Yellow Blue Tibia (31 page)

‘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
un
lucky. 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.