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. Well, there was a shortage of women too (and of children, and of old people), but the shortage of men was so extreme that Russia never recovered from it: the disparity, today, is ten million. So it was a corruptingly good time to be male in Russia, after the war, particularly if you were a handsome (and wounded) frontliner, as I was, returning to the great well of gratitude and relief, and even more particularly if, as I was, you were corrupt already. My dealings with women, I concede, were ruthless and shameless and faithless, and solipsistic to the point of malevolence. My behavior is perhaps easily explained: in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany.
It would suit me very well if, at this point, I could easternize your Western eyes, your Western heart. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German woman from eight to eighty,” wrote one witness. “It was an army of rapists.” And, yes, I marched with the rapist army. I could seek safety in numbers, and lose myself in the peer group; for we do know, Venus (the key study is Police Battalion 101), that middle-aged German schoolteachers, almost without exception, chose to machine-gun women and children all day rather than ask for reassignment and face the consequence. The consequence was not an official punishment, like being sent to the front, or even any mark of official disfavor; the consequence was a few days of peer displeasure before your transfer came through — the harsh words, all that jostling in the lunch queue. So you see, Venus, the peer group can make people do anything, and do it day in and day out. In the rapist army, everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too.
There is a further mitigating circumstance: namely the Second World War, and four years on the dirtiest front of the dirtiest fight in history. Don’t apply zero tolerance — a policy that calls for zero thought. I ask you not to turn your face away. I paid a price, as I said, and I have work, specific work, ahead of me to pay it fully. I have work to do and I will do it. I know I will. So Venus, I ask you to read on, merely noting, for now, the formation of a certain kind of masculine nature. A bashful and bookish youth, finding his feet in the 1930s (a time of catastrophe and pan-terror but also, if you please, a time of watchful prudishness from above), I lost my virginity to a Silesian housewife, in a roadside ditch, after a ten-minute chase. No. It was not the most auspicious of awakenings. I will add, in a pedagogic spirit, that the weaponization of the phallus, in victory, is an ancient fact, and one we saw remanifested on a vast scale, in Europe, in 1999. On my front, in 1945, many, many women were murdered as well as raped. I did no killing of women. Not then.
I am about to describe an unusually attractive young girl, and experience tells me that you won’t like it, because that’s what you are too. I’m sure you think you’ve evolved out of it — out of invidiousness; but evolution is not the work of an afternoon. And in my experience an attractive woman doesn’t want to hear about some other attractive woman. It is the more problematic, perhaps, in that you will feel a protective pang for your mother, as is only right. So I invite you to put yourself in the place of one of Zoya’s female contemporaries. She was nineteen, and, from the outset, her reputation was frankly terrible. You will perk up at that. And yet the other girls took an exceptionalist view of Zoya. They instinctively indulged her, as a vanguard figure—l’esprit fort. She lived more than they did, but she also suffered more than they did; and she showed them possibilities.
It used to be said that Moscow was the biggest village in Russia. On the outskirts, in winter, there were little paths connecting each house with tram stops and food stores (Milk, said the sign), and everyone shuffled around like rustics in their short sheepskin coats, and you expected mammoths and icebergs. But that’s a memory from childhood (no milk today). It changed: a primitive entanglement in which various foundries and blast furnaces and gasworks and tanneries had been planked down among the cottages and cobblestones. We had a village within the village (the district in the southeast known as the Elbow), and when Zoya walked into it, in January 1946, she was like a rebuke to the prevailing conditions, the absence of food and fuel, the absence of books, clothes, glass, lightbulbs, candles, matches, paper, rubber, toothpaste, string, salt, soap. No, more: she was like an act of civil disobedience. She was recklessly conspicuous, Zoya, and Jewish — a natural target for denunciation and arrest. Because that’s how resentments and jealousies were resolved in my country, for hundreds of years. That’s how a “love triangle” could be wonderfully simplified. An anonymous phone call, or an unsigned letter, to the secret police. You kept expecting it, but there she was, every day, not in camp or in prison but on the street, with the same smile, the same walk.
And I surprised myself: I, the heroic rapist, with the medals and the yellow badge. My first thought was not the first thought I was used to — some variant of When can I wrench her clothes off? No. It was this (and the sentence came to me unbidden and fully formed): How many poets are going to kill themselves because of you? Zoya was not an acquired taste. Her face was original (more Turkic than Jewish, the nose pointing down, not out, the mouth improbably broad whenever she laughed or wept), but her figure was a platitude — tall and ample and also wasp-waisted. Every male was condemned to receive its message. You felt it down the length of your spine. We all got it, from the street draggle-tail who pleaded to carry her books and hold her hand, right the way up to our pale and ancient postman who, each morning, stopped and stared at her with his mouth unevenly agape and one eye shut, as if over a gunsight.
Perhaps the single most unbelievably wonderful thing about her was that she had her own place: an attic the size of a parking bay, two floors up from her grandmother, but with its own stairs and its own front door. A nineteen-year-old girl, in Moscow, who had her own room: the equivalent, Venus, in Chicago, would be a nineteen-year-old girl who had her own yacht. You could see her going in there at night, with a man; you could see her coming out of there, with a man, in the morning. And there was something else. You won’t believe this, but under the circumstances I can’t omit it. One of the more malarial rumors attached to her was that, before each liaison, she went through some kind of Hasidic ablution that guarded her from pregnancy. This, then, was her preferred approach to the Jewish business of killing Christian babies. There were of course no contraceptives in Russia in 1946; and, as your prospective lovers monotonously reminded you, the penalty for abortion (quite mild, considering) was two years in jail.
We know quite a lot about the consequences of rape — for the raped. Understandably little sleep has been lost over the consequences of rape for the rapist. The peculiar resonance of his postcoital tristesse, for example; no animal is ever sadder than the rapist…As for the longer-term effects, what they were for me I now came to understand. This was the mental form they took: I couldn’t see women whole, intact and entire. I couldn’t even see their bodies whole. Now, Zoya wielded an outrageous allocation of physical gifts, and it would have been my style to atomize them: to do what Marvell did to the coy mistress (even her breasts, remember, were to be considered separately), to carve her up on the marble slab, each bit pierced by a flagpin, and bearing a price. That’s the way my mind went at it. So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike “all the others,” I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. When she sneezed — you felt that absolutely anything might happen. And when she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she leaned into it and performed a sedentary belly dance of rebuttal. And naturally I wondered what else she did like that, with the whole of her body. We were neighbors, and also colleagues at the Tech, the Institute for Systems, where she studied in the Jewish stream. I was twenty-five and she was nineteen. And Lev, for Christ’s sake, was still at school.