Birth of Our Power (26 page)

Whatever is necessary, no matter what the cost.

I recently reread a forgotten page of Korolenko, relating the following:

On May 19, 1864, a low black scaffold was raised on a seldom-frequented square in Petersburg. The scaffold supported a pillory from which chains ending in large rings were hanging. The sky was gray; a fine rain was soaking through everything; groups of curiosity seekers gathered behind the lines of mounted gendarmes and police. And a thirty-five-year-old man, thin and pale, blond, with a pointed beard and a look of concentration behind a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles was made to climb that scaffold. He was wearing a fur-collared overcoat; at first he remained standing in front of the pillory, his back turned on the public, while an officer wearing a three-cornered hat read out the decree condemning him to public disgrace and to forced labor. The crowd could only hear a feeble murmur of words; horses were snorting, the rain was falling noiselessly, endlessly washing the impoverished faces and things. Then the executioner appeared; he brusquely tore the hat off the man who was now facing the crowd, his large stubborn brows, flaxen hair lying over the right temple, and singularly attentive expression now clearly visible. From the height of a pillory be contemplated the world. They put the chains on him; he crossed his chained arms over his chest. The executioner made him kneel. He
wiped his damp glasses with his finger. The executioner broke his useless sword over his head and dropped the two pieces into the mud on either side of the scaffold. A young woman threw some flowers toward the condemned man: they too fell into the mud at the feet of a colossal gendarme whose horse seemed to be made of bronze. Poor people were murmuring that this educated man, this lord, must indeed be a very great criminal. Siberia would be too good for him! His name was Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky: he was without doubt one of the best minds in the country. The youth turned toward him as to a guide. From the depths of his study, he liberated them, taught them to think with the rest of Europe, prepared them for action. He was at once powerful and impotent, like the mind itself. Informers, publicists, forgers, secret agents, factotum senators, the Emperor had conspired to bring him low. Under this interminable rain, attached to that pillory, he was ending his career as a thinker for whom the world was not only to be understood but also to be transformed. His book, written in a cell, was to survive. He lived alone for twenty years in Siberian hamlets.

Every event is the result of an endless chain of causes. And this too, at a distance of a half-century, appears to me as a cause. Chernyshevsky in chains, wiping off his glasses in order to go on seeing the faces of life, listening to the dull rumblings of the crowd under the rain, explains for me the victory of millions of men on the march, besieging palaces, winning over squadrons and fortresses with harangues, burning the lords' manor houses, hanging the hangmen, finally declaring peace on the world and covered with opprobrium by the muzzled, slaughtered, and bamboozled peoples … They say that the seeds discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs germinated. Nothing is ever lost. How many of us in the past, how many of us are there even now, in all the prisons of the world, lulling ourselves to sleep with this certainty? And this force too will not be lost …

There is always, in the depths of the soul, in its secret folds, an insidious voice which would like to argue:

“Yes, but the man on the pillory was lost. His intelligence was extinguished like a useless fire set by lightning in the Siberian wilds: it neither guides nor warms anyone. Humanity on the march has endless centuries and lives. Chernyshevsky had only his life.

“Wouldn't he have lost a good deal more had he ended up as an academician?”

THE NEXT DAY WE ARRIVED AT THE DETENTION CAMP FOR SUSPECTS AT TRÉCY
. It was a vast abandoned convent, way out in the country, in the middle of beautiful, flat land furrowed with sunken hedge-lined lanes and roads hemmed by poplars stretching toward peaceful blue horizons. Just beyond the archway, the extremely simple, steepleless church, with its peaked blue-slate roof surmounted by a graceful stone Virgin, opened onto a courtyard covered all over with green ivy. The camp administration, occupied several small, low houses with window boxes full of carefully arranged flowerpots. Another gate, guarded by a sentry, gave onto a vast rectangular paved courtyard. On three sides were white buildings; at the end a grill hidden by chestnut trees. From here, the church with its soft slaty hues and that graceful Virgin crowned like a queen overlook dreary barracks where clothes are drying on the window sills. The still-generous November sun has drawn the inhabitants of this closed village out of their lairs: Orientals wearing red fezzes or black toques and long mountain coats are squatting along the chalky wall. An old Albanian is telling the heavy black beads of his perpetual rosary. His bones must be as hard as stones.

Some young men are chasing each other amid peals of laughter farther off among the trees. A buccaneer, high boots, red wool jacket, dented felt hat, rugged face bearded to the eyes, the heavy scrutinizing gaze of a man who buys and sells stolen horses, painted women, forged titles and contraband is walking arm in arm with a tall Serbian officer whose patched tunic has only light patches in the place of insignia. Other more ordinary-looking strollers are pacing up and down under the covered gallery which extends along the side of one of the buildings. Two men are washing under the pump, each in turn pumping for the other: a ruddy chest, a ruffled soapy, tawny-blond Scandinavian's head; a pair of powerful black shoulders of Herculean musculature—but, but, it's
Faustin! Faustin drying himself in a leisurely fashion with a gray towel! He strikes his chest with both fists. The Scandinavian, cupping his hands, throws an unexpected bowl of water right into his face. And now they are boxing joyfully, floundering about in the soapy water, the blond streaming, the black shining. Closed fists thud against resilient bodies. It's good to go at it like that, with all your strength, against a solid chest with a manly heart tireless under the robust carcass of muscle and bone, rolling with the punches, returning the punches; it's good to catch hold of a hundred pounds of force thrown out on the end of your opponent's fist without flinching, when they miss the target, glancing off your ribs. Eh, you bastard! If you had nailed me with that one! It only missed by a hair—and now it's my turn, take that … Missed?—No, not quite, take that—you got me—now! Faustin is leading the dance; he pivots on his heels, ducks under a right to the face by the Scandinavian and suddenly staggers, hit hard three or four times, so fast, from all sides, that I can't tell where any more. Nounés stamps his foot with enthusiasm.

“Christ!” growls the Negro. “I've had it!”

“Tchort!
[the Devil!]” blurts out the other, who turns out to be Russian, not Scandinavian.

We form a circle around them. And Faustin is not Faustin: this fellow is broader, with a larger mouth and a low forehead.

We could be on the main square of a bizarre village where there aren't any women but where strollers from many nations rub elbows around an itinerant boxing match.

And just then I notice, striding across the courtyard, with his long steps, his silky beard, and his crooked half-smile as always, Sam, my old Sam, exactly as he appeared not long ago on the boulevards in quest of a flag for his machine gunners …

“So many high-ranking ‘comrades' had their eyes on us that it couldn't last,” he says.

He leads me through this city isolated from the world by a double ring of barbed wire, a row of sentries, a low wall covered with fragments of broken bottles: not much, this last obstacle, but no one has yet reached it. There, on the ground floor, the Balkans: a whole roomful of anti-Venizelos Greeks, of Macedonians who really can't be classified either as Greeks, Serbs, or Bulgarians and who only want to be themselves; of refugees of the Chetniks who have been holding out
in the mountains for years, against all powers. It's only through error, negligence, chance circumstance, or lack of evidence that they haven't put that old man, Kostia the Silent to the sword. He is sitting cross-legged now on his hammock cover telling the black beads of his rosary while two young men argue in low voices in front of him, questioning him in turn with their eyes. Gray whiskers bristle on his granite chin; his nostrils are wide and dark. He knows all the secrets of the Vardar mountains, but he is as silent as a tomb (and several executed traitors are sleeping in that tomb) impenetrably polite, severe, firm, loyal and perfidious. Here's the story they tell: when another Chetnik chieftain sold out to the people in Sofia, Kostia became his friend, pretended to become his accomplice, and during a feast, in the midst of his companions, at the moment of swearing fraternal oaths killed him. How is this known? “Ah, that …” The Greeks and Macedonians keep to themselves, in deep silence, idle, meditative, sewing up their ragged clothing, picking their fleas, brewing their coffee, famished and unyielding. Other rooms house Russians, Jews, Alsatians, Belgians, Rumanians, Spaniards, thieves, marauders, adventurers, phony foreign noblemen, probable spies, certain victims, unlucky people, vagabonds, second offenders, undesirables, Germanophiles, simpleminded people, rebels, revolutionaries. There are Jewish tailors and restaurant owners guilty of having elbows on the counter, maintained the integrity of the Bolsheviks; shady interpreters who try to pass themselves off as “political” too, but who in reality used to guide American soldiers to bordellos; convicts coming from penitentiaries who feel
free
because bells no longer direct their mechanical steps in the endless round of dead days; vagrants of uncertain nationality picked up around the camps; Alsatians suspected of illegal trafficking with the enemy or denounced in anonymous letters in villages which have been taken and retaken; businessmen from friendly nations, filthily compromised and strangely protected; deported Belgians with no more territory; Russian sailors known around the ports as troublemakers, defeatists, syndicalists, anarchists, suspected Bolsheviks and Bolshevik suspects … There are the rich: the ones who eat as much as they want every day, drink wine at the canteen, dress well, are waited upon, pay for their pleasures; there are the miserable, those fallen into the depths of poverty, like old Antoine, a hobo for the past thirty years, driven by the war from his habitual roads in the Ardennes, who picks up potato peelings, carrot leaves, half-gnawed bones every night out of the garbage heap and makes succulent stews out of them in old
“monkey-meat” cans over twig fires—too filthy even to be approached, he leaves a trail of fleas behind wherever he goes.

“Let him croak, the vermin! A public nuisance!” say Blin and Lambert, two gay dogs in sweaters, red-cheeked, inseparable, living together in a comfortable little room above the hole in the wall where the old man sleeps, rolled up in a ball, on a nauseating pile of straw. Blin and Lambert, a pair of gourmets, spend their time fixing chow, reading the papers, playing cards. Half-dressed pinup girls clipped from the pages of
La Vie Parisienne
brighten up their décor, which is that of a pair of sybarites who are very glad to be here where it's warm, and not at the Front, not in prison …