The Case of Comrade Tulayev (31 page)

“Yes … No, it's nothing, I'm awake … Go on.”

“Those who owed you the most, and who were consequently in the greatest danger, spoke of you with the greatest treachery … They asked themselves if the discreet C.P. orator was not setting a trap for them. It was pitiful. I got up on the platform, like the others, without much idea of what I was going to say, I began like everyone else with empty phrases about the Party's vigilance. A hundred asphyxiated faces looked up at me, openmouthed; they impressed me as slimy and dried up, asleep and vicious, distorted by colic. The Bureau dozed on, what I might say to denounce you interested no one, it was an old story that wouldn't save me; and no one was thinking of anything but himself. And I found myself absolutely calm again, my friend, I had a tremendous desire to joke, I felt that my voice was clear and assured, I saw gelatinous faces moving feebly, I was beginning to make them uneasy. I calmly said unheard-of things, which froze the audience, the Bureau, the man from the Central Committee. (He was taking notes as fast as he could, he would have liked to sink into the ground.) I said that mistakes, under our overwhelming load of work, were inevitable, that I had known you for twelve years, that you were loyal, that you lived only for the Party and that everyone knew it, that we had very few men like you and a great many rats … The chill that rose around me might have come from the Great Ice Barrier. At the back of the room a strangled voice cried: ‘Shame!' It woke the terror-stricken ghosts: ‘Shame!' — ‘Shame on
you
,' I said, stepping down from the platform, and I added: ‘You are fools if you think you're any better off than I am!' I walked the whole length of the room. They were all afraid I would come and sit down beside them, they shrank into their chairs as I approached — every one of my colleagues. I went out to the buffet, smoked a cigarette, and flirted with the waitress. I was satisfied, and I was trembling all over … I was arrested the next morning.”

“Yes, yes,” said Erchov vaguely. “What were you going to say about my wife?”

“Valia? She had just written to the cell Bureau to say that she wanted a divorce … That she wanted to wash away the involuntary dishonor of having, unknowingly, been the wife of an enemy of the people … And so forth … You know the formulas. And she was right, she wanted to live, Valia did.”

“It doesn't matter.”

In a lower voice, Erchov added:

“Perhaps she was right … What has become of her?”

Ricciotti made a vague gesture: “I have no idea … In Kamchatka, I suppose … Or the Altai …”

“And now?”

Through their weariness, they looked at each other, and the colorless daylight revealed in each of them the same bleak astonishment, the same stricken and simple calm.

“Now,” Ricciotti answered, “it is time to give in, Maximka. Resistance serves no purpose … you know that better than anyone. You can force yourself to suffer the tortures of the damned, but the end will be the same, and furthermore it will be useless. Give in, I tell you.”

“Give in to what? Admit that I am an enemy of the people, a traitor, that I killed Tulayev, and I don't know what else? Repeat that hodgepodge which sounds as if it had been spouted by drunken epileptics?”

“Confess, brother. That or something else, anything they want you to. In the first place, you'll sleep; in the second, you'll have a slim chance … A very slim chance, almost no chance in my opinion, but there's nothing left that anyone can do about it … Maximka, you are a stronger man than I am, but I have better political judgment, you must admit … That's how it is, I assure you. They need just that, and they order it as they order a turbine destroyed … Neither the engineers nor the workers discuss the order, and no one worries about the lives it will cost … I had never even thought of it before … The last trials did not produce the political results that were expected of them, and the conviction now is that there must be a new demonstration and a new cleanup … You understand that they can't leave any veterans anywhere … It is not up to us to decide if the Political Bureau is wrong or not …”

“It is appallingly wrong,” said Erchov.

