You know what happened to us, brother? It wasn’t just a compendium of very bad experiences. The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness — that was general, and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I’m referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes, and a price to be paid, not by the spoonful or the shovelful, but by the dayful, the yearful, the lifeful. They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be. Watching Uglik, our master, trying to light his second cigarette — that’s when I felt it growing in me, my specific deformation.
What’s yours? Mine is cynicism. I’ve risen above it here and there in this letter to you, but the tone I use in speaking of the mother of my son is evidence enough of how it’s gone with me. Cynicism is what I feel, or what I don’t feel, all the time. And who would be a cynic? Cynic. Dogface. Condemned to see cynicism everywhere. But it’s here. It has me. I don’t care about anything or anyone. Blindspots, susceptibilities, come and go. I can sometimes persuade myself that I don’t care about Lidya, Kitty, you, Mother. I can seldom successfully convict myself of the blasphemy of not caring about Artem. And I can never say that I don’t care about Zoya.
Again — what’s yours? Only you have the right to name it. I used to think it was the war, and not camp, that fucked you up. But you won the war. And nobody won the other thing. Still, whatever the war did, camp trapped it inside you. For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect — not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing — from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason other than that I valued it so much. And maybe the brutes and the bitches had the truth of it. Those sore letters on Arbachuk’s stiff-veined forearm. You may live but you won’t—
I wish you well. It’s a great relief to be able to say that, and to mean it. I don’t wish many people well, not anymore. All the people I don’t know — I no longer wish them well. Tales of infirmity and destitution: that’s the kind of thing, these days, that very slightly cheers me up. Just now, I am having one of my better moments. I feel disencumbered. And I hope you do what I did, and manage to patch together some family around you. Good luck. And thanks. Thanks for the hefty loan, thanks for my Certificate of Manumission, and thanks for the seat on the train, that time. And, yes, thanks for breaking the Tartar’s arm. Boy, you were something. The way you’d make the German shepherd cringe and go belly-up and pee. “You think I’m going to be sneered at,” you told it, “by a fucking dog?” And in the last months of the war, the cannonades in Moscow whenever a major city fell — with every boom I felt your power.
You know, without your influence on Vad, I don’t think I would have survived childhood. That Vadim. On the strength of the fact that he came out first, he took on all the wants and wounds of the older brother. He really wanted me dead. And he wasn’t just going to hope for the best: he was going to do something about it. Why? Because I spoiled that blood-smeared half-hour idyll — when he had his mother all to himself. Ever since I was born, you were my righter. My righter of wrongs. You towered like a god — you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers. And so it will always be. Lev.
~ ~ ~
Oh, slave, thou hast slain me…
Yes, that’s right. Yes, that’s right, my girl. It was not your finest hour. In the space of it (our dinner at the Grill, late July) you subjected me to two rank vulgarisms — two craven borrowings, that is to say, from the common pool of catchphrase, ditty, and jingle. Don’t “go there,” Venus. Do not enter that necropolis of novelty.
The first was “closure.” Why didn’t I seek “closure”? “Closure”: ech, if I so much as whisper it or mouth it I feel myself transformed into a white-coated, fat-necked peanut in a mall-style consulting-room. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything. Your second enormity was not a lone epithet: it went on for an entire sentence. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Not so! Not so. Whatever doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you weaker, and kills you later on.
Of course, I happen to be taking the matter into my own hands. That lumbering but capacious health service Lev talked about — that’s all disappeared. Only a slim majority of state hospitals can boast of running water, and I say with tears of pride that the place I’m in is one of them. When it comes to death, though, Russia remains a land of opportunity: the lethal injection, here, would be a bargain at double the price. And there’s none of that right-to-life bullshit, no pious politicos or meddling divines, no crowds in the forecourt yelling at everyone to Let Me Live.
I’m in an immune-deficiency hospice (the only such unit in the country); to use the euphonious local acronym, it’s for people with SPID. This unacknowledged epidemic, by the way, is of African proportions. Some time later on (they can’t say when) I will be moved into a private room for my shot. And I’m wondering: how much should I tip, and when? I know. While I’m complaining. While I’m acting up: that’s the time to do it. The lethal injection will work — I don’t doubt that. But I am by no means persuaded that the transition will be painless. Morphine is extra, and I’ve ordered a double. But you’re right: I should have gone to Oslo or Amsterdam and done it business-class and not economy. Still, that wouldn’t answer. I am going to die where my brother died.
Call me a literalist, but I’m only doing what Russia is doing. And she tried it once before. Russia tried to kill herself in the 1930s, after her first decade of Joseph Vissarionovich. He was already a cadaver millionaire about ten times over, even before the Terror. But he did need Russians to go on producing Russians. And they stopped. After the startling census of 1936, the state jolted into action: crash kindergartenization, maternity medals, a resolemnized marriage ceremony, the legalization of inheritance, and the criminalization of abortion. It was a general strike, of a kind; and the state broke it. What will the state do now?
As the Babylonians were leading the Jews into captivity they asked them to play their harps. And the Jews said, “We shall work for you, but play we shall not.” That’s what they were saying in 1936, and that’s what they’re saying now. We will work for you, but we’re not going to fuck for you anymore. We are not going to go on doing it, making people. Making people to be set before the indifference of the state. We are not going to play.