David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (31 page)

However, I remember that she never kissed us. Besides, we were morose, cold children, at least I was. Only now and again, when she was very tired, would she stretch out her hand and stroke our hair, just once, slowly, as she sighed.

Her face was long and pale, with yellowish teeth and weary eyes that blinked behind her spectacles. She had delicate, clumsy hands that always dropped things in the house, that couldn’t sew or cook, but wrote constantly, coding messages, forging passports… I thought I had forgotten her features, what she looked like (so many years have passed by since then), but here they are, resurfacing once again in my memory.

Two or three nights a month, she would cross Lake Leman from Switzerland into France, carrying bundles of pamphlets and explosives. She would take me with her, perhaps to harden me to the dangerous life that was to be mine in years to come, in a kind of “revolutionary dynastic tradition,” perhaps to inspire trust in the customs officers, because I was so young, perhaps because my two brothers were dead and she didn’t want to leave me alone in the hotel, the same way that middle-class mothers might take their children with them to the cinema. I would fall asleep on the deck. It was usually winter; the lake was deserted, covered in a thick fog; the nights were freezing cold. Once in France, my mother would leave me for a few hours with some farmers, the Bauds, who lived in a house beside the lake. They had six or seven children; I remember a group of little ruddy-cheeked kids, very healthy but very stupid. There I drank piping hot coffee. I ate warm bread with chestnuts. The Bauds’ house— with its fires, the delicious aroma of coffee, the screaming children—was, to me, paradise on earth. They had a terrace, a sort of large wooden balcony that looked out over the lake, and, in winter, it was covered in snow and creaking ice.

I had two younger brothers; both had died. They’d also lived alone in a hotel for a while, like me. One of them died when he
was two, the other at three. I can particularly recall the night when the second one died; he was a good-looking boy, big and blond.

My mother was standing up, at the foot of the bed, an old bed made of dark wood. She held a lit candle in her hand and was watching the dying child. I was sitting on the floor beside her, and I could see her exhausted face, lit from below by the candle’s flame. The child had one or two little convulsions, looked up with a weary, astonished expression, and died. My mother didn’t move; her hand covering the flame was the only thing that was obviously trembling. Finally, she noticed me and wanted to say something (undoubtedly something like “Logna, death is part of nature”), but she just clenched her lips sadly and said nothing. She placed the dead child on his pillow, took my hand and brought me to a neighbour’s house. The silence, the darkness, and his pale face, his white nightshirt and long, fine blond hair— all this I remember as if it were a bewildering dream. Soon afterwards, she also died.

I was only ten years old then. I had inherited her predisposition to tuberculosis. The Revolutionary Committee lodged me at the home of Dr. Schwann. A naturalised Swiss citizen of Russian origin, he was one of the leaders of the Party. He owned a private clinic that had twenty beds in Monts, near Sierre, and it was there that I lived. Monts is a bleak village between Montana and Sierre, buried between dark fir trees and gloomy mountains, or perhaps that’s just how it seemed to me.

For years on end, I lived glued to a chaise-longue, on a balcony, seeing nothing of the world except the tops of the fir trees and, on the other side of the lake, a glass cage similar to ours that reflected the rays of the setting sun.

Later on, I was able to go out, down into the village, meeting the other patients along the only usable road. They were wrapped up in shawls, and we all climbed back together, breathing with difficulty, stopping after every few steps, counting the fir trees along the road, one by one, staring with hatred at the circle of mountains that shut out the sky. I can still see them, after all these years, just as I can smell the sanatorium—that odour of disinfectant and new linoleum—just as I can hear, in
my dreams, the sound
of the fohn,
the dry autumn wind, in the forest.

With Dr. Schwann, I studied foreign languages and medicine, which I particularly enjoyed. As soon as my health was better, I was given various assignments by the Revolutionary Committee in Switzerland and France.

I was a member of the Party by my very birth …

I
BEGAN WRITING
these notes thinking I would eventually write my autobiography. There’s so much time to fill. You have to do something at the end of your life, one way or another. But already, here I am, stopping. “A revolutionary education is difficult to explain in a way that is both sincere and instructive,” I recall that brave Hertz once said. And my code name, “Leon M.,” has its place in the iconography of the October Revolution, which no doubt should be left intact. The son of parents living in exile, brought up exclusively on revolutionary speeches, tracts, and models; and in spite of it all, I lacked strength and passion.

When I lived in Geneva, I would listen with envy as my friends talked about their youth. I recall a young man of thirty who had taken part in fourteen terrorist attacks—ofwhich four had been successful; four of these murders had been carried out in vicious cold blood, in the middle of the street. He was a pale red-head with small, delicate, sweaty hands. One December evening after a meeting of the Committee, when we were coming back along the peaceful, frozen streets of Geneva, he told me how he had run away from home at the age of sixteen and wandered the streets of Moscow for eighteen days.

“What you never did,” he said, smiling, “was to make your mother die of grief… or read illegal tracts by the light of a fire, like I did, when I was fifteen, at night, stretched out on the riverbank, in May…”

He spoke in a bizarre, rasping voice, in little rapid, breathless phrases, and sometimes, he would stop and say with a sigh: “The good old days…”

So true …

Later on, I also experienced exile, prison, the bunkers of the Pierre et Paul jail, the tiny cells, putrid-smelling in the summer
heat, where twenty or thirty of us were locked up together; the vast, dark, freezing-cold prisons in the countryside and the fortress where those condemned to death were held and where it was possible, by pressing your ear to certain places in the wall, to hear the echo of revolutionary songs coming from the women’s section.

But even now, I no longer appreciate the romantic side of the Revolution as much as I should.

An autobiography? Vanity. It would be better for me to remember certain things only for myself, as I did in the past. When I was in the state prisons they allowed us to write in notebooks, but then they destroyed them as soon as they were full of stories and memories.

Would I even have had the time to finish an autobiography? So much has happened, so many years gone by… I feel death approaching with a sense of weariness, of indifference, that is unmistakable: the debates, the changes within the Party, everything I used to feel so passionate about—I’m tired of all of it. Even my body is tired. More and more often, I want to turn over to face the wall, close my eyes, and fall into the deepest, sweetest sleep, forever.

AND
SO
I belonged to the Party through my birth, my childhood, through the conviction that a social revolution is inevitable, necessary, and fair, as fair as anything to do with human affairs could ever be. My love of power attracted me to it as much as my desire for a certain kind of human affection that I lacked, and it was the only place that I found it.

I like people, the masses. Here, near Nice, I live in Lourie’s house. It is a cube made of white stone, in the middle of a garden where no tree grows higher than a broomstick; the house is between two roads, one leading to Monaco and the other to the sea; you breathe in a fine dust here that is full of petrol and is finishing off my poor old lungs. I live alone; in the morning, an old woman comes in to clean the four empty rooms that make up my house; she prepares my food and leaves. But the sounds of life continue to surround me, and that is what I love, that is what pleases me, people, cars, trams going by, quarrels, shouting, laughter… fleeting silhouettes, the faces of strangers, conversations … Below, behind the bare little garden, where six delicate, sinuous bushes have been planted that will grow into peach trees, almond trees, goodness knows what, there is a kind of little Italian bistro, with a player piano, and benches beneath an arbour. Working men—Italian, French—go there to drink.

At night, when they begin to walk up the twisting road that runs along the sea, I come out of the house; I sit down on the small low wall that separates the garden from the bistro; I listen to them. I watch them.

I can see the small square lit up by paper lanterns, the pale light reflected on their faces. They go home late. The rest of the night passes more quickly that way, thank goodness, for I cough and fall asleep only when it’s morning. Why do I sit here looking at the flowers and the sea? I hate nature. I have only ever been
happy in cities, those ugly, dirty cities with houses full of people, and on the streets in summer, when it’s hot, where I walk by strange faces and weary bodies. These are the hours I wish to kill, when solitude and silence surge up, when the last of the cars are returning from Monte Carlo along the coast road. Since I became ill, I am overwhelmed by memories. Before, I used to work. But my work is finished now.

