Yellow Blue Tibia

PART FOUR

‘Doctor Bello,’ she said, again.

I was lying on my back.

This was a new voice. I had not heard this voice before, or I had. Either I had heard this voice before or I had not, or there was a third option.

‘Doctor Bello,’ she said again.

I contemplated this name for a long time. It seemed to have some mystery attached to it.

‘Can you speak?’

‘Of course,’ I said. It was my voice. It was a little croaky, but it was perfectly functional. I was dead, or. I was either dead or I was alive or there was some third option.

I had no idea who I was. I could not think what my name might be, where I was lying, what had happened to me, or anything like that. The most I could remember was meeting Josef Stalin. But I had only the vaguest memories of what he had said to me. But — had I not actually met Stalin, once upon a time?

I was lying on my back, and I was lying in bed. Lying on and in at the same time. I was not at the dacha at all. Stalin was not there. I was in a hospital room. Dr Bello was a doctor, and she was standing beside the bed.

The quality of light was completely different in this place. It was subdued, filtered, and ordinary. Bearable, I thought. Light was coming through the window over in the far wall.

‘Have you ever heard of Egas Monis?’ the doctor asked me.

‘It is a place on Mars,’ I said, raspily, but with confidence.

‘No, no. It is the name of a human being.’

‘Is he a science fiction writer?’ I asked. ‘I believe I have heard of his name, and it is the name of a science fiction writer.’

‘He won the Nobel prize.’

‘Well then he cannot be a science fiction writer. No writer of science fiction would be awarded such a prize.’

‘His was a prize for medicine. He was awarded it in 1949 for his work with the surgical operation called pre-frontal lobotomy. Why would you think he wrote science fiction? Why would you think such a thing?’

I considered this. ‘Perhaps,’ I answered, upping something from deep memory, ‘because I am myself a science fiction writer?’ Retrieving this was like pulling through my gullet and out of my throat a long piece of string I had, for some reason, swallowed. It was not, that is to say, pleasant.

‘Really? How very interesting.’

‘Do you read science fiction?’

‘Not at all. Not ever. Science fiction is for adolescent boys and people who make models of aircraft from plastic and glue. I am a mature woman, which is to say, the opposite of a science fiction fan.’ She considered for a bit. ‘You science fiction writers write about the future, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘That may be a problem.’

‘In what way?’

‘What I mean is this: you may find it harder conceptualising the future in, ah, the future. Can you write about something else? The present, say? The past?’

‘I could try.’

‘That might be a good idea. One of the things Egas Monis discovered is that the frontal lobes of the brain are where we imagine the future. Where we plan and project ourselves imaginatively forward in time. Because the future makes some people anxious — what might happen, and so on — Monis discovered that destroying portions of this lobe reduced people’s levels of anxiety. Do you feel anxious?’

‘No.’ And I really didn’t.

‘That’s good.’

‘Are you saying that you have performed a pre-frontal lobotomy upon me, Doctor?’

‘I have not. Although such an operation, if it is going to take place, really should be performed by a medically trained professional.’

The curiosity I felt on this matter was of a generalised, rather pleasant sort. There was no urgency in it. ‘Has some other doctor lobotomisied me?’

‘As to the medical expertise of Leo Alexeivich Trofim, I cannot say.’

My memories of Trofim were bright and immediate. I knew who he was. ‘Trofim! — I never knew his first name before! He is a Leo, is he? Like Tolstoy! For some reason that pleases me.’

‘As your doctor I am pleased to see you pleased. You will recover more quickly if you have a positive mental attitude.’

‘Is Trofim here?’

‘He is not far from here. Although he is no longer in a state of coherent bodily assemblage.’

‘Where is here?’

‘Kiev.’

‘In the Ukraine?’

‘Is there another Kiev?’

‘I mean: the Ukraine on the planet Earth?’

There was a few seconds’ silence. ‘As your doctor,’ she repeated, shortly, ‘I am pleased that you have not lost your sense of humour. A sense of humour will be helpful to you as you convalesce.’

‘I meant the question,’ I said, feeling momentarily confused, ‘seriously.’

‘Seriously has a different interpretation in the realm of science fiction, perhaps.’

There was a sort of mental spasm, another memorial regurgitation inside my brain, like a mamma seagull splurting half-digested fish through her beak for her young. ‘I was in the Chernobyl nuclear facility,’ I said.

‘Reactor Four,’ she said.

‘The reactor exploded,’ I said.

‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘Unless the reactor is your nickname for your young friend. He certainly was, according to the autopsy reports, a well-built individual.’

‘Chernobyl is still intact?’

‘It is generating the electricity that powers this hospital,’ she said. ‘So we must be grateful that your friend’s grenade did not inconvenience it.’

There was a cut, as if in a film. The doctor was no longer there, and instead a nurse — a very tall, thin young man with a bald head and the podgy, ingenuous face of a child — was taking my blood pressure. I had been asleep, or time had slipped, or something else had happened. ‘I was talking to the doctor.’

‘Were you?’

‘Doctor Bello.’

‘That’s her name.’

‘She was the middle of telling me something? I think I zoned out.’

At this point I think I zoned out. I was alone in the room. The window was very tall and thin, and admitted a perspective across a courtyard to a flank of rectangles, like the grid at the bottom of the spent fuel pool, only arrayed vertically rather than horizontally at the bottom of the pool. It took me a while to recognise these as blank windows. There was a tree somewhere in the space between my window and these windows, for a broomstick of branches poked out from the right side of the rectangle. These branches were usually motionless protrusions into the field of view, rather jagged and unpleasant, but every now and again a breeze would insinuate itself down into the courtyard and elate the twigs to a flurry of waving.

Now the window was dark, and the only illumination was a nightlight above the door. It shone with a gorgeous jade-green light; delicate and dim.

The nurse was coming in through the door. It occurred to me that he unlocked the door before stepping through it, and relocked it when he was through. For some reason this action snagged my attention. He was carrying a tray. On the tray was a bowl of broth and a small boulder of bread.

‘How long have I been here?’ I asked, between sips, as he spooned the soup into my mouth.

‘You know what I reckon about time?’ the nurse replied. ‘I figure that the passage of time is subjective. I don’t know much about frontal lobe injury, but I know it can do strange things to your sense of the passage of time. Does it feel like you’ve been here for a long time?’

‘Months.’

‘Ha!’ This pleased him. ‘Two days — three now. Or is it months? A philosopher might be able to tell us the difference. And why, anyway, should we submit to the tyranny of the calendar? The clock? Days? Months?’

He broke off some of the bread, dipped it in the broth, and poked one end in between my lips. I disliked the texture of it.

‘Which is it?’ I asked, annoyed, or tried to. I wanted solidity. But he wasn’t there anymore. I was alone in the room as the rectangular photographic print that was the window yielded the effects of the chemical wash in which it had been immersed and very slowly went from black to purple, to grey, to a yeasty paleness.

No.

Actually I wasn’t in the room, I was on a trolley, flowing along the longest corridor in the world. Actually it wasn’t a corridor, and those weren’t lights set at intervals into the ceiling; it was a liftshaft and those were floors. I was falling. Actually I wasn’t in a corridor, I was back in the womb, and the womb was a metal sac, like the interior of a toothpaste tube.

The doctor was helping me sit up in bed. I was in my room again. ‘Did I have a scan? Was that what that was? I assume that is what has just happened to me.’

‘As we discussed,’ she said. But I had no memory of such a discussion. ‘You used to be a smoker, I think’

‘A smoker?’

‘A smoker of cigarettes.’

And her words unlocked that whole storeroom of memory. I had been entirely oblivious to cigarettes until she uttered those words; and then, suddenly, I craved a smoke. I knew once again that stretched, physiological need for nicotine. ‘Do you have any cigarettes? ’ I asked. ‘I feel the need for one, right now, very acutely.’

‘Smoking is not permitted in here,’ she said.

That reminded me of something.

‘It is obvious,’ the doctor was saying, ‘from even the most cursory examination of your body, that you have smoked far too much for far too long. But I knew you were a smoker even before I examined you. Do you know how I knew? I shall tell you. You had a cigarette in your mouth. When they pulled you out of the pool, at the plant, they said your lips were set fast about the stub of a cigarette.’

‘I remember that cigarette,’ I said, fondly.

‘It played a part,’ she said, ‘in saving your life. There’s an irony there, perhaps. As a medical practitioner I spend much of my working life telling people not to smoke. I spend a lot of time telling them that. Almost as much time as I spend telling them not to drink. But in this case…’

‘That cigarette saved my life?’ I said.

‘It relaxed your muscles. Your friend, Mr Nuclear Reactor, your friend Leo-as-in-Tolstoy, his muscles were tensed tight. The shrapnel cut through him like snapping harpstrings. He went to pieces.’ She chuckled, and then stopped herself. ‘If you see what I mean. You, though, you were relaxed. Sometimes people come into the hospital here having fallen from, say, a high building. Adults, but also, sometimes, babies. The babies have a greater chance of surviving, because they don’t tense themselves in anticipation of the impact. They don’t know any better. They hit the ground as soft sacks, and so don’t shatter.’

‘I believe I have heard something of the like,’ I said.

‘Your muscles were slack, so some of the shrapnel passed straight through without causing too much damage. Pieces went through your legs, and arms, and there is a hole through your stomach and out the other side. It was a good job that none of the pieces had a trajectory that intersected your spine. A piece got stuck in your ribs, and another inside your head, but we were able to get both of those pieces out.’

I looked at my own left hand. I was wearing a stigmata. Turning the hand over, I saw the matching scar on the back. I flexed my fingers; they were stiff, and a little sore, but they worked.

‘Is this how a grenade works?’ I said, amazed.

She looked at me. Her face was a series of regular curves, regularly arranged, but there was a professional blankness in her expression that reduced what might otherwise have been beauty. ‘Weren’t you in the army?’

‘I was in the army,’ I said, with another internal wrench of memorialising regurgitation.

‘Then you should know how a grenade works. It is usually a fatal device, a grenade. Don’t misunderstand me. But, luckily for you, you were relaxed. And luckily you were blown into the pool, which extinguished and cooled your burns. You were partially in the pool. And a quantity of water had been blown about. There was much water in the air, and it rained back down upon you. So you didn’t burn.’

‘Thrice lucky,’ I said.

‘More than thrice. Your face was exposed to the blast, and your skin should have been badly burned. It was, in fact, burned. But your face has been burned before, hasn’t it?’

‘I can’t remember,’ I said.

‘Your chin and cheeks, some of your nose and much of your brow is covered with old scar tissue. The scarring indicates what must have been a fairly severe prior burn.’

‘I can’t remember,’ I said again.

‘Scar tissue is in some senses weaker than ordinary tissue; but it has a higher concentration of collagen, which makes it structurally tougher.’

‘I see.’

‘There is, furthermore, another piece of luck here,’ she said.

‘I’ve lost count now,’ I said.

‘The grenade was fairly radioactive. It had been left in a radioactive environment for perhaps a week, and had become itself fairly radioactive.’

I considered this. ‘That’s lucky?’

‘Normally, no. Normally that is no more lucky than smoking a cigarette is healthy. Normally the fact that this grenade was radioactive would be extremely unlucky. You had a fragment of this radioactive grenade stuck inside your skull for two and a half days. We have just operated to remove it. It entered through the left temple — your left, that is — so that’s how we retrieved it; out through the hole it made going in.’

I put my hand up to my head, and felt, on the left side, the enormous fabric excrescence of a surgical dressing, clamped to the side of my skull like an alien facehugger that had missed its target. ‘Don’t fiddle with that,’ said the doctor, severely. ‘There’s a tap under there.’

‘Tap,’ I said. I am not sure why I added. ‘The American word is [faucet].’

‘That’s as may be. Our tap is designed to relieve intercranial pressure, and must not be meddled with.’

‘Meddled with,’ I repeated.

‘Comrade Skvorecky,’ said the doctor. ‘Did you know you have cancer?’

‘Cancer,’ I said, as if leafing through the medical textbook of my memory. Most of the pages were blank. But I remembered this: ‘Because I was in Chernobyl?’

‘No no. Judging by its growth, I would say you have had cancer growing inside your brain for several years.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I pondered this. It sounded like news, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel any anxiety. ‘I may have known that. I may not. I can’t remember if I knew or not.’

‘Located on the border between the perifrontal lobe and the midbrain. Under normal circumstances I would describe such a growth as inoperable.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Does that mean I am going to die?’

‘Everybody dies, comrade.’

‘True of course,’ I agreed. I felt remarkably placid about this news.

‘You should ask: Am I to die soon?’

‘Am I?’

‘As to that, I can’t say. We took out some of the growth when we were in your skull, but wholly to excise it would require us to remove more brain tissue than would be compatible with your continuing mental function.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said again, passionlessly.

‘On the other hand, the grenade fragment was lodged in such a way as to be, in fact, in contact with the tumour.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said once more.

‘Not oh dear, comrade. The grenade itself had been irradiated by, it seems, a week or more in close proximity to depleted uranium. It was itself therefore radioactive. It therefore itself irradiated the tumour for two days. We’ve taken the shrapnel out now, but there’s little doubt that it has done you good.’

‘Done me good,’ I said, as if testing the word on my tongue. ‘Good.’

‘Cancer cells are more susceptible to radiation than ordinary cells. That, combined with the limited surgical excision, has, I believe, materially lengthened your life expectancy.’

‘To be clear,’ I said. ‘By smoking a cigarette, inside a nuclear facility, whilst having my skull blown up by a radioactive RGD-5 I have extended my life expectancy?’

‘A strange chance, indeed. You have months of convalescence ahead of you, of course. Your shrapnel damage amounts to having been shot in the body and head half a dozen times, in addition to being concussed and burned. I would be concerned about such injuries in a young, healthy man; but in a man of your advanced years and poor health it is much more alarming. How old are you, exactly?’

I thought about this. ‘Old,’ I said.

‘When were you born.’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You fought in the Great Patriotic War?’

‘I suppose so. I’m sorry but I can’t remember precisely.’

