The Case of Comrade Tulayev (18 page)

About this period Makeyev thought of his life for the first time. It was as if he had started talking with himself — and he almost laughed, it was funny — he was making a fool of himself! But the words that arranged themselves in his mind were so serious that they killed his laughter and made him screw up his face like a man who tries to raise a weight too heavy for his muscles. He told himself that he must
get away, carry grenades under his greatcoat, get back to his village, set fire to the manor house, take the land
. Where did he hit on the idea of fire? The forest sometimes catches fire in summer, no one knows how. Villages burn and no one knows where the fire started. The idea of the fire made him think further. A shame, of course, to burn down the beautiful manor house, it could be used for — what? What could it be made into for the peasants? To have the clodhoppers in it themselves — no, that would never do … Burn the nest and you drive away the birds. Burn the manorial nest, and a trench full of terror and fire would separate past from present, he would be an incendiary, and incendiaries go to jail or the gallows, so we must be the stronger — but this was beyond Makeyev's reasoning ability, he felt these things rather than thought them. He set out alone, leaving the louse-infested trench by way of the latrines. In the train he found himself with men like himself, who had set off like himself; when he saw them his heart filled with strength. But he told them nothing, because silence made him strong. The manor house went up in flames. A troop of Cossacks rode through the green roads toward the peasant uprising: wasps buzzed around their horses' sweating flanks; mottled butterflies fled before the mingled stench of human sweat and horse sweat. Before they reached the offending village, Akimovka near Kliuchevo-the-Spring, telegrams mysteriously reached the district, spreading good news: “Decree concerning the seizure of lands,” signed, “The People's Commissars.” The Cossacks had the news from a white-haired old man who popped out from among the roadside shrubbery, under the silver-scaled birches. “It's the law, my lads, the law, you can't do anything about it. It's the law.” The land, the land, the law! — there was an astonished murmuring among the Cossacks, and they began to deliberate. The stupefied butterflies settled in the grass, while the troop, restrained by the invisible decree, halted, not knowing whether to go forward or back. What land? Whose was the land? The landlords'? Ours? Whose? Whose? The amazed officer suddenly felt afraid of his men; but no one thought of stopping him from escaping. In Akimovka's single street, where the mud-daubed log houses leaned each its own way in the center of a little green enclosure, heavy-breasted women crossed themselves. This time there could be no mistake — the days of Antichrist were really come! Makeyev, who still clung to his beltload of grenades, came out onto the stairs of his house, a ruinous isba with a leaky roof, and shouted to the old witches to shut up, God damn it, or they would soon see, God damn it — his face growing more and more crimson … The first assembly of the poor peasants of the district elected him president of its Executive Committee. The first DECREED which he dictated to his scribe (who had been clerk to the district justice of peace) ordered that any woman who spoke of Antichrist in public should be whipped; and the text of it, written in a round hand, was posted in the main street.

Makeyev began a rather dizzying career. He became Artyem Artyemich, president of the Executive, without exactly knowing what the Executive was, but with eyes that were deeply set under arching brows, shaven head, shirt freed of vermin, and, in his soul, a will as tough as knotted roots in a rock crevice. He had people who regretted the former police turned out of their houses; other police, who were sent into the district, he had arrested, and that was the last that was seen of them. People said that he was just. He repeated the word from the depths of his being, with a subdued fire in his eyes: Just. If he had had time to watch himself live, he would have been astonished by a new discovery. Just as the faculty of reason had suddenly revealed itself to him so that he could seize the land, another more obscure faculty, which sprung inexplicably to life in his muscles, his neck, his viscera, led him, roused him, strengthened him. He did not know its name. Intellectuals would have called it will. Before he learned to say
It is my will
, which was not until several years later when he had grown accustomed to addressing assemblies, he instinctively knew what he had to do in order to obtain, dominate, order, succeed, then feel a calm content almost as good as that which comes after possessing a woman. He rarely spoke in the first person, preferring to say
We
. It is not my will, it is our will, brothers. His first speeches were to Red soldiers in a freight car; his voice had to rise above the rattle and clank of the moving train. His faculty of comprehension grew from event to event, by successive illuminations. He saw causes, probable effects, people's motives, he sensed how to act and react; he had a hard time reducing it all to words in his mind, and then reducing the words to ideas and memories, and he never wholly succeeded.

The Whites invaded the district. The Makeyevs met with short shrift from these gentry, who hanged them as soon as they captured them, pinning insulting inscriptions on their chests:
Brigand
or
Bolshevik
or both together. Makeyev managed to join comrades in the woods, seized a train with them, left it at a steppe city which greatly delighted him, for it was the first large city he had ever seen and it lived pleasantly under a torrid sun. In the market big juicy melons were sold for a few kopecks. Camels paced slowly through the sandy streets. A few miles from the city, Makeyev shot down so many white-turbaned horsemen that he was made a deputy chief. A little later, in '19, he joined the Party. The meeting was held around a fire in the open fields, under glittering stars. The fifteen Party members were grouped around the Bureau of Three, and the Three crouched in the firelight, with notebooks on their knees. After the report on the international situation, given in a harsh voice which imparted an Asiatic flavor to strange European names — Cle-mansso, Loy-Djorje, Guermania, Liebkneckt — Commissar Kasparov asked if anyone raised any objection to the admission of candidate Makeyev, Artyem Artyemiyevich, into the Party of the Proletarian Revolution? “Stand up, Makeyev,” he said imperiously. Makeyev was already on his feet, straight as a ramrod in the red firelight, blinded by it and by all the eyes that were fixed on him at this moment of consecration, blinded too by a rain of stars, though the stars were motionless … “Peasant, son of working peasants …” “Son of landless peasants!” Makeyev proudly corrected. Several voices approved his membership. “Adopted,” said the Commissar.

At Perekop, when, to win the final battle in the accursed war, they had to enter the treacherous lagoon of Sivash and march through it in water up to their waists, up to their shoulders in the worst places — and what awaited them ten paces ahead, if not the end? — Makeyev, Deputy Commissar with the Fourth Battalion, had more than one fierce struggle to save his life from his own fear or his own fury. What deadly holes might lie under that water which spread so dazzlingly under the white dawn? Had they not been betrayed by some staff technician? Jaws clenched, trembling all over, but resolute and cool to the point of insanity, he held his rifle above his head at arm's length, setting the example. He was the first out of the lagoon; the first to climb a sand dune, to lie down, feeling the sand warm against his belly, to aim and begin firing from ambush on a group of men, taken by surprise from the rear, whom he distinctly saw scurrying around a small fieldpiece.… On the evening of the exhausting victory, an officer dressed in new khaki stood on the same fieldpiece to read the troop a message from the Komandarm (Army Commander), to which Makeyev did not listen because his back was broken with stooping and his eyes gummy with sleep. Toward the end of it, however, the harsh rhythm of certain words penetrated his brain: “Who is the brave combatant of the glorious Steppes Division who …” Mechanically, Makeyev too asked himself who the brave combatant might be and what he might have done, but to hell with him and with all these ceremonies because I'll die if I don't get some sleep, I'm done in. At that moment Commissar Kasparov looked at Makeyev so intently that Makeyev thought: “I must be doing something wrong. I must look as if I were drunk,” and he made an immense effort to keep his eyes from closing. Kasparov called:

“Makeyev!”

And Makeyev staggered from the ranks, amid a murmur: “It's him, him, him, Artyemich!” The Artyomka whom the village girls once despised entered into glory covered to the neck with dried mud, drunk with weariness, wanting nothing in the world but a bit of grass or straw to lie down on. The officer kissed him on the mouth. The officer's chin was stubbly, he smelled of raw onion and dried sweat and horse. Then, for a brief instant, they looked at each other through a fog, as two exhausted horses reconnoiter each other. Their eyes were wet. And Makeyev came to, as he recognized the partisan of the Urals, the victor of Krasni-yar, the victor of Ufa, the man who turned the most desperate of retreats, Blücher. “Comrade Blücher,” he said thickly, “I'm … I'm glad to see you … You … You're a man, you are …” It seemed to him that Blücher was reeling with sleep, like himself. “You too,” Blücher answered with a smile, “you're a man, all right … Come and drink some tea with me tomorrow morning, at Division Headquarters.” Blücher had a tanned face, with deep perpendicular lines and heavy pockets under the eyes. That day was the beginning of their friendship, a friendship between men of the same stuff who saw each other for a brief hour twice a year, in camps, at ceremonies, at the great Party conferences.

