Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  He knew so many of the victims — tortured, executed — by their names, their faces, their weaknesses, their eccentricities, their talents, their journeys, their service records, their bookshelves, their greatness, that he had to stop himself remembering them for fear of being overcome by a demoralizing fatigue. Repressed, they massed within him to form the anonymous “cohort,” the dark “Number.” We fancied ourselves as the “iron cohort,” the elite of the elect, that was us! Our hubris has been properly punctured. The dark Number was arrived at by means of scrupulous cross-checks, and varied with the degree of bitterness, rebellion, or pity felt at the moment; in any case, it ran to five figures. So many victims.

  What is “conscience”? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today’s mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don’t even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I’m behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther’s words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, “God help me!” What will come to help me?

  The big newspapers don’t have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don’t count. The big writers wouldn’t believe me. Those who might, wouldn’t understand me, and it is not me that must be understood, it’s the nightmare of a sick power and the demise of a whole category of thinking men. Writers prefer other subjects anyway, less compromising, more commercial … I won’t say anything, not a word. If six months from now finds me quietly in Paraguay or California, I’ll order piles of psychology books and settle down to a study of conscience, the superego, the ego, and suspicion, the obsessiveness of suspicion, the sudden urge to liquidate the finest as though to become their equals by replacing them … My notions of all that are probably out-of-date. And there’s no such thing yet as social psychology. A day will come when people feel unable to live without such knowledge — more important than the knowledge required to build a machine. Catastrophes don’t need it. A psychology based on drilling men into obedience is quite sufficient for the Education Authority, the Psychiatric Service of the Public Health Secretariat, the Military Morale Office, the Politburo, or the Longevity Institute, devoted to the preservation of State cadres (whom the same State is destroying). Meanwhile these institutions, viewed as a whole, are working to prepare the catastrophes: the circle is closed.

  D had the driver stop in front of a small café in Neuilly. Sitting at a white marble table, he ordered some ham and a glass of wine. His depression was lifting. A mysterious ballet where dark thoughts, beams of light, and profound instincts choreographed by an unknown director played out in his mind: physiology plus the spiritual X. The taxi driver, drinking at the bar, was discussing with the patron the finer points of cooking hare in white wine. D felt a rush of friendship toward these two men. Enough of this cerebral debauchery! The noose has been cut. Now to overcome the effects of my overwrought nerves. A little pride, old man, you’re one of the strong type. (It’s worth telling yourself this from time to time, if only as a means of autosuggestion …) He mentally reread the letter he had addressed the day before to the Special Envoy, twenty lines of calculated platitudes, yet containing this clear and honest passage:

  … So deeply do I disapprove of what is happening that I find it impossible to carry out duties which are incompatible with doubt and blame. You know of my absolute commitment, repeatedly borne out by my actions. I can only assure you of my definitive retirement into private life, that I vow to say and do nothing that might harm our cause …

  A brief memo had followed regarding bank accounts, cases in progress, and liaisons with second-tier agents. It occurred to D that the concepts of disapproval, doubt, and blame (just one would have sufficed) canceled out the “absolute commitment” and the promise. They opened a thousand doors onto problems. They stood in judgment over the Party, the system, the Organization; any individual who judges the group, by the mere fact of such temerity, places himself outside the law. “After all, I was never afraid of being killed.” But now the seriousness of the risk amounted to near-certainty, even as its significance was humiliatingly trivialized. To embrace risk for the sake of the group required no justification. But a risk incurred for oneself? He told himself coarsely: “To live only for oneself is barren — like masturbation.”

  “ … nicely marinated in white wine,” the driver was repeating. “The onions browned separate. A clove of garlic, nutmeg …” Another voice, slurred and hearty, finished describing the recipe with an appreciative cluck of the tongue: “That, Monsieur, is what I call fine cooking!” “And hare stew?” D broke in happily. “Let me tell you,” said the patron, who was a dab hand with a shotgun. D listened to the instructions without taking them in. How good it would have been to exchange cordial handshakes with these fellows, to meet up for a Sunday’s shooting at Suresnes, to drink Beaujolais together! D’s gloom returned as he paid the bill. The difficult hour of his rendezvous with Nadine was approaching.

