Chapter 10

The life of the “Road to the Future” kolkhoze was really like an obstacle race. Definitely set up in 1931, after two purges of the village — marked by the deportation (God knows where!) of the well-to-do families and a few poor families who had shown a wrong spirit — by the following year the kolkhoze was without cattle and horses, since the farmers had contrived to destroy their livestock rather than turn it over to collective enterprise. The fodder shortage, carelessness, and epizootic diseases carried off the last horses just at the moment when a Machine and Tractor Station (M.T.S.) was finally set up at Molchansk. The arrest of the township veterinary, probably guilty because he belonged to the Baptist sect, caused no improvement. The difficulties of travel by road between Molchansk and the regional center immediately caused the M.T.S. to suffer from lack of motor fuel and parts for repairs. Situated on the Syeroglazaya (the Gray-eyed River), the old village of Pogoryeloye (so named to perpetuate the memory of ancient fires), being one of the farthest villages from the M.T.S., was one of the last to be served. The village, consequently, was without motors; and the muzhiks put little effort into sowing fields which they no longer considered to be their own, under the supervision of the president of a Communist kolkhoze, a workman from the bicycle factory at Penza who had been mobilized by the Party and sent by the Regional Center. They strongly suspected that the State would take almost all of the harvest away from them. Three harvests were short. Famine came nearer and nearer, a considerable group of men took refuge in the woods, where they were fed by relatives whom, this time, the authorities did not dare to deport. The famine carried off the small children, half the old men, and even a few adults. A president of the kolkhoze was drowned in the Syeroglazaya with a stone around his neck. The new law, several times revised by the C.C., restored a precarious peace by re-establishing family properties in the collective enterprise. The kolkhoze was inspected by a good agronomist and received selected seed and chemical fertilizers, there was an unusually hot and wet summer, and magnificent wheat flourished despite the rages and quarrels of men; there was a shortage of hands at harvesttime, and half the crop rotted in the fields. The bicycle-factory worker, tried for carelessness, incapacity, and abuse of power, was sentenced to three years at hard labor. “I hope my successor has a very good time,” he said simply. The management of the kolkhoze passed to President Vaniuchkin, a native of the village and a Communist recently demobilized from military service. In 1934-35 the kolkhoze rose from the depths of famine to a state of convalescence, thanks to the new C.C. directives, to the beneficent rhythm of rain and snow, to mild seasons, to the energy of the Young Communists, and — in the opinion of the old women and two or three bearded Believers — thanks to the return of the man of God, Father Guerassim, amnestied after three years of deportation. The seasonal crisis continued nevertheless, although it could not be denied that the sowing cycle, the selected seed, and the use of machines markedly increased the productivity of the soil. To retrieve the situation “definitely,” there appeared on the scene, first, Agronomist Kostiukin, a curious character; then a militant from the Young Communists, who had been sent by the Regional Committee, and whom everyone was soon familiarly calling “Kostia.” Not long before the autumn sowing, Agronomist Kostiukin observed that a parasite had attacked the seed (a part of which had been previously stolen). The M. and T. Station delivered only one tractor instead of the two which had been promised and the three which were absolutely necessary; and for the one and only tractor there was no gasoline. When the gasoline arrived, there was a breakdown. The plowing was done with horses, laboriously and late, but since the horses now could not be used to bring supplies from the township cooperatives to the kolkhoze with any regularity, the kolkhoze suffered from a shortage of manufactured articles. Half the trucks in the district were immobilized by lack of gasoline. The women began muttering that we were heading for a new famine and that it would be the just punishment for our sins.

It is a flat, slightly rolling country, severe in line under the clouds, among which you can distinctly see troops of white archangels pursuing one another from horizon to horizon. By the soft roads, muddy or dusty according to the season, Molchansk, the township, is some thirty-eight miles away; the railroad station is ten miles from the township; the nearest large city, the regional center, a hundred miles by rail. In short, a rather privileged location with regard to means of communication. The sixty-five houses (several of them unoccupied) are made of logs or planks, roofed with gray thatch, set in a half circle on a hill at a bend in the river: surrounded by little yards, they straggle out like a procession of tottering old women. Their windows look out on the clouds, the soft gray water, the fields on the farther shore, the somber mauve line of the forests on the horizon. On the paths that lead down to the river there are always children or young women carrying water in battered little casks hung from the two ends of a yoke which they carry on their shoulders. To keep the motion from spilling too much of the water, you float a disk of wood in each cask.

Noon. The rusty fields are hot under the sun. They are hungry for seed. You cannot look at them without thinking of it. Give us seed or you will go hungry. Hurry, the bright days will soon be over, hurry, the earth is waiting … The silence of the fields is a continual lament … Flakes of white cloud wander lazily across an indifferent sky. Two mechanics are exchanging advice and despairing oaths over a disabled tractor behind the house. President Vaniuchkin yawns furiously. The waiting fields cause him pain, the thought of the Plan harasses him, it keeps him awake at night, he has nothing to drink, the stock of vodka being exhausted. The messengers he sends to Molchansk come back covered with dust, exhausted and crestfallen, bringing slips of paper with penciled messages: “Hold out, Comrade Vaniuchkin. The first available truck will go to you. Communist greetings. Petrikov.” It means exactly nothing. I’d like to see what he’ll do with the first available truck, when every kolkhoze in the township is hounding him for the same thing! Besides: Will there be a first available truck? — The only piece of furniture in his office was a bare table, littered with papers which were turning yellow like dead leaves. The open windows gave onto the fields. At the other end of the room a portrait of the Chief contemplated a sooty samovar perched on the stove. Under it slumped sacks, piled one on another like exhausted animals and not one containing the prescribed amount of seed. It was contrary to the instructions of the regional Directorate for Kolkhozes, and Kostia, checking the weight of the sacks, emphasized the fact with a sneer. “It’s not worth putting a crick in my back to find out whether somebody’s been sending out short-weight sacks, Yefim Bogdanovich! If you think the muzhiks won’t know it just because they haven’t a pair of scales! You don’t know them, the devils, they can weigh a sack by looking at it — and you’ll see what a howl they’ll set up …”

“And what do you think you can do about it, know-it-all? All right, we’ll make a little trip to the township tribunal. It’s not up to me …”

And they saw Agronomist Kostiukin coming across the fields in their direction, walking with a springy stride, his long arms swinging as if they were flapping in the wind. “Here he comes again!”

“Like me to tell you everything he’s going to say to you, Yefim Bogdanovich?” Kostia proposed sarcastically.

