The Case of Comrade Tulayev (13 page)

“Report to me for orders,” said Erchov, controlling himself with difficulty. “No — cancel that. No conference today.”

He drank down a glass of ice water.

He did not tell his wife that he was taking this sudden vacation by order. At Sukhum (palms beside an unimaginably blue sea, hot summer weather), the “strictly secret” envelopes reached him for a week — then stopped. He did not dare to ask for more. Instead he spent his time in the bar, with several taciturn generals on their way back from Mongolia. Whisky gave them a common mentality — fiery and ponderous. The news that a member of the Political Bureau had come to stay in a nearby villa sent Erchov into a panic. Suppose he should ignore the High Commissar's presence? “We'll take a trip to the mountains, Valia.” Under a blazing sun the car climbed a zigzag road: dazzling rocks, ravines, the immense enamel beaker that was the sea. Blindingly blue, the sea's horizon rose higher and higher. Valia began to be afraid. She sensed flight, but a flight that was ridiculous, impossible. “Don't you love me any more?” she asked him at last. They had reached four thousand feet and still there was nothing but rocks, sea, and sky. He kissed her fingertips, not knowing if his sickening fear left him capable of desiring her. “I am too afraid to think about love now … I am afraid — what nonsense! … No, it's not nonsense — I am afraid because it is my turn to die …” The landscape of sun-drenched rocks was deliciously fatiguing — and the sea, the sea, the sea! “If I must die, let me at least enjoy this woman and these colors!” It was a brave thought. Avidly he kissed Valia on the mouth. The purity of the landscape filled them with an ecstasy that was like light. They spent three weeks in a chalet high in the mountains. An Abkhasian couple dressed in white (husband and wife were equally beautiful) served them in silence. They slept on a terrace in the open air, their bodies clothed in silk; and, after making love, they were together again as they gazed up at the stars. Once Valia said: “Look, darling, we're going to fall into the stars …” So, occasionally, he tasted peace. But all the rest of the time he was obsessed by two thoughts — one rational and reassuring, the other disguised and perfidious, following its own obscure course, tenacious as decay in a tooth. The first was clearly formulated: “Why shouldn't they retire me for just long enough to get this accursed case settled, since I seem to have made a mess of it? The Chief has shown that he is favorably disposed toward me. After all, all they have to do is send me back to the army. I can't have offended anyone, because I have no past. Suppose I ask to be sent back to the Far East?” The second, the insidious one, murmured: “You know too much — they're never going to believe you'll keep your mouth shut. You will be made to disappear as your predecessors disappeared. Your predecessors went through all this — work, clues, anxiety, doubt, leaves of absence, irrational flight, resignation, and return — and they were shot.” — “Valia,” he suddenly called, “come hunting with me!” He took her on long climbs to inaccessible spots, from which, suddenly, the sea would be visible, fringing an immense map; capes and rocks jutted out into a whirlpool of light. “Look, Valia!” On a rock peak rising from the sunny scree an ibex stood against the blue, horns lifted. Erchov handed Valia the rifle; she put it cautiously to her shoulder; her arms were bare, beads of sweat gleamed on the back of her neck. The sea filled the cup of the world, silence reigned over the universe, the creature stood tense and alive, a golden silhouette. “Aim carefully,” Erchov whispered into her ear. “And above all, darling, miss him.…” Slowly the rifle rose, rose; Valia's head dropped back; when the barrel pointed straight up into the sky, she fired. Valia was laughing, her eyes were full of the sky. The report faded to a faint rasp like tearing cloth. Calmly the ibex turned its slim head toward the two distant white figures, stared at them for a moment, bent its hocks, bounded gracefully toward the sea, and disappeared. … It was that evening, when they got back, that Erchov found a telegram summoning him to Moscow immediately.

They traveled in a private railway car. On the second day the train stopped at a forgotten station in the middle of snowcovered cornfields. An impenetrable gray mist darkened the horizon. Valia was sulking a little, with a cigarette between her lips and a book of Zoschenko's in her hands.… “What do you find to interest you,” he had asked, “in that sort of sour humor which is a libel on us?” She had just answered, angrily, “Nowadays you never say anything that isn't official. …” Going back to everyday life had set them both on edge. Erchov began looking through a newspaper. The orderly officer entered, announcing that Erchov was wanted on the telephone in the station — a defect in the equipment made it impossible to connect the through wire with the private car. Erchov's face darkened: “When we reach Moscow, you will have the rolling-stock supervisor put under arrest for a week. Telephones in private cars must function ir-re-proach-ab-ly. Make a note of it.”

“Yes, Comrade High Commissar.”

Erchov put on his overcoat, which bore the emblems of the highest power, stepped down onto the wooden platform of the deserted little station, noticed that the train was only three cars long, and strode rapidly toward the only visible building. The orderly officer followed him respectfully, three paces behind.
Security, Railway Supervision
. Erchov entered; several soldiers came to attention and saluted. “This way, Comrade Chief,” said the orderly officer, blushing oddly. In the little back room, overheated by an iron stove, two officers rose as he entered, puppets jerked by the strings of discipline, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, both smooth-faced and of high rank. A little surprised Erchov returned their salute. Then curtly:

“The telephone?”

“We have a message for you,” the tall, thin one answered evasively. He had a long wrinkled face and gray eyes that were absolutely cold.

“A message? Let me have it.”

The tall, thin one reached into his brief case and drew out a sheet of paper on which were a few typewritten lines. “Have the goodness …”

A sort of cramp settled on Erchov's throat, yet he found the strength to read it all through, word by word, to examine the seal, the signatures — “Gordeyev,” countersigned Illegible — the serial numbers … “No one has a right,” he said absurdly after a few seconds, “I am …” The short, fat one did not let him finish:

“You are so no longer, Maxim Andreyevich. You have been relieved of your high office by a decision of the Organization Bureau.”

He spoke with unctuous deference.

“I have a copy of it here … Be so good as to surrender your weapons …”

The table was covered with black oilcloth; Erchov laid his regulation revolver down on it. As he reached into his back pocket for the little spare Browning he always carried, he felt an urge to send a bullet into his heart; imperceptibly, he forced his hand to move more slowly, and he thought that he let no expression appear in his face. The gilded ibex on the pyramid of rock, between sea and sky. The gilded ibex threatened by the hunter's gun; Valia's teeth, her straining neck, the blueness … it is all over. The tall thin one's transparent eyes never left his, the short fat one's hands gently grasped the High Commissar's hand and secured the Browning. An engine gave a long whistle. Erchov said:

“My wife …”

The short, fat one broke in cordially:

“Set your mind at ease, Maxim Andreyevich, I shall look out for her myself …”

“Thank you very much,” said Erchov stupidly.

“Be so good as to change your clothes,” said the tall, thin one, “because of the insignia …”

Ah yes, his insignia … A military tunic without insignia, a military overcoat much like his own, but without insignia, lay over the back of a chair. It had all been carefully thought out. He dressed like a somnambulist. Everything was becoming clear — first of all, certain things that he had done himself … His own portrait, yellowed by the sun and dirtied with flyspecks, looked at him. “Have that portrait taken down,” he said severely. The sarcasm did him good, but it was received in silence.

When Erchov came out of the little back room, walking between the tall, thin officer and the short, fat one, the outer room was empty. The men who had seen him come in wearing the stars of power on collar and sleeves did not see him walk out disgraced. “Whoever organized this deserves to be complimented,” thought the ex-High Commissar. He did not know whether the idea had come to him from force of habit, or whether he was thinking ironically. The station was deserted. Black rails against the snow, empty space. The special train was gone — carrying away Valia, carrying away the past. A hundred yards away another car waited — an even more special car. Toward it Erchov strode, between the two silent officers.

Born in the Arctic, sweeping across the sleeping forests along the Kama, slow-falling, eddying snowstorms, before which packs of wolves fled here and there, bore down on Moscow. They seemed to be torn to shreds over the city, worn out by their long journeyings through the air, suddenly blotting out the blue sky. A dull milky light spread over the squares, the streets, the little forgotten private houses in ancient alleys, the streetcars with their frost-traced windows … Life went on in a soft swirling and eddying that was like a burial. Feet trod on millions of pure stars, fresh every instant. And suddenly, high up, behind church domes, behind delicate crosses springing from inverted crescents and still showing traces of gilt, the blue reappeared. The sun lay on the snow, caressed dilapidated old façades, shone in through double windows … Rublev never tired of watching these changes. Delicate, bediamonded branches appeared in the window of his office. Seen from there, the universe was reduced to a bit of forsaken garden, a wall, and, behind the wall, an abandoned chapel with a greenish-gold dome growing pink under the patina of time.

Rublev looked up from the four books which he was simultaneously consulting: the same series of facts appeared in them under four undeniable but unsubstantiated aspects — whence the errors of historians, some purposeful, others unconscious. You made your way through error as you did through snowstorms. Centuries later, the truth became apparent to someone — today it is to me — out of the tangle of contradictions. Economic history, Rublev made a note, often has the deceitful clarity of a coroner's report. Something, fortunately, escapes them both — the difference between corpse and living man.

“My handwriting looks neurotic.”

Assistant Librarian Andronnikova came in. (“She thinks that
I
look neurotic …”) “Be so good, Kiril Kirillovich, as to look over the list of banned books for which special permissions have been requested …” Usually Rublev carelessly OK'd all such requests — whether they came from idealistic historians, liberal economists, social-democrats with a tinge of bourgeois eclecticism, cloudy intuitionists … This time he gave a start: a student at the Institute of Applied Sociology had asked for
The Year 1905
by L. D. Trotsky. Assistant Librarian Andronnikova, with her small face framed in a foam of white hair, had expected that Rublev would be surprised.

“Refused,” he said. “Tell him to apply to the Library of the Party History Commission …”

“I did,” Andronnikova answered gently. “But he was very insistent.”

Rublev thought he read a childish sympathy in her eyes, the sympathy of a weak, clean, and good creature.

“How are you, Comrade Andronnikova? Did you find any cloth at the Kuznetsky-most Co-op?”

“Yes, thank you, Kiril Kirillovich,” she said, a restrained warmth coloring her voice.

He took his overcoat down from the coat stand, and, as he put it on, joked about the art of life:

“We lie in wait for luck, Comrade Andronnikova, for our friends and for ourselves … We are living in the jungle of the transition period, eh?”

“Living in it is a dangerous art,” thought the white-haired woman, but she merely smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. Did this singular man — scholarly, keen-minded, passionately fond of music — really believe in the “twofold period of transition, from Capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism,” about which he had published a book in the days when the Party still allowed him to write? Citizenness Andronnikova, sixty, ex-princess, daughter of a great liberal (and monarchist) politician, sister of a general massacred by his soldiers in 1916, widow of a collector of pictures the only loves of whose life had been Matisse and Picasso, deprived of the ballot because of her social origins, lived by a private cult whose saint was Wladimir Soloviev. The philosophy of mystical wisdom, if it did not help her to understand the species of men called “Bolsheviks” — men strangely stubborn, hard, limited, dangerous, yet some of whom had souls of unequaled richness — helped her to regard them with an indulgence in which, of late, there was an admixture of secret compassion. If the worst were not also to be loved, what place would there be for Christian charity here below? If the worst were not sometimes very near to the best, would they really be the worst? Andronnikova thought: “They certainly believe what they write … And perhaps Kiril Kirillovich is right. Perhaps it really is a period of transition …” She knew the names, faces, histories, smiles, characteristic gestures, of several prominent Party members who had recently disappeared or been executed in the course of incomprehensible trials. They were true brothers of the man before her; they all called each other by nicknames; they all talked of a “period of transition,” and no doubt it was because they believed in it that they had died … Andronnikova watched over Rublev with an almost painful anxiety, though he did not suspect it. She repeated the name of Kiril Kirillovich in her mental prayers at night, before she went to sleep with the covers pulled up to her chin, as she had at sixteen. Her room was tiny and full of faded things — old letters in elaborate boxes, portraits of handsome young men, cousins and nephews, most of them buried no one knew where, in the Carpathians, at Gallipoli, before Trebizond, at Yaroslavl, in Tunisia. Two of these aristocrats were presumably still alive — one a waiter in Constantinople, the other, under a false name, a streetcar motorman in Rostov. But when Andronnikova managed to get hold of some half-decent tea and a little sugar, she still found a certain pleasure in life … As a means of getting a few minutes' conversation with Rublev every day she had hit on the idea of searching the shops for dress goods, letter paper, choice foods, and telling him the difficulties she encountered. Rublev, who liked to walk the streets of Moscow, went into shops to get information for her.