Yellow Blue Tibia (3 page)

Grey rain fell all day. The sound of an endless flurry of wings behind the glass.

The weather cleared. The view from the glass doors was of hills, rising, sinking, and in places were hollows or sockets, grassed over but pooling the shadow until noon.

We wrote detailed accounts of alien atrocities. We had them villainously blowing up a city - New York, as a first choice. This was Rapoport’s idea; that the main island upon which New York stands (what was its name? we wondered. Nobody had the courage to ask Malenkov to supply us with an encyclopaedia that might answer such a question -
Brooklyn Island
said Kaganovich,
Manhattan Island
said Asterinov,
Long Island
said I) would be exploded by a diabolic alien death ray. Then we had second thoughts, for such a stunt, we reasoned, would be hard to fake; and if the Red Army were actually to bombard New York into dust and shards then we would have been the authors of mass death. So then we toyed with the idea of aliens attacking Siberia; some remote and inaccessible place where the story could not easily be falsified. But Asterinov voiced the obvious objection. ‘Our brief is to unite humanity against this monstrous alien foe!’ he said. ‘Why should humanity care if these aliens blow up a few trees in Siberia?’

‘We need a compromise,’ I suggested. ‘Somewhere close enough to civilisation to be threatening, but not so close as to be easily falsified. Eastern Europe?’

‘Germany,’ said Rapoport. ‘Let us have them erase Germany entirely. Turn that portion of central Europe into a blasted desert of polished and scorched glass.’

‘A little impracticable, in terms of faking the scenario,’ said Rapoport.

Nikolai Nikolaivitch only scowled.

‘Somewhere else,’ I suggested. ‘Ukraine, maybe. Latvia, perhaps. Let’s decide that later.’

‘The Ukraine has been almost depopulated,’ agreed Frenkel. ‘What with the famine, and then the war. Let us have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine. That would be the best option.’

How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually? This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one. Conceivably it is that we did not believe, even in the midst of our work, that it would come to anything - that we felt removed from the possible consequences of our planning. But I suspect a more malign motivation. Writers, you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in this respect. A realist writer might break his protagonist’s leg, or kill his fianc’e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day all through his life. How can this not produce calluses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?

The house had electricity, but the supply was intermittent. We worked in the afternoon in groups of two or three, or off by ourselves; and then we worked as a whole group in the evening by the light of oil lamps, tulip-shaped bulbs of brightness, orange as summer blooms. There would be three or four lamps placed upon the table, hissing quietly as if in disapproval of our work.

In the mornings there was a spring quality to the sunlight; a freshness. On one such day I walked in the garden with Nikolai, the two of us smoking earnestly. The brightness coming through the trees freckled the lawn with paler greens. Nikolai found a wooden soldier, a foot tall, in amongst the unmown grass, over by the shrubbery. It had once been bright with blue and yellow paint, but its time out in the open had blistered and stripped most of its colour off, and the wood beneath was damp and dark and crumby. ‘I wonder who left this here,’ I said. ‘I wonder for how long they wept for their lost toy! I wonder if it was quickly replaced.’

‘I wonder if they’re still alive,’ said Nikolai.

He tossed the thing into the foliage.

‘Konstantin,’ Nikolai said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have not written anything in a decade. Longer.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘
Dark Penguin. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The Vulture is Moulting
. Superb books. And what about that series about the man who could breathe under water?’

‘A French book, little known, and, I think, illegal here.
L’Homme qui peut vivre dans L’eau
. I simply translated it into Russian, purging it of bourgeois details and adding a few standard Russian touches. The same with the others. Though those were American, rather than French. I changed the titles, of course; and I was secretive. Who would want to be discovered in possession of an American novel?’ He shrugged. ‘I am a fraud. I can’t pull my weight.’

This was strange news. ‘Don’t worry’, I said, a little uncertainly.

‘I am very afraid of disappointing the Comrade General Secretary. I was in the army. I understand how . . .
unmerciful
authority . . . needs to be.’ His hand, I saw, was shaking as he lit a new cigarette.

‘I was in the army too,’ I said. ‘We were all in the army, Nikolai.’

‘Where were you posted?’

‘Moscow. Then Latvia, Estonia, the west.’

‘Moscow?’

‘I,’ I said, with a little tremor of remorse in my heart, ‘know.’

‘I suppose,’ he said, in a slow voice, ‘somebody had to be stationed in Moscow. Were you on the general staff?’

‘God, no. I was a regular soldier. Like you. And I saw plenty of fighting too, later on. In Latvia. The Nazis fought like hounds. Their lives at stake, of course. All my friends died; and then I made new friends, and they all died, and . . .’ I stopped. The wind moved between us and around us. The sun glared at us out of a petrol-blue sky. The shadows of the trees shuddered. ‘Well, you know all about that,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

We sat in silence, smoking.

‘When I was a young boy,’ I told Asterinov (I was telling him something I had shared with nobody since), ‘I saw a red-haired man selling chestnuts in a market square.’ Asterinov looked at me. ‘I thought that red-haired man was Death,’ I said. ‘I still do. I still think that Death is a red-haired man.’

‘Isn’t he supposed to come in a black cloak and have a skull for a face?’ This, of course, was how Asterinov’s imagination worked; and it was how most people’s imaginations work. They tap into the general well, which sometimes we call clich’. It is a weakness, but in another way it is a greater strength than any to which I have ever had access. It was what he had summoned his courage to tell me, I suppose, that day: my imagination is the
common
imagination, comrade, he was saying; and I have drawn on the imaginations of others to write my books.

‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘A skull. Not a redhead. I was a foolish child, I’m afraid, and I have carried this foolishness into adult life. Death - a red-haired man?’

We sat in silence for a further minute, or so.

‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘There is no need for the General Secretary to be bothered with any irrelevant details.’

‘He singled me out, that first day, to tell me how much he liked
Starsearch
.’

‘He said he’d blocked the motion picture.’

‘But he liked the novel! What if he pays close attention to me - to my contribution? What if he finds out?’

‘Comrade,’ I said. ‘Calm yourself, please. Find out what? This is a collective project. Literature,’ I went on, ‘has always been a collective activity. Writers adapting plots from other writers, sharing ideas and characters and images, all the way back to Homer. Shakespeare didn’t invent a single one of his plots. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your works have been an inspiration to the Soviet people in the great war. And, and,’ I stopped. ‘
Starsearch
too?’ I asked, in a sorrowful voice.

Asterinov took a deep breath. ‘No, that was one of mine.’

I could not explain the strange feeling of relief that passed through me when he said this.

A bifurcated cloud the shape and colour of a walrus moustache muffled the sun, with others following. Soon it began to rain, a drizzle drifting like spindrift, and we hurried indoors.

The next day we spent writing. The story we were assembling was growing; the particulars of the aliens - a very horrible, insectoid race, implacably individualist and implacably hostile to social animals such as human beings. To begin with, our aliens were something like giant ants, but the objection was made that the idea of a ruthlessly individualist ant was a contradiction in terms. ‘That’s the horror,’ Sergei Rapoport insisted. ‘Horror depends upon some substantive contradiction, some paradox that outrages our sense of nature! A live man, or corpse, neither is horrific: but a living corpse -
that
scares us!’

‘You’re talking nonsense, Sergei,’ said Ivan Frenkel. ‘Ants live in big collective groups. Ants are communists. We need a solitary insect - a spider.’

‘Spiders are not insects,’ retorted Sergei.

‘Corpses can be scary,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘Not - living corpses,’ he added, and I realised he was not making a suggestion, but was instead wrapped in the coils of memory. ‘Dead ones.’

‘I propose we do not call our aliens insectoid,’ said Ivan, calmly. ‘We call them arachnoid.’

‘Yes,
Jan
,’ said Sergei. ‘Let us do that,
Jan
.’ Frenkel coloured.

‘I have a better idea,’ I said. ‘Let us disembody them.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘Radiation aliens. Sentient emanations of poisonous radiation.’

The others contemplated this. ‘A little insubstantial, perhaps?’ offered Nikolai Nikolaivitch. ‘To be really scary, I mean?’

‘But they would have
machines
. As we have tanks and planes, they would have robots and killing machines; but inside - they would be only waveforms of poisonous radiation.’

This met with a general agreement.

We sketched their culture, the reasons for their assault, the nature of it. One sticking point was whether we confined the battles to space - announce to the world that Soviet rocket ships had been launched into orbit and were fighting off the foe up there; or whether we should report that aliens had landed.

‘We have agreed to blow up the Ukraine,’ Frenkel reminded us.

‘I assumed that would be a blast from space down to earth,’ said Asterinov.

‘No, no,’ insisted Frenkel. ‘People will not unite if the enemy is too far away. They won’t believe the threat. They must land.’

‘Like H. G. Wells’ Martians,’ said Kaganovich. ‘That would be better.’

‘Gherbert George,’ said Sergei, pouring himself some vodka. ‘Gh-
hh
-herberr Gyorgi.’
¹
But nobody laughed.

‘Comrades, remember,’ said Kaganovich, holding up his hand. ‘Everything we do must ring true! The whole world must believe it!’

‘We will need props,’ said Frenkel. ‘Artefacts. Perhaps theatre professionals, or film makers, can construct devices that would pass inspection as alien technology. We must have film of the fighting.’

‘In the future,’ I put in, ‘who knows what advances there may be in the creation of specialised filmic effects.’

‘And, uniting all the evidence, our narrative of the ongoing struggle.’ Frenkel was heady with the possibility.

‘Cut up and sear together portions of flesh from various animals,’ suggested Kaganovich, eagerly, ‘and present them as slain alien bodies.’

‘You forget,’ chided Sergei. ‘We have agreed our aliens will be incorporeal beings’

‘How are we to kill them if they are incorporeal?’ said Kaganovich.

‘That’s easily arranged,’ Sergei insisted. ‘Make them . . . manifest, from time to time. Say they are linked to their machines, such that by destroying their machines we destroy them. Have them . . . possess certain individuals.’

We jotted it all down, and Asterinov typed it all up, and we filed it away in files.

We ate together, but the conversation did not flow naturally or easily. Often the only sound - I have heard it many times in my life and I have never encountered any other sound
quite
like it - was of people scraping metal bowls with spoons so as to leave no atom or morsel of edible material behind. We were civilised men. We had survived the Great Patriotic War, the severest and most heroic martial test ever endured by human beings. Because we were civilised we did not go so far as to lick our bowls, like dogs. But because we had lived through the war we knew to make the most of our bowls of stew, and not leave scraps or particles of food to waste. Therefore we scraped assiduously.

As he lit a cigarette Sergei said, ‘I will tell you what I think the cause of the uneasiness here is. Mistrust.’

We were all smoking. ‘Some of us are old friends,’ said Ivan Frenkel. He did not say this as if contradicting Sergei, but rather by way of confirming what he had said.

‘I’d like to suggest that we put the mistrust on one side,’ said Sergei. ‘I believe we have all been through - similar experiences. I, for instance, spent half a year being,’ and he took a long draw on his cigarette, ‘re-educated.’

We all looked at him. None of us asked ‘What was your crime?’ But the question was implicit.

‘I wrote a story. It was a simple enough story. There is a peasant called Aleksandr, and his wife, and their six children, and they live in a hovel. And one day Aleksandr meets a witch-spirit in the forest, a creature that takes the form of a great bird with wings of foliage and a green beak. But understand that this is a
good
witch-spirit. And anyhow, the witch-spirit promises Aleksandr that he will have wealth beyond measure if only he performs certain tasks for her - I’ll spare you the various specifics, and the ways I folded over the narrative to make it an appropriate length. Build her a walking house, catch her a talking fish, that sort of thing. Suffice to say, bold Aleksandr successfully performs the tasks, and is told that his fortune is waiting for him at home. Wealth beyond measure, and it’s waiting for him back at home. As he walks through the forest he contemplates all the things that the money will buy him, a fine new dress for his wife, a new house. He thinks, now I can feed and educate my children! Now I am free from worry! That sort of thing. Oh, I had a long passage on this walk through the forest, with some nice Gushenko-style descriptions of the trees reaching up into the sky all around him like limbs of hope, and so on. Anyway he gets home and, instead of finding a pile of gold, he discovers that his peasant wife has given birth to a seventh child. He is about to go crazy in his grief at this betrayal, when he suddenly realises. The witch-spirit has been true to her word, and so on, and so forth, for there is no greater wealth in this world than children. This story was printed in a literary journal called
Gorky
.’