There was nothing here; there hadn’t been anything here for a long time. Maybe never. Sun, clay, wind. Only occasionally, swirling and skipping like some antic jester, the prickly skeleton of a bush would go hurtling by, torn out by the roots at some spot lying God only knew how far behind him. Not a drop of water, not a single sign of life. Nothing but dust, dust, dust, dust . . .
Every now and again the clay under his feet disappeared and a covering of crumbled stone began. Everything here was as scorching hot as in hell. Sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, gigantic, craggy fragments of cliffs peered out of the clouds of swirling dust—looking as gray as if they had been sprinkled with flour. The wind and heat had given them incredibly strange and astonishing forms, and the way they appeared and then disappeared again, like ghosts, was frightening, as if they were playing a crags’ game of hide-and-go-seek. And the crumbled stone he walked over kept getting coarser and coarser, until suddenly the deposit ended and the clay rang under his feet again.
The stones behaved very badly. They squirmed out from under his feet or did their damnedest to pierce as deeply as possible into the soles of his shoes, to pierce through them into his living body. The clay behaved a bit more decently. But it still tried every trick it knew. It suddenly bulged up into bald mounds, or out of the blue produced idiotic inclines; it parted to form deep, steep-sided ravines, on the bottom of which the stagnant heat of millennia made it impossible to breathe . . . It played its own game too, its own clay version of “statues,” inventing tricky metamorphoses within the limits of its own clayey imagination. Everything here played its own game. But everything played on the same side . . .
“Hey, Andrei!” Izya called hoarsely. “Andriukhaaa!”
“What do you want?” Andrei asked over his shoulder, and stopped. Wobbling about on its loose little wheels, the cart ran on by inertia and hit him on the back of his knees.
“Look!” Izya was standing about ten paces behind Andrei, holding out his hand to show him something.
“What is it?” asked Andrei, not particularly interested.
Izya laid into his harness and trundled his cart toward Andrei, without lowering his hand. Andrei watched him as he approached—a terrible sight, with his beard hanging down over his chest and his hair, gray with dust, standing up on end, in an unbelievably ragged jacket, with his wet, hairy body showing through the holes. The fringe of his trousers barely covered his knees, and his right shoe was gaping wide open, as if it were begging to be fed, exposing a set of dirty toes with broken, black nails . . . A luminary of the spirit. A priest and apostle of the eternal temple of culture . . .
“A comb!” Izya proclaimed triumphantly when he got close.
It was the very cheapest kind of comb—plastic, with broken teeth—not even a comb, really, more a fragment of a comb, and at the point where it was broken off, it was still possible to make out some kind of Soviet Industrial Standard number, but the plastic had been bleached by many decades of the sun’s heat and ferociously corroded by a scab of dust.
“There now,” said Andrei, “and you keep harping on: no one before us, no one before us.”
“That’s not what I harp on about at all,” Izya said amicably. “Why don’t we sit down for a while, eh?”
“OK then, let’s sit,” Andrei agreed without any enthusiasm, and Izya instantly plumped his backside down on the ground, without even taking off his harness, and started stuffing the fragment of comb into his breast pocket.
Andrei set his cart crosswind, took off his harness, and sat down, leaning his back and his head against the hot canisters. Immediately there was noticeably less wind, but now the naked clay burned his buttocks cruelly through the old, worn fabric.
“Where’s this reservoir of yours?” he said derisively. “Windbag.”
“Keep on looking!” Izya replied. “It’s got to be there!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s this joke, about a merchant,” Izya gladly explained. “A certain merchant went to a bawdy house—”
“Here we go again!” said Andrei. “Still yammering on about that? There’s no way to cool you off, Katzman, I swear to God . . .”
“I can’t afford to cool off,” Izya explained. “I’ve got to be ready at the very first opportunity.”
“The two of us are going to croak here,” said Andrei.
“God forbid! Don’t even think about it, don’t even imagine it.”
