That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my “proof,” framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. “Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion.” But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear — if God is a Russian.
And we the people keep coming back for more. We fucking love it. That week had an awful color for me, but when Lev came out, walking the way he did, and with his head at that angle, I more or less accepted the fact that Norlag wouldn’t kill him, not on its own. He could bear it.
3. “The Fascists Are Beating Us!”
What worries me about me,” he said (this was half a year later), “is what kind of shape I’ll be in when and if I get out. I don’t just mean how thin or how ill. Or how old. I mean up here. In the head. You know what I think I’m turning into?”
A moron.
“Exactly. Good. So it’s not just me.”
We all have it.
“Then that’s bad. Because it probably means it’s true. My thoughts — they’re not really thoughts anymore. They’re impulses. It’s all on the level of cold, hot. Cold soup, hot soup. What will I talk to my wife about? All I’ll be thinking is cold soup, hot soup.”
You’ll be talking to her like you’re talking to me.
“But it’s so tiring talking to you. You know what I mean. Christ. Imagine if we weren’t here. I mean together.”
The evening was warm and bright, and we sat smoking on the steps of the toy factory. Yes, the toy factory, because the economy of the camp was as various as the economy of the state. We churned out everything from uranium to teaspoons. I myself was mass-producing threadbare clockwork rabbits with sticks in their paws and little snare drums attached to their waists.
Two youngish prisoners strolled past at a donnish pace, one with his hands clasped behind his back, the other ponderously gesturing.
“All I care about, in the end,” the second man was saying, “is tits.”
“No,” said the other. “No, not tits. Arses.”
“…New boys,” said Lev.
I shrugged. Young men, after their arrival, would talk about sex and even sports for a couple of weeks, then about sex and food, then about food and sex, then about food.
Lev yawned. His color was better now. He had had his time in the infirmary, and a course of weak penicillin from Janusz. But his lips and nails were blue, from hunger, not cold, and he had the brownish pigmentation around the mouth, deeper than any suntan. We all had that too, the great-ape muzzle.
“It’s hard to do when you’re covered in lice,” he said, “but it’s good to think about sex.”
I’m very sorry to say, Venus, that this was by now, for me, an extremely sensitive subject. You see, I had managed to persuade myself that Lev’s bond with Zoya was largely a thing of the spirit. It was, in fact, pretty well platonic. What a relief for her, I told myself, after all those passionate ups and downs. And I could even derive some pleasure from imagining the kind of evening that must surely be their norm. The remains of the simple supper cleared away, the taking of turns at the washbasin, Gretel, a little shyly, slipping into her bedsocks and coarse nightgown, Hansel sighing in his vest and longjohns, the peck on the cheek, and then over they turned, back to back, each with a complacent grunt, and sought their rightful rest…And while Lev lay in his little death, the other Zoya, the sweating succubus, rose up like a mist and came to me.
“But it’s not really thought, is it. It’s more like cold soup, hot soup.”
There is poetry, I said.
“True. There is poetry. I can sometimes work on a line or two for half a minute. Then there’s a jolt and I’m back to the other stuff.”
I told him about the thirty-year-old professor in the women’s block. She recited Eugene Onegin to herself every day.
“Every day? Yeah, but some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Bronze Horseman.”
That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Song of Igor’s Campaign.
“That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…”
And so we got through another hour, before we groped our way to our bedding.
Then came the changes. But before I get to that, it is necessary for me to describe a brief internal detour: a lucky break. I suggest, my dear, that you take full advantage of this interlude or breather, using it, perhaps, to tabulate my better qualities. Because I am soon going to be doing some very bad things.
We never saw the Chief Administrator, Kovchenko, but we heard about him — his polar-bear fur coat, his groin-high sealskin boots, his fishing trips and reindeer hunts, his parties. Every so often a card would appear on the bulletin board, asking for the services of inmate musicians, actors, dancers, athletes, whom he used to entertain his guests (fellow chief administrators or inspectorates from the center). After their performance, the artistes were given a vat of leftovers. Excitingly, many came back sick from overeating, and there were a number of fatal gorgings.
One day Kovchenko posted a signed request for “any inmate with experience of installing a ‘television.’” I had never installed a television; but I had dissected one, at the Tech. I told Lev what I remembered about it, and we applied. Nothing happened for a week. Then they called out our names, and fed us and scrubbed us, and jeeped us out to Kovchenko’s estate.
Lev and I stood waiting, under guard, in what I would now call a gazebo, a heated octagonal outhouse, with a workbench and an array of tools. Kovchenko entered, gaunt and oddly professorial in his jodhpurs and tweed jacket. A metal crate was solemnly wheeled in, and two men who looked like gardeners began unbolting it. “Gentlemen,” said Kovchenko, breathing deeply and noisily, “prepare to see the future.” Up came the lid and in we peered: a formless, gray-black sludge of valves and tubes and wires.
So we started going there every day. Every day we came out of the thick breath of the camp and entered a world of room temperature, picture windows, ample food, coffee, American cigarettes, and continuous fascination.
After two months we put together something that looked like an especially disgraceful deep-sea fish, plus, on the open back porch, a pylon of aerials. All we ever raised, on the screen, were fleeting representations of the ambient weather: night blizzards, slanting sleet against a charcoal void. Once, in the presence of the chief, we picked up what might or might not have been a test card. This satisfied Kovchenko, whose expectations were no longer high. The set was transported to the main house. We later heard that it was put on a plinth in the entrance hall, for display, like a piece of ancient metalwork or a brutalist sculpture.
We too had wanted to see the future. Now we returned to the past — to the ball-bearings works, in fact, where you just went oompah every five seconds, and thought about cold soup, hot soup. I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system — the first being terror. At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be false (even my mother’s school was no different). Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. Public discourse was boring, the papers and the radio were just a drone in the other room, and the meetings were boring, and all talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally. Bureaucracy was boring. Queuing was boring. The most stimulating place in Russia was the Butyrki prison in Moscow. I can see why they needed the terror, but why did they need the boredom?