Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (24 page)

“Elkin.”

“Yes . . . and who else?”

“. . . Ryzhik . . .”

“So, you consider these two to be the ringleaders, the probable leaders of the illegal Committee of Three or of Five?”

A man is walking through a meadow and suddenly the ground sinks under his feet, the quagmire snatches him, the mud climbs to his knees, to his hips, he feels pulled down by his own weight, the slimy earth sticks to him, a vegetable odour confounds him, he foresees asphyxiation. And every move he makes, instead of freeing him, sinks him a little deeper . . . Kostrov protested feebly:

“No, Comrade Fedossenko, I said nothing of the kind. I know these men as former members of our Party who were mistaken about important political questions and probably are still mistaken. I really don’t know anything about their Committees of Three or of Five, if they have any . . .”

“I didn’t expect this kind of trickery from you, with all I know. Unless you’re putting me on. In that case, watch out. I have merely deduced the most likely hypothesis from your accusatory statements. In any case I’m going to put our interview in the form of a written interrogation, which you will sign. In the meantime, your hesitations and your attempted retraction cast a curious light on your attitude. Go.”

At the foot of the stairs, a sentry came up to Kostrov. “Please go in to the commandant’s, citizen.” The commandant’s desk was in the guardroom, at the entrance to the building. There, fishermen’s wives, pressed up against a railing, were bringing packages for their prisoners. A broken armchair was piled with dirty clothes which still seemed warm. Who had just been made to strip? Why? Through the window you could see carts passing slowly . . . “Empty your pockets,” said the commandant, and Kostrov understood that it was jail again. Chaos. Something inside his chest broke loose, fell slowly, heavily. He emptied his pockets. The Runt half-opened the far door and beckoned to him.

The Runt had a strange head—at once that of a living man and a dead man—the chest of a hollow, white skeleton under his uniform, and he led Kostrov through deepening darkness, made him cross a courtyard over which the sky was opaque like a huge concrete dome, made him descend a staircase full of foggy electric light, opened a door for him, pushed him, with an almost friendly familiarity, into a sort of cellar which stank of straw, mildew, salt-preserves, eternally cold stone; slammed home the bolts, departed, climbed limpingly back to the daylight in his crisp uniform, with his revolver at his waist, his empty chest, shadowy holes in place of eyes.

“He’s going to get the others,” Kostrov said to himself.

In the darkness, the straw began to move. A human form emerged from it, extended a pair of extremely long hands toward Kostrov—hands which ran over him, groped him from shoulders to hips with a touch so cold, so light that it was like the brushing of huge bats. Kostrov, leaning over, began to make out a stubble-covered face, pupils in which a dark soul glowed feebly.

“Got anything to eat?”

“No.” said Kostrov.

“What day is it? What’s the date?”

“The 16th . . .”

“Ah!” said the human form, “already. Shit!”

It sank back into itself and merged with the straw, the ground, the black stones, the silence. Kostrov wondered simply if this time it was the beginning or the end . . .

* * *

The Runt, instead of placing the official stamp on Ryzhik’s identity certificate, put that paper away in a drawer.

“Yes,” he said, as if in an aside, “it’s too bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Citizen, you’re under arrest.”

Ryzhik was not excessively surprised. Deep inside him, a bitter inner voice exclaimed: “Finally!” His hard white head, carved with nearly geometric regularity out of petrified flesh, recoiled as he raised it. He looked at the puppet in uniform across the desk with undisguised disgust.

“Good. I see that that old swine Koba has remembered me. That red-eyed swine . . .” (He was talking to himself, but out loud.)

“What? What did you say? Who?”

“Koba. The chief of the ruling faction of the Party. The gravedigger of the Revolution. The swine whose arse you lick . . .”

The instantaneous release of a totally mechanical spring placed somewhere between his seat and his neck made the Runt leap up, beside himself:

“I forbid you, citizen . . .”

But Ryzhik also exploded, all white, shoulders heavy, back heavy, filled with a definitive resolve. And perhaps for the last time in his life—uselessly, preposterously—he said what little he said with such authority that the Runt sat down again.

“Nothing, you are nothing, citizen. I won’t argue with the counter-revolution here. If one day I spit in its face, I won’t aim any lower than the General Secretary’s ugly mug. Inform your chiefs that I won’t answer any questions. You get the point, I hope?”

He leaned violently toward the Runt, and the Runt felt afraid. Hunched over, hands on the edge of the table, the Runt replied with cowardly politeness.

“I will transmit your statement exactly . . . I’m going to try to give you a clean cell . . .”

