Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  Happiness returned to him, summoned by merit. From the construction sites of the Special Purpose Concentration Camp of the Baltic-White Sea Canal, where one hundred thirty, one hundred seventy, perhaps two hundred thousand workers of both sexes were forging themselves new souls filled with enthusiasm for work (all you have to do is survive) as they completed a historic labour more memorable than the digging of the Suez Canal, than the digging of the Panama Canal, than the digging of the Saint-Gothard tunnel, than the draining of the Zuyderzee; comparable to no other, and planned by the far-seeing genius of the most admirable Leader—from those grey, frozen excavations over which dull glints of steel hung indefinitely, Comrade Fedossenko, reintegrated into the regular ranks by reason of the perfect execution of the plan by the convicts entrusted to his command, arrived one May day at Chernoe, Black-Waters, to take over the administration of the GPU Special Service: Party morale, surveillance of deportees, secret operations. As he took leave of his subordinates he received from the hands of engineer V. V. Botkin of the Technician’s Shock Brigade of Bureau No. 4, an inkwell of iridescent quartz hand-carved by convicts who, paying their thanks to an unforgettable educator in the person of Fedossenko, thus demonstrated the completion of their civic regeneration.

  The iridescent inkwell now contained a large drop of red. Through a transparent tulle curtain, Fedossenko glanced at the paths traced by the feet of pedestrians crossing the square around the little bronze Lenin. Elkin and Ryzhik were passing, bareheaded, leaning slightly forward into the fresh spring breeze. The new Deputy Chief of the Special Service took up his binoculars to follow them more closely. We are the vigilant, the responsible, the powerful, the cutting edge of a new world emerging from chaos. We are order. I’ll show you.

  Comrade Fedossenko immediately set about correcting abuses. Summoned to his office, Avvakoum Nestorovich, Chairman of the Soviet, signed a decree forbidding citizens with the right to vote to house transported persons, known as “special settlers”. This, so that the pernicious influence of expropriated peasants should not develop among the local population. It was a little, grey poster containing several spelling errors. Old men with white beards, several of whom resembled Tolstoy; mature men, bearded and hairy, who had resembled no one but themselves since the days of the Scythian invasions; young peasants, some athletic, some emaciated; women dressed in homespun, clutching infants to bosoms barren of all happiness (with other children clinging to their skirts)—this whole silent crowd, stinking like corpses and animals, gathered in front of the entrance of the Security building. They waited a long time in the biting cold of that day. Then they dispersed in small groups through the alleyways, straggled out along the paths leading to the little wood which stands on the other side of the river, and disappeared inexplicably, as if absorbed into the earth and the rocks. It is true that no one paid any attention to them. The women and urchins roamed from door to door on the outskirts of town where the open spaces begin, pleading in the name of Christ, the Son of God, and your soul’s salvation, for a crust of bread. The extraordinary thing is that they ended up by getting it, even though bread was selling for four roubles a pound, eight times its legal price, and there wasn’t any even at that price. At the edge of the wood, the Tolstoys took axes and cut down young trees, still shimmering with sap, to cover dugouts cut into the earth by their sons. In the evening the edge of the steppe was fringed with columns of smoke. Two families lived under an outcropping of rock on the bank of the Black-Waters, sheltered from the wind by the bluff. The Soviet published a new decree forbidding the special settlers to cut timber, which was collective property and henceforth sacred.

  Fedossenko, flushed with attention, studied the political deportees’ mail, secretly opened on arrival and departure. He also took courses, by correspondence, from the Higher Institute of the Security Department. Lesson XXII, Investigative Methods in the United States. Psychology, XIth Lesson. The Psychology of the Professional Mind. A. Military officers. Leninism. IV. The Teachings of Comrade Stalin in the struggle against Trotskyism. B. On the unequal development of the Capitalist countries. This learning reduced to sections, paragraphs, key sentences, boiled down to twenty-line summaries for each lesson with questions to ask yourself on your own (see Answers on the back page of the book) did not teach him how to decipher unconquerable souls. Fedossenko examined a postcard covered with tiny writing, signed Ryzhik, through a magnifying glass. The glass magnified the loops of the letters, revealed the texture of the cheap yellow cardboard, but the subtle spirit of the text escaped it. “Eh! Psychology be damned!” thought Fedossenko. “I’ll still make you sweat blood.”

  * * *

  The town got news at one and the same time that the District Cooperative had received a tank truck of kerosene oil and that the Tobacco Trust store was putting twelve cases of Red Factory cigarettes up for sale at sixty-five kopecks a pack in the morning. To tell the truth, they were unsmokable but what won’t people smoke! Any kind of straw is smokable. Any alcohol is drinkable, even the kind that rots your guts, wrecks your vision, turns your skin green and your lips purple. We’ll drink poison by the glassful, as long as it distils heat and strength inside us so we can holler, cry, sing, laugh and collapse out of the world, on the side of the road, insensitive to the cold, warming the earth ourselves. Three lines of people formed on Comrade Lebedkin Street. The one in front of the bakery contained the oldest women and the frailest girls, for bread was obtainable. The grey card entitled you to it. It was simply a question of waiting your turn to avoid being put off until the next day. Those at the head of the line read (written in pencil on a piece of paper stuck to the door) “the coupon for the 20th is void”. Barely murmured, these words passed from the first old woman to the last little girl and were instantly taken in by a hundred anaemic beings glued together against the wall. No one was surprised. It was normal procedure to “skip” a day every ten days so that the 10th, the 20th and the 30th of each month were breadless. But when one woman said that next month’s cards would be denied to non-workers belonging to workers’ families, except for children under fifteen, there were worried sighs. Eyes dilated with fear in the mould-tinged faces of old women.

  The queue for oil formed in front of the closed shop. No one knew for sure whether there really would be oil, whether it wouldn’t be sent instead to the co-op reserved for responsible officials. Like the last time, remember? When we spent the whole night waiting for it under compassionate stars and told crime and love stories—only to see the tank truck pull up next morning in front of the Security store! Certain things were definite: there wouldn’t be enough fuel for everyone. They wouldn’t give out more than three litres per person. Wives and daughters of former Red partisans, armed with the latest certificate (the clerk checks the seal to see if you have passed last year’s purge-review—he’s a clever devil) would be served out of turn. The wives of fishermen belonging to the prize-winning brigade would complain, but they would be sent packing. Let them wait their turn like everyone else. What good is the prize brigade anyway! It can’t even fulfil its production quota. Everyone knows that.

  The initiative of the masses was demonstrated in the organization of the queue. You could leave your can, mark it with a stone, and your place thus reserved, go elsewhere—as long as you served your turn on guard. For they’re capable of not delivering the fuel until tomorrow . . . I’m telling you, my husband is a truck driver. He knows there are no trucks available. He said so . . . That’s nothing. The night will be warm. A few of us will wait up . . . At midnight, when the moon reaches its zenith, the young women, faces all white as if their souls had been brought to the surface of their skins by invisible caresses, will begin to sing softly:

  O night of May, O lover mine,

  I’ll give to thee, I’ll give to thee,

  On the little bench . . .

  (Here a pause. Wait and see what these teasing girls will give their lover on the little bench.)

  I’ll give to thee my white handkerchief.<
br />
  Are you satisfied, is he satisfied? (Spoken) “If you want something more, go run after the white wolf.”

  The night watchman, Foma, will suddenly step out of the shadows, the barrel of his rifle behind his shoulder, his beard tinged silver. “That’s enough for me, girls . . . (Enigmatic) And the white wolf knows who I am.”

  “Tell us a story, grandfather.”

  “Dance a little, grandfather.”

  One hand on his hip, the other held high, old Foma will dance, barely moving in the supernatural moonlight, his heels marking the rhythm of the soft singing of the young girls, worn-out women and little pregnant ones, ugly girls living this moment as if they were beautiful. This will last us for the coming night. Let’s not anticipate joys to come. Each hour’s sorrow is sufficient unto itself.

  Right now the third queue, for cigarettes, is the most interesting since the cigarettes are there. And there aren’t enough for the whole town, that’s certain. If the company of special troops takes half of them again, what will be left over for ordinary citizens?

  The company parades down the street, in ranks of three, indifferent to bread, fuel, cigarettes. Tightly-belted forest green tunics, fingers on rifle triggers, hoods and gas masks whose mica circles give an unknown expression to the human eye. Sweat soaks their faces. The northern air is crystal-clear, but these Red soldiers are already marching through the acrid fogs and mustard gas of future wars, breathing chemical air filtered through the ringed trunks that turn them into monsters.

  “Thirteen roubles for a gas mask,” they say in the bread queue. “Looks like we’re gonna have to buy one. There’ll be an order from the Soviet. They’ll deduct the price from our salaries.”

  “I don’t want one. Let the gas come, if that’s life.”

  Other low voices repeat, a chorus of murmurs: “If that’s life. Yes, that’s life.”

  Avelii joined Rodion in front of the Tabak-Trust. They were about sixtieth in line and there were at least a hundred customers behind them. Far back in the queue, Elkin, who has abandoned his projected figures for fishing plans eighteen months from now for this singular occasion, waves to them cheerfully. “In prison where I once did time,” says Avelii dreamily, “they put gas masks on the poor fellows to take them to their execution. So they wouldn’t cry out, that was the idea. Only for each, it was one mask down the drain.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They sell ‘em for thirteen roubles. They cost three, and they’re not worth anything. Anyway, even without ‘em, the poor lads don’t say anything. They go quietly. I only saw one who was scared stiff, a Kazakh, ex-small-businessman. He hid himself under the cot and he wouldn’t come out. He was moaning as if he had a toothache. The guard dragged him out by the hair and slapped him about a bit to bring him round. He turned quiet and well-behaved like all the others. Left without a word. Only turned around to pass his canteen to another Kazakh.”

  The thirty trunked monsters halted, on command, in front of the Special Battalion dining hall. How easy it is to turn them back into men! Thirty masks with dead round mica eyes fall across thirty chests. There are thirty sweaty young heads held high in line.

  “I got fired this morning,” says Rodion.

  “You too?”

  Avelii had lost his job the day before. This morning at seven o’clock as Rodion was putting on his work overall, the gang foreman beckoned to him. “Don’t bother. Pack up your things. It’s not my fault, you understand. I have an order. Hurry up. Goodbye brother, good luck.”

  Rodion crossed the market square musing—empty-handed, an odd smile on his face. Bastards. Bastards. “Gonna have to live on their fifteen rouble allotment. Nine roubles for bread by the card leaves six. The corner at Kurochkin’s costs thirty. Whose house can I sleep at?” Then Rodion made a deal. Having sold his three day’s supply of bread, he drank a big glass of brandy and kept back four roubles for cigarettes and postage-stamps. When you’re not doing anything, you can survive pretty well on three hundred grams of bread a day: he would go drink sugared tea at Varvara’s—sugar is nourishing.

  Their turn was coming up, they were inside the dark shop, six feet away from the counter. “Elkin’s right. The Special Service wakes up when springtime comes. We’re in for trouble. What do you think of the comrade who just arrived?”

  “Kostrov?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good comrade, educated, you know. It’s a pleasure to ask him things. He has answers for everything, a real Marxist.”

  “One of us, or what?”

  Rodion hesitated a little. “He signed something, I think, but he’s one of us.”

  The clerk was tossing the little packs of cigarettes out of the cases with both hands and pushing them at the customers as fast as he could pick up the money. “Six packs a head, three roubles ninety and I don’t give change. Hurry up. Hurry up, citizen. Next, next, I say.” Rodion pushed three yellow bills and some coins across the counter. The clerk swept it all aside. “Next.”

  “What? What?” said Rodion.

