Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics)

by Victor Serge

  “Why are you . . . (she held the word back on her lips for a second) are you so hard, Dimitri?”

  “Why, Galia? Is it possible to be different? You have to be a man, not a dishrag. Aren’t there quite enough dishrags without me? You have to take hold of yourself with hands that are inflexible, remain firm whatever happens. And not spare others. You understand, don’t you?”

  All his tenderness was in the persuasive inflection of his voice, a boundless, stifled tenderness, in the final familiar you.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  And after they had taken a few steps in silence:

  “But if you want, take me in those hands. Try!”

  The water, the north, the spaces—and Galia close to him, walking beside him, tall and lithe. “Galia, you are my joy. You are my adorable fern. Once, near Batoum—that’s a sunny land on the shores of a blue sea—I went outside after a rainstorm. I walked on the red clay, walked, bitter-hearted, mean-fisted, I raged at the world. The bad days had already begun, I was fresh out of jail. And I saw ferns. It seemed to me that they had just shot out of the ground, in a single burst, during the tropical storm. Tall and supple like you, Galia, the ferns opened like fans, with their thousands of perfect little leaves. Proud, like you, my Galia, and like you they didn’t know they were perfect, that they were born of the sun and the earth. I spat on my bitterness. I understood that I loved the earth. Galia you are my fern of the North. You have perfect nails, perfect teeth, perfect nipples, tiny perfect stars in your eyes. I love everything when I touch you. These black waters, these barren plains. These woods, these rocks, the green, cruel earth, this swarm of men who inhabit the earth where we haven’t finished fighting. I love people, even the ones I detest, all of them, down to the last, down to the bastards whom I’d crush like vipers. I love vipers, Galia, because you are my joy, do you understand?”

  What she understood better were his hands holding her and the light in the depths of his eyes.

  “No, you don’t understand. You are simple, as ferns are, and like them you can’t understand words. You are my Galia and you can’t understand. And I can’t explain it to you. (He laughed a fond, caressing laugh.) That would be quite unnecessary.”

  “. . . And I, I want you to talk to me, Mitia, perhaps I won’t understand, but I’ll listen. Try.”

  Dimitri held her close, kissed her eyes, the nape of her neck. He pushed aside a lock of her chestnut hair to graze her ear with his lips—and the trembling in his arms never stopped. Deep down inside him a secret voice was murmuring clearly: “Farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell . . .” The black waters fled silently by. A patina of gold lingered over the rocks.

  IV. DIRECTIVES

  It was not, of course, a meeting of the Politburo even though the leading members were present. (The others didn’t count at meetings any more than they counted at this moment.) Nor was it a preliminary meeting at the Secretary General’s office, since they had met in a small committee-room at the other end of the corridor. A single portrait, Olympian, yet forlorn, for it no longer meant anything, anything—that of Karl Marx. A single colour—the red cloth covering the table. Walls of abstract grey . . .

  The Secretary General took his seat directly under the portrait, his elbow on the table and his pipe in his left hand, holding his yellow-brown eyes in check, a slightly ironic expression on his face and tiny vertical wrinkles between his eyebrows . . . He was wearing his military tunic as always. What kind of manoeuvre was he preparing on the eve of the Party Conference? Whom would he try to manipulate? The vanquished Left in order momentarily to strengthen the Right, repudiated by its own members, in order to bring round his own Left (the centre-Left, get it?) which was beginning to mistrust him? . . . Whom would he aim at with his heavy allusions, blunt-edged like dull axes? (Those axes no longer cut, they crush.)

  “How are you, Josif Vissarionovich?” asked Klim, head of the Army, in a cordial voice.

  “Well enough, well enough,” said the other man with a friendly, shrewd, sidewise glance. (He considered the bowl of his pipe.) “The world is populated by idiots, old man. Difficult to work under those conditions, isn’t it? And you, brother?”

  The Director of Propaganda, a youngish man with a round, hairless face under a shaved head, dressed bourgeois-style in a grey suit which made him look like an American dentist, held himself totally silent, totally alert, for this might be a commentary on his commentary on a remark by the Chief, which was published that morning in the newspapers and immediately censured, by telephone. The High-Commissar for State Security, seated right next to the Secretary General, had pushed his chair slightly back, perhaps in order to cross his legs more comfortably, perhaps in order to mark a voluntary self-effacement which allowed him to speak here only if questioned directly. When he did speak, it was in a deep, singularly persuasive voice which always said extremely important things like: I take full responsibility—With sixty thousand workers from the Special Camps, it will be completed in two months. —Shoot four or five of them, no more. —This information comes from an Intelligence Service report submitted to the Crown . . . He was a middling-minded man, somewhat pale, greying at the temples, with a rather open face, a high forehead, and a sad, thoughtful expression. A little cropped moustache above his lips reminded one that he shaved each morning, like anyone else, looked at himself in the mirror, like anyone else, probably desired a woman or women like anyone else, in a word that he, too, lived an ordinary life. He might have said quietly, in a detached voice, without any emphasis: “In short, I don’t exist. I’m the seventh cerebral circumvolution of the Central Committee. I’m the eye and the hand of the Party.—The hand that searches. The hand that holds the handcuffs. The hand that pours the poison. The hand that holds the revolver in the service of the Revolution.” And if he didn’t say this, not having any occasion to do so, his whole manner expressed it, even his discreetly military bearing, shadow of the great men over whom he watches night and day, formidable shadow over the subordinates he commands in the name of danger and of safety, deadly shadow over the captives he sends to their fate in the name of a magnificent future . . .

  The head of the government frowned: sparse eyebrows, a hard, churlish face with a forehead that bulged too much, eyeglasses that glittered too brilliantly. His head was a ball balanced on a white celluloid collar. This paunchy, wrinkled diplomat, who resembled a rich Antwerp diamond-merchant, a city banker certainly related to the Rothschilds, a banker from anywhere, perhaps eminent, excellent, sentimental, art-loving —perhaps odiously selfish, somnolent in his speciality, with a tiny spiritual candle burning in front of his strongbox . . . This paunchy diplomat who had once been a bold revolutionary, well-versed in theory and capable, in order to save the Party’s bank-notes, of risking his short neck under the gallows of the Imperial Police, said as he opened his briefcase:

  “The Dungans of southern Xinjiang have received six thousand Japanese rifles. Klimentii Efremich, I advise you to send a few aeroplanes to General Ma. We should not let them cut the Urumchi Road, which is indispensable to our smuggling operations.”

  Klimentii Efremovich, Peoples’ Commissar for Defense, a steam-fitter in his original profession, the brawniest of these ministers, corpulent, red-faced, with thick, close-cropped, grey hair, was thinking of nothing. Fingers lying flat on the edge of the table, he was staring at the well-defined half-moons of his fingernails. The half-moons, they say, are a gauge of the body’s reserve of vital energy. A French journal has published a study about this, I’ll have Doctor Levine order it. Although in the last analysis . . . “In any case, I won’t compromise on either cement or steel for the strategic Baikal-North line.” Urumchi, Dungans, Chinese Turkestan, Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, the fortification of the Amur, the Vladivostok submarine-base, the new Kamchatka special labour camp, the report of the military attaché in Berlin, no chance to take a breath before eight in the evening! And shrinking half-moons as well!

  “Maxim Maximovich, I’ll
do nothing of the kind. That question is political: submit it to the bureau . . .”

  The lids blinked over the Secretary General’s eyes, which were red at that instant, and two or three other heads of much less importance imperceptibly registered the blow: the Theoretician, Director of Propaganda, responsible for elaborating ideological theses on the eve of shifts in the line, of conferences, congresses, inner-Party ambushes; the agricultural specialist who alone knew the extent of certain secret disasters which he had succeeded in camouflaging as near-triumphs; the Georgian from Heavy Industry, obsessed by the problem of mechanization. All three told themselves with three slightly different mixtures of satisfaction and anxiety: “Good, there’s going to be trouble this time. Klimentii Efremovich is angry . . .” He no longer takes it upon himself to send ten aeroplanes to Xinjiang: let the Politburo decide, let the responsibilities be shared. He’s had enough of these little perfidies which consist in letting him make decisions in order to hold him responsible later on in order to nibble away at his reputation . . .”

