On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “Abram Davidovich, even as a cynic, you’re a failure. How can you be so sure?”

  “And you, Nadya, are such a good pupil; I’m no longer so sure about the colour of the bullet that’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t you worry: it’ll be White. Unlike you, I know what I’m doing. I’m a soldier and avoid thinking too much about the abstract or even where we’re going. I’m an avenger and the vengeance I’ll inflict will be against my class and myself. I leave the job of making the Revolution work to the leaders. If they fail, then the fault will be theirs and their years in a Tsarist prison a wasted effort.”

  Hold on, I’m telling you all about Nadezhda, and she’s the one this story’s about. But you need to know where I fit in and who the Polish count is. You also have to know about Alexei and a little about the Frenchman and a few others. So I must get that stuff out of the way, but Nadezhda’s the one who has forced me to sit down and write it all out. She’s the one who has broken my heart and made me see everything so differently.

  I am Abram Davidovich Geller, and I was born in the countryside fifty miles north of Odessa. I am a political commissar in the Red Army, and I have been seconded to the Comintern to assist one of their officials, Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, whom I call the Frenchman. He is an agreeable superior, although demanding and absolutely straight. He rarely acts in a dictatorial fashion, in spite of the war, and he consults me on everything. It’s true that he once looked at me a little fiercely and said, “Could you stop this business of always referring to me as the Frenchman? If I’m not a Russian, then I’m a Belgian.”

  “I know, but I like getting some things wrong,” I replied. “I think of you as a Frenchman, so that’s what I’ll call you.”

  “Abram Davidovich, I never know when you’re joking.”

  “I’m not joking. And I’m paying you a compliment. France is where this all started. Revolution and turning the world upside down.”

  He laughed when he heard me say this: “Then you’re an unintentional joker. France has little left of its revolution, and it also has some of the worst prisons. I know; I spent many years in one for publishing an anarchist journal. I know why you call me the Frenchman – it’s because you want to underscore my foreignness. These things don’t concern me. I’m an internationalist.”

  “Yes, of course, Victor Lvovich and so am I,” I grinned, “but I’m also a Russian and Russia is a big country. As a Russian I have to find all foreigners exotic and slightly ridiculous. My intellect tells me you’re an eminent internationalist revolutionary, but my rural Russian heart tells me you’re a Frenchman with puzzling Parisian ways.”

  “Abram Davidovich,” he continued to laugh, “whoever made you a political commissar must have been off his head.”

  “No he wasn’t,” I smiled again. “But he did have a sense of humour.”

  We both have rooms in the same building as the Polish count, an altogether more sinister fellow. Of course we respect him, because he has suffered much for the cause. The Tsarist prison guards beat him so regularly that his jaw and mouth are permanently disfigured. He wears a moustache and a goatee, dresses well for these times, and often hides his severity and merciless intellect behind an air of jocularity. This unhappy man works incessantly and is called Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. God knows what the world will think of him in twenty years time or fifty. One day a companion of his accused him of moralism, and he briskly replied as though all truth were contained in these few words, “This is not moralism; this is history playing itself out and we are its pawns.” Perhaps he defends the Revolution; perhaps he undermines it. Such are the times. His contribution to this story is primarily atmospheric. He is one of the gods – all-seeing, all-knowing and all-consuming. And he consorts with the Fates.

  We rarely see him, but his presence fills the building and hangs in the air like a threat. On one occasion, Victor Lvovich and I met him on the stairs and very formally Victor asked, “How are you, Felix Edmundovich?”

