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I can’t show you the whole thing, I said. I’m the censor. But it’s good news.

In Aesopian language Kitty told of Lev’s arrest, and his expected departure for “an unknown destination.” As a result of this second disappearance, the family had “unfortunately” lost the apartment. And Mother had lost her job. Kitty went on to say that “the flu” was very virulent in the capital, and that Zoya and her mother had gone back to Kazan.

I said, Where the flu’s less bad. And it’s good news anyway.

He leaned into me and pressed his face to my chest.

“You make me very happy, brother. That’s it—get her out of town. And I don’t care what else Kitty said.”

This was just as well. Kitty said that she thought it inconceivable that Zoya would “wait” for Lev. According to her, Zoya already had a new favorite at the Tech, and was “all over him” in the canteen. It is my solemn duty, Venus, to admit to the coarse joy this sentence gave me.

I said, What do you expect? It’s Kitty.

“That’s right. It’s Kitty.”

Yes, it was Kitty: that unreliable narrator. I wanted someone with greater authority to tell me it was true — about Zoya being all over her new favorite. I wanted someone like Georgi Zhukov or, better still, Winston Churchill to tell me it was true.

“Can you write back?” he said.

I’m supposed to be able to. But they don’t like me. Anyway there’s never anything to write with. Or write on.

“Why don’t they like you? I mean, I can think of a reason or two. But why?”

The dogs.

“Ah. The dogs.”

I was quite famous, in camp, for the way I dealt with the dogs. Most prisoners, including Lev, were horribly afraid of them. Not me. When I was a toddler we had a mule-sized borzoi. I can’t even remember her; but she passed something on to me before she went. I have no fear of dogs. So I used to make them cringe. It’s just a dog, imbued with a pig nature. It’s just a snarl, waiting to become a cringe. I would often risk a beating to make the dogs cringe.

Lev said, “I went to the guardhouse and asked the pig. It says on my file: Without the Right to Correspondence. I thought that that was code for immediate execution. So did the pig. He kept peering at it and then peering at me. I don’t have the right. But I’ll keep on. I’ll get it.”

I said, untruthfully, I’m glad you don’t worry about Kitty. And about Zoya.

“Worry? I’m good at worrying. When I started being her friend, before, I used to worry that someone was going to get her pregnant. But she didn’t get pregnant. She can’t. She had an abortion when she was sixteen and she can’t. Then I worried that she was going to get arrested or kicked to death in the street. But other men, you mean? No. The thing about her…She’s a hundred-percenter. And so am I, now. My uh, my status as a noncombatant. That’s for her. That’s for us.”

You talk in riddles, Lev. Don’t you understand that what you do here doesn’t count?

“Doesn’t it? Won’t it? You don’t see it, do you. It’ll count.”

On top of everything else there was also the huge brute, Arbachuk, who took a liking to my brother in what seemed to be the worst possible way. Every night he’d search him out. Why? To tousle him and taunt him and kiss him and tickle him. It was fashionable, at that time, for a brute to take a fascist as a pet, though Lev claimed it felt more like the other way around. “Suddenly I’m best friends with a mandrill,” he said, which was game of him, because he was badly and rightly frightened. As Arbachuk shouldered his way through the barracks, with his tattoos and his moist, gold-flecked smile, Lev would close his eyes for a second and the light would pass from his face. All I could do about Arbachuk was indicate, with a glance and a movement of the shoulders, that if it really came to it he would have to get by me too. Lev said that it was much worse when I wasn’t there. So I always was. And when I couldn’t be, we relied on Semyon or Johnreed, two of the higher-ranking officer veterans, a colonel and a captain, who were both Heroes of the Soviet Union — an honor of which, on arrest, they were naturally stripped…You’re probably wondering about that name: Johnreed. A lot of people his age were called Johnreed, after John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World. There were so many Johnreeds in camp that they had earned the status of a phylum, the Johnreeds, like the Americans and, later, the Doctors—the Jewish doctors. In its stirred account of the October Revolution, John Reed’s book barely mentioned Joseph Vissarionovich, so he banned it, thus whipping out the carpet, so to speak, from under all the Johnreeds.

Arbachuk used to bring titbits for Lev, who always refused them. Not just chunks of bread, either, but meat — mince, sausage — and on one occasion an apple. “I’m not hungry,” Lev would say. I couldn’t believe it: he sat there with Arbachuk’s tongue in his ear, and half a pork chop dangling under his nose, saying, “I’m not hungry.”

“Open!” said Arbachuk, squeezing the bolts of Lev’s jaw in his hand.

“I’m not hungry. This tattoo, Citizen. I can only see the last word. What does it say?”

Slowly and grimly Arbachuk rolled up his sleeve. And there were the bruised letters: You may live but you won’t love.

“One bite. Open!”

“I eat the full ration. I’m not hungry, Citizen. I work in a strong brigade.”

Like the kind of man who cannot forget or forgive a woman’s past, and must sit her down, every other night, and have her go through the hoops all over again (“He touched you where? You kissed his what?”), I would come to Lev, seeking the narrative of greatest pain. I know about that kind of man, because I’m him — he’s me. In later years it was the only way I could tell for sure that I was finding a woman interesting: I would want her to confess, to denounce, to inform. And they quite enjoyed it at first, because it felt like attention. They soon came to dread it. They soon caught on…This trait of mine didn’t really have the time or the opportunity to get started between war and camp. You see, nearly all the ex-lovers of nearly all my girlfriends — they were dead. And I didn’t mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn’t forgive the dead. I didn’t mind the dead. The living were what bothered me.

When, shortly before I was arrested, Lev asked for my permission to try his luck with Zoya, I didn’t even take the trouble to laugh in his face. I gave him the trisyllabic You?; and that was all. I honestly didn’t give it a moment’s thought. But Lev was like clever little brothers everywhere. He watched what I did and then tried the opposite. He came at Zoya without intensity.

Oh well done, I said, during one of our last conversations in freedom. You’re her errand boy. And her mascot.

“That’s it,” he said, stuttering. He was always stuttering. “Come on, how close did you ever get to her? Me, I’m there in the room. I’m there all the time. I’m there when she’s changing.”

Changing?

“Behind the curtain.”

How big is the curtain? And how thick?

“Thick. It goes from the floor up to here. She drapes clothes over the top of it.”

What clothes?

“Petticoats and things.”

Jesus Christ…And now she’s fucking that linguist. I don’t know how you can bear it.