Birth of Our Power (29 page)

His tone would suddenly become excruciating. He would open the poison drawer, always kept locked, and pull out a packet of bizarre, crosshatched letters, written over, you might think, several times.

Sam crushed him one evening.

“Tell me, Jean,” he asked him quietly, “does it really amuse you to write yourself letters from Stéphanie every day? You end up believing in them, eh?”

Jean seemed to emerge from a dream or to awaken; a clear, white glimmer passed over his pasty face. And went out. He seemed to grow larger, harder, heavier; perhaps stunned; perhaps on the point of charging forward like a brute beast. He walked ponderously up to my comrade and whispered:

“Get out.”

Sam turned his back on him, out of bravado, drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, and left. Never again did Jean talk to us of Stéphanie …

We stayed alive. The days passed by. The weeks, the months, the seasons, the battles, the revolution, the war passed by. Life passed by.

We formed a world apart within this city. It sufficed for one of us to call the others together with that magic word “Comrades,” and we would feel united, brothers without even needing to say it, sure of understanding each other even in our misunderstandings. We had a quiet little room with four cots, the walls papered with maps, a table loaded with books. There were always, a few of us there, poring over the endlessly annotated, commented, summarized texts. There Saint-Just, Robespierre, Jacques Roux, Baboeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin were spoken of as if they had just come down to take a stroll under the trees. Robespierre's error, “decapitating the Parisian masses themselves when he struck at the
enragés
of the Commune,” exasperated our old Fomine, who would thunder—his white mustache bristling, his eyebrows and mane in battle array, leonine despite his provincial's frock coat—that the Incorruptible One had doomed the Revolution by cutting off too many heads. “As long as he guillotined to the right, he was correct; the day he began guillotining to the left, he was ruined. That's my opinion.” It was the opinion of a fine old man, astonishingly young, always ready to fly off the handle, susceptible, irritated by trifles—his face abruptly screwed up like a bulldog's at these moments—but devoured by a need for activity, for solidarity, for struggle, for passionate affirmation. Expelled from England, expelled from France long ago—“Under another name, they don't know anything about it!”—interned at the age of sixty. The misfortune of Blanqui, a prisoner during the Commune, the head of the revolution cut off and preserved in the Château du Taureau at the very moment when the Parisian proletariat lacked a real leader, still troubled us as the worst kind of ill luck. Krafft, the chemist, member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks), a sickly, tidy little man, sharp profile, thin lips, would explain in his extremely gentle voice—a copy of Karl Marx's
Civil War in France
covered with penciled notes in hand—that a firm offensive by the Communards against Versailles could probably have changed the course of history …

This past is not all we have: we also have the world and the future. Three syndicalist sailors, Wobblies, have arrived, two from the United States, one from Australia; if they can't delve profoundly into history,
they still have some great stories to tell. Dmitri, a Little Russian who had been an athlete, now lanky, hollow-chested, wrinkled on the neck and face, almost succeeded in causing the incredibly ill-nourished crew of an English steamer to mutiny. A commonplace incident of a howl of wormy soup thrown into the face of the first mate earned him long days in irons, tormented by the cold, in the brig where the water was sometimes up to his knees; then, passing through the Red Sea in the deadly furnace heat. The result is that he is dying, his lungs consumed. But he would still like to see the Don again. “There perhaps …” But he has hardly proffered these words when a doubt of living (already a certainty of death) pierces through him and he bravely shrugs his shoulders. After all, here or there, a grave is a grave. His two pals from America, Karl and Gregor (in whose bunks leaflets were discovered during a search aboard the
Theodore Roosevelt)
were happier men: calm Vikings, joyful boxers in the morning at the pump, mending their clothes in the afternoons, waiting serenely. Admirable in appearance: that golden, flaxen beard—Karl; and that other massive, almost square head, the head of a Reiter practicing physical culture, bending over the needle, the thread, the cloth—Gregor. Gregor, the elder, can still remember the days when, as a boy, he used to take long walks through the forests of the Düna, alone, carrying messages to the Brothers of the Forest in the depths of their hidden glades. “I once met Yann the Great,” he said, “Yann the Great who was shot down at Wenden …”

Sonnenschein adds a note of tender comedy to our group. He is short, with a conical forehead, bald around the temples, a rather sharp Semitic profile, thick Assyrian lips, and tiny intelligent eyes which see everything with an ironic indulgence. His mind was shaped in a rabbinical school somewhere in Poland. He was a Zionist before becoming a socialist. He has a humorous way of arguing. His eyes are illuminated by a sharp glimmer of laughter. “Listen to a story,” he says … And it's always a Jewish story, slightly facetious, embellished with savory details, but of great wisdom. In order to explain to us that each task must be accomplished in its own time, he told us the definitive aphorism of Schmoul the tailor, whose neighbor had come to order a pair of pants. “When will you finish sewing it, Schmoul?”—“In two weeks, Itzek, my friend.”—“Two weeks, to sew a pair of pants? When God himself made the world in six days?” Schmoul withdrew the pins he was holding in his mouth, considered his bearded interlocutor, the room,
and the universe that could be seen through the window and said: “Yes, but what a world. Itzek! And what a pair of pants it will be!”

When there are six of us around a table, we have the experience of all the continents, all the oceans, all the pain and the revolt of men: the Labor parties of New South Wales, the vain apostleship of Theodor Herzl, the Mooney trial, the struggles of the Magón brothers in California, Pancho Villa, Zapata, syndicalism, anarchism, Malatesta's exemplary life, the individualism and the death of those bandits who wanted to be “new men,” Hervéism, social democracy, the work of Lenin—as yet unknown to the world—all the prisons.