Kostiukin entered. His yellow cap was pulled down over his eyes; drops of sweat stood on his sharp red nose; there were wisps of straw in his beard. He began complaining immediately. “We’re five days behind the Plan.” No trucks to bring the clean seed that had been promised from Molchansk. The M. and T. Station had given their word, but they would not keep it. “You’ve seen how they keep their promises, haven’t you?” As for the spare parts for emergency repairs, the Station would not receive them for ten days, in view of the congestion on the railroad — “I’m sure of that. And there we are! It’s all up with the sowing plan … just as I told you it would be. We’ll be short 40 per cent if everything goes well. Fifty or 60 if the frost…”

Vaniuchkin’s small red face, which looked like a clenched fist flattened by a collision, wrinkled in circles. He looked at the agronomist with hatred, as if he wanted to cry at him: “Are you happy now?” Agronomist Kostiukin gesticulated too much: when he talked he looked as if he were catching flies; his watery eyes became too bright; his tart voice sank and sank. But just when you thought it would become quite inaudible, it revived harshly. The kolkhoze directors were rather afraid of him, because he was always making scenes and prophesying misfortunes, and his very clear-sightedness seemed to evoke the calamities it foresaw. And what was one to think of him? Released from a concentration camp, an exsaboteur who had once allowed a whole crop to rot in the fields — for lack of hands to harvest it, if you believed his story! He had been released before his time was up, on account of his admirable work on the penitentiary farms, he had been mentioned in the newspapers for an essay he had written on new methods of clearing land in cold regions, finally he had been awarded the Labor Medal of Honor for having set up an ingenious irrigation system for the Votiak kolkhozes during a dry season … In short, then: an extremely able technician, a counterrevolutionary who perhaps might have sincerely repented or who might equally well be remarkably clever and remarkably well camouflaged. You had to be on your guard with him; however, he had a right to be respected, you had to listen to him — and consequently be doubly on your guard. President Vaniuchkin, himself a former seasonal mason and former elite infantryman, whose knowledge of agriculture had been derived from one of the short courses established for the executive personnel of collective farms, really did not know which way to turn. Kostiukin continued: The peasants saw everything. “At it again, working in order to die of starvation this winter!” Who is sabotaging? They wanted to write to the regional center, denounce the township. “We must call a meeting, explain things.” Kostia was chewing his nails. He asked:

The agronomist and Kostia instantly understood each other: they had had the same idea. Seed, provisions, matches, the calicoes that the women had been promised — why shouldn’t the people of the kolkhoze bring them from Molchansk on their own backs? It could be done in three or four days if the able-bodied women and the sixteen-year-old boys were mobilized to relieve the bearers. Days and nights of work would count double. We’ll promise a special distribution of soap, cigarettes, and sewing thread by the Co-op. If the Co-op objects, Vaniuchkin, I’ll go to the Party Committee, I’ll say, “Either that or the Plan is sunk!” They can’t refuse — we know what they have on hand. They’d prefer to keep the things for the Party cadres, the technicians, and so on — naturally; but they’ll have to give in, we’ll all go to see them together! They might even let us have some needles; we know they’ve received some, though they’ll deny it. The agronomist and Kostia flung the firm sentences back and forth as if they had been throwing stones. Kostiukin wriggled in his gray blouse, the pockets of which were stuffed with papers. Kostia took him by the elbows, they were face to face: the young, energetic profile, the old, sharp-nosed face with the cracked lips half open, the gaps in the rows of teeth. “We’ll call a meeting. We can mobilize as many as a hundred and fifty bearers if the Iziumka people come!”

“If the devil himself would make us a good stirring speech, I’d ask him,” Kostia cried. “We’d see his cloven hoofs sticking out through his boots, there’d be a smell of burning, he’d dart out his flaming tongue — to accomplish the sowing plan, citizens! I’m willing — let the old devil sell us his soul!”

Their laughter relaxed them all. The russet earth laughed too, in its own way, perceptible to them alone; the horizon swayed a little, a comical cloud drifted across the sky.

The meeting was held in the administration farmyard at twilight, at the hour when the gnats become a torment. Many came, for the kolkhoze felt that it was in danger; the women were pleased that Father Guerassim was going to speak. Benches were set out for the women, the men listened standing. President Vaniuchkin spoke first, frightened to the depths of his soul by two hundred indistinct and murmuring faces. Someone shouted to him from the back: “Why did you have the Kibotkins arrested? Anathema!” He pretended not to have heard. Duty — Plan — the honor of the kolkhoze — the powers demand — children — hunger this winter — he rolled out the great cloudy words toward the red ball which was sinking to the dark horizon through a threatening haze. “I now give the floor to Citizen Guerassim!” Compact as a single obscure creature, the crowd stirred. Father Guerassim hoisted himself onto the table.

Since the Great Democratic Constitution had been granted by the Chief to the federated peoples, the priest no longer camouflaged himself but had let his hair and beard grow in the old fashion, although he belonged to the new Church. He held services in an abandoned isba, which he had rebuilt with his own hands and on which he had set up a wooden cross planed, nailed, and gilded with his own hands too … A good carpenter, a tolerable gardener (crafts which he had learned at the Special Camp for Rehabilitation through Work in the White Sea Islands), he knew the Gospel thoroughly, and also the laws, regulations, and circulars promulgated by the Agricultural Commissariat and the Central Kolkhoze Bureau. His blood boiled with hatred for enemies of the people, conspirators, saboteurs, traitors, foreign agents — in short, for the Fascist-Trotskyists, whose extermination he had preached from the pulpit — that is, from the top of a ladder leaned against the isba stove. The district authorities thought well of him. All in all, he was simply a hairy muzhik, a little taller than the rest, married to a placid dairywoman. Abounding in a malicious common sense, speaking softly in a low voice, on great occasions he could utter vehement words which breathed inspiration. Then all his hearers turned to him, gripped and moved, even the Young Communists back from military service. “Christian brothers! Decent citizens! Folk of the Russian soil!” In his confused but often vivid periods he mingled our great fatherland, old Russia, our mother, the beloved Chief who considers the lowly, our infallible pilot (may the Lord bless him!), God who sees us, our Lord Jesus Christ who cursed the idle and the parasites, drove the chafferers from the temple, promised heaven to those who did their work well, St. Paul who cried to the world: “He that will not work shall not eat!” He brandished a crumpled sheet of paper: “People of the soil, the battle for wheat is our battle … A hellish brood still crawls under our feet! Our glorious people’s power has just struck down three more assassins with its sword of fire, three more of Satan’s hirelings, three more cowards who were trying to stab the Party in the back! May they burn in eternal flames while we set to work to save our harvest!”

Kostia and Maria applauded together. They had met in one of the last rows, from where they could see only the priest’s bushy hair against a background of gloomy bluish sky. Here and there, people crossed themselves. Kostia put his supple hand around Maria’s neck and braids. Firm cheekbones, slightly snub nose. The girl warmed him. When he was near her, he seemed to feel the blood pulsing faster through his veins. Her mouth was big and so were her eyes. There were in her both a vigorous animality and a luminous happiness. “He’s a man of the Middle Ages, Maria, but he speaks well, the old devil! It’s as good as done now, he has got it started …” He felt her hard, pointed breast graze his arm, he smelled the strong odor of her armpits, her eyes made his head swim. “Some definite decision must be reached, Kostia; otherwise our people may still drift away.”

“Comrades! Christians! We will go ourselves! Seed, tools, supplies — we will carry them on our own backs, in the sweat of our brows, slaves of God that we are, free citizens! And the Evil One, who wants the Plan to fail, who wants us to be treated as saboteurs by the government, who wants us to go hungry — we will shove his wickedness down his putrid throat!”

A woman’s voice, tense and high-pitched, cried: “Forward, Father!” And immediately teams were made up to collect sacks. They would start that very night, under the moon, with God, for the Plan, for the soil!

A hundred and sixty-five bearers, capable of carrying sixty loads by relieving one another, set out through the night, walking in single file, plunging into the dark fields. The moon was rising, huge and bright on the horizon — toward it Kostia led the first team, made up of young men who sang in chorus, until they were exhausted:

“If war comes,

If war comes,

O our strong land,

— Let us be strong!

Little girl, little girl,

How I love your little eyes!”

