Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  Once again, for the fortieth time in a hundred days, Varvara watched misery pass through that narrow door. There was pushing and squeezing and shadows crowded together against the two barred windows. The first women entered, so close one to another that they seemed glued together in a shapeless mass from which only bowed heads emerged. Old women, always the same. There since dawn, stooped, stiff-jointed, gaunt under their colourless shawls and black kerchiefs. Faces marked by mould, tuberculosis, endless famine and desperate guile; shrewd, tearful, red-ringed eyes. Terrible beggar-women who weren’t begging, greedy yet resigned, squinting the better to watch the oscillations of the arrow on the scale. Occasionally tossing sharp words out of mouths like mole-holes: “I didn’t get my weight, citizen!” Then Varvara would check, and the weight was there. The political deportee and the famished woman would look at each other as enemies.

  For each customer there were three things to be verified in the half-darkness, the hubbub of voices, the smell of fermented rye. The grey card had to be cut. The day’s number thrown into a box (to be counted that evening, without misplacing a single one of those tiny, one centimetre squares, since each represented a pound of bread, a human ration, the property of the State, the salvation of a living creature). The blue or black line indicating four or six hundred grams to be delivered, had to be taken into account. Money had to be counted and change given. 47 kopecks for four hundred, 66 for six hundred, plus 22 kopecks for a child’s ration. Numbers upon numbers, cheap alloyed coins, worn, ragged, yellow one-rouble notes, smelling of fish. The weight, the essential measure. Varvara cut the right amount almost infallibly give or take a few grams, but they wanted those few grams. She had to add or remove a few crumbs, and instantly there were children’s hands, children’s eyes—plaintive, devouring eyes—reaching for them. How did they get in? Where did these little boys with runny noses, these tousled girls with vermin-infested curls come from? Every three quarters of an hour Gavril came in and grabbed them by the collar or the hair, good-naturedly,—beat it pests, spawn of Kulaks!—but they squirmed, shilly-shallied and reappeared instantly among the skirts and shawls, their sharp little voices cutting through the din, to beg in singsong: “A little piece of bread! A little piece of bread, grandmother, aunty, uncle!” Pregnant women pushed their bellies forward and got served out of turn as did women with nursing infants. But one of the latter provoked recriminations: “She hasn’t nursed for a long time, and she could leave him at home. She brings him along on purpose, she has no right.” Another voice proclaimed maliciously: “We’ve seen that baby before. It’s not hers, someone lent it to her!”

  “What! He’s not mine?” The mother was choking with indignation. “Who said that?” No one took up the challenge. The incident seemed to drop along with the little grey numbers clipped from the bread cards, into the cardboard box where every existence left the same administrative residue. The mother’s voice needlessly shattered a silence composed of murmurs: “I breed my own starving spawn, you witch! May your filthy mouth rot like a dead rat’s arse.”

  At three in the afternoon, Miorzly and Varvara looked at each other in shock. About fifteen women were standing around in the store, their gimlet eyes boring balefully into its every corner.

  The bread shelf gaped bare, and there was nothing left in front of Varvara but a pile of cuttings, enough to make a pound and half at the most, to cover two cards, satisfy two beings. “But we did have the full count,” said Miorzly in a hoarse voice. Varvara answered:

  “I think so. We counted it all . . . but there’s a seven pound loaf missing.”

  The manager was muttering to himself in front of his bare desolate shelves.

  “Citizens, there’s none left. It’s not my doing. I give you whatever they send me. You can pass out of turn next time.”

  Next time? When? What will we eat tonight? And tomorrow? Bread arrived only twice a week at irregular intervals. The blurred group of white, black and red kerchiefs, of shawls, of thin stooped shoulders, erect or broken, forever bent, wavered for a moment on the spot as if it was about to break into tears, shouts, and wild gestures or collapse helplessly into a pile of rags. A few recriminations were made, feebly since the women knew they were futile. Ah! When will it end, this life? Bread thieves, that’s whom they should shoot. “Where were your eyes, Miorzly—public offender. When will they throw you in jail to teach you your job?”—“Shut up, Klavdia! There’s no point squawking and groaning! The Five Year Plan will end when we’re all six feet under!”

  Miorzly exploded: “Enough counter-revolutionary agitation citizens! Let’s have some consciousness here!”

  He came out from behind his counter and advanced on to the women. The group moved sheeplike toward the door, straggled through it, marked time for a moment outside and slowly broke up in the cold light of day. Miorzly closed the shutters and placed the iron bars—quite uselessly—over the double doors. He would explain the matter presently to the Food Administration. Let ‘em arrest me if they want to, after all. Shit! I won’t eat any worse as a logger in a penal colony—it seems you even get a bonus when you leave . . . (but he had children). After a series of cross checks summing up a mass of minute, inexpressible observations rounded out by intuition, ending in frighteningly precise telepathy, the light suddenly dawned in his mind. The carter! The cart driver had come in with the last load in his hands, talking very loud, his jacket unbuttoned—and the bastard had walked off with the bread in the flaps of his coat. None of this could be proved. But from that certainty flowed a need—totally physical—to murder. Just wait, you bastard!

