There was something he hadn’t told; a fraction of the Tale, scarcely pivotal but of more than passing interest, that he’d withheld from Strauss as he would withhold it from any interrogator. Perhaps it was unspeakable. Or perhaps it touched so centrally, so profoundly, upon the ambiguities that had pursued him through the wastelands of his life that to speak it was to reveal the color of his soul.
He pondered this last secret now, and in a strange way the thought of it warmed him:
He had left the game, that first and only game with the European, and scrambled through the half-choked door into Muranowski Square. No stars were burning; only the bonfire at his back.
As he’d stood in the gloom, reorienting himself, the chill creeping up through the soles of his boots, the lipless woman had appeared in front of him. She’d beckoned. He assumed she intended to lead him back the way he’d come, and so followed. She’d had other intentions, however. She’d led him away from the square to a house with barricaded windows, and-ever curious, he’d pursued her into it, certain that tonight of all nights no harm could possibly come to him.
In the entrails of the house was a tiny room whose walls were draped with pirated swaths of cloth, some rags, others dusty lengths of velvet that had once framed majestic windows. Here, in this makeshift boudoir, there was one piece of furniture only. A bed, upon which the dead Lieutenant Vasiliev-whom he had so recently seen in Mamoulian’s gaming room-was making love. And as the thief stepped through the door, and the lipless woman stood aside, Konstantin had looked up from his labors, his body continuing to press into the woman who lay beneath him on a mattress strewn with Russian and German and Polish flags.
The thief stood, disbelieving, wanting to tell Vasiliev that he was performing the act incorrectly, that he’d mistaken one hole for another, and it was no natural orifice he was using so brutally, but a wound.
The lieutenant wouldn’t have listened, of course. He grinned as he worked, the red pole rooting and dislodging, rooting and dislodging. The corpse he was pleasuring rocked beneath him, unimpressed by her paramour’s attentions.
How long had the thief watched? The act showed no sign of consummation. At last the lipless woman had murmured “Enough?” in his ear, and he had turned a little way to her while she had put her hand on the front of his trousers. She seemed not at all surprised that he was aroused, though in all the years since he had never understood how such a thing was possible. He had long ago accepted that the dead could be woken. But that he had felt heat in their presence-that was another crime altogether, more terrible to him than the first.
There is no Hell, the old man thought, putting the boudoir and its charred Casanova out of his mind. Or else Hell is a room and a bed and appetite everlasting, and I’ve been there and seen its rapture and, if the worst comes to the worst, I will endure it.