Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (28 page)

Fedossenko had them open Rodion’s cell for him. The ceiling was low, his height filled it. The little lad sitting in the straw got up slowly, brushing off his knees with his fingertips. There was mischief or gaiety in his tiny green eyes. He made no greeting. Not demoralized, that was certain. Then what? Fedossenko examined the black stone, the ventilator, the straw bedding, and Rodion, from bottom to top, from his worn out boots to his mason’s or carter’s jacket, to his turned-up nose, his unhandsome, peasant’s face—a little peasant’s face like so many others, a race of serfs: tramps, migrant workers, soldiers, all alike in their grey uniforms, cousins to the teeming coolies whose swarm fills all of Asia . . .

“How art thou, young fellow?” asked Fedossenko at last, awkwardly, for he still didn’t understand.

“How art
thou
, Citizen Chief?” answered Rodion with a little smile.

The advantage was his from the start. His use of the familiar “thou” made Fedossenko’s neck turn purple.

“You have a statement to make?”

That’s right. Hands in his pockets, Rodion answered that he would make it in writing. In substance, he was assuming full responsibility . . .

“For what?” inquired Fedossenko.

“For everything. I’m the one who did everything. Alone . . . I confess!”

“What, everything?”

“The theses, that was me. I’m the one who received the information. I was the liaison with . . . I won’t say with whom. There wasn’t any group, there was me, the organizer. I won’t tell any more . . .”

“But my boy, thou art mad,” Fedossenko, helpless, nearly exclaimed. Anger came to life in his muscles. Kostrov’s deposition, the fruit of so much effort, didn’t explicitly accuse anyone but Rodion, and Rodion was confessing. There was nothing left but a ridiculous Rodion affair. They were making a laughing stock of him. In the twinkling of an eye, by lying to his face, this young fellow had emptied the whole beautiful dossier . . .

“Why art thou lying, thou little son of a bitch?” scolded Fedossenko.

He towered over him by a whole head, and all the grey light from the ventilator was focused on his stubborn jowls. He was going to advance on Rodion, shove him hard against the black stone wall, grab him by his skinny neck like the bad boy he was and teach him to obey, the louse! But he didn’t move and Rodion didn’t back off. “I forbid you to speak to me in the familiar form,” Rodion said firmly.

“Ah! Thou liest! Ah! Thou confessest! Ah! Thou forbiddest me to . . . !”

These three interjections collided furiously inside Fedossenko’s skull. The only thing he articulated was an “Ugh!” and his clenched fist struck Rodion square in the face . . . They both reeled, one carried away by his momentum, the other under the impact and the pain of his lips crushed against his teeth. The black stone walls, the ventilator, the low ceiling pitched around them; then they both regained their balance, face to face: pale (the young lad with the piercing glance), red and breathing heavily (the Chief of the Special Service) . . .

“Get this brute out of here,” Rodion said quietly to someone, probably to the Runt, who must have been standing there, behind Fedossenko, at the entrance to the corridor, to the Runt who had seen . . .

“Ah! Thou insultest me.”

The huge Fedossenko hurled himself at Rodion, bent him back, knocked him down, felt a hank of hair, a neck in his grasp, a flank, then a belly under his knees . . . He bore down on that unresisting body with his full weight, he hammered it blindly with both fists . . .

“Comrade Chief, with your permission . . .” The voice of the Runt brought him back to himself, brought him back to his feet, brought up the chilling reminder of his uniform. He was covered with straw up to his shoulders, there was plaster on his knees (where did the plaster come from? that was odd), blood and scratches on his knuckles. Shredded pages of the dossier were swirling around him. Rodion seemed unconscious to him. The Runt closed the door . . .

Rodion had not lost his most acute lucidity for a single instant. He was accomplishing something more than a duty: a necessity. Clear the comrades of the charges. Throw the investigation off the track. Defy the powers of evil. Give himself. He felt there was enough unsuspected strength in him to fight with anyone. He could have felled the colossus, Fedossenko. Knocked down, bruised, blows raining down on his body, he never moaned, thinking confusedly: Strike, brute! There’s nothing more you can do! That was the idea onto which he clamped his bloody teeth. Further off, in the depths of a gaping silence, there reigned a feeling of power: I can do anything, even die here, victoriously, under your boots. When the door was bolted, Rodion bit his sleeve. A stifled howl emerged from his chest—not a groan, an inarticulate cry like the cry of wolves on snowy, hungry nights when all the earth’s sorrow howls through their strength.

