House of Meetings (13 page)

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

O
ne 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.