Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (11 page)

A feminine form, swollen by old felt boots, furs, an old cloak, appeared at the turning in the rocks. “Greetings, greetings.” Varvara was the last to arrive, for she worked at the fishermen’s cooperative distributing four hundred grams of black bread per work-card, salt, rough-cut tobacco, matches, and nothing more. (The promised sugar is two months late, the coupons for it are apparently going to be voided. As for soap, the Regional Centre has been announcing a case of it for seven weeks, let’s keep hoping.) The grey fur of her old wolf-skin cap blended with her hair. Yet her face retained a touch of beauty which was almost invisible, superfluous.

Elkin said:

“Comrade Ryzhik’s report on the joys of boreal springtime is adopted without debate, unanimously with one abstention: mine. I have ideological reservations. Let’s proceed with the agenda. Reports on the Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator, the agrarian question, the United Front in Germany. You have the floor, Varvara.”

* * *

“In a few months the Left-Communist Sector of the Verkhne-Uralsk Central Prison has grown from 45 to 96, an increase in strength of more than 100% due to the arrests carried out in the large centres on the eve of the XVIth Anniversary of the October Revolution. On the other hand, the unorganized Party sector has gone up from 8 to 160. These are the orthodox people under suspicion who don’t realize what’s hit them and still keep on with their stupid platitudes. This twenty-fold increase shows us the rising curve of repression directed against the unstable elements of the ruling bureaucracy. These two figures, of which the first is the index of the resistance of the conscious proletarian vanguard to the Bonapartist dictatorship and the second that of the accelerated liquidation of the Party, together demonstrate . . .”

“What do these figures demonstrate together, that each of us doesn’t already know? We live on that knowledge alone, that’s the reason we’re here, and knowing it has lead us to this slow death. The Revolution is showing a false face which is no longer its own. It is refuting itself, negating itself, cutting us down, killing us. You see it, but can you believe it? We used to feel infallibly victorious. Where’s the mistake? Everything we loved is now reduced to a despicable sham. I ask you to weigh the thesis and the antithesis, to think through every word. Be careful not to underrate the dictatorship of the proletariat even if it is sick, if it loses its head, if it is iniquitous.”

“Be careful of yourself, comrade, your illusions are quite understandable, but you’re getting drunk on words. Are we
Enragés, Equals
, or proscripts of
Prairial?”

“Drop your historical analogies, old man: They have nothing to do with Marxism. It’s Lenin’s ‘Who will carry if off’ that is the point today; and it’s not settled yet.

“In this connection, comrades, I request a three-second recess for
Karl’s
latest revelation (may his revolutionary’s soul rest in peace: his body is rotting slowly in the toilet of the General Secretary’s office). The ‘who will carry it off’—we’ve known that for a long time. The ‘who will carry it off to the grave’—we know that, too. But ‘when will
his
turn come?’ That’s what we don’t know . . .”

“. . . The Left-Communist sector of the prison has established fraternal ties with the Anarchists, who joined them during last year’s second hunger strike and this year’s first. The June strike was lost through a miscalculation. Scurvy had been rife during the winter; they should have taken the weakness brought on by the terrible cold into consideration. Several comrades were very ill by the seventh day. The strike committee proposed calling off the strike on their own responsibility, but they themselves were removed that night by surprise and taken off to the detention centre.”

“Removed? Why didn’t they resist?”

“Summoned separately to the prison office for negotiations around two in the morning, assaulted in the corridor, gagged, bound, kidnapped, what . . . The second committee, set up the following day, was unable to assume its functions because it was sequestered in a distant building and kept under surveillance. At six in the evening the commandant of the prison received telegraphed orders to resort to forced feeding. Old Kikvadze resisted. They sent to the madhouse for a strait-jacket to control him. His lips were in shreds from the food-pipe. He finally fainted, so that they couldn’t feed him. The other sick people decided to resist by force. Then a character from Moscow arrived, sent by the Special Collegium, who asked to meet with delegates.

“ ‘The Special Collegium of the State Political Administration,’ he says ‘has decided at this time to refrain from increasing by administrative sanction the sentences of prisoners who have served their terms. Your demands are satisfied, your strike is thus pointless.’

“The comrades answer him: ‘You’re giving in today because you’re afraid of our deaths. We don’t believe a word out of your mouth. We got your number a long time ago. What guarantees will you give us for the future?’ He was a real bastard, decorated with three Orders of the Red Flag won in the offices of concentration camps. He puts on a dignified expression and: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat keeps its hands free.’

“ ‘That’s a fact,’ says Grisha, who was swimming in slow exasperation, ‘and here’s the proof!’ With that he gives him a slap in the face but stumbles (you don’t hand out slaps very well on the ninth day of a hunger-strike) and misses him—luckily, for it would have caused us a fresh lot of trouble.

“The sick were extremely low. Four barracks declared an immediate end to the strike. The Far Left put out a protest bulletin in order to link this ‘shameful surrender’ to ‘centrist hesitations.’ The Left decided to form an organizing committee responsible for the preparation of a general movement to continue to the end at any price. The strike strategy shows the necessity for simultaneous actions in all the prisons, but it will take at least a year to perfect, if it can be managed. A young mechanic from Tver (an ex-member of the Worker’s Opposition won over to Trotskyism who then joined the Democratic Centralist group—I can’t recall his name) refused to recognize the decision that was taken, continued the strike on his own for several days, then tried to slash his wrists. What became of him? I don’t have any idea . . .”

“When all is said and done, it’s always the same story, for years now: only the dates and names change. Do you remember Tobolsk Central Prison, Ryzhik? Do you remember the Ufa Prison, Elkin?”

“Those were blessed days. I had promised the warden to have him made Director of all the Sanatoria in Crimea. He let my mail through and brought me brandy. There’s one fellow whom History cheated . . .”

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?”