Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Zoya introduced us. And you’ll think I’m making this up, but I’m not. His handshake was so disgusting that I at once resolved to hug him or even kiss him, in parting, rather than shake that hand again. White and humid, the flesh seemed about to give, to deliquesce. It was like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water.

At this point Zoya excused herself, promising her anxiously peering husband a swift return.

Ananias settled in his chair, saying, “I’m afraid you must have had a shocking flight over the mountains.”

I said, The mountains? No. They’re hardly worth the name of mountains.

“Ah, but the air pockets, do you see, the low pressure. You get it there because…”

As we talked, I found myself in the process of understanding something about Ananias: a pretty exact calculation could be made. The previous year I had seen a rerun of the film they made of his play, The Scallywags . I had also looked at a collection of his short fiction, published in 1937. This book greatly surprised and disquieted me. On the face of it his stories followed the social-realist pattern: say, the vicissitudes of a pig-iron factory or a collective farm, leading to a strengthened affirmation of “the general line.” Here was the anomaly: Ananias had talent. A consistently high level of perception was still alive and writhing. The prose lived. And when you came to the bits where he had to do the formulas and the piety — you could almost see the typewriter keys getting seized and wedged together like a mouthful of spindly black teeth. In the 1930s a talented writer who wasn’t already in prison had just two possible futures: silence, or collaboration followed by suicide. Only the talentless could collaborate and stay sane. So Ananias was a much rarer being. Within minutes I could feel the force of his accumulated mental distress, as unignorable as the touch of his hand or the smell of his breath. His breath, like the air above Predposylov.

She always seemed to be coming and going, and now she was coming again (her neck erect, like her harnessed gait). Ananias looked at her as if for leave and said in his weightless voice, “I commiserate with you in your tragedy. And the boy. Horrible. Horrible! An only child,” he said, nodding to himself. “This war is acting on us like a poison. The numbers are not yet enormous. But the young men being killed have no brothers, no sisters. Their families are at a stroke destroyed. Our whole society is cringing from this war.”

He paused, and his chin dropped onto his chest. When his gaze came up again, you saw that even the glass of the eyes gets old, ridged with scoopings and hardnesses. He said, “I’m as old as the century. Older! 1899!” His head twitched. “And your brother was still a young man. What was he, my dear? The same as you, no? Younger. A mere calf. And to give up the ghost like that. At his age. Quite extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.”

Ananias sat with his hands on his lap, their fingers inter-joined. His hands — how could they bear each other’s touch? Why didn’t they fly apart? And I felt an abstract pity for the mote of dust that might be caught in there, in the vile bivalve of his clasp. The answer I gave was valiantly mild, but it had already become clear that there would be no second handshake to avoid or survive.

I said, I assume you know that Lev spent ten years in camp.

“There was no other way, do you see. Free men would not have done that work, the mining for gold, for uranium, for nickel, all things the nation needed for its very survival.”

It was after the war, I said. We went there after the war.

“The institution got stuck. As institutions do. But that was all a very long time ago. And look at you . You’ve made your peace with the state. And doing rather well out of it, thank you very much. It hasn’t done you much harm, has it?”

I waited. I looked at Zoya, expecting a glance of warning. But her head was down. It seemed to me that every Russian was always doing the same thing. We were always fighting off an insanity of bitterness. For the moment I confined myself to saying that the reality of the camps was not what he chose to describe.

“Chose? Chose? I didn’t choose. You didn’t choose. She didn’t choose! No one chose .”

And I said it. I said, You chose. And you know who you’re like? You’re like the men and women in camp — the men and women who aren’t men and aren’t women. They had it taken away from them. But you. You did it all by yourself.

Time ticked past. And then he slapped down his hands on the leather arms of the chair and tried to rise. In a voice grown suddenly lost and childish he said, “Oh, why do people think they can come back and upset everyone? They think they can just come back. And cause such pain with these old wounds.”

Zoya helped him up. She gave me a nod and a quelling gesture, and guided Ananias toward the door, leaving me with the onerous notion that she was going off to attend to old Ester.

I spent this second intermission in a tour of the room; and it seemed that every ornament and gewgaw, every cornice and curlicue, had been potentiated, if not directly financed, by the forgiving laughter Ananias had provoked, nationwide, with his scapegrace brigands, stumbling just a little bit on their path to redemption. In The Rogues (1935) the fascists, the politicals, were straightforwardly demonic; in The Scallywags (1952) the politicals were demonic — and Semitic: we were all fagins and shylocks, we were all judases. Over in the corner there was a little shrine to Ananias’s more signal successes — autographed photos, cups and sashes, the certificate confirming his status as a Hero of Socialist Labor…I was also considering the depth of Zoya’s failure: her failure to live by the heart. I myself knew what a dispiriting project that was, with my widows, my orphans, the middle-aged waifs and changelings, the mice and the guinea pigs still rattling around the abandoned lab, long after the experiment was over. And now expected to just live out their lives.

Again she reentered. Jewess, I whispered. And “Ananias”—wasn’t that Jewish too? Oh, what’s wrong with Russians about the Jews…She closed the double doors and sank back with her hands flat against the teak. Now she moved forward with something that resembled the comic slovenliness of her old walk, and when she dropped herself onto the sofa her feet momentarily rode up from the parquet before resettling themselves as she patted for me to join her.

“He’s all right.”

You could feel her sigh through the sofa’s frame.

She said, “We’ve got about five minutes. Then he’ll start. It’s good of you to come but it hurts to see you. And it hurts to be seen. Why are you here? You must have a reason. Knowing you.”

I said I had two. Two questions.

“Begin.”

I asked her what happened in the House of Meetings.

“The house…?” In her brow many tiny lines conspired before she said, “Oh. Then. Why do you ask? Nothing happened. I mean, what do you think happened? It was lovely.” Seeing my surprise, and surprised by it, she said, “I suppose it was all too much, in a way. Lots of tears, lots of talk. As well as the obvious.”

I then apologized in advance for my unattractive haste, adding not very truthfully that certain plans of mine were impossible to postpone. I said I was getting out: America. Where I would be rich and free. I said I had thought about her a thousand times a day for thirty-six years. Here and now, I said, she delighted all my senses.

So the second question is — will you come with me?

There it was again: the sweet smell. But now all the windows were closed. And at that moment, as the blood rose through my throat, both my ears gulped shut, and when she spoke it was like listening long-distance, with pause, hum, echo.