The Case of Comrade Tulayev (6 page)

The doctor whom Romachkin consulted at the neuropsychiatric clinic at Khamovniki said: “Reflexes excellent, nothing to worry about, citizen. Sex life?” “Not much, only occasionally,” Romachkin answered, blushing. “I recommend intercourse twice a month,” said the doctor dryly. “As to the idea of justice, don't let it worry you. It is a positive social idea resulting from the sublimation of the primitive ego and the suppression of individualistic instincts; it is called upon to play a great role in the period of transition to Socialism … Macha, call in the next patient. Your number, citizen?” The next patient was already in the room, his number in his fingers — fingers of paper, shaken by an inner storm. A being disfigured by an animal laugh. The man in the white blouse, the doctor, disappeared behind his screen. What did he look like? Romachkin had forgotten his face already. Satisfied with his consultation, Romachkin was in a mood to joke: “The patient is yourself, Citizen Doctor. Primitive sublimation — what nonsense! You have never had the least notion of justice, citizen.”

He emerged from the crisis strengthened and illuminated. As a result of the doctor's advice on sexual hygiene he found himself, one cloudy evening, on a bench on the Boulevard Trubnoy, haunt of painted girls who ask you, in soft, alcoholic voices, for a cigarette … Romachkin did not smoke. “I am very sorry, mam'selle,” he said, trying to sound lewd. The prostitute took a cigarette from her pocket, lit it slowly to display her painted nails and her charming profile — then crushed her body against his: “Looking for something?” He nodded. “Come over on the other bench, it's farther from the light. You'll see what I can do … Three rubles, right?” Romachkin was overwhelmed by the thought of poverty and injustice; yet what connection was there between such thoughts and this prostitute, and himself, and sexual hygiene? He said nothing. Yet he was half aware of a connection, as tenuous as the silvery rays that on clear nights link star to star. “For five rubles, I'll take you home,” said the girl. “You pay in advance, darling — that's the rule.” He was glad that there was a rule for this sort of transaction. The girl led him through the moonlight to a hovel almost indistinguishable in the shadow of an eight-story office building. Discreet knocking on a windowpane brought out a poverty-stricken woman clutching a shawl over her sunken chest. “It's comfortable inside,” she said, “there's a little fire. Don't hurry, Katiuchenka, I'll be all right here smoking a butt while I wait. Don't wake the baby — she's asleep on the far side of the bed.” In order not to wake the baby, they lay down on the floor on a quilt which they took from the bed, in which a little dark-haired girl lay sleeping with her mouth open. A single candle gave the only light. Everything, from the dirty ceiling to the cluttered corners, was sordid. The iniquity of it went through Romachkin like a cold that freezes to the bone. He too was iniquitous, an iniquitous brute. In his person, iniquity itself writhed on the body of a miserable, anemic girl. Iniquity filled the huge silence into which he plunged with bestial fury. At that instant, another idea was born in him. Feeble, faraway, hesitant, not wanting to live, it yet was born. Thus from volcanic soil rises a tiny flame, which, small though it be, yet reveals that the earth will quake and crack and burst with flowing lava.

Afterwards, they walked back to the boulevard together. She chattered contentedly: “Still got to find one more tonight. It's not easy. Yesterday I hung around till dawn, and then didn't get anyone but a drunk who didn't have quite three rubles left. What do you think of that? Cholera! People are too hungry, men don't think about making love these days.” Romachkin politely agreed, preoccupied with watching the struggles of the new little flame: “Of course. Sexual needs are influenced by diet …” Thus encouraged, the girl talked of what was happening in the country. “I just got back from my village, oh cholera!” Cholera must be her favorite word, he thought. She said it charmingly, now blowing out a straight stream of cigarette smoke, now spitting sidewise. “The horses are all gone, cholera! What will people do now? First they took the best horses for the collective, then the township cooperative refused to furnish fodder for the ones the peasants had been left or had refused to give up. Anyway, there wasn't any more fodder because the army requisitioned the last of it. The old people, who remembered the last famine, fed them roof thatch — imagine what fodder that makes for the poor beasts after it's been out under rain and sun for years! Cholera! It made you weep to see them, with their sad eyes and their tongues hanging out and their ribs sticking through their sides — I swear they really came through the hide! — and their swollen joints and little boils all over their bellies and their backs full of pus and blood and worms eating right into the raw flesh — the poor creatures were rotting alive — we had to put bands under their bellies to hold them up at night or they'd never have been able to get back on their legs in the morning. We let them wander around the yards and they licked the fence palings and chewed the ground to find a scrap of grass. Where I come from, horses are more precious than children. There are always too many children to feed, they come when nobody wants them — do you think there was any need for
me
to come into the world? But there are never enough horses to do the farm work with. With a horse, your children can grow up; without a horse a man is not a man any more, is he? No more home — nothing but hunger, nothing but death…. Well, the horses were done for — there was no way out. The elders met. I was in the corner by the stove. There was a little lamp on the table, and I had to keep trimming the wick — it smoked. What was to be done to save the horses? The elders couldn't even speak, they were so sunk. Finally my father — he looked terrible, his mouth was all black — said: ‘There's nothing to be done. We'll have to kill them. Then they won't suffer any more. There's always the leather. As for us, we will die or not, as God pleases.' Nobody said anything after that, it was so quiet that I could hear the roaches crawling under the stove bricks. My old man got up slowly. ‘I'll do it,' says he. He took the ax from under the bench. My mother threw herself on him: ‘Nikon Nikonich, pity …' He looked as if he needed pity himself, with his face all screwed up like a murderer. ‘Silence, woman,' says he. ‘You, girl, come and hold a light for us.' I brought the lamp. The stable was against the house; when the mare moved at night we heard her. It was comforting. She saw us come in with the light, and she looked at us sadly, like a sick man, there were tears in her eyes. She hardly turned her head because her strength was nearly gone. Father kept the ax hidden, because the mare would surely have known. Father went up to her and patted her cheeks. ‘You're a good mare, Brownie. It's not my fault if you have suffered. May God forgive me — — ' Before the words were out of his mouth Brownie's skull was split open. ‘Clean the ax,' Father said to me. ‘Now we have nothing.' How I cried that night! — outside, because they would have beaten me if I'd cried in the house. I think everybody in the village hid somewhere and cried …” Romachkin gave her an extra fifty kopecks. Then she wanted to kiss him on the mouth — “You'll see how, darling” — but he said “No, thank you,” humbly, and walked away among the dark trees, his shoulders sagging.

All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them:
Empty Boxes
. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales. Romachkin bought some pickled mushrooms and reserved a place in a line that was forming for sausage. From a comparatively well-lighted street he turned into another that was dark, and walked up it. Electric signs, themselves invisible, filled the end of it with an orange glory. Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman's voice rose, rapid and vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful — that voice without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly cold. The woman's voice clamored: “In the name of the four thousand women workers …” Romachkin's brain passively echoed:
In the name of the four thousand women workers in this factory
… And four thousand women of all ages — seductive women, women prematurely old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women of whom he dared not dream — were present in him for an incalculable instant, and they all cried: “We demand the death penalty for these vile dogs! No pity!” (“Can you mean it, women?” Romachkin answered severely. “No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of us …”) “To the firing squad with them!” Factory meetings continued during the trial of the engineers — or was it the economists, or the food control board, or the Old Bolsheviks, who were being tried this time? Romachkin walked on. Twenty steps farther he stopped again, this time in front of a lighted window. Between the curtains he saw a table set for supper — tea, plates, hands, only hands on the checked linoleum: a fat hand holding a fork, a gray slumbering hand, a child's hand … A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry of the meetings: “Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them!” Who? It didn't matter. Why?

Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inexplicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers. “Good evening, Comrade Romachkin. Have you heard? Marfa and her husband have been refused passports because they were disenfranchised as artisans formerly working on their own account. Have you heard? Old Bukin has been arrested, they say he had hidden dollars sent him by his brother, who is a dentist in Riga … And the engineer has lost his job, he's suspected of sabotage. Have you heard? There is going to be a fresh purge of employees, get ready for it, I heard at the house committee meeting that your father was an officer …” — “It's not true,” said Romachkin, choking, “he was only a sergeant during the imperialist war, he was an accountant …” (But since that right-thinking accountant had belonged to the Russian People's Union, Romachkin's conscience was not entirely at ease.) — “Try to produce witnesses, they say the commissions are severe … They say there is trouble in the Smolensk region — no more wheat …” — “I know, I know … Come and play checkers, Piotr Petrovich …” They went to Romachkin's room, and his neighbor began telling his own troubles in a low voice: his wife's first husband had been a shopkeeper, so it was more than likely that her passport for Moscow would not be renewed. “They give you three days to get out, Comrade Romachkin, and you have to go somewhere at least two hundred miles away — but will they give you a passport there?” If it turned out that way, their daughter obviously couldn't enter the Forestry School. Gilded by the lamplight, the ax came down on the head of a horse with human eyes, voices lashed through fiery darkness demanding victims, stations were filled with crowds waiting almost hopelessly for trains which crawled over the map toward the last wheat, the last meat, the last combines; a prostitute from the Boulevard Trubnoy lay gaping wide open on a pallet beside a sleeping child pink as a sucking pig, pure as the innocents Herod slaughtered, and a prostitute cost money, five rubles, a day's pay — yes, he must find witnesses to face the new purge with, was the new rent scale going into effect? If in all this there was not some immense wrong, some boundless guilt, some hidden villainy, it must be that a sort of madness filled everyone's brain. The game of checkers was over. Piotr Petrovich went home, thinking of his troubles: “Most serious, the matter of the interior passport …” Romachkin turned down his bed, undressed, rinsed out his mouth, and lay down. The electric light burned on his bed table, the sheet was white, the portraits mute — ten o'clock. Before he went to sleep, he read the paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech:
Our economic successes
… Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen people, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises, unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages, as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skeptics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent of Opposition in their secret hearts! — It was set forth in angular periods, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six commandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic certainty … Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in prices…. But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. “Continued applause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for minutes. Salvos of shouts: ‘Long live our unconquerable Chief! Long live our great Pilot! Long live the Political Bureau! Long live the Party!' The ovation is resumed. Numerous voices: ‘Long live the Secret Police!' Thunderous applause.”

Feeling unfathomably sad, Romachkin thought: How he lies! — and was terrified at his own audacity. No one, fortunately, could hear him think; his room was empty; somebody came out of the toilet, walked down the hall dragging his slippers — no doubt it was old Schlem, who had stomach trouble; a sewing machine purred softly; before getting into bed, the couple across the hall were quarreling in little sentences that hissed like lashes. He felt the man pinching the woman, slowly twisting her hair, making her kneel down, then hitting her across the face with the back of his hand; the whole hall knew it, the couple had been reported, but they denied it and were reduced to torturing each other without making any noise, as, afterward, they cohabited without making any noise, moving like wary animals. And the people listening at the door heard almost nothing, but sensed everything. — Twenty-two people lived in the six rooms and the windowless nook at the back: twenty-two people, all clearly recognizable by the most furtive sounds they made in the stillness of night. Romachkin turned out the light. The feeble glow of a street light came through the curtain, tracing the usual pictures on the ceiling. They varied monotonously from day to day. In the half-light, the Chief's massive profile was superimposed on the figure of the man who was silently beating his wife in the room across the hall. Would she ever escape from her bondage? Shall we ever escape from falsehood? The responsibility was his who lied in the face of an entire people. The terrible thought which, until now, had matured in the dark regions of a consciousness that feared itself, that pretended to ignore itself, that struggled to disguise itself before the mirror within, now stripped off its mask. So, at night, lightning reveals a landscape of twisted trees above a chasm. Romachkin felt an almost visual revelation. He saw the criminal. A translucent flame flooded his soul. It did not occur to him that his new knowledge might avail him nothing. Henceforth it would possess him, would direct his thoughts, his eyes, his steps, his hands. He fell asleep with his eyes wide open, suspended between ecstasy and fear.