Martin Amis - House of Meetings

“Mm, the wet stuff. If there are any men, when this is over. It wouldn’t surprise me if they killed all the pigs, too. A smoke, brother. Yes, go on, a contemplative cigarette…”

He had a new voice, now, or a new intonation: precise, almost legalistic, and slightly crazed. A loner’s voice.

“You know,” he said, “massacres want to happen. They’re not neutral. Remember the fascist headcount in the yard in, what, in ’50? When the overloaded watchtower collapsed. It was fucking funny, wasn’t it? The way it fell — like an elevator cut from its cable. But then we heard the sound of all the rifles cocking. And every man with laughter in his chest, a volcano of laughter. One single titter and it would have happened. The massacre of the laughing men. I knew then that massacres want to happen. Massacres want there to be massacres.”

Well, you’d better want a massacre too. And a thorough one.

“Yes, I’ve already been threatened. It’s like a blocking unit in the army, isn’t it? Possible death with honor in the van. Or certain death with ignominy in the rear. Smoke up. I’ve been singing that song, ‘Let’s Smoke.’”

And there are other reasons, I said. If you sit here on your bench, you’re going to feel like shit for the rest of your life.

“Well I won’t not feel like shit for very long, will I? I’ve been listening to the radio with Janusz. Things are better in freedom now. The Doctors have all been pardoned. ‘The flu’—it died when he died. Zoya’s not in Birobidzhan. She’ll be back in Moscow. In her attic. The future looks bright.”

You’ll never write another poem. And you’ll never fuck your wife.

“…At last you convince me, brother. I can go out there and climb on a box and tell them to ignore the provocations and get back to their fucking barracks and wait. Or I can go out there and stand. You know they’re going to kill all the leaders. You’re about ten times more likely to die than I am. I never realized until now,” he said, “that you were so romantic.”

Provoked or not provoked, the Norlag Rebellion, I believe, was a thing of heroic beauty. I can’t and won’t give it up. We were ready to die. I have known war, and it was not like war. Let me spell it out. You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love — love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can’t actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron. On August 4 the love was still there, even at the close of the day. It was — it was like God. And not a Russian God. It was magnificent, the way we stood arm in arm. Everyone, the women, Lev, everyone, even the shiteaters, standing arm in arm.

Two days later I was in a filtration camp in the tundra, for resentencing or execution. Semyon and Johnreed had already been shot when the planes arrived from Moscow. Beria had fallen. The man appointed to arrest him was my marshal, Georgi Zhukov. I love it that that was so. Lavrenti Beria, the clever pervert, looked up from his desk and saw his nemesis: the man who won the Second World War…I was meaninglessly transferred to Krasnoyarsk, and barged back up the Yenisei the following spring. At the time of my return a disused dormitory by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger was being rebuilt, to serve as the House of Meetings.

On August 5, 1953, after twenty-eight hours of emergency operations, Janusz looked in the mirror: he thought there must have been some talc in his cap. His hair had gone white.

At around about this time, in another family matter related to the passing of Joseph Vissarionovich, Vadim, my half-brother and Lev’s fraternal twin, was beaten to death while suppressing strikes and riots in East Berlin.

We thus move on to the conjugal visits. And remember: life was easy, now, in 1956.

The wives had started coming to camp two years earlier, but it was a right granted only to the strongest of strong workers. So that’s what Lev became, all over again. Remembering him now, I see a child-sized version of the posters and paintings of an earlier time — the great globes of sweat, the raised veins on the forearms, even the sheet-metal stare that went out to meet the future. He did the work and he earned the right. By now, though, the question went as follows: did he want it? Did anyone?

Considering the variety and intensity of the suffering it almost always caused, I was astounded by how longed-for and pushed-for it remained: the chalet on the hill. I was a close student of this rite of passage — though quite unreflective, I admit, and especially at first. For the husbands, the conjugal visit meant a headshave, a disinfection, a sustained burst from the fire hose. They came out of the bathhouse unrecognizably scoured, stung, alerted, in clothes stiffened not by dirt but by the rasp of ferocious detergents. Then, with every appearance of appetite and verve, they hastened off, under light guard, to the House of Meetings. And the next day, as each wreck and wraith came stumbling back down the hill, I would find myself thinking: You clamored for it. We fought for it. What’s the matter now?

But very soon the meaning of it pressed down on me, and I bowed to the larger power. It really seemed as if this was the goal of the regnant system: it wanted to push every last one of us into the tightest possible corner. “Living in corners” was what they called it in freedom. Four people or four couples or four families per room, living in corners. The women who came to the House of Meetings belonged to a category of their own: they were wives of enemies of the people, and they lived under specific persecution, out in the big zona. And not just the wives but the whole clan. Those airy rooms in the chalet on the hill were in fact very crowded; liquid tentacles of injustice and culpability flowing out from the head of the octopus, and you as its beak.

All the men were different. Or were they? There was a shared theme, I think. And that theme was chronic anemia. They were trying to be red-blooded; and their blood was a watery white. This man’s face confesses failure, his body confesses it: the skewed mouth, the cottony weakness of the limbs. This man lays claim to success: he shoves you up against the wall and, in a menacing whisper, looking past you or beyond you, tells you what she did to him and what he did to her. And their hearts, too, were without defenses. This man has just been told that his marriage is over and that his children are now in the care of the state: he will come close to taking the walk to the perimeter. This man seems more or less convincingly buoyed, although he is always thoughtful and often tearful: he is remeasuring and rearranging his losses — and that was probably the best that anyone could hope for. What you were getting was the first wave of the rest of your life. You saw the accumulation of all the complexity that would await you in freedom. Everyone stepped lightly around these men and their mantle of solitude.

You see, the House of Meetings was also and always a house of partings — even in the best possible case. There was a meeting, and there was a parting, and then the years of separation resumed.

Now, whenever work took me up the steep little lane, and I saw the white tiling of the chalet roof, the good white tiling against the black hulk of Mount Schweinsteiger, I felt as I did when I passed the isolator and its double encirclement of barbed wire.

The day came: July 31, 1956. The evening came.