Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (9 page)

A few nights later he received a singular visit. Someone tapped softly on the shutters at the very moment when, stretched out on his sofa, he was about to blow out the lamp. Lebedkin, wrapped in an ancient dressing-gown, opened the window, pushed aside one shutter, and discovered in the shadows a harsh face framed by the long ear-flaps of a fur cap. Broad nose, tiny slanted eyes. “You’re the mayor now,” said the man in a low voice, “so I’ve got to talk to you, Ivan Vassilich.” Lebedkin leaned his elbow on the windowsill, for the May night was nearly warm; the constellations reigned over a silence of vertiginous sweetness. “I’m listening, comrade.”

“I am nothing,” said the man. “I am nobody. But I understand many things. I’m a fisherman from the lower town; my name is Alexei Matiuchenko. That’s all the same to you; to me as well. I need money, Ivan Vassilich, to go to Petersburg for the common cause—that’s it.”

Lebedkin observed that head silhouetted against the Milky Way. “Money?” he said, somewhat puzzled. “And to do what with?”

The man’s eyes, which were as large as the largest stars, were right up against his, their breaths mingled. “His throat must be cut,” said the man, “and I will cut it, or else it’s all a bloody mess and we’ll never get anywhere.” He had placed his large rough hand on the window-sill, fingers spread apart.

“Who?” asked Lebedkin simply.

“The Tsar, Herod.”

Lebedkin was pulling on his goatee with his fingertips. Wasn’t he going to stretch out his hand and touch the stars? There was an atmosphere of miracle in that silence. But he merely touched the shoulder of the fisherman Alexei Matiuchenko and heard himself answer him: “Perhaps you are right, Comrade Alexei, and it would be a good thing for you to go there—although it is a business that will be hard to accomplish. I’m too old, you understand. As for money, I haven’t any, brother.”

“Then I’ll go on foot,” said the man. “But I’ll get there. As for you, don’t say a word.”

“Yes,” said Lebedkin slowly. “Now it is time to pose the question of power. Of a power the like of which has never been seen, which will have a nameless, bottomless, pitiless and generous strength.”

“First pitiless,” whispered Matiuchenko, “to cleanse the earth. We will be kind afterwards. There will always be time for that.” He seemed to be smiling: “I couldn’t be before.”

They shook hands. Matiuchenko descended with long strides toward the Black-Waters which gleamed from their eternal abyss close by.

Lebedkin closed the shutters, lay down, covered himself with his fur-lined cloak, hesitated a moment before putting out the lamp, tempted to reread a few stanzas by Nekrassov. He thought only one name in the darkness: Russia, Russia, and it was terrible and sweet, it was like the breathing of someone close, elemental and mysterious, immensely powerful, sleeping there. Lebedkin fell asleep between two dreams which were also two fears. He was thinking of travelling to Petersburg but he didn’t dare leave, out of fear of not being able to find anyone there after so many years. Think of it: a year in prison awaiting trial, two in the Orel Central Prison, two at Tobolsk, twelve in deportation . . . Go back to find yourself alone, unknown, out of place, helpless, useless in the whirlpools of the Revolution? Freedom is beautiful in Chernoe too.

He would sometimes sit down to contemplate it in his soul, on a black rock at the summit of the crest overlooking the river and the open spaces, on the very spot where Seraphim Lack-Land used to meditate. The second wish, the second anxiety joined him there too. Will I never again have a shoulder next to my shoulder in life? The sweetness of a body abandoned next to my body at night? He divined that this would never be, never again, that his desolate flesh no longer deserved that great happiness, that his hands would never again dare even to try to grasp it; and, like a child ticking off pearls, he murmured sweet, tempting names to himself: Tatiana, Galina, Vera, Nadia, Liuba, Irina, Vassilissa . . . No one. The former Karnaoukhov Street, on which the Trade-Union Club and Social Nourishment Restaurant Number I stand, is now called Comrade Lebedkin Street because they found him one morning lying behind a stall at the fishmarket with his skull split open. His brains were spread over the dandelions, but his
pince-nez
glasses, their frame mended with black thread, were still perched on the bridge of his nose.

