The Case of Comrade Tulayev (5 page)

The truth of the novelist — unlike the truth of the historian — allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the vagaries of human feeling. The truth of fiction embodies, as in the pungent physicalness of Serge's descriptions of people and of landscapes. The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled, and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.

“I want to blow out the moon,” says the little girl at the end of Pilnyak's “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1926), which re-creates as fiction one of the first liquidations of a possible future rival ordered by Stalin (here called “Number One”): the murder, in 1925, of Trotsky's successor as the head of the Red Army, Mikhail Frunze, who was forced to undergo unnecessary surgery, and died, as planned, on the operating table. (Pilnyak's subsequent cave-in to Stalinist literary directives in the 1930s did not keep him from being shot in 1938.) In a world of unbearable cruelty and injustice, it seems as if all of nature should rhyme with grief and loss. And indeed, Pilnyak relates, the moon, as if in response to the challenge, vanishes. “The moon, plump as a merchant's wife, swam behind clouds, wearying of the chase.” But the moon is not to be extinguished. Neither is the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist's or the poet's — which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us there is more than politics, more, even, than history. Bravery … and indifference … and sensuality … and the living creatural world … and pity, pity for all, remain unextinguished.

— S
USAN
S
ONTAG

For several weeks Kostia had been thinking about buying a pair of shoes. But then a sudden impulse, which surprised even himself, upset all his calculations. By going without cigarettes, movies, and lunch every other day, he would need six weeks to save up the one hundred and forty rubles which was the price of a fairly good pair of shoes that the salesgirl in a secondhand store had kindly promised to set aside for him “on the q.t.” Meanwhile, he walked cheerfully on cardboard soles, which he replaced every evening. Fortunately the weather remained fair. When Kostia had accumulated seventy rubles he gave himself the pleasure of going to see the shoes that would one day be his. He found them half hidden on a dark shelf, behind several old copper samovars, a pile of opera-glass cases, a Chinese teapot, and a shell box with a sky-blue Bay of Naples. A magnificent pair of boots, of the softest leather, had the place of honor on the shelf — four hundred rubles, imagine! Men in threadbare overcoats licked their lips over them. “Don't worry,” the little salesgirl said to him. “Your boots are still here, don't worry …” She smiled at him, and again he noticed her brown hair, her deep-set eyes, her irregular but pretty teeth, her lips — but what was the right adjective for her lips? “Your lips are enchanted,” he thought and looked straight into her face, but never, never would he dare to say what he was thinking! For a moment her deep-set eyes held him, with their color between green and blue-just the color of those Chinese jades he had noticed under the glass top of the counter! Then his eyes wandered on over the jewels, the paper cutters, the watches, the snuffboxes, until, quite by chance, they fell on a little ebony-framed portrait of a woman, so small that he could have held it in his hand …

“How much is that?” Kostia asked in a startled voice.

“Sixty rubles — it's expensive, you know,” said the enchanted lips.

Hands that were no less enchanted dropped a piece of red-and-gold brocade, reached under the counter, brought out the miniature. Kostia took it. It was a shock to find his big, grimy fingers holding the little portrait. How alive it was! And how strange! It was the strangeness of it that he felt the most. The little black rectangle framed a blond head crowned with a tiara; alert yet sweet, penetrating yet mild, the eyes were an unfathomable mystery …

“I'll take it,” Kostia said, to his own surprise.

He had spoken so quietly, the voice had seemed to come from such depths of his being, that the salesgirl did not dare to protest. She looked furtively to right and left, then murmured:

“Don't say anything … I'll make out the slip for fifty rubles. Just don't let the cashier see what it is when you pay for it.”

Kostia thanked her. But he hardly saw her. “Fifty or seventy — what do I care, girl? The price has nothing to do with it — can't you see that?” A fire burned in him. As he walked homeward he felt the little ebony rectangle in his inside coat pocket cling gently to his breast; and from the contact there radiated a growing joy. He walked faster and faster, ran up a dark flight of stairs, hurried down the hall of the collective apartment — today it smelled rankly of naphthaline and cabbage soup — entered his room, switched on the light, looked ecstatically at his cot bed, the old illustrated magazines piled on the table, the window with the three broken panes replaced by cardboard — and felt embarrassed to hear himself murmur: “What luck!” Now the little black frame stood on the table, tilted against the wall, and the blond woman saw only him, as he saw only her. The room filled with an indefinable brightness. Kostia walked aimlessly from the window to the door — suddenly he felt imprisoned. On the other side of the partition Romachkin coughed softly.

