House of Meetings

by Martin Amis

  “Meet Comrade Uglik.” The guards stopped the work team—Lev’s work team—and Comrade Uglik was asked to inspect it. He moved from scarecrow to scarecrow, gracefully, with a bend of the knees and a courtly smile—as if, said Lev, he was choosing a partner for a dance. Which he was. He wanted his partner to be young and strong, because he wanted the dance to last a long time. At last he settled on the candidate (Rovno, the big Ukrainian), and the infraction (improper headgear). Then Uglik flexed his upraised fingers into a pair of black leather gloves.

  A pig would usually beat you more or less according to method, like a man chopping down a tree. Uglik of course intended to mount a display, and he did so, with many stylish feints and swivels, and with a toreador’s tight-buttocked saunters—little intervals for tacit applause. He was not very fat and very mottled—indeed, at this hour, he was not yet breathing and sweating very heavily, he was not yet very drunk…It went wrong for Lev when someone near him shouted out—a single word, and, in the circumstances, the worst word possible. The word was queer. Uglik’s head turned toward him, Lev said, like a weathercock whipped around by the wind. He came forward. He picked Lev, I think, because this time he wanted someone small. A double blow to the ears with the stiffened palms of the hand. Everyone there remembered an echoing slap, but Lev remembered a detonation.

  This was not the last of Uglik’s achievements during his short time among us. Late in the evening he visited the women’s block. There he also applied himself: he didn’t rape—he just beat. And finally, on his way back to the guardhouse, he succeeded in falling over and blacking out under the wooden portals of the toy factory. Uglik spent five hours in forty degrees of frost. He had his gloves on.

  Rovno, the giant farmboy, soon recovered. As for Lev—that night in the barracks, flat on his back, he had two worms of bloody phlegm coiling out of his head. The talk all around him was about how and when to retaliate, but Lev was just Lev, even then. “It’s a provocation,” he kept saying. “Uglik is a provocation.” And some people were paying attention to him now. “Don’t rise to it. Don’t rise.” Then he looked up at me and said suddenly, “Can anyone hear my voice?”

  Hear it? I said.

  “Hear it. Because I can’t. I can only hear it from the inside.”

  Three days later we had the opportunity to study Uglik for a full hour. And even in our world, Venus, even in our world of Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, it was something to see.

  We were in the woodshop, which stood in the eternally sunless shadow of its long eave, and we had a clear view of the porch of the infirmary, where Uglik sat with a quilt on a rocking chair, in his greatcoat, his boots. He wore no gloves. Silently we gathered around the window. Uglik’s immediate intention, clearly, was to have a smoke—but this was no longer a straightforward matter. Janusz put the cigarette in Uglik’s mouth and lit it for him, and then withdrew.

  There we were, by the window, six or seven of us, holding our tools. Nobody moved…Uglik seemed to be puffing away comfortably enough, but every few seconds he raised one, then the other, bandaged wrist to his mouth before realizing, over and over again, that he had no hands. Eventually, having spat the butt over the rail, it occurred to him, after a while, that he would soon be wanting another. He cuffed the packet onto the floor and kicked it about; he knelt, trying to use his stumped forearms as levers and pincers; then he lay flat on his stomach, and, like a man trying to possess the wooden floor, trying to enter it, trying to kiss it, writhed and rutted about until he snuffled one up with his questing lips.

  And of course there was more. Now: to watch a pig bungling a headcount, or indeed a bowl-count or a spoon-count; to watch him pause, frown, and begin again—for a moment it is like a return to school, when you glimpse the absurdity, the secret illegitimacy, of the adult power. It makes you want to laugh. But that’s in freedom. It’s different, in penal servitude. We stood at the woodshop window. No one laughed. No one spoke and no one moved.

  With every appearance of broad satisfaction Uglik returned to the rocker, his head tipped back: the vertical cigarette looked like a piccolo which would now trill Uglik’s praises. He patted his pockets and heard (no doubt) the companionable rattle of his matchbox; he reached within. There was an unbearable interlude of perfect stillness before he yelled raggedly for Janusz.

  “I never knew,” we could hear him say, conversationally (and he said it more than once)—“I never knew it got so cold up here in the Arctic.”

  And as Janusz once again withdrew, Uglik, with a jerk, fleetingly offered him his vanished right hand.

  You see, Uglik had something else on his mind: mortal fear. His activities in the women’s block, that first night, had resulted in a petition, a demonstration, and now a strike. This would be noticed. And in the end everything certainly added up for Uglik—yes, a most strenuous fate for Comrade Uglik.

  We were told the whole story, that spring, by a group of transferees from Kolyma. Recalled to Moscow, Uglik was put on trial and facetiously sentenced to a year in the gold mines of the remotest northeast. He mined no gold, and so earned no food, with the consequence that he became a more or less instant shiteater, and—necessarily—an all-fours shiteater at that. He died of starvation and dementia within a month. Knowledge of this would not have lightened our thoughts and feelings, as we stood watching at the woodshop window.

  It was in the nature of camp life that you would suffer even for Uglik—for Uglik, with Uglik. Lev, too, with his gonging head, his left ear already infected and now fizzing with Janusz’s peroxide, his inner gyroscopes undulant with nausea and vertigo. We looked on, each one of us, in septic horror. It wasn’t just the dreadful symmetry of his wounds—like the result of a barbaric punishment. No. Uglik was showing us how things really stood. This was our master: the man scared so stupid that he kept forgetting he had no hands.

  I glanced at Lev. And then, I think, it came upon my brother and me—a suspicion of what this might further mean. I found the suspicion was unentertainable, and I shuddered it off. But I had already heard its whisper, saying…The Ugliks, and the sons of the Ugliks, and the reality that produced them: all that would pass. And yet there was something else, something that would never pass, and was only just beginning.

  Uglik spat out his second cigarette, wiped his nose on his stump, and shouldered his way inside.

  On March 5 we were assembled in the yard and told of the death of the great leader of free human beings everywhere. Silence in the whole zona, a silence of rare quality: I remember listening to the subway noises of the points and wires in my sinuses. It was the silence of vacuum. For at least five or six years, in camp, there had been an intense rumor, daily or even hourly replenished—a rumor that placed Joseph Vissarionovich ever closer to death’s door. And what we had, now, was a vacuum. Now he was nowhere. But he used to be everywhere.

  From that day on a collision course was mapped out in front of us. No amnesties (not for the politicals), more frequent and more outrageous provocations (more Ugliks), and the uncontrollable impatience of the men—every last man but Lev. So, certainly, we rose up. And the pigs couldn’t hold us. It ended on August 4, with Cheka troops, fire engines and steel-plated trucks mounted with machineguns.

  We’ve got a little time, I said. A little time, you and I. And then you’re going to have to come out and stand.

  Lev was alone in the barracks. He sat at the table by the stove (inactive during the summer month), with his hands folded in front of him like a judge.

  “Ah, Spartacus,” he said. “Christ, what was that? A barricade?”

  They were doing the whole zona, sector by sector. The sound of shouts, screams, gunfire, and the collapse of bulldozed walls came and went on the hot wind.

  I said, The women are out there. Everyone who can walk is out there, standing in line. Arm in arm. You haven’t got a choice. When this is over, do you expect the men to be able to bear the sight of you?

  “Mm, the wet stuff. If there are any men, whe
n this is over. It wouldn’t surprise me if they killed all the pigs, too. A smoke, brother. Yes, go on, a contemplative cigarette…”

  He had a new voice, now, or a new intonation: precise, almost legalistic, and slightly crazed. A loner’s voice.

  “You know,” he said, “massacres want to happen. They’re not neutral. Remember the fascist headcount in the yard in, what, in ’50? When the overloaded watchtower collapsed. It was fucking funny, wasn’t it? The way it fell—like an elevator cut from its cable. But then we heard the sound of all the rifles cocking. And every man with laughter in his chest, a volcano of laughter. One single titter and it would have happened. The massacre of the laughing men. I knew then that massacres want to happen. Massacres want there to be massacres.”

  Well, you’d better want a massacre too. And a thorough one.

  “Yes, I’ve already been threatened. It’s like a blocking unit in the army, isn’t it? Possible death with honor in the van. Or certain death with ignominy in the rear. Smoke up. I’ve been singing that song, ‘Let’s Smoke.’”

  And there are other reasons, I said. If you sit here on your bench, you’re going to feel like shit for the rest of your life.

  “Well I won’t not feel like shit for very long, will I? I’ve been listening to the radio with Janusz. Things are better in freedom now. The Doctors have all been pardoned. ‘The flu’—it died when he died. Zoya’s not in Birobidzhan. She’ll be back in Moscow. In her attic. The future looks bright.”

  You’ll never write another poem. And you’ll never fuck your wife.

  “…At last you convince me, brother. I can go out there and climb on a box and tell them to ignore the provocations and get back to their fucking barracks and wait. Or I can go out there and stand. You know they’re going to kill all the leaders. You’re about ten times more likely to die than I am. I never realized until now,” he said, “that you were so romantic.”

  Provoked or not provoked, the Norlag Rebellion, I believe, was a thing of heroic beauty. I can’t and won’t give it up. We were ready to die. I have known war, and it was not like war. Let me spell it out. You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love—love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can’t actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron. On August 4 the love was still there, even at the close of the day. It was—it was like God. And not a Russian God. It was magnificent, the way we stood arm in arm. Everyone, the women, Lev, everyone, even the shiteaters, standing arm in arm.

  Two days later I was in a filtration camp in the tundra, for resentencing or execution. Semyon and Johnreed had already been shot when the planes arrived from Moscow. Beria had fallen. The man appointed to arrest him was my marshal, Georgi Zhukov. I love it that that was so. Lavrenti Beria, the clever pervert, looked up from his desk and saw his nemesis: the man who won the Second World War…I was meaninglessly transferred to Krasnoyarsk, and barged back up the Yenisei the following spring. At the time of my return a disused dormitory by the side of Mount Schweinsteiger was being rebuilt, to serve as the House of Meetings.

  On August 5, 1953, after twenty-eight hours of emergency operations, Janusz looked in the mirror: he thought there must have been some talc in his cap. His hair had gone white.

  At around about this time, in another family matter related to the passing of Joseph Vissarionovich, Vadim, my half-brother and Lev’s fraternal twin, was beaten to death while suppressing strikes and riots in East Berlin.

  5.

  “You’ve Got a Goddamned Paradise in Here”

  We thus move on to the conjugal visits. And remember: life was easy, now, in 1956.

  The wives had started coming to camp two years earlier, but it was a right granted only to the strongest of strong workers. So that’s what Lev became, all over again. Remembering him now, I see a child-sized version of the posters and paintings of an earlier time—the great globes of sweat, the raised veins on the forearms, even the sheet-metal stare that went out to meet the future. He did the work and he earned the right. By now, though, the question went as follows: did he want it? Did anyone?

  Considering the variety and intensity of the suffering it almost always caused, I was astounded by how longed-for and pushed-for it remained: the chalet on the hill. I was a close student of this rite of passage—though quite unreflective, I admit, and especially at first. For the husbands, the conjugal visit meant a headshave, a disinfection, a sustained burst from the fire hose. They came out of the bathhouse unrecognizably scoured, stung, alerted, in clothes stiffened not by dirt but by the rasp of ferocious detergents. Then, with every appearance of appetite and verve, they hastened off, under light guard, to the House of Meetings. And the next day, as each wreck and wraith came stumbling back down the hill, I would find myself thinking: You clamored for it. We fought for it. What’s the matter now?

  But very soon the meaning of it pressed down on me, and I bowed to the larger power. It really seemed as if this was the goal of the regnant system: it wanted to push every last one of us into the tightest possible corner. “Living in corners” was what they called it in freedom. Four people or four couples or four families per room, living in corners. The women who came to the House of Meetings belonged to a category of their own: they were wives of enemies of the people, and they lived under specific persecution, out in the big zona. And not just the wives but the whole clan. Those airy rooms in the chalet on the hill were in fact very crowded; liquid tentacles of injustice and culpability flowing out from the head of the octopus, and you as its beak.

  All the men were different. Or were they? There was a shared theme, I think. And that theme was chronic anemia. They were trying to be red-blooded; and their blood was a watery white. This man’s face confesses failure, his body confesses it: the skewed mouth, the cottony weakness of the limbs. This man lays claim to success: he shoves you up against the wall and, in a menacing whisper, looking past you or beyond you, tells you what she did to him and what he did to her. And their hearts, too, were without defenses. This man has just been told that his marriage is over and that his children are now in the care of the state: he will come close to taking the walk to the perimeter. This man seems more or less convincingly buoyed, although he is always thoughtful and often tearful: he is remeasuring and rearranging his losses—and that was probably the best that anyone could hope for. What you were getting was the first wave of the rest of your life. You saw the accumulation of all the complexity that would await you in freedom. Everyone stepped lightly around these men and their mantle of solitude.

  You see, the House of Meetings was also and always a house of partings—even in the best possible case. There was a meeting, and there was a parting, and then the years of separation resumed.

  Now, whenever work took me up the steep little lane, and I saw the white tiling of the chalet roof, the good white tiling against the black hulk of Mount Schweinsteiger, I felt as I did when I passed the isolator and its double encirclement of barbed wire.

  The day came: July 31, 1956. The evening came.

  I went to get him in the bathhouse. He stood alone in the changing room, at the far end, on a plank of yellow light. What existed between us now was a kind of codependence. Love, too, but all cross-purposed, and never more so than on this day, this night.

  She’s here, I said. The Americas is here. They’ve got her filling out the forms.

  He nodded, and richly sighed. It wasn’t that likely anymore, but they might have sent Zoya on her way, with a taunt; or they’d give him half an hour with her in the guardhouse, a pig sitting between them and picking his teeth…Lev was sheared, deloused, and power-hosed. He was lightly bobbing up and down, like a bantamweight before a fight he expected to win.

  We walked, under escort, out
of the zona and beyond the wire, over the carpet of wildflowers, and up the steep little lane and the five stone steps to the annex—that compact and manageable dream of gentility and repose, with the curtains, the lampshade, the dinner tray on the backless chair. The thermos of vodka, the candles that in the white night would not be strictly needed. I hadn’t sensed much anxiety, until then, in my younger brother. He was young. He was formidably fit. His left ear was dead but no longer infected. He slept on the top tier and ate the full ration plus twenty-five percent.

  Then came the flinch: the two inverted chevrons in the middle of the brow, the pleading rictus. It couldn’t not be there: fear of failure. Fear of failure, which was perhaps supposed to keep men honest, but turned out to make them mad.

  Remember what I told him? You’ve got a goddamned paradise in here. I also said, Look. Tell me to fuck off and everything if you want, but here’s some advice. Don’t expect too much. She won’t. So don’t you either.