Yellow Blue Tibia (32 page)

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.’