Yellow Blue Tibia (39 page)

‘There’s nothing out there.’ I said, aloud. I didn’t say this for Frenkel’s benefit. I suppose it was for
my
benefit. I suppose it was to confirm that I had never seen the thing in the sky.

‘Out the window you go, old friend. You can take a closer look, as you go down.’

He stepped towards me, and his left hand clamped onto (because I was facing him) my right arm, and his right arm clamped on to my left arm. Behind me the window was unlatched. A quick shove and I would tumble against it, and it would swing open, and I would fall.

‘The elephant in the room,’ I said again.

‘That’s it.’

‘The elephant is -
in
the room.’

Dora was right behind him.

She was holding a book in her hand: a thousand-page hardback book with a gaudy-coloured cover illustration of tentacled aliens. ‘[Mr Frenkel,]’ she asked, in the politest tones, ‘[would you sign my copy of your novel?]’

Frenkel’s expression twitched at the sound of her voice. He craned round to look back over his shoulder, and tried to twist his torso to face her. His hand went towards the pocket in which he had cached his knife; but I saw what he was doing and
my
two hands went towards
his
hand. He was stronger than me, but I was strong enough, and motivated enough, to grab his wrist and yank his hand down below the level of his jacket. I did this to prevent him grasping his knife. He strained to lift it and get inside his jacket pocket.

‘[Oh my mistake!]’ said Dora, and now I could hear the strain in her voice. ‘[This novel is not by you. It is by Konstantin Skvorecky.]’

‘Wait,’ grunted Frenkel, still straining to pull out his knife. He was reaching with his right arm, being right handed. My right side had been weakened by my injury. But luckily I was facing him, so I was using my left hand to prevent him from bringing out his knife.

Dora swung the book in towards his face, blushing red with the effort. Her prodigious jowls quivered.

She swung the book so that its spine collided with Frenkel’s nose. His head snapped back, and a gasp stuttered from his mouth. I danced to the side as quickly as my old legs could manage, and levered him onwards, and Dora pushed forward with her considerable, her beautiful, her life-saving bulk. With me on his right side, and Dora on his left, and blood coming out of his nose, Frenkel found himself propelled forwards and out. His head struck the unlatched window with a boom. The panel swung open, and Frenkel toppled out, and Dora and I released him at exactly the same moment.

Down he went.

He fell straight down the height of four floors. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for instance, call out. He had tipped over onto his back, and we could see him looking up at us, but the expression on his face was not even especially surprised: although a small quantity of blood
had
come out of his nose and covered his upper lip, like a black-red paint-on Hitler moustache. Like Hitler, or like Charlie Chaplin. It was four floors down to what the Americans call the [sidewalk]. He landed with the sound of cowflop hitting the ground. The first portion of his body to connect with the ground was the back of his head, and then his spine, and hips, and then his arms and legs: each segment of his body followed rapidly one after the other. He did not bounce. He did not move after the impact. Not so much as a twitch.

 

I felt wobbly, and unwell, and exhausted; but I felt better than Dora evidently did. It was not an easy matter for a fellow as elderly and infirm as I was to assist a woman as weighty as she across the floor, but I did my best, and was able to help her stagger over to the couch. She half-sat and half-collapsed, and I knelt down beside her. ‘[There is some blood,]’ I told her, lifting her shirt and examining the mouth-shaped wound.

‘[It hurts!]’

‘[My poor love - I’m so sorry - my poor girl.]’

‘[It hurts, but I don’t think there’s any serious damage. Thank heavens I’m so fat!]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ I agreed, earnestly. ‘[It has saved your life.]’

‘[Oh!]’ she said. [‘Oh, it hurts! But if I’d been some rake-skinny girl . . .]’

‘[Then you would have died],’ I said. ‘[Frenkel knew what he was doing. He was aiming the knife at vital organs.]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ she said, in a fainter voice, ‘[that all my vital organs are wrapped in my protective layer!]’

‘[Didn’t he stab you twice?]’

‘[My arm.]’ She was holding her left arm stiffly, awkwardly. I had not noticed this before.

‘[Let me look.]’

‘[He got me in the side,]’ she said. ‘[I moved my arm to where he’d cut me, and then he cut me again.]’

Her arm was sopping and wet, and her hand bright red. There was blood, I saw, dipping downwards from her fingers’ ends onto the carpet. This wound looked much more serious. ‘[I will get help,]’ I said, creakily rising and going to the bed where the room’s phone was. In a moment I had called the reception desk, and within a minute two people were in the room with me. A first aid box was brought in. By the look of it, it dated from before the war.

‘Have you called an ambulance?’ I asked the concierge. ‘There’s also a man on the pavement outside. He fell from the window. He might need help.’

He looked from the window. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said.

 

I went with Dora to the hospital. In the ambulance they gave her something for the pain, and then told me to talk with her. Don’t let her go to sleep, they told me. So I talked with her. ‘[Where did you get the book?]’

‘[It’s yours.]’

‘[I know it’s mine. It’s the omnibus edition of
Three Who Made a Star
. It’s all three volumes in one. That’s why it is so big; a thousand pages, more or less. But I have not seen a copy for half a century. I don’t even have a copy at my flat!]’

‘[Saltykov found it in an old bookshop, somewhere near the hotel. He bought it for me, as a present. He knew I would be interested, because it was by you.]’

There seemed to me something wrong with my burn-scarred face. I could feel a strange loosening behind the skin, near the eyes and the bridge of the nose.

‘[I got up, quietly, after he stabbed me. I lay there for a moment,]’ Dora was saying. ‘[Until I got my breath back, and then I got myself up. It stung to move. I looked around for something to hit him with. He was a dangerous man. But I couldn’t see anything - well, I thought about the lamp.]’

‘[The lamp?]’

‘[Only it was plugged in, and the plugs you have over here aren’t like proper American plugs, and I wasn’t sure I could unplug it easily. Then I saw the book. Your
Three Who Made a Star
. So I picked that up.]’

‘[Thank heavens I wrote such a fat book,]’ I said.

‘[A slim volume would hardly have been much of a weapon,]’ she agreed, grimacing; in pain, I thought at first; but, no: because she was laughing.

‘[We can be grateful,]’ I told her, kissing her good hand, ‘[that science fiction novels are so fat.]’

‘[We may be grateful in a general sense for fatness,]’ she agreed.

The ambulance brought us to the hospital - a different building, and indeed a different site, to the place in which I had convalesced. Two rows of cherry trees displayed their ridiculous pink and white blossom in enormous profusion. They wheeled her through the main door. They gave her a painkiller. I sat with her in the emergency room. I held her good hand as they cut off her shirt and bandaged up her wounds. ‘The wound to the stomach is superficial,’ the doctor said. ‘The wound to the arm is a little more serious, but not life-threatening. The tip of the blade has scratched the tibia. I’m afraid it will be sore for some time. There will be bruising.’

I translated this for her. ‘[Black and blue!]’ she said in a mournful voice. ‘[I have always bruised like a peach.]’

‘[You
are
a peach,]’ I told her, as tears seeped from my ridiculous old-man eyes. ‘[You are my peach. You are my beautiful luscious American peach.] I love you,’ I added, in Russian.

‘[What’s that?]’

So I told her then how to say
I love you
in Russian. It involves putting together three English words: two colours and a human bone - as it might be, the colour of a fading bruise, and the colour of a fresh bruise, and a bone in the arm: just those three English words. Say them together, rolling from one to the other as you speak, and you will find that you are saying
I love you
in Russian. It was a delight for me to hear her say that Russian phrase, over and over. It was delightful.

 

Frenkel’s body could not be found, although - according to the Militia - there
was
blood on the pavement beneath the hotel window. I do not believe that Frenkel could simply have stood up and walked away after such a fall. I couldn’t help the Militia explain who might have moved his body, or why.

Saltykov’s body was recovered from the park. The Militia had no suspects; and since we were the only two people in the whole of Kiev who knew him, we were formally questioned. He had no dependants, it seemed; and no friends or partners. He was buried in a Kiev municipal graveyard.

