Yellow Blue Tibia

CHAPTER 1

At dawn we boarded a special train. The track had recently been repaired. We all commented on the extraordinary and heroic efficiency with which war damage was being repaired all the way across the city. Sergei declared that the sunrise resembled a frozen explosion: clouds strewn about the sky like shreds of raw meat, and a vivid orange-yellow billowing-up of colour behind the eastern horizon. Our military escort didn’t know what to make of this. It’s possible they suspected bourgeois decadence in such talk. It’s possible they were right to be suspicious. Certainly the sky contrasted very sharply with the iron and stone of the city: grey and silver and rust. The eye was inevitably drawn to the frozen rage of sunrise. Such colours. We were on our way to meet Comrade Stalin himself, in person, and all of us feeling almost as honoured and excited as we did terrified. Then Sergei, as perverse as ever, tried to get the whole carriage singing patriotic songs, but the soldiers didn’t join in.

A smashed motorcycle was lodged in the fork of one bare tree.

An indication that this trip was something special came when one of the soldiers distributed American cigarettes. American cigarettes! We all smoked. The air inside the carriage, which had had the night chill still in it, began to warm and blur. The soldiers loosened their manner, became chatty.

‘They weren’t so badly touched here,’ said one of them, waving his hand at the window. ‘They complain, but compare this with the rest of the Motherland! Compare this with the west.’ He made a pssshh noise with his lips. ‘Hardly any damage, here.’

‘They should see the Volga,’ said another. ‘I’m not only talking about Stalingrad, but the whole countryside round there.’

‘I fought at Stalingrad,’ said Sergei Pavlovich Rapoport.

That killed the conversation.

We arrived at a small station in the middle of farmland. As we disembarked, Sergei said, ‘And where will our next train take us?’ He said no more, but his meaning — that he was expecting us all to be shipped off to the Gulag — was clear enough. The soldiers escorting us decided to find this hilarious — fortunately for us.

Our further transport took the form of three mule carts. Adam Kaganovich, giddy (I suppose) with the fear and the excitement, pretended to take offence at this. ‘Carts! Donkeys! You cannot expect us to put up with such rusticity, comrades! Comrades, remember that we are science fiction writers!’ ‘That you are science fiction writers,’ said the Lieutenant, in charge of us, ‘is precisely why Comrade Stalin wishes to see you.’

When we arrived at the dacha everything happened very quickly. We were taken through into a large room, with tall windows of uncracked glass and excellent views across the low hills. The ungrazed grasses, high and feathery, fuzzed the distant fields. One flank of the landscape was a blue-green, almost the colour of sky.

The room was under-furnished: a few chairs, nothing more. Over the mantelpiece was a large photographic reproduction of a group of revolutionary heroes. I recognised Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Comrade Stalin himself. In the middle was Lenin, with that expression on his face you often see in photographs of him — that sly narrowing of the eyes, his tight little beard bunched up around his upturned mouth, as if he is richly enjoying a joke that he has not chosen to share with anybody else.

A samovar was brought in and we all drank tea, smoking nervously the whole time. And then, without preliminary or preparation, in came Stalin himself, in the flesh, flanked by two aides. We all stood, of course, straight as iron railings, all in a line; and he came over and greeted us one by one, shaking our hands, and looking each of us in the eye. It was immediately evident that he knew our writings, that — indeed! — he was an enthusiast for science fiction. When he got to him, Frenkel dipped his head and said, ‘Ivan Frenkel, comrade.’

‘Ivan,’ said Stalin. ‘Ivan Frenkel. Not — Jan?’ And he laughed. Frenkel, a Slav, had been born Jan, of course, but had been publishing under the name Ivan since the thirties. ‘It’s more patriotic,’ he had once explained to me. ‘It’s a more patriotic name.’ But what did Comrade Stalin mean by drawing attention to Jan? The expression on Frenkel’s face was ghastly — smiling, but ghastly. Was Stalin saying: Do not pretend to be Russian when we all know you to be a Slav? He did not explain. He moved along the line with a jovial expression.

You will want me to say what my impression of him was. I can do little better than say to you that what most struck me, meeting him in the flesh, was how very like himself he looked. It is a foolish observation, I daresay, but that’s what most struck me. You must remember that his image was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union at that time: and the strong features, the thick black hair and moustache, the sheer physical heft and presence of the man, were exactly as you would think they were. It is true that he looked old: but, after all, he was in his late sixties. There was a degree of pallor and slackness to his complexion. Little red broken veins embroidered the corners of his nose. His eyes were each surrounded by an oval of puffy flesh. But his gaze was unwavering. I had heard it said that when encountering Stalin the crucial thing was to meet his gaze. Any shiftiness about the eyes, any apparent avoidance of looking directly back at his gaze, could provoke mistrust, rage or worse. Only a few things about the physical proximity of Stalin surprised me. One was his height — for he was considerably shorter than I had expected. The other was his smell. A tart odour combined of tobacco and sweat. Also (this, I do not think, has been reported) his feet were very large in proportion to the rest of his body. I could see this as he moved along the line.

He shook hands with Sergei Rapoport, Adam Kaganovich, Nikolai Asterinov and myself, one after the other. When he met Asterinov he chortled. Visibly plucking up his courage, Asterinov said, ‘Funny, comrade?’

‘Oh, Nikolai Nikolaivitch,’ Stalin said. ‘I am only thinking that they were making a film of your Starsearch, and I ordered the production stopped! And yet I admire the novel very much!’

‘Thank you, comrade,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch, his voice pitched rather higher than was normal for it.

‘Isn’t that funny, though?’ said Stalin.

‘Very, comrade.’

Finally Stalin settled his tun-shaped body in a chair by the windows, and lit a cigarette. Adam Mikhailovitch sat. The rest of us remained standing. Adam glanced around anxiously and leapt back to his feet. ‘No, no,’ said Stalin, ‘sit down, all of you.’

We all sat.

There was a single bird somewhere outside in the garden, chirruping over and over, like a squeaky wheel.

Stalin was quiet for a long time, staring into the smoke produced by his cigarette as if answers to many mysteries were written there. Then he coughed heartily and said, ‘Comrades, I imagine you are curious why I have sent for you.’

We, of course, said nothing. Each of us vied with the other in adopting the most solicitous posture; sitting forward in our chairs, leaning a little, putting our heads to one side.

‘I have learnt many things in my time,’ said Stalin. ‘And there is one thing I have learned above all. Nothing is so efficacious in advancing the cause of universal Communism as struggle. When the people have an enemy against which to unite, they are capable of superb heroics. When they lack such an enemy they become slack, they fall prey to counterrevolutionary elements, and generally backslide. The Great Patriotic War has surely taught us this above all! We all here remember the thirties — do we not?’

We murmured in agreement. Each of us, I am sure, trying hard to make our murmurs as non-specific as a murmur might be. Remember the thirties? The difficulty was not remembering the thirties. The difficulty was ever being able to forget the thirties.

‘It took the most strenuous efforts by the politburo to hold the country together during those years,’ Comrade Stalin said, smilingly. ‘Enemies without and traitors within, and the people loose, loose like a — like—’ He gazed out the window, as if searching for a suitable simile. Eventually, he went on. ‘Loose. I had to be stern, then. I’m a naturally loving man. It’s my nature to be loving. But sometimes love must be hard, or the loved ones become themselves weakened. Severity was the only way to preserve the revolution. But the war — the war gave us a proper enemy. Gave us something to unite against. Hitler’s declaration of war saved Communism. And now we have won the war.’

‘Hurrah,’ said Sergei, but not in a loud voice.

Stalin’s smile widened. ‘Victory was a necessary result of the advanced Soviet science of war, and of the fact that the high command,’ and he dipped his head, and we all understood he was referring to himself, ‘the fact that the high command more thoroughly understood and was able better to apply the iron laws of warfare, the dialectic of counter-offensive and offensive, the cooperation of all services and arms, that modern warmaking requires. But most of all. Most of all… with the Nazis we had a threat against which the entire country could unite. Now, I ask you, is there a similar enemy now against which we may continue to preserve that unity? I ask you.’

And it seemed he was genuinely asking us, for he paused. My throat dried at this. Did he expect us to answer? Eventually Ivan Frenkel spoke up. ‘America?’ he hazarded.

‘Of course,’ boomed Stalin. ‘Of course America! Only yesterday Zvezda reported that the American government machine-gunned workers in New York. Killed hundreds. Of course America. But I do not find that America unites the people in hostility, the way the German threat did.’

We said nothing. Nikolai Nikolaivitch fumbled a new cigarette from its box, and by doing so made it clear how trembly his fingers were.

‘Besides,’ said Stalin, with force, ‘I give America five years. Do you think that defeating America will be harder than defeating the Germans? The Nazi army was the most modern and best equipped in the world, and we made short work of them. And now our weapons are even stronger; our troops battle-hardened and our morale high. I can tell you, comrades, that America will fall within five years.’

‘Tremendous news,’ said Sergei, in a loud, brittle voice.

‘Indeed,’ we all said. ‘Excellent. Superb.’

‘But it is my duty,’ said Stalin, ‘to consider longer-term futures than a mere five years. It is my duty to ensure that the revolutionary vigour is preserved long into the future. And this is where you can help me. Yes, you, science fiction authors. Once the west falls, as it inevitably will, and the whole world embraces Communism, where then will we find the enemies against which we can unite, against which we can test our collective heroism? Eh?’

This was a tricky question — tricky in the sense that it was not immediately obvious which answers were liable to provoke official displeasure. We pretended to ponder it. Fortunately Comrade Stalin did not leave us to stew.

‘Outer space,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Space will provide the enemies. You, comrades, will work together — here, in this dacha. All amenities will be provided. I myself will visit from time to time. Together we will work upon the story of an extraterrestrial menace. It will be the greatest science fiction story ever told! And we will write it collectively! It will inspire the whole of the Soviet Union — inspire the whole world! It is, after all, the true Communist arena. Space, I mean. Outer space is ours! That is your task, comrades!’

He got to his feet. He moved slowly, but with force. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘But I shall return shortly, and I look forward to hearing what you have come up with! Soon, my friends, I shall return to you!’

That, naturally, was the last we saw of Stalin. We were left to our own devices, more or less, except for Malenkov, a senior party figure who stayed for a week or so to ensure that we did nothing foolish. By foolish, he told us, he meant ‘anything liable to disappoint Josef Vissarionovich’. We were as eager as was he to avoid this possibility.

At that evening’s first evening meal we chattered excitedly, and drank too much. It was the drink that meant we talked more freely than otherwise we might have done. Several military personnel, and of course Malenkov, were there the whole time, watching us, listening to what we said.

‘Do I understand?’ said Sergei. ‘Do I understand what exactly we are to do? Presumably this work we are to compose is to be more than just a story.’ He was appealing to Malenkov, but that man only smiled and said, ‘General Secretary Josef Vissarionovich explained this to you himself, did he not?’

‘Well, yes—’

‘Then surely you have all the information you need.’

‘More than just a story,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘A story, yes, but obviously not just a story. Comrade Stalin made it plain that what we decide will act as a social glue — that people, in short, will believe it, and organise on a mass scale to make it real.’

‘There is one great merit in the idea,’ I said.

‘Come, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ said Sergei, wagging his head, ‘only the one?’

‘The plan has very many merits, of course,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘But I am struck by one in particular. To unify the people against a human enemy — against Germans, Americans, Jews — necessarily involves us in a form of inhumanity. For these enemies are human beings, after all.’

‘Germans?’ said Rapoport, disbelievingly.

‘All human beings are surely capable of being brought within the healthy body politic of a Communist collective,’ I said.

‘The perfectibility of humanity,’ said Frenkel, sourly.

‘Not Germans,’ insisted Rapoport.

‘But against this threat — a perfectly unhuman enemy — the whole of humanity could unite. We would have that,’ I paused, for I had been about to say paradox, but instead I said, ‘that dialectical synthesis: a fully peaceful world that is simultaneously united in a great patriotic war!’

‘Peace,’ said Sergei. And then, in a high-pitched voice, ‘Comrade, will there be a war?’ And then, rapidly, in a lower voice, ‘No, comrade! But there will be such a struggle for peace that not a stone will be left standing.’ He laughed at his own joke. It was an old joke.

‘I think that Konstantin Skvorecky is correct,’ said Kaganovich. ‘We have the chance to perform a massive public good. And what have we ever actually achieved, as writers? What are we ever likely to achieve? As science fiction writers? Escapist junk, mostly. Missions to other worlds? Sentient comets? Clouds of black spores that soak into the atmosphere and make the trees come to life and walk around on sap-filled tentacles? Junk, all of it. This, however, this could be something worthwhile.’

‘I have a problem,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. ‘I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers’ collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists?’

‘Sit down,’ said Sergei. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself.’

‘In Three Who Made a Star,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch, still standing, the — what were they called?’

Three Who Made a Star was one of my novels: an alternate history in which World Communist Revolution had taken place in first-century Judea. I spoke up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The aliens they meet, in that novel. The ones with the three legs, and the spaceships made of spittle?’

‘The Goriniks.’

‘They. They were a socialist race, were they not? And you, Frenkel, in your Arctic story, the beings who live under the ice…’

‘Stop this,’ said Sergei, loudly. ‘Sit down, Nikolai Nikolaivitch. You’re making a fool of us, before our distinguished comrades.’

Asterinov looked around him, settled his gaze on Malenkov, and settled back into his chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Too much wine. Too much wine.’

One other thing I particularly remember from that first evening together, as the alcohol was drunk, was how clearly the grandiose nature of our ambitions manifested. Were we despised writers of pulp science fiction? By no means: rather, we were the inheritors of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Homer and Shakespeare. ‘We shall write a new Iliad,’ announced Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘We shall write mankind’s greatest epic of war!’

