Yellow Blue Tibia (40 page)

‘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.

CODA

‘We have built a new society, the kind of society mankind had
never known. And, finally, there is Soviet man, the most
important product of the past 60 years.’

 

 

 

 

I started with Frenkel, and will end with him. This is the part where the red-haired man shoots me through the heart; the inevitable coda. Death can be postponed, perhaps, but not evaded.

I took Dora for a ride on the famous Moscow Metro. We got off and ascended outside the American embassy, and I waited with her in the antechamber. The embassy officials were very agitated to meet her - excited, they assured her, and delighted. They’d reported her as missing; and the death of James Coyne, quite apart from creating an enormous stir in
certain circles
, had made everybody fearful for her safety. Her family and friends would be
delighted
to discover she was all right. Her whole country would.