The Great Chain of Unbeing E-Book

Andrew Crumey

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Andrew Crumey's novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey's acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

The Great Chain of Unbeing

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now lectures in creative writing at Northumbria University.

He is the author of seven novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D’Alembert’s Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia (2008, Dedalus edition 2015) and The Secret Knowledge (2013). Andrew Crumey’s novels have been translated into fourteen languages.

Acknowledgment

Different versions of some parts of this book appeared previously in:

Magnetic North (edited by Claire Malcolm); So, What Kept You? (edited by Margaret Wilkinson); NW15 (edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee); Headshook (edited by Stuart Kelly); The Seven Wonders of Scotland (edited by Gerry Hassan); Gutter 9 (edited by Helen Sedgwick, Colin Begg and Adrian Searle); The Herald; Radio 4.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgment

The Unbeginning

Tribology

Introduction

Fragments of Behring

Singularity

The Assumption

Between the Tones

Fragments of Sand

Impossible Tales

The Unending

Copyright

The Unbeginning

When my father was around twenty years old, doing compulsory national service with the British Army, he found himself posted to Christmas Island in the South Pacific. While his former schoolmates back home were square-bashing in the rain, he was spear fishing in the Blue Lagoon or watching land-crabs scuttle across burning sands. He was an avid stargazer, and at night he trained his binoculars on treasures of the southern sky – the Magellanic Clouds, the Jewel Box – which he described to me years afterwards, instilling in me a fascination that was to form the basis of my adult career.

Along with his fellow conscripts, my father was one day ordered to stand on the beach, close his eyes as tightly as he could, and hold his clenched fists over them. He knew what was about to happen. As a safety measure, the men had all been instructed to wear long trousers that morning, rather than shorts. It was a beautiful, calm day, my father told me. They all stood there, heard the countdown, and 30 miles behind them, a hydrogen bomb exploded.

My father said that even with his back to the fireball, and with his eyes closed, he could see the bones of his own hands. A few seconds later, he turned and saw the rising mushroom cloud; a ball of incinerated air convected so swiftly into the upper atmosphere that sparks of lightning flashed around its rolling flanks.

Then the sound arrived: a shockwave that knocked the young soldiers to the ground. As the spectacle continued to unfold, the disrupted air above them curdled into black rain clouds, drenching them with viscous bullets of water. When it was all over, they showered and changed, got on with their daily duties, and later enjoyed a laugh and a pint at the regimental club’s tombola night.

As soon as my father was released from the army he married the girl in Glasgow he’d been writing to every week since he was called up. A year later they had a plump and healthy son, my brother Ken, who now works as a civil engineer. After another two years, I came into the world; but at first the midwife wouldn’t hand me to my mother. Instead she called for a male doctor who had a look at the little bundle he was presented with, took it away for closer inspection, then came back to report his findings to my anxious and exhausted mother.

“It’s a little boy,” the doctor told her. “Unfortunately he’s blind.” My mother asked how he could possibly be so sure, and he told her that since I had no eyes there really couldn’t be much doubt about it, could there?

That’s how my life began: I told the new girl about it today. She’s called Jagoda and says the hours and money are fine; she’ll clean and iron, do a bit of cooking if need be, read the mail. She comes from what used to be the other side of the geo-political divide that caused my father to be soaked in fall-out. The bomb he witnessed was meant to damage people like her, but instead made me. Since then the lines have shifted, the arguments have changed. Best not discuss politics, I thought, recounting to her my nuclear beginning.

“Are you sad about it?” she asked in accented but perfect English, and I laughed, for how could I ever regret being born? I was a love-child, after all. Had my father not been so passionate about the stars, he would never have applied for a posting where clear nights and southern constellations attracted him more than puffer fish or gooney birds. Had a high-energy photon from the blast not severed a chemical bond inside his body, sending a free radical on its hungry, damaging course, then I might have been born sighted, and perhaps I would have been unmoved by the stories he told me about the mythical beasts and heroes that wheel above our heads each night and go unnoticed by people for whom the flicker of a television screen is more compelling than the glimmer of distant worlds. I might never have become a cosmologist – and Jagoda would have needed a different employer.

“Let me show you around,” I offered, then led her on a quick inspection of the flat. “The only rule,” I said, “is that you don’t move things, otherwise I never know where to find them. So no tidying. Otherwise treat it like any other place. And by the way, it’s John. Not even my students call me Dr Wood.”

“What about the lights?” she asked. I didn’t know what she meant. “They’re switched on, though it’s the middle of the day. Do you leave them on constantly?”

I realised there must be something wrong with the timer; the lights are meant to come on at night to reassure callers and deter burglars, but perhaps my young nephew had fiddled with the control at the weekend when my sister-in-law came to visit.

“Come and I’ll show you how to adjust them.” As she followed me along the passageway I heard her bump against my side table, prompting a clatter of framed photographs.

“I’m sorry,” she exclaimed. “I’ll put them back the same way.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, checking their positions. “They have different frames. This is me with Ken when I was about ten years old. I’d just learned to ride a bike. Here are my parents.”

“You look like your father. And this is your graduation?”

“Yes, sweating in our gowns on a very hot day. The fellow on the left is Roy Jones, I think he went on to do a PhD in tribology. The other was some musician friend of Roy’s.”

