Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (15 page)

“By God,” exclaimed Botkin, delighted to have been absent for three months, “I told them so! They should have foreseen the lack of materials, the fluctuations in prices, the shortage of transport, the decline in the purchasing power of the rouble, the labour shortage, the famine.” He would have foreseen everything.

“In any case,” replied the colleague, dropping his head, “if they had foreseen it, they would have been locked up even sooner, blamed for exaggerating their estimates, not believing in the stability of the rouble, banking on the disorganization of transport, underestimating the economic possibilities. Gerasimich more or less said all that to the Planning Sub-Commission. He got five years.”

Botkin made an evasive gesture. A worrier, this colleague, and a little bit anti-Soviet. How right they are not to entrust official missions to these fellows! After all, wasn’t Gerasimich an old social-democrat, pessimistic on principle? Pessimism, in our age of disciplined energy, is perhaps an involuntary form of sabotage. Botkin, quite at ease in a London-tailored suit, satisfied with himself, with his luck and with a world in which some people’s blunders automatically facilitate others’ advancement, concluded: “It’ll all work itself out. As for myself, I feel that miscalculations harmful to the State must be paid for. You have to have a sense of responsibility. Man doesn’t count compared to production.”

“I agree entirely,” mumbled the colleague, terrified, with suddenly distant politeness. His hand was holding his empty glass of curds, a large, dreary, faceted glass, all milky. It was all there was between them at the moment.

Botkin was arrested the next day as he was leaving an Administration meeting. They didn’t interrogate him until two months later, towards midnight. The suit of fine English wool retained its impeccable appearance, throughout tribulations. But the man—thinner, without underwear, his face drowning in stubble, his shoes unlaced—looked in it like a bogus wild man from a circus act, a ruined gambler picked up by the Bobbies around the London docks, a dirty, counter-revolutionary saboteur caught red-handed. He learned that five charges were hanging over him: smuggling (on account of the two flasks of Houbigant brought home for Lina); sabotage; counter-revolutionary activities; and espionage (economic and political). Various paragraphs of Article 58 of the Penal Code threatened him with several death penalties. Two attentive officers observed him from an angle, while a third exhorted him at length to confess. Botkin did not feel any excessive astonishment during this mysterious game. On the contrary, he felt a certain impersonal satisfaction at finally understanding the way these shady, commonplace things are done. But fear wore him down in the stifling murmur of the cells; fear, foul air, the pittances devoid of calories, a sexual half-frenzy which revived every few days at regular intervals. His cell-mates, five technicians, seemed more anxious than he did. “Out of five, they’ll certainly shoot one. The rest, gentlemen, is no more than a matter of probabilities.”

Confess to smuggling, to sabotage, to Trotskyism, to counter-revolution, to espionage, confess, confess, confess, confess, confess. Botkin dropped his head, indignant, resigned, sorry not to be able to discover in himself any sins to acknowledge, except for the two vials of perfume for Lina. That, yes, I confess, I brought them in illegally.

“Obviously. We have the material evidence. With all due respect, citizen Botkin, we also have other material evidence. But when I produce it, understand that it will already be too late for your salvation.” With these words (this was in the sixth month of wearing down his nerves), the investigating judge opened his drawer, took out an envelope, removed a photographic print which he sternly handed to the accused. Botkin took a moment to recognize his handwriting. It looked strange to him on that grey, glossy paper, for he had all but forgotten his notebook, covered with writing one night in Paris, reread on the train between Berlin and Warsaw, destroyed in the toilet of the sleeping-car an hour from the Soviet border, Niegoreloe. It was all so improbable, unfair, mad, crushing, improbable.

“Confess, confess, confess, confess. Ah! You understand?” He understood all right and blanched to the point of fainting under his blond stubble. Then—all at once—he began to talk volubly. He confessed, denied, demonstrated, explained, pleaded. Two uniformed men drank in his words. A stenographer recorded them without his knowledge behind the drapes. “But after all, Botkin, now that nothing but repentance can save you, you’d do better also to confess that on April 30th last, when you abstained from taking the floor at your company Technicians’ Conference, you did so deliberately in order to allow construction costs to be inflated by 8%, as one of your accomplices had proposed.”

“If you wish,” said Botkin, undone, no longer believing in reality, the truth, himself. Believing only in death, which surprises you from behind in the depths of a cellar and smashes your skull, probably without pain. Everything around him was heaving, floating, changing its shape, slipping away. His head was itching, his back aching. He had a great yearning for sleep. To sleep peacefully for one night before being shot. What more to desire.

