“I don’t think I do expect too much.”
We embraced. And as I ducked out I saw the small contraption on the windowsill, the test tube, steadied by its hand-carved wooden frame, and the single stemless bloom—an amorous burgundy.
I have already told you about the evening of July 31.
Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. Trying not to laugh, he gave me a cup of hot black muck. Trying not to laugh, I drank it.
Hey Krzysztov, I said. Why do you need all those zeds and the rest of it in the middle of your name? Why not call yourself Krystov?
“No Krystov,” he said. “Krzysztov!”
There was the lecture on Iran I didn’t go to. There was my tryst with Tanya: her notched mouth, like a scar, marking time in what had once been her face. She was twenty-four. Midnight came and midnight went.
The impersonation of reasonable man: that’s tiring. The impersonation of someone reasonably good. That’s tiring too. I should have slept, of course. But how was I supposed to do that? I had seen a woman who looked like a woman: Zoya, side on, with the whole of her in motion in the white cotton dress, one hand raised to steady the raincoat thrown over her shoulder, the other swinging a crammed straw bag, the Brazilian backside, the Californian breasts, and all of it in syncopation, against the beat, as she moved down the path to the House of Meetings, where Lev stood.
Around me in the dark the prisoners were eating the dream-meal, bolting it, wolfing it. I knew that dream, we all did, with loaves of bread the color of honey or mustard floating past you and turning to mist in your hands, on your lips, on your tongue.
I had something else in my mouth. All night I walked and crawled across a landscape overlaid with grit, a desert where each grain of sand, at some point or other, would have its time between my teeth.
When I first saw him, out beyond the boundary rail, I swear to God I thought he had been blinded in the night. He was being led by the arm, or dragged by the sleeve. Then the pig just swung him out into the yard. Lev turned a full circle, swayed, steadied, and at last began to come forward.
I thought too of his arrival, in the February of 1948, when he had felt his way out of the decontamination shed and moved into the darkness one step at a time—but not slowly, because he knew by then that there were always great distances to cross. Now he moved slowly. Now he was nightblind at noon. As he drew nearer I could tell that it was simpler than that and he just wasn’t interested in anything further than an inch from his face. The eyes, rather, were swiveled inward, where they were doing the work of decrease, of internal demotion. Lev came past me. His jaws toiled, as if he was sucking purposefully on a lozenge or a sweet. Some hoarded bonbon, maybe, popped in there, in parting, by Zoya? I thought not. I thought he was trying to rinse out a new taste inside his mouth.
Of course, I had no idea what had passed between them. But I felt the mass of it in a way that went on striking me for some time as tangential and perverse, and uncannily impersonal. It fled without so much as a whimper—all my social hope. More specifically, I ceased to believe, then and there, that human society could ever arrive at something just a little bit better than all that had come before. I know you must think that this faith of mine was dismayingly slow to evaporate. But I was young. And for two months in the spring and summer of 1953, even here, I had known utopia, and had quaffed sublimity and love.
For seventy-two hours he lay facedown in his bunk. Not even the guards tried to make him stir. But this couldn’t last. On the third morning I waited for the barracks to clear and then I approached. I stood over his curled form. Muttering, murmuring, I rubbed his shoulders until he opened his eyes. I said,
Work today, brother. Food today.
And I peeled him up from the boards and helped him down.
Listen, I said, you can’t stay silent forever. What’s the worst that could have happened? All right. She’s leaving you.
His chin jerked up and I was staring at his nostrils. I don’t think Lev knew it until that moment. His stutter was back.
“Leaving me?” he eventually managed to say. And he labored on. “No. She wants to get married again. Properly. She said she’d follow me anywhere. ‘Like a dog.’”
Then all is clear, I said. You couldn’t do it. Nobody can, not here. You know, in its whole history, I don’t think there’s ever been a single fuck in the House of Meetings.
“I could do it. Everything worked.”
Then tell me.
“I’ll tell you before I die.” And it took him a long time to get it out. “I have crossed over,” he said, fighting it, bringing everything to bear against it, “into the other half of my life.”
All that could be done was to help him with his norms and his rations. But he couldn’t eat. He tried and he tried and he couldn’t eat. He turned his face away. He drank the water, and he could sometimes manage the tea. But nothing solid passed his lips until September. No one joked or smiled or said anything. His attempts to work, to eat, to talk—these were respected in silence by every prisoner.
On the other hand, I too had crossed over into the other half of my life: the better half. He crossed over and I crossed over. We crossed.
By now the camp was simply disappearing all around us. Everything was coming down, and the inmates were mere impediments—we were always getting in the way. As freedom impended, I embraced inactivity. Lev gradually returned to his earlier regime—the jumping-jacks, the lashing skip-rope; he was a boxer again, but with the loath and somnolent look of a man asked to punch far above his weight. We were almost the last to leave. They were practically tearing the rafters off the roof above our heads. And when there was no prison left, they let the prisoners just wander away. Lev went first.
