The Red Thread Read online

  But the fox was talking again:

  “So all books on art touch on this aspect.”

  “Do you have many books on art, then?” asked the birch tree.

  “Oh, not such an enormous number. I suppose most of them are in English, German, and Japanese. There’s a new one in Italian, but it hasn’t come yet.”

  “What a fine library it must be!”

  “No, no. Just a few scattered volumes, really. And besides, I use the place for my studies too, so it’s rather a mess, what with a microscope in one corner and the London Times lying over there, and a marble bust of Caesar here. . . .”

  “Oh, but it sounds wonderful! Really wonderful!”

  There was a little sniff from the fox that might have been either modesty or pride, then everything was quiet for a while.

  By now the earthgod was quite beside himself. From what the fox said, it seemed the fox was actually more impressive than he was himself. He could no longer console himself with the thought that he was a god if nothing else. It was frightful. He felt like rushing over and tearing the fox in two. He told himself that one should never even think such things. But then, what was he to do? Hadn’t he let the fox get the better of him? He clutched at his breast in distress.

  “Has the telescope you once mentioned come yet?” started the birch tree again.

  “The telescope I mentioned? Oh, no, it hasn’t arrived yet. I keep expecting it, but the shipping routes are terribly busy. As soon as it comes, I’ll bring it along for you to see. I really must show you the rings around Venus, for one thing. They’re so beautiful.”

  At this, the earthgod clapped his hands over his ears and fled away toward the north. He had suddenly felt frightened at the thought of what he might do if he stayed there any longer.

  He ran on and on in a straight line. When he finally collapsed out of breath, he found himself at the foot of Mt. Mitsumori.

  He rolled about in the grass, tearing at his hair. Then he began to cry in a loud voice. The sound rose up into the sky, where it echoed like thunder out of season and made itself heard all over the plain. He wept and wept until dawn, when, tired out, he finally wandered vacantly back to his shrine.

  •

  Time passed, and autumn came at last. The birch tree was still green, but on the grass round about golden ears had already formed and were glinting in the breeze, and here and there the berries of lilies of the valley showed ripe and red.

  One transparent, golden autumn day found the earthgod in the very best of tempers. All the unpleasant things he had been feeling since the summer seemed somehow to have dissolved into a kind of mist that hovered in only the vaguest of rings over his head. The odd, cross-grained streak in him had quite disappeared, too. He felt that if the birch tree wanted to talk to the fox, well, she could, and that if the two of them enjoyed chatting together, it was a very good thing for them both. He would let the birch tree know how he felt today. With a light heart and his head full of such thoughts, the earthgod set off to visit her.

  The birch tree saw him coming in the distance and, as usual, trembled anxiously as she waited for him to arrive.

  The earthgod came up and greeted her cheerfully.

  “Good morning, Birch Tree. A lovely day we’re having!”

  “Good morning, Earthgod. Yes, lovely, isn’t it?”

  “What a blessing the sun is, to be sure! There he is up there, red in the spring, white in the summer, and yellow in the autumn. And when he turns yellow in the autumn, the grapes turn purple. Ah, a blessing indeed!”

  “How true.”

  “D’you know, today I feel much better. I’ve had all sorts of trials since the summer, but this morning at last something suddenly lifted from my mind.”

  The birch tree wanted to reply, but for some reason a great weight seemed to be bearing down on her, and she remained silent.

  “The way I feel now, I’d willingly die for anybody. I’d even take the place of a worm if it had to die and didn’t want to.” He gazed far off into the blue sky as he spoke, his eyes dark and splendid.

  Again the birch tree wanted to reply, but again something heavy seemed to weigh her down, and she barely managed to sigh.

  It was then that the fox appeared.

  When the fox saw the earthgod there, he started and turned pale. But he could hardly go back, so, trembling slightly, he went right up to where the birch tree stood.

  “Good morning, Birch Tree,” said the fox. “I believe that’s the earthgod I see there, isn’t it?” He was wearing his light brown leather shoes and a brown raincoat and was still in his summer hat.

  “Yes, I’m the earthgod. Lovely weather, isn’t it?” He spoke without a shadow on his mind.

