The Graveyard (13 page)

“What happened afterward?”

“What happened afterward is beside the point. I was expelled from the party. But that’s beside the point too.”

“And so?”

“I want you to tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“That I’m wrong.”

They were silent for a while. The other looked at Franciszek with his lusterless eyes, his head slightly bowed. “Listen,” he said at last. “The first year after the war I worked for the security police. I had a son; all through the occupation he was in the underground; then he took part in armed attacks, was riddled with bullets, lost one lung, and finally, as an invalid, he landed in my office. In my office, where he had to do the work of three strong healthy men. So he worked—interrogations, investigations, spies, saboteurs, diversionists. Once he questioned a diversionist; he had been questioning him I don’t know how many nights on end; the prisoner behaved provocatively, and finally my boy—sick, almost dead with exhaustion, his nerves strained to the breaking point—couldn’t stand it any more and struck the diversionist in the face.” He paused.

“Well, what then?” Franciszek asked.

Birch smiled strangely. “Well, nothing,” he said. “I had
to lock him up—eight years in jail. I myself saw to it that he was sentenced. And do you know what the diversionist got? Five years. He was a halfwit; he didn’t even know what he was doing, or who he was working against. Whereas my son was a conscious, militant party member, and was supposed to know what he was doing.”

He rose suddenly and began to pace the room. His neck grew purple, and his upper lip quivered. “Goddam it to hell!” he said. “To hell with this goddam chatter! What matters are the consequences, the final consequences. Once you’ve started a revolution, you have to realize that it can’t be stopped, or moderated, or turned off, or delayed. A revolution can be only won or lost, and that’s all. What horrifies you? The dimensions? The methods?”

“The consequences,” Franciszek said. “What you said a moment ago. Is the revolution a blind, brutal force?”

Birch gripped Franciszek by the arm and led him to the window. Before them lay the wet city, bristling with scaffoldings. “Here, to this place,” Birch said, “in I don’t know how many years, a man will come who hasn’t yet been born. He will come and he’ll want to live, to have food, an apartment, children, a family; he will want to live in security and he will expect the time he lives in to provide everything a man is entitled to. I assure you that he won’t be concerned with your sufferings and doubts, or mine. He will evaluate the world he finds by the yardstick of his reason. And that’s all.”

He fell silent. He looked down at the wet scaffoldings, and his sickly yellow face darkened.

“You have a son,” Franciszek said. “I didn’t know.”

Birch raised his head. “ ‘Have’?” he said. “I had. He’s so sick he’ll never survive it all …” He walked up to the radio and turned the knob. “Excuse me, Franciszek,” he said, “but
yesterday I made a speech at a meeting and now they’re going to broadcast it. I want to listen.”

Franciszek was silent. What had he come here for? Who had he been talking to? And what had he expected to hear in reply? He had heard only what he himself had repeated a million times to himself and others, in order to find strength to act. And where was that strength? In Mikołaj’s departure, in Bear’s failure, or in the tired voice of this man who had sentenced his own son? Where was the goal, and the hope? Was it really in this man still unborn who would confront life unseeing, ignorant of the sacrifices and renunciations and defeats others had suffered for his sake, those others who had been tortured to death and thrown on the dung pile? If this contented blind man of the future, who would walk with a smile upon this filthy earth, was to be our hope, if our sacrifices were for his sake, what would justify them?

“May Day is near,” Birch’s voice said on the radio. “Comrades. The founders of Marxism-Leninism teach us that the working class cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the oppressed and exploited, without abolishing all oppression and exploitation of man by man. The working class is the class under whose leadership mankind emancipates itself from all forms of social injustice, from everything that obstructs social progress. The working class is the class under whose leadership mankind takes the historic leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, achieves mastery over nature, and begins, through knowledge of the laws of social evolution, consciously to shape its fate.”

He was interrupted by long and frantic applause. Then he went on:

“The doctrine of Marx and Engels was further developed by Lenin and Stalin, our Great Teacher. They developed it in
the age of imperialism, when capitalist oppression and exploitation had spread over the entire terrestrial globe and combined with all the pre-capitalist forms of enslavement of labor, when the greed of the imperialist exploiters threw mankind into bloody wars of historically unprecedented dimensions, when the bourgeoisie and its ideologists betrayed and trampled upon all ideals, including the limited freedom and justice they themselves had once proclaimed, and when the working masses of the entire world were filled with a growing and irresistible aspiration for full social justice and full freedom—the aspiration toward socialism …”

Long and frantic applause.

“Lenin and the Great Teacher,” the speaker went on, “developed the doctrine of Marx and Engels according to which the working class is the class destined to free mankind from all exploitation and oppression, and gave us the doctrine of the leadership of the proletariat in the struggles for national liberation, in the struggles of the peasant masses against the feudal regime and its survivals, in the struggles of all toiling people against the capitalist regime …”

Again there was a mighty clamor. “Long, resounding applause,” Franciszek said. “That’s what all the newspapers will say.”

The speaker went on: “Standing at the head of all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle to overthrow imperialist tyranny, forging the alliance between the workers and the toiling peasants and the popular masses engaged in a struggle for national liberation, the party of the proletariat raises the banner of emancipation in the name of the overwhelming majority of society against an insignificant minority of exploiters. The leadership of the working class aims at carrying out, by the proletariat, a great revolutionary task, consisting
in the creation of new social conditions in the interests of the overwhelming majority of people in the whole world, and in the construction of a socialist society …”

“Everything true to form,” Franciszek said, “wasn’t it? The hired orphan with the flowers, and some old fogy, a veteran of the 1905 revolution, whom you embraced before the cameras; and secret policemen in dark blue uniforms behind you. Wasn’t it so?”

“Correct,” said Birch. “And there were people who, after the whole thing was over, asked whether I couldn’t get the woman at the refreshment stand to open an hour early; and there was a fellow who whispered into my ear, ‘Malinowski is a thief.’ ”

“But these details won’t be broadcast, will they?” Franciszek said.

“No, they won’t,” said Birch.

He fell silent and listened to his own voice: “The victorious Great Socialist October Revolution created the first proletarian state, the Soviet state. Henceforward, loyalty to proletarian internationalism is above all loyalty to October. It is no accident that the treachery of the Tito clique manifested itself from the outset in its anti-Soviet attitude, in its negation of the leading role of the Soviet Union. It is no accident that anti-Soviet tendencies were at the basis of Gomułkism, the Polish variety of Titoism. The great achievement of the Soviet Union is the model, the example, the hope of the world. It is a model which proves that there is a way out of depressions and misery, economic and cultural backwardness, oppressions of national minorities, and wars between nations. It is an example which teaches us how to overthrow the rule of capitalists and landlords, how to build a new, just society. It is the hope of all those who are oppressed by exploiters,
enslaved by imperialists, tortured by reactionaries who hate the toiling masses. The great constructive work of the Soviet Union is a source of strength for the proletarian movement, for progressive and libertarian movements the world over. It is the strength of the Soviet Union that smashed the Hitlerite dream of making a fascist master race the rulers of the world. It is the strength of the Soviet Union that stands in the way of the Wall Street magnates who are trying to repeat Hitler’s attempt to enslave mankind. The international proletariat led by the Soviet Union has become the vanguard of mankind, of all toiling men, of all the oppressed and exploited the world over, in the struggle for a better tomorrow without wars, a tomorrow without oppression and exploitation, a tomorrow of material prosperity and cultural flowering …” His voice was drowned out for a while; once again there was a clamor in the great auditorium, and happy cries rang out; at one point someone could even be heard saying, “There was misery, there was capitalism; then came a man named Lenin …”

“And now long, frantic applause,” Franciszek said. “How absurd!”

“What?”

“How you must despise these people, hate these poor ants, this working class, these people who have the leadership. On the one hand you have to keep flattering them to get a spark of effort out of them; on the other hand, you have to force them to do things which surely seem inhuman even to yourself.” He rose and walked to the window. “And yet there will surely come a time when you will have to stop talking about leadership and look them in the face,” he said. “And what will you see then? What people? The results will be beyond your expectation …” He returned to his armchair. “The only comforting thought is that you have no longer anything
in common with any class, or with any people,” he said. “If there is such a thing as comfort.”

