“You’re not going anywhere! You’ll stay, we’ll eat, and in the afternoon we’ll go out somewhere together.”
“Where?”
“To see Gorki. He sent a message; he’s expecting me. Today I shall see this celebrated European Istrati for the first time.”
His embittered voice revealed a childish envy of the great model.
He jumped out of bed and dressed himself. We went outside. He kept a tight grip on my arm.
“We shall become friends,” he kept saying to me. “Yes, we shall become friends, because I already begin to feel the need of giving you a punch in the nose. You’d better learn that I can’t feel friendship without punches. We’ve got to quarrel now and then and crack each other’s skulls—do you hear? That’s the meaning of love.”
We entered a restaurant and sat down. He took a tiny vial of olive oil from around his neck, where it hung like a talisman, and poured the oil into his thick meat soup. Next, he sprinkled the soup with ample pepper from a little box which he removed from his waistcoat pocket.
“Oil and pepper!” he said, licking his lips. “Just like in Brila.”
We ate with zest. Istrati was recalling his Greek little by little; each time a word rose out of his memory he clapped his hands like a child.
“How do you do!” he shouted at each word. “How do you do! And how are you today?”
He kept his wits about him, however, and every few minutes looked at his watch. Suddenly he got up. “It’s time,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Calling the waiter, he purchased four bottles of good Armenian wine, filled his overcoat pockets with little packages of mezédhes, loaded his cigarette case to overflowing, and we were off.
Istrati was excited; he was about to see the great Gorki for the first time. He doubtlessly expected hugs, tablefuls of food, tears, laughter, and conversation followed by more conversation, then, hugs and more hugs all over again, without end.
“You’re excited, Panait,” I said to him.
No answer. Irritated, he quickened his pace.
We reached a large building and climbed the stairs. I kept looking at my companion out of the corner of my eye; I enjoyed watching his slender, gangling body, his workingman’s hands that had known so much labor, his insatiable eyes.
“Can you control yourself now that you’re going to see Gorki?” I asked him. “Can you keep from launching into hugs and shouting?”
“No!” he replied angrily. “What do you think I am, an Englishman? How many times do I have to tell you that I’m a Greek, a Cephalonian. I shout, I hug, I give of myself. Your worship can play the Englishman if you like. . . . And if you must know,” he added a second later, “I prefer to be alone. I find your presence annoying.”
The words were hardly off his tongue when suddenly there stood Gorki on the landing, a cigarette butt glued to his lips. He was huge and heavy-boned, with sunken jaws, prominent cheekbones, small blue eyes that looked anxious and afflicted, and an indescribably embittered mouth. Never in my life had I seen so much bitterness on a man’s mouth.
Istrati mounted the stairs three at a time the moment he saw him, and seized his hand.
“Panait Istrati!” he shouted, ready to fall upon Gorki’s broad shoulders.
Gorki offered his hand calmly, without speaking. He regarded Istrati with an expression which betrayed not the slightest sign of either joy or curiosity.
After a moment, he said, “Come in.”
He went first at a calm pace, Istrati following behind nervously, the mezédhes and the four bottles of wine protruding from his overcoat pockets.
We sat down in a small office full of people. Gorki spoke nothing but Russian, and it was difficult to start the conversation. Istrati began to bibble-babble with great excitement. I do not remember what he said, but I shall never forget the ardor of his discourse, the tone of his voice, and his broad gestures and fiery eyes.
Gorki answered calmly and succinctly in a sweetly modulated voice, incessantly lighting cigarettes. His embittered smile gave his peaceful talk a deeply concentrated air of tragedy. You sensed in him a man who had endured much and who continued to endure much, a man who had seen sights so horrible that nothing, neither the Soviet celebrations and cheering, nor the honors and glory he had received, could ever again efface them. Flooding up behind his blue eyes was a calm, incurable sadness.
“My greatest teacher was Balzac,” he said. “When I read him, I remember, I used to lift the pages to the light, look at them, and exclaim with dismay, ‘Where can a person find so much strength? Where can he find the great secret?’”
