Birth of Our Power (33 page)

That head is shouting. What is it shouting?
“Vive la paix! Vive la France!”
What peace? The room is white, invaded by sky. “This one's croaking, that's for sure …” From the second floor, through the glass door, the noisy progress of a wild farandole can be seen. The door opens and there stand Maerts, Lamblin, Arthur, Jean, and others; they enter, arm in arm, joyous, but repressing a shudder …

“Baron,” says Maerts, “gotta get better! There's peace!”

“Get better, my poor fellow,” says Jean, his eyes humid, in the tone of voice in which he would have said, “better die.”

The Baron follows their more and more muddled group with his eyes. He was understood irrevocably: he no longer can feel his feet, which had been cold. His stomach is a stone. Tears gather in the corner of his eyes and roll down into his mustache.

OUR FATE, HOWEVER, WAS BEING DECIDED THOUSANDS OF LEAGUES FROM
there. Moscow was sleeping the tense and heavy sleep of cities where famine, fear, energy, and the unknown are at work. In a large apartment in the Hotel Metropole, furnished with Louis XVI consoles, glass-front cupboards for porcelains—now stuffed with files—and gilded chairs loaded down with papers, in which the disorder reigning was that of an old and slightly eccentric scholar, an old emigré, grizzled and hunchbacked, with the delicate gestures of a numismatist, was wearily moving papers around on his mahogany Empire desk ornamented at the corners by gilded lions' heads. There were newspapers brought by courier from the borders, all of which had become battlefields, some of them marked with checks in red pencil, American books, tracts published in Paris by the Committee for the Third International, copies of a review from Geneva, decrees reproduced by typewriter, sealed envelopes bearing the stamp of the Central Committee and sheets of notepaper carrying only a few words followed by initials: “Reject the Swedish proposal,” or “Please have some canned foods given to Mr. Hastings.” And rough drafts of diplomatic notes on the backs of sheets from desk calendars … This particular paper had almost got lost between a glass of tea, the erotic correspondence (devoid of interest) seized on the person of a spy, and a stack of papers to be filed. If it had been lost, would not our fates have been lost too for a few days, enough for the rebellion or the epidemic? The old emigré read it with his habitual attention, the attention of an extremely conscientious functionary, interrupting his reading for a sip of detestable K
INGDOM OF
D
ENMARK
tea (followed by an involuntary grimace: that lowest grade tea in hard tablets sent by the Kouznetzov brothers from Central Asia … ). Since it was six in the morning and this man was fighting against such great fatigue that his eyelids drooped irresistibly, heavy with sleep, his mind was no longer
able to master the words entirely. He thought: “Elsinore … ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …' Who said that?” And, his eyes completely shut, remembered: “Marcellus, in the first act.”
Red Cross.
What's this business all about? Another intercession for some executed bankers? This probability added weight to his fatigue. As if he could do anything about it! There was nothing to do, after all, but send an evasive answer … “The projected exchange of hostages could take place on the Finnish border …” Suddenly the man felt completely awake. Two lists of names were annexed to the letter. Generals, colonels, captains, ah! that little lieutenant who so stupidly let himself get arrested in that Yaroslav bridge business … and that general who was seen trembling right after the attempted assassination, when everyone still thought Lenin was dying, that general who said that “personally he had nothing to do with it …” Personally, by God! What a mess on this desk where a paper of such importance had been lost for two days. (“… I need a good secretary, but where can I find one?” Eyelids heavy.) Lets look at the other list.
Civilian Internees:
Potapenko, mechanic; Krafft, chemist; Fomine, commercial traveler; Levine, tailor, and his family, seven persons; Sonnenschein … Not a single recognizable name: no doubt, as usual, fifty per cent scoundrels and adventurers. That will give us a little more: a drop in the ocean … This business must be expedited rapidly. Let's get rid of these generals whose precious skins are difficult to preserve in periods of plebeian terrorism …

Thus the exchange of hostages was decided, signed two days later. The city lay under a blue haze, brightened slightly by a layer of snow covering all things. The façade and the white columns a the Grand Theater looked out on a huge deserted square where the night lay over the whiteness, twinkling in places, without smothering it. A little black stone lay encrusted there in a dead flowerbed; one might have thought it the tip of a grotesque rock flowering there above the earth in the middle of the city. It was in fact a block of granite, the color of old blood, of rust and coral, bearing these words:

This

is the first stone

of the monument to be raised

to

KARL MARX

leader and guide of the proletariat

All of us did not leave. This sudden denouement disconcerted Fomine, who had been living in Paris for thirty years and who, for twelve years, had made a nook for himself in Fontenay-aux-Roses, peopled with voices and works dedicated to the revolution. The Revolution of '89 gave his study its atmosphere. An autograph of Collot d'Herbois, under glass, hung alongside The Incorruptible's profile, engraved, on the occasion of the Festivals of Reason, by a sycophant artist; a precious copy of Baboeuf's
Tribune of the People,
dating from the good period—not the one when the Egalitarian was a Thermidorian but the one when he was repenting for having been one—was placed under beveled glass in one of the corners of the worktable. Memoirs of that period, along with Taine and Jaurès, filled a whole glassed-in cupboard; Marx and the Russians held another; Kropotkin and Sorel, the anarchists and syndicalists, a third. “All the explosives which will blow up the modern world are stored within these three panels,” Fomine would sometimes say. These three libraries looked out through a large bay window over the garden, between the thickets and the lilacs. The old man used to return there after his errands in Paris, disgusted by the world, pleased by his successful deals, despising himself a little for having pulled them off successfully, but looking forward with pleasure to the profits he had made (he had two ways of announcing that he was an insurance salesman: one full of dignity and spirit, with the squaring of the shoulders and the brow of a businessman confident of overcoming all objections—and the other, toneless, without any pride, in front of certain comrades). Back in his “lair” he recovered his real face, that of an exile who will never give in; his real step (muffled by slippers), that of a leader of men whose time is past or has not yet arrived; his real thoughts, the thoughts of a saboteur—and his confidence in the future. He trusted serenely in history, that abstract divinity which leads peoples, prosperous or impoverished, from catastrophes to revolutions; in good books; in correct theories; in comrades, whoever they might be, his hand forever open with welcome or aid, not in the least a dupe of their pettinesses, their stupidities and dishonesties, but certain that everything is settled in the long run and that the future makes its way, making use of petty rascals and thoroughgoing scoundrels, idiots and men of intelligence, cowards and brave men, errors and truth, all at the same time. They would come to ask him for articles (signed, out of prudence, with pseudonyms), addresses, advice, money. The Armistice signed, he had expectations of going back to
his “old lady” with whom, for a third of a century, he had been living “in free union,” so that the whole neighborhood believed they were legally married. If the revolution should need his head one day, all right, on Sansom-Deibler's machine or in any other way
¹⁰
—“it's still good for taking, my head!”—he was ready at any moment (“after all it's not my library that would weigh in
that
balance!”)—but to speak the truth, though he didn't say so, he no longer felt strong enough to leave his lair forever and to plunge into the unknown at an age when Bakunin himself was retiring. In order to justify himself in front of us he searched for contradictory reasons; he would be more useful by staying. We voted our approval, for everyone does his task in his place, as long as he really wants to. Sam murmured with an equivocal smile:

“You will be the repository of our illusions.”

That question settled, Fomine considered us with a new sadness. Suddenly he felt himself old, bothered again by a rheumatic ache in the knee; he was on the point of sending his library, Fontenay-aux-Roses and the rest, to the Devil. “Well, too bad,” he said to himself. “My old lady can leave too …” But the thought that the two of them would be plunging into the great storm of clubs, “days” in the squares, red flags, firing squads—he, all white and suffering from his knee; she, hunched, enslaved for such a long time under the drudgeries of housework—was even worse than the pain of watching us leave.

Krafft, without any explanation, announced that he was staying too.

“Take me along!” demanded Faustin II.

He had been coughing for several days. His handsome vigor had suddenly left him. Slightly stooped, his shoulder blades sticking out under an old lightweight spring overcoat which was too short and too tight and which he couldn't even button, he went up and down the stairways leaning on the banister; his hands, whose fingers were terminated by nails that were almost white, seemed to have faded. He hardly laughed any more: and when he did laugh, his softened lips parted over anemic gums which were tinted with the nasty bluish pink of disease. He was still holding up, however, The announcement of our departure caused him a strange sorrow, which he only realized himself while watching us pack our bags, when the corners of the room were empty and when it became clear to him, with inexorable clarity, that twenty men whom
he knew well, with whom he had looked after the sick, taken the dying to the Morgue, survived, would no longer be there in a few hours.

He sat down on the partition next to Sonnenschein, who was leaving him his blankets, remained there without speaking, his hands clasped on his knees, his jaw hanging, like an old man. “Don't worry about it,” Sonnenschein said to him. “The war is over. Soon you'll be free.”

He replied only after a long moment of silence.

“… I don't need much.”

And he stared at us with a discouraged smile, as vulnerable as a child. How like that other Faustin he seemed to me at that moment: his unknown double, that soldier who was doubtless long buried in some lousy corner of Champagne! It was really the same expression as that of a man who has a mistake to be forgiven for—but what mistake he didn't know himself?—and would like to lie, perhaps to lie to himself, but feels that it's useless.

“Farewell, Faustin.”

We set off one evening, over dark roads, twenty men flanked by gendarmes and home guards. We went along with such a lively step that we dragged our escort behind, striking the hard earth with our hobnailed boots. The whole camp had given out a shout when they saw us go. We were leaving its misery surrounded by barbwire; we were entering the night, going toward a distant conflagration. The camp cheered us; clusters of hands stretched out toward us, the bad, the vile and the unclean along with the others. Now we were a troop on the march, projected toward a goal thousands of miles distant, but one already strong with an immense élan, for the whole past was but an élan, and the very earth, stuffed with dead men, seemed to rebound under our feet like a springboard …

Some policemen in plain clothes took charge of us in a small railroad station. We felt singularly free and proud, still captives, but from now on following our own road: that road toward the great victory of our people … We traveled in second-class coaches. Our thinness and our shabby belongings contrasted with the luxury of the blue compartments and the well-dressed bulk of the gentlemen—more suspicious than we—who guarded the doors at stops while chatting agreeably with us. Dust of the vanquished that we were, leftovers from struggles without glory—for it is the masters who give out the glory—here it was
that we answered for the very precious existence of generals destined for all times to judge us; here it was that they answered for us, hostages themselves, before the revolution, our victory.

“What do you say about it, Sam?”

“I say that it's beginning too well. I hardly believe it.”

“I say it's about time!” murmured Dmitri, standing at the coach window, so thin that we wondered whether he would last out the voyage.

The train passed through a town at the Front. Gutted houses opened their dead insides, papered with bright wallpaper, to the wind. Blackened timbers lay all about a station whose metal roof supports were twisted and ripped apart. We stopped for a moment in a sort of dismal suburb: the white wooden crosses filled the landscape.