House of Meetings (15 page)

3.

Spirit Level

L
ev’s
effects
reached Chicago in the late spring of 1983: a sizeable plywood crate, glued and pressed and nailed. It lay immured in the closet in my study for twenty-one years. Then I opened it up. The precipitant was the news of Kitty’s death, and the undeniable intimations of my own. I waited for a morning that combined a faultless sky with the prospect of lunch at your apartment. Then, after breakfast, I asked the entity known as courage to take me by the hand. We went together to the toolbox for the chisel and the claw hammer. You see, one of my achievements, in the Rossiya, was the disfigurement of the past. And you don’t want to look at a disfigured thing, do you, when it clearly can’t be healed. This is what I was facing: testimony to the astounding dimensions of my crime—my perfect crime. I knew, too, that Lev’s offering would be boobytrapped or trip-wired. I knew it would explode in my face.

Well then. A leather belt, two ties, a scarf of my mother’s and some more of her books, a trophy of Artem’s, a clock, a straight razor, a hip flask, a spirit level (with its sleek burnish and its tragic eye), a white shoebox, and a green folder…The folder had a title: “Poems.” The shoebox was full of photographs. I slid one out and dragged my gaze over it: me, Zoya, and Lev, at Black Lake in Kazan: 1960, and the innocent haze of monochrome. But of the three faces only hers, under its bobble hat, had the light of pleasure—pleasure in the novelty of being photographed. Lev’s face was half averted, the eyes seeking something lower down and to the side. Mine was ulterior, and expressed the humorlessness of vigil: Kitty will click the camera, and another second will pass.

I rose up from the chair and strode to the desk with the green folder under my arm. It was my intention now to read the poems: the collected Lev. You must imagine my scholarly glower and the jutting lips of bookish inquiry—the abnormal normality of it, like the shrewd interest a man will suddenly take in the decor of the waiting room at his oncologist’s. While I do this normal thing (I was secretly thinking), this normal thing I’m quite good at, nothing abnormal can happen to me. I sat; I breathed in through my teeth; my frowns were like push-ups of the eyebrows. Excellent, I said out loud: chronological. Here, after all, is a
life
.

Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect. Too young, of course. There were poems about girls, girls in general, but no love poems.

A hiatus, now, until 1950, and then six or seven a year until 1956. These would have been memorized at the time and written up in freedom. They were all love poems—“you” lyrics, addressed to the loved one. Let us say that these were more difficult for me to assess. They were clenched, pained, pregnant. What they assailed me with, apart from the jolts and jabs of bile and loss, was an unbearable sense of emotional deprivation. As if I had never felt anything for anyone. I just thought I had…The last was dated July 1956: a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before the conjugal visit in the chalet on the hill.

After that, nothing for eight years. And then the stiff-limbed, almost apologetic resumption after the birth of his son. Two decades, and a smattering of epigrams about Artem. As I worked through them, I was asking myself what it all amounted to. A raft of clever juvenilia; a body of love lyrics written in slavery; and eight haikus about fatherhood. Nine.

I hadn’t been liking the look of poem number nine. It was unobjectionable in itself—a minimalist reflection on the quandary of the only child. But poem number nine had something underneath it. A rectangular presence of whiter white.

It was of course a letter, bearing my name and my old Moscow address. The envelope was sealed, and additionally fortified by a strip of sticking plaster. Not flesh-colored, but the nubby brick-red of Russian first aid. Inside were several pages. In holograph: in his small utilitarian hand.

“Brother,”
it began.
“I said I would answer your question before I died. I’m going to keep the first half of that promise. I feel sure that I will be able to slake your curiosity. I also intend to mortify your soul. Ready yourself
.”

And that was as far as I got. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since—readying myself.

Yes, I’ll read Lev’s letter. But I don’t want to give it any time at all to sink in.

I’ll read it later. I want that to be more or less the last thing I do.

4.

Test Tube

I
t was on one of my final twilit staggerings, by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger’s hollowed hulk, that I found it. Here the landforms, the tectonic plates, the very points of the compass have been reshuffled and redealt, but I found it: the steep little lane, the five stone steps stacked there just for you; and then the cleared tabletop of the foothill. No buildings, now, but you could still see the ridged outlines on the ground—the outlines of the annex of the House of Meetings. I crossed the threshold. As I kicked my way through the rubble and rubbish, I heard the faint resonance of creaking glass. My shoe nosed through the shavings, and then I stooped. I held it up, the feebly glinting thing: a cracked test tube, in a wooden frame. That dark smear on its rim. Maybe it was the wildflower with its amorous burgundy, witness to an experiment in human love.

In my other hand I held a plastic bag. It didn’t take very long to fill it—with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull. I was walking on a killing field. A grave churned up by bulldozers and excavators. Further around the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a
shrine
. Inside: icons, an apple, a wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance…The Jews have Yad Vashem and an air force. We have a prefab and a cankered apple. And a Russian cross.

I walked back to the city square. I bought a beer and a paper, and sat on a bench before a fablon-decked table. The only other customer was a speckly man in a gypsy outfit, irrevocably slumped, thank God, over his accordion. An item at the foot of page one in the
Post
informed me that the “numbers” of Joseph Vissarionovich continue to climb. His approval rating is what a devout and handsome U.S. president might expect in a time of monotonous prosperity. With my bag of bones and my cracked test tube, I sat in a trance of lovelessness and watched it—the harlequinade. The harlequinade of the incorrigible.

The middle-aged wrecks I told you about, the ones that won’t go away: a group of them, men and women, stood on the corner selling—auctioning—their analgesics to etiolated youths in overcoats made from vinyl car-seat covers. Then, very quickly, the old get drunk and the young get blocked. Twenty minutes later everyone is crashing and splashing around in the blood-colored puddles infested with iron oxide, used syringes, used condoms, American candy-bar wrappers, and broken glass. They veer and yaw and teeter. And they just watch each other drop. Yes, it’s all gone—the wild dogs have more esprit. That’s right, stay down. No one’s going to lick your face or try and fuck you back to life.

That night was Friday, and Predposylov was smashed, not on vodka, but on surgical spirit, or
spirt,
at thirty cents a flagon. One kiosk was glass-backed, and starkly lit, like a beacon. I went over and stared at it. I stared at the comfortable figure of the blonde in her trap. All she had for sale was surgical spirit and heaped paperbacks of a single genre. That’s all she was dealing in:
The Myth of the Six Million, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and
spirt
. And the blonde sat idly at the cash register, her face resting on the cushion of her placid double chin, as if what encircled her (on the shelves, in the streets and in the belts all around) was completely ordinary, and not a part of something nightmarish and unforgettable…You know what I think? I think there must have been a developmental requirement that Russia simply failed to meet. She’s not like Zoya. Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run. But she never learned how to walk.

Tomorrow I fly to Yekaterinburg. I am ready. We can close, now, with two letters from the sick bay.

5.

Lev’s Letter

I
t is dated July 31, 1982. “Brother,” it begins.

I said I would answer your question before I died. I’m going to keep the first half of that promise. I feel sure that I will be able to slake your curiosity. I also intend to mortify your soul. Ready yourself.

For twenty-six years to the day I have been trying to write a long poem called “House of Meetings.” A
long poem
. Symmetrically, though, my flame or numen, such as it was, died on that night, along with everything else. You’ll eventually see that I did manage two or three stanzas, much later on. I don’t think you’ll find them of interest. They’re about Artem, I’m afraid. They’re nursery rhymes. That’s all they are.

No, I couldn’t do it, that poem. I couldn’t tell that story. But now I’m dead, and I can tell it to you.

I am writing this in hospital. Our health system may be thick-fingered (with grimy nails), but it
is
broad-handed. The attitude to illness is this. All treatment—and no prevention. Still, they are using me to test the new asthma drug. I am not the first. It is clear that most, if not all, of the previous candidates suffered fatal heart attacks. Early on, too. But so far there is a concord of interests. My heart holds up and I breathe easy. How delicious air is. How luxurious to draw it in—once you know you can get the fucking stuff out. Air, even this air, with its smells of ashtrays (everyone still smokes, patients, cleaners, caterers, doctors, nurses), fierce medications, and terminal tuberculosis, tastes nice. Air tastes nice.

So—I watched her coming up the path, her walk, her shape exaggerated by the window’s bendy glass. She entered. And the moment of meeting was exactly what you would want it to be. I felt the force of certain clichés—“beside myself,” for example. I needed two mouths, one to kiss, one to praise. I needed four hands, one to unclip, one to unbutton, one to stroke, one to squeeze. And all the time I was replenishing memories worn thin by mental repetition. When you caress Zoya, she writhes, she almost wriggles, as if to broaden the inclusiveness of your touch. Children do that. Artem did it.

With the removal of each piece of clothing came the delivery of enormous stores of fascination. If there was an unwelcome feeling, at this stage, it was a kind of humorous mortal fear. Remember the shiteater who traded in his bowl and spoon, and then overdosed on a double ration? And who could forget the fate of Kedril the Gorger? As Zoya got more and more naked, I kept thinking about those ridiculous tsarist banquets we used to fantasize about. Salmon lips and peacock eyelids seethed in honey and burbot roe. And two hundred courses of it, with forty-five kinds of pie, and thirty different salads.

It is necessary at this point to tell you something about Zoya’s amatory style. I am not fastidious or possessive about these things (as I feel you are), and it is my intention, in any case, to encumber you—to hobble you—with confidences. Most remarkably, most alchemically, she was a big woman who weighed about half a kilo in bed. She was also very inventive, preternaturally unsqueamish, and quite incredibly long-haul. During our first nine months together, lovemaking, it seems fair to say, took up much of our time. For instance, with breaks for naps and snacks our last session (before the day of the marriage and my ten-minute trial) went on for seventy-two hours.

Before very long, in the House of Meetings, we were doing it—the thing that people do. I was so awed by my readiness, my capability, that it took me a while before I started asking myself what was wrong. It was this—and at first it felt entirely bathetic. As I made love, I wasn’t thinking about my wife. I was thinking about my dinner. The huge chunks of bread, the whole herring, and the fat-rich broth that you and the others had so carefully and movingly amassed. Of course I could say to myself, You haven’t had food in front of you and then
done something else
for eight years. But it would be untrue to say that I wasn’t already very frightened. One of the many awful things about that night was a sense of invasion from within and the feeling that I was the mere spectator of an alien self.

We had our dinner. And bloody good it was too. And the vodka, and the cigarettes. Then I helped her wash. She had spent that day in the back of a truck, and you couldn’t tell the smudges from the bruises. Two weeks on the rails and the roads. I was exulting, now, in her bravery, her fidelity, her beauty, her uncanny vivacity. God, what a
sport
she was. I was full of thanks and I was again eager.

This time I was pleased, at the outset, to find that I wasn’t thinking about food. All that did, though, was delay the recognition that I was thinking about sleep. Sleep, and pity. It was one of those times when your hidden thoughts and feelings show you the results of their silent labor. You find out what’s been worrying you, and how very much it’s been worrying you—and with what good reason. I wanted to be pitied into sleep. That’s what I wanted. And eventually we did sleep, for many hours, and at dawn we drank the tea in her flask and we began again. This time I didn’t think about sleep or food or even freedom. By now I had found my subject. All I thought about was what I’d lost.

And what
was
that? I remembered the first law of camp life: to you, nothing—from you, everything. I also thought of the urka slogan (and the text of many an urka tattoo): You may live but you won’t love. Now, it would be ghoulish to say that I had lost all my love. And not true, not true. This is what had happened to me, brother—I had lost all my play. All.

