Sonnenschein adds a note of tender comedy to our group. He is short, with a conical forehead, bald around the temples, a rather sharp Semitic profile, thick Assyrian lips, and tiny intelligent eyes which see everything with an ironic indulgence. His mind was shaped in a rabbinical school somewhere in Poland. He was a Zionist before becoming a socialist. He has a humorous way of arguing. His eyes are illuminated by a sharp glimmer of laughter. “Listen to a story,” he says … And it’s always a Jewish story, slightly facetious, embellished with savory details, but of great wisdom. In order to explain to us that each task must be accomplished in its own time, he told us the definitive aphorism of Schmoul the tailor, whose neighbor had come to order a pair of pants. “When will you finish sewing it, Schmoul?”—“In two weeks, Itzek, my friend.”—“Two weeks, to sew a pair of pants? When God himself made the world in six days?” Schmoul withdrew the pins he was holding in his mouth, considered his bearded interlocutor, the room, and the universe that could be seen through the window and said: “Yes, but what a world. Itzek! And what a pair of pants it will be!”
When there are six of us around a table, we have the experience of all the continents, all the oceans, all the pain and the revolt of men: the Labor parties of New South Wales, the vain apostleship of Theodor Herzl, the Mooney trial, the struggles of the Magón brothers in California, Pancho Villa, Zapata, syndicalism, anarchism, Malatesta’s exemplary life, the individualism and the death of those bandits who wanted to be “new men,” Hervéism, social democracy, the work of Lenin—as yet unknown to the world—all the prisons.
We used to come together almost every day, sometimes after the reading of the papers, sometimes in regular meetings of the group. And at times stormy division appeared in our debates, ready to become sources of hate among fraternal enemies. Old Fomine looked upon the revolution as the explosion and the disorderly growth of popular forces. The soundest ideas would quite naturally come to the fore amid the thousands of interconnected conflicts; the example of the best men would—through success, the exaltation of their souls and their own passion—impose itself on the masses, torn between their own higher aspirations and the dead weight of the past, of the lies, of the backward-looking egoism (for enlightened egoism understands that the good of the individual is found in solidarity) … When he had finished talking, Krafft took the floor and sprinkled his short, colorless sentences, spoken in a tone of insignificance, over that ardent voice still ringing in our ears: it was like a thin stream of ice water being poured over a glowing hearth … This old-fashioned romanticism would only be good for leading the revolution to disaster; happily the proletariat had already passed through that stage some time ago. It was based on utopian socialism and not on scientific socialism. Henceforth there is a technique of revolution, which demands organization, discipline, watchwords, order. Persuasion before the conquest of power, yes: the competition between false ideologies and the correct political line, the latter winning over the masses because it best expresses their true aspirations (hence its correctness). Of course. But after the conquest of power, Jacobin centralization, systematic resistance to the reactionary tendencies among the workers themselves, a merciless struggle against confused, reactionary, or romantic ideologies that have become pernicious …
A tense silence fell little by little around Krafft, whose feeble hand was making authoritarian gestures. And Fomine exploded in a voice snarling with sarcasm, stunning laughter, impetuosity:
“Ah! No! After all! If you want to imagine you are carrying the truth in your right-hand vest pocket, sharp and clear like a white pebble, that’s your business. But if, from that, you want to close my mouth by calling me a reactionary, a romantic, a utopian, a petit-bourgeois or whatever you like, then no! I won’t stand for it. Nobody will stand for it. In two words: Are you for freedom of the press, yes or no?”
“Under a bourgeois regime, before the conquest of power, yes, because it is necessary to the proletariat. Afterward, that notion becomes superfluous. We control the press. We are free. The unhealthy and reactionary tendencies of the working class have no right to what you call—using an old liberal word, not really revolutionary—freedom.”
A hubbub of exclamations drowned out his voice. “But who is to judge?”—“The organized proletariat.”—“That is to say the party, your party.”—“The only party of the proletariat.”
“Then,” cried Fomine, “you’ll have to throw me into prison, do you understand? You’ll have to mass-produce prisons! And then—then—I’d really like to see that!”