The applause died gradually, and again Birch’s voice resounded from the loudspeaker: “May Day is near, the holiday of the workers’ struggle, the holiday of proletarian internationalism, the holiday of the international solidarity of the proletariat. We shall celebrate this May Day at a moment when each passing hour witnesses new reports of the peaceful victories of the construction of Communism in the great Soviet Union, the state of victorious socialism, the hope of toiling mankind …” A last great storm of applause; then the noise gradually subsided, and the announcer promised a symphony concert. Franciszek and Birch exchanged glances.

“And then,” Birch said, “after long, endless applause, I went out into the yard, in front of the factory. The man you asked me about, the old fogy, veteran of the 1905 revolution, stepped up to me. He works in the factory as a night watchman; he asked if I couldn’t get him transferred to the position of a dog. ‘What do you mean—a dog?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the appropriation for a night watchman is a little over four hundred złotys, and almost six hundred is paid for the upkeep of the dog. So you see, comrade, maybe I could change places with the dog. I won’t starve the animal, my word of honor as a worker, but my own position will improve and no one will be the loser.’ Well, Franciszek? Shall we laugh, or start firing guns?” He rose and paced the floor; then he stopped in front of Franciszek. “Memory,” he said. “That’s our only shield against doubts. We must constantly remember where we come from.”

“Have you forgotten?”

“Have I forgotten what?”

“It’s very funny,” Franciszek said, “and I often laugh at it
myself, but the only sense in any action is man, and his short, sad life: unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about it, no matter how hard we might try. Apparently that’s how it has to be; in this accursed world, man, little as he is, has to be a giant; and in the actual relationship of forces, everything else is tiny—the great construction projects, the dams, the canals, the Dneprostroi, and God knows what. Unfortunately you can’t turn all this upside down.”

“What have you come for, Franciszek?” Birch asked. “For faith?”

“Yes,” Franciszek replied seriously, “for faith.”

“So you have no faith?”

“I have faith,” Franciszek said, “but not in you any more. I believe in Communism, if it can be saved from you, and if you quit in time. Pieces of wreckage can’t guide anyone lost at sea …” He paused, and then whispered, “Jerzy, perhaps.”

He saw Birch’s face give a sudden twitch. “What about Jerzy?” he asked sharply.

“He must be different.”

“Jerzy,” Birch said, smiling. “Yes, you’re right; go to see him. He is different. Even more different than you think.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Very well indeed.”

“Yes,” Franciszek said, shaking his head stubbornly. “He must be different. Different—from all of us.”

“Go to see him,” Birch said. “I can do only one thing for you: after you leave I can try to think that we chatted about the good old simple times in the underground.”

Franciszek rose.

“I can give you a lift,” Birch said. “I’m about to leave myself.”

“Where are you going? In what direction?”

“To the big electrical machine plant.”

“To a meeting?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll make a speech?”

“Yes.”

“About the leadership of the working class?”

“Yes.”

He held out his hand; and both pretended not to notice that their hands avoided each other.

“Goodbye, Birch,” Franciszek said.

“Goodbye, Skinny,” Birch said.

Again he walked through the nighttime city, wading in the wet, filthy snow; there was still not even the slightest sign of spring. Wherever he looked, he saw nothing but mud, patches of snow thawing in black puddles, and trash drifting about the pavements; nothing but the clammy darkness over which the single neon sign quivered hysterically. “Jerzy; of course, Jerzy,” Franciszek thought. “He is different, purer and better. Surely he’s putting up a fight, and he knows how to fight; it’s his destiny to fight this vile thing.” There was a telephone booth at the corner, and he hurried toward it. He waited a long time outside the glass door; someone with his back turned to him was talking vehemently, gesticulating madly with his left hand, in a strangely familiar way. Finally he hung up the receiver, and walked out.