A True Story
Serge, Victor
Published here for the first time in English, "A True Story" was written in 1946 when its author was living in Mexico. The Russian writer Victor Serge (1889-1947) was one of the most attractive...
...A pity," I said lightly...
...I will sign her exit pass...
...Drink it very hot...
...I can only offer you carrot tea," said the doctor...
...an excapitalist...
...The doctor received me in an office, heated by a stove and quite pleasant...
...The citizens were visibly dazzled by the daylight...
...Nestor Petrovich Yuriev, a friend of literature...
...Perhaps," I said...
...I watched their arrival through the smudgy double window pane, without trying to hide...
...He is resistant...
...We visited several rooms...
...Party member...
...He loved his ascetic existence and its privations, living cloistered in a little hell ignored by the world...
...We went on for a while in that vein...
...The cargo of prisoners from the political police consisted on that day of calm lunatics and rational neurotics, who were merely stunned by fear...
...It would put the courage to live into those who couldn't afford even a quarter liter . . . Beneficent shynkarka...
...She doesn't know what else to do...
...His university frock coat was nothing but creases and the color of faded poverty...
...The hospital, of course, no longer bore the name of the healing saint, but nobody knew its new name and I have forgotten it...
...Try to understand me beyond my words...
...You know that our patients often have surprising physical endurance...
...Enough...
...Yuriev signed his forty Appeals, but not because of pride...
...Good morning, Citizen," he said calmly, in a well-modulated voice...
...she needs only two rubles' capital...
...His bag was packed...
...You haven't been ill-treated...
...She examined me with great care and said quietly: "Who are you...
...We saw, through the dusty double windows, the dismal garden with the barren trees...
...This is the hour they arrive, and I must receive them...
...Yes, yes," I said sincerely...
...But, Doctor, why don't you send a report to the GPU...
...Of course...
...Excuse me again...
...His books are now kept under official seal, and that torments him a bit...
...a serious business, charged with violating several sections of paragraph 58 of the Criminal Code...
...They don't like methere...
...An elite of yesterday...
...A glass of tea, perhaps, after our little inspection tour...
...What do you think...
...he was ready...
...For some thirty years, Yuriev sold newspapers somewhere at the comer of Liteiny Prospect and Basseinaya Street, or maybe Panteleimonovskaya, the traditional quarter of writers...
...Sign or not sign...
...I promise...
...I felt that he was sincere and guileless...
...It's certainly easier done than said...
...I belonged to the last category, which meant that at night, even in the depths of sleep, I never ceased to listen for the noises on the staircase, for the ascending footsteps heralding my arrest...
...You see, Victor Lvovich, our establishment is attached to the GPU...
...Essays...
...A C.R., a counterrevolutionary...
...A moment later, on the hour, they arrived...
...The people fear the government and the government fears the people...
...the bottle was hidden under her coat...
...He got to know some of them by giving them newspapers on credit...
...No more fear of anything, anything...
...We went upstairs...
...Now she is reasonable...
...It penetrates us and shines around us...
...I took leave of Yuriev with a long handshake...
...I have saved you against your own will ....' Very harassed high officials attended these useless interrogation sessions...
...It isn't always like this...
...I'm not crazy, not hysterical, as you can see...
...an insignificant blonde," the doctor was saying...
...So I had come here, in this hostile city, to experience the precious feeling of mutual understanding and human contact, with a stranger—this "very curious case...
...The workers, he explains, fear to die of hunger if they don't steal, fear to steal, fear the Party, fear the Plan, fear themselves...
...I have had the honor of knowing a few of them: Rosanov, Gershensohn, Sologub, Blok, Bely...
...Yuriev loves men...
...He would be the director now and would have the food ration of a scientist of the first category...
...You know what they do: clandestine trading in alcohol...
...But is not anticipation of regret a fear?' I insisted...
...He knew that the government would not try him at once: the psychological effort of his Appeal required time...
...Why was he here...
...Writers send him bread and sausage, so he's quite well-fed...
...A light truck stopped in the garden...
