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

shanty. Kostia calmly took it down, tore it into four pieces, and put the pieces in his desk drawer, because they might be used as evidence in court …
    Autumn and the rains carried away the insignificant episode of Maria’s suicide. Submitted to the Branch Committee for a recommendation, the case disappeared under the directives for an urgent and immediate campaign against the Right opposition, which was followed by incomprehensible expulsions; then under another campaign, slower in getting started but actually far more drastic, against corruption among Y.C. and Party officials. Under the whirlwind, the yard Y.C. secretary sunk into an abyss of opprobrium — exclusion, derision, Wall Gazette (the broom reappeared, driving him out with his hair standing on end and his papers swirling over the dump heap), and, finally, dismissal for having granted himself two months’ vacation in a rest house whose dazzling white walls rose among the rockslides and bursting flowers of Alupka in the Crimea.
    Kostia, accused of “having demonstratively torn up an issue of the Wall Gazette (a serious breach of discipline) and having attempted to exploit the suicide of an excluded member as part of an intrigue to discredit the Young Communist Bureau,” was “severely censured.” What did he care? Every night — after the yard, the city, his suppressed rages, his sole-less shoes, the sour soup, the icy wind — he returned to the soothing eyes of his miniature. He knocked at Romachkin’s door — Romachkin had aged a good deal only recently, and read strange books of a religious tendency. Kostia warned him: “Watch out, Romachkin, or you’ll find yourself a mystic.” “Impossible,” the shriveled little man answered. “I am so profoundly a materialist that …”
    â€œThat?”
    â€œNothing. I believe it is always the same unrest in contradictory forms.”
    â€œPerhaps,” said Kostia, struck by the idea. “Perhaps the mystic and the revolutionary are brothers … But one has to extirpate the other …”
    â€œYes,” said Romachkin.
    He opened a book — Isolation , by Vladimir Rozanov. “Here — read this. How true it is!” His yellow fingernail pointed to the lines:
    â€œThe hearse moves slowly, the road is long. ‘Well, farewell, Vassili Vassilievich, it’s bad underground, old man, and you lived a bad life; if you had lived better, you would rest easier underground. Whereas, with iniquity …’
    â€œMy God, to die in iniquity …
    â€œAnd I am in iniquity.”
    â€œDying in iniquity is no use,” Kostia answered; “the thing is to fight while we are alive …”
    He was surprised to have thought so clearly. Romachkin observed him with the keenest attention. The conversation shifted to the issuing of passports, the stricter enforcement of discipline among workers, the Chief’s edicts, the Chief himself.
    â€œEleven o’clock,” said Kostia. “Good night.”
    â€œGood night. What have you done with the revolver?”
    â€œNothing.”
    One February night, about ten o’clock, the snow stopped falling on Moscow; a mild frost draped everything in sparkling crystals. The lifeless branches of trees and shrubs in the gardens were magically covered with them. Crystals full of a secret light flowered on stones, covered the house fronts, clothed monuments. You walked on powdered stars through a stellar city: myriads of crystals floated in the globes of light around the street lamps. Toward midnight the sky became incredibly clear. The smallest light shot skyward like a sword. It was a festival of frost. The silence seemed to scintillate. Kostia became aware of the enchantment only after he had been walking through it for several minutes, after a Y.C. meeting devoted, like so many before it, to discussing the relaxation of discipline at work. The month was drawing