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.