“I don’t think about it,” said Andrei.
It was true. The thought of death—which was inevitable, of course—entered his head only very rarely now. Either the cutting edge of this sense of doom had already been completely blunted, or his flesh was so desiccated and exhausted that it had given up yelling and howling, and now only croaked faintly somewhere on the threshold of audibility . . . Or perhaps quantity had finally been transformed into quality, and he had begun to be affected by the presence of Izya, with his almost unnatural indifference to death, which constantly circled around them, sometimes moving in right up close, then suddenly moving away again, but never letting them out of its sight . . . Whatever way it was, for many days now, if Andrei did start talking about the inevitable end, it was only to convince himself again and again of his growing indifference to it.
“What did you say?” Andrei asked.
“I said: the important thing is, don’t you be afraid of croaking here.”
“Ah, you’ve told me that a hundred times already. I haven’t been afraid for ages, and you just keep yammering on.”
“Well, that’s good,” Izya said peaceably. He stretched out his legs. “What could I tie this sole up with?” he inquired profoundly. “It’s about to fall off in the very next increment of time.”
“Cut off the end of the harness there and tie it up with that . . . Shall I give you a knife?”
Izya contemplated his protruding toes for a while. “Never mind,” he said eventually. “Later, when it completely comes off . . . Maybe we could take a little nip?”
“Hands and feet too cold to jig,” Andrei said, and immediately remembered Uncle Yura. It was hard to remember Uncle Yura now. He was from another life.
“Maybe we should take a swig?” Izya joined in exuberantly, glancing searchingly into Andrei’s eyes.
“Screw you!” Andrei said with relish. “Know what water you can swig? That water you read about somewhere. You lied to me about the reservoir, right?”
Just as he expected, Izya immediately blew his top. “Go to hell! Who do you think I am—your nanny?”
“Well, your manuscript lied, then.”
“Fool,” Izya said contemptuously. “Manuscripts don’t lie. They’re not books. You just have to know how to read them.”
“Well, you don’t know how to read them, then.”
Izya merely glanced at him and instantly started fidgeting about, getting up. “There’ll be all sorts of shit here . . .” he muttered. “Come on, get up! You want a reservoir? Then stop sitting around here . . . get up, I tell you!”
The wind exulted, lashing Andrei’s ears with prickles, and joyfully started swirling dust around in circles above the bald clay, like a playful dog, but the clay moved sluggishly toward him, behaving docilely for a while, as if it were gathering its strength, and then started tilting up into an incline.
If I could just finally figure out where the hell I’m rushing so fast, thought Andrei. All my life I’ve been rushing somewhere—like a stupid fool, I just can’t stay still . . . And the worst thing is, there’s no meaning to it any longer. There always used to be some kind of meaning. Even if it was absolutely paltry, maybe even totally screwy, but even so, whenever I was getting beaten, let’s say on the face, I could always tell myself: it’s OK, it’s in the name of . . . it’s the struggle . . .
“Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” Izya had said. (It was in the Crystal Palace; they’d just eaten chicken, pressure-roasted, and they were lying on mattresses of brig
ht synthetic material on the edge of a pool with transparent, backlit water.) “Everything in the world is worth no more than shit,” said Izya, picking his teeth with a well-washed finger. “All those plowmen of yours, all those lathe operators, all those blooming mills, cracking plants, branched varieties of wheat, lasers and masers. All that is shit, manure. It all passes away. Either it simply passes away without a trace, forever, or it passes away because it changes. All this only seems important because the majority believes it’s important. And the majority only believes it’s important because its goal is to stuff its belly and gratify its flesh with absolutely as little effort as possible. But if you think about it, who gives a damn about the majority? I personally have nothing against it—to some extent I am the majority. But I’m not interested in the majority. The history of the majority has a beginning and an end. At the beginning the majority eats what it’s given. And at the end it spends its entire life trying to solve the problem of choice. What special, tasty sort of item can I choose to eat? Something I haven’t eaten before?”
