Makeyev was exceptionally gifted in the art of forgetting in order to grow greater. Of the little peasant from Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, Tula Government — a country of green and brown valleys, dotted with thatched roofs — he preserved only a rudimentary memory, just enough to make him proud of his transformation. A little reddish-haired lad like a million others, like them destined to the soil, the village girls would have none of him — they called him “Artyomka the Pockmarked” with a shade of mockery. Rickets in childhood had left him with awkward bowlegs. Nevertheless, at seventeen, in the Sunday evening fights between the lads of Green Street and the lads of Stink Street, he brought down his enemy with a blow of his own invention which landed between neck and ear and caused instantaneous dizziness … After these rough-and-tumble fights, since even now no girl would have him, he sat on the dilapidated steps of his house, chewing his nails and watching his big strong toes wriggling in the dust. If he had known that there are words to express the vicious torpor of such moments, he would have muttered, as Maxim Gorki muttered at his age: “What boredom, what loneliness, what a desire to smash someone in the face!” — not for the pleasure of victory this time, but to escape from himself and an even worse world. In 1917 the Empire made Artyem Makeyev a soldier under its double eagles — a passive soldier, as dirty and with as little to do as all his fellows in Volhynia trenches. He spent his time marauding through a countryside which had already been visited by a hundred thousand marauders just like himself; laboriously delousing himself at twilight; dreaming of raping the peasant girls — they were few and far between — whom night caught on the roads, and who, incidentally, had been frequently raped before by many another … As for him, he did not dare. He followed them through a chalk countryside of shattered trees and fields full of shell holes; suddenly the ground would hold up a clutching hand, a knee, a helmet, a jagged tin can. He followed them, his throat dry, his muscles painfully thirsting for violence; but he never dared.
A curious strength, which at first made him uneasy, awoke in him when he learned that the peasants were taking possession of the land. Before his eyes hung the manor of Akimovka, the manor house with its low portico on four white columns, the statue of a nymph beside the pool, the fallow fields, the woods, the marsh, the meadows … He felt an inexpressible hatred for the owners of that unknown universe, which was really his, his from all eternity, his in all justice, but which had been taken from him by a nameless crime perpetrated long before his birth, an immense crime against all the peasants on earth. It had always been thus, though he had not known it; and that hatred had lain asleep in him always. The gusts of wind that blew at evening over fields which the war had disinherited brought him intelligible sentences, revealing words. The people of the manor — “Sir” and “Madam” — were “blood-drinkers.” Private Artyem Makeyev never having seen them, no human image disturbed the image which the words called up in him. But blood he had seen often enough — the blood of his comrades after a burst of shrapnel, when the earth and the yellowed grass drank it — very red at first, so red it turned your stomach, then black, and, very soon, the flies settled on it.
About this period Makeyev thought of his life for the first time. It was as if he had started talking with himself — and he almost laughed, it was funny — he was making a fool of himself! But the words that arranged themselves in his mind were so serious that they killed his laughter and made him screw up his face like a man who tries to raise a weight too heavy for his muscles. He told himself that he must get away, carry grenades under his greatcoat, get back to his village, set fire to the manor house, take the land. Where did he hit on the idea of fire? The forest sometimes catches fire in summer, no one knows how. Villages burn and no one knows where the fire started. The idea of the fire made him think further. A shame, of course, to burn down the beautiful manor house, it could be used for — what? What could it be made into for the peasants? To have the clodhoppers in it themselves — no, that would never do … Burn the nest and you drive away the birds. Burn the manorial nest, and a trench full of terror and fire would separate past from present, he would be an incendiary, and incendiaries go to jail or the gallows, so we must be the stronger — but this was beyond Makeyev’s reasoning ability, he felt these things rather than thought them. He set out alone, leaving the louse-infested trench by way of the latrines. In the train he found himself with men like himself, who had set off like himself; when he saw them his heart filled with strength. But he told them nothing, because silence made him strong. The manor house went up in flames. A troop of Cossacks rode through the green roads toward the peasant uprising: wasps buzzed around their horses’ sweating flanks; mottled butterflies fled before the mingled stench of human sweat and horse sweat. Before they reached the offending village, Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, telegrams mysteriously reached the district, spreading good news: “Decree concerning the seizure of lands,” signed, “The People’s Commissars.” The Cossacks had the news from a white-haired old man who popped out from among the roadside shrubbery, under the silver-scaled birches. “It’s the law, my lads, the law, you can’t do anything about it. It’s the law.” The land, the land, the law! — there was an astonished murmuring among the Cossacks, and they began to deliberate. The stupefied butterflies settled in the grass, while the troop, restrained by the invisible decree, halted, not knowing whether to go forward or back. What land? Whose was the land? The landlords’? Ours? Whose? Whose? The amazed officer suddenly felt afraid of his men; but no one thought of stopping him from escaping. In Akimovka’s single street, where the mud-daubed log houses leaned each its own way in the center of a little green enclosure, heavy-breasted women crossed themselves. This time there could be no mistake — the days of Antichrist were really come! Makeyev, who still clung to his beltload of grenades, came out onto the stairs of his house, a ruinous isba with a leaky roof, and shouted to the old witches to shut up, God damn it, or they would soon see, God damn it — his face growing more and more crimson … The first assembly of the poor peasants of the district elected him president of its Executive Committee. The first DECREED which he dictated to his scribe (who had been clerk to the district justice of peace) ordered that any woman who spoke of Antichrist in public should be whipped; and the text of it, written in a round hand, was posted in the main street.
Makeyev began a rather dizzying career. He became Artyem Artyemich, president of the Executive, without exactly knowing what the Executive was, but with eyes that were deeply set under arching brows, shaven head, shirt freed of vermin, and, in his soul, a will as tough as knotted roots in a rock crevice. He had people who regretted the former police turned out of their houses; other police, who were sent into the district, he had arrested, and that was the last that was seen of them. People said that he was just. He repeated the word from the depths of his being, with a subdued fire in his eyes: Just. If he had had time to watch himself live, he would have been astonished by a new discovery. Just as the faculty of reason had suddenly revealed itself to him so that he could seize the land, another more obscure faculty, which sprung inexplicably to life in his muscles, his neck, his viscera, led him, roused him, strengthened him. He did not know its name. Intellectuals would have called it will. Before he learned to say It is my will, which was not until several years later when he had grown accustomed to addressing assemblies, he instinctively knew what he had to do in order to obtain, dominate, order, succeed, then feel a calm content almost as good as that which comes after possessing a woman. He rarely spoke in the first person, preferring to say We. It is not my will, it is our will, brothers. His first speeches were to Red soldiers in a freight car; his voice had to rise above the rattle and clank of the moving train. His faculty of comprehension grew from event to event, by successive illuminations. He saw causes, probable effects, people’s motives, he sensed how to act and react; he had a hard time reducing it all to words in his mind, and then reducing the words to ideas and memories, and he never wholly succeeded.
The Whites invaded the district. The Makeyevs met with short shrift from these gentry, who hanged them as soon as they captured them, pinning insulting inscriptions on their chests: Brigand or Bolshevik or both together. Makeyev managed to join comrades in the woods, seized a train with them, left it at a steppe city which greatly delighted him, for it was the first large city he had ever seen and it lived pleasantly under a torrid sun. In the market big juicy melons were sold for a few kopecks. Camels paced slowly through the sandy streets. A few miles from the city, Makeyev shot down so many white-turbaned horsemen that he was made a deputy chief. A little later, in ’19, he joined the Party. The meeting was held around a fire in the open fields, under glittering stars. The fifteen Party members were grouped around the Bureau of Three, and the Three crouched in the firelight, with notebooks on their knees. After the report on the international situation, given in a harsh voice which imparted an Asiatic flavor to strange European names — Cle-mansso, Loy-Djorje, Guermania, Liebkneckt — Commissar Kasparov asked if anyone raised any objection to the admission of candidate Makeyev, Artyem Artyemiyevich, into the Party of the Proletarian Revolution? “Stand up, Makeyev,” he said imperiously. Makeyev was already on his feet, straight as a ramrod in the red firelight, blinded by it and by all the eyes that were fixed on him at this moment of consecration, blinded too by a rain of stars, though the stars were motionless … “Peasant, son of working peasants …” “Son of landless peasants!” Makeyev proudly corrected. Several voices approved his membership. “Adopted,” said the Commissar.