  * * *

  “No adulterers in sight today,” D said with a smile, when they were alone in the discreetly luxurious tearoom.

  There was a lovely fold to her eyelids. Her cheeks were full and dimpled, her mouth richly outlined in scarlet. She had a sidelong way of looking you straight in the eye that was at once demure and forthright, the tough candor of a peasant girl from the steppes who has just stepped out of a smart hairdresser’s on the rue Saint-Honoré. Nadine offered her cheek, not her lips: displeased.

  “Are you all right, Nadine? No one knows about your return to Paris, do they? Did you follow my instructions without fail — to the letter?”

  “Oh, of course I did, what do you think?”

  Her voice betrayed irritation.

  “It’s extremely important, actually.”

  “Well, not more than usual, is it? Sacha, I really hate it when you treat me like a child.”

  He insisted: “It’s infinitely more important than you think. So, you didn’t phone anyone?”

  The waitress took their order: tea with lemon and pastries. She was hard put to classify these two. Foreign? Lovers, married? She put her money on a heavy breakup scene, with a sprinkling of sentiment over the top like confectioner’s sugar on yesterday’s buns, plus a modest check to prevent hard feelings.

  At very bad moments, D would feel muscles cramping while a chill crept over his skin, as though his energies were being sucked deep inside, the better to be healed, the better to pounce. His pupils shrank to pinpoints then. Nadine pulled off her gloves. Knowing him through and through — as she thought — she said, “Don’t make those eyes at me, Sacha. By now you don’t have any lessons to teach me about being careful. And what if I did call Sylvia — surely it doesn’t matter?”

  “Ah.”

  The stupid mistake. Like a tightrope walker who trips over a bit of orange peel in the street, when at thirty feet up with the drums rolling, he would never have made a false move. One fractured shin bone and that’s the end of the beautiful, brilliant acrobat. Shit!

  “You did that?”

  Nadine was sincerely bewildered.

  “So now I’m to be suspicious of Sylvia, am I? Or perhaps Sylvia’s being watched? Sacha you’re out of your mind.”

  He chewed on a slice of lemon. He had traveled, in the past, with a cyanide capsule glued to his scalp. He would have chewed that in the same way under the nose of the detectives. Twice: in China, in Germany …

  “How did you get here? By car?”

  “I changed taxis at Porte Maillot …”

  “Good. Now please try to understand and try not to judge me. We’re going to America, it’s all fixed. I thought of everything except you
calling Sylvia. I’ve broken with them, Nadine.”

  Nadine thought in shattered images and disjointed phrases. As soon as an image became too upsetting it vanished, like it was torn up. The sentence trailed off, its gist telegraphed to minimize the disturbance. Everything that concerned her personally remained indelibly printed on a lower register. Departure — America, that’s nothing, we’ve traveled so much already! The word “broken” hit her like a nail bomb. Nadine glimpsed the broad flat nose of old Sémen — shot. She saw the fake but costly pearl necklace on Elsa’s white, nervous throat — Elsa, disappeared. The deep bluish hollows around Emmy’s eyes, eyes she’d always envied for their bewitching quality, very like hers, except that hers were not so bewitching — disappeared, Emmy who adored confectionery, Paris gowns, gloves, and handsome cads. Stout Kraus, saluting her as former officers do, click heels, bow low, kiss hand — gone, the fat malicious, twice-decorated ex-convict, et cetera, how, we’ll never know. The Poluyanovs, a young couple full of promise, thoroughly worldly to all appearances, fluent in four languages, thoroughly Anglicized, and shot, according to an unverifiable rumor. Bald Alexis, the one involved in that dreadful Ploesti business, the tortured hero who got out of prison six months ago — killed himself on being arrested they say, but it’s possible he was gunned down like a dog because he shot off his mouth (no noise allowed at night in apartment houses; and if there is noise, a pistol shot does less harm than an indignant voice). Nadine shook off these ghosts. Several others, on the point of appearing, hovered at the edge of memory. A ghastly exhalation steamed from a black pit toward her nostrils.

  “How did you dare, Sacha?”

