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

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,