Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (16 page)

Listen. He had drunk. The evening was blazing over the flat, pearly-hued sea. He was stifling in the low room darkened by the Bokhara carpets on the walls. He rang. “Have Miriam, the waitress at the club, arrested. Lock her up in the cellar for three hours—alone—and have her brought to me at ten o’clock.” He, himself, spent the next three hours locked in his own room alone, his heavy eye seeing nothing but Miriam, absent, locked in two floors below. At ten o’clock, the phosphorescent sea grown dark, Miriam entered, a prisoner. The dark carpets hung around them like a song of Bokhara accompanied by an irritating grating of strings. Miriam, her thin eyebrows winglines against the sky, was trembling. Her lips trembled, her glance trembled. Something elusive trembled deep in her eyes, in the corners of her lips, on the tips of her breasts veiled by a cotton print. Miriam—tall, white, broader through the shoulders than through the hips. “Don’t be afraid, my beauty,” said Comrade Fedossenko, whose tongue was thick but whose speech was distinct. “You have nothing to fear. Drink.” He handed her a glass of muscatel. “Drink. I’m telling you to drink, understand.” She drank. “Get undressed.”

“You have no right, Comrade Chief . . .”

What could those trembling words do—and what is right? Here the images became confused. It was necessary to drive them away, they became tormenting. For the crime against the Party ethic—
part-ethika
, the law, duty, the regulations of the Service—the undeniable crime remained intoxicating, the only moment in a life which was worth its full weight of eternity; and there was no more crime, no victim. It was just, right. It was the working of natural law, since he had the power, represented order, was appointed by his superiors, was deserving, rewarded according to his merits.

Why cry about it? Let old women who still wear black veils up to their eyes sob at the outrage and tear their cheeks with their nails. What is necessary is to act, to write. Miriam, lips sealed, careful and stealthy as a cat, waited for nights and for days before sneaking away at the hour when shadows lengthened across the cooling earth, behind the caravanserai bereft of caravans, into the booth of Saadi, public stenographer, poet, physician, seer. For all knowledge is but a poem. Every poem expresses a charm and charms cure and poets see. Saadi knew verses for every circumstance in several languages—Turkish, Arabic, Iranian—verses by the other Saadi, by Firdosi, his own verses and those of the Poet Without Name who has travelled the trails of Iran since the reign of Iskander a thousand years ago.

The old man, whose glance held a dark benevolent warmth, saw Miriam’s embarrassment. He took both her hands like a father, like no father had ever taken them, received from her unclenched little fist a green three-rouble-piece which he polished with his finger before putting it away, and asked: “Someone has hurt you? Offended you, little girl? Tell me everything before God who listens to us and I will write your complaint so well that the men with leather coats and hearts of stone will be moved by it. I will write your love so prettily that the man with the heart of flesh will cry from tenderness thinking about you. But I see, O one like unto a cool stream, that someone has hurt you.”

Turbaned, covered with old, faded silks, he slowly shook his sparse beard of white threads through which the old leather of his sunken cheeks was visible. Miriam spoke to him without shame, simply, her face closed—closed over a bottomless anger, without tears, without words, without gestures. An anger like a thirst, but to slake that thirst it would have been just to kill without anger. Old Saadi wrote out twenty intricate—yet very clear—lines in his beautiful calligraphy on the back of a page by Leon Nicolaievich Tolstoy, torn out of a book whose unintelligible title was written in a tongue of infidels:
The Kreutzer Sonata
. On the wrapping-paper envelope (Saadi made them himself, and someone had to steal him the grey sheets from the store reserved for Security), Saadi wrote “To the Esteemed Citizen-Chief of the Complaints Bureau at the Editorial Office of
Izvestia
, central organ of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets of the USSR, Moscow, Tverskaya Street.”

“Do not, my wounded gazelle, send this letter from here. Have it cross the sea and let it be posted at the great city beyond the sea, at Baku, and then be silent. The flowers of the fields keep silent even when an ass tramples them; but the flowers of the fields spring up again, the sun of Allah shines for them, while an ass will never be more than an ass,
ichak
. . .”

