Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (10 page)

“Yes,” interjected the Special Committee Chairman, “I committed an indiscretion.” The tongue of the Chairman, a chubby, red-faced fellow whose ample flesh seemed ready to burst his tunic, felt dry in his mouth. What a nasty piece of luck! A big glass of 110-proof brandy to set us to rights again—and quickly! The Delegate’s cordial tone of voice restored his salivation:

“Vigilance, Comrade Anissim!”

“Yes, Chief!”

Mochkov had no idea why they kept him from November to February in one of the cellars of Security—from which he emerged crippled with rheumatism. It meant that his sentence would be prolonged for a few more years, which meant that Niura would no longer wait for him, for that’s no life, which meant . . .

The Special Committee of State Security nonetheless summoned Elkin, and it was on a very cold day. He entered with no more than a nod by way of greeting, made a sort of leap for the heating-stove, stretched his hands over it, shook his shoulders and seemed to straighten up even taller. “The Devil take you,” he said gaily, “with your thirty degrees of frost. Better pray to your little god for little atheists that the Opposition doesn’t take power soon or I’ll teach you guys what real cold is.” He knew from experience that this threat still had a certain effectiveness, albeit one which decreased with the years. The Special Committee Chairman, upset because he hadn’t understood well, murmured: “I don’t in the least appreciate your jokes, Citizen Elkin,” to which Elkin boomed back in a joyful voice, at once exasperating and disarming: “Tell me, do you think I appreciate
yours
, esteemed citizens?” This outburst was followed by some murky phrases muttered to himself. The Special Committee Chairman thought he made out something like “Gang of feather-covered Devils . . .” but it couldn’t be that. That would have been such incredible insolence that it would have been necessary to raise the question of arresting him this very evening. But there, now he was smiling, politely. They never got anything out of him. A character, that. And then, after all, the ex-President of the Kiev
Cheka.

Elkin lived in the last house on the road. The walls of his room were bare logs; his window looked out onto the expansive plains, a streak of black water, sky. The room, darkened by the colour of the old wood, had a low ceiling and the light entered it brutally, sadly. When alone, Elkin would age suddenly, frown, and, before sitting or lying down, pace from one corner to the other, hands clasped behind his back. Emptiness. Stone. Space. Heaviness. Do you think you understand these words? Elkin monologued in a crushing silence. There’s nothing—and it weighs tons. Draw a straight line from here, in front of you: nothing for a thousand kilometres, nothing for two thousand, for three thousand, for four thousand, nothing at the Pole. You’d have to go down to the other side of the globe, through Labrador, to find more idiots (who are more or less happy, thanks to scientific wheat-farming; but they’re hurting right now on account of the decline of the price in the world market). The people here . . . His lips curled in disgust. Until they clear the earth of these god-forsaken burghs—or throw in electricity, daily newspapers, aeroplanes, cars, an abundance of gaiety and zest for living—they will be bipeds, not men. He halted in front of the bare panes, beyond which the spring sky was turning slightly pink. And tomorrow? The irresistible pressure of one hundred and forty million peasants, can you conceive that? If the West doesn’t start moving, that rising tide in five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, will carry everything away. Socialism? They don’t give a damn. They only know its lying face, its face of inhumanity and anti-socialism. Nothing will remain of our ashes. A cheerful thought.

His tablecloth was a newspaper. He laid out bread, salted cucumbers, butter. He worked the portable stove on the window-sill in order to stand in front of the expanse. The tin kettle purred. Outside, cows were passing by. A little girl ran from one to the other spurring their indolent progress. All at once three water-carriers came along the edge of the crest, three young women shouldering yokes, swinging the old wooden casks in rhythm with each step. Elkin heard them talking back and forth in loud voices. The last in line appeared to stand still for a very brief moment at the entrance of the path, a dark silhouette, erect, almost glowing against a background of empty sky: Galia. Elkin was staring at her so intensely that she was tempted to turn around. He was waiting for this movement, calling it forth. She did not make it, because of the yoke. She didn’t know why she held herself so straight, so proudly, as she descended the steep path, why the purplish-blue line of woods against the evening sky seemed enticing, vaguely poignant to her.

Elkin felt cold. There is a being on the earth from whom one waits for a gesture, less than a gesture, a glance, and who refuses it, without knowing. And all at once there is emptiness. The great strength we possess seems useless. Something within it is drained, for at the bottom of all strength there is apprehension. Elkin drank his flavourless tea while pacing from one corner to the other, a hunk of bread in his fist. At times he stopped at the table to rearrange some newspaper clippings, marked in red and blue, with his fingertip. Yield of arable land by acre . . . Canada . . . Australia . . . Denmark . . . the Ukraine . . . Black Lands . . . Western Siberia . . . Years . . . Gross figures and percentages . . .

At bottom, everything is contained in that.

* * *

On the other side of the river, snow still remained in hollow places among the rocks. The shrubs were turning green, a hue so undecided and light that you might have called it a glimmer of sunlight shining through the burgeoning shoots.

“I’m telling you it’s yellow and not green,” affirmed Avelii, “but since you’re used to thinking that bushes are supposed to be green, you no longer really see them. If you were a painter, you’d have a mighty big Right Deviation in your eye.” He was talking to Rodion as they both made their way along the bare rock between the bare trees, the sky, and the water. Rodion replied: “Don’t rely on your eyes. They don’t think.” Sometimes Rodion said intelligent things without really knowing it.

Avelii, a Georgian from Megrelia with perfectly-drawn features whitened by the North, a young, well-modulated voice which rang clear. “Eyes,” he said gaily, “eyes don’t need to think. They grasp and understand without it. I don’t like thinking, brother, I like seeing and touching. I’m breathing in this freshness. I don’t want anything more . . .” He stretched his neck and sniffed, smiling at everything.

Rodion looked at him sidewise, lowered his heavy forehead, a sad, hesitant little laugh in the depths of his eyes. Rodion: an unattractive face lit up by sea-green pupils. “Breathe all you like, comrade, that won’t teach you the sense of things.” Under his wolf-skin cap, his head was tortured by questions. He tried to find answers to them in books, but they prevented him from reading. His anxiety blurred the printed lines, henceforth unintelligible and useless. On one point, he saw clearly, and that was in his discussions with Elkin, on the river-bank, about State Capitalism, “a sort of enormous tank, old man, covering the whole horizon, which is going to crush everything.”

Avelii: student at the Industrial College of Baku, member of the youth organization, compromised for having questioned a lesson on Party history about the first divergences between the majority and the minority in 1904. Note in his file: “By his insidious questions attempted to discredit the leaders of the Party among the students.” Rodion: truck driver at the Penza bicycle factory compromised for having questioned the inequality of wages. Note in his file: “Pernicious agitator, dangerous demagogue, Trotskyist. Knows how to make the masses listen to him.” Because it happened that he couldn’t sleep for a whole long evening, his brain churning with statistics and ideas more difficult to steer than the heaviest trucks. And the next day, at the Party meeting, he reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out newspaper clippings in the margins of which he had scribbled equations in pencil. “Here, comrades, is the equation for the life of a worker in our factory: I call labour-time
h
, wages
w
, rent
r
, and I say that . . .”

At first they listened to him with indulgence, then with boredom. But his thinking made a breach in the general torpor, his voice grew passionate, his
x’s
suddenly transformed themselves into kilos of bread and meat, into roubles and kopecks, and they saw him, swaying from side to side, standing on a platform draped with red calico in front of a puny little black bust of Lenin, a stubborn kid with his head pulled into his neck, who was demonstrating by algebra, by Marx, by Lenin, by the day-before-yesterday’s
Pravda
, by Stalin’s own six points, that “the worker in our factory is hungry, dear comrades, and that’s the problem of problems—it’s the very meaning of life. Hegel said . . .”

He stopped short, unable to recapture the idea which had come to him out of the heap of words in a pamphlet on Hegel. “Hegel said: the worker in our factory can’t live on wages like these, that’s all.” His face beamed with satisfaction while the Party activists, following each other to the platform at a signal from the cell secretary, called him a demagogue, a careerist, an egotist who thought only of filling his belly, a Trotskyite, and a panic-monger. The truth was buzzing inside his skull; he didn’t understand a word of the arguments they were assaulting him with. Only at the end of the meeting, amid the scraping of benches, did he stand up to say loudly—and everybody heard him—with a broad smile, “Talk all you like! You know very well I’m right.”

Out in the street—a dismal street of perpetual mud, lined with picket fences which people were tearing down piece by piece each night to keep warm—an old worker put his hand on Rodion’s shoulder and, in a friendly voice, said, “You’re lost, comrade, that’s for sure, but you’re right. You’re great.”

“That’s right,” said Rodion warmly.

In reality, Rodion had both lost himself and found himself. He came to know the cellars of State Security, new faces, Northern skies. With the first half-pint of alcohol in him, problems appeared clearer, he began to feel intelligent. Then everything got cloudy again, and he felt like splitting wood with an axe, like he used to when he lived at home; or like grabbing young birch-trees in both hands to break them, uproot them and feel strong and victorious in the end. Then he could be heard to say, alternatively, “I’m nothing but a brute” or “Comrade Gorky is right. It’s a fine thing to be a man.” During these periods when he crashed, shattered, soared and suffered confusedly, the thing Rodion feared most was meeting up with Comrade Elkin.

They were arriving at the meeting place, a sort of rocky clearing under the slate cliff on the bank of the Black-Waters. It was a good spot, for you could see the approaching paths without being seen. A clump of birches filled a whole piece of universe there. The trees were waking back to life, their thin trunks all covered with silver whiteness and coolness. The sky filled their tracery of branches: the inescapable sky which cast its blue hues over the rock and over the dark, clear waters. Between the rock and the trees appeared a head, white mane blowing in the breeze. Avelii shouted: “Greetings, Ryzhik!” And the man, whose face was clean-shaven and wrinkled, raised his voice a little to reply. “The springtime, comrades! It’s magnificent.” He was talking with Elkin, who was seated comfortably on the stone, his cap skewed sideways over his temple: “An invention of the pre-industrial ages,” said Elkin in that solemn voice he liked to use when he made outlandish statements. “Doubtless you will explain it in terms of natural economy.”

“On the Yenisey,” said Ryzhik, “it was even more beautiful than here. The earth seemed to light up from within. Even before the snows had melted the grasses came to life and light filtered into the tiniest twig, the tiniest streamlet. You walked on light. The flowers burst out of the ground overnight. Those flowers have cool, light colours. Only the stars resemble them. You leave the house one morning, you go out onto the plains, straight ahead, for there’s nothing anywhere, nothing but the horizon and the same horizon beyond the horizon. You’re alone, alone like . . . Ah! I can’t really say like whom, like what. Well, like a stone at the bottom of a well, and you don’t know what’s happening to you. You want to sing, you feel the earth is on a spree. It’s something marvellous, unique: anything might happen. That’s it, you’re going to turn around, just like that, and there right in front of you, in the emptiness, will be a great happiness. What kind? You have no idea, but its possible, that’s sure. And you do turn around and you see birds arriving. They’re coming through the sky in clouds. They’re coming with great flapping wings, and the light is climbing, the stones have a luminous polish, there are flowers, the steppe is singing in silence. Nothing happens to you, of course, but everything is possible.”

Elkin said: ‘Ryzhik, you missed your calling. You should be turning out octosyllables at three roubles a line. Why did you have to get mixed up in the Revolution? Today, you would be an official of the Pastoral Poets’ Division of the Union of Soviet Writers. You would be inundating the gazettes with organized, ideologically correct, and profitable lyricism. Pushkin would turn green with envy on his pedestal.”

“Go to Hell. I would never have seen the amazing flowers of the North. And you see, nothing in the world would make me want to cross them out of my life. Around the time when the ice began to break up, the children would go up the hill to keep watch. There was always a whole gang of observant children up there, and they never took their eyes off the river. In the evening they would report on the events of the day: ‘the first crevasse has enlarged, a pool has formed on the surface, a new crevasse is starting, you can hear cracking . . .’ They reckoned the dates of preceding years, observed the flight of birds. When the cracked ice finally began to move, when the first clear waters opened up, those children would come bounding down to the houses with shouts of joy. They were carriers of joy. The doors would fling open, people dropped everything: ‘It’s here!’ They brought accordions, and all the young people, boys and girls, set off for the hill to greet the real Spring. We would go there, too, little Nikolkin and I. (Did you know him, little Nikolkin from the Donetz? He had done four years in the isolators; he died in Perm). Nikolkin, who used to say: ‘Let me live long enough to see a single socialist prison dynamited, just one. That’s all I ask of the permanent revolution.” ’