Birth of Our Power

by Greeman, Richard, Serge, Victor

  Everybody wanted to speak. Words brought relief. Sonnenschein stood up, his pince-nez in his hand, his eyes misty, and said: “I endorse the terror …” The rest was lost in a hubbub of confused voices. Dmitri, coughing out his lungs, Karl and Gregor as solid as oaks, Krafft, the only one who seemed really calm, Markus, beaming, and even the puppet Alschitz, all cried out: “Terror, terror!”

  A driving rain was beating against the windows. Sam remained silent, a little to one side. Old Fomine’s eye found him in his corner.

  “And you, Sam,” cried Fomine, “speak out if you are against, if you have doubts! We are locked up, we are in chains, we are nothing, but we are voting for terror. For or against?”

  Sam answered in a hollow voice.

  “For.”

  And got up, bidding us farewell, with his eyes. Furtively, Markus shook hands with people, murmuring: “What luck!”

  They slipped away, followed by Sonnenschein, who had been picked because of his innocuous appearance, to help them at the last minute. We prolonged the meeting. Evening had come very quickly under bursting clouds. The flaming tongues of the candles rose up in front of old Fomine, causing huge shadows to dance around us, and illuminating hands and faces frozen in an attitude of violence. We sang the “Farewell to the Dead” as at revolutionary funerals in Russia. That powerful lament, transforming masculine grief into solemn affirmation, drawing an act of faith from a farewell and an oath from tears, elevated the souls of thirty men, a few of whom were mediocre and the majority no different from most men. They were all sincere. They sang:

  “Our path is the same as yours,

  Like you, the prisons will destroy us …”

  when a rifle shot tore through the rainstorm, the night, our song, submerging us all suddenly in a glacial silence; only the rain, the faraway howl of a watchdog could be heard; then a harsh voice:

  “Halt there!”

  And again the silence exploded on all sides in a clatter of rifle fire which made our hearts leap, choked off the cries in our throats, resounded in our skulls like madly clanging bells. And again the silence descended immediately over the light drumming of the rain. The flaming tongues of the candles had not moved. Their raw light showed three heads immobile, singularly inexpressive: Fomine; Gregor, huge, his heavy jaw resting on powerful and clean hands; Krafft, exhausted, thin-lipped, his eyes slightly compressed … For a second everyone could cling to the wild idea that nothing had happened. But a formless moan, a sob, the death rattle of a murdered man sent us dashing to the windows, fists clenched, yelling:

  “Murderers! Murderers!”

  During the night our prison wore a halo of white light. The squalls of the rainstorm fought against the emptiness. A group of shadows disappeared at the edge of our field of vision. Our useless clamor was lost in this whiteness and this night, this silence and this emptiness.

  As the sentry watched, Sam had crossed the danger zone in three bounds. He had managed successfully to climb over the barbwire fence, near a stake. Markus and the Rumanian waited for him to get through: the huge room was dark and empty behind them; Sonnenschein was guarding the door. The night came in through the window, cold, damp, full of anguish.

  “Your turn, Kagan,” said Markus, smiling to his companion. “Sam slipped through like a letter through the mail … If you have trouble at the stake, wait for me.”

  The Rumanian made out clearly only the ominous words: “at the stake.” He leaned out and stared for a long time into the darkness. The sentry was not visible, hidden in his sentry box; but the barrel of his rifle shone out and perhaps the Rumanian sensed the furious eyes of the watchman over the spiraled tube of steel: Floquette, with his Mongol’s head, hunched in on himself, all ears so as not to miss the second escapee, the spy.

  “Don’t dawdle like that,” urged Markus. “Go ahead. Give me your arm …”

  The Rumanian drew back sharply.

  “No. I’m staying. I’ve changed my mind. Good luck.”

