Before very long, in the House of Meetings, we were doing it — the thing that people do. I was so awed by my readiness, my capability, that it took me a while before I started asking myself what was wrong. It was this — and at first it felt entirely bathetic. As I made love, I wasn’t thinking about my wife. I was thinking about my dinner. The huge chunks of bread, the whole herring, and the fat-rich broth that you and the others had so carefully and movingly amassed. Of course I could say to myself, You haven’t had food in front of you and then done something else for eight years. But it would be untrue to say that I wasn’t already very frightened. One of the many awful things about that night was a sense of invasion from within and the feeling that I was the mere spectator of an alien self.
We had our dinner. And bloody good it was too. And the vodka, and the cigarettes. Then I helped her wash. She had spent that day in the back of a truck, and you couldn’t tell the smudges from the bruises. Two weeks on the rails and the roads. I was exulting, now, in her bravery, her fidelity, her beauty, her uncanny vivacity. God, what a sport she was. I was full of thanks and I was again eager.
This time I was pleased, at the outset, to find that I wasn’t thinking about food. All that did, though, was delay the recognition that I was thinking about sleep. Sleep, and pity. It was one of those times when your hidden thoughts and feelings show you the results of their silent labor. You find out what’s been worrying you, and how very much it’s been worrying you — and with what good reason. I wanted to be pitied into sleep. That’s what I wanted. And eventually we did sleep, for many hours, and at dawn we drank the tea in her flask and we began again. This time I didn’t think about sleep or food or even freedom. By now I had found my subject. All I thought about was what I’d lost.
And what was that? I remembered the first law of camp life: to you, nothing — from you, everything. I also thought of the urka slogan (and the text of many an urka tattoo): You may live but you won’t love. Now, it would be ghoulish to say that I had lost all my love. And not true, not true. This is what had happened to me, brother — I had lost all my play. All.
It may not have escaped your notice that Zoya is more attractive than I am. Why, you said as much yourself, more than once, in 1946. I can assure you that I knew it — each of my senses knew it. I had felt exalted enough by the clumsy kindnesses of my Olga, my Ada. Then Zoya, the grand slam of love, who cured my stutter in a single night. What next? Would she make me tall, would she kit me out with a chin and a pair of ears that matched? And, yes, she did, she did.
I felt myself revolutionized — and freed. And my response was an unbounded gratitude. I just couldn’t do enough for her. Perpetual praise and infinite consideration, endearments and embraces, couplets, trinkets, messages, massages — undivided attention, together with the deployment of a desire that had no upper limit. The “specieshood” you talked about during those months of heroic madness in ’53, the “earthed” feeling — what you found in the communality I had found in her. With this superlove I redressed the balance. And she would look at me, at me, and say she couldn’t believe her luck. Oh, bro, I was almost paranoiac with happiness. It was like religion combined with reason. And I worshipped alone.
That night in the House of Meetings all my consciousness of inferiority returned, and it was reinforced, now, by the meaning of my enslavement. In Moscow, in the conical attic, I was Lev, but I was clean and free. I thought: she should have seen me a couple of hours ago, before the shearer and the power-hose — a little tumbleweed of nits and lice. So, to the silent but universal murmur of dismay I always heard, faintly, whenever I entered the fold of her arms, was added another voice, which said, “Never mind if he looks like a village idiot. That’s their business. How about what he is. He is an ant that toils for the state at gunpoint. What he is is a slave. Nothing to be done but pity him, pity him.” And I did want pity. I wanted the pity of all Russia.
Gathered about me was a raucous audience of thoughts, little gargoyles that sniggered and heckled. What was this miracle of womanliness beneath me and all around me? Women weren’t meant to look like women, not anymore. Then, Christ, the business with the hands. I kept thinking, Where is the hand that killed my ear? Where are the hands of Comrade Uglik? Are my hands his hands? Are his mine? This claw of mine, this crab — whose is it? And just by being there, just by not being absent, my hands seemed heavy, violent. And behind all this was the thought that, I don’t know — the thought that a man was not a good thing to be. I couldn’t keep it out. No thought was so stupid or noxious that I wouldn’t let it in. Because any thought whatever made a change from the other thought — the thought about what I’d lost.
I didn’t expect things to be any different in freedom. And they weren’t. Considered as a matter of the sensations, the nerve centers, the physical act was still far nicer than anything else I could imagine getting up to. I thought I could simply concentrate on the carnal. But when the heart goes, so, very soon, does the head. It became impossible to protect myself from the idea that what I was doing was fundamentally inane — like revisiting a futile and arduous hobby I had long outgrown. When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour. Night-time was a nightshift, looming over me the whole day long. Here it comes again (with satirical touches, true, with jokes and jeers), the rambling reminder of what I’d lost. I had to search my face for the contours of tenderness, but these shapes, too, were all gone.
That night in camp I did an excellent impersonation of the old Lev — that is to say, the young Lev. But the old Lev had disappeared, along with my youth. I went on doing this impersonation for five years. And she never knew. My experience of great beauties begins and ends with Zoya, but I’ve invested much thought in them. In the type. I think she was very untypical sexually. Most great beauties, I suspect, tend toward the passive: mere compliance is considered bounty enough. But in another area I think she was typical — indeed, archetypical. She was not a noticer of the texture of the feelings of the people around her. Great beauties, they don’t have to do the work that we have to do, the work of vox populi and “Mass Observation.” Except when its content was violent, she hardly even noticed anti-Semitism. People would look at her with that compassionate sneer, as if she was a cat that had lost all its hair. Take it from me, I really got to know about the influenza of the xenophobe. It is a mirror the size of the Pacific — an ocean of inadequacies.
No, she never knew. There was only one thing I couldn’t control, and it bothered her. I cried in my sleep. I was always crying in my sleep. And it was always the same dream. She used to question me about it as she dressed for work. I told her the dream was a dream about Uglik. It wasn’t true. The dream was a dream called House of Meetings.
My double-goer, my antic twin, my Vadim, was still there, in freedom, and he had a plan. His plan was for me to become even uglier. Hence the beergut, the new twitch, the conscientious gracelessness — and, of course, the way I lay down or bent over for my stutter. By then I was thirsting for illness, for incapacity. I wanted to be surrounded by people dressed in white. The word hospital took on the sacred glow it had had in Norlag. All the time, now, I was aware of a “waiting” feeling. It was the impatience to be old. Previously, at the very crest of sexual bliss, I used to feel I was being tortured by someone infinitely gentle. Now I felt like that every time she smiled at me or took my hand. The last and final phase, which introduced a whole new order of alarm, presented itself in the summer of 1962. And the first symptom was physical.