“Very interesting,” she conceded, though without asking me the meaning of tribology, a term which floated up like vapour to join the hovering cloud of other unspoken words.

“Do you wonder why I have these pictures?” I asked.

“Same reason as the lights?”

“They’re precious to me, that’s all.” Then I showed her the panel for the timer. “The really stupid thing is the digital display, but as long as nobody changes it we’re fine. You see how much trouble I have to go to?” I said with a laugh. “It costs me money to keep you folk from being in the dark.”

Resuming our brief tour, Jagoda said, “I heard of a restaurant with no lights. Everyone eats in complete darkness.”

“Yes, in Paris, I think.”

“To make people think how it is to be blind.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, displaying the bedroom with a wave of my hand and taking her back to the living room so we could finish our tea. “There’s no darkness in my life.” She thought I was being metaphorical; I was merely stating a fact. “What’s behind you right now?” I asked once we were seated.

I heard her turn to look. “A door, some bookshelves.” Her voice echoed against the far wall.

“Now face me again. How does the bookcase look to you?”

“It doesn’t look like anything – I can’t see it.”

“Exactly, and that’s how everything looks to me: neither dark nor light, but invisible. I’m sure you’ve never felt you were missing out by not having eyes in the back of your head; I feel that way about eyes in front. I’ve never needed them and don’t want them. I only wear these artificial things so that I won’t frighten people.”

Throughout my childhood I had to go to hospital regularly to have new eyes fitted. They prevented my sockets from closing up, but couldn’t keep pace with my growth; so on countless unpleasant occasions I sat stoically while gel was squirted into each empty orbit and left to set, providing a cast for my next pair of custom-made eyes. In a medical school drawer somewhere, I expect my youth is still mapped by a forgotten array of ancient discarded blobs staring blankly in every direction.

In the old days, the world’s false eyes were crafted by German glass-blowers renowned for their unmatchable skill. The one-eyed Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, maimed in a shooting accident, had a different eye made for every occasion: proud, lascivious, sleepy, hung-over. A man’s soul, it is said, is written in his eyes, so I share with Prince Christian the opportunity for self-creation; but my eyes are not glass, because the Second World War cut the supply line, and when Spitfire pilots fell from burning, shattered cockpits into the safety of military hospitals, there was nothing to plug their ruined faces. It was the Perspex shards embedded in their flesh that saved them. Found to be biologically inert, the plastic proved a perfect substitute for glass, and henceforth the nation’s artificial eyes were moulded in a workshop in Blackpool, which is where mine came from, made to simulate real eyes, with matching irises and pupils, so that I can look relatively “normal”.

“They’re very realistic,” Jagoda told me. “When you came to the door to let me in, I thought at first that you were someone else, because you’d told me on the phone that you were blind. It took a few moments to see there was something different about your eyes.”

“They don’t move or blink – you can only do so much with two lumps of plastic.”

“I think they make you look very distinguished,” she said tactfully. Perhaps mine came from the same design catalogue as Prince Christian’s. Posing as a child for successive generations of these impostors meant sitting patiently in a leather chair, holding my mother’s hand while the gel went firm in my sockets. When the casts were ready, the cheerful doctor would extract them delicately, but never without some of the gel adhering to my own tissue – like stripping an Elastoplast from under the tongue. There were consolations of the usual hospital kind: a chair I could swing in as much as I liked; a stethoscope with which to probe my beating heart; inscrutable gadgets of cold, smooth steel, drawn randomly, it seemed, from the doctor’s menagerie of disposable spares. None of these, however, could counterbalance the ominous sense of dread I felt whenever we walked down the echoing hospital corridor with its sickly smell of undefined despair; its heavy swing doors; its stock of conversational snippets, momentarily caught from passers-by as Mum and I marched to the eye clinic. Those fragments of unknown lives, falling into my ears like fluttering relics, seemed all the more poignant by virtue of their sheer triviality. This was a place where absolutely no one wanted to be – even the doctors would doubtless rather have been in the pub. And this was the place where I had to come and have false eyes pushed into my head so that to sighted people I would not appear too monstrous. And like any child, I accepted it.

My escape was to think. In the doctor’s leather chair I would avoid the discomfort by fixing my mind on an idea, a memory, a hope. I would hold it with the same tenacious grip that kept my comforting mother close beside me.

“Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see?” Jagoda asked.

“Of course, just as I’ve wondered what it must be like to be a goldfish or Napoleon. Or a woman, though I’d never undergo surgery to find out. I don’t suppose you’d want to go round wearing Perspex testicles, would you?”

She laughed. “Horrible thought!”

“False eyes are about as much use to me, and real ones appeal even less. Certainly, I’m curious about sight, but only if I could have the experience for a very short time, and be sure it was reversible. More tea?” She’d drained her cup with a slurp and chink, and accepted a top-up.

What’s it like to see? No poet has ever explained it, though accounts abound of what things look like, for the benefit of those who know already. There was even a congenitally blind poet, Thomas Blacklock, who impressed eighteenth-century sighted contemporaries with striking visual evocations of a natural world he never saw. Aristotle offered something more useful in his theory of how the eye works. Rays fly out of it, he claimed, strike distant objects, and in this way give the sensation of vision, so that sight is really a form of touch: a beautiful confirmation of what any blind person suspects. Uncontaminated by the later knowledge that light is a wave flowing into people’s eyes, Aristotle constructed a theory based only on what he truly felt.

