Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (21 page)

“Put a stop to this ruinous collectivization. Maintain only those
Kolkhozes
with adequate technical bases and yielding good crops. Restore the circulation of commodities. Give up gigantomania in industrialization! Ah! Yes. We must consider the labour force as important as plant and equipment. Stop the deterioration caused by overwork and undernourishment.”

“In the end,” said Kostrov, pensively, “the Verkhne-Uralsk minority fails to push its argument through to the very end. They don’t dare conclude that the old bureaucratized Party is finished for the Revolution and that the moment has come to consider starting everything over again.”

Rodion restrained himself from shouting: “I dare!”

“That’s right,” he said, pacing the room with nimble, heavy steps like a bear in a pit. “Listen, Mikhail Ivanovich, it’s time to understand.”

He spread his hands—broad stubby-fingered and calloused—as if to place the obvious conclusion there, between them.

“
They
won’t let us live! And it can’t go on. We are the new party, even if we don’t dare to want it.
They
know it better than we do.
They
’ll have to let us rot in jail. When they finally understand what they’re doing, they’ll start shooting us. All of us, I tell you. It’ll be the black terror. How can they leave us alive?

“Listen, Mikhail Ivanovich. I met some workers from the tannery. They haven’t been paid in six weeks. The special milk ration for unhealthy working conditions? No one’s even heard of it. This month they worked during three of their five rest days because the monthly production quota hadn’t been fulfilled. Do you know what the Party Secretary answered when they told him they couldn’t go on? He said: ‘There’s plenty of room for loafers in the penitentiary brigades.’ Can’t you just hear him?”

The courage was fading out of Kostrov’s soul after an hour’s fatigue. He lay down on his bed, stretched his left arm up behind him and drew the coolness of the iron bed-stead into his fingers.

“Pass me a cigarette, Rodion. Don’t be so quick to draw conclusions. The Party . . .”

“What Party? Theirs? Ours?”

Kostrov made a weary gesture, blew a few puffs of grey smoke up to the ceiling. Bad heart. “Rodion, almost all of us are out of work. That’s significant. I met Varvara Ivanova at the Special Committee. They’re implicating her in some business of stolen bread. Me, in a sabotage case . . .
They
must have received orders to cook up cases against us on the eve of the congress.”

The chess board lay between them on the corner of the table. Rodion brutally pushed the black pawn. Lose the white bishop. Between them, worlds: to each his own. Five weeks without a letter from Ganna. For Kostrov this silence was now ominous. They’re stopping our correspondence. The Runt, with his hollow eyesockets, his undead skull, the leather straps across his empty chest, was moving the black knight. “It’s bad, bad.” Kostrov was full of premonitions.

Rodion no longer thought about him, chess or theses. He sensed the approach of suffering, pain, rivers, hopes, gambles. It must be. It must be . . .

* * *

The group met at Elkin’s late one afternoon. Squatting outside in the courtyard, Galia was scouring a pot with earth—and watching the approaches to the house. Sometimes she hummed to herself. Then she pursed her lips, preoccupied. What are they talking about with exaltation in their eyes? Whenever men’s voices start ringing and their eyes begin to shine, it ends in trouble. It’s the same with love: whoever loves too much suddenly forgets himself, picks up a knife, goes off into the night down the dark road. Afterwards, the old women tell you: “He wanted too much happiness on this earth. He let his pride get the better of him, he kicked up his little row, one, two, and the devil gobbled him up alive . . . You can get your tears ready. Here you are, pregnant.”

To herself Galia answered them with a caustic little laugh: “You miss them, don’t you, old witches,—those days when you used to make love!” Dimitri, her man, didn’t love her too much. Wasn’t it she who loved him too much, not daring to say so? Even telling him, teasingly “In fact I don’t know if I’m in love with you. I let you have your way because I was bored.” Her whole face cried out the opposite. She knew it and she was glad of it. Loving him too much, she would never go off like a cat fleeing down the dark road. You’re the one who will leave, Mitia, when they summon you inexplicably, and the world will be empty. She choked back her tears, scrubbing furiously at the pot. She would have to live bowing lower than the grass, more silent than the water. Galia moved closer to the hallway, her ear cocked. Elkin was talking cheerfully about incomprehensible things: the world harvest, Molotov’s theses, the League of Nations, the International, the
Alianza Obrera
. . .

