by Adam Roberts
I stood like that, uncomfortably bent over, for long seconds. The next thing I remember is that I was no longer standing, but was instead slumped with one arm stuck out through the windowframe and the other trapped behind the lukewarm radiator. I suppose I must have passed out. I couldn’t tell you for how long. The snow against my face was giving me more authentic experiences of burning than had the flames.
I was sober enough to get myself to the hospital, and drunk enough not to panic on the way. The doctors treated me in that weary manner they employ upon the drinkers who throng their hospitals with idiot injuries, although they were impressed, I could tell, at my foresight in chilling the burns so effectively at the site of the injury. After a few days I was discharged to tend my bandages at home, alone. The nurse who helped me get my clothes back on and shuffle to the ward exit had a face white and pinched as any skull; and close-cropped red hair. He grinned at me. Away I went.
This was my turning point.
Now: I continued drinking through this period of convalescence, but only because I reasoned that drying myself out would require greater physical strength than a sick man possesses. I was right, too. And, true to my resolution, I stopped drinking as soon as my skin had puckered itself into its taut and tucked version of its former self - the face I wear to this day. I can speak without vanity and say that I do not, in fact, look too bad: my chin possesses a strange texture, and my beard now only grows on my neck (which I shave), but otherwise I mostly escaped this adventure without blemish. There is one exception, and that is the end of my nose. The skin on the end of my nose was burned raw, and the doctors covered its exposed gristle with a not very delicately handled skin graft: a circle from the inside of my forearm, skin of a very different texture to the normal skin of a nose. It looked, and looks to this day, as though I have something stuck to my nose. Strangers sometimes tell as much - ‘Comrade, there’s a sticking plaster on your . . . oh, I’m sorry’ - ‘Friend, is that a shred of tissue paper caught on the end of your . . . ? My apologies.’
Without alcohol to pass the time, or to distract me from the idiocy of my friends and companions, I fell into a different mode of living. I became, I suppose, grumpier and more reclusive. But at least I approached my sixtieth birthday alive. That was more than Rapoport had managed, for he disappeared into a camp in the wilderness under the rubric of ‘political dissident’, and was never heard from again. Adam Kaganovich died of a heart attack at fifty-seven. He had managed to stay out of trouble with the authorities, and had maintained his writing career; although it would be more precise to say that he had preserved his writing career by dedicating it entirely to staying out of trouble with the authorities, and none of the watery propaganda pieces he generated throughout the fifties and sixties are worth the cheap paper upon which they are printed. By the early eighties, though, his sheer longevity meant that he began to be celebrated by Russian fans of science fiction. There were conventions at which he was the guest of honour. When he died (in a Kiev hotel room, guest of honour at another convention) the papers ran complimentary obituaries.
As for the others: I lost all contact with Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. He was a fellow Muscovite, and therefore I might have expected to encounter him around or about the city, so perhaps the fact that I lost contact with him meant that he was dead. Of course, Moscow is a large city. But there are reasons, on which I shall touch later, for believing him dead all the same. As for Frenkel . . . well, in the camps, where gossip is the freest currency prisoners possess, I sometimes heard news. I heard that ‘Jan Frenkel’, the name under which he had been charged, had been sent to a camp in the furthest Siberian east. Some months later I heard he had been transferred to a specialist prison in Moscow. Some months after that I heard that he had been executed, on Stalin’s personal orders. So that was that.
2
But that wasn’t that. The gossip had got it wrong, for I met Ivan Frenkel, by chance, as it seemed, one winter morning early in 1986, walking along Prospekt Vernadskovo. More to the point he met me, for I (my eyes not being what they were) didn’t recognise him at first. He had aged well; his figure was still trim and muscular, and his face not excessively lined. He was dressed in a calf-long and expensive-looking black coat and was wearing a hat of bright blue fur. He was walking along in the company of a tall young man whose fur hat was a more decent white colour. And there he was, in the flesh, in the material mundane flesh, yelling out in a fierce voice:
‘Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky! As I live and breathe!’
Then I remembered him. ‘Ivan?’
He clasped both my shoulders and looked straight at my face. ‘By all that’s astonishing, comrade, I can hardly believe that I have met you here, on this day! What a strange luck to bring us together like this, by chance, after all these years!’
Even from the beginning I registered the strangeness in him emphasising the chance of our meeting at such length. But I only said, ‘I heard that you were dead.’
He took me to one side, out of the hearing of his tall young companion. ‘Comrade, you understand that gossip isn’t always a reliable thing.’
‘Indeed.’ I nodded at the other fellow. ‘And?’
‘Professional acquaintance.’ Frenkel nudged me a little further away from him, and then whispered, ‘It’s the most extraordinary chance meeting you like this. Konstantin, listen to me. I work for the government now.’ I understood then that the tall man in the white hat was by way of being a guard, or jailer, or minder: that his job was keeping an eye on Frenkel. Whichever government department would employ Frenkel, in whatsoever menial capacity, might well want to keep an eye on him; he had after all been in the camps.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘In a minor ministry, a minor position.’ He came closer to me. His breath did not smell pleasant. ‘Listen!’ He lowered his voice. It was the most extraordinary pantomime of secrecy. ‘Do you remember our time in the dacha? After the end of the Patriotic War, do you remember our meeting with Stalin?’
