The urka civil war was a consequence of Moscow’s attempt to undermine urka power and urka idleness. Its policy was to promote the urkas still further: to give them, in exchange for certain duties, pay and privileges close to those of the janitoriat. The bitches were the urkas who wanted to stop being urkas and start being pigs; the brutes were the urkas who wanted to go on being urkas. It looked good for us at first, when the war broke out. Suddenly the urkas had something else to do with their inexhaustible free time — something other than torturing the fascists, their premier activity. But now the war between the brutes and the bitches was getting out of control. Having lost their monopoly of violence, the pigs applied yet more violence. There was a wildness and randomness in the air that was beginning to feel almost abstract.
Venus. Remember how disappointed you were by the crocodiles in the reptile house at the zoo — because “the lizards never moved”? Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis. Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after half a second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw. That was the war between the brutes and the bitches.
Now, when I talk, here and elsewhere, of Moscow and its so-called policies, I do so with the assurance of informed hindsight. But at the time we had no idea what was going on. We never had any idea what was going on.
Lev’s first day (he would spend most of it with the medics and the work-assigners) was also the monthly day of rest.
I came up behind him in the yard. He was sitting on a low stone wall where the well used to be, his knees pressed together, his shoulders sloped forward. He was cherishing his fractured spectacles, and trying to believe his eyes.
And what did he see? The thing that was hardest to grasp was the scale—the inordinate amount of space needed to contain it. In his line of sight were five thousand men (ten times that number lay to the sides, beyond, behind). When you got used to that, you had to come to terms with the evident fact that you were living in something like an army base, where the conscripts had been drawn from a direly indigent madhouse. Or a direly indigent hospice. In your nose and mouth was the humid breath of the camp, of Norlag, and, more distantly, the fresh cement of the brand-new Arctic city, the monumental denture of Predposylov. And finally you had to absorb and assent to the ceaseless agitation, the mad dance of the stick insects — the nervous fury of the zona.
I said, Don’t turn around, Dmitriko.
Never again would I call him that. It was not the time for diminutives. It never was the time…A camp administrator who allowed two family members to set eyes on each other, let alone meet and talk (let alone cohabit, for almost ten years), would be punished for criminal leniency. On the other hand we would not need to be masters of deception, I didn’t think, to avoid exposure. We were half-brothers with different surnames, and we were radically unalike. To be brief. My father, Valery, was a Cossack (duly de-Cossackized in 1920, when I was one). Lev’s father, Dmitri, was a well-to-do peasant, or kulak (duly de-kulakized in 1932, when Lev was three). The father’s genes predominated: I was six foot two, with thick black hair and orderly features, whereas Lev…
It seems that I had better describe him now, your step-uncle, to prepare the ground for the thunderclap that is barely a page away. There was something yokelish, indeed almost troglodytic, in the asymmetries of his face, the features thrown together inattentively, as if in the dark. Even his ears seemed to belong to two completely different people. Say whatever else you like about it, but my nose was unquestionably a nose, while Lev’s was a mere protuberance. And when you looked at him side-on, you thought, Is that his chin or his Adam’s apple? He was also, as a kid, short, meager, and sickly — a stuttering bedwetter in inch-thick glasses. All he had was his smile (in the mess of his face lived the teeth of a beautiful woman) and his rich blue eyes, the eyes of an intelligent. Definitely an intelligent.
I said — Don’t turn around. And when you do, show no pleasure in seeing your older brother.
He stood up; he walked away, then circled back into range. For a moment I found his faintly hooded, self-caressing expression impossible to read; it seemed, in the circumstances, simply alien. After the jail and the interrogation, after the transport, many new arrivals were already mad; and I feared my brother was already mad.
“Guess what happened to me,” he said.
I said, patiently, You got arrested.
“No. Well, yes. But no. I got married.”
Congratulations, I said. So you finally knocked up little Ada. Or was it little Olga?
He didn’t answer. Look at the eyes now — the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself. This was clearly a great coup of love he had brought off: a grand slam of love. Has it ever happened to you, Venus? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you’re going to remember that moment for the rest of your life. Registering an impressive contraction of the heart, I said,
Not Zoya.
He nodded. “Zoya.”…You little cunt, I said. And I wheeled away from him into the yard.
After a time, as I staggered along, buckling and straightening, shaking my head, scratching my hair, I felt him settling into step beside me.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. I’m so sorry.”
No you’re not. I turned. And with an older brother’s grooved cruelty (spinning it out for at least three syllables), I said, You?
We sucked up breath and looked out into the sector. And saw what? In the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand, a team of locusts twirling an old shiteater into the compost heap, and, finally, a leech who, with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right-angles (scurvy), was nonetheless making a serious attempt to eat his shoe.
I whispered it: Lev and Zoya got married. If I can survive that, then I’ll never die.
“No, brother, you’ll never die.”
Sighing heroically, I added in a clear voice,
And you can survive this. And now you’ll have to.
4. Zoya
When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit. So what am I? You have consumed your share of Russian novels: every time a new character appears, there is a chapter break and you are suddenly reading about his grandparents. This too is a digression. And its import is sexual. So do yourself a favor, and go and get the framed photograph on my desk and prop it up in front of you as you read. I don’t want you thinking about the way I am now. I want you thinking about that twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who is throwing his hat into the air on Victory Day.