the moon, Lev.
“Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.
We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.
I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.
On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.
So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.
Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking. *3 No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his
hands
.
Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version—because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.
Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.
“I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”
Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.
I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.
“His conscience was
not
unclean. That’s the point.”
What are you
talking
about?
“Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”
Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again—freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.
Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I
“Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.
We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.
I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.
On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.
So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.
Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking. *3 No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his
hands
.
Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version—because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.
Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.
“I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”
Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.
I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.
“His conscience was
not
unclean. That’s the point.”
What are you
talking
about?
“Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”
Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again—freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.
Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I
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