House of Meetings Read online

  “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!”

  This cry (not without a certain charm, even then) was often to be heard during the summer of 1950. We started beating the snakes, the one-in-tens. No longer would they tarry at their tables in the mess hall, kissing bunched fingertips over their double rations. Now, when they made their way across the square to the guardhouse, it was not to top up their denunciations for an extra cigarette: it was to plead for sanctuary in the punishment block—with its shin-deep bilge, its obese bedbugs.

  Our favored method of chastisement was called “tossing.” It was what the peasants used to do, mindful, as ever, of scarce materials. Don’t blunt that knife, don’t strain that cudgel: let gravity do it. One man per limb, three preparatory swings, up they went, like a caber, and down they crashed. Then we tossed them again. Until they no longer flailed in the air. We left them out there for the pigs: canvas bagfuls of broken bones.

  You seem displeased, brother, I said, as I strode into the barracks dusting my palms.

  “You’re not my brother.”

  I waited. Everyone flocked and scrambled to witness a tossing. Not Lev, who always withdrew.

  “What I’m saying,” he said, “is that you’re unrecognizable. You’re like Vad. Do you know that? You’ve joined the herd. Suddenly you’re just like everybody else.”

  This was perfectly true. I was unrecognizable. In a matter of weeks I had become a Stakhanovite of agitation, a “shock” stirrer and mixer—demands and demonstrations, pickets, petitions, protests, provocations. Ah, you’re thinking: displacement, transference; the mechanism of sublimation. And it is true that I was deliberately embracing the chemical heat of mass emotion, and the infuriant of power. But I never lost sight of a possible outcome, and a possible future.

  “I ask you to consider my position. You’ve chosen a path, you and your herd,” he was saying. “Violence and escalation. You know fucking well what’s going to happen.”

  For a very brief period it looked as though the isolation of the politicals, as a policy, had a subtext: we were to be worked to death (less food, longer hours). But the pigs still had their quotas, and now they had given us the weapon of the strike.

  Anyway, I was in a position to say, with some indignation, Oh, I get it. You want the sixteen-hour day and the punitive ration. Well we don’t.

  “You won that fight. Christ, that was eight or nine fights ago. And the pigs, they aren’t going to keep on backing off. You know what’s going to happen. Or maybe you don’t. Because you’re running with the herd. Look at you. Thundering along with it.”

  Again I waited.

  “What you’re going to get is a war with the state. A fight to the death against Russia. Against the Cheka and the Red Army. And you’re going to win that, are you?”

  I didn’t say so, but I always knew what was coming our way. I always knew.

  “All right. I’ll ask you for the last time. And I’m asking a lot. There are three or four men here who have a chance of bringing the herd to a halt. And you’re one of them. Please consider my position. I have to ask. And it’s the last time that I’ll ask you anything as a brother.”

  You ask the moon, Lev.

  “Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.

  We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.

  I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.

  On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.

  So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.

  Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking.*3 No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his hands.

  Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version—because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.

  Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.

  “I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”

  Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.

  I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.

  “His conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”

  What are you talking about?

  “Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”

  Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again—freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.

  Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the First World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Mediterranean. I spent mine above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.

  It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals—from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him
”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens)—think it isn’t.*4 For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm—the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.

  The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.

  Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.

  4.

  “Meet Comrade Uglik”

  The pigs.

  They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners—cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.

  I shadowed my brother, over the years, and did some quiet roughing-up on his behalf. But there wasn’t anything I could have done about Uglik. He was just Lev’s bad luck.

  I asked him, Why are you crying?

  These were the first words I had addressed to Lev in ten or eleven months. By this time (January 1953), his level in camp was on a par with the shiteaters—or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracized. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape—the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offense he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.

  I asked him, Why are you crying?

  He flinched, as if my voice, grown unfamiliar, held a hardness for him. Or else, perhaps, he had some sense of the unholy brew of motives that lay behind my question…Of all the freedoms we had secured over the past eighteen months, the one that mattered most to me, I found, was the removal of the number from my back. The one that mattered to Lev was his right to correspondence. His right: not anybody else’s. He campaigned for it alone, and he won it alone; and for this too he was shunned. Now he was sitting on a tree stump in the copse behind the infirmary, Zoya’s first letter in one hand and his dripping face in the other. If you’d asked me whether I hoped that everything was over between them, the truth-drug answer would have been something like, Well, that would be a start. But I hope she hasn’t done it nicely. That might not do me any good at all.

  “I’m crying…” He bowed his head, becoming absorbed by the task of returning the sheath of tissuey paper to its wrinkled pouch; but every time he neared success he had to raise a finger to wipe the itch off his nose. “I’m crying,” he said, “because I’m so dirty.”

  I paused. I said, And all else is well?

  “Yes. No. There is talk, in freedom, of Birobidzhan. They’re building barracks in Birobidzhan.”

  Birobidzhan was a region on the northeastern border of China—largely, and wisely, uninhabited. Ever since the 1930s there had been talk of resettling the Jews in Birobidzhan.

  “They’re building barracks for them in Birobidzhan. Janusz thinks they’re going to hang the Jewish doctors in Red Square. The country is hysterical with it, the press…And then the Jews will run the gauntlet to Birobidzhan. Now if you’ll excuse me. This will take about a minute.”

  And for about a minute he wept, he musically wept. He was crying, he said, because he was so dirty. I believed him. Being so dirty made you cry more often than being so cold or being so hungry. We weren’t so cold or so hungry, not anymore. But we were so dirty. Our clothes were stiff, practically wooden, barklike, with dirt. And under the wood, woodlice and woodworm.

