Born in the Arctic, sweeping across the sleeping forests along the Kama, slow-falling, eddying snowstorms, before which packs of wolves fled here and there, bore down on Moscow. They seemed to be torn to shreds over the city, worn out by their long journeyings through the air, suddenly blotting out the blue sky. A dull milky light spread over the squares, the streets, the little forgotten private houses in ancient alleys, the streetcars with their frost-traced windows … Life went on in a soft swirling and eddying that was like a burial. Feet trod on millions of pure stars, fresh every instant. And suddenly, high up, behind church domes, behind delicate crosses springing from inverted crescents and still showing traces of gilt, the blue reappeared. The sun lay on the snow, caressed dilapidated old façades, shone in through double windows … Rublev never tired of watching these changes. Delicate, bediamonded branches appeared in the window of his office. Seen from there, the universe was reduced to a bit of forsaken garden, a wall, and, behind the wall, an abandoned chapel with a greenish-gold dome growing pink under the patina of time.
Rublev looked up from the four books which he was simultaneously consulting: the same series of facts appeared in them under four undeniable but unsubstantiated aspects — whence the errors of historians, some purposeful, others unconscious. You made your way through error as you did through snowstorms. Centuries later, the truth became apparent to someone — today it is to me — out of the tangle of contradictions. Economic history, Rublev made a note, often has the deceitful clarity of a coroner’s report. Something, fortunately, escapes them both — the difference between corpse and living man.
“My handwriting looks neurotic.”
Assistant Librarian Andronnikova came in. (“She thinks that I look neurotic …”) “Be so good, Kiril Kirillovich, as to look over the list of banned books for which special permissions have been requested …” Usually Rublev carelessly OK’d all such requests — whether they came from idealistic historians, liberal economists, social-democrats with a tinge of bourgeois eclecticism, cloudy intuitionists … This time he gave a start: a student at the Institute of Applied Sociology had asked for The Year 1905 by L. D. Trotsky. Assistant Librarian Andronnikova, with her small face framed in a foam of white hair, had expected that Rublev would be surprised.
“Refused,” he said. “Tell him to apply to the Library of the Party History Commission …”
“I did,” Andronnikova answered gently. “But he was very insistent.”
Rublev thought he read a childish sympathy in her eyes, the sympathy of a weak, clean, and good creature.
“How are you, Comrade Andronnikova? Did you find any cloth at the Kuznetsky-most Co-op?”
“Yes, thank you, Kiril Kirillovich,” she said, a restrained warmth coloring her voice.
He took his overcoat down from the coat stand, and, as he put it on, joked about the art of life:
“We lie in wait for luck, Comrade Andronnikova, for our friends and for ourselves … We are living in the jungle of the transition period, eh?”
“Living in it is a dangerous art,” thought the white-haired woman, but she merely smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. Did this singular man — scholarly, keen-minded, passionately fond of music — really believe in the “twofold period of transition, from Capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism,” about which he had published a book in the days when the Party still allowed him to write? Citizenness Andronnikova, sixty, ex-princess, daughter of a great liberal (and monarchist) politician, sister of a general massacred by his soldiers in 1916, widow of a collector of pictures the only loves of whose life had been Matisse and Picasso, deprived of the ballot because of her social origins, lived by a private cult whose saint was Wladimir Soloviev. The philosophy of mystical wisdom, if it did not help her to understand the species of men called “Bolsheviks” — men strangely stubborn, hard, limited, dangerous, yet some of whom had souls of unequaled richness — helped her to regard them with an indulgence in which, of late, there was an admixture of secret compassion. If the worst were not also to be loved, what place would there be for Christian charity here below? If the worst were not sometimes very near to the best, would they really be the worst? Andronnikova thought: “They certainly believe what they write … And perhaps Kiril Kirillovich is right. Perhaps it really is a period of transition …” She knew the names, faces, histories, smiles, characteristic gestures, of several prominent Party members who had recently disappeared or been executed in the course of incomprehensible trials. They were true brothers of the man before her; they all called each other by nicknames; they all talked of a “period of transition,” and no doubt it was because they believed in it that they had died … Andronnikova watched over Rublev with an almost painful anxiety, though he did not suspect it. She repeated the name of Kiril Kirillovich in her mental prayers at night, before she went to sleep with the covers pulled up to her chin, as she had at sixteen. Her room was tiny and full of faded things — old letters in elaborate boxes, portraits of handsome young men, cousins and nephews, most of them buried no one knew where, in the Carpathians, at Gallipoli, before Trebizond, at Yaroslavl, in Tunisia. Two of these aristocrats were presumably still alive — one a waiter in Constantinople, the other, under a false name, a streetcar motorman in Rostov. But when Andronnikova managed to get hold of some half-decent tea and a little sugar, she still found a certain pleasure in life … As a means of getting a few minutes’ conversation with Rublev every day she had hit on the idea of searching the shops for dress goods, letter paper, choice foods, and telling him the difficulties she encountered. Rublev, who liked to walk the streets of Moscow, went into shops to get information for her.
Since he enjoyed breathing the cold air, Rublev went home on foot through the white boulevards. Tall, thin, and broad-shouldered, he had begun to stoop during the last two years, not under the burden of years but under that heavier burden, anxiety. The little boys chasing each other on skates over the snowy boulevard knew his old fur-lined coat, much faded about the shoulders, the astrakhan cap which he wore pulled down to his eyes, his scanty beard, his big bony nose, his bushy eyebrows, the bulging brief case he carried under his arm. As he passed he heard them call: “Hi, Vanka, here’s Professor Checkmate,” or “Watch out, Tiomka, here comes Czar Ivan the Terrible.” The fact is that he both looked like a schoolmaster who was a champion chess player and resembled the portraits of the Bloody Czar. Once a schoolboy who had come whizzing along at top speed on a single skate and had crashed into him muttered this odd apology: “Excuse me, Citizen Professor Ivan the Terrible” — and could not understand the strange fit of laughter with which the stern old codger answered him.
He passed the ironwork gateway of No. 25 Tverskoy Boulevard, “Writers’ House.” On the façade of the little building a medallion displayed the noble profile of Alexander Herzen. Out of the basement windows wafted the odors of the “Writers’ Restaurant” — or rather of the scribblers’ trough. “I sowed dragons,” said Marx, “and reaped fleas.” This country is forever sowing dragons, and in times of stress it produces them, strong with wings and claws, furnished with magnificent brains, but their posterity dies out in fleas, trained fleas, stinking fleas, fleas, fleas! In this house was born Alexander Herzen, the most generous man in the Russia of his time, and therefore driven to live in exile; and because he had perhaps exchanged messages with him, a man of the high intelligence of Chernyshevski was manhandled by the police for twenty years. Now in this house the scribblers filled their bellies by writing, in verse or prose, and in the name of the Revolution, the stupidities and infamies which despotism ordered them to write. Fleas, fleas. Rublev still belonged to the Writers’ Syndicate, whose members, who not long ago sought his advice, now pretended not to see him in the street for fear of compromising themselves … A sort of hate came into his eyes when he saw the “poet of the Young Communists” (forty years old) who had written, for the executed Piatakov and certain others:
Shooting them is little,
Is too little, is nothing!
Poison carrion, profligates,
Imperialist vermin,
Who soil our proud Socialist bullets!
All in double rhymes. There were a hundred lines of it. At four rubles a line, it came to a skilled workman’s wages for a month, a ditchdigger’s for three months. The author of it, dressed in a sport suit made of good brown German cloth, displayed a rubicund face in editorial offices.
Strastnaya Square — Square of the Monastery of the Passion. Pushkin meditated on his pedestal. May you be forever blessed, Poet of Russia, because you were not a rat, because you were only a little of a coward, just enough, probably, to save your neck under an enlightened tyranny, when they hanged your friends the Decembrists! The little monastery tower across the square was being gradually demolished. The reinforced concrete Izvestia building, distinguished by a clock, rose above the gardens of the old monastery. At the four corners of the square: a little white church, movie theaters, a bookstore. People in single file waited patiently for a bus. Rublev turned right, into Gorki Street, looked idly into the windows of a big grocery store displaying fat fish from the Volga, magnificent fruits from Central Asia, de-luxe viands for handsomely paid specialists. He lived in an eleven-story apartment building in the next little side street. The spacious halls were scantly lighted. Slowly the elevator rose to the eighth floor. Rublev went down a dark gloomy corridor, knocked softly at a door. It opened, he entered and kissed his wife on the forehead:
“Any heat today, Dora?”
“Not much. The radiators are barely warm. Put on your old field jacket.”
Neither meetings of the tenants of Soviet House nor the annual arrest and trial of the technicians of the Regional Bureau of Combustibles did anything to improve the situation. The cold brought a sort of desolation into the big room. Touched by the twilight, the whiteness of roofs filtered through the window. The green leaves of the plants seemed to be made of metal, the typewriter displayed a dusty keyboard that looked like a fantastic set of false teeth. The strong radiant human bodies which Michael Angelo had painted for the Sistine Chapel, reduced to black and gray by photography, had become uninteresting blotches on the wall. Dora lit the lamp on the table, sat down, crossed her arms under her brown woolen shawl, and looked up at Kiril out of her calm gray eyes. “Did you have a good day?” She kept down her joy at having him back, as a moment earlier she had kept down her fear that he would not come back. It would always be like that. “Have you read the papers? … I ran through them … A new People’s Commissar for Agriculture has been appointed in the R.S.F.S.R.; the one before has disappeared. And this one will disappear before six months are out, Dora, I assure you. And the one who follows him too! Which of them will make things any better?” They talked in low voices. If there had been any occasion to draw up a list of tenants of this very building, all influential people, who had disappeared in the last twenty months, they would have discovered surprising percentages, would have concluded that certain floors were unlucky, would have seen twenty-five years of history under more than one murderous aspect. But the list was there — it was in them, obscurely. That was what was aging Rublev. It was the only way in which he yielded.
In that same room, between the plants with their metallic leaves and the dim reproductions of the Sistine frescoes, they had listened all day and late into the night to the senseless, demonic, inexorable, incredible voices that poured from the loud-speaker. Those voices filled hours, nights, months, years, they filled the soul with delirium, and it was astonishing that one could go on living after having heard them. Once, Dora had stood up, pale and shattered, her hands hanging limp, and said:
“It is like a snowstorm covering a continent. No roads, no light, no possible way of traveling, everything will be buried … It is an avalanche coming down on us, carrying us away … It is a horrible revolution …”
Kiril was pale too, the room flickered with white light. From the varnished case of the radio came a slightly hoarse, shaky, hesitating voice, with a heavy Turkish accent — the voice of an ex-member of the Turkmanistan Central Committee, who, like everyone else, was confessing to unending treason. “I organized the assassination of … I took part in the attempt on … which failed … I prevented the irrigation plans from succeeding … I incited the revolt of the Basmachi … I dealt with the British Intelligence … The Gestapo sent me … I was paid thirty thousand …” Kiril turned a knob and stopped the flood of insanity. “Abrahimov on the stand,” he murmured. “Poor devil!” He knew him — an ambitious young fellow from Tashkent who liked to drink good wine, hard-working, not stupid … Kiril rose to his feet and said solemnly:
“It is the counterrevolution, Dora.”
The voice of the Supreme Prosecutor went dismally on and on, rehashing conspiracies, assassinations, crimes, destruction, felonies, treason; it became a sort of weary barking, heaping insults upon men who listened, their heads bowed, desperate, done for, under the eyes of a mob, between two guards: among those men there were several who were spotless, the purest, the best, the most intelligent men of the Revolution — and precisely for that reason they were undergoing martyrdom, they accepted martyrdom. Hearing them over the radio, he sometimes thought: “How he must be suffering! … But no — that is his normal voice — what is it? Is he mad? Why is he lying like that?” Dora walked back and forth across the room, bumping against the walls, Dora collapsed onto the bed, shaken by dry sobs, choking. “Wouldn’t it be better if they let themselves be torn to pieces alive? Don’t they realize that they are poisoning the soul of the proletariat? That they are poisoning the springs of the future?”
“They do not realize it,” Kiril Rublev said. “They believe that they are still serving Socialism. Some of them hope that they will be allowed to live. They have been tortured …”
He wrung his hands. “No, they are not cowards; no, they have not been tortured. I do not believe it. They are true, that is it, still true to the Party, and there is no more Party, there are only inquisitors, executioners, criminals … No, I’m talking nonsense, it is not so simple. Perhaps I would do as they are doing if I were in their place …”
At that instant he thought, perfectly clearly: “Their place is mine, and some day I shall be there, infallibly …” and his wife knew, perfectly clearly, that he was thinking it.