  “On strictly rational grounds. If I’d waited, it would have come to the same thing before long. After Kraus, Alexis, Emmy, you know … And those were people with no influence …”

  Her phone conversation with Sylvia appeared in a new and disquieting light. “That’s right, I’m back from Nice, meeting Sacha later on, off to Les Trois Quartiers tomorrow at eleven … pure rayon, Sylvette, in two colors, rose and burgundy, what d’you think? With a frightfully low neckline …” Sylvia’s husband, the addresses, the passports, the money to be drawn — all the necessary connections fell into place so ominously that she became visibly panic-stricken, and had the shabbiest thoughts in her life. “If they kill him, will they kill me too? I’m only small-fry. And we have so little money …”

  “Careful,” D was saying. “Remain calm.”

  Suddenly he broke into an oily, screen-actor’s leer, as though playing a roguish but likable bank manager.

  “What charming gloves, my dear.”

  This idiotic pose and change of tone because a couple, a navy officer and a rangy brunette with the profile of a greyhound, had just walked into the tearoom. A true-blue, genuine article of an officer: they don’t make ’em like that to order! D feared a hostile reaction from Nadine in view of the enormity of the accident. He had loved this woman for ten years. She was younger than he was, selfish, practical, a skillful operator during missions, superficially romantic when they were alone, gifted at times with a mercurial, inebriated, almost silent laugh and the undefended gaze of a primitive; simple in her loving, and as harmoniously built as a beautiful animal … For him she reserved her admiration, a flattered, willing sensuality, and a comradely directness of manner. There were no conventional prejudices between them.

  An unexpected silence fell. Nadine called the waitress and ordered a liqueur.

  “One for you, Sacha?”

  “No thanks.”

  He was held by an expression on her face that he had never seen.

  “About Sylvia,” she said dreamily, “it’s a bore. So silly of me, I’m sorry. If I do what I have to do very quickly, it’ll be all right … probably. You can count on me. What you’ve done is irreparable. I think you’ve made a mistake, but I understand, it was strangling you. For me, the worst part isn’t that.”

  What lay behind this detachment of hers, this calm as of total disaster? Her hard expression on the verge of tears?

  “We’re an old couple, Sacha. You know that I love you in a special, profound way. I don’t always understand you, but sometimes I understand you completely. For me to take off, to leave now, is a bit … it’s a little awful.”

  “Little and awful don’t go together,” he said, intent on her.

  She brushed her fingers over the man’s hand where it lay on the tablecloth.

  “I love someone else, quite differently from the way I love you. I was very happy. I wasn’t planning to keep it from you or to hurt you unduly. We’ll always be what we are — if you want. I can’t imagine myself without you, Sacha … But there’s this person I love. He doesn’t prevent me being yours. You’ve got to understand … And now, now …”

  If a relationship is not free, it’s unhealthy. Sexuality can only be mastered through reason, by granting to it the part of us it demands. Thus delivered from its imperious claims, we can live for acts of intelligence and will. The human machine requires a good control mechanism which our physiologists — or moralists — named the brake. Repression diminishes a man as much as promiscuity. Jealousy is a leftover from an obsolete set of customs (among us), based on the subjugation of the female by the male and on private property. Moral hygiene, physical hygiene … The couple is a partnership of free beings, founded on comradeship in struggle … and so on and so forth, in formulas rehashed by Youth Club lecturers until the message had imprinted itself upon the smallest nerve filament. At least that’s what D thought up to a few seconds ago. We live on limited notions, dried out like plants pressed in a book. Under the shock, he pretended to stand by those shattered clichés. “Bad timing, in any case …” And four o’clock already. No time to lose.

  “Who? Is he one of us?”

  He only threw in the second question to provide a spurious justification for the first. What did it matter, when all was said and done? Bad timing for you too, Nadine, it’s just your hard luck. Now suffer. (He almost snickered.) We’re being tracked down together. The afterthought flashed through him that from now on she might — if push came to shove — betray him. Never expect too much of a woman: she has thousands of years of subjugation behind her.

  “Who is he?”

  “I can’t tell you. Forgive me. It’s impossible. I’ll take care of everything necessary, and we’ll leave whenever you say. But I …”

  A stubborn violence rose in him. Who? “I need to know so as to take adequate precautions.”