At Perekop, when, to win the final battle in the accursed war, they had to enter the treacherous lagoon of Sivash and march through it in water up to their waists, up to their shoulders in the worst places — and what awaited them ten paces ahead, if not the end? — Makeyev, Deputy Commissar with the Fourth Battalion, had more than one fierce struggle to save his life from his own fear or his own fury. What deadly holes might lie under that water which spread so dazzlingly under the white dawn? Had they not been betrayed by some staff technician? Jaws clenched, trembling all over, but resolute and cool to the point of insanity, he held his rifle above his head at arm’s length, setting the example. He was the first out of the lagoon; the first to climb a sand dune, to lie down, feeling the sand warm against his belly, to aim and begin firing from ambush on a group of men, taken by surprise from the rear, whom he distinctly saw scurrying around a small fieldpiece.… On the evening of the exhausting victory, an officer dressed in new khaki stood on the same fieldpiece to read the troop a message from the Komandarm (Army Commander), to which Makeyev did not listen because his back was broken with stooping and his eyes gummy with sleep. Toward the end of it, however, the harsh rhythm of certain words penetrated his brain: “Who is the brave combatant of the glorious Steppes Division who …” Mechanically, Makeyev too asked himself who the brave combatant might be and what he might have done, but to hell with him and with all these ceremonies because I’ll die if I don’t get some sleep, I’m done in. At that moment Commissar Kasparov looked at Makeyev so intently that Makeyev thought: “I must be doing something wrong. I must look as if I were drunk,” and he made an immense effort to keep his eyes from closing. Kasparov called:
“Makeyev!”
And Makeyev staggered from the ranks, amid a murmur: “It’s him, him, him, Artyemich!” The Artyomka whom the village girls once despised entered into glory covered to the neck with dried mud, drunk with weariness, wanting nothing in the world but a bit of grass or straw to lie down on. The officer kissed him on the mouth. The officer’s chin was stubbly, he smelled of raw onion and dried sweat and horse. Then, for a brief instant, they looked at each other through a fog, as two exhausted horses reconnoiter each other. Their eyes were wet. And Makeyev came to, as he recognized the partisan of the Urals, the victor of Krasni-yar, the victor of Ufa, the man who turned the most desperate of retreats, Blücher. “Comrade Blücher,” he said thickly, “I’m … I’m glad to see you … You … You’re a man, you are …” It seemed to him that Blücher was reeling with sleep, like himself. “You too,” Blücher answered with a smile, “you’re a man, all right … Come and drink some tea with me tomorrow morning, at Division Headquarters.” Blücher had a tanned face, with deep perpendicular lines and heavy pockets under the eyes. That day was the beginning of their friendship, a friendship between men of the same stuff who saw each other for a brief hour twice a year, in camps, at ceremonies, at the great Party conferences.
In 1922, Makeyev returned to Akimovka in a jolting Ford marked with the initials of the C.C. of the C.P.(b.) of the R.S.F.S.R. The village children surrounded the car. For some seconds Makeyev stared at them with a terrible intensity of emotion: really, he was looking for himself among them, but too awkwardly to recognize how much several of them resembled him. He threw them his whole stock of sugar and change, patted the cheeks of the little girls who were timid and hung back, joked with the women, went to bed with the merriest one — she had full breasts, big eyes, and big teeth — and installed himself, as Party organizing secretary for the district, in the best house. “What a backward place!” he said. “We have to begin at the very beginning. Not a ray of light!” Sent from Akimovka to eastern Siberia to preside over a regional Executive. Elected an alternate member of the C.C. the year after the death of Vladimir Ilich … Each year new distinctions were added to the service record in his personal dossier as a member of the Party in the most responsible category. Honestly, patiently, with sure tread, he climbed the rungs of power. Meanwhile, as he lost all distinct memories of his wretched childhood and adolescence, of his life of humiliations during the war, of a past without pride and without power, he began to feel himself superior to everyone with whom he came into contact — always excepting men whom the C.C. had appointed to positions of greater power. These he venerated, with no jealousy, as creatures of a nature that was not yet his but which was bound to be his some day. He felt himself, like them, possessed of a legitimate authority, integrated into the dictatorship of the proletariat like a good steel screw set in its proper place in some admirable, supple, and complex machine.
As Secretary of the regional Committee, Makeyev had governed Kurgansk (both the city and the district) for a number of years, with the proud but unspoken thought of giving it his name: Makeyevgorod or Makeyevgrad — why not? The simplest form — Makeyevo — reminded him too much of peasant speech. The proposal, broached in the lobbies of a regional Party conference, was about to pass — by unanimous vote, according to custom — when, suddenly doubtful, Makeyev himself changed his mind at the last moment. “All the credit for my work,” he cried from the platform, under the huge picture of Lenin, “belongs to the Party. The Party has made me, the Party has done all.” Applause. But already Makeyev was terrified by the thought that his words might be construed as containing unfortunate allusions to the members of the Political Bureau. An hour later, he mounted the platform again, having meanwhile run through the last two issues of The Bolshevik, the magazine devoted to theory, where he found several phrases which he distributed to his audience, pounding them home with short jabs of his fists. “The highest personification of the Party is our great, our inspired Chief. I propose that we give his glorious name to the new school we are about to build!” His audience applauded confidently, as they would confidently have voted for Makeyevgrad, Makeyevo, or Makeyev City. He came down from the platform wiping his forehead, glad that he had been wise enough to refuse fame for the moment. It would come. His name would be on maps, among the blue curves of rivers, the green blotches of forest, the crosshatched hills, the sinuous black railroad line. For he had faith in himself as he had faith in the triumph of Socialism — and doubtless it was the same faith.
In this present, which was the only reality, he no longer distinguished between himself and the country which — as big as centuries-old England — lies three quarters in Europe and one quarter in an Asia of plains and deserts still furrowed by caravan routes. A country without a history: the Khazars had passed that way in the fifth century on their little long-haired horses, as the Scythians had passed that way centuries before them, to found an empire on the Volga. Where did they come from? Who were they? Came too the Pechenegs, Genghis Khan’s horsemen, Kulagu Khan’s archers, the Golden Horde’s slant-eyed administrators and methodical headsmen, the Nogai Tatars. Plain upon plain — migrations vanished in them as water vanishes in sand. Of that immemorial legend, Makeyev knew only a few names, a few scenes; but he knew and loved horses as the Pechenegs and the Nogai did, like them he understood the flight of birds, like them he could find his way through blizzards by signs which men of other races could not discern. If by some miracle the weapon of past centuries, a bow, had been placed in his hands, he could have used it as skillfully as the divers unknown tribes whom that soil had nourished, who had died upon it and been absorbed into it … “All is ours!” he said, sincerely, at public meetings of the Railwaymen’s Club, and he could easily have substituted “All is mine,” since he was only vaguely aware where “I” ended and “we” began. (The “I” belongs to the Party, the “I” is of value only inasmuch as, through the Party, it incarnates the new collectivity; yet, since it incarnates it powerfully and consciously, the “I,” in the name of the “we,” possesses the world.) Makeyev could not have worked it out theoretically. In practice, he never felt the slightest doubt. “I have forty thousand head of sheep in the Tatarovka district this year!” he cried happily at the regional Production conference. “Next year I shall have three brickworks operating. I told the Plan Commission: ‘Comrade, you must give me three hundred horses before fall — or you’ll hold up the plan for the year! You want to put my only electric power station under the Center? Not if I can stop you, it’s mine, I’ll use every measure, the C.C. will decide.”’ (Instead of “measure” he said “resource,” or rather he thought he was saying “resource” but he actually said “recourse.”)
