Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  And let us try to remember the utterly invisible victims, whose numbers no one will ever tabulate. In the ‘ancient, slow-moving’ village of Kady, in the remote province of Ivanovo, in the year of 1937, some minor officials were accused of attempting to overthrow the Soviet government by disrupting the local supply of bread. Among those shot (after a risible public trial) was the head of the District Consumer Cooperatives, Vasily Vlasov: honest, fearless, and innocent. Solzhenitsyn adds, in fine print at the foot of the page:

  One little note on eight-year-old Zoya Vlasova. She loved her father intensely. She could no longer go to school. (They teased her: ‘Your papa is a wrecker!’ She would get in a fight: ‘My papa is good!’) She lived only one year after the trial. Up to then she had never been ill. During that year she did not once smile; she went about with head hung low, and the old women prophesied: ‘She keeps looking at the earth; she is going to die soon.’ She died of inflammation of the brain, and as she was dying she kept calling out: ‘Where is my papa? Give me my papa!’ When we count up the millions who perished in the camps, we forget to multiply them by two, by three.

  13 In his introduction to the abridged single-volume Gulag (first published in 1999, and recommended only as a kind of crib), Edward E. Ericson gives the following American sales figures: 2,244,000 for Volume One, 500,000 for Volume Two, and 100,000 for Volume Three. These figures are representative worldwide, and point to the limits of our stamina and appetite. In fact, The Gulag Archipelago simply goes on getting better, and, of course, achieves an impregnable unity.

  14 The Politburo moved against Beria with extreme wariness. The man chosen to arrest him was no lesser figure than the war-winner, Marshal Zhukov.

  15 To risk bathos, we should incidentally consider, as an illustration of the Chekist personality, the matter of Khrushchev’s car. When the cabal figureheaded by a trembling Brezhnev (who once fainted before Kaganovich’s wrath) finally ousted him, Khrushchev lived on in disgraced and much-monitored retirement (the bathroom, too, was bugged, and Khrushchev stoutly denounced the Politburo for spending good rubles just ‘to eavesdrop on my farts’). They gave Khrushchev a car. Much thought had gone into Khrushchev’s car. It was a low-to-middling kind of car, and went wrong all the time (which was meant to be humiliating). But the point was that the car had private plates, and not government plates. This was intended to suggest that Khruschev was corrupt. You want to say, ‘Make your point’ Either a reeking rattletrap with government plates, or, with private plates, a burnished limousine.

  As the stars are known to the Night

  In the search for decorum our feelings must have access to the high style. Laughter, as we have seen, will never absent itself from the black farce of Bolshevism; laughter will never raise its hands to its lips, bidding adieu. By now we recognize the kind of laughter we hear; we hear it when we witness epiphanic moral sordor. But there is also a plane of emotion that excludes laughter. The high style excludes laughter.

  In November 2000 it fell to me to help arrange my younger sister’s funeral. My father, in the last year of his life, told me that in his most defenceless insomnias he tended to worry about Sally and what it would be like for her when he was dead: the loss of general support, the loss of purpose, of raison. And so it proved. A long depression was followed by a sudden illness. When I arrived at the hospital she was in intensive care and had already lost consciousness. She never regained it, and died four days later. I was apprised of this death, not by any change in my sister’s demeanour, but by the twining coils of the monitor screen. She, or the respirator she was attached to, continued to breathe, to pant ardently: a corpse with a heaving chest. Then they disconnected her, and she could be approached and kissed without horror. And I asked her a question I had asked many times before, but would now have no cause to ask again: ‘Oh, Sally, what have you done?’ Many times, as a child, I silently promised to protect her. And I didn’t do that, did I? No one could have protected her, perhaps. But those promises, never uttered, are still inside me and are still a part of me.

  At St Dominic’s Priory Church in Kentish Town my wife and I discussed the service with Father John Farrell (Sally had converted some years earlier). The music (Bach), the readings (Romans 8, Matthew 11), the hymns (‘To Be a Pilgrim’, ‘Jerusalem’ – Blake, with his burning utopianism: ‘I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land.’). It was also agreed that I should recite the poem written for Sally by Philip Larkin (‘Tightly-folded bud, / I have wished you something / None of the others would …’), ‘Born Yesterday’, which bears the shockingly recent date of 20 January 1954.

  We moved into the church proper, where my wife (who did it all, really) talked on with Father Farrell while I stood, susceptibly, by the door. My thoughts were already returning to the consolations of habit (the study, the desk) when I noticed the plaque to the war dead of the parish, and the poetry, the war poetry, of their names (Bellord, Cody, Gubbins, Lawless, Notherway, Scrimshaw). Beneath was a stanza of verse etched in stone:

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  As these lines heaved their way through me, I naturally thought first of their connection to my sister. But again the sudden nod, and the thought that, yes, this would about answer to the Twenty Million.

