Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [63]
3
You don't want to kill us already, do you?
The words were pronounced by Virghilij Ossipovic with a slight trembling in his voice that contrasted with the almost bureaucratic though often harsh and polemical tone of the discussion so far and thus broke the tension in the meeting of the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ movement. Virghilij was the youngest member of the Executive Committee; a thin down of hair darkened a prominent lip; locks of blond hair fell over his oblong grey eyes; those red-knuckled hands, their wrists always sticking out from shirt sleeves that were too short had not trembled when they primed the bomb beneath the Tsar's carriage.
Grass-roots activists took up all the places round the low, smoky basement room; most of them sitting on benches and stools, others crouched on the ground, others on their feet leaning against the wall, arms folded. The Executive Committee sat in the centre, eight boys bent over a table laden with paper, like a group of students intent on the final slog before the summer exams. To the repeated interruptions fired at them by the activists from all four corners of the room, they answered without turning or raising their heads. Every now and then a wave of protest or agreement swept through the meeting and - since many got to their feet and pressed forward - seemed to converge from the walls on the table, there to wash over the backs of the Executive Committee.
Liborij Serapionovic, the heavily bearded secretary, had already and on several occasions pronounced the stony maxim he often resorted to to soften irreconcilable differences: ‘Where comrade parts company with comrade, there enemy joins hands with enemy’, and in reply the assembly had intoned with one voice: The head still at the head after the victory, victorious and honoured the day after shall fall’ — a ritual warning that the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ activists never forgot to direct at their leaders whenever they spoke to them, and that the leaders themselves would say to each other as a form of greeting.
The movement was struggling to establish, on the ruins of autocracy and of the Duma, an egalitarian society in which power would be regulated by the periodic execution of the elected heads. The movement's strict rules, all the more necessary as the imperial police stepped up their repression, demanded that all activists obey Executive Committee decisions without argument; at the same time every text setting out the movement's theory reminded the leaders that no exercise of authority was admissible unless by those who had already renounced enjoyment of the privileges of power, those who to all intents and purposes were no longer to be considered as among the living.
The young leaders of the organization never thought of the fate that a still Utopian future held for them: for the moment it was tsarist repression that unfortunately guaranteed an ever more rapid turnover in their numbers; the danger of arrest and execution was too real and immediate for the notional future of the theory to take shape in their imaginations. A youthfully ironic, disdainful attitude served to repress in their minds what was nevertheless the distinguishing element in their doctrine. The grass-roots activists knew all this, and just as they shared the risks and hardships of the committee members, so they understood their spirit; and yet they nursed an obscure awareness of their destiny as executioners, a destiny to be fulfilled not only at the expense of the status quo, but of the future government too, and being unable to express themselves any other way, they would flaunt an insolent attitude, which, while always expressed in the formal tones of the meeting, nevertheless weighed down on their leaders