‘There,’ said the policeman. ‘It turns out you are radioactive.’
‘Not badly?’
‘Badly enough to prevent me taking you into custody, I’m pleased to say. You can turn it off now,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘and replace it in the cabinet. Your nurses and doctors may need to avail themselves of it.’ He got to his feet. ‘Comrade, the Ukrainian Militia is content to leave you in this secure medical facility.’
I spent ten minutes manoeuvring my legs out of the bed, and another fifteen leaning against the wheeled crutch of my drip-rack, two fluid-heavy sacs swinging like an old man’s pendulous testicles (ballbag? I thought; and understood that this was a memory too, although I wasn’t sure how it related to the others). With infinite attention I made my way over to the window. My joints seemed to squeak. Or else the wheels on the drip-rack squeaked. It was one of the two, certainly. And here was the window. I looked through it. There was a courtyard, and standing in the courtyard, three floors below me, were three nurses: two female nurses and one male nurse. They were smoking, talking. One had her back to me: a plump and cornfed foreshortened torso, from my perspective, upon which the manmade fabric of her uniform stretched and wrinkled. This chimed, somehow, deep inside me. She had flame-coloured hair. The other female had hair the colour of black coffee, and a wide-faced, wide-hipped loveliness. She was laughing. And every now and again she threw a great bale of smoke over her left shoulder like a worker clearing spectral snow with an invisible shovel. As I watched, the male nurse — casually and with no reaction of shock or outrage from either woman — reached out and squeezed the breast of the brunette. His face was animated, but he was not looking at the woman he was pawing. Perhaps he was telling a story, and this was illustrating it. I was struck by how strange an action it was.
They finished their smokes and went in. There was nothing in the yard now except a stone bench, and some runty bushes, and a deal of litter on paving stones: spent cigarettes, old cartons, rubbish.
I looked over the roof at the sky: a cold-looking, hazed white. The sun was there, diluted by the cover of clouds. I looked and the sun seemed to be shivering in the sky. The motion disturbed me, because, after all, the sun is the stable point around which the world moves, and everybody knows that. And if we know that the sun herself moves too — as perhaps she does, on some larger galactic pavanne, then we need not trouble ourselves with it. But to shimmer in the sky? It was as if the sun was struggling in harness. Then I put my hand to my face and understood that it was my head that was trembling; and that when I looked down again at the courtyard with my trembly eyeballs it too seemed to quake like the terrors were in it.
‘What are you doing?’ said my nurse, in a sharp voice.
‘I was watching you lark about downstairs,’ I replied. Except that the words did not come out of my mouth coherently. My mouth did not seem to be working properly. I considered: it seemed likely I’d said nothing at all except inarticulate gurgles.
‘What’s that, old man?’ said the fellow, kindly, taking my weight, sliding an arm under my right armpit. ‘Come on, back to bed with you.’
I felt dizzy. There was a purple-edged tint to familiar things. I could smell a certain smell, and after a while I recognised it as the smell of a certain bunker where, in 1941, I had spent five weeks in close company with half a dozen men. It was the smell of male body-stink and cordite and dust. I could smell it now, although the only scent my male nurse exuded was one of soap. And although by the time I was back on the bed the smell had changed to one of roasting nuts. Not any old nuts, but particular nuts roasting on a brazier on the corner of Market Square, on a winter’s morning in the days after the civil war. My grandfather was leading me along, and my breath was steamtraining out of my mouth in a most delightful way. I was a young boy, and it was a joy to me to pretend to be a steam train. My grandfather was telling me that the civil war was over, and how glad we must be. ‘Our war is over now,’ he told me, ‘but in England it will shortly begin, and in all the other countries too.’ ‘Can I have some chestnuts?’ I pleaded. I was, I don’t know, ten years old. ‘Will you go back to England now that the war is over?’ I asked. ‘I’m Russian now,’ he said. ‘I’m Russian as all Russia.’
The man selling the chestnuts was Death.
Alone of all the people in the busy square he was hatless, and he was pale as summer clouds, and skinny as unfleshed bones. He was selling chestnuts. His hair was red as firelight, and his skin was a blank, and his eyes were black, so that they looked deeper and deader than human eyes. As we made our way over I became scared. ‘It’s Death,’ I told my grandfather. ‘It’s Death.’ And grandfather, his accent becoming more pronounced as it often used to do when he was angry, rebuked me. ‘Don’t be silly. He’s a respectable Russian selling chestnuts, and you’ll not insult him with such childishness.’ But I didn’t want to go any closer, and held back, and tugged at my grandfather’s coat.
‘Come along old man,’ said the nurse, and at his words, as at a magic spell, the hallucination vanished from my eyes and my nose. ‘Come along old man, what you want to be wandering about for? You’re as white as milled flour.’
I awoke, suddenly, and there was sweat all on me. It was cold on my skin. It was the middle of the night. I could not lie there. If there is one thing the Great Patriotic War taught me, it was not to lie there. The ones who lay down, though only to catch their breath, or only to rest their wound for a moment — those were the ones who died. You had to keep going. No matter what. No matter what. Not that it mattered. No matter what. Not, I told myself, that it mattered. I was not anxious about going on. It was a matter of simple will. I had to speak to — I couldn’t remember who. She was somewhere in Kiev — I did not know where, but I must find her.
Her?
I had no memory of any her. And yet that lack of memory felt like a palpable absence, as if I should have such a memory.
I woke up again, with no memory of the intervening time. I did not feel very comfortable. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the wall. They were hauling me upright. They were hospital staff. It was daytime, and spring light was printing a sharp, new trapezoid on the wall beside my bed. There were two nurses, and they were picking me up, and tutting me. They fussed me back to bed, and reinserted the drip, and wiped me up and then the doctor was there. ‘Mr Skvorecky,’ she said. ‘I must ask you to remain in your bed. If you persist in getting out of it, I really cannot be answerable for your recovery.’
‘I should like to make a phone call,’ I said.
‘Follow your doctor’s orders,’ she replied, ‘and in a day or two that might be possible.’ She had the Geiger counter in her hand, and was running it over me. It tutted disapprovingly, although intermittently.
‘Perhaps you could forward a message for me?’ I asked.
‘To whom?’
‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’
‘That is going to make it hard to deliver the message.’
‘I know — I appreciate that. I think there was somebody in the reactor with me. I wish I could tell you more about him, but I’m afraid I don’t remember, exactly. Except that it is very important I communicate with him, for some reason.’
Dr Bello sighed. ‘I shall be honest, Mr Skvorecky. The Militia seem curiously uncertain about your status, which is to say, as to whether they have or have not taken you under arrest. Although they are certain that they have further questions for you.’