House of Meetings (6 page)

Of course there are plans to storm the school. To say
plans
risks extravagance, perhaps, but somehow or other the school will be stormed. This we know, because the Spetsnaz, our elite special forces, are buying bullets from the locals, who are surging around outside with their muskets and flintlocks.

Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up
on purpose
. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain.

And life isn’t hard enough, not for you…I’m thinking of your first wave of boyfriends—eight or nine years ago. The shat-myself look they all favored, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump; and the eviscerated trainers. That’s a prison style: no belt or laces—lest you hang yourself with them. Looking at those boys, with their sheared heads, their notched noses and scarified ears, I felt myself back in Norlag. Is this the invention of pain? Or a little reenactment of the pains of the past? The past has a weight. And the past is heavy.

I’m not for a moment saying that your anorexia was in any sense
voulu
. The force of the thing took all my courage from me, and your mother and I sobbed when we saw the CCTV tape of your dark form, like a knobbly walking stick, doing push-ups beside your hospital bed in the middle of the night. I will just add that when you went to the other place, the one called the Manor, and I saw a hundred of you through the wire around the car park, it was impossible not to think of another iconic twentieth-century scene.

Forgive me. And anyway it’s not just the young. There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.

The train rocks and knocks across the simplified landforms of the tundra: Russia’s great white page, awaiting the characters and sentences of history. No hills and valleys, just bumps and dips. Here, topographical variation is the work of man: gigantic gougings and scourings, and pyramids of slag. If you saw a mountain, now, a plateau, a cliff, it would loom like a planet. There is a hollow hill in Predposylov that is called a mountain, Mount Schweinsteiger, named after the geologist (a Russian-German, I think, from the Volga basin) who discovered nickel here toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the plains of limbless trees stand pylons, attached to no cable.

Our little train is a local, a dutiful ferrier of souls, taking them from the dormitory towns and delivering them to the Kombinat. There are some very worn faces among the passengers, and some very new ones too (shorn pinheads attached to strapping tracksuits), but they all wear masks of dormitory calm, not aware of anything unusual, not aware of anything nightmarish and unforgettable.

So in this journey am I, as the phrases go, retracing my steps—in an attempt to bring it all back? To do that, I would have needed to descend below the waterline of the
Georgi Zhukov,
and induce the passengers and crew to coat themselves in shit and sick and then lie on top of me for a month and a half. Similarly, this train, its windows barred, its carriages subdivided into wire cages, the living and the dead all bolt upright, would have to be shunted into a siding and abandoned till mid-November. And there aren’t enough people—there just aren’t enough people.

With an hour to go, the train makes a stop at a humble township called Coercion. It says it on the platform: Coercion. How to explain this onset of candor? Where are the sister settlements of Fabulation and Amnesia? As we pull out of Coercion, the carriage is suddenly visited by a cloudburst of mosquitoes, and in silent unanimity—with no words or smiles or glances, with no sense of common purpose—the passengers set about killing every last one of them.

By the time they’re all dead (clapped in the hands, smeared across the window), you can see it on the shallow horizon: the heavy haze, like a fleece going yellow at the edges, there to warm the impossible city.

2.

“Oh, I Can Bear It”

I
told Lev, more than once, that his chances of survival were reasonably good. That was a guess. Now we can do the math.

In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people. Or so it was said in the years before the war, when the camps were lethalized as part of the push of the Terror. There were fluctuations, but in general the death rate was determined by the availability of food. Massively and shamingly, the camp system was a phenomenon of food.

In “hungry ’33” one out of seven died, in 1943 one out of five, in 1942 one out of four. By 1948 it had gone back down again, systemwide, and your chances were not much worse than in the rough-and-ready Soviet Union, or “the big zona,” as it was universally known in camp: the twelve-time-zone zona. By 1948, flies had stopped dying like people, and people had gone back to dying like flies.

