Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Kremlin, 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