House of Meetings

1. September 3, 2004: Predposylov

Today there is a piece in the local paper about the wild dogs of Predposylov.

The writer keeps referring to the dogs as “wild” but his terrified emphasis is on their discipline and esprit de corps. He tells of the “coordinated attacks” they mount on stalls and shops, notably on a butcher’s, where they came in through the backyard and “made off” with five meat pies, three chickens, and a string of sausages. The raid, he says, was reconnoitered by the “scout” dog, which barked the all-clear to the “alpha” dog.

Learnedly the writer compares the wild dogs of Predposylov to the “mutant” dogs of Moscow. The Moscow dogs are not called mutants because they have two heads and two tails. They are called mutants because they live in the metro and travel around by train. You may be intrigued to know that I once shared a carriage with a mutant pigeon in the London Tube. It got on at Westminster and it got off at St. James’s Park.

An “official source” is claiming that the wild dogs of Predposylov were responsible for the recent savaging of a five-year-old in a municipal playground. There is a picture of the playground — pretty pastels. There is a picture of the five-year-old — comprehensively mauled. Word of the approach of the wild dogs now empties a street, a square.

They tell me, here at the hotel, that the dogs come down the back alley behind the kitchens, every day, at twenty-five past one. The man said you can set your watch by them. I will be taking a closer look at the wild dogs of Predposylov.

Whatever else you may want to say about the place, Dudinka is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you have timber, and coal, and you’re on a big river, then you are going to get something very like Dudinka.

Dudinka has been here for nearly three centuries. Predposylov has been here since 1944. And it’s not an aggregation, as Dudinka is, but something slapped down in its entirety — Leninsky Prospect, House of Culture, Drama Theater, Sports Hall, Party Headquarters, and, more recently, Social Historical Museum. Why a city? A mining station, yes, a cluster of factories, quite possibly; and, if you must, a slave-labor camp containing sixty thousand people. But why build a city so near the North Pole?

When I got out of Norlag I felt, for nearly a year, that I was treading on the eggshells of freedom. That feeling comes over me here, the unpleasant vibrancy in the shins, the squeamish levitation of the spine. Predposylov is hollow. Underneath the city there are mines a mile deep. The ground itself is a shell you might put your foot through. And there is Mount Schweinsteiger, a black egg in its cup, all emptied out.

This isn’t the Second World anymore. It is not even the Third World. It is the Fourth. It is what happens after. Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.

I am the oldest man in Predposylov by a margin of thirty-five years.

Late at night I look in on a club called the Sixty Nine (the name refers to the parallel). There is a crooner, Presleyesque (late period), in dramatically swirling white flares. And there are G-stringed waitresses and milling prostitutes and softcore sex films showing on the raised screens. No, I don’t feel disgusted. I feel disgusting. People stare at me, as if they’ve never seen an old man before. Come to think of it, that’s probably true: they’ve never seen an old man before. Other people as old as me, and even older, do exist, don’t they, Venus? But really this whole thing has gone on long enough.

My idea is to get my hangover drunk. But I don’t go through with it, particularly. My hangover is not a hangover. I was mistaken. It is death. There is something in the center of my brain, something like a trapped sneeze. Which tickles. And the air here makes my eyes sting and weep.

On top of that I now live in a state of permanently lost temper. I lost my temper three days ago and have not recovered it. I am also very voluble, and am already widely feared at the bar here, by the staff and by the customers. Having been silent for so long, I’m now like a very much rowdier version of the Ancient Mariner. The arrangement at the bar is that I do all the buying but I also do all the talking. Sometimes I take a wedge of money from my wallet and burst out of the room looking for someone to yell at.

I’ve been reading up a bit, and this will be of especial interest to you, Venus, belonging as you do to a generation of self-mutilators. I mean the historical destiny of the urkas.

Now, I have no intention of reopening our debate (let us call it that) on your chin-stud. The soft underbelly of the ear, certainly — but why the chin? I know: it is strangely comforting (you claimed) to focus all your tender feelings on a particular part of your body, now hurt but soon to heal; and thereafter the implanted trinket will mark the spot of your self-inflicted wound. Very well. But what about the “cutting,” Venus? I’m assuming you don’t do it: your arms, when we meet, are often elegantly sleeveless. But many do. Something like twenty million young Americans, I learn, have regular recourse to the bleed valve.

Urka culture, in its decadent phase, became a lot queerer (the passives cringed, the actives swaggered), making you wonder how crypto-queer it was all along. I feel you flinch. These words are like points of heat on you, aren’t they? Your internal censor or commissar — she didn’t like that, did she? You have a censor living in your head, but it’s not all bad: you also have a beaming cheerleader living there too. So it’s not all bad by any means, having an ideology, as you do…Now understand me, Venus. I hear that the aftermath of a gay love-murder is something to see, but the homosexual impulse is clearly pacific. Crypto-queers are supposed heterosexuals; they confine themselves to women; and they are among the most dangerous men alive.

Urka culture, moreover, became self-mutilating, with full urka stringency. They took the battle to their very insides, swallowing nails, ground glass, metal spoons and blades, barbed wire. And this was on top of the self-amputations, self-cannibalizations, self-castrations. My country has always been strangely hospitable to self-neuterers. It began in the eighteenth century, a whole sect of them, the Castrates, who held that the removal of the instrument was a precondition, a sine qua non, of salvation.

Cutting. It’s done to combat numbness, isn’t it? These urkas were convicts, and fought the numbness of prison. Your crowd: what do they fight? If it’s the numbness of advanced democracy — I can’t sympathize. Other systems, you see, flood the glands and prickle the tips of the nerves.

I had the Social Historical Museum pointed out to me on the way in. It looks like a dry-cleaner’s or a Korean takeaway. And it is shuttered, whether for repair, or for final closure, no one knows.

But when I pass it in the early evening the shutter is up. My very small bribe is accepted by a russety youth in white overalls. He says he’s an electrician. He convincingly toils, in any event, over a succession of fuseboxes, fixing them, or just stripping them. He rents me one of his three powerful flashlights.

Whose careening beam reveals a short arcade, with four displays on either side—tableaux morts. The glass of broken bulbs splits and splinters under my feet as I move forward, past the Voguls, the Entsy, the Ostinks, the Nganasani, and so on: the absorbed or annihilated or alcohol-poisoned peoples of the Arctic. Then I come to the Zeks: us. I look round about me at the other figures, the gaunt revenants of the vanished tribes. The best part of you feels moved to take them as ennobling company, in any form or setting. We were all poor, poor bastards. Still, these were remoter multitudes, and would have succumbed, anyway, to mere modernity.

Their molded shapes stroke the flanks of stuffed reindeers and feed scraps of bread to plastic huskies. I am represented, Lev is represented, by the doll of an old geezer at a low table, before an open stove, beneath snow-furred windows, beside a tousled cot. The Entsy have their reassembled medicine-man outfit, their simulated yurt. We have our foreshortened mittens and our dented metal bowl. All this under the reeling and now failing beam of the flashlight.

“We wanted the best,” an old Kremlin hand once said, referring to some other disaster, some other panoramic inferno: “but it turned out as always.”

Middle School Number One is like a laboratory and a control experiment. It is showing how you build the Russian totality.

On the third day we reach the point where the situation of the hostages can no longer be plausibly worsened. Consider. They are parched, starved, stifled, filthy, terrified — but there is more. Outside, the putrefying bodies of the people killed on the first day are being eaten by dogs. And if the captives can smell it, if the captives can hear it, the sounds of the carrion dogs of North Ossetia eating their fathers, then all five senses are attended to, and the Russian totality is emplaced. Nothing for it now. Their situation cannot be worsened. Only death can worsen it.

So death comes at the moment of alleviation, of fractional alleviation — because the Russian totality can’t assent to that. The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many — the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.

You know, I can’t find a Russian who believes it: “We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.” I can’t find a Russian who believes that. They didn’t want the best, or so every Russian believes. They wanted what they got. They wanted the worst.

And now there is a doctor, on the television, who says that some of the surviving children “have no eyes.”

Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy: each of them insisted on a Russian God, a specifically Russian God. The Russian God would not be like the Russian state, but would weep and sing as it scourged.

I am in a terminal panic about my life, Venus; and this is no figure of speech. The panic seems to come…Seems? The panic comes, not from inside me, but from out of the earth or the ether. I outwait it — that’s all I can do. It rolls by me, and then it’s gone, leaving the taste of metal in my mouth and all over my body, as if I had been smelted or galvanized. Then it returns, not the same day, and maybe not the next, but it returns and rolls and billows by me. I think it sweeps the entire planet, and always has. The only people who feel it pass are the dying.

Dead reckoning is a phrase that sailors use — it means the simple calculation of their position at sea. Not by landmarks or the stars. Just direction and distance. I know where I am: the port where I’m heading already shows its outlines through the mist. What I’m doing, now, is dead reckoning. I am making a reckoning with the dead.

There is a letter in my pocket, in my inside breast pocket, which I have yet to read. I keep it there, hoping that it will enter my heart by a process of benign osmosis, one word at a time, on tiptoe. I don’t want my eyes, my head, to have to do it.

But I will open it up and spread it out before me, any day now.

2. Marrying the Mole

Right from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow. I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating. But as your nostrils widen and your jaw vibrates, keep an ear out for my clucks of satisfaction — the little snorts and gurglings of near-perfect felicity. This is a “quiet time,” such as you could often be prevailed upon to have, when, after too much chocolate and hours of screeching and flailing and whirling, you would submit to a coloring book at the kitchen table or a taped story in your room — before going back to more screeching and flailing and whirling.

