House of Meetings (16 page)

Forcing her out, forcing Zoya out, was not a contained cruelty. No one knew better than I did how hopeless she was at love. The awful way she laid herself open. She was a totalist among men who dealt in fractions. I know you and Kitty were appalled by her marriage, but I was secretly ecstatic, for a while, anyway. The irony is very sharp, I agree. But bear in mind that she was hopeless at other things too, including money. In the few months between our separation and our divorce she ran up debts that looked like state budgets. I heard that in the end it cost Ananias half of all he had to bail her out. At last: reparation. The money earned by mocking the sweat of slaves—it goes to Zoya. Hereafter, or so I felt, that dreadful old piece of shit will keep her warm and fed and clothed, and will value her. Or so I felt.

Now, my brother. It is my suspicion that you aren’t yet done with Zoya. You’re going to wait until after I’m dead and then you’re going to try again. Not immediately after. I don’t see you getting on the plane with a suitcase in one hand and a funeral baked meat in the other. Listen. There was one night in Moscow, the time we stayed over, and you’d been giving her “that look” every five minutes—you think you’re all strong and silent, bro, but you’re a book with its spine cracked open and its pages falling free. We were talking about it as we went to bed. I said, as was my habit, “Like a clever dog that knows it’s going to be thrashed.” Now you remember how perceptive she could be, when she tried, when she stopped and thought. I’ll indent her reply, to give it extra weight:

No, not anymore. More like a dog on a leash. With a gendarme at the other end of it. He lusts, but he also hates. See the way he’s always having a dig at Varvara about her past. You’d think he’d delivered her from prostitution. I bet he tortures her. That’s what he’d do to me. An endless exercise. An endless wank about the past. About you. You and all the others.

And you know what she did then? She made the sign of the
cross
.
She
.

Given a world of free will, you would have no chance with Zoya, not a prayer. It’s very simple: you’re violent. In camp, when I went pacifist, that was an attempt to preserve something in myself. It’s the philosophy of the truant, I know—of the pious shirker. I assumed at the time that you were doing some discreet brawling on my behalf, and I stayed silent. I remember the change in the attitude, and the appearance, of the three little hooligans who were always after me. They looked as though they’d all been in the same car crash.
Christ
. And that Tartar who wanted my shovel—was it you who broke his arm? Anyway, I tried, with my share of hypocrisy, to preserve something in myself. It didn’t work. Nothing would have worked. And I don’t condemn you, really, for what you did—to the informers. Oppression lays down bloodlust. It lays it down like a wine.

Now I know you to be a persistent and resourceful suitor—and, in her case (if I may say), a remarkably sanguine one. But she is weak against certain kinds of influence. And if the old hack is still alive, when I’m not, and she is still with him, well, it already sickens me to imagine her isolation, and her thwartedness. This I feel sure of, though, and I warn you with real fear. If you do move on her, it will create for you both nothing but misery. Not to mention, or at least not to go into, the insult it would in any case be to my memory, and to our fraternal love. A love that survives the strangest fact of all.

You wanted me dead, didn’t you? From pretty much the first day I came to camp. You fought it, and you won, and you risked much physical damage to keep me from harm. Yet you wanted me dead. Because Zoya was impossible so long as I was alive. I don’t know why. I don’t know what urka-like rule you were following, though I’m glad of it. Or maybe you realized that I just couldn’t let it happen. We’d need pistols at dawn. And then you’d get your wish. My suicide would have been simplest, no? Sometimes I find myself thinking that the entire Norlag Rebellion, the Fifty Days, with its hundred dead, was engineered by you for just one last roll of the dice. I could go, you could go—let fate do it. And, Jesus, August 4, with its deaths and its wounds. Wounds that turned our friend’s hair from taiga to tundra. As I said at the time, you’re a romantic. In your way. And no fun for you either, all this. No fun to want your brother’s wife. And to want her quite so badly.

