Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

The first spoonful of soup made Mr. Brown seem almost perky. His voice rose in pitch; his hands, rather overlarge but delicate, traced tiny gestures as he complimented the ladies on everything: the needlework on the linen bought at a pueblo market, the matchless cuisine which would put the best hotels to shame, the coral necklace hung with tiny silver fish which Daria was wearing, the wonderfully barbaric string of chunky clay beads and a jade figurine which so suited Noémi; how young they both looked, and how artful the lighting of the room, positively Rembrandt! “Here we go,” thought Bruno. “The marionette is on the loose.” Bruno preferred silence to the inane chatter that does nothing but add a bit of noise to a bit of vanity. He was so annoyed that toward the end of the meal, lest his contempt get the better of his manners, he drained two glasses of wine in quick succession and felt better at once. Mr. Brown was explaining the many pitfalls involved in transplanting delicate European vine stocks to the New World. No laboratory has yet succeeded in unraveling the secret chemistry, or should we say the wondrous alchemy, of wine. Its components are: the quality of the plant, its health, its capacity for regeneration; the characteristics of the soil; the type of sunlight and the angle of exposure of the vines; one would also have to study the nature of solar radiation and, beyond that, the effect of radiations from the night sky, as well as the nature of the microscopic fauna and flora that assist in fermentation; then of course there is the related science of volcanism, for Mr. Brown was convinced that a thousand subtle emanations are at work above volcanic subsoils, and thus, since Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhineland, or Andalusia are geologically stable, they must benefit from a telluric environment quite different from that of California, with its proximity to the volcanic plates of Mexico… The host was becoming perceptibly moody again. He reached for a bottle. “No, enough of that one, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Brown. “You must sample this other, which is by far the best.” This other was not the best — rather the opposite — but Bruno allowed politely that it was excellent, because he couldn’t care less.

Noémi was the first to retire, toward ten o’clock. Mr. Brown excused himself shortly thereafter. Daria and Bruno wandered out onto the terrace. From the horizon to the zenith the flashing ballet continued. Daria was fighting down tides of dizziness. “I drank much too much, Sacha. What a learned animal he is, of what fossilized erudition! This world mass-produces marionettes and fossils… Elsewhere they turn out automatons, with the instinct for torture and destruction loose in their mechanism… The same stars everywhere. Sacha! But where is hope?” “Everywhere,” Bruno answered evasively. “Remember the beach at Feodossia?”

Myriads of insects, drawn by the light, imprisoned by the light, were lying on the stone sill around the oil lamp that had been burning all evening. “Are they all going to die, having thrown themselves at an incomprehensible light?” “No. Most survive, saved by the sunrise… The banality of daylight. Insects have a strong grip on life.” “Feodossia… I’d forgotten. Do you know, I imagined in those days that I was in love with you, that’s why I was always pushing you away. You couldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to love again, after so many necessary and needless massacres… In another sense, I didn’t understand either. What have we understood since then?”

“Just what remains essential, it seems to me,” said Bruno.

It almost seemed that they might easily touch on some great and simple truth together, but too many lightning flashes surrounded them, passing through brains split between excitation and torpor. “Oh, how sleepy I am!” said Daria. At the door to her room, he gave her a brotherly kiss.

Bruno slept in a spartan bedroom next to Noémi’s, separated by a glass-bead doorway. He was dreaming as he put on his pajamas. He was young, entering a palace. There were smooth-faced soldiers and bearded soldiers, asleep on the marble staircase. He must wake them for this night’s duty, the march along frozen canals, the danger at dawn. Tomorrow some of these men would look the same as they did now, except that they would be asleep forever… “We have achieved justice,” Sacha told them. “We have changed one of the faces of the world, enough to make living and dying worthwhile. Let us consent to everything!” Did they hear him, understand him? They were swearing and grumbling. “We’re coming, Comrade!” What happened after that? One should never consent to everything, there are always non-consentments, refusals to be maintained… Our failure to admit this was the great error, or one of them… What happened after that? A red fox rolling in the sunlit snow — shivering, shivering! I’m frozen to the bone — a brown fox scampering through the sand toward the ruins. Shivering! I’m hit bad… “N’ga! Are you sleeping?” The young Uzbek glided in, as beautiful as a girl. “The water is pure, master, you drink…” Where were the secret papers? The most secret, in the briefcase, the briefcase in the strongbox, the nightmare in the strongbox, the death warrants in the strongbox… Dead, all of them, dead, the greatest, the purest and best, the builders, the lost, the fanatics, the knowing, the unknown, the humblest, in their thousands, their millions, absurdly, iniquitously dead. Why? How did we — insurgent, united, uplifted, and victorious — bring about the opposite of what we wanted to do? Reread the texts… But what use are old texts in the afterglow of cataclysms…? A young woman who resembled N’ga sidled up to the last customer in a café on place Wagram, showed him her pretty hands; he touched her hands with a kind of panicky desire… Troubled, he asked, “Did you pour the poison — the poison into the texts?” Autumn yellowed the Bois de Boulogne, the atrophy of life, everything is lost, everything is sullied… No! No, because I still possess consciousness, sovereign, useless, silent consciousness, tranquil consciousness… Rhetoric or truth? Noémi, Noémi, the ocean…

Had he been sleeping? Feverish, belly knotted with the urge to vomit, cardiac anxiety rising, Bruno called softly: “Noémi… N’ga!” From the next room Noémi answered, “I’m all right, Sacha, are you?” “I’m fine, don’t worry…” He groped for the important objects: flashlight, revolver. Hairy beasts blundered about in his head, predatory ideas with dripping muzzles… “What’s happening, for godsake?” He hadn’t drunk that much! He managed, unsteadily, to get outside. Lightning split the sky. Welcome, comets! Fall, comets! Bruno was trying so hard to think that his facial muscles cramped painfully. A lightning flash revealed the bougainvilleas covered with spume, and he realized he had just vomited. His bare feet dragged over the cool flagstones. “Where did we go wrong?” His heart thundered in his chest, crushing his lungs, hurting the back of his eyes at the place where the true eye lay, the eye that saw into the black chamber of the retina; how does it see without erring? “Check to the queen, checkmate! Be hard, never give in, believe, believe-know! Will! Everything will be transformed… This sick and crazy world…” A flash of relief. I vomited, that’s good, I may be all right. These eternal lightning flashes… What I need is an emetic and there isn’t one in the house… In a flash he understood: it was as clear as the sparkling vision of the lake in an upside-down world, with the sky below. The veins on his hands were hardening.

The door to Daria’s room cracked open at a blow from his shoulder. The advantage of having worm-eaten doors! He entered, shining the flashlight in front of him. “Do you remember Feodossia?” Chestnut-and-ash hair spread around her exhausted face, her head encircled in a halo of light, Daria was smiling, a convulsive smile. There was no mistaking that smile! “Daria, are you dead?” “Yes I am, Sacha…” She was icy. Bruno took her hand; it fell back with rigid finality. With an uncertain forefinger, he eased back her eyelid, observed the motionless eyeball, its sclera yellowed with tiny dark veins. The lid closed back slowly of its own accord. A bluish glimmer of lightning lingered on Daria’s forehead… Bruno’s legs gave way and he sat down abruptly, head bowed, still holding the revolver and the flashlight in dangling hands. The light shone a white circle at his feet. A bug crawled aimlessly in the circle. Was it sleep or did he faint for a moment? When he came to, back from the brink, he shone the flashlight once more onto Daria’s waxen face. Not a hope… He spat a thread of greenish spittle into the circle of light, stood up, and left the room. The lightning flashes were moving off, barely perceptible on the horizon. An illusion! They were all around, playing among themselves, making the gold beads of the stars vibrate, eternity’s chant. Nothing but that chant remains. No more error, no more doubt, only a flickering consciousness about to be extinguished, reabsorbed into lightning, stars, and darkness… Bruno felt a rush of exasperation. Ah! That murderous marionette with his fine wines, not such a marionette after all, not such a learned fossil, Mr. so-called Brown, it’s the end of you, you little bastard, if I have ten more minutes to live… Which I have, because I threw up, I might be saved! The sonorous gongs beating in his heart answered: No.