Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (30 page)

“Comrade Fedossenko. I spent the night studying the case of the counter-revolutionary Trotskyist centre of Chernoe. Your manner of conducting the investigation was beneath criticism . . . Hum . . . beneath all criticism . . .

Fedossenko, choking, took one step forward and stood at attention. Everyone’s eyes were glued on him. Six pairs of lungs exhaled the same silent
ouf
! Take it on the chin, my fat friend! Ah! How you used to put on airs! The big-shot! In charge of a big political case! Well, dear colleague, well, pig-face, you can climb down off your high horse now. You’ve had it. And Fedossenko, through a secret sense of hearing, took it all in. Everything was crumbling around him, everything, everything . . . Awful. And Knapp went on:

“What about these cases of a seven-pound loaf of bread and twelve hundred school notebooks? The directive from Moscow states clearly: ‘In certain cases it will be permissible to prosecute them for common crimes, without, however, allowing this to appear systematic . . .’ You were preoccupied with a seven-pound loaf stolen by delivery men, while a secret Committee of Five was carrying on its activities—its pernicious activities—among the deportees under your supervision. Where do the twelve hundred notebooks come from? From Moscow. Did you warn the Central Collegium about the presence of active and organized counter-revolutionary Right opportunists in the distribution service of the Public Education Department right in Moscow? I’m asking you did you report this?”

“No,” stammered Fedossenko.

Murmurs of disapproval surrounded him on all sides. Who would have thought? Such criminal negligence! Oh!

“Among the prisoners in your custody, the most dangerous Trotskyist, by his own confession, escaped. ESCAPED! Comrade Department Heads and Deputies, we are all responsible for this inconceivable event . . .”

Knapp’s letter-opener rapped sharply on the edge of the desk. They were all aware of the event, but their collective stupefaction weighed all the more heavily on the guilty party to the extent that each felt relieved on his own account.

“. . . Myself first of all for having allowed a dossier of this importance to remain in hands that are incapable . . . (
long pause, grey eyeglasses flashing from face to face, hushed voice
) or suspect . . .”

If Fedossenko did not fall over backwards, it was because he had the backbone of a bull, which kept him erect, independent of his will. His last shred of self-respect fell with his last hope. He raised his hands in a gesture of supplication and said in a humbly reproachful voice:
Comrade Chief, how could you
. . .! then, pulling himself together, cried vehemently:
Suspect? Me? Never
! But all this took place inside him, Outwardly he remained stunned, totally immobile and utterly mute, while his face grew more and more flushed and a nasty fog drew over his eyes.

“In itself, the case of the Trotskyist Centre is unexpectedly serious, but your investigation, instead of shedding light on it, strangely obscures it. From now on I will conduct it myself. Fedossenko!”

(. . . just ‘Fedossenko?’ That’s it . . . It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s prison . . . pri . . .)

“. . . I had ordered you to stay within legal bounds, do you recall?”

Fortunately, whenever a superior addressed a question to him, whatever his personal inner turmoil, Fedossenko immediately recovered the power of verbal assent:

“
Yes, Comrade Chief
.”

“Yet the escaped perpetrator, before escaping, turned in a complaint against you for brutality. Do you admit your guilt?”

“I . . . No . . . I don’t know . . .”

“One of your subordinates corroborates the escaped man’s complaint. Don’t be in a hurry to deny or confess it. You’ll have time to think about what line of conduct to adopt in front of the investigating judges of the Party and Security. You have betrayed the Party’s confidence and sabotaged the work of Security. You will be under arrest until further orders.”

The Director of inner-departmental services, a cigarette dangling from his lips, had the outrageous effrontery to murmur “Very good!” Fedossenko said, “I obey, Comrade Chief,” turned on his heels, took three stiff paces, opened the door, went out, did not collapse, but continued to walk, his head buzzing, straight down the hall . . . Then the Runt burst into sight in front of him, limping, one shoulder higher than the other, with holes in place of eyes.

“This way, Comrade Chief, if you please . . . Your revolver, please, Comrade Chief, if you please . . .” The Runt was hopping around him, looking as Fedossenko had never seen him, with a head that was more of a death’s head than a living head, an outsized uniform hanging over a hollow chest, the flat voice of a puppet or a ghost . . . Puppet or ghost, he carefully shut the door of a white-washed cell on the demolished Fedossenko.

* * *

Rodion crossed over the Black-Waters with the first group of loggers on their way to the cutting-grounds in the woods. They removed their boots before entering the water, where they followed a trail among the rocks which was known only to them. One clumsy fellow fell into the stream and splashed about in the suddenly-seething water for a moment before regaining his balance. People laughed. “Easy to get drowned here,” someone said to Rodion. “There are holes—no way to know all of them—and then the rocks, they move around . . .” Rodion had to pretend that he, too, knew his way among the treacherous rocks, which were hard to see because of the reflections. He followed the footsteps of the men ahead of him. Once in the shelter of the woods, the loggers stepped up the pace in order to get warm: Rodion would have liked to run. All at once the excitement of escape electrified him from head to foot. He wanted to leap with joy, to burst out laughing, to dance, but he made an effort not to turn around too often so as not to attract attention. He mingled with the little groups stretched out along the path through the underbrush, which was slippery with pine-needles. Around nine in the morning, they would be starting after him with dogs. What would they give the dogs to put them on the scent, since he had left nothing behind him? His straw mattress at the Kurochkin’s? So many sweaty bodies had slept on it . . . “My poverty protects me,” he thought with satisfaction. He had deliberately taken the longest, most dangerous, most improbable route . . .

Danger loomed simply at a turn in the path, much earlier than he had expected it, and Rodion approached it with steady steps . . . The silhouettes of the pines stood out more sharply before his eyes, the silence of the forest became softly, terribly resonant . . . Under a dark, ancient, pyramidal pine, a grey-coated horseman was inspecting the loggers’ papers. Attentively he fingered the passports or working papers of the “special colonists” (they were deportees, too); he barely glanced at the men. He was a puffy-faced young soldier with dirty hands who appeared to be half-awake. His little shaggy roan was licking the moss on the ground. Rodion got out the passport Galia had given him, which he had not had time to look over. He hadn’t yet learned his new name. Then, head held high, in order to hide the look in his eyes without appearing to conceal them, he stared calmly at the soldier, looking not into his eyes but just below, at his nostrils, his thick, chapped lips. “If you take me away, little brother, I’ll strangle you . . .” This clear resolve sank into Rodion like a stone dropping under water: everything remained calm on the surface. Attached to his passport was a little white card with the photo of a clean-shaven young man in his Sunday best wearing a blouse with an embroidered collar. Rodion had a ten-days’ growth of beard, a swollen right eye, scurfy scales on his chin . . . The soldier handed him back his papers. “Next.” The next man, an old fellow with broken-down shoulders, long hair, a face lined with deep wrinkles and furrowed all over with long, faded whiskers, did not have his papers in order. He was missing some visas on his deportee’s certificate. He explained in a whining voice, while showing his ribs, that he was suffering from a disease, that he wasn’t able, that Comrade Petrov knew it, that Comrade Petrov . . .

“I spit on all that,” said the soldier: “I don’t need your explanations. Orders are orders, old brother. You gotta come with me . . .” They went off among the dark pines, the broken old man, head lowered, silently preceding the sullen horseman. The horse also lowered its head, in order to browse the moss along the ground, and the rider, sitting listlessly with his hands hanging slack, let himself be carried along. The forest, around them, was desolate.

For Rodion, the underbrush was bathed in warm green light. Rodion replaced the old deportee in a crew of woodcutters. “We’re lucky,” said the crew chief. “We’ll make our quota by nightfall.” They made it. Toward noon, when the sun speckled the pointed tops of the pines with diamonds, the men, stripped to the waist, were struggling along bitterly amid the pools of light which lay on the red-brown earth. Axes thudded furiously against the tree-trunks, opening wounds whose delicate coloration no one noticed. The fresh resin lay beaded there like fat tears. Its odour mingled with the odour of sweat. A saw rhythmically cried out its two monotonous notes like the wail of some unknown beast. Toward the end of the afternoon, the loggers ate bread and dried fish on which crystals of salt were shining. When there was nothing left of the sun but an incandescent ball hanging over the lacy edge of the tree tops, work suddenly stopped. Too exhausted to curse, the men now had the sunken glossy eyes of sick people and heavy, charred hands with veins bulging out like bizarrely knotted ropes under their skin. With some difficulty, Rodion stood up erect. He was tormented by splinters and his shoulders and legs were bruised by the branches of a pine whose fall had nearly crushed him.

“Well!” he said joyfully, ‘we’re alive!”

