Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  “Hey, Citizen, I didn’t get my full weight! What are you thinking about?”

  Varvara returned to a present centred on the needle of the scale, added thirty grams of bread and murmured: “Next in line, citizeness,” while thoughts as sharp and as hard as metal castings assembled themselves in her mind. “No. It will be more serious this time. With the Conference approaching, they probably want to concoct Trotskyist conspiracy cases to create a diversion. The leaders among the deportees will be sent to isolators—and it will be two or three years before we get out again, unless unforeseen events intervene. Avelii and Rodion may get off, for they don’t like to lock young people up in prisons where they get educated through contact with older prisoners . . .”

  “Let’s not go!” Rodion proposed. It was dusk. They were in the public garden, on the deserted side from which you can see the old fish market. From there, blue slopes descended toward the ford where the plain on the opposite side of the Black-Waters stretched into the darkness. Varvara protested: “But Rodion, you’re mad!”

  “Listen to me.” continued the lad. He thought he knew the trails leading north, toward the sea, but that way they would get lost and the deserts themselves were penitentiaries. Toward the south-west lay the railway line, every station of which would be a trap. On the other hand, by travelling five or six hundred kilometres to the south, they would be out of the high security zone. Passports? You steal them. Ten days’ march through the forests and the steppes—with the risk of dying of hunger, and why not? eh?—and they would reach the Belaya River (the White Waters) and safety.

  “And the others?” said Varvara indignantly. “And the Party? What do you think we are, Rodion? Convicts? Tramps? Never forget that we are the living faction of the Party . . .”

  Perhaps she didn’t say that, but it was just as if she had said it. Rodion clasped his hands over his knees, and his eyes wandered into the shadowy distance. He knew all of that, but he didn’t quite understand it or no longer understood it or finally felt ready to understand something quite different. Jailors and prisoners, we are still members of the same Party: the only Party of the Revolution. They are debasing it, leading it to ruin. We are resisting in order to save it in spite of them. The only way we can appeal against the sick Party, controlled by corrupt parvenus, is by appealing to the healthy Party . . . But where is it? Where? Who is it? And what if it were outside the Party? The true workers’ Party, outside of parties . . . But is this possible? We are the persecuted faction loyal to our persecutors because we are the only faction loyal to the great Party whose emblems they have stolen and betrayed . . . Desperately, Rodion tried to make out the comrades’ faces in the deepening shadows.

  “Listen to me! It’s no longer true: something has been lost forever. Lenin will never rise again in his mausoleum. Our only brothers are the working people who no longer have either rights or bread. They’re the ones we must talk to. It is with them that we must remake the Revolution and first of all a completely different Party . . .” The comrades appeared livid to him in the falling shadows: Varvara, Avelii, heads pressed close together.

  “We would run the risk of committing a crime,” they answered him, “by stirring up the hungry, backward, unconscious workers against their own organized vanguard, however bankrupt and threadbare it may be. By attempting to revive the Revolution, we would run the risk of unleashing the hostile force of the peasant masses. It is the Party that must be cured, at any price. What does it matter that it runs over our bodies, if this is in order to come back to life tomorrow when the working classes . . .” In the meanwhile, no possible escape.

  “Thermidorians!” muttered Rodion. “Sons of bitches! Excuse me, Comrade Varvara. That’s what I really think of them, and so I have to say it out loud . . .”

  “Thermidorians is enough,” said Varvara softly. “It’s correct.”

  “No! Not enough,” shouted Rodion. “How do you say son of a bitch in Marxist terms? A filthy, humiliated animal who has been beaten, kicked in the belly, fed on scraps and is only good for biting poor people? You’re educated: tell me the scientific term. What would Hegel have said if he had seen this bureaucratic scum sucking the blood of the victorious proletariat? And Vladimir Illich, what would he have said?”

  “I think Lenin would have said the same as you,” Varvara replied seriously.

  Together, they examined all possible hypotheses, studied the line of conduct they should follow, concluded that nothing had been discovered concerning the messages, that a betrayal was out of the question, but that it was necessary to expect the worst, on principle. “Once again the Georgian is about to repudiate his past deeds, and he needs victims in order to manoeuvre the Party. We would be quite dangerous if we existed in the political sense of the word.”

