House of Meetings

1. The Yenisei, September 1, 2004

My little brother came to camp in 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches…

Now that wouldn’t be a bad opening sentence for the narrative proper, and I am impatient to write it. But not yet. “Not yet, not yet, my precious!” This is what the poet Auden used to say to the lyrics, the sprawling epistles, that seemed to be lobbying him for premature birth. It is too early, now, for the war between the brutes and the bitches. There will be war in these pages, inevitably: I fought in fifteen battles, and, in the seventh, I was almost castrated by a secondary missile (a three-pound iron bolt), which lodged itself in my inner thigh. When you get a wound as bad as that, for the first hour you don’t know whether you’re a man or a woman (or whether you’re old or young, or who your father was or what your name is). Even so, an inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell — because this is a love story. All right, Russian love. But still love.

The love story is triangular in shape, and the triangle is not equilateral. I sometimes like to think that the triangle is isosceles: it certainly comes to a very sharp point. Let’s be honest, though, and admit that the triangle remains brutally scalene. I trust, my dear, that you have a dictionary nearby? You never needed much encouragement in your respect for dictionaries. Scalene, from the Greek, skalenos: unequal.

It’s a love story. So of course I must begin with the House of Meetings.

I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain — a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of — I don’t know — thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer. But that’s still a very long ride. The brochure describes the cruise as “a journey to the destination of a lifetime”—a phrase that carries a somewhat unwelcome resonance. Bear in mind, please, that I was born in 1919.

Unlike almost everywhere else, over here, the Georgi Zhukov is neither one thing nor the other: neither futuristically plutocratic nor futuristically stark. It is a picture of elderly, practically tsarist Komfortismus. Below the waterline, where the staff and crew slumber and carouse, the ship is of course a fetid ruin — but look at the dining room, with its honey-gold drapes, its brothelly red velvets. And our load is light. I have a four-berth cabin all to myself. The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on…Moscow is impressive — grimly fantastic in its pelf. And Petersburg, too, no doubt, after its billion-dollar birthday: a tercentenary for the slave-built city “stolen from the sea.” It’s everywhere else that is now below the waterline.

My peripheral vision is ringed by crouching waiters, ready to pounce. There are two reasons for this. First, we have reached the penultimate day of our voyage, and by now it is massively established, aboard the Georgi Zhukov, that I am a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man — huge and shaggy, my hair not the downy white of the unprotesting dotard but a jagged and bitter gray. They also know, by now, that I am a psychotic overtipper. I don’t know why. I was from the start, I suppose, a twenty-percenter rather than a ten, and it’s climbed steadily since; but this is ridiculous. I always had a lot of spare cash, even in the USSR. But now I’m rich. For the record (and this is my record), just one patent, but with wide applications: a mechanism that significantly improves the “give” of prosthetic extremities…So all the waiters know that if they survive my cloacal frenzies, then a competence awaits them at the end of every meal. Propped up before me, a book of poems. Not Mikhail Lermontov or Marina Tsvetaeva. Samuel Coleridge. The bookmark I use is a plump envelope with a long letter in it. It’s been in my possession for twenty-two years. An old Russian, coming home, must have his significant keepsake — his deus ex machina. I haven’t read the letter yet, but I will. I will, if it’s the last thing I do.

Yes, yes, I know — the old shouldn’t swear. You and your mother were quite right to roll your eyes at it. It is indeed a charmless and pitiful spectacle, the effing and blinding of an ancient mouth, the teeth false or dropped, the lips licked half away. 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. All those who have truly grieved know the relief it eventually brings, to dip your head and, for hour upon hour, to weep and swear…Christ, look at my hands. The size of cheese-boards, no, cheeses, whole cheeses, with their pocks and ripples, their spread, their verdigris. I have hurt many men and women with these hands.

On August 29 we crossed the Arctic Circle, and there was a very comprehensive celebration aboard the Georgi Zhukov. An accordion, a violin, a much-bejeweled guitar, girls in wenchy blouses, a jodhpured drunk who tried to fake the Cossack dance and kept falling off his stool. I now have a hangover which, two days later, is still getting steadily worse. And at my age, in the “high” eighties, as they now say (in preference to the “late,” with its unfortunate connotations), there just isn’t room for a hangover. Dear oh dear…Oh dear oh dear oh dear. I didn’t think I was still capable of polluting myself quite so thoroughly. Worse, I succumbed. You know very well what I mean. I joined in all the toasts (a miniature dumpster had been provided for us to smash our glasses into), and I sang all the songs; I wept for Russia, and staunched my tears on her flag. I talked a very great deal about camp — about Norlag, about Predposylov. Around dawn, I started physically preventing certain people from leaving the bar. Later on I did a fair amount of damage to my cabin and had to be moved the next day, in a blizzard of swearwords and twenty-dollar bills.

Georgi Zhukov, General Zhukov, Marshal Zhukov: I served in one of his armies (he commanded a whole front) in 1944 and 1945. He also played a part in saving my life — eight years later, in the summer of 1953. Georgi Zhukov was the man who won the Second World War.

Our ship groans, as if shouldering yet more burdens and cares. I like this sound. But when the doors to the galley blat open I hear the music from the boombox (four beats to the bar, with some seventeen-year-old yelling about self-discovery), and it comes to my ears as pain. Naturally, at a single flicker of my eyelid, the waiters take the kitchen by storm. When you are old, noise comes to you as pain. Cold comes to you as pain. When I go up on deck tonight, which I will do, I expect the wet snow to come to me as pain. It wasn’t like that when I was young. The wake-up: that hurt, and went on hurting more and more. But the cold didn’t hurt. By the way, try crying and swearing above the Arctic Circle, in winter. All your tears will freeze fast, and even your obscenities will turn to droplets of ice and tinkle to your feet. It weakened us, it profoundly undermined us, but it didn’t come to us as pain. It answered something. It was like a searchlight playing over the universe of our hate.

Now the boombox has been supplanted by a radio. I hold up a hand. This is permitted. Today saw the beginning of the siege of Middle School Number One, in North Ossetia. Some of the children happened to be watching when the gunmen and gunwomen came over the railway track in their black balaclavas — and they laughed and pointed, thinking it was a game or an exercise. Then the van pulled up and out he climbed, the killer with the enormous orange beard: “Russians, Russians, don’t be afraid. Come. Come…” The authorities are saying three or four hundred, but in fact there are well over a thousand hostages — children, parents, teachers. And why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for something close to the worst possible outcome? Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for the phenomenon understood by all the world — Russian heavy-handedness? For what reason are our hands so heavy? What weighs them down?

Another cup of coffee, another cigarette, and I’ll go up on deck. The Siberian expanse, the olive-green immensity — it would frighten you, I think; but it makes Russians feel important. The mass of the land, of the country, the size of the stake in the planet: it is this that haunts us, and it is this that overthrows the sanity of the state…We are cruising north, but downriver. Which feels anomalous. Up on deck, it’s as if the ship is motionless and the facing riverbanks are on the move. We are still; the riverbanks bob and undulate. You are borne forward by a power that is traveling the other way. You have a sense, too, that you are looming up over the shoulder of the world and heading toward an infinite waterfall. Here be monsters.

My eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Eastern. I am back in the bosom of a vast slum family. Now it has to fend for itself. All the money has been divided up between the felons and the state.

It is curious. To type the word “Kansas” still seems reassuringly banal. And to type the word “Krasnoyarsk” still seems wholly grotesque. I could of course type “K—,” like a writer from another age. “He journeyed to M—, the capital of R—.” But you’re a big girl now. “Moscow,” “Russia”: nothing you haven’t seen before. My mother tongue — I find I want to use it as little as possible. If Russia is going, then Russian is already gone. We were very late, you see, to develop a language of feeling; the process was arrested after barely a century, and now all the implied associations and resonances are lost. I must just say that it does feel consistently euphemistic — telling my story in English, and in old-style English English, what’s more. My story would be even worse in Russian. For it is truly a tale of gutturals and nasals and whistling sibilants.

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 a humor of squalor and cynicism, the tendency to speak most passionately when being most insincere, and the thirst for 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.

Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It’s not the USSR I don’t like. What I don’t like is the northern Eurasian plain. I don’t like the “directed democracy,” and I don’t like Soviet power, and I don’t like the tsars, and I don’t like the Mongol overlords, and I don’t like the theocratic dynasts of old Moscow and old Kiev. I don’t like the multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire. I don’t like the northern Eurasian plain.

Please indulge the slight eccentricity in my use of dialogue. I’m not being Russian. I’m being “English.” I feel it’s bad form to quote oneself. Put it that way.

Yes, so far as the individual is concerned, Venus, it may very well be true that character is destiny. And the other way around. But on the larger scale character means nothing. On the larger scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster. When you look into it, when you look into the Russian case, you feel the stirrings of a massive force, a force not only blind but altogether insentient, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

There it is in front of me on the screen of my computer, the graph with its two crinkly lines intersecting, one pink, one blue. The birth rate, the death rate. They call it the Russian cross.

