Yellow Blue Tibia (22 page)

‘And why are you and I going to Kiev?’ I asked him.

‘Didn’t Coyne
explain
to you?’

‘He did not.’

‘Because we are the only ones left,’ he replied.

‘Left to do what?’

‘The others are dead,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get to Reactor Four at Chernobyl it will be exploded, and many millions will die. Which would be a regrettable turn of events.’

‘Regrettable indeed. You’re
sure
?’

‘Of course!’

‘I thought Lunacharsky knew the details, and you did not.’

‘Oh I know about the attack on Chernobyl. I know about
that
!’

‘Who is going to attack it?’

‘The aliens.’

‘I see. And
why
are they going attack this nuclear facility?’

‘That,’ said Saltykov, ‘I don’t know. Presumably in order to make war upon humankind’

‘And Lunacharsky knew all about this?’

‘Oh yes. And so did Coyne.’

‘[Chernobyl,]’ said Dora. ‘[You’re both talking about Chernobyl, aren’t you? Did James discover which reactor was going to be the target?]’

‘[Her told me,]’ I replied. ‘[Four.]’

‘We must go straight away!’ said Saltykov. ‘Immediately! Immediately
after
, that is, I have voided my bladder into the toilet. We must go to Kiev!’ He repeated this phrase as he made his way across his little hall to his toilet. ‘We shall go to Kiev!’ Then he closed the toilet door behind him, and Dora Norman and I waited for him. The silence between us was a little awkward; and was punctuated only by the faint sound of a stream of fluid striking porcelain.

CHAPTER 13

Thirteen. That unlucky number. In this thirteenth chapter we travel to Chernobyl, where I shall be blown up and exploded and destroyed.

Unlucky enough.

We went down in the lift and out through the hall like outlaws, glowering and looking all around. But of course we
were
outlaws. Dora had no luggage; all her belongings, including her passport, were in her hotel room, and there was no possibility of returning to retrieve them. We would have to make do without these things. She was more anxious about lacking her toiletries, and a change of clothes.

‘[I apologise,]’ she said to me, as we made our way to the car. ‘[I have been in the same clothes for two days now. I’m afraid I must not smell good.]’

‘[By no means,]’ I replied.

‘[I
must
smell. And it’s only going to get worse. I must smell.]’

‘[Your smell is delightful,]’ I said. ‘[Believe me. Your scent possesses an intoxicating femininity and delicacy which fills my nostrils with joy.]’

She looked at me quizzically. ‘[Do you have a good sense of smell? I only ask because, if you’re pardon me saying so, your nose is a little - scarred.]’

‘[I have almost no sense of smell at all,]’ I said, smiling. ‘[My scent receptors were all burnt out when my face was scorched.]’

She looked at me again, and then burst into birdsong-like laughter. ‘[How comical you are!]’

‘[Others have noted my ironical nature,]’ I conceded. To smile broadly was to stretch the skin of my face uncomfortably, but I smiled to the extent that I was able.

‘[All that blarney about my lovely smell, and you can’t smell anything!]’

‘[The smell is in my heart, beautiful Ms Norman, rather than my nose. A nobler organ, I feel.]’

She laughed again. We were at the car.

‘I shall drive,’ Saltykov announced. ‘I shall listen to the radio. You,’ he said to me, ‘must sit on the back seat with Ms Norman.’

‘Ms Norman,’ I replied, ‘would surely prefer to have the back seat to herself.’

‘Because of her bulk?’ Saltykov said.

I believe he meant nothing offensive in saying this; it was merely the weirdly blank straightforwardness of his manner. I looked at her, as she, all unwitting, smiled back.

‘For shame!’ I said, to Saltykov. ‘Why must you be so rude? I meant simply that, as a single woman, in a strange country, I am certain she would prefer her own space. I am certain she would rather not share the seat with an ugly, old Russian man she barely knows.’

‘You need not accuse me of discourtesy,’ said Saltykov. ‘She cannot speak Russian.’

‘Nevertheless.’

‘Besides,
you
are making assumptions about her. Should you not ask her?’

‘[Ms Norman,]’ I explained, ‘[We are discussing our seating arrangements in the car. Saltykov wishes to have the front entirely to himself. I am insisting that I sit up front and that you be given the rear seat to yourself.]’

‘[Because I’m so heavy,]’ she said, with a slightly mournful tone. She tried to add a trilling laugh to this, but it gurgled into nothing.

‘[No!]’ I said, rather over-insistently. ‘[Not at all! No no!]’

‘[It’s quite all right,]’ Dora said.

‘[Please, Ms Norman,]’ I insisted, with old-style Russian courtesy. ‘[I insist upon it.] I shall sit up front.’ I said this last in Russian to Saltykov, speaking with finality.

‘Nonsense,’ said Saltykov. ‘You cannot sit in the front passenger seat. It would distract me. It would make for unsafe driving.’

‘You are an absurd and rather childish fellow,’ I said.

‘I am neither! But we must get on quickly, and I am resolved to get on safely, so I must have no distractions as I drive. Driving,’ he added, with a spurt of sudden energy in his voice, ‘is a
complicated
process. I must concentrate wholly upon it.’

‘Much of the process is governed by the autonomous nervous system,’ I offered.

‘Nonsense,’ said Saltykov, as if this were the most absurd notion he had ever heard. It dawned on me then that perhaps he was not like other men when it came to driving cars. Perhaps he had to distil every atom of his concentration into the process of operating all the various levers and pedals that make a car move forward. I was, at any rate, disinclined to contest the point. ‘I shall inform Ms Norman of your intransigence,’ I said, stiffly.

I relayed Saltykov’s insistence to her in English. As I did so, I became conscious of the possibility that she, unable to understand Saltykov’s Russian, might suspect me of inventing his peculiar insistence as an excuse to place myself near her. As I thought this I blushed, and even stammered, for it filled me with a strange and sudden anxiety. As I chattered on in English, that strange vocalic language, I ran through the following sequence of thoughts in my own head. First I tried to reassure myself: she would not assume that a man as old as I could have sexual designs upon a woman as large as she. Then I thought, But she is a woman, for all that, and young, and single. Why might she not assume sexual predation as my motive? For all she knows, I prefer bulky women to the skinnier kind. And then, as she acquiesced heartily enough in my request, ‘[Of course you must sit on the back seat! It wouldn’t do to distract the driver!]’, I felt a counterflush. For as she smiled I was gifted a glimpse past the apperception of an anonymous spherical quantity of human flesh; and into the individual. Her eyes were very beautiful. Her eyes struck me. When she smiled, the extra flesh on her face dimpled, and this had the effect of spreading the expression more widely, really for all the world as if her whole face, and not just her mouth, were smiling.

I found an unexpected joy kindling inside me at this smile. I found myself wanting to do something to make the smile re-emerge. For a glittering moment, the veil lifted just enough to give insight past the external epiphenomena of Dora Norman and into her soul. And then she pulled the rear car door open and climbed inside, or rather she tackled the job of climbing inside, leaning forward and hauling the various fleshly components of her mass through the opening and rearranging them into a sitting shape, and the spell was broken. I was, once more, blind to her, and I saw only her bulkiness. She ceased, indeed, being a human being, for that portion of time that I was unable to uncloud my view of her.

I got in next to her. Conscious, I suppose, of my inner failing, and self-aware enough to be a little ashamed, I was excessively polite to her.

‘[It’s extraordinarily kind of you to permit this,]’ I said, like a genteel character from a Dickens novel.

‘[Don’t be silly!]’

I promised not to be silly.