  His arms were trembling, his lips black on a face of gray canvas. Markus shrugged his shoulders, threw his leg over the windowsill, and let himself slide down the knotted blankets. The first gunshot crackled. Markus saw a flame obstructing his path. The searchlights were blinding him; he hadn’t expected such a brilliant light, made more intense by the huge din of the explosion; he plunged ahead into the night directly in front of him, seized the fence, and began to climb—a splendid target hanging on barbwire. Coldly, Floquette fired on him at fifteen yards, cursing him under his breath: “Guzzle your Heinie gold, go on guzzle it, you bastard, you spy.” They dragged him, bleeding into the mud, up to the infirmary. Billiard Ball ran up, pushing through the outraged group intent upon the dying man, and turned his flashlight on that young face, ravaged by his final suffering.

  “Hell!” exclaimed the gendarme, “it’s not him!”

  “Quick, in God’s name, the male nurse … Pick him up, you brutes!”

  The Rumanian shivered in his bed, hideously happy, in every fiber of his being, that someone else had been killed in his place, but transfixed by the inescapable and devastating thought that now there was no escape possible and that the man who would be shot tomorrow would talk, would certainly talk …

  TWENTY-NINE

  Epidemic

  SAM WAS RECAPTURED THE NEXT DAY AFTER COVERING FIFTEEN MILES OVER muddy roads.

  Billiard Ball appeared in the large courtyard, his shoulders slumped, sullen and broken-hearted. To a group of Belgians who were standing around him he said: “It was a disaster. I would gladly have let him run, the poor lad …” A few men, their heads bowed, were staring fixedly at the holster of his revolver. The male nurse Jean passed by, trailing an odor of chloroform behind him. “They gave him six injections,” he whispered, his eyes wide open, his stare vacant. He never sobered up any more. We were overwhelmed by this murder, which we could reconstruct to the last detail; we were overcome by the feeling of complete powerlessness. Nothing had yet been changed in Room III which Markus had occupied. His wicker trunk was there, his magazines, his toothbrush. The Rumanian was playing checkers in the Bonne Fortune cabaret with Monsieur Arthur. Both had the same flabby hands, long and white.

  We deliberated. We would have liked an uprising. But we felt it to be impossible, futile; we were afraid: afraid of being cowardly, afraid of throwing ourselves into an adventure out of fear of being cowardly, afraid of our own impotence. Our repressed fury changed to disgust. We paced about as if in a cage weighing all the possibilities. What possible revolt against the thirty armed men who were guarding us with good rifles, starved as we were, without even a real knife? But just to let silence cover that pool of blood? What if we tried to protest, to demand an investigation? But a protest against whom? An investigation by whom? The Greeks had let us know that they would support us if we acted. We counted how many we were, eighteen trustworthy men, around ten more who would join us as long as we held out—twenty-eight—another ten hardy fellows who would join us. Thirty-eight out of four hundred. Fifty Greeks who could hold out for a good while. The rest more than doubtful, capable of supporting us in the beginning and giving in at the next moment.

  A tall blond fellow, wearing a blue and white striped sailor’s jersey, came to tell the Committee:

  “Don’t give in. I’ll kill Floquette.”

  He had his plan. And a weapon: an iron bar, pointed at the end, patiently sharpened into a stiletto, which he had been carrying around for a long time, inside his pants’ leg.

  When we were alone together, he told me:

  “I’ve been wanting to kill somebody for a long time now.”

  “Why, Ivan?”

  With a circular gesture he pointed to the black and gray corridor where we were standing, the old worn-out planks under our feet, the wide-open window through which—at the foot of the church and a somber building—you could see men who looked like larvae dragging themselves around the yard: bent old men leaning on their canes, an idiot—always half-naked, al
ways shivering, even in the sunlight—and some Greeks moving slowly in their dirty caftans.

  “For this, for everything.”

  I asked:

  “But what can they do about it?”

  And I remembered—as I looked at his bowed head, hard shell of bone ready to plunge straight ahead, even against a wall, with its load of gray matter devastated by thought—I remembered the dazzled bull in the arena, that human ring, who feels himself the plaything of strange powers and tormenting insects dancing around him, golden, scarlet, vermilion, emerald green, and who wants, yearns with all his strength, the dark strength of a powerful beast bearing a prodigious load of vital ardor, to knock them down with his muzzle, to disembowel them with his horns, to crush them under his hooves, these dancing insects spinning all around him—men.

