David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008)

by Irene Nemirovsky

  And so I began my life as a revolutionary at the age of eighteen; I was given several missions in the south of France; then I lived in Paris for a long time. In 1903, the Committee sent me to Russia. I was to kill the Minister of Education. It was after this event that I broke away from the terrorist section of the Party andjoined T. After the Courilof affair I was condemned to death, but a few days before my execution, Alexis, the heir to the throne, was born, and I was saved by the amnesty granted. My sentence was commuted to hard labour for life. When I learned that I had been spared, I cannot recall feeling anything except profound indifference. In any case, I was ill, I was coughing up buckets of blood, and I was sure to die on the way to Siberia. But you should never count on death any more than you should count on life.

  I lived and was cured in Siberia, in the penal colony. When I escaped, the Revolution of 1905 had started.

  Even though I was so exhausted at night that I would collapse and fall asleep as if I were dying, I have happy memories of 1905 and those first months of the Revolution.

  I would go with R. and L. to the factories, to the workers’ meetings. I have always had a piercing, unpleasant-sounding voice, and my weak lungs prevented me from speaking out loud for long. As for the others, they would rant at the workers for hours on end. I would leave the platform and mix with the crowd, explaining whatever they found confusing, advising them, helping them. Amidst the heat and smoke in the room, their pale faces, their sparkling eyes, the shouts coming from their open mouths, their anger, even their stupidity, gave me the same feeling of euphoria you get from wine. And I liked the danger. I liked the sudden silences, how they held their breath in anticipation, the look of panic on their faces when they saw the dvornik, the informer who was in the pay of the police, walking past the window.

  Into the dark night, those damp, freezing autumn nights in St. Petersburg, the workers would leave, one by one. They melted into the fog like shadows. We would disappear after they had gone; to throw the police off the trail, we would roam the streets until dawn, stopping only when we reached the dirty little traktirs where we hid.

  I left Russia only to return on the eve of the October Revolution. I have described this period and the one that followed in my previous writings on politics and history.

  After 1917, I became the Bolshevik, Leon M. In newspapers all over the world, they must have depicted me wearing a helmet on my head and with a knife between my teeth. I was given a job in the Tcheka Secret Police, where I remained for one year. But it requires fierce, personal hatred to carry out such terrible work without flinching. As for me …

  What is truly strange is that I, who spared not only innocent lives but several guilty ones as well (for at certain moments I was overcome by a kind of indifference, and the prisoners reaped the benefits), I was hated even more than some of my comrades. For example, I was hated more than Nostrenko, the frenzied sailor who executed the prisoners himself; he was an extraordinary show-offwho wore make-up and powder and left his shirt open, exposing a chest as smooth and white as a woman’s. I can still see him, a combination of bad actor, drunkard, and pederast. Or Ladislas, the hunchback Pole, with his drooping, scarlet lip, slashed and scarred from an old wound.

  I think the prisoners condemned to death vaguely consoled themselves with the idea that they were dealing with madmen or monsters; whereas Iwas an ordinary, sad little man who coughed, wore glasses, had a little snub nose and delicate hands.

  When the policies of the leaders changed, I was sent into exile. Since then I have lived near Nice, supported by the modest income from books, newspaper articles, Party magazines. I ended up in Nice because I am living under the passport of a certain Jacques Lourie, who died of typhus in the Pierre et Paul Fortress, imprisoned for revolutionary conspiracy. He was a Jew from Latvia, a naturalised French citizen. He had no family, he was utterly alone, and he owned a small villa which I consequently inherited, as it were. The danger of running into his friends or neighbours pleased me somewhat. But everyone had forgotten Jacques Lourie. I live here, and will probably soon die here.

  The house is small and not very comfortable, and Lourie, who was short of money, didn’t have the walls surrounding it built high enough to stop people looking in.

  On the left, there is a kind of enclosure, a piece of land for sale where goats come to graze on the thick sweet-smelling grass, between the abandoned bricks and stones. To the right, there is another little stone building, just like mine but painted pink, that is rented out to different couples each year. The road from Nice to Monte Carlo runs behind the house; below is the viaduct. The sea is far away. The house is cool and bright.

  So this is how I live, and, sometimes, I don’t know whether this tranquillity makes me happy or is killing me. Sometimes I feel I’d like to work again. At five o’clock, the time when my day used to begin in Russia, I wake with a start; or, if I haven’t yet gone to sleep, I feel a profound sense of anguish. I pick up the odd thing: a book, a notebook. I write, as I am doing now. The weather is beautiful, the sun is rising, the roses smell wonderful. I would give it all, and my whole life, for that room where we all used to sleep, fifteen, twenty men, in 1917, whenwe came to power. It was a foggy night, snowing. You could hear the wind, the bombs, the faint sound of the Neva rising as it did every autumn. The telephone rang continuously. Sometimes I think: “If I were younger and stronger, I would go back to Russia, I would start again, and I would die happy and at peace… in one of those prison cells I know so well.”

  Power, the illusion of influencing human destiny, is as intoxicating as smoke, as wine. When you have none, you feel an astonishing sense of suffering, of painful uneasiness. At other times, as I’ve said, I feel nothing more than indifference and a sort of relief in remaining here and waiting for death to wash over me in a great wave. I am not suffering. It is only at night, when my fever rises, that a painful restlessness sweeps through my body, and the steady sound of my heart-beat echoes in my ears and tires me. By morning it has gone. I light the lamp, and I sit at my table, in front of the open window, and when the sun has finally risen, I fall asleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE in Switzerland met once a year to examine a list of dignitaries, senior civil servants in the Russian Empire renowned for their cruelty and injustice, and to choose who was to die that year. My mother had belonged to this organisation which, in my day, was made up of about twenty people.

  In 1903, the Russian Minister of Education was Valerian Alex-androvitch Courilof, who was universally despised. He was a reactionary from the Pobiedonostsef school; he had a reputation as a man who exercised brute, cold-blooded force. Though protected by Emperor Alexander III and Prince Nelrode, he didn’t belong to the nobility and, as often happens, was “more of a royalist than the King”; he hated the Revolution and despised the ordinary people even more than the country’s ruling classes.

  He was tall and heavy, slow in his speech and movements; the students had nicknamed him the Killer Whale (“deadly and bloodthirsty”), for he was cruel, ambitious, and hungry for military honours. He was enormously feared.

  The leaders of the Party wanted him to be assassinated in public, in the most grandiose manner possible, in order to catch the imagination of the people as much as possible. For this reason, this execution presented even greater difficulties than usual. Indeed, it was not enough to trust luck and throw a bomb, or shoot him, as we did, more or less, on most other occasions; in this case, we had to choose the right time and place. It was Dr. Schwann who first spoke to me about this man. Schwann, when I knew him, must have been about sixty years old; he was short, slim, frail, and as light as a ballerina; his woolly hair, frizzy, completely white as milk or the moon, spilled over his forehead. He had a small, angular face, a tight mouth with a narrow, cruel shape, a delicate nose, as pinched and curved as a beak. He was mad. He was declared so officially, so to speak, only after I left, and he died in an asylum in Lausanne. However, even at this earlier time, he a
lready aroused within me an instinctive sense of foreboding and revulsion. He was something of a genius: he had been one of the first to experiment on pneumothorax in tuberculosis. He enjoyed destroying and healing in equal measures.

  I can still picture him on my balcony, with me, a twelve-year-old child stretched out and wrapped up in my fur blanket, the moon illuminating the pine trees, the snow blue and thick, the frozen little lake sparkling in the shadows. The moonlight bathed Schwann’s halo of white hair, his strange dressing-gown with its pink and baby-blue pattern, as he taught me the terrorist doctrine: “Logna, you see a gentleman like that one over there, big, fat, who’s bursting, feeding on the blood and sweat of the people… You laugh. You think: ‘Wait, just you wait.’ He doesn’t know you. You are there, in the shadows. You start to move… like this … you raise your hand… a bomb isn’t very big, you know; you can hide it in a shawl, in a bouquet of flowers… Whoosh! … It explodes! The gentleman is blown up, flesh and bones flying in all directions.”

  He spoke in a whisper, interspersed with laughter.

  “And his soul will also fly away … animula vagula, blandula … little soul, wandering soul.” (He was obsessedwith Latin quotations, just like poor Courilof.)

  He entwined his fingers in the most bizarre fashion, as if he were plaiting hair; his little hooked nose, his pinched mouth, were outlined with the sharpness of steel against the bluish, silvery background of the pine trees, the snow, and the moon.

  One of the Party leaders sometimes gave him large sums of money, I’ve never understood how. Some people believe he’d also been an agent provocateur, but I don’t think so.

  He was the one who took me along to the Executive Committee meeting in 1903. It was a cold and glistening winter’s night. We made our way to Lausanne on the little milk train that creaked as it descended the steep frozen fields, as hard and brittle as salt. We were alone in the compartment; Schwann was wrapped up in a shepherd’s greatcoat, wearing no hat, as usual, despite the cold.

  There, in his low murmur, he spoke to me again of the Killer Whale.

  Twice already, the Committee had sent men to kill the minister, but both of them had been arrested and hanged. The Committee had recognised that it would be almost impossible for Russians to carry out the assassination. The police knew all the suspects; no matter how well disguised they might be, they couldn’t hide their true identities for long; their arrests would compromise the work of the other Party members and would mean their death.

  Moreover, for a while now, terrorist attacks had been kept secret; even the foreign press hardly mentioned them. This assassination had to take place audaciously, as I’ve already mentioned, where the people could see it with their own eyes. And insofar as possible, it had to be witnessed by the ambassadors of foreign governments, somewhere in public, during an official ceremony or on a public holiday, which made it ten times more difficult. As for me, well, nobody knew me, not the police, not the Russian revolutionaries. I spoke Russian, although with a heavy foreign accent, which was not necessarily a bad thing; it would therefore be easy to get me into the country with a Swiss passport.

  I listened to Schwann speak, though it is difficult for me, with so many years’ distance, to remember exactly what I felt. The Committee had a reputation for justice; it condemned only people who were guilty of crimes. And the conviction that I was risking my own life as much as the minister was risking his, this conviction was the justification for the murder and absolved me of it. Also, I was only twenty-two years old. I was nothing like the man I was to become. All I knew of life was a sanatorium and a dingy little room in Montrouge. I was eager, thirsty, for life; already I enjoyed the feeling of holding someone’s life in my hands, the way you might hold a live bird.

  I said nothing to Schwann. I tapped the window where the snow had stuck to it. I looked outside. Soon, we came to the plain where the fir trees grew scarcer; through the darkness you could see their branches sparkling, heavy with ice, lit up by the first log fires.

  Finally, we arrived in Lausanne, where the Committee was meeting that night.

  I knew all the Committee members, but it was the first time I’d ever seen them all together. There was Loudine and his wife, Roubakof, Brodsky, Dora Eisen, Leonidif, Hertz … Most of them, since then, have died violent deaths.

  A few of them, on the other hand, gave up just in time. Hertz is still living here in France. When I came to Nice, I ran into him once on the Promenade des Anglais, strolling arm in arm with his wife, walking a little dog with curly white hair; he looked old and ill, but peaceful, just like a good little member of the French bourgeoisie.

  He walked past without recognising me. It was on his orders that General Rimsky and Minister Bobrinof had been killed.

  In 1907, he was supposed to blow up the Emperor’s train, but he made a mistake and ordered the bomb to be thrown under the Petersburg-Yalta train, while the Emperor and his family were travelling in the opposite direction. It was a mistake that cost the lives of twenty-odd people (not counting the men who had followed his orders, thrown the bomb, and didn’t have time to get away: such are the risks of the profession).