What I’d like to do is live long enough so that you’re too old to care. Or too old to move. You’ll realize how serious I am when I tell you that I’m going to give up
smoking
. But I don’t see them, really, the old bones. Who was it who said this? “In hospital, it’s always earlier than you think.” Earlier—and also later, at least for me. On my admission, they had me sign a form that said, more or less, that I didn’t mind dying. I’ve made my will, and I’m already dividing up my keepsakes, like the good little boy I used to be. Oh, what good boys we were. What good boys we were, before. The delivery of this letter I will entrust to Artem, whose tour ends at Christmas. It’s the only trait my wives have in common: you can’t ask them to post a letter. You might as well fold the envelope into a paper plane and throw it out of the window. And I don’t expect Lidya to be at her briskest, after I’ve gone.

You know what happened to us, brother? It wasn’t just a compendium of very bad experiences. The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness—that was general, and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I’m referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes, and a price to be paid, not by the spoonful or the shovelful, but by the dayful, the yearful, the lifeful. They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be. Watching Uglik, our master, trying to light his second cigarette—that’s when I felt it growing in me, my specific deformation.

What’s yours? Mine is cynicism. I’ve risen above it here and there in this letter to you, but the tone I use in speaking of the mother of my son is evidence enough of how it’s gone with me. Cynicism is what I feel, or what I don’t feel, all the time. And who would be a cynic? Cynic. Dogface. Condemned to see cynicism everywhere. But it’s here. It has me. I don’t care about anything or anyone. Blindspots, susceptibilities, come and go. I can sometimes persuade myself that I don’t care about Lidya, Kitty, you, Mother. I can seldom successfully convict myself of the blasphemy of not caring about Artem. And I can never say that I don’t care about Zoya.

Again—what’s yours? Only you have the right to name it. I used to think it was the war, and not camp, that fucked you up. But you won the war. And nobody won the other thing. Still, whatever the war did, camp trapped it inside you. For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect—not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing—from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason other than that I valued it so much. And maybe the brutes and the bitches had the truth of it. Those sore letters on Arbachuk’s stiff-veined forearm. You may live but you won’t—

I wish you well. It’s a great relief to be able to say that, and to mean it. I don’t wish many people well, not anymore. All the people I don’t know—I no longer wish them well. Tales of infirmity and destitution: that’s the kind of thing, these days, that very slightly cheers me up. Just now, I am having one of my better moments. I feel disencumbered. And I hope you do what I did, and manage to patch together some family around you. Good luck. And thanks. Thanks for the hefty loan, thanks for my Certificate of Manumission, and thanks for the seat on the train, that time. And, yes, thanks for breaking the Tartar’s arm. Boy, you were something. The way you’d make the German shepherd cringe and go belly-up and
pee
. “You think I’m going to be sneered at,” you told it, “by a fucking
dog
?” And in the last months of the war, the cannonades in Moscow whenever a major city fell—with every boom I felt your power.

You know, without your influence on Vad, I don’t think I would have survived childhood. That Vadim. On the strength of the fact that he came out first, he took on all the wants and wounds of the older brother. He
really
wanted me dead. And he wasn’t just going to hope for the best: he was going to do something about it. Why? Because I spoiled that blood-smeared half-hour idyll—when he had his mother all to himself. Ever since I was born, you were my righter. My righter of wrongs. You towered like a god—you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers. And so it will always be. Lev.

Oh, slave, thou hast slain me…

Yes, that’s right. Yes, that’s right, my girl. It was not your finest hour. In the space of it (our dinner at the Grill, late July) you subjected me to two rank vulgarisms—two craven borrowings, that is to say, from the common pool of catchphrase, ditty, and jingle. Don’t “go there,” Venus. Do not enter that necropolis of novelty.

The first was “closure.” Why didn’t I seek “closure”? “Closure”: ech, if I so much as whisper it or mouth it I feel myself transformed into a white-coated, fat-necked peanut in a mall-style consulting-room.
Closure
is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that
nobody ever gets over anything.
Your second enormity was not a lone epithet: it went on for an entire sentence. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Not so! Not so. Whatever doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you weaker, and kills you later on.

Of course, I happen to be taking the matter into my own hands. That lumbering but capacious health service Lev talked about—that’s all disappeared. Only a slim majority of state hospitals can boast of running water, and I say with tears of pride that the place I’m in is one of them. When it comes to death, though, Russia remains a land of opportunity: the lethal injection, here, would be a bargain at double the price. And there’s none of that right-to-life bullshit, no pious politicos or meddling divines, no crowds in the forecourt yelling at everyone to Let Me Live.