Miriam left feeling relieved, tying her shawl under her chin with a determined gesture. For a moment she was all alone in the deserted alley lined by yellow clay walls which led towards the low dome of a tomb. Slender, erect, bearing her silent anger with deadly pride. Her letter was opened among many others in Moscow, the capital of the universe, under a high casement-window in a square building in the style of Le Corbusier. Presses were humming faintly in the basement, typewriters were devouring despatches from all over the world, linotype machines were moulding official texts into shiny lines of type, one by one. On the telephone, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was smiling at one of
the Secretary General’s
secretaries, who was dictating the ideas for tomorrow’s editorial to him: “No indulgence toward the double-dealing capitalist States with their democratic pretentions. We refuse—you understand, Nikolai Ivanovich, we refuse to prefer them to the fascist States. You must emphasize democratic hypocrisy.” His face tense, Nikolai Ivanovich agreed into the receiver, even repeating the slogans—and he thought it was absurd, pure cretinism, a policy of ruin; that he would go see
Alexis Ivanovich Rykov
that very evening. They must not gamble with the fate of the Republic like this. We must deliberate, we must reflect upon this. While his mind was formulating the phraseology of the editorial he had been ordered to write taking care not to lay himself open to malicious interpretation, he was simultaneously formulating the opposite, correct thesis: “In our behaviour toward other powers, we must not neglect their domestic regimes, the conditions they impose on the working class.”

At the Complaints Bureau, in one of the offices on the same floor, an ambitious young careerist, recently selected by the Central Committee of Youth to study at the Central Journalism Institute, was pouring over old Saadi’s calligraphy. He remembered that the Chief of the Political Administration Department of State Security for Transcaspia was believed to have had ties with the Rightists. If this young prodigy, gifted in the secondary but indispensable roles of political intrigue, had by chance devoted his talents to astronomy, he would by the age of twenty-two have learned the signs, interdependencies, solsticial motions, and exact locations of almost all the stars down to the seventh magnitude. But the only constellations he knew so thoroughly were those of the “apparatus”: the subtle links between hidden interests, friendship, marriage, complicity, and ideology, connected by imaginary lines invisible to the ordinary eye. He, therefore, immediately perceived that G, a member of the Party since 1907, having sponsored Comrade N, Chairman of a local Cheka, during the creation of the Red Cavalry at Tambov in 1920, could hardly be extraneous to the advancement of B, Chief of Police Forces in Transcaspia. He, in turn, was related by the marriage of his sister to M, Deputy-Commissioner of the Post Office and Telegraph Service and belonged for these two reasons to the coterie of the Right. This man Fedossenko, Chief of the Service at Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan, today accused of rape and abuse of authority, had been appointed by R, was in his confidence, and would thus compromise him in the case of an investigation. R would compromise B. Through B, the affair would reach as far as N, still a Deputy Member of the Central Committee, and end up by bespattering G, who was reputed unimpeachable. “A conscience,” thought the young prodigy scornfully. He tossed the grey envelope into the basket for “serious cases to investigate” and this gesture, between cigarettes, interrupted Fedossenko’s advancement. It caused the burly fellow to be swept away by a cold wind, from the borders of the burning desert of Kara-Koum and the mountains of Tschil-Mamet-Koum, lilac-pink in the evening, to the convict labour construction sites of Trans-Onega,
Za-Onegie
.

At the construction sites of the North, Fedossenko found Klavdia, servant of the administrative personnel. She was a pale, little Siberian girl, twice convicted for illegal alcohol sales: one rouble for a little glass pulled out of her petticoat pocket for the ragged fellow who has only that one rouble. Klavdia obeyed. She was born to obey as he was born to command. She would never complain. Fortunately, for this time he might have got six millimetres of pointed steel in the back of the neck by order of his superiors. Thin and tidy, crafty, good-tempered, with pearls in the depths of her eyes, she filched half his rations without him daring to complain about it—at least so long as she still pleased him. Later, he would see if it was worth it. It wasn’t love, once glimpsed fleetingly in the midst of a criminal act. And it wasn’t happiness either: that comes from success.

Happiness returned to him, summoned by merit. From the construction sites of the Special Purpose Concentration Camp of the Baltic-White Sea Canal, where one hundred thirty, one hundred seventy, perhaps two hundred thousand workers of both sexes were forging themselves new souls filled with enthusiasm for work (all you have to do is survive) as they completed a historic labour more memorable than the digging of the Suez Canal, than the digging of the Panama Canal, than the digging of the Saint-Gothard tunnel, than the draining of the Zuyderzee; comparable to no other, and planned by the far-seeing genius of the most admirable Leader—from those grey, frozen excavations over which dull glints of steel hung indefinitely, Comrade Fedossenko, reintegrated into the regular ranks by reason of the perfect execution of the plan by the convicts entrusted to his command, arrived one May day at Chernoe, Black-Waters, to take over the administration of the GPU Special Service: Party morale, surveillance of deportees, secret operations. As he took leave of his subordinates he received from the hands of engineer V. V. Botkin of the Technician’s Shock Brigade of Bureau No. 4, an inkwell of iridescent quartz hand-carved by convicts who, paying their thanks to an unforgettable educator in the person of Fedossenko, thus demonstrated the completion of their civic regeneration.

