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

asked before they separated. — “No — is it interesting?” — “Very. It has the story of the attempt on Admiral Dubassov in 1906 …” Kostia took Issue 12 with him.
    But Romachkin himself did not want to reread any accounts of those red-letter days of the Revolution. They were too discouraging. Those historic assassinations had required meticulous preparation, disciplined organization, money, months of work, of watching, of waiting, courage linked with courage; besides, they had often failed. If he had really thought about it, his plan would have appeared completely visionary. But he did not think — thoughts formed and dissolved in him without control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life in that fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accurately, more clearly, but that such thinking is a strange labor which one performs almost in spite of oneself and which often results in a bitter pleasure, beyond which there is nothing. Whenever he could — whether in the morning, afternoon, or evening — Romachkin explored a certain locality in the center of the city: Staraia Place, an old square on which stands a sort of bank building in gray freestone; at the entrance there is a black glass plate with gold lettering: Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the U.S.S.R., Central Committee . A guard silhouetted in the hall. Elevators. Across the narrow square, the old white crenelated wall of Kitai-Gorod, the “Chinese City.” Cars drew up. There was always someone smoking thoughtfully at the corner … No, not here. Impossible here. Romachkin could not have said why. Because of the white crenelated wall, the severe gray freestone blocks, the emptiness? The ground was too hard, it bewildered his feet, he felt that he had neither weight nor substance. In the vicinity of the Kremlin, on the other hand, the breezes that swept through the gardens carried him across Red Square in all his insignificance, and when he stopped for a moment before Lenin’s tomb, he was as anonymous as the gaping provincials who stopped with him; the faded, twisted domes of St. Vasili the Blessed dwarfed him even more. It was not until he had mounted the three steps of the Place of Execution that he felt himself again. It had been there for centuries, surrounded by a small circular stone balcony. How many men had died there? Of them all, nothing survived in the souls of the passers-by — except in his. Just as simply would he have laid himself on the wheel that should break his limbs. The mere thought of the atrocious torture set his skin shivering. But what else was there to do when one had come thus far? From that day on, he carried the Colt whenever he went out.
    Romachkin liked the public gardens that border the outer wall of the Kremlin on the side toward the city. He gave himself the pleasure of walking there almost every day. It was there that the thing hit him between the eyes. He was walking in the gardens eating a sandwich (it was between 1:15 and 1:50), instead of chatting with his colleagues in the Trust restaurant. As usual, the central walk was almost deserted; the streetcars, making the turn outside the fence, rattled and clanged their bells. Where the walk curves in the direction of the rusty foliage that borders the high wall of the Kremlin, a man in uniform appeared. Two men in civilian clothes followed him, smoking. Tall, almost gaunt, the visor of his military cap pulled down over his eyes, his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual, the man stepped out of the portraits published in the papers, displayed four stories high on buildings, hung in offices, impressed, day after day, on the minds of the nation. There was no possible doubt: it was He . The air of authority, the hands — the right in the pocket, the other swinging … As if in final proof of his identity, the Chief drew a short