Martin Amis - House of Meetings

And up she flowed from the depths, all at once, her seizing arms, her tongue flooding my mouth, the jouncing shove of her groin. I thought, with a whisper of panic: one night will not be enough. For such an inundation — one night, one year, will not begin to sustain it.

“Oh, fuck, yes,” she said.

So, Venus, I had several seconds of that. I had several seconds of that. And then she opened her eyes. And awoke.

I suppose that this is the best you can say of what followed: technically speaking, it was not a rape from scratch. And it was very quick. Zoya opened her eyes and saw, inches away, a horrible delusion: it was I, Delirium Tremens. She had had the bad dream, then the good dream, then the horrible delusion. Now she had reality, and the locked shape beneath me at once gave way to infuriated struggle. But I remembered how you did it. You see, I remembered how you did it: the heavy palm over the airway, while the other hand…At a certain point her struggle ceased, and she pretended she was dead. It was very quick.

To understand her, in this last passage of time, please subtract from your thoughts any imputation of theatricality. Her manner wasn’t even pointed; it directed you to no meaning. She was uncanny. That’s what she was.

But first it was given to me to lie there, staring at the other wall, and hear her in the bathroom, hear her crash around with all the taps wrenched up, hear the rattle of the shower curtains, hear the slam of the toilet seat and its repeated flush. The door opened; and I could make out the sounds familiar to any man, as his wife or lover, in quiet self-sufficiency (and wrapped in a towel, perhaps), gathers and marshals her clothes. Then the runnel of the sliding door. Venus, the male orgasm, the male climax: only the rapist knows what a paltry thing it is. I clothed myself, and followed.

Zoya was standing in the shadows by the armchair that held her coat, her hat, her gumboots. She wore stockings and bustier and nothing else — madamlike, then, but innocent of all calculation and allure. In her raised hand she held her skirt and was wetting a finger to remove some thread or speck from its surface. As she methodically dressed herself, and then sat, back erect, to attend to her makeup, I moved around her rubbing my hands. Yes, I did try to speak; now and then I groaned out half a sentence of abjection or entreaty. Once or twice her eyes happened to pass over me, without reproach, without interest, without recognition. All that issued from her, every ten seconds or so, was a spitting sound, unemphatic but maddeningly punctual. As when a child discovers it can do something new with its mouth — hold its breath, pop its lips.

A new feeling was being born in me. At first it seemed at least vaguely familiar and, one supposed, just about manageable — no more, perhaps, than a completely new way of being very ill. I sat down at the table, under the light, and examined it, this birth. It was invisibility. It was the pain of the former person.

Fully clothed — coat, hat — she came out of the shadows. She stood in profile, an arm’s reach away. A minute passed. I could tell that she was considering something, something grave; and I could tell that I myself was not in her thoughts. She took one of the long glasses and shook the water out of it. Then she poured from the squat decanter — four inches, five — and drank it all in as many swallows. Zoya shuddered to the ends of her fingers, spat, breathed out, spat again, and made for the door.

Now the gravamen. Hie thee to the dictionary — that’s a good girl. Remember: every visit adds another gray cell.

Ten days later I was in Chicago. Like anyone else who had worked in state armaments, I was a “defector cat. A”—no great matter; but it took me quite a while to open up a channel to my sister, and not until March did I hear anything from home.

Her letter was written in haste, Kitty said, because my courier was sitting in the room, and staring at her, as she wrote…She offered wan congratulations on the success of my transposition. She went on to say that Lidya was clearing out the little house — she was moving in with her parents. There were various “effects” of Lev’s that would be passed on to me, by this route, as soon as they arrived from Tyumen. Kitty said that she too was considering a change of address: she was going to live, as a paying guest, in her lover’s two-room apartment. It didn’t sound like a good idea, she knew, but she expected to be lonelier, now, than formerly.

As for my other sister-in-law, my sometime sister-in-law, there was, alas, “grave news.” Kitty said that for months all her notes went unanswered. Her phone calls, sinisterly, were received by “a machine,” and were not returned. She even went to the Embankment, and through a slit in the door had a whispered minute with the maid, who said her mistress was “unwell,” was “indisposed.” Kitty heard nothing until she saw it in the paper — a lone paragraph at the foot of the page. On the night of February 1, 1983, the fifty-four-year-old wife of the beloved playwright Ananias threw herself off the Big Stone Bridge. There was blood on the ice of the Moscow River.

As forgetful as ever, Zoya left some articles of clothing in my rooms at the Rossiya. The wrinkled petticoat and the torn pants I found in the bathroom trashcan. The gumboots, in their transparent polythene pouch, I found on the sitting room floor. So I was obliged to imagine her, that night, uncertain of foot in the iron rink of the capital. Zoya wasn’t very steady on her legs (no mountain goat), because as a child, if you remember, she had never learned how to crawl.

Here they come, the wild dogs.

There are eight, no, nine of them, mongrels of different strains, different sizes, some shaggy, some close-coated, and all of them, like all dogs everywhere, descended from wolves. They move slowly, fanned out over the breadth of the alley, so that every scent can be reconnoitered, reported back on. Oh, how their noses love the smells. And there is time, too, to squat and squirt, to lay down the middens. Both sexes are represented: they are the brutes and the bitches. One is pregnant, heavy — big with the wild pups of Predposylov. She comes last, under light escort. As they approach I raise my arms to shoulder height, to make myself yet bigger. One ratlike, almost mouselike beast snarls up at me but cringes at once when I snarl back, and scurries by. I follow.

Just around the corner one of their number, on the flank, swoops down on a dropped shopping bag (of frayed straw, abandoned, perhaps, by a fleeing grandmother) and alerts the others with a shoutlike yap. Nine questing sets of jaws, nine quivering tails. But the bag contains only fruit, and they move on, one returning quickly and taking an apple in its holster-shaped snout.

As they file across the street there is a boost of speed from an accordion bus, and its front wheel strikes the gravid bitch with a sodden thud. A fierce cheer comes from the passengers (with a yodel in the middle of it, as the bus hits a pothole). The dog is dead or dying in the gutter. The others prod her with their noses, they lick her face; one tries to mount her, his back legs tense and trembling and, for a moment, meanly old-manlike. They leave her and move on. They look back, and move on.

The wild dogs of Predposylov don’t look wild to me. They look trained — not by a human, but by another dog; and this superdog taught them all he knew. I no longer believe that they savaged the five-year-old in the pastel playground. The five-year-old, I conjecture, was savaged by a German shepherd belonging to the security forces, as a prelude to a riotous and scatter-fire attempt to kill every pet in Siberia.