I began to hear, on and off, a taut hum — like the sound of jet engines heard from within the plane. White noise, I assumed, from my dead ear. After a time I realized that it was only happening in certain situations: crossing high bridges, on clifftops and balconies, near railway lines and busy roads — and also when I shaved with the straight razor. Then one day, in Kazan, it took me half an hour to walk past a stationary truck I saw on the street. It was a garbage-compactor. The men were leaving it running as they went ever further for their loads, of course (in case it didn’t start up again), and the hum in my ear was so loud that the foul mastications of the machine, its chomping and grinding, were actually noiseless, even when I came up close and stared in. The steel blocks that climbed and plunged were no more than lightly smeared, and the black teeth had almost picked themselves clean. It looked all right in there. And it made no sound.
When we were growing up you used to say I was a solipsist, and a solipsist of unusual briskness and resolve. You spoke of the sobriety of the calculation of my own interest, the lack of any instinct for compliance with the mood of the group (plus the off-center protrusion of the lower lip and the “privacy” of the eyes). Well, it remained true that I very much didn’t want to kill myself. That felt like a reasonable priority. The suicide of the slave survivor — we know it’s common enough, and in the end I think I can respect it. As a way of saying that my life is mine to take. But I thought I had held myself together fairly well, in camp — no violence, not much compromise, no herd emotion. I didn’t want to do what others did. And I reckoned I had a good chance of getting through life without killing anyone.
In fact it all felt pretty much involuntary. I mean my strike, sudden and unofficial — the wildcat strike. I let my hands fall to my sides. Not just the nightly act, but everything else, all the smiles and sacraments, all the words, all the commentary of love. She noticed that. I ask you to imagine what it was like to lie there, sit there, stand there, and watch. It was quick — I’ll say that. Within a month she got caught, in blazing crime, with the PT-instructor during the lunch break. And I was free.
Just to finish my side of it. I didn’t want a child with Zoya and I didn’t want a child with Lidya. But it’s curious. With Lidya, with Lidya, I felt a brief renewal of erotic purpose. There was now the possibility, at least, of a consequence. Something like — if it isn’t play, then let it be earnest. And, incidentally, I’ve always been amazed by what Lidya thinks a fuck is, compared to what Zoya thought a fuck was. But it worked out. The boy, when he came, began to give me the sort of pleasure I used to take in Zoya. Proximity to physical grandeur, but manageable, now. I have enough love in me for Lidya, I can scrape it together and eke it out with things like approbation and respect. Lidya understands. After Zoya, I feel as if I’m living with a dedicated psychotherapist — and mindreader. I can sense her decoding my silences. She understands, and she pities me. In the end you finish with self-pity. It’s too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you. Lidya pities me. She pities me, which Zoya rightly never did, and she pities me for Zoya, too.
Forcing her out, forcing Zoya out, was not a contained cruelty. No one knew better than I did how hopeless she was at love. The awful way she laid herself open. She was a totalist among men who dealt in fractions. I know you and Kitty were appalled by her marriage, but I was secretly ecstatic, for a while, anyway. The irony is very sharp, I agree. But bear in mind that she was hopeless at other things too, including money. In the few months between our separation and our divorce she ran up debts that looked like state budgets. I heard that in the end it cost Ananias half of all he had to bail her out. At last: reparation. The money earned by mocking the sweat of slaves — it goes to Zoya. Hereafter, or so I felt, that dreadful old piece of shit will keep her warm and fed and clothed, and will value her. Or so I felt.
Now, my brother. It is my suspicion that you aren’t yet done with Zoya. You’re going to wait until after I’m dead and then you’re going to try again. Not immediately after. I don’t see you getting on the plane with a suitcase in one hand and a funeral baked meat in the other. Listen. There was one night in Moscow, the time we stayed over, and you’d been giving her “that look” every five minutes — you think you’re all strong and silent, bro, but you’re a book with its spine cracked open and its pages falling free. We were talking about it as we went to bed. I said, as was my habit, “Like a clever dog that knows it’s going to be thrashed.” Now you remember how perceptive she could be, when she tried, when she stopped and thought. I’ll indent her reply, to give it extra weight:
No, not anymore. More like a dog on a leash. With a gendarme at the other end of it. He lusts, but he also hates. See the way he’s always having a dig at Varvara about her past. You’d think he’d delivered her from prostitution. I bet he tortures her. That’s what he’d do to me. An endless exercise. An endless wank about the past. About you. You and all the others.
And you know what she did then? She made the sign of the cross. She.
Given a world of free will, you would have no chance with Zoya, not a prayer. It’s very simple: you’re violent. In camp, when I went pacifist, that was an attempt to preserve something in myself. It’s the philosophy of the truant, I know — of the pious shirker. I assumed at the time that you were doing some discreet brawling on my behalf, and I stayed silent. I remember the change in the attitude, and the appearance, of the three little hooligans who were always after me. They looked as though they’d all been in the same car crash. Christ. And that Tartar who wanted my shovel — was it you who broke his arm? Anyway, I tried, with my share of hypocrisy, to preserve something in myself. It didn’t work. Nothing would have worked. And I don’t condemn you, really, for what you did — to the informers. Oppression lays down bloodlust. It lays it down like a wine.
Now I know you to be a persistent and resourceful suitor — and, in her case (if I may say), a remarkably sanguine one. But she is weak against certain kinds of influence. And if the old hack is still alive, when I’m not, and she is still with him, well, it already sickens me to imagine her isolation, and her thwartedness. This I feel sure of, though, and I warn you with real fear. If you do move on her, it will create for you both nothing but misery. Not to mention, or at least not to go into, the insult it would in any case be to my memory, and to our fraternal love. A love that survives the strangest fact of all.
You wanted me dead, didn’t you? From pretty much the first day I came to camp. You fought it, and you won, and you risked much physical damage to keep me from harm. Yet you wanted me dead. Because Zoya was impossible so long as I was alive. I don’t know why. I don’t know what urka-like rule you were following, though I’m glad of it. Or maybe you realized that I just couldn’t let it happen. We’d need pistols at dawn. And then you’d get your wish. My suicide would have been simplest, no? Sometimes I find myself thinking that the entire Norlag Rebellion, the Fifty Days, with its hundred dead, was engineered by you for just one last roll of the dice. I could go, you could go — let fate do it. And, Jesus, August 4, with its deaths and its wounds. Wounds that turned our friend’s hair from taiga to tundra. As I said at the time, you’re a romantic. In your way. And no fun for you either, all this. No fun to want your brother’s wife. And to want her quite so badly.
What I’d like to do is live long enough so that you’re too old to care. Or too old to move. You’ll realize how serious I am when I tell you that I’m going to give up smoking. But I don’t see them, really, the old bones. Who was it who said this? “In hospital, it’s always earlier than you think.” Earlier — and also later, at least for me. On my admission, they had me sign a form that said, more or less, that I didn’t mind dying. I’ve made my will, and I’m already dividing up my keepsakes, like the good little boy I used to be. Oh, what good boys we were. What good boys we were, before. The delivery of this letter I will entrust to Artem, whose tour ends at Christmas. It’s the only trait my wives have in common: you can’t ask them to post a letter. You might as well fold the envelope into a paper plane and throw it out of the window. And I don’t expect Lidya to be at her briskest, after I’ve gone.