The Case of Comrade Tulayev (21 page)

Would not his disagreement with Tulayev be remembered during the election for the Supreme Council? A certain vacillation in the Party committees made Makeyev uneasy. Many voices were raised in favor of candidates who were high Security officials or generals, rather than Communist leaders. Happy day! Official rumor repeated a remark by a member of the Political Bureau: “Makeyev's is the only possible candidacy in the Kurgansk region … Makeyev is a builder.” Immediately transparencies appeared across the streets, urging:
Vote for the Builder Makeyev
— who, in any case, was the only candidate. At the first session of the Supreme Council, held in Moscow, Makeyev, at the peak of his destiny, ran into Blücher in the anterooms. “Greetings, Artyem,” said the commander-in-chief of the valorous Special Army of the Red Flag in the Far East. Intoxicated, Makeyev answered: “Greetings, Marshal! How are you?” They went to the buffet together, arm in arm like the old comrades they were. Both of them were heavier, their faces full and well-massaged, with fatigue pouches under the eyes, both wore well-cut clothes of fine material, both were decorated — Blücher wore four brilliant medals on his right breast, three Orders of the Red Flag and one Order of Lenin; Makeyev, less heroic, had only one Red Flag and the Medal of Labor … The strange thing was that they had nothing to say to each other. With sincere delight they exchanged phrases from the newspapers: “So you're building, old man? Things going well? Happy? Healthy?” — “So, Marshal, you're keeping the little Japs in order, eh?” — “Right — they can come whenever they're ready!” Deputies from the Siberian North, from Central Asia, from the Caucasus, in their national costumes, flocked to stare at them. In the soldier's reflected glory, Makeyev admired himself. He thought: “We'd make a fine snapshot.” The memory of that memorable moment went sour some months later when, after the fighting in Chang-Ku-Feng, the Army of the Far East regained two hills overlooking Possiet Bay from the Japanese (the two hills turned out to be of enormous strategic importance, though it had never been mentioned before). The message from the C.C. detailing these glorious events did not mention Blücher's name. Makeyev understood, and a chill came over him. He felt himself compromised. Blücher, Blücher — it was his turn to go down into subterranean darkness! Inconceivable! … What luck that no snapshot had immortalized their last meeting!

Makeyev lived quite calmly through the proscriptions, because they wrought havoc chiefly among the generation of power which had preceded his own and among generations even earlier. “By and large, socially the old generation is worn out … So much the worse for them, this is no time for sentiment … Heroes yesterday, failures today — it's the dialectic of history.” But his unspoken thoughts told him that his own generation was rising to replace the generation which was going out. Ordinary men became great men when their day arrived — was that not justice? Although, when they had been in power, he had known and admired a number of the defendants in the great trials, he accepted their end with a sort of zeal. Incapable of comprehending anything but the baldest arguments, he was not troubled by the enormity of the accusations. (We have no time for subtleties!) And what was more natural than to use lies to overwhelm an enemy who must be put out of the way? The demands of mass psychology in a backward country must be met. Called to rule by the subalterns of the one and only Chief, integrated into the power behind the proscriptions, Makeyev had never felt that he was threatened. But now he felt the wind of the inevitable scythe that had mowed down Blücher. Had the Marshal been relieved of his command? Arrested? Would he reappear? He was not being tried, which perhaps meant that all was not over for him. However that might be, no one ever mentioned his name now. Makeyev would have liked to forget it; but the name, the image of the man, pursued him — at work, in his moments of silence, in his sleep. He found himself fearing that, speaking at some meeting of district officials, he would suddenly utter the obsessing name in the middle of a sentence. And the more he put it out of his mind, the more it rose to his lips — to the point where he thought that, reading a message aloud, he had inserted Blücher's name among the names of the members of the Political Bureau … “Didn't I make a slip of the tongue?” he asked one of the Regional Committee members lightly. Inside, he was writhing with anguish.

“No indeed,” said the comrade he had addressed. “Odd that you should think so.”

Makeyev looked at him, seized with a vague terror. “He is making a fool of me …” The two men blushed, equally embarrassed.

“You were most eloquent, Artyem Artyemich,” said the Committee member, to break the uncomfortable silence. “You read the address to the Political Bureau with magnificent fervor …”

Makeyev became completely confused. His thick lips moved silently. He made a wild effort to keep from saying, “Blücher, Blücher, Blücher, do you hear me? I named Blücher!” The other became uneasy:

“Don't you feel well, Comrade Makeyev?”

“A touch of dizziness,” said Makeyev, swallowing saliva.

He got over the crisis, he conquered his obsession, Blücher did not reappear, it was a little more ended every day. There were further disappearances, but of less importance. Makeyev made up his mind to ignore them. “Men like myself have to have hearts of stone. We build on corpses, but we build.”

That year the purges and personnel replacements in the Kurgansk district were not over until the middle of winter. Just before spring, one night in February, Tulayev was killed in Moscow. When Makeyev heard the news, he shouted for joy. Alia was playing solitaire, her body outlined in clinging silk. Makeyev threw down the red “
Confidential
” envelope.

“There's one that deserved what he got! The fool! It had been coming to him for a long time. A plot? Not much — somebody whose life he was ruining let him have it on the head with a brick … He certainly went out looking for it, with that character of his — a snarling dog …”

“Who?” said Alia, without raising her head, because for the second time the cards had brought the queen of diamonds between herself and the king of hearts.

“Tulayev. I've just heard from Moscow that he has been murdered …”

“My God!” said Alia, preoccupied by the queen of hearts, doubtless a blond woman.

Makeyev said sharply:

“I've told you a hundred times not to call on God like a peasant!”

The cards snapped under the pretty, red-nailed fingers. Irritation. The queen of diamonds confirmed the treacherous hints dropped by the wife of the president of the Soviet (Doroteya Guermanovna, a big, soft woman of German extraction who knew all the scandal of the city for the last ten years) … and the manicurist's skillful reticences … and the fatally precise information that had arrived in the form of an anonymous letter laboriously pieced together out of big letters cut from newspapers — at least four hundred of them had been pasted down one after the other to denounce the ticket girl of the Aurora Cinema, who had previously slept with the director of the municipal services department and who, a year ago, had become Artyem Artyemich's mistress, as witness the fact that she had had an abortion at the G.P.U. clinic last winter, being admitted on a personal recommendation, and then had been given a month's paid vacation, which she spent at the Rest House for Workers in Education, also on special recommendation, and as witness the fact that Comrade Makeyev had twice visited the Rest House during that period and had even spent the night there … The letter went on in this fashion for several pages, all in overlapping, ill-assorted letters which made absurd patterns. Alia looked at Makeyev out of eyes so intent that they became cruel.

“What is it?” asked the man, vaguely uneasy.

“Who was killed?” asked the woman, her face ugly with tension and distress.

“Tulayev, I told you, Tulayev — are you deaf?”

Alia came so close to him that she touched him, and stood pale and straight, her shoulders set, her lips trembling.

“And that blond ticket girl — who's going to kill her? Tell me, you traitor, you liar!”

Makeyev had barely begun to realize what a serious shock the Party was in for: revamping the C.C., accounts to be settled in the bureaus, full-scale attacks on the Right, deadly accusations against the expelled Left, counterattacks — what counterattacks? A vast, whirling wind out of the night drove the quiet daylight from the room, wrapped itself about him, made cold shivers run through his very marrow … Through those terrible, dark gusts, Alia's shaken words, Alia's poor shattered face, hardly reached him. “Get out of here and leave me alone!” he shouted, beside himself.

