Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

“You did that?”

Nadine was sincerely bewildered.

“So now I’m to be suspicious of Sylvia, am I? Or perhaps Sylvia’s being watched? Sacha you’re out of your mind.”

He chewed on a slice of lemon. He had traveled, in the past, with a cyanide capsule glued to his scalp. He would have chewed that in the same way under the nose of the detectives. Twice: in China, in Germany…

“How did you get here? By car?”

“I changed taxis at Porte Maillot…”

“Good. Now please try to understand and try not to judge me. We’re going to America, it’s all fixed. I thought of everything except you calling Sylvia. I’ve broken with them, Nadine.”

Nadine thought in shattered images and disjointed phrases. As soon as an image became too upsetting it vanished, like it was torn up. The sentence trailed off, its gist telegraphed to minimize the disturbance. Everything that concerned her personally remained indelibly printed on a lower register. Departure — America, that’s nothing, we’ve traveled so much already! The word “broken” hit her like a nail bomb. Nadine glimpsed the broad flat nose of old Sémen — shot. She saw the fake but costly pearl necklace on Elsa’s white, nervous throat — Elsa, disappeared. The deep bluish hollows around Emmy’s eyes, eyes she’d always envied for their bewitching quality, very like hers, except that hers were not so bewitching — disappeared, Emmy who adored confectionery, Paris gowns, gloves, and handsome cads. Stout Kraus, saluting her as former officers do, click heels, bow low, kiss hand — gone, the fat malicious, twice-decorated ex-convict, et cetera, how, we’ll never know. The Poluyanovs, a young couple full of promise, thoroughly worldly to all appearances, fluent in four languages, thoroughly Anglicized, and shot, according to an unverifiable rumor. Bald Alexis, the one involved in that dreadful Ploesti business, the tortured hero who got out of prison six months ago — killed himself on being arrested they say, but it’s possible he was gunned down like a dog because he shot off his mouth (no noise allowed at night in apartment houses; and if there is noise, a pistol shot does less harm than an indignant voice). Nadine shook off these ghosts. Several others, on the point of appearing, hovered at the edge of memory. A ghastly exhalation steamed from a black pit toward her nostrils.

“How did you dare, Sacha?”

“On strictly rational grounds. If I’d waited, it would have come to the same thing before long. After Kraus, Alexis, Emmy, you know… And those were people with no influence…”

Her phone conversation with Sylvia appeared in a new and disquieting light. “That’s right, I’m back from Nice, meeting Sacha later on, off to Les Trois Quartiers tomorrow at eleven… pure rayon, Sylvette, in two colors, rose and burgundy, what d’you think? With a frightfully low neckline…” Sylvia’s husband, the addresses, the passports, the money to be drawn — all the necessary connections fell into place so ominously that she became visibly panic-stricken, and had the shabbiest thoughts in her life. “If they kill him, will they kill me too? I’m only small-fry. And we have so little money…”

“Careful,” D was saying. “Remain calm.”

Suddenly he broke into an oily, screen-actor’s leer, as though playing a roguish but likable bank manager.

“What charming gloves, my dear.”

This idiotic pose and change of tone because a couple, a navy officer and a rangy brunette with the profile of a greyhound, had just walked into the tearoom. A true-blue, genuine article of an officer: they don’t make ’em like that to order! D feared a hostile reaction from Nadine in view of the enormity of the accident. He had loved this woman for ten years. She was younger than he was, selfish, practical, a skillful operator during missions, superficially romantic when they were alone, gifted at times with a mercurial, inebriated, almost silent laugh and the undefended gaze of a primitive; simple in her loving, and as harmoniously built as a beautiful animal… For him she reserved her admiration, a flattered, willing sensuality, and a comradely directness of manner. There were no conventional prejudices between them.

An unexpected silence fell. Nadine called the waitress and ordered a liqueur.

“One for you, Sacha?”

“No thanks.”

He was held by an expression on her face that he had never seen.

“About Sylvia,” she said dreamily, “it’s a bore. So silly of me, I’m sorry. If I do what I have to do very quickly, it’ll be all right… probably. You can count on me. What you’ve done is irreparable. I think you’ve made a mistake, but I understand, it was strangling you. For me, the worst part isn’t that.”

What lay behind this detachment of hers, this calm as of total disaster? Her hard expression on the verge of tears?

“We’re an old couple, Sacha. You know that I love you in a special, profound way. I don’t always understand you, but sometimes I understand you completely. For me to take off, to leave now, is a bit… it’s a little awful.”

“Little and awful don’t go together,” he said, intent on her.

She brushed her fingers over the man’s hand where it lay on the tablecloth.

“I love someone else, quite differently from the way I love you. I was very happy. I wasn’t planning to keep it from you or to hurt you unduly. We’ll always be what we are — if you want. I can’t imagine myself without you, Sacha… But there’s this person I love. He doesn’t prevent me being yours. You’ve got to understand… And now, now…”

If a relationship is not free, it’s unhealthy. Sexuality can only be mastered through reason, by granting to it the part of us it demands. Thus delivered from its imperious claims, we can live for acts of intelligence and will. The human machine requires a good control mechanism which our physiologists — or moralists — named the brake. Repression diminishes a man as much as promiscuity. Jealousy is a leftover from an obsolete set of customs (among us), based on the subjugation of the female by the male and on private property. Moral hygiene, physical hygiene… The couple is a partnership of free beings, founded on comradeship in struggle… and so on and so forth, in formulas rehashed by Youth Club lecturers until the message had imprinted itself upon the smallest nerve filament. At least that’s what D thought up to a few seconds ago. We live on limited notions, dried out like plants pressed in a book. Under the shock, he pretended to stand by those shattered clichés. “Bad timing, in any case…” And four o’clock already. No time to lose.

“Who? Is he one of us?”

He only threw in the second question to provide a spurious justification for the first. What did it matter, when all was said and done? Bad timing for you too, Nadine, it’s just your hard luck. Now suffer. (He almost snickered.) We’re being tracked down together. The afterthought flashed through him that from now on she might — if push came to shove — betray him. Never expect too much of a woman: she has thousands of years of subjugation behind her.

“Who is he?”

“I can’t tell you. Forgive me. It’s impossible. I’ll take care of everything necessary, and we’ll leave whenever you say. But I…”

A stubborn violence rose in him. Who? “I need to know so as to take adequate precautions.”

“I can’t. But I promise, you have no complications to fear from that quarter.”

“The quarter of the flesh,” he reflected bitterly, with a vision of Nadine’s sculpted body, the raised mound of her sex, the thick curls that were lighter than her hair… “It’s beautiful,” he’d said to her once, “it charms me in the same way as your face.” Push those images aside. Nadine looked so woefully disconsolate that he was ashamed of feeling dominated by instinct — and of being, as instinct would have it, the stronger of the two.