Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (12 page)

Elkin whistled:

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself for a long time.”

“So?”

“They all seem to be true.”

“The truest,” said Ryzhik, “can be broken. They plunge them into muddy water, they twist them and wring them out, and some of them are no better than dishrags after that.”

“We know that.”

The landscape was vanishing, yet the rocks were tinged with lilac and, climbing the hill, they had the whole bend of the Chernaya at their feet, its surface of ink and sky spread out in the middle of the darkened spaces. “Naturally,” continued Elkin, “but after all, that won’t happen either to you or to me.”

Then to whom? “Who drinks?” inquired Ryzhik.

“Everyone, except perhaps Varvara. You, first of all.”

Ryzhik ran his hand through his hair. “The devil take us!”

“So come on in,” said Elkin. “I’ve got half a bottle left.”

Night clung to the window-panes, which were broken and plastered over with paper. A woman was rocking a child to sleep in the cellar, just below. Her voice came out like a moan. Elkin lit the kerosene lamp, which gave no more light than a night-light. Its glass chimney was chipped and black with soot around the top. They sat down at the table, face to face, with the sooty light between them. Elkin filled two tall glasses with alcohol. For a moment they were silent—congealed, hardened, aged. Their faces stood out for each other with a sadness from which there is no escape. Then Elkin stifled a laugh. “Wait a moment,” he said. He went over to the pile of books and newspapers that occupied one corner of the room, next to a sack of potatoes, and got a hard-bound book. “Take a look!”

Ryzhik’s face lit up with amazement. “Oh my God!” The author’s name had been carefully scraped off the cover, on which a red star burst forth.

“I bought it in the market-place at Tiumen last year while I was being transferred, old man. I was passing through, accompanied by a rather decent bugger from the Special Battalions. I stopped short in front of an old woman who was selling this along with a pile of junk. I had it for a rouble, she didn’t know what it was. ‘You can barely use this paper for smoking,’ I told her.” They turned the first pages together smiling.
Leon Davidovich Trotsky’s
portrait looked right back at them: intelligence and energy were stamped across the forehead;
pince-nez
glasses; a definitive flash in the eyes.

“It’s a good likeness,” said Ryzhik. It made them forget the alcohol. Ryzhik frowned: “The main thing, you see, is that they don’t kill him!”

Elkin at first nodded his acquiescence; then, springing to his feet, flung out in a triumphant voice: “I’m sure they won’t kill him!” and tossed off his glass of brandy in a single gulp. It was like drinking fire. Three cheers for fire! The room expanded into the immensity of the night. The tiny flame under the smoky glass was startling.

Ryzhik opened the book at random. “Listen,” he said.

But of what matter now the rhythm of that bygone language, the precision and ardour of that thought, bound to events in order to force them, ceaselessly invoking history in order to make it? The old text lives because it expresses a fidelity, a necessity. It is necessary that someone not betray. Many may weaken, retract, fail themselves, betray. Nothing is lost if one man remains erect. Everything is saved if he is the greatest. This man has never yielded, will never yield, either to intrigue or to fear, to admiration or to slander, even to fatigue. Nothing will separate him from the Revolution—victorious or defeated, covering crowds with songs and red flags, heaping its dead in common graves to the sound of funeral hymns, or preserved in the hearts of a handful of men in snow-covered prisons. And if after that he is wrong, if he is intractable and imperious, it hardly matters. The essential thing is to remain true.

The chain on the double doors rattled in the dark vestibule. “It’s nothing,” said Elkin bringing his face up close to Ryzhik’s—and Ryzhik saw his pupils dilate with joy. “It’s Galia, a creature as pure as the steppes, as your flowers of the North, as . . . Ah!” He shook his head.

“Yes, yes,” said Ryzhik averting his eyes.

Galia halted, hesitant, in the semi-darkness near the door—tall and slender, wearing a red kerchief, the end of which was hanging across one cheek against a lock of hair like a dark poppy. “Good evening,” she said slowly, with a gracious hesitancy.

Ryzhik caught only a glimpse of her; the wrinkles in his face grew stony, he fixed his eyes on the open book in the poor light—the book in which the powerful words of nineteen hundred and eighteen hammered out the footsteps of fighters: “Red soldier comrades, commanders and commissars! At the hours of greatest danger, on the eve of decisive victory, the Party . . .” Step aside, young woman. The fire of memory and alcohol rose up in his chest. The 6th Division, the 7th Division, the XIIth Army, Turkestan. That was worth living through.

Elkin, both hands on Galia’s shoulders, pushed her gently toward the vestibule, then through the darkness, towards the doorway. She noticed the brandy on his breath, a slight drunkenness in the weight of his hands, which held her with tender strength. He imagined her half-smiling, annoyed that he had drunk. In the low doorway, as she stood one step down from him, her face lighted by the diffused glow of a moonless sky, he bent over her and warmly took her head in his hands. “Go to bed, Galia, Galinochka, dearest darling . . . I have visitors tonight—marvellous, invisible callers who have come from a place so far away I can’t tell you . . .”

“What visitors?” asked Galia under her breath, touched to the heart by jealous anxiety.

“Nothing to fear!” he answered. “They are Ideas . . .” They kissed, very quickly. Galia felt that the man’s lips were dry and burning. As for him the woman’s mouth left him with a sensation of pale coolness. Just before she went through the gate in the fence, four steps away, Galia turned and raised her hand: and the shape of that hand shone in the night with adorable whiteness. “Greetings to your Ideas!” Was she smiling? He should have called her back, not let her go, kept her, kept her! What was stopping him, what heaviness in his legs and his bowels? Elkin felt it tearing him apart. “The whole earth is alone. I’m drunk.” With heavy steps that made the floorboards creak, he went back into his room. Ryzhik hadn’t moved. He stood before the open book, his face lighted from below, the washed-out face of a man who would soon die. The bottle was empty—plague!

“Keep reading,” Elkin told him.

Galia, whose joy abandoned her as soon as she passed through the gate in the enclosure, went around to the other side of the house. She walked quickly, sure-footedly, through the shadows, the knowledge of every bump in the ground implanted in her limbs. Thus, altogether bound to this earth, these rocks, these waters, these skies, borne along by them, by them delivered from everything and even from herself, walking as she lived, quick and straight, without needing to think in words. At that instant it was necessary, absolutely necessary, for her to see him again: Dimitri. There was a rise in the road almost directly opposite his window. Galia stopped there, attentive, invisible. Elkin’s window, dimly lighted, was the only one living in the dense darkness of the houses and yards. The little lamp gave it a yellowish glow, more sad than unreal. Galia was angry with herself for not having cleaned the glass. It was a clear thought and did her good.

Ryzhik was reading something aloud, standing over the lamp, and the book must have been lying on the table. Ryzhik: a high bare forehead bristling with white locks, a strange face, powerful yet wan, in which the grey lashes hid the eyes and only the lips were moving. Galia thought of spells: she felt a vague fear. People believe they are conjuring away misfortune and they call it up. Whether they call it up or conjure it away, misfortune is there. But it must be a spell for virility, for Ryzhik’s chest was swelling, hands at his sides, and he seemed taller, strangely commanding. Around him, like dark wings, moved great shadows. Elkin was pacing back and forth, and he occasionally walked around the reader, his hands in his pockets, straightening or raising his brow, his shoulders squared like the shoulders of men preparing for battle. Galia foolishly raised her hand and began to make the sign of the cross over the two men, but she remembered in time that she wasn’t a believer, for “the younger generation is not religious, as is well known.” Night, emptiness, was everywhere, surrounding these two men. They were alone, absolutely alone. “Dimitri! Mitya!” Galia followed him from one corner of the room to the other, she even thought she met his eyes, but it was really impossible for him to see her, dazzled by his night-lamp, by his ideas. “They are perishing for those ideas,” thought Galia. “My God.”

In front of her girlfriends, and inside herself, she called him “My Man” with a tinge of pride. And here he was almost no longer hers, in spite of himself, alone with his captive strength, surrounded by incantations, winged shadows, feeble light, total night. He halted at the window, just across from Galia, sharply outlined in the night. “My Man, My Man,” she repeated to herself, anxiously. The coldness of the spaces behind her seized her by the shoulders, in the very place where Dimitri had touched her. She shuddered. What’s the matter with me? Dimitri, Mitya, don’t be afraid of all this emptiness, I’m here. Hmm, I’ll go wash my blouse for my day off, for you. Galia went running downhill toward Blacksmiths’ Street, where there were no longer any smithies or blacksmiths, a street which huddled half-way down the hill under the debris of a rockslide. She lived there, with her sisters, their husbands, and their brood, in a vast cellar cut right into the rock.

