The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

You will drown at the end of the road, brother, I pity you. Terrible days are coming, and you will be alone with millions of lying faces, alone with huge portraits of yourself placarded over the fronts of buildings, alone with ghosts whose skulls show the round hole of a bullet, alone at the summit of the pyramid of their bones, alone with this country which has forsaken itself, which has been betrayed by you, you who are loyal as we too are loyal, you who are mad with loyalty, mad with suspicions, mad with jealousies you have repressed all your life … Your life has been black, you alone see yourself approximately as you are, weak, weak, weak, driven mad by problems, weak and loyal, and evil because, under the armor that you will never take off, in which you will die, taut with will, you are feeble, you are nothing. That is your tragedy. You would like to destroy all the mirrors in the world, so that you would never see yourself in them again, and our eyes are your mirrors and you destroy them, you have had heads shot open to destroy the eyes in which you saw yourself, in which you judged yourself, just as you are, irremediably … Do my eyes trouble you, brother? Look me in the face, drop all the documents manufactured by our machine for crushing men. I do not reproach you with anything, I assess all the wrong you have done, but I see all your solitude and I think of tomorrow.