Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  “That’s odd, you only keep company with Trotskyists.”

  “. . . I made my act of submission to the Central Committee last April 18.”

  “Ah! So you’re with us?”

  A quarter of a second’s hesitation. “Yes.”

  “You never belonged to the Right Opposition?”

  “. . . No.”

  “Then how is it that you promote the illegal propaganda of the Right? Kostrov you don’t seem to be double-dealing but triple-dealing. That’s very dangerous, let me warn you.”

  Kostrov explained the twelve hundred notebooks—in sealed wrappers—the responsibility of the shipping department of the Torch central paper factory; the circular from the Regional Board of Education requiring them to insist by telephone on delivery of the notebooks and to distribute them immediately under the threat of having to answer to the charge of sabotaging the year’s education plan . . . Kostrov explained and felt like laughing, for this whole business was childishly stupid. But he was beginning to feel scared. Fear clutched the pit of his stomach, a gentle choking pressure. It climbed toward his sick heart, it reached his throat, it affected his voice. It mounted, carried by his blood, passed his mouth, clumsy at forming words. It reached his eyes, his forehead. It removed an invisible blindfold from the man’s eyes and forehead and he saw.

  He saw that the Runt had a strange head, at once that of a living man and a dead man, shadowy holes in the place of eyes, a thin mouth outlined in black, the chest of a hollow, white skeleton under his uniform.

  He saw the Runt get up, beckon to him snickering, and lead him down corridors cut at right angles, through ever-increasing darkness toward cement staircases, grey, underground passageways, singular doors in walls bathed in a fog of electricity.

  He saw the Runt walking jerkily ahead of him, limping alternately with his right foot and his left, turning around every three steps, without slowing down, to stare at him through the holes, now black, of his eye-sockets.

  The Runt in an ordinary uniform, revolver at his waist, and others following him. Other Runts with the same jerky gait leading comrades who walked with feeble steps like his own—Varvara, Rodion, Ryzhik, his white hair rising like motionless tongues of flame. Others.

  He saw a black ruler lying on some papers in front of the runty Deputy Director of the GPU Special Committee, and he read, even upside down, the typewritten text:

  Report on the Interrogations of . . .

  The Runt said “Of course your version is plausible, but all saboteurs have plausible versions. The most important thing, in my eyes, is that you are with us. I had some doubt about that because of the company you keep. But don’t change it, Mikhail Ivanovich, we’ll discuss this later. I’m quite inclined to trust you. How are you feeling, in general? Your heart? This matter of the twelve hundred notebooks is very troublesome, as you yourself understand. The C.C. and the Special Board of State Security just sent us circulars insisting on the greatest vigilance in the struggle against the insidious propaganda of the Right . . . and of the Left, of course, Kostrov. Anyhow, I’ll try to patch this up. Nonetheless, don’t bother to go back to the Education Department, you’ve been dismissed, you understand. Look for something else.”

  “A night watchman’s job, for example?”

  The Runt didn’t seem to notice the irony at all.

  “No, night watchmen are armed. Since you were convicted under Article 58 you would not be permitted to carry arms . . .”

  Kostrov went through the door walking tall, but he felt he was staggering. “They’re spreading their nets, that’s clear, I’m done for—they’re spreading their nets . . .” Providentially, Varvara offered him her eyes which had been sparkling recently: a touch of beauty graced her Mongolian shepherdess’ face (the glowing trace of the face she wore at other times—purified, bathed in smiles, known only to Avelii). Kostrov took her arm in the street with a kind of gratefulness, as if he had said to her: I thank you for having those bright eyes, this slender neck, for carrying I don’t know what joy within you. Aloud, he murmured.

  “How nice it is, Varvara Platonova.”

  Totally involved in her secret happiness, yet lucid, she replied to their common thought.

  “It looks like they’re digging a trap for us. Let’s be ready.”

  * * *

  Alone in front of his window, Kostrov played interesting chess matches with himself. Capablanca against Lasker: Capablasker, as he said with the poet. A crow came and perched on the sill outside, right against the pane. He considered the player at length with his little round eye, a black pearl surrounded by a thin ring of coral. This match would never be completed. Rodion’s footsteps were coming up the planks of the veranda.