“Well, that’s still a pretty long way off,” Andrei said.
“Not as far off as you imagine,” Izya objected. “And even if it is a long way off, that’s not the point. The main thing is, there’s a beginning and there’s an end . . .”
“Everything that has a beginning has an end too,” Andrei said.
“Right, right,” Izya said impatiently. “But I’m talking about the magnitudes of history, not the magnitudes of the universe. The history of the majority has an end, but the history of the minority will only come to an end together with the universe.”
“You’re a lousy elitist,” Andrei told him lazily, before getting up off his mat and plunking into the pool. He swam for a long time, snorting in the cool water and diving right down to the bottom, where the water was icy cold, greedily gulping it there, like a fish . . .
No, of course I didn’t gulp it. Now I’d gulp it. My God, how I’d gulp it! I’d gulp down the entire pool, I wouldn’t leave any for Izya—he can go search for his reservoir . . .
Over on the right, some kind of ruins peeped out from behind the swirling yellowish-gray clouds—a blank, half-collapsed wall, spiky with dust-covered plants, the remains of a clumsy quadrangular tower.
“There now, see,” Andrei said, stopping. “And you say: no one before us . . .”
“Ah, I never said that, you great lunkhead!” Izya wheezed. “I said—”
“Listen, maybe the reservoir’s here?”
“It very easily could be,” said Izya.
“Let’s go and take a look.”
They both slipped out of their harnesses and trudged over to the ruins.
“Ha!” said Izya. “A Norman fortress! Ninth century . . .”
“Water, look for water,” said Andrei.
“Ah, to hell with your water!” Izya said angrily. His eyes opened wide and started bulging, and with a long-forgotten gesture he reached under his beard to search for his wart. “Normans . . .” he muttered. “Well, well . . . I wonder how they lured them here?”
Catching their tattered rags on prickles, they forced their way through a gap in the wall and found themselves in a calm spot. Standing there in the smooth, quadrangular space was a low building with a collapsed roof.
“The union of the sword and wrath . . .” Izya muttered, hurrying toward the doorway. “Or maybe I don’t understand a damn thing about what that union is . . . Where would a sword come from here? How can you make sense of something like that?”
Inside the building the devastation was total, total and ancient. Centuries old. The collapsed roof timbers had mingled with fragments of rotted boards—the remains of a long table that ran the full length of the building. Everything was dusty, crumbling, and decayed, and the wall on the left was lined with equally dusty and decayed benches. Still muttering, Izya waded in to rummage through this heap of decay, and Andrei went out and walked around the building. He very soon came across what had once been a reservoir—an immense round pit lined with stone slabs. The slabs were as dry as the desert now, but there was no doubt that there had been water here at one time: the clay at the edge of the pit was as hard as cement, and it preserved the deep imprints of booted feet and dogs’ paws. Things are looking bad, thought Andrei. The old terror clutched his heart and then immediately released its grip: at the far end of the pit the broad, shaggy leaves of a “ginseng” plant were flattened out on the clay in a star shape. Andrei jogged around the pit toward them, feeling for the knife in his pocket on the way.
For several minutes, panting and streaming with sweat, he scrabbled furiously at the rock-hard clay with his knife and his nails, raked out the crumbs and scrabbled again, and then, grabbing hold of the thick stock of the root with both hands, he pulled hard, but cautiously—God forbid that the root should break off somewhere in the middle.
The root was a big one, about seventy centimeters long and as thick as a fist—white, clean, and glossy. Pressing it against his cheek with both hands, Andrei set off back to Izya, but along the way he gave in, sank his teeth into the succulent, crunchy flesh, and started chewing delightedly, relishing it, trying not to hurry, trying to chew as thoroughly as possible, so as not to lose even a single drop of this delightful minty bitterness that made his mouth and his entire body feel as fresh and cool as a forest in the morning, and cleared his head, so that he no longer feared anything, and he could move mountains . . .
