Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

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Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Page 9

by Victor Serge


  Varvara’s face has become flushed as she speaks. She tosses her fur cap onto the rock, unbuttons the front of her heavy tunic, almost young now, a slender neck, the narrow head of a Mongolian shepherdess, with short, glossy hair. Ryzhik is looking at her in profile. Woman. Severe. Closed. Worn out. Tempting to go off together, together . . . And then he shrugs his shoulders imperceptibly: it will be a miracle if they don’t lock me up before the year is out. She is speaking with assurance, without wasting words: ex-student at Sverdlov Communist University, ex-secretary of the factory cell at the Trekhgorka textile plant, ex-political-educator-lecturer at tractor stations in the Northern Caucasus, ex-instructor organizer of agricultural collectives in the Novocherkask district, ex-editor of the Leninist Voice, organ of the Workers’ Federation produced by the Leninist contingent in a central prison.

  As they listen to her, each is following his own train of thought. The pure, glacial waters of the Chernaya flow endlessly, silently, coming down this way from the wooded uplands of the Urals ever since the continent took its present configuration. Avelii is watching the rare wisps of cloud float slowly by in the blue above the birches. Avelii smiles at them. Here are these clouds, this sky, and him; and nothing comes between him and the universe, not even prisons. And, as clearly visible as these clouds, truth, proletarian duty.

  Rodion is prodding the stone with the tip of his boot, seeing nothing but the stone. For him all reality has that same grey hardness. Or he looks up at Varvara, the better to grasp what she is saying. What’s the point of all this discussion? The counter-revolution is victorious. The time has come to form a new party; for a new struggle which will be long, stifling, bloody—in which we will all perish. Rodion sees so clearly that it makes him wince. we should escape, forge some passports, set up underground printing-presses—begin anew . . . Rodion’s lips move silently with his thoughts, but he doesn’t dare stand up to speak the decisive words he should be shouting. At night a comet appears, climbs to the zenith, vanishes: thus certainty within him. The outlines of the idea, sharp and clear the instant before, fade, grow cloudy—where are they? Ah! They are problems. Rodion is good for nothing. He is nothing but weakness, self-doubt, doubt about everything.

  An argument begins between Elkin and Ryzhik over the united front in Germany. Thaelman, the German C. P. leader, predicting the seizure of power, rejects all compromise with the social-democratic leaders, the social-chauvinists, social-patriots, social-traitors, social-fascists who murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht. “We will form the united front with the social-democratic workers who are revolted by the turpitudes of their leaders. We will triumph. We will turn the Nazi plebiscite against the social-fascist government of Herr Otto Braun into a red plebiscite! The votes of the Nazis will be swamped by those of the proletariat!”

  Ryzhik says: “I read that. It reeks of defeat. The apparatchiks have become so spineless that they probably believe a third of a quarter of what they say. You’ll see that tomorrow they’ll be made to say exactly the opposite, when it’s too late. You’ll see: they’ll call for popular governments, broad fronts, from top to bottom, with Scheidemann, with Noske if he’s willing, with the worst scum who scuttled the German Republic. You’ll see. But only when Hitler throws them all together in the same concentration camps.” Ryzhik hesitates to draw conclusions. After all to hold out a hand to Severing! To Grzezinski, the Alexanderplatz butcher! Wouldn’t we be playing a fool’s game in which we would lose everything? Wouldn’t it be preferable to be beaten without being contaminated, without dishonour?

  “Say, do you think the hands of today’s IIIrd International are clean of workers’ blood? Just between ourselves, my friend, I think that Neumann, back from Canton where he led thousands of coolies to the slaughter, or Manuilsky, the Central Committee delegate who shot Yakov Blumkin and is quietly exterminating us, or Kolarov and Dimitrov, responsible for the slaughters in Sofia, can certainly shake hands with Noske and with Polizeipräsidents accustomed to ordering their men to club the unemployed. You’ll tell me that the working class hasn’t got much to gain from their handshakes—but maybe you’re wrong. Since, after all, the working class has faith in them! Since it cannot, has not, learned to do without them!”

