The Case of Comrade Tulayev (54 page)

“I am thinking of you, Kostia.”

“Maria, answer me. If I had killed a man, ages ago or a few days or a few months ago, on a night of unbelievable snow, without knowing him, without a thought of killing him, without having wanted to, but voluntarily just the same, with my eyes wide open, my hand steady, because he was doing evil in the name of ideas that are right, because I was full of the sufferings of others, because, without knowing it, I had pronounced judgment in a few seconds — I for many others, I who am unknown, for others who are unknown and nameless, for all who have no names, no will, no luck, not even my rag of a conscience, Maria, what would you say to me?”

“I would tell you, Kostia, that you ought to keep your nerves under better control, know exactly what you're doing, and not wake me up to tell me your bad dreams … Kiss me.”

He went on in an imploring voice:

“But if it was true, Maria?”

She looked at him very hard. The chimes on the Kremlin rang the hour. The first notes of the “International,” airy and solemn, drifted for a moment over the sleeping city.

“Kostia, I have seen enough peasants die by the roadside … I know what it is to struggle desperately. I know how much harm is done involuntarily when the struggle is desperate … Just the same, we are going forward, aren't we? There is a great and pure force in you. Don't worry.”

Her two hands plunged into his hair, she drew the vigorous and tormented head toward her.

Comrade Fleischman spent the day finding their final places in the files for the dossiers in the Tulayev case. There were thousands of pages, gathered into several volumes. Human life was reflected in them just as the earth's fauna and flora are to be found, in tenuous and monstrous forms, in a drop of stagnant water observed through a microscope. Certain documents were to go to the Party Archives, others to complete dossiers in the files of Security, the C.C., the General Secretariat, the foreign branch of Secret Service. A few were to be burned in the presence of a representative of the C.C. and Comrade Gordeyev, Deputy High Commissar for Security. Fleischman shut himself up alone with the papers, about which there hung an odor of death. The memorandum from the Special Operations Service on the execution of the three convicted criminals gave only one precise detail, the time: 12:01, 12:15, 12:18
A.M.
The great case had culminated at the zero hour of night.

Among the unimportant documents added to the Tulayev dossier since the end of the investigation (reports on conversations in public places, during the course of which Tulayev's name was alleged to have been mentioned; denunciations concerning the murder of a certain Butayev, an engineer at the waterworks in Krasnoyarsk; communications from the criminal police concerning the assassination of a certain Mutayev at Leninakan; and other documents which flood, wind, or the stupidity and uninspired folly of the law of averages seemed to have swept together), Fleischman found a gray envelope, postmarked “Moscow-Yaroslavl Station” and merely addressed: “To the Citizen Examining Magistrate conducting the Tulayev case investigation.” An attached memorandum read: “Transmitted to Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Another memorandum added: “
Zvyeryeva: under strict arrest until further order. Transmit to Comrade Popov
.” Administrative perfection would, at this point, have demanded a third memorandum concerning the as yet unsettled fate of Comrade Popov. Some prudent person had merely written on the envelope, in red ink: “
Unclassified
.” “That's myself — unclassified,” thought Fleischman with a shade of self-contempt. He nonchalantly cut open the envelope. It contained a letter, written by hand on a folded sheet of school notebook paper and unsigned.

“Citizen! I write to you from compulsion of conscience and out of regard for the truth …”

Ah! — somebody else denouncing his neighbor or happily giving himself up to his idiotic little private delusion … Fleischman skipped the middle of the letter and began again toward the end, not without noticing that the writing was firm and young, as of an educated peasant, that there was no attempt at style, and very little punctuation. The tone was direct, and the Security official found himself gripped.

