Martin Amis - House of Meetings

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Like what?

“Like the doctors look at me.”

Well, God help me, I had a plan.

This period of bourgeois calm, of progress and poetry and upward mobility, of no rape and no murder, is about to close. So let me bring you up to date.

At the turn of the decade we witnessed a series of developments, as if (it now seems) everyone was taking up position, in readiness for November 1982. Lev was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. They wanted to monitor his heart while they soused him in salbutamol, the new asthma drug. Increasingly critical of what she called my “ovine equanimity,” Jocelyn went back to England, on a visit. In her only letter, itself a remarkably sunny document, she said that it wasn’t the void, and her insight into it, that was depressing her: it was Russia. And she wouldn’t be coming back. My nephew, Artem, spent the Christmas of 1980 in the hold of a military stratocruiser, en route to Afghanistan and the war against the mujahideen. He was in the signals corps, and would be some way back from the front line. Christmas, an anniversary of no significance to Muslims or to Communists. And Zoya — Zoya did something strange.

News of her always came to me, with a glint, through the prism of my sister. The two of them met up about once a month, and when Kitty gave her reports she assumed the air of a hard-pressed social worker describing a particularly obstinate case. On the other hand, she was liable, as she spoke, to sudden physical expansions; for minutes on end she lost her slenderness, her meagerness, and swelled with possibilities…Often reaching for her inverted commas, Kitty had me know, for instance, that Zoya had “fallen in love with ‘a wonderful choreographer,’” that Zoya had been “swept off her feet by ‘a marvelous costume-designer.’” Over the years her menfriends seemed to decline in both caliber and staying power. I prepared myself for the era of the wonderful prop-shifter, the marvelous ticket-puncher, and so on. But as the old decade turned into the new, two things happened, and Zoya changed. She turned fifty-three and buried her mother in the course of the same week. And Zoya changed. Early in 1981 she told Kitty, very quietly, that she had accepted a proposal of marriage.

Go on then, I said. Who to?

Kitty paused, prolonging her power. Then she said, “Ananias.”

No . I thought he was dead.

“Ananias! How can we possibly tell Lev?”

Only the one name: Ananias. Now an occasional contributor to the Moscow wing of the Puppet Theater, Ananias was the formerly famous dramatist. The Rogues, the play that made his reputation (there were also stories and novels), came out in the mid-1930s. It was set in a corrective-labor camp, and was about a group of mildly feckless urkas. In the early 1950s it was revived, and then rewritten by him for the cinema, very successfully, and with a different title— The Scallywags . Ananias was eighty-one.

And Kitty? We had better round off Kitty, because we are not going to be seeing much more of her. No, she never did find true love. The passion was not a strong one, but it led to her incurable attachment to a married man. He had long ago stopped promising to leave home. Later, she additionally befriended the wife, and became a kind of Aunt Phyllis to the only child. I tell you this just to show that people everywhere can create their own deadfalls, their own adhesions. It doesn’t always need the orchestration of the state.

At this time, after Jocelyn, I was having a restful romance with one of the interpreters at the Ministry of Defense. Restful, because timid Tamara was still in mourning for her husband of twenty-five years (and her prior history was the work of a single shift). Although her colloquial English was only middling, her technical English was first-rate, and I would be needing that. Tamara was slightly insane too, but tending the other way, and more dreamy than manic. Her obsession was her dacha — the converted beach hut in southern Ukraine on the shores of the Black Sea. She vowed to take me there in the spring. As I went off to sleep, she spoke to me in furry whispers. In that simple shack we would dwell, swimming naked each morning in the turquoise waters, and we would walk for hours along the sand under the confetti of white butterflies. I do love to swim, it’s true, to pound around and then float and wallow, unsupported, without connection…

On November 3, 1982, along with hundreds of others, Russian and Afghan, Artem was killed in the Salang Tunnel on the road heading north from Kabul. The Salang Tunnel, the highest on earth, which bores through the Hindu Kush, was Soviet-built (in 1963), and was therefore, and remains, a four-dimensional, 360-degree deathtrap, even in peacetime. Artem’s convoy, having cleared one avalanche, was heading north. Another convoy, two miles away at the far end, having cleared another avalanche, was heading south. There was perhaps a collision; there was certainly an explosion. We were told that “several dozen” died, but the figure was probably closer to a thousand. It wasn’t the blast that killed them. It was the smoke. Because the Russian authorities wrongly believed that Artem’s convoy was under attack from the mujahideen. So they sealed the Salang Tunnel at both ends. And why do that anyway ? Blinded, maddened, choking, groping, flailing, pounding — and slow. A total death, a deep death for Artem.

I got to the house on the day after the telegram. All the blinds were drawn. You may wonder how I had the leisure to do it, but I thought of Wilfred Owen: “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” He was picturing a bereaved household (or a near-infinite series of such households) in the “sad shires”—October 1917. The drawn blind was an acknowledgment and a kind of signal. But the stricken need the dark. Light is life and is unbearable to them — as are voices, birdsong, the sound of purposeful footsteps. And they are themselves ghosts, and seek an atmosphere forgiving of ghosts, and conducive to the visits of other ghosts, or of one particular ghost.

For as long as I could bear it I sat with them in the shadows. Ten minutes. In the station hotel the water in the bathroom ran black. And this didn’t in the least surprise me or concern me. What color was water supposed to be? I looked in the mirror and I felt I could just remove it, my face. There would be clasps, behind the ears, and it would come away…I telephoned every few hours. I went over. And each time I came out of the front door — it was like fighting your way through the fathoms and snatching the first mouthful of air.

He said this to me. This is all he said. He said, “The worst is how much I pity him.”

Lidya, now, was always upstairs, in his room.

I said softly, What’s she doing up there?

“So young, and so afraid. She’s up there smelling his clothes…”

The blinds — they never did go back up. On the third morning Lev said that, insofar as he could locate his physical being, he seemed to be suffering from vertigo. He was admitted to the infirmary in Tyumen and transferred that afternoon to the hospital in Yekaterinburg. Detaching me from Lidya’s side, the doctor said that he had never seen a patient respond so weakly to such a massive infusion of drugs. He called it “a failure cascade”: organ after organ was closing down. My brother lay still and silent on the raised bed, but he was also in rapid motion. He was spinning around my head. He was disappearing into a maelstrom.

And conscious, all the way. His eyes swiveled from face to face — Lidya’s, Kitty’s, mine. His eyes were the eyes of a man who fears he has forgotten something. Then he remembered. He said goodbye to us in turn. He seemed to consider my face. Don’t expose me, I thought. Don’t tell.