  “I must apologize for coming when you have a visitor,” said the fox to the birch tree, his face pale with jealousy. “Here’s the book I promised you the other day. Oh, and I’ll show you the telescope one evening when the sky’s clear. Goodbye.”

  “Oh, thank you . . . ,” began the birch tree, but the fox had already set off toward home without so much as a nod to the other visitor. The birch tree blanched and began to quiver again.

  For a while, the earthgod gazed blankly at the fox’s retreating form. Then he caught a sudden glint of sunlight on the fox’s brown leather shoes amidst the grass, and he came to himself with a start. The next moment, something seemed to click in his brain. The fox was marching steadily into the distance, swaggering almost defiantly as he went. The earthgod began to seethe with rage. His face turned a dreadful dark color. He’d show him what was what, that fox with his art books and his telescopes!

  He was up and after him in a flash. The birch tree’s branches began to shake all at once in panic. Sensing something wrong, the fox himself glanced around casually, only to see the earthgod, black all over, rushing after him like a hurricane. Off went the fox like the wind, his face white and his mouth twisted with fear.

  To the earthgod, the grass about him seemed to be burning like white fire. Even the bright blue sky had suddenly become a yawning black pit with crimson flames burning and roaring in its depths.

  They ran snorting and panting like two railway trains. The fox ran as in a dream, and all the while part of his brain kept saying, “This is the end. This is the end. Telescope. Telescope. Telescope.”

  A small hummock of bare earth lay ahead. The fox dashed around it so as to get to the round hole at its base. He ducked his head, and was diving into the hole, his back legs flicking up as he went, when the earthgod finally pounced on him from behind. The next moment he lay all twisted, with his head drooping over the earthgod’s hand and his lips puckered as though smiling slightly.

  The earthgod flung the fox down on the ground and stamped on his soft, yielding body four or five times. Then he plunged into the fox’s hole. It was quite bare and dark, though the red clay of the floor had been trodden down hard and neat.

  The earthgod went outside again, feeling rather strange, with his mouth all slack and crooked. Then he tried putting a hand inside the pocket of the fox’s raincoat as he lay there limp and lifeless. The pocket contained two brown burrs, the kind foxes comb their fur with. From the earthgod’s open mouth came the most extraordinary sound, and he burst into tears.

  The tears fell like rain on the fox, and the fox lay there dead, with his head lolling limper and limper and the faintest of smiles on his face.

  Translated from the Japanese by John Bester

  AN ESCAPED MAN

  Victor Serge

  A MAN was squatting in front of a fire of twigs cooking some sizzling, red meat hanging from a sort of tripod. As his eyes opened, Rodion saw that man from behind. On his head he wore a fur cap made of a bristly animal-skin. Rodion’s first thought was mingled with saliva, for the grilled meat was giving off its pungent smell in the sunlight. Rodion recognized the golden sand on which he was lying—naked, exhausted, in a vast warmth. The man, as if sensing that glance on the back of his neck, spun around on his bare heels. R
odion saw a low forehead over which hung curly hair the colour of dirty straw, a wide mouth, a fleshy nose marked by a scar, and crafty, little pointed eyes as blue as the sky.

  “So you’re back?”

  Rodion recognized the sing-song accent of the Black-Lands folk in the man’s speech.

  “Thank you,” he said simply, and he added, after a pause, “comrade.”

  “You can take your comrades and shove ’em up your arse. What kind of comrade are you to me, you poor half-drowned fool? What makes you think I’m not going to turn you in to earn the bounty? You think it’s not obvious you escaped from the camp? Which brigade were you in? The Yagoda Brigade? The Enthusiasts’ Brigade? Triumphant Socialism? Screw the lot of them, citizen. If you don’t want me to chuck your arse back in the water, you better not call me comrade. In this country, you’ll learn there’s no more anything: neither socialism, nor capitalism, bunch of syphilitic whores. There’s only you and me, and if that makes one too many, the question will be easy to settle without consulting the masses . . .”

  As he delivered this half-mocking, half-angry monologue, the man was carefully broiling the meat. Rodion, comforted by his deep bass voice, tried his limbs: they were working, almost painful. A sudden confidence in the universe made him cordial.

  “I’m sorry. Thank you anyway. That smells good.”

  “That smells of broiled wolf-cub,” explained the man. “I killed it this morning in its lair. It bit me on the thumb, the little rascal. I didn’t think it was so quick. There are lots of them here. I’m a wolf to the wolves, I am. I catch their scent, I lie in wait for them, I know all their tricks, and they haven’t learned mine yet. You see, I’m the more cunning in this class struggle . . . So I eat them. (His eyes were laughing.) I spot the lair. When the she-wolf goes off to hunt, I sneak up. Gotta work fast. I whistle, I imitate the little growling sounds the she-wolf makes, like this, listen . . . I don’t know whether it makes them nervous or charms them. The wolf-cub comes up; he shows the end of his snout, all pink and grey, then a suspicious puppy eye. I whistle again to give them confidence. I let him see my left hand, that intrigues him. He’s never seen a human hand, he can’t suspect that it is made to kill in a thousand ways. They’re innocent, wolf-cubs, they’re fools, and my hand looks like a harmless animal, it’s pink. So he licks his chops and he jumps at it; to play, I think, for he’s not yet strong enough to be mean; but I’ve got another hand, I have, and I break the wolf-cub’s neck with this . . .”

  This: a piece of flint similar in every respect to the weapons of prehistoric cave-men.

  “That’s my productive system. I don’t need any cooperatives, I don’t.”

  With his fingers the man took a pinch of coarse salt and sprinkled it over a slice of meat which he practically threw in Rodion’s face. “There, eat.” Rodion was so weak that he attacked that sand-covered meat with his teeth, right on the sand, without even trying to take it in his hands, so as to move as little as possible . . . Time passed, perhaps a long time. The wolf-cub’s flesh had a delicious taste of blood, a taste of sunlight, a taste of life.

  “How did you pull me out of the water?” asked Rodion at last.

  Sitting with his legs tucked under him, Samoyed-fashion, the man went on devouring broiled meat, which he held with both hands. Bones cracked under his teeth. His hair was hanging over his forehead and eyes. His eyes sparkled with good humour: less, though, than his teeth. He replied only after a long while, after he had spat onto the sand some chewed tendons and some little crunched bones whose marrow he had sucked.

  “First ask why,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe I was more interested in your bundle than your pretty face. If you had had a good pair of boots I’m not sure I wouldn’t have thrown you back into the water. What is your life going to be good for? I don’t need it, and the entire world doesn’t give a damn, believe me, just like I don’t give a damn. I really don’t know why I didn’t just let you sink and drift slowly down to the White Sea. Maybe that would have been better for you, one more drowned man never hurt anybody. And nobody will ever ask him for his passport. Maybe I needed your company, arsehole. Not for long.”

  Rodion was listening in a dream. Such utter translucence reigned on the green fringe of the bushes. He asked:

  “What’s your name?”

  The man shrugged his shoulders. “Ivan.”

  “Ivan Nobody?”

  “Exactly.” Ivan got up, sated, smiling a funny smile of well-being. He walked around for a while between sand and sky. He filled the vast landscape: his low forehead, his rounded shoulders, his heavy jaw, his vigilant little eyes, their blue cheerfulness sharpened by slyness. Stockily built, broad and heavy, giving an impression of enormous strength now that he was standing up, dressed more or less like a hunter from the Taiga. He returned toward Rodion, who lay naked, limbs outstretched, shivering. From his full height he looked down at Rodion and suddenly declaimed in a joking schoolboy’s voice:

  Diadia! diadia! our nets

  Have pulled in the body of a drowned man . . . .

  “That’s from Pushkin,” said Rodion, at the edge of unconsciousness.

  “And Shakespeare?” said Ivan, with an imperceptible trace of mockery, “do you know that name?”

  “No . . . I’ve only read Hegel, Hegel . . .”

  “Possible. But you have fever, my drowned man.”