“What about Dostoevski and Gogol?” I asked.
“No, no. Of the Russians, only one: Leskov.”
He fell silent for a moment.
“But above all—life. I suffered greatly, and I developed great love for everyone who suffers. Nothing else.”
He remained silent, following with half-closed eyes the blue smoke from his cigarette.
Panait brought out the bottles and placed them on the table; he brought out the packages and packets of mezédhes. But he lacked the courage to open them. He realized that it was not fitting. The atmosphere he expected had not developed. He had expected something quite different. He thought the two tormented heroes of trial would drink and shout, utter grand speeches, sing and dance until the very earth commenced to thunder. But Gorki was still plunged in his trials, still nearly without hope.
He rose. Several of the young men present had called him, and he shut himself up with them in the adjoining office.
“Well, Panait,” I asked when he was gone, “what do you think of the master?”
Istrati opened a bottle with a spasmodic movement.
“We don’t have any glasses,” he said. “Can you drink from the bottle?”
“Yes.”
I took the wine.
“Here’s to!” I said. “Man is a desert beast, Panait. Each man is surrounded by a gulf, and there are no bridges anywhere. Don’t get upset, Panaitáki. Didn’t you know this?”
“Hurry up and drink so I can have my turn,” he said disgustedly. “I’m thirsty.”
He wiped his lips. “I knew it. But I keep forgetting.”
“That’s your great virtue, Panait. Alas if you didn’t know it—you’d be an idiot. And knowing it, alas if you didn’t keep forgetting—you’d be cold and insensitive. Whereas now you’re a real man—warm, full of absurdities, a skein of hopes and disappointments—to the death.”
“Well, we’ve seen Gorki now. That’s that!” He replaced the bottles in his pockets, collected the packages and packets, and we left.
On our way he said to me, “I thought Gorki extremely cold. And you?”
“I though him extremely embittered. Inconsolable.”
“He should have screamed, drunk, and wept to lighten his burden!” growled Panait indignantly.
“Once, when the dear ones of a certain Mohammedan emir were killed in a war, the emir issued an order to the men of his tribe: ‘Do not weep or scream, lest your sorrow be lightened?’ That, Panait, is the proudest discipline a man can impose on himself. And that is why I liked Gorki so very much.”
The next day I went by Moscow’s great Cathedral, and entered. The boundless temple which had been the boast of czarist Russia was empty, unlighted, and unheated, the multicolored processions of gilt-haloed saints freezing in the desolate winter darkness. The little old lady who kept watch at the offertory table over an empty plate containing not a single kopeck was not sufficient to warm this whole sacred, shivering flock with her breath, which issued like smoke from her mouth and nostrils.
Suddenly, I heard the angelic-sweet voices of men and women singing psalms in the women’s gallery high above. Groping about, I found the marble spiral staircase and began to mount. Above me I could discern two or three little old men and women in the dimness. Wearing shawls, they were mounting also, gasping for breath.
When I reached the head of the stairs, I found mys
elf in a warm alcove, a chapel all of gilt, with lighted tapers, kneeling people, and the sanctuary filled with deacons, priests, and prelates dressed in gold, dressed in silk.
I shall not forget that alcove’s warmth and sweetness. The men were for the most part old, with side whiskers; they seemed like former noblemen, or like doormen in noble houses. The women had their hair cowled with snow-white wimples. Christ glittered on the iconostasis, well fed and rubicund, his breast covered with decorations—human hands, eyes, and hearts of silver and gold.
I remained standing amid the kneeling crowd. I found it impossible to contain my emotion. All this assemblage seemed to me like a heart-rending farewell, as though some extremely beloved person were going away on a distant, dangerous journey, and his friends were seeing him off. . . . The last believers were taking bitter leave of their God’s beloved form while the first believers in the terrible Mystery’s new form were charging without mercy and smashing the old, infirm idols. . . . We live in a crucial, merciless moment in which an old religion is dying and a new one being engendered in the blood.