“What a man!” Kostia thought, suddenly amused by the recollection of the bilious little fellow. He never went out, he was so neat and clean — a real
petit bourgeois
, living there alone with his geraniums, his gray-paper-bound books, his portraits of great men: Ibsen, who said that the solitary man is the strongest man; Mechnikov, who enlarged the boundaries of life; Darwin, who proved that animals of the same species do not eat each other; Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and loved the forest. Romachkin still wore old coats made in the days of the war that preceded the revolution that preceded the Civil War — in the days when the world swarmed with inoffensive and frightened Romachkins. Kostia gave a little smile as he turned toward his half-a-fireplace — because the partition which separated his room from Assistant Clerk Romachkin's room exactly divided the handsome marble fireplace of what had once been a drawing room.

Poor old Romachkin! you'll never have any more than half a room, half a fireplace, half a life — and not even half of a face like that …

(The face in the miniature, the intoxicating blue light of those eyes.)

“Your half of life is the dark half, poor old Romachkin.”

Two strides took Kostia into the hall and to his neighbor's door, on which he rapped the customary three little knocks. A stale odor of fried food, mingled with talk and quarreling voices, wafted from the other end of the apartment. An angry woman — who was certainly thin, embittered, and unhappy — was clattering pots and saying: “So he said, ‘Very well, citizen, I'll tell the manager.' And I said, ‘Very well, citizen, I'll' — ” A door opened, then instantly slammed shut, letting a burst of childish sobs escape. The telephone rang furiously. Romachkin came to the door. “Hello, Kostia.”

Romachkin's domain was nine feet long by eight feet wide, just like Kostia's. Paper flowers, carefully dusted, decorated the half-a-mantelpiece. His geraniums bordered the window sill with reddish purple. A cold glass of tea stood on the table, which was neatly covered with white paper. “I'm not interrupting, I hope? Were you reading?” The thirty books stood ranged on the double shelf over the bed.

“No, Kostia, I wasn't reading. I was thinking.”

The faded wall, the portraits of the four great men, the glass of tea, and Romachkin sitting there thinking with his coat buttoned. “What,” Kostia wondered, “does he do with his hands?” Romachkin never put his elbows on the table; when he spoke, his hands usually lay spread flat on his knees; he walked with his hands behind his back; he sometimes folded his arms over his chest, timidly raising his shoulders. His shoulders suggested the humble patience of a beast of burden.

“What were you thinking about, Romachkin?”

“Injustice.”

A vast subject, you certainly didn't exhaust it, my friend. Odd — it was chillier here than in his own room. “I came to borrow some books,” said Kostia. Romachkin's hair was neatly brushed, his face was sallow and aging, his lips were thin, his eyes fastened on you, yet they looked afraid. What color were they? They didn't seem to have any color. No more, indeed, did Romachkin — at first you thought gray, and then not even that. He studied his shelves for a moment, then took down an old paper-bound volume. “Read that, Kostia. It's the stories of brave men.” It was issue Number 9 of
Prison
, “official organ of the Association of Former Convicts and Life-Exiles.” Thank you, good-by. Good-by, my friend. Would he go back to his thinking now, the poor creature?

Their two tables exactly faced each other on the two sides of the partition. Kostia sat down, opened the magazine, and tried to read. Now and again he looked up at the miniature, each time with the happy certainty that he would find the greenish-blue eyes fixed on his. Spring skies, pale above the snow, had that light when the river ice went out and the earth began to live again. Romachkin, in his private desert on the other side of the partition, had sat down again with his head in his hands — solitary, absorbed, convinced that he was thinking. Perhaps he really was thinking.