‘We have just finished a war,’ I pointed out, in a glum voice.

War never finishes,’ said Frenkel. ‘How could war finish? What is there apart from war?’

The unspoken answer to his question rubbed a silence into the conversation like salt in a cut. Eventually, after a long pause, Frenkel went on. ‘Life is war, life is struggle, we all know that. And hard as the last war was, can we honestly say it was harder than the thirties?’ He was so drunk that, despite the fact that Malenkov was still sitting in the corner of the room eyeing us thoughtfully, Frenkel essayed an impression of Stalin himself, purring his rs like a Georgian. ‘Surely, comrades, you remember the thirties?’

Kaganovich laughed. Nobody else did.

‘It is in the nature of Marxism itself,’ said Frenkel, in a heavy, yokel voice, ‘in the very fabric of dialectical materialism, that life consists of conflict, of enemies all about us who cannot be appeased and who must be destroyed. After war comes — not peace, but more war. And we are gifted here! Gifted by historical necessity! Gifted by the news that we shall be the ones to shape this new war. This next war! It will be ours! War and war!’

‘I had thought,’ I said, ‘that the next war was to be against the Americans? To correct you, comrade, on one small point: we are planning the war after next.’

War and war and war,’ said somebody. With an alcohol-delayed jolt, I realised it was Commissar Malenkov. He was getting, slowly, to his feet, an unreadable smile on his face. Bluster as we might, we were all intensely aware that it would require only one phone call from this man to turn us all into corpses before the sun rose. All of us stared at him. All conversation stopped dead. ‘Goodnight, gentlemen,’ he said, with a curiously old-world courtesy. That I didn’t like. That none of us liked. And he left the room.

After a space of time Kaganovich said, ‘Jan Frenkel, your mouth will be the death of us. Jan. Jan.’ And Frenkel blushed the colour of spilt blood, and looked furious, though he said nothing.

So our new phase as writers of science fiction began. We were in that dacha, like a high-class barracks, for months. We fell into a rhythm; working as one group or separating into smaller groups during the morning; then a long lunch, and perhaps a sleep. Then late afternoon and evening, working further. The soldiers guarding us brought us some of what we asked for: paper; pens; cigarettes (Russian cigarettes, alas).

Our mornings began with a gathering in the dacha’s largest room to discuss, and make notes. Lunch would be our larger meal, brought to us by a surly battalion chef called Spiridinov. We worked and worked; mostly I made notes in a succession of notepads, and Nikolai Nikolaivitch typed them up on an enormous nineteenth-century typewriter that clattered like a rusty machine-gun.

In the evening, soup was brought in, straight from the oven and still in its copper pan. This was settled on the windowsill, where the sunset polished red gleams from the metal.

Sometimes we were supplied with vodka, sometimes not. In that respect it was like being back in the army.

We discussed and planned the nature of the alien foe that would threaten the whole of humanity. We decided that their weaponry would be atomic — very up-to-the-minute, this, for the mid-1940s. You must remember that there had been no official notification of the American atom bomb attack on Japan; our version of atomics was that of science fiction from the 1930s. But Comrade Malenkov personally approved this part of our design. We could imagine why; that such a threat would justify the Soviet Union in the accelerated development of its own atomic weaponry. We wrote pages and pages of human interest material, heroic exploits by soldiers of the Global Soviet; wicked traitors to the cause of humanity (Jews and homosexuals and the like); scene setting. We spent nearly a week on a set of stories about children encountering aliens. ‘And yet we have not decided on the nature of these aliens!’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch declared.

Grey rain fell all day. The sound of an endless flurry of wings behind the glass.

The weather cleared. The view from the glass doors was of hills, rising, sinking, and in places were hollows or sockets, grassed over but pooling the shadow until noon.

We wrote detailed accounts of alien atrocities. We had them villainously blowing up a city — New York, as a first choice. This was Rapoport’s idea; that the main island upon which New York stands (what was its name? we wondered. Nobody had the courage to ask Malenkov to supply us with an encyclopaedia that might answer such a question — Brooklyn Island said Kaganovich, Manhattan Island said Asterinov, Long Island said I) would be exploded by a diabolic alien death ray. Then we had second thoughts, for such a stunt, we reasoned, would be hard to fake; and if the Red Army were actually to bombard New York into dust and shards then we would have been the authors of mass death. So then we toyed with the idea of aliens attacking Siberia; some remote and inaccessible place where the story could not easily be falsified. But Asterinov voiced the obvious objection. ‘Our brief is to unite humanity against this monstrous alien foe!’ he said. ‘Why should humanity care if these aliens blow up a few trees in Siberia?’

‘We need a compromise,’ I suggested. ‘Somewhere close enough to civilisation to be threatening, but not so close as to be easily falsified. Eastern Europe?’

‘Germany,’ said Rapoport. ‘Let us have them erase Germany entirely. Turn that portion of central Europe into a blasted desert of polished and scorched glass.’

‘A little impracticable, in terms of faking the scenario,’ said Rapoport.

Nikolai Nikolaivitch only scowled.

‘Somewhere else,’ I suggested. ‘Ukraine, maybe. Latvia, perhaps. Let’s decide that later.’

‘The Ukraine has been almost depopulated,’ agreed Frenkel. ‘What with the famine, and then the war. Let us have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine. That would be the best option.’

How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually? This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one. Conceivably it is that we did not believe, even in the midst of our work, that it would come to anything — that we felt removed from the possible consequences of our planning. But I suspect a more malign motivation. Writers, you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in this respect. A realist writer might break his protagonist’s leg, or kill his fianc’e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day all through his life. How can this not produce calluses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?

The house had electricity, but the supply was intermittent. We worked in the afternoon in groups of two or three, or off by ourselves; and then we worked as a whole group in the evening by the light of oil lamps, tulip-shaped bulbs of brightness, orange as summer blooms. There would be three or four lamps placed upon the table, hissing quietly as if in disapproval of our work.

In the mornings there was a spring quality to the sunlight; a freshness. On one such day I walked in the garden with Nikolai, the two of us smoking earnestly. The brightness coming through the trees freckled the lawn with paler greens. Nikolai found a wooden soldier, a foot tall, in amongst the unmown grass, over by the shrubbery. It had once been bright with blue and yellow paint, but its time out in the open had blistered and stripped most of its colour off, and the wood beneath was damp and dark and crumby. ‘I wonder who left this here,’ I said. ‘I wonder for how long they wept for their lost toy! I wonder if it was quickly replaced.’

‘I wonder if they’re still alive,’ said Nikolai.

He tossed the thing into the foliage.

‘Konstantin,’ Nikolai said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have not written anything in a decade. Longer.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Dark Penguin. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The Vulture is Moulting. Superb books. And what about that series about the man who could breathe under water?’

‘A French book, little known, and, I think, illegal here. L’Homme qui peut vivre dans L’eau. I simply translated it into Russian, purging it of bourgeois details and adding a few standard Russian touches. The same with the others. Though those were American, rather than French. I changed the titles, of course; and I was secretive. Who would want to be discovered in possession of an American novel?’ He shrugged. ‘I am a fraud. I can’t pull my weight.’

This was strange news. ‘Don’t worry’, I said, a little uncertainly.

‘I am very afraid of disappointing the Comrade General Secretary. I was in the army. I understand how… unmerciful authority… needs to be.’ His hand, I saw, was shaking as he lit a new cigarette.

‘I was in the army too,’ I said. ‘We were all in the army, Nikolai.’

‘Where were you posted?’

‘Moscow. Then Latvia, Estonia, the west.’

‘Moscow?’

‘I,’ I said, with a little tremor of remorse in my heart, ‘know.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, in a slow voice, ‘somebody had to be stationed in Moscow. Were you on the general staff?’

‘God, no. I was a regular soldier. Like you. And I saw plenty of fighting too, later on. In Latvia. The Nazis fought like hounds. Their lives at stake, of course. All my friends died; and then I made new friends, and they all died, and…’ I stopped. The wind moved between us and around us. The sun glared at us out of a petrol-blue sky. The shadows of the trees shuddered. ‘Well, you know all about that,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

We sat in silence, smoking.

‘When I was a young boy,’ I told Asterinov (I was telling him something I had shared with nobody since), ‘I saw a red-haired man selling chestnuts in a market square.’ Asterinov looked at me. ‘I thought that red-haired man was Death,’ I said. ‘I still do. I still think that Death is a red-haired man.’

‘Isn’t he supposed to come in a black cloak and have a skull for a face?’ This, of course, was how Asterinov’s imagination worked; and it was how most people’s imaginations work. They tap into the general well, which sometimes we call clich’. It is a weakness, but in another way it is a greater strength than any to which I have ever had access. It was what he had summoned his courage to tell me, I suppose, that day: my imagination is the common imagination, comrade, he was saying; and I have drawn on the imaginations of others to write my books.

‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘A skull. Not a redhead. I was a foolish child, I’m afraid, and I have carried this foolishness into adult life. Death — a red-haired man?’

We sat in silence for a further minute, or so.

‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘There is no need for the General Secretary to be bothered with any irrelevant details.’

‘He singled me out, that first day, to tell me how much he liked Starsearch.’

‘He said he’d blocked the motion picture.’

‘But he liked the novel! What if he pays close attention to me — to my contribution? What if he finds out?’

‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Calm yourself, please. Find out what? This is a collective project. Literature,’ I went on, ‘has always been a collective activity. Writers adapting plots from other writers, sharing ideas and characters and images, all the way back to Homer. Shakespeare didn’t invent a single one of his plots. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your works have been an inspiration to the Soviet people in the great war. And, and,’ I stopped. ‘Starsearch too?’ I asked, in a sorrowful voice.

Asterinov took a deep breath. ‘No, that was one of mine.’

I could not explain the strange feeling of relief that passed through me when he said this.

A bifurcated cloud the shape and colour of a walrus moustache muffled the sun, with others following. Soon it began to rain, a drizzle drifting like spindrift, and we hurried indoors.

The next day we spent writing. The story we were assembling was growing; the particulars of the aliens — a very horrible, insectoid race, implacably individualist and implacably hostile to social animals such as human beings. To begin with, our aliens were something like giant ants, but the objection was made that the idea of a ruthlessly individualist ant was a contradiction in terms. ‘That’s the horror,’ Sergei Rapoport insisted. ‘Horror depends upon some substantive contradiction, some paradox that outrages our sense of nature! A live man, or corpse, neither is horrific: but a living corpse — that scares us!’

‘You’re talking nonsense, Sergei,’ said Ivan Frenkel. ‘Ants live in big collective groups. Ants are communists. We need a solitary insect — a spider.’

‘Spiders are not insects,’ retorted Sergei.

‘Corpses can be scary,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘Not — living corpses,’ he added, and I realised he was not making a suggestion, but was instead wrapped in the coils of memory. ‘Dead ones.’

‘I propose we do not call our aliens insectoid,’ said Ivan, calmly. ‘We call them arachnoid.’

‘Yes, Jan,’ said Sergei. ‘Let us do that, Jan.’ Frenkel coloured.

‘I have a better idea,’ I said. ‘Let us disembody them.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘Radiation aliens. Sentient emanations of poisonous radiation.’

The others contemplated this. ‘A little insubstantial, perhaps?’ offered Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘To be really scary, I mean?’

‘But they would have machines. As we have tanks and planes, they would have robots and killing machines; but inside — they would be only waveforms of poisonous radiation.’

This met with a general agreement.

We sketched their culture, the reasons for their assault, the nature of it. One sticking point was whether we confined the battles to space — announce to the world that Soviet rocket ships had been launched into orbit and were fighting off the foe up there; or whether we should report that aliens had landed.

‘We have agreed to blow up the Ukraine,’ Frenkel reminded us.

‘I assumed that would be a blast from space down to earth,’ said Asterinov.

‘No, no,’ insisted Frenkel. ‘People will not unite if the enemy is too far away. They won’t believe the threat. They must land.’

‘Like H. G. Wells’ Martians,’ said Kaganovich. ‘That would be better.’

‘Gherbert George,’ said Sergei, pouring himself some vodka. ‘Gh-hh-herberr Gyorgi.’[1] But nobody laughed.

‘Comrades, remember,’ said Kaganovich, holding up his hand. ‘Everything we do must ring true! The whole world must believe it!’

‘We will need props,’ said Frenkel. ‘Artefacts. Perhaps theatre professionals, or film makers, can construct devices that would pass inspection as alien technology. We must have film of the fighting.’

‘In the future,’ I put in, ‘who knows what advances there may be in the creation of specialised filmic effects.’

‘And, uniting all the evidence, our narrative of the ongoing struggle.’ Frenkel was heady with the possibility.

‘Cut up and sear together portions of flesh from various animals,’ suggested Kaganovich, eagerly, ‘and present them as slain alien bodies.’

‘You forget,’ chided Sergei. ‘We have agreed our aliens will be incorporeal beings’

‘How are we to kill them if they are incorporeal?’ said Kaganovich.

‘That’s easily arranged,’ Sergei insisted. ‘Make them… manifest, from time to time. Say they are linked to their machines, such that by destroying their machines we destroy them. Have them… possess certain individuals.’

We jotted it all down, and Asterinov typed it all up, and we filed it away in files.

We ate together, but the conversation did not flow naturally or easily. Often the only sound — I have heard it many times in my life and I have never encountered any other sound quite like it — was of people scraping metal bowls with spoons so as to leave no atom or morsel of edible material behind. We were civilised men. We had survived the Great Patriotic War, the severest and most heroic martial test ever endured by human beings. Because we were civilised we did not go so far as to lick our bowls, like dogs. But because we had lived through the war we knew to make the most of our bowls of stew, and not leave scraps or particles of food to waste. Therefore we scraped assiduously.