  Behind him people were grumbling because he wasn’t moving on fast enough. Some carters pushed past him and were served in front of him. At the end of a crushing minute, a tall redhead breathed into his ear in a thick voice. “You can see, there’s none for you, eh, kill-joy. Better beat it, you’re blocking traffic.” Avelii had no time to open his mouth. The clerk thrust his flat, underfed bulldog’s face at him: “There’s none for you, try to understand, eh.” The whispering around them got louder. People were glad. Two less to get served ahead of them—and then, they’re the workers’ cigarettes. The counterrevolution has no right to them. As they left, the two lads shoved someone—hard. “What happened to you?” Elkin asked them. “I don’t suppose the C.C. has ordered a major price-cut?”

  He understood instantly. “Let’s go into the sunshine, little brothers.” He was like a big brother between them, a head taller, rugged and cheerful, built for walking against the wind. Avelii wondered if he shouldn’t have pushed in the clerk’s snarling yap with three punches from his bony little fist. “Above all none of that!” exclaimed Elkin. “Firstly, the citizen in question, albeit a perfect specimen of shit in every particular, can’t do the least thing about it. Secondly, you’d get yourself sent away for three years to dig canals or build pyramids. On a charge of assault and battery on a unionized employee. Thirdly, the newspapers would say that the Trotskyists are making attempts on workers’ lives and preventing the equitable distribution of the products of the Tabak-Trust.

  “No, my boys, learn to live. We are very likely only at the beginning of the journey. In the first place, we have white bread to eat. As for cigarettes, we’ll buy them in the private sector of the economy, there are some right here.”

  There were, in fact, some—in the dark hands of a ragged, sunbrowned curly-headed urchin of under twelve. He was sitting on the threshold of what was once, before the earthquakes, the house of a wealthy man.

  “They’ve got to live somehow, the youth of the highways, they’re the future of our country. He might be a future Beethoven, this little black fellow. You like music, don’t you old mate? Beat the drum! Or a future great Commander. I hope he becomes one—one who will take the Kremlin again, lead a new march on Warsaw, and Shanghai and many other things we can’t imagine. Isn’t that right, you old rascal? Where’re you from? From Baku, you say? You seem to me to have many talents. We’re going for a drink. If in the next hour you bring me a pocket handkerchief and something else stolen from someone important and well dressed, without leaving the street, I’ll give you three roubles. Got it? I’m in the business myself. I had a share in the looting of the Empire.

  “We’re right, comrades. Right, like stones are right to be hard, like the grass is right to grow, for the Revolution doesn’t want to die out. Without us, there would be nothing left of it but reinforced concrete, turbines, loudspeakers, uniforms, victims of exploitation, humbugs and informers. Now you see it, now you don’t! But we’re here—like th
e ocean floor, and the trick is spoiled! Well that little thief is right to steal. Just as we’re right to exist—since it’s the only way he can exist. And he’s right to exist, for his rags alone are enough to give the lie to a huge falsehood.

  “Let’s rest in the sunshine for a while. Maybe tonight they’ll lock us up in the cellar of the Security building. Keep that in mind and you’ll savour this sunshine all the more. I’m teaching you wisdom! One day you’ll lie down on a cot in a disheartening darkness. Then remember the sunshine of this moment. The greatest joy on earth, love apart, is sunshine in your veins.”

  “And thought?” asked Rodion. “Thought?”

  “Ah! Right now it’s something of a midnight sun piercing the skull. Glacial. What’s to be done if it’s midnight in the century?”

  “Midnight’s where we have to live then,” said Rodion with an odd elation.

  The boy with the hands of a blackamoor caught up with them before they reached the tavern. “Get your three roubles out, Uncle!” he cried triumphantly, waving a dirty handkerchief and a card.

  “You little rascal! Do you know you stole the Party card of an important official? I’ll put it in the mailbox myself. You don’t need it. Neither do I. We belong to another species. As for that rag, throw it into the gutter and promise never to blow your nose in the linen of bureaucrats. Here are your three roubles. Catch!”