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…