand over the Bolshevik—let them shoot him,
it’s only one man, and what does one man more or less matter? Sur-
render or we will all end up like the three astern there, who don’t groan
any more . . . The next to the last night, before they reached the rapids,
a revolver shot like a whipcrack was heard on deck, then the sound of a
heavy body falling into the water, which at that point was shallow. No
one moved. Kondratiev came down the ladder, lighted a torch, and said:
“Comrades, come this way, all of you ... I declare the meeting
open . . .” Tottering specters gathered around him, death’s-heads,
shaggy manes of hair, with eye sockets in which a dull spark still
gleamed. They let themselves slowly down onto the boards against
which the lapping of the black, cold water could be heard. “Comrades,
tomorrow at dawn, we fight our last battle . . . Innokentievka is four
versts away, in Innokentievka there are bread and cattle . . .”—“What,
fight now?” someone growled. “Fool! Can’t you see that we’re no better
than corpses?” Kondratiev was sheer dizzy nausea, chattering teeth, re-
solve. He pretended not to have heard; slowly brought out the most ter-
rible oath he knew, his mouth foaming. Then: “In the name of the risen
People, I have shot that vermin in a cassock, that libertine, that bearded
Satan, may his black soul go straight to his master . . .” The dying men
instantly understood that there was no forgiveness for them now. A
silence like the tomb held them for several seconds, then moans drowned
a murmur of curses, and Kondratiev saw a troop of mad ghosts coming
toward him, he thought that they would crush him, but a tall, tottering
body fell weakly on him, feverish eyes glittered close to his own, skele-
ton arms that were strangely strong embraced him fraternally, a warm
cadaverous breath whispered into his face: “You did right, brother,
right! Dirty dogs all of them, I say, all of them!” Kondratiev summoned
the leaders of the detachments to a “general staff counsel,” to prepare
the next morning’s operation. From under his mattress he brought out
the last sack of dry black bread, and himself divided the surprise ration.
He had hidden this last reserve for the moment of supreme effort. Each
man received two pieces which he could hold in the palm of his hand.
Dying men demanded their share—wasted rations. While the leaders
deliberated in the torchlight, the only sound was crusts crumbling under

the attack of sore jaws ... Of this episode from a distant past, the
two men had at the moment only a documentary memory. They con-
tinued to measure each other, as it were gropingly . . .
Kondratiev said:
“I have almost forgotten about it ... I never suspected then that
the value of human life would fall so low among us twenty years after
our victory.”
It was not an aggressive remark, but Popov knew very well that it was
the most cogent comment possible. Kondratiev smiled.
“Yes ... At dawn we marched for a long time over wet sand . . .
It was a green, silent dawn . . . We felt monstrously strong—as strong
as dead men, I thought. And we did not have to fight; day broke on
bitter foliage which we chewed as we marched on—forward with wild
joy . . . Yes, old man.”
“Now that you are over fifty,” Popov thought, “how much of that
strength can you have left?”
Afterwards Kondratiev was in charge of river transport, when aban-
doned barges rotted along the banks; he harangued crafty and dis-
couraged fishermen in forgotten settlements, got together teams of young
men, appointed captains seventeen years old, whom he put in command
of rafts, created a School of River Navigation which principally taught
political economy, became the chief organizer of a district, quarreled
with the Plan Commission, asked to be put in charge of the Far North-
ern Fur Depots, was sent to China on a mission to the Red Dragons of
Szechwan . . . Not a man to flinch, Popov thought; psychologically
a soldier rather than an ideologist. Ideologists, being susceptible to the
supple and complex dialectics of our period, give in more easily; whereas
seven times out of ten, the only thing to do with a soldier, once things get
started, is to shoot him and say nothing. Even if he finally promises that
he will behave before the judges and the audience, you’re never sure, and
what’s to he done then? Experiences, secret investigations, closed trials,
trials that might be opened, memories, dossiers—these things and many
more, formless, jumbled, instantly clear when clarity was needed, lived
for a moment in Popov’s brain while he considered imponderables . . .
Kondratiev had forgotten his own life for the moment, but he almost
divined all the rest, and he wore a hard half-smile that was like an insult,
he sat straight and massive in his chair. Popov sensed a great aggressive-
ness in him. Nothing could be got from him, it was most annoying.
Ryzhik’s death had scuttled 50 per cent of the trial; Kondratiev, the ideal
defendant, was scuttling the other 50 per cent—what was he to say to the

Chief? Something had to be said . . . Could he wriggle out of it, leave
the job to the Prosecutor, Rachevsky? A donkey, Rachevsky, with noth-
ing in his head but dragging off one cartload of culprits after another
... He would pile blunder on blunder—and to kill him afterwards, like
the stupid beast he was, would help nothing . . . Popov, feeling that he
had been silent a few seconds too long, raised his head just in time to
receive a blow straight from the shoulder.
“Have I made myself clear?” Kondratiev asked, without raising his
voice. “I have told you a great deal in a few words, I believe . . . And,
as you know, I never go back on what I have said . . .”
Why was he so insistent? Could he know? How? Impossible that he
should know. “Certainly, certainly,” Popov muttered. “I . . . we know
you, Ivan Nicolayevich . . . We appreciate you . . .”
“Delighted,” said Kondratiev—absolutely insufferable. And what he
did not say, hut thought, Popov understood: “And I know you too.”
“Well, so you’re going to Serpukhov?”
“Tomorrow, by car.”
Popov could think of nothing more to say. He put on his falsest smile
of cordiality, his face was never grayer, his soul never shabbier. A tele-
phone call delivered him. “Good-by, Kondratiev ... I have to hurry
. . . Too bad . . . We ought to see each other oftener . . . Hard life,
mmm . . . It’s good to have a frank little talk . . .”
“Good indeed!”
Kondratiev followed him to the door with unseeing eyes. “Tell them
that I’ll yell at the top of my lungs, that I’ll yell for all those who didn’t
dare yell, that I’ll yell by myself, that I’ll yell underground, that I don’t
give a shit for a bullet in my head, that I don’t give a shit for you or for
myself, because someone has got to yell at last, or everything is done
for . . . But what has come over me, where do I get all this energy
from? From my youth, from that dawn at Innokentievka, from Spain?
What does it matter? I’m going to yell.”
That day at Serpukhov passed in a region of lucidity that bordered on
dream. How could Kondratiev feel sure that he would not be arrested
that night, nor in the C.C. car, which was driven by a Security man? He
knew it, and he smoked calmly, he admired the birches, the russet and
gray of fields under flying clouds. He did not go to call on the local Com-
mittee before the function, as he should have done: Let me see as few
administrative faces as possible (though there must still be some decent
people among these provincial bureaucrats). He dismissed the aston-

ished chauffeur in the middle of a street, stopped in front of the display
windows of co-operative groceries and stationery stores, immediately
discovered little placards reading “Samples,” “Empty” (the latter on
biscuit boxes . . .), “No notebooks”; set off again, wandered through
the streets, read the newspaper posted at the door of the Industrial Survey
Commission, a paper exactly like the papers of all provincial towns of
the Same size, no doubt supplied with news by the daily circulars sent
out by the C.C.’s Regional Press Bureau. He read only the local items,
knowing in advance the entire contents of the first two pages, and he at
once found the oddities that he had expected. The editor of the local
column wrote that “Comrade President of the ‘Triumph of Socialism’
Kolkhoze, despite repeated warnings from the Party Committee, persists
in his pernicious anti-cow ideological deviation, contrary to the instruc-
tions of the Commissariat for Kolkhozes . . .” Anti-cow! What a won-
derful neologism! God almighty! These specimens of illiterate prose
made him angry and sad at once . . . “Comrade Andriuchenko would
not allow cows to be harnessed for plowing! Must we recall to him the
decision of the recent conference, unanimously voted after the most
convincing report by Veterinary Trochkin?” Somewhere under the
immense sky of the steppes, Kondratiev remembered, he had once seen
a cow drawing a cart on which there was nothing but a white coffin and
a heap of paper flowers; a peasant woman and two small children fol-
lowed it. Well—if a cow can pull a poor devil’s coffin to a cemetery on
the horizon, why shouldn’t a cow pull a plow? The director of the dairy
can always be sent to court afterward, if milk production falls below the
Plan quota ... We lost between sixteen and seventeen million horses
during the period of collectivization—between 50 and 52 per cent. So
much the worse for the Russian cow—since obviously we can’t make the
members of the C.C. pull plows! There was nothing in the rest of the
paper. Nicholas I had his official architects design models of churches
and schools, to be followed by builders throughout the Empire ... For
our part, we have this press in uniform, edited by fools who think up
“anti-cow ideological deviations.” It is a slow process, the rise of a
people, especially when you put such heavy burdens on their shoulders
and so many shackles on their bodies . . . Kondratiev thought of the
complex relation between tradition and the mistakes for which we our-
selves are responsible. A tall young man in the black leather uniform of
the Tank School came hurrying out of a shop, turned, suddenly found
himself face to face with Kondratiev; and surprise and hostility ap-

peared in his fresh young cold-eyed face. “Eyes which are determined
to reveal nothing . . .”
“You, Sacha!” Kondratiev exclaimed softly, and he felt that, from
that instant, he too would force himself to reveal nothing—nothing.
“Yes, Ivan Nicolayevich, it is I,” said the young man, so embarrassed
that he blushed slightly.
Kondratiev almost said, idiotically: “Nice day, isn’t it?” but that
evasion was not permissible ... A virile face, regular features, the
high forehead and wide nostrils of a Great Russian—-a handsome face
under the leather helmet.
“You make quite a fine-looking warrior, Sacha. How’s your work get-
ting on?”
Sacha sternly broke the ice, with unbelievable calm, as if he were
speaking of perfectly commonplace things:
“I thought that I would be thrown out of the school when my father
was arrested . . . But I wasn’t. Is it because I am one of the top
students, or is there a directive that forbids throwing the sons of executed
men out of special units? What do you think, Ivan Nicolayevich?”
“I don’t know,” said Kondratiev, and looked at the sidewalk.
The toes of his boots were dirty. A red, half-crushed worm writhed
in the muddy space between two paving blocks. There was a pin on the
pavement too, and a few inches from it, a blob of spit. Kondratiev
raised his eyes again and looked straight into Sacha’s face.
“What is your own opinion?”
“For a while I told myself that everyone knew my father was innocent,
but obviously that doesn’t count. And besides, the Political Commissar
advised me to change my name. I refused.”
“You were wrong, Sacha. It will be a great handicap to you.”
They had nothing more to say to each other, nothing whatever.
“Are we going to have war?” Sacha asked in the same unemotional
voice.
“Probably.”
Sacha’s face barely lit up with a restrained smile.
Kondratiev smiled broadly. He thought: Don’t say a word, lad. I
know. The enemy first.
“Do you need any books?”
“Yes, Ivan Nicolayevich. I want German books on tank tactics . . .
We shall have to meet superior tactics ...”
“But our morale will be superior . . .”

“Right,” said Sacha dryly.
“I will try to get the books for you . . . Good luck, Sacha.”
“Good luck to you too,” the young man said.
Was there really that strange little gleam in his eyes, that implication
in his tone, that restrained vigor in his handshake?
“He would have every right to hate me,” Kondratiev thought, “to
despise me, and yet he must understand me, know that I too ...” A
girl was waiting for Sacha in front of the wax figures of the “Schehera-
zade” Hairdressers’ Syndicate Co-op (“permanents 30 rubles”—one
third of a working woman’s monthly wage). Kondratiev made more
serious calculations. According to the no longer up-to-date statistics of
the C.C. Bulletins, we have eliminated to date between 62 and 70 per cent
of Communist officials, administrators, and officers—and that in less
than three years. In other words, out of some two hundred thousand men
representing the Party cadres, between 124,000 and 140,000 Bolsheviks.
It is impossible, on the basis of the published data, to determine the
proportion between men executed and men interned in concentration
camps, but to judge from personal experience ... It is true that the
proportion of men executed is particularly high in government circles,
which doubtless gives me a wrong perspective . . .
A few minutes before the hour set for his speech, he found himself
under the white colonnade of Red Army House. Worried secretaries
came running to meet him . . . the secretary of the Executive Com-
mittee, the secretary of the General Staff, the secretary of the local
Commandant, and yet others—almost all dressed in uniforms so new
that they looked as if they had been polished, with yellow knee leathers,
shining holsters, shining faces too, and obsequious handshakes; and they
made an impressive escort as he mounted the great marble stairway and
young officers threw out their chest to salute him, magnificently immo-
bile. “How many minutes before I am to speak?” was the only question
he asked. Two secretaries answered simultaneously, their freshly shaven
faces bowing eagerly. “Seven minutes, Comrade Kondratiev ...” A
voice which respect made almost hoarse ventured: “Will you take a glass
of wine?” and added in a humble and casual tone: “We have a re-
mark-a-ble Tsinondali . . .” Kondratiev nodded and forced a smile. It
was as if he were walking surrounded by perfectly constructed manikins.
The group entered a sort of drawing room and buffet in one. Two heav-
ily framed pictures faced each other from cream-colored walls, on either
side of the edibles: one represented Marshal Klimentii Efremovich Voro-
shilov on a rearing charger, his naked saber pointing to a murky spot

on the horizon; red flags surrounded by bayonets hurried to overtake
him under a sky of dark clouds. The horse was painted with extraor-
dinary care, the nostrils and the dark eye, to which a highlight lent
animation, were even more successfully rendered than the details of the
saddle; the rider had a round, slightly foreshortened head which might
have come out of a popular picture book; but the stars on his collar glit-
tered. The other large portrait showed the Chief, in a white tunic,
delivering a speech from a platform, and he was pure painted wood, his
smile a grimace, the platform looked like an empty buffet, the Chief like
a Caucasian waiter saying, in his pungent accent: “Nothing left, citi-
zen . . .” On the other hand, the real buffet gleamed white and opulent,
with caviar, Volga sturgeons, smoked salmon, glazed eels, game, fruits
from the Crimea and Turkestan. “Gifts of our native soil,” Kondratiev
joked cheerfully, as he went to the buffet to receive the offered glass of
Tsinondali from the plump hands of a dazzled blonde. His joke, the bit-
terness of which no one divined, was greeted by obliging little laughs, not
very loud because no one knew whether it was really permissible to
laugh in the presence of such an eminent personage. Behind the waitress
who had been given the honor of serving him (photogenic, 50-ruble
permanent, and decorated with the Medal of Honor of Labor), Kon-
dratiev saw a broad red ribbon garlanding a small photograph—of
himself. Gilt letters proclaimed: WELCOME TO COMRADE KON-
DRATIEV, DEPUTY MEMBER OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
. . . Where the devil had they unearthed that old snapshot, the boot-
lickers? Kondratiev slowly drank the Caucasian wine, waved away smiles
and sandwiches with a stern hand, remembered that he had barely
glanced at the printed outline of his speech, supplied by the Division for
Army Propaganda. “Excuse me, comrades . . .” His escort instantly
fell back, leaving him in the center of a six-foot circle of emptiness. He
drew several crumpled sheets from his pocket. An enormous white-eyed
sturgeon pointed its minute carnivorous teeth at him. The bulbs in the
chandeliers were reflected in the amber jelly. The printed speech dis-
cussed the international situation, the battle against the enemies of the
people, technical training, the invincibility of the Army, patriotic feel-
ing, loyalty to “our inspired Chief, guide of peoples, unique strategist.”
Idiots! they’ve given me the standard speech for Morale Office repre-
sentatives with the rank of general! ... “The Chief of our great Party
and of our invincible Army, animated by a will of iron against the
enemies of the Fatherland, is at the same time filled with a profound and
incomparable love for the workers and all upright citizens. ‘Think of

man!’ That unforgettable phrase, which he propounded at the XlXth
Conference, should be graven in letters of fire in the consciousness of
every commander of a unit, of every political commissar, of every . . .”
Kondratiev thrust the dead cliches back into his trousers pocket. Scowl-
ing, he looked around for someone. A dozen faces offered themselves,
hastily assuming dutiful smiles: We are here, absolutely at your disposal,
Comrade Deputy Member of the C.C.! He asked:
“You have had some suicides?”
An officer with cropped hair answered, speaking very quickly:
“Only one. Personal reasons. Two attempts—both men have acknowl-
edged their misconduct, and reports on them are good.”
All this took place completely outside reality, in a world as insub-
stantial and superficial as an airy vision. Then suddenly reality forced
itself upon him; it was a painted wooden lectern, on which he laid his
heavy, blue-veined, hairy hand, a hand which had a life of its own. He
became aware of it, looked at it for a long moment, observed too the
minute details of the wood, and out of that real wood, out of that hand,
there came to him a simple decision: He would face the entire reality of
the moment, three hundred strange faces, different yet alike, each one
of them silently triumphing over uniformity. Attentive, anonymous,
molded in a flesh that suggested metal, what did they expect of him?
What was he to say to them that would be basically true? Already he
heard his own voice, heard it with nervous displeasure, because it was
speaking vain words, words he had glimpsed in the printed speech, words
long known by heart, read a thousand times in editorials, the sort of
words of which Trotsky once said that when you spoke them you felt
as if you were chewing cotton batting . . . Why have I come here? Why
have they come here? Because we are trained to obedience. Nothing
is left of us but obedience. They do not know it yet. They do not suspect
that my obedience is deadly. Everything that I say to them, even if it is
as true as the whiteness of snow, becomes spectral and false because of
obedience. I speak, they listen, some of them perhaps try to understand
me, and we do not exist: we obey. A voice within him answered: To obey
is still to exist. And he continued the debate: It is to exist as numbers
and machines ... He went on delivering the prepared speech. He saw
Russians with shaved heads, the strong race which we formed by freeing
the serfs, then by breaking their will, then by teaching them to resist us
unendingly, thereby creating within them a new will, despite ourselves
and against ourselves. In one of the front rows sat a Mongolian, arms
crossed, small head held erect, looking sternly into Kondratiev’s face.

Eyes eager to the point of cruelty. He was weighing every word. It was
as if he had distinctly murmured: “You are on the wrong track, com-
rade, all that you are saying is useless, I assure you . . . Stop speaking,
or find words that are alive . . . After all, we are alive . . .” Kon-
dratiev answered him with such assurance that his voice changed. Behind
him there was a stir among the secretaries, who, with the garrison com-
mander, made up the presidium. No longer were they hearing the
familiar phrases to which they were accustomed at functions of this sort;
it made them physically uneasy—with the sort of uneasiness that is
produced hy an error of command in field maneuvers . . . The line of
tanks suddenly sags, breaks, all is confusion, the commanders are re-
duced to humiliating rages. The Political Commissar of the Tank School
stiffened against his dismay, reached for his automatic pencil, and began
taking notes so hurriedly that the letters overlapped on the page . . .
He could not grasp the phrases which he heard being uttered by the
orator—who was a member of the Central Committee, of the Central
Committee, of the Central Committee—was it possible? The orator was
saying:
“. . . we are covered with crimes and errors, yes, we have forgotten
the essential in order to live from hour to hour, and yet we are justified
before the universe, before the future, before our magnificent and miser-
able fatherland, which is not the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics,
which is not Russia, which is the Revolution . . . did you hear me?
. . . the Revolution, outside of any definite territory . . . the mutilated,
universal, human Revolution ... Be well assured that, in the battle
which will break on us tomorrow, all our forces will be dead within three
months . . . And you are our forces ... You must understand why
. . . The world is going to split in two . . .” Should he be stopped? Was
it not a crime to let him say such things? The Political Commissar is
responsible for all that is said by a speaker at the school, but has he the
right to stop the Central Committee’s orator? The Commandant, the
fool, would certainly not understand a word of it, he was probably hear-
ing only a murmur of periods; the head of the school had turned purple
and was concentrating his attention on an ash tray . . . The orator was
saying (the commissar caught only snatches of his fiery discourse, and
could not establish a connection between them):
“. . . the old Party members of my generation have all perished . . .
most of them in confusion, in despair, in error . . . servilely . . . They
had roused the world ... all in the service of truth . . . Never forget
. . . Socialism . . . Revolution . . . tomorrow, the battle for Europe

amid world crisis . . . Yesterday, Barcelona, the beginning ... we ar-
rived too late, too sapped by our errors . . . our forgetfulness of the
international proletariat, of mankind . . . too late, wretches that we
are . . .” The orator spoke of the Aragon front, of the arms which did
not arrive—why? He shouted the “why” in a tone of defiance, and did
not answer it—a reference to what? He proclaimed the “heroism of the
Anarchists . . He said (and the commissar, transfixed, could not take
his eyes from him), he said:
“. . . Perhaps, young men, I shall never speak again ... I have not
come here, in the name of the Central Committee of our great Party, that
iron cohort ...”
Iron cohort? Hadn’t the phrase been coined by Bukharin, enemy of
the people, agent of a foreign intelligence service?
“. . . to bring you the copybook phrases which Lenin called our
Communist lie, ‘Comm-lie’! I ask you to look at reality, be it baffling or
base, with the courage of your youth, I tell you to think freely, to con-
demn us in your consciences—we, the older generation, who could not
do better; I tell you to go beyond us as you judge us ... I urge you to
feel that you are free men under your armor of discipline ... to judge,
to think out everything for yourselves. Socialism is not an organization
of machines, a mechanizing of human beings—it is an organization of
clear-thinking and resolute men, who know how to wait, to give way
and to recover their ground . . . Then you shall see how great we are,
one and all—we who are the last, you who are the first, of tomorrow . . .
Live forward . . . Among you there are some who have thought of
deserting, for hanging yourself or putting a bullet in your brain is desert-
ing ... I understand them thoroughly, I have considered doing the
same thing myself—otherwise I should not have the right to speak to
them ... I tell them to see this vast country before them, this vast
future ... I tell them ... A pitiful creature, the man who thinks only
of his own life, his own death, he has understood nothing .... and let
him go, it is the best thing he can do, let him go with our pity . . .” The
orator continued his incoherencies with such persuasive power that for
a time the Political Commissar lost his own self-control, and regained it
only when he heard Kondratiev speaking of the Chief in very strange
terms: “The most solitary man among us all, the man who can turn to
no one, overwhelmed by his superhuman task, by the burden of our
common faults in this backward country where the new consciousness is
feeble and sickly . . . corrupted by suspicion . . .” But he ended with
reassuring words: “the inspired guide,” the “pilot’s immovable hand,”