I was there when my country started to die: the night of July 31, 1956, in the House of Meetings, just above the sixty-ninth parallel.

2. House of Meetings

It was with some ceremony, I remember, that I showed my younger brother the place where he would entertain his bride. I say “bride.” They’d been married for eight years. But this would be their first night together as husband and wife…You head north from the zona, and after half a mile you strike off to the left and climb the steep little lane and the implausible flight of old stone steps, and there it is: beyond, on the slope of Mount Schweinsteiger, the two-story chalet called the House of Meetings, and, to the side, its envied annex, a lone log cabin like an outpost of utter freedom.

Just the one room, of course: the narrow cot with its furry undersheet and dead-weight gray blanket, the water barrel with the tin mug chained to it, the spotless slops-bucket with its tactful wooden lid. And then the chair (armless, backless), and the waiting supper tray — two fist-sized lumps of bread, a whole herring (slightly green around the edges), and the big jug of cold broth with at least four or five beads of fat set into its surface. Many hours had gone into this, and many hands.

Lev whistled.

I said, Well, kid, we’ve come a long way. Look.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

And I produced from my pocket the squat thermos of vodka, the six cigarettes (rolled out of the state newspaper), and the two candles.

Maybe he was still recovering from the power-hose and the shearer — there were droplets of sweat on his upper lip. But then he gave me the look I knew well: the mirthless rictus, with the two inverted chevrons in the middle of his brow. This I took, with considerable confidence, to be an expression of sexual doubt. Sexual doubt — the exclusively male burden. Tell me, my dear: what is it there for? The utilitarian answer, I suppose, would be that it’s meant to stop us from reproducing if we’re weak and sickly or just too old. Perhaps, also (this would have been at the planning stage of the masculine idea), it was felt that the occasional fiasco, or the fiasco as an ever-present possibility, might help to keep men honest. This would have been at the planning stage.

Lev, my boy? I said. You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. And then I told him, with all due diffidence, not to expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.

He said, “I don’t think I do expect too much.”

We embraced. As I ducked out of the shed and straightened up, I saw something I hadn’t noticed, on the windowsill — and much magnified, now, by a lenslike swelling in the glass. It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wildflower floated in it, overflowed it — an amorous burgundy. I remember thinking that it looked like an experiment on the male idea. A poetic experiment, perhaps, but still an experiment.

The guard stepped forward and gestured with his firearm: I was to precede him down the path. Coming the other way and also under escort was my sister-in-law. That walk of hers, that famous tottering swagger — it set a world in motion.

By now the five-week Arctic summer was under way. It was as if nature woke up in July and realized how badly she had neglected her guests; and then of course she completely overdid it. There was something gushing and hysterical in the show she put on: the sun with its dial turned up, and staring, in constant attendance; the red carpet of wildflowers, the colors lush but sharply irritant, making the eyes itch; and the thrilled mosquitoes, the size of hummingbirds. I walked on, under a hairnet of midges, of gnats and no-see-ums. There was, I remember, an enormous glinting gray cloud overhead; its leading edge had a chewed look, and was about to shred or grate itself into rain.

The night of July 31, 1956: the night of crunch and crux. How did I spend it?

First, Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. In Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop, this was how it went: trying not to laugh, Krzysztov served you a cup of hot black muck; and, trying not to laugh, you drank it. Krzysztov told me, inter alia, that there was going to be a lecture in the mess hall at eight o’clock — on Iran. Lectures on foreign countries, particularly contiguous foreign countries, were always very popular (“The Maoris of New Zealand” wouldn’t draw much of a crowd, but anything on Finland or Mongolia would be packed). This was because a description of life across the border gave flesh to fantasies of escape. The men sat there glazedly, as if watching an exotic dancer. For analagous reasons, by far the most successful play they ever staged was a double bill, two obscure and anonymous fragments called “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger.” It was so popular that they revived it almost monthly; and Lev and I always fought our way in, along with everybody else. Ah, the cult of “Three Sluggards” and “Kedril the Gorger”…But it was my idea, that night, to avoid stimulation. Instead I sought a mild depressant. So I paid a call on Tanya.

