THE SOW THAT EATS HER OWN FARROW
Kis, Danilo
The first act of the tragedy, or comedy (in the scholastic sense of the word), whose main character is a certain Gould Verschoyle, begins as all earthly tragedies do: with birth. The rejected...
...During that time, through the deafening noise of the engines, the Irishman heard the sound of a familiar foxtrot coming from the deck...
...Verschoyle was then twenty-eight years old...
...The young men understood and finished the vodka, laughing at the Irishman's distrust...
...q *During the interrogation Verschoyle stubbornly denied that, on that fatal day, during his report, he had whispered into the commander's ear that coded messages were reaching Moscow...
...The rejected positivist formula of milieu and race can be applied to human beings to the same degree as to Flemish art...
...It will also remain a psychological secret, and legally a most interesting one, whether it is possible for a man cornered by fear and despair to so sharpen his arguments and experience that he is able—without external pressure, without the use of force and torture—to throw into doubt all that has been developed through many years of upbringing, lectures, habit, and training in the consciousness of two other men...
...Is this the Honor Guard that fired salvos into the sky or into living flesh...
...Three men in uniform, one with the rank of captain and the other two without insignia, approached Verschoyle and aimed their guns at him...
...After a three-day stopover in Marseilles, the Ringsend sailed without one of its crew...
...At the same time he realized—more in rage than terror— that he had fallen into a trap, naively, like a fool...
...The famous battle of Brunete, waged bravely by the Lincoln Battalion, took place the night of July 8-9, 1938...
...Viva la RepUblica...
...All day long this carnivalesque cohort parades along the Liffey...
...It was after midnight when the door of the cabin was unlocked, and the three men left their quarters strewn with cigarette butts and fishbones...
...A brief encounter with the second-in-command, Chelyustnikov, at the transit station in Karaganda revealed this secret to him: the commander had informed his aide of Verschoyle's confidential declaration as if it were a good joke...
...But let the dark clouds form, let a star fall, and suddenly the island again becomes as in a legend that distant place covered with fog and darkness, which for so long marked the boundary of the known world to navigators...
...Wearied by the vain prattle in dark pubs where conspiracies and assassinations were plotted by phony priests, poets, and traitors, Gould Verschoyle wrote in his journal the sentence spoken by a certain tall nearsighted student, without foreseeing the tragic consequence that these words would have: "Anyone with any self-respect cannot bear to remain in Ireland and must go into exile, fleeing the country struck by the wrathful hand of Jupiter...
...The picture is blurred...
...The two sailors took him to a cabin below...
...in Ireland, "the land of sadness, hunger, despair, and violence," according to another explorer, who is less inclined to myth and more to laborious earthy prose...
...Then, perhaps, the decision of the high tribunal, which, according to some loftier justice, had pronounced the same stern sentence (eight years of imprisonment) on each of the three participants in that long game of persuasion, might not seem entirely arbitrary...
...He could not have known that the interrogator had before him the report of the secondincommand in which Verschoyle's words, expressing the dangerous and sacrilegious suspicion "that Soviet secret agents are trying to usurp the leadership positions in the Republican army," were repeated verbatim...
...I see him under the redhot sky by a cemetery near Bilbao, listening to lectures in which, as at the Creation, life and death, heaven and earth, freedom and tyranny are fixed within boundaries...
...On the third day Verschoyle awoke from a nightmare: on the narrow bench across from his bunk, two men sat silently watching him...
...With an unnatural politeness (unnatural for the time and place), they also rose at once, and introduced themselves, slightly nodding their heads...
...However, in him too a certain lyrical quality is not in harmony with the cruelty of the region: "The ultimate step of the sunset, Ireland is the last land to see the fading of the day...
...In August of the same year he boarded a merchant ship, the Ringsend, which was sailing for Morocco...
...The cracked looking glass of a servant, the sow that eats her farrow"—at nineteen Verschoyle wrote this cruel sentence, which referred more to Ireland than to his parents...
...I see him shaking the dead body of the student Armand Joffroy, who died in his arms somewhere near Santander...
...I see him in a shouting contest with Anarchists, whose black flag is raised on the bare hills near Guadalajara, and who are ready to die a noble, senseless death...
...Thus the first act of the tragedy begins in Ireland, "the ultima Thule, the land on the other side of knowledge," as one of Dedalus's doubles calls it...
