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Paris, France
October, 1936
At that moment, a loud knocking came from the door. “OPEN UP! THIS IS THE POLICE!” Ian paled and looked frantically for another exit, a fire escape, or anywhere to hide. The door splintered on its hinges, and a lone officer entered the room with his gun drawn.
Alain looked up calmly and said, “So good of you to join us, Alphonse.”
Alphonse peered over his handgun into the room with wild eyes that softened upon recognizing Alain. “Oh, sorry Rubashov.” Eddie’s eyes widened. “I thought I ought to put on a show if you weren’t here.”
Alain / Rubashov smiled. “Don’t bother trying to jump out of the window, Ian. Alphonse is my man in the Paris prefect. He is on our side.”
Ian obediently swung back into the room and closed the window. “I was just checking to see if he had double-crossed us” Ian sheepishly replied.
Alain scowled at Ian and shook his head. Turning back to Alphonse, who had put the gun away; “Have you got everything?”
“Of course! It’s in the car.” Alphonse gestured in the direction of the street. “A week’s supply of rations, and those extra items you asked for. If we leave within the hour we can still catch our express. We’ll have to dump the car though.”
“The express?!” Ian nearly shouted, storming across the room. “You’re not seriously suggesting that we just board another train? The gendarmes would pick us up in no time! I will not be going back to their hands so…”
“EASY, EASY Ian!” Eddie responded. “I’m sure we have a more sophisticated plan than that. Am I right?”
Alain smiled wryly. “Sophisticated…sure…I’ve got just what we need…”
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The darkness was near absolute. Ian could just see the Alain’s form a foot ahead of him in the gloom of the train yard. Alain and Alphonse whispered in low tones, apparently attempting to decide on a direction. Apparently satisfied, the two men led off to the left and headed down the tracks between two lines of freight cars. They came to a break. Alphonse indicated to cross the tracks and then started across. Ian was about to walk across when the whole yard was bathed in light. Alain reached out and grabbed Ian, pulling him back into the darkness of the shadow behind the carriage. The moon shone briefly through a break in the clouds before vanishing again, leaving behind the comforting darkness. Ian breathed again, and shuffled forward into the empty space. Several seconds later, he had caught up to Alphonse, and they continued their lonely trek through the yard. At long last, Alphonse jumped up into the interior of a freight car and extended his arm to Ian. Soon, the four travelers were safely ensconced behind the closed door. An hour later, the train left Paris heading south.
Soon, the rocking of the boxcar and the late hour had dropped Eddy and Alphonse off to sleep. Ian stared blankly at the wall for a while, thinking over the events of the day.
How different this trip looks now. He shifted his upper torso in two or three spasms, failing to achieve a comfortable position. Sighing, he looked over toward the door. Alain sat there his head leaning against the door. He was looking through a hole at the French countryside.
!@#$ it, I’ll ask him.
“Do you ever sleep?” Ian asked, crab-walking over towards the door.
"Heh…it is always wise to have someone alert, on guard as it were.” Alain snorted, turning his face away back to Ian. “You should get some sleep, you’ll need it.”
Ian shook his head. “I can’t sleep, not until I find out about you and Marseille.”
“Marseille…” Alain looked deep in thought. “So you want to know about Marseille…”
Ian waited for what seemed like a minute. Finally, he could stand the silence no longer. “Is it true? Did you murder a man?”
Alain smiled. “What do you think?”
Ian thought for a moment. “It’s possible. I don’t believe it though. What possible use could the killing of an innocent man have in the struggle of the masses?”
Alain leaned forward. “You would be wise to leave the masses out of it. You understand nothing about them.” He leaned back now, into what could be called a teaching posture. “We members of the Party understand them as no one has ever understood them before. We have penetrated into their depths and worked in the amorphous raw material of history itself…”
Without noticing it, he had taken a cigarette out of a case. Ian bent forward and lit it for him. Alain nodded his thanks. “We are called the Party of the Plebs. What do others know of its history? Passing ripples, little eddies, and breaking waves. They wonder at the changing forms of the surface and can not explain them. But we have descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constitute the substance of history; and we are the first to discover her laws of motion. We discovered the laws of inertia, the slow changing of her molecular structure, and her sudden eruptions. That is the greatness of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists; we are empirics. We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We know more than all that men have known about mankind; that is why our revolution succeeds. And you talk about the value of an innocent man?”
Ian sat back with his legs stretched out, listening. “Go on. I am curious to know what you are driving at.”
Alain was smoking with relish. “As you notice, I am talking my way into something of a confession,” he said and looked up smilingly at the hole in the door. “Well, telling you will make no difference. Everything there is buried, the traitor and his influence. He wished to kill the movement; we destroyed him. Do you really think the masses will understand any other measures?”
Ian looked down, puzzled. “But I don’t believe that death was the only solution. You could have merely expelled him from the movement.”
Alain grunted. “The Bishop of Verden once said, ‘When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.’ So you see, we could not just play politics, we had to make history. That is the whole difference between your morality and ours.
Ian leant back against the wall. “I’m sorry, but the difference is not quite clear to me. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain.”
“Certainly,” said Alain. “A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people – one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics means operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation.”
“Pretty,” said Ian. “But unfortunately rather abstract. To return to more tangible things; you mean that ‘we’ – namely, the Party – represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity.”
“This time you have grasped it,” said Alain smiling. Ian did not answer his smile.
Alain continued. “The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.”
Ian was about to interject, but Alain preempted him. “But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.”
“So that is why you emphasise Machiavellian morality…” Ian mused.
Alain nodded. “So we should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We are the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we are right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.”
Alain was fully warmed up now, his eyes flashing in the moonlight. “Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it.”
“Then you are sailing without ballast and therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life and death!” Ian exclaimed.
“You are correct,” Alain responded. “And if we are in the right, history will absolve us, and the execution of ‘innocent men’ will be a mere bagatelle. It is that alone that matters who is objectively in the right. The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another problem: whether the ‘innocent man’ was subjectively in good faith when he attempted to betray the Party. If he was not, according to their ethics he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that betraying the revolution would have been better after all. If he was in good faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue making propaganda, even if the Revolution should be ruined by it…”
Ian cocked his head, his mind fighting drowsiness to follow the logic.
Alain continued picking up speed. “That is, of course, complete nonsense. For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit; it is our law. History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.”
Ian looked up in wonderment at this mixture of analogies. However, he did not stop Alain’s train of logic.
“We have learnt history more thoroughly than the others. We differ from all others in our logical consistency. We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself upon the seventh generation. Therefore we concentrate all our efforts on preventing error and destroying the very seeds of it. Never in history has so much power over the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands as in our case. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death. We are held for madmen because we follow every thought down to its final consequence and act accordingly. We are compared to the inquisition because, like them, we constantly feel in ourselves the whole weight of responsibility for the super-individual life to come.”
Alain paused, breathing heavily. He turned his face back to the hole in the door. Slowly and quietly Alain began again. “I am one of those. I think and act as I have to; I have killed people whom I was fond of, and given power to those I did not like. History has put me where I stand; I have exhausted the credit which she has accorded me; if I was right I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I will pay.”
Alain looked back at Ian. “You’d better get to sleep now, I’ve said enough for tonight.”
From the distance came the long haunting sound of the train whistle.