Our camp had been coeducational since 1953, when the dividing wall came down, and many of us now had ladyfriends. We dreamed up a wide variety of generic names for them (as they did for us: “my heart-throb,” “my sugar daddy,” “my Tristan,” “my Daphnis”), and you could tell a lot about a man by the way he referred to his girl. “My Eve,” “my goddess,” or indeed “my wife” indicated a romantic; less fastidious types used every possible synonym for copulation, plus every possible synonym for the vulva. But although there were real liaisons (pregnancies, abortions, even marriages, even divorces), ninety percent of them, I would guess, were wholly platonic. I know mine was. Tanya was a factory girl, and her crime was not political. She was a “three-timer.” Three times she had done it: shown up twenty minutes late for work. Less tenderly than it may at first seem, I called her “my Dulcinea”: like Quixote’s mistress, she was largely a project of the imagination.

The love of one prisoner for another could be a thing of great purity. There were in fact enormous quantities of thwarted love, of trapped love, in the slave archipelago. Avowals, betrothals, hands clasped through the wire. Once, at a transit camp, I saw a spontaneous mass wedding (with priest) of scores of perfect strangers, who were then resegregated and marched off in opposite directions…My thing with Tanya was earthbound and workaday. I had simply discovered that having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all.

That night our tryst was not a success. It remained axiomatic, in camp, that the women were tougher and more durable than the men. They pitied us and mothered us. You too would have pitied us and mothered us. Our filth, our rags, our drift into hopeless self-neglect…They were stronger; but the price they paid was the evaporation of all their feminine essence, every last drop of their dew. “I am both a cow and a bull,” wrote the encamped poetess, “A woman and a man.” No, my dear, you are neither. The hormones were no longer being produced. It was the same for us. We were all heading toward neither.

Usually I could conjure with Tanya, and re-create the little darling she must surely have been in freedom. But that night, as we sat for an hour on the tree stumps in the clearing behind the infirmary, all I could manage was a kind of callous fascination. It was her mouth. Her mouth resembled one of the etched hieroglyphs you see on the walls of the cell of the prototypical solitary, in cartoons, in the illustrations to nineteenth-century novels about epic confinements: a horizontal line measured off with six notched verticals, representing yet another week of your time. The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread. Oh yes: and the sandpapery grain of the flushed flesh of her cheeks, in the white dusk, made me long for the rind of an orange. A week later they shipped her out. She was your age. She was twenty-four.

Midnight came and went. I turned in. When you come to camp, the seven deadly sins strike up a new configuration. Your mainstays in freedom, pride and avarice, are instantly jettisoned, to be replaced, as rampant obsessions, sparkling with unsuspected delights, by the two you never used to think about: gluttony and sloth. As my mind patrolled the House of Meetings, where Lev lay with a woman who looked like a woman, I lay alone with the other three — envy, lust, and anger.

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.

Life was easy, in 1956. There was the dirt and the cold, the hunger and the hate; but life was easy. Joseph Vissarionovich was dead, Beria had fallen, and Nikita Sergeyevich had made the Secret Speech.^*1 The Secret Speech caused a planetary sensation. It was “the first time” a Russian leader had ever acknowledged the transgressions of the state. It was the first time. It was the last time too, more or less; but we’ll come to that.

Joseph Vissarionovich: I knew his face better than I knew my own mother’s. The mustachioed smile of a recruiting sergeant (I want you) and then the yellowy, grudge-hoarding, mountain-dwelling eyes, gazing from the shadows of crag or crevice.

He wants you but you don’t want him. I use the “correct” form, Christian name and patronymic, Venus, to establish distance. For many years this distance did not exist. You must try hard to imagine it, the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odor, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.

In the end it is above all embarrassing to have been so intimately shaped by such a presence. By such a sky-filler and ocean-straddler as Joseph Vissarionovich. And I fought in the war he had with the other one: the one in Germany. These two leaders had certain things in common: shortness of stature, bad teeth, anti-Semitism. One had an unusually good memory; one was an hysterical but evidently compelling speaker, compelling, at any rate, to that nation at that time. And there was of course the strength of their will to power. Otherwise, they were both undistinguished men.

“I am not a character in a novel,” says Conrad’s 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

My 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 bigger. The locusts had no norms at all…Finally, right down there in the dust were the shiteaters, the goners, the wicks; they couldn’t work anymore, and they could no longer bear the pains of hunger, so they feebly brawled over the slops and the garbage. Like my brother, I was a “socially hostile element,” a political, a fascist. Needless to say, I was not a fascist. I was a Communist. And a Communist I remained until the early afternoon of August 1, 1956. There were also animals, real animals, in our animal farm. Dogs.

