House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780676977875
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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.

“I don’t think I do expect too much.”

We embraced. And as I ducked out I saw the small contraption on the windowsill, the test tube, steadied by its hand-carved wooden frame, and the single stemless bloom—an amorous burgundy.

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