Yellow Blue Tibia (41 page)

She was taken away. She said she was happy staying with me in my flat, but the authorities lodged her in embassy accommodation and - I believe - flew her out of Moscow the following day. The exact nature of Coyne’s nuclear business, presumably rendered more acutely sensitive by the events at Chernobyl, facilitated the rapidity and secrecy of her exit.

The last thing she said to me was a promise that she would be in touch as soon as she could. I did not know whether I would ever see her again.

But I could hope.

Rather than go straight home I took a walk through the centre of the enormous, populous city in which I had been born and in which I had spent most of my life. I wandered like a tourist. Wasn’t the city full of beauty, and youth, though, that morning?
Wasn’t
it though? The sunlight, perhaps, had scared away the crones and the wrinkled old retainers; the rising sap had driven out the natural Russian reticence of the courting couples. There was a superfluity of youth: infatuated young girls in headscarfs lolling on the arms of solid-limbed, blunt-faced young men; athletic females, witchy, pale-faced males, walking serious-faced together; the glibness of youth, the cleanness of youth, the innocent ferocity of youth. I had been young in the first half of the 1940s, when youth had existed as expensive filler for ditches and shell-holes, as the cement between two nations coming together like bricks squashed in the wall. It was wonderful, and peculiar, to see such unreaped harvests of youth. And always amongst them, moving, as the red-spiny stickleback headbutts the clear flowing waters and worms his way upstream, is death.

The front of my skull throbbed. I was wholly without anxiety, because, after all, I had lost the capacity for anxiety.

‘Come along,’ said the red-haired man, burlying up against me. He was wearing a jacket, into which his right arm was tucked, Napoleon-style - he had a gun in there, of course.

‘You have followed me from the American embassy.’

‘I think you mean to say,’ the red-haired man hissed, ‘
you again
? Isn’t that what you mean to say?’

‘I can say that if you prefer.’

‘You didn’t think,’ he said, coming closer still, to impress upon me that he did indeed have a pistol, ‘that you’d seen the last of me? Did you?’ He smelt, a little, of soap. Since my sense of smell is very poor, I suppose that means that, in fact, he smelt
strongly
of soap. But
of course
he was clean! Death is the cleanest thing of all.

‘You were lucky in Kiev,’ he said. ‘But your luck runs out here. Here is where it all ends for you, comrade.’

‘I’ve had so much good luck recently,’ I told him, ‘I was getting sated with it. It’s like sugar, good luck. At first its very sweet, but after a while you start to think: any more of this and I shall be sick.’

We were standing on a main thoroughfare, and people were coming and going. But of course none of them stopped to interfere with two men having so intimate a conversation. I wondered if there might be Militia officers somewhere who might want to intervene, but there was nobody. ‘At least,’ I said, ‘Dora is safe. I’m content to die, given that.’

‘Come on,’ he said, directing me down the street. ‘Down here,’ he said, down a side road on the left. ‘Along there.’ This was much less busy, and a much better arena for an assassin to shoot an old man and leave his body on the side. ‘Here?’ I asked, in a disinterested voice.

‘Further on.’

‘Trofim tried to kill me, and he didn’t manage it,’ I said, conversationally. I was walking alongside a huge pane of glass, in which my shuffling reflection seemed to step ghostly through the dust-covered and empty display spaces. ‘Then
you
tried to kill me, in that hospital in Kiev, and you didn’t manage it. Then Frenkel himself - your boss - tried to kill me in a hotel room, and
he
didn’t manage it either.’

‘Fourth time lucky,’ said the red-haired man.

‘But where are you
taking
me, though?’ I complained. We were passing, now, a pockmarked stone fa¸ade arrayed with closed shutters. ‘My legs get tired easily. Why not just do it right here?’

We walked into an open space with a dry fountain in the middle, and there was Frenkel, waiting for me. I understood then that Frenkel wanted to rant at me before I was dispatched. He had always been a choleric individual. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long. I really was very tired of all that.

He was sitting in a wheeled chair, with a red blanket tucked over his lap and a pair of sunglasses - for by now the hot Moscow spring had heated itself up, and the sky was bright and the sun bore down with an almost radioactive intensity. The concrete bowl of the fountain, and its central stone spire from which water had long since ceased to flow, looked rather like a satellite dish; except that all it had gathered from being pointed at the sky was a layer of dried and blackened human detritus: old paper and discarded rubbish cartons.

‘Hello Jan,’ I said.

‘Konsty,’ he slurred. His mouth was curled round in a left-heavy sneer. The red-headed KGB man looked into the middle distance with an expression of vague disgust.

‘How delightful to see you,’ I said.

The red-haired man took up position behind me. There was something ostentatious about the way he had his hand on his gun.

‘You pushed me out of a fucking window,’ Frenkel gobbled, and saliva cried from his mouth. With a claw-like hand he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief.

‘You were about to push
me
.’

‘I was trying to close off your timelines, you fucker, not
kill
you. But you were trying to kill
me
. Don’t you understand anything?’

‘Close off my
what
?’

‘You think your luck in evading death is down to . . . what? God just really
likes
you?’

My temper rose half a degree or so. ‘You stabbed Dora.’

He nodded. ‘I thought I’d killed her too,’ he said, shortly. ‘But she fucking came back to life, didn’t she?’

‘Dora Norman has left the country,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to get to her now. But Comrade Red-hair here knows all about that. He has followed me here from the American embassy. Haven’t you, comrade?’

‘Don’t talk to
him
,’ slobbered Frenkel, padding at his face again with the cloth. His arm came up and went down like a mechanical spar, pivoting at the elbow. He was clutching a square of cloth in his birdclaw right hand, dabbing at his mouth with it after each little speech. ‘Fucking red-headed imbecile.’

‘The injury to his head has disinhibited him,’ murmured the red-headed man, in a disappointed tone of voice.

‘How unfortunate,’ I said.

Frenkel wriggled in his chair. ‘Can’t keep my fucking mouth
shut
, now, can I? It’s not just the swearing. It’s the secrets. I can’t stop babbling them. We
almost had it
in 1977. People - the world - people almost
saw them
in fucking 1977. Petrazavodsk. We were thwarted by - certain persons. And since then, haven’t things gone to shit? Haven’t they?’

‘Hard to think we could get any closer to shit than we were in the 1970s,’ I said.

‘Scientology,’ Frenkel growled. ‘Interference pattern. Mass belief systems. Communism is the creation of the people.
Religion
is the creation of the people. It gets in the way. We can’t - oh! ah! Fuck! You know what Lenin said-fuck?’

‘Said-fuck? What do you mean?’

‘
Said
. Fucking
said
. Do you know what Lenin fucking
said
. Fuck.’

‘I also suffered an injury to my head, to the frontal lobe,’ I observed. ‘I assume, from Colonel Frenkel’s propensity to profanity, that an injury to the back of the head is associated with a different set of symptoms?’

‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said red-hair, grimly.

‘Lenin said,’ slobbered Frenkel, ‘that if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. Lenin said that! That was Lenin! Coyne was fond of quoting that.’

‘Coyne?’

‘Fucking American bastard.’

‘Coyne was yours?’

‘Of course! What did you think? Fuck. He was supposed to persuade you of the reality of the attack on Chernobyl. Fuckfuck.’

‘He was trying to warn me,’ I said, curiously unsettled by this information.

‘In a fucking manner of speaking,’ slurred Frenkel, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. ‘He was trying to warn everybody. That’s what we are fucking
doing
.’

‘You killed him!’

Frenkel twitched his face about. ‘Don’t be, don’t be,’ he snarled, and pressed his handkerchief against his mouth. ‘Don’t be fucking - stupid,’ he said, through the fabric. Why would
we
kill him? He was ours.’

‘Nonsense. Don’t swear and talk nonsense, Jan. Do one or the other. Coyne and Dora were . . .’

‘He’d called me when L-Ron,’ Frenkel interrupted. ‘When L-Ron. Fuck! He’d
brought
the woman over to
me
,’ said Frenkel, flapping his arm away, with its square of white cloth, as if surrendering. ‘She’s a
special case
. There aren’t many like her! That’s why he brought her. He usually came on his own. You think I was loitering outside the ministry that evening just by chance? And then! And then! Hubbard’s death was the
perfect
opportunity. The moment had come. We figured: a loosening of that whole system. We figured a defocusing. All we needed to do was give the collective blindness of people one fucking
jolt
. It was the perfect fucking opportunity to pull together the . . .’ He coughed, and then dropped his head.

