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  ‘You forget,’ chided Sergei. ‘We have agreed our aliens will be incorporeal beings’

  ‘How are we to kill them if they are incorporeal?’ said Kaganovich.

  ‘That’s easily arranged,’ Sergei insisted. ‘Make them . . . manifest, from time to time. Say they are linked to their machines, such that by destroying their machines we destroy them. Have them . . . possess certain individuals.’

  We jotted it all down, and Asterinov typed it all up, and we filed it away in files.

  8

  We ate together, but the conversation did not flow naturally or easily. Often the only sound - I have heard it many times in my life and I have never encountered any other sound quite like it - was of people scraping metal bowls with spoons so as to leave no atom or morsel of edible material behind. We were civilised men. We had survived the Great Patriotic War, the severest and most heroic martial test ever endured by human beings. Because we were civilised we did not go so far as to lick our bowls, like dogs. But because we had lived through the war we knew to make the most of our bowls of stew, and not leave scraps or particles of food to waste. Therefore we scraped assiduously.

  As he lit a cigarette Sergei said, ‘I will tell you what I think the cause of the uneasiness here is. Mistrust.’

  We were all smoking. ‘Some of us are old friends,’ said Ivan Frenkel. He did not say this as if contradicting Sergei, but rather by way of confirming what he had said.

  ‘I’d like to suggest that we put the mistrust on one side,’ said Sergei. ‘I believe we have all been through - similar experiences. I, for instance, spent half a year being,’ and he took a long draw on his cigarette, ‘re-educated.’

  We all looked at him. None of us asked ‘What was your crime?’ But the question was implicit.

  ‘I wrote a story. It was a simple enough story. There is a peasant called Aleksandr, and his wife, and their six children, and they live in a hovel. And one day Aleksandr meets a witch-spirit in the forest, a creature that takes the form of a great bird with wings of foliage and a green beak. But understand that this is a good witch-spirit. And anyhow, the witch-spirit promises Aleksandr that he will have wealth beyond measure if only he performs certain tasks for her - I’ll spare you the various specifics, and the ways I folded over the narrative to make it an appropriate length. Build her a walking house, catch her a talking fish, that sort of thing. Suffice to say, bold Aleksandr successfully performs the tasks, and is told that his fortune is waiting for him at home. Wealth beyond measure, and it’s waiting for him back at home. As he walks through the forest he contemplates all the things that the money will buy him, a fine new dress for his wife, a new house. He thinks, now I can feed and educate my children! Now I am free from worry! That sort of thing. Oh, I had a long passage on this walk through the forest, with some nice Gushenko-style descriptions of the trees reaching up into the sky all around him like limbs of hope, and so on. Anyway he gets home and, instead of finding a pile of gold, he discovers that his peasant wife has given birth to a seventh child. He is about to go crazy in his grief at this betrayal, when he suddenly realises. The witch-spirit has been true to her word, and so on, and so forth, for there is no greater wealth in this world than children. This story was printed in a literary journal called Gorky.’

  ‘A fine story,’ said Asterinov, twining his fingers in his black beard and tugging at the hairs.

  ‘Six months in prison, that tale,’ said Sergei.

  ‘Was it the witch?’ I asked ‘I never know where the Party stands on issues of the supernatural. In one sense, clearly, any ghost or spirit at all is contrary to the principles of dialectical materialism. So putting one in a story could be asking for trouble. But, then again, ghost stories have a rich proletarian tradition. So perhaps not putting one in a story could be seen as bourgeois affectation, and insulting to the people.’

  ‘I’m guessing it wasn’t the spirits,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch Kaganovich in a confident voice. ‘I’m betting you couldn’t keep the sneer out of your voice when you were talking about the peasant children. Did you call them brats? Did you imply that they were brats?’