  At this point Avelii interrupted Varvara: “ ‘If we existed,’ you say? So you think we don’t exist? I’ve often wondered. We exist like a seed in the ground, like remorse in a sick conscience, but we are no more that . . .”

  Prison already enclosed them. It made them feel as if they were suffocating, even under that vast, still-transparent sky.

  “Let’s not go in tonight or tomorrow,” said Avelii. “Let them come get us themselves—those sons of bitches, in the words of Hegel and Lenin . . .”

  “Yes, forget about your bakery, Varvara. They can divide up the bread of poverty well enough without your help. Let’s breathe free tonight.”

  * * *

  They agreed to spend the night in the woods above the river. Avelii went to destroy the messages and to get blankets, soap, and bread. Rodion said: “I want to see the town one more time . . .” What singing sadness called him there? He couldn’t have expressed it in words. He strolled among the people on the Boulevard of the Soviets. On the movie-posters you could see sailors of the year ’17, jackets crisscrossed with cartridge-belts, shouting out an appeal to the world. “What is to be done, little brothers?” Rodion asked them. He recognized himself in them, born ten years too late because of fate, which either exists or doesn’t. Maybe that’s not a problem any more: fate must be shaped with a rough proletarian hand, and too bad if I die in the process! At the foot of a red-brick tower, some firemen were leading their horses back to the stable. Rodion patted a powerful mare on the rump. The sullen redhead with bulging biceps who was brushing her down seemed like a nice guy to Rodion. A lantern lighted his face from below. Rodion pitied him for his lack of consciousness. To live without knowing, taken in by every slogan, to obey without serving the one great cause—I’d rather die in your coldest prison, sons of bitches! Rodion rested on some stones that had fallen from the cornice of Saint Nicholas’ Church and contemplated Lenin Square: the little bust of Vladimir Illich forgotten in the very centre of that abandoned space; the three stone houses confiscated long ago from the rich in the name of justice, which now housed Security, the Party Committee, the Soviet—in a word, injustice. A spotted nanny-goat followed by her two funny little black kids was grazing in the dark grass around the monument. People were cutting across the corner of the square heading for the lighted windows of the Trade-Union Club on Comrade Lebedkin Street. Rodion admired the sky above the roof. As it grew darker, its blue became even deeper. Rodion sat so still that the goat brought her kids right near him and let them graze around his boots. An inner calm was coming to life in Rodion, and the animals sensed that he was incapable of throwing a stone at them. If he wasn’t thinking, it was because thought was ripening all by itself in his brain: like the sky growing darker.

  The lights went on on the second floor of the Security building. “Work! Work night and day, you’ll still be swept away . . . The ice breaks up after the long winter, the spring floods sweep it away . . . It will be beautiful when they overflow . . . Your files, your papers, all your dirty little typewritten verdicts, and your prisons, all of them, the old wooden barracks, sealed with barbed wire, the modern American-style concrete buildings, all of that will be blown sky high . . .” Rodion realized that
this was a certainty within him. “Everything. Everything will be blown up!” The thought illuminated him. Man is unable to hasten the arrival of spring by even an hour. He must therefore suffer through the whole winter. But he knows that one season follows another. So let him wait confidently, his boat ready, his soul ready. And what if the time is snatched away from him? What if he himself is extinguished before the dawn, like a tiny candle flickering in the great winds of space? “I am that tiny candle,” thought Rodion, who saw himself, alone in the empty square, separated from the comrades, unknown to anyone, with prison waiting for him, sitting on rubble . . . “Well, I don’t give a damn. The sun will come up just the same . . .”

  A dark group emerged from the door of the Security building and moved toward the centre of the square. Rodion made out an indistinct mass of ragged prisoners surrounded by soldiers holding their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. A dog was prowling around these men with his tongue hanging out: a tracked animal who would be thirsty all his life, a slave-animal, a police-animal trained by man to track man down. A killer beast. This group of slaves crossed the paths of people on their way to the club to divert themselves watching the misadventures of The Lucky Cobbler on the screen (he bought a lottery-bond, issued for the construction of socialism, and he won the jackpot, and the pretty girl next door discovered his tender heart, and . . .) Rodion’s eyes were following the prisoners, their guards, the police-dog—the only creature set off from the group with any distinct individuality, eye-teeth and pupils gleaming, huge thirsty snout . . . “I’ll be taking that path next week,” thought Rodion. “I’ll be with you, comrades! I’m already with you, totally . . .” For he had no doubt that these captives were victims: the vilest are victims too, and they are even ours now that we have taken the world into our hands.

  Eight o’clock chimed somewhere. No one else passed by. A little girl came to collect the goats. Stars broke through the deep blue of the sky. In the Security building, two windows went dark at the same instant; then the floodlights at the entrance came up. Suddenly illuminated, the sentry, weapon held horizontal at the ready, was pacing silently up and down his section of phosphorescent sidewalk with the regularity of a clockwork dummy. And Rodion had a clear vision of the machine that controlled this automaton: it made the lights go on and off in the offices above the files, it made the telephones ring, it made hearts (but not his, no! not his) tremble with anxiety. It disgorged the group of captives onto the little dark square, the ones guarding the others: the hungry ones and the ones carrying loaded rifles, and even the humanized animal with emasculated instincts who would never again make a spontaneous movement. Someone turned a switch and the little red soldiers began to move. Another click and a current passed through their skulls; they halted, lowered their rifles, clack, clack, the captives who were moving ahead of them crumbled into the grave. Another switch. Trains began running, presses rolling, drills drilling, orators clamouring: Glory to the Chief! Glory to us, glory, glory . . . like in Mayakovsky’s poem . . .

  Rodion, chin resting on his fist, faded into the night, once again absorbed in problems. Only this time he knew in the very fibres of his being that tomorrow he would be in one of the cellars of Security. Dimitri was there already. Old Ryzhik was there. Thousands of unknown people were there, living there, probably dying there, and he felt torn between a yes and a no which were equally bitter, equally true, equally necessary, equally hard. I accept it. I can’t accept it. When machines begin working against man, you have to throw a bolt into them. Then they break down, they’re nothing more than dead scrap-iron. We built these soulless machines, so we have every right to destroy them, we’ll build others. I, Rodion, know this. He straightened up, transfixed by a resolution like a beam of light. What are we hoping for? What are we waiting for? We’re crazy with resignation! Our resignation is driving us crazy! Impossible to live this way. I tell you it’s impossible, comrades! Impossible to die this way, unless they kill us. Nothing to expect, except from ourselves. “History,” said Hegel . . . “History is something we make, we are historical, too, like all the poor devils . . .” There is no certainty that this machine will stop and crumble one day all by itself. It must be destroyed. Another revolution. We will make one, and in a very different way. I don’t know how, but it will be very different. But first, escape from them. Enough.

  He walked along lightly until he reached the meeting-place where Avelii and Varvara were waiting for him in order to spend their last night before jail together. From the hard earth beneath his feet, itself supported by the black rock, a simple energy ascended through his limbs—fresh, loving and stubborn, like a self-evident truth. He followed a narrow path through the woods, illuminated by the feeble glow of the Milky Way. But as he drew closer to the comrades the words he was bringing them—burning winged words—lost their persuasive power; nothing was left of them but ordinary words, which other words could easily refute:

  “Marxist thinking, Rodion, must be objective. This dictatorship which is no longer anything but violence and lies directed against the proletariat, is still proletarian, in spite of itself, because it maintains the property-relations established by the October Revolution . . .”

