Chapter 9

On his desk Prosecutor Rachevsky found a foreign newspaper which announced (the item was carefully circled in red pencil) the imminent trial of Comrade Tulayev’s assassins. “From our special correspondent: Informed circles are discussing … — the principal defendants — the former High Commissar for Security, Erchov; the historian Kiril Rublev, former member of the Central Committee; the Regional Secretary for Kurgansk, Artyem Makeyev; an immediate agent of Trotsky’s, whose name is still a secret … — are said to have made complete confessions … — it is hoped that this trial will cast light on certain points which the preceding trials left obscure …” The Foreign Affairs Commissariat’s press bureau added a request for information concerning the source of this item. Originally emanating from the Supreme Court, the request had been officially communicated by the press bureau itself … Calamity. Toward noon the Prosecutor learned that the audience for which he had been asking for several days was granted.

The Chief received him in a small anteroom, before a glass-covered table. The audience lasted three minutes and forty-five seconds. The Chief seemed preoccupied. “Good day. Sit down. Well?” Discommoded by his thick glasses, Rachevsky could not see the Chief well. The lenses broke his image into absorbing details: wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, bushy black eyebrows in which there was a sprinkling of white hairs … Leaning slightly forward, his two hands resting on the edge of the table (because he did not dare to gesticulate), the Prosecutor made his report. He did not know quite what he was saying, but professional habit made him brief and precise: 1. Complete confessions from the principal defendants; 2. the unexpected death of the person who appeared to be the soul of the conspiracy, the Trotskyist Ryzhik, a death due to the unpardonable negligence of Comrade Zvyeryeva, who had been in charge of the preliminary investigation; 3. the very strong presumptive evidence collected against Ryzhik, whose guilt, if proven, would show the connection between the conspirators and foreign powers … In principle, a doubt must be admitted until Kondratiev should be questioned … However …

“I have investigated the Kondratiev matter. It is of no further interest to you.”

The Prosecutor bowed, choking. “Ah, so much the better. Thank you …” Why was he saying thank you? He felt as if he were falling, falling straight down. It was thus that one would fall from the skyscrapers of some inconceivable city, past oblongs of window, oblongs, oblongs, five hundred stories …

Go on with what? The Prosecutor gropingly returned to the “complete confessions of the principal defendants …”

A thousand floors, the sidewalk below him. His head hitting the sidewalk at meteor speed.

The Chief rose, his hands in his pockets. “Good-by, Comrade Prosecutor.” Rachevsky walked away like an automaton. No question presented itself to him. In the car he gave himself up to stupor — the stupor of a man stunned. “I will see no one,” he told his secretary, “leave me to myself …” He sat down at his desk. The huge office offered nothing to hold his eyes (the life-size portrait of the Chief was behind the Prosecutor’s chair). “I am so tired,” he said to himself, and put his head in his hands. “When all is said and done, there is only one way out for me: to shoot myself …” The idea came to him of itself: there it was in his mind, quite simply. A telephone buzzed — direct wire from the Commissariat for the Interior. As he took up the receiver, Rachevsky became aware what a languor there was in his limbs. There was absolutely nothing in him but that one idea, reduced to an impersonal force, without emotion, without images, without argument, obvious. “Hello …” It was Gordeyev, inquiring into “this deplorable indiscretion which has communicated a so-called rumor to certain European newspapers … Do you know anything about it, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?” Excessively polite, Gordeyev — using circumlocutions to avoid saying: “I am making an investigation.” Rachevsky began by spluttering. “What indiscretion? What did you say? An English newspaper? But all communications of that nature go through the Foreign Affairs press bureau …” Gordeyev insisted: “I think you don’t quite understand, my dear Ignatii Ignatiyevich … Allow me to read you this paragraph: From our special correspondent …” Rachevsky hastily interrupted: “Ah, yes, I know … My secretariat issued a verbal communication … at the suggestion of Comrade Popov …” Gordeyev appeared to be embarrassed by the unexpected precision of this answer. “Right, right,” he said, lowering his voice. “The point is” — his voice rose an octave: Perhaps there was someone with Gordeyev? Perhaps their telephone conversation was being recorded? — “have you a written memorandum from Comrade Popov?” — “No, but I am sure he remembers it very well …” — “Thank you very much. Excuse me now, Ignatii Ignatiyevich …”

When he was under great pressure of work, Rachevsky often slept at Government House. There he had the use of a small, plainly furnished apartment, which was crammed with dossiers. He did a great deal of work himself, since he did not know how to use secretaries and trusted no one. Sixty cases of sabotage, treason, espionage, which he must look into before he went to bed, were scattered over various articles of furniture. The most secret were in a small safe at the head of his bed. Rachevsky stopped in front of the safe and, to shake off his sluggishness, elaborately wiped his glasses. “Obviously, obviously.” His usual supper was brought in, and he devoured it standing by the window, without being aware of the suburban view, in which innumerable golden sparks were kindling into light. “It is the only thing to do, the only thing …” Of the thing as such, he thought hardly at all. Present within him, it offered no real difficulty. To blow out his brains — what could be simpler? No one suspects how simple it is. He was a rudimentary man, who feared neither pain nor death since he had been present at a number of executions. There is probably no real pain, only a shock of infinitesimal duration. And materialists like ourselves have no need to fear nothingness. He longed for sleep and for darkness, which gives the best idea of nothingness, which does not exist. — Let me be, let me be! He would write nothing. It would be better for his children. As he was thinking of his children, Masha called him on the telephone: “You won’t be home tonight, Papa?” — “No.” — “Papa, I got very good today in history and political economy … Tiopka got a cut finger cutting out decalcomanias, Niura bandaged it the way it says to in the First Aid Manual. Mama’s headache is better. All well on the Interior Front! Sleep well, Comrade Papa-Prosecutor!” — “Sleep well, all of you,” Rachevsky answered.

Oh, God. He opened the cupboard in the little bureau, took out a bottle of brandy and drank from it. His eyes dilated, a warmth ran through him, it was good. He slammed the bottle down and it rocked back and forth on the table. Will you fall or won’t you? It did not fall. He banged at the table on either side of the bottle, but keeping one hand open, ready to catch the bottle if it should start to fall. “You won’t fall, damn you — ha-ha-ha-ha!” He was laughing and hiccuping. “A-bullet-in-the-brain — poo-poo-poo-poo! A-bullet-in-the-bottle — poo-poo-poo-poo!” Leaning so far to one side that he almost toppled over, he tried to get his fingers on a blue dossier which lay on a stand against the wall. The effort made him groan. “So you won’t let me catch you, damn you … damn you!” He worked his fingers to the edge of the dossier, drew it toward him craftily, caught it in the air while other papers showered onto the carpet, put it on the table, flung his glasses into a corner over his shoulder, licked his forefinger and, drawing it clumsily along under the words on the cover, began spelling them out: Sa-bo-tage in the Chemical Industry, Armolinsk Case. The syllables overlapped, ran after each other, and each letter, written in black ink in a big round hand, was fringed with fire. His finger captured the syllables, but they got away like mice, like rats, like the little lizards which, when he was a boy in Turkestan, he used to catch with a noose made from a blade of grass — ha ha ha! “I was always a specialist in nooses!” He tore the dossier across and then across again. Come here, bottle, come here, damn you — hurrah! He drank till he lost breath, the desire to laugh, consciousness …

When he arrived at his office on the afternoon of the next day, Popov was waiting for him, surrounded by the department heads, whom he dismissed with a wave. Popov looked bored, yellow, and ill. The Prosecutor sat down under the great portrait of the Chief, opened his brief case, assumed a pleasant look, but a headache pressed down on his eyelids, his mouth was woolly, he breathed laboriously. “Had a bad night, Comrade Popov, attack of asthma, my heart, I don’t know what to make of it, haven’t had time to see a doctor … At your service!”

He had not read his mail either, since the unopened envelopes lay there on his desk. Popov rubbed his hands. “So … so … Well, Comrade Rachevsky, it is just as well that I should tell you the news …” It couldn’t be easy, because he looked in his pockets for a newspaper, opened it, found an item toward the middle of the third page. “There, read that, Ignatii Ignatiyevich … In any case, everything has been arranged, I saw to it this morning …”

“By decision of… and so on … Comrade Rachevsky, I. I., Prosecutor to the Supreme Tribunal, is relieved of his functions … in view of his appointment to another post …”

“It stands to reason,” said Rachevsky, without emotion, for he saw quite a different reason.

Weakly, using both hands, he pushed the heavy brief case toward Popov. “There you are.”

To an accompaniment of hand-rubbing, little coughs, and vaguely pleasant smiles — none of which had any meaning — Popov said: “You understand, do you not, Ignatii Ignatiyevich? … You have carried out a task … a superhuman task … Mistakes were inevitable … We have thought of a post which will give you a chance to take some rest … Your appointment is” — From the depths of his torpor, Rachevsky pricked up his ears — “is … Director of the Tourist Bureau … with two months’ leave in advance … which, as a friend, I advise you to spend at Sochi … or at Suk-Su — they are our two best rest houses … Blue sea, flowers, Alupka, Alushta, views, Ignatii Ignatiyevich! You will come back renewed … ten years younger … and tourist travel, you know, is far from a negligible matter!”

Former Prosecutor Rachevsky appeared to wake up. He gesticulated. The thick lenses of his glasses flashed lightning. A laugh made a horizontal gash in his concave face.

“Delighted! Travel, touring, the dream of my life! Little birds in the woods! Cherry trees in flower! The Svanetia highway! Yalta! Our Riviera! Thank you, thank you!” His two gnarled, hairy hands seized Popov’s flabby ones. Popov drew back a little, his eyes uneasy, his smile fading.

The office staff saw them come out, arm in arm like the good old friends they were. Rachevsky showed all his yellow teeth in a smile, and Popov appeared to be telling him a good story. Together they got into a Central Committee car. Rachevsky had the driver stop for a moment in Maxim Gorki Street in front of a large grocery store. He came back from the store with a package which he carefully placed in Popov’s lap. He was his old serious self again. “Look, old man!” The neck of an uncorked bottle protruded from the wrapping. “Drink, my friend, drink first,” Rachevsky said amiably, and his arm went around Popov’s puny shoulders. “No, thank you,” said Popov coldly, “furthermore, I advise you …” Rachevsky burst out:

And he drank greedily, his head thrown back, the bottle held high in a firm hand, then licked his lips. “Long live tourist travel, Comrade Popov! Do you know what I regret? I regret having begun my life by hanging lizards!” After that he said nothing, but he unwrapped the bottle to see how much was left in it. Popov took him all the way home — his house was in the outer suburbs. “How is your family, Ignatii Ignatiyevich?” — “All right, very well,” he said. “This news will make them terribly happy. And yours?” Was he sneering? — “My daughter is in Paris,” said Popov, with a hint of uneasiness. He watched the former Prosecutor get out of the car in front of a villa surrounded by faded shrubs. Rachevsky stepped heavily into a muddy puddle, which made him laugh and swear. The bottle protruded from his overcoat pocket, he felt of it with a hand that was like a big crab. “Good-by, old man,” he said cheerfully, or sarcastically, and ran toward the gate of the little garden.

“He’s done for,” Popov thought. And what of it? He was never good for much.

Paris was not at all as Xenia had vaguely imagined it. Only at moments and by chance did she find it resembling the twofold city she had expected — the capital of a decaying world, the capital of workers’ risings … It had all been built so many centuries ago, and so much rain, so much daylight, so much darkness, had impregnated the old stones, that the idea of a unique achievement forced itself upon her mind. Turbid yet bluish, the Seine flowed between scattered, ancient trees, between stone quays whose exact color was indeterminable. The stone seemed to have no consistency, the water, polluted by the huge city, could be neither ill-tasting nor dangerous — and nowhere else could drowned bodies evoke more simple tears. The tragedy of Paris was clothed in a worn, almost fragile splendor. It became a delight to stop before a bookstall, under the skeleton of a tree, and take in the prospect with one sweeping look: the books before her (hardly alive, yet not quite dead, soiled with the fingerprints of unknown hands), the stones of the Louvre across the river, the Belle Jardinière’s sign farther on, beside a square full of ant-like motion, the arching span and the equestrian statue of the Pont-Neuf, with, below it, that strange little triangular park almost at water level, and then, among the distant rooftops, the dark, fretted spire of the Sainte Chapelle. The sordid old quarters, seared with the leprosy of a civilization, attracted and horrified Xenia; they called for dynamite; where they had stood there should rise great blocks of houses into which air and sunlight should stream. Yet it would be pleasant to live there, even the poverty-stricken life of the little hotels, of lodgings partitioned off in very old houses, reached by dark stairways, but whose pots of flowers on a window sill were as surprising as a smile on the face of a sick child. Exploring districts of ancient poverty and humiliation through the late afternoons, Xenia conceived a strange tenderness for these abandoned cities within the giant city, far from the wide avenues, the royal quays, the nobly architectural squares, the triumphal arches, the opulent boulevards … At the end of a sloping street, the high, creamy cupolas of Sacré-Coeur caught all the evening light. It gilded even their soulless ugliness. In this street, women, infinitely remote from all pity, whether Christian or atheist, watched at the doors or from behind dirty windowpanes, in the poisonous half-darkness of shabby rooms. Seen across the width of the street, with their shawls drawn tight or their arms crossed over dressing gowns, they looked pretty; but close to, they all had the same ravaged faces, lithographs in make-up, crudely and melodramatically drawn. “They are women and I am a woman …” Xenia found it difficult to judge this truth. “What have we in common, what is the difference between us?” It was so easy to answer herself: “I am the daughter of a people which has accomplished the Socialist revolution and they are the victims of age-old capitalist exploitation” — so easy that it became almost an empty formula. Were there not such women in certain streets in Moscow too? What was she to think? Curious eyes followed the obviously foreign girl in her white jacket and white beret as she went up the steep street — what on earth could she be looking for in this quarter? Not her happiness — that was certain — nor “bizness,” nor a man — so what, then? — vice? — a neat little package, though, d’y’a see those ankles, I had ankles like that when I was seventeen, no kidding! Xenia passed a dreary-looking Oriental, like a Crimean Tatar, who was peering furtively into windows and doorways, and she saw that he was driven by a kind of hunger more pitiful and keener than hunger. The most wretched little shops, next door to the brothels, displayed flyspecked chocolate bars, cigarette papers, cheeses, imported fruits. Xenia remembered the poverty of our co-operatives in the Moscow suburbs. How could it be? — are they so rich that even their poverty can wallow in a sort of abundance? The fetid horror of these sloughs spread over a base and hoggish ease full of food and drink, of charming dress prints, of sentimental love-making and sexual irritants.

Xenia made her way back to the Left Bank. The Châtelet marked the end of a commercial city whose bustle was purely elemental — bellies and guts to be fed. The animality of the crowds sought its ends on the spot. The Tour St.-Jacques, surrounded by a sorry oasis of greenery and two-sou chairs, was only a useless poem in stone. “A vestige of the theocratic age,” Xenia thought, “and this city is in the mercantile age …” She had only to cross a bridge and — between the Préfecture, the Conciergerie, and the Palais de Justice — she would reach the administrative age. The prisons dated back seven hundred years, their round towers, facing the Seine, were so nobly proportioned that they made you forget their ancient torture chambers. The courts nourished a people of scribes, but there was a flower market there too.

Another bridge over the same waters, and books lived on the stalls, students walked bareheaded with notebooks under their arms, in the cafés you glimpsed faces bent over texts which were simultaneously the Pandects of Justinian, Caesar’s Commentaries, Sigmund Freud’s Book of Dreams, and surrealist poems. Life surged along the café terraces toward a garden laid out in quiet lines; and the garden ended, among bourgeois apartment houses, in an airy bronze globe supported by human figures, like a thought bound to the earth, metallic but transparent, terrestrial but proudly aloof. Xenia preferred to go home through this square, where the sky was wider than elsewhere. The printed fabrics which the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Textile Trust wanted required little of her time — one conference a week on submitted samples. She let herself live, an unimaginable thing, but so easy.

To stop before a sixteenth-century doorway in the Rue St. Honoré and remember that Robespierre and Saint-Just had passed it on their way to the guillotine, to discover beside it a shopwindow displaying cloths from the Levant, to ask the price of a bottle of perfume, to wander through the Eiffel Tower gardens … Was it beautiful or ugly, that metal skeleton which rose so high into the sky above Paris? Lyric in any case, moving, unique in the world! What esthetic emotion was involved in the feeling with which Xenia saw it from the heights of Ménilmontant, on the horizon of the city? Sukhov explained that our Palace of the Soviets would raise a steel statue of the Chief yet higher into the sky above Moscow, would be of another order of greatness and symbolism! Their little Eiffel Tower, an outmoded monument to industrial technique at the end of the nineteenth century, made him laugh. “How can you find that thing interesting?” (The word moving was not in his vocabulary.) “You may be a poet,” Xenia answered, “but you have less intuition about certain things than a plant has”; and since he had no idea what she meant, he laughed, sure of his superiority … So Xenia preferred to go out alone.

Having waked late, about nine o’clock, Xenia dressed, then opened her window, which looked out on the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard de Montparnasse. Happy to be alive, she contemplated the scene as if it were a landscape — houses, cafés with their chairs still upside down on the tables, pavements, sidewalks. A subway station: Métro Vavin. The oyster and shellfish stand, still closed; the woman who kept the newsstand, unfolding her campstool … Nothing changed from one day to another. Xenia ate breakfast in the hotel café, and it was a pleasant interlude. The matutinal rites of the establishment brought her a feeling of peaceful security. How could these people live without anxiety, without enthusiasm for the future, without thinking of others and of themselves with anguish, pity, sternness? From whence did they draw this plenitude in a sort of emptiness? Hardly had Xenia (already falling a victim, she too, to the beginning of a habit) sat down at her usual table close to the curtains behind which the boulevard was visible in shades of stone, unconcernedly beginning its daily life over again — hardly had she settled herself there, before Madame Delaporte came silently in, like a large and very dignified cat. Cashier of the café-restaurant for twenty-three years, Madame Delaporte quite simply felt herself the queen of a realm from which uneasiness was banished — like a Queen Wilhelmina of Holland reigning over fields of tulips. Even the unpaid bills of several old clients inspired confidence too. The house extends credit, sir — why not? That Dr. Poivrier, who owned a house in the Rue d’Assas besides holding stock in the Bon Marché, owed five hundred francs — why, it was money in the bank! Madame Delaporte considered that the respectable and reglar clientele which patronized the establishment was her own handiwork. If Leonardo da Vinci had painted the Gioconda, Madame Delaporte had created that clientele. Other, less privileged women have children who grow up and marry, who get divorced, whose children fall ill, whose businesses fail, and all the rest of it, in short! “As for me, sir, I have this establishment, it is my home, and as long as I am here, things will be as they should be!” Madame Delaporte would bring out the last words with a modest assurance which left no doubts in her hearer’s mind. She began the morning by opening the cash drawer, then put within easy reach her knitting, her spectacles, a book from the lending library, the illustrated magazine in which, at slack times, she would read, with a pitying and skeptical half-smile, Aunt Solange’s advice to “Myosotis, eighteen years old,” “Blondinette, Lyons,” “Unhappy Rose”: “Do you think he really loves me?” Madame Delaporte patted her hair with her fingers to make sure that each prettily waved gray strand was properly in place. Then she took her first comprehensive look at the café. Unchanging order still reigned. Monsieur Martin, the waiter, was just putting the last ash trays on the last tables; then, with an excess of conscientiousness, he rubbed at the blurred outline of a wet stain until the wood shone irreproachably. He smiled at Xenia, and Madame Delaporte smiled at her too. Together the two friendly voices wished her good morning: “Everything to your liking, mademoiselle?” The phrases seemed to be uttered by things themselves — things happy to exist, and sociable by nature. Between ten and ten-fifteen the first regular client, Monsieur Taillandier, came in, to lean on the counter by the cash register and take a coffee with kirsch. Cashier and client exchanged remarks which varied so little that Xenia thought she knew them by heart … For twelve years Madame Delaporte had been taking medicines for various stomach ailments — flatulence, acidity … Monsieur Taillandier was preoccupied by his diet for arthritis. “There you are, madame — both coffee and kirsch are on my forbidden list, and yet — you see … I don’t deny myself the pleasure of them, not I, madame! What doctors say has to be taken with a grain of salt; the only guide I trust is my instinct! Why, in ’24, when I was with my regiment …” — “As for me, monsieur” — at this point Madame Delaporte’s long knitting needles began their ballet — “I have tried the most expensive preparations, I have consulted the greatest specialists without a thought for the cost, I beg you to believe me, yes, monsieur … Well, I have come back to plain, homely remedies; what does me the most good is a herb tea that a herborist in the Marais compounds for me, and you can see that I don’t look too badly after all …” Sometimes at about this time the elegant Monsieur Gimbre arrived. He knew all about the races: “Be sure to bet on Nautilus II! And in the next race, Cleopatra!” Peremptory on this subject, Monsieur Gimbre sometimes ventured into politics if he could find anyone to sustain a dialogue with him; he spoke disapprovingly of the Czechoslovaks, whom he even pretended to confuse with the Kurdo-Syriacs, and revealed the exact prices of the châteaux Léon Blum had bought. Xenia looked at him over her newspaper. His self-importance, his contemptible viewpoint, irritated her, and she asked herself: What meaning can the life of such a creature have? Full of tact, Madame Delaporte quickly managed to change the subject. “Is Normandy still your sales territory, Monsieur Taillandier?” and the discussion immediately turned to Norman cooking. “Ah, yes,” the cashier sighed inexplicably. Monsieur Taillandier left, Monsieur Gimbre shut himself up in the telephone booth, Monsieur Martin, the waiter, took his stand in front of the open door between the grass plots, whence, without appearing to, he could watch the modistes across the way, Chez Monique. An old, gray, terribly egotistic tomcat glided among the tables without deigning to see anyone. Madame Delaporte called him discreetly: “Here, here, Mitron.” Mitron went his own way, probably flattered by the attention. “Ungrateful beast!” Madame Delaporte would murmur, and if Xenia looked up, she would go on: “Animals, mademoiselle, are just as ungrateful as people. If you take my advice you won’t trust either!” It was a minute and peaceful universe, where people lived without discussing Plan quotas, without fearing purges, without devoting themselves to the future, without considering the problems of Socialism. That morning Madame Delaporte had been just about to launch one of her usual aphorisms when, instead, she dropped her knitting, climbed down from her high stool, drew the waiter’s attention by a nod, and, her face full of interest, advanced toward the corner where Xenia, her elbows on the table, sat before coffee, croissants, and a newspaper.

