The Case of Comrade Tulayev (22 page)

Life became normal again for Makeyev, between a silent Alia and the queen of diamonds, whom, for safety's sake, he had sent to the construction yard for the new electric plant, between the plain and the forest, where she was put in charge of handling the mail. The yard operated twenty-four hours a day. The Secretary of the Regional Committee frequently appeared there to stimulate the efforts of the elite brigades, to oversee the execution of the weekly plans in person, to receive reports from the technical personnel, to countersign the daily telegrams to the Center … He came back exhausted, under the clear stars. (Meanwhile, somewhere in the city, unknown hands, laboring in profound secrecy, obstinately cut alphabets of all dimensions from the papers, collected them, aligned them on notebook sheets: it would take at least five hundred characters for the contemplated letter. This patient labor was carried on in solitude, in silence, with every sense alert; the mutilated papers, weighted with a stone, went to the bottom of a well, for burning them would have made smoke — and where there's smoke there's fire, don't they say? The secret hands prepared the demonic alphabet, the unknown mind collected the evidence, the scattered clues, the infinitesimal elements of several hidden and unavowable certainties …)

Makeyev was planning to go to Moscow to thrash out the question of material shortages with the directors of electrification; at the same time he would inform the C.C. and the Central Executive of the progress made during the last six months in road-improvements and irrigation (thanks to cheap convict labor); perhaps this progress would compensate for the dwindling supply of skilled labor, the crisis in livestock, the poor condition of industrialized agriculture, the production slowdown in the railway workshops … With pleasure he received the brief message from the C.C. (“
Confidential. Urgent
.”) inviting him to attend a conference of regional secretaries from the Southwest. Leaving two days early, Makeyev sat in his blue sleeping-car compartment, contentedly making abstracts of the reports from the regional Economic Council. The specialists of the Central Plan Commission would find he was a man worth talking to! Endless fields of snow, dotted with ramshackle houses, fled past the windows; the wooded horizon was melancholy under the leaden sky, the light filled the white spaces with an immense expectancy. Makeyev looked at the rich black fields which an early thaw had scattered with standing pools that reflected the hurrying clouds. “Indigent Russia, opulent Russia,” he murmured, because Lenin had quoted those two lines of Nekrassov's in 1918. The Makeyevs, by working those fields, made opulence come out of indigence.

At the station in Moscow, Makeyev had no difficulty in getting a C.C. car sent for him, and it was a big American car, strangely elongated and rounded — “streamlined,” explained the chauffeur, who was dressed much like a millionaire's chauffeur in a foreign movie. Makeyev found that many things had changed for the better in the capital since he had been there seven months earlier. Life bustled through a gray transparency, over the new asphalt pavements which were relentlessly cleared of snow day in and day out. The shop-windows made a good impression. At the Central Plan Commission, in a building made of reinforced concrete, glass, and steel, and containing from two to three hundred offices, Makeyev, in accordance with his rank, was received as an extremely important person by elegant officials who wore big spectacles and suits of British cut. He found no difficulty in obtaining what he wanted: materials, additional credits, the return of a dossier to the Projects department, authority to build an additional road. How could he have known that the materials did not exist, and that all these impressive personages no longer had anything but a sort of ghostly existence, since the P.B. had just decided “in principle” upon a purge and complete reorganization of the Plan offices? Well satisfied, he became more important than ever. His plain fur coat, his plain fur cap contrasted with the careful attire of the technicians and made him look all the more the provincial builder. “We who are clearing virgin soil …” He slipped little phrases like that into the conversation, and they did not ring false.

Of the few old friends whom he tried to find the second day, none could be reached. One was ill in a suburban hospital, too far from town; telephoning to two others, he received only evasive answers. On the second occasion, Makeyev got angry. “Makeyev speaking, I tell you. Makeyev of the C.C., do you understand? I want to know where Foma is; I have a right to be told, I imagine …” The man at the other end of the wire answered, in a doubtful voice: “He has been arrested …” Arrested? Foma, Bolshevik of 1904, loyal to the general line, former member of the Central Control Commission, member of Security's special college? Makeyev gasped for breath, a spasm passed over his face, for a moment he felt stunned. What was happening now?