I had three weeks to wait for the rubber stamp. But nothing frightened me or worried me or even bothered me. I minded nothing: the nonappearance of my Certificate of Rehabilitation, the low-priority rail voucher, the “travel ration” of bread. I didn’t even mind the train station at Predposylov—at first sight a clear impossibility, with dozens brawling over every seat. I rolled up my sleeves and took my place in the line.
Twenty-four hours later, with caked blood on my cheeks and knuckles, as I settled into my cranny at the carriage window, I turned to see a face pressed up against the glass. I stood up on the bench and hollered through the slit:
How long have you been here?
“Ever since. I want to go back.”
Of course you do.
“Not there.” He wagged his head. “There.”
So another fight, another flail through limbs and torsos now unshiftably wedged, and back again, and back again, as I made Lev take my place.
It’s all right, it’s all right, I kept mechanically shouting. It’s all right—he’s only little. He’s smaller than I am. He’s small. It’s all right, it’s all right.
PART III
1.
September 3, 2004: Predposylov
Today there is a piece in the local paper about the wild dogs of Predposylov.
The writer keeps referring to the dogs as “wild” but his terrified emphasis is on their discipline and esprit de corps. He tells of the “coordinated attacks” they mount on stalls and shops, notably on a butcher’s, where they came in through the backyard and “made off” with five meat pies, three chickens, and a string of sausages. The raid, he says, was reconnoitered by the “scout” dog, which barked the all-clear to the “alpha” dog.
Learnedly the writer compares the wild dogs of Predposylov to the “mutant” dogs of Moscow. The Moscow dogs are not called mutants because they have two heads and two tails. They are called mutants because they live in the metro and travel around by train. You may be intrigued to know that I once shared a carriage with a mutant pigeon in the London Tube. It got on at Westminster and it got off at St. James’s Park.
An “official source” is claiming that the wild dogs of Predposylov were responsible for the recent savaging of a five-year-old in a municipal playground. There
is a picture of the playground—pretty pastels. There is a picture of the five-year-old—comprehensively mauled. Word of the approach of the wild dogs now empties a street, a square.
They tell me, here at the hotel, that the dogs come down the back alley behind the kitchens, every day, at twenty-five past one. The man said you can set your watch by them. I will be taking a closer look at the wild dogs of Predposylov.
Whatever else you may want to say about the place, Dudinka is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you have timber, and coal, and you’re on a big river, then you are going to get something very like Dudinka.
Dudinka has been here for nearly three centuries. Predposylov has been here since 1944. And it’s not an aggregation, as Dudinka is, but something slapped down in its entirety—Leninsky Prospect, House of Culture, Drama Theater, Sports Hall, Party Headquarters, and, more recently, Social Historical Museum. Why a city? A mining station, yes, a cluster of factories, quite possibly; and, if you must, a slave-labor camp containing sixty thousand people. But why build a city so near the North Pole?
When I got out of Norlag I felt, for nearly a year, that I was treading on the eggshells of freedom. That feeling comes over me here, the unpleasant vibrancy in the shins, the squeamish levitation of the spine. Predposylov is hollow. Underneath the city there are mines a mile deep. The ground itself is a shell you might put your foot through. And there is Mount Schweinsteiger, a black egg in its cup, all emptied out.
This isn’t the Second World anymore. It is not even the Third World. It is the Fourth. It is what happens after. Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.
I am the oldest man in Predposylov by a margin of thirty-five years.
Late at night I look in on a club called the Sixty Nine (the name refers to the parallel). There is a crooner, Presleyesque (late period), in dramatically swirling white flares. And there are G-stringed waitresses and milling prostitutes and softcore sex films showing on the raised screens. No, I don’t feel disgusted. I feel disgusting. People stare at me, as if they’ve never seen an old man before. Come to think of it, that’s probably true: they’ve never seen an old man before. Other people as old as me, and even older, do exist, don’t they, Venus? But really this whole thing has gone on long enough.
My idea is to get my hangover drunk. But I don’t go through with it, particularly. My hangover is not a hangover. I was mistaken. It is death. There is something in the center of my brain, something like a trapped sneeze. Which tickles. And the air here makes my eyes sting and weep.
On top of that I now live in a state of permanently lost temper. I lost my temper three days ago and have not recovered it. I am also very voluble, and am already widely feared at the bar here, by the staff and by the customers. Having been silent for so long, I’m now like a very much rowdier version of the Ancient Mariner. The arrangement at the bar is that I do all the buying but I also do all the talking. Sometimes I take a wedge of money from my wallet and burst out of the room looking for someone to yell at.
I’ve been reading up a bit, and this will be of especial interest to you, Venus, belonging as you do to a generation of self-mutilators. I mean the historical destiny of the urkas.
Now, I have no intention of reopening our debate (let us call it that) on your chin-stud. The soft underbelly of the ear, certainly—but why the chin? I know: it is strangely comforting (you claimed) to focus all your tender feelings on a particular part of your body, now hurt but soon to heal; and thereafter the implanted trinket will mark the spot of your self-inflicted wound. Very well. But what about the “cutting,” Venus? I’m assuming you don’t do it: your arms, when we meet, are often elegantly sleeveless. But many do. Something like twenty million young Americans, I learn, have regular recourse to the bleed valve.
