House of Meetings Read online

  One scrap of comfort was given to me (and there are these leftovers of comfort, at the banquet of sorrow). Its efficacy will perhaps be obscure to those accustomed to the exercise of free will. I learned that Zoya, while not indifferent to older men (she came close to scandal with a newly married thirty-year-old), never involved herself with any of my closest peers: veterans. So I could tell myself that when we kissed, and she retained my lower lip for a second between her big square teeth, the taste she didn’t like was the ferrous hormone of war.

  It comforted me because I could attribute my failure to historical forces, along with everything else. History did it.

  Reveille, in camp, was achieved as follows: a metal bludgeon, wielded by a footlike hand, would clatter up and down for a full minute between two parallel iron rails. This you never got used to. Each morning, as you girded yourself in the yard, you would stare at the simple contraption and wonder at its acoustical might. I now know that, for some barbarous reason (the quicker detection, perhaps, of even the tiniest animal), hunger sharpens the hearing. But it didn’t just get louder—it grew in shrillness and, somehow, in articulacy. The sound seemed to trumpet the dawn of a new dominion (more savage, more stupid, more certain) and to repudiate the laxity and amateurism of the day before.

  Until Lev came to camp my first thought, on waking, was always the same thought, admitting of no modulation. It was always: I would give my eyesight for just ten more seconds…Another day has been cranked up in front of you; the day itself, the dark dawn (the glassy sheen of the sector and the chalklike mist which the lungs refused), looked like the work of a team of laborers, a nightshift—the result of hours of toil. The cold is waiting for me, I’d think; it is expecting me, and everything is prepared. Don’t you find, my dear, when you step out into the rain, that you always have a moment’s grace before feeling the first few dots on your hair? Cold isn’t like that. Cold is cold, obviously, and wants all your heat. It is on you. It grips and frisks you for all your heat.

  Then, after Lev came, daily consciousness would arrive to find me yanked upright on my boards. The pig would still be belaboring the iron rails as I dropped to the floor. I was always the first man out of the hut—and always with the feeling that a lurid but sizable treat lay ahead of me. What was this treat, exactly? It was to get my first glimpse of Lev, and to see the way his frown softened into the flesh of his brow. It wouldn’t happen the moment he set eyes on me. He would smile his strained—his stretched—smile, but the frown, the inverted chevron of care, would remain awhile and then fade, like a gauge measuring my power to reassure. And sometimes I feel that I was never closer to the crest than during those exchanges or transfusions—never more alive.

  Now that sounds all right, doesn’t it? Lurid, then, in what way? I see that I cannot avoid the lurid. Another sun had risen in me. This sun was black, and its rays, its spokes, were made of hope and hate.

  Lev, by the way, didn’t last long in his brigade—the strong brigade under Markargan. Even though he was by now very fit. Very sick and very fit: you could be that there, and go on being it for quite a while. But no. It was a rare fascist who lasted long in a strong brigade. In a strong brigade there was a unanimity of effort that had the weight of a union contract or a military oath: you met the norm and you ate the full ration. It was one way of getting through it—the booming worksong, the bucketful of soup, the sleep of the dead. A peasant, carrying around with him his millennium of slave ethic—a peasant could manage it without great inner cost. But an intelligent…This is what comes over you, in the slave system. It takes a couple of months. It builds, like a graduated panic attack. It is this: the absorption of the fact that despite your obvious innocence of any crime, the exaction of the penalty is not inadvertent. Now go with such a thought to a strong brigade. You try and you try, but the idea that you are excelling in the service of the state—it weighs your hands down, and causes them to drop to your side. You can feel your hands as they drop to your side; your sides, your hips, feel them as they fall. Needless to say, a weak brigade, with its shiteater short commons, wasn’t any good either. So what do you do? You do what all the fascists do. You skive and slack and fake and wheedle, and you subsist.

  Once he was off the full ration, Lev’s bowel infection got worse. In camp, even hospitalization for dysentery obeyed the law of the norm; and by early 1949 Lev could meet it. And what was the norm? The norm was more blood than shit. More blood than shit. He went to Janusz, who gave him some pills and promised him a bed. On the day before his admission, Lev had some sort of shouting match in his barracks, over a sewing needle (that is, a fishbone), and was immediately denounced—his name dropped into the suggestion box outside the guardhouse. Instead of a week in the infirmary he had a week in the isolator, wearing underclothes, and crouched on a bench above knee-deep bilge.

  The frequency of the total. The total state—the masterpiece of misery.

  That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my “proof,” framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. “Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion.” But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear—if God is a Russian.

  And we the people keep coming back for more. We fucking love it. That week had an awful color for me, but when Lev came out, walking the way he did, and with his head at that angle, I more or less accepted the fact that Norlag wouldn’t kill him, not on its own. He could bear it.

  3.

  “The Fascists Are Beating Us!”

