Read Online The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask - Free Book Online

like wary animals. And the people listening at the door heard almost nothing, but sensed everything. — Twenty-two people lived in the six rooms and the windowless nook at the back: twenty-two people, all clearly recognizable by the most furtive sounds they made in the stillness of night. Romachkin turned out the light. The feeble glow of a street light came through the curtain, tracing the usual pictures on the ceiling. They varied monotonously from day to day. In the half-light, the Chief’s massive profile was superimposed on the figure of the man who was silently beating his wife in the room across the hall. Would she ever escape from her bondage? Shall we ever escape from falsehood? The responsibility was his who lied in the face of an entire people. The terrible thought which, until now, had matured in the dark regions of a consciousness that feared itself, that pretended to ignore itself, that struggled to disguise itself before the mirror within, now stripped off its mask. So, at night, lightning reveals a landscape of twisted trees above a chasm. Romachkin felt an almost visual revelation. He saw the criminal. A translucent flame flooded his soul. It did not occur to him that his new knowledge might avail him nothing. Henceforth it would possess him, would direct his thoughts, his eyes, his steps, his hands. He fell asleep with his eyes wide open, suspended between ecstasy and fear.
    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,