For a long time Romachkin had been living in solitary communion with a depressing thought. His job as assistant clerk in the wages department of the Moscow Clothing Trust would never be made permanent, since he was not a member of the Party. On the other hand, unless he should be arrested or die, he would never be replaced because, of all the 117 employees of the central office who, from nine to six, filled forty rooms under the Alcohol Trust and over the Karelian Furs Syndicate and next door to the Uzbekistan Cottons Agency, he alone knew every detail of the seventeen categories of wages and salaries, in addition to the seven types of remuneration for piecework, the possible combinations of basic wages with production bonuses, the art of reclassifications and paper raises which had no upsetting effect on the total salary budget. “Romachkin,” the order would come, “the director wants you to prepare the application of the new circular from the Plan Committee in conformity with the Central Committee's circular of January 6, of course taking into consideration the decision of the Conference of Textile Trusts — you know the one?” He knew. The head of his office, former capmaker and member of the Party since last spring, knew nothing — he couldn't even add. But he was said to be connected with the secret service (supervision of technical personnel and manual labor). He spoke with the voice of authority: “Understand, Romachkin? Have it ready by five o'clock tomorrow. I am going to the board meeting.” The office was in the third court of a brick building in St. Barnaby Alley; a few sickly trees, half killed by rubble from a demolished building, made a touching spot of green under his window.

Romachkin immersed himself in his calculations. And after a time it appeared that the 5 per cent increase in the basic wage published by the Central Committee, combined with the reclassifications whereby certain workers in Category 11 were transferred to Category 10, and certain workers in Category 10 to Category 9, thus improving the condition of the lowest wage groups (as not only justice but also the directive of the Council of Syndicates demanded), resulted in a 0.5 per cent reduction in the total wage budget if the regulations were applied with the utmost strictness. Now, the workmen in the two mills earned between 110 and 120 rubles, and the new rent increase became effective at the end of the month. Romachkin sadly turned his conclusions over to be typed. Every month he went through some similar operation (though the pretext for it was always new), brought his explanatory tables for the accounting office up to date, waited until quarter to five before he went to wash his hands, which he did slowly, humming “tra-la-la, tra-la-la” or “mmmm-mmmmm” like a melancholy bee … He dined hurriedly in the office restaurant, reading the leading article in the paper, which always announced, in the same tone of authority, that the country was progressing, was making rapid strides, that there had never been anything to compare with it, that despite all opposition history was being made for the glory of the Republic, the happiness of the working masses — witness the 210 factories opened during the year, the brilliant success in creating a grain reserve, and …

“But I,” Romachkin said to himself one day as he swallowed his last spoonful of cold semolina, “am squeezing the poor.”

The figures proved it. He lost his peace of mind. “The trouble is that I think … or rather, there is a being in me that thinks without my being aware of it, and then suddenly raises its voice in the silence of my brain and utters some short, acid, intolerable sentence. And after that, life can't be the same.” Romachkin was terrified by his twofold discovery — that he thought, and that the papers lied. He spent evenings at home, making complex calculations, comparing millions in goods rubles with millions in nominal rubles, tons of wheat with masses of human beings. He went to libraries and opened dictionaries and encyclopedias to
Obsession, Mania, Insanity, Mental Diseases, Paranoia, Schizophrenia
, and concluded that he was neither paranoid nor cyclothymic nor schizophrenic nor neurotic, but at most suffering from a slight degree of hysteromaniacal depression. Symptoms: an obsession with figures, a propensity to find falsehood everywhere, and an idea which was almost an obsession, an idea which was so sacred that he feared to name it, an idea which solved all intellectual problems, which put all falsehood to flight, an idea which a man must keep perpetually in his consciousness or he would cease to be more than a miserable wretch, a sub-human paid to nibble at other men's bread, a cockroach snug in the brick building of the Trusts … Justice was in the Gospels, but the Gospels were feudal and pre-feudal superstition; surely Justice was in Marx, though Romachkin could not find it there; it was in the Revolution, it watched in Lenin's tomb, it illuminated the embalmed brow of a pink and pallid Lenin who lay under crystal, guarded by motionless sentries; in reality they were guarding eternal Justice.