The Case of Comrade Tulayev (7 page)

Romachkin took to haunting the Great Market — sometimes before the office opened in the morning, sometimes late in the afternoon after his work was done. There, from dawn to dark, several thousand human beings formed a stagnant crowd which might almost have appeared motionless, so patient and wary were their comings and goings. Patches of color, human faces, objects, were all overwhelmed by the uniform gray of the trodden muddy ground which never dried out; misery marked every creature there with its crushing imprint. It was in the suspicious eyes of market women swathed in shapeless wool or prints, in the earthy faces of soldiers who could no longer really be soldiers, though they still wore vague uniforms that had been in battle only to flee; it was in the frayed cloth of overcoats, in hands that held out unexpected wares: a Samoyed reindeer glove fringed with red and green and lined inside — “Soft as down, citizen, just feel it” — a solitary glove, as it was the solitary merchandise the little Kalmuck thief had to offer today. Difficult to tell sellers from buyers, as they stood shifting their feet or prowled slowly around one another. “A watch, a watch, a good Cyma watch — buy it?” The watch ran only seven minutes — “What a movement, listen, citizen!” — just long enough for the seller to pocket your fifty rubles and vanish. A sweater, worn at the collar and patched in the body, ten rubles — done! A man dead of typhoid had soaked it with his sweat? — Certainly not, citizen, that's only the smell of the trunk it was in. “Tea, real caravan tea,
t'ai, t'ai
.” The slant-eyed Chinaman chants the magic syllables over and over, looking at you hard, then passes on; if you answer him with a wink he half pulls out of his sleeve a tiny, square painted packet in which Kutzetsov tea used to come in the old days. “It's the real thing. From the Gepeou co-op.” Is he sneering, the Chinese, or is it the shape of his mouth, with those greenish teeth, that makes him look as if he were sneering? Why does he mention the Gepeou? Can he belong to it? Strange that he's not arrested, that he's there every day — but they are all there every day, the three thousand speculators, male and female, between the ages of ten and eighty — no doubt because it's impossible to arrest them all at once, and because, no matter how many raids the police make, the creatures are legion. Among them too, their caps pulled down to their eyes, stalk the police detectives in search of their prey: murderers, escaped convicts, crooks, renegade counter-revolutionaries. This swarming mass of human beings has an imperceptible structure, like an ancient bog. (Watch your pockets and shake yourself well when you leave, you will certainly have picked up some lice; and beware of those lice, they come from the country, from prisons, from trains, from the huts of Eurasia — they carry typhus; you can pick them up from the ground, you know; people that have them sow them as they walk, and the filthy little insect, who's looking for a living too, climbs up your legs till it gets to the warm place — they know what they're doing, the little beasts! What — you really believe that the day will come when men won't have lice? True Socialism — eh? — with butter and sugar for everybody? Maybe, to increase human happiness, there'll be soft, perfumed lice that caress you?) Romachkin vaguely listened to the tall bearded man who was discussing lice with evident enjoyment. He followed “Butter Alley,” where of course there was no alley and no butter to be seen, but simply two lines of standing women, some of them holding lumps of butter wrapped in cloths; others, who had not paid the inspector for their places, kept their butter hidden in their bodices, between waist and breasts. (Now and again one of them was arrested: “Aren't you ashamed of yourself, speculator!”) Farther on was the section of illegally slaughtered cattle, meat brought in the bottoms of sacks, under vegetables, under grain, under anything, and which the sellers scarcely showed. “Good fresh meat — buy it?” From under her cloak the woman produced a shin of beef wrapped in a blood-stained newspaper. How much? Just feel it! A sinister fellow with an epileptic tic held a peculiar piece of black meat in his crooked sorcerer's claws, saying not a word. You can even eat that, it's cheap, all you have to do is cook it well, and the only way to cook it, of course, is in a tin dish over a fire in some empty lot! Do you like stories about women who have been dismembered, citizen? I know some interesting ones. A small boy went by, carrying a kettle and glasses, selling boiled water at ten kopecks a glass. Here began the legally constituted market, with its wares duly displayed on the ground. But what wares! An incredible juxtaposition of dark glasses, oil lamps, chipped teapots, old snapshots, books, dolls, scrap iron, dumbbells, nails (the big ones were sold by the piece, the small ones, which you examined one by one to make sure the points weren't broken, by the dozen), china, bibelots from the old days, shells, spittoons, teething rings, dancing slippers still vaguely gilt, a top hat which had belonged to a circus rider or a dandy under the old regime, things impossible to classify, but which
could
be sold because they
were
sold, because people lived by selling them — flotsam from innumerable wrecks battered by the waves of more than one flood. Not far from the Armenian theater, Romachkin at last found himself interested in someone, in something. The Armenian theater was composed of a number of large boxes covered with black cloth and pierced with a dozen oval holes, into which the spectators put their faces — thus their bodies remained outside while their heads were in wonderland. “Still three places free, comrades, only fifty kopecks, the show is about to begin — The Mysteries of Samarkand in ten scenes with thirty actors in real colors.” Having found his three clients, the Armenian disappeared behind the curtain to pull the strings of his mysterious marionettes and make them all talk himself, in thirty different voices — houris with long eyes, wicked old women, servants, children, fat Turkish merchants, a gypsy fortuneteller, a thin devil with a beard and horns — imitating the fire-eating assassin, the amorous tenor, the brave Red soldier … Not far away a squatting Tatar watched over his merchandise: felt hats, carpets, a saddle, daggers, a yellow quilt covered with strange stains, a very old fowling piece. “A good gun,” he said soberly as Romachkin bent over it. “Three hundred.” Thus they became acquainted. The fowling piece was useless, except to attract the dangerous client. “I have another one at home that's brand new,” the Tatar — Akhim — finally said at their fourth meeting, after they had drunk tea together. “Come and see it.”

Akhim lived at the end of a courtyard surrounded by white birches, in the district of quiet, clean little alleys around Kropotkin Street (they had to go through Death Street to reach it). There, in a cavern darkened by the hides and felts that hung from the ceiling, Akhim displayed a magnificent Winchester with two shining blue barrels — “twelve hundred rubles, my friend.” That was Romachkin's salary for six months, and the gun was not at all the weapon for what he had in mind — only two shots, clumsy to transport. Well, by sawing off part of the barrel and two thirds of the stock, it could be carried under an ordinary suit. Romachkin hesitated, weighing the pros and cons. By going into debt, by selling everything he owned which was salable, and even stealing a few things from the office besides, he could not get together six hundred … A series of dull explosions shook the walls and rattled the windowpanes. “What's that?” — “Nothing, my friend, they're dynamiting St. Saviour's Cathedral.” They dropped the subject. “No, really,” Romachkin said, “I can't, it's too expensive. Besides …” He had said that he was a hunter, a member of the official hunter's association, and consequently had a permit … Akhim's face changed, Akhim's voice changed, he went for the singing tea-kettle, poured tea into their glasses, sat down opposite Romachkin on a low stool, and drank the amber beverage with relish; doubtless he was getting ready to say something important, perhaps his final price, nine hundred? Romachkin could no more get together nine hundred than twelve hundred. It was devastating. After a long silence he heard Akhim's caressing voice mingling with the distant boom of an explosion:

“If it is to kill somebody, I have something better …”

“Better?” Romachkin asked, gasping for breath …

On the table, between their glasses, lay a Colt revolver with a short barrel and a black cylinder — a forbidden weapon, the mere presence of which was a crime — a fine clean Colt, calling the hand, fortifying the will.

“Four hundred, my friend.”

“Three hundred,” said Romachkin unconsciously, already filled with the Colt's spell.

“Three hundred — take it, my friend,” said Akhim, “because my heart trusts you.”

It was only as he went out that Romachkin noticed how strangely neglected and disorderly Akhim's quarters looked. It was not a place where anyone lived, it was a place where someone was waiting to vanish, in a confusion like a station platform during the rout of an army. Under the white birches, Akhim smiled at him mildly. Romachkin set out through the peaceful little streets. The heavy Colt lay against his chest, in the inside pocket of his coat. From what robbery, what murder on the distant steppe, did it come? Now it lay against the heart of a pure man whose one thought was justice.

He stopped for a moment at the entrance to a huge construction yard. There was a wide view under the liquid blue of the moon. In the distance, through scaffolding and the rubble of demolished buildings, he could see the waters of the Moskva, as through the crenelations of a ruined fortress. To the right was the scaffolding of an uncompleted skyscraper; to the left rose the citadel of the Kremlin, with the heavy flat façade of the Great Palace, the tall tower of Czar Ivan, the pointed turrets of the enclosing wall, the bulbous domes of the cathedrals rising against the starry sky. Here searchlights reigned, men ran through a zone of harsh white light, a sentry ordered back a crowd of gapers. The wounded mass of the Cathedral of St. Saviour occupied the foreground; the great gilded cupola that had crowned it was gone like an ancient dream, the building rested heavily on the beginning of its own ruins; a dark crack a hundred feet long split it from top to bottom, like a dead lightning bolt in the masonry. “There it goes!” someone said. A woman's voice murmured, “My God!” Thunder burrowed through the ground, shook the ground, made the whole moonlit landscape rock fantastically, set the river sparkling, set people shuddering. Smoke rose slowly, the thunder rolled over the ground and vanished in a silence like the end of the world; a deep sigh rose from the mass of stone, and it began to sink in upon itself with a snapping of bones, a cracking of beams, a desolate look of suffering. “That's done it!” cried a little bareheaded engineer to several dust-covered workmen who, like himself, had emerged from the cloud. Romachkin, having read it in the papers, thought that life progressed through destruction, that things must perpetually be torn down so that things could be built, that the old stones must be killed so that new buildings, better ventilated and worthier of man, might rise; that on this spot would one day stand the beautiful Palace of the Peoples of the Union — in which perhaps iniquity would no longer reign. A slight unacknowledged grief mingled with these grandiose ideas as he resumed his walk toward the place where he could catch Streetcar A.

He put the Colt on the table. Bluish-black, it filled the room with its presence. Eleven o'clock. He bent over it in thought for a moment before he went to bed. On the other side of the partition Kostia moved; he was reading, from time to time he looked up at the radiant miniature. The two men felt each other's nearness. Kostia drummed gently against the partition with his fingertips. Romachkin answered in the same fashion: Yes, come! Should he hide the Colt before Kostia came in? His hesitation lasted only a hundredth part of a second. The first thing Kostia saw as he entered was the magical blue-black steel on the white paper tablecloth. Kostia picked up the Colt and bounced it happily up and down in his hand. “Magnificent!” He had never held a revolver before, he felt childishly happy. He was rather tall, with a high forehead, unruly hair, and sea-green eyes. “How well you hold it!” said Romachkin admiringly. And in fact the Colt increased Kostia's stature, giving him the look of a proud young warrior. “I bought it,” Romachkin explained, “because I like firearms. I used to hunt, but a shotgun is too expensive … A double-barreled Winchester costs twelve hundred — think of it!” Kostia only half listened to the embarrassed explanation: that his timid neighbor should own a revolver amused him, and he made no attempt to hide his amusement — his whole face lit up with a smile … “You will certainly never use it, Romachkin,” he said. Romachkin answered warily: “I don't know … Of course I have no use for it. What should I use it for? I have no enemies … But a firearm is a beautiful thing. It makes you think …”

“Of assassins?”

“No. Of just men.”

Kostia suppressed a guffaw. A fine hero
you'd
make, my poor friend! — A good sort, though. The little man was looking at him quite seriously. Kostia feared that he would hurt him if he joked. They chatted a few minutes just as usual. “Have you read Issue 12 of
Prison
?” Romachkin asked before they separated. — “No — is it interesting?” — “Very. It has the story of the attempt on Admiral Dubassov in 1906 …” Kostia took Issue 12 with him.

But Romachkin himself did not want to reread any accounts of those red-letter days of the Revolution. They were too discouraging. Those historic assassinations had required meticulous preparation, disciplined organization, money, months of work, of watching, of waiting, courage linked with courage; besides, they had often failed. If he had really thought about it, his plan would have appeared completely visionary. But he did not think — thoughts formed and dissolved in him without control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life in that fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accurately, more clearly, but that such thinking is a strange labor which one performs almost in spite of oneself and which often results in a bitter pleasure, beyond which there is nothing. Whenever he could — whether in the morning, afternoon, or evening — Romachkin explored a certain locality in the center of the city: Staraia Place, an old square on which stands a sort of bank building in gray freestone; at the entrance there is a black glass plate with gold lettering:
Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the U.S.S.R., Central Committee
. A guard silhouetted in the hall. Elevators. Across the narrow square, the old white crenelated wall of Kitai-Gorod, the “Chinese City.” Cars drew up. There was always someone smoking thoughtfully at the corner … No, not here. Impossible here. Romachkin could not have said why. Because of the white crenelated wall, the severe gray freestone blocks, the emptiness? The ground was too hard, it bewildered his feet, he felt that he had neither weight nor substance. In the vicinity of the Kremlin, on the other hand, the breezes that swept through the gardens carried him across Red Square in all his insignificance, and when he stopped for a moment before Lenin's tomb, he was as anonymous as the gaping provincials who stopped with him; the faded, twisted domes of St. Vasili the Blessed dwarfed him even more. It was not until he had mounted the three steps of the Place of Execution that he felt himself again. It had been there for centuries, surrounded by a small circular stone balcony. How many men had died there? Of them all, nothing survived in the souls of the passers-by — except in his. Just as simply would he have laid himself on the wheel that should break his limbs. The mere thought of the atrocious torture set his skin shivering. But what else was there to do when one had come thus far? From that day on, he carried the Colt whenever he went out.