by Adam Roberts
I got back into the car. ‘[Dora,]’ I said. ‘[What happened?]’
‘[What do you mean?]’ she asked.
I sat at the wheel for a while, as the daylight strengthened and as buses and lorries and the occasional car juggernauted past us, making the shell of our taxi shudder as if sobbing. Rocking it from side to side on its spongy suspension.
Eventually Dora dozed again on the back seat, and I started the car and drove through the outer reaches of Moscow until I found a road I recognised, and followed it, and turned off, and made my way to the unfashionable block in which my own flat was to be found.
I’m almost at the end of this narrative now, and I have little to add. The important thing - the crucial thing - was to get Dora to safety. Once I accomplished that I had no cares for myself. I could hope that Frenkel was gone, and that I would be safe. But I think I had a premonition of my death: of the red-haired man standing and shooting his gun directly at my heart. If I’d though more about it, I might have reasoned that it would happen on the Moscow streets, that I would be tracked down (I would not be hard to find) and that Death would aim his gun and fire straight through my chest. The point is this: if only I could get Dora safe, I did not care. One of the advantages of a lobotomy, perhaps: the dissolution of timor mortis.
Dora and I were, first of all, both exhausted from the long journey, both still weak and convalescent from our respective injuries. We agreed to rest for a day, to recover from the journey, before I took her to her embassy. She lay down on the beige settee in my unsalubrious flat. I went round the corner, and queued for an hour to buy bread and a small pot of blood-coloured jam. Back at the flat I made coffee from grains in a tin box in my cupboard that were six months old and stale as dust.
We talked. Our options were: to marry in Russia and then try and get to America as a couple; or for Dora to go home as soon as possible, and then for me to apply for a visa to go visit her so that we could marry in America. After a long discussion we agreed that the latter option was preferable.
We watched the television news on my shoebox-sized black and white television. I translated for her. The news was still, of course, all about Chernobyl.
‘[The world is coming to an end,]’ I said.
‘[It’s a terrible business,]’ she agreed. ‘[But maybe some good can come out of it. Perhaps people will now be more safety-conscious where nuclear power is concerned.]’
I didn’t reply.
This is what was happening in my head. I was remembering. This is what I remembered. I remembered the engine dying as we were driving in the night. I remembered coasting to a halt, with the headlights spontaneously flashing a code to spies in the surroundings forests and then, alarmingly, going out altogether. None of the electrics in the motor worked. Our passenger shifted awkwardly in his seat, and kept repeating, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know.’ The car rolled more slowly and stopped. On either side forest towered, dark fat trunks going up and shaggy coniferous heads given a metallic sheen by the moonlight. We were quite alone. ‘What’s going on?’
I twisted and twisted at the key in the ignition, to no effect.
Then the moonlight swelled and climaxed, and every window in the taxi was blindingly bright. The light seemed to swirl, to focus into a great patch of even intenser brightness that swung from the left side of the car to the right. The soldier was gasping, and yelping like a little dog. ‘Stay in the car,’ I cried, but there was a rushing waterfalling sound all around and my words fell into it. I could see the young man panicking. I could see the hideous leer of fear distorting his face. He clutched at the door release and hauled it open, as I yelled ‘No! No!’ and tried to seize his arm. But the fool had opened his door, and then he was sucked out with ferocity and vehemence. I had his forearm, but his legs went straight up, and his torso stretched horizontal. His face snapped up towards me terrified, eyes like unshelled boiled eggs, and a weird grunting coming out of his mouth. Then my grip failed and he flew backwards with great speed, as if gravity were abruptly going sideways.
I saw behind the light: a great globe of silver, and great white-bright twisting ropes of light emanating from it. One of them had coiled itself around the soldier’s waist and was—’
‘[What?]’ said Dora.
I blinked at her. ‘[The journey here,]’ I said. ‘[I can’t believe I’d forgotten! Now I remember! I am remembering now. The soldier . . .]’
‘[We dropped him at his friend’s house,]’ she said.
The whole bright-lit fantasy sublimed away from my brain. None of the other stuff had happened, it was true. There had been no dead engine, or bright lights: we had simply pulled up at a tall shuttered house and the soldier had hopped out. ‘[I,]’ I said, momently disoriented. ‘[I don’t think . . .]’
‘[Oh I know,]’ she said. ‘[It was a house of ill repute.]’ She laughed. ‘[I’m not so innocent as all that!]
It was true. We had pulled up. He had leapt out. He had evidently forgotten all about his kitbag, because he had had other, carnal things on his mind. There was no question of us waiting around for him. ‘I can make my own way to Moscow from here,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I shall see you, comrades. I shall see you.’
And I had driven on. Shortly, feeling the exhaustion of the long drive catching up with my elderly brain, I had pulled over to nap. Everything else had been - something else. It had swarmed up in my brain like a schizophrenia. But it was sucked away and extinguished in the presence of Dora. Everything Frenkel had said in the park, after killing poor old Saltykov: the allure of this mass fantasy of UFOs; this materialisation of the old religious impulse, this relocation of gods and demons into the spaces between the stars - it all fell back into a proper perspective when I was with Dora. She made me sane again. And that was only one reason, and not the least of them, why I was in love with her.
CODA
‘We have built a new society, the kind of society mankind had
never known. And, finally, there is Soviet man, the most
important product of the past 60 years.’
Leonid Brezhnev, February 1972
I started with Frenkel, and will end with him. This is the part where the red-haired man shoots me through the heart; the inevitable coda. Death can be postponed, perhaps, but not evaded.
I took Dora for a ride on the famous Moscow Metro. We got off and ascended outside the American embassy, and I waited with her in the antechamber. The embassy officials were very agitated to meet her - excited, they assured her, and delighted. They’d reported her as missing; and the death of James Coyne, quite apart from creating an enormous stir in certain circles, had made everybody fearful for her safety. Her family and friends would be delighted to discover she was all right. Her whole country would.
She was taken away. She said she was happy staying with me in my flat, but the authorities lodged her in embassy accommodation and - I believe - flew her out of Moscow the following day. The exact nature of Coyne’s nuclear business, presumably rendered more acutely sensitive by the events at Chernobyl, facilitated the rapidity and secrecy of her exit.
The last thing she said to me was a promise that she would be in touch as soon as she could. I did not know whether I would ever see her again.
But I could hope.
Rather than go straight home I took a walk through the centre of the enormous, populous city in which I had been born and in which I had spent most of my life. I wandered like a tourist. Wasn’t the city full of beauty, and youth, though, that morning? Wasn’t it though? The sunlight, perhaps, had scared away the crones and the wrinkled old retainers; the rising sap had driven out the natural Russian reticence of the courting couples. There was a superfluity of youth: infatuated young girls in headscarfs lolling on the arms of solid-limbed, blunt-faced young men; athletic females, witchy, pale-faced males, walking serious-faced together; the glibness of youth, the cleanness of youth, the innocent ferocit
y of youth. I had been young in the first half of the 1940s, when youth had existed as expensive filler for ditches and shell-holes, as the cement between two nations coming together like bricks squashed in the wall. It was wonderful, and peculiar, to see such unreaped harvests of youth. And always amongst them, moving, as the red-spiny stickleback headbutts the clear flowing waters and worms his way upstream, is death.
The front of my skull throbbed. I was wholly without anxiety, because, after all, I had lost the capacity for anxiety.
‘Come along,’ said the red-haired man, burlying up against me. He was wearing a jacket, into which his right arm was tucked, Napoleon-style - he had a gun in there, of course.
‘You have followed me from the American embassy.’
‘I think you mean to say,’ the red-haired man hissed, ‘you again? Isn’t that what you mean to say?’
‘I can say that if you prefer.’
‘You didn’t think,’ he said, coming closer still, to impress upon me that he did indeed have a pistol, ‘that you’d seen the last of me? Did you?’ He smelt, a little, of soap. Since my sense of smell is very poor, I suppose that means that, in fact, he smelt strongly of soap. But of course he was clean! Death is the cleanest thing of all.
‘You were lucky in Kiev,’ he said. ‘But your luck runs out here. Here is where it all ends for you, comrade.’
‘I’ve had so much good luck recently,’ I told him, ‘I was getting sated with it. It’s like sugar, good luck. At first its very sweet, but after a while you start to think: any more of this and I shall be sick.’
We were standing on a main thoroughfare, and people were coming and going. But of course none of them stopped to interfere with two men having so intimate a conversation. I wondered if there might be Militia officers somewhere who might want to intervene, but there was nobody. ‘At least,’ I said, ‘Dora is safe. I’m content to die, given that.’
‘Come on,’ he said, directing me down the street. ‘Down here,’ he said, down a side road on the left. ‘Along there.’ This was much less busy, and a much better arena for an assassin to shoot an old man and leave his body on the side. ‘Here?’ I asked, in a disinterested voice.
‘Further on.’
‘Trofim tried to kill me, and he didn’t manage it,’ I said, conversationally. I was walking alongside a huge pane of glass, in which my shuffling reflection seemed to step ghostly through the dust-covered and empty display spaces. ‘Then you tried to kill me, in that hospital in Kiev, and you didn’t manage it. Then Frenkel himself - your boss - tried to kill me in a hotel room, and he didn’t manage it either.’
‘Fourth time lucky,’ said the red-haired man.
‘But where are you taking me, though?’ I complained. We were passing, now, a pockmarked stone fa¸ade arrayed with closed shutters. ‘My legs get tired easily. Why not just do it right here?’
We walked into an open space with a dry fountain in the middle, and there was Frenkel, waiting for me. I understood then that Frenkel wanted to rant at me before I was dispatched. He had always been a choleric individual. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long. I really was very tired of all that.
He was sitting in a wheeled chair, with a red blanket tucked over his lap and a pair of sunglasses - for by now the hot Moscow spring had heated itself up, and the sky was bright and the sun bore down with an almost radioactive intensity. The concrete bowl of the fountain, and its central stone spire from which water had long since ceased to flow, looked rather like a satellite dish; except that all it had gathered from being pointed at the sky was a layer of dried and blackened human detritus: old paper and discarded rubbish cartons.
‘Hello Jan,’ I said.
‘Konsty,’ he slurred. His mouth was curled round in a left-heavy sneer. The red-headed KGB man looked into the middle distance with an expression of vague disgust.
‘How delightful to see you,’ I said.
The red-haired man took up position behind me. There was something ostentatious about the way he had his hand on his gun.
‘You pushed me out of a fucking window,’ Frenkel gobbled, and saliva cried from his mouth. With a claw-like hand he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief.
‘You were about to push me.’
‘I was trying to close off your timelines, you fucker, not kill you. But you were trying to kill me. Don’t you understand anything?’
‘Close off my what?’
‘You think your luck in evading death is down to . . . what? God just really likes you?’
My temper rose half a degree or so. ‘You stabbed Dora.’
He nodded. ‘I thought I’d killed her too,’ he said, shortly. ‘But she fucking came back to life, didn’t she?’
‘Dora Norman has left the country,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to get to her now. But Comrade Red-hair here knows all about that. He has followed me here from the American embassy. Haven’t you, comrade?’
‘Don’t talk to him,’ slobbered Frenkel, padding at his face again with the cloth. His arm came up and went down like a mechanical spar, pivoting at the elbow. He was clutching a square of cloth in his birdclaw right hand, dabbing at his mouth with it after each little speech. ‘Fucking red-headed imbecile.’
‘The injury to his head has disinhibited him,’ murmured the red-headed man, in a disappointed tone of voice.
‘How unfortunate,’ I said.
Frenkel wriggled in his chair. ‘Can’t keep my fucking mouth shut, now, can I? It’s not just the swearing. It’s the secrets. I can’t stop babbling them. We almost had it in 1977. People - the world - people almost saw them in fucking 1977. Petrazavodsk. We were thwarted by - certain persons. And since then, haven’t things gone to shit? Haven’t they?’
‘Hard to think we could get any closer to shit than we were in the 1970s,’ I said.
‘Scientology,’ Frenkel growled. ‘Interference pattern. Mass belief systems. Communism is the creation of the people. Religion is the creation of the people. It gets in the way. We can’t - oh! ah! Fuck! You know what Lenin said-fuck?’
‘Said-fuck? What do you mean?’
‘Said. Fucking said. Do you know what Lenin fucking said. Fuck.’
‘I also suffered an injury to my head, to the frontal lobe,’ I observed. ‘I assume, from Colonel Frenkel’s propensity to profanity, that an injury to the back of the head is associated with a different set of symptoms?’
‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said red-hair, grimly.
‘Lenin said,’ slobbered Frenkel, ‘that if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. Lenin said that! That was Lenin! Coyne was fond of quoting that.’
‘Coyne?’
‘Fucking American bastard.’
‘Coyne was yours?’
‘Of course! What did you think? Fuck. He was supposed to persuade you of the reality of the attack on Chernobyl. Fuckfuck.’
‘He was trying to warn me,’ I said, curiously unsettled by this information.
‘In a fucking manner of speaking,’ slurred Frenkel, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. ‘He was trying to warn everybody. That’s what we are fucking doing.’
‘You killed him!’
Frenkel twitched his face about. ‘Don’t be, don’t be,’ he snarled, and pressed his handkerchief against his mouth. ‘Don’t be fucking - stupid,’ he said, through the fabric. Why would we kill him? He was ours.’
‘Nonsense. Don’t swear and talk nonsense, Jan. Do one or the other. Coyne and Dora were . . .’
‘He’d called me when L-Ron,’ Frenkel interrupted. ‘When L-Ron. Fuck! He’d brought the woman over to me,’ said Frenkel, flapping his arm away, with its square of white cloth, as if surrendering. ‘She’s a special case. There aren’t many like her! That’s why he brought her. He usually came on his own. You think I was loitering outside the ministry that evening just by chance? And then! And then! Hubbard’s death was the perfect opportunity. The moment had com
e. We figured: a loosening of that whole system. We figured a defocusing. All we needed to do was give the collective blindness of people one fucking jolt. It was the perfect fucking opportunity to pull together the . . .’ He coughed, and then dropped his head.
‘Scientology? What has that to do with anything?’
‘Aa. Oo. I don’t know why I keep talking,’ slurped Frenkel. ‘I can’t seem to stop babbling.’
‘No,’ agreed the red-haired man, snide. ‘You can’t.’
‘Fucking brain injury. Mass hypnosis. They’re techniques. Brainwashing. Fuck. That’s too strong a term for it, brainwashing, but - you know. Belief systems. Belief. Oh, garoo. You saw them fucking kill him, and then you magicked a fucking rope out of your brainpan to explain it away. Why would you do that?’
‘I know what I saw,’ I told him.
‘That’s the whole fucking point! Nobody sees anything - until they know what they are seeing! There’s no such fucking thing as pure seeing. It’s always being shaped by what we know. Except it’s not what we know, it’s what we fucking think and what we presuppose and what we have been told. She doesn’t even know what she’s capable of!’
‘You’re not making sense, Jan,’ I said.
‘Excuse me, Comrade fucking Ironist. Making sense? Don’t give me that. You wouldn’t know sense if it came up and bit off your balls.’
I looked around. Red-haired man was still behind me, with his hand tucked into his own jacket. A few people were coming and going. I contemplated calling to them, but it would have been fruitless. What would I have yelled? ‘Help help!’ perhaps? I would have been taken for a drunk, and Muscovites would have averted their eyes and shuffled on.
‘If they are here, these aliens of yours,’ I said, meaning perhaps to postpone the inevitable, ‘then where are they? What are they doing?’