Two Narychkins successively exiled to Kurgansk — one, at the end of the eighteenth century, for misappropriations considered excessive when he fell into disfavor with an aging and obese empress; the other, early in the nineteenth, for some witty remarks on the Jacobinism of Monsieur Bonaparte — built a little square palace there in the Neo-Greek style of the Empire, with a peristyle and columns. On either side of this palace extended the wooden houses of the merchants, the low-walled caravansary, the gardens of the more luxurious dwellings. Makeyev set up his office in one of the drawing rooms to the old-regime governors-general, the very drawing room to which the liberal Narychkin, waited on by indolent servitors, had been wont to retire to reread Voltaire. A local antiquarian told Comrade Artyem Artyemiyevich about it. “He was a Freemason too — belonged to the same lodge as the Decembrists.” — “Do you really believe any of those feudal dogs could be sincerely liberal?” Makeyev asked. “Anyway, what does liberal mean?” A copybook containing a part of the family journal, odd volumes of Voltaire, a copy of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws annotated in the nobleman’s own hand, were still in the attic, together with odd pieces of old furniture and some family portraits, one of which, signed by Madame Vigée-Lebrun, a French Revolutionary émigrée, represented a stout dignitary of fifty, with penetrating brown eyes and an ironic and sensual mouth … Makeyev had it brought down, contemplated Narychkin for a moment, looked sourly at the glittering cross on his chest, touched the frame with the toe of his boot, and pronounced judgment: “Not bad. A real feudal mug. Send it to the regional museum.” The title of Montesquieu’s book was translated for him. He sneered: “Spirit of exploitation! … Send it to the library.” “I should suggest the museum,” the antiquarian objected. Makeyev turned on him and, in a crushing voice (because he did not understand), said: “Why?” The frightened antiquarian made no answer. On the double mahogany door a sign was tacked: Office of the Regional Secretary. Inside: a large desk; four telephones, one of them a direct wire to Moscow, the C.C., and the Central Executive; dwarf palms between the tall windows; four big leather armchairs (the only ones in the district); on the right-hand wall, a map of the district especially drawn by a deported ex-officer; on the left-hand wall, a map from the Economic Plan Commission indicating the sites of future factories, of a projected railway and a projected canal, of three workers’ housing developments to be built, of baths, schools, and stadiums to be brought into existence in the city … Behind the Regional Secretary’s comfortable armchair hung a large portrait in oils of the General Secretary, supplied for eight hundred rubles by the Universal Stores in the capital — a slick and shining portrait, in which the Chief’s green tunic seemed to be cut out of heavy painted cardboard and his half-smile miscarried into absolute nullity. When the office was completely furnished, Makeyev entered it with suppressed delight. “Wonderful, that portrait of the Chief. That’s real proletarian art!” he said expansively. But what was lacking in the room? What was this strange, irritating, improper, inconceivable blank? He turned on his heel, vaguely displeased, and the people around him — the architect, the secretary of the city Committee, the commandant of the building, the chief clerk, his private stenographer — all felt the same discomfort. “And Lenin?” he said at last; then added, with almost thunderous reproach: “You have forgotten Lenin, comrades! Ha, ha, ha!” His laughter rang out insolently amid the general confusion. The secretary of the city Committee was the first to regain his self-possession:
“Not at all, Comrade Makeyev, not at all. We hurried to get things finished this morning and there wasn’t time to put in the bookcase — there’s where it will stand — with Ilich’s Complete Works, in the Institute edition, and the little bust that goes on top of it, just like in my place.”
“That’s better,” said Makeyev, his eyes still gleaming with mockery.
And, before dismissing them, he announced sententiously:
“Never forget Lenin, comrades — that is the Communist’s law.”
Left alone, Makeyev sat squarely down in his revolving chair, turned it happily back and forth, dipped the new pen into the red ink, and wrote a large signature, complete with flourishes — A. A. MAKEYEV — on the memorandum pad with its printed heading: C.P. of the U.S.S.R. Kurgansk Regional Committee. The Regional Secretary. After admiring it for a while, he looked at the telephones, and his full cheeks creased in a smile. “Hello, operator. Seven-six.” His voice became soft: “Is that you, Alia?” Half mockingly, half caressingly: “Nothing, nothing. Everything going all right? Yes, of course, pretty soon.” He turned to the second telephone: “Hello, Security? The Chief’s office. Hello, Tikhon Alexeyich — come about four o’clock. Is your wife feeling better? Yes — yes — all right.” Great stuff! He looked long and eagerly at the direct Moscow connection, but could think of nothing urgent to tell the Kremlin; yet he put his hand on the receiver (suppose I call the Central Plan Commission about trucks?), but then did not dare. In times past the telephone had been a wonder to him, a magical instrument; awkward about using it, he had long feared it, losing far too much of his self-assurance in the presence of the little black cylinder of the receiver. Now that all its terrifying magic was placed at his service, he saw it as a symbol of power. The little local committees came to fear his calls. His imperious voice burst from the receiver: “Makeyev speaking.” It was an almost unintelligible roar. “That you, Ivanov? More lapses, eh? I won’t have it … immediate sanctions … Give you twenty-four hours! …” He preferred to act these scenes before a few deferential colleagues. The blood rose to his heavy face, his broad, conical, shaven skull. The reprimand delivered, he slammed down the receiver, stared into space like an angry beast of prey, pretending to see no one, opened a dossier, ostensibly to calm himself. (But it was all only an inner rite.) Woe to the Party member under investigation whose personal dossier fell into Makeyev’s hands at such a moment! In less than a minute he infallibly discovered the weak point in the case: “Claims to be the son of poor peasants, was actually the son of a deacon.” The genuine son of landless peasants laughed harshly, and wrote in the column reserved for suggested action: “exp.” (expulsion) followed by an implacable M., all in heavy blue pencil. He had a disconcerting faculty of remembering such dossiers, fishing them out from among a hundred others to confirm his decision a year and a half later, when the file, swelled by a dozen reports, came back from Moscow. If the Central Control Commission happened to favor keeping the poor wretch in the Party “with a solemn warning,” Makeyev was even capable of renewing his opposition with Machiavellian ingenuity. The C.C.C. was well aware of these cases, and indulgently supposed that Makeyev was settling personal accounts — no one had the least idea of the absolute impartiality of the rages which he put on for the sake of his prestige. Only one of the C.C.C. secretaries occasionally permitted himself to override these decisions of Makeyev’s — Tulayev. “One down for Makeyev,” he muttered into his thick mustache as he ordered the reinstatement of the expelled member whom neither he nor Makeyev had ever seen or would ever see. On the rare occasions when they met in Moscow, Tulayev, who was a bigger man than Makeyev, addressed him genially in the familiar form, though at the same time calling him “comrade,” to indicate that not all Bolsheviks were equal. Tulayev discerned Makeyev’s value. Basically the two men were much alike, though Tulayev was better educated, more adaptable, and more blasé about exercising power (as chief clerk to a substantial Volga merchant, he had taken courses at a commercial school). Tulayev was embarked on a bigger career. He once plunged Makeyev into unbearable embarrassment by reporting to a meeting that the last May Day procession at Kurgansk had included no less than 137 large or small portraits of Comrade Makeyev, Regional Secretary, and then going on to mention the official opening of a Makeyev Day Nursery in a Kazak village which had soon after emigrated in a body to newer pastures … Crushed by the laughter, Makeyev rose and stood looking into the sea of hilarious faces, his eyes full of tears, his voice half choked, demanding the floor … He did not get it, for a member of the Political Bureau came in, wearing an elegantly tailored workman’s blouse, and the whole assembly rose for the ritual seven-to-eight-minute ovation. After the meeting Tulayev sought out Makeyev: “That was a pretty good trouncing I gave you, eh, brother? But don’t let a little thing like that make you angry. If you get the chance, come back at me as hard as you like. Have a drink?” Those were the good old times of rough-and-ready brotherhood.
