House of Meetings

1. Dudinka, September 2, 2004

The phrase “dirty old man” has two meanings, and one of them happens to be literal. There is a dirty old man on board who is that kind of dirty old man. He may be a dirty old man of the other kind too, but something tells me that the two callings are difficult to combine. Now tell me, Venus. Why do I feel tempted to take the road of this dirty old man? I hate washing more and more every day, and shaving, and I hate stuffing my laundry into plastic bags and writing “socks—4 prs.” I almost burst into tears, the other morning, when I realized I’d have to cut my toenails one more time. A really dirty old man wouldn’t bother. What clarity and intrepidity, what boldness and pride. I find I deeply admire this dirty old man. His leftover-infested beard, his death-ray breath, and his rotting, many-layered overcoat are things that everyone else has to worry about. The smell that follows him about, and precedes him, is light-speed: you know it the instant he enters the dining room even when he’s forty feet away. He behaves as though it isn’t his fault and he’s innocent. He’s clean: in some mysterious way, he’s clean. Yesterday he disembarked; I saw him, quite a distance off, being canoed through the mist — a mist perhaps of his own making — to what looked like a fish cannery lurking under the eaves of the western bank.

Women don’t mind it, because baths and showers are, at least, “lovely and warm” (this was the phrase used by an English ladyfriend of mine, whom you’ll meet); and it’s interesting, the female admiration for warmth, combined with the well-attested tolerance of cold. But the male, I think, is eventually bored to the point of dementia by the business of not being dirty. On the other hand, I do see that it’s necessary, and that it gets more necessary every day. The “high” eighties: that too has unfortunate connotations. High, late — it doesn’t matter. Eighty-six is never going to sound any good.

I realize you must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph. And it isn’t just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude — my appetite for generalizations. Your crowd, they’re so terrorstricken by generalizations that they can’t even manage a declarative sentence. “I went to the store? To buy orange juice?” That’s right, keep it tentative — even though it’s already happened. Similarly, you say “okay” when an older hand would say (c” “My name is Pete?” “Okay.” “I was born in Ohio?” “Okay.” What you’re saying, with your okays, is this: for the time being I take no exception. You have not affronted me yet. No one has been humiliated so far.

A generalization might sound like an attempt to stereo-type — and we can’t have that. I’m at the other end. I worship generalizations. And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.

The name of your ideology, in case anyone asks, is Westernism. It would be no use to you here.

Now, at noon, the passengers and crew of the Georgi Zhukov are disembarking in Dudinka with as much triumphalism as their numbers will allow. The tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that’s what a port looks like — a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettledrums of the storage vats.

But this is different. It is a Mars of rust, in various hues and concentrations. Some of the surfaces have dimmed to a modest apricot, losing their barnacles and asperities. Elsewhere, it looks like arterial blood, newly shed, newly dried. The rust boils and bristles, and the keel of the upended ferryboat glares out across the water with personalized fury, as if oxidation were a crime it would lay at your door.

Tottering and swaying over my cane, I think of those more or less ridiculous words, Greek-derived, for irrational fears, many of which describe more or less ridiculous conditions: anthophobia (fear of flowers), pogonophobia (beards), deipnophobia (dinner parties), triskaidekaphobia (the number thirteen). Yes, these are sensitive souls. But there’s one for rust (iophobia); and I think I’ve got it. I’ve got iophobia. The condition doesn’t strike me, now, as at all ridiculous — or at all irrational. Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

A stupor of self-satisfaction: that’s the state to be in when your life is drawing to an end. And not this state — not my state. It isn’t death that seems so very frightening. What frightens me is life, my own, and what it’s going to turn out to add up to.

There is a letter in my pocket that I have yet to read.

The big wrongs — you reach a point where you’ve just about bedded them down. And then the little wrongs wake up and bite, with their mean little teeth.

What’s annoying me now is the state-driven prudery of the 1930s. These were my teenage years, and I might have got off to a much better start. I fondly see myself kiting with Katya, mushrooming with Masha, bobsleighing with Bronislava — first kiss, first love. But the state wouldn’t have it. “Free love” was officially classified as a bourgeois deformity. It was the “free” bit they really didn’t like. Still, they didn’t like love either.

Only this year has it emerged — some sort of picture of the sexual mores at the court of Joseph Vissarionovich. And it unsurprisingly transpires that the revolutionary energy had its erotic aspect. The Kremlin circle, in short, was a hive of adultery and seigneurism.

It was like food and space to breathe. They could have it. And we couldn’t. Why not? Sex isn’t a finite resource; and free love costs nothing. Yet the state, as I think Nikita Sergeyevich pointed out, wanted to give the impression that Russia was a stranger to carnal knowledge. As you might put it — What’s that about?

On the quay a small fleet of minivans stands by for those passengers who are impatient to reach Predposylov. No, we are not many, we are pitifully few. The Gulag tour, the purser told me with an indulgent shrug, always lost money; and then he mimed a yawn. Similarly, on the flight from the capital to my point of embarkation, I quite clearly heard a stewardess refer to me (she and a colleague were remixing my drink) as “the Gulag bore in 2B.” It is nice to know that this insouciance about Russian slavery — abolished, it is true, as long ago as 1987—has filtered down to the caste of tourism. I let the stewardess get away with it. Start a ruckus on a plane these days and you get fifteen bullets in the head. But the indulgent purser (much shaken, much enriched) now knows that here is one who still swears and weeps, that here is one who still hates and burns.

We say our goodbyes, and I am alone on the quayside. I want to get to the Arctic city the way I did the first time, and I’m taking the train. After ten or fifteen minutes, and after some cursing (but no haggling), a reasonably sober longshoreman agrees to drive me to the station in his truck. What is the matter with me — why all this swearing and tipping? It could be that my behavior is intended as exemplary. I frequently transgress, it’s true; but I at least am prompt with my reparations, my apologies in the form of cash.

The uncertain Arctic light, I realize, makes my body clock run too fast or too slow; every day I feel as if I have risen in the small hours or else shamefully overslept. The colors of the cars don’t look quite right either, like car colors everywhere but seen at dawn under streetlamps. My hangover has not gone away. All the buildings, all the medium-rise flat blocks, stand on stout little stilts, pilings driven down through the melting permafrost and into the bedrock. This is the world of the crawlspace.

Lev’s geographical theory of Russian destiny was not his alone, and serious historians now propound it. The northern Eurasian plain, with its extreme temperatures, its ungenerous soil, its remoteness from the southerly trade routes, its lack of any ocean but the Arctic; and then the Russian state, with its compulsive and self-protective expansion, its land empire of twenty nations, its continent-sized borders: all this demands a heavily authoritarian center, a vast and vigilant bureaucracy — or else Russia flies apart.

Our galaxy, too, would fly apart, if not for the massive black holes in its core, each the size of the solar system, and the presence all around of dark matter and dark energy, policing the pull to the center.

This explanation appealed to my brother because, he said, it was “the right size”: the same size as the landmass. We can shake our heads and say physics did it. Geography did it.

With its light-blue plaster and creamy trim, the railway station has the appearance of a summer pavilion, yet the bar, where I wait, is darkly congested (with locals, not travelers), and this reassures me. Until now the human sparsity of Dudinka has given me the feeling of free fall or imminent levitation. And the memories of my first journey here, in 1946, are like an awful dream of human constriction, of inconceivable crowding and milling and huddling.

A liter of hundred-proof North Korean vodka, I notice, costs less than a liter of watery Russian beer. There is also an impressive dedication, on the part of the customers, to oloroso, or fortified wine (“sweet sack”). Oloroso is a drunkard’s drink as it is, and this stuff doesn’t come from Jerez. That’s the distinction Dostoevsky is making when he includes, on a tabletop already inauspiciously burdened with alcohol, “a bottle of the strongest sherry from the national cellar.”

My hangover continues to deteriorate. Or should I say that my hangover continues to thrive? For indeed it comes on wonderfully well. I want a lot of it, I need a lot of it, but I haven’t been drunk for fifteen years. Remember? I was lying in bed, on a Sunday afternoon, and quietly dying. Occasionally I whispered water—in Russian. A sign of truly bestial need. You walked in on stiffened legs, head down, intensely concentrated: you weren’t going to spill the clear liquid in the pint glass you held in both hands. “Here,” you said. I reached out a withered arm. And then: “It’s vodka.” And I absorbed the vicious intelligence of your stare. By then I was married to your mother. You were nine.

On the television, which perches high on the wall, there now appears the familiar and dreadful sight of the E-shaped redbrick building. I move closer, in time to hear yet another untruth: that there are “no plans” to storm the school. Then, suddenly and with no explanation, the screen fizzes, and Middle School Number One is replaced by a Latin soap opera in medias res — and, as always, under an inch of makeup each, a tearful old vamp is reproaching a haughty gigolo. The disruption goes unnoticed or at least unremarked. My instinct is to throw another costly tantrum — but directed at whom, and to what end? In any event I cannot bear it, so I pay, and tip, and wheel my case out onto the platform, and stare at the rails, narrow-gauged, that lead to the Arctic city.

