Flight Without End

V

He witnessed the victory of the Revolution.

The house in the towns displayed red flags and the women red kerchiefs. They moved about like living poppies. And the unknown Reds ruled — over the misery of the beggars and the homeless, over the ruined streets, the shot-riddled houses, the rubble in the public places, the wreckage that smelled of burning, the rooms where the sick lay, the cemeteries where graves were incessantly opened and closed, the groaning bourgeoisie who were compelled to shovel snow and clear the pavements. In the forests the faint echoes of the last shots died away. The last glow of fires flickered over the night horizons. The church-bells, ponderous or light, did not cease to sound. The wheels of the type-setting and printing machines began to turn; they were the mills of the Revolution. In a thousand squares orators addressed the people. The Red Guards marched in ragged clothes and torn boots and sang. The ruins sang. Joyfully the newborn emerged from their mothers’ wombs.

Tunda came to Moscow. He would have found it helpful, in those days when official appointments abounded, to obtain a desk and a chair. He needed only to apply. He did not do so. He listened to all the speeches, visited all the clubs, conversed with all and sundry, went to all the museums and read all the books he could get hold of. He lived at that time by writing articles for the newspapers and periodicals. There was one platitude for protests and proclamations, another for sketches and reminiscences, a third for indignation and accusation. His own sentiments were more revolutionary than these facile speeches, which he used only as a tool. Writers experience everything in terms of language, no experience is authentic if it cannot be formulated. Tunda sought enduring, well-tried and reliable definitions in order not to be swept away by his own experiences. Like a drowning man, he reached with outstretched arms towards the nearest rock. Tunda, who had joined the army in the year 1914 and had marched through the Ringstrasse in Vienna to the sound of the Radetzky March a few months later, stumbled in the torn, haphazard uniform of a Red Army man through the streets of Moscow, finding no other outlet for his emotion than the modified text of the Internationale. Now there are moments in the lives of peoples, classes, individuals, moments in which the commonplace nature of a hymn is justified by the solemnity with which it is sung. But the professional authors were no match for the victory of The Russian Revolution. All made cheap borrowings and contributed well-worn phrases to posterity. Tunda was quite unaware of the tawdriness of these words; they seemed to him as magnificent as the times in which he lived, as the victory he had fought for.

He met Natasha only at night.

They occupied a bed in a room used by three families and cooked for themselves with the help of a spirit-stove heated by petroleum. A curtain patched together out of three blue and white striped skirts served for a wall, a door, and a window. Tunda, like all men a slave to the habit known as love, rebelled doubly against the conditions Natasha had laid down by becoming jealous. He loudly upbraided Natasha in the harmless manner of naive men who think it is enough not to be seen in order not to be heard either. Moreover, the neighbours — who had gradually lost their curiosity in these conditions of proximity, much as a prisoner serving a life sentence gradually loses his eyesight — did not object to the substance of Tunda’s jealous admonitions and complaints, but rather to the disturbance they caused.

Tunda wanted to know what Natasha did all day till midnight. Even had her principles allowed it, she would not have been able to list her activities, they were so numerous. She organized women’s hostels, taught hygiene to midwives, supervised homeless children, lectured in factories where the work was interrupted so that she might interpret Marxism undisturbed, arranged revolutionary theatrical productions, conducted peasant women through museums, became absorbed in cultural propaganda, all without exchanging the wide riding-breeches in which she had fought for a skirt. She remained, as it were, a front-line fighter.

She met all Tunda’s reproaches, she forestalled them with others which were more important in the context of the significance of the times.

‘Why don’t you work?’ she scolded. ‘You’re resting on your laurels. We haven’t gained victory yet, the war goes on, it breaks out afresh every day. The struggle against the bourgeoisie is over, but the much more important battle against illiteracy is just beginning. Today we wage a holy war for the enlightenment of our masses, for the electrification of the country, against neglect of children, for the hygiene of the working class. No sacrifice on our part is too great for the Revolution,’ said Natasha, who had expressed herself with more originality in the field but could speak in no other fashion since her increased public activities.

‘You talk of sacrifices,’ retorted the naïve Tunda, who from time to time cultivated his own ideas about historical events. ‘I have often meant to ask you whether you don’t also agree with my views. I picture the period of capitalism as the period of sacrifice. Men have made sacrifices since the beginning of history. First they sacrificed children and cattle for victory, then daughters to prevent their fathers’ downfall, sons to guarantee their mothers a comfortable old age; the devout offered candles for the salvation of the dead, soldiers sacrificed their lives for the Kaiser. Must we continue to make sacrifices for the Revolution? It seems to me that at last the time has come to cease making sacrifices. We own nothing, we have abolished property, haven’t we? Our very lives don’t belong to us any more. We are free. What we have belongs to everyone. Everyone takes from us what they think they need. We are not to be sacrificed and we make no sacrifices for the Revolution. We are the Revolution.’

‘Bourgeois ideology,’ said Natasha. ‘No worker is going to fall for that. You say such extravagant things, I wonder where you get them from. You talk as if you have had at least six terms of philosophy. It’s lucky that your articles aren’t written like that. A few of them are quite good.’