  The Secretary General clearly grasped the meaning of this demonstrative colloquy in undertones between the head of the Army and the chief of diplomacy. Go on with your little skirmishing, comrades, we’ll see eighteen months from now if I won’t have broken your backs or made you as pliant as synthetic rubber. He nonchalantly turned three-quarters profile—pipe protruding, clenched between his teeth—toward Comrade Yagoda, Heinrich Grigorievich, High Commissar for Security, Peoples’ Commissar for Internal Affairs, and, so everyone could hear him:

  “Henry Grigorievich, the Conference is approaching. The Right and the Left will be stirring in little corners. Lock ‘em up, eh, lock ‘em up! And keep me informed of everything.”

  The Left figures in this statement merely as a counter-weight to the Right: and the Right is only mentioned for the benefit of one or two present who are, of course, neither Rightists nor Leftists but within the general line . . . The accent on the words Lock ‘em up has its importance.

  The Heavy Industry man nods his fleshy, flush-faced head: “Very good.”

  “Very good,” murmurs the head of the government with the smooth, round skull on a white celluloid collar—the man Bukharin nicknamed “stone-arse”. And Klimentii Efremovich Vorochilov, sitting up straight in his chair, fingers inside his thick leather belt, also says, clearly—for he’s a good loser and what’s more has nothing better to say—

  “Naturally. Lock ‘em up.”

  On this question at least, unanimity is achieved.

  . . . It goes without saying that the forthcoming Conference will likewise be unanimous in all its manifestations, that it will approve the Chief’s remarks “totally, unconditionally, and from the heart”; that fifteen hundred frenetic hands will applaud until they wear his smiling patience; that a white-turbaned septagenarian Tadzhik poet will mount the platform to read, in an unknown language, the Ode to the Great Shepherd of Peoples who leadeth them toward the valleys of flowers, Oh our beloved of the centuries! Everyone knows the rules of the game. No surprise is possible. But no one can prevent the mechanics in the apparatus from thinking about the things that nobody dares to talk about. And unspoken thought has inexorable exigencies. On the eve of spring planting it is impossible to leave in effect last year’s decisions, which spoiled two harvests, or to leave the regional secretaries, who applied them, in place. It is impossible to move in any direction without appearing to be turning toward the Left or toward the Right; it is impossible to sign any decision which doesn’t imply a tightening, a relaxation, a change, a disavowal of yesterday’s decisions. Thus everything is a trap—an argument for the men of the Left, for the men of the Right, a threat to the reputation of the Infallible One, the danger of a crack in the soil. And who knows which crack will be tomorrow’s abyss? Who knows where the smoking lava will erupt? Watch out, watch out . . . The Secretary General has thirty new nominations for regional secretaries in his brief-case and three decrees:

  On the distribution of the income of agricultural collectives;

  On the system of individual ownership of small and medium livestock within collective enterprises;

  On the temporary level of stabilization of the relation between the commodity-rouble and the paper rouble.

  These decisions signify a step backward from last year’s decisions: concessions to small rural property, thus an evolution toward the policy silently advocated by the Right. Now the Leftist elements, the Trotskyists first of all, will raise their heads, denounce the disastrous slide toward Thermidor, recall what he said in 1926 (etc.) . . . The elements of the Right (and first of all the insupportable Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin) are going to say to themselves—without saying anything out loud, the rascals, for they keep quiet with boundless malice—that they had predicted this in the days when they still dared to murmur anything. A struggle on two fronts: to contain the Right, before taking away their last leadership positions, strike the Left . . . Dia-lek-ti-ka . . . The cadaverous Left, struck down a hundred times already, dispersed among the jails and exiled to the back-country, reduced to the vain satisfaction of a martyrdom unknown to the world . . .

  Let’s be materialists. The greatest danger is not the visible one, it is the one which cannot be unmasked because it does not yet exist in the facts: analysis reveals it lying latent among the masses. The important thing is not what men do nor what they think nor what they themselves think they are, it is what they must accomplish by virtue of the necessity they carry within them. See Marx’s Holy Family, the passage on the essence of the proletariat. The Left, at the very moment it seems done for, is brought back to life by decrees which, tending toward the restoration of private plots among the peasantry, must call forth tendencies within the Party inclined toward the negation of that private property. Even if these tendencies do not yet possess a material existence the very fact that they should exist awakens other, much more formidable tendencies, which negate them. Dia-lek-ti-ka, dear comrade. Affirmation calls forth negation and negation a new negation which is in turn a new affirmation since it is the negation of the negation. Consult Hegel’s Phenomenology. And understand that the Chief of the Socialist Peoples is walking on ground which is ready to break open into abysses beneath his feet; that his practised eye sees hydras springing up everywhere, invisible to all others, ceaselessly cut down—for he strikes!—ceaselessly coming back to life . . . Understand that those who pretend to be his closest comrades spy on his slightest moves, but that the Chief, searching beyond men’s real intentions for those they should have if they dared, suddenly sees potential traitors in his most trusted companions. And everything rests on him, the living keystone of the edifice.

  Thus, at the Conference, in order to pass the thirty nominations for regional secretaries (and the thirty dismissals in disgrace they imply, which threaten three hundred influential local secretaries, three thousand less influential local secretaries, thirty thousand even less influential little secretaries—none of which will be discussed during the session), the Secretary General’s report will have to allude to the clandestine activity of the Left—in reality supported by the Right, since Left extremism can only play into the hands of the Right. And anyway the Left is only a Left in the verbal sense; in reality it’s a Right which is unconscious of itself. And the Right is only a Communist Right in the same sense; in reality it is an unconscious counter-revolutionary vanguard . . .

  * * *

  “Bring me the map,” the High Commissar quietly commanded the Secret Operations Chief in charge of inner-Party deviations.

  Somewhere in the four or fourteen hundred bureaus of the Repression there are large maps of the sixth part of the world covered with names, symbols, numbers referring to file-cards. There, Chernoe is surrounded by a circle drawn in green ink, with the aid of a compass for greater elegance. It encloses several names: Elkin, Kostrov, Ryzhik, Tarassova (Varvara), Tabidze (Avelii) . . . It is just one circle among many, containing a few names among three thousand names: more name
s than there are visible stars in the sky, it is true, but many fewer than there are people of the Left, the Far Left, and the Right dispersed between the Arctic and the Kunlun Mountains, the Tianshan Mountains, the Pamirs, the desert of Kara-Koum; between the lakes beyond the Onega in Karelia on the Finnish border and the Okhotsk and Bering Seas, daughters of the Pacific. It does not arrest the glance, the vague glance of an official absorbed by his inner preoccupation.

  On the scale of the Soviet continent, what is it, in truth, but a mere one of those circles enclosing the fates of a few human beings? And these encircled fates, what is their weight among the hundred and seventy million fates, also encircled, encompassed by a shrewd glance? On the scale of history, of what importance are these little sufferings, this senseless resistance of micro-organisms in a drop of water?

  If the Interim Director of the Department of Inner-Party Deviations had a touch of the poet about him, he would imagine himself peering down at the whole immense country from the height of an unimaginable stratosphere; but his technician’s eye perceives on the map flexible lines invisible to all others. They are the probable curves of the pathways down which dangerous ideas are spreading. They radiate like stars starting from the Central Prisons for political offenders—imperfect isolators in which thought has still not been extinguished. From there they reach the concentration camps, the exile colonies, the shacks on the shores of the White Sea, the monastery on the Solovietski Isles, this forsaken house at the foot of Mount Ararat, that sandy hamlet on the edge of the Hungry Steppe, Golodnaya Stiep, where the author of Theses on the Stalinist Counter-Revolution, published by a handwritten review at Suzdal Prison, has just been sent for three years. But during the course of a transfer, at the Cheliabinsk Detention Centre in the Ural region, he met two men and a woman to whom he explained his theses in person. Today one of the two men is at Yakutsk in the North of East Asia; the other is in Karelia; the woman, arrested again in the fifth month of exile, is in the Verkhne-Uralsk Central Prison. And it is probably through her that the prison came to know these theses whose influence can be found in those of the Left of the Trotskyist convicts’ faction . . . Thus another star lights up in another prison. From here, the heresy shines out again over the whole USSR.