‘One per cent of the population,’ clarified the major.
‘More or less. The arsenal includes nuclear weapons, platforms for launching weapons of all ranges. But on the whole the Khanate is peaceful and hasn’t been at war for many years.’
‘Yet it has territorial issues …’
He knew what he was talking about. Itil, the Khanate’s ancient capital, had been captured five hundred years before by the Slovenorussians. But the Khanate wasn’t going to fight over it.
At first one interrogation was very like another. It was like helping schoolchildren who were about to take an examination and whom I was helping to prepare. The children asked me questions, and I’d answer them; they’d write down my answers and ask me more questions. The first interrogations were almost exactly like exam-preparation sessions. I was tutoring my investigator, Major Sinevusov. And waiting for him to come to the point.
2004
A day went by before I managed to get hold of Kurochkin. Kurochkin was a big fish in our rather small pond. He was now a Member of Parliament, and five years ago he was a Member of Parliament, but in between, he had been First Deputy Premier—I beg your pardon, they now style themselves First Deputy Prime Minister, a splendid title that is the secret posthumous envy of all the Viceroys of India. Kurochkin now had a stake in a reputable bank, and for his sustenance he had been given a fund through which ethereal American dollars were pumped into decrepit Ukrainian industry.
I had to ring him from the office. Not good. Once a month our office receives a list from the telephone exchange of all the numbers we’ve dialed. Including numbers dialed from mobiles. If they noticed that I’d rung Parliament two days in a row they would start asking me all kinds of stupid questions. But only if they noticed. And that was pretty unlikely.
Which reminded me of a time when it hadn’t taken days to get through to Kurochkin, when I knew by heart all the numbers where I might find him, and he knew mine just as well. We could meet up at any time and for any reason, and reasons weren’t hard to find. We didn’t even look for them. At school we’d been in the same class, sat at the same desk, prepared for examinations using the same textbooks. I called him Kurkin, usually just Kur. We were both in love with Natasha Belokrinitskaya, and our chances were an even nil. And we were both searched at the same time and arrested on the same day.
‘Kurochkin,’ I said, when I was finally put through, ‘have you received a letter?’
He didn’t ask what kind of letter. Perversely he said, ‘I just knew this was one of your idiotic jokes.’ And sighed heavily. Meaning it was his lifelong burden to endure me and my jokes. Laborer. Defender of the People’s Welfare. Victim of Davidov.
But it meant he’d received the letter.
‘No, Kurochkin, it’s not one of my jokes. It’s someone else’s joke. I thought you might know something.’
‘Davidov,’ the note of fatigue was gone, but the perversity remained, ‘have you any idea how busy I am? Today alone I …’ Here he yawned loudly and began shuffling familiarly through his parliamentary papers. As if he were about to read through the day’s entire order of business from the lectern in Parliament.
‘Enough! I believe you,’ I said, interrupting so that he wouldn’t actually start reciting all his business.
‘And here you are with your letter,’ concluded Kurochkin with satisfaction.
‘It’s not my letter. And the text—word for word, it’s …’
‘Well, yes …’
‘It’s exactly the same. I know because I know it by heart. The only difference is the date.’
‘I noticed. So it wasn’t you?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to say.’
At that he grew thoughtful, and there was certainly plenty to think about.
‘Which e-mail account was your letter addressed to?’
‘My parliamentary e-mail. Why?’
‘Can someone outside of Parliament get hold of it?’
‘It’s pretty straightforward—it’s open access.’
‘So will you write back, then?’ I asked simply, incidentally, as if that’s not why I had called in the first place.
‘Write back? Me? Are you pulling my leg, Davidov?’
‘Well, just imagine it’s an e-mail from one of your electorate. You do have voters, right? One voter’s pension has been miscalculated, another hasn’t received the tax credit he’s due …’
‘And a third sends an ultimatum.’
‘By the way, it’s already four o’clock.’
‘So?’
‘You have until six to write back. You’ve got another two hours.’
‘And the third,’ Kurochkin suddenly roared, ‘sends me an ultimatum signed by Emperor Karl and demands the withdrawal of troops before six o’clock … Where does he want troops withdrawn from?’
‘Leibach.’
‘From Ljubljana, in other words. And the return of Istria. It would look just great if I used my parliamentary e-mail to answer this … this … Words fail me, honestly.’
‘Then use a different e-mail address if that’s the problem.’
‘It’s not the address. Don’t play the idiot.’ Kurochkin was already more composed. ‘You know it’s not the address.’
‘Fine. Then let’s think on it for a few days. Okay? And talk later.’
‘Okay. Although … Well, you know where to find me.’
I knew he wanted to say one more time that he wasn’t interested. But he didn’t say it. And it’s a good thing, too. Because I knew this was interesting and important. As important as it had been before, although twenty years had passed since it had all first begun.
1984
It’s a long time since I’ve been able to believe myself. I don’t believe what I remember. I’m sure that’s not how it was … but how was it? I would be glad, I would even want to watch—right now, but as a bystander, an invisible observer in a far-away corner—what had actually happened. To hear again the questions I was asked and how I answered. Sinevusov’s office with its window overlooking a courtyard, the lifeless fluorescent light in the cell … Scores of times I’ve seen them in dreams, hundreds of times in memory. Yet always afresh, always somehow different. For every minute of the interrogation, every day spent in that cold place, sequestered inside the concrete walls of the inner prison, away from the rest of the world, every minute and every day was different from all other minutes and days. And the differences, scarcely noticeable at times, monstrous at others, had long since been effaced and overlaid by invention and dream. Layer upon layer of thoughts about what hadn’t been but might exist on top of the memory of what had been but might not have been. And each new layer was not merely as plausible as the one before but even more so. So what can I, what should I, remember now? What I had been asked? What I had answered? Had I even been there at all? What about Sinevusov? Well, we can at least assume that he was there.
As were the others. They would come into Sinevusov’s office during the interrogations. When he greeted his visitor the major would sometimes leap to his feet and wait for permission to resettle his backside on to the soft leather of his armchair and resume his work. But more often he just gave a friendly wave and a warm, fond smile. Not only to other majors but to those with fewer stars on their shoulders (although I never saw Sinevusov in uniform) and those without any stars at all. As far as I was concerned, he always behaved properly. Even affably. And he oozed oil endlessly.
He interrogated me at length about Istemi, the relationship that had developed between Emperor Karl and President Betancourt, the history of the wars between the Khanate and the Caliphates. He questioned me about many things, and all of it interested him. His questions often surprised me. I tried not to show it. He, on the other hand, reacted animatedly to my responses, cross-questioning me and going over the same point again and again to clarify it. And he always listened very attentively. He liked watching me draw the boundaries of our countries on a school relief map. How the greasy red lin
e—the trail of a brand new Polish marker he’d got out of a desk drawer especially for me—crawled across the map and met up with the light-blue dotted line of the European border then broke away and set off across the living territory of sovereign states. Once Sinevusov’s superior, the general, had come upon us engaged in this activity. With a mild gesture he indicated that the major, who had leaped to his feet, should return to his seat and continue the interrogation.
By then I had extended the red boundary along the border between Bulgaria and Greece and was moving northwards along the border between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Following its twists and turns, I slowly made my way along the Danube. The general stopped me.
‘Label it right away or else it’s not clear. What’s this?’ He tapped his finger on the four-fingered fist of the Peloponnese.
‘The Caliphates.’ I wrote ‘UAC’ between Patra and Delphi.
‘And this?’ The general’s finger lingered on Bulgaria.
‘The Khanate.’
I noticed Sinevusov glancing warily at the general. His brow glistened with fine drops of oil.
‘Write it down, then!’ demanded the general.
He had learned this phrase well during his years of service. I carefully traced ‘ZK’ on the border between Bulgaria and Romania and then, without waiting for further questions, I wrote ‘SRC’ on the territory of Yugoslavia and said, ‘That’s the Slovenorussian Confederation.’