* * *

Every year, just before Spring sowing-time, the government tries to ingratiate itself with the peasants. This year, in March, a circular from the Centre had required the authorities to permit (which meant to instigate) the re-opening of a few churches, “without, however, appearing to encourage a revival of religious activity.” Two months later
The Godless
, the official publication of the Atheists’ Society, edited by an old member of the Central Committee, denounced these symptoms of a religious renaissance. Questioned by the Central Control Commission, the relevant department in the Commissariat of the Interior certified that the percentage of re-opened churches remained 3% lower than the percentage allowed. The director of that department was immediately transferred: the higher-ups would have preferred the allowed percentage to be surpassed. The General Secretary had hinted as much. “Eh, let the peasants pray a little more or a little less; we don’t give a damn as long as they sow!” Thus
The Godless
did not get the Central Committee’s permission to raise the issue in a broader context. One of the secretaries of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda gave them a suggestion: “Direct your attack against the sects instead: Security hasn’t looked into that corner for a long time . . .”

Right after that, a series of articles appeared in a little illustrated magazine with a poorly-printed cover coloured a dismal greyish-green. On it the Pope, snickering under his tiara, was handing a bomb with a smoking fuse to a Polish general. The articles on page three dealt with
The Revival of Counter-Revolutionary Sects
. Knapp skimmed them with one dim eye while getting his hair cut. But three weeks later,
Pravda
approvingly reprinted seven lines from the second of these articles. Knapp always read the central organ of the Party from cover to cover, especially what was between the lines. “Ah, so!” He rang and ordered his secretary to get a detailed report on religious sects in the district ready by the next day. “Right, Chief!” While waiting, Knapp had to deal with some Zionist deportees whom he had been ordered by telegram to arrest and transfer to the Regional Centre under escort. Were there two or three of them? No doubt about two. The third, a Communist loyal to the general line, a lecturer in a Pedagogical Institute, expelled, imprisoned, then deported in the wake of an affair of embezzlement of public funds, did not associate with the first two. A disciplined, orthodox Communist, the dossier on this Isaaksohn indicated that he was the author of several articles on Zionism published by an organ of the Party. As an extra added precaution, Knapp had him arrested: they would see at the Regional Centre whether or not he should be released. Knapp transmitted his doubt in veiled terms to the Region. The two authentic Zionists, a Jewish student from Kiev and an old ruined shopkeeper from Berdichev, were housed in a cellar of the Security building, where they greeted Isaaksohn with snickers. Previously, when they had run into him in the streets of Chernoe, they had ostentatiously turned their heads away. In prison, they looked him square in the face: wispy goatee, wrinkled pockets under his eyes, sickly complexion. It was he who turned his head away.

“It did you a lot of good, eh?” the student told him, “betraying the Jewish nation and writing so much trash about us?” The pedagogue overcame a sudden desire to sigh and answered sententiously:

“Young man, one day I hope you will understand that the salvation of the Jewish proletariat is in the socialist revolution and that Zionism is a corrupt bourgeois ideology,
ja, ja, eine korrumpierte kapitalistische Ideologie
. . . And now please don’t speak to me any more . . .”

The two Zionists turned scornfully away from him and began a long discussion between themselves on the origins, causes, forms, moral and social consequences of the betrayal of certain rotten elements of the Jewish nation, ah! completely rotten “like the dead hand of a leper, like a collapsed nose in a syphilitic sore . . .” They carried on this horrible conversation during every waking moment, for forty hours. Isaaksohn listened to them without saying a word, with a dismal, wizened face which he believed was impassive but which was soft like the face of a rag doll. After a day and a half, the door opened and the Christians entered.