  “Ah, that’s better. It beats me how the women stay so clean,” he went on, as if talking to himself. “Maybe they lick themselves, like cats. And we’re like dogs that just roll in the shit. Now,” he said and turned to me. “I have a dilemma. Perhaps you can help me resolve it.”

  He focused and smiled—the pretty teeth. I found I still feared that smile.

  “Here,” he said, “is no good. I can’t stay here. I’m leaving. I’m off. It’s no good here. Here, everybody’s going to die.”

  I said, There comes a time when you have to—

  “Oh don’t give me that. Every man in the camp can give me that. The thing is that I’m urgently needed in freedom. To protect my wife. So. Two choices. I can escape.”

  Where to? Birobidzhan?

  “I can escape. Or I can inform.”

  I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

  “Come on, take me seriously. Think it through, think it through. If I inform, it’s conceivable I’ll be pardoned. With things as they are now. You know, give them a list of all the strike leaders. I could try that. Then you could kill me. And do you know what you’d get if you killed me?” He closed his eyes and nodded and opened them again. “You’d get a hard-on.”

  I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

  He looked at the ground, saying, “And that’s another reason to cry.”

  The two of us always went to the bathhouse together. Even when we weren’t speaking or meeting each other’s eyes. The thing had to be done in relay. Now you’d think that the bathhouse was where we all wanted to go, but many men would risk a beating to avoid it or even delay it. None of our innumerable agitations had any effect in the bathhouse. For instance, it was quite possible to come out even dirtier than you went in. One of the reasons for this was institutional or systemic: an absence of soap. There was not always an absence of water, but there was always, it seemed, an absence of soap. Even in 1991 the coalminers went on strike for soap. There was never any soap in the USSR.

  We were queueing in the sleet. Then suddenly there were a hundred of us in a changing room with hooks for twelve. And suddenly there was soap—little black globules, doled out of a bucket. At this point everything but your overcoat got thrown into the pot, to be redistributed later on at random; but by taking turns we could guard our most precious things—the spare foot-rag, the extra spoon. Lev filed through first, with his mug of warm water. I gazed at my black globule. I held it to my nose. It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

  It was then I noticed it, in the pocket of the leaden wad I held in my arms: Lev’s letter…After four years of war and nearly seven years of camp, my integrity, some might feel, had come under a certain strain. A for-the-duration rapist (or so it then seemed), a coldblooded (but also tumescent) executioner, I intended, when I ever thought about it, to go back to being the kind of man I was in 1941. And now, of course, I weep to think that I imagined this was possible. The kind of man who drew a shopkeeper’s attention to the fact that he had undercharged; the kind of man who gave up his seat for the elderly and infirm; the kind of man who would never read the last page of a novel first, but would get there by honest means; and so on. But there was Zoya’s letter, and I reached for it.

  There are self-interested and utilitarian reasons for behaving well, it turns out. I had some bad times in camp, clearly e
nough, but those five minutes, under the brown mists of the bathhouse, bred half a century of pain…Family news (her mother’s poor health, his mother’s improvement), that new job in the textiles factory, Kazan, the idea of a “homeland” in the east, earnest and repetitive protestations of love: all that was over in the first paragraph. The remainder, four dense sides, was of course Aesopian in style, with the fable unfolding in three stages. She described the arrangement of a vase of flowers, and then the preparation and consumption of an enormous meal. It was easily translated: a marathon preen (with much posing and primping), a saturnalia of foreplay, and a contortionist’s black mass of coition. Even her handwriting, tiny though it was, looked completely indecent, wanton—lost to shame.

  Lev came out and I went in.

  The conjugal visits, in the House of Meetings, had not yet begun. His was three and a half years away.

  Lev’s brigade, that morning (February 14, 1953), had been reassigned and reequipped, and was late starting out. The pigs stopped the column as it was crossing the sector. And one of them said,

  “We have a distinguished visitor. Gentlemen? Meet Comrade Uglik.”

  Uglik? Take away the uniform (and the riding boots and neckerchief), and he looked more like an urka than a pig. And the urkas, it had to be said, were physically vivid. You sometimes caught yourself thinking that if human life ended anyway at twenty-five, then an urka might seem a reasonable thing to be. Whereas, with the pigs, the only suggestion of moisture and mobility in their gray, closed faces was the vague lavatorial humidity that came off them when they were roused. Uglik was with us for only a week, and was active among us for only a day and a night. But no one ever forgot him.

  His face was sleek, and rosily sensual, with rich, moist, outward-tending lips. His eyes were positively flamboyant. Looking at those eyes, you felt not just fear but also the kind of depression that would normally take a week to build. His eyes were wearyingly vigorous. Uglik, I think, came from the future. Hitherto, the standard janitor of the Gulag was a product of the sleeping residuum to be found in all societies: they were sadists and subnormals (and the palest and dankest onanists), now hugely empowered; and in their best moments, their moments of clarity and candor, they all knew it. That was why they would far rather torment a cosmologist or a ballet dancer than a rapist or a murderer. They wanted someone good. Raised as a pig, by a pig, Uglik was different. He’d never felt subnormal. And freedom from conscious shame had given him the leisure to develop as an extrovert. He was, on the other hand, an alcoholic. That was why he was here, as demotion and punishment for a string of disgraces at various camps in South Central Asia. They were sending us their lost men. At this point Uglik had two months to live.