‘Scientology? What has that to do with anything?’

‘Aa. Oo. I don’t know why I keep talking,’ slurped Frenkel. ‘I can’t seem to stop babbling.’

‘No,’ agreed the red-haired man, snide. ‘You can’t.’

‘Fucking brain injury. Mass hypnosis. They’re techniques. Brainwashing. Fuck. That’s too strong a term for it, brainwashing, but - you know.
Belief
systems. Belief. Oh,
garoo
. You saw them fucking kill him, and then you magicked a fucking rope out of your brainpan to explain it away. Why would you
do
that?’

‘I know what I saw,’ I told him.

‘That’s the whole fucking point! Nobody sees anything -
until
they
know what they are seeing!
There’s no such fucking thing as pure seeing. It’s always being shaped by what we know. Except it’s not what we know, it’s what we fucking
think
and what we
presuppose
and what we have been told.
She
doesn’t even know what she’s capable of!’

‘You’re not making sense, Jan,’ I said.

‘Excuse
me
, Comrade fucking Ironist. Making
sense
? Don’t give me that. You wouldn’t know sense if it came up and bit off your balls.’

I looked around. Red-haired man was still behind me, with his hand tucked into his own jacket. A few people were coming and going. I contemplated calling to them, but it would have been fruitless. What would I have yelled? ‘Help help!’ perhaps? I would have been taken for a drunk, and Muscovites would have averted their eyes and shuffled on.

‘If
they
are here, these aliens of yours,’ I said, meaning perhaps to postpone the inevitable, ‘then
where
are they? What are they doing?’

‘They’re making war upon us,’ said Frenkel. ‘Of course.’

‘I don’t see—’

‘They’re invading us, of course. They’re fucking softening us up. A century or so of attrition. It’s the’- dab, dab, dab - ‘battleship anchored off the coast, bombarding our fucking entrenchments. Of course they’d prefer it if we didn’t see the battleship. If we saw it, we might start firing back.’

‘Bombarding us?’

‘You don’t think the entire twentieth century is fucking evidence of the shells landing amongst us? You don’t think it’s strange that this century, out of all the previous epochs of human existence, is the one where the world goes up in fucking flames all around us?’

‘Flames?
You
were the one who wanted to blow up Chernobyl!’

‘The thing that’s incredible about UFOs,’ Frenkel went on, ‘is not that millions of people believe in them, but that millions don’t. It takes a continual effort of will
not
to see them.’

I started to reply. But Frenkel was in spate now.

‘
I’m
not the bad guy,’ he slurred. ‘Two roads. One of them leads to glory - a human renaissance. One led
to the stars
, do you understand?’ Dab, dab. ‘Not a figure of speech. The other leads to the mundane. The mundane. The fucking mundane. The bourgeois mundane.’ He seemed to be getting increasingly worked up. ‘The shitting mundane. The Yankee mundane. The deadly mundane. The defeating mundane. The appalling, appalling, appalling mundane. Into the realm of that American woman’s perceiving consciousness. The interference pattern that . . . fucking fuck. That fucking. Fucking.’

‘You seem to be distilling your thought down to a single word,’ I observed.

‘If only we’d taken her out of the picture . . .’ Dab dab. ‘
Everything
was in place. She’ll go back to America,’ dabbing at his twisted mouth. ‘And good riddance. Fucking reality
catalyst
and she’s not even aware of it
herself
. Coyne was right about her.’

‘You’re talking about the woman I love,’ I said.

A rasp, the sound of somebody clearing his throat.

I looked behind me. Red-hair was still standing there, his hand still menacingly inside his jacket. But directly behind him was now standing a second man: a fellow enormously bearded and dressed in an old-style black coat. There was something vaguely familiar-looking about him, but perhaps it was simply that he looked as many Russians do. Coat, beard, patient manner. ‘Good morning, comrade,’ I said to this newcomer.