the “continuer of Lenin” . . . When he stopped speaking, the entire
audience hovered in painful indecision. The presidium did not give the
signal for applause, the three hundred listeners waited for more. The
young Mongolian rose and clapped passionately, it set off a tumult of
irregular and as it were galvanic applause, in which there were islands
of silence. Kondratiev saw Sacha standing at the back of the hall—he
was not applauding, his hair was rumpled . . . Facing off stage, the
Political Commissar was making fervid signals, an orchestra struck up
“Be There War Tomorrow,” the audience took up the virile refrain in
chorus, three working women, wearing decorations and the uniform of
Chemical Aviation, filed onto the platform, one of them carrying the
new school flag, in red silk richly embroidered with gold . . .
Forced smiles displayed above new uniforms surrounded Kondratiev
during the ball. The garrison commander, who had understood not a
word of the speech but whose good humor was fortified by a slight
degree of intoxication, displayed all the grace of a bear gorged on sweet-
meats. The sandwiches which he offered Kondratiev—going to fetch
them from the buffet, three rooms away—he recommended in coy
phrases and with languishing looks: “Just taste this adorable caviar, my
dear comrade . . . ah, life, life!” When, tray in hand, he made his way
through the circle of dancers, his face beaming, his boots so highly
polished that they reflected the fluttering silks of the women’s dresses, he
seemed grotesquely on the point of falling over backward, but he forged
ahead despite his stoutness, with the amazing lightness of a steppe
horseman. The head of the school, a ruddy bulldog whose very small blue
eyes remained cold and steely through everything, neither moved nor
spoke. His legs crossed, his face frozen into a grimacing Oriental smile,
he sat beside the Central Committee’s delegate, pondering fragments of
incomprehensible sentences, which he clearly saw might be terrible, and
which hung over him like an obscure menace, however loyal he might be.
“We are covered with crimes and yet we are justified before the universe
. . . Your elders have nearly all perished servilely, servilely . . .” It
was so incredible that he stopped pondering to scrutinize Kondratiev
out of the corner of his eye—was he, in fact, the genuine Kondratiev,
deputy member of the C.C.? Or was he some enemy of the people who
had abused the confidence of the bureaus, forging official documents with
the help of foreign agents, to bring a message of defeat into the heart of
the Red Army? Suspicion gripped him so intensely that he rose and went
to the buffet to look at the beribboned portrait of Comrade Kondratiev.
The picture left no room for doubt, but the enemy’s artifices are inex-

haustible—plots, trials, even marshals turned traitors, had more than
demonstrated it. The impostor might be made up; intelligence services
use chance resemblances with consummate skill; the photograph might
be a forgery! Comrade Bulkin, who had recently been promoted to
lieutenant colonel, and who had seen three of his superiors disappear
(probably shot) in three years, was completely panic-stricken. His first
thought was to order the exits guarded and to alert the secret service.
What a responsibility! Sweat stood on his forehead. Beyond the tango-
ing couples he saw the city’s Chief of Security talking very earnestly with
Kondratiev—perhaps he had actually penetrated his disguise, was ques-
tioning him without seeming to? Lieutenant Colonel Bulkin, built like
a bulldog, his conical forehead drawn into horizontal wrinkles which
expressed his state of tension, wandered through the rooms looking for
the Political Commissar and finally found him, equally preoccupied, at
the door of the telephone booth—-direct wire to the capital. “Saveliev, my
friend,” said Bulkin, taking him by the arm, “I don’t know what’s
happening ... I hardly dare to think . . . I . . . Are you sure he is
really the speaker from the Central Committee?”
“What, Filon Platonovich?”
It was not an answer. They talked for a moment in terrified whispers,
then walked the length of the room to examine Kondratiev again. Kon-
dratiev was sitting with his legs crossed, smoking, feeling thoroughly at
ease, pleased by the dancers, among whom there were not a few pretty
girls and not a few young men made of excellent human material . . .
The sight of him nailed the two men to the spot with respect. Bulkin, the
less intelligent of the two, gave a long sigh and murmured confidentially:
“Don’t you think, Comrade Saveliev, that this may augur a change in
policy by the C.C. . . . may indicate a new line for the political educa-
tion of subalterns?”
Commissar Saveliev asked himself if he had not been out of his head
when he had telephoned a brief summary of Kondratiev’s speech to
Moscow, though he had been extremely circumspect in what he had said.
In any case, when he took leave of the C.C. envoy he must tell the com-
rade that “the precious directives contained in his most interesting report
would henceforth form the basis of our educational work . . .” Aloud
he concluded: “It is possible, Filon Platonovich; but until we receive
supplementary instructions, I believe we should refrain from any initia-
tives ...”
Kondratiev rose and walked away, trying to escape from the obsequi-
ous circle of officials. He succeeded for only a very short time, having,

by some unlikely chance, found himself alone at the door of the great
room. It was alive with movement and music. The faces of a dancing
couple emerged before him, one charming, with eyes that smiled like
pure spring, the other firm-featured and, as it were, illuminated by a
restrained light: Sacha. Sacha held back his partner and they danced
slowly round and round in one spot so that the young man could lean
toward Kondratiev:
“Thank you, Ivan Nicolayevich, for what you said to us . .
The rhythmical revolution brought the other face toward Kondratiev,
a face framed in chestnut braids caught in a knot at the neck, a smooth
forehead, golden eyebrows; again the movement carried it away, and
here was Sacha, his lips colorless, his eyes intense and veiled. Through
the music, Sacha said softly, without apparent emotion:
“Ivan Nicolayevich, I believe you will soon be arrested.”
“I believe so too,” Kondratiev said simply, waving them an affection-
ate good-by.
He was impatient to escape from this irritating gathering, these too-
well-fed heads with rudimentary minds, these insignia of command, these
girls with too carefully dressed hair who were nothing but young sex
organs under gaudy silks, these young men who were uneasy despite
themselves, incapable of really thinking because discipline forbade it,
and who bore their lives almost joyously to imminent sacrifices which
they did not understand . . . Perhaps it is a very good thing that we
cannot wholly rule our minds and that they force on us ideas and images
which we would ignobly prefer to dismiss; thus truth makes its way
in spite of egotism and unconsciousness. In the great, brightly lit room,
to the rhythm of a waltz, Kondratiev had suddenly remembered a morn-
ing inspection by the Ebro. A useless inspection, like so many others.
The General Staffs could no longer do anything to better the situation.
For a moment they looked professionally at the enemy positions on red-
dish hills dotted with bushes like a leopard’s hide. The morning was
fresh as the beginning of the world, blue mists dissolved on the slopes
of the sierra, the purity of the sky increased from moment to moment,
the rays of the sun rose into it, prodigiously straight, prodigiously visible,
fanning out just above the glittering curve of the river which separated
the armies . . . Kondratiev knew that the orders neither could nor
would be carried out, that the men who would give them, these colonels,
some of whom looked like mechanics exhausted by too many sleepless
nights, others like elegant gentlemen (which indeed they doubtless were)
who had left their ministries for a week end at the front and were all

ready to set off for Paris on secret missions by plane and Pullman—that
all these leaders of defeat, at once heroic and contemptible, had ceased
to have any illusions about themselves . . . Kondratiev turned his back
on them and, following a goat track strewn with white pebbles, climbed
back up the hill alone, toward the battalion commander’s shelter. At a
turn in the path a muffled, rhythmical sound drew him to a nearby
ridge; on its summit, thistles grew, thorny and solitary, springing from a
stony soil, and the tough thickets of them, spared by yesterday’s bom-
bardment, speared up into the sky. Just below that miniature landscape
of desolation, a squad of militiamen were at work, silently filling a wide
grave in which lay the corpses of other militiamen. The living and the
dead were dressed in the same clothes, they had almost the same faces:
those of the dead, taking on the color of the soil, more harrowing than
terrible, with their partly open mouths, their swollen lips, mysterious
in their bloodlessness; those of the living, famished and concentrated,
bent toward the ground, oily with sweat, unseeing, as if the morning light
knew them not. The men were working fast and in unison; their shovels
threw up a single stream of earth, which fell with a muffled sound. No
officer was in command of them. Not one of them turned to look at
Kondratiev, probably not one of them was aware of his presence. Em-
barrassed to be there behind them, completely useless, Kondratiev went
back down the slope, making an effort to keep the pebbles from rolling
under his feet . . . Now, in the same way, he stole away from the ball-
room, and no one turned to look at him—he was as distant from these
young dancing soldiers as he had been from the grave-digging militia-
men in Spain. And just as there in Spain, here too the General Staff
overtook him, danced attendance on him, asked his advice—here on the
great marble staircase. He had to make his way down surrounded by
commissars, commandants, declining their invitations. Those of the
highest rank offered to put him up for the night, offered to take him to
the maneuvers in the morning, to show him the factories, the school,
the barracks, the library, the swimming pool, the disciplinary section,
the motorized cavalry, the model hospitals, the traveling printing press
... He smiled, thanked them, spoke familiarly to people he did not
know, even joked, in spite of his violent desire to shout at them:
“Enough! Shut up, will you? I don’t belong to the species ‘general staff’
—can’t you tell it from my face?” Not one of these puppets suspected
that he would be arrested one of these days, they all saw him only
through the gigantic shadow of the Central Committee’s stamp of ap-
proval . . .

He slept in the C.C. Lincoln. Somewhere on the road, just before dawn,
a jolt waked him. The landscape was beginning to emerge from darkness
—black fields under pale stars. A few hours later Kondratiev saw the
same dark desolation in a woman’s face, in the depths of Tamara Leon-
tiyevna’s eyes. She had come into his office at the Combustibles Trust to
report. He felt in a good humor, he made a healthy man’s ordinary
gesture, he took her arm with a smile, and instantly he felt a vague terror
enter into him. “This matter of the Donets Syndicate is in fine shape,
it will be all settled in twenty-four hours, but what’s the trouble, Tamara
Leontiyevna, are you ill? You shouldn’t have come in this morning if
you didn’t feel well . . .”—“I would have come at any cost,” the girl
murmured, her lips pale, “excuse me, I have, I have to warn you . . .”
She was desperate, finding no words. Then: “Go away, Ivan Nicolaye-
vich, leave at once and never come back. I involuntarily overheard a
telephone conversation between the Director and ... I don’t know who
... I don’t want to know, I have no right to know, I have no right to
tell you either, what am I doing, my God!” Kondratiev took her hands
—they were as cold as ice. “There, there, I know all about it, Tamara
Leontiyevna, calm yourself . . .You think that I am going to be ar-
rested?” She barely nodded. “Go away, quick, quick!”
“No indeed,” he said. “Not under any circumstances.”
He freed himself from her, became again the distant assistant director
in charge of special plans:
“I am much obliged to you, Tamara Leontiyevna, please have the
documents on the Yuzovka Refineries ready by two o’clock. Meanwhile,
get the General Secretary of the Party on the telephone for me. Use my
name, and insist on getting through to the General Secretary’s office. At
once, if you please.”
Could this light be the light of the last day? One chance in a thousand
that he would be granted an audience . . . And once there? The beauti-
ful fish, armed all over with scales each one of which reflects the whole
light of an asphyxiating universe, struggles in the net, struggles in utter
impossibility, suffocating—but I am ready. He smoked furiously, taking
two puffs from a cigarette, then crushing it out on the edge of the desk
and flinging it on the floor. He instantly lighted another, and his jaws
clenched, he forgot himself in his director’s chair, in this absurd office,
antechamber to a place of unforeseeable tortures. Tamara Leontiyevna
came back without knocking. “I didn’t call you,” he said crossly, “leave
me alone . . . Ah, yes, put the call on my line here . . .’’To escape—
perhaps there actually was a slight possibility that he could? “What

now? The Gorlovka Refineries?”—“No, no,” said Tamara Leontiyevna,
“I asked for an audience for you, He expects you at three sharp at the
Central Committee . .
What, what! You did that? But who gave you permission? You' are
mad, it is not true! I tell you, you are mad! “I heard HIS VOICE,”
Tamara went on, “HE came to the telephone HIMSELF, I assure
you . . .” She spoke of him with terrified reverence. Kondratiev turned
to stone—the great fish beginning to die.
“Very well,” he said dryly. “Keep after the reports on the Donets,
Gorlovka, and so on . . . And if you have a headache, take aspirin.”
Ten minutes to three, the great reception room of the General Secre-
tariat. Two presidents of Federated Republics were conversing in low
tones. Other presidents of Republics had disappeared, it was said, after
leaving here . . . Three o’clock. The void. Steps in the void.
“Go in, please ...”
Go into the void.
The Chief was standing in the attenuated whiteness of the huge office.
Tensely collected. He received Kondratiev without a gesture of welcome.
His tawny eyes were impenetrable. He murmured: “Greetings” in an
indifferent voice. Kondratiev felt no fear; his feeling was more one of
surprise at finding himself almost impassive. Good—now we are face to
face, you, the Chief, and I who do not know whether I am a living man
or a dead one—leaving out of account a certain period of minor im-
portance. Well?
The Chief took two or three steps toward him, without holding out
his hand. The Chief looked him up and down, from head to foot, slowly,
harshly. Kondratiev heard the question, too serious to be spoken:
Enemy? and he answered in the same fashion, without opening his lips:
Enemy, I ? Are you mad ?
The Chief quietly asked:
“So you are a traitor too?”
Quietly, from the depths of an assured calm, Kondratiev answered:
“I am not a traitor either.”
Each syllable of the terrible sentence stood out like a block of ice in
Arctic whiteness. There was no going back on such words. A few more
seconds, and all would be over. For such words in this place, one should
be annihilated on the spot, instantaneously. Kondratiev finished them
firmly:
“And you must know it.”

Would he not summon someone, give orders in a voice so furious that
it would sound stifled? The Chief’s hands, still hanging at his sides,
sketched several little incoherent movements. Were they looking for the
bell? Take this creature out of here, arrest him, do away with him! What
he says is a thousand times worse than treason! A calm and completely
disarmed resolve forced Kondratiev to speak:
“Don’t get angry, it will do no good. All this is very painful to me . . .
Listen ... You can believe me, or you can not believe me, I hardly
care, the truth will still be the truth. And it is that, despite every-
thing . . .”
Despite EVERYTHING?
“. . . I am loyal to you . . . There are many things that escape me.
There are too many that I understand. I am in agony. I think of the
country, of the Revolution, of you, yes, of you—I think of them . . .
Of them above all, I tell you frankly. Their end has left me with an
almost unbearable regret: what men they were! What men! History
takes millenniums to produce men so great! Incorruptible, intelligent,
formed by thirty or forty decisive years, and pure, pure! Let me speak,
you know that I am right. You are like them yourself, that is your essen-
tial worth . . .”
(So Cain and Abel, born of the same womb under the same stars . . .)
The Chief swept away invisible obstacles with both hands. With no
apparent emotion, looking away, and even giving himself an air of
detachment, he said:
“Not another word on this subject, Kondratiev. What had to be had
to be. The Party and the country have followed me ... It is not for you
to judge ... You are an intellectual ...” A malevolent smile ap-
peared in his leaden face. “I, as you know, have never been one . . .”
Kondratiev shrugged his shoulders.
“What has that to do with us? . . . This is hardly the moment to
discuss the failings of the intelligentsia . . . The intelligentsia did a lot
of useful work, though, eh? . . . We shall soon be at war . . . Ac-
counts will be settled, all the dirty old accounts, you know it better than
I do . . . Perhaps we shall all perish, even to the last—and drag you
down with us. Let us put the best face on things: you will be the last of
the last. You will hold out an hour longer than we do, thanks to us, on
our bones. Russia is short of men, men whose brains know what ours
know, what theirs knew . . . Who have studied Marx, known Lenin,
lived through October, gone through all the rest, the best of it and the
worst! How many of us are left? You know the figure, you are one of

them yourself . . . And the earth is going to begin shaking, as when
all volcanoes come to life at once, from continent to continent. We shall
be under the ground at the dark hour—and you will be alone. That’s it.”
Kondratiev went on, in the same melancholy, persuasive tone:
“You will be alone under the avalanche, with the country in its last
agony behind you and a host of enemies around you ... No one will
forgive us for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity
. . . That your shoulders are strong, I know ... As strong as ours:
ours carried you . . . Only—we have the place of the individual in
history . . . not a very big place, especially when a man has isolated
himself at the peak of power ... I hope that your portraits, as big
as buildings, have not given you any illusions on the subject?”
The simplicity of his speech performed a miracle. They walked up
and down together over the white carpet. Which led the other? They
stopped before the Mercator’s projection: oceans, continents, frontiers,
industries, green spaces, our sixth part of the earth, primitive, powerful,
threatened ... A heavy red line, in the ice-floe region, indicated the
great Arctic road . . . The Chief studied the relief of the Ural Moun-
tains: Magnitogorsk, our new pride, blast furnaces as well equipped as
Pittsburgh’s. That’s what counts! The Chief half turned to Kondratiev,
his gestures were clearer, his voice more relaxed. His eyes grew less
impenetrable:
“Always the writer! You ought to go in for psychology . . .”
An amused gesture of his forefinger completed the word: twisting and
untwisting an imaginary skein . . . The Chief smiled:
“In our day, old man, Chekhov and Tolstoi would be genuine counter-
revolutionaries ... Yet I like writers, though I don’t have time to
read them . . . Some of them are useful ... I see that they are very
well paid . . . One novel sometimes brings them in more than several
proletarian lives. Is that just or not? It is something we need . . . But
I don’t need your psychologizing, Kondratiev.”
A rather strange pause followed. The Chief filled his pipe. Kondratiev
looked at the map. The dead can no longer fill their pipes or feel proud
of Magnitogorsk, which they built! There was nothing more to add,
everything had been set forth under an impersonal light which permitted
neither maneuvering nor fear. The consequences would be what they
must be: irrevocable.
The Chief said:
“Do you know that you have been denounced? That you are accused
of treason?”

“Naturally! What should all those vermin do but denounce me? That’s
what they live on. They gobble denunciations day and night . . .”
“What they affirm seems not unlikely . . .”
“Of course! They know how to cook these things up. In our day what
is easier? But whatever stinking nonsense they may have sent you . . .”
“I know. I have gone into it. A piece of stupidity, or worse, in Spain
. . . You were wrong to get yourself mixed up in it, there’s no doubt
of that ... I know better than anyone how many vile things and
stupid things have been done there . . . That fool of a prosecutor
wanted to have you arrested . . . Once let them get started and they’d
arrest all Moscow. He is a brute we shall have to get rid of someday. A
sort of maniac.
“Enough of that. I have made my decision. You will leave for eastern
Siberia, you will receive your appointment tomorrow morning. Do not
lose a day . . . Zolotaya Dolina, the Valley of Gold—do you know
what it is? Our Klondike, production increasing from 40 to 50 per cent
every year . . . Splendid technicians, a few cases of sabotage as is to
be expected . . .”
Pleased with himself, the Chief began to laugh. He was not good at
joking, and the fact sometimes made him aggressive. He would have
liked to be jovial. His laugh was always a little forced.
“We need a man there who has character—sinew, enthusiasm, the
Marxist instinct for gold . . .”
“I loathe gold,” said Kondratiev, almost angrily.
Life? Exile in the mountains of Yakutia, in the white brushland,
among secret placers, unknown to the universe? His whole being had
prepared itself for a catastrophe, hardened itself by expecting it, accus-
tomed itself to bitterly wishing for it, as a man seized with vertigo above
a chasm knows that a double within him longs for the relief of falling.
And now? You let me off after what I came here to say to you? Are you
trying to make a fool of me? Am I not going to disappear at the first
corner I come to after I leave here? It is too late to restore our confi-
dence, you have killed too many of us, I no longer believe in you, I don’t
want any of your missions which turn out to be traps! You will never
forget what I have said to you, and if you let me off today, it will be to
order my arrest six months from now, when remorse and suspicion have
gone to your head . . . “No, Yossif, I thank you for granting me life,
I believe in you, I came here to find my salvation, you are great despite
everything, you are sometimes blind when you strike, you are perfidious,
you are eaten by bloody jealousies, but you are still the leader of the

Revolution, we have no one but you, I thank you.” But Kondratiev
restrained both protest and effusion. There was no pause. The Chief
laughed again:
“I told you that you were always the writer. As for me, I have no
feeling about gold one way or the other . . . Excuse me—this is audi-
ence day. Get the dossier on Gold from the secretariat, study it. Your
reports you will send to me directly. I count on you. A good journey,
brother!”
“Right. Keep in good health! Good-by.”
The audience had lasted fourteen minutes ... A secretary handed
him a leather brief case on which, in letters of gold, stood the magical
words: East Siberian Gold Trust. He passed blue uniforms without see-
ing them. The daylight seemed pellucid. He walked for a while, mingling
with the people in the street and thinking of nothing. A physical happi-
ness grew in him, but his mind did not share it. He also felt a sadness
which was like a sense of uselessness. He sat down on a bench in a square,
before disinherited trees and lawns of a green which meant nothing. An
old woman was watching her grandchildren making mud pies. Farther
away rolled long yellow streetcars; their clatter rebounded from the
front of a recently constructed office building of glass, steel, and rein-
forced concrete. Eight floors of offices: a hundred and forty compart-
ments, each containing the same portrait of the Chief, the same adding
machines, the same glasses of tea on directors’ and accountants’ desks,
the same worried lives ... A beggarwoman passed, leading several
small children. “For the love of Christ . . .” she said, holding out a
pretty brown hand. Kondratiev put a handful of small change into it.
On each of the little coins, he remembered, you could read the words:
Proletarians of all countries, unite! He passed his hand over his fore-
head. Could the nightmare be over? Yes, over, for a time at least—my
small, personal nightmare. But all the rest goes on, nothing is clarified,
no dawn rises on the tombs, we have no real hope for tomorrow, we must
still travel through darkness, ice, fire . . . Stefan Stern is doubtless
dead. For his sake, I must hope so. Kiril Rublev has disappeared; with
him the line of our theoreticians of the great days is extinguished . . .
In our schools of higher education we have nothing left but teachers as
contemptible as they are insipid, armed with an inquisitorial dialectic
that is three-fourths dead. As usual, names and faces crowded into his
memory. What a peaceful motion—the motion of those militiamen by
the Ebro, covering their comrades in that mass grave with heavy shovel-
fuls of earth! The same men, in the grave and beside the grave—buried

and buriers the same. They were covering themselves with earth, yet
they had not lost heart to live and fight. The thing is to keep on, com-
rades, obviously. To wash gold-bearing sand. Kondratiev opened the
Gold Trust brief case. Only the maps interested him, because of their
peculiar magic—an algebra of the earth. With the map of the Vitim
district open on his knees, Kondratiev looked at the hatchings which
signified elevations, patches of green which indicated forests, the blue of
watercourses ... No villages, stern solitudes, brush on rock, cold
streams which absorbed the colors of sky and stone, shining mosses
clothing rock, the low, tenacious vegetation of the taiga, indifferent skies.
Among the gaunt splendors of that world, man feels himself delivered
over to a glacial freedom which has no human meaning. The nights
glitter, they have an inhuman significance, sometimes their brightness
sends the weary sleeper to sleep forever. Bodaibo is doubtless only an
administrative settlement surrounded by clearings, in the heart of the
forested wilderness, under a metallic brightness like a perpetual light-
ning bolt. “I’ll take Tamara Leontiyevna with me,” Kondratiev thought,
“she’ll come. I’ll say to her: You are as straight as the young birches in
those mountains, you are young, I need you, we shall fight for gold, do
you understand?” Kondratiev’s eyes turned from the map to pursue
a joy beyond visible things. And he discovered a pair of worn-out shoes,
laced with string, a dusty trouser cuff. The man had on only one sock,
which hung around his ankle like a dirty rag. His feet expressed vio-
lence and resignation, a desperate determination—to do what? To walk
through the city as through a jungle, seeking the pittance of food, the
knowledge, the ideas, by which to live the next day, blind to the stars
which the electric signs drive back into their immensities. Kondratiev
slowly turned to look at his neighbor on the bench, a young man whose
hands clutched an open notebook full of equations. He had stopped read-
ing, his gray eyes were exploring the square with intense and idle atten-
tion. On the hunt, always prey to the same desolate bitterness? “In this
distress and apathy, no one whose hand I can take,” says the poet, but the
wandering Maxim the Bitter, Gorki, amends: “no one whose jaw I can
break . . .” An obstinate forehead under the visor of the cap, which he
wears tipped back, guttersnipe fashion. Irregular features, tormented
from within by an anemic violence; chalky complexion. Clear eyes—not
an alcoholic. Movements still lithe and flexible. Were he ever to sleep on
the naked soil of the Siberias, no glitter of stars would kill him, because
his desperate determination would never go to sleep. Kondratiev forgot
him for the moment.

