by Adam Roberts
‘You fought in the Great Patriotic War?’
‘I suppose so. I’m sorry but I can’t remember precisely.’
‘Well. There has been a degree of neural damage. It seems to be affecting your left brain - your right side - in particular. There has been additional scarring, and various other forms of superficial damage. But all things considered. All things considered—’
I felt quite remarkably calm. But a memory of standing in the reactor hall at the power plant, trying and failing to persuade ox-like Trofim to put the grenade away, flashed into my mind, and with it came the memory of full-strength anxiety. ‘Chernobyl,’ I cried. ‘It blew up!’
‘No no,’ said the doctor, crossly. ‘I explained this. It is true that somebody had conspired to vandalise the power plant - and true that the consequences would have been horrific. There was recovered, from the bottom of one of the spent fuel pools, a suitcase containing a number of grenades. Had they exploded, particularly had they been fixed to the wall that the spent fuel pool shared with the reactor . . . well then there would have been serious damage. But the single grenade in the hand of your friend did not do so much damage. The other grenades were covered by thirty metres of water, and were quite untouched by the explosion. The reactor itself is shielded in dozens of metres of concrete, and it was fine. Almost all the force of the blast went upwards. There was, I am told, one piece of damage. Trofim was holding a gun in his right hand. The hand was blown off by the explosion, still holding the gun; and the gun struck the ground. The round in the chamber fired, and this bullet pierced one of the steam pipes, leading to a small reduction in pressure. But the staff have practised for that eventuality. They were able to restore pressure. The explosion, on the other hand, caused very little damage.’
‘Luck indeed,’ I observed.
‘Or fate.’
‘Thank you, Comrade Doctor,’ I said.
‘Comrade Colonel Doctor,’ she said, and left the room, locking the door behind her.
I dreamt. I was in the dacha again, but the quality of the experience was not as visionary as it had been before. There was Stalin, except that his moustache was a mess of fine tentacles rather than hair, his nostrils were two teethed orifices, his skin bristled with pale warts, and his eyes glowed red.
I awoke with a sudden insight, brilliance igniting inside my head like fireworks. ‘Christmas Day, 1917!’ I cried aloud. ‘The day of my birth!’
I was telling an empty room.
Death is a red-haired man: his skin is pale, and his eyes unusually dark. He smiles. He has every reason too. How he must haunt a hospital such as this.
I dreamed, and when I woke up the nurse was rolling me to one side to pull away the bedpan. ‘There’s a Militia officer here to speak with you,’ he said.
I brought my eyes into focus, something that seemed to take me longer now than formerly it had. I don’t know who I expected to see, but it was a uniformed policeman, sitting in a hospital chair, his broad-peaked cap in his lap.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I am Officer Pahulanik of the Ukrainian Militia. I am a policeman. Do you understand?’
‘Good afternoon. I understand perfectly.’
‘There are, it seems, protocols regarding the circumstances under which I may take you into custody.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Your case seems complicated,’ said Officer Pahulanik. ‘You were arrested in Moscow with respect to the death of an American citizen. You were released into the custody of the KGB. According to the KGB, you are still in their custody.’
‘They do not say they released me?’
‘Nor that you escaped. Nor that you are dead. Accordingly . . . it is awkward. No policeman wishes to incur the wrath of the KGB, or trespass upon their proper ground.’ He looked carefully at me for a time. ‘Then there is this matter of attempted sabotage in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.’
‘I was endeavouring to prevent such sabotage. At risk of my own life, I tackled an individual armed with a grenade.’
‘That would seem to be the case,’ said Officer Pahulanik. ‘And yet, it remains to be explained why you - a lowly translator from Moscow - chanced to be inside Chernobyl at the precise moment a saboteur attempted to explode the facility with grenades.’
‘My memory is a little enholed,’ I said. Then, since enholed did not seem to me a proper Russian word I stopped. I spent a few moments trying to remember whether it was, perhaps, an English word. When that didn’t seem right I pondered, vaguely, about French. Then I said, ‘I suffered a degree of injury of the brain. An irregular piece of metal was deposited in my frontal lobe.’
