Birth of Our Power (30 page)

Their plan was simple. Wait for one of those stormy evenings when the rain forces the sentries to huddle in their shelters while the white glare of the searchlights fights against the rain squalls, and the noises of the downpour fill the garden. Then they would climb down, with the help of knotted blankets, from a second-story window conveniently hidden by the shade of an apple tree. Like shadows fleeting through the darts of rain, they would cross over the most dangerous zone, one after the other. The scaling of the barbwire seemed relatively easy near certain fence posts, the sentries' attention being focused principally on the lighted space between the buildings and the barbwire. They could count, with luck, on getting over the obstacle and plunging into the night. They would travel by night and hide during the day.

As well as the secret was kept, something must have leaked out, for Maerts made it known to us that he was inviting two members of the group for coffee. I went there with Sam. The buccaneer flashed a dark, enigmatic look at us from under his felt hat.

“You can have confidence in Maerts,” he said, talking of himself in the third person. “The whole camp knows that. So let's be frank! You're preparing a break, eh?”

“Some people prepare them and some people only dream of them,” said Sam, leaving matters undetermined.

We were drinking the coffee in little sips, without hurrying, like sly old foxes talking over a business deal. But what were we selling there?

“It will succeed,” declared Maerts at last, “if I want it to. That will only cost you a hundred francs.”

To have him against us could be dangerous. To fall in with him could be worse. Discussing it would be tantamount to admitting it.

“You're wasting your drinks, Monsieur Maerts; you shouldn't let people take you in like that …”

We felt it was proper to remain a little longer out of politeness.

We exchanged firm handshakes with the scoundrel. He couldn't know anything very precise. His suspicions must have fallen on our
group. Maybe the gendarme Richard had even commissioned him to test us out?

The gendarme Richard, having made his rounds, entered Adjutant Soupe's office. Boredom held these two men together like a thick layer of glue and made them as impermeable to each other as two stones cemented into the same wall. The adjutant was thinness itself, the gendarme roundness. One was known as the Beanpole and the other the Billiard Ball. The Beanpole lived surrounded by bills of lading, pots of geraniums, letters from a little village in the Oise where he had a bit of property, and newspapers snitched from the internees' mail. The Billiard Ball guarded his camp with the diligence of a man who knows his craft, without zeal however and without malice. “Billiard Ball's a round fellow,” they used to say. The Billiard Ball wiped his tar-black mustache with the back of his hand and unfolded some little rolled-up bits of paper he had taken from his pockets.

“Well, well! The Rumanian is informing against the tavernkeeper: trafficking in money.”

“That's all the same to me!” replied M. Soupe, stuffing his nose with snuff. “Is that all?”

“No. The tavernkeeper is informing against the Rumanian: attempted escape.”

That was more serious. The Beanpole put down his newspaper; his head, reduced to the proportions of a hairy skull, and his eyes, like mollusks on the half-shell, now strangely animated came out of the zone of indifference. The Billiard Ball knew all about it anyway. The Russian group was running the show, probably in order to send someone to Paris.

“Who is supposed to be leaving?”

“A chubby lad, worker from Billancourt. Not dangerous. If it were up to me,” said the round fellow, “I'd let him run. The other: one Potapenko, known as Sam. Pass me his dossier.”

They learned nothing disturbing from the dossier.

“It's the Rumanian I'm gunning for,” said the Billiard Ball. “That one mustn't get through. In God's name, no! Not for anything in the world! Ever since they shot Duval he's been shitting in his pants, and I can understand why. As for me, I'd give orders, and clear ones. What do you say?”

M. Soupe always gave his approval, as long as trouble was avoided—“Oh, of course. Do your best”—so that the round one led the lanky one by the nose.

There was only one window, sheltered by an apple tree, from which the descent into the garden would be easy. There was only one sentry box from which it could easily be watched. On nights when the weather looked like it might be stormy, M. Richard placed on this spot the man he had chosen for his good eyesight, his sharp hearing, and above all because he had quite a few little things to be forgiven for: the home-guard Floquette.

“Listen carefully,” the Billiard Ball explained to him: “Three of them are leaving. The first, I don't care about. They can always catch up with him on the road. Same for the third. The second has ‘spy' written all over him. On no condition should he be allowed to pass. You can fill his ribs full of lead without a second thought. They won't give you the Military Medal for that, of course. But you will get a hundred sous out of it.”

From then on Floquette walked slowly, his loaded rifle on its sling, under that window which opened over the road to death. We would observe the sky with a sailor's solicitude. The splendor of the fiery sunsets tormented us, for they announced peaceful nights full of constellations, nights of absolute captivity, nights without possible flight, without possible death. Every evening three faces turned toward the future: Markus, erect once again, a frank smile traced on the corners of his mouth, a spark of joy—perhaps of power being born—in his eyes; Sam, his mouth twisted, seemed to mock his own fate; and, at a distance from them, at another window so as not to he seen together, the pasty-faced Rumanian, devoured by anxiety, afraid of staying, afraid of fleeing, afraid of opening a newspaper and horribly afraid each time a uniform came into the yard. Wasn't his life hanging on a thread as thin as that shiny spider's web among the branches? His letters, transmitted by a neutral embassy, were probably known to the authorities. Everything depended on the silence of a man who had been waiting for three months in a light-blue cell for them to fling open the door suddenly in the middle of the night and say to him: “Take courage …” Would he keep quiet? He was keeping quiet. Why was he keeping quiet? Why? “If, it were me, I would talk …” This thought wormed its way into every nook of his coward's soul. “He” could still make some
last-minute revelations, gain a week of stay of execution by turning in the man who was here, anxious, chewing on his well-manicured nails and saying to himself: “I would do it myself …” So, treacherous, he felt himself betrayed.

