Martin Amis
House of Meetings
Again to my mother
~ ~ ~
Dear Venus,
If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.
Meanwhile, I offer my congratulations. You now join a substantial contingent of young people — those condemned to tout the festering memoirs of an elderly relative. Still, you won’t have to go far: the Gagarin Press on Jones Street. Ask for Mr. Nosrin. Do not worry: I won’t be going the way of that fuddled deviant we read about, who sent whole rolls of his handiwork to One Hour Photo. Nosrin has been squared (and everything is paid for). Besides, he’s a compatriot of mine, so he’ll understand. I’d like a print run, please, consisting of a single copy. It is yours.
You were always asking me why I could never “open up,” why I found it so hard to “vent” and “decompress” and all the rest of it. Well, with a past like mine, you pretty much live for the interludes when you aren’t thinking about it — and time spent talking about it clearly isn’t going to be one of them. There was a more obscure inhibition: the frankly neurotic fear that you wouldn’t believe me. I saw you turning away, I saw you turning your face away and slowly shaking your lowered head. And this was for some reason an unendurable prospect. I said my fear was neurotic, but I know it to be widely shared by men with similar histories. Shared neurosis, shared anxiety. Mass emotion: we will have to keep returning to the subject of mass emotion.
When at first I assembled the facts before me, black words on a white page, I found myself staring at a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror. So I’ve tried to give the thing a bit of structure. Inasmuch as I could locate some semblance of form and pattern, I felt less isolated, and could sense the assistance of impersonal forces (which I badly needed). This intimation of unity was perhaps delusive. The fatherland is eternally prodigal with anti-illuminations, with negative epiphanies — but not with unity. There aren’t any unities in my country.
In the 1930s there was a miner called Aleksei Stakhanov who, some said, unearthed more than a hundred tons of coal — the quota was seven — in a single shift. Hence the cult of the Stakhanovites, or “shock” workers: canyon-fillers and mountain-flatteners, human bulldozers and excavators. Stakhanovites, very often, were obvious frauds; very often, too, they were strung up by their mates, who hated the ballooning norms…There were also “shock” writers. They were taken off the factory floor, in their thousands, and trained to write propaganda in the guise of prose fiction. My purpose is otherwise, but that’s how you’d better think of me — as a “shock” writer who is telling the truth.
The truth will be painful for you. It has once again struck me (a subtle laceration, like a paper cut) that my most disgraceful act was perpetrated, not in the distant past, like nearly all the others, but well within your lifetime, and a matter of months before I was introduced to your mother. My ghost expects censure. But make it personal, Venus; make it your own and not the censure of your group and your ideology. Yes, you heard me, young lady: your ideology. Oh, it’s a mild ideology, I agree (mildness is its one idea). Nobody’s going to blow themselves to bits for it.
Your assimilation of what I did — this will in any case be a heavy call on your courage and generosity. But I think that even a strict retributionist (which you are not) would be reasonably happy with the way things turned out. It could be objected, and I would not argue, that I didn’t deserve your mother; and I didn’t deserve to have you in the house for nearly twenty years. Nor do I now seriously fear that you will excommunicate me from your memory. I don’t think you’ll do that. Because you understand what it means to be a slave.
Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right — it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from.
You are as well-prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you — look at the burnish of you.
PART I
1. The Yenisei, September 1, 2004
My little brother came to camp in 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches…
Now that wouldn’t be a bad opening sentence for the narrative proper, and I am impatient to write it. But not yet. “Not yet, not yet, my precious!” This is what the poet Auden used to say to the lyrics, the sprawling epistles, that seemed to be lobbying him for premature birth. It is too early, now, for the war between the brutes and the bitches. There will be war in these pages, inevitably: I fought in fifteen battles, and, in the seventh, I was almost castrated by a secondary missile (a three-pound iron bolt), which lodged itself in my inner thigh. When you get a wound as bad as that, for the first hour you don’t know whether you’re a man or a woman (or whether you’re old or young, or who your father was or what your name is). Even so, an inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell — because this is a love story. All right, Russian love. But still love.
The love story is triangular in shape, and the triangle is not equilateral. I sometimes like to think that the triangle is isosceles: it certainly comes to a very sharp point. Let’s be honest, though, and admit that the triangle remains brutally scalene. I trust, my dear, that you have a dictionary nearby? You never needed much encouragement in your respect for dictionaries. Scalene, from the Greek, skalenos: unequal.
It’s a love story. So of course I must begin with the House of Meetings.
I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain — a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of — I don’t know — thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer. But that’s still a very long ride. The brochure describes the cruise as “a journey to the destination of a lifetime”—a phrase that carries a somewhat unwelcome resonance. Bear in mind, please, that I was born in 1919.
Unlike almost everywhere else, over here, the Georgi Zhukov is neither one thing nor the other: neither futuristically plutocratic nor futuristically stark. It is a picture of elderly, practically tsarist Komfortismus. Below the waterline, where the staff and crew slumber and carouse, the ship is of course a fetid ruin — but look at the dining room, with its honey-gold drapes, its brothelly red velvets. And our load is light. I have a four-berth cabin all to myself. The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on…Moscow is impressive — grimly fantastic in its pelf. And Petersburg, too, no doubt, after its billion-dollar birthday: a tercentenary for the slave-built city “stolen from the sea.” It’s everywhere else that is now below the waterline.