  Elkin went on:

  “The Old Man’s theses are correct—the only chance for salvation is a common front with Social Democracy and the Reformist trade-unions. It’s madness to expect to win the masses away from their leaders, when the proletarian spirit has become stabilized within the old parties. And when you yourselves are hardly much better than the people you’re denouncing! . . . There are still some imbeciles who say that Hitler should be allowed to take power, for he’ll use himself up rapidly, go bankrupt, dissatisfy everybody, open the way for us . . . The Old Man is right on another point. The time to fight to the death is before he takes over. Once Hitler has power, he will keep it. We know the way. And our goose will be cooked for a long time: as a result, the bureaucratic reaction in the USSR would probably be stabilized for ten years.

  “There are singular congruencies between the two dictatorships. Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians. Hitler, by making Europe abandon the hope of socialism, will strengthen Stalin. These grave-diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them are leading those they serve—the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here at home—toward a catastrophe.”

  “Yes,” said Rodion brightly, aglow with the joy of understanding.

  Varvara suggests writing up some theses, discussing perspectives . . . “Yes,” Rodion agrees again, “you can’t live without perspectives.” Why does Elkin break out laughing? Rodion feels confused. Avelii, standing, is throwing stones into the Chernaya. They curve high into the air against a pale background tinged with saffron pink, shrink to black specks, splash into flowers of spray as they fall. Avelii turns. “I feel like singing,” he says. The verses of The Knight of the Panther-Skin are humming softly in his chest, for there are evenings like this two thousand nine hundred kilometres from here, on the banks of the Rion, below the forests of Kutais, in the heart of the Georgian hills. “Me too,” half-whispers Varvara, who never sings.

  * * *

  Ryzhik was examining those four faces with almost malevolent attention. He probed their eyes and was so deeply engrossed in introspection that his wrinkles were set in a sort of grimace. An old stone figure bristling with white hair which fluttered in the breeze like a flame over his brow. When they separated, Rodion left alone by the steepest path; Avelii and Varvara followed the bank as far as the boats; Ryzhik, walking alongside of Elkin, suddenly took his arm. “Listen, brother, I’m uneasy. There are five of us—and not one informer! Do you think that’s possible? And if its like that, what do you think they’re preparing for us, those bastards, with their thirty-six thousand dossiers? After all, they can’t have obligingly brought us together on the banks of the Black-Waters without realizing it. It can only be to find a good gimmick and throw us into the soup with a stone around our necks. What do you think?”

  Elkin whistled:

  “That’s what I’ve been telling myself for a long time.”

  “So?”

  “They all seem to be true.”

  “The truest,” said Ryzhik, “can be broken. They plunge them into muddy water, they twist them and wring them out, and some of them are no better than dishrags after that.”

  “We know that.”

  The landscape was vanishing, yet the rocks were tinged with lilac and, climbing the hill, they had the whole bend of the Chernaya at their feet, its surface of ink and sky spread out in the middle of the darkened spaces. “Naturally,” continued Elkin, “but after all, tha
t won’t happen either to you or to me.”

  Then to whom? “Who drinks?” inquired Ryzhik.

  “Everyone, except perhaps Varvara. You, first of all.”

  Ryzhik ran his hand through his hair. “The devil take us!”

  “So come on in,” said Elkin. “I’ve got half a bottle left.”

  Night clung to the window-panes, which were broken and plastered over with paper. A woman was rocking a child to sleep in the cellar, just below. Her voice came out like a moan. Elkin lit the kerosene lamp, which gave no more light than a night-light. Its glass chimney was chipped and black with soot around the top. They sat down at the table, face to face, with the sooty light between them. Elkin filled two tall glasses with alcohol. For a moment they were silent—congealed, hardened, aged. Their faces stood out for each other with a sadness from which there is no escape. Then Elkin stifled a laugh. “Wait a moment,” he said. He went over to the pile of books and newspapers that occupied one corner of the room, next to a sack of potatoes, and got a hard-bound book. “Take a look!”

