Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (25 page)

“I bet,” said Elkin, “that that confession didn’t stop him from interrogating you . . .”

“Naturally. It was even on account of him that I got sent to Suzdal. But what else could he do? Since somebody had to do the job, it might just as well have been him as anyone else, right? That’s what he said to me as he shrugged his shoulders . . . I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Dimitri. To each his own way of drowning in the deluge. I doubt they’ll leave us together more than twenty-four hours, and I have two important things to tell you. Here they are: You must cling stubbornly to life, in prison or anywhere else, whatever the cost, do you understand? Don’t get carried away in stupid hunger strikes.
Their
job is to suppress us noiselessly; ours is to survive. History is pursuing its course. What they sow, they will reap one hundredfold. When that day comes, we will be extremely useful.”

“I agree on every point.”

“As for the rest of what I have to say, I’m not asking your opinion. I’ve got it all thought out. I’m leaving. I’m finished. I’ve had enough. Don’t object, don’t say anything. You’ll see I’m not quitting. For a long while now I haven’t had anything or needed anything. No longer any need for myself. Anyway, I never needed myself. I used to tell myself: I am a human tool in the hands of the Party. Ah! what marvellous times they were! One night my throat was choking with sorrow, a thousand bells were tolling in my head because they had just killed a woman whom I had not allowed myself to love. Then I wondered if I hadn’t somehow forgotten to live, and the answer suddenly echoed inside me in the middle of that mad carillon: we must forget ourselves so that the proletariat may live! How it lived in those times . . . Don’t smile if I seem to be wandering from the point. You know, I have nothing but contempt for people who kill themselves out of cowardice or because a universe in the throes of labour denies them the little toy that would console them a while for their own emptiness. Despite them, I recognize the right to leave. There is revolutionary courage in shooting yourself. You’re not good for anything any more, old brother, so leave. Your nerves, your muscles, your marrow, your chops still aspire to life. You’d like to take a little drink and stretch out on the grass in the sunshine, because you’re an animal. To conquer the zoological being within you, if this is useful, then becomes a final act of consciousness. I think I’m ready for it. No pistol, unfortunately. It will take a long time, with a lot of unpleasantness. No way around it. Keep still, I tell you. We don’t have much time. I won’t begin my hunger-strike until I get to Moscow, when I’ll be sure my last glob of spit will hit Koba in the eye.

“Between now and then, and afterwards, I need your help. You’re going to learn my last declaration by heart and publish it in whatever prison you’re in exactly one year from today unless you learn of my death first, from a reliable source. Don’t change a single syllable, for I don’t trust your theories.”

Elkin, who had also begun pacing back and forth between the walls (so that the two men were animating the cell with strange oscillations like pendulums gone wild) answered, frowning:

“Naturally . . . I’ll publish my ideological reservations later. It seems to me you’re right. Your departure will produce a certain effect within the Party . . .” (he rubbed his hands forcefully together) “a certain effect.”

“Good,” said Ryzhik. “Let’s get to work.”

* * *

Varvara was cutting bread. Faces floated by her in the half-light, all alike. They came and went, like the hands, with the hands . . . Hands holding bread cards from which she had to cut off the number 26. Hands reaching for the hastily weighed loaves of rye. Life smelled of damp rye, slightly fermented. The fishermen’s wives brought in the smell of fish. A little girl clutched her three rations of bread against her chest and lingered. She pressed her whole body against the counter and looked up at Varvara with big secretive eyes. Varvara read something in those eyes. “Do you need something else, little girl?” Varvara was cutting out the next card as she leaned down toward the child, and the child said quickly:

“Galia sent me. They came for her Dimitri last night. Don’t go
there
today. They’re going to get all of you. . . .”

The secretive eyes brightened. The little girl smiled: “I don’t think I forgot anything . . . Goodbye, comrade.”

“Goodbye.”

If only Avelii . . .! So love is also a bad thing, since it can push everything else out of its way with this unscrupulous brutality? Varvara felt a great cry echoing inside her—Avelii! Avelii! But her hands, trembling a bit, still tossed the bread onto the scale. Someone spoke to her and she answered; and if anyone had been watching her, they would have seen the skin of her face become drawn, smooth at the temples, her features narrow, her eyes grow veiled, her lips darken. For love must be pushed aside; if this is the way things are, if in times of danger you think of
him
rather than think of the comrades . . . They’re probably going to arrest us all, this very day. 1) Destroy the messages. 2) Prepare the youth, Avelii, Rodion, for this trial. (They’ll hold firm . . .) 3) Write to Katia. 4) Write to Moscow. Warn them. Change the handwriting and the address to prevent
them
from intercepting the card.