In 1922, Makeyev returned to Akimovka in a jolting Ford marked with the initials of the C.C. of the C.P.(b.) of the R.S.F.S.R. The village children surrounded the car. For some seconds Makeyev stared at them with a terrible intensity of emotion: really, he was looking for himself among them, but too awkwardly to recognize how much several of them resembled him. He threw them his whole stock of sugar and change, patted the cheeks of the little girls who were timid and hung back, joked with the women, went to bed with the merriest one — she had full breasts, big eyes, and big teeth — and installed himself, as Party organizing secretary for the district, in the best house. “What a backward place!” he said. “We have to begin at the very beginning. Not a ray of light!” Sent from Akimovka to eastern Siberia to preside over a regional Executive. Elected an alternate member of the C.C. the year after the death of Vladimir Ilich … Each year new distinctions were added to the service record in his personal dossier as a member of the Party in the most responsible category. Honestly, patiently, with sure tread, he climbed the rungs of power. Meanwhile, as he lost all distinct memories of his wretched childhood and adolescence, of his life of humiliations during the war, of a past without pride and without power, he began to feel himself superior to everyone with whom he came into contact — always excepting men whom the C.C. had appointed to positions of greater power. These he venerated, with no jealousy, as creatures of a nature that was not yet his but which was bound to be his some day. He felt himself, like them, possessed of a legitimate authority, integrated into the dictatorship of the proletariat like a good steel screw set in its proper place in some admirable, supple, and complex machine.

As Secretary of the regional Committee, Makeyev had governed Kurgansk (both the city and the district) for a number of years, with the proud but unspoken thought of giving it his name: Makeyevgorod or Makeyevgrad — why not? The simplest form — Makeyevo — reminded him too much of peasant speech. The proposal, broached in the lobbies of a regional Party conference, was about to pass — by unanimous vote, according to custom — when, suddenly doubtful, Makeyev himself changed his mind at the last moment. “All the credit for my work,” he cried from the platform, under the huge picture of Lenin, “belongs to the Party. The Party has made me, the Party has done all.” Applause. But already Makeyev was terrified by the thought that his words might be construed as containing unfortunate allusions to the members of the Political Bureau. An hour later, he mounted the platform again, having meanwhile run through the last two issues of
The Bolshevik
, the magazine devoted to theory, where he found several phrases which he distributed to his audience, pounding them home with short jabs of his fists. “The highest personification of the Party is our great, our inspired Chief. I propose that we give his glorious name to the new school we are about to build!” His audience applauded confidently, as they would confidently have voted for Makeyevgrad, Makeyevo, or Makeyev City. He came down from the platform wiping his forehead, glad that he had been wise enough to refuse fame for the moment. It would come. His name would be on maps, among the blue curves of rivers, the green blotches of forest, the crosshatched hills, the sinuous black railroad line. For he had faith in himself as he had faith in the triumph of Socialism — and doubtless it was the same faith.

In this present, which was the only reality, he no longer distinguished between himself and the country which — as big as centuries-old England — lies three quarters in Europe and one quarter in an Asia of plains and deserts still furrowed by caravan routes. A country without a history: the Khazars had passed that way in the fifth century on their little long-haired horses, as the Scythians had passed that way centuries before them, to found an empire on the Volga. Where did they come from? Who were they? Came too the Pechenegs, Genghis Khan's horsemen, Kulagu Khan's archers, the Golden Horde's slant-eyed administrators and methodical headsmen, the Nogai Tatars. Plain upon plain — migrations vanished in them as water vanishes in sand. Of that immemorial legend, Makeyev knew only a few names, a few scenes; but he knew and loved horses as the Pechenegs and the Nogai did, like them he understood the flight of birds, like them he could find his way through blizzards by signs which men of other races could not discern. If by some miracle the weapon of past centuries, a bow, had been placed in his hands, he could have used it as skillfully as the divers unknown tribes whom that soil had nourished, who had died upon it and been absorbed into it … “All is ours!” he said, sincerely, at public meetings of the Railwaymen's Club, and he could easily have substituted “All is mine,” since he was only vaguely aware where “I” ended and “we” began. (The “I” belongs to the Party, the “I” is of value only inasmuch as, through the Party, it incarnates the new collectivity; yet, since it incarnates it powerfully and consciously, the “I,” in the name of the “we,” possesses the world.) Makeyev could not have worked it out theoretically. In practice, he never felt the slightest doubt. “I have forty thousand head of sheep in the Tatarovka district this year!” he cried happily at the regional Production conference. “Next year I shall have three brickworks operating. I told the Plan Commission: ‘Comrade, you must give me three hundred horses before fall — or you'll hold up the plan for the year! You want to put my only electric power station under the Center? Not if I can stop you, it's mine, I'll use every measure, the C.C. will decide.”' (Instead of “measure” he said “resource,” or rather he thought he was saying “resource” but he actually said “recourse.”)