In those days the Party was turning over a new leaf. No more heroes — what was needed was good administrators, practical unromantic men. No more venturesome spurts of international or planetary or name-your-own-adjective revolution — we must think of ourselves, build Socialism for ourselves, in our own country. A renovation of cadres, opening the way to second-rank men, rejuvenated the Republic. Makeyev took part in the purges, acquired a reputation as a practical man devoted to the “general line,” learned the official phrases which bring peace to the soul, and was able to recite them for an hour by the clock. It was with strange emotion that he one day received a visit from Kasparov. The former Commissar of the Steppes Division, the leader of the fiery Civil War days, quietly entered the Regional Secretary’s office, without knocking or sending in his name, about three o’clock one torrid summer afternoon. A Kasparov who had aged and grown thinner, in a white blouse and cap. “You!” Makeyev exclaimed, and flew to embrace his visitor, kissed him, clasped him to his chest. Kasparov gave the impression of being light. They sat down facing each other in the deep armchairs, and now a feeling of uneasiness extinguished their joy. “Well,” said Makeyev, who did not know what to say, “where are you bound in that outfit?” Kasparov’s face looked tense and severe, as it used to look when they camped on the Orenburg steppes, or during the Crimean campaign, or at Perekop … He looked at Makeyev impenetrably; perhaps he was judging him. Makeyev felt uncomfortable. “Appointed by the C.C.,” said Kasparov, “to be director of river transport in the Far East …” Makeyev instantly computed the extent of this disgrace: distant exile, a purely economic position, whereas a Kasparov could have governed Vladivostok or Irkutsk, at the very least.
“And you?” said Kasparov, with something of melancholy in his tone.
To shake off his uneasiness, Makeyev stood up — herculean, massive, shaven-skulled. Sweat stains showed on his blouse.
“I’m building,” he said cheerfully. “Come and see.” He took Kasparov to the Plan Commission’s map — irrigation canals, brickworks, railway yard, schools, baths, stud farms. “Just look at that — you can see the country growing under your eyes, in twenty years we’ll be up with the U.S.A. I believe it because I am in the thick of it.” His voice rang a little false and he noticed it. It was the voice in which he made official speeches … With a barely sketched gesture, Kasparov waved aside the vain words, the economic plans, his old comrade’s simulated joy — and that was just what Makeyev obscurely feared. Kasparov said:
“All that is fine. But the Party is at the crossroads. The fate of the Revolution is being decided, brother.”
By the greatest of luck, the telephone began buzzing shrilly at that moment. Makeyev gave some orders relative to nationalized trade. Then, taking his turn at dismissing what he preferred to overlook, he spread his broad, plump hands in a conclusive gesture, and, with a guileless look:
“In this country, old man, everything has been decided once and for all. The general line — I don’t see any other way. I’m going ahead. Come back here in two or three years, and you won’t recognize the town or the district. A new world, old man, a new America! A young Party that doesn’t know what fear is, full of confidence. Will you come and review the Young Communist sports parade with me this evening? You’ll see!”
Kasparov shook his head evasively. Another played-out Thermidorian, a fine administrative animal who could glibly recite the four hundred current ideological phrases that obviated thinking, seeing, feeling, and even remembering, even suffering the least remorse when you did the vilest things! There were both irony and despair in the little smile that lighted Kasparov’s lined face. Makeyev bristled in the presence of feelings utterly foreign to his nature but which he nevertheless divined.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Kasparov in a peculiar tone. He appeared to make himself at ease, unbuttoned the neck of his shirt, threw his cap into one of the armchairs, sat down comfortably in another with his legs crossed:
“A nice office you have here — for whatever that’s worth — very nice. But beware of bureaucratic comfort, Artyemich. It’s a slough — a man can drown in it.”
Was he trying to be deliberately disagreeable? Makeyev lost a little of his assurance. Kasparov looked at him judicially out of his strange gray eyes, which were calm in danger, calm in excitement.
“Artyemich, I have been thinking things over. Our plans are 50 to 60 per cent impossible to carry out. To carry them out to the extent of the remaining 40 per cent, the real wages of the working class will have to be reduced below the level they reached under the Imperial Government — far below the present level even in backward capitalist countries … Have you thought about that? I fear not. In six months at most, we shall have to declare war on the peasants and begin shooting them down — as sure as two and two make four. Shortage of industrial goods, plus depreciation of the ruble — or, to put it frankly, hidden inflation; low grain prices imposed by the state, natural resistance on the part of grain owners — you know how it goes. Have you considered the consequences?”
Makeyev had too much sense of reality to demur, but he was afraid someone in the hall might hear such words spoken in his office — words of sacrilege, challenging the Chief’s doctrine, challenging everything! They cut him, they troubled him: he became aware that it required his most conscious effort to keep himself from speaking the same terrible language. Kasparov went on:
“I am neither a coward nor a bureaucrat, I know what duty to the Party is. What I am saying to you, I have written to the Political Bureau, with figures to support it. Thirty of us signed it — all survivors of Czarist prisons, of Taman, Perekop, Kronstadt … Can you guess how they answered us? As for me, I was first sent to inspect the schools in Kazakistan, which have neither teachers nor buildings nor books nor pencils … Now I am being sent to count barges at Krasnoyarsk — which is all the same to me. But that this criminal stupidity should be continued for the pleasure of a hundred thousand bureaucrats too lazy to realize that they are headed for their own destruction and are dragging the Revolution with them — that is not all the same to me. And you, old man, hold an honorable rank in the hierarchy of those hundred thousand. I rather suspected it. I sometimes asked myself: What is going to become of old Makeyich, if he isn’t a down-and-out drunk by now?”
Makeyev walked nervously back and forth from map to map. Kasparov’s words, his ideas, his very presence, were becoming intolerably distressing — it was as if he suddenly felt dirty from head to foot because of those words, of those ideas, of Kasparov. The four telephones, the smallest details of the office, began to look odious. And anger was no way out — why? In a tired voice he answered:
“Let’s talk about something else. You know I am not an economist. I carry out the Party’s directives, that’s all — today, just as I used to in the Army with you. And you taught me to obey for the Revolution. What more can I do? Come and have dinner at my house later. I have a new wife, you know — Alia Sayidovna, a Tatar. You’ll come?”
Under the indifferent tone, Kasparov read an entreaty: Show me that you still think enough of me to sit down at my table with my new wife — that’s all I ask of you. Kasparov put on his cap, stood at the window for a moment humming to himself and looking out into the public garden (a gravel disk flooded with sunshine; a little dark bronze bust exactly in the center of it). “Right — see you this evening, Artyemich. A fine town you have here …” — “Isn’t it?” Makeyev answered quickly, feeling intensely relieved. Below them Lenin’s bronze cranium gleamed like polished stone. It was a good dinner, nicely served by Alia. She was short and plump, with a sleek animal grace: clean, well-fed; bluish-black hair twined over her temples, doe eyes, a profile of soft curves, all the lines of her face and body melting into each other. Ancient Iranian gold coins hung at her ears, her fingernails were painted pomegranate red. She served Kasparov to pilau, juicy watermelon, real tea — “you can’t find it anywhere any more,” she said pleasantly. Kasparov refrained from confessing that he had not eaten such a good meal for six months. He exhibited himself in his most amiable light, told the only three stories he knew (which he privately referred to as his “three little stories for inane evenings”) and showed none of the exasperation aroused in him by her little laugh, which displayed her white teeth and arched her round breasts, and by Makeyev’s self-satisfied guffaws; he even went so far as to congratulate them on their happiness. “You ought to have a canary, in a big, pretty cage — it’s just the thing for a nice, homelike place …” Makeyev was very nearly aware of the sarcasm, but Alia exploded: “Just what I’ve been saying, comrade. Ask Artyem if I haven’t!” When they parted, the two men sensed that they would not meet again — unless as enemies.
