House of Meetings Read online

  “Guess what happened to me,” he said.

  I said, patiently, You got arrested.

  “No. Well, yes. But no. I got married.”

  Congratulations, I said. So you finally knocked up little Ada. Or was it little Olga?

  He didn’t answer. Look at the eyes now—the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself. This was clearly a great coup of love he had brought off: a grand slam of love. Has it ever happened to you, Venus? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you’re going to remember that moment for the rest of your life. Registering an impressive contraction of the heart, I said,

  Not Zoya.

  He nodded. “Zoya.”…You little cunt, I said. And I wheeled away from him into the yard.

  After a time, as I staggered along, buckling and straightening, shaking my head, scratching my hair, I felt him settling into step beside me.

  “I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. I’m so sorry.”

  No you’re not. I turned. And with an older brother’s grooved cruelty (spinning it out for at least three syllables), I said, You?

  We sucked up breath and looked out into the sector. And saw what? In the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand, a team of locusts twirling an old shiteater into the compost heap, and, finally, a leech who, with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right-angles (scurvy), was nonetheless making a serious attempt to eat his shoe.

  I whispered it: Lev and Zoya got married. If I can survive that, then I’ll never die.

  “No, brother, you’ll never die.”

  Sighing heroically, I added in a clear voice,

  And you can survive this. And now you’ll have to.

  4.

  Zoya

  When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit. So what am I? You have consumed your share of Russian novels: every time a new character appears, there is a chapter break and you are suddenly reading about his grandparents. This too is a digression. And its import is sexual. So do yourself a favor, and go and get the framed photograph on my desk and prop it up in front of you as you read. I don’t want you thinking about the way I am now. I want you thinking about that twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who is throwing his hat into the air on Victory Day.

  Listen. In Russia, after the war, there was a shortage of everything, including bread. There was, in fact, a famine in Russia, after the war, and two more million died. There was also a shortage of men. Well, there was a shortage of women too (and of children, and of old people), but the shortage of men was so extreme that Russia never recovered from it: the disparity, today, is ten million. So it was a corruptingly good time to be male in Russia, after the war, particularly if you were a handsome (and wounded) frontliner, as I was, returning to the great well of gratitude and relief, and even more particularly if, as I was, you were corrupt already. My dealings with women, I concede, were ruthless and shameless and faithless, and solipsistic to the point of malevolence. My behavior is perhaps easily explained: in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany.

  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.

  There is a further mitigating circumstance: namely the Second World War, and four years on the dirtiest front of the dirtiest fight in history. Don’t apply zero tolerance—a policy that calls for zero thought. I ask you not to turn your face away. I paid a price, as I said, and I have work, specific work, ahead of me to pay it fully. I have work to do and I will do it. I know I will. So Venus, I ask you to read on, merely noting, for now, the formation of a certain kind of masculine nature. A bashful and bookish youth, finding his feet in the 1930s (a time of catastrophe and pan-terror but also, if you please, a time of watchful prudishness from above), I lost my virginity to a Silesian housewife, in a roadside ditch, after a ten-minute chase. No. It was not the most auspicious of awakenings. I will add, in a pedagogic spirit, that the weaponization of the phallus, in victory, is an ancient fact, and one we saw remanifested on a vast scale, in Europe, in 1999. On my front, in 1945, many, many women were murdered as well as raped. I did no killing of women. Not then.

  I am about to describe an unusually attractive young girl, and experience tells me that you won’t like it, because that’s what you are too. I’m sure you think you’ve evolved out of it—out of invidiousness; but evolution is not the work of an afternoon. And in my experience an attractive woman doesn’t want to hear about some other attractive woman. It is the more problematic, perhaps, in that you will feel a protective pang for your mother, as is only right. So I invite you to put yourself in the place of one of Zoya’s female contemporaries. She was nineteen, and, from the outset, her reputation was frankly terrible. You will perk up at that. And yet the other girls took an exceptionalist view of Zoya. They instinctively indulged her, as a vanguard figure—l’esprit fort. She lived more than they did, but she also suffered more than they did; and she showed them possibilities.

