House of Meetings Read online

  Just the one room, of course: the narrow cot with its furry undersheet and dead-weight gray blanket, the water barrel with the tin mug chained to it, the spotless slops-bucket with its tactful wooden lid. And then the chair (armless, backless), and the waiting supper tray—two fist-sized lumps of bread, a whole herring (slightly green around the edges), and the big jug of cold broth with at least four or five beads of fat set into its surface. Many hours had gone into this, and many hands.

  Lev whistled.

  I said, Well, kid, we’ve come a long way. Look.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  And I produced from my pocket the squat thermos of vodka, the six cigarettes (rolled out of the state newspaper), and the two candles.

  Maybe he was still recovering from the power-hose and the shearer—there were droplets of sweat on his upper lip. But then he gave me the look I knew well: the mirthless rictus, with the two inverted chevrons in the middle of his brow. This I took, with considerable confidence, to be an expression of sexual doubt. Sexual doubt—the exclusively male burden. Tell me, my dear: what is it there for? The utilitarian answer, I suppose, would be that it’s meant to stop us from reproducing if we’re weak and sickly or just too old. Perhaps, also (this would have been at the planning stage of the masculine idea), it was felt that the occasional fiasco, or the fiasco as an ever-present possibility, might help to keep men honest. This would have been at the planning stage.

  Lev, my boy? I said. You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. And then I told him, with all due diffidence, not to expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.

  He said, “I don’t think I do expect too much.”

  We embraced. As I ducked out of the shed and straightened up, I saw something I hadn’t noticed, on the windowsill—and much magnified, now, by a lenslike swelling in the glass. It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wildflower floated in it, overflowed it—an amorous burgundy. I remember thinking that it looked like an experiment on the male idea. A poetic experiment, perhaps, but still an experiment.

  The guard stepped forward and gestured with his firearm: I was to precede him down the path. Coming the other way and also under escort was my sister-in-law. That walk of hers, that famous tottering swagger—it set a world in motion.

  By now the five-week Arctic summer was under way. It was as if nature woke up in July and realized how badly she had neglected her guests; and then of course she completely overdid it. There was something gushing and hysterical in the show she put on: the sun with its dial turned up, and staring, in constant attendance; the red carpet of wildflowers, the colors lush but sharply irritant, making the eyes itch; and the thrilled mosquitoes, the size of hummingbirds. I walked on, under a hairnet of midges, of gnats and no-see-ums. There was, I remember, an enormous glinting gray cloud overhead; its leading edge had a chewed look, and was about to shred or grate itself into rain.

  The night of July 31, 1956: the night of crunch and crux. How did I spend it?

  First, Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. In Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop, this was how it went: trying not to laugh, Krzysztov served you a cup of hot black muck; and, trying not to laugh, you drank it. Krzysztov told me, inter alia, that there was going to be a lecture in the mess hall at eight o’clock—on Iran. Lectures on foreign countries, particularly contiguous foreign countries, were always very popular (“The Maoris of New Zealand” wouldn’t draw much of a crowd, but anything on Finland or Mongolia would be packed). This was because a description of life across the border gave flesh to fantasies of escape. The men sat there glazedly, as if watching an exotic dancer. For analagous reasons, by far the most successful play they ever staged was a double bill, two obscure and anonymous fragments called “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger.” It was so popular that they revived it almost monthly; and Lev and I always fought our way in, along with everybody else. Ah, the cult of “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger”…But it was my idea, that night, to avoid stimulation. Instead I sought a mild depressant. So I paid a call on Tanya.

  Our camp had been coeducational since 1953, when the dividing wall came down, and many of us now had ladyfriends. We dreamed up a wide variety of generic names for them (as they did for us: “my heart-throb,” “my sugar daddy,” “my Tristan,” “my Daphnis”), and you could tell a lot about a man by the way he referred to his girl. “My Eve,” “my goddess,” or indeed “my wife” indicated a romantic; less fastidious types used every possible synonym for copulation, plus every possible synonym for the vulva. But although there were real liaisons (pregnancies, abortions, even marriages, even divorces), ninety percent of them, I would guess, were wholly platonic. I know mine was. Tanya was a factory girl, and her crime was not political. She was a “three-timer.” Three times she had done it: shown up twenty minutes late for work. Less tenderly than it may at first seem, I called her “my Dulcinea”: like Quixote’s mistress, she was largely a project of the imagination.

  The love of one prisoner for another could be a thing of great purity. There were in fact enormous quantities of thwarted love, of trapped love, in the slave archipelago. Avowals, betrothals, hands clasped through the wire. Once, at a transit camp, I saw a spontaneous mass wedding (with priest) of scores of perfect strangers, who were then resegregated and marched off in opposite directions…My thing with Tanya was earthbound and workaday. I had simply discovered that having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all.

  That night our tryst was not a success. It remained axiomatic, in camp, that the women were tougher and more durable than the men. They pitied us and mothered us. You too would have pitied us and mothered us. Our filth, our rags, our drift into hopeless self-neglect…They were stronger; but the price they paid was the evaporation of all their feminine essence, every last drop of their dew. “I am both a cow and a bull,” wrote the encamped poetess, “A woman and a man.” No, my dear, you are neither. The hormones were no longer being produced. It was the same for us. We were all heading toward neither.

  Usually I could conjure with Tanya, and re-create the little darling she must surely have been in freedom. But that night, as we sat for an hour on the tree stumps in the clearing behind the infirmary, all I could manage was a kind of callous fascination. It was her mouth. Her mouth resembled one of the etched hieroglyphs you see on the walls of the cell of the prototypical solitary, in cartoons, in the illustrations to nineteenth-century novels about epic confinements: a horizontal line measured off with six notched verticals, representing yet another week of your time. The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread. Oh yes: and the sandpapery grain of the flushed flesh of her cheeks, in the white dusk, made me long for the rind of an orange. A week later they shipped her out. She was your age. She was twenty-four.

  Midnight came and went. I turned in. When you come to camp, the seven deadly sins strike up a new configuration. Your mainstays in freedom, pride and avarice, are instantly jettisoned, to be replaced, as rampant obsessions, sparkling with unsuspected delights, by the two you never used to think about: gluttony and sloth. As my mind patrolled the House of Meetings, where Lev lay with a woman who looked like a woman, I lay alone with the other three—envy, lust, and anger.

  All around me, now, was the faint but unanimous sound of slurping and rinsing. It might have seemed encouragingly lubricious if you didn’t know what it was. But I knew. It was the sound of three hundred men eating in their sleep.

  Life was easy, in 1956. There was the dirt and the cold, the hunger and the hate; but life was easy. Joseph Vissarionovich was dead, Beria had fallen, and Nikita Sergeyevich had made the Secret Speech.*1 The Secret Speech caused a planetary sensation. It was “the first time” a Russian leader had ever acknowledged the transgressions of the state. It was the first time. It was the last time too, more or l
ess; but we’ll come to that.

  Joseph Vissarionovich: I knew his face better than I knew my own mother’s. The mustachioed smile of a recruiting sergeant (I want you) and then the yellowy, grudge-hoarding, mountain-dwelling eyes, gazing from the shadows of crag or crevice.

  He wants you but you don’t want him. I use the “correct” form, Christian name and patronymic, Venus, to establish distance. For many years this distance did not exist. You must try hard to imagine it, the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odor, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.

  In the end it is above all embarrassing to have been so intimately shaped by such a presence. By such a sky-filler and ocean-straddler as Joseph Vissarionovich. And I fought in the war he had with the other one: the one in Germany. These two leaders had certain things in common: shortness of stature, bad teeth, anti-Semitism. One had an unusually good memory; one was an hysterical but evidently compelling speaker, compelling, at any rate, to that nation at that time. And there was of course the strength of their will to power. Otherwise, they were both undistinguished men.

  “I am not a character in a novel,” says Conrad’s Razumov, more than once (as the dreadful dilemma solidifies around him), and very reasonably, I think. I am not a character in a novel either. Like many millions of others, I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities.

  But life was easy in 1956.

  3.

  The War Between the Brutes and the Bitches

  My brother Lev came to Norlag in February 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches. He came at night. I recognized him instantly, in a crowd and at a distance, because a sibling, Venus, far more tellingly than a child, displaces a fixed amount of air. A child grows, while its parent remains static in space. With brothers it is always the same difference.

  I was having a smoke with Semyon and Johnreed on the roof of the cement works, and I saw Lev filing into the disinfection block, which stood foolishly exposed by its great battery of encaged lightbulbs. Forty minutes later he filed into the yard. He was naked but for the catsuit of thick white ointment they hosed you down with, for the purgation of small vermin; the caustic fire it generated on the surface of the skin did nothing to ease the galvanic shivering caused by thirty degrees of frost. He stumbled (he was nightblind), and went down on all fours, and the cold really took him: he looked like a hairless dog trying to shake itself dry. Then he got to his feet and stood there, holding something in his cupped hands—something precious. I kept back.

  This was the year when the tutelary powers lost their hold on the monopoly of violence. It was a time of spasm savagery, with brute going at bitch and bitch going at brute. The factions had, at their disposal, a toolshop each, and this set the tone of their encounters: warm work with the spanner and the pliers, the handspike and the crowbar, vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chiselings. Even as Lev jogged across the yard to the infirmary, there came through the mist the ear-hurting screams from the entrance to the toy factory, where two brutes (we later learned) were being castrated by a gang of bitches armed with whipsaws, in retaliation for a blinding earlier that day.

  The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil war, because the brutes and the bitches were, alike, urkas. A social substratum of hereditary criminals, the urkas had been in existence for centuries—but invisibly. They were fugitive in both senses: on the run, and quick to disappear. Outside in the land of freedom you would glimpse them rarely, and with callow wonder, as a child glimpses the half-hidden figures in the wings at a circus or a fairground: a world of Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, of monstrous tattoos and scarifications, a world of coded chaos. You could hear them, too, sometimes: in a Moscow backstreet it could stop you dead—the urka whistle, scandalously shrill (and involving, you felt sure, indecent use of the tongue). On the outside, the urkas were a spectral underclass. In the camps, of course, they formed a conspicuous and vociferous elite. But now they were at war.

  This was how power was distributed in our animal farm. At the top were the pigs—the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the urkas: designated as “socially friendly elements,” they had the status of trusties who, moreover, did no work. Beneath the urkas were the snakes—the informers, the one-in-tens—and beneath the snakes were the leeches, bourgeois fraudsters (counterfeiters and embezzlers and the like). Close to the bottom of the pyramid came the fascists, the counters, the fifty-eighters, the enemies of the people, the politicals. Then you got the locusts, the juveniles, the little calibans: by-blows of revolution, displacement, and terror, they were the feral orphans of the Soviet experiment. Without their nonsensical laws and protocols, the urkas would have been just like the locusts, only bigger. The locusts had no norms at all…Finally, right down there in the dust were the shiteaters, the goners, the wicks; they couldn’t work anymore, and they could no longer bear the pains of hunger, so they feebly brawled over the slops and the garbage. Like my brother, I was a “socially hostile element,” a political, a fascist. Needless to say, I was not a fascist. I was a Communist. And a Communist I remained until the early afternoon of August 1, 1956. There were also animals, real animals, in our animal farm. Dogs.

  The urka civil war was a consequence of Moscow’s attempt to undermine urka power and urka idleness. Its policy was to promote the urkas still further: to give them, in exchange for certain duties, pay and privileges close to those of the janitoriat. The bitches were the urkas who wanted to stop being urkas and start being pigs; the brutes were the urkas who wanted to go on being urkas. It looked good for us at first, when the war broke out. Suddenly the urkas had something else to do with their inexhaustible free time—something other than torturing the fascists, their premier activity. But now the war between the brutes and the bitches was getting out of control. Having lost their monopoly of violence, the pigs applied yet more violence. There was a wildness and randomness in the air that was beginning to feel almost abstract.

  Venus. Remember how disappointed you were by the crocodiles in the reptile house at the zoo—because “the lizards never moved”? Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis. Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after half a second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw. That was the war between the brutes and the bitches.

  Now, when I talk, here and elsewhere, of Moscow and its so-called policies, I do so with the assurance of informed hindsight. But at the time we had no idea what was going on. We never had any idea what was going on.

  Lev’s first day (he would spend most of it with the medics and the work-assigners) was also the monthly day of rest.

  I came up behind him in the yard. He was sitting on a low stone wall where the well used to be, his knees pressed together, his shoulders sloped forward. He was cherishing his fractured spectacles, and trying to believe his eyes.

  And what did he see? The thing that was hardest to grasp was the scale—the inordinate amount of space needed to contain it. In his line of sight were five thousand men (ten times that number lay to the sides, beyond, behind). When you got used to that, you had to come to terms with the evident fact that you were living in something like an army base, where the conscripts had been drawn from a direly indigent madhouse. Or a direly indigent hospice. In your nose and mouth was the humid breath of the camp, of Norlag, and, more distantly, the fresh cement of the brand-new Arctic city, the monumental denture of Predposylov. And finally you had to absorb and assent to the ceaseless agitation, the mad dance of the stick insects—the nervous fury of the zona.

  I said, Don’t turn around, Dmitriko.

  Never again would I call him that. It was not the time for diminutives. It never was the time…A camp administrator who allowed two family members to set eyes on each other, let alone meet and talk (let alone cohabit, for almost te
n years), would be punished for criminal leniency. On the other hand we would not need to be masters of deception, I didn’t think, to avoid exposure. We were half-brothers with different surnames, and we were radically unalike. To be brief. My father, Valery, was a Cossack (duly de-Cossackized in 1920, when I was one). Lev’s father, Dmitri, was a well-to-do peasant, or kulak (duly de-kulakized in 1932, when Lev was three). The father’s genes predominated: I was six foot two, with thick black hair and orderly features, whereas Lev…

  It seems that I had better describe him now, your step-uncle, to prepare the ground for the thunderclap that is barely a page away. There was something yokelish, indeed almost troglodytic, in the asymmetries of his face, the features thrown together inattentively, as if in the dark. Even his ears seemed to belong to two completely different people. Say whatever else you like about it, but my nose was unquestionably a nose, while Lev’s was a mere protuberance. And when you looked at him side-on, you thought, Is that his chin or his Adam’s apple? He was also, as a kid, short, meager, and sickly—a stuttering bedwetter in inch-thick glasses. All he had was his smile (in the mess of his face lived the teeth of a beautiful woman) and his rich blue eyes, the eyes of an intelligent. Definitely an intelligent.

  I said—Don’t turn around. And when you do, show no pleasure in seeing your older brother.

  He stood up; he walked away, then circled back into range. For a moment I found his faintly hooded, self-caressing expression impossible to read; it seemed, in the circumstances, simply alien. After the jail and the interrogation, after the transport, many new arrivals were already mad; and I feared my brother was already mad.