The Case of Comrade Tulayev (43 page)

“You have had some suicides?”

An officer with cropped hair answered, speaking very quickly:

“Only one. Personal reasons. Two attempts — both men have acknowledged their misconduct, and reports on them are good.”

All this took place completely outside reality, in a world as insubstantial and superficial as an airy vision. Then suddenly reality forced itself upon him; it was a painted wooden lectern, on which he laid his heavy, blue-veined, hairy hand, a hand which had a life of its own. He became aware of it, looked at it for a long moment, observed too the minute details of the wood, and out of that real wood, out of that hand, there came to him a simple decision: He would face the entire reality of the moment, three hundred strange faces, different yet alike, each one of them silently triumphing over uniformity. Attentive, anonymous, molded in a flesh that suggested metal, what did they expect of him? What was he to say to them that would be basically true? Already he heard his own voice, heard it with nervous displeasure, because it was speaking vain words, words he had glimpsed in the printed speech, words long known by heart, read a thousand times in editorials, the sort of words of which Trotsky once said that when you spoke them you felt as if you were chewing cotton batting … Why have I come here? Why have they come here? Because we are trained to obedience. Nothing is left of us but obedience. They do not know it yet. They do not suspect that my obedience is deadly. Everything that I say to them, even if it is as true as the whiteness of snow, becomes spectral and false because of obedience. I speak, they listen, some of them perhaps try to understand me, and we do not exist: we obey. A voice within him answered: To obey is still to exist. And he continued the debate: It is to exist as numbers and machines … He went on delivering the prepared speech. He saw Russians with shaved heads, the strong race which we formed by freeing the serfs, then by breaking their will, then by teaching them to resist us unendingly, thereby creating within them a new will, despite ourselves and against ourselves. In one of the front rows sat a Mongolian, arms crossed, small head held erect, looking sternly into Kondratiev's face. Eyes eager to the point of cruelty. He was weighing every word. It was as if he had distinctly murmured: “You are on the wrong track, comrade, all that you are saying is useless, I assure you … Stop speaking, or find words that are alive … After all, we are alive …” Kondratiev answered him with such assurance that his voice changed. Behind him there was a stir among the secretaries, who, with the garrison commander, made up the presidium. No longer were they hearing the familiar phrases to which they were accustomed at functions of this sort; it made them physically uneasy — with the sort of uneasiness that is produced by an error of command in field maneuvers … The line of tanks suddenly sags, breaks, all is confusion, the commanders are reduced to humiliating rages. The Political Commissar of the Tank School stiffened against his dismay, reached for his automatic pencil, and began taking notes so hurriedly that the letters overlapped on the page … He could not grasp the phrases which he heard being uttered by the orator — who was a member of the Central Committee, of the Central Committee, of the Central Committee — was it possible? The orator was saying:

“… we are covered with crimes and errors, yes, we have forgotten the essential in order to live from hour to hour, and yet we are justified before the universe, before the future, before our magnificent and miserable fatherland, which is not the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, which is not Russia, which is the Revolution … did you hear me? … the Revolution, outside of any definite territory … the mutilated, universal, human Revolution … Be well assured that, in the battle which will break on us tomorrow, all our forces will be dead within three months … And you are our forces … You must understand why … The world is going to split in two …” Should he be stopped? Was it not a crime to let him say such things? The Political Commissar is responsible for all that is said by a speaker at the school, but has he the right to stop the Central Committee's orator? The Commandant, the fool, would certainly not understand a word of it, he was probably hearing only a murmur of periods; the head of the school had turned purple and was concentrating his attention on an ash tray … The orator was saying (the commissar caught only snatches of his fiery discourse, and could not establish a connection between them):

“… the old Party members of my generation have all perished … most of them in confusion, in despair, in error … servilely … They had roused the world … all in the service of truth … Never forget … Socialism … Revolution … tomorrow, the battle for Europe amid world crisis … Yesterday, Barcelona, the beginning … we arrived too late, too sapped by our errors … our forgetfulness of the international proletariat, of mankind … too late, wretches that we are …” The orator spoke of the Aragon front, of the arms which did not arrive — why? He shouted the “
why
” in a tone of defiance, and did not answer it — a reference to what? He proclaimed the “heroism of the Anarchists …” He said (and the commissar, transfixed, could not take his eyes from him), he said:

“… Perhaps, young men, I shall never speak again … I have not come here, in the name of the Central Committee of our great Party, that iron cohort …”

Iron cohort? Hadn't the phrase been coined by Bukharin, enemy of the people, agent of a foreign intelligence service?