A superficial investigation revealed to Knapp the presence in Chernoe of Believers belonging to several dangerous sects, mostly composed of former deportees, some of whom had been sent to Black-Waters under the old regime and others under the new. Knapp had the twenty-three most suspect among them arrested in order to sound out their political attitudes. This group included two Castrati (
Skoptzi
), old shoe-makers. At the house of one of the two they seized a little wooden casket containing a dried-up penis, scissors, and a knife wrapped up in old, yellowed linen. There was a very old woman who had known Father Illiodor and already passed for a saint in a concentration camp. She sold wicker baskets, which she wove with her own hands, on the market-place, and people venerated her. There were artisans, men and women of the Flagellant Sect (
Khlisty
), who had been run out of the Baikal region three years earlier, having arrived there after being run out of the Ural six years before. Finally, there were Baptists, the most numerous group and the most suspicious since they had corresponded with America, received dollars, and conceived the idea of building a City of the Sun in Siberia. They looked like ordinary workers but they neither drank nor swore, which was quite extraordinary. They even arrested a Silent One, a robust forty-year-old fisherman with a combed beard and a peaceful smile, who never spoke except in his dreams so that even the members of his entourage finally came to believe that he was a mute in his wakeful state. Yet he understood everything and preserved a mischievous gravity in the depths of his eyes. Thus he appeared in Knapp’s office, bowing with dignity, his hands crossed over his chest, nodding to signify that he knew how to read and write, yes, but wished neither to read nor to write . . . “They are people of the Middle Ages,” Knapp said to Fedossenko, for they considered themselves men of the scientific age.

Overworked, waxen-faced, Knapp slept five hours a night: he had so many cases to keep up with. At night his deputies went around arresting people. The salt fish case caused the arrest of the five managers and twenty workers of the commercial Fish Syndicate. Thirty casks of salt fish delivered to the Regional Centre were going bad as a result of insufficient salting: the Syndicate claimed, on the basis of documentary evidence, that it had requested salt, even grey salt, from the Statified Salt Trust in vain. Half of the quantity delivered, which was 40% less than needed, had apparently been stolen by the workers and then sold to the small fishermen’s cooperatives, whose salt fish was still edible. Besides, where did the salt given over to speculation in the market-place come from? The two employees of the Salt Trust should have been arrested too, but, smelling trouble, they had departed, leaving a sign scribbled in red ink on the boards of their shop:
There is no salt
. There was nothing to investigate at the three small fishermen’s cooperatives. However, they were in debt to the State Bank and the tax collector and hadn’t been meeting their payments for months. Yet the authorities hesitated to foreclose on them, for this would have ruined the fishing industry merely in order to auction off a few old nets which the Fish Syndicate would have bought up at a ridiculously low price . . . Knapp had the administrators of the co-ops arrested on account of the loss to the state caused by their poor financial management. This was purely a pretext, for the only case he intended to pursue was the salt affair, which was interesting because it could be linked up with the sabotage of distribution in general . . .

Two other cases, which came to light at the same time, left him with a further burden. In the nave of Saint Nicholas’ church, where the wind blowing through the broken dome had carried in so much dust that grass was beginning to grow on the flagstones, two packing-crates of dry-goods, left for storage, had been broken into. The job had been organized by the transport workers with the complicity of the stock-watchers’ service: nineteen arrests . . . That same day the smoked-fish factory named after Kaganovich collapsed. An audit of the books prescribed by the Party Control Commission revealed that the enterprise was insolvent: the State Bank would lose eighteen thousand roubles at first estimate, and a subsidy amounting to twice that sum became necessary to keep the factory working . . . All this made a shambles of the year’s financial plan for the district, and the Party secretary was wild with fury. Here is how the factory had executed the plan of the regional committee: by allocating the funds budgeted for re-tooling and amortization in order to cover current production costs, by overestimating the contents of crates produced by 20%, by . . . Get it? On top of this, the workers were systematically stealing one fifth to one sixth of total production. Thirty-five arrests. And matters were threatening to get even worse: now the factory lacked both funds and hands, while the fisheries continued to deliver raw materials. The fish were spoiling. The fisheries were demanding to be paid for them. The procurator telephoned to the Party Committee, the Party Committee to Knapp, Knapp to the Regional Centre, Regional Security to the Regional Planning Commission, Planning to Control, Control to the District Party Committee . . .