Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I didn’t expect things to be any different in freedom. And they weren’t. Considered as a matter of the sensations, the nerve centers, the physical act was still far nicer than anything else I could imagine getting up to. I thought I could simply concentrate on the carnal. But when the heart goes, so, very soon, does the head. It became impossible to protect myself from the idea that what I was doing was fundamentally inane — like revisiting a futile and arduous hobby I had long outgrown. When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour. Night-time was a nightshift, looming over me the whole day long. Here it comes again (with satirical touches, true, with jokes and jeers), the rambling reminder of what I’d lost. I had to search my face for the contours of tenderness, but these shapes, too, were all gone.

That night in camp I did an excellent impersonation of the old Lev — that is to say, the young Lev. But the old Lev had disappeared, along with my youth. I went on doing this impersonation for five years. And she never knew. My experience of great beauties begins and ends with Zoya, but I’ve invested much thought in them. In the type. I think she was very untypical sexually. Most great beauties, I suspect, tend toward the passive: mere compliance is considered bounty enough. But in another area I think she was typical — indeed, archetypical. She was not a noticer of the texture of the feelings of the people around her. Great beauties, they don’t have to do the work that we have to do, the work of vox populi and “Mass Observation.” Except when its content was violent, she hardly even noticed anti-Semitism. People would look at her with that compassionate sneer, as if she was a cat that had lost all its hair. Take it from me, I really got to know about the influenza of the xenophobe. It is a mirror the size of the Pacific — an ocean of inadequacies.

No, she never knew. There was only one thing I couldn’t control, and it bothered her. I cried in my sleep. I was always crying in my sleep. And it was always the same dream. She used to question me about it as she dressed for work. I told her the dream was a dream about Uglik. It wasn’t true. The dream was a dream called House of Meetings.

My double-goer, my antic twin, my Vadim, was still there, in freedom, and he had a plan. His plan was for me to become even uglier. Hence the beergut, the new twitch, the conscientious gracelessness — and, of course, the way I lay down or bent over for my stutter. By then I was thirsting for illness, for incapacity. I wanted to be surrounded by people dressed in white. The word hospital took on the sacred glow it had had in Norlag. All the time, now, I was aware of a “waiting” feeling. It was the impatience to be old. Previously, at the very crest of sexual bliss, I used to feel I was being tortured by someone infinitely gentle. Now I felt like that every time she smiled at me or took my hand. The last and final phase, which introduced a whole new order of alarm, presented itself in the summer of 1962. And the first symptom was physical.

I began to hear, on and off, a taut hum — like the sound of jet engines heard from within the plane. White noise, I assumed, from my dead ear. After a time I realized that it was only happening in certain situations: crossing high bridges, on clifftops and balconies, near railway lines and busy roads — and also when I shaved with the straight razor. Then one day, in Kazan, it took me half an hour to walk past a stationary truck I saw on the street. It was a garbage-compactor. The men were leaving it running as they went ever further for their loads, of course (in case it didn’t start up again), and the hum in my ear was so loud that the foul mastications of the machine, its chomping and grinding, were actually noiseless, even when I came up close and stared in. The steel blocks that climbed and plunged were no more than lightly smeared, and the black teeth had almost picked themselves clean. It looked all right in there. And it made no sound.

When we were growing up you used to say I was a solipsist, and a solipsist of unusual briskness and resolve. You spoke of the sobriety of the calculation of my own interest, the lack of any instinct for compliance with the mood of the group (plus the off-center protrusion of the lower lip and the “privacy” of the eyes). Well, it remained true that I very much didn’t want to kill myself. That felt like a reasonable priority. The suicide of the slave survivor — we know it’s common enough, and in the end I think I can respect it. As a way of saying that my life is mine to take. But I thought I had held myself together fairly well, in camp — no violence, not much compromise, no herd emotion. I didn’t want to do what others did. And I reckoned I had a good chance of getting through life without killing anyone.

In fact it all felt pretty much involuntary. I mean my strike, sudden and unofficial — the wildcat strike. I let my hands fall to my sides. Not just the nightly act, but everything else, all the smiles and sacraments, all the words, all the commentary of love. She noticed that. I ask you to imagine what it was like to lie there, sit there, stand there, and watch. It was quick — I’ll say that. Within a month she got caught, in blazing crime, with the PT-instructor during the lunch break. And I was free.

Just to finish my side of it. I didn’t want a child with Zoya and I didn’t want a child with Lidya. But it’s curious. With Lidya, with Lidya, I felt a brief renewal of erotic purpose. There was now the possibility, at least, of a consequence. Something like — if it isn’t play, then let it be earnest. And, incidentally, I’ve always been amazed by what Lidya thinks a fuck is, compared to what Zoya thought a fuck was. But it worked out. The boy, when he came, began to give me the sort of pleasure I used to take in Zoya. Proximity to physical grandeur, but manageable, now. I have enough love in me for Lidya, I can scrape it together and eke it out with things like approbation and respect. Lidya understands. After Zoya, I feel as if I’m living with a dedicated psychotherapist — and mindreader. I can sense her decoding my silences. She understands, and she pities me. In the end you finish with self-pity. It’s too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you. Lidya pities me. She pities me, which Zoya rightly never did, and she pities me for Zoya, too.

Forcing her out, forcing Zoya out, was not a contained cruelty. No one knew better than I did how hopeless she was at love. The awful way she laid herself open. She was a totalist among men who dealt in fractions. I know you and Kitty were appalled by her marriage, but I was secretly ecstatic, for a while, anyway. The irony is very sharp, I agree. But bear in mind that she was hopeless at other things too, including money. In the few months between our separation and our divorce she ran up debts that looked like state budgets. I heard that in the end it cost Ananias half of all he had to bail her out. At last: reparation. The money earned by mocking the sweat of slaves — it goes to Zoya. Hereafter, or so I felt, that dreadful old piece of shit will keep her warm and fed and clothed, and will value her. Or so I felt.

Now, my brother. It is my suspicion that you aren’t yet done with Zoya. You’re going to wait until after I’m dead and then you’re going to try again. Not immediately after. I don’t see you getting on the plane with a suitcase in one hand and a funeral baked meat in the other. Listen. There was one night in Moscow, the time we stayed over, and you’d been giving her “that look” every five minutes — you think you’re all strong and silent, bro, but you’re a book with its spine cracked open and its pages falling free. We were talking about it as we went to bed. I said, as was my habit, “Like a clever dog that knows it’s going to be thrashed.” Now you remember how perceptive she could be, when she tried, when she stopped and thought. I’ll indent her reply, to give it extra weight: