House of Meetings

New Words

rictus: the gape of the mouth (of a bird)

invidious: calculated to create ill will or resentment

intercrural: pertaining to the leg or the hind limb

tumescent: swelling, tumid; exhibiting or affected with many ideas or emotions; teeming

saturnalia: unrestrained revelry; orgy

amatory: of or pertaining to lovers or lovemaking

moribund: in a dying state; near death

Passages for Discussion:

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 (37).

. . . in the four of five seconds between my kiss and her awakening, Zoya was dreaming about Lev.  It had to be that way, to crystallize his fate and mine (241).

You know what happened to us, brother?  It wasn’t just a compendium of very bad experiences. The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness—that was general, and standard-issue.  That was off the rack.  What I’m referring to is the destiny that is made to measure.  Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there (233).

Fascinating Quotes/Prose

When you get a wound as bad as that, for the first hour you don’t know whether you’re a man or a woman (or whether you’re old or yound, or who your father was or what your name is).  Even so, an inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell—because this story is a love story.  All right, Russian love.  But still love (9).

My eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Easter.  I am back in the bosom of a vast slum family (15).

There it is in front of me on the screen of my computer, the graph with its two crinkly lines intersecting, one pink, one blue.  The birth rate, the death rate.  They call it the Russian cross (17).

But then he gave me the look I knew well: the mirthless rictus, with the two inverted chevrons in the middle of his brow (19).

           

Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis.  Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after hald a second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw.  That was the war between the brutes and the bitches (29).

“Free love” was officially classified as a bourgeois deformity.  It was the “free” bit they really didn’t like.  Still, they didn’t like love either (64).

You could just see the corona, a pearly liquid smeared on the tundra’s edge.  The long eclipse was over: fingers pointed, and there was a grumbling, burbly cheer from the men.  And I too came up out of eclipse and obscuration.  I was no longer muffled in the chemicals of calm (80).

The watchtowers—their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth . . . (100).

“. . . Then you could kill me.  And do you know what you’d get if you killed me?’ he closed his eyes and nodded and opened them again. ‘You’d get a hard-on.’” (112).

“. . . One single titter and it would have happened.  The massacre of the laughing men.  I knew then that massacres want to happen.  Massacres want there to be massacres” (122).

It’s all right, it’s all right, I kept mechanically shouting.  It’s all right—he’s only little.  He’s smaller than I am (133).

“You know what happened,” he said. “You and I have been sold into slavery.  All that fucking around with the interrogations and the confessions and the documents” (47).

Right from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow.  I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating (144).

. . . significant addenda to the panoply of my brother’s attractions.  A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, a perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede; and, most mysteriously, an unvarying arc of perspiration, the width of a hatband, running from temple to temple (154).

“Stop looking at me like that.” / Like what? / “Like the doctors look at me.” / Well, God help me, I had a plan (170).

I saw that she had thrown off the upper sheet and now lay with her right arm under the pillow.  One leg was straightened, the other fully flexed.  A leaping dancer, frozen in midair (195).

And she flowed up from the depths, all at once, her seizing arms, her tongue flooding my mouth, the jouncing shove of her groin.  I thought, with a whisper of panic: one night will not be enough.  For such an inundation—one night, one year, will not begin to sustain it (197).

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 (217).

She’s not like Zoya.  Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run.  But she never learned how to walk (219).

Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers.  And so it always will be.  Lev (235).