by Victor Serge
The guard on duty has come in, cocky, in a white smock, his képi pulled down over one eye.
“Well, well, Pop Vincent’s kicking the bucket!” he said aloud (perhaps Vincent even heard him). “Better put a screen in front of his bed.”
Thiébaut, the orderly, came in to set up a screen around his bedstead, and from every bed, every head turned that way.
“Rrr … rrr … Ouf! … rrr …”
This incessant moaning gets louder and louder, its rhythm monotonous. You get used to it. Little George is playing checkers with Madré. Van Hoever is conversing in a low voice with Gobin, the notary.
Madré came over to me a few minutes ago, his mouth twisted in a sickly smile, and said:
“You see that yellow-skinned old hayseed in Number 15? That’s Van Hoever, the male virgin—to hear him tell it—really a filthy bastard! The old bigot used to sweep out his village church every Sunday morning, and killed his neighbor’s wife because of a quarrel over a boundary wall … I hope to see him leave here one of these fine days, feet first … If it were only up to me …”
He made an “O” with his lips, went “pfuii” gleefully and significantly, then explained: “A fag like that!”
Within this old body, within this old shyster’s prison-hardened soul, the little hatreds built up every day, spewed forth in venomous words and gestures as petty as pinpricks, but unceasing. And yet he had his good side, the kindness and loyalty of an old-timer who has seen plenty of hard times. Was he ashamed before my silent disapproval? His tone of voice changed:
“That other fellow, Number 17, that’s poor old Gobin the notary, a nice old fellow … Just like all the others, by God!—ran off with the cashbox. But it didn’t work out for him; he didn’t have the temperament. The gentleman, you see, had the soul of an honest man. It’s not his fault. So there he is, three more years to do, rheumatism, arthritis, gout, anemia, the whole works! And three months to live … The Chief Guard had it in for him on account of an old complaint he once made, and that cut his time-off-for-good-behavior in half. You’ll see what a farce it is. He can’t eat anything but eggs and milk, which they steal from him. So he’s dying from hunger along with everything else … And the best of it is that neither of them thinks about anything but their release … They watch the others drop dead one by one, overjoyed each time it isn’t them … That’s humanity for you.”
Madré began to laugh a stifled little laugh, which made his whole crippled body shake and sent thousands of little wrinkles running around his eyes. Perhaps his thoughts, running ahead of his words, had already settled on some more genuinely cheerful image, for he added, with a wry, gluttonous expression:
“Listen! That old rascal of a notary has two little nieces … Wow! Lemme tell you … one blonde, one brunette, eighteen, twenty years old, all white, pink, and perfumed, with ruffles … They come to visit him, you’ll see … What tits, what gams, a little wiggle like that when they walk, and little red cheeks like apples … Those cheeks, you know, they always made me think of little buttocks just small enough to hold one in each hand …”
Over in the corner Van Hoever, Number 15, was racked by a coughing fit. Then he spat for a long time, looking like a broken china gargoyle, his chest fallen in. Gobin turned over laboriously in his bed and bit his lips, probably to avoid groaning. Then the two old men looked at each other. You could hear them picking up the train of their conversation: “He’s a bastard,” said Van Hoever, whose voice was no more than a whisper. “Just let him croak, that’s what I say …”
Madré, sticking to his idea, concluded:
“Because, my friend, I’m nothing but an old swine myself. That’s the truth, by God!”
A ray of sunlight falls across the window, lighting up the white morning. Little George’s hoarse laughter cuts across the dying man’s rattle and mingles with it for a moment.
Now that Old Vincent is dying, he has visitors. It seems that a man becomes more interesting before departing. Until now, they didn’t pay any attention to him except to punish him; he was never anything more than Number 5231, condemned for ten years. Now that he’s dying he has become a human being again.
The room is immobilized. Not a whisper rises from the beds. Madré moves in the background, silent, his eyes lowered, arranging pillows and quilts. The two old men across the way are like two long-dead, dried-out wax figurines. Then comes the sound of self-assured, authoritarian voices. The stout Chief Guard, yellow-skinned from a fever brought back from the colonies, with a bristling mustache and black-and-silver braid running from his cuff to his shoulder, makes his entrance. Then His Honor the Civilian Controller, in a bottle-green overcoat, his hands behind his back, holding a notebook. Under his képi he has a little pimply face with rimless glasses. And his eyes, also bottle-green, seem watery. The guard-cum-orderly, known as “Top Kick,” follows respectfully, three paces to the rear. We can hear him explaining that this is Vincent, Augustin, and that Vincent, Augustin, is dying.
These gentlemen look at Vincent, Augustin. Can he feel their cold glances falling on his face (where the blood now comes only in rare little spurts), cold glances which see nothing of his pain and misery? His eyes open again. For an instant his pupils are intensely alive. The screen, the uniforms, the white room with, a ray of sunlight clinging to the ceiling, he takes it all in … A murmur stirs his lips. But nothing is heard, nothing but the rattle in his phlegm-choked throat.
“Yes, yes,” says His Honor the Civilian Controller.
And they leave. An infinite silence falls over Old Vincent. A few more thoughts still wander through his slowly darkening brain. For three years now these people have been watching him die with the same indifference.
Another visitor. The Chaplain, a canon who has come to the prison to replace a young priest sent to the front, moves rapidly on his short legs toward the dying man’s bed. The Canon has a kind, decent face, with distinguished, graying temples. His whole person (full, pink, well-shaven face, sharply chiseled mouth, sensual and aristocratic), from his face to the slightest details of his clothing (starched clerical collar and purple ribbon), exudes cleanliness, contentment, and the easy comfort of a well-fed man on whose shoulders life has placed neither fatigue nor undue burden. “… My good fellow, my good fellow,” he greets us right and left, with a quiet smile. In front of Old Vincent’s bed, the Canon lapses into meditation. The man seems to have lost consciousness.
“Ah, Canon!” Van Hoever calls out timidly.
From the depths of his sleep, the dying man no doubt hears the noise and the voices. Why have they come to bother him now? The Canon never thought about Old Vincent when he was dying of hunger, when they gave him five days on bread and water, when he went for six months without a word from his son, alone in the world like an old tree which has fallen, unheeded, beside the road. A last storm gathers in the soul of the old man who fought at Beaugency, worked hard for fifty-one years, and suffered for three years in prison without ever finding any Christian charity … The orderly says:
“Canon, I think he’s coming to. Look, his eyes are moving.”
Yes, his eyes are moving and he is coming back to life, from far away, from that limbo into which his mind was already sinking: So they can’t even let him die in peace? The black Cossack offends him and, from the depths his early youth a rage awakens within him. As a child, in the days of anticlericalism, he used to run after priests and vent his spite at them: “Caw, Caw, the crows!” For they are fat and black and don’t do any work; they feed off the misery of the poor, to whom they promise paradise at the final agony … Is this one going to take Pop Vincent for an idiot now?
Pop Vincent looks up. Then he raises his great gnarled hand, already feeble with death. You can see he is trying to speak; he makes a great effort. His hand rises, becomes a fist: his face convulses, and with a grimace of hate he raises himself up to cry:
“Goddamn you, goddamn you …”
Nothing more. Pop Vincent lapses into his coma. But th
ere was so much fury trembling in his gurgling throat, burning in his flickering eyes, that the Canon gets the message. He turns away with dignity and says:
“He is delirious. There is nothing more I can do, my poor friend.”
How pained he looks as he says it! You’d really think it does something to him to see Old Vincent die—Old Vincent whom he doesn’t know and who is probably his five-hundredth dead man. His elegant hand traces a vague sign of the cross in the air over the dying man. Thiébaut, the orderly, put on a sorrowful face too, and the two of them stare at each other, as solemn as judges, without smiling.
“And my stew is going to be all burnt now!” thinks Thiébaut, scratching his red nose.
THIRTY
Surviving
OLD VINCENT PASSED ON A FEW HOURS LATER.
Madré was telling dirty stories to Little George. Zetti was eating some soup, making annoying little noises with his tongue and lips. The orderly, at the back of the room, was writing at a little black desk. The sky was growing red. Imperceptibly, without a crisis, the rattle grew quieter and quieter, then ceased. Only Van Hoever, whose shriveled, old man’s soul trembled ceaselessly at the intuition of death, understood right away. But at first he didn’t dare say anything; his eyes opened wide, full of mortal terror.
At dusk, just before the lights were turned on, Van Hoever suddenly felt all alone in the cheerless room, alone with those who dozed, with the Perpetual Sleeper (Number 4627), and with the dead man. The old peasant’s eyes searched into every corner of the room. Slowly, with precaution, holding in his already feeble breath, he began to move. His old, dried-up arms—all yellowed and covered with a layer of dirt—pushed aside the stale-smelling sheets. He got out of bed, barefoot, huddling against the chilly air and cold floor. He took a few steps, terribly embarrassed at first in his nightshirt and drawers, and tottering in the unaccustomed, upright position. Then, moving from bed to bed, supporting himself on their iron frames (but careful not to give himself away), Van Hoever slithered toward the dead man’s bed. Surely the dead man had not been able to drink his milk since last night. The jug must still be there. “The milk, the milk” thought Van Hoever—“or else he’ll drink it, the filthy hunchback …” He grinned from hatred, fear, and greed. Ah, the milk! He had it at last; he had only to empty the jug. His face contorted in silent laughter.
But the sacrilege of his laughter before the dead man made him shudder. All he could see in the shadows was the pallor of that large, motionless face, and the dark mouth from which emanated an odor of damp earth. Van Hoever, old and shriveled himself, ready to start out on the same voyage, stared, fascinated by the attraction of the chilled corpse. Terror crept into his dying flesh, soon to be the same shade of green, as cold as a lifeless object. He stood there, terrified, his chin trembling, the jug of milk in his hand. Someone appeared:
“Thief! Thief! old vulture! Ah, I’ve caught you now, you old bastard, robbing the dead, stealing a dead man’s milk, you old vulture! …”
Madré seemed to be shaking all over with rage. The two old men stared at each other, consumed by the same anger. They could not see their resemblance, although they were almost identical in their hideous scrawniness, enveloped by the same shadow. Insults rose to their sputtering lips, repressed by one out of fear, shouted by the other so as to rouse the whole room.
“Ha! I hope you choke on that milk!”
The whole room awoke from its lethargy to watch the old Fleming’s terror-stricken retreat. He backed away, eyes dazed, moving from bed to bed without answering. He climbed back into his bed, rolled himself up in his covers, paralyzed with fear, hardly daring to stammer out: “Bastard, bastard,” and his favorite peasant’s insult: “Bum.”
Madré ran up and stood over him, his arm pointing toward the dead man:
“Just wait a little, you old thief! You saw how he went off. He was a better man than you. Well, you’re going to go too, you can take my word for it. Right here, in your smelly sheets, behind the screen, yeah, and soon, too! You’ll be just like him, only uglier, with your hen’s ass of a mouth …”
The superstitious Van Hoever trembled under that curse. A strange coldness crept into his bones. The memory of sorcerers who make animals die without anyone knowing how, who set fire to haystacks invisibly, and bring evil down on farms where the master has sinned, increased his terror. Madré went on and on; his seething anger against men and the world, repressed for so long, now overflowed in a torrent of furious language:
“Die! Die, you thief!”
The whole room, peopled by thieves and murderers, seemed to turn on the old rascal. Madré himself, carried away by his split personality, that of a once “honest” landlord, who had doubtless forgotten his own trespasses on other people’s property.
