Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Lev was standing by the barracks window, looking out, and bobbing minutely up and down — his way of discharging unease. He said,

“Listen. Arbachuk cornered me behind the woodshop last night. I thought I was finally going to get raped, but no. He was speechless, he was all stricken and mournful. Then he reached down and squeezed my hand…He’s been like that before. But now I think he was saying goodbye. They’re shipping out the brutes.”

I said that that had to be good for us.

“Why good?” He turned. “Since when do they make it good for us? I know how to stay alive here. As it is. What’s next?”

We were confined to barracks and spent our days looking out, looking out. And you didn’t want to be in the zona, not now, with its dogs and columns of men and the new disposition of forces. The watchtowers — their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth…At such times, I often thought I was playing in a sports match, ice hockey, say, in slow motion (dreamlike yet lethal, zero-sum, sudden-death); and that I was the goalkeeper — excluded from the action except when responding to hideous emergencies.

They isolated the brutes, and trucked them out — the simplest way, we supposed, of ending the war between the brutes and the bitches. But then they isolated the bitches, too. And as soon as the bitches were gone, they isolated the locusts, and then the leeches. If you discounted the shiteaters, who remained, that left the politicals and the informers — the fascists and the snakes.

Lev said, looking out, “Christ, how clear does it need to be? They’re isolating us .”

…We’re all going to be freed, I said.

“It’s just as likely,” said Lev, “that we’re all going to be shot.”

Over the next few weeks our sector, freshly depopulated, started filling up again. And all the new arrivals were fascists. They were isolating us . Why? Why were they giving us, systemwide, exactly what we wanted — delivering us, awakening us?

To read the mind of Moscow, in 1950, this was where you would have needed to be: in the antennae, in the control turret, of the slug that was unmethodically devouring the leader’s brain. We weren’t in that turret. I say this with a shrug, but the best guess, now, is that Joseph Vissarionovich had started to fear for the ideological integrity of the common felon.

The power ascribed to us, even the power of contamination, wasn’t real (we were not yet a force). Now the power was telling us it was there. The process took about a month. We were like blind men recovering their sight. It was a question of eyes turning to other eyes, and holding them. Self-awareness dawned. The politicals looked from face to face — and became political.

Two things followed from this. The policy change in Moscow meant the end, the unintended suicide, of the slave-labor system. It also meant that Lev and I became enemies. A decision is made, around a table, in a room a thousand miles away — and a pair of brothers must go to war. This, Venus, is the meaning, the hour-by-hour import, of political systems.

But I’m not going to waste your time with the politics. I’ll give you what you need to know. And I’m afraid I cannot neglect to tell the tale of the guard called Uglik — the strenuous tale of Comrade Uglik. Looking back, I now see what the politics was: the politics of Siamese twins, and mermen, and bearded ladies. It was the politics of the slug called arteriosclerosis.

“The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!”

This cry (not without a certain charm, even then) was often to be heard during the summer of 1950. We started beating the snakes, the one-in-tens. No longer would they tarry at their tables in the mess hall, kissing bunched fingertips over their double rations. Now, when they made their way across the square to the guardhouse, it was not to top up their denunciations for an extra cigarette: it was to plead for sanctuary in the punishment block — with its shin-deep bilge, its obese bedbugs.

Our favored method of chastisement was called “tossing.” It was what the peasants used to do, mindful, as ever, of scarce materials. Don’t blunt that knife, don’t strain that cudgel: let gravity do it. One man per limb, three preparatory swings, up they went, like a caber, and down they crashed. Then we tossed them again. Until they no longer flailed in the air. We left them out there for the pigs: canvas bagfuls of broken bones.

You seem displeased, brother, I said, as I strode into the barracks dusting my palms.

“You’re not my brother.”

I waited. Everyone flocked and scrambled to witness a tossing. Not Lev, who always withdrew.

“What I’m saying,” he said, “is that you’re unrecognizable. You’re like Vad. Do you know that? You’ve joined the herd. Suddenly you’re just like everybody else.”

This was perfectly true. I was unrecognizable. In a matter of weeks I had become a Stakhanovite of agitation, a “shock” stirrer and mixer — demands and demonstrations, pickets, petitions, protests, provocations. Ah, you’re thinking: displacement, transference; the mechanism of sublimation. And it is true that I was deliberately embracing the chemical heat of mass emotion, and the infuriant of power. But I never lost sight of a possible outcome, and a possible future.

“I ask you to consider my position. You’ve chosen a path, you and your herd,” he was saying. “Violence and escalation. You know fucking well what’s going to happen.”

For a very brief period it looked as though the isolation of the politicals, as a policy, had a subtext: we were to be worked to death (less food, longer hours). But the pigs still had their quotas, and now they had given us the weapon of the strike.

Anyway, I was in a position to say, with some indignation, Oh, I get it. You want the sixteen-hour day and the punitive ration. Well we don’t.

“You won that fight. Christ, that was eight or nine fights ago. And the pigs, they aren’t going to keep on backing off. You know what’s going to happen. Or maybe you don’t. Because you’re running with the herd. Look at you. Thundering along with it.”

Again I waited.

“What you’re going to get is a war with the state. A fight to the death against Russia. Against the Cheka and the Red Army. And you’re going to win that, are you?”

I didn’t say so, but I always knew what was coming our way. I always knew.

“All right. I’ll ask you for the last time. And I’m asking a lot. There are three or four men here who have a chance of bringing the herd to a halt. And you’re one of them. Please consider my position. I have to ask. And it’s the last time that I’ll ask you anything as a brother.”

You ask the moon, Lev.

“Then some of us will die,” he said, turning his eyes away from mine and folding his arms.

We haven’t all of us got a good reason to live, I said. Some of us will die. And some of us won’t.

I know how you feel about violence. I knew how you felt about it right from the start. The film on TV, in the Chicago den, was in fact a comedy; but a punch was thrown, and a nose dripped blood. You ran in tears from the room. And as you swung the door inward the brass knob caught you full in the eye. That’s how tall you were when you found out the world was hard.

On New Year’s Day, 1951, the authorities retaliated: three men from our center were confined to the main punishment block, where thirty or forty informers had found refuge. The informers, we heard, would that night be issued with axes and alcohol, and the cells would all be unlocked.

So we at once sent a message. We too changed our policy. We stopped beating the snakes. We stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three.