He was incapable of thinking of big things and little things simultaneously. He shut himself up with his private secretary, to prepare the speech which he would deliver that evening at the extraordinary meeting of Party officials — a bludgeoning speech, shouted from the bottom of his lungs, punctuated with his clenched fist. He spoke as if he were fighting, then and there, singlehanded, against the Enemies of the Party. Men who were Creatures of Darkness; the world Counterrevolution; Trotskyism, its brazen snout branded with the swastika; Fascism; the Mikado … “Woe to the stinking vermin who have dared to raise a hand against our great Party! We shall wipe them out forever, even to the last generation! Eternal remembrance to our great, our wise comrade, Tulayev, iron Bolshevik, unswerving disciple of our beloved Chief, the greatest man of all the centuries! …” At five in the morning, dripping with sweat and surrounded by exhausted secretaries, Makeyev was still correcting the typescript of his speech, which a special messenger, starting two hours later, would carry to Moscow. When he went to bed, bright daylight flooded the city, the plains, the building yards, the caravan trails. Alia had just fallen into a doze after a night of torture. Feeling her husband's presence, she opened her eyes to the white ceiling, to reality, to her suffering. And, almost naked, she got quietly out of bed, and saw herself in the mirror: her hair in disorder, her breasts sagging, herself pale, faded, forsaken, humiliated, looking like an old woman — because of that blond ticket girl at the Aurora. Did she know what she was doing? What did she want in the drawer where the trinkets were kept? She found a short bone-handled hunting knife there, and took it. She went back to the bed. Lying with the sheets thrown off and his dressing gown open, Artyem was sound asleep, his mouth shut, his nostrils ringed with beads of sweat, his big body naked, covered with reddish hair, abandoned … Alia stared at him for a moment, as if it astonished her to recognize him, astonished her even more to discover something utterly unknown in him, something which incessantly escaped her, perhaps an unwonted presence, a soul that was kindled in him in sleep, like a secret light, and which his awakening extinguished. “My God, my God, my God,” she repeated mentally, sensing that a power in her would raise the knife, clench her hand, stab down into that outstretched male body, the male body which she loved in the very depths of her hate. Where aim? Try to find the heart, well protected by an armor of bones and flesh, difficult to reach? Pierce the unprotected belly, where it is easy to make a mortal wound? Tear the penis lying in its fleece of hair — soft flesh, loathsome and touching? The idea — but it was not an idea, it was already the adumbration of an act — traveled darkly through her nerve centers … The dark current encountered another: fear. Alia turned her head, and saw that Makeyev had opened his eyes and was watching her with terrifying sagacity.

“Alia,” he said simply, “drop that knife.”

She was paralyzed. Sitting up in a single motion, he caught her wrist, opened her helpless little hand, flung the bone-handled knife across the room. Alia collapsed into shame and despair, great bright tears hung from her lashes … She felt like a naughty child caught doing something wrong; there was no help anywhere, and now he would cast her off like a sick dog … you drown sick dogs …

“You wanted to kill me?” he said. “To kill Makeyev, secretary of the Regional Committee — and you a member of the Party? Kill the Builder Makeyev, you miserable creature? Kill me for a blond ticket girl, fool that you are?”

Anger rose in him with every clearly spoken word.

“Yes,” said Alia feebly.

“Idiot! They'd have shut you up underground for six months — have you thought of that? Then one night, about 2
A.M
., they'd have taken you out behind the station and put a bullet there, right there!” (He hit her hard on the back of the neck.) “Don't you know that? Do you want a divorce this morning?”

She said furiously:

“Yes.”

And at the same time, more softly, her long eyelashes lowered: “No.”

“You are a liar and a traitor,” she repeated almost automatically, trying to collect her thoughts. Then she went on:

“Tulayev was killed for less, and you were glad. Yet you helped him to organize the famine — you've said so often enough! But perhaps he didn't lie to a woman, like you!”

They were such terrible words that Makeyev looked at his wife with panic in his eyes. He felt desperately weak. Only his fury saved him from collapsing. He burst out:

“Never! I never said or thought a word of your criminal ravings … You are unworthy of the Party … Bitch!”

He strode about the room, now this way, now that, waving his arms like a madman. Suddenly he came back to her, carrying a leather belt. He gripped the back of her neck with his left hand and struck with his right, beating, beating the almost naked body which writhed feebly under his hand, beating so hard that he panted … When the body stopped moving, when Alia's whimpering breathing seemed to have ceased, Makeyev turned away, pacified. He went for a wad of cotton, soaked it in eau de cologne, came back, and began gently rubbing her face with it — her ravaged face which, in a few moments, had become ugly with a pitiful, little-girl ugliness … Then he went for ammonia, he dampened towels, he was as diligent and skillful as a good nurse … And, when Alia came to, she saw Makeyev's green eyes leaning over her, the pupils narrowed like a cat's eyes … Artyem kissed her face heavily, hotly, then turned away. “Get some sleep, little fool. I'm going to work.”