  He stopped but didn’t look at us. He seemed to be considering a very difficult intellectual puzzle, but perhaps he was struggling to retain fading ruminations. After perhaps a full half minute he turned to Victor and his face expressed mild irritation at the banal interruption to his daily routine. “Well,” he said in the clipped tone of someone whose thoughts are still racing on some other subject, “as well as can be expected.” After another pause, brief but long enough for his face to brighten, he added, “But busy, busy, busy. We must get together, Victor Lvovich, and have a little chat some time. We have much in common, you and I. Foreigners both, but only foreigners like us can get a grip on this crazy revolution. What is required is zeal for thoroughness. Without it there can be no progress – no revolution. The dialectic produces one paradox after another: history has called on Russians, a people most lacking in such zeal, to carry out its greatest task.” He chortled with only a hint of tiredness, as though he had said something funny – or even profound.

  So much had sprung from Victor’s tiny courtesy, and I doubt that Victor felt any great affinity with Felix Edmundovich. War kills not only people, but also the values that motivate them. In war, the single goal of victory overrides all other things, and most especially our understanding of what is acceptable. We all change but some more than others, and Dzerzhinsky was one of those who had changed a great deal. Certainly, that invitation was not genuine; it was a pre-war reflex still active in his febrile, war-wearied mind. Somewhere there was a memory of good manners and the realisation that his behaviour was now manic and compulsive. I doubt Victor ever dropped in on the Director of Cheka for tea and a few words about the dialectic and its paradoxes. That was something I would do – something required by the events I wish to recount.

  After yet another pregnant silence, Dzerzhinsky said with a thin smile, “Good day to you, Victor Lvovich,” and, recognising my presence for the first time, added, “and to you, Abram Davidovich.”

  That encounter showed me that Felix was in all probability being consumed and destroyed by his work. The three years since he investigated and “severely reprimanded” one of his officers for hitting a detainee must now seem to him like a century of invasions rebuffed by the faltering energies of a powerful dream. Did he look in the mirror and see the face of one of his former persecutors? Was he a good man forced to do evil for a greater good, or a bad man freed to enact his vengeful dreams? A mix of both? Perhaps human acts are never pure, and always the product of varied and sometimes contradictory impulses. A kindness could theoretically be a pure desire to be kind or alternatively a pure desire to appear to be kind, but surely it must nearly always be a mixture of the two. The balance between them may shift, of course, and who would dare to judge the balance between good and bad in Dzerzhinsky. And to judge is to be both arrogant and vain, because we cannot know.

  To speak of Dzerzhinsky is inevitably to speak of ends and means. The events of recent days have confirmed my hunch that the former can never entirely justify the latter, but those who make decisions must indulge in such calculations. They have soldiers and civilians to protect. They are responsible; they have taken on God-like duties. They’re supposed to know – to see all – but they can’t. They’re human. They have forgotten and possibly have been forced to forget that, although we can never achieve purity as we struggle through life, we should at least seek after it, and this is our principal task.

  Alexei Konstantinovich Kozlov was Nadezhda’s lover. And I was her ex-lover. We had become close when we were fighting down in the Ukraine, but our love affair never had the passion of theirs. I don’t know how much Alexei knew, probably everything. Relations between lover and ex-lover were cool, but never too cool, because neither of us wanted to compromise our relationship with Nadezhda, and we both knew that she could be unforgiving of “old-fashioned ways”. She, we felt, really belonged to the future, while we were struggling to keep up. Alexei was a good-looking young man, I have to admit that, but I was the smarter. She always chided me
for my lack of seriousness, but I could never tell her that Alexei’s lack of seriousness was much more serious than mine. His derived from an almost complete lack of conviction in anything but his own pleasure. He was not made for our times. I’m not saying that he didn’t run risks; we all have to. But he avoided them where he could, and he had an acquisitiveness that displayed itself in his surprisingly smart boots, and shirts we could only dream of – except we didn’t. Who would care about shirts, when he doesn’t know whether he’ll live to the end of the week? Only a man like Alexei.

