House of Meetings Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    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