Birth of Our Power (37 page)

We had stopped for a moment in the middle of these white splendors, in front of the granite-banked Neva, a river of ice on which human ants were moving back and forth on yellowing paths. Behind us rose the Marble Palace, as dead as the Theban tombs, all in stern, sharp outlines, all in flat, polished surfaces of a light, dusk like gray. “Men,” said Gregor, “move across that hard ice never thinking of the deep river rolling along beneath. The revolution lives on a layer of ice too, and we do not know what dark ocean lies beneath, ready to engulf us tomorrow.” Engulf us, eh? What of it! As if it were we who really mattered … But no, on the contrary, it is we who matter, we who must obstinately persist in living, in holding out despite everything, in doing at last what we have so much wanted to do … The times when it was necessary for us to know how to accept prison, exile, poverty, and—the best, the strongest of us—death itself are in the past. From now on we must persist obstinately in living and only consent to everything for that! We were looking at a tall gold spire atop a church dome, surmounted by a lantern of delicately sculpted filigree, which rose over the old stone-colored bastions of the fortress, lying low across the opposite bank. We repeated to ourselves: “This is Peter and Paul.” Those who, in these bastions, had waited ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, until madness, until death, for the days which we were living; those who had been led along the battlements to the scaffold, those who had been allowed to die of hunger or to disappear there—but where was the Alexis ravelin? our eyes searched into the distance for the emplacement of its dungeons—had thus been right! Now it was our turn to be right, whatever the thickness of the ice might be! “Yes, but it's much more difficult,” the youngest among us said naively. We burst into laughter.

Amid a great clatter of clanking metal, a filthy streetcar—on whose windows the frost had traced a luxuriant flowering of delicate ferns—so overcrowded that you couldn't even move—so that an odor of grease, of sweat, of stale cloth and wet leather suffocated you—brought us, Sonnenschein and myself, back toward the Smolny Institute, the seat of government. The dreary façade was already disappearing into the fog. The narrow muzzles of cannon, placed between the columns of the peristyle, pointed their blind menace into the cold night. At the foot of a white staircase down which a double file of young ladies wearing the wide, brilliant collarettes of daughters of the nobility had only lately trod, stood a soldier wearing a banker's fur cape, the velvet collar raised, filing slips of pink paper on the blade of his bayonet. In the commander's absence, a young lad armed with a revolver was writing out these passes in a room on the ground floor. At his worktable, surrounded by telephones, alone in a huge room from whose windows you could see the icy river and the boundless solitudes, we discovered a man wearing an old unbuttoned uniform tunic who told us, between two phone calls:

“Ah so! You've begun to run the rounds of the offices! I sympathize with you. You will discover that they are no good for anything yet. Nests for saboteurs, scoundrels, thieves, incompetents, do-nothings, idiots, and little young ladies with powdered noses. We'll put them in order in time, if they don't hang us on the way.”

He stamped a huge red seal on a piece of notepaper covered by a few lines of writing.

“Take this and run over to Social Aid before they close. Take the Secretariat's car. I'll tell the commander.”

We were obliged to abandon that worn-out luxury car—its flower holders stuffed with cigarette butts—along the way, for its motor stopped dead every five minutes after a pitiful series of explosions. The chauffeur disappeared into a nearby house, looking for a telephone from which to ask for reinforcements from the central garage, which was called, in order to emphasize its importance, the Auto Combat Service. After a few minutes wait, the huge red seal opened the oak doors for us, guarded by an old footman in livery. For twenty-seven years he had been attached to this corner of the universe, that is to say to this corner of the corridor at the top of a marble stairway, and he was still there, full of a distressed scorn, already ministering to the seventh revolutionary institution in fourteen months. There, by an accident which seemed to us to touch upon the marvelous, we found a suite of impeccably kept
offices functioning noiselessly under the direction of a woman with close-cropped gray hair. Her cold blue eyes fixed us with a sharp stare (already, I thought, the habit of making judgments; already the necessity, among us who call each other “comrades,” far a great deal of mistrust; already the second thought that we may be lying … ) “Where do you come from? Who are you? What do you want?” Then her face changed, as the water brightens when the clouds have passed, revealing the vast shining circles which cavort on its surface.

“Heavens, where are we going to lodge your families? Four, you say? Would you like the Grand Duchesses' rooms in the Winter Palace? You'd never be able to heat them. Besides, you would find nothing to burn there but the furniture, which would be too bad even though it is in very bad taste … I think I still have the apartment of a Counselor of the Empire …”

The Levines moved in there two hours later. It was on the second floor of a tall gray house, a series of twelve rooms abandoned to the cold, the darkness, the strange desolation of places where life has suddenly come to a halt. The grand salon seemed to have been turned topsyturvy in a brawl. The grand piano, covered with a layer of dust, had been pushed out into the middle of the floor. The naiad coming out of her bath, attributed to Bryulov, which had smiled down for twenty years on several generations of ladies, was hanging crooked … A cooking pot full of mold was standing on the marble windowsill. In the open drawers of a little mahogany secretary you could see a jumble of photographs of children and schoolboys, seashells from the Lido, cards postmarked Wiesbaden, a whole pile of those dusty nothings to which our memories cling: favors, ribbons, sachets, trinkets, calendars, old-fashioned jewelry. And fragments of letters: “… met Mama on the Promenade des Anglais …” In Counselor of the Empire Benedick Illarionovitch Stavski's study, behind the master's straight-back armchair bearing a carved monogram, the back wall was entirely covered by a glassed-in bookcase in which the massive volumes of the
COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE,
boxed in green cardboard, were lined up. One could easily imagine the late master, as he appeared on a photograph which had been used to pick up sweepings in the next room standing behind that table: narrow forehead, stern monocled eye; an intelligent, egotistical industrialist, resembling a Roman senator; and a little girl bursting into that austere study clapping her hands: “Papa, little Papa, it's the revolution! If you knew how happy everyone is in the streets. I saw some soldiers with red ribbons, how pretty it is!”