  “I can’t. But I promise, you have no complications to fear from that quarter.”

  “The quarter of the flesh,” he reflected bitterly, with a vision of Nadine’s sculpted body, the raised mound of her sex, the thick curls that were lighter than her hair … “It’s beautiful,” he’d said to her once, “it charms me in the same way as your face.” Push those images aside. Nadine looked so woefully disconsolate that he was ashamed of feeling dominated by instinct — and of being, as instinct would have it, the stronger of the two.

  “Very well, Nadine. Let’s assume I don’t care, even if I do — more than I would have expected. All I insist on are the precautions. No goodbyes. No letters or signals of any kind, to anyone.” (He imagined how many problems this could cause.) “You see, we are in the greatest danger. I’ve got you a new passport, with visa, and I’ve reserved a cabin. You have to follow my instructions to the letter. We sail on the seventh. Let’s go.”

  All this pretended calm cost him effort. Oh to send the tea service flying, pick a fight with the naval officer, smash his face in, forbidden pleasures! He accompanied Nadine in a taxi to a point not far from her mid-price pension on the rue d’Amsterdam (it was bound to be staked out by now), which she would be leaving that same evening. “Say you’re going abroad, leave everything in order as though you were coming back, and later have a letter posted there from London, so nobody worries about your disappearance. Watch out for anyone taking photos, all right? I’ll expect you after nine. Keep i
n mind you could be tailed, and being tailed could be lethal …” Business over, as they sat side by side, without touching, in a muffled silence like a fog, D was wondering: “Who is he? One of us? A stranger she met on a train, at the beach, at the pension? Our life was wretchedly separate, between hasty meetings … I don’t want this obsession. I don’t care. Enough. Finished. But who?” Nadine took his hand.

  “Have I hurt you terribly? I never thought …”

  So convenient, never to think … !

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m fine. Worried — especially by your carelessness. It’ll work out … See you later.”

  The cab was driving past the pension. D didn’t like the look of the news vendor leaning against the wall. “Is he always there?” “I … I don’t think so … If I remember right, he used to stand farther down, by the haberdashery …”

  “Bye now, Sacha. Don’t be nervous.”

  Nadine offered her cheek. He placed a cold kiss on it. She got out.

  * * *

  It was the day after a hike over the Roof of the World, in a Xinjiang village, if a point on the sterile steppe where a few mud huts cluster around a well can be termed a village. I was dying as I explored the Roof of Life, the environs of death, and they acquired for me the simple features of a continent’s bare peak. A diminutive yellow man with an Astrakhan bonnet and a triangular face, his pupils opaque within the fleshy slits of his lids, had fired a slim Japanese bullet at me from his rampart of ruins. I was in love with the ruins. After decoding the dispatches and encoding the reports; after the ceremonious interviews with turbaned elders in striped robes, venerable, devious, and unwashed, and greasy junior notables who were always smiling, homosexual, guarded, and false; after the tea, the salaam, the agreements that neither side would honor; after the hours spent mulling over the probable treacheries, the possible ambushes, and the itinerary of bands on the march along the goat tracks — then, when dusk cooled the air, I would leave the low longhouse of baked clay. First I went to visit N’ga, the keeper of the water. At the center of a blue-white space, jars of cold water stood coated with a sweat of droplets. No one was allowed to approach this water, which N’ga personally drew from the well. The people of this country were adept at poisons that had no taste and that could shrivel a man in a matter of weeks. Your mucus turns blue, your teeth rattle, you become sleepy, incurably sleepy, with a dull ache in your bones … N’ga was devoted to me. He clothed in white his ephebe’s body, molded by the lusts of local chiefs, he trilled piercingly on his flute, he played knucklebones all by himself, hooting with girlish laughter when he won. I had healed the sores that were torturing him, swabbed away his pus and his fleas, cleansed him of fear. He loved me with a servile passion, conveyed through his beautiful, blank eyes: it must come as a puzzle that the Powerful White Man from the Country of the Bear felt no hankering for his caresses. We had few words in common. I would ask, “Is the water cold and pure, faithful N’ga?”