Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (20 page)

Kostrov worked in the Education Department of the Soviet. One morning, his boss notified him of the delivery of twelve hundred school notebooks which Moscow had been promising since last Fall. An event of some importance. Hold one-third of them in reserve, the rest are to be handed out to the school-children immediately. There would be approximately two thirds of a notebook per pupil for the semester . . . Kostrov made up the accounts and supervised the distribution of the packets without ever dreaming of opening one. They had come from the Centre in the wrappers of the nationalized
Torch
paper-mill. Three days passed. At the market place in the crowd of second-hand dealers, among the fortune-tellers and mountebanks, Kostrov flushed out some kids selling notebooks. But they recognized his way of walking with a cane, his air of an ageing officer suffering from jaundice. As he approached, they took to their heels. “Speculators make sport of me,” thought Kostrov, “and they’re perfectly right.” He noticed, overhead, a sky of transparent mother-of-pearl. He went back to his office where there was nothing to do, nothing useful anyway, since next year’s planned reorganization of the schools was obviously nothing but a huge joke. By next year, the present Superintendent of Schools would be assigned some place else or sent to prison. His successor would pay no heed to a future which would be out of date before it was born. He would order other plans in line with other directives. This time the Superintendent of Schools was waiting for Kostrov, smoking furiously, in the overheated little room in which the desk was generally empty. He threw him a strangely angry look, snapped up the brim of his cap with the back of his hand and:

“You did quite a job on me, Mikhail Ivanovich. The Party Committee has me on the carpet. The case is being studied by the Special Committee.”

“What case?”

“The twelve hundred notebooks, may the Devil take them and you with them. Have you looked at them?”

“. . . No.”

“Well take a look at them.”

A thin notebook came flapping out of the Superintendent’s briefcase and hit the desk with a snap. Sure enough, an oval stood out on the pink cover and in that oval, a portrait of Alexis Ivanovich Rykov, ex-Chairman of the Soviet People’s Commissars, present People’s Commissar for Post Office, Telephone and Telegraph, ex-member of the Politburo, member of the Central Committee, leader of the Right Opposition, which he tirelessly repudiated at congresses, friend of Mikhail Ivanovich Tomski, ex-leader of the Trade Unions, who repudiated him from every platform (but this—who could doubt it?—was in order to remain more surely faithful to him), friend of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, editor of
Izvestia
, who also repudiated him, repudiated Tomski, repudiated his own teachings of the day before, but assuredly in order to remain devoted to them in his secret heart. On the inside of the cover, selected sayings of Bukharin and Rykov recalling the mission of Soviet schools, the greatness of socialist culture, the wisdom of Lenin and Engels. On the last page, the multiplication table.

The Superintendent had a pock-marked face, a turned-up nose, and little, colourless eyes sharpened by worry. (“They’re capable of kicking me out of the Party over this—and then . . .”). Kostrov smiled at him amiably with a wild urge to laugh:

“Oof! I was expecting to find a picture of Bukharin on the fourth page.”

His amused glance fell on the Pythagorean Table, just at the spot where the following figures blazed discreetly forth: 7 × 7 = 94. “Look here, Comrade Driabkin.” At first the other man didn’t understand, not knowing exactly how much seven times seven makes. Slowly he calculated: three sevens make twenty-one, twice twenty-one is forty-two, plus seven, forty-nine . . . 94? Mikhail Ivanovich said sarcastically:

“Deliberate sabotage . . . But that’s not our problem. The paper factory is fobbing off its notebooks from four years ago on us. As for the sabotage of the teaching of arithmetic, Comrade Driabkin, I will write up my report at once and you will forward it.
We
will take the offensive, do you understand?”

To tell the truth, Driabkin no longer understood anything, except that things looked bad. Kostrov, summoned by telephone to the Special Committee, was received by the Deputy Director, a puny runt with glasses and a shaved head, tightly girthed by his tunic and leather straps. The runt, obviously modelling himself on Fedossenko, took the long view of the affair:

“You’re a Trotskyist, Kostrov?”

A quarter of a second’s hesitation. “No.”

“That’s odd, you only keep company with Trotskyists.”

“. . . I made my act of submission to the Central Committee last April 18.”

“Ah! So you’re with us?”

A quarter of a second’s hesitation. “Yes.”

“You never belonged to the Right Opposition?”

“. . . No.”

“Then how is it that you promote the illegal propaganda of the Right? Kostrov you don’t seem to be double-dealing but triple-dealing. That’s very dangerous, let me warn you.”

Kostrov explained the twelve hundred notebooks—in sealed wrappers—the responsibility of the shipping department of the
Torch
central paper factory; the circular from the Regional Board of Education requiring them to insist by telephone on delivery of the notebooks and to distribute them immediately under the threat of having to answer to the charge of sabotaging the year’s education plan . . . Kostrov explained and felt like laughing, for this whole business was childishly stupid. But he was beginning to feel scared. Fear clutched the pit of his stomach, a gentle choking pressure. It climbed toward his sick heart, it reached his throat, it affected his voice. It mounted, carried by his blood, passed his mouth, clumsy at forming words. It reached his eyes, his forehead. It removed an invisible blindfold from the man’s eyes and forehead and he saw.

He saw that the Runt had a strange head, at once that of a living man and a dead man, shadowy holes in the place of eyes, a thin mouth outlined in black, the chest of a hollow, white skeleton under his uniform.

He saw the Runt get up, beckon to him snickering, and lead him down corridors cut at right angles, through ever-increasing darkness toward cement staircases, grey, underground passageways, singular doors in walls bathed in a fog of electricity.

He saw the Runt walking jerkily ahead of him, limping alternately with his right foot and his left, turning around every three steps, without slowing down, to stare at him through the holes, now black, of his eye-sockets.

The Runt in an ordinary uniform, revolver at his waist, and others following him. Other Runts with the same jerky gait leading comrades who walked with feeble steps like his own—Varvara, Rodion, Ryzhik, his white hair rising like motionless tongues of flame. Others.

He saw a black ruler lying on some papers in front of the runty Deputy Director of the GPU Special Committee, and he read, even upside down, the typewritten text:

Report on the Interrogations of
. . .

The Runt said “Of course your version is plausible, but all saboteurs have plausible versions. The most important thing, in my eyes, is that you are with us. I had some doubt about that because of the company you keep. But don’t change it, Mikhail Ivanovich, we’ll discuss this later. I’m quite inclined to trust you. How are you feeling, in general? Your heart? This matter of the twelve hundred notebooks is very troublesome, as you yourself understand. The C.C. and the Special Board of State Security just sent us circulars insisting on the greatest vigilance in the struggle against the insidious propaganda of the Right . . . and of the Left, of course, Kostrov. Anyhow, I’ll try to patch this up. Nonetheless, don’t bother to go back to the Education Department, you’ve been dismissed, you understand. Look for something else.”

“A night watchman’s job, for example?”

The Runt didn’t seem to notice the irony at all.

“No, night watchmen are armed. Since you were convicted under Article 58 you would not be permitted to carry arms . . .”

Kostrov went through the door walking tall, but he felt he was staggering. “They’re spreading their nets, that’s clear, I’m done for—they’re spreading their nets . . .” Providentially, Varvara offered him her eyes which had been sparkling recently: a touch of beauty graced her Mongolian shepherdess’ face (the glowing trace of the face she wore at other times—purified, bathed in smiles, known only to Avelii). Kostrov took her arm in the street with a kind of gratefulness, as if he had said to her: I thank you for having those bright eyes, this slender neck, for carrying I don’t know what joy within you. Aloud, he murmured.

“How nice it is, Varvara Platonova.”

Totally involved in her secret happiness, yet lucid, she replied to their common thought.

“It looks like they’re digging a trap for us. Let’s be ready.”

* * *

Alone in front of his window, Kostrov played interesting chess matches with himself. Capablanca against Lasker: Capablasker, as he said with the poet. A crow came and perched on the sill outside, right against the pane. He considered the player at length with his little round eye, a black pearl surrounded by a thin ring of coral. This match would never be completed. Rodion’s footsteps were coming up the planks of the veranda.

“Explain the difference,” asked Rodion, “between natural economy and feudalism.”

In order to listen better, he sat with his elbow on the table, chin in hand. The chess board lay between them. Kostrov came back to life, a wholly different Kostrov whose waxy complexion and sadly sunken features regained an appearance of youth. He spoke better than he would have spoken before a class. He spoke as he had not thought for a long while, tired of himself, having given up making discoveries. He perceived a strange disparity between his knowledge and life, now that, for the sake of an attentive young comrade, he had to express things in living terms. Rodion questioned tirelessly. “What is the relationship between the psychological and the economic? Art, love . . .?

Kostrov entered into vast digressions, rising to recite a stanza by Pushkin, to tell the story of Lassalle’s great love affair, to define the Lassallean type of revolutionary, steeped in scientific socialism yet still individualistic and romantic, marked by his middle-class origins . . . And, suddenly enlightened by a flash of boldness, he made the white knight, threatened by the black bishop on the chessboard, make an extravagant move which upset the two classic games like an earthquake from the depths. “Look, Rodion! Capablasker is no longer a brilliant idiot obsessed by mathematical combinations: he’s gone mad! He’s going to win on both sides at once. That’s never been seen before. It’s because of you!”

Rodion, concentrating, received an affectionate glance in his eyes. “But art, Kostrov, art?”

“The origins of art lie in the gratuitous repetition of the motions of labour . . . Plekhanov said, based on the anthropological studies of Morgan . . . The dances of primitive peoples evoke hunting and war, which is also a form of labour. (These were truths learned from books, as precise as the gambits of the two classic chess games.) The work of art, dear Rodion, begins with the gesture you make to communicate a feeling—and thought begins with feeling. You are standing in front of a landscape. There is someone near you. You stretch out your hand. You say
see
, for you would like to give what you see, and that’s the beginning of everything: you’re a painter, a poet, a novelist, a sculptor, a playwright. You’re a man who explodes boundaries. You live, for there are two of you living. The most beautiful landscape makes you sad when you see it alone: so you must think of other men.”

“I am always thinking of them,” said Rodion softly. “I don’t even need to think of them any more, they’re always there . . . The ones whose lives are worth living, naturally.”

Their discussions took place in a tiny, neatly-kept room with sea-blue painted walls. Kostrov lived with a fisherman who was a member of the sect of Old Believers without priests. The woodwork around the window framed white birches, a piece of an ash-coloured log house, an edge of sky. Kostrov had not disturbed the icons hanging in the corner of the woodwork over the head of his bed: a Souzdal Virgin-with-Child, and a portrait of Kalinin cut out of a picture magazine and glued onto a sheet of red paper, thus illustrating the craftiest of saints. Rodion left, charged up with ideas, reviewing principles in his mind and mixing them up, yet drawing inexplicable confidence from this jumble of words and ideas. He believed he now had a better understanding of the meaning of art, love, agrarian reform, imperialism. In reality he understood better that—after the Gracchi, the peasants of the Peasant War of 1525, Lassalle, Bernstein’s revisionism, the victory of Soviet bureaucracy—he, himself, was a living man. The next morning he washed more thoroughly in the river, ate his crust of rye with an onion on the bank of the Black-Waters and meditated, squatting in the sun in a warm crevice among the rocks. Great resolutions ripened within him. “They’re all mistaken, the Comrades. They don’t dare to think. The epoch demands of us the courage to pass judgement. What are we doing in these prisons? Who will save mankind if not the proletariat? What are we waiting for when the proletariat expects everything from us?”

Letter by letter, Rodion deciphered the thesis of the minority of the Communist Left of the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison, copied by Ivanov at the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp on Kola Peninsula. He read the summaries of the
Bulletin of the Opposition
, reconstructed there by Ivanov based on the mental notes of Engineer Botkin. It was Rodion who brought Kostrov these insidious yet blinding insights. And it was Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, professor of Hist-Mat, historical materialism, author of studies on the system of property-ownership in old Kievian Russia and on the agrarian question in the Chinese revolution (Shanxi, Hubei), who, abandoning the white bishop blocked by the black queen, threatened by a black pawn, guarded by the black knight—the white bishop surrounded on the chess board with no escape—took his chin in his hand to listen to Rodion—Rodion who rose, eyes swollen with brightness, paced from one wall to the other, leaned against the cold porcelain stove and declared with an abrupt gesture: