Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (7 page)

“There’s really no point in the two of us behaving like diplomats. First of all, we know everything. Much more than you think, anyway. You’re not quite an enemy. You’re not quite with us. Don’t get angry, I know your dossier by heart. You quit the Opposition in June 1928, in agreement with
Ivan Nikitich Smirnov.
But on the questionnaire of the Central Control Commission you left the section concerning your relations with other oppositionists blank. Despite this lack of confidence in the Party, which in reality made you unworthy of the Party’s confidence, you were reinstated. Four months later you wrote, in a letter addressed to a counter-revolutionary who has been cast out of the Party and has paid for his crimes . . .”

If a bell had started clanging at full peal in his chest, Mikhail Ivanovich would not have heard it with more deafening clarity than he heard the heavy beating of his heart. Temples constricted, throat tight, breathing short. Sacha arrested. That’s why he no longer answered his mail. But why, for God’s sake, why?

“You wrote: ‘Collectivization, in its present form with all its violence and disorder, will end up by turning the entire peasantry against the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ You made veiled allusions to the disorders in Uzbekistan. Note that I could ask you how you came by your information about them and remind you of the penalties for domestic espionage. We have that letter. We had a copy of it at the time, and now we are in possession of the original. You added, ‘I’m afraid that I. N. was in error. He is blinded by his loyalty and, in that matter of the missing editions,
Trubkin-Pipeface
is duping him as he is duping all of us . . .’ Do you recall that? Is it possible that I remember your style better than you yourself? These things sometimes happen. Trubkin-Pipeface! Aren’t you blushing? Do you think we didn’t understand? You, an old underground worker, using such a childish cover-name for the recognized leader of the Party. Will you deny it? Don’t make a sign. Better think it over first.

“You were something of a wit. If I charged you with counter-revolutionary talk, perhaps you would protest? But when you were telling funny stories to aspiring actresses, did you think you were still a faithful member of the Party? ‘Do you know the difference between a great misfortune and a national disaster, Zina Valentinovna? Imagine a very great leader falling to the sidewalk from the eighth floor balcony of the Central Committee. That would be a great misfortune. Now imagine him surviving. That would be a national disaster.’ I can’t imitate the way you told it, Mikhail Ivanovich. The joke loses its flavour, doesn’t it? You sent her far, to a very cold climate, that little goose of a Zina Valentinovna, with your witty remarks which she went around repeating everywhere. Will you deny that in precise language this is what is known as discrediting the leaders of the party?”

Mikhail Ivanovich felt himself blush, then turn pale. Then his forehead grew damp.

“I’d rather not go into your conversations with Kostychev, who passed you Numbers 10 and 14 of the
Bulletin of the Opposition
. I could quote your own words to you, describe the scornful way you pronounced certain names in private . . .”

Kostychev, Kostychev too! A double agent, a coward, or . . . Yet it’s totally impossible. Anyway, they wouldn’t use his name if he were. Then who? Maybe his wife? That drab blonde who was sleeping behind the screen—who was pretending to sleep, who was probably listening—while we whispered, face to face. There we were, our elbows on newspaper, the empty liquor glasses in front of us, both of us deathly sad, alone, hardly daring to confess our enormous apprehension?

“You teach. If one analysed your course on the French Revolution, page by page, it would reveal such insidious counter-revolutionary propaganda that you would never—no, never—leave the concentration camps. Who were you aiming at in your lessons on
Barras, Tallien, Bourdon?
And your
distinguo
between Right and Left Thermidorians, the authentic ones and the in-spite-of-themselves. Ha! Ha! Do you imagine that we were fast asleep and that all of the youth who listened to you were betraying the Party like yourself? Not a single line about
Babeuf
that isn’t a criminal allusion.”

Motionless, head erect, with a sort of grimace stamped on his face, Mikhail Ivanovich felt prostrate with indignation and disgust. Corrupt idiots! You see allusions in every line because the Babeufs of today are in your prisons. You’re a living allusion to every kind of counter-revolution. But impossible, useless, to say a word. Any word would be turned against itself, would mean, after rolling in that muddy stream, the opposite of the truth. And fear was there too. The drab voice continued:

“You finally decided to abandon your apparent submission to the Party, you formed with Kostychev and Ilin a Committee of Three . . .”

“That’s untrue,” cried Mikhail Ivanovich. “Untrue! Untrue, untrue!”