As a child I sought my own conception of that mysterious ability to perceive what is beyond reach. Embraced by the leather hospital chair whose smell and texture I still recall, I urged my thoughts to probe the limits of their own extension, as with my fingernails I explored the cracks and crumbs beneath me, finding ever new and imponderable questions. Why did I exist? Because my parents made me. But why did they exist? Because of a great chain of causes stretching back… to what? To nothing? Out of the succession of dead and unknown ancestors, and of yet-unborn descendants, here I was, a pattern of raised dots in a Braille text visible only to God whose moving finger made this moment “now”, the rest written unalterably in eternity. It made me dizzy, this thought of being alive, the improbable sensation of existence, devoid of any name I knew.

I wonder if Dad felt it when the bomb exploded behind his back, its light strong enough to crowd straight through his head. He could see the bones of his own hands, he told me, even with his eyes shut; and as a child this didn’t strike me as extraordinary because the bones of my own small hands made an equally clear impression when I held them to my face. But I noticed the strange pleasure he took in recounting the scene of beauty and destruction he attended: the scorching flash; the momentary, all-embracing burst of creation; the rising pillar of involuting cloud that was a brain, a tree, or a thousand other resemblances to the awed onlookers watching from many miles away through smoked glass, irradiated by human ingenuity.

I was in the back garden with my father one night, holding his star map for him while his binoculars licked the cold sky, when he explained to me how it all worked: the fusion of hydrogen atoms, releasing so much energy that for a brief moment the fireball was like a piece of the sun brought down to earth. He was an engineer by trade, and the universe he described to me was one of machine-like intricacy and perfection. A hoarder of spare parts encountered in his work, he had filled a cupboard in our house with knurled cogs, bits of clocks, greasy gears and tangled wires terminating in sandwiches of plastic and solder that smelled of unknown factories as romantic to my mind as Ursa Major, Canes Venatici, and those other unreachable territories far above our heads. Dad was a hoarder of useless knowledge too: the workings of bombs and stars lay heaped in the reckless jumble he shared so eagerly with me.

We are all made of atoms, he told me, whose centres are like little jack-in-the-boxes. The lids are held down by nuclear force; the electrical repulsion of protons inside the atom pushes against this restraint like a pent-up spring. To close a jack-in-the-box, you need to push down hard on the spring until the box shuts with a click. Squeeze lots of hydrogen atoms together and the force makes a trillion clicks: fusion’s thunderous roar.

It was enough to knock my father to the ground, this energy from mating particles carried through seared air into his youthful body. Yet only a single click – on a Geiger counter as he emerged from the shower afterwards – was enough to decide my future and his. For me, it was the blessing of being who I am. For him, it was the cancer that killed him three years ago.

I didn’t tell all of this to Jagoda; she’d come to offer domestic help, not hear my life story. But she wanted to know what I do for a living, so I explained how one thing had followed another, like particles communicating their quantity of motion, or the harmonious interlocking of a succession of toothed wheels. I was born from a nuclear reaction and so is everyone, since the sun or any other star is a bottomless ocean of hydrogen whose atoms, compressed by their own sheer weight, fuse unavoidably, sending parcels of light burrowing haphazardly through the thick and perilous mantle, out into space, across distances of unimaginable emptiness, traversing the cosmos without incident until at last a few of them might fall, like unexpected snowflakes, upon the innocent lens a human aims towards the site of their conception.

“But how did everything begin?” she asked. “What caused the Big Bang?”

Like a child again I was at the limit of expression, wishing to resort by way of explanation to a certain metric of general relativity, yet aware that the response would be inadequate, and that calculation is not the same sort of understanding as experience. Instead I said, “You can try to describe to me what it’s like to see, and I’ll never really know. When I speak of my own invisible reality where neither light nor dark exist, that’s equally hard for you to grasp. What neither of us can imagine is a universe without space and time. A kind of unbeginning. We lack sufficient sense, or have too much, or the wrong kind.”

“I like philosophy,” she said. “It’s what we need in this crazy world. But the bomb… it’s scary.”

She starts next week; there’ll be plenty for her to do. I shall ask her to keep a check on the timer. I wonder what ever happened to Roy Jones?

Tribology (or The Truth about my Wife)

Arriving at Moscow airport, Roy Jones passed through the customs channel and emerged into the public concourse to see a row of impoverished-looking taxi drivers, mournfully waiting for their pre-booked customers.

Russia, his wife had warned him, is a wild and unruly place. The taxi drivers are in some instances muggers in disguise. She’d seen it on a TV documentary. They lure Westerners into their cars, drive them to remote and shabby neighbourhoods, then allow their passengers to escape with their lives only if they first hand over their every valuable. Even their Berghaus fleeces.

But among the drivers Roy Jones saw as he emerged stood one, sallow-faced in a fur hat and battered black leather jacket, bearing a sign saying Mr Jones. How reassuring. Though surely the organisers of the Thirteenth International Congress of Tribology should have remembered that Roy Jones was Doctor, not Mister.

They went outside to a grimy white car. Roy Jones felt brave enough to place himself in the passenger seat, holding his briefcase, while the driver casually fitted the larger suitcase into the boot. Roy Jones had just about figured out the seat belt when the driver got in beside him and started the car.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Roy Jones asked.

The driver gave a thin smile. “Yes. Do you?”

Roy Jones didn’t know the name of the hotel. The conference organiser had e-mailed it to him last week, but it was a funny Russian word that meant nothing to him: a possible hotel, nothing more. Now the driver was taking him there.

Roy Jones watched the unfolding succession of slab-like buildings and strangely quiet roads, punctuated by advertising hoardings whose enthusiasm was almost touching in its futility. The sky was grey and overcast; the air was filled with swirling powder-snow, whipped by the slipstreams of the ancient, fuming lorries they overtook.

“Do you live in Moscow?” Roy Jones asked. It was all the small-talk he could think of. Long silences were as discomforting to him, even with insignificant foreigners, as long periods without going to the bathroom.

The driver nodded. “I live in Moscow,” he said. “All my life, I live in Moscow. Except for one year, I live in London.”

So when he said he lived all his life in Moscow, Roy Jones reasoned, the driver was in fact lying. It was good for Roy Jones to know exactly where he stood. Or rather, sat, with his briefcase clutched tightly on his lap.

“What were you doing in London?” Roy Jones asked.

“A girl,” said the driver enigmatically. He looked the kind of man no woman could ever fall for. At least, no woman that Roy Jones could think of. Like his wife, for instance. Or Dorothy, the departmental secretary at the university. But what about the students? Those female ones, who’d sit on the lawn beneath his office window in the summer term? Roy Jones knew nothing about those young and dangerously carefree girls. None of them were tribologists.

“I love London,” said the driver, turning towards Roy Jones with a sudden obliviousness to the road ahead. “And I hate it.”

It must be a Russian thing, Roy Jones decided: this tendency towards inconsistency. Not to mention a tendency to ignore the road. He said, “Do you love Moscow, or do you hate it?”

The driver nodded. “Yes. That’s it exactly, my friend.”

The car took a bend, and a dignified building appeared on their left, adorned with a hammer and sickle. Roy Jones thought they would have got rid of all that long ago, but apparently not.

“What I really love,” said the driver, “is the taiga.”

Roy Jones was puzzled. “You love the tiger?”

The driver nodded.

“Which tiger is that?”

“The taiga,” the driver repeated. “You know, the forest.”

From the depths of his memory, Roy Jones recalled a wildlife programme he’d watched one Sunday evening with his wife. The taiga: a great expanse of dense woodland, between grassy steppe to the south and frozen tundra to the north. So at once, Roy Jones knew exactly where he was with the driver. Lots and lots of trees, the odd bear or eagle, and the soothing voice of David Attenborough, while his wife got up and asked if he wanted more tea.

“Of course, the taiga,” said Roy Jones. “Well, I’m sure it must be very nice. A bit like the New Forest, perhaps?”

“I hate it,” said the driver. “The taiga, it is beautiful, and it is hell.”

Roy Jones could not recall, in at least twenty years of attendance at international conferences on industrial lubricants, any conversation with a local taxi driver quite like the one that was now evolving. “Tell me,” he said, “have you always been a taxi driver?”

His companion shook his head. “I am not a taxi driver.” Roy Jones felt a shiver of fear; was this the moment when the hidden plan would make itself known, as the driver pulled up in a side street far from any hotel or officer of the local law?

The driver repeated, “I am not a driver, not a teacher, not a husband, not a writer.” Roy Jones was struggling to find the point of all these negatives. Apart from husband and teacher (or rather, lecturer), Roy Jones was none of these things either. “No,” said the driver. “I am a man. That is all I am. You go to taiga, you find this for yourself. You find what you are. Then perhaps you love yourself. Or perhaps you hate.”

“I see,” said Roy Jones. Clearly this taiga place wasn’t like the New Forest after all. “Do you go there often?”

“Not since many years,” said the driver sorrowfully. “Last time, it was enough for me.” Still the car followed its steady route through streets Roy Jones began to notice less and less, intrigued instead by the driver’s words.

“Twelve years ago,” the driver said, “or maybe more, I can’t remember. My cousin and I, we like to hunt. We go to taiga with our rifles. The big black bird, what do you call it?”

“Crow?”

“No.”

“Eagle?”

“No, big black bird, kind of a grouse. What beautiful meat! And the one with the tail like this…” The driver drew a curve with his finger.

“Lyre bird?”

“Of course not.”

Roy Jones had seen lyre birds on David Attenborough, but obviously it wasn’t taiga week then.

The driver drew the bird’s tail again, this time taking both hands from the wheel in order to express himself more accurately, and Roy Jones realised that his life possibly depended right now on his own neglected skills in ornithology.

“Quail? Ptarmigan?”

“No, no. Quail is with the feathers on his head…” The driver was more interested in doing bird impressions than in watching Moscow traffic. Roy Jones was shrinking into his seat, wondering if his briefcase would have the protective qualities of an airbag, as random bird names continued to spill from his mind.

“Partridge?”

“Yes! yes!” The driver clapped and gripped the wheel once more. Roy Jones breathed a sigh of relief. A partridge had saved his life.

“That’s a good bird,” said the driver. “We hunt it, in the taiga. And another one…”

“Alright, never mind,” said Roy Jones.

The driver was hurt. “I bore you?”