  I had recently come across this poem in one of my father’s anthologies, and I looked it up that evening: ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon. The fallen are the British dead of World War I.16 And it is not inappropriate, it is not indecorous, that war poetry should resonate with our thoughts about the Twenty Million. A war was prosecuted against them and against human nature – by their own people. War poetry, which is summarized in a single line of Wilfred Owen’s – from ‘Strange Meeting’, where the dead poet meets his dead opposite or double from the other side, who says: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend …’

  Binyon was a distinguished scholar and translator (he did The Divine Comedy in the 1930s), and a good, affable, yet unarguably minor poet. But here something happened: an uncovenanted expansion. Despite its opening sonorities, ‘The Fallen’ is not a glorification of war; it is an attempt at maximum consolation, in the high style; and it answers to our theme:

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

  They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

  They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

  They sleep beyond England’s foam.

  But where our desires and our hopes profound,

  Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

  To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

  As the stars are known to the Night.

  As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

  Moving in marches on the heavenly plain;

  As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

  To the end, to the end, they remain.

  16 The poem’s ‘tone may give it the appearance of a commentary after the event [reads my father’s note]; in fact Binyon wrote it within the first few weeks of war’. Like Kipling at the same stage, he seemed to grasp the dimensions of what was about to unfold.

  Afterword: Letter to My Father’s Ghost

  Dearest Dad,

  I experimented with ‘Dearest Kingsley’, in recognition of your changed status; but I spend a lot of time in your mental company – and why break the habit of half a lifetime?

  If you could so much as glance at the dedication page of my last book you would know at once that the thing yo
u greatly feared is come upon you, and that which you were afraid of is come unto you. The dedication page reads:

  To Kingsley

  and Sally

  For these are my Amis dead. She survived you by half a decade. Her last years were quiet, and quietly comfortable (she managed your legacy with care). There was no sudden precipitant. Her last days were peaceful, and there was no pain. Don’t despair: the story has a happier ending. I suppose, too, that there is one chance in a googolplex that she is now at your side. Supposing she isn’t, and yet also supposing that you actually get my news, I suggest that you spend a few years of your eternity recuperating from it – and then come back to this letter. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.

  I will return to the happier ending. But before we get there … ‘I do not want to be personal,’ wrote Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, before going on, very gently, to analyse his friend’s forgivable, even likeable, but in the end fatally woolly utopianism. I do not want to be personal either (you didn’t like people who were personal), but I do want to talk briefly about a couple of differences between you and me. As father and son we have an unusual thing in common: ‘we are both English novelists’, as you once put it, ‘who are some good’. But you were a poet, too. And that accounts for the main dissimilarity between my prose and yours. The other dissimilarities may be almost entirely generational. If our birthdates had been transposed, then I might have written your novels and you might have written mine. Remember the rule (truer in our case than in most): you are your dad and your dad is you. Just to round this off: you wrote, very largely, about the bourgeoisie in your fiction, i.e., the middle classes – a category seldom seen in mine, where I make do with the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the lumpenproletariat, and the urkas.

  You are your dad and your … But not quite. The other difference is political, and basic. You were ideological and I am not. Of course, you believed, and believed in, Soviet Communism for fifteen years. There were, as Bob says, no rational justifications for doing so. But I can give you some good excuses: middle-class guilt; ‘an unfocused dissatisfaction with the way things are’ (as you described it), or unusual hatred of the status quo; a desire to scandalize parental, or paternal, conservatism; and the not quite entirely delusional sense that you were involving yourself directly in world affairs. It was also a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union. As the admirable and pitiable Viktor Kravchenko wrote, in his I Chose Freedom (1946: N.B.): ‘This scene outside the [Cheka building, where the families of the arrested wept and screamed] I shall never be able to expunge from my memory. A great theatrical genius, hoping to convey mass despair, macabre and boundless sorrow, could not have invented anything more terrifying’… But I don’t want to reproach you for credulity – you were not alone in believing. It’s the ‘believing in’ bit that interests me.

  In your essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, written when you were forty-five, you said, explaining your earlier affiliation:

  We are dealing with a conflict of feeling and intelligence, a form of wilful self-deception whereby a part of the mind knows full well that its overall belief is false or wicked, but the emotional need to believe is so strong that that knowledge remains, as it were, encysted, isolated, powerless to influence word or deed.

  This is well said. But what is the basis of the ‘emotional need’? I will now juxtapose two sentences from the last two paragraphs of the piece:

  You cannot decide to have brotherhood; if you start trying to enforce it, you will before long find yourself enforcing something very different, and much worse than the mere absence of brotherhood.

  And:

  The ideal of the brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss.

  Sentence one seems to me so obvious, and so elementary, that sentence two has no meaning – indeed, no content. Just what is this Just City? What would it look like? What would its citizens be saying to each other and doing all day? What would laughter be like, in the Just City? (And what would you find to write about in it?) This is the time to start asking why. Zachto? Why? What for? To what end? Your ‘emotional need’ was not a positive but a negative force. Not romantic. Not idealistic. The ‘very nobility’ of that ideal, you say, ‘makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying’. But the breakdown, the ignobility, is inherent in the ideal. This is the joke, isn’t it? And it’s a joke about human nature: the absurd assiduity, the droll dispatch, with which utopia becomes dystopia, with which heaven becomes hell … The ‘conflict’ you describe is, in the end, not a conflict between ‘feeling and intelligence’. It is, funnily enough, a conflict between hope and despair.

  I quote the following with only token complacency (it is not merely ‘derivative’, as claimed; it is kleptomaniacal):

  ‘… although Eden, then, is the “goal” of human life, it remains strictly an imaginative goal, not a social construct, even as a possibility. The argument applies also to the literary utopias, which are not the dreary fascist states popularisers try to extrapolate from them, but, rather, analogies of the well-tempered mind: rigidly disciplined, highly selective as regards art, and so on. Thus Blake, like Milton, saw the hidden world, the animal world in which we are condemned to live, as the inevitable complement to man’s imagination. Man was never meant to escape death, jealousy, pain, libido – what Wordsworth calls “the human heart by which we live”. Perhaps this is why Blake paints the created Adam with a serpent already coiled round his thigh.’

  So ended my short, derivative, Roget-roughaged essay …

  When I wrote that I was about twenty-two; and my student narrator was nineteen – the same age as you were when you ‘joined’. And so, Dad, probably to my detriment, I never felt the call of political faith (and probably one should feel it, one should be zealous, for a while). Nobody can be ‘against’ the Just City. This is among the reasons people feel entitled to kill people who get in the way of it. But when you threw in your lot with the agnostics, the gradualists (and also found another ideology: anti-Communism), you aligned yourself with those who have more faith in human nature than the believers. More faith in – and more affection for. Enough. And now the happier ending.

  Anonymously present at Sally’s funeral was Sail’s daughter. Remember, you and I saw her when she was a baby (in the summer of 1979), just before her adoption. The baby, who was perfect, was called Heidi, named after Sally’s very unencouraging new mentor. She is not called Heidi any longer. Sally, then, was twenty-four. Catherine, now, is twenty-two.

  She had never met her mother. The funeral was supposed to be a goodbye to her birth identity. As we reconstructed it later, though, she saw our clan at the church and thought – that’s my clan too. She wrote to ‘The Amis Family’ via the undertaker (and what a sinister word that turns out to be). I wrote back: we would meet. A little later, when it was all becoming very much worse for me (the cud in my throat tasted like a decisive diminution of love of life), I wrote again. I said that soon I would be going for three months to the other side of the world; and before I could do that I needed to see the semblance of my sister. She came (with her foster-parents), and she was perfect. You will have to imagine the strange precision of the way she physically occupied the space that Sally had vacated – the same weight of presence, and then a certain smile, a certain glance.

  Last spring we took her to Spain to meet her grandmother, and her step-grandfather, and her uncles Philip and Jaime. Catherine was also accompanied by four cousins: my Louis and Jacob, whom you will admiringly remember, and my Fernanda and Clio, two of the three granddaughters you never met. So all your grandchildren were there bar two: my Delilah Seale, and Philip’s Jessica. The clan suffers its losses but continues to expand. There have been four additions in the last six years. Mum said that if we spring too many more grandchildren on her she’s going to have to start strangl
ing them like kittens. Catherine said afterwards, ‘It was like a dream.’ I know you would have taken to her very much, and especially and instantly for this proof of both her nature and her nurture: she’s one of the last thirty or forty people in the English-speaking world who doesn’t say ‘between you and I’.

  Last winter, over in Uruguay, as we were about to begin our evening game of catch, Fernanda, who had just turned four, seized the ball with a look of demure triumph on her face. The ball was an inflated globe; and on its surface a dead bee had alighted. The bees were dying in their hundreds as the southern summer ended. They would fizz greedily around the lamps on the veranda, then drop. This was the thing they wanted to do before they died … Of course, a dead bee can still sting. Fernanda’s smile abruptly disappeared and she said in a strong, proud, declarative voice (before shedding the necessary tears), ‘Something just hurt me very much.’ Well, that was exactly how I was feeling about Sally’s death. Remembering her, and you, and you and her, has filled me with an exhaustion that no amount of sleep can seem to reach. But the exhaustion is not onerous. It is appropriate. It feels like decorum. Naturally, it feels like self-pity, too. But pity and self-pity can sometimes be the selfsame thing. Death does that. Don’t you find?

  Stalin (whom, incredibly, you served for twelve years, inconspicuously, infinitesimally – but still incredibly) once said that, while every death is a tragedy, the death of a million is a mere statistic. The second half of the aphorism is of course wholly false: a million deaths are, at the very least, a million tragedies. The first half of the aphorism is perfectly sound – but only as far as it goes. In fact, every life is a tragedy, too. Every life cleaves to the tragic curve.

  This letter comes at the end of a book subtitled ‘Laughter and the Twenty Million’. You might consider it an odd conclusion. Sally, of course, has nothing whatever in common with the Twenty Million. Nothing but death, and perhaps a semblance of reawakening.