As they neared the foothills of the mountains, the transition from desert to greenery was abrupt. Silence gave way to birdsong, the harsh yellow glare to a patchwork of colors less fierce on the eye. They joined the road from Chimkent, which proved just as rutted as the one from Saryagash, but which wound prettily through thinly wooded slopes and across the occasional dried-up stream. It passed through several villages, each a single street of clay dwellings surrounded by fields full of working women, each boasting a chaikhana or two full of lolling men, glasses of green tea and ornate hookahs only an arm’s reach away.
Piatakov didn’t have to wonder what Caitlin would have thought.
The sun was approaching its zenith when they drove across a wide riverbed and stopped beside a guard post on the northeastern edge of Tashkent. Two Uzbeks in Red Army uniform noted the red stars in their caps and examined the proffered papers only with reluctance, before returning to their seats in the shade. Mirumar urged the ponies forward once more, down a narrow, unpaved street hemmed in by a wall of clay houses.
Ulionshin had explained the city’s layout to them: a Sart town of around a hundred and sixty thousand Uzbek natives and a Russian town of a hundred and twenty thousand colonists, side by side on either bank of the Sarla River. Coming from Saryagash they would arrive in the Sart town first, but Mirumar knew the route through to the Russian quarter.
Brady had other ideas. He leaned forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Chaikhana,” Brady said, adding a drinking mime for good measure.
A few moments later they pulled up outside a large and prosperous looking teahouse and, after disentangling their cramped limbs and luggage from the taranta, sent Mirumar on his way with a precious ruble. Brady surveyed the coins still left in his hand somewhat ruefully. “Rogdayev had better cough up,” he said.
They found an empty mattress and sat with legs stretched out, their backs to the side of the building. The adjoining square contained at least twenty empty market stalls, and the wall of dun-colored single-story buildings that enclosed it was broken only by the streets running in and out. Above the roofs the dome of a mosque gleamed fitfully in the sun. Most of the mosaic tiling had fallen away, and red poppies were climbing up the dome from roots in the supporting stonework.
“You’ve never been out of Russia before, have you, Sergei?” Brady observed.
“No.”
“I think we should stay in the Russian town,” Brady decided, surveying the other, mostly sleeping, customers.
“We’d certainly be conspicuous here,” Piatakov agreed.
Brady sighed. “Yes. But isn’t it fascinating?”
“It is.”
“I wonder how religious these people really are,” Brady mused. “That mosque doesn’t look very well cared for. You remember Dzagin, on the train? He told me about a notice he’d seen in a small town near here; it said something like: the service today is being given by a communist priest, so members of the party are allowed to attend!”
Brady laughed out loud, drawing stares and one or two disapproving murmurs. “He had another story about a Chinese dentist, a traveling dentist, who used to work here in the old town. He told all his patients that toothache was caused by maggots in their teeth, and he’d poke around with a pair of chopsticks in their mouths, bring out the offending maggot, and stomp on it. Then he’d give them a pill and pocket his fee. Of course, the maggot was in a hollow chopstick, and the pill was opium, so the tooth would never get better. But no one seemed to mind. He came back year after year and did a roaring trade. He just had the knack of getting people to believe in him.”
Like you, Piatakov thought but didn’t say.
Brady gulped down the last of his tea. “Come on. Let’s go and find some lodgings.”
They walked on in the direction that seemed most likely, threading narrow streets and small squares until they suddenly emerged beside a wide boulevard, just as an overcrowded electric tram squealed past. The shock of this sudden encounter with modernity was exacerbated by the tram’s occupants, nearly all Uzbeks, the men in white robes and turbans or caps, the women veiled from head to foot.
A hundred yards farther on they found a tram stop leaning drunkenly into the road, bearing information in Russian.
Another tram duly arrived, every bit as full as its predecessor. They found themselves each gripping the rear veranda rail with one hand, their bags with the other, as the tram rolled down the boulevard and crossed a large square boasting two large mosques and the statue of a Russian on horseback. A long bridge over a wide, dry riverbed led into the Russian town, where the buildings were much more substantial. Most were painted in traditional pastel colors, and many had red flags hanging from poles or flying from the roof. The faces on the pavement were mostly European.
They clambered off the tram, and Brady examined the map Ulionshin had drawn for them.
Ten minutes later they were knocking on the door of a mansion in Gogol Street. An attractive middle-aged Russian woman let them in, examined their papers, and copied out the details. “For the Cheka,” she explained, as if they’d just arrived from Mars. Then she showed them up to a first-floor room, the contents of which were half a dozen rolled carpets, a table with one leg missing, and a precarious tower of books.
“The bourgeois family who lived here smashed all their furniture before they fled,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “And they tore out all the wiring, so there’s only cotton oil for light.” She indicated the twists of cotton wool on the table, lying beside a saucer of oil. “Unless you have some candles?” she asked hopefully.
“I’m afraid not,” Piatakov told her. “Thank you.”
“We do have water again,” the woman said. “At the end of the hall. Supper is at nine.”
Piatakov shut the door behind her and joined Brady at the window. A young Russian girl was cycling past on the road below, pieces of blue ribbon streaming out from her bonnet. The sound of running water drifted up from the irrigation stream which ran between the road and the parched grass beyond. In the distance, half-hidden by a line of palms, a string of camels was sauntering along.
Moscow seemed far away. In more ways than one.
McColl stared out through his compartment window, something he had been doing for much of the previous twenty-four hours. The train was stabled a few hundred yards south of Orenburg station, close to where a dirt road from the east crossed the tracks and entered the town.
The view from the window rarely stopped shifting. A steady stream of carts trundled into the town, emerging from behind a derelict warehouse like one of those endless strips of bunting magicians drew out of their sleeves. Each was driven by a peasant with an anxious expression; each carried a high pile of decrepit-looking furniture, upon which a varying number of children precariously perched. And there was often a scrawny mongrel chasing its tail down among the trundling wheels, as if survival itself wasn’t hard enough.
And then there were the soldiers. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Columns marched into town and columns marched out, none of them showing much in the way of enthusiasm. There were solitary soldiers, groups small and large, all milling wherever space allowed, picking up rifles and putting them down, passing around cigarettes, pissing against anything that rose out of the ground.
It reminded McColl of the Boer War. Take away the distant onion domes, and Orenburg could be any small town in the western Cape, dry and dusty, full of purposeless motion, and reeking of troop disaffection. Each time a new column appeared on the track he half expected a dolorous chorus of “Goodbye, Dolly Gray.”