For a very brief period it looked as though the isolation of the politicals, as a policy, had a subtext: we were to be worked to death (less food, longer hours). But the pigs still had their quotas, and now they had given us the weapon of the strike.
Anyway, I was in a position to say, with some indignation, Oh, I get it. You want the sixteen-hour day and the punitive ration. Well we don’t.
“You won that fight. Christ, that was eight or nine fights ago. And the pigs, they aren’t going to keep on backing off. You know what’s going to happen. Or maybe you don’t. Because you’re running with the herd. Look at you. Thundering along with it.”
Again I waited.
“What you’re going to get is a war with the state. A fight to the death against Russia. Against the Cheka and the Red Army. And you’re going to win that, are you?”
I didn’t say so, but I always knew what was coming our way. I always knew.
“All right. I’ll ask you for the last time. And I’m asking a lot. There are three or four men here who have a chance of bringing the herd to a halt. And you’re one of them. Please consider my position. I have to ask. And it’s the last time that I’ll ask you anything as a brother.”
You ask the moon, Lev.
“Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.
We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.
I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.
On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.
So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.
Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking.*3 No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his hands.
Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version — because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.
Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.
“I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”
Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.
I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.
“His conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”
What are you talking about?
“Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”
Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again — freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.
Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the First World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Mediterranean. I spent mine above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.
It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals — from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens) — think it isn’t.*4 For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm — the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.
The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.
Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.
4. “Meet Comrade Uglik”
The pigs.
They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners — cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.