House of Meetings by Martin Amis

must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph. And it isn’t just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude—my appetite for generalizations. Your crowd, they’re so terrorstricken by generalizations that they can’t even manage a declarative sentence. “I went to the store? To buy orange juice?” That’s right, keep it tentative—even though it’s already happened. Similarly, you say “okay” when an older hand would say (c” “My name is Pete?” “Okay.” “I was born in Ohio?” “Okay.” What you’re saying, with your okays, is this: for the time being I take no exception. You have not affronted me
yet
. No one has been humiliated
so far
.
    A generalization might sound like an attempt to stereo-type—and we can’t have that. I’m at the other end. I worship generalizations. And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.
    The name of your ideology, in case anyone asks, is Westernism. It would be no use to you here.
             
    Now, at noon, the passengers and crew of the
Georgi Zhukov
are disembarking in Dudinka with as much triumphalism as their numbers will allow. The tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that’s what a port looks like—a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettledrums of the storage vats.
    But this is different. It is a Mars of rust, in various hues and concentrations. Some of the surfaces have dimmed to a modest apricot, losing their barnacles and asperities. Elsewhere, it looks like arterial blood, newly shed, newly dried. The rust boils and bristles, and the keel of the upended ferryboat glares out across the water with personalized fury, as if oxidation were a crime it would lay at your door.
    Tottering and swaying over my cane, I think of those more or less ridiculous words, Greek-derived, for irrational fears, many of which describe more or less ridiculous conditions: anthophobia (fear of flowers), pogonophobia (beards), deipnophobia (dinner parties), triskaidekaphobia (the number thirteen). Yes, these are sensitive souls. But there’s one for rust (iophobia); and I think I’ve got it. I’ve got iophobia. The condition doesn’t strike me, now, as at all ridiculous—or at all irrational. Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.
    A stupor of self-satisfaction:
that’s
the state to be in when your life is drawing to an end. And not this state—not my state. It isn’t death that seems so very frightening. What frightens me is life, my own, and what it’s going to turn out to add up to.
    There is a letter in my pocket that I have yet to read.
             
    The big wrongs—you reach a point where you’ve just about bedded them down. And then the little wrongs wake up and bite, with their mean little teeth.
    What’s annoying me now is the state-driven prudery of the 1930s. These were my teenage years, and I might have got off to a much better start. I fondly see myself kiting with Katya, mushrooming with Masha, bobsleighing with Bronislava—first kiss, first love. But the state wouldn’t have it. “Free love” was officially classified as a bourgeois deformity. It was the “free” bit they really didn’t like. Still, they didn’t like love either.
    Only this year has it emerged—some sort of picture of the sexual mores at the court of Joseph Vissarionovich. And it unsurprisingly transpires that the revolutionary energy had its erotic aspect. The Kremlin circle, in short, was a hive of adultery and seigneurism.
    It was like food and space to breathe. They could have it. And we couldn’t. Why not? Sex isn’t a finite resource; and free