“… to bring you the copybook phrases which Lenin called our Communist lie, ‘Comm-lie'! I ask you to look at reality, be it baffling or base, with the courage of your youth, I tell you to think freely, to condemn us in your consciences — we, the older generation, who could not do better; I tell you to go beyond us as you judge us … I urge you to feel that you are free men under your armor of discipline … to judge, to think out everything for yourselves. Socialism is not an organization of machines, a mechanizing of human beings — it is an organization of clear-thinking and resolute men, who know how to wait, to give way and to recover their ground … Then you shall see how great we are, one and all — we who are the last, you who are the first, of tomorrow … Live forward … Among you there are some who have thought of deserting, for hanging yourself or putting a bullet in your brain is deserting … I understand them thoroughly, I have considered doing the same thing myself — otherwise I should not have the right to speak to them … I tell them to see this vast country before them, this vast future … I tell them … A pitiful creature, the man who thinks only of his own life, his own death, he has understood nothing … and let him go, it is the best thing he can do, let him go with our pity …” The orator continued his incoherencies with such persuasive power that for a time the Political Commissar lost his own self-control, and regained it only when he heard Kondratiev speaking of the Chief in very strange terms: “The most solitary man among us all, the man who can turn to no one, overwhelmed by his superhuman task, by the burden of our common faults in this backward country where the new consciousness is feeble and sickly … corrupted by suspicion …” But he ended with reassuring words: “the inspired guide,” the “pilot's immovable hand,” the “continuer of Lenin” … When he stopped speaking, the entire audience hovered in painful indecision. The presidium did not give the signal for applause, the three hundred listeners waited for more. The young Mongolian rose and clapped passionately, it set off a tumult of irregular and as it were galvanic applause, in which there were islands of silence. Kondratiev saw Sacha standing at the back of the hall — he was not applauding, his hair was rumpled … Facing off stage, the Political Commissar was making fervid signals, an orchestra struck up “Be There War Tomorrow,” the audience took up the virile refrain in chorus, three working women, wearing decorations and the uniform of Chemical Aviation, filed onto the platform, one of them carrying the new school flag, in red silk richly embroidered with gold …

Forced smiles displayed above new uniforms surrounded Kondratiev during the ball. The garrison commander, who had understood not a word of the speech but whose good humor was fortified by a slight degree of intoxication, displayed all the grace of a bear gorged on sweetmeats. The sandwiches which he offered Kondratiev — going to fetch them from the buffet, three rooms away — he recommended in coy phrases and with languishing looks: “Just taste this adorable caviar, my dear comrade … ah, life, life!” When, tray in hand, he made his way through the circle of dancers, his face beaming, his boots so highly polished that they reflected the fluttering silks of the women's dresses, he seemed grotesquely on the point of falling over backward, but he forged ahead despite his stoutness, with the amazing lightness of a steppe horseman. The head of the school, a ruddy bulldog whose very small blue eyes remained cold and steely through everything, neither moved nor spoke. His legs crossed, his face frozen into a grimacing Oriental smile, he sat beside the Central Committee's delegate, pondering fragments of incomprehensible sentences, which he clearly saw might be terrible, and which hung over him like an obscure menace, however loyal he might be. “We are covered with crimes and yet we are justified before the universe … Your elders have nearly all perished servilely, servilely …” It was so incredible that he stopped pondering to scrutinize Kondratiev out of the corner of his eye — was he, in fact, the genuine Kondratiev, deputy member of the C.C.? Or was he some enemy of the people who had abused the confidence of the bureaus, forging official documents with the help of foreign agents, to bring a message of defeat into the heart of the Red Army? Suspicion gripped him so intensely that he rose and went to the buffet to look at the beribboned portrait of Comrade Kondratiev. The picture left no room for doubt, but the enemy's artifices are inexhaustible — plots, trials, even marshals turned traitors, had more than demonstrated it. The impostor might be made up; intelligence services use chance resemblances with consummate skill; the photograph might be a forgery! Comrade Bulkin, who had recently been promoted to lieutenant colonel, and who had seen three of his superiors disappear (probably shot) in three years, was completely panic-stricken. His first thought was to order the exits guarded and to alert the secret service. What a responsibility! Sweat stood on his forehead. Beyond the tangoing couples he saw the city's Chief of Security talking very earnestly with Kondratiev — perhaps he had actually penetrated his disguise, was questioning him without seeming to? Lieutenant Colonel Bulkin, built like a bulldog, his conical forehead drawn into horizontal wrinkles which expressed his state of tension, wandered through the rooms looking for the Political Commissar and finally found him, equally preoccupied, at the door of the telephone booth — direct wire to the capital. “Saveliev, my friend,” said Bulkin, taking him by the arm, “I don't know what's happening … I hardly dare to think … I … Are you sure he is really the speaker from the Central Committee?”

“What, Filon Platonovich?”

It was not an answer. They talked for a moment in terrified whispers, then walked the length of the room to examine Kondratiev again. Kondratiev was sitting with his legs crossed, smoking, feeling thoroughly at ease, pleased by the dancers, among whom there were not a few pretty girls and not a few young men made of excellent human material … The sight of him nailed the two men to the spot with respect. Bulkin, the less intelligent of the two, gave a long sigh and murmured confidentially: “Don't you think, Comrade Saveliev, that this may augur a change in policy by the C.C. … may indicate a new line for the political education of subalterns?”