No, young lady, I haven’t turned my phone off. I’ve just been using it a lot — Middle School Number One, in North Ossetia. I was, as you know, a tolerably big cheese in Russia by the time I left, and I had many contacts in the military. You may also remember the not very serious trouble this put me to right up until 1991, when the certificate, framed in Paris, pronounced the death of the Russian experiment. Of that particular Russian experiment. My contemporaries are of course all long gone, and in many cases I deal with the sons of the men I knew. They talk to me. And I am hearing some extraordinary things.

By now the children are in their underwear and sitting with parents and teachers on the floor of the boobytrapped gymnasium. Mines clad in metal bolts are strung up on the basketball hoops. When the children chant for water they are silenced by a bullet fired into the ceiling. To aid ventilation, some of the gym windows have been obligingly shattered, but the killers, it seems, remain committed to the dehydration of their hostages, if hostages they are, and have clubbed off the tap handles in the kitchens and bathrooms. The children are now reduced, and some are now forced, to drink sweat and urine filtered through layers of clothing. How long can a child survive in great heat without water? Three days? Of course there are plans to storm the school.

It will be revealed, postmortem, that the killers are on heroin and morphine, and some of the doses will be described as “beyond lethal.” As the power of the analgesic fades, what was numb will become raw; I keep thinking of the killer with red hair and how his rusty beard will itch and smart. Pogonophobia…North Ossetia has started to remind me of another school massacre, swaggering, drug-fueled — Columbine. Yes I know. Columbine was not political but purely recreational, and was over in minutes. Only the briefest visit, on that occasion, to the parallel universe where murdering the young is accounted witty.

They are now saying that the killers, who have made “no demands,” are jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Jihadis they may well be, but they are almost certainly from Chechnya, and what they want is independence. The reason that can’t happen, Venus, is that Chechnya, after centuries of Russian invasion, oppression, mass deportation, and (most recently) blitz, is now organically insane. So the leader’s in a bind, now, just as Joseph Vissarionovich felt himself to be with the Jews in 1948: “I can’t swallow them, and I can’t spit them out.” All he could do was chew.

Early on in the siege of the Moscow theater — Dubrovka — in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere — in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians.^*2 You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading The New York Times, even I found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.

Of course there are plans to storm the school. To say plans risks extravagance, perhaps, but somehow or other the school will be stormed. This we know, because the Spetsnaz, our elite special forces, are buying bullets from the locals, who are surging around outside with their muskets and flintlocks.

Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up on purpose. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain.

And life isn’t hard enough, not for you…I’m thinking of your first wave of boyfriends — eight or nine years ago. The shat-myself look they all favored, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump; and the eviscerated trainers. That’s a prison style: no belt or laces — lest you hang yourself with them. Looking at those boys, with their sheared heads, their notched noses and scarified ears, I felt myself back in Norlag. Is this the invention of pain? Or a little reenactment of the pains of the past? The past has a weight. And the past is heavy.

I’m not for a moment saying that your anorexia was in any sense voulu. The force of the thing took all my courage from me, and your mother and I sobbed when we saw the CCTV tape of your dark form, like a knobbly walking stick, doing push-ups beside your hospital bed in the middle of the night. I will just add that when you went to the other place, the one called the Manor, and I saw a hundred of you through the wire around the car park, it was impossible not to think of another iconic twentieth-century scene.

Forgive me. And anyway it’s not just the young. There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.

The train rocks and knocks across the simplified landforms of the tundra: Russia’s great white page, awaiting the characters and sentences of history. No hills and valleys, just bumps and dips. Here, topographical variation is the work of man: gigantic gougings and scourings, and pyramids of slag. If you saw a mountain, now, a plateau, a cliff, it would loom like a planet. There is a hollow hill in Predposylov that is called a mountain, Mount Schweinsteiger, named after the geologist (a Russian-German, I think, from the Volga basin) who discovered nickel here toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the plains of limbless trees stand pylons, attached to no cable.

Our little train is a local, a dutiful ferrier of souls, taking them from the dormitory towns and delivering them to the Kombinat. There are some very worn faces among the passengers, and some very new ones too (shorn pinheads attached to strapping tracksuits), but they all wear masks of dormitory calm, not aware of anything unusual, not aware of anything nightmarish and unforgettable.

So in this journey am I, as the phrases go, retracing my steps — in an attempt to bring it all back? To do that, I would have needed to descend below the waterline of the Georgi Zhukov, and induce the passengers and crew to coat themselves in shit and sick and then lie on top of me for a month and a half. Similarly, this train, its windows barred, its carriages subdivided into wire cages, the living and the dead all bolt upright, would have to be shunted into a siding and abandoned till mid-November. And there aren’t enough people — there just aren’t enough people.

With an hour to go, the train makes a stop at a humble township called Coercion. It says it on the platform: Coercion. How to explain this onset of candor? Where are the sister settlements of Fabulation and Amnesia? As we pull out of Coercion, the carriage is suddenly visited by a cloudburst of mosquitoes, and in silent unanimity — with no words or smiles or glances, with no sense of common purpose — the passengers set about killing every last one of them.

By the time they’re all dead (clapped in the hands, smeared across the window), you can see it on the shallow horizon: the heavy haze, like a fleece going yellow at the edges, there to warm the impossible city.

2. “Oh, I Can Bear It”

I told Lev, more than once, that his chances of survival were reasonably good. That was a guess. Now we can do the math.

In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people. Or so it was said in the years before the war, when the camps were lethalized as part of the push of the Terror. There were fluctuations, but in general the death rate was determined by the availability of food. Massively and shamingly, the camp system was a phenomenon of food.

In “hungry ’33” one out of seven died, in 1943 one out of five, in 1942 one out of four. By 1948 it had gone back down again, systemwide, and your chances were not much worse than in the rough-and-ready Soviet Union, or “the big zona,” as it was universally known in camp: the twelve-time-zone zona. By 1948, flies had stopped dying like people, and people had gone back to dying like flies.

Still, this was the Arctic. And there was the question of his physical mass. What the body is doing, in camp, is slowly eating itself; my brother was thicker now in the chest and shoulders, but at five foot three he remained a lenten meal. An actuary might put it this way: if there were ten Levs in Norlag, in 1948, then one of them was going to die. That still didn’t mean that he had a good chance of surviving his ten-year sentence. It meant that he had a good chance of surviving 1948. Do the math, and his prospects were exactly zero. No, less than zero. Because it transpired, Venus, toward the end of the first week, that my brother wasn’t merely a fascist. He was also a pacifist.

I cannot give here a full inventory of Lev’s troubles, during his naturalization, and, to the extent that I do, it is because everything that happened to him in Norlag came together and converged on the night of July 31, 1956, in the House of Meetings. This was his Russian cross. And it was also mine.

For the crucial first day of general work Lev was assigned to “land clearance,” and with a strong brigade. Which meant that he was lowered into a pit at six in the morning, equipped with half a shovel, and hoisted out again twelve hours later. The team got back to the sector just before eight. I scanned their faces; I stared so hard that I felt my eyes might have the power to carve him out of the air. Yes — he was among them. With dropped head, and shoulderless and bowlegged; but he was among them. I knew then that Lev had made the norm. If he hadn’t, they would have left him down there until he had. The team leader, the Latvian, Markargan, would have seen to that. This was a strong brigade.

Toward the end of the week his face wasn’t brick-red any more. It was black-and-blue.

You’re a what? I said.

“A pacifist. I didn’t want to tell you on the first night.” He spat, bloodily, and wiped his pulped lips. “Nonviolence — that’s my ticket.”

Who did your face?

“There’s a Tartar who covets my shovel. He’s got the other half of it. I won’t fight but I won’t give it up. He’s getting the idea. Yesterday he practically bit my hand off at the wrist — look. I’m nineteen. It’ll heal. And I didn’t give it up.”

What is all this? I said. You can fight. I’ve seen you. You were even quite talented for a while — quite savory — after you did Vad. And you’re stronger now. They had you digging fucking ditches in the street for four years. You’re no milksop.

“I’m not weak anymore. But I’m a pacifist. I turn the other cheek. Listen,” he said. “I’m not Gandhi — I don’t believe in heaven. If my life is threatened, I’ll fight to defend it. And I think I’d fight to defend yours. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. But that’s all. I have my reasons. I have my reason.” He shook his head, and again he spat. “I didn’t tell you this either. They killed Solomon Mikhoels.”

Solomon Mikhoels was the most famous Jew in Russia: venerable actor, and intercontinental envoy. During the war he mobilized American Jewry and raised millions of dollars. Once he performed for Joseph Vissarionovich in the Kremlin. Shakespeare. Lear.

“The Organs killed him. ‘Road accident.’ They beat him to death and then a truck ran him over. It’s starting. Zoya threw up when she heard.”

I said, There’s nothing you can do about that. What’s the Tartar’s name? You’re not there. You’re here.

“That’s right. I’m here.”

You see, Lev had just told me that after a week in his barracks — one of the most caked and clotted in the whole of Norlag — he was still sleeping on the floor. I feel the need for italicization: on the floor. And you just couldn’t do that. Down there you churned in a heap of spongy shiteaters, decrepit fascists, and (another subsection) Old Believers inching their way into martyrdom. And the smell, the smell…As the dark-age Mongol horde approached your city, it hurt the ears when it was still some distance from the walls. More terrifying than the noise was the smell, expressly cultivated — the militarization of dirt, of heads of hair, armpits, docks, feet. And the breath: the breath, further enriched by the Mongol diet of fermented mare’s milk, horse blood, and other Mongols. So it was in camp, too. The smell was penal, weaponized. The floor of the barracks was where it gathered — all the breath of the zona.

“Everything comes down on you,” he conceded. “I reach into my shirt for a handful of lice. And if they’re only little ones I think fuck it and put them back.”

There were about fifteen reasons why he couldn’t stay down there. He had to make it to the second tier. The topmost boards were, of course, the inalienable roosts of the urkas, of the brutes, of the bitches; but Lev had to make it to the second tier.

So I went through it all again, in soft-voiced earnest. Markargan will be behind you, I told him. He needs your labor — he needs your sleep, your health. You’re not going to last in that brigade so use the clout now. Gain the face. For the ground bunk, pick someone who’s on the low ration. They won’t fight for long. Then trade that for the middle bunk. This time pick a leech. He’ll have greased his way up there. Drag him down.

“…By what right?”

I supposed that if he ever stopped to think about it, Lev would have found me much reduced, humanly. And this is what he suddenly seemed to be doing. To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument. It wasn’t even diplomacy by other means. It was currency, like tobacco, like bread. I told him,

By what right? The right to life. They call you a fascist. Now act like one.

Lev wouldn’t do it. He stayed on the floor. And as a result he was always ill. “Pellagra,” said Janusz, the young prisoner-doctor, and spread his hands. This was a deficiency that announced itself in the form of dermatitis, diarrhea, and disorganization of thought. With hot flushes in the frost of the tundra, with cold sweats in the cauldron of the barracks, and shivering, always shivering, Lev did hard labor in a strong brigade.

To one of Conrad’s terse characterizations of Russian life—“the frequency of the exceptional”—I would like to add another: the frequency of the total. Total states, with your sufferings selected, as if off a menu, by your sworn enemy.

I said, earlier, that I was in shock about Zoya — and that’s true. It lasted until the day the sun came up. You could just see the corona, a pearly liquid smeared on the tundra’s edge. The long eclipse was over: fingers pointed, and there was a grumbling, burbly cheer from the men. And I too came up out of eclipse and obscuration. I was no longer muffled in the chemicals of calm.

Now I started to look at my losses. And they were serious. I realized that there was nothing, now, nothing at all, that I liked to think about…Many more or less regrettable peccadilloes, in camp, were widely practiced; but onanism wasn’t one of them. The urkas did it, and in public. And I suppose the younger rustics managed it for a while. For the rest of us it became a part of the past. Yet we all had the thoughts. I think we all still had the thoughts.

I still had them. Every night I staged my experiment. I would enter a room where Zoya lay sleeping. It was late afternoon. She was on the bed among star-bright pillows, in a petticoat or a short nightdress (here, and here only, some variation was allowed). I sat beside her and took her hand in mine. I kissed her lips. Then came the moment of transformation, when she rose up, flowed up, into my arms, and it began.

This nightly Fata Morgana used to feel like a source of strength — a reconnection with vital powers. But now it was weakening me, and corroding me. And as the sun worked its way up over the horizon I started saying it to myself, at first in a whisper of insomnia, then out loud in daylight, I started saying it: They didn’t mean to do this, but that’s what they’ve done. They’ve attacked my will. And that’s all I’ve got.

You’re a lucky boy, I told him.

It was his second rest day, and Lev sat scratching himself on the low wall in the yard. He squinted up at me and said, “Lucky how?”

I got my annual letter today. Kitty.

“…Where is it?”

When I held it up Lev got to his feet — but he flinched and stepped back. I understood. At the moment of arrest you already feel halfway vanished. In prison you’re a former person and already dead. In camp you’re almost sure you’ve never been. Letters from home are like communications from an enfeebled medium, some ailing Madame Sosostris, with her tea leaves and her cracked Ouija board.

I can’t show you the whole thing, I said. I’m the censor. But it’s good news.

In Aesopian language Kitty told of Lev’s arrest, and his expected departure for “an unknown destination.” As a result of this second disappearance, the family had “unfortunately” lost the apartment. And Mother had lost her job. Kitty went on to say that “the flu” was very virulent in the capital, and that Zoya and her mother had gone back to Kazan.

I said, Where the flu’s less bad. And it’s good news anyway.

He leaned into me and pressed his face to my chest.

“You make me very happy, brother. That’s it—get her out of town. And I don’t care what else Kitty said.”

This was just as well. Kitty said that she thought it inconceivable that Zoya would “wait” for Lev. According to her, Zoya already had a new favorite at the Tech, and was “all over him” in the canteen. It is my solemn duty, Venus, to admit to the coarse joy this sentence gave me.

I said, What do you expect? It’s Kitty.

“That’s right. It’s Kitty.”

Yes, it was Kitty: that unreliable narrator. I wanted someone with greater authority to tell me it was true — about Zoya being all over her new favorite. I wanted someone like Georgi Zhukov or, better still, Winston Churchill to tell me it was true.

“Can you write back?” he said.

I’m supposed to be able to. But they don’t like me. Anyway there’s never anything to write with. Or write on.

“Why don’t they like you? I mean, I can think of a reason or two. But why?”

The dogs.

“Ah. The dogs.”

I was quite famous, in camp, for the way I dealt with the dogs. Most prisoners, including Lev, were horribly afraid of them. Not me. When I was a toddler we had a mule-sized borzoi. I can’t even remember her; but she passed something on to me before she went. I have no fear of dogs. So I used to make them cringe. It’s just a dog, imbued with a pig nature. It’s just a snarl, waiting to become a cringe. I would often risk a beating to make the dogs cringe.

Lev said, “I went to the guardhouse and asked the pig. It says on my file: Without the Right to Correspondence. I thought that that was code for immediate execution. So did the pig. He kept peering at it and then peering at me. I don’t have the right. But I’ll keep on. I’ll get it.”

I said, untruthfully, I’m glad you don’t worry about Kitty. And about Zoya.

“Worry? I’m good at worrying. When I started being her friend, before, I used to worry that someone was going to get her pregnant. But she didn’t get pregnant. She can’t. She had an abortion when she was sixteen and she can’t. Then I worried that she was going to get arrested or kicked to death in the street. But other men, you mean? No. The thing about her…She’s a hundred-percenter. And so am I, now. My uh, my status as a noncombatant. That’s for her. That’s for us.”

You talk in riddles, Lev. Don’t you understand that what you do here doesn’t count?

“Doesn’t it? Won’t it? You don’t see it, do you. It’ll count.”

On top of everything else there was also the huge brute, Arbachuk, who took a liking to my brother in what seemed to be the worst possible way. Every night he’d search him out. Why? To tousle him and taunt him and kiss him and tickle him. It was fashionable, at that time, for a brute to take a fascist as a pet, though Lev claimed it felt more like the other way around. “Suddenly I’m best friends with a mandrill,” he said, which was game of him, because he was badly and rightly frightened. As Arbachuk shouldered his way through the barracks, with his tattoos and his moist, gold-flecked smile, Lev would close his eyes for a second and the light would pass from his face. All I could do about Arbachuk was indicate, with a glance and a movement of the shoulders, that if it really came to it he would have to get by me too. Lev said that it was much worse when I wasn’t there. So I always was. And when I couldn’t be, we relied on Semyon or Johnreed, two of the higher-ranking officer veterans, a colonel and a captain, who were both Heroes of the Soviet Union — an honor of which, on arrest, they were naturally stripped…You’re probably wondering about that name: Johnreed. A lot of people his age were called Johnreed, after John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World. There were so many Johnreeds in camp that they had earned the status of a phylum, the Johnreeds, like the Americans and, later, the Doctors—the Jewish doctors. In its stirred account of the October Revolution, John Reed’s book barely mentioned Joseph Vissarionovich, so he banned it, thus whipping out the carpet, so to speak, from under all the Johnreeds.

Arbachuk used to bring titbits for Lev, who always refused them. Not just chunks of bread, either, but meat — mince, sausage — and on one occasion an apple. “I’m not hungry,” Lev would say. I couldn’t believe it: he sat there with Arbachuk’s tongue in his ear, and half a pork chop dangling under his nose, saying, “I’m not hungry.”

“Open!” said Arbachuk, squeezing the bolts of Lev’s jaw in his hand.

“I’m not hungry. This tattoo, Citizen. I can only see the last word. What does it say?”

Slowly and grimly Arbachuk rolled up his sleeve. And there were the bruised letters: You may live but you won’t love.

“One bite. Open!”

“I eat the full ration. I’m not hungry, Citizen. I work in a strong brigade.”

Like the kind of man who cannot forget or forgive a woman’s past, and must sit her down, every other night, and have her go through the hoops all over again (“He touched you where? You kissed his what?”), I would come to Lev, seeking the narrative of greatest pain. I know about that kind of man, because I’m him — he’s me. In later years it was the only way I could tell for sure that I was finding a woman interesting: I would want her to confess, to denounce, to inform. And they quite enjoyed it at first, because it felt like attention. They soon came to dread it. They soon caught on…This trait of mine didn’t really have the time or the opportunity to get started between war and camp. You see, nearly all the ex-lovers of nearly all my girlfriends — they were dead. And I didn’t mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn’t forgive the dead. I didn’t mind the dead. The living were what bothered me.

When, shortly before I was arrested, Lev asked for my permission to try his luck with Zoya, I didn’t even take the trouble to laugh in his face. I gave him the trisyllabic You?; and that was all. I honestly didn’t give it a moment’s thought. But Lev was like clever little brothers everywhere. He watched what I did and then tried the opposite. He came at Zoya without intensity.

Oh well done, I said, during one of our last conversations in freedom. You’re her errand boy. And her mascot.

“That’s it,” he said, stuttering. He was always stuttering. “Come on, how close did you ever get to her? Me, I’m there in the room. I’m there all the time. I’m there when she’s changing.”

Changing?

“Behind the curtain.”

How big is the curtain? And how thick?

“Thick. It goes from the floor up to here. She drapes clothes over the top of it.”

What clothes?

“Petticoats and things.”

Jesus Christ…And now she’s fucking that linguist. I don’t know how you can bear it.

“Oh, I can bear it.”

This went on for nearly a year — a year in which Zoya had three more affairs. “One a term,” he now told me. And it was while he was sitting there, in the conical attic, holding her hand, and talking her through her latest misadventure, that Lev made his next move.

“I said it teasingly. I said, ‘You’re unlucky in love because you’re drawn to the wrong men. These head-in-air types. Try a slightly smaller, uglier one. Like me. We’re so much keener.’ She laughed, and then went silent for five seconds. Then next time I said it, she laughed and went silent for ten seconds. And so on. And then she had another.”

Another what?

“Another affair. A whole other one.”

Is it possible, I said, that you and I have a drop of blood in common? Weren’t you jealous?

“Jealous? I couldn’t have borne it for a minute if I’d been jealous. I didn’t have the right to be jealous. In whose name? I was too busy learning.”

I waited.

“Learning what I’d have to do to keep her.”

…You dirty little bastard.

It does happen. In my life I’ve seen perhaps three examples of it. And you, Venus, are one of them. You and that Roger. As I said at the time, possibly rather unfeelingly, You’re about three-quarters trained to think that everyone looks the same. That’s the illusion your crowd is foisting on itself. So you think it’s snobbish not to fancy cripples. And now you’ve got that sick bat trailing after you. I still think that that’s what it mainly was, Venus: pity and piety. You told me there were compensations, and I believed you. You spoke of his gratitude — his gratitude, and your relief from certain cares. And I can see that obviously attractive women sometimes do get to the end of obviously attractive men: their entitlements, their expectations, their unexceptionable hearts. And so one morning the princess kisses the bullfrog, and finds it good.

Then what?

“It was a Sunday. Late afternoon. We were lying there and I said it again. Then she went all still. Then she stood up and took—”

Enough. Took her clothes off, I suppose.

“She already had her clothes off. Most of them. No, she took my—”

Enough.

They had nine months; and then, as Lev’s classmates and professors were being hauled in one after the other, it was she who took the decision. They activated the scrofulous rabbi in his basement. It was clandestine, and I suppose of doubtful legitimacy. But they stamped on the glass, wrapped in its handkerchief — the destruction of the temple, the renunciation of earlier ties. And they made the vows.

One scrap of comfort was given to me (and there are these leftovers of comfort, at the banquet of sorrow). Its efficacy will perhaps be obscure to those accustomed to the exercise of free will. I learned that Zoya, while not indifferent to older men (she came close to scandal with a newly married thirty-year-old), never involved herself with any of my closest peers: veterans. So I could tell myself that when we kissed, and she retained my lower lip for a second between her big square teeth, the taste she didn’t like was the ferrous hormone of war.

It comforted me because I could attribute my failure to historical forces, along with everything else. History did it.

Reveille, in camp, was achieved as follows: a metal bludgeon, wielded by a footlike hand, would clatter up and down for a full minute between two parallel iron rails. This you never got used to. Each morning, as you girded yourself in the yard, you would stare at the simple contraption and wonder at its acoustical might. I now know that, for some barbarous reason (the quicker detection, perhaps, of even the tiniest animal), hunger sharpens the hearing. But it didn’t just get louder — it grew in shrillness and, somehow, in articulacy. The sound seemed to trumpet the dawn of a new dominion (more savage, more stupid, more certain) and to repudiate the laxity and amateurism of the day before.

Until Lev came to camp my first thought, on waking, was always the same thought, admitting of no modulation. It was always: I would give my eyesight for just ten more seconds…Another day has been cranked up in front of you; the day itself, the dark dawn (the glassy sheen of the sector and the chalklike mist which the lungs refused), looked like the work of a team of laborers, a nightshift — the result of hours of toil. The cold is waiting for me, I’d think; it is expecting me, and everything is prepared. Don’t you find, my dear, when you step out into the rain, that you always have a moment’s grace before feeling the first few dots on your hair? Cold isn’t like that. Cold is cold, obviously, and wants all your heat. It is on you. It grips and frisks you for all your heat.

Then, after Lev came, daily consciousness would arrive to find me yanked upright on my boards. The pig would still be belaboring the iron rails as I dropped to the floor. I was always the first man out of the hut — and always with the feeling that a lurid but sizable treat lay ahead of me. What was this treat, exactly? It was to get my first glimpse of Lev, and to see the way his frown softened into the flesh of his brow. It wouldn’t happen the moment he set eyes on me. He would smile his strained — his stretched — smile, but the frown, the inverted chevron of care, would remain awhile and then fade, like a gauge measuring my power to reassure. And sometimes I feel that I was never closer to the crest than during those exchanges or transfusions — never more alive.

Now that sounds all right, doesn’t it? Lurid, then, in what way? I see that I cannot avoid the lurid. Another sun had risen in me. This sun was black, and its rays, its spokes, were made of hope and hate.

Lev, by the way, didn’t last long in his brigade — the strong brigade under Markargan. Even though he was by now very fit. Very sick and very fit: you could be that there, and go on being it for quite a while. But no. It was a rare fascist who lasted long in a strong brigade. In a strong brigade there was a unanimity of effort that had the weight of a union contract or a military oath: you met the norm and you ate the full ration. It was one way of getting through it — the booming worksong, the bucketful of soup, the sleep of the dead. A peasant, carrying around with him his millennium of slave ethic — a peasant could manage it without great inner cost. But an intelligent…This is what comes over you, in the slave system. It takes a couple of months. It builds, like a graduated panic attack. It is this: the absorption of the fact that despite your obvious innocence of any crime, the exaction of the penalty is not inadvertent. Now go with such a thought to a strong brigade. You try and you try, but the idea that you are excelling in the service of the state — it weighs your hands down, and causes them to drop to your side. You can feel your hands as they drop to your side; your sides, your hips, feel them as they fall. Needless to say, a weak brigade, with its shiteater short commons, wasn’t any good either. So what do you do? You do what all the fascists do. You skive and slack and fake and wheedle, and you subsist.

Once he was off the full ration, Lev’s bowel infection got worse. In camp, even hospitalization for dysentery obeyed the law of the norm; and by early 1949 Lev could meet it. And what was the norm? The norm was more blood than shit. More blood than shit. He went to Janusz, who gave him some pills and promised him a bed. On the day before his admission, Lev had some sort of shouting match in his barracks, over a sewing needle (that is, a fishbone), and was immediately denounced — his name dropped into the suggestion box outside the guardhouse. Instead of a week in the infirmary he had a week in the isolator, wearing underclothes, and crouched on a bench above knee-deep bilge.

The frequency of the total. The total state — the masterpiece of misery.

