by Adam Roberts
‘[What subject?]’
‘[I hope you won’t mind. But James said that you are a science fiction writer.]’
Now it was my turn to bark with laughter. ‘[Indeed! I used to be.]’
‘[You have not mentioned the fact. Perhaps I trespass upon your privacy by talking about it.]’
‘[By no means. It is simply that I have not written science fiction for a long time.]’
‘[Might I ask?]’ she said. ‘[Why did you stop writing it?]’
‘[I,]’ I started. But I did not complete the sentence.
We rolled along the road. Saltykov was humming something to himself in the front seat. The radio was playing, but the volume was turned down so very low that I hardly believed he could hear it.
‘[I apologise,]’ said Dora. ‘[I feel I have touched upon a tender spot.]’
‘[It’s not that, it’s not that,]’ I said. ‘[I simply have not thought about it for a long time. My life seemed to—]’ But again the sentence fell away. I had been going to say die, but that seemed an absurd and melodramatic thing to say. I tried again. ‘[Science fiction was my passion when I was young. Because science fiction is about the future, and when we are young we are fascinated with our future worlds. That’s natural, since when we are young we possess no past, or none worth mentioning; but we possess an endless future stretching before us. But I am no longer young. When we are old, the future vanishes from our life to become replaced with death. Accordingly we become intrigued, rather, with the past. We have the same escapist urge we had as youngsters, but it takes us back, into memory, instead of forward into science fiction]’
‘[You’re not so old,]’ she said. I was about to contradict her, scoffingly, when I realised that her words were intended not as a statement but as a reassurance to me. So instead I said. ‘[Do you read science fiction?]’
‘[I love it,]’ she said, gazing through the glass at the evening sky. ‘[Those stars ! Who would read about ordinary things when they could read about extraordinary ones? Of course, I am a Scientologist.] ’
‘[I confess to my ignorance about your religion.]’
‘[Sometimes it is mocked,]’ she said, ‘[Because people don’t understand it. And because it is a relatively new religion. But it is rooted in the faculty of humanity to unlock our imaginative potential. The founder, our leader, is, was, a writer of science fiction. That’s not a coincidence.]’
‘[The truth is,]’ I said, feeling the urge to confide in Dora - an urge I had felt with nobody for many decades. ‘[The truth is the war bashed the science fiction out of me. The war and after the war. The things that happened. The imagination is like any other part of the body; it can be healthy and strong, or it can be broken, or diseased, and it can even become amputated. Science fiction is the Olympics Games of the imaginatively fit. After the war I was too injured, mentally, to partake.]’
‘[Like an amputee?] she said, looking at me. ‘[But it need not be like that. I mean, if we were talking about another sort of writing, then of course I would see what you mean. But science fiction . . .]’
‘[I’m afraid I don’t follow.]’
‘[I only mean - it’s science fiction! If your science-fictional imagination is broken, you can rebuild it with imaginary high technology! If your writer’s soul is amputated, then because we are talking of science fiction you can fit it with a robotic prosthesis! You can write again, and write better, stronger, as a cyborg.]’
‘[Wonderful,]’ I said, my face aching again as I tried to smile. ‘[I have not previously considered it in that light.]’
We drove through the darkness. ‘Shall I take a turn driving now?’ I said to Saltykov.
‘Do not distract me!’ he snapped.
‘I am only offering to . . .’
‘Talking to the driver! Distracting the driver!’
‘You may be getting tired. Why not let me drive for a few hours whilst you sleep?’
‘You are distracting me!’ he complained. ‘I told you not to distract me! Do not talk to me!’
I gave up on that approach. Instead Dora and I talked about Scientology. She explained aspects of her faith to me, and I sat meekly and listened. Then we talked a little about science fiction, and the contrary impulses in the human spirit; to dedicate itself to the past, which is to say (because the past is by definition dead and gone) to death; or to dedicate itself to the future, and to possibility, and to a better world. ‘[Communism,]’ I said, ‘[is the same desire. For the future. For a better future.’]
