The Case of Comrade Tulayev (8 page)

Romachkin liked the public gardens that border the outer wall of the Kremlin on the side toward the city. He gave himself the pleasure of walking there almost every day. It was there that the thing hit him between the eyes. He was walking in the gardens eating a sandwich (it was between 1:15 and 1:50), instead of chatting with his colleagues in the Trust restaurant. As usual, the central walk was almost deserted; the streetcars, making the turn outside the fence, rattled and clanged their bells. Where the walk curves in the direction of the rusty foliage that borders the high wall of the Kremlin, a man in uniform appeared. Two men in civilian clothes followed him, smoking. Tall, almost gaunt, the visor of his military cap pulled down over his eyes, his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual, the man stepped out of the portraits published in the papers, displayed four stories high on buildings, hung in offices, impressed, day after day, on the minds of the nation. There was no possible doubt: it was
He
. The air of authority, the hands — the right in the pocket, the other swinging … As if in final proof of his identity, the Chief drew a short pipe from his pocket, put it between his teeth, and walked on. Now he was only thirty feet from Romachkin. Romachkin's hand flew into his coat pocket, groping for the butt of the Colt. At that moment the Chief, still walking, drew out his tobacco pouch; less than six feet from Romachkin he stopped, daring him; his cat eyes shot a little cruel gleam in Romachkin's direction. His mocking lips muttered something like, “You abject worm Romachkin,” with devastating scorn. And he passed by. Demolished, Romachkin stumbled over a stone, tottered, almost fell. Two men, sprung from nowhere, caught him in time. “Do you feel ill, citizen?” They must be members of the Chief's secret-police escort. “Let me alone!” Romachkin shouted at them, beside himself with rage — but actually he barely breathed the words, or other words, in a despairing whisper. The two men, who were holding him by the elbows, let him go. “Don't drink when you don't know how, idiot,” muttered one. “Damned vegetarian!” Romachkin sank onto a bench beside a young couple. A voice of thunder — his own — rang in his head: “Coward, coward, coward, coward …” The couple, paying no attention to him, went on quarreling.

“If you see her again,” the woman said, “I …” (the next words were inaudible) “I've had enough. I've suffered too much, I …” (more inaudible words). “I beg you …”

An anemic creature, hardly more than a girl — lifeless blond hair, a face covered with pink pimples. The fellow answered:

“You make me tired, Maria. Stop it. You make me tired.” And he stared into the distance.

It was all relentlessly logical. Romachkin rose as if pushed up by a spring, looked at the couple implacably, and said:

“We are all cowards — do you hear me?”

It was so obvious, that the tension of his despair snapped; he was able to get up, to walk as he had walked before, to reach the office without being a minute late, go back to his graphs, drink his glass of tea at four o'clock, answer questions, finish his day's work, go home … Now, what should he do with the Colt? He could not bear to have the useless weapon in his room any longer.

It was lying on the table, the blue-black steel gleaming with a coldness that was an insult, when Kostia came in and seemed to smile at him. Romachkin was sure he saw him smile. “Do you like it, Kostia?” he asked. Around them spread the peace of evening. Kostia, with the revolver in his hand and smiling at him quite openly, became a young warrior again. “It's a beautiful thing,” he said.

“I have no use for it,” said Romachkin, torn with regret. “You can have it.”

“But it's worth a lot,” the young man objected.

“Not to me. And you know I can't sell it. Take it, Kostia.” Romachkin was afraid to insist, because suddenly he so much wanted Kostia to take it. “Really?” Kostia spoke again. And Romachkin answered: “Yes, really. Take it.” Kostia carried away the Colt, put it on his own table, under the miniature, smiled once more at the faithful eyes that looked out of the frame, then at the clean weapon — mortally clean and proud it was! He did a few gymnastics for very joy. Romachkin enviously heard his joints crack.

Almost every evening they talked for a few minutes before they went to bed — the one ponderously insidious, returning to the same ideas over and over, again and again, like a plow ox making one furrow, then beginning again, to plow one beside it, again and yet again; the other mocking, attracted despite himself, sometimes leaping out of the invisible circle that had been drawn around him, only to find himself unwittingly back in it again. “What do you think, Romachkin?” he asked at last. “Who is guilty, guilty of it all?”