An ill-omened visit: for soon after it, troubles began. The Party and administrative purges were just completed, under Makeyev’s energetic leadership. In the offices of Kurgansk there remained but a small percentage of old-timers — that is, of men formed in the storms of the past ten years. Tendencies — whether Left (Trotskyist), Right (Rykov-Tomsky-Bukharin), or Pseudo-Loyalist (Zinoviev-Kamenev) — appeared to be thoroughly wiped out, though actually they were not entirely so, for wisdom advised laying something aside for the future. But grain was not coming in satisfactorily. In accordance with messages from the C.C., Makeyev visited the villages, broadcast promises and threats, had himself photographed surrounded by muzhiks, women, and children, got up several parades of enthusiastic farmers who were turning over all their wheat to the state. The carts entered the city in procession, laden with sacks and accompanied by red flags, transparencies proclaiming a single-hearted devotion to the Party, portraits of the Chief and portraits of Comrade Makeyev, carried like banners by the village lads and girls. There was a fine holiday feeling about these manifestations. The Executive of the regional Soviet sent the orchestra of the Railwaymen’s Club to meet the parades; moving-picture photographers, summoned from Moscow by telephone, arrived by plane to film one of the Red convoys, and the entire U.S.S.R. later saw it on the screen. Makeyev received it, standing on a truck, shouting sonorously: “Honor to the farmers of a happy land!” The evening of the same day he stayed in his office late into the night, conferring with the President of the Executive of the Soviet and an envoy extraordinary from the C.C. The situation was becoming serious: insufficient reserves, insufficient receipts, the certainty of a reduction in cropping, an illicit rise in market prices, a wave of speculation. The envoy extraordinary announced draconian measures to be applied “with an iron hand.” “Certainly,” said Makeyev, afraid to understand.
So began the black years. First expropriated, then deported, some seven per cent of the farmers left the region in cattle cars amid the cries, tears, and curses of urchins and disheveled women and old men mad with rage. Fields lay fallow, cattle disappeared, people ate the oil cake intended for the stock, there was no more sugar or gasoline, leather or shoes, cloth or clothes, everywhere there was hunger on impenetrable white faces, everywhere pilfering, collusion, sickness; in vain did Security decimate the bureaus of animal husbandry, agriculture, transport, food control, sugar production, distribution … The C.C. recommended raising rabbits. Makeyev had placards posted: “The rabbit shall be the cornerstone of proletarian diet.” And the local government rabbits — his own — were the only ones in the district which did not die at the outset, because they were the only ones which were fed. “Even rabbits have to eat before they are eaten,” Makeyev oberved ironically. The collectivization of agriculture extended over 82 per cent of family units, “so great is the Socialist enthusiasm among the peasants of the region” wrote Pravda and at the same time published a picture of Comrade Makeyev, “the fighting organizer of this rising tide.” No one stayed out of the kolkhozes except isolated peasants whose houses slumbered far from roads, a few villages populated by Mennonites, a village where there was resistance from an old partisan from the Irtysh, who had twice been decorated with the Order of the Red Flag, had known Lenin, and for that reason was not arrested … Meanwhile a meat-canning factory was built, equipped with the latest-model American machinery and supplemented by a tannery, a shoe factory, and a factory to make special leathers for the army: it was finished the year meat and hides disappeared. Further building included comfortable houses for the Party leaders and technicians and a workers’ garden city not far from the lifeless factory … Makeyev faced everything, actually fought “on three fronts” to carry out the C.C.’s orders, fulfill the industrialization plan, keep the earth from dying. Where to find seasoned wood for building, nails, leather, work clothes, bricks, cement? There was a perpetual lack of materials, the starving workmen were perpetually stealing or running away — the great builder found himself with nothing on hand but papers, circulars, reports, orders, theses, official predictions, texts of denunciatory speeches, motions voted by the shock brigades. Makeyev telephoned, jumped into his Ford (now as battered as a General Staff car in the old days), arrived unheralded at a building site; counted the barrels of cement and sacks of lime himself, frowning fiercely; questioned the engineers: some of whom defied truth by swearing to build even without wood and bricks, others by demonstrating that it was impossible to build with such cement. Makeyev wondered whether they were not all in a conspiracy to destroy himself and the Union. But basically he knew, he felt, that all they said was true. His brief case under his arm, his cap on the back of his head, Makeyev had himself driven at full speed through woods and plains to the “Hail Industrialization” kolkhoze, which had not a horse left, where the last cows were dying for lack of fodder, where thirty bales of hay had recently been stolen at night, perhaps to feed horses which had been reported dead but were really hidden in the dreaming forest of Chertov-Rog, “The Devil’s Horn.” The kolkhoze looked deserted, two Young Communists from the city lived there amid general hostility and hypocrisy; the president, so helpless that he blurted unintelligibly, explained to “Comrade Secretary of the Regional Committee” that the children were all sick from undernourishment, that he must have at least a truckload of potatoes immediately so that field work could be resumed, since the rations allocated by the State at the end of the previous year (a year of scarcity) had been two months short — “just as we said, don’t you remember?” Makeyev grew angry, promised, threatened, both uselessly, overwhelmed by a dull despair … The same old story, over and over, over and over — it kept him awake at night. The land was going to ruin, the livestock was dying, the people were dying, the Party was suffering from a sort of scurvy, Makeyev saw even the roads dying — the roads over which no wagons any longer passed, the roads over which grass was spreading …
So hated by the inhabitants that he never went out on foot in the city except when he was forced to, and then accompanied by a guard who walked three feet behind him with his hand on his holster, he carried a cane himself to ward off aggressors. He had a fence built around his house, had it guarded by soldiers. Things suddenly came to a head in the third year of scarcity, the day when Moscow telephoned him a confidential order to begin a new purge of the kolkhozes before the autumn sowing, in order to cut down secret resistance. “Who signed this decision?” — “Comrade Tulayev, third secretary of the C.C.” Makeyev dryly said: “Thank you,” hung up, and struck the desk with his fist. Into his brain rose a wave of hate against Tulayev, Tulayev’s long mustaches, Tulayev’s broad face, Tulayev the heartless bureaucrat, Tulayev the starver of the people … That evening Alia Sayidovna opened the door to a surly Makeyev, a Makeyev who looked like a bulldog. He very seldom talked to her about business; but he often talked aloud to himself, because under emotional pressure silent thinking was difficult for him. Alia, with her soft sleek profile, with the gold coins dangling from the lobes of her pretty ears, heard him muttering: “I won’t stand for another famine — not me. We’ve paid our share, old man, and that’s enough. I won’t play up any longer. The district can’t stand any more. The roads are dying! No, no, no, no! I’ll write to the C.C.”
He did write, after a sleepless night, a night of agony. For the first time in his life, Makeyev refused to carry out an order from the C.C., denounced it as error, madness, crime. He felt he was saying too much, then again that he was saying too little. When he reread what he had written, terrified at his own audacity, he told himself that he would have demanded the expulsion and arrest of anyone who dared to criticize a Party directive in such terms. But the fields overrun with weeds, the roads overrun with grass, the children with their bellies swollen from starvation, the empty shops of nationalized retail commerce, the black looks of the peasants, were there, really there. One after the other he tore up several drafts. Hot and uneasy, Alia tossed feverishly in the big bed; she attracted him only rarely now, a little female who would never understand. His memorandum on the necessity for postponing or annulling the Tulayev circular regarding the new purge of kolkhozes was dispatched the next morning. Makeyev had a violent headache, drifted from room to room, in his slippers and half-dressed, behind the wooden blinds which were closed against the torrid heat. Alia brought him small glasses of vodka, pickled cucumbers, tall glasses of water so cold that vapor condensed on them in drops. He was red-eyed from lack of sleep, his face was unshaven, he smelled of sweat … “You ought to take a trip somewhere, Artyem,” Alia suggested. “It would do you good.” He became aware of her; the hallucinating midafternoon heat made a furnace of the city, the plains, the surrounding steppes, poured through the walls of the house, flamed in his numb veins. Hardly three steps separated him from Alia, who fell back, tottered beside the divan, was thrown down, felt Artyem’s dry hands knead her fiercely from neck to knees, felt his suffocating mouth press down on her mouth, felt him rip her silk kaftan, which would not unfasten quickly enough, felt him bruise her legs, which had not opened quickly enough … “Alia, you are as downy as a peach,” said Makeyev as he rose refreshed. “Now the C.C. will see who’s right, that numskull Tulayev or me!” For a moment, possessing his wife gave him the feeling of conquering the universe.