“It’s true,” continued the drab voice. “You’re wrong to get angry. They confessed. I have their signed statements right here. They implicate you overwhelmingly. You have raised a criminal hand against the Party. I no longer know what might save you except for a sincere repentance whose sincerity will have to be demonstrated.”

So that’s what they’re getting at. They know very well that what they say is false. What do they want? The cigarette between Mikhail Ivanovich’s stiff fingers—which were somehow foreign to his being—had gone out with a long cylinder of ash hanging on it. That ash fell softly. Thus a worn-down will collapses. All of this leads nowhere. All of this is absurd. Resist? Useless. They can do anything. Give in again, play their game, humiliate yourself, lie, where does that lead to? He remembered the auscultation with dull anger. . . .

“Comrade Judge,” he said harshly, “all these aberrations have tired me out. Send me back to my cell, I need sleep. Anyway, I won’t answer you any more.”

Ponderously, he got to his feet, supporting himself on the edge of the table with both hands, unaware that he was reeling.
Ah! Very good
, he said with a kind of wild joy, as if he had just recognized the man seated opposite him, whose hand was softly caressing the holster of his revolver.

“Listen, esteemed Comrade Investigating Judge, to some lines of poetry I’m fond of:

but the most extraordinary thing was that the man didn’t give a good goddam . . .

“Do you want,” said the inquisitor, “to request a visit from your wife?”

“No.”

* * *

The most sensible thing would be to die, and that’s probably what will happen to me (“. . . one hundred twenty beats . . .”) Farewell Ganna, Tamarochka. Ganna will remarry. That fat Bykov once wooed her; who knows if they’re not sleeping together already. How else could she live with her salary as a statistician? Bykov has oily skin and a pig-like expression; Ganna’s flesh is smooth and cool; her soul is like her flesh, only more defenceless. Let him penetrate that flesh and intrude on that soul. Farewell Ganna, the child must live.

Such nagging, base thoughts plunged the man on the cot into a state of unpleasant queasiness.

I’m not jealous, yet I feel nauseous as if I were seasick.

We were
beaten in 1923,
thanks to our faith. We still had confidence: it was already too late. Only a few thousand of us were left who wanted to continue the Revolution, which everyone had had enough of. The world was subsiding into inertia and nothing was finished. We were theorizing, searching for correct formulations, for explosive truths while the others—and there were a hundred of them for every one of us—only wanted to spend the summers at watering-places, bring home silk stockings for their wives, sleep with well-fleshed creatures. And you, too, Brother. You spent your Sundays playing cards and drinking the sweet wines of Crimea. Then you walked Masha home along the banks of the Moika—a laughing Masha with shining white teeth in a moon face. You didn’t love her, you knew you would never love her and you didn’t talk about love. She consulted you absent-mindedly about Party history, but she knew very well that once you reached the shade of the Summer Garden, you would grasp her elbows with determined hands and cover her face with moist kisses without speaking a word. She was waiting for that moment with all her being. Remember the sight of her head thrown back willingly, cool, closed lips, eyes shut. And then you would move on in silence and then, in the light of a first lamp, you would continue in a polite voice:
After the Second Congress, Masha, the unity tendency
. . .

You knew very well that you were breaking her heart. Now this pale memory is breaking your heart. For your life is over. You’re still attached to it since your flesh still remembers these feelings. Of no importance. You think you’re unique and that the universe would be empty without you. In reality you occupy in the world the place of an ant in the grass. The ant moves along carrying a louse-egg—a momentous task for which it was born. You crush it without knowing, without being aware of it. Without the ant itself being aware of it. Nothing changes. There will be ants until the end of the world who will bravely carry louse-eggs through the tunnels of the city. Don’t suffer on account of your nullity. Let it reassure you. You lose so little when you lose yourself—and the world loses nothing. You can see very well, from up in an aeroplane, that cities are anthills . . .

Tiflis, the Kazbek, the Elbrus, Rostov, Moscow from high in the air. The glaciers are stars smashed across the earth. Why did that other within you want so much to fall that day? You were scared and the other leaned toward the glaciers with a tender vertigo. It was because you were crossing borders within yourself. Never had you appeared lower to yourself than during those sky-drenched moments. From that day, your courage and rectitude end. No more heights. Now you will walk through the flatlands of cowardice. You had just made up your mind to break, and you kept repeating to yourself:
resistance is impossible, impossible
—when Mount Metek appeared, divided into blocks of glowing-red stone and near-black shadow by the light of the setting sun. The foam-flecked Kura was refreshing to see: women were washing out clothes on its banks—Tamaras, Tatianas—and you spoke to them with tenderness, you whose presence they couldn’t even imagine, peering down at them from a height of one thousand metres, saying: “Young women, I’m a coward, don’t love a man like me.” At the barred windows of the castle there were certainly prisoners’ faces raised to watch the flight of the R. 2 in which you sat strapped, helmeted, intoxicated with speed, with your secret governmental message from the Central Committee of Georgia to the C. C. of the Federal Union—and your little defeat, your vile little defeat . . .