I’m in an immune-deficiency hospice (the only such unit in the country); to use the euphonious local acronym, it’s for people with SPID. This unacknowledged epidemic, by the way, is of African proportions. Some time later on (they can’t say when) I will be moved into a private room for my shot. And I’m wondering: how much should I tip, and when? I know. While I’m complaining. While I’m acting up: that’s the time to do it. The lethal injection will work—I don’t doubt that. But I am by no means persuaded that the transition will be painless. Morphine is extra, and I’ve ordered a double. But you’re right: I should have gone to Oslo or Amsterdam and done it business-class and not economy. Still, that wouldn’t answer. I am going to die where my brother died.

Call me a literalist, but I’m only doing what Russia is doing. And she tried it once before. Russia tried to kill herself in the 1930s, after her first decade of Joseph Vissarionovich. He was already a cadaver millionaire about ten times over, even before the Terror. But he did need Russians to go on producing Russians. And they stopped. After the startling census of 1936, the state jolted into action: crash kindergartenization, maternity medals, a resolemnized marriage ceremony, the legalization of inheritance, and the criminalization of abortion. It was a general strike, of a kind; and the state broke it. What will the state do now?

As the Babylonians were leading the Jews into captivity they asked them to play their harps. And the Jews said, “We shall work for you, but play we shall not.” That’s what they were saying in 1936, and that’s what they’re saying now. We will work for you, but we’re not going to fuck for you anymore. We are not going to go on doing it, making people. Making people to be set before the indifference of the state. We are not going to play.

Oh, I’m not suggesting that it’s died out entirely—sexual intercourse. About a third of those specters in the TV room here (former people, of the former nation) can claim to have come by their SPID through venereal means. And how else do you explain all the used condoms you see in the street? There are always these diehards and bitter-enders. Why, look at the figures for syphilis among teenage girls—an increase, over the past ten years, of fourteen thousand percent.

I can’t be expected, at this stage, to change my ways. I mean my weakness for pedagogy. You have my list for further reading. They’re mostly memoirs, you’ll find—the memoirs of Russian slaves. I hope you read the one written, much later on, and from Iowa City, by Janusz. It is sometimes said that these books are “unrepresentative,” because they all derive from the same stratum: the
intelligents.
All politicals; no snakes or leeches, no brutes, no bitches. The authors are unrepresentative in another way too, in that their integrity, it seems, was never in the slightest danger. They lived; and they also loved, I think. Stakhanovites of the spirit, “shock” seekers and seers, they didn’t even hate. None of this was true for my brother and me. And hate is weary work. You hate hating—you come to hate the hate.

Let me tell you what I loved about August 4, 1953, when we stood arm in arm. When we stood and faced the state and its whirlwind of iron. I had reached the end of philosophy: I knew how to die. And men
don’t
know how to do that. It might even be that all the really staggering male exertions, both great and base, are brought on by this single incapacity. No other animal is asked to form an attitude to its own extinction. This is horribly difficult for us, and may be thought to mitigate our general notoriety…You need mass emotion—to know how to die. You need to be like all the other animals, and run with the herd. Ideology gives you mass emotion, which is why Russians have always liked it. I’ve gone on a bit about yours—your ideology. And all your life I’ve tried to interest you in
my
ideology: the ideology of no ideology. It’s not a bad one, your one; but it’s an ideology. And it’s the only thing I detect in you that remains imperfectly free.

I have just had a visitor. She came with fruit and flowers: little Lidya. Not so little anymore, true (the usual Slavic slab, with something religious, Quakerish, in her bulk), yet I was briefly cheered by how vigorous she seemed. She’s in her mid-sixties; and don’t forget that Russian women live about twenty-five percent longer than Russian men (they get the full four quarters, and not just the three). I didn’t tell Lidya what I was here for exactly, but she understood that this was our last goodbye. She asked if she might say a prayer for me, and I said all right, on the assumption that I could probably bear it. I was quite wrong about that, and almost immediately started shouting her down. Not
that
ideology; I wasn’t going to lie there and watch her kiss the Russian cross. She apologized quite prettily, and stroked my brow, and backed out of the room. Yes, I’m in the room now. The room in the basement, with its two boilers and its thousands of pink and blue towels stacked on duckboards and smelling of vinegar. My sister-in-law will prepare another hardboard crate, and send you my PC, wallet, glasses, watch, my wedding ring and spirit level, and one or two of my clothes—a tie, a handkerchief. I gave Lidya the straight razor and the folder of poems.

There’s a final gender difference I will draw your attention to, if I may. Prepare yourself for some good news. In 1953 I discovered how to die. And now I’ve forgotten again. But I do know this. Women can die gently, as your mother did, as my mother did. Men always die in torment. Why? Toward the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive. We can’t do that. And I mean all men, not just old violators like me—great thinkers, great souls, even they have to do it. The work of who did what, and to whom.

What was the matter with me and women? On the plane, this morning, I engaged the search engine: “retrospective sexual jealousy.” Lots of sexual stuff, and lots of jealousy stuff, and lots of stuff about retrospectives. I toiled past a few thousand entries—and finally came to a stylish essay from the august British journal
Mind and Body.
It was called “Retrospective Sexual Jealousy and the Repressed Homosexual.” With the RSJ-merchant, the essay argues, it’s not the women he’s interested in—it’s the men. In other words, I’m crypto-queer. What makes me doubt this? Only the fact that I wouldn’t have minded, much, being queer in the first place. All right, I wouldn’t have liked it, in camp, taking my spoon and bowl and joining the passives, who ate at a separate table (and could only talk among themselves). After that, though, in the city, if you’re not making children anyway, what’s the difference? I know
you
wouldn’t think the less of me. But it’s probably worse, in my case, because I was queer for my brother.

The thing that stays with me from those hours at the Rossiya, perhaps surprisingly, is an irreducible sense of the sterile. In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform—we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder. And you could people a good-sized city, now, with the by-blows of the rapist army (population: one million). Many of the impregnated women, of course, never did give birth: they were killed then and there by their rapists. I can at least truthfully say that this phenomenon was and is beyond my understanding.

And in the Rossiya? What I did had no meaning. It was gratuitous, it was perverse, and it was dedicated to the propagation of misery, but it wasn’t even particularly Russian. Except maybe in this. No power, no freedom, no responsibility, ever, in all our history. It stirs an anarchy within. But no—I give it up. I said earlier that rape made a reckoning with me. Its revenge wasn’t commensurate or anything like that, but it was thorough, and dramatically swift. Have you guessed? Have you asked your mother’s ghost? At the Rossiya, I crossed over from satyr to senex in the course of an afternoon. As early as the next day I couldn’t even remember what it was I liked about women and their bodies. I have remembered now. Over these past few days I have remembered.

Of course, it would be nice to be able to blame it, the rape, on the war or on the camp or on the state. I do honestly think, sometimes, that Artem’s death (the manner of it), as well as Lev’s, had overthrown my sanity. In that moment, when her wide smile of love became a gape of horror, I experienced a
disappointment,
Venus, that was a thousand ply. After all that, I thought. And for just long enough the possession of Zoya felt like a right. And I didn’t even have the right to be there in the room. And now when I close my eyes I can only see a moribund murderer, implacable to his last breath, gathering himself for one last thrust. It used to be an inkling and is now a conviction which perhaps you already share: in the four or five seconds between my kiss and her awakening, Zoya was dreaming about Lev. It had to be that way, to crystallize his fate and mine. Christ, Russia is the nightmare country. And always the compound nightmare. Always the most talented nightmare.

And from this dream I am about to escape. They have come. Two men in street clothes, with what looks like a toolbox. They’re having a smoke while I finish this. And so am I. Any moment now I will click SEND…Go, little book, go, little mine tragedy. And you go, too, Venus, go out into it, with your good diet, your lavish health insurance, your two degrees, your languages, your property, and your capital. The insane luxury of having you to think about has kept me alive, until now, anyway. And oh my heart, every time you called me Dad or Pop or Father, oh, every single time. Well, kid, it wouldn’t be right to sign off sounding sour. Let’s not submit to the gloom supposedly so typical of the northern Eurasian plain, the land of compromised clerics and scowling boyars, of narks and xenophobes and sweat-soaked secret policemen. Join me, please, as I look on the bright side. Russia is dying. And I’m glad.