Such should he those who prowl the taiga around the Upper Angara,
in Vitim, around Chara, in the Zolotaya Dolina, the Valley of Gold. They
follow wild beasts by invisible signs, they foretell the storm, they fear the
bear, they say “thou” to him, as to an elder brother whom it is wise to
respect. It is they who come to the solitary posts, bringing silvery furs
and bulging leather purses filled with grains of gold—for the war chest
of the Socialist Republic. A minor official, silent because he has lost the
habit of speech, who lives alone with his wife, his dog, his machine pistol
and the birds of the air, in an isba of heavy blackened logs, weighs the
grains of gold, counts rubles, sells vodka, matches, gunpowder, tobacco,
the precious empty bottle, makes notes on the work card issued by the
Gold-Seekers’ Co-operative. He smiles and swallows a glass of vodka,
does some figuring, says to the man from the taiga: “Comrade, it’s not
enough. You are 8 per cent behind your Plan quota . . . Won’t do.
Make it up, or I can’t sell you any more vodka . . .” He says it in a
toneless voice, and adds: “Palmyra, bring us tea . . .” because his wife
is named Palmyra, but he has no idea that it is the magical name of a
vanished city in another world, a world of sand and palms and sun . . .
Those hunters, those prospectors, those gold washers, those engineers,
Yakuts, Buriats, Mongols, Tungus, Oirads, Great Russians from the capi-
tals, Young Communists, Party members initiated into the sorceries of
shamans, those clerks half mad with solitude, their wives, their little
Yakut girls from obscure villages who sell themselves in a dark corner of
the house for a pinch of yellow grains or a package of cigarettes, the
Trust’s inspectors, ambushed on the road by sawed-off shotguns, the
engineers who know the latest statistics from the Transvaal and the new
methods of hydraulic drilling to work deep-lying auriferous strata—all
of them, all of them live a magnificent life under the twofold sign of the
Plan and of glittering nights, in the vanguard of forward-marching man-
kind, in communion with the Milky Way!—The preamble to the Report
on Socialist Emulation and Sabotage in the Zolotaya Dolina Gold Placers
contained these lines: “. . . As our great Comrade Tulayev, traitorously
assassinated by Trotskyist terrorists in the service of world imperialism,
recently said, workers in gold production form an elite contingent at the
spearhead of the Socialist army. They fight Wall Street and the City with
capitalism’s own weapons . . .” Ah, Tulayev, the stupid fool, and this
verbiage of public prosecutors intoxicated with vileness . . . Prosaically
put, but, so far as gold was concerned, true enough . . . The icy winds
of the North carry violet snow-laden clouds down to that country. Behind
them whiteness covers the universe, which has relapsed into a sort of

void. Before them flee such multitudes of birds that they hide the sky. At
sunset faraway flocks of white birds trace gilded snakes in the upper air.
The Plan must be carried out before winter.
Kondratiev rediscovered the string-laced shoes of the poverty-stricken
walker.
“Student?”
“Technology, third year.”
Kondratiev was thinking of too many things at once. Of the winter, of
Tamara Leontiyevna, who would come, of life beginning again, of the
prisoners in the prison where he had expected to end this day, of the
dead, of Moscow, of the Valley of Gold. Without looking at the young
man—and what did that thin, bitter face matter to him, after all?—he
said:
“Do you want to fight with winter, with the wilderness, with solitude,
with the earth, with night? To fight—understand? I am the head of an
enterprise. I offer you work in the Siberian brush.”
Without taking time to reflect, the student answered:
“If you really mean it, I accept. I have nothing to lose.”
“Neither have I,” Kondratiev murmured cheerfully.

9 * Let Purity Be Treason
On his desk Prosecutor Rachevsky found a foreign
newspaper which announced (the item was carefully circled in red pen-
cil) the imminent trial of Comrade Tulayev’s assassins. “From our spe-
cial correspondent: Informed circles are discussing . . . —the principal
defendants—the former High Commissar for Security, Erchov; the his-
torian Kiril Rublev, former member of the Central Committee; the Re-
gional Secretary for Kurgansk, Artyem Makeyev; an immediate agent of
Trotsky’s, whose name is still a secret . . . —are said to have made
complete confessions . . . —it is hoped that this trial will cast light on
certain points which the preceding trials left obscure . . .” The Foreign
Affairs Commissariat’s press bureau added a request for information
concerning the source of this item. Originally emanating from the Su-
preme Court, the request had been officially communicated by the press
bureau itself . . . Calamity. Toward noon the Prosecutor learned that
the audience for which he had been asking for several days was granted.
The Chief received him in a small anteroom, before a glass-covered
table. The audience lasted three minutes and forty-five seconds. The

Chief seemed preoccupied. “Good day. Sit down. Well?” Discommoded
by his thick glasses, Rachevsky could not see the Chief well. The lenses
broke his image into absorbing details: wrinkles at the corners of
his eyes, bushy black eyebrows in which there was a sprinkling of white
hairs . . . Leaning slightly forward, his two hands resting on the edge
of the table (because he did not dare to gesticulate), the Prosecutor made
his report. He did not know quite what he was saying, hut professional
habit made him brief and precise: 1. Complete confessions from the prin-
cipal defendants; 2. the unexpected death of the person who appeared to
be the soul of the conspiracy, the Trotskyist Ryzhik, a death due to the
unpardonable negligence of Comrade Zvyeryeva, who had been in charge
of the preliminary investigation; 3. the very strong presumptive evidence
collected against Ryzhik, whose guilt, if proven, would show the connec-
tion between the conspirators and foreign powers ... In principle, a
doubt must he admitted until Kondratiev should be questioned . . .
However ...
The Chief interrupted:
“I have investigated the Kondratiev matter. It is of no further interest
to you.”
The Prosecutor bowed, choking. “Ah, so much the better. Thank
you . . .” Why was he saying thank you? He felt as if he were falling,
falling straight down. It was thus that one would fall from the sky-
scrapers of some inconceivable city, past oblongs of window, oblongs,
oblongs, five hundred stories ...
“Go on.”
Go on with what? The Prosecutor gropingly returned to the “complete
confessions of the principal defendants ...”
“They have confessed? And you have no doubts?”
A thousand floors, the sidewalk below him. His head hitting the side-
walk at meteor speed.
“. . . No,” said Rachevsky.
“Then apply the Soviet law. You are the Prosecutor.”
The Chief rose, his hands in his pockets. “Good-by, Comrade Prose-
cutor.” Rachevsky walked away like an automaton. No question pre-
sented itself to him. In the car he gave himself up to stupor—the stupor
of a man stunned. “I will see no one,” he told his secretary, “leave me to
myself . . .” He sat down at his desk. The huge office offered nothing to
hold his eyes (the life-size portrait of the Chief was behind the Prose-
cutor’s chair). “I am so tired,” he said to himself, and put his head in his
hands. “When all is said and done, there is only one way out for me: to

shoot myself . . .” The idea came to him of itself: there it was in his
mind, quite simply. A telephone buzzed—direct wire from the Commis-
sariat for the Interior. As he took up the receiver, Rachevsky became
aware what a languor there was in his limbs. There was absolutely noth-
ing in him but that one idea, reduced to an impersonal force, without
emotion, without images, without argument, obvious. “Hello . . It
was Gordeyev, inquiring into “this deplorable indiscretion which has
communicated a so-called rumor to certain European newspapers . . .
Do you know anything about it, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?” Excessively po-
lite, Gordeyev—using circumlocutions to avoid saying: “I am making an
investigation.” Rachevsky began by spluttering. “What indiscretion?
What did you say? An English newspaper? But all communications of
that nature go through the Foreign Affairs press bureau . . .” Gordeyev
insisted: “I think you don’t quite understand, my dear Ignatii Ignatiye-
vich . . . Allow me to read you this paragraph: From our special cor-
respondent . . .” Rachevsky hastily interrupted: “Ah, yes, I know . . .
My secretariat issued a verbal communication ... at the suggestion of
Comrade Popov . . .” Gordeyev appeared to be embarrassed by the un-
expected precision of this answer. “Right, right,” he said, lowering his
voice. “The point is”—his voice rose an octave: Perhaps there was some-
one with Gordeyev? Perhaps their telephone conversation was being re-
corded?—“have you a written memorandum from Comrade Popov?”—
“No, but I am sure he remembers it very well . . .”—“Thank you very
much. Excuse me now, Ignatii Ignatiyevich ...”
When he was under great pressure of work, Rachevsky often slept at
Government House. There he had the use of a small, plainly furnished
apartment, which was crammed with dossiers. He did a great deal of
work himself, since he did not know how to use secretaries and trusted no
one. Sixty cases of sabotage, treason, espionage, which he must look into
before he went to bed, were scattered over various articles of furniture.
The most secret were in a small safe at the head of his bed.. Rachevsky
stopped in front of the safe and, to shake off his sluggishness, elaborately
wiped his glasses. “Obviously, obviously.” His usual supper was brought
in, and he devoured it standing by the window, without being aware of
the suburban view, in which innumerable golden sparks were kindling
into light. “It is the only thing to do, the only thing . . .” Of the thing as
such, he thought hardly at all. Present within him, it offered no real
difficulty. To blow out his brains—what could be simpler? No one sus-
pects how simple it is. He was a rudimentary man, who feared neither
pain nor death since he had been present at a number of executions.

There is probably no real pain, only a shock of infinitesimal duration.
And materialists like ourselves have no need to fear nothingness. He
longed for sleep and for darkness, which gives the best idea of nothing-
ness, which does not exist.—Let me be, let me be! He would write noth-
ing. It would be better for his children. As he was thinking of his
children, Masha called him on the telephone: “You won’t be home to-
night, Papa?”—“No.”—“Papa, I got very good today in history and
political economy . . . Tiopka got a cut finger cutting out decalcoma-
nias, Niura bandaged it the way it says to in the First Aid Manual.
Mama’s headache is better. All well on the Interior Front! Sleep well,
Comrade Papa-Prosecutor!”—“Sleep well, all of you,” Rachevsky
answered.
Oh, God. He opened the cupboard in the little bureau, took out a bottle
of brandy and drank from it. His eyes dilated, a warmth ran through
him, it was good. He slammed the bottle down and it rocked back and
forth on the table. Will you fall or won’t you? It did not fall. He banged
at the table on either side of the bottle, but keeping one hand open, ready
to catch the bottle if it should start to fall. “You won’t fall, damn you—
ha-ha-ha-ha!” He was laughing and hiccuping. “A-bullet-in-the-brain—
poo-poo-poo-poo! A-bullet-in-the-bottle—poo-poo-poo-poo!” Leaning so
far to one side that he almost toppled over, he tried to. get his fingers on a
blue dossier which lay on a stand against the wall. The effort made him
groan. “So you won’t let me catch you, damn you . . . damn you!” He
worked his fingers to the edge of the dossier, drew it toward him craftily,
caught it in the air while other papers showered onto the carpet, put it on
the table, flung his glasses into a corner over his shoulder, licked his fore-
finger and, drawing it clumsily along under the words on the cover, be-
gan spelling them out: Sa-bo-tage in the Chemical Industry, Armolinsk
Case. The syllables overlapped, ran after each other, and each letter, writ-
ten in black ink in a big round hand, was fringed with fire. His finger
captured the syllables, but they got away like mice, like rats, like the little
lizards which, when he was a boy in Turkestan, he used to catch with a
noose made from a blade of grass—ha ha ha! “I was always a specialist
in nooses!” He tore the dossier across and then across again. Come here,
bottle, come here, damn you—hurrah! He drank till he lost breath, the
desire to laugh, consciousness ...
When he arrived at his office on the afternoon of the next day, Popov
was waiting for him, surrounded by the department heads, whom he dis-
missed with a wave. Popov looked bored, yellow, and ill. The Prosecutor
sat down under the great portrait of the Chief, opened his brief case,

assumed a pleasant look, but a headache pressed down on his eyelids, his
mouth was woolly, he breathed laboriously. “Had a bad night, Comrade
Popov, attack of asthma, my heart, I don’t know what to make of it,
haven’t had time to see a doctor . . . At your service!”
Popov asked softly:
“Have you read the papers, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?”
“Haven’t had time.”
He had not read his mail either, since the unopened envelopes lay there
on his desk. Popov rubbed his hands. “So . . . so . . . Well, Comrade
Rachevsky, it is just as well that I should tell you the news . . .” It
couldn’t be easy, because he looked in his pockets for a newspaper,
opened it, found an item toward the middle of the third page. “There,
read that, Ignatii Ignatiyevich ... In any case, everything has been
arranged, I saw to it this morning . . .”
“By decision of . . . and so on . . . Comrade Rachevsky, 1.1., Pros-
ecutor to the Supreme Tribunal, is relieved of his functions . . . in view
of his appointment to another post . . .”
“It stands to reason,” said Rachevsky, without emotion, for he saw
quite a different reason.
Weakly, using both hands, he pushed the heavy brief case toward
Popov. “There you are.”
To an accompaniment of hand-rubbing, little coughs, and vaguely
pleasant smiles—none of which had any meaning—Popov said: “You
understand, do you not, Ignatii Ignatiyevich? . . . You have carried
out a task ... a superhuman task . . . Mistakes were inevitable . . .
We have thought of a post which will give you a chance to take some rest
. . . Your appointment is”—From the depths of his torpor, Rachevsky
pricked up his ears—“is . . . Director of the Tourist Bureau . . . with
two months’ leave in advance . . . which, as a friend, I advise you to
spend at Sochi ... or at Suk-Su—they are our two best rest houses
... Blue sea, flowers, Alupka, Alushta, views, Ignatii Ignatiyevich!
You will come back renewed . . . ten years younger . . . and tourist
travel, you know, is far from a negligible matter!”
Former Prosecutor Rachevsky appeared to wake up. He gesticulated.
The thick lenses of his glasses flashed lightning. A laugh made a hori-
zontal gash in his concave face.
“Delighted! Travel, touring, the dream of my life! Little birds in the
woods! Cherry trees in flower! The Svanetia highway! Yalta! Our
Riviera! Thank you, thank you!” His two gnarled, hairy hands seized

Popov’s flabby ones. Popov drew back a little, his eyes uneasy, his smile
fading.
The office staff saw them come out, arm in arm like the good old
friends they were. Rachevsky showed all his yellow teeth in a smile, and
Popov appeared to be telling him a good story. Together they got into a
Central Committee car. Rachevsky had the driver stop for a moment in
Maxim Gorki Street in front of a large grocery store. He came back from
the store with a package which he carefully placed in Popov’s lap. He was
his old serious self again. “Look, old man!” The neck of an uncorked
bottle protruded from the wrapping. “Drink, my friend, drink first,”
Rachevsky said amiably, and his arm went around Popov’s puny shoul-
ders. “No, thank you,” said Popov coldly, “furthermore, I advise
you . . Rachevsky burst out:
“You advise me, my dear friend! How nice of you!”
And he drank greedily, his head thrown back, the bottle held high in a
firm hand, then licked his lips. “Long live tourist travel, Comrade Popov!
Do you know what I regret? I regret having begun my life by hanging
lizards!” After that he said nothing, but he unwrapped the bottle to see
how much was left in it. Popov took him all the way home—his house
was in the outer suburbs. “How is your family, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?”—
“All right, very well,” he said. “This news will make them terribly happy.
And yours?” Was he sneering?—“My daughter is in Paris,” said Popov,
with a hint of uneasiness. He watched the former Prosecutor get out of
the car in front of a villa surrounded by faded shrubs. Rachevsky stepped
heavily into a muddy puddle, which made him laugh and swear. The
bottle protruded from his overcoat pocket, he felt of it with a hand that
was like a big crab. “Good-by, old man,” he said cheerfully, or sarcas-
tically, and ran toward the gate of the little garden.
“He’s done for,” Popov thought. And what of it? He was never good
for much.
Paris was not at all as Xenia had vaguely imagined it. Only at mo-
ments and by chance did she find it resembling the twofold city she had
expected—the capital of a decaying world, the capital of workers’ risings
... It had all been built so many centuries ago, and so much rain, so
much daylight, so much darkness, had impregnated the old stones, that
the idea of a unique achievement forced itself upon her mind. Turbid yet
bluish, the Seine flowed between scattered, ancient trees, between stone
quays whose exact color was indeterminable. The stone seemed to have

no consistency, the water, polluted by the huge city, could be neither ill-
tasting nor dangerous—and nowhere else could drowned bodies evoke
more simple tears. The tragedy of Paris was clothed in a worn, almost
fragile splendor. It became a delight to stop before a bookstall, under the
skeleton of a tree, and take in the prospect with one sweeping look: the
books before her (hardly alive, yet not quite dead, soiled with the finger-
prints of unknown hands), the stones of the Louvre across the river, the
Belle Jardiniere’s sign farther on, beside a square full of antlike motion,
the arching span and the equestrian statue of the Pont-Neuf, with, below
it, that strange little triangular park almost at water level, and then,
among the distant rooftops, the dark, fretted spire of the Sainte Chapelle.
The sordid old quarters, seared with the leprosy of a civilization, at-
tracted and horrified Xenia; they called for dynamite; where they had
stood there should rise great blocks of houses into which air and sunlight
should stream. Yet it would be pleasant to live there, even the poverty-
stricken life of the little hotels, of lodgings partitioned off in very old
houses, reached by dark stairways, but whose pots of flowers on a win-
dow sill were as surprising as a smile on the face of a sick child. Ex-
ploring districts of ancient poverty and humiliation through the late
afternoons, Xenia conceived a strange tenderness for these abandoned
cities within the giant city, far from the wide avenues, the royal quays, the
nobly architectural squares, the triumphal arches, the opulent boulevards
... At the end of a sloping street, the high, creamy cupolas of Sacre-
Cceur caught all the evening light. It gilded even their soulless ugliness.
In this street, women, infinitely remote from all pity, whether Christian
or atheist, watched at the doors or from behind dirty windowpanes, in the
poisonous half-darkness of shabby rooms. Seen across the width of the
street, with their shawls drawn tight or their arms crossed over dressing
gowns, they looked pretty; but close to, they all had the same ravaged
faces, lithographs in make-up, crudely and melodramatically drawn.
“They are women and I am a woman . . .” Xenia found it difficult to
judge this truth. “What have we in common, what is the difference be-
tween us?” It was so easy to answer herself: “I am the daughter of a
people which has accomplished the Socialist revolution and they are the
victims of age-old capitalist exploitation”—so easy that it became almost
an empty formula. Were there not such women in certain streets in
Moscow too? What was she to think? Curious eyes followed the obvi-
ously foreign girl in her white jacket and white beret as she went up the
steep street—what on earth could she be looking for in this quarter?
Not her happiness—that was certain—nor “bizness,” nor a man—so

what, then?—vice?—a neat little package, though, d’y’a see those ankles,
I had ankles like that when I was seventeen, no kidding! Xenia passed a
dreary-looking Oriental, like a Crimean Tatar, who was peering furtively
into windows and doorways, and she saw that he was driven by a kind of
hunger more pitiful and keener than hunger. The most wretched little
shops, next door to the brothels, displayed flyspecked chocolate bars,
cigarette papers, cheeses, imported fruits. Xenia remembered the poverty
of our co-operatives in the Moscow suburbs. How could it be?—are they
so rich that even their poverty can wallow in a sort of abundance? The
fetid horror of these sloughs spread over a base and hoggish ease full of
food and drink, of charming dress prints, of sentimental love-making and
sexual irritants.
Xenia made her way back to the Left Bank. The Chatelet marked the
end of a commercial city whose bustle was purely elemental—bellies and
guts to be fed. The animality of the crowds sought its ends on the spot.
The Tour St.-Jacques, surrounded by a sorry oasis of greenery and two-
sou chairs, was only a useless poem in stone. “A vestige of the theocratic
age,” Xenia thought, “and this city is in the mercantile age . . .” She
had only to cross a bridge and—between the Prefecture, the Conci-
ergerie, and the Palais de Justice—she would reach the administrative
age. The prisons dated back seven hundred years, their round towers,
facing the Seine, were so nobly proportioned that they made you forget
their ancient torture chambers. The courts nourished a people of scribes,
but there was a flower market there too.
Another bridge over the same waters, and books lived on the stalls,
students walked bareheaded with notebooks under their arms, in the
cafes you glimpsed faces bent over texts which were simultaneously the
Pandects of Justinian, Caesar’s Commentaries, Sigmund Freud’s Book of
Dreams, and surrealist poems. Life surged along the cafe terraces toward
a garden laid out in quiet lines; and the garden ended, among bourgeois
apartment houses, in an airy bronze globe supported by human figures,
like a thought bound to the earth, metallic but transparent, terrestrial but
proudly aloof. Xenia preferred to go home through this square, where
the sky was wider than elsewhere. The printed fabrics which the Ivanovo-
Voznesensk Textile Trust wanted required little of her time—one con-
ference a week on submitted samples. She let herself live, an unimagi-
nable thing, but so easy.
To stop before a sixteenth-century doorway in the Rue St. Honore and
remember that Robespierre and Saint-Just had passed it on their way to
the guillotine, to discover beside it a shopwindow displaying cloths from