Heavy, jolting years have passed. Kazatzkaya Street (or Cossak Street) has become Red Army Street; the former Traktirnaya (The Footpath of the Inn) is called The Boulevard of The Soviets; Saint Nicholas Square is Lenin Square; a Marty Street runs alongside the public garden and crosses Clara-Zetkin Street formerly Ivanovskaya. The State Security Department occupies the house of old Ananiev, who exploited the fishermen for a half-century; that same Ananiev was killed in ’18 on the doorstep. In ’31, one of the worst years, Petrochkin, the instructor of the Godless, had returned from the centre with directives and so the fishermen and the tanners, meeting in joint assembly at the
Comintern
movie-theatre, voted unanimously (nineteen were in attendance) to tear down the church. The Soviet, lacking money, had refused the necessary funds, so the Godless and the Party mobilized workers for a day of voluntary labour. They cleverly put out the rumour that the purpose was to unload the trucks of the Regional Cooperative, which had arrived loaded with manufactured goods. Three hundred volunteers instantly answered the call.

As soon as they were informed that the real purpose was to tear down Saint Nicholas’ Church in order to put an end to capitalist, imperialist, and feudal superstition, which is the opium of the people and the hydra of counter-revolution, only twenty-seven of them stayed—the best to be sure, the youth, the most conscious elements, “the flower of the district”, as Petrochkin wrote in his report to the Regional Committee. They carried the icons and vestments to the town square in order to burn them, but “an ignorant mob, whipped up by the rich peasants and the interventionist priests, forcibly seized this national property which we were preparing to destroy in the interest of the workers, which proves that backward prejudices still have deep roots in the consciousness of the non-proletarian and the petty-bourgeois masses of Chernoe, influenced by centuries-old obscurantism . . .” (Petrochkin’s Report).

The twenty-seven conscious elements smashed the glass out of the windows, since that was the easiest thing to do, and attempted to demolish the church’s blue onion-dome, because a scaffolding placed there for repairs made it easy for them to get at. They only succeeded in smashing a hole in it. The gilded cross, balanced by a heavy counter-weight, tilted to one side but failed to fall. It is still there, hanging over men’s destiny, and perhaps it is no longer a cross, but an interrogative X. The smashed dome remains gaping—which is rather inconvenient, since the church has been converted into a warehouse for merchandise belonging to the District Industrial Cooperative,
Ray-Prom-Koop
. (Fortunately, merchandise is rare and quickly distributed.) Empty packing-cases are slowly rotting there now. The wind sweeps into the wounded dome, swirls through the emptiness, and escapes through the narrow windows, filling the building with a continuous murmur which makes the old women cross themselves. “Listen to the evil spirits carrying on their revels . . .”

Across from the church, on a little round grassy knoll, a bronze bust of Lenin has been erected. The pedestal was taken from the bust of Tsar Alexander II, presented to the town long ago by the rich Ananiev. It is surrounded by barbed wire as a precaution against vandalism by children. This black bronze seems very tiny in the middle of the huge square, all alone in its grassy circle, surrounded by a vast expanse of trampled earth. Most of the time, the mud makes it impossible to approach. Turning its back to the church, it has three buildings in front of it: The Party Committee, the
Salomé
restaurant-bar, and the Soviet. Security is on its right; on its left the club reserved for militants holding responsible positions and Security men. Such is the heart of the town on the Black-Waters.

Here, between the
Salomé
restaurant-bar and the
Comintern
movie-house, run three hundred metres of wooden sidewalk, illuminated by a few lanterns, on which people stroll in the evening when the weather is fair—so numerous that their voices and footsteps make a sound like a beehive. Here people meet, love-affairs begin, jealousies are kindled. Here is where the child vendors who sell cigarettes one at a time prowl, with their razors ready to slash the pockets of the representative of the regional cooperative who arrived this very morning. The young men follow the young women who, walking arm-in-arm, take up the whole width of the soft planks, and one of them will always turn around—shoulders held high, her profile standing out, unique in this world—to answer one of the lads. Here pass Elkin, Ryzhik, Avelii, Rodion, Varvara Platonovna, separate and united, prodigiously free and miserably captive, each following the path of his faith, a rather rough path. Four men, one woman, five threats to the regime. Five files. Five little circles enclosing names and numbers on the vast (and secret) coded map of deportation centres for counter-revolutionary Communist oppositionists of the Left, the Far Left, and the Right, as well as the unaffiliated and the adaptably orthodox, hanging in a (secret) office in Moscow at the Special Collegium for State Security, linked by direct (secret) line to the Kremlin, by direct (secret) line to the General Secretary’s desk, in short by direct line to the (secret) laboratory of history.

* * *

Elkin made that journey twice a day. He worked at the State Fish Trust,
Gos-Ryb-Trust
, working out plans for catches, storage, distribution of raw materials, etc., for the current year, the following year, the next three years, all of this according to directives from the Regional Centre, the Pan-Soviet Centre, the Central Planning Commission, and the Chief (through the application of his memorable six points establishing the rules for labour training). “I know how many fish are supposed to be caught in five years,” he used to say. “Alas, nobody knows how many will be caught.” The Trust occupied a long, narrow suite of rooms inundated by the ceaseless crackle of typewriters and adding-machines, on the corner of Prison Street over a cooperative full of useless neckties and tooth-powder which people used to whitewash the insides of their houses in the spring.

Prison Street keeps its name by an accident composed of a series of omissions or because the truth sometimes emerges without violence despite the words set up to block it. Ever since a decree of the Regional Centre raised Chernoe to the rank of district capital, the little old prison of former times is no longer adequate to hold the dispossessed former rich peasants, the poor and middle-peasant accomplices of the rich, the petty rural officials who coddled these enemies of socialism, the cheaters, the embezzlers, the . . . So they requisitioned the neighbouring houses, put barbed wire over the windows, placed sentries in front of them—sentries who are most often prisoners themselves, Party members to be sure. All this makes for a discreetly animated street. At the end of it, the sky—for it runs into the road that skirts the bluff. A sky which is almost always crystal: pure, pale, so limpid that it clearly reveals the infinite and makes you yearn for stars in the middle of the day. Across from the prison, in winter as in summer, ageless women sell sunflower-seeds by the glass. People come to talk to the prisoners from the sidewalk. (“Not so loud,” says the sentinel, “and not so close, citizens! This here is no club you know.” “Yes it is.” interjects Elkin as he walks by. “The Club of the Peoples’ Will.” The sentry, surprised by these strange words, follows him with a worried glance: he walks like somebody important yet his clothes don’t indicate anything. Better be careful. “That’s enough talking, I tell you, citizeness . . .”)

Elkin, blond and well-built, went bare-headed in summer, hair in the wind, the collar of his peasant blouse unbuttoned, wearing cloth slippers which he sewed himself out of old remnants of blankets. As soon as it got cold, he never took off his cavalry-coat (without insignia, naturally), which he had brought back from the Far-Eastern campaign. He strode along, head erect, as if he were always marching into the wind; and whenever he met someone he immediately began joking, with a serious air. Affably, he asked the book-keeper of the Milk Syndicate: “So, that little overdraft of six thousand roubles in expenses is still unaccounted for?” and the other man blinked, transfixed by the idea that actually . . . Then, reassuring himself, answered: “How you do joke, Dimitri Dimitrich. Where I work, it’s O.K., everything’s in order—go on with you. It’s not like at the Artisans’ Cooperative.”

In front of the portal of the deconsecrated church, in preparation for a celebration, they were setting up a boarding five metres tall on which the Chief, three times life-size, in a cap and military overcoat, was depicted striding forward as if he were about to step down and rush across the muddy square. “Great!” exclaimed Elkin. “He’s getting the hell out at last! And it makes him as happy as it does us.” The remark, reported to State Security by Maria Ismailovna (librarian, Party member since 1919, expelled in 1930 on suspicion of sympathizing with the successive oppositions, which she had betrayed one after the other every year for the past eight years)—the remark forced the Security Delegate, the Deputy Delegate, and the Chairman of the Special Committee to deliberate. Arrest Elkin? The note from Moscow recommended “the greatest caution” in dealing with him. Yes, but what exactly does
caution
mean? Hmm, remove the picture? suggested the Deputy Delegate. That could be given a bad interpretation. “Who drew it?” inquired the Delegate. The Special Committee Chairman, embarrassed, answered, “Mochkov . . .”

“Mochkov!” The three men looked at each other, annoyed. Mochkov, cartoonist on
The Red Star
of Taganrog, was serving out a three-year sentence under their auspices for “having attempted to discredit the leaders of the Party and the State through his drawings”. The Special Committee Chairman, who was about to add that Mochkov had copied his drawing from a sketch published in the central organ of the Party (which everyone knew), bit his lips. “Arrest Mochkov,” decided the Delegate. “Give this artist a little taste of our cellar.”