Free Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge Page A

the places of my childhood: the tall reeds where my father hid his dinghy to wait for wild duck.
    Anton emerged from the ruins, clad in gold-embroidered white silk, like a Persian prince in an illuminated manuscript. His horse’s hooves gamboled so lightly over the dead city, wasn’t it a wingèd charger? Anton on a wingèd charger! I laughed. Ha, you didn’t think it was possible? Neither did I, Anton. Then I saw him differently, with his flat face, funny diamond-shaped spectacles, hospital coat, and a syringe between his fingers. N’ga was holding a flaming-red object with both hands, a captive bird — hallo, they’ve dug my heart from my chest! No, it was a flask. Anton said, “Saved in the nick of time. You’ve really put me through it, you louse. Bloody hell! Time you came around. The melodrama’s over, or d’you want my fist in your face?”
    “I don’t have a face … What’s the matter? Where did you come from?”
    “You’re the one coming back from a long way off, brother. I got off a plane four days ago. Have some of this iced coffee. I bring you messages from on high. You’ve got a medal, you skunk.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “Yes, you do. You’re behind with your work.”
    I was still suspended between two realities. “Behind with my work” brought me to earth with a bump. Clever, Anton. “Tell me about Mania,” I said feebly.
    “Mania has remarried for the third time since she left you. Getting uglier by the minute. A veritable camel, my brother. More coffee?”
    At university, I had adored Anton. We never stopped bickering. He was inventing biological Marxism or Marxist biology or was it dialectical biology … He had no time for old-world romantics who believe in love. “The couple,” he would say, in the insufferable tone he adopted to emit verdicts beyond appeal, “is necessarily nothing but a two-bit drama determined by physio-psychological, not to say social, misunderstandings … Most women are garrulous vaginas with the brains of a sparrow … The outcome of a hundred thousand years of domestic exploitation.” A textbook case of the believer with a cynical veneer. I wonder what happened to him? Back then he was a favorite of men in high places; he must have followed them to the grave, as he foresaw. “We have built” — it was one of his sarcastic sayings — “a colossal infernal machine of stupendous perfection, and we’ve settled down for a nice snooze on top of it, wearing shiny red-paper laurel crowns on our heads. There!” Nothing left of him but this memory of mine … (There’ll be time to spare for sorting out memories. Anton lecturing about how we should only preserve useful ones: “To forge a living memory, in the service of an active present …” What use is your memory now, dear Anton?)
    This unease that recalls you to me, Anton, comes from Nadine. Nadine is straight as a die, mettlesome, instinctual. She’s right, I’m wrong: instincts are always right in the end. We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned …
    * * *
    Nadine lit a big fire in the fireplace and the room filled with well-being. She threw in some letters, photos, several passports. Her devastation had attained a calm of utter catastrophe. It was compounded of two disasters, one trivial, the other almost inconceivable, and it was the trivial one that caused the most pain, like an open wound. “Sacha only made up his mind at the end of the twelfth hour, because we were in Hell …” For two years now Nadine had been afraid to open a newspaper, receive a letter, speak a name, think of a person, let slip the least doubt concerning the totally absurd accusations that were universally proclaimed, to seem not to be applauding the unforgivable with all her heart and soul. Conspiracies whirled around like a witches’ sabbath … At first she’d believed in them, like everyone; then she’d willed herself to believe the unbelievable; then