House of Meetings by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online

were, Lev and me, with our books and our thick periodicals, our basic German, English, French, our heavy chess pieces, our maps and charts.
    I said, as I’d planned, You have arrived in hell. I don’t have to tell you that. Here, man is wolf to man. But the funny thing is it’s just like anywhere else.
    “No it isn’t. It isn’t like anywhere else.”
    Yes it is. You came up under Vad, am I right?
    Vad, Vadim, was Lev’s twin brother (fraternal—profoundly nonidentical), a leering, sidling, scheming kid, and “
very
socialist,” as our mother used to say as she fanned herself and blew the fringe off her brow. Tormenting Lev was Vad’s chief hobby and project for fifteen years. I’d tell Lev, Hit back, hit back. And keep hitting back. And Lev did hit back. But always just that single flail, and then he’d curl himself up again to take his punishment. Vad, in 1948, was a military politico, junior but hyperactive, and stationed in East Germany. Incidentally, he resembled me more closely than he resembled his twin. Tacit family lore had it that Vadim, implacable even in the womb, had shouldered Lev to the side and then drained off everything good.
    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