Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

A gray Citröen stood parked and unoccupied in front of number 15. A young cyclist was starting off slowly, with a small yellow parcel dangling from the handlebars — maybe a signal. If he looks at me, that would mean… He doesn’t look, but then perhaps he’s already spotted me and he’s too well trained… A woman slackened her pace, opposite, fumbling in her handbag for something: a good way to survey the street in a pocket mirror. A green van rounded the corner of the rue de Sèvres and made a three-point turn, as though the driver wished to save himself the bother of a slight detour… Everything seemed at once unremarkable and suspect. D opted to make his way past the empty Citröen.

Nobody followed him down into the Métro. Nobody caught his attention in the first-class carriage. The warren of passages in the Saint-Lazare station lend themselves to dodging and doubling back, to abrupt corrections of deliberate mistakes… D changed direction several times. A brassy blonde wheeled around, flashing a pink-gummed grin in his face. “Do you mind!” D said irritably. It was just afterward that he realized how comical he looked, with his collar up and his overcoat grotesquely buttoned up crooked. He lit a cigarette and strolled into the railway station. Not a good idea: stations make for unexpected encounters. Sure enough here came Alain through the crowd, as though rushing out from behind a newspaper-stall display.

“It’s you!” Alain exclaimed, full of joyful surprise.

His face was frank, his eyes more alert than intelligent, his movements vigorous like those of someone used to success; D liked him, to whatever atrophied extent he was still capable of friendship. Alain was an exemplary agent, enterprising, prudent, and selfless, who owed to D his initiation into the job, that is, into the devotion that fills to the brim the cup of existence. So far, D had trusted him with only moderately risky missions, such as meeting minor functionaries or party militants who were embedded in arsenals and shipyards. In the old days, before the nightmare that had made a taciturn man out of him, D used to enjoy inviting Alain and his wife to dinner at a good restaurant. They discussed painting, theory, the news. Alain didn’t mind asking questions and D enjoyed teaching him without appearing to do so. It probably did him more good than it did to that cultivated but still rudimentary young mind.

“And you?” asked D.

“Swimmingly. In ten days, I’ll have some interesting stuff for you. You’ll be pleased.”

“And me,” thought D, “I’m rudimentary, too… It took a whole historical epoch to mold me. At twenty-five I was just like him, minus the handsome face for charming the girls…”

“Walk with me, Alain. I’m so glad I ran into you.”

They went up the rue de Rome to the place de l’Europe, the traffic circle suspended high over the railroad tracks. Under the fine drizzle which now began to fall, the great airy intersection, true to its name, drew together arteries named for all the European capitals, arteries inseparable yet foreign to one another… “Here will do fine,” said D. Soft explosions of white vapor billowed up from the station. Paris’s pallor was serene. They stopped.

“We won’t be seeing each other anymore, Alain. Someone will contact you. You’ll receive instructions.”

D watched a nascent anxiety contract the young brown eyes.

“Yes, that’s how it is. I’m saying goodbye.”

“I don’t get it,” said Alain. “Listen… You have confidence in me. You can say a word, just a word. Has something happened? Something dangerous? Are you…”

Fear was pricking Alain, the kind of fear D knew the best (there are so many different kinds!): the fear of guessing right, the fear of confronting, of understanding, the incomprehensible…

“A suspect? No. I am the same person. I’m leaving. It’s finished for me, that’s all.”

“But that’s impossible!” the young man said in a very low voice.

Further words appeared to quiver on his lips, but were held back.

“I resigned,” said D sharply. “You’re to carry on under someone else.”

He was conducting an experiment on the boy, while operating alive on himself. Putting friendship to the test by a display of futile bravado. D became aware — odd, for such sentiments ought to have died out in him — of a wish to be understood. After all, he had shaped this youth’s very soul; Alain couldn’t fail to see that if he, D, was bailing out, if D himself couldn’t go along any longer, if even D was giving it up, then serious things must be happening which finally should be condemned. A man’s conscience is secondary in the battle for such a great cause — but now it’s essential. You cast off your whole life, you “drop” the Secret Service, you say no. I who am alone, disarmed, faithful after twenty years’ labor, today I say: No. The situation must be terribly grim for me to have arrived at that conclusion.

D opens his leather cigarette case. Cyclists flit across the square like mosquitoes, human mosquitoes. They know nothing of these problems. An engine puffs below street level. Autumn seeps into the marrow, as needling as the rain. Alain is bareheaded.

“You’ll catch cold, Alain,” D says affectionately. “Let’s go our ways. Goodbye.”

But he is watching. The young face has gone pale and looks sick, even nasty. If a woman flung back at him: “Go away, I love someone else!” he might be similarly dumbfounded. Alain sees D through a dull, disfiguring space. He sees a wrinkled old face, flesh wasting away so that the skull shines through. A death’s-head pretending to be alive. You don’t quit! You run away and you are hunted down and you are finished off, justly, because running away is treason.

“I didn’t expect this from you,” Alain murmurs.

His tone changes. Rising disappointment verging on contempt, growing almost insulting. Some of the color returns to his cheeks. He blurts out: “You know better than I do that…”

(The old spool unwinds by itself: that every apparently abominable deed perpetrated corresponds to a necessity, since they are perpetrated; that the Party, steered by supremely capable hands, stands above whatever it does; that if we start to doubt we’re doomed; that those who are killed are traitors, since they are killed — that YOU YOURSELF taught me all this! D understands the precision of these exact and unalterable formulas that could not be worded any other way, as though a machine were punching them out of metal. Against them he opposes, deep inside, nothing but a stony NO of liberation, a liberation difficult to justify. His shake of the head is barely perceptible; the confident, superior smirk he puts on comes out as a grimace. Isn’t this boy going to remember all that I have meant to him, the bits of my past I have shared, the person I am?)

Alain doesn’t know what to do with his hands. The right worries a button on his mackintosh. He’s stunned. Take him by the arm, look him straight in the eye, no holding back, say: “Take it easy, kid. I haven’t changed in any way. I’ve understood, I’ve made a judgment, it’s because I’ll never change that I can no longer bear what is happening. So many corpses, so many lies, so much poison brusquely poured into our souls, into our very souls, do you understand! Forgive me for using such a mystical term…” This is only a fleeting impulse for D. It’s not possible, he knows that. It’s always rash to be too human…

“You’re going to tear off that button, Alain.”

The young man’s distress spreads across his face in a madman’s grin.

“You are a…”

He breaks off and marches jerkily away, as though willing himself not to run. So, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the word “traitor.” Was that because of a regret? A doubt? The smallest sense of what that word’s iniquitous, unbelievable implication would be?