Birth of Our Power (34 page)

Overworked women pushed through the blue mobs at the stations under the December rains. Houses leaning over, sometimes crushed in, their windows cut out like dark wounds, watched peace being born in boundless fatigue. Red Cross ladies, blond, powdered, elegant, and attractive, appeared, placed there like tall sheaves of brilliant flowers at the doors of neat barracks. “Devotion in lace,” said Sam. In a dark city, beneath the spire of a cathedral, there were mutilated houses held up by beams as if on crutches; a dark cabaret, brimming with exhausted Britons, and Dmitri, whom we had brought there searching for a hot supper, talking to them in English; and suddenly their handshakes, the enthusiasm in their eyes, a whole circle of anxious faces around us saying, “Us too! us too!” with a profound accent of menace and of hope. “A whole camp mutinied near Calais,” a skinny Tommy whispered to us, like a miner out of the mine, on the sly so as not to be noticed by the embarrassed gentleman who accompanied us …

Some poor bastards of Bavarian peasants floundering about in the mud, under a rain as sad as their days—and so many of ours—were watching the trains go by from behind barbwire; in order to greet them we waved a red handkerchief which provoked a confused commotion among them.

And then the sea.

10
Family of French executioners, 1740–1840,
père et fils.
Killed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

THE GREEK STEAMER
ANDROS,
SAILING UNDER FRENCH REGISTRY, WAS CAR
rying seventeen hundred Russian wounded and convalescents in its hold and steerage: a whole starving mob, like ourselves guarded by tall Senegalese, savage shepherds of this peaceful flock. We occupied comfortable first- and second-class cabins: Other groups had joined ours and, since the exchange was arranged by head, children were counted as hostages too. A few gangs of undesirables, collected off the slum streets of Paris and Toulon, delighted by the clean whiteness of the cabins and the good food, were living a waking dream there. The North Sea was tinted with gray silk and silvery reflections; heavy white clouds scuttled ceaselessly by. Derelict hulks were often sighted. A destroyer, slicing through the waves in front of us, shelled a mine, a black object which you could see, through field glasses, floating like a cork; a tall geyser of splashing water, a fantastic palm tree surging out of the waves and then immediately engulfed, erased that floating death. The hazes in the evening glowed red, splendid as in the first days of the earth. Children and childlike young women leaned over the bulwarks with us before these flaming horizons. Streams of gold on the surface of the sea ran right up to us. In the end, the pale blues came inexorably over the sky, soon dotted by the winking points of the constellations. At times the long brilliant shafts of searchlights would glide through the night in even flight. We watched the land appear and disappear; outlined so lightly on the horizon that they hardly seemed to exist: Denmark, Sweden, islands. Even the cold seemed tonic and purifying.

I loved to follow the sober curve of the seagulls' flight around the ship. The extended shapes—gliding, piercing—of the white birds had, in their capricious yet precise flight, an almost perfect harmony. I thought of
the beauty of a law fulfilled with simplicity. I should have wished for a fate similar to that sinuous yet direct curve of white flight above the foam, in the vast pale light. To accomplish one's task among those who are moving ahead, to accomplish it simply, without weakening or souring, as difficult as it might be. And with our eyes open: refusing to lie to others, refusing to lie to oneself.

We were nearing our goal. The prow of the
Andros
was slicing through new oceans with powerful ease. The waves, now milky, now oily, mirrored the white Baltic skies.

We were approaching the revolution with each turn of the ship's screws. I was seized by a certain anxiety, as at the end of any long wait, as on the eve of any great accomplishment. It would no longer be books, theories, dreams, newspaper clippings, reminiscences from history, the inexpressed, the inexpressible; it would be reality. Men similar to all men, things, struggles. Struggles against ourselves and among ourselves. Were we not to be overrun, after the conquest, by the sly, the adaptable, the false companions? That crowd would come to us because we were the power. To be the power: what a weakness! The dregs that were in us, a little in each of us, would ferment. How does one contain in oneself the old man ready to take over?

At least hall of us, even on this ship, saw in the victory only an adventure doubled by a conquest; they were arriving, their souls greedy to
take,
to become masters in their turn, to eat their fill, to open for their children a life which, in the end, they envisioned according to old examples. They would fight for that against all comers and even against each other. They had just been arguing, with a sharpness ill-masked by comradeliness, over two trunks of warm clothing. Professor Alschitz, arching his narrow shoulders, was saying: “In Odessa? But my dear friend, I will immediately be elected to the Soviet.” A swarthy old man was already preparing a denunciation against his bunkmate. And we had good reason to be keeping on eye on
him.