  Rodion repressed a sort of exasperation. Am I doomed never to understand? Never to know? Yet a triumphant confidence penetrated his limbs. He could make out Varvara and Avelii lying together between the mossy roots of a pine tree. Two imperceptible faces which he could barely glimpse, surmising them rather, so close that their breath was intertwined. The woman’s oddly tender voice offered him bread. “Give it here,” he answered gaily, and his hands made a game of groping for the hand which held out a crust of rye in the night. His eyes were getting used to the dark, which was velvety beneath the spreading branches of the tree. A vague phosphorescence of starlight must have penetrated that far, for Rodion was suddenly sure he could see Varvara’s smooth, narrow face on which—without a smile—a kind of beatitude was floating. Avelii’s profile was burrowed between the woman’s cheek and the back of her neck, in her warm flesh and hair. The silence went on forever. A minute passed, and it grew darker still, the darkness of an abyss. To Rodion, the earth felt frosty, the bread bitter, the dome of boughs oppressive. Avelii and Varvara lying on the ground were talking softly to each other about prison, about life, about love, about the proletariat, about prison. For a moment, Rodion lent an ear to their murmurings: it was excruciating . . . Then he went to lie down a few yards away on the cold moss where he could see a shred of sky between the tops of the pines. Faint rays linked each star to all the others. They formed a web of mysterious light. Where did the night end, where did the light begin? Where did light end, where did night begin? Rodion fell asleep with his eyes open.

  * * *

  The next day Avelii and Varvara descended into a subterranean world with which they were already familiar, where people lived like larvae in a kind of slow delirium. The windows—for the cellars reached ground-level—were crisscrossed over with barbed wire and were missing half their panes: whatever glass remained was covered with the blackened dust of the years. Twelve women here, seventeen men over there, bathed in the same animal warmth, breathed the same stale odour of defecation, killed time with the same tales of misfortune. The women took turns lying down to sleep on planks which stank of bedbugs. When Varvara’s turn came, she had to share with a thin fisherman’s wife with sharp cheekbones, accused of speculating, and an old woman in a black kerchief, accused of witchcraft and counter-revolutionary talk. The first night, the latter asked her: “Would you like me to pray for you a little, my dove?”

  “No,” said Varvara, “thank you. I’m not religious.”

  “Then not for you, for your boyfriend,” the religious woman insisted. “My heart feels he is in need of it . . .”

  “If you wish,” answered Varvara, shrugging her shoulders, but with a pang of irritation . . .

  Avelii lived among thieves: local people, clerks from the cooperatives, fishermen, special depor
tees, and a pickpocket from Tiflis—a young vagabond who told complicated stories artistically:

  “Part One: Love. Part Two: The Tragic Surprise. Part Three: Hope and Despair. There’ll be three more parts tomorrow, comrades and citizens, for those among us who aren’t sent out tonight on a free tour of the natural planetarium from which no one has ever returned. Amen!”

  These allusions were aimed at some gloomy young fellows against whom he seemed to have a personal grudge. They were threatened with capital punishment for having, on numerous occasions during moonless nights, visited the stockrooms of the cooperatives reserved for Party and Security officials.

  The wandering pickpocket knew the seamy side of every big city, the nightclubs of the Maidan in Tiflis, marked cards, cocaine, the heavily made-up girls, naked under their flowered print dresses, who wander the Krestchatiki on the heights of Kiev, a fabulous town, and who make love in the bushes for five roubles, three roubles when you’re one of the boys, and for free when you’re fresh out of jail! He knew the thieves’ dens around the Smolensk Market in Moscow, the girls along Neglinaya Street who sell themselves on the sidewalk just across from the new buildings of the State Bank, the interesting parts of Ligovka and Pushkin Streets in Leningrad, haunted by real bandits in caps, like Gold-Tooth-Kolia, One-Leg-Artem, and Puzaty-Chaitan (the Pot-Bellied Clipper): “Got shot, that brother, a little while back. Was really too fat to hide himself nowadays when everybody’s thin. He really couldn’t pass himself off as a high-paid technician. Yet he sure was a real technician: he would have disassembled and sold off the turbines of the Dnieprostroy one piece at a time . . .” The light-fingered vagabond took a liking to Avelii “ ’cause you’re sincere, and you deserve some credit for taking a trip on this filthy boat for your own pleasure . . . Some night I’ll tell you, just you, how sweet the girls are in those thieves’ dens. Ah! You’ll see, it’s like a story . . .”