She remained alert, monitoring her pleasure as a sentry monitors the noises of the night. Bodily love was a call of nature. Natasha elevated love almost to a revolutionary duty, so giving herself a clear conscience. Tunda had always pictured women soldiers like this. It was as if this woman had stepped out of a book, and he submitted to her existence, validated by literature, with admiration and the humble loyalty of a man who, following false conventions, sees in a resolute woman an exception and not the rule.
He was a revolutionary; he loved Natasha and the Revolution.
Natasha devoted many hours of the day to the ‘political enlightenment’ of himself and her people, and to giving Tunda special supplementary instruction because he understood less about the Revolution than the workers and sailors.
It was a long time before he gave up thinking of the word ‘proletariat’ in terms of Maundy Thursday. He was in mid-revolution and he still missed the barricades. Whenever his men — for he commanded them now — sang The Internationale, he sprang to his feet with the guilty conscience of a traitor, he cried Hurrah with the embarrassment of a stranger or guest who, on a chance visit, must join in the observance of some ceremonial. It was a long time before he was able to stop himself wincing when his companions called him ‘comrade’. He himself preferred to call them by their names and, in the early days was suspect on account of this.
‘We are in the first stage of the World Revolution,’ said Natasha at each lesson. ‘Men like you still belong to the old world but can render us good service. So we take you along with us. You are a traitor to the middle class to which you belong, so you are welcome to us. Maybe you can be made into a revolutionary but you will always be a bourgeois at heart. You were an officer, the deadliest weapon in the hands of the ruling class, you have exploited the proletariat, you should have been exterminated. See, then, how magnanimous the proletariat can be! It acknowledges your understanding of tactics, it forgives you, it even allows itself to be led by you.’
‘I lead it only for your sake, because I love you,’ said the old-fashioned Tunda.
‘Love! Love!’ cried Natasha. “You can tell that to your fiancée! I despise your love. What is it? You can’t even explain it. You’ve heard a word, read it in your lying books and poetry, in your family journals! Love! It’s all been wonderfully laid out for you: here you have the dwelling-house, there’s the factory or the delicatessen shop, over there the barracks with the brothel close by, and the summer-house in the middle. For you it’s as if it were the most important thing in your world, you invest in it everything that is noble, fine, and tender in you and deposit your baseness in everything else. Your writers are either blind or corrupt, they believe in your architecture, they write about feelings instead of affairs, about the heart instead of money, they describe the costly pictures on the walls and not the accounts in the banks.’
‘I’ve only read detective stories,’ interpolated Tunda timidly.
‘Yes, detective stories! Where the police come out on top and the burglar is caught, or where the burglar is the winner simply because he is a gentleman and pleases the ladies and wears a frock-coat. If you’re only with us because of me I’d shoot you,’ said Natasha.
‘Yes, only because of you!’ said Tunda.
She sighed and suffered him to live.
It is is unimportant whether anyone becomes a revolutionary through lectures, reflection, experience or through love. One day they marched into a village in the province of Samara. A priest and five peasants who were accused of having tortured Red Army men to death were brought before Tunda. He ordered the priest and the five peasants to be tied up and shot. Their corpses he left as a warning. He hated even the dead. He took personal revenge on them. This was taken for granted; none of the band were surprised at it.
Did it not surprise them that a man could kill without wanting to do so?
‘You did it for me,’ said Natasha scornfully.
For the first time, however, Tunda had not done something for Natasha’s sake. As she reproached him it occurred to him that he had not been thinking of her at all. But he did not admit it.
‘Of course it was for you!’ he lied.
She rejoiced and despised him.
He would have shot all his comrades from the Cadet School and from his regiment in the name of the Revolution. One day a political commissar was allocated to the section, a Jew who had adopted the name of Nirunov, a writer who rapidly turned out newspapers and proclamations, who delivered inflammatory speeches before an attack, and whose clumsiness in conversation equalled his ability to inspire. This man, ugly, shortsighted, foolish, fell in love with Natasha, who treated him as a political equal. Tunda wanted to be able to speak just like the commissar, he emulated him. He adopted the politician’s technical expressions, he learned them by heart with the facility of a man in love. One day the commissar was wounded and had to be left behind; after that it was Tunda who delivered the political addresses and issued the proclamations.
He fought in the Ukraine and on the Volga; he moved into the mountains of the Caucasus and marched back to the Urals. His band melted away, he found reinforcements, he recruited peasants, shot traitors and deserters and spies, infiltrated the enemy’s rear, spent several days in a town occupied by the Whites, was arrested, escaped. He loved the Revolution and Natasha like a knight, he got to know marshes, fever, cholera, hunger, typhus, barracks without medicaments, the taste of mouldy bread. He quenched his thirst with blood, he knew the pain of burning frost, of freezing in the pitiless nights, the languor of hot days, once in Kazan he heard Trotsky speak, the hard factual speech of the Revolution, he loved the people. He remembered his former world now and again as one remembers an old garment, he called himself Baranowicz, he was a revolutionary. He hated the rich peasants, the foreign armies who helped the White Guards, he hated the generals who fought against the Reds. His comrades began to love him.
V
He witnessed the victory of the Revolution.
The house in the towns displayed red flags and the women red kerchiefs. They moved about like living poppies. And the unknown Reds ruled — over the misery of the beggars and the homeless, over the ruined streets, the shot-riddled houses, the rubble in the public places, the wreckage that smelled of burning, the rooms where the sick lay, the cemeteries where graves were incessantly opened and closed, the groaning bourgeoisie who were compelled to shovel snow and clear the pavements. In the forests the faint echoes of the last shots died away. The last glow of fires flickered over the night horizons. The church-bells, ponderous or light, did not cease to sound. The wheels of the type-setting and printing machines began to turn; they were the mills of the Revolution. In a thousand squares orators addressed the people. The Red Guards marched in ragged clothes and torn boots and sang. The ruins sang. Joyfully the newborn emerged from their mothers’ wombs.
Tunda came to Moscow. He would have found it helpful, in those days when official appointments abounded, to obtain a desk and a chair. He needed only to apply. He did not do so. He listened to all the speeches, visited all the clubs, conversed with all and sundry, went to all the museums and read all the books he could get hold of. He lived at that time by writing articles for the newspapers and periodicals. There was one platitude for protests and proclamations, another for sketches and reminiscences, a third for indignation and accusation. His own sentiments were more revolutionary than these facile speeches, which he used only as a tool. Writers experience everything in terms of language, no experience is authentic if it cannot be formulated. Tunda sought enduring, well-tried and reliable definitions in order not to be swept away by his own experiences. Like a drowning man, he reached with outstretched arms towards the nearest rock. Tunda, who had joined the army in the year 1914 and had marched through the Ringstrasse in Vienna to the sound of the Radetzky March a few months later, stumbled in the torn, haphazard uniform of a Red Army man through the streets of Moscow, finding no other outlet for his emotion than the modified text of the Internationale. Now there are moments in the lives of peoples, classes, individuals, moments in which the commonplace nature of a hymn is justified by the solemnity with which it is sung. But the professional authors were no match for the victory of The Russian Revolution. All made cheap borrowings and contributed well-worn phrases to posterity. Tunda was quite unaware of the tawdriness of these words; they seemed to him as magnificent as the times in which he lived, as the victory he had fought for.