TWO

Zoya never came that evening, and Joe, alone, could not make himself go out.

He stayed in his room and, as with the urgency to save himself, tried to imagine himself somewhere that would be different from anywhere he had ever been. But he could only imagine himself back in that brown clapboard house in the New England woods; could only imagine himself, on a hot summer afternoon, wandering through all the rooms of the house.

When he made himself at least go down to the hotel restaurant, a big woman shouted at him, “Zagrit,” which he knew meant closed, but beyond the woman standing stolid at the entrance he saw that the restaurant was packed with people, waiters rushing among the tables with raised, silvery trays. He couldn’t argue. He returned to his room and lay on his bed.

He was in Russia, but he imagined himself outside the house in the New England woods, wandering about and seeing the house through the trees.

He suddenly heard himself say, Imagine.

Imagine? he asked himself.

Go ahead, he said to himself, try to imagine some place where you never before imagined yourself or anyone to be.

Lying on the bed, he closed his eyes.

He imagined himself walking toward the back door of the house in the woods to go back in and wander from room to room, but he stopped at the bulkhead by the door. He imagined himself studying the bulkhead with a sense that it led down, not just to the cellar, but to a place he had never before been to. And he imagined opening one of the slanting doors to the bulkhead.

On his bed in a hotel in Russia, his eyes closed tightly, he urged himself to open one of the bulkhead doors and look down the cement steps, lit up halfway down by sunlight.

He smelled damp earth and mold. He felt the cement cold and rough against his bare soles as he descended the steps. He saw pale light beam in through a small, oblong window onto the dirt floor. Another window was blocked with cement cinderblocks. In a corner was a stone sink and, standing in a puddle, an old clothes-washing machine with a wringer. A rusted tin tub hung on a cinderblock wall. Deflated inner automobile tiretubes were piled by a roughly made brick wall that had a doorway in it to another part of the cellar.

Joe stood before that open doorway and with a slight shiver said, “God save us.”

He entered the boiler room, where the furnace was encased thickly in dusty asbestos and the tank for the oil was covered with cobwebs. The floor was dry earth. There was no window.

Beyond the furnace was a wooden door, made of warped, unpainted planks and with a rope handle, which Joe had never before seen. Opening it, he peered into, then entered, a small room with old, uneven brick walls. The floor was thick with gray dust, and in the gray dust lay half-buried broken wine casks, and there were footprints to a part of the wall that appeared recently bricked in. On a stone nearby was a trowel. Hanging out of a hole in the newly bricked-in wall was an arm, reduced to skin and bone; it rose a little and the fingers of the hand reached out and remained reaching out for a long moment before the arm dropped.

No, Joe thought, not this.

At the back of the room was an old, heavy, paneled door with a shiny black knob that gave onto a long narrow corridor, and Joe went down the corridor to another wide, heavy, paneled door with a shiny black knob, and in the door was a small, barred window through which Joe looked.

He saw beyond the bars into a room whose walls were lined with torn and stained mattresses. Lying on a dirty mattress in the middle of the cell was a naked woman, her body tied so tightly with nylon stockings her back was arched. Her mouth was forced open by a stick jammed between the roof of her mouth and her bleeding tongue. A naked man, his back and shoulders and chest matted with black and gray hair, was standing over her. Her head and body were shuddering, her eyes wide open on what the man was about to do to her.

Joe shut his eyes and thought, And not this, something beyond this, something you haven’t seen yet, something so different the world hasn’t seen it yet.

He opened his eyes. The woman was no longer there. Joe went into the cell, and as he did, he shut the door behind him, and it locked. In the cell was silence, then, faintly, the distant sound of water sloshing.

What he’d seen in this cell he’d only imagined, and he hated what he imagined. But, looking about, he saw the amputated breasts in the dirt on the floor, and splattered against the mattresses along the walls were bits of organs and bloody fat and flesh.

No, no, Joe thought, he had to be able to imagine more than this. He had to be able to imagine a place that had never been imagined by anyone in all the history of the world.

But the door to the next room was as he expected it to be: a metal door, partly rusted and flaking where the paint remained. And he already knew what was going to be behind it if he opened it, knew that he’d find a low room with a metal grating on the floor, under which water sloshed. He knew this would be the room the operations took place in, on a steel operating table with an acetylene lamp hissing above it. And at the center of a circle of naked men and women, all having contorted sex with one another, a woman in high heels with a scalpel was operating on a young man strapped to the operating table. He was gagged with adhesive tape. The woman cut off his cock and showed it to him, cut off his balls and showed them to him, cut off his ears, nose, cheeks, and showed them to him, and then she cut out his eyes. Even while Joe stood behind the closed ship’s door, he knew what was happening behind it, so there was no reason to open the door to see if what was happening would be different.

There had to be something we hadn’t ever seen, he thought, had to be something no one had ever imagined, so different from what anyone in the world had ever imagined it had never in fact been seen, something that could occur only by God making it occur.

Heavy and rigid on its rusted hinges, the door resisted his opening it, and he threw his body against it to shove it wide open, but it opened slowly—with, yes, a groan. The room was empty except for the hanging lamp, extinguished.

Joe crossed the room and opened a sliding steel door and saw a long, cobbled alley, and at the end of the alley the dim light of a city street. Outside on the black cobbles he thought, But this, too, everyone, everywhere, has imagined. And when he saw, in the streetlight at the end of the alley, a truck with people packed together in the back, he thought, And this, too; this, too. The alley remained quiet, and Joe, hunched, ran down the side of it trying the doors of the small stone houses he passed, but they were all locked. And when he got to the street, he ran to a cement hut at a bus stop to hide.

There he found a girl in a nightdress pressed into a corner, shivering, and he thought, No, not here, somewhere else, somewhere I could not have expected.

As he reached out to put his arms around her, she drew back with wide and terrified eyes, and he knew before she spoke what she would say, stuttering: that they must escape, that they must find somewhere to hide before dawn. He ran after her as she ran out and down the street, but as he had known would happen, the truck turned a corner so they were now running toward it.

Everything that followed was as he expected it, everything—He and the girl were shoved into the back of a truck packed with terrified men, women, children. The truck took them out of the city into flat country. The truck, at dawn, stopped before a wooden gate of a ranch on a wide, grassy plain with roaming buffalo and woods and mountains in the far distance. The high fence around the ranch was coiled with barbed wire.

God help me to think of something else, he thought, as, hit in the head by a rifle butt, he was herded into the camp, where he was separated from the girl. Even if it is worse, even if it is so much worse than this, God help me to think of something I would never, ever have been able to expect, what world history would not let anyone expect. That’s what I want, that’s what I want helplessly to give in to—not this, which is everything I knew would happen, but something that has never, ever before happened to anyone.

But it was just as he expected. He saw a bare, muddy lot surrounded by barbed wire, and more barbed wire uncoiled, in huge spirals, across the lot, and in the midst of the coils were groups of naked men and women, their heads shaved, reduced to bone and skin, the groups being commanded to race from place to place by guards in uniforms hitting them with clubs and rifle butts, breaking jaws, ribs, skulls, so some of the prisoners, falling as they clutched their bleeding faces, were trampled on by the feet of the racing groups and the—oh, yes—boots of the guards.

As Joe, shoving people aside, searched for the girl in the skeletal mass, thinking, I know this, I know it, he felt his arm wrenched by a guard and he was hurled into a group racing from place to place. Just able to balance himself, he, startled, found himself racing among them. He shouted out, All the world knows this, but he realized that, if the guards were shouting orders and the prisoners were screaming, no voices were heard, and there was silence. He saw the girl ahead of him among the racers and he ran faster to catch up with her, but she ran even faster to win the race. Trampling over prostrate bodies, his skin caught on and torn by the barbs of the wire, pushed and shoved aside by the people he was racing with, trying to reach the girl, he shouted, but without sound: I know all this. And the rest happened as he’d known it would happen: he reached the girl, but, on impulse, he raced past her, and as he did, he turned only once to see that she, fallen behind, was taken apart and made to stand at the edge of a muddy pit.

And in the next race he fell behind and was commanded to stand among those who had fallen behind, the girl among them, all at the edge of the muddy pit. And when there were enough couples, men with women, men with men, women with women, they were forced to have sex. Down the line, the girl was in the arms of an old man. Joe put his arms about a trembling girl whose nipples on her small, gray breasts were tight and cold and whose rib cage, backbone, hipbones stuck out, but they were not able to have sex, as much as they both tried. And as Joe knew would happen, black rain fell.

What he wanted was something he didn’t yet know. Everything, everything depended on his being able to imagine something he didn’t yet know, but what only God could let him know, depended on the world being able to imagine what the world didn’t yet know, but what only God could let the world know.

All he was able to see was this—that he and the girl he had tried to have sex with, that the girl and the old man she had tried to have sex with, that the other couples who hadn’t been able to have sex no matter how they had tried, were pushed together and their throats slit. Their bodies fell, twisted on one another. Joe, dying among the arms and legs of people he didn’t know, thought, But no, no, there’s something else for us.

He saw his naked body thrown into a ditch among the other dead bodies, the bodies below sliding against one another with the impact of his body falling on them. He saw a bulldozer heaping earth over the bodies. He saw the marks of the bulldozer treads in the mud.

Was he the only one, ever, to imagine that something of him rose from the mud crisscrossed by the bulldozer tracks and walked away, walked over a vast, blasted landscape with poles with wires strung from one to the other and a loudspeaker on top of each pole, walked beyond the poles into a country where snow was falling and was blown into drifts against trees, walked into a forest until he came, in the snow, to a brown clapboard house with a fieldstone chimney tangled in a bare honeysuckle vine, before which he stood, his hands over his face?

Joe sat up when he heard a knock on the door. He didn’t answer. The room was dark. Rigid, he waited for someone to come into his room, but no one did.