‘[Communism is science fiction,]’ said Dora, gravely.
‘[And vice versa.]’
‘[I can think of many American writers of science fiction who would be insulted to think so.]’
‘[Perhaps they do not fully understand the genre in which they are working.]’
Eventually we both slept, or tried to. I dozed uneasily at first, in the back seat with Dora. I sat facing forward and simply closed my eyes; she moved her bulk with a surprising grace and ease, almost felinely, to settle herself into a more comfortable position. Saltykov was humming: he still had the radio on at low volume, and the intermittent wash of band music, folk music and the occasional Western song formed a fractured lullaby. I drifted in and out of sleep.
I was aware, in a half-awake manner, that the motion of the car had shuffled me along the back seat a little, and that the side of my head was now resting on Dora’s well-fleshed shoulder. It was fantastically comfortable; it was really astonishingly comfortable; there was a rightness about it that brought me a sense of peace and sweetness. I suppose I was also conscious of a certain unease at the unbidden and unsought intimacy; but only very distantly, a more quiet sound than the radio playing in the front of the car. After all, she was asleep, and her shoulder was, quite simply, extraordinarily comfortable. I slipped away into deeper sleep.
I experienced that unconscious muscular spasm that occasionally accompanies the drift into sleep, and which is known to the medical profession as the myoclonic jerk. I lurched forward and smashed against the back of the driver’s seat. This was enough to wake me.
I had not experienced a myoclonic jerk.
It took a moment to go through the mental manoeuvres to understand what had happened. The car had been in a collision. We had crashed. We were stopped, slewed across the road. The sky outside was cold grey, mixed with a quantity of purple-blue.
‘What?’ I cried, pulling myself upright. ‘What? What happened ?’
‘We hit something,’ said Saltykov from the front, in a tight voice. He did not look round.
‘What did we hit?’
Dora had been rolled over by the collision, and was face down in the footwell. She got herself upright with some effort. ‘[What happened?]’
‘We hit something,’ I said to her, automatically speaking Russian. And then, in English: ‘[We hit something.]’
‘A deer,’ said Saltykov, in his same tight voice.
‘[We hit a deer,]’ I said.
We all opened our respective doors and tumbled from the car. The sky was underlit, a perfect dark grey concavity above, paling only slightly at the horizon. There were stars above us. To the east, back along the road we had been driving, the darkness was beginning that slow dissolution into warmth, as if the horizon line were an electric filament beginning the process of heating up. To the right and the left of us, flanking the road, shapes loomed: darkness solidified. Forests.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘A little way from Bryansk,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘We’ve made good time,’ I said.
‘I have damaged my taxi,’ he said, in a strangled voice. ‘My taxi is my livelihood. Who will want to hail a taxi with a distorted or tangled front portion?’
‘It is not so bad,’ I said, peering. ‘It is all right, really.’
‘It is not all right. It is so bad.’
‘[The poor deer!]’ said Dora, going over to the side of the road. An imperfectly bundled-up roll of
brown carpet lay there: the victim. I went to stand beside Dora. The creature’s neck was bent impressively backwards; one of its eyes was black, and the other a mess of red. Its horns were nothing more than spring buds bulging from the top of its head, furred like catkins. I took hold of its rear hoofs and pulled the carcass fully off the highway, to deposit it amongst the bushes at the roadside. When I climbed back onto the tarmac Dora was standing, head back, gazing upwards at the spread of stars still visible in the predawn sky.
‘[So many,]’ she said to me.
‘[Rather more than is absolutely necessary, I’ve always thought,]’ I replied, in a sour voice. I wiped my hands on the inside of my jacket, but doing this made my hands feel no cleaner, and only seemed to spread the sense of deathly contamination onto my clothing.
‘[Necessary for what?]’ Dora asked me in a voice of child-like surprise.
‘[Don’t you think the sheer number is a little vulgar?]’ I asked.
She began to laugh, a gorgeous little trickling laugh. ‘[Your grumpiness, because it is not heartfelt, but only a sort of act you put on - your grumpiness is charming!]’
