House of Meetings Read Free Page A

swelling in the glass. It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wildflower floated in it, overflowed it—an amorous burgundy. I remember thinking that it looked like an experiment on the male idea. A poetic experiment, perhaps, but still an experiment.
    The guard stepped forward and gestured with his firearm: I was to precede him down the path. Coming the other way and also under escort was my sister-in-law. That walk of hers, that famous tottering swagger—it set a world in motion.
    By now the five-week Arctic summer was under way. It was as if nature woke up in July and realized how badly she had neglected her guests; and then of course she completely overdid it. There was something gushing and hysterical in the show she put on: the sun with its dial turned up, and staring, in constant attendance; the red carpet of wildflowers, the colors lush but sharply irritant, making the eyes itch; and the thrilled mosquitoes, the size of hummingbirds. I walked on, under a hairnet of midges, of gnats and no-see-ums. There was, I remember, an enormous glinting gray cloud overhead; its leading edge had a chewed look, and was about to shred or grate itself into rain.
             
    The night of July 31, 1956: the night of crunch and crux. How did I spend it?
    First, Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. In Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop, this was how it went: trying not to laugh, Krzysztov served you a cup of hot black muck; and, trying not to laugh, you drank it. Krzysztov told me, inter alia, that there was going to be a lecture in the mess hall at eight o’clock—on Iran. Lectures on foreign countries, particularly contiguous foreign countries, were always very popular (“The Maoris of New Zealand” wouldn’t draw much of a crowd, but anything on Finland or Mongolia would be packed). This was because a description of life across the border gave flesh to fantasies of escape. The men sat there glazedly, as if watching an exotic dancer. For analagous reasons, by far the most successful play they ever staged was a double bill, two obscure and anonymous fragments called “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger.” It was so popular that they revived it almost monthly; and Lev and I always fought our way in, along with everybody else. Ah, the cult of “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger”…But it was my idea, that night, to avoid stimulation. Instead I sought a mild depressant. So I paid a call on Tanya.
    Our camp had been coeducational since 1953, when the dividing wall came down, and many of us now had ladyfriends. We dreamed up a wide variety of generic names for them (as they did for us: “my heart-throb,” “my sugar daddy,” “my Tristan,” “my Daphnis”), and you could tell a lot about a man by the way he referred to his girl. “My Eve,” “my goddess,” or indeed “my wife” indicated a romantic; less fastidious types used every possible synonym for copulation, plus every possible synonym for the vulva. But although there were real liaisons (pregnancies, abortions, even marriages, even divorces), ninety percent of them, I would guess, were wholly platonic. I know mine was. Tanya was a factory girl, and her crime was not political. She was a “three-timer.” Three times she had done it: shown up twenty minutes late for work. Less tenderly than it may at first seem, I called her “my Dulcinea”: like Quixote’s mistress, she was largely a project of the imagination.
    The love of one prisoner for another could be a thing of great purity. There were in fact enormous quantities of thwarted love, of trapped love, in the slave archipelago. Avowals, betrothals, hands clasped through the wire. Once, at a transit camp, I saw a spontaneous mass wedding (with priest) of scores of perfect strangers, who were then resegregated and marched off in opposite directions…My thing with Tanya was earthbound and workaday. I had simply discovered that