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.