She used to run a regular errand for her mother, old Ester, bringing a few edible odds and ends for the scrofulous rabbi who lay endlessly praying and dying in the basement beneath our flat. The only way to get there was through the ground floor and down the spiral staircase outside our kitchen. These iron steps were often sheathed in ice, and after a mishap or two she reluctantly fell in with my soldierly insistence that I should lead her there by the hand. She was actually not at all steady on her feet, and she knew it; much later, Lev would learn that she lacked certain spatial wirings, certain readinesses, because, as a child, she had never learned how to crawl…At the door to the basement she would always give me a smile of gratitude, and I always wondered what the force was, the force preventing me from throwing my arms around her, or even meeting her eye, but the force was there, and it was a strong force. “Call my name when you want to come back,” I said. But she never did. From the look of her, sometimes, I thought she scaled those steps on her hands and knees. Then one night I heard her voice, lost and hoarse, calling my name. I went out and took her surprisingly warm hand in mine.
Jesus, I said at the top. I thought I was going to take a toss.
She smiled greedily and said, “You’d have to be a bloody mountain goat to get up there.”
We laughed. And I was lost.
Yes, Venus, at that point my desperate fascination became fulminant love; and it came on me like an honor. I had all the troubadour symptoms: not eating, not sleeping, and sighing with every other breath. Do you remember Montague, the father, in Romeo and Juliet—“Away from light steals home my heavy son”? That’s what I was, heavy, incredibly heavy. It is the heaviness you feel when, after an hour-long fight for your life in an anarchic sea, you come out of the surf, drop to the sand, and feel the massive pull of the center of the earth. Every morning I would wonder how the bed could bear my weight. I wrote poems. I walked out at night. I liked standing in the shadows across the street from her house, in the rain, in the sleet, or (this was best) in an electric storm. When the blind was up you knew that you would still be there to watch her close it.
I once saw a man leaning against the window frame, his armpits insolently singleted, his chin upraised. I was jealous, and all that, but I was also sharply aroused. That’s right. I could sulk and pine, but my obsession was dependably and gothically carnal. I further confess that, while not really believing it, I was much taken with the story about the prophylactic ablution. I was used to a certain pattern — half-clothed fumblings, messy intercrural compromises, and snuffling aftermaths; and this would be happening on stairwells, in alleys and bombsites — or on a carpet or against a table, with an extended family heaped up on the other side of a locked door. Oral “relief,” lasting half a minute, was the sex act of choice and necessity. And I offer this final observation (very vulgar, but not entirely gratuitous) in a pedagogic spirit, because it shows that even in their most intimate dealings the women, too, were worked on by socioeconomic reality. In the postwar years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.
Absent that little flourish of enthusiasm, and the sexual atmosphere was one of coercion: my humorless insistence, their faltering submission. So in Zoya’s turret, under its witchy, candlesnuffer apex, there awaited something more futuristic than female consent or even female abandonment. I mean female lust.
“Do you know what you look like when you’re with her?”
Lev said this, I thought, with dissimulated ill wilclass="underline" I had just declined his offer of a game of chess with an abstracted, frivolity-imputing wave of the hand. So I readied myself.
“I’ll tell you what you look like. If you want.”
He was more advanced, and much busier, than I was, at seventeen, in the matter of girls. And so were his friends. In addition, the shortage of housing was slightly eased by the shortage of people; there was just a little more space and air — though I was never sure how far Lev got, in those secluded intervals, with his various Adas and Olgas…The tempo of the age was speeding up, or was trying to. You can’t see yourself in history, but that’s where you are, in history; and, after World War I, revolution, terror, famine, civil war, terror-famine, more terror, World War II, and more famine, there was a feeling that things could not but change. Universal dissatisfaction took the following form: everyone everywhere complained about everything. We all sensed that reality would change. But the state sensed our sensing it, and reality would not change.
All right, I said. What do I look like?
He had a certain expression, sometimes, that I knew, that I feared — a sharpened focus, an amusement with something savage in it.
“You look like Vronsky when he starts shadowing Anna. ‘Like an intelligent dog that knows it’s done wrong.’”
I transcribe Lev’s speech in the normal way, but in fact he spoke with a stutter. And a stutter is something that prose cannot duplicate. To write “d-d-d-dog” is perfunctory to the point of insult. And stuttering is in any case a poor word for what used to happen to Lev. It was more like a sudden inability to speak — or even to breathe. First, the tensing, the momentary glint of self-hatred, then the little nose went up and the fight began. My brother looked far from his best at such moments, with his head stretched back and his nostrils staring at you like a pair of importunate eyes. When people stutter, you just sit through it and watch. You can’t just turn away. And, with Lev, I always wanted to know what he was going to say. Even when he was a child, before the stutter came, I always wanted to know what he was going to say.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said, poking out his cigarette. “And anyway. She’s already got a boyfriend.”
I said, I know she has. And I’m waiting him out.
“…Yup, that’s it,” he concluded with satisfaction (as if dusting his palms). “That’s what you look like. You look like a clever dog that knows it’s about to be thrashed.”
My brother started smoking early. He started drinking early too, and having girlfriends early. Increasingly, people do everything early in Russia. Because there isn’t much time.
5. Among the Shiteaters
People always talked about the strange light in a shiteater’s eyes — that shiteater glitter. It disturbed me very much when I identified the strange light as flirtatious and peculiarly feminine. Like the moist brightness in the eye of an unpredictable aunt who has drunk too much at Easter, and is about to obey an impulse she knows to be ill-advised — a kiss, a squeeze, a pinch…Furtive yet conspiratorial, that shiteater glitter had something to say and something to ask. I have crossed a line, it said. And it asked: Why don’t you cross it too?