the Levant, to ask the price of a bottle of perfume, to wander through the
Eiffel Tower gardens , . . Was it beautiful or ugly, that metal skeleton
which rose so high into the sky above Paris? Lyric in any case, moving,
unique in the world! What esthetic emotion was involved in the feeling
with which Xenia saw it from the heights of Menilmontant, on the hori-
zon of the city? Sukhov explained that our Palace of the Soviets would
raise a steel statue of the Chief yet higher into the sky above Moscow,
would be of another order of greatness and symbolism! Their little Eiffel
Tower, an outmoded monument to industrial technique at the end of the
nineteenth century, made him laugh. “How can you find that thing inter-
esting?” (The word moving was not in his vocabulary.) “You may be a
poet,” Xenia answered, “but you have less intuition about certain things
than a plant has”; and since he had no idea what she meant, he laughed,
sure of his superiority ... So Xenia preferred to go out alone.
Having waked late, about nine o’clock, Xenia dressed, then opened her
window, which looked out on the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail
and the Boulevard de Montparnasse. Happy to be alive, she contemplated
the scene as if it were a landscape—houses, cafes with their chairs still
upside down on the tables, pavements, sidewalks. A subway station:
Metro Vavin. The oyster and shellfish stand, still closed; the woman who
kept the newsstand, unfolding her campstool . . . Nothing changed
from one day to another. Xenia ate breakfast in the hotel cafe, and it was
a pleasant interlude. The matutinal rites of the establishment brought her
a feeling of peaceful security. How could these people live without anxi-
ety, without enthusiasm for the future, without thinking of others and of
themselves with anguish, pity, sternness? From whence did they draw
this plenitude in a sort of emptiness? Hardly had Xenia (already falling
a victim, she too, to the beginning of a habit) sat down at her usual table
close to the curtains behind which the boulevard was visible in shades of
stone, unconcernedly beginning its daily life over again—hardly had she
settled herself there, before Madame Delaporte came silently in, like a
large and very dignified cat. Cashier of the cafe-restaUrant for twenty-
three years, Madame Delaporte quite simply felt herself the queen of a
realm from which uneasiness was banished—like a Queen Wilhelmina of
Holland reigning over fields of tulips. Even the unpaid bills of several old
clients inspired confidence too. The house extends credit, sir—why not?
That Dr. Poivrier, who owned a house in the Rue d’Assas besides holding
stock in the Bon Marche, owed five hundred francs—why, it was money
in the bank! Madame Delaporte considered that the respectable and

regular clientele which patronized the establishment was her own handi-
work. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted the Gioconda, Madame Delaporte
had created that clientele. Other, less privileged women have children
who grow up and marry, who get divorced, whose children fall ill, whose
businesses fail, and all the rest of it, in short! “As for me, sir, I have this
establishment, it is my home, and as long as I am here, things will be as
they should be!” Madame Delaporte would bring out the last words with
a modest assurance which left no doubts in her hearer’s mind. She began
the morning by opening the cash drawer, then put within easy reach her
knitting, her spectacles, a book from the lending library, the illustrated
magazine in which, at slack times, she would read, with a pitying and
skeptical half-smile, Aunt Solange’s advice to “Myosotis, eighteen years
old,” “Blondinette, Lyons,” “Unhappy Rose”: “Do you think he really
loves me?” Madame Delaporte patted her hair with her fingers to make
sure that each prettily waved gray strand was properly in place. Then she
took her first comprehensive look at the cafe. Unchanging order still
reigned. Monsieur Martin, the waiter, was just putting the last ash trays
on the last tables; then, with an excess of conscientiousness, he rubbed at
the blurred outline of a wet stain until the wood shone irreproachably.
He smiled at Xenia, and Madame Delaporte smiled at her too. Together
the two friendly voices wished her good morning: “Everything to your
liking, mademoiselle?” The phrases seemed to be uttered by things them-
selves—things happy to exist, and sociable by nature. Between ten and
ten-fifteen the first regular client, Monsieur Taillandier, came in, to lean
on the counter by the cash register and take a coffee with kirsch. Cashier
and client exchanged remarks which varied so little that Xenia thought
she knew them by heart ... For twelve years Madame Delaporte had
been taking medicines for various stomach ailments—flatulence, acidity
. . . Monsieur Taillandier was preoccupied by his diet for arthritis.
“There you are, madame—both coffee and kirsch are on my forbidden
list, and yet—you see ... I don’t deny myself the pleasure of them, not
I, madame! What doctors say has to be taken with a grain of salt; the
only guide I trust is my instinct! Why, in ’24, when I was with my regi-
ment . . .”—“As for me, monsieur”—at this point Madame Delaporte’s
long knitting needles began their ballet—“I have tried the most expen-
sive preparations, I have consulted the greatest specialists without a
thought for the cost, I beg you to believe me, yes, monsieur . . . Well, I
have come back to plain, homely remedies; what does me the most good
is a herb tea that a herborist in the Marais compounds for me, and you

can see that I don’t look too badly after all . . Sometimes at about
this time the elegant. Monsieur Gimbre arrived. He knew all about the
races: “Be sure to bet on Nautilus II! And in the next race, Cleopatra!”
Peremptory on this subject, Monsieur Gimbre sometimes ventured into
politics if he could find anyone to sustain a dialogue with him; he spoke
disapprovingly of the Czechoslovaks, whom he even pretended to confuse
with the Kurdo-Syriacs, and revealed the exact prices of the chateaux
Leon Blum had bought. Xenia looked at him over her newspaper. His
self-importance, his contemptible viewpoint, irritated her, and she asked
herself: What meaning can the life of such a creature have? Full of tact,
Madame Delaporte quickly managed to change the subject. “Is Nor-
mandy still your sales territory, Monsieur Taillandier?” and the discus-
sion immediately turned to Norman cooking. “Ah, yes,” the cashier
sighed inexplicably. Monsieur Taillandier left, Monsieur Gimbre shut
himself up in the telephone booth, Monsieur Martin, the waiter, took his
stand in front of the open door between the grass plots, whence, without
appearing to, he could watch the modistes across the way, Chez Monique.
An old, gray, terribly egotistic tomcat glided among the tables without
deigning to see anyone. Madame Delaporte called him discreetly: “Here,
here, Mitron.” Mitron went his own way, probably flattered by the atten-
tion. “Ungrateful beast!” Madame Delaporte would murmur, and if
Xenia looked up, she would go on: “Animals, mademoiselle, are just as
ungrateful as people. If you take my advice you won’t trust either!” It
was a minute and peaceful universe, where people lived without discuss-
ing Plan quotas, without fearing purges, without devoting themselves to
the future, without considering the problems of Socialism. That morning
Madame Delaporte had been just about to launch one of her usual apho-
risms when, instead, she dropped her knitting, climbed down from her
high stool, drew the waiter’s attention by a nod, and, her face full of
interest, advanced toward the corner where Xenia, her elbows on the
table, sat before coffee, croissants, and a newspaper.
What was strange about Xenia was her immobility. Her chin in one
hand, “white as a shroud” (Madame Delaporte remarked later), her eye-
brows raised, her eyes staring, she ought to have seen the cashier ap-
proaching, but she did not see her, did not see her set off hurriedly in the
opposite direction, did not hear her say to the waiter: “Quick, quick,
Martin, a Marie Brizard—no, better an anisette, but do hurry—she’s out
of her senses, my God!” . . . Madame Delaporte herself carried the
anisette to the table and set it in front of Xenia, who did not stir . . .
“Mademoiselle, my child, what is it?” A hand laid gently on her white

beret and her hair recalled Xenia to present reality. She looked at Mad-
ame Delaporte, blinking back her tears; she bit her lips, she said some-
thing in Russian. (“What can I do? Oh, what can I do?”) There were
affectionate questions on Madame Delaporte’s lips: “Lovesick, child?
Has he been cross to you? Is he unfaithful?” but that hard waxen face,
with its concentrated bewilderment, did not look like lovesickness, it
must be something much worse, something unheard of and incomprehen-
sible . . . did one ever know with these Russians?
“Thank you,” said Xenia.
A wild smile disfigured her childish face. She swallowed the anisette,
rose, her eyes dry again, and, without thinking of touching up her pow-
der, left the cafe almost at a run, crossed the boulevard, dodging busses,
and disappeared down the subway stairs . . . The open paper, the un-
touched coffee and croissants on the table, bore witness to some very
unusual trouble. Monsieur Martin and Madame Delaporte bent over the
paper together. “Without my glasses I can’t see, Monsieur Martin—do
you find anything? An accident, a crime?” After a moment Monsieur
Martin answered: “All I see is the announcement of a trial in Moscow
... You know, Madame Delaporte, they shoot people there in a wink,
and for nothing at all ...”
“A trial?” said Madame Delaporte incredulously. “Do you think that
can be it? In any case, I pity the poor girl. I feel very strange, Monsieur
Martin. Give me an anisette, please—or no, better a Marie Brizard. It is
as if I had seen bad luck . . .”
In the luminous field of her consciousness Xenia saw but two clear
ideas: “We cannot let Kiril Rublev be shot . . . Perhaps there is only a
week left to save him, a week . . .” She let the train carry her, she let the
crowd guide her through the subterranean corridors of St.-Lazare, she
read the names of unknown stations. Her thought went no further than
the idea that obsessed it. Suddenly, on the wall of a station, she saw a
huge and monstrous advertisement representing a bull’s head, black and
wide-horned, with one eye alive and the, other pierced by an enormous
square wound in which the blood was as red as fire. A beast shot dead, an
atrocious vision. Fleeing the picture, which reappeared in station after
station, Xenia found herself on the sidewalk in front of the Trois Quar-
tiers opposite the Madeleine, irresolutely talking to herself.
What was she to do? An elderly gentleman took off his hat to her, he
had gold teeth, he was saying something in a honeyed voice, he seemed
embarrassed. He said “graceful” and Xenia heard “grace.” To write
instantly, to telegraph: Grace, grace for Kiril Rublev, grace! The gentle-

man saw her sharp, childish face light up, he was preparing to look rav-
ished, but Xenia stamped her foot, she saw him, his thin but carefully
parted hair, his piglike eyes, and she did what she used to do when she
was a child, in her worst furies, she spat . . . The gentleman fled, Xenia
entered a noisy cafe. “Letter paper, please . . . Yes, coffee, ■ and
quickly.” The waiter brought her a yellow envelope, a sheet of cross-
ruled paper. Write to the Chief, only he would save Kiril Rublev. “You
who are dear and great and just, our beloved Chief . . . Comrade!”
Xenia’s impulse failed. “Dear”—but was she not, even as she wrote,
overcoming a sort of hatred? It was a terrible thought. “Great”—but
what did he not permit? “Just”—and Rublev was going to be tried, to be
killed, Rublev who was like a saint . . . and these trials are certainly
decided on by the Political Bureau! She reflected. To save Rublev, why
should she not humiliate herself, why should she not lie? Only, the letter
would not arrive in time—and even if it arrived, would he read it, He
who received thousands of letters a day, which were opened by a secre-
tary? Whom could she beg to intervene? The Consul General, Nikifor
Antonich, stupid, unfeeling, soulless coward that he was? The First Sec-
retary of the Legation, Willi, who was teaching her bridge, took her to
Tabarin, seeing in her only Popov’s pretty daughter? He spied on the
ambassador, he was the perfect climber, was Willi, and he too had no
soul. Other faces came to her, and they all suddenly looked repulsive.
That very evening, as soon as the newspaper paragraph was confirmed,
the Party would meet, the secretary would propose telegraphing a unani-
mous resolution demanding the supreme penalty for Kiril Rublev,
Erchov, Makeyev, traitors, assassins, enemies of the people, scum of
humanity. Willi would vote Yes, Nikifor Antonich would vote Yes, the
rest would all vote Yes . . . “May my hand wither if I raise it with
yours, you wretches!” No one to beg for help, no one to whom she could
talk, no one! The Rublevs perish alone, alone! What was she to do?
It came to her: Father! Father, help me! You have known Rublev all
your life, Father, you will save him, you can save him..You will go to the
Chief, you will tell him . . . She lit a cigarette: the match flame was a
star of good omen in her fingers. Almost radiant, Xenia began writing
her telegram in a post office. The first word she put on paper extinguished
her confidence. She tore up the first blank, and felt her face become
tense. Above the desk a poster explained: “By a monthly payment of 50
francs for twenty-five years, you can assure yourself of a peaceful old
age . . .” Xenia burst out laughing. Her fountain pen had run dry, she

looked around. A magic hand held out a yellow pen with a gold band.
Xenia wrote decisively:
Father, Kiril must he saved Stop You have know Kiril for twenty
years Stop He is a saint Stop Innocent Stop Innocent Stop If you do not
save him there will be a crime upon our heads Stop Father you will save
him ...
Where had that absurd yellow fountain pen come from? Xenia did not
know what to do with it, but a hand took it from her; a gentleman, of
whom she saw nothing but his Charlie Chaplin mustache, said something
agreeable to her which she did not hear. Go to the devil! At the counter
the clerk, a young woman with thick lips heavily rouged, counted the
words in Xenia’s telegram. She looked straight into Xenia’s eyes and
said:
“I hope you will succeed, mademoiselle.”
A knot of sobs in her throat, Xenia answered:
“It is almost impossible.”
The brown, gold-flecked eyes on the other side of the counter looked at
her in terror, but their expression enlightened Xenia—she recovered her-
self: “No, everything is possible, thank you, thank you.” The Boulevard
Haussmann vibrated under a pale sun. At a corner a crowd had gathered
to look up at a second-floor window in which slender, swaying manne-
quins appeared one by one, displaying the season’s dresses . . . Xenia
knew that she would find Sukhov at the Marbeuf. Though she did not
think about it, he inspired in her the physical confidence which a young
woman has in the male who desires her. Poet, secretary of a section of the
Poets’ Syndicate, he wrote prosaic, impersonal poems which were printed
in the newspapers and which the State Publishing House collected in
small volumes: Drums, Step by Step, Guard the Frontier ... He re-
peated Maiakovsky’s epigrams: “Notre-Dame? It would make a magnifi-
cent movie theater.” Associated with Security, he visited the cells of
young officials on missions abroad, recited them his verses in the virile
voice of a town crier, and wrote confidential reports on the behavior of
his auditors in their capitalist surroundings. When Sukhov and Xenia
were alone in a garden, he put his arm around her. The grass, the smell
of earth made him amorous, made him want to run, to gallop, Xenia said.
She let him embrace her and was pleased, though she insisted to him that
she felt no more than friendship for him, “and if you want to write to me,
let it be in prose, please!” No—he was writing nothing. She refused him
her lips, she refused to go to a hotel in the Porte Dore district with him

to begin “an adventure d la franqaise”—“which perhaps, Xeniuchka,
would make me as lyrical as old Pushkin! You ought to love me for
poetry’s sake!” Sukhov kissed her hands. “You get prettier every day,
you have a little Champs-Elysees air about you now that fascinates me,
Xeniuchka . . . But you don’t look well. Come closer.” He squeezed her
into a corner of the bench, knee to knee, put his arm around her waist,
looked her up and down with eyes that were like a fine stallion’s. But what
Xenia said froze him. He drew away. And, severely: “Xeniuchka, don’t
do anything foolish. Keep out of this business. If Rublev has been ar-
rested, then he is guilty. If he has confessed, you cannot make a denial
for him- If he is guilty, he no longer exists for anyone. That is my point
of view, and there is no other.” Xenia was already looking for someone
else to help her. Sukhov took her hand. The contact aroused such intense
disgust in her that she suppressed it and remained inert. Was I mad that
I thought of him to save a Rublev? “Are you leaving so soon, Xeniuchka,
you’re not angry, are you?”
“What an idea! I’m busy. No, don’t come with me.”
You are nothing but a brute, Sukhov, just fit to turn out poems for
rotary presses. Your loud linen waistcoat is grotesque, your double crepe-
rubber soles give me the horrors. Xenia was refreshed by her irritation.
“Taxi . . . Anywhere . . . Bois de Boulogne . . . No, Buttes-Chau-
mont . . .” The Buttes-Chaumont floated in a green haze. On fine sum-
mer mornings the trees and shrubs in Petrovsky Park look like that.
Xenia looked at the leaves. Leaves, calm me. Leaning over the pool, she
saw that she looked as if she had been crying for a long time. Absurd
ducklings came running toward her . . . An insane nightmare—there
had been nothing in that accursed paper, it was impossible. She pow-
dered her face, rouged her lips, took a deep breath. What a frightful
dream! The next instant her distress overpowered her again—but she
remembered a name: Passereau. How could she have failed to remember
it sooner? Passereau is a great man. Passereau had an audience with the
Chief. Together, Passereau and Father will save Rublev.
It was about three o’clock when Xenia called on Professor Passereau,
famous in two hemispheres, President of the Congress for the Defense of
Culture, corresponding member of the Moscow Academy of Sciences,
whom even Popov did not refuse to visit when he made an inspection trip
to Paris. A servant took in her name, the door of the drawing room
opened at once (Xenia had a glimpse of provincial furniture, walls deco-
rated with water colors), and Professor Passereau advanced to take her
most affectionately by the shoulders. “Mademoiselle! How happy I am to

see you! In Paris for a while? Do you know, mademoiselle, that you are
adorable? The daughter of my old friend will forgive the compliment, I
am sure . . . Come in, come in!” He took her arm, seated her on the
sofa in his study, smiled at her with every inch of his frank, military-
looking face. None of the city’s noises penetrated here. Various pieces of
precision apparatus, under glass bells, occupied the corners of the room.
A cluster of green leaves filled the door that gave on the garden. A large
portrait in a gold frame appeared to attract Xenia’s attention. The pro-
fessor explained: “Count Montessus de Ballore, mademoiselle, the man
of genius who deciphered the enigma of earthquakes ...”
“But you too,” said Xenia enthusiastically, “you have . . .”
“Oh, I—that was much easier. Once the trail has been blazed in scien-
tific matters, all one has to do is to follow it ...”
Xenia allowed herself to be distracted, because she shrank from her
problem. “Yours is a magnificent and mysterious science, is it not?” The
professor laughed: “Magnificent, if you insist, like all science. But not
mysterious. We are hot on the track of mystery, mademoiselle, and it will
not elude us!” The professor opened a file. “See—here are the co-ordi-
nates for the Messina earthquake of 1908; no more mystery there. When
I demonstrated them before the Tokio Congress . . .” But he saw that
Xenia’s lips were trembling. “Mademoiselle . . . What is it? Bad news
of your father? . . . Are you in trouble? Tell me . . .”
“Kiril Rublev,” Xenia stammered.
“Rublev, the historian? . . . The Rublev of the Communist Academy,
you mean? I’ve heard of him, I believe I even met him once ... at a
banquet ... a friend of your father, is he not?”
Xenia felt ashamed of the tears she was holding back, ashamed of her
absurd feeling of humiliation, ashamed perhaps of what was about to
take place. Her throat became dry, she felt that she was an enemy here.
“Kiril Rublev will be shot before the week is over if we do not inter-
vene instantly.”
Professor Passereau appeared to shrink into his chair. She saw that he
had a potbelly, old-fashioned ornaments dangling from his watch chain,
an old-fashioned waistcoat. “Ah,” he said. “Ah, what you tell me is
terrible . . .” Xenia explained the dispatch from Moscow, published
that morning, the abominable phrase concerning the “complete confes-
sions,” the assassination of Tulayev a year since . . . The professor
stressed the point: “There was an assassination?”—“Yes, but to make
Rublev responsible for it is as mad as . . .”—“I understand, I under-
stand . . .” She had nothing more to say. The glittering and prepos-

terous seismographic machines occupied an inordinate space in the
silence. There was no earthquake anywhere.
“Well, mademoiselle, I beg you to believe that you have my deepest
sympathy ... I assure you ... It is terrible . . . Revolutions de-
vour their children—we French have learned that only too well . . . the
Girondins, Danton, Hebert, Robespierre, Babeuf ... It is the impla-
cable movement of history . . .” Xenia heard only fragments of what he
was saying. Her mind distilled the essence of his sentences, the fragments
fitted together to compose a different discourse for her. “A sort of fatal-
ity, mademoiselle ... I am an old materialist myself, and yet, in the
presence of these trials, I think of the fatality of antique tragedy . . .”
(“Hurry up and get it over,’’Xenia thought sternly.) “. . . before which
we are powerless . . .
“Besides, are you quite sure that partisan passion, the spirit of
conspiracy, have not proved too much of a temptation to an old revo-
lutionary whom ... I admire, with you, of whom I too think with
distress . . .” The professor made an allusion to Dostoevsky’s The
Possessed ...
“If he brings in the Slavic soul,” Xenia said to herself, “I will make a
scene . . . And your own soul, you puppet?” Her despair changed into
a sort of hate. If she could throw a brick at those idiotic seismographs, go
at them with a blacksmith’s hammer, or even with the old ax of the
Russian countryside . . .
“In short, mademoiselle, it seems to me that all hope is not lost. If
Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice . . .”
“Do you mean to say you believe that?”
Professor Passereau tore yesterday’s sheet from the calendar. This
young woman in white, with her beret askew, her hostile mouth and eyes,
her uneasy hands, was a strange being, vaguely dangerous, swept into his
peaceful study by a sort of hurricane. If his imagination had been liter-
ary, Passereau would have compared her to a stormy petrel, and she
made him Uncomfortable.
“You must telegraph to Moscow at once,” said Xenia resolutely.’ “Have
your League telegraph this afternoon. That you stand guarantee for
Rublev, that you proclaim his innocence. Rublev belongs to science!”
Professor Passereau sighed deeply. The door opened, a psiting card
was handed to him on a tray. He looked at his watch and said: “Ask the
gentleman to wait for a moment . . .” Whatever be the tragedies that
convulse distant lands, we have our usual obligations. The intervention
of the visiting card gave him back all his eloquence.