He decided to spend the evening alone, at the opera. Entering the great government box (once the imperial box) soon after the curtain went up, he found no one there but an old couple, sitting at the left in the first row of chairs. Makeyev discreetly greeted Popov, one of the Party's directors of conscience, an untidy little old man with a vague profile and a yellowish straggling beard. He had on a gray tunic that sagged around the pockets. His companion looked amazingly like him; it seemed to Makeyev that she barely returned his greeting and even avoided looking at him. Popov crossed his arms on the velvet of the balustrade, coughed, thrust out his lips, entirely absorbed by the performance. Makeyev sat down at the other end of the row. The empty chairs increased the distance between himself and the Popovs; even if they had sat close together, the huge box would have surrounded them with solitude. Makeyev could not make himself take an interest either in the stage or the music, though music usually intoxicated him like a drug, filling his whole being with emotion, filling his mind with disconnected images, now violent, now plaintive, filling his throat with abortive cries, with sighs or a sort of wailing. He assured himself that all was well, that it was one of the finest spectacles in the world, even though it belonged to the culture of the old regime — but we are the legitimate heirs of that culture, we have conquered it. Then, too, those dancers, those lovely dancers — why should he not desire them? (Desire was another of his ways of forgetting.)

When the intermission began, the Popovs left so discreetly that only his increased solitude in the huge box made him aware that they had gone. For a moment he stood looking at the house, brilliant with lights and evening dresses and uniforms. “Our Moscow, capital of the world.” Makeyev smiled. As he made his way to the lobby, an officer — spectacles, neat square-cut mustache, a little curved nose like an owl's beak — bowed to him most respectfully. Makeyev returned his bow, then stopped him with a gesture. The officer introduced himself:

“Captain Pakhomov, commanding the building police, happy to be of service to you, Comrade Makeyev.”

Flattered at being recognized, Makeyev felt like embracing him. His strange solitude vanished.

“Ah, so you have just arrived, Comrade Makeyev,” said Pakhomov slowly, as if he were thinking; “then you haven't seen our new scene-shifting machines, bought in New York and installed last November. You ought to take a look at them — they made Meyerhold open his eyes! Shall I expect you after the third act, to show you the way?”

Before answering, Makeyev nonchalantly inquired:

“Tell me, Captain Pakhomov — the little dancer in the green turban, the one who's so graceful — who is she?”

Pakhomov's owl face and nocturnal eyes brightened a little:

“Very talented, Comrade Makeyev — getting a great deal of notice. Paulina Ananiyeva. I'll introduce you to her in her dressing room, Comrade Makeyev — she will be very happy to meet you — oh, certainly …”

And now good riddance to you, Popov, you old moralist, you old crab — you and your antique wife who looks like a plucked turkey. What do you know about the life of strong men, builders, outdoor men, men who fight? Under floors, in cellars, rats gnaw at strange fodder — and you, you eat dossiers, complaints, circulars, theses, which the great Party throws at you in your office, and so it will go on until you are buried with greater honors than you ever knew in your miserable life! Makeyev leaned forward and almost turned his back on the disagreeable couple. Where should he take Paulina? To the Metropole bar? Paulina … nice name for a mistress. Paulina … Would she let herself be tempted tonight? Paulina … Makeyev's feeling, as he waited for the intermission, was almost blissful.

Captain Pakhomov was waiting for him at the turn in the great staircase. “First, Comrade Makeyev, I'll show you the new machines; then we'll go to see Ananiyeva — she's expecting you …”

“Splendid, splendid …”

Makeyev followed the officer through a maze of corridors, each more brightly lighted than the last. Pushing back a curtain to his left, the officer pointed to mechanics busy around a winch; young men in blue blouses were sweeping the stage; a technician appeared, pushing a little searchlight on wheels. “Fascinating, isn't it?” said the owl-faced officer. Makeyev, his head empty of everything except the expectation of a woman, said: “The magic of the theater, my dear comrade …” They went on. A metal door opened before them, closed behind them, they were in darkness. “What's this?” the officer exclaimed. “Stay where you are, just for a moment, Comrade Makeyev, I …” It was cold. The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but when a wretched little backstage bulb came on, like the light in a forsaken waiting room or in the antechamber of a dilapidated Hell, Pakhomov was no longer there; instead, several black overcoats detached themselves from the opposite wall, someone rapidly advanced on Makeyev — a thickset man with his overcoat collar turned up, his cap pulled down to his eyes, his hands in his pockets. Very close now, the voice of the unknown murmured, distinctly:

“Artyem Artyemich, we don't want any scenes. You are under arrest.”

