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haven’t told Dora, but she knows. So, in my case it is a very practical
question, which I may have to answer any day . . . And ... I don’t
know ...”

They began to walk, sinking in the snow to their calves. Above them,

crows flew from branch to branch. The light was charged with wintry
whiteness. Kiril was a head taller than either of his companions. He
differed from them in spirit as well. He spoke in a calm voice:
“Suicide is only an individual solution—therefore not Socialist. In
my case it would set a bad example. I don’t say this to shake your reso-
lution, Wladek: you have your reasons, and I believe that they are valid
for you. To say that one will confess nothing is courageous, perhaps
overly courageous: no one knows precisely how strong he is. And then,
it is all more complex than it appears.”

“Yes,” said the other two, stumbling through the snow.

“One has to become conscious of what is going on . . . become
conscious . . .”

Rublev, repeating his words in a doubtful voice, wore an expression

which was often seen on his face—the look of a preoccupied pedant.
Wladek flew into a rage, turned purple, waved his short arms:

“Damned theoretician! There’s no curing you! I can still see the

articles in which you cut up the Trotskyists in ’27 by maintaining that the
proletarian party cannot degenerate . . . Because if it degenerates,
obviously it is not the proletarian party ... You casuist! What is
going on is as clear as daylight. Thermidor, Brumaire, and all the rest
of it, on an unheard-of social scale and in the country where Genghis
Khan has the use of the telephone, as old Tolstoi put it.”

“Genghis Khan,” said Philippov, “is a great man not properly appre-

ciated. He was not cruel. If he had his servants build pyramids of
severed heads, it was not out of cruelty nor to satisfy a primitive taste
for statistics, hut to depopulate the countries which he could not other-
wise dominate and which he intended to bring back to a pastoral econ-
omy, the only economy which he could understand. Already, it was
differences in economies which made heads fall . . . Note that the only
way he could assure himself that the massacres had been properly car-
ried out, was to collect the heads. The Khan distrusted his man-
power ...”

They walked a little while longer in deeper snow. “A marvelous

Siberia,” murmured Rublev, whom the landscape had calmed. And
Wladek turned abruptly toward his two companions, planted himself in
front of them in comic exasperation:




“What eloquence! One of you lectures on Genghis Khan, the other
advocates becoming fully conscious! You are making a mock of your
own selves, my dear comrades. Permit me to reveal something to you!
It’s my turn, my turn . . .”

They saw that his thick lips were trembling, that there was mist on the

lenses of his glasses, that straight lines cut horizontally across his cheeks.
For several seconds he kept muttering “my turn, my turn” almost unin-
telligibly.

“But doubtless I am of a grosser constitution, my dear comrades. As

for me—the fact is—I am afraid. I am deathly afraid—do you hear me?
—whether it is worthy of a revolutionary or not. I live alone like an
animal among all these woods and all this snow, which I loathe—
because I am afraid. I live without a wife, because I don’t want two of us
waking up at night to ask ourselves if it is the last night. I wait for
them every night, all by myself, I take a bromide, I go to sleep in a
stupor, I wake with a start, thinking they’ve come, crying out ‘Who’s
there?’ and the woman next door answers, ‘It’s the blind banging,
Vladimir Ernestovich, sleep well,’ and I can’t get back to sleep. I am
afraid and I am ashamed, not of myself, but of all of us. I think of those
who have been shot, I see their faces, I hear their jokes, and I have
migraines that medicine has not yet named—a little pain the color of
fire fixes itself in the back of my neck. I am afraid, afraid, not so much
afraid of dying as of nothing and everything—afraid to see you, afraid
to talk to people, afraid to think, afraid to understand . . .”

And indeed it could be read in his puffy face, in his red-rimmed eyes,

in his precipitate speech. Philippov said:

“I am afraid too, of course—but it doesn’t do any good. I have grown

used to it. One lives with fear as one lives with a hernia.”

Kiril Rublev slowly pulled off his gloves and looked at his hands,

which were long and strong, a little hairy between the joints—“hands
still full of vitality,” he thought. And, picking up some snow, he began
kneading it violently.

“Everyone is an ignoble coward,” he said, “it’s an old, old story.

