32
PARTISAN REVIEW
grey vastness from which should rise a new poetry and a new
painting. But our civilization reduces it all to a mechanism for
killing. Only the well-to-do use it for travelling, their senses long
dead to all excitement. They slept in the com£ortable armchairs
of the Douglas while we flew over the stormy landscape of Yucatan
and spanned the high central plateau covered with heavy clouds
transfused with light.... The first face I saw at the airport in
Mexico City was that of a Spanish friend, an eye-glassed face,
intense, energetic, lean. For eighteen months during the Spanish
war we had struggled at Paris and elsewhere to save this man, one
of the most clear-headed of all revolutionists, from a death which
the Stalinists were stubbornly preparing for him in Mr. Negrin's
prisons. Now he with other comrades had just fought for fourteen
months to ensure my voyage and escape. Without them I would
not have had a chance. It was my good fortune to have had the
rational miracle of solidarity happen twice for me. The first time
was five years ago, when I left the USSR for exile, stripped of
everything-saved, on the eve of the mass executions, saved by the
action of some French comrades. So it is that we stand together
from one end of the world to the other, few in numbers, but sure
of each other, and confident: on the eve, confident of tomorrow.
. . . In the streets of Mexico City the feeling of no longer being
outside the law was extraordinary. No longer was I a hunted man
on reprieve from an internment camp, nor that alien suspect whose
papers the Haitian police had examined with a kind of horror.
Do
you come from Europe? From France? Political refugees? No
nationality? But Russians all the same?! And a French writer
too?! With a Mexican travel-permit! Writer, painter? Is that why
one of you takes notes and the other makes sketches?
The police–
men would go into a fit, and regain their composure only just
in
time to smile politely at some Phalangist gentleman who was pass–
ing through with a passport in good order, prettily bound in blue
paper and duly stamped by Franco's consuls.
I have gone through too much not to be able to live in the
immediate moment only. But the hospitable lights of Mexico City
still superimpose themselves on a background of far-eff, ruined,
uneasy cities, plunged in the black-out; and I see hunted men
going through them, the most hunted men in all the world. I know
that not all can <?r ought to leave, that the duty of those who can
