The Case of Comrade Tulayev (26 page)

“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 clearness. 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 overgrown paths, feeling strangely depressed, finding no comfort in either the flowers or the fresh morning air. The hill beyond was already beginning 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 prearranged 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 immediately 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 salvation. 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 winning 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 saying; 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 proletariat, 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 assumed 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 rail; 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 Trotskyist, 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 considering 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 horizon, where sea and sky mingled. Emptiness. From the emptiness there issued a confusion which was not yet oppressive, which was even attractive. 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 military 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 intoxicating, 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 lunge 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 kolkhoze …”

“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 transparent 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, gone 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 Europeans 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 consciousness 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 understand 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, bulging forehead, his intelligent blue eyes, his ravaged face, still able to smile, questioning himself before the microphone of the Supreme Tribunal, 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 Dürer 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.