“Mademoiselle, never doubt that I ... I am more moved than I can
express . . . But please note that I have met Rublev, whom I respect,
only once in my life, at a reception . . . How can I stand guarantee for
him in such a complex situation? That he is a scientist of great ability, I
do not doubt, and, like you, I hope with all my heart that he will be pre-
served to science . . . For the justice of your country I have a respect
which is absolute ... I believe in the goodness of men, even in our age
... If Rublev—I state it purely as a hypothesis—is guilty to any de-
gree, the magnanimity of the Chief of your Party will, I am sure, leave
him every hope of escaping punishment . . . Personally, my most fer-
vent wishes accompany him, and you too, mademoiselle—I share your
emotion, but I really do not see what I could do ... I have made it a
principle never to interfere in the internal affairs of your country, it is a
matter of conscience with me . . . The League Committee meets only
once a month, the date of the next meeting is the twenty-seventh, three
weeks hence, and I have no power to call a meeting earlier, since I iam
only vice-president . . . Furthermore, the League has, properly speak-
ing, but one object—to fight fascism. A proposal to take a step contrary
to our by-laws, even coming from me, would be likely to arouse the most
intense objection ... If we insisted, we might well open a breach in the
heart of an organization which has, nevertheless, a noble mission to ac-
complish. Our present campaigns in favor of Carlos Prestes, Thaelmann,
the persecuted Jews, might thereby suffer. You follow me, mademoi-
selle?”
“I am afraid I do!” said Xenia brutally. “So you refuse to take any
steps?”
“I am extremely sorry, mademoiselle—but you greatly overestimate
my influence . . . Believe me . . . Come, consider the situation! What
could I do?”
Xenia’s clear eyes looked at him coldly.
“And the execution of a Rublev will not rob you of any sleep, I take
it?”
Professor Passereau answered sadly:
“You are most unjust, mademoiselle. But, old man that I am, I under-
stand you ...”
She did not look at him again, did not give him her hand. She was
walking down the middle-class street; her face was set. No one passed.
“His science is vile, his instruments are vile, his brown study is vile! And
Kiril Rublev is lost, we are all lost, there is no way out any more, no way
out!”

In the editorial office of a weekly which was almost extreme Left, an-
other professor, a man of thirty-five, listened to her as if her news moved
him to profound grief. Was he not going to tear his hair, wring his
hands? He did nothing of the sort. He had never heard of Rublev, but
these Russian catastrophes haunted him day and night. “They are Shake-
spearean tragedies ... Mademoiselle, I have cried my indignation in
this very paper. ‘Mercy!’ I cried, ‘in the name of our love and devotion to
the Russian Revolution.’ I was not heard, I aroused reactions which must
likewise be accepted in good faith, I tendered my resignation to our
managing committee . . . Today, the political situation makes it impos-
sible for such an article to appear. We represent the average opinion of
an audience which belongs to numerous parties; the ministerial crisis, of
which the papers have not yet got wind, imperils all our work of the last
few years ... A conflict with the Communists at this moment might
have the most disastrous results . . . And should we save Dublev?”
“Rublev,” Xenia corrected.
“Yes, Rublev—should we save him? My unfortunate experience does
not permit me to believe so ... I really cannot see how ... At most,
I could try calling on your ambassador at once and expressing my con-
cern to him ...”
“At least do that,” murmured Xenia, completely discouraged, for she
was thinking: “They won’t do anything, no one will do anything, they
don’t even understand . . .” She felt like beating her head against the
wall . . . She swept through several other editorial offices, so hastily,
borne along by such a desperate and exasperated grief, that later she had
only a confused memory of where she had gone. An old intellectual with
a soiled necktie became almost rude in the presence of her insistence.
“Well then, go and see the Trotskyists! We have our sources of informa-
tion, our minds are made up. All revolutions have produced traitors, who
may appear to be, who may in fact be, admirable personally. I admit it.
All revolutions have committed great injustices in particular cases. You
have to take them by and large!” He picked up a paper cutter and hacked
furiously at the wrapping of a morning paper. “Our task, here, is to fight
reaction!” Somewhere else, an old lady with a carelessly powdered, lined
face was so touched that she called Xenia “my dear child.” “If I really
had any influence with the editor, my dear child, ah, believe me, I . . .
In any case I will try to slip in a paragraph emphasizing the importance
of your friend’s work—Uplev, did you say, or Rulev? Here, write it
down for me, clearly. A musician, you said? Ah, a historian, yes, yes, a
historian,,.” The old lady wrapped a faded silk scarf around her throat.

“What days we live in, my dear child! It is frightening to think of it!”
She leaned forward, sincerely moved: “Tell me—excuse me if I am in-
discreet—but a woman—are you in love with Kiril Rublev? Such a
beautiful name, Kiril ...”
“No, no, I’m not in love with him,” said Xenia, in great distress and
finding it as difficult to restrain her tears as her anger.
For no reason, she stopped in front of an American book and station-
ery shop in the Avenue de l’Opera. Photographic cutouts of pretty little
nudes posed above ash trays, not far from maps of partitioned Czecho-
slovakia. The books had a well-to-do look. They raised great problems,
they were idiotic. The Mystery of the Moonless Night, The Masked
Stranger, Pity Poor Women! It all emanated the luxurious futility of
well-fed, well-bathed, well-perfumed people who wanted to expose them-
selves to a little shudder of fear or pity before going to sleep in silk
sheets. Is it possible that this present age goes on, without their ever
learning fear and pity in their own flesh, in their own nerves? In another
white-and-gilt display, sea horses in an aquarium promised luck to the
purchasers of jewels. Luck in love, luck in business, with our brooches,
rings, necklaces—the latest thing—the astral sea horse. She must flee!
Xenia rested at the other end of Paris, on a bench, in a gray landscape of
hospital windows and chalky walls. Every few minutes the monstrous
thunder of a train crossing a bridge penetrated to the depths of her
nerves. Home again, dead tired—where had she been, how could she
sleep? The next morning she had to overcome a feeling of nausea as she
dressed, her hands trembled when she rouged her lips, she got down after
Madame Delaporte had come in, sat at her usual table without noticing
the curious and pitying looks that greeted her, put her chin in her hands,
stared at the Boulevard Raspail . . . Madame Delaporte herself came
and touched her on the shoulder: “Telephone, mademoiselle ... No
better?”—“Oh yes,” said Xenia, “it’s nothing . . .” In the telephone
booth a man’s voice, velvety and assured, a voice like doom, spoke in
Russian:
“Krantz speaking ... I am aware of all your . . . imprudent and
criminal proceedings . . . I insist that you cease them immediately . . .
Do you understand? The consequences can be serious, and not only for
yourself . . .”
Xenia hung up without answering. Willi, First Secretary of the Em-
bassy, entered the cafe—gray raglan overcoat, immaculate felt hat, the
well-dressed man, English style; just the type for ash trays decorated
with naked women, a copy of Esquire, yellow pigskin gloves, she’d like to

throw them all in his face at once, the climber! Fake gentleman, fake
Communist, fake diplomat, fake, fake! He took off his hat, bowed:
“Xenia Vassilievna, I have a telegram for you . . .” While she opened
the blue envelope, he watched her attentively. Tired, nervous, resolved.
He must be careful.
The telegram was from Popov:
MOTHER ILL WE BOTH BEG YOU RETURN IMMEDIATELY . . .
“I have reserved a place for you on Wednesday’s plane . . .”
“I am not going,” said Xenia.
Without being asked, he sat down at the other side of her table. Lean-
ing toward one another, they looked like a pair of lovers who had quar-
reled and were making up. Madame Delaporte understood it all now.
“Krantz has instructed me to tell you, Xenia Vassilievna, that you
must go home ... You have been most imprudent, Xenia Vassilievna,
allow me to tell you so, as your friend . . . We all belong to the
Party . . .”
It was not the thing to say. Willi began again:
“Krantz is a fine sort . . . He’s worried about you. Worried about
your father . . .You are seriously compromising your father . . .
He’s an old man, your father . . . And you can do nothing here, you
will get nowhere, absolutely nowhere . . . You’re up against a blank
wall.”
That was more like it. Xenia’s white face lost a little of its hardness.
“Between ourselves, I believe that when you get back you will be
arrested . . . But it will not be serious, Krantz will intervene, he has
promised me . . . Your father can stand guarantee for you ... You
have no need to be afraid.”
That reference to being afraid had worked . . . Xenia said:
“You think I am afraid?”
“Not in the least! I am talking to you as a comrade, as a friend . . .”
“I will go back when I have done what I have to do. Tell that to
Krantz. Tell him that if Rublev is shot, I will go through the streets
protesting . . . That I will write to every paper . . .”
“There will be no trial, Xenia Vassilievna, we have received informa-
tion on the subject. We are not issuing a denial, as we consider that the
sooner that unfortunate announcement is forgotten, the better. Krantz
does not even know if Rublev has really been arrested. If he has been,
the publicity you might stir up for him could only harm him . . . And it
horrifies me to hear you say such things. It is not like you. You are

incapable of treason. You will say nothing to anyone, no matter what
happens. To whom would you protest? To this hostile world around us?
To this bourgeois Paris, to these fascist papers which calumniate us?
To the Trotskyist agents of the fascists? What more could you accom-
plish than to stir up a little counterrevolutionary scandal for the delec-
tation of a few anti-Soviet publications? Xenia Yassilievna, I promise
to forget what you have said. Here is your ticket. The plane leaves Le
Bourget at 9:45 A.M. Wednesday. I shall be there. Have you money?”
“Yes.”
It was not true, Xenia was uneasily aware. When she had paid her
hotel bill she would have almost nothing left. She pushed away the
ticket: “Take it, if you don’t want me to tear it up in front of you.”
Willi calmly put it into his wallet. “Think it over, Xenia Vassilievna, I
shall come back to see you tomorrow morning.” Madame Delaporte was
disappointed when they parted with no sign of affection. “She must be
terribly jealous, Russian women are tigresses once they get started . . .”
—“Either tigresses or profligates—none of these foreigners have any
sense of decency . . .” Through the curtains Xenia observed that
before Willi got into his Chrysler he looked toward the head of the boule-
vard, where a beige overcoat was strolling up and down. Already shad-
owed. They will force me to go. They stop at nothing. To hell with
them! But ...
She counted what money she had left. Three hundred francs. Should
she go to the Foreign Commerce Bureau? They would refuse her an
advance. Would they even let her go? Could she sell her wrist watch, her
Leica? She packed her suitcase, put a pair of pajamas and some odds
and ends in her brief case, and set off down the Rue Vavin without look-
ing back—she was sure she was being followed. And at the Luxembourg
she caught a glimpse of the beige overcoat, fifty yards behind her. “Now
I am a traitor too, like Rublev . . . And my father is a traitor because
I am his daughter . . .” How could she rise above this flood of thoughts,
this shame, this indignation, this anger? It was exactly like the ice
breaking up on the Neva: the enormous floes, like shattered stars, must
collide and battle and destroy one another until the moment when they
would disappear under the quiet sea swell. She must undergo her
thought, follow it to its uttermost limits, until the unforeseeable but
inevitable moment when all would be over, one way or another. The
moment will come, can it come, can it fail to come? It seemed to Xenia
that her torture would never end. But what would end, then? Life?
Would they shoot me? Why? What have I done? What has Rublev

done? A terrible possibility. Stay here? Without money? Look for
work? What work? Where could she live? Why live? Children were sail-
ing boats in the great circular fountain. In this French world, life is as
calm and insipid as children’s games, people live only for themselves! To
live for myself—how ridiculous! Expelled from the Party, I could no
longer look a worker in the face, I could explain nothing to anyone, no
one would understand. Willi, the beast, had just said: “Well, I grant you
—perhaps they are crimes, we know nothing about it. Our duty is to
trust, with our eyes shut. Because there is nothing else for either of us to
do. To accuse, to protest, never results in anything but serving the enemy.
I would rather be shot by mistake myself. Neither the crimes nor the
mistakes alter our duty . . .” It is true. On his lips they are parroted
phrases, because he will always manage to risk nothing. But they are
true. What would Rublev himself do, what would he say? The faintest
shadow of treason would never enter his mind . . .
At the St.-Michel subway station Xenia shook off the detective in the
beige overcoat. She wandered on through Paris, stopping sometimes to
look at her reflection in shopwindows: bedraggled silhouette, rumpled
jacket, pale face and sunken eyes—it was not in order to feel sorry for
herself, but to see that she was ugly, I want to be ugly, I must be ugly!
The women she passed—self-centered, carefully dressed, pleased because
they had chosen some hideous bauble to dangle from the lapel of a
tailored jacket or the neck of a bodice—were merely human animals
satisfied to breathe, but the sight of them made her want to stop living
... At nightfall Xenia found herself on the edge of a brightly lit square.
She was exhausted from walking. Cascades of electric light flowed over
the dome of a huge movie theater, the flood of barbaric brilliance sur-
rounded two enormous faces, joined in the most meaningless of kisses,
as revolting in their beatitude as in their utter anonymity. The other
corner of the square, flaming with red and gold, sent a love song pouring
frantically out of loud-speakers, to an accompaniment of little strident
cries and clicking heels. For Xenia the whole effect resolved itself into
a long and insistent caterwauling whose human intonation made it a
thing of shame. Men and women were drinking at the bar, and they
suggested strange insects, cruel to their own kind, collected in an over-
heated vivarium. Between these two conflagrations—the theater and the
cafe—a wide street mounted into a darkness starred with signs: HOTEL,
HOTEL, HOTEL. Xenia started up it, turned in at the first door, and
asked for a room for the night. The little old bespectacled man whom she
woke from a drowse seemed inseparable from the keyboard and the

counter between which his tobacco-reeking person was wedged. “It will
be fifteen francs,” he said, laying his cloudy spectacles on the paper he
had been reading. His staring rabbit eyes blinked. “Funny, I don’t
recognize you. Could you be Paula, from the Passage Clichy? Don’t
you always go to the Hotel du Morbihan? You’re a foreigner? Just a
minute . . .” He stooped, disappeared, popped out from under a board,
disappeared again down the corridor . . . And the proprietor himself
appeared, his shirt sleeves rolled up, exposing thick butcher’s arms. He
seemed to be surrounded by a greasy fog. He looked Xenia over, as if he
were going to sell her, hunted for something under the counter, finally
said: “All right, fill out the form. Have you your papers?” Xenia held
out her diplomatic passport. “Alone? Right . . . I’ll give you Number
11, it’ll be thirty francs, the bathroom is right next door . . .” Huge,
bull-necked, he preceded Xenia up the stairs, swinging a bunch of keys
between his fat fingers. Cold, dimly lighted by two shaded lamps set on
two night tables, Room No. 11 reminded Xenia of a detective story. In
that corner over there was the ironbound chest in which the murdered
girl’s body was found, cut up in pieces. The corner smelled of phenol.
After she put out the lamps, the blue neon signs in the street filled the
room from mirror to ceiling with luminous arabesques. Among them
Xenia quickly discovered visions familiar to her childhood: the wolf,
the fish, the witch’s spinning wheel, the profile of Ivan the Terrible, the
enchanted tree. She was so tired from thinking and walking that she
went to sleep immediately. The murdered girl timidly raised the lid of
the chest, stood up, stretched her bruised limbs. “Don’t be afraid,”
Xenia said to her, “I know we are innocent.” She had hair like a naiad’s,
and calm eyes like wild daisies. “We’ll read the story of the Golden Fish
together, listen to that music . . .” Xenia took her into her bed to warm
her . . . Downstairs, behind the desk, the proprietor of the Two Moons
Hotel was conversing by telephone with Monsieur Lambert, assistant
police commissioner of the district.
Life begins anew every morning. Too young to despair, Xenia felt
that she had shaken off her nightmare. If there was no trial, Rublev
would live. It was impossible that they should kill him—he was so great,
so simple, so pure, and Popov knew it, the Chief must know it. Xenia felt
happy, she dressed, she looked in the mirror and found herself pretty
again. But where did I think the murder chest was yesterday? She was
glad she had not felt afraid. There was a little knock, she opened the
door. A broad-shouldered figure, a broad, sad face appeared in the half-

light of the hall. Neither familiar nor unfamiliar, a vague fleshy face.
The visitor introduced himself, in a thick, velvety voice:
“Krantz.”
He entered, looked the room over, took in everything. Xenia covered
up the unmade bed.
“Xenia, I have come for you on your father’s behalf. A car is waiting
at the door for you. Come.”
“And if I don’t wish to?”
“I give you my word that you shall do as you please. You have not
been a traitor, you will never be a traitor, I am not here to use force
on you. The Party trusts in you as it trusts in me. Come.”
In the car Xenia rebelled. Half facing her and pretending to be busy
with his pipe, Krantz felt the storm coming. The car was going down
the Rue de Rivoli. Jeanne d’Arc, with her gilt dull and peeling off, but
still very beautiful, brandished a childish sword on her little pedestal.
“I want to get out,” Xenia said firmly, and she half rose. Krantz caught
her arm and forced her to sit down.
“You shall get out if you wish, Xenia Vassilievna, I promise you; but
not as simply as that.”
He lowered the window on Xenia’s side. The Vendome Column dis-
appeared down a perspective of arches, in the pale light.
“Do not be impulsive, I beg of you. Whatever you do, do it delib-
erately. We shall pass a number of policemen on the way. We are not
going fast. You can call out if you wish, I will not stop you. You, a
Soviet citizen, will put yourself under the protection of the French
police ... I will be asked for my papers. You will go your way. After-
noon extras will announce your escape—that is, your treason. Throw
your little handful of mud on the embassy, on your father, on our Party,
on our country. I will take Wednesday’s plane alone and I will pay for
you—with Popov. You know the law: close relatives of traitors must
at least be deported to the most distant parts of the Union.”
He drew away a little, admired the white meerschaum mermaid which
formed the bowl of his handsome pipe, opened his tobacco pouch, said
to the driver:
“Fedia, be so good as to slow down whenever you pass a policeman.”
“At your orders, Comrade Chief.”
Xenia’s hands clenched painfully. She looked at the policemen’s short
capes almost with hatred. She said:
“How strong you are, Comrade Krantz, and how despicable!”
“Neither as strong nor as despicable as you think. I am loyal. And

you too, Xenia Vassilievna, you must be loyal, no matter what happens.”
They took Wednesday’s plane from Le Bourget together. The Eiffel
Tower dwindled, glued to the earth, the severe design of the gardens
opened around it, the Arc de Triomphe was only a block of stone at the
center of radiating avenues. The marvel of Paris vanished under clouds,
leaving Xenia regretting a world which she had scarcely touched and
had not understood, which perhaps she would never understand. “I have
accomplished nothing toward saving Rublev, I will fight for him in
Moscow, if only we arrive in time! I will make my father act, I will ask
for an audience with the Chief. He has known us for so many years that
he will not refuse to listen to me, and if he listens to me, Rublev will be
saved.” In her waking dream Xenia imagined her interview with the
Chief. Confidently, without fear and without humility, well knowing
that she was nothing and he the incarnation of the Party for which we
must all live and die, she would be brief and direct, for his minutes were
precious. He had all the problems of a sixth of the world to solve every
day; she must speak to him with her whole soul, that she might convince
him in a few moments . . . Krantz considerately left her to her thoughts.
He occupied his time reading, alternating between stupid magazines
and military reviews in several languages. The poem of the clouds un-
rolled above the moving earth. Rivers flowing from their distant springs
enchanted the eye.—They dined almost gaily in Warsaw. It seemed an
even more elegant and luxurious city than Paris, but from the sky you
saw that it was surrounded and, as it were, menaced by a poverty-
stricken terrain. Presently, through rents in the clouds, appeared great
somber forests . . . “We are nearly home,” Xenia murmured, flooded
with a joy so poignant that she felt a momentary sympathy for her
traveling companion. Krantz leaned toward the porthole; he looked tired.
With gloomy satisfaction he said: “We’re already over kolkhoze land—
see, there are no more small strips . . .” Infinite fields of an indefinable
color, something between ocher and grayish hrown. “We shall reach
Minsk in twenty minutes . . .” From under the French Infantry Review
he drew a copy of Vogue and turned the glossy pages.
“Xenia Yassilievna, I must ask you to excuse me. My instructions are
definite. I request you to regard yourself as under arrest. From Minsk
on, your journey will be managed by Security . . . Don’t be too uneasy,
I hope that it will all come out all right.”
On the cover of the magazine, elegant faces, eyeless under wide hat-
brims, displayed lips rouged in different shades to match their com-
plexions. Fifteen hundred feet helow, between newly plowed fields,

peasants dressed in earth-colored rags followed a heavily loaded cart.
You could see them urging on the exhausted horse, pushing at the cart
when the wheels sank into the mud.
“So I can do nothing for Rublev,” thought Xenia desolately. They
could no nothing for anyone in the world, those peasants with their
bogged wagon, and no one in the world could do anything for them.
They disappeared, the bare ground gradually approached.
Since he had received his daughter’s criminally insane telegram, Com-
rade Popov had been in a state between uneasiness and prostration,
besides being really tortured by his rheumatism. There was no mistaking
the coldness people showed him. The new Prosecutor, Atkin, who was
investigating his predecessor’s activities, carried his veiled insolence to
the point of twice excusing himself when Popov invited him or went to
call on him. Stopping in at the General Secretariat to test the atmosphere,
Popov found only preoccupied faces which gave him an impression of
hypocrisy. No one came hurrying to meet him. Gordeyev, who usually
consulted him on current matters, did not show himself for several days.
But he came on the fourth day, about six in the evening, having learned
that Popov was not well and was staying at home. The Popovs lived in
a C.C. villa in Bykovo Forest. Gordeyev arrived in uniform. Popov
received him in a dressing gown; he walked across the room to meet
him, supporting himself on a cane. Gordeyev began by asking about his
rheumatism, offered to send him a doctor who was said to be exception-
ally good, did not insist, accepted a glass of brandy. The furniture, the
carpets, everything in the quiet room, which gave the impression of being
dusty without being so, was slightly antiquated. Gordeyev coughed to
clear his throat.
“I have news of your daughter for you. She is very well . . . She
. . . She is under arrest. She did some foolish things in Paris—have you
heard about it?”
“Yes, yes,” said Popov, utterly crushed. “I can imagine, it’s possible
... I received a telegram, but is it serious, do you think?”
Coward that he was, what he most wanted to know was whether it was
serious for himself.
Gordeyev looked doubtfully at his fingernails, then at the faded half-
tints of the room, the black firs outside the window. “What shall I say?
I do not know yet. Everything will depend on the inquiry. Theoretically
it can be quite serious: attempted desertion in a foreign country, during
a mission, activities contrary to the interests of the Union . . , Those

are the terms of the law, but I certainly hope that, in actual fact, it is only
a matter of ill-advised, or let us say unconsidered, acts, which are repre-
hensible rather than culpable . . .”
Shivering into himself, Popov became so old that he lost all substance.
“The difficulty, er, Comrade Popov, is that ... I find it most awk-
ward to explain it to you . . . Help me ...”
He wanted help, the creature!
“It puts you, Comrade Popov, in a delicate situation. Aside from the
fact that the relevant articles of the Code—which, of course, we shall not
apply in all their rigor, without definite orders from above—that the
law provides for . . . for measures . . . concerning the relatives of
guilty parties, you certainly know that Comrade Atkin has opened an
inquiry . . . which is being kept secret . . . into the case of Rachev-
sky. We have established that Rachevsky—it is incredible, but it is a fact
—Rachevsky destroyed the dossier on the Aktyubinsk sabotage affair
. . . We have sought for the source of the most unfortunate indiscretion
which caused the, announcement abroad of a new trial . . . We even
thought it might be a maneuver on the part of foreign agents! Rachev-
sky, with whom it is very difficult to talk since he appears to be always
drunk, admits that he ordered the preparation of a dispatch on the sub-
ject, but he claims that he acted on verbal instructions from you . . .
As soon as he is arrested, I shall question him myself, you may be sure,
and I shall not allow him to elude his responsibilities . . . The coinci-
dence between this fact and the charge that hangs over your daughter
remains, however—how shall I put it?—most unfortunate . . .”
Popov answered nothing. Twinges of pain shot through his limbs.
Gordeyev tried to read him: a man at his last gasp, or an old fox who
would still find a way out? Difficult to decide, but the former hypothesis
seemed more likely. Popov’s silence invited him to come to a conclu-
sion. Popov was looking at him with the piercing eyes of a beast tracked
to its lair.
“You can have no doubt, Comrade Popov, of my personal feel-
ings . . .”
The other did not flinch: Either he doubted them or he didn’t give a
damn for them, or else he felt too badly to consider them of the slightest
importance. What his feelings were, Gordeyev did not feel called upon
to say.
“It has been decided . . . provisionally ... to ask you to remain
at home and to make no telephone calls . . .”
“Except to the Chief of the Party?”