“Keep your mouth shut on the subject. No member of the Party has a right to say such things. If you were sent against Japanese tanks as the head of a division, you wouldn't argue, you'd go, even though you knew that not a man would come back. Tulayev is only an accident or an excuse. For my part, I am even convinced that there is nothing behind the case, that he was killed by chance, if you please! You must see, nevertheless, that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people's soul … The Chief has been in an impasse for a long time. Perhaps he's losing his mind. Perhaps he sees farther and better than all the rest of us. I don't believe he is a genius, I believe he has decided limitations, but we have no one else, and he has only himself. We have killed off all the others, allowed them to be killed off, that is; and he is the only one left, the only real one. He knows that when somebody shoots Tulayev, it is himself that was aimed at, because it can't be otherwise, there is no one but himself that anyone either
can
hate or
has
to hate …”

“You think so?”

Ricciotti said lightly:

“Only the rational is real, according to Hegel.”

“I cannot,” said Erchov, with an effort. “It is beyond my strength …”

“Empty words. Neither you nor I have any strength left. And afterward?”

Half the offices in the building they could see through the window were closed and empty now. To the right, a few floors were lighted up, where people would be working all night … The green light through the window shades brightened the twilight. Erchov and Ricciotti were enjoying a singular freedom: they went and washed their faces in the toilet room, they were brought a reasonably good supper and plenty of cigarettes. They glimpsed faces that looked almost friendly … Erchov stretched out on the sofa, Ricciotti wandered around the room, straddled a chair:

“I know all that you are thinking, I have thought it all myself, I still think it. Point 1: There is no other solution, old man. Point 2: This way, we give ourselves a very slim chance, say one half of one per cent. Point 3: I would rather die
for
the country than
against
it … I will admit to you that, at bottom, I no longer believe in the Party, but I believe in the country … This world belongs to us, we belong to it, even to the point of absurdity and abomination … But it is all neither so absurd nor so abominable as it seems at first sight. It is more by way of being barbarous and clumsy. We are performing a surgical operation with an ax. Our government holds the fort in situations that are catastrophic, and sacrifices its best divisions one after the other because it doesn't know anything else to do. Our turn has come.”

Erchov put his face in his hands.

“Stop, I can't follow you.”

He raised his head, he seemed able to think clearly again, he looked angry.

“Do you believe one fifth of what you're telling me? What are they paying you to convince me?”

The same furious despair set them one against the other; their heads close together, they saw each other — unshaven for a week, their faces bloodless, their eyelids netted with wrinkles, their features blurred by a weariness without end. Ricciotti answered, without heat:

“No one is paying me anything, you idiot. But I don't want to die for nothing — do you understand that? That chance — one half of one per cent, of one thousand per cent, yes, of one thousand per cent — I mean to take it — do you understand that? I mean to try to live, cost what it may — and then, that's that! I am a human animal that wants to live despite everything, to kiss women, work, fight in China … Dare to tell me that you are any different! I want to try to save you, do you understand? I am logical. We used this move on others, now it's being used on us — they know the game! Things have overtaken us and we must keep going to the end. Don't you see that? We were made to serve this regime, it is all we have, we are its children, its ignoble children, all this is not a matter of chance — can I ever make you understand? I am loyal — don't you see? And you are loyal too, Maximka.” His voice broke, changed tone, acquired a shade of tenderness. “That's all, Maximka. You are wrong to revile me. Think it over. Sit down.”

He took him by the shoulders and pushed him toward the sofa. Erchov let himself drop onto it limply.

Night had fallen, steps sounded in a distant corridor, mingled with the tapping of a typewriter. The scattered sounds, creeping into the silence, were poignant.

Erchov was still rebellious:

“Confess that I am complete traitor! That I was a party to a crime against which I have fought with all my strength! … Let me alone, you're mad!”

His comrade's voice came to him from very far away. There were icy distances between them, in which dark planets revolved slowly … There was nothing between them except a mahogany table, empty tea glasses, an empty carafe of vodka, five feet of dusty carpet.

“Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will ever go over to the enemy … And if you consider yourself innocent, you are absolutely wrong. We innocent? Who do you think you're fooling? Have you forgotten our trade? Can Comrade High Commissar for Security be innocent? Can the Grand Inquisitor be as pure as a lamb? Can he be the only person in the world who doesn't deserve the bullet in the neck which he distributed, like a rubber-stamp signature, at the rate of seven hundred per month on the average? Official figures — way off, of course. No one will ever know the real figures …”

“Shut up, will you?” cried Erchov. “Have me taken back to my cell. I was a soldier, I obeyed orders — that's all! You are torturing me for no purpose …”

“No. Your torture is only beginning. Your torture is yet to come. I am trying to keep you from going through it. I am trying to save you … To save you, do you understand?”

“Have they promised you something?”

“They have us so in their hands that they don't need to promise us anything … We know what promises are worth … Popov has been to see me — you know, that blithering old fool … When his turn comes, I'll be very happy, even in the next world … He said to me: ‘The Party demands much of you, the Party promises nothing to anyone. The Political Bureau will decide in accordance with political necessities. The Party can also shoot you without trial …' Make up your mind, Maximka, I am as tired as you are.”

“Impossible,” said Erchov.

He covered his face with his hands and crumpled over. Perhaps he was crying. His breath came wheezily. There was a shattering interval.

“It would be a pleasure to blow out my own brains,” Erchov muttered.

“Of course,” said Ricciotti.

Time — sheer, colorless, deadly time stretching on and on — with nothing at the end. To sleep …

“One chance in a thousand,” Erchov muttered, out of a calm from which there was no appeal. “Very well! You are right, brother. We have to stay in the game.”

Ricciotti pressed a frenzied finger on the bell push. Somewhere the bell rang commandingly … A young soldier of the special battalion half opened the door. “Tea, sandwiches, brandy! Quick!” Bluish daylight dimmed the lights in the windows of the Secret Service, which was deserted at that hour. Before they parted, Erchov and Ricciotti embraced each other. Smiling faces surrounded them. Someone said to Erchov: “Your wife is well. She is at Viatka, she has a job in the communal government …” In his cell, Erchov was amazed to find newspapers on the table. He had read nothing for months, his brain had worked in a vacuum, at times it had been very hard. Exhausted, he dropped onto the bed, unfolded a copy of
Pravda
to a benevolent portrait of the Chief, looked at it for a long minute, laboriously, as if he were trying to understand something, and fell asleep just as he lay, with the printed image covering his face.

Telephones transmitted the important news. At 6:27
A.M.
Zvyeryeva, who had herself been waked by her secretary, called Comrade Popov by direct wire and informed him: “Erchov has confessed …” Lying in her big bed of gilded Karelian wood, she laid the receiver down on the night table. A polished mirror, hung so that it tilted toward the bed, sent her back an image of which she never tired: herself. Her long, straight, dyed hair framed her face in an almost perfect oval. “I have a tragic mouth,” she thought, seeing the yellowish curve of her lips, which expressed both shame and rancor. Complexion the color of old wax, wrinkles painstakingly massaged — there was nothing in that face human except the eyes. Soot-colored, without lashes or brows, in everyday life their opaque darkness expressed nothing but an ultimate dissimulation. But when she was alone with her looking glass they expressed a ravenous bewilderment. Brusquely she threw off the bedclothes. Because her breasts were aging, she slept in a black lace brassière. Her body appeared in the looking glass, still pure in line, long, supple, lusterless, like the body of a slim Chinese girl, “like the Chinese slaves in the brothels at Harbin.” Her dry palms followed the curve of her hips. She admired herself: “My belly is tight and cruel …” On the mount of Venus there was only an arid tuft; below, the secret folds were sad and taut, like a forsaken mouth … Toward those folds her hand glided, while her body arched, her eyes clouded, the mirror expanded, became full of vague presences. She caressed herself gently. Above her, in a loathsome emptiness, floated the forms of men mingled with the forms of very young women brutally possessed. Her own tranced face — the eyes half closed, the mouth open — rose before her for an instant. “Ah, I am beautiful, ah, I …” A violent trembling shook her from head to foot, and in it she sank into her solitude. “Ah, when will I have …” The telephone squeaked. It was old Popov's insipid mumbling: