“Of course,” Piatakov said.
The unwrapped canvas showed a long line of deep blue domes climbing a yellow-brown hill, set against a pale blue sky. The style reminded Piatakov of some German paintings he’d seen at an exhibition in Petrograd before the revolution, all bold colors and minimal lines. Expressionists, the artists had called themselves. He hadn’t known quite how to take them, but this… it had a simplicity that told no lies. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
The old German gave them an ironic smile but seemed pleased nevertheless. “The place is called the Shah-i-Zinda,” he said. “And it is very beautiful. About a mile over there,” he added, nodding toward the east. “And you?” he asked, rewrapping the canvas. “What are you doing with your brief time here on earth?”
Brady and Piatakov exchanged glances. “We are having a little trouble with the authorities,” Brady admitted with a smile. “We need somewhere to stay in the old town.”
The old man didn’t raise an eyebrow. “Any enemy of theirs is a friend of mine,” he said brightly, and gave them directions to a place where they should find a room. “Mention my name,” he said as he left, “Bertolt.”
The hostel proved easy to find, a caravansary set back from the crossroads at the old town’s eastern gateway; they had actually passed it on their way in. The lower floor was a chaikhana, above and behind which a long building with half a dozen rooms had been dug into the hillside. The proprietor, a morose-looking Uzbek, grunted on hearing the German’s name but took their money and asked no questions.
The room was on a corner, with unglazed windows facing north and east. Looking through the former, Piatakov saw a summer mosque on a flattened ridge, its colonnaded prayer canopy flanked by ornate minarets. Beside and slightly below it, there was a sprawling one-story compound, containing both inner and outer courtyards. Because of the hostel’s elevation, he had a view of the inner sanctum, albeit one interrupted by trees.
Joining him at the window, Brady took a look with his collapsible telescope and let out a soft whistle. He passed the instrument to Piatakov, who soon espied the reason. The courtyard was full of young women, all unveiled.
“A harem?” Brady said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Or a lot of daughters,” Piatakov responded drily. He was examining the view through the other window, where the line of blue domes from Bertolt’s painting tumbled down their grave-strewn hillside.
“Where there’s a harem, there’ll be money,” Brady mused out loud. “We’ll soon be down to our last few kopeks again.”
“Let’s wait until the others arrive before we let the Cheka know we’re here,” Piatakov suggested mildly as he watched a huge black bird touch gracefully down on the crown of a dome.
Piatakov slept badly and woke up scratching a new crop of bites. The darkness was only just breaking, the town still quiet. Through the window a distant line of low hills was silhouetted against the faint glow of the coming dawn.
He left the room quietly and climbed the steps to the flat roof, where a young boy was curled up in sleep. Samarkand was spread out around him, a vista of flat yellow-brown houses interspersed with the occasional dome. Away to the west, a clutch of minarets guarded three large buildings, which themselves formed three sides of a square. The Registan, he thought, remembering the engravings Brady had shown him in the Moscow library. Their rendezvous point. He wondered if Aram was already here.
The line of hills grew darker, the sky yellower; then the first sliver of the rising sun flashed in a distant cleft. A cock crowed in response, and the sleeping boy sat up abruptly, rubbing his eyes. Noticing he had company, the boy said something in his own language, and when Piatakov simply shrugged in reply, he almost leapt to his feet and left, bare feet slapping on the earthen steps.
Piatakov took a last look around, then followed him down. Brady was awake and sitting at the window with his telescope.
“Movement,” he reported, handing the instrument over.
All Piatakov saw was a woman hurrying across the inner courtyard, carrying a basin of water.
“Look to the right,” Brady said, “where the road climbs level with the front gates. There’s an alley there. It must go around the back; it can’t go anywhere else.”
“There’s also a dog,” Piatakov told him. It was a large wolflike creature, lying against a wooden outhouse.
“I know. But he won’t be a problem.”
“This one may be the exception,” Piatakov suggested. But he knew that wasn’t likely—the American had a way with dogs that verged on the miraculous.
“I doubt it,” Brady said, in a tone that precluded even the possibility. He pulled on a shirt, announced he was hungry, and left the room. Ten minutes later he was back with a tray bearing bowls of yogurt, two small omelets, bread, and a jug of tea. There were even four large chunks of sugar.
They ate and drank with relish, then sat for several minutes in contented silence before Brady went back to the window to reexamine the view. “Tamerlane never lost a battle,” he said after lowering the telescope. “I can’t remember any other great general who could say that. Lee, Hannibal, Napoleon—they all lost the last one. Tamerlane won them all. He conquered Mesopotamia, Turkey, Russia, India. He was on his way to China when he died. And this was his capital,” he added, raising the telescope once more. “It was about twice the size it is now. All the other cities he took, he killed every last person and made a mound of their skulls.”
“A real sweetheart,” Piatakov murmured.
Brady smiled. “Now we make enormous graveyards. Endless fields of crosses. The bourgeois way.”
“That’s progress,” Piatakov said wryly. This was a typical conversation between them, he thought. Knowing and bitter. They were so tangled up in history that the present was beginning to feel unreal.
The train journeyed on across the desert steppe. A returning traveler told McColl that in spring this stretch was a carpet of flowers, unsurpassed in loveliness, but now the land was parched and mostly bare. Not that there was uniformity: swathes of yellow-brown earth would dissolve into sand or disappear beneath drifts of snow-white salt; flat horizons would break into rounded hills or jagged escarpments; occasionally the line would veer close to the Syr Darya, the Jaxartes of ancient times, a river as brown as the land it traversed. Two or three times a day they would pass caravans of a hundred camels and more, shepherded along by tribesmen in wide skin hats, who would rein in their mounts and watch the train steam by through hooded eyes.
Small settlements were dotted along the line, each with its handful of scrawny trees and mosaic of mud houses, its cavorting children and impassive white-robed men. In the small town of Termen Tyube, they saw their first mosque, its clay dome barely rising above the roofs, a skittish mule tethered beside the arched doorway.
They were now into the thirteenth day of the journey and less than five hundred miles from Tashkent, but with the driest stretch still to come. Since Aralsk, drums of water and bricks of dried camel dung had been loaded onto the tenders at each stop, but when the settlements disappeared, there was only the desert to water and feed the engines. Every few hours parties of soldiers would trek out toward a smudge of green that the observer had spotted from his carriage-roof vantage point, some carrying axes for cutting through the saxaul roots, others rolling iron drums across the cracked earth to replenish the water supply. McColl joined the first party, his appetite for exercise overcoming his fear of the heat, and wished he hadn’t. Neither in Egypt nor in India had he ever experienced such a blazing sun.