Then they sat in the doorway of the building, joyfully gnawing and crunching and champing, merrily winking at each other with their mouths full, and the wind howled disappointedly over their heads and couldn’t reach them. They’d deceived it again; they hadn’t allowed it to toy with their bones on the bald clay. Now they could match their strength against it one more time.
They drank two swallows each from a hot canister, harnessed themselves into their carts, and strode on. And it was easy to walk now; Izya didn’t drop behind anymore but stepped out beside Andrei, with the half-detached sole of his shoe slapping.
“By the way, I spotted another little plant there,” Andrei said. “A small one. On the way back . . .”
“That’s a mistake,” said Izya. “We should have eaten it.”
“Didn’t you get enough?”
“Why let good stuff go to waste?”
“It won’t go to waste,” said Andrei. “It’ll come in useful for the return journey.”
“There’s not going to be any return journey.”
“That’s something no one knows, brother,” said Andrei. “Why don’t you just tell me this: Is there still going to be water?”
Izya threw his head back and looked up at the sun. “At the zenith,” he announced. “Or almost at the zenith. What do you think, Mr. Astronomer?”
“Looks like it.”
“The most interesting part will start soon,” said Izya.
“What could be so interesting about it? So, we pass through the zero point. Then we start walking toward the Anticity . . .”
“How do you know that?”
“About the Anticity?”
“No. Why do you think we’ll just simply pass through and walk on?”
“I’m not thinking a damned thing about it,” said Andrei. “I’m thinking about water.”
“Oh Lord, give me strength! The zero point is the beginning of the world, do you understand? And he talks about water!”
Andrei didn’t reply. The ascent of yet another hillock had begun; walking had become hard, and the harness was cutting into his shoulders. That “ginseng” is great, he thought. How come we know about it? Did Pak tell us? I think that was it—Ah, no! Skank brought a few roots into camp one day and started eating them, and the soldiers took them away from her and tried them themselves. Yes. They were all strutting and swaggering afterward, and they tumbled Skank all night long . . . And later Pak said that this “ginseng,” like the real ginseng, is only found very rarely. It grows in places where there used to be water, and
it’s really good when your energy’s low. Only it’s impossible to store it—you have to eat it immediately. Because after an hour or even less, the root withers and becomes almost poisonous . . . There was a lot of this “ginseng” near the Pavilion, a whole truck farm of it . . . That was where we stuffed ourselves with it, and all Izya’s sores disappeared overnight. It was good at the Pavilion. And all the time there Izya kept pontificating about the edifice of culture . . .
“All the rest is just the scaffolding around the wall of the temple,” he had said. “All the best things that humankind has invented in a hundred thousand years, all the important things it has understood and achieved through the power of thought, go into that temple. Through all the millennia of its history, howling, starving, lapsing into slavery and rebelling, guzzling and copulating, humanity carries this temple along on the turbid crest of its wave, without even suspecting it. Sometimes it suddenly notices this temple on its back and stumbles, and then it starts either taking the temple apart brick by brick or frenziedly worshipping it, or building a different temple next to it in order to vilify it, but humankind never really understands what it’s dealing with, and after it despairs of making use of the temple in some way or other, it’s soon distracted by its own so-called vital needs. It starts dividing up all over again something that has already been divided up thirty-three times, crucifying somebody, glorifying somebody—but the temple just carries on growing and growing from century to century, from millennium to millennium, and it’s impossible either to destroy it or to ultimately abase it.
“The most amusing thing,” said Izya, “is that every little brick of this temple, every eternal book, every eternal melody, every unique architectural silhouette, bears within itself the compressed experience of this humankind, its thoughts and thoughts about it, ideas about the goals and contradictions of its existence; that no matter how separate it might seem from all the vital interests of this herd of swine, at the same time it is always inseparable from this herd and inconceivable without it . . .