Weren't we running the risk of being conquered by our own conquest, of being ourselves overcome by the evils we were fighting against? What was to become of our comrades' solidarity? How were we to find ourselves, to recognize each other in the crowd of newcomers, false enthusiasts, masqueraders of the day after the victory? Would we not be too overburdened with functions and tasks, sometimes terrible ones, even to dream of it? Would I have the right, who, according to history, judged the terror to be necessary, to push aside the
hand which offered me the weapon and to answer the man who says to me, “Go,
and strike; I am spent”
—to answer him abjectly, “No, I want to keep my hands clean, go ahead and dirty your own, comrade; I'm squeamish about my soul, you see, in these times when that is really the question! and I'll leave all the dirty jobs to you … ?” We would have to be hard on ourselves, in order to be hard on others, since we were at last the power. It would be necessary to stop at nothing, or all would be lost. Would we be strong enough? Would we be worthy of you, Revolution? Would we be able to consent to the inevitable sacrifice of the best among us? Are we sufficiently tempered? The prisons, the poverty, the concentration camps from which we have come, the epidemics, the vanquished rebellions, the strikes, the trials, the death of our brothers, all of this has become a providential preparation. But other men, of another stamp, one which might not please us, would they not soon be stronger than we, better adapted to the realistic work to be done? Would we know how to recognize, in reality, the unexpected face of justice, would we know how to distinguish the necessary from the arbitrary, compromise from treason? Things never turn out the way one dreams about them. We must not be imprisoned by dreams or by theories. But then what guides remain?

Sam joined me on the deck, taciturn. His usual half-smile had disappeared. His hollow-checked profile seemed sharper than usual.

“I'm thinking about Pittsburgh,” he said. “I had set up a bicycle repair shop which brought in a hundred dollars a week. I wavered. To leave? Not to leave? It was all right, Pittsburgh. But Europe: war and revolution. Chaos. I could no longer live back there. The restaurants, the people, the policemen, The Star-Spangled Banner, my own Uncle Sam's face in the mirror, disgusted me. O.K. Now here we are practically in the eye of the hurricane. We're about to arrive in the middle of chaos.”

He became his usual mocking self again.

“I'm wondering whether I'm not an idiot?”

“An idiot, no. But perhaps you would have done better to stay in Pittsburgh.”

We need whole men, cast in a solid block, in work, in suffering, in rebellion; men born for this victory; men made for holding a rifle in the Red Guards as firmly as they hold their tools, able to carry out the tasks of organized revolt with the expert attention of sailors rapidly tightening a knot; men like Karl and Gregor, a calm spark of joy in their eyes, who pass by on their morning walk around the deck, thinking
about the day's weather, greeting the black sentry keeping watch on the spar deck with a smile.

The sentry returns their greeting with his eyes. Sheathed in sheepskin, a thick leather belt tightened around his waist, a flattened nose, eyes black under the gay helmet, strap across his chin—he is a warrior of former times, a slave trained for murder, placed here, on the threshold of our freedom, to call us back to an inexorable law … whom we disarm with a fraternal smile.

Last night an incident took place. Out of fraud or negligence, the authorities who drew up the lists of hostages had placed on them, despite us, some commonplace adventurers, happy to declare themselves “politicos” and to go looking for profitable fishing in the troubled waters of a revolution. There are a dozen of them among the forty of us. They play cards in the smoking room. They intervene cautiously in our conferences. They despise us somewhat, fear us obscurely, hate us certainly. Two of them had had a fight over a missing card. They were on their feet, swearing at each other—one had a puffed eye, the other a bloody lip—from opposite sides of the polished oak table on which the square of green felt had slipped, forming a diamond. The ship was pitching slightly; they were bobbing about, ready to let their fists fly, shoulders hunched, necks drawn in, foreheads low, of pimps getting ready for a knife fight. Karl and Gregor entered. “Enough!” said Karl in a commanding voice. “Watch what you are getting mixed up in!” said one of the men, over, his shoulder, without ceasing to stare at his opponent. But he didn't even have to touch him. Never had Gregor's square face been more massive; he repeated tranquilly:

“Enough, Davidsohn, if you don't want to get a bullet through the head when we arrive. We don't fool around with your kind.”

The brawl quieted down under our threats. Happily, no one, no outsider, had seen it. Our Committee met a little later on the deck. Gregor spoke, punctuating his words with a short gesture, sharp and heavy, of his clenched fist. He was saying simple and terrible things, as if he were chopping down an old rotten tree, which had become an obstacle, with solid ax blows. Even his sentences had the dull echo of blows struck into worm-eaten wood. “What to do with that riffraff? What do they have in common with the proletariat? What do they want from the revolution? I say we must show them a fist of iron. I say that the terror must not only strike down the bourgeoisie, but also hit the scoundrels, the rotten apples, the filth carriers, that whole vermin which will infect us
with its syphilis if we don't treat it with the hot iron … We don't have the time to weigh each piece of slime and then sweep it quietly off to the sewers. You besmudge the revolution? You cheat at cards and sell women while we fight for expropriation? And then you come and lie in our faces, rotten bastard? No speeches. We are purifiers …

As we approached our goal a kind of transformation came over Karl and Gregor: our common transformation, but sharper, I don't know why. It is stiffening inside. They have always held themselves straight, whatever the circumstances; but a new assurance reinforces their footsteps, they cast a commanding gaze over men and things, they already see themselves, confusedly, as organizers, fighters, masters … One feels they are ready to unleash a force tamed and turned around, the discipline of the great American warships which they underwent for a long time, and to which they owe their martial step, their cleanliness, the methodical use of their days.

Gregor is here. We watch the foam bubbling along the sides of the ship. We have been talking about trifles. We have laughed. We notice chunks of ice floating on the crests of waves: the frozen seas and lands are near … Suddenly he looks into my eyes as if opening his soul to me.