The times through which we are passing—and even more terrifying, those through which our children and grandchildren will pass—are difficult ones. Difficulty, however, has always been life’s stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before us. Thus we sometimes reach a point much further than we had hoped: by mobilizing all our forces, which otherwise would have remained asleep or acted reluctantly and without concentration. For these mobilized forces are not merely our own personal ones, nor are they merely human. The forces released within us in the forward propulsion we develop in order to jump are a threefold unity: personal, panhuman, and prehuman. At the instant when man contracts like a spring in order to undertake the leap, inside us the entire life of the planet likewise contracts and develops its propulsion. This is when we clearly sense that simplest of truths which we so often forget in comfortable, barren moments of ease: that man is not immortal, but rather serves Something or Someone that is immortal.
When the liturgy terminated and the last believers began to go slowly down the marble staircase, I was approached by a pale, weakish young man. He had a short blond beard, tired blue eyes, and kept coughing. He engaged me in conversation.
“Are you one of us?” he asked excitedly. “You didn’t betray Christ?”
“I don’t betray Him if He doesn’t betray me,” I answered.
“Christ never betrays,” said the youth, astonished at my words. “He never betrays; He is only betrayed. But come, it’s cold out; let’s go to my house and have some hot tea.”
His father was a former nobleman who owned a large mansion and had been crowded now into two rooms, the rest being filled with working-class families. He had been given the least sunny rooms because, unlike the workers, he did not have small children, and the workers’ children needed to enjoy the sun. The young man worked in a factory in order to live, but he was a poet, and he wrote verses whenever he had a little time.
“Right now I am writing a long poem,” he said. “A dialogue-Christ talking with a worker. It is morning; the factory whistles are blowing; it’s snowing out, very cold. The men and women are running to their factories, shivering, their bodies deformed by toil. My worker takes Christ by the hand and conducts Him on a tour of the factories, the coal mines, the harbors. Christ sighs.
“‘Why all these damned? What have they done?’
“‘I don’t know,’ the worker answers him. ‘You tell me.’
“He takes Him next to his damp shack with its fireless hearth and his hungry, crying children. The worker shuts the door, clutches Christ by the arm, and cries, ‘Rabbi, how should we behave toward Caesar? What is his, that we may give it him, and what is ours, that we may take it!’”
The young man stopped, out of breath. He kept moving his hands back and forth, vehemently, anxiously.
“Well?” I asked. “What was Christ’s reply?”
“I don’t know,” answered the last believer, looking around him fearfully. “I don’t know yet; or more exactly, I don’t know any more.”
The young man collapsed into a disemboweled armchair and hid his face behind his hands. “Why? Why?” he groaned.
He too asks, I reflected, asks and finds no answer. I wonder if Christ is capable of answering. Why doesn’t he ask Lenin?
“Why don’t you ask Lenin?” I demanded of him. Involuntarily I spoke with anger.
“I did.”
“And what was his reply?”
“‘Workers of the world, unite!’ I jumped up in a rage: ‘But I’m asking about the soul, Vladimir Ilich, about God, about eternity!’”
“And?”
“Lenin shrugged his shoulders and laughed. ‘Bourgeois . . . ’ he murmured, and he crushed his cigarette butt beneath his heel.”
The forest is large, the wind is right.
Forward, Be-Kou, take up your bow!
This way, that way, this way, that way!
A boar! Who kills the boar,
O poor Be-Kou? Be-Kou!
But who eats it, O poor Be-Kou?
Forward, cut it in pieces. You shall eat the guts.
Bam! An elephant rolled to the ground!
Who killed it? Be-Kou.
Who shall get the precious tusks, O poor Be-Kou?
Patience, Be-Kou. They’ll give you the tail.
