‘That is correct. This particular interest emerged a few years ago. Before that, it was others.’

‘Others?’

‘His first enthusiasm was for Pushkin.’ She dispatched her coffee in a single gulp and began looking at her watch. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Slopen …’

Her body language and tone was intended to hasten our interview to its close, but I was determined to press on. I told her I had a favour to ask of her. ‘I hope you don’t think it’s forward of me,’ I said. ‘Last time, unfortunately, our visit was cut short. I wondered if I could watch him – Jack, your brother – working.’

‘That won’t be possible, I’m afraid.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to seem pushy. It’s just so incredible to think that your brother is capable of that extraordinary work.’ I set my cup down and stood up as if to leave.

She understood immediately what I was driving at: I was calling their whole story into question. ‘One moment,’ she said. ‘Please sit.’

About ten minutes later, she returned.

‘This way, please,’ she said.

*

Bykov and Vera led the way as we descended the back stairs to the cellar passage. Bykov was the first to the door. There was a circular window of reinforced glass about the diameter of a grapefruit which he looked through. ‘Vot tak. Nam udalos’. Mankurt pishet,’ he muttered, almost to himself. There it is. We’re in luck. The mankurt is writing.

I was a step or two behind them, but I heard him clearly and I saw the icy look that he got from Vera.

‘Chto?’ he asked – What? He was too dim or insensitive to read her admonitory glance.

Vera signalled for me to join her at the tiny window.

There was something sordid and zoological about the scene inside the room. The brightness of it. The aliveness of him. One thinks of writing as meditative, an act full of repose, but Jack was sprawled over his desk, shirtless, twitching and fidgeting, the flesh of his back all wax-coloured and loose. A piece of rejected paper was scrunched in his right hand; his left moved steadily across the page.

He was, he was, he was … I want to call him a brooding immensity, but I realise I’m plagiarising Conrad’s description of the Belgian Congo. I don’t know whether that’s a coincidence or a side-effect of the Procedure: there must have been at least one essay on Heart of Darkness in the batch that Vera coded.

Poor, poor Jack Telauga. Would it have been any kinder, I wonder, to rebuild a less melancholy personality?

I don’t think it’s hindsight that makes me recall, from this distance, feeling that he was like a huge malfunctioning machine. But the truth about him – about me as I am now – was unguessable.

‘Come,’ said Vera, unlocking the door and knocking three times on the pane of glass to forewarn him. We went in together. He glanced up from his work.

His face was expressionless. There is no surprise left in you after a month of reawakening, only stoicism alternating with rage. He turned away and continued to write.

Knowing, as I do, the pain of coming to in a carcass, I understand now some of what he must have undergone. The physical agony is severe, but the sense of psychological dislocation is unimaginable, and in his case probably fatal. Someone recovering from a stroke or floundering in the shallows of progressive dementia might have an inkling of a fraction of what we felt. And keep in mind that the world that generated him, the world he had been coded for, bore no resemblance to what he found. It’s a wonder he was as sane as he was.

I watched as his pen formed the letters on the paper. To my eye, there were slight differences between Jack’s and the hand of the forged letters, but it might have been the pen – a fat Mont Blanc fountain pen on this occasion – or some change in his physical condition. He set down the pen for a moment to pause for thought and rubbed his big hands against the bristles of his shaved dome.

Vera took a page from the discarded ones at his feet. ‘You see: Milton has been much on his mind since your meeting.’ In that eerily Johnsonian hand, he had quoted Johnson’s own judgement of ‘Lycidas’. ‘The diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing … its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind … where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.’

‘Was he always like this?’ I asked her.

She looked at me. ‘You pity him?’ she said, as though surprised.

‘Who wouldn’t?’ I said. She turned away abruptly. I thought at the time that I’d offended her.

‘So, have you seen enough?’ she asked, with her back still to me. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t think of a reason to prolong the spectacle and I felt faintly uncomfortable about the prurience of my interest in him.

As we returned to the ground floor, I made some polite comments about the large oil paintings in the stairwell, and Vera proceeded to identify them for me.

‘Malevich, Repin, Goncharova. Over there Aivazovskii.’

I paused at the Aivazovskii. I’d seen his work at the Hermitage. Russians often compare him to Turner and his paintings sell for millions, but I had never been a fan. This one showed Pushkin on a craggy Black Sea shoreline, ankle-deep in water that was as flat and shiny as icing sugar.

‘I can’t forgive Aivazovskii for boasting that he had never read a book,’ I said, truthfully.

Vera gave me a strange look. I noticed again how smooth her forehead was, and the alert intelligence in her blue-grey eyes. Something in them seemed to soften slightly. She handed me the page that she’d picked up off the floor. ‘A souvenir.’

I thanked her. In the last yard or so of hallway, I remembered something that I’d meant to ask. ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘what does mankurt mean?’

She smiled thinly. ‘Russian slang.’ She thanked me for my visit and I left.

*

It was one of those English spring days which are as fresh and green as a spear of asparagus: the plane trees rustling in the light wind, the sky unimprovably blue.

I wheeled my bicycle back along Piccadilly and through Green Park. American students were playing Ultimate Frisbee in a clearing.

Sitting in a deckchair, I turned over the strange events of the morning in my mind and looked again at the page Vera had given me; the ink on it seemed almost purple in the sun. The handwriting had an entirely natural flow. It had been written without hesitation. I thought how odd it was that Jack had achieved that fluency at all, never mind the fact that he was working left-handed. There was something about the ease of it, its wu wei, that was surely beyond a willed act.

I had never come across anything like it; but then again, it didn’t seem to be far outside the bell curve of human giftedness. The few savants I knew of by name had, if anything, greater talents: the artist Stephen Wiltshire could reproduce architecturally correct pictures of whole cityscapes in a matter of minutes and from memory; the linguistic savant Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in a week; Kim Peek could read two pages of text simultaneously by scanning separate pages with each eye. Even at my old school there was a boy called Dave Crabcock – a nickname derived of course from the operations of schoolboy logic on his actual name and surname: David Babcock – who memorised all the hexadecimal commands on the ZX Spectrum and could calculate pi in his head to fifty places.

So where did my unease come from?

Vot tak. Nam udalos’. Mankurt pishet.

Sooner or later, every student of Russian who visits the country gets taken aside and coached, usually over vodka and always by a man, in the art of mat: foul language. Russians pride themselves on the variety and complexity of their swearing and the many shades of meaning that can be coaxed from a handful of root words. It’s been said that much of the vocabulary of mat is of Tartar origin: so that part of the words’ offensiveness is that they recapitulate the humiliation of those centuries when the country was subjected to Tartar rule, when Russian virgins were left outside villages as tribute along with gold and furs.