19

Mekler, Lev Naumovich...He had used to wear size forty-five shoes and a size fifty-eight suit from the Moscow Tailoring Combine. And now he had been sentenced under Article 58: betrayal of the Motherland, terrorism, sabotage, never mind a few other things.

He had not been shot, probably because he was one of the first to be arrested. At that time death sentences had not been handed out with such freedom.

Stumbling, squinting shortsightedly and distractedly, he had gone through all the circles of the prison and camp hell. He had not perished because an inner fire—the faith that had consumed him since adolescence—had protected him from scurvy and from malnutrition, from bitter winds and from nights when the temperature fell to forty degrees below zero. Nor had he died of dysentery; nor had he perished when a barge packed with prisoners sank in the Yenisey.

He had not had his throat cut by the common criminals. He had not been tortured to death in a punishment cell or beaten to death during interrogation. He had not been shot during a mass purge, at a time when every tenth prisoner was being shot.

Where had this powerful flame of fanaticism come from? How had it appeared in this son of a sad, sly shopkeeper from the shtetl of Fastov? How had it sprung up in a young man who had studied in a commercial school and who had been brought up on the Golden Library and on the adventure stories of Louis Boussenard? What had instilled him with this hatred of capitalism? Neither he nor his father, after all, had spent years down mines or in factories filled with smoke and dust.

Who or what had given him the soul of a fighter? The example of Zhelyabov and Kalyaev? The wisdom of The Communist Manifesto? The sufferings of the poor next door?

Or had these coals been smoldering deep in the millennial abyss of heredity, ready to burst into flame in the struggle against Caesar’s soldiers or against the Spanish Inquisition, in the hunger and intellectual frenzy of Talmud Torah schools, in a shtetl’s attempt to defend itself during a pogrom?

Maybe it was indeed these thousands of years of humiliation, the anguish of exile in Babylon, the humiliations of the shtetl, the poverty of the Pale of Settlement, that had engendered the frenzy for justice that had forged the soul of the Bolshevik Lev Mekler?

His inability to adapt to everyday life evoked both mockery and admiration. To some there had seemed something saintly about this Komsomol leader in torn sandals, in a calico shirt with an open collar, with nothing on his head but his curly hair—and he had seemed no less saintly as a regimental commissar wearing a torn leather jacket and a peaked Budyonny helmet with a red star that had faded as if from loss of blood. And he had been no less unshaven and ragged when, as commissar of justice for the entire Ukraine, he had gotten out of his car in a tattered raincoat with missing buttons and walked, in winter, to his office.

He had seemed helpless, as if not of this world, but there were some who remembered listening reverently to him during stormy meetings at the front and then following him into the fire of Wrangel’s machine guns.

He was a preacher, an apostle, a soldier of the world socialist revolution. For the sake of the Revolution he was ready, without a second thought, to give up everything—his life, the love of a woman, all those nearest and dearest to him. The only thing it was impossible for him to give up was happiness—since nothing could have brought him more happiness than to go to the stake for the Revolution, to sacrifice for her everything on earth that a human being holds dear.

The future world order seemed to him infinitely splendid, and for its sake Mekler was ready to employ the most pitiless violence.

He was, essentially, someone kindhearted. If a mosquito was sucking his blood, rather than crushing it with a slap of the hand, he would send it on its way with a delicate flick of his fingers. If he caught a bedbug on the scene of the crime, he would wrap it in a piece of paper and carry it outside.

What distinguished his service to the Revolution and the good of humanity was his lack of pity for suffering and his readiness to shed blood.

In his revolutionary purity he imprisoned his father and testified against him before the Cheka. And when his sister begged him to defend her husband, who had been arrested as a saboteur, he turned his back on her cruelly and sullenly.

In his meekness he was pitiless toward those who held the wrong views. To him the Revolution seemed helpless and childishly trustful—surrounded as she was by treachery, the cruelty of the wicked and villainous, the filth of those who wished to corrupt her.

And so he was pitiless toward the enemies of the Revolution.