I am a stranger in a strange land. A freshly glittering landscape is opening up before me: I mean the mundane. God, what a beautiful sight. There will be ups and downs, of course, especially for your step-uncle and his spouse, but for now these lives rise and fall as they will. We no longer uninterruptedly sense the leaden mass, the adenoidal breathing, and the moronic stare of the state. How can I evoke it for you, the impossible glamour of the everyday? We are safe, for now; above us is the boilerplate of banality. Like a saga-spinner of another age, I can almost start the business of tidying up after my guests. “Zoya is as forgetful as ever.” “No, Kitty never did find true love.” And this goes on for nearly two whole chapters, and twenty-five years. All is well, all is safe, until we enter the Salang Tunnel.

Before there was that, though, there was this.

As an unrehabilitated political, I was effectively “minus forty,” as was Lev. This phrase no longer referred to the temperature in Norlag on an autumn afternoon. For us it now meant that forty cities were out of bounds. We were also ineligible for such perquisites as accommodation and employment…I went east from Predposylov, all the way to the Pacific (where I had one swim), before I started coming west. It took me two months to get to Moscow. I spent half an hour with Kitty in a suburban teashop called the Singing Kettle, where a lumpy rucksack changed hands. This was the bequest of my mother, who had died, calmly, said Kitty, in the spring. And then for many months I seemed to be shunted around from berg to berg, always arriving in the small hours — the pale bulb over the station exit, the clockface staring elsewhere, the deep stone of the stairwell. Then you moved off into a blackout and a town of tin. The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light. A fully achieved cheerlessness, you may think. Darkness, silence, and a palpable rigidity, as if the buildings were seized not to the surface of the world but to its center. And yet I knew that my footsteps made a sound that was no longer feared, and that the huddled houses would open up to me, if not now then tomorrow. Because kindness was rubbing its eyes and reawakening, Russian kindness — the reflexive care for another’s good. And I was free and I was sane.

I came equipped with some of my sister’s cash, some of my father’s clothes, and some of my mother’s books — namely, an introduction to advanced electronics, an English primer, and the tragedies of Shakespeare in parallel translation (the main four and also the Roman plays, plus Timon, Troilus, and Richard II). I loved my mother (and she must have scried me here, in minus-forty), as every honest man should and does. And I wondered why it didn’t go easier with women and me…I was always getting pulled in and moved on, of course, but that year became my nomadic sabbatical — paid leave for travel and study, and for internal relocation. The weight of Zoya, I thought, was also shifting. When I settled down at night she was always there the moment I closed my eyes, waking, half-clad, becomingly disheveled, a slight sneer on her downy upper lips, as she appraised me, her escort to oblivion. But what was the matter with her? Amazingly, and alarmingly (this can’t be normal), her effigy, her mockery, had detached itself from the control of my will. In the past, this little mannequin of mine was charmingly rigorous, even draconian in her promptings and insistences. No longer. She was without words and without wants, dumb and numb — unresisting but inert, and almost unwieldably heavy. And her face was always turned away from mine, in illegible sorrow and defeat. I told myself, Well, we’re all free now, I suppose. So I would give it up and desist, holding her for a while in my brotherly arms before I too turned away, into sleep and into dreamlessness.

Such sexual kindness that came my way, during that time, and my generally weak response to it, had the curious effect of imbuing me with material ambition. The Slavic form, the oblong of pallor with the marmalade garnish, the grunts of compassion or acceptance, the rustly whispers: this would no longer answer. The center — I could feel it tugging at me, with its women and its money. And in the late summer of 1958 I started orbiting Moscow.

When Lev reached Kazan he found that his wife and mother-in-law had already withdrawn beyond the municipal boundary. He was expected. My sister told me that the three of them were living in “half a hovel” on the outskirts of another city (smaller, more obscure — admissibly abject), where Zoya had found work in the accounts department of a granary. Old Ester made and sold patchwork quilts, and from her sickbed continued to teach Hebrew (a language illegalized in 1918) to an intrepid enthusiast and his three small sons, who drove out twice a week. Lev wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent much of the day (according to Zoya’s letters to Kitty) in the supine position — understandable and salutary, she said; he was “trying to recover his strength.” I said nothing. In his last months there, Lev was again one of the fittest men in Norlag. Deaf in one ear, and with the fingers of his clawlike right hand, even in sleep, locked in the grasp of an imaginary pickax or shovel — but physically strong. He was apparently maintaining that he wouldn’t work for the state, which, at this point, wouldn’t have him anyway. And the state was all there was. He complained of headaches and nightmares. This was the start of a long decline.

I did better. Living in corners, at first, I poised myself on the northern brink of the capital, and went in every morning on the seven o’clock train. Very soon I had money…In 1940 there were four hundred television sets in the USSR. In 1958 there were two and a half million. Every single one of them belonged to a CP. Dealing with the TV sets of the nomenklatura — this was my day job and my night job, installing them, repairing them, or simply clearing up after them, because they frequently exploded (even when they were switched off; even when they weren’t plugged in). I would soon indulge in an extravagance: the purchase of my Certificate of Rehabilitation. A considerable expense, in those years, because Russia had not become — or had not yet gone back to being — a bribe society. But I spoiled myself.

When I went away, I was twenty-six. I was getting on for forty when I came back. Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time. I mixed with the black-economy crowd, and my girlfriends were of a type. I suppose it would be accurate to say that they were of the type of the croupier. They were veteran molls and flappers with excellent heads for business. And in my dealings with these women, Venus, I ran into a logistical problem which would trouble me more and more. Take one at random. The inventory of her body and its abilities would, of course, be paralleled by the inventory of her past. And her past would be long, and gruelingly populous. And they were still walking, these men: you see, by that time hardly anybody was getting killed. And I had to know about them. All of them. So I would often find myself prolonging a hopelessly soured romance, sometimes doubling its duration, just to make sure I had winkled out that rugged smuggler from Vladivostok, that sleek bijouterist from Minsk.

Between 1946 and 1957 I ate two apples, one in 1949 and one in 1955. Now I went to however much trouble it took to eat an apple every day. The man who usually sold them to me knew that fresh fruit was something of a delicacy in the Soviet Union. But we had completely different ideas about what an apple was. In the queue there were currents of recognition and mistrust. If the line was fifty Russians long, there would be seven or eight who had been away. There would be another seven or eight who had helped put them there. I would meet the eyes of men and women who agreed with me about what an apple was. I ate everything, the core, the seeds, the stalk.

What was needed was a meeting. There came a series of second-hand soundings, of vague proposals vaguely deferred. On his side, a sense of reclusion or paralysis; on mine, something like the fear of the diagnostic. The pocket marionette slept beside me, unfrowning in her white petticoat. Would it wake? Would I want it to?

As soon as I got the keys to the new apartment, I made a move. It was an invitation that no Russian could conceivably refuse: a family housewarming at Easter. The time got nearer: the spring equinox, the first full moon over the northern Eurasian plain, the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday.

I hadn’t seen Lev for eighteen months. He came on ahead into the main room, leaving Kitty and Zoya in mid-greeting at the front door. He registered my smile, my parted arms, but continued to review his surroundings — the rugs, the sofas, the chest-high television in its walnut cabinet, the copper horn of the gramophone. A look of mildly amused disdain did not exactly lend charm or distinction to his plinthless, bump-nosed face. I stepped forward and we hugged. Or I hugged. Fuller, softer, and the smell of unlaundered synthetics. But then Zoya was flooding the room with her presence, and there was champagne, and the seven-hour meal began.

“See what I mean?” said Kitty, later. “She’s bleeding the life out of him.”

Maybe it just looks that way, I said.

It looked that way because Lev kept his good ear (frequently cupped in his clawlike right hand) exclusively trained on Zoya. And she was his interpreter. If you aimed a question at him, he met you with a look of rustic incomprehension, which slowly faded as Zoya, from close range, gave her murmured gloss. He couldn’t hear — and he couldn’t talk. His stutter was thoroughly reensconced. So it sometimes seemed, when she gestured at him (she always gestured) and raptly mouthed, that this was a rite of lip-reading and sign language, and that without her he would be alone in his mutist universe.

I said, He cheered up a bit later on.

“Yes,” said Kitty. “When he was drunk.”

She’s far more beautiful now, I think.

“Do you think? Yes. She is.”

It’s got gravitas. She hasn’t, but her beauty has.

“I saw you were looking at her…Do you still?”

No no. Not anymore, thank God.

“Lend him money. Give him money.”

But I said I had already tried.

Our reunions, which became fairly regular, soon assumed a pattern — something like a childish feud of assertion and rebuttal. Usually they came to us, but the laws of hospitality demanded that we occasionally went to them. Lev was very different in Kazan. He dominated. We would meet, not at the hotel where Kitty and I put up, but on a street corner in the industrial district — the zinc fogs of Zarechye. There would then be a longish walk, with the visitors falling into step behind the two hooded duffelcoats, the two pairs of squeaking plastic boots. “Ah, here we are. How nice,” he would say, levering open the sodden door of a hostel canteen or a subsidized cafeteria. While we pushed the food around our plates, he questioned us about its quality. Is the horsemeat accurately cooked? The porridge, I hope, is al dente? When that was over, we’d get a glass of spuddy vodka in some roiling taproom or pothouse. And Lev and Zoya would be squelching back to the bus station at half past eight.

