Someone giggled spitefully.
“Silence in the ranks! Permission to punish him, Colonel?”
“I consider—” the colonel began, and at that point he was interrupted.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaa . . .” someone started whimpering quietly at first, then wailing louder and louder, and Andrei started rapidly glancing around the camp, trying to see who was making that noise and why.
Everyone began shifting about in alarm, turning their heads to and fro, and then Andrei saw Anastasis, whiter than a sheet, almost green, jabbing his hand at something up ahead of him, unable to say a single intelligible word. Gathering his nerve, ready for anything at all, Andrei looked where the man was pointing, but couldn’t see anything there. The street was empty and the heat haze was already shimmering at the far end of it. Then the sergeant suddenly cleared his throat with a hollow sound and tugged his cap down over his forehead, and someone swore in a quiet, desperate voice, but Andrei still didn’t understand, and it was only when an unfamiliar voice wheezed “God save us!” right in his ear that he finally understood. The hairs on the back of his neck started rising and his legs went weak.
The statue on the corner was gone. The huge man of iron with the face like a toad and the theatrically outstretched arms had disappeared. There was nothing left at the intersection but the heaps of dried-out crap that the soldiers had dumped around the statue the day before.
3
“I’ll be going, then, Colonel,” Andrei said, getting up.
The colonel also got up, and immediately leaned heavily on his cane. Today he was even paler, his face was drawn, and he seemed like a genuinely old man. Nothing left, not even his bearing, you could say . . . “A safe journey to you, Mr. Counselor,” said the colonel. His faded eyes had an almost guilty look. “Damn it all, commander’s reconnaissance is basically my job . . .”
Andrei picked up his automatic off the table and hooked the strap over his shoulder. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “For instance, I have the feeling I’m running off and dumping everything on you. And you’re not well, Colonel.”
“Yes, just imagine, today I . . .” the colonel began and then stopped short. “I suppose you’ll be back before dark?”
“I’ll be back quite a bit earlier than that,” said Andrei. “I don’t even regard this sortie as reconnaissance. I simply want to show these cowardly bastards that there’s nothing terrible up ahead. Walking statues, my eye!” Then he realized what he’d said. “That wasn’t intended as a reproach to your men, Colonel . . .”
“Think nothing of it,” said the colonel, gesturing feebly with his gaunt hand. “You’re perfectly right. Soldiers are always cowardly. I’ve never seen any brave soldiers in my life. And why on Earth should they be brave?”
“Well,” Andrei said with a smile, “if there were merely enemy tanks waiting for us up ahead . . .”
“Tanks!” said the colonel. “Tanks are a different matter. But I remember very clearly one incident when a squadron of paratroopers refused to advance into a village that was home to a sorcerer famous for miles around.”
Andrei laughed and held out his hand to the colonel. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Just a moment,” said the colonel, stopping him. “Duggan!”
Duggan was instantly there in the room, holding a flask sheathed in silver grillwork. A little silver tray appeared on the table, with little silver shot glasses on it.
“Be my guest,” said the colonel.
They drank and shook hands. “I’ll see you later,” Andrei repeated.
He walked down the stinking stairway into the lobby, nodded coolly to Quejada, who was fiddling with some theodolite-like instrument right there on the floor, and went out into the red-hot street. When his short shadow fell across the cracked slabs of the sidewalk, a second shadow immediately sprang up beside it, and then Andrei remembered about the Mute. He looked around. The Mute was standing in his usual pose, with his open hands stuck into the belt on which his terrifying machete hung. His thick black hair was standing up on end, his bare feet were planted wide apart, and his brown skin gleamed as if it had been smeared with grease.
“Maybe you’ll take an automatic after all?” Andrei asked.
No.
“Well, please yourself.”
Andrei looked around. Izya and Pak were sitting in the shade of a trailer with a map spread out in front of them, studying the layout of the City. Two soldiers were craning their necks and glancing over their heads. One of the soldiers caught Andrei’s eye, hastily looked away, and nudged the other in the side. They both immediately walked off, disappearing behind the sled.
The drivers were jostling around the second tractor under Ellisauer’s supervision. They were dressed in various odds and ends, and Ellisauer was sporting a gigantic, wide-brimmed hat. Two soldiers were hanging about close beside them, giving advice and frequently spitting off to the side.
Andrei looked up along the line of the street. Nothing there. Scorching hot air shimmering above the cobblestones. Heat haze. A hundred meters away it was impossible to make out anything—like being underwater.
“Izya!” he called.
Izya and Pak looked around and got to their feet. The Korean picked up his small, handmade automatic rifle off the road and tucked it under his arm. “Already time, is it?” Izya asked briskly.
Andrei nodded and walked on.
Everyone looked at him: Permyak, screwing his eyes up against the sun; feeble-minded Ungern, with his permanently slack mouth rounded into a circle of alarm; the morose gorilla Jackson, slowly wiping his hands on a piece of fiber packing . . . Ellisauer, looking just like a ragged, dirty wooden-mushroom shelter from a children’s play area in Leningrad, set two fingers to the brim of his hat with a supremely solemn air of commiseration, and the spitting soldiers stopped spitting, exchanged inaudible remarks through their teeth, and drifted off together through the dust. Run scared, you yellow bastards, Andrei thought vindictively. If I called you now, just as a joke, you’d crap in your pants . . .
They walked past the sentry, who performed a hasty “present arms,” and then they strode off across the cobblestones—Andrei in front with his automatic over his shoulder, and the Mute hard on his heels with a rucksack containing four cans of food, a pack of hardtack, and two flasks of water, while Izya plodded along about ten steps behind in his battered shoes, carrying an empty rucksack over his shoulder; he was holding the map in one hand and feverishly patting at his pockets with the other, as if checking to see to if he had forgotten anything. At the back, striding along easily with the slightly waddling gait of a man used to long-distance marches, came Pak, his short-barreled automatic under his arm.
The street was scorching hot and the ferocious sun roasted their shoulder blades and the tops of their shoulders. They were deluged by surges of heat from the walls of the houses. There was no wind at all today.
In the camp behind them the wrecked motor was started up—Andrei didn’t even look back. He was suddenly engulfed by a sense of liberation. For a few glorious hours the soldiers, with their stink and their inscrutably simplistic minds, were disappearing from his life. And Quejada was disappearing too, that schemer who was so totally transparent, which made Andrei loathe him all the more; all those loathsome problems with other people’s sore feet were disappearing too, all the problems with someone else’s squabbles and fights, with someone else’s puking (could it be poisoning?) and someone else’s blood-saturated diarrhea (could it be dysentery?). To hell with all of you, Andrei euphorically repeated over and over. I never want to see you again. It feels so good without you!
Of course, he immediately recalled the dubious Korean Pak, and for a moment it felt as if the bright joy of liberation had been clouded with new anxieties and suspicions, but he instantly dismissed the idea without a second thought. Just a Korean. Calm and impassive, he never complains about anything. A Far East version of Izya Katzman, that’s all. He suddenly recalled something his br
other once told him—that all the peoples of the Far East, especially the Japanese, felt exactly the same way about the Koreans as all the peoples of Europe, especially the Russians and Germans, felt about the Jews. Just at this moment he found that amusing, and for some reason he suddenly remembered Kensi . . . Yes, if only Kensi were here, and Uncle Yura, and Donald . . . Agh . . . If only he had managed to persuade Uncle Yura to join this expedition, everything would be very different now.