‘I remember very particularly being told not to remember it.’
‘Ah, how could we forget, though?’
‘I understand that vodka is one popular method.’
‘Those were great times!’
‘I try to resist parcelling time into good and bad. After all, from a scientific perspective one minute is exactly like another minute.’
‘Rapoport and Kaganovich are both dead, you know,’ said Frenkel. ‘As for Asterinov - nobody’s heard from him in years. He’s probably dead too. You and I are the only ones left.’
‘Really?’
‘What do you think of that?’
‘I suppose it’s a salubrious mental discipline to reflect upon mortality,’ I observed. ‘I believe the philosophers recommend it.’
‘You don’t understand! You don’t understand what I’m saying! Listen - didn’t you hear me when I said I worked for the government?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never mind that! Say I’m lowly. But perhaps I have stumbled across . . . something remarkable.’
‘When a governmental employee says something,’ I observed, ‘it is usually a good idea to check whether you’re supposed to listen or not before hearing it.’
‘That story we concocted,’ said Ivan. ‘You remember?’
‘It was a long time ago, comrade,’ I said, wearily, feeling suddenly sick of the whole conversation, and Frenkel’s peculiar eagerness - and, I suppose, of life itself.
‘We could be the only two people left alive who remember it!’
‘Or,’ I offered, ‘we could be two more of the great mass who have no idea about it.’
‘You don’t understand!’ He glanced over his shoulder once again at his minder. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying! Let’s say I’ve happened to become privy to a certain secret, state secret. It has to do with the particular department in which I clerk. Let’s say I am - privy - to one of the most secret of state secrets.’
�
��If you are, then please don’t tell me.’
‘What if I were to say to you . . .
‘Putting every sentence you utter in the conditional mode like this,’ I interrupted, ‘inoculates neither of us from potentially evil consequences.’
‘That story!’ he burst out. ‘That fiction we worked on, and that nobody else but us knows. No other human being upon the entire world knows this fiction was even written, let alone knows all the ins and outs of it, all the specifics.’
‘No fiction was ever shrouded more effectively in unknowing,’ I conceded.
‘Friend, it is starting to come true.’
The late winter sky overhead was all cloud, and had the quality of a vast marble wall reaching up to eternity, flecked with blurry specks of grey and black set in a ground as white as bleach. Moscow was lidded. The row of buildings on the far side of the road seemed crammed close against this wall. The few intervening cars moved sluggishly under its influence.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, wearily.
‘I mean exactly what I say. The things we plotted. That we buried. The story we wrote. It is starting to come true. In the real world. It’s all coming true.’
‘That doesn’t entirely sound,’ I suggested, ‘possible.’
‘No! You’re right! It’s perfectly impossible! But it’s true, nonetheless. It’s true!’
That’s how I met up with Ivan Frenkel again.
3
I am not trying to trick you. The purpose of this memoir is not trickery, or sleight-of-hand. There are no secrets in this book. I might go so far as to say: the purpose of this book is the very opposite of secrecy - it is drawing your attention to that which is hidden in plain view all the time. I am writing it to record the most profound change in my life; nothing less than a translation from one manner of existence into another, from something grossly physical into something - let us say, spiritual. You might call it ethereal, or radiative, or at the very least other. It all has to do with meeting the alien, and overcoming my cynicism. For I can confess I had fallen into a cynical, an ironic mode of life.
The great change happened in the year 1986, which was in itself a year of many changes. The Soviet Union was changing, with perestroika and glasnost and a number of suchlike words we are proud to have exported to the rest of the world. Then on 9 January - which was a Thursday - the American space-rocket Challenger was launched. I watched it, after the event, on a friend’s television. The news footage was played over and over in Russia: the rocket lifting itself on the blowtorch tail of its own blast. The spacecraft shrinking as the camera followed it up, dwindling to a white dot in the dark blue, shimmying from side to side as the camera juddered slightly on its windblown tripod. Then, without preparation, the axe descending, with its immaterial blade, and cleaving through the whole length of the spacecraft from nose to exhaust and cutting it, with a great puff of magician’s smoke, into two. The footage was silent, but, trained up by cinema, you heard the explosion anyway. One coral-like billow of white cloud suddenly blooming at the end, and two new tendrils of smoking white spiralling away in opposite directions. After that, just the endless hairy meteor-trails of debris coming back down.
No science fiction writer, even a former science fiction writer, could watch that and be unmoved.
To be honest, the mood in the USSR was a curious mix with respect to the Challenger disaster; for we envied the USA and desired to be like her to almost exactly the same degree that we loathed the USA and wished ill to befall her. It was a heart-clenching and rather contradictory occasion, that exploding rocket. Good Russians tried to kindle some national pride from the fact that, the following month, the space station Mir was launched without mishap.
The truth is that our country, having limped through a terrible century, was in a poor way. In that same February the papers were full of the news of the Mikhail Lermontov, a very large ocean vessel that ran foolishly aground near New Zealand. Our whole union was symbolised in that hulk. And what else did 1986 have in store for the USSR? Death throes. The Chernobyl disaster. The collapse of the Soviet system. The rise of the Moscow Mafia. And through it all, me picking out a precarious living interpreting between people who spoke Russian but no English and people who spoke English but no Russian. Turning Ya ne panimayu tibia into ‘[I don’t understand you, and Uspekhov! into ‘[Here’s to our success!]’
That day, when I chanced upon Ivan Frenkel again in the street, being monitored by his white-hatted official guard, he was enormously keen that we discuss this matter further. Our strange heated science fictional fantasy was coming true! We must talk about it, my friend. It must be talked about!
‘It seems a strange development,’ I noted. ‘And by strange I suppose I mean - impossible.’
Frenkel winked at me.
This is what I deduced: Frenkel presumably worked in some monitoring station - which was a safe guess, of course, since almost all of the business of government is monitoring. His days were filled with inconsequential chatter, overhearing the mild quotidian treacheries and betrayals of Soviet citizens kvetching and complaining. Given his history in the camps he would not be trusted with classified information. Perhaps it gnawed away at him, his unimportance. Perhaps he dwelled on the day when Stalin himself summoned him - him, Ivan Frenkel, science fiction writer! - to do top secret work of the greatest importance. Perhaps, being old, he blurred together that glorious past and this degraded present in some mental construction. Perhaps he interpreted something he overheard, or read, or came across as evidence that the radiation aliens were massing overhead and readying themselves to come down.
Another man might have felt some pity for an old friend, and indulged him. But I am not another man. I only wished him to go away. I had no interest in his fantasies. The question I ponder now, from my present elevated situation is: Had I known then what I now know - that Frenkel was in effect speaking the truth - would I have been so dismissive? It’s always possible, you see, that I would have been.
Frenkel pulled an official-looking notepad from his breast pocket and scribbled an address on it. ‘This is where I’m working now. There are several good places for lunch in the area.’
‘Your workplace is indeed very central.’
‘Write your address on this piece of paper.’
Not wanting to prolong the scene I scribbled something down.
‘Lenin hills?’ said Frenkel, examining what I’d written. ‘That’s a very nice area.’
‘Not bad,’ I said.
‘That’s a very nice part of town indeed,’ he said, looking me up and down.
I had written down my ex-wife’s address, not mine. I wanted rid of the man, and his peculiar official guard, or monitor, or superior. We embraced, and went our separate ways. I hoped never to see him again. Moreover I can say, as a science fiction writer, that in some alternate reality, some different branching timeline, I never did see him again. You’ll permit me, I hope, the indulgence of pausing here to imagine that eventuality - my consciousness sliding, frictionlessly, from choice to choice, veering left and right at the branching nodes of a billion quantum choices and into a world in which Frenkel and I never met again, and I lived out my life in peaceful, blissful boredom. A world in which I did not endure the sufferings I endured in this timeline. A world in which I didn’t die in Chernobyl.
PART TWO
‘The party proceeds from the Marxist-Leninist proposition:
History is made by the People, and Communism is a creation of
the People.’
From The Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted by the 22nd Congress of the Party 1961
CHAPTER 3
I shall stand before you now, as narrators used to do in old-fashioned fiction, to relate how the consequences of this story worked themselves out. We had written these aliens, and now they were coming true. You will want to know: But were they truly? And not wishing to deceive you I shall say: Yes, they were. (Of course they weren’t! At least
, either these stories were literally coming true, or they weren’t. There’s no third option.) In order to explain how this could be, I need first of all to relate two episodes. The first is a meeting I had with two Americans. The other sees me sitting in a restaurant being stung on the neck by a mosquito. It may not be immediately clear to you why these two episodes are so important; but you must trust me that they are, and that if you read on you will understand how and why.
Moscow.
The very cold winter of 1985-6 was on the cusp of changing into a very cold spring, and I was still in the process of getting on with my solitary life. I was queuing for hours every day outside dusty understocked shops, because I had no wife or girlfriend who was prepared to queue on my behalf. I was picking up work where I could find it: jabbing an accusing forefinger over and again at my typewriter to generate, slowly, the Russian version of some foreign document for Izvestia; sitting in an airless room with junior trade functionaries and a doleful-looking Cuban factory owner whose English, though execrable, was nevertheless better than his Russian, on a day when no Spanish translator could be obtained. Much of the time I had no work.
One day I was called in to the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange; an annexe of government for whom I occasionally interpreted. It was a dusty, frozen day. I walked into town to save the price of a Metro ticket. An east wind pushed its icy palm against my face, and poured chill down my collar. The sun was shining very brightly. I might describe its light as sarcastic.
The Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange was housed in an enormous concrete carton of a building on Leningradsky Prospekt. The glass of all the windows on its ground floor was covered in speckles of grit and dirt, as if they had caught grey measles. Its main entrance was an off-the-street alcove that trapped and turned over the wind most effectively. A miniature flurry of airborne jetsam seemed endlessly to be circulating in that space. Antique cigarette ends buzzed at my ankles like cardboard midges.
