‘Don’t step on the threshold when you go in. If you do, they’ll chop your head off,’ the man said, cracking his knuckles.
The women walked in front of her and opened the door. It was painted red and squeaked pathetically. She stepped inside warily. In the middle of the yurt a small fire smoked on the bare ground, a young woman and an old woman bustling around it. When they noticed her through the curtain of smoke they motioned for her to sit near the fire. The older woman handed her a bowl of white tea.
Soon the young woman spread a flowered mattress on the floor – the guest bed. The older woman laid a neatly folded cotton quilt over it and placed a large cushion at one end. They gave her a thick lambskin for a blanket. She looked at the flowered fabric covering the walls, the skilfully made, bright-coloured rugs on the floor, the hand-painted dishes and little cloth dolls hanging from the ceiling and lying on top of a blue Chinese cabinet, and soon fell asleep.
She woke to the hideous shriek of a song thrush. She watched from her mattress as Gafur and the people of the yurt gnawed at mutton, without greed or any great gusto, and gulped down kumis. She was careful not to step on the threshold when she went outside. The gentle silence of the night greeted her. The seething sun had set behind the Golden Mountains and the sky gradually was lit with a thousand dry, restless stars. They swept across the blue space, the Milky Way zigzagging fitfully above the mountains, galaxies hissing over the village of yurts. She sat down on a stone, touched its cold surface. The stone was silent. She watched the song thrush torment the tethered falcon.
In the morning her eyes hurt again. Her head was splitting; there was an unbearable cosmic roar in her ears. Her shoulders slumped, her head hung limply.
The bright icy sun didn’t ask forgiveness. In the summer, that same sun dried up the raindrops before they could reach the earth. A stinging icy wind flowed from the north, dragging a mountain crow and a tattered burlap sack with it. Frost laid down by the night’s freeze grew from the ground up the walls of the yurt. Thin black trails of smoke floated sleepily through the air.
The girl stood still. From the east a piercing brightness came, in the west a thick grey gelatinous fog swirled, and in the north, at the northern edge of the sky, hung a blood-red comet. It looked like an old 1930s decal glued to a paper sky stained with dark-blue ink. She marvelled at a flock of cranes that stepped in a phalanx along the level ground, pecking up dead grasshoppers from the autumn before. She saw five black long-haired bulls. They were scraping the ice with their hooves to find the grass beneath. She heard the goats bleating and strolled towards a grove of frosty, sad-hanging branches. The women were milking the goats.
Gafur appeared out of nowhere, lively, enjoying his fix, capering over the hard-frozen snow in his dandy’s pointy-toed shoes, and followed a Mongolian man to where the horses were. They took the harnesses of two restive horses and led them out in front of the yurt. They were on their way to look for a half-tamed flock of sheep that had disappeared during the night.
She walked to the edge of the bubbling river. From there she could see the wooden fence of the corral, which was empty now. A small mongrel dog followed her. White steam rose from its mouth. It stopped to watch her, thought for a moment, stared at her with bitter green eyes, then crept up to where she stood, laid its snout against her knee, sighed deeply, and continued on its way. Farther up the mountain a thick-furred camel swayed, pulling a flimsy long-shafted cart behind it. The man saw the girl. He walked over to her.
‘You can’t see farther than your nose, no matter how you try. But remember, even at the darkest moments, beyond the dead horizon, there’s always life. When Mishka left, I envied him. He got away and I stayed behind. But now…’
He smelled like warm sweat. The strong sunlight reflected from the frozen mountainside where powdered snow had fallen during the night. A light, melancholy feeling floated like a low cloud over the pure landscape. He scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. The sky glowed with spring light.
‘Do you know why people live longer than other animals do? It’s because animals live by their instincts, and they don’t make mistakes. We people, on the other hand, rely on reason, and we screw up all the time. We spend half our lives messing things up, half realising the stupid mistakes we’ve made, and the rest of the time trying to fix whatever we can. We need all the years we live for all that rigamarole. I was born in 1941. My father, whom I didn’t get to choose, begat me on his way from the work camp to the front. My mother is a mean, bitter woman. She hated my father for travelling in a prison carriage to get to a soup kettle in Siberia, leaving her to be trampled by the war and starve. I knew everything about life when I was five, and I spent the next forty years trying to understand it.’
He picked up a handful of rocks and started to toss them into the water. She could see his hands growing hard.
‘I often wonder at how I’ve managed to stay alive. When I was young I was crazy with fear, then I learned to overcome fear. I studied judo and five years later I was a black belt. After that I wasn’t afraid. I’m ready to die at any time. I still get goosebumps when I go home to Moscow and hear my mother breathing in the next room. I despise my mother; sometimes I feel sorry for her. A person who’s always right is a blind, deaf murderer. But you wouldn’t understand that, and you don’t have to. As long as you’re here.’
He stopped speaking and a smothered silence settled around them. He took his knife out of his boot, sprang its sharp blade open, and felt it with a finger, its brightly polished surface. Disappointment lay deep in his half-closed eyes.
‘I didn’t have a family, or relationships. That thread broke before I was born, and why wake the ghosts of the past? The cart of the past only leads to the rubbish dump.’ He held the knife out to her. ‘This is my father’s cross, a Siberian knife. I don’t know all he did with it, but I stabbed Vimma with this knife. One good-for-nothing killing another.’
He touched his cheek with the blade. ‘It’s yours now.’
She took the knife. It was heavy. The black handle was made of bone and had a silver Orthodox cross inlaid in it. She felt the power of the knife, and the trip up to this point, with all its light and shadow, flooded through her. Its joys, sorrows, hope, hopelessness, hate and, perhaps, love. Then she looked him in the eye and said, as Job said: ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come to me, Vadim Nikolayevich.’
He touched her hand tenderly, took a pack of papirosas out of his pocket, and lit one. She snapped the blade open and looked at the man’s hands. She looked at the heavy sharp knife. How many people had been killed with it?
She dug in her pocket, took out a twenty-five-rouble note, and handed it to him. He took the note, smiling faintly, and folded it into his pocket. The thick snow squeaked under his heavy leather shoes. Tatters of large light snowflakes drifted from the sky.
When he left, the children came. They admired and begged for everything she had on: a ring, a necklace, buttons, a belt, hairpins, her scarf. She handed her necklace to the oldest boy. He looked at it for a moment, threw it on the ground, and started to beg for her shoes. Black-tailed squirrels followed after the children. They jumped onto her shoulders and head; one tried to nibble at her face. The children swarmed around her and sicced the squirrels on her. One small boy had a stick in his hand and he tried to poke her with it. When she screamed loudly he dashed away, but he soon came back and continued to poke her. She grabbed the stick from his hand and broke it in two. The boy started to bawl, the squirrels disappeared, and the other children laughed.