‘Where are we going, then?’
‘Get in, my car’s comfortable, it has air-conditioning!’
I shook my head and looked at an elderly Uzbek driver who was waiting calmly beside an old Volga with the black-and-white checkerboard squares of a taxi stencilled on its side.
‘Are you free, Father?’
‘A man’s free as long as he believes in his own freedom,’ the taxi driver replied philosophically. He spoke Russian very well, without any accent at all. ‘Get in.’
There you go. I had barely even arrived, and already I’d called someone ‘Father’, and the taxi driver had replied with the typical florid wisdom of the East. I asked:
‘Did one of the great ones say that?’
‘My grandfather said that. He was a Red Army soldier. Then an enemy of the people. Then the director of a Soviet farm. Yes, he was great.’
‘Did he happen to be called Rustam?’ I enquired.
‘No, Rashid.’
The car drove off and I turned my face to the breeze from the window. The air was warm and fresh, and it smelled quite different from how it did in Russia. And the road was good, even by Moscow standards. A wall of trees along the side of the highway provided shade and created the impression that we were already in the city.
The taxi driver said thoughtfully:
‘An air-conditioner. Nowadays everyone promises their passengers coolness. But what did out grandfathers and great-grandfathers know about air-conditioners? They just opened the windows in their cars and they felt fine!’
I looked at the driver in bewilderment.
‘It’s just my joke. Have you flown in from Moscow?’
‘Yes.’
‘No suitcase… Ai-ai-ai!’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Don’t tell me they lost it!’
‘An urgent business trip. There was no time to pack.’
‘Urgent? Nothing’s urgent in our city. There was a city standing here a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, three thousand years ago. The place has forgotten what urgent means.’
I shrugged. The car was certainly taking its time, but it didn’t bother me.
‘So where are we going? There’s the Hotel Samarkand, the Hotel …’
‘No, thanks. I didn’t come here to sleep. I need the market place. The Siabsky Market, in the Old City.’
‘That’s the right way to do it!’ the driver said warmly. ‘The man knows where he’s going and what for. The moment he lands he goes straight to the market. No luggage, no wife, no problems – that’s the right way to live! But did you bring money to go to the market?’
‘I did,’ I said, nodding. ‘How can you go to the market with no money? How much will I owe you? And what do you take – soms or roubles?
‘Even dollars or euros,’ the driver replied nonchalantly. ‘Give me as much as you think you can spare. I can see you’re a good man, so why haggle? A good man is ashamed not to pay a poor taxi driver enough. He pays more than my conscience will allow me to ask.’
‘You’re a good psychologist.’ I laughed.
‘Good? Yes … probably. I did a Ph.D. in Moscow. A long time ago …’ He paused and then said, ‘But no one needs psychologists nowadays. I earn more as a taxi driver.’
He paused again, and I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply. But we were already driving through the city, and soon the driver began listing all the places I had to visit in Samarkand. Three madrasahs that made up the Registan, a single architectural ensemble; the Bibi-Khanum mosque … All this, as it happened, was right beside the finest market in Samarkand, the Siabsky, which, as the driver now realised, was famous even as far away as Moscow. And I also had to visit the market, even before anything else. It would be a sin not to see it. But a good man like me wouldn’t make a mistake like that …
The driver would probably have been very disappointed to see me walk straight past the entrance to the market. No, of course I was planning to visit it. There was work to do, but I still had to gather some impressions to take away with me.
Only not right now.
And so I elbowed my way out of the noisy crowd outside the entrance to the market, walked past a herd of Japanese (they’d even found their way here!) who all had the usual tiny cameras and video cameras dangling from their necks and their shoulders, then set off to walk round the Bibi-Khanum mosque. It really was impressive. The ceramic tiling of the huge dome glinted a bright azure blue in the sunlight. The doorway was so huge that I thought it looked bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the absence of any bas-relief work on the wall was more than made up for by the intricate patterning of blue glazed bricks.
But the place I was headed for was no glamorous tourist spot.
Every city has streets that were built under an unlucky star. And they don’t have to be located in the outskirts, either. Sometimes they run along beside gloomy factory buildings, sometimes along the railway lines or main highways, sometimes even beside a park or ravine that has survived through some oversight by the municipal authorities. People move in there reluctantly, but they don’t leave very often either – they seem to fall under the spell of a strange kind of drowsiness. And life there follows quite difference laws and moves at a quite different pace …
I remember one district in Moscow where a one-way street ran alongside a ravine overgrown with trees. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary dormitory suburb – but it was under that spell of drowsiness. I found myself there one winter evening on a false alarm – the witch who was making love potions had a licence. The car drove away, leaving me to draw up a report noting the absence of any complaints on either side, then I went out into the street and tried to stop a car – I didn’t want to call a taxi and wait for it in the witch’s apartment. Although it wasn’t very late, it was already completely dark and there was thick snow falling. There was absolutely no one on the street, everyone took a different way home from the metro station. Almost all the cars had disappeared too, and the ones that did drive by were in no hurry to stop. But right at the edge of the ravine there was a small amusement park, surrounded by a low fence: a little hut for the ticket-seller, two or three roundabouts and a children’s railway – a circle of rails about ten metres in diameter. And in the total silence, under the soft snow falling from the sky, against the background of the empty, lifeless blackness, the tiny locomotive was running round the circle, jingling its bell and blinking its little coloured lights as it pulled along two small carriages. Sitting absolutely still in the first one was a boy about five years old, dusted with snow, wearing a large cap with earflaps and clutching a plastic spade in his hand. He was probably the ticket-seller’s son and she had no one to leave him with at home … It didn’t seem like anything special, but it gave me such a bad feeling that I made the driver of a passing truck stop and took off to the city centre.
Allowing for the difference between the cities, that was pretty much the kind of street where the Night Watch office was located. I didn’t need a map, I could sense where I needed to go. And I only had to walk for ten minutes from the market place, which was right at the centre of town. But I seemed to have entered a different world. Not the bright world of an eastern fairy tale, but a kind of ordinary, average place that you can find in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, and Turkey, and the southern countries of Europe. Half European, half Asian, with far from the best features of both parts of the world. A lot of greenery, but that’s the only good part – the two- or three-storey houses were dusty, dirty and dilapidated. If they’d been less monotonous they might at least have rejoiced the eye of some tourist. But even that variety was lacking here. Everything was dismally standard: paint flaking off the walls, dirty windows, entrance doors standing wide open, washing hanging on lines in the courtyards. The phrase ‘frame-and-panel housing construction’ surfaced from somewhere in the depths of my memory. Its bleak bureaucratic tone made it the perfect description of these buildings that had been meant to be ‘temporary’ but had already stood fo
r more than half a century.
The Night Watch office occupied a small, dilapidated single-storey building that was surrounded by a small garden. I thought a building like that looked just perfect for a small kindergarten, filled with swarthy, dark-haired little kids.
But all the children here had grown up long ago. I walked round a Peugeot parked by the fence, opened the gate, went past the flower beds in which withering flowers were struggling to survive, and shuddered as I read the old Soviet bureaucratic-style sign on the door.
NIGHT WATCH
Samarkand branch
Business hours:
20.00 – 8.00
At first I thought I must have gone crazy. Then I thought I must be looking through the Twilight. But no, the inscription was absolutely real, written in yellow letters on a black background and covered with a cracked sheet of glass. One corner of the glass had fallen off, and the final letter of the word ‘watch’ was tattered and faded.
The same text was written alongside in Uzbek, and I learned that ‘Night Watch’ translated as ‘Tungi Nazorat’.
I pushed the door – it wasn’t locked, of course – and walked straight into a large room. As usual in the East, there was no entrance hall. And that was right: why would they need a hallway here? The weather was never cold in Samarkand.
The furnishings were very simple, reminiscent in part of a small militia station and in part of an old office from Soviet times. There was a coat rack and several cupboards full of papers by the door. Three young Uzbek men and a plump middle-aged Russian woman were drinking tea at an office desk. There was a large electric samovar, decorated in the traditional Khokhloma folk style, boiling on the desk. Well, how about that – a samovar! The last time I’d seen one in Russia had been at the Izmailovo flea market, with all the matryoshka dolls, caps with earflaps and other goods for the foreign tourists. There were several other desks with no one sitting at them. An ancient computer with a massive monitor was clattering away on the farthest desk – its cooling fan ought to have been changed ages ago …
‘Assalom aleikhum,’ I said, feeling like a total idiot who was trying to look intelligent. Why on earth hadn’t Gesar taught me Uzbek?
‘Aleikhum assalom,’ the woman replied. She was swarthy-skinned, with black hair – quite clearly Slav in origin, but with that remarkable change in appearance that happens without any magic at all to a European who spends a long time in the East or is born and lives there. She was even dressed like an Uzbek woman, in a long, brightly coloured dress. She looked at me curiously – I sensed the skilful but weak touch of a probing spell. I didn’t shield myself, and she gathered her information with no difficulty. Her expression immediately changed. She got up from the desk and said:
‘Boys, we have a distinguished visitor …’
‘I’m here entirely unofficially!’ I said, raising my hands in the air.
But the fuss had already begun. They greeted me and introduced themselves: Murat, sixth level; Timur, fifth level; Nodir, fourth level. I thought they looked their real age, about twenty to thirty. According to Gesar, there were five Others in the Samarkand watch … and according to Alisher, the members of the Watch in Tashkent were younger. How much younger could they be? Did they take on children from school?
‘Valentina Ilinichna, Other. Fourth level.’
‘Anton Gorodetsky, Other, Higher,’ I said in turn.
‘I run the office,’ the woman went on. She was the last to shake my hand and in general she behaved like the most junior member of the Watch. But I estimated her age as at least a hundred and fifty, and her Power was greater than the men’s.
Another peculiarity of the East?
But a second later any doubt about who was in charge here was dispelled.
‘Right, boys, get the table set out quick,’ Valentina commanded. ‘Murat, you take the car, run round the route quickly and call into the market.’
And so saying, she handed Murat the key to the huge old safe, from which the young guy took out a tattered wad of banknotes, trying his best to do it inconspicuously.
‘Please, there’s no need!’ I implored them. ‘I’m only here for a brief, entirely unofficial visit. Just to introduce myself and ask a couple of questions … And I have to call in to the Day Watch too.’
‘What for?’ the woman asked.
‘There were no Others at the border check. There was just a notice in the Twilight, saying that Light Ones should register with the Day Watch on arrival, and Dark Ones should register with the Night Watch.’
I wondered what she would have to say about such a flagrant piece of incompetence. But Valentina Ilinichna merely nodded and said:
‘We don’t have enough members to maintain a post in the airport. In Tashkent they do everything properly … Nodir, go and tell the ghouls that Higher Light One Gorodetsky is here on a visit from Moscow.’
‘I’m here unofficially, but not exactly on personal—’ I began, but no one was listening to me any longer. Nodir opened an inconspicuous door in the wall and walked through into the next room, which I was surprised to see was equally large and half empty.
‘Why the ghouls?’ I asked, struck by an unbelievable suspicion.
‘Oh, that’s the Day Watch office, they haven’t really got any ghouls, that’s just what we call them – to be neighbourly …’ Valentina Ilinichna laughed.
I followed Nozdir into the next room without saying anything. Two Dark Others – one young and one middle-aged, fourth and fifth level – smiled at me amicably.
‘Assalom aleikhum …’ I muttered and walked through the large room (everything was just the same, even the samovar was standing in the same place) and opened the door to the street running parallel to the one from which I had entered the building.
