They spent a silent day at the natural history museum.
The next morning she walked behind her guide through the city and thought about Irina, but Irina seemed to have slipped into the distance somewhere. When they passed the state telephone office she told the guide she wanted to call Moscow. He tried to prevent her, but she went inside and ordered ten minutes on the phone, in a panic. They waited there for six hours, the guide staring at the floor angrily, before the operator announced that Irina wasn’t answering. Of course she wasn’t – Irina and Mitka were still in the south.
Late that night a fierce wind blew up. It tore at the tin roof of the hotel and sent oil barrels tumbling down the ice-covered streets. The hotel shook in the buffeting wind, creaked, cracked, felt like it would come falling down. The girl was cold. The windstorm was followed by a blizzard of gritty snow from the desert that whipped straight at the hotel windows and melted against the warm panes of glass. She imagined it turning the screws in the window frames, the bolts falling out, nails breaking in two, the cement crumbling, the whole building tilting and collapsing in a heap of sand.
In the morning she told the receptionist that she was sick and didn’t need her guide, planned to spend the day in her room resting.
She stood at the window. The indifferent sun moved past from east to west. As evening fell, the sun dropped behind the yurt village and a drear, heavy darkness settled over the city, day changed to evening, evening to night. She watched a satellite that looked like the moon shining hysterically bright over the roofs of the yurts. She missed Moscow and its summer poplars.
She decided to go out and look for the man. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. The night was bright and cold. She left at a run, glancing behind her as she ran, the green beam of a floodlight throwing itself over the hotel, the grey clouds shuttling their way north. She jumped onto the first bus and rode it out of the city. Lanterns from distant yurt villages flickered in the darkness. The bus passed a group of colourless people walking next to the road, swaying randomly. Some of them had sacks on their backs, some had their arms full of packages and other burdens. The bus veered towards a new building site where half-finished Soviet-style highrises languished. The buildings stood with their bellies open in the middle of the torn-up, ravaged ground. Scaffolding rose up on every side – beams, stairways, floors, canopies, hallways, bridges. Faint lights from a village of builders’ barracks greeted the coming night. An old truck and a battered bulldozer lay collapsed outside the fence. Ruddy rings of lampposts drew trembling ellipses on the black sky, the scaffolds lit with the yellow illumination of evening.
She walked along a half-built road. The ruts left by the trucks were filled with watery sludge. Swinging lanterns clinked against metal wires at the gate to the guards’ barracks, where a Komsomolets excavator stood out at the front like a guard dog, a one-legged Lapp chickadee hopping along its roof. She knocked on the barracks door for a long time before the sleepy watchman came to open it. Stuffy heat wafted out of the barracks onto her face. The watchman asked in a stern voice what she wanted. He looked at her with his head to one side and smiled.
‘I’ve always wondered what young women like you see in that old phoney. The more lost the cause the more interesting it is. You women have no sense of self-preservation. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov is staying over there in the barracks, but you can’t go there. Give me your number. He’ll call you if he wants to.’
She handed him the hotel address and her room number.
‘Don’t forget – I warned you.’
She went back to the hotel, past the nauseating stench of poisoned yurt slums, through the red dark of night, the dismal, frozen silence. All the stars of Orion shone straight down on her, and the snowy moon rose slowly into the sky from behind a concrete wall. Much later a deaf dawn appeared in the east and lit up the low-hanging clouds. A few flakes of snow drifted onto her fevered face.
Before she fell asleep she listened to the progress of the waking morning. She thought about Siberia’s frosty, spent forests, spread like a wall along the edge of a sea of fields. She thought of the blizzarded, stiff-frozen borderlands, where herds of reindeer wandered aimlessly, lazily looking for food, the impenetrable wilderness, puny hills, uninhabited provinces, snowstorms, swarms of mosquitoes, and autumn’s still, misty damp wrapping itself around a little village.
He didn’t call.
The next day she went with the tour guide to Suhbaatar’s mausoleum, Bogd Khan’s winter palace, and the Lenin statue. When they ran out of sights, she tried one more time. She reminded the guide about the petroglyphs. He laughed with amusement and she understood that there was no point in bringing it up again. She looked out of the grey hotel window at the quiet clouds crawling unhurried to the east.
When Mitka came home after eight months of psychiatric treatment, she sensed that he had guessed everything. Irina had arranged through her office for herself and Mitka to stay in a citizens’ sanatorium in the Crimea. The purpose was for them to rest, and if his reason returned to its former sharpness, everything would be just as it was before. Irina had prepared her for this, for the fact that it might be as if nothing had happened while he was away.
Mornings crawled into days, days into evenings, deep nights filled the earth and sky, as long as the life to come, filled with a hum, with the hiss of radiators, the cold dryness of sheets, the dry rustle of gritty snowfall. She paced around her room, looked out of the window at the sleeping city, the greasy, struggling wind sinking into the darkness of the city. She gazed at the nights, the stars coming out so large and pale she could have touched them. She waited for the mornings, the stars twinkling uncertainly for a moment and disappearing. She watched the slow rise and set of the desperate sun, the momentary light of falling stars, and cursed herself. She was tired and empty. Far away from everything. Even herself.
Gradually, she accepted her solitude and stopped waiting for him to call. She began to bear the continual anxiety, the growing pressure, the pain in her chest, a little better. She learned to listen a little more calmly to her own tense breathing and the restless beat of her overwrought heart devouring her blood.
One evening he came. He smelled of mare’s milk kumis and mutton fat. She sobbed. As they stepped outside, a rock-hard, heavy southwest wind shoved them along, carrying them towards a yurt suburb. He took hold of her shoulder and pulled her next to him, fatherly. She told him what had happened. She was crying, but the wind from beyond the yurts dried her tears so quickly that he didn’t see them. He listened to her without interrupting, and when she came to the end of the story, he burst into boisterous laughter.
‘You really are stupid. I’ve never met a broad like you, and I’ve come across all kinds. Don’t worry. It’ll all work out.’
He swallowed his laughter. He scratched the back of his head and snarled. ‘I wonder what those guys had been up to, for God to punish them like that? The law here barely recognises manslaughter, fines you about as much as the price of a bottle of black-market vodka. They must be quite the rascals, eh?’
They walked on in silence. A gust of air blasted around a corner, she swallowed it and coughed.
‘When things don’t get better, they get worse, and it’s a short road from bad to good. Don’t worry, my girl, a bit of bad luck can suddenly change to a bit of good. Those bums got what they asked for. No normal Mongolian man goes to a hotel to meet a Western tourist – it’s like suicide.’
He looked at her pityingly.
‘I once had a whore here who I really liked a lot. She had a six-year-old son who always gave me a murderous stare. When I was screwing her I was always afraid he could come up behind me and put a Finnish pen through my skull. I bought him a set of building blocks from Moscow, the kind you can use to build all of Red Square, with the church and Lenin’s mausoleum. When I gave it to him, he threw it in the corner and stared at me like he could have killed me. But when I went to get some pussy later on, the whore told me to look under the bed. There was Red Square in all its glory, handsome as Beria’s dick.’
She jumped over a pile of horse manure in front of a drinks machine and laughed. There was a snowy amusement park behind a low warehouse where a tired old ferris wheel moped, stiff with cold. He took off, running towards the park. She watched as he slipped through the hanging half-open door of the leaning, abandoned booth and, as if by magic, the light bulbs strung around the park flickered on in faint tatters of light and the ferris wheel creaked into motion, first rattling slowly, then growing faster with a steady whine. She looked first at the man, then at the ferris wheel, then at the outlandish city with its wind-licked, blackened, discarded remains of yurts, strewn over a wasteland. The melting snow smelled like spring. A puddle of greasy black liquid spread from an oil barrel thrown into a snow drift. She thought about Moscow, Malaya Nikitskaya, where she and Irina once walked, the yellow lights gliding through the autumn fog.
The darkness thickened to a blue mist over the amusement park. He walked her back to the hotel. They could see from a distance a gigantic puddle of oily sludge, a cold red circle of moon shining on its surface. Little children were playing at the edge of the puddle, although it was night. A girl barely four years old, her legs swollen, was gathering oil in a broken bottle. A boy younger than her was wading in the puddle, shoeless, splashing it on himself.
The hotel was locked. The two of them stood with their backs to the wind and waited. The faint light of the moon shone on the puddles of slush, an indifferent wind whistled around the building. A sullen functionary eventually came and opened the door. The man followed her to the desk in the lobby and handed her a twenty-five-rouble note. She smiled bashfully back at him. He winked at her and left.
The girl climbed the stairs to her room and collapsed happily onto the sofa. She fell asleep with all her clothes on, at peace, thinking of nothing.