Birth of Our Power (36 page)

Why it's Fleischmann! Of course!

He has hardly changed, only his clothing: black leather, worn out at the elbows and pockets, the jacket pockets stuffed full, as in Paris. He is still wearing his striped trousers, he has the same look of a preoccupied old night bird …

“Greetings. How are you? A letter for you sent through the Danish Red Cross. I've been here six months already. I've just come back from the Front. We took Riga. I hope it holds! Where is Potapenko!”

“Here I am,” said Sam, appearing. “Hello.”

Fleischmann shakes hands with him perfunctorily, staring at the others—He takes a stack of lodging papers out of his pocket. There. There. “Potapenko, you come with me; I have a car. Let's go.”

“See you later,” Sam told us.

THE AUTO, AN OLD FORD WITH A GRAY CANVAS TOP AND ISINGLASS WINDOWS
had probably not been washed since an apprentice drove it to the Soviet of the Second District saying: “The boss has run out. I am nationalizing the machine. I place it in the service of the revolution.” (Which was, by the way, a good way of not having to leave for the Front.) Fleischmann opened the door for Sam. There was already someone in the car.

“What, Fleischmann, you're not coming?”

“No. I'll meet you later. This comrade will drive you.”

The door slams; he moves off, in such a hurry that he doesn't say good-by. The auto rolls over the snow with a clanging of hardware and wild backfires.

“So what kind of gas do you use?” Sam asks his neighbor, to break the ice.

“Whatever kind we have,” grumbles the other man.

All Sam can see of him is a long, regular profile and a clear complexion. Probably a Lett. The isinglass sheets jumble the streets together, all alike under the snow with their closed store fronts and shop windows full of spidery bullet holes. The machine bounces, pants, and pitches through the ruts of hardened snow. Sam, overcome by the cold, wishes he could shake off this fogginess. Carelessly, but with a secret anxiety, he asks his companion:

“Where are we going?”

“Here we are.”

Through the half-open door, the Lett holds out his pass. A triangular bayonet scratches against the isinglass. The Ford turns into a narrow little courtyard where there is nothing but a broken-down truck, covered with snow.

“To the rear, on the right,” says the Lett.

Sam moves ahead, with the man behind him, strangely troubled. A typewriter is crackling somewhere. The narrow corridors, intersected by sharp corners, are deserted, badly illuminated by feeble electric lights. They form a labyrinth; you go down one flight of stairs only to climb another. A woman with her hair cut short on the back of her neck passes by very rapidly, carrying some blue files. Finally a rather large waiting room opens up, poorly lighted by an electric bulb covered with flyspecks, hanging, shadeless, from a huge chandelier. Some worn blotters, covered with those mechanical drawings that preoccupied people put on paper with such childish attention, are lying about on tables. Sam collapses into a green leather couch, whose arms are supported by naiads carved in oak. The broken springs squeak; the leather is cracked. Opposite, a double door.

“Well?” Sam hesitantly asks at last of the Lett, who, sitting crosswise on a fluted chair of gilded wood, has pulled a crust of black bread out of his pocket and is getting ready to have supper.

“Wait,” says the Lett in a low voice.

Sam comes rapidly to his feet.

“Come on now. What is this? Am I under arrest?”

“Not so loud,” says the Lett. “I don't know anything about it.”

Sam flops down on the couch again. The fogginess, the silence, the presence of this man whose regular chewing is all he can hear, the dilapidation of this ruined former salon, slowly fill him with a foreboding.

Finally one of the leaves of the door at the rear opens, and someone calls:

“Potapenko.”

Sam enters like an automaton powered by a spring. An enormous fear possesses him, he feels an indistinct anxiety in his chest, his stomach, his bones, and a tightness in his skull. Through a sort of foggy glass he can see three austere faces turned toward him: a dry old woman with grizzled hair gathered in a bun, an ageless man with a bulldog face who seems to be struggling with great effort against sleep, a big tall fellow with ruffled hair perched on the window sill in a cloud of smoke. The latter is the only one in uniform: bristling with braids, a huge red and gold insignia plastered across the right-hand pocket of his tunic. The tired bulldog, having puffed his sagging cheeks full of air, interrogates:

“How much a month did they pay you for your services,
Le Matois?”

