What the hell was all this? ‘The Night Watch’ … What on earth had I meant by saying that? And that beast with the teeth had immediately started whining and crept back into the bushes …
I took another mouthful of beer and tried once again to make sense of what had happened.
So, first I left the house.
Stop.
I put the bottle down on the little table, feeling confused. I must have looked very stupid at that moment, but there was no one to look at me – I was the only person in the compartment.
Stop.
I suddenly realised I couldn’t remember my own house at all.
I couldn’t remember a single thing about my past life. My memories began there, in that chilly winter park, just a few seconds before the attack. And everything before that was hidden in a mysterious darkness. Or rather, not even darkness, but a strange, grey shroud – sticky and viscous, almost completely impenetrable. A dense, grey swirling half-light.
I didn’t understand a thing.
I cast a confused and frightened glance round the compartment. It was a perfectly ordinary compartment. A little table, four bunks, brown plastic and maroon imitation leather. With lights occasionally slipping past in the night outside the window. My bag lying on the other bunk.
My bag!
I realised I didn’t have the slightest idea what was in my bag. It had to be my stuff. And stuff can tell you a lot. Or remind you. For instance, it might remind me why I was going to Moscow. For some reason I felt certain the bag could help reawaken my failed memory I must have read about that somewhere or heard about it from someone.
Then I suddenly had a better idea and reached in under my sweater, because I realised my passport was in my shirt pocket. If I could start with my name, then maybe I really would remember everything else.
As I looked at the yellowish page with its dark pattern of fanciful curlicues, I had mixed feelings. I looked at the photograph. At the face that I had probably been used to identifying with my own unique personality for about thirty years – or was this the very first day?
The face was familiar to the minutest detail. From the scar on the cheekbone to the premature hint of grey in the hair. But never mind the face. That wasn’t what interested me just at that moment.
The name.
Vitaly Sergeevich Rogoza. Date of birth, September 28, 1965.
Place of birth, the city of Nikolaev.
Turning over the page, I read the same information in Ukrainian and also ascertained that my sex was male and the passport had been issued by an organisation with the exceptionally clumsy acronym DO PMC ADIA – the District Office of the People’s Municipal Council of the Administration of the Department of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. The ‘Family status’ page was an unsullied, virginal blank. I heaved a sigh of relief, or perhaps disappointment.
Then came the eternal burden and curse borne by every ex-Soviet citizen: my residence permit and address. Apartment 28, 28 Tchaikovsky Street, Nikolaev.
Well, well, there was the number 28 again, twice in a row.
And then the associations really began to click – I remembered that my house stood on the corner of Tchaikovksy Street and Young Guard Street, next to School No. 28 (that number yet again). I remembered everything quite clearly and distinctly, right down to the charred poplar below my window – the victim of chemical experiments conducted by the young kid who lived on the floor above me, who had poured all sorts of rubbish out of the window onto the long-suffering tree. I remembered a drunken party in the next house five years ago, when someone had casually told the neighbour from downstairs what she could do with herself when she complained about the noise, and she’d turned out to be Armenian, the wife of some local bigwig, and how later a whole mob of those dark Armenians had come bursting in and started battering our faces to pulp and I’d had to clamber out through the little window in the end room, because the main window wouldn’t open, and climb down the drainpipe. When they noticed that one of the miserable drunks had disappeared from the blockaded apartment, the Armenians stopped flailing their fists about and some kind of agreement was eventually reached with them. And I also remembered my bitter disappointment when I asked for help from some local mates of mine who I’d often drunk beer with at the kiosks in the area, and not a single one of them came.
I tore myself away from these surprisingly vivid memories.
So I did have a past after all. Or were these merely the forms of memories, with nothing real behind them?
I had to try to figure it out.
From the passport I also gathered the entirely useless piece of information that I had ‘exercised the right to privatise without payment the following volume of living space’ – the volume was not indicated – ‘subject to the standard maximum of 24.3 square metres’.
And that was all.
I thoughtfully put the document back in the same pocket and looked hard at the bag. What will you help me remember, my black-and-green travelling companion with the foreign inscription FUJI on your bulging side?
Well, let’s hope you’ll help me remember at least something.
The zip opened with a quiet whoosh. I threw back the flap of cloth that covered the contents and looked inside. The polythene bag on top contained a toothbrush, a tube of Blend-a-Med toothpaste, a couple of cheap disposable razors and a small, fragrant black bottle of eau-de-cologne.
I put them on the bunk.
In the next plastic bag I discovered a warm wool sweater, obviously knitted by hand, not on a machine. I put that aside too.
I spent two or three minutes rummaging through the other bags – clean underwear, T-shirts, socks, a warm checked shirt.
Aha, here was something that wasn’t clothes.
A little mobile phone in a leather case, with an extendable aerial. My memory instantly reacted: ‘When I get to Moscow, I’ll have to buy a card.’
The charger was there too.
And finally, at the very bottom, one more plastic bag. Filled with blocks of something.
When I opened it, I was astounded. This ordinary plastic bag, the logo half worn away so that it was completely unrecognisable, contained wads of money, stacked in two layers. American dollars. Ten wads of hundred-dollar notes. That was a hundred thousand.
My hand automatically reached for the door and clicked the latch shut.
Je-sus, where had I got this from? And how was I going to get such a huge amount of money across the border? But then, I could probably stick a hundred-dollar bill under every customs officer’s nose and they’d leave me alone.
The discovery provoked almost no associations, apart from the memory of how expensive hotels are in Moscow.
Still in a mild state of shock, I put everything back in the bag, zipped it shut and pushed it under the bunk. I felt glad there was a second, unopened, bottle of beer standing beside the one I’d already started.
I don’t know why, but the alcohol had a distinctly soporific effect on me. I was expecting to spend a long time lying there, listening to the hammering of the wheels, screwing up my eyes when the bright light suddenly broke in for a few moments, and racking my brains painfully.
Nothing of the sort happened. Before I’d even finished the second bottle of beer, I slumped onto the bunk, still in all my clothes, and crashed out on top of the blanket.
Maybe I’d got too close to something taboo in my memories?
But how would I know?
I woke up to cold winter sunshine flooding in through the window. The train wasn’t moving. I could hear indifferent official voices in the corridor: ‘Good morning, Russian customs. Are you carrying any arms, narcotics or hard currency?’ The replies sounded less indifferent, but most of them were unintelligible.