 

We made our way quickly through the outskirts of Moscow, and soon enough we were on the almost deserted highway heading southwest. In those days, in Russia, few people drove, and nobody but delivery drivers and truckers drove between cities (things are very different now). From time to time another vehicle would pass us in the other direction, or a tractor would appear in front of us, scattering scales of mud from its dinosaurian rear wheels as it grumbled along the road at fifteen miles an hour. If the road were perfectly straight and perfectly empty then Saltykov might overtake such an obstacle; but if there were the merest reason to be cautious, then Saltykov was cautious, and we crawled behind the tractor until it turned off the road into the field of some enormous farm.

We drove all afternoon. At some point, with the sun low and elderly in the sky, Saltykov turned off the highway and made his way into a village to try and buy some diesel. The place possessed one solitary petrol station, and its owner told us that he had none to sell. He directed us to a second village. So we left the village, and Saltykov manoeuvred his taxi very slowly along a one-track road whose surface was suffering the tarmac equivalent of psoriasis. It was thirty minutes before we rolled into the next village along: a set of concrete cubes and boxes distributed upon and amongst cold green fields. The petrol station there was shut, and nobody seemed to be about. We bought some sausage and bread from a shop owner. When I asked for directions to the nearest petrol station the owner offered to sell us some diesel himself. In a yard at the back of the store he had a pile of jerry cans, and after sniffing at the uncapped mouth of one of these, and insisting a portion of the stuff be poured into a cup for him to inspect, Saltykov agreed to the purchase.

We drove back to the main road, Dora and I eating bread and sausage quietly on the back seat, and Saltykov - who seemed to need no solid sustenance at all - complaining peevishly about the quality of the diesel he had just bought. ‘It is making my engine knock.’

‘Is it distracting you from driving?’ I asked.

‘It’s distracting the engine from functioning optimally.’

I dozed for an hour or so. When I awoke we were still in motion, and the sun was going down in rural splendour, laminating the horizon with two dozen shades of alien reds and beetle-iridescences, and aqua-yellows and Jupiter-oranges. There are no sunsets finer than those in the level country of western Russia.

The road ran along the edge of a vast forest, and for a long time we skirted the gloom.

‘[I can’t sleep,]’ said Dora. ‘[I keep thinking about James.]’

I couldn’t think of anything to say to this, so we sat in silence for a while. The sky deepened, and grew darker: thrush-coloured; crow-coloured; then finally an ice and transparent blackness.

‘[The stars!]’

I craned to peer through the glass. ‘[There they are,]’ I agreed.

For a while she was silent, and then she said, ‘[I’ve been trying to find a way of raising this subject.]’

‘[What subject?]’

‘[I hope you won’t mind. But James said that you are a science fiction writer.]’

Now it was my turn to bark with laughter. ‘[Indeed! I used to be.]’

‘[You have not mentioned the fact. Perhaps I trespass upon your privacy by talking about it.]’

‘[By no means. It is simply that I have not written science fiction for a long time.]’

‘[Might I ask?]’ she said. ‘[Why did you stop writing it?]’

‘[I,]’ I started. But I did not complete the sentence.

We rolled along the road. Saltykov was humming something to himself in the front seat. The radio was playing, but the volume was turned down so very low that I hardly believed he could hear it.

‘[I apologise,]’ said Dora. ‘[I feel I have touched upon a tender spot.]’

‘[It’s not that, it’s not that,]’ I said. ‘[I simply have not thought about it for a long time. My life seemed to—]’ But again the sentence fell away. I had been going to say
die
, but that seemed an absurd and melodramatic thing to say. I tried again. ‘[Science fiction was my passion when I was young. Because science fiction is about the future, and when we are young we are fascinated with our future worlds. That’s natural, since when we are young we possess no past, or none worth mentioning; but we possess an endless future stretching before us. But I am no longer young. When we are old, the future vanishes from our life to become replaced with death. Accordingly we become intrigued, rather, with the past. We have the same escapist urge we had as youngsters, but it takes us back, into memory, instead of forward into science fiction]’