Authors: Victor Serge
I opened my eyes. Or perhaps they were already open, and I merely forced myself to return to the other reality, now ending its useless existence, finite, pointless reality. The low ceiling, veined with green streaks … A basin full of bandages. A gangly spider on the wall … A stocky serving woman entered, braids coiled over her ears, silver hoops knocking against her cheeks. She moved about the room, I could perceive the attention in her gaze, focused on what? The spider watched her. I wanted to call N’ga, but I could not move or speak. Why was I fretting, about what, since I had nothing more to fear or to desire? The servant was nudging my suitcase, softly, softly toward the door, the suitcase that contained my most precious things, tea, sugar, matches, cigarettes, soap, a scholarly edition of the Manifesto … “Thief! Thief! Bitch!” I screamed and the stocky woman heard nothing, I knew that my brain alone was screaming and that its scream was nothing. So then, thought and will were participants in nothingness? The revolver under the pillow — my brain was seizing it, but a brain without hands is nothing, I was a part of
nothing
. Before pushing the suitcase through the doorway, the servant looked shrewdly straight at me. Her little eyes were as sharp and alert as a foraging rodent’s. My anger subsided. Take the suitcase, sneaky creature, weasel woman, if you want it to winter more snugly in your den, the spider won’t tell. I turned away, toward the places of my childhood: the tall reeds where my father hid his dinghy to wait for wild duck.
Anton emerged from the ruins, clad in gold-embroidered white silk, like a Persian prince in an illuminated manuscript. His horse’s hooves gamboled so lightly over the dead city, wasn’t it a wingèd charger? Anton on a wingèd charger! I laughed. Ha, you didn’t think it was possible? Neither did I, Anton. Then I saw him differently, with his flat face, funny diamond-shaped spectacles, hospital coat, and a syringe between his fingers. N’ga was holding a flaming-red object with both hands, a captive bird — hallo, they’ve dug my heart from my chest! No, it was a flask. Anton said, “Saved in the nick of time. You’ve really put me through it, you louse. Bloody hell! Time you came around. The melodrama’s over, or d’you want my fist in your face?”
“I don’t have a face … What’s the matter? Where did you come from?”
“You’re the one coming back from a long way off, brother. I got off a plane four days ago. Have some of this iced coffee. I bring you messages from on high. You’ve got a medal, you skunk.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do. You’re behind with your work.”
I was still suspended between two realities. “Behind with my work” brought me to earth with a bump. Clever, Anton. “Tell me about Mania,” I said feebly.
“Mania has remarried for the third time since she left you. Getting uglier by the minute. A veritable camel, my brother. More coffee?”
At university, I had adored Anton. We never stopped bickering. He was inventing biological Marxism or Marxist biology or was it dialectical biology … He had no time for old-world romantics who believe in love. “The couple,” he would say, in the insufferable tone he adopted to emit verdicts beyond appeal, “is necessarily nothing but a two-bit drama determined by physio-psychological, not to say social, misunderstandings … Most women are garrulous vaginas with the brains of a sparrow … The outcome of a hundred thousand years of domestic exploitation.” A textbook case of the believer with a cynical veneer. I wonder what happened to him? Back then he was a favorite of men in high places; he must have followed them to the grave, as he foresaw. “We have built” — it was one of his sarcastic sayings — “a colossal infernal machine of stupendous perfection, and we’ve settled down for a nice snooze on top of it, wearing shiny red-paper laurel crowns on our heads. There!” Nothing left of him but this memory of mine … (There’ll be time to spare for sorting out memories. Anton lecturing about how we should only preserve useful ones: “To forge a living memory, in the service of an active present …” What use is your memory now, dear Anton?)
This unease that recalls you to me, Anton, comes from Nadine. Nadine is straight as a die, mettlesome, instinctual. She’s right, I’m wrong: instincts are always right in the end. We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned …
* * *
Nadine lit a big fire in the fireplace and the room filled with well-being. She threw in some letters, photos, several passports. Her devastation had attained a calm of utter catastrophe. It was compounded of two disasters, one trivial, the other almost inconceivable, and it was the trivial one that caused the most pain, like an open wound. “Sacha only made up his mind at the end of the twelfth hour, because we were in Hell …” For two years now Nadine had been afraid to open a newspaper, receive a letter, speak a name, think of a person, let slip the least doubt concerning the totally absurd accusations that were universally proclaimed, to seem not to be applauding the unforgivable with all her heart and soul. Conspiracies whirled around like a witches’ sabbath … At first she’d believed in them, like everyone; then she’d willed herself to believe the unbelievable; then she’d feigned belief and, lately, she’d been smothering fits of sobbing under her pillow. Sacha, who feared being alone with her — Sacha whom she pictured all alone with his opaque tragedy — packed her off to Mont Saint-Michel, to Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins on the least pretext: “Go look after your nerves, darling, I feel better facing all these worries alone …” Nadine at the seaside tried her best to read Proust, such penetrating novels, but what was the goal in life of all those people? She strolled along the beaches in the company of American ladies, an English boxer, flirtatious gentlemen dressed like fashion plates — and these people too had no goal in life, they served no purpose whatsoever, and the sight of them would have been demoralizing had it not been so ridiculous. She was invited to a pigeon shoot. Rigging yourself out in white flannels to perform serial execution on birds — how perverted! It made her sick. Only in small fishing ports, reading Zola, did she feel good.
Sacha withdrew from her so as not to see in her eyes the anguish that tormented him too. “What’s going on? Weren’t all of these disgraced men trustworthy, intelligent, incorruptible? Where is this leading us? I can’t understand it anymore. I’ll soon stop believing in anything …” He’d only said that much, but with a look on his face that she would never forget. It was during their dismal night in Juan-les-Pins. Sacha had kept her away from Paris. “Keep as far from the job as you can, we’re going through a very bad moment,” which clearly meant “I don’t want you to die,” not that it would prevent anything … From time to time he telegraphed to arrange a meeting: two or three days of fresh air, two or three nights of lovemaking. The news must have been dire, because he was unable to unwind in Juan-les-Pins and when she came to bed beside him, naked, he noticed neither her new perfume nor her white enamel earrings — not even that her breasts were the firmer after a regime of massages and cold showers. Instead of making love, they conducted a frosty, fitful conversation — all in veiled allusions. “No, I’m not in a bad mood, darling …” “Then look at me, Sacha, and stop glowering. Do you love me?” Nadine felt ashamed of the breasts he didn’t see. “Yesterday I learned of three disappearances …” He gave three names. “Executed?” “Obviously, ah, you want me to dot the
i
’s …” “But why, why? Is it going to continue?” Nadine yanked the sheet over her shoulders, ashamed of her why’s which no longer made sense. He stubbed his cigarette out on the pillow where it made a small black hole, like a bullet’s, and stared at the mark with a strange laugh. “Why? You silly girl. Because they were old, well-known, and battle-hardened. Because they were in the way, because they knew as much as I do …” He swigged some whiskey straight from the bottle. Their bodies moved closer without heat, Nadine suppressed a shiver; they did not desire each other. Sacha was ruminating stolidly, eyes on the ceiling. Nadine thought (she was sure she only thought), “What about you? What about us?” and he answered her, “We’ll go the way of the others. The avalanche rolls onward, and we’re in its path. We count for nothing.” Nadine let the shivers overcome her. “Then let’s run, Sacha, escape anywhere!” There was an interminable lull before he shot back: “Stop talking drivel! It’s treason to run away. Me, a traitor? To save my own miserable skin, or your pretty skin, eh? And then what would we be left with? This old world we execrate? Pass the whiskey.” They took pills to be able to sleep … And now she was feeding the postcards from Juan-les-Pins into the fire.
The other disaster, trifling by comparison, sliced into an open wound. No meeting with him tomorrow, no meeting ever again with those boyish clever eyes, that somewhat hard mouth, that wiry athlete’s body, those clumsy nimble hands, that lively voice, its flatness rendered abruptly tender under the impulse of a sharp organic impulses … There were so few problems for him, everything was what it seemed, so few backstage machinations in his world constructed out of a succession of planes each of which negates and destroys the previous one! It says in books that it is simple to surrender to a man who attracts you — who needs love? — that the moment’s pleasure can be savored like a glass of champagne. And I don’t really love him, that overgrown boy who thinks he’s a man, I don’t love him, I couldn’t live with him for a week without finding his naïveté stupid … And so what? It would be a simple kind of love, like a ramble on a heath. But we’re not cut out for healthy outdoor rambles, are we, we’re better at creeping through tunnels! Tear him out, leaving a throbbing wound behind: the amputated arm still feels pain. Nadine’s eyes swam with tears. All she had of him was two notes in his sprawling script, signed with a trenchant
Y
: Yours. She put them to her lips before casting them into the fire. She was packing a small suitcase with what she would take when a knock came at the locked door. Immediately the intrusive rat-tat-tat brought her back to earth. Like a cat she reached the door in two swift bounds, pressing herself against it.
“Yes … What is it?”
“If you please, Madame … You’re wanted on the phone.”
The hoops of danger tighten without warning and you can’t breathe.
“Tell them I’m not here … I’ve gone out, I’ll be back late.”
“Yes Madame, very good Madame.”
But it was bad, very bad … Apprehension made short work of sadness. Nadine slipped on new clothes she had hardly worn, so that she’d be harder to recognize in the street. A green velvet toque pinned to her curls, she applied lipstick almost without checking in the mirror, straining to hear. The room was becoming more oppressive than a prison cell. At the far end of the corridor, the telephone whirred again. Nadine heard the chambermaid say, “Madame’s not back yet, Monsieur, no, not before midnight …” The word “Monsieur” stood out in black, buzzing letters. Who was it? Who could be calling? If Sacha, then he must have a serious reason. The other man didn’t know this number … A message from Sylvia? Has the hunt begun? The animal urge to flee coursed through her limbs like a torrent. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, her broad face narrowed into hard lines, a face warped by the magnet of escape. She rang for the maid.
“The gentleman has phoned four times, but I just told him the same thing, Madame, like you told me to.”
A good-looking girl from the Midi, the maid, with a hypocritically modest gaze. Wasn’t she peering a trifle too intently from under those long straight lashes? Servants are there to be bribed, it’s the ABC of the art! Nadine smiled crookedly. Say something natural, aggressive, to break the silence of the telephone and divert the girl’s attention … Nadine thought she was talking vulgarly, but really her voice sounded deranged.
“Have you had lovers, Céline? No? Well, you will. You’ll find out all about it. He’s my lover and I’m leaving him, do you understand? I have my reasons.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“I’m going away on a trip.”
“Ooh yes, Madame, it must be painful, Madame.”
Nadine opened her bag and pressed a banknote into the maid’s hand.
“And not a word. It’s nobody’s business but my own.”
“I’m sure it isn’t, Madame.”
Air, air, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. The elevator. You never know how far down you’re going. Alone in the dark trench of the hall it all vanished: the room, the smoldering papers, the telephone, Céline, their hallucinatory exchange. Nadine stepped to one side and paused to appraise the street. Opposite the doorway, a flower vendor — chrysanthemums — was lowering her basket to the ground. A bus went by, then a couple, a very young couple talking fast and, it seemed, heatedly. The sidewalks were wet, glistening with swiftly alternating reflections of yellow and red from a neon sign. The street was calling: dive in and lose yourself.
Nadine walked quickly, with determination, wary of hailing a taxi straightaway. She needed to check the lay of the land. She stopped before the window of a shoe store: in the glass she could see behind her without turning around. Nobody, apparently, but Paris streets are so crowded at nine in the evening … Vaguely reassured all the same, Nadine turned the corner. Someone turned and faced her so quickly that she nearly bumped into the fellow. “Excuse me … Oh! You? Alain!”
As he took her arm his fingers squeezed her wrist, hard. His hand was hot.
“Well, what a piece of luck!” the voice sounded false to her. “What a coincidence! Are you in a hurry?”
He wanted to sound tender, but something held him back. Too frank — he couldn’t manage one of those intimate phrases that sounded so clear from his lips. Nadine was thinking: think quickly, act innocent, it’s logically impossible that he already knows. He’s not in touch with Sylvia, but he is with Mougin, with B, with R. Neither B nor R will find out for a while, and they may even be kept in the dark altogether, so as not to terrify the one or demoralize the other. The telephone was still ringing in her ears. She’d just said, “It’s my lover,” in an echo of her secret obsession. Now she said, “You called me?”
And as he was answering, “No, I don’t have your number,” she knew he was lying. So he knows. So, concealed not far from my door, he’s been watching. Probably with someone else who filled in while he dialed from the bar. The strong hand clamped to her wrist was upsetting Nadine who wished she hadn’t blundered into the first side street, with scarcely a light along it, even fewer passersby, and at the end a dark square lined along one side by the decrepit railings of a private mansion that looked abandoned. The hiss of tires made her turn. A black car came up behind them, sliding closer.