This wrongfooted me. I found myself smiling. ‘[You’re the first person to say so, or think so,]’ I said.
‘[That profusion,]’ she said, lifting her right arm to gesture at the sky, ‘[it means life.]’
‘[You mean that amongst so many stars there must be some with planets upon which intelligence has evolved.]’
‘[Four hundred million stars in our galaxy,]’ she said. ‘[A billion galaxies. Of course there is life. That is precisely what profusion means.]’ She was talking with a tone of awe in her voice; but then I considered her religious affiliation, and understood that such awe was strictly religious.
‘[We’re surrounded by life above,]’ she said. ‘[And canopied over our heads with life. But not below us . . . below us is only rock.]’
‘[Surely there are moles?]’
‘[All right,]’ she said, ‘[I concede the moles.]’ I was experiencing the peculiar sensation of the smile again in my cheeks.
‘We must go on,’ insisted Saltykov. ‘We have to be at Chernobyl today or it will be too late. We have no time to lose. Please, reenter the car.’
The car groaned on along the road as the sun rose and licked the sky clean of stars. Dora and I talked together. I told her about the radiation aliens; which is to say, the story of their creation. She expressed polite astonishment, and seemed genuinely involved in the tale. Halfway through this dawn conversation I was, with sudden insight, able to put my finger on the unusual and slightly uncomfortable sensation in my torso: it was happiness. I had not felt that for a very long time.
The only true ground for amazement is rarity. Consequentially, amazement is always a relative judgement. She was like no woman I had met before. Of course it is also true to say that nobody who has suffered prolonged periods of hunger, indeed of starvation, as my generation of Russians has done, could ever find too skinny a woman attractive. Such women are, for people who have lived through the times I have lived through, the icons of a world that seeks to deny us nourishment. Dora was the very opposite of this. This is my roundabout way of saying that, as the sun came up over western Russia, on that nearly deserted road, I found myself struck by the thought that Dora was a beautiful woman. You don’t have to look so surprised that I would say such a thing. It was a belated realisation, yes, that’s true; but my brain was old, and battered, and scorched, and could not make the rapid connections and realisations that had marked my youth. The important thing is that I got there in the end.
CHAPTER 14
We arrived at the Ukrainian border a couple of hours later. There were wooden sheds and a barrier, but the barrier was raised and nobody seemed to be, about. ‘[We are, after all, all members of the one glorious union of soviet republics,]’ I explained to Dora.
Twenty minutes into the new country we drove into a town. Saltykov found a source of diesel: a garage tucked into a small alcove behind a caf’. We waited whilst a tractor driver filled the tank of his machine, and then watched as he clambered onto the seat and drove it away: its Oo wheels leaving four parallel blotchy lines of mud on the tarmac. Then Saltykov filled his tank; and Dora and I walked about to stretch our legs. There was a caf’ overlooking the macadamized square, but it was closed, and to judge by the thickness of dust on its inner windowsill, and the number of dead flies behind the glass, had been closed for some time. We walked a little further, up a narrow street of lowering yellow-plaster housefronts, the windows tiny, inset holes each blocked with a single fat vertical iron bar. We discovered a bakery where we were able to buy some new bread, and some milk.
Back in the car we drove out of the town and munched the bread and drank the milk as we travelled. ‘I had a conversation with the woman at the pumps,’ said Saltykov.
‘Really?’
‘She asked what the registration of my car was. I explained it was Moscow. She said she didn’t know how long it had been since a Moscow registration had filled up at her fuel pump.’
I waited to see where this story was going, or what the punchline was going to be; but this seemed as far as Saltykov wanted to take it.
‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ I said.
The road took us through other towns and through countryside and finally into the suburbs of Kiev; a great many low concrete buildings, and then, as we came closer to the centre of the city, larger high-rise concrete buildings. ‘[I don’t see any older buildings,]’ said Dora, peering through the glass.
‘[Not much survived the war,]’ I said.
