House of Meetings (14 page)

Zoya was standing in the shadows by the armchair that held her coat, her hat, her gumboots. She wore stockings and bustier and nothing else—madamlike, then, but innocent of all calculation and allure. In her raised hand she held her skirt and was wetting a finger to remove some thread or speck from its surface. As she methodically dressed herself, and then sat, back erect, to attend to her makeup, I moved around her rubbing my hands. Yes, I did try to speak; now and then I groaned out half a sentence of abjection or entreaty. Once or twice her eyes happened to pass over me, without reproach, without interest, without recognition. All that issued from her, every ten seconds or so, was a spitting sound, unemphatic but maddeningly punctual. As when a child discovers it can do something new with its mouth—hold its breath, pop its lips.

A new feeling was being born in me. At first it seemed at least vaguely familiar and, one supposed, just about manageable—no more, perhaps, than a completely new way of being very ill. I sat down at the table, under the light, and examined it, this birth. It was invisibility. It was the pain of the former person.

Fully clothed—coat, hat—she came out of the shadows. She stood in profile, an arm’s reach away. A minute passed. I could tell that she was considering something, something grave; and I could tell that I myself was not in her thoughts. She took one of the long glasses and shook the water out of it. Then she poured from the squat decanter—four inches, five—and drank it all in as many swallows. Zoya shuddered to the ends of her fingers, spat, breathed out, spat again, and made for the door.

Now the gravamen. Hie thee to the dictionary—that’s a good girl. Remember: every visit adds another gray cell.

Ten days later I was in Chicago. Like anyone else who had worked in state armaments, I was a “defector cat. A”—no great matter; but it took me quite a while to open up a channel to my sister, and not until March did I hear anything from home.

Her letter was written in haste, Kitty said, because my courier was sitting in the room, and staring at her, as she wrote…She offered wan congratulations on the success of my transposition. She went on to say that Lidya was clearing out the little house—she was moving in with her parents. There were various “effects” of Lev’s that would be passed on to me, by this route, as soon as they arrived from Tyumen. Kitty said that she too was considering a change of address: she was going to live, as a paying guest, in her lover’s two-room apartment. It didn’t sound like a good idea, she knew, but she expected to be lonelier, now, than formerly.

As for my other sister-in-law, my sometime sister-in-law, there was, alas, “grave news.” Kitty said that for months all her notes went unanswered. Her phone calls, sinisterly, were received by “a machine,” and were not returned. She even went to the Embankment, and through a slit in the door had a whispered minute with the maid, who said her mistress was “unwell,” was “indisposed.” Kitty heard nothing until she saw it in the paper—a lone paragraph at the foot of the page. On the night of February 1, 1983, the fifty-four-year-old wife of the beloved playwright Ananias threw herself off the Big Stone Bridge. There was blood on the ice of the Moscow River.

As forgetful as ever, Zoya left some articles of clothing in my rooms at the Rossiya. The wrinkled petticoat and the torn pants I found in the bathroom trashcan. The gumboots, in their transparent polythene pouch, I found on the sitting room floor. So I was obliged to imagine her, that night, uncertain of foot in the iron rink of the capital. Zoya wasn’t very steady on her legs (no mountain goat), because as a child, if you remember, she had never learned how to crawl.

PART IV

1.

From Mount Schweinsteiger to Yekaterinburg: September 4–6, 2004

H
ere they come, the wild dogs.

There are eight, no, nine of them, mongrels of different strains, different sizes, some shaggy, some close-coated, and all of them, like all dogs everywhere, descended from wolves. They move
slowly,
fanned out over the breadth of the alley, so that every scent can be reconnoitered, reported back on. Oh, how their noses love the smells. And there is time, too, to squat and squirt, to lay down the middens. Both sexes are represented: they are the brutes and the bitches. One is pregnant, heavy—big with the wild pups of Predposylov. She comes last, under light escort. As they approach I raise my arms to shoulder height, to make myself yet bigger. One ratlike, almost mouselike beast snarls up at me but cringes at once when I snarl back, and scurries by. I follow.

Just around the corner one of their number, on the flank, swoops down on a dropped shopping bag (of frayed straw, abandoned, perhaps, by a fleeing grandmother) and alerts the others with a shoutlike yap. Nine questing sets of jaws, nine quivering tails. But the bag contains only fruit, and they move on, one returning quickly and taking an apple in its holster-shaped snout.

As they file across the street there is a boost of speed from an accordion bus, and its front wheel strikes the gravid bitch with a sodden thud. A fierce cheer comes from the passengers (with a yodel in the middle of it, as the bus hits a pothole). The dog is dead or dying in the gutter. The others prod her with their noses, they lick her face; one tries to mount her, his back legs tense and trembling and, for a moment, meanly old-manlike. They leave her and move on. They look back, and move on.

The wild dogs of Predposylov don’t look wild to me. They look trained—not by a human, but by another dog; and this superdog taught them all he knew. I no longer believe that they savaged the five-year-old in the pastel playground. The five-year-old, I conjecture, was savaged by a German shepherd belonging to the security forces, as a prelude to a riotous and scatter-fire attempt to kill every pet in Siberia.

Yes, I’m re-Russified. But what can you do? The rule is:
This thing, like every other, is not what it seems; and all you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks
. Every Russian I talk to, without exception, tells me that Middle School Number One is the work of the government. How would it go? For reasons of state, it would begin. For reasons of state—and then, in Aesopian language, the word is handed down. For reasons of state, we need something that will strengthen national support for the war on our southeastern border. Exploding apartment blocks and airplanes aren’t any good—we need something worse than that. We need a lower low.

Of course, this is just a theory. And one that betrays symptoms of paranoia, at least to Western eyes. Still, the fact that every Russian spontaneously and independently subscribes to it:
that
is not a theory.

You will think me tendentious, my dear. But this is what they look like.

The planet has a bald patch, and its central point is the Kombinat. There are no living trees in any direction for over a hundred versts. But some of the dead ones are still standing. Typically, two leafless, twigless branches remain; they point, not upward or outward, but downward, and meet at the trunk. Seen from a distance, the trees look like the survivors of a concentration camp, wandering out to be counted, and shielding their shame with their hands. Above them, the watchtowers of the cableless pylons.

You will think me tendentious. But that is what they look like.

That’s what they look like from the slopes of Mount Schweinsteiger. I pace its modest gradients with my limp and my cane. Twice, now, I have postponed the flight to Yekaterinburg. There is a place I need to find, a place I need to be, before I go.

2.

Statistics, Silence, Necessity

T
he graph consists of two lines that toil their way from left to right. The upper line is the birth rate, and slopes downward; the lower line is the death rate, and slopes upward. They converged in 1992. Thereafter the line of life drops sharply, and the line of death as sharply climbs. It looks like a three-year-old’s attempt to draw the back half of a whale or a shark: the broad torso narrows to nothing, then flairs into the tailfin. Russian cross.

Fatigue, undernourishment, cramped housing, and the nationwide nonexistence of double beds: these help. But the chief method of birth control in Russia is abortion—the fate of seven-tenths of all pregnancies. Seven-tenths of these abortions will be performed after the first trimester, and in an atmosphere of great squalor and menace; the need for further abortions is often obviated by the process (variously though inadvertently achieved) of sterilization. Failing that, there is always child mortality: the rate has improved in the last five years and is now on a par with Mauritius and Colombia.

A man in Russia is nine times more likely to die violently than a man in Israel. Failing that, he will live about as long as a man in Bangladesh. There is a new demographic phenomenon: the all-babushka village, where the young are gone and the men are dead.

It is thought that Russia could become “an epidemiological pump.” The northern Eurasian plain will be girded by a cordon sanitaire, and visitors will arrive dressed like moonwalkers.

Over the next fifty years, in any event, the population is expected to halve.

There is a young family here at the hotel (they await permanent accommodation): burly husband, burly wife, small boy. They always wear tracksuits, as if expected to be ready, at the snap of a finger, for a run or an exercise drill; but all they ever do is eat. And they are silent and dedicated eaters. I sit with my back to them in the dining room. You hear nothing from their table except the work of the cutlery and the clogged or slurped requests for more—plus the faint buzzes and squeaks of the various gadgets the boy is plugged into (headphones, game console), together with the restless scraping of his illuminated rollerblades. I wonder if they ever discuss the kind of deal they have entered into. The uninterrupted ingestion of food makes it easier to maintain the silence—the conspiracy of silence.

Mother and father are destined for the Kombinat. Their natural strength will be extracted from them, as nickel is extracted from ore. Youth will be smelted out of them, and they will be duly replaced—perhaps by their son and his future bride. Wages are high. Careers are short. But now they have a health plan, and you’ll be getting assistance with that respiratory disease, that early-onset tumor.

What I am seeing, I suppose, is capitalism with a Russian face, a statist face. The state has given up on nationalization and the monopoly of employment. It is now just the major shareholder, the chief oligarch—the autogarch or olicrat. And the state must continue to be hard and heavy, because topography keeps trying to tear Russia apart.

Ananias was wrong. Free men and women will come and use up their bodies in this frozen and venomous bog—at the market price. Russians will come to Predposylov. What they won’t do, being Russians, is go away again. The Kombinat tries to shed them, these middle-aged gimps and wrecks. It gives them shares, valuable in Moscow, but they sell them here at the scalpers’ stalls. It gives them apartments in the cities of the south, but they sell them too, and stay. You see them in the street, ready to hunker down, any day now, for a night that lasts four months.

Lev didn’t
want
to come to Predposylov, though by the end, it’s true, he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave. The rationale for slave labor, by the way, was as follows. I was clinically speechless for a week when I found out what it was. The rationale for slave labor? It helped keep the people terrorized, and, far more importantly, it made money. But it didn’t make money, it never made money. It lost money. Everyone knew this except the General Secretary. From which one concludes that there was a conspiracy of silence. “If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionovich.” But no one ever dared.

Ananias was wrong. Ananias the widow. The widow Ananias, now of course long dead.

You and I once spent an hour on this question, for some paper of yours at CU. Do you remember? They phrased it differently, less judgmentally, of course, but here’s what it amounted to: in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, who was more disgusting, Russia or Germany?
They
were, I said.
Much
more disgusting.

But something follows from that. They were much more disgusting than we were. Still, they recovered and we did not. Germany isn’t withering away, as Russia is. Rigorous atonement—including, primarily, not truth commissions and state reparations but prosecutions, imprisonments, and, yes, executions, sacramental suicides, crack-ups, self-lacerations, the tearing of hair—reduces the weight of the offense. Or what is atonement for? What does it do? In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004, is still the same offense.

Yes, yes. I know, I know. Russia’s busy. There’s that other feature of national life: permanent desperation. We will never have the “luxury” of confession and remorse. But what if it isn’t a luxury? What if it’s a necessity, a dirt-poor necessity? The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go.

If it was up to me, I’d demand a formal apology, in writing, for the tenth century; and for all the others in between. But no trembling relicts, made of smoke and flame, are going to rear up and wring their hands. No Russian God is going to weep and sing.

Say sorry, someone. Someone tell me they’re sorry. Go on. Cry me the Volga, cry me the Yenisei, cry me the Moscow River.