‘So I hear,’ said the policeman. ‘Does this mean that you can no longer remember what you were doing inside the facility?’
I thought. Elements of the journey from Moscow flapped batlike through the cavernous spaces of my brain. There were no faces, and no names, in my memorious supply. I said, ‘I’m afraid not. I am not memorious.’ My memory refused to focus. Was memorious even a word? And there was somebody else, too, but I could not figure who, or what this person had been doing, or what my relation to them was. I could not remember how I had come to be in Kiev after being in Moscow.
‘I was with somebody,’ I said, in a slow voice. ‘Or I wasn’t. It must be one or the other.’ I was not attempting to deceive the police; and I had the distinct impression that it was all there. But it was a great deal to process. Perhaps I should say, I remembered, but I was not yet used to having so many memories in my head again.
‘Indeed,’ said the policeman. ‘It seems you were indeed with somebody. You were with a KGB agent called Trofim. Another agent, whose identity and present location is obscure, had gathered the entire staff of the Chernobyl nuclear station in Reactor One. He was addressing the staff in stern and, it seems, forbidding terms, although none of them seem very certain as to the exact content of his speech. But there he was, talking away. And now he has vanished. You, comrade, are officially still in KGB custody in Moscow. You certainly were there. Next thing we know, the KGB are in Chernobyl. And so are you. You didn’t fly down, because we have checked all the passenger manifests. Nor did you come by train, because the stations were guarded. You do not, according to records, possess a car. Perhaps you might have stolen one, but all the cars in the Chernobyl car park have been accounted for. So how else might you have come there? What do you think?’
‘Why should the KGB bring a prisoner all the way down to the Ukraine from Moscow?’ I asked, genuinely. I asked the question because I wanted to know the answer.
‘I find it best not to pry too closely into the business of the KGB,’ said the policeman. In all this, he had not moved from his chair, nor approached the bed. ‘It would be injurious to my career, and possibly to my life, if I attempted to arrest an individual who was already in KGB custody.’
‘I see your dilemma.’
‘Well, then, comrade. Perhaps you can help me. In the cupboard beside your bed - there - would you mind?’
He pointed, and, with some difficulty (for movement did not come easily to me, and was not comfortable), I opened the bedside cabinet and brought out an alien raygun. It was a long tube, with a handle, and a switch.
‘That is a Geiger counter,’ said the policeman.
‘It is not an alien raygun,’ I said, mostly for my own benefit.
‘Indeed not. Please point it at you, and press the button.’
I did so. Immediately the device leapt to life with a ferocious crackling, like ten thousand dry twigs on a huge fire. ‘That’s not good,’ I observed, placidly.
‘Comrade, you have pressed the test button. That is there to ensure that the machine’s speakers are operational.’
‘If that were a reading of my radioactivity . . .’
‘Then you’d be dead in half an hour, and I’d be very ill. Switch it off.’ I did so. ‘Press the trigger, on the front of the handle.’
I did this, and the device burped and snapped. It
popped and was silent; popped twice and was silent again.’
‘There,’ said the policeman. ‘It turns out you are radioactive.’
‘Not badly?’
‘Badly enough to prevent me taking you into custody, I’m pleased to say. You can turn it off now,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘and replace it in the cabinet. Your nurses and doctors may need to avail themselves of it.’ He got to his feet. ‘Comrade, the Ukrainian Militia is content to leave you in this secure medical facility.’
I spent ten minutes manoeuvring my legs out of the bed, and another fifteen leaning against the wheeled crutch of my drip-rack, two fluid-heavy sacs swinging like an old man’s pendulous testicles (ballbag? I thought; and understood that this was a memory too, although I wasn’t sure how it related to the others). With infinite attention I made my way over to the window. My joints seemed to squeak. Or else the wheels on the drip-rack squeaked. It was one of the two, certainly. And here was the window. I looked through it. There was a courtyard, and standing in the courtyard, three floors below me, were three nurses: two female nurses and one male nurse. They were smoking, talking. One had her back to me: a plump and cornfed foreshortened torso, from my perspective, upon which the manmade fabric of her uniform stretched and wrinkled. This chimed, somehow, deep inside me. She had flame-coloured hair. The other female had hair the colour of black coffee, and a wide-faced, wide-hipped loveliness. She was laughing. And every now and again she threw a great bale of smoke over her left shoulder like a worker clearing spectral snow with an invisible shovel. As I watched, the male nurse - casually and with no reaction of shock or outrage from either woman - reached out and squeezed the breast of the brunette. His face was animated, but he was not looking at the woman he was pawing. Perhaps he was telling a story, and this was illustrating it. I was struck by how strange an action it was.
They finished their smokes and went in. There was nothing in the yard now except a stone bench, and some runty bushes, and a deal of litter on paving stones: spent cigarettes, old cartons, rubbish.
I looked over the roof at the sky: a cold-looking, hazed white. The sun was there, diluted by the cover of clouds. I looked and the sun seemed to be shivering in the sky. The motion disturbed me, because, after all, the sun is the stable point around which the world moves, and everybody knows that. And if we know that the sun herself moves too - as perhaps she does, on some larger galactic pavanne, then we need not trouble ourselves with it. But to shimmer in the sky? It was as if the sun was struggling in harness. Then I put my hand to my face and understood that it was my head that was trembling; and that when I looked down again at the courtyard with my trembly eyeballs it too seemed to quake like the terrors were in it.
‘What are you doing?’ said my nurse, in a sharp voice.
‘I was watching you lark about downstairs,’ I replied. Except that the words did not come out of my mouth coherently. My mouth did not seem to be working properly. I considered: it seemed likely I’d said nothing at all except inarticulate gurgles.
‘What’s that, old man?’ said the fellow, kindly, taking my weight, sliding an arm under my right armpit. ‘Come on, back to bed with you.’
I felt dizzy. There was a purple-edged tint to familiar things. I could smell a certain smell, and after a while I recognised it as the smell of a certain bunker where, in 1941, I had spent five weeks in close company with half a dozen men. It was the smell of male body-stink and cordite and dust. I could smell it now, although the only scent my male nurse exuded was one of soap. And although by the time I was back on the bed the smell had changed to one of roasting nuts. Not any old nuts, but particular nuts roasting on a brazier on the corner of Market Square, on a winter’s morning in the days after the civil war. My grandfather was leading me along, and my breath was steamtraining out of my mouth in a most delightful way. I was a young boy, and it was a joy to me to pretend to be a steam train. My grandfather was telling me that the civil war was over, and how glad we must be. ‘Our war is over now,’ he told me, ‘but in England it will shortly begin, and in all the other countries too.’ ‘Can I have some chestnuts?’ I pleaded. I was, I don’t know, ten years old. ‘Will you go back to England now that the war is over?’ I asked. ‘I’m Russian now,’ he said. ‘I’m Russian as all Russia.’
The man selling the chestnuts was Death.
Alone of all the people in the busy square he was hatless, and he was pale as summer clouds, and skinny as unfleshed bones. He was selling chestnuts. His hair was red as firelight, and his skin was a blank, and his eyes were black, so that they looked deeper and deader than human eyes. As we made our way over I became scared. ‘It’s Death,’ I told my grandfather. ‘It’s Death.’ And grandfather, his accent becoming more pronounced as it often used to do when he was angry, rebuked me. ‘Don’t be silly. He’s a respectable Russian selling chestnuts, and you’ll not insult him with such childishness.’ But I didn’t want to go any closer, and held back, and tugged at my grandfather’s coat.
‘Come along old man,’ said the nurse, and at his words, as at a magic spell, the hallucination vanished from my eyes and my nose. ‘Come along old man, what you want to be wandering about for? You’re as white as milled flour.’