(Pygmy song)
The more the days went by, the more I felt Russia’s mysterious fascination penetrating deeper and deeper within me. It was not simply the exotic spectacle of the hyperborean winter which fascinated me, nor my first view of Slavic life—the people, palaces, churches, troikas, balalaikas, and dances everywhere around me. It was something else, something more mysterious and profound. Here in the Russian air I felt the two primordial world-generating forces openly, almost visibly, clashing. So much did the surrounding atmosphere of war penetrate to your very vitals that like it or not you threw yourself into the struggle with one of these world-generating forces or the other, and fought. What I myself had tasted so sharply in my own microscopic existence I saw merciless and terrible here in Russia’s vast body. It was the same struggle, the precisely identical battle, with the same eternal adversaries: light and darkness. Thus my own struggle gradually became one with Russia’s struggle. Russia’s deliverance would be my deliverance as well, for light is one and indivisible, and wherever it triumphs or is defeated, it also triumphs or is defeated inside you.
From the instant I finally arrived inwardly at this identification, Russia’s fate became my fate. I was struggling and agonizing at her side. Feeling too constricted in Moscow now, I set out to see the entire vast arena at first hand—from Murmansk on the Arctic to Bokhara and Samarkand, from Leningrad to Vladivostok—everywhere the primeval enemies and allies were wrestling.
Each man bears his cross; so does each people. The majority carry it on their shoulders until they die; there is no one to crucify them. Happy the man who is crucified, for he alone shall enjoy a resurrection. Russia was being crucified. As I roamed her various republics and villages, I shuddered from sacred awe. Never had I seen such struggle, such agony upon the cross, never so many hopes. For the first time I realized how difficult it is for a man to decide to take a step forward in order to conquer his former love, former God, age-old habits. Although all these had once been spirit urging him to ascend, they had turned to leaden matter in the course of time and had collapsed halfway along in the journey. Now they kept the new creative breath from passing.
Millions of muzhiks were resisting. They did not understand, did not want to be saved. They held nails and nailed them into the Mother. Working the soil generation after generation, they had turned to soil, they hated the flame. The hungry, wounded workers—all flame, they—were pushing the crude masses to join the path of deliverance, sometimes by means of gentle coaxing, sometimes by violence.
And the peoples o
f the world stood, prudent and well fed, around the Russian arena where light and darkness were engaged in battle. “Finished! Russia is finished!” they guffawed, because the prudent and well-fed can never understand the invisible resurrectional forces of the Crucifixion. But as Christ said, in order for the grain of wheat to become an ear of wheat, it must descend to earth and die. Russia was suffering similarly—like a grain of wheat; like a great idea.
One of the apocryphal Gospels relates how the beloved disciple John had an astounding vision as he stood weeping before the Crucified. The cross was not of wood but of light, and crucified upon it was not a single man but rather thousands of men, women, and children, all groaning and dying. The beloved disciple trembled, unable to capture and immobilize any of the innumerable figures. All kept changing, running, disappearing; some returned a second time. Suddenly they all vanished, and nothing remained on the cross but a crucified Cry.
This vision writhes before us today. Today’s savior, however, is not one man but an entire people. All of Russia, millions of men, women, and children, are being crucified and are suffering. They disappear, they flow, you cannot distinguish one definite figure; but out of these innumerable deaths surely the Cry will remain.
Nothing else is needed; this is how the world will be saved anew. What does “will be saved” mean? It means finding a new justification for life because the old one has vented its strength and can no longer support the human edifice. Happy the man who hears the Cry of his times (each epoch has its own Cry) and works in collaboration with it. He alone can be saved.
We live our epoch and consequently do not see it. But if in time the new idea which is being crucified today really does enkindle and renew the world, then we have already entered the first circle of fire. Centuries from now this epoch of ours will possibly be called a middle age, not a renaissance. Middle age—in other words an interregnum. One civilization becomes exhausted, loses its creative strength and crumbles; a new Breath carried by a new class of men toils with love, rigor, and faith to create a new civilization.
The creation of this new civilization is not assured; in no creative act is anything assured beforehand. The future may be a total catastrophe; it may be a pusillanimous compromise. But it may also be a triumph for the creative Breath. In that case our own transitional period is one in which we are experiencing the excruciating labor pains of a civilization in process of birth.