Gafur gazed in disbelief at the engine, then at the man. The man sat down on a large stone, watched a hawk gliding above them along the restless bird’s trail of the Milky Way crackling atop the nearest mountain. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, calmly blowing smoke.
‘I once got so mad at Katinka that I took a sledgehammer to her washing machine. Katinka gathered her things and she and her boy took off to her mother’s house in Leningrad. They would have stayed there, too, but I went and got them three months later. A man can’t get along without a woman. Even if he can find some pussy, he’ll still need somebody to make the soup.’
He lifted a hand to his temple and looked like a cockroach sitting there.
The waxing moon hovered over the mountainside; the landscape of sand mixed with snow spread deathlike, tranquil, silent.
They gently rolled the car to the side of the road and Gafur stroked its sickly chassis. He was humming contentedly – apparently he and the Volga had made up. The man slumped into the back seat and pulled his cap over his eyes. The girl leaned against an enormous boulder. The fat moon and glaring stars lit up the roadside, and the cold, naked rocks pressed in at either side of the mountain road. A pale mist snaked through the ravines and a few yaks huddled in the valley, while over the mountains an opaque, tired sky billowed, covered in snowclouds.
The girl touched the surface of the boulder with her hand and felt a gouge cut in it. She looked at it more closely. The headlights of a swaying truck went past, brushing over the stone. There were deer, goats, and other animals in various poses painted on its surface. She waited for the flash of lights from the next truck. She moved her fingers slowly over the surface of the rock. There were marks carved around the animals. Tree signs, Uigur signs, runes. She laid her cheek against the boulder and kissed it, and tears ran down her cheeks.
Gafur appeared beside her. He took a Kazbek out of his pocket and started to smoke. Unfriendly mud splashed in the puddles as half-ton trucks splattered with mire and battered by rocks and potholes roared and rattled past in an almost continuous line, leaving ruts in the soft roadway. They were like ravines in the slippery, overflowing mud. The girl stroked the rock surreptitiously. Gafur smoked his cigarette and threw the stub on the ground.
‘It was a warm summer morning in Kazan. I was sitting on the bench behind our building smoking some hash. I watched clouds shaped like grand pianos flitting across the brilliant sky and I thought, soon I’ll be flying above them. Then I heard a horrible boom and a pressure wave slammed me all the way to the back of the yard. When I lifted my head a few hours later I saw that the whole building had collapsed. Grey dust and smoke covered everything, and when I looked at the sky I saw a black starlit August night.’
She listened, as she had become used to doing.
‘I’m a free man. I live in the here and now. I focus on what I like, and let everything else alone. I watch from the sidelines and live like the animals do. That’s the way I am. So if the young lady is in the mood for a shot of heroin made from first-class, professionally cultivated Afghan opium, uncle’s got some in his pocket.’
A plump, poison-green cloud sailed alone across the sky. Soon it had settled in front of the moon and smothered its gleaming light. The girl felt the glow of the petroglyph under her hand. Gafur took a spoon and a small bag of white powder out of his pocket, prepared his fix, lifted his wide-cut trouser-leg and jabbed the needle somewhere into his shin, with an apparently practised aim.
‘Now the goodness is pumping into every vein and brain cell,’ he whispered languidly.
A new star appeared in the sky, a meteor fell, beams of starlight splashed across the pitch-blackness, the planets glowed. She brushed her fingers against the distant past once more and felt the power of life within her. They walked to the car. The air was opaque now, like a thin glue. She got in the back seat, the man moved to the front, and Gafur got behind the wheel. Watery mud flew into the windshield. White sleet fell from the sky and soon it had covered the smudges of dirt, then the whole windshield. They were freezing in the cold car but the man soon drew forth a large green bottle. It was filled with spiked kumis. He pulled a long baguette and three dirty glasses from under the front seat.
‘These formerly fierce horsemen were the toughest working men in Khabarovsk and Novosibirsk a couple of decades ago, way ahead of us Russians. Things are different now. Gafur sits tight on his needle, ready to sell the blood out of his veins if need be to get his next dose. And so, dear comrades, my beloved homeland grows more beautiful year after year, but never blossoms. Winter’s gone; summer’s here; let us lift our glasses to friendship, with or without the needle.’
As soon as a little light penetrated the muddy windshield, the girl snapped awake from her stupor. She carefully opened the creaking door and eased out of the car. A gentle whirlwind brushed her sleepy face and brought with it the earthy smell of early spring. High in the sky a white dinosaur bounded brightly.
Gafur poured oil into the engine, hoping it would forgive him and love him again. The car pinged good-naturedly and started up. Bright rays of early morning sunshine cut across the sky. The man put on his sunglasses. Gafur kept squeezing the steering wheel nervously, although he’d already had his morning fix, and accelerated the Volga. The car leapt onto the road.
The full sun threw its first rays over the numb and sleeping sandy steppe. Soon it billowed yellow and made the snow-streaked mountains sparkle gold. Sunbeams moved along the mountainsides, the steep narrow road, and the ice-hard drifts glittering with powdery snow. For a moment everything stopped, then the sleepy sky exploded. Hail the size of ping-pong balls came zinging down.
Three yurts flitted into view from beyond a curve in the twisting road. They stood on a broad low place near a river. Snakes of smoke wriggled from them towards the pulsating sky. Everywhere she looked lay the bodies of frozen dead animals. A Mongolian ass swollen like a ball, the pecked eyes of yaks, hundreds of carcasses of spotted sheep and delicate goats. The winter’s storms had hardened the snow.
‘Golod i holod,’ the man grunted mournfully. ‘We’re here, my girl! More than three kilometres up. A secret, stinking little world. Don’t piss in running water around here. If you do, you’ll die.’
Gafur drove the car behind a yurt and turned off the engine. The village children formed a circle around the Volga. They stared at the girl in disbelief, afraid.
She watched a lone scrap of red fabric as the wind blew it up the mountainside. It got stuck briefly on a pine branch, then on a sharp piece of stone, dived into a sheltered hollow for a moment, then continued its journey up to the uninhabited and unexplored rocky, rugged heights. Frightened, halfwild, restlessly twitching Gobi horses snorted beside one of the yurts. They had small heads, narrow ears and graceful legs, and halters of braided leather on short ropes tied loosely to a clothesline. Thus tied they could move like dogs leashed to a cable. A full-grown tundra falcon was perched on a wooden rail next to the door of the yurt. One of its legs was tied to the rail with a strip of reindeer hide.
Boulders mounded with snow rose high on either side of the village. The golden heights of the mountains were close; the air smelled of pungent herbs, water babbled in the stream. In the distance behind the yurts a herd of horses wandered. One of the horses was so white that it nearly disappeared as it galloped over the snowy pasture. Beyond the horses a flock of goats lounged in the mellow sunshine.
The girl’s head hurt; she didn’t feel well. The man gave her a pill. A few brisk, curious women came out of a yurt, a man with a slack yellow face, black-browed eyes, and green spots on his forehead appeared from behind it. He greeted the men with familiarity. He didn’t greet the girl, just looked at her for a long time. A little later he gestured towards the yurt – the women were to bring her inside to rest.