Courage consists in knowing that fact and, when necessary, acting as if
fear did not exist. You are wrong, Wladek, in thinking that you are dif-
ferent from anyone else. However, it is hardly worth our meeting in this
magnificent landscape if we are only going to make useless confessions
to one another . . .”

Wladek did not answer. His eyes searched the deserted, barren, lumi-

nous landscape. Ideas as slow-moving as the flight of the crows in the




sky passed through his mind: Whatever we say is useless now ... I
wish I had a glass of hot tea . . . Kiril, suddenly dropping the burden
of his years, jumped back, raised his arm—and the hard snowball he
had jUst finished making struck an astonished Philippov square on the
chest. “Defend yourself, I attack,” Kiril cried gaily and, his eyes laugh-
ing, his beard askew, he grabbed up handfuls of snow. “Son of a sea-
cook,” Philippov shouted, transfigured. And they began to fight like two
schoolboys. They leaped, laughed, sank into snow up to their waists,
hid behind trees to make their ammunition and take aim before they
let fly. Something of the nimbleness of their boyhood came back to them,
they shouted joyous “ughs,” shielded their faces with their elbows,
gasped for breath. Wladek stood where he was, firmly planted, method-
ically making snowballs to catch Rublev from the flank, laughing until
the tears came to his eyes, showering him with abuse: “Take that, you
theoretician, you moralist, to hell with you,” and never once hitting
him ...

They got very hot, their hearts pounded, their faces relaxed. From a

sky which had imperceptibly grown gray, night suddenly fell on lustre-
less snow, on misty and petrified trees. Breathing hard, the three started
back in the direction of the railroad. “How about that one I landed on
your ear, Kiril,” said Philippov, chortling. “How about the one I landed
on the back of your neck?” Rublev retorted. It was Wladek who returned
to serious matters:

“You know, my nerves are all to pieces, I admit—but I am not as

afraid as I might be. Come what may, my death will fertilize Socialist
soil, if it is Socialist soil . . .”

“State Capitalism,” said Philippov.

Rublev:

“. . . We must cultivate consciousness. There is sure progress under

this barbarism, progress under this retrogression. Look at our masses,
our youth, all the new factories, the Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, Kirovsk
. . . We are all dead men under a reprieve, but the face of the earth has
been changed, the migrating birds must wonder where they are when
they see what were deserts covered with factories. And what a new prole-
tariat! Ten million men at work, with machines, instead of three and
a half million in 1927. What will that effort not accomplish for the world
in half a century!”

“. . . When nothing of us will remain, not even our smallest bones,”

Wladek chanted, perhaps without irony.

By way of precaution, they parted before they reached the first houses.

“We must meet again,” Wladek proposed. And the other two said, “Yes,
yes, absolutely,” hut none of them believed that it would really he
possible or of any use. When they parted they all shook hands warmly.
Kiril Rublev skiied rhythmically to the nearest station, following the
silent forest where darkness seemed to grow out of the ground like an
imperceptible mist. A thin, blue, terribly sharp crescent moon, curved
like an ideal breast, rose into the sky. Rublev thought: “Ill-omened moon.
Fear comes exactly like night.”

One evening as the Rublevs were finishing dinner, Xenia Popova

came to tell them a great piece of news. On the table there were a dish
of rice, a sausage, a bottle of Narzan mineral water, gray bread. The
primus stove hissed under the kettle. Kiril Rublev was sitting in the old
armchair, Dora in the corner of the sofa. “How pretty you are,” Kiril
said to Xenia affectionately. “Let me see your big eyes.” She turned
them toward him frankly—wide, well-shaped eyes, fringed with long
lashes. “Neither stones, nor flowers, nor the sky have that color,” said
Rublev to his wife. “It is the eye’s own miracle. You can be proud,
child.”

“You’ll have me embarrassed soon,” she said.

The clear features, the high forehead, the little rolls of blond hair
above the ears, the eyes that always seemed to be smiling at life—Rublev
scanned them almost maliciously. So purity was born of dirt, youth of
attrition. He had known Popov for more than twenty years—an old fool
who, because he could not understand the a-b-c of political economy,
had specialized in matters of Socialist ethics. In pursuit of his specialty,
he had buried himself in the dossiers of the Central Control Commission
of the Party, and now his entire life was devoted to the adulteries, lies,
drinking bouts, and abuses of power perpetrated by old revolutionaries.
It was he who found grounds for reprimands, distributed warnings,
prepared indictments, planned executions, and proposed rewards for the
executioners. “Many vile tasks must needs be performed, so there must
needs be many vile beings,” as Nietzsche said. But how, by what miracle,
did the rancid flesh and the rancid spirit of a Popov produce this crea-
ture, Xenia? So life triumphs over our base clay. Kiril Rublev looked
at Xenia with a delight in which there was both hunger and malice.

Sitting with her knees crossed, the girl lit a cigarette. She was so

happy that she had to do something—anything—to keep it from showing.
Making a very unsuccessful attempt to look detached, she said:

“Papa is having me sent abroad—a mission to Paris—six months—for

the Central Textile Bureau. Pm to study the new technique for printing
cloth . . . Papa knew that I had been wanting to go abroad for years
... I jumped for joy!”

“Why shouldn’t you?” said Dora. “Pm terribly glad. What are you

going to do in Paris?”

“It makes me dizzy to think of it. I’ll see Notre-Dame, Belleville. Pm

reading a biography of Blanqui and the history of the Commune. I’ll go
to see the Faubourg-St.-Antoine, the Rue St.-Merri, the Rue Haxo, the
Wall of the Confederates . . . Bakunin lived in the Rue de Bourgogne,
but I haven’t been able to find out the number. Anyway, the number may
have been changed. Do you know where Lenin lived?”

“I went to see him in Paris,” said Rublev slowly, “but I have no

idea where it was ...”

“Oh!” said Xenia reproachfully. How could anyone forget such

things? Her big eyes opened wide. “Really? You knew Vladimir Ilich?
What luck!”

“What a child you are!” Rublev thought. “But you are right.”

“And then,” she said, overcoming a slight hesitation, “I mean to get
some clothes. Pretty French things—is that wrong, do you think?”
'“Not a bit,” said Dora. “It’s a fine idea. I wish all our young people
could have lovely things.”

“That’s what I thought—just that! But my father is always saying

that clothes ought to be practical, that elaborate clothes are a survival
from barbaric cultures, that fashion is a characteristic of the capitalist
mentality . . .” The incomparably blue eyes smiled.

“Your father is a damned old puritan . . . What is he doing these

days?”

Xenia chattered on. Sometimes, at the bottom of a clear stream flowing

over pebbles, a shadow appears, troubles the eye for a moment, and
vanishes, leaving one wondering what it was, what mysterious life was
following its destiny in those depths. Suddenly the Rublevs found them-
selves listening intently. Xenia was saying:

“. . . Father has been very busy with the Tulayev case, he says it is

another plot ...”

“I had some contact with Tulayev in the past,” said Rublev in a

subdued voice. “I spoke against him in the Moscow Committee four
years ago. Winter was coming on, and of course there was a fuel
shortage. Tulayev proposed that the directors of the Combustibles Trust
be brought to trial. I got his idiotic proposal turned down.”

“. . . Father says that a great many people are compromised ... I

think—don’t repeat this, it’s very serious—I think Erchov has been
arrested . . . He was recalled from the Caucasus, but he has never
showed up anywhere ... I happened to overhear a telephone conver-
sation about his wife . . . She has apparently been arrested too . . .”

Rublev picked up his empty glass from the table, held it to his lips as

if he were drinking, and set it down. Xenia watched him in amazement.
“Kiril,” Dora asked, “what have you been drinking?” “Why, nothing,”
he said with a bewildered smile.

An uncomfortable silence followed. Xenia bowed her head. The useless

cigarette burned out between her fingers.

“And our Spain, Kiril Kirillovich,” she asked at last, with an effort

. . . “do you think it can hold out? ... I should like . . .” She did
not say what she would like.

Rublev picked up the empty glass again.

“Defeated. And it will be partly our doing.”

