Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge

Author:Victor Serge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-796-9
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2014-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

Varvara reads aloud, smiling, looks at Katia’s picture, puts the poetry book down on the bread. “And yet I don’t understand.”

Lightning-bolts, forever momentary.

Come illuminate these bright recesses of the mind . . .

Take up each object, prod it shrewdly. Let it reveal itself. No signs on the oily paper or on the scraps of newsprint used to wrap the bread. Avelii examines it line by line: there might be nearly invisible dots sown among the letters of the text. Sometimes pencil marks, sometimes pin pricks, spaced out among the letters to form a text. They know that trick. They know almost every trick. But if it wasn’t for their stupidity, their negligence, the impossibility of checking everything, no mail would be possible. The tears in the newspaper might contain a clue. Nothing.

“You know, Varvara, they often change the wrapping on packages as a precaution. A poor method.”

Varvara leafs through The Arabian Nights, disappointed by the illustrations which imitate old Persian manuscripts. The eyes of the beautiful Sultanas are quite as inexpressive as their round breasts. “It’s a good edition,” she says. Avelii takes the book from her hands, tests its weight, prods the ornamented cover.

“If there’s any mail, Varvara, it must be in here. That’s what I think. And there must be mail, for we can’t go on living like this. My God! Five months without news. Rodion has begun to think all by himself. He needs ideas so badly that he invents them. You can imagine what he invents. Pass me the scissors, will you? To Hell with their Academia bindings created to corrupt the taste of the proletariat. And if it doesn’t contain anything, don’t make long faces at me, O.K.?”

Nothing in the outer cardboard box. “Neither theses nor counter-theses. If that’s the way it is, dear comrade, I really feel like tearing your book into tiny shreds which we will burn later.” It’s not a pretty sight, a new book, a precious object, at the mercy of scissors.

Varvara begins to banter sarcastically: “You see, that’s what they do to people. They suddenly pluck out their little soul, with all its little freshly imprinted stories. They slice through the middle and they see there’s nothing inside. They even realize that it wasn’t a soul but something entirely material, useless and empty.”

Avelii answers: “Don’t talk nonsense. There’s nothing apart from the body. But the body is damned intelligent. And clean inside, full of marvellously beautiful blood.”

He was about to throw the massacred book away. He removed the back cover, which seemed too thick to him. “Well, what was I telling you?” From the torn linen emerged, folded lengthwise, the thin slips which Ivanov had covered with microscopic calligraphy in Projects Office No. 4 of the SPCC, Special Purpose Concentration Camp, on Kola Peninsula. Avelii could not have felt more joy watching his trained falcon swoop down on a hare in the sweet-smelling grass.

“What were you saying, Varvara: Lightning bolts, forever momentary . . .”

“I can’t believe my eyes,” said Varvara sadly.

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