House of Meetings

by Martin Amis

  Three times it happened: three times she shot out of sight, and there she was at my feet, flat on her back and shaking with silent laughter, her eyes clenched shut and her hands on her heart. The last time (and we have entered a period of last times) her summer dress, resisting the speed of her drop, rode up over her waist…And it wasn’t just the erotic shock, the power of her two-toned thighs in their stockings, the intricate engineering, and attention to detail, in all those slips and clips and grips. It was the helplessness, the silent laughter, the unseeing eyes, the two hands folded on the heart, it was the helplessness.

  “That was the last time,” said Lev as I brought her to her feet.

  I spoke earlier, I think, of the coldness that is always available to the elder brother. It was this coldness that I now sought. What you’re really doing is giving yourself some distance, in preparation for disaster. And—God help me—I had a plan.

  Of course, I never asked Lev whether he still wrote poetry. If he had been alive and present, Vadim would have asked him that. Someone who hated him would have asked him that.

  As you might put it, Venus: think Thumbelina.

  Before her deliverance on the wings of the healed bird, before her redemption at the hands of the tiny Flower King, tiny Thumbelina, you may recall, comes close to marrying the mole. Marrying the dot-eyed insectivore, and spending the rest of her days in darkness.

  Could you marry a mole? I asked.

  “Sure!” you said, with heat.

  Sure! I’m not prejudiced! You were six. About a month later, Thumbelina came up again, as the themes of childhood so often do, and I repeated my question. You were silent, troubled: it was your very first dilemma. You had been weighing the reality of marriage to the mole. You now wanted to avoid it. But how could you do that, without hurting the mole’s feelings? “It hurt my feelings.” Girl children are very quick to recruit that phrase. The only little boy I ever knew well—he would never have used it. Girls understand that their feelings also have rights…What happened to you, by the way, in the space of those four or five weeks? Some mysterious accession or promotion. If they’d been making a parallel film of your life, they would have known, then, that a new hairstyle or built-up shoes wouldn’t do it: the time had come to hire an older actress.

  In later life you married the mole, for a while, when you took up with that Nigel. Walking beside you, I said, he looked like your broken umbrella. After him, I noticed, you kept to the flower kings, with only the occasional porcupine or polecat.

  But say Thumbelina had married the mole. And let’s consider it from the mole’s point of view. They live together under the soil, in unbreathable damp and darkness. The tiny beauty is a devoted wife. And yet the mole, who can’t help being half blind, can’t help hating flowers and sunshine, feels the thwartedness of Thumbelina—Thumbelina, who was born from a tulip. It is not in the mole to ask her to go. So he makes his grotto more gravelike, darker, danker, and wills her to leave.

  3.

  The Salang Tunnel

  And leave she did, on October 29, 1962.

  It was the day after the defusing of the Cuba Crisis. And this imparted a false perspective. Zoya leaving Lev: that wasn’t the end of the world. Not for me, anyway. Was there a precipitant? Kitty herself, who went down there and even cross-questioned the mother, never established the details, though she claimed to sense the aftershock of scandal…We knew that Zoya had gone back to her job at the school. Teaching drama. And we knew that she had been summarily dismissed. She was in Petersburg, where old Ester was about to join her. Lev was still in their half of the hovel near Kazan.

  I didn’t see him for nearly a year. But we wrote. This is what happened to him.

  In my first letter I made a practical suggestion. I offered to buy him his Certificate of Rehabilitation, just as I had bought mine some years earlier (and just as I would soon buy my Party card). He took me up on it and asked, in addition, for a large loan, appending a repayment schedule that included calculations for interest. Surveying this schedule, with its percentages, its busy decimals, I felt a cavernous bewilderment. Let’s put it that way, for now. The big brother in me was, of course, delighted that Zoya had gone. What bothered me was Lev’s response to it: a repayment schedule that ventured far, far into the future. Why wasn’t it the end of the world?

