by Adam Roberts
‘I’m not very hungry,’ I said, truthfully; for lack of sleep leaves me feeling rather nauseous. ‘I believe I shall skip breakfast.’
‘Ah,’ said Saltykov, ‘that is one thing you cannot do!’
‘Can I not?’
‘By definition, whichever meal you next eat will break your fast. Do you see? It is in the nature of the word.’
This did not dispose me to conversation with the fellow. I folded my arms and put my chin on my chest. For a while there was only the sound of Saltykov’s munching and chewing.
‘So,’ he said, eventually. A full belly had put him in a much better humour. He tried for a smile, but managed only a sort of crookedness of the lower face. Then he winked. I was surprised at this. He was acting, indeed, for all the world like a child attempting to insinuate himself into the confidence of an adult. ‘So. You were the last person to see the American alive?’
‘A dispiriting thought.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Say?’
‘Come come, don’t be coy. You can tell me.’
‘I am not usually remarked upon for my coyness.’
‘Then out with it!’ He tried the weird face-stretching exercise once again, and once again failed to manage a smile.
‘What did he tell you? He was very interested in,’ and Saltykov, I am certain with perfect genuineness, glanced back over his shoulder, as if to check that there were any eavesdroppers nearby, ‘a certain project, initiated by a certain dictator. A certain, now deceased, ruler of all the Russias. You know that of which I am talking.’
‘I would answer your question if I understood it.’
‘Walls have ears,’ Saltykov said brightly. ‘Or is it: walls are ears? I forget. The latter would imply that we are inside a gigantic ear. Either way it would be foolish of me to blurt out a name like Project Stalin, or to mention the impending alien attack upon Chernobyl.’ He stopped. A troubled look passed over his face. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘said more than I meant.’
‘Remembering that you are a member of the Pushkin Chess Club, your credulity ought not to surprise me.’
‘Credulity?’
‘Concerning UFOs.’
‘Psshh! Not so loud. Not out loud.’
‘I shall be more circumspect, and adopt your cunningly impenetrable code.’
‘But what did Coyne say?’ he asked. ‘Had he found out whether it is truly to be Ukraine? We only suspected. But is it? And which of the reactors?’
At this, belatedly, and with a piercing sense of my foolishness for not comprehending earlier, I finally understood what Coyne had been saying as he died. I opened my mouth, and then shut it for mere foolishness.
At that exact moment we were interrupted. Singsong, the door turned on its musical hinges.
‘Comrade,’ declared a voice, forcefully. It was Officer Liski. ‘You are free to go. The people of the Soviet Union thank you for your assistance with the investigation of this crime.’
‘Me?’ I said.
‘No, comrade. The other one.’
Saltykov bobbed to his feet, like an amateur debater. ‘I object. I wish to make official complaint. I have been brutally handled by your men, despite suffering from a syndrome that makes such contact odious to me. I deeply resent such treatment.’
‘Resent it all you like,’ Liski said. ‘But resent it outside.’
‘Do-on’t!’ said Saltykov, his tone changing from brittle annoyance to wailing apprehension, as Liski advanced upon him, as if with the intention of grasping him by the arm and hauling him through the door. ‘Do-o-on’t to-o-ouch me! No touching! No hands touching!’ He had backed his small body so hard against the cell wall it was as if he hoped to topographically transform himself from a three- to a two-dimensional being.
‘Comrade,’ I said to Liski, from my seated position. ‘He dislikes being touched. He will go, with no need for coercion, if you simply tell him to.’
Liski stopped. ‘Prove what this prisoner says,’ he told Saltykov. ‘Go.’
‘Reactor Four, Saltykov,’ I said, as clearly and distinctly as I could. ‘That’s the answer to your question.’ But the look on the man’s face made my spirit sink; for it seemed inconceivable that he would comprehend my words. Terror was seated in that face, and his mouth was as round as a drainpipe’s end. ‘No!’ he said, flapping his hands in the air in the direction of the uniformed man.
‘Reactor Four,’ I said again. ‘Saltykov!’
‘Get him out,’ said Liski to one of his officers.
‘O-o-o-o-o,’ replied Saltykov, cringing, and dancing round the uniformed man like a crab. ‘O-o-o,’ he added, as he darted through the open door. Doppler shift nudged the tone of his wail downwards a notch as he ran up the stairs outside.
Liski sighed, and returned to the door.
‘And what of me, comrade?’ I asked. ‘When can I look forward to my release?’
‘You?’ he said. ‘If we constellate the severity of the crime, the length of sentence likely to be passed upon you, and your advanced age, then the likelihood is - never.’
‘With respect,’ I put in. ‘You must include my innocence of the crime in your constellation.’
‘You are our prime suspect,’ Liski said in a flat voice. ‘To be honest, you are our only suspect. You have a criminal record. You were, we discover, in the camps for many years.’
‘As a political!’
‘Nevertheless. You were the last person to see the deceased alive. You admit you were walking along the Zholtovskovo with him. Then one of two things happens: either he is snared by a rope and hauled upward, or else you and he quarrel and fight. The latter seems more likely, to us, than the former. Either way, the next thing, the American is lying on the ground with a broken neck.’
‘Look at me!’ I said. ‘Note my physical decrepitude. Do you think I have the strength of arm to break a man’s neck?’
‘The crime is being investigated, comrade,’ Liski said, pulling the door closed as he went out, ‘and perhaps other leads will emerge; but as it stands - I’d advise you to cultivate patience.’
He slammed the door behind him. I lay back on the bench. There didn’t seem to be much more to do.
I slept, I sat, I slept some more. Many hours passed, although in that windowless space I could not gauge exactly how many. Eventually I was removed from the cell by two militia officers and marched up the stairs into a room with windows, which at last gave me some sense of the time of day. It was now late afternoon. It had been raining in the day, and the wet rooftops were lacquered yellow by the low sun. Light came in shafts through the windows. I was led through to the captain’s office. I was not offered a seat.
The captain, seated behind his desk, looked up at me with a fauvist face rather startling in the severity of its primary colours: choleric red skin, intensely blue eyes, and white smoothed-back hair.
‘I have yet to be charged with a crime,’ I said. ‘I believe that under the law I must be officially charged, so as to know the crime of which I have been accused.’
‘Konstantin Skvorecky,’ said the captain, in a voice simultaneously deep and buzzing. ‘We’ve had interventions from higher authorities. From high up in the government no less.’
Perhaps I was a little drunk with lack of sleep. ‘You misunderstand the nature of government, comrade,’ I said, in a tone of polite correction. ‘It comes from the people, from the ground up. No altitude there.’
‘Believe me, friend,’ said the captain, signing a document. ‘You have no cause for levity.’ He coughed, but when he spoke again the wasp was still in his voice box. ‘We are releasing you into the custody of the KGB.’ He said this as he might have said May God have mercy on your soul.
‘KGB?’ I repeated, with some alarm.
‘Indeed. You are still under arrest, of course. There, signed and completed.’ This last, I understood, was addressed not to me, but to somebody standing behind me. ‘He’s yours now.’
‘Thank you,
captain,’ said a familiar voice. It took me a moment to place it.
‘We would appreciate,’ continued the captain, ‘if you could keep us informed of developments. The murder of an American, you know . . .’
‘Oh, I’ll undertake personally to keep you in the loop.’
I turned. The first person I saw was the vast frame of Trofim, tall as Andre the Giant. And standing beside him, zoo-keeper-like with his gorillan charge, Ivan Frenkel. ‘Hello again, Konstantin,’ said Frenkel. And then, with a slow distinctiveness, he smiled broadly.
CHAPTER 10
Frenkel and Trofim led me away. They did not even handcuff me. Like the Militia, they clearly thought there was no point in restraining so elderly and broken-down a figure. ‘You told me you were a lowly employee of an obscure ministry,’ I remonstrated with Frenkel mildly.
‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’
‘You certainly didn’t tell me you were KGB.’
‘You are upset that I kept my membership of the KGB secret from you,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that the KGB is a secret organisation?’
