Martin Amis - House of Meetings

We say our goodbyes, and I am alone on the quayside. I want to get to the Arctic city the way I did the first time, and I’m taking the train. After ten or fifteen minutes, and after some cursing (but no haggling), a reasonably sober longshoreman agrees to drive me to the station in his truck. What is the matter with me — why all this swearing and tipping? It could be that my behavior is intended as exemplary. I frequently transgress, it’s true; but I at least am prompt with my reparations, my apologies in the form of cash.

The uncertain Arctic light, I realize, makes my body clock run too fast or too slow; every day I feel as if I have risen in the small hours or else shamefully overslept. The colors of the cars don’t look quite right either, like car colors everywhere but seen at dawn under streetlamps. My hangover has not gone away. All the buildings, all the medium-rise flat blocks, stand on stout little stilts, pilings driven down through the melting permafrost and into the bedrock. This is the world of the crawlspace.

Lev’s geographical theory of Russian destiny was not his alone, and serious historians now propound it. The northern Eurasian plain, with its extreme temperatures, its ungenerous soil, its remoteness from the southerly trade routes, its lack of any ocean but the Arctic; and then the Russian state, with its compulsive and self-protective expansion, its land empire of twenty nations, its continent-sized borders: all this demands a heavily authoritarian center, a vast and vigilant bureaucracy — or else Russia flies apart.

Our galaxy, too, would fly apart, if not for the massive black holes in its core, each the size of the solar system, and the presence all around of dark matter and dark energy, policing the pull to the center.

This explanation appealed to my brother because, he said, it was “the right size”: the same size as the landmass. We can shake our heads and say physics did it. Geography did it.

With its light-blue plaster and creamy trim, the railway station has the appearance of a summer pavilion, yet the bar, where I wait, is darkly congested (with locals, not travelers), and this reassures me. Until now the human sparsity of Dudinka has given me the feeling of free fall or imminent levitation. And the memories of my first journey here, in 1946, are like an awful dream of human constriction, of inconceivable crowding and milling and huddling.

A liter of hundred-proof North Korean vodka, I notice, costs less than a liter of watery Russian beer. There is also an impressive dedication, on the part of the customers, to oloroso, or fortified wine (“sweet sack”). Oloroso is a drunkard’s drink as it is, and this stuff doesn’t come from Jerez. That’s the distinction Dostoevsky is making when he includes, on a tabletop already inauspiciously burdened with alcohol, “a bottle of the strongest sherry from the national cellar.”

My hangover continues to deteriorate. Or should I say that my hangover continues to thrive? For indeed it comes on wonderfully well. I want a lot of it, I need a lot of it, but I haven’t been drunk for fifteen years. Remember? I was lying in bed, on a Sunday afternoon, and quietly dying. Occasionally I whispered water —in Russian. A sign of truly bestial need. You walked in on stiffened legs, head down, intensely concentrated: you weren’t going to spill the clear liquid in the pint glass you held in both hands. “Here,” you said. I reached out a withered arm. And then: “It’s vodka .” And I absorbed the vicious intelligence of your stare. By then I was married to your mother. You were nine.

On the television, which perches high on the wall, there now appears the familiar and dreadful sight of the E-shaped redbrick building. I move closer, in time to hear yet another untruth: that there are “no plans” to storm the school. Then, suddenly and with no explanation, the screen fizzes, and Middle School Number One is replaced by a Latin soap opera in medias res — and, as always, under an inch of makeup each, a tearful old vamp is reproaching a haughty gigolo. The disruption goes unnoticed or at least unremarked. My instinct is to throw another costly tantrum — but directed at whom, and to what end? In any event I cannot bear it, so I pay, and tip, and wheel my case out onto the platform, and stare at the rails, narrow-gauged, that lead to the Arctic city.

No, young lady, I haven’t turned my phone off. I’ve just been using it a lot — Middle School Number One, in North Ossetia. I was, as you know, a tolerably big cheese in Russia by the time I left, and I had many contacts in the military. You may also remember the not very serious trouble this put me to right up until 1991, when the certificate, framed in Paris, pronounced the death of the Russian experiment. Of that particular Russian experiment. My contemporaries are of course all long gone, and in many cases I deal with the sons of the men I knew. They talk to me. And I am hearing some extraordinary things.

By now the children are in their underwear and sitting with parents and teachers on the floor of the boobytrapped gymnasium. Mines clad in metal bolts are strung up on the basketball hoops. When the children chant for water they are silenced by a bullet fired into the ceiling. To aid ventilation, some of the gym windows have been obligingly shattered, but the killers, it seems, remain committed to the dehydration of their hostages, if hostages they are, and have clubbed off the tap handles in the kitchens and bathrooms. The children are now reduced, and some are now forced, to drink sweat and urine filtered through layers of clothing. How long can a child survive in great heat without water? Three days? Of course there are plans to storm the school.

It will be revealed, postmortem, that the killers are on heroin and morphine, and some of the doses will be described as “beyond lethal.” As the power of the analgesic fades, what was numb will become raw; I keep thinking of the killer with red hair and how his rusty beard will itch and smart. Pogonophobia…North Ossetia has started to remind me of another school massacre, swaggering, drug-fueled — Columbine. Yes I know. Columbine was not political but purely recreational, and was over in minutes. Only the briefest visit, on that occasion, to the parallel universe where murdering the young is accounted witty.

They are now saying that the killers, who have made “no demands,” are jihadis from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Jihadis they may well be, but they are almost certainly from Chechnya, and what they want is independence. The reason that can’t happen, Venus, is that Chechnya, after centuries of Russian invasion, oppression, mass deportation, and (most recently) blitz, is now organically insane. So the leader’s in a bind, now, just as Joseph Vissarionovich felt himself to be with the Jews in 1948: “I can’t swallow them, and I can’t spit them out.” All he could do was chew.

Early on in the siege of the Moscow theater — Dubrovka — in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere — in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians. *2You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading The New York Times, even I found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.

Of course there are plans to storm the school. To say plans risks extravagance, perhaps, but somehow or other the school will be stormed. This we know, because the Spetsnaz, our elite special forces, are buying bullets from the locals, who are surging around outside with their muskets and flintlocks.