‘Well. There has been a degree of neural damage. It seems to be affecting your left brain — your right side — in particular. There has been additional scarring, and various other forms of superficial damage. But all things considered. All things considered—’

I felt quite remarkably calm. But a memory of standing in the reactor hall at the power plant, trying and failing to persuade ox-like Trofim to put the grenade away, flashed into my mind, and with it came the memory of full-strength anxiety. ‘Chernobyl,’ I cried. ‘It blew up!’

‘No no,’ said the doctor, crossly. ‘I explained this. It is true that somebody had conspired to vandalise the power plant — and true that the consequences would have been horrific. There was recovered, from the bottom of one of the spent fuel pools, a suitcase containing a number of grenades. Had they exploded, particularly had they been fixed to the wall that the spent fuel pool shared with the reactor… well then there would have been serious damage. But the single grenade in the hand of your friend did not do so much damage. The other grenades were covered by thirty metres of water, and were quite untouched by the explosion. The reactor itself is shielded in dozens of metres of concrete, and it was fine. Almost all the force of the blast went upwards. There was, I am told, one piece of damage. Trofim was holding a gun in his right hand. The hand was blown off by the explosion, still holding the gun; and the gun struck the ground. The round in the chamber fired, and this bullet pierced one of the steam pipes, leading to a small reduction in pressure. But the staff have practised for that eventuality. They were able to restore pressure. The explosion, on the other hand, caused very little damage.’

‘Luck indeed,’ I observed.

‘Or fate.’

‘Thank you, Comrade Doctor,’ I said.

‘Comrade Colonel Doctor,’ she said, and left the room, locking the door behind her.

I dreamt. I was in the dacha again, but the quality of the experience was not as visionary as it had been before. There was Stalin, except that his moustache was a mess of fine tentacles rather than hair, his nostrils were two teethed orifices, his skin bristled with pale warts, and his eyes glowed red.

I awoke with a sudden insight, brilliance igniting inside my head like fireworks. ‘Christmas Day, 1917!’ I cried aloud. ‘The day of my birth!’

I was telling an empty room.

Death is a red-haired man: his skin is pale, and his eyes unusually dark. He smiles. He has every reason too. How he must haunt a hospital such as this.

I dreamed, and when I woke up the nurse was rolling me to one side to pull away the bedpan. ‘There’s a Militia officer here to speak with you,’ he said.

I brought my eyes into focus, something that seemed to take me longer now than formerly it had. I don’t know who I expected to see, but it was a uniformed policeman, sitting in a hospital chair, his broad-peaked cap in his lap.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I am Officer Pahulanik of the Ukrainian Militia. I am a policeman. Do you understand?’

‘Good afternoon. I understand perfectly.’

‘There are, it seems, protocols regarding the circumstances under which I may take you into custody.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Your case seems complicated,’ said Officer Pahulanik. ‘You were arrested in Moscow with respect to the death of an American citizen. You were released into the custody of the KGB. According to the KGB, you are still in their custody.’

‘They do not say they released me?’

‘Nor that you escaped. Nor that you are dead. Accordingly… it is awkward. No policeman wishes to incur the wrath of the KGB, or trespass upon their proper ground.’ He looked carefully at me for a time. ‘Then there is this matter of attempted sabotage in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.’

‘I was endeavouring to prevent such sabotage. At risk of my own life, I tackled an individual armed with a grenade.’

‘That would seem to be the case,’ said Officer Pahulanik. ‘And yet, it remains to be explained why you — a lowly translator from Moscow — chanced to be inside Chernobyl at the precise moment a saboteur attempted to explode the facility with grenades.’

‘My memory is a little enholed,’ I said. Then, since enholed did not seem to me a proper Russian word I stopped. I spent a few moments trying to remember whether it was, perhaps, an English word. When that didn’t seem right I pondered, vaguely, about French. Then I said, ‘I suffered a degree of injury of the brain. An irregular piece of metal was deposited in my frontal lobe.’

‘So I hear,’ said the policeman. ‘Does this mean that you can no longer remember what you were doing inside the facility?’

I thought. Elements of the journey from Moscow flapped batlike through the cavernous spaces of my brain. There were no faces, and no names, in my memorious supply. I said, ‘I’m afraid not. I am not memorious.’ My memory refused to focus. Was memorious even a word? And there was somebody else, too, but I could not figure who, or what this person had been doing, or what my relation to them was. I could not remember how I had come to be in Kiev after being in Moscow.

‘I was with somebody,’ I said, in a slow voice. ‘Or I wasn’t. It must be one or the other.’ I was not attempting to deceive the police; and I had the distinct impression that it was all there. But it was a great deal to process. Perhaps I should say, I remembered, but I was not yet used to having so many memories in my head again.

‘Indeed,’ said the policeman. ‘It seems you were indeed with somebody. You were with a KGB agent called Trofim. Another agent, whose identity and present location is obscure, had gathered the entire staff of the Chernobyl nuclear station in Reactor One. He was addressing the staff in stern and, it seems, forbidding terms, although none of them seem very certain as to the exact content of his speech. But there he was, talking away. And now he has vanished. You, comrade, are officially still in KGB custody in Moscow. You certainly were there. Next thing we know, the KGB are in Chernobyl. And so are you. You didn’t fly down, because we have checked all the passenger manifests. Nor did you come by train, because the stations were guarded. You do not, according to records, possess a car. Perhaps you might have stolen one, but all the cars in the Chernobyl car park have been accounted for. So how else might you have come there? What do you think?’

‘Why should the KGB bring a prisoner all the way down to the Ukraine from Moscow?’ I asked, genuinely. I asked the question because I wanted to know the answer.

‘I find it best not to pry too closely into the business of the KGB,’ said the policeman. In all this, he had not moved from his chair, nor approached the bed. ‘It would be injurious to my career, and possibly to my life, if I attempted to arrest an individual who was already in KGB custody.’

‘I see your dilemma.’

‘Well, then, comrade. Perhaps you can help me. In the cupboard beside your bed — there — would you mind?’

He pointed, and, with some difficulty (for movement did not come easily to me, and was not comfortable), I opened the bedside cabinet and brought out an alien raygun. It was a long tube, with a handle, and a switch.

‘That is a Geiger counter,’ said the policeman.

‘It is not an alien raygun,’ I said, mostly for my own benefit.

‘Indeed not. Please point it at you, and press the button.’

I did so. Immediately the device leapt to life with a ferocious crackling, like ten thousand dry twigs on a huge fire. ‘That’s not good,’ I observed, placidly.

‘Comrade, you have pressed the test button. That is there to ensure that the machine’s speakers are operational.’

‘If that were a reading of my radioactivity…’

‘Then you’d be dead in half an hour, and I’d be very ill. Switch it off.’ I did so. ‘Press the trigger, on the front of the handle.’

I did this, and the device burped and snapped. It popped and was silent; popped twice and was silent again.’

‘There,’ said the policeman. ‘It turns out you are radioactive.’

‘Not badly?’

‘Badly enough to prevent me taking you into custody, I’m pleased to say. You can turn it off now,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘and replace it in the cabinet. Your nurses and doctors may need to avail themselves of it.’ He got to his feet. ‘Comrade, the Ukrainian Militia is content to leave you in this secure medical facility.’

I spent ten minutes manoeuvring my legs out of the bed, and another fifteen leaning against the wheeled crutch of my drip-rack, two fluid-heavy sacs swinging like an old man’s pendulous testicles (ballbag? I thought; and understood that this was a memory too, although I wasn’t sure how it related to the others). With infinite attention I made my way over to the window. My joints seemed to squeak. Or else the wheels on the drip-rack squeaked. It was one of the two, certainly. And here was the window. I looked through it. There was a courtyard, and standing in the courtyard, three floors below me, were three nurses: two female nurses and one male nurse. They were smoking, talking. One had her back to me: a plump and cornfed foreshortened torso, from my perspective, upon which the manmade fabric of her uniform stretched and wrinkled. This chimed, somehow, deep inside me. She had flame-coloured hair. The other female had hair the colour of black coffee, and a wide-faced, wide-hipped loveliness. She was laughing. And every now and again she threw a great bale of smoke over her left shoulder like a worker clearing spectral snow with an invisible shovel. As I watched, the male nurse — casually and with no reaction of shock or outrage from either woman — reached out and squeezed the breast of the brunette. His face was animated, but he was not looking at the woman he was pawing. Perhaps he was telling a story, and this was illustrating it. I was struck by how strange an action it was.

They finished their smokes and went in. There was nothing in the yard now except a stone bench, and some runty bushes, and a deal of litter on paving stones: spent cigarettes, old cartons, rubbish.

I looked over the roof at the sky: a cold-looking, hazed white. The sun was there, diluted by the cover of clouds. I looked and the sun seemed to be shivering in the sky. The motion disturbed me, because, after all, the sun is the stable point around which the world moves, and everybody knows that. And if we know that the sun herself moves too — as perhaps she does, on some larger galactic pavanne, then we need not trouble ourselves with it. But to shimmer in the sky? It was as if the sun was struggling in harness. Then I put my hand to my face and understood that it was my head that was trembling; and that when I looked down again at the courtyard with my trembly eyeballs it too seemed to quake like the terrors were in it.

‘What are you doing?’ said my nurse, in a sharp voice.

‘I was watching you lark about downstairs,’ I replied. Except that the words did not come out of my mouth coherently. My mouth did not seem to be working properly. I considered: it seemed likely I’d said nothing at all except inarticulate gurgles.

‘What’s that, old man?’ said the fellow, kindly, taking my weight, sliding an arm under my right armpit. ‘Come on, back to bed with you.’

I felt dizzy. There was a purple-edged tint to familiar things. I could smell a certain smell, and after a while I recognised it as the smell of a certain bunker where, in 1941, I had spent five weeks in close company with half a dozen men. It was the smell of male body-stink and cordite and dust. I could smell it now, although the only scent my male nurse exuded was one of soap. And although by the time I was back on the bed the smell had changed to one of roasting nuts. Not any old nuts, but particular nuts roasting on a brazier on the corner of Market Square, on a winter’s morning in the days after the civil war. My grandfather was leading me along, and my breath was steamtraining out of my mouth in a most delightful way. I was a young boy, and it was a joy to me to pretend to be a steam train. My grandfather was telling me that the civil war was over, and how glad we must be. ‘Our war is over now,’ he told me, ‘but in England it will shortly begin, and in all the other countries too.’ ‘Can I have some chestnuts?’ I pleaded. I was, I don’t know, ten years old. ‘Will you go back to England now that the war is over?’ I asked. ‘I’m Russian now,’ he said. ‘I’m Russian as all Russia.’

The man selling the chestnuts was Death.

Alone of all the people in the busy square he was hatless, and he was pale as summer clouds, and skinny as unfleshed bones. He was selling chestnuts. His hair was red as firelight, and his skin was a blank, and his eyes were black, so that they looked deeper and deader than human eyes. As we made our way over I became scared. ‘It’s Death,’ I told my grandfather. ‘It’s Death.’ And grandfather, his accent becoming more pronounced as it often used to do when he was angry, rebuked me. ‘Don’t be silly. He’s a respectable Russian selling chestnuts, and you’ll not insult him with such childishness.’ But I didn’t want to go any closer, and held back, and tugged at my grandfather’s coat.

‘Come along old man,’ said the nurse, and at his words, as at a magic spell, the hallucination vanished from my eyes and my nose. ‘Come along old man, what you want to be wandering about for? You’re as white as milled flour.’

I awoke, suddenly, and there was sweat all on me. It was cold on my skin. It was the middle of the night. I could not lie there. If there is one thing the Great Patriotic War taught me, it was not to lie there. The ones who lay down, though only to catch their breath, or only to rest their wound for a moment — those were the ones who died. You had to keep going. No matter what. No matter what. Not that it mattered. No matter what. Not, I told myself, that it mattered. I was not anxious about going on. It was a matter of simple will. I had to speak to — I couldn’t remember who. She was somewhere in Kiev — I did not know where, but I must find her.

Her?

I had no memory of any her. And yet that lack of memory felt like a palpable absence, as if I should have such a memory.

I woke up again, with no memory of the intervening time. I did not feel very comfortable. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. They were hauling me upright. They were hospital staff. It was daytime, and spring light was printing a sharp, new trapezoid on the wall beside my bed. There were two nurses, and they were picking me up, and tutting me. They fussed me back to bed, and reinserted the drip, and wiped me up and then the doctor was there. ‘Mr Skvorecky,’ she said. ‘I must ask you to remain in your bed. If you persist in getting out of it, I really cannot be answerable for your recovery.’

‘I should like to make a phone call,’ I said.

‘Follow your doctor’s orders,’ she replied, ‘and in a day or two that might be possible.’ She had the Geiger counter in her hand, and was running it over me. It tutted disapprovingly, although intermittently.

‘Perhaps you could forward a message for me?’ I asked.

‘To whom?’

‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

‘That is going to make it hard to deliver the message.’

‘I know — I appreciate that. I think there was somebody in the reactor with me. I wish I could tell you more about him, but I’m afraid I don’t remember, exactly. Except that it is very important I communicate with him, for some reason.’

Dr Bello sighed. ‘I shall be honest, Mr Skvorecky. The Militia seem curiously uncertain about your status, which is to say, as to whether they have or have not taken you under arrest. Although they are certain that they have further questions for you.’

‘I understand,’ I said, placidly. ‘But he can tell me something I need to know. To fill in the holes in my… in my…’ There was something else I meant to say, but it was sliding out from the speech centres of my brain, and playing peek-a-boo in other portions. A car. A deer. A man lifted bodily into the night air and dangling up there.

‘Does Death have red hair?’ I asked.

‘What’s that?’

‘Do you think Death is a redhead?’

‘Isn’t he supposed to be a skeleton?’ was the reply, and I didn’t recognise the voice. It wasn’t Dr Bello’s voice; she was no longer there. It was a new voice. It possessed a breathy, underpowered quality that I didn’t like.

‘I’ve met you before,’ I said, sitting up a little in the bed.

Here was a man, with red hair, sitting in the room’s single chair, surveying me in bed. I did not like his smile. He did not work for the hospital.

He and I were alone in the room together. The light was on. Perhaps turning on the light had woken me up. I don’t know.

He smiled at me. This was not a pleasant smile.

