Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Tomorrow I fly to Yekaterinburg. I am ready. We can close, now, with two letters from the sick bay.

It is dated July 31, 1982. “Brother,” it begins.

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.

For twenty-six years to the day I have been trying to write a long poem called “House of Meetings.” A long poem. Symmetrically, though, my flame or numen, such as it was, died on that night, along with everything else. You’ll eventually see that I did manage two or three stanzas, much later on. I don’t think you’ll find them of interest. They’re about Artem, I’m afraid. They’re nursery rhymes. That’s all they are.

No, I couldn’t do it, that poem. I couldn’t tell that story. But now I’m dead, and I can tell it to you.

I am writing this in hospital. Our health system may be thick-fingered (with grimy nails), but it is broad-handed. The attitude to illness is this. All treatment — and no prevention. Still, they are using me to test the new asthma drug. I am not the first. It is clear that most, if not all, of the previous candidates suffered fatal heart attacks. Early on, too. But so far there is a concord of interests. My heart holds up and I breathe easy. How delicious air is. How luxurious to draw it in — once you know you can get the fucking stuff out. Air, even this air, with its smells of ashtrays (everyone still smokes, patients, cleaners, caterers, doctors, nurses), fierce medications, and terminal tuberculosis, tastes nice. Air tastes nice.

So — I watched her coming up the path, her walk, her shape exaggerated by the window’s bendy glass. She entered. And the moment of meeting was exactly what you would want it to be. I felt the force of certain clichés—“beside myself,” for example. I needed two mouths, one to kiss, one to praise. I needed four hands, one to unclip, one to unbutton, one to stroke, one to squeeze. And all the time I was replenishing memories worn thin by mental repetition. When you caress Zoya, she writhes, she almost wriggles, as if to broaden the inclusiveness of your touch. Children do that. Artem did it.

With the removal of each piece of clothing came the delivery of enormous stores of fascination. If there was an unwelcome feeling, at this stage, it was a kind of humorous mortal fear. Remember the shiteater who traded in his bowl and spoon, and then overdosed on a double ration? And who could forget the fate of Kedril the Gorger? As Zoya got more and more naked, I kept thinking about those ridiculous tsarist banquets we used to fantasize about. Salmon lips and peacock eyelids seethed in honey and burbot roe. And two hundred courses of it, with forty-five kinds of pie, and thirty different salads.

It is necessary at this point to tell you something about Zoya’s amatory style. I am not fastidious or possessive about these things (as I feel you are), and it is my intention, in any case, to encumber you — to hobble you — with confidences. Most remarkably, most alchemically, she was a big woman who weighed about half a kilo in bed. She was also very inventive, preternaturally unsqueamish, and quite incredibly long-haul. During our first nine months together, lovemaking, it seems fair to say, took up much of our time. For instance, with breaks for naps and snacks our last session (before the day of the marriage and my ten-minute trial) went on for seventy-two hours.

Before very long, in the House of Meetings, we were doing it — the thing that people do. I was so awed by my readiness, my capability, that it took me a while before I started asking myself what was wrong. It was this — and at first it felt entirely bathetic. As I made love, I wasn’t thinking about my wife. I was thinking about my dinner. The huge chunks of bread, the whole herring, and the fat-rich broth that you and the others had so carefully and movingly amassed. Of course I could say to myself, You haven’t had food in front of you and then done something else for eight years. But it would be untrue to say that I wasn’t already very frightened. One of the many awful things about that night was a sense of invasion from within and the feeling that I was the mere spectator of an alien self.

We had our dinner. And bloody good it was too. And the vodka, and the cigarettes. Then I helped her wash. She had spent that day in the back of a truck, and you couldn’t tell the smudges from the bruises. Two weeks on the rails and the roads. I was exulting, now, in her bravery, her fidelity, her beauty, her uncanny vivacity. God, what a sport she was. I was full of thanks and I was again eager.

This time I was pleased, at the outset, to find that I wasn’t thinking about food. All that did, though, was delay the recognition that I was thinking about sleep. Sleep, and pity. It was one of those times when your hidden thoughts and feelings show you the results of their silent labor. You find out what’s been worrying you, and how very much it’s been worrying you — and with what good reason. I wanted to be pitied into sleep. That’s what I wanted. And eventually we did sleep, for many hours, and at dawn we drank the tea in her flask and we began again. This time I didn’t think about sleep or food or even freedom. By now I had found my subject. All I thought about was what I’d lost.

And what was that? I remembered the first law of camp life: to you, nothing — from you, everything. I also thought of the urka slogan (and the text of many an urka tattoo): You may live but you won’t love. Now, it would be ghoulish to say that I had lost all my love. And not true, not true. This is what had happened to me, brother — I had lost all my play. All.

It may not have escaped your notice that Zoya is more attractive than I am. Why, you said as much yourself, more than once, in 1946. I can assure you that I knew it — each of my senses knew it. I had felt exalted enough by the clumsy kindnesses of my Olga, my Ada. Then Zoya, the grand slam of love, who cured my stutter in a single night. What next? Would she make me tall, would she kit me out with a chin and a pair of ears that matched? And, yes, she did, she did.

I felt myself revolutionized — and freed. And my response was an unbounded gratitude. I just couldn’t do enough for her. Perpetual praise and infinite consideration, endearments and embraces, couplets, trinkets, messages, massages — undivided attention, together with the deployment of a desire that had no upper limit. The “specieshood” you talked about during those months of heroic madness in ’53, the “earthed” feeling — what you found in the communality I had found in her. With this superlove I redressed the balance. And she would look at me, at me, and say she couldn’t believe her luck. Oh, bro, I was almost paranoiac with happiness. It was like religion combined with reason. And I worshipped alone.

That night in the House of Meetings all my consciousness of inferiority returned, and it was reinforced, now, by the meaning of my enslavement. In Moscow, in the conical attic, I was Lev, but I was clean and free. I thought: she should have seen me a couple of hours ago, before the shearer and the power-hose — a little tumbleweed of nits and lice. So, to the silent but universal murmur of dismay I always heard, faintly, whenever I entered the fold of her arms, was added another voice, which said, “Never mind if he looks like a village idiot. That’s their business. How about what he is. He is an ant that toils for the state at gunpoint. What he is is a slave. Nothing to be done but pity him, pity him.” And I did want pity. I wanted the pity of all Russia.

Gathered about me was a raucous audience of thoughts, little gargoyles that sniggered and heckled. What was this miracle of womanliness beneath me and all around me? Women weren’t meant to look like women, not anymore. Then, Christ, the business with the hands. I kept thinking, Where is the hand that killed my ear? Where are the hands of Comrade Uglik? Are my hands his hands? Are his mine? This claw of mine, this crab — whose is it? And just by being there, just by not being absent, my hands seemed heavy, violent. And behind all this was the thought that, I don’t know — the thought that a man was not a good thing to be. I couldn’t keep it out. No thought was so stupid or noxious that I wouldn’t let it in. Because any thought whatever made a change from the other thought — the thought about what I’d lost.