That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my “proof,” framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. “Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion.” But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear — if God is a Russian.

And we the people keep coming back for more. We fucking love it. That week had an awful color for me, but when Lev came out, walking the way he did, and with his head at that angle, I more or less accepted the fact that Norlag wouldn’t kill him, not on its own. He could bear it.

3. “The Fascists Are Beating Us!”

What worries me about me,” he said (this was half a year later), “is what kind of shape I’ll be in when and if I get out. I don’t just mean how thin or how ill. Or how old. I mean up here. In the head. You know what I think I’m turning into?”

A moron.

“Exactly. Good. So it’s not just me.”

We all have it.

“Then that’s bad. Because it probably means it’s true. My thoughts — they’re not really thoughts anymore. They’re impulses. It’s all on the level of cold, hot. Cold soup, hot soup. What will I talk to my wife about? All I’ll be thinking is cold soup, hot soup.”

You’ll be talking to her like you’re talking to me.

“But it’s so tiring talking to you. You know what I mean. Christ. Imagine if we weren’t here. I mean together.”

The evening was warm and bright, and we sat smoking on the steps of the toy factory. Yes, the toy factory, because the economy of the camp was as various as the economy of the state. We churned out everything from uranium to teaspoons. I myself was mass-producing threadbare clockwork rabbits with sticks in their paws and little snare drums attached to their waists.

Two youngish prisoners strolled past at a donnish pace, one with his hands clasped behind his back, the other ponderously gesturing.

“All I care about, in the end,” the second man was saying, “is tits.”

“No,” said the other. “No, not tits. Arses.”

“…New boys,” said Lev.

I shrugged. Young men, after their arrival, would talk about sex and even sports for a couple of weeks, then about sex and food, then about food and sex, then about food.

Lev yawned. His color was better now. He had had his time in the infirmary, and a course of weak penicillin from Janusz. But his lips and nails were blue, from hunger, not cold, and he had the brownish pigmentation around the mouth, deeper than any suntan. We all had that too, the great-ape muzzle.

“It’s hard to do when you’re covered in lice,” he said, “but it’s good to think about sex.”

I’m very sorry to say, Venus, that this was by now, for me, an extremely sensitive subject. You see, I had managed to persuade myself that Lev’s bond with Zoya was largely a thing of the spirit. It was, in fact, pretty well platonic. What a relief for her, I told myself, after all those passionate ups and downs. And I could even derive some pleasure from imagining the kind of evening that must surely be their norm. The remains of the simple supper cleared away, the taking of turns at the washbasin, Gretel, a little shyly, slipping into her bedsocks and coarse nightgown, Hansel sighing in his vest and longjohns, the peck on the cheek, and then over they turned, back to back, each with a complacent grunt, and sought their rightful rest…And while Lev lay in his little death, the other Zoya, the sweating succubus, rose up like a mist and came to me.

“But it’s not really thought, is it. It’s more like cold soup, hot soup.”

There is poetry, I said.

“True. There is poetry. I can sometimes work on a line or two for half a minute. Then there’s a jolt and I’m back to the other stuff.”

I told him about the thirty-year-old professor in the women’s block. She recited Eugene Onegin to herself every day.

“Every day? Yeah, but some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Bronze Horseman.”

That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Song of Igor’s Campaign.

“That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…”

And so we got through another hour, before we groped our way to our bedding.

Then came the changes. But before I get to that, it is necessary for me to describe a brief internal detour: a lucky break. I suggest, my dear, that you take full advantage of this interlude or breather, using it, perhaps, to tabulate my better qualities. Because I am soon going to be doing some very bad things.

We never saw the Chief Administrator, Kovchenko, but we heard about him — his polar-bear fur coat, his groin-high sealskin boots, his fishing trips and reindeer hunts, his parties. Every so often a card would appear on the bulletin board, asking for the services of inmate musicians, actors, dancers, athletes, whom he used to entertain his guests (fellow chief administrators or inspectorates from the center). After their performance, the artistes were given a vat of leftovers. Excitingly, many came back sick from overeating, and there were a number of fatal gorgings.

One day Kovchenko posted a signed request for “any inmate with experience of installing a ‘television.’” I had never installed a television; but I had dissected one, at the Tech. I told Lev what I remembered about it, and we applied. Nothing happened for a week. Then they called out our names, and fed us and scrubbed us, and jeeped us out to Kovchenko’s estate.

Lev and I stood waiting, under guard, in what I would now call a gazebo, a heated octagonal outhouse, with a workbench and an array of tools. Kovchenko entered, gaunt and oddly professorial in his jodhpurs and tweed jacket. A metal crate was solemnly wheeled in, and two men who looked like gardeners began unbolting it. “Gentlemen,” said Kovchenko, breathing deeply and noisily, “prepare to see the future.” Up came the lid and in we peered: a formless, gray-black sludge of valves and tubes and wires.

So we started going there every day. Every day we came out of the thick breath of the camp and entered a world of room temperature, picture windows, ample food, coffee, American cigarettes, and continuous fascination.

After two months we put together something that looked like an especially disgraceful deep-sea fish, plus, on the open back porch, a pylon of aerials. All we ever raised, on the screen, were fleeting representations of the ambient weather: night blizzards, slanting sleet against a charcoal void. Once, in the presence of the chief, we picked up what might or might not have been a test card. This satisfied Kovchenko, whose expectations were no longer high. The set was transported to the main house. We later heard that it was put on a plinth in the entrance hall, for display, like a piece of ancient metalwork or a brutalist sculpture.

We too had wanted to see the future. Now we returned to the past — to the ball-bearings works, in fact, where you just went oompah every five seconds, and thought about cold soup, hot soup. I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system — the first being terror. At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be false (even my mother’s school was no different). Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. Public discourse was boring, the papers and the radio were just a drone in the other room, and the meetings were boring, and all talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally. Bureaucracy was boring. Queuing was boring. The most stimulating place in Russia was the Butyrki prison in Moscow. I can see why they needed the terror, but why did they need the boredom?

That was the big zona. This was the little zona, the slave-labor end of it. In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger — the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.

Another thing that happened, on the credit side, is that we both grew close to Janusz, the prisoner-doctor. He did everything he could for us — and just to stand next to him for ten minutes made you feel marginally less unhealthy. Tall, broad, and twenty-four years old, he had a head of jungly black hair that grew with anarchic force; we used to say that any barber, going in there, would want danger money. Janusz was a Jewish doctor who was trapped in an imposture. He wasn’t pretending that he was a Christian (no great matter either way, in camp). He was pretending that he was a doctor. And he wasn’t — not yet. Always the most difficult position. And it wouldn’t have been so hard for him if he hadn’t been kind, very kind, continuously moved by all he saw. For those early operations he had to feel his way into it, into the human body, with his knife. First, do no harm.

Trucks and troops went the word. Trucks and troops. That meant Moscow, and policy change. A decision had been arrived at in the Central Committee, and it came down to us in the form of headlights and machineguns.

At all times and in all seasons the camp population was in flux, with various multitudes being reshuffled, released, reimprisoned, shipped out, shipped in (and it was amazing, by the way, that my brother and I were separated just once, and then for barely a year). Our business, now, was to gaze into this motion arithmetic, and try to discern something that could be called an intention…

Lev was standing by the barracks window, looking out, and bobbing minutely up and down — his way of discharging unease. He said,

“Listen. Arbachuk cornered me behind the woodshop last night. I thought I was finally going to get raped, but no. He was speechless, he was all stricken and mournful. Then he reached down and squeezed my hand…He’s been like that before. But now I think he was saying goodbye. They’re shipping out the brutes.”

I said that that had to be good for us.

“Why good?” He turned. “Since when do they make it good for us? I know how to stay alive here. As it is. What’s next?”

We were confined to barracks and spent our days looking out, looking out. And you didn’t want to be in the zona, not now, with its dogs and columns of men and the new disposition of forces. The watchtowers — their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth…At such times, I often thought I was playing in a sports match, ice hockey, say, in slow motion (dreamlike yet lethal, zero-sum, sudden-death); and that I was the goalkeeper — excluded from the action except when responding to hideous emergencies.

They isolated the brutes, and trucked them out — the simplest way, we supposed, of ending the war between the brutes and the bitches. But then they isolated the bitches, too. And as soon as the bitches were gone, they isolated the locusts, and then the leeches. If you discounted the shiteaters, who remained, that left the politicals and the informers — the fascists and the snakes.

Lev said, looking out, “Christ, how clear does it need to be? They’re isolating us.”

…We’re all going to be freed, I said.

“It’s just as likely,” said Lev, “that we’re all going to be shot.”

Over the next few weeks our sector, freshly depopulated, started filling up again. And all the new arrivals were fascists. They were isolating us. Why? Why were they giving us, systemwide, exactly what we wanted — delivering us, awakening us?

To read the mind of Moscow, in 1950, this was where you would have needed to be: in the antennae, in the control turret, of the slug that was unmethodically devouring the leader’s brain. We weren’t in that turret. I say this with a shrug, but the best guess, now, is that Joseph Vissarionovich had started to fear for the ideological integrity of the common felon.

The power ascribed to us, even the power of contamination, wasn’t real (we were not yet a force). Now the power was telling us it was there. The process took about a month. We were like blind men recovering their sight. It was a question of eyes turning to other eyes, and holding them. Self-awareness dawned. The politicals looked from face to face — and became political.

Two things followed from this. The policy change in Moscow meant the end, the unintended suicide, of the slave-labor system. It also meant that Lev and I became enemies. A decision is made, around a table, in a room a thousand miles away — and a pair of brothers must go to war. This, Venus, is the meaning, the hour-by-hour import, of political systems.

But I’m not going to waste your time with the politics. I’ll give you what you need to know. And I’m afraid I cannot neglect to tell the tale of the guard called Uglik — the strenuous tale of Comrade Uglik. Looking back, I now see what the politics was: the politics of Siamese twins, and mermen, and bearded ladies. It was the politics of the slug called arteriosclerosis.

“The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!”

This cry (not without a certain charm, even then) was often to be heard during the summer of 1950. We started beating the snakes, the one-in-tens. No longer would they tarry at their tables in the mess hall, kissing bunched fingertips over their double rations. Now, when they made their way across the square to the guardhouse, it was not to top up their denunciations for an extra cigarette: it was to plead for sanctuary in the punishment block — with its shin-deep bilge, its obese bedbugs.

Our favored method of chastisement was called “tossing.” It was what the peasants used to do, mindful, as ever, of scarce materials. Don’t blunt that knife, don’t strain that cudgel: let gravity do it. One man per limb, three preparatory swings, up they went, like a caber, and down they crashed. Then we tossed them again. Until they no longer flailed in the air. We left them out there for the pigs: canvas bagfuls of broken bones.

You seem displeased, brother, I said, as I strode into the barracks dusting my palms.

“You’re not my brother.”

I waited. Everyone flocked and scrambled to witness a tossing. Not Lev, who always withdrew.

“What I’m saying,” he said, “is that you’re unrecognizable. You’re like Vad. Do you know that? You’ve joined the herd. Suddenly you’re just like everybody else.”

This was perfectly true. I was unrecognizable. In a matter of weeks I had become a Stakhanovite of agitation, a “shock” stirrer and mixer — demands and demonstrations, pickets, petitions, protests, provocations. Ah, you’re thinking: displacement, transference; the mechanism of sublimation. And it is true that I was deliberately embracing the chemical heat of mass emotion, and the infuriant of power. But I never lost sight of a possible outcome, and a possible future.

“I ask you to consider my position. You’ve chosen a path, you and your herd,” he was saying. “Violence and escalation. You know fucking well what’s going to happen.”

For a very brief period it looked as though the isolation of the politicals, as a policy, had a subtext: we were to be worked to death (less food, longer hours). But the pigs still had their quotas, and now they had given us the weapon of the strike.

Anyway, I was in a position to say, with some indignation, Oh, I get it. You want the sixteen-hour day and the punitive ration. Well we don’t.

“You won that fight. Christ, that was eight or nine fights ago. And the pigs, they aren’t going to keep on backing off. You know what’s going to happen. Or maybe you don’t. Because you’re running with the herd. Look at you. Thundering along with it.”

Again I waited.

“What you’re going to get is a war with the state. A fight to the death against Russia. Against the Cheka and the Red Army. And you’re going to win that, are you?”

I didn’t say so, but I always knew what was coming our way. I always knew.

“All right. I’ll ask you for the last time. And I’m asking a lot. There are three or four men here who have a chance of bringing the herd to a halt. And you’re one of them. Please consider my position. I have to ask. And it’s the last time that I’ll ask you anything as a brother.”

You ask the moon, Lev.

“Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.

We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.

I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.

On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.

So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.

Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking.^*3 No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his hands.

Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version — because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.

Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.

“I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”

Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.

I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.

“His conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”

What are you talking about?

“Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”

Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again — freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.

Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the First World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Mediterranean. I spent mine above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.

It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals — from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens) — think it isn’t.^*4 For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm — the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.

The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.

Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.

4. “Meet Comrade Uglik”

The pigs.

They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners — cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.

I shadowed my brother, over the years, and did some quiet roughing-up on his behalf. But there wasn’t anything I could have done about Uglik. He was just Lev’s bad luck.

I asked him, Why are you crying?

These were the first words I had addressed to Lev in ten or eleven months. By this time (January 1953), his level in camp was on a par with the shiteaters — or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracized. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape — the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offense he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.

I asked him, Why are you crying?

He flinched, as if my voice, grown unfamiliar, held a hardness for him. Or else, perhaps, he had some sense of the unholy brew of motives that lay behind my question…Of all the freedoms we had secured over the past eighteen months, the one that mattered most to me, I found, was the removal of the number from my back. The one that mattered to Lev was his right to correspondence. His right: not anybody else’s. He campaigned for it alone, and he won it alone; and for this too he was shunned. Now he was sitting on a tree stump in the copse behind the infirmary, Zoya’s first letter in one hand and his dripping face in the other. If you’d asked me whether I hoped that everything was over between them, the truth-drug answer would have been something like, Well, that would be a start. But I hope she hasn’t done it nicely. That might not do me any good at all.

“I’m crying…” He bowed his head, becoming absorbed by the task of returning the sheath of tissuey paper to its wrinkled pouch; but every time he neared success he had to raise a finger to wipe the itch off his nose. “I’m crying,” he said, “because I’m so dirty.”

I paused. I said, And all else is well?

“Yes. No. There is talk, in freedom, of Birobidzhan. They’re building barracks in Birobidzhan.”

Birobidzhan was a region on the northeastern border of China — largely, and wisely, uninhabited. Ever since the 1930s there had been talk of resettling the Jews in Birobidzhan.

“They’re building barracks for them in Birobidzhan. Janusz thinks they’re going to hang the Jewish doctors in Red Square. The country is hysterical with it, the press…And then the Jews will run the gauntlet to Birobidzhan. Now if you’ll excuse me. This will take about a minute.”

And for about a minute he wept, he musically wept. He was crying, he said, because he was so dirty. I believed him. Being so dirty made you cry more often than being so cold or being so hungry. We weren’t so cold or so hungry, not anymore. But we were so dirty. Our clothes were stiff, practically wooden, barklike, with dirt. And under the wood, woodlice and woodworm.

“Ah, that’s better. It beats me how the women stay so clean,” he went on, as if talking to himself. “Maybe they lick themselves, like cats. And we’re like dogs that just roll in the shit. Now,” he said and turned to me. “I have a dilemma. Perhaps you can help me resolve it.”

He focused and smiled — the pretty teeth. I found I still feared that smile.

“Here,” he said, “is no good. I can’t stay here. I’m leaving. I’m off. It’s no good here. Here, everybody’s going to die.”

I said, There comes a time when you have to—

“Oh don’t give me that. Every man in the camp can give me that. The thing is that I’m urgently needed in freedom. To protect my wife. So. Two choices. I can escape.”

Where to? Birobidzhan?

“I can escape. Or I can inform.”

I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

“Come on, take me seriously. Think it through, think it through. If I inform, it’s conceivable I’ll be pardoned. With things as they are now. You know, give them a list of all the strike leaders. I could try that. Then you could kill me. And do you know what you’d get if you killed me?” He closed his eyes and nodded and opened them again. “You’d get a hard-on.”

I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

He looked at the ground, saying, “And that’s another reason to cry.”

The two of us always went to the bathhouse together. Even when we weren’t speaking or meeting each other’s eyes. The thing had to be done in relay. Now you’d think that the bathhouse was where we all wanted to go, but many men would risk a beating to avoid it or even delay it. None of our innumerable agitations had any effect in the bathhouse. For instance, it was quite possible to come out even dirtier than you went in. One of the reasons for this was institutional or systemic: an absence of soap. There was not always an absence of water, but there was always, it seemed, an absence of soap. Even in 1991 the coalminers went on strike for soap. There was never any soap in the USSR.

We were queueing in the sleet. Then suddenly there were a hundred of us in a changing room with hooks for twelve. And suddenly there was soap — little black globules, doled out of a bucket. At this point everything but your overcoat got thrown into the pot, to be redistributed later on at random; but by taking turns we could guard our most precious things — the spare foot-rag, the extra spoon. Lev filed through first, with his mug of warm water. I gazed at my black globule. I held it to my nose. It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

It was then I noticed it, in the pocket of the leaden wad I held in my arms: Lev’s letter…After four years of war and nearly seven years of camp, my integrity, some might feel, had come under a certain strain. A for-the-duration rapist (or so it then seemed), a coldblooded (but also tumescent) executioner, I intended, when I ever thought about it, to go back to being the kind of man I was in 1941. And now, of course, I weep to think that I imagined this was possible. The kind of man who drew a shopkeeper’s attention to the fact that he had undercharged; the kind of man who gave up his seat for the elderly and infirm; the kind of man who would never read the last page of a novel first, but would get there by honest means; and so on. But there was Zoya’s letter, and I reached for it.

