In the year ’22, after a good deal of throat cutting, I ran into her again at Feodossia, tending to her lungs which she said were “as wrecked as the floors of that factory, do you remember?” and striving to keep a glimmer of life going in the body of a scrawny baby girl, ten months old, who was soon to die. Daria was a director of schools, “no paper, no books, twice the children, half the teachers” and those at their wits’ end. Hunger; two successive waves of terror. Premature aging had spoiled the childish charm of her youthful looks; her nose was pinched, her lips drained of color, her mouth twisted slightly out of line. I found her obtuse, almost stupid, with an edge of hysteria, one cool night on a pebbly strand bewitched by the most sparkling stars, when I tried to dispel the bitterness I perceived in her by defending the Party’s behavior… Forehead banded by a black lace scarf, hands on knees, squatting on her heels like a sulky tomboy, Daria answered me curtly, clipping her phrases as she would have coldly ripped up the beliefs without which we could not have lived: “Spare me the theoretical considerations. And the lofty quotations out of books! I’ve seen the massacres. Theirs and ours. Them, they’re made for that, the rubbish of history, the debased humanity of drunken officers… But us, if we’re no different, then it’s a betrayal. We’ve betrayed plenty, I can tell you. See that rock out there? Officers trussed together, driven with sabers to the edge of the cliff. I saw men falling in bunches, like big crabs… There are too many psychopaths on our side… Our side? What do I have in common with them? And you? Don’t answer. What do they have in common with socialism? Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll leave.”
I kept my mouth closed. Then she let me put an arm around her shoulders, I felt her thinness, I squeezed her to me in a rush of affection, I only wanted to make her warmer, she froze. “Leave off, I’m not a woman anymore…” “A great big child is what you are and always have been, Daria,” I told her, “a wonderful child…” She shoved me so violently, I almost lost my balance. “Be a man, then! And keep your platitudes for a more appropriate time.” We remained good friends. We took long hikes over the parched Greek hills of Feodossia. A kindly sun warmed the curves of the rock, the sea was incredibly blue, the horizons of the parched land were turning green. Great birds with azure plumage more shimmering than the sea alighted close to us from time to time, inquisitively. “Not a hunter, are you?” Daria asked. “Don’t you want to shoot at it?” She buried her baby, cured her lungs, rebuilt her morale.
At a Trade Mission soiree in Berlin, there she was, looking elegant and youthful, her health restored. She was attached to a clandestine branch that took care of certain prisoners; having grown up with French and German governesses, she was able to pose as the wife of the political prisoners she visited. The jails of the Weimar Republic were tolerably good, in keeping with a judicious liberalism comfortably greased by dollars. “What do you think of those men, Daria?” “I think they’re admirable and mediocre. I like them. Nothing great will be achieved through the likes of them.” Her white teeth were laughing. We were of one mind about the frailties of the West: its deep-seated habits of selfishness, its total oblivion to the implacable rigors of History, its fetishization of money, its craven slippage toward disaster due to the fear of taking risks… Its absurd belief that things will always die down so that people can go on living. “Whereas we,” Daria said, “we know how inhuman the dying-down can be… That’s what makes us superior.” A year’s prison sentence, served in Central Europe, spared her the heartache of our first internal crises.
And years later, we were walking along Kurfürstendamm toward Am Zoo, through the flurry, the luxury, the bright lights and ready pleasures of Berlin at midnight. Here and there a jobless man slunk through the cosseted throng of men with porcine rolls for necks and she-grenadiers covered in furs. Girls with painted faces — the only attractive creatures in sight — mimicked the airs of perverse young men. Daria burst out: “Our unemployed are going over to the Nazis, who buy them bread and boots… How do you think it’s going to end?” “In apocalyptic slaughter…” We saw each other in Paris, Brussels, Liège, Stuttgart, Barcelona… Daria married a construction engineer who got caught up in a purge of technicians; she divorced. “He’s honest, but stubborn. We don’t build as others do, we build the way you put up concrete bunkers on the front line… He’ll never grasp that reason and justice take second place to efficiency, and as we’re sacrificing millions of peasants, we can’t appear to be letting the technicians off…” I was glad to hear her being so sensible. As the dark years wore on, those of us working with the secret services abroad were in no position to know or sense everything that was going on. We heard of new towns rising on lands which only yesterday lay fallow, of automobile, aluminum, aviation, and chemical industries developed in less than five years… On the banks of a Meuse river clad in gray silk, outside the stern old Maison Curtius washed up there like a stone coffer full of the wealth of an artisan people, Daria lectured me on the by-products of the tinplate industry. “Production will bring about justice. The rational exploitation of by-products is more important, in the short term, than ideological errors or judicial excesses. All those faults can be rectified over time, so long as there are enough little medicine tins being made… And if political reputations are unjustly damaged along the way, well, that’s secondary, don’t you think?” I was the one nagged by doubt. Should one not, while attending to all those pillboxes and blast furnaces, have a thought for man? A thought for the poor devil of today, for the occasionally great poor devil, who cannot content himself with straining under the yoke while waiting for tomorrow’s medicines and railway lines? — The end justifies the means, what a swindle. No end can be achieved by anything but appropriate means. If we trample on the man of today, will we do anything worthwhile for the man of tomorrow? And what will we do to ourselves? But I was grateful to Daria for not doubting, at least not overtly.