As he lit a cigarette Sergei said, ‘I will tell you what I think the cause of the uneasiness here is. Mistrust.’

We were all smoking. ‘Some of us are old friends,’ said Ivan Frenkel. He did not say this as if contradicting Sergei, but rather by way of confirming what he had said.

‘I’d like to suggest that we put the mistrust on one side,’ said Sergei. ‘I believe we have all been through — similar experiences. I, for instance, spent half a year being,’ and he took a long draw on his cigarette, ‘re-educated.’

We all looked at him. None of us asked ‘What was your crime?’ But the question was implicit.

‘I wrote a story. It was a simple enough story. There is a peasant called Aleksandr, and his wife, and their six children, and they live in a hovel. And one day Aleksandr meets a witch-spirit in the forest, a creature that takes the form of a great bird with wings of foliage and a green beak. But understand that this is a good witch-spirit. And anyhow, the witch-spirit promises Aleksandr that he will have wealth beyond measure if only he performs certain tasks for her — I’ll spare you the various specifics, and the ways I folded over the narrative to make it an appropriate length. Build her a walking house, catch her a talking fish, that sort of thing. Suffice to say, bold Aleksandr successfully performs the tasks, and is told that his fortune is waiting for him at home. Wealth beyond measure, and it’s waiting for him back at home. As he walks through the forest he contemplates all the things that the money will buy him, a fine new dress for his wife, a new house. He thinks, now I can feed and educate my children! Now I am free from worry! That sort of thing. Oh, I had a long passage on this walk through the forest, with some nice Gushenko-style descriptions of the trees reaching up into the sky all around him like limbs of hope, and so on. Anyway he gets home and, instead of finding a pile of gold, he discovers that his peasant wife has given birth to a seventh child. He is about to go crazy in his grief at this betrayal, when he suddenly realises. The witch-spirit has been true to her word, and so on, and so forth, for there is no greater wealth in this world than children. This story was printed in a literary journal called Gorky.’

‘A fine story,’ said Asterinov, twining his fingers in his black beard and tugging at the hairs.

‘Six months in prison, that tale,’ said Sergei.

‘Was it the witch?’ I asked ‘I never know where the Party stands on issues of the supernatural. In one sense, clearly, any ghost or spirit at all is contrary to the principles of dialectical materialism. So putting one in a story could be asking for trouble. But, then again, ghost stories have a rich proletarian tradition. So perhaps not putting one in a story could be seen as bourgeois affectation, and insulting to the people.’

‘I’m guessing it wasn’t the spirits,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch Kaganovich in a confident voice. ‘I’m betting you couldn’t keep the sneer out of your voice when you were talking about the peasant children. Did you call them brats? Did you imply that they were brats?’

‘The emphasis on the importance of having children for the greater glory of the Motherland was, I thought, the most politically correct part of the whole thing,’ Sergei replied, dourly. ‘That was how I hoped to curry favour! The tale was, in effect, an exhortation to breed. What could be more patriotic? But, no, it wasn’t that. It was — understand, I don’t know for sure, I heard this at second- or third-hand, but — it was the walk through the forest. Apparently I was just that bit too convincing in my representation of a poor man’s yearning for money. Money, comrades? Do we need money? No, comrades.’

‘Money’s no good without a life in which to spend it,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch.

‘Six months,’ said Sergei. ‘I spent as long as that on a military punishment detail.’

That pulled us up short. Prison is one thing; but military punishment quite another.

‘I was fighting on the Volga,’ said Sergei, ‘at Stalingrad. And in one engagement we surged forward, we the Red Army. I had a rifle, but I lost it. Rifles were very precious, comrades, and to lose one was a sentence of death, no question. To go out with a rifle and come back without one? Cowardice. Criminal incompetence. Orders were very clear. But I lost it anyway, when my group was trapped in a street by machine-gun fire. A thousand hammer-claws pounding out at my vulnerable body. I ran. But then my wits came back to me, and I thought about what would happen if I went back without a rifle. So I loitered in the battlefield, and tried to pick up another rifle. It wasn’t easy, because some of the troops had been sent in without any weaponry at all, and they were looking for guns too. So I struggled with two other Russian soldiers like rats over a piece of meat for the rifle held in the hands of a dead boy. No more than nineteen, I’d say, that boy. But dead, so I suppose you could say he was very old. I suppose nobody gets any older than dead. He was missing a portion of his head. There were three of us, and I was a fierce fighter but one of the others was fiercer yet — you must understand, this took place in the very midst of the battle, bullets screeching, mortars exploding to the left and right, great spurting clouds and rushes of dust and screaming and the horrible thunder-noise of planes overhead. The Germans milled that town finer than flour. A building was blown up, not far from us, and I got pieces of brick in my flesh; I was still picking out shards of tile and brick a month later. There were,’ he stopped and stared at the light. ‘Lots of bodies,’ he went on, shortly. ‘Anyway, this other soldier took the weapon and ran off with it, and I chased him. I was a little insane. There was a masonry dust all over us, so that we were white figures, pure white all over, clothes and skin, and with every step I put down as I ran white clouds like ectoplasm spouted from my boots and my trousers and my jacket. Anyway, this other one tripped over something, and fell and in falling he dropped the rifle. I picked it up, and when I looked behind me I saw that he had not tripped. I saw on the contrary that he had been shot. So I thought, maybe Providence wants me to have this rifle. After that I met up with some other soldiers, and fought with them for a while. I killed Germans. And when we fell back, I had my rifle with me. But, you know what? The boy, from whom it had been taken, the boy who had been lying on the ground with a portion of his head missing, had been called Sergei. Just like me! The same name! It is as if he were my alter ego! So. Do you know how I know this? How I know what the boy’s name was? Because he had scratched his name on the butt, SERGEI. Providence, indeed. My captain saw this, and was outraged. The rifle is not your personal property, Sergei Pavlovich Rapoport, he said. Defacing Red Army property? Trying, selfishly and counter to Soviet war aims, to hoard military equipment for your own exclusive use? I was sentenced to a punishment detail.’ He shook his head. ‘Better than being shot, I suppose. But, hard. Hard, hard.’

None of us felt like talking after that. ‘War,’ said Frenkel, in a grumbling voice. ‘Do you know what Tolstoy would write if he were alive today? Not War and Peace but War and War. He would write War and War and More War.’

We had assembled the overarching superstructure of our story, and had filled in many of the details. We were, I admit, proud of what we had constructed. And then one morning Comrade Malenkov walked in upon us, accompanied by half a dozen armed soldiers. My heart clattered in my chest as vigorously as a man who has been pushed downstairs by the secret police. I was, suddenly and overwhelmingly, certain that we were all going to be shot.

‘Comrades,’ said Malenkov. ‘It is over. You are no longer going to sit around here, idling at state expense enjoying the best food and free vodka! Back to real work for the lot of you.’