  Miorzly caught up with the cart driver at the tavern without a name, the poorest one in town, the one at the corner of Parricide’s Alley among the last houses at the edge of the heath. A ramshackle roof, a grey front, window frames charred at the top by the smoke from a fire, a lopsided, green sign announcing only: BEER. An oil lamp was hanging from the low ceiling. Men in caps sat with their elbows propped up at all the tables, drinking and smoking in the deafening din of their own voices. “Come, Vanya,” Miorzly said calmly to the cart driver who was sitting with his elbows on a table, his jacket unbuttoned at the collar, his big red head bare. “Come, we have business to discuss.” The carter finished his glass, paid and they went out. “What’s this all about?” He knew very well.

  They went around to the back of the building. The end of town. Dusk was spreading across the stony ground, flat as far as the eye could see. The light was fading from one second to the next. Miorzly halted and faced the carter, chest to chest, with the calm of a slaughterer or a judge. “What’s this about? Thief, vermin, bastard, son-of-a-bitch, you dare ask? Take your coat off, I’m going to knock all your teeth down your throat.”

  “Watch yourself,” said the redhead calmly as he stepped back to remove his jacket. “Maybe I’m the one who’s gonna pound your face into pudding, you son-of-a-whore fattened at the people’s expense, you arse-hole of a bourgeois who eats the bread of others.”

  They walked a little farther from the building, side by side, scanning the ground to make sure there were no broken bottles, holes, or big rocks. Then, suddenly, they leaped at each other and began to fight. Locked in a frenetic embrace, their hot panting was punctuated by the same muttered curses: dog, whore, dog, whore, dog . . . Fists thudded against solid flesh, muscles bulging, rage dominating pain. The carter was trying to free his right hand so it could reach the sharp Finnish blade in his boot—my knife in your guts, son-of-a-whore, ah! So we can’t steal any more, ah! We’re not supposed to eat—just let the kids starve, you dog!

  Miorzly, every limb alert in that embrace, watched that hand reaching for murder with prodigious shrewdness, seized it on the wing as it clenched his face, fingers aiming at his eyes, bit it so hard that his jaws locked over bruised flesh. His head was filled with the taste of earth, blood, tobacco and horse-sweat. He gasped. Then the carter succeeded in mashing his testicles with his left hand. Under the impact of the double pain, they let ea
ch other go, almost surprised at being separated. The carter started to fall. You don’t hit a man when he’s down, but you can hit a man when he’s falling, before he hits the ground. Miorzly kicked him in the gums with his iron heel. His satisfaction at hearing the broken teeth crackle like ground glass was so great that the pain in his groin turned to red heat.

  All of this happened very fast, without any real importance. The cold night air brought the loser round from his prostration. He returned to his hovel, walking more steadily, despite everything, than a drunk. Anya, his wife, covered his wounds with ointments supplied by an old neighbour who knew healing recipes. For small cuts, spider-webs do a world of good. Bird droppings and urine (especially the urine of pregnant women) have precious curative virtues. Algae brought from the sea, dried and then soaked, are soothing for the gums. But the essential thing is . . . “Anya, my soul,” explained the old woman. “Don’t worry . . . If the moon comes up in a little while your man will be all better. I know some marvellous words to say, but they must be said at midnight, by the light of the moon, without a single cloud to disturb it. Give me a lock of his hair.” The carter moaned. His face, in the yellow candlelight, was swollen and splotched with purplish-blue blotches like the faces of drowned men. Anya gazed at it lovingly, for the children were sleeping, glutted, she herself was no longer hungry, there was enough bread left for two days and she understood the price. If only they didn’t take her man away and send him God-knows-where, to one of those camps from which they’re supposed to return after two or three years. But do they ever return?

  God protect us, deliver us. Anya raised the big, bruised head with both hands so that the old woman could pour brandy into the swollen mouth. The alcohol burned the cuts horribly, but warmed a powerful body. The carter opened his purple eyelids, looked tenderly at the two women, muttered some more: “Dog, whore, son-of-a-bitch, cut your guts out.” It wasn’t serious. His head and hand bandaged, he was driving his cart to the sawmill at dawn the very next morning—for the moonlight had beamed down clearly just before midnight.

  Varvara, summoned to appear at the GPU Special Service, was received by Fedossenko, who sat behind his desk like a Buddha in a Security uniform. His skull glistened. Sit down. The Buddha continued leafing through some papers and, casually, without raising his head, watching her from below with upturned eyes:

  “What about this business of the stolen bread in your store?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. The Manager’s no thief. I would vouch for him.”

  Sprawled against the back of his chair, the Buddha appeared less imposing but fatter: a glutton and a revolting male. Two leather straps across his chest, a new insignia above the left pocket of his tunic. Indeterminate tone of voice.

  “I know that the Manager is not a thief, citizen.”

  Varvara caught the insulting insinuation. Her nostrils drew in as if assaulted by a powerful stench. Watch out, keep a grip on yourself, don’t say one word too many.