What was strange about Xenia was her immobility. Her chin in one hand, “white as a shroud” (Madame Delaporte remarked later), her eyebrows raised, her eyes staring, she ought to have seen the cashier approaching, but she did not see her, did not see her set off hurriedly in the opposite direction, did not hear her say to the waiter: “Quick, quick, Martin, a Marie Brizard — no, better an anisette, but do hurry — she’s out of her senses, my God!”… Madame Delaporte herself carried the anisette to the table and set it in front of Xenia, who did not stir … “Mademoiselle, my child, what is it?” A hand laid gently on her white beret and her hair recalled Xenia to present reality. She looked at Madame Delaporte, blinking back her tears; she bit her lips, she said something in Russian. (“What can I do? Oh, what can I do?”) There were affectionate questions on Madame Delaporte’s lips: “Lovesick, child? Has he been cross to you? Is he unfaithful?” but that hard waxen face, with its concentrated bewilderment, did not look like lovesickness, it must be something much worse, something unheard of and incomprehensible … did one ever know with these Russians?

A wild smile disfigured her childish face. She swallowed the anisette, rose, her eyes dry again, and, without thinking of touching up her powder, left the café almost at a run, crossed the boulevard, dodging busses, and disappeared down the subway stairs … The open paper, the untouched coffee and croissants on the table, bore witness to some very unusual trouble. Monsieur Martin and Madame Delaporte bent over the paper together. “Without my glasses I can’t see, Monsieur Martin — do you find anything? An accident, a crime?” After a moment Monsieur Martin answered: “All I see is the announcement of a trial in Moscow … You know, Madame Delaporte, they shoot people there in a wink, and for nothing at all …”

“A trial?” said Madame Delaporte incredulously. “Do you think that can be it? In any case, I pity the poor girl. I feel very strange, Monsieur Martin. Give me an anisette, please — or no, better a Marie Brizard. It is as if I had seen bad luck …”

In the luminous field of her consciousness Xenia saw but two clear ideas: “We cannot let Kiril Rublev be shot … Perhaps there is only a week left to save him, a week …” She let the train carry her, she let the crowd guide her through the subterranean corridors of St.-Lazare, she read the names of unknown stations. Her thought went no further than the idea that obsessed it. Suddenly, on the wall of a station, she saw a huge and monstrous advertisement representing a bull’s head, black and wide-horned, with one eye alive and the other pierced by an enormous square wound in which the blood was as red as fire. A beast shot dead, an atrocious vision. Fleeing the picture, which reappeared in station after station, Xenia found herself on the sidewalk in front of the Trois Quartiers opposite the Madeleine, irresolutely talking to herself.

What was she to do? An elderly gentleman took off his hat to her, he had gold teeth, he was saying something in a honeyed voice, he seemed embarrassed. He said “graceful” and Xenia heard “grace.” To write instantly, to telegraph: Grace, grace for Kiril Rublev, grace! The gentleman saw her sharp, childish face light up, he was preparing to look ravished, but Xenia stamped her foot, she saw him, his thin but carefully parted hair, his piglike eyes, and she did what she used to do when she was a child, in her worst furies, she spat … The gentleman fled, Xenia entered a noisy café. “Letter paper, please … Yes, coffee, and quickly.” The waiter brought her a yellow envelope, a sheet of cross-ruled paper. Write to the Chief, only he would save Kiril Rublev. “You who are dear and great and just, our beloved Chief … Comrade!” Xenia’s impulse failed. “Dear” — but was she not, even as she wrote, overcoming a sort of hatred? It was a terrible thought. “Great” — but what did he not permit? “Just” — and Rublev was going to be tried, to be killed, Rublev who was like a saint … and these trials are certainly decided on by the Political Bureau! She reflected. To save Rublev, why should she not humiliate herself, why should she not lie? Only, the letter would not arrive in time — and even if it arrived, would he read it, He who received thousands of letters a day, which were opened by a secretary? Whom could she beg to intervene? The Consul General, Nikifor Antonich, stupid, unfeeling, soulless coward that he was? The First Secretary of the Legation, Willi, who was teaching her bridge, took her to Tabarin, seeing in her only Popov’s pretty daughter? He spied on the ambassador, he was the perfect climber, was Willi, and he too had no soul. Other faces came to her, and they all suddenly looked repulsive. That very evening, as soon as the newspaper paragraph was confirmed, the Party would meet, the secretary would propose telegraphing a unanimous resolution demanding the supreme penalty for Kiril Rublev, Erchov, Makeyev, traitors, assassins, enemies of the people, scum of humanity. Willi would vote Yes, Nikifor Antonich would vote Yes, the rest would all vote Yes … “May my hand wither if I raise it with yours, you wretches!” No one to beg for help, no one to whom she could talk, no one! The Rublevs perish alone, alone! What was she to do?

It came to her: Father! Father, help me! You have known Rublev all your life, Father, you will save him, you can save him. You will go to the Chief, you will tell him … She lit a cigarette: the match flame was a star of good omen in her fingers. Almost radiant, Xenia began writing her telegram in a post office. The first word she put on paper extinguished her confidence. She tore up the first blank, and felt her face become tense. Above the desk a poster explained: “By a monthly payment of 50 francs for twenty-five years, you can assure yourself of a peaceful old age …” Xenia burst out laughing. Her fountain pen had run dry, she looked around. A magic hand held out a yellow pen with a gold band. Xenia wrote decisively:

Father, Kiril must be saved Stop You have known Kiril for twenty years Stop He is a saint Stop Innocent Stop Innocent Stop If you do not save him there will be a crime upon our heads Stop Father you will save him…

Where had that absurd yellow fountain pen come from? Xenia did not know what to do with it, but a hand took it from her; a gentleman, of whom she saw nothing but his Charlie Chaplin mustache, said something agreeable to her which she did not hear. Go to the devil! At the counter the clerk, a young woman with thick lips heavily rouged, counted the words in Xenia’s telegram. She looked straight into Xenia’s eyes and said:

The brown, gold-flecked eyes on the other side of the counter looked at her in terror, but their expression enlightened Xenia — she recovered herself: “No, everything is possible, thank you, thank you.” The Boulevard Haussmann vibrated under a pale sun. At a corner a crowd had gathered to look up at a second-floor window in which slender, swaying manikins appeared one by one, displaying the season’s dresses … Xenia knew that she would find Sukhov at the Marbeuf. Though she did not think about it, he inspired in her the physical confidence which a young woman has in the male who desires her. Poet, secretary of a section of the Poets’ Syndicate, he wrote prosaic, impersonal poems which were printed in the newspapers and which the State Publishing House collected in small volumes: Drums, Step by Step, Guard the Frontier … He repeated Maiakovsky’s epigrams: “Notre-Dame? It would make a magnificent movie theater.” Associated with Security, he visited the cells of young officials on missions abroad, recited them his verses in the virile voice of a town crier, and wrote confidential reports on the behavior of his auditors in their capitalist surroundings. When Sukhov and Xenia were alone in a garden, he put his arm around her. The grass, the smell of earth made him amorous, made him want to run, to gallop, Xenia said. She let him embrace her and was pleased, though she insisted to him that she felt no more than friendship for him, “and if you want to write to me, let it be in prose, please!” No — he was writing nothing. She refused him her lips, she refused to go to a hotel in the Porte Doré district with him to begin “an adventure à la française” — “which perhaps, Xeniuchka, would make me as lyrical as old Pushkin! You ought to love me for poetry’s sake!” Sukhov kissed her hands. “You get prettier every day, you have a little Champs-Elysées air about you now that fascinates me, Xeniuchka … But you don’t look well. Come closer.” He squeezed her into a corner of the bench, knee to knee, put his arm around her waist, looked her up and down with eyes that were like a fine stallion’s. But what Xenia said froze him. He drew away. And, severely: “Xeniuchka, don’t do anything foolish. Keep out of this business. If Rublev has been arrested, then he is guilty. If he has confessed, you cannot make a denial for him. If he is guilty, he no longer exists for anyone. That is my point of view, and there is no other.” Xenia was already looking for someone else to help her. Sukhov took her hand. The contact aroused such intense disgust in her that she suppressed it and remained inert. Was I mad that I thought of him to save a Rublev? “Are you leaving so soon, Xeniuchka, you’re not angry, are you?”

You are nothing but a brute, Sukhov, just fit to turn out poems for rotary presses. Your loud linen waistcoat is grotesque, your double crepe-rubber soles give me the horrors. Xenia was refreshed by her irritation. “Taxi … Anywhere … Bois de Boulogne … No, Buttes-Chaumont …” The Buttes-Chaumont floated in a green haze. On fine summer mornings the trees and shrubs in Petrovsky Park look like that. Xenia looked at the leaves. Leaves, calm me. Leaning over the pool, she saw that she looked as if she had been crying for a long time. Absurd ducklings came running toward her … An insane nightmare — there had been nothing in that accursed paper, it was impossible. She powdered her face, rouged her lips, took a deep breath. What a frightful dream! The next instant her distress overpowered her again — but she remembered a name: Passereau. How could she have failed to remember it sooner? Passereau is a great man. Passereau had an audience with the Chief. Together, Passereau and Father will save Rublev.

It was about three o’clock when Xenia called on Professor Passereau, famous in two hemispheres, President of the Congress for the Defense of Culture, corresponding member of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, whom even Popov did not refuse to visit when he made an inspection trip to Paris. A servant took in her name, the door of the drawing room opened at once (Xenia had a glimpse of provincial furniture, walls decorated with water colors), and Professor Passereau advanced to take her most affectionately by the shoulders. “Mademoiselle! How happy I am to see you! In Paris for a while? Do you know, mademoiselle, that you are adorable? The daughter of my old friend will forgive the compliment, I am sure … Come in, come in!” He took her arm, seated her on the sofa in his study, smiled at her with every inch of his frank, military-looking face. None of the city’s noises penetrated here. Various pieces of precision apparatus, under glass bells, occupied the corners of the room. A cluster of green leaves filled the door that gave on the garden. A large portrait in a gold frame appeared to attract Xenia’s attention. The professor explained: “Count Montessus de Ballore, mademoiselle, the man of genius who deciphered the enigma of earthquakes …”

“Oh, I — that was much easier. Once the trail has been blazed in scientific matters, all one has to do is to follow it…”

Xenia allowed herself to be distracted, because she shrank from her problem. “Yours is a magnificent and mysterious science, is it not?” The professor laughed: “Magnificent, if you insist, like all science. But not mysterious. We are hot on the track of mystery, mademoiselle, and it will not elude us!” The professor opened a file. “See — here are the co-ordinates for the Messina earthquake of 1908; no more mystery there. When I demonstrated them before the Tokio Congress …” But he saw that Xenia’s lips were trembling. “Mademoiselle … What is it? Bad news of your father? … Are you in trouble? Tell me …”

“Rublev, the historian? … The Rublev of the Communist Academy, you mean? I’ve heard of him, I believe I even met him once … at a banquet … a friend of your father, is he not?”

Xenia felt ashamed of the tears she was holding back, ashamed of her absurd feeling of humiliation, ashamed perhaps of what was about to take place. Her throat became dry, she felt that she was an enemy here.

“Kiril Rublev will be shot before the week is over if we do not intervene instantly.”

Professor Passereau appeared to shrink into his chair. She saw that he had a potbelly, old-fashioned ornaments dangling from his watch chain, an old-fashioned waistcoat. “Ah,” he said. “Ah, what you tell me is terrible …” Xenia explained the dispatch from Moscow, published that morning, the abominable phrase concerning the “complete confessions,” the assassination of Tulayev a year since … The professor stressed the point: “There was an assassination?” — “Yes, but to make Rublev responsible for it is as mad as …” — “I understand, I understand …” She had nothing more to say. The glittering and preposterous seismographic machines occupied an inordinate space in the silence. There was no earthquake anywhere.

“Well, mademoiselle, I beg you to believe that you have my deepest sympathy … I assure you … It is terrible … Revolutions devour their children — we French have learned that only too well… the Girondins, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre, Babeuf … It is the implacable movement of history …” Xenia heard only fragments of what he was saying. Her mind distilled the essence of his sentences, the fragments fitted together to compose a different discourse for her. “A sort of fatality, mademoiselle … I am an old materialist myself, and yet, in the presence of these trials, I think of the fatality of antique tragedy …” (“Hurry up and get it over,” Xenia thought sternly.) “… before which we are powerless …

“Besides, are you quite sure that partisan passion, the spirit of conspiracy, have not proved too much of a temptation to an old revolutionary whom … I admire, with you, of whom I too think with distress …” The professor made an allusion to Dostoevsky’s The Possessed …

“If he brings in the Slavic soul,” Xenia said to herself, “I will make a scene … And your own soul, you puppet?” Her despair changed into a sort of hate. If she could throw a brick at those idiotic seismographs, go at them with a blacksmith’s hammer, or even with the old ax of the Russian countryside …

“In short, mademoiselle, it seems to me that all hope is not lost. If Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice …”

Professor Passereau tore yesterday’s sheet from the calendar. This young woman in white, with her beret askew, her hostile mouth and eyes, her uneasy hands, was a strange being, vaguely dangerous, swept into his peaceful study by a sort of hurricane. If his imagination had been literary, Passereau would have compared her to a stormy petrel, and she made him uncomfortable.

“You must telegraph to Moscow at once,” said Xenia resolutely. “Have your League telegraph this afternoon. That you stand guarantee for Rublev, that you proclaim his innocence. Rublev belongs to science!”

Professor Passereau sighed deeply. The door opened, a visiting card was handed to him on a tray. He looked at his watch and said: “Ask the gentleman to wait for a moment …” Whatever be the tragedies that convulse distant lands, we have our usual obligations. The intervention of the visiting card gave him back all his eloquence.

“Mademoiselle, never doubt that I … I am more moved than I can express … But please note that I have met Rublev, whom I respect, only once in my life, at a reception … How can I stand guarantee for him in such a complex situation? That he is a scientist of great ability, I do not doubt, and, like you, I hope with all my heart that he will be preserved to science … For the justice of your country I have a respect which is absolute … I believe in the goodness of men, even in our age … If Rublev — I state it purely as a hypothesis — is guilty to any degree, the magnanimity of the Chief of your Party will, I am sure, leave him every hope of escaping punishment … Personally, my most fervent wishes accompany him, and you too, mademoiselle — I share your emotion, but I really do not see what I could do … I have made it a principle never to interfere in the internal affairs of your country, it is a matter of conscience with me … The League Committee meets only once a month, the date of the next meeting is the twenty-seventh, three weeks hence, and I have no power to call a meeting earlier, since I am only vice-president … Furthermore, the League has, properly speaking, but one object — to fight fascism. A proposal to take a step contrary to our by-laws, even coming from me, would be likely to arouse the most intense objection … If we insisted, we might well open a breach in the heart of an organization which has, nevertheless, a noble mission to accomplish. Our present campaigns in favor of Carlos Prestes, Thaelmann, the persecuted Jews, might thereby suffer. You follow me, mademoiselle?”