Father Guerassim and Agronomist Kostiukin brought up the rear so that they could keep the laggards moving by telling them stories. They bivouacked on the bank of the Syeroglazaya, the Gray-eyed River, more milky than gray; a soft, continuous rustling rose from the reeds. The cold dew of dawn chilled them to the bone. Kostia and Maria slept side by side for several hours, rolled in the same blanket for warmth, too tense to talk to each other, although the moon was magical, ringed with a circle of pale light as big as the world. They set off again at daybreak, slept again in the forest through the noonday heat, reached the highroad, trudged along it in a cloud of dust, and reached the township before the offices closed. The Party Committee provided a good meal for them — fish soup and groats; the truck drivers’ orchestra played as they started off, some bent under their sacks and bundles, others singing, and the red flag of the Communist Youth preceded them as far as the first turn in the road. Yet Kostiukin, Kostia, and Father Guerassim had spoken bitter words to the Committee. “Your transport section has been making fools of us — neither trucks, nor tractors, nor carts — the devil take you!” Kostiukin’s face contracted furiously, reddish and wrinkled like the head of some old bird of prey. “People are not made to be beasts of burden! We can manage it for once — but the kolkhozes that are sixty miles and more away — what are they to do?” — “Very true, comrades!” the township secretary answered with a conclusive gesture toward one of his committee: “That means you!” Father Guerassim said nothing until almost the end, then he spoke in a veiled voice, full of implications: “Are you quite sure, Citizen Secretary, that there is no sabotage at the bottom of this?”

“I guarantee it, Citizen Administering the Cult! Gasoline deliveries are behind, that is all.”

“In your place, I would not guarantee it, Citizen Secretary, for God alone probes men’s consciences and hearts.”

His repartee roused a hearty laugh. “Isn’t he getting to be a little too influential?” the representative of Security whispered, uncomfortably caught between two directives, one of which prescribed that the clergy should be permitted to acquire no political influence, the other ordering the cessation of religious persecution. “Judge for yourself,” answered the Party secretary, also in a whisper. Kostia increased their embarrassment by emphatically stating: “The Comrade Administering the Cult is our real organizer today.”

Every hour counted, since they had lost at least seven days on the work schedule after having lost many more waiting for transportation, and since the rains were now to be feared. The one hundred and sixty-five trudged on to the point of exhaustion, bent under their loads, sweating, groaning, swearing, praying. The roads were abominable — there were soft clods that melted underfoot, or stones that made you stumble. Now they were staggering along a sunken road, through mud and pebbles. The moon rose, huge and russet and cynical. Kostia and Maria were taking turns on the same seventy-pound sack, Kostia carrying it as much as possible, yet husbanding his strength so that he should hold out longer than Maria. Dripping with sweat, the young woman trudged on in a steamy odor of flesh. The burden-bearers emerged into a silvery plain. The moon, risen to the zenith and now white, hung over them; their shadows moved beneath them over the phosphorescent ground. The groups straggled out. Maria was carrying the sack on her head, steadying it with both hands; her armpits were bare; her shoulders, her breasts, the tense line of her throat, resisting the force of gravity, caught the light. Her lips were open, baring her teeth to the night. Kostia had stopped joking many hours ago, had almost stopped speaking. “We are nothing now but muscles operating … muscles and will … That’s what men are … That’s what the masses are …” Suddenly it was as if the mauve and milky sky, the moonlit night, had begun singing in him: “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you …” unwearyingly, endlessly, with stubborn enthusiasm. “Give me the sack, Maria!” — “Not yet; when we get to those trees there. Don’t talk to me, Kostia.” She was panting softly. He went on in silence: “I love you, I love you …” and his tiredness vanished, the moonlight marvelously unburdened him.

When the hundred and sixty-five bivouacked by the Gray-eyed River, the Syeroglazaya, to sleep a few hours before dawn, Kostia and Maria lay down beside their sack, facing the sky. The grass was soft and cold and damp. “All right, Marussia?” Kostia asked, in a tone which was indifferent at the beginning of the short sentence but which suddenly became caressing upon the diminutive which closed it. “Falling asleep?” — “Not yet,” she said. “I’m fine. How simple everything is — the sky, the earth, and us …”

Lying on their backs side by side, their shoulders touching, infinitely close to each other, infinitely detached from each other, they gazed up into space.

She did not move, her hands were crossed under her head. He heard her regular breathing. She said nothing for a time, then answered calmly:

A sort of anguish seized him, he overcame it and swallowed his saliva. He did not know what to say or to do. A moment passed. The sky was magnificently bright. Kostia said:

“I knew a Maria in Moscow; she worked underground, building the subway. She came to a sad end, which she didn’t deserve. Her nerves weren’t strong enough. When I remember her, I think of her as Maria the Unhappy. I want you to be Maria the Happy. You shall be.”

“I don’t believe in happiness during transition periods,” said Maria. “We will work together. We will see life. We will fight. That is enough.”

He thought: “Strange, here we are husband and wife, and we talk like two old friends; I was longing to take her in my arms, and now I only want to make this moment last …”

“I knew another Kostia. He belonged to the Communist Youth, like you, he was almost as good-looking as you are, but he was a fool and a skunk …”

Kostia put his arm around her shoulders, he sought her eyes and found them, with their look that was as dark and as luminous as the night.

“I do not believe in ecclesiastical mumble-jumble, Kostia, try to understand me. I believe in everything that is. Look around us, look!”

Her face, her clear-cut lips turned impulsively toward him to show him the universe: that simple sky, the plains, the invisible river among the reeds, space.

“I can’t say what I believe in, Kostia, but I believe. Perhaps it’s just in reality. You must understand me.”

Ideas flooded through Kostia: he perceived them in his heart and his loins as he did in his mind. Reality, embraced by a single motion of the whole universe. We are inseparable from the stars; from the authentic magic of this night in which there is no miracle; from the waiting earth; from all the confused power that lies within us … Joy filled him. “You are right, Maria, I believe as you do, I see …” The earth, the sky, the very night, in which there were no shadows, brought them inexpressibly together, forehead against forehead, their hair mingling, eyes to eyes, mouth to mouth, their teeth meeting with a little shock. “Maria, I love you …” The words were only tiny gilded crystals which he dropped into deep, dark, sluggish, turbulent, enrapturing waters … Maria answered with restrained violence: “But I’ve already told you I love you, Kostia.” Maria said: “I feel as if I were throwing little white pebbles at the sky and they turn into meteors, I see them disappear but I know they will never fall, that’s how I love you …” Then, “What is rocking us,” she murmured, “I think I’m going to sleep …” She fell asleep with her cheek on the sack, smelling the odor of wheat. Kostia watched her for a moment. His joy was so great that it became like grief. Then the same rocking put him to sleep too.

The last stretch, which had to be covered first through the morning fog, then under the sun, was the hardest. The line of staggering bearers reached from horizon to horizon. The president of the kolkhoze, Vaniuchkin, came to meet them with carts. Kostia dropped his sack over Vaniuchkin’s head and shoulders. “Your turn, President!” The whole landscape was calm and bright.

“The sowing is safe, brother. You are going to sign me two two-week leaves right away, for Maria and myself. We’re getting married.”

Romachkin’s life had recently become more dignified. Though he was still in the same office, on the sixth floor of the Moscow Clothing Trust, and though he was not yet a member of the Party, he felt that he had increased in stature. An official announcement, posted in the hall one evening, had said that “the assistant clerk in the salaries bureau, Romachkin, a punctual and zealous worker, has been promoted to first assistant with an increase in salary of 50 rubles per month and citation on the Board of Honor.” From his ink-stained and glue-smeared desk in insignificance, Romachkin moved to the varnished desk which stood opposite to the similar but larger desk of the Trust’s Director of Tariffs and Salaries. Romachkin was provided with an interoffice telephone, which was rather a nuisance than otherwise, because the calls interrupted him in his calculations, but which was a symbol of unhoped-for authority. The president of the Trust himself sometimes called him on this telephone to ask for information. Those were solemn moments. Romachkin found it somewhat difficult to answer sitting down, and without bowing and smiling amiably. If he had been alone, he would certainly have stood up, the better to assume an air of deference as he promised: “At once, Comrade Nikolkin; you shall have the exact figures in fifteen minutes …” Having promised, Romachkin straightened up until his back touched the back of his swivel chair, looked importantly around at the five desks in the office, and beckoned to the sad-faced Antochkin, whose liver was always giving him trouble and who had replaced him at the desk in insignificance. “Comrade Antochkin, I am looking up some information for the President of the Trust. I need the file on the last conference on prices and wages and also the message from the Textile Syndicate concerning the application of the C.C. directives. You have seven minutes.” Spoken with simple firmness from which there was no appeal. Assistant Clerk Antochkin looked at the clock as a donkey looks at his driver’s whip; his fingers flew through the files; he seemed to be chewing on something … Before the end of the seventh minute, Romachkin received the papers from him and thanked him amiably. From the other side of the room the old typist and the office boy looked at Romachkin with evident respect. (That they were both thinking: “Oh, that worn-out rat, who does he think he is! I hope you get your bellyful of it, Citizen Bootlicker!” Romachkin, who was always well disposed toward everyone, could not suspect.) The head of the office, though he went on signing letters, rounded his shoulders approvingly. Romachkin was discovering authority, which enlarges the individual, cements organization, fecundates work, saves time, reduces overhead … “I thought I was nobody and only knew how to obey, and here I am, able to give orders. What is this principle which bestows a value on a man who had no value before? The principle of hierarchy.” But is hierarchy just? Romachkin thought about it for several days before he answered himself in the affirmative. What better government than a hierarchy of just men?

His promotion had brought him yet another reward: the window was at his right, he had only to turn his head to see trees in courtyards, washing drying on wires, the roofs of old houses, the pinnacles of a church, washed with yellow and old rose, humbly surviving beside a modern building — almost too much space, almost too many astonishing things, for him to concentrate properly on his work. Why does man have such a need for dreams? Romachkin thought that it would be a sensible idea to put opaque glass in office windows, so that the sight of the outside world should not be a distraction which might reduce the quantity of work accomplished. Five small, almost round pinnacles, surmounted by tottering crosses, survived amid a forgotten garden and a group of ill-assorted houses a century and a half old. They were an invitation to meditate, like forest paths leading to unknown clearings which perhaps did not exist … Romachkin felt slightly afraid of them even as he loved them. Perhaps people still prayed under those meaningless and almost colorless pinnacles, in the heart of the new city mathematically laid out in straight lines drawn by steel, concrete, glass, and stone.

“It is strange,” Romachkin said to himself. “How can anyone pray?” To keep himself in good working trim, Romachkin allowed himself a few minutes between one job and the next. These minutes he devoted to dreaming — without letting it be apparent, of course, pencil in hand, brows knit … What alley through which I have never walked leads to that fantastically surviving church?

Romachkin went to see, and the result was a new accomplishment in his life — a friendship. He had to go down a blind alley, pass through a carriage gateway, cross a courtyard lined with workshops; thus he arrived at a small, ancient square, shut off from the rest of the world. Children were playing marbles; and there was the church, with its three beggars on the steps and its three praying women kneeling in the solitude of the nave. Pleasant to read the nearby signboards — they made up a poem studded with harmonious and meaningless words and names: Filatov, Teaseler and Mattressmaker, Oleandra, Shoemakers’ Craft Co-operative, Tikhonova, Midwife, Kindergarten No. 4, The First Joy. Romachkin met Filatov, teaseler and mattressmaker, a childless widower, a prudent man who no longer drank, no longer smoked, no longer believed, and who, at fifty-five, was taking free night courses at the Higher Technical School to learn mechanics and astrophysics. “And what have I left now but science? I have lived half a century, Citizen Romachkin, without suspecting that science existed, like a blind man.” Filatov wore an old-fashioned leather apron and a proletarian cap, unchanged for fifteen years. His room was only nine feet by five, a converted vestibule, but in the back of it he had cut a window which gave onto the church garden; and on the window sill he had a hanging garden of his own, constructed of old boxes. A copying stand in front of his flowers gave him a place to copy out Eddington’s Stars and Atoms, with annotations of his own … This unexpected friendship occupied an exalted place in Romachkin’s life. At first the two men had not understood each other very well. Filatov said:

“Mechanics rules technique, technique is the base of production, that is, of society. Celestial mechanics is the law of the universe. Everything is physical. If I could begin my life over again, I would be an engineer or an astronomer; I believe that the real engineer must be an astronomer if he is to understand the world. But I was born the grandson of a serf, under the Czarist oppression. I was illiterate until I reached thirty, a drunkard until I reached forty, I lived without understanding the universe until my poor Natassia died. When she was buried at Vagankovskoye, I had a small red cross set up on her grave, because she was a Believer herself, being ignorant; and because we live in the Socialist age, I said: Let the cross of a proletarian be red! And I was left all alone in the cemetery, Comrade Romachkin, I paid the watchman fifty kopecks so that I could stay after closing time until the stars came out. And I thought: What is man on this earth? A wretched speck of dust which thinks, works, and suffers. What does he leave behind him? Work, the mechanisms of work. What is the earth? A speck of dust which revolves in the sky with the work and sufferings of man, and the silence of plants, and everything. And what makes it revolve? The iron law of stellar mechanics. ‘Natassia,’ I said over her grave, ‘you can no longer hear me because you no longer exist, because we have no souls, but you will always be in the soil, the plants, the air, the energy of nature, and I ask you to forgive me for having hurt you by getting drunk, and I promise you I will stop drinking, and I promise you I will study so that I may understand the great mechanism of creation.’ I have kept my word because I am strong, with proletarian strength, and perhaps I shall marry again one day, when I have finished my second year of study, for I should not have money to buy books if I were to take a wife now. Such is my life, comrade. I am at peace, I know that it is man’s duty to understand and I am beginning to understand.”

They were sitting side by side on a little bench at the door of Filatov’s workshop, late in the afternoon — Romachkin pale and worn, not yet old, but with all his youth and vigor gone, if he had ever had either; and Filatov, beardless and with shaven skull, his face lined with symmetrical wrinkles, solid as an old tree. From the “Oleandra” Co-operative came the sound of hammers on leather, the chestnut trees were beginning to loom larger in the twilight. Had it not been for the muffled noise of the city, they could have thought they were in an old-time village square, not far from a river on the other side of which was a forest … Romachkin answered:

“I have not had time to think about the universe, Comrade Filatov, because I have been tortured by injustice.”

“The causes of injustice,” Filatov answered, “lie in the social mechanism.”

Romachkin feebly wrung his hands, then put them on his knees. They lay there, flat and without strength.