  “Citizen Chief, I’m a Civil War Communist, wounded at the age of eighteen on the Orenburg front. I hope that’s enough for you.”

  “I very much regret, it isn’t.”

  “I won’t tell you anything else. Will you sign, please . . .”

  Varvara presented her pass to the Buddha, a little rectangle of green paper on which the exact time of arrival was marked at the entrance. In order to leave the security building, it had to be returned to the sentry, signed and stamped. Her gesture meant: Arrest me, if that’s your intention. I’ll show you how little I care about the bread. The Buddha signed, affixed his seal. “The investigation will follow its course, citizen.”

  * * *

  Kostrov was coming out of the adjacent office, the Deputy Director’s. He looked worried, his complexion was yellow. No, he wasn’t well. “My heart, Varvara Platonova. And then what do they want from me? I think they’re trying to cook up a sabotage case out of this stupid business of the twelve hundred notebooks.”

  Kostrov worked in the Education Department of the Soviet. One morning, his boss notified him of the delivery of twelve hundred school notebooks which Moscow had been promising since last Fall. An event of some importance. Hold one-third of them in reserve, the rest are to be handed out to the school-children immediately. There would be approximately two thirds of a notebook per pupil for the semester . . . Kostrov made up the accounts and supervised the distribution of the packets without ever dreaming of opening one. They had come from the Centre in the wrappers of the nationalized Torch paper-mill. Three days passed. At the market place in the crowd of second-hand dealers, among the fortune-tellers and mountebanks, Kostrov flushed out some kids selling notebooks. But they recognized his way of walking with a cane, his air of an ageing officer suffering from jaundice. As he approached, they took to their heels. “Speculators make sport of me,” thought Kostrov, “and they’re perfectly right.” He noticed, overhead, a sky of transparent mother-of-pearl. He went back to his office where there was nothing to do, nothing useful anyway, since next year’s planned reorganization of the schools was obviously nothing but a huge joke. By next year, the present Superintendent of Schools would be assigned some place else or sent to prison. His successor would pay no heed to a future which would be out of date before it was born. He would order other plans in line with other directives. This time the Superintendent of Schools was waiting for Kostrov, smoking furiously, in the overheated little room in which the desk was generally empty. He threw him a strangely angry look, snapped up the brim of his cap with the back of his hand and:

  “You did quite a job on me, Mikhail Ivanovich. The Party Committee has me on the carpet. The case is being studied by the Special Committee.”

  “What case?”

  “The twelve hundred notebooks, may the Devil take them and you with them. Have you looked at them?”

  “. . . No.”

  “Well take a look at them.”

  A thin notebook came flapping out of the Superintendent’s briefcase and hit the desk with a snap. Sure enough, an oval stood out on the pink cover and in that oval, a portrait of Alexis Ivanovich Rykov, ex-Chairman of the Soviet People’s Commissars, present People’s Commissar for Post Office, Telephone and Telegraph, ex-member of the Politburo, member of the Central Committee, leader of the Right Opposition, which he tirelessly repudiated at congresses, friend of Mikhail Ivanovich Tomski, ex-leader of the Trade Unions, who repudiated him from every platform (but this—who could doubt it?—was in order to remain more surely faithful to him), friend of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, editor of Izvestia, who also repudiated him, repudiated Tomski, repudiated his own teachings of the day before, but assuredly in order to remain devoted to them in his secret heart. On the inside of the cover, selected sayings of Bukharin and Rykov recalling the mission of Soviet schools, the greatness of socialist culture, the wisdom of Lenin and Engels. On the last page, the multiplication table.

  The Superintendent had a pock-marked face, a turned-up nose, and little, colourless eyes sharpened by worry. (“They’re capable of kicking me out of the Party over this—and then . . .”). Kostrov smiled at him amiably with a wild urge to laugh:

  “Oof! I was expecting to find a picture of Bukharin on the fourth page.”

  His amused glance fell on the Pythagorean Table, just at the spot where the following figures blazed discreetly forth: 7 × 7 = 94. “Look here, Comrade Driabkin.” At first the other man didn’t understand, not knowing exactly how much seven times seven makes. Slowly he calculated: three sevens make twenty-one, twice twenty-one is forty-two, plus seven, forty-nine . . . 94? Mikhail Ivanovich said sarcastically:

  “Deliberate sabotage . . . But that’s not our problem. The paper factory is fobbing off its notebooks from four years ago on us. As for the sabotage of the teaching of arithmetic, Comrade Driabkin, I will write up my report at once and you will forward it. We will take the offensive, do you understand?”

  To tell the truth, Driabkin no longer understood anything, exc
ept that things looked bad. Kostrov, summoned by telephone to the Special Committee, was received by the Deputy Director, a puny runt with glasses and a shaved head, tightly girthed by his tunic and leather straps. The runt, obviously modelling himself on Fedossenko, took the long view of the affair:

  “You’re a Trotskyist, Kostrov?”

  A quarter of a second’s hesitation. “No.”