Makeyev fought a losing battle with Tulayev for two weeks. Accused by his powerful antagonist of tending toward the “Right opportunist deviation,” he saw himself on the brink of the abyss. Figures and several sentences from his memorandum, quoted to denounce “the incoherencies of the Political Bureau’s agrarian policy” and the “fatal blindness of certain functionaries,” appeared in a document probably drawn up by Bukharin and delivered to the Control Commission by an informer. Makeyev, seeing that he was lost, abjured instantly and passionately. The Politburo and the Orgburo (Organization Bureau) decided to maintain him in his position since he had renounced his errors and was devoting himself to the new purge of kolkhozes with exemplary energy. Far from sparing his own henchmen, he regarded them with such suspicion that several of them found themselves on their way to concentration camps. Putting the burden of his own responsibility upon them, he harshly refused to see them or intercede for them. From the depths of prisons, some of them wrote that they had merely carried out his orders. “The counterrevolutionary irresponsibility of these demoralized elements,” Makeyev commented, “deserves no indulgence. Their only aim is to discredit the Party.” In the end he believed it himself.
Would not his disagreement with Tulayev be remembered during the election for the Supreme Council? A certain vacillation in the Party committees made Makeyev uneasy. Many voices were raised in favor of candidates who were high Security officials or generals, rather than Communist leaders. Happy day! Official rumor repeated a remark by a member of the Political Bureau: “Makeyev’s is the only possible candidacy in the Kurgansk region … Makeyev is a builder.” Immediately transparencies appeared across the streets, urging: Vote for the Builder Makeyev — who, in any case, was the only candidate. At the first session of the Supreme Council, held in Moscow, Makeyev, at the peak of his destiny, ran into Blücher in the anterooms. “Greetings, Artyem,” said the commander-in-chief of the valorous Special Army of the Red Flag in the Far East. Intoxicated, Makeyev answered: “Greetings, Marshal! How are you?” They went to the buffet together, arm in arm like the old comrades they were. Both of them were heavier, their faces full and well-massaged, with fatigue pouches under the eyes, both wore well-cut clothes of fine material, both were decorated — Blücher wore four brilliant medals on his right breast, three Orders of the Red Flag and one Order of Lenin; Makeyev, less heroic, had only one Red Flag and the Medal of Labor … The strange thing was that they had nothing to say to each other. With sincere delight they exchanged phrases from the newspapers: “So you’re building, old man? Things going well? Happy? Healthy?” — “So, Marshal, you’re keeping the little Japs in order, eh?” — “Right — they can come whenever they’re ready!” Deputies from the Siberian North, from Central Asia, from the Caucasus, in their national costumes, flocked to stare at them. In the soldier’s reflected glory, Makeyev admired himself. He thought: “We’d make a fine snapshot.” The memory of that memorable moment went sour some months later when, after the fighting in Chang-Ku-Feng, the Army of the Far East regained two hills overlooking Possiet Bay from the Japanese (the two hills turned out to be of enormous strategic importance, though it had never been mentioned before). The message from the C.C. detailing these glorious events did not mention Blücher’s name. Makeyev understood, and a chill came over him. He felt himself compromised. Blücher, Blücher — it was his turn to go down into subterranean darkness! Inconceivable! … What luck that no snapshot had immortalized their last meeting!
Makeyev lived quite calmly through the proscriptions, because they wrought havoc chiefly among the generation of power which had preceded his own and among generations even earlier. “By and large, socially the old generation is worn out … So much the worse for them, this is no time for sentiment … Heroes yesterday, failures today — it’s the dialectic of history.” But his unspoken thoughts told him that his own generation was rising to replace the generation which was going out. Ordinary men became great men when their day arrived — was that not justice? Although, when they had been in power, he had known and admired a number of the defendants in the great trials, he accepted their end with a sort of zeal. Incapable of comprehending anything but the baldest arguments, he was not troubled by the enormity of the accusations. (We have no time for subtleties!) And what was more natural than to use lies to overwhelm an enemy who must be put out of the way? The demands of mass psychology in a backward country must be met. Called to rule by the subalterns of the one and only Chief, integrated into the power behind the proscriptions, Makeyev had never felt that he was threatened. But now he felt the wind of the inevitable scythe that had mowed down Blücher. Had the Marshal been relieved of his command? Arrested? Would he reappear? He was not being tried, which perhaps meant that all was not over for him. However that might be, no one ever mentioned his name now. Makeyev would have liked to forget it; but the name, the image of the man, pursued him — at work, in his moments of silence, in his sleep. He found himself fearing that, speaking at some meeting of district officials, he would suddenly utter the obsessing name in the middle of a sentence. And the more he put it out of his mind, the more it rose to his lips — to the point where he thought that, reading a message aloud, he had inserted Blücher’s name among the names of the members of the Political Bureau … “Didn’t I make a slip of the tongue?” he asked one of the Regional Committee members lightly. Inside, he was writhing with anguish.
“No indeed,” said the comrade he had addressed. “Odd that you should think so.”
Makeyev looked at him, seized with a vague terror. “He is making a fool of me …” The two men blushed, equally embarrassed.
“You were most eloquent, Artyem Artyemich,” said the Committee member, to break the uncomfortable silence. “You read the address to the Political Bureau with magnificent fervor …”
Makeyev became completely confused. His thick lips moved silently. He made a wild effort to keep from saying, “Blücher, Blücher, Blücher, do you hear me? I named Blücher!” The other became uneasy:
“Don’t you feel well, Comrade Makeyev?”
“A touch of dizziness,” said Makeyev, swallowing saliva.
He got over the crisis, he conquered his obsession, Blücher did not reappear, it was a little more ended every day. There were further disappearances, but of less importance. Makeyev made up his mind to ignore them. “Men like myself have to have hearts of stone. We build on corpses, but we build.”
That year the purges and personnel replacements in the Kurgansk district were not over until the middle of winter. Just before spring, one night in February, Tulayev was killed in Moscow. When Makeyev heard the news, he shouted for joy. Alia was playing solitaire, her body outlined in clinging silk. Makeyev threw down the red “Confidential” envelope.
“There’s one that deserved what he got! The fool! It had been coming to him for a long time. A plot? Not much — somebody whose life he was ruining let him have it on the head with a brick … He certainly went out looking for it, with that character of his — a snarling dog …”
“Who?” said Alia, without raising her head, because for the second time the cards had brought the queen of diamonds between herself and the king of hearts.
“Tulayev. I’ve just heard from Moscow that he has been murdered …”
“My God!” said Alia, preoccupied by the queen of hearts, doubtless a blond woman.
Makeyev said sharply:
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to call on God like a peasant!”
The cards snapped under the pretty, red-nailed fingers. Irritation. The queen of diamonds confirmed the treacherous hints dropped by the wife of the president of the Soviet (Doroteya Guermanovna, a big, soft woman of German extraction who knew all the scandal of the city for the last ten years) … and the manicurist’s skillful reticences … and the fatally precise information that had arrived in the form of an anonymous letter laboriously pieced together out of big letters cut from newspapers — at least four hundred of them had been pasted down one after the other to denounce the ticket girl of the Aurora Cinema, who had previously slept with the director of the municipal services department and who, a year ago, had become Artyem Artyemich’s mistress, as witness the fact that she had had an abortion at the G.P.U. clinic last winter, being admitted on a personal recommendation, and then had been given a month’s paid vacation, which she spent at the Rest House for Workers in Education, also on special recommendation, and as witness the fact that Comrade Makeyev had twice visited the Rest House during that period and had even spent the night there … The letter went on in this fashion for several pages, all in overlapping, ill-assorted letters which made absurd patterns. Alia looked at Makeyev out of eyes so intent that they became cruel.
