Comrade Lecoq did not respond right away.
“It’s a romantic notion, this expedition of yours. Even if you do manage to make it to the other side, I don’t see them letting you back in. They’ll sink you and all your cargo.”
“No harm in trying. If they get us, they’ll be wiping out ten men. Ten men isn’t the whole commune. The Anglo-American territory isn’t going anywhere. If they sink us, then go search for your bread over there. We’ve got to try.”
Comrade Lecoq pulled on his cigarette in silence.
“You see, comrade, we haven’t even gotten to the catch yet. Let’s say that you managed to get through the cordon and returned with the provisions, which seems to me rather unlikely. One way or another, comrade, we have no right to carry the plague outside the cordon, even to save the whole commune from starving to death. Threats are one thing, execution another. If you succeed in your expedition you’ll have to disembark on the other side of the cordon to search for provisions and come in contact with the people there, which means we have to consider the possibility of spreading the plague. We have no right, comrade, to put the whole proletariat and peasantry of France at risk of the plague to save the ten thousand citizens of the commune. I cannot give you my permission to go on such an expedition.”
“What you say is just, Comrade Commandant. But I have considered all this from the very beginning. I’ve found a way to avoid docking. We arrive, stop in the middle of the river, collect the provisions, and then take off! You see, this is why I’m not taking any barges with us – we’ll use theirs. We just need to hitch them up and go!”
“So you simply think they’ll carry their flour out to you, load them onto their own barges, and then let you haul it away with their blessings?”
“How did you guess, Comrade Commandant? They’ll load it up themselves. I have a plan, you’ll see yourself, it’s simple and straightforward, but you haven’t let me finish.”
Comrade Laval took a pencil from the table and traced it along a sheet of paper, explaining his plan in detail.
By the time Comrade Lecoq was alone in his room it was already dawning outside, and the street’s tiny universe was incrusting itself into pale, frosted stained glass upon windowpanes streaked with the soot of the night.
Comrade Lecoq threw off his greatcoat and stretched out on his bed, trying to sleep. Sleep had spirited off, however, and would not return. Lecoq reached for the shelf and selected a book. He opened it. Lenin: “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution.” He tried to read.
The thoughts, like tiny barnacle worms unable to burrow into his brain, sulked back between the black crops of the lines. Comrade Lecoq replaced the book and stared at the ceiling.
From somewhere, from his memory’s mirror, like a delayed reflection, emerged a swarthy, wind-lashed face, and simple, smiling words rang out: “If they get us, they’ll be wiping out ten men. Ten men isn’t the whole commune. We’ve got to try.”
Comrade Lecoq smiled. Ambition? Recklessness? Or perhaps a genuinely fervid love for the commune?
He’d met with these people every day for years, face to face, even back at university, when the bookish son of an impoverished gymnasium teacher ran from the student cookhouse to an assembly to see how the black digits of statistics looked in real life. He learned to look into those eyes, to decipher deep, unhealed, and real injuries from wrinkles and the tone of abuse in the contour of nonchalant, sacramental words – “proletariat,” “imperialism” – to estimate the digits of cut salaries, the weight of humiliations received. And suddenly here – bright blue eyes, a smile, and death. The effects of romantic literature? Heroism?
The telephone clattered on the desk.
Comrade Lecoq got up, listened to a report, then dictated a few directives into the black bowl of the speaker. And stretching out once more on his hard military bed, his face to the wall, he closed his eyes to sleep, and thought:
“They’ll crush him, no doubt. It’s a shame. When the plague blows over, we’ll have to rebuild the commune, and we’ll need as many like him as we can get.”
His drowsy lips mouthed a trained phrase he recited every evening:
“But by then I’ll be long gone…”
Sleep would not come. Turning from side to side, Comrade Lecoq smoked a cigarette. He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. Finishing the cigarette, he got up and turned on the light. He went to the desk. He reached under some reports buried deep inside the desk drawer, took out a thick notebook with an oilcloth cover, and opened it on the table.
No one knew Comrade Lecoq was writing a history of plague-infested Paris. Few knew he had once been a man of letters. He’d written poems in his youth. Apparently they weren’t bad. But he’d long stopped writing them. He was ashamed of his literary talents, as he was of his erudition and his roots in the intelligentsia. He’d bristle like a wildcat at crudeness, at the barbs of a soldier’s vocabulary, at curt and gruff manners.
The relentless progress of the plague had made him certain that the Parisians were condemned to die in the ring of the cordon, that not a soul would be spared.
Nonetheless, from the first moments of the republic’s existence there had been the liveliest attempts to fight the plague, as mandated by the Central Committee. Taking advantage of the confusion in the stunned bourgeois districts, the Belleville Republic had made a daring raid on the Pasteur Institute and trucked all its inventories off to their own territory. In well-equipped laboratories, dozens of scientists committed to the proletarian cause worked day and night in a superhuman effort to defeat the deadly virus. Every day new vaccinations were tested, though these refused to produce the desired results, like all those that came before.
After a month of fruitless struggle, Comrade Lecoq stopped believing in success. He watched the events taking place around him with the curiosity of a natural scientist observing the atrophy of cells. It troubled him that so much documentary material was being squandered in vain, that it would never be a part of the legacy of humankind. This thought tormented him at night.
Everyone will die off, no one will be left behind to tell future generations of the unforgettable and chimerical history of this city.
So at last he decided he would secretly write its chronicle, based on gathered information, oral reports, and first-hand observations. He would die, everyone would die, but his chronicle would remain. The plague would pass, new people would arrive, they’d find it, shake off the dust, and this piece of history, so full of valuable experiences, the unique vicissitudes of this macabre period, would not be forever lost.
In the nights, surreptitiously, during off-duty hours, he would record the news of the day in the thick notebook, adding to and rearranging the endless documents and clippings.
Opening the notebook to where he left off, Comrade Lecoq thought once more of Laval. What a superb specimen! Such people deserved an epos. He’d have to wait till the end of the expedition. What a melodramatic chapter! He absent-mindedly flipped through a couple of pages. He paused on the last entry, about the uprising at Place Pigalle and the surrounding streets of the new autonomous African Republic, founded by the black people of Montmartre (jazz musicians and doormen), as a protest against the anti-African authorities ruling the central quarters. According to eyewitnesses, any white person caught in the area of the new state was beheaded by the Africans, with ceremonies borrowed from the Ku Klux Klan.