He was spared the cellar of ultimate anguish. It even worked out rather well in the end, for when Botkin reached Projects Office No. 4 of the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp, Kola Peninsula (latitude 68° 8', longitude 37° 2'), he found a dozen colleagues, slide-rules, a draftboard, excellent technical dictionaries in German, and a quiet corner. Through a skylight he could see a stony heath overhung with clouds which the north winds sometimes moulded into prodigious aerial battles. From the office to the dormitory-barracks it was a good hour’s walk through the empty spaces under the clouds. And for Botkin that hour became an hour of unexpected joy: he spent it with a travelling companion of dull appearance whose name was just as dull—Ivanov or Petrov or Pavlov. He was an economist by profession, an old Party member although young in years, a Trotskyist, accustomed for the past six years to deportations, imprisonment, concentration camps, transfers; a lad of methodical and ironic disposition. With him Botkin felt for the first time in his life that he could talk as if he were thinking aloud, without fear, doubt, or reservation. The other man responded in kind, simply. The things they said to each other on that deserted heath, and in safety, would have been enough anywhere else to destroy them forever. Here, this brought them closer together in an absolute disinterestedness.

Botkin described his journey to the West. “It’s good to speak freely,” he said once. It seemed to him that he had finally understood the singular pleasure of living in the Western countries, even though—with their lights burning bright into the night, their pretty women, their parliaments, their newspapers full of crime stories, their chronic unemployment, the little, old tug boats of the Thames—they reminded him of great liners steaming towards shipwreck. “Can you imagine, Ivanov, that in London or Paris you can talk anywhere, to anyone, about anything, just as we are talking? You pay two francs at a kiosk on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and you can buy the
Bulletin of the Opposition
, all the bulletins of all the oppositions in the world if you like, in every language. Imagine . . .”

“No,” answered Ivanov, “I can’t imagine it. I’ve never been abroad and I hadn’t yet reached the age of consciousness when there was still freedom within the Revolution. In a few years, when all the old people who went through the Tsar’s prisons are dead, no one among the seventy million citizens of the Union will be able to imagine what freedom of thought is. People will have to be crazy in order to escape the fixed ideas stamped on their brains by mechanical stencils.”

Botkin’s gaze ranged over the heath, looking for something on which to rest his eyes. There was nothing. The hills on the horizon were flat. “Technological progress will become impossible,” said the engineer. “Why did it become impossible in ancient society? Because slavery . . .”

Ivanov shrugged his shoulders. “No. It’ll all explode one fine day. Deep inside man there will always be . . .”

“Then you believe in the irrational?”

“I believe in the proletariat.”

Botkin’s photographic memory enabled him to reconstruct almost word for word what he had secretly read in the West. Invisibly, across the silence of the heath, the entire contents of his notebook, revitalized, entered Ivanov’s mind. The Communist laughed, quietly, without apparent reason. So this is how ideas cross borders!

Ivanov spent half of his days in his glassed cubicle at the statistics office composing messages inscribed with a drawing pen on slips of tissue-paper the width of postage stamps and several times longer, in perfectly formed characters that could only be deciphered with a magnifying glass. One message for the deportees in Semipalatinsk, Central Asia; another for those in Kansk, Western Siberia; a third for those in Chernoe, Black-Waters, in the North. “Dear Comrades, the fate of the Revolution is being decided at each hour. We think for millions of silent proletarians.” No one will ever know how these messages got out, carried by the mail-planes of the penitentiary; nor what miracles of ingenuity enabled them to arrive at their destination. They were received in Semipalatinsk, the city of the sands, on torrid days under a sun of blazing coals; in Kansk, a station on the Trans-Siberian, on days of bright-blue frost; in Chernoe one spring morning on a steppe sown with pale buttercups.

* * *

It’s good to be alive.

Let us agree that these events, taking place on totally different levels of creation, have no perceptible relationship. But the fact is that myriad buttercups covering the plains with a golden powder had opened precisely as Comrade Fedossenko was arriving that morning. His being was entirely open, like those flowers, to a mute felicity. It is necessary to use the word
being
, when speaking of him. It would be totally incompatible to speak of his soul, or even of his mind, although the cerebral mechanism of a higher vertebrate endowed with speech, with thought up to a certain point, even with ‘historic consciousness’ (to use his own expression), functioned quite efficiently inside his cranium. This was wide, round and flattened at the temples. A being thick in all respects: bones, muscles, jaws, brows, and occupying a massive rank in the universe. The Regional Centre’s Ford wound its way, hours on end, through vast landscapes over which the light was ascending, on which golden buttercups were opening. Squarely seated in his warm winter coat bearing brand new insignia, sewn on the night before last, Comrade Fedossenko inhaled the still-cold air of the pure spaces.

The Ford, at which people gaped wonderstruck, made one last turn around Lenin Square, opposite the church with the broken dome, before parking in front of the Security building. The sentry presented arms. Fedossenko saluted back exactly like the People’s Commissar for Defence in the newsreels: with a brief, incomplete, yet clearly delineated movement, arm raised, hand curved eight inches from his cheek. Careless familiarity, firmness, discipline, that’s what I’m like, citizens. Let us model ourselves after Climentii Efremich Vorochilov, the ex-steam-fitter from Lugansk, the inflexible People’s Commissar, the man of iron. And long may he live!

If Fedossenko had been in the habit of talking to himself, it would have sounded like a Party meeting. But he wasn’t. When he was alone, he either worked, going over reports in his memory, or pursued his professional studies, through correspondence courses, or rested without thinking about anything, satisfied with himself, with his well-run administration, with the established order, with the triumphant building of socialism. At this point, he was emerging from a strange lethargy haunted by depressing dreams which were unworthy of him. Listen.

Every night men wearing grey-leather belted overcoats hanging down to the snow, men with horsey backsides, went about their duties, always the same, always different. They went down into cellars, climbed rickety stairs in the pungent smell of rooms heated with cow-dung. They made their way under miraculous moonlit skies (nothing is that simple), through shimmering fields of snow, without lifting their heads towards the huge halo ringing the moon with blue radiance. They dictated reports, filled out forms, annotated files, transmitted orders, carried out sentences. But in reality they were sleep-walking, like the whole dictatorship, like the whole earth. And the one-hundred-thirty or one-hundred-seventy thousand workers in the special camps (no one knows the exact figure), who were digging through heaths, through swamps, through granite, through forests, through islands, through the inland fjords of Karelia, digging the
Baltic-White Sea Canal
so that the red squadrons of Kronstadt in the next war will be able to reach the emerald highway of the Arctic without having to sail around Scandinavia; these one-hundred-thirty or one-hundred-seventy thousand convicts undergoing re-education through labour were sleepwalking too, numbed with the cold, while they dynamited chunks out of the mountains of the legendary Trans-Onega,
Za-Onegie
. To complete the Plan—law, commandment, faith, punishment, pride, the Plan—they attacked the hard, frozen earth along the seacoast of Pomorie with pick and shovel, with excavating machines, with the furious, relentless hands of intellectual mystics, of technician-saboteurs, of farmers snatched from their farms for having over-bountiful harvests, of pilfering or bungling workers, of orthodox priests, of unlucky officials, of corrupt Communists, of authentic counter-revolutionaries and of even more authentic victims.

They worked by night as well as by day, under the light of floodlamps, in bursts of driving snow, barely seeing in the moving whiteness which kept burying everything, burying them with their machines, their leaders, and even the shadow of their pre-eminent leader, thrice decorated, over-decorated, Heinrich Grigorievich Yagoda, he who walks two steps behind the Leader of Leaders at celebrations. The work sites, for which the blizzards contended at every minute, were set ablaze with the light of torches and flood lamps so that at dawn Comrade Fedossenko, in charge of the sector, might write in his report: “Today the shock brigades surpassed the plan for the day’s work by 38%. Two men were injured by an excavating machine, six fell sick . . .” Fedossenko, like an angry Peter the Great scouring the docks of his New Holland in the mud of a future Saint Petersburg; Fedossenko, his grey overcoat sweeping through the snow, his leather straps, his revolver, his broad tanned face under his astrakhan hat, his centaur’s neck; Fedossenko forged through the biting cold, the snow, the wind, the night, the suffering, the inner despair of his brigades, punishment and reward on his lips—merciless punishment, immediate reward: disciplinary battalions, double rations, extra correspondence—I am recommending you for the expected discharge (all you have to do is survive!); Fedossenko of the Special Political Administration (GPU) of Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan, Transcaspia, three thousand miles from here, on the banks of the great inland sea whose waters, the saltiest in the world, are warm and heavy. He himself was here to expiate a serious offence, a crime (let’s use the word) for which he was halfway pardoned on account of his merits as an ex-cavalry man of the invincible ‘Gai’ Division—and his more recent merits in various repressions. This memory still sometimes filled his skull with damp heat. “I’m a strong man, you see—a bronze Bolshevik, but I can’t completely dominate my instincts,” he told his superiors, standing at attention in front of them, without blushing, but dying of shame in his heart!