  Don’t get me wrong! I wasn’t behaving like the jilted lover, but I knew that Alexei was taking a different kind of risk – not the kind we take with the Whites – but the silly unnecessary kind which could put her in danger too. I liked him – you may not believe me – but I liked his difference from me: his handsome face always with a ready smile for everyone, even for the Whites. I saw him give a cigarette to a White soldier we’d taken prisoner – just a boy whose unsteady hands couldn’t light it. Alexei lit it himself and then stuffed it between the youngster’s trembling lips. “You’ll be okay,” he smiled at the lad, “you’re recruited to the other side. We’ll see you through.” I think the boy no longer cared about life and death, or smiles and cigarettes; the shock of war had broken him and he would be of little use to either Reds or Whites. Of course, Alexei would have heard all about me and my foibles from Nadya, but there were some things she could only talk to me about. Like the time she came across the White officer in no-man’s-land, which is now just a few kilometres from the city boundaries. This is more or less how she described it to me. Perhaps I infer too much.

  She went out into the night to position herself for sniping at the enemy once the sun came up, but as soon as she got there, she acted with her usual foolhardiness, made herself a bed of straw and lay down to sleep.

  “Quite a little filly,” she heard someone say as she struggled for consciousness. The first thing she saw was the muzzle of an officer’s pistol pointed at her head. Her hand went up towards it but his foot came down on her neck. He continued to apply enough pressure to half choke her. “You’re not going anywhere, my dear, until I’ve had a little fun with you, and then you’re going to hell where all you Red bastards belong.” He threw his pistol onto the straw some six or seven metres away, and started to undo his belt.

  “Nikolai, don’t you know me,” she rasped. “I’m Nadezhda Alexeyevna Trubetskoy.”

  He stopped and looked at her face carefully, until an expression of recognition gradually passed over his own. He removed his foot and looked a little ashamed. “Nadya, what are you doing with the Reds?”

  “I was trying to cross over but got lost and took refuge in this barn. I’m just a girl, Nikolai, and my upbringing was very sheltered, as you know. I was caught by a band of Reds and they raped me and forced me to enlist.”

  “The animals! This is the filth we have to fight against? The world has indeed gone mad. We must restore order; we must punish these people, by God! We’ll inflict such terror that it’ll take them generations just to straighten their backs.”

  “You’re right, Kolya. You were always so wise. Get me some water from the stream.”

  Dutifully, like the polite young aristocrat he was, he made for the door, his heart contested by two conflicting emotions: the first was anguish that order in this world had been so fractured that the dregs of society could commit such unthinkable acts and go unpunished; the second elation that he, Nikolai Sergeyevich Obolensky, would be the one to free this delightful young woman from the hideous barbarity into which she had fallen through no fault of her own. He was already composing a letter to his friend, Nadezhda’s first cousin, in which he would explain the circumstances of this encounter – well, most of them. Of course, he had always adored her – hadn’t they all? Everyone thought Pavel Mikhailevich Stroganov would be the one to take the prize, but now fate had dealt him this great opportunity. No one was to know of what had happened to her. Such things damage a young woman’s reputation, but he would let her father know very discreetly, to demonstrate how his love was in no way diminished by what she had suffered. How could her father fail to be moved by such magnanimity? Once the war was over and normality restored, they would marry in style. No, on second thoughts, he couldn’t wait for this hellfire to finish. Who would have thought that that shabby, ill-disciplined army of thugs would put up so much resistance? They know they have done wrong and are fearful of the consequences – the inescapable consequences.

  As he moved across the barn through a mist of pleasant, restorative dreams in which his ideals – so different from hers – became concrete in a narrative of hope, she carefully compared his increasing distance from his pistol with the fixed one that divided her from her rifle. Then she moved. The rustling hay did not matter. Her calculation was infallible. In the event, he started to turn only very slowly, detaching himself unwillingly from the sluggish viscosity of his fantasy, while still the request for water remained lodged in his mind as the purpose of his movement. In a sense, he was no longer in an abandoned and war-damaged barn in no-man’s-land, but back home on the family estate, where courtesy and comfort were taken for granted. He turned not out of fear, but curiosity to see what the lovely girl was up to now.