‘A bourgeois republic. Territory, 9.5 million square kilometers. Population, 210 million. Army of two million. Nuclear weapons capability,’ Sinevusov briefed him.
I hadn’t told him this, and he hadn’t asked me. Which meant that he had found it in the documents. Or else Kurochkin had said something. For he was somewhere getting interrogated, too. Perhaps just on the other side of the wall in the next room. At the time I don’t think I realized they had also arrested the other members of our group. But it wasn’t hard to figure out.
The general, standing and leaning heavily on Sinevusov’s desk, was examining the map carefully.
‘Carry on,’ he ordered.
From the Danube the Khanate’s border ran northeast, dividing Romania in half and divesting Ukraine of nine of its western provinces before coming up against the blue border line. The map was finished.
Without waiting for the general to prompt me I found the right place on the map, put down a greasy dot, wrote ‘Uman’ in big letters and underlined it.
‘The capital,’ I said.
‘Okay, but what about the south? Who does this belong to?’ He tapped on the Sea of Marmara.
‘Ah, yes,’ I remembered. ‘It’s ours.’ And I partitioned the northwest from Turkey. The red stripe linked the estuaries of the Gediz, Porsuk and Sakarya rivers.
‘Ours?’ The general smirked. ‘Do the Turks agree with that?’
‘There are no Turks here. This is the ceasefire line set by the 1975 armistice. It’s actually the border between the Khanate and the Caliphates. It’s true that Slovenorussia thinks the straits should belong to them, but their claim isn’t serious.’
‘Not serious?’ The general smirked again. ‘Very well. Carry on.’ He nodded to Sinevusov and went to the door, then stopped abruptly and asked, ‘What if Slovenorussia invades the Caliphates? Could that happen?’
‘Could the Soviet Union invade Iran?’ I said it to show him what rubbish he was talking. But that’s not how he understood me. Everything I said they interpreted in their own way.
‘What gave you that idea?’ The general looked at Sinevusov, who shook his head helplessly. ‘Does that mean your Slovenorussia is analogous to the Soviet Union? Is that what you mean?’
If someone wants to hear something that’s what he’ll hear, no matter what you say to him. All I could do was shrug my shoulders. ‘If I wanted to say that I would have said it. Slovenorussia isn’t the Soviet Union, and the Zaporozhian Khanate isn’t …’ I stopped and tried to think of a suitable state. ‘This country has no pre-existing value,’ I said, slipping in a bit of mathematical analysis.
At the next interrogation I drew another map for Sinevusov, this time of the Caliphates.
‘Tell me,’ he said, looking over the drawing, ‘how did you ever come up with such a strange game in the first place?’
Sinevusov asked me this question no less than five times a day. Every day. He would choose his moment, distract me, manoeuver like Suvorov preparing to storm the impregnable fortress of Ismail, and over and again make me repeat my answer—one short sentence that he refused to believe. I had memorized this harmless fabrication—forgive me, testimony—and recited it the way children recite Pushkin’s ‘Frost and Sunshine,’ the way students recite the definition of material according to Lenin, the way retirees recite the price of a hundred grams of butter. I had decided that once I said something I should stick to my story. And that’s what I did. Sinevusov listened with boredom, waiting for the moment when once again, as if graced by heavenly illumination, he could marvel, ‘Tell me, how did you ever come up with such a strange game in the first place?’
1983
Place names such as Apple, Little Apple, Apple Tree, Upper and Lower Apple, Greater and Lesser Apple and so forth were so common and scattered so densely throughout the province of Zhytomyr as to suggest that the most common tree in the Ukrainian north-west wasn’t the oak, pine or birch but the apple tree. We drew Greater Apple for our food, bed and plunder. Three and a half weeks of kolkhoz life.
Like a caravan of slow black beetles, a dozen moonlighting LAZ coaches, stiflingly hot inside, lurched off from the university student quarters at around ten thirty in the morning. One police escort with flashing lights to the front and another to the rear, our long caravan made for the west. We flew over the Kiev provincial border without even noticing. By lunchtime we were passing the town of Korostishev.