Markus was telling us how he had been knocked out one May Day in the Place de la République. When he named the streets, the squares of Paris, they were no longer names but realities. He would go to see the comrades at the Committee for Social Defense. This accepted mission lifted his revived spirits even more. His face smiling, enraptured, in the semidarkness, he at last confessed his secret to us: “Laura, I can't live without her!” And, as if this were somehow unworthy of a revolutionary, he quickly spoke of something else. Laura would write to us on his behalf, in a prearranged language. “Here is her writing …”—her illegible handwriting.

Sam, who was the strongest, besides being chosen by the group, would go over first. The Rumanian would follow, then Markus, so that the Rumanian could be helped, if necessary, in the scaling of the barbwire.

THE NEWSPAPERS INFORMED US OF LENIN
'
S ASSASSINATION. THIS TIME THE
news seemed authentic. No one had been more marked for such an end than Lenin. We assembled early, in a near-empty barracks room, more numerous than usual. Our impotence, our sense of futility, of time running out while things were being accomplished, were turning, at long last, into cold rage. We walked about, furious, hands in our pockets, brooding over our anger like animals in a zoo, like men in jail. In vain Krafft would tell us, “All revolutionaries have known times like these, these captivities, these insipid moments; this is how men are tempered, how their power is born, how they learn to be hard and to see clearly; we are under an iron heel: but we are alive and stronger than those who judge and hold us, and growing even stronger. There comes a time when they can do nothing more but kill us; and then it is too late, for our blood might be more useful spilled than in our veins …” Krafft was right, but a kind of choking fury grew in us, causing us at times to reject that truism, as if we wanted to despair, for despair meant respite, renunciation.

“We are ready.”

Ready for what? Perhaps to fight. Perhaps to die any kind of absurd or necessary death—here, by chance. Or elsewhere, because it must be so, doing rigorously, pitilessly what must be done. Perhaps to live without weariness, without turning sour—relentlessly. Perhaps to harness ourselves for years, for life, to thankless tasks, to dark struggles, to the obstinate destruction of things, to the obstinate gathering of the forces whose coming we would not see. Ready. This feeling came to us all at once, born out of a hatred so vast that it could not be expressed even in thought. From the depths of the outcasts' pit we condemned the world, the war, the law, the powerful, the rich, the liars, the corrupt, the idiots.

Fomine opened the meeting, his head lowered.

“Seems that it's true they've killed Lenin. The revolution has responded with a reign of terror. Six hundred bourgeois have been shot in Petrograd. The cost, in blood, of a few skirmishes in the Somme after which both headquarters write ‘all quiet.' I endorse the reign of terror, comrades. Let us not grieve over Lenin's blood. He did his job. The revolution must finally stand up straight, sword unsheathed, and strike.”

He became impassioned. From the back of the room, Belgians and Macedonians were staring at this tall, white-maned old man who recalled historic massacres, heads cut off in '93, red streams of the Château-d'Eau barracks in '70, and who sang the praises of terror.

Everybody wanted to speak. Words brought relief. Sonnenschein stood up, his pince-nez in his hand, his eyes misty, and said: “I endorse the terror …” The rest was lost in a hubbub of confused voices. Dmitri, coughing out his lungs, Karl and Gregor as solid as oaks, Krafft, the only one who seemed really calm, Markus, beaming, and even the puppet Alschitz, all cried out: “Terror, terror!”

A driving rain was beating against the windows. Sam remained silent, a little to one side. Old Fomine's eye found him in his corner.

“And you, Sam,” cried Fomine, “speak out if you are against, if you have doubts! We are locked up, we are in chains, we are nothing, but we are voting for terror. For or against?”

Sam answered in a hollow voice.

“For.”

And got up, bidding us farewell, with his eyes. Furtively, Markus shook hands with people, murmuring: “What luck!”

They slipped away, followed by Sonnenschein, who had been picked because of his innocuous appearance, to help them at the last minute. We prolonged the meeting. Evening had come very quickly under bursting clouds. The flaming tongues of the candles rose up in front of old Fomine, causing huge shadows to dance around us, and illuminating hands and faces frozen in an attitude of violence. We sang the “Farewell to the Dead” as at revolutionary funerals in Russia. That powerful lament, transforming masculine grief into solemn affirmation, drawing an act of faith from a farewell and an oath from tears, elevated the souls of thirty men, a few of whom were mediocre and the majority no different from most men. They were all sincere. They sang:

“Our path is the same as yours,

Like you, the prisons will destroy us …”

when a rifle shot tore through the rainstorm, the night, our song, submerging us all suddenly in a glacial silence; only the rain, the faraway howl of a watchdog could be heard; then a harsh voice: