Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Then what?

“It was a Sunday. Late afternoon. We were lying there and I said it again. Then she went all still. Then she stood up and took—”

Enough. Took her clothes off, I suppose.

“She already had her clothes off. Most of them. No, she took my—”

Enough.

They had nine months; and then, as Lev’s classmates and professors were being hauled in one after the other, it was she who took the decision. They activated the scrofulous rabbi in his basement. It was clandestine, and I suppose of doubtful legitimacy. But they stamped on the glass, wrapped in its handkerchief — the destruction of the temple, the renunciation of earlier ties. And they made the vows.

One scrap of comfort was given to me (and there are these leftovers of comfort, at the banquet of sorrow). Its efficacy will perhaps be obscure to those accustomed to the exercise of free will. I learned that Zoya, while not indifferent to older men (she came close to scandal with a newly married thirty-year-old), never involved herself with any of my closest peers: veterans. So I could tell myself that when we kissed, and she retained my lower lip for a second between her big square teeth, the taste she didn’t like was the ferrous hormone of war.

It comforted me because I could attribute my failure to historical forces, along with everything else. History did it.

Reveille, in camp, was achieved as follows: a metal bludgeon, wielded by a footlike hand, would clatter up and down for a full minute between two parallel iron rails. This you never got used to. Each morning, as you girded yourself in the yard, you would stare at the simple contraption and wonder at its acoustical might. I now know that, for some barbarous reason (the quicker detection, perhaps, of even the tiniest animal), hunger sharpens the hearing. But it didn’t just get louder — it grew in shrillness and, somehow, in articulacy. The sound seemed to trumpet the dawn of a new dominion (more savage, more stupid, more certain) and to repudiate the laxity and amateurism of the day before.

Until Lev came to camp my first thought, on waking, was always the same thought, admitting of no modulation. It was always: I would give my eyesight for just ten more seconds…Another day has been cranked up in front of you; the day itself, the dark dawn (the glassy sheen of the sector and the chalklike mist which the lungs refused), looked like the work of a team of laborers, a nightshift — the result of hours of toil. The cold is waiting for me, I’d think; it is expecting me, and everything is prepared. Don’t you find, my dear, when you step out into the rain, that you always have a moment’s grace before feeling the first few dots on your hair? Cold isn’t like that. Cold is cold, obviously, and wants all your heat. It is on you. It grips and frisks you for all your heat.

Then, after Lev came, daily consciousness would arrive to find me yanked upright on my boards. The pig would still be belaboring the iron rails as I dropped to the floor. I was always the first man out of the hut — and always with the feeling that a lurid but sizable treat lay ahead of me. What was this treat, exactly? It was to get my first glimpse of Lev, and to see the way his frown softened into the flesh of his brow. It wouldn’t happen the moment he set eyes on me. He would smile his strained — his stretched — smile, but the frown, the inverted chevron of care, would remain awhile and then fade, like a gauge measuring my power to reassure. And sometimes I feel that I was never closer to the crest than during those exchanges or transfusions — never more alive.

Now that sounds all right, doesn’t it? Lurid, then, in what way? I see that I cannot avoid the lurid. Another sun had risen in me. This sun was black, and its rays, its spokes, were made of hope and hate.

Lev, by the way, didn’t last long in his brigade — the strong brigade under Markargan. Even though he was by now very fit. Very sick and very fit: you could be that there, and go on being it for quite a while. But no. It was a rare fascist who lasted long in a strong brigade. In a strong brigade there was a unanimity of effort that had the weight of a union contract or a military oath: you met the norm and you ate the full ration. It was one way of getting through it — the booming worksong, the bucketful of soup, the sleep of the dead. A peasant, carrying around with him his millennium of slave ethic — a peasant could manage it without great inner cost. But an intelligent …This is what comes over you, in the slave system. It takes a couple of months. It builds, like a graduated panic attack. It is this: the absorption of the fact that despite your obvious innocence of any crime, the exaction of the penalty is not inadvertent. Now go with such a thought to a strong brigade. You try and you try, but the idea that you are excelling in the service of the state — it weighs your hands down, and causes them to drop to your side. You can feel your hands as they drop to your side; your sides, your hips, feel them as they fall. Needless to say, a weak brigade, with its shiteater short commons, wasn’t any good either. So what do you do? You do what all the fascists do. You skive and slack and fake and wheedle, and you subsist.

Once he was off the full ration, Lev’s bowel infection got worse. In camp, even hospitalization for dysentery obeyed the law of the norm; and by early 1949 Lev could meet it. And what was the norm? The norm was more blood than shit. More blood than shit. He went to Janusz, who gave him some pills and promised him a bed. On the day before his admission, Lev had some sort of shouting match in his barracks, over a sewing needle (that is, a fishbone), and was immediately denounced — his name dropped into the suggestion box outside the guardhouse. Instead of a week in the infirmary he had a week in the isolator, wearing underclothes, and crouched on a bench above knee-deep bilge.

The frequency of the total. The total state — the masterpiece of misery.

That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my “proof,” framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. “Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion.” But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear — if God is a Russian.

And we the people keep coming back for more. We fucking love it. That week had an awful color for me, but when Lev came out, walking the way he did, and with his head at that angle, I more or less accepted the fact that Norlag wouldn’t kill him, not on its own. He could bear it.

What worries me about me,” he said (this was half a year later), “is what kind of shape I’ll be in when and if I get out. I don’t just mean how thin or how ill. Or how old . I mean up here. In the head. You know what I think I’m turning into?”

A moron.

“Exactly. Good. So it’s not just me.”

We all have it.

“Then that’s bad. Because it probably means it’s true. My thoughts — they’re not really thoughts anymore. They’re impulses. It’s all on the level of cold, hot. Cold soup, hot soup. What will I talk to my wife about? All I’ll be thinking is cold soup, hot soup.”

You’ll be talking to her like you’re talking to me.

“But it’s so tiring talking to you. You know what I mean. Christ. Imagine if we weren’t here. I mean together.”

The evening was warm and bright, and we sat smoking on the steps of the toy factory. Yes, the toy factory, because the economy of the camp was as various as the economy of the state. We churned out everything from uranium to teaspoons. I myself was mass-producing threadbare clockwork rabbits with sticks in their paws and little snare drums attached to their waists.