House of Meetings (10 page)

PART III

1.

September 3, 2004: Predposylov

T
oday there is a piece in the local paper about the wild dogs of Predposylov.

The writer keeps referring to the dogs as “wild” but his terrified emphasis is on their discipline and esprit de corps. He tells of the “coordinated attacks” they mount on stalls and shops, notably on a butcher’s, where they came in through the backyard and “made off” with five meat pies, three chickens, and a string of sausages. The raid, he says, was reconnoitered by the “scout” dog, which barked the all-clear to the “alpha” dog.

Learnedly the writer compares the wild dogs of Predposylov to the “mutant” dogs of Moscow. The Moscow dogs are not called mutants because they have two heads and two tails. They are called mutants because they live in the metro and travel around by train. You may be intrigued to know that I once shared a carriage with a mutant pigeon in the London Tube. It got on at Westminster and it got off at St. James’s Park.

An “official source” is claiming that the wild dogs of Predposylov were responsible for the recent savaging of a five-year-old in a municipal playground. There is a picture of the playground—pretty pastels. There is a picture of the five-year-old—comprehensively mauled. Word of the approach of the wild dogs now empties a street, a square.

They tell me, here at the hotel, that the dogs come down the back alley behind the kitchens, every day, at twenty-five past one. The man said you can set your watch by them. I will be taking a closer look at the wild dogs of Predposylov.

Whatever else you may want to say about the place, Dudinka is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you have timber, and coal, and you’re on a big river, then you are going to get something very like Dudinka.

Dudinka has been here for nearly three centuries. Predposylov has been here since 1944. And it’s not an aggregation, as Dudinka is, but something slapped down in its entirety—Leninsky Prospect, House of Culture, Drama Theater, Sports Hall, Party Headquarters, and, more recently, Social Historical Museum. Why a city? A mining station, yes, a cluster of factories, quite possibly; and, if you must, a slave-labor camp containing sixty thousand people. But why build a
city
so near the North Pole?

When I got out of Norlag I felt, for nearly a year, that I was treading on the eggshells of freedom. That feeling comes over me here, the unpleasant vibrancy in the shins, the squeamish levitation of the spine. Predposylov is hollow. Underneath the city there are mines a mile deep. The ground itself is a shell you might put your foot through. And there is Mount Schweinsteiger, a black egg in its cup, all emptied out.

This isn’t the Second World anymore. It is not even the Third World. It is the Fourth. It is what happens
after
. Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.

I am the oldest man in Predposylov by a margin of thirty-five years.

Late at night I look in on a club called the Sixty Nine (the name refers to the parallel). There is a crooner, Presleyesque (late period), in dramatically swirling white flares. And there are G-stringed waitresses and milling prostitutes and softcore sex films showing on the raised screens. No, I don’t feel disgusted. I feel disgusting. People stare at me, as if they’ve never seen an old man before. Come to think of it, that’s probably true: they’ve never seen an old man before. Other people as old as me, and even older, do exist, don’t they, Venus? But really this whole thing has gone on long enough.

My idea is to get my hangover drunk. But I don’t go through with it, particularly. My hangover is not a hangover. I was mistaken. It is death. There is something in the center of my brain, something like a trapped sneeze. Which tickles. And the air here makes my eyes sting and weep.

On top of that I now live in a state of permanently lost temper. I lost my temper three days ago and have not recovered it. I am also very voluble, and am already widely feared at the bar here, by the staff and by the customers. Having been silent for so long, I’m now like a very much rowdier version of the Ancient Mariner. The arrangement at the bar is that I do all the buying but I also do all the talking. Sometimes I take a wedge of money from my wallet and burst out of the room looking for someone to yell at.

I’ve been reading up a bit, and this will be of especial interest to you, Venus, belonging as you do to a generation of self-mutilators. I mean the historical destiny of the urkas.

Now, I have no intention of reopening our debate (let us call it that) on your chin-stud. The soft underbelly of the ear, certainly—but why the chin? I know: it is strangely comforting (you claimed) to focus all your tender feelings on a particular part of your body, now hurt but soon to heal; and thereafter the implanted trinket will mark the spot of your self-inflicted wound. Very well. But what about the “cutting,” Venus? I’m assuming you don’t do it: your arms, when we meet, are often elegantly sleeveless. But many do. Something like twenty million young Americans, I learn, have regular recourse to the bleed valve.

