Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (26 page)

A dark group emerged from the door of the Security building and moved toward the centre of the square. Rodion made out an indistinct mass of ragged prisoners surrounded by soldiers holding their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. A dog was prowling around these men with his tongue hanging out: a tracked animal who would be thirsty all his life, a slave-animal, a police-animal trained by man to track man down. A killer beast. This group of slaves crossed the paths of people on their way to the club to divert themselves watching the misadventures of
The Lucky Cobbler
on the screen (he bought a lottery-bond, issued for the construction of socialism, and he won the jackpot, and the pretty girl next door discovered his tender heart, and . . .) Rodion’s eyes were following the prisoners, their guards, the police-dog—the only creature set off from the group with any distinct individuality, eye-teeth and pupils gleaming, huge thirsty snout . . . “I’ll be taking that path next week,” thought Rodion. “I’ll be with you, comrades! I’m already with you, totally . . .” For he had no doubt that these captives were victims: the vilest are victims too, and they are even ours now that we have taken the world into our hands.

Eight o’clock chimed somewhere. No one else passed by. A little girl came to collect the goats. Stars broke through the deep blue of the sky. In the Security building, two windows went dark at the same instant; then the floodlights at the entrance came up. Suddenly illuminated, the sentry, weapon held horizontal at the ready, was pacing silently up and down his section of phosphorescent sidewalk with the regularity of a clockwork dummy. And Rodion had a clear vision of the machine that controlled this automaton: it made the lights go on and off in the offices above the files, it made the telephones ring, it made hearts (but not his, no! not his) tremble with anxiety. It disgorged the group of captives onto the little dark square, the ones guarding the others: the hungry ones and the ones carrying loaded rifles, and even the humanized animal with emasculated instincts who would never again make a spontaneous movement. Someone turned a switch and the little red soldiers began to move. Another click and a current passed through their skulls; they halted, lowered their rifles, clack, clack, the captives who were moving ahead of them crumbled into the grave. Another switch. Trains began running, presses rolling, drills drilling, orators clamouring:
Glory to the Chief! Glory to us, glory, glory
. . . like in Mayakovsky’s poem . . .

Rodion, chin resting on his fist, faded into the night, once again absorbed in problems. Only this time he knew in the very fibres of his being that tomorrow he would be in one of the cellars of Security. Dimitri was there already. Old Ryzhik was there. Thousands of unknown people were there, living there, probably dying there, and he felt torn between a yes and a no which were equally bitter, equally true, equally necessary, equally hard. I accept it. I can’t accept it. When machines begin working against man, you have to throw a bolt into them. Then they break down, they’re nothing more than dead scrap-iron. We built these soulless machines, so we have every right to destroy them, we’ll build others. I, Rodion, know this. He straightened up, transfixed by a resolution like a beam of light. What are we hoping for? What are we waiting for? We’re crazy with resignation! Our resignation is driving us crazy! Impossible to live this way. I tell you it’s impossible, comrades! Impossible to die this way, unless they kill us. Nothing to expect, except from ourselves. “History,” said Hegel . . . “History is something we make, we are historical, too, like all the poor devils . . .” There is no certainty that this machine will stop and crumble one day all by itself. It must be destroyed. Another revolution. We will make one, and in a very different way. I don’t know how, but it will be very different. But first, escape from them. Enough.

He walked along lightly until he reached the meeting-place where Avelii and Varvara were waiting for him in order to spend their last night before jail together. From the hard earth beneath his feet, itself supported by the black rock, a simple energy ascended through his limbs—fresh, loving and stubborn, like a self-evident truth. He followed a narrow path through the woods, illuminated by the feeble glow of the Milky Way. But as he drew closer to the comrades the words he was bringing them—burning winged words—lost their persuasive power; nothing was left of them but ordinary words, which other words could easily refute:

“Marxist thinking, Rodion, must be objective. This dictatorship which is no longer anything but violence and lies directed against the proletariat, is still proletarian, in spite of itself, because it maintains the property-relations established by the October Revolution . . .”

Rodion repressed a sort of exasperation. Am I doomed never to understand? Never to know? Yet a triumphant confidence penetrated his limbs. He could make out Varvara and Avelii lying together between the mossy roots of a pine tree. Two imperceptible faces which he could barely glimpse, surmising them rather, so close that their breath was intertwined. The woman’s oddly tender voice offered him bread. “Give it here,” he answered gaily, and his hands made a game of groping for the hand which held out a crust of rye in the night. His eyes were getting used to the dark, which was velvety beneath the spreading branches of the tree. A vague phosphorescence of starlight must have penetrated that far, for Rodion was suddenly sure he could see Varvara’s smooth, narrow face on which—without a smile—a kind of beatitude was floating. Avelii’s profile was burrowed between the woman’s cheek and the back of her neck, in her warm flesh and hair. The silence went on forever. A minute passed, and it grew darker still, the darkness of an abyss. To Rodion, the earth felt frosty, the bread bitter, the dome of boughs oppressive. Avelii and Varvara lying on the ground were talking softly to each other about prison, about life, about love, about the proletariat, about prison. For a moment, Rodion lent an ear to their murmurings: it was excruciating . . . Then he went to lie down a few yards away on the cold moss where he could see a shred of sky between the tops of the pines. Faint rays linked each star to all the others. They formed a web of mysterious light. Where did the night end, where did the light begin? Where did light end, where did night begin? Rodion fell asleep with his eyes open.

* * *

The next day Avelii and Varvara descended into a subterranean world with which they were already familiar, where people lived like larvae in a kind of slow delirium. The windows—for the cellars reached ground-level—were crisscrossed over with barbed wire and were missing half their panes: whatever glass remained was covered with the blackened dust of the years. Twelve women here, seventeen men over there, bathed in the same animal warmth, breathed the same stale odour of defecation, killed time with the same tales of misfortune. The women took turns lying down to sleep on planks which stank of bedbugs. When Varvara’s turn came, she had to share with a thin fisherman’s wife with sharp cheekbones, accused of speculating, and an old woman in a black kerchief, accused of witchcraft and counter-revolutionary talk. The first night, the latter asked her: “Would you like me to pray for you a little, my dove?”

“No,” said Varvara, “thank you. I’m not religious.”

“Then not for you, for your boyfriend,” the religious woman insisted. “My heart feels he is in need of it . . .”

“If you wish,” answered Varvara, shrugging her shoulders, but with a pang of irritation . . .

Avelii lived among thieves: local people, clerks from the cooperatives, fishermen, special deportees, and a pickpocket from Tiflis—a young vagabond who told complicated stories artistically:

“Part One:
Love
. Part Two:
The Tragic Surprise
. Part Three:
Hope and Despair
. There’ll be three more parts tomorrow, comrades and citizens, for those among us who aren’t sent out tonight on a free tour of the natural planetarium from which no one has ever returned.
Amen
!”

These allusions were aimed at some gloomy young fellows against whom he seemed to have a personal grudge. They were threatened with capital punishment for having, on numerous occasions during moonless nights, visited the stockrooms of the cooperatives reserved for Party and Security officials.

The wandering pickpocket knew the seamy side of every big city, the nightclubs of the Maidan in Tiflis, marked cards, cocaine, the heavily made-up girls, naked under their flowered print dresses, who wander the Krestchatiki on the heights of Kiev, a fabulous town, and who make love in the bushes for five roubles, three roubles when you’re one of the boys, and for free when you’re fresh out of jail! He knew the thieves’ dens around the Smolensk Market in Moscow, the girls along Neglinaya Street who sell themselves on the sidewalk just across from the new buildings of the State Bank, the interesting parts of Ligovka and Pushkin Streets in Leningrad, haunted by real bandits in caps, like Gold-Tooth-Kolia, One-Leg-Artem, and Puzaty-Chaitan (the Pot-Bellied Clipper): “Got shot, that brother, a little while back. Was really too fat to hide himself nowadays when everybody’s thin. He really couldn’t pass himself off as a high-paid technician. Yet he sure was a real technician: he would have disassembled and sold off the turbines of the Dnieprostroy one piece at a time . . .” The light-fingered vagabond took a liking to Avelii “ ’cause you’re sincere, and you deserve some credit for taking a trip on this filthy boat for your own pleasure . . . Some night I’ll tell you, just you, how sweet the girls are in those thieves’ dens. Ah! You’ll see, it’s like a story . . .”

And that was prison, like a story, that hubbub of men, that motley collection of flesh-and-blood shadows, that heart-to-heart, that flesh-to-flesh, that fear without fear, hunger gnawing your innards, incipient scurvy making your teeth wobble in your gums. Most of the prisoners were so weak they no longer even volunteered for soup detail, which was done twice a day: two streets to cross and the whole yard of the Security building . . . Avelii went regularly in search of a unique joy which was enough to fill his days, his nights, even his sleep. For it took him past Varvara’s prison and, in one corner of a broken window-pane, Varvara’s eyes would be waiting for him, calm, illuminated by a midnight sun.

* * *

Fedossenko had fourteen days to put his case together. Eighteen at the most, but then his report would not be ready in time to be mentioned in the monthly bulletin of the Security Department. He was well aware of the fact that the case would make no sense if it were completed too late to be utilized in the preparation of the Party Conference. The rules demanded that the dossier include formal evidence of guilt—confessions or accusatory depositions—so that the responsibility of the political police to the Party Control Commission would be covered. The Rodion document would be worthless unless it were confirmed by at least one deposition. To make matters worse, Rodion was hiding in town or in the woods. They would catch him soon enough, stubborn like the others.

Ryzhik and Elkin were refusing to answer any questions, unless presented with specific detailed accusations. They were demanding to be transferred to Moscow. In the meantime, they were writing to the Central Control Commission of the Party. Their epistles, which Fedossenko read even though he didn’t have the right to, were full of cold brutality. They followed their signatures with brief summaries of services rendered to the Party during the terrible years, and that alone contained the most revolting reproach. Further, “having long ago foreseen that the mediocre Asiatic Bonaparte of whom you are the mindless unscrupulous lackeys would be led to liquidate the Party of the proletariat,” they quoted the platform of the Opposition, the decisions of Congresses, the Party statutes and the writings of Lenin, concluding with blasphemous apostrophes like this: “What more would you do. Koba Djugashvili Stalin, the Cain of tomorrow, what more would you do if, like the
agent provocateur
Azev,
you were a mere tool of the bourgeois police scum? You were kicked out of the Party in 1907 for pushing it into highway robbery; you were an opportunist in 1917, an opportunist in 1923, slapped down by Lenin in his last letter, an opponent of industrialization until 1926, an apologist for the rich peasantry in 1926, an accomplice of Chiang Kaishek in 1927, responsible for the useless Canton massacre, the harbinger of Fascism in Germany, the organizer of famine, the persecutor of proletarian Leninists . . .” Ryzhik had written these lines—and many more vehement lines—in his impersonal hand, every letter etched deeply into the grey paper. With each sentence, as he wrote, Ryzhik had leaped to his feet and paced around his cell, gesticulating. Aloud, he harangued the Other: “Koba! Koba! You scoundrel! What have you done to the Party? What have you done to our iron cohort? You’re as supple as a noose, lying to us at every Congress, every Politburo meeting, bastard, bastard, bastard . . .” Ryzhik collided with the wall, pursuing the Other, the Powerful One, who backed away from him with little steps in his shiny boots, the little red flag of the Central Executive pinned over the right breast of his blue uniform: the Other of 1919, that disquieting oriental non-com with a narrow, swarthy face, who had nothing to offer the Revolution but his mountaineer’s stern will and his jealous mind, always dominated by events or by clearer minds—and henceforth bitter, already weighed down by suspicion and resentment, armed with deceit. And the Ryzhik of today, who was no longer the same man as in the days of their fraternal encounters in Tsaritsyn, full of confidence and danger, when they were setting the world aflame together, but this old man with a bloodless complexion, a grey mouth, wearing a fur jacket in the middle of summer, shivering from time to time—this old man kept harassing him uselessly: “Will you answer me at last? Who brought you food and ammunition at the eleventh hour? Who? Ah! Now you want us all to drop dead in your prisons . . .” Ryzhik stopped short in front of the dirty white wall and read a mysterious little inscription written in pencil by a semi-literate hand: