An amusing half-page, rabbits dancing in a circle around the head of a dead bear.
Very representative, the bears, in the Gulag a poet, a Bukharinian, jailed for Bukharinian deviation even though he never had the first clue about what Bukharinism was, this poet had told a bear story, he’d got it from a German, a Silesian joke, we were talking one evening to take our minds off how hungry we were, the Bukharinian poet decided he would tell the story of the rabbit and the fox in Alexander Nevsky, we all jumped down his throat, then he said:
‘I know what the moral of my life-story is, I thought I wanted to be part of the Revolution, my story is also yours.’
We let him speak, trying to stop someone speaking is only funny if you know that you will actually be able to stop him, we knew that he didn’t have that much time left, he was too thin, he talked like an actor at his farewell appearance, he retreated a few steps, put a broom on his shoulder, walked back towards us sticking his chest out, a hunter in the middle of the forest, a very jaunty step, suddenly he’s facing this huge bear, on its hind legs, more than two metres tall, the dream of every self-respecting hunter, takes aim with his broom, the bristles against his shoulder, bang! the bear goes down, the hunter goes up to it, take care, gives it a kick, no reaction, places his foot on the bear.
The Bukharinian poet was in the middle of the cell, we’d formed a circle, he’d put his foot on a stool, he was holding his broom vertical, the bear doesn’t move, the hunter stays there for a moment with his bear, walks round it, struts his hour all by himself, decides to go and fetch the villagers, returns singing, the old man heads back towards the cell-door, he’s making for the village, faint coils of wood smoke, the houses nice and warm, as he walks there comes a tap on the hunter’s shoulder, from behind, it’s the bear, on two legs, fifty centimetres away, the bear gives him a great big smile, very friendly, you can see his teeth, he raises his right paw, palm as big as a hunter’s head, splendid claws, with traces of blood on them, the bear slowly lowers its left paw, shows what he has between his legs, he smiles, says to the hunter:
‘Jollywobbles please, or I’ll eat you up!’
The hunter does what he’s told, the bear lets him go, the hunter goes back to the village puking every hundred metres, locks himself in his house, washes his mouth out, reloads his gun, leaves his house, plunges into the forest, determined step, looks for the bear, finds the bear.
For the dissertation I’ve got to have at least two examples from the history of science, reason that’s patently historical is the kind whose history can be constructed, the history of a scientific concept, which one? Canguilhem? the reflex concept, the history of a series of theories, but there’s the other sort of reason, that of the reasonable man, who gives up killing, everything in reason that relates to the reasonable rather than to the rational, I’m going to get this wrong, it’s always the same, I manage to cope with the first two parts, describing, trawling through the works, but the minute I have to start thinking for myself I get lost or I knock it all over and can’t put it back together again, I do terrible essays. Old people don’t break the spines of books when they open them, no need for me to worry there, they know the value of things, and when they pinch stuff it’s always specifically targeted, I’m sure it was some old guy who stole that special edition of Tintin in America two months back, the one priced seven thousand francs, fortunately it was an afternoon when I wasn’t here, it was an old guy did that because the owner keeps a close eye on the young ones, dead twitchy straight away, he’ll go and tidy the shelves just near where they are, he stands quite close to them, doesn’t let them alone for one second:
‘May I help you? Something you want to ask, perhaps?’
The owner’s ‘perhaps’ is a masterpiece, unlikely that even the cops have got a ‘perhaps’ as good as that.
Actually that story about the bear, I’ve let the poet tell it, but I recognised it, I’d known it from way back, Müller had told me it, Müller loved that story, claimed to have got it from Kappler, one day he told me he intended to use it for one of his plays but he never did, here it’s a children’s book, the big bear is dead and the rabbits are dancing round his head, a huge head, larger than life, on the ground, might easily be Stalin’s head when people started dancing round it.
When Becher stood up in front the Central Committee and recited his poem about the bust of Stalin, the deer and the accordion, people wept, it was at the time of Stalin’s death, I personally never had any occasion to shed a tear, I was still at Magadan, not the worst in the Gulag, but it was already very cold, I saw grown men weep at Magadan when the news of Stalin’s death was announced, and not just among the ones who were guarding us, I saw Stalin’s bust lying on the ground later, in 1956, lying between two tram rails, Budapest, trust the Hungarians!
My young friend has spoken just once to the girl behind the counter, they don’t know each other, or maybe he’s already been here before to buy something, still it seems odd, a man as serious, as important, in a shop like this, he looks very elegant in that beige coat, this place a really good find for a meeting, too good, I’m spending my time wondering about this shop and I’m forgetting to be careful, I honestly couldn’t say whom I’ve seen walking past the shop window in the last ten minutes.
Those Hungarians danced a merry jig in ’56, the first bust of Stalin to get knocked off its pedestal, no the first was earlier, in ’53, lying in a gutter, that’s when I became aware of the disaster, hardly out of Magadan I get to Berlin and I’m treated to the spectacle of the German proletariat knocking over statues of the great leader, I got the picture, I’d understood before, before the war, I got the picture very early on, I didn’t dare speak the word aloud, but I knew very early on what Stalinism was.
I’ve always known, by day I was active and at night I thought, I knew, there was someone who knew and someone who acted, two someones who went under the same name, Lilstein, the Lilstein who knew took care not to get in the way of the Lilstein who acted, and the Lilstein who acted tried not to cramp the style of the Lilstein who knew, and there was never a right dme to clarify things, confronting us was the counter-revolutionary threat, the fascist threat, the Nazi threat, the imperialist threat, the hawks of Washington, today there are clever people who tell us you could have seen what you were doing and who you were doing it with, I did see, but confronting me were people who wanted to send me up a chimney as smoke or melt me down with the H-bomb, I always preferred keeping my sights on the people facing me.
Rewind the spring, I knew but I said nothing, I acted, even in Magadan I never said anything, in the end I was convinced I was going to die in that bloody Gulag, and I never said a word, wasn’t fear, wasn’t to save the essential thing, even in the camp I never said anything because the Lilstein who knew had no wish to break with the Lilstein who had acted, two Lilsteins, every evening there’s one of them who says to the other cosy up to the butcher but change the world, and the other one laughs.
Siamese twins, they can’t bear to be together, and they know that to be separated would mean that one would die, no one knows which, both would have died, maybe I might permit myself to know because I used to be pro-active, perhaps I did certain things because I could still tell myself that they were foul things, at the end of a working day you ring for a secretary, you hold out a folder containing a single sheet of paper, you could hold out just the sheet of paper, three names are on it, but in a folder it becomes a file, even if the men haven’t done much, and all you have to do is say: