The colonel had not understood what the doctor was saying, so the doctor repeated that he could, indeed was going to, save comrade Lilstein’s life, he spoke with a cheerfulness intended to carry the colonel along on the tide of his enthusiasm.
And once more the colonel talked about Ivanov and the speech, and the doctor heard his guts rumble, he clenched his buttocks, and then contracted the muscles to prevent having an accident more befitting a toddler, and with the contraction and the cramps in his intestines came understanding, and with understanding his voice began to tremble at the moment when, for the third time, he was about to inform the colonel who seemed so hard of hearing that comrade Ivanov’s oration would not be needed, his voice shook, his jaw trembled, the words made no sense, panic spread to his airways, lips, the rest of him, he said nothing.
He did not give her penicillin and he felt so bad about this that he kept as close an eye on her as if she’d been his own mother, he took notes of what she said when she grew feverish, a kind of shorthand record of her delirium, because he was meticulous, out of medical scrupulousness, a good reason, they were notes taken with a view to a ‘Nosography of a Fever-Induced Delirium’, and all the while he was taking his notes he experienced a terror even more intense than that which had made him feel like a private on latrine fatigue reporting to the colonel of the guard.
But a second visitation by terror did not stop him taking dangerous notes, this second terror had been forced to admit defeat for, unlike the first which had only morality to overcome, the second had found itself up against remorse which is, in regimes which require strict observance, the only means of achieving dignity.
And his notes had been found by them, some of them made it their business to ensure that the good doctor disappeared, but another group of them had arranged for the notes to be completed, in secret.
From the time she felt sure she was going to die, and this was in the month of March 1946, comrade Sarah Lilstein began to babble, it was, noted the doctor, as if she’d understood everything, the toing and froing in the corridor, the decision that penicillin was contraindicated, the substitution of her nurses by others, it was as if she’d felt relieved by such signs of her imminent demise and had deliberately used her fevered state to let her thoughts run wild, so that she could say whatever she liked behind her ravings, think freely under the cover of the rambling state of mind they’d induced in her, think without being afraid of seeing death loom up before her, because death was there with her already, let her mind ramble without being afraid that friends and loved ones would be accused of plotting, since the proof of a rambling mind is in the excess of its rambling, in the things no healthy person would dream of saying.
Above all you had to avoid doing anything that might moderate the incoherence of your ramblings, in fact this would only prove that your mind was not wandering, so if your mind was really wandering you had no choice but to tell all and hold nothing back, so if you said you’d like to cut great Stalin’s balls off with Lev Davidovich Bronstein’s rusty scissors you ran fewer risks than if you didn’t dare go that far and made do, for example, with saying that the great leader had fucked up more than once on the agricultural policy front.
So Sarah Lilstein began to babble her way towards the worst things that could be said, she went on believing she could think under the cover of her ravings, keep control of her divagations, rave with the lucidity of the very drunk, and while she raved be both the Fool who raves and Shakespeare who makes him wise, Ariadne and the labyrinth, the egregious labyrinth, the eddy and the thing that thinks in the eddy, the eddy which scourges and dilutes everything in its wake, its history and its present, Sarah delving deep into her reserves, in the throbbing of her temples with a temperature of forty and eight tenths, and the fever entered into the very heart of her, took the place of the thought she believed she could control — and so, what she was trying to leave behind her to give a meaning to those fevered moments, now lost all meaning just when she was trying to find one, her ramblings were no longer a mask for her thoughts but the shape of the life she had led: her fevered outpourings were History itself.
Just a few images remained, the only ones that seemed still to have a meaning, a young woman in tears at the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg, then the young woman found herself in the clinic on the outskirts of Moscow and there unleashed a volley of curses even before she turned herself back into an old, dying woman Yezhov little shit Jdanov arsehole let Yezhov cut Stalin’s head off and then into the blood pumping out, into the blood pumping out at the base of his throat, let him cast the whole decapitated world, a serpent-world, the poster that had so enraged her before the war showing homeland commissar Yezhov, massive in his red uniform, filling the whole right-hand side with his arm pointing out his hand inside a glove, wool or iron no way of telling which, throttling a viper under its chin its head is made of a number of heads belonging to homunculi, the men condemned to death in the thirties, Trotsky the viper’s tail in the shape of a swastika the tiny heads Bukharin Rykov spitting blood squeezed out by Yezhov’s massive gloved hand, tiny heads with big noses thick lips brown hair bloodshot popping eyes as seen also at the time in posters in Berlin or Nuremberg disgraceful at the time she’d only seen the poster, not the big noses.
Whenever Sarah, having nightmares within some episode full of nightmares, began to doubt, she remembers, the beginnings, when she had to tell herself this is a nightmare, it’ll pass, it’s passing, another nightmare, which passes, from nightmare to nightmare people pass, not the nightmares, a mortiferous process which swallows orders in Russian and spits them out again in a variety of foreign languages, those were the words of Clara Zetkin, ‘the meaning and content of the Russian Revolution are being reduced to a set of rules like those of the Pickwick Club’, Clara Zetkin attended the Party conference at Tours, she had spoken in support of the twenty-one conditions, and here she was, talking of a Pickwick-type club, of a mortiferous machine, she died saying ‘through the midnight gloom I look to the future with optimism’, that was in 1933.
Sarah whispering the whisper of her friend Clara Zetkin, and the hospital attendants did not dare go into her room, may Yezhov enter into Stalin and father a monstrous offspring, Beria saying when Yezhov was liquidated I realised that nothing was to be gained by always saying yes to Stalin, Yezhov plunging into the entrails of great Stalin and out of him siring the swastika-tailed heir who shall sit at the head of what the republic of soviets has been turned into, the optimists can go to hell, listen to the laughter of Bukharin, Kamenev and all those who scale the heavens.
Let them all laugh like hanged men who point to the sky with their third foot, let them watch while Stalin dies clubbed to death by Yezhov as they themselves died and may the diminutive Bronstein die a second death along with all those who believed in it all, the innocents who pledged their future to it and into the great receptacle along with the entrails and afterbirth shall go the Orthodox popes who manufactured terror and the rabbis who processed obedience and the men who worshipped organisation, the heroes of labour, the heroes of war, the commissars and the Vlassovs, the same vessel, Tukhachevsky and his fiddle.
May no one ever again sire believers, Nicolas the cretin, the imbecile Tsarina, the incompetent executioners, the innocents who confess, the martyrs who smile, Lenin who laughs, and all bide their time for the succession in the coming days, the child which Stalin held in the photo, the Bouriate girl, daughter of a regional secretary, she broke free from her parents at some reception or other and jumped into the arms of the Grandfather with the moustache, millions of copies of that photo were printed, the little girl with the slightly oriental eyes, behold, peoples of the world, the only union that is not racist!