The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask

“Of course. Sexual needs are influenced by diet …” Thus encouraged, the girl talked of what was happening in the country. “I just got back from my village, oh cholera!” Cholera must be her favorite word, he thought. She said it charmingly, now blowing out a straight stream of cigarette smoke, now spitting sidewise. “The horses are all gone, cholera! What will people do now? First they took the best horses for the collective, then the township cooperative refused to furnish fodder for the ones the peasants had been left or had refused to give up. Anyway, there wasn’t any more fodder because the army requisitioned the last of it. The old people, who remembered the last famine, fed them roof thatch — imagine what fodder that makes for the poor beasts after it’s been out under rain and sun for years! Cholera! It made you weep to see them, with their sad eyes and their tongues hanging out and their ribs sticking through their sides — I swear they really came through the hide! — and their swollen joints and little boils all over their bellies and their backs full of pus and blood and worms eating right into the raw flesh — the poor creatures were rotting alive — we had to put bands under their bellies to hold them up at night or they’d never have been able to get back on their legs in the morning. We let them wander around the yards and they licked the fence palings and chewed the ground to find a scrap of grass. Where I come from, horses are more precious than children. There are always too many children to feed, they come when nobody wants them — do you think there was any need for me to come into the world? But there are never enough horses to do the farm work with. With a horse, your children can grow up; without a horse a man is not a man any more, is he? No more home — nothing but hunger, nothing but death…. Well, the horses were done for — there was no way out. The elders met. I was in the corner by the stove. There was a little lamp on the table, and I had to keep trimming the wick — it smoked. What was to be done to save the horses? The elders couldn’t even speak, they were so sunk. Finally my father — he looked terrible, his mouth was all black — said: ‘There’s nothing to be done. We’ll have to kill them. Then they won’t suffer any more. There’s always the leather. As for us, we will die or not, as God pleases.’ Nobody said anything after that, it was so quiet that I could hear the roaches crawling under the stove bricks. My old man got up slowly. ‘I’ll do it,’ says he. He took the ax from under the bench. My mother threw herself on him: ‘Nikon Nikonich, pity …’ He looked as if he needed pity himself, with his face all screwed up like a murderer. ‘Silence, woman,’ says he. ‘You, girl, come and hold a light for us.’ I brought the lamp. The stable was against the house; when the mare moved at night we heard her. It was comforting. She saw us come in with the light, and she looked at us sadly, like a sick man, there were tears in her eyes. She hardly turned her head because her strength was nearly gone. Father kept the ax hidden, because the mare would surely have known. Father went up to her and patted her cheeks. ‘You’re a good mare, Brownie. It’s not my fault if you have suffered. May God forgive me — — ’ Before the words were out of his mouth Brownie’s skull was split open. ‘Clean the ax,’ Father said to me. ‘Now we have nothing.’ How I cried that night! — outside, because they would have beaten me if I’d cried in the house. I think everybody in the village hid somewhere and cried …” Romachkin gave her an extra fifty kopecks. Then she wanted to kiss him on the mouth — “You’ll see how, darling” — but he said “No, thank you,”