House of Meetings (5 page)

I’m sorry.

“It’s not
your
fault.”

Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism. By which I mean an abnormal emphasis on the
folk
(the Great Russians), together with an abnormal xenophobia. Pogrom was coming. So there were sensible, indeed cynical reasons for Zoya to look kindly on me. It was one thing to stage conspicuous entanglements with your fellow bohemians, and especially your fellow Jews; it was another thing to be the devoted companion of a tall and handsome war hero, with his medals and his yellow badge, denoting a serious wound. Not much fun to say, all that. But I’m telling you, my dear: this is the meaning, this is the daily and hourly import of state systems.

I sat with my back to the window and the moonbeams. The walls breathed or bristled in the dark. I reached out—a costume (velvet), ostrich feathers, a tasseled tambourine. With the light behind me I could stare at Zoya, seeing her singly, entire, with unprecedented indifference to detail. And I was in any case full of emotion. Untypically, for a Russian, I had been raised by my mother to regard anti-Semitism as a reflex of the gutter; and the shame I felt for my nation was so intense that it had already ruined my memory of the war. At the same time I was lost in admiration for her—for the way she hadn’t flinched in the street and her resilience, now, when everyone else was mentally packing her pillowslip. You have a consciousness of this laid down in you, Venus, and I don’t: how it feels to be the other. And we know, from the memoirists, about the pain, the physical pain, of wearing the star, also yellow, the burning crysanthemum of the star. You in your flesh have worn the star…Half of Soviet Jewry had been killed by the Germans. And now the Russians had begun to glare at the half that remained. It was coming from above but also coming from below, coming up from the depths.

At the door Zoya was saying goodnight to her penultimate guest (her farewells punctuated by a violent yawn). All the time I kept asking myself how it happened—how had I stood by and given someone such power to hurt me? In my mouth, not the usual slow drool but a humble aridity—the aching throat of the lovelorn. I would act, though, I would act; and Russia would help me. You see, when the depths stir like this, when a country sets a course for darkness, it comes to you not as horror but as unreality. Reality weighs nothing, and everything is allowed. I rose. I rose, and impended.

She placed a palm on my chest, to establish a distance, but she accepted the kiss, or withstood it; and yet, as she withdrew her mouth, she retained my lower lip for a second between her teeth, and her eyes moved sideways, ruminatively; she was chewing it over—but not at length. I said three words and she said three words. Hers were, “You frighten me…” A novelettish incitement, you may think. And I would once have taken it as that. But I deeply knew that she hadn’t liked the taste of my lips.

“I’m sorry.”

For several seconds I stood there with my hands writhing around in one another’s grasp. And then I, the decorated rapist, I, who went through a woman a week using every form of flattery, false promises, bribery, and blackmail, not to mention the frank application of masculine bulk—I gave out a noise like the muffled coo of a pigeon, kissed her palm, and staggered out, seeming to twirl end over end all the way down the stairs.

They didn’t come for her, of course. They came for me. And understand that it didn’t feel like the worst thing that had ever happened when, ten weeks later, they gave me ten years.

This was his first morning and he was out there in the sector.

This was what I told him, as we stood among the shiteaters and their eager swirls of breath, their laughing eyes. I told him he would join their number unless he could find some murder in his heart. I told him that the acceptance of murder was the thing that was being asked of him.

This was Lev in the yard. His face, already brick-red, wore a gashed forehead and a split lip. During the bungled headcount (and recount, and re-recount), many of the men in his brigade—a strong brigade—were running on the spot, or at least flapping their arms about. Lev was doing jumping jacks.

PART II

1.

Dudinka, September 2, 2004

T
he phrase “dirty old man” has two meanings, and one of them happens to be literal. There is a dirty old man on board who is that kind of dirty old man. He may be a dirty old man of the other kind too, but something tells me that the two callings are difficult to combine. Now tell me, Venus. Why do I feel tempted to take the road of this dirty old man? I hate washing more and more every day, and shaving, and I hate stuffing my laundry into plastic bags and writing “socks—4 prs.” I almost burst into tears, the other morning, when I realized I’d have to cut my toenails
one more time
. A really dirty old man wouldn’t bother. What clarity and intrepidity, what boldness and pride. I find I deeply admire this dirty old man. His leftover-infested beard, his death-ray breath, and his rotting, many-layered overcoat are things that everyone
else
has to worry about. The smell that follows him about, and precedes him, is light-speed: you know it the instant he enters the dining room even when he’s forty feet away. He behaves as though it isn’t his fault and he’s innocent. He’s clean: in some mysterious way, he’s clean. Yesterday he disembarked; I saw him, quite a distance off, being canoed through the mist—a mist perhaps of his own making—to what looked like a fish cannery lurking under the eaves of the western bank.

Women don’t mind it, because baths and showers are, at least, “lovely and warm” (this was the phrase used by an English ladyfriend of mine, whom you’ll meet); and it’s interesting, the female admiration for warmth, combined with the well-attested tolerance of cold. But the male, I think, is eventually bored to the point of dementia by the business of not being dirty. On the other hand, I do see that it’s necessary, and that it gets more necessary every day. The “high” eighties: that too has unfortunate connotations. High, late—it doesn’t matter. Eighty-six is never going to sound any good.

I realize you must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph. And it isn’t just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude—my appetite for generalizations. Your crowd, they’re so terrorstricken by generalizations that they can’t even manage a declarative sentence. “I went to the store? To buy orange juice?” That’s right, keep it tentative—even though it’s already happened. Similarly, you say “okay” when an older hand would say (c” “My name is Pete?” “Okay.” “I was born in Ohio?” “Okay.” What you’re saying, with your okays, is this: for the time being I take no exception. You have not affronted me
yet
. No one has been humiliated
so far
.

A generalization might sound like an attempt to stereo-type—and we can’t have that. I’m at the other end. I worship generalizations. And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.

The name of your ideology, in case anyone asks, is Westernism. It would be no use to you here.

Now, at noon, the passengers and crew of the
Georgi Zhukov
are disembarking in Dudinka with as much triumphalism as their numbers will allow. The tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that’s what a port looks like—a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettledrums of the storage vats.

But this is different. It is a Mars of rust, in various hues and concentrations. Some of the surfaces have dimmed to a modest apricot, losing their barnacles and asperities. Elsewhere, it looks like arterial blood, newly shed, newly dried. The rust boils and bristles, and the keel of the upended ferryboat glares out across the water with personalized fury, as if oxidation were a crime it would lay at your door.

Tottering and swaying over my cane, I think of those more or less ridiculous words, Greek-derived, for irrational fears, many of which describe more or less ridiculous conditions: anthophobia (fear of flowers), pogonophobia (beards), deipnophobia (dinner parties), triskaidekaphobia (the number thirteen). Yes, these are sensitive souls. But there’s one for rust (iophobia); and I think I’ve got it. I’ve got iophobia. The condition doesn’t strike me, now, as at all ridiculous—or at all irrational. Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

A stupor of self-satisfaction:
that’s
the state to be in when your life is drawing to an end. And not this state—not my state. It isn’t death that seems so very frightening. What frightens me is life, my own, and what it’s going to turn out to add up to.

There is a letter in my pocket that I have yet to read.

The big wrongs—you reach a point where you’ve just about bedded them down. And then the little wrongs wake up and bite, with their mean little teeth.

What’s annoying me now is the state-driven prudery of the 1930s. These were my teenage years, and I might have got off to a much better start. I fondly see myself kiting with Katya, mushrooming with Masha, bobsleighing with Bronislava—first kiss, first love. But the state wouldn’t have it. “Free love” was officially classified as a bourgeois deformity. It was the “free” bit they really didn’t like. Still, they didn’t like love either.

Only this year has it emerged—some sort of picture of the sexual mores at the court of Joseph Vissarionovich. And it unsurprisingly transpires that the revolutionary energy had its erotic aspect. The Kremlin circle, in short, was a hive of adultery and seigneurism.

It was like food and space to breathe. They could have it. And we couldn’t. Why not? Sex isn’t a finite resource; and free love costs nothing. Yet the state, as I think Nikita Sergeyevich pointed out, wanted to give the impression that Russia was a stranger to carnal knowledge. As you might put it—What’s
that
about?

On the quay a small fleet of minivans stands by for those passengers who are impatient to reach Predposylov. No, we are not many, we are pitifully few. The Gulag tour, the purser told me with an indulgent shrug, always lost money; and then he mimed a yawn. Similarly, on the flight from the capital to my point of embarkation, I quite clearly heard a stewardess refer to me (she and a colleague were remixing my drink) as “the Gulag bore in 2B.” It is nice to know that this insouciance about Russian slavery—abolished, it is true, as long ago as 1987—has filtered down to the caste of tourism. I let the stewardess get away with it. Start a ruckus on a plane these days and you get fifteen bullets in the head. But the indulgent purser (much shaken, much enriched) now knows that here is one who still swears and weeps, that here is one who still hates and burns.

We say our goodbyes, and I am alone on the quayside. I want to get to the Arctic city the way I did the first time, and I’m taking the train. After ten or fifteen minutes, and after some cursing (but no haggling), a reasonably sober longshoreman agrees to drive me to the station in his truck. What is the matter with me—why all this swearing and tipping? It could be that my behavior is intended as exemplary. I frequently transgress, it’s true; but I at least am prompt with my reparations, my apologies in the form of cash.

The uncertain Arctic light, I realize, makes my body clock run too fast or too slow; every day I feel as if I have risen in the small hours or else shamefully overslept. The colors of the cars don’t look quite right either, like car colors everywhere but seen at dawn under streetlamps. My hangover has not gone away. All the buildings, all the medium-rise flat blocks, stand on stout little stilts, pilings driven down through the melting permafrost and into the bedrock. This is the world of the crawlspace.

Lev’s geographical theory of Russian destiny was not his alone, and serious historians now propound it. The northern Eurasian plain, with its extreme temperatures, its ungenerous soil, its remoteness from the southerly trade routes, its lack of any ocean but the Arctic; and then the Russian state, with its compulsive and self-protective expansion, its land empire of twenty nations, its continent-sized borders: all this demands a heavily authoritarian center, a vast and vigilant bureaucracy—or else Russia flies apart.

Our galaxy, too, would fly apart, if not for the massive black holes in its core, each the size of the solar system, and the presence all around of dark matter and dark energy, policing the pull to the center.

This explanation appealed to my brother because, he said, it was “the right size”: the same size as the landmass. We can shake our heads and say physics did it. Geography did it.

With its light-blue plaster and creamy trim, the railway station has the appearance of a summer pavilion, yet the bar, where I wait, is darkly congested (with locals, not travelers), and this reassures me. Until now the human sparsity of Dudinka has given me the feeling of free fall or imminent levitation. And the memories of my first journey here, in 1946, are like an awful dream of human constriction, of inconceivable crowding and milling and huddling.

A liter of hundred-proof North Korean vodka, I notice, costs less than a liter of watery Russian beer. There is also an impressive dedication, on the part of the customers, to oloroso, or fortified wine (“sweet sack”). Oloroso is a drunkard’s drink as it is, and this stuff doesn’t come from Jerez. That’s the distinction Dostoevsky is making when he includes, on a tabletop already inauspiciously burdened with alcohol, “a bottle of the strongest sherry from the national cellar.”

My hangover continues to deteriorate. Or should I say that my hangover continues to thrive? For indeed it comes on wonderfully well. I want a lot of it, I need a lot of it, but I haven’t been
drunk
for fifteen years. Remember? I was lying in bed, on a Sunday afternoon, and quietly dying. Occasionally I whispered
water
—in Russian. A sign of truly bestial need. You walked in on stiffened legs, head down, intensely concentrated: you weren’t going to spill the clear liquid in the pint glass you held in both hands. “Here,” you said. I reached out a withered arm. And then: “It’s
vodka
.” And I absorbed the vicious intelligence of your stare. By then I was married to your mother. You were nine.

On the television, which perches high on the wall, there now appears the familiar and dreadful sight of the E-shaped redbrick building. I move closer, in time to hear yet another untruth: that there are “no plans” to storm the school. Then, suddenly and with no explanation, the screen fizzes, and Middle School Number One is replaced by a Latin soap opera in medias res—and, as always, under an inch of makeup each, a tearful old vamp is reproaching a haughty gigolo. The disruption goes unnoticed or at least unremarked. My instinct is to throw another costly tantrum—but directed at whom, and to what end? In any event I cannot bear it, so I pay, and tip, and wheel my case out onto the platform, and stare at the rails, narrow-gauged, that lead to the Arctic city.

No, young lady, I haven’t turned my phone off. I’ve just been using it a lot—Middle School Number One, in North Ossetia. I was, as you know, a tolerably big cheese in Russia by the time I left, and I had many contacts in the military. You may also remember the not very serious trouble this put me to right up until 1991, when the certificate, framed in Paris, pronounced the death of the Russian experiment. Of that particular Russian experiment. My contemporaries are of course all long gone, and in many cases I deal with the sons of the men I knew. They talk to me. And I am hearing some extraordinary things.

By now the children are in their underwear and sitting with parents and teachers on the floor of the boobytrapped gymnasium. Mines clad in metal bolts are strung up on the basketball hoops. When the children chant for water they are silenced by a bullet fired into the ceiling. To aid ventilation, some of the gym windows have been obligingly shattered, but the killers, it seems, remain committed to the dehydration of their hostages, if hostages they are, and have clubbed off the tap handles in the kitchens and bathrooms. The children are now reduced, and some are now forced, to drink sweat and urine filtered through layers of clothing. How long can a child survive in great heat without water? Three days? Of
course
there are plans to storm the school.

It will be revealed, postmortem, that the killers are on heroin and morphine, and some of the doses will be described as “beyond lethal.” As the power of the analgesic fades, what was numb will become raw; I keep thinking of the killer with red hair and how his rusty beard will itch and smart. Pogonophobia…North Ossetia has started to remind me of another school massacre, swaggering, drug-fueled—Columbine. Yes I know. Columbine was not political but purely recreational, and was over in minutes. Only the briefest visit, on that occasion, to the parallel universe where murdering the young is accounted witty.

They are now saying that the killers, who have made “no demands,” are jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Jihadis they may well be, but they are almost certainly from Chechnya, and what they want is independence. The reason that can’t happen, Venus, is that Chechnya, after centuries of Russian invasion, oppression, mass deportation, and (most recently) blitz, is now organically insane. So the leader’s in a bind, now, just as Joseph Vissarionovich felt himself to be with the Jews in 1948: “I can’t swallow them, and I can’t spit them out.” All he could do was chew.

Early on in the siege of the Moscow theater—Dubrovka—in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere—in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians.
^*2
You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading
The New York Times,
even I found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.