“Listen, Filatov, and tell me if I have done wrong. I am almost a Party member, I go to meetings, I am trusted. At yesterday’s meeting, the rationalization of work was discussed. And the Secretary read us a newspaper paragraph on the execution of three enemies of the people, who assassinated Comrade Tulayev, of the C.C. and the Moscow Committee. It is all proven, the criminals confessed, I don’t remember their names, and what do their names matter to us? They are dead, they were murderers, they were miserable creatures, they died the death of criminals. The Secretary explained it all to us: that the Party defends the country, that war is at hand, that we must kill the mad dogs for love of mankind … It is all true, very true. Then he said: ‘Those in favor raise their hands!’ I understood that we were to thank the C.C. and Security for the execution of these men, I suffered, I thought: And pity, pity — does no one think of pity? But I did not dare not to raise my hand. Should I be the only one to remember pity, I who am nothing? And I raised my hand with the rest. Did I betray pity? Should I have betrayed the Party if I had not raised my hand? What is your answer, Filatov, you who are upright, you who are a true proletarian?”

Filatov reflected. Darkness fell. Romachkin’s face, turned toward his companion, became beseeching.

“The machine,” said Filatov, “must operate irreproachably. That it crushes those who stand in its way is inhuman, but it is the universal law. The workman must know the insides of the machine. Later there will be luminous and transparent machines which men’s eyes can see through without hindrance. They will be machines in a state of innocence, comparable to the innocence of the heavens. Human law will be as innocent as astrophysical law. No one will be crushed. No one will any longer need pity. But today, Comrade Romachkin, pity is still needed. Machines are full of darkness, we never know what goes on inside them. I do not like secret sentences, executions in cellars, the mechanism of plots. You understand: there are always two plots, the positive and the negative — how is one to know which is the plot of the just, which the plot of the guilty? How is one to know whether to feel pity, whether to be pitiless? How should we know, when the men in power themselves lose their heads, as there is no doubt that they do? In your case, Romachkin, you had to vote Yes, otherwise things would have turned out badly for you, and there was nothing you could do about it, was there? You voted with pity — well and good. I did the same thing, last year. What else could we do?”

Romachkin had the impression that his hands were becoming lighter. Filatov invited him in, they drank a glass of tea and ate pickled cucumbers with black bread. The room was so small that they touched each other. Their proximity gave birth to an increased intimacy. Filatov opened Eddington’s book and held it under the light. And:

Romachkin read more compassion than reproach in the mattressmaker’s eyes. That a man should have a long life behind him and not know what an electron was!

The universe and man are made of stars, some infinitely little, others infinitely great, Figure 17 on Page 45 showed it clearly. Romachkin had difficulty in following the admirable demonstration because he was thinking of the three executed criminals, of his hand raised in favor of their death, of his hand which had felt so heavy then, which had now — strangely — become light again because he had set pity against machines and stars.

A child cried in the next courtyard, the lights in the shoemaker’s shop went out, a couple embraced, almost invisible, against the church railing. Filatov came as far as the end of the square with his friend. Romachkin walked on toward the railing. Before going into his room, Filatov stopped for no reason and looked at the black ground. What have we done with pity in this human mechanism? Three more men executed … They are more numerous than the stars, since there are only three thousand stars visible in the northern hemisphere. If those three men killed, did they not have profound reasons for killing, reasons connected with the eternal laws of motion? Who weighed those reasons? Weighed them without hatred? Filatov felt pity for the judges: the judges must suffer most of all … The sight of the couple embracing in the shadows, making but a single being by force of the eternal law of attraction, consoled him. It is good to see the young live, when one is at the sunset of life oneself. They have half a century before them, by the law of averages: perhaps they will see true justice, in the days of transparent machines. It takes a great deal of fertilizer to feed exhausted soil. Who knows how many more men must be executed to feed the soil of Russia? We thought we could see ahead so clearly in the days of the Revolution, and now we are in the dark again; perhaps it is the punishment for our pride. Filatov went in, put the iron bar across his door, and undressed. He slept on a narrow mattress spread out on boxes, and kept a night light burning. The spiders began their nocturnal travels over the ceiling: the little black creatures, with legs like rays, moved slowly, and it was absolutely impossible to understand the meaning of their movements. Filatov thought of the judges and the executed men. Who is to judge the judges? Who will pardon them? Need they be pardoned? Who will shoot them if they were unjust? Everything will come in its time, inexorably. Under the ground, everywhere, under the city, under the fields, under the little black square where the lovers were no doubt still continuing their caresses and endearments, a multitude of eyes shone for Filatov, on the edge of visibility, like stars of the seventh magnitude. “They wait, they wait,” Filatov murmured; “eyes without number, forgive us.”

Romachkin’s anxiety returned when he found himself once more in the poverty-stricken whiteness of his room. The noise of the collective apartment smote ceaselessly at his bastion of silence: telephones, music from the radio, children’s voices, toilets being flushed, hissing of kerosene pressure stoves … The couple next door, from whom he was separated only by a plank partition, were arguing feverishly over a deal in secondhand cloth. Romachkin put on his nightshirt: undressed, he felt even more puny than dressed; his bare feet showed wretched toes, absurdly far apart. The human body is ugly — and if man has only his body, if thought is only a product of the body, how can it be anything but doubtful and inadequate? He lay down between cold sheets, shivered for a moment, reached out to his bookshelf, took a book by a poet whose name he did not know, for the first pages were missing — but the others still kept all their magical charm. Romachkin read where the book opened.

Divine revolving planet

thy Eurasias thy singing seas

simple scorn for the headsmen

and behold o merciful thought we are

almost like unto heroes

Why was there no punctuation? Perhaps because thought, which embraces and connects by invisible threads (but do such threads exist?) planets, seas, continents, headsmen, victims, and ourselves, is fluid, never rests, stops only in appearance? Why, precisely tonight, the reference to headsmen, the reference to heroes? Who should reproach me, who despise nothing but myself? And why, if there are men who have this ardor for life and this scorn for the headsmen, am I so different from them? Are not the poets ashamed of themselves when they see themselves in their solitude and their nakedness? Romachkin put away the book and returned to the papers of the last few days. At the foot of a Page 3, under the heading Miscellaneous Information, the government daily described the preparations for an athletic festival in which three hundred parachutists, members of school sports clubs, would take part … Huge bright flowers float down from the sky, each bearing a brave human head whose eyes intently watch the approach of the alluring and threatening earth … The next item, which had no heading and was set in small type, read:

The case of the assassins of Comrade Tulayev, member of the Central Committee. — Having confessed that they were guilty of treason, plotting, and assassination, M. A. Erchov, A. A. Makeyev, and K. K. Rublev, sentenced to capital punishment by the special session of the Supreme Tribunal sitting in camera, have been executed.

The Chess-Player’s Association, affiliated with the All-Union Sports Federation, plans to organize a series of elimination games in the Federated Republics preparatory to the forthcoming Tournament of Nationalities.

The chessmen had human faces, unfamiliar but grave-eyed. They moved of themselves. Someone aimed at them from a long way off: suddenly they jumped into the air, their heads bursting open, and vanished inexplicably. Three accurate shots, one after the other, instantaneously demolished three heads on the chessboard. Numb and half asleep, Romachkin felt fear: someone was knocking at the door.

Romachkin went to the door. The floor was rough and cold under his bare feet. Before drawing the bolt he waited a moment to master his panic. Kostia came rushing in so impulsively that he picked Romachkin up like a child.

“Good old neighbor! Romachkin! Half-thinker, half-Hero of Toil, shut up in your half-room and your half-pint destiny! Glad to see you again! Everything all right? Why don’t you say something? Ultimatum: Everything all right? Answer yes or no!”

“Everything’s all right, Kostia. Good of you to come. I am fond of you, you know.”

“In that case I order you to stop looking at me like a man who’s just been pulled out from under a bus! … The earth is revolving magnificently, the devil take you! Can you see it revolving, our green globe inhabited by toiling monkeys?”

