by Adam Roberts
Dora swung the book in towards his face, blushing red with the effort. Her prodigious jowls quivered.
She swung the book so that its spine collided with Frenkel’s nose. His head snapped back, and a gasp stuttered from his mouth. I danced to the side as quickly as my old legs could manage, and levered him onwards, and Dora pushed forward with her considerable, her beautiful, her life-saving bulk. With me on his right side, and Dora on his left, and blood coming out of his nose, Frenkel found himself propelled forwards and out. His head struck the unlatched window with a boom. The panel swung open, and Frenkel toppled out, and Dora and I released him at exactly the same moment.
Down he went.
He fell straight down the height of four floors. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for instance, call out. He had tipped over onto his back, and we could see him looking up at us, but the expression on his face was not even especially surprised: although a small quantity of blood had come out of his nose and covered his upper lip, like a black-red paint-on Hitler moustache. Like Hitler, or like Charlie Chaplin. It was four floors down to what the Americans call the [sidewalk]. He landed with the sound of cowflop hitting the ground. The first portion of his body to connect with the ground was the back of his head, and then his spine, and hips, and then his arms and legs: each segment of his body followed rapidly one after the other. He did not bounce. He did not move after the impact. Not so much as a twitch.
I felt wobbly, and unwell, and exhausted; but I felt better than Dora evidently did. It was not an easy matter for a fellow as elderly and infirm as I was to assist a woman as weighty as she across the floor, but I did my best, and was able to help her stagger over to the couch. She half-sat and half-collapsed, and I knelt down beside her. ‘[There is some blood,]’ I told her, lifting her shirt and examining the mouth-shaped wound.
‘[It hurts!]’
‘[My poor love - I’m so sorry - my poor girl.]’
‘[It hurts, but I don’t think there’s any serious damage. Thank heavens I’m so fat!]’
‘[Thank heavens,]’ I agreed, earnestly. ‘[It has saved your life.]’
‘[Oh!]’ she said. [‘Oh, it hurts! But if I’d been some rake-skinny girl . . .]’
‘[Then you would have died],’ I said. ‘[Frenkel knew what he was doing. He was aiming the knife at vital organs.]’
‘[Thank heavens,]’ she said, in a fainter voice, ‘[that all my vital organs are wrapped in my protective layer!]’
‘[Didn’t he stab you twice?]’
‘[My arm.]’ She was holding her left arm stiffly, awkwardly. I had not noticed this before.
‘[Let me look.]’
‘[He got me in the side,]’ she said. ‘[I moved my arm to where he’d cut me, and then he cut me again.]’
Her arm was sopping and wet, and her hand bright red. There was blood, I saw, dipping downwards from her fingers’ ends onto the carpet. This wound looked much more serious. ‘[I will get help,]’ I said, creakily rising and going to the bed where the room’s phone was. In a moment I had called the reception desk, and within a minute two people were in the room with me. A first aid box was brought in. By the look of it, it dated from before the war.
‘Have you called an ambulance?’ I asked the concierge. ‘There’s also a man on the pavement outside. He fell from the window. He might need help.’
He looked from the window. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said.
I went with Dora to the hospital. In the ambulance they gave her something for the pain, and then told me to talk with her. Don’t let her go to sleep, they told me. So I talked with her. ‘[Where did you get the book?]’
‘[It’s yours.]’
‘[I know it’s mine. It’s the omnibus edition of Three Who Made a Star. It’s all three volumes in one. That’s why it is so big; a thousand pages, more or less. But I have not seen a copy for half a century. I don’t even have a copy at my flat!]’
‘[Saltykov found it in an old bookshop, somewhere near the hotel. He bought it for me, as a present. He knew I would be interested, because it was by you.]’
There seemed to me something wrong with my burn-scarred face. I could feel a strange loosening behind the skin, near the eyes and the bridge of the nose.
‘[I got up, quietly, after he stabbed me. I lay there for a moment,]’ Dora was saying. ‘[Until I got my breath back, and then I got myself up. It stung to move. I looked around for something to hit him with. He was a dangerous man. But I couldn’t see anything - well, I thought about the lamp.]’
‘[The lamp?]’
‘[Only it was plugged in, and the plugs you have over here aren’t like proper American plugs, and I wasn’t sure I could unplug it easily. Then I saw the book. Your Three Who Made a Star. So I picked that up.]’
‘[Thank heavens I wrote such a fat book,]’ I said.
‘[A slim volume would hardly have been much of a weapon,]’ she agreed, grimacing; in pain, I thought at first; but, no: because she was laughing.
‘[We can be grateful,]’ I told her, kissing her good hand, ‘[that science fiction novels are so fat.]’
‘[We may be grateful in a general sense for fatness,]’ she agreed.
The ambulance brought us to the hospital - a different building, and indeed a different site, to the place in which I had convalesced. Two rows of cherry trees displayed their ridiculous pink and white blossom in enormous profusion. They wheeled her through the main door. They gave her a painkiller. I sat with her in the emergency room. I held her good hand as they cut off her shirt and bandaged up her wounds. ‘The wound to the stomach is superficial,’ the doctor said. ‘The wound to the arm is a little more serious, but not life-threatening. The tip of the blade has scratched the tibia. I’m afraid it will be sore for some time. There will be bruising.’
I translated this for her. ‘[Black and blue!]’ she said in a mournful voice. ‘[I have always bruised like a peach.]’
‘[You are a peach,]’ I told her, as tears seeped from my ridiculous old-man eyes. ‘[You are my peach. You are my beautiful luscious American peach.] I love you,’ I added, in Russian.
‘[What’s that?]’
So I told her then how to say I love you in Russian. It involves putting together three English words: two colours and a human bone - as it might be, the colour of a fading bruise, and the colour of a fresh bruise, and a bone in the arm: just those three English words. Say them together, rolling from one to the other as you speak, and you will find that you are saying I love you in Russian. It was a delight for me to hear her say that Russian phrase, over and over. It was delightful.
Frenkel’s body could not be found, although - according to the Militia - there was blood on the pavement beneath the hotel window. I do not believe that Frenkel could simply have stood up and walked away after such a fall. I couldn’t help the Militia explain who might have moved his body, or why.
Saltykov’s body was recovered from the park. The Militia had no suspects; and since we were the only two people in the whole of Kiev who knew him, we were formally questioned. He had no dependants, it seemed; and no friends or partners. He was buried in a Kiev municipal graveyard.
We were warned by the Militia not to leave the city, since investigation into the death of Saltykov, and the assault upon Dora Norman, was still ongoing. We stayed in the hotel room, both of us slowly recovering our health. My grief for poor old Saltykov was strangely modulated by my joy that Dora was alive, even though I had thought her dead. Every night I laid my hands gently upon her enormous belly, her fluid hips, and gave thanks to her sheer bulk for saving her life.
We made our doddery way about the city; me actually old and she temporarily aged by her wounds, her arm in a sling. She expressed repeated astonishment at the beauty of the Ukrainian springtime. We took the tram along the lengthy, wide streets, where rows and rows of chestnut trees and cherry trees were in blossom. One day, when we were feeling a little more hearty, we went down to the beach, by the river. It was a bright day, and t
he space was filled with large Kiev women in polka-dotted swimming costumes, and blocky Kiev men in trunks. The men were sunbathing standing up, all of them putting their chests out towards the sun, and slowly turning like human heliotropes.
‘[Why are they all standing?]’ Dora asked me. ‘[Why don’t they just lie down?]’
‘[They are standing,]’ I told her, ‘[to show that even after a full day’s work of building Communism they are not tired.]’
We both of us healed from our respective wounds, although slowly.
What happened next was that the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl suffered a catastrophic malfunction. News was at first confused and contradictory. The explosion happened on 26 April. By the 27th there was no official confirmation - although the reactor is less than seventy miles from Kiev, and smoke was evident over the northern horizon. Rumours circulated through the city. Lights in the sky. Over the night of the 27th and the morning of the 28th trucks and buses containing the inhabitants of Pripyat, the nearby town, began rolling into Kiev. There was no official news for almost a week, but everybody in Kiev knew that something terrible had happened.
You, doubtless, remember that particular disaster.
I sat with Dora in a restaurant in the city one evening, the two of us as subdued and alarmed as any person in the city. ‘[Do you think Frenkel—]’ she asked.
‘[Dead,]’ I insisted.
‘[Or Frenkel’s people. His organisation. Do you think that they . . .?]’
‘[Trofim exploded a grenade inside the main reactor. Two months later the reactor explodes. Perhaps that is no coincidence. Perhaps there was damage to the pipes, or the structure, or something; and it took two months or so for the damage to lead to the malfunction.]’
‘[Or,]’ she said. ‘[Perhaps Frenkel’s people came back and finished the job. That driver you talked about - the red-headed one.]’
‘[Or perhaps,]’ I said, ‘[the radiation aliens blasted it from orbit,]’
We agreed that we must leave the city, for I feared the effects of radiation poisoning. Besides, we did not belong. I needed to get her back to Moscow. It was not difficult: the Militia, certainly, had more important things to occupy their time than attending to us. We took Saltykov’s cab, and drove out of the city together.
I filled the car with fuel and drove east. The main road to Russia went north to Chernilhiv, and then east along the River Desna; but I did not want to take my beautiful Dora closer to the source of radioactive contamination than absolutely necessary. I took small roads, and felt my way, as it were, through eastern Ukraine. The sky was filled with apocalyptic clouds. Even this far south the fir trees were tinted rust and red by the fallout.
Eventually we reached Russia. We were stopped at the border, something, of course, that had not happened to us on the way in to the Ukraine - but things were different now. There was considerable panic. I told the soldiers manning the border crossing that Dora was my wife, a naturally shy woman who preferred not to speak. They detained us for four hours, and finally they let us through on the understanding that we would give one of their number a lift to Moscow - a young lad who had to get back to the capital for some reason.
‘I was supposed to take the train,’ he said, getting into the front seat beside me, after stowing his kitbag in the boot of the car. ‘But none of the others wanted to drive me to the station. It’s like the whole Ukraine is a plague zone. Are you Ukrainian?’
‘I am a Muscovite.’
The young fellow swivelled in his seat and addressed himself to Dora. ‘Good day to you, madam.’
‘She doesn’t speak much,’ I told him.
‘Don’t be shy, madam! I’ll not alarm you, I promise! Cat got your tongue, has it?’
Dora looked at me, and then at the young fellow. ‘I love you,’ she told him.
He blushed, and faced front. ‘Why did she say that?’ he asked me, in a low voice.
‘She’s not all there in the head,’ I told the young soldier, as I drove off along the country road. ‘She takes sudden fancies to people. Especially to good-looking young men. Don’t encourage her, I’d advise. Just ignore her and she’ll cool down.’
‘Whatever you say, chief,’ said the soldier, fixing his eye on the passing landscape.
Dora remained perfectly silent for the remainder of the day.
It took us two days to drive to Moscow; too far for me to drive in Saltykov’s creaky old car in one journey. When we got to Bryansk we stopped. We ate a frugal supper together in a paint-peely restaurant, and then drove on to discover some lodgings for the night. The soldier had no money, and slept in the car. I certainly did not offer to pay for him to sleep in a room. That night, as Dora and I lay in the bed together, I said to her, ‘[I saw something strange, the day you were stabbed. When Frenkel was about to push me from the window.]’
‘[Strange?]’
‘[I saw it through the window. But it can’t have been real. And when I looked again, it wasn’t there.]’
‘[What did you see?]’
‘[In the sky, over the roofs opposite. The roofs on the far side of the park. A great metal craft. A great disc of dull silver, five hundred yards wide, with a vast central bulb, also silver, like the dome of a Kremlin minaret. Hanging there, above those roofs. But I looked again and it wasn’t there.]’
‘[There was nothing there.]’
‘[I thought for a moment it was like a building in the sky. Like one of those church domes you get in Russia, only not quite so gold, and separated from any building. Just in the sky. But I looked again and it wasn’t there.]’
