Александр Абрамов - The Time Scale

Translated by D. Mafias

I was coming back from an evening session of the Security Council with Ordinsky, my colleague from Moscow, whom everyone at the UNO Press centre took to be a Pole like myself – probably because of the surname. Ordinsky, Glinsky – to the American ear they sound much the same. I suggested we go somewhere to kill what remained of the evening, but he was busy and I had to be content with the prospect of a solitary supper. I stopped the taxi at a third-class bar called the Olympia. My hotel was only a few blocks away and, if the worst came to the worst, I could always get home on foot.

They knew me in the bar and Antony, the normally languid waiter, didn’t even ask for my order, just appeared in a flash, with beer and hot sausage. The bar was deserted except for a corner behind the door curtain where two girls I hadn’t seen before were having supper, and at the bar itself a lean old man in a short raincoat was sipping whisky. He gave me a quick glance, questioned Antony about something and then, without so much as a by-your-leave, sat down at my table. I frowned.

‘A spontaneous and frank reaction,’ he laughed. ‘Don’t you like chance acquaintances?’

‘To be honest, not very much.’

‘That’s rather strange for a journalist. Why, any chance acquaintance can prove to be a source of information.’

‘I prefer to get my information from other sources,’ I said.

‘So I gather from Antony. You gossip in the corridors of the UNO and imagine that that’s journalism.’

I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t going to pick a quarrel with the first person I met.

‘You’re a Pole of course,’ he said, addressing me in Polish. ‘Unfortunately, I am not in a position to pass any judgement on your writing, I am not familiar with contemporary Polish newspapers. I can remember Golos Poranny, and Kurier Tsodzienny. But I’ve read nothing at all in Polish since forty-four.’

‘In forty-four I was four years old,’ I said.

‘And I was forty. To avoid any misunderstandings, I’ll define my political position.’ He gave a crisp, military bow. ‘Leszczycki, Kazimierz-Andrzej, ex-Major of the Armia Krajowa. They like hyphenated names here, but in Poland then a nickname was enough. What the nickname was didn’t matter, all that mattered was to go on repeating liberty, equality, fraternity, and repeat it we did, before we sent the lot to hell. I did likewise when the English took me to London and there… sold me to the States.’

I didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean, sold?’

‘Well, I’ll put it more gently – let’s say they gave me up, slipped me something in a drink – both me and my boss Dr Holling – loaded us into a submarine and took us across the ocean. And now, I can introduce myself: former colleague of Einstein, former professor at Princeton University and originator of a theory of discrete time, now officially rejected by science. The sad sum total of many, many things.’

‘And what do you do now?’ I asked cautiously.

‘I drink.’

He smoothed his grey hair which stood up like a hedgehog’s prickles over a high forehead and hooked nose: he had something of a Sherlock Holmes twenty years older and something of a Don Quixote relieved of whiskers and beard.

‘Don’t think I’m an inveterate drunkard. It’s just a reaction to ten years’ isolation when I didn’t go anywhere, didn’t read anything, didn’t see anyone, just worked till I dropped on a scientific problem that was one big gamble. That’s all.’

‘Failure?’I said sympathetically.

‘There are some successes more dangerous than failures. And it’s that danger that has dragged me down to the depths of this big city, down to my countrymen.’

‘There aren’t that many of them here,’ I said.

He pulled such a face that even his cheeks twitched.

‘What do you see from the corridors of the UNO or from the windows of your hotel? Get on a bus and go where your eyes lead you, turn down some smelly side street, look, not for a drug store, but for a cafй that sells home-made cakes. Who won’t you meet there – from former Anders men to yesterday’s bandits.’

He grimaced again. The conversation had taken a turn that was of no great interest to me, but Leszczycki didn’t notice – he was affected either by alcohol or simply by the need to talk to someone.

‘They’re capable of many things,’ he went on, ‘of crying over the past, and cursing the present, of gambling all night, and they shoot no worse than the Italians of Cosa Nostra. There’s just one thing they don’t know how to do and that’s how to accumulate capital or return to their homes on the Wisla. They don’t get worked up about Gomulka’s meeting with Kadar, but they’ll spend all night talking about my namesake Leszczycki, or kill you if you know where those letters are hidden.’

‘What letters?’ I asked growing interested.

‘I don’t know. Leszczycki was an agent for some kind of underworld bosses. They say his letters could send some home to Poland and others to the electric chair. It seems there isn’t a single Pole in the city who doesn’t dream of finding those letters.’

‘There is one,’ I laughed,

‘What’s your name?’ he asked me suddenly.

‘Walaw.’

‘Waek then – as one old enough to be your father I may use the diminutive. The fact is, Waek, you’re just a pup, a kitten. You haven’t even lived, you’ve just grown up. You weren’t lost in the Warsaw catacombs, nor did you serve out your time in the forests and swamps after the war. You were suckling milk then, and tramping to school. Then you went to university, and then someone taught you to write notes for a paper and someone else arranged you a trip to America.’

‘That’s not so little,’ I remarked.

‘Trivially little. Even in this awful city you expect to live in a cocoon. You think nothing will happen to you if you always get home by midnight. And then “bye bye”. Give me your arm.’

He bent my arm and felt my muscles. ‘There’s something there,’ he said. ‘You’ve played some sport?’

‘A little boxing. Then I threw it in.’

‘Why?’

‘No future in it,’ I said indifferently. ‘You can’t be a champion and you won’t need it for living.’

‘How do you know? And if suddenly you did need it?’

‘Don’t you worry about my future,’ I broke in, and immediately regretted my sharpness. But he didn’t seem at all offended.

‘And why shouldn’t I bother about it?’ he asked.

‘If for no other reason than because not just any future will suit me.’

‘You can choose it yourself. I’ll just do the prompting.’

It was very rude of me but I couldn’t restrain myself, I burst out laughing. Again, he didn’t seem offended.

‘You wonder how I’ll do the prompting? Like this…’ He threw out on to his palm something that looked like a cigarette case and gave off a strange, lilac, metallic gleam. There were some sort of flat buttons on the back.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I’ve just put one out.’

‘It’s not a cigarette case,’ he corrected me pedantically, at the same time concealing the object in his pocket again as if he feared I might want a closer look. ‘If it’s to be compared with anything, then it’s with a watch.’

‘But I don’t think I saw a clock-face on it,’ I said caustically.

‘It doesn’t measure time, it creates it.’

His strange air of triumph didn’t convince me, it was all too clear – the lonely genius, inventor of perpetuum mobile , the mad scientist from the novels of Taine. I had met his kind back in the Warsaw newspaper office. But Leszczycki didn’t even notice my involuntary, sceptical smile. Looking somewhere through me, he seemed to be thinking aloud: ‘What do we know about time? Some regard it as a fourth dimension, others as a material substance. It’s strange. Einstein’s paradox and the ringing of an alarm clock in the morning are incompatible. And they will continue to be incompatible for a long time yet, until time lets us into its secrets. Is it arbitrary or determined, continuous or irregular, finite or infinite? Does it have a beginning, or is our past as limitless as our future? And is there a time quantum as there is a light quantum? It’s on this point that I diverged from the great Einstein. It was at this point that even Gordon, the boldest of the bold, baulked: “It’s too insane, Leszczycki, too insane to be true”.’