We the Living (75 page)

The toilers of Leningrad marched behind a red coffin.

Row after row, like walls, like the rungs of an endless ladder, they moved forward, swallowing Nevsky in the slow, rumbling, growing tide of bodies and banners, thousands of feet stepping in time, as if one gigantic pair of boots made Nevsky shudder in rhythm, from the statue of Alexander III to the columns of the Admiralty. Thousands of human bodies marched gravely, flaming banners raised high in a last salute.

Soldiers of the Red Army came as khaki ramparts, row after row of straight, husky shoulders, of boots firm and steady in the snow, of peaked caps with a red star on each forehead, and over them—a red banner with gold letters:

Workers of the Putilovsky factory came in gray, unbroken ranks, moving slowly under a red banner held high in sturdy fists:

Students of the Technological Institute followed, rows of young, earnest faces, of grave, clear eyes, of straight, taut bodies, of boys in black caps and girls in red kerchiefs, red as the banner that said:

Members of his Party Collective, rows of black leather jackets, marched gravely, austere as monks, stately as warriors, their banner spread high and straight, without a wrinkle, a narrow red band with black letters, as sharp and plain as the men who carried it:

Every factory of Petrograd, every club, every office, every Union, every small, forgotten Cell rolled in a single stream, gray, black and red, through a single artery of the great city, three miles of caps and red kerchiefs and feet crunching snow and banners like red gashes in the mist. And the gray walls of Nevsky were like the sides of a huge canal where human waves played a funeral dirge on a snow hard as granite.

It was cold; a piercing, motionless cold hung over the city, heavy as a mist that cut into the walls, into the cracks of sealed windows, into the bones and skins under the heavy clothes. The sky was torn into gray layers of rags, and clouds were smeared on, like patches of ink badly blotted, with a paler ink under them, and a faded ink beneath, and then a water turbid with soap suds, under which no blue could ever have existed. Smoke rose from old chimneys, gray as the clouds, as if that smoke had spread over the city, or the clouds had belched gray coils into the chimneys and the houses were spitting them back, and the smoke made the houses seem unheated. Snowflakes fluttered down lazily, once in a while, to melt on indifferent, moving foreheads.

An open coffin was carried at the head of the procession.

The coffin was red. A banner of scarlet, regal velvet was draped over a still body; a white face lay motionless on a red pillow, a clear, sharp profile swimming slowly past the gray walls, black strands of hair scattered on the red cloth, black strands of hair hiding a dark little hole on the right temple. The face was calm. Snowflakes did not melt on the still, white forehead.

Four honorary pall-bearers, his best Party comrades, carried the coffin on their shoulders. Four bowed heads were bared to the cold. The coffin seemed very red between the blond hair of Pavel Syerov and the black curls of Victor Dunaev.

A military band followed the coffin. The big brass tubes were trimmed with bows of black crêpe. The band played “You fell as a victim.”

Many years ago, in secret cellars hidden from the eyes of the Czar’s gendarmes, on the frozen roads of Siberian prison camps, a song had been born to the memory of those who had fallen in the fight for freedom. It was sung in muffled, breathless whispers to the clanking of chains, in honor of nameless heroes. It traveled down dark sidelanes; it had no author, and no copy of it had ever been printed. The Revolution brought it into every music store window and into the roar of every band that followed a Communist to his grave. The Revolution brought the “Internationale” to its living and “You fell as a victim” to its dead. It became the official funeral dirge of the new republic.

The toilers of Leningrad sang solemnly, marching behind the open red coffin:

The music began with the majesty of that hopelessness which is beyond the need of hope. It mounted to an ecstatic cry, which was not joy nor sorrow, but a military salute. It fell, breaking into a pitiless tenderness, the reverent tenderness that honors a warrior without tears. It was a resonant smile of sorrow.

And feet marched in the snow, and the brass tubes thundered, and brass cymbals pounded each step into the earth, and gray ranks unrolled upon gray ranks, and scarlet banners swayed to the grandeur of the song in a solemn farewell.

