Free Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) by Victor Serge

tactics, the repudiation of errors due to lack of understanding, to the petty-bourgeois spirit, to the counter-revolutionary influence of ex-comrades now denounced and repudiated. He wrote it out with his features clenched, his mouth pursed into an expression at once bad-tempered and scornful. When he had finished, he swallowed his saliva, began a smile which ended in a yawn, stretched, and heard himself say out loud:
    “Go on, you rotten fraud!”
    The spyhole in the door opened half way. “It is forbidden to speak aloud, Citizen.”
    Kostrov answered with a kind of bluster:
    “Here is my letter to the C.C., Citizen.”
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II. BLACK-WATERS
    The ice-floes break up late on the Chernaya—toward the middle of May. By then the snows have disappeared, except in a few shady glens. Water stands in shimmering pools on the plain, and whole flocks of birds come to splash and frolic in them. With its white cover gone, the earth is conquered by water, wings, and sky. Where do so many birds come from? Some fly in V-formations. Others gather in clouds which sweep, swirl and spread like nebulae. A calm joy stretches between earth and sky. At the end of the day the people of Chernoe gather on the bluff overlooking the river to contemplate the expanses where spring is coming to life. These are careful people, like the muddy earth they tread, like the whole town with its log houses which time has faded to the colour of ash.
    An old woman murmurs: “The grebes are back . . . ( Sigh .) In my day, little father . . .” Were there more grebes in her day, spreading their wings over the steppes? A man, cap pulled low over his eyes, huddled in his short russet-coloured fur jacket, speaks aloud to himself: “It’ll be another week yet before the Chernaya is completely open.” Young voices protest: “Don’t lie, citizen, a week! You crazy?” Another week would be too long for that lust for life that comes over you after the snow melts, after seven cold months that chill you to the very soul. (“All the more ‘cause you don’t eat; nothing but sour cabbage soup and rye bread—it all adds up to shit and there’s not enough of it; I ask you, Citizen, can your body survive this cold without consuming any fat?”) The sky takes on a pearly, almost azure hue; a kind of peace descends from it. You might mistake it for hope.
    “If you let yourself get taken in,” snickers Avelii, a young man with a sharp profile. “Spring, little brother, means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression. Repression means no wheat in August, no bread in December. We have all the luck.”
    And Rodion, continuing his own thought, replies inconsequentially:
    “. . . After the shock brigades they’ll have to think up something new to make people work. Look at that plain. There used to be roads. See, over there, and over there, too, toward Bear’s Woods. There ain’t any more roads ‘cause there ain’t any more carts ‘cause there ain’t any more horses.”
    Two lads. They’re wearing sheepskins—one grey the other brown—and old caps with ear-flaps plastered over their skulls. They have a way of looking at you with a tranquil mocking expression. Their cocky air makes them seem different right off from all the others in town. We’re proletarians, see! Also we’re under the special patronage of You-Know-Who. So we have the right to think a little. We’re paying for it. And the right to speak, since we’re already deportees—and not the kind who repent, who approve of everything, who say polite thank-yous when the boys from Security tickle them in the butt with a boot-toe. We’re the only free men on socialist soil—fresh out of jail and ready to go back in, required to register every five days, provided with administrative papers like this one:
    Does not take the place
    of a Residency Permit
    USSR
    RSFSR
    State Political Administration