“I shall not sign this. Innocent men having inexplicably paid for me, there is no way left for me to make amends. Believe me if I had known of this miscarriage of justice in time I would have brought you my innocent and guilty head. I belong body and soul to our great country, to our magnificent Socialist future. If I have committed a crime almost without knowing it which I am not sure of because we live in a period where the murder of man by man is an ordinary thing and no doubt it is a necessity of the dialectics of history and no doubt the rule of the workers which sheds so much blood, sheds it for the good of mankind and I myself have been only the less than half-conscious instrument of that historical necessity, if I have led into error judges better educated and more conscientious than myself who have committed an even greater crime while believing that they too were serving justice, I can now only live and work freely with all my powers for the greatness of our Soviet fatherland …”

Fleischman went back to the middle of the letter:

“Alone, unknown to the world, not even knowing myself the moment before what I was going to do I fired at Comrade Tulayev whom I detested without knowing him since the purge of the higher schools. I assure you that he had done immeasurable harm to our sincere young generation, that he had lied to us incessantly, that he had basely outraged the best thing we possess our faith in the Party, that he had brought us to the brink of despair …”

Fleischman bent over the open letter and sweat bathed his forehead, his eyes blurred, his double chin sagged, an expression of utter defeat twisted and ravaged his fat face, the innumerable pages of the dossier floated before him in a choking fog. He muttered: “I knew it,” annoyed because he found himself having to restrain an idiotic impulse to burst into tears or to flee, no matter where, instantly, irrevocably — but nothing was possible any more. He slumped over the letter, every word of which bore the stamp of truth. There was a mouselike scratching at the door, then the voice of his maid asked: “Would you like some tea, Comrade Chief?” — “Yes, yes, Lisa — make it strong …” He walked up and down the room for a little, read the unsigned letter over again, standing this time, the better to confront it. Impossible to show it to anyone, anyone. He half opened the door to take the tray on which stood two glasses of tea. And, within himself, he talked to the unknown man whom he glimpsed behind the folded sheet of ruled paper. “Well, young man, well, your letter is not bad at all … Never fear, I am not going to start a hunt for you at this point. We of the older generation, you see, we don't need your erratic and self-intoxicated strength to stand condemned … It is beyond us all, it carries us all off …”

He lit the candle which he used to soften sealing wax. The stearine was encrusted with red streaks like coagulated blood. In the flame of the bloodstained candle Fleischman burned the letter, collected the ashes in the ash tray, and crushed them under his thumb. He drank his two glasses of tea and felt better. Half aloud, with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm, he said:

“The Tulayev case is closed.”

Fleischman decided to hurry through the rest of the filing, so that he could get away earlier. The notebooks which Kiril Rublev had filled in his cell had been put with a sheaf of letters “Held for the inquiry” — they were Dora Rublev's letters, written from a small settlement in Kazakstan. Sent from the depths of solitude and anguish to be read only by Comrade Zvyeryeva, they made him furious. “What a bitch! If I can lay my hands on her, I'll see that she gets her fill of steppes and snow and sand …”

Fleischman leafed through the notebooks. The writing remained regular throughout, the forms of certain letters suggested artistic interests (very early in his life, and long outgrown), the straightness of the lines recalled the man, the way he squared his shoulders when he talked, the long bony face, the intellectual forehead, the particular way he had of looking at you with a smile which was only in his eyes, as he expounded a train of reasoning as rigorous and as subtle as an arabesque in metal … “We are all dying without knowing why we have killed so many men in whom lay our highest strength …” Fleischman realized that he thought as Kiril Rublev had written a few days or a few hours before his death.

The notebooks interested him … He ran through the economic deductions based on the decrease in the rate of profit resulting from the continuous increase of constant capital (whence the capitalist stagnation?), on the increase of the production of electrical power in the world, on the development of metallurgy, on the gold crisis, on the changes in character, functions, interests, and structure of social classes and more particularly of the working class … Several times Fleischman murmured: “Right, absolutely right … questionable, but … worth considering … true on the whole or in trend …” He made notes of data which he wanted to check in books by specialists. Next came pages of enthusiastic or severe opinions on Trotsky. Kiril Rublev praised his revolutionary intuition, his sense of Russian reality, his “sense of victory,” his reasoned intrepidity; and deplored his “pride as a great historic figure,” his “too self-conscious superiority,” his “inability to make the mediocre follow him,” his “offense tactics in the worst moments of defeat,” his “high revolutionary algebra perpetually cast before swine, when the swine alone held the front of the stage …”

“Obviously, obviously,” Fleischman murmured, making no effort to overcome his uneasiness.

