Yellow Blue Tibia (24 page)

‘Driving a Moscow car? Asking for the American embassy? How could this not draw attention? Perhaps I should add that I am a qualified nuclear physicist, and that you are on the run from the KGB?’

‘There is no need for sarcasm,’ I suggested.

‘If you persist in—’ Saltykov began, and then he jerked the steering wheel. Saltykov, it seemed, had been compelled to swerve to avoid colliding with a small motorcycle. The tyres sang like sirens, and with a cumbrous shudder the car moved sideways, slid a little, and stopped. Immediately, from surrounding morning traffic, a symphony of horns rang out.

‘You distracted me!’ gasped Saltykov, in outrage. ‘Did I tell you not to distract me when I was driving? And
yet
you distracted me! I very nearly collided with the two-wheeled vehicle.’

He seemed to be in a very bad mood. I have no doubt that this, of course, was in part to do with his lack of sleep.

‘Move the car,’ I urged, from the back seat. ‘We are blocking the junction.’

‘Do not tell me what to do. And do not distract me,’ said Saltykov.

‘All right - but move the car.’

‘That is telling me what to do! I asked you not to tell me what to do! You deliberately told me what to do after I told you not to tell me what to do! I need
hardly
tell you how distracting it is to tell me what to do when I have previously
told
you
not
to tell me what to do!’

I put my teeth together, behind my lips, and tried counting, silently to ten; in Russian, then in English. I still felt the urge to pound Saltykov with my elderly fists. I tried again in French. At
huit
Saltykov had calmed down sufficiently to restart the engine and move the car.

We drove through the streets of central Kiev in silence. Eventually, Saltykov drew his car to a stop outside a row of shops. He turned the engine off and withdrew the key. ‘You may go into one of these shops,’ he told me, ‘and ask about the embassy.’

‘Very well,’ I retorted, clambering from the car in a fury.

 

The first shop sold clothes and, although there was very little by way of stock, there was of course a queue. I contemplated joining the queue, although I would have been queuing not to buy anything but only to ask the way to the American embassy. This, I decided, would be a ridiculous thing to do. So I came out of the shop again, and went into the shop next door: a bookshop. The shopgirl was fitting blocks of volumes into the shelves like a bricklayer; I asked if she knew the whereabouts of the American embassy, and she expressed her perfect and complete ignorance. Coming onto the street again I stopped a passerby: a bearded individual in a black overcoat with a bundle of wooden dowels in his hand. ‘American embassy?’ he said, with a puzzled expression. ‘In Kiev? There’s no American embassy in Kiev. You want Moscow. That’s where the American embassy is.’

‘Comrade,’ I pressed, in a crestfallen voice. ‘You are sure?’

‘What should Ukraine want with an American embassy? Kch, kch, kch.’ This last was a strange little scraping-gulping noise he made in his throat, something I took to be an expression of disapproval. ‘You know, you should know about the embassy being in Moscow,’ he added, his face creasing further from puzzlement to suspicion. ‘You have a Moscow accent.’

‘Thank you, comrade,’ I said, stepping away.

‘Have you come
from
Moscow
to
Kiev to look for an American embassy?’ he called after me, pointing at Saltykov’s Moscow numberplates. ‘Why would you not simply go to the American embassy in Moscow?’

I hurried back to the car. The man stood on the pavement staring at us. ‘Drive away,’ I told Saltykov.

‘Did that individual give you directions?’

‘There’s no American embassy in Kiev,’ I snapped. ‘Just drive away, before he flags down the Militia and we are all arrested.’

‘No American embassy?’ said Saltykov in his implacable voice, pointedly not starting the engine of his taxicab. ‘But that is not good news.’

I explained the situation to Dora. ‘[Oh no!]’ she said, her flawless brow creasing with dismay. ‘[What can we do? Oh no! And we came all this way!]

‘[It would be terrible to think that the deer died in vain.]’

‘What did she say?’ Saltykov wanted to know.

‘She considers it unfortunate.’

‘Indeed. Of course, on the other hand, it was
necessary
for us to come to the Ukraine, embassy or no embassy. So it is not entirely unfortunate.’

‘Necessary?’

‘I have already explained,’ said Saltykov. It is crucial that we make our way to the nuclear facility at Chernobyl, not far from here. It must be today. Tomorrow would be too late.’

‘You are sure about the date?’

‘I am sure of what Coyne told me.’

‘We can hardly take Ms Norman to the nuclear facility.’

‘Indeed!’

The man on the pavement was still there. He had tucked his faggot of wooden dowels under his arm and had taken out a notepad and a pencil in order to write down the registration number of Saltykov’s taxi. ‘We must go,’ I said. ‘That man is writing down your numberplate.’

‘Get out and remonstrate with him,’ Saltykov told me.

‘You do it!’

‘But I have a disinclination to interact with strange men, on account of my syndrome. You must do it.’

‘Certainly not.’

Making unhappy noises, Saltykov started his car and drove away. ‘The situation cannot be helped,’ he said. ‘We must take Ms Norman to a hotel. We must book her into a hotel, and then you and I must drive out to Chernobyl.’

CHAPTER 15

Ukraine: so here we were. The countryside was one of low hills, but as the road fell into line alongside a lengthy stretch of water, more like a Scottish loch than a normal lake, a vista opened up to the west of open fields. The sky seemed showy, a projection rather than a reality: large irregular flint-coloured clouds against a shining grey expanse. The clouds looked as if painted upon a vast transparency that was being slid slowly from left to right along the backrail of the horizon.

We were driving to Chernobyl, Saltykov and I. Dora Norman was settled into a pleasant room in a downtown Kiev hotel room. Saltykov’s taxi was not quite the same after its collision with the deer as it had been before. It creaked and rolled awkwardly when taking corners; never a rapid machine, it appeared to have less capacity for velocity now. But it was still working.

‘The question,’ I said, ‘is what we do when we get there.’

‘There is a conspiracy to blow the facility up. We must find the bomb. Where exactly in the facility the bomb will be - that is the real question.

‘The real question,’ I countered, ‘is whether we will get there at all, in this galvanised lizard cock of a car.’

‘That is a question on nobody’s lips,’ Saltykov replied in a peevish voice. ‘That is a ridiculous and insulting question. Do not, by talking, distract the driver.’

The car creaked, and the engine continued making the sound of a man continually throwing up, and slowly, slowly, we followed the road round, and the blocky profile of Chernobyl nuclear facility rose up amongst the trees, shouldering the low hills aside and pushing its roofs towards the sky as we approached.

 

Though the guard at the gate was young - no more than eighteen, at a guess - he was nevertheless completely bald. It made him look, oddly, vulnerable. First of all he peered at us through the glass of his little hut. Then he stepped outside, fumbling with his hat, fitting it over his egg against the chill of the early spring air. His face looked like something drawn in felt-tip pen upon an elbow. ‘Pass?’

‘Pass,’ repeated Saltykov intently.

It occurred to me that we ought to have foreseen this eventuality. But the guard seemed disproportionately impressed by Saltykov’s response.

‘You’re with the others,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see your badges?’

His inflection was such that it took me a moment to understand that he was asking a question. ‘That’s right,’ said Saltykov, quicker on the uptake than I.

‘Go in, comrades. You want to go left at the end there,’ he stuck his arm out, ‘and park in Car Park One.’

‘Reactor One
is
where we’re going,’ I said, as my elderly brain caught up. ‘To join our colleagues.’

The guard stepped back and raised the barrier, and we drove through. I turned my head as we drove off, watching him scurrying back inside his little booth. Saltykov followed the road left and drove past the hangar-shaped enormity of the first reactor. ‘But we don’t want Reactor One,’ I said.