Roy Jones was sheepish. For all his consumptive appearance, the driver could still probably kick the shit out of him if he cared to, judging by the deft way he’d handled Roy Jones’s suitcase. “I only meant to ask you what else you hunted. Bears?”

The driver shook his head. “Bears, you leave them alone, they leave you. But the pig, with the tusks…”

“Wild boar?” Roy Jones said swiftly, before the driver could bring his hands up and make little tusks out of them that would have sent the car careering off the road into what Roy Jones noticed to be a passing McDonalds.

“Yes, the wild boar. We shot one, cooked it on a fire.”

“That’s most interesting,” Roy Jones said politely. “And you’re allowed to light fires in the taiga?” Yes, it really wasn’t like the New Forest at all.

“You do whatever you want,” said the driver. “In the taiga, no one can see you. In the taiga, nearest village is maybe a thousand kilometres away. You see another man in the taiga, first thing you do, you reach for your rifle.”

Roy Jones swallowed. “Well. Fascinating. And you went there with your cousin?”

The driver nodded. “We camp; we stay in huts. They open all the time; if nobody there you go in, light the fire, live there as long as you wish.”

“And if somebody’s in the hut when you arrive?”

“Then you no go near. You keep your rifle close by your side.”

All in all, this taiga place sounded a lot less inviting than when David Attenborough did it on the television. Roy Jones’s wife had made a fresh pot of tea, and there on the screen was a big cuddly bear, reaching into a tree and mucking up a beehive, just like an outsized Winnie the Pooh. “Come and look at this, dear,” Roy Jones called to his wife in the kitchen, as the bear slopped bee-studded honey into its hungry mouth. “Really, these creatures are so comical, don’t you think?”

But now the driver had totally spoiled it all. The taiga, it seemed, was just as lawless as the rest of this huge, unfathomable country.

“We go in boat,” he explained.

“You and your cousin?”

The driver nodded. “Some supplies, a tent, essential things. Our rifles, of course. We go up the river, two hundred kilometres from road where we leave the car. Takes us a few days. We hear there’s good place for the… for the…”

“Partridges? Grouse?”

“No, the black one. Never mind. We think there’s a hut not far away, nobody is there probably. So, on the third day, we wake up in our tent, wash ourselves in the river, we have some fish to eat. In the taiga, very good fish.”

Roy Jones could almost see it: the smouldering campfire beside the broad, cool waters. And all around, nothing but trees, impenetrably dense.

“We get the boat ready, and my cousin, he say to me suddenly, did you hear that? What, I say. A noise, he tell me. Sound like a gun. I say to him, I hear nothing – you hear a branch breaking. It might be a bear, he say, we better be careful, and I say, never mind about the bear, we make the boat ready, we go to the hut today and we find a nice bed tonight, have everything we need. He laugh – everything except a woman of course. Yes, in the taiga you have everything except that.”

Roy Jones could at least relate to this aspect of the adventure. While the resemblance with the New Forest had dwindled out of existence, the taiga nevertheless had something in common with the field of international tribology research.

“My cousin, he say, let’s check the rifles. He not like the sound he heard. In the taiga, you meet another man, he’s either mad or he’s escaped from a prison.”

“What about you two?”

“We were hunters. That’s the other kind you meet. And hunters, they like to hunt. So you not want to meet other hunter. Otherwise, maybe he hunt you.”

The driver slowed up, but it was not a hotel they had arrived at, only a set of traffic lights that soon changed.

“Well, we check the rifles, we get the boat ready, we set off. Beautiful morning. In the taiga, clear days like you see nowhere else. The air is like… like…” Roy Jones quietly prayed that the fresh air of the taiga bore no resemblance to anything that would mean the driver lifting his hands from the wheel again. “Like honey,” he said at last. “Air like honey.” All ready for a big bear to come and steal, and without signalling, the driver took a sudden left in front of an oncoming lorry. Roy Jones braced himself, but the taxi easily avoided the approaching vehicle, whose horn blared as they left it rushing behind them.

“And the water,” the driver continued, “it’s like glass. Only few small waves on the wide river, it flows so slow. And the boat cutting through when we start the engine.” He breathed in, as if tasting the honeyed air of the taiga; Roy Jones watched the driver breathe deeply, exhaling noisily before repeating the gesture, and then finally the driver’s sickly face darkened. “Shit!” he murmured. “The air, to me, it’s like a shit.”

Roy Jones wasn’t sure if this was Russian contradiction again, or else a comparison between the taiga and the city; but he didn’t really care. “Then you took the boat to the hut?” he said, wishing to move things along to their conclusion, as if this might somehow bring them more quickly to his hotel.

The driver slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “We not make it to the hut. We not make it any place. The boat, it goes fine, engine run smoothly, and then my cousin, he says suddenly: Listen! So I listened, and I hear nothing. My cousin, he leans towards me in the boat and he says, it was another gunshot, you didn’t hear it? Me, I reckon he’s dreaming. But then, across the water, in front of the boat, there it was: pat-pat-pat-pat-pat!” The driver, using only one hand, made a motion like a flat stone skimming over the waves.

“My cousin, he get hold of me while I watch, he grab me and pull me down in the boat. I raise my head to look, and there it is again, in front of us: pat-pat-pat-pat-pat! Line of bullets hitting the water. A machine gun. Some guys in trees, they want a little fun, little sport. Maybe they sink the boat first, then they kill us. Or else they want the boat. My cousin and me, we’re lying in the boat, terrified, and we hear bullets flying over our head: zip-zip-zip-zip!” A zooming finger illustrated this new torment for the benefit of Roy Jones. “We not steering the boat – I try to hold with my foot. And then: kaa-kaa-kaa-kaa-kaa! Little pieces of wood splintering all over us – a line of holes in the side of the boat. They getting serious. My cousin, he say to me: we gotta do something! And he reach the… the… what do you call the handle on motor you steer with?”

Roy Jones couldn’t remember. “The rudder?”

“No, not rudder I think.”

“Let’s just call it the handle,” Roy Jones suggested. “Tell me what happened next.”

“My cousin, he get the handle between his feet and he go THIS WAY and THIS WAY.” The swerving of the boat was perfectly imitated by the driver’s sudden lurching of his body to left and right, some of which was in turn transmitted to the taxi. “He make the boat spin all around.”

“No need to illustrate,” said Roy Jones. “I get the idea.”

“And for a moment, I think we gonna turn over in the water, maybe we hide under the boat or something – I dunno, it’s crazy, but when a man’s firing at you – pa-pa-pa-pa! – you gotta do anything you can. And the boat, it’s going everywhere. My cousin can’t control it. And then: bang! The boat’s grounded at the side of the river. We gotta get out and run for it, while the bullets keep coming at us: za-za-za-za-za-za-za-za! I’m running into the trees, and I see a line of them right beside me, like a rabbit I’m chasing – only I’m the rabbit, and the bullets are chasing me. And I get behind a tree and look round to see the river bank. And there’s my cousin lying on the ground, my own cousin in front of my eyes. My poor cousin.”

The driver at this point kissed his fingertips, touched the small faded icon affixed to the car’s battered dashboard, and crossed himself.

“Was he dead?” Roy Jones asked. Being a tribologist of international eminence, he was by nature a man of exactitude.

The driver shook his head. “My cousin not dead. Not quite. His leg was moving – he was trying to push himself along the ground. No bullets now, no sound anywhere, except my cousin, on the ground, trying to get himself to safety, and this kind of gurgling sound he make. Ah – shit!” The driver suddenly stopped the car. “Here is your hotel.”

Roy Jones looked out and saw a huge building in which, right now, he had absolutely no interest. “I’d really like to hear the rest of your story,” he said.

The driver glanced at his watch. “I have another delegate to meet from airport in forty minutes.”

“Well, that gives you plenty of time to get to the end,” Roy Jones suggested; but already the driver had got out and walked round to open the boot. Roy Jones also stepped out of the car, and took charge of the wheeled suitcase that was handed to him. The cab had been arranged by the conference organisers; there was nothing to pay, no more to be said. During much of the preceding story about the taiga, Roy Jones had been quietly wondering whether a tip would be expected; but he had no Russian money, and it seemed that this little episode was about to end and be forgotten – as such episodes always are – without any further resolution.

However, with a sudden burst of initiative, Roy Jones said, “Do you think you could help me inside with the suitcase?” The driver looked sceptical. Roy Jones said, “I could even buy you a drink.”

“A drink?”

“Well, a coffee, I suppose. And you could tell me a little more about the taiga.”

The driver smiled. “I help you, then,” he said, taking the suitcase by the carrying handle on its long side, rather than the extendible one for less muscular travellers such as Roy Jones who rely on trolley wheels, and the driver ascended the hotel steps, easily bearing the suitcase while Roy Jones made do with his briefcase which contained the precious presentation – “Mixed-phase lubricants: a top-down approach” – that was still his reason for being here, and almost entirely the reason why he left the driver settling comfortably in the hotel bar while he went to check in.

The girl behind the desk was perfectly groomed but imperfectly trained. It all took a lot longer than Roy Jones would have preferred, and as he handed over his passport, he looked at his watch, wondering if it had really been such a good idea to invite the driver in. Roy Jones was a sucker for a good story, that was his problem. He was simply too impulsive, as his wife told him the other week, when he suddenly changed the habit of a lifetime and decided that their next car would not be a Rover after all.

“Enjoy your stay,” the desk girl finally announced with a smile that clearly had had too much prior use. Roy Jones took his key and his luggage and went straight back to the bar, where the driver was sitting silently over a cup of coffee. Roy Jones sat down opposite him at the small wooden table and thought it best to get to the point.

“What did you do about your cousin?” Roy Jones asked.

“What would any man do?” said the driver with a shrug. “He was lying there in the dirt, trailing blood as he pushed himself along the ground with one foot, trying to reach the trees. At the other side of the river, a man with a machine gun, or two men, or a whole army, were waiting for me to make my move. As soon as I ran out to save my cousin, they would finish both of us.”

“I see,” said Roy Jones. Put in such straightforward terms, the whole matter became as clear as the most elementary problem of engineering. “So you left your cousin to die?”

The driver’s eyebrows shot up. “To die! You think I’m a monster! No, I never leave any man to die. I take a deep breath, I say a prayer, I kiss the picture of my mother I carry here in my own head, and then I run – yes, I run out from behind the tree, faster than ever I run in my life. And the bullets, they come BA! BA! BA! BA! BA! BA!” The driver’s hand chopped salami slices across the table, so loudly that heads turned in response. “The bullets tear the sleeves of my coat, they chew the leather of my boots. BA! BA! BA! BA! BA! BA! They rip my cousin’s back to pieces, and right before my eyes his head explodes – SHAAH!”

Roy Jones gave a jump and clutched the room key in his hand.

“My cousin, there was no hope. And I never make it back to the trees. So I run to the boat in the water, I jump inside the boat, and the bullets are like crazy. And in all those thousand bullets, not one of them hits my body. I think to myself, I am like a saint. God has chosen this. As many bullets as there are leaves on a tree – as many bullets as there are trees in the forest. They’ve torn my sleeve, my boot. But not my flesh. And I throw myself in the boat – they can perhaps even see me there, but it was the closest place, closer than the trees where I was already safe. I land in the boat, and my head, it hits the wooden seat, real hard. So here I am, a bulletproof saint. And a piece of wood knocks me unconscious.”

The driver raised his coffee cup and took a sip. “How long I lie there? I don’t know: a minute, an hour, a day. Next thing, I realise I’m awake, and there’s no shooting. They must have decided I was dead. No guns anywhere, except the two loaded rifles there beside me in the boat. I wake up, and I remember that my cousin is dead. I can’t raise my head to look: I can’t risk it. Perhaps only a minute has passed since I landed here – who knows? So I lie and wait. All I hear is the gentle wind in the trees, the river lapping against the boat, sometimes the birds. And then, after a while, I hear another boat, far away. A motor boat, slowly it get louder, nearer. And now I know what happens. They come to see what they done. They find me, they shoot me – how can I play dead, when they go through my pockets looking for my wallet? How can I lie still, with my heart pounding and not a drop of blood on my body? I think to myself, this is the final test. I hear the motor boat get closer, and I reach for the rifles, very slowly. I’m working it out in my head: one rifle or two? And I figure, I start with two, then I drop one when I got something to aim at. First, I’ll get up and fire both of them at once, blindly. At least, if nothing else, I’ll die shooting.”

The driver drained his cup and stared into it. “Now perhaps a little vodka, my friend?”

“For you? But you’re driving.”

“Only a little one,” he said soothingly. “And I have some mints that will clear my breath before I drive, so it’s okay.” He looked round towards the barman and called out his order, then said to Roy Jones, “The other motor boat, it’s so near now. I hear the motor revving down, idling while it steers closer. I hear someone moving in the boat, sounds like walking on planks. I reckon any moment I’ll hear a splash as he jumps into the shallow water and then it’ll be my moment. I wait and then… and then…”

A glass of vodka materialised on the table.

“SPLASH!” the driver cried, instantly getting to his feet and, from both arms, spraying with imaginary gunfire the hotel bar and the startled, retreating barman. “GA-GA-GA-GA-GA-GA! And now I could see them, I dropped the rifle in my left hand and took good aim with the one remaining. The man in the water was on his knees – GA! – I finished him. In the boat, a younger guy with a fur hat who was still trying to cock his rifle when I got him – GA! GA! GA!” The driver sat down.

Roy Jones was shaken. “You killed them both?”

The driver nodded. “The one in the water, he was face down, his chest caught on stones on the shallow river bed and his arms and legs swaying like reeds in the current. I went and turned him over, looked at his face. A man in his forties, perhaps. He had no gun. And in the boat, maybe this other one was his son. That boy, I don’t know how old. I got him in the face. All they had between them was their two rifles, same as my cousin and me. The boy’s was in his hand, where he’d been trying to cock it. The father’s rifle was lying with their fishing gear, unloaded. I checked it all afterwards. So you see, these weren’t the ones who had fired at me.”

Roy Jones’s mouth was hanging open. “You killed two innocent men!”

The driver nodded. “And on the river bank, my cousin lay in a terrible mess. And our boat was ruined by the gunfire – I congratulated myself that at least now I had a usable boat, thanks to the men I shot.”

Roy Jones was horrified. “But they were innocent! Hunters like you, out on a trip.”

The driver again nodded, drained his glass in one shot, exhaled vodka in his breath and said, “We too, my cousin and me, we were innocent men. But in the taiga, there is no law except survival. When I lay in the boat and heard them coming, what was I supposed to do? Was I to lie there like a frightened doe and let them shoot me dead? Was I supposed to be a good citizen and stand up, raise my arms in the air, and say, kill me now please? No. In the taiga, you live by the law of the taiga. The father and son in the motor boat, they knew that too. Or they should have known. A wild boar, it can kill you. A bear, it can kill you. A damned mushroom, it can kill you. And a man, he will certainly kill you, if he thinks that this is what he has to do. So, my friend, I regret nothing, except that I ran a little too fast towards the trees, like a cotton-assed rabbit, when I should have been saving my cousin. But in the taiga, we are not asked to make choices, only to act.”

It seemed to Roy Jones that the story had now come to its dreadful end. “What about the ones with the machine gun?”

The driver shrugged. “They went away. They watched me lying in the boat for an hour or a day, and they got bored. I don’t know. Perhaps the father and son really were the killers, and left their machine gun on the opposite bank of the river while they came to take some trophies. Who cares? You kill a bear, you don’t go asking afterwards what it had for dinner. You shoot, you kill, you go to sleep and you move on. This is law of the taiga. And you see, my friend, I am a man of the law.”

The driver reached inside his coat; Roy Jones wondered if a gun might emerge, or perhaps a photograph of the lost cousin. It was only a packet of cigarettes that came out, and a cheap lighter. “Relax,” the driver said with a smile. “It was all a long time ago.”

“Did you bury those people? Did you tell the police?”

“Relax.” The driver lit a cigarette. “The dead are in Heaven, it’s we who have to live on Earth. I am a husband, a father. I drive a taxi, I write poetry.”

“You’re a poet?”

The driver nodded. “I’ve published books, won a few prizes. Perhaps you think I demean my art by driving a taxi. But I have to earn a living. This is law of the city. And I promise you, since the last time in the taiga, I kill no more people.” He chuckled. “Killing, it’s bad for you, like smoking. A pity I can’t give up smoking like the doctor says I should, and the vodka. Doctor says I have a heart attack in next two years. He can see it like a clock. I say to him, okay.” The driver looked down at his empty vodka glass, and the empty cup beside it. “Thank you,” he said to Roy Jones.

“Like another?”

“No, I die soon enough in any case.” He stood up to leave. “Enjoy your stay,” he said to Roy Jones. The two men shook hands, then the taxi driver walked briskly across the hotel foyer, giving a final friendly wave before disappearing out through the heavy revolving door.

Two hours later, Roy Jones was in his room, and having showered and changed, he now felt sufficiently refreshed to begin the next part of the day. It was still only lunchtime: he understood that he was due to be collected by someone from the conference, who would presumably also take care of feeding him. He was at the mercy of whoever should happen to appear.

The telephone rang. Roy Jones went to the chipped wooden desk where it sat, and lifted the receiver.

“Mr Jones?”

“Speaking.”

“I am here to take you to the conference.”

“Splendid.”

“You had a safe trip?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Please be in the foyer in five minutes.”

“Of course.” Roy Jones hung up. His briefcase was ready, and he checked once again that the text of “Mixed-phase lubricants: a top-down approach” was safely stored there. He put on his coat, then took the elevator to the lobby where a man in a long grey coat paced conspicuously to and fro.

“I’m Dr Jones.” He reached out his hand for the other to shake.

“Hello sir. Now let us go.” And he led Roy Jones outside to his car.

This was to be a journey of the strictly no-nonsense kind, in contrast to the earlier taxi ride. Attempting to make conversation out of his habitual sense of politeness, Roy Jones asked, “Are you a tribologist yourself?” The driver merely gave him a look of incomprehension, remaining silent until they reached their destination.

“Here is conference centre,” said the driver, suddenly pulling up. They both got out, and Roy Jones followed him inside. Everything seemed so colourless in comparison with the earlier taxi driver’s story of the taiga. That alone had been real: the wrong men, shot dead for daring to approach a damaged boat.

Roy Jones followed his escort upstairs, where he was deposited at a desk whose occupant smiled and gave him a badge with his name on it: Mr N Jones. They hadn’t even got his initial right this time, never mind his title. A bearded man came over, and the next thing Roy Jones knew, he was being shaken by the hand; embraced, even.

“It is so good to meet you, Mr Jones – we are delighted that you will be speaking at the seminar – and you are just in time! We were a little nervous that you would not be here!”

Roy Jones’s stomach rumbled as he was swiftly introduced to four or five people whose names came from the impenetrably unmemorable world of Tolstoy. One was a woman whose handshake was like touching polished ivory, and whose curved and slanting eyes suggested a message from a distant wilderness. She certainly didn’t look like your average tribologist.

Barely able to take in his surroundings, Roy Jones was then led to the seminar room, where rows of chairs, mostly filled, faced a desk with a microphone on it, and an empty seat behind. As Roy Jones took his place to speak it occurred to him that it was just as well he’d brought a print-out of his talk along with the PowerPoint file, since there wasn’t a projector or screen in sight.

And so there he was at last, sitting with the text laid neatly before him, ready to embark on a voyage of discovery through the multi-faceted world of mixed-phase lubricants. His bearded host intended first to say a few words in Russian. Some of the audience members, Roy Jones now observed, were wearing headsets, of the kind a diplomat might sport in a United Nations debate. There was one lying on Roy Jones’s desk; and at the back of the room he could see a well-dressed woman neatly encased in a glass-walled booth, whose role was evidently that of interpreter. Roy Jones put on his headset and immediately heard the woman’s smooth, authoritative voice as she translated what the Russian was saying.

“Mr Jones’ work repeatedly poses the question: what is true, what is false?”

Roy Jones weighed this comment up. Yes, his work on mixed-phase lubricants had questioned some of the most familiar assumptions of the subject. Still a pity about the “mister”, though.

“As Richard Sand has put it, Jones contests the territory between being and non-being…”

Richard Sand? There was no significant tribologist by that name. Possibly an error of the over-zealous interpreter, translating a conference organiser’s name that happened to be the Russian word for sand.

“Consider for example his comments regarding Fragments of Behring…”

A garbled reference to Roy Jones’ work on compliant foil bearings?

“Or Jones’ striking remark that the greatest adventure one can undertake is to cease to be oneself…”

When would Roy Jones ever say anything so utterly ridiculous?

“In his most recent book, The Truth about my Wife, Nick Jones exposes the dilemma of people trapped by convention, who long to live a more spiritual life, but can find this only through the most terrible acts of depravity…”