Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Zoya’s time with Lev, she told me, before he went away, was “like a new universe,” because at last she had found someone “just like me.” Someone who didn’t hold back. In matters of the heart “he always said I was hopeless. Far, far too total.” But what he didn’t yet know was that even in her wildest infatuations and most reckless surrenders she was still holding back. “I mean physically too,” she stipulated, nodding. With Lev she did not hold back. And my brother (it became clear) was equal to it…So. Lev, the “shock” lover, the sexual Stakhanovite, with his hundred tons of coal. I absorbed this in perfect calm. A premonition of what must now follow was twining itself through me; but Lev I forgave. He was among the dead. He was forgiven. And the living? In all my thoughts of Zoya, I had never looked beyond the opening act. And now the opening act was at last secure. So I looked and I saw.

“When he came back, things were in general very hard. As you know. And he made a bit of a show of being grim. But when it was just him and me, alone, it was still heavenly. He wondered how I could get up in the morning and go to work, but for me it was like fuel…You know, Lev cried in his sleep. Not every night. It was always the same dream, he said. Something that had happened in camp. He didn’t want to talk about it but I pressed him. He said he kept dreaming of the guard with no hands. No hands. As if they’d just been lopped off in Saudi Arabia. Unspeakable. But why would that make you cry? And so wretchedly.”

And for a moment she cried herself, in silence; her eyes shed a tear each. She resumed, saying, “Five more years. I still don’t understand what happened. I mean I do and I don’t. That last summer he became very withdrawn. He was not well physically, I think. He turned away from me. At night he turned away. And the words. They went too. It all went. So then I did something stupid. The whole time he was gone I never looked at another man. It wasn’t will. My eyes just didn’t look. I was him and he was me. And when he turned away from me I became very confused. Actually I was desperate. If I’d been a peasant in a time of hunger, I’d have skipped all the mice and the berries and the bugs. I’d have been thinking about cannibalism straight away …There was a young teacher, a colleague. And a complete brute, as it happened. I couldn’t even keep the thing secret. The whole school found out. Then it was over. I thought it might not be. Sometimes there is — forgiveness. But it was over. And then he knocked up that bitch in Yekaterinburg.”

Here they come again, I was vaguely thinking — the brutes and the bitches. Here they come. I said, She wasn’t a bitch.

“Of course she wasn’t a bitch. It’s just a way of talking. Anyway. And after that, God. Man after man after man after man after man.”

Something in the room had begun to change. This was what is called a nodal moment — a moment when timelines fork and branch. Over the last half hour I had acclimatized myself to Zoya’s snow-white brow, her habit of jerking her head as if to evade a vindictive housefly, the way she crushed her hands between her knees to control them or just to know where they were. Her pallor: the flesh had the numb glisten of white chocolate — but with the promise of other tints in it, yellow, beige, brown, rose. Now in a single pulse Zoya’s body went still and all her color returned. All her dusk and blush. She stood. She looked at the floor and said in a voice that had gone an octave deeper,

“My clothes are too tight. Where’s the bathroom?”

Through the bedroom, I said — the sliding door.

And even as her thighs swished past me I was contemplating, with a blood-rush all my own, the enormous project that lay before me. There was a gigantomanic headiness in the appraisal of its dimensions; I might have been looking at a blueprint of the White Sea Canal or the TransArctic Railway. And what was this enterprise? Zoya’s past — Zoya’s men. Not Lev, but every last one of the others. Even the slug trail of Ananias. Oh, what work lay ahead of us, what prodigies of retrieval and categorization, what audits and manifests, what negations, what cancellations…

“This is pathetic, but I think I need a doctor.”

I turned. She stood in the doorway, jacketless, shoeless, her color further freshened by the lightest coating of sweat. Her skirt was loosened at the waist: an inverted triangle of white against the charcoal gray…For some time, perhaps right from the start, I had been intermittently conscious of a drift or division inside me; and as I came up off the chair I had the sense that I was leaving another self, another me, still sitting quietly at the table.

But I came up off the chair saying no no no no no, it’ll pass, it’ll pass, you just, here (you’re on fire ), that’s it, I’ve got you, off with this now, good girl, and with this, lift your foot, and the other, there we are, there we are. There there. There there.

She stood above me, a towering ghost in a white petticoat.

“Out of the way. Off with you. Out! Just the sheets,” she said. And she slid in between them.

At the dining table I drank a glass of whisky, and smoked a cigarette. I made a call to the hotel operator. When I returned to the doorway I saw that she had thrown off the upper sheet and now lay with her right arm under the pillow. One leg was straightened, the other fully flexed. A leaping dancer, frozen in midair.

Many times in the past, like all Russian men, I had found myself paying court to a woman who was, by any reckoning, helplessly drunk. No false delicacy, then, could deter me from paying court to a woman who was in withdrawal. First, I shed some clothes, attaining rough parity with my guest; and then I joined her. It would not be true to say that she was dozing. In common with most of my compatriots, I knew a bit about DTs — the cold turkey and the pink elephant. This was one of the shallow comas that normally precede recovery; Zoya was deeply cooperating with sleep, abandoning herself to it, breathing hungrily, and she was smooth of brow.

There must be very few women who, on a first liaison, exult in an unconscious lover. And perhaps not many men; but it has its constituency. For the time being it exactly suited my purpose. She was lying on her side, facing away; then she tipped forward and flattened herself out with a swivel of the hips.

So the inventory began. Each shoulderblade, each upper hump of her spine, each rib. After just the right amount of time she turned onto her back. From recto to verso. You see, I would be needing to know what men had done to each part of her body. I would be needing to know the history, the full picaresque, of either breast and either buttock, of these legs that had opened, of these lips that had kissed and sucked. And I was even thinking that we would both have to live for a very long time. We would both have to live long lives, Zoya and I, in order to complete our work.

Her strapless brassiere or bustier, which I had already taken the liberty of unfastening, I now conjured out from beneath her slip. Also, by the patient application of my left kneecap, I prevailed on her thighs, which in the end slackly parted, causing the hem of the petticoat to inch up toward the whiter white.

It was now, as I continued to snuffle and rummage, that Zoya began to stir. Local tremors, originating in the calves or the forearms, would roll through the plates of her body. A faint sound issued from her, nasal, a soft whinnying; she was like a bitch all atremble in her basket, chasing cats and cars. Inside me the atmosphere was that of a very hot day in the middle of winter: warmth, gratitude, a deferred awareness of the unnatural.

I began to kiss her lips. We had done this before, after all. I had kissed her. She had kissed me. Now we kissed again.