Authors: Victor Serge
A CHART HANGING BEHIND THE BED READS:
“#5529, V
INCENT, AUGUSTIN,
welder, 66 years old,” and, lower down, in an ugly scrawl: “bronchial pneumonia. 104° of fever, this morning.” Three little black dots connected by a line. That means you’re on the way out, old boy. Little George went and got a blanket, for your feet, in spite of the heat in here. You couldn’t even say thank you, your mumbled words lost in a choking gasp. The boy was terrified by the greenish tint of your face.
“Jesus Christ! My pipes were always good and solid … At sixty-six, I’m still as much of a man as I was at twenty.”
Last night he was rambling on like that, sitting up in his bed in spite of his worn-out lungs. His eyes bright with fever, he took advantage of the orderly’s absence to give joyful reign to his voice as in the good old days. For nearly three years now he hadn’t tasted the rare joy of talking out loud.
He went at it to his heart’s content, without suspecting that he would die of it in a few hours. Little George’s raucous laughter egged him on. He was saying:
“I fought at Beaugency, on the Loire, with Chanzy … in the snow, nothing to eat, with holes in our shoes and frozen breechloaders that burned in our hands … I lived through that. We were men, all right!”
He was still full of burning energy. The sweat glittered on his forehead. They got him to tell his story, the story of a tired old worker who could no longer keep up at the factory. “The foreman had it in for me, you see. He didn’t want any old men in his shop. I get called into the office, they tell me politely: ‘Here’s a hundred francs, my friend, try to find a nice light job more in line with your strength.’ A clerk was pushing me gently toward the door: ‘Think about it, M. Vincent. You’ll certainly find something else. Our work isn’t made for men of your age, I’m sure you understand. You’re such a sensible fellow.’ I didn’t understand
anything. Out in the street—I can still see that street corner, the tobacco shop, the mailbox, as if I were standing there now—I suddenly understood that they were showing me the door, after sweating for twenty-seven years. Right away I thought of killing that bastard of a foreman. I went to buy a revolver.”
Life was still in him then. Now Vincent’s hairy chest is filled with mucous phlegm he can’t even spit up. He struggles, coughs spasmodically, vomits into his spittoon. He’s had it; he’s turning green. His dark, flaring nostrils can no longer get enough air. Was it really worth it to fight at Beaugency, to accept hunger, cold, love, hard work, valiantly, all these long years, only to come to this sorry hour? Madré, mulling over such thoughts, shakes his head as he stands by the window, cooking for himself an appetizing stew: potatoes in onion gravy. Old Vincent is no longer thinking. His face ashen, his mouth drawn, his swollen brows dripping with cold sweat, his eyes closed, he gasps painfully for his last breaths of air. His chest gives out a continuous rattle, and you can hear the phlegm that’s choking him rumbling in his throat. The white room is full of that rasping noise and his spasmodic breathing …
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 there 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.
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: