Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (6 page)

BOOK: Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)
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The first night was heavy, despite the satisfaction of clean underwear and sheets. Ganna, Tamarochka—what were they doing at this moment? He was about to fall asleep when a face approached his face. Wild blonde hair over her forehead, hollow, deepset blue eyes, bottomless stare, dark mouth. The dark mouth murmured: “They’re torturing me, do you hear? I can’t answer all those questions, questions all night, always the same, always different. I’m going crazy, do you hear? Well.” (The voice became pleading with Ganna’s intonation.) “So help me, Mikhail Ivanovich.” And suddenly the eyes were no longer blue but brown and there were thin tortoise-shell circles around them, and it was Ganna, Ganna being tortured. “Micha,” she said, “Micha. Let’s get it over with. Don’t fight it any more, I can’t go on any longer, Micha, have pity on us.”

He came out of this nightmare with his forehead drenched in sweat; he saw himself lying in the glare of the electric bulb, the silence of the night, the solitude—outside of time. And the days and nights flowed into the void, peacefully.

* * *

It all began with a dull pain in the area of the heart. But was it the area of the heart? We don’t know precisely where our heart is nor what it is. His thoughts immediately swerved away from their usual meanderings and steered, through bizarre twists and turns, toward an anxious place. The pain persisted, as if it enjoyed resting there, in that warm breast. Mikhail Ivanovich remembered a hand lying on his flesh on that spot, a refreshing hand which lingered. Ganna murmured: “I love to hear your heart beating. And yet it’s awful to hear a heart beating. Sometimes at night I’m afraid of mine.” Those words and that gesture had never before come up in his memory: now they brought a grimace, perhaps a smile of helplessness, to his face, on which beads of sweat were beginning to form. The pain expanded, burrowing, penetrating his being at the place-where-the-heart-is. He felt that his nose was growing thinner, that the skin on his temples was like a sheet of parchment and that a sweat which was at once cold and burning (or neither cold nor burning, worse, a sweat of anguish) was moistening his face. Control yourself, it’s just a heart attack—and if it were something worse? Control yourself anyway, control yourself. Lying on his back, he often stared at the lines and shadows that stood out on the white ceiling of the cell. His imagination picked out shapes among them—motionless forms which he changed at will. He would try to bring them back again: a Japanese mask, a head that looked vaguely like Pushkin’s, an armless female torso, a sail . . . The sweat and the pain were stronger than this silly game. His mind was nothing more than a tiny lamp cowering somewhere under his skull, illuminating a murky inner collapse. The pain prowled all around his flesh: he closed his eyes, opened them again—it had no limits. No . . . Sweat, mortal sweat. In the ceiling, the electric bulb.

And the pain vanished, as it had come. Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, Lecturer in Hist. Mat. (Historical Materialism) at the Communist University named after Sverdlov, rose from his prisoner’s cot in his shorts and shirtsleeves, ran to the door, barefoot on the cold floor, rapped softly on the spy-hole and listened to the peacefully-lighted silence of the cell. Soft footsteps glided down the corridor, fingers snapped, low voices conferred. Reality returned all in one piece, all at once. A neighbouring door opened and closed. “Hmm, they’re still interrogating him. Hmm . . .” The door suddenly opened and Mikhail Ivanovich stepped back as an enormous, broad-shouldered guard—belts, straps—entered and marched towards him, observing everything—the unmade bed, the chamber pot, the bare table, a crust of bread, every object and even the man, the prisoner: his dubious undershorts, his shirt, unbuttoned over his hairy chest, his bare feet which were brown like gypsies’ feet and hairy too.

“What’s the matter, citizen?”

Nothing. There was nothing any more. After all, the fact that maybe I nearly died is of no importance to you, citizen, to these walls, to
Them
. Mikhail Ivanovich felt this more than he thought it, with a little self-pity mixed with sudden anger against them. He frowned, his nostrils flared as they did when he got mean, he said politely, nastily (he was never more polite than when bad temper made his nostrils quiver, and this was easy to see):

“Nothing. I thought I felt ill. Excuse me, esteemed comrade, for having disturbed you.”

The guard considered him with human eyes: brown, shrewd, devoid of kindness—ah! eyes which performed their duty admirably.

“Yes. You’re sweating. That happens. Go back to bed. I’ll send you the doctor tomorrow.”

That happens? What happens? Mikhail Ivanovich went back to bed, pulled up the blanket.

“Don’t go to such trouble,” he said smiling. “It’s unnecessary. I’ll show your doctor the door, dear comrade.”

Curtly, he turned over against the wall. The shrewd eyes observed him for a moment, attentively. The bolt slid shut, there was silence, nocturnal light, the roughness of the grey-painted wall, the feeble well-being of a body relaxing after a crisis, the approach of sleep, the last thoughts before sleep, nearly always the same ones. Welcome thoughts, unwelcome thoughts.

. . . Living is never done with

and every day we’re the same,

vain, vain, vain, pain . . .

His heart was beating regularly.

* * *

In the dark corner beneath the window, the dampness softened the paint on the wall. It was there that Mikhail Ivanovich made a scratch every morning with his nail; every seven days he drew a longer line—it was his calendar. “Four months already!” Although it seemed senseless, the passage of time somehow eased this whole nasty business. No one bothered with him any more, and he merely sent a few words of useless protest to the prosecutor in charge of control or to other high officials once a week. Jokers! Frauds! Pious rogues, beyond a doubt. The cell’s restfulness did its work, he felt a little better after all the strain—yet tormented by worry at night because of that pain in the area of his heart which came back every three or four days. He asked for the doctor. Around eleven o’clock the next morning, the Chief Guard entered quietly, carefully examined the window-bars, the bare table, the waxed floor. Then, satisfied: “You asked for the doctor?” There then appeared a personage in a white smock and, in a totally neutral voice, with a glance so neutral it seemed to see nothing: “What is your problem?” The first time, Mikhail Ivanovich carefully explained that it was his heart. The personage in the white smock was carrying a box suspended across his chest. He opened it, removed three pills from a compartment with a tweezers, and said: “One every morning.” When the door was closed again, Mikhail Ivanovich broke into wild guffaws. That pill, all ready to calm, revive, invigorate, perhaps cure an unknown heart, that mechanical perfection—the man, the white smock, the little box, the tweezers, the pill—attained an absolute imbecility. The spy-hole opened, a voice hissed: “Citizen, laughter is forbidden.” Mikhail Ivanovich let out another guffaw, even louder. The door opened, a strapping peasant in uniform took two steps into the cell and said severely: “Please, Citizen, stop laughing. It’s forbidden.”

Mikhail Ivanovich felt he was going joyfully mad. The three pills on the table took on a fire-green hue, they were about to leap into the air, all by themselves, swell up into balloon-heads, and burst into wild laughter. He was ready to holler, to stamp with rage, for his laughter was swelling into fury and tears were clouding his eyes.

“Please be quiet, Citizen,” said the guard even more quietly. “I’m the one who’ll get punished for you.”

“They’ve really got us—tied to one another,” thought Mikhail Ivanovich as the laughter died out within him. Another night his pain got worse. It must have been at the beginning of the fifth month. He had been reading for two weeks. They brought him stacks of old yellowed books. When the white-smocked personage reappeared, he curtly turned his back. “Heart again?” he said. Mikhail Ivanovich gave no answer. The tweezers placed three little pills on the edge of the table, the neutral voice murmured: “One in the evening. Anyway, it will calm you . . .”

That day Mikhail Ivanovich’s cell was changed, inexplicably. He lost the pentagon-shaped patch of sky formed by the outer bars in the upper corner of the window. His new cell, one floor lower, was less bright; and all he could see of the world was a patch of grey stonework. He lost his calendar, the addition of weeks and months, and decided to live outside time. He lost the end of a Wells novel about the future. Between the lines of the text, lettered in minuscule, pale pencil-marks to escape the vigilant eyes of the librarians, a maniac had written several times over: “Pray for the executioners, pray for the victims, pray for me.” An intense sadness swept down over Mikhail Ivanovich. He forbade himself to think about Ganna, about Tamarochka. He forbade himself to think about himself, about the future. He forbade himself to try to understand any more. He clenched his jaws, frowned, and paced back and forth until bedtime, reviewing in his mind Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of the accumulation of capital along with Dvoyalatzki’s objections, Bukharin’s and his own.

Having smoked all his cigarettes and devoured his hunk of black bread as he paced, he went to bed at the signal. According to Bukharin, “under an hypothetical State Capitalism, where the capitalist class would be consolidated into a single trust, and in which the economy would be organized, although class antagonisms would remain, there would be no crises, despite the underconsumption of the masses, since reciprocal demand among all sectors of production as well as consumer demand would be established in advance.” Bukharin will go far with his formulas for a capitalism so perfectly organized that it ends up resembling socialism in all its features—except for justice. “What am I saying here? How did that entity, justice, unknown in economics, get into this?” The approach of sleep impaired his thinking. Mikhail Ivanovich observed himself on the brink of succumbing to the oldest form of idealism. At that instant, pain came to life under his left breast. And what do you have to say about death, old brother? Is it metaphysical twaddle, an entity, or what? Nothing to do with economics either, death. The pain made him gasp and bite the pillow. It extinguished the last worldly light within him—that hard profusion of electricity falling from the ceiling—carried him off into a dark rocking beyond, beyond . . . Somewhere within his brain or his soul, the imprisoned ideas continued their useless course. “And yet the revolution . . .” He gasped.

* * *

Did they have to wait until he was sick before springing that surprise on him! Nervous wrinkles were etching themselves around his nose, he felt like acting rude. Yes, like calling this comrade chief a camel, explaining to him that he positively looked like a camel. But the camel is a useful, patient beast. It crosses deserts; it has a precious function in trade; it carried ancient civilizations on its humps. Whereas you, citizen! I don’t know what slimy responsibilities you carry on your back nor where your caravan is leading us. In any case, you are one of those people who cost the revolution dear. Mikhail Ivanovich, naked, was thinking these thoughts while a doctor listened to his chest. “Turn around. Good. Lie down. No malaria?” The room was naked too. Seated, with his legs comfortably crossed, an officer of about fifty was observing the naked man—his nervous wrinkles, his beard, thick and heavy under his chin, broad around the cheeks, the simian beard of a stubborn prisoner. This officer had two little red rectangles on his collar: thus the rank of a major or a department head, probably a confidential aide of Comrade Molchanov, candidate member of the Central Committee, member of the Collegium of the United State Political Administration
(OGPU)
, member of the Special Board, director of the Secret Service in charge of oppositionists.

“Get dressed,” said the doctor.

The doctor was filling in a questionnaire. He wrote something on a pink card which he handed to the Major-Department Head to read. The latter asked a question in a low voice, then, having heard the answer, murmured,

“Ah! Very good!”

Mikhail Ivanovich heard him. All his life this officer probably had no more to say than
Ah! Very Good!
Stupid and self-satisfied. When, on his night-table, under the silk lampshade, he finds this note from his wife: “I love another man and you’re nothing but a clod”—he’ll say mechanically
Ah! Very Good!
When they chuck his own arse into prison for administrative abuse (15,000 roubles of unjustifiable travel expenses), he will look right into the eyes of his chief, his double in every respect, and he’ll certainly say,
Ah! Very good, Comrade Chief
.

“Come,” said the Major.

The two men were in a soberly-furnished private office. French books behind the glass front of a bookcase.

“You read French novels?” asked Mikhail Ivanovich in an aggressive voice.

“No time.”

Nothing on the table but a telephone and some push-buttons. The Major was looking calmly at Mikhail Ivanovich. He pushed forward a pack of amazing five-rouble cigarettes. Waited until Mikhail Ivanovich got comfortable in his armchair, lighted up. Waited another moment for Mikhail Ivanovich to get nervous. Sighed and, as if in an aside, said
Hmm, Hmm
in a vexed tone of voice.

“My nerves are steady,” Mikhail Ivanovich said to himself. “Keep up your little game.” In reality he was beginning to feel scared. The pink card had appeared on the table and the Major was reading it over. Brusquely:

“Your wife and your child are well.”

“Ah! Very good.”

“Now I’m the one saying
Ah! Very good,
” Mikhail Ivanovich thought bitterly. Might we be interchangable? That would be curious. A double-edged idea.

“You are . . . rather seriously ill.”


Ah! Very good
.”

“And I really don’t know what you’re doing in prison.”

“Wonderful to hear you say so,” exhaled Mikhail Ivanovich through a fat smoke-ring.

The Major shrugged. His meaningless voice, like a streamlet of grey water, intoned words, words.

BOOK: Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)
3.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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