“I don’t know,” retorted Krafft, without raising his voice, “if it will be necessary to build new prisons, for prisons are destined to disappear, but we’ll certainly need the old ones for the enemies of the revolution as well as for bunglers. Besides, they’ll be quite well off there. Much better than here, you can believe me … The only choice we have is between victory and destruction. Fantasy and poetry are beside the point. Look, it’s entirely possible that three-quarters of the workers themselves will turn against us at the first serious difficulties. Aren’t we well aware that they, too, are permeated with the old ideas, the old instincts of the bourgeoisie? that they have only its newspapers to read? Ought we, out of a respect for some high principles inculcated by the enemy, to leave him alone so that they can help to hang us and then take up the yoke again?”
Krafft remained alone. Shrugs, Karl’s broad smile in his sunny beard, and one of Sonnenschein’s good stories calmed everyone down. Krafft, overcome by sheer weight of numbers, considered us calmly, with a nuance of irony in his eyes.
The news from Russia filled us all with a boundless confidence.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Flight
HAVING STRETCHED OUT IN THE YARD, IN THE SUN, UNDER HIS BLANKET, OLD Antoine fell asleep. At soup call at four o’clock he didn’t get up and nobody paid any attention to him. The shade crept over the sleeper. Strollers bent over him; a group formed. They were looking at his fleas. The blanket was covered with wide milky spots with moving edges. After a long moment, someone wondered why those thousands of parasites were fleeing the man, already as cold as a stone.
“’E’s dead.”
Nobody was willing to touch the hunched-up corpse. The male nurse Jean promised God-knows-what to two miserable devils who finally dragged him off without lifting him, stiff as a wax doll.
“Our crew is ready,” Sam announced to us that day.
They had been preparing their escape for long days—three of them: Sam, a tall, sad boy called Markus (a Russian Jew in his twenties), and the Rumanian. Markus had been my bunkmate for a while. Captivity oppressed him to an inexplicable degree. He was covered with invisible chains; they wore out his muscles, they drove him to despair. His young worker’s hands had become soft, thin, pale: “Ladylike hands, wouldn’t you say?” he would ask, full of scorn and humiliation. His spirits rose abruptly once his decision had been made. “What the hell, I’ll take the chance!” he told us, exalted. We considered the barbwire fence under the window and, near his sentry box, the sleepy sentry, recognizable by his red neck and his elephantine hindquarters: it was Vignaud, a socialist solider who never spared the Bolsheviks his disapproval. “Do you think Vignaud would shoot?” questioned Sonnenschein. “And how!” said Sam. “I think so too,” said Sonnenschein, “but he would miss his man …”—“Without doing it on purpose, the fat-ass bastard!” Vignaud noticed us and gave us a friendly wave of the hand … The Rumanian who was supposed to leave with our two comrades rather worried us. Certainly suspected of espionage, he was truly elegant, ageless, his hair carefully pomaded, his eyelids wrinkled; a jaded habitué of nightclubs, an expert poker player, deceitful and polite, who trimmed his nails carefully every morning. He needed resolute companions for this daring attempt; his contribution to the group was a wad of banknotes artistically sewn into the lining of his clothes.
Their plan was simple. Wait for one of those stormy evenings when the rain forces the sentries to huddle in t
heir shelters while the white glare of the searchlights fights against the rain squalls, and the noises of the downpour fill the garden. Then they would climb down, with the help of knotted blankets, from a second-story window conveniently hidden by the shade of an apple tree. Like shadows fleeting through the darts of rain, they would cross over the most dangerous zone, one after the other. The scaling of the barbwire seemed relatively easy near certain fence posts, the sentries’ attention being focused principally on the lighted space between the buildings and the barbwire. They could count, with luck, on getting over the obstacle and plunging into the night. They would travel by night and hide during the day.
As well as the secret was kept, something must have leaked out, for Maerts made it known to us that he was inviting two members of the group for coffee. I went there with Sam. The buccaneer flashed a dark, enigmatic look at us from under his felt hat.