He recalled how, a week before he left, he had carved out a few hours, taken Heiger’s limousine with the bulletproof windows, and hit the road to Uncle Yura’s place. And what a time they had, drinking together in the large village house that was clean and bright, with a delicious scent of mint, smoke from the hearth, and freshly baked bread. They drank moonshine, snacked on piglet in aspic and crunchy home pickles of a kind that Andrei hadn’t eaten in God only knew how long, they gnawed on lamb ribs, dipping the pieces in a sauce suffused with the scent of garlic, and then Uncle Yura’s wife, Marthe, a buxom Dutch woman, who was pregnant for the third time already, brought in a whistling samovar that Uncle Yura had bought for a cartload of grain and a cartload of potatoes, and they spent a long time staunchly and substantially drinking tea with some amazing kind of jam—they sweated and panted, wiped their wet faces with embroidered towels, and Uncle Yura kept mumbling, “Things are fine, guys, life’s pretty tolerable now. Every day they march five parasites from the camp over here to me, I reeducate them with labor, and I don’t spare the effort, you know . . . If need be, I just poke them in the teeth, but they stuff their bellies full here, they eat the same as I do, I’m not some kind of blood-sucking exploiter . . .” And when they were saying good-bye, as Andrei was already getting into the car, Uncle Yura squeezed Andrei’s hand in his huge paws that seemed to have turned into two great callouses and tried to catch Andrei’s eyes as he said, “You’ll forgive me, Andrei, I know you will . . . I’d abandon everything, I’d abandon my woman . . . But I can’t abandon those guys—that’s something I can’t allow myself to do,” and he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb in the direction of two white-haired little boys with no more than a year between them, who were pummeling away at each other behind the porch—but quietly, so that no one would hear . . .
Andrei looked back. He couldn’t see the camp anymore; the heat haze had hidden it. The stuttering of the motor only faintly reached him—as if it were coming through cotton wool. Izya was walking alongside Pak, waving the map under his nose and shouting something about scale. Pak wasn’t actually arguing. He just smiled, and when Izya tried to stop, in order to unfold the map and demonstrate what he was thinking, Pak delicately took him by the elbow and led him on. A serious man, no doubt about it. Other things being equal, he could definitely be relied on. I wonder what his beef is with Heiger? They’re completely different people, that much at least is clear . . .
Pak had studied at Cambridge and he had a PhD. On returning to South Korea, he took part in some kind of student protests against the regime, and Syngman Rhee clapped him in jail. He was released by the Korean army in 1950, and the newspapers wrote about him as a genuine son of the Korean people, who hated Syngman Rhee’s clique and the American imperialists. He became a deputy president of the university, and a month later he was clapped in jail again, where he was held without any charges being brought until the landing at Chemulpo, when the jail came under fire from the First Cavalry Division, which was pushing hard toward the northeast. Seoul was sheer hell on Earth, and Pak didn’t expect to survive—and then he was offered the chance to participate in the Experiment.
He had arrived in the City a long time before Andrei, run through twenty different professions, and of course found himself in conflict with the mayor and joined an underground organization of intellectuals that supported Heiger at the time. Something happened between him and Heiger. For some reason or other, the large group of underground oppositionists left the City two years before the Turning Point and moved away to the north. They were lucky: 350 kilometers from the City they discovered a “time capsule” in the ruins—a huge metal tank, packed to overflowing with all sorts of cultural artifacts and examples of technology. It was a good spot, with water and fertile soil, right beside the Wall—so they settled there.
They knew nothing about what had happened in the City, and when the expedition’s armor-plated tractors arrived, they thought they had come for them. Fortunately only one man was killed in the furious, brief, and absurd skirmish. Pak recognized Izya, an old friend of his, and realized the fighting was a mistake . . . And afterward he asked to join up with Andrei. He said that his motivation was curiosity, that he had been planning a trek to the north for a long time but the emigrants didn’t have the resources for it. Andrei didn’t entirely trust him, but he took him along. He thought Pak’s knowledge would come in handy, and Pak really had been useful to him. He had assisted the expedition in every way he could and had always been friendly and obliging with Andrei—and even more so with Izya, his old friend—but it was impossible to get him to speak frankly. Not even Izya, let alone Andrei, could discover where Pak had obtained so much mythical and real-world information about the road ahead, why he had tagged along with the expedition, and what he thought in general—about Heiger, about the City, about the Experiment . . . Pak never made conversation on abstract subjects.
Andrei stopped, waited for his rear guard to catch up, and asked, “Well, have you agreed what exactly we’re interested in?”