There are self-interested and utilitarian reasons for behaving well, it turns out. I had some bad times in camp, clearly enough, but those five minutes, under the brown mists of the bathhouse, bred half a century of pain…Family news (her mother’s poor health, his mother’s improvement), that new job in the textiles factory, Kazan, the idea of a “homeland” in the east, earnest and repetitive protestations of love: all that was over in the first paragraph. The remainder, four dense sides, was of course Aesopian in style, with the fable unfolding in three stages. She described the arrangement of a vase of flowers, and then the preparation and consumption of an enormous meal. It was easily translated: a marathon preen (with much posing and primping), a saturnalia of foreplay, and a contortionist’s black mass of coition. Even her handwriting, tiny though it was, looked completely indecent, wanton — lost to shame.

Lev came out and I went in.

The conjugal visits, in the House of Meetings, had not yet begun. His was three and a half years away.

Lev’s brigade, that morning (February 14, 1953), had been reassigned and reequipped, and was late starting out. The pigs stopped the column as it was crossing the sector. And one of them said,

“We have a distinguished visitor. Gentlemen? Meet Comrade Uglik.”

Uglik? Take away the uniform (and the riding boots and neckerchief), and he looked more like an urka than a pig. And the urkas, it had to be said, were physically vivid. You sometimes caught yourself thinking that if human life ended anyway at twenty-five, then an urka might seem a reasonable thing to be. Whereas, with the pigs, the only suggestion of moisture and mobility in their gray, closed faces was the vague lavatorial humidity that came off them when they were roused. Uglik was with us for only a week, and was active among us for only a day and a night. But no one ever forgot him.

His face was sleek, and rosily sensual, with rich, moist, outward-tending lips. His eyes were positively flamboyant. Looking at those eyes, you felt not just fear but also the kind of depression that would normally take a week to build. His eyes were wearyingly vigorous. Uglik, I think, came from the future. Hitherto, the standard janitor of the Gulag was a product of the sleeping residuum to be found in all societies: they were sadists and subnormals (and the palest and dankest onanists), now hugely empowered; and in their best moments, their moments of clarity and candor, they all knew it. That was why they would far rather torment a cosmologist or a ballet dancer than a rapist or a murderer. They wanted someone good. Raised as a pig, by a pig, Uglik was different. He’d never felt subnormal. And freedom from conscious shame had given him the leisure to develop as an extrovert. He was, on the other hand, an alcoholic. That was why he was here, as demotion and punishment for a string of disgraces at various camps in South Central Asia. They were sending us their lost men. At this point Uglik had two months to live.

“Meet Comrade Uglik.” The guards stopped the work team — Lev’s work team — and Comrade Uglik was asked to inspect it. He moved from scarecrow to scarecrow, gracefully, with a bend of the knees and a courtly smile — as if, said Lev, he was choosing a partner for a dance. Which he was. He wanted his partner to be young and strong, because he wanted the dance to last a long time. At last he settled on the candidate (Rovno, the big Ukrainian), and the infraction (improper headgear). Then Uglik flexed his upraised fingers into a pair of black leather gloves.

A pig would usually beat you more or less according to method, like a man chopping down a tree. Uglik of course intended to mount a display, and he did so, with many stylish feints and swivels, and with a toreador’s tight-buttocked saunters — little intervals for tacit applause. He was not very fat and very mottled — indeed, at this hour, he was not yet breathing and sweating very heavily, he was not yet very drunk…It went wrong for Lev when someone near him shouted out — a single word, and, in the circumstances, the worst word possible. The word was queer. Uglik’s head turned toward him, Lev said, like a weathercock whipped around by the wind. He came forward. He picked Lev, I think, because this time he wanted someone small. A double blow to the ears with the stiffened palms of the hand. Everyone there remembered an echoing slap, but Lev remembered a detonation.

This was not the last of Uglik’s achievements during his short time among us. Late in the evening he visited the women’s block. There he also applied himself: he didn’t rape — he just beat. And finally, on his way back to the guardhouse, he succeeded in falling over and blacking out under the wooden portals of the toy factory. Uglik spent five hours in forty degrees of frost. He had his gloves on.

Rovno, the giant farmboy, soon recovered. As for Lev — that night in the barracks, flat on his back, he had two worms of bloody phlegm coiling out of his head. The talk all around him was about how and when to retaliate, but Lev was just Lev, even then. “It’s a provocation,” he kept saying. “Uglik is a provocation.” And some people were paying attention to him now. “Don’t rise to it. Don’t rise.” Then he looked up at me and said suddenly, “Can anyone hear my voice?”

Hear it? I said.

“Hear it. Because I can’t. I can only hear it from the inside.”

Three days later we had the opportunity to study Uglik for a full hour. And even in our world, Venus, even in our world of Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, it was something to see.

We were in the woodshop, which stood in the eternally sunless shadow of its long eave, and we had a clear view of the porch of the infirmary, where Uglik sat with a quilt on a rocking chair, in his greatcoat, his boots. He wore no gloves. Silently we gathered around the window. Uglik’s immediate intention, clearly, was to have a smoke — but this was no longer a straightforward matter. Janusz put the cigarette in Uglik’s mouth and lit it for him, and then withdrew.

There we were, by the window, six or seven of us, holding our tools. Nobody moved…Uglik seemed to be puffing away comfortably enough, but every few seconds he raised one, then the other, bandaged wrist to his mouth before realizing, over and over again, that he had no hands. Eventually, having spat the butt over the rail, it occurred to him, after a while, that he would soon be wanting another. He cuffed the packet onto the floor and kicked it about; he knelt, trying to use his stumped forearms as levers and pincers; then he lay flat on his stomach, and, like a man trying to possess the wooden floor, trying to enter it, trying to kiss it, writhed and rutted about until he snuffled one up with his questing lips.

And of course there was more. Now: to watch a pig bungling a headcount, or indeed a bowl-count or a spoon-count; to watch him pause, frown, and begin again — for a moment it is like a return to school, when you glimpse the absurdity, the secret illegitimacy, of the adult power. It makes you want to laugh. But that’s in freedom. It’s different, in penal servitude. We stood at the woodshop window. No one laughed. No one spoke and no one moved.

With every appearance of broad satisfaction Uglik returned to the rocker, his head tipped back: the vertical cigarette looked like a piccolo which would now trill Uglik’s praises. He patted his pockets and heard (no doubt) the companionable rattle of his matchbox; he reached within. There was an unbearable interlude of perfect stillness before he yelled raggedly for Janusz.

“I never knew,” we could hear him say, conversationally (and he said it more than once)—“I never knew it got so cold up here in the Arctic.”

And as Janusz once again withdrew, Uglik, with a jerk, fleetingly offered him his vanished right hand.

You see, Uglik had something else on his mind: mortal fear. His activities in the women’s block, that first night, had resulted in a petition, a demonstration, and now a strike. This would be noticed. And in the end everything certainly added up for Uglik — yes, a most strenuous fate for Comrade Uglik.

We were told the whole story, that spring, by a group of transferees from Kolyma. Recalled to Moscow, Uglik was put on trial and facetiously sentenced to a year in the gold mines of the remotest northeast. He mined no gold, and so earned no food, with the consequence that he became a more or less instant shiteater, and — necessarily — an all-fours shiteater at that. He died of starvation and dementia within a month. Knowledge of this would not have lightened our thoughts and feelings, as we stood watching at the woodshop window.

It was in the nature of camp life that you would suffer even for Uglik — for Uglik, with Uglik. Lev, too, with his gonging head, his left ear already infected and now fizzing with Janusz’s peroxide, his inner gyroscopes undulant with nausea and vertigo. We looked on, each one of us, in septic horror. It wasn’t just the dreadful symmetry of his wounds — like the result of a barbaric punishment. No. Uglik was showing us how things really stood. This was our master: the man scared so stupid that he kept forgetting he had no hands.

I glanced at Lev. And then, I think, it came upon my brother and me — a suspicion of what this might further mean. I found the suspicion was unentertainable, and I shuddered it off. But I had already heard its whisper, saying…The Ugliks, and the sons of the Ugliks, and the reality that produced them: all that would pass. And yet there was something else, something that would never pass, and was only just beginning.

Uglik spat out his second cigarette, wiped his nose on his stump, and shouldered his way inside.

On March 5 we were assembled in the yard and told of the death of the great leader of free human beings everywhere. Silence in the whole zona, a silence of rare quality: I remember listening to the subway noises of the points and wires in my sinuses. It was the silence of vacuum. For at least five or six years, in camp, there had been an intense rumor, daily or even hourly replenished — a rumor that placed Joseph Vissarionovich ever closer to death’s door. And what we had, now, was a vacuum. Now he was nowhere. But he used to be everywhere.

From that day on a collision course was mapped out in front of us. No amnesties (not for the politicals), more frequent and more outrageous provocations (more Ugliks), and the uncontrollable impatience of the men — every last man but Lev. So, certainly, we rose up. And the pigs couldn’t hold us. It ended on August 4, with Cheka troops, fire engines and steel-plated trucks mounted with machineguns.

We’ve got a little time, I said. A little time, you and I. And then you’re going to have to come out and stand.

Lev was alone in the barracks. He sat at the table by the stove (inactive during the summer month), with his hands folded in front of him like a judge.

“Ah, Spartacus,” he said. “Christ, what was that? A barricade?”

They were doing the whole zona, sector by sector. The sound of shouts, screams, gunfire, and the collapse of bulldozed walls came and went on the hot wind.

I said, The women are out there. Everyone who can walk is out there, standing in line. Arm in arm. You haven’t got a choice. When this is over, do you expect the men to be able to bear the sight of you?

“Mm, the wet stuff. If there are any men, when this is over. It wouldn’t surprise me if they killed all the pigs, too. A smoke, brother. Yes, go on, a contemplative cigarette…”

He had a new voice, now, or a new intonation: precise, almost legalistic, and slightly crazed. A loner’s voice.

“You know,” he said, “massacres want to happen. They’re not neutral. Remember the fascist headcount in the yard in, what, in ’50? When the overloaded watchtower collapsed. It was fucking funny, wasn’t it? The way it fell — like an elevator cut from its cable. But then we heard the sound of all the rifles cocking. And every man with laughter in his chest, a volcano of laughter. One single titter and it would have happened. The massacre of the laughing men. I knew then that massacres want to happen. Massacres want there to be massacres.”

Well, you’d better want a massacre too. And a thorough one.

“Yes, I’ve already been threatened. It’s like a blocking unit in the army, isn’t it? Possible death with honor in the van. Or certain death with ignominy in the rear. Smoke up. I’ve been singing that song, ‘Let’s Smoke.’”

And there are other reasons, I said. If you sit here on your bench, you’re going to feel like shit for the rest of your life.

“Well I won’t not feel like shit for very long, will I? I’ve been listening to the radio with Janusz. Things are better in freedom now. The Doctors have all been pardoned. ‘The flu’—it died when he died. Zoya’s not in Birobidzhan. She’ll be back in Moscow. In her attic. The future looks bright.”

You’ll never write another poem. And you’ll never fuck your wife.

“…At last you convince me, brother. I can go out there and climb on a box and tell them to ignore the provocations and get back to their fucking barracks and wait. Or I can go out there and stand. You know they’re going to kill all the leaders. You’re about ten times more likely to die than I am. I never realized until now,” he said, “that you were so romantic.”

Provoked or not provoked, the Norlag Rebellion, I believe, was a thing of heroic beauty. I can’t and won’t give it up. We were ready to die. I have known war, and it was not like war. Let me spell it out. You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love — love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can’t actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron. On August 4 the love was still there, even at the close of the day. It was — it was like God. And not a Russian God. It was magnificent, the way we stood arm in arm. Everyone, the women, Lev, everyone, even the shiteaters, standing arm in arm.

Two days later I was in a filtration camp in the tundra, for resentencing or execution. Semyon and Johnreed had already been shot when the planes arrived from Moscow. Beria had fallen. The man appointed to arrest him was my marshal, Georgi Zhukov. I love it that that was so. Lavrenti Beria, the clever pervert, looked up from his desk and saw his nemesis: the man who won the Second World War…I was meaninglessly transferred to Krasnoyarsk, and barged back up the Yenisei the following spring. At the time of my return a disused dormitory by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger was being rebuilt, to serve as the House of Meetings.

On August 5, 1953, after twenty-eight hours of emergency operations, Janusz looked in the mirror: he thought there must have been some talc in his cap. His hair had gone white.

At around about this time, in another family matter related to the passing of Joseph Vissarionovich, Vadim, my half-brother and Lev’s fraternal twin, was beaten to death while suppressing strikes and riots in East Berlin.

5. “You’ve Got a Goddamned Paradise in Here”

We thus move on to the conjugal visits. And remember: life was easy, now, in 1956.

The wives had started coming to camp two years earlier, but it was a right granted only to the strongest of strong workers. So that’s what Lev became, all over again. Remembering him now, I see a child-sized version of the posters and paintings of an earlier time — the great globes of sweat, the raised veins on the forearms, even the sheet-metal stare that went out to meet the future. He did the work and he earned the right. By now, though, the question went as follows: did he want it? Did anyone?

Considering the variety and intensity of the suffering it almost always caused, I was astounded by how longed-for and pushed-for it remained: the chalet on the hill. I was a close student of this rite of passage — though quite unreflective, I admit, and especially at first. For the husbands, the conjugal visit meant a headshave, a disinfection, a sustained burst from the fire hose. They came out of the bathhouse unrecognizably scoured, stung, alerted, in clothes stiffened not by dirt but by the rasp of ferocious detergents. Then, with every appearance of appetite and verve, they hastened off, under light guard, to the House of Meetings. And the next day, as each wreck and wraith came stumbling back down the hill, I would find myself thinking: You clamored for it. We fought for it. What’s the matter now?

But very soon the meaning of it pressed down on me, and I bowed to the larger power. It really seemed as if this was the goal of the regnant system: it wanted to push every last one of us into the tightest possible corner. “Living in corners” was what they called it in freedom. Four people or four couples or four families per room, living in corners. The women who came to the House of Meetings belonged to a category of their own: they were wives of enemies of the people, and they lived under specific persecution, out in the big zona. And not just the wives but the whole clan. Those airy rooms in the chalet on the hill were in fact very crowded; liquid tentacles of injustice and culpability flowing out from the head of the octopus, and you as its beak.

All the men were different. Or were they? There was a shared theme, I think. And that theme was chronic anemia. They were trying to be red-blooded; and their blood was a watery white. This man’s face confesses failure, his body confesses it: the skewed mouth, the cottony weakness of the limbs. This man lays claim to success: he shoves you up against the wall and, in a menacing whisper, looking past you or beyond you, tells you what she did to him and what he did to her. And their hearts, too, were without defenses. This man has just been told that his marriage is over and that his children are now in the care of the state: he will come close to taking the walk to the perimeter. This man seems more or less convincingly buoyed, although he is always thoughtful and often tearful: he is remeasuring and rearranging his losses — and that was probably the best that anyone could hope for. What you were getting was the first wave of the rest of your life. You saw the accumulation of all the complexity that would await you in freedom. Everyone stepped lightly around these men and their mantle of solitude.

You see, the House of Meetings was also and always a house of partings — even in the best possible case. There was a meeting, and there was a parting, and then the years of separation resumed.

Now, whenever work took me up the steep little lane, and I saw the white tiling of the chalet roof, the good white tiling against the black hulk of Mount Schweinsteiger, I felt as I did when I passed the isolator and its double encirclement of barbed wire.

The day came: July 31, 1956. The evening came.

I went to get him in the bathhouse. He stood alone in the changing room, at the far end, on a plank of yellow light. What existed between us now was a kind of codependence. Love, too, but all cross-purposed, and never more so than on this day, this night.

She’s here, I said. The Americas is here. They’ve got her filling out the forms.

He nodded, and richly sighed. It wasn’t that likely anymore, but they might have sent Zoya on her way, with a taunt; or they’d give him half an hour with her in the guardhouse, a pig sitting between them and picking his teeth…Lev was sheared, deloused, and power-hosed. He was lightly bobbing up and down, like a bantamweight before a fight he expected to win.

We walked, under escort, out of the zona and beyond the wire, over the carpet of wildflowers, and up the steep little lane and the five stone steps to the annex — that compact and manageable dream of gentility and repose, with the curtains, the lampshade, the dinner tray on the backless chair. The thermos of vodka, the candles that in the white night would not be strictly needed. I hadn’t sensed much anxiety, until then, in my younger brother. He was young. He was formidably fit. His left ear was dead but no longer infected. He slept on the top tier and ate the full ration plus twenty-five percent.

Then came the flinch: the two inverted chevrons in the middle of the brow, the pleading rictus. It couldn’t not be there: fear of failure. Fear of failure, which was perhaps supposed to keep men honest, but turned out to make them mad.

Remember what I told him? You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. I also said, Look. Tell me to fuck off and everything if you want, but here’s some advice. Don’t expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.

“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.