“It is painful to me to insist: To anyone whomsoever. It is not impos-
sible, in any case, that your line has been cut.”
When Gordeyev was gone, Popov did not stir. The room grew darker.
Rain began falling on the firs. Shadows lengthened across the forest
roads. There in his armchair, Popov became one with the darkness of
things. His wife entered—stooped, gray-haired, walking noiselessly, she
too a shadow.
“Shall I turn on the light, Vassili? How do you feel?”
Old Popov answered in a very low voice:
“All right. Xenia is under arrest. We are both under arrest, you and I.
I am infinitely tired. Don’t turn on the light.”

10 ' And Still the Floes Came Down .
The life of the “Road to the Future” kolkhoze was
really like an obstacle race. Definitely set up in 1931, after two purges
of the village-—marked by the deportation (God knows where!) of the
well-to-do families and a few poor families who had shown a wrong
spirit—by the following year the kolkhoze was without cattle and horses,
since the farmers had contrived to destroy their livestock rather than
turn it over to collective enterprise. The fodder shortage, carelessness,
and epizootic diseases carried off the last horses just at the moment when
a Machine and Tractor Station (M.T.S.) was finally set up at Molchansk.
The arrest of the township veterinary, probably guilty because he be-
longed to the Baptist sect, caused no improvement. The difficulties of
travel by road between Molchansk and the regional center immediately
caused the M.T.S. to suffer from lack of motor fuel and parts for repairs.
Situated on the Syeroglazaya (the Gray-eyed River), the old village of
Pogoryeloye (so named to perpetuate the memory of ancient fires), be-
ing one of the farthest villages from the M.T.S., was one of the last to be
served. The village, consequently, was without motors; and the muzhiks

put little effort into sowing fields which they no longer considered to be
their own, under the supervision of the president of a Communist
kolkhoze, a workman from the bicycle factory at Penza who had been
mobilized by the Party and sent by the Regional Center. They strongly
suspected that the State would take almost all of the harvest away from
them. Three harvests were short. Famine came nearer and nearer, a
considerable group of men took refuge in the woods, where they were
fed by relatives whom, this time, the authorities did not dare to deport.
The famine carried off the small children, half the old men, and even a
few adults. A president of the kolkhoze was drowned in the Syeroglazaya
with a stone around his neck. The new law, several times revised by the
C.C., restored a precarious peace by re-establishing family properties in
the collective enterprise. The kolkhoze was inspected by a good agrono-
mist and received selected seed and chemical fertilizers, there was an
unusually hot and wet summer, and magnificent wheat flourished despite
the rages and quarrels of men; there was a shortage of hands at harvest-
time, and half the crop rotted in the fields. The bicycle-factory worker,
tried for carelessness, incapacity, and abuse of power, was sentenced to
three years at hard labor. “I hope my successor has a very good time,”
he said simply. The management of the kolkhoze passed to President
Yaniuchkin, a native of the village and a Communist recently demo-
bilized from military service. In 1934-35 the kolkhoze rose from the
depths of famine to a state of convalescence, thanks to the new C.C.
directives, to the beneficent rhythm of rain and snow, to mild seasons, to
the energy of the Young Communists, and—in the opinion of the old
women and two or three bearded Believers—thanks to the return of the
man of God, Father Cuerassim, amnestied after three years of deporta-
tion. The seasonal crisis continued nevertheless, although it could not
be denied that the sowing cycle, the selected seed, and the use of machines
markedly increased the productivity of the soil. To retrieve the situation
“definitely,” there appeared on the scene, first, Agronomist Kostiukin, a
curious character; then a militant from the Young Communists, who
had been sent by the Regional Committee, and whom everyone was soon
familiarly calling “Kostia.” Not long before the autumn sowing, Agron-
omist Kostiukin observed that a parasite had attacked the seed (a part of
which had been previously stolen). The M. and T. Station delivered only
one tractor instead of the two which had been promised and the three
which were absolutely necessary; and for the one and only tractor there
was no gasoline. When the gasoline arrived, there was a breakdown. The
plowing was done with horses, laboriously and late, but since the horses

now could not be used to bring supplies from the township co-operatives
to the kolkhoze with any regularity, the kolkhoze suffered from a short-
age of manufactured articles. Half the trucks in the district were immo-
bilized by lack of gasoline. The women began muttering that we were
heading for a new famine and that it would be the just punishment for
our sins.
It is a flat, slightly rolling country, severe in line under the clouds,
among which you can distinctly see troops of white archangels pursuing
one another from horizon to horizon. By the soft roads, muddy or dusty
according to the season, Molchansk, the township, is some thirty-eight
miles away; the railroad station is ten miles from the township; the
nearest large city, the regional center, a hundred miles by rail. In short,
a rather privileged location with regard to means of communication. The
sixty-five houses (several of them unoccupied) are made of logs or
planks, roofed with gray thatch, set in a half circle on a hill at a bend in
the river: surrounded by little yards, they straggle out like a procession
of tottering old women. Their windows look out on the clouds, the soft
gray water, the fields on the farther shore, the somber mauve line of the
forests on the horizon. On the paths that lead down to the river there are
always children or young women carrying water in battered little casks
hung from the two ends of a yoke which they carry on their shoulders.
To keep the motion from spilling too much of the water, you float a disk
of wood in each cask.
Noon. The rusty fields are hot under the sun. They are hungry for
seed. You cannot look at them without thinking of it. Give us seed or you
will go hungry. Hurry, the bright days will soon be over, hurry, the
earth is waiting . . . The silence of the fields is a continual lament ...
Flakes of white cloud wander lazily across an indifferent sky. Two
mechanics are exchanging advice and despairing oaths over a disabled
tractor behind the house. President Yaniuchkin yawns furiously. The
waiting fields cause him pain, the thought of the Plan harasses him, it
keeps him awake at night, he has nothing to drink, the stock of vodka
being exhausted. The messengers he sends to Molchansk come back
covered with dust, exhausted and crestfallen, bringing slips of paper
with penciled messages: “Hold out, Comrade Yaniuchkin. The first avail-
able truck will go to you. Communist greetings. Petrikov.” It means ex-
actly nothing. I’d like to see what he’ll do with the first available truck,
when every kolkhoze in the township is hounding him for the same thing!
Besides: Will there be a first available truck?—The only piece of furni-
ture in his office was a bare table, littered with papers which were turn-

ing yellow like dead leaves. The open windows gave onto the fields. At
the other end of the room a portrait of the Chief contemplated a sooty
samovar perched on the stove. Under it slumped sacks, piled one on
another like exhausted animals and not one containing the prescribed
amount of seed. It was contrary to the instructions of the regional
Directorate for Kolkhozes, and Kostia, checking the weight of the sacks,
emphasized the fact with a sneer. “It’s not worth putting a crick in my
back to find out whether somebody’s been sending out short-weight
sacks, Yefim Bogdanovich! If you think the muzhiks won’t know it just
because they haven’t a pair of scales! You don’t know them, the devils,
they can weigh a sack by looking at it—and you’ll see what a howl
they’ll set up ...”
Vaniuchkin chewed on an extinguished cigarette:
“And what do you think you can do about it, know-it-all? All right,
we’ll make a little trip to the township tribunal. It’s not up to me . . .”
And they saw Agronomist Kostiukin coming across the fields in their
direction, walking with a springy stride, his long arms swinging as if
they were flapping in the wind. “Here he comes again!”
“Like me to tell you everything he’s going to say to you, Yefim Bog-
danovich?” Kostia proposed sarcastically.
“Shut up!”
Kostiukin entered. His yellow cap was pulled down over his eyes;
drops of sweat stood on his sharp red nose; there were wisps of straw in
his beard. He began complaining immediately. “We’re five days behind
the Plan.” No trucks to bring the clean seed that had been promised from
Molchansk. The M. and T. Station had given their word, but they would
not keep it. “You’ve seen how they keep their promises, haven’t you?”
As for the spare parts for emergency repairs, the Station would not
receive them for ten days, in view of the congestion on the railroad—
“I’m sure of that. And there we are! It’s all up with the sowing plan . . .
just as I told you it would be. We’ll be short 40 per cent if everything
goes well. Fifty or 60 if the frost ...”
Vaniuchkin’s small red face, which looked like a clenched fist flat-
tened by a collision, wrinkled in circles. He looked at the agronomist
with hatred, as if he wanted to cry at him: “Are you happy now?”
Agronomist Kostiukin gesticulated too much: when he talked he looked
as if he were catching flies; his watery eyes became too bright; his tart
voice sank and sank. But just when you thought it would become quite
inaudible, it revived harshly. The kolkhoze directors were rather afraid
of him, because he was always making scenes and prophesying mis-

fortunes, and his very clear-sightedness seemed to evoke the calamities
it foresaw. And what was one to think of him? Released from a concen-
tration camp, an ex-saboteur who had once allowed a whole crop to rot
in the fields—for lack of hands to harvest it, if you believed his story!
He had been released before his time was up, on account of his admi-
rable work on the penitentiary farms, he had been mentioned in the
newspapers for an essay he had written on new methods of clearing
land in cold regions, finally he had been awarded the Labor Medal of
Honor for having set up an ingenious irrigation system for the Votiak
kolkhozes during a dry season ... In short, then: an extremely able
technician, a counterrevolutionary who perhaps might have sincerely
repented or who might equally well be remarkably clever and remark-
ably well camouflaged. You had to be on your guard with him; however,
he had a right to be respected, you had to listen to him—and conse-
quently be doubly on your guard. President Yaniuchkin, himself a for-
mer seasonal mason and former elite infantryman, whose knowledge of
agriculture had been derived from one of the short courses established
for the executive personnel of collective farms, really did not know
which way to turn. Kostiukin continued: The peasants saw everything.
“At it again, working in order to die of starvation this winter!” Who is
sabotaging? They wanted to write to the regional center, denounce the
township. “We must call a meeting, explain things.” Kostia was chewing
his nails. He asked:
“How far from here to the township?”
“Thirty-four miles by the plain.”
The agronomist and Kostia instantly understood each other: they had
had the same idea. Seed, provisions, matches, the calicoes that the women
had been promised—why shouldn’t the people of the kolkhoze bring
them from Molchansk on their own backs? It could be done in three or
four days if the able-bodied women and the sixteen-year-old boys were
mobilized to relieve the bearers. Days and nights of work would count
double. We’ll promise a special distribution of soap, cigarettes, and sew-
ing thread by the Co-op. If the Co-op objects, Vaniuchkin, I’ll go to the
Party Committee, I’ll say, “Either that or the Plan is sunk!” They can’t
refuse—we know what they have on hand. They’d prefer to keep the
things for the Party cadres, the technicians, and so on—naturally; but
they’ll have to give in, we’ll all go to see them together! They might even
let us have some needles; we know they’ve received some, though they’ll
deny it. The agronomist and Kostia flung the firm sentences back and
forth as if they had been throwing stones. Kostiukin wriggled in his gray

blouse, the pockets of which were stuffed with papers. Kostia took him by
the elbows, they were face to face: the young, energetic profile, the old,
sharp-nosed face with the cracked lips half open, the gaps in the rows of
teeth. “We’ll call a meeting. We can mobilize as many as a hundred and
fifty bearers if the Iziumka people come!”
“Shall we get the priest to speak?” President Vaniuchkin proposed.
“If the devil himself would make us a good stirring speech, I’d ask
him,” Kostia cried. “We’d see his cloven hoofs sticking out through his
boots, there’d be a smell of burning, he’d dart out his flaming tongue—to
accomplish the sowing plan, citizens! I’m willing—let the old devil sell
us his soul!”
Their laughter relaxed them all. The russet earth laughed too, in its
own way, perceptible to them alone; the horizon swayed a little, a comi-
cal cloud drifted across the sky.
The meeting was held in the administration farmyard at twilight, at
the hour when the gnats become a torment. Many came, for the kolkhoze
felt that it was in danger; the women were pleased that Father Guerassim
was going to speak. Benches were set out for the women, the men listened
standing. President Vaniuchkin spoke first, frightened to the depths of
his soul by two hundred indistinct and murmuring faces. Someone
shouted to him from the back: “Why did you have the Kibotkins ar-
rested? Anathema!” He pretended not to have heard. Duty—Plan—the
honor of the kolkhoze—the powers demand—children—hunger this
winter—he rolled out the great cloudy words toward the red ball which
was sinking to the dark horizon through a threatening haze. “I now give
the floor to Citizen Guerassim!” Compact as a single obscure creature,
the crowd stirred. Father Guerassim hoisted himself onto the table.
Since the Great Democratic Constitution had been granted by the
Chief to the federated peoples, the priest no longer camouflaged himself
but had let his hair and beard grow in the old fashion, although he be-
longed to the new Church. He held services in an abandoned isba, which
he had rebuilt with his own hands and on which he had set up a wooden
cross planed, iiailed, and gilded with his own hands too ... A good
carpenter, a tolerable gardener (crafts which he had learned at the Spe-
cial Camp for Rehabilitation through Work in the White Sea Islands), he
knew the Gospel thoroughly, and also the laws, regulations, and circu-
lars promulgated by the Agricultural Commissariat and the Central Kol-
khoze Bureau. His blood boiled with hatred for enemies of the people,
conspirators, saboteurs, traitors, foreign agents—in short, for the Fas-
cist-Trotskyists, whose extermination he had preached from the pulpit—

that is, from the top of a ladder leaned against the isba stove. The district
authorities thought well of him. All in all, he was simply a hairy muzhik,
a little taller than the rest, married to a placid dairywoman. Abounding
in a malicious common sense, speaking softly in a low voice, on great
occasions he could utter vehement words which breathed inspiration.
Then all his hearers turned to him, gripped and moved, even the Young
Communists back from military service. “Christian brothers! Decent
citizens! Folk of the Russian soil!” In his confused but often vivid
periods he mingled our great fatherland, old Russia, our mother, the
beloved Chief who considers the lowly, our infallible pilot (may the Lord
bless him!), God who sees us, our Lord Jesus Christ who cursed the idle
and the parasites, drove the chafferers from the temple, promised heaven
to those who did their work well, St. Paul who cried to the world: “He
that will not work shall not eat!” He brandished a crumpled sheet of
paper: “People of the soil, the battle for wheat is our battle ... A hell-
ish brood still crawls under our feet! Our glorious people’s power has
just struck down three more assassins with its sword of fire, three more
of Satan’s hirelings, three more cowards who were trying to stab the
Party in the back! May they burn in eternal flames while we set to work
to save our harvest!”
Kostia and Maria applauded together. They had met in one of the
last roWs, from where they could see only the priest’s bushy hair against
a background of gloomy bluish sky. Here and there, people crossed them-
selves. Kostia put his supple hand around Maria’s neck and braids. Firm
cheekbones, slightly snub nose. The girl warmed him. When he was near
her, he seemed to feel the blood pulsing faster through his veins. Her
mouth was big and so were her eyes. There were in her both a vigorous
animality and a luminous happiness. “He’s a man of the Middle Ages,
Maria, but he speaks well, the old devil! It’s as good as done now, he has
got it started . . .” He felt her hard, pointed breast graze his arm, he
smelled the strong odor of her armpits, her eyes made his head swim.
“Some definite decision must be reached, Kostia; otherwise our people
may still drift away.”
Father Guerassim was saying:
“Comrades! Christians! We will go ourselves! Seed, tools, supplies—
we will carry them on our own backs, in the sweat of our brows, slaves of
God that we are, free citizens! And the Evil One, who wants the Plan to
fail, who wants us to be treated as saboteurs by the government, who
wants us to go hungry—we will shove his wickedness down his putrid
throat!”

A woman’s voice, tense and high-pitched, cried: “Forward, Father!”
And immediately teams were made up to collect sacks. They would start
that very night, under the moon, with God, for the Plan, for the soil!
A hundred and sixty-five bearers, capable of carrying sixty loads by
relieving one another, set out through the night, walking in single file,
plunging into the dark fields. The moon was rising, huge and bright on
the horizon—toward it Kostia led the first team, made up of young men
who sang in chorus, until they were exhausted:
“If war comes,
If war comes,
O our strong land,
—Let us be strong!
Little girl, little girl,
How I love your little eyes!”
Father Guerassim and Agronomist Kostiukin brought up the rear so
that they could keep the laggards moving by telling them stories. They
bivouacked on the bank of the Syeroglazaya, the Gray-eyed River, more
milky than gray; a soft, continuous rustling rose from the reeds. The cold
dew of dawn chilled them to the bone. Kostia and Maria slept side by side
for several hours, rolled in the same blanket for warmth, too tense to talk
to each other, although the moon was magical, ringed with a circle of
pale light as big as the world. They set off again at daybreak, slept again
in the forest through the noonday heat, reached the highroad, trudged
along it in a cloud of dust, and reached the township before the offices
closed. The Party Committee provided a good meal for them—fish soup
and groats; the truck drivers’ orchestra played as they started off, some
bent under their sacks and bundles, others singing, and the red flag of the
Communist Youth preceded them as far as the first turn in the road. Yet
Kostiukin, Kostia, and Father Guerassim had spoken bitter words to the
Committee. “Your transport section has been making fools of us—nei-
ther trucks, nor tractors, nor carts—the devil take you!” Kostiukin’s face
contracted furiously, reddish and wrinkled like the head of some old bird
of prey. “People are not made to be beasts of burden! We can manage it
for once—but the kolkhozes that are sixty miles and more away—what
are they to do?”—“Very true, comrades!” the township secretary an-
swered with a conclusive gesture toward one of his committee: “That
means you!” Father Guerassim said nothing until almost the end, then
he spoke in a veiled voice, full of implications: “Are you quite sure,
Citizen Secretary, that there is no sabotage at the bottom of this?”

Nettled, the secretary answered:
“I guarantee it, Citizen Administering the Cult! Gasoline deliveries are
behind, that is all.”
“In your place, I would not guarantee it, Citizen Secretary, for God
alone probes men’s consciences and hearts.”
His repartee roused a hearty laugh. “Isn’t he getting to be a little too
influential?” the representative of Security whispered, uncomfortably
caught between two directives, one of which prescribed that the clergy
should be permitted to acquire no political influence, the other ordering
the cessation of religious persecution. “Judge for yourself,” answered the
Party secretary, also in a whisper. Kostia increased their embarrassment
by emphatically stating: “The Comrade Administering the Cult is our
real organizer today.”
Every hour counted, since they had lost at least seven days on the work
schedule after having lost many more waiting for transportation, and
since the rains were now to be feared. The one hundred and sixty-five
trudged on to the point of exhaustion, bent under their loads, sweating,
groaning, swearing, praying. The roads were abominable—there were
soft clods that melted underfoot, or stones that made you stumble. Now
they were staggering along a sunken road, through mud and pebbles. The
moon rose, huge and russet and cynical. Kostia and Maria were taking
turns on the same seventy-pound sack, Kostia carrying it as much as pos-
sible, yet husbanding his strength so that he should hold out longer than
Maria. Dripping with sweat, the young woman trudged on in a steamy
odor of flesh. The burden-bearers emerged into a silvery plain. The
moon, risen to the zenith and now white, hung over them; their shadows
moved beneath them over the phosphorescent ground. The groups strag-
gled out. Maria was carrying the sack on her head, steadying it with both-
hands; her armpits were bare; her shoulders, her breasts, the tense line
of her throat, resisting the force of gravity, caught the light. Her lips
were open, baring her teeth to the night. Kostia had stopped joking many
hours ago, had almost stopped speaking. “We are nothing now but
muscles operating . . . muscles and will . . . That’s what men are . . .
That’s what the masses are . . .” Suddenly it was as if the mauve and
milky sky, the moonlit night, had begun singing in him: “I love you, I
love you, I love you, I love you . . .” unwearyingly, endlessly, with
stubborn enthusiasm. “Give me the sack, Maria!”—“Not yet; when we
get to those trees there. Don’t talk to me, Kostia.” She was panting softly..
He went on in silence: “I love you, I love you . . .” and his tiredness
vanished, the moonlight marvelously unburdened him.