“They assure themselves that it is better to die dishonored, murdered by the Chief, than to denounce him to the international bourgeoisie …”
He almost screamed, like a man crushed in an accident:
“And in that, they are right.”
For a long time they returned to this obsessing thought again and again, discussed it again and again. Their minds worked on nothing else, they scrutinized this single theme from every standpoint, because in that part of the world — the Great Sixth — history had nothing to work on but this darkness, these lies, this perverse devotion, this blood that was shed day in and day out. Old Party members avoided one another — so that they should not have to meet each other’s eyes, or lie ignobly to each other’s faces out of a reasonable cowardice, so that they might not stumble over the name of a comrade who had disappeared, not have to compromise themselves by a handshake, or disgust themselves by not giving it. Nevertheless, they came to know of the arrests, the disappearances, the fantastic sick leaves, the ill-omened transfers, bits of secret interrogations, sinister rumors. Long before a member of the General Staff — ex-coal miner, a Bolshevik in 1908, once famous for a campaign in the Ukraine, a campaign in the Altai, a campaign in Yakutsk, thrice decorated with the Order of the Red Flag — long before this general disappeared, a perfidious rumor followed him everywhere, making the women whom he met look at him with eyes that were strangely wide, emptying the antechambers of the Defense Commissariat when he passed through them. Rublev saw him one evening at Red Army House: “Imagine it, Dora. The reception line was not ten feet from him … Those who found themselves face to face with him smiled sweetly and too politely, and disappeared … I watched him for twenty minutes. He sat all alone, between two empty chairs — brand-new uniform, all his decorations, looking like a wax doll as he watched the dancing. Fortunately some young lieutenants, who knew nothing, danced with his wife … Arkhinov came up, recognized him, hesitated, pretended to look for something in his pockets — and slowly turned his back on him …” A month later, when he was arrested as he left a committee meeting at which he had not opened his mouth, the general felt relieved; in fact, everyone felt the relief that comes at the end of a long wait. When the same icy atmosphere began to surround another Red general, summoned to Moscow from the Far East to receive mythical orders, he blew out his brains in the bathtub. Contrary to all expectations, the Artillery Command gave him a handsome funeral; three months later, in accordance with the decree providing that the families of traitors must be deported to “the most remote districts of the Union,” his mother, his wife, and his two children were ordered to set forth into the unknown. News of such cases — and they were many — came to people by chance, confidentially, in whispered conversations, and the details were never fully known. You knocked at a friend’s door, and the maid looked at you in terror when she opened it. “I don’t know anything about it, he is not here, he will not be back, I have been told to go to the country … No, I don’t know anything, no …” She was afraid to say another word, afraid of you as if danger were at your heels. You telephoned to a friend — from a public booth, by way of precaution — and the voice of an unknown man asked, “Who is calling?” very clearly, and you understood that a spy had been posted there and you answered mockingly, though you felt disturbed, “The State Bank, on business,” and then you got away as fast as you could because you knew that the booth would be searched within ten minutes. New faces appeared in offices instead of the faces you had known; you felt ashamed when you mentioned the former incumbent’s name, and ashamed when you did not mention it. The papers published the names of new members of the federated governments without saying what had become of their predecessors — which was obvious enough. In communal apartments, occupied by several families, if the bell rang at night, people thought: “They’ve come for the Communist” — as in earlier days they would immediately have thought it was the technician or the ex-officer who was being arrested. Rublev checked over the list of his earlier comrades and found only two still alive with whom he was more or less intimate: Philippov, of the Plan Commission, and Wladek, a Polish émigré. The latter had once known Rosa Luxemburg, had belonged, with Warsky and Waletsky, to the first Central Committees of the Polish C.P., had done secret-service work under Unschlicht … Warsky and Waletsky, if perhaps they were still alive, were alive in prison, in some secret isolator reserved for those who had once been influential leaders of the Third International; the corpulent Unschlicht, with his big face and spectacles, was generally supposed to have been executed — it was almost a certainty. Wladek, holding an obscure post in an Institute of Agronomy, did his utmost to remain forgotten there. He lived some twenty-five miles from Moscow in a dilapidated villa in the heart of the forest; he came to the city only for his work, saw no one, wrote to no one, received no letters, and made no telephone calls.
“Perhaps in that way they will forget me? Do you understand?” he said to Rublev. “There were some thirty of us Poles who belonged to the old Party cadres; if four are still alive, it is surprising.”
Short, almost bald, bulb-nosed, extremely shortsighted, he surveyed Rublev through extraordinarily thick glasses; yet his expression remained cheerful and young, his thick lips were playful.
“Kiril Kirillovich, all this nightmare is basically very interesting and very old. History doesn’t give a damn for us, my friend. ‘Ah-ha, my little Marxists,’ she says, like one of Macbeth’s witches, ‘you make plans, you worry over questions of social conscience!’ And she turns Little Father Czar Iohan the Terrible loose on us, with his hysterical fears and his big ironshod stick …”
They were whispering together in a dim antechamber lined with showcases containing an exhibition of grains. Rublev answered with a faint laugh:
“You know the schoolboys think that I look like Czar Iohan …”
“We are all like him in one way or another,” said Wladek, half serious, half joking. “We are all of us professors descended from the Terrible Czar … Even I, despite my baldness and my Semitic ancestry — even I feel a little frightened when I look inside myself, I assure you.”
“I cannot in the least agree with your bad literary psychology, Wladek. We must talk seriously. I will bring Philippov.”
They arranged to meet in the woods, on the bank of the Istra, because it would not have been prudent to meet either in the city or at Philippov’s, whose neighbors were railway-men. “I never let anyone come to my place,” said Philippov. “That is the safest way. Besides, what is one to talk about?”