“Member of the Party since 1904, met Lenin at the Prague Conference, ex-member of the Revolutionary Council of the VIth, VIIth, and VIIIth Armies,” Ryzhik obviously had the right to a clean cell. He almost shouted, “Clean or not, I don’t give a good goddam, it’s all the same to me.” But his will-power was too strong. His useless anger subsided. Everything seemed perfectly clear. Impossible to get on with spring planting without making a few concessions to the peasants. Consequently, a shift to the Right. The Georgian is going to sacrifice his underlings of yesterday. To cover this manoeuvre, repression on the Left (first movement), then a campaign within the Party against the Right (second movement). So they’re going to manufacture “cases” and send the people released last year back to jail again—always the same ones. Since I’ve already done three years, then two: five, (seven including deportation) I can count on the maximum. The bureaucratic counter-revolution is rising with all the energy it has stolen from the proletariat. It has just achieved its victory and it will take long years before the proletariat begins to think, to move . . . And me, I’m sixty-one years old. Since Ryzhik had known all of this for a long time, this moment failed to surprise him, despite its inexpressible weight.

The Runt came out from behind his desk, tiptoed around Ryzhik, and retired to the corridor. Ryzhik’s eyes, full of hate, followed the back of his blue-shaved neck topped by a small, round skull. Ryzhik picked up a bronze inkwell from the desk, hefted it in his hand like a weapon, eyes hooded, mouth bitter. “No, really, not worth it . . .” (“It’s not the right time . . . and when the time comes, I’ll be done for . . .”) He put the bronze back in its place and, violently flinging open the door, found himself face to face with the Runt.

“I’ve had enough. Take me wherever you wish. I don’t want to wait another second. Let’s go.”

Impetuously, whether by chance or intuition, he turned the right way, toward the reserved cells on the second floor, and strode off. The Runt went limping along ahead of him like a jerky puppet. Only Ryzhik’s angry steps were audible.

“Here it is,” said the Runt, almost obsequiously, in front of a door. “Excuse me, citizen, but I don’t have a better cell. We’re too crowded. You’ll be all right anyway . . .”

In front of Ryzhik the door opened into the stark whiteness of beyond the grave or of a limestone crypt. Yet it was only an empty room. He entered it, prodigiously free, holding his destiny well in hand, to be greeted by the familiar voice of Elkin:

“Hello, old fellow. Delighted to see you . . . So, we’re back to this again?”

* * *

Ryzhik paced from wall to wall, and his voice bounced from wall to wall too. And his thoughts collided with invisible walls every four steps . . . Then, captives, they followed the same path in the opposite direction.

“That’s it, Dimitri: an impasse. These things happen in nature when you’re at the end of your strength. Suddenly a mountain blocks the horizon—and there is no longer any future. I was alone with my men, my horses, myself. Alone like a child. I stared stupidly at the little red-dotted lines of trails on the map. Then I stared at the mountain. I read off the altitude of the peaks in the hatchings: two thousand four, two thousand seven . . . If ‘
Death, Death
’ had been written there, it couldn’t have been any clearer. No way to cross over in the state we were in. ‘Comrades, we won’t make it. Impossible.’ You understand: the animals exhausted, the men exhausted, thirst, trails that climb, climb along the edge of precipices, through the dizziness . . . On the other side of the crest there may have been the most beautiful valley in the world. At that point, in any case, we could believe it without any fear of being disappointed since we wouldn’t reach it. Behind us the Turgai Desert with the skeletons of Kazakhs and camels on its yellow trails—its stunted, thorny bushes, its scorpions, its sun of blazing brass—and the heights of Kara-Tagh, and the apricot orchards of Fergana. We were at the end of our strength. We needed twenty less hours of thirst to keep up the effort. Then anything would have been possible. At dusk, the hyenas circled within rifle-range, for they could already smell fresh corpses in us. Filthy beasts. That’s exactly it, brother. Today I would need to be fifteen years younger to get over the crest . . .”

“If the end were really like that, old man, I’d find it magnificent. We would stretch out on the scorched grass, the pebbles, the sand. We’d be thirsty, hungry, cold, feverish. Our teeth would chatter. We would see the whole, green, cruel earth again in our delirium. We would still say to ourselves: Oh! God! How enraging it is to die like this, but how beautiful the earth, life, the Revolution! And in the end, maybe we’d pull through. You pulled through that time. All you had to do was cross the Pamirs. Today, we’d have to climb down through chasms of baseness, without maps or compasses, with little hope of climbing out. Maybe we’ll still be there in ten years, arguing, while awaiting our hundred and eighth socialist prison . . . Who caused us to be born under such a calamitous star? Answer,
Herr Doktor Faust
!”

“Don’t joke, Dimitri. Maybe
you
will be there in ten years, talking with someone the way you’re talking with me today, but certainly not with me. History moves slowly, it only produces hurricanes every hundred and twenty years or so. Kropotkin gave that approximate figure for the periodic cycle of great revolutions, but that old Utopian didn’t understand anything about Marxism. In any case, decades will pass before our Russia starts to move again. Think of this old agricultural country, of its old, exhausted, depleted proletariat devoured by new ideas and new machines, of its young peasant proletariat which knows nothing about itself yet . . . Don’t delude yourself, you’ll be living with a gag in your mouth a long time from now, if you live, if that mob of
parvenus
, which betrays everything so as not to betray its belly, doesn’t end up getting rid of you by drilling a bit of lead into your troublesome brain so full of scarlet memories . . . They know what we are and what they are themselves! There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface at the end of revolutions, when the lava has hardened over the fire, when everybody’s revolution turns into the counter-revolution of a few against everybody. It forms a new petty-bourgeoisie with itching palms which doesn’t know the meaning of the word
conscience
, doesn’t give a damn about what it doesn’t know, lives on steel springs and steel slogans, and knows perfectly well it stole the old flags from us. It is ferocious and base. We were implacable in order to change the world; they will be implacable in order to hold onto their loot. We gave everything, even what wasn’t ours—the blood of others with our own—for an unknown future. They say that everything has been achieved so that no one will ask them for anything. And for them, everything has been achieved since they have everything. They will be inhuman out of cowardice.

“I want to tell you about my meeting with
Fleischman.
Yes, Fleischman of the VIth Army, of the Petrograd Cheka, of the General Staff Academy, of the Manganese Trust, of the Tula scandal. You remember how he looks—like a shaved rabbi. I had known him when he was thin, when he arrived from Paris in 1919. Well, when I was called for interrogation, in the inner prison of the Lubianka, who do I find waiting for me but Fleischman—in uniform, with insignia on his collar: a bigshot. That fat pig wanted to interrogate me himself. ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘you’re crawling, eh? Up to your double-chin in sewage, eh?’ In 1919 we were together before Yamburg, side by side in a flooded trench with a company of shock-troops made up of workers from the porcelain factory. Shit was pouring in from both sides, corpses were moving under-foot. Whenever we stepped on one, big green bubbles of nauseating gas came out of its stomach. A machine gun was cutting swaths eight inches above our heads. Those who stood up—the brave and the asphyxiated—were instantly shot in the head. I gave the order:
Forward! Flat on your bellies!
and I advanced. Fleischman followed me, setting the example. Our elbows were touching. Every two yards we turned to look at each other in that sewer, covered with filth up to our eyebrows, and one of us would ask the other: ‘Are you crawling?’ and the other, gasping would answer, in a glorious voice: ‘In the Service of the Revolution . . .’ When they saw us stand up at the other end of the trench like horrible stinking mannikins, those quondam Imperial Guard officers must have thought the rotted corpses were rising up . . . Ten years later, Fleischman, covered with stripes and decorations, was preparing to interrogate me: me with my railwayman’s mug and an empty belly. ‘Still crawling, eh?’ I say to him. ‘Your whole reptilian life? In the service of what? Poor old fellow!’

“ ‘I’ll crawl as long as it’s necessary,’ Fleischman answers me, thick-tongued, ‘and you, you idiot, will die a useless death!’ Then, in an official voice, ‘Citizen accused . . .’ So then I understood that he was in his element there, that from that point on it was his very nature to crawl in the mud of Thermidor, that he was even getting fat off of it now that it was no longer dangerous, that types like him were legion. Fleischman was still one of the better ones, for he had some good moments in his life. He would certainly have preferred something different, and deep down in his little soul, under the rancid fat of the high official, he probably retains some shred of socialist consciousness. I understood that after him come others who are worse, for they never knew what he has such trouble forgetting, never knew that they are greedy reptiles, never breathed anything but lies, immune to asphyxiation from even the worst stink. Those people don’t understand either of us, me or Fleischman. They fear us as incomprehensible intruders in a world they are in the process of building. They will have my hide, and probably Fleischman’s as well, now that he’s fat. ‘David,’ I cried, ‘stop acting your part. You’re something more than just that. Let me speak.’ He let me speak. In the end he was shaken to the core. We stood in front of the window like in the old days at the end of Revolutionary Committee meetings. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he answered me, ‘but I still think the wisest thing is to keep crawling a while more . . .’ ”