“Obviously it is whoever has the most power. If there were a God, it would be God,” Romachkin said softly. “That would be very convenient,” he added, with a little devious laugh.

Kostia felt that he had understood too many things at once. It made his head spin. “You don't know what you are saying, Romachkin. And it's a good thing for you that you don't! Good night.”

From nine in the morning to six in the evening, Kostia worked in the office of a subway construction yard. The rhythmic and raucous throb of the excavating machine was communicated to the planking of the shanty. Trucks carried away the excavated earth. The first layers appeared to be composed of human debris, as humus is composed of vegetable debris; they had an odor of corpses, of the decaying city, of refuse long fermented under alternate snow and hot pavements. The truck engines, fed on an inconceivable gasoline, filled the yard with staccato explosions so violent that they drowned out the swearing of the drivers. A thin board fence separated Yard No. 22 from the bustling, klaxoning street, with its two surging streams flowing in opposite directions, its hysterically ringing streetcars, brand new police vans, ramshackle hackney carriages, swarming pedestrians. The shanty, the center of which was occupied by a stove, housed the timekeeping department, the accounting department, the technicians' office, the desk reserved for the Party and the Young Communists, with its file cases, the corner allocated to the Secretary of the Syndical Cell, the office of the yard chief — but the latter was never there, he ran from one end of Moscow to the other looking for materials, with the Control Commissions running after him. So his space could be used. The Party secretary took it as of right: from morning to night he received the complaints of mud-covered workers, male and female, who descended into the earth, then came up out of the earth — one because he had no lamp, the second because he had no boots, the third no gloves; the fourth had been hurt; the fifth, fired for arriving drunk and late, furious because he was not allowed to go now that he had been fired: “I demand that the law be obeyed, Comrade Part.-Org. (Party Organizer). I came late, I was drunk, I made a row. Throw me out — it's the law!” The Part.-Org. burst out, turning crimson: “In the name of God and all the stinking saints, you rub your dirty nose in the law because you want to quit, eh? Think you'll get yourself some more work clothes somewhere else, eh? Damned dirty …” — “The law's the law, Comrade.” Kostia checked the timecards for absences, went down into the tunnel with messages, helped the organizer of the Young Communists in his various educational, disciplinary, and secret-service duties. A short, dark, bobbed-haired, energetic eighteen-year-old girl with rouged lips and small acid eyes passed. He waved to her. “So your little pal Maria hasn't showed up for two days? I'll have to take it up with the Y.C. office.”

The girl stopped short and pulled up her skirt with a masculine gesture. A miner's lamp hung from her leather apron. With her hair hidden under a thick kerchief, she looked as if she were wearing a helmet. She spoke passionately, slowly, in a low voice:

“You won't see Maria again. Dead. Threw herself in the Moskva yesterday. She's in the morgue this minute. Go take a look at her if you feel like it. You made her do it — you and the Bureau. And I'm not afraid to tell you so.”

The edge of her shovel gleamed evilly over her shoulder. She pushed her way into the gaping elevator. Kostia telephoned to the department, the police, the Y.C. secretary (private wire), the secretary of the yard newspaper, and even others. Everywhere the same news echoed back to him — numbing, and now banally irreparable. At the morgue, on the marble slabs, in a lugubrious gray chill riddled with electric bulbs, lay a nameless boy who had been run over by a street-car. He lay sleeping on his back, his skin white as wax, his two hands open as if they had just dropped two marbles. There was an old Asiatic in a long overcoat, hooknosed, blue-lidded, with his cut throat gaping and black (his face had been crudely painted for a photograph). He looked like an actor made up as a corpse — greenish, the high cheekbones rose-pink. There was Maria, with her blue and white polka-dot blouse, her thin neck horribly blue, her little snub nose, her red curls plastered to her skull, but with no eyes at all, no eyeballs, only those pitiable folds of torn flesh, strangely sunk into the eye sockets. “Why did you do it, poor Marussia?” Kostia asked stupidly, while his unhappy hands kneaded his cap. This was death, the end of a universe. But a red-haired girl wasn't the universe? The guardian of the morgue, a morose Jew in a white blouse, came up:

“You know her, citizen? Then there's no use staying here any longer. Come and fill out the questionnaire.”

His office was warm, comfortable, full of papers.
Drownings. Street Accidents. Crimes. Suicides. Doubtful Cases
. “Under what heading should we put the deceased, in your opinion, citizen?” Kostia shrugged his shoulders. Then he asked angrily:

“Is there a heading, ‘Collective Crimes?'”

“No,” said the Jew. “I call your attention to the fact that the deceased has already been examined by the medical expert and shows neither ecchymoses nor signs of strangulation.”

“Suicide,” Kostia interrupted furiously.

He pushed through the drizzle, his right shoulder forward. If he could have fought somebody, broken somebody's nose, or taken a straight right on the jaw — for you, poor Marussia, you sweet little nitwit — it would have done him good. You big fool, why let yourself get so desperate? Everybody knows that men are bastards. Nobody pays any attention to the Wall Gazette, it's only fit to wipe your arse with! How could you be so dumb, you poor baby, oh for God's sake, oh hell! — The whole thing had been perfectly simple. The horror-stricken Y.C. secretary kept her brief statement to himself. It was written on a page from a school notebook and solemnly signed “Maria” (and her family name):

And that was that! On orders from the Y.C. Central Committee, the branch committees were making a campaign “for health, against demoralization.” How should the campaign be conducted? The five young men who made up the Bureau had beaten their brains, until one of them had said: “Outlaw venereal diseases.” It seemed like a brilliant idea. Of the five, two were probably V.D. cases themselves, but they were clever enough to take their treatments in distant clinics. “There's Maria, the redhead.” — “Perfect!” — A strange girl — she never said anything at meetings, she was always clean and tidy, she repulsed any advances, frightened to death, yet flared up when she was pinched — where had she ever caught her case? Not in the organization, that was certain. Then it must have been from the demoralized petty-bourgeois element? “She has no class instinct,” said the secretary severely. “I propose that we publish her expulsion in the yard Wall Gazette. We must make an example.” The Wall Gazette, illustrated with caricatures in water colors which showed a Maria recognizable only by her holiday blouse and her red hair, and grotesquely loaded with a pair of rhinestone earrings, tumbling out of a door from which projected the shadow of an enormous broom — the typewritten Wall Gazette was still posted in the vestibule of the shanty. Kostia calmly took it down, tore it into four pieces, and put the pieces in his desk drawer, because they might be used as evidence in court …

Autumn and the rains carried away the insignificant episode of Maria's suicide. Submitted to the Branch Committee for a recommendation, the case disappeared under the directives for an urgent and immediate campaign against the Right opposition, which was followed by incomprehensible expulsions; then under another campaign, slower in getting started but actually far more drastic, against corruption among Y.C. and Party officials. Under the whirlwind, the yard Y.C. secretary sunk into an abyss of opprobrium — exclusion, derision, Wall Gazette (the broom reappeared, driving him out with his hair standing on end and his papers swirling over the dump heap), and, finally, dismissal for having granted himself two months' vacation in a rest house whose dazzling white walls rose among the rockslides and bursting flowers of Alupka in the Crimea.

Kostia, accused of “having demonstratively torn up an issue of the Wall Gazette (a serious breach of discipline) and having attempted to exploit the suicide of an excluded member as part of an intrigue to discredit the Young Communist Bureau,” was “severely censured.” What did he care? Every night — after the yard, the city, his suppressed rages, his sole-less shoes, the sour soup, the icy wind — he returned to the soothing eyes of his miniature. He knocked at Romachkin's door — Romachkin had aged a good deal only recently, and read strange books of a religious tendency. Kostia warned him: “Watch out, Romachkin, or you'll find yourself a mystic.” “Impossible,” the shriveled little man answered. “I am so profoundly a materialist that …”

“That?”

“Nothing. I believe it is always the same unrest in contradictory forms.”

“Perhaps,” said Kostia, struck by the idea. “Perhaps the mystic and the revolutionary are brothers … But one has to extirpate the other …”