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

Faith, divided the Church, and betrayed, banished, hunted, insulted the true faithful. A new Patriarch, organizing his grudges along with his administration, remembered Seraphim, had him brought to the Kremlin, offered him bread, salt and forgiveness with Christian unction and told him: “Repent, Seraphim, and your sins will be forgiven and I will bless you.” Seraphim cried out: “Repent, yourself, or be silent, shameless servant of the Evil One!” They chained Seraphim in the cellar of the Monastery of the Trinity. Winter was eternal there. He could hear the bells of the false faith ringing. But he needed only to close his eyes to see the pacifying Holy Face. Then, shivering, his teeth chattering, but his will stretched to the limits of strength, he would repeat: “Lord, I will never deny Thee, I will never deny Thee, I will never deny Thy people.” He died there, after years of obstinacy, tormented by nostalgia for the open spaces and for the children of his children. They sometimes tell the story of his life, with many other details, on long winter evenings.
    These tales inspire Tikhon, the disabled pensioner, who fought through the whole Ural campaign under Blücher in 1918, and he in turn tells of battles, of captures, of how he was shot on the bank of the Bielaya (The White River). The officer told the line of prisoners: “Jews and Communists, three steps forward.” Three men stepped out. Tikhon stepped out with them—next to them—a blond lad in ragged clothing. “You’re neither a Jew nor a Commissar, you son of a bitch! So you’re looking to stop a bullet, eh, you little snot-nose!” they jeered. “I’m for the Commune, your Honour.” said Tikhon, who didn’t exactly know what it was and whose guts were shrieking with fear. Fear saved him by toppling him into the ravine a hundredth of a second before the bullets would have hit him. Now he’s the one who sells cigarettes—when there are any—in the booth of the Regional Union of Co-ops (Ray-Koop-Soyouz) on the market square. You still find significant names among the population. There’s a Seraphim Seraphimovich, a woman named Nadiezhda Seraphimovna who sells salted cucumbers, a Liubov Seraphimovna who is a Party member. The Secretary of the Soviet is named Avvakum Nestorovich.
    Between Seraphim and Tikhon two centuries empty of history passed over Chernoe, Black-Town, Black-Waters. The Zyrians besieged the town at the beginning of the XVIIIth Century. They shot reed arrows tipped with fish-bones. (But maybe they weren’t Zyrians). The town burned down every thirty years more or less, so that the generations have succeeded each other there from one fire to the next and all its improvements are connected with great calamities. The Revolution happened all by itself. Once the police chief had taken flight, a political deportee assembled the doctor, the agronomist, the vet, some school-teachers, some fishery-workers, a carter and a postal-clerk, and explained to them that henceforth they formed the Provisional Self-Administration Committee of the town and the district. The agronomist, Babulin, a thick-set man with a low forehead, said: “I understand. Res-publica , the public thing. That’s marvellous. What are we going to do?” The postal-clerk suggested composing a message to the provisional government of Prince Lvov; the doctor, ordering the vaccination of the school children.
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    The great storm, centuries in preparation, began with total simplicity. Where are the actors of those bygone days and who remembers them? Each year’s thaw renews the earth. The political deportee, a Social-Revolutionary it seems, unless he was a Populist, a Maximalist or something else, was named Lebedkin. He had long been a well-known figure, dressed in his dark, fur-lined cloak in winter and in white peasant blouses belted with a silk cord in summer, with his stringy beard and his half-joking half-professorial way of talking. He had been rereading the same