House of Meetings

~ ~ ~

Oh, slave, thou hast slain me…

Yes, that’s right. Yes, that’s right, my girl. It was not your finest hour. In the space of it (our dinner at the Grill, late July) you subjected me to two rank vulgarisms — two craven borrowings, that is to say, from the common pool of catchphrase, ditty, and jingle. Don’t “go there,” Venus. Do not enter that necropolis of novelty.

The first was “closure.” Why didn’t I seek “closure”? “Closure”: ech, if I so much as whisper it or mouth it I feel myself transformed into a white-coated, fat-necked peanut in a mall-style consulting-room. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything. Your second enormity was not a lone epithet: it went on for an entire sentence. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Not so! Not so. Whatever doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you weaker, and kills you later on.

Of course, I happen to be taking the matter into my own hands. That lumbering but capacious health service Lev talked about — that’s all disappeared. Only a slim majority of state hospitals can boast of running water, and I say with tears of pride that the place I’m in is one of them. When it comes to death, though, Russia remains a land of opportunity: the lethal injection, here, would be a bargain at double the price. And there’s none of that right-to-life bullshit, no pious politicos or meddling divines, no crowds in the forecourt yelling at everyone to Let Me Live.

I’m in an immune-deficiency hospice (the only such unit in the country); to use the euphonious local acronym, it’s for people with SPID. This unacknowledged epidemic, by the way, is of African proportions. Some time later on (they can’t say when) I will be moved into a private room for my shot. And I’m wondering: how much should I tip, and when? I know. While I’m complaining. While I’m acting up: that’s the time to do it. The lethal injection will work — I don’t doubt that. But I am by no means persuaded that the transition will be painless. Morphine is extra, and I’ve ordered a double. But you’re right: I should have gone to Oslo or Amsterdam and done it business-class and not economy. Still, that wouldn’t answer. I am going to die where my brother died.

Call me a literalist, but I’m only doing what Russia is doing. And she tried it once before. Russia tried to kill herself in the 1930s, after her first decade of Joseph Vissarionovich. He was already a cadaver millionaire about ten times over, even before the Terror. But he did need Russians to go on producing Russians. And they stopped. After the startling census of 1936, the state jolted into action: crash kindergartenization, maternity medals, a resolemnized marriage ceremony, the legalization of inheritance, and the criminalization of abortion. It was a general strike, of a kind; and the state broke it. What will the state do now?

As the Babylonians were leading the Jews into captivity they asked them to play their harps. And the Jews said, “We shall work for you, but play we shall not.” That’s what they were saying in 1936, and that’s what they’re saying now. We will work for you, but we’re not going to fuck for you anymore. We are not going to go on doing it, making people. Making people to be set before the indifference of the state. We are not going to play.

Oh, I’m not suggesting that it’s died out entirely — sexual intercourse. About a third of those specters in the TV room here (former people, of the former nation) can claim to have come by their SPID through venereal means. And how else do you explain all the used condoms you see in the street? There are always these diehards and bitter-enders. Why, look at the figures for syphilis among teenage girls — an increase, over the past ten years, of fourteen thousand percent.

I can’t be expected, at this stage, to change my ways. I mean my weakness for pedagogy. You have my list for further reading. They’re mostly memoirs, you’ll find — the memoirs of Russian slaves. I hope you read the one written, much later on, and from Iowa City, by Janusz. It is sometimes said that these books are “unrepresentative,” because they all derive from the same stratum: the intelligents. All politicals; no snakes or leeches, no brutes, no bitches. The authors are unrepresentative in another way too, in that their integrity, it seems, was never in the slightest danger. They lived; and they also loved, I think. Stakhanovites of the spirit, “shock” seekers and seers, they didn’t even hate. None of this was true for my brother and me. And hate is weary work. You hate hating — you come to hate the hate.

Let me tell you what I loved about August 4, 1953, when we stood arm in arm. When we stood and faced the state and its whirlwind of iron. I had reached the end of philosophy: I knew how to die. And men don’t know how to do that. It might even be that all the really staggering male exertions, both great and base, are brought on by this single incapacity. No other animal is asked to form an attitude to its own extinction. This is horribly difficult for us, and may be thought to mitigate our general notoriety…You need mass emotion — to know how to die. You need to be like all the other animals, and run with the herd. Ideology gives you mass emotion, which is why Russians have always liked it. I’ve gone on a bit about yours — your ideology. And all your life I’ve tried to interest you in my ideology: the ideology of no ideology. It’s not a bad one, your one; but it’s an ideology. And it’s the only thing I detect in you that remains imperfectly free.