  “Explain the difference,” asked Rodion, “between natural economy and feudalism.”

  In order to listen better, he sat with his elbow on the table, chin in hand. The chess board lay between them. Kostrov came back to life, a wholly different Kostrov whose waxy complexion and sadly sunken features regained an appearance of youth. He spoke better than he would have spoken before a class. He spoke as he had not thought for a long while, tired of himself, having given up making discoveries. He perceived a strange disparity between his knowledge and life, now that, for the sake of an attentive young comrade, he had to express things in living terms. Rodion questioned tirelessly. “What is the relationship between the psychological and the economic? Art, love . . .?

  Kostrov entered into vast digressions, rising to recite a stanza by Pushkin, to tell the story of Lassalle’s great love affair, to define the Lassallean type of revolutionary, steeped in scientific socialism yet still individualistic and romantic, marked by his middle-class origins . . . And, suddenly enlightened by a flash of boldness, he made the white knight, threatened by the black bishop on the chessboard, make an extravagant move which upset the two classic games like an earthquake from the depths. “Look, Rodion! Capablasker is no longer a brilliant idiot obsessed by mathematical combinations: he’s gone mad! He’s going to win on both sides at once. That’s never been seen before. It’s because of you!”

  Rodion, concentrating, received an affectionate glance in his eyes. “But art, Kostrov, art?”

  “The origins of art lie in the gratuitous repetition of the motions of labour . . . Plekhanov said, based on the anthropological studies of Morgan . . . The dances of primitive peoples evoke hunting and war, which is also a form of labour. (These were truths learned from books, as precise as the gambits of the two classic chess games.) The work of art, dear Rodion, begins with the gesture you make to communicate a feeling—and thought begins with feeling. You are standing in front of a landscape. There is someone near you. You stretch out your hand. You say see, for you would like to give what you see, and that’s the beginning of everything: you’re a painter, a poet, a novelist, a sculptor, a playwright. You’re a man who explodes boundaries. You live, for there are two of you living. The most beautiful landscape makes you sad when you see it alone: so you must think of other men.”

  “I am always thinking of them,” said Rodion softly. “I don’t even need to think of them any more, they’re always there . . . The ones whose lives are worth living, naturally.”

  Their discussions took place in a tiny, neatly-kept room with sea-blue painted walls. Kostrov lived with a fisherman who was a member of the sect of Old Believers without priests. The woodwork around the window framed white birches, a piece of an ash-coloured log house, an edge of sky. Kostrov had not disturbed the icons hanging in the corner of the woodwork over the head of his bed: a Souzdal Virgin-with-Child, and a portrait of Kalinin cut out of a picture magazine and glued onto a sheet of red paper, thus illustrating the craftiest of saints. Rodion left, charged up with ideas, reviewing principles in his mind and mixing them up, yet drawing inexplicable confidence from this jumble of words and ideas. He believed he now had a better understanding of the meaning of art, love, agrarian reform, imperialism. In reality he understood better that—after the
Gracchi, the peasants of the Peasant War of 1525, Lassalle, Bernstein’s revisionism, the victory of Soviet bureaucracy—he, himself, was a living man. The next morning he washed more thoroughly in the river, ate his crust of rye with an onion on the bank of the Black-Waters and meditated, squatting in the sun in a warm crevice among the rocks. Great resolutions ripened within him. “They’re all mistaken, the Comrades. They don’t dare to think. The epoch demands of us the courage to pass judgement. What are we doing in these prisons? Who will save mankind if not the proletariat? What are we waiting for when the proletariat expects everything from us?”

  Letter by letter, Rodion deciphered the thesis of the minority of the Communist Left of the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison, copied by Ivanov at the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp on Kola Peninsula. He read the summaries of the Bulletin of the Opposition, reconstructed there by Ivanov based on the mental notes of Engineer Botkin. It was Rodion who brought Kostrov these insidious yet blinding insights. And it was Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, professor of Hist-Mat, historical materialism, author of studies on the system of property-ownership in old Kievian Russia and on the agrarian question in the Chinese revolution (Shanxi, Hubei), who, abandoning the white bishop blocked by the black queen, threatened by a black pawn, guarded by the black knight—the white bishop surrounded on the chess board with no escape—took his chin in his hand to listen to Rodion—Rodion who rose, eyes swollen with brightness, paced from one wall to the other, leaned against the cold porcelain stove and declared with an abrupt gesture:

  “Put a stop to this ruinous collectivization. Maintain only those Kolkhozes with adequate technical bases and yielding good crops. Restore the circulation of commodities. Give up gigantomania in industrialization! Ah! Yes. We must consider the labour force as important as plant and equipment. Stop the deterioration caused by overwork and undernourishment.”

  “In the end,” said Kostrov, pensively, “the Verkhne-Uralsk minority fails to push its argument through to the very end. They don’t dare conclude that the old bureaucratized Party is finished for the Revolution and that the moment has come to consider starting everything over again.”

  Rodion restrained himself from shouting: “I dare!”

  “That’s right,” he said, pacing the room with nimble, heavy steps like a bear in a pit. “Listen, Mikhail Ivanovich, it’s time to understand.”

  He spread his hands—broad stubby-fingered and calloused—as if to place the obvious conclusion there, between them.

  “They won’t let us live! And it can’t go on. We are the new party, even if we don’t dare to want it. They know it better than we do. They’ll have to let us rot in jail. When they finally understand what they’re doing, they’ll start shooting us. All of us, I tell you. It’ll be the black terror. How can they leave us alive?

  “Listen, Mikhail Ivanovich. I met some workers from the tannery. They haven’t been paid in six weeks. The special milk ration for unhealthy working conditions? No one’s even heard of it. This month they worked during three of their five rest days because the monthly production quota hadn’t been fulfilled. Do you know what the Party Secretary answered when they told him they couldn’t go on? He said: ‘There’s plenty of room for loafers in the penitentiary brigades.’ Can’t you just hear him?”

  The courage was fading out of Kostrov’s soul after an hour’s fatigue. He lay down on his bed, stretched his left arm up behind him and drew the coolness of the iron bed-stead into his fingers.

  “Pass me a cigarette, Rodion. Don’t be so quick to draw conclusions. The Party . . .”

  “What Party? Theirs? Ours?”

  Kostrov made a weary gesture, blew a few puffs of grey smoke up to the ceiling. Bad heart. “Rodion, almost all of us are out of work. That’s significant. I met Varvara Ivanova at the Special Committee. They’re implicating her in some business of stolen bread. Me, in a sabotage case . . . They must have received orders to cook up cases against us on the eve of the congress.”

  The chess board lay between them on the corner of the table. Rodion brutally pushed the black pawn. Lose the white bishop. Between them, worlds: to each his own. Five weeks without a letter from Ganna. For Kostrov this silence was now ominous. They’re stopping our correspondence. The Runt, with his hollow eyesockets, his undead skull, the leather straps across his empty chest, was moving the black knight. “It’s bad, bad.” Kostrov was full of premonitions.

  Rodion no longer thought about him, chess or theses. He sensed the approach of suffering, pain, rivers, hopes, gambles. It must be. It must be . . .

  * * *

  The group met at Elkin’s late one afternoon. Squatting outside in the courtyard, Galia was scouring a pot with earth—and watching the approaches to the house. Sometimes she hummed to herself. Then she pursed her lips, preoccupied. What are they talking about with exaltation in their eyes? Whenever men’s voices start ringing and their eyes begin to shine, it ends in trouble. It’s the same with love: whoever loves too much suddenly forgets himself, picks up a knife, goes off into the night down the dark road. Afterwards, the old women tell you: “He wanted too much happiness on this earth. He let his pride get the better of him, he kicked up his little row, one, two, and the devil gobbled him up alive . . . You can get your tears ready. Here you are, pregnant.”

