Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Two youngish prisoners strolled past at a donnish pace, one with his hands clasped behind his back, the other ponderously gesturing.

“All I care about, in the end,” the second man was saying, “is tits.”

“No,” said the other. “No, not tits. Arses.”

“…New boys,” said Lev.

I shrugged. Young men, after their arrival, would talk about sex and even sports for a couple of weeks, then about sex and food, then about food and sex, then about food.

Lev yawned. His color was better now. He had had his time in the infirmary, and a course of weak penicillin from Janusz. But his lips and nails were blue, from hunger, not cold, and he had the brownish pigmentation around the mouth, deeper than any suntan. We all had that too, the great-ape muzzle.

“It’s hard to do when you’re covered in lice,” he said, “but it’s good to think about sex.”

I’m very sorry to say, Venus, that this was by now, for me, an extremely sensitive subject. You see, I had managed to persuade myself that Lev’s bond with Zoya was largely a thing of the spirit. It was, in fact, pretty well platonic. What a relief for her, I told myself, after all those passionate ups and downs. And I could even derive some pleasure from imagining the kind of evening that must surely be their norm. The remains of the simple supper cleared away, the taking of turns at the washbasin, Gretel, a little shyly, slipping into her bedsocks and coarse nightgown, Hansel sighing in his vest and longjohns, the peck on the cheek, and then over they turned, back to back, each with a complacent grunt, and sought their rightful rest…And while Lev lay in his little death, the other Zoya, the sweating succubus, rose up like a mist and came to me.

“But it’s not really thought, is it. It’s more like cold soup, hot soup.”

There is poetry, I said.

“True. There is poetry. I can sometimes work on a line or two for half a minute. Then there’s a jolt and I’m back to the other stuff.”

I told him about the thirty-year-old professor in the women’s block. She recited Eugene Onegin to herself every day.

“Every day? Yeah, but some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Bronze Horseman .”

That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…the fucking Song of Igor’s Campaign .

“That’s right. Some days you don’t want to read the…”

And so we got through another hour, before we groped our way to our bedding.

Then came the changes. But before I get to that, it is necessary for me to describe a brief internal detour: a lucky break. I suggest, my dear, that you take full advantage of this interlude or breather, using it, perhaps, to tabulate my better qualities. Because I am soon going to be doing some very bad things.

We never saw the Chief Administrator, Kovchenko, but we heard about him — his polar-bear fur coat, his groin-high sealskin boots, his fishing trips and reindeer hunts, his parties. Every so often a card would appear on the bulletin board, asking for the services of inmate musicians, actors, dancers, athletes, whom he used to entertain his guests (fellow chief administrators or inspectorates from the center). After their performance, the artistes were given a vat of leftovers. Excitingly, many came back sick from overeating, and there were a number of fatal gorgings.

One day Kovchenko posted a signed request for “any inmate with experience of installing a ‘television.’” I had never installed a television; but I had dissected one, at the Tech. I told Lev what I remembered about it, and we applied. Nothing happened for a week. Then they called out our names, and fed us and scrubbed us, and jeeped us out to Kovchenko’s estate.

Lev and I stood waiting, under guard, in what I would now call a gazebo, a heated octagonal outhouse, with a workbench and an array of tools. Kovchenko entered, gaunt and oddly professorial in his jodhpurs and tweed jacket. A metal crate was solemnly wheeled in, and two men who looked like gardeners began unbolting it. “Gentlemen,” said Kovchenko, breathing deeply and noisily, “prepare to see the future.” Up came the lid and in we peered: a formless, gray-black sludge of valves and tubes and wires.

So we started going there every day. Every day we came out of the thick breath of the camp and entered a world of room temperature, picture windows, ample food, coffee, American cigarettes, and continuous fascination.

After two months we put together something that looked like an especially disgraceful deep-sea fish, plus, on the open back porch, a pylon of aerials. All we ever raised, on the screen, were fleeting representations of the ambient weather: night blizzards, slanting sleet against a charcoal void. Once, in the presence of the chief, we picked up what might or might not have been a test card. This satisfied Kovchenko, whose expectations were no longer high. The set was transported to the main house. We later heard that it was put on a plinth in the entrance hall, for display, like a piece of ancient metalwork or a brutalist sculpture.

We too had wanted to see the future. Now we returned to the past — to the ball-bearings works, in fact, where you just went oompah every five seconds, and thought about cold soup, hot soup. I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system — the first being terror. At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be false (even my mother’s school was no different). Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. Public discourse was boring, the papers and the radio were just a drone in the other room, and the meetings were boring, and all talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally. Bureaucracy was boring. Queuing was boring. The most stimulating place in Russia was the Butyrki prison in Moscow. I can see why they needed the terror, but why did they need the boredom?

That was the big zona. This was the little zona, the slave-labor end of it. In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger — the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.

Another thing that happened, on the credit side, is that we both grew close to Janusz, the prisoner-doctor. He did everything he could for us — and just to stand next to him for ten minutes made you feel marginally less unhealthy. Tall, broad, and twenty-four years old, he had a head of jungly black hair that grew with anarchic force; we used to say that any barber, going in there, would want danger money. Janusz was a Jewish doctor who was trapped in an imposture. He wasn’t pretending that he was a Christian (no great matter either way, in camp). He was pretending that he was a doctor. And he wasn’t — not yet. Always the most difficult position. And it wouldn’t have been so hard for him if he hadn’t been kind, very kind, continuously moved by all he saw. For those early operations he had to feel his way into it, into the human body, with his knife. First, do no harm.

Trucks and troops went the word. Trucks and troops. That meant Moscow, and policy change. A decision had been arrived at in the Central Committee, and it came down to us in the form of headlights and machineguns.

At all times and in all seasons the camp population was in flux, with various multitudes being reshuffled, released, reimprisoned, shipped out, shipped in (and it was amazing, by the way, that my brother and I were separated just once, and then for barely a year). Our business, now, was to gaze into this motion arithmetic, and try to discern something that could be called an intention …