by Adam Roberts
‘Of course he was,’ said the senior KGB officer. When he became irate, his voice rose from a croak to the sound of a metal file rasping on metal. ‘Hum hum! You told the Moscow Militia so! He was hauled up by a rope around his ankle, like a deer in a snare!’
‘The Militia never found the rope.’
‘What does that matter? You don’t think it truly was aliens?’
I searched my mind. It had, before the explosion, been a cluttered and rather oppressive mind to live inside; but now it was clear and brightly lit: long elegant hallways and wide shining windows and order. I must concede it was an improvement. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not.’
‘There we are then! It’s nonsense. Poisonous and decadent nonsense, imported mostly from the USA, with films such as Warring Stars and Intimate Embraces of Three Different Kinds, and other such pornography.’
‘I have not seen these films.’
‘Quite right. They are banned. Nevertheless dedicated groups of counter-revolutionaries stage illicit screenings.’
‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘If I may? As one old man to another. This talk of counter-revolutionaries and so on - it is old-fashioned, you know. The Soviet Union is undergoing a process of reform and restructuring.’
He grunted at that. ‘Make a statement: say that persons unknown murdered the American. State categorically that there are no such things as space aliens, and that no UFO hovered over Moscow that night. Do not mention the events in the nuclear reactor. That is still a secret matter. But it is important we issue assurances to the Soviet people that they are not being menaced by UFOs.’
‘Very well,’ I said.
‘Do that, and you will be released from KGB arrest.’
‘No charges?’ I said.
‘It is my belief,’ he grumbled, by way of reply, ‘that you attempted to prevent the traitor Trofim from detonating a grenade inside the nuclear reactor. For that all Soviet people are grateful. We express our gratitude by informing you that, if ever you make public what happened in that place, we will arrest and charge you immediately. But otherwise you will be free to resume your work as a,’ and he chewed the word a little before speaking it, ‘translator.’
He stood up. ‘One thing we don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how you got to Kiev.’
‘How did I get to Kiev?’ He was asking me a question about memory, and my memory was still clumsy. ‘How?’
‘From Moscow. Somehow you slipped out of Moscow. Frenkel had men at the stations, and the airport, you know. Watching for you.’
‘I drove,’ I said, prompted to the statement by something. I couldn’t have told you where the memory came from. Mumbling in the dark. I could smell fresh bread. There was somebody else there.
‘You drove? You own a car?’
‘I was driven.’ The memory bulged against the membrane of my mind, and threatened to burst through. Then it receded. You’ve had that experience: where you think something is going to come vomiting up, but then recedes. ‘Or did I drive myself? I can’t remember.’
‘Nobody drives from Moscow to Kiev. Don’t be silly. What do you think we have trains for?’ He fitted his hat more securely to his head and left the room.
I never learnt his name. His subordinate, also in uniform, came in as he went out; and I dictated a statement to the effect that there are no such things as UFOs. This, I signed. It was nothing but the truth, after all. There are no such things as UFOs. Except in the imagination of such people as science fiction writers.
How many days passed? I don’t know, exactly. A number of days. The tap was removed from the side of my head, and a simple bandage placed there. My hair, where it had been shaved away, was growing back itchy and bristly.
I practised a great deal with my right side: moving my right arm, flexing my right fist. It felt stiff, as though with cold. But I could at least move it.
With the nurse’s help I climbed from my bed. I walked to the window, and I walked back from the window. ‘Very good,’ I was told. ‘You should have seen me,’ I gasped, ‘when I walked to the door to lock it. Now, that was a walk.’
‘We are keen to discharge you,’ said Dr Bello. ‘A nurse or security officer must sit on a chair outside your room all day and all night. It is an onerous duty we have to discharge.’
‘I can only apologise for being so difficult a patient,’ I told her.
‘Why waste energy on apologising that you could use getting well? Once you are well you can remove yourself from the hospital. Then you will cease to be our problem.’
‘And, by way of after-care?’
‘As for that, well you can tend for yourself,’ said Dr Bello. ‘That is to say,’ she added, turning away, ‘you can take your place in the supportive bosom of the united nations of Soviet peoples.’
