The Case of Comrade Tulayev (55 page)

“You thought well, Rublev,” said Fleischman, and it made him feel a sort of pride.

He shut the notebook gently. So he would have closed the eyes of a dead man. He heated the sealing wax and slowly let drops of it, like burning blood, fall on the envelope which contained the notebooks. On the wax he pressed the great seal of the Archives of the Commissariat of the Interior: the proletarian emblem stood deeply printed.

About five o'clock Comrade Fleischman had himself driven to the stadium where the Athletic Festival was in progress. He took a seat on the official stand, among the decorated uniforms of the hierarchy. On his left breast there were two medals: the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Flag. The high, flat military cap increased the size of his fat face, which with the passing years had come to look much like the face of a huge frog. He felt emptied, anonymous, important: a general identical with any general of any army, feeling the first touch of old age, his flesh flabby, his spirit preoccupied by administrative details. Battalions of athletes, the young women with their arching breasts preceding the young men, marched past, necks straight, faces turned toward the stands — where they recognized no one, since the Chief, whose colossal effigy dominated the entire stadium, had not come. But they smiled at the uniforms with cheerful confidence. Their footsteps on the ground were like a rhythmic rain of hail. Tanks passed, covered with green branches and flowers. Standing in the turrets, the machine gunners in their black leather headgear waved bouquets tied with red ribbons. High banks of cloud, gilded by the setting sun, deployed powerfully over the sky.

Paris (Pré-St.-Gervais),

Agen, Marseille,

Ciudad Trujillo (Dominican Republic),

Mexico
1940–42.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1950, copyright renewed 1967 by the Victor Serge Foundation

Introduction copyright © 2004 by Susan Sontag

All rights reserved.

Cover photograph: Victor Serge in San Juan de Parangaricutiro, Mexico, 1944

Cover design: Katy Homans

Published by arrangement with The Victor Serge Foundation, 16 rue de la

Teinturerie, Montpellier 34000 France, a nonprofit corporation dedicated

to promoting Serge's writings and ideas internationally through publication,

translation, research, and related activities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Serge, Victor, 1890–1947.

[Affaire Toulaév. English]

The case of Comrade Tulayev / by Victor Serge ; translation by Willard R. Trask;

introduction by Susan Sontag.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 1-59017-064-4 (alk. paper)

I. Trask, Willard R. II. Title. III. Series.

PQ2637.E49A6513 2004

843'.912—dc22

2004001563

eISBN 978-1-59017-426-5

v2.0

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