bind, now, just as Joseph Vissarionovich felt himself to be with the Jews in 1948: “I can’t swallow them, and I can’t spit them out.” All he could do was chew.
Early on in the siege of the Moscow theater—Dubrovka—in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere—in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians. *2 You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading
The New York Times,
even I found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.
Of course there are plans to storm the school. To say
plans
risks extravagance, perhaps, but somehow or other the school will be stormed. This we know, because the Spetsnaz, our elite special forces, are buying bullets from the locals, who are surging around outside with their muskets and flintlocks.
Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up
on purpose
. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain.
And life isn’t hard enough, not for you…I’m thinking of your first wave of boyfriends—eight or nine years ago. The shat-myself look they all favored, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump; and the eviscerated trainers. That’s a prison style: no belt or laces—lest you hang yourself with them. Looking at those boys, with their sheared heads, their notched noses and scarified ears, I felt myself back in Norlag. Is this the invention of pain? Or a little reenactment of the pains of the past? The past has a weight. And the past is heavy.
I’m not for a moment saying that your anorexia was in any sense
voulu
. The force of the thing took all my courage from me, and your mother and I sobbed when we saw the CCTV tape of your dark form, like a knobbly walking stick, doing push-ups beside your hospital bed in the middle of the night. I will just add that when you went to the other place, the one called the Manor, and I saw a hundred of you through the wire around the car park, it was impossible not to think of another iconic twentieth-century scene.
Forgive me. And anyway it’s not just the young. There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.
In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.
Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.
The train rocks and knocks across the simplified landforms of the tundra: Russia’s great white page, awaiting the characters and sentences of history. No hills and valleys, just bumps and dips. Here, topographical variation is the work of man: gigantic gougings and scourings, and pyramids of slag. If you saw a mountain, now, a plateau, a cliff, it would loom like a planet. There is a hollow hill in Predposylov that is called a mountain, Mount Schweinsteiger, named after the
Early on in the siege of the Moscow theater—Dubrovka—in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere—in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians. *2 You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading
The New York Times,
even I found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.
Of course there are plans to storm the school. To say
plans
risks extravagance, perhaps, but somehow or other the school will be stormed. This we know, because the Spetsnaz, our elite special forces, are buying bullets from the locals, who are surging around outside with their muskets and flintlocks.
Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up
on purpose
. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain.
And life isn’t hard enough, not for you…I’m thinking of your first wave of boyfriends—eight or nine years ago. The shat-myself look they all favored, with the loose jeans sagging off the rump; and the eviscerated trainers. That’s a prison style: no belt or laces—lest you hang yourself with them. Looking at those boys, with their sheared heads, their notched noses and scarified ears, I felt myself back in Norlag. Is this the invention of pain? Or a little reenactment of the pains of the past? The past has a weight. And the past is heavy.
I’m not for a moment saying that your anorexia was in any sense
voulu
. The force of the thing took all my courage from me, and your mother and I sobbed when we saw the CCTV tape of your dark form, like a knobbly walking stick, doing push-ups beside your hospital bed in the middle of the night. I will just add that when you went to the other place, the one called the Manor, and I saw a hundred of you through the wire around the car park, it was impossible not to think of another iconic twentieth-century scene.
Forgive me. And anyway it’s not just the young. There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.
In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.
Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.
The train rocks and knocks across the simplified landforms of the tundra: Russia’s great white page, awaiting the characters and sentences of history. No hills and valleys, just bumps and dips. Here, topographical variation is the work of man: gigantic gougings and scourings, and pyramids of slag. If you saw a mountain, now, a plateau, a cliff, it would loom like a planet. There is a hollow hill in Predposylov that is called a mountain, Mount Schweinsteiger, named after the
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