  Ryzhik’s face lit up with amazement. “Oh my God!” The author’s name had been carefully scraped off the cover, on which a red star burst forth.

  “I bought it in the market-place at Tiumen last year while I was being transferred, old man. I was passing through, accompanied by a rather decent bugger from the Special Battalions. I stopped short in front of an old woman who was selling this along with a pile of junk. I had it for a rouble, she didn’t know what it was. ‘You can barely use this paper for smoking,’ I told her.” They turned the first pages together smiling. Leon Davidovich Trotsky’s portrait looked right back at them: intelligence and energy were stamped across the forehead; pince-nez glasses; a definitive flash in the eyes.

  “It’s a good likeness,” said Ryzhik. It made them forget the alcohol. Ryzhik frowned: “The main thing, you see, is that they don’t kill him!”

  Elkin at first nodded his acquiescence; then, springing to his feet, flung out in a triumphant voice: “I’m sure they won’t kill him!” and tossed off his glass of brandy in a single gulp. It was like drinking fire. Three cheers for fire! The room expanded into the immensity of the night. The tiny flame under the smoky glass was startling.

  Ryzhik opened the book at random. “Listen,” he said.

  But of what matter now the rhythm of that bygone language, the precision and ardour of that thought, bound to events in order to force them, ceaselessly invoking history in order to make it? The old text lives because it expresses a fidelity, a necessity. It is necessary that someone not betray. Many may weaken, retract, fail themselves, betray. Nothing is lost if one man remains erect. Everything is saved if he is the greatest. This man has never yielded, will never yield, either to intrigue or to fear, to admiration or to slander, even to fatigue. Nothing will separate him from the Revolution—victorious or defeated, covering crowds with songs and red flags, heaping its dead in common graves to the sound of funeral hymns, or preserved in the hearts of a handful of men in snow-covered prisons. And if after that he is wrong, if he is intractable and imperious, it hardly matters. The essential thing is to remain true.

  The chain on the double doors rattled in the dark vestibule. “It’s nothing,” said Elkin bringing his face up close to Ryzhik’s—and Ryzhik saw his pupils dilate with joy. “It’s Galia, a creature as pure as the steppes, as your flowers of the North, as . . . Ah!” He shook his head.

  “Yes, yes,” said Ryzhik averting his eyes.

  Galia halted, hesitant, in the semi-darkness near the door—tall and slender, wearing a red kerchief, the end of which was hanging across one cheek against a lock of hair like a dark poppy. “Good evening,” she said slowly, with a gracious hesitancy.

  Ryzhik caught only a glimpse of her; the wrinkles in his face grew stony, he fixed his eyes on the open book in the poor light—the book in which the powerful words of nineteen hundred and eighteen hammered out the footsteps of fighters: “Red soldier comrades, commanders and commissars! At the hours of greatest danger, on the eve of decisive victory, the Party . . .” Step aside, young woman. The fire of memory and alcohol rose up in his chest. The 6th Division, the 7th Division, the XIIth Army, Turkestan. That was worth living through.

  Elkin, both hands on Galia’s shoulders, pushed her gently toward the vestibule, then through the darkness, towards the doorway. She noticed the brandy on his breath, a slight drunkenness in the weight of his hands, which held her with tender strength. He imagined her half-smiling, annoyed that he had drunk. In the low doorway, as she stood one step down from him, her face lighted by the diffused glow of a moonless sky, he bent over her and warmly took her head in his hands. “Go to bed, Galia, Galinochka, dearest darling . . . I have visitors tonight—marvellous, invisible callers who have come from a place so far away I can’t tell you . . .”

  “What visitors?” asked Galia under her breath, touched to the heart by jealous anxiety.

  “Nothing to fear!” he answered. “They are Ideas . . .” They kissed, very quickly. Galia felt that the man’s lips were dry and burning. As for him the woman’s mouth left him with a sensation of pale coolness. Just before she went through the gate in the fence, four steps away, Galia turned and raised her hand: and the shape of that hand shone in the night with adorable whiteness. “Greetings to your Ideas!” Was she smiling? He should have called her back, not let her go, kept her, kept her! What was stopping him, what heaviness in his legs and his bowels? Elkin felt it tearing him apart. “The whole earth is alone. I’m drunk.” With heavy steps that made the floorboards creak, he went back into his room. Ryzhik hadn’t moved. He stood before the open book, his face lighted from below, the washed-out face of a man who would soon die. The bottle was empty—plague!

  “Keep reading,” Elkin told him.

  Galia, whose joy abandoned her as soon as she passed through the gate in the enclosure, went around to the other side of the house. She walked quickly, sure-footedly, through the shadows, the knowledge of every bump in the ground implanted in her limbs. Thus, altogether bound to this earth, these rocks, these waters, these skies, borne along by them, by them delivered from everything and even from herself, walking as she lived, quick and straight, without needing to think in words. At that instant it was necessary, absolutely necessary, for her to see him again: Dimitri. There was a rise in the road almost directly opposite his window. Galia stopped there, attentive, invisible. Elkin’s window, dimly lighted, was the only one living in the dense darkness of the houses and yards. The little lamp gave it a yellowish glow, more sad than unreal. Galia was angry with herself for not having cleaned the glass. It was a clear thought and did her good.

  Ryzhik was reading something aloud, standing over the lamp, and the book must have been lying on the table. Ryzhik: a high bare forehead bristling with white locks, a strange face, powerful yet wan, in which the grey lashes hid the eyes and only the lips were moving. Galia thought of spells: she felt a vague fear. People believe they are conjuring away misfortune and they call it up. Whether they call it up or conjure it away, misfortune is there. But it must be a spell for virility, for Ryzhik’s chest was swelling, hands at his sides, and he seemed taller, strangely commanding. Around him, like dark wings, moved great shadows. Elkin was pacing back and forth, and he occasionally walked around the reader, his hands in his pockets, straightening or raising his brow, his shoulders squared like the shoulders of men preparing for battle. Galia foolishly raised her hand and began to make the sign of the cross over the two men, but she remembered in time that she wasn’t a believer, for “the younger generation is not religious, as is well known.” Night, emptiness, was everywhere, surrounding these two men. They were alone, absolutely alone. “Dimitri! Mitya!” Galia followed him from one corner of the room to the other, she even thought she met his eyes, but it was really impossible for him to see her, dazzled by his night-lamp, by his ideas. “They are perishing for those ideas,” thought Galia. “My God.”

  In front of her gi
rlfriends, and inside herself, she called him “My Man” with a tinge of pride. And here he was almost no longer hers, in spite of himself, alone with his captive strength, surrounded by incantations, winged shadows, feeble light, total night. He halted at the window, just across from Galia, sharply outlined in the night. “My Man, My Man,” she repeated to herself, anxiously. The coldness of the spaces behind her seized her by the shoulders, in the very place where Dimitri had touched her. She shuddered. What’s the matter with me? Dimitri, Mitya, don’t be afraid of all this emptiness, I’m here. Hmm, I’ll go wash my blouse for my day off, for you. Galia went running downhill toward Blacksmiths’ Street, where there were no longer any smithies or blacksmiths, a street which huddled half-way down the hill under the debris of a rockslide. She lived there, with her sisters, their husbands, and their brood, in a vast cellar cut right into the rock.

  * * *

  Rodion was at work by eight in the morning in one of the side-stalls of the market-place under the sign of the Tinsmiths’ Artisanal Cooperative. With his shears he cut into the old iron, turned dark grey, even black with the years, for they had received their last sheets of real tin years ago, before industrialization. He soldered new bottoms into old cans, and, of the four guildsmen, none was more expert in the art of diagnosing the ills of old portable stoves. So much so that the women of the lower town would entrust their pre-war Primus-stoves only to him. Rodion loved this work, all work, as a class-conscious proletarian should love it. This put him at odds with his mates, local folk and rather backward, for whom it was above all a question of accumulating roubles, even if this meant palming off such mediocre work on their clientele that Rodion was ashamed for them. Then he would try to explain to them that “technology is the liberation of man.”

 

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