Without in the least knowing why, Philippov had survived several sets of economists on the Central Plan Commission. “The only plan which will be completely carried out,” he said lightly, “is the plan of arrests.” Member of the Party since 1910, president of a Siberian Soviet when the spring floods of March, 1917, carried away the double-headed eagles (thoroughly worm-eaten), later commissar with little troops of Red partisans who held the taiga against Admiral Kolchak, he had for almost two years been collaborating on plans for the production of goods of prime necessity — an incredible task, enough to get a man thrown into prison instantly, in a country where there was a simultaneous lack of nails, shoes, matches, cloth, et cetera. However, since he was a man to fear because of his long connection with the Party, directors who wanted primarily to keep out of trouble had set him to work on the plan for the distribution of popular musical instruments — accordions, harmoniums, flutes, guitars, and zithers and tambourines for the East (the equipment of orchestras being undertaken by a special bureau, orchestral instruments did not fall within his province). This appointment provided an oasis of safety, since the supply always exceeded the demand in almost all markets, except those of Buriat-Mongolia, Birobidjan, the Autonomous Region of Nakhichevan, and the Autonomous Republic of the Karabakh Mountains, which were regarded as of secondary importance. “On the other hand,” Philippov commented, “we have introduced the accordion into Dzungeria … The shamans of Inner Mongolia demand our tambourines …” He scored unexpected successes. As a matter of fact everyone knew that the thriving trade in musical instruments was due to the lack of more useful goods, and that their production in sufficient quantities was partly due to the labor of artisans refractory to co-operative organization, partly to the uselessness of the instruments themselves … But that was the responsibility of the higher echelons of the Central Plan Commission … Philippov, with his round head, his freckled face, his straight black mustache, trimmed very short, his big sagacious eyes which shone from between puffy lids, arrived at the meeting place on skis, as did Rublev. Wladek came from his villa in felt boots and a sheepskin coat, like a fantastic and extremely shortsighted woodcutter. They met under pines whose straight black trunks rose forty feet above the bluish snow before branching. Under the wooded hills, the river traced slow curves of gray-pink and pale azure such as are to be found in Japanese prints. The three men had known each other for many years. Philippov and Rublev had slept in the same room in a wretched hotel on the Place de la Contrescarpe, in Paris, shortly before the Great War; in those days they lived on brie and blood pudding; at the Bibliothèque Ste.-Genevieve they commented scathingly on the insipid sociology of Dr. Gustave Le Bon; together they read the accounts of Madame Caillaux’s trial in Juarès’s newspaper; they shopped at the stalls in the Rue Mouffetard, looking with delight at the old houses which had seen the revolutions, amusing themselves by recognizing Daumier’s types in the figures they saw emerging from corridors and halls that were like vaults … Philippov sometimes slept with little Marcella, chestnut-haired, smiling, and serious, who was generally to be found at the Taverne du Panthéon. There, late at night, she and her girl friends danced lusty waltzes in the small rooms downstairs, to the music of violins. They went to the Closerie des Lilas to see Paul Fort, surrounded by admirers. The poet always got himself up to look like a musketeer. In front of the café, Marshal Ney, on his pedestal, marched to his death, brandishing his saber — and Rublev insisted that he must be cursing: “Swine, swine!” Together they recited poems by Constantin Belmont:
Be we like the sun! …
They quarreled over the problem of matter and energy, which was being restated by Avenarius, Mach, and Maxwell. “Energy is the only cognizable reality,” Philippov asserted one evening. “Matter is only an aspect of it …” — “You are nothing but an unconscious idealist,” Rublev retorted, “and you are turning your back on Marxism … In any case,” he added, “the petty bourgeois frivolity of your private life had given me due warning …” They shook hands coldly at the corner of the Rue Soufflot. The ponderous black silhouette of the Panthéon rose from the wide deserted street with its lines of funereal street lamps. The paving stones gleamed, a solitary woman, a prostitute who kept her veil down, waited in the darkness for an unknown man. The war aggravated their long disagreement, although they both remained internationalists; but one of them had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, the other was interned. They met again at Perm in ’18, and were too busy to be surprised or to celebrate the occasion for more than five minutes. Rublev was bringing a detachment of workers into the city to suppress a mutiny of drunken sailors. Philippov, a muffler around his neck, his voice a whisper, one arm wounded and in a sling, had just escaped by the merest chance from the clubs of peasants in revolt against requisitionings. Both of them were dressed in black leather, armed with Mausers sheathed in wood, carrying urgent orders, living on boiled groats and pickled cucumbers, exhausted, enthusiastic, radiating a somber energy. They held a council of war by candlelight, guarded by proletarians from Petrograd with cartridge belts over their overcoats. Inexplicable shots sounded in the dark city; its gardens were full of excitement under the stars.
Philippov spoke first: “We have to shoot people or we’ll get nothing done.”
One of the men on guard at the door said soberly: “By God, you’re right!” — “Shoot who?” Rublev asked, overcoming his fatigue, his desire to sleep, his desire to vomit.
“Some hostages — there are officers, a priest, manufacturers …”
“Is it really necessary?”
“I’ll say it is,” growled the man at the door, “or we’re done for.” And he came toward them, holding out his black hands.
And Rublev rose, seized by wild anger. “Silence! There will be no interrupting the deliberations of the Army Council! Discipline!” Philippov put his hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair. Then, to end the quarrel, he whispered ironically: “Do you remember the Boul’ Miche’?”
“What?” said Rublev in amazement. “Not another word, you Tatar, I beg of you. I am absolutely against the execution of hostages. Let us not become barbarians.”
Philippov answered: “You have to consent to it. First, our retreat is cut off on three sides out of four. Second, I absolutely must have several carloads of potatoes and I can’t pay for them. Third, the sailors have behaved like gangsters, and it’s they who ought to be shot; but we can’t shoot them, they’re splendid physical specimens. Fourth, as soon as our backs are turned, the whole countryside will rise … So sign.”
The order for execution, written in pencil on the back of a receipt, was ready. Rublev signed it, muttering: “I hope we have to pay for this, you and I; I tell you we are besmirching the Revolution; the devil knows what all this is about …” They were still young then. Now, twenty years later, growing fat and gray, they glided on their skis through the admirable Hokusai landscape, and wordlessly the past reawoke within them.
Philippov lengthened his stride and shot ahead. Wladek came to meet them. They set their skis up in the snow and followed the edge of the wood, above a river of ice fringed with astonishing white shrubbery.
“It’s good to meet again,” said Rublev.
“It’s wonderful that we are alive,” said Wladek.