  I explained to him that his primitive weapon, whose quadrangular point and metallic shimmer he was inspecting, would not accomplish anything; that his rebellion was just, but not well thought out; that Floquette, guilty or innocent, was in any case negligible; that we had to lock up everything inside ourselves, to forget nothing, to wait, know how to wait for years and to resist, because the time to change everything, to be the stronger, would come …

  And, shaking his head, stubborn as an Andalusian bull, he began to smile vaguely.

  However, the next day or the day after, an agitated hand rang the bell like a tocsin. Anxious soldiers appeared at the grill. Stormy groups milled around the yard protesting because the beans were inedible. We spoke of Markus in our harangues. There was hunger and there was blood. There was time and there was war.

  And there was death.

  It came without fanfare, simply, faceless, without terror, and it curbed the rebellion, which was ready to rise up, as a great wind curbs the sheaves of grain (—but the grain stands up again … ).

  A few Greeks feverish, had begun to cough, to moan. Little Nikos was delirious. We improvised a new infirmary in an empty room on the ground floor, known as the “schoolroom” which was used for our meetings … The bars on the windows, shaped like inverted hooks, projected crude fleurs-de-lis on the background of the green foliage in the garden. Nikos spent his last night there, alone, as in a bare chapel. He had the extremely red cheeks, the damp forehead, the intense stare of one who now can only look inwards. Jean was supposed to sit, up with him, but he fell asleep, drunk with ether, before a senseless letter from Stéphanie. When he awoke, at dawn, Nikos was frozen. His greenish body was marbled with gray spots, like the shadow of a panther skin. We had to place three living men beside him. Three men who looked as he had yesterday, who would be tomorrow what he was already today. The three were Greeks too, lined up together according to their age; one beardless, twenty years old; the other hirsute, forty; the third, a gray-bearded patriarch. The last alone had remained conscious—serious, still authoritarian, talking quietly to his bearers.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said to write to his sons that they shouldn’t sell the house; to give his wool blanket to old Kostia—and also: ‘Let the Devil take them, those sons of bitches!’”

  That very day the Belgians were attacked. The new infirmary had five beds, six, seven in the evening (and Nikos’ speckled corpse was still there, exuding a stale odor; for there were no coffins ready in the village; Monsieur Soupe, farsighted, but not farsighted enough, ordered a dozen of them—for which he received a commission of twenty-four francs). Sonnenschein and Faustin, two volunteers, watched over them in the glow of a kerosene lamp. The Jew had taken up a book; but the murmurs of the delirious, their calls, the white light cut off by stooped shadows which came through the bars from the outside, the smell of urine, of defecation and death, the tense silence of the dead created an atmosphere from which one could not hope to escape. Sonnenschein stood in the doorway in order to breathe in the cool night air, his arms folded, wiping his pince-nez from time to time—in his gestures and attitudes like the man on the pillory who stood out in my memory. He forced himself to think, calmly, like a wise man, about life, death, matter, spirit, eternity. Faustin II’s tall dark body slipped noiselessly between the cots. A division of the labor had occurred of itself between the two men. The Negro, sure of his strength and conscious of the vulnerability of his ignorance, took upon himself the hard task of turning over the moaners on their damp cots, of taking them to urinate, of giving them something to drink, of keeping them covered at every moment, of forcibly restraining the delirious when they arose, going off with uncanny energy on God-knows-what voyages. Sonnenschein would explain, point things out, help … “What should I do?” Faustin asked him when a heavy-set man tied down to his cot tossed about ponderously and moaned loudly. Faustin seemed to have no fear of the corpses, who were like men asleep, yet immediately recognizable by the stiff way they were laid out, by an indefinable look of being broken-down or of hardness, which reduced them to objects; Faustin had all the gravity of a child performing a painful duty and desirous above all of pleasing the teacher. “Nothing to be done,” answered Sonnenschein, underlining their common impotence with a gesture of his two open hands. And the Negro, smiling with all of his powerful teeth: commented, “Strong will live, weak will die.”

