Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Now, pluck out your Western eyes. Pluck them out, and reach for the other pair…These others are not the eyes of a Temachin or a Hulagu, hooded and aslant, nor those of Ivan the Terrible, paranoid and pious, nor those of Vladimir Ilich, both childish and horizon-seeking. *3No, these others are the eyes of the old city-peasant (drastically urbanized), on her hands and knees at the side of the road, witness to starvation and despair, to permanent and universal injustice, to innumerable enormities. Eyes that say: enough…But now I see your eyes before me, as they really are (the long brown irises, the shamingly clean whites); and they threaten the decisive withdrawal of love, just as Lev’s did, half a century ago. All right. In setting my story down I create a mirror. I see me, myself. Look at his face. Look at his hands .

Lev once saw me fresh from a killing: my second. He described the encounter to me, years later. I give his memory of it, his version — because I haven’t got a memory. I haven’t got a version.

Badged with blood, and panting like a dog that has run all day, I pushed past Lev at the entrance to the latrine; I slapped my raised forearm against the wall and dropped my head on it, and with the other hand I clawed at the string around my waist, then emptied my bladder with gross copiousness and (I was told) a snarl of gratitude. I paused and made another sound: an open-mouthed exhalation as I whipped my head to the right, freeing my brow from the tickling heat of my forelock. I looked up. I remember this. He was staring at me with bared teeth and a frown that went half an inch deep. He pointed, directing my attention to the frayed belt, the lowered trousers. I find I can’t avoid asking you to imagine what he saw.

“I know where you’ve been,” he said. “You’ve been at the wet stuff.”

Which is what we called it: killing. The wet stuff.

I said, Well someone’s got to do it. Hut Three, Prisoner 47. His conscience was unclean.

“His conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”

What are you talking about?

“Look at your eyes. You’re like an Old Believer. Ah, kiss the cross, brother. Kiss the cross.”

Kissing the cross: this was fraternal shorthand for religious observance. Because that’s what they did, in church, before Christianity was illegalized (along with all the others): they kissed it, the death instrument. Lev was telling me that my mind was no longer free. It was all of a piece that my sense of it, then, wasn’t mental but physical. I was a slave who had got his body back. And now I was offering it up again — freely. That’s all true. But I was never without the other thought and the other calculation.

Years later, in a very different phase of my existence, sitting on a hotel balcony, in Budapest, and drinking beer and eating nuts and olives after a shower, and before going out for a late-night meeting with a ladyfriend, I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the First World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Mediterranean. I spent mine above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.

It was a while before I worked out what he meant, Lev, when he said of the murdered snake that “his conscience was not unclean. That’s the point.”…In freedom, in the big zona, the informer ruined lives. In camp, in the little zona, the informer worsened, and sometimes shortened, lives that were already ruined. Anonymous denunciation, for self-betterment: you can tell it’s profoundly criminal, and profoundly Russian, because only Russian criminals think it isn’t. All other criminals, the world over, think it is. But Russian criminals — from Dostoevsky’s fellow inmates (“an informer is not subjected to the slightest humiliation; the thought never occurs to anyone to react indignantly towards him”) to the current president, yes, to Vladimir Vladimirovich (who has expressed simple dismay at the idea of doing without his taiga of poison pens) — think it isn’t. *4For my part, then, in the extermination of the snakes, I am guilty on the following count: they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. “The fascists are beating us! The fascists are beating us!” Now I see the obscure charm — the pathos of that scandalized cry. And then we stopped beating them, and started killing them. I did three. I couldn’t have done a fourth. Nevertheless, I did three.

The camp was more war, Venus, more war, and the moral rot of war…The war between the brutes and the bitches was a civil or sectarian war. The war between the snakes and the fascists was a proxy war. Now that the snakes were gone (siphoned off as a class), the battle lines were forming for a revolutionary war: the war between the fascists and the pigs.

Lev was an innocent bystander in the first war (as we all were), and he was a conscientious objector in the second war. No one could avoid the third war. And early on he took a wound.

The pigs.

They were all semiliterate, but even I could remember the tail end of a time when the pigs were as humanly various as the prisoners — cruel, kind, indifferent. We had other things in common. They were almost as frozen, starving, filthy, disease-ridden, slave-driven, and terrorized as we were. But by now they had evolved. They were second-generation: pigs, and the sons of pigs. And what you saw was the emergence of human beings of a new type. Such was Comrade Uglik.

I shadowed my brother, over the years, and did some quiet roughing-up on his behalf. But there wasn’t anything I could have done about Uglik. He was just Lev’s bad luck.

I asked him, Why are you crying?

These were the first words I had addressed to Lev in ten or eleven months. By this time (January 1953), his level in camp was on a par with the shiteaters — or lower still, for a while, because the shiteaters were merely pitied and then ignored, and Lev was ostracized. There were people who had a bit more respect for him now. Something to do with his size and shape — the little bent figure, the sloping shoulders under the crumpled face, and always alone, aloof, against. Chinless, of course, but the whole set of him as defiant as a barrel-jawed dwarf in a city street. He wouldn’t cross a picket line or walk away from a sit-down or anything like that. The offense he was giving was moral and passive and silent. He wouldn’t partake of the ambient esprit. He just wouldn’t come to the well. Lev, now, was twenty-four.

I asked him, Why are you crying?

He flinched, as if my voice, grown unfamiliar, held a hardness for him. Or else, perhaps, he had some sense of the unholy brew of motives that lay behind my question…Of all the freedoms we had secured over the past eighteen months, the one that mattered most to me, I found, was the removal of the number from my back. The one that mattered to Lev was his right to correspondence. His right: not anybody else’s. He campaigned for it alone, and he won it alone; and for this too he was shunned. Now he was sitting on a tree stump in the copse behind the infirmary, Zoya’s first letter in one hand and his dripping face in the other. If you’d asked me whether I hoped that everything was over between them, the truth-drug answer would have been something like, Well, that would be a start . But I hope she hasn’t done it nicely. That might not do me any good at all.

“I’m crying…” He bowed his head, becoming absorbed by the task of returning the sheath of tissuey paper to its wrinkled pouch; but every time he neared success he had to raise a finger to wipe the itch off his nose. “I’m crying,” he said, “because I’m so dirty .”