“You can have confidence in Maerts,” he said, talking of himself in the third person. “The whole camp knows that. So let’s be frank! You’re preparing a break, eh?”
“Some people prepare them and some people only dream of them,” said Sam, leaving matters undetermined.
We were drinking the coffee in little sips, without hurrying, like sly old foxes talking over a business deal. But what were we selling there?
“It will succeed,” declared Maerts at last, “if I want it to. That will only cost you a hundred francs.”
To have him against us could be dangerous. To fall in with him could be worse. Discussing it would be tantamount to admitting it.
“You’re wasting your drinks, Monsieur Maerts; you shouldn’t let people take you in like that …”
We felt it was proper to remain a little longer out of politeness.
We exchanged firm handshakes with the scoundrel. He couldn’t know anything very precise. His suspicions must have fallen on our group. Maybe the gendarme Richard had even commissioned him to test us out?
The gendarme Richard, having made his rounds, entered Adjutant Soupe’s office. Boredom held these two men together like a thick layer of glue and made them as impermeable to each other as two stones cemented into the same wall. The adjutant was thinness itself, the gendarme roundness. One was known as the Beanpole and the other the Billiard Ball. The Beanpole lived surrounded by bills of lading, pots of geraniums, letters from a little village in the Oise where he had a bit of property, and newspapers snitched from the internees’ mail. The Billiard Ball guarded his camp with the diligence of a man who knows his craft, without zeal however and without malice. “Billiard Ball’s a round fellow,” they used to say. The Billiard Ball wiped his tar-black mustache with the back of his hand and unfolded some little rolled-up bits of paper he had taken from his pockets.
“Well, well! The Rumanian is informing against the tavernkeeper: trafficking in money.”
“That’s all the same to me!” replied M. Soupe, stuffing his nose with snuff. “Is that all?”
“No. The tavernkeeper is informing against the Rumanian: attempted escape.”
That was more serious. The Beanpole put down his newspaper; his head, reduced to the proportions of a hairy skull, and his eyes, like mollusks on the half-shell, now strangely animated came out of the zone of indifference. The Billiard Ball knew all about it anyway. The Russian group was running the show, probably in order to send someone to Paris.
“Who is supposed to be leaving?”
“A chubby lad, worker from Billancourt. Not dangerous. If it were up to me,” said the round fellow, “I’d let him run. The other: one Potapenko, known as Sam. Pass me his dossier.”
They learned nothing disturbing from the dossier.
“It’s the Rumanian I’m gunning for,” said the Billiard Ball. “That one mustn’t get through. In God’s name, no! Not for anything in the world! Ever since they shot Duval he’s been shitting in his pants, and I can understand why. As for me, I’d give orders, and clear ones. What do you say?”
M. Soupe always gave his approval, as long as trouble was avoided—“Oh, of course. Do your best”—so that the round one led the lanky one by the nose.
There was only one window, sheltered by an apple tree, from which the descent into the garden would be easy. There was only one sentry box from which it could easily be watched. On nights when the weather looked like it might be stormy, M. Richard placed on this spot the man he had chosen for his good eyesight, his sharp hearing, and above all because he had quite a few little things to be forgiven for: the home-guard Floquette.
“Listen carefully,” the Billiard Ball explained to him: “Three of them are leaving. The first, I don’t care about. They can always catch up with him on the road. Same for the third. The second has ‘spy’ written all over him. On no condition should he be allowed to pass. You can fill his ribs full of lead without a second thought. They won’t give you the Military Medal for that, of course. But you will get a hundred sous out of it.”