Commissar Saveliev asked himself if he had not been out of his head when he had telephoned a brief summary of Kondratiev's speech to Moscow, though he had been extremely circumspect in what he had said. In any case, when he took leave of the C.C. envoy he must tell the comrade that “the precious directives contained in his most interesting report would henceforth form the basis of our educational work …” Aloud he concluded: “It is possible, Filon Platonovich; but until we receive supplementary instructions, I believe we should refrain from any initiatives …”

Kondratiev rose and walked away, trying to escape from the obsequious circle of officials. He succeeded for only a very short time, having, by some unlikely chance, found himself alone at the door of the great room. It was alive with movement and music. The faces of a dancing couple emerged before him, one charming, with eyes that smiled like pure spring, the other firm-featured and, as it were, illuminated by a restrained light: Sacha. Sacha held back his partner and they danced slowly round and round in one spot so that the young man could lean toward Kondratiev:

“Thank you, Ivan Nicolayevich, for what you said to us…”

The rhythmical revolution brought the other face toward Kondratiev, a face framed in chestnut braids caught in a knot at the neck, a smooth forehead, golden eyebrows; again the movement carried it away, and here was Sacha, his lips colorless, his eyes intense and veiled. Through the music, Sacha said softly, without apparent emotion:

“Ivan Nicolayevich, I believe you will soon be arrested.”

“I believe so too,” Kondratiev said simply, waving them an affectionate good-by.

He was impatient to escape from this irritating gathering, these too-well-fed heads with rudimentary minds, these insignia of command, these girls with too carefully dressed hair who were nothing but young sex organs under gaudy silks, these young men who were uneasy despite themselves, incapable of really thinking because discipline forbade it, and who bore their lives almost joyously to imminent sacrifices which they did not understand…Perhaps it is a very good thing that we cannot wholly rule our minds and that they force on us ideas and images which we would ignobly prefer to dismiss; thus truth makes its way in spite of egotism and unconsciousness. In the great, brightly lit room, to the rhythm of a waltz, Kondratiev had suddenly remembered a morning inspection by the Ebro. A useless inspection, like so many others. The General Staffs could no longer do anything to better the situation. For a moment they looked professionally at the enemy positions on reddish hills dotted with bushes like a leopard's hide. The morning was fresh as the beginning of the world, blue mists dissolved on the slopes of the sierra, the purity of the sky increased from moment to moment, the rays of the sun rose into it, prodigiously straight, prodigiously visible, fanning out just above the glittering curve of the river which separated the armies…Kondratiev knew that the orders neither could nor would be carried out, that the men who would give them, these colonels, some of whom looked like mechanics exhausted by too many sleepless nights, others like elegant gentlemen (which indeed they doubtless were) who had left their ministries for a week end at the front and were all ready to set off for Paris on secret missions by plane and Pullman — that all these leaders of defeat, at once heroic and contemptible, had ceased to have any illusions about themselves…Kondratiev turned his back on them and, following a goat track strewn with white pebbles, climbed back up the hill alone, toward the battalion commander's shelter. At a turn in the path a muffled, rhythmical sound drew him to a nearby ridge; on its summit, thistles grew, thorny and solitary, springing from a stony soil, and the tough thickets of them, spared by yesterday's bombardment, speared up into the sky. Just below that miniature landscape of desolation, a squad of militiamen were at work, silently filling a wide grave in which lay the corpses of other militiamen. The living and the dead were dressed in the same clothes, they had almost the same faces: those of the dead, taking on the color of the soil, more harrowing than terrible, with their partly open mouths, their swollen lips, mysterious in their bloodlessness; those of the living, famished and concentrated, bent toward the ground, oily with sweat, unseeing, as if the morning light knew them not. The men were working fast and in unison; their shovels threw up a single stream of earth, which fell with a muffled sound. No officer was in command of them. Not one of them turned to look at Kondratiev, probably not one of them was aware of his presence. Embarrassed to be there behind them, completely useless, Kondratiev went back down the slope, making an effort to keep the pebbles from rolling under his feet… Now, in the same way, he stole away from the ballroom, and no one turned to look at him — he was as distant from these young dancing soldiers as he had been from the grave-digging militiamen in Spain. And just as there in Spain, here too the General Staff overtook him, danced attendance on him, asked his advice — here on the great marble staircase. He had to make his way down surrounded by commissars, commandants, declining their invitations. Those of the highest rank offered to put him up for the night, offered to take him to the maneuvers in the morning, to show him the factories, the school, the barracks, the library, the swimming pool, the disciplinary section, the motorized cavalry, the model hospitals, the traveling printing press… He smiled, thanked them, spoke familiarly to people he did not know, even joked, in spite of his violent desire to shout at them: “Enough! Shut up, will you? I don't belong to the species ‘general staff' — can't you tell it from my face?” Not one of these puppets suspected that he would be arrested one of these days, they all saw him only through the gigantic shadow of the Central Committee's stamp of approval …