House of Meetings (12 page)

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Like what?

“Like the doctors look at me.”

Well, God help me, I had a plan.

This period of bourgeois calm, of progress and poetry and upward mobility, of no rape and no murder, is about to close. So let me bring you up to date.

At the turn of the decade we witnessed a series of developments, as if (it now seems) everyone was taking up position, in readiness for November 1982. Lev was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. They wanted to monitor his heart while they soused him in salbutamol, the new asthma drug. Increasingly critical of what she called my “ovine equanimity,” Jocelyn went back to England, on a visit. In her only letter, itself a remarkably sunny document, she said that it wasn’t the void, and her insight into it, that was depressing her: it was Russia. And she wouldn’t be coming back. My nephew, Artem, spent the Christmas of 1980 in the hold of a military stratocruiser, en route to Afghanistan and the war against the mujahideen. He was in the signals corps, and would be some way back from the front line. Christmas, an anniversary of no significance to Muslims or to Communists. And Zoya—Zoya did something strange.

News of her always came to me, with a glint, through the prism of my sister. The two of them met up about once a month, and when Kitty gave her reports she assumed the air of a hard-pressed social worker describing a particularly obstinate case. On the other hand, she was liable, as she spoke, to sudden physical expansions; for minutes on end she lost her slenderness, her meagerness, and swelled with possibilities…Often reaching for her inverted commas, Kitty had me know, for instance, that Zoya had “fallen in love with ‘a wonderful choreographer,’” that Zoya had been “swept off her feet by ‘a marvelous costume-designer.’” Over the years her menfriends seemed to decline in both caliber and staying power. I prepared myself for the era of the wonderful prop-shifter, the marvelous ticket-puncher, and so on. But as the old decade turned into the new, two things happened, and Zoya changed. She turned fifty-three and buried her mother in the course of the same week. And Zoya changed. Early in 1981 she told Kitty, very quietly, that she had accepted a proposal of marriage.

Go on then, I said. Who to?

Kitty paused, prolonging her power. Then she said, “Ananias.”

No
. I thought he was dead.

“Ananias! How can we possibly tell Lev?”

Only the one name: Ananias. Now an occasional contributor to the Moscow wing of the Puppet Theater, Ananias was the formerly famous dramatist.
The Rogues,
the play that made his reputation (there were also stories and novels), came out in the mid-1930s. It was set in a corrective-labor camp, and was about a group of mildly feckless urkas. In the early 1950s it was revived, and then rewritten by him for the cinema, very successfully, and with a different title—
The Scallywags
. Ananias was eighty-one.

And Kitty? We had better round off Kitty, because we are not going to be seeing much more of her. No, she never did find true love. The passion was not a strong one, but it led to her incurable attachment to a married man. He had long ago stopped promising to leave home. Later, she additionally befriended the wife, and became a kind of Aunt Phyllis to the only child. I tell you this just to show that people everywhere can create their own deadfalls, their own adhesions. It doesn’t always need the orchestration of the state.

At this time, after Jocelyn, I was having a restful romance with one of the interpreters at the Ministry of Defense. Restful, because timid Tamara was still in mourning for her husband of twenty-five years (and her prior history was the work of a single shift). Although her colloquial English was only middling, her technical English was first-rate, and I would be needing that. Tamara was slightly insane too, but tending the other way, and more dreamy than manic. Her obsession was her dacha—the converted beach hut in southern Ukraine on the shores of the Black Sea. She vowed to take me there in the spring. As I went off to sleep, she spoke to me in furry whispers. In that simple shack we would dwell, swimming naked each morning in the turquoise waters, and we would walk for hours along the sand under the confetti of white butterflies. I do love to swim, it’s true, to pound around and then float and wallow, unsupported, without connection…

On November 3, 1982, along with hundreds of others, Russian and Afghan, Artem was killed in the Salang Tunnel on the road heading north from Kabul. The Salang Tunnel, the highest on earth, which bores through the Hindu Kush, was Soviet-built (in 1963), and was therefore, and remains, a four-dimensional, 360-degree deathtrap, even in peacetime. Artem’s convoy, having cleared one avalanche, was heading north. Another convoy, two miles away at the far end, having cleared another avalanche, was heading south. There was perhaps a collision; there was certainly an explosion. We were told that “several dozen” died, but the figure was probably closer to a thousand. It wasn’t the blast that killed them. It was the smoke. Because the Russian authorities wrongly believed that Artem’s convoy was under attack from the mujahideen. So they sealed the Salang Tunnel at both ends. And why do that
anyway
? Blinded, maddened, choking, groping, flailing, pounding—and slow. A total death, a
deep
death for Artem.

I got to the house on the day after the telegram. All the blinds were drawn. You may wonder how I had the leisure to do it, but I thought of Wilfred Owen: “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” He was picturing a bereaved household (or a near-infinite series of such households) in the “sad shires”—October 1917. The drawn blind was an acknowledgment and a kind of signal. But the stricken need the dark. Light is life and is unbearable to them—as are voices, birdsong, the sound of purposeful footsteps. And they are themselves ghosts, and seek an atmosphere forgiving of ghosts, and conducive to the visits of other ghosts, or of one particular ghost.

For as long as I could bear it I sat with them in the shadows. Ten minutes. In the station hotel the water in the bathroom ran black. And this didn’t in the least surprise me or concern me. What color was water supposed to be? I looked in the mirror and I felt I could just remove it, my face. There would be clasps, behind the ears, and it would come away…I telephoned every few hours. I went over. And each time I came out of the front door—it was like fighting your way through the fathoms and snatching the first mouthful of air.

He said this to me. This is all he said. He said, “The worst is how much I pity him.”

Lidya, now, was always upstairs, in his room.

I said softly, What’s she doing up there?

“So young, and so afraid. She’s up there smelling his clothes…”

The blinds—they never did go back up. On the third morning Lev said that, insofar as he could locate his physical being, he seemed to be suffering from vertigo. He was admitted to the infirmary in Tyumen and transferred that afternoon to the hospital in Yekaterinburg. Detaching me from Lidya’s side, the doctor said that he had never seen a patient respond so weakly to such a massive infusion of drugs. He called it “a failure cascade”: organ after organ was closing down. My brother lay still and silent on the raised bed, but he was also in rapid motion. He was spinning around my head. He was disappearing into a maelstrom.

And conscious, all the way. His eyes swiveled from face to face—Lidya’s, Kitty’s, mine. His eyes were the eyes of a man who fears he has forgotten something. Then he remembered. He said goodbye to us in turn. He seemed to consider my face. Don’t expose me, I thought. Don’t tell.

“At last, no?” he said. And then the word “Please.”

Lev died on the same day that Leonid Ilich died—November 10. On the same day as the man who sent Artem into the Salang Tunnel.

4.

The House of Ill Fame

S
he was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame…Wait. What about a decent interval? No, we have already
had
a decent interval. It lasted for twenty years. Of course, I could tell myself, as I walked through the streets of the capital, that I was a messenger, bearing mortal tidings, like the best of brothers—the best of brothers. But I didn’t do that. I had a plan. And she was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame.

It was the landmark mansion block on the Embankment, looming square of shoulder, its bemedaled chest out-thrust, as if standing to attention over the Moscow River: neoclassical Gothic, and violently vast. When I call it infamous, which I do, I am using the word in its older sense, and not just as a synonym for
notorious
. They put it up just after the war, to house the victorious nomenklatura; and it still contained many a venerable and contented mass-murderer—taciturn amnesiacs on state pensions. The residents were by now more diversified, but as I entered, and registered, and waited while the guard made his call, I could have come across a Kaganovich here, a Molotov there.
^*6
I stepped into the wooden lift, which swilled on its tumblers. When it rose, the old contraption began to screech, as if the shaft with its swooning counterweight was an instrument of torture eight floors high. The encaged platform was being drawn up into it, into the house of infamy.

I had walked across town from the Rossiya, where I had taken a suite overlooking Red Square. November 17, 1982, and Leonid Ilich was being laid to rest. At the funeral of Joseph Vissarionovich, in 1953, the whole city was ascreech—human howls, the horns of cars and trucks, the factory whistles, the sirens. In her entire history, Venus, Russia was never madder than on that day. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were trampled or crushed (and not just in Moscow). My sister was there. Corpses, she said, rolled like barrels down the sharp incline into Trubnaya Square and jolted to a halt in a pond of blood. Even Pasternak, even Sakharov, felt the panic. An outrageously vast presence had disappeared; an outrageously vast absence took its place. In the vacuum everyone seriously believed that Russia itself would—would what? That Russia would stop existing. Only the Jews were glad. Only the Jews and the slaves…No grief, no apocalypse, for Leonid Ilich. Not a lethal superfluity of human beings but, instead, an embarrassing dearth. Mourners had been trucked and bussed in for the day from outlying farms and factories. They wore black. The blacks of the women frayed and puffy, the blacks of the men lucent with use. I walked through a city of Jocelyns and undertakers. I too wore a black tie, beneath my white silk scarf, my cashmere overcoat.

These last items I surrendered to the uniformed maid. Then I turned. Zoya stood at a round table, leaning back on it with her gloved fingertips. She, also, was in mourning wear: a black suit, black stockings and shoes, and a finemeshed veil attached to the rim of her velvet hat.

