We stood among them, the shiteaters, Lev and I, outside the bolted door of the kitchens, in darkness and fine rain. The fine rain, not even falling, but floating, like the gnats and midges of July. He was coming to the end of his first day, and I had chosen this place for a conversation we very much needed to have. The shiteaters loomed and swayed beneath the lone lightbulb, waiting for the last buckets to be tipped out of the back window. By now the pigs seldom came by, seldom bothered them, because no amount of beating could keep a shiteater from the slops. There seemed to be very little physical pain — where they lived, beyond the line they had crossed.
Even within the stratum of the shiteaters, Venus, there were two echelons. There were some shiteaters that the other shiteaters looked down on. These were known as all-fours shiteaters…I relay these details, my dear, these details of awlings and chiselings, of educated, even cultivated men eating slops on their hands and knees, because I want you to think about their strangeness. Wildly directed violence, drastic degradation: this is all terribly strange.
“Why’s it so fucking dark around here,” he said.
It was a complaint, not a question. Lev, the swot geographer, knew why it was so dark around here.
“Yes yes,” he said. “This is the Arctic in February. The sun’ll come up in March. What do I do, brother? What do I do?”
I was ready for this. The majority of the fascists who got ten-year sentences in 1937–38 had been rearrested, in alphabetical order, and resentenced in 1947–48. And they all looked like Lev. Older, thinner, wilder — but they all looked like Lev, the rapidly blinking intelligent, with his hopeless shoes (vastly dissimilar, but each a dog’s dinner of frayed rope and car tire), his half a book, and his torn summer jacket. And always cherishing the fractured spectacles. Whereas the new fascists were men who had spent five years in the Red Army. For us the camp was just more war, with one startling difference. We had fought the fascists — the enemy. Then the Russian state, now fascist itself, told us that we were the fascists, and they were arresting us for it and enslaving us for it. Now we were the enemy, to be flung out over the shoulder of the world. I have noticed that you and your crowd have a high tolerance for self-pity in others, so I will add the following. What made this capsizal hard to forget was that my war wound throbbed in the cold from September to June. But I mustn’t be self-pitying. I mustn’t be the lachrymist. There are other things I mustn’t be — the tough guy, the martyr. And I mustn’t be indignant. Or earnest. That’s less difficult. Americans are earnest, Russians, when the mood is on them, are earnest. While I prefer the droller cultures, and the wizened ironists, to be found on the northwestern fringe of the Eurasian plain.
What do you do? I began. Oh we’ll come to that. But first — aren’t you going to say it?
“Say what?”
You know: “There must have been a mistake.” Or “If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionovich.”
“…Why the fuck would I say that? They arrest by quota. They do. I bet they do.”
Lev was right about that. The Terror, too, was driven by quota: this or that many people from this or that area and social group, at such and such a rate, quotas, norms, minimums.
“You know what’s happened,” he said. “You and I have been sold into slavery. All that fucking around with the interrogations and the confessions and the documents. That’s just the process of being sold into slavery. It sounds quite romantic, doesn’t it, being sold into slavery…”
He looked around. No, there was nothing romantic about Norlag, about Predposylov.
“I mean, you’d expect somewhere hot. Jesus.”
Lev was nineteen. And already he was seeing more than I saw (I had no head for politics, as will soon be evident). Looking back, now, I can recall my fever of fear when I realized that the younger brother saw more than the older. It happened over the chess board. I felt myself exposed to greater powers of combination, of permutation and penetration. And he always stood back from the general opinion, the general mood. Except when it happened to suit him, he never went along with anything. He always made his own calculation. He pushed out a rigid nether lip, slightly off center, lowered his gaze, and made the calculation.
And I asked him: Which prison?
“Butyrki.”
Butyrki’s great, isn’t it.
“Great. In my cell I had three Red professors, two composers, and one poet. Oh yeah — and one informer. I was proud to be there. Butyrki’s great.”
Great. How did it go? Before.
“The usual thing. Called out of class at the Tech. Quite polite. Then for a couple of weeks I had to go to the Kennel every other day and eat shit.”
A shiteater veered up at us from the darkness, and then stepped back with his blanketed forearm raised. I said,
What was the charge? Or didn’t they give you one.
“They gave me one.” He let out a soft snort and said, “Praising America.”
I knew this to be a crime, sure enough, and one with several subsections. Many recently arrived fascists had committed it — Praising American Democracy or Praising American Technique or Abasement Before America. Or alternatively Abasement Before the West. Not a few of our number had now seen something of the West; and even in ruins it abased us…There were scores of Americans in Norlag, including an American American. Come over here to participate in the Soviet experiment, he told the CP man who issued his passport that he was fully prepared to take the big cut in his standard of living. That same day he got the quarter—twenty-five years.
And were you praising America?
“No. I was praising The Americas. I was in a queue with Kitty and I was praising The Americas.”
Then we both did something we hadn’t been expecting to do for some time to come: we laughed — with our vapor forming and fleeing. I understood. “The Americas” was sibling code for Zoya. And it was a good name for her too, because it caught her walk. The spatial relationship between the two continents, Venus, has best been evoked by the exile Nabokov: two figures on a trapeze, in the big top, one beneath the other, and just coming out of the backswing. But Zoya’s walk also expressed it, embodied it, the giddy disjunction between north and south, and then the waist, as thin as Panama. Kitty was family, Lev’s full sibling, like Vadim, the other one.
And was Kitty dispraising The Americas?
“You know. A bit. Basically Zoya makes Kitty feel like a pencil. No. Like Chile. That’s what I told her. You’re jealous of The Americas because she makes you feel like Chile.”
I said, I thought Kitty was keen on Zoya.
“Kitty is riveted by Zoya. But she says she’ll destroy me. Not on purpose. But that’s what will happen in the end.”
I would remember this. Right from the start I had fingered Zoya for a decimator of the poets, and a poet (Acmeist, Mandelstamian) was what Lev, at this stage, was in some sense hoping to be…There came a clatter from within and the sound of voices. The shiteaters looked up, with thin mouths and smiling eyes.
“Chile,” Lev said suddenly. “You’d have to be an island to be less landlocked than Chile.”
He sniffed, wiped his nose, and straightened his shoulders. His upper lip, temporarily beaklike, and his wary glance: he looked like what he was — an adolescent, fearing ridicule after a vulnerable remark…Lev had always been owlishly capable of getting excited by geography. I remember he once said, “The Pacific is the prince of the oceans. The Atlantic’s a mere strait when compared to it.” And he had a whole theory about the geography of Russia, how it determined both her history and her fate. Oh, Venus, what good boys we were, originally. I think I told you that our mother was a schoolteacher. She was in fact a completely different kind of human being: she was a headmistress. And therefore a harpy of ambition. “You are intelligents!” she used to shriek at us, often out of a clear blue sky. “You serve the nation, not the state!” And there we were, Lev and me, with our books and our thick periodicals, our basic German, English, French, our heavy chess pieces, our maps and charts.