Urka culture, in its decadent phase, became a lot queerer (the passives cringed, the actives swaggered), making you wonder how crypto-queer it was all along. I feel you flinch. These words are like points of heat on you, aren’t they? Your internal censor or commissar—she didn’t like that, did she? You have a censor living in your head, but it’s not all bad: you also have a beaming cheerleader living there too. So it’s not all bad by any means, having an ideology, as you do…Now understand me, Venus. I hear that the aftermath of a gay love-murder is something to see, but the homosexual impulse is clearly pacific. Crypto-queers are supposed heterosexuals; they confine themselves to women; and they are among the most dangerous men alive.
Urka culture, moreover, became self-mutilating, with full urka stringency. They took the battle to their very insides, swallowing nails, ground glass, metal spoons and blades, barbed wire. And this was on top of the self-amputations, self-cannibalizations, self-castrations. My country has always been strangely hospitable to self-neuterers. It began in the eighteenth century, a whole sect of them, the Castrates, who held that the removal of the instrument was a precondition, a sine qua non, of salvation.
Cutting. It’s done to combat numbness, isn’t it? These urkas were convicts, and fought the numbness of prison. Your crowd: what do they fight? If it’s the numbness of advanced democracy—I can’t sympathize. Other systems, you see, flood the glands and prickle the tips of the nerves.
I had the Social Historical Museum pointed out to me on the way in. It looks like a dry-cleaner’s or a Korean takeaway. And it is shuttered, whether for repair, or for final closure, no one knows.
But when I pass it in the early evening the shutter is up. My very small bribe is accepted by a russety youth in white overalls. He says he’s an electrician. He convincingly toils, in any event, over a succession of fuseboxes, fixing them, or just stripping them. He rents me one of his three powerful flashlights.
Whose careening beam reveals a short arcade, with four displays on either side—tableaux morts. The glass of broken bulbs splits and splinters under my feet as I move forward, past the Voguls, the Entsy, the Ostinks, the Nganasani, and so on: the absorbed or annihilated or alcohol-poisoned peoples of the Arctic. Then I come to the Zeks: us. I look round about me at the other figures, the gaunt revenants of the vanished tribes. The best part of you feels moved to take them as ennobling company, in any form or setting. We were all poor, poor bastards. Still, these were remoter multitudes, and would have succumbed, anyway, to mere modernity.
Their molded shapes stroke the flanks of stuffed reindeers and feed scraps of bread to plastic huskies. I am represented, Lev is represented, by the doll of an old geezer at a low table, before an open stove, beneath snow-furred windows, beside a tousled cot. The Entsy have their reassembled medicine-man outfit, their simulated yurt. We have our foreshortened mittens and our dented metal bowl. All this under the reeling and now failing beam of the flashlight.
“We wanted the best,” an old Kremlin hand once said, referring to some other disaster, some other panoramic inferno: “but it turned out as always.”
Middle School Number One is like a laboratory and a control experiment. It is showing how you build the Russian totality.
On the third day we reach the point where the situation of the hostages can no longer be plausibly worsened. Consider. They are parched, starved, stifled, filthy, terrified—but there is more. Outside, the putrefying bodies of the people killed on the first day are being eaten by dogs. And if the captives can smell it, if the captives can hear it, the sounds of the carrion dogs of North Ossetia eating their fathers, then all five senses are attended to, and the Russian totality is emplaced. Nothing for it now. Their situation cannot be worsened. Only death can worsen it.
So death comes at the moment of alleviation, of fractional alleviation—because the Russian totality can’t assent to that. The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the
roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many—the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.
You know, I can’t find a Russian who believes it: “We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.” I can’t find a Russian who believes that. They didn’t want the best, or so every Russian believes. They wanted what they got. They wanted the worst.
And now there is a doctor, on the television, who says that some of the surviving children “have no eyes.”
Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy: each of them insisted on a Russian God, a specifically Russian God. The Russian God would not be like the Russian state, but would weep and sing as it scourged.
I am in a terminal panic about my life, Venus; and this is no figure of speech. The panic seems to come…Seems? The panic comes, not from inside me, but from out of the earth or the ether. I outwait it—that’s all I can do. It rolls by me, and then it’s gone, leaving the taste of metal in my mouth and all over my body, as if I had been smelted or galvanized. Then it returns, not the same day, and maybe not the next, but it returns and rolls and billows by me. I think it sweeps the entire planet, and always has. The only people who feel it pass are the dying.
Dead reckoning is a phrase that sailors use—it means the simple calculation of their position at sea. Not by landmarks or the stars. Just direction and distance. I know where I am: the port where I’m heading already shows its outlines through the mist. What I’m doing, now, is dead reckoning. I am making a reckoning with the dead.
There is a letter in my pocket, in my inside breast pocket, which I have yet to read. I keep it there, hoping that it will enter my heart by a process of benign osmosis, one word at a time, on tiptoe. I don’t want my eyes, my head, to have to do it.