House of Meetings (9 page)

“I never knew,”
we could hear him say, conversationally (and he said it more than once)—
“I never knew it got so cold up here in the Arctic.”

And as Janusz once again withdrew, Uglik, with a jerk, fleetingly offered him his vanished right hand.

You see, Uglik had something else on his mind: mortal fear. His activities in the women’s block, that first night, had resulted in a petition, a demonstration, and now a strike. This would be noticed. And in the end everything certainly added up for Uglik—yes, a most strenuous fate for Comrade Uglik.

We were told the whole story, that spring, by a group of transferees from Kolyma. Recalled to Moscow, Uglik was put on trial and facetiously sentenced to a year in the gold mines of the remotest northeast. He mined no gold, and so earned no food, with the consequence that he became a more or less instant shiteater, and—necessarily—an all-fours shiteater at that. He died of starvation and dementia within a month. Knowledge of this would not have lightened our thoughts and feelings, as we stood watching at the woodshop window.

It was in the nature of camp life that you would suffer even for Uglik—for Uglik, with Uglik. Lev, too, with his gonging head, his left ear already infected and now fizzing with Janusz’s peroxide, his inner gyroscopes undulant with nausea and vertigo. We looked on, each one of us, in septic horror. It wasn’t just the dreadful symmetry of his wounds—like the result of a barbaric punishment. No. Uglik was showing us how things really stood. This was our master: the man scared so stupid that he kept forgetting he had no hands.

I glanced at Lev. And then, I think, it came upon my brother and me—a suspicion of what this might further mean. I found the suspicion was unentertainable, and I shuddered it off. But I had already heard its whisper, saying…The Ugliks, and the sons of the Ugliks, and the reality that produced them: all that would pass. And yet there was something else, something that would never pass, and was only just beginning.

Uglik spat out his second cigarette, wiped his nose on his stump, and shouldered his way inside.

On March 5 we were assembled in the yard and told of the death of the great leader of free human beings everywhere. Silence in the whole zona, a silence of rare quality: I remember listening to the subway noises of the points and wires in my sinuses. It was the silence of vacuum. For at least five or six years, in camp, there had been an intense rumor, daily or even hourly replenished—a rumor that placed Joseph Vissarionovich ever closer to death’s door. And what we had, now, was a vacuum. Now he was nowhere. But he used to be everywhere.

From that day on a collision course was mapped out in front of us. No amnesties (not for the politicals), more frequent and more outrageous provocations (more Ugliks), and the uncontrollable impatience of the men—every last man but Lev. So, certainly, we rose up. And the pigs couldn’t hold us. It ended on August 4, with Cheka troops, fire engines and steel-plated trucks mounted with machineguns.

We’ve got a little time, I said. A little time, you and I. And then you’re going to have to come out and stand.

Lev was alone in the barracks. He sat at the table by the stove (inactive during the summer month), with his hands folded in front of him like a judge.

“Ah, Spartacus,” he said. “
Christ,
what was that? A barricade?”

They were doing the whole zona, sector by sector. The sound of shouts, screams, gunfire, and the collapse of bulldozed walls came and went on the hot wind.

I said, The women are out there. Everyone who can walk is out there, standing in line. Arm in arm. You haven’t got a choice. When this is over, do you expect the men to be able to bear the sight of you?

“Mm, the wet stuff. If there
are
any men, when this is over. It wouldn’t surprise me if they killed all the pigs, too. A smoke, brother. Yes, go on, a contemplative cigarette…”

He had a new voice, now, or a new intonation: precise, almost legalistic, and slightly crazed. A loner’s voice.

“You know,” he said, “massacres want to happen. They’re not neutral. Remember the fascist headcount in the yard in, what, in ’50? When the overloaded watchtower collapsed. It was fucking funny, wasn’t it? The way it fell—like an elevator cut from its cable. But then we heard the sound of all the rifles cocking. And every man with laughter in his chest, a volcano of laughter. One single titter and it would have happened. The massacre of the laughing men. I knew then that massacres want to happen. Massacres want there to be massacres.”

Well, you’d better want a massacre too. And a thorough one.

“Yes, I’ve already been threatened. It’s like a blocking unit in the army, isn’t it? Possible death with honor in the van. Or certain death with ignominy in the rear. Smoke up. I’ve been singing that song, ‘Let’s Smoke.’”

And there are other reasons, I said. If you sit here on your bench, you’re going to feel like shit for the rest of your life.

“Well I won’t
not
feel like shit for very long, will I? I’ve been listening to the radio with Janusz. Things are better in freedom now. The
Doctors
have all been pardoned. ‘The flu’—it died when he died. Zoya’s not in Birobidzhan. She’ll be back in Moscow. In her attic. The future looks bright.”

You’ll never write another poem. And you’ll never fuck your wife.

“…At last you convince me, brother. I can go out there and climb on a box and tell them to ignore the provocations and get back to their fucking barracks and wait. Or I can go out there and stand. You know they’re going to kill all the leaders. You’re about ten times more likely to die than I am. I never realized until now,” he said, “that you were so romantic.”

Provoked or not provoked, the Norlag Rebellion, I believe, was a thing of heroic beauty. I can’t and won’t give it up. We were ready to die. I have known war, and it was not like war. Let me spell it out. You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love—love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can’t actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron. On August 4 the love was still there, even at the close of the day. It was—it was like God. And not a Russian God. It was magnificent, the way we stood arm in arm. Everyone, the women, Lev, everyone, even the shiteaters, standing arm in arm.

Two days later I was in a filtration camp in the tundra, for resentencing or execution. Semyon and Johnreed had already been shot when the planes arrived from Moscow. Beria had fallen. The man appointed to arrest him was my marshal, Georgi Zhukov. I love it that that was so. Lavrenti Beria, the clever pervert, looked up from his desk and saw his nemesis: the man who won the Second World War…I was meaninglessly transferred to Krasnoyarsk, and barged back up the Yenisei the following spring. At the time of my return a disused dormitory by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger was being rebuilt, to serve as the House of Meetings.

On August 5, 1953, after twenty-eight hours of emergency operations, Janusz looked in the mirror: he thought there must have been some talc in his cap. His hair had gone white.

At around about this time, in another family matter related to the passing of Joseph Vissarionovich, Vadim, my half-brother and Lev’s fraternal twin, was beaten to death while suppressing strikes and riots in East Berlin.

5.

“You’ve Got a Goddamned Paradise in Here”

W
e thus move on to the conjugal visits. And remember: life was easy, now, in 1956.

The wives had started coming to camp two years earlier, but it was a right granted only to the strongest of strong workers. So that’s what Lev became, all over again. Remembering him now, I see a child-sized version of the posters and paintings of an earlier time—the great globes of sweat, the raised veins on the forearms, even the sheet-metal stare that went out to meet the future. He did the work and he earned the right. By now, though, the question went as follows: did he want it? Did anyone?

Considering the variety and intensity of the suffering it almost always caused, I was astounded by how longed-for and pushed-for it remained: the chalet on the hill. I was a close student of this rite of passage—though quite unreflective, I admit, and especially at first. For the husbands, the conjugal visit meant a headshave, a disinfection, a sustained burst from the fire hose. They came out of the bathhouse unrecognizably scoured, stung, alerted, in clothes stiffened not by dirt but by the rasp of ferocious detergents. Then, with every appearance of appetite and verve, they hastened off, under light guard, to the House of Meetings. And the next day, as each wreck and wraith came stumbling back down the hill, I would find myself thinking: You clamored for it. We fought for it. What’s the matter now?

But very soon the meaning of it pressed down on me, and I bowed to the larger power. It really seemed as if this was the goal of the regnant system: it wanted to push every last one of us into the tightest possible corner. “Living in corners” was what they called it in freedom. Four people or four couples or four families per room, living in corners. The women who came to the House of Meetings belonged to a category of their own: they were wives of enemies of the people, and they lived under specific persecution, out in the big zona. And not just the wives but the whole clan. Those airy rooms in the chalet on the hill were in fact very crowded; liquid tentacles of injustice and culpability flowing out from the head of the octopus, and you as its beak.

All the men were different. Or were they? There was a shared theme, I think. And that theme was chronic anemia. They were trying to be red-blooded; and their blood was a watery white. This man’s face confesses failure, his body confesses it: the skewed mouth, the cottony weakness of the limbs. This man lays claim to success: he shoves you up against the wall and, in a menacing whisper, looking past you or beyond you, tells you what she did to him and what he did to her. And their hearts, too, were without defenses. This man has just been told that his marriage is over and that his children are now in the care of the state: he will come close to taking the walk to the perimeter. This man seems more or less convincingly buoyed, although he is always thoughtful and often tearful: he is remeasuring and rearranging his losses—and that was probably the best that anyone could hope for. What you were getting was the first wave of the rest of your life. You saw the accumulation of all the complexity that would await you in freedom. Everyone stepped lightly around these men and their mantle of solitude.

You see, the House of Meetings was also and always a house of partings—even in the best possible case. There was a meeting, and there was a parting, and then the years of separation resumed.

Now, whenever work took me up the steep little lane, and I saw the white tiling of the chalet roof, the good white tiling against the black hulk of Mount Schweinsteiger, I felt as I did when I passed the isolator and its double encirclement of barbed wire.

The day came: July 31, 1956. The evening came.

I went to get him in the bathhouse. He stood alone in the changing room, at the far end, on a plank of yellow light. What existed between us now was a kind of codependence. Love, too, but all cross-purposed, and never more so than on this day, this night.

She’s here, I said. The Americas is here. They’ve got her filling out the forms.

He nodded, and richly sighed. It wasn’t that likely anymore, but they might have sent Zoya on her way, with a taunt; or they’d give him half an hour with her in the guardhouse, a pig sitting between them and picking his teeth…Lev was sheared, deloused, and power-hosed. He was lightly bobbing up and down, like a bantamweight before a fight he expected to win.

We walked, under escort, out of the zona and beyond the wire, over the carpet of wildflowers, and up the steep little lane and the five stone steps to the annex—that compact and manageable dream of gentility and repose, with the curtains, the lampshade, the dinner tray on the backless chair. The thermos of vodka, the candles that in the white night would not be strictly needed. I hadn’t sensed much anxiety, until then, in my younger brother. He was young. He was formidably fit. His left ear was dead but no longer infected. He slept on the top tier and ate the full ration plus twenty-five percent.

Then came the flinch: the two inverted chevrons in the middle of the brow, the pleading rictus. It couldn’t not be there: fear of failure. Fear of failure, which was perhaps supposed to keep men honest, but turned out to make them mad.

Remember what I told him? You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. I also said, Look. Tell me to fuck off and everything if you want, but here’s some advice. Don’t expect too much.
She
won’t. So don’t you either.

“I don’t think I do expect too much.”

We embraced. And as I ducked out I saw the small contraption on the windowsill, the test tube, steadied by its hand-carved wooden frame, and the single stemless bloom—an amorous burgundy.

I have already told you about the evening of July 31.

Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. Trying not to laugh, he gave me a cup of hot black muck. Trying not to laugh, I drank it.

Hey Krzysztov, I said. Why do you need all those zeds and the rest of it in the middle of your name? Why not call yourself Krystov?

“No
Krystov,
” he said. “Krzysztov!”

There was the lecture on Iran I didn’t go to. There was my tryst with Tanya: her notched mouth, like a scar, marking time in what had once been her face. She was twenty-four. Midnight came and midnight went.

The impersonation of reasonable man: that’s tiring. The impersonation of someone reasonably good. That’s tiring too. I should have slept, of course. But how was I supposed to do that? I had seen a woman who looked like a woman: Zoya, side on, with the whole of her in motion in the white cotton dress, one hand raised to steady the raincoat thrown over her shoulder, the other swinging a crammed straw bag, the Brazilian backside, the Californian breasts, and all of it in syncopation, against the beat, as she moved down the path to the House of Meetings, where Lev stood.

Around me in the dark the prisoners were eating the dream-meal, bolting it, wolfing it. I knew that dream, we all did, with loaves of bread the color of honey or mustard floating past you and turning to mist in your hands, on your lips, on your tongue.

I had something else in my mouth. All night I walked and crawled across a landscape overlaid with grit, a desert where each grain of sand, at some point or other, would have its time between my teeth.

When I first saw him, out beyond the boundary rail, I swear to God I thought he had been blinded in the night. He was being led by the arm, or dragged by the sleeve. Then the pig just swung him out into the yard. Lev turned a full circle, swayed, steadied, and at last began to come forward.