  The barrel was pointed at his thigh, and the rifle’s report and the stabbing pain occupied the same instant. He fell like every soldier falls – no longer the brutal slayer of his recalcitrant countrymen, but a victim of war. His smart uniform manufactured in England was now soiled with mud on the barn floor, and his blood was darkening the blue of his trouser leg. Unlike her, he had only done what was expected of him. He had not thought about society; he had just accepted society as it was, as any sensible man should. His was the innocence of the blind. Could he be held responsible for what he could not see?

  She lay on the ground where she’d thrown herself, and watched him writhing on the floor, not with relish but neither with compassion. She stood up slowly and never took her eyes off him, as a hunter might treat a fierce but wounded animal. The wound gave her superiority, but he could not be dealt with carelessly.

  “Nadya, why did you do that?” he asked pathetically, more troubled by his incomprehension than by the excruciating pain in his leg.

  “Quite the lad,” she grinned and placed her boot on his neck, applying just the right pressure as he had taught her to do. “You’re not going anywhere until I’ve had a little fun with you, and then you’re going to the hell reserved for White guards. I imagine it as an endless waste of snow; whiteness in every direction. Very appropriate, don’t you think? Not just the colour of your politics, of course – the right place for those who believe so steadfastly in their own purity and see nothing, for those who are alone in the insubstantiality of their very material existences.”

  What she said was so incomprehensible that he now knew she was mad, and this only increased his compassion for her. “Nadezhda, my darling, what they did to you was hideous; you have, I think, lost your mind – but not forever, Nadezhda. I understand you, Nadezhda Alexeyevna, and I’ll help you. We must stand together. I love you. Always have.”

  For Nadya, this was an unpleasant and unexpected turn of events, which she reacted to by increasing the pressure on his neck and saying, “Who did what to me? What are you raving about?”

  “The Reds – they raped you.”

  “I was lying, you idiot.”

  “Why would you lie about a thing like that? They’re quite capable of it, you know.”

  “That’s your opinion, but I seem to remember you were the one undoing your belt.”

  “But that was before I knew who you were,” he pleaded.

  Exasperated by the perfidiousness of her class, she pressed her foot down hard. “I told you a lie, because I couldn’t tell you that I joined up right at the beginning of the Civil War when your backers, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, decided to invade. I had already joined the party in August 1917. I am now a child of th
e Revolution – not a Trubetskoy at all.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “But you were such a placid girl, so well-mannered and kind. An example – I might say – to other girls who lacked your maturity and self-discipline.”

  “You thought you knew me,” she sneered, still keeping her foot on his neck and the rifle pointed at his heart. “You clearly understand nothing, Nikolai. You feel that someone has stolen your life and that you can fight to win it back. I tell you this, Nikolai,” she spat, “whoever wins this war, things will never go back to what they were before. Russia has changed, and either it will build socialism or there will be something infinitely worse than what we had before.”

  “Socialism, what’s that?” It was his turn to sneer. “Castles in the sky! Meanwhile clerks and metalworkers wander around as though they own the world. Nadya, for Christ’s sake, you come from one of Russia’s oldest families. How can you disown that? You think you can run a country by waving flags and marching the streets? Your Lenin is a disturbed fanatic.”

  “Socialism? You want to know what it means? Then I’ll tell you: education for our children, hospitals, a living wage for our working people, the right of women to do all the things men do, and without hindrance. Socialism means common ownership of everything. Socialism means changing the world, and giving everyone a chance.”

  “Russia may never go back to what it was,” now Nikolai was angry, “but the fires of hell will dim before Russia ever resembles that utopia. The muzhiks will never emerge from their grime and ignorance. You fool, Nadya, you’ve thrown away your birthright, your people. Worse, you’ve betrayed your country.”

  “Our country? How can you say that? You who fight with the Estonians and drive those six tanks General Yudenich had as a gift from the British. You’re in the foreigner’s pocket, and if you win, Russia will never be more than a satrapy.”