‘A comforting thought indeed,’ I said.
‘You could be more grateful,’ said Dr Bello, mildly. ‘You are lucky to have survived.’
‘It is a convention of science fiction,’ I said, ‘that each reality is shadowed by alternate realities, every history has a variant alternate history. In such alternatives, I doubt whether I did survive. My alternate history stops at page number two hundred.’
‘Page two hundred? And when did you meet me?’
‘Round about page two hundred and twenty.’
‘So your novel ended even before I met you. Still,’ said Dr Bello, getting to her feet, ‘I find the endings of novels to be the best parts; so an ending that comes more quickly is probably to be preferred.’
I gave three separate reports to Militia officers, and two, in total, to representatives of the KGB, but I fear these reports - filed, somewhere, I suppose, to this day - differ markedly from one another. I was not attempting to mislead the authorities, but my memory was gappy: bubbles of pure-lit clarity rising through a fog-coloured sea. Specific stimuli might trigger new memories to pop up, which would in turn leave me slightly bewildered.
‘You just sit there and look at Trofim,’ said Frenkel, leaning over me.
It was dark. Therefore it was night. I did not recognise his voice. I did not recognise his voice. Then, abruptly, I recognised his voice and I woke up with a jolt. ‘But how are you here?’
He had a torch in his left hand and he threw the light from this into my sleepy eyes, as he might throw sand or dust. But I did not need to make out his features from in amongst the knot of shadows; I remembered his voice, and with his voice I remembered everything about him. ‘I met a senior KGB officer,’ I told him, ‘who said you were under internal investigation.’
‘Leo, keep your eyes on his eyes.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said, with a gummy mouth. Then I said, ‘There’s supposed to be somebody outside my door. I’m supposed to have a guard, day and night. I hope you haven’t killed them.’
‘I’m invisible. You cannot see me. Fast asleep,’ said Frenkel. I remember thinking this was silly of him: speaking like a hypnotist. That wasn’t going to do him any good. I have never believed in hypnotism. It’s mere stage performance, like card tricks and sawing the woman in—
Sawing the woman in.
Sawing the woman. Something about the woman.
‘Hold still,’ said Frenkel, crossly.
There was something enormously important about the woman. What woman?
‘You’re going to kill me, obviously,’ I said, distractedly. ‘The guard on the door will be embarrassed when he wakes in the morning.’
‘I’m invisible,’ said Frenkel, in a soothing voice,
‘To find that I was killed in the night, when they were supposed to be guarding me.’
I felt a dry hand on the back of my neck, as Frenkel reached round. An old man’s parchmenty palm. The blaze of electric light filled my eyes. I couldn’t see anything except the light. ‘You are calm,’ said Frenkel. I took him to mean: in the face of your impending extinction.
‘The nature of the injury I have suffered in my brain,’ I told him, ‘is such that it has taken the anxiety fro
m contemplating the future.’
‘You haven’t suffered your brain injury yet,’ said Frenkel. This struck me as an oddly disconnected thing to say. I pondered the words, but as I pondered them I found I couldn’t be sure that Frenkel had even said them. But if Frenkel hadn’t said them, where had they come from?
There was a jab at the back of my neck. A mosquito bite.
I yelped, more in surprise than pain. I cannot say whether I believed that this sensation was that of a stiletto bursting in between my vertebrae, or only a mosquito bite.
‘You won’t remember,’ said Frenkel.
This struck me after the fashion of a challenge. ‘I’ll remember if I want to,’ I returned. The torch flickered in front of my face. I still couldn’t make out Frenkel’s face. Then, for a horrible moment, I thought I did see a face, but the face I thought I saw was Trofim’s. Trofim’s huge bovine face floating directly in front of me: as if he were sitting across the bed from me. I do not believe in ghosts, as I believe I have mentioned before; but this was startling. ‘I can remember anything I want to!’ I cried, in a wavery voice.
‘You won’t remember,’ Frenkel said again. It was certainly Frenkel’s voice. I could hear it very distinctly.
‘I remember you,’ I said, defiantly. ‘I remember you exactly. I remember meeting Josef Stalin.’ Did I remember that? In the dark I seemed to hear Trofim muttering Joe-SF, Joe-SF. There was a stutter inside my brain. ‘I remember driving from Moscow in a car, in the back of a car with . . .’
‘You won’t remember,’ said Frenkel for a third time, as if weaving a charm.
‘That’s no good you know, I don’t believe in hypnotism,’ I said, as forcefully as my reluctant throat muscles permitted. ‘I remember driving in the car with . . .’
It came to me.
‘Dora,’ I said, in a voice of dawning wonder. ‘Dora.’
And then, with something like a consummation, or a sense of arrival and rightness, Dora came into my memory. The thought of her, like air filling a gasping lung, made me blush; and blush with sheer pleasure of memory. It all blocked itself in, and then shaded with colour and solidity. I loved her. It was hard to think that I had forgotten that I loved her. But I was not anxious, because it was not that the love had gone away, but only that my mind, with mental grit thrown in its metaphorical eye, had blinked, and blinked, and for the moment not seen it.
The other man was still talking.
‘I am going to come back in a minute,’ he said. ‘And we will continue our little talk. And you will forget all about what has happened here.’ And the torch went out.
I sat in the dark for a long time. There was no further talk. He was not true to his word.
A strange dream.
There was a lump on the back of my neck. I did not forget about that. I had it from before. Or was it new? I wondered if Frenkel had injected some poison, or hallucinogen, or truth serum - but then I thought I could feel a lump, something hard underneath my skin. This did not distress me. Perhaps I told myself that there were many pieces of shrapnel embedded in my flesh. Finally I fell asleep, and as I slid into unconsciousness I thought, quite distinctly, this thought: If I have just been dreaming, then how can I be falling asleep? To be asleep, and dream of falling asleep - does that remove you to a deeper, secondary level of sleep? And what if you dream there of falling asleep . . . ?
This was all very puzzling. But - Dora! At least I had Dora back. Of course I fell asleep, and in sleep I lost her again. My mind had been mashed about.
I woke in the morning with this peculiar encounter, real or dreamed, in my head.
‘My concern,’ I told the doctor, ‘is that my sanity has been dislodged. I dreamt last night that—’
‘I have no interest in your dreams. You are well enough to continue your convalescence at home. A taxi is here to take you away.’
‘I did not order a taxi,’ I said. But as I said this, the memory flushed through me, like water through a pipe, of my journey from Moscow to Kiev in the back of the cab, and Dora. Saltykov, with his absurd syndrome, and glorious Dora. She had been with me the whole time. How could I have forgotten Dora?
‘Dora,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘I must find Dora. I must find her.’
‘I’m sure you will, too.’ A male nurse was helping me to get dressed. My actual clothes, it seemed, had been effectively destroyed by the grenade explosion. The hospital had a supply of garments. ‘Donations,’ said the nurse, with a cheery expression on his face. ‘Dead people, and such. You know?’
‘Which dead people?’ I replied, and I fumbled at the buttons of an oversized shirt. Its fabric had the texture of dried, salted beef. It was at least clean, however; and it was certainly better than nothing in the raw Kiev weather.
‘Dead people,’ he chirruped. ‘Lots of dead people, in a hospital, I can tell you.’
He helped me pull a sweater over my head, and fed my arms into a canvas jacket. This process had worn me out so greatly that I had to sit back and catch my breath. ‘Now,’ he told me. ‘You’ve a choice: leather shoes that might be a little on the large side; or other shoes that, I’d say, will fit you perfectly.’
‘Other shoes?’ I panted.
‘I’ll not lie. I say shoes. Another person might say slippers.’
‘I can’t believe I forgot about Dora,’ I said.
‘Pretty is she?’ He was rummaging in a capacious fabric bag, and pulling out slippers, one after the other. He held them up and they wobbled in his hands like live fish.
‘I would say beautiful, rather than pretty,’ I said, the memory of her returning to me. ‘Not pretty, no. But beautiful.’
‘That’s what men say when their girl looks like a horse,’ he told me, cheerfully.
‘She doesn’t look like a horse,’ I said.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t. A man your age, in your condition, any girlfriend is an impressive achievement, I’d say. Wait - I’ve put the right slipper on your left foot.’
‘I’m not sure it matters,’ I said.
There were other papers to be signed, and Dr Bello gave me a twenty-second primer for my post-hospital care. ‘Take it easy for a month,’ she said. ‘And don’t start smoking again. To start smoking again would be very stupid. Very bad for your frail health. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Doctor.’
‘Will you go back to Moscow?’
‘Not straight away.’
‘Smoking is very bad for your health.’
‘I understand.’
‘I shall say it three times,’ Dr Bello said, ‘and it will become a charm. I come from a long line of forest witches, and what I tell you three times will become true. Smoking is very bad for your health. Here is your taxi driver.’
And there was Saltykov, with his sandy hair and his serious, pale face. The taxi driver of the doleful countenance. He came into the room like a comet drawing all the great nimbus of my memories of him with him. I was so pleased to see him I felt the urge, which I barely contained, to burst into tears. ‘You were not exploded in Chernobyl!’ I said.
‘It’s more than I can say for you,’ he replied, disapprovingly. He did not look particularly glad to see me. ‘It is true you are alive. But getting exploded in such a place was - reckless.’
‘Mr Skvorecky is still frail,’ said Dr Bello. ‘You may need to assist him down the stairs and into your taxi.’
‘Assist him?’ The tone of Saltykov’s voice - tart with suspicion - brought back another little flurry of memory. He was exactly like himself. I remembered exactly what he was like. There was a curious joy in that fact.
‘Permit him to lean against you,’ said Dr Bello, with a straight face. ‘Perhaps lend him your shoulder.’
‘It is impermissible for me to come into contact with another person,’ said Saltykov, primly, ‘and a man most especially. I suffer from a certain syndrome . . .’
Bello spoke across him: ‘I thought he was your friend?’
‘Perhaps, Doctor,’ I put in, ‘I might have a stick?’
The nurse went off to fetch me a walking stick, and Dr Bello peered intently at Saltykov. He, for his part, ignored her.
‘Saltykov,’ I asked. ‘Dora . . .’
‘Indeed. I shall drive you directly to her. She is most anxious to see you again.’
A great happiness bloomed inside me.
The nurse returned with a peanut-brown walking stick. It was for me. It was tipped with half-perished rubber. Very gingerly I levered myself off my bed.
It was a long walk down the corridor to the lift, and it was followed by another long walk through the main hall out to where Saltykov had parked his taxicab. But emerging into the chill of early spring, under a bright blue sky, felt like renewal. I was still alive. I was going to see Dora again. The grey of the buildings had a pewter, precious tint; the noise of traffic, distant in the air, chimed a strange symphony and even that noise was delightful. After weeks of hospital air, I breathed in the tainted chill with pleasure.
Saltykov, in what I believe he regarded as a kind of concession, opened the door of his taxi for me, and then stood aside as I grunted, and struggled, and strained and eventually manoeuvred myself into a sitting position inside unaided.
He got in and drove away. We drove for long minutes in silence before he said, ‘You do not think my taxicab is bugged?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ I said.
‘It is not likely, I suppose. Still, one cannot be too careful.’
‘No.’
‘In that case, I may tell you where we are going. Dora is in a small hotel in Kiev.’
‘I would have guessed as much.’
‘Really?’ He sounded disappointed. ‘If you can think of that, then perhaps they will think of it too.’
I knew what he meant by they, although without precision. I don’t believe Saltykov had any better knowledge. Nevertheless I said, ‘I could not guess which Kiev hotel. I daresay there are many.’
He brightened at this. ‘True! I tried to persuade her to return to Moscow. I told her: Go to the US embassy in Moscow. Seek sanctuary, I said. I said: Consider yourself the hunchback of Notre Dame.’