House of Meetings Read Online Free Page B

I had better describe him now, your step-uncle, to prepare the ground for the thunderclap that is barely a page away. There was something yokelish, indeed almost troglodytic, in the asymmetries of his face, the features thrown together inattentively, as if in the dark. Even his ears seemed to belong to two completely different people. Say whatever else you like about it, but my nose was unquestionably a nose, while Lev’s was a mere protuberance. And when you looked at him side-on, you thought, Is that his chin or his Adam’s apple? He was also, as a kid, short, meager, and sickly—a stuttering bedwetter in inch-thick glasses. All he had was his smile (in the mess of his face lived the teeth of a beautiful woman) and his rich blue eyes, the eyes of an
intelligent
. Definitely an
intelligent
.
    I said—Don’t turn around. And when you do, show no pleasure in seeing your older brother.
    He stood up; he walked away, then circled back into range. For a moment I found his faintly hooded, self-caressing expression impossible to read; it seemed, in the circumstances, simply alien. After the jail and the interrogation, after the transport, many new arrivals were already mad; and I feared my brother was already mad.
    “Guess what happened to me,” he said.
    I said, patiently, You got arrested.
    “No. Well, yes. But no. I got
married
.”
    Congratulations, I said. So you finally knocked up little Ada. Or was it little Olga?
    He didn’t answer. Look at the eyes now—the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself. This was clearly a great coup of love he had brought off: a grand slam of love. Has it ever happened to you, Venus? The color of the day suddenly changes to shadow. And you know you’re going to remember that moment for the rest of your life. Registering an impressive contraction of the heart, I said,
    Not
Zoya
.
    He nodded. “Zoya.”…You little
cunt,
I said. And I wheeled away from him into the yard.
    After a time, as I staggered along, buckling and straightening, shaking my head, scratching my hair, I felt him settling into step beside me.
    “I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. I’m so sorry.”
    No you’re not. I turned. And with an older brother’s grooved cruelty (spinning it out for at least three syllables), I said,
You?
    We sucked up breath and looked out into the sector. And saw what? In the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand, a team of locusts twirling an old shiteater into the compost heap, and, finally, a leech who, with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right-angles (scurvy), was nonetheless making a serious attempt to eat his shoe.
    I whispered it: Lev and Zoya got married. If I can survive that, then I’ll never die.
    “No, brother, you’ll never die.”
    Sighing heroically, I added in a clear voice,
    And
you
can survive
this
. And now you’ll have to.

4.
    Zoya
    W hen a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit. So what am I? You have consumed your share of Russian novels: every time a new character appears, there is a chapter break and you are suddenly reading about his grandparents. This too is a digression. And its import is sexual. So do yourself a favor, and go and get the framed photograph on my desk and prop it up in front of you as you read. I don’t want you thinking about the way I am now. I want you thinking about that twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who is throwing his hat into the air on Victory Day.
    Listen. In Russia, after the war, there was a shortage of everything, including bread. There was, in fact, a famine in Russia, after the war, and two
more
million died. There was also a shortage of men.