‘Hey, Korostichevski,’ said Nedremailo, standing in the aisle of the bus. He mispronounced Korostishevski’s name so badly and so forcefully it felt like a sharp poke in the shoulder blade. ‘Are we passing through the land of your forefathers?’
Sashka Korostishevski drew aside the dusty curtain and looked out the window. Stretched along the road were shrubs, short little conifers and a herd of wiry cows huddled on the verge and following us with hungry eyes.
Nedremailo paused for a moment then headed off without waiting for an answer.
Vadik Kanyuka, sitting next to Sashka, gave him a shove and said, ‘He wants to swap homelands with you.’
‘What for?’ asked Sashka. Outside the window the shrubs had given way to enormous heaps of rubbish.
‘Not that,’ said Vadik irritably. Sashka wasn’t taking the bait. ‘What are you looking at out there?’
‘I’ve never been here before,’ Sashka drawled. ‘It’s interesting.’
‘Prince Korostishevski makes a ceremonial entrance into the paternal appanage,’ mocked Kanyuka. ‘Cue the pealing of bells, the procession of the cross. Countrymen and countrywomen, shepherds and shepherdesses, old men and old women. The kissing of hands and of feet in stirrups, the right to veto the veche and the right to the first night on the first night …’
‘That would be all right,’ said Korostishevski. ‘A principality of one’s own without any mathematical analysis or differential equations.’
Kurochkin and I were quietly playing cards, a game of Preference. Korostishevski and Kanyuka were sitting in front of us, and we could hear their conversation.
‘Think big, Korostishevski,’ said Kurochkin without looking away from his cards. ‘The days of petty feudal fiefdoms are long gone. Why not conquer a few neighbors, unite them under your iron fist and threaten the Swedes?’
‘And you’re under threat, too, pal,’ said Kanyuka coolly. ‘You’re about to take another trick when you’ve declared misère. Keep up now. Matters of state are being decided without you. Not just any old cook is capable of running a feudal principality, despite what Lenin said.’
The caravan of buses tr
avelled almost as far as Zhytomyr without stopping or other holdups, ticking away the kilometers of the M-17 in orderly fashion. The two buses directly in front of us were the first to break away from the caravan. They turned south for Berdychiv. Soon it was our bus’s turn, and blinking its lights in farewell it headed north off the M-17. Somewhere beyond Chernyakhiv, on the border of the Volodar-Volyn district, lay Greater Apple.
Dusk had fallen by the time we found the village, so it was the next day when we had a look around. It was small, its main street swimming in autumnal mud. Apple orchards circled it to the east and west, and its northern end led to the banks of the mighty Siberian-European ‘River’ Druzhba—oil pipeline of friendship—and just beyond the pipeline began pine forest. But we hadn’t been brought to this backwoods to pump oil. We were here to pick apples—Antonovkas and Simirenkos.
And when you think about it, what else is there for radiophysics students to do in the autumn?
The village’s main thoroughfare, Lenin Street, had been paved back in the 1950s and, although it was still passable, immediately beyond the village it turned into a rusty bog, by turns puddle or battered, broken road. The road went through the apple orchards, dividing them in half. On one side grew Antonovkas; on the other clusters of Simirenko. In Greater Apple everything came in twos, doubled and halved with fruity dualism. We, too, were halved, not by any particular rationale but simply into two brigades. One brigade was entrusted with Antonovkas, the other with Simirenkos. Kurochkin and I got Simirenkos.
‘Reinettes are prized winter apples. What kinds of Reinette do you know?’ We were being addressed by a local agronomist. Or perhaps a storekeeper or orchard manager. That is to say he was a village intellectual, wearing glasses, jacket, peaked cap and moustache (the better to hide his faint, sly smile), and he had decided to show us that we were a bunch of young louts from the capital. We were too lazy to argue with him. We were altogether too lazy.
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