“Brother,” it began. “I said I would answer your question before I died. I’m going to keep the first half of that promise. I feel sure that I will be able to slake your curiosity. I also intend to mortify your soul. Ready yourself.”
And that was as far as I got. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since — readying myself.
Yes, I’ll read Lev’s letter. But I don’t want to give it any time at all to sink in.
I’ll read it later. I want that to be more or less the last thing I do.
4. Test Tube
It was on one of my final twilit staggerings, by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger’s hollowed hulk, that I found it. Here the landforms, the tectonic plates, the very points of the compass have been reshuffled and redealt, but I found it: the steep little lane, the five stone steps stacked there just for you; and then the cleared tabletop of the foothill. No buildings, now, but you could still see the ridged outlines on the ground — the outlines of the annex of the House of Meetings. I crossed the threshold. As I kicked my way through the rubble and rubbish, I heard the faint resonance of creaking glass. My shoe nosed through the shavings, and then I stooped. I held it up, the feebly glinting thing: a cracked test tube, in a wooden frame. That dark smear on its rim. Maybe it was the wildflower with its amorous burgundy, witness to an experiment in human love.
In my other hand I held a plastic bag. It didn’t take very long to fill it — with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull. I was walking on a killing field. A grave churned up by bulldozers and excavators. Further around the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a shrine. Inside: icons, an apple, a wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance…The Jews have Yad Vashem and an air force. We have a prefab and a cankered apple. And a Russian cross.
I walked back to the city square. I bought a beer and a paper, and sat on a bench before a fablon-decked table. The only other customer was a speckly man in a gypsy outfit, irrevocably slumped, thank God, over his accordion. An item at the foot of page one in the Post informed me that the “numbers” of Joseph Vissarionovich continue to climb. His approval rating is what a devout and handsome U.S. president might expect in a time of monotonous prosperity. With my bag of bones and my cracked test tube, I sat in a trance of lovelessness and watched it — the harlequinade. The harlequinade of the incorrigible.
The middle-aged wrecks I told you about, the ones that won’t go away: a group of them, men and women, stood on the corner selling — auctioning — their analgesics to etiolated youths in overcoats made from vinyl car-seat covers. Then, very quickly, the old get drunk and the young get blocked. Twenty minutes later everyone is crashing and splashing around in the blood-colored puddles infested with iron oxide, used syringes, used condoms, American candy-bar wrappers, and broken glass. They veer and yaw and teeter. And they just watch each other drop. Yes, it’s all gone — the wild dogs have more esprit. That’s right, stay down. No one’s going to lick your face or try and fuck you back to life.
That night was Friday, and Predposylov was smashed, not on vodka, but on surgical spirit, or spirt, at thirty cents a flagon. One kiosk was glass-backed, and starkly lit, like a beacon. I went over and stared at it. I stared at the comfortable figure of the blonde in her trap. All she had for sale was surgical spirit and heaped paperbacks of a single genre. That’s all she was dealing in: The Myth of the Six Million, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and spirt. And the blonde sat idly at the cash register, her face resting on the cushion of her placid double chin, as if what encircled her (on the shelves, in the streets and in the belts all around) was completely ordinary, and not a part of something nightmarish and unforgettable…You know what I think? I think there must have been a developmental requirement that Russia simply failed to meet. She’s not like Zoya. Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run. But she never learned how to walk.
Tomorrow I fly to Yekaterinburg. I am ready. We can close, now, with two letters from the sick bay.
5. Lev’s Letter
It is dated July 31, 1982. “Brother,” it begins.
I said I would answer your question before I died. I’m going to keep the first half of that promise. I feel sure that I will be able to slake your curiosity. I also intend to mortify your soul. Ready yourself.
For twenty-six years to the day I have been trying to write a long poem called “House of Meetings.” A long poem. Symmetrically, though, my flame or numen, such as it was, died on that night, along with everything else. You’ll eventually see that I did manage two or three stanzas, much later on. I don’t think you’ll find them of interest. They’re about Artem, I’m afraid. They’re nursery rhymes. That’s all they are.
No, I couldn’t do it, that poem. I couldn’t tell that story. But now I’m dead, and I can tell it to you.
I am writing this in hospital. Our health system may be thick-fingered (with grimy nails), but it is broad-handed. The attitude to illness is this. All treatment — and no prevention. Still, they are using me to test the new asthma drug. I am not the first. It is clear that most, if not all, of the previous candidates suffered fatal heart attacks. Early on, too. But so far there is a concord of interests. My heart holds up and I breathe easy. How delicious air is. How luxurious to draw it in — once you know you can get the fucking stuff out. Air, even this air, with its smells of ashtrays (everyone still smokes, patients, cleaners, caterers, doctors, nurses), fierce medications, and terminal tuberculosis, tastes nice. Air tastes nice.
So — I watched her coming up the path, her walk, her shape exaggerated by the window’s bendy glass. She entered. And the moment of meeting was exactly what you would want it to be. I felt the force of certain clichés—“beside myself,” for example. I needed two mouths, one to kiss, one to praise. I needed four hands, one to unclip, one to unbutton, one to stroke, one to squeeze. And all the time I was replenishing memories worn thin by mental repetition. When you caress Zoya, she writhes, she almost wriggles, as if to broaden the inclusiveness of your touch. Children do that. Artem did it.
With the removal of each piece of clothing came the delivery of enormous stores of fascination. If there was an unwelcome feeling, at this stage, it was a kind of humorous mortal fear. Remember the shiteater who traded in his bowl and spoon, and then overdosed on a double ration? And who could forget the fate of Kedril the Gorger? As Zoya got more and more naked, I kept thinking about those ridiculous tsarist banquets we used to fantasize about. Salmon lips and peacock eyelids seethed in honey and burbot roe. And two hundred courses of it, with forty-five kinds of pie, and thirty different salads.
It is necessary at this point to tell you something about Zoya’s amatory style. I am not fastidious or possessive about these things (as I feel you are), and it is my intention, in any case, to encumber you — to hobble you — with confidences. Most remarkably, most alchemically, she was a big woman who weighed about half a kilo in bed. She was also very inventive, preternaturally unsqueamish, and quite incredibly long-haul. During our first nine months together, lovemaking, it seems fair to say, took up much of our time. For instance, with breaks for naps and snacks our last session (before the day of the marriage and my ten-minute trial) went on for seventy-two hours.