Yellow Blue Tibia (6 page)

That day, when I chanced upon Ivan Frenkel again in the street, being monitored by his white-hatted official guard, he was enormously keen that we discuss this matter further. Our strange heated science fictional fantasy was coming true! We must talk about it, my friend. It must be talked about!

‘It seems a strange development,’ I noted. ‘And by strange I suppose I mean - impossible.’

Frenkel winked at me.

This is what I deduced: Frenkel presumably worked in some monitoring station - which was a safe guess, of course, since almost all of the business of government is monitoring. His days were filled with inconsequential chatter, overhearing the mild quotidian treacheries and betrayals of Soviet citizens kvetching and complaining. Given his history in the camps he would not be trusted with classified information. Perhaps it gnawed away at him, his unimportance. Perhaps he dwelled on the day when Stalin himself summoned him - him, Ivan Frenkel, science fiction writer! - to do top secret work of the greatest importance. Perhaps, being old, he blurred together that glorious past and this degraded present in some mental construction. Perhaps he interpreted something he overheard, or read, or came across as evidence that the radiation aliens were massing overhead and readying themselves to come down.

Another man might have felt some pity for an old friend, and indulged him. But I am not another man. I only wished him to go away. I had no interest in his fantasies. The question I ponder now, from my present elevated situation is: Had I known then what I now know - that Frenkel was in effect speaking the truth - would I have been so dismissive? It’s always possible, you see, that I would have been.

Frenkel pulled an official-looking notepad from his breast pocket and scribbled an address on it. ‘This is where I’m working now. There are several good places for lunch in the area.’

‘Your workplace is indeed very central.’

‘Write
your
address on this piece of paper.’

Not wanting to prolong the scene I scribbled something down.

‘Lenin hills?’ said Frenkel, examining what I’d written. ‘That’s a
very
nice area.’

‘Not bad,’ I said.

‘That’s a very nice part of town
indeed
,’ he said, looking me up and down.

I had written down my ex-wife’s address, not mine. I wanted rid of the man, and his peculiar official guard, or monitor, or superior. We embraced, and went our separate ways. I hoped never to see him again. Moreover I can say, as a science fiction writer, that in some alternate reality, some different branching timeline, I never did see him again. You’ll permit me, I hope, the indulgence of pausing here to imagine that eventuality - my consciousness sliding, frictionlessly, from choice to choice, veering left and right at the branching nodes of a billion quantum choices and into a world in which Frenkel and I never met again, and I lived out my life in peaceful, blissful boredom. A world in which I did not endure the sufferings I endured in
this
timeline. A world in which I didn’t die in Chernobyl.

‘The party proceeds from the Marxist-Leninist proposition:
History is made by the People, and Communism is a creation of
the People.’

CHAPTER 3

I shall stand before you now, as narrators used to do in old-fashioned fiction, to relate how the consequences of this story worked themselves out. We had written these aliens, and now they were coming true. You will want to know:
But were they truly?
And not wishing to deceive you I shall say: Yes, they were. (Of course they weren’t! At least, either these stories were literally coming true, or they weren’t. There’s no third option.) In order to explain how this could be, I need first of all to relate two episodes. The first is a meeting I had with two Americans. The other sees me sitting in a restaurant being stung on the neck by a mosquito. It may not be immediately clear to you why these two episodes are so important; but you must trust me that they are, and that if you read on you will understand how and why.

Moscow.

The very cold winter of 1985-6 was on the cusp of changing into a very cold spring, and I was still in the process of getting on with my solitary life. I was queuing for hours every day outside dusty understocked shops, because I had no wife or girlfriend who was prepared to queue on my behalf. I was picking up work where I could find it: jabbing an accusing forefinger over and again at my typewriter to generate, slowly, the Russian version of some foreign document for
Izvestia
; sitting in an airless room with junior trade functionaries and a doleful-looking Cuban factory owner whose English, though execrable, was nevertheless better than his Russian, on a day when no Spanish translator could be obtained. Much of the time I had no work.

One day I was called in to the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange; an annexe of government for whom I occasionally interpreted. It was a dusty, frozen day. I walked into town to save the price of a Metro ticket. An east wind pushed its icy palm against my face, and poured chill down my collar. The sun was shining very brightly. I might describe its light as
sarcastic.

The Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange was housed in an enormous concrete carton of a building on Leningradsky Prospekt. The glass of all the windows on its ground floor was covered in speckles of grit and dirt, as if they had caught grey measles. Its main entrance was an off-the-street alcove that trapped and turned over the wind most effectively. A miniature flurry of airborne jetsam seemed endlessly to be circulating in that space. Antique cigarette ends buzzed at my ankles like cardboard midges.

In I went.

I signed in, and rode the lift to the top of the building where Comrade Polenski himself met me. ‘A real stab in the arse with a dagger, this pair,’ he said.

‘UK?’

‘American.’

I was impressed. I said so. If I had known what was coming - I mean, what these Americans would mean for my life, and for the saving of my nation - I would have been more than impressed.

‘Since Gorbachev,’ Polenski was saying, ‘my desk is
clogged
with Americans eager to visit Moscow.’

‘What do these Americans want? Trade?’

Polenski stopped. He was twenty years my junior, and exactly my height; but since I had been considerably shrunken by age, he appeared somehow more condensed and solider than I. He certainly possessed more pugnacity. ‘What do
they
want? Let me tell you something, you scorch-face bastard. Don’t you worry what
they
want. Worry what
I
want. I’m the one you should worry about. And one of the things I want is for you not to jab me in the arse with a dagger. All right? It may be that you have friends who enjoy being jabbed in the arse, but I am not your friend, and that is not how I choose to spend my time. Yes?’

I looked at my immaculately cleaned and clipped fingertips. ‘Not the arse, comrade. I understand.’

He glowered at me; and then, abruptly, beamed. ‘This must be why I continue to call on your services. Skvorecky,’ he said. ‘You are at least
droll
. You know how many people in this building are droll?’

‘Is there a sub-department in charge of the production of drollery?’

‘Droll isn’t really our governmental style,’ he said. ‘Is my point.’

‘Dictatorship of the drolletariat,’ I said.

His scowl was back. ‘See, sometimes you’re amusing,’ he said, ‘and sometimes you go out of your way to jab me in the arse with a dagger. Come on.’

He took me through to a small windowless room, the walls of which were painted an unpleasant algae-green. Inside was a table, and four chairs, and two of the chairs were occupied with - exotic! -
American
bodies. I was introduced to Dr James Tilly Coyne, US citizen, and also to Ms Dora Norman, US citizen. Had this latter individual been cut into two portions with a horizontal slice at her waist, hollowed out and laminated it would have been possible very comfortably to fit the former individual
inside
her, afterwards replacing the upper element. ‘[I am pleased to meet you both,]’ I said, in English. ‘[My name is Konstantin Skvorecky.]’

‘[It’s
indeed
a pleasure to meet you, sir,]’ said Coyne, shaking my hand. I met his eye. Within twenty-four hours I would be staring at his corpse, lying on the ground wry-necked and with blood coming out of its nose. Poor James Tilly Coyne!

His frame was both short and slight, and his houndlike face was woodgrained with vertical age-lines down his brow and both cheeks. These wrinkles looked, rather mournfully, like the erosion lines of decades of tears. Yet his eyes were lively, and he smiled often. Had I been asked to guess I would have put his age in the sixties; old enough, easily, to be Dora Norman’s father. Despite his age his hair was very dark, though visibly thinning. It lay across the pronounced knobbles of his skull like the lines illustrators carve into metal plates to indicate shading in their engraved pictures.

‘[I am afraid I have exhausted my guidebook Russian on your colleague,]’ said Coyne, with a smile.

The four of us sat down around the table. ‘[He’s no colleague of mine,]’ I said, in English. [I am not a member of this ministry.]’

‘[A civilian?]’

‘[A translator, only. I have no official standing.]’

At this point, Dora Norman intervened. ‘[Mr - Koreshy?]’ Her prodigious jowls quivered as she spoke. ‘[Excuse me, but . . .?]’

‘[Skvorecky, madam.]’

‘[Excuse me,]’ she said again. ‘[But - you have something stuck on the end of your nose. I think it is a piece of paper tissue.]’ She reached out, her hand remarkably small and dainty on its ponderously conic forearm, and brushed the end of my nose with forefinger and thumb. ‘[If you’ll permit me,]’ she said, and had another go at brushing the end of my nose. Her voice was high pitched, but melodious and indeed rather attractive. The bulk of her frame gave her soprano tone the merest hint of a sensual underthrum.

I took hold of her wrist and guided her hand away with as much gentleness as I could. ‘[Madam,]’ I said. ‘[You are kind, but mistaken. It is not paper. It is a small tab of scar tissue. The mark of an old wound. An unfortunate place to have such a thing, I know.]’

‘[Oh my word, I’m sorry,]’ she said, in an alarmed voice. A blush spread across the silk expanse of her neck, passing as rapidly as pink tea suffuses boiling clear water, over the humps of her two chins and spilling colour upwards into her cheeks. This was really quite a pretty effect. ‘[Gracious I’m so
sorry
,]’ she gushed.

‘[It is perfectly all right.]’

‘[I’m
so
sorry! God, em
bar
rassing! God
how
embarrassing! I’m such a fool!]’

‘[Please Mrs Norman, think nothing of it,]’ I said.

‘[Oh God!]‘

[‘Really, I insist.’] I was starting to become embarrassed at her embarrassment.

‘[No - how ridiculously stupid of me. I’m the world’s biggest fool.]’

‘[Believe me,]’ I said, forcing the least convincing smile imaginable from my tight face, ‘[you are very far from being the first person to make that particular mistake. It is after all an unusual place to have scar tissue.]’

‘What are you two saying?’ said Polenski in a suspicious voice. ‘Don’t exclude me. Why is she stroking your face? Are you two flirting, Konsty, you goat?’

‘She mistook the scar on my nose for a piece of tissue paper.’

‘Ha,’ grunted Polenski. ‘Ha!’ He went on in his intermittent, bolting manner of laugher. ‘Haha! Ha! Did she? Ha!’

Polenski’s reaction deepened Norman’s blush. ‘[I apologise, I can’t apologise enough,]’ she said, looking from him to me. ‘[I really am the world’s biggest fool.]’

‘What’s she saying now?’ Polenski wanted to know.