Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Read online

  He left there with a sharp suspicion: “Someone has informed on me: Who?” Then his memory recovered the image of a dumpy, inelegant little woman with a rather large bust draped in an army-supply-store trenchcoat. A narrow forehead, a long mouth, cold eyes—something rodent-like in her face. He didn’t like her. In her pudgy hand an activist’s briefcase already stuffed, he was sure, with important papers: District Committee Theses for agitators, lists of activists, etc.—“Comrade Professor, you weren’t very clear on the Left-wing Thermidorians . . . or I didn’t catch your point. . . . They were, you said (I noted it), bad Thermidorians, who, by supporting Barras and Tallien, prepared their own undoing . . . I don’t completely understand your distinction between good and bad Thermidorians.” “You’ve been spying on me, you little bitch. You’re the one who denounced me.”

  At that instant she emerged from the Dia-Mat office (Dialectical Materialism) preceded by her briefcase and that odious soft bosom, talking loudly in her rather harsh voice, suitable for platforms constructed of unplaned planks and decorated with red gauze. She was talking, naturally, about the wall-newspaper. “That’s forbidden,” she said imperiously, “it’s quite, quite out of the question. The Editorial Committee . . .” At the words “out of the question” Kostrov had no more doubts. Informer. He walked more rapidly to avoid having to say hello to her, but she waved to him gaily, and behind her he saw the curly head of Irina, a little Zyrianka from the Kama highlands whom he found charming with her smooth face, wide-set eyes, sharp cheekbones, and fine lips chiselled by a miniaturist of the Reindeer Age. “Well, comrade,” he asked her, “your paper, is it coming along?” Yes, yes, she nodded, serious yet playful—playful only in the depths of her eyes, those tiny distant flecks of gold flashing as if from the bottom of a pool. They spoke for a moment, then a wave of students separated them, for the eleven o’clock bell was ringing.

  That evening, at the supper table, across from Ganna, with Tamarochka perched on her paint-smeared highchair between them, he inquired:

  “And what would you say, Ganna, if they arrested me?”

  Ganna continued serving grey macaroni to the little girl. A slight flush came to her cheeks and her shell-rimmed glasses seemed slightly askew as she said simply:

  “You think so?”

  The little girl was listening, a watchful mouse. In our times, children have to understand. Let the children know. It’s better to prepare them than lie to them endlessly. They arrested Vanil Vanilich, downstairs, two weeks ago and his Svetlana, who had been told that “Daddy went to Leningrad, you know, to the Academy of Sciences,” finally complained that they were deceiving her. “I know that Daddy is in jail; I know it, I know it! And I’m sad that Daddy’s in jail, but why are you all lying?” The Jew from the fourth floor was in jail. Marussia’s brother-in-law, too. Seven-year-old Svetlana told six-year-old Tamarochka: “I saw a man who got shot: he used to come to my aunt’s, and he had a big nose. He was a nasty man and I’m glad they shot him.”

  Her grandfather scolded her: “Svetlana, it’s wrong to talk like that, Svetlana, you have to think of others’ sorrow.” (An old dotard, this grandfather, who cautiously sympathized with the sect of the Churikovtsy.) Svetlana, pouting, persisted, looking up at him from under her big, round forehead: “And I say, Grandfather, that he’s a nasty man and so they were right. They were right to shoot him.” She hopped around on one foot repeating: “They were right.” It was probably only to see Grandfather’s eyes grow misty and his lips start to tremble, from which she concluded that he loved her and that he was weak.

  Tamarochka watched these carryings-on, listened to everything. How Grandfather loves her and how she torments him! What a naughty girl you are Svetlana, she thought. And she jumped sideways, tapped Svetlana on the shoulder, and ran behind the bench to make her chase after her.

  Then Grandfather contemplated the tall silhouette of a man—gaunt, severe, all vertical lines—cut in grey stone against the sky. So straight. So hard. So beautiful. The Inquisitor. Grandfather sighed. Yet it was only Timiriazev, the naturalist, for the children had gone out for some fresh air on Tverskoy Boulevard at the corner of Malaya Nikitskaya. There, in that quiet street on the right, an ordinary white church. Pushkin was married there, one hundred years ago. Pushkin.

  No happiness here below, but calm and will.

  Grandfather loved that line, he who had had neither calm nor will. Like Pushkin himself. Like almost everyone here below. But that line contained a harmony, an admirable lie. No: a truth from beyond. Truer than the truth, superior. Calm and will don’t exist. They tower above everything, inaccessible and supreme, real and unreal. No one can understand it, no one . . . Across from the church, a little townhouse surrounded by a wrought-iron fence backed up by a wooden palisade to keep out indiscreet eyes. There lived Maxim Gorky. A man who needed nothing: neither calm nor happiness nor will! He wrote—implacably—sugary, revolting, almost soul-less things. Perhaps he suffered, for it must be painful to feel yourself so close to death with so little soul. “I would gladly pray for you, Alexei Maximovich,” thought Grandfather, “but the things you write make me lose the desire . . .”

  This whole universe and much more—things vaster and more complicated—were at that moment reflected in the soul of six-year-old Tamarochka, watchful little mouse, who was gnawing something at the table, eyes wide open. Above her the man and the woman were examining the future within them.

  “You think so?” repeated Ganna.

  Kostrov realized that he knew. Prescience, premonition are words used by ignorant people, but they mean what they mean. You add up hundreds of subconscious observations and computations, and suddenly you come up with a certainty—not exactly a rational one perhaps, but perfectly valid.

  “Of course.”

  “In the past six weeks we’ve had three hundred arrests in Moscow, think of it. All men of my generation, Civil War militants, members of the ’26 ’27 Opposition, all of whom had fallen into line in order to live in peace.” Ganna was lost in thought, Ganna who looked amazingly like a studious little girl, with pink cheeks, a slightly upturned nose, and braids. Even in bed, when it was time to make love, he wanted her to keep her shell-rimmed glasses on because of the funny-serious expression they gave her childish face. Then she would turn deliciously pink. “No, let me take them off, I’m embarrassed.” His male laughter shocked her, she blushed and Mikhail would repeat “I forbid it, Darling . . . Darling . . .” as he bent over her naked body. He liked her. He didn’t know if he loved her, exactly. We live that way, without knowing.

  “If they arrest you,” she asked, “don’t you think I’ll lose my job at Statistics?”

  Quite possible. “You can sell the sofa, and my brown suit.” They laughed. That sofa, that brown suit, last resorts! They were ready. Two days later, they arrested him. Just like that, in the street, near the trolley stop. A man came up alongside him on the sidewalk, walked along with him, cut him off. Cap, shabby overcoat, vulgar, young face. “Comrade Kostrov, please come with me.”

  “I know, I know,” said Mikhail Ivanovich, almost relieved. The other man showed no surprise. “This way.” They entered a courtyard with broken paving. Puddles of rainwater were stagnating, a car splattered with last night’s mud was parked in front of a door opening into a dark hallway. From the cellars emerged a stale odour of something rotting. Kostrov stumbled into a puddle, annoyed that his trouser-cuff would be muddy, even more annoyed to catch himself thinking about something so stupid. The man opened the door. “Get in, Citizen.”

  The Housing Cooperative Committee requests tenants behind in their rent . . . under penalty of being written up on the blackboard. . . . Housing Cooperative No 6767, Lenin lives eternally.

  Kostrov read these lines posted on the crumbling plaster. Eternally! Bunch of morons! The car jounced through the puddles, turned under the frantic clanging of a trolley-bell, shot off toward the massive, square, red-brick tower of Trinity Gate, spun past the battlements of the Kre
mlin, past the white colonnade of the Grand Theatre, slowed down under a huge picture of the Chief which covered the whole facade of a department store under construction, stopped short in Dzherzhinsky Square opposite a door like any other, guarded by an infantryman wearing a sort of spiked helmet made of cloth. Above this door a tarnished bronze mask was smiling nastily through its beard. “Hi, there, Marx!” Kostrov greeted him in his mind. “Is that bayonet tickling you? You’re wise not to show yourself among us, or you’d be going through this door yourself, old brother, and they’d take care of you in short order.” He had nothing but ideas coming and going in disorder through his wind-swept brain. But no fear: a kind of relief, the urge to make wise-cracks.

  * * *

  Next, he sank into the boredom of a long wait in an empty office. From there he was taken down by elevator into an ordinary compartment of chaos. From chaos, he came up to the surface of silence, calmly. And then came that stab of cardiac pain. Thus a key turns in a lock, from the other side of the door; and a whole unknown world of desolation lies behind that door. Kostrov, satisfied with himself, would have told you: “You know, being locked up doesn’t upset me. I’ve been through it before. For instance, in Lvov, in Poland, in ’20. The police picked me up in a roundup of suspects. My friend, I was in a tight spot. If they had looked a little closer at my Czech passport, I would have been hanged at the least. Another time, in Tiflis in ’21—less dangerous, of course, because the Social-Democrats were very well informed. Noah Agachvili came to see me at the Metek prison. We had known each other in Paris. ‘Your uprising?’ he told me. ‘But my dear fellow, I’m pulling all the strings. I’m putting you out of the way, in your own interest. Say, would you care for a game of chess?’ I must tell you that Agachvili never forgot the checkmate I inflicted on him in Petersburg after the July insurrection in which we had fought against each other at the corner of Millionnaya Street . . . I arrested him myself some time after Sovietization. He must be in deportation out in Uzbekistan right now. In ’24, in Ruschuk, in Bulgaria, a difficult time . . . In ’28, in Moscow, but then I had some good ideological arguments with the judge who interrogated me. Not without effect, since he later turned bad, or rather turned good: he’s out in the Solovietski Islands, five years, Sir, for a far-left deviation.

  “Here, after all, I feel at home, like part of the family. They lock us up. Politics demands it. The time for grain stockpiling is getting close. Obviously it will be a fiasco; the Planning Commission’s audit figures show it clearly enough. So they’re afraid of us, even though we keep our mouths shut.”

  Chaos was a rectangular room containing six bunks and thirty prisoners. Vapour from peoples’ breath was dripping down the walls. The tobacco smoke was so thick that you moved through a suffocating cloud. It was very hot. Your flesh was damp, your head ached, you felt like vomiting. Someone was always vomiting. They pissed or shat over the chamber-pot, and newcomers, who were placed in that corner, lived in the midst of the stench and filthy carnal noises. People slept on and under the cots. In order to move, a narrow space along the back wall was reserved by mutual agreement, with everyone, seated or standing, squeezing up against his neighbour. It was called the boulevard, and each, in his turn, had the right to take a little walk on it. In the evening, somewhere above, past several floors that were a series of closed universes, one above the next, a brass band belted out catchy dance-tunes for the 4th Special Battalion Club—fellows in uniform and blondes, brunettes, chestnuts, redheads, yes even redheads, wearing too much powder and shoulders draped in those pretty see-through shawls they sell for twenty-one roubles at the Coop of the State Political Administration (GPU).

  A ghost in a goatee looming out of the mist of Chaos, told how he had resold some of those shawls: “There they are, strutting their stuff up there, the little whores, while I’m down here for six shawls! Shit, what a life!” Curses trickled out of his mouth, the brasses blared. Thirty ghosts with voices stifled by the regulations moved about in there, managed to live on top of each other, to scratch themselves without annoying their neighbours too much, to share the tepid water, black bread, and tiny bits of sugar equitably, to kill time, to kill fear. You could have drawn up a rather complete list of possible crimes—sordid ones and noble ones, imaginary, fictitious, real, unimaginable crimes—by cataloguing their stories, which they only told in whispers, for fear of informers.

  “Say, that old fellow over there, to the right of the drooler who’s lying down most of the time—he’s one. They promised him something to make him listen. He listens to everything and then adds some. Wherever he goes, he’ll get his—believe you me.”

  You could have drawn up an even more complete list of useless sufferings and benighted innocence by examining their ghostly consciences a little. The Elder was the biggest—in size—the boniest, and the wisest of the inhabitants of Chaos. Whenever there was trouble, his bushy eyebrows and granite chin would loom out of a haze of thick tobacco and establish order and peace. “I have all of Dostoyevsky in my Chaos No. 16 and more,” he said proudly. “Thirty-one miseries this morning.” Two Trotskyists, one genuine, the other doubtful, were quietly discussing Radek’s objections to the theory of permanent revolution. The genuine one on the cot, the other under it. Mikhail Ivanovich spotted them, but he himself had abjured in the year ’29, admitting that collectivization . . . They proved unfriendly. Mikhail Ivanovich, at a loss, sought and won the sympathy of a pale hunchback who had illegally made soap. The half-dressed ghost who was strolling slowly along the boulevard—fifteen feet six inches from one end to the other—suddenly stopped and said in a rather loud voice:

  “Citizens and Comrades! Excuse me for taking this great liberty. I can’t go on. I request permission to cry. Do you hear, Elder? Permission to cry.”

  The Elder’s steady voice emerged from the shadowy zone beneath the bright rectangle of the window.

  “Cry as much as you like, as much as you can, old man. Here it’s your only right as a citizen. I forbid you to laugh at him, comrades. Only try not to make noise. The regulations are the supreme law.”

  Everyone looked up. The dice and checker games broke off. The dice and checkers, made of dried bread-crumbs, instantly lost their significance. The man (he was no longer a ghost) had a terribly hollow face, the colour of walls, of earth, of bitterness, of madness. There are no words to describe that colour of the human face which no one has ever painted. Bristling with ashy whiskers, that face, and the eyes—holes with glowing depths. The man said:

  “I’m charged with espionage. And I’m only a poor slob, citizens and comrades, I swear to you, only a poor slob!”

  His words were convulsed like a sob, but his face remained dry. He had a bulging Adam’s apple, an extremely thin neck ridged with tendons. After a pause, the Elder replied from the depths of his corner.

  “What you’re charged with is none of our business. I’d even say that it’s none of your business. The authorities know what they’re doing when they throw us in jail. We’re all poor slobs, that’s the saddest part of this whole story.”

  The “spy” looked around him with a kind of chagrin. His slender, dirty fingers moved up and down over his face. Dry, all over.

  “And now I can’t cry. I can’t anymore, citizens, excuse me. It’s over. What a bitch of a life. When will it all end?”

  The Elder replied sententiously:

  “The Permanent Session of Chaos No. 16 continues. Next point on the agenda.”

  * * *

  Mikhail Ivanovich lived in Chaos for seven weeks. Weeks full of small events—the days went by very quickly although the hours were long and heavy—and completely empty in his memory. Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist. Mikhail Ivanovich received a package from his wife: a good sign. It wasn’t allowed in serious cases. The dozen hard-boiled eggs—which the guards had brutally broken and cut up with a dirty knife—proved to him that Ganna had not been fired from the Statistics Bure
au on the 15th of the month. But the next Wednesday he waited in vain, anxious each time footsteps approached the door. Tatarev, the speculator, a flabby ruminant whose corpulent flesh was sagging more and more, received some delicacies which he shared: half for the men in the room, half for himself. He placed his half on his grey blanket and contemplated it. The little slices of rusk seemed golden. They radiated light. Tatarev stared at them until evening and ate them at night, with prolonged sniffing and irritating chewing-noises. Dirty ruminant. Two men had dysentery. They were left for several days in Chaos, which they filled with a fetid stench. Life was passing out of them, visibly, in bloody stools, all day, all night. One was a mechanic accused of sabotage, the other an ex-second-hand-dealer accused of fraud. Twice each day the Elder explained to the Section Supervisor:

  “I’m telling you they’re croaking, Comrade Chief, and that’s against the hygiene regulations.”

  “All right, all right,” said the supervisor. “They won’t croak tonight. There’s no room in the infirmary. Wait till tomorrow.”

  They must have been waiting for death to empty two beds in the infirmary before moving in these stinking moribund men. Upstairs, from nine to eleven, the bands played gallant tunes. The brunettes, the chestnuts, the blondes, even the redheads with brilliant shawls over their shoulders, danced around on the arms of soldiers.

  A shirt was stolen from Aunty-Fat-Fart, a respectable young man accused of occultism on whom nature had inflicted a slightly disproportionate posterior. An aunt kept him supplied with edibles: hence his double nickname. He rejected the idea of a general search, proposed by the Elder, as an indignity. But this provoked long debates, a whole moral crisis in the midst of Chaos, during which the thieves, who made up an organized faction under the presidency of Little-Guy Malych (of the Smolensk Square Marketplace), published their demand that the stolen object be restored during the night, or else they would make a point of finding the guilty party and depriving him of any desire to start in again. The next morning Aunty-Fat-Fart found his shirt at the foot of his straw mattress. It was intact except for a rather large square of cloth.