Birth of Our Power (35 page)

“So, we are arriving. So, it's true. It's real. Can you believe it?”

“I believe it.”

The lieutenant, dressed in horizon blue, who is passing behind us on the deck, cannot understand why we suddenly take each other by the shoulders, like men who find each other at last after having looked for each other for a long time and whose lightheartedness is such that they would like to fight joyfully …

The
Andros
has entered a snowstorm. The siren wails every quarter of an hour. We are passing through old mine fields in this white fog. Heavy floating blocks of ice strike the ship's hull with a dull noise. Sonnenschein, hunched as always, his pince-nez askew, takes my arm in the stark white second-class corridor. His happiness is expressed in wringing his hands without reason and in a dull desire to laugh—a low, mischievous laugh. “Listen to a good story,” he says. I suspect that he actually makes them up himself; this one, however, ends with a proverb of Solomon which he pronounces with a kind of somewhat confused gravity: “As in water face answereth to face, / So the heart of man to man.”

“Isn't that so?”

A long whistle pierces through the storm over the sea; the
Andros
comes to a halt. We look at each other, smiling for an instant, in the sudden silence, and we enter the Levines' cabin.

There are seven of them, including four children and a very young woman, the most solemn of the children. The father's voice, energetic and talkative, fills the narrow cabin, which is full of shining brass work and has doubtless never yet seen such passengers—immigrants suddenly come up from steerage. The mother, soft, white, a little heavy, watches over her brood with an imperious love. Her life consists in nourishing—first with her body, then with her breasts, then with her housewife's hands—these greedy lives that have come out of her without her knowing why, that have martyred her on hospital beds in Buenos Aires, that have made her happy, anxious, cruel. The father speaks a polyglot enriched by the slang of the docks. A good animal warmth emanates from them and attracts us—the homeless, familyless, used to cold beds. “My children,” says Levine, “will grow up free. Famine? I've known it all my life.” Like most eloquent phrases pronounced with sincerity by people who don't know how to tone down their involuntary cleverness, this one rings a little false. For his whole life this man has been battling like a primitive in foreign cities so that his kids should have warm bellies in the evening, covered by blankets bought on credit. He has been knavish and valiant, ardent and clever, lucky and unlucky, never forgetting however that it is necessary to struggle, as well as one can, against the rich—the rich whom you admire, envy, detest—to organize unions, to support strikes, to send money to distant prisons, to hide contraband … He tells us about a pitiful, jobless day spent searching for bread for his brood in a large, opulent port city. Was he lucky, that day, mistaking one streetcar for another and ending up in the harbor just in time for the arrival of an American freighter? Thus his life took a new track, thirteen years ago … The young woman, still only a solemn child, with narrow hips and breasts barely suggested under her blue jersey, listens distractedly. Her features are barely sketched in; the slight carmine of her lips is going to disappear or become more pronounced; her brow is half-hidden under a cloud of hair; she has a direct glance, timid and luminous; large eyes the color—sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes gray—of the sea we are crossing. “The greatest happiness,” she told us one day, “is to have children.”

OUR FOOTSTEPS SINK INTO THE SOFT SNOW. WE ARE ENTERING A NEW NIGHT
, biting with cold, transparent as if under a totally black crystal dome. Our convoy moves ahead by groups, loaded down with packages, tripping over invisible obstacles under the snow. Children are crying, terrified by such deep darkness, their fingers frostbitten. We are being escorted by gaunt shadows. They move about lightly at the dividing line between reality and the bottomless darkness which begins at either edge of the road under the dense blackness of tall pines. I know that they are blond Finns, dressed in long overcoats, armed with the short carbines of border guards. Their eyes, in which the image of cold lakes is reflected, have been watching over us for two days with an impassable hostility. They are mute. They move forward, opening up the night. They halt. The darkness slowly engulfs them. We are still moving ahead into a sort of glacial no man's land … A motionless shape emerges suddenly from the night, so close when we notice it that we can touch it. It is a soldier, standing stock-still, leaning with both hands on his rifle, covered with earth, wearing an astrakan hat, bearded up to his glowing wolf-like eyes—an emaciated
muzhik.
The red star incrusted in the fur above his forehead glows black like a fantastic wound on an animal skin. We greet him in a low voice, with an exalted, but curiously heavy heart. “Greetings, brother!” Our brother, this soldier, stares at us severely … Brothers? brothers? Are we really brothers? What man is not a threat to another man? Karl plants himself in front of him and his resonant voice, dispelling all unreality, cuts through the night. The no man's land has been crossed.

“Greetings, comrade. What's the news?”

“Nothing … Hunger … Nothing.”

What is nothing? Hunger?

“Do you have any bread?”

We have some. Take, Comrade. Bread, that is the essential thing.

