Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I had the Social Historical Museum pointed out to me on the way in. It looks like a dry-cleaner’s or a Korean takeaway. And it is shuttered, whether for repair, or for final closure, no one knows.

But when I pass it in the early evening the shutter is up. My very small bribe is accepted by a russety youth in white overalls. He says he’s an electrician. He convincingly toils, in any event, over a succession of fuseboxes, fixing them, or just stripping them. He rents me one of his three powerful flashlights.

Whose careening beam reveals a short arcade, with four displays on either side— tableaux morts . The glass of broken bulbs splits and splinters under my feet as I move forward, past the Voguls, the Entsy, the Ostinks, the Nganasani, and so on: the absorbed or annihilated or alcohol-poisoned peoples of the Arctic. Then I come to the Zeks: us. I look round about me at the other figures, the gaunt revenants of the vanished tribes. The best part of you feels moved to take them as ennobling company, in any form or setting. We were all poor, poor bastards. Still, these were remoter multitudes, and would have succumbed, anyway, to mere modernity.

Their molded shapes stroke the flanks of stuffed reindeers and feed scraps of bread to plastic huskies. I am represented, Lev is represented, by the doll of an old geezer at a low table, before an open stove, beneath snow-furred windows, beside a tousled cot. The Entsy have their reassembled medicine-man outfit, their simulated yurt. We have our foreshortened mittens and our dented metal bowl. All this under the reeling and now failing beam of the flashlight.

“We wanted the best,” an old Kremlin hand once said, referring to some other disaster, some other panoramic inferno: “but it turned out as always.”

Middle School Number One is like a laboratory and a control experiment. It is showing how you build the Russian totality.

On the third day we reach the point where the situation of the hostages can no longer be plausibly worsened. Consider. They are parched, starved, stifled, filthy, terrified — but there is more. Outside, the putrefying bodies of the people killed on the first day are being eaten by dogs. And if the captives can smell it, if the captives can hear it, the sounds of the carrion dogs of North Ossetia eating their fathers, then all five senses are attended to, and the Russian totality is emplaced. Nothing for it now. Their situation cannot be worsened. Only death can worsen it.

So death comes at the moment of alleviation, of fractional alleviation — because the Russian totality can’t assent to that. The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many — the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.

You know, I can’t find a Russian who believes it: “We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.” I can’t find a Russian who believes that. They didn’t want the best, or so every Russian believes. They wanted what they got. They wanted the worst.

And now there is a doctor, on the television, who says that some of the surviving children “have no eyes.”

Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy: each of them insisted on a Russian God, a specifically Russian God. The Russian God would not be like the Russian state, but would weep and sing as it scourged.

I am in a terminal panic about my life, Venus; and this is no figure of speech. The panic seems to come…Seems? The panic comes, not from inside me, but from out of the earth or the ether. I outwait it — that’s all I can do. It rolls by me, and then it’s gone, leaving the taste of metal in my mouth and all over my body, as if I had been smelted or galvanized. Then it returns, not the same day, and maybe not the next, but it returns and rolls and billows by me. I think it sweeps the entire planet, and always has. The only people who feel it pass are the dying.

Dead reckoning is a phrase that sailors use — it means the simple calculation of their position at sea. Not by landmarks or the stars. Just direction and distance. I know where I am: the port where I’m heading already shows its outlines through the mist. What I’m doing, now, is dead reckoning. I am making a reckoning with the dead.

There is a letter in my pocket, in my inside breast pocket, which I have yet to read. I keep it there, hoping that it will enter my heart by a process of benign osmosis, one word at a time, on tiptoe. I don’t want my eyes, my head, to have to do it.

But I will open it up and spread it out before me, any day now.

Right from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow. I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating. But as your nostrils widen and your jaw vibrates, keep an ear out for my clucks of satisfaction — the little snorts and gurglings of near-perfect felicity. This is a “quiet time,” such as you could often be prevailed upon to have, when, after too much chocolate and hours of screeching and flailing and whirling, you would submit to a coloring book at the kitchen table or a taped story in your room — before going back to more screeching and flailing and whirling.

I am a stranger in a strange land. A freshly glittering landscape is opening up before me: I mean the mundane. God, what a beautiful sight. There will be ups and downs, of course, especially for your step-uncle and his spouse, but for now these lives rise and fall as they will. We no longer uninterruptedly sense the leaden mass, the adenoidal breathing, and the moronic stare of the state. How can I evoke it for you, the impossible glamour of the everyday? We are safe, for now; above us is the boilerplate of banality. Like a saga-spinner of another age, I can almost start the business of tidying up after my guests. “Zoya is as forgetful as ever.” “No, Kitty never did find true love.” And this goes on for nearly two whole chapters, and twenty-five years. All is well, all is safe, until we enter the Salang Tunnel.

Before there was that, though, there was this.

As an unrehabilitated political, I was effectively “minus forty,” as was Lev. This phrase no longer referred to the temperature in Norlag on an autumn afternoon. For us it now meant that forty cities were out of bounds. We were also ineligible for such perquisites as accommodation and employment…I went east from Predposylov, all the way to the Pacific (where I had one swim), before I started coming west. It took me two months to get to Moscow. I spent half an hour with Kitty in a suburban teashop called the Singing Kettle, where a lumpy rucksack changed hands. This was the bequest of my mother, who had died, calmly, said Kitty, in the spring. And then for many months I seemed to be shunted around from berg to berg, always arriving in the small hours — the pale bulb over the station exit, the clockface staring elsewhere, the deep stone of the stairwell. Then you moved off into a blackout and a town of tin. The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light. A fully achieved cheerlessness, you may think. Darkness, silence, and a palpable rigidity, as if the buildings were seized not to the surface of the world but to its center. And yet I knew that my footsteps made a sound that was no longer feared, and that the huddled houses would open up to me, if not now then tomorrow. Because kindness was rubbing its eyes and reawakening, Russian kindness — the reflexive care for another’s good. And I was free and I was sane.

I came equipped with some of my sister’s cash, some of my father’s clothes, and some of my mother’s books — namely, an introduction to advanced electronics, an English primer, and the tragedies of Shakespeare in parallel translation (the main four and also the Roman plays, plus Timon, Troilus, and Richard II ). I loved my mother (and she must have scried me here, in minus-forty), as every honest man should and does. And I wondered why it didn’t go easier with women and me…I was always getting pulled in and moved on, of course, but that year became my nomadic sabbatical — paid leave for travel and study, and for internal relocation. The weight of Zoya, I thought, was also shifting. When I settled down at night she was always there the moment I closed my eyes, waking, half-clad, becomingly disheveled, a slight sneer on her downy upper lips, as she appraised me, her escort to oblivion. But what was the matter with her? Amazingly, and alarmingly (this can’t be normal), her effigy, her mockery, had detached itself from the control of my will. In the past, this little mannequin of mine was charmingly rigorous, even draconian in her promptings and insistences. No longer. She was without words and without wants, dumb and numb — unresisting but inert, and almost unwieldably heavy. And her face was always turned away from mine, in illegible sorrow and defeat. I told myself, Well, we’re all free now, I suppose. So I would give it up and desist, holding her for a while in my brotherly arms before I too turned away, into sleep and into dreamlessness.