The Khagan himself was nowhere to be seen. Voiced his will through the Chechmek. People were whispering: There’s no Khagan, only the word itself remains: Khaganate! But no Khagan.
Maybe there had never been one.
What about the Murzlas? Where were they?
Gone, gone to the lands beyond the sea, gone to the places where they’d taken all that grain, poured it into their own barns and bins. Grain makes the man.
Abandoned the Khazar land.
So they weren’t Khazars after all, but a different people, nomadic.
Saat made his way home to his tent, and there were new people living there, children running and crawling like kittens in the yard, howling. Guess he wasn’t going to get back his mare. Home full of strangers. Who needed him now? And where could he go?
Saat sat on a hill, mourned.
The falling star?
Passed him by.
WASTELAND
The events of the previous day—the Dutch pills and the trip into Ni Guan’s head—had shaken Maximus out of his usual dazed state, his preoccupation with the mundane: his commute to work every morning, his beer drinking and TV every night. The mind-body interface in his brain had shifted, something had changed forever. And there was something alarming in that change.
The day after his excursion with Peter was Saturday, and he didn’t have to be at work. Semipyatnitsky slept until noon. Just before awakening he had the next dream in his Khazaria series, a sad little installment.
Maximus took a shower, boiled himself four eggs for breakfast (lunch?), and decided to take a drive. Somewhere, anywhere. One of his magazines had an article in it about an archaeological site, a three- or four-hour drive away. Though of course he had to figure out where he’d left the car.
Maximus dressed, went out, and hailed a taxi heading downtown. He found the car right where he had left it the night before, near the Tribunal. Untouched by thieves, hooligans, or the tow truck. A good omen. And Semipyatnitsky headed north.
The Murmansk Highway begins just after Vesyoly. At the city line the driver encounters a row of Cyclopean bulletin boards advertising the Mega Mart. After that the road broadens out into a divided highway with a tree-lined median, but that lasts only as far as Sinyavino. The road that continues on to Murmansk after Sinyavino bears little resemblance to a national highway. Resembles it even less than that string on the stripper’s hips resembled panties. Narrow, just one lane going each way, no stripe down the middle. Nightmarish pavement, nothing but potholes. Maximus clutched the wheel, shuddering as trucks roared past his window a mere arm’s distance away, pondering the sobering truth that this transport artery was the only road linking an entire oblast to the rest of Russia. Other than that there was one railroad line and a seaport that iced up every winter. That was all. Considering the high cost of railway tariffs it was clear that most of Murmansk oblast was supplied by truck transport using this one narrow, pitted road. And there are so many other regions like this in Russia, essentially cut off from the capitals! And no one cares. Not until one of them rises up and demands its independence or one of their neighbors starts to show too much interest. There was that incident where the Finns claimed a village, and the president offered them the ears of a dead donkey instead. But we’re talking about an entire oblast here. Do we really need to keep it? Well, if so, you’d think they’d at least put down a decent road.
It’s only on the map that we’re one big united country, all one color. But the land isn’t a map, it’s forests and rivers, fields and ravines. And for one place to be united with another, you need a road.
Centuries ago people on the flatlands settled along rivers, mostly because the rivers served as highways linking one world to another. You can’t get far traveling through the great slumbering forest or across the vast empty steppe, especially if you’re hauling goods for trade. The Varangians, those bandits and traders who founded the Russian state, had traveled by river, if you buy that theory about the Norse origins of Rus, that is.
Semipyatnitsky had no intention of going all the way to Murmansk. His destination was the village of Staraya Ladoga, Russia’s first capital, the place where the Varangians had begun their expansion onto the Central European highlands. He wanted to see that landscape for himself, to feel what those energetic Norse adventurers had felt so long ago. To unwind the scroll of the country’s history back to zero. To understand how and why things had turned out the way they had.
The road was long. Nothing on either side. Semipyatnitsky recalled a phrase from a guidebook for tourists: “Some ten percent of Russian territory is densely populated; twenty percent is relatively civilized, and seventy percent is virgin land.” Tselina, in Russian. The land is a young girl. A virgin, you say? But what if she’s an embittered widow, an old trollop?
What do we need all this space for? For nothing—all that emptiness just gets in the way. We cross it in haste and in shame as we travel from one oasis to another in our busy lives. Indeed, if Moscow were closer to St. Petersburg, and Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, with Novosibirsk nearby, it would be a lot easier to govern and supply. You can see why the tsar unloaded Alaska in exchange for a couple of glass beads: He knew that the cord binding it to Russia would unravel.
Yes, in the big cities people fight to the death for every square meter; the buildings cram in closer and closer together and rise higher and higher, grasping at the last remaining breathable air, reaching up to the heavens. Along Russia’s horizontal axis, however, the only things that grow and multiply are cemeteries and wasteland: pustosh. You could cover four or five cities with the palm of your hand, and all the rest of Russia is one giant empty wasteland.
And it’s all the same: above and below, outside and inside. Above the scorched, burned-out land is an empty sky, devoid of color. And inside your heart too: nothing there, just parched, wretched emptiness: pustota.
Wasteland, pustosh. The word entered Semipyatnitsky’s head and surrounded itself with other thoughts. An ancient word, conveying an exact meaning: pustosh, wasteland, not pustota, emptiness. Emptiness entails something Buddhist, a vacuum, there is something postmodern and pretensions about it. But pustosh is primordial. Like a pagan divinity: Mokosh… Pustosh… God of Emptiness.
Emptiness, though, pustota… is just emptiness. It is and always has been, from the beginning. And will remain so, permanently. Emptiness is cold, no way out. Wise: Chinese, Hindu. Eternal, indifferent.
Whereas pustosh is warm and melancholy. It contains the past, what’s gone by. In what is now pustosh, grain used to be harvested, great households stood, gardens and lush orchards grew and flourished. Then everything burned to the ground. Weeds grew tall and covered the arid soil. It’s abandoned now: no one there, just an old wino digging a hole in the earth. Planting sunflowers, maybe, on a whim, or digging a grave for his dead dog.
Then there’s pustinya, desert. That’s different too. Pustinya is sand, wind, a white camel, the Prophet on her back—peace be unto Him—she’s taking him from Mecca to Medina, or is it from Medina to Mecca, whatever, bearing Him on her back, and along with Him, salvation to all mankind.
Maybe it’s a bad thing that the land is so empty, but emptiness is necessary, because emptiness is a space that can be filled. Though everyone’s emptiness is different.