‘Since boasting requires breath,’ I said, pretending to calculate an answer, ‘and since meeting Stalin usually preceded the confiscation of that very quality…’
‘Fuck you, Konsty. I’m not your enemy. Don’t make me out to be your enemy. You could help me, if you chose to. You could perform a life-saving service for the Soviet Union, if you’d only work with me and stop fighting me.’
I looked at him. I felt enormously weary. ‘I’ve decided,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Jumping off a bridge in front of a river cruiser with a rope around my neck,’ I said. ‘To make assurance doubly sure.’
‘Fucker,’ said Frenkel.
‘Shakespeare,’ I corrected.
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Frenkel began laughing. ‘Do you know what, Konstantin? Do you know what?’
‘What is only one of a great many things I do not know.’
‘I’m not used to this. I’m a senior figure, comrade. I’m KGB, you understand? When I talk to people they’re almost always polite and deferential.’
‘Almost always?’
He waved this away. ‘Oh, sometimes I speak to my superiors. They’re usually curt. But this… bantering! It makes a change, I can tell you.’
‘I don’t think you’re right,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘About Communism being government by old men. Revolution is a newness coming into the world. Revolution is a continual youth, the resurgence and eternal youth of mankind.’
‘Comrade,’ he said, and again his hand came up, only this time it was to my shoulder. ‘You’re an old man.’
‘So are you.’
‘Exactly! Who knows better how to run a country? The young have crazy ideas. They have absurd, destructive energy. But the old have — wisdom. Which quality is better for governance? Don’t answer, I’m being rhetorical. Besides, you misunderstand the logic of Revolution. Revolution is the manifestation of historical necessity. It is the coming-into-the-world of inevitable historical consequences. History is old. History is an old man. What’s older than history?’
‘Death,’ I said.
But Frenkel wasn’t in a mood to be metaphysical. ‘History is the oldest man there is. That’s what Communism says. That’s what Marx says, if you boil him down. He says: You can’t escape history. You can’t avoid him, or trick him, or bribe him. He rules. That’s all. The capitalists think they’ve overthrown history, they think history has come to an end and there is no history. They think there’s only money. But they’re fooling themselves. History can’t be escaped. History doesn’t care for youth, or money, or fancy clothes. History is the tyrant that makes rulers like Stalin look weak and benign.’
‘Speaking personally,’ I said, ‘my interpretation of Marx sees him as being more dialectical and less monolithic.’
At this Frenkel laughed loudest of all. ‘Your personal interpretation of Marx!’ he repeated, and I was unsure whether he was amused by the fact that anybody actually read Marx, or by the notion that it was possible to have a personal perspective on a figure so marmoreal.
The car pulled up by the side of the road. Frenkel shifted in his seat the better to look straight at me. ‘Tell me what he said,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘I will ask you the question once,’ said Frenkel. ‘I shall even ask it twice. But thrice I will not ask.’
“‘Thrice”?’ I repeated, unable to keep the incredulous tone from my voice.
‘Quiet! You hear? Be quiet! I want to hear you answer the question, not banter with me.’
‘I understand, comrade. Nevertheless, as one writer to another, I must query thrice.’
‘Trofim — put a gun in his ear.’
The huge fellow swivelled, a little awkwardly, in his seat at the front of the car, and glowered at me. He did not look comfortable. ‘I’m not sure I can manage the ear, sir,’ he said in a slow voice.
‘What?’
‘Unless Comrade Skvorecky turns his head? Otherwise the angle is not correct. Perhaps the eye?’
‘The eye then! I don’t care! Menace him, you idiot!’
With an impressively fluid gesture for so large a man Trofim unholstered his pistol and reached round the back of the seat in which he was sitting. His left hand grasped my neck and held it in place; and with his right hand he pressed the end of the muzzle against my left eye. Naturally I tried to flinch backwards, but Trofim held me firm, with an insulting ease. His reach was long enough for this to be no effort for him. He possessed arms a gorilla might have envied for length, muscularity and, I daresay, hairiness. My head was pressed against the upholstery of my seat, and the gun was digging against my eye. This was very far from comfortable. I put my hands up, on reflex, and wrapped my fingers about Trofim’s left wrist, where his hand had fixed my neck, but it availed me nothing. He was much too strong for me.
‘Now that we have your attention,’ said Frenkel. ‘You fucking ironist. You went for a walk with Coyne. The American. You are now going to tell me exactly what he said to you.’
‘Gladly, comrade,’ I said, in a slightly strangulated voice. ‘I have just given the Militia a complete transcript, and am happy to do the same for the KGB.’
‘Fuck you, Konsty,’ said Ivan. ‘What did you tell the police? I’ll have Trofim scoop your skull out and feed your brains to your wife.’
‘My ex-wife,’ I said. ‘She might be less distressed by the scooping than you imagine.’
‘Quiet! Fucking be quiet!’
The pain in my eye was sharp, like a migraine. ‘I’ll be quiet.’
‘What did you tell the police?’ Frenkel was yelling at me. ‘You fucker, what did you tell them?’
‘I told them what happened,’ I gasped. ‘I was walking with Coyne. That’s what I told them. He seemed to think I was privy to a plan, although I assured him I wasn’t. That gun is hurting my eyeball.’
‘Where? Did he tell you where?’
‘He said aliens were going to attack a nuclear reactor,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to worry I’ll lose the sight in that eyeball.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, but did he tell you where?’
‘Lithuania,’ I improvised. ‘He said it was connected to the ghost rockets after the war. I think he believed it, too.’
Frenkel, I was relieved to see, accepted this. ‘Better!’ He sank back into his seat. ‘I like you when you’re cooperative, Konstantin Andreiovich. You can do one more thing for me, to prove that you are in a properly cooperative mood. Or perhaps I should let Trofim squeeze the eyeball right out with his gun.’
‘That wouldn’t be my preference.’
‘Tell me where the woman is. The American woman.’
Suddenly the gun was taken out of my eyeball, a very relieving sensation, although it left my vision scattered and lanced across with weird neon cobwebs and blobs of light. I rubbed at the eye with the heel of my hand, which didn’t help particularly but seemed the thing to do. Trofim had reholstered his weapon.
‘Where is she?’ Frenkel asked me again, sitting forward to be able to turn his head and look properly at me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know?’ This answer infuriated him. He flung himself back against the seat and bounced forward. The car rocked on its suspension. ‘Give me the pistol! Give it to me, Trofim.’
The weapon was handed back.