Mother and father are destined for the Kombinat. Their natural strength will be extracted from them, as nickel is extracted from ore. Youth will be smelted out of them, and they will be duly replaced — perhaps by their son and his future bride. Wages are high. Careers are short. But now they have a health plan, and you’ll be getting assistance with that respiratory disease, that early-onset tumor.
What I am seeing, I suppose, is capitalism with a Russian face, a statist face. The state has given up on nationalization and the monopoly of employment. It is now just the major shareholder, the chief oligarch — the autogarch or olicrat. And the state must continue to be hard and heavy, because topography keeps trying to tear Russia apart.
Ananias was wrong. Free men and women will come and use up their bodies in this frozen and venomous bog — at the market price. Russians will come to Predposylov. What they won’t do, being Russians, is go away again. The Kombinat tries to shed them, these middle-aged gimps and wrecks. It gives them shares, valuable in Moscow, but they sell them here at the scalpers’ stalls. It gives them apartments in the cities of the south, but they sell them too, and stay. You see them in the street, ready to hunker down, any day now, for a night that lasts four months.
Lev didn’t want to come to Predposylov, though by the end, it’s true, he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave. The rationale for slave labor, by the way, was as follows. I was clinically speechless for a week when I found out what it was. The rationale for slave labor? It helped keep the people terrorized, and, far more importantly, it made money. But it didn’t make money, it never made money. It lost money. Everyone knew this except the General Secretary. From which one concludes that there was a conspiracy of silence. “If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionovich.” But no one ever dared.
Ananias was wrong. Ananias the widow. The widow Ananias, now of course long dead.
You and I once spent an hour on this question, for some paper of yours at CU. Do you remember? They phrased it differently, less judgmentally, of course, but here’s what it amounted to: in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, who was more disgusting, Russia or Germany? They were, I said. Much more disgusting.
But something follows from that. They were much more disgusting than we were. Still, they recovered and we did not. Germany isn’t withering away, as Russia is. Rigorous atonement — including, primarily, not truth commissions and state reparations but prosecutions, imprisonments, and, yes, executions, sacramental suicides, crack-ups, self-lacerations, the tearing of hair — reduces the weight of the offense. Or what is atonement for? What does it do? In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004, is still the same offense.
Yes, yes. I know, I know. Russia’s busy. There’s that other feature of national life: permanent desperation. We will never have the “luxury” of confession and remorse. But what if it isn’t a luxury? What if it’s a necessity, a dirt-poor necessity? The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go.
If it was up to me, I’d demand a formal apology, in writing, for the tenth century; and for all the others in between. But no trembling relicts, made of smoke and flame, are going to rear up and wring their hands. No Russian God is going to weep and sing.
Say sorry, someone. Someone tell me they’re sorry. Go on. Cry me the Volga, cry me the Yenisei, cry me the Moscow River.
3. Spirit Level
Lev’s effects reached Chicago in the late spring of 1983: a sizeable plywood crate, glued and pressed and nailed. It lay immured in the closet in my study for twenty-one years. Then I opened it up. The precipitant was the news of Kitty’s death, and the undeniable intimations of my own. I waited for a morning that combined a faultless sky with the prospect of lunch at your apartment. Then, after breakfast, I asked the entity known as courage to take me by the hand. We went together to the toolbox for the chisel and the claw hammer. You see, one of my achievements, in the Rossiya, was the disfigurement of the past. And you don’t want to look at a disfigured thing, do you, when it clearly can’t be healed. This is what I was facing: testimony to the astounding dimensions of my crime — my perfect crime. I knew, too, that Lev’s offering would be boobytrapped or trip-wired. I knew it would explode in my face.
Well then. A leather belt, two ties, a scarf of my mother’s and some more of her books, a trophy of Artem’s, a clock, a straight razor, a hip flask, a spirit level (with its sleek burnish and its tragic eye), a white shoebox, and a green folder…The folder had a title: “Poems.” The shoebox was full of photographs. I slid one out and dragged my gaze over it: me, Zoya, and Lev, at Black Lake in Kazan: 1960, and the innocent haze of monochrome. But of the three faces only hers, under its bobble hat, had the light of pleasure — pleasure in the novelty of being photographed. Lev’s face was half averted, the eyes seeking something lower down and to the side. Mine was ulterior, and expressed the humorlessness of vigiclass="underline" Kitty will click the camera, and another second will pass.
I rose up from the chair and strode to the desk with the green folder under my arm. It was my intention now to read the poems: the collected Lev. You must imagine my scholarly glower and the jutting lips of bookish inquiry — the abnormal normality of it, like the shrewd interest a man will suddenly take in the decor of the waiting room at his oncologist’s. While I do this normal thing (I was secretly thinking), this normal thing I’m quite good at, nothing abnormal can happen to me. I sat; I breathed in through my teeth; my frowns were like push-ups of the eyebrows. Excellent, I said out loud: chronological. Here, after all, is a life.
Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect. Too young, of course. There were poems about girls, girls in general, but no love poems.
A hiatus, now, until 1950, and then six or seven a year until 1956. These would have been memorized at the time and written up in freedom. They were all love poems—“you” lyrics, addressed to the loved one. Let us say that these were more difficult for me to assess. They were clenched, pained, pregnant. What they assailed me with, apart from the jolts and jabs of bile and loss, was an unbearable sense of emotional deprivation. As if I had never felt anything for anyone. I just thought I had…The last was dated July 1956: a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before the conjugal visit in the chalet on the hill.
After that, nothing for eight years. And then the stiff-limbed, almost apologetic resumption after the birth of his son. Two decades, and a smattering of epigrams about Artem. As I worked through them, I was asking myself what it all amounted to. A raft of clever juvenilia; a body of love lyrics written in slavery; and eight haikus about fatherhood. Nine.
I hadn’t been liking the look of poem number nine. It was unobjectionable in itself — a minimalist reflection on the quandary of the only child. But poem number nine had something underneath it. A rectangular presence of whiter white.
It was of course a letter, bearing my name and my old Moscow address. The envelope was sealed, and additionally fortified by a strip of sticking plaster. Not flesh-colored, but the nubby brick-red of Russian first aid. Inside were several pages. In holograph: in his small utilitarian hand.