Martin Amis - House of Meetings

“At last, no?” he said. And then the word “Please.”

Lev died on the same day that Leonid Ilich died — November 10. On the same day as the man who sent Artem into the Salang Tunnel.

She was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame…Wait. What about a decent interval? No, we have already had a decent interval. It lasted for twenty years. Of course, I could tell myself, as I walked through the streets of the capital, that I was a messenger, bearing mortal tidings, like the best of brothers — the best of brothers. But I didn’t do that. I had a plan. And she was living, Venus, in a house of ill fame.

It was the landmark mansion block on the Embankment, looming square of shoulder, its bemedaled chest out-thrust, as if standing to attention over the Moscow River: neoclassical Gothic, and violently vast. When I call it infamous, which I do, I am using the word in its older sense, and not just as a synonym for notorious . They put it up just after the war, to house the victorious nomenklatura; and it still contained many a venerable and contented mass-murderer — taciturn amnesiacs on state pensions. The residents were by now more diversified, but as I entered, and registered, and waited while the guard made his call, I could have come across a Kaganovich here, a Molotov there. *6I stepped into the wooden lift, which swilled on its tumblers. When it rose, the old contraption began to screech, as if the shaft with its swooning counterweight was an instrument of torture eight floors high. The encaged platform was being drawn up into it, into the house of infamy.

I had walked across town from the Rossiya, where I had taken a suite overlooking Red Square. November 17, 1982, and Leonid Ilich was being laid to rest. At the funeral of Joseph Vissarionovich, in 1953, the whole city was ascreech — human howls, the horns of cars and trucks, the factory whistles, the sirens. In her entire history, Venus, Russia was never madder than on that day. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were trampled or crushed (and not just in Moscow). My sister was there. Corpses, she said, rolled like barrels down the sharp incline into Trubnaya Square and jolted to a halt in a pond of blood. Even Pasternak, even Sakharov, felt the panic. An outrageously vast presence had disappeared; an outrageously vast absence took its place. In the vacuum everyone seriously believed that Russia itself would — would what? That Russia would stop existing. Only the Jews were glad. Only the Jews and the slaves…No grief, no apocalypse, for Leonid Ilich. Not a lethal superfluity of human beings but, instead, an embarrassing dearth. Mourners had been trucked and bussed in for the day from outlying farms and factories. They wore black. The blacks of the women frayed and puffy, the blacks of the men lucent with use. I walked through a city of Jocelyns and undertakers. I too wore a black tie, beneath my white silk scarf, my cashmere overcoat.

These last items I surrendered to the uniformed maid. Then I turned. Zoya stood at a round table, leaning back on it with her gloved fingertips. She, also, was in mourning wear: a black suit, black stockings and shoes, and a finemeshed veil attached to the rim of her velvet hat.

“Cleopatra,” she said in an unamused voice, “had the right idea.” She looked at me consideringly — my frown, my knitted black tie. “She killed the messenger if he gave her bad news, of course. Quite properly. But sometimes she killed the messenger before he said anything at all. Before. I ought to kill you now. Kitty told me about Artem. But this isn’t about him, is it? It’s about his father. Your brother. My first husband.”

And she swayed forward and engulfed me. It was my intention, whatever happened, to load up on sense impressions, future memories of smell and touch. And Russian men are old hands at comforting bereaved Russian women. They know that the embrace will last a long time, and that a certain license obtains. It seems to be permitted to stroke the sides of the upper thorax; and when you murmur “there there” you are also referring to the pendency beneath one armpit, the pendency under the other…Zoya cried with her whole body. I felt her hot breath in my ear as she heaved and gulped and popped, and her veil grew moist against my cheek. The veil — somber hosiery for the eyes, the nose, the mouth; when she straightened up and backed away it was stuck flat to her face, and not just with tears but with other fluids. She held up a black hand and pointed with the other.

In the sitting room one of the three leaded windows was open to the morning. As I approached the wavering bank of glass I picked up an odor, sweet but sinisterly sweet; it came, I knew, from the Red October Chocolate Factory across the way, but it reminded me of the smell of humanity in the Arctic thaw. Abruptly the maid’s uniform moved past me and she shut the window with a soft exclamation of surprise. How, she then asked, did I like my coffee? I declined. I feared even the slightest upsurge of agitation. You should take note of this. I cannot talk about the loss of a child. But the loss of almost anyone else is a kind of intoxicant. Mine was a rare and dreadful case, I agree, but I suspect that the invigoration is universal. You are being asked, after all, to register the greatest of all conceivable contrasts. And I was very alive. Don’t worry. The bill, on its silver tray, is presented later. Your payments are made on the installment plan — what the English, artistically but without truth, used to call the never-never. As I say, you should take note of these thoughts on bereavement, Venus. You who are about to be bereaved.

I was on my fourth cigarette by the time she again appeared. The veil was lifted now, pinned to the hat…At reunions after long intervals, beautiful women do this, I have found — they sidle toward you with their faces lowered and at an angle, peeping out, not from the ruins, but from the museum of what they once were, now that their trophies are kept behind glass. Zoya, her own curatress. And there of course it all was, despite her coloring of dusk and blush, her self-moisturizing flesh: the silky fissures of the forehead, the bruised pouches beneath the orbits, the nicks on the upper lip, and the extra painlines that all Russians have, stressing the push of the jaw. Seen head-on, her figure looked to have kept its contours and outline, but when she turned, it was as if (to persist with the schoolboy metaphor) a reeflike Caribbean island had unmoored itself and drifted all the way to the Gulf of Panama.

“His suit,” she said. “His shoes! I felt your overcoat for five whole minutes. I didn’t stint myself.”

And you, I said. Your hair…

“It’s still black. That’s because I dye the shit out of it once a week. Oh, I’m gray. Like Voltaire. It’s awful, presenting yourself to the past. I want all my old friends to be struck blind . I—” She dropped her head and made a listening face. She said, “He’s coming. He’s coming. He’ll only stay a minute. He wants to pay his respects.”

And in he came, through the double doors…As late as 1960 or so, it was possible in Moscow and Petersburg to see Ananias on posters and billboards. Sitting at a table, chin on palm, the toppled quiff of brown hair, the mock-resolute pout, the air of bohemian entitlement. And now? It is the fate of a significant fraction of little old women to turn into little old men: little old men in knickers and camisoles. You don’t so often see the process going the other way, but here was Ananias, a little old bag in a suit and tie. A little old boiler in gartered socks and black brogues. Even the stiff, tugged-back shoulders were feminine. He also had that spryness which, in elderly ladies, some claim to admire. Only in the brambly eyebrows did you see the burdens and calculations of the male.