House of Meetings (4 page)

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said, poking out his cigarette. “And anyway. She’s already got a boyfriend.”

I said, I know she has. And I’m waiting him out.

“…Yup, that’s it,” he concluded with satisfaction (as if dusting his palms). “That’s what you look like. You look like a clever dog that knows it’s about to be thrashed.”

My brother started smoking early. He started drinking early too, and having girlfriends early. Increasingly, people do everything early in Russia. Because there isn’t much time.

5.

Among the Shiteaters

P
eople always talked about the strange light in a shiteater’s eyes—that shiteater glitter. It disturbed me very much when I identified the strange light as flirtatious and peculiarly feminine. Like the moist brightness in the eye of an unpredictable aunt who has drunk too much at Easter, and is about to obey an impulse she knows to be ill-advised—a kiss, a squeeze, a pinch…Furtive yet conspiratorial, that shiteater glitter had something to say and something to ask. I have crossed a line, it said. And it asked: Why don’t you cross it too?

We stood among them, the shiteaters, Lev and I, outside the bolted door of the kitchens, in darkness and fine rain. The fine rain, not even falling, but floating, like the gnats and midges of July. He was coming to the end of his first day, and I had chosen this place for a conversation we very much needed to have. The shiteaters loomed and swayed beneath the lone lightbulb, waiting for the last buckets to be tipped out of the back window. By now the pigs seldom came by, seldom bothered them, because no amount of beating could keep a shiteater from the slops. There seemed to be very little physical pain—where they lived, beyond the line they had crossed.

Even within the stratum of the shiteaters, Venus, there were two echelons. There were some shiteaters that the other shiteaters looked down on. These were known as
all-fours shiteaters
…I relay these details, my dear, these details of awlings and chiselings, of educated, even cultivated men eating slops on their hands and knees, because I want you to think about their
strangeness
. Wildly directed violence, drastic degradation: this is all terribly
strange
.

“Why’s it so fucking
dark
around here,” he said.

It was a complaint, not a question. Lev, the swot geographer, knew why it was so dark around here.

“Yes yes,” he said. “This is the Arctic in February. The sun’ll come up in March. What do I do, brother? What do I do?”

I was ready for this. The majority of the fascists who got ten-year sentences in 1937–38 had been rearrested, in alphabetical order, and resentenced in 1947–48. And they all looked like Lev. Older, thinner, wilder—but they all looked like Lev, the rapidly blinking
intelligent,
with his hopeless shoes (vastly dissimilar, but each a dog’s dinner of frayed rope and car tire), his half a book, and his torn summer jacket. And always cherishing the fractured spectacles. Whereas the new fascists were men who had spent five years in the Red Army. For us the camp was just more war, with one startling difference. We had fought the fascists—the enemy. Then the Russian state, now fascist itself, told us that
we
were the fascists, and they were arresting us for it and enslaving us for it. Now we were the enemy, to be flung out over the shoulder of the world. I have noticed that you and your crowd have a high tolerance for self-pity in others, so I will add the following. What made this capsizal hard to forget was that my war wound throbbed in the cold from September to June. But I mustn’t be self-pitying. I mustn’t be the lachrymist. There are other things I mustn’t be—the tough guy, the martyr. And I mustn’t be indignant. Or earnest. That’s less difficult. Americans are earnest, Russians, when the mood is on them, are earnest. While I prefer the droller cultures, and the wizened ironists, to be found on the northwestern fringe of the Eurasian plain.

What do you do? I began. Oh we’ll come to that. But first—aren’t you going to say it?

“Say what?”

You know: “There must have been a mistake.” Or “If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionovich.”

“…Why the fuck would I say that? They arrest
by quota
. They do. I bet they do.”

Lev was right about that. The Terror, too, was driven by quota: this or that many people from this or that area and social group, at such and such a rate, quotas, norms, minimums.

“You know what’s happened,” he said. “You and I have been sold into slavery. All that fucking around with the interrogations and the confessions and the documents. That’s just the process of being sold into slavery. It sounds quite romantic, doesn’t it, being sold into slavery…”

He looked around. No, there was nothing romantic about Norlag, about Predposylov.

“I mean, you’d expect somewhere hot. Jesus.”

