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

“Understand, Romachkin? Have it ready by five o’clock tomorrow. I am going to the board meeting.” The office was in the third court of a brick building in St. Barnaby Alley; a few sickly trees, half killed by rubble from a demolished building, made a touching spot of green under his window.
    Romachkin immersed himself in his calculations. And after a time it appeared that the 5 per cent increase in the basic wage published by the Central Committee, combined with the reclassifications whereby certain workers in Category 11 were transferred to Category 10, and certain workers in Category 10 to Category 9, thus improving the condition of the lowest wage groups (as not only justice but also the directive of the Council of Syndicates demanded), resulted in a 0.5 per cent reduction in the total wage budget if the regulations were applied with the utmost strictness. Now, the workmen in the two mills earned between 110 and 120 rubles, and the new rent increase became effective at the end of the month. Romachkin sadly turned his conclusions over to be typed. Every month he went through some similar operation (though the pretext for it was always new), brought his explanatory tables for the accounting office up to date, waited until quarter to five before he went to wash his hands, which he did slowly, humming “tra-la-la, tra-la-la” or “mmmm-mmmmm” like a melancholy bee … He dined hurriedly in the office restaurant, reading the leading article in the paper, which always announced, in the same tone of authority, that the country was progressing, was making rapid strides, that there had never been anything to compare with it, that despite all opposition history was being made for the glory of the Republic, the happiness of the working masses — witness the 210 factories opened during the year, the brilliant success in creating a grain reserve, and …
    â€œBut I,” Romachkin said to himself one day as he swallowed his last spoonful of cold semolina, “am squeezing the poor.”
    The figures proved it. He lost his peace of mind. “The trouble is that I think … or rather, there is a being in me that thinks without my being aware of it, and then suddenly raises its voice in the silence of my brain and utters some short, acid, intolerable sentence. And after that, life can’t be the same.” Romachkin was terrified by his twofold discovery — that he thought, and that the papers lied. He spent evenings at home, making complex calculations, comparing millions in goods rubles with millions in nominal rubles, tons of wheat with masses of human beings. He went to libraries and opened dictionaries and encyclopedias to Obsession, Mania, Insanity, Mental Diseases, Paranoia, Schizophrenia , and concluded that he was neither paranoid nor cyclothymic nor schizophrenic nor neurotic, but at most suffering from a slight degree of hysteromaniacal depression. Symptoms: an obsession with figures, a propensity to find falsehood everywhere, and an idea which was almost an obsession, an idea which was so sacred that he feared to name it, an idea which solved all intellectual problems, which put all falsehood to flight, an idea which a man must keep perpetually in his consciousness or he would cease to be more than a miserable wretch, a sub-human paid to nibble at other men’s bread, a cockroach snug in the brick building of the Trusts … Justice was in the Gospels, but the Gospels were feudal and pre-feudal superstition; surely Justice was in Marx, though Romachkin could not find it there; it was in the Revolution, it watched in Lenin’s tomb, it illuminated the embalmed brow of a pink and pallid Lenin who lay under crystal, guarded by motionless sentries; in reality they were guarding eternal Justice.
    The doctor whom Romachkin consulted at the neuropsychiatric clinic at Khamovniki said: “Reflexes excellent, nothing to worry about, citizen. Sex life?” “Not