Read Online Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) by Victor Serge - Free Book Online Page A

with a tender vertigo. It was because you were crossing borders within yourself. Never had you appeared lower to yourself than during those sky-drenched moments. From that day, your courage and rectitude end. No more heights. Now you will walk through the flatlands of cowardice. You had just made up your mind to break, and you kept repeating to yourself: resistance is impossible, impossible —when Mount Metek appeared, divided into blocks of glowing-red stone and near-black shadow by the light of the setting sun. The foam-flecked Kura was refreshing to see: women were washing out clothes on its banks—Tamaras, Tatianas—and you spoke to them with tenderness, you whose presence they couldn’t even imagine, peering down at them from a height of one thousand metres, saying: “Young women, I’m a coward, don’t love a man like me.” At the barred windows of the castle there were certainly prisoners’ faces raised to watch the flight of the R. 2 in which you sat strapped, helmeted, intoxicated with speed, with your secret governmental message from the Central Committee of Georgia to the C. C. of the Federal Union—and your little defeat, your vile little defeat . . .
    How beautiful the earth was! Steppes, then forests: a living, moving map, rich colours, oceans of foliage stretched to infinity. You were both blinded by the sunlight. Gregor turned around, shouting against the thundering of the propeller—and suddenly you were falling, falling with magnificent slowness. The hidden forest revealed tall outcroppings of rock divided into blue and gold by amazing shadows. A river of sky flowed around them. And then you nearly cried out with joy at the idea of falling, while fear made your limbs quiver with mild hysteria. The loss of the secret envelope would have put off for a few more days a few more iniquities in the vertical fall of a revolution. The propeller, which had fallen silent, exploded into life again. Rostov appeared on the horizon like a great heavy shadow concentrated on the earth—into which the sea seemed to plunge like a twisted steel blade.
    We were beaten in 1927. Sacha returned from Wuhan. You were running around to workers’ rooms in the Zamoskvarechie district with typewritten papers in your tunic. With every flight of stairs you climbed, you discovered more of the old misery. The victorious proletariat back in the slums. Time blackened the wallpaper, squiggles of smoke were visible on the walls in corners and you could imagine the naked man separating from the warm woman in the night to burn out bed bugs. A sordid life. Five or six faces were asking: What news? Each had come by circuitous routes in order to throw “shadows” off the track. You thought: “ They know everything anyway: besides, among these five there is certainly one double-agent. Which woman? Which man?” The news, comrades, is this: Trotsky was able to speak for five minutes at the C. C. in the midst of shouting and catcalling. Twenty-nine expulsions at the Bogatyr factory. Wuhan is disavowing the Changsha peasant uprising. Treint is coming over to the Opposition in France.
    It was the only piece of good news for the moment and much discussed, but you knew that in that vast shipwreck it was really of no importance. You didn’t say so, you did your duty, you explained Treint’s theses. The only real hope was a return to illegality. Fill the jails with devoted men since everything is going to pieces. Start again from the beginning. And then? Then they’ll begin killing us off. They won’t make the mistake of letting us live on in prison. Then what? Hold out anyway. Maybe a few will survive. But the cowards? Those who are tired? Sacha, back from China with memories full of blood, spoke to you that night as you drank the last of the tea at opposite ends of a battered sofa. (Books were lying pell-mell on the shelves around you. The desk was dead—ashes and rusty pens. What’s the point of putting anything in its place since