Lev was nineteen. And already he was seeing more than I saw (I had no head for politics, as will soon be evident). Looking back, now, I can recall my fever of fear when I realized that the younger brother saw more than the older. It happened over the chess board. I felt myself exposed to greater powers of combination, of permutation and penetration. And he always stood back from the general opinion, the general mood. Except when it happened to suit him, he never went along with anything. He always made his own calculation. He pushed out a rigid nether lip, slightly off center, lowered his gaze, and made the calculation.

And I asked him: Which prison?

“Butyrki.”

Butyrki’s great, isn’t it.

“Great. In my cell I had three Red professors, two composers, and one poet. Oh yeah—and one informer. I was proud to be there. Butyrki’s great.”

Great. How did it go? Before.

“The usual thing. Called out of class at the Tech. Quite polite. Then for a couple of weeks I had to go to the Kennel every other day and eat shit.”

A shiteater veered up at us from the darkness, and then stepped back with his blanketed forearm raised. I said,

What was the charge? Or didn’t they give you one.

“They gave me one.” He let out a soft snort and said, “Praising America.”

I knew this to be a crime, sure enough, and one with several subsections. Many recently arrived fascists had committed it—Praising American Democracy or Praising American Technique or Abasement Before America. Or alternatively Abasement Before the West. Not a few of our number had now seen something of the West; and even in ruins it abased us…There were scores of
Americans
in Norlag, including an American
American
. Come over here to participate in the Soviet experiment, he told the CP man who issued his passport that he was fully prepared to take the big cut in his standard of living. That same day he got the
quarter
—twenty-five years.

And
were
you praising America?

“No. I was praising The Americas. I was in a queue with Kitty and I was praising The Americas.”

Then we both did something we hadn’t been expecting to do for some time to come: we laughed—with our vapor forming and fleeing. I understood. “The Americas” was sibling code for Zoya. And it was a
good
name for her too, because it caught her walk. The spatial relationship between the two continents, Venus, has best been evoked by the exile Nabokov: two figures on a trapeze, in the big top, one beneath the other, and just coming out of the backswing. But Zoya’s walk also expressed it, embodied it, the giddy disjunction between north and south, and then the waist, as thin as Panama. Kitty was family, Lev’s full sibling, like Vadim, the other one.

And was Kitty
dis
praising The Americas?

“You know. A bit. Basically Zoya makes Kitty feel like a pencil. No. Like Chile. That’s what I told her. You’re jealous of The Americas because she makes you feel like Chile.”

I said, I thought Kitty was keen on Zoya.

“Kitty is riveted by Zoya. But she says she’ll destroy me. Not on purpose. But that’s what will happen in the end.”

I would remember this. Right from the start I had fingered Zoya for a decimator of the poets, and a poet (Acmeist, Mandelstamian) was what Lev, at this stage, was in some sense hoping to be…There came a clatter from within and the sound of voices. The shiteaters looked up, with thin mouths and smiling eyes.

“Chile,” Lev said suddenly. “You’d have to be an
island
to be less landlocked than Chile.”

He sniffed, wiped his nose, and straightened his shoulders. His upper lip, temporarily beaklike, and his wary glance: he looked like what he was—an adolescent, fearing ridicule after a vulnerable remark…Lev had always been owlishly capable of getting excited by geography. I remember he once said, “The Pacific is the prince of the oceans. The Atlantic’s a mere
strait
when compared to it.” And he had a whole theory about the geography of Russia, how it determined both her history and her fate. Oh, Venus, what
good
boys we were, originally. I think I told you that our mother was a schoolteacher. She was in fact a completely different kind of human being: she was a headmistress. And therefore a harpy of ambition. “You are
intelligents
!” she used to shriek at us, often out of a clear blue sky. “You serve the
nation,
not the state!” And there we were, Lev and me, with our books and our thick periodicals, our basic German, English, French, our heavy chess pieces, our maps and charts.

I said, as I’d planned, You have arrived in hell. I don’t have to tell you that. Here, man is wolf to man. But the funny thing is it’s just like anywhere else.

“No it isn’t. It isn’t like anywhere else.”

Yes it is. You came up under Vad, am I right?

Vad, Vadim, was Lev’s twin brother (fraternal—profoundly nonidentical), a leering, sidling, scheming kid, and “
very
socialist,” as our mother used to say as she fanned herself and blew the fringe off her brow. Tormenting Lev was Vad’s chief hobby and project for fifteen years. I’d tell Lev, Hit back, hit back. And keep hitting back. And Lev did hit back. But always just that single flail, and then he’d curl himself up again to take his punishment. Vad, in 1948, was a military politico, junior but hyperactive, and stationed in East Germany. Incidentally, he resembled me more closely than he resembled his twin. Tacit family lore had it that Vadim, implacable even in the womb, had shouldered Lev to the side and then drained off everything good.

I said, Until the day came when you hit back and kept on hitting. What changed?

In ones and twos the shiteaters had started drifting off, back into the sector. Of those remaining, some seemed discouraged by the defection, and the aggregate loss of hope; others freshly twinkled—dreaming of the lion’s share, with Irish eyes…

Lev said, “I was different inside.”…
Shit,
I said. It’s just struck me. What happened to your stutter? Where’d your stutter go?

He gave a taut nod and said, “She did that. After the first night, I woke up and it wasn’t there. Can you imagine? You know what it means? It means I can’t die. Not yet.”

No, you can’t die. Not yet.

Venus, you’re probably marveling—I know I am—at my calm and helpfulness, and the superb urbanity of my fraternal exchange with the husband of the woman I loved, the husband of Zoya, healer of stutterers. The truth is that I was in shock. And not “still in shock” either: I had hardly started. I would go on being in shock for over a month, buoyed by buxom chemicals. They did me good, morally. I got a lot worse when they wore off.

I said, Here,
everyone’s
Vad. Vad with a wrench and a screwdriver. And you haven’t got fifteen years to adapt to it. You haven’t got fifteen hours. You’ve got till tomorrow morning.

My breath hung in the air. Even in June your breath hung in the air as if you were smoking an enormous and fiery cigar. They went out six feet and curled back around you, these scarves of breath.

The last kitchen light went out, the last internal door slammed shut, and the last lingering shiteater wandered off crying childishly into his fists.

I said, This is what you’ve got to do.

“Tell me.”

I told him. And then I said, You’re what she’s giving up her twenties for. Christ. Think of that. And when it’s this cold, don’t eat the snow. You’ll have blood on your lips and your tongue. The snow burns.

I will now briefly describe the conclusion of my thing with Zoya. I will now briefly describe my abasement before The Americas.

On March 20, 1946, it came to pass that I was alone with her, in the conical attic, at half past one in the morning.

She hadn’t actually asked me up. I’d simply attached myself to a group that was on its way to pay her a call. We were not good Communists, not anymore; but we were excellent communitarians. Community: the cardinal Russian strength, even though the state now feared it and hated it. Russians looked out for each other. Russians did do that…We sat around in our overcoats. There was no heat and no light. There was no food and no drink. We had, I remember, a paper bagful of a nameless orange tea, but no water. The tea turned out to be carrot peel. So we ate it. They were all younger than me; it was perhaps to be expected that I said very little. I didn’t care how obvious it was, how dourly obvious—my determination to be the last to leave.

Because I now felt that I had a deadline. Zoya, that day, had done something, said something, that could not but lead to her arrest, or so I judged. It will sound unserious to you, Venus; but it wasn’t unserious. The whole Tech was talking about it. After classes Zoya showed up for the plenary session of the Komsomol, or the Communist Youth League. I remember the convocations of the Komsomol: try to imagine something halfway between a temperance meeting and a Nuremberg Rally. On her way out, Zoya said, quite audibly, that the two-hour keynote address (its full title, I remember, was “The Scum of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Deviation and the City Administration Committee Decision About the Party Meeting at the Mining Institute”) had “bored her tits off.” And no no no no no, you just
couldn’t
say that. Doubly provocative, and she was trebly endangered—boredom and breasts and Jewishness. That night, every time I heard a car or a truck in the street, I thought, It’s them. They’re here.

A couple of days earlier, as I walked Zoya to Tech, a man going past on a bicycle shouted out something with the word
kike
in it. I asked her—Kike what?

“Dirty kike bedstraw,” she repeated without any emphasis.

We walked on. I said, How often does it happen?

“You know what I’d like? I’d like to be vulgar in America. I’d like to be a Jew in America—all flash. How often? You might get nothing for a week. Then you get about nine in one day.”