Natasha showed less and less interest in love. Love now belonged to the conventions of the Civil War, the morals of the field, it was incompatible with peaceful cultural propaganda. Natasha would return home at midnight, their discussions would go on until two o’clock, and she had to be up again at seven; love would have made her daily work start an hour late.

She was also bored by Tunda, a man lacking in energy, whose decline into bourgeois ideology was evidenced by the strength of his interest in love. Nikita Kolohin, a Ukrainian communist, who fought for the national autonomy of the Ukraine and despised the Great Russians because they did not understand every word of the Ukrainian dialect, had recently begun to discuss the state of the Ukrainian nation with Natasha for hours at a stretch and had taken advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate how greatly superior he was to an Austrian officer. Natasha recalled that she herself had been born in Kiev, that she was therefore a true Ukrainian, that her place was in Kiev and only there. So she travelled with Nikita to Kiev — what else could she do?

She learned a few pithy Ukrainian expressions, travelled through the villages, awoke the peasants to their national obligations and joined up with Nikita again in Kharkov, which was no longer called Kharkov, and where a small room was available for Nikita and herself with friends.

Unfortunately, at the time, Natasha forgot to inform Tunda of her extended sojourn in the Ukraine. And this made Tunda jealous to begin with, for he assumed that one man, or several, were preventing Natasha from returning home at night. He sought her in all the clubs, all the hostels, all the editorial bureaux, all the offices. Then he grew melancholy; it was the first step to acceptance. He forgot to write articles, to earn money for the following day, he almost starved. He spoke of Natasha’s absence to a few familiar comrades. They looked at him with indifference. Each of them had undergone similar experiences during these months. Was it not taken for granted that the world must be reconstructed anew and that minor private tribulations were trivialities?

Only Ivan Alexeievich, known as Ivan the Terrible, because during the Civil War he had braided the long hair of captured priests, tied the braids together, and then forced them to run in different directions, Ivan Alexeievich who still served in the cavalry, was essentially good-natured and committed atrocities only out of an excess of fantasy, only Ivan permitted himself to engage in a long discussion about love.

‘Love,’ said Ivan, ‘has nothing whatever to do with the Revolution. During the war you slept with Natasha, she was a soldier, you were a soldier, Revolution or no Revolution, Capitalism or Socialism, love only lasts a few years anyway. Natasha is no longer a soldier, she is a politician, and you are — I don’t quite know what you are. In the old days one would have beaten a woman who didn’t come home, but how can you beat this woman who has fought like twenty men? She not only has equal rights, she has more rights than you. That’s why I never went back to my village where my wife lives with five children (unless she’s had any more, but the first five are mine). Before I joined the Red Army I used to beat them all, all five and my wife too. Now I’ve been converted; if I were to go home I’d have to say to myself: ‘Thrashing is out’. But it would go against the grain, I’d still want to thrash one or other of my family, and I wouldn’t dare. And so conflicts would develop and there just couldn’t be a decent family life if I had to control myself all the time.’

Even Natasha’s return brought Tunda no consolation. She arrived after some weeks, had to see a doctor, and gave no more heed either to Tunda or to the Ukrainian state. She stayed in bed for a week; Tunda looked after the spirit stove. Anyone familiar with this activity will understand that it is calculated to drive even sentimental men to distraction. Tunda’s love, which had given way to cooking, simply faded away during these eight days.

With the help of some old friends from the period of military communism he found a desk-job. He sat in the office of a newly-founded institute whose task it was to create new national cultures for some small peoples in the Caucasus by furnishing them with a new alphabet, primers and primitive newspapers. Tunda was commissioned to travel to the Caucasus with specimen newspapers, magazines and propaganda material, to the River Terek, on whose banks lived a small people which according to ancient statistics numbered some twelve thousand souls.

He lived for some weeks in the house of a relatively well-to-do Tartar, who practised hospitality on religious grounds and treated inconvenient strangers with friendly solicitude.

Little remained for Tunda to do. Some of the young folk had already taken control of culture, formed clubs and composed wall-newspapers.

It emerged that the people were not learning fast enough. They had to be helped with films. Tunda became the director of a cinema, which was however only able to operate three times a week.

Among his regular visitors was a girl called Alja, daughter of a Georgian father and a Tadzhik mother.

The girl lived with her uncle, a potter, who practised his vocation in the open air and with quite a marked talent, but who had also become somewhat stupid as a result of his monotonous existence. He was unable to converse and, to make himself understood, employed only a few fragmentary phrases which he seemed to extract slowly from his brain with the aid of his fingers.

The girl was beautiful and placid. She moved around as if cloaked in silence. Many animals engender such a silence in which they then spend their lives, as if they had made a vow to serve some secret and elevated purpose. The girl was silent, her great brown eyes lay in dark blue pools, she walked as erect as if she carried a pitcher on her head, her hands lay always on her lap as if under an apron.

This girl was Tunda’s second love.