“They would tell the people there was a God more mighty than Tranck,” I said.
“The missionaries frighten the people. They create sin.”
“And does not Tranck Tane create sin? He has his Tepia a Tevu.”
“That is just to keep them from drink,” she said with all the innocence in the world. “If they drink they will not work, and if they do no work they will die.”
Had not her father told her his charity alone supported the atoll? “I should think if that were the case, they would gladly work and any drinking they did would not prevent that.”
“If they drink, they become sad.”
“I should think they may be induced to work,” I said.
“Will you threaten them with your gun?”
“I will not threaten anyone.”
“Then they will not work,” she said.
He who believes strongly is bound eventually to come face-to-face with the limits of his belief. I had argued with Tranck that socialism might be brought to Atu-Hiva without tears, that from the revolutionary past in the Soviet Union we might take lesson, not example. But when I called upon Seventh Man and found him sitting before a palm-frond hut, a stack of dominoes before him on a table of rough deal, my hopes suddenly fell. If to Tranck he appeared noble, to me he was burnt out, a shell. I called out a greeting in English, and for good measure a Russian curse, for he barely noted my arrival, and remained surly as impatiently he heard me out.
“First the Catorika, then the Mormoni and the Protestani and the Malachiti,” he said. “And now this Marax. We do not need any of it.”
“Because Tranck Tane provides you with tinned foods, with cotton and with flour for bread.”
He shrugged. “Tranck Tane makes his profits. We dived for him when there was pearl. I do not believe there will be pearl again. We bring him copra now.”
“It is meager and spoiled,” I said. At this he turned his head, and as he did so, his pareu fell open, exposing his private parts. I was immensely embarrassed, for him as well as myself, so that when he turned back it was I who was forced to avert my eyes. “Do you see no greater future for your people than to subsist upon charity? Tranck has made of this atoll a zoological garden, Seventh Man. Do you know what that is?”
“A white cannot insult me, Pupinay Captain,” he said, and with that rose and turned back into his hut. There was no door. For a moment he stopped and faced me, almost spitting out the words. “When my people knew the legends and lived fully as men, the whites were cowering in caves. You have nothing to teach.”
“Nothing to teach?” I shouted back, but he was already inside. “Look at this, your island. Look at your poor and dispirited people. Look at yourself!”
But Seventh Man had looked too long at himself, I am sure, and had no need of more. He did not come out, nor did he reply. With heavy heart I walked back to Goetz’s store. There I found the trader handing over a stack of tins to a woman of middle years. Her pareu was clean, and though she was fat and no longer attractive, she wore a flower in her hair. Somehow it set off her face. I was amazed to see in it a shrewdness I had thought did not here exist. Perhaps the best had died, but survival is something too. Goetz scratched a number in his great green ledger and turned to me. “I shall spare you the misery,” he said. “They will not work. Not for you, not for me, not for Tranck. Even the missionaries have a time of it. You have only to look at their church.”
Their plain hall was as battered and neglected as any building on the atoll. “But why?”
Goetz shrugged. “Myself, I believe it is the race which has died. Simply died, captain. There are races and races.”
“There are only men,” I said. “I shall want some tools.” With these the next morning I began.
My first task was to make some sense of the coconut plantation, cutting out the older non-bearing trees, hauling them down to the beach to burn, thinning out the volunteer shoots, cleaning out from under the remaining trees the rubble of the years, rusted tin cans, broken bottles and jars, rotted nail-studded boards no one had thought to preserve. On the entire island there was not one wheeled conveyance — these would hardly have been practical in the sand — and so I hauled the refuse by myself, brutal work, but less brutal by far than the mental strain. Though I had not had to labor with my back for a long time, I had always remained in the same physical trim that had been one of the requirements for entrance to the Zhukovsky. At the very time of my leaving the Soviet Union I had been on special duty at the Summer Air Forces Camp near Serpukhovo, about two hours by motor from Moscow, and so it was that I had spent the season before in strenuous physical activity. Even in Papeete I had not neglected my body, but had run and swum every day. Now, working like a muzhik in the sun, the strain was not on my body, for while my hands bled, then hardened, my mind drifted back to the days of my life in the Soviet Union, as over and over I recreated that one moment when my fate had been given over to the bizarre obsessions of Tranck.
A civilian friend had come out to Serpukhovo and we met outside the camp, purposively mingling with the bathers in the River Oka. His message was as brief as it was grim: all branches of the democratic underground were to dissolve at once and wait for better times.
The news of this collapse left me seething, but there was little I could do, and less so shortly thereafter when, in Leningrad, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the butcher who had turned my lovely native city into a barracks, was assassinated in his party headquarters at the former Smolney Institute. This act provided Stalin with all he would need. Within hours arrests were made all over the Soviet Union — the NKVD head, Yagoda, himself shipped off for trial and replaced by Medved who, a fortnight later, was replaced as well. The whole of the country was in an uproar of speculation and fear. Yet within this, at its very heart, a peculiar calm reigned.
When I was ushered into the office of Yakov Ivanovich Alksnis, head of the Soviet Air Forces and member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, that calm was such that one would not have known that all about us the Soviet Union seemed intent on cannibalizing itself. Though during the terror Alksnis devoted himself to protecting his junior officers from arrest, he was not long able to protect himself. In 1937 he was labeled a traitor, broken to the ranks, tortured and then shot. It was Alksnis who ordered me to fly at once to Odessa and report for instructions there. In a time of great fear I knew instinctively that he was that rare horoshy chelovek, a decent fellow who would not play according to the depraved rules of the time.
Willingly I flew to Odessa and thence on to Vladivostok, where I caught a steamer for Papeete. Others in danger at the Zhukovsky were sent on similar missions in order to preserve them from Stalin’s wrath. Alksnis knew that the young guard of the air corps must be preserved, and so Musabekov disappeared into the North Ossetian Republic to oversee meteorological information; Kushnitzov envoyed to China as air attaché; Shprinz to Brazil, and Zhuavlyov, the test pilot who had been injured in the breaking in of the famed ANT-14, packed off to North Africa on a mysterious mission having to do with the technology of wine. Wine! Just as Stalin had prepared his terror long before the Kirov murder, so had the leaders of the democratic opposition prepared our tactical withdrawal. Alas, it was the leadership that did not survive. By the time I had induced the Marquesans to work for themselves, Alksnis was dead. I did not know it then, for I had not received one letter from home. It was hardly difficult to suspect the worst. Being so far away I felt a kind of shame.