by Adam Roberts
‘You told her to consider herself a hunchback?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Saltykov.
‘Did this not strike you as, perhaps, an insulting thing to say to a woman?’
He puffed and chewed his lower lip at this, and then said, ‘I was not attempting to be insulting. It is a well known story. The hunchback was in danger and he claimed sanctuary inside the cathedral in Paris. That was the point of the analogy. Do you think Dora Norman would be likely to take offence?’
‘Take offence at being compared to the hunchback of Notre Dame? Surely no woman could take offence at that.’
‘Exactly!’ But then his face became stern. ‘Unless you are being sarcastic? Perhaps you are being sarcastic. You must remember, please, that my syndrome makes it difficult for me to understand nuances such as irony and sarcasm. At any rate, she refused to return to Moscow. Specifically she refused to return to Moscow alone. To be more specific still, she refused to return to Moscow without you.’
My old heart sang like it was young again. ‘She said so?’
‘Indeed. I told her she was foolish. But she didn’t listen to me.’
Driving through the streets of the city might, for the buoyancy of my heart, have been flying through the sun-rubbed blue of the sky. I was grinning, my mouth stretched as wide as my pinched and scarred flesh permitted. I do not doubt I looked perfectly idiotic. I may even have looked like a death’s head. But I didn’t care.
After a while Saltykov spoke. ‘I did not mean to compare her physique to the physique of the hunchback of Notre Dame.’
‘I’m sure she understood that.’
‘The comparison was in point of the principle of sanctuary. I was not intending to imply she had a hunchy back.’
‘Of course not.’
‘In point of fact,’ he went on. ‘She does not have a hunchy back.’
‘That’s right.’
He indicated, slowed, turned right, and pulled away again. ‘In point of fact her excess weight is mostly on her front.’
‘You must stop talking now.’
‘One might say hunchstomach,’ said Saltykov. ‘Or—’
‘No,’ I stopped him. ‘One might not.’
The hotel was a little way from the centre of town: part of a terrace of a 1960s development, a tall narrow building squeezed between an office block and a clothes shop. Tram wires ran like giant clothes’ lines suspended along the middle of the road in front of it. The parade overlooked a dingy little park, dotted with bushes and containing a pond, a cadre of doleful ducks, a bandstand that I feel sure had never seen an actual band, and a concrete structure containing public conveniences that possessed somewhat the proportions of a large tool box. Saltykov parked on the road and, pointedly, neither helped me out of the cab nor aided my awkward progress over the pavement and inside the hotel.
At my re-encounter with Dora Norman, I felt, as the English poet said, [as if some new planet swam into my ken]. What I mean is that I felt a sense of renewed possibility. I have, since that day, often pondered those words. A new planet swims into your [ken], an English word for knowledge. Does this mean you are an imperialist, set upon dropping interplanetary troopers onto the surface, enslaving the indigenous inhabitants, colonising them? Or is the planet unoccupied, filled with verdancy, enforested, with bejewelled birds flying from bough to bough? Is it crying out for occupancy? Another English poet once called the object of his affections: ‘My America, my newfoundland’. How could I not think of that, that had spent so much of my life reading poetry in English, and who found myself - at my age! with my ruined face and bashed-up brain! - in love with a woman young enough to be my daughter?
Dora put her arms around me when I saw her again. She was weeping, but with happiness. ‘[At first I thought you were dead - when Mr Saltykov returned . . .]’
‘[Certainly not dead, my dear Dora,]’ I said.
I sat down on the settee in the main room of the hotel suite, panting with the effort of the journey, and Dora made me some bitter-tasting tea - nectar, I declared it. Saltykov had the grace to leave us together. Syndrome or not, he empathised enough to see that we needed a little privacy.
‘[When Mr Saltykov returned, he had such a doleful face . . .]’
‘[His syndrome disposes him to dolour, I think.]’
‘[I believe he thought you dead. There was an explosion?’]
‘[There was.]’
‘[It hasn’t been in the news.]’
‘[It is not surprising that the authorities have . . . is the English expression shushed it up?]’