“What exactly?” said Izya, finally unfolding his map. “Look . . .” and he started pointing with his black-edged fingernail. “Right now, we’re here. That means . . . one, two . . . in six city blocks there should be a square. There’s a big building of some kind there, probably something to do with government. We definitely have to get in there. Well, and if something interesting turns up along the way . . . Ah yes! It would be interesting to get here too. It’s quite a long way, but the scale here’s not worth a damn, so we can’t tell—maybe it’s all pretty close . . . See, it says ‘Pantheon.’ I just love pantheons.”
“Well now . . .” said Andrei, adjusting his automatic. “We can do it like that, of course . . . So we’re not going to look for water today, then?”
“It’s a long way to water,” Pak said in a low voice.
“Yes, brother,” Izya put in. “The water’s a long way off . . . See what they show here—a water tower . . . Is it here?” he asked Pak.
Pak shrugged. “I don’t know, but if there is any water left in this neighborhood, it can only be there.”
“Uh-huh,” Izya drawled. “It’s a pretty long way, about thirty kilometers; we can’t get there and back in one day . . . Of course, there’s the scale . . . Listen, why do you want water right now? We can go for the water tomorrow, the way we agreed . . . we’ll drive there, right?”
“All right,” said Andrei. “Let’s go.”
They walked side by side now, and no one said anything for a while. Izya kept twisting his head around and seemed to be sniffing at the air, but nothing of any interest turned up, either on the left or the right. Three- or four-story houses, sometimes rather beautiful. Broken-out window panes. Some windows boarded up with warped sheets of plywood, and half-ruined flower boxes on balconies. Lots of houses entwined in coarse, dusty ivy. A large store, with huge display windows that had somehow survived, too dusty to see through, although the doors had been smashed in . . . Izya darted away at a jog, glanced inside, and came back again.
“Empty,” he announced. “All smashed to hell.”
Some kind of public building—maybe a playhouse, maybe a concert hall, or maybe a movie theater. Then another store—with the display window cracked right across—and yet another store across the street . . . Izya suddenly stopped, drew his breath in noisily through his nose, and raised a dirty finger.
“Oh!” he said. “Here’s something!
“What?” asked Andrei, looking around.
“Paper,” Izya replied t
ersely.
Without looking at either of them, he made a confident beeline for a building on the right side of the street. It was an ordinary-looking building, not distinguished in any way from the others nearby, except perhaps by a slightly more sumptuous entrance and a certain Gothic accent detectable in its general style. Izya disappeared through the entrance, and before they could even get across the street, he stuck his head back out and called excitedly, “Come in here, Pak! A library!”
Andrei merely shook his head in admiration. Attaboy, Izya.
“A library?” said Pak, lengthening his stride. “Impossible!”
The vestibule was cool and dark after the searing yellow heat of the street. Tall Gothic windows, filled with stained glass, obviously overlooking an internal courtyard. A floor paved with decorative tiles. A double staircase of white stone leading upward to the left and the right . . . Izya was already running up to the left; Pak easily overtook him and they disappeared, striding up three steps at a time
“Why the hell do we want to trudge all the way up there?” Andrei asked the Mute.
The Mute agreed with him. Andrei looked for a place to sit down, and lowered himself onto the cool, white steps. He took off his automatic and put it down beside him. The Mute was already squatting down by the wall with his eyes closed and his long, powerful arms wrapped around his knees. It was quiet, with only an indistinct murmur of voices coming from upstairs.
I’m sick of this, Andrei thought impatiently. I’m sick of the dead city blocks. Of this silence. Of these riddles . . . If only we could find people, stay with them for a while, ask them a few questions . . . and if only they would feed us something . . . Anything at all, just not that gruesome oatmeal . . . and give us cool wine! Lots of it, as much as we want . . . or beer. His stomach started gurgling and he tensed up in fright, listening. No, it’s OK. Today I haven’t had to run even once—knock on wood, so far, so good! And it seems like my heel’s grown new skin . . .