When the hundred and sixty-five bivouacked by the Gray-eyed River,
the Syeroglazaya, to sleep a few hours before dawn, Kostia and Maria lay
down beside their sack, facing the sky. The grass was soft and cold and
damp. “All right, Marussia?” Kostia asked, in a tone which was indiffer-
ent at the beginning of the short sentence but which suddenly became
caressing upon the diminutive which closed it. “Falling asleep?”—“Not
yet,” she said. “I’m fine. How simple everything is—the sky, the earth,
and us . . .”
Lying on their backs side by side, their shoulders touching, infinitely
close to each other, infinitely detached from each other, they gazed up
into space.
Without moving, smiling up into the faintly luminous sky, Kostia said:
“Maria, listen to me, Maria, it’s really true. Maria, I love you.”
She did not move, her hands were crossed under her head. He heard
her regular breathing. She said nothing for a time, then answered
calmly:
“That’s fine, Kostia. We can make a good solid couple.”
A sort of anguish seized him, he overcame it and swallowed his saliva.
He did not know what to say or to do. A moment passed. The sky was
magnificently bright. Kostia said:
“I knew a Maria in Moscow; she worked underground, building the
subway. She came to a sad end, which she didn’t deserve. Her nerves
weren’t strong enough. When I remember her, I think of her as Maria the
Unhappy. I want you to be Maria the Happy. You shall be.”
“I don’t believe in happiness during transition periods,” said Maria.
“We will work together. We will see life. We will fight. That is enough.”
He thought: “Strange, here we are husband and wife, and we talk like
two old friends; I was longing to take her in my arms, and now I only
want to make this moment last . . .”
There was a silence, then Maria said:
“I knew another Kostia. He belonged to the Communist Youth, like
you, he was almost as good-looking as you are, but he was a fool and a
skunk . . .”
“What did he do to you?”
“He made me pregnant, and left me because I am a believer.”
“You are a believer, Maria?”
Kostia put his arm around her shoulders, he sought her eyes and found
them, with their look that was as dark and as luminous as the night.
“I do not believe in ecclesiastical mumble-jumble, Kostia, try to under-
stand me. I believe in everything that is. Look around us, look!”

Her face, her clear-cut lips turned impulsively toward him to show
him the universe: that simple sky, the plains, the invisible river among
the reeds, space.
“I can’t say what I believe in, Kostia, but I believe. Perhaps it’s just in
reality. You must understand me.”
Ideas flooded through Kostia: he perceived them in his heart and his
loins as he did in his mind. Reality, embraced by a single motion of the
whole universe. We are inseparable from the stars; from the authentic
magic of this night in which there is no miracle; from the waiting
earth; from all the confused power that lies within us ... Joy filled
him. “You are right, Maria, I believe as you do, I see . . .” The earth,
the sky, the very night, in which there were no shadows, brought them
inexpressibly together, forehead against forehead, their hair mingling,
eyes to eyes, mouth to mouth, their teeth meeting with a little shock.
“Maria, I love you . . .” The words were only tiny gilded crystals which
he dropped into deep, dark, sluggish, turbulent, enrapturing waters . . .
Maria answered with restrained violence: “But I’ve already told you I
love you, Kostia.” Maria said: “I feel as if I were throwing little white
pebbles at the sky and they turn into meteors, I see them disappear but I
know they will never fall, that’s how I love you . . .” Then, “What is
rocking us,” she murmured, “I think I’m going to sleep . . .” She fell
asleep with her cheek on the sack, smelling the odor of wheat. Kostia
watched her for a moment. His joy was so great that it became like grief.
Then the same rocking put him to sleep too.
The last stretch, which had to be covered first through the morning
fog, then under the sun, was the hardest. The line of staggering bearers
reached from horizon to horizon. The president of the kolkhoze, Va-
niuchkin, came to meet them with carts. Kostia dropped his sack over
Vaniuchkin’s head and shoulders. “Your turn, President!” The whole
landscape was calm and bright.
“The sowing is safe, brother. You are going to sign me two two-week
leaves right away, for Maria and myself. We’re getting married.”
“Congratulations,” said the president.
He clicked his tongue to hurry on the horses.
Romachkin’s life had recently become more dignified. Though he was
still in the same office, on the sixth floor of the Moscow Clothing Trust,
and though he was not yet a member of the Party, he felt that he had
increased in stature. An official announcement, posted in the hall one

evening, had said that “the assistant clerk in the salaries bureau, Ro-
machkin, a punctual and zealous worker, has been promoted to first
assistant with an increase in salary of 50 rubles per month and citation
on the Board of Honor.” From his ink-stained and glue-smeared desk in
insignificance, Romachkin moved to the varnished desk which stood
opposite to the similar but larger desk of the Trust’s Director of Tariffs
and Salaries. Romachkin was provided with an interoffice telephone,
which was rather a nuisance than otherwise, because the calls interrupted
him in his calculations, but which was a symbol of unhoped-for author-
ity. The president of the Trust himself sometimes called him on this tele-
phone to ask for information. Those were solemn moments. Romachkin
found it somewhat difficult to answer sitting down, and without bowing
and smiling amiably. If he had been alone, he would certainly have stood
up, the better to assume an air of deference as he promised: “At once,
Comrade Nikolkin; you shall have the exact figures in fifteen min-
utes . . .” Having promised, Romachkin straightened up until his back
touched the back of his swivel chair, looked importantly around at the
five desks in the office, and beckoned to the sad-faced Antochkin, whose
liver was always giving him trouble and who had replaced him at the
desk in insignificance. “Comrade Antochkin, I am looking up some in-
formation for the President of the Trust. I need the file on the last con-
ference on prices and wages and also the message from the Textile
Syndicate concerning the application of the C.C. directives. You have
seven minutes.” Spoken with simple firmness from which there was no
appeal. Assistant Clerk Antochkin looked at the clock as a donkey looks
at his driver’s whip; his fingers flew through the files; he seemed to be
chewing on something . . . Before the end of the seventh minute,
Romachkin received the papers from him and thanked him amiably.
From the other side of the room the old typist and the office boy looked at
Romachkin with evident respect. (That they were both thinking: “Oh,
that worn-out rat, who does he think he is! I hope you get your bellyful
of it, Citizen Bootlicker!” Romachkin, who was always well disposed
toward everyone, could not suspect.) The head of the office, though he
went on signing letters, rounded his shoulders approvingly. Romachkin
was discovering authority, which enlarges the individual, cements or-
ganization, fecundates work, saves time, reduces overhead ... “I
thought I was nobody and only knew how to obey, and here I am, able to
give orders. What is this principle which bestows a value on a man who
had no value before? The principle of hierarchy.” But is hierarchy just?
Romachkin thought about it for several days before he answered himself

in the affirmative. What better government than a hierarchy of just men?
His promotion had brought him yet another reward: the window was
at his right, he had only to turn his head to see trees in courtyards, wash-
ing drying on wires, the roofs of old houses, the pinnacles of a church,
washed with yellow and old rose, humbly surviving beside a modern
building—almost too much space, almost too many astonishing things,
for him to concentrate properly on his work. Why does man have such a
need for dreams? Romachkin thought that it would be a sensible idea to
put opaque glass in office windows, so that the sight of the outside world
should not be a distraction which might reduce the quantity of work
accomplished. Five small, almost round pinnacles, surmounted by totter-
ing crosses, survived amid a forgotten garden and a group of ill-assorted
houses a century and a half old. They were an invitation to meditate, like
forest paths leading to unknown clearings which perhaps did not exist
. . . Romachkin felt slightly afraid of them even as he loved them. Per-
haps people still prayed under those meaningless and almost colorless
pinnacles, in the heart of the new city mathematically laid out in straight
lines drawn by steel, concrete, glass, and stone.
“It is strange,” Romachkin said to himself. “How can anyone pray?”
To keep himself in good working trim, Romachkin allowed himself a few
minutes between one job and the next. These minutes he devoted to
dreaming—without letting it be apparent, of course, pencil in hand,
brows knit . . . What alley through which I have never walked leads to
that fantastically surviving church?
Romachkin went to see, and the result was a new accomplishment in
his life—a friendship. He had to go down a blind alley, pass through a
carriage gateway, cross a courtyard lined with workshops; thus he ar-
rived at a small, ancient square, shut off from the rest of the world. Chil-
dren were playing marbles; and there was the church, with its three
beggars on the steps and its three praying women kneeling in the solitude
of the nave. Pleasant to read the nearby signboards—they made up a
poem studded with harmonious and meaningless words and names:
Filatov, Teaseler and Mattressmaker, Oleandra, Shoemakers’ Craft Co-
operative, Tikhonova, Midwife, Kindergarten No. 4, The First Joy.
Romachkin met Filatov, teaseler and mattressmaker, a childless wid-
ower, a prudent man who no longer drank, no longer smoked, no longer
believed, and who, at fifty-five, was taking free night courses at the
Higher Technical School to learn mechanics and astrophysics. “And
what have I left now but science? I have lived half a century, Citizen
Romachkin, without suspecting that science existed, like a blind man.”

Filatov wore an old-fashioned leather apron and a proletarian cap, un-
changed for fifteen years. His room was only nine feet by five, a con-
verted vestibule, but in the back of it he had cut a window which gave
onto the church garden; and on the window sill he had a hanging garden
of his own, constructed of old boxes. A copying stand in front of his
flowers gave him a place to copy out Eddington’s Stars and Atoms, with
annotations of his own . . . This unexpected friendship occupied an
exalted place in Romachkin’s life. At first the two men had not under-
stood each other very well. Filatov said:
“Mechanics rules technique, technique is the base of production, that
is, of society. Celestial mechanics is the law of the universe. Everything is
physical. If I could begin my life over again, I would be an engineer or
an astronomer; I believe that the real engineer must be an astronomer if
he is to understand the world. But I was born the grandson of a serf,
under the Czarist oppression. I was illiterate until I reached thirty, a
drunkard until I reached forty, I lived without understanding the uni-
verse until my poor Natassia died. When she was buried at Vagankov-
skoye, I had a small red cross set up on her grave, because she was a Be-
liever herself, being ignorant; and because we live in the Socialist age, I
said: Let the cross of a proletarian be red! And I was left all alone in the
cemetery, Comrade Romachkin, I paid the watchman fifty kopecks so
that I could stay after closing time until the stars came out. And I
thought: What is man on this earth? A wretched speck of dust which
thinks, works, and suffers. What does he leave behind him? Work, the
mechanisms of work. What is the earth? A speck of dust which revolves
in the sky with the work and sufferings of man, and the silence of plants,
and everything. And what makes it revolve? The iron law of stellar
mechanics. “ ‘Natassia,’ I said over her grave, ‘you can no longer
hear me because you no longer exist, because we have no souls, but you
will always be in the soil, the plants, the air, the energy of nature, and I
ask you to forgive me for having hurt you by getting drunk, and I prom-
ise you I will stop drinking, and I promise you I will study so that I may
understand the great mechanism of creation.’ I have kept my word be-
cause I am strong, with proletarian strength, and perhaps I shall marry
again one day, when I have finished my second year of study, for I
should not have money to buy books if I were to take a wife now. Such is
my life, comrade. I am at peace, I know that it is man’s duty to under-
stand and I am beginning to understand.”
They were sitting side by side on a little bench at the door of Filatov’s

workshop, late in the afternoon—Romachkin pale and worn, not yet old,
hut with all his youth and vigor gone, if he had ever had either; and
Filatov, beardless and with shaven skull, his face lined with symmetrical
wrinkles, solid as an old tree. From the “Oleandra” Co-operative came
the sound of hammers on leather, the chestnut trees were beginning to
loom larger in the twilight. Had it not been for the muffled noise of the
city, they could have thought they were in an old-time village square, not
far from a river on the other side of which was a forest . . . Romachkin
answered:
“I have not had time to think about the universe, Comrade Filatov,
because I have been tortured by injustice.”
“The causes of injustice,” Filatov answered, “lie in the social mecha-
nism.”
Romachkin feebly wrung his hands, then put them on his knees. They
lay there, flat and without strength.
“Listen, Filatov, and tell me if I have done wrong. I am almost a Party
member, I go to meetings, I am trusted. At yesterday’s meeting, the ra-
tionalization of work was discussed. And the Secretary read us a news-
paper paragraph on the execution of three enemies of the people, who
assassinated Comrade Tulayev, of the C.C. and the Moscow Committee.
It is all proven, the criminals confessed, I don’t remember their names,
and what do their names matter to us? They are dead, they were mur-
derers, they were miserable creatures, they died the death of criminals.
The Secretary explained it all to us: that the Party defends the country,
that war is at hand, that we must kill the mad dogs for love of mankind
... It is all true, very true. Then he said: ‘Those in favor raise their
hands!’ I understood that we were to thank the C.C. and Security for the
execution of these men, I suffered, I thought: And pity, pity—does no
one think of pity? But I did not dare not to raise my hand. Should I be
the only one to remember pity, I who am nothing? And I raised my hand
with the rest. Did I betray pity? Should I have betrayed the Party if I
had not raised my hand? What is your answer, Filatov, you who are
upright, you who are a true proletarian?”
Filatov reflected. Darkness fell. Romachkin’s face, turned toward his
companion, became beseeching.
“The machine,” said Filatov, “must operate irreproachably. That it
crushes those who stand in its way is inhuman, but it is the universal law.
The workman must know the insides of the machine. Later there will be
luminous and transparent machines which men’s eyes can see through

without hindrance. They will be machines in a state of innocence, com-
parable to the innocence of the heavens. Human law will be as innocent
as astrophysical law. No one will be crushed. No one will any longer need
pity. But today, Comrade Romachkin, pity is still needed. Machines are
full of darkness, we never know what goes on inside them. I do not like
secret sentences, executions in cellars, the mechanism of plots. You un-
derstand : there are always two plots, the positive and the negative—how
is one to know which is the plot of the just, which the plot of the guilty?
How is one to know whether to feel pity, whether to be pitiless? How
should we know, when the men in power themselves lose their heads, as
there is no doubt that they do? In your case, Romachkin, you had to vote
Yes, otherwise things would have turned out badly for you, and there
was nothing you could do about it, was there? You voted with pity—well
and good. I did the same thing, last year. What else could we do?”
Romachkin had the impression that his hands were becoming lighter.
Filatov invited him in, they drank a glass of tea and ate pickled cucum-
bers with black bread. The room was so small that they touched each
other. Their proximity gave birth to an increased intimacy. Filatov
opened Eddington’s book and held it under the light. And:
“Do you know what an electron is?”
“No.”
Romachkin read more compassion than reproach in the mattress-
maker’s eyes. That a man should have a long life behind him and not
know what an electron was!
“Let me explain it to you. Every atom of matter is a sidereal sys-
tem ...”
The universe and man are made of stars, some infinitely little, others
infinitely great, Figure 17 on page 45 showed it clearly. Romachkin had
difficulty in following the admirable demonstration because he was think-
ing of the three executed criminals, of his hand raised in favor of their
death, of his hand which had felt so heavy then, which had now—
strangely—become light again because he had set pity against machines
and stars.
A child cried in the next courtyard, the lights in the shoemaker’s shop
went out, a couple embraced, almost invisible, against the church railing.
Filatov came as far as the end of the square with his friend. Romachkin
walked on toward the railing. Before going into his room, Filatov stopped
for no reason and looked at the black ground. What have we done with
pity in this human mechanism? Three more men executed . . . They
are more numerous than the stars, since there are only three thousand

stars visible in the northern hemisphere. If those three men killed, did
they not have profound reasons for killing, reasons connected with the
eternal laws of motion? Who weighed those reasons? Weighed them
without hatred? Filatov felt pity for the judges: the judges must suffer
most of all . . . The sight of the couple embracing in the shadows, mak-
ing but a single being by force of the eternal law of attraction, consoled
him. It is good to see the young live, when one is at the sunset of life
oneself. They have half a century before them, by the law of averages:
perhaps they will see true justice, in the days of transparent machines. It
takes a great deal of fertilizer to feed exhausted soil. Who knows how
many more men must be executed to feed the soil of Russia? We thought
we could see ahead so clearly in the days of the Revolution, and now we
are in the dark again; perhaps it is the punishment for our pride. Filatov
went in, put the iron bar across his door, and undressed. He slept on a
narrow mattress spread out on boxes, and kept a night light burning. The
spiders began their nocturnal travels over the ceiling: the little black
creatures, with legs like rays, moved slowly, and it was absolutely impos-
sible to understand the meaning of their movements. Filatov thought of
the judges and the executed men. Who is to judge the judges? Who will
pardon them? Need they be pardoned? Who will shoot them if they were
unjust? Everything will come in its time, inexorably. Under the ground,
everywhere, under the city, under the fields, under the little black square
where the lovers were no doubt still continuing their caresses and endear-
ments, a multitude of eyes shone for Filatov, on the edge of visibility, like
stars of the seventh magnitude. “They wait, they wait,” Filatov mur-
mured; “eyes without number, forgive us.”
Romachkin’s anxiety returned when he found himself once more in the
poverty-stricken whiteness of his room. The noise of the collective apart-
ment smote ceaselessly at his bastion of silence: telephones, music from
the radio, children’s voices, toilets being flushed, hissing of kerosene
pressure stoves . . . The couple next door, from whom he was separated
only by a plank partition, were arguing feverishly over a deal in second-
hand cloth. Romachkin put on his nightshirt: undressed, he felt even
more puny than dressed; his bare feet showed wretched toes, absurdly
far apart. The human body is ugly—and if man has only his body, if
thought is only a product of the body, how can it be anything but doubt-
ful and inadequate? He lay down between cold sheets, shivered for a
moment, reached out to his bookshelf, took a book by a poet whose name
he did not know, for the first pages were missing—but the others still

kept all their magical charm. Romachkin read where the book opened.
Divine revolving planet
thy Eurasias thy singing seas
simple scorn for the headsmen
and behold o merciful thought we are
almost like unto heroes
Why was there no punctuation? Perhaps because thought, which em-
braces and connects by invisible threads (but do such threads exist?)
planets, seas, continents, headsmen, victims, and ourselves, is fluid, never
rests, stops only in appearance? Why, precisely tonight, the reference to
headsmen, the reference to heroes? Who should reproach me, who de-
spise nothing but myself? And why, if there are men who have this ardor
for life and this scorn for the headsmen, am I so different from them?
Are not the poets ashamed of themselves when they see themselves in
their solitude and their nakedness? Romachkin put away the book and
returned to the papers of the last few days. At the foot of a Page 3, under
the heading Miscellaneous Information, the government daily described
the preparations for an athletic festival in which three hundred para-
chutists, members of school sports clubs, would take part . . . Huge
bright flowers float down from the sky, each bearing a brave human head
whose eyes intently watch the approach of the alluring and threatening
earth . . . The next item, which had no heading and was set in small
type, read:
The case of the assassins of Comrade Tulayev, member of the Central
Committee.—Having confessed that they were guilty of treason, plotting,
and assassination, M. A. Erchov, A. A. Makeyev, and K. K. Rublev, sen-
tenced to capital punishment by the special session of the Supreme
Tribunal sitting in camera, have been - executed.
The Chess-Player’s Association, affiliated with the All-Union Sports
Federation, plans to organize a series of elimination games in the Feder-
ated Republics preparatory to the forthcoming Tournament of Nationali-
ties.
The chessmen had human faces, unfamiliar but grave-eyed. They
moved of themselves. Someone aimed at them from a long way off: sud-
denly they jumped into the air, their heads bursting open, and vanished
inexplicably. Three accurate shots, one after the other, instantaneously
demolished three heads on the chessboard. Numb and half asleep, Ro-
machkin felt fear: someone was knocking at the door.

“Who’s there?”
“I, I,” answered a radiant voice.
Romachkin went to the door. The floor was rough and cold under his
bare feet. Before drawing the bolt he waited a moment to master his
panic. Kostia came rushing in so impulsively that he picked Romachkin
up like a child.
“Good old neighbor! Romachkin! Half-thinker, half-Hero of Toil, shut
up in your half-room and your half-pint destiny! Glad to see you again!
Everything all right? Why don’t you say something? Ultimatum: Every-
thing all right? Answer yes or no!”
“Everything’s all right, Kostia. Good of you to come. I am fond of you,
you know.”
“In that case I order you to stop looking at me like a man who’s just
been pulled out from under a bus! . . . The earth is revolving magnifi-
cently, the devil take you! Can you see it revolving, our green globe
inhabited by toiling monkeys?”
Back in the warmth of his bed, Romachkin saw the little room enlarge,'
the light burn ten times brighter.
“I was just falling asleep, Kostia, over this hodgepodge in the papers:
parachutists, executions, chess tournaments, planets . . . Absolute mad-
ness. Life, I suppose. How handsome and healthy you look, Kostia. It’s
wonderful to see you ... As for me, things are going extremely well.
I’ve had a promotion at the Trust, I go to Party meetings, I have a friend,
a remarkable proletarian with the brain of a physicist ... We discuss
the structure of the universe.”
“The structure of the universe,” Kostia repeated in a singsong voice.
Too big for the cramped little room, he kept turning round and round.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Romachkin. I bet the same anemic fleas
feed on you at night.”
“You’re right,” said Romachkin, with a happy little laugh.
Kostia pushed him back against the wall and sat down on the hed. His
tousled hair, in which the chestnut lights looked russet, his aggressive
dark eyes, his big, slightly asymmetrical mouth, bent over Romachkin.
“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going somewhere. If the com-
ing war doesn’t change us all into carrion, old man, I don’t know what we
are going to do, but it will be fabulous. If we die, we’ll make the earth
bear such a crop as was never heard of. I haven’t a kopeck, of course; my
soles are worn through and more, of course . . . And so on. But I am
happy.”
“Love?”