No one echoed him. He remembered that he alone was escaping, that the others would return tomorrow and on every succeeding day, perhaps every day of their lives, to this forest humming with silence in order to fulfill this impossible quota. They would go on indefinitely, from their hovels to the old condemned trees, from sleep to work, obsessed by the idea of the quota and by hunger, for the quota is bread and bread demands the quota and neither bread nor the quota have any end . . . Rodion left them in the purple evening shadows. No one thought of him as he lingered behind, the last, on the homeward path.
Slaves! slaves! comrades!
. . . Rodion bade them fare-well inside himself with a sigh of deliverance. He found his way by the stars, his limbs exhausted, his head ardent, his steps stumbling and deliberate like those of a drunken man. The pines surrounded him with their tall, motionless silhouettes. Suddenly outcroppings of rock burst through the soil; he slipped, fell, got up again and went on, panting, through the darkness, which was now blue, now spangled, for it was raining stars. In reality—if there was a reality realer than his half-delirious flight—thirst and fever were the cause of the silver disks which danced before his pupils, dilated in the night. Thirst and hunger now prevented him from thinking, but he walked on, walked on, lacerating his feet against roots and rocks, into the depth of the night, the madness of thirst, the exaltation of escape, the proximity of death . . .

It was probably the next day or the day after. All at once the stars froze, the sharp outline of the trees burst open across the sky, and Rodion fell over backwards. A single thought crossed his mind, creeping across his brain like a tiny blue flame on the ground: “I’m drowning . . .” Was this the fourth or the fifth day of his new life? How did he drag himself, appeasing his hunger by chewing pine leaves and green moss, which had the taste of damp stone and under which tiny, salty worms still wriggled between his teeth—how did he drag himself out of the woods, into the full pale light, toward the stream whose murmuring he could hear distinctly, the stream he could glimpse from a hundred yards away, flowing among the roots, the stream which didn’t exist? How?

Then, suddenly, the landscape opened out in two great folds: the woolly flocks of pine trees huddled back into a huge past; an immobile avalanche of rocks and scrabble toppled down toward the wide milky ribbon of a river on the far shore of which lay a golden sandy beach. And Rodion’s excessive joy was overpowered by a fear: “I’m done for, it’s a mirage . . .” Despairing, he made his way down toward the mirage. He spent his very last strength in economical movements so as to avoid falling (perhaps he would never have got up again), to find handholds, footholds, to get closer to the mirage. His whole mind, awakening from silence, fever, thirst, delirium, even from the will to live which engenders delirium and mirage, was concentrated on that miraculous water, spread like a sheet of sky, drawing nearer and nearer. It wasn’t a mirage, since it was drawing nearer, since he could make out tufts of grass right on its bank, but why shouldn’t there be tufts of grass on the bank of a mirage? He began to believe in the reality of that water only when he had quenched his thirst in it.

One more day slipped past outside measurable time between the vanquished mirage, the reality of the water, and the icy sadness of evening. Rodion was getting some of his strength back. The sun licked the wounds on his bare feet. He no longer felt his hunger. He had to swim across those three hundred metres of real water, tomorrow, when the sun reached its zenith. The night was polar, illuminated by an enormous moon. Bats fluttered nearby. Rodion felt himself come suddenly awake, but he had merely emerged from an extremely lifelike dream, only to drift back into chilled somnolence. The teeth-chattering morning was longer than the night; then the sun climbed into the pure solitude of the sky. When the earth and the river were all aglow with it, Rodion took off his clothes, made a bundle of them which he hung behind his neck, carefully observed the sandy bank on the opposite side, and slowly entered the water, which was so cold that all his flesh bristled. Another step and he fell in—the rock ended there. The cold penetrated him through and through, but he swam calmly across that white, gilded, liquid ice whose current deflected his course slightly. Every ten seconds, he raised his head toward the sun, mouth open, eyes dazzled, to snatch the warm air. So careful was he to conserve his strength that he refused to turn around in order to see how far he had come. And the farther he swam, the wider grew that sparkling sheet. A million needles tore his skin. He swam with frenzy, his guts convulsing with strange cramps. But the warm golden sand which at last shimmered before his eyes was only a mirage . . . His muscles clenched violently, his mouth, open in order to drink in air, breathed in water, water. A dull thunder rumbled in his ears, then exploded like a peal of bells. In his frenzied effort to overcome the pain and asphyxiation he turned himself around and the last thing he saw on earth was the high wall of the bluff crowned by pine trees . . . The vast forest climbed inexorably higher, filling the sky, swinging out over the land to come crashing down on the lost swimmer. With extraordinary detachment, the drowned man saw the river close over his head—clear, without a ripple, abstract.