The rest of her day flowed by on three different levels. The automaton did her job, served the bread, didn’t lose a single number. Behind her everyday mask, two beings lived their separate and intermingled lives: one thinking, the other suffering. It might not amount to anything: the usual springtime persecutions, three months to spend in the cellars of Security, perhaps a transfer afterwards . . . But what if they transfer Avelii somewhere else? Avelii! How to live without Avelii? That apprehension brought up an uncontrollable sob; Varvara swallowed it back with a mouthful of saliva.

“Hey, Citizen, I didn’t get my full weight! What are you thinking about?”

Varvara returned to a present centred on the needle of the scale, added thirty grams of bread and murmured: “Next in line, citizeness,” while thoughts as sharp and as hard as metal castings assembled themselves in her mind. “No. It will be more serious this time. With the Conference approaching, they probably want to concoct Trotskyist conspiracy cases to create a diversion. The leaders among the deportees will be sent to isolators—and it will be two or three years before we get out again, unless unforeseen events intervene. Avelii and Rodion may get off, for they don’t like to lock young people up in prisons where they get educated through contact with older prisoners . . .”

“Let’s not go!” Rodion proposed. It was dusk. They were in the public garden, on the deserted side from which you can see the old fish market. From there, blue slopes descended toward the ford where the plain on the opposite side of the Black-Waters stretched into the darkness. Varvara protested: “But Rodion, you’re mad!”

“Listen to me.” continued the lad. He thought he knew the trails leading north, toward the sea, but that way they would get lost and the deserts themselves were penitentiaries. Toward the south-west lay the railway line, every station of which would be a trap. On the other hand, by travelling five or six hundred kilometres to the south, they would be out of the high security zone. Passports? You steal them. Ten days’ march through the forests and the steppes—with the risk of dying of hunger, and why not? eh?—and they would reach the Belaya River (the White Waters) and safety.

“And the others?” said Varvara indignantly. “And the Party? What do you think we are, Rodion? Convicts? Tramps? Never forget that we are the living faction of the Party . . .”

Perhaps she didn’t say that, but it was just as if she had said it. Rodion clasped his hands over his knees, and his eyes wandered into the shadowy distance. He knew all of that, but he didn’t quite understand it or no longer understood it or finally felt ready to understand something quite different. Jailors and prisoners, we are still members of the same Party: the only Party of the Revolution. They are debasing it, leading it to ruin. We are resisting in order to save it in spite of them. The only way we can appeal against the sick Party, controlled by corrupt
parvenus
, is by appealing to the healthy Party . . . But where is it? Where? Who is it? And what if it were outside the Party? The true workers’ Party, outside of parties . . . But is this possible? We are the persecuted faction loyal to our persecutors because we are the only faction loyal to the great Party whose emblems they have stolen and betrayed . . . Desperately, Rodion tried to make out the comrades’ faces in the deepening shadows.

“Listen to me! It’s no longer true: something has been lost forever. Lenin will never rise again in his mausoleum. Our only brothers are the working people who no longer have either rights or bread. They’re the ones we must talk to. It is with them that we must remake the Revolution and first of all a completely different Party . . .” The comrades appeared livid to him in the falling shadows: Varvara, Avelii, heads pressed close together.

“We would run the risk of committing a crime,” they answered him, “by stirring up the hungry, backward, unconscious workers against their own organized vanguard, however bankrupt and threadbare it may be. By attempting to revive the Revolution, we would run the risk of unleashing the hostile force of the peasant masses. It is the Party that must be cured, at any price. What does it matter that it runs over our bodies, if this is in order to come back to life tomorrow when the working classes . . .” In the meanwhile, no possible escape.

“Thermidorians!” muttered Rodion. “Sons of bitches! Excuse me, Comrade Varvara. That’s what I really think of them, and so I have to say it out loud . . .”

“Thermidorians is enough,” said Varvara softly. “It’s correct.”

“No! Not enough,” shouted Rodion. “How do you say son of a bitch in Marxist terms? A filthy, humiliated animal who has been beaten, kicked in the belly, fed on scraps and is only good for biting poor people? You’re educated: tell me the scientific term. What would Hegel have said if he had seen this bureaucratic scum sucking the blood of the victorious proletariat? And Vladimir Illich, what would he have said?”

“I think Lenin would have said the same as you,” Varvara replied seriously.

Together, they examined all possible hypotheses, studied the line of conduct they should follow, concluded that nothing had been discovered concerning the messages, that a betrayal was out of the question, but that it was necessary to expect the worst, on principle. “Once again the Georgian is about to repudiate his past deeds, and he needs victims in order to manoeuvre the Party. We would be quite dangerous if we existed in the political sense of the word.”

At this point Avelii interrupted Varvara: “ ‘
If
we existed,’ you say? So you think we don’t exist? I’ve often wondered. We exist like a seed in the ground, like remorse in a sick conscience, but we are no more that . . .”

Prison already enclosed them. It made them feel as if they were suffocating, even under that vast, still-transparent sky.

“Let’s not go in tonight or tomorrow,” said Avelii. “Let them come get us themselves—those sons of bitches, in the words of Hegel and Lenin . . .”

“Yes, forget about your bakery, Varvara. They can divide up the bread of poverty well enough without your help. Let’s breathe free tonight.”

* * *

They agreed to spend the night in the woods above the river. Avelii went to destroy the messages and to get blankets, soap, and bread. Rodion said: “I want to see the town one more time . . .” What singing sadness called him there? He couldn’t have expressed it in words. He strolled among the people on the Boulevard of the Soviets. On the movie-posters you could see sailors of the year ’17, jackets crisscrossed with cartridge-belts, shouting out an appeal to the world. “What is to be done, little brothers?” Rodion asked them. He recognized himself in them, born ten years too late because of fate, which either exists or doesn’t. Maybe that’s not a problem any more: fate must be shaped with a rough proletarian hand, and too bad if I die in the process! At the foot of a red-brick tower, some firemen were leading their horses back to the stable. Rodion patted a powerful mare on the rump. The sullen redhead with bulging biceps who was brushing her down seemed like a nice guy to Rodion. A lantern lighted his face from below. Rodion pitied him for his lack of consciousness. To live without knowing, taken in by every slogan, to obey without serving the one great cause—I’d rather die in your coldest prison, sons of bitches! Rodion rested on some stones that had fallen from the cornice of Saint Nicholas’ Church and contemplated Lenin Square: the little bust of Vladimir Illich forgotten in the very centre of that abandoned space; the three stone houses confiscated long ago from the rich in the name of justice, which now housed Security, the Party Committee, the Soviet—in a word, injustice. A spotted nanny-goat followed by her two funny little black kids was grazing in the dark grass around the monument. People were cutting across the corner of the square heading for the lighted windows of the Trade-Union Club on Comrade Lebedkin Street. Rodion admired the sky above the roof. As it grew darker, its blue became even deeper. Rodion sat so still that the goat brought her kids right near him and let them graze around his boots. An inner calm was coming to life in Rodion, and the animals sensed that he was incapable of throwing a stone at them. If he wasn’t thinking, it was because thought was ripening all by itself in his brain: like the sky growing darker.

The lights went on on the second floor of the Security building. “Work! Work night and day, you’ll still be swept away . . . The ice breaks up after the long winter, the spring floods sweep it away . . . It will be beautiful when they overflow . . . Your files, your papers, all your dirty little typewritten verdicts, and your prisons, all of them, the old wooden barracks, sealed with barbed wire, the modern American-style concrete buildings, all of that will be blown sky high . . .” Rodion realized that this was a certainty within him. “Everything. Everything will be blown up!” The thought illuminated him. Man is unable to hasten the arrival of spring by even an hour. He must therefore suffer through the whole winter. But he knows that one season follows another. So let him wait confidently, his boat ready, his soul ready. And what if the time is snatched away from him? What if he himself is extinguished before the dawn, like a tiny candle flickering in the great winds of space? “I am that tiny candle,” thought Rodion, who saw himself, alone in the empty square, separated from the comrades, unknown to anyone, with prison waiting for him, sitting on rubble . . . “Well, I don’t give a damn. The sun will come up just the same . . .”