House of Meetings Read Online Free

Razumov, more than once (as the dreadful dilemma solidifies around him), and very reasonably, I think. I am not a character in a novel either. Like many millions of others, I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities.
    But life was easy in 1956.

3.
    The War Between the Brutes and the Bitches
    M y brother Lev came to Norlag in February 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches. He came at night. I recognized him instantly, in a crowd and at a distance, because a sibling, Venus, far more tellingly than a child, displaces a fixed amount of air. A child grows, while its parent remains static in space. With brothers it is always the same difference.
    I was having a smoke with Semyon and Johnreed on the roof of the cement works, and I saw Lev filing into the disinfection block, which stood foolishly exposed by its great battery of encaged lightbulbs. Forty minutes later he filed into the yard. He was naked but for the catsuit of thick white ointment they hosed you down with, for the purgation of small vermin; the caustic fire it generated on the surface of the skin did nothing to ease the galvanic shivering caused by thirty degrees of frost. He stumbled (he was nightblind), and went down on all fours, and the cold really took him: he looked like a hairless dog trying to shake itself dry. Then he got to his feet and stood there, holding something in his cupped hands—something precious. I kept back.
    This was the year when the tutelary powers lost their hold on the monopoly of violence. It was a time of spasm savagery, with brute going at bitch and bitch going at brute. The factions had, at their disposal, a toolshop each, and this set the tone of their encounters: warm work with the spanner and the pliers, the handspike and the crowbar, vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chiselings. Even as Lev jogged across the yard to the infirmary, there came through the mist the ear-hurting screams from the entrance to the toy factory, where two brutes (we later learned) were being castrated by a gang of bitches armed with whipsaws, in retaliation for a blinding earlier that day.
    The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil war, because the brutes and the bitches were, alike, urkas. A social substratum of hereditary criminals, the urkas had been in existence for centuries—but invisibly. They were fugitive in both senses: on the run, and quick to disappear. Outside in the land of freedom you would glimpse them rarely, and with callow wonder, as a child glimpses the half-hidden figures in the wings at a circus or a fairground: a world of Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, of monstrous tattoos and scarifications, a world of coded chaos. You could
hear
them, too, sometimes: in a Moscow backstreet it could stop you dead—the urka whistle, scandalously shrill (and involving, you felt sure, indecent use of the tongue). On the outside, the urkas were a spectral underclass. In the camps, of course, they formed a conspicuous and vociferous elite. But now they were at war.
    This was how power was distributed in our animal farm. At the top were the
pigs
—the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the
urkas:
designated as “socially friendly elements,” they had the status of trusties who, moreover, did no work. Beneath the urkas were the
snakes
—the informers, the one-in-tens—and beneath the snakes were the
leeches,
bourgeois fraudsters (counterfeiters and embezzlers and the like). Close to the bottom of the pyramid came the
fascists,
the counters, the fifty-eighters, the enemies of the people, the politicals. Then you got the
locusts,
the juveniles, the little calibans: by-blows of revolution, displacement, and terror, they were the feral orphans of the Soviet experiment. Without their nonsensical laws and protocols, the urkas would have been just like the locusts, only