‘[It wasn’t there,]’ she repeated.
She said this without emphasis, in a perfectly matter of fact way. And as soon as she said it I knew that it was true. The hallucination, or whatever it had been, receded - blissfully, blissfully. It was just a bad dream.
‘[It wasn’t there,]’ I agreed. ‘[It wasn’t there.]’
We woke early the next day, and had breakfast when it was still dark. Crunching over frosty grass to where the taxicab was parked. The insides of all the windows were cataracted over with condensation, and it took me five minutes to rub them clean with a rag. The soldier himself shifted position in his seat, but without waking up.
We drove off, Dora silent in the back of the cab; the soldier snoring softly; and made our way along a perfectly straight road between two fields of purple earth. The sun was above the horizon, making the bands of cloud gleam with mysterious illumination. The sky above was not marked with brushstrokes, but had been painted with a perfect gradation of colouration, as if by an artist skilled in the use of spray-guns. The colours were unearthly and very beautiful: pinks and pale amber, Caribbean blues and gunmetal greys, mauves, cyans, and the rectangle of black still fruiting with stars that filled the rear-view mirror.
We were making our way through south-west Russia, driving a lonely road, and the weather was strange. As we crawled over the surface of the earth, a great and tentacled cloud of radioactive material was spreading above our heads. Most of the contamination went north, and north-north-west, on the prevailing breezes, into Belarus, and beyond into non-Communist Europe - Germany, Sweden, England, Scotland. But a great radiative viewless squid-arm of poison reached north-east: massively raised levels of radioactive iodine and cesium and tellurium were measured as far away as Mahlyov and Kryshaw. The endlessly circulating and recirculating ocean of air above us seeped with invisible death, and we scurried away inside our metal beetle-case along vein-like roads making for Moscow. Moscow was hardly far enough away.
We drove and drove. Dora dozed on the back seat.
Very late in the afternoon, the sun came out. Clouds tucked themselves away, into the corners of the sky like a bedsheet, and the blue stretched itself taut. The sun’s face blazed upon us as if it were wholly innocent of the meaning of strontium-90.
The sun went behind us and dipped its face down to examine what was happening over the Ukraine. Everything went dark. It had gone into mou
rning, of course, for what had happened westward.
I drove on into the night, figuring I would keep going until I became too sleepy to drive safely. We were creeping along the road at forty miles an hour, ever closer towards Moscow.
Suddenly, having slept all day long, the soldier grunted, and twitched his head. ‘Stop a bit,’ he said. ‘Pull over. I need a piss.’ He swivelled in his seat again. ‘Begging your pardon, madam. Don’t mean to speak so rudely in the company of a lady.’
‘I love you,’ Dora told him.
I pulled the car onto the mud at the side of the road, and the soldier got out. He walked no more than three yards from the car and unzipped his fly. I remember thinking how vulgar it was. The sound of his stream hitting the mud was very audible and, in the cold of night, billows and gouts of steam rose from the ground where the urine landed. This smoke, lit by the taxi’s headlights, swirled about his legs. It looked like a stage effect. I remember turning to Dora, behind me on the back seat, to say something in English about the vulgarity of this behaviour, but as I—
It was dark. We were at the side of the road, but not the road we had been on before, because there were buildings around us. The sky was black behind us, but paling to the east, with that unique spread of gleam and opacity of the half hour or so before dawn. The soldier had gone. My stomach felt fizzy and uncomfortable.
I turned again to face Dora. ‘What happened?’
‘[What?]’
‘[What happened to us?]’ I said, speaking this time in English. How could I forget that she spoke English, and not Russian? ‘[We were in the countryside.]’
‘[We were.]’
‘[Where are we now?]’ I looked again. A bus thundered past, its lights on like a carnival. It was a Moscow bus. We were on the outskirts of Moscow.
‘[What happened to the soldier?]’ Dora asked.
He was nowhere to be seen. I got out of the taxicab and went round to the trunk. I opened it and peered inside. Another car swept past me, loud, and close enough to make the stationary taxi rock a little on its suspension. Inside was the kitbag.