“What are we going to do?” asked Philippov. “ ‘That is the question.’ ”
Space, the woods, the snow, the ice, the blue, the silence, the clarity of the cold air surrounded them. Wladek spoke of the Poles, all vanished into prisons — the Left, led by Lensky, after the Right, led by Koschewa. “The Jugoslavs, too,” he added, “and the Finns … It happens to the whole Comintern …” He studded his narrative with names and faces.
“Why, it’s even worse than at the Plan Commission!” Philippov exclaimed cheerfully.
“As for me,” Philippov said, “I’m quite sure that I owe my life to Bruno. You knew him, Kiril, when he was legation secretary at Berlin — can you see his Assyrian profile? After Krestinsky’s arrest, he expected to be liquidated too and, incredible as it may seem, he had been appointed assistant director of a central bureau in Internal Affairs — which gave him access to the master files. He told me that he hoped he had managed to save a dozen comrades by destroying their cards. ‘But I am done for,’ he said. ‘There are still the dossiers, of course, and there is the Central Committee file, but one doesn’t show up so much there, sometimes names are hard to find …’ ”
“And then?”
“Finis — I don’t know how or where — last year.”
Philippov repeated: “What is to be done?”
“For my part,” said Wladek, searching his pockets for a cigarette, and looking more than ever like a mocking, prematurely old child, “if they come to arrest me, I will not let them take me alive. No, thanks.”
“But there are people,” said Philippov, “who are released or deported. I know of cases. Your solution is not reasonable. Besides, there is something about it I don’t like. It smacks of suicide.”
“Have it your own way.”
Philippov went on:
“If I am arrested I shall politely tell them that under no circumstances will I enter into any scheme, either with a trial or without. Do as you please with me … Once that is absolutely clear, I think one has a chance of getting out of it. You go to Kamchatka or you draw up plans for timber cutting. I’m willing. How about you, Kiril?”
Kiril Rublev took off his fur cap. His high forehead, under curls that were still dark, stood bare to the cold.
“Ever since they shot Nicolai Ivanovich, I have sensed that they were prowling around me, imperceptibly. And I am waiting for them. I haven’t told Dora, but she knows. So, in my case it is a very practical question, which I may have to answer any day … And … I don’t know …”
They began to walk, sinking in the snow to their calves. Above them, crows flew from branch to branch. The light was charged with wintry whiteness. Kiril was a head taller than either of his companions. He differed from them in spirit as well. He spoke in a calm voice:
“Suicide is only an individual solution — therefore not Socialist. In my case it would set a bad example. I don’t say this to shake your resolution, Wladek: you have your reasons, and I believe that they are valid for you. To say that one will confess nothing is courageous, perhaps overly courageous: no one knows precisely how strong he is. And then, it is all more complex than it appears.”
“Yes,” said the other two, stumbling through the snow.
“One has to become conscious of what is going on … become conscious …”
Rublev, repeating his words in a doubtful voice, wore an expression which was often seen on his face — the look of a preoccupied pedant. Wladek flew into a rage, turned purple, waved his short arms:
“Damned theoretician! There’s no curing you! I can still see the articles in which you cut up the Trotskyists in ’27 by maintaining that the proletarian party cannot degenerate … Because if it degenerates, obviously it is not the proletarian party … You casuist! What is going on is as clear as day-light. Thermidor, Brumaire, and all the rest of it, on an unheard-of social scale and in the country where Genghis Khan has the use of the telephone, as old Tolstoi put it.”
“Genghis Khan,” said Philippov, “is a great man not properly appreciated. He was not cruel. If he had his servants build pyramids of severed heads, it was not out of cruetly nor to satisfy a primitive taste for statistics, but to depopulate the countries which he could not otherwise dominate and which he intended to bring back to a pastoral economy, the only economy which he could understand. Already, it was differences in economies which made heads fall … Note that the only way he could assure himself that the massacres had been properly carried out, was to collect the heads. The Khan distrusted his manpower …”
They walked a little while longer in deeper snow. “A marvelous Siberia,” murmured Rublev, whom the landscape had calmed. And Wladek turned abruptly toward his two companions, planted himself in front of them in comic exasperation:
“What eloquence! One of you lectures on Genghis Khan, the other advocates becoming fully conscious! You are making a mock of your own selves, my dear comrades. Permit me to reveal something to you! It’s my turn, my turn …”
They saw that his thick lips were trembling, that there was mist on the lenses of his glasses, that straight lines cut horizontally across his cheeks. For several seconds he kept muttering “my turn, my turn” almost unintelligibly.
“But doubtless I am of a grosser constitution, my dear comrades. As for me — the fact is — I am afraid. I am deathly afraid — do you hear me? — whether it is worthy of a revolutionary or not. I live alone like an animal among all these woods and all this snow, which I loathe — because I am afraid. I live without a wife, because I don’t want two of us waking up at night to ask ourselves if it is the last night. I wait for them every night, all by myself, I take a bromide, I go to sleep in a stupor, I wake with a start, thinking they’ve come, crying out ‘Who’s there?’ and the woman next door answers, ‘It’s the blind banging, Vladimir Ernestovich, sleep well,’ and I can’t get back to sleep. I am afraid and I am ashamed, not of myself, but of all of us. I think of those who have been shot, I see their faces, I hear their jokes, and I have migraines that medicine has not yet named — a little pain the color of fire fixes itself in the back of my neck. I am afraid, afraid, not so much afraid of dying as of nothing and everything — afraid to see you, afraid to talk to people, afraid to think, afraid to understand …”
And indeed it could be read in his puffy face, in his redrimmed eyes, in his precipitate speech. Philippov said:
“I am afraid too, of course — but it doesn’t do any good. I have grown used to it. One lives with fear as one lives with a hernia.”
Kiril Rublev slowly pulled off his gloves and looked at his hands, which were long and strong, a little hairy between the joints — “hands still full of vitality,” he thought. And, picking up some snow, he began kneading it violently.