Potapenko, feeling the triple stare fixed on him, does not flinch, in spite of the shudder which passes from the small of his back to his
throat. Behind these men, on a mahogany console, a gilded Empire clock marks the time: 11:20.
Cupid and Psyche …
Above, a portrait of Lenin. Potapenko takes a deep breath.

“I don't understand.”

“We don't have any time to waste,” resumes the bulldog, unmoved; and his eyelids droop shut, in spite of himself (he hasn't slept for twenty hours). “Embassy Secretary Droujin used to send you eighty rubles a month from Washington. On June 27, 1913, Police Captain Kügel, on mission; raised your salary to one hundred rubles a month. Here is the note written in his hand: ‘A good, conscientious agent who knows emigré circles extremely well …' You thanked him by letter on July 4. Here is your letter.” (His eyes are now entirely closed, he feels his head ready to fall down over agent
Le Matois
” blue dossier.) “Do you have any statement to make to us?”

Everything staggers around the dumb struck man standing there. This little room seems to be pitching like a cabin aboard the
Andros.
Everything is finished. He nods No.

“Why did you return?” asks the woman with the smoothed-back hair whom you might mistake for an old governess in a great house.

He answers in a whisper, surprised by his own answer because it comes from deep within him:

“I couldn't live otherwise.”

“Is that all?”

“That's all.”

“Go.”

All at once Sam feels curiously lightheaded. He recovers his slightly twisted, ironical smile. He makes a sign to the tousled-haired smoker, a Georgian or Turkistani with a ravenous profile: “A cigarette?” The colorful box bears a woman's name:
Ira.
Diminutive:
Irotchka
… She would be a tall, auburn-haired girl …

Sam is gone. The bulldog places a blank form on the table in front of him: “Your opinion, Arkadi: on the debit side?”—“On the debit side.”—“Yours, Maria Pavlovna?”

“… Naturally.” Four lines in an uneven handwriting, signed forcefully, run across the form. “What's next, Arkadi?”—“That business at the Whal factory …”

Sam found the waiting room empty. The other door open … Open! The narrow corridor is empty. He moves forward, on tiptoe, tense all over, unthinking, raised up by a senseless hope …” Where are you
going?” Where has he come from, that damned Lett? The magic thread snaps …

“To the bathroom.”

“In the corner on the right.”

This boxlike room smells of urine. The electricity fills it with a feeble light. Having pulled the cord, Sam feels himself sinking. His elbow against the wall, his face in the hollow of his arm, he bites into the cloth to keep from sobbing. No more salvation, no more hope, no more anything. Ira.
Irotchka.
No one. No one will know that this sharp-featured man is there, like a terrified child, in complete collapse …

The Lett has heard nothing. Sam reappears, aged, thinned in four minutes, but straight, hard. As he is about to retrace his steps, the Lett says:

“Don't bother. Pass this way.”

“Where are we going?”

The Lett answers with terrible solicitude:

“Please be patient a few moments longer.”

These stifling corridors are like the galleries of an underground city. A door, at the bottom of a stairway, and then the good feeling of the cold fresh air right on one's face, the soft crackling of the snow, glimmering with silver flakes, under the feet. It is a little courtyard between tall buildings with black windows, like a mineshaft, but crudely illuminated by an electric bulb. Some stars shine high above. Sam, as if he knew this road which no one ever travels twice, moves toward a high rectangular pile of logs covered with snow. The trampled snow has taken on a brown tinge here; it gives off a stale odor. Some birch chips glisten on the edge of the bark, sliced off with an ax. The ax … Here they use a Nagan revolver, made in Seraing. Sam closes his eyes, shuddering. Someone comes up behind him. It must be 11:30.

