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He stood up. ‘One thing we don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how you got to Kiev.’

‘How did I get to Kiev?’ He was asking me a question about memory, and my memory was still clumsy. ‘How?’

‘From Moscow. Somehow you slipped out of Moscow. Frenkel had men at the stations, and the airport, you know. Watching for you.’

‘I drove,’ I said, prompted to the statement by something. I couldn’t have told you where the memory came from. Mumbling in the dark. I could smell fresh bread. There was somebody else there.

‘You drove? You own a car?’

‘I was driven.’ The memory bulged against the membrane of my mind, and threatened to burst through. Then it receded. You’ve had that experience: where you think something is going to come vomiting up, but then recedes. ‘Or did I drive myself? I can’t remember.’

‘Nobody drives from Moscow to Kiev. Don’t be silly. What do you think we have trains for?’ He fitted his hat more securely to his head and left the room.

I never learnt his name. His subordinate, also in uniform, came in as he went out; and I dictated a statement to the effect that there are no such things as UFOs. This, I signed. It was nothing but the truth, after all. There are no such things as UFOs. Except in the imagination of such people as science fiction writers.

How many days passed? I don’t know, exactly. A number of days. The tap was removed from the side of my head, and a simple bandage placed there. My hair, where it had been shaved away, was growing back itchy and bristly.

I practised a great deal with my right side: moving my right arm, flexing my right fist. It felt stiff, as though with cold. But I could at least move it.

With the nurse’s help I climbed from my bed. I walked to the window, and I walked back from the window. ‘Very good,’ I was told. ‘You should have seen me,’ I gasped, ‘when I walked to the door to lock it. Now, that was a walk.’

‘We are keen to discharge you,’ said Dr Bello. ‘A nurse or security officer must sit on a chair outside your room all day and all night. It is an onerous duty we have to discharge.’

‘I can only apologise for being so difficult a patient,’ I told her.

‘Why waste energy on apologising that you could use getting well? Once you are well you can remove yourself from the hospital. Then you will cease to be our problem.’

‘And, by way of after-care?’

‘As for that, well you can tend for yourself,’ said Dr Bello. ‘That is to say,’ she added, turning away, ‘you can take your place in the supportive bosom of the united nations of Soviet peoples.’

‘A comforting thought indeed,’ I said.

‘You could be more grateful,’ said Dr Bello, mildly. ‘You are lucky to have survived.’

‘It is a convention of science fiction,’ I said, ‘that each reality is shadowed by alternate realities, every history has a variant alternate history. In such alternatives, I doubt whether I did survive. My alternate history stops at page number two hundred.’

‘Page two hundred? And when did you meet me?’

‘Round about page two hundred and twenty.’

‘So your novel ended even before I met you. Still,’ said Dr Bello, getting to her feet, ‘I find the endings of novels to be the best parts; so an ending that comes more quickly is probably to be preferred.’

I gave three separate reports to Militia officers, and two, in total, to representatives of the KGB, but I fear these reports — filed, somewhere, I suppose, to this day — differ markedly from one another. I was not attempting to mislead the authorities, but my memory was gappy: bubbles of pure-lit clarity rising through a fog-coloured sea. Specific stimuli might trigger new memories to pop up, which would in turn leave me slightly bewildered.

‘You just sit there and look at Trofim,’ said Frenkel, leaning over me.

It was dark. Therefore it was night. I did not recognise his voice. I did not recognise his voice. Then, abruptly, I recognised his voice and I woke up with a jolt. ‘But how are you here?’

He had a torch in his left hand and he threw the light from this into my sleepy eyes, as he might throw sand or dust. But I did not need to make out his features from in amongst the knot of shadows; I remembered his voice, and with his voice I remembered everything about him. ‘I met a senior KGB officer,’ I told him, ‘who said you were under internal investigation.’

‘Leo, keep your eyes on his eyes.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said, with a gummy mouth. Then I said, ‘There’s supposed to be somebody outside my door. I’m supposed to have a guard, day and night. I hope you haven’t killed them.’

‘I’m invisible. You cannot see me. Fast asleep,’ said Frenkel. I remember thinking this was silly of him: speaking like a hypnotist. That wasn’t going to do him any good. I have never believed in hypnotism. It’s mere stage performance, like card tricks and sawing the woman in—

Sawing the woman in.

Sawing the woman. Something about the woman.

‘Hold still,’ said Frenkel, crossly.

There was something enormously important about the woman. What woman?

‘You’re going to kill me, obviously,’ I said, distractedly. ‘The guard on the door will be embarrassed when he wakes in the morning.’

‘I’m invisible,’ said Frenkel, in a soothing voice,

‘To find that I was killed in the night, when they were supposed to be guarding me.’

I felt a dry hand on the back of my neck, as Frenkel reached round. An old man’s parchmenty palm. The blaze of electric light filled my eyes. I couldn’t see anything except the light. ‘You are calm,’ said Frenkel. I took him to mean: in the face of your impending extinction.

‘The nature of the injury I have suffered in my brain,’ I told him, ‘is such that it has taken the anxiety from contemplating the future.’

‘You haven’t suffered your brain injury yet,’ said Frenkel. This struck me as an oddly disconnected thing to say. I pondered the words, but as I pondered them I found I couldn’t be sure that Frenkel had even said them. But if Frenkel hadn’t said them, where had they come from?

There was a jab at the back of my neck. A mosquito bite.

I yelped, more in surprise than pain. I cannot say whether I believed that this sensation was that of a stiletto bursting in between my vertebrae, or only a mosquito bite.

‘You won’t remember,’ said Frenkel.

This struck me after the fashion of a challenge. ‘I’ll remember if I want to,’ I returned. The torch flickered in front of my face. I still couldn’t make out Frenkel’s face. Then, for a horrible moment, I thought I did see a face, but the face I thought I saw was Trofim’s. Trofim’s huge bovine face floating directly in front of me: as if he were sitting across the bed from me. I do not believe in ghosts, as I believe I have mentioned before; but this was startling. ‘I can remember anything I want to!’ I cried, in a wavery voice.

‘You won’t remember,’ Frenkel said again. It was certainly Frenkel’s voice. I could hear it very distinctly.

‘I remember you,’ I said, defiantly. ‘I remember you exactly. I remember meeting Josef Stalin.’ Did I remember that? In the dark I seemed to hear Trofim muttering Joe-SF, Joe-SF. There was a stutter inside my brain. ‘I remember driving from Moscow in a car, in the back of a car with…’