  The meeting of the Committee in 1903 took place in Loudine’s room; it lasted barely an hour. In order to confuse the neighbours, some wine bottles had been placed on a table, lit up by a lamp, opposite the window. Now and again, one of the women would get up and play some waltzes on an old piano in the corner of the room. I was given a passport in the name of Marcel Legrand, born in Geneva, a doctor of medicine, diplomas as proof of my qualifications, and some money. Then everyone went back home, while I checked into a hotel.

  CHAPTER 5

  I CAN REMEMBER in extraordinary detail the room where I spent that night. Through the old threadbare carpet, I could see floorboards the colour of rope; I paced up and down all night as if in a trance. A small cloudy mirror, above the sink, reflected the image of the dark wooden furniture, the green wallpaper, and my pale, anxious face. I remember opening the window. I forced myself to look at a small, grey church, streaked with soft snow. Here and there, on the deserted street, gloomy lights were burning. I felt unspeakably exhausted and miserable. Throughout my entire life, just before I was about to do something essential to the fate of my Party—I’m not talking about my own life, which has never really been of much interest to me—I have always felt overwhelmed by deadly indifference. The clean, cold air finally brought me back to life. And, little by little, the secret exultation I had felt in the train won me over once again, the realisation that I was going to leave this lethal place, that I was cured, that the life of a revolutionary, with its passions and battles, was there waiting for me, and so many other things as well… I remained at the hotel for a few days.

  Finally, one morning, 25 January 1903, I received my orders and left. I was to go to Kiev, and once there, my first order of business was to make myself known to a woman called Fanny Zart, who would follow me to St. Petersburg and help me. When I left Lausanne, something strange happened, something that struck me, and—even though it was insignificant and never had anything to do with my own life afterwards—I have never forgotten it. Even now, I still have dreams about it.

  That day I had gone to Monts for one last meeting with Dr. Schwann and was returning to Lausanne on a little train, slowly puffing away, that stopped at each and every station. I was meant to reach Lausanne at midnight. We arrived in Vevey around ten o’clock in the evening. The station appeared deserted and you could even hear a little bell ringing in the total silence.

  Suddenly, on the platform opposite me, I saw a man running towards a train that was pulling into the station. Schwann and I were walking by. The man looked like he wanted to throw himself under the train. A woman, standing next to me, let out a sharp little cry. All of a sudden, I saw him spin around, in a kind of circle, like a bird gliding downwards; he threw himself to the ground, then got up, started running again and fell over in exactly the same way—two or three times, he did this. F
inally, he stayed on the ground, his body twitching.

  The train had stopped; the passengers saw what was happening, jumped out, and helped the man up. I could see them lean over him, asking him questions, but he said nothing, just waved his arms in an astonished, feeble gesture, then began to sob uncontrollably.

  They sat him down on a bench, stared at him for a moment, then left him there: the train was about to leave. I have carried the image ofthat man with me ever since: sitting, alone, in the deserted train station, on a cold January night, a big man in mourning, with a thick black moustache, a black felt hat, large hands clutching his knees in desperate resignation.

  Afterwards, I often wondered why that incident made such a strong impression on me, for the face of that big man haunted me for years, it’s true, and in my dreams, I watched his features merge with the Killer Whale’s, after his murder. They looked a little like each other.

  In Kiev, I found the address I’d been given for the medical student, Fanny Zart. She was a young woman of twenty, with a stocky build and black hair pulled forward over her cheeks like great sideburns; she had a long straight nose, a strong mouth whose lower lip drooped and gave her face an obstinate and scornful expression. Her eyes were unique to women in the Party, eyes whose harshness and determination were inhuman. (Only those of the second generation, nothing like the weary, short-sighted look of my mother.) She was the daughter of a watchmaker in Odessa and the sister of an extremely wealthy banker in St. Petersburg who financed her education and wanted nothing more to do with her. Because of this, her hatred of the wealthy classes took the concrete form of this little Jewish banker with his fat stomach. She had been a member of the Party for three years.