I have just had a visitor. She came with fruit and flowers: little Lidya. Not so little anymore, true (the usual Slavic slab, with something religious, Quakerish, in her bulk), yet I was briefly cheered by how vigorous she seemed. She’s in her mid-sixties; and don’t forget that Russian women live about twenty-five percent longer than Russian men (they get the full four quarters, and not just the three). I didn’t tell Lidya what I was here for exactly, but she understood that this was our last goodbye. She asked if she might say a prayer for me, and I said all right, on the assumption that I could probably bear it. I was quite wrong about that, and almost immediately started shouting her down. Not that ideology; I wasn’t going to lie there and watch her kiss the Russian cross. She apologized quite prettily, and stroked my brow, and backed out of the room. Yes, I’m in the room now. The room in the basement, with its two boilers and its thousands of pink and blue towels stacked on duckboards and smelling of vinegar. My sister-in-law will prepare another hardboard crate, and send you my PC, wallet, glasses, watch, my wedding ring and spirit level, and one or two of my clothes — a tie, a handkerchief. I gave Lidya the straight razor and the folder of poems.

There’s a final gender difference I will draw your attention to, if I may. Prepare yourself for some good news. In 1953 I discovered how to die. And now I’ve forgotten again. But I do know this. Women can die gently, as your mother did, as my mother did. Men always die in torment. Why? Toward the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive. We can’t do that. And I mean all men, not just old violators like me — great thinkers, great souls, even they have to do it. The work of who did what, and to whom.

What was the matter with me and women? On the plane, this morning, I engaged the search engine: “retrospective sexual jealousy.” Lots of sexual stuff, and lots of jealousy stuff, and lots of stuff about retrospectives. I toiled past a few thousand entries — and finally came to a stylish essay from the august British journal Mind and Body. It was called “Retrospective Sexual Jealousy and the Repressed Homosexual.” With the RSJ-merchant, the essay argues, it’s not the women he’s interested in — it’s the men. In other words, I’m crypto-queer. What makes me doubt this? Only the fact that I wouldn’t have minded, much, being queer in the first place. All right, I wouldn’t have liked it, in camp, taking my spoon and bowl and joining the passives, who ate at a separate table (and could only talk among themselves). After that, though, in the city, if you’re not making children anyway, what’s the difference? I know you wouldn’t think the less of me. But it’s probably worse, in my case, because I was queer for my brother.

The thing that stays with me from those hours at the Rossiya, perhaps surprisingly, is an irreducible sense of the sterile. In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform — we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder. And you could people a good-sized city, now, with the by-blows of the rapist army (population: one million). Many of the impregnated women, of course, never did give birth: they were killed then and there by their rapists. I can at least truthfully say that this phenomenon was and is beyond my understanding.

And in the Rossiya? What I did had no meaning. It was gratuitous, it was perverse, and it was dedicated to the propagation of misery, but it wasn’t even particularly Russian. Except maybe in this. No power, no freedom, no responsibility, ever, in all our history. It stirs an anarchy within. But no — I give it up. I said earlier that rape made a reckoning with me. Its revenge wasn’t commensurate or anything like that, but it was thorough, and dramatically swift. Have you guessed? Have you asked your mother’s ghost? At the Rossiya, I crossed over from satyr to senex in the course of an afternoon. As early as the next day I couldn’t even remember what it was I liked about women and their bodies. I have remembered now. Over these past few days I have remembered.

Of course, it would be nice to be able to blame it, the rape, on the war or on the camp or on the state. I do honestly think, sometimes, that Artem’s death (the manner of it), as well as Lev’s, had overthrown my sanity. In that moment, when her wide smile of love became a gape of horror, I experienced a disappointment, Venus, that was a thousand ply. After all that, I thought. And for just long enough the possession of Zoya felt like a right. And I didn’t even have the right to be there in the room. And now when I close my eyes I can only see a moribund murderer, implacable to his last breath, gathering himself for one last thrust. It used to be an inkling and is now a conviction which perhaps you already share: in the four or five seconds between my kiss and her awakening, Zoya was dreaming about Lev. It had to be that way, to crystallize his fate and mine. Christ, Russia is the nightmare country. And always the compound nightmare. Always the most talented nightmare.

And from this dream I am about to escape. They have come. Two men in street clothes, with what looks like a toolbox. They’re having a smoke while I finish this. And so am I. Any moment now I will click SEND…Go, little book, go, little mine tragedy. And you go, too, Venus, go out into it, with your good diet, your lavish health insurance, your two degrees, your languages, your property, and your capital. The insane luxury of having you to think about has kept me alive, until now, anyway. And oh my heart, every time you called me Dad or Pop or Father, oh, every single time. Well, kid, it wouldn’t be right to sign off sounding sour. Let’s not submit to the gloom supposedly so typical of the northern Eurasian plain, the land of compromised clerics and scowling boyars, of narks and xenophobes and sweat-soaked secret policemen. Join me, please, as I look on the bright side. Russia is dying. And I’m glad.