‘[Hushed it up, yes. So Mr Saltykov drove away from the reactor, and came back to me. He’s been very good. He arranged this hotel room - I couldn’t stay where I was, before. There were cockroaches.]’
‘[This is to be preferred,]’ I agreed.
‘[It was, of course, hard to understand what Mr Saltykov was saying,]’ she said. [‘He found an English-Russian dictionary in an old bookshop in Kiev. Actually he found an English-Portuguese dictionary, and a Spanish-Russian dictionary, and the two of us sat for a long time looking up words and pointing at them. Communication was not very clear.]’
‘[Ah,]’ I said, trying to picture the scene.
‘[There was some confusion. He wanted to tell me that he thought you were dead, but at first I thought he was saying that you were destined for greatness. Then he said I would never see you again, and I thought he was saying that you have proposed marriage in my absence. I understood eventually. It’s so good to see you alive again!]’
‘[It is good to be alive again,]’ I said. Then I added, ‘[Better still to see you.]’ Had I been standing, or capable of getting to my feet quickly, I would have bowed.
‘[He checked the hospitals anyway. And he sat for hours in the lobby of the police station. Eventually they informed him you were still alive. How overjoyed I was! And here you are!]’
We embraced.
We settled into a sort of routine, the three of us occupying that two-room suite. Dora and Saltykov slept in the separate rooms they had been previously occupying; I slept on the settee in the front room. We agreed to make our way back to Moscow as soon as I was fit enough for the journey. And we agreed also on the need to keep Dora out of the way until she could be delivered to the American embassy in Moscow. I impressed upon them both the malignity and implacability of Frenkel. ‘[He wishes to kill you,]’ I told Dora.
‘[It makes me shudder to think of it,]’ she said. There was something simply delightful in the way a quiver might pass across the amplitude of her flesh. I said as much to her, and she blushed again.
‘But why does he wish such harm to Ms Norman?’ Saltykov pressed.
‘He wishes to kill her for the same reason he killed Dr Coyne,’ I replied. ‘I am sure of it. Although I am not sure, exactly, why he needed to kill Dr Coyne.’
I told them everything that Trofim had told me in the reactor room at Chernobyl; but it did nothing, precisely, to clear up the mystery.
Every day, Saltykov accompanied me as I undertook a ponderous, awkward walk in the park opposite the hotel. Every evening we ate together, and I translated between my beautiful Dora and my friend. We were waiting, simply enough, for me to become well enough to withstand the lengthy car journey back to Moscow; that is all. But some of the happiest moments in any life are moments of waiting. It has taken me a long life, and old age, to understand this important truth, and to slough off my youthful impatience.
‘A week. No more,’ I said. ‘Then we can journey back.’
Three days passed in this manner. I told Dora of the strange encounter with Frenkel in the hospital, late at night. ‘[Perhaps I only dreamt it,]’ I said. ‘[But it was a curious and vivid dream in that case.]’
‘[Ugh! You scare me.]’
‘[It is my intention. I love watching the shiver run through your flesh. It is a very sensual thing.]’
This had become a piece of common banter between us, and usually she laughed at it. Bu
t on this occasion she burst, suddenly, into tears. This wrongfooted me rather. ‘[My dear Ms Norman! Please do not cry.]’
‘[I’m sorry! So sorry!]’
‘[You have nothing to be sorry for, my dear Ms Norman!]’
‘[It was when you said flesh.]’
‘[I apologise! I am a monstrous and cruel man!]’
‘[No! No! I know I have too much flesh - that’s all.]’
‘[All the better!]’
‘[It cannot be better - I’m ashamed of being so fat . . .]’
‘[There’s no shame,]’ I said severely. ‘[Since your flesh is beautiful, the amplitude of your flesh magnifies that beauty. Shame? Shame is not welcome here. Shame is how you feel in front of other people, that is the definition of shame. But there are no other people here, only me, and I am a part of you now. You cannot be ashamed of yourself, by yourself.]’
On another occasion she said, ‘[You were married before. I bet she was thin.]’
