by Victor Serge
At last Number 4627 began to stir, showing a puffy face, spotted with tufts of beard, and bewildered eyes. “Poissonnier, yes, yes, that’s me … here!”
“O.K., you shoulda said so!” said the guard, without any malice, handing-him a yellow envelope.
The postman wiped his tobacco-flecked mustache with the back of his hand. He stood there for another half-minute, set strangely apart. We saw his ruddy, wrinkled little face, his lopsided shoulders, the metal buttons on his yellow-braided tunic; then he became invisible. Only the letters still existed, as if the ignorant and insignificant hands that had handled them, carried them, delivered them, had completely disappeared.
Number 4627 fell back into his perpetual slumber. Madré had to use force to keep him up.
“Come on, do you want me to read you your letter, yes or no?”
Immensely discouraged, he answered “yes,” just to be left in peace again.
“All right. Now listen. Don’t fall asleep, eh?”
Number 4627 stared stupidly at the letter. His mouth continued to hang open in a sort of drawn-out, unfinished gasp.
“Listen. It’s from your wife. Poissonnier spouse, Therese, née Michon.”
Something of these words must have reached the patient through the veil of lethargy and sleep. His swollen face twisted in an effort of attention: “My … my … my … wife,” he mumbled, and he seemed a little bit more awake. Could he understand that “his little Marcel, who had just turned nine, sent him a big kiss?” That his eldest, Marie, was becoming an apprentice and that they both were thinking about their father, who had been away on a trip for so long (in the colonies) and that they were always asking when he would return?
“Sunday night Marcel asked me: ‘Tell me, Mama, what will Father bring me when he comes home?’ My poor man, I was completely undone …” These words could be heard throughout the room. We thought we had heard the child’s own voice. Did he understand, Number 4627, with his vague, sleepy stare, that he would never return from that long voyage?
“Did you understand?” said Madré when he had put the letter back in the envelope.
The man shook his head.
“Yes, yes, leave me in peace, let me sleep. Who are these children calling me, and this woman? We are no longer part of the same universe.”
He made a face and slid under his bedclothes.
The letters were tiny wings beating in the hands of the men. Each one had its soul, its character, its voice. This one, on fine paper with a sober Chamber of Deputies letterhead, contained only a trite word of acknowledgment (typewritten) which probably cost its recipient five hundred francs. And Van Hoever reckoned up the enormity of the sum which made this bit of paper, with its flamboyant signature, precious: “If he would only do something for me! If he only would!”—this personage who had to be paid so much. A wild hope swelled within the old peasant’s heart.
This other, which Madré was reading, came from an extremely old grandmother, spry at ninety-three, whose trembling hand revealed her fear of no longer being around when her “little one”—already nearly an old man—came home. He could visualize her in her black lace cap, raising her eyes, still lively, to him and saying “M’boy” in her peasant accent. He was touched. His grin faded. And as he lost his sly smile he seemed to grow older, to become apelike, a faun without his crown of laughter.
Thiébaut moved his lips as he pored over his letter. A sharp-featured patient had taken refuge near the window and stood staring out across the lilac-colored paper. At the bottom of the page, which was covered with large, uneven writing, there was:
“My darling, I love you. —Simone.”
And at that moment, that prisoner felt invulnerable, like someone wearing a talisman.
That large handwriting, offering him a cup of fortifying wine across the distance of years, laid bare a woman’s love on the page, initialed by the prison postmaster with a blue-penciled V.
“You can stand anything when you love somebody the way I love you. I know that nothing, nothing can untie that knot that has been tied between us! Suffering is nothing. Dream of me. I am yours and I love you. I tell you so every night, at the times when I know you are thinking of me. There is nothing but you, there is nothing but me, us. Love me, wait for me. Come to me … A day will come …”
He answered:
“Yes, Simone.”
This rapture lifted him above his misery. The window offered him a fairly wide view. He stood there for hours, motionless, contemplating a corner of the world. A quai-side corner. The river’s lusterless surface, with its faint reflections; the towpath with a few tufts of green, a length of wall, a shuttered window. The house was silent. The deserted quai seemed silent: But people passed by from time to time. They were unaware that someone followed their steps, and that long after they had passed he still saw them. A little blond girl in a black coat. A workman carrying a toolbox slung over his shoulder. A man on a bicycle, a team of mules. Barges towed by sluggish, black tugboats, of which only the smokestacks were visible. The landscapes unfolded under the sailors’ eyes.
The man who gazed out, having been so close to death, was joyful at his own survival. He felt generous, oblivious, selfish, naïve, heroic, poetic.
“Little girl, little girl,” he murmured.
The little girl had gone away. A washer woman came and kneeled at the edge of the water. Her bare arms moved rhythmically, and it was good to imagine her regular breathing. From a distance, that female form, at moments, became very beautiful.
From the nearest windows of the stockade cell block rose a cry of lamentation, muted at first, then suddenly frenzied with despair. The dreamer, his head pressed against the bars, imagined he caught a glimpse of a man inside a dark, cavernlike cell, a man in a ragged tunic, head, shaved, shoulders hunched, hands held in the vice of irons, a man crying out his anguish in pain and humiliation, like a beast at the slaughter. Latruffe, pointed snout and drooling mouth, was doubtless working him over placidly with his keys, insulting him in his little eunuch’s voice, stuttering like a clown. A sharper, louder cry brusquely broke the silence.
Ribotte, the fourth-floor orderly, came running in. The sandals on his bare feet went “flap-flap” across the floor. The whole room heard him calling Thiébaut:
“Come quick. Perchot’s dying. And What’s-his-name is coughing up blood.”
“Who’s that?” growled Thiébaut.
From bed to bed, these few words passed through the room:
“Perchot’s dying.”
But we were all right, nonetheless.
THIRTY-TWO
More Deaths
PERCHOT DID NOT DIE THAT EVENING, BUT ON ANOTHER EVENING A FEW DAYS later.
On the fourth floor of the infirmary there were two rows of light-green cells set aside for patients who had to be isolated, with contagious or chronic diseases, or had been placed under special surveillance.
Cell Number 2, closed off by a glass-paneled door, had an outside view. All of the space was taken up by a large, low bed, piled high with covers and clothing. The patient’s body was practically invisible, sunk into the hollow place where he had been lying for months. The bed seemed to swallow up the man. Only the head emerged, propped up by bolsters, facing tenaciously toward the window. The sharp angles of bone under the emaciated skin already suggested a death mask: the smooth, high brow of a twenty-year-old, cheeks sunken under a faint growth of beard, but lips that were strikingly red and revealed white teeth frozen in a wide grin. Whatever strength the sick man had left was concentrated in his glowing, watchful eyes.
That morning, after a terrible night—two hours of unconsciousness followed by dull sleep—Perchot half-opened his eyes without entirely emerging from his dream. His side was hurting him. The tops of the poplars swayed from side to side in the distance. White clouds floated across the sky. Catherine was walking across the barnyard in wooden shoes, her arms bare. Chickens were pecking at the ground near the manure pit. A stale smell of rotting
straw floated in the warm air where flies were buzzing. Father was calling: “Zidore, Zidore!” The dying Perchot relived these dead things as he heard voices drifting around him. What were they talking about? Catherine went into the kitchen; Maraud, the old, one-eyed watchdog, stretched himself out in front of his kennel …
“The doctor said he wouldn’t live through the night. Morphine … Yesterday, Top Kick gave him a chocolate bar. Better wake him up; I haven’t the time. Get the syringe ready.”
“Perchot! Perchot! Boy, can he sleep! Perchot!”
Perchot came out of oblivion. The orderly, Ribotte, was pulling back his covers. A new man was attentively filling a hypodermic syringe. The sick man gazed at the steel needle with indifference. The injections no longer hurt him. But the man holding the syringe turned a thin face lit by gentle gray eyes toward him. He said nothing, he propped up the pillow, he folded the clothes thrown on the foot of the bed while the orderly gave the injection.