I could see, at the corner of my vision, Asterinov blushing with anger, his face red behind the black of his full beard. I had spent so much time with him now that I knew what he was thinking, down to the very words: Comrade! I protest! We have not been idling, but instead labouring hard and diligently fulfilling Comrade Stalin’s personal order! But of course he said nothing.

‘Nobody must ever know about what you have done here,’ said Malenkov.

I was conscious of my breathing. I daresay we all were. We were, all of us, stricken with the thought that these breaths would be our very last.

‘You are to forget everything you have done here,’ said Malenkov.

I breathed out then, because this meant that we were not to be killed.

‘Everything. Comrades, understand me: it is a matter of supreme importance to the Soviet Union that you tell nobody of your time here. You did not write these elaborate stories. You did not discuss this matter. You never met Stalin. This sojourn never happened. Do you understand?’

None of us spoke. But he didn’t need us to speak. It was self-evident.

‘How does your science-fictional narrative open?’ he snapped.

I looked from face to face. ‘The Americans launch a rocket to explore space. The aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation.’

‘Start with a bang, eh?’ Malenkov nodded. ‘Good, yes. I like the way you begin with a smack aimed at the Americans, too. I like it. Then?’

‘Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation.’

‘Good! Good. But I never want to hear it again. If I hear of it again, I shall take time from my busy schedule to put bullets in the back of all your skulls quicker than mustard. Yes?’

‘Yes,’ we said, in one voice.

‘Back to real life for all of you,’ said Malenkov, briskly. ‘And none of this happened. But be clear: I shall be keeping an eye on each of you, personally. If you use any of the material you have invented here in your own stories — if you try to recycle any of this material — I shall know about it. The sentence will be ten years without the right of correspondence.’ This was a euphemism, of course; it meant that we would be shot. ‘If you so much as mutter about this dacha in your sleep, and your sweethearts, or whores, hear you, I shall know about it, and I will take measures to ensure you do not mutter any more. Yes?’

‘Yes, comrade,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivich.

‘Good. As long as we understand one another.’

None of us was so foolish as to offer up, as it might be, ‘But why, comrade?’ or ‘But all our work, comrade — wasted?’ or anything along those lines. That would have been a suicidal gambit. This manner of sudden reversal was nothing new to us. Perhaps Stalin himself had suddenly cooled on his plan; or perhaps our work had been unsatisfactory; or perhaps there were hidden unseen reasons. It hardly mattered. All that mattered was that, given the choice between killing us to tie off the knot of this enterprise, and letting us all go with this injunction to secrecy, the powers had decided on the latter, even though the former was less messy. Malenkov didn’t need to tell us twice to keep this secret. His parting shot was, ‘And if you gentlemen should meet up, as is perhaps not inconceivable, in the future; not even then will it be acceptable to talk about this time together.’

With a sly smile, Frenkel looked straight at Malenkov. ‘Comrade, I have no idea who these people even are.’

CHAPTER 2

That was that. We all went our separate ways and, I suppose, got on with the business of living our various lives. Speaking for myself I did what I was told: I forgot all about our elaborate narrative; about the radiation aliens and their designs upon planet earth; upon their strange spaceships and artefacts. Forgot all about it. I lived in Moscow. I carried on working as a writer, for a short time, although the late forties were hard years and I did other jobs to supplement my income. The fact that I could speak English got me a job working on translations of Western documentation for a governmental ministry. I married somebody who worked in that same ministry, but she had previously been in the Red Army and she found it impossible to acquire the habits of peacetime. She woke in the night often, screaming. She could not walk down a city street without seeing the bloodied and decaying spectres of all her dead friends, or of all the enemies she had killed. One time, when I came home from work, she thought me a German and ran at me with a knife. Ours was not a relaxed relationship. Then one rainy autumn day, when the Moscow trees were bleeding their red leaves in clotted clumps and the air was cool, she fell in front of a tram and died; and though I have often thought of it, I have never settled in my head the most likely explanation for her stumble. Perhaps she threw herself. Perhaps she indeed fell by accident. Perhaps she was trying to run away from a street full of zombies. I don’t know.

I drank more than most Russians. That, I am perfectly well aware, is quite a boast.

The fact that I could speak English, which had previously obtained for me a relatively comfortable governmental job, now brought me under suspicion. I was arrested and sent to a camp, and for eighteen months I helped lay a railroad across northern swampland. It was an unpleasant place. It did little for my health.

Eventually, however, Stalin died. Afterwards, although long enough afterwards for my spirit to have been effectively broken, I was released back into Muscovite society. A broken bone mends, although sometimes it sets awry. This same is true of a broken spirit.

I worked at a variety of jobs, but did no more writing of science fiction, or anything else. I married again, and fathered upon my young wife two children, one a daughter and one a son. That my wife remained with me as long as she did amazes me only marginally more than the fact that she agreed to be with me in the first place. I was a horrible man. I did horrible things. Eventually she left me and took the children and I rarely saw her or them afterwards.

So I lived alone. I ate little. I used to perform a malign conjuring trick with the vodka I drank: putting it down my throat clear and then drawing it back up my throat bright pink-red. I smoked all the time, without cease. For a time I made a point of buying the more expensive brands of vodka, and better brands of cigarette, but this was a charade that I could maintain only for a while. I did this, I think, to try and convince myself that I was a sophisticated connoisseur of adult pleasures, rather than a mere drunk. But eventually I embraced the inevitable. When you are a mere drunk, three bottles of the cheapest vodka are always better than two bottles of classier stuff. Soon enough I was drinking anything at all, no matter how rough. I smoked Primo cigarettes.

Death is a red-haired man.

Then, one winter’s day, something important happened. Let us call this a turning-point.

I was sitting in my flat, alone as ever. It was lunchtime, and I was lunching, as was my habit in those days, on vodka. I remember that particular day very well. The sunlight was washing through my uncurtained windows very strong and clear, as bright and astringent as alcoholic spirit. The light printed a block of brightness across my table top. I had just finished the bottle on my table, and was staring at this shape of light. I was marvelling, in a soggy, half-conscious way, at the beauty of it, at the way it stepped down from tabletop to floor. Marvelling, there, perhaps looks overstatement, but it is precisely the right word. Spirits and spirit. Spirit and spirits. The vehemence of the way the gleam launched itself from the table. The two-tier step down from the table onto the floor. These things amazed me.

I tucked a cigarette between my lips and fiddled with the tricky metal nipple on the top of the lighter.

The next thing I knew I had been translated into an idiom of pure bright light and pure bright heat. I sat there dazzled, momentarily. I sat there spiritually dazzled.

It didn’t last long. Almost at once, like smelling salts, I was stung back to the mundane by the stench of burning hair going up my nose. Then I felt the scorch of pain on the skin of my chin and cheeks, and my eyes began watering.

This is what I had done: I had been drinking sloppily, and dribbled some vodka into my beard. Subsequently I must have flicked the lighter flame in a careless manner, such that the stem of the fire had brushed my face. My beard went up in a great buzz of light and fire.