We were warned by the Militia not to leave the city, since investigation into the death of Saltykov, and the assault upon Dora Norman, was still ongoing. We stayed in the hotel room, both of us slowly recovering our health. My grief for poor old Saltykov was strangely modulated by my joy that Dora was alive, even though I had thought her dead. Every night I laid my hands gently upon her enormous belly, her fluid hips, and gave thanks to her sheer bulk for saving her life.

 

We made our doddery way about the city; me actually old and she temporarily aged by her wounds, her arm in a sling. She expressed repeated astonishment at the beauty of the Ukrainian springtime. We took the tram along the lengthy, wide streets, where rows and rows of chestnut trees and cherry trees were in blossom. One day, when we were feeling a little more hearty, we went down to the beach, by the river. It was a bright day, and the space was filled with large Kiev women in polka-dotted swimming costumes, and blocky Kiev men in trunks. The men were sunbathing standing up, all of them putting their chests out towards the sun, and slowly turning like human heliotropes.

‘[Why are they all standing?]’ Dora asked me. ‘[Why don’t they just lie down?]’

‘[They are standing,]’ I told her, ‘[to show that even after a full day’s work of building Communism they are not tired.]’

We both of us healed from our respective wounds, although slowly.

What happened next was that the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl suffered a catastrophic malfunction. News was at first confused and contradictory. The explosion happened on 26 April. By the 27th there was no official confirmation - although the reactor is less than seventy miles from Kiev, and smoke was evident over the northern horizon. Rumours circulated through the city. Lights in the sky. Over the night of the 27th and the morning of the 28th trucks and buses containing the inhabitants of Pripyat, the nearby town, began rolling into Kiev. There was no official news for almost a week, but everybody in Kiev knew that something terrible had happened.

You, doubtless, remember that particular disaster.

I sat with Dora in a restaurant in the city one evening, the two of us as subdued and alarmed as any person in the city. ‘[Do you think Frenkel—]’ she asked.

‘[Dead,]’ I insisted.

‘[Or Frenkel’s people. His organisation. Do you think that they . . .?]’

‘[Trofim exploded a grenade inside the main reactor. Two months later the reactor explodes. Perhaps that is no coincidence. Perhaps there was damage to the pipes, or the structure, or something; and it took two months or so for the damage to lead to the malfunction.]’

‘[Or,]’ she said. ‘[Perhaps Frenkel’s people came back and finished the job. That driver you talked about - the red-headed one.]’

‘[Or perhaps,]’ I said, ‘[the radiation aliens blasted it from orbit,]’

We agreed that we must leave the city, for I feared the effects of radiation poisoning. Besides, we did not belong. I needed to get her back to Moscow. It was not difficult: the Militia, certainly, had more important things to occupy their time than attending to us. We took Saltykov’s cab, and drove out of the city together.

I filled the car with fuel and drove east. The main road to Russia went north to Chernilhiv, and then east along the River Desna; but I did not want to take my beautiful Dora closer to the source of radioactive contamination than absolutely necessary. I took small roads, and felt my way, as it were, through eastern Ukraine. The sky was filled with apocalyptic clouds. Even this far south the fir trees were tinted rust and red by the fallout.

Eventually we reached Russia. We were stopped at the border, something, of course, that had not happened to us on the way
in
to the Ukraine - but things were different now. There was considerable panic. I told the soldiers manning the border crossing that Dora was my wife, a naturally shy woman who preferred not to speak. They detained us for four hours, and finally they let us through on the understanding that we would give one of their number a lift to Moscow - a young lad who had to get back to the capital for some reason.

‘I was supposed to take the train,’ he said, getting into the front seat beside me, after stowing his kitbag in the boot of the car. ‘But none of the others wanted to drive me to the station. It’s like the whole Ukraine is a plague zone. Are you Ukrainian?’

‘I am a Muscovite.’

The young fellow swivelled in his seat and addressed himself to Dora. ‘Good day to you, madam.’

‘She doesn’t speak much,’ I told him.

‘Don’t be shy, madam! I’ll not alarm you, I promise! Cat got your tongue, has it?’

Dora looked at me, and then at the young fellow. ‘I love you,’ she told him.

He blushed, and faced front. ‘Why did she say that?’ he asked me, in a low voice.