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By Root 1547 0

thin nose, and his rosy complexion all gave him the appearance of a determinedly sweet girl, while the steely glint in his eye gave periodic glimpses of a more savage side. His room, which was otherwise like that of any impoverished workman, contained just a single chest full of books and papers. He was Russian, but he never talked about himself and was content to let various tales circulate on his account. The miners, being deeply suspicious of foreigners and sensing from the sight of his small, bourgeois hands that he belonged to a different class, had originally imagined some story about his being a murderer on the run. But he had then behaved in such a friendly way with them, not at all proud and distributing every coin in his pocket among the village children, that they now accepted him, reassured by the tag of ‘political refugee’ that was bandied about, a rather vague term, which they interpreted as a kind of excuse, even for crime, and which made him seem like their comrade in adversity.

During the first few weeks Étienne had found him fiercely reserved, and so it was only later that he heard the full story. Souvarine was the youngest child of a noble family in the province of Tula. While studying medicine in St Petersburg, he had been swept up in the great wave of socialist fervour just like every other young person in Russia and decided to learn a manual skill instead. Thus he became a mechanic, so that he could mix with the common people and get to know them and help them as one of their own. And this was how he now earned his living, having fled after a failed assassination attempt on the Tsar:1 for a month he had lived in a greengrocer’s cellar while he dug a tunnel under the street and primed his bombs at constant risk of blowing the house up and himself with it. Disowned by his family, penniless, and blacklisted as a foreigner in French workshops where he was suspected of being a spy, he had been dying of hunger when the Montsou Mining Company had eventually taken him on during a labour shortage. For a year now he had shown himself to be a good worker, sober, quiet, doing the day shift one week and the night shift the next, and always so reliable that the bosses cited him as a model.

‘Aren’t you ever thirsty?’ asked Étienne with a laugh.

And he replied in his gentle voice, with barely the trace of an accent:

‘I only drink at mealtimes.’

Étienne also used to tease him on the subject of girls; he could swear he’d seen him in the cornfields one day with a putter over by the First Estate. But Souvarine would simply shrug his shoulders with calm indifference. A putter? What would he be doing with one of them? As far as he was concerned, women were workmates, comrades, assuming they showed the same courage and sense of solidarity as men. And anyway, why risk developing a soft spot which might one day prove to be a weakness? No girls, no friends: he wanted no ties. He was free, free of his own flesh and blood, and free of everyone else’s.

Each evening towards nine, when the bar emptied, Étienne would remain there talking with Souvarine. He would sip his beer slowly while the mechanic chain-smoked, a habit which had eventually turned his slender fingers a ruddy brown. His eyes had the blank expression of a mystic, and they would follow the smoke upwards as he pursued his dream. He used to search restlessly with his left hand for something to occupy it and often ended up by installing on his knee a large female rabbit that enjoyed the run of the house and was always pregnant. This pet rabbit, whom he had named Poland,2 now adored him: she would come and sniff his trousers, stand on her hind legs and then scratch him until he picked her up, as though she were a small child. As she snuggled down in his lap with her ears flattened along her back, she would close her eyes; and he would stroke her automatically, tirelessly running his hand through the grey silk of her fur and evidently soothed by this warm, living softness.

‘Incidentally,’ Étienne said one evening, ‘I’ve had a letter from Pluchart.’

They were alone