Martin Amis - House of Meetings

“Can you write back?” he said.

I’m supposed to be able to. But they don’t like me. Anyway there’s never anything to write with. Or write on.

“Why don’t they like you? I mean, I can think of a reason or two. But why?”

The dogs.

“Ah. The dogs.”

I was quite famous, in camp, for the way I dealt with the dogs. Most prisoners, including Lev, were horribly afraid of them. Not me. When I was a toddler we had a mule-sized borzoi. I can’t even remember her; but she passed something on to me before she went. I have no fear of dogs. So I used to make them cringe. It’s just a dog, imbued with a pig nature. It’s just a snarl, waiting to become a cringe. I would often risk a beating to make the dogs cringe.

Lev said, “I went to the guardhouse and asked the pig. It says on my file: Without the Right to Correspondence. I thought that that was code for immediate execution. So did the pig. He kept peering at it and then peering at me. I don’t have the right. But I’ll keep on. I’ll get it.”

I said, untruthfully, I’m glad you don’t worry about Kitty. And about Zoya.

“Worry? I’m good at worrying. When I started being her friend, before, I used to worry that someone was going to get her pregnant. But she didn’t get pregnant. She can’t. She had an abortion when she was sixteen and she can’t. Then I worried that she was going to get arrested or kicked to death in the street. But other men, you mean? No. The thing about her…She’s a hundred-percenter. And so am I, now. My uh, my status as a noncombatant. That’s for her. That’s for us.”

You talk in riddles, Lev. Don’t you understand that what you do here doesn’t count?

“Doesn’t it? Won’t it? You don’t see it, do you. It’ll count.”

On top of everything else there was also the huge brute, Arbachuk, who took a liking to my brother in what seemed to be the worst possible way. Every night he’d search him out. Why? To tousle him and taunt him and kiss him and tickle him. It was fashionable, at that time, for a brute to take a fascist as a pet, though Lev claimed it felt more like the other way around. “Suddenly I’m best friends with a mandrill,” he said, which was game of him, because he was badly and rightly frightened. As Arbachuk shouldered his way through the barracks, with his tattoos and his moist, gold-flecked smile, Lev would close his eyes for a second and the light would pass from his face. All I could do about Arbachuk was indicate, with a glance and a movement of the shoulders, that if it really came to it he would have to get by me too. Lev said that it was much worse when I wasn’t there. So I always was. And when I couldn’t be, we relied on Semyon or Johnreed, two of the higher-ranking officer veterans, a colonel and a captain, who were both Heroes of the Soviet Union — an honor of which, on arrest, they were naturally stripped…You’re probably wondering about that name: Johnreed. A lot of people his age were called Johnreed, after John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World . There were so many Johnreeds in camp that they had earned the status of a phylum, the Johnreeds, like the Americans and, later, the Doctors —the Jewish doctors. In its stirred account of the October Revolution, John Reed’s book barely mentioned Joseph Vissarionovich, so he banned it, thus whipping out the carpet, so to speak, from under all the Johnreeds.

Arbachuk used to bring titbits for Lev, who always refused them. Not just chunks of bread, either, but meat — mince, sausage — and on one occasion an apple . “I’m not hungry,” Lev would say. I couldn’t believe it: he sat there with Arbachuk’s tongue in his ear, and half a pork chop dangling under his nose, saying, “I’m not hungry.”

“Open!” said Arbachuk, squeezing the bolts of Lev’s jaw in his hand.

“I’m not hungry. This tattoo, Citizen. I can only see the last word. What does it say?”

Slowly and grimly Arbachuk rolled up his sleeve. And there were the bruised letters: You may live but you won’t love .

“One bite. Open!”

“I eat the full ration. I’m not hungry, Citizen. I work in a strong brigade.”

Like the kind of man who cannot forget or forgive a woman’s past, and must sit her down, every other night, and have her go through the hoops all over again (“He touched you where ? You kissed his what ?”), I would come to Lev, seeking the narrative of greatest pain. I know about that kind of man, because I’m him — he’s me. In later years it was the only way I could tell for sure that I was finding a woman interesting: I would want her to confess, to denounce, to inform. And they quite enjoyed it at first, because it felt like attention. They soon came to dread it. They soon caught on…This trait of mine didn’t really have the time or the opportunity to get started between war and camp. You see, nearly all the ex-lovers of nearly all my girlfriends — they were dead. And I didn’t mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn’t forgive the dead. I didn’t mind the dead. The living were what bothered me.

When, shortly before I was arrested, Lev asked for my permission to try his luck with Zoya, I didn’t even take the trouble to laugh in his face. I gave him the trisyllabic You?; and that was all. I honestly didn’t give it a moment’s thought. But Lev was like clever little brothers everywhere. He watched what I did and then tried the opposite. He came at Zoya without intensity.

Oh well done, I said, during one of our last conversations in freedom. You’re her errand boy. And her mascot.

“That’s it,” he said, stuttering. He was always stuttering. “Come on, how close did you ever get to her? Me, I’m there in the room. I’m there all the time. I’m there when she’s changing .”

Changing?

“Behind the curtain.”

How big is the curtain? And how thick?

“Thick. It goes from the floor up to here. She drapes clothes over the top of it.”

What clothes?

“Petticoats and things.”

Jesus Christ…And now she’s fucking that linguist. I don’t know how you can bear it.

“Oh, I can bear it.”

This went on for nearly a year — a year in which Zoya had three more affairs. “One a term,” he now told me. And it was while he was sitting there, in the conical attic, holding her hand, and talking her through her latest misadventure, that Lev made his next move.

“I said it teasingly. I said, ‘You’re unlucky in love because you’re drawn to the wrong men. These head-in-air types. Try a slightly smaller, uglier one. Like me. We’re so much keener.’ She laughed, and then went silent for five seconds. Then next time I said it, she laughed and went silent for ten seconds. And so on. And then she had another.”

Another what?

“Another affair. A whole other one.”

Is it possible, I said, that you and I have a drop of blood in common? Weren’t you jealous?

“Jealous? I couldn’t have borne it for a minute if I’d been jealous . I didn’t have the right to be jealous. In whose name? I was too busy learning.”

I waited.

“Learning what I’d have to do to keep her.”

…You dirty little bastard .

It does happen. In my life I’ve seen perhaps three examples of it. And you, Venus, are one of them. You and that Roger. As I said at the time, possibly rather unfeelingly, You’re about three-quarters trained to think that everyone looks the same. That’s the illusion your crowd is foisting on itself. So you think it’s snobbish not to fancy cripples. And now you’ve got that sick bat trailing after you . I still think that that’s what it mainly was, Venus: pity and piety. You told me there were compensations, and I believed you. You spoke of his gratitude — his gratitude, and your relief from certain cares. And I can see that obviously attractive women sometimes do get to the end of obviously attractive men: their entitlements, their expectations, their unexceptionable hearts. And so one morning the princess kisses the bullfrog, and finds it good.