“Of course.”
Kostia’s laughter shook the bed, shook Romachkin from his toes to his
eyebrows, made the wall tremble, echoed through the room in golden
waves.
“Don’t let it frighten you, old brother, if I seem drunk. I’m drunker yet
when I haven’t had anything to eat, but then I sometimes go mad . . .
“You remember, I walked out on the subway and working like an in-
dustrialized mole under the streets of Moscow, between the Morgue and
the Young Communist Bureau. I wanted air. I was fed up with their dis-
cipline. I have discipline enough of my own to set up shop with, it’s
inside me, my discipline. I got out. At Gorki I worked in the automobile
factory: seven hours in front of a machine. I was willing to become a
beast in the long run, to give the country trucks. I was going to see fine
cars come out, all shiny and new—it’s prettier and cleaner than the birth
of a human being, I assure you. When I told myself that we had built
them with our own hands and that perhaps they would eat up the roads
in Mongolia bringing cigarettes and rifles to oppressed peoples, I felt
proud, I was glad to be alive. Good. Dispute with a technician, who
wanted to make me clean my tools after hours. ‘What do you think?’ I
said to him. ‘That the wage earner doesn’t exist? The worker’s nerves
and muscles have to be kept up just as much as the machines do. So long.’
I took the train, they were going to accuse me of Trotskyism, the idiots,
but you know what that means: three years in the Karaganda mines, no
thank you! Have you ever seen the Volga, old man? I worked on board a
tug, fireman first, then mechanic. We towed barges as far as the Kama.
There the rivers are full, you forget cities, the moon rises over steep for-
ests, an immense vegetable army stands guard day and night, and you
hear it calling to you insidiously: Ours is the true life—if you do not
drink a cup of silence with the beasts of the forest, you will never know
what a man ought to know. I found a substitute in a Komi village and
went to work for the regional Forest Trust. ‘I’ll do anything, as far away
as possible, in the most out-of-the-way forests,’ I said to the provincial
bureaucrats. It pleased them. They put me to inspecting foresters’ posts,
and the militia took me on for the fight against banditry. In a forest at
the end of the earth, between the Kama and the Vychegda, I discovered a
village of Old Believers and sorcerers who had fled from statistics. They
had taken the great census for a diabolic maneuver, they had convinced
themselves that their lands were going to be taken from them once more,
their men sent to war, their old women forced to learn to read and then to
study the science of the Evil One. They recited the Apocalypse at night.
They also proclaimed that everything on earth was corrupt and that noth-

ing remained for the pure in heart except patience—and that their pa-
tience would soon be exhausted! ‘And then what will happen?’ I asked
them. ‘It will be the return of the millennium.’ They offered to let me live
with them, I was tempted to on account of a beautiful girl, she was as
vigorous as a tree, exciting and pure as forest air, but she told me that
what she most wanted was a child, that I had seen too much of machines
to live long with her, and that she did not trust me ... I left there,
Romachkin, to get away before their Last Judgment arrived, or I became
a complete imbecile . . . Through brothers of theirs in the city, the
Elders asked me to send them recent papers, a treatise on agronomy, and
to write and tell them if ‘the census had gone by’ without wars, floods, or
plunder . . . Shall we go and live with them, Romachkin? I am the only
man who knows the paths through the forests along the Sysola. The forest
animals don’t harm me, I’ve learned to rob wild bees’ hives for honey, I
know how to set traps for hares, to set traps in rivers . . . Come on,
Romachkin, you will never think of your books again and when someone
asks you what a streetcar is you will explain to the little children and the
white-haired old men that it is a long yellow box on wheels which' carries
men and is made to move by a mysterious force that comes out of the
bowels of the earth over wires. And if they ask you why, you will find
yourself hard put to it for an answer . .
“I am willing,” said Romachkin weakly. Kostia’s story had enchanted
him like a fairy tale.
Kostia jerked him out of his dream:
“Too late, old man. There are no more Holy Scriptures or Apocalypses
for you and me. If the millennium is ahead of us, we cannot know it. We
belong to the age of reinforced concrete.”
“And your love affair?” asked Romachkin, feeling strangely at ease.
“I got married at the kolkhoze,” Kostia answered. “She is . .
His two hands began a gesture intended to express enthusiasm. But
they remained suspended for a fraction of a second, then dropped inertly.
Even as he spoke, Kostia’s eyes had fallen on Romachkin’s long, feeble
hand, spread out on a page of a newspaper. The middle finger seemed to
be pointing to an impossible paragraph:
The case of the assassins of Comrade Tulayev, member of the C.C.
Having confessed that they were guilty ... Erchov, Makeyev, Rublev
. . . have been executed . . .
“What is she like, Kostia?”
Kostia’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you remember the revolver, Romachkin?”

“I remember it.”
“Do you remember that you were looking for justice?”
“I remember. But I have thought a great deal since then, Kostia. I have
become aware of my own weakness. I have come to understand that it is
too early for justice. What we have to do is work, believe in the Party,
feel pity. Since we cannot be just, we must feel pity for men ...”
A fear of which he did not dare to think would not let his lips utter the
question: “What did you do with the revolver?” Kostia spoke angrily:
“As for me, pity exasperates me. Here you are”—Kostia pointed to the
paragraph in the paper—“take pity on those three, if that makes you feel
any better, Romachkin—they are beyond needing anything now. As for
me, I have no use for your pity, and I have no wish to pity you—you
don’t deserve it. Perhaps you are guilty of their crime. Perhaps I am the
author of your crime, but you will never understand it or anything about
it. You are innocent, they were innocent . . .”
With an effort, he managed to shrug his shoulders. “I am innocent
. . . But who is guilty?”
“I believe that they were guilty,” Romachkin murmured, “since they
were found guilty.”
Kostia gave a leap that shook the floor and the walls. His hard laugh
rattled against things.
“Romachkin, you win all prizes! Let me explain to you what I guess.
They were certainly guilty, they confessed, because they understood what
you and I do not understand. Do you see?”
“It must be true,” said Romachkin gravely.
Kostia paced nervously between the door and the window. “I am
stifling,” he said. “Air! What is wanting here? Everything!
“Well, my old friend Romachkin, good-by. Life is a sort of delirium,
don’t you think?”
“Yes, yes . . .”
Romachkin was going to be left there alone, he had a wretched, worn
face, wrinkled eyelids, white hairs around his mouth, so little vigor in his
eyes! Kostia thought aloud: “The guilty are the millions of Romachkins
on this earth ...”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing, old man, I’m just maundering.”
There was empty space between them.
“Romachkin, this place of yours is too gloomy. Here!”
From his inside blouse pocket Kostia drew a rectangular object
wrapped in an India print. “Take it. It’s what I loved the most in the

world when I was alone.” Romachkin’s hand held a miniature framed in
ebony. In the black circle appeared a woman’s face—magically real, all
sanity, intelligence, radiance, silence. With a sort of amazed terror,
Romachkin said: “Is it possible? Do you really believe, Kostia, that
there are faces like this?”
Kostia flared up:
“Living faces are much more beautiful . . . Good-by, old man.”
As he hurried down the stairs Kostia had a blissful sensation: He
seemed to be falling, the material world dissolved before him, things be-
came aerial. He followed the streets with the light step of a runner. But in
his mind anxiety loosed a sort of thunder. “It was I who . . . I . . .”
He began running as he approached the house where Maria lay sleeping
—running as he had run one night long ago, that Arctic night, when the
thing had suddenly exploded at the end of his hand, making a black
flower fringed with flame, and he had heard the police whistles all around
him . . . The dark staircase was aerial too. Apartment No. 12 housed
three families and three couples in seven rooms. A 25-candle-power bulb
burned in the hall, looped up close to the ceiling so that it could not easily
be unscrewed. The walls were sooty. A sewing machine, fastened to a
heavy chest by a chain and padlock, was reflected in the cracked mirror
of the coat stand. Irregular snores filled the half-darkness with a bestial
vibration. The door of the toilet opened, the figure of a man in pajamas
hovered indistinctly at the end of the hall and suddenly stumbled noisily
into something metallic. The drunken man bounced back against the
opposite wall, striking his head against a door. Angry voices came
through the darkness—a low voice saying “Shhhhh,” and a high voice
showering insults: “. . . gutter rat . . Kostia went to the drunken
man and caught him by the collar of his swaying pajamas.
“Quiet, citizen. My wife is asleep next door. Which is your room?”
“Number 4,” said the drunk. “Who’re you?”
“Nobody. Stay on your feet! Don’t make any noise or I’ll give you a
friendly poke in the j aw.”
“Good of you . . . Have a drink?”
Kostia pushed the door of No. 4 open with his elbow and flung the
drunk inside, where he gently collapsed among overturned chairs. Some-
thing made of glass rolled across the floor before breaking with a crystal-
line tinkle. Kostia groped his way to the door of No. 7, a triangular closet
with a low slanting ceiling in which there was a round dormer. The
electric bulb, at the end of a long cord, lay on the floor between a pile of
books and an enamel basin in which a pink chemise was soaking. The

only furniture was a chair with the seat broken and an iron bed, on
which Maria lay sleeping, stretched out straight on her back, her fore-
head lifted, vaguely smiling. Kostia looked at her. Her cheeks were pink
and hot, she had wide nostrils, eyebrows like the outline of a pair of slim
wings, adorable eyelashes. One shoulder and one bare breast were un-
covered; on the amber-colored flesh of the breast lay a black braid with
coppery lights. Kostia kissed her bare breast. Maria opened her eyes.
“You!”
He knelt beside the bed, took both her hands.
“Maria, wake up, Maria, look at me, Maria, think of me . . .”
No smile came to her lips, but her whole being smiled.
“I am thinking of you, Kostia.”
“Maria, answer me. If I had killed a man, ages ago or a few days or a
few months ago, on a night of unbelievable snow, without knowing him,
without a thought of killing him, without having wanted to, but volun-
tarily just the same, with my eyes wide open, my hand steady, because he
was doing evil in the name of ideas that are right, because I was full of
the sufferings of others, because, without knowing it, I had pronounced
judgment in a few seconds—I for many others, I who am unknown, for
Others who are unknown and nameless, for all who have no names, no
will, no luck, not even my rag of a conscience, Maria, what would you say
to me?”
“I would tell you, Kostia, that you ought to keep your nerves under
better control, know exactly what you’re doing, and not wake me up to
tell me your bad dreams . . . Kiss me.”
He went on in an imploring voice:
“But if it was true, Maria?”
She looked at him very hard. The chimes on the Kremlin rang the
hour. The first notes of the “International,” airy and solemn, drifted for
a moment over the sleeping city.
“Kostia, I have seen enough peasants die by the roadside ... I know
what it is to struggle desperately. I know how much harm is done invol-
untarily when the struggle is desperate . . . Just the same, we are going
forward, aren’t we? There is a great and pure force in you. Don’t
worry.”
Her two hands plunged into his hair, she drew the vigorous and tor-
mented head toward her.
Comrade Fleischman spent the day finding their final places in the files
for the dossiers in the Tulayev case. There were thousands of pages, gath-

ered into several volumes. Human life was reflected in them just as the
earth’s fauna and flora are to be found, in tenuous and monstrous forms,
in a drop of stagnant water observed through a microscope. Certain
documents were to go to the Party Archives, others to complete dossiers
in the files of Security, the C.C., the General Secretariat, the foreign
branch of Secret Service. A few were to he burned in the presence of a
representative of the C.C. and Comrade Gordeyev, Deputy High Commis-
sar for Security. Fleischman shut himself up alone with the papers, about
which there hung an odor of death. The memorandum from the Special
Operations Service on the execution of the three convicted criminals gave
only one precise detail, the time: 12:01,12:15,12:18 a.m. The great case
had culminated at the zero hour of night.
Among the unimportant documents added to the Tulayev dossier since
the end of the investigation (reports on conversations in public places,
during the course of which Tulayev’s name was alleged to have been
mentioned; denunciations concerning the murder of a certain Butayev,
an engineer at the waterworks in Krasnoyarsk; communications from
the criminal police concerning the assassination of a certain Mutayev at
Leninakan; and other documents which flood, wind, or the stupidity and
uninspired folly of the law of averages seemed to have swept together),
Fleischman found a gray envelope, postmarked “Moscow-Yaroslavl Sta-
tion” and merely addressed: “To the Citizen Examining Magistrate con-
ducting the Tulayev case investigation.” An attached memorandum
read: “Transmitted to Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Another memorandum
added: “Zvyeryeva: under strict arrest until further order. Transmit to
Comrade Popov.” Administrative perfection would, at this point, have
demanded a third memorandum concerning the as yet unsettled fate of
Comrade Popov. Some prudent person had merely written on the enve-
lope, in red ink: “Unclassified.” “That’s myself—unclassified,” thought
Fleischman with a shade of self-contempt. He nonchalantly cut open the
envelope. It contained a letter, written by hand on a folded sheet of
school notebook paper and unsigned.
“Citizen! I write to you from compulsion of conscience and out of
regard for the truth . .
Ah!—somebody else denouncing his neighbor or happily giving him-
self up to his idiotic little private delusion . . . Fleischman skipped the
middle of the letter and began again toward the end, not without noticing
that the writing was firm and young, as of an educated peasant, that
there was no* attempt at style, and very little punctuation. The tone was
direct, and the Security official found himself gripped.

“I shall not sign this. Innocent men having inexplicably paid for me,
there is no way left for me to make amends. Believe me if I had known of
this miscarriage of justice in time I would have brought you my innocent
and guilty head. I belong body and soul to our great country, to our mag-
nificent Socialist future. If I have committed a crime almost without
knowing it which I am not sure of because we live in a period where the
murder of man by man is an ordinary thing and no doubt it is a necessity
of the dialectics of history and no doubt the rule of the workers which
sheds so much blood, sheds it for the good of mankind and I myself have
been only the less than half-conscious instrument of that historical neces-
sity, if I have led into error judges better educated and more conscien-
tious than myself who have committed an even greater crime while be-
lieving that they too were serving justice, I can now only live and work
freely with all my powers for the greatness of our Soviet fatherland . . .”
Fleischman went back to the middle of the letter:
“Alone, unknown to the world, not even knowing myself the moment
before what I was going to do I fired at Comrade Tulayev whom I de-
tested without knowing him since the purge of the higher schools. I
assure you that he had done immeasurable harm to our sincere young
generation, that he had lied to us incessantly, that he had basely outraged
the best thing we possess our faith in the Party, that he had brought us to
the brink of despair . .
Fleischman bent over the open letter and sweat bathed his forehead, his
eyes blurred, his double chin sagged, an expression of utter defeat twisted
and ravaged his fat face, the innumerable pages of the dossier floated
before him in a choking fog. He muttered: “I knew it,” annoyed because
he found himself having to restrain an idiotic impulse to burst into tears
or to flee, no matter where, instantly, irrevocably—but nothing was pos-
sible any more. He slumped over the letter, every word of which bore the
stamp of truth. There was a mouselike scratching at the door, then the
voice of his maid asked: “Would you like some tea, Comrade Chief?”—
“Yes, yes, Lisa—make it strong . . .” He walked up and down the room
for a little, read the unsigned letter over again, standing this time, the
better to confront it. Impossible to show it to anyone, anyone. He half
opened the door to take the tray on which stood two glasses of tea. And,
within himself, he talked to the unknown man whom he glimpsed behind
the folded sheet of ruled paper. “Well, young man, well, your letter is not
bad at all . . . Never fear, I am not going to start a hunt for you at this
point. We of the older generation, you see, we don’t need your erratic

and self-intoxicated strength to stand condemned ... It is beyond us
all, it carries us all off . . .”
He lit the candle which he used to soften sealing wax. The stearine was
encrusted with red streaks like coagulated blood. In the flame of the
bloodstained candle Fleischman burned the letter, collected the ashes in
the ash tray, and crushed them under his thumb. He drank his two
glasses of tea and felt better. Half aloud, with as much relief as gloomy
sarcasm, he said:
“The Tulayev case is closed.”
Fleischman decided to hurry through the rest of the filing, so that he
could get away earlier. The notebooks which Kiril Rublev had filled in
his cell had been put with a sheaf of letters “Held for the inquiry”—they
were Dora Rublev’s letters, written from a small settlement in Kazakstan.
Sent from the depths of solitude and anguish to be read only by Comrade
Zvyeryeva, they made him furious. “What a bitch! If I can lay my hands
on her, I’ll see that she gets her fill of steppes and snow and sand . . .”
Fleischman leafed through the notebooks. The writing remained regu-
lar throughout, the forms of certain letters suggested artistic interests
(very early in his life, and long outgrown), the straightness of the lines
recalled the man, the way he squared his shoulders when he talked, the
long bony face, the intellectual forehead, the particular way he had of
looking at you with a smile which was only in his eyes, as he expounded
a train of reasoning as rigorous and as subtle as an arabesque in metal
. . . “We are all dying without knowing why we have killed so many
men in whom lay our highest strength . . .” Fleischman realized that he
thought as Kiril Rublev had written a few days or a few hours before his
death.
The notebooks interested him ... He ran through the economic
deductions based on the decrease in the rate of profit resulting from the
continuous increase of constant capital (whence the capitalist stagna-
tion?), on the increase of the production of electrical power in the
world, on the development of metallurgy, on the gold crisis, on the
changes in character, functions, interests, and structure of social classes
and more particularly of the working class . . . Several times Fleisch-
man murmured: “Right, absolutely right . . . questionable, but . . .
worth considering . . . true on the whole or in trend . . .” He made
notes of data which he wanted to check in books by specialists. Next
came pages of enthusiastic or severe opinions on Trotsky. Kiril Rublev
praised his revolutionary intuition, his sense of Russian reality, his
“sense of victory,” his reasoned intrepidity; and deplored his “pride as

a great historic figure,” his “too self-conscious superiority,” his “inability
to make the mediocre follow him,” his “offense tactics in the worst
moments of defeat,” his “high revolutionary algebra perpetually cast
before swine, when the swine alone held the front of the stage . . .”
“Obviously, obviously,” Fleischman murmured, making no effort to
overcome his uneasiness.
Rublev must have been very sure that he was going to be shot, or he
would never have written such things? . . .
The tone of the writing changed, but the same inner conviction gave it
even more detachment. “We were an exceptional human accomplishment,
and that is why we are going under. A half century unique in history
was required to form our generation. Just as a great creative mind is a
unique biological and social accomplishment, caused by innumerable
interferences, the formation of our few thousand minds is to be ex-
plained by interferences that were unique. Capitalism at its apogee, rich
with all the powers of industrial civilization, was planted in a great
peasant country, a country of ancient culture, while a senile despotism
moved year by year toward its end. Neither the old castes nor the new
classes could be strong, neither the one nor the other could feel sure of
the future. We grew up amid struggle, escaping two profound captivities,
that of the old ‘Holy Russia,’ and that of the bourgeois West, at the same
time that we borrowed from those two worlds their most living elements:
the spirit of inquiry, the transforming audacity, the faith in progress of
the nineteenth-century West; a peasant people’s direct feeling for truth
and for action, and its spirit of revolt, formed by centuries of despotism.
We never had a sense of the stability of the social world; we never had
a belief in wealth; we were never the puppets of bourgeois individualism,
dedicated to the struggle for money; we perpetually questioned ourselves
about the meaning of life and we worked to transform the world . . .
“We acquired a degree of lucidity and disinterestedness which made
both the old and the new interests uneasy. It was impossible for us to adapt
ourselves to a phase of reaction; and as we were in power, surrounded
by a legend that was true, born of our deeds, we were so dangerous
that we had to be destroyed beyond physical destruction, our corpses
had to be surrounded by a legend of treachery . . .
“The weight of the world is upon us, we are crushed by it. All those
who want neither drive nor uncertainty in the successful revolution over-
whelm us; and behind them they have all those whom the fear of revo-
lution blinds and saps . . .” Rublev was of the opinion that the impla-
cable cruelty of our period is explained by its feeling of insecurity: fear

of the future . . . “What is going to happen in history tomorrow will be
comparable only to the great geological catastrophes which change the
face of the planet . .	—“We alone, in this universe in transformation,
had the courage to see clearly. It is more a matter of courage than of
intelligence. We saw that, to save man, what was needed was the attitude
of the surgeon. To the outside world, hungry for stability to the point of
shutting its eyes to the ever-darkening horizon, we were the intolerable
evil prophets of social cataclysms; to those who were comfortably estab-
lished inside our own revolution, we represented venturesomeness and
risk. Neither on one side nor the other did anyone see that the worst
venture, the hopeless venture, is to seek for immobility at a time when
continents are splitting up and breaking adrift. It would he so comfort-
ing to say to oneself that the days of creation are over: ‘Let us rest! We
are sure of all tomorrows!’”—“An immense rage of reprobation and
incomprehension rose up against us. But what sort of wild conspirators
were we? We demanded the courage to continue our exploit, and people
wanted nothing but more security, rest, to forget the effort and the blood
—on the eve of rains of blood!”—“Upon one point we lacked clarity and
daring: we were unable to perceive what the evil was which was sapping
our country and for which for a time there was no remedy. We ourselves
denounced as traitors and men of little faith those among us who re-
vealed it to us . . . Because we loved our work blindly, we too . . .”
Rublev refuted the executed Nicolas Ivanovich Bukharin who, during
the trial of March 1938, exclaimed: “We were before a dark abyss . . .”
(And now it became only a dialogue of the dead.) Rublev wrote: “On
the eve of our disappearance we do not reckon up the balance sheet of
a disaster, we bear witness to the fullness of a victory which encroached
too far upon the future and asked too much of men. We have not lived on
the brink of a dark abyss, as Nicolas Ivanovich said, for he was subject
to attacks of nervous depression—we are on the eve of a new cycle of
storms and that is what darkens our consciences. The compass needle
goes wild at the approach of magnetic storms . . .”—“We are terribly
disquieting because we might soon become terribly powerful again . . .”
“You thought well, Rublev,” said Fleischman, and it made him feel
a sort of pride.
He shut the notebook gently. So he would have closed the eyes of a
dead man. He heated the sealing wax and slowly let drops of it, like
burning blood, fall on the envelope which contained the notebooks. On
the wax he pressed the great seal of the Archives of the Commissariat of
the Interior: the proletarian emblem stood deeply printed.

About five o’clock Comrade Fleischman had himself driven to the
stadium where the Athletic Festival was in progress. He took a seat on
the official stand, among the decorated uniforms of the hierarchy. On
his left breast there were two medals: the Order of Lenin and the Order
of the Red Flag. The high, flat military cap increased the size of his fat
face, which with the passing years had come to look much like the face
of a huge frog. He felt emptied, anonymous, important: a general
identical with any general of any army, feeling the first touch of old age,
his flesh flabby, his spirit preoccupied by administrative details. Bat-
talions of athletes, the young women with their arching breasts preceding
the young men, marched past, necks straight, faces turned toward the
stands—where they recognized no one, since the Chief, whose colossal
effigy dominated the entire stadium, had not come. But they smiled at
the uniforms with cheerful confidence. Their footsteps on the ground
were like a rhythmic rain of hail. Tanks passed, covered with green
branches and flowers. Standing in the turrets, the machine gunners in
their black leather headgear waved bouquets tied with red ribbons.
High banks of cloud, gilded by the setting sun, deployed powerfully
over the sky.
Paris {Pre-St.-Gervais),
Agen, Marseille,
Ciudad Trujillo (Dominican Republic),
Mexico 1940-42.