“Cleopatra,” she said in an unamused voice, “had the right idea.” She looked at me consideringly—my frown, my knitted black tie. “She killed the messenger if he gave her bad news, of course. Quite properly. But sometimes she killed the messenger before he said anything at all. Before. I ought to kill you now. Kitty told me about Artem. But this isn’t about him, is it? It’s about his father. Your brother. My first husband.”

And she swayed forward and engulfed me. It was my intention, whatever happened, to load up on sense impressions, future memories of smell and touch. And Russian men are old hands at comforting bereaved Russian women. They know that the embrace will last a long time, and that a certain license obtains. It seems to be permitted to stroke the sides of the upper thorax; and when you murmur “there there” you are also referring to the pendency beneath one armpit, the pendency under the other…Zoya cried with her whole body. I felt her hot breath in my ear as she heaved and gulped and popped, and her veil grew moist against my cheek. The veil—somber hosiery for the eyes, the nose, the mouth; when she straightened up and backed away it was stuck flat to her face, and not just with tears but with other fluids. She held up a black hand and pointed with the other.

In the sitting room one of the three leaded windows was open to the morning. As I approached the wavering bank of glass I picked up an odor, sweet but sinisterly sweet; it came, I knew, from the Red October Chocolate Factory across the way, but it reminded me of the smell of humanity in the Arctic thaw. Abruptly the maid’s uniform moved past me and she shut the window with a soft exclamation of surprise. How, she then asked, did I like my coffee? I declined. I feared even the slightest upsurge of agitation. You should take note of this. I cannot talk about the loss of a child. But the loss of almost anyone else is a kind of intoxicant. Mine was a rare and dreadful case, I agree, but I suspect that the invigoration is universal. You are being asked, after all, to register the greatest of all conceivable contrasts. And I was very alive. Don’t worry. The bill, on its silver tray, is presented later. Your payments are made on the installment plan—what the English, artistically but without truth, used to call the never-never. As I say, you should take note of these thoughts on bereavement, Venus. You who are about to be bereaved.

I was on my fourth cigarette by the time she again appeared. The veil was lifted now, pinned to the hat…At reunions after long intervals, beautiful women do this, I have found—they sidle toward you with their faces lowered and at an angle, peeping out, not from the ruins, but from the museum of what they once were, now that their trophies are kept behind glass. Zoya, her own curatress. And there of course it all was, despite her coloring of dusk and blush, her self-moisturizing flesh: the silky fissures of the forehead, the bruised pouches beneath the orbits, the nicks on the upper lip, and the extra painlines that all Russians have, stressing the push of the jaw. Seen head-on, her figure looked to have kept its contours and outline, but when she turned, it was as if (to persist with the schoolboy metaphor) a reeflike Caribbean island had unmoored itself and drifted all the way to the Gulf of Panama.

“His suit,” she said. “His shoes! I felt your overcoat for five whole minutes. I didn’t stint myself.”

And you, I said. Your hair…

“It’s still black. That’s because I dye the shit out of it once a week. Oh, I’m gray. Like Voltaire. It’s awful, presenting yourself to the past. I want all my old friends to be struck
blind
. I—” She dropped her head and made a listening face. She said, “He’s coming. He’s coming. He’ll only stay a minute. He wants to pay his respects.”

And in he came, through the double doors…As late as 1960 or so, it was possible in Moscow and Petersburg to see Ananias on posters and billboards. Sitting at a table, chin on palm, the toppled quiff of brown hair, the mock-resolute pout, the air of bohemian entitlement. And now? It is the fate of a significant fraction of little old women to turn into little old men: little old men in knickers and camisoles. You don’t so often see the process going the other way, but here was Ananias, a little old bag in a suit and tie. A little old boiler in gartered socks and black brogues. Even the stiff, tugged-back shoulders were feminine. He also had that spryness which, in elderly ladies, some claim to admire. Only in the brambly eyebrows did you see the burdens and calculations of the male.

Zoya introduced us. And you’ll think I’m making this up, but I’m not. His handshake was so disgusting that I at once resolved to hug him or even kiss him, in parting, rather than shake that hand again. White and humid, the flesh seemed about to give, to deliquesce. It was like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water.

At this point Zoya excused herself, promising her anxiously peering husband a swift return.

Ananias settled in his chair, saying, “I’m afraid you must have had a shocking flight over the mountains.”

I said, The mountains? No. They’re hardly worth the name of mountains.

