House of Meetings

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Dear Venus,

If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.

Meanwhile, I offer my congratulations. You now join a substantial contingent of young people — those condemned to tout the festering memoirs of an elderly relative. Still, you won’t have to go far: the Gagarin Press on Jones Street. Ask for Mr. Nosrin. Do not worry: I won’t be going the way of that fuddled deviant we read about, who sent whole rolls of his handiwork to One Hour Photo. Nosrin has been squared (and everything is paid for). Besides, he’s a compatriot of mine, so he’ll understand. I’d like a print run, please, consisting of a single copy. It is yours.

You were always asking me why I could never “open up,” why I found it so hard to “vent” and “decompress” and all the rest of it. Well, with a past like mine, you pretty much live for the interludes when you aren’t thinking about it — and time spent talking about it clearly isn’t going to be one of them. There was a more obscure inhibition: the frankly neurotic fear that you wouldn’t believe me. I saw you turning away, I saw you turning your face away and slowly shaking your lowered head. And this was for some reason an unendurable prospect. I said my fear was neurotic, but I know it to be widely shared by men with similar histories. Shared neurosis, shared anxiety. Mass emotion: we will have to keep returning to the subject of mass emotion.

When at first I assembled the facts before me, black words on a white page, I found myself staring at a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror. So I’ve tried to give the thing a bit of structure. Inasmuch as I could locate some semblance of form and pattern, I felt less isolated, and could sense the assistance of impersonal forces (which I badly needed). This intimation of unity was perhaps delusive. The fatherland is eternally prodigal with anti-illuminations, with negative epiphanies — but not with unity. There aren’t any unities in my country.

In the 1930s there was a miner called Aleksei Stakhanov who, some said, unearthed more than a hundred tons of coal — the quota was seven — in a single shift. Hence the cult of the Stakhanovites, or “shock” workers: canyon-fillers and mountain-flatteners, human bulldozers and excavators. Stakhanovites, very often, were obvious frauds; very often, too, they were strung up by their mates, who hated the ballooning norms…There were also “shock” writers. They were taken off the factory floor, in their thousands, and trained to write propaganda in the guise of prose fiction. My purpose is otherwise, but that’s how you’d better think of me — as a “shock” writer who is telling the truth.

The truth will be painful for you. It has once again struck me (a subtle laceration, like a paper cut) that my most disgraceful act was perpetrated, not in the distant past, like nearly all the others, but well within your lifetime, and a matter of months before I was introduced to your mother. My ghost expects censure. But make it personal, Venus; make it your own and not the censure of your group and your ideology. Yes, you heard me, young lady: your ideology. Oh, it’s a mild ideology, I agree (mildness is its one idea). Nobody’s going to blow themselves to bits for it.

Your assimilation of what I did — this will in any case be a heavy call on your courage and generosity. But I think that even a strict retributionist (which you are not) would be reasonably happy with the way things turned out. It could be objected, and I would not argue, that I didn’t deserve your mother; and I didn’t deserve to have you in the house for nearly twenty years. Nor do I now seriously fear that you will excommunicate me from your memory. I don’t think you’ll do that. Because you understand what it means to be a slave.

Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right — it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from.

You are as well-prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you — look at the burnish of you.