The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask

all?”
    â€œObviously it is whoever has the most power. If there were a God, it would be God,” Romachkin said softly. “That would be very convenient,” he added, with a little devious laugh.
    Kostia felt that he had understood too many things at once. It made his head spin. “You don’t know what you are saying, Romachkin. And it’s a good thing for you that you don’t! Good night.”
    From nine in the morning to six in the evening, Kostia worked in the office of a subway construction yard. The rhythmic and raucous throb of the excavating machine was communicated to the planking of the shanty. Trucks carried away the excavated earth. The first layers appeared to be composed of human debris, as humus is composed of vegetable debris; they had an odor of corpses, of the decaying city, of refuse long fermented under alternate snow and hot pavements. The truck engines, fed on an inconceivable gasoline, filled the yard with staccato explosions so violent that they drowned out the swearing of the drivers. A thin board fence separated Yard No. 22 from the bustling, klaxoning street, with its two surging streams flowing in opposite directions, its hysterically ringing streetcars, brand new police vans, ramshackle hackney carriages, swarming pedestrians. The shanty, the center of which was occupied by a stove, housed the timekeeping department, the accounting department, the technicians’ office, the desk reserved for the Party and the Young Communists, with its file cases, the corner allocated to the Secretary of the Syndical Cell, the office of the yard chief — but the latter was never there, he ran from one end of Moscow to the other looking for materials, with the Control Commissions running after him. So his space could be used. The Party secretary took it as of right: from morning to night he received the complaints of mud-covered workers, male and female, who descended into the earth, then came up out of the earth — one because he had no lamp, the second because he had no boots, the third no gloves; the fourth had been hurt; the fifth, fired for arriving drunk and late, furious because he was not allowed to go now that he had been fired: “I demand that the law be obeyed, Comrade Part.-Org. (Party Organizer). I came late, I was drunk, I made a row. Throw me out — it’s the law!” The Part.-Org. burst out, turning crimson: “In the name of God and all the stinking saints, you rub your dirty nose in the law because you want to quit, eh? Think you’ll get yourself some more work clothes somewhere else, eh? Damned dirty …” — “The law’s the law, Comrade.” Kostia checked the timecards for absences, went down into the tunnel with messages, helped the organizer of the Young Communists in his various educational, disciplinary, and secret-service duties. A short, dark, bobbed-haired, energetic eighteen-year-old girl with rouged lips and small acid eyes passed. He waved to her. “So your little pal Maria hasn’t showed up for two days? I’ll have to take it up with the Y.C. office.”
    The girl stopped short and pulled up her skirt with a masculine gesture. A miner’s lamp hung from her leather apron. With her hair hidden under a thick kerchief, she looked as if she were wearing a helmet. She spoke passionately, slowly, in a low voice:
    â€œYou won’t see Maria again. Dead. Threw herself in the Moskva yesterday. She’s in the morgue this minute. Go take a look at her if you feel like it. You made her do it — you and the Bureau. And I’m not afraid to tell you so.”
    The edge of her shovel gleamed evilly over her shoulder. She pushed her way into the gaping elevator. Kostia telephoned to the department, the police, the Y.C. secretary (private wire), the secretary of the yard newspaper, and even others. Everywhere the same news echoed back to him — numbing, and now banally irreparable. At