‘You were Frenkel’s driver,’ I said. ‘You drove us around, whilst Trofim was pushing his pistol into my eye socket. And then,’ I added, for this memory had just that moment come back to me, ‘Frenkel himself put his gun inside my mouth. And you drove the car. You work for Frenkel. You’re KGB.’

‘I am KGB,’ he agreed.

‘You’ve come to kill me?’

‘I have come to kill you.’

I thought about this. It seemed a flavourless, angstless statement. The words had the quality of facts rather than emotions.

‘It seems I am hard to kill,’ I said.

‘I’m sure I’ll manage it.’

‘And why are you going to kill me?’

His eyes said I need a reason? but his mouth said, ‘Orders.’

‘I suppose it has to do with poor Trofim,’ I croaked. I thought about my meeting with the Steel-Stalin. ‘I suppose I’m getting in Comrade Frenkel’s way. He wanted to recruit me, in order to intensify the…’ But I couldn’t think of the word. ‘To do,’ I went on tentatively, curious in a dispassionate way, to see what words would come out of my mouth, ‘something… for the creatures. The aliens. But whatever he hoped, I’m having the opposite effect.’

‘Gabble gabble,’ said the red-headed man. I knew I had met him before, but I couldn’t recall his name. ‘I’ll give you this: you hide your fear pretty well, old man.’

I thought about fear. Shouldn’t I be afraid? But if there was any sensation there it was, rather, the memory of fear than fear. I contemplated my situation. It seemed clear to me — mental clarity sometimes drew its ticklish bow across the violin string of my consciousness — that I needed to get out of bed if I wanted to save my life. I needed to get up and lock the door. I needed, however hard it might be, to rise from my bed and get to the door. If I could lock the door, I would survive. Did the choice really present itself to me so starkly? Death here, life there, a key in a keyhole the difference. I had the memory of an elongated chopstick of light shining through a keyhole and into a darkened room. Why was the room so darkened? What was the light on the other side of the door that spilled so promiscuously through the tiny hole? Where was it shining from? A chink of light. Then I thought to myself: Of course the light is defined by the darkness. I don’t know why I thought this.

I moved my legs round until they dangled over the edge of the bed, like two sleeves of cloth. Then I pulled the wormy plastic tube from my arm and got, unsteadily, to my feet. Red-haired Death was sat in the chair, regarding me with a complacently predatory expression. I suppose he was wondering what I thought I was doing.

‘After the first death,’ I told him, with a grunt, ‘there is no other.’

‘Gabble gabble,’ he said again. From a holster inside his jacket he withdrew a pistol.

Three steps, doddery, and I was at the door. This motion tired me out. I paused for a moment to breathe.

‘Are you thinking of making a run for it?’ he asked. ‘A stagger for it? A bumble for it?’ He was amusing himself. ‘A shuffle for it?’

‘I don’t think I’d get very far,’ I said. I needed to pause twice in the middle of this short sentence in order to catch my breath. There was a deep-bone ache in my legs. I felt nauseous. This was too much exertion for me. But at least I was at the door now.

‘I’ve been involved in various pursuits of suspects in my time,’ he said. ‘This will be an interesting, if brief, addition to that body of experience.’

I opened the door an inch, two inches, and I reached an arm round to the outside. I could feel, without needing to look round, the pistol aimed between my shoulder blades. ‘I think,’ I said, groping for the key in the lock, ‘you mis—’ and there it was, and I fumbled it from its hole, ‘—understand.’

I pushed the door shut, and leant against it for a moment, to recover. But my labour was almost completed now.

‘Get back in the bed, old man,’ said the redhead. ‘I have no objection to shooting you, but it might be simpler all round if I just smother you with a pillow.’ He did not move from the chair. ‘It’d be demeaning to have you lurching down the corridor at half a mile an hour. I’d shoot you in the back, you know. I have no compunction about shooting people in the back. You’d bleed out on a hard hospital floor. Wouldn’t you rather die in bed? You’re an old man. Old men always hope to die in their beds’.

‘There,’ I said, slipping the key into the keyhole on the inside of the door, and turning it round. ‘A little privacy.’ I pulled the key out.

Make no mistake: the physical effort this manoeuvre required, and, without wishing to sound vainglorious, the courage and application it entailed, was greater than any effort I had made for decades. But I was fighting for my life. And, without anxiety or fear, and without any strong preference for living over dying, I so fought.

‘What are you doing?’ the redhead demanded, a peevish tone entering his voice. ‘Have you locked us in?’

I turned. One step and my knee almost folded. Another step. I didn’t want to collapse in a heap on the bed; or, worse, miss the edge of the bed and tumble to the floor. That wouldn’t do at all. It required a focus of effort. ‘A little,’ I gasped, ‘privacy.’

‘Give me the key,’ he ordered, flourishing his pistol.

The final step and I paused. ‘A moment,’ I gasped. ‘Let me get. Back into the bed.’

‘Why did you lock the door?’

‘A little,’ I panted, ‘privacy.’

I was standing with my hands down on the mattress. My intention had been to swallow the key straight down, but now that I had it in my hand it seemed far too large and jagged. I thought about taking a drink of water, but even so I could not see it going down the gullet. Things are often different in imagination to the way they are in reality.

I put my hip against the edge of the bed, and levered myself round into a sitting position, facing him. The mattress felt hard beneath me. Still in his chair, he was aiming the pistol directly at my face.

‘Is this about delay?’ he demanded. ‘Come on, old man. You’re a hero of the Patriotic War. Don’t demean yourself.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. Leaving the key tucked into my bedclothes I raised my right hand, empty, and put it to my mouth. With what I hoped was a convincing dumb-show I made as if to swallow the key.

‘Hey!’ said the redhead, leaping to his feet. ‘What are you playing at?’

‘Gah!’ I said. Did that sound like somebody with a key sliding down his gullet? ‘Gur! Gah! That is uncomfortable.’ I leaned back against my pillows, and slid my heels along the mattress until my legs were flat. Then, perhaps too theatrically, I patted my stomach. ‘The condemned man,’ I puffed, ‘can choose his last meal.’

‘You’ve gone gaga!’ said the redhead. Why’d you do that? You’ve locked yourself in a room with your assassin.’

‘I decided against,’ I said, slowly as I recovered my puff. I could feel the key digging into my buttock. ‘Trying to run away.’

‘I suppose I can go out the window?’ the redhead said, and went over to look. ‘Or, well that’s quite a drop. I suppose I can just kick the door down.’

‘You could easily kick the door down.’

‘Why did you lock us in?’ he asked.

‘I thought it would be more fun,’ I said, ‘the other way around.’

‘What’s the other way around?’

‘Me. Chasing you.’

‘That’s more like it,’ he said, smiling broadly at the absurdity of the situation. ‘That’s the spirit that beat the Nazis! You’re an old man. Unarmed. Walking three paces exhausts you. I’m a young, fit, KGB operative with a gun. I’ve killed dozens of people healthier than you. But you’re the one chasing me! That is indeed the way to think of it. That’s a better way to go.’ He tucked his pistol back into his holster and beckoned. ‘Come on then! Come get me!’

‘When you say,’ I said, reaching over for the bedside cabinet, ‘that I am unarmed…’

I pulled out the Geiger counter.

Immediately he drew his gun again and held it two-handed, pointed straight at my head. ‘Put that down,’ he said.

‘It’s not a gun,’ I said. ‘It’s a Geiger counter.’

There was a pause. ‘Geiger-M̈ller tube,’ said the redhead; but he kept the gun trained on me.

‘Here’s a funny thing,’ I told him. ‘The American President? His name is Reagan. You know what that means, in English? A literal translation into Russian would be President Laser Pistol. Isn’t that funny?’

I pointed the tube at my own chest.

‘Stop!’ he barked. ‘Is that a laser pistol? You said Geiger counter. Is it a laser pistol, though?’

‘Tch! And where would I get hold of a laser pistol?’

‘You and I both know where,’ he retorted quickly. ‘Who knows what weaponry they might dispose of, when it’s no longer useful to them?’

This barely wrongfooted me. It might have given me pause, if I hadn’t been so tired. I pushed on. ‘Well if it’s a laser pistol,’ I said, settling the end of its plastic muzzle over the exact centre of my chest, ‘and I pull this trigger, then I’ll do your job for you. On the other hand, if it’s a Geiger counter, all that will happen is that you’ll discover how radioactive I am.’

I could see the fox-like process of calculation flicker in his eyes. He was starting to work out what I had done. He glanced over to the door. Then he took a step towards me, and then stopped. ‘You’ve locked me in,’ he said, in a low voice.

‘It’s not a question of me escaping from you,’ I told him.

‘You’re bluffing,’ he said. ‘Bluffing is what you are doing.’

‘Shall we see? Shall I press the button?’

‘Bluffing,’ he said.

‘You know how one of these works?’

‘Go on,’ he instructed.

I pushed the test button, and the counter crackled and trilled to life. For long seconds he stood there, listening to the malign static interference sizzle and sizzle. Eventually he spoke. ‘You’ve been here more than a week.’

I turned the machine off.

‘If you’re that radioactive,’ he said, backing against the window. ‘You’d have died long ago.’

‘Are you concerned about my health?’ I asked. ‘Or your own?’

He swallowed. ‘Is it them?’ he said.

‘It’d be better for my purpose if you came over here,’ I told him. ‘Get a fuller dose. Put a pillow over my mouth, and lean over me. Get a proper coating.’

‘Did they make you immune, somehow, to radiation? Is that why you’re still alive?’

‘Never mind that. Are you immune to radioactivity, comrade? That’s the question.’ I was gathering my strength after my exertion; such strength as I had. ‘Because if you are, then feel free to stay here as long as you like. But if not—’ I breathed in, and out. ‘If not, then I’d advise you to get out as soon as possible. Really, there’s no time to lose. Every second increases your cancer risk.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘You’re white hot. Christ you’re a fucking bomb.’ He pulled the window open and peered out. Presumably he thought: too far to jump, because he turned back to face me, and this was the first moment since his arrival in my room that I felt hope flicker in my brain. There was a panic in his eyes.

‘That hairdo,’ I said. ‘You towel it dry after showering? That’ll start falling out now, of course. Bright side: you won’t have to bother about it anymore. No more tiresome washing or drying your hair. You can skip that whole portion of the morning routine. Think of the time you’ll save.’

He raised his pistol at me, and then lowered it. ‘Give me the key,’ he said.

‘As for that,’ I said. ‘Your options are: to get me to vomit it up. Or perhaps cut me open for it. You have a knife?’

‘Give me the fucking—’ He aimed the gun at me again. Then he reholstered it.

‘Just cut me open and rummage around. Of course, it’ll significantly increase your dose. But if you stay here too long then—’ I started coughing at this moment, on account of all the talking I was doing and the dryness of my throat. But it succeeded in increasing the panic in the redhead’s face. I took a sip from the glass of water beside my bed.

The redhead bolted suddenly for the door, and heaved with all his strength on the handle. ‘Give me the key or I’ll blow your alien brains onto the wall!’ he shouted.

‘My alien brains?’ I said. ‘I have to assume you’re going to shoot me whatever happens.’ I was fingering the Geiger counter in my lap. ‘So your threat is hardly an incentive.’

He began kicking at the door. He was wearing comfortable leather loafers. ‘Army boots would be more useful for that, comrade,’ I told him.

He kicked, and kicked again. ‘Bastard!’ he grunted. ‘Bastard!’

‘You do not seem to be making much of a dent.’

He spun round and, once more, drew his pistol on me. ‘I’ll at least finish you off,’ he told me.

‘All right, all right,’ I said, calmly. ‘Hold on a moment. I’ll give you the key! I’ll cough it back up! I’ll even wipe it on the bedclothes, to remove as much of my highly radioactive saliva as I can manage.’

It did not suit his face for his eyes to be as wide open as they were. He looked disconcerting. He levelled the pistol at my head, and then with a moan of frustration he span and fired into the door once, twice, and then a third time. The noise of the pistol was very great, and it struck my inner ear like a crashing blow, leaving me with a high, pure singsong note. There was the stench of burnt powder. I shook my head ponderously, and the whine vanished from my ear.

The redhead aimed another kick at the punctured door, and kicked right through it. Now he was compelled to hop on one foot, for the other had become snagged through the woodwork. He almost fell backwards, and then he pulled the foot free, and did a little staggery dance. He swore.

‘The door opens inward, comrade,’ I said.

The wood around the handle was splintered and frayed. He pulled his right arm into the sleeve jacket, and using the fabric as a makeshift glove to protect his skin from splinters, he took hold and hauled the door towards him. It gave way with a noise of snapping wood, and once again he almost fell backwards. But at least his exit was clear now.

In the open doorway he turned around to face me. ‘They should keep you in a fucking lead-lined room!’ he said. He aimed the pistol at my chest.

I did not experience any spike or fear, or excitement. My heart kept beating smoothly.

‘Hey!’

This was my doctor’s voice. I heard running footsteps in the corridor outside. The redhead turned and waved his pistol at them. ‘KGB business,’ he barked. ‘KGB business.’

‘Murdering my patients in their beds is nobody’s business,’ cried the doctor. Ah! But she was fearless, my wonderful Dr Bello. I learned afterwards that she was not alone; the banging and thumping had roused half a dozen hospital staff, and they had all come scurrying down to see what the fuss was about. I daresay the red-headed man contemplated gunning them all down; but it was not a likely calculation.

‘Get out!’ snapped Dr Bello. She had reached the door, now, and was looking with horror at the mess of splintered wood. ‘Damaging hospital property? Breaking down doors? Threatening hospital patients with a gun? I’ll call the Militia, KGB or no. I’ll speak to your superiors! I’ll take it all the way to the top. I know people.’

The redhead growled, and looked at me, and then he growled again. ‘You want,’ he said, speaking in a low tone, ‘to put him in a fucking lead-lined room.’ And he stalked away.

And then they all came hurrying into my room, and fussing about me, and reconnecting my drip. Dr Bello took the Geiger counter from my lap. ‘Doctor,’ I told her. ‘You have saved my life.’

‘It is a doctor’s business,’ she said, in a plain voice, ‘to save the life of her patient.’

After that there was a great deal of fuss. The Militia came to see me again, and a guard was placed on my room. I was visited by a senior KGB officer. He was very old, and in uniform — a vast, stiff concoction of cloth and braid, upon which a great many medals clustered like bees upon a beehive. His face was prodigiously weathered by age, and lined with a series of deep creases in the vertical and the horizontal, giving him the appearance, almost, of crumbling brickwork.

‘Comrade,’ he said, in a voice like rust. He did not tell me his name.

‘Comrade.’ I nodded.

‘You fought in the Great Patriotic War,’ he said.

‘As did you,’ I replied, nodding towards his medals. ‘And now, you are in the KGB?’

He smiled, and leaned a little towards me. ‘Confidentially, now,’ he croaked. ‘As one old soldier to another.’

‘As one old soldier to another.’

‘People think the KGB is a unity,’ he said to me. ‘But it is not so.’

‘No?’

‘No. There are different… sects, shall we say. Different tribes. Shall we say different tribes?’

‘We can say tribes.’

He leaned back again. ‘My subordinate will take a statement,’ he said, shifting his weight in the chair, and groaning slightly, either with the effort of moving himself or else with the world-weariness of having to go through these formalities. Then he said, ‘Colonel Frenkel is presently under investigation.’

‘He’s a colonel? I had no idea he was so elevated.’

‘Between you and me,’ said the senior KGB officer, ‘and in confidence as one old soldier to another, he is not — universally liked.’

‘You astonish me,’ I said.

‘I have seen the report on your war service, and I have seen the report on Colonel Frenkel’s war service, and frankly yours is more glorious.’

‘Yet he is a colonel in the KGB, and I am an out-of-work translator in a hospital bed in Kiev.’

‘You were never going to get on in the world, once you’d decided to work as a translator,’ croaked the senior KGB officer. ‘Who can trust translators? Living in two languages? How can speaking like an American not corrupt the soul a little?’

‘There may well be something in that,’ I conceded.

‘As one old soldier to another,’ said the fellow again, wearily. ‘Colonel Frenkel had been put in charge of a section, tasked with a certain highly secret long-term mission, by Chernenko himself. It is sometimes the case that, with the death of a general secretary, the missions inaugurated by that general secretary possess enough inertial velocity to…’ But he seemed to lose his thread. He peered at the bright window, and then he yawned.

Everyone, it occurred to me, seemed very tired. I, of course, felt tired myself.

‘Did this project have to do with UFOs?’ I asked.

‘It is secret business,’ said the senior KGB officer. ‘But as one old soldier to another? Chernenko certainly believed in aliens from space, like a credulous boy. This is, in fact, a matter of public record. Other general secretaries have shared this belief. A great quantity of military, and KGB, resource has been wasted chasing UFOs around the Soviet Union. Wasted.’

‘You do not believe in UFOs?’

‘Of course not. And neither do you. I require that you give a statement to that effect. Write this: James Coyne, the American, was murdered by people — do not say government agents, say counter-revolutionaries — in a crude attempt to make it appear he had been kidnapped by space aliens. Say that.’

‘And we are certain,’ I said mildly, ‘that he was?’

‘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 from 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?’

‘He is my friend,’ snapped Saltykov in the least friendly voice imaginable.

‘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.’

‘You told her to consider herself a hunchback?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Saltykov.

‘Did this not strike you as, perhaps, an insulting thing to say to a woman?’

He puffed and chewed his lower lip at this, and then said, ‘I was not attempting to be insulting. It is a well known story. The hunchback was in danger and he claimed sanctuary inside the cathedral in Paris. That was the point of the analogy. Do you think Dora Norman would be likely to take offence?’

‘Take offence at being compared to the hunchback of Notre Dame? Surely no woman could take offence at that.’

‘Exactly!’ But then his face became stern. ‘Unless you are being sarcastic? Perhaps you are being sarcastic. You must remember, please, that my syndrome makes it difficult for me to understand nuances such as irony and sarcasm. At any rate, she refused to return to Moscow. Specifically she refused to return to Moscow alone. To be more specific still, she refused to return to Moscow without you.’

My old heart sang like it was young again. ‘She said so?’

‘Indeed. I told her she was foolish. But she didn’t listen to me.’

Driving through the streets of the city might, for the buoyancy of my heart, have been flying through the sun-rubbed blue of the sky. I was grinning, my mouth stretched as wide as my pinched and scarred flesh permitted. I do not doubt I looked perfectly idiotic. I may even have looked like a death’s head. But I didn’t care.

After a while Saltykov spoke. ‘I did not mean to compare her physique to the physique of the hunchback of Notre Dame.’

‘I’m sure she understood that.’

‘The comparison was in point of the principle of sanctuary. I was not intending to imply she had a hunchy back.’

‘Of course not.’

‘In point of fact,’ he went on. ‘She does not have a hunchy back.’

‘That’s right.’

He indicated, slowed, turned right, and pulled away again. ‘In point of fact her excess weight is mostly on her front.’

‘You must stop talking now.’

‘One might say hunchstomach,’ said Saltykov. ‘Or—’

‘No,’ I stopped him. ‘One might not.’

The hotel was a little way from the centre of town: part of a terrace of a 1960s development, a tall narrow building squeezed between an office block and a clothes shop. Tram wires ran like giant clothes’ lines suspended along the middle of the road in front of it. The parade overlooked a dingy little park, dotted with bushes and containing a pond, a cadre of doleful ducks, a bandstand that I feel sure had never seen an actual band, and a concrete structure containing public conveniences that possessed somewhat the proportions of a large tool box. Saltykov parked on the road and, pointedly, neither helped me out of the cab nor aided my awkward progress over the pavement and inside the hotel.

At my re-encounter with Dora Norman, I felt, as the English poet said, [as if some new planet swam into my ken]. What I mean is that I felt a sense of renewed possibility. I have, since that day, often pondered those words. A new planet swims into your [ken], an English word for knowledge. Does this mean you are an imperialist, set upon dropping interplanetary troopers onto the surface, enslaving the indigenous inhabitants, colonising them? Or is the planet unoccupied, filled with verdancy, enforested, with bejewelled birds flying from bough to bough? Is it crying out for occupancy? Another English poet once called the object of his affections: ‘My America, my newfoundland’. How could I not think of that, that had spent so much of my life reading poetry in English, and who found myself — at my age! with my ruined face and bashed-up brain! — in love with a woman young enough to be my daughter?

Dora put her arms around me when I saw her again. She was weeping, but with happiness. ‘[At first I thought you were dead — when Mr Saltykov returned…]’

‘[Certainly not dead, my dear Dora,]’ I said.

I sat down on the settee in the main room of the hotel suite, panting with the effort of the journey, and Dora made me some bitter-tasting tea — nectar, I declared it. Saltykov had the grace to leave us together. Syndrome or not, he empathised enough to see that we needed a little privacy.

‘[When Mr Saltykov returned, he had such a doleful face…]’

‘[His syndrome disposes him to dolour, I think.]’

‘[I believe he thought you dead. There was an explosion?’]

‘[There was.]’

‘[It hasn’t been in the news.]’

‘[It is not surprising that the authorities have… is the English expression shushed it up?]’

‘[Hushed it up, yes. So Mr Saltykov drove away from the reactor, and came back to me. He’s been very good. He arranged this hotel room — I couldn’t stay where I was, before. There were cockroaches.]’

‘[This is to be preferred,]’ I agreed.

‘[It was, of course, hard to understand what Mr Saltykov was saying,]’ she said. [‘He found an English-Russian dictionary in an old bookshop in Kiev. Actually he found an English-Portuguese dictionary, and a Spanish-Russian dictionary, and the two of us sat for a long time looking up words and pointing at them. Communication was not very clear.]’

‘[Ah,]’ I said, trying to picture the scene.

‘[There was some confusion. He wanted to tell me that he thought you were dead, but at first I thought he was saying that you were destined for greatness. Then he said I would never see you again, and I thought he was saying that you have proposed marriage in my absence. I understood eventually. It’s so good to see you alive again!]’

‘[It is good to be alive again,]’ I said. Then I added, ‘[Better still to see you.]’ Had I been standing, or capable of getting to my feet quickly, I would have bowed.

‘[He checked the hospitals anyway. And he sat for hours in the lobby of the police station. Eventually they informed him you were still alive. How overjoyed I was! And here you are!]’

We embraced.

We settled into a sort of routine, the three of us occupying that two-room suite. Dora and Saltykov slept in the separate rooms they had been previously occupying; I slept on the settee in the front room. We agreed to make our way back to Moscow as soon as I was fit enough for the journey. And we agreed also on the need to keep Dora out of the way until she could be delivered to the American embassy in Moscow. I impressed upon them both the malignity and implacability of Frenkel. ‘[He wishes to kill you,]’ I told Dora.

‘[It makes me shudder to think of it,]’ she said. There was something simply delightful in the way a quiver might pass across the amplitude of her flesh. I said as much to her, and she blushed again.

‘But why does he wish such harm to Ms Norman?’ Saltykov pressed.

‘He wishes to kill her for the same reason he killed Dr Coyne,’ I replied. ‘I am sure of it. Although I am not sure, exactly, why he needed to kill Dr Coyne.’

I told them everything that Trofim had told me in the reactor room at Chernobyl; but it did nothing, precisely, to clear up the mystery.

Every day, Saltykov accompanied me as I undertook a ponderous, awkward walk in the park opposite the hotel. Every evening we ate together, and I translated between my beautiful Dora and my friend. We were waiting, simply enough, for me to become well enough to withstand the lengthy car journey back to Moscow; that is all. But some of the happiest moments in any life are moments of waiting. It has taken me a long life, and old age, to understand this important truth, and to slough off my youthful impatience.

‘A week. No more,’ I said. ‘Then we can journey back.’

Three days passed in this manner. I told Dora of the strange encounter with Frenkel in the hospital, late at night. ‘[Perhaps I only dreamt it,]’ I said. ‘[But it was a curious and vivid dream in that case.]’

‘[Ugh! You scare me.]’

‘[It is my intention. I love watching the shiver run through your flesh. It is a very sensual thing.]’

This had become a piece of common banter between us, and usually she laughed at it. But on this occasion she burst, suddenly, into tears. This wrongfooted me rather. ‘[My dear Ms Norman! Please do not cry.]’

‘[I’m sorry! So sorry!]’

‘[You have nothing to be sorry for, my dear Ms Norman!]’

‘[It was when you said flesh.]’

‘[I apologise! I am a monstrous and cruel man!]’

‘[No! No! I know I have too much flesh — that’s all.]’

‘[All the better!]’

‘[It cannot be better — I’m ashamed of being so fat…]’

‘[There’s no shame,]’ I said severely. ‘[Since your flesh is beautiful, the amplitude of your flesh magnifies that beauty. Shame? Shame is not welcome here. Shame is how you feel in front of other people, that is the definition of shame. But there are no other people here, only me, and I am a part of you now. You cannot be ashamed of yourself, by yourself.]’

On another occasion she said, ‘[You were married before. I bet she was thin.]’

‘[I was married in the 1940s. Everybody was thin. People starved to death — that’s how thin they were. When you have watched that you never again find thinness to be a beautiful thing. This strange modern aberration that praises thinness — it’s a function of an anomalous, global glut of food. Now, at this end of this terrible century, we find ourselves with more food than we can eat. But the human condition, taken as a whole, has not been plenty, but dearth. And it will be dearth again. Yours is the default position of beauty, my dear Ms Norman.]’ Perhaps I was not quite so eloquent as I have here recalled, but this was the gist of what I said.

‘[You are a sweet and lovely man,]’ she said.

‘[I don’t know about that. I am, I would say, a ruined man,]’ I noted.

‘[You mean money?]’

‘[I mean physically.]’ I gestured at my scarred face; at the still livid, scorched-looking marks on my temple; at the bristly cropped hair. ‘[I am old, and disfigured. I know you cannot love me, you, young and lovely as you are. But it is enough for me to have seen you again. It is enough for me that you are alive.]’

She looked at me for a long time. Then she laid a hand — one of her tiny, delicate hands — on my cheek. ‘[But you have a beautiful soul,]’ she said, simply.

Later she and Saltykov examined the back of my neck: she moved the back of my collar down, so that he did not have to touch me, and he peered. ‘There is a lump,’ Saltykov told me. ‘A redness and a lump. Something under the skin.’

‘A boil,’ I said.

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps your dream was not a dream?’

‘You think Frenkel crept into my hospital room in the middle of the night, injected me with this, and then crept away again without killing me? It doesn’t seem very likely to me.’

The two of them pondered that.

‘You could cut it out,’ I said, to Saltykov.

‘What!’

‘’Get a knife and cut it open… to see if there’s anything inside.’

‘Not I,’ said Saltykov, very emphatically.

I pondered making the same proposal to Dora, but thought better of it.

‘Come,’ said Saltykov. ‘Time for your constitutional.’

‘I would prefer to sit here.’

‘[Come along,]’ said Dora, tipping the perfect sphere of her body forward in the settee just enough to kiss me on the end of my scarred nose. ‘[You need your exercise.]’

‘[Very well],’ I replied. ‘[But I shall expect you to wait upon me like a geisha when I return, as a reward for my efforts.]’

She laughed, and rolled backwards, settling into her seat again.

Saltykov and I went down in the lift and exited the hotel. We waited for an especially shuddery and noisy tram to pass by and, crossing the road, made our way unrapidly into the park. Above us, barely visible flying saucers darted from the cover of one cloud to another. All the onion domes of all the towers of the Kremlin had detached themselves and flown straight up, and now they were flying in V-formation in the very high blue sky. Then, with an effort that brought a sweat to my skin, I walked a hundred yards, with Saltykov walking beside me. ‘It would be easier for me,’ I said, ‘if I could lean upon your arm.’

‘Perhaps you have forgotten,’ he said. ‘I suffer from a syndrome, one symptom of which is—’

‘Syndrome, syndrome, syndrome. Do you know the English name for your syndrome? [Fuckwittery].’

‘Really? I have come across American studies of my syndrome, and have never yet heard it so described.’

‘You live and learn,’ I said.

‘Is [Fuckwitter] perhaps the name of a doctor who…’

‘I have to sit upon this bench,’ I said, lowering myself into the wooden slats.