...Which addresses of consulates do you know...
...Anaging man, wearing a gray greatcoat, was sitting on a window sill, reading...
...What is thought, if not a brave anxiety?' He is subtle, you see...
...of liberation in depth...
...Outside the window, a tree's naked branches seemed to gesture—a voiceless cry...
...And we do heat the place a little...
...The old doctor himself looked alarmingly half-mad, though he was a man of great goodness, and always ruled by his unusual intelligence, which was, perhaps, limited yet deep...
...She made me think of a bird held in one's hands so that one can feel its heartbeat...
...I have sent them enough reports, believe me...
...They all took him for an ordinary posterman, working a little late so that he could paste in peace...
...Infantile...
...No, not like everybody...
...Who paid you...
...Do tell me...
...you must create...
...I also write novels...
...I don't doubt it, Doctor...
...Published here for the first time in English, "A True Story" was written in 1946 when its author was living in Mexico...
...I was glad that the one-eyed doctor arrived that moment to take me back...
...He now was so boldly persuasive before a committee that everything was arranged on the spot...
...Too hard for her...
...Our food situation is awful...
...I suf A TRUE STORY fered from it...
...I saw a pretty dark-haired girl, serious, and almost elegantly dressed, her coarse scarf neatly tied at her neck...
...It seems one doesn't do too badly there sometimes, rehabilitation through work...
...Yes, I know...
...It's a pity," he went on, "there are so many little clowns in literature...
...I drifted for a brief moment into a fantastic solitude...
...Those were dark times, of shortages in the cities and famine in the villages, of terror, secret murders, and persecution of spetsy (technical specialists), peasants, true believers, and those opposed to the regime...
...Here, she calms down, becomes gentle, starts living again...
...But in this century, we do not lose our shadow, not even in the dark...
...I have quite a few of them...
...A visionary, I thought...
...Why does our government discover plots that do not exist...
...I would like particularly," the doctor told me, "to acquaint you with a curious, an even amusing case, that is—how shall I put it?—of topical interest...
...The ideologists fear ideas, the believers fear to believe and fear to betray their belief...
...Yuriev, it seemed to me, was saying astonishingly just things, well thought-out, revealing an exceptional capacity for analysis...
...I believe that...
...He withdrew from the conversation, looked into space, toward the floor, out of the window, beyond it all...
...He spent a night pasting them up in the central streets, under the eyes of the militiamen and late passersby...
...A gray, calm, almost benevolent look...
...All I was seeing of the doctor was the scar of his lost eye under the enormous pale-pink brow...
...No doubt he came here between drawn sabers...
...Remember my name, my address .. . that's all" "I'll inform your parents...
...he asked me...
...Yuriev: a pale, asymmetric face, lengthened by a thin, whitish beard...
...Who is he...
...his ties were frayed...
...Excuse me," he said gently...
...Broken teeth notched his smile...
...No...
...Why do you fear to raise your voices against lies and indignities...
...I knew the dubious and stagnant little markets—without any visible merchandise— that were put up behind the churches...
...I have nothing to offer you, Victor Lvovich, not a drop of vodka...
...Yuriev made a slight motion of denial with his head...
...I trust you...
...My job is not to comment on their decisions but to fill in their forms...
...This girl escapes, returns to Leningrad, God knows how, and starts again, selling her little glasses of vodka...
...I still remember him with unbounded respect...
...The departure is announced, she gets herself into a nervous crisis, becomes untransportable...
...Yuriev, a humble citizen of our age, was ravaged by it for a long time, like you...
...I call him Yuriev here because Yuri is a Slavic form of George, and St...
...Let me explain . . .' And he demonstrated to them tirelessly that fear made them lose their common sense, that they, too, could cure themselves, as he had, that this was the only salvation...
...We were definitely in rapport...
...I saw the blonde shynkarka, guilty of illicit traffic in alcohol...
...It is fear...
...It's a matter of...
...He woke up free...
...For many nights he trembled, although nothing threatened him...
...The doctor, his one eye bulging and charged with secretive light, made me feel vaguely uneasy...