“Everyone is an ignoble coward,” he said, “it’s an old, old story. Courage consists in knowing that fact and, when necessary, acting as if fear did not exist. You are wrong, Wladek, in thinking that you are different from anyone else. However, it is hardly worth our meeting in this magnificent landscape if we are only going to make useless confessions to one another …”
Wladek did not answer. His eyes searched the deserted, barren, luminous landscape. Ideas as slow-moving as the flight of the crows in the sky passed through his mind: Whatever we say is useless now … I wish I had a glass of hot tea … Kiril, suddenly dropping the burden of his years, jumped back, raised his arm — and the hard snowball he had just finished making struck an astonished Philippov square on the chest. “Defend yourself, I attack,” Kiril cried gaily and, his eyes laughing, his beard askew, he grabbed up handfuls of snow. “Son of a seacook,” Philippov shouted, transfigured. And they began to fight like two schoolboys. They leaped, laughed, sank into snow up to their waists, hid behind trees to make their ammunition and take aim before they let fly. Something of the nimbleness of their boyhood came back to them, they shouted joyous “ughs,” shielded their faces with their elbows, gasped for breath. Wladek stood where he was, firmly planted, methodically making snowballs to catch Rublev from the flank, laughing until the tears came to his eyes, showering him with abuse: “Take that, you theoretician, you moralist, to hell with you,” and never once hitting him …
They got very hot, their hearts pounded, their faces relaxed. From a sky which had imperceptibly grown gray, night suddenly fell on lustreless snow, on misty and petrified trees. Breathing hard, the three started back in the direction of the railroad. “How about that one I landed on your ear, Kiril,” said Philippov, chortling. “How about the one I landed on the back of your neck?” Rublev retorted. It was Wladek who returned to serious matters:
“You know, my nerves are all to pieces, I admit — but I am not as afraid as I might be. Come what may, my death will fertilize Socialist soil, if it is Socialist soil …”
“State Capitalism,” said Philippov.
Rublev:
“… We must cultivate consciousness. There is sure progress under this barbarism, progress under this retrogression. Look at our masses, our youth, all the new factories, the Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, Kirovsk … We are all dead men under a reprieve, but the face of the earth has been changed, the migrating birds must wonder where they are when they see what were deserts covered with factories. And what a new proletariat! Ten million men at work, with machines, instead of three and a half million in 1927. What will that effort not accomplish for the world in half a century!”
“… When nothing of us will remain, not even our smallest bones,” Wladek chanted, perhaps without irony.
By way of precaution, they parted before they reached the first houses. “We must meet again,” Wladek proposed. And the other two said, “Yes, yes, absolutely,” but none of them believed that it would really be possible or of any use. When they parted they all shook hands warmly. Kiril Rublev skiied rhythmically to the nearest station, following the silent forest where darkness seemed to grow out of the ground like an imperceptible mist. A thin, blue, terribly sharp crescent moon, curved like an ideal breast, rose into the sky. Rublev thought: “Ill-omened moon. Fear comes exactly like night.”
One evening as the Rublevs were finishing dinner, Xenia Popova came to tell them a great piece of news. On the table there were a dish of rice, a sausage, a bottle of Narzan mineral water, gray bread. The primus stove hissed under the kettle. Kiril Rublev was sitting in the old armchair, Dora in the corner of the sofa. “How pretty are you,” Kiril said to Xenia affectionately. “Let me see your big eyes.” She turned them toward him frankly — wide, well-shaped eyes, fringed with long lashes. “Neither stones, nor flowers, nor the sky have that color,” said Rublev to his wife. “It is the eye’s own miracle. You can be proud, child.”
“You’ll have me embarrassed soon,” she said.
The clear features, the high forehead, the little rolls of blond hair above the ears, the eyes that always seemed to be smiling at life — Rublev scanned them almost maliciously. So purity was born of dirt, youth of attrition. He had known Popov for more than twenty years — an old fool who, because he could not understand the a-b-c of political economy, had specialized in matters of Socialist ethics. In pursuit of his specialty, he had buried himself in the dossiers of the Central Control Commission of the Party, and now his entire life was devoted to the adulteries, lies, drinking bouts, and abuses of power perpetrated by old revolutionaries. It was he who found grounds for reprimands, distributed warnings, prepared indictments, planned executions, and proposed rewards for the executioners. “Many vile tasks must needs be performed, so there must needs be many vile beings,” as Nietzsche said. But how, by what miracle, did the rancid flesh and the rancid spirit of a Popov produce this creature, Xenia? So life triumphs over our base clay. Kiril Rublev looked at Xenia with a delight in which there was both hunger and malice.
Sitting with her knees crossed, the girl lit a cigarette. She was so happy that she had to do something — anything — to keep it from showing. Making a very unsuccessful attempt to look detached, she said:
“Papa is having me sent abroad — a mission to Paris — six months — for the Central Textile Bureau. I’m to study the new technique for printing cloth … Papa knew that I had been wanting to go abroad for years … I jumped for joy!”
“Why shouldn’t you?” said Dora. “I’m terribly glad. What are you going to do in Paris?”
“It makes me dizzy to think of it. I’ll see Notre-Dame, Belleville. I’m reading a biography of Blanqui and the history of the Commune. I’ll go to see the Faubourg-St.-Antoine, the Rue St.-Merri, the Rue Haxo, the Wall of the Confederates … Bakunin lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, but I haven’t been able to find out the number. Anyway, the number may have been changed. Do you know where Lenin lived?”
“I went to see him in Paris,” said Rublev slowly, “but I have no idea where it was …”
“Oh!” said Xenia reproachfully. How could anyone forget such things? Her big eyes opened wide. “Really? You knew Vladimir Ilich? What luck!”
“What a child you are!” Rublev thought. “But you are right.”
“And then,” she said, overcoming a slight hesitation, “I mean to get some clothes. Pretty French things — is that wrong, do you think?”
“Not a bit,” said Dora. “It’s a fine idea. I wish all our young people could have lovely things.”
“That’s what I thought — just that! But my father is always saying that clothes ought to be practical, that elaborate clothes are a survival from barbaric cultures, that fashion is a characteristic of the capitalist mentality …” The incomparably blue eyes smiled.
“Your father is a damned old puritan … What is he doing these days?”
Xenia chattered on. Sometimes, at the bottom of a clear stream flowing over pebbles, a shadow appears, troubles the eye for a moment, and vanishes, leaving one wondering what it was, what mysterious life was following its destiny in those depths. Suddenly the Rublevs found themselves listening intently. Xenia was saying:
“… Father has been very busy with the Tulayev case, he says it is another plot …”
“I had some contact with Tulayev in the past,” said Rublev in a subdued voice. “I spoke against him in the Moscow Committee four years ago. Winter was coming on, and of course there was a fuel shortage. Tulayev proposed that the directors of the Combustibles Trust be brought to trial. I got his idiotic proposal turned down.”
“… Father says that a great many people are compromised … I think — don’t repeat this, it’s very serious — I think Erchov has been arrested … He was recalled from the Caucasus, but he has never showed up anywhere … I happened to overhear a telephone conversation about his wife … She has apparently been arrested too …”
Rublev picked up his empty glass from the table, held it to his lips as if he were drinking, and set it down. Xenia watched him in amazement. “Kiril,” Dora asked, “what have you been drinking?” “Why, nothing,” he said with a bewildered smile.
An uncomfortable silence followed. Xenia bowed her head. The useless cigarette burned out between her fingers.
“And our Spain, Kiril Kirillovich,” she asked at last, with an effort … “do you think it can hold out? … I should like …” She did not say what she would like.
Rublev picked up the empty glass again.
“Defeated. And it will be partly our doing.”
The end of their conversation was labored. Dora tried to start other subjects. “Have you been to the theater lately, Xenia? What are you reading?” Her questions found no answers. A damp, chill mist irresistibly invaded the room. It dimmed the lamp. Xenia felt a stab of cold between her shoulder blades. Rublev and Dora rose as she did. Standing there, they overcame the mist for a moment.
“Xenia,” said Dora gently, “I wish you every happiness.”
And Xenia felt a little sad — it was like a good-by. How was she to return their good wishes? Rublev affectionately put his arm around her waist.
“You have shoulders like an Egyptian statuette, wider than your hips. With those shoulders and those bright eyes of yours, you must take very good care of yourself, Xeniuchka!”
“What do you mean?”
“Only too much. Someday you’ll understand. Bon voyage.”
At the last moment, in the narrow vestibule cluttered with heaps of newspapers, Xenia remembered something important that she could not leave unsaid. Her eyes clouded; she spoke in a low voice.
“I heard my father say that Ryzhik has been brought back to a prison in Moscow, that he is on a hunger strike and very ill … Is he a Trotskyist?”
“Yes.”
“A foreign agent?”
“No. A man as strong and pure as crystal.”
There was terror in the helpless look Xenia gave him.
“Then why …?”
“Nothing happens in history that is not, in some sense, rational. The best sometimes have to be broken, because they do harm precisely by being the best. You cannot understand that yet.”
Something in her carried her toward him; she almost fell on his chest.
“Kiril Kirillovich, are you an Oppositionist?”
“No.”
On that word, after a few caressing gestures, a few swift kisses on Dora’s unhappy lips, they parted. Xenia’s youthful footfalls grew fainter down the hall. To Kiril and Dora, the room looked larger, more inhospitable. “So it goes,” said Kiril. “So it goes,” said Dora with a sigh.
Rublev poured himself a big drink of vodka and swallowed it down.
“And you, Dora, you who have lived with me for sixteen years — do you think I am an Oppositionist? Yes or no?”
Dora preferred not to answer. He sometimes talked to himself like that, asking her questions with a sort of fierceness.
“Dora, I’d like to get drunk tomorrow, I think I should see more clearly afterward … Our Party can have no Opposition, it is monolithic because we reconcile thought and action for the sake of a higher efficiency. Rather than settle which of us is right and which wrong, we prefer to be wrong together because in that way we are stronger for the proletariat. And it was an old mistake of bourgeois individualism to seek truth for the sake of conscience, one conscience, my conscience. We say: To hell with my and me, to hell with self, to hell with truth, if the Party can be strong!”
“What Party?”
Dora’s two words, spoken in a low, cold voice, reached him at the instant when the pendulum within him began its swing in the opposite direction.
“… Obviously, if the Party is betrayed, if it is no longer the Party of the Revolution, that position of ours is ridiculous and meaningless. We ought to do exactly the opposite — in that case, each of us should recover his conscience … We need unfailing unity to hold back the thrust of hostile forces … But if those forces exercise themselves precisely through our unity … What did you say?”
He could not sit still in the huge room. His angular frame moved across it obliquely. He looked like a great emaciated bird of prey shut up in a cage that was quite large but still too small. So Dora saw him. She answered:
“I don’t know.”
“The conclusions reached concerning the Opposition from seven to ten years ago and formulated between 1923 and 1930 would have to be revised. We were wrong then, perhaps the Opposition was right — perhaps, because no one knows if the course of history could be different from what it is … Revise our conclusions concerning a time now dead, struggles that are ended, outworn formulas, men sacrificed in one way or another?”
Several days passed — Moscow days, crowding on each other, crowded with events, cluttered with things to do, then suddenly interrupted by limpid moments when you forget yourself in the street to stare at the colors and the snow under a cold bright sky. Healthy young faces pass, and you wish you could know the souls behind them, and you think that we are a people numerous as grass, a mixture of a hundred peoples, Slavs, Finns, Mongols, Turks, Jews, all on the march and led by girls and youths whose blood runs golden. You think of the machines waking to strength in the new factories; they are agile and shining, they contain the power of millions of insentient slaves. In them the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever. This new world is arising little by little out of evil — and its people lack soap, underwear, clothes, clear knowledge, true, simple, meaningful words, generosity; we hardly know enough to animate our machines; there are sordid hovels around our giant factories, which are better equipped than the factories of Detroit or the Ruhr; in those hovels men bowed under the relentless law of toil still sleep the sleep of animals; but the factory will conquer the hovel, the machines will give these men — or the men who will follow them, it matters little — an astounding awakening. This unfolding of a world — machines and masses progressing together, inevitably — makes up for many things. Why should it not make up for the end of our generation? Overhead expenses, an absurd ransom paid to the past. Absurd — that was the worst part of it. And that the masses and the machines should still need us; that, without us, they might lose their way — that was dismaying, it was horrible. But what are we to do? To accomplish things consciously, we have only the Party, the “cohort of iron.” Of iron and flesh and spirit. None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of innumerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspiration, of other yet greater masses — Proletarians of all countries, unite! The spirit became confused, the flesh decayed, the iron rusted, because the cohort — chosen by successive trials of doctrine, exile, imprisonment, insurrection, power, war, work, fraternity, at a moment perhaps unique in history — wore away, gradually invaded by intruders who spoke our language, imitated our gestures, marched under our banners, but who were utterly different from ourselves — moved by old appetites, neither proletarians nor revolutionaries — profiteers … Enfeebled cohort, artfully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us, then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to submit. Would our resistance do anything but make bad worse? If — as they could have done at any instant — a Bukharin, a Piatakov had suddenly risen in the dock to unmask their poor comrades lying through their last hours by command, the fraudulent prosecutor, the abetting judges, the double-dealing inquisition, the gagged Party, the stupid and terrorized Central Committee, the devastated Political Bureau, the Chief ridden by his nightmare — what demoralization there would have been in the country, what jubilation in the capitalist world, what headlines in the fascist press! “Read all about it — The Moscow Scandal, The Bolshevik Sink, The Chief Denounced by his Victims.” No, no — better the end, any end. The account must be settled between ourselves, in the heart of the new society preyed on by old ills …
In that iron circle Rublev’s thoughts never ceased to travel.
One evening after dinner he put on his short overcoat and his astrakhan cap, said to Dora, “I’m going up for a breath of air,” took the elevator, and got out on the terrace roof above the eleventh floor. An expensive restaurant occupied it in summer; and the diners, as they listened vaguely to the violins, looked at the innumerable lights of Moscow, spellbound despite themselves by those terrestrial constellations, whose tiniest lights guided lives at work. The place was even more beautiful in winter, when there were neither diners, nor flowers, nor colored lamp shades on the little tables, nor violins, nor odors of broiled mutton, champagne, and cosmetics — only the vast calm night over the vast city, the red halo of Passion Square, with its electric signs, its snow stained by black ruts and footpaths, its swarm of people and vehicles under the arc lights, the discreet, secret glow of its windows … At that height, the electric lights did not interfere with vision, the stars were clear and distinct. Fountains of reddish light in the midst of the dense black of buildings indicated the squares; the white boulevards disappeared into darkness. His hands in his pockets, Rublev made the circuit of the terrace, thinking nothing. A faint smile came to his lips. “I should have made Dora come up to see this — it is magnificent, magnificent …” And he stopped short, surprised — for a couple with their arms around each other’s waists were swiftly bearing down on him, leaning forward in a graceful attitude of flight. Skating alone on the terrace, the two lovers swept up to Kiril Rublev, their ravished faces shone on him, they smiled at him, leaned into a long airy curve, and were off toward the horizon — that is, toward the other end of the terrace, from which there was a view of the Kremlin. Rublev watched them stop there and lean on the railing; he joined them and leaned on the railing too. They could clearly see the high crenelated wall, the heavy watchtowers, the red flame of the flag, lit by a search-light, on the cupola of the Executive offices, the domes of the cathedrals, the vast halo of Red Square.
The girl looked toward Rublev, in whom she recognized the old and influential Bolshevik for whom a Central Committee car came every morning — last year. She half turned to him. Her companion stroked the back of her neck with his fingers.
“Is that where the Chief of our Party lives?” she asked, looking off toward the towers and crenelations bright against the night.
“He has an apartment in the Kremlin, but he doesn’t often stay there,” Rublev answered.
“Is that where he works? Somewhere under the red flag?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
The young face was thoughtful for a moment, then turned to Rublev:
“It is terrible to think that a man like him has lived for years surrounded by traitors and criminals! It makes you tremble for his life … Isn’t it terrible?”
Rublev echoed her hollowly: “… terrible.”
“Come on, Dina,” the young man murmured.
They put their arms around each other’s waists, became aerial again, leaned forward, and, borne by a magic power, set off on their skates toward another horizon … A little tense, Rublev made his way to the elevator.
In the apartment he found Dora sitting opposite a young well-dressed man whom he did not know. Her face was pale. “Comrade Rublev, I have brought you a message from the Moscow Committee …” A big yellow envelope. Merely a summons to discuss urgent business. “If you could come at once, there is a car waiting …”
“But it is eleven o’clock,” Dora objected.
“Comrade Rublev will be back in twenty minutes, by car. I was told to assure you of that.”
Rublev dismissed the messenger. “I’ll be down in three minutes.” His eyes upon hers, he looked at his wife: her lips were colorless, her cheeks yellowish, it was as if her face were disintegrating. She murmured:
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It happened once before, you remember. A little peculiar, even so.”
No light anywhere. No possible help. They kissed hurriedly, blindly, their lips were cold. “See you later.” — “See you later.”
The Committee offices were deserted. In the secretary’s office a stout, bemedaled Tatar, with cropped skull and a thin fringe of black hairs on his upper lip, was reading the papers and drinking tea. He took the summons. “Rublev? Right away …” He opened a dossier in which there was only a single typewritten sheet, read it, frowning, raised his face — the puffy, opaque, heavy face of a big eater.
“Have you your Party card with you? Please let me see it.”
From his pocketbook Rublev took the red folder in which was written: “Member since 1907.” Over twenty years. What years!
“Right.”
The red folder disappeared into a drawer, the key turned.
“You are charged with a crime. Your card will be returned to you, if necessary, after the investigation. That is all.”
Rublev had been waiting for the blow too long. A sort of fury bristled his eyebrows, clenched his jaws, squared his shoulders. The secretary slid back a little in his revolving chair:
“I know nothing about it, those are my orders. That is all, citizen.”
Rublev walked away, strangely light, borne by thoughts like flights of birds. So that’s the trap — the beast in the trap is you, the trapped beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you … And we’re all in it, all in the trap … Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere? Scoundrels, scoundrels! An empty hall, rawly lighted, the great marble stairway, the double revolving door, the street, the dry cold, the messenger’s black car. Beside the messenger, who was smoking while he waited, someone else, a low voice saying thickly: “Comrade Rublev, be so good as to come with us for a short conversation …” — “I know, I know,” said Rublev furiously, and he opened the door, flung himself into the icy Lincoln, folded his arms, and summoned all his will power to hold down an explosion of despairing fury …
The snow-white and night-blue of the narrow streets passed over the windows in parallel bands. “Slower,” Rublev ordered, and the driver obeyed. Rublev let down the window — he wanted a good look at a bit of street, it did not matter what street. The sidewalk glittered with untrodden snow. A nobleman’s residence of the past century, with its pillared portico, seemed to have been sleeping for the last hundred years behind its ornamental iron fence. The silvery trunks of birches shone faintly in the garden. That was all — forever, in a perfect silence, in the purity of a dream. City under the sea, farewell. The driver pushed down the accelerator. — It is we who are under the sea. It doesn’t matter — we were strong men once.