  That October he successfully applied for a job in a mine-construction project in Tyumen, just the other side of the Urals, beyond Yekaterinburg. At Christmas he sent me a photograph of a freckled and bespectacled blonde, standing in a striplit corridor with her hands behind her back. This was the twenty-three-year-old he had met in the works dispensary: little Lidya. I will mention here that in his covering letter my brother confessed to some reactionary pride in the fact that Lidya was—or had been—a virgin. Looking again at the photograph, I had to say that I wasn’t at all surprised. I quietly concluded, too, that I wasn’t interested in virgins. Naturally I wasn’t. What would I do with a virgin? What would we find to talk about all night?

  In the new year, in February, he got promoted and she got pregnant. Now, Lev was still a married man, and divorce wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Divorce used to be very easy indeed. You didn’t even have to go through the rigmarole required of our Muslim brethren, who got divorced by saying “I divorce thee” three times. In the Soviet Union you only had to say it once, on a postcard. But now, for reasons we’ll return to, both parties were obliged to attend a court hearing. I couldn’t understand why Zoya refused to cooperate, nor could Kitty. Lev felt it prudent to go to Petersburg. As soon as he told her that Lidya was, as the Latins say, embarazada (have I got that right?), Zoya complied; and then it was just bureaucracy.

  I was best man at the August wedding. My brother seemed much leaner (amazingly, some of his hair had grown back), Lidya’s pious parents seemed at last assuaged, and it all went fairly well, considering that Lidya, as Kitty put it, was “out here.” Lidya was long and thin, with legs the shape of noodles—another Kitty, another Chile. I found her to be pretty much as far as you could get from Zoya, which is another way of saying that she didn’t look very feminine, even as she entered her third trimester. Already the baby dwarfed her. She was like the string on the package. A seven-kilo son, Artem, was duly delivered in November.

  Zoya stayed on for a while in Petersburg with her mother. She got involved with the famous Puppet Theater there, making puppet costumes, painting puppet scenery. When the Puppet Theater opened up a subsidiary in Moscow, Zoya was part of the team that came along to run it. In a long, new-broomist letter to Kitty, she said that it was her intention, now, “to return to the life of the heart.” She and her mother had their old place back, too. So, once again, Zoya was entertaining in the conical attic.

  Kitty called on her, of course. I didn’t. I didn’t return to the old neighborhood and stand beneath her window. I didn’t linger there in all weathers, trying to interpret the movements of shadows on the ceiling of her bedroom. Something else had to happen first. Something that might take a very long time.

  Nikita Sergeyevich fell. Leonid Ilich rose.*5 The Thaw, then the Little Freeze, then the Stagnation.

  My lovelife, as I will go on calling it, took an unexpected turn. I was getting older. The croupiers were getting older. They weren’t real croupiers—though in my recurring dream about Varvara (the last in the line) she stood over a chip-strewn wheel of fortune, and her rake kept turning into a lorgnette…It is hard to get a smile from a good-time girl once she passes the age of forty. Their thoughts are all of solemnization. I tried a couple of younger ones; but with them I always felt that I was on the wrong train or the wrong boat, that the other passengers had different tickets and itineraries, different stamps, different visas. And the whole black-market milieu lost most of its pep after the law of 1961, which gave the economic criminal something new to worry about: capital punishment. So I partly reformed, and joined my generation, entering into a series of more tenacious, more complicated, and (certainly) much c
heaper relationships with the children of the Revolution, divorcées, veteran widows, ex-convicts, ex-exiles, all of them fatherless, all of them brotherless. In 1969, on a working trip to Hungary, I met Jocelyn, with whom I more or less cohabited, on and off, until the events of 1982—the Salang Tunnel, and what followed from it.

  By ’69 I had found my métier. Robotics, but not yet in its medical applications. To get your hands on materials of international standard, you had to do space or you had to do armaments. Space was oversubscribed, so I did armaments. Rotary launchers for nuclear weapons. That’s right, my child: preparations for the third world war. The third world war never became the Third World War, which is just as well. In my current mood, not notable for its leniency, I wouldn’t enjoy it—reproaching myself for the Third World War.