And so I began my life as a revolutionary at the age of eighteen; I was given several missions in the south of France; then I lived in Paris for a long time. In 1903, the Committee sent me to Russia. I was to kill the Minister of Education. It was after this event that I broke away from the terrorist section of the Party andjoined T. After the Courilof affair I was condemned to death, but a few days before my execution, Alexis, the heir to the throne, was born, and I was saved by the amnesty granted. My sentence was commuted to hard labour for life. When I learned that I had been spared, I cannot recall feeling anything except profound indifference. In any case, I was ill, I was coughing up buckets of blood, and I was sure to die on the way to Siberia. But you should never count on death any more than you should count on life.

I lived and was cured in Siberia, in the penal colony. When I escaped, the Revolution of 1905 had started.

Even though I was so exhausted at night that I would collapse and fall asleep as if I were dying, I have happy memories of 1905 and those first months of the Revolution.

I would go with R. and L. to the factories, to the workers’ meetings. I have always had a piercing, unpleasant-sounding voice, and my weak lungs prevented me from speaking out loud for long. As for the others, they would rant at the workers for hours on end. I would leave the platform and mix with the crowd, explaining whatever they found confusing, advising them, helping them. Amidst the heat and smoke in the room, their pale faces, their sparkling eyes, the shouts coming from their open mouths, their anger, even their stupidity, gave me the same feeling of euphoria you get from wine. And I liked the danger. I liked the sudden silences, how they held their breath in anticipation, the look of panic on their faces when they saw
the
dvornik,
the informer who was in the pay of the police, walking past the window.

Into the dark night, those damp, freezing autumn nights in St. Petersburg, the workers would leave, one by one. They melted into the fog like shadows. We would disappear after they had gone; to throw the police off the trail, we would roam the streets until dawn, stopping only when we reached the dirty little
traktirs
where we hid.

I left Russia only to return on the eve of the October Revolution. I have described this period and the one that followed in my previous writings on politics and history.

After
1917
, I became the Bolshevik, Leon M. In newspapers all over the world, they must have depicted me wearing a helmet on my head and with a knife between my teeth. I was given a job in the Tcheka Secret Police, where I remained for one year. But it requires fierce, personal hatred to carry out such terrible work without flinching. As for me …

What is truly strange is that I, who spared not only innocent lives but several guilty ones as well (for at certain moments I was overcome by a kind of indifference, and the prisoners reaped the benefits), I was hated even more than some of my comrades. For example, I was hated more than Nostrenko, the frenzied sailor who executed the prisoners himself; he was an extraordinary show-offwho wore make-up and powder and left his shirt open, exposing a chest as smooth and white as a woman’s. I can still see him, a combination of bad actor, drunkard, and pederast. Or Ladislas, the hunchback Pole, with his drooping, scarlet lip, slashed and scarred from an old wound.

I think the prisoners condemned to death vaguely consoled themselves with the idea that they were dealing with madmen or monsters; whereas
I
was an ordinary, sad little man who coughed, wore glasses, had a little snub nose and delicate hands.

When the policies of the leaders changed, I was sent into exile. Since then I have lived near Nice, supported by the modest income from books, newspaper articles, Party magazines. I ended up in Nice because I am living under the passport of a certain Jacques Lourie, who died of typhus in the Pierre et Paul Fortress, imprisoned for revolutionary conspiracy. He was a Jew
from Latvia, a naturalised French citizen. He had no family, he was utterly alone, and he owned a small villa which I consequently inherited, as it were. The danger of running into his friends or neighbours pleased me somewhat. But everyone had forgotten Jacques Lourie. I live here, and will probably soon die here.

The house is small and not very comfortable, and Lourie, who was short of money, didn’t have the walls surrounding it built high enough to stop people looking in.

On the left, there is a kind of enclosure, a piece of land for sale where goats come to graze on the thick sweet-smelling grass, between the abandoned bricks and stones. To the right, there is another little stone building, just like mine but painted pink, that is rented out to different couples each year. The road from Nice to Monte Carlo runs behind the house; below is the viaduct. The sea is far away. The house is cool and bright.