Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Seeing them together, you couldn’t help but be struck by that besetting embarrassment — embarrassing for the Revolution and for all utopian dreams, including yours: human inequality. I hope I have made it clear that I was always rather touched by my brother’s physical appearance. “A face face,” as our mother always called it, though one illumined, in the past, by the smile and the soft blue eyes. And we honor Zoya, don’t we, Venus, for her indifference to the norms and quotas of romantic convention — and all that. But there is such a thing as force of life. And the contrast was like something out of a fairy tale or a nursery rhyme or a joke on a seaside postcard.

Jack Spratt would eat no fat. And there was Zoya, seemingly a yard the taller, swinging herself around (this was Moscow) as she laughed, sang, mimicked, brimmed. In those blighted eateries in Kazan, Lev made a big to-do with the bill, intently frowning and shrewdly sniffing over a scrap of paper that said four dinners, if that, and suborning Zoya for a strained colloquy about the number of weightless coins to be dropped in the jar. Elsewhere, for every calorie of expended high spirits, Zoya always paid…He still wore his hair cropped, prison-style. In the old days, up in camp, I used to like to smooth it back against the nap — it made my fingertips hum. Now, when I once ventured to touch it, the pale fuzz was damp and flat and had lost the power to impart any tingle. He pulled his head away and slid another cigarette into his crumpled mouth.

Over these years there were other changes: significant addenda to the panoply of my brother’s attractions. A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money-belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede; and, most mysteriously, an unvarying arc of perspiration, the width of a hatband, running from temple to temple. All three developments looked strangely uniform and standardized on such an asymmetrical little chap. Especially the bald spot. Once, rising suddenly and looking down on him, I believed I saw an open mouth, all tongue, fringed by a beard and a sweat-drenched mustache.

Lev’s morose and monotonous asides about my apartment, my clothes, my car (and, during one unrepeated experiment, my croupier) were now like a snore in another room. He didn’t despise me, I don’t think, for taking the shilling of the state. He despised my appetite. I had drive, and all Russians hate that; but there was a further layer to it. In one of her letters to Kitty, Zoya neutrally mentioned the fact that Lev’s circle in the environs of Kazan, such as it was, consisted entirely of elderly failures. If we had been on easier terms I might have said to him that he was feeling what many others felt; he was submitting, in short, to generic emotion. Many others who had been away — they too hated money. Because money was freedom, it was even political freedom, and they had stopped wanting to believe in freedom. Better if no one had it — money, freedom.

I completed his sentences for him, now, when he stuttered. So would you have done. There would have been no end to it if you hadn’t. Besides, we always knew, now, exactly where his sentences were going. And he didn’t care. He had stopped minding because he had stopped fighting. Lev had surrendered, without conditions, and his stutter had it all its own way; a couple of uppercuts to the chin, and it would leap on his chest and strangle him into silence. Now, when he tipped his head far back, in this or that soupkitchen in Kazan, it was not to prosecute the civil war with the self — to bring everything to bear. It was in reluctant submission to Zoya’s demand that he eat a vegetable. Back went the head; down went the section of blackened beetroot or utterly soundless cucumber. And you had the sense that he wasn’t fighting it anymore — he was feeding it. One night, after a great deal of vodka, he told me that he had stopped reading. He said it not casually but with defiance. “If it’s bad I don’t like it,” he went on in a softer voice. “And if it’s good I hate it.”

The girls were more continent, but Lev and I got through the traditional amounts of alcohol. We were both subject to the centuries-old momentum of Russian drunkenness. And it may surprise you to learn that we were good drunks, too, both of us: amenable, reasonably quiet, not likely, on the whole, to brawl or sob. There usually came a point, about halfway through the third bottle, when his eyes met mine and almost confessed to the moment of remission — maybe it was just the nonappearance of the next wave of pain. He didn’t draw attention as a drinker. That, I admit, would have been hard to do. But he did draw attention as a smoker. Now, smoking (like drinking) allays anxiety. So try not smoking in Russia and see how far you get. But Lev? He ate with a cigarette in the hand that held the knife. And when he went to stub it out, the movement was but a step on the road to lighting another. He did this all day long. Zoya said he smoked even when he was shaving.

Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive. The thought was this: mad teeth. Those pretty teeth of his, though lavishly stained, still looked sound enough. But the angles had been rearranged. They no longer stood to attention; they leaned and slumped, they crisscrossed. And you do sometimes see this taken much further by the very mad, the teeth tugged and bent by tectonic forces deep beneath the crust.

And me? I think I might have come through all right, if it hadn’t been for the dancing.

Three times it happened. Exactly the same thing happened…Zoya was superstitiously drawn to the gramophone in my apartment, and would lurk by it and commune with it. Three times she asked with a guilty air for American jazz. She listened, nodding, then with a twist of the head she banged down her glass and extended an elegantly narrowed hand toward her husband. “I don’t, anymore,” Lev could be relied upon to say. “And you can’t.” So I danced with Zoya — the exploratory Russified jive. I don’t know how good she might have been; what was certain was that it made her madly happy, every inch of her, so much so that you felt implicated and even compromised by the glitter of her ravenous grin. But even at arm’s length it was like wielding a woman-sized jumping bean. There was an opposition in her, something like a counterweight in a liftshaft, but ominously misaligned.

Three times it happened: three times she shot out of sight, and there she was at my feet, flat on her back and shaking with silent laughter, her eyes clenched shut and her hands on her heart. The last time (and we have entered a period of last times) her summer dress, resisting the speed of her drop, rode up over her waist…And it wasn’t just the erotic shock, the power of her two-toned thighs in their stockings, the intricate engineering, and attention to detail, in all those slips and clips and grips. It was the helplessness, the silent laughter, the unseeing eyes, the two hands folded on the heart, it was the helplessness.

“That was the last time,” said Lev as I brought her to her feet.

I spoke earlier, I think, of the coldness that is always available to the elder brother. It was this coldness that I now sought. What you’re really doing is giving yourself some distance, in preparation for disaster. And — God help me — I had a plan.

Of course, I never asked Lev whether he still wrote poetry. If he had been alive and present, Vadim would have asked him that. Someone who hated him would have asked him that.

As you might put it, Venus: think Thumbelina.

Before her deliverance on the wings of the healed bird, before her redemption at the hands of the tiny Flower King, tiny Thumbelina, you may recall, comes close to marrying the mole. Marrying the dot-eyed insectivore, and spending the rest of her days in darkness.