...Also, a group snapshot with the date November 5, 1936...
...The Eccentrics Dublin is a city that breeds a menagerie of eccentrics, the most notorious in the whole Western world: nobly disappointed, aggressive bohemians, professors in redingotes, superfluous prostitutes, infamous drunkards, tattered prophets, fanatical revolutionaries, sick nationalists, flaming anarchists, widows decked out in combs and jewelry, hooded priests...
...Gould Verschoyle was murdered in November 1945, in Karaganda, after an unsuccessful attempt to escape...
...The face of Gould Verschoyle jealously guards this secret...
...Following the example of his father—who rose from bribe-taking customs official to even more wretched (in the moral sense) bureaucrat, and from passionate Parnellite to bootlicker and puritan—Gould Verschoyle acquired a revulsion for his native land, which is only one of the guises of perverted and masochistic patriotism...
...Verschoyle compliantly went down the rope ladder and into the motorboat, where they handcuffed him to the seat...
...The cabin was empty, and the door was plated with the same tarnished brass...
...Night has already fallen on Europe while the slanting rays of the sun still purple the fjords and wastelands in the West...
...He would stare through the porthole at the monotonous waves of the open sea...
...I see him, his head wrapped in filthy bandages, lying in an improvised hospital near GijOn, listening to the ravings of the wounded, one of whom is calling on God in Irish...
...The Traveling Companions Blue-eyed, with healthy white teeth, the visitors smiled at Verschoyle amicably...
...For even if it is believed that the two men succeeded, through dense and exhausting ideological polemics, in dispelling certain suspicions that had appeared in the head of the Republican Verschoyle (suspicions with possible far-reaching consequences), there was a perfectly justified suspicion that the other two had also felt the fatal influence of certain counterarguments: in the merciless battle of equal opponents, as in a bloody cockfight, no one comes out unharmed, regardless of which one walks away with the empty glory of victory,* Finale We lose track of Verschoyle's two companions in Murmansk, on the banks of the Baltic Sea, where for a time during the terrible winter of 1942 they lay in the same section of the prison camp's outpatient ward, half blind and wasted with scurvy: all their teeth had fallen out, and they looked like old men...
...I see him charging toward a bayonet, carried along by his own war cry as if by the wings of the exterminating angel...
...In the absence of more reliable sources, Bourniquel's picture of Dublin enables us to get a sense of the experience Gould Verschoyle would inevitably take with him from the island, an experience that is drawn into the soul just as the terrible stench of fish meal from the cannery near the harbor is drawn into the lungs...
...Excerpted from A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kit...
...Verschoyle abruptly stood up...
...Over the rows of soldiers' heads, in the distant blue an airplane hovers like a crucifix...
...In the morning he would wash himself over the tin basin, then glance at the food (herring, salmon, black bread, which they gave him three times a day through the round opening in the door), and without touching anything but water, lie down again on the hard sailor's bunk...
...Interrupting the discussion only to gobble a piece of dried herring (the fourth day Verschoyle also began to eat) or to refresh their dry throats and take a breather from their shouting (and then the deafening noise of the engines would become only the reverse of silence), the three men spoke of justice, of freedom, of the proletariat, of the goals of the Revolution, vehemently trying to prove their beliefs, as if they had purposely chosen this semidark cabin of a ship on international waters as the only possible objective and neutral terrain for this terrible game of argument, passion, persuasion, and fanaticism...
...Postscript In the commemorative volume Ireland to Spain, published by the Federation of Dublin veterans, the name of Gould Verschoyle is mistakenly entered among some one hundred Irish Republicans slain in the battle of Brunete...
...Verschoyle put his hands up...
...He saw his two companions also coming down the ladder with ropes tied around their waists...
...With a certain rash anticipation, we would be inclined to view this carnivalesque cohort as the last image our hero would see in a rapid succession of images: the noble menagerie of Irish eccentrics (to which, in some ways, he also belonged) descending along the Liffey all the way down to the anchorage, and disappearing as if into hell...
...The journey lasted eight days...
...Their black ships on shores with strange names testify to a time when travel had something metaphysical about it: they summon up dreams without shores, without return...
...This was written in the entry for May 19, 1935...
...Now they were silent, totally mute, listening to the waves splashing at the sides of the ship, to the thud of footsteps on deck, and the prolonged scraping of heavy chains...
...They offered him some vodka...
...Soon all three sat side by side, handcuffed to the seat...
...I see him talking with a young nurse who lulls him to sleep like a child, singing in a tongue unknown to him, and later he, half asleep and full of morphine, sees her climbing into the bed of a Pole who has had a leg amputated, and soon thereafter he hears, as in 170 the rowboat (one of whom had relieved him of his leather bag, so the guest could climb more easily...
...They told Verschoyle that there was a celebration on board: a cablegram received that afternoon by the radioman had told them that their ship, the Vitebsk, had changed its name to Ordzhonikidze...
...English translation, by Dutka Mikic Mitchell, copyright ©1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...To Verschoyle, who introduced himself, the syllables of his own name suddenly sounded strange and altogether alien...
...They searched him, then tied a rope around his waist...
...To be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...On the back, in Verschoyle's handwriting: "Alcazar...
...Cautious Speculations I see Verschoyle retreating from Milaga on foot, in the leather coat he took from a dead Falangist (under the coat there was only the thin, naked body and a silver cross on a leather string...
...Thus Verschoyle enjoyed the bitter glory of being pronounced dead some eight years before his actual death...
...The Just Sentence The true outcome of the six-day battle of words and arguments waged by the Irishman Gould Verschoyle and his two traveling companions will probably remain a secret to the contemporary researcher...
...We have only two snapshots...
...173...
...His high forehead is half covered by a Basque beret, a smile hovers around his lips, on which one can read (from today's perspective) the triumph of the victor and the bitterness of the defeated: the paradoxical reflections that, like a line on the forehead, foreshadow inevitable death...
...The life of Gould Verschoyle blends and merges with the life and death of the young Spanish Republic...
...He watched the ghostly silhouette of the ship illuminated by searchlights...
...I see him discharging a clip of bullets into the air at planes, impotent, felled right afterward by fire, earth, and shrapnel...
...The next five days the three men spent in the hot, narrow cabin behind the brass-plated door in a terrible game of chance, resembling three-handed poker in which the loser pays with his life...
...The sudden and unexpected halt of the engine noise abruptly interrupted the conversation in the cabin, as if that deadly rhythm was the ritual accompaniment which until then had given impetus and inspiration to their thoughts and arguments...
...In February 1936 we find Gould Verschoyle near Guadalajara in the 15th Anglo-American Brigade bearing the name of the legendary Lincoln...
...In a strange reconciliation with his fate (very deceptive, as shall be seen), he didn't bang on the door, he didn't call for help...
...Verschoyle is in the second row, still with a Basque beret pulled over his forehead...
...From the cluster of distant lights on the shore, one soon separated, and grew larger, while the 172 wind, like an advance guard, brought the noise of the boat that was approaching the ship...
...or, to be exact, the place of the radio operator Verschoyle was filled by a newcomer...
...His frozen, naked corpse, bound with wire and hung upside down, was displayed in front of the camp's entrance as a warning to all those who dream of the impossible...
...With rolled-up sleeves, unshaven and sweaty, worn out from near fasting, they stopped the discussion completely only once: on the fifth day, the two visitors (besides their names, all that was known was that they were about twenty years old and not members of the crew) left Verschoyle alone for several hours...
...He refused, fearing poison...
...One, with an unknown soldier next to the ruins of a shrine...
...Verschoyle spent these eight days and nights below deck, in a narrow cabin by the engine room, where the deafening noise of engines crushed the current of his thought and his sleep like a millstone...
...Faded Photographs Here the reliability of the documents, resembling, as they do, palimpsests, is suspended for a moment...
...The Black Marsh Gould Verschoyle was born in one such suburb of Dublin within reach of the harbor, where he listened to ships' whistles, that piercing howl which tells the righteous young heart that there are worlds and nations outside "Dubh-linn," this black marsh in which the stench and injustice are more 169 heavily oppressive than anywhere else...
...Before midnight the music suddenly died, and the visitors returned, tipsy...
...The Handcuffs The Vitebsk-Ordzhonikidze dropped anchor in the open sea nine miles from Leningrad...
...Verschoyle heard the turning of the key in the lock...
...And on the other side is a break: the dark sea in which the dead once found their land of eternity...
...It seemed he didn't even think of escape, which in any case was useless...
...In front of the lined-up group a landscape stretches out, and it would not be hard to believe that we are in a cemetery...
...There was no one on deck...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