From then on Floquette walked slowly, his loaded rifle on its sling, under that window which opened over the road to death. We would observe the sky with a sailor’s solicitude. The splendor of the fiery sunsets tormented us, for they announced peaceful nights full of constellations, nights of absolute captivity, nights without possible flight, without possible death. Every evening three faces turned toward the future: Markus, erect once again, a frank smile traced on the corners of his mouth, a spark of joy—perhaps of power being born—in his eyes; Sam, his mouth twisted, seemed to mock his own fate; and, at a distance from them, at another window so as not to he seen together, the pasty-faced Rumanian, devoured by anxiety, afraid of staying, afraid of fleeing, afraid of opening a newspaper and horribly afraid each time a uniform came into the yard. Wasn’t his life hanging on a thread as thin as that shiny spider’s web among the branches? His letters, transmitted by a neutral embassy, were probably known to the authorities. Everything depended on the silence of a man who had been waiting for three months in a light-blue cell for them to fling open the door suddenly in the middle of the night and say to him: “Take courage …” Would he keep quiet? He was keeping quiet. Why was he keeping quiet? Why? “If, it were me, I would talk …” This thought wormed its way into every nook of his coward’s soul. “He” could still make some last-minute revelations, gain a week of stay of execution by turning in the man who was here, anxious, chewing on his well-manicured nails and saying to himself: “I would do it myself …” So, treacherous, he felt himself betrayed.
Markus was telling us how he had been knocked out one May Day in the Place de la République. When he named the streets, the squares of Paris, they were no longer names but realities. He would go to see the comrades at the Committee for Social Defense. This accepted mission lifted his revived spirits even more. His face smiling, enraptured, in the semidarkness, he at last confessed his secret to us: “Laura, I can’t live without her!” And, as if this were somehow unworthy of a revolutionary, he quickly spoke of something else. Laura would write to us on his behalf, in a prearranged language. “Here is her writing …”—her illegible handwriting.
Sam, who was the strongest, besides being chosen by the group, would go over first. The Rumanian would follow, then Markus, so that the Rumanian could be helped, if necessary, in the scaling of the barbwire.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Blood
THE NEWSPAPERS INFORMED US OF LENIN’S ASSASSINATION. THIS TIME THE news seemed authentic. No one had been more marked for such an end than Lenin. We assembled early, in a near-empty barracks room, more numerous than usual. Our impotence, our sense of futility, of time running out while things were being accomplished, were turning, at long last, into cold rage. We walked about, furious, hands in our pockets, brooding over our anger like animals in a zoo, like men in jail. In vain Krafft would tell us, “All revolutionaries have known times like these, these captivities, these insipid moments; this is how men are tempered, how their power is born, how they learn to be hard and to see clearly; we are under an iron heel:
but we are alive and stronger than those who judge and hold us, and growing even stronger. There comes a time when they can do nothing more but kill us; and then it is too late, for our blood might be more useful spilled than in our veins …” Krafft was right, but a kind of choking fury grew in us, causing us at times to reject that truism, as if we wanted to despair, for despair meant respite, renunciation.
“We are ready.”
Ready for what? Perhaps to fight. Perhaps to die any kind of absurd or necessary death—here, by chance. Or elsewhere, because it must be so, doing rigorously, pitilessly what must be done. Perhaps to live without weariness, without turning sour—relentlessly. Perhaps to harness ourselves for years, for life, to thankless tasks, to dark struggles, to the obstinate destruction of things, to the obstinate gathering of the forces whose coming we would not see. Ready. This feeling came to us all at once, born out of a hatred so vast that it could not be expressed even in thought. From the depths of the outcasts’ pit we condemned the world, the war, the law, the powerful, the rich, the liars, the corrupt, the idiots.
Fomine opened the meeting, his head lowered.
“Seems that it’s true they’ve killed Lenin. The revolution has responded with a reign of terror. Six hundred bourgeois have been shot in Petrograd. The cost, in blood, of a few skirmishes in the Somme after which both headquarters write ‘all quiet.’ I endorse the reign of terror, comrades. Let us not grieve over Lenin’s blood. He did his job. The revolution must finally stand up straight, sword unsheathed, and strike.”
He became impassioned. From the back of the room, Belgians and Macedonians were staring at this tall, white-maned old man who recalled historic massacres, heads cut off in ’93, red streams of the Château-d’Eau barracks in ’70, and who sang the praises of terror.
Birth of Our Power Page 20