Outside the door there was an identical garden and on the wall there was a sign:
DAY WATCH
Samarkand branch
Business hours:
8.00 – 20.00
I closed the door quietly and walked back into the room. Nodir had evidently sensed my reaction and cleared out.
One of the Dark Ones said good-naturedly:
‘When you finish your business, come back to see us, respected guest. We don’t often get visitors from Moscow.’
‘Yes, do come, do come!’ the other one said emphatically.
‘Some time later … thank you for the invitation,’ I muttered. I went back into the Night Watch office and closed the door behind me.
It didn’t even have a lock on it!
The Light Ones appeared slightly embarrassed.
‘The Night Watch,’ I hissed through my teeth. ‘The forces of Light …’
‘We’ve cut back on space a bit. Utilities are expensive, and there’s the rent …’ said Valentina Ilinichna, spreading her hands and shrugging. ‘We’ve been renting these premises for two offices like this for ten years now.’
I made a simple pass with my hand and the wall separating the Light Ones’ office from the Dark Ones’ office lit up with a blue glow for an instant. The Dark Ones of Samarkand were not likely to have a magician capable of removing a spell cast by a Higher One.
‘There’s no need for that, Anton,’ Valentina Ilinichna said reproachfully. ‘They won’t listen. That’s not the way we do things here.’
‘You are supposed to keep a watch on the powers of Darkness,’ I exclaimed. ‘To monitor them!’
‘We do monitor them,’ Timur replied judiciously. ‘If they’re right next door, it makes them easier to monitor. And we’d need five times as many members to go dashing around all over town.’
‘And the signs? What about the signs? Night Watch? Day Watch? People read them!’
‘Let them read them,’ said Nodir. ‘There are all sorts of offices in the city. If you try to hide and don’t put up a sign, you’re immediately suspect. The militia will come round, or bandits working the protection racket. But this way everybody can see this is a state organisation, there’s nothing to be g
ot out of it, let it get on with its work …’
I came to my senses. After all, this wasn’t Russia. The Samarkand Watch didn’t come under our jurisdiction. In places like Belgorod or Omsk I could criticise and lay down the law. But the members of the Samarkand Watch didn’t have to listen to me, even though I was a Higher Light One.
‘I understand. But in Moscow it could never happen … Dark Ones sitting on the other side of the wall!’
‘What’s the harm in it?’ Valentina Ilinichna asked in a soothing voice. ‘Let them sit there. I expect their job’s not too much fun either. But if anything happens, we won’t compromise on our principles. Remember when the zhodugar Aliya-apa put a hex on old Nazgul three years ago, boys?’
The boys nodded. They livened up a bit and were obviously quite ready to reminisce about this glorious adventure.
‘Who was it she put the hex on?’ I asked, unable to resist.
They all laughed.
‘It’s a name – Nazgul. Not those nazguls in the American movie,’ Nodir explained, and his white teeth flashed as he smiled. ‘He’s a man. That is, he was – he died last year. He took a long time to die, and he had a young wife. So she asked a witch to sap her husband’s strength. We spotted the hex, arrested the witch, reprimanded the wife, did everything the way it’s supposed to be done. Valentina Ilinichna removed the hex, everything worked out very well. Although he was an obnoxious old man, a very bad character. Malicious, greedy and a womaniser, even though he was old. Everybody was glad when he died. But we removed the hex, just like we’re supposed to do.’
I thought for a moment and sat down on a squeaky Viennese chair. Yes, knowledge of the Uzbek language wouldn’t have been much help to me. It wasn’t a matter of language. It was a matter of a different mentality.
The rational explanation had calmed me down a bit. But then I spotted Valentina Ilinichna’s glance – kindly, but condescendingly sympathetic.
‘But even so, it’s not right,’ I said. ‘Please understand, I don’t want to criticise, it’s your city, you’re responsible for maintaining order here … But it’s a bit unusual.’