I got to my feet. My eyes were closed now, but I would have seen nothing but brightness had I opened them. I took a step forward. I took another step forward. I remember thinking, but distantly (as if I were eavesdropping, telepathically, upon the thinking of some third party) that I was moving remarkably slowly for somebody whose face was on fire. My right foot went forward, and then my left, and my knee banged again the wall. I reached up with my right hand and — in perhaps the luckiest conjunction of body and object in my life — my fingers fell on the latch to the window. Had I not found that I would surely have stood at that window as my head burned, and the flesh roasted away, and the marrow cracked out of the skullbone. As it was, really without thinking about it, I pushed down and the window swung away. Then all I needed to do was bow down. I bowed, like a gentleman, to the winter sky, and the prospect of Moscow’s bridal chill. My face went down into the snow that lay a foot thick on the windowsill outside.

I stood like that, uncomfortably bent over, for long seconds. The next thing I remember is that I was no longer standing, but was instead slumped with one arm stuck out through the windowframe and the other trapped behind the lukewarm radiator. I suppose I must have passed out. I couldn’t tell you for how long. The snow against my face was giving me more authentic experiences of burning than had the flames.

I was sober enough to get myself to the hospital, and drunk enough not to panic on the way. The doctors treated me in that weary manner they employ upon the drinkers who throng their hospitals with idiot injuries, although they were impressed, I could tell, at my foresight in chilling the burns so effectively at the site of the injury. After a few days I was discharged to tend my bandages at home, alone. The nurse who helped me get my clothes back on and shuffle to the ward exit had a face white and pinched as any skull; and close-cropped red hair. He grinned at me. Away I went.

This was my turning point.

Now: I continued drinking through this period of convalescence, but only because I reasoned that drying myself out would require greater physical strength than a sick man possesses. I was right, too. And, true to my resolution, I stopped drinking as soon as my skin had puckered itself into its taut and tucked version of its former self — the face I wear to this day. I can speak without vanity and say that I do not, in fact, look too bad: my chin possesses a strange texture, and my beard now only grows on my neck (which I shave), but otherwise I mostly escaped this adventure without blemish. There is one exception, and that is the end of my nose. The skin on the end of my nose was burned raw, and the doctors covered its exposed gristle with a not very delicately handled skin graft: a circle from the inside of my forearm, skin of a very different texture to the normal skin of a nose. It looked, and looks to this day, as though I have something stuck to my nose. Strangers sometimes tell as much — ‘Comrade, there’s a sticking plaster on your… oh, I’m sorry’ — ‘Friend, is that a shred of tissue paper caught on the end of your… ? My apologies.’

Without alcohol to pass the time, or to distract me from the idiocy of my friends and companions, I fell into a different mode of living. I became, I suppose, grumpier and more reclusive. But at least I approached my sixtieth birthday alive. That was more than Rapoport had managed, for he disappeared into a camp in the wilderness under the rubric of ‘political dissident’, and was never heard from again. Adam Kaganovich died of a heart attack at fifty-seven. He had managed to stay out of trouble with the authorities, and had maintained his writing career; although it would be more precise to say that he had preserved his writing career by dedicating it entirely to staying out of trouble with the authorities, and none of the watery propaganda pieces he generated throughout the fifties and sixties are worth the cheap paper upon which they are printed. By the early eighties, though, his sheer longevity meant that he began to be celebrated by Russian fans of science fiction. There were conventions at which he was the guest of honour. When he died (in a Kiev hotel room, guest of honour at another convention) the papers ran complimentary obituaries.

As for the others: I lost all contact with Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. He was a fellow Muscovite, and therefore I might have expected to encounter him around or about the city, so perhaps the fact that I lost contact with him meant that he was dead. Of course, Moscow is a large city. But there are reasons, on which I shall touch later, for believing him dead all the same. As for Frenkel… well, in the camps, where gossip is the freest currency prisoners possess, I sometimes heard news. I heard that ‘Jan Frenkel’, the name under which he had been charged, had been sent to a camp in the furthest Siberian east. Some months later I heard he had been transferred to a specialist prison in Moscow. Some months after that I heard that he had been executed, on Stalin’s personal orders. So that was that.

But that wasn’t that. The gossip had got it wrong, for I met Ivan Frenkel, by chance, as it seemed, one winter morning early in 1986, walking along Prospekt Vernadskovo. More to the point he met me, for I (my eyes not being what they were) didn’t recognise him at first. He had aged well; his figure was still trim and muscular, and his face not excessively lined. He was dressed in a calf-long and expensive-looking black coat and was wearing a hat of bright blue fur. He was walking along in the company of a tall young man whose fur hat was a more decent white colour. And there he was, in the flesh, in the material mundane flesh, yelling out in a fierce voice:

‘Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky! As I live and breathe!’

Then I remembered him. ‘Ivan?’

He clasped both my shoulders and looked straight at my face. ‘By all that’s astonishing, comrade, I can hardly believe that I have met you here, on this day! What a strange luck to bring us together like this, by chance, after all these years!’

Even from the beginning I registered the strangeness in him emphasising the chance of our meeting at such length. But I only said, ‘I heard that you were dead.’

He took me to one side, out of the hearing of his tall young companion. ‘Comrade, you understand that gossip isn’t always a reliable thing.’

‘Indeed.’ I nodded at the other fellow. ‘And?’

‘Professional acquaintance.’ Frenkel nudged me a little further away from him, and then whispered, ‘It’s the most extraordinary chance meeting you like this. Konstantin, listen to me. I work for the government now.’ I understood then that the tall man in the white hat was by way of being a guard, or jailer, or minder: that his job was keeping an eye on Frenkel. Whichever government department would employ Frenkel, in whatsoever menial capacity, might well want to keep an eye on him; he had after all been in the camps.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘In a minor ministry, a minor position.’ He came closer to me. His breath did not smell pleasant. ‘Listen!’ He lowered his voice. It was the most extraordinary pantomime of secrecy. ‘Do you remember our time in the dacha? After the end of the Patriotic War, do you remember our meeting with Stalin?’

‘I remember very particularly being told not to remember it.’

‘Ah, how could we forget, though?’

‘I understand that vodka is one popular method.’

‘Those were great times!’

‘I try to resist parcelling time into good and bad. After all, from a scientific perspective one minute is exactly like another minute.’

‘Rapoport and Kaganovich are both dead, you know,’ said Frenkel. ‘As for Asterinov — nobody’s heard from him in years. He’s probably dead too. You and I are the only ones left.’

‘Really?’

‘What do you think of that?’

‘I suppose it’s a salubrious mental discipline to reflect upon mortality,’ I observed. ‘I believe the philosophers recommend it.’

‘You don’t understand! You don’t understand what I’m saying! Listen — didn’t you hear me when I said I worked for the government?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never mind that! Say I’m lowly. But perhaps I have stumbled across… something remarkable.’