‘No. We want Reactor Four. So you said.’

‘I only know what Coyne told me.’

‘His dying words.’

‘How do we tell,’ I asked, ‘which reactor is which?’

‘Are you asking,’ he growled, as we drove past the ranks of parked cars, ‘whether the reactor buildings have large numerals painted upon them? If you are, then the answer is: no they don’t.’

‘I can see that they don’t.’

‘Then perhaps you would limit yourself to useful questions?’

‘I would ask a useful question,’ I said, sourly. ‘But I wouldn’t want to distract the driver.’

We exited the far side of the car park and drove along one-track tarmac, round a bend and between two separate huge cubes of architecture. ‘That’s
One
,’ I hazarded, tipping a thumb behind us, ‘so this must be Two.’ The road turned again, flanking the second reactor, and past a fumble of low buildings. We passed a second, less crowded car park. The road went through a copse of trees, and then ran alongside a pond. ‘That pond will supply cooling for the reactors,’ noted Saltykov.

‘Won’t that make it radioactive?’ I asked.

‘Everything in the world is radioactive,’ said Saltykov, with a humourless chuckle in his throat, ‘to one degree or another. You learn that when you are educated about nuclear power, as I have been. There’s no getting away from radiation.’

‘There are, I assume however, degrees.’

‘Indeed. A little radioactivity is fine. A lot is not fine.’

I peered at the pool with suspicious eyes. The water, perfectly still, looked like mahogany in the grim light. We were moving slowly enough for me to note that carp were crowding the pond. A single fin was unzipping the surface of the water.

‘Radioactive fishes,’ I said.

Then we turned again and Reactor Three filled our windshield, like a grey iceberg. We drove round it and yet another huge shed loomed into view.

‘That one, then,’ said Saltykov.

We followed the road round until it decanted us into another car park. It was almost wholly unoccupied: a few cars, but then nothing more than the white-painted sets of IIIs and Es on the ground, like a giant practising his lettering. Saltykov parked, and we got out. I rubbed life back into my stiff old legs. Saltykov was spryer than I.

‘So here we are,’ I said. ‘Reactor Four. It’s hard to believe.’

‘Things are either believable or they’re not,’ said Saltykov, pursing his lips. ‘Belief is not something that admits of degree.’

‘How true. For example,
I believe
,’ I said, ‘that you are the single most annoying human being on the planet. I also
believe
that you’re quite mad.’

‘By no means! My syndrome is a thing apart from insanity.’ He locked the driver’s door, and unlocked it. Then he locked it again, and unlocked it. Lock, unlock, lock. ‘Perfectly sane,’ I agreed.

As we walked towards the main entrance, I said, ‘It is strangely deserted.’

‘And why should it be crowded? Didn’t you hear the guard at the gate? Everybody is with our colleagues in Reactor One.’

‘Whoever our colleagues are.’

‘Whoever,’ agreed Saltykov.

‘And you, as an expert, will tell me it’s safe to leave a nuclear reactor untended like this?’

‘These things run themselves,’ said Saltykov. ‘The best thing to do is leave them alone. The last thing you want is some foolish operator tinkering with the controls.’

The reactor building itself loomed over us as we approached. The air was colder in its shadow. I felt a tingle of dread. More than a tingle: a tang. ‘It looks,’ I noted, ‘like a pastiche of an aristocratic country house. Two wings, one on either side. A main entrance. But all in
concrete
, and with hardly any windows. And so much bigger - it must be ten floors high. Like a country house built by giants as a satire on bourgeois wealth.’

‘It sounds,’ said Saltykov, ‘as if you are groping towards a description of the Revolution itself.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Come! Revolution is a
giant
enterprise. A giant construction. A satirical reworking of bourgeois life on a larger scale.’

‘Just when I think you’re some kind of idiot savant, comrade,’ I told him, ‘you surprise me with a sudden perceptiveness.’

‘I am highly intelligent,’ he said blandly.