Shamsudin ate his food and told him where he’d been while Zulfugar took off his ragged mittens to touch and marvel at the flask.
By this time, it was getting close to the hour of the rendezvous. Zulfugar said they would have to leave, or risk getting there late. He stood up first and offered Shamsudin his hand to hoist him to his feet.
Shamsudin looked at him in surprise and asked him for his other hand. Zulfugar showed him its back and front. The wound had knitted up without a mark.
Zulfugar grabbed him fiercely by the coat and told him, ‘God is great.’
I asked Shamsudin if he was sure it was the flask that had done it. He swore five ways that it was and said that it healed some smaller scrapes of his own.
Then Zulfugar asked Shamsudin if he thought he would be able to find his way back to the room where they were stored.
Shamsudin said he thought that with a rope and a lantern the return could be made pretty smoothly, though the truth was that he dreaded going back there.
A change had come over Zulfugar. He puzzled over his drawings and found a number that matched one on the flask. His joy had given way to a kind of nervousness. It’s the same when a green card player gets dealt a winning hand and he finds himself all sweaty and anxious at the thought of scooping the pot. Zulfugar was hatching a plan to barter the flask for their freedom.
He said that if they went back to the bridge together, the guards wouldn’t hesitate to strong-arm the flask off whoever had it. Instead, he told Shamsudin that one of them should return while the other remained in the Zone guarding it.
His proposal was that Shamsudin should go back empty-handed and tell Tolya exactly what he’d stumbled upon. In return for leading the guards to it, he was to ask for a week of rations and a horse.
Time was ticking by. Shamsudin had misgivings about the plan. He had a timid spirit and his natural inclination was just to hand over the flask and trust to the good faith of the guards.
Zulfugar would have none of that. He was pacing in the snow, ramping up his demands like the fisherman’s wife in the fairy tale: two weeks of rations, a month of rations, a horse each, a gun.
Right at the last minute, Zulfugar decided Shamsudin should be the one to stay behind. Maybe he didn’t trust his friend. More likely, he felt he was the shrewder bargainer.
The trouble with Zulfugar’s plan was that it credited the guards with too much intelligence. I don’t think anyone but Apofagato knew exactly what we had been sent to the Zone to find. You could copy pictures until your hand got cramp, and write down all the numbers you liked, but until you saw that flask, with the light pulsing in it, you would never believe such a thing existed.
I could see it right in front of me and I had a hard time crediting it.
Also, Tolya’s speech about the Zone had all the guards panicking. Even watching them through the glass, I could see they wanted to get their job done as quick as possible.
As Zulfugar waited on the bridge with the other prisoners, he must have sensed that he’d miscalculated.
Instead of being let loose on the other side, they were being corralled together, like pigs waiting for the bolt.
He’d turned to flee. Maybe he risked a bullet, thinking that if he could just get back to the flask it would make him better.
I’d seen what had unfolded next from my perch on the roof.
That flask might be able to heal a graze or close up a cut hand, but it couldn’t fix the hole they put in Zulfugar.
*
We made good time over the next two days in spite of the dearth of food. Shamsudin walked quicker without the chain, and we moved so fast that we had to watch that we didn’t overtake the party of guards.
I didn’t dare risk hunting or a fire those first two days — not because of disease or radiation, but because I feared revealing our position.
On the third night, I snared a pair of rabbits and started to build a tiny fire to broil them on.
That evening, Shamsudin got a fever. It was by no means warm yet, but he complained about the heat, and even by the moonlight, I could see his face was basted in sweat.
He had taken it into his head that his flask, as well as mending cuts, would be proof against disease, and he had started laying it on himself when we stopped to melt snow or let the horse feed.
I teased him for it. I told him that it was no medicine, but pure ju-ju. But he was ready with a theory about how it worked and even suggested I try it.
‘I’ll take my chances with the germs I have,’ I said, ‘rather than sharing yours.’
Anyway, he was at it with his magic jar, rolling it over his sweaty forehead and up andown his arms which he said ached.
That gave me a bad feeling, and the truth was I didn’t feel so great myself. Also, the horse was skittish and off her food.
I thought it would be a twisted kind of justice for us to get sick now.
Digging in my pocket for the flints, my hand closed on the memory stone. I drew it out without thinking. When I had put it away three days before, the thing was dead. Now its face was all etched with green fire and the lights on it were winking and alive.
The thought crossed my mind that it had drawn its power from the bottled lightning, or that whatever had been broken in it, had been knit up by its closeness to the flask. But I pushed the idea out of my head for a piece of foolishness.
Shamsudin had noticed me pause, and he asked what I had.
I showed it to him and he told me how to make it play.
It lit into life at my touch. Its screen took colour and moved with pictures that showed the city as it had been, its streets all come to life, filled with people and transport.
You couldn’t see her at first, but there was a girl’s voice in it, telling you what the pictures were. She was speaking in Russian which I couldn’t make sense of, but Shamsudin translated.
She said this is my school, this is where I live, this is my friend Darya — who was a girl giggling and covering her face with her hand, this is my father who is packing to leave.
It became clear that all the bustle in the city was people getting ready to go.
I understood why she’d made this thing. I’ve often wished I had a keepsake like it. It was a sampler with patches of the past worked into it. It should have been with her in the city she had gone to. It seemed a pity that she had forgotten it in a drawer.
Then it showed her on her bed. The picture went wobbly and you could hear a girl laughing in the background.
Lyudi budushchevo, she said, or something that sounded like it.
Shamsudin sat up and said she hadn’t forgotten it at all, she’d intended it to be left.
People of the future, she was saying. Whoever sees this message. I was born in the city of Polyn, Russia. I am eighteen years old. This is how I lived. This is who I was.
This is how I lived. This is who I was.
When Shamsudin said those words I felt a chill run through me. I saw that skull of a city with the life gone from it.
I thought of the mounds of coins and ribbons beside the highway. And the scratches on the cell-walls at Buktygachak. And the bronze head guarding the empty square.
You never expect to be in at the end of anything, Boathwaite had said. But then he had his brother’s arrogance. The end is where you end up. You always end up at the end of something. So what is it that keeps you shambling out to the stable when it’s sixty below, doing up the saddle with your fingers stiff with cold shding out in summer when you can’t breathe for dust?
There are many words I’ve seen written down that I’ve never heard spoken. This is one I wouldn’t know how to say exactly, but I know it’s at the back of every other fear.