How beautiful the earth was! Steppes, then forests: a living, moving map, rich colours, oceans of foliage stretched to infinity. You were both blinded by the sunlight. Gregor turned around, shouting against the thundering of the propeller—and suddenly you were falling, falling with magnificent slowness. The hidden forest revealed tall outcroppings of rock divided into blue and gold by amazing shadows. A river of sky flowed around them. And then you nearly cried out with joy at the idea of falling, while fear made your limbs quiver with mild hysteria. The loss of the secret envelope would have put off for a few more days a few more iniquities in the vertical fall of a revolution. The propeller, which had fallen silent, exploded into life again. Rostov appeared on the horizon like a great heavy shadow concentrated on the earth—into which the sea seemed to plunge like a twisted steel blade.

We were
beaten in 1927.
Sacha returned from Wuhan. You were running around to workers’ rooms in the Zamoskvarechie district with typewritten papers in your tunic. With every flight of stairs you climbed, you discovered more of the old misery. The victorious proletariat back in the slums. Time blackened the wallpaper, squiggles of smoke were visible on the walls in corners and you could imagine the naked man separating from the warm woman in the night to burn out bed bugs. A sordid life. Five or six faces were asking: What news? Each had come by circuitous routes in order to throw “shadows” off the track. You thought: “
They
know everything anyway: besides, among these five there is certainly one double-agent. Which woman? Which man?” The news, comrades, is this: Trotsky was able to speak for five minutes at the C. C. in the midst of shouting and catcalling. Twenty-nine expulsions at the
Bogatyr
factory.
Wuhan
is disavowing the Changsha peasant uprising.
Treint
is coming over to the Opposition in France.

It was the only piece of good news for the moment and much discussed, but you knew that in that vast shipwreck it was really of no importance. You didn’t say so, you did your duty, you explained Treint’s theses. The only real hope was a return to illegality. Fill the jails with devoted men since everything is going to pieces. Start again from the beginning. And then? Then they’ll begin killing us off. They won’t make the mistake of letting us live on in prison. Then what? Hold out anyway. Maybe a few will survive. But the cowards? Those who are tired? Sacha, back from China with memories full of blood, spoke to you that night as you drank the last of the tea at opposite ends of a battered sofa. (Books were lying pell-mell on the shelves around you. The desk was dead—ashes and rusty pens. What’s the point of putting anything in its place since . . .) Sacha was saying:

“With scientific methods of repression, not a single typewriter can escape surveillance any more. There will be as many stool-pigeons as comrades. More, if necessary. Believe me, it’s finished. After Germany, after China. There’s nothing left for us but to write ourselves off. The revolution will be stranded on the beach for the next twenty years. The last to talk about it will be right, sublimely right, but they will be broken on the rack. Give me a drink. No, fill up my glass. As long as I’m not completely drunk, I can’t help seeing things clearly. Listen, brother. The Chinese are magnificent. At night our unions have little posters pasted up: ‘Comrades, calm, discipline, etc. Surrender your weapons. . . .’ In the morning the streets are full of young officers in khaki with round glasses. Dirty sons of bitches from any angle. They grab anyone—a worker’s mug is easy to recognize, you understand—and drag him before a young, principled lieutenant who says one word without looking at the bugger. And you notice that there is also a big brute with a shaved head and a curved sabre standing there. The worker kneels down without a word and holds out his neck. Talk about people who know how to hold their tongues in front of executioners! It’s unforgettable. It’s horrible. The brute winds up, the sabre whirls, the head comes off all at once, a fountain of blood spurts out a full metre. I was standing smoking on the sidewalk next to two Americans who smelled of whiskey. I had the formal directive of the Executive in my pocket: ‘Prohibit and disavow resistance.’ Never have I wanted so much to be recognized by chance and killed in a corner. If that had happened before passing on the directive, my death might have been of some service to the revolution.”