Two brothers living in the Russian Gulag system work out their complex relationship, and each of their love for the woman Zoya. The story is told by one brother in the form of a letter to his daughter, as he is nearing his own death.
Through this story, the larger broken story of Russia is told. The senseless imprisonment of millions of citizens and the impact that had on the country. One person at a time.
Amis writes with a stark bravery. These characters are complex, not always easy to be with, although he connects you to them. And through them, connects you to the Gulag experience and what it leaves of men in its wake. As Lev says in the letter he leaves his brother after his death, "They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be." Pg 223
How does one emerge from an experience like extended unjust imprisonment? What is left of the life and how does one move forward through it? How does it interrupt the man, the brothers, love, the country itself? Is there something cathartic in telling the story? Even if the story is honest, staggering and brutal, like the stories each of the brothers leaves behind?
"And pitiful because it is such a transparent protest against failing powers: saying fuck is the only dirty thing we can still get up to. But I would like to emphasize the therapeutic properties of the four-letter word." Pg. 12
"I have hurt many men and women with these hands." Pg. 12
"The rest of me, even so, is becoming Eastern - re-Russifying all over again. So keep a lookout, hereafter, for other national traits: the freedom from all responsibility and scruple, the energetic championship of views and beliefs that are not only irreconcilable but also mutually exclusive, the weakness for humor of squalor and cynicism, the tendency to speak most passionately when being most insincere, and the thirst for the abstract argument (abstract to the point of pretension) at unlikely moments - say, in the middle of a prison stampede, at the climax of a cholera riot, or in the most sepulchral phase of a terror-famine." Pg. 15
"I had simply discovered that having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all." Pg. 22
"All around me, now, was the faint but unanimous sound of slurping and rinsing. It might have seemed encouragingly lubricious if you didn't know what it was. But I knew. It was the sound of three hundred men eating in their sleep." Pg. 23
"It would suit me very well if, at this point, I could easternize your Western eyes, your Western heart. 'The Russian soldiers were raping every German woman from eight to eighty,' wrote one witness. 'It was an army of rapists.' And, yes, I marched with the rapist army. I could seek safety in numbers, and lose myself in the peer group; for we do know, Venus (the key study is Police Battalion 101), that middle-aged German schoolteachers, almost without exception, chose to machine-gun women and children all day rather than ask for reassignment and face the consequence. The consequence was not an official punishment like being sent to the front, or even any mark of official disfavor; the consequence was a few days of peer displeasure before your transfer came through - the harsh words, all that jostling in the lunch queue. So you see, Venus, the peer group can make people do anything, and do it day in and day out. In the rapist army, everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too." Pg. 35
"This was the mental form they took: I couldn't see women whole, intact and entire. I couldn't even see their bodies whole. Now Zoya wielded an outrageous allocation of physical gifts . . . So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike 'all the others' I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. And when she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she leaned into it and performed a sedentary belly dance of rebuttal. And naturally I wondered what else she did like that, with the whole of her body." Pg 39
"Wildly directed violence, drastic degradation: this is all terribly strange." Pg 45
"How to explain this onset of candor?" (upon coming into a train station with the town named Coercion) Pg 73
"In 'hungry '33' one out of seven died in 1943 one out of five, and in 1942 one out of four. By 1948 it had gone back down again, systemwide, and your chances were not much worse than in the rough-and-ready SOviet Union . . . By 1948, flies had stopped dying like people, and people had gone back to dying like flies." Pg 75
"To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument. It wasn't even diplomacy by other means. It was currency, like tobacco, like bread." Pg 79
"And I didn't mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn't forgive the dead. The living were what bothered me." Pg. 85
"Cold isn't like that. Cold is cold , obviously, and wants all your heat. It is on you. It grips and frisks you for all your heat." Pg 89
"What was the treat, exactly? It was to get my first glimpse of Lev, and to see the way his frown softened into the flesh of his brow. It wouldn't happen the moment he set eyes on me. He would smile his strained - his stretched - smile, but the frown, the inverted chevron of care, would remain awhile and then fade, like a gauge measuring my power to reassure. And sometimes I feel that I was never closer to the crest than during those exchanges or transfusions - never more alive." Pg. 90
"And what was the norm? The norm was more blood than shit." Pg 91
"That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my 'proof,' framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. 'Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us he would have never given us religion.' But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear - if God is a Russian." Pg. 91
"He wasn't pretending that he was a Christian (no great matter either way, in camp). He was pretending that he was a doctor. And he wasn't - not yet. ALways the most difficult position. ANd it wouldn't have been so hard for him if he hadn't been kind, very kind, continuously moved by all he saw. For those early operations he had to feel his way into it, into the human body, with his knife. First, do no harm." Pg 98
"There was never any soap in the USSR." Pg. 112
"You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love - love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can't actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron." Pg. 122
"She had the bad dream, then the good dream, than the horrible delusion. Now she had reality, and the locked shape beneath me at once gave way to infuriated struggle. But I remembered how you did it." Pg 198
"Yes, I'm re-Russified. But what can you do? The rule is: This thing, like every other, isnot what it seems; and all you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks." Pg 207
"The rationale for slave labor, by the way, was as follows. I was clinically speechless for a week when I found out what it was. The rationale for slave labor? It helped keep the people terrorized, and, far more importantly, it made money. But it didn't make money, it never made money. It lost money. Everyone knew this except the General Secretary. From which one concludes that there was a conspiracy of silence. 'If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionvich.' But no one ever dared." Pg. 211
"Or what is atonement for? What does it do? In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004 is still the same offense.
Yes, yes. I know, I know. Russia's busy. There's that other feature of national life: permanent desperation. We will never have the luxury of confession and remorse. But what if it isn't a luxury? What if its a necessity, a dirt-poor necessity? The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. When it goes, you go.
If it was up to me, I'd demand a formal apology, in writing, for the tenth century; and for all the others in between. But no trembling relicts, made of smoke and flame, are going to rear up and wring their hands. No Russian God is going to weep and sing.
Say sorry, someone. Someone tell me they're sorry. Go on. Cry me the Volga, cry me the Yenisei, cry me the Moscow River." Pgs 211 - 212
"In my other hand I held a plastic bag. It didn't take very long to fill it - with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull. I was walking on a killing field. A grave churned up by bulldozers and excavators. Further around the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a shrine. Inside: icons, an apple, a wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance . . . The Jews have Yad Vashem and an air force. We have a prefab and a cankered apple. And a Russian cross." Pg.218
"Ever since I was born, you were righter. My righter of wrongs. You towered like a god - you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers. And so it will always be. Lev" Pg 235
Books Amis recommends on the Gulag:
- Black Earth: Russia After the Fall - Andrew Meier
- Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia - Orlando Fige
- Stalin: The court of the Red Tsar - Sebag Montefiore
- Ester and Ruzya: How my Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace - Masha Gessen
- Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag - Janusz Bardach
- Man is Wolf to Man - Bardach
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Book 67
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