Lanterns ran up and down the tracks. A dark shape counted us without seeming to see, us as we moved by. We might have thought we were in a hostile desert. The locomotive whistled. The coaches were dark and frozen, but inside them we found straw on the long lateral bunks, a good cast-iron stove and piles of cordwood. The fire sparkled; the glow of candles surrounded us, in this encampment on wheels, with a primitive intimacy.

We passed slowly through a strange, black and white lunar landscape. Not a single light. The train rolled through this frozen desert until dawn, which rose over the crystalline, iridescent snows, as pure as on mountaintops. Little wooden houses appeared, grouped around the blue bulbs of a church. Fields of snow were stretched out to either side, piled up in oddly shaped drifts: we perceived at last that it was a deserted station. The sky had a blue, near-white, unutterable purity. The first houses of the city appeared in absolute silence, immobile, peaceful. Our hearts were more and more constricted. Not a soul. Not a noise. Not a tuft of smoke. This implacable splendor of the snow, the polar limpidity of the sky. The dead houses were terrifying.

Ah!

A thin line of smoke rose above a chimney. And all at once, a marvelous apparition, a golden-haired young woman, wearing a red kerchief on her head, doming out of a gray hovel with a hatchet in her hand, began to chop wood, some hundred yards off. We listened avidly to that rhythmic sound, we admired the virile curve of her bare arms. Dmitri, whose last strength was waning, forced a smile.

“We are out of the darkness at last,” he said.

The train came to a halt. We had spent the day rolling through the deserts of the outlying railroad yards. The
Internationale
broke out in a din of brasses. A long red banner, running across the fronts of the wooden shelters, cried out:
“WELCOME TO THE CAPTIVES OF IMPERIALISM!”
The snow-covered wooden platform seemed deserted, however. We saw only about thirty people huddling under a wide calico banner
(T
HE
R
EIGN OF THE
W
ORKERS
W
ILL
L
AST
F
OREVER!
),
the band, and a few men dressed in black leather and carrying heavy Mausers in wooden holsters
at their waists. The brasses fell silent; a tall devil sheathed in a reversed sheepskin, but wearing a light English cap on his head, jumped up on a bench. He had a resounding voice, made for dominating crowds, which flowed over our little group and carried off into the distance in the vast empty station. He began to speak all at once, without looking at us, his eyes circled by little silver-rimmed glasses, his chin black, his mouth enormous. While he was talking, we noticed the motionless musicians, a dozen yellowed faces, bony noses, beards like burnt grass—faces lined with deep fatigue. They were wearing old, unmatched uniforms, all equally gray, and various forms of headgear: huge white fur bonnets, astrakan hats, the flat caps of the old army. The trombone player had put on a pair of magnificent green gloves. Others had red hands, stiffened by the cold. Some wore old gloves, of leather or cloth and full of holes. They were of every age, from eighteen to sixty. An old man who might once have been fat, now flabby with hanging cheeks, stared stupidly at us next to a skinny kid, blowing on his fingers. By their indifferent expressions, their undernourished looks, the incongruousness of their dress, high boots, Belgian uniform leggings, civilian trousers falling over down-at-heel rubbers—by their hunched shoulders, their weary and detached attitudes—they expressed only hunger and fatigue. They were freezing. Never could the idea come to anyone to rush toward them with outstretched hand saying
Brothers!
for they belonged entirely to a world where words, feelings, fine sentiments shed their prestige immediately on contact with primordial realities. One could only have talked to them about a fire in front of which you could warm up; about shoes to be mended, about flannels to keep your empty stomach warm, about hot soup with which to fill it. I stared intensely at these silent men, standing there in such great distress. I thanked them for teaching me already about true fraternity, which is neither in sentiments nor in words, but in shared pain and shared bread. If I had no bread to share with them, I must keep silent and take my place at their side: and we would go off somewhere to fight or to fall together, and would thus be brothers, without saying so and perhaps without even loving each other. Loving each other, what for? It is necessary to stay alive. At that instant the Agitator's words came through to me. Endlessly he was repeating the same gesture of hammering a nail into hard wood with sharp blows. He was giving all the capitals of the world to the Revolution: Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Rome, Calcutta. He cried: “Liebknecht!” and

“… we have taken Revel! We have taken Riga! We have taken Ufa! We have taken Minsk! We will take Vilna! We will conquer famine, typhus, lice, imperialism! We will not stop, neither on the Vistula nor on the Rhine! Long live …”

He stopped short and disappeared into the group, now revivified by the explosion of the brasses. The Agitator, without looking back at us, crossed the deserted rooms with broad strides. He had to be at the Baltic factory at five o'clock to give a report on the international situation at the workers' conference where the Mensheviks were cooking something up. And we had nothing to teach him. He was suffering from a stomach virus; his boots were leaky.

Who is that other fellow?