The urka civil war was a consequence of Moscow’s attempt to undermine urka power and urka idleness. Its policy was to promote the urkas still further: to give them, in exchange for certain duties, pay and privileges close to those of the janitoriat. The bitches were the urkas who wanted to stop being urkas and start being pigs; the brutes were the urkas who wanted to go on being urkas. It looked good for us at first, when the war broke out. Suddenly the urkas had something else to do with their inexhaustible free time — something other than torturing the fascists, their premier activity. But now the war between the brutes and the bitches was getting out of control. Having lost their monopoly of violence, the pigs applied yet more violence. There was a wildness and randomness in the air that was beginning to feel almost abstract.

Venus. Remember how disappointed you were by the crocodiles in the reptile house at the zoo — because “the lizards never moved”? Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis. Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after half a second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw. That was the war between the brutes and the bitches.

Now, when I talk, here and elsewhere, of Moscow and its so-called policies, I do so with the assurance of informed hindsight. But at the time we had no idea what was going on. We never had any idea what was going on.

Lev’s first day (he would spend most of it with the medics and the work-assigners) was also the monthly day of rest.

I came up behind him in the yard. He was sitting on a low stone wall where the well used to be, his knees pressed together, his shoulders sloped forward. He was cherishing his fractured spectacles, and trying to believe his eyes.

And what did he see? The thing that was hardest to grasp was the scale—the inordinate amount of space needed to contain it. In his line of sight were five thousand men (ten times that number lay to the sides, beyond, behind). When you got used to that, you had to come to terms with the evident fact that you were living in something like an army base, where the conscripts had been drawn from a direly indigent madhouse. Or a direly indigent hospice. In your nose and mouth was the humid breath of the camp, of Norlag, and, more distantly, the fresh cement of the brand-new Arctic city, the monumental denture of Predposylov. And finally you had to absorb and assent to the ceaseless agitation, the mad dance of the stick insects — the nervous fury of the zona.

I said, Don’t turn around, Dmitriko.

Never again would I call him that. It was not the time for diminutives. It never was the time…A camp administrator who allowed two family members to set eyes on each other, let alone meet and talk (let alone cohabit, for almost ten years), would be punished for criminal leniency. On the other hand we would not need to be masters of deception, I didn’t think, to avoid exposure. We were half-brothers with different surnames, and we were radically unalike. To be brief. My father, Valery, was a Cossack (duly de-Cossackized in 1920, when I was one). Lev’s father, Dmitri, was a well-to-do peasant, or kulak (duly de-kulakized in 1932, when Lev was three). The father’s genes predominated: I was six foot two, with thick black hair and orderly features, whereas Lev…

It seems that I had better describe him now, your step-uncle, to prepare the ground for the thunderclap that is barely a page away. There was something yokelish, indeed almost troglodytic, in the asymmetries of his face, the features thrown together inattentively, as if in the dark. Even his ears seemed to belong to two completely different people. Say whatever else you like about it, but my nose was unquestionably a nose, while Lev’s was a mere protuberance. And when you looked at him side-on, you thought, Is that his chin or his Adam’s apple? He was also, as a kid, short, meager, and sickly — a stuttering bedwetter in inch-thick glasses. All he had was his smile (in the mess of his face lived the teeth of a beautiful woman) and his rich blue eyes, the eyes of an intelligent. Definitely an intelligent.

I said — Don’t turn around. And when you do, show no pleasure in seeing your older brother.

He stood up; he walked away, then circled back into range. For a moment I found his faintly hooded, self-caressing expression impossible to read; it seemed, in the circumstances, simply alien. After the jail and the interrogation, after the transport, many new arrivals were already mad; and I feared my brother was already mad.

“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-tail 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 always 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.

Even within the stratum of the shiteaters, Venus, there were two echelons. There were some shiteaters that the other shiteaters looked down on. These were known as all-fours shiteaters…I relay these details, my dear, these details of awlings and chiselings, of educated, even cultivated men eating slops on their hands and knees, because I want you to think about their strangeness. Wildly directed violence, drastic degradation: this is all terribly strange.

“Why’s it so fucking dark around here,” he said.

It was a complaint, not a question. Lev, the swot geographer, knew why it was so dark around here.

“Yes yes,” he said. “This is the Arctic in February. The sun’ll come up in March. What do I do, brother? What do I do?”