  What worries me about me,” he said (this was half a year later), “is what kind of shape I’ll be in when and if I get out. I don’t just mean how thin or how ill. Or how old. I mean up here. In the head. You know what I think I’m turning into?”

  A moron.

  “Exactly. Good. So it’s not just me.”

  We all have it.

  “Then that’s bad. Because it probably means it’s true. My thoughts—they’re not really thoughts anymore. They’re impulses. It’s all on the level of cold, hot. Cold soup, hot soup. What will I talk to my wife about? All I’ll be thinking is cold soup, hot soup.”

  You’ll be talking to her like you’re talking to me.

  “But it’s so tiring talking to you. You know what I mean. Christ. Imagine if we weren’t here. I mean together.”

  The evening was warm and bright, and we sat smoking on the steps of the toy factory. Yes, the toy factory, because the economy of the camp was as various as the economy of the state. We churned out everything from uranium to teaspoons. I myself was mass-producing threadbare clockwork rabbits with sticks in their paws and little snare drums attached to their waists.

  Two youngish prisoners strolled past at a donnish pace, one with his hands clasped behind his back, the other ponderously gesturing.

  “All I care about, in the end,” the second man was saying, “is tits.”

  “No,” said the other. “No, not tits. Arses.”

  “…New boys,” said Lev.

  I shrugged. Young men, after their arrival, would talk about sex and even sports for a couple of weeks, then about sex and food, then about food and sex, then about food.

  Lev yawned. His color was better now. He had had his time in the infirmary, and a course of weak penicillin from Janusz. But his lips and nails were blue, from hunger, not cold, and he had the brownish pigmentation around the mouth, deeper than any suntan. We all had that too, the great-ape muzzle.

  “It’s hard to do when you’re covered in lice,” he said, “but it’s good to think about sex.”

  I’m very sorry to say, Venus, that this was by now, for me, an extremely sensitive subject. You see, I had managed to persuade myself that Lev’s bond with Zoya was largely a thing of the spirit. It was, in fact, pretty well platonic. What a relief for her, I told myself, after all those passionate ups and downs. And I could even derive
some pleasure from imagining the kind of evening that must surely be their norm. The remains of the simple supper cleared away, the taking of turns at the washbasin, Gretel, a little shyly, slipping into her bedsocks and coarse nightgown, Hansel sighing in his vest and longjohns, the peck on the cheek, and then over they turned, back to back, each with a complacent grunt, and sought their rightful rest…And while Lev lay in his little death, the other Zoya, the sweating succubus, rose up like a mist and came to me.

  “But it’s not really thought, is it. It’s more like cold soup, hot soup.”

  There is poetry, I said.

  “True. There is poetry. I can sometimes work on a line or two for half a minute. Then there’s a jolt and I’m back to the other stuff.”

  I told him about the thirty-year-old professor in the women’s block. She recited Eugene Onegin to herself every day.

  “Every day? Yeah, but some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Bronze Horseman.”

  That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Song of Igor’s Campaign.

  “That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…”

  And so we got through another hour, before we groped our way to our bedding.

  Then came the changes. But before I get to that, it is necessary for me to describe a brief internal detour: a lucky break. I suggest, my dear, that you take full advantage of this interlude or breather, using it, perhaps, to tabulate my better qualities. Because I am soon going to be doing some very bad things.

  We never saw the Chief Administrator, Kovchenko, but we heard about him—his polar-bear fur coat, his groin-high sealskin boots, his fishing trips and reindeer hunts, his parties. Every so often a card would appear on the bulletin board, asking for the services of inmate musicians, actors, dancers, athletes, whom he used to entertain his guests (fellow chief administrators or inspectorates from the center). After their performance, the artistes were given a vat of leftovers. Excitingly, many came back sick from overeating, and there were a number of fatal gorgings.

  One day Kovchenko posted a signed request for “any inmate with experience of installing a ‘television.’” I had never installed a television; but I had dissected one, at the Tech. I told Lev what I remembered about it, and we applied. Nothing happened for a week. Then they called out our names, and fed us and scrubbed us, and jeeped us out to Kovchenko’s estate.

  Lev and I stood waiting, under guard, in what I would now call a gazebo, a heated octagonal outhouse, with a workbench and an array of tools. Kovchenko entered, gaunt and oddly professorial in his jodhpurs and tweed jacket. A metal crate was solemnly wheeled in, and two men who looked like gardeners began unbolting it. “Gentlemen,” said Kovchenko, breathing deeply and noisily, “prepare to see the future.” Up came the lid and in we peered: a formless, gray-black sludge of valves and tubes and wires.

  So we started going there every day. Every day we came out of the thick breath of the camp and entered a world of room temperature, picture windows, ample food, coffee, American cigarettes, and continuous fascination.

  After two months we put together something that looked like an especially disgraceful deep-sea fish, plus, on the open back porch, a pylon of aerials. All we ever raised, on the screen, were fleeting representations of the ambient weather: night blizzards, slanting sleet against a charcoal void. Once, in the presence of the chief, we picked up what might or might not have been a test card. This satisfied Kovchenko, whose expectations were no longer high. The set was transported to the main house. We later heard that it was put on a plinth in the entrance hall, for display, like a piece of ancient metalwork or a brutalist sculpture.

  We too had wanted to see the future. Now we returned to the past—to the ball-bearings works, in fact, where you just went oompah every five seconds, and thought about cold soup, hot soup. I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system—the first being terror. At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be false (even my mother’s school was no different). Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. Public discourse was boring, the papers and the radio were just a drone in the other room, and the meetings were boring, and all talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally. Bureaucracy was boring. Queuing was boring. The most stimulating place in Russia was the Butyrki prison in Moscow. I can see why they needed the terror, but why did they need the boredom?

  That was the big zona. This was the little zona, the slave-labor end of it. In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger—the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.

  Another thing that happened, on the credit side, is that we both grew close to Janusz, the prisoner-doctor. He did everything he could for us—and just to stand next to him for ten minutes made you feel marginally less unhealthy. Tall, broad, and twenty-four years old, he had a head of jungly black hair that grew with anarchic force; we used to say that any barber, going in there, would want danger money. Janusz was a Jewish doctor who was trapped in an imposture. He wasn’t pretending that he was a Christian (no great matter either way, in camp). He was pretending that he was a doctor. And he wasn’t—not yet. Always the most difficult position. And it wouldn’t have been so hard for him if he hadn’t been kind, very kind, continuously moved by all he saw. For those early operations he had to feel his way into it, into the human body, with his knife. First, do no harm.

  Trucks and troops went the word. Trucks and troops. That meant Moscow, and policy change. A decision had been arrived at in the Central Committee, and it came down to us in the form of headlights and machineguns.

  At all times and in all seasons the camp population was in flux, with various multitudes being reshuffled, released, reimprisoned, shipped out, shipped in (and it was amazing, by the way, that my brother and I were separated just once, and then for barely a year). Our business, now, was to gaze into this motion arithmetic, and try to discern something that could be called an intention…

  Lev was standing by the barracks window, looking out, and bobbing minutely up and down—his way of discharging unease. He said,

  “Listen. Arbachuk cornered me behind the woodshop last night. I thought I was finally going to get raped, but no. He was speechless, he was all stricken and mournful. Then he reached down and squeezed my hand…He’s been like that before. But now I think he was saying goodbye. They’re shipping out the brutes.”

  I said that that had to be good for us.

  “Why good?” He turned. “Since when do they make it good for us? I know how to stay alive here. As it is. What’s next?”

  We were confined to barracks and spent our days looking out, looking out. And you didn’t want to be in the zona, not now, with its dogs and columns of men and the new disposition of forces. The watchtowers—their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth…At such times, I often thought I was playing in a sports match, ice hockey, say, in slow motion (dreamlike yet lethal, zero-sum, sudden-death); and that I was the goalkeeper—excluded from the action except when responding to hideous emergencies.

  They isolated the brutes, and trucked them out—the simplest way, we supposed, of ending the war between the brutes and the bitches. But then they isolated the bitches, too. And as soon as the bitches were gone, they isolated the locusts, and then the leeches. If you discounted the shiteaters, who remained, that left the politicals and the informers—the fascists and the snakes.

  Lev said, looking out, “Christ, how clear d
oes it need to be? They’re isolating us.”

  …We’re all going to be freed, I said.

  “It’s just as likely,” said Lev, “that we’re all going to be shot.”

  Over the next few weeks our sector, freshly depopulated, started filling up again. And all the new arrivals were fascists. They were isolating us. Why? Why were they giving us, systemwide, exactly what we wanted—delivering us, awakening us?

  To read the mind of Moscow, in 1950, this was where you would have needed to be: in the antennae, in the control turret, of the slug that was unmethodically devouring the leader’s brain. We weren’t in that turret. I say this with a shrug, but the best guess, now, is that Joseph Vissarionovich had started to fear for the ideological integrity of the common felon.

  The power ascribed to us, even the power of contamination, wasn’t real (we were not yet a force). Now the power was telling us it was there. The process took about a month. We were like blind men recovering their sight. It was a question of eyes turning to other eyes, and holding them. Self-awareness dawned. The politicals looked from face to face—and became political.

  Two things followed from this. The policy change in Moscow meant the end, the unintended suicide, of the slave-labor system. It also meant that Lev and I became enemies. A decision is made, around a table, in a room a thousand miles away—and a pair of brothers must go to war. This, Venus, is the meaning, the hour-by-hour import, of political systems.

  But I’m not going to waste your time with the politics. I’ll give you what you need to know. And I’m afraid I cannot neglect to tell the tale of the guard called Uglik—the strenuous tale of Comrade Uglik. Looking back, I now see what the politics was: the politics of Siamese twins, and mermen, and bearded ladies. It was the politics of the slug called arteriosclerosis.