House of Meetings Read Free Page B

having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all.
    That night our tryst was not a success. It remained axiomatic, in camp, that the women were tougher and more durable than the men. They pitied us and mothered us. You too would have pitied us and mothered us. Our filth, our rags, our drift into hopeless self-neglect…They were stronger; but the price they paid was the evaporation of all their feminine essence, every last drop of their dew. “I am both a cow and a bull,” wrote the encamped poetess, “A woman and a man.” No, my dear, you are neither. The hormones were no longer being produced. It was the same for us. We were all heading toward neither.
    Usually I could conjure with Tanya, and re-create the little darling she must surely have been in freedom. But that night, as we sat for an hour on the tree stumps in the clearing behind the infirmary, all I could manage was a kind of callous fascination. It was her mouth. Her mouth resembled one of the etched hieroglyphs you see on the walls of the cell of the prototypical solitary, in cartoons, in the illustrations to nineteenth-century novels about epic confinements: a horizontal line measured off with six notched verticals, representing yet another week of your time. The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread. Oh yes: and the sandpapery grain of the flushed flesh of her cheeks, in the white dusk, made me long for the rind of an orange. A week later they shipped her out. She was your age. She was twenty-four.
    Midnight came and went. I turned in. When you come to camp, the seven deadly sins strike up a new configuration. Your mainstays in freedom, pride and avarice, are instantly jettisoned, to be replaced, as rampant obsessions, sparkling with unsuspected delights, by the two you never used to think about: gluttony and sloth. As my mind patrolled the House of Meetings, where Lev lay with a woman who looked like a woman, I lay alone with the other three—envy, lust, and anger.
    All around me, now, was the faint but unanimous sound of slurping and rinsing. It might have seemed encouragingly lubricious if you didn’t know what it was. But I knew. It was the sound of three hundred men eating in their sleep.

    Life was easy, in 1956. There was the dirt and the cold, the hunger and the hate; but life was easy. Joseph Vissarionovich was dead, Beria had fallen, and Nikita Sergeyevich had made the Secret Speech. *1 The Secret Speech caused a planetary sensation. It was “the first time” a Russian leader had ever acknowledged the transgressions of the state. It was the first time. It was the last time too, more or less; but we’ll come to that.
    Joseph Vissarionovich: I knew his face better than I knew my own mother’s. The mustachioed smile of a recruiting sergeant (I want
you
) and then the yellowy, grudge-hoarding, mountain-dwelling eyes, gazing from the shadows of crag or crevice.
    He wants you but you don’t want him. I use the “correct” form, Christian name and patronymic, Venus, to establish distance. For many years this distance did not exist. You must try hard to imagine it, the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odor, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.
    In the end it is above all embarrassing to have been so intimately shaped by such a presence. By such a sky-filler and ocean-straddler as Joseph Vissarionovich. And I fought in the war he had with the other one: the one in Germany. These two leaders had certain things in common: shortness of stature, bad teeth, anti-Semitism. One had an unusually good memory; one was an hysterical but evidently compelling speaker, compelling, at any rate, to that nation at that time. And there was of course the strength of their will to power. Otherwise, they were both undistinguished men.
    “I am not a character in a novel,” says Conrad’s