I awoke, suddenly, and there was sweat all on me. It was cold on my skin. It was the middle of the night. I could not lie there. If there is one thing the Great Patriotic War taught me, it was not to lie there. The ones who lay down, though only to catch their breath, or only to rest their wound for a moment - those were the ones who died. You had to keep going. No matter what. No matter what. Not that it mattered. No matter what. Not, I told myself, that it mattered. I was not anxious about going on. It was a matter of simple will. I had to speak to - I couldn’t remember who. She was somewhere in Kiev - I did not know where, but I must find her.
Her?
I had no memory of any her. And yet that lack of memory felt like a palpable absence, as if I should have such a memory.
I woke up again, with no memory of the intervening time. I did not feel very comfortable. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. They were hauling me upright. They were hospital staff. It was daytime, and spring light was printing a sharp, new trapezoid on the wall beside my bed. There were two nurses, and they were picking me up, and tutting me. They fussed me back to bed, and reinserted the drip, and wiped me up and then the doctor was there. ‘Mr Skvorecky,’ she said. ‘I must ask you to remain in your bed. If you persist in getting out of it, I really cannot be answerable for your recovery.’
‘I should like to make a phone call,’ I said.
‘Follow your doctor’s orders,’ she replied, ‘and in a day or two that might be possible.’ She had the Geiger counter in her hand, and was running it over me. It tutted disapprovingly, although intermittently.
‘Perhaps you could forward a message for me?’ I asked.
‘To whom?’
‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’
‘That is going to make it hard to deliver the message.’
‘I know - I appreciate that. I think there was somebody in the reactor with me. I wish I could tell you more about him, but I’m afraid I don’t remember, exactly. Except that it is very important I communicate with him, for some reason.’
Dr Bello sighed. ‘I shall be honest, Mr Skvorecky. The Militia seem curiously uncertain about your status, which is to say, as to whether they have or have not taken you under arrest. Although they are certain that they have further questions for you.’
‘I understand,’ I said, placidly. ‘But he can tell me something I need to know. To fill in the holes in my . . . in my . . .’ There was something else I meant to say, but it was sliding out from the speech centres of my brain, and playing peek-a-boo in other portions. A car. A deer. A man lifted bodily into the night air and dangling up there.
‘Does Death have red hair?’ I asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Do you think Death is a redhead?’
‘
Isn’t he supposed to be a skeleton?’ was the reply, and I didn’t recognise the voice. It wasn’t Dr Bello’s voice; she was no longer there. It was a new voice. It possessed a breathy, underpowered quality that I didn’t like.
‘I’ve met you before,’ I said, sitting up a little in the bed.
Here was a man, with red hair, sitting in the room’s single chair, surveying me in bed. I did not like his smile. He did not work for the hospital.
He and I were alone in the room together. The light was on. Perhaps turning on the light had woken me up. I don’t know.
He smiled at me. This was not a pleasant smile.
‘You were Frenkel’s driver,’ I said. ‘You drove us around, whilst Trofim was pushing his pistol into my eye socket. And then,’ I added, for this memory had just that moment come back to me, ‘Frenkel himself put his gun inside my mouth. And you drove the car. You work for Frenkel. You’re KGB.’
‘I am KGB,’ he agreed.
‘You’ve come to kill me?’
‘I have come to kill you.’
I thought about this. It seemed a flavourless, angstless statement. The words had the quality of facts rather than emotions.
‘It seems I am hard to kill,’ I said.
‘I’m sure I’ll manage it.’
‘And why are you going to kill me?’
His eyes said I need a reason? but his mouth said, ‘Orders.’
‘I suppose it has to do with poor Trofim,’ I croaked. I thought about my meeting with the Steel-Stalin. ‘I suppose I’m getting in Comrade Frenkel’s way. He wanted to recruit me, in order to intensify the . . .’ But I couldn’t think of the word. ‘To do,’ I went on tentatively, curious in a dispassionate way, to see what words would come out of my mouth, ‘something . . . for the creatures. The aliens. But whatever he hoped, I’m having the opposite effect.’
‘Gabble gabble,’ said the red-headed man. I knew I had met him before, but I couldn’t recall his name. ‘I’ll give you this: you hide your fear pretty well, old man.’