“What is it?” asked the man, vaguely uneasy.
“Who was killed?” asked the woman, her face ugly with tension and distress.
“Tulayev, I told you, Tulayev — are you deaf?”
Alia came so close to him that she touched him, and stood pale and straight, her shoulders set, her lips trembling.
“And that blond ticket girl — who’s going to kill her? Tell me, you traitor, you liar!”
Makeyev had barely begun to realize what a serious shock the Party was in for: revamping the C.C., accounts to be settled in the bureaus, full-scale attacks on the Right, deadly accusations against the expelled Left, counterattacks — what counterattacks? A vast, whirling wind out of the night drove the quiet daylight from the room, wrapped itself about him, made cold shivers run through his very marrow … Through those terrible, dark gusts, Alia’s shaken words, Alia’s poor shattered face, hardly reached him. “Get out of here and leave me alone!” he shouted, beside himself.
He was incapable of thinking of big things and little things simultaneously. He shut himself up with his private secretary, to prepare the speech which he would deliver that evening at the extraordinary meeting of Party officials — a bludgeoning speech, shouted from the bottom of his lungs, punctuated with his clenched fist. He spoke as if he were fighting, then and there, singlehanded, against the Enemies of the Party. Men who were Creatures of Darkness; the world Counterrevolution; Trotskyism, its brazen snout branded with the swastika; Fascism; the Mikado … “Woe to the stinking vermin who have dared to raise a hand against our great Party! We shall wipe them out forever, even to the last generation! Eternal remembrance to our great, our wise comrade, Tulayev, iron Bolshevik, unswerving disciple of our beloved Chief, the greatest man of all the centuries! …” At five in the morning, dripping with sweat and surrounded by exhausted secretaries, Makeyev was still correcting the typescript of his speech, which a special messenger, starting two hours later, would carry to Moscow. When he went to bed, bright daylight flooded the city, the plains, the building yards, the caravan trails. Alia had just fallen into a doze after a night of torture. Feeling her husband’s presence, she opened her eyes to the white ceiling, to reality, to her suffering. And, almost naked, she got quietly out of bed, and saw herself in the mirror: her hair in disorder, her breasts sagging, herself pale, faded, forsaken, humiliated, looking like an old woman — because of that blond ticket girl at the Aurora. Did she know what she was doing? What did she want in the drawer where the trinkets were kept? She found a short bone-handled hunting knife there, and took it. She went back to the bed. Lying with the sheets thrown off and his dressing gown open, Artyem was sound asleep, his mouth shut, his nostrils ringed with beads of sweat, his big body naked, covered with reddish hair, abandoned … Alia stared at him for a moment, as if it astonished her to recognize him, astonished her even more to discover something utterly unknown in him, something which incessantly escaped her, perhaps an unwonted presence, a soul that was kindled in him in sleep, like a secret light, and which his awakening extinguished. “My God, my God, my God,” she repeated mentally, sensing that a power in her would raise the knife, clench her hand, stab down into that outstretched male body, the male body which she loved in the very depths of her hate. Where aim? Try to find the heart, well protected by an armor of bones and flesh, difficult to reach? Pierce the unprotected belly, where it is easy to make a mortal wound? Tear the penis lying in its fleece of hair — soft flesh, loathsome and touching? The idea — but it was not an idea, it was already the adumbration of an act — traveled darkly through her nerve centers … The dark current encountered another: fear. Alia turned her head, and saw that Makeyev had opened his eyes and was watching her with terrifying sagacity.
“Alia,” he said simply, “drop that knife.”
She was paralyzed. Sitting up in a single motion, he caught her wrist, opened her helpless little hand, flung the bone-handled knife across the room. Alia collapsed into shame and despair, great bright tears hung from her lashes … She felt like a naughty child caught doing something wrong; there was no help anywhere, and now he would cast her off like a sick dog … you drown sick dogs …
“You wanted to kill me?” he said. “To kill Makeyev, secretary of the Regional Committee — and you a member of the Party? Kill the Builder Makeyev, you miserable creature? Kill me for a blond ticket girl, fool that you are?”
Anger rose in him with every clearly spoken word.
“Yes,” said Alia feebly.
“Idiot! They’d have shut you up underground for six months — have you thought of that? Then one night, about 2 A.M., they’d have taken you out behind the station and put a bullet there, right there!” (He hit her hard on the back of the neck.) “Don’t you know that? Do you want a divorce this morning?”
She said furiously:
“Yes.”
And at the same time, more softly, her long eyelashes lowered: “No.”
“You are a liar and a traitor,” she repeated almost automatically, trying to collect her thoughts. Then she went on:
“Tulayev was killed for less, and you were glad. Yet you helped him to organize the famine — you’ve said so often enough! But perhaps he didn’t lie to a woman, like you!”
They were such terrible words that Makeyev looked at his wife with panic in his eyes. He felt desperately weak. Only his fury saved him from collapsing. He burst out:
“Never! I never said or thought a word of your criminal ravings … You are unworthy of the Party … Bitch!”
He strode about the room, now this way, now that, waving his arms like a madman. Suddenly he came back to her, carrying a leather belt. He gripped the back of her neck with his left hand and struck with his right, beating, beating the almost naked body which writhed feebly under his hand, beating so hard that he panted … When the body stopped moving, when Alia’s whimpering breathing seemed to have ceased, Makeyev turned away, pacified. He went for a wad of cotton, soaked it in eau de cologne, came back, and began gently rubbing her face with it — her ravaged face which, in a few moments, had become ugly with a pitiful, little-girl ugliness … Then he went for ammonia, he dampened towels, he was as diligent and skillful as a good nurse … And, when Alia came to, she saw Makeyev’s green eyes leaning over her, the pupils narrowed like a cat’s eyes … Artyem kissed her face heavily, hotly, then turned away. “Get some sleep, little fool. I’m going to work.”
Life became normal again for Makeyev, between a silent Alia and the queen of diamonds, whom, for safety’s sake, he had sent to the construction yard for the new electric plant, between the plain and the forest, where she was put in charge of handling the mail. The yard operated twenty-four hours a day. The Secretary of the Regional Committee frequently appeared there to stimulate the efforts of the elite brigades, to oversee the execution of the weekly plans in person, to receive reports from the technical personnel, to countersign the daily telegrams to the Center … He came back exhausted, under the clear stars. (Meanwhile, somewhere in the city, unknown hands, laboring in profound secrecy, obstinately cut alphabets of all dimensions from the papers, collected them, aligned them on notebook sheets: it would take at least five hundred characters for the contemplated letter. This patient labor was carried on in solitude, in silence, with every sense alert; the mutilated papers, weighted with a stone, went to the bottom of a well, for burning them would have made smoke — and where there’s smoke there’s fire, don’t they say? The secret hands prepared the demonic alphabet, the unknown mind collected the evidence, the scattered clues, the infinitesimal elements of several hidden and unavowable certainties …)
Makeyev was planning to go to Moscow to thrash out the question of material shortages with the directors of electrification; at the same time he would inform the C.C. and the Central Executive of the progress made during the last six months in road-improvements and irrigation (thanks to cheap convict labor); perhaps this progress would compensate for the dwindling supply of skilled labor, the crisis in livestock, the poor condition of industrialized agriculture, the production slowdown in the railway workshops … With pleasure he received the brief message from the C.C. (“Confidential. Urgent.”) inviting him to attend a conference of regional secretaries from the Southwest. Leaving two days early, Makeyev sat in his blue sleeping-car compartment, contentedly making abstracts of the reports from the regional Economic Council. The specialists of the Central Plan Commission would find he was a man worth talking to! Endless fields of snow, dotted with ramshackle houses, fled past the windows; the wooded horizon was melancholy under the leaden sky, the light filled the white spaces with an immense expectancy. Makeyev looked at the rich black fields which an early thaw had scattered with standing pools that reflected the hurrying clouds. “Indigent Russia, opulent Russia,” he murmured, because Lenin had quoted those two lines of Nekrassov’s in 1918. The Makeyevs, by working those fields, made opulence come out of indigence.