Far beyond the rows of soldiers and students and workers, in the ranks of nameless stragglers that carried no banners, a girl walked alone, her unblinking eyes fixed ahead, even though she was too far away to see the red coffin. Her hands hung limply by her sides; above the heavy woolen mittens, her wrists were bare to the cold, frozen to a dark, purplish red. Her face had no expression; her eyes had: they seemed astonished.

Those marching around her paid no attention to her. But at the start of the demonstration, someone had noticed her. Comrade Sonia, leading a detachment of women workers from the Zhenotdel, had hurried past to take her place at the head of the procession, where she had to carry a banner; Comrade Sonia had stopped short and chuckled aloud: “Really, Comrade Argounova, you—here? I should think you’d be the one person to stay away!”

Kira Argounova had not answered.

Some women in red kerchiefs had passed by. One had pointed at her and whispered something, eagerly, furtively, to her comrades; someone had giggled.

Kira walked slowly, looking ahead. Those around her sang “You fell as a victim.” She did not sing.

A red banner said:

A freckled woman with strands of rusty hair under a man’s cap, whispered to her neighbor: “Mashka, did you get the buckwheat at the co-operative this week?”

“No. They giving any?”

“Yeah. Two pounds per card. Better get it before it’s all gone.”

A red banner said:

A woman hissed through blackened stumps of teeth: “Oh, hell! They would choose a cold day like this to make us march in another one of their cursed parades!”

“. . . stood in line for two hours yesterday, but best onions you ever hope to see. . . .”

“Dounka, don’t miss the sunflower-seed oil at the co-operative. . . .”

“If they don’t get shot by someone, they shoot themselves—just to make us walk. . . .”

A red banner said:

“God! I left soup cooking on the Primus. It will boil all over the house. . . .”

“Stop scratching, comrade.”

“Comrade, stop chewing sunflower seeds. It’s disrespectful. . . .”

“It’s like this, Praskovia: you peel the onions and add a dash of flour, just any flour you can get, and then a dash of linseed oil and . . .”

“What do
they
have to commit suicide about?”

A red banner said:

“There’s a little closet under the back stairs and some straw and no one can hear us in there. . . . My husband? The poor sap will never get wise. . . .”

“Let the millet soak for a coupla hours before cooking. . . .”

“God! It’s the seventh month, it is, and you can’t expect me to have a figure like a match stick, and here I have to walk like this. . . . Yeah, it’s my fifth one. . . .”

“Lord Jesus Christ! I bet the newspaper’s grown fast to my skin. Ever use newspapers to keep your feet warm, comrade? Under the socks?”

“Makes your feet stink.”

“Cover your mouth when you yawn like that, comrade.”

“Damn those demonstrations! Who the hell was he, anyway?”

The Field of Victims of the Revolution was a huge square in the heart of the city, on the shore of the Neva, a vast, white desert, stretching for half a mile, like a bald spot on the scalp of Petrograd. The iron lances of the Summer Garden fence stood on guard at one side of the Field, and behind them lay the white desolation of a park with bare trees that seemed made of black iron like the lances.

Before the revolution, it had been called the Field of Mars and long ranks of gray uniforms had crossed it in military drills. The revolution had erected a small square of rose granite slabs, a little island lost in the center of the Field. Under the slabs were buried the first victims fallen in the streets of Petrograd in February of 1917. The days since February of 1917 had added more granite slabs to the little island. The names carved on the granite had belonged to those whose death had been the occasion for a demonstration, whose last reward had been the honor of the title of “The Revolution’s Victim.”

Pavel Syerov mounted a block of red granite over a red coffin. His slender figure in a tight, new leather jacket and breeches and tall military boots stood sharply, proudly against the gray sky, his blond hair waved in the wind, and his arms rose solemnly, in blessing and exhortation, over a motionless sea of heads and banners.

“Comrades!” Pavel Syerov’s voice thundered over the solemn silence of thousands. “We are here, united by a common sorrow, by the common duty of paying a last tribute to a fallen hero. We have lost a great man. We have lost a great fighter. Perhaps, I may be permitted to say that I feel the loss more keenly than many who join me in honoring his death, but who knew him not while he lived. I was one of his closest friends—and it was a privilege which I must share with all of you. Andrei Taganov was not a famous man, but he bore, proudly and gallantly, one title: that of a Communist. He came from the toilers’ ranks. His childhood was spent at the proletarian work bench. He and I, we grew up together, and together we shared the long years of toil in the Putilovsky factory. We joined the Party together, long before the Revolution, in those dark days when a Party card was a ticket to Siberia or a mark for the Czar’s hangman’s noose. Side by side, Comrade Taganov and I fought in the streets of this city in the glorious days of October, 1917. Side by side, we fought in the ranks of the Red Army. And in the years of peace and reconstruction that followed our victory, the years which are harder and, perhaps, more heroic than any warfare, he did more than his share of the silent, modest, self-sacrificing work which your Party carries on for you, toilers of the U.S.S.R.! He fell as a victim to that work. But our sorrow at his death shall also be joy at his achievement. He is dead, but his work, our work, goes on. The individual may fall, but the Collective lives forever. Under the guidance of the Soviets, under the leadership of the great All-Union Communist Party, we are marching into a radiant tomorrow when the honest toil of free toilers will rule the world! Then labor will no longer be slavery, as it is in capitalistic countries, but a free and happy duty to that which is greater than our petty concerns, greater than our petty sorrows, greater than our very lives—the eternal Collective of a Proletarian Society! Our glorious dead shall be remembered forever, but we are marching on. Andrei Taganov is dead, but we remain. Life and victory are ours. Ours is the future!”

The applause rolled like a dull thunder to the houses of the city far away, to the snow of the Summer Garden, and red banners waved in the roar of clapping hands, rising to the gray sky. When the hands dropped and the heads turned their eyes to the red granite slab, Comrade Syerov was gone—and against the gray sky stood the trim, proud, resolute figure of Victor Dunaev, black curls waving in the wind, eyes sparkling, mouth open wide over lustrous white teeth, throwing into the silence the clear, ringing notes of a young, powerful voice:

“Comrade workers! Thousands of us are gathered here to honor one man. But one man means nothing in the face of the mighty Proletarian Collective, no matter how worthy his achievements. We would not be here, if that man were not more than a single individual, if he were not a symbol of something greater, which we are gathered here to honor. This is not a funeral, comrades, but a birthday party! We are not celebrating the death of a comrade, but the birth of a new humanity. Of that new humanity, he was one of the first, but not the last. The Soviets, comrades, are creating a new race of men. That new race terrifies the old world, for it brings death to all its outworn standards. What, then, are the standards of our new humanity? The first and basic one is that we have lost a word from our language, the most dangerous, the most insidious, the most evil of human words: the word ‘I.’ We have outgrown it. ‘We’ is the slogan of the future. The Collective stands in our hearts where the old monster—‘self ’—had stood. We have risen beyond the worship of the pocketbook, of personal power and personal vanity. We do not long for gold coins and gold medals. Our only badge of honor is the honor of serving the Collective. Our only aim is the honest toil which profits not one, but all. What is the lesson we are to learn here today and to teach our enemies beyond the borders? The lesson of a Party comrade dying for the Collective. The lesson of a Party that rules but to sacrifice itself to those it rules. Look at the world around you, comrades! Look at the fat, slobbering ministers of the capitalistic countries, who fight and stab one another in the back in their bloody scramble for power! Then look at those who rule you, who consecrate their lives to the unselfish service of the Collective, who carry the tremendous responsibility of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! If you do, you will understand me when I say that the All-Union Communistic Party is the only honest, fearless, idealistic body of men in the politics of the world today!”