by Martin Amis
The thing that stays with me from those hours at the Rossiya, perhaps surprisingly, is an irreducible sense of the sterile. In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform—we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder. And you could people a good-sized city, now, with the by-blows of the rapist army (population: one million). Many of the impregnated women, of course, never did give birth: they were killed then and there by their rapists. I can at least truthfully say that this phenomenon was and is beyond my understanding.
And in the Rossiya? What I did had no meaning. It was gratuitous, it was perverse, and it was dedicated to the propagation of misery, but it wasn’t even particularly Russian. Except maybe in this. No power, no freedom, no responsibility, ever, in all our history. It stirs an anarchy within. But no—I give it up. I said earlier that rape made a reckoning with me. Its revenge wasn’t commensurate or anything like that, but it was thorough, and dramatically swift. Have you guessed? Have you asked your mother’s ghost? At the Rossiya, I crossed over from satyr to senex in the course of an afternoon. As early as the next day I couldn’t even remember what it was I liked about women and their bodies. I have remembered now. Over these past few days I have remembered.
Of course, it would be nice to be able to blame it, the rape, on the war or on the camp or on the state. I do honestly think, sometimes, that Artem’s death (the manner of it), as well as Lev’s, had overthrown my sanity. In that moment, when her wide smile of love became a gape of horror, I experienced a disappointment, Venus, that was a thousand ply. After all that, I thought. And for just long enough the possession of Zoya felt like a right. And I didn’t even have the right to be there in the room. And now when I close my eyes I can only see a moribund murderer, implacable to his last breath, gathering himself for one last thrust. It used to be an inkling and is now a conviction which perhaps you already share: in the four or five seconds between my kiss and her awakening, Zoya was dreaming about Lev. It had to be that way, to crystallize his fate and mine. Christ, Russia is the nightmare country. And always the compound nightmare. Always the most talented nightmare.
And from this dream I am about to escape. They have come. Two men in street clothes, with what looks like a toolbox. They’re having a smoke while I finish this. And so am I. Any moment now I will click SEND…Go, little book, go, little mine tragedy. And you go, too, Venus, go out into it, with your good diet, your lavish health insurance, your two degrees, your languages, your property, and your capital. The insane luxury of having you to think about has kept me alive, until now, anyway. And oh my heart, every time you called me Dad or Pop or Father, oh, every single time. Well, kid, it wouldn’t be right to sign off sounding sour. Let’s not submit to the gloom supposedly so typical of the northern Eurasian plain, the land of compromised clerics and scowling boyars, of narks and xenophobes and sweat-soaked secret policemen. Join me, please, as I look on the bright side. Russia is dying. And I’m glad.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a debt to several recent books.
First, Anne Applebaum’s magisterial Gulag: A History (Allen Lane; Doubleday). Lucidly and elegantly constructed, simply and strongly written, and asking all the right questions, this is the single indispensable work, after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, on the phenomenon of Soviet slavery.
With Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall (HarperCollins), you only have to look at the jacket photo of the author to know what lies ahead of you: honesty, intrepidity, wit, candor, and (a vital quality, hereabouts) cheerful unfastidiousness. This book combines travel writing and historiography at a formidably high level.
Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin; Metropolitan Books). I have an informal method of evaluating tomes of this kind (729 pp.): I look to see how many notes I have made at the back of them (e.g., “39—serf theaters and orchestras…552—Nabokov Sr.’s murderer”). My edition of Natasha’s Dance ends, generously, with ten blank sides. I needed them all.
Like Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Knopf) is partly the result of heroic labor in the newly opened archives. This book changes the picture, and in a disturbing way. The author is very meticulous and very moral; but he can’t prevent the emergence of a Stalin more personally impressive than we generally believed him to be—more complex and more intelligent. Stalin was in possession of a certain amount of political poetry; he was also, alas, in possession of a soul.
Masha Gessen’s Ester and Ruzya (Dial Press) has an informative subtitle: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace. The family memoir is very smoothly assembled; but the experience of reading it is necessarily jagged and gaunt. Gessen is superlatively good at showing how state systems bend and tug the individual into all kinds of strange shapes. She is also especially evocative on the physical furniture and mental atmosphere of postwar Moscow.
As is Janusz Bardach, in Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag (University of California Press). In an earlier book of mine (Koba the Dread) I praised an earlier book of his (Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag); Dr. Bardach wrote to me, and we had a brief interchange in the months before his death. I knew the defector-historian Tibor Szamuely, who served time at Vorkuta. But Tibor died thirty years ago. And it was Janusz Bardach whom I felt to be my one human link to the events I describe in House of Meetings; and in my struggle, as I wrote it, I was greatly sustained by his ghost.
And by other ghosts—by Fyodor Dostoevsky, by Joseph Conrad, by Eugenia Ginzburg, and by the Tolstoy of the USSR, Vasily Grossman.
ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Yellow Dog
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dread
*1Joseph Vissarionovich is Stalin, leader of Russia, 1928?–53. Lavrenti Beria was head of the Cheka, or secret police, 1938–53. Nikita Sergeyevich is Khrushchev, leader of Russia, 1953–64. I see no way around these footnotes. It would have cost the memoirist his soul, I know, to write out the word Stalin.
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*2Immobilized by an “anesthetic aerosol,” all thirty-five hostage-takers were executed in situ. Of the seven hundred hostages, one hundred and thirty were fatally gassed.
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*3Temachin is Genghis Khan; the Mongol warlord Hulagu is his grandson. Vladimir Ilich is Lenin, leader of Russia, 1917–24.
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*4Dostoevsky was imprisoned from 1849 to 1853, for sedition. Vladimir Vladimirovich is Putin, leader of Russia since 1999.
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*5Leonid Ilich is Brezhnev, leader of Russia, 1964–82.
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*6Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov belonged to the regnant inner circle from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. Both were key actors in the two great waves of terror, 1931–33 (the countryside), and 1937–38(the cities and towns). This is the last footnote. And the reader may want a question answered, in view of what is to come. Do I forgive him? In the end, yes, I do. The only thing I don’t forgive is that he wouldn’t let me drive him to the airport. That was O’Hare: at least another hour.
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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2006 by Martin Amis
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All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2006.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
LC Control Number: 2006047397
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Amis, Martin, 1949–
House of meetings / Martin Amis.
I. Title.
PR6051.M58H68 2007 823'.914 C2006-905392-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26730-6
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