The five were discussing the messages. Ryzhik was chairing the meeting. Varvara was serving tea. Avelii was sketching birds on a folded newspaper. Rodion, seated a little to one side on the bed, was holding his knee in his clasped hands. He had something serious to say which had to be said but which got stuck in his throat. He had to accuse himself, without having finished judging himself. He believed he was right against all odds. Yes, right, yet certainly guilty. His clenched jaws unclenched by themselves:

“I want the floor.”

Rodion spoke distinctly, without looking at anyone, and Varvara, stunned, set the teapot down on the newspaper clippings. Avelii drew a black line through a pair of spread wings. Ryzhik turned to stone, Elkin rocked in his chair, and scowled.

“I believe I have committed an error. I think I did right but it’s still an error. Personally I trust him, but I had no right to do it, I know. I broke the group’s discipline. I accept your decision in advance, I’m in the wrong, but I know I’m right. You understand. That’s it.”

“What are you telling us, you idiot?” Elkin exploded. “Explain yourself. What did you do?”

Rodion realized that he hadn’t said it, it was still stuck in his throat. You think you’re saying and you’re not, you want to speak and you can’t. You must. Clearly.

“I discussed the messages with Kostrov. He’s isolated, he’s one of us. You’re unfair to him. I only spoke about ideas. I’m wrong, but I’m not sorry, it’s only from the point of view of discipline . . .”

“
So
,” said Ryzhik softly, “
so
. . .”

With that single word, five minds visualized something dark, something against which nothing more could be done. Rodion understood. The boat swamps and you’re in the water, spray in your mouth, choking. Eternity was smiling down from the heavens the instant before. Now that moment is forever past. Die. It was a loaded moment. Varvara began a useless sentence which no one heard. Ryzhik implacably measured the consequences.

“When did you talk to him, Rodion?”

“Seven days ago.”

Elkin kept rocking back and forth on his chair, whistling through his teeth. The chair fell loudly to the floor. Tea from an overturned glass streamed over the newspapers. Elkin, standing erect, let out a foul curse. He had struck Rodion right in the face and Rodion, painfully regaining his balance, elbows on his knees, both hands over his face, was breathing heavily. Elkin dropped down next to him on the bed with the same movement of his hands to cover his face, the same heavy breathing. A little blood on the back of his hand.

“
So
,” Ryzhik said once more, “
so
.”

“Elkin, you have behaved unpardonably. Like a brute. We agree on that and you do, too. As for the infraction of discipline committed by Rodion, the group will make its decision later. I don’t think there’s very much we can do about it any more. Show your face, Rodion. Here, at least, you behaved well. Let everyone take his precautions this very evening. No papers lying around, eh?”

Rodion went out into the hall to wash. There, he encountered Galia’s terrified glance.

“It’s nothing, Galia, we had a little scuffle . . .”

His ashen lips attempted a smile to reassure her.

“Come over here, Rodion. Here’s some cold water.”

She held the basin for him. He wiped himself slowly, with a sad expression.

“What is it, Rodion?”

“Nothing, dear . . . Midnight. Midnight in the century.”

Yet he didn’t seem drunk.

* * *

As Elkin dragged her along, Galia felt a shudder run through his arm with almost every step he took. She was watching Dimitri out of the corner of her eye, and she sensed that he was terribly upset: self-disgust, a bitter shameful anger. They were following the river, right along the water’s edge. The sun, still high, was a golden globe above the woods on the opposite shore. It coloured the rocks sumptuously. Galia asked:

“Why are you . . . (she held the word back on her lips for a second) are you so hard, Dimitri?”

“Why, Galia? Is it possible to be different? You have to be a man, not a dishrag. Aren’t there quite enough dishrags without me? You have to take hold of yourself with hands that are inflexible, remain firm whatever happens. And not spare others. You understand, don’t you?”

All his tenderness was in the persuasive inflection of his voice, a boundless, stifled tenderness, in the final familiar
you
.

“I don’t know,” she said.

And after they had taken a few steps in silence:

“But if you want, take me in those hands. Try!”

The water, the north, the spaces—and Galia close to him, walking beside him, tall and lithe. “Galia, you are my joy. You are my adorable fern. Once, near Batoum—that’s a sunny land on the shores of a blue sea—I went outside after a rainstorm. I walked on the red clay, walked, bitter-hearted, mean-fisted, I raged at the world. The bad days had already begun, I was fresh out of jail. And I saw ferns. It seemed to me that they had just shot out of the ground, in a single burst, during the tropical storm. Tall and supple like you, Galia, the ferns opened like fans, with their thousands of perfect little leaves. Proud, like you, my Galia, and like you they didn’t know they were perfect, that they were born of the sun and the earth. I spat on my bitterness. I understood that I loved the earth. Galia you are my fern of the North. You have perfect nails, perfect teeth, perfect nipples, tiny perfect stars in your eyes. I love everything when I touch you. These black waters, these barren plains. These woods, these rocks, the green, cruel earth, this swarm of men who inhabit the earth where we haven’t finished fighting. I love people, even the ones I detest, all of them, down to the last, down to the bastards whom I’d crush like vipers. I love vipers, Galia, because you are my joy, do you understand?”

What she understood better were his hands holding her and the light in the depths of his eyes.

“No, you don’t understand. You are simple, as ferns are, and like them you can’t understand words. You are my Galia and you can’t understand. And I can’t explain it to you. (He laughed a fond, caressing laugh.) That would be quite unnecessary.”

“. . . And I, I want you to talk to me, Mitia, perhaps I won’t understand, but I’ll listen. Try.”

Dimitri held her close, kissed her eyes, the nape of her neck. He pushed aside a lock of her chestnut hair to graze her ear with his lips—and the trembling in his arms never stopped. Deep down inside him a secret voice was murmuring clearly: “Farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell . . .” The black waters fled silently by. A patina of gold lingered over the rocks.

It was not, of course, a meeting of the Politburo even though the leading members were present. (The others didn’t count at meetings any more than they counted at this moment.) Nor was it a preliminary meeting at the Secretary General’s office, since they had met in a small committee-room at the other end of the corridor. A single portrait, Olympian, yet forlorn, for it no longer meant anything, anything—that of Karl Marx. A single colour—the red cloth covering the table. Walls of abstract grey . . .

The Secretary General took his seat directly under the portrait, his elbow on the table and his pipe in his left hand, holding his yellow-brown eyes in check, a slightly ironic expression on his face and tiny vertical wrinkles between his eyebrows . . . He was wearing his military tunic as always. What kind of manoeuvre was he preparing on the eve of the Party Conference? Whom would he try to manipulate? The vanquished Left in order momentarily to strengthen the Right, repudiated by its own members, in order to bring round his own Left (the centre-Left, get it?) which was beginning to mistrust him? . . . Whom would he aim at with his heavy allusions, blunt-edged like dull axes? (Those axes no longer cut, they crush.)

“How are you, Josif Vissarionovich?” asked
Klim,
head of the Army, in a cordial voice.

“Well enough, well enough,” said the other man with a friendly, shrewd, sidewise glance. (He considered the bowl of his pipe.) “The world is populated by idiots, old man. Difficult to work under those conditions, isn’t it? And you, brother?”

The
Director of Propaganda,
a youngish man with a round, hairless face under a shaved head, dressed bourgeois-style in a grey suit which made him look like an American dentist, held himself totally silent, totally alert, for this might be a commentary on his commentary on a remark by the Chief, which was published that morning in the newspapers and immediately censured, by telephone. The
High-Commissar for State Security,
seated right next to the Secretary General, had pushed his chair slightly back, perhaps in order to cross his legs more comfortably, perhaps in order to mark a voluntary self-effacement which allowed him to speak here only if questioned directly. When he did speak, it was in a deep, singularly persuasive voice which always said extremely important things like:
I take full responsibility—With sixty thousand workers from the Special Camps, it will be completed in two months. —Shoot four or five of them, no more. —This information comes from an Intelligence Service report submitted to the Crown
. . . He was a middling-minded man, somewhat pale, greying at the temples, with a rather open face, a high forehead, and a sad, thoughtful expression. A little cropped moustache above his lips reminded one that he shaved each morning, like anyone else, looked at himself in the mirror, like anyone else, probably desired a woman or women like anyone else, in a word that he, too, lived an ordinary life. He might have said quietly, in a detached voice, without any emphasis: “In short, I don’t exist. I’m the seventh cerebral circumvolution of the Central Committee. I’m the eye and the hand of the Party.—The hand that searches. The hand that holds the handcuffs. The hand that pours the poison. The hand that holds the revolver in the service of the Revolution.” And if he didn’t say this, not having any occasion to do so, his whole manner expressed it, even his discreetly military bearing, shadow of the great men over whom he watches night and day, formidable shadow over the subordinates he commands in the name of danger and of safety, deadly shadow over the captives he sends to their fate in the name of a magnificent future . . .