I thought too of his arrival, in the February of 1948, when he had felt his way out of the decontamination shed and moved into the darkness one step at a time—but not slowly, because he knew by then that there were always great distances to cross. Now he moved slowly. Now he was nightblind at noon. As he drew nearer I could tell that it was simpler than that and he just wasn’t interested in anything further than an inch from his face. The eyes, rather, were swiveled inward, where they were doing the work of decrease, of internal demotion. Lev came past me. His jaws toiled, as if he was sucking purposefully on a lozenge or a sweet. Some hoarded bonbon, maybe, popped in there, in parting, by Zoya? I thought not. I thought he was trying to rinse out a new taste inside his mouth.

Of course, I had no idea what had passed between them. But I felt the mass of it in a way that went on striking me for some time as tangential and perverse, and uncannily impersonal. It fled without so much as a whimper—all my social hope. More specifically, I ceased to believe, then and there, that human society could ever arrive at something just
a little bit better
than all that had come before. I know you must think that this faith of mine was dismayingly slow to evaporate. But I was young. And for two months in the spring and summer of 1953, even here, I had known utopia, and had quaffed sublimity and love.

For seventy-two hours he lay facedown in his bunk. Not even the guards tried to make him stir. But this couldn’t last. On the third morning I waited for the barracks to clear and then I approached. I stood over his curled form. Muttering, murmuring, I rubbed his shoulders until he opened his eyes. I said,

Work today, brother. Food today.

And I peeled him up from the boards and helped him down.

Listen, I said, you can’t stay silent forever. What’s the worst that could have happened? All right. She’s leaving you.

His chin jerked up and I was staring at his nostrils. I don’t think Lev knew it until that moment. His stutter was back.

“Leaving me?” he eventually managed to say. And he labored on. “No. She wants to get married again. Properly. She said she’d follow me anywhere. ‘Like a dog.’”

Then all is clear, I said. You couldn’t do it. Nobody can, not here. You know, in its whole history, I don’t think there’s ever been a single fuck in the House of Meetings.

“I could do it. Everything worked.”

Then tell me.

“I’ll tell you before I die.” And it took him a long time to get it out. “I have crossed over,” he said, fighting it, bringing everything to bear against it, “into the other half of my life.”

All that could be done was to help him with his norms and his rations. But he couldn’t eat. He tried and he tried and he couldn’t eat. He turned his face away. He drank the water, and he could sometimes manage the tea. But nothing solid passed his lips until September. No one joked or smiled or said anything. His attempts to work, to eat, to talk—these were respected in silence by every prisoner.

On the other hand, I too had crossed over into the other half of my life: the better half. He crossed over and I crossed over. We crossed.

By now the camp was simply disappearing all around us. Everything was coming down, and the inmates were mere impediments—we were always getting in the way. As freedom impended, I embraced inactivity. Lev gradually returned to his earlier regime—the jumping-jacks, the lashing skip-rope; he was a boxer again, but with the loath and somnolent look of a man asked to punch far above his weight. We were almost the last to leave. They were practically tearing the rafters off the roof above our heads. And when there was no prison left, they let the prisoners just wander away. Lev went first.

I had three weeks to wait for the rubber stamp. But nothing frightened me or worried me or even bothered me. I minded nothing: the nonappearance of my Certificate of Rehabilitation, the low-priority rail voucher, the “travel ration” of bread. I didn’t even mind the train station at Predposylov—at first sight a clear impossibility, with dozens brawling over every seat. I rolled up my sleeves and took my place in the line.

Twenty-four hours later, with caked blood on my cheeks and knuckles, as I settled into my cranny at the carriage window, I turned to see a face pressed up against the glass. I stood up on the bench and hollered through the slit:

How long have you been here?

“Ever since. I want to go back.”

Of course you do.

“Not there.”
He wagged his head.
“There.”

So another fight, another flail through limbs and torsos now unshiftably wedged, and back again, and back again, as I made Lev take my place.

It’s all right, it’s all right, I kept mechanically shouting. It’s all right—he’s only little. He’s smaller than I am. He’s small. It’s all right, it’s all right.