House of Meetings

by Martin Amis

  But I will open it up and spread it out before me, any day now.

  2.

  Marrying the Mole

  Right from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow. I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating. But as your nostrils widen and your jaw vibrates, keep an ear out for my clucks of satisfaction—the little snorts and gurglings of near-perfect felicity. This is a “quiet time,” such as you could often be prevailed upon to have, when, after too much chocolate and hours of screeching and flailing and whirling, you would submit to a coloring book at the kitchen table or a taped story in your room—before going back to more screeching and flailing and whirling.

  I am a stranger in a strange land. A freshly glittering landscape is opening up before me: I mean the mundane. God, what a beautiful sight. There will be ups and downs, of course, especially for your step-uncle and his spouse, but for now these lives rise and fall as they will. We no longer uninterruptedly sense the leaden mass, the adenoidal breathing, and the moronic stare of the state. How can I evoke it for you, the impossible glamour of the everyday? We are safe, for now; above us is the boilerplate of banality. Like a saga-spinner of another age, I can almost start the business of tidying up after my guests. “Zoya is as forgetful as ever.” “No, Kitty never did find true love.” And this goes on for nearly two whole chapters, and twenty-five years. All is well, all is safe, until we enter the Salang Tunnel.

  Before there was that, though, there was this.

  As an unrehabilitated political, I was effectively “minus forty,” as was Lev. This phrase no longer referred to the temperature in Norlag on an autumn afternoon. For us it now meant that forty cities were out of bounds. We were also ineligible for such perquisites as accommodation and employment…I went east from Predposylov, all the way to the Pacific (where I had one swim), before I started coming west. It took me two months to get to Moscow. I spent half an hour with Kitty in a suburban teashop called the Singing Kettle, where a lumpy rucksack changed hands. This was the bequest of my mother, who had died, calmly, said Kitty, in the spring. And then for many months I seemed to be shunted around from berg to berg, always arriving in the small hours—the pale bulb over the station exit, the clockface staring elsewhere, the deep stone of the stairwell. Then you moved off into a blackout and a town of tin. The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light. A fully achieved cheerlessness, you may think. Darkness, silence, and a palpable rigidity, as if the buildings were seized not to the surface of the world but to its center. And yet I knew that my footsteps made a sound that was no longer feared, and that the huddled houses would open up to me, if not now then tomorrow. Because kindness was rubbing its eyes and reawakening, Russian kindness—the reflexive care for another’s good. And I was free and I was sane.

  I came equipped with some of my sister’s cash, some of my father’s clothes, and some of my mother’s books—namely, an introduction to advanced electronics, an English primer, and the tragedies of Shakespeare in parallel translation (the main four and also the Roman plays, plus Timon, Troilus, and Richard II). I loved my mother (and she must have scried me here, in minus-forty), as every honest man should and does. And I wondered why it didn’t go easier with women and me…I was always getting pulled in and moved on, of course, but that year became my nomadic sabbatical—paid leave for travel and study, and for internal relocation. The weight of Zoya, I thought, was also shifting. When I settled down at night she was always there the moment I closed my eyes, waking, half-clad, becomingly disheveled, a slight sneer on her downy upper lips, as she appraised me, her escort to oblivion. But what was the matter with her? Amazingly, and alarmingly (this can’t be normal), her effigy, her mockery, had detached itself from the control of my will. In the past, this little mannequin of mine was charmingly rigorous, even draconian in her promptings and insistences. No longer. She was without words and without wants, dumb and numb—unresisting but inert, and almost unwieldably heavy. And her face was always turned away from mine, in illegible sorrow and defeat. I told myself, Well, we’re all free now, I suppose. So I would give it up and desist, holding her for a while in my brotherly arms before I too turned away, into sleep and into dreamlessness.

  Such sexual kindness that came my way, during that time, and my generally weak response to it, had the curious effect of imbuing me with material ambition. The Slavic form, the oblong of pallor with the marmalade garnish, the grunts of compassion or acceptance, the rustly whispers: this would no longer answer. The center—I could feel it tugging at me, with its women and its money. And in the late summer of 1958 I started orbiting Moscow.

  When Lev reached Kazan he found that his wife and mother-in-law had already withdrawn beyond the municipal boundary. He was expected. My sister told me that the three of them were living in “half a hovel” on the outskirts of another city (smaller, more obscure—admissibly abject), where Zoya had found work in the accounts department of a granary. Old Ester made and sold patchwork quilts, and from her sickbed continued to teach Hebrew (a language illegalized in 1918) to an intrepid enthusiast and his three small sons, who drove out twice a week. Lev wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent much of the day (according to Zoya’s letters to Kitty) in the supine position—understandable and salutary, she said; he was “trying to recover his strength.” I said nothing. In his last months there, Lev was again one of the fittest men in Norlag. Deaf in one ear, and with the fingers of his clawlike right hand, even in sleep, locked in the grasp of an imaginary pickax or shovel—but physically strong. He was apparently maintaining that he wouldn’t work for the state, which, at this point, wouldn’t have him anyway. And the state was all there was. He complained of headaches and nightmares. This was the start of a long decline.

  I did better. Living in corners, at first, I poised myself on the northern brink of the capital, and went in every morning on the seven o’clock train. Very soon I had money…In 1940 there were four hundred television sets in the USSR. In 1958 there were two and a half million. Every single one of them belonged to a CP. Dealing with the TV sets of the nomenklatura—this was my day job and my night job, installing them, repairing them, or simply clearing up after them, because they frequently exploded (even when they were switched off; even when they weren’t plugged in). I would soon indulge in an extravagance: the purchase of my Certificate of Rehabilitation. A considerable expense, in those years, because Russia had not become—or had not yet gone back to being—a bribe society. But I spoiled myself.

  When I went away, I was twenty-six. I was getting on for forty when I came back. Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time. I mixed with the black-economy crowd, and my girlfriends were of a type. I suppose it would be accurate to say that they were of the type of the croupier. They were veteran molls and flappers with excellent heads for business. And in my dealings with these women, Venus, I ran into a logistical problem which would trouble me more and more. Take one at random. The inventory of her body and its abilities would, of course, be paralleled by the inventory of her past. And her past would be long, and gruelingly populous. And they were still walking, these men: you see, by that time hardly anybody was getting killed. And I had to know about them. All of them. So I would often find myself prolonging a hopelessly soured romance, sometimes doubling its duration, just to make sure I had winkled out that rugged smuggler from Vladivostok, that sleek bijouterist from Minsk.

  Between 1946 and 1957 I ate two apples, one in 1949 and one in 1955. Now I went to however much trouble it took to eat an apple every day. The man who usually sold them to me knew that fresh fruit was something of a delicacy in the Soviet Union. But we had completely different ideas about what an apple was. In the queue there were currents of recognition and mistrust. If the line was fifty Russians long, there would be seven or eight who had been away. There would be another seven or eight who had helped put th
em there. I would meet the eyes of men and women who agreed with me about what an apple was. I ate everything, the core, the seeds, the stalk.

  What was needed was a meeting. There came a series of second-hand soundings, of vague proposals vaguely deferred. On his side, a sense of reclusion or paralysis; on mine, something like the fear of the diagnostic. The pocket marionette slept beside me, unfrowning in her white petticoat. Would it wake? Would I want it to?

  As soon as I got the keys to the new apartment, I made a move. It was an invitation that no Russian could conceivably refuse: a family housewarming at Easter. The time got nearer: the spring equinox, the first full moon over the northern Eurasian plain, the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday.

  I hadn’t seen Lev for eighteen months. He came on ahead into the main room, leaving Kitty and Zoya in mid-greeting at the front door. He registered my smile, my parted arms, but continued to review his surroundings—the rugs, the sofas, the chest-high television in its walnut cabinet, the copper horn of the gramophone. A look of mildly amused disdain did not exactly lend charm or distinction to his plinthless, bump-nosed face. I stepped forward and we hugged. Or I hugged. Fuller, softer, and the smell of unlaundered synthetics. But then Zoya was flooding the room with her presence, and there was champagne, and the seven-hour meal began.

  “See what I mean?” said Kitty, later. “She’s bleeding the life out of him.”

  Maybe it just looks that way, I said.

  It looked that way because Lev kept his good ear (frequently cupped in his clawlike right hand) exclusively trained on Zoya. And she was his interpreter. If you aimed a question at him, he met you with a look of rustic incomprehension, which slowly faded as Zoya, from close range, gave her murmured gloss. He couldn’t hear—and he couldn’t talk. His stutter was thoroughly reensconced. So it sometimes seemed, when she gestured at him (she always gestured) and raptly mouthed, that this was a rite of lip-reading and sign language, and that without her he would be alone in his mutist universe.

  I said, He cheered up a bit later on.

  “Yes,” said Kitty. “When he was drunk.”

  She’s far more beautiful now, I think.

  “Do you think? Yes. She is.”

  It’s got gravitas. She hasn’t, but her beauty has.

  “I saw you were looking at her…Do you still?”

  No no. Not anymore, thank God.

  “Lend him money. Give him money.”

  But I said I had already tried.

  Our reunions, which became fairly regular, soon assumed a pattern—something like a childish feud of assertion and rebuttal. Usually they came to us, but the laws of hospitality demanded that we occasionally went to them. Lev was very different in Kazan. He dominated. We would meet, not at the hotel where Kitty and I put up, but on a street corner in the industrial district—the zinc fogs of Zarechye. There would then be a longish walk, with the visitors falling into step behind the two hooded duffelcoats, the two pairs of squeaking plastic boots. “Ah, here we are. How nice,” he would say, levering open the sodden door of a hostel canteen or a subsidized cafeteria. While we pushed the food around our plates, he questioned us about its quality. Is the horsemeat accurately cooked? The porridge, I hope, is al dente? When that was over, we’d get a glass of spuddy vodka in some roiling taproom or pothouse. And Lev and Zoya would be squelching back to the bus station at half past eight.

  These outings, of course, were clearly, almost openly, punitive. Kitty didn’t much mind, and I found it quite funny in a nerve-racking way. It was Zoya who suffered. Fanning herself, she held her head at a prideful angle, taking deep breaths through her rigid nostrils. Her blushes lasted for half an hour, and the great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons. In Moscow I naturally retaliated, taking them to modernist black-economy steakhouses, and on to traditionalist black-economy casinos. The tuxed waiter served us green Chartreuse, and I drank to Zoya’s thirtieth birthday, raising my chalice under spangleballs and twirling mirrorspheres.

  Seeing them together, you couldn’t help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment—embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality. I hope I have made it clear that I was always rather touched by my brother’s physical appearance. “A face face,” as our mother always called it, though one illumined, in the past, by the smile and the soft blue eyes. And we honor Zoya, don’t we, Venus, for her indifference to the norms and quotas of romantic convention—and all that. But there is such a thing as force of life. And the contrast was like something out of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme or a joke on a seaside postcard.

  Jack Spratt would eat no fat. And there was Zoya, seemingly a yard the taller, swinging herself around (this was Moscow) as she laughed, sang, mimicked, brimmed. In those blighted eateries in Kazan, Lev made a big to-do with the bill, intently frowning and shrewdly sniffing over a scrap of paper that said four dinners, if that, and suborning Zoya for a strained colloquy about the number of weightless coins to be dropped in the jar. Elsewhere, for every calorie of expended high spirits, Zoya always paid…He still wore his hair cropped, prison-style. In the old days, up in camp, I used to like to smooth it back against the nap—it made my fingertips hum. Now, when I once ventured to touch it, the pale fuzz was damp and flat and had lost the power to impart any tingle. He pulled his head away and slid another cigarette into his crumpled mouth.

  Over these years there were other changes: 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, 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. All three developments looked strangely uniform and standardized on such an asymmetrical little chap. Especially the bald spot. Once, rising suddenly and looking down on him, I believed I saw an open mouth, all tongue, fringed by a beard and a sweat-drenched mustache.

  Lev’s morose and monotonous asides about my apartment, my clothes, my car (and, during one unrepeated experiment, my croupier) were now like a snore in another room. He didn’t despise me, I don’t think, for taking the shilling of the state. He despised my appetite. I had drive, and all Russians hate that; but there was a further layer to it. In one of her letters to Kitty, Zoya neutrally mentioned the fact that Lev’s circle in the environs of Kazan, such as it was, consisted entirely of elderly failures. If we had been on easier terms I might have said to him that he was feeling what many others felt; he was submitting, in short, to generic emotion. Many others who had been away—they too hated money. Because money was freedom, it was even political freedom, and they had stopped wanting to believe in freedom. Better if no one had it—money, freedom.

  I completed his sentences for him, now, when he stuttered. So would you have done. There would have been no end to it if you hadn’t. Besides, we always knew, now, exactly where his sentences were going. And he didn’t care. He had stopped minding because he had stopped fighting. Lev had surrendered, without conditions, and his stutter had it all its own way; a couple of uppercuts to the chin, and it would leap on his chest and strangle him into silence. Now, when he tipped his head far back, in this or that soupkitchen in Kazan, it was not to prosecute the civil war with the self—to bring everything to bear. It was in reluctant submission to Zoya’s demand that he eat a vegetable. Back went the head; down went the section of blackened beetroot or utterly soundless cucumber. And you had the sense that he wasn’t fighting it anymore—he was feeding it. One night, after a great deal of vodka, he told me that he had stopped reading. He said it not casually but with defiance. “If it’s bad I don’t like it,” he went on in a softer voice. “And if it’s good I hate it.”

  The girls were more continent, but Lev and I got through the traditional amounts of alcohol. We were both subject to the centuries-old momentum of Russian drunkenness. And it may surprise you to learn that we
were good drunks, too, both of us: amenable, reasonably quiet, not likely, on the whole, to brawl or sob. There usually came a point, about halfway through the third bottle, when his eyes met mine and almost confessed to the moment of remission—maybe it was just the nonappearance of the next wave of pain. He didn’t draw attention as a drinker. That, I admit, would have been hard to do. But he did draw attention as a smoker. Now, smoking (like drinking) allays anxiety. So try not smoking in Russia and see how far you get. But Lev? He ate with a cigarette in the hand that held the knife. And when he went to stub it out, the movement was but a step on the road to lighting another. He did this all day long. Zoya said he smoked even when he was shaving.

  Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive. The thought was this: mad teeth. Those pretty teeth of his, though lavishly stained, still looked sound enough. But the angles had been rearranged. They no longer stood to attention; they leaned and slumped, they crisscrossed. And you do sometimes see this taken much further by the very mad, the teeth tugged and bent by tectonic forces deep beneath the crust.

  And me? I think I might have come through all right, if it hadn’t been for the dancing.

  Three times it happened. Exactly the same thing happened…Zoya was superstitiously drawn to the gramophone in my apartment, and would lurk by it and commune with it. Three times she asked with a guilty air for American jazz. She listened, nodding, then with a twist of the head she banged down her glass and extended an elegantly narrowed hand toward her husband. “I don’t, anymore,” Lev could be relied upon to say. “And you can’t.” So I danced with Zoya—the exploratory Russified jive. I don’t know how good she might have been; what was certain was that it made her madly happy, every inch of her, so much so that you felt implicated and even compromised by the glitter of her ravenous grin. But even at arm’s length it was like wielding a woman-sized jumping bean. There was an opposition in her, something like a counterweight in a liftshaft, but ominously misaligned.