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

suspects. My friend, I was in a tight spot. If they had looked a little closer at my Czech passport, I would have been hanged at the least. Another time, in Tiflis in ’21—less dangerous, of course, because the Social-Democrats were very well informed. Noah Agachvili came to see me at the Metek prison. We had known each other in Paris. ‘Your uprising?’ he told me. ‘But my dear fellow, I’m pulling all the strings. I’m putting you out of the way, in your own interest. Say, would you care for a game of chess?’ I must tell you that Agachvili never forgot the checkmate I inflicted on him in Petersburg after the July insurrection in which we had fought against each other at the corner of Millionnaya Street . . . I arrested him myself some time after Sovietization. He must be in deportation out in Uzbekistan right now. In ’24, in Ruschuk, in Bulgaria, a difficult time . . . In ’28, in Moscow, but then I had some good ideological arguments with the judge who interrogated me. Not without effect, since he later turned bad, or rather turned good: he’s out in the Solovietski Islands, five years, Sir, for a far-left deviation.
    “Here, after all, I feel at home, like part of the family. They lock us up. Politics demands it. The time for grain stockpiling is getting close. Obviously it will be a fiasco; the Planning Commission’s audit figures show it clearly enough. So they’re afraid of us, even though we keep our mouths shut.”
    Chaos was a rectangular room containing six bunks and thirty prisoners. Vapour from peoples’ breath was dripping down the walls. The tobacco smoke was so thick that you moved through a suffocating cloud. It was very hot. Your flesh was damp, your head ached, you felt like vomiting. Someone was always vomiting. They pissed or shat over the chamber-pot, and newcomers, who were placed in that corner, lived in the midst of the stench and filthy carnal noises. People slept on and under the cots. In order to move, a narrow space along the back wall was reserved by mutual agreement, with everyone, seated or standing, squeezing up against his neighbour. It was called the boulevard, and each, in his turn, had the right to take a little walk on it. In the evening, somewhere above, past several floors that were a series of closed universes, one above the next, a brass band belted out catchy dance-tunes for the 4th Special Battalion Club—fellows in uniform and blondes, brunettes, chestnuts, redheads, yes even redheads, wearing too much powder and shoulders draped in those pretty see-through shawls they sell for twenty-one roubles at the Coop of the State Political Administration (GPU).
    A ghost in a goatee looming out of the mist of Chaos, told how he had resold some of those shawls: “There they are, strutting their stuff up there, the little whores, while I’m down here for six shawls! Shit, what a life!” Curses trickled out of his mouth, the brasses blared. Thirty ghosts with voices stifled by the regulations moved about in there, managed to live on top of each other, to scratch themselves without annoying their neighbours too much, to share the tepid water, black bread, and tiny bits of sugar equitably, to kill time, to kill fear. You could have drawn up a rather complete list of possible crimes—sordid ones and noble ones, imaginary, fictitious, real, unimaginable crimes—by cataloguing their stories, which they only told in whispers, for fear of informers.
    “Say, that old fellow over there, to the right of the drooler who’s lying down most of the time—he’s one. They promised him something to make him listen. He listens to everything and then adds some. Wherever he goes, he’ll get his—believe you me.”
    You could have drawn up an even more complete list of useless sufferings and benighted innocence by examining their ghostly consciences a little. The Elder was the biggest—in size—the boniest, and the wisest of the inhabitants of Chaos. Whenever there was trouble,