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

(GPU)
    Delegation for Chernoe
    Certificate issued to Citizen .................. deported by administrative action by virtue of a decision of the Special Board of the State Security Dept. Required to appear every five days at the office of the commander. Forbidden to exceed the town limits by more than five hundred metres. Signed: The Delegate of the SSD, the Secretary .
    (Seal, date, order number in red ink.)
    The worst is getting by without galoshes when the snows are melting; and getting by without eating when you’re hungry at night.
    “Didya’ ever notice, Rodion, how hungry you get in the Spring?”
    The forest line grows darker at the horizon. A little over two centuries ago, peasants fleeing serfdom built this little town on the bluff overlooking the river bend. They thought they had gone far enough into the inclement North to be forgotten. They were only half right, but what could they do? However far you flee, your grandchildren will have to flee one day in their turn.
    From the Embankment of the Revolution (but there is no embankment in reality: there is only a vague abandoned road, its surface abruptly broken by outcroppings of black stone, running along the bluff, one hundred metres above the river), you can see the lines of plains and woods rising like a sea for fifty kilometres around: no sign, no habitation, no fire at night. At night there are no lights showing except in the sky, but during the great thaws or on marvellous summer evenings all shimmering with a universal caress, the stars shine with a supernatural brilliance which heightens your taste for living.
    Chernoe means Black-Town and Chernaya, Black-Waters. The river gets its name—despite the energy of its rapid, slightly turbulent waves endlessly rolling scraps of sky—from its floor of dark pebbles, visible from close up through the clear water. Under the town there are more outcroppings of black stone broken off by some geological catastrophe. Thus revolutions shape the earth, burying, crushing whole forests rustling with birds. They tell a story about the founder of the town, Seraphim Bezzemelny (Seraphim Lack-Land), who fled un-belief even more than servitude. When he arrived on this bluff with Nadiezhda, his wife, and their sons, their daughters-in-law, their grand-children, he cried: “Praise Thee, Lord! Thy Will is done! On these black stones we will build our house. On these black stones we will eat our black bread of the time of Antichrist.” Earlier, in a dream, he had seen himself seated on a peak overlooking the empty North and he had foreseen his death and he had said: “Remove not this cup from me, for I want to bear witness to my faith.” The Lord heard that prayer. It’s the only one he hears for certain over the centuries in this land of the Russias where everyone drinks his bitter cup—never doubt it—down to the last drop. And it’s not over yet.
    Tall houses built of tree-trunks rose out of the rock. Pale golden wheat rustled in August. The bare feet of young women carrying kegs of limpid water from the Chernaya twice daily, bodies braced under the yoke, cut a twisting path into the grass, the earth, even the rock. They still follow it two hundred years later. In the summer sun, children with gleaming bodies dive into the Chernaya, drunk with chill and daring, for there are treacherous whirlpools which every year suddenly carry some bold tousled head down to fatal depths. They find the little bodies three kilometres downstream on a sandbar where they seem to be sleeping desperately, washed and bruised in an unreal blue light. In the days when the town was founded, it enjoyed ten years of peace. Then the great heresiarch was burned at Pustozersky (Desert-of-Lakes), at the limit of the Nordic world. The great persecuting Patriarch died persecuted, and his remains, transported on a boat, descended another river amid the prayers and sobs of the people.
    Seraphim Lack-Land prayed for that man of faith who had attacked the