Martin Amis - House of Meetings

“America? No. I’m touched, but no. And if you want me to just kiss goodbye to what I have here and put myself back at risk, at my age, you’re wrong…America. It’s months since I’ve been out in the street. It’s months since I’ve been downstairs . I’m far too drunk. Can’t you tell?”

I would have gone on but Ananias was calling her name and she said, “I’m so finished. Anyway. Not you . Never you. Him. Him.”

All the saloons and bistros were shut to the lunchtime trade, out of respect. Respect for the most decorated man in Russian history, respect for the seasoned leader who, on his public appearances, had been drooling all over himself for at least five years. At a resilient pace I had crossed the Big Stone Bridge, with echoing footsteps. You will be wondering at my tone, Venus, wondering at my resilient pace, my echoing footsteps…

I bought my way into one of the clubs I used to go to in my black-economy days. More Party people now, it seemed, as well as the usual crowd of skivers and chancers. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of champagne. The TV set, mounted on a wall of booze, was soundlessly screening the state funeral. And it looked like the usual masterpiece of boredom — until something happened. Something that silenced the room and then ignited it in a crossfire of wolf whistles and catcalls. The soldiers of the honor guard were about to close the coffin; Leonid Ilich’s widow, Viktoriya, took a lungful of air and paused. And then she committed a criminal act. She made the sign of the cross. There was only one human being in my country who could have done that without reprisal: her. She made the sign of the cross over the dead emperor of the godless.

And did I have hopes of resurrection, of resurrection at the eleventh hour? I have to say that I did; and not, in my case, without some reason. I was taking my leave of the house of ill fame — and it wasn’t a good exit, Venus. I was all right at first, but it wasn’t a good exit. Zoya unlocked the tall door, and I moved past her and turned with my scarf and overcoat in my arms. She offered me her black satin hand, knuckle-up. Which I did not take. Ananias was calling her name. That was the accompaniment to my valediction: Ananias’s ever less frequent but increasingly desperate cries.

I said in a raised voice that she could not possibly be living with less honor than she was now. Considering what had happened to Lev. And to me and the other twenty million. There was more, there was too much, in this vein. Then came the moment when I referred to her husband, with clearly superfluous asperity, as a rancid old dyke. Zoya gave a jolt of the shoulder. I waited for the door to be swung shut in my face. But she didn’t do that; her body changed its mind, and she stepped forward and leaned against me and kissed my lower lip, holding it between her teeth for a second and looking at my eyes.

This was a test.

Now you must believe how passionately, how tumultuously I wish that that had been the end of it, and that she had never come to my rooms at the Rossiya.

One of things I loved about your mother was her name. The name is of course very pretty in itself, but it was also, I thought, an evocation of the shape of her life, with its cyclical resurrections: the sharecropper childhood, the cages of New Orleans, the convenient first marriage, the factory years, the time with your father, all of it survived and surmounted. And then you, the late arrival, the “autumn crocus.” And then her time with me. But I, I did not have the power to rise from my ashes. When I met your mother I was threatened in the deepest sources of my being. Your mother got me through that — or past it. But I could not do what the firebird does and reascend in flames.

You were impressively and dauntingly distressed when I told you, soon after her death, that our marriage had been chaste. You were seventeen. I should have kept my mouth shut. If she didn’t tell you, why should I? My thoughtlessness, I would like to claim, was a consequence of my crude euphoria: it was the day you decided not to go and live with your aunt, uncle, and cousins, as we had more or less intended, but to stay on with me. The sense that Phoenix, in her final span, remained imperfectly fulfilled: this is what hurt you. All I can do is repeat, with all possible diffidence, that your mother didn’t want for spoonings and cuddlings and cradlings.

And if it still hurts you, Venus, then now at least you will understand.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and then suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

She had a blond fur coat over one shoulder. And a transparent polythene pouch held to her chest: gumboots. I looked down and saw her oxblood high heels and the bands of wet on the shins of her stockings. Her Turkic face was as pale as a plaster cast — outside nature. I was reminded of the yogurty unguent that Varvara, my final croupier, used to entomb herself in, nightly, toward the end; it changed the color of her teeth — from almond flesh to an almond’s woody husk.

In Zoya swayed, throwing her things (including, I now saw, a Davy Crockett fur hat) the considerable distance to one of the heavy armchairs. I asked her what she would like — vodka, champagne, perhaps a warming cognac? She declined with a shooing flutter of both hands.

“I told them you were my husband,” she said. Then she dug her fists into her hips and leaned forward, like a schoolgirl sending a taunt across a playground. “Don’t think I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going anywhere with you — but I am going to change my life.”

The room had a dining table in it: four cylindrical straw stools, a circular silver tray with glasses, a bottle of mineral water, a decanter of British malt. Here she established herself. With impatient, with already exasperated fingernails she picked at the cellophane of a cigarette packet, holding it very close to her eyes.

You’re dry, I said.

“Dry.” The low stool creaked beneath her. “Also on my own, for now. My only friend is the maid. He’s in the clinic for his checkup. They do him bit by bit. And it’s everyone else who dies…You’re right. I hate me. I hate me. And I want to say sorry to you. If you were being truthful then I’m sorry. I bet you think you’re quite a plum, compared to him. But look at you. Look at your eyes. You’re not kind. And I don’t have a choice: I must be with the kind. Ooh, I know you’d find a way to torture me. And anyway you’re Lev’s brother . So sorry again, mate. There isn’t much in this for you, I’m afraid. If Kitty was back I’d go to her. I need to talk about Lev. Will you listen for an hour? And then we can say goodbye as brother and sister.”

At this point, you may be surprised to hear, my heart was like a hive of bees, and my ears, again, were thickly clogged; both conditions would pass. Her words make perfect sense to me, now. They made no sense to me then. Zoya said she needed to talk, but I was basking in the assurance that she had come to my rooms for quite another purpose. She might, at most, have a scruple or two she would want me to help her out of. Just as I would help her out of her clothes. The decision, I imagined, had already been made. This morning. Yesterday. And that decision would beget another decision. Because everything would look very different to her, after a night at my hands.

I was of course prepared for a longish interlude of volubility. Giving myself small doses of the boggy, peaty scotch, I listened and I looked. She wore a close-fitting business suit of charcoal gray, and a plain blue shirt of manly cut. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Through the far window you could see the dusk as it gathered over Red Square — Red Square, and the Asiatic frenzy of the Kremlin. The straw stool crackled under her shifting weight.