  It used to be said that Moscow was the biggest village in Russia. On the outskirts, in winter, there were little paths connecting each house with tram stops and food stores (Milk, said the sign), and everyone shuffled around like rustics in their short sheepskin coats, and you expected mammoths and icebergs. But that’s a memory from childhood (no milk today). It changed: a primitive entanglement in which various foundries and blast furnaces and gasworks and tanneries had been planked down among the cottages and cobblestones. We had a village within the village (the district in the southeast known as the Elbow), and when Zoya walked into it, in January 1946, she was like a rebuke to the prevailing conditions, the absence of food and fuel, the absence of books, clothes, glass, lightbulbs, candles, matches, paper, rubber, toothpaste, string, salt, soap. No, more: she was like an act of civil disobedience. She was recklessly conspicuous, Zoya, and Jewish—a natural target for denunciation and arrest. Because that’s how resentments and jealousies were resolved in my country, for hundreds of years. That’s how a “love triangle” could be wonderfully simplified. An anonymous phone call, or an unsigned letter, to the secret police. You kept expecting it, but there she was, every day, not in camp or in prison but on the street, with the same smile, the same walk.

  And I surprised myself: I, the heroic rapist, with the medals and the yellow badge. My first thought was not the first thought I was used to—some variant of When can I wrench her clothes off? No. It was this (and the sentence came to me unbidden and fully formed): How many poets are going to kill themselves because of you? Zoya was not an acquired taste. Her face was original (more Turkic than Jewish, the nose pointing down, not out, the mouth improbably broad whenever she laughed or wept), but her figure was a platitude—tall and ample and also wasp-waisted. Every male was condemned to receive its message. You felt it down the length of your spine. We all got it, from the street draggle-tai
l who pleaded to carry her books and hold her hand, right the way up to our pale and ancient postman who, each morning, stopped and stared at her with his mouth unevenly agape and one eye shut, as if over a gunsight.

  Perhaps the single most unbelievably wonderful thing about her was that she had her own place: an attic the size of a parking bay, two floors up from her grandmother, but with its own stairs and its own front door. A nineteen-year-old girl, in Moscow, who had her own room: the equivalent, Venus, in Chicago, would be a nineteen-year-old girl who had her own yacht. You could see her going in there at night, with a man; you could see her coming out of there, with a man, in the morning. And there was something else. You won’t believe this, but under the circumstances I can’t omit it. One of the more malarial rumors attached to her was that, before each liaison, she went through some kind of Hasidic ablution that guarded her from pregnancy. This, then, was her preferred approach to the Jewish business of killing Christian babies. There were of course no contraceptives in Russia in 1946; and, as your prospective lovers monotonously reminded you, the penalty for abortion (quite mild, considering) was two years in jail.

  We know quite a lot about the consequences of rape—for the raped. Understandably little sleep has been lost over the consequences of rape for the rapist. The peculiar resonance of his postcoital tristesse, for example; no animal is ever sadder than the rapist…As for the longer-term effects, what they were for me I now came to understand. 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, and it would have been my style to atomize them: to do what Marvell did to the coy mistress (even her breasts, remember, were to be considered separately), to carve her up on the marble slab, each bit pierced by a flagpin, and bearing a price. That’s the way my mind went at it. 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. When she sneezed—you felt that absolutely anything might happen. 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. We were neighbors, and also colleagues at the Tech, the Institute for Systems, where she studied in the Jewish stream. I was twenty-five and she was nineteen. And Lev, for Christ’s sake, was still at school.

  She used to run a regular errand for her mother, old Ester, bringing a few edible odds and ends for the scrofulous rabbi who lay endlessly praying and dying in the basement beneath our flat. The only way to get there was through the ground floor and down the spiral staircase outside our kitchen. These iron steps were often sheathed in ice, and after a mishap or two she reluctantly fell in with my soldierly insistence that I should lead her there by the hand. She was actually not at all steady on her feet, and she knew it; much later, Lev would learn that she lacked certain spatial wirings, certain readinesses, because, as a child, she had never learned how to crawl…At the door to the basement she would always give me a smile of gratitude, and I always wondered what the force was, the force preventing me from throwing my arms around her, or even meeting her eye, but the force was there, and it was a strong force. “Call my name when you want to come back,” I said. But she never did. From the look of her, sometimes, I thought she scaled those steps on her hands and knees. Then one night I heard her voice, lost and hoarse, calling my name. I went out and took her surprisingly warm hand in mine.

  Jesus, I said at the top. I thought I was going to take a toss.

  She smiled greedily and said, “You’d have to be a bloody mountain goat to get up there.”

  We laughed. And I was lost.

  Yes, Venus, at that point my desperate fascination became fulminant love; and it came on me like an honor. I had all the troubadour symptoms: not eating, not sleeping, and sighing with every other breath. Do you remember Montague, the father, in Romeo and Juliet—“Away from light steals home my heavy son”? That’s what I was, heavy, incredibly heavy. It is the heaviness you feel when, after an hour-long fight for your life in an anarchic sea, you come out of the surf, drop to the sand, and feel the massive pull of the center of the earth. Every morning I would wonder how the bed could bear my weight. I wrote poems. I walked out at night. I liked standing in the shadows across the street from her house, in the rain, in the sleet, or (this was best) in an electric storm. When the blind was up you knew that you would still be there to watch her close it.

  I once saw a man leaning against the window frame, his armpits insolently singleted, his chin upraised. I was jealous, and all that, but I was also sharply aroused. That’s right. I could sulk and pine, but my obsession was dependably and gothically carnal. I further confess that, while not really believing it, I was much taken with the story about the prophylactic ablution. I was used to a certain pattern—half-clothed fumblings, messy intercrural compromises, and snuffling aftermaths; and this would be happening on stairwells, in alleys and bombsites—or on a carpet or against a table, with an extended family heaped up on the other side of a locked door. Oral “relief,” lasting half a minute, was the sex act of choice and necessity. And I offer this final observation (very vulgar, but not entirely gratuitous) in a pedagogic spirit, because it shows that even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socioeconomic reality. In the postwar years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.

  Absent that little flourish of enthusiasm, and the sexual atmosphere was one of coercion: my humorless insistence, their faltering submission. So in Zoya’s turret, under its witchy, candlesnuffer apex, there awaited something more futuristic than female consent or even female abandonment. I mean female lust.

  “Do you know what you look like when you’re with her?”

  Lev said this, I thought, with dissimulated ill will: I had just declined his offer of a game of chess with an abstracted, frivolity-imputing wave of the hand. So I readied myself.

  “I’ll tell you what you look like. If you want.”

  He was more advanced, and much busier, than I was, at seventeen, in the matter of girls. And so were his friends. In addition, the shortage of housing was slightly eased by the shortage of people; there was just a little more space and air—though I was never sure how far Lev got, in those secluded intervals, with his various Adas and Olgas…The tempo of the age was speeding up, or was trying to. You can’t see yourself in history, but that’s where you are, in history; and, after World War I, revolution, terror, famine, civil war, terror-famine, more terror, World War II, and more famine, there was a feeling that things could not but change. Universal dissatisfaction took the following form: everyone everywhere complained about everything. We all sensed that reality would change. But the state sensed our sensing it, and reality would not change.

  All right, I said. What do I look like?

  He had a certain expression, sometimes, that I knew, that I feared—a sharpened focus, an amusement with something savage in it.

  “You look like Vronsky when he starts shadowing Anna. ‘Like an intelligent dog that knows it’s done wrong.’”

  I transcribe Lev’s speech in the normal way, but in fact he spoke with a stutter. And a stutter is something that prose cannot duplicate. To write “d-d-d-dog” is perfunctory to the point of insult. And stuttering is in any case a poor word for what used to happen to Lev. It was more like a sudden inability to speak—or even to breathe. First, the tensing, the momentary glint of self-hatred, then the little nose went up and the fight began. My brother looked far from his best at such moments, with his head stretched back and his nostrils staring at you like a pair of importunate eyes. When people stutter, you just sit through it and watch. You can’t just turn away. And, with Lev, I always wanted to know what he was going to say. Even when he was a child, before the stutter came, I alw
ays wanted to know what he was going to say.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said, poking out his cigarette. “And anyway. She’s already got a boyfriend.”

  I said, I know she has. And I’m waiting him out.

  “…Yup, that’s it,” he concluded with satisfaction (as if dusting his palms). “That’s what you look like. You look like a clever dog that knows it’s about to be thrashed.”

  My brother started smoking early. He started drinking early too, and having girlfriends early. Increasingly, people do everything early in Russia. Because there isn’t much time.

  5.

  Among the Shiteaters

  People always talked about the strange light in a shiteater’s eyes—that shiteater glitter. It disturbed me very much when I identified the strange light as flirtatious and peculiarly feminine. Like the moist brightness in the eye of an unpredictable aunt who has drunk too much at Easter, and is about to obey an impulse she knows to be ill-advised—a kiss, a squeeze, a pinch…Furtive yet conspiratorial, that shiteater glitter had something to say and something to ask. I have crossed a line, it said. And it asked: Why don’t you cross it too?

  We stood among them, the shiteaters, Lev and I, outside the bolted door of the kitchens, in darkness and fine rain. The fine rain, not even falling, but floating, like the gnats and midges of July. He was coming to the end of his first day, and I had chosen this place for a conversation we very much needed to have. The shiteaters loomed and swayed beneath the lone lightbulb, waiting for the last buckets to be tipped out of the back window. By now the pigs seldom came by, seldom bothered them, because no amount of beating could keep a shiteater from the slops. There seemed to be very little physical pain—where they lived, beyond the line they had crossed.