Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

I walked up and down the room’s narrow length, turning the question over almost as often as I turned around. After several iterations I decided that I couldn’t have been fooled about her feelings, that her passion was real—and that if she’d been intent on manipulating me, she would have done it more subtly—

But then, perhaps that itself was evidence of how subtly she’d done it. At that point I stopped. To suspect manipulation that subtle—an apparently clumsy and obvious approach disguising one devious and elegant—was to undermine the very confidence in my own judgement on which all such discriminations must perforce rely.

So I forgot my suspicions, and looked once more at the books, and at a quarter before eight went out into the evening to meet her, and my fate.

Three flags hung behind the coffin: the Soviet, red with gold hammer and sickle; the Kazakhstani, blue with yellow sun and eagle; and the ISTWR, yellow with black trefoil.

About two hundred people were crammed into the hall of the crematorium. The funeral was the nearest thing to a State occasion the republic had had since the Sputnik centenary. The entire depleted apparat was there, and a good proportion of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia was probably watching on television. The distinguished foreign guests included the Kazakhstani consul, the head of the Western United States Interests Section, and David Reid, who was wedged between a couple of Mutual Protection greps. Myra sat with the rest of Sovnarkom in the front row, dry-eyed, as one of Georgi’s old comrades—another Afganets—delivered the eulogy.

“Major Georgi Yefrimovich Davidov was born in Alma-Ata in 1956. At school, in the Pioneers and the Komsomol, he soon distinguished himself as an exemplary individual—studious, civic-minded, with great athletic prowess. After obtaining a degree at the University of Kazakhstan, where he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he completed his national service and chose a military career. In 1979 he qualified as a helicopter pilot, and later that same year was among the first of the limited contingent of the Soviet armed forces to fulfil their internationalist duty to the peoples of Afghanistan.”

A ripple of dissidence, expressed with indrawn breaths, or sighs, or shifting of feet, went through the room. Myra herself sniffed, compressed her lips, looked down. All those nights he’d woken her by grabbing her, holding her, talking away his nightmares; all those mornings when he’d said not a word, given no indication that he remembered any interruption to his sleep, or to hers.

The speaker raised his voice a little and continued undaunted.

“His service earned him promotion and the honour of Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1985 he applied for transfer to the space programme, and after training at Baikonur he won the proud title of Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union. However, many decades were to pass before he was able to fulfil this part of his destiny.”

By which time it was a fucking milk-run, and there was no fucking Soviet Union, so get on with it—

“During the turbulent years of the late 1980s, Major Davidov took some political stands about which his friends and comrades may honesdy differ—”

Nice one, he was a fucking Yeltsinite, get on with it—

“—but which testify to his true Soviet and Kazakh patriotism and the seriousness with which he took his civic duty and the Leninist ideals of the armed forces, which in his view proscribed the use of violence against the people.”

Myra was not the only one who had to choke back a laugh.

“After the Republic of Kazakhstan became independent, Major Davidov’s expertise in the areas of nuclear weaponry and questions of nuclear disarmament gave him a new field for his great political skill and personal charm…”

Myra bit her lip.

He was in front of her in the taxi queue outside the airport at Alma-Ata. Tall, even taller than she was, very dark; swept-back black hair, eyebrows almost as thick as his black moustache; relaxed in a stiff olive-green uniform; smoking a Marlboro and glancing occasionally at a counterfeit Rolex.

Myra, just arrived, lost and anxious, could not take her eyes off him. But it was the yellow plastic bag at his feet that gave her the nerve to speak. Printed on it in red were a picture of a parrot and the words:

THE PET SHOP

992 Pollockshaws Road

Glasgow G41 2HA

She leaned forward, into his field of vision.

You’ve flown in from Glasgow?” she asked, in Russian.

He turned, startled out of some trance, and looked at her with a bemused expression which rapidly became a smile.

“Ah, the bag.” He poked it with his foot, revealing that the carrier was bulging with cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label. Toil’re a stranger here, then.”

“Oh?”

“These plastic bags have nothing to do with Glasgow. They’re used by every shop from here to China, God knows why.” He laughed, showing strong teeth stained with nicotine. “Have you been to Glasgow?”

“Yes,” said Myra. “I lived there for several years, back in the seventies.”

Something cooled in his look. “What were you do-ing?”

“I was writing a thesis,” Myra said, “on the economy of the Soviet Union.”

He guffawed. “You got permission to do thai?”

“It wasn’t a problem—” she began, then stopped. She realised that he’d taken her for a former-Soviet citizen. Former nomenklatura, if she’d had clearance for such dangerous research.

“I’m not a Russian, I’m from the United States!”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Your accent is very good,” he said, in English. His accent was very good. They talked until they reached the top of the queue, and then went on talking, because they shared a taxi into town, and went on talking…

Would she ever have spoken to him, Myra wondered, if it hadn’t been for that yellow bag? And if she hadn’t spoken to him, would she ever have seen him again? Perhaps; but perhaps not, or not at such a moment, when they were both free, and on the rebound from other lovers, and in that case…

She wouldn’t be here, for one thing, and Georgi wouldn’t be in that coffin, and… the consequences went on and on, escalating until she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost—and the result of that triviality, the fictitious Pollockshaws pet-shop address on the plastic bag, had gained her a republic, and imposed on others losses she could not bear to contemplate. Or so it might seem, if anyone ever learned enough about her to see her hand in history.

But then again, maybe not, maybe old Engels and Plekhanov had been right after all about the role of the individual in history: maybe it did all come out in the wash—at the end of the French Revolution someone, but, of course, ha-ha, “not necessarily that particular Corsican’, would have stepped into the tall boots which circumstances, like a good valet, had laid out for a man on horseback.

She’d never found that theory particularly convincing, and it gave her small comfort now to even consider it. No, she was stuck, as were they all, with her actions and their consequences.

“—in recent years Georgi Yefrimovich played a leading part in the diplomatic service of the ISTWR, in which duty he met his death.” The eulogist paused for a moment to direct a stabbing glance at the distinguished foreign guests. “He is survived by his former wife and loyal friend, Myra Godwin-Davidova, their children and grandchildren—”

Too many to read out, and none of them here, get on with it—

Messages were, however, read out from all of the absent offspring, other relatives, old friends. The eulogist laid down his sheaf of papers at last, and raised his hand. The crematorium filled with the oddly quiet and modest sound of Kazakhstan’s national anthem. The coffin rolled silendy through the unobtrusive hatch. Everyone stood up and sang, or mimed along to, the Internationale. And that was that. Another good materialist gone to ash.