“I am afraid I do!” said Xenia brutally. “So you refuse to take any steps?”

“I am extremely sorry, mademoiselle — but you greatly overestimate my influence … Believe me … Come, consider the situation! What could I do?”

“You are most unjust, mademoiselle. But, old man that I am, I understand you …”

She did not look at him again, did not give him her hand. She was walking down the middle-class street; her face was set. No one passed. “His science is vile, his instruments are vile, his brown study is vile! And Kiril Rublev is lost, we are all lost, there is no way out any more, no way out!”

In the editorial office of a weekly which was almost extreme Left, another professor, a man of thirty-five, listened to her as if her news moved him to profound grief. Was he not going to tear his hair, wring his hands? He did nothing of the sort. He had never heard of Rublev, but these Russian catastrophes haunted him day and night. “They are Shakespearean tragedies … Mademoiselle, I have cried my indignation in this very paper. ‘Mercy!’ I cried, ‘in the name of our love and devotion to the Russian Revolution.’ I was not heard, I aroused reactions which must likewise be accepted in good faith, I tendered my resignation to our managing committee … Today, the political situation makes it impossible for such an article to appear. We represent the average opinion of an audience which belongs to numerous parties; the ministerial crisis, of which the papers have not yet got wind, imperils all our work of the last few years … A conflict with the Communists at this moment might have the most disastrous results … And should we save Dublev?”

“Yes, Rublev — should we save him? My unfortunate experience does not permit me to believe so … I really cannot see how … At most, I could try calling on your ambassador at once and expressing my concern to him …”

“At least do that,” murmured Xenia, completely discouraged, for she was thinking: “They won’t do anything, no one will do anything, they don’t even understand …” She felt like beating her head against the wall … She swept through several other editorial offices, so hastily, borne along by such a desperate and exasperated grief, that later she had only a confused memory of where she had gone. An old intellectual with a soiled necktie became almost rude in the presence of her insistence. “Well then, go and see the Trotskyists!

We have our sources of information, our minds are made up. All revolutions have produced traitors, who may appear to be, who may in fact be, admirable personally. I admit it. All revolutions have committed great injustices in particular cases. You have to take them by and large!” He picked up a paper cutter and hacked furiously at the wrapping of a morning paper. “Our task, here, is to fight reaction!” Somewhere else, an old lady with a carelessly powdered, lined face was so touched that she called Xenia “my dear child.” “If I really had any influence with the editor, my dear child, ah, believe me, I … In any case I will try to slip in a paragraph emphasizing the importance of your friend’s work — Uplev, did you say, or Rulev? Here, write it down for me, clearly. A musician, you said? Ah, a historian, yes, yes, a historian …” The old lady wrapped a faded silk scarf around her throat. “What days we live in, my dear child! It is frightening to think of it!” She leaned forward, sincerely moved: “Tell me — excuse me if I am indiscreet — but a woman — are you in love with Kiril Rublev? Such a beautiful name, Kiril …”

“No, no, I’m not in love with him,” said Xenia, in great distress and finding it as difficult to restrain her tears as her anger.

For no reason, she stopped in front of an American book and stationery shop in the Avenue de l’Opéra. Photographic cutouts of pretty little nudes posed above ash trays, not far from maps of partitioned Czechoslovakia. The books had a well-to-do look. They raised great problems, they were idiotic. The Mystery of the Moonless Night, The Masked Stranger, Pity Poor Women! It all emanated the luxurious futility of well-fed, well-bathed, well-perfumed people who wanted to expose themselves to a little shudder of fear or pity before going to sleep in silk sheets. Is it possible that this present age goes on, without their ever learning fear and pity in their own flesh, in their own nerves? In another white-and-gilt display, sea horses in an aquarium promised luck to the purchasers of jewels. Luck in love, luck in business, with our brooches, rings, necklaces — the latest thing — the astral sea horse. She must flee! Xenia rested at the other end of Paris, on a bench, in a gray landscape of hospital windows and chalky walls. Every few minutes the monstrous thunder of a train crossing a bridge penetrated to the depths of her nerves. Home again, dead tired — where had she been, how could she sleep? The next morning she had to overcome a feeling of nausea as she dressed, her hands trembled when she rouged her lips, she got down after Madame Delaporte had come in, sat at her usual table without noticing the curious and pitying looks that greeted her, put her chin in her hands, stared at the Boulevard Raspail … Madame Delaporte herself came and touched her on the shoulder: “Telephone, mademoiselle … No better?” — “Oh yes,” said Xenia, “it’s nothing …” In the telephone booth a man’s voice, velvety and assured, a voice like doom, spoke in Russian:

“Krantz speaking … I am aware of all your … imprudent and criminal proceedings … I insist that you cease them immediately … Do you understand? The consequences can be serious, and not only for yourself …”

Xenia hung up without answering. Willi, First Secretary of the Embassy, entered the café — gray raglan overcoat, immaculate felt hat, the well-dressed man, English style; just the type for ash trays decorated with naked women, a copy of Esquire, yellow pigskin gloves, she’d like to throw them all in his face at once, the climber! Fake gentleman, fake Communist, fake diplomat, fake, fake! He took off his hat, bowed: “Xenia Vassilievna, I have a telegram for you …” While she opened the blue envelope, he watched her attentively. Tired, nervous, resolved. He must be careful.

MOTHER ILL WE BOTH BEG YOU RETURN IMMEDIATELY…

Without being asked, he sat down at the other side of her table. Leaning toward one another, they looked like a pair of lovers who had quarreled and were making up. Madame Delaporte understood it all now.

“Krantz has instructed me to tell you, Xenia Vassilievna, that you must go home … You have been most imprudent, Xenia Vassilievna, allow me to tell you so, as your friend … We all belong to the Party …”

“Krantz is a fine sort … He’s worried about you. Worried about your father … You are seriously compromising your father … He’s an old man, your father … And you can do nothing here, you will get nowhere, absolutely nowhere … You’re up against a blank wall.”

“Between ourselves, I believe that when you get back you will be arrested … But it will not be serious, Krantz will intervene, he has promised me … Your father can stand guarantee for you … You have no need to be afraid.”

“I will go back when I have done what I have to do. Tell that to Krantz. Tell him that if Rublev is shot, I will go through the streets protesting … That I will write to every paper …”

“There will be no trial, Xenia Vassilievna, we have received information on the subject. We are not issuing a denial, as we consider that the sooner that unfortunate announcement is forgotten, the better. Krantz does not even know if Rublev has really been arrested. If he has been, the publicity you might stir up for him could only harm him … And it horrifies me to hear you say such things. It is not like you. You are incapable of treason. You will say nothing to anyone, no matter what happens. To whom would you protest? To this hostile world around us? To this bourgeois Paris, to these fascist papers which caluminate us? To the Trotskyist agents of the fascists? What more could you accomplish than to stir up a little counterrevolutionary scandal for the delectation of a few anti-Soviet publications? Xenia Vassilievna, I promise to forget what you have said. Here is your ticket. The plane leaves Le Bourget at 9:45 A.M. Wednesday. I shall be there. Have you money?”

It was not true, Xenia was uneasily aware. When she had paid her hotel bill she would have almost nothing left. She pushed away the ticket: “Take it, if you don’t want me to tear it up in front of you.” Willi calmly put it into his wallet. “Think it over, Xenia Vassilievna, I shall come back to see you tomorrow morning.” Madame Delaporte was disappointed when they parted with no sign of affection. “She must be terribly jealous, Russian women are tigresses once they get started …” — “Either tigresses or profligates — none of these foreigners have any sense of decency …” Through the curtains Xenia observed that before Willi got into his Chrysler he looked toward the head of the boulevard, where a beige overcoat was strolling up and down. Already shadowed. They will force me to go. They stop at nothing. To hell with them! But …

She counted what money she had left. Three hundred francs. Should she go to the Foreign Commerce Bureau? They would refuse her an advance. Would they even let her go? Could she sell her wrist watch, her Leica? She packed her suitcase, put a pair of pajamas and some odds and ends in her brief case, and set off down the Rue Vavin without looking back — she was sure she was being followed. And at the Luxembourg she caught a glimpse of the beige overcoat, fifty yards behind her. “Now I am a traitor too, like Rublev … And my father is a traitor because I am his daughter …” How could she rise above this flood of thoughts, this shame, this indignation, this anger? It was exactly like the ice breaking up on the Neva: the enormous floes, like shattered stars, must collide and battle and destroy one another until the moment when they would disappear under the quiet sea swell. She must undergo her thought, follow it to its uttermost limits, until the unforeseeable but inevitable moment when all would be over, one way or another. The moment will come, can it come, can it fail to come? It seemed to Xenia that her torture would never end. But what would end, then? Life? Would they shoot me? Why? What have I done? What has Rublev done? A terrible possibility. Stay here? Without money? Look for work? What work? Where could she live? Why live? Children were sailing boats in the great circular fountain. In this French world, life is as calm and insipid as children’s games, people live only for themselves! To live for myself — how ridiculous! Expelled from the Party, I could no longer look a worker in the face, I could explain nothing to anyone, no one would understand. Willi, the beast, had just said: “Well, I grant you — perhaps they are crimes, we know nothing about it. Our duty is to trust, with our eyes shut. Because there is nothing else for either of us to do. To accuse, to protest, never results in anything but serving the enemy. I would rather be shot by mistake myself. Neither the crimes nor the mistakes alter our duty …” It is true. On his lips they are parroted phrases, because he will always manage to risk nothing. But they are true. What would Rublev himself do, what would he say? The faintest shadow of treason would never enter his mind …

At the St.-Michel subway station Xenia shook off the detective in the beige overcoat. She wandered on through Paris, stopping sometimes to look at her reflection in shopwindows: bedraggled silhouette, rumpled jacket, pale face and sunken eyes — it was not in order to feel sorry for herself, but to see that she was ugly, I want to be ugly, I must be ugly! The women she passed — self-centered, carefully dressed, pleased because they had chosen some hideous bauble to dangle from the lapel of a tailored jacket or the neck of a bodice — were merely human animals satisfied to breathe, but the sight of them made her want to stop living … At nightfall Xenia found herself on the edge of a brightly lit square. She was exhausted from walking. Cascades of electric light flowed over the dome of a huge movie theater, the flood of barbaric brilliance surrounded two enormous faces, joined in the most meaningless of kisses, as revolting in their beatitude as in their utter anonymity. The other corner of the square, flaming with red and gold, sent a love song pouring frantically out of loudspeakers, to an accompaniment of little strident cries and clicking heels. For Xenia the whole effect resolved itself into a long and insistent caterwauling whose human intonation made it a thing of shame. Men and women were drinking at the bar, and they suggested strange insects, cruel to their own kind, collected in an overheated vivarium. Between these two conflagrations — the theater and the café — a wide street mounted into a darkness starred with signs: HOTEL, HOTEL, HOTEL. Xenia started up it, turned in at the first door, and asked for a room for the night. The little old bespectacled man whom she woke from a drowse seemed inseparable from the keyboard and the counter between which his tobacco-reeking person was wedged. “It will be fifteen francs,” he said, laying his cloudy spectacles on the paper he had been reading. His staring rabbit eyes blinked. “Funny, I don’t recognize you. Could you be Paula, from the Passage Clichy? Don’t you always go to the Hotel du Morbihan? You’re a foreigner? Just a minute …” He stooped, disappeared, popped out from under a board, disappeared again down the corridor … And the proprietor himself appeared, his shirt sleeves rolled up, exposing thick butcher’s arms. He seemed to be surrounded by a greasy fog. He looked Xenia over, as if he were going to sell her, hunted for something under the counter, finally said: “All right, fill out the form. Have you your papers?” Xenia held out her diplomatic passport. “Alone? Right … I’ll give you Number 11, it’ll be thirty francs, the bathroom is right next door …” Huge, bull-necked, he preceded Xenia up the stairs, swinging a bunch of keys between his fat fingers. Cold, dimly lighted by two shaded lamps set on two night tables, Room No. 11 reminded Xenia of a detective story. In that corner over there was the ironbound chest in which the murdered girl’s body was found, cut up in pieces. The corner smelled of phenol. After she put out the lamps, the blue neon signs in the street filled the room from mirror to ceiling with luminous arabesques. Among them Xenia quickly discovered visions familiar to her childhood: the wolf, the fish, the witch’s spinning wheel, the profile of Ivan the Terrible, the enchanted tree. She was so tired from thinking and walking that she went to sleep immediately. The murdered girl timidly raised the lid of the chest, stood up, stretched her bruised limbs. “Don’t be afraid,” Xenia said to her, “I know we are innocent.” She had hair like a naiad’s, and calm eyes like wild daisies. “We’ll read the story of the Golden Fish together, listen to that music …” Xenia took her into her bed to warm her … Downstairs, behind the desk, the proprietor of the Two Moons Hotel was conversing by telephone with Monsieur Lambert, assistant police commissioner of the district.

Life begins anew every morning. Too young to despair, Xenia felt that she had shaken off her nightmare. If there was no trial, Rublev would live. It was impossible that they should kill him — he was so great, so simple, so pure, and Popov knew it, the Chief must know it. Xenia felt happy, she dressed, she looked in the mirror and found herself pretty again. But where did I think the murder chest was yesterday? She was glad she had not felt afraid. There was a little knock, she opened the door. A broad-shouldered figure, a broad, sad face appeared in the half-light of the hall. Neither familiar nor unfamiliar, a vague fleshy face. The visitor introduced himself, in a thick, velvety voice:

He entered, looked the room over, took in everything. Xenia covered up the unmade bed.

“Xenia, I have come for you on your father’s behalf. A car is waiting at the door for you. Come.”

“I give you my word that you shall do as you please. You have not been a traitor, you will never be a traitor, I am not here to use force on you. The Party trusts in you as it trusts in me. Come.”

In the car Xenia rebelled. Half facing her and pretending to be busy with his pipe, Krantz felt the storm coming. The car was going down the Rue de Rivoli. Jeanne d’Arc, with her gilt dull and peeling off, but still very beautiful, brandished a childish sword on her little pedestal. “I want to get out,” Xenia said firmly, and she half rose. Krantz caught her arm and forced her to sit down.

“You shall get out if you wish, Xenia Vassilievna, I promise you; but not as simply as that.”

He lowered the window on Xenia’s side. The Vendôme Column disappeared down a perspective of arches, in the pale light.

“Do not be impulsive, I beg of you. Whatever you do, do it deliberately. We shall pass a number of policemen on the way. We are not going fast. You can call out if you wish, I will not stop you. You, a Soviet citizen, will put yourself under the protection of the French police … I will be asked for my papers. You will go your way. Afternoon extras will announce your escape — that is, your treason. Throw your little handful of mud on the embassy, on your father, on our Party, on our country. I will take Wednesday’s plane alone and I will pay for you — with Popov. You know the law: close relatives of traitors must at least be deported to the most distant parts of the Union.”

He drew away a little, admired the white meerschaum mermaid which formed the bowl of his handsome pipe, opened his tobacco pouch, said to the driver:

Xenia’s hands clenched painfully. She looked at the policemen’s short capes almost with hatred. She said:

“Neither as strong nor as despicable as you think. I am loyal. And you too, Xenia Vassilievna, you must be loyal, no matter what happens.”

They took Wednesday’s plane from Le Bourget together. The Eiffel Tower dwindled, glued to the earth, the severe design of the gardens opened around it, the Arc de Triomphe was only a block of stone at the center of radiating avenues. The marvel of Paris vanished under clouds, leaving Xenia regretting a world which she had scarcely touched and had not understood, which perhaps she would never understand. “I have accomplished nothing toward saving Rublev, I will fight for him in Moscow, if only we arrive in time! I will make my father act, I will ask for an audience with the Chief. He has known us for so many years that he will not refuse to listen to me, and if he listens to me, Rublev will be saved.” In her waking dream Xenia imagined her interview with the Chief. Confidently, without fear and without humility, well knowing that she was nothing and he the incarnation of the Party for which we must all live and die, she would be brief and direct, for his minutes were precious. He had all the problems of a sixth of the world to solve every day; she must speak to him with her whole soul, that she might convince him in a few moments … Krantz considerately left her to her thoughts. He occupied his time reading, alternating between stupid magazines and military reviews in several languages. The poem of the clouds unrolled above the moving earth. Rivers flowing from their distant springs enchanted the eye. — They dined almost gaily in Warsaw. It seemed an even more elegant and luxurious city than Paris, but from the sky you saw that it was surrounded and, as it were, menaced by a poverty-stricken terrain. Presently, through rents in the clouds, appeared great somber forests … “We are nearly home,” Xenia murmured, flooded with a joy so poignant that she felt a momentary sympathy for her traveling companion. Krantz leaned toward the porthole; he looked tired. With gloomy satisfaction he said: “We’re already over kolkhoze land — see, there are no more small strips …” Infinite fields of an indefinable color, something between ocher and grayish brown. “We shall reach Minsk in twenty minutes …” From under the French Infantry Review he drew a copy of Vogue and turned the glossy pages.

“Xenia Vassilievna, I must ask you to excuse me. My instructions are definite. I request you to regard yourself as under arrest. From Minsk on, your journey will be managed by Security … Don’t be too uneasy, I hope that it will all come out all right.”

On the cover of the magazine, elegant faces, eyeless under wide hatbrims, displayed lips rouged in different shades to match their complexions. Fifteen hundred feet below, between newly plowed fields, peasants dressed in earth-colored rags followed a heavily loaded cart. You could see them urging on the exhausted horse, pushing at the cart when the wheels sank into the mud.

“So I can do nothing for Rublev,” thought Xenia desolately. They could do nothing for anyone in the world, those peasants with their bogged wagon, and no one in the world could do anything for them. They disappeared, the bare ground gradually approached.

Since he had received his daughter’s criminally insane telegram, Comrade Popov had been in a state between uneasiness and prostration, besides being really tortured by his rheumatism. There was no mistaking the coldness people showed him. The new Prosecutor, Atkin, who was investigating his predecessor’s activities, carried his veiled insolence to the point of twice excusing himself when Popov invited him or went to call on him. Stopping in at the General Secretariat to test the atmosphere, Popov found only preoccupied faces which gave him an impression of hypocrisy. No one came hurrying to meet him. Gordeyev, who usually consulted him on current matters, did not show himself for several days. But he came on the fourth day, about six in the evening, having learned that Popov was not well and was staying at home. The Popovs lived in a C.C. villa in Bykovo Forest. Gordeyev arrived in uniform. Popov received him in a dressing gown; he walked across the room to meet him, supporting himself on a cane. Gordeyev began by asking about his rheumatism, offered to send him a doctor who was said to be exceptionally good, did not insist, accepted a glass of brandy. The furniture, the carpets, everything in the quiet room, which gave the impression of being dusty without being so, was slightly antiquated. Gordeyev coughed to clear his throat.

“I have news of your daughter for you. She is very well … She … She is under arrest. She did some foolish things in Paris — have you heard about it?”

“Yes, yes,” said Popov, utterly crushed. “I can imagine, it’s possible … I received a telegram, but is it serious, do you think?”

Coward that he was, what he most wanted to know was whether it was serious for himself.

Gordeyev looked doubtfully at his fingernails, then at the faded half-tints of the room, the black firs outside the window. “What shall I say? I do not know yet. Everything will depend on the inquiry. Theoretically it can be quite serious: attempted desertion in a foreign country, during a mission, activities contrary to the interests of the Union … Those are the terms of the law, but I certainly hope that, in actual fact, it is only a matter of ill-advised, or let us say unconsidered, acts, which are reprehensible rather than culpable …”

“The difficulty, er, Comrade Popov, is that … I find it most awkward to explain it to you … Help me …”

“It puts you, Comrade Popov, in a delicate situation. Aside from the fact that the relevant articles of the Code — which, of course, we shall not apply in all their rigor, without definite orders from above — that the law provides for … for measures … concerning the relatives of guilty parties, you certainly know that Comrade Atkin has opened an inquiry… which is being kept secret … into the case of Rachevsky. We have established that Rachevsky — it is incredible, but it is a fact — Rachevsky destroyed the dossier on the Aktyubinsk sabotage affair … We have sought for the source of the most unfortunate indiscretion which caused the announcement abroad of a new trial … We even thought it might be a maneuver on the part of foreign agents! Rachevsky, with whom it is very difficult to talk since he appears to be always drunk, admits that he ordered the preparation of a dispatch on the subject, but he claims that he acted on verbal instructions from you … As soon as he is arrested, I shall question him myself, you may be sure, and I shall not allow him to elude his responsibilities … The coincidence between this fact and the charge that hangs over your daughter remains, however — how shall I put it? — most unfortunate …”

Popov answered nothing. Twinges of pain shot through his limbs. Gordeyev tried to read him: a man at his last gasp, or an old fox who would still find a way out? Difficult to decide, but the former hypothesis seemed more likely. Popov’s silence invited him to come to a conclusion. Popov was looking at him with the piercing eyes of a beast tracked to its lair.

The other did not flinch: Either he doubted them or he didn’t give a damn for them, or else he felt too badly to consider them of the slightest importance. What his feelings were, Gordeyev did not feel called upon to say.

“It has been decided … provisionally … to ask you to remain at home and to make no telephone calls …”

“It is painful to me to insist: To anyone whomsoever. It is not impossible, in any case, that your line has been cut.”

When Gordeyev was gone, Popov did not stir. The room grew darker. Rain began falling on the firs. Shadows lengthened across the forest roads. There in his armchair, Popov became one with the darkness of things. His wife entered — stooped, gray-haired, walking noiselessly, she too a shadow.

“All right. Xenia is under arrest. We are both under arrest, you and I. I am infinitely tired. Don’t turn on the light.”

9. Let Purity Be Treason