Free The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask

skyscraper; to the left rose the citadel of the Kremlin, with the heavy flat façade of the Great Palace, the tall tower of Czar Ivan, the pointed turrets of the enclosing wall, the bulbous domes of the cathedrals rising against the starry sky. Here searchlights reigned, men ran through a zone of harsh white light, a sentry ordered back a crowd of gapers. The wounded mass of the Cathedral of St. Saviour occupied the foreground; the great gilded cupola that had crowned it was gone like an ancient dream, the building rested heavily on the beginning of its own ruins; a dark crack a hundred feet long split it from top to bottom, like a dead lightning bolt in the masonry. “There it goes!” someone said. A woman’s voice murmured, “My God!” Thunder burrowed through the ground, shook the ground, made the whole moonlit landscape rock fantastically, set the river sparkling, set people shuddering. Smoke rose slowly, the thunder rolled over the ground and vanished in a silence like the end of the world; a deep sigh rose from the mass of stone, and it began to sink in upon itself with a snapping of bones, a cracking of beams, a desolate look of suffering. “That’s done it!” cried a little bareheaded engineer to several dust-covered workmen who, like himself, had emerged from the cloud. Romachkin, having read it in the papers, thought that life progressed through destruction, that things must perpetually be torn down so that things could be built, that the old stones must be killed so that new buildings, better ventilated and worthier of man, might rise; that on this spot would one day stand the beautiful Palace of the Peoples of the Union — in which perhaps iniquity would no longer reign. A slight unacknowledged grief mingled with these grandiose ideas as he resumed his walk toward the place where he could catch Streetcar A.
    He put the Colt on the table. Bluish-black, it filled the room with its presence. Eleven o’clock. He bent over it in thought for a moment before he went to bed. On the other side of the partition Kostia moved; he was reading, from time to time he looked up at the radiant miniature. The two men felt each other’s nearness. Kostia drummed gently against the partition with his fingertips. Romachkin answered in the same fashion: Yes, come! Should he hide the Colt before Kostia came in? His hesitation lasted only a hundredth part of a second. The first thing Kostia saw as he entered was the magical blue-black steel on the white paper tablecloth. Kostia picked up the Colt and bounced it happily up and down in his hand. “Magnificent!” He had never held a revolver before, he felt childishly happy. He was rather tall, with a high forehead, unruly hair, and sea-green eyes. “How well you hold it!” said Romachkin admiringly. And in fact the Colt increased Kostia’s stature, giving him the look of a proud young warrior. “I bought it,” Romachkin explained, “because I like firearms. I used to hunt, but a shotgun is too expensive … A double-barreled Winchester costs twelve hundred — think of it!” Kostia only half listened to the embarrassed explanation: that his timid neighbor should own a revolver amused him, and he made no attempt to hide his amusement — his whole face lit up with a smile … “You will certainly never use it, Romachkin,” he said. Romachkin answered warily: “I don’t know … Of course I have no use for it. What should I use it for? I have no enemies … But a firearm is a beautiful thing. It makes you think …”
    â€œOf assassins?”
    â€œNo. Of just men.”
    Kostia suppressed a guffaw. A fine hero you’d make, my poor friend! — A good sort, though. The little man was looking at him quite seriously. Kostia feared that he would hurt him if he joked. They chatted a few minutes just as usual. “Have you read Issue 12 of Prison ?” Romachkin