Trofim’s huge hand was on my shoulder as we stepped through the main entrance and onto the street. The afternoon was in the process of burning coldly into the deeper blue of evening. The streetlamps had been lit. The sky over the roofs was a garish lamination of yellow, salmon, lime and - higher up - dark-blue and black. Light shimmied and shifted on the wet pavement, like an untrustworthy thing. There were puddles in the gutter in which vodka, or petroleum, mixed oily rainbows. A large black auto was parked at the side of the road, and into this I was shuffled, Trofim’s enormous hand on the top of my head to make me duck.
The driver, sitting up front, was a gentleman I had not previously met: a skinny fellow with red hair trimmed close over the back of his head, and a hard-edged, freckled face. The cut of his hair swirled like rusty iron filings on a magnet. This is the fellow who, in a matter of some few months, would shoot a bullet from his standard-issue Makarov automatic pistol right through my heart. I don’t mean to confuse you: but it seems fair to give you, the reader of this memoir, a glimpse of my future; and the glimpse is of a bullet bursting from the end of his pistol and going directly through the heart in the middle of my chest - out the other side, too.
We’ll come to that in due course. I suppose I am saying, at this point in the narrative, keep an eye on this red-headed man.
Trofim got in the front passenger seat; which is to say, he somehow folded himself small enough to squeeze into the front passenger seat. Frenkel sat himself down next to me. ‘Off we go, lads,’ he said.
The car growled as a dog growls when somebody menaces its bone. It pulled smoothly away, and into traffic.
Frenkel sat in contemplative silence for a while before addressing me. ‘It was one day in the 1950s,’ he said in a serious voice. ‘I had occasion, on account of my work, to look at an atlas. It struck me then - there was Russia. I put my hand,’ and he held his broad hand up in front of me, ‘over Siberia and the east. Let’s not concern ourselves with them, I thought. Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, that’s enough. And here was Germany, East and West, so small. The Mammoth and the Polecat. Goliath and David. Excepting only that Goliath was us, and Goliath won. Germany, such a small place, so underpopulated - compared, I mean, with us. Then I thought: We were so joyful about winning the war! We thought we were David and they were Goliath. But it was the other way about ! We were much bigger than them. Defeating them was as inevitable as Josef Vissarionovich constantly claimed in his wartime speeches.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a shock, you know? Realising that.’
‘Tell me, Jan,’ I said. ‘Were you abducted by space-aliens? Did that really happen to you?’
‘You’re not listening to me, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ Frenkel replied, sternly. ‘My revelation? It was the Force of Necessity. There’s nothing else in the cosmos. You know science fiction.’
‘Not for many years. I haven’t kept up.’
‘You know one of the main varieties of American science fiction? The alternative history. And you know the most popular form of alternative history?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘They call it Hitler Wins. It’s that mode in which the Nazis are victorious in the war. Dozens of novels about what the world would have been like. Imagine!’
‘I imagine things would have been rather unpleasant.’
‘Here’s my point: Soviet science fiction writers never write that sort of story. Alternative history has no pedigree in Soviet science fiction. Do you know why? Because we understand necessity. Russia could not have lost to Hitler. Postulating what things would have been like had he won is meaningless to us.’
‘The moral of this story?’ I prompted, feeling light headed. I had not, you see, eaten during my Militia captivity.
‘The moral is Necessity. You’d do well to accept it. Necessity.’
The car pulled from the slip road to accelerate smoothly along the main ring. Other cars, I could see, were pulling over to permit us to pass. A car so large, so modern, so unrusted, could only be KGB.
‘You and I,’ he said to me. ‘We’re old men.’
‘I can hardly deny it.’
‘The Soviet Union is our place. This is where we belong. It is the country for old men. Communism is the system of old men. All those antique statesmen standing on their balcony watching the May Day Parade. Old, old men. Men like Chernenko. You knew where you were with Chernenko.’
‘In Gaga-grad,’ I said.
‘Oh he wasn’t as senile as people now say. You see, I knew him.’ He considered this statement. I realised then that, although Frenkel might put great energies into lying and deception, he was nevertheless oddly punctilious about the truth of all matters pertaining to the dignity of the Communist Party. I say although and nevertheless. Perhaps I should say because and therefore. ‘Well,’ Frenkel added, ‘it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I knew him. I worked with him, or worked under him. I sat in meetings that he chaired, for instance.’
‘I’m impressed by how elevated your position truly is.’
This clearly annoyed him. Perhaps he thought I was rebuking him for boasting. ‘I’m only saying that Chernenko was not senile. I’m only saying that I should know.’
‘Comrade, I’m not criticising,’ I said. ‘For the whole of the 1970s I had no better employment for my brain than as a filter for several hundred gallons of vodka, like an old sock used for straining moonshine. I believe I have only two memories from that entire decade. I’d never claim the right to criticise others for senility.’
Ivan stared at me. ‘Comrade,’ he said, coolly. ‘I shall be frank with you.’
‘Franker than you usually are?’
This was the wrong thing to say.
‘You fucker,’ he snarled, suddenly furious. ‘One thing I hate in this world and you are fucking it. You are an ironist.’
‘An ironist?’
‘Fundamentally, you take nothing seriously. You believe it is all a game. It was the same in your novels; they were never serious. They had no heart. That wasn’t my way. For me, as for Asterinov, literature was a high calling. A serious business. One story, not the ludicrous branchings of possibilities and ironic alternatives. But you, you don’t really take anything seriously, do you, comrade?’
I thought about this. I can be honest, now, and say that I had not previously considered the matter in this light. ‘There may be something in what you say, comrade,’ I conceded.
‘Understand,’ Frenkel added, his fury draining away a little. ‘I do not exactly denounce you for this. Some human beings are ironists. Others take the business of the world very seriously. The worst that could be said,’ he went on, his voice acquiring a slightly portentous edge, ‘is that revolution is not achieved by ironists.’ I thought of all those pictures of Lenin; those myriad images of him smiling at his own private joke, squinnying up his eyes in amusement at the absurdity of things. But I held my peace. Fr
enkel was still pontificating. ‘Revolution is a serious business. Changing the world for the better is a serious undertaking.’
‘No doubt.’
‘Chernenko was old, it is true. His mind was perhaps . . . less flexible than comrade Gorbachev’s is proving to be. But - and I do not speak out of disloyalty—’
‘The idea!’
‘It is not disloyalty to Gorbachev to say this,’ Frenkel snapped, over-insistent, ‘but General Secretary Gorbachev wants to institute change. He wants to change the way the Soviet Union is run. Perestroika and so on. But Chernenko - you see, he was born before the Revolution. That meant he understood change in a profound way; understood in a way somebody like Comrade Gorbachev never can. Chernenko lived through that time when change was the idiom of the whole world. Gorbachev can never understand change in the same way, because he was born after 1917.’
‘So was I,’ I pointed out.
Frenkel rubbed his bald head. ‘You miss my point. You do so on purpose.’
‘In itself, perhaps, a definition of irony.’
‘Communism,’ said Frenkel, as if explaining to a stubborn and unlikable child. ‘Communism is government by old men. Capitalism is different. Under capitalism things are run by the young, the thrusting, the violent. You know how it is in New York.’
‘To be honest I don’t really know how it is in Moscow,’ I said. ‘And I live here.’
‘Don’t be obtuse. You know what happens on Wall Street. It’s gangsters in suits. It’s teenagers high on their own piss and testosterone. They’re the ones who make all the money, and who have all the power. Capitalism is the jungle. In the jungle the top gorilla never gets to grow old, because there’s always some young psychopath ready to brain him with the,’ and he stumbled a little. I noticed that two frogspawny spots of spittle had accumulated in the corner of Frenkel’s mouth. He was getting worked up. ‘The jawbone of an ass,’ he concluded, unexpectedly.
‘Ass, comrade?’
The tone in which I said this increased Frenkel’s fury. He reached across and put his thumb against my chest, digging it into my sternum. It made me think of army basic training - it gave me, indeed, one of those vertiginous feelings of a deep memory surfacing abruptly and unexpectedly - when we had been taught how to stab a human being with bayonet or knife: to press the thumb in amongst the corrugations of the ribcage, to find the ossified knot at its base and then slide the blade underneath.