  How much warmth there was in his voice now . . . Rodion, feeling faint, closed his eyes. The man kneeled down next to him and with both hands began covering the lad’s naked body with sand. Rodion felt that material warmth over all his flesh. His features relaxed. His childish face emerged from the sand. The light, passing through his eyelids and his sleep, extinguished all thought within him. He was coming back to life.

  . . . He spent several days with the man, Ivan, who said he did not know the name of the river nor that of the other river whose junction Rodion had to find, a two or three day’s walk upstream. There, big rafts loaded with logs were always floating downstream; by riding on one for three days you get to a town, a town without a name or memories either, for this man was wary of men, of language, of numbers, of memories. “Rivers have no names in nature,” he said mischievously. “Drowned men don’t have names at the bottom of the water, and they all have the same blue faces. The wolves don’t know that they are wolves. That’s the way things are . . .” He led Rodion to his lair, a comfortable burrow, large and quite dry, which had been dug right into the earth of the steppe. It was well exposed to the sun, yet well hidden by the bushes, and it was so well laid out that Rodion thought several men must have worked on it. Two cavalry coats and two heavy winter quilts made a comfortable bed. As he fell asleep there for the first time, Rodion felt a fear: why shouldn’t Ivan smash my head in tonight? And he immediately answered himself: a refugee from a firing-squad and a refugee from a drowning—we were made to sleep together underground. What good would my death be to him? What good is my life to me? Nothing has any importance. No more problems. The simplicity of things made him slightly dizzy. The earth was vast, vast . . .

  They parted without shaking hands or pronouncing any useless phrases. Both were taciturn, probably because the sky was white and heavy that day. Nothing to say to each other on the edge of the beach where a gloomy heath began. Rodion set off toward the dark line of distant mountains. Ivan was holding a stump of a carbine with a sawed-off barrel and a sawed-off stock, which dangled at the end of his arm. When Rodion was about a hundred metres away, Ivan raised up that mutilated weapon and shook it up and down over his head for a long while. He seemed to be sending incomprehensible signals. Rodion, who was walking rapidly, turned around several times to answer him by waving his cap.

  •

  The other nameless river was wider. A stunning breadth of heavenly blue flowed between sheer cragged cliffs of purplish-blue rocks. Tree trunks were floating in it. A wisp of smoke curled up over a patch of woods. From that point on, Rodion’s whole being was expectant, on the lookou
t. Hidden on the bank, which was covered with tall reeds pointed like swords, he watched the majestic passage of a huge, well-constructed raft carrying a complete building made of logs. The men aboard were talking very loudly in a language he didn’t understand, Finnish, or Samoyed or Syzran or Mari. They were blond men, rather well dressed in sweaters and old rusty leather—probably Communists. The next raft appeared several hours later, just before sunset, through a cloud of gnats. It was small, less heavily laden. Two young lads were steering it, standing, with long poles. Rodion hailed them; they came in to shore with a sort of indifference, welcomed him aboard without saying a word, and handed him a pole. All this took place automatically. As soon as the sun had set, the rocks took on the colour of blackened blood; the river became hostile, the gnat-bites painful. Then the two lads broke into an old convicts’ song:

  We go on, dragging our chains

  Down the road of sorrows

  We go on, dragging our hearts

  To the end of our bitter fate

  One night we will escape

  Beautiful girl, you will love us

  And then they will pinch us again

  Beautiful girl, you will cry for us

  They kept repeating this stanza—the only one they knew—until they could no longer go on: from fatigue, from dull sadness. Rodion sang along with them as he worked his pole, for they needed to pay strict attention in order to prevent the current from dashing them against the rocks. At critical moments the three lads, leaning out over the dark waters, would arch their backs, absorbing the impact against their chests with a single gasp, and one of them swore. When the moon rose they again took up the song of chains and sorrows, of love and heartbreak, until the hour when, exhausted, they moored in a sort of creek in order to sleep. At dawn, Rodion told the two lads he had money, and they sold him a hunk of black bread for three roubles. As a precaution he left them a few hours upstream from the town. He leaped adroitly onto the bank. The two lads, having turned their backs, never saw him again. The surface of the water was shimmering, totally calm, and the motionless shrubs were reflected in it, emerald green.