  ‘The emphasis on the importance of having children for the greater glory of the Motherland was, I thought, the most politically correct part of the whole thing,’ Sergei replied, dourly. ‘That was how I hoped to curry favour! The tale was, in effect, an exhortation to breed. What could be more patriotic? But, no, it wasn’t that. It was - understand, I don’t know for sure, I heard this at second- or third-hand, but - it was the walk through the forest. Apparently I was just that bit too convincing in my representation of a poor man’s yearning for money. Money, comrades? Do we need money? No, comrades.’

  ‘Money’s no good without a life in which to spend it,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch.

  ‘Six months,’ said Sergei. ‘I spent as long as that on a military punishment detail.’

  That pulled us up short. Prison is one thing; but military punishment quite another.

  ‘I was fighting on the Volga,’ said Sergei, ‘at Stalingrad. And in one engagement we surged forward, we the Red Army. I had a rifle, but I lost it. Rifles were very precious, comrades, and to lose one was a sentence of death, no question. To go out with a rifle and come back without one? Cowardice. Criminal incompetence. Orders were very clear. But I lost it anyway, when my group was trapped in a street by machine-gun fire. A thousand hammer-claws pounding out at my vulnerable body. I ran. But then my wits came back to me, and I thought about what would happen if I went back without a rifle. So I loitered in the battlefield, and tried to pick up another rifle. It wasn’t easy, because some of the troops had been sent in without any weaponry at all, and they were looking for guns too. So I struggled with two other Russian soldiers like rats over a piece of meat for the rifle held in the hands of a dead boy. No more than nineteen, I’d say, that boy. But dead, so I suppose you could say he was very old. I suppose nobody gets any older than dead. He was missing a portion of his head. There were three of us, and I was a fierce fighter but one of the others was fiercer yet - you must understand, this took place in the very midst of the battle, bullets screeching, mortars exploding to the left and right, great spurting clouds and rushes of dust and screaming and the horrible thunder-noise of planes overhead. The Germans milled that town finer than flour. A building was blown up, not far from us, and I got pieces of brick in my flesh; I was still picking out shards of tile and brick a month later. There were,’ he stopped and stared at the light. ‘Lots of bodies,’ he went on, shortly. ‘Anyway, this other soldier took the weapon and ran off with it, and I chased him. I was a little insane. There was a masonry dust all over us, so that we were white figures, pure white all over, clothes and skin, and with every step I put down as I ran white clouds like ectoplasm spouted from my boots and my trousers and my jacket. Anyway, this other one tripped over something, and fell and in falling he dropped the rifle. I picked it up, and when I looked behind me I saw that he had not tripped. I saw on the contrary that he had been shot. So I thought, maybe Providence wants me to have this rifle. After that I met up with some other soldiers, and fought with them for a while. I killed Germans. And when we fell back, I had my rifle with me. But, you know what? The boy, from whom it had been taken, the boy who had been lying on the ground with a portion of his head missing, had been called Sergei. Just like me! The same name! It is as if he were my alter ego! So. Do you know how I know this? How I know what the boy’s name was? Because he had scratched his name on the butt, SERGEI. Providence, indeed. My captain saw this, and was outraged. The rifle is not your personal property, Sergei Pavlovich Rapoport, he said. Defacing Red Army property? Trying, selfishly and counter to Soviet war aims, to hoard military equipment for your own exclusive use? I was sentenced to a punishment detail.’ He shook his head. ‘Better than being shot, I suppose. But, hard. Hard, hard.’

  None of us felt like talking after that. ‘War,’ said Frenkel, in a grumbling voice. ‘Do you know what Tolstoy would write if he
were alive today? Not War and Peace but War and War. He would write War and War and More War.’

  9

  We had assembled the overarching superstructure of our story, and had filled in many of the details. We were, I admit, proud of what we had constructed. And then one morning Comrade Malenkov walked in upon us, accompanied by half a dozen armed soldiers. My heart clattered in my chest as vigorously as a man who has been pushed downstairs by the secret police. I was, suddenly and overwhelmingly, certain that we were all going to be shot.

  ‘Comrades,’ said Malenkov. ‘It is over. You are no longer going to sit around here, idling at state expense enjoying the best food and free vodka! Back to real work for the lot of you.’

  I could see, at the corner of my vision, Asterinov blushing with anger, his face red behind the black of his full beard. I had spent so much time with him now that I knew what he was thinking, down to the very words: Comrade! I protest! We have not been idling, but instead labouring hard and diligently fulfilling Comrade Stalin’s personal order! But of course he said nothing.

  ‘Nobody must ever know about what you have done here,’ said Malenkov.

  I was conscious of my breathing. I daresay we all were. We were, all of us, stricken with the thought that these breaths would be our very last.

  ‘You are to forget everything you have done here,’ said Malenkov.

  I breathed out then, because this meant that we were not to be killed.

  ‘Everything. Comrades, understand me: it is a matter of supreme importance to the Soviet Union that you tell nobody of your time here. You did not write these elaborate stories. You did not discuss this matter. You never met Stalin. This sojourn never happened. Do you understand?’

  None of us spoke. But he didn’t need us to speak. It was self-evident.

  ‘How does your science-fictional narrative open?’ he snapped.

  I looked from face to face. ‘The Americans launch a rocket to explore space. The aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation.’

  ‘Start with a bang, eh?’ Malenkov nodded. ‘Good, yes. I like the way you begin with a smack aimed at the Americans, too. I like it. Then?’

  ‘Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation.’

  ‘Good! Good. But I never want to hear it again. If I hear of it again, I shall take time from my busy schedule to put bullets in the back of all your skulls quicker than mustard. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ we said, in one voice.

  ‘Back to real life for all of you,’ said Malenkov, briskly. ‘And none of this happened. But be clear: I shall be keeping an eye on each of you, personally. If you use any of the material you have invented here in your own stories - if you try to recycle any of this material - I shall know about it. The sentence will be ten years without the right of correspondence.’ This was a euphemism, of course; it meant that we would be shot. ‘If you so much as mutter about this dacha in your sleep, and your sweethearts, or whores, hear you, I shall know about it, and I will take measures to ensure you do not mutter any more. Yes?’

  ‘Yes, comrade,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivich.

  ‘Good. As long as we understand one another.’

  None of us was so foolish as to offer up, as it might be, ‘But why, comrade?’ or ‘But all our work, comrade - wasted?’ or anything along those lines. That would have been a suicidal gambit. This manner of sudden reversal was nothing new to us. Perhaps Stalin himself had suddenly cooled on his plan; or perhaps our work had been unsatisfactory; or perhaps there were hidden unseen reasons. It hardly mattered. All that mattered was that, given the choice between killing us to tie off the knot of this enterprise, and letting us all go with this injunction to secrecy, the powers had decided on the latter, even though the former was less messy. Malenkov didn’t need to tell us twice to keep this secret. His parting shot was, ‘And if you gentlemen should meet up, as is perhaps not inconceivable, in the future; not even then will it be acceptable to talk about this time together.’

  With a sly smile, Frenkel looked straight at Malenkov. ‘Comrade, I have no idea who these people even are.’

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  That was that. We all went our separate ways and, I suppose, got on with the business of living our various lives. Speaking for myself I did what I was told: I forgot all about our elaborate narrative; about the radiation aliens and their designs upon planet earth; upon their strange spaceships and artefacts. Forgot all about it. I lived in Moscow. I carried on working as a writer, for a short time, although the late forties were hard years and I did other jobs to supplement my income. The fact that I could speak English got me a job working on translations of Western documentation for a governmental ministry. I married somebody who worked in that same ministry, but she had previously been in the Red Army and she found it impossible to acquire the habits of peacetime. She woke in the night often, screaming. She could not walk down a city street without seeing the bloodied and decaying spectres of all her dead friends, or of all the enemies she had killed. One time, when I came home from work, she thought me a German and ran at me with a knife. Ours was not a relaxed relationship. Then one rainy autumn day, when the Moscow trees were bleeding their red leaves in clotted clumps and the air was cool, she fell in front of a tram and died; and though I have often thought of it, I have never settled in my head the most likely explanation for her stumble. Perhaps she threw herself. Perhaps she indeed fell by accident. Perhaps she was trying to run away from a street full of zombies. I don’t know.

