Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Twenty-four hours later, with caked blood on my cheeks and knuckles, as I settled into my cranny at the carriage window, I turned to see a face pressed up against the glass. I stood up on the bench and hollered through the slit:

How long have you been here?

“Ever since. I want to go back.”

Of course you do.

“Not there.” He wagged his head. “There.”

So another fight, another flail through limbs and torsos now unshiftably wedged, and back again, and back again, as I made Lev take my place.

It’s all right, it’s all right, I kept mechanically shouting. It’s all right — he’s only little. He’s smaller than I am. He’s small. It’s all right, it’s all right.

Today there is a piece in the local paper about the wild dogs of Predposylov.

The writer keeps referring to the dogs as “wild” but his terrified emphasis is on their discipline and esprit de corps. He tells of the “coordinated attacks” they mount on stalls and shops, notably on a butcher’s, where they came in through the backyard and “made off” with five meat pies, three chickens, and a string of sausages. The raid, he says, was reconnoitered by the “scout” dog, which barked the all-clear to the “alpha” dog.

Learnedly the writer compares the wild dogs of Predposylov to the “mutant” dogs of Moscow. The Moscow dogs are not called mutants because they have two heads and two tails. They are called mutants because they live in the metro and travel around by train. You may be intrigued to know that I once shared a carriage with a mutant pigeon in the London Tube. It got on at Westminster and it got off at St. James’s Park.

An “official source” is claiming that the wild dogs of Predposylov were responsible for the recent savaging of a five-year-old in a municipal playground. There is a picture of the playground — pretty pastels. There is a picture of the five-year-old — comprehensively mauled. Word of the approach of the wild dogs now empties a street, a square.

They tell me, here at the hotel, that the dogs come down the back alley behind the kitchens, every day, at twenty-five past one. The man said you can set your watch by them. I will be taking a closer look at the wild dogs of Predposylov.

Whatever else you may want to say about the place, Dudinka is a perfectly reasonable proposition. If you have timber, and coal, and you’re on a big river, then you are going to get something very like Dudinka.

Dudinka has been here for nearly three centuries. Predposylov has been here since 1944. And it’s not an aggregation, as Dudinka is, but something slapped down in its entirety — Leninsky Prospect, House of Culture, Drama Theater, Sports Hall, Party Headquarters, and, more recently, Social Historical Museum. Why a city? A mining station, yes, a cluster of factories, quite possibly; and, if you must, a slave-labor camp containing sixty thousand people. But why build a city so near the North Pole?

When I got out of Norlag I felt, for nearly a year, that I was treading on the eggshells of freedom. That feeling comes over me here, the unpleasant vibrancy in the shins, the squeamish levitation of the spine. Predposylov is hollow. Underneath the city there are mines a mile deep. The ground itself is a shell you might put your foot through. And there is Mount Schweinsteiger, a black egg in its cup, all emptied out.

This isn’t the Second World anymore. It is not even the Third World. It is the Fourth. It is what happens after . Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.

I am the oldest man in Predposylov by a margin of thirty-five years.

Late at night I look in on a club called the Sixty Nine (the name refers to the parallel). There is a crooner, Presleyesque (late period), in dramatically swirling white flares. And there are G-stringed waitresses and milling prostitutes and softcore sex films showing on the raised screens. No, I don’t feel disgusted. I feel disgusting. People stare at me, as if they’ve never seen an old man before. Come to think of it, that’s probably true: they’ve never seen an old man before. Other people as old as me, and even older, do exist, don’t they, Venus? But really this whole thing has gone on long enough.

My idea is to get my hangover drunk. But I don’t go through with it, particularly. My hangover is not a hangover. I was mistaken. It is death. There is something in the center of my brain, something like a trapped sneeze. Which tickles. And the air here makes my eyes sting and weep.

On top of that I now live in a state of permanently lost temper. I lost my temper three days ago and have not recovered it. I am also very voluble, and am already widely feared at the bar here, by the staff and by the customers. Having been silent for so long, I’m now like a very much rowdier version of the Ancient Mariner. The arrangement at the bar is that I do all the buying but I also do all the talking. Sometimes I take a wedge of money from my wallet and burst out of the room looking for someone to yell at.

I’ve been reading up a bit, and this will be of especial interest to you, Venus, belonging as you do to a generation of self-mutilators. I mean the historical destiny of the urkas.

Now, I have no intention of reopening our debate (let us call it that) on your chin-stud. The soft underbelly of the ear, certainly — but why the chin? I know: it is strangely comforting (you claimed) to focus all your tender feelings on a particular part of your body, now hurt but soon to heal; and thereafter the implanted trinket will mark the spot of your self-inflicted wound. Very well. But what about the “cutting,” Venus? I’m assuming you don’t do it: your arms, when we meet, are often elegantly sleeveless. But many do. Something like twenty million young Americans, I learn, have regular recourse to the bleed valve.

Urka culture, in its decadent phase, became a lot queerer (the passives cringed, the actives swaggered), making you wonder how crypto-queer it was all along. I feel you flinch. These words are like points of heat on you, aren’t they? Your internal censor or commissar — she didn’t like that, did she? You have a censor living in your head, but it’s not all bad: you also have a beaming cheerleader living there too. So it’s not all bad by any means, having an ideology, as you do…Now understand me, Venus. I hear that the aftermath of a gay love-murder is something to see, but the homosexual impulse is clearly pacific. Crypto -queers are supposed heterosexuals; they confine themselves to women; and they are among the most dangerous men alive.

Urka culture, moreover, became self-mutilating, with full urka stringency. They took the battle to their very insides, swallowing nails, ground glass, metal spoons and blades, barbed wire. And this was on top of the self-amputations, self-cannibalizations, self-castrations. My country has always been strangely hospitable to self-neuterers. It began in the eighteenth century, a whole sect of them, the Castrates, who held that the removal of the instrument was a precondition, a sine qua non, of salvation.

Cutting. It’s done to combat numbness, isn’t it? These urkas were convicts, and fought the numbness of prison. Your crowd: what do they fight? If it’s the numbness of advanced democracy — I can’t sympathize. Other systems, you see, flood the glands and prickle the tips of the nerves.