It is an attractive city despite all that: wide boulevards lined with many chestnut trees, or cherry trees, both of which were just starting to bud into blossom. Trams clanked and swayed down the middle of the larger roads; and their electrical cables ruled as-yet unwritten musical scores against the sky. There was an air of mid-morning bustle. It seemed busy, after so much vacant countryside.
‘[And where is the American embassy?]’ Dora asked me.
‘[I don’t know. I shall ask Saltykov.]’
But this conversation did not go well. ‘I don’t know where it is!’ he snapped at me. ‘How should I know?’
‘Well I don’t know either. We need to ask somebody. Find a policeman.’
‘We can hardly address a policeman!’ Saltykov said. ‘Are you insane? How insane are you? Is that the form your insanity takes - drawing a policeman’s attention to us?’
‘The policeman need not know who we are,’ I said.
‘Driving a Moscow car? Asking for the American embassy? How could this not draw attention? Perhaps I should add that I am a qualified nuclear physicist, and that you are on the run from the KGB?’
‘There is no need for sarcasm,’ I suggested.
‘If you persist in—’ Saltykov began, and then he jerked the steering wheel. Saltykov, it seemed, had been compelled to swerve to avoid colliding with a small motorcycle. The tyres sang like sirens, and with a cumbrous shudder the car moved sideways, slid a little, and stopped. Immediately, from surrounding morning traffic, a symphony of horns rang out.
‘You distracted me!’ gasped Saltykov, in outrage. ‘Did I tell you not to distract me when I was driving? And yet you distracted me! I very nearly collided with the two-wheeled vehicle.’
He seemed to be in a very bad mood. I have no doubt that this, of course, was in part to do with his lack of sleep.
‘Move the car,’ I urged, from the back seat. ‘We are blocking the junction.’
‘Do not tell me what to do. And do not distract me,’ said Saltykov.
‘All right - but move the car.’
‘That is telling me what to do! I asked you not to tell me what to do! You deliberately told me what to do after I told you not to tell me what to do! I need hardly tell you how distracting it is to tell me what to do when I have previously told you not to tell me what to do!’
I put my teeth together, behind my lips, and trie
d counting, silently to ten; in Russian, then in English. I still felt the urge to pound Saltykov with my elderly fists. I tried again in French. At huit Saltykov had calmed down sufficiently to restart the engine and move the car.
We drove through the streets of central Kiev in silence. Eventually, Saltykov drew his car to a stop outside a row of shops. He turned the engine off and withdrew the key. ‘You may go into one of these shops,’ he told me, ‘and ask about the embassy.’
‘Very well,’ I retorted, clambering from the car in a fury.
The first shop sold clothes and, although there was very little by way of stock, there was of course a queue. I contemplated joining the queue, although I would have been queuing not to buy anything but only to ask the way to the American embassy. This, I decided, would be a ridiculous thing to do. So I came out of the shop again, and went into the shop next door: a bookshop. The shopgirl was fitting blocks of volumes into the shelves like a bricklayer; I asked if she knew the whereabouts of the American embassy, and she expressed her perfect and complete ignorance. Coming onto the street again I stopped a passerby: a bearded individual in a black overcoat with a bundle of wooden dowels in his hand. ‘American embassy?’ he said, with a puzzled expression. ‘In Kiev? There’s no American embassy in Kiev. You want Moscow. That’s where the American embassy is.’
‘Comrade,’ I pressed, in a crestfallen voice. ‘You are sure?’
‘What should Ukraine want with an American embassy? Kch, kch, kch.’ This last was a strange little scraping-gulping noise he made in his throat, something I took to be an expression of disapproval. ‘You know, you should know about the embassy being in Moscow,’ he added, his face creasing further from puzzlement to suspicion. ‘You have a Moscow accent.’
‘Thank you, comrade,’ I said, stepping away.
‘Have you come from Moscow to Kiev to look for an American embassy?’ he called after me, pointing at Saltykov’s Moscow numberplates. ‘Why would you not simply go to the American embassy in Moscow?’
I hurried back to the car. The man stood on the pavement staring at us. ‘Drive away,’ I told Saltykov.