We used to come together almost every day, sometimes after the reading of the papers, sometimes in regular meetings of the group. And at times stormy division appeared in our debates, ready to become sources of hate among fraternal enemies. Old Fomine looked upon the revolution as the explosion and the disorderly growth of popular forces. The soundest ideas would quite naturally come to the fore amid the thousands of interconnected conflicts; the example of the best men would—through success, the exaltation of their souls and their own passion—impose itself on the masses, torn between their own higher aspirations and the dead weight of the past, of the lies, of the backward-looking egoism (for enlightened egoism understands that the good of the individual is found in solidarity) … When he had finished talking, Krafft took the floor and sprinkled his short, colorless sentences, spoken in a tone of insignificance, over that ardent voice still ringing in our ears: it was like a thin stream of ice water being poured over a glowing hearth … This old-fashioned romanticism would only be good for leading the revolution to disaster; happily the proletariat had already passed through that stage some time ago. It was based on utopian socialism and not on scientific socialism. Henceforth there is a technique of revolution, which demands organization, discipline, watchwords, order. Persuasion before the conquest of power, yes: the competition between false ideologies and the correct political line, the latter winning over the masses because it best expresses their true aspirations (hence its correctness). Of course. But after the conquest of power, Jacobin centralization, systematic resistance to the reactionary tendencies among the workers themselves, a merciless struggle against confused, reactionary, or romantic ideologies that have become pernicious …

A tense silence fell little by little around Krafft, whose feeble hand was making authoritarian gestures. And Fomine exploded in a voice snarling with sarcasm, stunning laughter, impetuosity:

“Ah! No! After all! If you want to imagine you are carrying the truth in your right-hand vest pocket, sharp and clear like a white pebble, that's your business. But if, from that, you want to close my mouth by calling me a reactionary, a romantic, a utopian, a petit-bourgeois or whatever you like, then no! I won't stand for it. Nobody will stand for it. In two words: Are you for freedom of the press, yes or no?”

“Under a bourgeois regime, before the conquest of power, yes, because it is necessary to the proletariat. Afterward, that notion becomes superfluous. We control the press. We are free. The unhealthy and reactionary tendencies of the working class have no right to what you call—using an old liberal word, not really revolutionary—freedom.”

A hubbub of exclamations drowned out his voice. “But who is to judge?”—“The organized proletariat.”—“That is to say the party, your party.”—“The only party of the proletariat.”

“Then,” cried Fomine, “you'll have to throw me into prison, do you understand? You'll have to mass-produce prisons! And then—then—I'd really like to see that!”

“I don't know,” retorted Krafft, without raising his voice, “if it will be necessary to build new prisons, for prisons are destined to disappear, but we'll certainly need the old ones for the enemies of the revolution as well as for bunglers. Besides, they'll be quite well off there. Much better than here, you can believe me … The only choice we have is between victory and destruction. Fantasy and poetry are beside the point. Look, it's entirely possible that three-quarters of the workers themselves will turn against us at the first serious difficulties. Aren't we well aware that they, too, are permeated with the old ideas, the old instincts of the bourgeoisie? that they have only
its
newspapers to read? Ought we, out of a respect for some high principles inculcated by the enemy, to leave him alone so that they can help to hang us and then take up the yoke again?”

Krafft remained alone. Shrugs, Karl's broad smile in his sunny beard, and one of Sonnenschein's good stories calmed everyone down. Krafft, overcome by sheer weight of numbers, considered us calmly, with a nuance of irony in his eyes.

The news from Russia filled us all with a boundless confidence.

HAVING STRETCHED OUT IN THE YARD, IN THE SUN, UNDER HIS BLANKET, OLD
Antoine fell asleep. At soup call at four o'clock he didn't get up and nobody paid any attention to him. The shade crept over the sleeper. Strollers bent over him; a group formed. They were looking at his fleas. The blanket was covered with wide milky spots with moving edges. After a long moment, someone wondered why those thousands of parasites were fleeing the man, already as cold as a stone.

“'E's dead.”

Nobody was willing to touch the hunched-up corpse. The male nurse Jean promised God-knows-what to two miserable devils who finally dragged him off without lifting him, stiff as a wax doll.

“Our crew is ready,” Sam announced to us that day.

They had been preparing their escape for long days—three of them: Sam, a tall, sad boy called Markus (a Russian Jew in his twenties), and the Rumanian. Markus had been my bunkmate for a while. Captivity oppressed him to an inexplicable degree. He was covered with invisible chains; they wore out his muscles, they drove him to despair. His young worker's hands had become soft, thin, pale: “Ladylike hands, wouldn't you say?” he would ask, full of scorn and humiliation. His spirits rose abruptly once his decision had been made. “What the hell, I'll take the chance!” he told us, exalted. We considered the barbwire fence under the window and, near his sentry box, the sleepy sentry, recognizable by his red neck and his elephantine hindquarters: it was Vignaud, a socialist solider who never spared the Bolsheviks his disapproval. “Do you think Vignaud would shoot?” questioned Sonnenschein. “And how!” said Sam. “I think so too,” said Sonnenschein, “but he would miss his man …”—“Without doing it on purpose, the fat-ass bastard!” Vignaud noticed us and gave us a friendly wave of the hand … The Rumanian who was supposed to
leave with our two comrades rather worried us. Certainly suspected of espionage, he was truly elegant, ageless, his hair carefully pomaded, his eyelids wrinkled; a jaded habitué of nightclubs, an expert poker player, deceitful and polite, who trimmed his nails carefully every morning. He needed resolute companions for this daring attempt; his contribution to the group was a wad of banknotes artistically sewn into the lining of his clothes.