Several overcoats surrounded him, pressed against him; skillful hands ran over him, pushed him about, fished out his revolver … Makeyev gave a violent start which almost freed him from all the hands, from all the shoulders, but they closed in, nailed him to the spot:

“We don't want any scenes, Comrade Makeyev,” the persuasive voice repeated. “Everything will be all right, I am sure — there must be some misunderstanding. Just obey orders …” Then, to the others: “No noise!”

Makeyev let himself be led, almost carried. They put on his overcoat, two men took him by the arms, others preceded and followed him, and so they walked through formless semidarkness, like a single creature clumsily moving a profusion of legs. The narrow corridor squeezed them together, they stumbled over each other. Behind a thin partition the orchestra began to play with miraculous sweetness. Somewhere in the meadows, beside a silvery lake, thousands of birds greeted the dawn, the light increased instant by instant, a song rose into it, a pure woman's voice sounded through the unearthly morning … “Easy there, watch out for the steps,” someone whispered into Makeyev's ear … and there was no more dawn, no more song, there was nothing … nothing but the cold night, a black car, the unimaginable …

Before reaching Barcelona, Ivan Kondratiev underwent several standard transformations. First he was Mr. Murray Barron, of Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A., photographer for the World Photo Press, traveling from Stockholm to Paris by way of London … He took a taxi to the Champs-Elysées, then, carrying his little brown valise, strolled about for a while between the Rue Marbeuf and the Grand Palais; he was seen to stop before the Clemenceau disguised as an old soldier who trudges along a block of stone at the corner in front of the Petit Palais. The bronze froze the old man's drive, and it was perfect: so a man walks when he is at the end of his resources, when all his strength is gone. “For how much longer has your stubbornness saved a dying world, old man? Perhaps you only bored a deeper hole in the rock for the mine that will blow it up?” — “I messed things up for the bastards for fifty years,” the man of bronze muttered bitterly. Kondratiev looked at him with secret sympathy. Two hours later Mr. Murray Barron came out of a monastic-looking house near St.-Sulpice, still carrying his brown valise but now transformed into Mr. Waldemar Laytis, Latvian citizen, on a mission to Spain from his country's Red Cross. From Toulouse an Air-France plane, flying over landscapes bathed in happy light, the rusty summits of the Pyrenees, sleeping Figueras, the hills of Catalonia tanned like a beautiful skin, carried Mr. Waldemar Laytis to Barcelona. The officer representing the International Non-Intervention Board, a meticulous Swede, must have thought that the Red Cross organizations of the several Baltic States were displaying a laudable activity in the Peninsula: Mr. Laytis was certainly the fifth or sixth delegate they had dispatched to observe the effects of bombing on open cities. Ivan Kondratiev, noticing that the officer looked rather hard at his passport, merely made a mental note that the liaison office must be overdoing the trick. At the Prat airfield a podgy colonel, wearing glasses, complimented Mr. Laytis in unctuous tones, led him to a handsome car which displayed a few elegant shot scratches, and said to the driver: “
Vaya, amigo
.” Ivan Kondratiev, emissary of a strong and victorious revolution, felt that he was entering a very sickly one.

“The situation?”

“Fair. I mean, not entirely desperate … We are counting heavily on you. A Greek ship under British colors sunk last night off the Balearic Islands: munitions, bombings, artillery fire, the usual confusion …
No importa
. Rumors of concentrations in the Ebro region.
Es todo
.”

“Internal affairs? The Anarchists? The Trotskyists?”

“The Anarchists are ready to listen to reason — probably on the way out …”