“Did you receive my letter?” she asked, entering a bare room-mats and paper-whose panels were drawn aside, revealing the entire bay.
“Yes.”
“Let’s hurry. The ship is leaving again in two hours.”
“I’m not leaving, May.”
She looked at him. “Useless to question him,” she thought; “he’U explain.” But it was he who questioned her.
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to serve in one of the sections of women agitators. It’s practically arranged, it appears. I shaU be in Vladivostok the day after tomorrow, and I shaU immediately leave for Moscow. If it can’t be arranged, I shall serve as a doctor in Moscow or in Siberia. I hope the first thing succeeds. I am so weary of nursing. … To live always with sick people, when it isn’t for a combat, requires a kind of special grace-and there is no grace left in me of any sort. And besides, the sight of death has become almost intolerable to me now. Well, if I must … It is still a way of avenging Kyo.”
“Revenge is no longer possible at my age. ”
Indeed, something in him was changed. He was distant, isoiated, as if only a part of himself were there in the room with her. He lay down on the floor: there were no seats. She lay down too, beside an opium tray.
“What are you going to do with yourself?” she asked.
He shrugged his shoulder with indifference.
“Thanks to Kama, I have been made professor of Occidental art. I return to my first profession, as you see. ”
She sought his eyes, stupefied:
“Even now,” she said, “when we are politically beaten, when our hospitals have been closed down, clandestine groups are forming again in all the provinces. Our people will never forget that they suffer because of other men, and not because of their previous lives. You used to say: ‘They have awakened with a start from a sleep of thirty centuries, to which they will never return.’ You also used to say that those who have given a consciousness of their revolt to three hundred million wretches were not shadows like men who pass-even beaten, even tortured, even dead. ”
She was silent for a moment:
“They are dead, now,” she said finally.
“I still think so, May. It’s something else. Kyo’s death is not only grief, not only change-it is. a metamorphosis. I have never loved the world over-much: it was Kyo who attached me to men, it was through him that they existed for me. I don’t want to go to Moscow. I would teach wretchedly there. Marxism has ceased to live in me. In Kyo’s eyes it was a will, wasn’t it? But in mine, it is a fatality, and I found myself in harmony with it because my fear of death was in harmony with fatality. There is hardly any fear left in me, May; since Kyo died, I am indifferent to death. I am freed (freed!.) both from death and from life. What would I do over there?”
“Change anew, perhaps.”
“I have no other son to lose.”
He drew the opium tray towards him, prepared a pipe. Without speaking she pointed with her finger to one of the nearby hillslopes: attached by the shoulder, some hundred coolies were pulling a heavy weight which could not be seen, in the centuries-old posture of slaves. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“And yet,” he went on after a moment, “note this: these men are ready to die for Japan.”
“For how much longer?”
“Longer than I shall lived’
Gisors had been puffing steadily at his pipe. He opened his eyes:
“One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be. Every old man is a confession, believe me, and if old age is usuaUy so empty it is because the men were themselves empty and had managed to conceal it. But that in itself is unimportant. Men should be able to learn that there is no reality, that there are worlds of contemplation- with or without opium-where all is vain. ”
“Where one contemplates what?”
“Perhaps nothing other than this vanity. That’s a great deal.”
Kyo had told May: “Opium plays a great role in my father’s life, but I sometimes wonder if opium determines his life, or if it justifies certain forces that make him uneasy. ”
“If Ch’en,” Gisors went on, “had lived outside of the Revolution, don’t forget that he would undoubtedly have forgotten his murders. Forgotten. ”
“The others have not forgotten them; there have been two terrorist attempts since his death. He did not like women, and I therefore scarcely knew him; but I don’t think he would have lived out of the Revolution even a year. There is no dignity that is not founded on suffering.”
He had barely listened to her.
“Forgotten. ” he continued. “Since Kyo died, I have discovered music. Music alone can speak of death.
I listen to Kama, now, whenever he plays. And yet, without effort on my part (he was speaking to himself as much as to May), what do I still remember? My desires and my anguish, the very weight of my destiny, my life. ”
(But while you are freeing yourself from your life, she was thinking, other Katovs are burning in boilers, other Kyos.)
Gisors’ eyes, as though they were continuing his gestures of forgetfulness, looked away, became absorbed in the world outside: beyond the road, the thousand sounds of the port seemed to be setting out with the waves towards the radiant sea. Those noises matched the dazzling Japanese springtime with all the efforts of men, with the ships, the elevators, the cars, the active crowd. May was thinking of Pei’s letter: it was in work pursued with warlike energy, released over the whole Russian land, in the will of a multitude for whom this work had become life, that her dead had found refuge. The sky was sparkling like the sun in the spaces between the pine- trees; the wind which gently stirred the branches glided over their reclining bodies. It seemed to Gisors that this wind was passing through him like a river, like Time itself, and for the first time the idea that the time which was bringing him closer to death was flowing through him did not isolate him from the world, but joined him to it in a serene accord. He looked do^n at the bristling cranes on the edge of the city, the steamships and the sailboats on the sea, the men-black specks-on the road. “All suffer,” he thought, “and each one suffers because he thinks. At bottom, the mind conceives man only in the eternal, and the consciousness of life can be nothing but anguish. One must not think life with the mind, but with opium. How many of the sufferings scattered about in this light would disappear, if thought were to disappear. ” Liberated from everything, even from being a man, he caressed the stem of his pipe with gratitude, contemplating the bustle of all those unknown creatures who were marching towards death in the dazzling sunlight, each one nursing his deadly parasite in a secret recess of his being. “Every man is a madman,” he went on thinking, “but what is a human destiny if not a life of effort to unite this madman and the universe. ” He saw Ferra! again, lighted by the low lamp against the background of the night full of mist. “Every man dreams of being god. ”
Fifty sirens at once burst upon the air: today was the eve of a festival, and work was over. Before any change was visible in the port, tiny men emerged, like scouts, upon the straight road that led to the city, and soon the crowd covered it, distant and black, in a din of automobile horns: foremen and laborers were leaving work together. It was approaching, as if for an attack, with the great uneasy movement of every crowd beheld from a distance. Gisors had seen the dash of animals towards watering-holes, at night-falclass="underline" one, several, then all, thrown in the direction of the water by a force that seemed to fall from the darkness; in his memory, opium gave to their cosmic rush a savage harmony, and the men lost in the distant clatter of their wooden clogs all seemed mad, separated from the universe whose heart beating somewhere up there in the shimmering light seized them and threw them back upon solitude, like the grains of some unknown harvest. Very high up, the light clouds passed above the dark pine trees, and little by little became absorbed in the sky; and it seemed to him that one of their group, precisely the one he was looking at, expressed the men he had known or loved, and who were dead.