Martin Amis - House of Meetings

A pig would usually beat you more or less according to method, like a man chopping down a tree. Uglik of course intended to mount a display, and he did so, with many stylish feints and swivels, and with a toreador’s tight-buttocked saunters — little intervals for tacit applause. He was not very fat and very mottled — indeed, at this hour, he was not yet breathing and sweating very heavily, he was not yet very drunk…It went wrong for Lev when someone near him shouted out — a single word, and, in the circumstances, the worst word possible. The word was queer . Uglik’s head turned toward him, Lev said, like a weathercock whipped around by the wind. He came forward. He picked Lev, I think, because this time he wanted someone small. A double blow to the ears with the stiffened palms of the hand. Everyone there remembered an echoing slap, but Lev remembered a detonation.

This was not the last of Uglik’s achievements during his short time among us. Late in the evening he visited the women’s block. There he also applied himself: he didn’t rape — he just beat. And finally, on his way back to the guardhouse, he succeeded in falling over and blacking out under the wooden portals of the toy factory. Uglik spent five hours in forty degrees of frost. He had his gloves on.

Rovno, the giant farmboy, soon recovered. As for Lev — that night in the barracks, flat on his back, he had two worms of bloody phlegm coiling out of his head. The talk all around him was about how and when to retaliate, but Lev was just Lev, even then. “It’s a provocation,” he kept saying. “ Uglik is a provocation.” And some people were paying attention to him now. “Don’t rise to it. Don’t rise.” Then he looked up at me and said suddenly, “Can anyone hear my voice?”

Hear it? I said.

“Hear it. Because I can’t. I can only hear it from the inside.”

Three days later we had the opportunity to study Uglik for a full hour. And even in our world, Venus, even in our world of Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, it was something to see.

We were in the woodshop, which stood in the eternally sunless shadow of its long eave, and we had a clear view of the porch of the infirmary, where Uglik sat with a quilt on a rocking chair, in his greatcoat, his boots. He wore no gloves. Silently we gathered around the window. Uglik’s immediate intention, clearly, was to have a smoke — but this was no longer a straightforward matter. Janusz put the cigarette in Uglik’s mouth and lit it for him, and then withdrew.

There we were, by the window, six or seven of us, holding our tools. Nobody moved…Uglik seemed to be puffing away comfortably enough, but every few seconds he raised one, then the other, bandaged wrist to his mouth before realizing, over and over again, that he had no hands. Eventually, having spat the butt over the rail, it occurred to him, after a while, that he would soon be wanting another. He cuffed the packet onto the floor and kicked it about; he knelt, trying to use his stumped forearms as levers and pincers; then he lay flat on his stomach, and, like a man trying to possess the wooden floor, trying to enter it, trying to kiss it, writhed and rutted about until he snuffled one up with his questing lips.

And of course there was more. Now: to watch a pig bungling a headcount, or indeed a bowl-count or a spoon-count; to watch him pause, frown, and begin again — for a moment it is like a return to school, when you glimpse the absurdity, the secret illegitimacy, of the adult power. It makes you want to laugh. But that’s in freedom. It’s different, in penal servitude. We stood at the woodshop window. No one laughed. No one spoke and no one moved.

With every appearance of broad satisfaction Uglik returned to the rocker, his head tipped back: the vertical cigarette looked like a piccolo which would now trill Uglik’s praises. He patted his pockets and heard (no doubt) the companionable rattle of his matchbox; he reached within. There was an unbearable interlude of perfect stillness before he yelled raggedly for Janusz.

“I never knew,” we could hear him say, conversationally (and he said it more than once)— “I never knew it got so cold up here in the Arctic.”

And as Janusz once again withdrew, Uglik, with a jerk, fleetingly offered him his vanished right hand.

You see, Uglik had something else on his mind: mortal fear. His activities in the women’s block, that first night, had resulted in a petition, a demonstration, and now a strike. This would be noticed. And in the end everything certainly added up for Uglik — yes, a most strenuous fate for Comrade Uglik.

We were told the whole story, that spring, by a group of transferees from Kolyma. Recalled to Moscow, Uglik was put on trial and facetiously sentenced to a year in the gold mines of the remotest northeast. He mined no gold, and so earned no food, with the consequence that he became a more or less instant shiteater, and — necessarily — an all-fours shiteater at that. He died of starvation and dementia within a month. Knowledge of this would not have lightened our thoughts and feelings, as we stood watching at the woodshop window.

It was in the nature of camp life that you would suffer even for Uglik — for Uglik, with Uglik. Lev, too, with his gonging head, his left ear already infected and now fizzing with Janusz’s peroxide, his inner gyroscopes undulant with nausea and vertigo. We looked on, each one of us, in septic horror. It wasn’t just the dreadful symmetry of his wounds — like the result of a barbaric punishment. No. Uglik was showing us how things really stood. This was our master: the man scared so stupid that he kept forgetting he had no hands.

I glanced at Lev. And then, I think, it came upon my brother and me — a suspicion of what this might further mean. I found the suspicion was unentertainable, and I shuddered it off. But I had already heard its whisper, saying…The Ugliks, and the sons of the Ugliks, and the reality that produced them: all that would pass. And yet there was something else, something that would never pass, and was only just beginning.

Uglik spat out his second cigarette, wiped his nose on his stump, and shouldered his way inside.

On March 5 we were assembled in the yard and told of the death of the great leader of free human beings everywhere. Silence in the whole zona, a silence of rare quality: I remember listening to the subway noises of the points and wires in my sinuses. It was the silence of vacuum. For at least five or six years, in camp, there had been an intense rumor, daily or even hourly replenished — a rumor that placed Joseph Vissarionovich ever closer to death’s door. And what we had, now, was a vacuum. Now he was nowhere. But he used to be everywhere.

From that day on a collision course was mapped out in front of us. No amnesties (not for the politicals), more frequent and more outrageous provocations (more Ugliks), and the uncontrollable impatience of the men — every last man but Lev. So, certainly, we rose up. And the pigs couldn’t hold us. It ended on August 4, with Cheka troops, fire engines and steel-plated trucks mounted with machineguns.

We’ve got a little time, I said. A little time, you and I. And then you’re going to have to come out and stand.

Lev was alone in the barracks. He sat at the table by the stove (inactive during the summer month), with his hands folded in front of him like a judge.

“Ah, Spartacus,” he said. “ Christ, what was that? A barricade?”

They were doing the whole zona, sector by sector. The sound of shouts, screams, gunfire, and the collapse of bulldozed walls came and went on the hot wind.

I said, The women are out there. Everyone who can walk is out there, standing in line. Arm in arm. You haven’t got a choice. When this is over, do you expect the men to be able to bear the sight of you?