I was ready for this. The majority of the fascists who got ten-year sentences in 1937–38 had been rearrested, in alphabetical order, and resentenced in 1947–48. And they all looked like Lev. Older, thinner, wilder — but they all looked like Lev, the rapidly blinking intelligent, with his hopeless shoes (vastly dissimilar, but each a dog’s dinner of frayed rope and car tire), his half a book, and his torn summer jacket. And always cherishing the fractured spectacles. Whereas the new fascists were men who had spent five years in the Red Army. For us the camp was just more war, with one startling difference. We had fought the fascists — the enemy. Then the Russian state, now fascist itself, told us that we were the fascists, and they were arresting us for it and enslaving us for it. Now we were the enemy, to be flung out over the shoulder of the world. I have noticed that you and your crowd have a high tolerance for self-pity in others, so I will add the following. What made this capsizal hard to forget was that my war wound throbbed in the cold from September to June. But I mustn’t be self-pitying. I mustn’t be the lachrymist. There are other things I mustn’t be — the tough guy, the martyr. And I mustn’t be indignant. Or earnest. That’s less difficult. Americans are earnest, Russians, when the mood is on them, are earnest. While I prefer the droller cultures, and the wizened ironists, to be found on the northwestern fringe of the Eurasian plain.

What do you do? I began. Oh we’ll come to that. But first — aren’t you going to say it?

“Say what?”

You know: “There must have been a mistake.” Or “If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionovich.”

“…Why the fuck would I say that? They arrest by quota. They do. I bet they do.”

Lev was right about that. The Terror, too, was driven by quota: this or that many people from this or that area and social group, at such and such a rate, quotas, norms, minimums.

“You know what’s happened,” he said. “You and I have been sold into slavery. All that fucking around with the interrogations and the confessions and the documents. That’s just the process of being sold into slavery. It sounds quite romantic, doesn’t it, being sold into slavery…”

He looked around. No, there was nothing romantic about Norlag, about Predposylov.

“I mean, you’d expect somewhere hot. Jesus.”

Lev was nineteen. And already he was seeing more than I saw (I had no head for politics, as will soon be evident). Looking back, now, I can recall my fever of fear when I realized that the younger brother saw more than the older. It happened over the chess board. I felt myself exposed to greater powers of combination, of permutation and penetration. And he always stood back from the general opinion, the general mood. Except when it happened to suit him, he never went along with anything. He always made his own calculation. He pushed out a rigid nether lip, slightly off center, lowered his gaze, and made the calculation.

And I asked him: Which prison?

“Butyrki.”

Butyrki’s great, isn’t it.

“Great. In my cell I had three Red professors, two composers, and one poet. Oh yeah — and one informer. I was proud to be there. Butyrki’s great.”

Great. How did it go? Before.

“The usual thing. Called out of class at the Tech. Quite polite. Then for a couple of weeks I had to go to the Kennel every other day and eat shit.”

A shiteater veered up at us from the darkness, and then stepped back with his blanketed forearm raised. I said,

What was the charge? Or didn’t they give you one.

“They gave me one.” He let out a soft snort and said, “Praising America.”

I knew this to be a crime, sure enough, and one with several subsections. Many recently arrived fascists had committed it — Praising American Democracy or Praising American Technique or Abasement Before America. Or alternatively Abasement Before the West. Not a few of our number had now seen something of the West; and even in ruins it abased us…There were scores of Americans in Norlag, including an American American. Come over here to participate in the Soviet experiment, he told the CP man who issued his passport that he was fully prepared to take the big cut in his standard of living. That same day he got the quarter—twenty-five years.

And were you praising America?

“No. I was praising The Americas. I was in a queue with Kitty and I was praising The Americas.”

Then we both did something we hadn’t been expecting to do for some time to come: we laughed — with our vapor forming and fleeing. I understood. “The Americas” was sibling code for Zoya. And it was a good name for her too, because it caught her walk. The spatial relationship between the two continents, Venus, has best been evoked by the exile Nabokov: two figures on a trapeze, in the big top, one beneath the other, and just coming out of the backswing. But Zoya’s walk also expressed it, embodied it, the giddy disjunction between north and south, and then the waist, as thin as Panama. Kitty was family, Lev’s full sibling, like Vadim, the other one.

And was Kitty dispraising The Americas?

“You know. A bit. Basically Zoya makes Kitty feel like a pencil. No. Like Chile. That’s what I told her. You’re jealous of The Americas because she makes you feel like Chile.”

I said, I thought Kitty was keen on Zoya.

“Kitty is riveted by Zoya. But she says she’ll destroy me. Not on purpose. But that’s what will happen in the end.”

I would remember this. Right from the start I had fingered Zoya for a decimator of the poets, and a poet (Acmeist, Mandelstamian) was what Lev, at this stage, was in some sense hoping to be…There came a clatter from within and the sound of voices. The shiteaters looked up, with thin mouths and smiling eyes.

“Chile,” Lev said suddenly. “You’d have to be an island to be less landlocked than Chile.”

He sniffed, wiped his nose, and straightened his shoulders. His upper lip, temporarily beaklike, and his wary glance: he looked like what he was — an adolescent, fearing ridicule after a vulnerable remark…Lev had always been owlishly capable of getting excited by geography. I remember he once said, “The Pacific is the prince of the oceans. The Atlantic’s a mere strait when compared to it.” And he had a whole theory about the geography of Russia, how it determined both her history and her fate. Oh, Venus, what good boys we were, originally. I think I told you that our mother was a schoolteacher. She was in fact a completely different kind of human being: she was a headmistress. And therefore a harpy of ambition. “You are intelligents!” she used to shriek at us, often out of a clear blue sky. “You serve the nation, not the state!” And there we were, Lev and me, with our books and our thick periodicals, our basic German, English, French, our heavy chess pieces, our maps and charts.

I said, as I’d planned, You have arrived in hell. I don’t have to tell you that. Here, man is wolf to man. But the funny thing is it’s just like anywhere else.

“No it isn’t. It isn’t like anywhere else.”

Yes it is. You came up under Vad, am I right?

Vad, Vadim, was Lev’s twin brother (fraternal — profoundly nonidentical), a leering, sidling, scheming kid, and “very socialist,” as our mother used to say as she fanned herself and blew the fringe off her brow. Tormenting Lev was Vad’s chief hobby and project for fifteen years. I’d tell Lev, Hit back, hit back. And keep hitting back. And Lev did hit back. But always just that single flail, and then he’d curl himself up again to take his punishment. Vad, in 1948, was a military politico, junior but hyperactive, and stationed in East Germany. Incidentally, he resembled me more closely than he resembled his twin. Tacit family lore had it that Vadim, implacable even in the womb, had shouldered Lev to the side and then drained off everything good.

I said, Until the day came when you hit back and kept on hitting. What changed?

In ones and twos the shiteaters had started drifting off, back into the sector. Of those remaining, some seemed discouraged by the defection, and the aggregate loss of hope; others freshly twinkled — dreaming of the lion’s share, with Irish eyes…

Lev said, “I was different inside.”…Shit, I said. It’s just struck me. What happened to your stutter? Where’d your stutter go?

He gave a taut nod and said, “She did that. After the first night, I woke up and it wasn’t there. Can you imagine? You know what it means? It means I can’t die. Not yet.”

No, you can’t die. Not yet.

Venus, you’re probably marveling — I know I am — at my calm and helpfulness, and the superb urbanity of my fraternal exchange with the husband of the woman I loved, the husband of Zoya, healer of stutterers. The truth is that I was in shock. And not “still in shock” either: I had hardly started. I would go on being in shock for over a month, buoyed by buxom chemicals. They did me good, morally. I got a lot worse when they wore off.

I said, Here, everyone’s Vad. Vad with a wrench and a screwdriver. And you haven’t got fifteen years to adapt to it. You haven’t got fifteen hours. You’ve got till tomorrow morning.

My breath hung in the air. Even in June your breath hung in the air as if you were smoking an enormous and fiery cigar. They went out six feet and curled back around you, these scarves of breath.

The last kitchen light went out, the last internal door slammed shut, and the last lingering shiteater wandered off crying childishly into his fists.

I said, This is what you’ve got to do.

“Tell me.”

I told him. And then I said, You’re what she’s giving up her twenties for. Christ. Think of that. And when it’s this cold, don’t eat the snow. You’ll have blood on your lips and your tongue. The snow burns.

I will now briefly describe the conclusion of my thing with Zoya. I will now briefly describe my abasement before The Americas.

On March 20, 1946, it came to pass that I was alone with her, in the conical attic, at half past one in the morning.

She hadn’t actually asked me up. I’d simply attached myself to a group that was on its way to pay her a call. We were not good Communists, not anymore; but we were excellent communitarians. Community: the cardinal Russian strength, even though the state now feared it and hated it. Russians looked out for each other. Russians did do that…We sat around in our overcoats. There was no heat and no light. There was no food and no drink. We had, I remember, a paper bagful of a nameless orange tea, but no water. The tea turned out to be carrot peel. So we ate it. They were all younger than me; it was perhaps to be expected that I said very little. I didn’t care how obvious it was, how dourly obvious — my determination to be the last to leave.

Because I now felt that I had a deadline. Zoya, that day, had done something, said something, that could not but lead to her arrest, or so I judged. It will sound unserious to you, Venus; but it wasn’t unserious. The whole Tech was talking about it. After classes Zoya showed up for the plenary session of the Komsomol, or the Communist Youth League. I remember the convocations of the Komsomol: try to imagine something halfway between a temperance meeting and a Nuremberg Rally. On her way out, Zoya said, quite audibly, that the two-hour keynote address (its full title, I remember, was “The Scum of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Deviation and the City Administration Committee Decision About the Party Meeting at the Mining Institute”) had “bored her tits off.” And no no no no no, you just couldn’t say that. Doubly provocative, and she was trebly endangered — boredom and breasts and Jewishness. That night, every time I heard a car or a truck in the street, I thought, It’s them. They’re here.

A couple of days earlier, as I walked Zoya to Tech, a man going past on a bicycle shouted out something with the word kike in it. I asked her — Kike what?

“Dirty kike bedstraw,” she repeated without any emphasis.

We walked on. I said, How often does it happen?

“You know what I’d like? I’d like to be vulgar in America. I’d like to be a Jew in America — all flash. How often? You might get nothing for a week. Then you get about nine in one day.”

I’m sorry.

“It’s not your fault.”

Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism. By which I mean an abnormal emphasis on the folk (the Great Russians), together with an abnormal xenophobia. Pogrom was coming. So there were sensible, indeed cynical reasons for Zoya to look kindly on me. It was one thing to stage conspicuous entanglements with your fellow bohemians, and especially your fellow Jews; it was another thing to be the devoted companion of a tall and handsome war hero, with his medals and his yellow badge, denoting a serious wound. Not much fun to say, all that. But I’m telling you, my dear: this is the meaning, this is the daily and hourly import of state systems.

I sat with my back to the window and the moonbeams. The walls breathed or bristled in the dark. I reached out — a costume (velvet), ostrich feathers, a tasseled tambourine. With the light behind me I could stare at Zoya, seeing her singly, entire, with unprecedented indifference to detail. And I was in any case full of emotion. Untypically, for a Russian, I had been raised by my mother to regard anti-Semitism as a reflex of the gutter; and the shame I felt for my nation was so intense that it had already ruined my memory of the war. At the same time I was lost in admiration for her — for the way she hadn’t flinched in the street and her resilience, now, when everyone else was mentally packing her pillowslip. You have a consciousness of this laid down in you, Venus, and I don’t: how it feels to be the other. And we know, from the memoirists, about the pain, the physical pain, of wearing the star, also yellow, the burning crysanthemum of the star. You in your flesh have worn the star…Half of Soviet Jewry had been killed by the Germans. And now the Russians had begun to glare at the half that remained. It was coming from above but also coming from below, coming up from the depths.

At the door Zoya was saying goodnight to her penultimate guest (her farewells punctuated by a violent yawn). All the time I kept asking myself how it happened — how had I stood by and given someone such power to hurt me? In my mouth, not the usual slow drool but a humble aridity — the aching throat of the lovelorn. I would act, though, I would act; and Russia would help me. You see, when the depths stir like this, when a country sets a course for darkness, it comes to you not as horror but as unreality. Reality weighs nothing, and everything is allowed. I rose. I rose, and impended.

She placed a palm on my chest, to establish a distance, but she accepted the kiss, or withstood it; and yet, as she withdrew her mouth, she retained my lower lip for a second between her teeth, and her eyes moved sideways, ruminatively; she was chewing it over — but not at length. I said three words and she said three words. Hers were, “You frighten me…” A novelettish incitement, you may think. And I would once have taken it as that. But I deeply knew that she hadn’t liked the taste of my lips.

“I’m sorry.”

For several seconds I stood there with my hands writhing around in one another’s grasp. And then I, the decorated rapist, I, who went through a woman a week using every form of flattery, false promises, bribery, and blackmail, not to mention the frank application of masculine bulk — I gave out a noise like the muffled coo of a pigeon, kissed her palm, and staggered out, seeming to twirl end over end all the way down the stairs.

They didn’t come for her, of course. They came for me. And understand that it didn’t feel like the worst thing that had ever happened when, ten weeks later, they gave me ten years.

This was his first morning and he was out there in the sector.

This was what I told him, as we stood among the shiteaters and their eager swirls of breath, their laughing eyes. I told him he would join their number unless he could find some murder in his heart. I told him that the acceptance of murder was the thing that was being asked of him.

This was Lev in the yard. His face, already brick-red, wore a gashed forehead and a split lip. During the bungled headcount (and recount, and re-recount), many of the men in his brigade — a strong brigade — were running on the spot, or at least flapping their arms about. Lev was doing jumping jacks.