Martin Amis - House of Meetings

I said, Until the day came when you hit back and kept on hitting. What changed?

In ones and twos the shiteaters had started drifting off, back into the sector. Of those remaining, some seemed discouraged by the defection, and the aggregate loss of hope; others freshly twinkled — dreaming of the lion’s share, with Irish eyes…

Lev said, “I was different inside.”… Shit, I said. It’s just struck me. What happened to your stutter? Where’d your stutter go?

He gave a taut nod and said, “She did that. After the first night, I woke up and it wasn’t there. Can you imagine? You know what it means? It means I can’t die. Not yet.”

No, you can’t die. Not yet.

Venus, you’re probably marveling — I know I am — at my calm and helpfulness, and the superb urbanity of my fraternal exchange with the husband of the woman I loved, the husband of Zoya, healer of stutterers. The truth is that I was in shock. And not “still in shock” either: I had hardly started. I would go on being in shock for over a month, buoyed by buxom chemicals. They did me good, morally. I got a lot worse when they wore off.

I said, Here, everyone’s Vad. Vad with a wrench and a screwdriver. And you haven’t got fifteen years to adapt to it. You haven’t got fifteen hours. You’ve got till tomorrow morning.

My breath hung in the air. Even in June your breath hung in the air as if you were smoking an enormous and fiery cigar. They went out six feet and curled back around you, these scarves of breath.

The last kitchen light went out, the last internal door slammed shut, and the last lingering shiteater wandered off crying childishly into his fists.

I said, This is what you’ve got to do.

“Tell me.”

I told him. And then I said, You’re what she’s giving up her twenties for. Christ. Think of that. And when it’s this cold, don’t eat the snow. You’ll have blood on your lips and your tongue. The snow burns.

I will now briefly describe the conclusion of my thing with Zoya. I will now briefly describe my abasement before The Americas.

On March 20, 1946, it came to pass that I was alone with her, in the conical attic, at half past one in the morning.

She hadn’t actually asked me up. I’d simply attached myself to a group that was on its way to pay her a call. We were not good Communists, not anymore; but we were excellent communitarians. Community: the cardinal Russian strength, even though the state now feared it and hated it. Russians looked out for each other. Russians did do that…We sat around in our overcoats. There was no heat and no light. There was no food and no drink. We had, I remember, a paper bagful of a nameless orange tea, but no water. The tea turned out to be carrot peel. So we ate it. They were all younger than me; it was perhaps to be expected that I said very little. I didn’t care how obvious it was, how dourly obvious — my determination to be the last to leave.

Because I now felt that I had a deadline. Zoya, that day, had done something, said something, that could not but lead to her arrest, or so I judged. It will sound unserious to you, Venus; but it wasn’t unserious. The whole Tech was talking about it. After classes Zoya showed up for the plenary session of the Komsomol, or the Communist Youth League. I remember the convocations of the Komsomol: try to imagine something halfway between a temperance meeting and a Nuremberg Rally. On her way out, Zoya said, quite audibly, that the two-hour keynote address (its full title, I remember, was “The Scum of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Deviation and the City Administration Committee Decision About the Party Meeting at the Mining Institute”) had “bored her tits off.” And no no no no no, you just couldn’t say that. Doubly provocative, and she was trebly endangered — boredom and breasts and Jewishness. That night, every time I heard a car or a truck in the street, I thought, It’s them. They’re here.

A couple of days earlier, as I walked Zoya to Tech, a man going past on a bicycle shouted out something with the word kike in it. I asked her — Kike what?

“Dirty kike bedstraw,” she repeated without any emphasis.

We walked on. I said, How often does it happen?

“You know what I’d like? I’d like to be vulgar in America. I’d like to be a Jew in America — all flash. How often? You might get nothing for a week. Then you get about nine in one day.”

I’m sorry.

“It’s not your fault.”

Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism. By which I mean an abnormal emphasis on the folk (the Great Russians), together with an abnormal xenophobia. Pogrom was coming. So there were sensible, indeed cynical reasons for Zoya to look kindly on me. It was one thing to stage conspicuous entanglements with your fellow bohemians, and especially your fellow Jews; it was another thing to be the devoted companion of a tall and handsome war hero, with his medals and his yellow badge, denoting a serious wound. Not much fun to say, all that. But I’m telling you, my dear: this is the meaning, this is the daily and hourly import of state systems.

I sat with my back to the window and the moonbeams. The walls breathed or bristled in the dark. I reached out — a costume (velvet), ostrich feathers, a tasseled tambourine. With the light behind me I could stare at Zoya, seeing her singly, entire, with unprecedented indifference to detail. And I was in any case full of emotion. Untypically, for a Russian, I had been raised by my mother to regard anti-Semitism as a reflex of the gutter; and the shame I felt for my nation was so intense that it had already ruined my memory of the war. At the same time I was lost in admiration for her — for the way she hadn’t flinched in the street and her resilience, now, when everyone else was mentally packing her pillowslip. You have a consciousness of this laid down in you, Venus, and I don’t: how it feels to be the other. And we know, from the memoirists, about the pain, the physical pain, of wearing the star, also yellow, the burning crysanthemum of the star. You in your flesh have worn the star…Half of Soviet Jewry had been killed by the Germans. And now the Russians had begun to glare at the half that remained. It was coming from above but also coming from below, coming up from the depths.

At the door Zoya was saying goodnight to her penultimate guest (her farewells punctuated by a violent yawn). All the time I kept asking myself how it happened — how had I stood by and given someone such power to hurt me? In my mouth, not the usual slow drool but a humble aridity — the aching throat of the lovelorn. I would act, though, I would act; and Russia would help me. You see, when the depths stir like this, when a country sets a course for darkness, it comes to you not as horror but as unreality. Reality weighs nothing, and everything is allowed. I rose. I rose, and impended.

She placed a palm on my chest, to establish a distance, but she accepted the kiss, or withstood it; and yet, as she withdrew her mouth, she retained my lower lip for a second between her teeth, and her eyes moved sideways, ruminatively; she was chewing it over — but not at length. I said three words and she said three words. Hers were, “You frighten me…” A novelettish incitement, you may think. And I would once have taken it as that. But I deeply knew that she hadn’t liked the taste of my lips.

“I’m sorry.”

For several seconds I stood there with my hands writhing around in one another’s grasp. And then I, the decorated rapist, I, who went through a woman a week using every form of flattery, false promises, bribery, and blackmail, not to mention the frank application of masculine bulk — I gave out a noise like the muffled coo of a pigeon, kissed her palm, and staggered out, seeming to twirl end over end all the way down the stairs.