Still, this was the Arctic. And there was the question of his physical mass. What the body is doing, in camp, is slowly eating itself; my brother was thicker now in the chest and shoulders, but at five foot three he remained a lenten meal. An actuary might put it this way: if there were ten Levs in Norlag, in 1948, then one of them was going to die. That still didn’t mean that he had a good chance of surviving his ten-year sentence. It meant that he had a good chance of surviving 1948. Do the math, and his prospects were exactly zero. No, less than zero. Because it transpired, Venus, toward the end of the first week, that my brother wasn’t merely a fascist. He was also a pacifist.

I cannot give here a full inventory of Lev’s troubles, during his naturalization, and, to the extent that I do, it is because everything that happened to him in Norlag came together and converged on the night of July 31, 1956, in the House of Meetings. This was his Russian cross. And it was also mine.

For the crucial first day of general work Lev was assigned to “land clearance,” and with a strong brigade. Which meant that he was lowered into a pit at six in the morning, equipped with half a shovel, and hoisted out again twelve hours later. The team got back to the sector just before eight. I scanned their faces; I stared so hard that I felt my eyes might have the power to carve him out of the air. Yes—he was among them. With dropped head, and shoulderless and bowlegged; but he was among them. I knew then that Lev had made the norm. If he hadn’t, they would have left him down there until he had. The team leader, the Latvian, Markargan, would have seen to that. This was a strong brigade.

Toward the end of the week his face wasn’t brick-red any more. It was black-and-blue.

You’re a
what
? I said.

“A pacifist. I didn’t want to tell you on the first night.” He spat, bloodily, and wiped his pulped lips. “Nonviolence—that’s my ticket.”

Who did your face?

“There’s a Tartar who covets my shovel. He’s got the other half of it. I won’t fight but I won’t give it up. He’s getting the idea. Yesterday he practically bit my hand off at the wrist—look. I’m nineteen. It’ll heal. And I didn’t give it up.”

What is all this? I said. You can fight. I’ve seen you. You were even quite talented for a while—quite savory—after you did Vad. And you’re stronger now. They had you digging fucking ditches in the street for four years. You’re no milksop.

“I’m not weak anymore. But I’m a pacifist. I turn the other cheek. Listen,” he said. “I’m not Gandhi—I don’t believe in heaven. If my life is threatened, I’ll fight to defend it. And I think I’d fight to defend yours. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. But that’s all. I have my reasons. I have my reason.” He shook his head, and again he spat. “I didn’t tell you this either. They killed Solomon Mikhoels.”

Solomon Mikhoels was the most famous Jew in Russia: venerable actor, and intercontinental envoy. During the war he mobilized American Jewry and raised millions of dollars. Once he performed for Joseph Vissarionovich in the Kremlin. Shakespeare.
Lear
.

“The Organs killed him. ‘Road accident.’ They beat him to death and then a truck ran him over. It’s starting. Zoya threw up when she heard.”

I said, There’s nothing you can do about that. What’s the Tartar’s name? You’re not there. You’re here.

“That’s right. I’m here.”

You see, Lev had just told me that after a week in his barracks—one of the most caked and clotted in the whole of Norlag—he was still sleeping on the floor. I feel the need for italicization:
on the floor
. And you just couldn’t do that. Down there you churned in a heap of spongy shiteaters, decrepit fascists, and (another subsection) Old Believers inching their way into martyrdom. And the smell, the smell…As the dark-age Mongol horde approached your city, it hurt the ears when it was still some distance from the walls. More terrifying than the noise was the smell, expressly cultivated—the militarization of dirt, of heads of hair, armpits, docks, feet. And the breath: the breath, further enriched by the Mongol diet of fermented mare’s milk, horse blood, and other Mongols. So it was in camp, too. The smell was penal, weaponized. The floor of the barracks was where it gathered—all the breath of the zona.

“Everything comes down on you,” he conceded. “I reach into my shirt for a handful of lice. And if they’re only little ones I think fuck it and put them back.”

There were about fifteen reasons why he couldn’t stay down there. He had to make it to the second tier. The topmost boards were, of course, the inalienable roosts of the urkas, of the brutes, of the bitches; but Lev had to make it to the second tier.

So I went through it all again, in soft-voiced earnest. Markargan will be behind you, I told him. He needs your labor—he needs your sleep, your health. You’re not going to last in that brigade so use the clout
now
. Gain the face. For the ground bunk, pick someone who’s on the low ration. They won’t fight for long. Then trade that for the middle bunk. This time pick a leech. He’ll have greased his way up there. Drag him down.

“…By what right?”

I supposed that if he ever stopped to think about it, Lev would have found me much reduced, humanly. And this is what he suddenly seemed to be doing. To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument. It wasn’t even diplomacy by other means. It was currency, like tobacco, like bread. I told him,

By what right? The right to life. They call you a fascist. Now act like one.

Lev wouldn’t do it. He stayed on the floor. And as a result he was always ill. “Pellagra,” said Janusz, the young prisoner-doctor, and spread his hands. This was a deficiency that announced itself in the form of dermatitis, diarrhea, and disorganization of thought. With hot flushes in the frost of the tundra, with cold sweats in the cauldron of the barracks, and shivering, always shivering, Lev did hard labor in a strong brigade.

To one of Conrad’s terse characterizations of Russian life—“the frequency of the exceptional”—I would like to add another: the frequency of the total. Total states, with your sufferings selected, as if off a menu, by your sworn enemy.

I said, earlier, that I was in shock about Zoya—and that’s true. It lasted until the day the sun came up. You could just see the corona, a pearly liquid smeared on the tundra’s edge. The long eclipse was over: fingers pointed, and there was a grumbling, burbly cheer from the men. And I too came up out of eclipse and obscuration. I was no longer muffled in the chemicals of calm.

Now I started to look at my losses. And they were serious. I realized that there was nothing, now, nothing at all, that I liked to think about…Many more or less regrettable peccadilloes, in camp, were widely practiced; but onanism wasn’t one of them. The urkas did it, and in public. And I suppose the younger rustics managed it for a while. For the rest of us it became a part of the past. Yet we all had the thoughts. I think we all still had the thoughts.

I still had them. Every night I staged my experiment. I would enter a room where Zoya lay sleeping. It was late afternoon. She was on the bed among star-bright pillows, in a petticoat or a short nightdress (here, and here only, some variation was allowed). I sat beside her and took her hand in mine. I kissed her lips. Then came the moment of transformation, when she rose up, flowed up, into my arms, and it began.

This nightly Fata Morgana used to feel like a source of strength—a reconnection with vital powers. But now it was weakening me, and corroding me. And as the sun worked its way up over the horizon I started saying it to myself, at first in a whisper of insomnia, then out loud in daylight, I started saying it: They didn’t mean to do this, but that’s what they’ve done. They’ve attacked my will. And that’s all I’ve got.

You’re a lucky boy, I told him.

It was his second rest day, and Lev sat scratching himself on the low wall in the yard. He squinted up at me and said, “Lucky how?”

I got my annual letter today. Kitty.

“…Where is it?”

When I held it up Lev got to his feet—but he flinched and stepped back. I understood. At the moment of arrest you already feel halfway vanished. In prison you’re a former person and already dead. In camp you’re almost sure you’ve never been. Letters from home are like communications from an enfeebled medium, some ailing Madame Sosostris, with her tea leaves and her cracked Ouija board.

I can’t show you the whole thing, I said.
I’m
the censor. But it’s good news.

In Aesopian language Kitty told of Lev’s arrest, and his expected departure for “an unknown destination.” As a result of this second disappearance, the family had “unfortunately” lost the apartment. And Mother had lost her job. Kitty went on to say that “the flu” was very virulent in the capital, and that Zoya and her mother had gone back to Kazan.

I said, Where the flu’s less bad. And it’s good news anyway.

He leaned into me and pressed his face to my chest.

“You make me very happy, brother. That’s it—
get her out of town
. And I don’t care what else Kitty said.”

This was just as well. Kitty said that she thought it inconceivable that Zoya would “wait” for Lev. According to her, Zoya already had a new favorite at the Tech, and was “all over him” in the canteen. It is my solemn duty, Venus, to admit to the coarse joy this sentence gave me.

I said, What do you expect? It’s Kitty.

“That’s right. It’s Kitty.”

Yes, it was Kitty: that unreliable narrator. I wanted someone with greater authority to tell me it was true—about Zoya being all over her new favorite. I wanted someone like Georgi Zhukov or, better still, Winston Churchill to tell me it was true.

“Can you write back?” he said.

I’m supposed to be able to. But they don’t like me. Anyway there’s never anything to write with. Or write on.

“Why don’t they like you? I mean, I can think of a reason or two. But why?”

The dogs.

“Ah. The dogs.”

I was quite famous, in camp, for the way I dealt with the dogs. Most prisoners, including Lev, were horribly afraid of them. Not me. When I was a toddler we had a mule-sized borzoi. I can’t even remember her; but she passed something on to me before she went. I have no fear of dogs. So I used to make them cringe. It’s just a dog, imbued with a pig nature. It’s just a snarl, waiting to become a cringe. I would often risk a beating to make the dogs cringe.

Lev said, “I went to the guardhouse and asked the pig. It says on my file: Without the Right to Correspondence. I thought that that was code for immediate execution. So did the pig. He kept peering at it and then peering at me. I don’t have the right. But I’ll keep on. I’ll get it.”

I said, untruthfully, I’m glad you don’t worry about Kitty. And about Zoya.

“Worry? I’m good at worrying. When I started being her friend, before, I used to worry that someone was going to get her pregnant. But she didn’t get pregnant. She can’t. She had an abortion when she was sixteen and she can’t. Then I worried that she was going to get arrested or kicked to death in the street. But other men, you mean? No. The thing about her…She’s a hundred-percenter. And so am I, now. My uh, my status as a noncombatant. That’s for her. That’s for us.”

You talk in riddles, Lev. Don’t you understand that what you do here doesn’t count?

“Doesn’t it? Won’t it? You don’t see it, do you. It’ll count.”

On top of everything else there was also the huge brute, Arbachuk, who took a liking to my brother in what seemed to be the worst possible way. Every night he’d search him out. Why? To tousle him and taunt him and kiss him and tickle him. It was fashionable, at that time, for a brute to take a fascist as a pet, though Lev claimed it felt more like the other way around. “Suddenly I’m best friends with a mandrill,” he said, which was game of him, because he was badly and rightly frightened. As Arbachuk shouldered his way through the barracks, with his tattoos and his moist, gold-flecked smile, Lev would close his eyes for a second and the light would pass from his face. All I could do about Arbachuk was indicate, with a glance and a movement of the shoulders, that if it really came to it he would have to get by me too. Lev said that it was much worse when I wasn’t there. So I always was. And when I couldn’t be, we relied on Semyon or Johnreed, two of the higher-ranking officer veterans, a colonel and a captain, who were both Heroes of the Soviet Union—an honor of which, on arrest, they were naturally stripped…You’re probably wondering about that name: Johnreed. A lot of people his age were called Johnreed, after John Reed, the author of
Ten Days That Shook the World
. There were so many Johnreeds in camp that they had earned the status of a phylum, the
Johnreeds,
like the
Americans
and, later, the
Doctors
—the Jewish doctors. In its stirred account of the October Revolution, John Reed’s book barely mentioned Joseph Vissarionovich, so he banned it, thus whipping out the carpet, so to speak, from under all the Johnreeds.

Arbachuk used to bring titbits for Lev, who always refused them. Not just chunks of bread, either, but meat—mince, sausage—and on one occasion an
apple
. “I’m not hungry,” Lev would say. I couldn’t believe it: he sat there with Arbachuk’s tongue in his ear, and half a pork chop dangling under his nose, saying, “I’m not hungry.”