THE CENTRAL OFFICE OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND REFUGEES WOULD ONLY AGREE
to lodge us, in its barracks where typhus was raging, for a few days, for Circular 3499 of the Council of Peoples' Commissars of the Northern Commune had just limited its prerogatives. They advised us to address ourselves, to simplify the formalities, to the Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Soviet. This Secretariat directed us—Sonnenschein and myself, who had taken charge of securing housing for the families as rapidly as possible—to the Repatriation Service of the Commissariat for Social Aid. From this Commissariat we obtained an imperative directive (two signatures and a seal on paper with a rubber-stamped letterhead, and crosswise, in huge letters, underlined in blue pencil:
“URGENT!”
… ) to the Housing Subsection of the Soviet for the Second District. This Soviet had just moved out of a building where the firewood had been used up and into another one where there was still some left; their offices occupied several luxurious apartments which looked as if they had been visited by a tornado the day before. Not only had the Housing Subsection got lost in the process of moving, but its leader (who, according to one version, had gone off to the front in the latest draft call, known as the Five Hundreds, or according to another, been arrested while returning from the country with a sack of flour in spite of the prohibition on transporting foodstuffs individually) had disappeared several days ago. Night was falling and we were dead with fatigue when a typist—seated before her machine smoking, in a delicious pink boudoir, between rolls of carpeting stamped with the seal of the Extraordinary Commission and rifles stacked against an Empire commode—dissipated our last hopes.

“It's always like that with
them,”
she said.

Slowly, with an inexperienced finger, on the reverse side of a bill of lading of the firm V.I. Kozmine-Kataev and Son, Wholesale Grain Dealers, she typed the words “Housing Order.” And, in a nasty voice:

“That's how it is. I type out orders and there is no housing. The whole city is empty and sacked and there is no housing! Do you think that this can go on much longer?”

We had already visited a half-dozen institutions, covered miles through the snow, stomachs empty, through silent streets where the rare passers-by dragged their feet, some carrying sacks, others their meager dinners in little greasy pots. Already, in a few hours, we had learned more about the revolution than in many long meditations. And it had appeared to us under aspects very different from those suggested by our imagination, shaped by legend and by history, which is very close to legend. We had been thinking of the squares transformed into tumultuous forums, of the excited clubs of '92; of the blossoming of many little journals, each crying out its own solution, its system, its fantasy; of the great “days” of the Soviets, like Conventions. In the language, in the slogans posted everywhere, in the only two newspapers published, among the men, we discovered one enormous uniformity of a single way of thinking, imperious, almost despotic, but supreme, terribly true, made flesh and blood at each moment through action. We found not the passionate mobs going forward under new flags to struggles begun anew each day in tragic and fruitful confusions, but a sort of vast administration, an army, a machine in which the most burning energies and the clearest intelligences were cold) integrated and which performed its task inexorably. And that task was to strain ceaselessly; for commonplace, often invisible achievements, with forces which, each day, seemed to be the last; to live and to persevere day after day; it was also to make an exhausted country, on the point of falling back into inertia, rise, above itself; it was, finally to resist and to conquer everywhere, at every moment, transcending all logic.

We had glimpsed that vast city—not at all dead, but savagely turned in on itself, in the terrible cold, the silence, the hate, the will to live, the will to conquer; that city divided by broad rectilinear perspectives at the end of which you could see the dull, frozen glint of golden spires that made you think of elegant swords … We were beginning to understand the faces of its empty white streets, lined with closed or shattered shop windows.

The silence of the houses, the emptiness of the straight avenues no longer distressed us. We knew that within all those glacial houses, in the depths of their souls, they were burning bushes of anger, of fury, of perfidy; that the ground was mined everywhere under our feet; that people were waiting—unatonable vengeances slowly ripening in brains debilitated by famine and terror—for the uprising brought on
by hunger or the onslaught of the Finns, implacable wolf hunters who would massacre us like wolves; that the workers' quarters were being slowly drained of their living strength by the Army, the supply services, the State; that the dregs were rising and overflowing around the men of energy and truth: a swarm of adventurers, profiteers, speculators; the slow conquest of the factories by those without faith or devotion; that there were only enough foodstuffs for three days, not enough munitions for more than twenty-four hours of combat if the Finnish invasion took place, only enough combustibles—some wood cut last week—for five days on the Moscow railway …