House of Meetings Page 6

  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.”

  “Open!” said Arbachuk, squeezing the bolts of Lev’s jaw in his hand.

  “I’m not hungry. This tattoo, Citizen. I can only see the last word. What does it say?”

  Slowly and grimly Arbachuk rolled up his sleeve. And there were the bruised letters: You may live but you won’t love.

  “One bite. Open!”

  “I eat the full ration. I’m not hungry, Citizen. I work in a strong brigade.”

  Like the kind of man who cannot forget or forgive a woman’s past, and must sit her down, every other night, and have her go through the hoops all over again (“He touched you where? You kissed his what?”), I would come to Lev, seeking the narrative of greatest pain. I know about that kind of man, because I’m him—he’s me. In later years it was the only way I could tell for sure that I was finding a woman interesting: I would want her to confess, to denounce, to inform. And they quite enjoyed it at first, because it felt like attention. They soon came to dread it. They soon caught on…This trait of mine didn’t really have the time or the opportunity to get started between war and camp. You see, nearly all the ex-lovers of nearly all my girlfriends—they were dead. And I didn’t mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn’t forgive the dead. I didn’t mind the dead. The living were what bothered me.

  When, shortly before I was arrested, Lev asked for my permission to try his luck with Zoya, I didn’t even take the trouble to laugh in his face. I gave him the trisyllabic You?; and that was all. I honestly didn’t give it a moment’s thought. But Lev was like clever little brothers everywhere. He watched what I did and then tried the opposite. He came at Zoya without intensity.

  Oh well done, I said, during one of our last conversations in freedom. You’re her errand boy. And her mascot.

  “That’s it,” he said, stuttering. He was always stuttering. “Come on, how close did you ever get to her? Me, I’m there in the room. I’m there all the time. I’m there when she’s changing.”

  Changing?

  “Behind the curtain.”

  How big is the curtain? And how thick?

  “Thick. It goes from the floor up to here. She drapes clothes over the top of it.”

  What clothes?

  “Petticoats and things.”

  Jesus Christ…And now she’s fucking that linguist. I don’t know how you can bear it.

  “Oh, I can bear it.”

  This went on for nearly a year—a year in which Zoya had three more affairs. “One a term,” he now told me. And it was while he was sitting there, in the conical attic, holding her hand, and talking her through her latest misadventure, that Lev made his next move.

  “I said it teasingly. I said, ‘You’re unlucky in love because you’re drawn to the wrong men. These head-in-air types. Try a slightly smaller, uglier one. Like me. We’re so much keener.’ She laughed,
and then went silent for five seconds. Then next time I said it, she laughed and went silent for ten seconds. And so on. And then she had another.”

  Another what?

  “Another affair. A whole other one.”

  Is it possible, I said, that you and I have a drop of blood in common? Weren’t you jealous?

  “Jealous? I couldn’t have borne it for a minute if I’d been jealous. I didn’t have the right to be jealous. In whose name? I was too busy learning.”

  I waited.

  “Learning what I’d have to do to keep her.”

  …You dirty little bastard.

  It does happen. In my life I’ve seen perhaps three examples of it. And you, Venus, are one of them. You and that Roger. As I said at the time, possibly rather unfeelingly, You’re about three-quarters trained to think that everyone looks the same. That’s the illusion your crowd is foisting on itself. So you think it’s snobbish not to fancy cripples. And now you’ve got that sick bat trailing after you. I still think that that’s what it mainly was, Venus: pity and piety. You told me there were compensations, and I believed you. You spoke of his gratitude—his gratitude, and your relief from certain cares. And I can see that obviously attractive women sometimes do get to the end of obviously attractive men: their entitlements, their expectations, their unexceptionable hearts. And so one morning the princess kisses the bullfrog, and finds it good.

  Then what?

  “It was a Sunday. Late afternoon. We were lying there and I said it again. Then she went all still. Then she stood up and took—”

  Enough. Took her clothes off, I suppose.

  “She already had her clothes off. Most of them. No, she took my—”

  Enough.

  They had nine months; and then, as Lev’s classmates and professors were being hauled in one after the other, it was she who took the decision. They activated the scrofulous rabbi in his basement. It was clandestine, and I suppose of doubtful legitimacy. But they stamped on the glass, wrapped in its handkerchief—the destruction of the temple, the renunciation of earlier ties. And they made the vows.