These outings, of course, were clearly, almost openly, punitive. Kitty didn’t much mind, and I found it quite funny in a nerve-racking way. It was Zoya who suffered. Fanning herself, she held her head at a prideful angle, taking deep breaths through her rigid nostrils. Her blushes lasted for half an hour, and the great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons. In Moscow I naturally retaliated, taking them to modernist black-economy steakhouses, and on to traditionalist black-economy casinos. The tuxed waiter served us green Chartreuse, and I drank to Zoya’s thirtieth birthday, raising my chalice under spangleballs and twirling mirrorspheres.

Seeing them together, you couldn’t help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment — embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality. I hope I have made it clear that I was always rather touched by my brother’s physical appearance. “A face face,” as our mother always called it, though one illumined, in the past, by the smile and the soft blue eyes. And we honor Zoya, don’t we, Venus, for her indifference to the norms and quotas of romantic convention — and all that. But there is such a thing as force of life. And the contrast was like something out of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme or a joke on a seaside postcard.

Jack Spratt would eat no fat. And there was Zoya, seemingly a yard the taller, swinging herself around (this was Moscow) as she laughed, sang, mimicked, brimmed. In those blighted eateries in Kazan, Lev made a big to-do with the bill, intently frowning and shrewdly sniffing over a scrap of paper that said four dinners, if that, and suborning Zoya for a strained colloquy about the number of weightless coins to be dropped in the jar. Elsewhere, for every calorie of expended high spirits, Zoya always paid…He still wore his hair cropped, prison-style. In the old days, up in camp, I used to like to smooth it back against the nap — it made my fingertips hum. Now, when I once ventured to touch it, the pale fuzz was damp and flat and had lost the power to impart any tingle. He pulled his head away and slid another cigarette into his crumpled mouth.

Over these years there were other changes: significant addenda to the panoply of my brother’s attractions. A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money-belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede; and, most mysteriously, an unvarying arc of perspiration, the width of a hatband, running from temple to temple. All three developments looked strangely uniform and standardized on such an asymmetrical little chap. Especially the bald spot. Once, rising suddenly and looking down on him, I believed I saw an open mouth, all tongue, fringed by a beard and a sweat-drenched mustache.

Lev’s morose and monotonous asides about my apartment, my clothes, my car (and, during one unrepeated experiment, my croupier) were now like a snore in another room. He didn’t despise me, I don’t think, for taking the shilling of the state. He despised my appetite. I had drive, and all Russians hate that; but there was a further layer to it. In one of her letters to Kitty, Zoya neutrally mentioned the fact that Lev’s circle in the environs of Kazan, such as it was, consisted entirely of elderly failures. If we had been on easier terms I might have said to him that he was feeling what many others felt; he was submitting, in short, to generic emotion. Many others who had been away — they too hated money. Because money was freedom, it was even political freedom, and they had stopped wanting to believe in freedom. Better if no one had it — money, freedom.

I completed his sentences for him, now, when he stuttered. So would you have done. There would have been no end to it if you hadn’t. Besides, we always knew, now, exactly where his sentences were going. And he didn’t care. He had stopped minding because he had stopped fighting. Lev had surrendered, without conditions, and his stutter had it all its own way; a couple of uppercuts to the chin, and it would leap on his chest and strangle him into silence. Now, when he tipped his head far back, in this or that soupkitchen in Kazan, it was not to prosecute the civil war with the self — to bring everything to bear. It was in reluctant submission to Zoya’s demand that he eat a vegetable. Back went the head; down went the section of blackened beetroot or utterly soundless cucumber. And you had the sense that he wasn’t fighting it anymore — he was feeding it. One night, after a great deal of vodka, he told me that he had stopped reading. He said it not casually but with defiance. “If it’s bad I don’t like it,” he went on in a softer voice. “And if it’s good I hate it.”

The girls were more continent, but Lev and I got through the traditional amounts of alcohol. We were both subject to the centuries-old momentum of Russian drunkenness. And it may surprise you to learn that we were good drunks, too, both of us: amenable, reasonably quiet, not likely, on the whole, to brawl or sob. There usually came a point, about halfway through the third bottle, when his eyes met mine and almost confessed to the moment of remission — maybe it was just the nonappearance of the next wave of pain. He didn’t draw attention as a drinker. That, I admit, would have been hard to do. But he did draw attention as a smoker. Now, smoking (like drinking) allays anxiety. So try not smoking in Russia and see how far you get. But Lev? He ate with a cigarette in the hand that held the knife. And when he went to stub it out, the movement was but a step on the road to lighting another. He did this all day long. Zoya said he smoked even when he was shaving.

Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive. The thought was this: mad teeth. Those pretty teeth of his, though lavishly stained, still looked sound enough. But the angles had been rearranged. They no longer stood to attention; they leaned and slumped, they crisscrossed. And you do sometimes see this taken much further by the very mad, the teeth tugged and bent by tectonic forces deep beneath the crust.

And me? I think I might have come through all right, if it hadn’t been for the dancing.

Three times it happened. Exactly the same thing happened…Zoya was superstitiously drawn to the gramophone in my apartment, and would lurk by it and commune with it. Three times she asked with a guilty air for American jazz. She listened, nodding, then with a twist of the head she banged down her glass and extended an elegantly narrowed hand toward her husband. “I don’t, anymore,” Lev could be relied upon to say. “And you can’t.” So I danced with Zoya — the exploratory Russified jive. I don’t know how good she might have been; what was certain was that it made her madly happy, every inch of her, so much so that you felt implicated and even compromised by the glitter of her ravenous grin. But even at arm’s length it was like wielding a woman-sized jumping bean. There was an opposition in her, something like a counterweight in a liftshaft, but ominously misaligned.

Three times it happened: three times she shot out of sight, and there she was at my feet, flat on her back and shaking with silent laughter, her eyes clenched shut and her hands on her heart. The last time (and we have entered a period of last times) her summer dress, resisting the speed of her drop, rode up over her waist…And it wasn’t just the erotic shock, the power of her two-toned thighs in their stockings, the intricate engineering, and attention to detail, in all those slips and clips and grips. It was the helplessness, the silent laughter, the unseeing eyes, the two hands folded on the heart, it was the helplessness.

“That was the last time,” said Lev as I brought her to her feet.

I spoke earlier, I think, of the coldness that is always available to the elder brother. It was this coldness that I now sought. What you’re really doing is giving yourself some distance, in preparation for disaster. And — God help me — I had a plan.

Of course, I never asked Lev whether he still wrote poetry. If he had been alive and present, Vadim would have asked him that. Someone who hated him would have asked him that.

As you might put it, Venus: think Thumbelina.

Before her deliverance on the wings of the healed bird, before her redemption at the hands of the tiny Flower King, tiny Thumbelina, you may recall, comes close to marrying the mole. Marrying the dot-eyed insectivore, and spending the rest of her days in darkness.

Could you marry a mole? I asked.

“Sure!” you said, with heat.

Sure! I’m not prejudiced! You were six. About a month later, Thumbelina came up again, as the themes of childhood so often do, and I repeated my question. You were silent, troubled: it was your very first dilemma. You had been weighing the reality of marriage to the mole. You now wanted to avoid it. But how could you do that, without hurting the mole’s feelings? “It hurt my feelings.” Girl children are very quick to recruit that phrase. The only little boy I ever knew well — he would never have used it. Girls understand that their feelings also have rights…What happened to you, by the way, in the space of those four or five weeks? Some mysterious accession or promotion. If they’d been making a parallel film of your life, they would have known, then, that a new hairstyle or built-up shoes wouldn’t do it: the time had come to hire an older actress.

In later life you married the mole, for a while, when you took up with that Nigel. Walking beside you, I said, he looked like your broken umbrella. After him, I noticed, you kept to the flower kings, with only the occasional porcupine or polecat.

But say Thumbelina had married the mole. And let’s consider it from the mole’s point of view. They live together under the soil, in unbreathable damp and darkness. The tiny beauty is a devoted wife. And yet the mole, who can’t help being half blind, can’t help hating flowers and sunshine, feels the thwartedness of Thumbelina — Thumbelina, who was born from a tulip. It is not in the mole to ask her to go. So he makes his grotto more gravelike, darker, danker, and wills her to leave.

3. The Salang Tunnel

And leave she did, on October 29, 1962.

It was the day after the defusing of the Cuba Crisis. And this imparted a false perspective. Zoya leaving Lev: that wasn’t the end of the world. Not for me, anyway. Was there a precipitant? Kitty herself, who went down there and even cross-questioned the mother, never established the details, though she claimed to sense the aftershock of scandal…We knew that Zoya had gone back to her job at the school. Teaching drama. And we knew that she had been summarily dismissed. She was in Petersburg, where old Ester was about to join her. Lev was still in their half of the hovel near Kazan.

I didn’t see him for nearly a year. But we wrote. This is what happened to him.

In my first letter I made a practical suggestion. I offered to buy him his Certificate of Rehabilitation, just as I had bought mine some years earlier (and just as I would soon buy my Party card). He took me up on it and asked, in addition, for a large loan, appending a repayment schedule that included calculations for interest. Surveying this schedule, with its percentages, its busy decimals, I felt a cavernous bewilderment. Let’s put it that way, for now. The big brother in me was, of course, delighted that Zoya had gone. What bothered me was Lev’s response to it: a repayment schedule that ventured far, far into the future. Why wasn’t it the end of the world?

That October he successfully applied for a job in a mine-construction project in Tyumen, just the other side of the Urals, beyond Yekaterinburg. At Christmas he sent me a photograph of a freckled and bespectacled blonde, standing in a striplit corridor with her hands behind her back. This was the twenty-three-year-old he had met in the works dispensary: little Lidya. I will mention here that in his covering letter my brother confessed to some reactionary pride in the fact that Lidya was — or had been — a virgin. Looking again at the photograph, I had to say that I wasn’t at all surprised. I quietly concluded, too, that I wasn’t interested in virgins. Naturally I wasn’t. What would I do with a virgin? What would we find to talk about all night?

In the new year, in February, he got promoted and she got pregnant. Now, Lev was still a married man, and divorce wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Divorce used to be very easy indeed. You didn’t even have to go through the rigmarole required of our Muslim brethren, who got divorced by saying “I divorce thee” three times. In the Soviet Union you only had to say it once, on a postcard. But now, for reasons we’ll return to, both parties were obliged to attend a court hearing. I couldn’t understand why Zoya refused to cooperate, nor could Kitty. Lev felt it prudent to go to Petersburg. As soon as he told her that Lidya was, as the Latins say, embarazada (have I got that right?), Zoya complied; and then it was just bureaucracy.

I was best man at the August wedding. My brother seemed much leaner (amazingly, some of his hair had grown back), Lidya’s pious parents seemed at last assuaged, and it all went fairly well, considering that Lidya, as Kitty put it, was “out here.” Lidya was long and thin, with legs the shape of noodles — another Kitty, another Chile. I found her to be pretty much as far as you could get from Zoya, which is another way of saying that she didn’t look very feminine, even as she entered her third trimester. Already the baby dwarfed her. She was like the string on the package. A seven-kilo son, Artem, was duly delivered in November.

Zoya stayed on for a while in Petersburg with her mother. She got involved with the famous Puppet Theater there, making puppet costumes, painting puppet scenery. When the Puppet Theater opened up a subsidiary in Moscow, Zoya was part of the team that came along to run it. In a long, new-broomist letter to Kitty, she said that it was her intention, now, “to return to the life of the heart.” She and her mother had their old place back, too. So, once again, Zoya was entertaining in the conical attic.

Kitty called on her, of course. I didn’t. I didn’t return to the old neighborhood and stand beneath her window. I didn’t linger there in all weathers, trying to interpret the movements of shadows on the ceiling of her bedroom. Something else had to happen first. Something that might take a very long time.

Nikita Sergeyevich fell. Leonid Ilich rose.^*5 The Thaw, then the Little Freeze, then the Stagnation.

My lovelife, as I will go on calling it, took an unexpected turn. I was getting older. The croupiers were getting older. They weren’t real croupiers — though in my recurring dream about Varvara (the last in the line) she stood over a chip-strewn wheel of fortune, and her rake kept turning into a lorgnette…It is hard to get a smile from a good-time girl once she passes the age of forty. Their thoughts are all of solemnization. I tried a couple of younger ones; but with them I always felt that I was on the wrong train or the wrong boat, that the other passengers had different tickets and itineraries, different stamps, different visas. And the whole black-market milieu lost most of its pep after the law of 1961, which gave the economic criminal something new to worry about: capital punishment. So I partly reformed, and joined my generation, entering into a series of more tenacious, more complicated, and (certainly) much cheaper relationships with the children of the Revolution, divorcées, veteran widows, ex-convicts, ex-exiles, all of them fatherless, all of them brotherless. In 1969, on a working trip to Hungary, I met Jocelyn, with whom I more or less cohabited, on and off, until the events of 1982—the Salang Tunnel, and what followed from it.

By ’69 I had found my métier. Robotics, but not yet in its medical applications. To get your hands on materials of international standard, you had to do space or you had to do armaments. Space was oversubscribed, so I did armaments. Rotary launchers for nuclear weapons. That’s right, my child: preparations for the third world war. The third world war never became the Third World War, which is just as well. In my current mood, not notable for its leniency, I wouldn’t enjoy it — reproaching myself for the Third World War.

I had my own chauffeur-driven Zigli. I shopped in the subterranean valuta arcades. Not very often, about once a year, I would amass a parcel of silk shirts and silk scarves and silk stockings, and scents and unguents and elixirs, and blushers and highlighters and concealers, and send it, without any covering note, to the occupant of the conical attic.

You need to know something about Jocelyn. The main theme of her character was melancholy — melodramatic melancholy. Sad enough in Budapest, Jocelyn was suicidal in Moscow. She carried melancholy around with her, maybe in her handbag, a black and bottomless entanglement of frayed embroidery; or maybe in her hair (another entanglement) it chose to lurk. Her obsession was transience. Oh yes: change and decay in all around she saw. What she feared was the void. Going to sleep was for Jocelyn an existential torment; if she turned in early, you had to rig up a wireless or a gramophone, and she wanted the light on and the door open. The reason for all this, you were led to understand, was the high sensitivity enforced by exceptional intelligence. The more intelligent you were, the more depressed you were bound to get. She could have been the male lead in one of the more forbidding novels of Dostoyevsky. And she was English. Her husband, soon to be estranged, was number two at the British Embassy in Budapest. Jocelyn Patience Harris was a frump and a joke, as well as a door-darkener of mythic power. There were several reasons for the attraction. Chief among them was snobbery.

She was also basically handsome, and rich, and literary, in her way. She never went anywhere without her four or five leather-bound anthologies, or treasuries, of Georgian verse. These we read together. With a new language, of course, the last thing you learn is taste; and for years I would be trying to impress everybody with my marathon memorizations of people like Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater. At the same stage, my idea of a colloquial English sentence was one that contained lots of phrases like “in the nick of time” and “by hook or by crook.” Do you know the expression “a disgusting Anglophile”? That’s what I became. And it was disgusting. I could sometimes catch myself being disgusting — the tweeds and the twills she imported for me, and the shooting-stick. Also the invidiousness, and the awful pedantry. You yourself got a taste of this when I had that worryingly prolonged laughing fit, and you called Tannenbaum: I had just come across the locution “he had the cheek of taking my photograph” in Lolita. Still, I would claim that Anglophilia is not irrational. For this reason. You see, Venus, Russian literature is sometimes thought to be our recompense for a gruesome history. So strong, so real, grown on that mulch of blood and shit. But the English example shows that literature gains no legitimacy from the gruesome. In making claims for world domination, the English novel must look anxiously to the French, the Americans, and, yes, the Russians. But English poetry does not abide our judgment. And it isn’t nothing, I contend, to have that history — and a body of verse that fears no man. To have that polity, and that poetry.

Jocelyn, the high priestess of evanescence and infertility, grew impatient, as with a dredged-up irrelevance, when you pointed out that she had five grown daughters and twenty-three grandchildren (each of whom got a card, and a gawky Russian toy, on their birthday). Sexual intercourse, similarly, she regarded as the depth of frivolity, but she would often relent. And then there was the constantly surprising buoyancy of her figure. For some reason her past lovers, including her husband, awoke in me no hostility. To be candid, and therefore ungallant, I couldn’t see what they saw in her: they were all English already. My inner life, in any event, became increasingly Anglophone. This was part of the plan, too, but it was also a tremendous resource. When Pasternak was silenced as a writer, he turned to translation — of Shakespeare, among others. I know what he meant when he said that he was thereby in communion “with the West, with the historical earth, with the face of the world.” Jocelyn wore black, but blackness was what she feared. I dealt with more bilious colors — the browns, the greens.

My nephew Artem still hid from Jocelyn when he was as old as ten or eleven. Then an hour or two later he would creep into the sitting room and stare. And he was not otherwise a timid little boy…That didn’t stop me taking her down there for a week every summer. Lev and Lidya soon acclimatized themselves. After all, it was not out of the way, in my country, for someone to sit through dinner with their face in their hands; it was not out of the way for someone to seek the fetal position for the duration of a picnic. She would have seemed quite unremarkable if she hadn’t been an Englishwoman who could get out any time she liked. Besides, Jocelyn spoke the same amount of Russian as a nineteenth-century aristocrat (perhaps a dozen words), so nobody but me had to listen to her. And I liked to listen to her.

Lev and I once again became close. Ah, these soothing modulations: imagine a whole life being told in soothing modulations…Lev and I once again became close. We used to sit up late in the kitchen, drinking and smoking. There were several indices of at least partial well-being. The excellence of his chess was one (for me, the achievement of a draw was like clambering onto a raft in a mountainous sea). The stutter was another: he had once again taken up arms. And it no longer felt like a clear unkindness when, one night, I raised the subject of poetry. I was not disinterested. There was something I still very badly needed to know.

That stuff she reads, I said quietly, meaning Jocelyn (you could still hear her radio, next door, where she and I slept), is terrible.

“What kind of terrible?”

I explained — pastoral-sentimental, silver-age. I told him about Wilfred Owen, a poet of the First War who started off like that. He had a phrase: “fatuous sunbeams.”

That’s what all her books should be called, I said. “Fatuous Sunbeams: A Treasury of Georgian Verse.” I don’t know what she gets out of it.

“Presumably something. Which is better than nothing. Nothing is what I get out of it. It’s all dead to me now. You still like it because you never wanted to write it. Poetry.”

I waited.

He said, “And I used to think, with Mandelstam, that that was the measure of a man, of a woman: how they responded to poetry. With Mandelstam. It sounds antique now. But maybe I still believe it. And I’ll tell you who else believes it. Artem.”

Aged fifteen, now, Artem lay hugely asleep upstairs, like a colt, in an Artem-sized bedroom infested with sashes and rosettes.

“I know. I still can’t get over it. That I somehow produced such a magnificent creature. And he knows his Akhmatova.”

For a moment he allowed himself a private smile. Then he sat up straight and said, “When we were away, I still did it. I wrote poems in my head. Right up until ’56.”

He went still. Our eyes met.

’56, I said. The House of Meetings.

“Oh don’t worry,” he said. “Not now, not yet. But before I die you will know.”

At this point Lidya entered, yawning and shuffling in her tubular nightcoat; and then Jocelyn entered, unappeasably sleepless, and wearing black. It occurred to me that both these women were Zoya’s assiduous opposites, Lidya in the physical sphere, Jocelyn in the spiritual. If you put the three of them in a room together, there would be an E=mc² event, such as was supposed to happen when antimatter met matter.

Lev, I concluded, was split along similar lines. He was all right now, just about, in his head, but his body was not all right. He had the grated, red-rimmed glance of the chronic. For a while, whenever he had a fit of coughing to get through, he would leave the room; a little later, he was leaving the house. In middle age he was developing “stress” asthma. These attacks involved him in another kind of fight. Back went the head. He could breathe it in but he couldn’t expel it. He tried. He couldn’t get the air out. He couldn’t get it out.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Like what?

“Like the doctors look at me.”

Well, God help me, I had a plan.

This period of bourgeois calm, of progress and poetry and upward mobility, of no rape and no murder, is about to close. So let me bring you up to date.

At the turn of the decade we witnessed a series of developments, as if (it now seems) everyone was taking up position, in readiness for November 1982. Lev was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. They wanted to monitor his heart while they soused him in salbutamol, the new asthma drug. Increasingly critical of what she called my “ovine equanimity,” Jocelyn went back to England, on a visit. In her only letter, itself a remarkably sunny document, she said that it wasn’t the void, and her insight into it, that was depressing her: it was Russia. And she wouldn’t be coming back. My nephew, Artem, spent the Christmas of 1980 in the hold of a military stratocruiser, en route to Afghanistan and the war against the mujahideen. He was in the signals corps, and would be some way back from the front line. Christmas, an anniversary of no significance to Muslims or to Communists. And Zoya — Zoya did something strange.

News of her always came to me, with a glint, through the prism of my sister. The two of them met up about once a month, and when Kitty gave her reports she assumed the air of a hard-pressed social worker describing a particularly obstinate case. On the other hand, she was liable, as she spoke, to sudden physical expansions; for minutes on end she lost her slenderness, her meagerness, and swelled with possibilities…Often reaching for her inverted commas, Kitty had me know, for instance, that Zoya had “fallen in love with ‘a wonderful choreographer,’” that Zoya had been “swept off her feet by ‘a marvelous costume-designer.’” Over the years her menfriends seemed to decline in both caliber and staying power. I prepared myself for the era of the wonderful prop-shifter, the marvelous ticket-puncher, and so on. But as the old decade turned into the new, two things happened, and Zoya changed. She turned fifty-three and buried her mother in the course of the same week. And Zoya changed. Early in 1981 she told Kitty, very quietly, that she had accepted a proposal of marriage.

Go on then, I said. Who to?

Kitty paused, prolonging her power. Then she said, “Ananias.”

No. I thought he was dead.

“Ananias! How can we possibly tell Lev?”

Only the one name: Ananias. Now an occasional contributor to the Moscow wing of the Puppet Theater, Ananias was the formerly famous dramatist. The Rogues, the play that made his reputation (there were also stories and novels), came out in the mid-1930s. It was set in a corrective-labor camp, and was about a group of mildly feckless urkas. In the early 1950s it was revived, and then rewritten by him for the cinema, very successfully, and with a different title—The Scallywags. Ananias was eighty-one.

And Kitty? We had better round off Kitty, because we are not going to be seeing much more of her. No, she never did find true love. The passion was not a strong one, but it led to her incurable attachment to a married man. He had long ago stopped promising to leave home. Later, she additionally befriended the wife, and became a kind of Aunt Phyllis to the only child. I tell you this just to show that people everywhere can create their own deadfalls, their own adhesions. It doesn’t always need the orchestration of the state.

At this time, after Jocelyn, I was having a restful romance with one of the interpreters at the Ministry of Defense. Restful, because timid Tamara was still in mourning for her husband of twenty-five years (and her prior history was the work of a single shift). Although her colloquial English was only middling, her technical English was first-rate, and I would be needing that. Tamara was slightly insane too, but tending the other way, and more dreamy than manic. Her obsession was her dacha — the converted beach hut in southern Ukraine on the shores of the Black Sea. She vowed to take me there in the spring. As I went off to sleep, she spoke to me in furry whispers. In that simple shack we would dwell, swimming naked each morning in the turquoise waters, and we would walk for hours along the sand under the confetti of white butterflies. I do love to swim, it’s true, to pound around and then float and wallow, unsupported, without connection…

On November 3, 1982, along with hundreds of others, Russian and Afghan, Artem was killed in the Salang Tunnel on the road heading north from Kabul. The Salang Tunnel, the highest on earth, which bores through the Hindu Kush, was Soviet-built (in 1963), and was therefore, and remains, a four-dimensional, 360-degree deathtrap, even in peacetime. Artem’s convoy, having cleared one avalanche, was heading north. Another convoy, two miles away at the far end, having cleared another avalanche, was heading south. There was perhaps a collision; there was certainly an explosion. We were told that “several dozen” died, but the figure was probably closer to a thousand. It wasn’t the blast that killed them. It was the smoke. Because the Russian authorities wrongly believed that Artem’s convoy was under attack from the mujahideen. So they sealed the Salang Tunnel at both ends. And why do that anyway? Blinded, maddened, choking, groping, flailing, pounding — and slow. A total death, a deep death for Artem.

I got to the house on the day after the telegram. All the blinds were drawn. You may wonder how I had the leisure to do it, but I thought of Wilfred Owen: “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” He was picturing a bereaved household (or a near-infinite series of such households) in the “sad shires”—October 1917. The drawn blind was an acknowledgment and a kind of signal. But the stricken need the dark. Light is life and is unbearable to them — as are voices, birdsong, the sound of purposeful footsteps. And they are themselves ghosts, and seek an atmosphere forgiving of ghosts, and conducive to the visits of other ghosts, or of one particular ghost.

For as long as I could bear it I sat with them in the shadows. Ten minutes. In the station hotel the water in the bathroom ran black. And this didn’t in the least surprise me or concern me. What color was water supposed to be? I looked in the mirror and I felt I could just remove it, my face. There would be clasps, behind the ears, and it would come away…I telephoned every few hours. I went over. And each time I came out of the front door — it was like fighting your way through the fathoms and snatching the first mouthful of air.

He said this to me. This is all he said. He said, “The worst is how much I pity him.”

Lidya, now, was always upstairs, in his room.

I said softly, What’s she doing up there?

“So young, and so afraid. She’s up there smelling his clothes…”

The blinds — they never did go back up. On the third morning Lev said that, insofar as he could locate his physical being, he seemed to be suffering from vertigo. He was admitted to the infirmary in Tyumen and transferred that afternoon to the hospital in Yekaterinburg. Detaching me from Lidya’s side, the doctor said that he had never seen a patient respond so weakly to such a massive infusion of drugs. He called it “a failure cascade”: organ after organ was closing down. My brother lay still and silent on the raised bed, but he was also in rapid motion. He was spinning around my head. He was disappearing into a maelstrom.

And conscious, all the way. His eyes swiveled from face to face — Lidya’s, Kitty’s, mine. His eyes were the eyes of a man who fears he has forgotten something. Then he remembered. He said goodbye to us in turn. He seemed to consider my face. Don’t expose me, I thought. Don’t tell.

“At last, no?” he said. And then the word “Please.”

Lev died on the same day that Leonid Ilich died — November 10. On the same day as the man who sent Artem into the Salang Tunnel.

4. The House of Ill Fame

She was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame…Wait. What about a decent interval? No, we have already had a decent interval. It lasted for twenty years. Of course, I could tell myself, as I walked through the streets of the capital, that I was a messenger, bearing mortal tidings, like the best of brothers — the best of brothers. But I didn’t do that. I had a plan. And she was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame.

It was the landmark mansion block on the Embankment, looming square of shoulder, its bemedaled chest out-thrust, as if standing to attention over the Moscow River: neoclassical Gothic, and violently vast. When I call it infamous, which I do, I am using the word in its older sense, and not just as a synonym for notorious. They put it up just after the war, to house the victorious nomenklatura; and it still contained many a venerable and contented mass-murderer — taciturn amnesiacs on state pensions. The residents were by now more diversified, but as I entered, and registered, and waited while the guard made his call, I could have come across a Kaganovich here, a Molotov there.^*6 I stepped into the wooden lift, which swilled on its tumblers. When it rose, the old contraption began to screech, as if the shaft with its swooning counterweight was an instrument of torture eight floors high. The encaged platform was being drawn up into it, into the house of infamy.

I had walked across town from the Rossiya, where I had taken a suite overlooking Red Square. November 17, 1982, and Leonid Ilich was being laid to rest. At the funeral of Joseph Vissarionovich, in 1953, the whole city was ascreech — human howls, the horns of cars and trucks, the factory whistles, the sirens. In her entire history, Venus, Russia was never madder than on that day. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were trampled or crushed (and not just in Moscow). My sister was there. Corpses, she said, rolled like barrels down the sharp incline into Trubnaya Square and jolted to a halt in a pond of blood. Even Pasternak, even Sakharov, felt the panic. An outrageously vast presence had disappeared; an outrageously vast absence took its place. In the vacuum everyone seriously believed that Russia itself would — would what? That Russia would stop existing. Only the Jews were glad. Only the Jews and the slaves…No grief, no apocalypse, for Leonid Ilich. Not a lethal superfluity of human beings but, instead, an embarrassing dearth. Mourners had been trucked and bussed in for the day from outlying farms and factories. They wore black. The blacks of the women frayed and puffy, the blacks of the men lucent with use. I walked through a city of Jocelyns and undertakers. I too wore a black tie, beneath my white silk scarf, my cashmere overcoat.

These last items I surrendered to the uniformed maid. Then I turned. Zoya stood at a round table, leaning back on it with her gloved fingertips. She, also, was in mourning wear: a black suit, black stockings and shoes, and a finemeshed veil attached to the rim of her velvet hat.

“Cleopatra,” she said in an unamused voice, “had the right idea.” She looked at me consideringly — my frown, my knitted black tie. “She killed the messenger if he gave her bad news, of course. Quite properly. But sometimes she killed the messenger before he said anything at all. Before. I ought to kill you now. Kitty told me about Artem. But this isn’t about him, is it? It’s about his father. Your brother. My first husband.”

And she swayed forward and engulfed me. It was my intention, whatever happened, to load up on sense impressions, future memories of smell and touch. And Russian men are old hands at comforting bereaved Russian women. They know that the embrace will last a long time, and that a certain license obtains. It seems to be permitted to stroke the sides of the upper thorax; and when you murmur “there there” you are also referring to the pendency beneath one armpit, the pendency under the other…Zoya cried with her whole body. I felt her hot breath in my ear as she heaved and gulped and popped, and her veil grew moist against my cheek. The veil — somber hosiery for the eyes, the nose, the mouth; when she straightened up and backed away it was stuck flat to her face, and not just with tears but with other fluids. She held up a black hand and pointed with the other.

In the sitting room one of the three leaded windows was open to the morning. As I approached the wavering bank of glass I picked up an odor, sweet but sinisterly sweet; it came, I knew, from the Red October Chocolate Factory across the way, but it reminded me of the smell of humanity in the Arctic thaw. Abruptly the maid’s uniform moved past me and she shut the window with a soft exclamation of surprise. How, she then asked, did I like my coffee? I declined. I feared even the slightest upsurge of agitation. You should take note of this. I cannot talk about the loss of a child. But the loss of almost anyone else is a kind of intoxicant. Mine was a rare and dreadful case, I agree, but I suspect that the invigoration is universal. You are being asked, after all, to register the greatest of all conceivable contrasts. And I was very alive. Don’t worry. The bill, on its silver tray, is presented later. Your payments are made on the installment plan — what the English, artistically but without truth, used to call the never-never. As I say, you should take note of these thoughts on bereavement, Venus. You who are about to be bereaved.

I was on my fourth cigarette by the time she again appeared. The veil was lifted now, pinned to the hat…At reunions after long intervals, beautiful women do this, I have found — they sidle toward you with their faces lowered and at an angle, peeping out, not from the ruins, but from the museum of what they once were, now that their trophies are kept behind glass. Zoya, her own curatress. And there of course it all was, despite her coloring of dusk and blush, her self-moisturizing flesh: the silky fissures of the forehead, the bruised pouches beneath the orbits, the nicks on the upper lip, and the extra painlines that all Russians have, stressing the push of the jaw. Seen head-on, her figure looked to have kept its contours and outline, but when she turned, it was as if (to persist with the schoolboy metaphor) a reeflike Caribbean island had unmoored itself and drifted all the way to the Gulf of Panama.

“His suit,” she said. “His shoes! I felt your overcoat for five whole minutes. I didn’t stint myself.”

And you, I said. Your hair…

“It’s still black. That’s because I dye the shit out of it once a week. Oh, I’m gray. Like Voltaire. It’s awful, presenting yourself to the past. I want all my old friends to be struck blind. I—” She dropped her head and made a listening face. She said, “He’s coming. He’s coming. He’ll only stay a minute. He wants to pay his respects.”

And in he came, through the double doors…As late as 1960 or so, it was possible in Moscow and Petersburg to see Ananias on posters and billboards. Sitting at a table, chin on palm, the toppled quiff of brown hair, the mock-resolute pout, the air of bohemian entitlement. And now? It is the fate of a significant fraction of little old women to turn into little old men: little old men in knickers and camisoles. You don’t so often see the process going the other way, but here was Ananias, a little old bag in a suit and tie. A little old boiler in gartered socks and black brogues. Even the stiff, tugged-back shoulders were feminine. He also had that spryness which, in elderly ladies, some claim to admire. Only in the brambly eyebrows did you see the burdens and calculations of the male.

Zoya introduced us. And you’ll think I’m making this up, but I’m not. His handshake was so disgusting that I at once resolved to hug him or even kiss him, in parting, rather than shake that hand again. White and humid, the flesh seemed about to give, to deliquesce. It was like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water.

At this point Zoya excused herself, promising her anxiously peering husband a swift return.

Ananias settled in his chair, saying, “I’m afraid you must have had a shocking flight over the mountains.”

I said, The mountains? No. They’re hardly worth the name of mountains.

“Ah, but the air pockets, do you see, the low pressure. You get it there because…”

As we talked, I found myself in the process of understanding something about Ananias: a pretty exact calculation could be made. The previous year I had seen a rerun of the film they made of his play, The Scallywags. I had also looked at a collection of his short fiction, published in 1937. This book greatly surprised and disquieted me. On the face of it his stories followed the social-realist pattern: say, the vicissitudes of a pig-iron factory or a collective farm, leading to a strengthened affirmation of “the general line.” Here was the anomaly: Ananias had talent. A consistently high level of perception was still alive and writhing. The prose lived. And when you came to the bits where he had to do the formulas and the piety — you could almost see the typewriter keys getting seized and wedged together like a mouthful of spindly black teeth. In the 1930s a talented writer who wasn’t already in prison had just two possible futures: silence, or collaboration followed by suicide. Only the talentless could collaborate and stay sane. So Ananias was a much rarer being. Within minutes I could feel the force of his accumulated mental distress, as unignorable as the touch of his hand or the smell of his breath. His breath, like the air above Predposylov.

She always seemed to be coming and going, and now she was coming again (her neck erect, like her harnessed gait). Ananias looked at her as if for leave and said in his weightless voice, “I commiserate with you in your tragedy. And the boy. Horrible. Horrible! An only child,” he said, nodding to himself. “This war is acting on us like a poison. The numbers are not yet enormous. But the young men being killed have no brothers, no sisters. Their families are at a stroke destroyed. Our whole society is cringing from this war.”

He paused, and his chin dropped onto his chest. When his gaze came up again, you saw that even the glass of the eyes gets old, ridged with scoopings and hardnesses. He said, “I’m as old as the century. Older! 1899!” His head twitched. “And your brother was still a young man. What was he, my dear? The same as you, no? Younger. A mere calf. And to give up the ghost like that. At his age. Quite extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.”

Ananias sat with his hands on his lap, their fingers inter-joined. His hands — how could they bear each other’s touch? Why didn’t they fly apart? And I felt an abstract pity for the mote of dust that might be caught in there, in the vile bivalve of his clasp. The answer I gave was valiantly mild, but it had already become clear that there would be no second handshake to avoid or survive.

I said, I assume you know that Lev spent ten years in camp.

“There was no other way, do you see. Free men would not have done that work, the mining for gold, for uranium, for nickel, all things the nation needed for its very survival.”

It was after the war, I said. We went there after the war.

“The institution got stuck. As institutions do. But that was all a very long time ago. And look at you. You’ve made your peace with the state. And doing rather well out of it, thank you very much. It hasn’t done you much harm, has it?”

I waited. I looked at Zoya, expecting a glance of warning. But her head was down. It seemed to me that every Russian was always doing the same thing. We were always fighting off an insanity of bitterness. For the moment I confined myself to saying that the reality of the camps was not what he chose to describe.

“Chose? Chose? I didn’t choose. You didn’t choose. She didn’t choose! No one chose.”

And I said it. I said, You chose. And you know who you’re like? You’re like the men and women in camp — the men and women who aren’t men and aren’t women. They had it taken away from them. But you. You did it all by yourself.

Time ticked past. And then he slapped down his hands on the leather arms of the chair and tried to rise. In a voice grown suddenly lost and childish he said, “Oh, why do people think they can come back and upset everyone? They think they can just come back. And cause such pain with these old wounds.”

Zoya helped him up. She gave me a nod and a quelling gesture, and guided Ananias toward the door, leaving me with the onerous notion that she was going off to attend to old Ester.

I spent this second intermission in a tour of the room; and it seemed that every ornament and gewgaw, every cornice and curlicue, had been potentiated, if not directly financed, by the forgiving laughter Ananias had provoked, nationwide, with his scapegrace brigands, stumbling just a little bit on their path to redemption. In The Rogues (1935) the fascists, the politicals, were straightforwardly demonic; in The Scallywags (1952) the politicals were demonic — and Semitic: we were all fagins and shylocks, we were all judases. Over in the corner there was a little shrine to Ananias’s more signal successes — autographed photos, cups and sashes, the certificate confirming his status as a Hero of Socialist Labor…I was also considering the depth of Zoya’s failure: her failure to live by the heart. I myself knew what a dispiriting project that was, with my widows, my orphans, the middle-aged waifs and changelings, the mice and the guinea pigs still rattling around the abandoned lab, long after the experiment was over. And now expected to just live out their lives.

Again she reentered. Jewess, I whispered. And “Ananias”—wasn’t that Jewish too? Oh, what’s wrong with Russians about the Jews…She closed the double doors and sank back with her hands flat against the teak. Now she moved forward with something that resembled the comic slovenliness of her old walk, and when she dropped herself onto the sofa her feet momentarily rode up from the parquet before resettling themselves as she patted for me to join her.

“He’s all right.”

You could feel her sigh through the sofa’s frame.

She said, “We’ve got about five minutes. Then he’ll start. It’s good of you to come but it hurts to see you. And it hurts to be seen. Why are you here? You must have a reason. Knowing you.”

I said I had two. Two questions.

“Begin.”

I asked her what happened in the House of Meetings.

“The house…?” In her brow many tiny lines conspired before she said, “Oh. Then. Why do you ask? Nothing happened. I mean, what do you think happened? It was lovely.” Seeing my surprise, and surprised by it, she said, “I suppose it was all too much, in a way. Lots of tears, lots of talk. As well as the obvious.”

I then apologized in advance for my unattractive haste, adding not very truthfully that certain plans of mine were impossible to postpone. I said I was getting out: America. Where I would be rich and free. I said I had thought about her a thousand times a day for thirty-six years. Here and now, I said, she delighted all my senses.

So the second question is — will you come with me?

There it was again: the sweet smell. But now all the windows were closed. And at that moment, as the blood rose through my throat, both my ears gulped shut, and when she spoke it was like listening long-distance, with pause, hum, echo.

“America? No. I’m touched, but no. And if you want me to just kiss goodbye to what I have here and put myself back at risk, at my age, you’re wrong…America. It’s months since I’ve been out in the street. It’s months since I’ve been downstairs. I’m far too drunk. Can’t you tell?”

I would have gone on but Ananias was calling her name and she said, “I’m so finished. Anyway. Not you. Never you. Him. Him.”

All the saloons and bistros were shut to the lunchtime trade, out of respect. Respect for the most decorated man in Russian history, respect for the seasoned leader who, on his public appearances, had been drooling all over himself for at least five years. At a resilient pace I had crossed the Big Stone Bridge, with echoing footsteps. You will be wondering at my tone, Venus, wondering at my resilient pace, my echoing footsteps…

I bought my way into one of the clubs I used to go to in my black-economy days. More Party people now, it seemed, as well as the usual crowd of skivers and chancers. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of champagne. The TV set, mounted on a wall of booze, was soundlessly screening the state funeral. And it looked like the usual masterpiece of boredom — until something happened. Something that silenced the room and then ignited it in a crossfire of wolf whistles and catcalls. The soldiers of the honor guard were about to close the coffin; Leonid Ilich’s widow, Viktoriya, took a lungful of air and paused. And then she committed a criminal act. She made the sign of the cross. There was only one human being in my country who could have done that without reprisal: her. She made the sign of the cross over the dead emperor of the godless.

And did I have hopes of resurrection, of resurrection at the eleventh hour? I have to say that I did; and not, in my case, without some reason. I was taking my leave of the house of ill fame — and it wasn’t a good exit, Venus. I was all right at first, but it wasn’t a good exit. Zoya unlocked the tall door, and I moved past her and turned with my scarf and overcoat in my arms. She offered me her black satin hand, knuckle-up. Which I did not take. Ananias was calling her name. That was the accompaniment to my valediction: Ananias’s ever less frequent but increasingly desperate cries.

I said in a raised voice that she could not possibly be living with less honor than she was now. Considering what had happened to Lev. And to me and the other twenty million. There was more, there was too much, in this vein. Then came the moment when I referred to her husband, with clearly superfluous asperity, as a rancid old dyke. Zoya gave a jolt of the shoulder. I waited for the door to be swung shut in my face. But she didn’t do that; her body changed its mind, and she stepped forward and leaned against me and kissed my lower lip, holding it between her teeth for a second and looking at my eyes.

This was a test.

Now you must believe how passionately, how tumultuously I wish that that had been the end of it, and that she had never come to my rooms at the Rossiya.

5. Blood on the Ice

One of things I loved about your mother was her name. The name is of course very pretty in itself, but it was also, I thought, an evocation of the shape of her life, with its cyclical resurrections: the sharecropper childhood, the cages of New Orleans, the convenient first marriage, the factory years, the time with your father, all of it survived and surmounted. And then you, the late arrival, the “autumn crocus.” And then her time with me. But I, I did not have the power to rise from my ashes. When I met your mother I was threatened in the deepest sources of my being. Your mother got me through that — or past it. But I could not do what the firebird does and reascend in flames.

You were impressively and dauntingly distressed when I told you, soon after her death, that our marriage had been chaste. You were seventeen. I should have kept my mouth shut. If she didn’t tell you, why should I? My thoughtlessness, I would like to claim, was a consequence of my crude euphoria: it was the day you decided not to go and live with your aunt, uncle, and cousins, as we had more or less intended, but to stay on with me. The sense that Phoenix, in her final span, remained imperfectly fulfilled: this is what hurt you. All I can do is repeat, with all possible diffidence, that your mother didn’t want for spoonings and cuddlings and cradlings.

And if it still hurts you, Venus, then now at least you will understand.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and then suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

She had a blond fur coat over one shoulder. And a transparent polythene pouch held to her chest: gumboots. I looked down and saw her oxblood high heels and the bands of wet on the shins of her stockings. Her Turkic face was as pale as a plaster cast — outside nature. I was reminded of the yogurty unguent that Varvara, my final croupier, used to entomb herself in, nightly, toward the end; it changed the color of her teeth — from almond flesh to an almond’s woody husk.

In Zoya swayed, throwing her things (including, I now saw, a Davy Crockett fur hat) the considerable distance to one of the heavy armchairs. I asked her what she would like — vodka, champagne, perhaps a warming cognac? She declined with a shooing flutter of both hands.

“I told them you were my husband,” she said. Then she dug her fists into her hips and leaned forward, like a schoolgirl sending a taunt across a playground. “Don’t think I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going anywhere with you — but I am going to change my life.”

The room had a dining table in it: four cylindrical straw stools, a circular silver tray with glasses, a bottle of mineral water, a decanter of British malt. Here she established herself. With impatient, with already exasperated fingernails she picked at the cellophane of a cigarette packet, holding it very close to her eyes.

You’re dry, I said.

“Dry.” The low stool creaked beneath her. “Also on my own, for now. My only friend is the maid. He’s in the clinic for his checkup. They do him bit by bit. And it’s everyone else who dies…You’re right. I hate me. I hate me. And I want to say sorry to you. If you were being truthful then I’m sorry. I bet you think you’re quite a plum, compared to him. But look at you. Look at your eyes. You’re not kind. And I don’t have a choice: I must be with the kind. Ooh, I know you’d find a way to torture me. And anyway you’re Lev’s brother. So sorry again, mate. There isn’t much in this for you, I’m afraid. If Kitty was back I’d go to her. I need to talk about Lev. Will you listen for an hour? And then we can say goodbye as brother and sister.”

At this point, you may be surprised to hear, my heart was like a hive of bees, and my ears, again, were thickly clogged; both conditions would pass. Her words make perfect sense to me, now. They made no sense to me then. Zoya said she needed to talk, but I was basking in the assurance that she had come to my rooms for quite another purpose. She might, at most, have a scruple or two she would want me to help her out of. Just as I would help her out of her clothes. The decision, I imagined, had already been made. This morning. Yesterday. And that decision would beget another decision. Because everything would look very different to her, after a night at my hands.

I was of course prepared for a longish interlude of volubility. Giving myself small doses of the boggy, peaty scotch, I listened and I looked. She wore a close-fitting business suit of charcoal gray, and a plain blue shirt of manly cut. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Through the far window you could see the dusk as it gathered over Red Square — Red Square, and the Asiatic frenzy of the Kremlin. The straw stool crackled under her shifting weight.

Zoya’s time with Lev, she told me, before he went away, was “like a new universe,” because at last she had found someone “just like me.” Someone who didn’t hold back. In matters of the heart “he always said I was hopeless. Far, far too total.” But what he didn’t yet know was that even in her wildest infatuations and most reckless surrenders she was still holding back. “I mean physically too,” she stipulated, nodding. With Lev she did not hold back. And my brother (it became clear) was equal to it…So. Lev, the “shock” lover, the sexual Stakhanovite, with his hundred tons of coal. I absorbed this in perfect calm. A premonition of what must now follow was twining itself through me; but Lev I forgave. He was among the dead. He was forgiven. And the living? In all my thoughts of Zoya, I had never looked beyond the opening act. And now the opening act was at last secure. So I looked and I saw.

“When he came back, things were in general very hard. As you know. And he made a bit of a show of being grim. But when it was just him and me, alone, it was still heavenly. He wondered how I could get up in the morning and go to work, but for me it was like fuel…You know, Lev cried in his sleep. Not every night. It was always the same dream, he said. Something that had happened in camp. He didn’t want to talk about it but I pressed him. He said he kept dreaming of the guard with no hands. No hands. As if they’d just been lopped off in Saudi Arabia. Unspeakable. But why would that make you cry? And so wretchedly.”

And for a moment she cried herself, in silence; her eyes shed a tear each. She resumed, saying, “Five more years. I still don’t understand what happened. I mean I do and I don’t. That last summer he became very withdrawn. He was not well physically, I think. He turned away from me. At night he turned away. And the words. They went too. It all went. So then I did something stupid. The whole time he was gone I never looked at another man. It wasn’t will. My eyes just didn’t look. I was him and he was me. And when he turned away from me I became very confused. Actually I was desperate. If I’d been a peasant in a time of hunger, I’d have skipped all the mice and the berries and the bugs. I’d have been thinking about cannibalism straight away…There was a young teacher, a colleague. And a complete brute, as it happened. I couldn’t even keep the thing secret. The whole school found out. Then it was over. I thought it might not be. Sometimes there is — forgiveness. But it was over. And then he knocked up that bitch in Yekaterinburg.”

Here they come again, I was vaguely thinking — the brutes and the bitches. Here they come. I said, She wasn’t a bitch.

“Of course she wasn’t a bitch. It’s just a way of talking. Anyway. And after that, God. Man after man after man after man after man.”

Something in the room had begun to change. This was what is called a nodal moment — a moment when timelines fork and branch. Over the last half hour I had acclimatized myself to Zoya’s snow-white brow, her habit of jerking her head as if to evade a vindictive housefly, the way she crushed her hands between her knees to control them or just to know where they were. Her pallor: the flesh had the numb glisten of white chocolate — but with the promise of other tints in it, yellow, beige, brown, rose. Now in a single pulse Zoya’s body went still and all her color returned. All her dusk and blush. She stood. She looked at the floor and said in a voice that had gone an octave deeper,

“My clothes are too tight. Where’s the bathroom?”

Through the bedroom, I said — the sliding door.

And even as her thighs swished past me I was contemplating, with a blood-rush all my own, the enormous project that lay before me. There was a gigantomanic headiness in the appraisal of its dimensions; I might have been looking at a blueprint of the White Sea Canal or the TransArctic Railway. And what was this enterprise? Zoya’s past — Zoya’s men. Not Lev, but every last one of the others. Even the slug trail of Ananias. Oh, what work lay ahead of us, what prodigies of retrieval and categorization, what audits and manifests, what negations, what cancellations…

“This is pathetic, but I think I need a doctor.”

I turned. She stood in the doorway, jacketless, shoeless, her color further freshened by the lightest coating of sweat. Her skirt was loosened at the waist: an inverted triangle of white against the charcoal gray…For some time, perhaps right from the start, I had been intermittently conscious of a drift or division inside me; and as I came up off the chair I had the sense that I was leaving another self, another me, still sitting quietly at the table.

But I came up off the chair saying no no no no no, it’ll pass, it’ll pass, you just, here (you’re on fire), that’s it, I’ve got you, off with this now, good girl, and with this, lift your foot, and the other, there we are, there we are. There there. There there.

She stood above me, a towering ghost in a white petticoat.

“Out of the way. Off with you. Out! Just the sheets,” she said. And she slid in between them.

At the dining table I drank a glass of whisky, and smoked a cigarette. I made a call to the hotel operator. When I returned to the doorway I saw that she had thrown off the upper sheet and now lay with her right arm under the pillow. One leg was straightened, the other fully flexed. A leaping dancer, frozen in midair.

Many times in the past, like all Russian men, I had found myself paying court to a woman who was, by any reckoning, helplessly drunk. No false delicacy, then, could deter me from paying court to a woman who was in withdrawal. First, I shed some clothes, attaining rough parity with my guest; and then I joined her. It would not be true to say that she was dozing. In common with most of my compatriots, I knew a bit about DTs — the cold turkey and the pink elephant. This was one of the shallow comas that normally precede recovery; Zoya was deeply cooperating with sleep, abandoning herself to it, breathing hungrily, and she was smooth of brow.

There must be very few women who, on a first liaison, exult in an unconscious lover. And perhaps not many men; but it has its constituency. For the time being it exactly suited my purpose. She was lying on her side, facing away; then she tipped forward and flattened herself out with a swivel of the hips.

So the inventory began. Each shoulderblade, each upper hump of her spine, each rib. After just the right amount of time she turned onto her back. From recto to verso. You see, I would be needing to know what men had done to each part of her body. I would be needing to know the history, the full picaresque, of either breast and either buttock, of these legs that had opened, of these lips that had kissed and sucked. And I was even thinking that we would both have to live for a very long time. We would both have to live long lives, Zoya and I, in order to complete our work.

Her strapless brassiere or bustier, which I had already taken the liberty of unfastening, I now conjured out from beneath her slip. Also, by the patient application of my left kneecap, I prevailed on her thighs, which in the end slackly parted, causing the hem of the petticoat to inch up toward the whiter white.

It was now, as I continued to snuffle and rummage, that Zoya began to stir. Local tremors, originating in the calves or the forearms, would roll through the plates of her body. A faint sound issued from her, nasal, a soft whinnying; she was like a bitch all atremble in her basket, chasing cats and cars. Inside me the atmosphere was that of a very hot day in the middle of winter: warmth, gratitude, a deferred awareness of the unnatural.

I began to kiss her lips. We had done this before, after all. I had kissed her. She had kissed me. Now we kissed again.

And up she flowed from the depths, all at once, her seizing arms, her tongue flooding my mouth, the jouncing shove of her groin. I thought, with a whisper of panic: one night will not be enough. For such an inundation — one night, one year, will not begin to sustain it.

“Oh, fuck, yes,” she said.

So, Venus, I had several seconds of that. I had several seconds of that. And then she opened her eyes. And awoke.

I suppose that this is the best you can say of what followed: technically speaking, it was not a rape from scratch. And it was very quick. Zoya opened her eyes and saw, inches away, a horrible delusion: it was I, Delirium Tremens. She had had the bad dream, then the good dream, then the horrible delusion. Now she had reality, and the locked shape beneath me at once gave way to infuriated struggle. But I remembered how you did it. You see, I remembered how you did it: the heavy palm over the airway, while the other hand…At a certain point her struggle ceased, and she pretended she was dead. It was very quick.

To understand her, in this last passage of time, please subtract from your thoughts any imputation of theatricality. Her manner wasn’t even pointed; it directed you to no meaning. She was uncanny. That’s what she was.

But first it was given to me to lie there, staring at the other wall, and hear her in the bathroom, hear her crash around with all the taps wrenched up, hear the rattle of the shower curtains, hear the slam of the toilet seat and its repeated flush. The door opened; and I could make out the sounds familiar to any man, as his wife or lover, in quiet self-sufficiency (and wrapped in a towel, perhaps), gathers and marshals her clothes. Then the runnel of the sliding door. Venus, the male orgasm, the male climax: only the rapist knows what a paltry thing it is. I clothed myself, and followed.

Zoya was standing in the shadows by the armchair that held her coat, her hat, her gumboots. She wore stockings and bustier and nothing else — madamlike, then, but innocent of all calculation and allure. In her raised hand she held her skirt and was wetting a finger to remove some thread or speck from its surface. As she methodically dressed herself, and then sat, back erect, to attend to her makeup, I moved around her rubbing my hands. Yes, I did try to speak; now and then I groaned out half a sentence of abjection or entreaty. Once or twice her eyes happened to pass over me, without reproach, without interest, without recognition. All that issued from her, every ten seconds or so, was a spitting sound, unemphatic but maddeningly punctual. As when a child discovers it can do something new with its mouth — hold its breath, pop its lips.

A new feeling was being born in me. At first it seemed at least vaguely familiar and, one supposed, just about manageable — no more, perhaps, than a completely new way of being very ill. I sat down at the table, under the light, and examined it, this birth. It was invisibility. It was the pain of the former person.

Fully clothed — coat, hat — she came out of the shadows. She stood in profile, an arm’s reach away. A minute passed. I could tell that she was considering something, something grave; and I could tell that I myself was not in her thoughts. She took one of the long glasses and shook the water out of it. Then she poured from the squat decanter — four inches, five — and drank it all in as many swallows. Zoya shuddered to the ends of her fingers, spat, breathed out, spat again, and made for the door.

Now the gravamen. Hie thee to the dictionary — that’s a good girl. Remember: every visit adds another gray cell.

Ten days later I was in Chicago. Like anyone else who had worked in state armaments, I was a “defector cat. A”—no great matter; but it took me quite a while to open up a channel to my sister, and not until March did I hear anything from home.

Her letter was written in haste, Kitty said, because my courier was sitting in the room, and staring at her, as she wrote…She offered wan congratulations on the success of my transposition. She went on to say that Lidya was clearing out the little house — she was moving in with her parents. There were various “effects” of Lev’s that would be passed on to me, by this route, as soon as they arrived from Tyumen. Kitty said that she too was considering a change of address: she was going to live, as a paying guest, in her lover’s two-room apartment. It didn’t sound like a good idea, she knew, but she expected to be lonelier, now, than formerly.

As for my other sister-in-law, my sometime sister-in-law, there was, alas, “grave news.” Kitty said that for months all her notes went unanswered. Her phone calls, sinisterly, were received by “a machine,” and were not returned. She even went to the Embankment, and through a slit in the door had a whispered minute with the maid, who said her mistress was “unwell,” was “indisposed.” Kitty heard nothing until she saw it in the paper — a lone paragraph at the foot of the page. On the night of February 1, 1983, the fifty-four-year-old wife of the beloved playwright Ananias threw herself off the Big Stone Bridge. There was blood on the ice of the Moscow River.

As forgetful as ever, Zoya left some articles of clothing in my rooms at the Rossiya. The wrinkled petticoat and the torn pants I found in the bathroom trashcan. The gumboots, in their transparent polythene pouch, I found on the sitting room floor. So I was obliged to imagine her, that night, uncertain of foot in the iron rink of the capital. Zoya wasn’t very steady on her legs (no mountain goat), because as a child, if you remember, she had never learned how to crawl.