Flight Without End

IV

I have narrated how Tunda began to fight for the Revolution. It was an accident.

He did not forget his betrothed, but found himself no longer on the way to her but actually in the neighbourhood of Kiev and marching towards the Caucasus. He wore a red star; his boots were in shreds. He still did not know whether he was in love with this girl comrade. But one day when, following an ancient tradition, he declared his allegiance he was confronted with her opposition to such poetic nonsense and experienced the collapse of traditional laws.

‘I shall never leave you,’ said Franz Tunda.

‘I shall get rid of you!’ retorted the girl.

Her name was Natasha Alexandrovna. She was the daughter of a clockmaker and a peasant woman, had made an early marriage with a manufacturer of French perfumery and left him after a year. She was twenty-three years old. Her expression changed from time to time. Her arched forehead became creased, her thick short eyebrows moved close together, the fine skin of her nose became taut over the bone, her nostrils narrowed, her lips — usually round and half-open — pressed together like two bitter enemies, her neck reached out like a searching animal. Her pupils, usually brown and round, in thin gold circles, could become narrow green ovals between contracted lids like swords in their sheaths. She did not want to acknowledge her beauty, rebelled against herself, regarded her femininity as a reversion to bourgeois conceptions and the entire female sex as the unwarranted residue of a defeated expiring world. She was braver than the whole of the male troop with whom she fought. She did not realize that courage is a virtue in women and cowardice the prudence of men. Neither did she realize that all the men were her comrades only because they loved her. She was unaware that men are chaste and ashamed to betray their affection. She had taken none of them; she had not acknowledged the love of a single one because she was more bourgeois than she dared to admit to herself.

The men of her troop were sailors, workers, peasants, uneducated men of animal innocence. Tunda was the only man of bourgeois origin. She took him immediately. She did not accept that this was a significant relapse into bourgeois behaviour. She acknowledged his sexual parity, she ridiculed his bourgeois outlook. Out of these qualities she decided to make a revolutionary. She did not realize that she was able to succeed in this only because, though surrounded by all the others, she and he nevertheless lived on an isolated island and, despite their differing convictions, came to understand each other more quickly than anyone else.

Natasha Alexandrovna fell thoroughly in love with Tunda, in accordance with all the contested rules of love of the old world she denied. And so, when she said: ‘I shall get rid of you,’ she did not know she lied. Tunda began by swearing eternal love with the assurance of all the superficial men to whom many clever women have fallen prey. It was only the persistent, contrary and determined resistance of the woman and her self-conscious and — to him — inexplicably offhand refusal of all the delights of male seductiveness that made him fall in love for the first time in his life.

Only at this point did his betrothed recede into the distance, and the whole of his earlier life with her. His past was like a country abandoned for ever, the years he had spent there utterly meaningless. His fiancée’s photograph was a souvenir like the picture postcard of a street one has once lived in, his former name on his genuine documents like an old out-of-date police registration form.

Natasha once saw the photograph of his fiancée and, although jealous, handed him back the picture in unconcerned fashion, saying:

‘A good bourgeois type!’

It was as if she had been commenting on an antique pistol, properly constructed for its period but now completely superseded and quite unfit for use in modern revolutionary warfare.

How well she knew how to apportion the hours of their day, to combine comradeship with the delights of love, and love with the duties of combat!

‘We are moving forward at eleven-thirty,’ she said to Tunda. ‘It’s nine now. We eat till half-past, you draw the map for Andrej Pavlovich, you will be ready at ten, we can sleep together till eleven-thirty if you aren’t afraid of being too tired by then.’ ‘It’s all the same to me!’ she added with faint scorn, convinced that she had once more demonstrated her masculine superiority.

She remained alert, monitoring her pleasure as a sentry monitors the noises of the night. Bodily love was a call of nature. Natasha elevated love almost to a revolutionary duty, so giving herself a clear conscience. Tunda had always pictured women soldiers like this. It was as if this woman had stepped out of a book, and he submitted to her existence, validated by literature, with admiration and the humble loyalty of a man who, following false conventions, sees in a resolute woman an exception and not the rule.

He was a revolutionary; he loved Natasha and the Revolution.

Natasha devoted many hours of the day to the ‘political enlightenment’ of himself and her people, and to giving Tunda special supplementary instruction because he understood less about the Revolution than the workers and sailors.

It was a long time before he gave up thinking of the word ‘proletariat’ in terms of Maundy Thursday. He was in mid-revolution and he still missed the barricades. Whenever his men — for he commanded them now — sang The Internationale, he sprang to his feet with the guilty conscience of a traitor, he cried Hurrah with the embarrassment of a stranger or guest who, on a chance visit, must join in the observance of some ceremonial. It was a long time before he was able to stop himself wincing when his companions called him ‘comrade’. He himself preferred to call them by their names and, in the early days was suspect on account of this.

‘We are in the first stage of the World Revolution,’ said Natasha at each lesson. ‘Men like you still belong to the old world but can render us good service. So we take you along with us. You are a traitor to the middle class to which you belong, so you are welcome to us. Maybe you can be made into a revolutionary but you will always be a bourgeois at heart. You were an officer, the deadliest weapon in the hands of the ruling class, you have exploited the proletariat, you should have been exterminated. See, then, how magnanimous the proletariat can be! It acknowledges your understanding of tactics, it forgives you, it even allows itself to be led by you.’

‘I lead it only for your sake, because I love you,’ said the old-fashioned Tunda.

‘Love! Love!’ cried Natasha. “You can tell that to your fiancée! I despise your love. What is it? You can’t even explain it. You’ve heard a word, read it in your lying books and poetry, in your family journals! Love! It’s all been wonderfully laid out for you: here you have the dwelling-house, there’s the factory or the delicatessen shop, over there the barracks with the brothel close by, and the summer-house in the middle. For you it’s as if it were the most important thing in your world, you invest in it everything that is noble, fine, and tender in you and deposit your baseness in everything else. Your writers are either blind or corrupt, they believe in your architecture, they write about feelings instead of affairs, about the heart instead of money, they describe the costly pictures on the walls and not the accounts in the banks.’

‘I’ve only read detective stories,’ interpolated Tunda timidly.

‘Yes, detective stories! Where the police come out on top and the burglar is caught, or where the burglar is the winner simply because he is a gentleman and pleases the ladies and wears a frock-coat. If you’re only with us because of me I’d shoot you,’ said Natasha.

‘Yes, only because of you!’ said Tunda.

She sighed and suffered him to live.

It is is unimportant whether anyone becomes a revolutionary through lectures, reflection, experience or through love. One day they marched into a village in the province of Samara. A priest and five peasants who were accused of having tortured Red Army men to death were brought before Tunda. He ordered the priest and the five peasants to be tied up and shot. Their corpses he left as a warning. He hated even the dead. He took personal revenge on them. This was taken for granted; none of the band were surprised at it.

Did it not surprise them that a man could kill without wanting to do so?

‘You did it for me,’ said Natasha scornfully.

For the first time, however, Tunda had not done something for Natasha’s sake. As she reproached him it occurred to him that he had not been thinking of her at all. But he did not admit it.

‘Of course it was for you!’ he lied.

She rejoiced and despised him.

He would have shot all his comrades from the Cadet School and from his regiment in the name of the Revolution. One day a political commissar was allocated to the section, a Jew who had adopted the name of Nirunov, a writer who rapidly turned out newspapers and proclamations, who delivered inflammatory speeches before an attack, and whose clumsiness in conversation equalled his ability to inspire. This man, ugly, shortsighted, foolish, fell in love with Natasha, who treated him as a political equal. Tunda wanted to be able to speak just like the commissar, he emulated him. He adopted the politician’s technical expressions, he learned them by heart with the facility of a man in love. One day the commissar was wounded and had to be left behind; after that it was Tunda who delivered the political addresses and issued the proclamations.

He fought in the Ukraine and on the Volga; he moved into the mountains of the Caucasus and marched back to the Urals. His band melted away, he found reinforcements, he recruited peasants, shot traitors and deserters and spies, infiltrated the enemy’s rear, spent several days in a town occupied by the Whites, was arrested, escaped. He loved the Revolution and Natasha like a knight, he got to know marshes, fever, cholera, hunger, typhus, barracks without medicaments, the taste of mouldy bread. He quenched his thirst with blood, he knew the pain of burning frost, of freezing in the pitiless nights, the languor of hot days, once in Kazan he heard Trotsky speak, the hard factual speech of the Revolution, he loved the people. He remembered his former world now and again as one remembers an old garment, he called himself Baranowicz, he was a revolutionary. He hated the rich peasants, the foreign armies who helped the White Guards, he hated the generals who fought against the Reds. His comrades began to love him.