‘[I was married in the 1940s. Everybody was thin. People starved to death - that’s how thin they were. When you have watched that you never again find thinness to be a beautiful thing. This strange modern aberration that praises thinness - it’s a function of an anomalous, global glut of food. Now, at this end of this terrible century, we find ourselves with more food than we can eat. But the human condition, taken as a whole, has not been plenty, but dearth. And it will be dearth again. Yours is the default position of beauty, my dear Ms Norman.]’ Perhaps I was not quite so eloquent as I have here recalled, but this was the gist of what I said.
‘[You are a sweet and lovely man,]’ she said.
‘[I don’t know about that. I am, I would say, a ruined man,]’ I noted.
‘[You mean money?]’
‘[I mean physically.]’ I gestured at my scarred face; at the still livid, scorched-looking marks on my temple; at the bristly cropped hair. ‘[I am old, and disfigured. I know you cannot love me, you, young and lovely as you are. But it is enough for me to have seen you again. It is enough for me that you are alive.]’
She looked at me for a long time. Then she laid a hand - one of her tiny, delicate hands - on my cheek. ‘[But you have a beautiful soul,]’ she said, simply.
Later she and Saltykov examined the back of my neck: she moved the back of my collar down, so that he did not have to touch me, and he peered. ‘There is a lump,’ Saltykov told me. ‘A redness and a lump. Something under the skin.’
‘A boil,’ I said.
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps your dream was not a dream?’
‘You think Frenkel crept into my hospital room in the middle of the night, injected me with this, and then crept away again without killing me? It doesn’t seem very likely to me.’
The two of them pondered that.
‘You could cut it out,’ I said, to Saltykov.
‘What!’
‘’Get a knife and cut it open . . . to see if there’s anything inside.’
‘Not I,’ said Saltykov, very emphatically.
I pondered making the same proposal to Dora, but thought better of it.
‘Come,’ said Saltykov. ‘Time for your constitutional.’
‘I would prefer to sit here.’
‘[Come along,]’ said Dora, tipping the perfect sphere of her body forward in the settee just enough to kiss me on the end of my scarred nose. ‘[You need your exercise.]’
‘[Very well],’ I replied. ‘[But I shall expect you to wait upon me like a geisha when I return, as a reward for my efforts.]’
She laughed, and rolled backwards, settling into her seat again.
Saltykov and I went down in the lift and exited the hotel. We waited for an especially shuddery and noisy tram to pass by and, crossing the road, made our way unrapidly into the park. Above us, barely visible flying saucers darted from the cover of one cloud to another. All the onion domes of all the towers of the Kremlin had detached themselves and flown straight up, and now they were flying in V-formation in the very high blue sky. Then, with an effort that brought a sweat to my skin, I walked a hundred yards, with Saltykov walking beside me. ‘It would be easier for me,’ I said, ‘if I could lean upon your arm.’
‘Perhaps you have forgotten,’ he said. ‘I suffer from a syndrome, one symptom of which is—’
‘Syndrome, syndrome, syndrome. Do you know the English name for your syndrome? [Fuckwittery].’
‘Really? I have come across American studies of my syndrome, and have never yet heard it so described.’
‘You live and learn,’ I said.
‘Is [Fuckwitter] perhaps the name of a doctor who . . .’
‘I have to sit upon this bench,’ I said, lowering myself into the wooden slats.
‘I shall sit beside you,’ said Saltykov, primly. He sat at the other end of the bench, ensuring of course that there were several feet of wood between us. It would not do for him to come into contact of any kind with another man.
For a while we simply sat, and the sweat cooled on my face. The chill of early spring was in the air. It being a weekday, the park was more or less deserted.
‘I do not comprehend love,’ said Saltykov, out of the blue. I understood this to be his oblique way of making reference to the situation between Dora and myself.
‘No?’
‘People talk about it as a wonderful thing. An exciting and pleasurable thing. Certainly I can see that it is, in terms of the successful transmission of genes, an immensely useful thing. But to elevate love to transcendental, cosmic and godly proportions, as people do? Is this not a little self-regarding? As if because I enjoy eating beefsteaks, and because beefsteaks serve the useful purpose of keeping me alive, I therefore declared that the universe is beefsteak, God a beefsteak and beefsteak the universal core value of everything?
