Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Lev’s effects reached Chicago in the late spring of 1983: a sizeable plywood crate, glued and pressed and nailed. It lay immured in the closet in my study for twenty-one years. Then I opened it up. The precipitant was the news of Kitty’s death, and the undeniable intimations of my own. I waited for a morning that combined a faultless sky with the prospect of lunch at your apartment. Then, after breakfast, I asked the entity known as courage to take me by the hand. We went together to the toolbox for the chisel and the claw hammer. You see, one of my achievements, in the Rossiya, was the disfigurement of the past. And you don’t want to look at a disfigured thing, do you, when it clearly can’t be healed. This is what I was facing: testimony to the astounding dimensions of my crime — my perfect crime. I knew, too, that Lev’s offering would be boobytrapped or trip-wired. I knew it would explode in my face.

Well then. A leather belt, two ties, a scarf of my mother’s and some more of her books, a trophy of Artem’s, a clock, a straight razor, a hip flask, a spirit level (with its sleek burnish and its tragic eye), a white shoebox, and a green folder…The folder had a title: “Poems.” The shoebox was full of photographs. I slid one out and dragged my gaze over it: me, Zoya, and Lev, at Black Lake in Kazan: 1960, and the innocent haze of monochrome. But of the three faces only hers, under its bobble hat, had the light of pleasure — pleasure in the novelty of being photographed. Lev’s face was half averted, the eyes seeking something lower down and to the side. Mine was ulterior, and expressed the humorlessness of vigil: Kitty will click the camera, and another second will pass.

I rose up from the chair and strode to the desk with the green folder under my arm. It was my intention now to read the poems: the collected Lev. You must imagine my scholarly glower and the jutting lips of bookish inquiry — the abnormal normality of it, like the shrewd interest a man will suddenly take in the decor of the waiting room at his oncologist’s. While I do this normal thing (I was secretly thinking), this normal thing I’m quite good at, nothing abnormal can happen to me. I sat; I breathed in through my teeth; my frowns were like push-ups of the eyebrows. Excellent, I said out loud: chronological. Here, after all, is a life .

Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect. Too young, of course. There were poems about girls, girls in general, but no love poems.

A hiatus, now, until 1950, and then six or seven a year until 1956. These would have been memorized at the time and written up in freedom. They were all love poems—“you” lyrics, addressed to the loved one. Let us say that these were more difficult for me to assess. They were clenched, pained, pregnant. What they assailed me with, apart from the jolts and jabs of bile and loss, was an unbearable sense of emotional deprivation. As if I had never felt anything for anyone. I just thought I had…The last was dated July 1956: a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before the conjugal visit in the chalet on the hill.

After that, nothing for eight years. And then the stiff-limbed, almost apologetic resumption after the birth of his son. Two decades, and a smattering of epigrams about Artem. As I worked through them, I was asking myself what it all amounted to. A raft of clever juvenilia; a body of love lyrics written in slavery; and eight haikus about fatherhood. Nine.

I hadn’t been liking the look of poem number nine. It was unobjectionable in itself — a minimalist reflection on the quandary of the only child. But poem number nine had something underneath it. A rectangular presence of whiter white.

It was of course a letter, bearing my name and my old Moscow address. The envelope was sealed, and additionally fortified by a strip of sticking plaster. Not flesh-colored, but the nubby brick-red of Russian first aid. Inside were several pages. In holograph: in his small utilitarian hand.

“Brother,” it began. “I said I would answer your question before I died. I’m going to keep the first half of that promise. I feel sure that I will be able to slake your curiosity. I also intend to mortify your soul. Ready yourself .”

And that was as far as I got. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since — readying myself.

Yes, I’ll read Lev’s letter. But I don’t want to give it any time at all to sink in.

I’ll read it later. I want that to be more or less the last thing I do.

It was on one of my final twilit staggerings, by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger’s hollowed hulk, that I found it. Here the landforms, the tectonic plates, the very points of the compass have been reshuffled and redealt, but I found it: the steep little lane, the five stone steps stacked there just for you; and then the cleared tabletop of the foothill. No buildings, now, but you could still see the ridged outlines on the ground — the outlines of the annex of the House of Meetings. I crossed the threshold. As I kicked my way through the rubble and rubbish, I heard the faint resonance of creaking glass. My shoe nosed through the shavings, and then I stooped. I held it up, the feebly glinting thing: a cracked test tube, in a wooden frame. That dark smear on its rim. Maybe it was the wildflower with its amorous burgundy, witness to an experiment in human love.

In my other hand I held a plastic bag. It didn’t take very long to fill it — with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull. I was walking on a killing field. A grave churned up by bulldozers and excavators. Further around the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a shrine . Inside: icons, an apple, a wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance…The Jews have Yad Vashem and an air force. We have a prefab and a cankered apple. And a Russian cross.

I walked back to the city square. I bought a beer and a paper, and sat on a bench before a fablon-decked table. The only other customer was a speckly man in a gypsy outfit, irrevocably slumped, thank God, over his accordion. An item at the foot of page one in the Post informed me that the “numbers” of Joseph Vissarionovich continue to climb. His approval rating is what a devout and handsome U.S. president might expect in a time of monotonous prosperity. With my bag of bones and my cracked test tube, I sat in a trance of lovelessness and watched it — the harlequinade. The harlequinade of the incorrigible.

The middle-aged wrecks I told you about, the ones that won’t go away: a group of them, men and women, stood on the corner selling — auctioning — their analgesics to etiolated youths in overcoats made from vinyl car-seat covers. Then, very quickly, the old get drunk and the young get blocked. Twenty minutes later everyone is crashing and splashing around in the blood-colored puddles infested with iron oxide, used syringes, used condoms, American candy-bar wrappers, and broken glass. They veer and yaw and teeter. And they just watch each other drop. Yes, it’s all gone — the wild dogs have more esprit. That’s right, stay down. No one’s going to lick your face or try and fuck you back to life.

That night was Friday, and Predposylov was smashed, not on vodka, but on surgical spirit, or spirt, at thirty cents a flagon. One kiosk was glass-backed, and starkly lit, like a beacon. I went over and stared at it. I stared at the comfortable figure of the blonde in her trap. All she had for sale was surgical spirit and heaped paperbacks of a single genre. That’s all she was dealing in: The Myth of the Six Million, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and spirt . And the blonde sat idly at the cash register, her face resting on the cushion of her placid double chin, as if what encircled her (on the shelves, in the streets and in the belts all around) was completely ordinary, and not a part of something nightmarish and unforgettable…You know what I think? I think there must have been a developmental requirement that Russia simply failed to meet. She’s not like Zoya. Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run. But she never learned how to walk.