  I had my own chauffeur-driven Zigli. I shopped in the subterranean valuta arcades. Not very often, about once a year, I would amass a parcel of silk shirts and silk scarves and silk stockings, and scents and unguents and elixirs, and blushers and highlighters and concealers, and send it, without any covering note, to the occupant of the conical attic.

  You need to know something about Jocelyn. The main theme of her character was melancholy—melodramatic melancholy. Sad enough in Budapest, Jocelyn was suicidal in Moscow. She carried melancholy around with her, maybe in her handbag, a black and bottomless entanglement of frayed embroidery; or maybe in her hair (another entanglement) it chose to lurk. Her obsession was transience. Oh yes: change and decay in all around she saw. What she feared was the void. Going to sleep was for Jocelyn an existential torment; if she turned in early, you had to rig up a wireless or a gramophone, and she wanted the light on and the door open. The reason for all this, you were led to understand, was the high sensitivity enforced by exceptional intelligence. The more intelligent you were, the more depressed you were bound to get. She could have been the male lead in one of the more forbidding novels of Dostoyevsky. And she was English. Her husband, soon to be estranged, was number two at the British Embassy in Budapest. Jocelyn Patience Harris was a frump and a joke, as well as a door-darkener of mythic power. There were several reasons for the attraction. Chief among them was snobbery.

  She was also basically handsome, and rich, and literary, in her way. She never went anywhere without her four or five leather-bound anthologies, or treasuries, of Georgian verse. These we read together. With a new language, of course, the last thing you learn is taste; and for years I would be trying to impress everybody with my marathon memorizations of people like Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater. At the same stage, my idea of a colloquial English sentence was one that contained lots of phrases like “in the nick of time” and “by hook or by crook.” Do you know the expression “a disgusting Anglophile”? That’s what I became. And it was disgusting. I could sometimes catch myself being disgusting—the tweeds and the twills she imported for me, and the shooting-stick. Also the invidiousness, and the awful pedantry. You yourself got a taste of this when I had that worryingly prolonged laughing fit, and you called Tannenbaum: I had just come across the locution “he had the cheek of taking my photograph” in Lolita. Still, I would claim that Anglophilia is not irrational. For this reason. You see, Venus, Russian literature is sometimes thought to be our recompense for a gruesome history. So strong, so real, grown on that mulch of blood and shit. But the English example shows that literature gains no legitimacy from the gruesome. In making claims for world domination, the English novel must look anxiously to the French, the Americans, and, yes, the Russians. But English poetry does not abide our judgment. And it isn’t nothing, I contend, to have that history—and a body of verse that fears no man. To have that polity, and that poetry.

  Jocelyn, the high priestess of evanescence and infertility, grew impatient, as with a dredged-up irrelevance, when you pointed out that she had five grown daughters and twenty-three grandchildren (each of whom got a card, and a gawky Russian toy, on their birthday). Sexual intercourse, similarly, she regarded as the depth of frivolity, but she would often relent. And then there was the constantly surprising buoyancy of her figure. For some reason her past lovers, including her husband, awoke in me no hostility. To be candid, and therefore ungallant, I couldn’t see what they saw in her: they were all English already. My inner life, in any event, became increasingly Anglophone. This was part of the plan, too, but it was also a tremendous resource. When Pasternak was silenced as a writer, he turned to translation—of Shakespeare, among others. I know what he meant when he said that he was thereby in communion “with the West, with the historical earth, with the face of the world.” Jocelyn wore black, but blackness was what she feared. I dealt with more bilious colors—the browns, the greens.

  My nephew Artem still hid from Jocelyn when he was as old as ten or eleven. Then an hour or two later he would creep into the sitting room and stare. And he was not otherwise a timid little boy…That didn’t stop me taking her down there for a week every summer. Lev and Lidya soon acclimatized themselves. After all, it was not out of the way, in my country, for someone to sit through dinner with their face in their hands; it was not out of the way for someone to seek the fetal position for the duration of a picnic. She would have seemed quite unremarkable if she hadn’t been an Englishwoman who could get out any time she liked. Besides, Jocelyn spoke the same amount of Russian as a nineteenth-century aristocrat (perhaps a dozen words), so nobody but me had to listen to her. And I liked to listen to her.

  Lev and I once again became close. Ah, these soothing modulations: imagine a whole life being told in soothing modulations…Lev and I once again became close. We used to sit up late in the kitchen, drinking and smoking. There were several indices of at least partial well-being. The excellence of his chess was one (for me, the achievement of a draw was like clambering onto a raft in a mountainous sea). The stutter was another: he had once again taken up arms. And it no longer felt like a clear unkindness when, one night, I raised the subject of poetry. I was not disinterested. There was something I still very badly needed to know.

  That stuff she reads, I said quietly, meaning Jocelyn (you could still hear her radio, next door, where she and I slept), is terrible.

  “What kind of terrible?”

  I explained—pastoral-sentimental, silver-age. I told him about Wilfred Owen, a poet of the First War who started off like that. He had a phrase: “fatuous sunbeams.”

  That’s what all her books should be called, I said. “Fatuous Sunbeams: A Treasury of Georgian Verse.” I don’t know what she gets out of it.

  “Presumably something. Which is better than nothing. Nothing is what I get out of it. It’s all dead to me now. You still like it because you never wanted to write it. Poetry.”

  I waited.

  He said, “And I used to think, with Mandelstam, that that was the measure of a man, of a woman: how they responded to poetry. With Mandelstam. It sounds antique now. But maybe I still believe it. And I’ll tell you who else believes it. Artem.”

  Aged fifteen, now, Artem lay hugely asleep upstairs, like a colt, in an Artem-sized bedroom infested with sashes and rosettes.

  “I know. I still can’t get over it. That I somehow produced such a magnificent creature. And he knows his Akhmatova.”

  For a moment he allowed himself a private smile. Then he sat up straight and said, “When we were away, I still did it. I wrote poems in my head. Right up until ’56.”

  He went still. Our eyes met.

  ’56, I said. The House of Meetings.

  “Oh don’t worry,” he said. “Not now, not yet. But before I die you will know.”

  At this point Lidya entered, yawning and shuffling in her tubular nightcoat; and then Jocelyn entered, unappeasably sleepless, and wearing black. It occurred to me that both these women were Zoya’s assiduous opposites, Lidya in the physical sphere, Jocelyn in the spiritual. If you put the three of them in a room together, there would be an E=mc2 event, such as was supposed to happen when antimatter met matter.

 
Lev, I concluded, was split along similar lines. He was all right now, just about, in his head, but his body was not all right. He had the grated, red-rimmed glance of the chronic. For a while, whenever he had a fit of coughing to get through, he would leave the room; a little later, he was leaving the house. In middle age he was developing “stress” asthma. These attacks involved him in another kind of fight. Back went the head. He could breathe it in but he couldn’t expel it. He tried. He couldn’t get the air out. He couldn’t get it out.

  “Stop looking at me like that.”

  Like what?

  “Like the doctors look at me.”

  Well, God help me, I had a plan.

  This period of bourgeois calm, of progress and poetry and upward mobility, of no rape and no murder, is about to close. So let me bring you up to date.

  At the turn of the decade we witnessed a series of developments, as if (it now seems) everyone was taking up position, in readiness for November 1982. Lev was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. They wanted to monitor his heart while they soused him in salbutamol, the new asthma drug. Increasingly critical of what she called my “ovine equanimity,” Jocelyn went back to England, on a visit. In her only letter, itself a remarkably sunny document, she said that it wasn’t the void, and her insight into it, that was depressing her: it was Russia. And she wouldn’t be coming back. My nephew, Artem, spent the Christmas of 1980 in the hold of a military stratocruiser, en route to Afghanistan and the war against the mujahideen. He was in the signals corps, and would be some way back from the front line. Christmas, an anniversary of no significance to Muslims or to Communists. And Zoya—Zoya did something strange.