Victor Serge: Unforgiving Years

This striking affirmation illustrates what Serge’s son, Vlady, used to call his father’s “materialist spirituality” — since it was derived from Serge’s scientific worldview rather than from any tendency toward mysticism. Serge’s notion of materialism is closer to Spinoza’s Substance, Bergson’s élan vital , Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, Verdnatsky’s noosphere , and Edgar Morin’s Complexity than to positivism and vulgar scientism. “The immaterial is not in the least unreal, but on the contrary an essential form of the real (thought) completely unexplainable by yesterday’s scientific rules.” [23] 23. Victor Serge, Carnets . Indeed, it was after reading two scientific books about recent discoveries and theories in genetics that he noted: “The old materialist schools would wax indignant and yet it is quite evident, however mysterious nature may be, that thought is the product of life, consubstantial with life, and that there would be nothing particularly bold in maintaining that it [thought] is itself life coming to discover and know itself.” In consequence, even after a nuclear holocaust, consciousness/life will survive, if only in the form of a virus whose reproduction will, over the eons, evolve toward greater complexity until it reaches the stage of intelligent life in some unimagined form “coming to discover and know itself.” Thus while Serge the socialist activist continued to “set his course on hope,” Serge the creator of Unforgiving Years put hope further off into the long term, to archaeological, geological, and evolutionary time where ultimately “true death does not exist.” A writer for our times — which well may be (to quote the title of another Serge novel) Last Times . [24] 24. Les derniers temps (Monteal: Editions de l’Arbre, 1946), translated into English by Ralph Manheim as The Long Dusk (Dial Press, 1946).

AROUND seven in the morning, D personally loaded his two suitcases into the taxi. The street was still slumbering, tinged by the bleak whiteness of a Paris awakening. No one was about except for a milkman. Morning purity of cobbles and asphalt. The garbage cans were empty. D felt no suspicions. He had himself driven to the Gare du Nord, grew irritable at the station buffet because they made him wait for a tasteless cup of coffee, and piled his luggage into another cab which dropped him off in the place d’Iéna. Sure of not being followed, he took in the vast square, a stage set empty of actors, bathed in a dappled light under which one would wish to live for a long while, meditating. Before eight in the morning Paris, in her wealthier neighborhoods, seems delivered from herself; pacified, she is nothing more than a work of human wisdom. D found a chauffeurs’ bar where he was served a good, unpretentious coffee and two hot croissants, reminding him of that young condemned man whose sole last request was for croissants, which he could not have, because it was too early. “Just my luck!” said the pale young man, and he was right, for in fact the only thing he ever succeeded in was his own death by decapitation… Before boarding a third cab, which he had to call for, D reflected that all these complex precautions, reasonable as they might appear, were actually a semi-lunatic’s game. They left the path of danger studded with small markers, perhaps even with milestones. How easily he might have been seen, quite by chance, without realizing, at the Gare du Nord or in the vicinity of the place d’Iéna. Someone could have jotted down a license plate. The business of changing from one taxi to another might attract attention itself. If you took all these possibilities into account, you’d go right over the edge. This time he had himself driven directly to the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart. It was a middle-class establishment of the sort frequented by traveling salesmen, tourists on a modest budget, sedately adulterous couples, and well-behaved musicians with nightclub contracts. “Ah, Monsieur Lamberti,” the porter greeted him. D corrected him firmly, the better to steep himself in his new persona: “It’s Battisti, Bruno Battisti.” “Room 17, wasn’t it?” inquired the porter, who knew perfectly well. Inside the room, D checked the locks on the suitcases even though he knew he’d closed them securely. By nine, he was back “home.” The concierge met him with a “Morning, Monsieur Malinesco! And me thinking you were gone on a trip!” (So you saw me with my luggage, you old witch!) “Quite so, Madame, I shall be away for six weeks.” (For all eternity, Madame!) “Well, it’s nice weather for you anyway, Monsieur Malinesco,” said the concierge, because you should always say something pleasant.

Mademoiselle Armande turned up promptly at ten, being an odiously punctual person who had been known to loiter in the street with an eye on her wristwatch, or stand for thirty seconds on the landing before knocking. She entered the study through the door left half open and murmured, “Monsieur Malinesco,” the words more snuffled than pronounced, accompanied by a deferential bob of the head. She was an insipid woman, rather on the homely side, pink-complexioned and dressed in neutral colors, who wore large shiny spectacles over the face of a wizened, calculating child. D watched her with concealed attention. What did she know about him? That he was rich (he who had never owned anything), and she respected rich people. A philatelist, a bibliophile, a lover of ancient art, liable to jump on a train or into a car and scour Brittany in winter just to bring back an antique dresser… Friendly with artists. Her job was to answer the telephone, write the occasional letter, visit the bank, and receive Monsieur Soga, the embassy attaché, a nervous little man who reeked of cologne; Monsieur Sixte Mougin, the antiques dealer; Monsieur Kehl from the Philatelist Society; and, more rarely, Monsieur Alain, who didn’t much look like a painter. She was becoming a connoisseur of postage stamps and even did a little collecting herself, only the French colonies, not to be extravagant. It’s a highly regarded hobby; they say the King of England has built up a remarkable collection. D had Mademoiselle Armande periodically tailed by a detective. She stepped out on Saturday nights with Monsieur Dupois, a civil servant at the Ministry of Education; they went to the pictures; Dupois’s concierge referred to Mademoiselle Armande as “the lady engaged to that nice gentleman who has been so unfortunate…” D, who distrusted other people’s misfortunes even more than his own, set the detective onto Monsieur Evariste Dupois, age forty-seven, owner of a property at Ivry, divorced… A gentleman who bet judiciously on the horses, bought a weekly lottery ticket, read the right-wing press, and visited a brothel in the rue Saint-Sauveur every Friday evening. An innocent man.

“Are you engaged, then?” inquired D of Mademoiselle Armande.

She did not flinch, being no doubt incapable of such a lively reaction, but her fingers twitched a little.

“Dear me, Monsieur Malinesco… However did you know?”

He saw that her complexion was improved by embarrassment.

“Just a coincidence, Mademoiselle. I happened to see you one Saturday on the arm of your fiancé.”

“It has not been completely decided yet,” she said reticently.

Innocent, innocent! (But that was not a wholly rational conclusion…)

“I intend to go away for six weeks. You will please pass on the mail to Monsieur Mougin.”

If anybody was going to look miserable as a drowned rat in a bucket three days from now, it was definitely Monsieur Sixte Mougin! D regretted the atrophied state of his sense of humor; it would have cheered him up no end to dwell on the troubles of that quavering, servile bastard Monsieur Sixte Mougin.