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

humbly, and walked away among the dark trees, his shoulders sagging.
    All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty Boxes . Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales. Romachkin bought some pickled mushrooms and reserved a place in a line that was forming for sausage. From a comparatively well-lighted street he turned into another that was dark, and walked up it. Electric signs, themselves invisible, filled the end of it with an orange glory. Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman’s voice rose, rapid and vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful — that voice without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly cold. The woman’s voice clamored: “In the name of the four thousand women workers …” Romachkin’s brain passively echoed: In the name of the four thousand women workers in this factory … And four thousand women of all ages — seductive women, women prematurely old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women of whom he dared not dream — were present in him for an incalculable instant, and they all cried: “We demand the death penalty for these vile dogs! No pity!” (“Can you mean it, women?” Romachkin answered severely. “No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of us …”) “To the firing squad with them!” Factory meetings continued during the trial of the engineers — or was it the economists, or the food control board, or the Old Bolsheviks, who were being tried this time? Romachkin walked on. Twenty steps farther he stopped again, this time in front of a lighted window. Between the curtains he saw a table set for supper — tea, plates, hands, only hands on the checked linoleum: a fat hand holding a fork, a gray slumbering hand, a child’s hand … A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry of the meetings: “Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them!” Who? It didn’t matter. Why?
    Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inexplicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers. “Good evening, Comrade Romachkin. Have you heard? Marfa and her husband have been refused passports because they were disenfranchised as artisans formerly working on their own account. Have you heard? Old Bukin has been arrested, they say he had hidden dollars sent him by his brother, who is a dentist in Riga … And the engineer has lost his job, he’s suspected of sabotage. Have you heard? There is going to be a fresh purge of employees, get ready for it, I heard at the house committee meeting that your father was an officer …” — “It’s not true,” said Romachkin, choking, “he was only a sergeant during the imperialist war, he was an accountant …” (But since that right-thinking accountant had belonged to the Russian People’s Union, Romachkin’s conscience was not entirely at ease.) — “Try to produce witnesses, they say the commissions are severe … They say there is trouble in the Smolensk region — no more wheat …” — “I know, I know … Come and play checkers, Piotr Petrovich …” They went to Romachkin’s room, and his neighbor began telling his own troubles in a low voice: his wife’s first husband had been a shopkeeper, so it was more than likely that her passport