Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It’s not the USSR I don’t like. What I don’t like is the northern Eurasian plain. I don’t like the “directed democracy,” and I don’t like Soviet power, and I don’t like the tsars, and I don’t like the Mongol overlords, and I don’t like the theocratic dynasts of old Moscow and old Kiev. I don’t like the multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire. I don’t like the northern Eurasian plain.
Please indulge the slight eccentricity in my use of dialogue. I’m not being Russian. I’m being “English.” I feel it’s bad form to quote oneself. Put it that way.
Yes, so far as the individual is concerned, Venus, it may very well be true that character is destiny. And the other way around. But on the larger scale character means nothing. On the larger scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster. When you look into it, when you look into the Russian case, you feel the stirrings of a massive force, a force not only blind but altogether insentient, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
There it is in front of me on the screen of my computer, the graph with its two crinkly lines intersecting, one pink, one blue. The birth rate, the death rate. They call it the Russian cross.
I was there when my country started to die: the night of July 31, 1956, in the House of Meetings, just above the sixty-ninth parallel.
2. House of Meetings
It was with some ceremony, I remember, that I showed my younger brother the place where he would entertain his bride. I say “bride.” They’d been married for eight years. But this would be their first night together as husband and wife…You head north from the zona, and after half a mile you strike off to the left and climb the steep little lane and the implausible flight of old stone steps, and there it is: beyond, on the slope of Mount Schweinsteiger, the two-story chalet called the House of Meetings, and, to the side, its envied annex, a lone log cabin like an outpost of utter freedom.
Just the one room, of course: the narrow cot with its furry undersheet and dead-weight gray blanket, the water barrel with the tin mug chained to it, the spotless slops-bucket with its tactful wooden lid. And then the chair (armless, backless), and the waiting supper tray — two fist-sized lumps of bread, a whole herring (slightly green around the edges), and the big jug of cold broth with at least four or five beads of fat set into its surface. Many hours had gone into this, and many hands.
Lev whistled.
I said, Well, kid, we’ve come a long way. Look.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
And I produced from my pocket the squat thermos of vodka, the six cigarettes (rolled out of the state newspaper), and the two candles.
Maybe he was still recovering from the power-hose and the shearer — there were droplets of sweat on his upper lip. But then he gave me the look I knew welclass="underline" the mirthless rictus, with the two inverted chevrons in the middle of his brow. This I took, with considerable confidence, to be an expression of sexual doubt. Sexual doubt — the exclusively male burden. Tell me, my dear: what is it there for? The utilitarian answer, I suppose, would be that it’s meant to stop us from reproducing if we’re weak and sickly or just too old. Perhaps, also (this would have been at the planning stage of the masculine idea), it was felt that the occasional fiasco, or the fiasco as an ever-present possibility, might help to keep men honest. This would have been at the planning stage.
Lev, my boy? I said. You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. And then I told him, with all due diffidence, not to expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.
He said, “I don’t think I do expect too much.”
We embraced. As I ducked out of the shed and straightened up, I saw something I hadn’t noticed, on the windowsill — and much magnified, now, by a lenslike swelling in the glass. It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wildflower floated in it, overflowed it — an amorous burgundy. I remember thinking that it looked like an experiment on the male idea. A poetic experiment, perhaps, but still an experiment.
The guard stepped forward and gestured with his firearm: I was to precede him down the path. Coming the other way and also under escort was my sister-in-law. That walk of hers, that famous tottering swagger — it set a world in motion.
By now the five-week Arctic summer was under way. It was as if nature woke up in July and realized how badly she had neglected her guests; and then of course she completely overdid it. There was something gushing and hysterical in the show she put on: the sun with its dial turned up, and staring, in constant attendance; the red carpet of wildflowers, the colors lush but sharply irritant, making the eyes itch; and the thrilled mosquitoes, the size of hummingbirds. I walked on, under a hairnet of midges, of gnats and no-see-ums. There was, I remember, an enormous glinting gray cloud overhead; its leading edge had a chewed look, and was about to shred or grate itself into rain.
The night of July 31, 1956: the night of crunch and crux. How did I spend it?
First, Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. In Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop, this was how it went: trying not to laugh, Krzysztov served you a cup of hot black muck; and, trying not to laugh, you drank it. Krzysztov told me, inter alia, that there was going to be a lecture in the mess hall at eight o’clock — on Iran. Lectures on foreign countries, particularly contiguous foreign countries, were always very popular (“The Maoris of New Zealand” wouldn’t draw much of a crowd, but anything on Finland or Mongolia would be packed). This was because a description of life across the border gave flesh to fantasies of escape. The men sat there glazedly, as if watching an exotic dancer. For analagous reasons, by far the most successful play they ever staged was a double bill, two obscure and anonymous fragments called “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger.” It was so popular that they revived it almost monthly; and Lev and I always fought our way in, along with everybody else. Ah, the cult of “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger”…But it was my idea, that night, to avoid stimulation. Instead I sought a mild depressant. So I paid a call on Tanya.
Our camp had been coeducational since 1953, when the dividing wall came down, and many of us now had ladyfriends. We dreamed up a wide variety of generic names for them (as they did for us: “my heart-throb,” “my sugar daddy,” “my Tristan,” “my Daphnis”), and you could tell a lot about a man by the way he referred to his girl. “My Eve,” “my goddess,” or indeed “my wife” indicated a romantic; less fastidious types used every possible synonym for copulation, plus every possible synonym for the vulva. But although there were real liaisons (pregnancies, abortions, even marriages, even divorces), ninety percent of them, I would guess, were wholly platonic. I know mine was. Tanya was a factory girl, and her crime was not political. She was a “three-timer.” Three times she had done it: shown up twenty minutes late for work. Less tenderly than it may at first seem, I called her “my Dulcinea”: like Quixote’s mistress, she was largely a project of the imagination.
The love of one prisoner for another could be a thing of great purity. There were in fact enormous quantities of thwarted love, of trapped love, in the slave archipelago. Avowals, betrothals, hands clasped through the wire. Once, at a transit camp, I saw a spontaneous mass wedding (with priest) of scores of perfect strangers, who were then resegregated and marched off in opposite directions…My thing with Tanya was earthbound and workaday. I had simply discovered that having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all.