Free House of Meetings by Martin Amis Page A

to Kazan.
    I said, Where the flu’s less bad. And it’s good news anyway.
    He leaned into me and pressed his face to my chest.
    “You make me very happy, brother. That’s it—
get her out of town
. And I don’t care what else Kitty said.”
    This was just as well. Kitty said that she thought it inconceivable that Zoya would “wait” for Lev. According to her, Zoya already had a new favorite at the Tech, and was “all over him” in the canteen. It is my solemn duty, Venus, to admit to the coarse joy this sentence gave me.
    I said, What do you expect? It’s Kitty.
    “That’s right. It’s Kitty.”
    Yes, it was Kitty: that unreliable narrator. I wanted someone with greater authority to tell me it was true—about Zoya being all over her new favorite. I wanted someone like Georgi Zhukov or, better still, Winston Churchill to tell me it was true.
    “Can you write back?” he said.
    I’m supposed to be able to. But they don’t like me. Anyway there’s never anything to write with. Or write on.
    “Why don’t they like you? I mean, I can think of a reason or two. But why?”
    The dogs.
    “Ah. The dogs.”
    I was quite famous, in camp, for the way I dealt with the dogs. Most prisoners, including Lev, were horribly afraid of them. Not me. When I was a toddler we had a mule-sized borzoi. I can’t even remember her; but she passed something on to me before she went. I have no fear of dogs. So I used to make them cringe. It’s just a dog, imbued with a pig nature. It’s just a snarl, waiting to become a cringe. I would often risk a beating to make the dogs cringe.
    Lev said, “I went to the guardhouse and asked the pig. It says on my file: Without the Right to Correspondence. I thought that that was code for immediate execution. So did the pig. He kept peering at it and then peering at me. I don’t have the right. But I’ll keep on. I’ll get it.”
    I said, untruthfully, I’m glad you don’t worry about Kitty. And about Zoya.
    “Worry? I’m good at worrying. When I started being her friend, before, I used to worry that someone was going to get her pregnant. But she didn’t get pregnant. She can’t. She had an abortion when she was sixteen and she can’t. Then I worried that she was going to get arrested or kicked to death in the street. But other men, you mean? No. The thing about her…She’s a hundred-percenter. And so am I, now. My uh, my status as a noncombatant. That’s for her. That’s for us.”
    You talk in riddles, Lev. Don’t you understand that what you do here doesn’t count?
    “Doesn’t it? Won’t it? You don’t see it, do you. It’ll count.”
             
    On top of everything else there was also the huge brute, Arbachuk, who took a liking to my brother in what seemed to be the worst possible way. Every night he’d search him out. Why? To tousle him and taunt him and kiss him and tickle him. It was fashionable, at that time, for a brute to take a fascist as a pet, though Lev claimed it felt more like the other way around. “Suddenly I’m best friends with a mandrill,” he said, which was game of him, because he was badly and rightly frightened. As Arbachuk shouldered his way through the barracks, with his tattoos and his moist, gold-flecked smile, Lev would close his eyes for a second and the light would pass from his face. All I could do about Arbachuk was indicate, with a glance and a movement of the shoulders, that if it really came to it he would have to get by me too. Lev said that it was much worse when I wasn’t there. So I always was. And when I couldn’t be, we relied on Semyon or Johnreed, two of the higher-ranking officer veterans, a colonel and a captain, who were both Heroes of the Soviet Union—an honor of which, on arrest, they were naturally stripped…You’re probably wondering about that name: Johnreed. A lot of people his age were called Johnreed, after John Reed, the author of
Ten Days That Shook the World
. There were so many Johnreeds in camp