At the door Zoya was saying goodnight to her penultimate guest (her farewells punctuated by a violent yawn). All the time I kept asking myself how it happened — how had I stood by and given someone such power to hurt me? In my mouth, not the usual slow drool but a humble aridity — the aching throat of the lovelorn. I would act, though, I would act; and Russia would help me. You see, when the depths stir like this, when a country sets a course for darkness, it comes to you not as horror but as unreality. Reality weighs nothing, and everything is allowed. I rose. I rose, and impended.
She placed a palm on my chest, to establish a distance, but she accepted the kiss, or withstood it; and yet, as she withdrew her mouth, she retained my lower lip for a second between her teeth, and her eyes moved sideways, ruminatively; she was chewing it over — but not at length. I said three words and she said three words. Hers were, “You frighten me…” A novelettish incitement, you may think. And I would once have taken it as that. But I deeply knew that she hadn’t liked the taste of my lips.
“I’m sorry.”
For several seconds I stood there with my hands writhing around in one another’s grasp. And then I, the decorated rapist, I, who went through a woman a week using every form of flattery, false promises, bribery, and blackmail, not to mention the frank application of masculine bulk — I gave out a noise like the muffled coo of a pigeon, kissed her palm, and staggered out, seeming to twirl end over end all the way down the stairs.
They didn’t come for her, of course. They came for me. And understand that it didn’t feel like the worst thing that had ever happened when, ten weeks later, they gave me ten years.
This was his first morning and he was out there in the sector.
This was what I told him, as we stood among the shiteaters and their eager swirls of breath, their laughing eyes. I told him he would join their number unless he could find some murder in his heart. I told him that the acceptance of murder was the thing that was being asked of him.
This was Lev in the yard. His face, already brick-red, wore a gashed forehead and a split lip. During the bungled headcount (and recount, and re-recount), many of the men in his brigade — a strong brigade — were running on the spot, or at least flapping their arms about. Lev was doing jumping jacks.
PART II
1. Dudinka, September 2, 2004
The phrase “dirty old man” has two meanings, and one of them happens to be literal. There is a dirty old man on board who is that kind of dirty old man. He may be a dirty old man of the other kind too, but something tells me that the two callings are difficult to combine. Now tell me, Venus. Why do I feel tempted to take the road of this dirty old man? I hate washing more and more every day, and shaving, and I hate stuffing my laundry into plastic bags and writing “socks—4 prs.” I almost burst into tears, the other morning, when I realized I’d have to cut my toenails one more time. A really dirty old man wouldn’t bother. What clarity and intrepidity, what boldness and pride. I find I deeply admire this dirty old man. His leftover-infested beard, his death-ray breath, and his rotting, many-layered overcoat are things that everyone else has to worry about. The smell that follows him about, and precedes him, is light-speed: you know it the instant he enters the dining room even when he’s forty feet away. He behaves as though it isn’t his fault and he’s innocent. He’s clean: in some mysterious way, he’s clean. Yesterday he disembarked; I saw him, quite a distance off, being canoed through the mist — a mist perhaps of his own making — to what looked like a fish cannery lurking under the eaves of the western bank.
Women don’t mind it, because baths and showers are, at least, “lovely and warm” (this was the phrase used by an English ladyfriend of mine, whom you’ll meet); and it’s interesting, the female admiration for warmth, combined with the well-attested tolerance of cold. But the male, I think, is eventually bored to the point of dementia by the business of not being dirty. On the other hand, I do see that it’s necessary, and that it gets more necessary every day. The “high” eighties: that too has unfortunate connotations. High, late — it doesn’t matter. Eighty-six is never going to sound any good.
I realize you must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph. And it isn’t just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude — my appetite for generalizations. Your crowd, they’re so terrorstricken by generalizations that they can’t even manage a declarative sentence. “I went to the store? To buy orange juice?” That’s right, keep it tentative — even though it’s already happened. Similarly, you say “okay” when an older hand would say (c” “My name is Pete?” “Okay.” “I was born in Ohio?” “Okay.” What you’re saying, with your okays, is this: for the time being I take no exception. You have not affronted me yet. No one has been humiliated so far.
A generalization might sound like an attempt to stereo-type — and we can’t have that. I’m at the other end. I worship generalizations. And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.
The name of your ideology, in case anyone asks, is Westernism. It would be no use to you here.
Now, at noon, the passengers and crew of the Georgi Zhukov are disembarking in Dudinka with as much triumphalism as their numbers will allow. The tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that’s what a port looks like — a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettledrums of the storage vats.
But this is different. It is a Mars of rust, in various hues and concentrations. Some of the surfaces have dimmed to a modest apricot, losing their barnacles and asperities. Elsewhere, it looks like arterial blood, newly shed, newly dried. The rust boils and bristles, and the keel of the upended ferryboat glares out across the water with personalized fury, as if oxidation were a crime it would lay at your door.
Tottering and swaying over my cane, I think of those more or less ridiculous words, Greek-derived, for irrational fears, many of which describe more or less ridiculous conditions: anthophobia (fear of flowers), pogonophobia (beards), deipnophobia (dinner parties), triskaidekaphobia (the number thirteen). Yes, these are sensitive souls. But there’s one for rust (iophobia); and I think I’ve got it. I’ve got iophobia. The condition doesn’t strike me, now, as at all ridiculous — or at all irrational. Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.
A stupor of self-satisfaction: that’s the state to be in when your life is drawing to an end. And not this state — not my state. It isn’t death that seems so very frightening. What frightens me is life, my own, and what it’s going to turn out to add up to.
There is a letter in my pocket that I have yet to read.
The big wrongs — you reach a point where you’ve just about bedded them down. And then the little wrongs wake up and bite, with their mean little teeth.