  The old patriarch fought on for two days and a night, keeping or recovering by moments his cruel clear-headedness. He only knew a few words of French mixed with slang. Each time he woke up he would raise his head and look around him, counting the living and the dead. He called Sonnenschein over with his eyes; and Sonnenschein, troubled by that clear look—as if he ought to be ashamed, himself, of letting his fellow creatures die and of surviving them, angry at himself for not knowing in what language to address this old man—would ask:

  “Comment ça va? Wiegeht’s? Nié loutché?”

  The patriarch’s bloodshot eyes would move slowly and direct an unswerving glance, like an invisible ray, toward a form stretched out nearby; his lips, at the same time gray and violet-tinged stirred, pronouncing only one word:

  “Croaked?”

  Sonnenschein lacked the courage to lie—a lie would doubtless have exasperated this solid old man, as would cheating on a bargain, or a precaution unworthy of him in danger. But in order to comply with a desire for dignity in death which he believed he sensed in him, Sonnenschein would go over to the designated remains, close the dead man’s eyelids with his fingertips, and join his hands across his stomach. The patriarch followed all these movements with a serious attention in which Sonnenschein discerned approbation. He alone out of eight was alive on the third day. They didn’t know what to do with him. The doctor did not appear.

  Before falling into a coma, the patriarch painfully stirred his great arms, which made one think of the rugged branches of a felled tree. Sonnenschein thought he understood his wish, went over, and gently, but not without difficulty, raised his hands with their shapeless nails like the worn claws of an old tiger—hands which had firmly held the swing-plow, the ax, the knife, the woman’s shoulder, the child’s frail body, the friend’s hand … The Jew thought obscurely of those things as he joined them over the huge tortured chest in which the heart made a dull sound as of shovels of earth filling into a faraway grave.

  “Good,” said the old man.

  It was still night. The twinkling stars emitted an extraordinary calm. All at once to himself, Sonnenschein said that life is marvelous. He took a few steps in the darkness, stumbling over some sharp stones, and pronounced aloud: “Marvelous.” He looked at the stars, and, between them, making his eyes blink, the tiny luminous points that were still more stars. And he thought wordlessly of those countless worlds, of those great fires gravitating through space, following necessary courses, of the continents, of the races, of the cities, of the flowers, of the machines, of the animals in the warm grass, the teeming water, the jungle, the cold steppe, of the children who were laughing, at that moment, on beaches in the sun, on the other side of the earth; a mother giving suck to her greedy child, somewhere, perhaps in California, perhap
s in Malaysia, bronzed or copper-colored madonna … madonna with half-closed eyes, with pointed breasts … white madonna … “But they exist, they exist,” thought Sonnenschein with astonished joy. “There is no death,” he said, surprised by his own words, without the presence of cold corpses, behind him in the nauseating room, seeming to contradict the inexpressible affirmation with which he was brimming.

  “Sonnenschein!”

  Faustin II joined him. “Sonnenschein,” he asked, “do you know how to row?”—“No.”—“It’s good to row,” said the Negro. He leaned over, his neck bent, working imaginary oars with his Herculean arms. “Like this. The night so. There are reeds, the river is terrible, you know, calm and terrible, treacherous like a sleeping serpent …”—“What river,” thought Sonnenschein, but without asking. He murmured:

  “Yes, it’s good to row, Faustin. You’ll take up the oars again, Faustin, on the peaceful and treacherous river.”

  THIRTY

  The Armistice

  UPON WAKING, PEOPLE WOULD WONDER WHO HAD DIED DURING THE NIGHT We used to call the infirmary the Morgue. A sick man even said, feeling very low: “All right, I’m cooked. Take me off to the Morgue.” They took him. He was an Alsatian or a Belgian, worker or peasant, one lad among many others about whom nothing in particular was known. The disease, obliterating his youth, depersonalized him even more. His greatest preoccupation during his last day was to prevent anyone from stealing his nickel-plated watch, attached to his wrist by a copper band. Consumed by fever, he would raise his arms: trying to join them behind his neck in order to hide the watch. We went to see him, Sonnenschein and I: he came out of his bewildered despair in order to wave good-by to us with his hand over his head: Farewell, farewell … The pain of death could be read clearly on that damp and dried-out face, as if ossified, streaked with purple, livid at the temples where the eyes, drowned in a haze, had an atrocious fixity. He was only one dead man among many others.