‘When a governmental employee says something,’ I observed, ‘it is usually a good idea to check whether you’re supposed to listen or not before hearing it.’

‘That story we concocted,’ said Ivan. ‘You remember?’

‘It was a long time ago, comrade,’ I said, wearily, feeling suddenly sick of the whole conversation, and Frenkel’s peculiar eagerness — and, I suppose, of life itself.

‘We could be the only two people left alive who remember it!’

‘Or,’ I offered, ‘we could be two more of the great mass who have no idea about it.’

‘You don’t understand!’ He glanced over his shoulder once again at his minder. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying! Let’s say I’ve happened to become privy to a certain secret, state secret. It has to do with the particular department in which I clerk. Let’s say I am — privy — to one of the most secret of state secrets.’

‘If you are, then please don’t tell me.’

‘What if I were to say to you…

‘Putting every sentence you utter in the conditional mode like this,’ I interrupted, ‘inoculates neither of us from potentially evil consequences.’

‘That story!’ he burst out. ‘That fiction we worked on, and that nobody else but us knows. No other human being upon the entire world knows this fiction was even written, let alone knows all the ins and outs of it, all the specifics.’

‘No fiction was ever shrouded more effectively in unknowing,’ I conceded.

‘Friend, it is starting to come true.’

The late winter sky overhead was all cloud, and had the quality of a vast marble wall reaching up to eternity, flecked with blurry specks of grey and black set in a ground as white as bleach. Moscow was lidded. The row of buildings on the far side of the road seemed crammed close against this wall. The few intervening cars moved sluggishly under its influence.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, wearily.

‘I mean exactly what I say. The things we plotted. That we buried. The story we wrote. It is starting to come true. In the real world. It’s all coming true.’

‘That doesn’t entirely sound,’ I suggested, ‘possible.’

‘No! You’re right! It’s perfectly impossible! But it’s true, nonetheless. It’s true!’

That’s how I met up with Ivan Frenkel again.

I am not trying to trick you. The purpose of this memoir is not trickery, or sleight-of-hand. There are no secrets in this book. I might go so far as to say: the purpose of this book is the very opposite of secrecy — it is drawing your attention to that which is hidden in plain view all the time. I am writing it to record the most profound change in my life; nothing less than a translation from one manner of existence into another, from something grossly physical into something — let us say, spiritual. You might call it ethereal, or radiative, or at the very least other. It all has to do with meeting the alien, and overcoming my cynicism. For I can confess I had fallen into a cynical, an ironic mode of life.

The great change happened in the year 1986, which was in itself a year of many changes. The Soviet Union was changing, with perestroika and glasnost and a number of suchlike words we are proud to have exported to the rest of the world. Then on 9 January — which was a Thursday — the American space-rocket Challenger was launched. I watched it, after the event, on a friend’s television. The news footage was played over and over in Russia: the rocket lifting itself on the blowtorch tail of its own blast. The spacecraft shrinking as the camera followed it up, dwindling to a white dot in the dark blue, shimmying from side to side as the camera juddered slightly on its windblown tripod. Then, without preparation, the axe descending, with its immaterial blade, and cleaving through the whole length of the spacecraft from nose to exhaust and cutting it, with a great puff of magician’s smoke, into two. The footage was silent, but, trained up by cinema, you heard the explosion anyway. One coral-like billow of white cloud suddenly blooming at the end, and two new tendrils of smoking white spiralling away in opposite directions. After that, just the endless hairy meteor-trails of debris coming back down.

No science fiction writer, even a former science fiction writer, could watch that and be unmoved.

To be honest, the mood in the USSR was a curious mix with respect to the Challenger disaster; for we envied the USA and desired to be like her to almost exactly the same degree that we loathed the USA and wished ill to befall her. It was a heart-clenching and rather contradictory occasion, that exploding rocket. Good Russians tried to kindle some national pride from the fact that, the following month, the space station Mir was launched without mishap.

The truth is that our country, having limped through a terrible century, was in a poor way. In that same February the papers were full of the news of the Mikhail Lermontov, a very large ocean vessel that ran foolishly aground near New Zealand. Our whole union was symbolised in that hulk. And what else did 1986 have in store for the USSR? Death throes. The Chernobyl disaster. The collapse of the Soviet system. The rise of the Moscow Mafia. And through it all, me picking out a precarious living interpreting between people who spoke Russian but no English and people who spoke English but no Russian. Turning Ya ne panimayu tibia into ‘[I don’t understand you, and Uspekhov! into ‘[Here’s to our success!]’

That day, when I chanced upon Ivan Frenkel again in the street, being monitored by his white-hatted official guard, he was enormously keen that we discuss this matter further. Our strange heated science fictional fantasy was coming true! We must talk about it, my friend. It must be talked about!

‘It seems a strange development,’ I noted. ‘And by strange I suppose I mean — impossible.’

Frenkel winked at me.

This is what I deduced: Frenkel presumably worked in some monitoring station — which was a safe guess, of course, since almost all of the business of government is monitoring. His days were filled with inconsequential chatter, overhearing the mild quotidian treacheries and betrayals of Soviet citizens kvetching and complaining. Given his history in the camps he would not be trusted with classified information. Perhaps it gnawed away at him, his unimportance. Perhaps he dwelled on the day when Stalin himself summoned him — him, Ivan Frenkel, science fiction writer! — to do top secret work of the greatest importance. Perhaps, being old, he blurred together that glorious past and this degraded present in some mental construction. Perhaps he interpreted something he overheard, or read, or came across as evidence that the radiation aliens were massing overhead and readying themselves to come down.

Another man might have felt some pity for an old friend, and indulged him. But I am not another man. I only wished him to go away. I had no interest in his fantasies. The question I ponder now, from my present elevated situation is: Had I known then what I now know — that Frenkel was in effect speaking the truth — would I have been so dismissive? It’s always possible, you see, that I would have been.

Frenkel pulled an official-looking notepad from his breast pocket and scribbled an address on it. ‘This is where I’m working now. There are several good places for lunch in the area.’

‘Your workplace is indeed very central.’

‘Write your address on this piece of paper.’

Not wanting to prolong the scene I scribbled something down.

‘Lenin hills?’ said Frenkel, examining what I’d written. ‘That’s a very nice area.’

‘Not bad,’ I said.

‘That’s a very nice part of town indeed,’ he said, looking me up and down.

I had written down my ex-wife’s address, not mine. I wanted rid of the man, and his peculiar official guard, or monitor, or superior. We embraced, and went our separate ways. I hoped never to see him again. Moreover I can say, as a science fiction writer, that in some alternate reality, some different branching timeline, I never did see him again. You’ll permit me, I hope, the indulgence of pausing here to imagine that eventuality — my consciousness sliding, frictionlessly, from choice to choice, veering left and right at the branching nodes of a billion quantum choices and into a world in which Frenkel and I never met again, and I lived out my life in peaceful, blissful boredom. A world in which I did not endure the sufferings I endured in this timeline. A world in which I didn’t die in Chernobyl.