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

his bushy eyebrows and granite chin would loom out of a haze of thick tobacco and establish order and peace. “I have all of Dostoyevsky in my Chaos No. 16 and more,” he said proudly. “Thirty-one miseries this morning.” Two Trotskyists, one genuine, the other doubtful, were quietly discussing Radek’s objections to the theory of permanent revolution. The genuine one on the cot, the other under it. Mikhail Ivanovich spotted them, but he himself had abjured in the year ’29, admitting that collectivization . . . They proved unfriendly. Mikhail Ivanovich, at a loss, sought and won the sympathy of a pale hunchback who had illegally made soap. The half-dressed ghost who was strolling slowly along the boulevard—fifteen feet six inches from one end to the other—suddenly stopped and said in a rather loud voice:
    “Citizens and Comrades! Excuse me for taking this great liberty. I can’t go on. I request permission to cry. Do you hear, Elder? Permission to cry.”
    The Elder’s steady voice emerged from the shadowy zone beneath the bright rectangle of the window.
    “Cry as much as you like, as much as you can, old man. Here it’s your only right as a citizen. I forbid you to laugh at him, comrades. Only try not to make noise. The regulations are the supreme law.”
    Everyone looked up. The dice and checker games broke off. The dice and checkers, made of dried bread-crumbs, instantly lost their significance. The man (he was no longer a ghost) had a terribly hollow face, the colour of walls, of earth, of bitterness, of madness. There are no words to describe that colour of the human face which no one has ever painted. Bristling with ashy whiskers, that face, and the eyes—holes with glowing depths. The man said:
    “I’m charged with espionage. And I’m only a poor slob, citizens and comrades, I swear to you, only a poor slob!”
    His words were convulsed like a sob, but his face remained dry. He had a bulging Adam’s apple, an extremely thin neck ridged with tendons. After a pause, the Elder replied from the depths of his corner.
    “What you’re charged with is none of our business. I’d even say that it’s none of your business. The authorities know what they’re doing when they throw us in jail. We’re all poor slobs, that’s the saddest part of this whole story.”
    The “spy” looked around him with a kind of chagrin. His slender, dirty fingers moved up and down over his face. Dry, all over.
    “And now I can’t cry. I can’t anymore, citizens, excuse me. It’s over. What a bitch of a life. When will it all end?”
    The Elder replied sententiously:
    “The Permanent Session of Chaos No. 16 continues. Next point on the agenda.”
    * * *
    Mikhail Ivanovich lived in Chaos for seven weeks. Weeks full of small events—the days went by very quickly although the hours were long and heavy—and completely empty in his memory. Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist. Mikhail Ivanovich received a package from his wife: a good sign. It wasn’t allowed in serious cases. The dozen hard-boiled eggs—which the guards had brutally broken and cut up with a dirty knife—proved to him that Ganna had not been fired from the Statistics Bureau on the 15th of the month. But the next Wednesday he waited in vain, anxious each time footsteps approached the door. Tatarev, the speculator, a flabby ruminant whose corpulent flesh was sagging more and more, received some delicacies which he shared: half for the men in the room, half for himself. He placed his half on his grey blanket and contemplated it. The little slices of rusk seemed golden. They radiated light. Tatarev stared at them until evening and ate them at night, with prolonged sniffing and irritating chewing-noises. Dirty ruminant. Two men had dysentery. They were left for several days in Chaos, which they filled with a fetid stench. Life was passing out of them, visibly, in bloody stools, all day, all