This was my turning point.
Now: I continued drinking through this period of convalescence, but only because I reasoned that drying myself out would require greater physical strength than a sick man possesses. I was right, too. And, true to my resolution, I stopped drinking as soon as my skin had puckered itself into its taut and tucked version of its former self — the face I wear to this day. I can speak without vanity and say that I do not, in fact, look too bad: my chin possesses a strange texture, and my beard now only grows on my neck (which I shave), but otherwise I mostly escaped this adventure without blemish. There is one exception, and that is the end of my nose. The skin on the end of my nose was burned raw, and the doctors covered its exposed gristle with a not very delicately handled skin graft: a circle from the inside of my forearm, skin of a very different texture to the normal skin of a nose. It looked, and looks to this day, as though I have something stuck to my nose. Strangers sometimes tell as much — ‘Comrade, there’s a sticking plaster on your… oh, I’m sorry’ — ‘Friend, is that a shred of tissue paper caught on the end of your… ? My apologies.’
Without alcohol to pass the time, or to distract me from the idiocy of my friends and companions, I fell into a different mode of living. I became, I suppose, grumpier and more reclusive. But at least I approached my sixtieth birthday alive. That was more than Rapoport had managed, for he disappeared into a camp in the wilderness under the rubric of ‘political dissident’, and was never heard from again. Adam Kaganovich died of a heart attack at fifty-seven. He had managed to stay out of trouble with the authorities, and had maintained his writing career; although it would be more precise to say that he had preserved his writing career by dedicating it entirely to staying out of trouble with the authorities, and none of the watery propaganda pieces he generated throughout the fifties and sixties are worth the cheap paper upon which they are printed. By the early eighties, though, his sheer longevity meant that he began to be celebrated by Russian fans of science fiction. There were conventions at which he was the guest of honour. When he died (in a Kiev hotel room, guest of honour at another convention) the papers ran complimentary obituaries.
As for the others: I lost all contact with Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. He was a fellow Muscovite, and therefore I might have expected to encounter him around or about the city, so perhaps the fact that I lost contact with him meant that he was dead. Of course, Moscow is a large city. But there are reasons, on which I shall touch later, for believing him dead all the same. As for Frenkel… well, in the camps, where gossip is the freest currency prisoners possess, I sometimes heard news. I heard that ‘Jan Frenkel’, the name under which he had been charged, had been sent to a camp in the furthest Siberian east. Some months later I heard he had been transferred to a specialist prison in Moscow. Some months after that I heard that he had been executed, on Stalin’s personal orders. So that was that.
But that wasn’t that. The gossip had got it wrong, for I met Ivan Frenkel, by chance, as it seemed, one winter morning early in 1986, walking along Prospekt Vernadskovo. More to the point he met me, for I (my eyes not being what they were) didn’t recognise him at first. He had aged well; his figure was still trim and muscular, and his face not excessively lined. He was dressed in a calf-long and expensive-looking black coat and was wearing a hat of bright blue fur. He was walking along in the company of a tall young man whose fur hat was a more decent white colour. And there he was, in the flesh, in the material mundane flesh, yelling out in a fierce voice:
‘Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky! As I live and breathe!’
Then I remembered him. ‘Ivan?’
He clasped both my shoulders and looked straight at my face. ‘By all that’s astonishing, comrade, I can hardly believe that I have met you here, on this day! What a strange luck to bring us together like this, by chance, after all these years!’
Even from the beginning I registered the strangeness in him emphasising the chance of our meeting at such length. But I only said, ‘I heard that you were dead.’
He took me to one side, out of the hearing of his tall young companion. ‘Comrade, you understand that gossip isn’t always a reliable thing.’
‘Indeed.’ I nodded at the other fellow. ‘And?’
‘Professional acquaintance.’ Frenkel nudged me a little further away from him, and then whispered, ‘It’s the most extraordinary chance meeting you like this. Konstantin, listen to me. I work for the government now.’ I understood then that the tall man in the white hat was by way of being a guard, or jailer, or minder: that his job was keeping an eye on Frenkel. Whichever government department would employ Frenkel, in whatsoever menial capacity, might well want to keep an eye on him; he had after all been in the camps.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘In a minor ministry, a minor position.’ He came closer to me. His breath did not smell pleasant. ‘Listen!’ He lowered his voice. It was the most extraordinary pantomime of secrecy. ‘Do you remember our time in the dacha? After the end of the Patriotic War, do you remember our meeting with Stalin?’
‘I remember very particularly being told not to remember it.’
‘Ah, how could we forget, though?’
‘I understand that vodka is one popular method.’
‘Those were great times!’
‘I try to resist parcelling time into good and bad. After all, from a scientific perspective one minute is exactly like another minute.’
‘Rapoport and Kaganovich are both dead, you know,’ said Frenkel. ‘As for Asterinov — nobody’s heard from him in years. He’s probably dead too. You and I are the only ones left.’
‘Really?’
‘What do you think of that?’
‘I suppose it’s a salubrious mental discipline to reflect upon mortality,’ I observed. ‘I believe the philosophers recommend it.’
‘You don’t understand! You don’t understand what I’m saying! Listen — didn’t you hear me when I said I worked for the government?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never mind that! Say I’m lowly. But perhaps I have stumbled across… something remarkable.’
‘When a governmental employee says something,’ I observed, ‘it is usually a good idea to check whether you’re supposed to listen or not before hearing it.’
‘That story we concocted,’ said Ivan. ‘You remember?’
‘It was a long time ago, comrade,’ I said, wearily, feeling suddenly sick of the whole conversation, and Frenkel’s peculiar eagerness — and, I suppose, of life itself.
‘We could be the only two people left alive who remember it!’
‘Or,’ I offered, ‘we could be two more of the great mass who have no idea about it.’
‘You don’t understand!’ He glanced over his shoulder once again at his minder. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying! Let’s say I’ve happened to become privy to a certain secret, state secret. It has to do with the particular department in which I clerk. Let’s say I am — privy — to one of the most secret of state secrets.’
‘If you are, then please don’t tell me.’
‘What if I were to say to you…
‘Putting every sentence you utter in the conditional mode like this,’ I interrupted, ‘inoculates neither of us from potentially evil consequences.’