Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I went to get him in the bathhouse. He stood alone in the changing room, at the far end, on a plank of yellow light. What existed between us now was a kind of codependence. Love, too, but all cross-purposed, and never more so than on this day, this night.

She’s here, I said. The Americas is here. They’ve got her filling out the forms.

He nodded, and richly sighed. It wasn’t that likely anymore, but they might have sent Zoya on her way, with a taunt; or they’d give him half an hour with her in the guardhouse, a pig sitting between them and picking his teeth…Lev was sheared, deloused, and power-hosed. He was lightly bobbing up and down, like a bantamweight before a fight he expected to win.

We walked, under escort, out of the zona and beyond the wire, over the carpet of wildflowers, and up the steep little lane and the five stone steps to the annex — that compact and manageable dream of gentility and repose, with the curtains, the lampshade, the dinner tray on the backless chair. The thermos of vodka, the candles that in the white night would not be strictly needed. I hadn’t sensed much anxiety, until then, in my younger brother. He was young. He was formidably fit. His left ear was dead but no longer infected. He slept on the top tier and ate the full ration plus twenty-five percent.

Then came the flinch: the two inverted chevrons in the middle of the brow, the pleading rictus. It couldn’t not be there: fear of failure. Fear of failure, which was perhaps supposed to keep men honest, but turned out to make them mad.

Remember what I told him? You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. I also said, Look. Tell me to fuck off and everything if you want, but here’s some advice. Don’t expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.

“I don’t think I do expect too much.”

We embraced. And as I ducked out I saw the small contraption on the windowsill, the test tube, steadied by its hand-carved wooden frame, and the single stemless bloom — an amorous burgundy.

I have already told you about the evening of July 31.

Count Krzysztov’s Coffee Shop. Trying not to laugh, he gave me a cup of hot black muck. Trying not to laugh, I drank it.

Hey Krzysztov, I said. Why do you need all those zeds and the rest of it in the middle of your name? Why not call yourself Krystov?

“No Krystov, ” he said. “Krzysztov!”

There was the lecture on Iran I didn’t go to. There was my tryst with Tanya: her notched mouth, like a scar, marking time in what had once been her face. She was twenty-four. Midnight came and midnight went.

The impersonation of reasonable man: that’s tiring. The impersonation of someone reasonably good. That’s tiring too. I should have slept, of course. But how was I supposed to do that? I had seen a woman who looked like a woman: Zoya, side on, with the whole of her in motion in the white cotton dress, one hand raised to steady the raincoat thrown over her shoulder, the other swinging a crammed straw bag, the Brazilian backside, the Californian breasts, and all of it in syncopation, against the beat, as she moved down the path to the House of Meetings, where Lev stood.

Around me in the dark the prisoners were eating the dream-meal, bolting it, wolfing it. I knew that dream, we all did, with loaves of bread the color of honey or mustard floating past you and turning to mist in your hands, on your lips, on your tongue.

I had something else in my mouth. All night I walked and crawled across a landscape overlaid with grit, a desert where each grain of sand, at some point or other, would have its time between my teeth.

When I first saw him, out beyond the boundary rail, I swear to God I thought he had been blinded in the night. He was being led by the arm, or dragged by the sleeve. Then the pig just swung him out into the yard. Lev turned a full circle, swayed, steadied, and at last began to come forward.

I thought too of his arrival, in the February of 1948, when he had felt his way out of the decontamination shed and moved into the darkness one step at a time — but not slowly, because he knew by then that there were always great distances to cross. Now he moved slowly. Now he was nightblind at noon. As he drew nearer I could tell that it was simpler than that and he just wasn’t interested in anything further than an inch from his face. The eyes, rather, were swiveled inward, where they were doing the work of decrease, of internal demotion. Lev came past me. His jaws toiled, as if he was sucking purposefully on a lozenge or a sweet. Some hoarded bonbon, maybe, popped in there, in parting, by Zoya? I thought not. I thought he was trying to rinse out a new taste inside his mouth.

Of course, I had no idea what had passed between them. But I felt the mass of it in a way that went on striking me for some time as tangential and perverse, and uncannily impersonal. It fled without so much as a whimper — all my social hope. More specifically, I ceased to believe, then and there, that human society could ever arrive at something just a little bit better than all that had come before. I know you must think that this faith of mine was dismayingly slow to evaporate. But I was young. And for two months in the spring and summer of 1953, even here, I had known utopia, and had quaffed sublimity and love.

For seventy-two hours he lay facedown in his bunk. Not even the guards tried to make him stir. But this couldn’t last. On the third morning I waited for the barracks to clear and then I approached. I stood over his curled form. Muttering, murmuring, I rubbed his shoulders until he opened his eyes. I said,

Work today, brother. Food today.

And I peeled him up from the boards and helped him down.

Listen, I said, you can’t stay silent forever. What’s the worst that could have happened? All right. She’s leaving you.

His chin jerked up and I was staring at his nostrils. I don’t think Lev knew it until that moment. His stutter was back.

“Leaving me?” he eventually managed to say. And he labored on. “No. She wants to get married again. Properly. She said she’d follow me anywhere. ‘Like a dog.’”

Then all is clear, I said. You couldn’t do it. Nobody can, not here. You know, in its whole history, I don’t think there’s ever been a single fuck in the House of Meetings.

“I could do it. Everything worked.”

Then tell me.

“I’ll tell you before I die.” And it took him a long time to get it out. “I have crossed over,” he said, fighting it, bringing everything to bear against it, “into the other half of my life.”

All that could be done was to help him with his norms and his rations. But he couldn’t eat. He tried and he tried and he couldn’t eat. He turned his face away. He drank the water, and he could sometimes manage the tea. But nothing solid passed his lips until September. No one joked or smiled or said anything. His attempts to work, to eat, to talk — these were respected in silence by every prisoner.

On the other hand, I too had crossed over into the other half of my life: the better half. He crossed over and I crossed over. We crossed.

By now the camp was simply disappearing all around us. Everything was coming down, and the inmates were mere impediments — we were always getting in the way. As freedom impended, I embraced inactivity. Lev gradually returned to his earlier regime — the jumping-jacks, the lashing skip-rope; he was a boxer again, but with the loath and somnolent look of a man asked to punch far above his weight. We were almost the last to leave. They were practically tearing the rafters off the roof above our heads. And when there was no prison left, they let the prisoners just wander away. Lev went first.

I had three weeks to wait for the rubber stamp. But nothing frightened me or worried me or even bothered me. I minded nothing: the nonappearance of my Certificate of Rehabilitation, the low-priority rail voucher, the “travel ration” of bread. I didn’t even mind the train station at Predposylov — at first sight a clear impossibility, with dozens brawling over every seat. I rolled up my sleeves and took my place in the line.