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whether you’re supposed to listen or not before hearing it.’
    ‘That story we concocted,’ said Ivan. ‘You remember?’
    ‘It was a long time ago, comrade,’ I said, wearily, feeling suddenly sick of the whole conversation, and Frenkel’s peculiar eagerness - and, I suppose, of life itself.
    ‘We could be the only two people left alive who remember it!’
    ‘Or,’ I offered, ‘we could be two more of the great mass who have no idea about it .’
    ‘You don’t understand!’ He glanced over his shoulder once again at his minder. ‘You don’t understand what I’m saying! Let’s say I’ve happened to become privy to a certain secret, state secret. It has to do with the particular department in which I clerk. Let’s say I am - privy - to one of the most secret of state secrets.’
    ‘If you are, then please don’t tell me.’
    ‘What if I were to say to you . . .
    ‘Putting every sentence you utter in the conditional mode like this,’ I interrupted, ‘inoculates neither of us from potentially evil consequences.’
    ‘That story!’ he burst out. ‘That fiction we worked on, and that nobody else but us knows. No other human being upon the entire world knows this fiction was even written, let alone knows all the ins and outs of it, all the specifics.’
    ‘No fiction was ever shrouded more effectively in unknowing,’ I conceded.
    ‘Friend, it is starting to come true .’
    The late winter sky overhead was all cloud, and had the quality of a vast marble wall reaching up to eternity, flecked with blurry specks of grey and black set in a ground as white as bleach. Moscow was lidded. The row of buildings on the far side of the road seemed crammed close against this wall. The few intervening cars moved sluggishly under its influence.
    ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, wearily.
    ‘I mean exactly what I say. The things we plotted. That we buried. The story we wrote. It is starting to come true. In the real world. It’s all coming true.’
    ‘That doesn’t entirely sound,’ I suggested, ‘possible.’
    ‘No! You’re right! It’s perfectly impossible! But it’s true , nonetheless. It’s true!’
    That’s how I met up with Ivan Frenkel again.

3
    I am not trying to trick you. The purpose of this memoir is not trickery, or sleight-of-hand. There are no secrets in this book. I might go so far as to say: the purpose of this book is the very opposite of secrecy - it is drawing your attention to that which is hidden in plain view all the time. I am writing it to record the most profound change in my life; nothing less than a translation from one manner of existence into another, from something grossly physical into something - let us say, spiritual . You might call it ethereal, or radiative, or at the very least other . It all has to do with meeting the alien, and overcoming my cynicism. For I can confess I had fallen into a cynical, an ironic mode of life.
    The great change happened in the year 1986, which was in itself a year of many changes. The Soviet Union was changing, with perestroika and glasnost and a number of suchlike words we are proud to have exported to the rest of the world. Then on 9 January - which was a Thursday - the American space-rocket Challenger was launched. I watched it, after the event, on a friend’s television. The news footage was played over and over in Russia: the rocket lifting itself on the blowtorch tail of its own blast. The spacecraft shrinking as the camera followed it up, dwindling to a white dot in the dark blue, shimmying from side to side as the camera juddered slightly on its windblown tripod. Then, without preparation, the axe descending, with its immaterial blade, and cleaving through the whole length of the spacecraft from nose to exhaust and cutting it, with a great puff of magician’s smoke, into two. The footage was silent, but, trained up by cinema, you heard the explosion anyway. One coral-like billow of white cloud suddenly blooming at the end, and