‘I shall sit beside you,’ said Saltykov, primly. He sat at the other end of the bench, ensuring of course that there were several feet of wood between us. It would not do for him to come into contact of any kind with another man.

For a while we simply sat, and the sweat cooled on my face. The chill of early spring was in the air. It being a weekday, the park was more or less deserted.

‘I do not comprehend love,’ said Saltykov, out of the blue. I understood this to be his oblique way of making reference to the situation between Dora and myself.

‘No?’

‘People talk about it as a wonderful thing. An exciting and pleasurable thing. Certainly I can see that it is, in terms of the successful transmission of genes, an immensely useful thing. But to elevate love to transcendental, cosmic and godly proportions, as people do? Is this not a little self-regarding? As if because I enjoy eating beefsteaks, and because beefsteaks serve the useful purpose of keeping me alive, I therefore declared that the universe is beefsteak, God a beefsteak and beefsteak the universal core value of everything?

‘Your words produce in me,’ I replied, ‘an enormous desire to piss.’

‘Are you referring to an actual desire, or a metaphorical one?’ he replied, blandly.

‘An actual one.’

‘In that case the public toilets are over there.’

‘Shall you come with me, to assist me?’

‘The nature of my syndrome, as far as any intimacy at all with another man is concerned,’ he began, but I cut him off with the groans I made as I levered myself upright from the bench.

‘I appreciate,’ I said stiffly, ‘your courteous attempt to raise the subject of the state of emotional affairs between Dora Norman and myself.’ He blinked at me. ‘It is more than beefsteak,’ I added, ‘to my soul.’

‘Good,’ he said. Just that.

I walked slowly into the toilets, and stood at a bra-cup-shaped urinal, and relieved myself. Then I walked, slowly, back through the park. As I approached the bench I could see that another man had sat down upon it, next to Saltykov. But it was not until I had actually sat myself down that I saw that this new person was Frenkel.

‘Sit down, Konsty,’ he said, patting the wooden slats beside him. I would have preferred to remain standing, and would have liked to have been able to say, ‘I prefer to stand’; but it so happened that my clapped-out legs would in no way support my weight. I lowered myself onto the seat.

‘Jan,’ I said, recovering my breath. ‘It is surprising to see you again.’

‘Surprising?’

‘Saltykov?’ I said, speaking across Frenkel’s lap. ‘Allow me to introduce Jan Frenkel, formerly of the KGB.’

Saltykov was looking away to the left, disdainfully.

‘I have already introduced myself to Comrade Saltykov,’ said Frenkel. ‘I’m afraid he has taken a dislike to me. He is sulking.’

‘He suffers from a syndrome,’ I said.

‘But why,’ Frenkel went on, ‘do you refer to me as formerly of the KGB?’

‘I met a senior officer in hospital,’ I replied, ‘who gave me to believe…’

‘Oh, I’m under internal investigation,’ said Frenkel, airily. ‘They’ve taken away my gun. But that doesn’t stop me being a member of the KGB. The KGB is not a club that people enter and leave at will.’

‘I understand that you are now a colonel,’ I said. ‘Congratulations on your elevation.’

‘Thank you!’

Saltykov was glowering with supreme intensity at some sparrows away to the left, as if they were somehow responsible for the career-advancement of so wicked a man as Frenkel.

‘Did your promotion have anything to do with UFOs?’

‘Ah,’ said Frenkel.

‘UFOs are good,’ I said, ‘at imparting elevation to individuals, after all. Lifting them up. One way or another.’

‘UFOs,’ said Frenkel. ‘Do you know how many departments in the KGB are dedicated to UFOs?’

‘I am of course prepared to guess.’

‘Or I could just tell you,’ he said, crossly. ‘Seven research institutes and eleven departments. All of them are attached to a secret wing of the KGB created specifically for this purpose. So. Why do you think the KGB is prepared to expend such resources on UFOs?’

‘Is there a word for an acronym that has, specifically, three letters?’ I asked, because the thought had just then struck me, and because it made me curious. ‘Acronyms such as UFO and KGB. Tricronyms, perhaps?’ But that didn’t sound very convincing. ‘What do you think, Saltykov?’ But my friend was still sulking.

Frenkel glowered at me. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I preferred you before the lobotomy.’

‘I was more anxious then, I think,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘And more, as they say in America, [stressed-out]. More sarcastic, for that reason. But on the other hand, I had a better sense of future possibilities. I tried playing chess,’ I added, ‘with the nursing staff in the hospital, after my accident; but I can’t plan my moves. I have lost the ability to play chess. And my memory is very erratic.’

‘I really could not be less interested in your condition,’ said Frenkel. ‘You have lost focus, my old friend.’ He shook his head. ‘You were always an ironist — but now? What are you now? A blatherer! I preferred the caustic old Skvorecky, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘I don’t mind hearing it,’ I said.

‘And how’s your memory?’

‘It has holes.’

‘Do you remember this? Stalin personally commissioned us to write a coherent and plausible story of alien invasion, and then — surely you’ll remember this — not long after, Stalin personally ordered us to quit the undertaking. Your memory isn’t so malfunctional as to forget that, is it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not to forget that.’

‘Kiev,’ he said looking around. ‘It always was a shithole. I was here in the war, you know? It was a shithole then, and it’s a shithole now.’

‘It was certainly full of holes, in the war,’ I said. ‘And, to be fair to it, it has far fewer holes now.’

‘Shitheap, then,’ he said. ‘Eh Saltykov?’

And the conversation stalled for a while.

‘After the war,’ said Frenkel, in an expansive tone of voice, as if beginning a lecture, ‘an official Soviet archeological expedition was digging in Kiev. There was a lot of rebuilding, so there was plenty of opportunity. This was a site on Reitarskaya Street — it’s been kept completely secret, of course. It was a tomb, a vault, twenty feet below the ground. Inside was a massive chest. Inside the chest were five hundred books. Books in Russian, but also in Greek, in Arabic, even in fucking Sanskrit. The MVD arrived in a matter of hours, bunged everything into three covered trucks, and carried it all away to Moscow.’

‘Intriguing,’ I said, ‘if not wholly plausible.’

‘It’s real,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen these artefacts. I have held the books in my hand.’

‘Really?’

‘Books filled with drawings, technical plans, instructions. Orbital stations. Docking equipment for spaceships.’

‘If the KGB owns the groundplans for spaceships and space-stations, then am I to assume that the Soviet Union has been secretly constructing advanced spacecraft?’

‘No. It was not about building our own spaceships. It was about preparing the machinery necessary to receive their spaceships.’

‘Like getting instructions from Hitler to build garages in Moscow so he can park his tanks?’

‘Not like that! Do you know what else was there? A handwritten manuscript. Slovo o polku Igoreve, Prince Igor’s adventures. The Prince Igor! Written by Pyotr Borislavovich — the famous Pyotr Borislavovich. They’ve been here for thousands of years.’

‘And yet they are still to arrive.’

‘That’s it!’ he sounded, excited. ‘That’s exactly right!’

‘Back in Moscow, when I sent you up to that safe apartment with Trofim. You were supposed to call her, Dora Norman, and get her to meet with me, remember?’

‘I remember the chute,’ I said, darkly. ‘And I remember you putting a pistol into my mouth.’

‘Oh that was just to, you know. What do the French say? Pour encourager les — les—,’

‘Aliens?’

‘Exactly. We’re old friends, you and I. I went to a good deal of effort to bring you onside. To help you believe. You could have done some good. You see, I was foolish enough to trust our friendship. We’d been friends before, hadn’t we? When we met Stalin? I didn’t see why we wouldn’t be friends still. You would have helped me because of our friendship. But you’re not very good at friendship. Too much the ironist.’

‘Irony is a jealous mistress,’ I said.

‘But,’ Frenkel went on, adopting an incongruously oleaginous voice, ‘I still think of myself as your friend, Konsty,’

‘Is that why you sent the red-haired fellow to smother me with a pillow in my hospital bed?’

‘I wonder if you’ll be able to understand why I would do such a thing?’ he mused.

‘Wonder away.’

‘Besides he was unsuccessful — wasn’t he? You’re still alive — aren’t you?’

‘Not for want of trying.’

‘The important point is,’ said Frenkel, locking his fingers together, and pushing his palms out, producing thereby a Geiger-counter crackle of pops and snaps in his joints. ‘You don’t believe in UFOs?’

This question, calmly posed, seemed to me to distil the entire hectic week into a quiet intensity. It was, it occurred to me, it. I did not rush an answer. I opened my mind to my thoughts, as a person flips through a well-read novel. What evidence was there? None. ‘Let us say, no,’ I said.

‘Would you say that you can prove there are no UFOs?’

‘The burden of proof is not mine,’ I noted. ‘It is on the people claiming the extraordinary.’

‘But who is to say which state of affairs — aliens, no aliens — is extraordinary? At any rate, you accept that you cannot prove that aliens do not exist.’

‘It’s a big cosmos.’

‘Exactly! Let us say, then, that I cannot prove to you that aliens exist. Even though I believe it with a perfect certainty. And you cannot prove to me they do not exist.’

‘We should, then, go on the balance of probabilities. My belief is more probable than yours.’

‘I disagree.’

‘We can agree to disagree. I think we both know what is going on.’

‘And what is that?’ Frenkel asked.

The words came smoothly, and easily, although I am not sure I had arranged all the elements in the picture until that moment. But as I said it, there, it all cohered. It was my brain’s new-found ability to understand the picture. It was my new brain.

This is what I said to him. ‘The world is changing,’ I said. ‘Gorbachev is dismantling the Soviet Union. You, and people like you — people with authority, people hidden and secret — do not want it to happen. You are engaged upon an illegal and covert operation to destabilise perestroika, and unseat Gorbachev; to create — no, wait: to recreate — the crisis days of the Great Patriotic War. Because the USSR is losing the Cold War, you have decided that America will not function as the enemy. But because you, like all old and stubborn Communists, revere Stalin, you have decided to resurrect the old man’s plan. And so you have spent years building the narrative of alien invasion, and adding heft to it by scattering clues, props, assertion and even creative denial to fix the belief in people’s minds. It’s nonsense, but it is surprising how much nonsense people will believe. Particularly in worrying times.’

‘Go on,’ said Frenkel.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe the American, Coyne, was part of a secret team assembled to blow up the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. That is the main event: that’s what you’re really doing. You blow up Chernobyl — and then go public with the story. Aliens! War! Special measures — roll back glasnost, remilitarise the nation, the Soviet Union steps to the vanguard! It leads the world against the new threat. And of course, you have all the evidence, all the props and trimmings, kept, you say, in a secret warehouse in Moscow since being dug out of the ground in Kiev after the war.’

‘You tell a compelling story,’ said Frenkel. ‘I always admired your storytelling powers.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Except that this story is not science fiction. It is a murder story. Trofim said as much, inside the reactor. These people would be laying down their lives, by the million, for the greater good. The survival of Communism.’

Frenkel seemed to be considering this. ‘But Trofim believed, literally, in the aliens. Didn’t he?’

‘That you were able to persuade Trofim of this absurd story,’ I said, ‘does not surprise me. He was hardly the most nimble-witted individual I have ever met.’

‘And Nik?’

‘Nik?’

‘The gentleman I sent to your hospital to kill you.’

‘Ah — Comrade Red-hair.’

‘Did it seem to you that he believed?’ Frenkel asked.

‘In the aliens.’ I recalled. ‘I suppose so. But, Jan, so what? Naturally you need a story capable of being believed by many people. That is necessary. Naturally you have worked to convince your underlings that it is the truth. It is after the manner of a cult,’ I said. ‘Look at Trofim: he believed the aliens were attacking Chernobyl, even though he was himself planting the bomb!’

‘Or perhaps he believed that he himself planting the bomb was the method by which the aliens were attacking Chernobyl?’

I thought about this for a while. It was a curiously resonant, and oddly disconcerting, observation. ‘Wouldn’t aliens be more likely to use laser cannons, or photon torpedoes?’

‘And wouldn’t Hitler be more likely to fire V2 rockets and atom bombs at Soviet troops? Yet I once fought a Nazi in a farmyard, and he was armed with a shovel.’

‘Hardly the same situation.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Jan, you were planning to tell the world that aliens had blown up Chernobyl. I was a witness that Trofim was the agent of destruction, not space visitors. Thus I had to be eliminated.’

‘That wasn’t the reason.’ He grimaced, with glee, or pain, it was hard to say. ‘And besides you are getting things the wrong way around. You think we concocted a story of aliens in order to shore up Communism. I have seen what the USSR was capable of under a strong Communist leadership. So have you. And now we need only look to Afghanistan to see what it is capable of under a weak, reformist, crypto-capitalist leadership. I know which system is better geared to protecting humanity. I do not wish to invent space aliens in order to shore up Communism. I wish to shore up Communism because it is the best defence against alien invasion.’

‘By shore up Communism you mean things like… murder Americans.’

‘Coyne?’ Frenkel seemed actually shocked. ‘I didn’t murder him.’

‘But of course you want to pretend that the aliens murdered him.’

His eyes were wide open in his solid, Slav face. ‘Konsty,’ he said. ‘You were there when Coyne was murdered.’

‘He was hooked up in a poacher’s snare, by somebody leaning out of a window, hoisted twenty feet above ground, and then dropped down to break his back.’

‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘Lifted up, how?’

‘By a rope.’

‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘You remember there being a rope?’

‘I do.’

‘But I have read the police reports. No rope was discovered at the scene.’

‘I saw the rope,’ I said.

‘The Militia officers did not.’

‘I was there.’

‘And yet there is no material evidence.’

‘I suppose the rope was removed from the scene by the murderers.’

‘And how, exactly, did they do this? It was tied around his ankle, no? So did you see somebody come down and untie it?’

‘No,’ I conceded.

‘And yet you stayed by the body until the Militia arrived?’

‘They arrested me immediately.’

‘So, there was no rope. And yet you remember seeing a rope. Now: if the physical evidence contradicts witness testimony, wouldn’t you be inclined to mistrust the witness? People sometimes see things that aren’t there, after all. They may not be lying; they may be genuinely mistaken. Genuinely hallucinating.’ He smiled broadly at me.

‘I saw the rope,’ I repeated.

‘Your disbelief is stubborn,’ said Frenkel. ‘Disbelief can be like belief in that respect.’

‘Let’s talk about the UFO phenomenon,’ he said.

‘I am enjoying this talk,’ I replied. ‘It is diverting and stimulating.’

‘But permit me to ask a question,’ he said. ‘You do not believe in the material reality of UFOs, or aliens, or abductions, or any of that?’

‘No.’

‘And yet you cannot deny that many people do believe in those things.’

‘Of course.’

‘So you deny the reality of UFOs, but you do not deny the reality of UFOs as a cultural or social phenomenon?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well then. Let us say three million people in the USSR, and three million in the USA, not only believe in UFOs, but claim to have experienced them directly. To have seen them. To have been abducted by them — to have had procedures enacted upon their bodies, semen extracted from their genitals, memories wiped from their minds.’

‘Is it so many?’

‘At a conservative estimate.’

‘It is a large number.’

‘Some of these people,’ said Frenkel, ‘are perhaps lying. Perhaps they are malicious, or bored, or perhaps they are seeking attention and fame and the like. So they tell these stories of alien abduction, even though they know them to be false.’

‘Eminently plausible.’

‘But surely you cannot believe that all six million people who report UFOs are like this? Six million wicked liars? Impossible!’

‘Not all of them, by any means.’

‘Perhaps only a small proportion of them are deliberately lying?’

‘The remainder,’ I said, ‘are simply mistaken.’

‘Mistaken? Nearly six million people — mistaken?’

‘Indeed. Hallucinating perhaps. Or interpreting ordinary occurrences in an extraordinary way.’

‘Six million people hallucinating in unison?’

‘It sounds a little improbable,’ I said. ‘But it is the only explanation that fits the facts.’

‘May we not apply your earlier test of probabilities, in lieu of proof?’

‘But that’s it,’ I said. ‘There are only two explanations for this widespread reportage of alien abduction. So let us test the respective probabilities of the two. Somebody claims to have been abducted by a UFO. Let us discard the possibility that he is deliberately lying, since, as you say, not all the six million can be liars. So what has happened? Either he has been literally abducted. Or else he has in some sense imagined the experience. A dream, a hallucination. Perhaps it was not an alien, but only a spectre from the subconscious mind. Which is more likely?’

‘There is a third possibility.’

‘That he is lying?’

‘No, we have agreed to discount that,’ said Frenkel. ‘So we have on the one hand, perhaps, an actual alien; and on the other perhaps a phantom from the subconscious mind. But there is a third possibility.’

‘Go on,’ I prompted.

‘You must listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are approaching the reality of the situation. What I will say may dissolve your unbelief quite away.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘But I am listening.’

‘You think of alien abduction as something that happens to certain individuals.’

‘Are you saying it does not?’

He shook his head. ‘No, no. It does happens to individuals, of course. But also it happens to a mass of people.’

‘Millions of them,’ I said.

‘If an individual imagines something that’s not there we say he hallucinates. But what happens when a whole people imagines something?’

‘Mass hallucination?’

‘You are being distressingly literal minded. I shall give you an example. What is Communism, but the dream of a whole people? If an individual dreams utopia, he is just a dreamer. But once an entire people dream it, it becomes reality.’

‘Communism seems to be a dream from which people are waking up,’ I observed.

This might have made him angry, but instead he seized upon it. ‘Exactly! Exactly. We have stopped collectively imagining Communism, and so it is decaying around us. You suggested that UFOs were either material objects in the universe, or else the abductee simply imagined it. I say that what we need is an act of collective imagination, an act as heroic and world-changing as the October Revolution. I say that we are on the cusp of alien invasion — a real one, not an imaginary one — and that the only thing that can save us is a world capable of collectively willing those aliens into our observation.’

‘Imaginative revolution,’ I said. ‘Naturally such rhetoric appeals to a creative writer. But what about an ordinary citizen? What do you think, Saltykov?’

‘He agrees with me,’ said Frenkel.

‘You’ve been silent a very long time, Saltykov,’ I said, loudly. ‘Don’t sulk! What is your opinion of all this blather?’

‘A little deaf, I think,’ whispered Frenkel. ‘In his right ear.’

His head was still turned away. I looked at the back of his neck; his lager-coloured hair; his narrow, pale cranium. ‘Old friend,’ I said, loudly, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘There’s nothing the matter with old Saltykov,’ boomed Frenkel, putting his arm around the man’s back and clapping his shoulder? ‘Eh? Eh?’ Saltykov’s body jiggled with the motion imparted to it by Frenkel’s jollity.

‘Oh!’ I said, as I understood. Saltykov permitting himself to be touched? By a man? Oh, of course.

I took a deep breath. Matters were more serious than I had realised.

The odd thing, as I contemplated the situation I was in, was how little fear I felt. This was odd because I could still remember what it felt like to experience fear, so much so that I was actually conscious of the gap between the former and the present state of mind. I was also aware of a deep penetration of sorrow, as if a heavy stone fell through an inner shaft in my soul, into my depths. It was a sad business. It is sad to lose a friend, and nothing that had happened in the explosion had robbed me of the capacity to experience the weight of that. Nevertheless there was very little acuteness of emotional attack in my cut-about brain.

‘I’m not the bad guy,’ Frenkel was saying, earnestly. ‘You mistake me. I’m the good guy. I’m the one trying to save humanity.’

‘By committing mass murder?’

‘On the contrary: mass redemption. There may be casualties, of course. But casualties are one of the best ways of bringing home to people — that which they do not yet realise, but which is the bald truth — that we are fighting a war.’

‘I’ve had enough of war,’ I said.

‘Nonsense! You’re a hero of the Great Patriotic War, a warrior of Communism. Come on, Konstantin,’ Frenkel boomed, getting to his feet and hauling me up. ‘You are staying in a hotel, here in Kiev. Take me to it! Show me some hospitality!’

I was unsteady on my feet, and staggered a little like a drunk. Saltykov, of course, remained sitting on the bench glowering at the sparrows.

Poor old Saltykov.

‘I thought you said,’ I put in, in as steady a voice as I could manage, ‘that your gun has been taken from you?’

‘Pending investigation,’ he confirmed. ‘But my muscles are still there — I have not lost my muscular strength.’

‘You always were a big Slav,’ I agreed.

‘And now, in your enfeebled state, you are frankly no match for me.’ I saw the glint of metal tucked into the sleeve of his coat. ‘Come! Take me to the hotel.’

‘We’ll need to get a tram,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a long way from here. Or we could get a taxi.’

‘Distance,’ said Frenkel, giving me another slap on the back to move me along. ‘In a sense it is a subjective quality, is it not? Distortions in the space-time continuum. For what you describe as a long way, reachable only by taxi, I would call just across the road.’ He pointed at the entrance to our hotel. ‘The very building from which I saw you and Saltykov come out not half an hour ago.’

Another push, and I stumbled a few more steps. ‘It’s really not a very nice hotel,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere nice for a drink? We can continue our conversation. I was enjoying our conversation.’

‘Come on,’ he said, giving me another shove. ‘I have something special for you. You can still serve the greater good.’

The road was not busy, which was fortunate since it took me a long time to shuffle across to the far side. I felt enormously decrepit. I felt this because it was true. And there I was, standing in front of the main entrance to the hotel, with Frenkel’s wrestler’s torso pressed up against my back. I could feel the sharp point of his knife against my kidney. ‘Straight through the lobby and into the lift,’ he said, into my ear.

‘The key.’ I said. ‘I’ll need to collect the key from the concierge.’

‘You really think I’m a fucking idiot,’ said Frenkel, not unkindly. ‘That I should fall for such a thing? You didn’t leave the key with the concierge. She’s still up there in the room. You can just knock on the door, and she’ll let you in.’

The lift door opened as soon as I pressed the button, and closed as soon as we were inside. I could smell Frenkel’s body odour, shrimpy and dense. That I could smell it suggested that it was a potent stench indeed. The blade he was holding against my back had poked through the cloth of my coat, and my shirt, and my vest, and was a sharp point of hurt on my skin. The upward motion of the lift in motion made my stomach quail.

At the top the lift door opened, and Frenkel shoved me out, and into the corridor. It was ten yards, at most, along the dingy thread-bare carpet to our door. I was trying to think on my feet, but my bashed old brain was not functioning well. ‘This isn’t the right floor,’ I said.

‘Yes it is. Go along and knock on the door,’ he told me.

I stepped towards the wrong door and lifted my fist, but Frenkel ‘a!-a!’ -ed me, and angled my body in the right direction.

I was carried inevitably towards the door.

‘I don’t understand why you want to kill her,’ I said. It was, to a degree, infuriating to me that I felt so little by way of fear. But I had a bone-deep sense of the intellectual and emotional wrongness of any harm coming to Dora.

‘What’s she to you?’ he snapped. ‘A foreigner. A stranger. You barely know her.’

‘I barely know Ms Norman,’ I conceded.

‘So you’ll be barely upset when I kill her.’

‘I know almost nothing about her,’ I said, slightly stiffly. ‘I have spent only a few days in her company. She is from a different nation, and a different generation, to me. I would have to say that the word that best describes the relationship between herself and myself would be engaged.’

‘Engaged?’

‘Yes.’

‘To be married?’

‘Certainly not engaged to be stabbed,’ I said.

‘Konsty!’ gasped Frenkel. But I saw at once that he was not gasping, but laughing. ‘You never cease to amaze me. You old goat!’

‘In the circumstances…’

‘In the circumstances it’s a great shame she has to die,’ he said. ‘Before she’s been able to enjoy the conjugal delight of your wheezy old body humping about on top of her!’

I flipped through the pages of my mental notepad, but there was almost nothing there. I had to do something. I couldn’t permit this man to murder the woman I loved. ‘Ivan,’ I said, ‘we’ve been through a lot together. You said you considered me a friend. I am asking you as a friend — do not kill her. I’ll help you do what you want to do. I’ll do anything you tell me. There’s no need for her to die.’

‘I tell you what,’ said Frenkel. ‘Do as I say, and I’ll not kill her. Engaged! You getting married again? And to an American! Hey — you could claim US citizenship! Assuming the authorities ever let you go there.’

‘That’s not why I’m doing it.’

‘No? Why, then?’

‘I love her.’

And Frenkel laughed like a barking seal. ‘Splendid! Splendid! Well, knock on the door, introduce me properly to your wife-to-be. ’

‘You promise not to kill her?’

‘I promise. On the understanding that you promise to do everything I tell you.’

‘It’s understood.’

‘Go on then.’

I knocked. Almost at once Dora opened the door. The light was behind her and her face was enshadowed, though I could see enough to see that was smiling. More, I could see that she was looking past me to the man behind expecting to see Saltykov. But there was no mistaking burly Frenkel for scrawny Saltykov. Her expression darkened.

With a hefty push Frenkel threw me into the room, straight past her. There wasn’t even time for me to reach out and touch her as I shot in. I tried to balance myself on my rickety legs, staggered several steps and began to fall, striking the back of the settee with my hip and collapsing over. Then I was on the ground, moaning with the pain, and struggling ineffectually to get up. Dora stepped back, her dainty feet moving with characteristic nimbleness to balance her large body. Frenkel came in. The blade flashed in his hand, and went into Dora’s side. It came out bloody, and then it went in again.

She did not cry out. She danced back another two steps, with her head cocked to the side and her face crumpled with pain, or surprise, or the combination of the two; and she rolled down onto the floor with a thud. Hungry knifeblade — to take the life first of Saltykov in the park, and yet not to be satiated! Straight away to take the life of gracious, beautiful Dora Norman in that hotel room! How strange it was that an old and feeble man, such as I, could be blown to pieces by a grenade and yet survive; where a young and vigorous woman, such as she, could be killed by a few inches of polished metal.

I cried out, ‘Dora!’

Frenkel was shutting the door to the room. ‘Get up,’ he said to me. ‘Get off the floor. This is no time for lounging about.’

It’s a mistake to talk about being full of grief, as if grief were a tumour, or a full stomach, or some manner of swelling. Grief is an absence. It doesn’t push, it sucks. To make a metaphorical cut or slice in the sealed membrane of the grieving self is not to permit matter to gush out. On the contrary, it is to permit the unbearable world to come surging in. I had lain there and watched as Frenkel stuffed a knife blade into the pliant flesh of the woman I loved. ‘What have you done?’

He was hauling me to my feet, and shoving me over towards the window. ‘Sacrifices have to be made,’ he said. He still had the knifeblade in his right hand. There was blood.

‘You promised me you wouldn’t kill her,’ I observed, nearly falling over my own feet.

‘A KGB officer not keeping his promises? You amaze me.’

He shoved me.

‘I can’t believe it!’ I cried. ‘[Dora? My love?]’ Shove, and shove, and I was at the window. ‘[Dora, can you hear me?]’ I was calling. ‘Dora!’ I could see her, over Frenkel’s shoulder, a heap of flesh piled motionless on the floor.

‘She’s dead,’ said Frenkel. ‘Forget about her. Consider instead your own imminent extinction.’

I was pressed up against the glass now. The prospect of my own death did not bother me in the slightest. ‘You could have killed me at the hospital,’ I said.

He was holding the knife against my torso with his right hand and fiddling with the latch for the window with his left. ‘I rebuked Nik thoroughly for his failure, don’t worry.’

‘I don’t mean the red-haired man,’ I said, still trying to see past Frenkel to the body of my fiancée, humped upon the carpet like a small hill of flesh. ‘I mean when you visited me personally.’

‘I never visited you in hospital. What, you think I’m going to bring you a bundle of flowers?’

‘When you injected this thing in my neck.’ I wasn’t really concentrating on what I said. I was straining to look at Dora’s ample body, lying on the carpet. Not moving.

Frenkel had stopped fiddling with the latch. He was looking at me.

‘What did you say?’

‘You stuck me in the neck with this mosquito bite.’

‘I never did that,’ he said. He was speaking, all of a sudden, curiously slowly.

‘I remember it.’

‘You don’t remember,’ he insisted.

‘Again with your hypnotism nonsense? That tone of voice? I remember what I remember.’

He looked at me long and hard. Then he looked at the knife in his hand, turning the blade back and forth. ‘Believe me, I never came to your hospital. It was under Militia guard, you know. Nik failing in his bid to have you killed meant I’d missed my chance.’

‘You came,’ I told him, casting my mind back, ‘in the middle of the night, and you shone a torch in my face, and then you reached round and jabbed me in the neck.’

‘And how did I get past the guards?’

‘You told me you were invisible.’

‘I told you that!’ he said. It looked at though his face was about to crumple into anger, or perhaps even despair, but then, with that odd little knight’s move of the emotions that was characteristic of him, he suddenly burst out laughing. ‘I did tell you that! I told you I was invisible? Fuck, I was invisible!’

‘If you’d simply killed me there,’ I said, trying to access the full range of anguish I knew to be inside me, ‘then I wouldn’t have been able to lead you back to her now. I wish you’d done it then.’

Frenkel was looking at me in a very strange way. ‘It wasn’t the hospital, Konsty.’

‘But I remember you! You came in the middle of the night!’

‘Ah! Now couldn’t that have been a dream? Don’t you have dreams in the middle of the night, like everybody else?’

Of course it could have been a dream. ‘On the other hand,’ I said. ‘This lump is definitely in my neck. The mosquito definitely bit me. Even though the weather is much too cold for mosquitoes.’ Saying this brought the memory of Trofim’s huge bovine face swimming in front of me. I was back, momentarily, in the Moscow restaurant; back in the place where Frenkel had told me his whole peculiar abduction story. I blinked.

I blinked.

I was in a Kiev hotel room, and the woman I loved was lying dead upon the carpet, and the man who killed her was standing right in front of me. ‘You know what?’ he was saying. ‘It’s remarkable.’

‘What is this thing you’ve put in my neck, anyway?’

‘It’s very precious, old man. Miniature and powerful and made by no human hands.’

‘Still with this? Genuine alien technology? Give it up, Jan! You and I know better than that.’

‘I’m very struck that you remembered,’ he mused. ‘I suppose it’s the brain injury. Who knows what effect that would have?’

‘Mashed up,’ I said. ‘But I’m still capable of feeling grief.’ I wished that were true.

‘Konsty, you goat,’ he chortled. ‘I did jab you in the neck. I did it in a seedy little restaurant in Moscow, weeks ago. Weeks and weeks. Then I made you forget that I had done it. I made you forget, and you really had forgotten for good. And now here you are remembering! What I mean to say is: the memory has been jumbled up out of the ooze of your brain. You’ve relocated the experience in your memory. I was invisible to you when I jabbed you. So you’ve relocated the memory to the night-time, when people generally are invisible. And you’ve attached it to the hospital. It didn’t happen in the hospital.’

‘I remember that restaurant.’

‘Of course you do!’

‘Are you saying,’ I asked him, ‘that you hypnotised me? Are you a hypnotist?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Did you hypnotise Trofim into seeing aliens? Little green men?’

‘No, no. Hypnotism is no good for those sorts of special effects. What hypnotism is good for is encouraging you not to notice things that are there.’

‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ I said.

‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ he agreed. ‘No magical trance state in the brain, no. It is nothing. Shall I tell you what it is? It is wholly a question of suggestibility. I’ll tell you something else. It works best with people who are conditioned to respect authority and who are used to doing what authority figures tell them. The Soviet Union is full of such people. Most of this century has been an experiment in creating an entire population of such people. Ex-army are best of all. When somebody with a suitably authoritative manner tells you something, you tend to believe it. Even if what they are telling you is: I am invisible, you cannot see me, you will not remember this.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘Isn’t it, though? Still, you didn’t see me, and didn’t remember. Until that explosion knocked your brain about.’

‘Mesmerism, though?’

‘It’s a technical discipline — one mastered by the KGB.’

‘KGB mind control?’ I scoffed.

‘It’s not mind control,’ he said. ‘It’s alternate realities. It’s tuning the brain into an alternate timeline. It’s purely technical — there’s a generator, and it superimposes a slightly different quantum reality upon the…’ He put a finger out and rotated an imaginary telephone dial in the air in front of him. ‘Etcetera and etcetera,’ he concluded, airily.

‘How very plausible,’ I observed, craning my neck to see Dora’s body.

‘It’s of especial use for a secret policeman,’ he explained. ‘I say, “You can’t see me,” and you can’t see me. The important thing is in making sure you can’t see certain things. Things,’ he added, slipping the knife into his pocket, and readying his stance, prior to pushing me, ‘like aliens.’

‘You want people not to see the aliens?’

‘People not seeing the aliens is precisely the point!’ This seemed to animate him tremendously. ‘You need to understand. Getting people to see the aliens is everything we have been working towards! People are distressingly good at not seeing things. Have you never had the experience of looking for a pen, and searching your desk, and looking everywhere, and only at the end realising that the pen was right there in front of your face the whole time?’

‘The elephant in the room,’ I said.

‘Exactly — that’s it exactly. We are trying to get people to see the fucking elephant.’

‘Not pen?’

‘The elephant is a better analogy.’

‘It is a bigger analogy, I suppose.’

He ignored this. ‘If things go to plan — and you have been a fucking pain in the arse about that, by the way — but if they go to plan then people will suddenly see the elephant that’s been in front of them all along. Like now: you’re chatting with me, and in doing so you’re entirely failing to see the big thing here, your own death. It’s right outside the window, there — look — huge, and you can’t even see it.’ And the strange thing is that there was something outside the window: vast, metal, oval or spherical; it occupied the sky; it hung in air. It was so huge you couldn’t miss it. You could not not see it. But I looked again, and understood that it was too huge to be seen. I couldn’t see anything: just sky, and the Kiev skyline. As if it might be: hold a coin-sized circle of glass, with its shine and its scratches, at arm’s length and you’ll see it. And hold it in front of your eye and you’ll see it. But your cornea, shining and scratched and closer than anything else, you cannot see. For a moment I saw the machine in the sky, and then I could only see sky.

‘There’s nothing out there.’ I said, aloud. I didn’t say this for Frenkel’s benefit. I suppose it was for my benefit. I suppose it was to confirm that I had never seen the thing in the sky.

‘Out the window you go, old friend. You can take a closer look, as you go down.’

He stepped towards me, and his left hand clamped onto (because I was facing him) my right arm, and his right arm clamped on to my left arm. Behind me the window was unlatched. A quick shove and I would tumble against it, and it would swing open, and I would fall.

‘The elephant in the room,’ I said again.

‘That’s it.’

‘The elephant is — in the room.’

Dora was right behind him.

She was holding a book in her hand: a thousand-page hardback book with a gaudy-coloured cover illustration of tentacled aliens. ‘[Mr Frenkel,]’ she asked, in the politest tones, ‘[would you sign my copy of your novel?]’

Frenkel’s expression twitched at the sound of her voice. He craned round to look back over his shoulder, and tried to twist his torso to face her. His hand went towards the pocket in which he had cached his knife; but I saw what he was doing and my two hands went towards his hand. He was stronger than me, but I was strong enough, and motivated enough, to grab his wrist and yank his hand down below the level of his jacket. I did this to prevent him grasping his knife. He strained to lift it and get inside his jacket pocket.

‘[Oh my mistake!]’ said Dora, and now I could hear the strain in her voice. ‘[This novel is not by you. It is by Konstantin Skvorecky.]’

‘Wait,’ grunted Frenkel, still straining to pull out his knife. He was reaching with his right arm, being right handed. My right side had been weakened by my injury. But luckily I was facing him, so I was using my left hand to prevent him from bringing out his knife.

Dora swung the book in towards his face, blushing red with the effort. Her prodigious jowls quivered.

She swung the book so that its spine collided with Frenkel’s nose. His head snapped back, and a gasp stuttered from his mouth. I danced to the side as quickly as my old legs could manage, and levered him onwards, and Dora pushed forward with her considerable, her beautiful, her life-saving bulk. With me on his right side, and Dora on his left, and blood coming out of his nose, Frenkel found himself propelled forwards and out. His head struck the unlatched window with a boom. The panel swung open, and Frenkel toppled out, and Dora and I released him at exactly the same moment.

Down he went.

He fell straight down the height of four floors. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for instance, call out. He had tipped over onto his back, and we could see him looking up at us, but the expression on his face was not even especially surprised: although a small quantity of blood had come out of his nose and covered his upper lip, like a black-red paint-on Hitler moustache. Like Hitler, or like Charlie Chaplin. It was four floors down to what the Americans call the [sidewalk]. He landed with the sound of cowflop hitting the ground. The first portion of his body to connect with the ground was the back of his head, and then his spine, and hips, and then his arms and legs: each segment of his body followed rapidly one after the other. He did not bounce. He did not move after the impact. Not so much as a twitch.

I felt wobbly, and unwell, and exhausted; but I felt better than Dora evidently did. It was not an easy matter for a fellow as elderly and infirm as I was to assist a woman as weighty as she across the floor, but I did my best, and was able to help her stagger over to the couch. She half-sat and half-collapsed, and I knelt down beside her. ‘[There is some blood,]’ I told her, lifting her shirt and examining the mouth-shaped wound.

‘[It hurts!]’

‘[My poor love — I’m so sorry — my poor girl.]’

‘[It hurts, but I don’t think there’s any serious damage. Thank heavens I’m so fat!]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ I agreed, earnestly. ‘[It has saved your life.]’

‘[Oh!]’ she said. [‘Oh, it hurts! But if I’d been some rake-skinny girl…]’

‘[Then you would have died],’ I said. ‘[Frenkel knew what he was doing. He was aiming the knife at vital organs.]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ she said, in a fainter voice, ‘[that all my vital organs are wrapped in my protective layer!]’

‘[Didn’t he stab you twice?]’

‘[My arm.]’ She was holding her left arm stiffly, awkwardly. I had not noticed this before.

‘[Let me look.]’

‘[He got me in the side,]’ she said. ‘[I moved my arm to where he’d cut me, and then he cut me again.]’

Her arm was sopping and wet, and her hand bright red. There was blood, I saw, dipping downwards from her fingers’ ends onto the carpet. This wound looked much more serious. ‘[I will get help,]’ I said, creakily rising and going to the bed where the room’s phone was. In a moment I had called the reception desk, and within a minute two people were in the room with me. A first aid box was brought in. By the look of it, it dated from before the war.

‘Have you called an ambulance?’ I asked the concierge. ‘There’s also a man on the pavement outside. He fell from the window. He might need help.’

He looked from the window. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said.

I went with Dora to the hospital. In the ambulance they gave her something for the pain, and then told me to talk with her. Don’t let her go to sleep, they told me. So I talked with her. ‘[Where did you get the book?]’

‘[It’s yours.]’

‘[I know it’s mine. It’s the omnibus edition of Three Who Made a Star. It’s all three volumes in one. That’s why it is so big; a thousand pages, more or less. But I have not seen a copy for half a century. I don’t even have a copy at my flat!]’

‘[Saltykov found it in an old bookshop, somewhere near the hotel. He bought it for me, as a present. He knew I would be interested, because it was by you.]’

There seemed to me something wrong with my burn-scarred face. I could feel a strange loosening behind the skin, near the eyes and the bridge of the nose.

‘[I got up, quietly, after he stabbed me. I lay there for a moment,]’ Dora was saying. ‘[Until I got my breath back, and then I got myself up. It stung to move. I looked around for something to hit him with. He was a dangerous man. But I couldn’t see anything — well, I thought about the lamp.]’

‘[The lamp?]’

‘[Only it was plugged in, and the plugs you have over here aren’t like proper American plugs, and I wasn’t sure I could unplug it easily. Then I saw the book. Your Three Who Made a Star. So I picked that up.]’

‘[Thank heavens I wrote such a fat book,]’ I said.

‘[A slim volume would hardly have been much of a weapon,]’ she agreed, grimacing; in pain, I thought at first; but, no: because she was laughing.

‘[We can be grateful,]’ I told her, kissing her good hand, ‘[that science fiction novels are so fat.]’

‘[We may be grateful in a general sense for fatness,]’ she agreed.

The ambulance brought us to the hospital — a different building, and indeed a different site, to the place in which I had convalesced. Two rows of cherry trees displayed their ridiculous pink and white blossom in enormous profusion. They wheeled her through the main door. They gave her a painkiller. I sat with her in the emergency room. I held her good hand as they cut off her shirt and bandaged up her wounds. ‘The wound to the stomach is superficial,’ the doctor said. ‘The wound to the arm is a little more serious, but not life-threatening. The tip of the blade has scratched the tibia. I’m afraid it will be sore for some time. There will be bruising.’

I translated this for her. ‘[Black and blue!]’ she said in a mournful voice. ‘[I have always bruised like a peach.]’

‘[You are a peach,]’ I told her, as tears seeped from my ridiculous old-man eyes. ‘[You are my peach. You are my beautiful luscious American peach.] I love you,’ I added, in Russian.

‘[What’s that?]’

So I told her then how to say I love you in Russian. It involves putting together three English words: two colours and a human bone — as it might be, the colour of a fading bruise, and the colour of a fresh bruise, and a bone in the arm: just those three English words. Say them together, rolling from one to the other as you speak, and you will find that you are saying I love you in Russian. It was a delight for me to hear her say that Russian phrase, over and over. It was delightful.

Frenkel’s body could not be found, although — according to the Militia — there was blood on the pavement beneath the hotel window. I do not believe that Frenkel could simply have stood up and walked away after such a fall. I couldn’t help the Militia explain who might have moved his body, or why.

Saltykov’s body was recovered from the park. The Militia had no suspects; and since we were the only two people in the whole of Kiev who knew him, we were formally questioned. He had no dependants, it seemed; and no friends or partners. He was buried in a Kiev municipal graveyard.

We were warned by the Militia not to leave the city, since investigation into the death of Saltykov, and the assault upon Dora Norman, was still ongoing. We stayed in the hotel room, both of us slowly recovering our health. My grief for poor old Saltykov was strangely modulated by my joy that Dora was alive, even though I had thought her dead. Every night I laid my hands gently upon her enormous belly, her fluid hips, and gave thanks to her sheer bulk for saving her life.

We made our doddery way about the city; me actually old and she temporarily aged by her wounds, her arm in a sling. She expressed repeated astonishment at the beauty of the Ukrainian springtime. We took the tram along the lengthy, wide streets, where rows and rows of chestnut trees and cherry trees were in blossom. One day, when we were feeling a little more hearty, we went down to the beach, by the river. It was a bright day, and the space was filled with large Kiev women in polka-dotted swimming costumes, and blocky Kiev men in trunks. The men were sunbathing standing up, all of them putting their chests out towards the sun, and slowly turning like human heliotropes.

‘[Why are they all standing?]’ Dora asked me. ‘[Why don’t they just lie down?]’

‘[They are standing,]’ I told her, ‘[to show that even after a full day’s work of building Communism they are not tired.]’

We both of us healed from our respective wounds, although slowly.

What happened next was that the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl suffered a catastrophic malfunction. News was at first confused and contradictory. The explosion happened on 26 April. By the 27th there was no official confirmation — although the reactor is less than seventy miles from Kiev, and smoke was evident over the northern horizon. Rumours circulated through the city. Lights in the sky. Over the night of the 27th and the morning of the 28th trucks and buses containing the inhabitants of Pripyat, the nearby town, began rolling into Kiev. There was no official news for almost a week, but everybody in Kiev knew that something terrible had happened.

You, doubtless, remember that particular disaster.

I sat with Dora in a restaurant in the city one evening, the two of us as subdued and alarmed as any person in the city. ‘[Do you think Frenkel—]’ she asked.

‘[Dead,]’ I insisted.

‘[Or Frenkel’s people. His organisation. Do you think that they…?]’

‘[Trofim exploded a grenade inside the main reactor. Two months later the reactor explodes. Perhaps that is no coincidence. Perhaps there was damage to the pipes, or the structure, or something; and it took two months or so for the damage to lead to the malfunction.]’

‘[Or,]’ she said. ‘[Perhaps Frenkel’s people came back and finished the job. That driver you talked about — the red-headed one.]’

‘[Or perhaps,]’ I said, ‘[the radiation aliens blasted it from orbit,]’

We agreed that we must leave the city, for I feared the effects of radiation poisoning. Besides, we did not belong. I needed to get her back to Moscow. It was not difficult: the Militia, certainly, had more important things to occupy their time than attending to us. We took Saltykov’s cab, and drove out of the city together.

I filled the car with fuel and drove east. The main road to Russia went north to Chernilhiv, and then east along the River Desna; but I did not want to take my beautiful Dora closer to the source of radioactive contamination than absolutely necessary. I took small roads, and felt my way, as it were, through eastern Ukraine. The sky was filled with apocalyptic clouds. Even this far south the fir trees were tinted rust and red by the fallout.

Eventually we reached Russia. We were stopped at the border, something, of course, that had not happened to us on the way in to the Ukraine — but things were different now. There was considerable panic. I told the soldiers manning the border crossing that Dora was my wife, a naturally shy woman who preferred not to speak. They detained us for four hours, and finally they let us through on the understanding that we would give one of their number a lift to Moscow — a young lad who had to get back to the capital for some reason.

‘I was supposed to take the train,’ he said, getting into the front seat beside me, after stowing his kitbag in the boot of the car. ‘But none of the others wanted to drive me to the station. It’s like the whole Ukraine is a plague zone. Are you Ukrainian?’

‘I am a Muscovite.’

The young fellow swivelled in his seat and addressed himself to Dora. ‘Good day to you, madam.’

‘She doesn’t speak much,’ I told him.

‘Don’t be shy, madam! I’ll not alarm you, I promise! Cat got your tongue, has it?’

Dora looked at me, and then at the young fellow. ‘I love you,’ she told him.

He blushed, and faced front. ‘Why did she say that?’ he asked me, in a low voice.

‘She’s not all there in the head,’ I told the young soldier, as I drove off along the country road. ‘She takes sudden fancies to people. Especially to good-looking young men. Don’t encourage her, I’d advise. Just ignore her and she’ll cool down.’

‘Whatever you say, chief,’ said the soldier, fixing his eye on the passing landscape.

Dora remained perfectly silent for the remainder of the day.

It took us two days to drive to Moscow; too far for me to drive in Saltykov’s creaky old car in one journey. When we got to Bryansk we stopped. We ate a frugal supper together in a paint-peely restaurant, and then drove on to discover some lodgings for the night. The soldier had no money, and slept in the car. I certainly did not offer to pay for him to sleep in a room. That night, as Dora and I lay in the bed together, I said to her, ‘[I saw something strange, the day you were stabbed. When Frenkel was about to push me from the window.]’

‘[Strange?]’

‘[I saw it through the window. But it can’t have been real. And when I looked again, it wasn’t there.]’

‘[What did you see?]’

‘[In the sky, over the roofs opposite. The roofs on the far side of the park. A great metal craft. A great disc of dull silver, five hundred yards wide, with a vast central bulb, also silver, like the dome of a Kremlin minaret. Hanging there, above those roofs. But I looked again and it wasn’t there.]’

‘[There was nothing there.]’

‘[I thought for a moment it was like a building in the sky. Like one of those church domes you get in Russia, only not quite so gold, and separated from any building. Just in the sky. But I looked again and it wasn’t there.]’

‘[It wasn’t there,]’ she repeated.

She said this without emphasis, in a perfectly matter of fact way. And as soon as she said it I knew that it was true. The hallucination, or whatever it had been, receded — blissfully, blissfully. It was just a bad dream.

‘[It wasn’t there,]’ I agreed. ‘[It wasn’t there.]’

We woke early the next day, and had breakfast when it was still dark. Crunching over frosty grass to where the taxicab was parked. The insides of all the windows were cataracted over with condensation, and it took me five minutes to rub them clean with a rag. The soldier himself shifted position in his seat, but without waking up.

We drove off, Dora silent in the back of the cab; the soldier snoring softly; and made our way along a perfectly straight road between two fields of purple earth. The sun was above the horizon, making the bands of cloud gleam with mysterious illumination. The sky above was not marked with brushstrokes, but had been painted with a perfect gradation of colouration, as if by an artist skilled in the use of spray-guns. The colours were unearthly and very beautiful: pinks and pale amber, Caribbean blues and gunmetal greys, mauves, cyans, and the rectangle of black still fruiting with stars that filled the rear-view mirror.

We were making our way through south-west Russia, driving a lonely road, and the weather was strange. As we crawled over the surface of the earth, a great and tentacled cloud of radioactive material was spreading above our heads. Most of the contamination went north, and north-north-west, on the prevailing breezes, into Belarus, and beyond into non-Communist Europe — Germany, Sweden, England, Scotland. But a great radiative viewless squid-arm of poison reached north-east: massively raised levels of radioactive iodine and cesium and tellurium were measured as far away as Mahlyov and Kryshaw. The endlessly circulating and recirculating ocean of air above us seeped with invisible death, and we scurried away inside our metal beetle-case along vein-like roads making for Moscow. Moscow was hardly far enough away.

We drove and drove. Dora dozed on the back seat.

Very late in the afternoon, the sun came out. Clouds tucked themselves away, into the corners of the sky like a bedsheet, and the blue stretched itself taut. The sun’s face blazed upon us as if it were wholly innocent of the meaning of strontium-90.

The sun went behind us and dipped its face down to examine what was happening over the Ukraine. Everything went dark. It had gone into mourning, of course, for what had happened westward.

I drove on into the night, figuring I would keep going until I became too sleepy to drive safely. We were creeping along the road at forty miles an hour, ever closer towards Moscow.

Suddenly, having slept all day long, the soldier grunted, and twitched his head. ‘Stop a bit,’ he said. ‘Pull over. I need a piss.’ He swivelled in his seat again. ‘Begging your pardon, madam. Don’t mean to speak so rudely in the company of a lady.’

‘I love you,’ Dora told him.

I pulled the car onto the mud at the side of the road, and the soldier got out. He walked no more than three yards from the car and unzipped his fly. I remember thinking how vulgar it was. The sound of his stream hitting the mud was very audible and, in the cold of night, billows and gouts of steam rose from the ground where the urine landed. This smoke, lit by the taxi’s headlights, swirled about his legs. It looked like a stage effect. I remember turning to Dora, behind me on the back seat, to say something in English about the vulgarity of this behaviour, but as I—

It was dark. We were at the side of the road, but not the road we had been on before, because there were buildings around us. The sky was black behind us, but paling to the east, with that unique spread of gleam and opacity of the half hour or so before dawn. The soldier had gone. My stomach felt fizzy and uncomfortable.

I turned again to face Dora. ‘What happened?’

‘[What?]’

‘[What happened to us?]’ I said, speaking this time in English. How could I forget that she spoke English, and not Russian? ‘[We were in the countryside.]’

‘[We were.]’

‘[Where are we now?]’ I looked again. A bus thundered past, its lights on like a carnival. It was a Moscow bus. We were on the outskirts of Moscow.

‘[What happened to the soldier?]’ Dora asked.

He was nowhere to be seen. I got out of the taxicab and went round to the trunk. I opened it and peered inside. Another car swept past me, loud, and close enough to make the stationary taxi rock a little on its suspension. Inside was the kitbag.

I got back into the car. ‘[Dora,]’ I said. ‘[What happened?]’

‘[What do you mean?]’ she asked.

I sat at the wheel for a while, as the daylight strengthened and as buses and lorries and the occasional car juggernauted past us, making the shell of our taxi shudder as if sobbing. Rocking it from side to side on its spongy suspension.

Eventually Dora dozed again on the back seat, and I started the car and drove through the outer reaches of Moscow until I found a road I recognised, and followed it, and turned off, and made my way to the unfashionable block in which my own flat was to be found.

I’m almost at the end of this narrative now, and I have little to add. The important thing — the crucial thing — was to get Dora to safety. Once I accomplished that I had no cares for myself. I could hope that Frenkel was gone, and that I would be safe. But I think I had a premonition of my death: of the red-haired man standing and shooting his gun directly at my heart. If I’d though more about it, I might have reasoned that it would happen on the Moscow streets, that I would be tracked down (I would not be hard to find) and that Death would aim his gun and fire straight through my chest. The point is this: if only I could get Dora safe, I did not care. One of the advantages of a lobotomy, perhaps: the dissolution of timor mortis.

Dora and I were, first of all, both exhausted from the long journey, both still weak and convalescent from our respective injuries. We agreed to rest for a day, to recover from the journey, before I took her to her embassy. She lay down on the beige settee in my unsalubrious flat. I went round the corner, and queued for an hour to buy bread and a small pot of blood-coloured jam. Back at the flat I made coffee from grains in a tin box in my cupboard that were six months old and stale as dust.

We talked. Our options were: to marry in Russia and then try and get to America as a couple; or for Dora to go home as soon as possible, and then for me to apply for a visa to go visit her so that we could marry in America. After a long discussion we agreed that the latter option was preferable.

We watched the television news on my shoebox-sized black and white television. I translated for her. The news was still, of course, all about Chernobyl.

‘[The world is coming to an end,]’ I said.

‘[It’s a terrible business,]’ she agreed. ‘[But maybe some good can come out of it. Perhaps people will now be more safety-conscious where nuclear power is concerned.]’

I didn’t reply.

This is what was happening in my head. I was remembering. This is what I remembered. I remembered the engine dying as we were driving in the night. I remembered coasting to a halt, with the headlights spontaneously flashing a code to spies in the surroundings forests and then, alarmingly, going out altogether. None of the electrics in the motor worked. Our passenger shifted awkwardly in his seat, and kept repeating, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know.’ The car rolled more slowly and stopped. On either side forest towered, dark fat trunks going up and shaggy coniferous heads given a metallic sheen by the moonlight. We were quite alone. ‘What’s going on?’

I twisted and twisted at the key in the ignition, to no effect.

Then the moonlight swelled and climaxed, and every window in the taxi was blindingly bright. The light seemed to swirl, to focus into a great patch of even intenser brightness that swung from the left side of the car to the right. The soldier was gasping, and yelping like a little dog. ‘Stay in the car,’ I cried, but there was a rushing waterfalling sound all around and my words fell into it. I could see the young man panicking. I could see the hideous leer of fear distorting his face. He clutched at the door release and hauled it open, as I yelled ‘No! No!’ and tried to seize his arm. But the fool had opened his door, and then he was sucked out with ferocity and vehemence. I had his forearm, but his legs went straight up, and his torso stretched horizontal. His face snapped up towards me terrified, eyes like unshelled boiled eggs, and a weird grunting coming out of his mouth. Then my grip failed and he flew backwards with great speed, as if gravity were abruptly going sideways.

I saw behind the light: a great globe of silver, and great white-bright twisting ropes of light emanating from it. One of them had coiled itself around the soldier’s waist and was—’

‘[What?]’ said Dora.

I blinked at her. ‘[The journey here,]’ I said. ‘[I can’t believe I’d forgotten! Now I remember! I am remembering now. The soldier…]’

‘[We dropped him at his friend’s house,]’ she said.

The whole bright-lit fantasy sublimed away from my brain. None of the other stuff had happened, it was true. There had been no dead engine, or bright lights: we had simply pulled up at a tall shuttered house and the soldier had hopped out. ‘[I,]’ I said, momently disoriented. ‘[I don’t think…]’

‘[Oh I know,]’ she said. ‘[It was a house of ill repute.]’ She laughed. ‘[I’m not so innocent as all that!]

It was true. We had pulled up. He had leapt out. He had evidently forgotten all about his kitbag, because he had had other, carnal things on his mind. There was no question of us waiting around for him. ‘I can make my own way to Moscow from here,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I shall see you, comrades. I shall see you.’

And I had driven on. Shortly, feeling the exhaustion of the long drive catching up with my elderly brain, I had pulled over to nap. Everything else had been — something else. It had swarmed up in my brain like a schizophrenia. But it was sucked away and extinguished in the presence of Dora. Everything Frenkel had said in the park, after killing poor old Saltykov: the allure of this mass fantasy of UFOs; this materialisation of the old religious impulse, this relocation of gods and demons into the spaces between the stars — it all fell back into a proper perspective when I was with Dora. She made me sane again. And that was only one reason, and not the least of them, why I was in love with her.