Applause filled the little space like expansive aural foam. It was the concrete manifestation of my own impotent annoyance. I nodded my head like an idiot. Feeling oddly powerless in the face of this public approbation, I turned to find the stairs with the thought of getting away and finding the nearest Metro. The taxi driver, Saltykov, was standing between the exit and me. ‘It was a very interesting talk,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I have to go now.’
‘I insist that you come and meet my friend.’
‘No thank you.’
‘I insist, and so does he. He is American.’
‘I’d prefer to go.’
‘He’s your friend too. That’s what he says.’
In the noise and dark I wasn’t certain I’d heard this correctly. ‘I’m sorry? I don’t know any Americans.’
‘His name,’ said Saltykov, gesturing towards the deepest corner of the basement bar, ‘is James Tilly Coyne. He represents the Church of Scientology.’
A little disoriented, I found myself threading through the crush of humanity two steps behind Saltykov. There was a table fitted snug into an alcove. ‘Please sit down,’ said Saltykov. He nudged me, and I ducked my head to fit under the alcove. In the furthest corner of the recess, nursing a bottle of beer without a glass, sat Dr James Tilly Coyne, US citizen. He beamed at me. ‘An excellent performance,’ he said. In some sense, a way in which I could not quite understand, the disorientation of finding this individual sitting here, in this bar, was connected with the disorientation of sitting with Frenkel in the restaurant earlier that day. They seemed to be aspects of the same disorientation.
Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar. Of course if that were true, you’d think I’d be more comfortable with the sensation.
CHAPTER 6
I sat down. ‘Mr Coyne,’ I said.
‘And how pleasant to meet you again,’ he said.
‘Your Russian is very fluent,’ I said.
‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘But I am poor with contemporary idiom. I like to come to places such as this. This club for example. In part I mean to acquire contemporary idiom. Such things, one cannot learn out of books.’
‘It is almost,’ I said, ‘as if you have no need of an official translator.’
‘That business at the ministry?’ he said, pinching a simulacrum of remorse from his squinnying eyes. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry about that. Will you forgive me?’
‘Is there something to forgive?’
‘We were detained by the authorities,’ he explained. ‘I’ve come to the USSR many times, toing and froing between here and the USA. It is an occupational hazard of such travel that occasionally the authorities become suspicious and detain me. In such circumstances I have learnt it is best to… pretend to be less knowledgeable than actually I am.’
‘I understand.’
‘Wise, wouldn’t you say?’
‘But if you are asking about wisdom,’ I said, ‘you are asking the wrong man.’
Saltykov had reappeared, carrying three bottles of beer. ‘Here you are! I am content to drink beer,’ he added, a little mysteriously. ‘I hope you are too?’
‘I am not thirsty,’ I said. ‘Forgive me if it appears ungrateful on my part.’
‘I drink one beer a day,’ Saltykov explained, seating himself. ‘Always between the hours of six and nine in the evening. Never at any other time, never more than one, and never anything stronger.’
‘I prefer not to drink alcohol at any time.’
‘Mr Konstantin!’ said the American. ‘Are you [teetotal], my friend?’ Then, to Saltykov he added, ‘That’s the English word. I don’t know the Russian equivalent.’
‘There is no Russian equivalent,’ I said in a level voice. ‘It is a concept alien to, and corrosive of, the Russian tongue. But yes, I do not drink. I used to do so. I found myself with a choice: continue drinking; continue breathing. I chose the latter.’
‘You do not drink beer?’ said Saltykov in his prissy voice. ‘Or vodka?’
‘Sometimes I touch tea.’
‘I do not drink vodka either,’ said Saltykov. ‘It is unpleasant stuff. I drink very little, in fact, although I permit myself, as I explained, one bottle of beer between the hours of six and nine.
‘I do believe,’ said James Coyne, beaming, ‘that I am sitting at a table with the only two [teetotallers] in Russia.’
‘Mr Coyne,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better go. I have had a tiring and, indeed, rather confusing day.’
‘Please don’t go just yet,’ said Coyne, sitting forward with a sparkle in his eye. ‘I’m here for one reason only, and that’s to meet with you.’
This, of course, made no sense at all. ‘You’ve come to Russia to meet me?’
He laughed again, with pleasant warmth. ‘That’s right, sir. I’ve come to Russia to meet you.’
‘And so it is that my day gets odder and odder,’ I said. ‘I am a nobody, Mr Coyne, I assure you. I live in a very small flat. I know nobody of any importance, and actually hardly anybody of any kind at all. As the English say, [I eke out a living] as a translator. There’s no reason for my neighbour to cross the hall to meet me; certainly no reason for an American to cross the world for that purpose.’
‘It is a matter of the very greatest importance,’ he said.
‘You are a baffling human being,’ I said. ‘And so are you,’ I added, looking at Saltykov.
‘Me?’ Saltykov returned, looking hurt. ‘Why say that I am baffling? You ought to be more understanding. I,’ he added, ‘have a syndrome.’
‘Syndrome,’ I repeated. ‘What is it?’
‘Do you mean, what is a syndrome,’ he asked. ‘Or do you mean, what particular syndrome do I have? It is important to be precise.’
‘I am guessing that precision is your syndrome,’ I said.
He put his head a little on one side, no more than five degrees. ‘Do you know what? That is quite a good way of putting it! Yes, yes, I like that way of putting it.’
‘I’d say,’ said Coyne, after sizing me up and down, and with what at the time I took for extraordinary prescience (though now, of course, I understand how he was able to know so much about me), ‘that you have a syndrome too, [Mr] Skvorecky.’
‘Do you think so? Not precision, surely.’
‘Not that. I don’t mean to presume.’
‘Presume all you like,’ I said.
‘You were in the war, I suppose?’
‘The Great Patriotic War,’ I said, nodding. ‘But you might guess as much about me from my age.’
‘In America we observe that many survivors of war suffer from a condition called [post-traumatic stress disorder]. You understand the English?’
‘I’ve heard of this disorder,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised you think I suffer from it.’
‘What?’ asked Saltykov, blinking. ‘I didn’t catch the name of the syndrome.’
‘After-trauma stress syndrome,’ I translated.
‘It is often diagnosed in soldiers who have survived a war,’ said Coyne.
‘The war was four decades ago,’ I pointed out.
‘But it was an unusually savage war,’ he returned. ‘It laid its imprint upon you when you were very young. One’s [thetan], which is to say, one’s soul, is more impressionable when one is young.’
‘That is one English word I don’t know.’
‘It is a piece of Scientological terminology.’