It may not have escaped your notice that Zoya is more attractive than I am. Why, you said as much yourself, more than once, in 1946. I can assure you that I knew it—each of my senses knew it. I had felt exalted enough by the clumsy kindnesses of my Olga, my Ada. Then
Zoya
, the grand slam of love, who cured my stutter in a single night. What next? Would she make me tall, would she kit me out with a chin and a pair of ears that matched? And, yes, she did, she did.

I felt myself revolutionized—and freed. And my response was an unbounded gratitude. I just couldn’t do enough for her. Perpetual praise and infinite consideration, endearments and embraces, couplets, trinkets, messages, massages—undivided attention, together with the deployment of a desire that had no upper limit. The “specieshood” you talked about during those months of heroic madness in ’53, the “earthed” feeling—what you found in the communality I had found in her. With this superlove I redressed the balance. And she would look at me, at
me
, and say she couldn’t believe her luck. Oh, bro, I was almost paranoiac with happiness. It was like religion combined with
reason
. And I worshipped alone.

That night in the House of Meetings all my consciousness of inferiority returned, and it was reinforced, now, by the meaning of my enslavement. In Moscow, in the conical attic, I was Lev, but I was clean and free. I thought: she should have seen me a couple of hours ago, before the shearer and the power-hose—a little tumbleweed of nits and lice. So, to the silent but universal murmur of dismay I always heard, faintly, whenever I entered the fold of her arms, was added another voice, which said, “Never mind if he looks like a village idiot. That’s their business. How about what he
is
. He is an ant that toils for the state at gunpoint. What he is is a
slave
. Nothing to be done but pity him, pity him.” And I did want pity. I wanted the pity of all Russia.

Gathered about me was a raucous audience of thoughts, little gargoyles that sniggered and heckled. What was this miracle of womanliness beneath me and all around me? Women weren’t
meant
to look like women, not anymore. Then, Christ, the business with the hands. I kept thinking, Where is the hand that killed my ear? Where are the hands of Comrade Uglik? Are my hands his hands? Are his mine? This claw of mine, this crab—whose is it? And just by being there, just by not being absent, my hands seemed heavy, violent. And behind all this was the thought that, I don’t know—the thought that a man was not a good thing to be. I couldn’t keep it out. No thought was so stupid or noxious that I wouldn’t let it in. Because any thought whatever made a change from the other thought—the thought about what I’d lost.

I didn’t expect things to be any different in freedom. And they weren’t. Considered as a matter of the sensations, the nerve centers, the physical act was still far nicer than anything else I could imagine getting up to. I thought I could simply concentrate on the carnal. But when the heart goes, so, very soon, does the head. It became impossible to protect myself from the idea that what I was doing was fundamentally inane—like revisiting a futile and arduous hobby I had long outgrown. When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour. Night-time was a nightshift, looming over me the whole day long. Here it comes again (with satirical touches, true, with jokes and jeers), the rambling reminder of what I’d lost. I had to search my face for the contours of tenderness, but these shapes, too, were all gone.

That night in camp I did an excellent impersonation of the old Lev—that is to say, the young Lev. But the old Lev had disappeared, along with my youth. I went on doing this impersonation for five years. And she never knew. My experience of great beauties begins and ends with Zoya, but I’ve invested much thought in them. In the type. I think she was very untypical sexually. Most great beauties, I suspect, tend toward the passive: mere compliance is considered bounty enough. But in another area I think she was typical—indeed, archetypical. She was not a noticer of the texture of the feelings of the people around her. Great beauties, they don’t have to do the work that we have to do, the work of vox populi and “Mass Observation.” Except when its content was violent, she hardly even noticed anti-Semitism. People would look at her with that compassionate sneer, as if she was a cat that had lost all its hair. Take it from me, I really got to know about the influenza of the xenophobe. It is a mirror the size of the Pacific—an ocean of inadequacies.

No, she never knew. There was only one thing I couldn’t control, and it bothered her. I cried in my sleep. I was always crying in my sleep. And it was always the same dream. She used to question me about it as she dressed for work. I told her the dream was a dream about Uglik. It wasn’t true. The dream was a dream called House of Meetings.

My double-goer, my antic twin, my Vadim, was still there, in freedom, and he had a plan. His plan was for me to become even uglier. Hence the beergut, the new twitch, the conscientious gracelessness—and, of course, the way I lay down or bent over for my stutter. By then I was thirsting for illness, for incapacity. I wanted to be surrounded by people dressed in white. The word
hospital
took on the sacred glow it had had in Norlag. All the time, now, I was aware of a “waiting” feeling. It was the impatience to be old. Previously, at the very crest of sexual bliss, I used to feel I was being tortured by someone infinitely gentle. Now I felt like that every time she smiled at me or took my hand. The last and final phase, which introduced a whole new order of alarm, presented itself in the summer of 1962. And the first symptom was physical.

I began to hear, on and off, a taut hum—like the sound of jet engines heard from within the plane. White noise, I assumed, from my dead ear. After a time I realized that it was only happening in certain situations: crossing high bridges, on clifftops and balconies, near railway lines and busy roads—and also when I shaved with the straight razor. Then one day, in Kazan, it took me half an hour to walk past a stationary truck I saw on the street. It was a garbage-compactor. The men were leaving it running as they went ever further for their loads, of course (in case it didn’t start up again), and the hum in my ear was so loud that the foul mastications of the machine, its chomping and grinding, were actually noiseless, even when I came up close and stared in. The steel blocks that climbed and plunged were no more than lightly smeared, and the black teeth had almost picked themselves clean. It looked all right in there. And it made no sound.

When we were growing up you used to say I was a solipsist, and a solipsist of unusual briskness and resolve. You spoke of the sobriety of the calculation of my own interest, the lack of any instinct for compliance with the mood of the group (plus the off-center protrusion of the lower lip and the “privacy” of the eyes). Well, it remained true that I very much didn’t want to kill myself. That felt like a reasonable priority. The suicide of the slave survivor—we know it’s common enough, and in the end I think I can respect it. As a way of saying that my life is
mine
to take. But I thought I had held myself together fairly well, in camp—no violence, not much compromise, no herd emotion. I didn’t want to do what others did. And I reckoned I had a good chance of getting through life without killing
anyone
.

In fact it all felt pretty much involuntary. I mean my strike, sudden and unofficial—the wildcat strike. I let my hands fall to my sides. Not just the nightly act, but everything else, all the smiles and sacraments, all the words, all the commentary of love. She noticed
that
. I ask you to imagine what it was like to lie there, sit there, stand there, and watch. It was quick—I’ll say that. Within a month she got caught, in blazing crime, with the PT-instructor during the lunch break. And I was free.

Just to finish my side of it. I didn’t want a child with Zoya and I didn’t want a child with Lidya. But it’s curious. With Lidya, with
Lidya
, I felt a brief renewal of erotic purpose. There was now the possibility, at least, of a consequence. Something like—if it isn’t play, then let it be earnest. And, incidentally, I’ve always been amazed by what Lidya thinks a fuck is, compared to what Zoya thought a fuck was. But it worked out. The boy, when he came, began to give me the sort of pleasure I used to take in Zoya. Proximity to physical grandeur, but manageable, now. I have enough love in me for Lidya, I can scrape it together and eke it out with things like approbation and respect. Lidya understands. After Zoya, I feel as if I’m living with a dedicated psychotherapist—and mindreader. I can sense her decoding my silences. She understands, and she pities me. In the end you finish with self-pity. It’s too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you. Lidya pities me. She pities me, which Zoya rightly never did, and she pities me for Zoya, too.