At the station in Moscow, Makeyev had no difficulty in getting a C.C. car sent for him, and it was a big American car, strangely elongated and rounded — “streamlined,” explained the chauffeur, who was dressed much like a millionaire’s chauffeur in a foreign movie. Makeyev found that many things had changed for the better in the capital since he had been there seven months earlier. Life bustled through a gray transparency, over the new asphalt pavements which were relentlessly cleared of snow day in and day out. The shop-windows made a good impression. At the Central Plan Commission, in a building made of reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, and containing from two to three hundred offices, Makeyev, in accordance with his rank, was received as an extremely important person by elegant officials who wore big spectacles and suits of British cut. He found no difficulty in obtaining what he wanted: materials, additional credits, the return of a dossier to the Projects department, authority to build an additional road. How could he have known that the materials did not exist, and that all these impressive personages no longer had anything but a sort of ghostly existence, since the P.B. had just decided “in principle” upon a purge and complete reorganization of the Plan offices? Well satisfied, he became more important than ever. His plain fur coat, his plain fur cap contrasted with the careful attire of the technicians and made him look all the more the provincial builder. “We who are clearing virgin soil …” He slipped little phrases like that into the conversation, and they did not ring false.
Of the few old friends whom he tried to find the second day, none could be reached. One was ill in a suburban hospital, too far from town; telephoning to two others, he received only evasive answers. On the second occasion, Makeyev got angry. “Makeyev speaking, I tell you. Makeyev of the C.C., do you understand? I want to know where Foma is; I have a right to be told, I imagine …” The man at the other end of the wire answered, in a doubtful voice: “He has been arrested …” Arrested? Foma, Bolshevik of 1904, loyal to the general line, former member of the Central Control Commission, member of Security’s special college? Makeyev gasped for breath, a spasm passed over his face, for a moment he felt stunned. What was happening now?
He decided to spend the evening alone, at the opera. Entering the great government box (once the imperial box) soon after the curtain went up, he found no one there but an old couple, sitting at the left in the first row of chairs. Makeyev discreetly greeted Popov, one of the Party’s directors of conscience, an untidy little old man with a vague profile and a yellowish straggling beard. He had on a gray tunic that sagged around the pockets. His companion looked amazingly like him; it seemed to Makeyev that she barely returned his greeting and even avoided looking at him. Popov crossed his arms on the velvet of the balustrade, coughed, thrust out his lips, entirely absorbed by the performance. Makeyev sat down at the other end of the row. The empty chairs increased the distance between himself and the Popovs; even if they had sat close together, the huge box would have surrounded them with solitude. Makeyev could not make himself take an interest either in the stage or the music, though music usually intoxicated him like a drug, filling his whole being with emotion, filling his mind with disconnected images, now violent, now plaintive, filling his throat with abortive cries, with sighs or a sort of wailing. He assured himself that all was well, that it was one of the finest spectacles in the world, even though it belonged to the culture of the old regime — but we are the legitimate heirs of that culture, we have conquered it. Then, too, those dancers, those lovely dancers — why should he not desire them? (Desire was another of his ways of forgetting.)
When the intermission began, the Popovs left so discreetly that only his increased solitude in the huge box made him aware that they had gone. For a moment he stood looking at the house, brilliant with lights and evening dresses and uniforms. “Our Moscow, capital of the world.” Makeyev smiled. As he made his way to the lobby, an officer — spectacles, neat square-cut mustache, a little curved nose like an owl’s beak — bowed to him most respectfully. Makeyev returned his bow, then stopped him with a gesture. The officer introduced himself:
“Captain Pakhomov, commanding the building police, happy to be of service to you, Comrade Makeyev.”
Flattered at being recognized, Makeyev felt like embracing him. His strange solitude vanished.
“Ah, so you have just arrived, Comrade Makeyev,” said Pakhomov slowly, as if he were thinking; “then you haven’t seen our new scene-shifting machines, bought in New York and installed last November. You ought to take a look at them — they made Meyerhold open his eyes! Shall I expect you after the third act, to show you the way?”
Before answering, Makeyev nonchalantly inquired:
“Tell me, Captain Pakhomov — the little dancer in the green turban, the one who’s so graceful — who is she?”
Pakhomov’s owl face and nocturnal eyes brightened a little:
“Very talented, Comrade Makeyev — getting a great deal of notice. Paulina Ananiyeva. I’ll introduce you to her in her dressing room, Comrade Makeyev — she will be very happy to meet you — oh, certainly …”
And now good riddance to you, Popov, you old moralist, you old crab — you and your antique wife who looks like a plucked turkey. What do you know about the life of strong men, builders, outdoor men, men who fight? Under floors, in cellars, rats gnaw at strange fodder — and you, you eat dossiers, complaints, circulars, theses, which the great Party throws at you in your office, and so it will go on until you are buried with greater honors than you ever knew in your miserable life! Makeyev leaned forward and almost turned his back on the disagreeable couple. Where should he take Paulina? To the Metropole bar? Paulina … nice name for a mistress. Paulina … Would she let herself be tempted tonight? Paulina … Makeyev’s feeling, as he waited for the intermission, was almost blissful.
Captain Pakhomov was waiting for him at the turn in the great staircase. “First, Comrade Makeyev, I’ll show you the new machines; then we’ll go to see Ananiyeva — she’s expecting you …”
“Splendid, splendid …”
Makeyev followed the officer through a maze of corridors, each more brightly lighted than the last. Pushing back a curtain to his left, the officer pointed to mechanics busy around a winch; young men in blue blouses were sweeping the stage; a technician appeared, pushing a little searchlight on wheels. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” said the owl-faced officer. Makeyev, his head empty of everything except the expectation of a woman, said: “The magic of the theater, my dear comrade …” They went on. A metal door opened before them, closed behind them, they were in darkness. “What’s this?” the officer exclaimed. “Stay where you are, just for a moment, Comrade Makeyev, I …” It was cold. The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but when a wretched little backstage bulb came on, like the light in a forsaken waiting room or in the antechamber of a dilapidated Hell, Pakhomov was no longer there; instead, several black overcoats detached themselves from the opposite wall, someone rapidly advanced on Makeyev — a thickset man with his overcoat collar turned up, his cap pulled down to his eyes, his hands in his pockets. Very close now, the voice of the unknown murmured, distinctly:
“Artyem Artyemich, we don’t want any scenes. You are under arrest.”
Several overcoats surrounded him, pressed against him; skillful hands ran over him, pushed him about, fished out his revolver … Makeyev gave a violent start which almost freed him from all the hands, from all the shoulders, but they closed in, nailed him to the spot:
“We don’t want any scenes, Comrade Makeyev,” the persuasive voice repeated. “Everything will be all right, I am sure — there must be some misunderstanding. Just obey orders …” Then, to the others: “No noise!”
Makeyev let himself be led, almost carried. They put on his overcoat, two men took him by the arms, others preceded and followed him, and so they walked through formless semidarkness, like a single creature clumsily moving a profusion of legs. The narrow corridor squeezed them together, they stumbled over each other. Behind a thin partition the orchestra began to play with miraculous sweetness. Somewhere in the meadows, beside a silvery lake, thousands of birds greeted the dawn, the light increased instant by instant, a song rose into it, a pure woman’s voice sounded through the unearthly morning … “Easy there, watch out for the steps,” someone whispered into Makeyev’s ear … and there was no more dawn, no more song, there was nothing … nothing but the cold night, a black car, the unimaginable …