House of Meetings Read Online Free PDF Page A

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