Flight Without End

XII

Why had he left Russia? Tunda might be labelled immoral and unprincipled. Men who have a clear sense of direction and a moral objective, as well as those who are ambitious, look different from my friend Tunda.

My friend was the very model of an unreliable character. He was so unreliable that no one could even accuse him of egoism.

He did not strive for so-called personal advantage. His ideas were as little egoistic as they were moralistic. If it were absolutely necessary to characterize him by some particular attribute, I would say that his most significant quality was the desire for freedom. For he was as willing to throw away his assets as he was able to avert what was of disadvantage. For the most part he behaved as the mood took him, occasionally from conviction, always from necessity. He possessed more vitality than the Revolution could dispose of at the time. He possessed more independence than can be utilized by any theory that endeavours to make life conform to it. Basically he was a European, an ‘individualist’, as educated people say. He required complex situations to enjoy life to the full. He needed an atmosphere of tangled falsehoods, false ideals, seeming health, arrested decay, red-painted ghosts, the atmosphere of cemeteries that look like ballrooms, or factories, or castles, or schools or drawing-rooms. He required the proximity of skyscrapers that always look as if they are about to topple and yet are certain to endure for centuries.

He was a ‘modern man’.

Admittedly, he found the thought of his fiancée, Irene, enticing. If he had strayed somewhat from the path he had taken six years before, he now returned to it. Where did she live? How did she live? Did she love him? Had she waited for him? What would he be like today if he had reached her then?

I confess that, after reading Tunda’s letter, these were the questions I considered first, rather than the more immediate one of how to help Tunda. I knew that he was one of those men to whom material security means absolutely nothing. He was never afraid of going under. He was never concerned about hunger, which determines almost all present-day human activities. It is a kind of talent for survival. I know a few men of this kind. They live like fish in water: always on the lookout for plunder, never in fear of destruction. They are proof against both wealth and poverty. They do not show the signs of deprivation; and they are thereby equipped with a hard-heartedness which allows them not to register the private needs of others. They are the greatest enemies of compassion and of the so-called social conscience.

They are therefore the natural enemies of society.

It did not occur to me to help Tunda till a week later. I sent him a suit and wondered whether I should not write to his brother, to whom Tunda had not spoken since he entered the Cadet School.