  I drank more than most Russians. That, I am perfectly well aware, is quite a boast.

  The fact that I could speak English, which had previously obtained for me a relatively comfortable governmental job, now brought me under suspicion. I was arrested and sent to a camp, and for eighteen months I helped lay a railroad across northern swampland. It was an unpleasant place. It did little for my health.

  Eventually, however, Stalin died. Afterwards, although long enough afterwards for my spirit to have been effectively broken, I was released back into Muscovite society. A broken bone mends, although sometimes it sets awry. This same is true of a broken spirit.

  I worked at a variety of jobs, but did no more writing of science fiction, or anything else. I married again, and fathered upon my young wife two children, one a daughter and one a son. That my wife remained with me as long as she did amazes me only marginally more than the fact that she agreed to be with me in the first place. I was a horrible man. I did horrible things. Eventually she left me and took the children and I rarely saw her or them afterwards.

  So I lived alone. I ate little. I used to perform a malign conjuring trick with the vodka I drank: putting it down my throat clear and then drawing it back up my throat bright pink-red. I smoked all the time, without cease. For a time I made a point of buying the more expensive brands of vodka, and better brands of cigarette, but this was a charade that I could maintain only for a while. I did this, I think, to try and convince myself that I was a sophisticated connoisseur of adult pleasures, rather than a mere drunk. But eventually I embraced the inevitable. When you are a mere drunk, three bottles of the cheapest vodka are always better than two bottles of classier stuff. Soon enough I was drinking anything at all, no matter how rough. I smoked Primo cigarettes.

  Death is a red-haired man.

  Then, one winter’s day, something important happened. Let us call this a turning-point.

  I was sitting in my flat, alone as ever. It was lunchtime, and I was lunching, as was my habit in those days, on vodka. I remember that particular day very well. The sunlight was washing through my uncurtained windows very strong and clear, as bright and astringent as alcoholic spirit. The light printed a block of brightness across my table top. I had just finished the bottle on my table, and was staring at this shape of light. I was marvelling, in a soggy, half-conscious way, at the beauty of it, at the way it stepped down from tabletop to floor. Marvelling, there, perhaps looks ove
rstatement, but it is precisely the right word. Spirits and spirit. Spirit and spirits. The vehemence of the way the gleam launched itself from the table. The two-tier step down from the table onto the floor. These things amazed me.

  I tucked a cigarette between my lips and fiddled with the tricky metal nipple on the top of the lighter.

  The next thing I knew I had been translated into an idiom of pure bright light and pure bright heat. I sat there dazzled, momentarily. I sat there spiritually dazzled.

  It didn’t last long. Almost at once, like smelling salts, I was stung back to the mundane by the stench of burning hair going up my nose. Then I felt the scorch of pain on the skin of my chin and cheeks, and my eyes began watering.

  This is what I had done: I had been drinking sloppily, and dribbled some vodka into my beard. Subsequently I must have flicked the lighter flame in a careless manner, such that the stem of the fire had brushed my face. My beard went up in a great buzz of light and fire.

  I got to my feet. My eyes were closed now, but I would have seen nothing but brightness had I opened them. I took a step forward. I took another step forward. I remember thinking, but distantly (as if I were eavesdropping, telepathically, upon the thinking of some third party) that I was moving remarkably slowly for somebody whose face was on fire. My right foot went forward, and then my left, and my knee banged again the wall. I reached up with my right hand and - in perhaps the luckiest conjunction of body and object in my life - my fingers fell on the latch to the window. Had I not found that I would surely have stood at that window as my head burned, and the flesh roasted away, and the marrow cracked out of the skullbone. As it was, really without thinking about it, I pushed down and the window swung away. Then all I needed to do was bow down. I bowed, like a gentleman, to the winter sky, and the prospect of Moscow’s bridal chill. My face went down into the snow that lay a foot thick on the windowsill outside.