Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (31 page)

* * *

A man was squatting in front of a fire of twigs cooking some sizzling, red meat hanging from a sort of tripod. As his eyes opened, Rodion saw that man from behind. On his head he wore a fur cap made of a bristly animal-skin. Rodion’s first thought was mingled with saliva, for the grilled meat was giving off its pungent smell in the sunlight. Rodion recognized the golden sand on which he was lying—naked, exhausted, in a vast warmth. The man, as if sensing that glance on the back of his neck, spun around on his bare heels. Rodion saw a low forehead over which hung curly hair the colour of dirty straw, a wide mouth, a fleshy nose marked by a scar, and crafty, little pointed eyes as blue as the sky.

“So you’re back?”

Rodion recognized the sing-song accent of the Black-Lands folk in the man’s speech.

“Thank you,” he said simply, and he added, after a pause, “comrade.”

“You can take your comrades and shove ‘em up your arse. What kind of comrade are you to me, you poor half-drowned fool? What makes you think I’m not going to turn you in to earn the bounty? You think it’s not obvious you escaped from the camp? Which brigade were you in? The Yagoda Brigade? The Enthusiasts’ Brigade? Triumphant Socialism? Screw the lot of them, citizen. If you don’t want me to chuck your arse back in the water, you better not call me comrade. In this country, you’ll learn there’s no more anything: neither socialism, nor capitalism, bunch of syphilitic whores. There’s only you and me, and if that makes one too many, the question will be easy to settle without consulting the masses . . .”

As he delivered this half-mocking, half-angry monologue, the man was carefully broiling the meat. Rodion, comforted by his deep bass voice, tried his limbs: they were working, almost painful. A sudden confidence in the universe made him cordial.

“I’m sorry. Thank you anyway. That smells good.”

“That smells of broiled wolf-cub,” explained the man. “I killed it this morning in its lair. It bit me on the thumb, the little rascal. I didn’t think it was so quick. There are lots of them here. I’m a wolf to the wolves, I am. I catch their scent, I lie in wait for them, I know all their tricks, and they haven’t learned mine yet. You see, I’m the more cunning in this class struggle . . . So I eat them. (
His eyes were laughing
.) I spot the lair. When the she-wolf goes off to hunt, I sneak up. Gotta work fast. I whistle, I imitate the little growling sounds the she-wolf makes, like this, listen . . . I don’t know whether it makes them nervous or charms them. The wolf-cub comes up; he shows the end of his snout, all pink and grey, then a suspicious puppy eye. I whistle again to give them confidence. I let him see my left hand, that intrigues him. He’s never seen a human hand, he can’t suspect that it is made to kill in a thousand ways. They’re innocent, wolf-cubs, they’re fools, and my hand looks like a harmless animal, it’s pink. So he licks his chops and he jumps at it; to play, I think, for he’s not yet strong enough to be mean; but I’ve got another hand, I have, and I break the wolf-cub’s neck with this . . .”

This: a piece of flint similar in every respect to the weapons of prehistoric cave-men.

“That’s my productive system. I don’t need any cooperatives, I don’t.”

With his fingers the man took a pinch of coarse salt and sprinkled it over a slice of meat which he practically threw in Rodion’s face. “There, eat.” Rodion was so weak that he attacked that sand-covered meat with his teeth, right on the sand, without even trying to take it in his hands, so as to move as little as possible . . . Time passed, perhaps a long time. The wolf-cub’s flesh had a delicious taste of blood, a taste of sunlight, a taste of life.

“How did you pull me out of the water?” asked Rodion at last.

Sitting with his legs tucked under him, Samoyed-fashion, the man went on devouring broiled meat, which he held with both hands. Bones cracked under his teeth. His hair was hanging over his forehead and eyes. His eyes sparkled with good humour: less, though, than his teeth. He replied only after a long while, after he had spat onto the sand some chewed tendons and some little crunched bones whose marrow he had sucked.

“First ask why,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe I was more interested in your bundle than your pretty face. If you had had a good pair of boots I’m not sure I wouldn’t have thrown you back into the water. What is your life going to be good for? I don’t need it, and the entire world doesn’t give a damn, believe me, just like I don’t give a damn. I really don’t know why I didn’t just let you sink and drift slowly down to the White Sea. Maybe that would have been better for you, one more drowned man never hurt anybody. And nobody will ever ask him for his passport. Maybe I needed your company, arsehole. Not for long.”

Rodion was listening in a dream. Such utter translucence reigned on the green fringe of the bushes. He asked:

“What’s your name?”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “Ivan.”

“Ivan Nobody?”

“Exactly.” Ivan got up, sated, smiling a funny smile of well-being. He walked around for a while between sand and sky. He filled the vast landscape: his low forehead, his rounded shoulders, his heavy jaw, his vigilant little eyes, their blue cheerfulness sharpened by slyness. Stockily built, broad and heavy, giving an impression of enormous strength now that he was standing up, dressed more or less like a hunter from the Taiga. He returned toward Rodion, who lay naked, limbs outstretched, shivering. From his full height he looked down at Rodion and suddenly declaimed in a joking schoolboy’s voice:

“That’s from Pushkin,” said Rodion, at the edge of unconsciousness.

“And Shakespeare?” said Ivan, with an imperceptible trace of mockery, “do you know that name?”

“No . . . I’ve only read Hegel, Hegel . . .”

“Possible. But you have fever, my drowned man.”

How much warmth there was in his voice now . . . Rodion, feeling faint, closed his eyes. The man kneeled down next to him and with both hands began covering the lad’s naked body with sand. Rodion felt that material warmth over all his flesh. His features relaxed. His childish face emerged from the sand. The light, passing through his eyelids and his sleep, extinguished all thought within him. He was coming back to life.

. . . He spent several days with the man, Ivan, who said he did not know the name of the river nor that of the other river whose junction Rodion had to find, a two or three day’s walk upstream. There, big rafts loaded with logs were always floating downstream; by riding on one for three days you get to a town, a town without a name or memories either, for this man was wary of men, of language, of numbers, of memories. “Rivers have no names in nature,” he said mischievously. “Drowned men don’t have names at the bottom of the water, and they all have the same blue faces. The wolves don’t know that they are wolves. That’s the way things are . . .” He led Rodion to his lair, a comfortable burrow, large and quite dry, which had been dug right into the earth of the steppe. It was well exposed to the sun, yet well hidden by the bushes, and it was so well laid out that Rodion thought several men must have worked on it. Two cavalry coats and two heavy winter quilts made a comfortable bed. As he fell asleep there for the first time, Rodion felt a fear: why shouldn’t Ivan smash my head in tonight? And he immediately answered himself: a refugee from a firing-squad and a refugee from a drowning—we were made to sleep together underground. What good would my death be to him? What good is my life to me? Nothing has any importance. No more problems. The simplicity of things made him slightly dizzy. The earth was vast, vast . . .

They parted without shaking hands or pronouncing any useless phrases. Both were taciturn, probably because the sky was white and heavy that day. Nothing to say to each other on the edge of the beach where a gloomy heath began. Rodion set off toward the dark line of distant mountains. Ivan was holding a stump of a carbine with a sawed-off barrel and a sawed-off stock, which dangled at the end of his arm. When Rodion was about a hundred metres away, Ivan raised up that mutilated weapon and shook it up and down over his head for a long while. He seemed to be sending incomprehensible signals. Rodion, who was walking rapidly, turned around several times to answer him by waving his cap.

* * *

The other nameless river was wider. A stunning breadth of heavenly blue flowed between sheer cragged cliffs of purplish-blue rocks. Tree trunks were floating in it. A wisp of smoke curled up over a patch of woods. From that point on, Rodion’s whole being was expectant, on the lookout. Hidden on the bank, which was covered with tall reeds pointed like swords, he watched the majestic passage of a huge, well-constructed raft carrying a complete building made of logs. The men aboard were talking very loudly in a language he didn’t understand, Finnish, or Samoyed or Syzran or Mari. They were blond men, rather well dressed in sweaters and old rusty leather—probably Communists. The next raft appeared several hours later, just before sunset, through a cloud of gnats. It was small, less heavily laden. Two young lads were steering it, standing, with long poles. Rodion hailed them; they came in to shore with a sort of indifference, welcomed him aboard without saying a word, and handed him a pole. All this took place automatically. As soon as the sun had set, the rocks took on the colour of blackened blood; the river became hostile, the gnat-bites painful. Then the two lads broke into an old convicts’ song:

They kept repeating this stanza—the only one they knew—until they could no longer go on: from fatigue, from dull sadness. Rodion sang along with them as he worked his pole, for they needed to pay strict attention in order to prevent the current from dashing them against the rocks. At critical moments the three lads, leaning out over the dark waters, would arch their backs, absorbing the impact against their chests with a single gasp, and one of them swore. When the moon rose they again took up the song of chains and sorrows, of love and heartbreak, until the hour when, exhausted, they moored in a sort of creek in order to sleep. At dawn, Rodion told the two lads he had money, and they sold him a hunk of black bread for three roubles. As a precaution he left them a few hours upstream from the town. He leaped adroitly onto the bank. The two lads, having turned their backs, never saw him again. The surface of the water was shimmering, totally calm, and the motionless shrubs were reflected in it, emerald green.

“An escaped man,” said one, “God go with him.”

“An escaped man,” echoed the other in reply, “The Devil take him.”

The town began with a row of poor log houses standing in little yards enclosed by dilapidated fences. A little girl bounded out, barefoot. Her feet were black. Rodion halted, enchanted. He felt naïve joy, tinged with another feeling—bitter, almost terrible—as he gazed at those familiar houses, always the same, with thatched or planked roofs so weather-beaten that you could see daylight through them. What town was this? He didn’t dare ask. He mingled with the crowd, searching for a street-sign, a notice posted by the local Soviet. But this was a town without street-signs, without posters, perhaps without a name, an ordinary little town with ruined churches: the same empty cooperatives as everywhere, a line of people in front of the closed shop of the
Tabak-Trust
, a miserable market-place where everything—the horses’ long drooping heads, the people’s faces, the rare sacks of grain—had the same colour of dried mud . . . On the red gauze banner strung across the main street, Rodion, who did not wish to read them, made out two faded rain-washed words:
Enthusiasm, Industrialization
. . .

His hungry wanderings led him to a vast building-site bristling with scaffolds and tall skeletal walls of red brick. Trucks were jouncing drunkenly through mud-puddles without even startling the little, resigned horses harnessed to ancient carts. Casks of cement were bursting through a rail fence, and men were bustling clumsily about among the trucks, the horses, the carts, the cement, the scaffoldings. On a door Rodion read:
Now hiring: labourers, masons, carpenters, stucco-workers and others—bed and soup
. He pushed open the door. Inside it smelled of cheap tobacco, fresh lime, manure, benzine; it was full of hoarse voices arguing about an incident involving a missing cart-load, a drunken driver, twenty-seven roubles, the Control Commission. Rodion asked for a job as a mason-tender.

“Fine. If you know the work, we’ll give you a chance to prove it in the second brigade, ‘Socialist Emulation’. Its output is nineteen percent higher than the average for the plan. Three roubles and sixty-five kopecks a day and soup from the technicians’ canteen—you’re lucky. Only you better meet the quota. We carry out the plan here, brother: we don’t want any loafers. If you don’t work out, tomorrow I’ll send you over to the fourth, the gold-brickers brigade: black-list, two roubles forty-five, and sour-cabbage soup—Diarrhoea Brand.”

“I’ll meet the quota,” said Rodion with an imperceptible touch of self-mockery. “I’m class-conscious, citizen. What are we building here?”

“District Headquarters for State Security, comrade proletarian. So the work must be done properly, you understand. There’s competition with the prisoners’ brigades.”

The crew that Rodion joined included a woman who taught him to carry the maximum load of solidly-stacked bricks on his back and shoulders, to carry them to the top of the scaffolding fast enough so that the masons of the fifth prisoners’ brigade never paused for an instant in their methodical labours. There was no time to breathe, to exchange a few words, or to smoke, and anyway smoking was forbidden, and anyway you lost your taste for everything. To keep up your spirits, you chewed bad tobacco—twenty cigarettes for sixty-five kopecks. The woman must have been about thirty. She hid in order to drink. When she saw Rodion’s face drenched with sweat, pinched like the face of a dying man, she joined him on a shaky platform from which you could see a soft landscape of humble roofs and light-green prairies blending off into the horizons. The woman held her brandy-bottle out to Rodion.