For six months a dozen officials had been turning over the one hundred and fifty selected dossiers of the Tulayev case. Fleischman and Zvyeryeva, as “examiners appointed to follow the most serious cases,” followed this one from hour to hour under the immediate supervision of Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev. Fleischman and Zvyeryeva, both formerly Chekists — that is, in the old heroic days — should have been under suspicion; they knew it, and hence they could be counted on to show the utmost zeal. The case ramified in every direction, linked itself to hundreds of others, mingled with them, disappeared in them, re-emerged like a dangerous little blue flame from under fire-blackened ruins. The examiners herded along a motley crowd of prisoners, all exhausted, all desperate, all despairing, all innocent in the old legal meaning of the word, all suspect and guilty in many ways; but it was in vain that the examiners herded them along, the examiners always ended up in some fantastic impasse. Common sense suggested dismissing the confessions of half a dozen lunatics who all told how they had murdered Comrade Tulayev. An American tourist, a woman who was almost beautiful and completely mad, though her self-control was an impenetrable weapon, declared: “I know nothing about politics, I hate Trotsky, I am a Terrorist. Since childhood I have dreamed of being a Terrorist. I came to Moscow to become Comrade Tulayev’s mistress and kill him. He was so jealous; he adored me. I should like to die for the U.S.S.R. I believe that the love of the people must be spurred by overwhelming emotions … I killed Comrade Tulayev, whom I loved more than my life, to avert the danger that threatened the Chief … I can’t sleep for remorse — look at my eyes. I acted from love … I am happy to have accomplished my mission on earth … If I were free, I’d like to write my reminiscences for the papers … Shoot me! Shoot me!” During her periods of depression she sent her consul long messages (which of course were not transmitted), and she wrote to the examining judge: “You cannot shoot me because I am an American.” — “Drunken trollop,” Gordeyev cursed, when he had spent three hours studying her case. Wasn’t she simulating insanity? Hadn’t she actually thought about committing a murder beforehand? Didn’t her declarations contain some echo of plans ripened by others? What was to be done with her, mad as she was? An embassy was taking an interest in her, news agencies on the other side of the globe distributed pictures of her, described the tortures which they claimed the examiners were inflicting on her … Psychiatrists in uniform, still faithful to the rite of question-and-answer, applied suggestion, hypnotism, and psychoanalysis in turn, to persuade her to admit her innocence. She exhausted their patience. “Well then,” Fleischman suggested, “at least persuade her that she killed somebody else, anybody … Have you no imagination! Show her photographs of murder victims, give her details of sadistic attacks, and let her go to the devil! The witch!” But in her waking dream she would only consent to murder prominent people. Fleischman hated her, hated her voice, her accent, her yellowish-pink complexion … A young doctor assigned to the investigation spent hours with the madwoman, stroking her hands and knees while he made her repeat: “I am innocent, I am innocent …” She repeated it perhaps two hundred times, gave a beatific smile, and said softly: “How sweet you are … I’ve known for a long time that you love me … But it was I, I, I who killed Comrade Tulayev … He loved me as you do.” The same evening the young doctor made his report to Fleischman. A sort of bewilderment clouded his eyes and troubled his speech. “Are you quite sure,” he asked at the end of the interview, with a strange seriousness, “that she has no connection with the case?” Fleischman angrily crushed out his cigarette. “Go take a shower, my boy — right away!” The young doctor was sent to rest his nerves in the forests of northern Pechora. Five sets of detailed confessions were thus classed as products of insanity — yet it took courage to dismiss them. Gordeyev sent the suspects back to the doctors. The doctors went mad in their turn … So much the worse for them! “To the insane asylum under a strong guard,” Fleischman proposed with his soft smile. Zvyeryeva smoothed her dyed hair with her slim fingers, and answered: “I consider them extremely dangerous … Antisocial mania …” Face massages, creams, and make-up kept her face an irritating, ageless mask of blurred features and indistinct wrinkles. The hard, restless look in her eyes aroused uneasiness. It was she who told Fleischman that Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev expected them in his office at one-thirty for an important conference. She added, in a significant tone: “Prosecutor Rachevsky will be there. He has had an interview with the Boss …”
“Then the crisis will soon be upon us,” Fleischman thought.
They conferred in Gordeyev’s office on the thirteenth floor of a tower that overlooks the principal streets of the city. Fleischman, having taken a drink of brandy, felt well. Leaning toward the window, he watched the human swarm in the street below, the line of parked cars in front of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, peered at the show windows of the bookstores and co-operatives. To wander around down there for a while, go into an antique shop, stare into windows, follow a pretty girl — what a joy that would be! A hell of a life! Even when you manage not to think of the danger. Stout, decorated, with flabby jowls, tired eyelids, yellow blotches under his eyes, thinning hair, he had lately begun to age quite obviously. He thought: “I shall be absolutely impotent in another year or two …” no doubt because his eye had been caught by a group of students, with their caps and books, who were roughhousing cheerfully as they crossed the street between a black prison van, a shining diplomatic Fiat, and a green bus.
Meanwhile, Prosecutor Rachevsky’s eyes had fallen on a small landscape by Levitan which hung on the wall. A blue Ukrainian night, a thatched roof, the ashy curve of a road, magic of the plains under dim stars. Without looking away from that road into the unreal, he said:
“Comrades, I think it is time we produced results.”
“Obviously,” Gordeyev thought, warily. “It’s high time. But what results, may I ask?” Gordeyev believed that he knew very well what results, but he refrained from coming to a conclusion. The slightest error in such a matter is like a misstep by a man putting in rivets on a skyscraper, three hundred feet above the sidewalk. Falling knows no mercy. Impossible to get a definite directive. They left him to his own devices, encouraged him, spied on him, and reserved the right to reward him or disown him. What Prosecutor Rachevsky had said made it likely that there would be a revelation, since he had been closeted with the Boss. Scales burst out at the other end of the apartment: Ninelle beginning her piano lesson.
“I am of the same opinion, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” said Gordeyev with a broad, sugary smile.
Fleischman shrugged his shoulders.
“Certainly, let’s get it over with. This preliminary investigation can’t go on forever. But what would be the proper way to close it?” (He looked straight at Rachevsky.) “The case is definitely political …”
Treacherously, or nonchalantly, he made a little pause before he went on:
“… though the crime, to tell the truth …”
To tell the truth, what? Fleischman turned to the window without finishing his sentence and stood there, intolerably fat, round-shouldered, his chin overflowing the collar of his tunic. Zvyeryeva, who never risked herself first, said starchily:
“You didn’t finish your sentence, I believe?”
“On the contrary.”
Among the students grouped at the edge of the sidewalk, an amazingly blond and beautiful girl was explaining something, gesturing vividly with both hands; at that distance her fingers seemed to hold the light, and she threw her head back a little to laugh more freely. Distant as a star, inaccesible and real as a star, her head did not feel Fleischman’s dull eyes staring at it. The Deputy High Commissar for Security, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Tribunal, the Investigatress appointed to the most serious cases, waited for Fleischman to express his opinion. Aware of their expectation, he resumed firmly:
“The preliminary investigation must be closed.”
Turning until he almost faced them, he looked at the three, one after the other, giving each a pleasant nod, as if he had just said something most important — three repugnant, corrupt faces, composed of some horrible gelatinous substance … And I am ugly too, my complexion is greenish, I have a bestial jowl and puffy eyelids … We ought to be put out of the way … And now you are in a fine fix, my dear comrades, because that is all I intend to say. It’s up to you to motivate our decision or to put it off, I’ve taken enough responsibility as it is … The students had gone, and so had the prison van and the bus … Other pedestrians passed, a baby carriage maneuvered across the street, under the heavy snouts of trucks. Of all that crowd in the street, not one knows the name of Tulayev … In this city, in this country of 170,000,000 inhabitants, not a single person really remembers Tulayev. Of the big, genial man with his mustaches, his clumsiness, his easy familiarity, his trite eloquence, his occasional drinking bouts, his sordid loyalty to the Party, who was aging and growing ugly like all the rest of us, nothing remained but a handful of ashes in an urn and an uncordial and unvalued memory in the minds of a few exhausted and half-mad inquisitors. The only living beings for whom he had really been a man, the women whom, after an evening of drinking, he undressed to an accompaniment of throaty laughter, stammered endearments, obscene jokes, and bursts of taurine violence, would perhaps for a while preserve secret images of him completely different from the portraits of him which still hung in some offices because no one had thought to take them down. But did they know his name? Both memories and portraits would soon vanish … Nothing in the dossier, not a clue worth considering, nothing to implicate anyone. Tulayev had simply disappeared, carried off by the wind, the snow, the darkness, the bracing cold of a night of hard frost.
“Close the preliminary investigation?” said Zvyeryeva interrogatively.
The peculiar sensitivity of the official was always wide awake in her. Intuitions that were almost infallible gave her a presentiment of plans which were silently and doubtfully being matured in high places. With her chin in her hand, her shoulders hunched, her waved hair, her eyes that were gimlets, or rather less like gimlets than augurs, she was an incarnate question. Fleischman yawned behind his hand. Gordeyev, to cover his embarrassment, got brandy from a cupboard and began setting out small glasses. “Martel or Armenian?” Prosecutor Rachevsky, realizing that no one would say anything more before he spoke, began:
“This case, which is indeed purely political, can have only a political solution … The results of the preliminary investigation are, in themselves, of only secondary interest to us … According to the criminologists of the old school, with whom in this case we are in agreement, the quid prodest…”
“Quite right,” said Zvyeryeva.
Prosecutor Rachevsky’s face appeared to be sculptured in two opposite curves out of a resistant and unhealthy flesh. Concave in general effect from the bulging forehead to the gray bulbous chin, a curving nose, swollen at the base, with dark hairy nostrils, made it a strong face. In color it was sanguine, with blotchy areas of violet. Large chestnut-brown eyes, like opaque marbles, gave it a dark expression. He had emerged but a few years since, during a terrible period, from the depths of a dismal destiny made up of obscure, difficult, and dangerous tasks, accomplished for no reward, with the plodding stubbornness of a beast of burden. Suddenly raised to greatness, he had stopped indulging in drinking bouts, for fear of talking too much. Because there had been times when, in the soothing warmth of a good drunk, he had said of himself: “I am a work horse … I pull the old harrow of justice. All I know is my furrow, ha-ha! I hear Gee, and I pull. A click of the tongue, and I stop. I am the beast of revolutionary duty, I am; get on, old beast — ha-ha!” Toward the friends who had heard him say such things, he felt an undying resentment afterwards. His rise dated from a sabotage trial — terrorism, treason — staged at Tashkent against men of the local government, his masters the day before. Without even an explicit order, he built up a complicated structure of false hypotheses and bits of fact, spread a net of tortuous dialectic over the laboriously worked-up declarations of a score of defendants, took it upon himself to dictate the implacable sentence which his superiors hesitated to communicate to him, delayed the transmission of the petitions for reprieve … Then he went to the Grand Theater and spoke before three thousand workers. This episode decided his advancement. He wrapped perfectly clear thinking in halting phrases, which groped and tumbled over each other. Only his parentheses were more or less grammatical. Thus his voice shed a sort of fog over the minds of his hearers, yet through the fog certain threatening outlines became visible, always the same. “You argue,” a defendant said to him one day, “like a hypocritical bandit who talks to you with pacific gestures and all the time you see that he has a knife up his sleeve …” — “I scorn your insinuations,” the prosecutor answered calmly. “And the whole room can see that my sleeves are tight-fitting.” In private conversation he lacked assurance. He found Zvyeryeva’s encouragement so timely that he acknowledged it with a half-smile: the three caught a glimpse of his teeth, which were yellow and irregularly set. He discoursed:
“There is no occasion for me to set forth the theory of plots to you, comrades. The word, in law, can have either a restricted or a more general meaning, and, I will add, yet another, which accords much better with our revolutionary law, which we have restored to its original purity by rescuing it from the pernicious influence of the enemies of the people who had succeeded, here in Russia, in distorting its meaning to the extent of subjugating it to the outworn formulas of bourgeois law which rests upon a static establishment of fact whence it proceeds to seek out a formal guilt considered as effectual by virtue of pre-established definitions …”
The stream of words flowed for nearly an hour. Fleischman looked into the street, and felt disgust rising in him. What creatures without an ounce of talent make a career nowadays! Zvyeryeva blinked her eyes, pleased as a cat in the sun. Gordeyev mentally translated the discourse from the agitator’s terms in which it was delivered into more intelligible ones, because somewhere in it, like a weasel crouched in a thicket, lay the Chief’s directive. “In short: we have lived at the heart of an immense and infinitely ramified plot, which we have succeeded in liquidating. Three fourths of the leaders of the previous periods of the revolution had ended by becoming corrupt; they had sold themselves to the enemy, or if not, it was the same thing, in the objective meaning of the word. Causes: the inner contradictions of the regime, the desire for power, pressure from surrounding capitalism, intrigues of foreign agents, the demoniac activity of Judas-Trotsky. The high foresight, the truly inspired foresight of the Chief has made it possible for us to thwart the machinations of innumerable enemies of the people who frequently held in their hands the levers which control the State. Henceforth no one must be considered above suspicion except for the entirely new men whom history and the genius of the Chief have summoned up for the salvation of the country … In three years, the battle for public security has been won, the conspiracy has been reduced to impotence; but in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the street, men yet survive who are our last internal enemies, and the most dangerous because they are the last, even if they have done nothing, even if they are innocent according to formal law. Their defeat has taught them a more profound hatred and dissimulation, so dangerous that they are even capable of taking refuge in a temporary inactivity. Juridically innocent, they may have a feeling of impunity, believe that they are safe from the sword of justice. They prowl around us like hungry jackals at twilight, they are sometimes among us, hardly betray themselves by a look. By them and through them, hydra-headed conspiracy may be born anew. You know the news from the rural areas, with what we are faced in regard to harvests, there have been troubles in the Middle Volga, a recrudescence of banditism in Tadjikistan, a number of political crimes in Azerbaijan and in Georgia! Strange incidents have taken place in Mongolia in the field of religion; the president of the Jewish republic was a traitor, you know the role that Trotskyism has played in Spain; a conspiracy against the Chief’s life was hatched in the suburbs of Barcelona, we have received an astounding dossier on the case! Our frontiers are threatened, we are perfectly aware of the deals between Berlin and Warsaw; the Japanese are concentrating troops in Jehol, they are building new forts in Korea, their agents have just maneuvered a breakdown of turbines at Krasnoyarsk …”
The prosecutor drank another brandy. Zvyeryeva said enthusiastically:
“Ignatii Ignatiyevich, you have the material for a tremendous indictment!”
The prosecutor thanked her by dropping his eyelids. “Let us not, furthermore, conceal from ourselves that the preceding great trials were insufficiently prepared in certain respects, and hence have left the Party’s cadres relatively disoriented. The conscience of the Party turns to us, asking for explanations which we can only furnish during the sessions of a trial which will be, as it were, complementary …”
“Complementary,” Zvyeryeva repeated. “That is exactly what I was thinking.”
She beamed discreetly. The burden of doubt fell from Gordeyev’s shoulders. Phew! “I agree with you entirely, Ignatii Ignatiyevich,” he said loudly. “Permit me to leave you for a moment; my little girl …” He hurried down the white hall, because Ninelle’s scales had stopped and because he needed to take the precaution of a moment’s solitude. He took Ninelle’s bony buttocks between his flat hot hands. “Well, darling, did your lesson go all right?” Sometimes he looked at the dark-haired child, with her green-flecked eyes, as he was no longer capable of looking at anyone else in the world. The music mistress was putting away her music, there was the snap of a brief case. “And now,” Gordeyev thought, “the traps are in the list of indictments … We’ll have to dig up at least one genuine ex-Trotskyist, one genuine spy … Dangerous business …”
“Papa,” said Ninelle uncomfortably, “you were so sweet and now you look angry …”
“Business, darling.”
He kissed her on both cheeks, quickly, but felt none of the happiness the pure caress should have given him — the ghosts of too many tortured men were astir in him, though he was not conscious of it. He returned to the conference. Fleischman sighed strangely: “Music … what music …”
“What do you mean?” Zvyeryeva asked. Fleischman bent his pale forehead a little, thus spreading even more of his double chin over his tunic collar, and became stickily amiable: “It’s so long since I’ve heard any music … Don’t you ever long for it?”
Zvyeryeva murmured something and looked bland.
“The list of indictments,” said Gordeyev …
No one answered him.
“The list of indictments,” repeated Prosecutor Rachevsky, firmly resolved to say no more.
Imagine a hippopotamus at the zoo suddenly sliding into his little concrete pool … Fleischman had the pleasant sensation of producing precisely the same effect as he brought out: “It is for you, my esteemed comrades, to propose it …” Everyone has his responsibilities, so assume yours!
Erchov was gallingly aware that his preparation for the shock had been complete. Nothing surprised him, except not recognizing the place where he was taken. “I had so many prisons to supervise, all more or less secret!” The Ex-High Commissar made the excuse to soothe his conscience. Yet this particular prison — new, modern, built of concrete, and located somewhere underground — should not have escaped his attention. The effort of memory which he made to recover some mention of it in the reports of the Prisons department or the Building department was unavailing. “Perhaps it was under the sole jurisdiction of the Political Bureau?” He shrugged and abandoned the problem. The heating was adequate, the lighting soft. Cot, bedclothes, pillows, a swivel chair. Nothing else, nothing. — Even the fate of his wife troubled Erchov less than he had expected. “We are all soldiers …” That meant: “Our wives must expect to become widows …” Essentially, the transposition of another idea, which it was harder to admit: “A dying soldier doesn’t feel sorry for his wife …” Little elementary formulas like that satisfied his mind; there was nothing to be done about them, as there was nothing to be done about orders. He waited, going through his setting-up exercises every morning. He asked for a daily shower and was granted it. He walked endlessly between the door and the window, his head bowed, frowning. All his reflections ended in a single word, a word that forced itself on him from outside, despite his soundest arguments: “Shot.” Suddenly he felt sorry for himself, almost fainted. “Shot.” He recovered without much effort, though he turned pale (but he could not see that he was pale): “Well, we’re all soldiers, aren’t we? …” His male body, well rested, demanded a woman, and he remembered Valia with anguish. But was it really Valia he remembered, or was it his own bodily life, now over? If the burning cigarette butt a man crushes underfoot could feel and think, it would experience the same anguish. What could he do to get it over with sooner?
Weeks passed, during which he was not allowed to see a glimpse of the sky. Then came interrogation after interrogation — conducted in the adjoining cell, so that a walk of thirty steps along a subterranean corridor gave him no bearings on his prison. Men who were of high rank, but whom he did not know, questioned him with a mixture of deference and harsh insolence. “Did you check on the use made of the 344,000 rubles allocated for reconstructing the offices of the prison administration at Rybinsk?” Stupefied, Erchov answered: “No.” A smile which was perhaps sarcastic, perhaps pitying, creased the hollow cheeks of the high official whose round spectacles gave him the look of a deep-sea fish … And the session was over … At the next session: “When you signed the appointment of Camp Commandant Illenkov, did you know the past record of that enemy of the people?” — “Which Illenkov?” The name must have been submitted to him in a long list. “But this is ridiculous! Comrade, I …” — “Ridiculous?” said the other in a threatening voice. “On the contrary, it is most serious, it is a matter of a crime against the security of the State committed by a high official in the exercise of his office, and punishable, under Article … of the Penal Code, by death …” This one was aging — sandy hair, coppery flecks in his face, his eyes hidden behind gray lenses. “Then you claim that you did not know, defendant Erchov?” — “No.” — “As you please … But you are well aware that in our country confessing errors and crimes is always a better choice than resisting … I am not telling you anything new …” Another interrogation revolved around the sending to China of an agent who had turned traitor. Erchov answered sharply that the Organization Bureau of the Central Committee had made the appointment. The thin inquisitor, whose long nose and dark mouth made as it were a cross on his face, replied: “You are making a clumsy attempt to elude your responsibilities …” Other subjects brought up were the price of Valia’s furs, perfumes which he had taken for her from the stock of contraband articles, the execution of a confessed counterrevolutionary, a former officer in Baron Wrangel’s army: “No doubt you will claim that you did not know he was one of your most devoted agents?” — “I did not know it,” said Erchov, who, to tell the truth, remembered nothing. The meaninglessness of the inquiry restored his confidence a little — if they really had only these small things against him? — at the same time that it gave him a feeling of increasing danger. “In any case, I shall probably be shot …” A sentence heard long ago at the War Academy haunted his memory: “Within the radius of the explosion, the destruction of human life is instantaneous and complete …” We are all soldiers. He grew thin, his hands trembled. Write to the Chief? No, no, no …
Prisoners in solitary gradually sink into a state that is pure prolongation. If an event suddenly awakens them, it has the intensity of a dream. Erchov saw himself entering the spacious offices of the Central Committee. He advanced, almost as if he were floating, toward a group of half a dozen men seated around a table covered with a red cloth. Street sounds, oddly muffled, reached his ears. Erchov did not recognize a single face. The man at the right, ill-shaven, with a profile like a fat rodent, might be the new prosecutor, Rachevsky … Six official faces, abstract and impersonal, two uniforms … “How weak I’ve become, I am afraid, terribly afraid … What shall I say to them? … What shall I try? I am going to hear everything, it will be overwhelming … It is not possible that they won’t shoot me …” A heavy head seemed to lean toward him: slightly moonlike, slightly shining, entirely without hair, a tiny round nose, an absurdly small mouth. A eunuch’s voice proceeded from it, saying almost amiably:
“Erchov, sit down.”
Erchov obeyed. There was one unoccupied chair behind the table. — Tribunal? Six pairs of eyes studied him with great severity. Tired, pale, dressed in a tunic from which the insignia had been removed, he felt dirty. “Erchov, you have belonged to the Party … Here, you must understand, all resistance is useless … Speak … Unburden yourself … Confess everything to us, we know it all already … Go down on your knees before the Party … There lies salvation, Erchov, there lies the only possible salvation … We are listening …” The man with the moonlike face, with the eunuch’s voice, emphasized his invitation by a gesture. Erchov looked at him for a few seconds in bewilderment, then rose and said:
“Comrades …”
He must cry out his innocence, and he realized that he could not, that he felt obscurely guilty, justly condemned in advance, though he could not say why; and it was as impossible for him to confess anything whatever as to defend himself. All he could do was to pour out a flood of words before these unknown judges, words which he felt were lamentably confused. “I have loyally served the Party and the Chief … ready to die … I have made mistakes, I admit … the 344,000 rubles for the Rybinsk Central, the nomination of Illenkov, yes, I agree … Believe me, Comrades … I live only for the Party …”
The six did not listen to him, they rose as one man. Erchov came to attention. The Chief appeared, without a look toward him, silent, gray, his face hard and sad. The Chief sat down and bent his head over a sheet of paper, read it attentively. As one man, the six sat down again. There was a moment of absolute silence, even in the city. “Go on,” the eunuch voice resumed, “tell us about your part in the plot which cost the life of Comrade Tulayev …”
“… but that is absolutely insane,” Erchov cried. “It is sheer madness, no, no, I mean it’s I who am going mad … Give me a glass of water, I’m stifling …”
Then the Chief raised his wonderful and monstrous head, the head of all his numberless portraits, and said exactly what Erchov would have said in his place, what Erchov, in his despair, ought to be thinking himself:
“Erchov, you are a soldier … Not a hysterical woman. We ask the truth from you … The objective truth … This is not the place for scenes …”
The Chief’s voice was so like his own inner voice that it restored Erchov to complete lucidity, and even to a sort of assurance. Later he remembered that he had argued coolly, gone over all the essential factors in the Tulayev case, quoted documents from memory … yet feeling clearly all the while that nothing could be of any use to him. Accused men who had disappeared long, long ago had argued in just the same fashion before him; and he had not been taken in, he knew what the wretches were concealing. Or he knew why words were superfluous. The Chief cut him off in the middle of a sentence.
“Enough. We are wasting our time with this cynical traitor … Have you sunk so low that you accuse us? Go!”
He was led away. He had only glimpsed the angry gleam in the russet eye and the guillotine motion of a paper knife brought down on the table. Erchov spent that night walking up and down his cell — his mouth tasted bitter, his breathing was labored. Impossible to hang himself, impossible to open his veins, ridiculous to fling himself at the wall headfirst, impossible to let himself die of starvation, he would be fed by force, through a tube (he had himself signed orders for cases of the sort). The Orientals say that you can die if you will to die, it is not the pistol that kills, it is the will … Mysticism. Literature. Materialists know very well how to kill, they do not know how to die at will. Poor creatures that we are! — Erchov understood everything now.
… Was it four weeks, or five, or six, that passed? What connection did measurements of time based on the rotation of the earth in space have with the fermentation of a brain between the concrete walls of a secret prison in the age of the rebuilding of the world? Erchov underwent twenty-hour interrogations without flinching. Amid a mass of questions which apparently had no connection with one another, there were three which were asked again and again: “What did you do to prevent the arrest of your accomplice Kiril Rublev? What did you do to conceal the past of the Trotskyist Kondratiev on the eve of his mission to Spain? What messages did you give him for the Spanish Trotskyists?” Erchov explained that Kondratiev’s personal dossier had been sent to him by the Political Bureau at the very last moment; that the dossier contained nothing unusual; that he had seen Kondratiev only for ten minutes and only to advise him about trustworthy agents … “And who were these trustworthy agents?” When he returned to his cell after these interrogations, he slept like a stunned animal, but talked in his sleep, because the interrogation went on and on in his dreams.
During the sixteenth hour (but, for him, it could as well have been the hundredth; his mind dragged through weariness like an exhausted horse through mud) of his seventh or eighth interrogation, something fantastic happened. The door opened. Ricciotti walked in, quite simply, holding out his hand. “Glad to see you, Maximka.”
“What’s this? What? I’m so tired, damn it, that I don’t know if I’m dreaming or awake. Where did you come from, brother?”
“Twenty hours of good sound sleep, Maximka, and everything will become clear, I promise you. I’ll manage it for you.”
Ricciotti turned to the two examiners behind the big desk, as if he had been their superior: “Leave us now, comrades … Tea, cigarettes, a little vodka, please …”
Erchov saw that, under the abundant white tangled hair, Ricciotti’s face was bloodless like an old prisoner’s, that his violet mouth was disagreeably lined, that his clothes were shapeless. The flame of intelligence in Ricciotti’s eyes was still alight, but it shone through a cloud. Ricciotti forced a smile. “Sit down, we have plenty of time … You’re done in, eh?”
He explained:
“The cell I’m in is probably not far from yours. But in my case, the little formalities are all over … I sleep, I walk in the courtyard … I get jam with every meal, I even read the papers …” His eyelids blinked, he went through the gesture of snapping his fingers, soundlessly. “Sickening, the papers … It’s curious how different panegyrics look when you read them in an underground prison … We’re going down like a ship that …” He pulled himself together. “I’m getting a good rest, now, you see … Arrested about ten days after you …”
The tea, the cigarettes, and the vodka were brought in. Ricciotti opened the window curtains wide, on a great square courtyard in bright daylight. In the offices opposite, stenographers moved past the windows. Several young women, who must have been standing on a stair landing, were talking animatedly; you could even see their painted nails, see that one of them wore her hair just following the shape of her ears.
“It is strange,” said Erchov half aloud.
He swallowed down a big glass of steaming tea, then a stiff drink of vodka. He was like a man beginning to come out of a fog.
“My insides were cold … Do you understand what is going on, Ricciotti?”
“The whole thing. I’ll explain it all to you. It is as clear as a chess game for beginners. Check and mate.”
His fingers gave a decisive little tap on the table.
“I committed suicide twice, Maximka. At the time of your arrest, I had an excellent Canadian passport, with which I could have cleared out … I learned what had happened to you, I expected it, I told myself that they would come for me within ten days — and I was right … I began packing. But what was I to do in Europe, in America, in Constantinople? Write articles for their stinking press? Shake hands with crowds of bourgeois idiots, hide in dirty little hotels, or in palaces, and finally catch a bullet as I came out of the toilet? As for the West, I loathe it. And I loathe our world, this world here, too; but I love it more than I loathe it, I believe in it, I have all our poisons in my veins … And I am tired, I’ve had enough … I returned my Canadian passport to the Liaison office. It amazed me to walk through the streets of Moscow like a real living person. I looked at everything and told myself that it was for the last time. I took leave of women I didn’t know, I suddenly felt like kissing children, I found an extraordinary charm in sidewalks scrawled over with chalk for a little girls’ game, I stopped in front of house windows that interested me, I couldn’t sleep, I went with whores, I got drunk. If by some chance they don’t come for me, I asked myself, what will become of me? I’m good for nothing any more. I woke with a start, from sleep or drunkenness, to think up preposterous schemes which intoxicated me for half an hour: I’d go to Vyatka, get a job as foreman of a lumbercutting gang under a false name … become Kuzma, woodcutter, illiterate, not a member of the Party, not a member of a union — why not? And it was not entirely impossible, but at bottom I did not believe it, I did not even want it myself … My second suicide was the Party cell meeting: The speaker sent by the Central Committee was obviously going to talk about you … The room was full, everyone in uniform, everyone green, green with fear, my friend, everyone silent, but waves of coughing and sniffling spreading over the room … I was afraid myself, yet I wanted to shout: ‘Cowards, you cowards, aren’t you ashamed to be so afraid for your dirty little hides?’ The speaker was discreet, his speech all slimy circumlocutions, he didn’t mention your name until the end, and referred to ‘extremely serious professional errors … which might justify the gravest suspicions …’ We didn’t dare look at one another, I felt that everyone’s face was sweating, that chills were running up and down everyone’s spine. Because it wasn’t you he was sparing when he talked about you. Even your wife … Arrests were still going on. After all, twenty-five members of your confidential entourage were there, all with their revolvers and all knowing very well what it was all about … When the speaker stopped, we dropped into a pocket of silence. The Central Committee’s envoy himself dropped into it with us. Those who sat in the first row, under the Bureau’s eyes, were the first to recover themselves, naturally; they began the applause, it became frenzied. ‘How many dead men are applauding their own end?’ I asked myself, but I did as the rest did, to avoid calling attention to myself; we all applauded like that, under one another’s eyes … Are you falling asleep? …”
“Yes … No, it’s nothing, I’m awake … Go on.”
“Those who owed you the most, and who were consequently in the greatest danger, spoke of you with the greatest treachery … They asked themselves if the discreet C.P. orator was not setting a trap for them. It was pitiful. I got up on the platform, like the others, without much idea of what I was going to say, I began like everyone else with empty phrases about the Party’s vigilance. A hundred asphyxiated faces looked up at me, openmouthed; they impressed me as slimy and dried up, asleep and vicious, distorted by colic. The Bureau dozed on, what I might say to denounce you interested no one, it was an old story that wouldn’t save me; and no one was thinking of anything but himself. And I found myself absolutely calm again, my friend, I had a tremendous desire to joke, I felt that my voice was clear and assured, I saw gelatinous faces moving feebly, I was beginning to make them uneasy. I calmly said unheard-of things, which froze the audience, the Bureau, the man from the Central Committee. (He was taking notes as fast as he could, he would have liked to sink into the ground.) I said that mistakes, under our overwhelming load of work, were inevitable, that I had known you for twelve years, that you were loyal, that you lived only for the Party and that everyone knew it, that we had very few men like you and a great many rats … The chill that rose around me might have come from the Great Ice Barrier. At the back of the room a strangled voice cried: ‘Shame!’ It woke the terror-stricken ghosts: ‘Shame!’ — ‘Shame on you,’ I said, stepping down from the platform, and I added: ‘You are fools if you think you’re any better off than I am!’ I walked the whole length of the room. They were all afraid I would come and sit down beside them, they shrank into their chairs as I approached — every one of my colleagues. I went out to the buffet, smoked a cigarette, and flirted with the waitress. I was satisfied, and I was trembling all over … I was arrested the next morning.”
“Yes, yes,” said Erchov vaguely. “What were you going to say about my wife?”
“Valia? She had just written to the cell Bureau to say that she wanted a divorce … That she wanted to wash away the involuntary dishonor of having, unknowingly, been the wife of an enemy of the people … And so forth … You know the formulas. And she was right, she wanted to live, Valia did.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
In a lower voice, Erchov added:
“Perhaps she was right … What has become of her?”
Ricciotti made a vague gesture: “I have no idea … In Kamchatka, I suppose … Or the Altai …”
“And now?”
Through their weariness, they looked at each other, and the colorless daylight revealed in each of them the same bleak astonishment, the same stricken and simple calm.
“Now,” Ricciotti answered, “it is time to give in, Maximka. Resistance serves no purpose … you know that better than anyone. You can force yourself to suffer the tortures of the damned, but the end will be the same, and furthermore it will be useless. Give in, I tell you.”
“Give in to what? Admit that I am an enemy of the people, a traitor, that I killed Tulayev, and I don’t know what else? Repeat that hodgepodge which sounds as if it had been spouted by drunken epileptics?”
“Confess, brother. That or something else, anything they want you to. In the first place, you’ll sleep; in the second, you’ll have a slim chance … A very slim chance, almost no chance in my opinion, but there’s nothing left that anyone can do about it … Maximka, you are a stronger man than I am, but I have better political judgment, you must admit … That’s how it is, I assure you. They need just that, and they order it as they order a turbine destroyed … Neither the engineers nor the workers discuss the order, and no one worries about the lives it will cost … I had never even thought of it before … The last trials did not produce the political results that were expected of them, and the conviction now is that there must be a new demonstration and a new cleanup … You understand that they can’t leave any veterans anywhere … It is not up to us to decide if the Political Bureau is wrong or not …”
“It is appallingly wrong,” said Erchov.
“Keep your mouth shut on the subject. No member of the Party has a right to say such things. If you were sent against Japanese tanks as the head of a division, you wouldn’t argue, you’d go, even though you knew that not a man would come back. Tulayev is only an accident or an excuse. For my part, I am even convinced that there is nothing behind the case, that he was killed by chance, if you please! You must see, nevertheless, that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people’s soul … The Chief has been in an impasse for a long time. Perhaps he’s losing his mind. Perhaps he sees farther and better than all the rest of us. I don’t believe he is a genius, I believe he has decided limitations, but we have no one else, and he has only himself. We have killed off all the others, allowed them to be killed off, that is; and he is the only one left, the only real one. He knows that when somebody shoots Tulayev, it is himself that was aimed at, because it can’t be otherwise, there is no one but himself that anyone either can hate or has to hate …”
“You think so?”
Ricciotti said lightly:
“Only the rational is real, according to Hegel.”
“I cannot,” said Erchov, with an effort. “It is beyond my strength …”
“Empty words. Neither you nor I have any strength left. And afterward?”
Half the offices in the building they could see through the window were closed and empty now. To the right, a few floors were lighted up, where people would be working all night … The green light through the window shades brightened the twilight. Erchov and Ricciotti were enjoying a singular freedom: they went and washed their faces in the toilet room, they were brought a reasonably good supper and plenty of cigarettes. They glimpsed faces that looked almost friendly … Erchov stretched out on the sofa, Ricciotti wandered around the room, straddled a chair:
“I know all that you are thinking, I have thought it all myself, I still think it. Point 1: There is no other solution, old man. Point 2: This way, we give ourselves a very slim chance, say one half of one per cent. Point 3: I would rather die for the country than against it … I will admit to you that, at bottom, I no longer believe in the Party, but I believe in the country … This world belongs to us, we belong to it, even to the point of absurdity and abomination … But it is all neither so absurd nor so abominable as it seems at first sight. It is more by way of being barbarous and clumsy. We are performing a surgical operation with an ax. Our government holds the fort in situations that are catastrophic, and sacrifices its best divisions one after the other because it doesn’t know anything else to do. Our turn has come.”
Erchov put his face in his hands.
“Stop, I can’t follow you.”
He raised his head, he seemed able to think clearly again, he looked angry.
“Do you believe one fifth of what you’re telling me? What are they paying you to convince me?”
The same furious despair set them one against the other; their heads close together, they saw each other — unshaven for a week, their faces bloodless, their eyelids netted with wrinkles, their features blurred by a weariness without end. Ricciotti answered, without heat:
“No one is paying me anything, you idiot. But I don’t want to die for nothing — do you understand that? That chance — one half of one per cent, of one thousand per cent, yes, of one thousand per cent — I mean to take it — do you understand that? I mean to try to live, cost what it may — and then, that’s that! I am a human animal that wants to live despite everything, to kiss women, work, fight in China … Dare to tell me that you are any different! I want to try to save you, do you understand? I am logical. We used this move on others, now it’s being used on us — they know the game! Things have overtaken us and we must keep going to the end. Don’t you see that? We were made to serve this regime, it is all we have, we are its children, its ignoble children, all this is not a matter of chance — can I ever make you understand? I am loyal — don’t you see? And you are loyal too, Maximka.” His voice broke, changed tone, acquired a shade of tenderness. “That’s all, Maximka. You are wrong to revile me. Think it over. Sit down.”
He took him by the shoulders and pushed him toward the sofa. Erchov let himself drop onto it limply.
Night had fallen, steps sounded in a distant corridor, mingled with the tapping of a typewriter. The scattered sounds, creeping into the silence, were poignant.
Erchov was still rebellious:
“Confess that I am complete traitor! That I was a party to a crime against which I have fought with all my strength! … Let me alone, you’re mad!”
His comrade’s voice came to him from very far away. There were icy distances between them, in which dark planets revolved slowly … There was nothing between them except a mahogany table, empty tea glasses, an empty carafe of vodka, five feet of dusty carpet.
“Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will ever go over to the enemy … And if you consider yourself innocent, you are absolutely wrong. We innocent? Who do you think you’re fooling? Have you forgotten our trade? Can Comrade High Commissar for Security be innocent? Can the Grand Inquisitor be as pure as a lamb? Can he be the only person in the world who doesn’t deserve the bullet in the neck which he distributed, like a rubber-stamp signature, at the rate of seven hundred per month on the average? Official figures — way off, of course. No one will ever know the real figures …”
“Shut up, will you?” cried Erchov. “Have me taken back to my cell. I was a soldier, I obeyed orders — that’s all! You are torturing me for no purpose …”
“No. Your torture is only beginning. Your torture is yet to come. I am trying to keep you from going through it. I am trying to save you … To save you, do you understand?”
“Have they promised you something?”
“They have us so in their hands that they don’t need to promise us anything … We know what promises are worth … Popov has been to see me — you know, that blithering old fool … When his turn comes, I’ll be very happy, even in the next world … He said to me: ‘The Party demands much of you, the Party promises nothing to anyone. The Political Bureau will decide in accordance with political necessities. The Party can also shoot you without trial …’ Make up your mind, Maximka, I am as tired as you are.”
“Impossible,” said Erchov.
He covered his face with his hands and crumpled over. Perhaps he was crying. His breath came wheezily. There was a shattering interval.
“It would be a pleasure to blow out my own brains,” Erchov muttered.
“Of course,” said Ricciotti.
Time — sheer, colorless, deadly time stretching on and on — with nothing at the end. To sleep …
“One chance in a thousand,” Erchov muttered, out of a calm from which there was no appeal. “Very well! You are right, brother. We have to stay in the game.”
Ricciotti pressed a frenzied finger on the bell push. Somewhere the bell rang commandingly … A young soldier of the special battalion half opened the door. “Tea, sandwiches, brandy! Quick!” Bluish daylight dimmed the lights in the windows of the Secret Service, which was deserted at that hour. Before they parted, Erchov and Ricciotti embraced each other. Smiling faces surrounded them. Someone said to Erchov: “Your wife is well. She is at Viatka, she has a job in the communal government …” In his cell, Erchov was amazed to find newspapers on the table. He had read nothing for months, his brain had worked in a vacuum, at times it had been very hard. Exhausted, he dropped onto the bed, unfolded a copy of Pravda to a benevolent portrait of the Chief, looked at it for a long minute, laboriously, as if he were trying to understand something, and fell asleep just as he lay, with the printed image covering his face.
Telephones transmitted the important news. At 6:27 A.M. Zvyeryeva, who had herself been waked by her secretary, called Comrade Popov by direct wire and informed him: “Erchov has confessed …” Lying in her big bed of gilded Karelian wood, she laid the receiver down on the night table. A polished mirror, hung so that it tilted toward the bed, sent her back an image of which she never tired: herself. Her long, straight, dyed hair framed her face in an almost perfect oval. “I have a tragic mouth,” she thought, seeing the yellowish curve of her lips, which expressed both shame and rancor. Complexion the color of old wax, wrinkles painstakingly massaged — there was nothing in that face human except the eyes. Soot-colored, without lashes or brows, in everyday life their opaque darkness expressed nothing but an ultimate dissimulation. But when she was alone with her looking glass they expressed a ravenous bewilderment. Brusquely she threw off the bedclothes. Because her breasts were aging, she slept in a black lace brassière. Her body appeared in the looking glass, still pure in line, long, supple, lusterless, like the body of a slim Chinese girl, “like the Chinese slaves in the brothels at Harbin.” Her dry palms followed the curve of her hips. She admired herself: “My belly is tight and cruel …” On the mount of Venus there was only an arid tuft; below, the secret folds were sad and taut, like a forsaken mouth … Toward those folds her hand glided, while her body arched, her eyes clouded, the mirror expanded, became full of vague presences. She caressed herself gently. Above her, in a loathsome emptiness, floated the forms of men mingled with the forms of very young women brutally possessed. Her own tranced face — the eyes half closed, the mouth open — rose before her for an instant. “Ah, I am beautiful, ah, I …” A violent trembling shook her from head to foot, and in it she sank into her solitude. “Ah, when will I have …” The telephone squeaked. It was old Popov’s insipid mumbling:
“My con-con-gratulations … The investigation has made a great step … Now, Comrade Zvyeryeva, get the Rublev dossier ready for me …”
“You shall have it this morning, Comrade Popov.”
For almost ten full years Makeyev’s life had consisted in inflicting or swallowing humiliation. The only art of government that he knew was to abolish every objection by repression and humiliation. At first, when some comrade stood on the platform before an ironical audience, struggling to admit his errors of yesterday, to abjure his companions, his friendships, his own thoughts, Makeyev used to feel uncomfortable. “Son of a bitch,” he would think, “wouldn’t you do better to let them beat you up?” After the arguments of 1927–28, he brought a scorn heavily weighted with mockery to bear on the great veterans who had recanted to avoid being expelled from the Party. In a confused way, he felt that he was called to share their heritage. His monumental scoffing influenced audiences against the militants of 1918, who, suddenly stripped of their halos, stripped of their power, were seen to humiliate themselves before the Party — and in reality it was before mediocre men and women united by but one preoccupation: discipline. His whole head purple, Makeyev thundered: “No, it is not enough! Less beating around the bush! Tell us about the criminal agitation you took part in at the factories!” His interruptions — like blows from a blackjack full in the face — contributed largely to opening the path of power before him. He followed it as he had risen to it: persecuting his vanquished comrades; insisting on their repeating — over and over, and each time in blunter and more revolting terms — the same abjurations, because it was the only way left them to withdraw their claims to power (which, it seemed, was always about to fall into their hands, because actually they were free from the errors of the present); insisting that his subordinates should take the responsibility for his own errors, because he, Makeyev, was of more value to the Party than they were; hurrying to humiliate himself in turn, when someone bigger than himself demanded it. Prison plunged him into an animal desperation. In his dark, low cell he was like a steer which the slaughterer’s hammer has not hit hard enough. His powerful muscles became flabby, his hairy chest caved in, a beard the color of weather-beaten straw grew up to his eyes, he became a big, bent muzhik, round-shouldered, with sad and timid eyes … Time passed, Makeyev was forgotten, no one answered his protestations of loyalty. He himself did not dare to claim an innocence which was as imprudent as it was doubtful, if not more so. The reality of the outside world came to an end, he could no longer picture his wife to himself, even at the moments when a sexual frenzy seized him and prostrated him on his cot, his flesh throbbing, an edge of foam in the corners of his mouth … When his questioning began, he felt a great relief. Everything would come out all right, it was only a broken career, it couldn’t call for more than a few years in an Arctic concentration camp, and even there you can show that you are zealous, that you have a sense of organization, there are rewards to be won … There are women too … He was called upon to agree that he had carried the May directives too far and, on the other hand, had consciously neglected to apply those of September; to admit that he was responsible for the decrease in sown fields in the region; to admit that he had appointed to the agricultural directorate officials who had since been sentenced as counterrevolutionaries (he had denounced them himself); to admit that he had diverted for his personal use, specifically for the purchase of furniture, monies earmarked for a Rest House for Agricultural Workers … The point was arguable, but he did not argue, he agreed, it was all true, it could be true, it must be true … as you see, comrades, if the Party demands it, I am more than ready to take everything on myself … A good sign: none of the accusations rated capital punishment. He was allowed to read old illustrated magazines.
Wakened one night from the deepest of sleep, led to his interrogation by a different route — elevators, courtyards, well-lighted basements — Makeyev suddenly found himself facing new dangers. A terrible severity made everything clear:
“Makeyev, you admit that it was you who organized the famine in the district which the Central Committee entrusted to you …”
Makeyev made a sign of assent. But the formula was startlingly disquieting — it was reminiscent of recent trials … But what else could they ask of him? Of what could he reasonably accuse himself if not of that? No one at Kurgansk would doubt his guilt. And the Political Bureau would be freed of responsibility.
“The time has come for you to make us a fuller confession. What you are hiding from us shows what an indomitable enemy of the Party you have become. We know everything. We have proof of everything, Makeyev, irrefutable proof. Your accomplices have confessed. Tell us what part you played in the plot which cost the life of Comrade Tulayev …”
Makeyev bowed his head — or, more precisely, his strength failed him and his head dropped on his chest. His shoulders sagged, as if, while he had listened to the examiner’s words, the very substance of his body had drained away. A black hole, a black hole before him, a vault, a grave, and there was nothing more he could say. He could neither speak nor move, he stared stupidly at the polished floor.
“Answer to the accusation, Makeyev! … Do you feel ill?”
If they had beaten him they could have got nothing from him, his big body appeared to have no more substance than a sack of rags. He was led away, doctored; a shave gave him back something of his usual appearance. He talked to himself ceaselessly. His head looked like a skull — high, conical, with prominent jawbones and carnivorous teeth. One night when he had recovered from the first nervous shock, he was led out to be questioned again. He walked totteringly, his heart sank, what little strength he had left failed him the nearer he came to the door …
“Makeyev, we have an overwhelming deposition against you in the Tulayev case — your wife’s statement …”
“Impossible.”
The curiously unreal image of the woman who had been real to him in another life, one of those former lives which had become unreal, brought a flash of firmness into his face. His teeth gleamed balefully.
“Impossible. Or else she is lying because you have tortured her.”
“It is not for you to accuse us, criminal. You still deny the charge?”
“I deny it.”
“Then listen and be abashed. When you learned that Comrade Tulayev had been assassinated, you exclaimed that you had expected it, that it served him right, that it was he, and not you, who had organized the famine in the district … I have your actual words, do I need to read them to you? Is it true?”
“It is false,” Makeyev murmured. “It is all false.”
And the memory emerged mysteriously from his inner darkness. Alia, her face miserably swollen from crying … She held the queen of hearts in a trembling hand, she was shouting, but her wheezy breathless voice could hardly be heard: “And you, traitor and liar, when will someone kill you?” What could she have thought, what could they have suggested to her, the poor simpleton? Was she denouncing him to save him or to ruin him?
“It is true,” he said. “I ought to explain to you that it is more false than true, false, false …”
“That would be wholly useless, Makeyev. If you have the remotest chance of salvation, it lies in a complete and sincere confession …”
The urgent memory of his wife had revived him. He became like himself again, grew sarcastic:
“Like the others, you mean?”
“To what are you alluding, Makeyev? What is it that you presume to think, counterrevolutionary Makeyev, traitor to the Party, murderer of the Party?”
“Nothing.”
Again he collapsed.
“In any case, this may be your last interrogation. It may be your last day. A decision may be reached this very evening, Makeyev — did you hear me? Take the prisoner back to his cell.”
… At Kurgansk the man was taken from the prison in a van. Sometimes he was informed of his sentence, sometimes he was left in doubt — and that was better, because occasionally men who had no doubts left had to be carried, tied, helped along, gagged. The others walked like broken-down automatons, but they walked. A few miles from the station, at a place where the tracks make a shining curve under the stars, the van stopped. The man was led toward the underbrush … Makeyev attended the execution of four railwaymen who had stolen parcel-post packages. Traffic was being disorganized by such larcenies. At the regional Committee, Makeyev had demanded capital punishment for the proletarians turned brigands. The bastards! He held a grudge against them for forcing him into a hideous severity. The four still hoped for a transfer. “They won’t dare shoot workers for so little …” seven thousand rubles’ worth of merchandise … Their last hope vanished in the underbrush, under an ugly yellow moon whose sickly light filtered through little leaves. Standing at a turn in the path, Makeyev watched to see how the men would behave. The first walked straight on, his head held high, his step firm, charging forward toward the open grave (“the stuff of a revolutionary …”). The second stumbled over roots, jerked epileptically, hung his head — he looked as if he were plunged in deep thought, but when he came nearer Makeyev saw that, for all his fifty years, the man was crying silently. The third was like a drunken man with sudden intervals of clearheadedness. He dragged along, then ran a few steps (they were going in single file, followed by several men with rifles). The last, a lad of twenty, had to be supported. He recognized Makeyev, fell to his knees, and cried: “Comrade Makeyev, beloved father, pardon us, have mercy on us, we are workers …” Makeyev sprang back, his foot struck a root, he felt a stab of pain, the silent soldiers dragged the boy on … At that moment the first of the four turned his head and said calmly, in a voice perfectly distinct in the moonlit silence: “Keep quiet, Sacha, they are not men any more, they are hyenas … We ought to spit in his dirty face …” Four reports, quite close together, reached Makeyev in his car. A cloud darkened the moon, the driver almost drove the car into the ditch. Makeyev went straight to bed, put his arms around his sleeping wife, and lay so for a long time, his eyes open on darkness. Alia’s warmth and her regular breathing calmed him. Since it was easy for him not to think, he was able to escape from himself. The next morning, seeing a brief notice of the execution in the paper, he was almost glad to feel that he was “an iron Bolshevik” …
Makeyev lived but little by his memories; rather, his memories lived a life of their own, an insidious and awkward life, in him. That one had appeared on the luminous screen of consciousness while he was being led toward his cell, toward … And, horribly, it brings another with it: In those days, Makeyev felt that he belonged to a different race from that of men who walked such paths at night, under the yellow moon, toward graves dug by soldiers of the Special Battalion. No conceivable event could cast him down from the summits of power, make him in turn one of the disinherited. Even disgraces would leave him in the files of the Central Committee. Nothing short of expulsion from the Party, and that was impossible … He was loyal, body and soul! Adaptable, too, and he knew very well that the Central Committee was always right, that the Political Bureau was always right, that the Chief was always right, because might is right; the errors of power compel recognition, become Truth; just pay the overhead, and a wrong solution becomes the right solution … In the little elevator cage Makeyev was pressed against the wall by the massive torso of a noncommissioned officer who might be forty and who looked like him — that is to say, who looked like the Makeyev of former days. The same rugged head and chin, the same stubborn eyes, the same broad shoulders. (But neither of them was aware of the resemblance at the time.) The guard fixed his prisoner with an anonymous eye. Man-pincers, man-revolver, man-password, man-might — and Makeyev was in the power of such men, from henceforth he belonged to the other race … He had a momentary vision of himself walking through a wood, under a patchwork of yellow moonlight and leaf shadows, with rifles following him at the ready … And the same man was waiting for Makeyev at a turn in the path, he was dressed in leather, his hands were in his pockets; and when Makeyev should be no more, the same man would go calmly home and climb into a wide, warm bed, beside a sleeping woman with burning breasts … The same man, or another, but with the same anonymous eyes, would come for Makeyev, perhaps that very night …
Yet another somber image rose from the past. At the Party club a new moving picture in honor of Soviet aviation, Aerograd, was being shown. In the Siberian forest, in the Far East, bearded peasants who had been Red partisans were standing up against Japanese agents … There were two old trappers who were like brothers, and one of them discovered that the other was a traitor. Face to face under the great grim trees, in the murmuring taiga, the patriot disarmed the traitor: “Walk ahead!” The other walked, bent toward the ground, feeling himself sentenced to death. Again and again, the two almost identical faces alternated on the screen — the face of an old bearded man, stricken with terror, and the face of his comrade, his like, who had judged him, who cried to him: “Prepare yourself! In the name of the Soviet people …” and who raised his carbine … Around them the maternal forest, the inescapable forest. Close-up: the enormous face of the guilty man baying at death … It disappeared at last in the welcome roar of a shot. Makeyev gave the signal for applause … The elevator stopped, Makeyev would have liked to bay at death. Yet he walked uprightly enough. When he reached his cell he sent for a sheet of paper. Wrote:
“I cease all resistance in the face of the Party. I am ready to sign a complete and sincere confession …”
Signed it: Makeyev. The M was still strong, the other letters looked crushed.
Kiril Rublev refused to answer his examiners’ questions. (“If they need me, they will give in. If they only intend to get rid of me, I am shortening the formalities …”) A high official came to inquire into his demands. “I do not wish to be treated worse in a Socialist prison than in a prison under the old regime … After all, citizen, I am one of the founders of the Soviet State.” (As he spoke, he thought: “I am being ironical despite myself … Integral humor …”) “I want books and paper …” He was given books from the prison library and notebooks with numbered pages … “Now, leave me in peace for three weeks …” He needed the time to clarify his thought. A man feels singularly free when all is lost, he can at last think in a strictly objective fashion — to the extent, that is, to which he overcomes the fear which, in a living being, is a primordial force comparable to the sex instinct … Both the instinct and the force are almost insurmountable; it is a matter of inner training. Nothing more to lose. A few gymnastic exercises in the morning: naked, loose-limbed, sharp-faced, he found it amusing to imitate the supple movement of the reaper in the wheat field — the upper body and both arms swinging vigorously forward and to the side. Then he walked a little, thinking; sat down and wrote. Interrupted himself to meditate on another theme: on death, from the only rational point of view, that of the natural sciences: a field of poppies. The thought of Dora often tormented him, more often than it ought. “We had been prepared for so long, Dora …” All her life, all their life, their real life, seventeen years, since the hardships and enthusiasms of the Revolution, Dora had been strong, under a defenseless gentleness, a scrupulous gentleness that was full of hesitancies and doubts. There are plants like that, plants which under their delicate tracery of leaves have such a resistance and vitality that they survive storms, that, seeing them, we divine the existence of a true and admirable strength entirely different from the mixture of instantaneous ardor and brutality which is commonly called strength. Kiril talked to Dora as if she had been present. They knew each other so well, they had so many thoughts in common, that when he wrote she sometimes foresaw the sentence or the page that was to follow. “I thought you would go on like that, Kiril,” she would say; and looking up, he would see her, pale and pretty, her hair brushed away from her forehead and drawn into tresses that lay piled above either temple. “Why, you’re absolutely right!” he would marvel. “How well you read me, Dora!” In the joy of their mutual understanding they sometimes kissed each other over his manuscripts. Those were the days of the Cold, of the Typhoid, of the Famine, of the Terror, of the War Fronts which were always being broken through but which never quite gave in, the days of Lenin and Trotsky, the good days. “What luck if we had died together then, Dora!” This conversation between them took place fifteen years later, when they were struggling in the grip of night-mare as suffocating miners struggle in a doomed mine. “We even missed the chance, you remember: you had typhoid, and one day the bullets made a perfect half-circle around me …” — “I was delirious,” said Dora, “I was delirious and I saw everything, I understood everything, I had the key to things, and it was I who kept the bullets from your head by moving my hand, and I touched your hair … My hallucination was so real that I almost believed it, Kiril. Afterward I had a terrible period of doubt — what was I good for if I could not keep the bullets away from you, had I a right to love you more than the Revolution, for I knew very well that I loved you more than anything in the world, that if you disappeared I could not go on living, even for the Revolution … And you scolded me when I told you, you talked to me so well in my delirium, that was the first time I came to really know you …” Kiril put both his hands on Dora’s hips and looked into her eyes; they smiled only with their eyes now, and they were very pale, very much older, very much troubled. “Have I changed much since?” he asked in a strangely young voice. “You are amazingly the same,” Dora answered, stroking his cheeks. “Amazingly … But as for me, who have always told myself that you must go on living because the world would be a lesser place if you were not in it, and that I must go on living with you … I begin to believe that we missed that chance to die, really I do … Perhaps there are whole periods when, for men of a certain kind, it is no longer worth while to live …” Kiril answered slowly: “Whole periods, you say? You are right. But since, in the present state of our knowledge, no one can foresee the duration or the succession of periods, and since we must try to be present at the moment when history needs us …” He would have talked like that in his course on “Chartism and the Development of Capitalism in England” … Now he squeezed into the right-hand corner of his cell, directly against the wall; and, raising his Ivan the Terrible profile toward the window at the precise angle which allowed him to see a lozenge of sky a foot square, he murmured: “Well, Dora, well, Dora, now the end has come …”
His manuscript progressed. In a swift hand, a little unsteady at the beginning of each day’s first paragraph, but firm after twenty lines, he went over the history of the last fifteen years, wasting no words, with the concision of an economist, quoted figures from the secret statistics (the correct ones), analyzed the decisions and acts of those in power. He achieved a terrifying objectivity, which spared nothing. The confused battles for the democratization of the Party; the first debates of the Communist Academy on the subject of industrialization; the real figures on goods shortages, on the value of the ruble, on wages; the growing tension of the relations between the rural masses, a weakling industry, and the State; the NEP crisis; the effects of the world crisis on Soviet economy, shut up within its own borders; the gold crisis; the solutions imposed by a power which was at once farsighted (in matters of danger which threatened it directly) and blinded by its instinct for self-preservation; the degeneration of the Party, the end of its intellectual life; the birth of the authoritarian system; the beginnings of collectivization, conceived as an expedient to avoid the bankruptcy of the directing group; the famine which spread over the country like a leprosy … Rublev knew the minutes of the meetings of the Political Bureau, he quoted the most forbidden passages from them (passages probably now destroyed); he showed the General Secretary daily encroaching upon all powers; he followed the intrigue in the lobbies of the Central Committee; against it as a background, the figure of the Chief began to appear, still hesitantly, between resignation, arrest, the violent scene at the end of which two equally pale members of the P.B. faced each other among the overturned chairs and one said: “I will kill myself so that my corpse will denounce you! But as for you, the muzhiks will rip your guts out one day, and more power to them — but the country, the Revolution …” And the other, his face closed as the grave, murmured: “Calm yourself, Nicolas Ivanovich. If you will accept my resignation I tender it …” It was not accepted, there were no more successors.
When he had written page after page, written freely, as he had not written for more than ten years, Kiril Rublev would walk up and down his cell, smoking. “Well, Dora, what do you think of it?” Dora invisibly turned over the written sheets. “Good,” she said. “Firm and clear. Yourself. Go on, Kiril.” Then he returned to that other necessary meditation, his meditation on the poppy field.
Early morning. A field of red flowers on a gentle slope, undulating like flesh. Each flower is a flame, and so frail that a mere touch makes the petals fall. How many flowers are there? Impossible to count them. Every instant one withers, another opens. If you were to cut down the tallest ones, those that had made the best growth — whether because they sprang from more vigorous seed or because they had found some elements unequally distributed through the soil — neither the appearance nor the nature nor the future of the field would be changed. Shall I give a name, shall I vow a love, to one flower among them all? It seems to be a fact that each flower exists in itself, is unique and solitary in its particular kind, different from all the others, and that, once destroyed, that flower will never be born again … It seems so, but are we sure? From instant to instant, the flower changes, it ceases to be like itself, something in it dies and is reborn. The flower of this instant is no longer the flower of the instant before. Is the difference between its successive selves, in time, really less than the present difference between itself and many others which closely resemble it, which are perhaps what it was an hour before, what it will be an hour hence?
A rigorous investigation thus abolished in reverie the boundaries between the momentary and the enduring, the individual and the species, the concrete and the conceptual, life and death. Death was completely absorbed into that marvelous field of poppies, sprung perhaps from a mass grave, perhaps fed by decomposed human flesh … A different and vaster problem. Studying it, would one not likewise see the boundaries between species abolished? “But that would no longer be scientific,” Rublev answered himself, who considered that, outside of purely experimental syntheses, philosophy does not exist or is only “the theoretical mask of an idealism which is theological in origin.”
As he was brave, lyrical, and a little tired of living, the poppies helped him to grow accustomed to a death which was not far distant, and which had been the death of so many of his comrades that it was no longer strange or too terrifying. Besides, he knew that men were seldom executed while an investigation was in process. So the threat — or the hope — was not immediate. When he should have to go to sleep with the thought of being waked only to be shot, his nerves would undergo another trial … (But weren’t there executions in the daytime too?)
Zvyeryeva sent for him. She tried to give the examination the tone of a familiar conversation.
“You’re writing, Comrade Rublev?”
“Yes, I am writing.”
“A message to the Central Committee, I take it?”
“Not exactly. I don’t really know whether we still have a Central Committee in the sense in which we used the term in the old Party.”
Zvyeryeva was surprised. Everything that was known about Kiril Rublev suggested that he was “in line,” docile — not without inward reservations — disciplined; and inward reservations strengthen acceptances in practice. The investigation was in danger of failing.
“I don’t quite understand you, Comrade Rublev. You know, I believe, what the Party expects of you?”
Prison had made the less change in his appearance because he had always worn a beard. He did not look depressed, though he looked tired: dark circles under his eyes. The face of a vigorous saint, with a big bony nose, such as are to be seen in certain icons of the Novgorod school. Zvyeryeva tried to decipher him. He spoke calmly:
“The Party … I know more or less what is expected of me … But what Party? What is now called the Party has changed so much … But you certainly cannot understand me …”
“And why, Comrade Rublev, should you think that I cannot understand you? On the contrary, I …”
“Don’t go on,” Rublev interrupted. “What is on your tongue is an official phrase that no longer means anything … I mean to say that you and I probably belong to different human species. I say it without the slightest animosity, I assure you.”
What might be offensive in his remark was lessened by his objective tone and the polite look he gave her.
“May I ask you, Comrade Rublev, what you are writing, and to whom, and for what purpose?”
Rublev shook his head and smiled, as if one of his students had asked him an intentionally embarrassing question.
“Comrade Examining Judge, I am thinking of writing a study on the machine-smashing movement in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century … Please don’t protest, I am seriously thinking of it.”
He waited to see what effect his joke would produce. Zvyeryeva was observing him too. Small, shrewd eyes.
“I am writing for the future. One day the archives will open. Perhaps my memorial will be found in them. The work of the historians who are studying our period will thereby be lightened. I regard that as much more important than what you are probably commissioned to ask me … Now, citizen, permit me to ask a question in turn: Of what, precisely, am I accused?”
“You will learn that before long. Are you satisfied with your living conditions? The food?”
“Passable. Sometimes not enough sugar in the preserves. But many Soviet proletarians, who are accused of nothing, are less well fed than you and I are, citizen.”
Zvyeryeva said dryly:
“The session is over.”
Rublev returned to his cell in excellent humor. “I sent that hideous cat running, Dora. If one had to explain oneself to such creatures … Let them send me someone better, or let them shoot me without any explanations …” The field of poppies appeared on a distant slope, through a veil of rain. “My poor Dora … Am I not even now tearing their entire scaffolding down?” Dora would be glad. She would say: “I am certain that I shall not survive you long, Kiril. Show me the way.”
Rublev did not always turn around when the door opened. This time, after he had distinctly heard the door close, he had the feeling of a presence behind him. He went on writing — he did not intend to let his nerves get the better of him.
“Good day, Rublev,” said a drawling voice.
It was Popov. Gray cap, old overcoat, bulging brief bag under his arm, just the same as ever. (They had not seen each other for years.)
“Good day, Popov, sit down.”
Rublev gave him the chair, closed his notebook, which lay open on the table, and stretched out on the bed. Popov examined the cell — bare, yellow, stifling, surrounded by silence. He obviously found it unpleasant.
“Well, well,” said Rublev, “so they’ve locked you up too! Welcome, brother, you have more than deserved it.”
He laughed to himself, heartily. Popov threw his cap on the table, dropped his overcoat, spat several times into a gray handkerchief. “Toothache. The devil take … But you are mistaken, Rublev, I have not been arrested yet …”
Rublev flung his two long legs into the air in a jubilant caper. And, talking to himself and laughing uncontrollably: “Old Popov said not yet. Not yet! Freud would give three rubles spot cash for that lapsus linguae.… Seriously, Popov, did you hear yourself say not yet? Not yet!”
“I said not yet?” Popov stammered. “Not yet what? What can it matter? What do you mean by … by picking on words like that? What is that I am not yet?”
“… arrested, arrested, arrested, not yet arrested!” Rublev cried, with wild mockery in his eyes, in the reddish tangle of his eyebrows, in his bristling beard.
Wall, window with dirty panes, iron grating … Popov stared at them stupidly. This insane reception staggered him. He let silence grow between them until it became almost uncomfortable. Rublev crossed his arms under his neck.
“Rublev, I have come to decide your fate with you. We expect much of you … We know what an intensely critical mind you have … but we know too that you are loyal to the Party … The men of the older generation, like myself, know you … I have brought you some documents … Read them … We have confidence in you … Only, if you don’t mind, let’s change places — I’d rather lie down … My health, you know — rheumatism, myocarditis, polyneuritis, et cetera … You’re lucky to be healthy, Rublev …”
Spilled water spreads, but the very obstacles it encounters give it a definite outline. So Popov regained the advantage. They changed places, Popov lay down on the cot, and he really looked like a sick old man — his teeth gray, his skin muddy, his few strands of hair a sorry white and absurdly ruffled. “Will you hand me my brief bag, please, Rublev? You don’t mind if I smoke?” He extracted a sheaf of papers from his bag. “There, read those … Don’t hurry … We have plenty of time … It is serious, everything is extremely serious.” His short sentences ended in little coughs. Rublev settled down to read. Résumé of the reports of the military attachés at … Report on the construction of strategic roads in Poland … Fuel Reserves … The London Conversations … Long minutes passed.
“War?” said Rublev at last, wholly serious.
“Very probably war, next year … mmmm … Did you see the figures on transport?”
“Yes.”
“We still have a slight chance of shifting the war toward the West …”
“Not for long.”
“Not for long …”
They discussed the danger as if one of them were calling on the other at his house. How long would it take to mobilize? Cover troops? There would have to be a second oil refinery, in the Far East, and the Komsomolsk road system would have to be developed at top speed. Was the new railroad in Yakutia really finished? How did it stand up under winter conditions?
“We count on the probability of extremely high troop losses …” said Popov in a clear voice. “All those young fellows …” thought Rublev. He had always enjoyed watching parades of athletes; his eyes, as he walked through the streets, would follow the strapping young men from different parts of Russia: Siberians with broad noses and horizontal eyes set deep under stern foreheads, Asiatics with broad, flat faces, and certain Mongols with delicate features, products of fine races civilized long before white civilization. Their young women went through life with them, shoulder to shoulder (he was perhaps visualizing these images from recollections of moving pictures), and all together they moved through crumbling cities, under the bombers; and our new square reinforced-concrete buildings, the work of so many famished proletarians, became burning skeletons, and all those young men, all those young women, millions of them, splattered with blood, filled hideous pits, hospital trains, ambulances stinking of gangrene and chloroform — we shall certainly have a shortage of anesthetics … Slowly, there in the hospitals, they continued their transformation into corpses … “I must stop thinking in images,” he said, “it becomes unbearable.”
“Unbearable indeed,” Popov answered.
Rublev nearly cried out: “You still here! What are you doing here?”
But Popov attacked first:
“We count on losses which may reach several millions of men during the first year … That is why … mmmm … the Political Bureau has adopted the … mmm … unpopular measure … forbidding abortion.… Millions of women are suffering under it … We no longer count in anything less than millions … We must have millions of children, and have them now, to replace the millions of young men who will perish … mmmm … and you, meanwhile, sit here writing … may the devil take … take what you are writing, Rublev … mmmm … and all this paltry business of your resisting the Party … Knee and jaw at once …”
“What jaw?”
“The upper … Pain here, pain there … Rublev, the Party asks you, the Party orders you … I am not the Party.”
“Asks what? Orders what?”
“You know as well as I do … It is not for me to go into details … You can arrange things with the examining judges … they know the scenario … that’s what they’re paid for … mmm … some of them even believe it, the young ones, the stupid ones … mmm … they’re the most useful … I pity the suspects who fall into their clutches … mmm … You still resist? … You’ll be made to stand up in front of a roomful of people — all the diplomats, the official spies, the foreign correspondents, the ones we pay, the ones who are on more than one payroll, the scum of the earth, all hungry for just that, you will be put in front of the microphone, and you’ll say, for example, that you are morally responsible for the assassination of Comrade Tulayev … That, or something else … mmm … how should I know what? You will say it because the Prosecutor, Rachevsky, will make you say it, word by word and not once but ten times over … mmm … he’s patient, Rachevsky, like a mule … a filthy mule … You will say whatever they want you to say, because you know the situation … because you have no choice: obey or betray … Or we will call upon you to stand in front of the same microphone and dishonor the Supreme Tribunal, the Party, the Chief, the U.S.S.R. — everything at once, to proclaim … the devil take me … my knee … to proclaim what you call your innocence … and what a pretty spectacle your innocence will make at that moment! …”
It had grown dark. Rublev walked up and down his cell in silence. The voice that sometimes rose out of Popov’s mutterings, sometimes was lost in them, showered him with little muddy words; he did not hear them all, but he had the feeling that he was walking on spit, and little gray splatterings of spit kept raining around him, and there was nothing to say in answer, or what he could say in answer was of no use … “And it is on the eve of war, in this hour of danger, that you have destroyed the cadres of the country, decapitated the army, the Party, industry — you immitigable idiots and criminals …” If he cried that, Popov would answer: “My knee … mmm … perhaps you are right, but what good does it do you to be right? It is we who are the power, and even we can do nothing about it. You are being asked for your own head now; and you aren’t going to announce the fact before the international bourgeoisie, are you? Even to avenge your precious little head, which will soon be cracked open like a nut … mmmm …” A despicable person — but what way was there out of this infernal circle, what way?
Dressed in an old tunic and shapeless trousers, his hands crossed on his chest, Popov continued his monologue, with short pauses. Rublev stopped beside him as if he were seeing him for the first time. And now he addressed him in the familiar form — sadly at first:
“Popov, old man, you look like Lenin … It is striking … Don’t move, let your hands stay just as they are … Not like Ilich alive, not a bit … You look like his embalmed body … The way a rag doll looks like a living being …” He studied him with an attention that was at once dreamy and intense. “You look like him in gray crumbling stone, or after the fashion of a sow bug … the bumps on your forehead, your miserable little beard, poor, poor old man …”
There was sincere pity in his voice. On his side, Popov was watching him with the most intense attention. Rublev read something in his eyes which was at once veiled and unmistakable: danger.
“… poor bastard that you are, poor old wreck … Cynical and foul-smelling … Ah!”
With a look of despairing disgust, Rublev turned away and went to the door. The cell seemed too small for him. He thought aloud:
“And this graveyard maggot has brought me word of the war …”
Popov’s muttering and spluttering began behind him again — spitefully perhaps?
“Ilich said that there’s always some use around a house for a cleaning rag … mmmm … a slightly dirty rag, naturally, since it is in the nature of cleaning rags to be slightly dirty … I am willing … I am no individualist … mmmm … It is written in the Bible that a living dog is better than a dead lion …”
Popov rose, put away the papers he had brought, and laboriously got into his overcoat. Rublev stood with his hands in his pockets, not offering to help him. He murmured, for himself:
“Living dog, or plague-bearing, half-dead rat?”
Popov had to pass in front of him to get the guard to open the door. They did not take leave of each other. Before he crossed the threshold, Popov shoved his cap on his head with a quick gesture, visor tilted up and at a slight angle. At seventeen, just before his first taste of prison, in the days of the first revolutionary enthusiasm, he had enjoyed giving himself the same sort of underworld air. Framed in the metal doorway, he turned, his chest brushing against the square double tooth of the lock, and looked straight at Rublev with eyes that were clear and still vigorous.
“Good-by, Rublev. I don’t need your answer … I know what I needed to know … mmmm … Basically, we understand each other perfectly …” He lowered his voice because of the uniforms outside the door. “It is hard, certainly … mmmm … for me too … But … mmm … the Party has confidence in you …”
“Go to hell!”
Popov took two strides back into the cell and, without any stammering, as if the hideous fog of his life had cleared around him, asked:
“What answer shall I take from you to the Central Committee?”
And Rublev, erect too, said firmly:
“That I have lived my whole life only for the Party. Sick and degraded though it may be, our Party. That I have neither thought nor conscience outside of the Party. That I am loyal to the Party, whatever it may be, whatever it may do. That if I must perish, crushed by my Party, I consent … But that I warn the villains who are killing us that they are killing the Party …”
“Good-by, Comrade Rublev.”
The door closed, the well-oiled bolt slipped gently into the socket. The darkness was almost complete. Rublev rained smashing blows on the sepulchral door. Muffled steps hurried along the corridor, the wicket opened.
“What is it, citizen?”
Rublev thought that he roared, but actually his voice was only an angry breath:
“Turn on the light!”
“Sh … sh … There you are, citizen.” The electric bulb went on.
Rublev shook the pillow on which his visitor’s head had left a hollow. “He is unspeakable, Dora, he is filthy. It would be a pleasure to drop him over a cliff, into a well, into a black abyss, provided that he would stay under forever and neither his cap nor his brief bag would float to the surface of any water ever again … One would go away afterward with a feeling of relief, the night air would seem purer … Dora, Dora …” But — as Rublev very well knew — it was Popov’s flabby hands which were pushing him insidiously toward the black abyss.… “Dialectics of the relation between social forces in periods of reaction …”