I arrived there in the middle of the night. Darkness reigned over the city. Not a light anywhere. It was a necropolis buried under snow; but at times you could make out the uncertain glow of a night light in some window where people were awake. On a square, in front of the Opera, I stumbled against the carcass of a horse lying at the foot of an unrecognizable monument between two banks of hardened snow. Far off in the distance a gunshot reverberated for a long time in a silence as deep as the darkness. Perhaps a sailor, guarding a woodpile, shooting suddenly, without knowing why, at the shadows or at the shadow of an enemy. There were no stars. The emptiness seemed to stretch out over the city and, slowly, irresistibly, in a frozen dizziness, to draw it in: the dark stones and the snow, blending together, seemed about to vanish …

An old woman wearing pince-nez, and a peevish man, whose features I could not make out but whom the old woman called “Doctor,” were on guard at the threshold of the house. They struck a light in order to stare at me. The Levines had gathered in the smallest of the rooms, probably a nursery, furnished with two iron bedsteads with gilded balls on which only the mattresses remained … (one of them appeared to be stained with blood). This candle-lit room was like a corner in steerage on an immigrant ship. The children had fallen asleep on the baggage, rolled up in blankets. The mother was resting in a low armchair. The young woman, like a solemn child, with large limpid eyes which seemed by turns distended by fear and then victorious over the fleeting shadows, was dreaming before the open stove, the reddish glow of which illuminated from below her graceful hands, her thin neck, and her fine features. Old Levine's footsteps echoed on the floor of the grand salon, plunged in darkness. He entered, his arms loaded with heavy green-covered books which he dropped softly next to the stove. Silent laughter illuminated his ruddy face.

“The laws are burning!” he said.

The friendly warmth in front of which the young woman was stretching out her hands came from the flames devouring Tome XXVII of the
COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE.
For fun, I pulled out a half-burned page, edged with incandescent lace. The flames revealed these words forming a chapter heading: C
ONCERNING
L
ANDED
P
ROPERTY
… and, farther down: “…
the rights of collateral heirs
…”

It was only then, after thirty harassing hours, that I remembered the letter I had received the previous day. I had carried it through this unknown city, hereafter ours, without doing more than glancing at it very superficially, so absorbed had I been by the at times forbidding novelty of things. (Besides, I wasn't expecting news from anyone, not having left any particular ties behind me.) The letter was postmarked Spain. With the laws burning, I sat down on a stool near the stove, in that comforting warmth and that sudden peace, in which only the even breathing of the children was audible. Dario, El Chorro, José, Joaquin, Comrades, how I remembered you all at once! How I remembered the city which we had not been able to take, our hope, our will, our power, our real power, since I was about to go to sleep at last in a conquered city where everything was booty taken in the height of battle—everything, even this moment, this shelter, this warmth which allow me to think of you. All at once it seemed to me that Dario was about to walk in, to shrug his invisible burden off his shoulders, to say, in that joyful tone of voice reserved for glad evenings spent together, “Brrr! What cold, my friends!” then to turn toward me, his palms open, his eyes full of mischief, “Well, old man, what was I telling you? You see that we
can
take cities! and it's not over yet, and we will take the world!” I unfolded the letter. It was in El Chorro's uneven but forceful script. “Gusano sends his regards. He's sure you haven't forgotten him, for people only forget whole men, he says …” No, I haven't forgotten you, Gusano—a more complete man in what is left of your mutilated flesh than many of those who pity you because they still have all four of their slaves' or Pharisees' limbs. Perhaps I hesitated to read on. I skimmed over those four pages of writing once more, at a glance, and I stumbled upon one line, no different from all the others in the forest of symbols, which said:

“… ever since they killed our Dario …”

Leningrad, 1929–30

Of the many people who were helpful in making this publication possible, I would like to thank the following:

Raya Dunayevskaya, a genuine American Marxist-Humanist, who first introduced me to the works of Victor Serge;

The Columbia University Libraries which supported me financially in gathering rare and out-of-print works by Victor Serge;

Peter Sedgwick, the British translator of Serge's
Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
who unselfishly helped and encouraged me;

Vladimir Kibalchich, Victor Serge's son, a good comrade and a fine artist;

Eugene Eoyang, a book editor who likes good books;

Daniel Aaron, Daniel Bell, Erich Fromm, Robert Herbert, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Henry L. Roberts, I.F. Stone, and Bertram D. Wolfe, who were kind enough to write letters supporting the publication in English of Serge's early novels;