You are not only left to fear and hope. You have duties and functions also. You have your idealism, there is room for personal ambition. At times you can even predict the success or failure of some enterprise. But in many cases what happens is contrary to all your expectations. For instance, you have entirely neglected some duty and anticipate a very unpleasant outcome. But what transpires is either nothing at all or something very pleasant. So you never know whether the unpleasant outcome has not become manifest in the guise of a pleasant one. You can trust neither your successes nor your failures.
The worst is that you are under constant surveillance, without knowing by whom. In the office where you work, someone is a member of the secret police. It may be the charwoman who scrubs the floor every week, or it may be the learned professor who is in process of drawing up an alphabet of the Tartar language. It may be the secretary to whom you dictate your letters, or the manager who deals with the supply of office equipment and the replacement of broken windows. They all, without exception, call you Comrade. You, too, call all of them Comrade. But you suspect each one of being a spy and realize at the same time that each takes you for a spy. You do not have a guilty conscience, you are a revolutionary, you are not afraid of being observed. But you fear that, at least, you may be taken for an informer. You are harmless, but because you must strive to appear so the others notice your endeavours. That in turn makes you anxious that they may no longer consider you harmless.
One needs steady nerves for this kind of existence, and a large quota of revolutionary zeal. For one must allow that the Revolution, surrounded as it is by declared enemies, has no other chance of maintaining its power than by sacrificing any individual when necessary. Imagine yourself lying on the altar for years without being slaughtered!
For all that, I would have stayed in Russia — at least, so I believe — if one day a party had not arrived from France, on a pleasure rather than a study trip, a lawyer and his wife and secretary. The secretary was the wife’s lover, and the lawyer managed so to arrange matters that I spent a day alone with his wife and an unforgettable evening in a hotel. I was the tool of his revenge. When she left, the woman, who took me for a dangerous informer of the Tcheka, handed me a card on which she had written in a triumphant hand: ‘So you are from the secret police after all!’, after I had endeavoured to rid her of the absurd idea. For that was why she had slept with me.
That is by the way. What matters is that the arrival of these foreigners suddenly made it clear to me that I had yet to begin my life, even though I had already experienced so much. It was remarkable that as soon as I saw this lady I thought of my fiancée’s name: Irene. I yearn for her. Perhaps because I cannot discover where she lives and to whom she is married, possibly because I know that she waited for me for a long time.
I believe that the foreign woman’s arrival at Baku was more than fortuitous. It was as if someone had opened a door which I had always thought of, not as a door, but as part of the wall that surrounded me. I saw a way out and used it. Now I am outside and very much at a loss.
So this is your world! Again and again I marvel at its solidity. In Russia, when we were fighting for the Revolution, we thought we were fighting the world, and when we were victorious we thought that victory over the whole world was near. Even now, over there, they have no idea how firm this world is. I feel a stranger in it. It is as if I was protesting against it in saying it to you twice over. I go around with alien eyes, alien ears, an alien attitude to people. I meet old friends, acquaintances of my father, and find I have to make an effort to understand what they are saying to me.
I continue to play my part as a ‘Siberian’ just returned home. People ask about my experiences and I lie as best I can. To avoid contradicting myself, I have begun to write down everything I have invented during the last few weeks; it has grown into fifty large quarto pages, it amuses me to do this, I am fascinated by what I shall write next.
This has turned into a very long letter. You won’t be surprised at this — it is a long time since we last spoke to each other. I greet you in the name of old friendship.
Franz Tunda.
XII
Why had he left Russia? Tunda might be labelled immoral and unprincipled. Men who have a clear sense of direction and a moral objective, as well as those who are ambitious, look different from my friend Tunda.
My friend was the very model of an unreliable character. He was so unreliable that no one could even accuse him of egoism.
He did not strive for so-called personal advantage. His ideas were as little egoistic as they were moralistic. If it were absolutely necessary to characterize him by some particular attribute, I would say that his most significant quality was the desire for freedom. For he was as willing to throw away his assets as he was able to avert what was of disadvantage. For the most part he behaved as the mood took him, occasionally from conviction, always from necessity. He possessed more vitality than the Revolution could dispose of at the time. He possessed more independence than can be utilized by any theory that endeavours to make life conform to it. Basically he was a European, an ‘individualist’, as educated people say. He required complex situations to enjoy life to the full. He needed an atmosphere of tangled falsehoods, false ideals, seeming health, arrested decay, red-painted ghosts, the atmosphere of cemeteries that look like ballrooms, or factories, or castles, or schools or drawing-rooms. He required the proximity of skyscrapers that always look as if they are about to topple and yet are certain to endure for centuries.
He was a ‘modern man’.
Admittedly, he found the thought of his fiancée, Irene, enticing. If he had strayed somewhat from the path he had taken six years before, he now returned to it. Where did she live? How did she live? Did she love him? Had she waited for him? What would he be like today if he had reached her then?
I confess that, after reading Tunda’s letter, these were the questions I considered first, rather than the more immediate one of how to help Tunda. I knew that he was one of those men to whom material security means absolutely nothing. He was never afraid of going under. He was never concerned about hunger, which determines almost all present-day human activities. It is a kind of talent for survival. I know a few men of this kind. They live like fish in water: always on the lookout for plunder, never in fear of destruction. They are proof against both wealth and poverty. They do not show the signs of deprivation; and they are thereby equipped with a hard-heartedness which allows them not to register the private needs of others. They are the greatest enemies of compassion and of the so-called social conscience.
They are therefore the natural enemies of society.
It did not occur to me to help Tunda till a week later. I sent him a suit and wondered whether I should not write to his brother, to whom Tunda had not spoken since he entered the Cadet School.
XIII
Tunda’s brother George was an orchestral conductor in a medium-sized German city.