...Good morning, Doctor...
...What are you reading...
...Everything happened quickly, silently, without surprise or protest...
...His scrutinizing look took me in as he asked: "Are you afraid...
...my pincenez, I thought, made me look like a psychiatrist...
...what strikes us now, in retrospect, is the extent to which it also anticipates the writings of such Russian novelists as Solzhenitsyn.—ED...
...only a clear feeling of being cleansed...
...Eighteen years old, a peasant A TRUE STORY from Kostroma...
...The grimy halls were filled with low noises which echoed across the floor in the damp cold...
...I preach the last revolution, the only true one...
...Private room...
...Who was he...
...The sabers, held rigidly, seemed to render them derisive honor...
...Oh, I see," I said stupidly...
...You're not asking me for a diagnosis, I hope...
...An officer appeared, opened the rear door of the truck, leaned inside, and shouted, "Come on, Citizens, step lively...
...they'll soon bring her back...
...I will leave you alone for a moment...
...Essays are of no use...
...Yuriev told me he was feeling well here, "like in a monk's cell," and, besides, he would feel just as well in prison, "naturally...
...That great artist was to vanish only a few years later...
...Nurses, dressed in white, seized them briskly and led them toward the hospital entrance, a few steps away...
...They have even been quite pleasant since the first night...
...And the citizens, men and women, hopped clumsily out of their box, for it stood high on its wheels, that box...
...He could be happy...
...They ended by sending Yuriev to me...
...All this, speaking in a very low voice, in a firm tone, her brown eyes fixed upon mine...
...He winked with his one eye...
...I've wept too much...
...Yuriev esteems them but feels sorry for them because they live in fear...
...they return her to me tied up...
...What do you think of capitalism...
...H H E LIKED to talk to me, because he usually lived in silence, prudently self-contained, in the midst of incoherent mutterings...
...A counterrevolutionary...
...And everything went well for him, because of the new assurance with which he tackled his little problems...
...These GPU patients are often very embarrassing from the professional point of view...
...Guilty of mysticism...
...I WALKED THROUGH the tall iron gate, after identifying myself at the sentry box...
...The strange sensation one sometimes feels under the barely perceptible weight of a look made me turn...
...George, according to the Golden Legend, killed the dragon of Silene, whose anger could by appeased only by offering him children to devour...
...At nine in the morning, a character in uniform and one in civilian dress knocked at his door...
...He judged me with greater penetration...
...We, the doctor and I, passedthrough some more hideous rooms...
...You'll certainly be glad to meet...
...The doctor opened the door of a spacious cell that seemed to be bathed in light...
...I saw what one usually sees in this kind of institution...
...But how about the instinct of self-preservation?' I asked Yuriev...
...Fear is a neurosis...
...Sent for three years to cut wood in the forests of north-central Siberia...
...I like writers who really dare to write...
...Sometimes...
...Control your nerves, Citizen Chief...
...Charming, lucid, restless...
...T T HE ONE-EYED DOCTOR brought me back to his narrow little office, and we sat down before the lukewarm stove...
...but faker of what...
...I remember only one incident...
...Dostoyevsky...
...In prison, she is in good humor, she lives only for the day, can't imagine the future...
...She was scrubbing the floor in the corridor...
...like everybody...
...This time, five years' woodcutting, in a colder place, of course...
...No, it is you who should understand, my friend...
...They send her to me...
...The Khozyayin [Boss] fears his attendants, his attendants fear him...
...The Russian writer Victor Serge (1889-1947) was one of the most attractive figures in the European radical movement of the twentieth century: the author of many books, always independent in outlook and humane in quality...
...At that time, a doctor friend invited me to visit the city's oldest psychiatric hospital, the Bolnitsa Ivana Chudotvortsa (the Hospital of Saint John the Miracle-Worker), which was overcrowded, dilapidated, and shrouded in a somber reputation...
...A fine face...
...without this support, they might have fallen limply onto the black earth, and one would perhaps have discovered that they were really only dolls dressed in rags, with waxen faces, borrowed from the prop department of Meyerhold's theater...
...Translated by I. A. LANGNAS...
...I had a glimpse of trembling lips...
...That morning Yuriev was in a festive mood...
...Upper floor...
...caught flagrante delicto...
...You write...
...Why do the members of our triumphant Great Communist party tremble...
...A German writer once wrote a story of the man who lost his shadow...
...And suddenly I, too, felt guileless...
...The intellectuals fear to understand and fear not to understand, fear to seem to understand and fear to seem not to understand...
...I was remembering a name, an address, the vague sensation of a look from brown eyes VICTOR SERGE DOCTOR," I said, "how about that "j N interesting, even amusing case you told me about...
...They had refused him bread cards because, fifteen years earlier, he had tried to open a little bookstore...
...Punctuality reigned in that world, at least for this kind of appointment...
...This little joke cheered us both up...
...I was entering petrified silence...
...Look at each other loyally, without fear or resentment, and the abomination will crumble...
...I should sign her exit pass again...
...That," people around him said, "was a cranky thing to do...
...In my own home, I have much less contact with the outdoors," said Yuriev...
...Don't be annoyed by what I tell you...
...The shynkarka didn't mumble, since a small glass would be visible in the hollow of her hand...
...some of our peasant women are like that, they have an innate inhibition against prostitution...
...No,' he said, `rather an anxiety...
...He spent several days writing out by hand forty copies of an Appeal to the People: Why do you tremble, citizens...
...The doctor's profile showed me his empty socket—an old scar crossed by a bluish line...
...meaning that the GPU sends me its clients when it can do nothing more with them...
...Do you expect a thinking being to live without anxiety...
...He had spent all his life in the hospital, but was only its deputy director—and that was entirely his own fault, for a scruple of conscience had made him refuse to join the governing party...
...I counted more than half a dozen new arrivals, ordinary people, such as one sees in buses, almost without noticing them...
...After he had finished, he went home to sleep...
...The great neurosis of the masses...
...I could not place him...
...His own misfortune—I speak in objective terms—is that he freed himself from fear...
...Gaunt trees, the black earth giving off coldness, under the dim Baltic autumn sky...
...The instinct of self-preservation wants the joy of living,' he answered...
...Right away, Victor Lvovich...
...Oh, no...
...that fear fills our souls with ghosts, debases us, darkens us...
...the features a bit too sharp, I can't explain why...
...Suddenly they unsheathed their cavalry sabers, which looked enormous, broad and shining, as if all the paltry light of the miserable day were concentrated in their blades...
...but did he have the right to keep the secret of salvation to himself...
...Caught again red-handed...
...He thought a while before answering me that it would be a true bereavement for him and that regret partakes of love...
...state loan...
...there were seven arrests last night...
...Are you afraid of losing them?' I asked him insidiously...
...What kind of things...
...the black earth...
...But what could I wish her...
...The one-eyed doctor returned to his office...
...But he freezes up there, your interesting case...
...The nurses supported them, which seemed a wise precaution...
...What should I do, Victor Lvovich...
...He was a big, bony man, bald-headed and one-eyed...
...Never forget,' he told them, `what I have told you...
...the line of upright spikes of the railing...
...They should understand...
...if there is an inspection, I would be in trouble...
...I won't have any other till the end of the month...
...it is contagious but curable...
...Yuriev, whose system I'm outlining to you, thinks the most powerful are the most sick, but they are not the most to be pitied...
...She cut off her phrases hurriedly...
...Isn't that so...
...I hope so too," Yuriev said with a smile...
...A poor great man...
...She refuses to prostitute herself...
...A stark room, with a dozen or so women dressed in gray smocks, some prostrate, some without noticing us, others greeting us excitedly, a few making obscene gestures, others surrounding the doctor and all shouting at him at once...
...One morning, Yuriev had a revelation...
...I'm a worker at the Skorokod shoe shop...
...The guilty fear to confess their crimes, the innocent fear their innocence, the fact that they have nothing to confess...
...It is enough to want...
...I remembered her name, her address...
...the memory of the saint has triumphed, without benefit of miracle...
...Two beardless soldiers in trailing greatcoats got out and walked to the two wings of the back door...
...You can also cure yourself, if you want to...
...the vast, smoky sky...
...I wish you...
...They, the slightly stressed pronoun, as if to refer to ghosts, intrigued me...
...It is as if one tore a superfluous organ from oneself, a dark organ...
...You are going to see a little woman, on the second floor, a shynkarka...
...One or the other would pass close to you and mumble through his teeth: "Tea . . . sugar . . . CYMA watch...
...She smiled at the doctor, who addressed her familiarly and then told me: "Can't do it...
...I hope there are none in mine...
...It's terribly difficult to explain, that's the trouble...
...every second counted...
...You have a beautiful view," I said, almost believing it...
...A member of the Writers' Union...
...Try to calm yourself...
...There are so many lies and futilities in novels...
...To want in the middle of the night, you know what I mean...
...He looked at his watch with embarrassment and said: VICTOR SERGE "Excuse me, Victor Lvovich, you'll have to be patient for a moment...
...I had no reply to such criticism...
...A valuable biographical-critical sketch by Peter Sedgwick appears in Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 19011941, published by Oxford University Press...
...He was so reasonably persuasive that the disconcerted men in uniform took him for an extraordinary faker...
...Serge thought of "A True Story" as a work in the line of Chekhov...
...Several interrogators of the State Political Department questioned him in turn, exhorted him, threatened him, tried to win him over: Who are your accomplices...
...I am not worried about her...
...At the top of the VICTOR SERGE state, the men of the Politburo fear each other, fear to act and fear not to act, fear an economic crisis, fear the masses, and fear a war...
...He warmed his cold-reddened hands over the little stove...
...A serving girl brought us two glasses of sickly tea and four lumps of sugar no bigger than match-heads...
...So," he said to me, "They are all pretty quiet today...
...Yuriev did not flinch when guns were pointed at him...
...He wrote his home address below each of them as well...
...I felt that I didn't exist for him at all, and that he wanted to be for me, at the moment, only an abstract voice, without a face...
...And, would you believe it, I am also a bit afraid of the forest...
...There you would find groups of taciturn men and suspect women, all the color of misery, slow-moving, with shifty looks...
...With the tip of my finger I touched her shoulders, which also trembled slightly...
...I felt ashamed of walking through them, useless and helpless...
...a stretch of the street without any movement...
...He has some rare books, with dedications, the only things he loves on this earth...
...I cured myself of it...
...If you are afraid, forgive me for saying so, you are a sick man who cultivates his sickness...
...I sign her exit pass—and everything starts all over again...
...N 1932 I WAS LIVING in Leningrad, and there I discovered the existence of clin ical psychiatry when a person very dear to me was struck down by mental illness...
...Her psychosis is reduced to -a horror of the forest...
...The word afraid gave him a start...
...They're mad,' he said sadly...
...Yes, don't I?" heanswered with satisfaction...
...The shining sabers returned to their sheaths, the truck vanished behind the gaunt trees...
...For the love of God, or of whoever you love, let my parents know...
...I asked him confidentially, in a low voice for I could not raise my voice to him: "It's all a matter of . .. of what...
...The doctor introduced us: "Victor Lvovich K—, writer...
...He really looks for truth and fears to find it...
...At my age...
...He concluded that dangers exist, but are best faced with serenity...
...A flat facade, painted yellow, stained by smoke, pockmarked with grilled windows...
...She sold vodka retail, a swallow, half a swallow, "Drink it down, citizen...
...The nightmare will be over tomorrow, if only you want it...
...A military man, at the end of his patience, called him a counterrevolutionary dog, `to be shot this very evening!' Yuriev shook his head but did not stir from his firm benevolence...
...he often finds it all the same, and then he isterrified...
...The best and the worst, inseparable...
...He doesn't drink a glass of water without fear of poison, he mistrusts his most faithful guards...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
