Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  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.”

  Sacha went on:

  “Yet we must sign Ivan Nikitich’s paper. Capitulate. What else do you want us to do? Going to jail wouldn’t accomplish anything. At least let them give us a chance to build factories, to prevent the specialists—with their irresistible and false expertise which leads God-knows-where—from taking that away from us. Piatakov is right: let’s become technicians. If the revolution is able to come back to life one day, it will be on the basis of a revitalized technology with a new proletariat. We’ll be finished by that time, but we will have contributed something. Those who talk of resisting are crazy: either they’ll be crushed like fleas, or the counter-revolution will support them at first and later carry them along with it.”

  “But isn’t it already supporting the Central Committee?”

  You only dared say such things because you were pretty drunk. And Sacha shouted: “Of course! We’re between two counter-revolutions—how clear can anything be!” He threw the empty bottle out of the window into an empty lot where sparrows were hopping about. Your face felt like a block of stone with welded jaws. Forty-five years old. Worn out. More cowardice than strength.

  “Sacha, my friend, I feel like smashing you in the face! And I want you to beat me senseless.”

  “No,” said Sacha, seriously. “I’ll fetch another bottle.”

  Sacha is in jail. A ferocious petty-bourgeoisie hunts us down even when we surrender. They’re afraid of our past, of our silences. When we give in, they imagine we’re trying to trick them. When we join them, out of lassitude and in order to live, they’re afraid we’ll betray them one day. The men of ’17 and ’20 will never seem emasculated enough for them. They have seen the promised land, tasted of the new bread, gone through the trials of fire, hunger, and conviction: of the truth. These have marked them forever.

  Too bad for us.

  * * *

  The next morning he asked for paper to write to the Central Committee—and wrote out one more surrender. All the right words were there: The edification of socialism, the great wisdom of the C.C., the correctness of its tactics, the repudiation of errors due to lack of understanding, to the petty-bourgeois spirit, to the counter-revolutionary influence of ex-comrades now denounced and repudiated. He wrote it out with his features clenched, his mouth pursed into an expression at once bad-tempered and scornful. When he had finished, he swallowed his saliva, began a smile which ended in a yawn, stretched, and heard himself say out loud:

  “Go on, you rotten fraud!”

  The spyhole in the doo
r opened half way. “It is forbidden to speak aloud, Citizen.”

  Kostrov answered with a kind of bluster:

  “Here is my letter to the C.C., Citizen.”

  * For further details about hyperlinked words, click on them or see the Glossary at the end of this volume.

  II. BLACK-WATERS

  The ice-floes break up late on the Chernaya—toward the middle of May. By then the snows have disappeared, except in a few shady glens. Water stands in shimmering pools on the plain, and whole flocks of birds come to splash and frolic in them. With its white cover gone, the earth is conquered by water, wings, and sky. Where do so many birds come from? Some fly in V-formations. Others gather in clouds which sweep, swirl and spread like nebulae. A calm joy stretches between earth and sky. At the end of the day the people of Chernoe gather on the bluff overlooking the river to contemplate the expanses where spring is coming to life. These are careful people, like the muddy earth they tread, like the whole town with its log houses which time has faded to the colour of ash.

  An old woman murmurs: “The grebes are back . . . (Sigh.) In my day, little father . . .” Were there more grebes in her day, spreading their wings over the steppes? A man, cap pulled low over his eyes, huddled in his short russet-coloured fur jacket, speaks aloud to himself: “It’ll be another week yet before the Chernaya is completely open.” Young voices protest: “Don’t lie, citizen, a week! You crazy?” Another week would be too long for that lust for life that comes over you after the snow melts, after seven cold months that chill you to the very soul. (“All the more ‘cause you don’t eat; nothing but sour cabbage soup and rye bread—it all adds up to shit and there’s not enough of it; I ask you, Citizen, can your body survive this cold without consuming any fat?”) The sky takes on a pearly, almost azure hue; a kind of peace descends from it. You might mistake it for hope.

  “If you let yourself get taken in,” snickers Avelii, a young man with a sharp profile. “Spring, little brother, means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression. Repression means no wheat in August, no bread in December. We have all the luck.”

  And Rodion, continuing his own thought, replies inconsequentially:

  “. . . After the shock brigades they’ll have to think up something new to make people work. Look at that plain. There used to be roads. See, over there, and over there, too, toward Bear’s Woods. There ain’t any more roads ‘cause there ain’t any more carts ‘cause there ain’t any more horses.”

  Two lads. They’re wearing sheepskins—one grey the other brown—and old caps with ear-flaps plastered over their skulls. They have a way of looking at you with a tranquil mocking expression. Their cocky air makes them seem different right off from all the others in town. We’re proletarians, see! Also we’re under the special patronage of You-Know-Who. So we have the right to think a little. We’re paying for it. And the right to speak, since we’re already deportees—and not the kind who repent, who approve of everything, who say polite thank-yous when the boys from Security tickle them in the butt with a boot-toe. We’re the only free men on socialist soil—fresh out of jail and ready to go back in, required to register every five days, provided with administrative papers like this one:

  Does not take the place

  of a Residency Permit

  USSR

  RSFSR

  State Political Administration (GPU)

  Delegation for Chernoe

  Certificate issued to Citizen .................. deported by administrative action by virtue of a decision of the Special Board of the State Security Dept. Required to appear every five days at the office of the commander. Forbidden to exceed the town limits by more than five hundred metres. Signed: The Delegate of the SSD, the Secretary.

  (Seal, date, order number in red ink.)

  The worst is getting by without galoshes when the snows are melting; and getting by without eating when you’re hungry at night.

  “Didya’ ever notice, Rodion, how hungry you get in the Spring?”

  The forest line grows darker at the horizon. A little over two centuries ago, peasants fleeing serfdom built this little town on the bluff overlooking the river bend. They thought they had gone far enough into the inclement North to be forgotten. They were only half right, but what could they do? However far you flee, your grandchildren will have to flee one day in their turn.

  From the Embankment of the Revolution (but there is no embankment in reality: there is only a vague abandoned road, its surface abruptly broken by outcroppings of black stone, running along the bluff, one hundred metres above the river), you can see the lines of plains and woods rising like a sea for fifty kilometres around: no sign, no habitation, no fire at night. At night there are no lights showing except in the sky, but during the great thaws or on marvellous summer evenings all shimmering with a universal caress, the stars shine with a supernatural brilliance which heightens your taste for living.

  Chernoe means Black-Town and Chernaya, Black-Waters. The river gets its name—despite the energy of its rapid, slightly turbulent waves endlessly rolling scraps of sky—from its floor of dark pebbles, visible from close up through the clear water. Under the town there are more outcroppings of black stone broken off by some geological catastrophe. Thus revolutions shape the earth, burying, crushing whole forests rustling with birds. They tell a story about the founder of the town, Seraphim Bezzemelny (Seraphim Lack-Land), who fled un-belief even more than servitude. When he arrived on this bluff with Nadiezhda, his wife, and their sons, their daughters-in-law, their grand-children, he cried: “Praise Thee, Lord! Thy Will is done! On these black stones we will build our house. On these black stones we will eat our black bread of the time of Antichrist.” Earlier, in a dream, he had seen himself seated on a peak overlooking the empty North and he had foreseen his death and he had said: “Remove not this cup from me, for I want to bear witness to my faith.” The Lord heard that prayer. It’s the only one he hears for certain over the centuries in this land of the Russias where everyone drinks his bitter cup—never doubt it—down to the last drop. And it’s not over yet.

  Tall houses built of tree-trunks rose out of the rock. Pale golden wheat rustled in August. The bare feet of young women carrying kegs of limpid water from the Chernaya twice daily, bodies braced under the yoke, cut a twisting path into the grass, the earth, even the rock. They still follow it two hundred years later. In the summer sun, children with gleaming bodies dive into the Chernaya, drunk with chill and daring, for there are treacherous whirlpools which every year suddenly carry some bold tousled head down to fatal depths. They find the little bodies three kilometres downstream on a sandbar where they seem to be sleeping desperately, washed and bruised in an unreal blue light. In the days when the town was founded, it enjoyed ten years of peace. Then the great heresiarch was burned at Pustozersky (Desert-of-Lakes), at the limit of the Nordic world. The great persecuting Patriarch died persecuted, and his remains, transported on a boat, descended another river amid the prayers and sobs of the people.

  Seraphim Lack-Land prayed for that man of faith who had attacked the Faith, divided the Church, and betrayed, banished, hunted, insulted the true faithful. A new Patriarch, organizing his grudges along with his administration, remembered Seraphim, had him brought to the Kremlin, offered him bread, salt and forgiveness with Christian unction and told him: “Repent, Seraphim, and your sins will be forgiven and I will bless you.” Seraphim cried out: “Repent, yourself, or be silent, shameless servant of the Evil One!” They chained Seraphim in the cellar of the Monastery of the Trinity. Winter was eternal there. He could hear the bells of the false faith ringing. But he needed only to close his eyes to see the pacifying Holy Face. Then, shivering, his teeth chattering, but his will stretched to the limits of strength, he would repeat: “Lord, I will never deny Thee, I will never deny Thee, I will never deny Thy people.” He died there, after years of obstinacy, tormented by nostalgia for the open spaces and for the children of his children. They sometimes tell the story of his life, wit
h many other details, on long winter evenings.

  These tales inspire Tikhon, the disabled pensioner, who fought through the whole Ural campaign under Blücher in 1918, and he in turn tells of battles, of captures, of how he was shot on the bank of the Bielaya (The White River). The officer told the line of prisoners: “Jews and Communists, three steps forward.” Three men stepped out. Tikhon stepped out with them—next to them—a blond lad in ragged clothing. “You’re neither a Jew nor a Commissar, you son of a bitch! So you’re looking to stop a bullet, eh, you little snot-nose!” they jeered. “I’m for the Commune, your Honour.” said Tikhon, who didn’t exactly know what it was and whose guts were shrieking with fear. Fear saved him by toppling him into the ravine a hundredth of a second before the bullets would have hit him. Now he’s the one who sells cigarettes—when there are any—in the booth of the Regional Union of Co-ops (Ray-Koop-Soyouz) on the market square. You still find significant names among the population. There’s a Seraphim Seraphimovich, a woman named Nadiezhda Seraphimovna who sells salted cucumbers, a Liubov Seraphimovna who is a Party member. The Secretary of the Soviet is named Avvakum Nestorovich.

  Between Seraphim and Tikhon two centuries empty of history passed over Chernoe, Black-Town, Black-Waters. The Zyrians besieged the town at the beginning of the XVIIIth Century. They shot reed arrows tipped with fish-bones. (But maybe they weren’t Zyrians). The town burned down every thirty years more or less, so that the generations have succeeded each other there from one fire to the next and all its improvements are connected with great calamities. The Revolution happened all by itself. Once the police chief had taken flight, a political deportee assembled the doctor, the agronomist, the vet, some school-teachers, some fishery-workers, a carter and a postal-clerk, and explained to them that henceforth they formed the Provisional Self-Administration Committee of the town and the district. The agronomist, Babulin, a thick-set man with a low forehead, said: “I understand. Res-publica, the public thing. That’s marvellous. What are we going to do?” The postal-clerk suggested composing a message to the provisional government of Prince Lvov; the doctor, ordering the vaccination of the school children.