“Ah, but the air pockets, do you see, the low pressure. You get it there because…”

As we talked, I found myself in the process of understanding something about Ananias: a pretty exact calculation could be made. The previous year I had seen a rerun of the film they made of his play,
The Scallywags
. I had also looked at a collection of his short fiction, published in 1937. This book greatly surprised and disquieted me. On the face of it his stories followed the social-realist pattern: say, the vicissitudes of a pig-iron factory or a collective farm, leading to a strengthened affirmation of “the general line.” Here was the anomaly: Ananias had talent. A consistently high level of perception was still alive and writhing. The prose lived. And when you came to the bits where he had to do the formulas and the piety—you could almost see the typewriter keys getting seized and wedged together like a mouthful of spindly black teeth. In the 1930s a talented writer who wasn’t already in prison had just two possible futures: silence, or collaboration followed by suicide. Only the talentless could collaborate and stay sane. So Ananias was a much rarer being. Within minutes I could feel the force of his accumulated mental distress, as unignorable as the touch of his hand or the smell of his breath. His breath, like the air above Predposylov.

She always seemed to be coming and going, and now she was coming again (her neck erect, like her harnessed gait). Ananias looked at her as if for leave and said in his weightless voice, “I commiserate with you in your tragedy. And the boy. Horrible. Horrible! An only child,” he said, nodding to himself. “This war is acting on us like a poison. The numbers are not yet enormous. But the young men being killed have no brothers, no sisters. Their families are at a stroke destroyed. Our whole society is cringing from this war.”

He paused, and his chin dropped onto his chest. When his gaze came up again, you saw that even the glass of the eyes gets old, ridged with scoopings and hardnesses. He said, “I’m as old as the century. Older! 1899!” His head twitched. “And your brother was still a young man. What was he, my dear? The same as you, no? Younger. A mere calf. And to give up the ghost like that. At
his
age. Quite extraordinary.
Quite
extraordinary.”

Ananias sat with his hands on his lap, their fingers inter-joined. His hands—how could they bear each other’s touch? Why didn’t they fly apart? And I felt an abstract pity for the mote of dust that might be caught in there, in the vile bivalve of his clasp. The answer I gave was valiantly mild, but it had already become clear that there would be no second handshake to avoid or survive.

I said, I assume you know that Lev spent ten years in camp.

“There was no other way, do you see. Free men would not have done that work, the mining for gold, for uranium, for nickel, all things the nation needed for its very survival.”

It was after the war, I said. We went there after the war.

“The institution got stuck. As institutions do. But that was all a very long time ago. And look at
you
. You’ve made your peace with the state. And doing
rather
well out of it, thank you very much. It hasn’t done you much harm, has it?”

I waited. I looked at Zoya, expecting a glance of warning. But her head was down. It seemed to me that every Russian was always doing the same thing. We were always fighting off an insanity of bitterness. For the moment I confined myself to saying that the reality of the camps was not what he chose to describe.

“Chose? Chose? I didn’t choose. You didn’t choose.
She
didn’t choose!
No one chose
.”

And I said it. I said, You chose. And you know who you’re like? You’re like the men and women in camp—the men and women who aren’t men and aren’t women. They had it taken away from them. But you. You did it all by yourself.

Time ticked past. And then he slapped down his hands on the leather arms of the chair and tried to rise. In a voice grown suddenly lost and childish he said, “Oh, why do people think they can come back and upset everyone? They think they can just come back. And cause such pain with these old wounds.”

Zoya helped him up. She gave me a nod and a quelling gesture, and guided Ananias toward the door, leaving me with the onerous notion that she was going off to attend to old Ester.

I spent this second intermission in a tour of the room; and it seemed that every ornament and gewgaw, every cornice and curlicue, had been potentiated, if not directly financed, by the forgiving laughter Ananias had provoked, nationwide, with his scapegrace brigands, stumbling just a little bit on their path to redemption. In
The Rogues
(1935) the fascists, the politicals, were straightforwardly demonic; in
The Scallywags
(1952) the politicals were demonic—and Semitic: we were all fagins and shylocks, we were all judases. Over in the corner there was a little shrine to Ananias’s more signal successes—autographed photos, cups and sashes, the certificate confirming his status as a Hero of Socialist Labor…I was also considering the depth of Zoya’s failure: her failure to live by the heart. I myself knew what a dispiriting project that was, with my widows, my orphans, the middle-aged waifs and changelings, the mice and the guinea pigs still rattling around the abandoned lab, long after the experiment was over. And now expected to just live out their lives.

Again she reentered. Jewess, I whispered. And “Ananias”—wasn’t that Jewish too? Oh, what’s
wrong
with Russians about the Jews…She closed the double doors and sank back with her hands flat against the teak. Now she moved forward with something that resembled the comic slovenliness of her old walk, and when she dropped herself onto the sofa her feet momentarily rode up from the parquet before resettling themselves as she patted for me to join her.

“He’s all right.”

You could feel her sigh through the sofa’s frame.

She said, “We’ve got about five minutes. Then he’ll start. It’s good of you to come but it hurts to see you. And it hurts to be seen. Why are you here? You must have a reason. Knowing you.”