Urka culture, in its decadent phase, became a lot queerer (the passives cringed, the actives swaggered), making you wonder how crypto-queer it was all along. I feel you flinch. These words are like points of heat on you, aren’t they? Your internal censor or commissar—she didn’t like that, did she? You have a censor living in your head, but it’s not all bad: you also have a beaming cheerleader living there too. So it’s not all bad by any means,
having an ideology,
as you do…Now understand me, Venus. I hear that the aftermath of a gay love-murder is something to see, but the homosexual impulse is clearly pacific.
Crypto
-queers are supposed heterosexuals; they confine themselves to women; and they are among the most dangerous men alive.

Urka culture, moreover, became self-mutilating, with full urka stringency. They took the battle to their very insides, swallowing nails, ground glass, metal spoons and blades, barbed wire. And this was on top of the self-amputations, self-cannibalizations, self-castrations. My country has always been strangely hospitable to self-neuterers. It began in the eighteenth century, a whole sect of them, the
Castrates,
who held that the removal of the instrument was a precondition, a sine qua non, of salvation.

Cutting. It’s done to combat numbness, isn’t it? These urkas were convicts, and fought the numbness of prison. Your crowd: what do they fight? If it’s the numbness of advanced democracy—I can’t sympathize. Other systems, you see, flood the glands and prickle the tips of the nerves.

I had the Social Historical Museum pointed out to me on the way in. It looks like a dry-cleaner’s or a Korean takeaway. And it is shuttered, whether for repair, or for final closure, no one knows.

But when I pass it in the early evening the shutter is up. My very small bribe is accepted by a russety youth in white overalls. He says he’s an electrician. He convincingly toils, in any event, over a succession of fuseboxes, fixing them, or just stripping them. He rents me one of his three powerful flashlights.

Whose careening beam reveals a short arcade, with four displays on either side—
tableaux morts
. The glass of broken bulbs splits and splinters under my feet as I move forward, past the Voguls, the Entsy, the Ostinks, the Nganasani, and so on: the absorbed or annihilated or alcohol-poisoned peoples of the Arctic. Then I come to the Zeks: us. I look round about me at the other figures, the gaunt revenants of the vanished tribes. The best part of you feels moved to take them as ennobling company, in any form or setting. We were all poor, poor bastards. Still, these were remoter multitudes, and would have succumbed, anyway, to mere modernity.

Their molded shapes stroke the flanks of stuffed reindeers and feed scraps of bread to plastic huskies. I am represented, Lev is represented, by the doll of an old geezer at a low table, before an open stove, beneath snow-furred windows, beside a tousled cot. The Entsy have their reassembled medicine-man outfit, their simulated yurt. We have our foreshortened mittens and our dented metal bowl. All this under the reeling and now failing beam of the flashlight.

“We wanted the best,” an old Kremlin hand once said, referring to some other disaster, some other panoramic inferno: “but it turned out as always.”

Middle School Number One is like a laboratory and a control experiment. It is showing how you build the Russian totality.

On the third day we reach the point where the situation of the hostages can no longer be plausibly worsened. Consider. They are parched, starved, stifled, filthy, terrified—but there is more. Outside, the putrefying bodies of the people killed on the first day are being eaten by dogs. And if the captives can smell it, if the captives can hear it, the sounds of the carrion dogs of North Ossetia eating their fathers, then all five senses are attended to, and the Russian totality is emplaced. Nothing for it now. Their situation cannot be worsened. Only death can worsen it.

So death comes at the moment of alleviation, of fractional alleviation—because the Russian totality can’t assent to that. The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many—the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.

You know, I can’t find a Russian who believes it: “We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.” I can’t find a Russian who believes that. They didn’t want the best, or so every Russian believes. They wanted what they got. They wanted the worst.

And now there is a doctor, on the television, who says that some of the surviving children “have no eyes.”

Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy: each of them insisted on a Russian God, a specifically Russian God. The Russian God would not be like the Russian state, but would weep and sing as it scourged.

I am in a terminal panic about my life, Venus; and this is no figure of speech. The panic seems to come…Seems? The panic comes, not from inside me, but from out of the earth or the ether. I outwait it—that’s all I can do. It rolls by me, and then it’s gone, leaving the taste of metal in my mouth and all over my body, as if I had been smelted or galvanized. Then it returns, not the same day, and maybe not the next, but it returns and rolls and billows by me. I think it sweeps the entire planet, and always has. The only people who feel it pass are the dying.

Dead reckoning is a phrase that sailors use—it means the simple calculation of their position at sea. Not by landmarks or the stars. Just direction and distance. I know where I am: the port where I’m heading already shows its outlines through the mist. What I’m doing, now, is dead reckoning. I am making a reckoning with the dead.

There is a letter in my pocket, in my inside breast pocket, which I have yet to read. I keep it there, hoping that it will enter my heart by a process of benign osmosis, one word at a time, on tiptoe. I don’t want my eyes, my head, to have to do it.

But I will open it up and spread it out before me, any day now.

2.

Marrying the Mole

R
ight from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow. I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating. But as your nostrils widen and your jaw vibrates, keep an ear out for my clucks of satisfaction—the little snorts and gurglings of near-perfect felicity. This is a “quiet time,” such as you could often be prevailed upon to have, when, after too much chocolate and hours of screeching and flailing and whirling, you would submit to a coloring book at the kitchen table or a taped story in your room—before going back to more screeching and flailing and whirling.

I am a stranger in a strange land. A freshly glittering landscape is opening up before me: I mean the mundane. God, what a beautiful sight. There will be ups and downs, of course, especially for your step-uncle and his spouse, but for now these lives rise and fall as they will. We no longer
uninterruptedly
sense the leaden mass, the adenoidal breathing, and the moronic stare of the state. How can I evoke it for you, the impossible glamour of the everyday? We are safe, for now; above us is the boilerplate of banality. Like a saga-spinner of another age, I can almost start the business of tidying up after my guests. “Zoya is as forgetful as ever.” “No, Kitty never did find true love.” And this goes on for nearly two whole chapters, and twenty-five years. All is well, all is safe, until we enter the Salang Tunnel.

Before there was that, though, there was this.

As an unrehabilitated political, I was effectively “minus forty,” as was Lev. This phrase no longer referred to the temperature in Norlag on an autumn afternoon. For us it now meant that forty cities were out of bounds. We were also ineligible for such perquisites as accommodation and employment…I went east from Predposylov, all the way to the Pacific (where I had one swim), before I started coming west. It took me two months to get to Moscow. I spent half an hour with Kitty in a suburban teashop called the Singing Kettle, where a lumpy rucksack changed hands. This was the bequest of my mother, who had died, calmly, said Kitty, in the spring. And then for many months I seemed to be shunted around from berg to berg, always arriving in the small hours—the pale bulb over the station exit, the clockface staring elsewhere, the deep stone of the stairwell. Then you moved off into a blackout and a town of tin. The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light. A fully achieved cheerlessness, you may think. Darkness, silence, and a palpable rigidity, as if the buildings were seized not to the surface of the world but to its center. And yet I knew that my footsteps made a sound that was no longer feared, and that the huddled houses would open up to me, if not now then tomorrow. Because kindness was rubbing its eyes and reawakening, Russian kindness—the reflexive care for another’s good. And I was free and I was sane.

I came equipped with some of my sister’s cash, some of my father’s clothes, and some of my mother’s books—namely, an introduction to advanced electronics, an English primer, and the tragedies of Shakespeare in parallel translation (the main four and also the Roman plays, plus
Timon, Troilus,
and
Richard II
). I loved my mother (and she must have scried me here, in minus-forty), as every honest man should and does. And I wondered why it didn’t go easier with women and me…I was always getting pulled in and moved on, of course, but that year became my nomadic sabbatical—paid leave for travel and study, and for internal relocation. The weight of Zoya, I thought, was also shifting. When I settled down at night she was always there the moment I closed my eyes, waking, half-clad, becomingly disheveled, a slight sneer on her downy upper lips, as she appraised me, her escort to oblivion. But what was the matter with her? Amazingly, and alarmingly (this can’t be normal), her effigy, her mockery, had detached itself from the control of my will. In the past, this little mannequin of mine was charmingly rigorous, even draconian in her promptings and insistences. No longer. She was without words and without wants, dumb and numb—unresisting but inert, and almost unwieldably heavy. And her face was always turned away from mine, in illegible sorrow and defeat. I told myself, Well, we’re all free now, I suppose. So I would give it up and desist, holding her for a while in my brotherly arms before I too turned away, into sleep and into dreamlessness.

Such sexual kindness that came my way, during that time, and my generally weak response to it, had the curious effect of imbuing me with material ambition. The Slavic form, the oblong of pallor with the marmalade garnish, the grunts of compassion or acceptance, the rustly whispers: this would no longer answer. The center—I could feel it tugging at me, with its women and its money. And in the late summer of 1958 I started orbiting Moscow.

When Lev reached Kazan he found that his wife and mother-in-law had already withdrawn beyond the municipal boundary. He was expected. My sister told me that the three of them were living in “half a hovel” on the outskirts of another city (smaller, more obscure—admissibly abject), where Zoya had found work in the accounts department of a granary. Old Ester made and sold patchwork quilts, and from her sickbed continued to teach Hebrew (a language illegalized in 1918) to an intrepid enthusiast and his three small sons, who drove out twice a week. Lev wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent much of the day (according to Zoya’s letters to Kitty) in the supine position—understandable and salutary, she said; he was “trying to recover his strength.” I said nothing. In his last months there, Lev was again one of the fittest men in Norlag. Deaf in one ear, and with the fingers of his clawlike right hand, even in sleep, locked in the grasp of an imaginary pickax or shovel—but physically strong. He was apparently maintaining that he wouldn’t work for the state, which, at this point, wouldn’t have him anyway. And the state was all there was. He complained of headaches and nightmares. This was the start of a long decline.

I did better. Living in corners, at first, I poised myself on the northern brink of the capital, and went in every morning on the seven o’clock train. Very soon I had money…In 1940 there were four hundred television sets in the USSR. In 1958 there were two and a half million. Every single one of them belonged to a CP. Dealing with the TV sets of the nomenklatura—this was my day job and my night job, installing them, repairing them, or simply clearing up after them, because they frequently exploded (even when they were switched off; even when they weren’t plugged in). I would soon indulge in an extravagance: the purchase of my Certificate of Rehabilitation. A considerable expense, in those years, because Russia had not become—or had not yet gone back to being—a bribe society. But I spoiled myself.

When I went away, I was twenty-six. I was getting on for forty when I came back. Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time. I mixed with the black-economy crowd, and my girlfriends were of a type. I suppose it would be accurate to say that they were of the type of the croupier. They were veteran molls and flappers with excellent heads for business. And in my dealings with these women, Venus, I ran into a logistical problem which would trouble me more and more. Take one at random. The inventory of her body and its abilities would, of course, be paralleled by the inventory of her past. And her past would be long, and gruelingly populous. And they were still walking, these men: you see, by that time hardly anybody was getting killed. And I had to know about them. All of them. So I would often find myself prolonging a hopelessly soured romance, sometimes doubling its duration, just to make sure I had winkled out that rugged smuggler from Vladivostok, that sleek bijouterist from Minsk.

Between 1946 and 1957 I ate two apples, one in 1949 and one in 1955. Now I went to however much trouble it took to eat an apple every day. The man who usually sold them to me knew that fresh fruit was something of a delicacy in the Soviet Union. But we had completely different ideas about what an apple was. In the queue there were currents of recognition and mistrust. If the line was fifty Russians long, there would be seven or eight who had been away. There would be another seven or eight who had helped put them there. I would meet the eyes of men and women who agreed with me about what an apple was. I ate everything, the core, the seeds, the stalk.

What was needed was a meeting. There came a series of second-hand soundings, of vague proposals vaguely deferred. On his side, a sense of reclusion or paralysis; on mine, something like the fear of the diagnostic. The pocket marionette slept beside me, unfrowning in her white petticoat. Would it wake? Would I want it to?

As soon as I got the keys to the new apartment, I made a move. It was an invitation that no Russian could conceivably refuse: a family housewarming at Easter. The time got nearer: the spring equinox, the first full moon over the northern Eurasian plain, the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday.

I hadn’t seen Lev for eighteen months. He came on ahead into the main room, leaving Kitty and Zoya in mid-greeting at the front door. He registered my smile, my parted arms, but continued to review his surroundings—the rugs, the sofas, the chest-high television in its walnut cabinet, the copper horn of the gramophone. A look of mildly amused disdain did not exactly lend charm or distinction to his plinthless, bump-nosed face. I stepped forward and we hugged. Or I hugged. Fuller, softer, and the smell of unlaundered synthetics. But then Zoya was flooding the room with her presence, and there was champagne, and the seven-hour meal began.

“See what I mean?” said Kitty, later. “She’s bleeding the life out of him.”

Maybe it just looks that way, I said.

It looked that way because Lev kept his good ear (frequently cupped in his clawlike right hand) exclusively trained on Zoya. And she was his interpreter. If you aimed a question at him, he met you with a look of rustic incomprehension, which slowly faded as Zoya, from close range, gave her murmured gloss. He couldn’t hear—and he couldn’t talk. His stutter was thoroughly reensconced. So it sometimes seemed, when she gestured at him (she always gestured) and raptly mouthed, that this was a rite of lip-reading and sign language, and that without her he would be alone in his mutist universe.

I said, He cheered up a bit later on.

“Yes,” said Kitty. “When he was drunk.”

She’s far more beautiful now, I think.

“Do you think? Yes. She is.”

It’s got gravitas. She hasn’t, but her beauty has.

“I saw you were looking at her…Do you
still
?”

No no. Not anymore, thank God.

“Lend him money. Give him money.”

But I said I had already tried.

Our reunions, which became fairly regular, soon assumed a pattern—something like a childish feud of assertion and rebuttal. Usually they came to us, but the laws of hospitality demanded that we occasionally went to them. Lev was very different in Kazan. He dominated. We would meet, not at the hotel where Kitty and I put up, but on a street corner in the industrial district—the zinc fogs of Zarechye. There would then be a longish walk, with the visitors falling into step behind the two hooded duffelcoats, the two pairs of squeaking plastic boots. “Ah,
here
we are. How nice,” he would say, levering open the sodden door of a hostel canteen or a subsidized cafeteria. While we pushed the food around our plates, he questioned us about its quality. Is the horsemeat accurately cooked? The porridge, I hope, is al dente? When that was over, we’d get a glass of spuddy vodka in some roiling taproom or pothouse. And Lev and Zoya would be squelching back to the bus station at half past eight.

These outings, of course, were clearly, almost openly, punitive. Kitty didn’t much mind, and I found it quite funny in a nerve-racking way. It was Zoya who suffered. Fanning herself, she held her head at a prideful angle, taking deep breaths through her rigid nostrils. Her blushes lasted for half an hour, and the great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons. In Moscow I naturally retaliated, taking them to modernist black-economy steakhouses, and on to traditionalist black-economy casinos. The tuxed waiter served us green Chartreuse, and I drank to Zoya’s thirtieth birthday, raising my chalice under spangleballs and twirling mirrorspheres.

Seeing them together, you couldn’t help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment—embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality. I hope I have made it clear that I was always rather touched by my brother’s physical appearance. “A
face
face,” as our mother always called it, though one illumined, in the past, by the smile and the soft blue eyes. And we honor Zoya, don’t we, Venus, for her indifference to the norms and quotas of romantic convention—and all that. But there is such a thing as force of life. And the contrast was like something out of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme or a joke on a seaside postcard.

Jack Spratt would eat no fat. And there was Zoya, seemingly a yard the taller, swinging herself around (this was Moscow) as she laughed, sang, mimicked, brimmed. In those blighted eateries in Kazan, Lev made a big to-do with the bill, intently frowning and shrewdly sniffing over a scrap of paper that said
four dinners,
if that, and suborning Zoya for a strained colloquy about the number of weightless coins to be dropped in the jar. Elsewhere, for every calorie of expended high spirits, Zoya always paid…He still wore his hair cropped, prison-style. In the old days, up in camp, I used to like to smooth it back against the nap—it made my fingertips hum. Now, when I once ventured to touch it, the pale fuzz was damp and flat and had lost the power to impart any tingle. He pulled his head away and slid another cigarette into his crumpled mouth.