The end of their conversation was labored. Dora tried to start other

subjects. “Have you been to the theater lately, Xenia? What are yoti
reading?” Her questions found no answers. A damp, chill mist irresistibly
invaded the room. It dimmed the lamp. Xenia felt a stab of cold between
her shoulder blades. Rublev and Dora rose as she did. Standing there,
they overcame the mist for a moment.

“Xenia,” said Dora gently, “I wish you every happiness.”

And Xenia felt a little sad—it was like a good-by. How was she to
return their good wishes? Rublev affectionately put his arm around her
waist.

“You have shoulders like an Egyptian statuette, wider than your hips.

With those shoulders and those bright eyes of yours, you must take very
good care of yourself, Xeniuchka!”

“What do you mean?”

“Only too much. Someday you’ll understand. Bon voyage.”

At the last moment, in the narrow vestibule cluttered with heaps of

newspapers, Xenia remembered something important that she could not
leave unsaid. Her eyes clouded; she spoke in a low voice.

“I heard my father say that Ryzhik has been brought back to a prison

in Moscow, that he is on a hunger strike and very ill . . . Is he a
Trotskyist?”

“Yes.”

“A foreign agent?”

“No. A man as strong and pure as crystal.”

There was terror in the helpless look Xenia gave him.




“Then why . . . ?”

“Nothing happens in history that is not, in some sense, rational. The

best sometimes have to be broken, because they do harm precisely by
being the best. You cannot understand that yet.”

Something in her carried her toward him; she almost fell on his

chest.

“Kiril Kirillovich, are you an Oppositionist?”

“No.”

On that word, after a few caressing gestures, a few swift kisses on

Dora’s unhappy lips, they parted. Xenia’s youthful footfalls grew fainter
down the hall. To Kiril and Dora, the room looked larger, more inhospi-
table. “So it goes,” said Kiril. “So it goes,” said Dora with a sigh.

Rublev poured himself a big drink of vodka and swallowed it down.

“And you, Dora, you who have lived with me for sixteen years—do
you think I am an Oppositionist? Yes or no?”

Dora preferred not to answer. He sometimes talked to himself like that,

asking her questions with a sort of fierceness.

“Dora, I’d like to get drunk tomorrow, I think I should see more

cle'arly afterward . . . Our Party can have no Opposition, it is mono-
lithic because we reconcile thought and action for the sake of a higher
efficiency. Rather than settle which of us is right and which wrong, we
prefer to be wrong together because in that way we are stronger for the
proletariat. And it was an old mistake of bourgeois individualism to seek
truth for the sake of conscience, one conscience, my conscience. We say:
To hell with my and me, to hell with self, to hell with truth, if the Party
can be strong!”

“What Party?”

Dora’s two words, spoken in a low, cold voice, reached him at the
instant when the pendulum within him began its swing in the opposite
direction.

“. . . Obviously, if the Party is betrayed, if it is no longer the Party

of the Revolution, that position of ours is ridiculous and meaningless.
We ought to do exactly the opposite—in that case, each of us should
recover his conscience ... We need unfailing unity to hold back the
thrust of hostile forces . . . But if those forces exercise themselves pre-
cisely through our unity . . . What did you say?”

He could not sit still in the huge room. His angular frame moved

across it obliquely. He looked like a great emaciated bird of prey shut




up in a cage that was quite large but still too small. So Dora saw him. She
answered:

“I don’t know.”

“The conclusions reached concerning the Opposition from seven to
ten years ago and formulated between 1923 and 1930 would have to
be revised. We were wrong then, perhaps the Opposition was right—per-
haps, because no one knows if the course of history could be different
from what it is . . . Revise our conclusions concerning a time now
dead, struggles that are ended, outworn formulas, men sacrificed in one
way or another?”

Several days passed—Moscow days, crowding on each other, crowded

with events, cluttered with things to do, then suddenly interrupted by
limpid moments when you forget yourself in the street to stare at the
colors and the snow under a cold bright sky. Healthy young faces pass,
and you wish you could know the souls behind them, and you think that
we are a people numerous as grass, a mixture of a hundred peoples, Slavs,
Finns, Mongols, Turks, Jews, all on the march and led by girls and
youths whose blood runs golden. You think of the machines waking to
strength in the new factories; they are agile and shining, they cotitain
the power of millions of insentient slaves. In them the old suffering of toil
is extinguished forever. This new world is arising little by little out of
evil—and its people lack soap, underwear, clothes, clear knowledge,
true, simple, meaningful words, generosity; we hardly know enough to
animate our machines; there are sordid hovels around our giant facto-
ries, which are better equipped than the factories of Detroit or the Ruhr;
in those hovels men bowed under the relentless law of toil still sleep the
sleep of animals; but the factory will conquer the hovel, the machines
will give these men—or the men who will follow them, it matters little—
an astounding awakening. This unfolding of a world—machines and
masses progressing together, inevitably—makes up for many things.
Why should it not make up for the end of our generation? Overhead
expenses, an absurd ransom paid to the past. Absurd—that was the
worst part of it. And that the masses and the machines should still need
us; that, without us, they might lose their way—that was dismaying, it
was horrible. But what are we to do? To accomplish things consciously,
we have only the Party, the “cohort of iron.” Of iron and flesh and spirit.
None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we
thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of in-
numerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspira-




tion, of other yet greater masses—Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The spirit became confused, the flesh decayed, the iron rusted, because
the cohort—chosen by successive trials of doctrine, exile, imprisonment,
insurrection, power, war, work, fraternity, at a moment perhaps unique
in history—wore away, gradually invaded by intruders who spoke our
language, imitated our gestures, marched under our banners, but who
were utterly different from ourselves—moved by old appetites, neither
proletarians nor revolutionaries—profiteers . . . Enfeebled cohort, art-
fully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could
be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our
lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us,
then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to
submit. Would our resistance do anything but make bad worse? If—as
they could have done at any instant—a Bukharin, a Piatakov had sud-
denly risen in the dock to unmask their poor comrades lying through
their last hours by command, the fraudulent prosecutor, the abetting
judges, the double-dealing inquisition, the gagged Party, the stupid and
terrorized Central Committee, the devastated Political Bureau, the Chief
ridden by his nightmare—what demoralization there would have been in
the country, what jubilation in the capitalist world, what headlines in
the fascist press! “Read all about it—The Moscow Scandal, The Bol-
shevik Sink, The Chief Denounced by his Victims.” No, no—better the
end, any end. The account must be settled between ourselves, in the
heart of the new society preyed on by old ills . . .

In that iron circle Rublev’s thoughts never ceased to travel.

One evening after dinner he put on his short overcoat and his
astrakhan cap, said to Dora, “I’m going up for a breath of air,” took the
elevator, and got out on the terrace roof above the eleventh floor. An
expensive restaurant occupied it in summer; and the diners, as they
listened vaguely to the violins, looked at the innumerable lights of Mos-
cow, spellbound despite themselves by those terrestrial constellations,
whose tiniest lights guided lives at work. The place was even more beauti-
ful in winter, when there were neither diners, nor flowers, nor colored
lamp shades on the little tables, nor violins, nor odors of broiled mutton,
champagne, and cosmetics—only the vast calm night over the vast city,
the red halo of Passion Square, with its electric signs, its snow stained
by black ruts and footpaths, its swarm of people and vehicles under the
arc lights, the discreet, secret glow of its windows ... At that height,
the electric lights did not interfere with vision, the stars were clear and
distinct. Fountains of reddish light in the midst of the dense black of




buildings indicated the squares; the white boulevards disappeared into
darkness. His hands in his pockets, Rublev made the circuit of the
terrace, thinking nothing. A faint smile came to his lips. “I should have
made Dora come up to see this—it is magnificent, magnificent . .
And he stopped short, surprised—for a couple with their arms around
each other’s waists were swiftly bearing down on him, leaning forward in
a graceful attitude of flight. Skating alone on the terrace, the two lovers
swept up to Kiril Rublev, their ravished faces shone on him, they smiled
at him, leaned into a long airy curve, and were off toward the horizon—
that is, toward the other end of the terrace, from which there was a view
of the Kremlin. Rublev watched them stop there and lean on the railing;
he joined them and leaned on the railing too. They could clearly see the
high crenelated wall, the heavy watchtowers, the red flame of the flag,
lit by a searchlight, on the cupola of the Executive offices, the domes of
the cathedrals, the vast halo of Red Square.

The girl looked toward Rublev, in whom she recognized the old and

influential Bolshevik for whom a Central Committee car came every
morning—last year. She half turned to him. Her companion stroked the
back of her neck with his fingers.

“Is that where the Chief of our Party lives?” she asked, looking off

toward the towers and crenelations bright against the night.

“He has an apartment in the Kremlin, but he doesn’t often stay there,”

Rublev answered.

“Is that where he works? Somewhere under the red flag?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

The young face was thoughtful for a moment, then turned to Rublev:

“It is terrible to think that a man like him has lived for years sur-
rounded by traitors and criminals! It makes you tremble for his life . . .
Isn’t it terrible?”

Rublev echoed her hollowly: “. . . terrible.”

“Come on, Dina,” the young man murmured.

They put their arms around each other’s waists, became aerial again,

leaned forward, and, borne by a magic power, set off on their skates
toward another horizon ... A little tense, Rublev made his way to the
elevator.

In the apartment he found Dora sitting opposite a young well-dressed

man whom he did not know. Her face was pale. “Comrade Rublev, I have
brought you a message from the Moscow Committee ...” A big yellow
envelope. Merely a summons to discuss urgent business. “If you could
come at once, there is a car waiting . . .”




“But it is eleven o’clock,” Dora objected.

“Comrade Rublev will be back in twenty minutes, by car. I was told

to assure you of that.”

Rublev dismissed the messenger. “I’ll be down in three minutes.” His

eyes upon hers, he looked at his wife: her lips were colorless, her cheeks
yellowish, it was as if her face were disintegrating. She murmured:
“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It happened once before, you remember. A little

peculiar, even so.”

No light anywhere. No possible help. They kissed hurriedly, blindly,

their lips were cold. “See you later.”—“See you later.”

The Committee offices were deserted. In the secretary’s office a stout,

bemedaled Tatar, with cropped skull and a thin fringe of black hairs on
his upper lip, was reading the papers and drinking tea. He took the
summons. “Rublev? Right away . . .” He opened a dossier in which
there was only a single typewritten sheet, read it, frowning, raised his
face—the puffy, opaque, heavy face of a big eater.

“Have you your Party card with you? Please let me see it.”

from his pocketbook Rublev took the red folder in which was written:
“Member since 1907.” Over twenty years. What years!

“Right.”

The red folder disappeared into a drawer, the key turned.

“You are charged with a crime. Your card will be returned to you, if

necessary, after the investigation. That is all.”

Rublev had been waiting for the blow too long. A sort of fury bristled

bis eyebrows, clenched his jaws, squared his shoulders. The secretary
slid back a little in his revolving chair:

“I know nothing about it, those are my orders. That is all, citizen.”

Rublev walked away, strangely light, borne by thoughts like flights
of birds. So that’s the trap—the beast in the trap is you, the trapped
beast, you old revolutionist, it’s you . . . And we’re all in it, all in the
trap . . . Didn’t we all go absolutely wrong somewhere? Scoundrels,
scoundrels! An empty hall, rawly lighted, the great marble stairway, the
double revolving door, the street, the dry cold, the messenger’s black car.
Beside the messenger, who was smoking while he waited, someone else,
a low voice saying thickly: “Comrade Rublev, be so good as to come with
us for a short conversation . . .”—“I know, I know,” said Rublev
furiously, and he opened the door, flung himself into the icy Lincoln,




folded his arms, and summoned all his will power to hold down an ex-
plosion of despairing fury . . .

The snow-white and night-blue of the narrow streets passed over the

windows in parallel bands. “Slower,” Rublev ordered, and the driver
obeyed. Rublev let down the window—he wanted a good look at a bit of
street, it did not matter what street. The sidewalk glittered with untrod-
den snow. A nobleman’s residence of the past century, with its pillared
portico, seemed to have been sleeping for the last hundred years behind
its ornamental iron fence. The silvery trunks of birches shone faintly
in the garden. That was all—forever, in a perfect silence, in the purity
of a dream. City under the sea, farewell. The driver pushed down the
accelerator.—It is we who are under the sea. It doesn’t matter—we were
strong men once.


4 *