Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I paused. I said, And all else is well?

“Yes. No. There is talk, in freedom, of Birobidzhan. They’re building barracks in Birobidzhan.”

Birobidzhan was a region on the northeastern border of China — largely, and wisely, uninhabited. Ever since the 1930s there had been talk of resettling the Jews in Birobidzhan.

“They’re building barracks for them in Birobidzhan. Janusz thinks they’re going to hang the Jewish doctors in Red Square. The country is hysterical with it, the press…And then the Jews will run the gauntlet to Birobidzhan. Now if you’ll excuse me. This will take about a minute.”

And for about a minute he wept, he musically wept. He was crying, he said, because he was so dirty. I believed him. Being so dirty made you cry more often than being so cold or being so hungry. We weren’t so cold or so hungry, not anymore. But we were so dirty. Our clothes were stiff, practically wooden, barklike, with dirt. And under the wood, woodlice and woodworm.

“Ah, that’s better. It beats me how the women stay so clean,” he went on, as if talking to himself. “Maybe they lick themselves, like cats. And we’re like dogs that just roll in the shit. Now,” he said and turned to me. “I have a dilemma. Perhaps you can help me resolve it.”

He focused and smiled — the pretty teeth. I found I still feared that smile.

“Here,” he said, “is no good. I can’t stay here. I’m leaving. I’m off. It’s no good here . Here, everybody’s going to die.”

I said, There comes a time when you have to—

“Oh don’t give me that. Every man in the camp can give me that. The thing is that I’m urgently needed in freedom. To protect my wife. So. Two choices. I can escape.”

Where to? Birobidzhan?

“I can escape. Or I can inform.”

I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

“Come on, take me seriously. Think it through, think it through. If I inform, it’s conceivable I’ll be pardoned. With things as they are now. You know, give them a list of all the strike leaders. I could try that. Then you could kill me. And do you know what you’d get if you killed me?” He closed his eyes and nodded and opened them again. “You’d get a hard-on.”

I said, Today we go to the bathhouse.

He looked at the ground, saying, “And that’s another reason to cry.”

The two of us always went to the bathhouse together. Even when we weren’t speaking or meeting each other’s eyes. The thing had to be done in relay. Now you’d think that the bathhouse was where we all wanted to go, but many men would risk a beating to avoid it or even delay it. None of our innumerable agitations had any effect in the bathhouse. For instance, it was quite possible to come out even dirtier than you went in. One of the reasons for this was institutional or systemic: an absence of soap. There was not always an absence of water, but there was always, it seemed, an absence of soap. Even in 1991 the coalminers went on strike for soap. There was never any soap in the USSR.

We were queueing in the sleet. Then suddenly there were a hundred of us in a changing room with hooks for twelve. And suddenly there was soap — little black globules, doled out of a bucket. At this point everything but your overcoat got thrown into the pot, to be redistributed later on at random; but by taking turns we could guard our most precious things — the spare foot-rag, the extra spoon. Lev filed through first, with his mug of warm water. I gazed at my black globule. I held it to my nose. It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

It was then I noticed it, in the pocket of the leaden wad I held in my arms: Lev’s letter…After four years of war and nearly seven years of camp, my integrity, some might feel, had come under a certain strain. A for-the-duration rapist (or so it then seemed), a coldblooded (but also tumescent) executioner, I intended, when I ever thought about it, to go back to being the kind of man I was in 1941. And now, of course, I weep to think that I imagined this was possible. The kind of man who drew a shopkeeper’s attention to the fact that he had undercharged; the kind of man who gave up his seat for the elderly and infirm; the kind of man who would never read the last page of a novel first, but would get there by honest means; and so on. But there was Zoya’s letter, and I reached for it.

There are self-interested and utilitarian reasons for behaving well, it turns out. I had some bad times in camp, clearly enough, but those five minutes, under the brown mists of the bathhouse, bred half a century of pain…Family news (her mother’s poor health, his mother’s improvement), that new job in the textiles factory, Kazan, the idea of a “homeland” in the east, earnest and repetitive protestations of love: all that was over in the first paragraph. The remainder, four dense sides, was of course Aesopian in style, with the fable unfolding in three stages. She described the arrangement of a vase of flowers, and then the preparation and consumption of an enormous meal. It was easily translated: a marathon preen (with much posing and primping), a saturnalia of foreplay, and a contortionist’s black mass of coition. Even her handwriting, tiny though it was, looked completely indecent, wanton — lost to shame.

Lev came out and I went in.

The conjugal visits, in the House of Meetings, had not yet begun. His was three and a half years away.

Lev’s brigade, that morning (February 14, 1953), had been reassigned and reequipped, and was late starting out. The pigs stopped the column as it was crossing the sector. And one of them said,

“We have a distinguished visitor. Gentlemen? Meet Comrade Uglik.”

Uglik? Take away the uniform (and the riding boots and neckerchief), and he looked more like an urka than a pig. And the urkas, it had to be said, were physically vivid. You sometimes caught yourself thinking that if human life ended anyway at twenty-five, then an urka might seem a reasonable thing to be. Whereas, with the pigs, the only suggestion of moisture and mobility in their gray, closed faces was the vague lavatorial humidity that came off them when they were roused. Uglik was with us for only a week, and was active among us for only a day and a night. But no one ever forgot him.

His face was sleek, and rosily sensual, with rich, moist, outward-tending lips. His eyes were positively flamboyant. Looking at those eyes, you felt not just fear but also the kind of depression that would normally take a week to build. His eyes were wearyingly vigorous. Uglik, I think, came from the future. Hitherto, the standard janitor of the Gulag was a product of the sleeping residuum to be found in all societies: they were sadists and subnormals (and the palest and dankest onanists), now hugely empowered; and in their best moments, their moments of clarity and candor, they all knew it. That was why they would far rather torment a cosmologist or a ballet dancer than a rapist or a murderer. They wanted someone good. Raised as a pig, by a pig, Uglik was different. He’d never felt subnormal. And freedom from conscious shame had given him the leisure to develop as an extrovert. He was, on the other hand, an alcoholic. That was why he was here, as demotion and punishment for a string of disgraces at various camps in South Central Asia. They were sending us their lost men. At this point Uglik had two months to live.

“Meet Comrade Uglik.” The guards stopped the work team — Lev’s work team — and Comrade Uglik was asked to inspect it. He moved from scarecrow to scarecrow, gracefully, with a bend of the knees and a courtly smile — as if, said Lev, he was choosing a partner for a dance. Which he was. He wanted his partner to be young and strong, because he wanted the dance to last a long time. At last he settled on the candidate (Rovno, the big Ukrainian), and the infraction (improper headgear). Then Uglik flexed his upraised fingers into a pair of black leather gloves.