‘Your words produce in me,’ I replied, ‘an enormous desire to piss.’
‘Are you referring to an actual desire, or a metaphorical one?’ he replied, blandly.
‘An actual one.’
‘In that case the public toilets are over there.’
‘Shall you come with me, to assist me?’
‘The nature of my syndrome, as far as any intimacy at all with another man is concerned,’ he began, but I cut him off with the groans I made as I levered myself upright from the bench.
‘I appreciate,’ I said stiffly, ‘your courteous attempt to raise the subject of the state of emotional affairs between Dora Norman and myself.’ He blinked at me. ‘It is more than beefsteak,’ I added, ‘to my soul.’
‘Good,’ he said. Just that.
I walked slowly into the toilets, and stood at a bra-cup-shaped urinal, and relieved myself. Then I walked, slowly, back through the park. As I approached the bench I could see that another man had sat down upon it, next to Saltykov. But it was not until I had actually sat myself down that I saw that this new person was Frenkel.
‘Sit down, Konsty,’ he said, patting the wooden slats beside him. I would have preferred to remain standing, and would have liked to have been able to say, ‘I prefer to stand’; but it so happened that my clapped-out legs would in no way support my weight. I lowered myself onto the seat.
‘Jan,’ I said, recovering my breath. ‘It is surprising to see you again.’
‘Surprising?’
‘Saltykov?’ I said, speaking across Frenkel’s lap. ‘Allow me to introduce Jan Frenkel, formerly of the KGB.’
Saltykov was looking away to the left, disdainfully.
‘I have already introduced myself to Comrade Saltykov,’ said Frenkel. ‘I’m afraid he has taken a dislike to me. He is sulking.’
‘He suffers from a syndrome,’ I said.
‘But why,’ Frenkel went on, ‘do you refer to me as formerly of the KGB?’
‘I met a senior officer in hospital,’ I replied, ‘who gave me to believe . . .’
‘Oh, I’m under internal investigation,’ said Frenkel, airily. ‘They’ve taken away my gun. But that doesn’t stop me being a member of the KGB.
The KGB is not a club that people enter and leave at will.’
‘I understand that you are now a colonel,’ I said. ‘Congratulations on your elevation.’
‘Thank you!’
Saltykov was glowering with supreme intensity at some sparrows away to the left, as if they were somehow responsible for the career-advancement of so wicked a man as Frenkel.
‘Did your promotion have anything to do with UFOs?’
‘Ah,’ said Frenkel.
‘UFOs are good,’ I said, ‘at imparting elevation to individuals, after all. Lifting them up. One way or another.’
‘UFOs,’ said Frenkel. ‘Do you know how many departments in the KGB are dedicated to UFOs?’
‘I am of course prepared to guess.’
‘Or I could just tell you,’ he said, crossly. ‘Seven research institutes and eleven departments. All of them are attached to a secret wing of the KGB created specifically for this purpose. So. Why do you think the KGB is prepared to expend such resources on UFOs?’
‘Is there a word for an acronym that has, specifically, three letters?’ I asked, because the thought had just then struck me, and because it made me curious. ‘Acronyms such as UFO and KGB. Tricronyms, perhaps?’ But that didn’t sound very convincing. ‘What do you think, Saltykov?’ But my friend was still sulking.
Frenkel glowered at me. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I preferred you before the lobotomy.’
‘I was more anxious then, I think,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘And more, as they say in America, [stressed-out]. More sarcastic, for that reason. But on the other hand, I had a better sense of future possibilities. I tried playing chess,’ I added, ‘with the nursing staff in the hospital, after my accident; but I can’t plan my moves. I have lost the ability to play chess. And my memory is very erratic.’
‘I really could not be less interested in your condition,’ said Frenkel. ‘You have lost focus, my old friend.’ He shook his head. ‘You were always an ironist - but now? What are you now? A blatherer! I preferred the caustic old Skvorecky, I don’t mind telling you.’
