‘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.
16
A HALF MOON STILL HUNG over the yurts despite the concentrated sunlight. Small white clouds scuttled briskly across the lid of sky. Columns of trucks rumbled towards construction sites, shaking the window of her room, horses whinnied and flicked away the burning rays of sun with their long thick tails, old men in lambskin coats puffed cigarettes on the main street in front of the department store, women hurried by carrying milk pails.
When she went down to the lobby, the man handed her a budding cyclamen and kissed her three times on the cheeks.
‘Is this the fellow that’s been bothering you?’
He pointed disdainfully at the tour guide. When she nodded, he took the man aside. A moment later the guide left without looking back, angry and humiliated, but well paid.
‘We won’t have any more trouble from that louse,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Walking around in rags, but still full of himself.’
A shiny old Volga was waiting for them outside behind a buzzing telegraph pole, its thin, goateed driver dangling an extinguished cigarette in a short amber holder.
‘This here’s Gafur, soldier of the Golden Horde and my friend at the construction site. A real Tatar. Not one of these Swabian Protestants. Do you know what kind of fellows these Tatars are? They gave Hitler a gilded saddle as a present, and to repay them Stalin killed the whole nation, millions of them. Gafur’s the only one left alive.’
Gafur laughed. The man got in the front beside him, the girl in the back. The car smelled of sweat and dandruff.
‘Complete dashboard with frame-suspended pedals, four on the column, and built-in radio. And best of all, with very little money you get lots of little extra annoyances.’
Gafur started the engine with a quick sharp movement of his hand, stomped on the accelerator so hard that the back wheels skidded in the slippery slush, and edged the nose of the car out of the driveway, revving it for all it was worth. The retreating road was covered in a thick layer of dust mixed with sand and snow. Gafur said he’d been with his Tatyana for fifteen years and successfully driven her from Alma Ata to Mongolia.
Now and then the car bounced over to the right side of the road, then the left. Oncoming trucks rushed by on one side or the other. Gafur suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing the man to hit his head on the windshield, then immediately floored the accelerator so that the girl was slammed against the back headrest. The man pointed towards the Golden Mountains on the horizon, brightly painted with sunshine. They glowed red in some places, white in others.
‘Let’s head for the mountains. Some country air and nature will do us good. I’ll sell you to some horse herder who’ll screw your brains out and make you the best goat milker in Mongolia.’
Here and there trucks idled with steaming water shooting out of them. There were sheep and goats of different colours everywhere. A caravan of camels with full loads undulated in the distance. One of the camels had a gigantic antenna contraption on its back. The Volga lurched and coughed as it roared along, the radio rasping. The black-spotted sun shed its hot rays through the rear window; the girl let her cheek press up against the cool glass.
She came awake with a hard knock. The car had stopped in the middle of a clear-running river. Gafur cursed and the man laughed.
The two men took off their shoes, socks, and trousers, and asked her to get behind the wheel while the engine continued to knock, wheeze and sputter. They got behind the car and pushed. She wrenched the transmission into first, gently lifted her foot from the clutch, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The men shivered in the ice-cold water all the way across the river. Luckily the water was shallow, only knee-deep. She got to the other side and got out of the car.
‘I’ll tame you yet, you whore,’ Gafur hissed, hopping back in and furiously seizing the steering wheel.
The man looked at Gafur and wrinkled his brow. Gafur punched the car straight into second gear, stomped vehemently on the accelerator, and cranked the wheel farther than was reasonable. The Volga flung itself from the slippery bank onto level ground. Feodor Challiapin sang from the hefty vacuum-tube radio built into the dashboard.
The road ascended into the mountains. The Volga jerked its way up the steep, narrow route. The fiery red sun hung at the edge of the snow-covered sandy steppe and started to set; a pink mist hovered low over the desert. Owls appeared, loitering in the middle of the road and flapping into flight just as the Volga was about to crush them. Sometimes the car stopped and the girl got behind the wheel as the men pushed. Sometimes they stopped along the road to let the engine cool.
It was a steep climb and the car’s strong but simple engine couldn’t go more than a few metres at a time. The girl and the man walked alongside the car. She took very careful sips of the thin mountain air. A melancholy night lit by a hazy blue moon loomed far beyond the mountains and spread peacefully around them. At midnight the Volga started to whine, then to howl.
‘Squealing like a sow,’ Gafur growled in a wounded voice, just as the engine died completely.
He opened the hood. The large-celled radiator leered at him from its loose corner to the left of the engine, hot as fire, the coolant grid hanging sadly, almost touching the ground. The two men stared at the engine for a long time, but neither of them touched it.