On his revolutionary conscience there was only one stain. Without telling the Party, he had given help to his old mother, the widow of a man who had been shot by the organs of justice. And, after her death, he had paid for her to be given a religious funeral; that had been her last, pathetic wish.

His vocabulary, his way of thinking, his actions all sprang from one and the same source: the books written in the name of the Revolution, the justice and morality of the Revolution, the poetry of the Revolution, and the strategy of the Revolution—her marching soldiers, her visions, her songs.

It was through the eyes of the Revolution that he looked at the stars in the sky and at birch leaves in April; it was from her most sweet cup that he drank the charm, the potion of first love; it was in the light of her wisdom that he understood the battle in ancient Rome between patricians and slaves, the struggle between landowners and serfs, the class warfare between factory owners and the proletariat. The Revolution was his mother, his tender beloved, his sun, his destiny.

And now the Revolution had put him in a cell in the Lubyanka and knocked out eight of his teeth. Swearing obscenely and calling him a mangy Yid, stamping on him with officer’s boots, she had demanded that he, her son, her beloved apostle, should confess himself to be her secret and mortal enemy, her would-be poisoner.

He did not, of course, renounce the Revolution. During conveyor-belt interrogations that went on for a hundred hours his faith did not waver for even a moment; his faith did not waver when he lay on the floor and saw the polished toe of a box-calf boot beside his blood-filled mouth. The Revolution was coarse, obtuse, and cruel as she interrogated him under torture; she was enraged by the loyalty, by the meek patience of the Old Bolshevik, Lev Mekler.

This rage was the rage of a man trying to drive away a mongrel who won’t stop following at his heels. First he quickens his steps; then he shouts at the dog and stamps his feet; then he shakes his fist at the dog and throws stones at it. The dog runs away, but when, a hundred yards farther on, the man looks around, he sees the now crippled dog hurriedly limping after him—as determinedly faithful as ever.

And what the man finds most abhorrent of all is the look in those doggy eyes—so meek, so sad and loving, so fanatical in their devotion.

The dog’s love enrages its master. The dog sees this rage and cannot understand it. The dog cannot understand that, while committing an unprecedented injustice, the master wants, at least a little, to appease his conscience. The dog’s meekness and devotion have been driving him insane. He hates the dog for this love more than he ever hated the wolves against which the dog once defended the house of his youth. He is hoping, through his coarse brutality, to put an end to this love.

Shocked by this sudden, inexplicable cruelty, the dog keeps on following the master.

Why? Why?

And the dog cannot understand that there is nothing absurd or senseless about this sudden hatred; the dog cannot understand that everything is real and rational.

This hatred is normal and predictable; it is an expression of a clear, mathematical logic. To the dog, however, it seems like a spell of madness. It all seems wild and senseless, and the dog even feels anxious on the master’s behalf. The dog wants to rescue the master from his blindness—for the master’s sake, not for its own. And the dog loves the master and therefore cannot leave him.

And the master understands now that the dog is not going to leave him. The master knows now that the only thing he can do is to strangle the dog or shoot it.

And in order that this execution—this execution of a dog that adores and idolizes him—should not weigh on his conscience or evoke the disapproval of his neighbors, the master decides that this dog must be turned into an enemy, into an artificial enemy. Let the dog confess, before dying, that it wished to tear its master to pieces.

It is easier to kill an enemy than to kill a friend.

In that first house, after all—in the house he built in his youth in the midst of gloomy and deserted ruins, in the house where he once prayed with a pure heart—the dog was his friend and guard, his inseparable companion.

So let the dog confess that it was in cahoots with the wolves.

And in its death agony, as it is being choked with a rope, the dog looks at its master with meek love, with a faith equal to that which led the first Christian martyrs to their deaths.

And the dog never understood one very simple thing: its master had left that house of prayer and youthful intoxication and moved into a building of granite and glass, and his village mongrel had begun to seem an absurdity, a burden. More than a burden—a danger. Which was why he killed it.