Perchot wanted to say something to those strangely solicitous eyes:
“Thanks, thanks,” he mumbled. “That feels good. It’s good medicine, that … I have the feeling it’s going to save me. Anyway, I’ve been better for the last three days. The pain has gone away …”
Realizing that he was lying too much, he added:
“Last night was only a weak spell. Isn’t that so, Ribotte?”
“Sure!”
Ribotte wrote something down in his notebook.
“Yes, you’re much better,” said the new man at last. “I’ll bring you a little coffee: Would you like that?”
Ribotte went out. They were alone. These two men had never spoken to each other before, yet there was an understanding between them. The visitor bent over close enough so that the sick man could speak into his ear without raising his voice.
“I’m going to tell you the truth … I heard you talking; I won’t live through the night; I can feel it myself. My feet are dead already … I can’t move my arms anymore … I’m finished; that stuff, it puts me to sleep … It’s horrible! I can’t take it anymore.”
Tell a lie? The other man didn’t have the strength.
“Be quiet. Don’t tire yourself out. Don’t be afraid.”
But both of them were afraid. They read disturbing thoughts in the other’s eyes. You are going to die. You are going to live. It can’t be helped. It was a moment of silent clarity, in spite of everything. And Perchot felt better. Those eyes meeting his did him good.
“Come back again, come back again,” he said, with supplication in his voice. He gazed longingly at that stranger, whose presence somehow reconciled him to the thought of death.
A soft light hovered in the corridor between the two rows of glassed-in doors. It was like being on an ocean liner.
“In Number 4, Old Horta. In Number 6, Father Nicot, the priest. In Number 8, Ollivier. The cells on the other side are empty … But the first one is where Miss Roberta died, you know.”
The cool air, full of the sound of chirping birds, swept gaily in through the open window. The quais and the prison wall seemed bathed in sunlight. The cell, freshly painted, was almost attractive. Ribotte— full of broad smiles, sly little laughs and winks talked about this strange dead man in his thick voice:
“His body was something to look at! Slender as a sixteen-year-old girl. With hips like a regular little woman. And eyes! You wouldn’t believe me, but when he was tucked in bed, just looking at his eyes, it made you think of a woman. He was gentle, a real liar, and bitchy when he had it in for somebody, just like a woman. I sometimes used to watch him through the glass in the door: When he was all alone he would curl his hair, pluck his eyebrows, look at himself in a little mirror … What faces he made! He would smile, sulk, put on airs, or pout; he used to blow himself kisses and make goo-goo eyes at himself … On his good days, he would stand by the window, all afternoon, humming:
… Amoureuse,
Langoureuse,
La berceuse des amants…
“In the end, just to please him, I got him a lipstick and some powder. He used to make himself up. His mouth looked like a bright red carnation … And not a bit afraid of dying, braver than any man, singing ‘Fouti-foutu, fouti-foutu’ after his attacks of fever; and, when I tried to cheer him up, he answered me: ‘Pull through three more years? Who are you kidding? Save your fairy tales … But if you want to be nice, tell Coco to come and see me …’”
Coco was a young banker, just arrived, in for five years. His wife bombarded half a dozen senators with requests to have him certified consumptive. They finally put him in Number 7, just to make her stop. A tall flabby fellow, who used to do his nails for an hour every morning with special brushes made for him in the workshop. Miss Roberta couldn’t get up anymore; she had abscesses in her knees, her thighs, her back; her bones were all rotten, bleeding, full of holes; some days it hurt her so much she would faint. But her arms, her chest and her head were still alive, and that was enough for their love. I saw her—all made up, lips like cherries, white cheeks, languorous eyes—suddenly turn pale, her face distorted with pain. I gave her injections. Coco would come and sit on the edge of her bed; and they would kiss and caress all the time. She was like a little woman who is always sick in bed, and makes everyone look after her … He, I don’t know what attracted him.”
“He … I mean she, she died?”
