Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Could you marry a mole? I asked.

“Sure!” you said, with heat.

Sure! I’m not prejudiced! You were six. About a month later, Thumbelina came up again, as the themes of childhood so often do, and I repeated my question. You were silent, troubled: it was your very first dilemma. You had been weighing the reality of marriage to the mole. You now wanted to avoid it. But how could you do that, without hurting the mole’s feelings? “It hurt my feelings.” Girl children are very quick to recruit that phrase. The only little boy I ever knew well — he would never have used it. Girls understand that their feelings also have rights…What happened to you, by the way, in the space of those four or five weeks? Some mysterious accession or promotion. If they’d been making a parallel film of your life, they would have known, then, that a new hairstyle or built-up shoes wouldn’t do it: the time had come to hire an older actress.

In later life you married the mole, for a while, when you took up with that Nigel. Walking beside you, I said, he looked like your broken umbrella. After him, I noticed, you kept to the flower kings, with only the occasional porcupine or polecat.

But say Thumbelina had married the mole. And let’s consider it from the mole’s point of view. They live together under the soil, in unbreathable damp and darkness. The tiny beauty is a devoted wife. And yet the mole, who can’t help being half blind, can’t help hating flowers and sunshine, feels the thwartedness of Thumbelina — Thumbelina, who was born from a tulip. It is not in the mole to ask her to go. So he makes his grotto more gravelike, darker, danker, and wills her to leave.

And leave she did, on October 29, 1962.

It was the day after the defusing of the Cuba Crisis. And this imparted a false perspective. Zoya leaving Lev: that wasn’t the end of the world. Not for me, anyway. Was there a precipitant? Kitty herself, who went down there and even cross-questioned the mother, never established the details, though she claimed to sense the aftershock of scandal…We knew that Zoya had gone back to her job at the school. Teaching drama. And we knew that she had been summarily dismissed. She was in Petersburg, where old Ester was about to join her. Lev was still in their half of the hovel near Kazan.

I didn’t see him for nearly a year. But we wrote. This is what happened to him.

In my first letter I made a practical suggestion. I offered to buy him his Certificate of Rehabilitation, just as I had bought mine some years earlier (and just as I would soon buy my Party card). He took me up on it and asked, in addition, for a large loan, appending a repayment schedule that included calculations for interest. Surveying this schedule, with its percentages, its busy decimals, I felt a cavernous bewilderment. Let’s put it that way, for now. The big brother in me was, of course, delighted that Zoya had gone. What bothered me was Lev’s response to it: a repayment schedule that ventured far, far into the future. Why wasn’t it the end of the world?

That October he successfully applied for a job in a mine-construction project in Tyumen, just the other side of the Urals, beyond Yekaterinburg. At Christmas he sent me a photograph of a freckled and bespectacled blonde, standing in a striplit corridor with her hands behind her back. This was the twenty-three-year-old he had met in the works dispensary: little Lidya. I will mention here that in his covering letter my brother confessed to some reactionary pride in the fact that Lidya was — or had been — a virgin. Looking again at the photograph, I had to say that I wasn’t at all surprised. I quietly concluded, too, that I wasn’t interested in virgins. Naturally I wasn’t. What would I do with a virgin? What would we find to talk about all night?

In the new year, in February, he got promoted and she got pregnant. Now, Lev was still a married man, and divorce wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Divorce used to be very easy indeed. You didn’t even have to go through the rigmarole required of our Muslim brethren, who got divorced by saying “I divorce thee” three times. In the Soviet Union you only had to say it once, on a postcard. But now, for reasons we’ll return to, both parties were obliged to attend a court hearing. I couldn’t understand why Zoya refused to cooperate, nor could Kitty. Lev felt it prudent to go to Petersburg. As soon as he told her that Lidya was, as the Latins say, embarazada (have I got that right?), Zoya complied; and then it was just bureaucracy.

I was best man at the August wedding. My brother seemed much leaner (amazingly, some of his hair had grown back), Lidya’s pious parents seemed at last assuaged, and it all went fairly well, considering that Lidya, as Kitty put it, was “out here.” Lidya was long and thin, with legs the shape of noodles — another Kitty, another Chile. I found her to be pretty much as far as you could get from Zoya, which is another way of saying that she didn’t look very feminine, even as she entered her third trimester. Already the baby dwarfed her. She was like the string on the package. A seven-kilo son, Artem, was duly delivered in November.

Zoya stayed on for a while in Petersburg with her mother. She got involved with the famous Puppet Theater there, making puppet costumes, painting puppet scenery. When the Puppet Theater opened up a subsidiary in Moscow, Zoya was part of the team that came along to run it. In a long, new-broomist letter to Kitty, she said that it was her intention, now, “to return to the life of the heart.” She and her mother had their old place back, too. So, once again, Zoya was entertaining in the conical attic.

Kitty called on her, of course. I didn’t. I didn’t return to the old neighborhood and stand beneath her window. I didn’t linger there in all weathers, trying to interpret the movements of shadows on the ceiling of her bedroom. Something else had to happen first. Something that might take a very long time.

Nikita Sergeyevich fell. Leonid Ilich rose. *5The Thaw, then the Little Freeze, then the Stagnation.

My lovelife, as I will go on calling it, took an unexpected turn. I was getting older. The croupiers were getting older. They weren’t real croupiers — though in my recurring dream about Varvara (the last in the line) she stood over a chip-strewn wheel of fortune, and her rake kept turning into a lorgnette…It is hard to get a smile from a good-time girl once she passes the age of forty. Their thoughts are all of solemnization. I tried a couple of younger ones; but with them I always felt that I was on the wrong train or the wrong boat, that the other passengers had different tickets and itineraries, different stamps, different visas. And the whole black-market milieu lost most of its pep after the law of 1961, which gave the economic criminal something new to worry about: capital punishment. So I partly reformed, and joined my generation, entering into a series of more tenacious, more complicated, and (certainly) much cheaper relationships with the children of the Revolution, divorcées, veteran widows, ex-convicts, ex-exiles, all of them fatherless, all of them brotherless. In 1969, on a working trip to Hungary, I met Jocelyn, with whom I more or less cohabited, on and off, until the events of 1982—the Salang Tunnel, and what followed from it.

By ’69 I had found my métier. Robotics, but not yet in its medical applications. To get your hands on materials of international standard, you had to do space or you had to do armaments. Space was oversubscribed, so I did armaments. Rotary launchers for nuclear weapons. That’s right, my child: preparations for the third world war. The third world war never became the Third World War, which is just as well. In my current mood, not notable for its leniency, I wouldn’t enjoy it — reproaching myself for the Third World War.