Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“The maintenance of the Consortium does not in any way interest us,” he said slowly. “A share in the building of the Railways is assured to France by the treaties. If the Consortium falls, another enterprise will be formed, or will develop, and will succeed it. ”

“And this new corporation,” said Ferral, “instead of having industrialized Indo-China, will distribute dividends. But, as it will have done nothing for Chiang Kai- shek, it will find itself in the situation in which you would be here, if you had never done anything for the State; and the treaties will be manipulated by some American or British society with a French screen, obviously. To whom you will lend, for that matter, the money which you refuse me. We have created the Consortium because the policy of the French banks of Asia maintained a policy of guarantees that would have led them to make loans to the English in order to avoid making loans to the Chinese. We have followed a policy of risk, it is. ”

“I did not dare to say so.”

“. obvious. It is natural that we should reap the consequences. The savings will be protected (he smiled with one corner of his mouth) to the extent of a fifty- eight billion franc loss, and not fifty-eight billion and a few hundred million. Let us now examine together, gentlemen, if you wish, the manner in which the Consortium will cease to exist.”

In the full light of spring, May-too poor to hire a carriage-was walking up the hill towards Kama’s house. If Gisors’ baggage was heavy, they would have to borrow some money from the old painter to get back to the ship. Upon leaving Shanghai, Gisors had told her he would seek refuge with Kama; upon arriving he had sent her his address. Since then, nothing. Not even when she had informed him that he had been appointed professor in the Sun Yat-sen institute of Moscow. Fear of the Japanese police?

As she walked she was reading a letter from Pei which had been delivered to her upon the arrival of the ship at Kobe, when she had had her passport visaed.

“. and all those who were able to flee Shanghai are awaiting you. I have received the pcmtphlets. . ”

He had published two anonymous accounts of Ch’en’s death, one according to his heart: “The murder of the dictator is the duty of the individual towards himself, and must be separate from political action, which is determined by collective forces.,” the other for the traditionalists: “Even as filial duty-the faith which our ancestors have in us-enjoins us to seek what is noblest in our lives, even so it requires of each of us the murder of the usurper.” The clandestine presses were already publishing these pamphlets again.

“… I saw Hemmelrich yesterday. He thinks of you. He is a mounter in the electric plant. He said to me: ‘Before, I began to live when 1 left the factory; now, I begin to live when I enter it. It’s the first time in my life that

I work and know why I work, not merely waiting patiently to die. ’ Tell Gisors that we are waiting for him. Since I have been here, I have been thinking of the lecture where he said:

“ ‘A civilization becomes transformed, you see, when its most oppressed element-the humiliation of the slave, the work of the modern worker-suddenly becomes a value, when the oppressed ceases to attempt to escape this humiliation, and seeks his salvation in it, when the worker ceases to attempt to escape this work, and seeks in it his reason for being. The factory, which is still only a kind of church of the catacombs, must become what the cathedral was, and men must see in it, instead of gods, human power struggling against the Earth. ’ ”

Yes; no doubt the value of men lay only in what they had transformed. The Revolution had just passed through a terrible malady, but it was not dead. And it was Kyo and his men, living or not, vanquished or not, who had brought it into the world.

“1 am going to return to Cbina as an agitator: 1 shall never be a pure Communist. Nothing is finished over there. Perbaps we sball meet; 1 bave been told that your request has been granted. . ”

A newspaper clipping fell from the letter; she picked it up:

Work must become the principal weapon of the class-struggle. The vastest industrialization plan in the world is at present being studied: the aim is to transform the entire U.S.S.R. in five years to make it one of the leading industrial powers in Europe, and then to catch up with and surpass the United States. This gigantic enterprise.

Gisors was waiting for her, in the doorway. In a kimono. No baggage in the hallway.

“Did you receive my letter?” she asked, entering a bare room-mats and paper-whose panels were drawn aside, revealing the entire bay.

“Yes.”

“Let’s hurry. The ship is leaving again in two hours.”

“I’m not leaving, May.”

She looked at him. “Useless to question him,” she thought; “he’U explain.” But it was he who questioned her.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to serve in one of the sections of women agitators. It’s practically arranged, it appears. I shaU be in Vladivostok the day after tomorrow, and I shaU immediately leave for Moscow. If it can’t be arranged, I shall serve as a doctor in Moscow or in Siberia. I hope the first thing succeeds. I am so weary of nursing. … To live always with sick people, when it isn’t for a combat, requires a kind of special grace-and there is no grace left in me of any sort. And besides, the sight of death has become almost intolerable to me now. Well, if I must … It is still a way of avenging Kyo.”

“Revenge is no longer possible at my age. ”

Indeed, something in him was changed. He was distant, isoiated, as if only a part of himself were there in the room with her. He lay down on the floor: there were no seats. She lay down too, beside an opium tray.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulder with indifference.

“Thanks to Kama, I have been made professor of Occidental art. I return to my first profession, as you see. ”

She sought his eyes, stupefied:

“Even now,” she said, “when we are politically beaten, when our hospitals have been closed down, clandestine groups are forming again in all the provinces. Our people will never forget that they suffer because of other men, and not because of their previous lives. You used to say: ‘They have awakened with a start from a sleep of thirty centuries, to which they will never return.’ You also used to say that those who have given a consciousness of their revolt to three hundred million wretches were not shadows like men who pass-even beaten, even tortured, even dead. ”

She was silent for a moment:

“They are dead, now,” she said finally.

“I still think so, May. It’s something else. Kyo’s death is not only grief, not only change-it is. a metamorphosis. I have never loved the world over-much: it was Kyo who attached me to men, it was through him that they existed for me. I don’t want to go to Moscow. I would teach wretchedly there. Marxism has ceased to live in me. In Kyo’s eyes it was a will, wasn’t it? But in mine, it is a fatality, and I found myself in harmony with it because my fear of death was in harmony with fatality. There is hardly any fear left in me, May; since Kyo died, I am indifferent to death. I am freed (freed!.) both from death and from life. What would I do over there?”

“Change anew, perhaps.”

“I have no other son to lose.”

He drew the opium tray towards him, prepared a pipe. Without speaking she pointed with her finger to one of the nearby hillslopes: attached by the shoulder, some hundred coolies were pulling a heavy weight which could not be seen, in the centuries-old posture of slaves. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”