“She died. Before she lost consciousness, she said to him again, half-delirious: ‘My darling, my little one, don’t forget me … don’t forget me … We really loved each other, eh?’ Then it was all over. She began to moan and didn’t recognize anybody … It was just about this time of day, a day like today. You know me, I’m not one of the Boys. They disgust me. They’re not real men, they’re perverts, dirty perverts. But at that moment I felt pity, I could have cried … And then, I’ll never stop feeling that deep down, that kid was a woman.”
Perchot died at dusk, after a rainshower. Streaks of silver flowed in the river.
Perchot was too weak to cry out. His head—freezing after the burning fever—rolled from side to side on the pillow. There was no life left except in his eyes, where a spark of consciousness still flickered, another tiny flame about to go out.
Ollivier was waiting in the next cell, which was empty. Quick muffled footsteps pattered down the corridor, hurrying past the dying man’s closed cell. Ollivier smiled. The door opened noiselessly. Ollivier turned around, his arms outstretched.
“Good evening, dear.”
Little George entered, out of breath, his cheeks flushed, his denim tunic floating around his thin shoulders, as fragile as a sapling that will snap in the first storm.
“I really ran. I was scared coming up the stairs. I thought the ‘screw’ was coming. What a fright!”
They met here every evening, the stooped man and the adolescent who had neither past nor future. They talked quietly together. They sat together in silence. One talked about life, about which he knew everything, as if he were telling a story. The other listened, not really understanding, to that penetrating voice, unlike any voice he had ever heard. Sometimes they held each other close, in the shadows, gazing at each other, at a loss for words. Ollivier waited for that moment when Little George’s eyes—slightly off-center, and dark as a pond full of reflections—lost all trace of their normal expression; when his colorless lips became the only sign in that proffered face. The door swung open.
“Beat it, quick!” whispered Ribotte. “Perchot just kicked off.”
The guard came upstairs. He touched Perchot’s stone-cold forehead and said:
“O.K. Nothing to do until tomorrow. No need to call the doctor … The death certificate has been ready since yesterday.”
The profile of the guard (the one they call “Top Kick”) is sharply silhouetted for an instant against the gray background of the window: comical jutting jaw, bushy mustache, képi visor slanting down. He leaves. The dead man remains, his eyes open, empty, and transparent like funeral lights waiting to b
e lit …
I knew Perchot rather well. It was hard for me to recognize him in that emaciated mask. It had been a long time since anyone could have recognized in him the strapping farmboy who had entered a bordello one drunken Sunday. Afterwards he had never been able to understand what had gone on inside of him while he was lying on that passive, indifferent female, who suddenly awoke in fright to discover fixed upon her his wild, hard, inflamed eyes. Later, when they showed him the mangled breasts and belly and he saw his pocketknife red to the hilt with shreds of flesh clinging to the handle, he could hardly grasp what had happened. “What did you do that for?” they asked him. He answered: “I don’t know. I still can’t believe I did it.” Nothing now remained in that white, bony head of the young man’s fleshy lips. For years all trace had disappeared, in that inoffensive young lad, of the passionate brute who had murdered. Perchot was paying for an ancestor’s crime.
THIRTY-THREE
The Innocent
CELL NUMBER 4. HORTA.
This octogenarian, whose heavy flaccid jowls hung down over his wrinkled neck, had whiskers all over his face, which gave him a pale, bristly look. He used to cock his head to one side and stare out of the corner of one eye, keeping his weaker left eye closed. This gave him the air of having only one huge, metallic, cold-blue eye, through which he stared out at people in hatred. For eight years now the prison had held him in its grip; fiercely bent on survival, his endurance baffled doctors, guards, and attendants, in whom that obstinate eye had at last inspired a kind of terror. Remarried at the age of seventy after living the life of a corsair, tossed between palaces on the Riviera and cells in the Milan penitentiary; legend had turned him into something of a villainous old Borgia, pouring a phial of poison into his young bride’s tea. The crime, committed with the skill of an artist, remained in doubt. In the dock, Horta shook his white mane, hurled invective at his judges, railed bitterly at the prosecutor, raised toward the crowd the vigorous hand of a prophet, and cried out in a tragic voice:
