We watched the television news on my shoebox-sized black and white television. I translated for her. The news was still, of course, all about Chernobyl.
‘[The world is coming to an end,]’ I said.
‘[It’s a terrible business,]’ she agreed. ‘[But maybe some good can come out of it. Perhaps people will now be more safety-conscious where nuclear power is concerned.]’
I didn’t reply.
This is what was happening in my head. I was remembering. This is what I remembered. I remembered the engine dying as we were driving in the night. I remembered coasting to a halt, with the headlights spontaneously flashing a code to spies in the surroundings forests and then, alarmingly, going out altogether. None of the electrics in the motor worked. Our passenger shifted awkwardly in his seat, and kept repeating, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know.’ The car rolled more slowly and stopped. On either side forest towered, dark fat trunks going up and shaggy coniferous heads given a metallic sheen by the moonlight. We were quite alone. ‘What’s going on?’
I twisted and twisted at the key in the ignition, to no effect.
Then the moonlight swelled and climaxed, and every window in the taxi was blindingly bright. The light seemed to swirl, to focus into a great patch of even intenser brightness that swung from the left side of the car to the right. The soldier was gasping, and yelping like a little dog. ‘Stay in the car,’ I cried, but there was a rushing waterfalling sound all around and my words fell into it. I could see the young man panicking. I could see the hideous leer of fear distorting his face. He clutched at the door release and hauled it open, as I yelled ‘No! No!’ and tried to seize his arm. But the fool had opened his door, and then he was sucked out with ferocity and vehemence. I had his forearm, but his legs went straight up, and his torso stretched horizontal. His face snapped up towards me terrified, eyes like unshelled boiled eggs, and a weird grunting coming out of his mouth. Then my grip failed and he flew backwards with great speed, as if gravity were abruptly going sideways.
I saw behind the light: a great globe of silver, and great white-bright twisting ropes of light emanating from it. One of them had coiled itself around the soldier’s waist and was—’
‘[What?]’ said Dora.
I blinked at her. ‘[The journey here,]’ I said. ‘[I can’t believe I’d forgotten! Now I remember! I am remembering now. The soldier…]’
‘[We dropped him at his friend’s house,]’ she said.
The whole bright-lit fantasy sublimed away from my brain. None of the other stuff had happened, it was true. There had been no dead engine, or bright lights: we had simply pulled up at a tall shuttered house and the soldier had hopped out. ‘[I,]’ I said, momently disoriented. ‘[I don’t think…]’
‘[Oh I know,]’ she said. ‘[It was a house of ill repute.]’ She laughed. ‘[I’m not so innocent as all that!]
It was true. We had pulled up. He had leapt out. He had evidently forgotten all about his kitbag, because he had had other, carnal things on his mind. There was no question of us waiting around for him. ‘I can make my own way to Moscow from here,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I shall see you, comrades. I shall see you.’
And I had driven on. Shortly, feeling the exhaustion of the long drive catching up with my elderly brain, I had pulled over to nap. Everything else had been — something else. It had swarmed up in my brain like a schizophrenia. But it was sucked away and extinguished in the presence of Dora. Everything Frenkel had said in the park, after killing poor old Saltykov: the allure of this mass fantasy of UFOs; this materialisation of the old religious impulse, this relocation of gods and demons into the spaces between the stars — it all fell back into a proper perspective when I was with Dora. She made me sane again. And that was only one reason, and not the least of them, why I was in love with her.
CODA
‘We have built a new society, the kind of society mankind had never known. And, finally, there is Soviet man, the most important product of the past 60 years.’
I started with Frenkel, and will end with him. This is the part where the red-haired man shoots me through the heart; the inevitable coda. Death can be postponed, perhaps, but not evaded.
I took Dora for a ride on the famous Moscow Metro. We got off and ascended outside the American embassy, and I waited with her in the antechamber. The embassy officials were very agitated to meet her — excited, they assured her, and delighted. They’d reported her as missing; and the death of James Coyne, quite apart from creating an enormous stir in certain circles, had made everybody fearful for her safety. Her family and friends would be delighted to discover she was all right. Her whole country would.
She was taken away. She said she was happy staying with me in my flat, but the authorities lodged her in embassy accommodation and — I believe — flew her out of Moscow the following day. The exact nature of Coyne’s nuclear business, presumably rendered more acutely sensitive by the events at Chernobyl, facilitated the rapidity and secrecy of her exit.
The last thing she said to me was a promise that she would be in touch as soon as she could. I did not know whether I would ever see her again.
But I could hope.
Rather than go straight home I took a walk through the centre of the enormous, populous city in which I had been born and in which I had spent most of my life. I wandered like a tourist. Wasn’t the city full of beauty, and youth, though, that morning? Wasn’t it though? The sunlight, perhaps, had scared away the crones and the wrinkled old retainers; the rising sap had driven out the natural Russian reticence of the courting couples. There was a superfluity of youth: infatuated young girls in headscarfs lolling on the arms of solid-limbed, blunt-faced young men; athletic females, witchy, pale-faced males, walking serious-faced together; the glibness of youth, the cleanness of youth, the innocent ferocity of youth. I had been young in the first half of the 1940s, when youth had existed as expensive filler for ditches and shell-holes, as the cement between two nations coming together like bricks squashed in the wall. It was wonderful, and peculiar, to see such unreaped harvests of youth. And always amongst them, moving, as the red-spiny stickleback headbutts the clear flowing waters and worms his way upstream, is death.
The front of my skull throbbed. I was wholly without anxiety, because, after all, I had lost the capacity for anxiety.
‘Come along,’ said the red-haired man, burlying up against me. He was wearing a jacket, into which his right arm was tucked, Napoleon-style — he had a gun in there, of course.
‘You have followed me from the American embassy.’
‘I think you mean to say,’ the red-haired man hissed, ‘you again? Isn’t that what you mean to say?’
‘I can say that if you prefer.’
‘You didn’t think,’ he said, coming closer still, to impress upon me that he did indeed have a pistol, ‘that you’d seen the last of me? Did you?’ He smelt, a little, of soap. Since my sense of smell is very poor, I suppose that means that, in fact, he smelt strongly of soap. But of course he was clean! Death is the cleanest thing of all.
‘You were lucky in Kiev,’ he said. ‘But your luck runs out here. Here is where it all ends for you, comrade.’