  To herself Galia answered them with a caustic little laugh: “You miss them, don’t you, old witches,—those days when you used to make love!” Dimitri, her man, didn’t love her too much. Wasn’t it she who loved him too much, not daring to say so? Even telling him, teasingly “In fact I don’t know if I’m in love with you. I let you have your way because I was bored.” Her whole face cried out the opposite. She knew it and she was glad of it. Loving him too much, she would never go off like a cat fleeing down the dark road. You’re the one who will leave, Mitia, when they summon you inexplicably, and the world will be empty. She choked back her tears, scrubbing furiously at the pot. She would have to live bowing lower than the grass, more silent than the water. Galia moved closer to the hallway, her ear cocked. Elkin was talking cheerfully about incomprehensible things: the world harvest, Molotov’s theses, the League of Nations, the International, the Alianza Obrera . . .

  The five were discussing the messages. Ryzhik was chairing the meeting. Varvara was serving tea. Avelii was sketching birds on a folded newspaper. Rodion, seated a little to one side on the bed, was holding his knee in his clasped hands. He had something serious to say which had to be said but which got stuck in his throat. He had to accuse himself, without having finished judging himself. He believed he was right against all odds. Yes, right, yet certainly guilty. His clenched jaws unclenched by themselves:

  “I want the floor.”

  Rodion spoke distinctly, without looking at anyone, and Varvara, stunned, set the teapot down on the newspaper clippings. Avelii drew a black line through a pair of spread wings. Ryzhik turned to stone, Elkin rocked in his chair, and scowled.

  “I believe I have committed an error. I think I did right but it’s still an error. Personally I trust him, but I had no right to do it, I know. I broke the group’s discipline. I accept your decision in advance, I’m in the wrong, but I know I’m right. You understand. That’s it.”

  “What are you telling us, you idiot?” Elkin exploded. “Explain yourself. What did you do?”

  Rodion realized that he hadn’t said it, it was still stuck in his throat. You think you’re saying and you’re not, you want to speak and you can’t. You must. Clearly.

  “I discussed the messages with Kostrov. He’s isolated, he’s one of us. You’re unfair to him. I only spoke about ideas. I’m wrong, but I’m not sorry, it’s only from the point of view of discipline . . .”

  “So,” said Ryzhik softly, “so . . .”

  With that single word, five minds visualized something dark, something against which nothing more could be done. Rodion understood. The boat swamps and you’re in the water, spray in your mouth, choking. Eternity was smiling down from the heaven
s the instant before. Now that moment is forever past. Die. It was a loaded moment. Varvara began a useless sentence which no one heard. Ryzhik implacably measured the consequences.

  “When did you talk to him, Rodion?”

  “Seven days ago.”

  Elkin kept rocking back and forth on his chair, whistling through his teeth. The chair fell loudly to the floor. Tea from an overturned glass streamed over the newspapers. Elkin, standing erect, let out a foul curse. He had struck Rodion right in the face and Rodion, painfully regaining his balance, elbows on his knees, both hands over his face, was breathing heavily. Elkin dropped down next to him on the bed with the same movement of his hands to cover his face, the same heavy breathing. A little blood on the back of his hand.

  “So,” Ryzhik said once more, “so.”

  “Elkin, you have behaved unpardonably. Like a brute. We agree on that and you do, too. As for the infraction of discipline committed by Rodion, the group will make its decision later. I don’t think there’s very much we can do about it any more. Show your face, Rodion. Here, at least, you behaved well. Let everyone take his precautions this very evening. No papers lying around, eh?”

  Rodion went out into the hall to wash. There, he encountered Galia’s terrified glance.

  “It’s nothing, Galia, we had a little scuffle . . .”

  His ashen lips attempted a smile to reassure her.

  “Come over here, Rodion. Here’s some cold water.”

  She held the basin for him. He wiped himself slowly, with a sad expression.

  “What is it, Rodion?”

  “Nothing, dear . . . Midnight. Midnight in the century.”

  Yet he didn’t seem drunk.

  * * *

  As Elkin dragged her along, Galia felt a shudder run through his arm with almost every step he took. She was watching Dimitri out of the corner of her eye, and she sensed that he was terribly upset: self-disgust, a bitter shameful anger. They were following the river, right along the water’s edge. The sun, still high, was a golden globe above the woods on the opposite shore. It coloured the rocks sumptuously. Galia asked: