XVI. TICKETS

Serrati has been arrested in Italy, Tasca has fled to Switzerland, Lenin has had a stroke and lost his power of speech. All that seems marginal to Gramsci. He’s walking with Giulia down Tverskaya Street. The young women are wearing rouge on their cheeks, and the men are relaxed. Life here is quieting down, the city is growing used to its new administration and Giulia laughs when he sticks out his tongue at her. He caresses the bridge of her nose, she keeps laughing, runs ahead of him only to stop at the end of the block, then turns around to wait. After 20 metres, they finally, finally fall back into each other’s arms. He holds her hand. He holds her elbows. His fingers run up and down her back. Giulia’s vigorous and softly pulsing veins at her temples. Her cheeks. The half-moon of her jawline. Her chin. The cheekbones below the bright, silky skin.

What had summer been up until this summer? A collection of hot and too-hot days. Dazzling bright light when he tried to read. Mosquitoes circling his bed when he wanted to sleep. How beautiful Moscow is now. More beautiful than in autumn when the red leaves cover the walkways and Giulia is walking next to him through the grounds of the sanatorium, their touches still hidden and new. Had he known Giulia already? Just a hair’s difference from what he knows now.

Right on time, Giulia pulls him back by the arm. A hackney carriage rushes past and almost pulls Gramsci along with it. It stops a few houses later, and a man in an English suit steps out. He snarls at the carriage driver and disappears into the elegant entrance.

‘Sometimes you don’t know who’s actually in power,’ Giulia says. ‘Why does someone like that think they can still do whatever they want?’

‘Because he gets away with it,’ Gramsci answers, ‘and the workers continue to cringe.’

‘Then what’s the whole point? In the end, the tsar’s palace simply has new inhabitants. Outside, everything looks exactly the same.’

‘It takes time. You all think that the workers won a long time ago, but they are just on the alert.’

‘But the rulers live worse than the ruled!’ Giulia cries. ‘Some see that. They simply won’t prevail, perhaps for that very reason. Because no one wants to see something like that.’

They turn into the park. Children run past them. The noise from the main street reaches them in dampened tones.

‘You know, on the islands, people are still dying of malaria,’ Gramsci says, ‘and in the mines they beat out stones fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. In northern Italy, they’ve founded a parliament and are building one factory after another. For the people in Turin, the south is just a supply of cheap labour. And the people there have heard it so often that they believe it themselves. Those who have never been told they have rights first have to learn to be able to speak for themselves.’

He thinks about Sardinia, about the eternal noontime when nothing grows because of the heat pressing down on everything. This is the famous Italian shoe, he thinks, this half-island dangling into the Mediterranean and rotting at its sole. Giulia’s collarbone gleams in the sun. One cannot understand Russia, one can only believe in it, Tyutchev had written. And that’s how it is with Giulia. Although she is next to him now, is running a hand through his hair and talking about her father who had called in on the sick Lenin, he misses her, he misses her for all those years he was not with her because for twenty-six years she wanted nothing to do with him. Twenty-six years of her life. In his own life there were thirty-one.

‘Lenin is worse off than they are saying,’ Giulia says. ‘And Stalin is coming to visit and acts like his heir.’

‘You don’t like him.’

‘Stalin is sinister.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘No. But he’s up to no good,’ Giulia says emphatically.

‘Please, what are you afraid of?’

‘Sometimes I am simply afraid, I cannot explain it to you. Go ahead and laugh at me.’

‘I’m not laughing.’

She edges a bit closer into him.

‘I see a scene in front of me. We are sitting there in our day-to-day, and there’s a man walking around, a stocky man in baggy trousers with a tired face. He’s collecting our tickets and saying: “So, that was it, folks. The ride’s over.” But the train has not even left yet.’

As she speaks, she keeps putting her hand in front of her eyes, as if something were blinding her.

‘We look at ourselves in irritation,’ she says, ‘a few strangers sharing a compartment, then look out of the window onto the empty wagons standing on the rails. The man opens the door, please come with me, Madame, he says and takes a deep bow. I slide to the exit, step outside, but the metal stair has disappeared and I fall into nothingness.’ She hunches her shoulders as if protecting her neck from an attack. ‘It’s nothing, it’s just an absurdity, forgive me,’ she says. ‘But I’m afraid that the man with the tickets will call after me: “It’s your own fault.” ’

In front of the Executive Committee Building they say goodbye. Gramsci has to go back to his work, he has a meeting, he has to get to his desk which is piled up with papers, he has to speak with Togliatti. As he climbs the stairs, the train in which Giulia was sitting among strangers comes to mind and he thinks of Stalin. Lenin won’t be around for much longer. He hardly appears in public any more, they push him out into the garden in a wheelchair, wrapped up in blankets he smiles at everything and has fallen back into his childhood. His mind is dying and you can see it. His empire is little now, two squares on the blanket along which he runs his finger over and over again. In the postscript to his will, Lenin wants Stalin to be removed from his position as general secretary. He is too coarse and that cannot be tolerated in such a post. They should put someone else in his place who differs ‘in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious’.

Sitting at his desk, which is too small, new papers keep coming and coming, a comrade tells him about the results of a special session and in the background the telephone is ringing. He wants to be holding Giulia’s hand. Or her hair. Nothing else. And regardless of whether they’re successful or not at removing Stalin from his position, as long as Giulia is there everything will be fine. She appears in the notes Gramsci takes during the Executive Committee meeting, she is sitting next to Trotsky, she is looking down from a balcony onto the whole group, and then she’s simply there, without any backdrop, without Trotsky, Mussolini, Stalin, Lenin, Zinoviev, Bordiga, without any roads or country or sky above her. He can see her hand. Her watery eyes. He hears her thoughts or what he imagines her thoughts to be. But if she isn’t there, if she were to disappear (he cannot allow himself to even consider that), the world would only be a stone falling through the void.