* * *

Rodion was at work by eight in the morning in one of the side-stalls of the market-place under the sign of the Tinsmiths’ Artisanal Cooperative. With his shears he cut into the old iron, turned dark grey, even black with the years, for they had received their last sheets of real tin years ago, before industrialization. He soldered new bottoms into old cans, and, of the four guildsmen, none was more expert in the art of diagnosing the ills of old portable stoves. So much so that the women of the lower town would entrust their pre-war Primus-stoves only to him. Rodion loved this work, all work, as a class-conscious proletarian should love it. This put him at odds with his mates, local folk and rather backward, for whom it was above all a question of accumulating roubles, even if this meant palming off such mediocre work on their clientele that Rodion was ashamed for them. Then he would try to explain to them that “technology is the liberation of man.”

“There are motors . . .” he began enthusiastically, but he didn’t know exactly what motors, only that they existed, simply marvellous ones, ready to liberate men . . .

“Shut up,” yelled a smut-grimed devil. “A plague on your motors. It’s because they don’t want to produce anything anymore but machines that there’s no more bread. Men will end up starving under machines, for sure. And as for you, you’d do better to learn how to make love.”

Furious laughter shook the stall, plunging Rodion into confusion. The fact is that he didn’t know how to dance or to woo the girls on the Ivanskaya who laughingly toss peppery quatrains in your face—or how to get himself to ask them for the least of their favours. The girls he had walked to the Marat Garden, while talking about “the fundamental transformation of relations between the sexes” had found him duller than most agitators. Only one expressed interest in an important subject, and that was to ask him: “You’re educated, Rodion, so explain to me what a jazz is? People are talking about it . . .” Rodion didn’t know. Rodion asked Ryzhik, who didn’t know either, then Elkin, who put on his most mocking expression and proclaimed:

“Technique of Negro music exploited by the bourgeois decadence of the music-hall”—which could only be a joke.

Rodion knew the torment of thinking—he never stopped thinking. As he re-tinned cooking-pots his lips murmured: “The iron law of wages . . .” He had more ideas than he had words; he muddled, confused, and jumbled formulas and texts, never sure if it was Engels or Lenin who had said a certain thing, aghast and bewildered by it, discovering glimmers of light in it, tripping into its pitfalls, trying to grasp the mist. Obsessed by problems, and above all by the problem of the worker. Without a commodity-equivalent for real wages, without a full wage corresponding to the actual product of labour, minus a necessary quantity set aside for the expansion of production, there is no socialism: therefore . . .

Here, Rodion felt the strength that comes from grasping a truth, but how to tie it in with the dialectic of history, the period of transition, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the degeneration of the Party, the dictatorship of the Georgian over an exhausted proletariat? How to explain, by the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, the law of August 7, 1932, made for shooting starving peasants, since socialist and cooperative property is sacred and the workers are thus the owners of everything—everything—even and including the grain they steal to keep from starving to death, and the bullet fired into the backs of their necks because they stole their own wheat? What connection between all of this and the plan of
Go-El-Ro
(State Electrification) which is nevertheless being carried out? For Lenin said: “Socialism equals Soviet power plus electrification”—and we have electrification: the Volkhovstroy, Shatura, Kashira, the Zagess, the Dnieprostroy, the most powerful turbines in the world. We have power—it’s still the dictatorship of the proletariat, however sick it may be—but we don’t have electric light bulbs in the big centres, no kerosene, no candles in Chernoe. We no longer have Soviets, we don’t have socialism because . . . Is the bureaucracy a class? A subclass? A caste? A corrupted element of the conscious proletarian vanguard? A fraction of the middle classes? The involuntary instrument of international capitalism? Is it . . .

People who understand don’t know how happy they are, how bitter it is to live without really understanding, feeling your way, half-blind. And how to serve the workers’ cause then? How? For thirty roubles a month, Rodion rented a corner with a mattress on some planks, at the Kurochkins’, who lived—the four of them—in a low room under fishing-nets, strings of dried fish, and odd objects hanging from smoke-blackened beams. Rodion came home one evening, sat down in the corner, and opened a metropolitan newspaper in which Kaganovich, a Politburo member, dealt with the immediate tasks of the shock-brigades in the mines. Kurochkin was once again mending his boots with wooden pegs, which he was pounding into the leather of an old transmission-belt with sharp little hammer blows. The mother was wringing out grey diapers in a tub. Nina was rocking the cradle of the last-born with a rough movement, and the purple-faced baby was crying softly, endlessly, from an unknown hurt.