Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (18 page)

I could have interrupted at this point, quoted some examples, but no one would listen to me.

‘So? What did people do?’ they asked the old man.

‘They had to cut their heads off willy-nilly, with brute force, against their wishes! Not on appointed days, but when they just couldn’t put up with them any more. That’s what used to happen before things were organized, before the leaders accepted…’

‘Oh, we’d just like to see them try not to accept!’ the others said. ‘Oh we’d like to see that!’

‘It’s not the way you think,’ interrupted the man with the glasses. ‘It’s not true that the leaders are forced to undergo execution. Say that and you miss the real meaning of our statutes, the real relationship that binds our leaders to the rest of the people. Only heads of state can be beheaded, hence you can’t wish to be a head without also wishing for the chop. Only those who feel they have this vocation can become heads of state, only those who already feel themselves beheaded the moment they take up a position of authority.’

Little by little the customers in the bar had thinned out, each going back to his work. I realized that the man with the glasses was talking exclusively to me.

‘That’s what power is,’ he went on, ‘this waiting for the end. All the authority one has is no more than advance notice of the blade hissing through the air, crashing down in a clean cut, all the applause you get is no more than the beginning of that last applause that greets your head as it rolls down the waxed surface of the scaffold.’

He took off his glasses to clean them on his handkerchief. I realized his eyes were full of tears. He paid for his beer and left.

The man behind the bar bent down to my ear. ‘He’s one of them,’ he said. ‘See?’ He pulled out a pile of portrait posters from under the bar. ‘Tomorrow I have to take those ones down and stick up these.’ The first picture showed the man with the glasses, an ugly enlargement from a passport photo. ‘He’s been elected to succeed the ones on their way out. Tomorrow he’ll be taking over. It’s his turn, now. If you ask me it’s not right to tell him the day before. You heard the way he was talking about it? Tomorrow he’ll be watching the executions as if they were already his own. They’re all like that, the first days; they get upset, excited, they make a big deal of it. “Vocation”: what pompous words they come out with!’

‘And afterwards?’

‘He’ll get used to it, like everybody else. They have so much to do, they don’t think about it any more, until their day comes around. But then: who can see into a leader’s mind. They give the impression they’re not thinking about it. Another beer?’

Television has changed a lot of things. Once power was remote, distant figures puffed up on a platform, or portraits assuming expressions of conventional pride, symbols of an authority that could barely be related to any flesh and blood individual. Now, with television, the physical presence of politicians is something immediate and familiar to us; their faces, blown up on the screen, visit the homes of private citizens every day; quietly sunk in their armchairs, at leisure, everybody can pore over the slightest movement of the features, the irritated twitch of eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and the next… In its death throes in particular, that face, so well known from the many close-ups of formal or speech-making postures on both solemn and festive occasions, betrays itself completely: it is at that moment more than any other that the simple citizen feels his leader is his, is something that will always belong to him. But even before that, in all the preceding months, every time the citizen saw the leader appear on the small screen, strutting about his duties—opening some building project, for example, or pinning medals on worthies’ chests, or just climbing down the steps of aeroplanes waving an open hand—he was already searching that face for painful spasms, trying to imagine the convulsions that would precede rigor mortis, to guess from the delivery of his speeches and toasts how the death rattle would sound. It is in this that the public man’s ascendance over the crowd consists: he is the man who will have a public death, the man whose death we are sure to be there for, all together, and that is why so long as he lives he will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern. We can no longer imagine what it was like in the past, in times when public men died in private: we laugh today when we hear that they described some of their erstwhile procedures as democratic; for us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period. We know that in other times just as today the mechanics of power were based on killings, on slaughters whether slow or sudden, but aside from rare exceptions the victims then were shadowy folk, subordinates, hard to identify; often the massacres went unreported, were officially ignored, or given specious justifications. Only this now definitive conquest, this unification of the roles of torturer and victim, in continuous rotation, has allowed us to quench every last flicker of hatred and pity in our minds. The close-ups of the mouth yawning open, of the carotid throbbing in the starched collar, of the raised hand that clutches and tears at a breast sparkling with medals, are watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent cycles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it.

You don’t want to kill us already, do you?

The words were pronounced by Virghilij Ossipovic with a slight trembling in his voice that contrasted with the almost bureaucratic though often harsh and polemical tone of the discussion so far and thus broke the tension in the meeting of the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ movement. Virghilij was the youngest member of the Executive Committee; a thin down of hair darkened a prominent lip; locks of blond hair fell over his oblong grey eyes; those red-knuckled hands, their wrists always sticking out from shirt sleeves that were too short had not trembled when they primed the bomb beneath the Tsar’s carriage.

Grass-roots activists took up all the places round the low, smoky basement room; most of them sitting on benches and stools, others crouched on the ground, others on their feet leaning against the wall, arms folded. The Executive Committee sat in the centre, eight boys bent over a table laden with paper, like a group of students intent on the final slog before the summer exams. To the repeated interruptions fired at them by the activists from all four corners of the room, they answered without turning or raising their heads. Every now and then a wave of protest or agreement swept through the meeting and—since many got to their feet and pressed forward—seemed to converge from the walls on the table, there to wash over the backs of the Executive Committee.

Liborij Serapionovic, the heavily bearded secretary, had already and on several occasions pronounced the stony maxim he often resorted to to soften irreconcilable differences: ‘Where comrade parts company with comrade, there enemy joins hands with enemy’, and in reply the assembly had intoned with one voice: ‘The head still at the head after the victory, victorious and honoured the day after shall fall’—a ritual warning that the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ activists never forgot to direct at their leaders whenever they spoke to them, and that the leaders themselves would say to each other as a form of greeting.

The movement was struggling to establish, on the ruins of autocracy and of the Duma, an egalitarian society in which power would be regulated by the periodic execution of the elected heads. The movement’s strict rules, all the more necessary as the imperial police stepped up their repression, demanded that all activists obey Executive Committee decisions without argument; at the same time every text setting out the movement’s theory reminded the leaders that no exercise of authority was admissible unless by those who had already renounced enjoyment of the privileges of power, those who to all intents and purposes were no longer to be considered as among the living.

The young leaders of the organization never thought of the fate that a still Utopian future held for them: for the moment it was tsarist repression that unfortunately guaranteed an ever more rapid turnover in their numbers; the danger of arrest and execution was too real and immediate for the notional future of the theory to take shape in their imaginations. A youthfully ironic, disdainful attitude served to repress in their minds what was nevertheless the distinguishing element in their doctrine. The grass-roots activists knew all this, and just as they shared the risks and hardships of the committee members, so they understood their spirit; and yet they nursed an obscure awareness of their destiny as executioners, a destiny to be fulfilled not only at the expense of the
status quo
, but of the future government too, and being unable to express themselves any other way, they would flaunt an insolent attitude, which, while always expressed in the formal tones of the meeting, nevertheless weighed down on their leaders like a threat.

‘So long as the enemy before us is the Tsar,’ Virghilij Ossipovic had said, ‘foolish is the man who would seek the Tsar in his comrade.’ It was an untimely thing to say perhaps, and certainly badly received by the noisy assembly.

Virghilij felt a hand gripping his own; sitting on the floor at his feet was Evghenija Ephraimovna, knees pulled up in her pleated skirt, hair knotted on her neck and hanging at the two sides of her face like spirals from a tawny coil. One of Evghenija’s hands had found its way up Virghilij’s boots to encounter the young man’s fingers closed in a fist, it had skimmed the back of that fist, as though in a consolatory caress, then dug sharp nails into it scratching slowly until they drew blood. Virghilij realized that there was a precise and stubborn determination guiding the floor of the meeting today, something that had to do with them, the leaders, in person, and that would soon be revealed.

‘Let none of us ever forget, comrades,’ Ignatij Apollonovic, the oldest member of the Committee and with a reputation for being a peacemaker, attempted to calm the waters, ‘what must not be forgotten… in any event, it is only right that you remind us from time to time… although,’ he added, chuckling in his beard, ‘when it comes to reminding us, Count Galitzin and his horses’ hoofs are only too reliable…’ He was alluding to the commander of the Imperial Guard who had recently torn one of their protest marches to pieces with a cavalry charge at Maneggio Bridge.

A voice, it wasn’t clear where from, interrupted him with: ‘Idealist!’ and Ignatij Apollonovic lost his way. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, disconcerted.

‘Do you think we need do no more than keep the words of our doctrine uppermost in our minds?’ said a tall lanky fellow from another part of the room, a man who had made a name for himself as one of the most militant of recent recruits. ‘You know why our doctrine can’t be confused with those of all the other movements?’

‘Of course we know. Because it’s the only doctrine which once it has achieved power cannot be corrupted by power!’ grumbled a shaved head bent over papers, and that was Femja, the one the others called ‘the ideologue’.

‘So why wait till the day we’ve got power, my lovey-dovey comrades,’ insisted the lanky fellow, ‘to put it into practice?’

‘Here, now!’ the cry was raised from various parts of the room. The Marianzev sisters, known as ‘the three Marias’ stepped forward between the benches, chirping ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ and catching their long tresses on things. Carrying tablecloths folded over their arms, humming to themselves and pushing aside the boys, it was as if they were laying table for a snack on the veranda of their house in Izmailovo.

‘What’s different about our doctrine is this,’ the lanky fellow went on with his sermon, ‘that the only way to write it is with a sharp blade on the bodies of our beloved leaders!’

There was a mill of people and benches turning over because many in the meeting had got up and rushed forward. The ones who shoved and shouted most were the women: ‘Sit down, little boys! We want to see! Mother of God, what hotheads! We can’t see anything at all here!’ and they thrust their school-mistressy faces between the men’s backs, short hair under peaked caps lending an air of resolution.

There was only one thing could shake Virghilij’s courage, and that was female hostility, even the slightest sign of it. He had got up, sucking the blood from Evghenija’s scratches on the back of his hand, and he had scarcely spoken those words: ‘You don’t want to kill us already, do you?’ when the door opened and in came a procession of people in white coats pushing trolleys laden with glittering surgical instruments. From that moment on something in the mood of the meeting changed. There was a sharp patter of voices, one hard on another. ‘Of course not… who said anything about killing you?… you’re our leaders… with how much we like you and everything… what would we do without you?… there’s still a long way to go… we’ll always be here beside you…’ and the lanky fellow, the girls, those who a few moments before had seemed to constitute the opposition, were now falling over each other to encourage the leaders, in reassuring, almost protective tones. ‘It’s only a little thing, significant, yes, but not serious in itself, no no no, a bit painful, for sure, but it’s so we can see you as our real leaders, our well-loved leaders, a mutilation, that’s all, when it’s done it’s done, a little mutilation every now and then, you’re not going to get mad about such a little thing, it’s what marks out the leaders of our movement, what else if not that?’

Already the members of the Executive Committee had been immobilized by scores of strong arms. Laid on the table were gauze, basins with cotton wool, serrated knives. The smell of ether filled the room. The girls laid things out quickly and carefully, as if they’d all been practising their tasks for some time.

‘Now the doctor will explain everything properly. Come on, Tòlja!’