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

the morgue, on the marble slabs, in a lugubrious gray chill riddled with electric bulbs, lay a nameless boy who had been run over by a street-car. He lay sleeping on his back, his skin white as wax, his two hands open as if they had just dropped two marbles. There was an old Asiatic in a long overcoat, hooknosed, blue-lidded, with his cut throat gaping and black (his face had been crudely painted for a photograph). He looked like an actor made up as a corpse — greenish, the high cheekbones rose-pink. There was Maria, with her blue and white polka-dot blouse, her thin neck horribly blue, her little snub nose, her red curls plastered to her skull, but with no eyes at all, no eyeballs, only those pitiable folds of torn flesh, strangely sunk into the eye sockets. “Why did you do it, poor Marussia?” Kostia asked stupidly, while his unhappy hands kneaded his cap. This was death, the end of a universe. But a red-haired girl wasn’t the universe? The guardian of the morgue, a morose Jew in a white blouse, came up:
    â€œYou know her, citizen? Then there’s no use staying here any longer. Come and fill out the questionnaire.”
    His office was warm, comfortable, full of papers. Drownings. Street Accidents. Crimes. Suicides. Doubtful Cases . “Under what heading should we put the deceased, in your opinion, citizen?” Kostia shrugged his shoulders. Then he asked angrily:
    â€œIs there a heading, ‘Collective Crimes?’”
    â€œNo,” said the Jew. “I call your attention to the fact that the deceased has already been examined by the medical expert and shows neither ecchymoses nor signs of strangulation.”
    â€œSuicide,” Kostia interrupted furiously.
    He pushed through the drizzle, his right shoulder forward. If he could have fought somebody, broken somebody’s nose, or taken a straight right on the jaw — for you, poor Marussia, you sweet little nitwit — it would have done him good. You big fool, why let yourself get so desperate? Everybody knows that men are bastards. Nobody pays any attention to the Wall Gazette, it’s only fit to wipe your arse with! How could you be so dumb, you poor baby, oh for God’s sake, oh hell! — The whole thing had been perfectly simple. The horror-stricken Y.C. secretary kept her brief statement to himself. It was written on a page from a school notebook and solemnly signed “Maria” (and her family name):
    â€œ As a proletarian, I will not live with this filthy dishonor. Accuse no one of my death. Farewell .”
    And that was that! On orders from the Y.C. Central Committee, the branch committees were making a campaign “for health, against demoralization.” How should the campaign be conducted? The five young men who made up the Bureau had beaten their brains, until one of them had said: “Outlaw venereal diseases.” It seemed like a brilliant idea. Of the five, two were probably V.D. cases themselves, but they were clever enough to take their treatments in distant clinics. “There’s Maria, the redhead.” — “Perfect!” — A strange girl — she never said anything at meetings, she was always clean and tidy, she repulsed any advances, frightened to death, yet flared up when she was pinched — where had she ever caught her case? Not in the organization, that was certain. Then it must have been from the demoralized petty-bourgeois element? “She has no class instinct,” said the secretary severely. “I propose that we publish her expulsion in the yard Wall Gazette. We must make an example.” The Wall Gazette, illustrated with caricatures in water colors which showed a Maria recognizable only by her holiday blouse and her red hair, and grotesquely loaded with a pair of rhinestone earrings, tumbling out of a door from which projected the shadow of an enormous broom — the typewritten Wall Gazette was still posted in the vestibule of the