Rublev must have been very sure that he was going to be shot, or he would never have written such things?…

The tone of the writing changed, but the same inner conviction gave it even more detachment. “We were an exceptional human accomplishment, and that is why we are going under. A half century unique in history was required to form our generation. Just as a great creative mind is a unique biological and social accomplishment, caused by innumerable interferences, the formation of our few thousand minds is to be explained by interferences that were unique. Capitalism at its apogee, rich with all the powers of industrial civilization, was planted in a great peasant country, a country of ancient culture, while a senile despotism moved year by year toward its end. Neither the old castes nor the new classes could be strong, neither the one nor the other could feel sure of the future. We grew up amid struggle, escaping two profound captivities, that of the old ‘Holy Russia,' and that of the bourgeois West, at the same time that we borrowed from those two worlds their most living elements: the spirit of inquiry, the transforming audacity, the faith in progress of the nineteenth-century West; a peasant people's direct feeling for truth and for action, and its spirit of revolt, formed by centuries of despotism. We never had a sense of the stability of the social world; we never had a belief in wealth; we were never the puppets of bourgeois individualism, dedicated to the struggle for money; we perpetually questioned ourselves about the meaning of life and we worked to transform the world …

“We acquired a degree of lucidity and disinterestedness which made both the old and the new interests uneasy. It was impossible for us to adapt ourselves to a phase of reaction; and as we were in power, surrounded by a legend that was true, born of our deeds, we were so dangerous that we had to be destroyed beyond physical destruction, our corpses had to be surrounded by a legend of treachery …

“The weight of the world is upon us, we are crushed by it. All those who want neither drive nor uncertainty in the successful revolution overwhelm us; and behind them they have all those whom the fear of revolution blinds and saps …” Rublev was of the opinion that the implacable cruelty of our period is explained by its feeling of insecurity: fear of the future … “What is going to happen in history tomorrow will be comparable only to the great geological catastrophes which change the face of the planet …” — “We alone, in this universe in transformation, had the courage to see clearly. It is more a matter of courage than of intelligence. We saw that, to save man, what was needed was the attitude of the surgeon. To the outside world, hungry for stability to the point of shutting its eyes to the ever-darkening horizon, we were the intolerable evil prophets of social cataclysms; to those who were comfortably established inside our own revolution, we represented venturesomeness and risk. Neither on one side nor the other did anyone see that the worst venture, the hopeless venture, is to seek for immobility at a time when continents are splitting up and breaking adrift. It would be so comforting to say to oneself that the days of creation are over: ‘Let us rest! We are sure of all tomorrows!' ” — “An immense rage of reprobation and incomprehension rose up against us. But what sort of wild conspirators were we? We demanded the courage to continue our exploit, and people wanted nothing but more security, rest, to forget the effort and the blood — on the eve of rains of blood!” — “Upon one point we lacked clarity and daring: we were unable to perceive what the evil was which was sapping our country and for which for a time there was no remedy. We ourselves denounced as traitors and men of little faith those among us who revealed it to us … Because we loved our work blindly, we too …”

Rublev refuted the executed Nicolas Ivanovich Bukharin who, during the trial of March 1938, exclaimed: “We were before a dark abyss …” (And now it became only a dialogue of the dead.) Rublev wrote: “On the eve of our disappearance we do not reckon up the balance sheet of a disaster, we bear witness to the fullness of a victory which encroached too far upon the future and asked too much of men. We have not lived on the brink of a dark abyss, as Nicolas Ivanovich said, for he was subject to attacks of nervous depression — we are on the eve of a new cycle of storms and that is what darkens our consciences. The compass needle goes wild at the approach of magnetic storms …” — “We are terribly disquieting because we might soon become terribly powerful again …”