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

for Moscow would not be renewed. “They give you three days to get out, Comrade Romachkin, and you have to go somewhere at least two hundred miles away — but will they give you a passport there?” If it turned out that way, their daughter obviously couldn’t enter the Forestry School. Gilded by the lamplight, the ax came down on the head of a horse with human eyes, voices lashed through fiery darkness demanding victims, stations were filled with crowds waiting almost hopelessly for trains which crawled over the map toward the last wheat, the last meat, the last combines; a prostitute from the Boulevard Trubnoy lay gaping wide open on a pallet beside a sleeping child pink as a sucking pig, pure as the innocents Herod slaughtered, and a prostitute cost money, five rubles, a day’s pay — yes, he must find witnesses to face the new purge with, was the new rent scale going into effect? If in all this there was not some immense wrong, some boundless guilt, some hidden villainy, it must be that a sort of madness filled everyone’s brain. The game of checkers was over. Piotr Petrovich went home, thinking of his troubles: “Most serious, the matter of the interior passport …” Romachkin turned down his bed, undressed, rinsed out his mouth, and lay down. The electric light burned on his bed table, the sheet was white, the portraits mute — ten o’clock. Before he went to sleep, he read the paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech: Our economic successes … Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen people, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises, unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages, as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skeptics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent of Opposition in their secret hearts! — It was set forth in angular periods, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six commandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic certainty … Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in prices…. But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. “Continued applause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for minutes. Salvos of shouts: ‘Long live our unconquerable Chief! Long live our great Pilot! Long live the Political Bureau! Long live the Party!’ The ovation is resumed. Numerous voices: ‘Long live the Secret Police!’ Thunderous applause.”
    Feeling unfathomably sad, Romachkin thought: How he lies! — and was terrified at his own audacity. No one, fortunately, could hear him think; his room was empty; somebody came out of the toilet, walked down the hall dragging his slippers — no doubt it was old Schlem, who had stomach trouble; a sewing machine purred softly; before getting into bed, the couple across the hall were quarreling in little sentences that hissed like lashes. He felt the man pinching the woman, slowly twisting her hair, making her kneel down, then hitting her across the face with the back of his hand; the whole hall knew it, the couple had been reported, but they denied it and were reduced to torturing each other without making any noise, as, afterward, they cohabited without making any noise, moving