“Die! And good riddance! Wait till he’s three feet underground; then the old carrion won’t plague us anymore …” The sinister words circled among the beds, where pale sick men listened with abject smiles. The cold wind of death blew on them all. Van Hoever, in the lengthening shadows, raised his shriveled right hand and crossed himself slowly. Now he was stammering: “Holy Mary, Mother of God …,” unable to recall the rest of the prayer in his addled brain. His face was like dirty old ivory.
Madré took away the milk. And it was he who got to drink it.
Old Vincent had regained such a simple serenity that nothing of the weariness of his sixty years remained on his wrinkled face. His slack mouth, half-open over his yellow teeth, seemed to be laughing feebly. His eyes were almost closed (although no one had taken the trouble to lower their lids) as if he disdained to see. Even his paleness had become a neutral color, serenely indifferent.
They came for Old Vincent’s remains in the evening, after supper. The body, brusquely uncovered, appeared pale, gray, hairy, pressing strangely into the mattress as if it had become very heavy. The big feet stood out; the toes were spread apart and stiffened, probably by a last convulsion. The penis, a fat worm of limp flesh stretched out in its dark bush, inspired pity … The belly stuck out too far; the enlarged chest seemed swollen. The limp neck was creased by thousands of wrinkles; the head, hung heavily to one side, mouth gaping, eyes not quite closed, yellow, cold, heavy as stone.
“Is that it?” asked fat Ribotte.
He was breathing noisily. He bent his fat, pale face—the face of a potato-stuffed peasant—over the dead man’s head for a second.
“That’s it.”
Then they lifted up the body by the feet and shoulders and laid it out in an old, piss-stained bedsheet spread right on the floor. The dead man’s head and elbows hit the wood hard.
“Doesn’t matter,” declared Madré. “He don’t feel it anymore. Come on.”
They folded the arms of the man who didn’t feel it anymore and closed the sheet over his face. There was nothing left but a long, bumpy shape stretched out in the whiteness of the shroud. But at that moment a cry rang out, a kind of wild moan. Zetti, his face covered by his hands, bolted toward the other end of the room. Like an epidemic, his terror passed from one man to the next. The two orderlies and Madré, who were bending over, their hands ready to take up the body and carry it away, stood up trembling. And all they saw in the room were two heads drawn together by the same sense of horror, two bloodless, already cadaverous old men’s heads with eyes staring out in terror … It was only for a second. The dead man was carried off. Voices were heard. Someone even laughed. The terror stayed only with a few; but these it filled with an enormous shadow of despair.
“You scared?” Little George asked Zetti.
Gently, he pulled Zetti’s hands away from his eyes, so he could see that fear whose cold breath reached out to touch him.
“You’re crazy! What are you scared of the dead for? It’s all over for them; and as for him, he lived out his time, didn’t he? It was his turn, not ours, right? Old folks, they just gotta die.”
“Si, si!” the Italian was at last able to say, calmed by that soft young voice.
“Have pity on us …”
THIRTY-ONE
Letters
NUMBER 4627 WAS A LONG BODY, COVERED UP TO HIS EYES, LYING PROSTRATE in almost perpetual slumber. No one could remember the name of this patient, who never spoke and hardly moved. He appeared once every night, like a phantom in his damp bedclothes, dragging himself very slowly from bed to bed toward the toilet. Then he went back to bed. He was dying, by inches, after six or seven years in prison. They used to imitate his nightly babblings, which ended in a comical murmur: “Ben-ben-ta-ti … ff.”
The prison postman came through the room one evening, oblivious to the greedy looks which clung in the stack of opened letters in hand:
“Alexis … Madré … Van Hoever … Poissonnier …”
They had to search for Poissonnier, unknown to his neighbors. They found him in bed 19, under Number 4627, the man who was always sleeping, the man who slept endlessly because that was his way of dying. Madré ran limping over to him.
“Hey! Sleepy! Wake up, I tell you! There’s a letter for you!”
