“But if we don't help it, then starvation will! Without bread we won’t last long!”
“I know, comrades, we won’t last long without bread, but one hunk won’t get you far either. And we must find that hunk of bread elsewhere, where we know it to be for certain, and not where we already know it is not. We must seek it, comrades, beyond the cordon.”
“But how, comrade, through the cordon? You can’t just reach your hand through the cordon. There’s no way of breaking through.”
“Just a moment, comrades, allow me to finish. I have a plan. We don’t need to break through the cordon to force the imperialist French government to give us provisions. It will suffice, in my opinion, for the Council of Delegates to send a telegram to the government: either they provide us with so many freight cars of flour, potatoes, and whatever else, delivered to our side of the cordon in two days, and continue to provide us with such supplies in the future, or we’ll break through and tear their cordon apart. Even if we don’t manage to break through, at the very least the army will be infected grappling with us, and from the army the plague will run riot all across France. We’ll wait two days – the choice is theirs.”
“They won’t respond!”
“As I see it, comrades, they will respond, and mighty quick at that. There’s no threat so effective as the fear of plague. They’ll figure we have nothing to lose. They’ll get frightened. They won’t want to risk it. What if we do manage to break the cordon and come in contact with their soldiers? That’s their worst nightmare. They wouldn’t want to risk infecting all of France over a dozen freight cars of supplies. And it wouldn’t hurt to send a second telegram to the French proletariat on the other side of the cordon: the Parisian proletariat are dying of starvation, they call out to the proletariat of France and the whole world to put pressure on the French government to force them to send aid. On the one side the plague, and on the other a general strike. Before two days have passed we’ll have a first-rate food shipment across the cordon. That, comrades, is the way I see it. I’ve said my piece.”
Dozens of voices rang out at once.
Late in the evening the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Delegates of the Belleville Soviet Republic, having in the majority voted for Comrade Laval’s proposition, sent two telegrams out into the void.
Silence was the only reply.
Two days later the Council of Delegates reconvened and accepted the conclusions of Comrade Lerbier, who recommended that the commission work out a detailed plan for taking the Anglo-American territory by force.
Leaving the session, Comrade Laval pulled his cap down low over his forehead, which always meant he was deeply upset, and set off into the dim and winding streets. A light rain fell.
The fiasco of Comrade Laval’s motion had cut him to the quick, like a personal affront, filling him with a hollow rage.
“The bastards! Ignoring our threats! Leaving us to starve to death!” he muttered through gritted teeth.
He knew them all too welclass="underline" the imperialists. How could they be in league? They weren’t the slightest bit moved by the fate of the dying proletariat. But he had been counting on their fear of the plague. That they wouldn’t want to risk it. No, they weren’t afraid. One could see they felt mighty sure of their cordon. They’d butcher the proletariat like dogs. Wouldn’t let them get within one mile of the cordon.
A hollow, powerless rage swelled in Comrade Laval’s heart.
He hated those bandits with every fiber, just thinking about them made his throat constrict in painful convulsions. Their heavy jackboots had already trampled the Paris Commune. And now they were calmly standing by while everyone died of hunger and the plague, to take over a disinfected Paris once more, smother it in police, drown it in democracy by opening the floodgates of futile parliamentary blather, set up snares for criminals, lock the city in iron manacles. And the swarthy, browbeaten people driven from their fields would again flow into the factories to forge for them their peace, their luxury and idleness by the sweat of workers’ hands. Everything would continue just as it always had, and there wouldn’t be the slightest indication that only months before Paris had had a commune, a workers’ and soldiers’ government, the Council of Delegates, a rugged workers’ epic.
At the thought of all this Comrade Laval clenched his teeth tighter, until his jaws gave a warning crack. The heavy boot of powerlessness pressed even harder than the yoke of plague.
Comrade Jacques Laval, captain of the Red Guard of the Soviet Republic of Belleville, had been a sailor on the Victory in the period prior to the revolution, that is, four weeks hence. He’d been in the Party for eight years, from the moment when, as a twenty-year-old ruddy-faced farmer’s boy from the Combé sawmill, he was assigned to the navy by the draft board, and, thrust into that black floating dungeon, he began shoveling heavy lumps of coal into the huffing maw of the furnace, his coarse fingers probing the first burns on his naked, muscular torso. His twenty years of knowledge flipped a somersault, and the firmly grounded, orderly world swirled around in his head like a ship’s deck in a raging gale.
From the vantage point of the Party everything suddenly took on a glassy transparency, and looking back Comrade Laval found he now understood a thing or two. Old Combé drove himself to the sawmill once a week to ask: Is everything OK? And old Frost, who had lost his sight measuring fractions of inches, was declared “unfit” by the foreman and given the boot by the factory police. The Victory had cannons, armored towers – it was a military vessel. The slick naval officer and old Combé were one man, two faces with the same torso – the white international. While setting the cannon at a 25° angle, Private Laval dreamed: corral the whole mob from all over the world, along with their cars, epaulettes, and cassocks, into one big space and – Kaboom! Comrade Laval’s face lit up in a grin.
Comrade Laval had come to Paris on holiday and the plague had trapped him. When the plague sparked the first riots, the ground shook, splitting the various class strata at their seams, and Comrade Laval thought: there’s no way we’re dying like dogs, like we did before. As long as the imperialists were across the cordon, and the plague was blocking access to Paris, it was time to demolish this old ramshackle house and lay the foundations of a free people’s republic.
And pushing back his beret, Comrade Laval was the first to head briskly back to the barracks, only to emerge an hour later at the head of a blue division, which had swiftly acquired – no one knew how – a red flag.