Back in the warmth of his bed, Romachkin saw the little room enlarge, the light burn ten times brighter.

“I was just falling asleep, Kostia, over this hodgepodge in the papers: parachutists, executions, chess tournaments, planets … Absolute madness. Life, I suppose. How handsome and healthy you look, Kostia. It’s wonderful to see you … As for me, things are going extremely well. I’ve had a promotion at the Trust, I go to Party meetings, I have a friend, a remarkable proletarian with the brain of a physicist … We discuss the structure of the universe.”

“The structure of the universe,” Kostia repeated in a singsong voice. Too big for the cramped little room, he kept turning round and round.

“You haven’t changed a bit, Romachkin. I bet the same anemic fleas feed on you at night.”

Kostia pushed him back against the wall and sat down on the bed. His tousled hair, in which the chestnut lights looked russet, his aggressive dark eyes, his big, slightly asymmetrical mouth, bent over Romachkin.

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going somewhere. If the coming war doesn’t change us all into carrion, old man, I don’t know what we are going to do, but it will be fabulous. If we die, we’ll make the earth bear such a crop as was never heard of. I haven’t a kopeck, of course; my soles are worn through and more, of course … And so on. But I am happy.”

Kostia’s laughter shook the bed, shook Romachkin from his toes to his eyebrows, made the wall tremble, echoed through the room in golden waves.

“Don’t let it frighten you, old brother, if I seem drunk. I’m drunker yet when I haven’t had anything to eat, but then I sometimes go mad …

“You remember, I walked out on the subway and working like an industrialized mole under the streets of Moscow, between the Morgue and the Young Communist Bureau. I wanted air. I was fed up with their discipline. I have discipline enough of my own to set up shop with, it’s inside me, my discipline. I got out. At Gorki I worked in the automobile factory: seven hours in front of a machine. I was willing to become a beast in the long run, to give the country trucks. I was going to see fine cars come out, all shiny and new — it’s prettier and cleaner than the birth of a human being, I assure you. When I told myself that we had built them with our own hands and that perhaps they would eat up the roads in Mongolia bringing cigarettes and rifles to oppressed peoples, I felt proud, I was glad to be alive. Good. Dispute with a technician, who wanted to make me clean my tools after hours. ‘What do you think?’ I said to him. ‘That the wage earner doesn’t exist? The worker’s nerves and muscles have to be kept up just as much as the machines do. So long.’ I took the train, they were going to accuse me of Trotskyism, the idiots, but you know what that means: three years in the Karaganda mines, no thank you! Have you ever seen the Volga, old man? I worked on board a tug, fireman first, then mechanic. We towed barges as far as the Kama. There the rivers are full, you forget cities, the moon rises over steep forests, an immense vegetable army stands guard day and night, and you hear it calling to you insidiously: Ours is the true life — if you do not drink a cup of silence with the beasts of the forest, you will never know what a man ought to know. I found a substitute in a Komi village and went to work for the regional Forest Trust. ‘I’ll do anything, as far away as possible, in the most out-of-the-way forests,’ I said to the provincial bureaucrats. It pleased them. They put me to inspecting foresters’ posts, and the militia took me on for the fight against banditry. In a forest at the end of the earth, between the Kama and the Vychegda, I discovered a village of Old Believers and sorcerers who had fled from statistics. They had taken the great census for a diabolic maneuver, they had convinced themselves that their lands were going to be taken from them once more, their men sent to war, their old women forced to learn to read and then to study the science of the Evil One. They recited the Apocalypse at night. They also proclaimed that everything on earth was corrupt and that nothing remained for the pure in heart except patience — and that their patience would soon be exhausted! ‘And then what will happen?’ I asked them. ‘It will be the return of the millennium.’ They offered to let me live with them, I was tempted to on account of a beautiful girl, she was as vigorous as a tree, exciting and pure as forest air, but she told me that what she most wanted was a child, that I had seen too much of machines to live long with her, and that she did not trust me … I left there, Romachkin, to get away before their Last Judgment arrived, or I became a complete imbecile … Through brothers of theirs in the city, the Elders asked me to send them recent papers, a treatise on agronomy, and to write and tell them if ‘the census had gone by’ without wars, floods, or plunder … Shall we go and live with them, Romachkin? I am the only man who knows the paths through the forests along the Sysola. The forest animals don’t harm me, I’ve learned to rob wild bees’ hives for honey, I know how to set traps for hares, to set traps in rivers … Come on, Romachkin, you will never think of your books again and when someone asks you what a streetcar is you will explain to the little children and the white-haired old men that it is a long yellow box on wheels which carries men and is made to move by a mysterious force that comes out of the bowels of the earth over wires. And if they ask you why, you will find yourself hard put to it for an answer …”

“I am willing,” said Romachkin weakly. Kostia’s story had enchanted him like a fairy tale.

“Too late, old man. There are no more Holy Scriptures or Apocalypses for you and me. If the millennium is ahead of us, we cannot know it. We belong to the age of reinforced concrete.”

His two hands began a gesture intended to express enthusiasm. But they remained suspended for a fraction of a second, then dropped inertly. Even as he spoke, Kostia’s eyes had fallen on Romachkin’s long, feeble hand, spread out on a page of a newspaper. The middle finger seemed to be pointing to an impossible paragraph:

The case of the assassins of Comrade Tulayev, member of the C.C. Having confessed that they were guilty … Erchov, Makeyev, Rublev … have been executed …

“I remember. But I have thought a great deal since then, Kostia. I have become aware of my own weakness. I have come to understand that it is too early for justice. What we have to do is work, believe in the Party, feel pity. Since we cannot be just, we must feel pity for men …”

A fear of which he did not dare to think would not let his lips utter the question: “What did you do with the revolver?” Kostia spoke angrily:

“As for me, pity exasperates me. Here you are” — Kostia pointed to the paragraph in the paper — “take pity on those three, if that makes you feel any better, Romachkin — they are beyond needing anything now. As for me, I have no use for your pity, and I have no wish to pity you — you don’t deserve it. Perhaps you are guilty of their crime. Perhaps I am the author of your crime, but you will never understand it or anything about it. You are innocent, they were innocent …”

With an effort, he managed to shrug his shoulders. “I am innocent … But who is guilty?”

“I believe that they were guilty,” Romachkin murmured, “since they were found guilty.”

Kostia gave a leap that shook the floor and the walls. His hard laugh rattled against things.

“Romachkin, you win all prizes! Let me explain to you what I guess. They were certainly guilty, they confessed, because they understood what you and I do not understand. Do you see?”

Kostia paced nervously between the door and the window. “I am stifling,” he said. “Air! What is wanting here? Everything!

“Well, my old friend Romachkin, good-by. Life is a sort of delirium, don’t you think?”

Romachkin was going to be left there alone, he had a wretched, worn face, wrinkled eyelids, white hairs around his mouth, so little vigor in his eyes! Kostia thought aloud: “The guilty are the millions of Romachkins on this earth …”

From his inside blouse pocket Kostia drew a rectangular object wrapped in an India print. “Take it. It’s what I loved the most in the world when I was alone.” Romachkin’s hand held a miniature framed in ebony. In the black circle appeared a woman’s face — magically real, all sanity, intelligence, radiance, silence. With a sort of amazed terror, Romachkin said: “Is it possible? Do you really believe, Kostia, that there are faces like this?”

As he hurried down the stairs Kostia had a blissful sensation: He seemed to be falling, the material world dissolved before him, things became aerial. He followed the streets with the light step of a runner. But in his mind anxiety loosed a sort of thunder. “It was I who … I …” He began running as he approached the house where Maria lay sleeping — running as he had run one night long ago, that Arctic night, when the thing had suddenly exploded at the end of his hand, making a black flower fringed with flame, and he had heard the police whistles all around him … The dark staircase was aerial too. Apartment No. 12 housed three families and three couples in seven rooms. A 25-candle-power bulb burned in the hall, looped up close to the ceiling so that it could not easily be unscrewed. The walls were sooty. A sewing machine, fastened to a heavy chest by a chain and padlock, was reflected in the cracked mirror of the coat stand. Irregular snores filled the half-darkness with a bestial vibration. The door of the toilet opened, the figure of a man in pajamas hovered indistinctly at the end of the hall and suddenly stumbled noisily into something metallic. The drunken man bounced back against the opposite wall, striking his head against a door. Angry voices came through the darkness — a low voice saying “Shhhhh,” and a high voice showering insults: “… gutter rat …” Kostia went to the drunken man and caught him by the collar of his swaying pajamas.

“Nobody. Stay on your feet! Don’t make any noise or I’ll give you a friendly poke in the jaw.”

Kostia pushed the door of No. 4 open with his elbow and flung the drunk inside, where he gently collapsed among overturned chairs. Something made of glass rolled across the floor before breaking with a crystalline tinkle. Kostia groped his way to the door of No. 7, a triangular closet with a low slanting ceiling in which there was a round dormer. The electric bulb, at the end of a long cord, lay on the floor between a pile of books and an enamel basin in which a pink chemise was soaking. The only furniture was a chair with the seat broken and an iron bed, on which Maria lay sleeping, stretched out straight on her back, her forehead lifted, vaguely smiling. Kostia looked at her. Her cheeks were pink and hot, she had wide nostrils, eyebrows like the outline of a pair of slim wings, adorable eyelashes. One shoulder and one bare breast were uncovered; on the amber-colored flesh of the breast lay a black braid with coppery lights. Kostia kissed her bare breast. Maria opened her eyes. “You!”

“Maria, answer me. If I had killed a man, ages ago or a few days or a few months ago, on a night of unbelievable snow, without knowing him, without a thought of killing him, without having wanted to, but voluntarily just the same, with my eyes wide open, my hand steady, because he was doing evil in the name of ideas that are right, because I was full of the sufferings of others, because, without knowing it, I had pronounced judgment in a few seconds — I for many others, I who am unknown, for others who are unknown and nameless, for all who have no names, no will, no luck, not even my rag of a conscience, Maria, what would you say to me?”

“I would tell you, Kostia, that you ought to keep your nerves under better control, know exactly what you’re doing, and not wake me up to tell me your bad dreams … Kiss me.”

She looked at him very hard. The chimes on the Kremlin rang the hour. The first notes of the “International,” airy and solemn, drifted for a moment over the sleeping city.

“Kostia, I have seen enough peasants die by the roadside … I know what it is to struggle desperately. I know how much harm is done involuntarily when the struggle is desperate … Just the same, we are going forward, aren’t we? There is a great and pure force in you. Don’t worry.”

Her two hands plunged into his hair, she drew the vigorous and tormented head toward her.

Comrade Fleischman spent the day finding their final places in the files for the dossiers in the Tulayev case. There were thousands of pages, gathered into several volumes. Human life was reflected in them just as the earth’s fauna and flora are to be found, in tenuous and monstrous forms, in a drop of stagnant water observed through a microscope. Certain documents were to go to the Party Archives, others to complete dossiers in the files of Security, the C.C., the General Secretariat, the foreign branch of Secret Service. A few were to be burned in the presence of a representative of the C.C. and Comrade Gordeyev, Deputy High Commissar for Security. Fleischman shut himself up alone with the papers, about which there hung an odor of death. The memorandum from the Special Operations Service on the execution of the three convicted criminals gave only one precise detail, the time: 12:01, 12:15, 12:18 A.M. The great case had culminated at the zero hour of night.

Among the unimportant documents added to the Tulayev dossier since the end of the investigation (reports on conversations in public places, during the course of which Tulayev’s name was alleged to have been mentioned; denunciations concerning the murder of a certain Butayev, an engineer at the waterworks in Krasnoyarsk; communications from the criminal police concerning the assassination of a certain Mutayev at Leninakan; and other documents which flood, wind, or the stupidity and uninspired folly of the law of averages seemed to have swept together), Fleischman found a gray envelope, postmarked “Moscow-Yaroslavl Station” and merely addressed: “To the Citizen Examining Magistrate conducting the Tulayev case investigation.” An attached memorandum read: “Transmitted to Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Another memorandum added: “Zvyeryeva: under strict arrest until further order. Transmit to Comrade Popov.” Administrative perfection would, at this point, have demanded a third memorandum concerning the as yet unsettled fate of Comrade Popov. Some prudent person had merely written on the envelope, in red ink: “Unclassified.” “That’s myself — unclassified,” thought Fleischman with a shade of self-contempt. He nonchalantly cut open the envelope. It contained a letter, written by hand on a folded sheet of school notebook paper and unsigned.

“Citizen! I write to you from compulsion of conscience and out of regard for the truth …”

Ah! — somebody else denouncing his neighbor or happily giving himself up to his idiotic little private delusion … Fleischman skipped the middle of the letter and began again toward the end, not without noticing that the writing was firm and young, as of an educated peasant, that there was no attempt at style, and very little punctuation. The tone was direct, and the Security official found himself gripped.

“I shall not sign this. Innocent men having inexplicably paid for me, there is no way left for me to make amends. Believe me if I had known of this miscarriage of justice in time I would have brought you my innocent and guilty head. I belong body and soul to our great country, to our magnificent Socialist future. If I have committed a crime almost without knowing it which I am not sure of because we live in a period where the murder of man by man is an ordinary thing and no doubt it is a necessity of the dialectics of history and no doubt the rule of the workers which sheds so much blood, sheds it for the good of mankind and I myself have been only the less than half-conscious instrument of that historical necessity, if I have led into error judges better educated and more conscientious than myself who have committed an even greater crime while believing that they too were serving justice, I can now only live and work freely with all my powers for the greatness of our Soviet fatherland …”

“Alone, unknown to the world, not even knowing myself the moment before what I was going to do I fired at Comrade Tulayev whom I detested without knowing him since the purge of the higher schools. I assure you that he had done immeasurable harm to our sincere young generation, that he had lied to us incessantly, that he had basely outraged the best thing we possess our faith in the Party, that he had brought us to the brink of despair …”

Fleischman bent over the open letter and sweat bathed his forehead, his eyes blurred, his double chin sagged, an expression of utter defeat twisted and ravaged his fat face, the innumerable pages of the dossier floated before him in a choking fog. He muttered: “I knew it,” annoyed because he found himself having to restrain an idiotic impulse to burst into tears or to flee, no matter where, instantly, irrevocably — but nothing was possible any more. He slumped over the letter, every word of which bore the stamp of truth. There was a mouselike scratching at the door, then the voice of his maid asked: “Would you like some tea, Comrade Chief?” — “Yes, yes, Lisa — make it strong …” He walked up and down the room for a little, read the unsigned letter over again, standing this time, the better to confront it. Impossible to show it to anyone, anyone. He half opened the door to take the tray on which stood two glasses of tea. And, within himself, he talked to the unknown man whom he glimpsed behind the folded sheet of ruled paper. “Well, young man, well, your letter is not bad at all … Never fear, I am not going to start a hunt for you at this point. We of the older generation, you see, we don’t need your erratic and self-intoxicated strength to stand condemned … It is beyond us all, it carries us all off …”

He lit the candle which he used to soften sealing wax. The stearine was encrusted with red streaks like coagulated blood. In the flame of the bloodstained candle Fleischman burned the letter, collected the ashes in the ash tray, and crushed them under his thumb. He drank his two glasses of tea and felt better. Half aloud, with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm, he said:

Fleischman decided to hurry through the rest of the filing, so that he could get away earlier. The notebooks which Kiril Rublev had filled in his cell had been put with a sheaf of letters “Held for the inquiry” — they were Dora Rublev’s letters, written from a small settlement in Kazakstan. Sent from the depths of solitude and anguish to be read only by Comrade Zvyeryeva, they made him furious. “What a bitch! If I can lay my hands on her, I’ll see that she gets her fill of steppes and snow and sand …”

Fleischman leafed through the notebooks. The writing remained regular throughout, the forms of certain letters suggested artistic interests (very early in his life, and long outgrown), the straightness of the lines recalled the man, the way he squared his shoulders when he talked, the long bony face, the intellectual forehead, the particular way he had of looking at you with a smile which was only in his eyes, as he expounded a train of reasoning as rigorous and as subtle as an arabesque in metal … “We are all dying without knowing why we have killed so many men in whom lay our highest strength …” Fleischman realized that he thought as Kiril Rublev had written a few days or a few hours before his death.

The notebooks interested him … He ran through the economic deductions based on the decrease in the rate of profit resulting from the continuous increase of constant capital (whence the capitalist stagnation?), on the increase of the production of electrical power in the world, on the development of metallurgy, on the gold crisis, on the changes in character, functions, interests, and structure of social classes and more particularly of the working class … Several times Fleischman murmured: “Right, absolutely right … questionable, but … worth considering … true on the whole or in trend …” He made notes of data which he wanted to check in books by specialists. Next came pages of enthusiastic or severe opinions on Trotsky. Kiril Rublev praised his revolutionary intuition, his sense of Russian reality, his “sense of victory,” his reasoned intrepidity; and deplored his “pride as a great historic figure,” his “too self-conscious superiority,” his “inability to make the mediocre follow him,” his “offense tactics in the worst moments of defeat,” his “high revolutionary algebra perpetually cast before swine, when the swine alone held the front of the stage …”

“Obviously, obviously,” Fleischman murmured, making no effort to overcome his uneasiness.

Rublev must have been very sure that he was going to be shot, or he would never have written such things?…

The tone of the writing changed, but the same inner conviction gave it even more detachment. “We were an exceptional human accomplishment, and that is why we are going under. A half century unique in history was required to form our generation. Just as a great creative mind is a unique biological and social accomplishment, caused by innumerable interferences, the formation of our few thousand minds is to be explained by interferences that were unique. Capitalism at its apogee, rich with all the powers of industrial civilization, was planted in a great peasant country, a country of ancient culture, while a senile despotism moved year by year toward its end. Neither the old castes nor the new classes could be strong, neither the one nor the other could feel sure of the future. We grew up amid struggle, escaping two profound captivities, that of the old ‘Holy Russia,’ and that of the bourgeois West, at the same time that we borrowed from those two worlds their most living elements: the spirit of inquiry, the transforming audacity, the faith in progress of the nineteenth-century West; a peasant people’s direct feeling for truth and for action, and its spirit of revolt, formed by centuries of despotism. We never had a sense of the stability of the social world; we never had a belief in wealth; we were never the puppets of bourgeois individualism, dedicated to the struggle for money; we perpetually questioned ourselves about the meaning of life and we worked to transform the world …

“We acquired a degree of lucidity and disinterestedness which made both the old and the new interests uneasy. It was impossible for us to adapt ourselves to a phase of reaction; and as we were in power, surrounded by a legend that was true, born of our deeds, we were so dangerous that we had to be destroyed beyond physical destruction, our corpses had to be surrounded by a legend of treachery …

“The weight of the world is upon us, we are crushed by it. All those who want neither drive nor uncertainty in the successful revolution overwhelm us; and behind them they have all those whom the fear of revolution blinds and saps …” Rublev was of the opinion that the implacable cruelty of our period is explained by its feeling of insecurity: fear of the future … “What is going to happen in history tomorrow will be comparable only to the great geological catastrophes which change the face of the planet …” — “We alone, in this universe in transformation, had the courage to see clearly. It is more a matter of courage than of intelligence. We saw that, to save man, what was needed was the attitude of the surgeon. To the outside world, hungry for stability to the point of shutting its eyes to the ever-darkening horizon, we were the intolerable evil prophets of social cataclysms; to those who were comfortably established inside our own revolution, we represented venturesomeness and risk. Neither on one side nor the other did anyone see that the worst venture, the hopeless venture, is to seek for immobility at a time when continents are splitting up and breaking adrift. It would be so comforting to say to oneself that the days of creation are over: ‘Let us rest! We are sure of all tomorrows!’ ” — “An immense rage of reprobation and incomprehension rose up against us. But what sort of wild conspirators were we? We demanded the courage to continue our exploit, and people wanted nothing but more security, rest, to forget the effort and the blood — on the eve of rains of blood!” — “Upon one point we lacked clarity and daring: we were unable to perceive what the evil was which was sapping our country and for which for a time there was no remedy. We ourselves denounced as traitors and men of little faith those among us who revealed it to us … Because we loved our work blindly, we too …”

Rublev refuted the executed Nicolas Ivanovich Bukharin who, during the trial of March 1938, exclaimed: “We were before a dark abyss …” (And now it became only a dialogue of the dead.) Rublev wrote: “On the eve of our disappearance we do not reckon up the balance sheet of a disaster, we bear witness to the fullness of a victory which encroached too far upon the future and asked too much of men. We have not lived on the brink of a dark abyss, as Nicolas Ivanovich said, for he was subject to attacks of nervous depression — we are on the eve of a new cycle of storms and that is what darkens our consciences. The compass needle goes wild at the approach of magnetic storms …” — “We are terribly disquieting because we might soon become terribly powerful again …”

“You thought well, Rublev,” said Fleischman, and it made him feel a sort of pride.

He shut the notebook gently. So he would have closed the eyes of a dead man. He heated the sealing wax and slowly let drops of it, like burning blood, fall on the envelope which contained the notebooks. On the wax he pressed the great seal of the Archives of the Commissariat of the Interior: the proletarian emblem stood deeply printed.

About five o’clock Comrade Fleischman had himself driven to the stadium where the Athletic Festival was in progress. He took a seat on the official stand, among the decorated uniforms of the hierarchy. On his left breast there were two medals: the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Flag. The high, flat military cap increased the size of his fat face, which with the passing years had come to look much like the face of a huge frog. He felt emptied, anonymous, important: a general identical with any general of any army, feeling the first touch of old age, his flesh flabby, his spirit preoccupied by administrative details. Battalions of athletes, the young women with their arching breasts preceding the young men, marched past, necks straight, faces turned toward the stands — where they recognized no one, since the Chief, whose colossal effigy dominated the entire stadium, had not come. But they smiled at the uniforms with cheerful confidence. Their footsteps on the ground were like a rhythmic rain of hail. Tanks passed, covered with green branches and flowers. Standing in the turrets, the machine gunners in their black leather headgear waved bouquets tied with red ribbons. High banks of cloud, gilded by the setting sun, deployed powerfully over the sky.

10. And Still the Floes Came Down …