The iridescent inkwell now contained a large drop of red. Through a transparent tulle curtain, Fedossenko glanced at the paths traced by the feet of pedestrians crossing the square around the little bronze Lenin. Elkin and Ryzhik were passing, bareheaded, leaning slightly forward into the fresh spring breeze. The new Deputy Chief of the Special Service took up his binoculars to follow them more closely. We are the vigilant, the responsible, the powerful, the cutting edge of a new world emerging from chaos. We are order.
I’ll
show you.

Comrade Fedossenko immediately set about correcting abuses. Summoned to his office, Avvakoum Nestorovich, Chairman of the Soviet, signed a decree forbidding citizens with the right to vote to house transported persons, known as “special settlers”. This, so that the pernicious influence of expropriated peasants should not develop among the local population. It was a little, grey poster containing several spelling errors. Old men with white beards, several of whom resembled Tolstoy; mature men, bearded and hairy, who had resembled no one but themselves since the days of the Scythian invasions; young peasants, some athletic, some emaciated; women dressed in homespun, clutching infants to bosoms barren of all happiness (with other children clinging to their skirts)—this whole silent crowd, stinking like corpses and animals, gathered in front of the entrance of the Security building. They waited a long time in the biting cold of that day. Then they dispersed in small groups through the alleyways, straggled out along the paths leading to the little wood which stands on the other side of the river, and disappeared inexplicably, as if absorbed into the earth and the rocks. It is true that no one paid any attention to them. The women and urchins roamed from door to door on the outskirts of town where the open spaces begin, pleading in the name of Christ, the Son of God, and your soul’s salvation, for a crust of bread. The extraordinary thing is that they ended up by getting it, even though bread was selling for four roubles a pound, eight times its legal price, and there wasn’t any even at that price. At the edge of the wood, the Tolstoys took axes and cut down young trees, still shimmering with sap, to cover dugouts cut into the earth by their sons. In the evening the edge of the steppe was fringed with columns of smoke. Two families lived under an outcropping of rock on the bank of the Black-Waters, sheltered from the wind by the bluff. The Soviet published a new decree forbidding the special settlers to cut timber, which was collective property and henceforth sacred.

Fedossenko, flushed with attention, studied the political deportees’ mail, secretly opened on arrival and departure. He also took courses, by correspondence, from the Higher Institute of the Security Department. Lesson XXII,
Investigative Methods in the United States
. Psychology, XIth Lesson.
The Psychology of the Professional Mind
. A. Military officers. Leninism. IV.
The Teachings of Comrade Stalin in the struggle against Trotskyism. B. On the unequal development of the Capitalist countries
. This learning reduced to sections, paragraphs, key sentences, boiled down to twenty-line summaries for each lesson with questions to ask yourself on your own (see Answers on the back page of the book) did not teach him how to decipher unconquerable souls. Fedossenko examined a postcard covered with tiny writing, signed Ryzhik, through a magnifying glass. The glass magnified the loops of the letters, revealed the texture of the cheap yellow cardboard, but the subtle spirit of the text escaped it. “Eh! Psychology be damned!” thought Fedossenko. “I’ll still make you sweat blood.”

* * *

The town got news at one and the same time that the District Cooperative had received a tank truck of kerosene oil and that the Tobacco Trust store was putting twelve cases of
Red Factory
cigarettes up for sale at sixty-five kopecks a pack in the morning. To tell the truth, they were unsmokable but what won’t people smoke! Any kind of straw is smokable. Any alcohol is drinkable, even the kind that rots your guts, wrecks your vision, turns your skin green and your lips purple. We’ll drink poison by the glassful, as long as it distils heat and strength inside us so we can holler, cry, sing, laugh and collapse out of the world, on the side of the road, insensitive to the cold, warming the earth ourselves. Three lines of people formed on Comrade Lebedkin Street. The one in front of the bakery contained the oldest women and the frailest girls, for bread was obtainable. The grey card entitled you to it. It was simply a question of waiting your turn to avoid being put off until the next day. Those at the head of the line read (written in pencil on a piece of paper stuck to the door) “the coupon for the 20th is void”. Barely murmured, these words passed from the first old woman to the last little girl and were instantly taken in by a hundred anaemic beings glued together against the wall. No one was surprised. It was normal procedure to “skip” a day every ten days so that the 10th, the 20th and the 30th of each month were breadless. But when one woman said that next month’s cards would be denied to non-workers belonging to workers’ families, except for children under fifteen, there were worried sighs. Eyes dilated with fear in the mould-tinged faces of old women.