Then she took a step back, dragging my rucksack, to which her rein was tied, after her over the sand.
I had to get up. I tried to shake the chameleon off gently, but he had taken such a firm grip on the striped bed mat that he was almost part of it.
Remembering that chameleons are not aggressive, but rather the opposite, I climbed out from under the mat, got up and looked around. Gulya’s disappearance had frightened me. If she had simply gone somewhere, then why hadn’t she told me, and if . . .? At that point a chilly shiver ran across my skin and I didn’t even try to complete the thought. There was a dry, unpleasant feeling in my mouth. I walked over to the canister of water and took a gulp.
When I looked around again, I was delighted to see Gulya about two hundred metres away. She was carrying an armful of dry brushwood.
‘Good morning,’ she said with a smile. She struck a match and the fire, built in the shape of a little tent, began crackling.
‘Good morning,’ I answered.
Gulya took an iron tripod and a cooking pot out of her bundle, set this travelling contraption over the fire and poured water into the pot. All her movements were graceful and precise. I watched her admiringly, but at the same time I felt an almost parental desire to admonish her, for educational purposes.
‘Gulya,’ I said, trying to speak as gently as possible, ‘please, don’t do that again. I was worried . . .’
Gulya turned to look at me. Her beautiful face expressed surprise, which was replaced a moment later by a half-smile.
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ she said. ‘I grew up here . . . I’m the one who should worry about you . . .’
‘Why?’ It was my turn to be surprised now.
‘Because you are mine and I have to take care of you . . .’
‘I am yours and you are mine?’ I asked her, pronouncing the words slowly and too distinctly, listening carefully as I spoke, afraid of hearing a note of platitude or banality – and even more afraid of hearing them in her reply to this strange question.
‘No,’ Gulya said calmly. ‘You are mine . . .’
‘And you?’ I asked again, getting confused in her logic.
‘And I am beside you . . . It was our she-camel Khatema, who saved you.’
‘That means I belong to all three of you, and not just to you,’ I said with a nod, recalling my last conversation with Jamshed. The meaning of the old man’s words was beginning to seem a bit clearer.
‘Do not be offended,’ Gulya said, smiling and looking into my face with her brown eyes. ‘You are mine. You chose me, didn’t you?’
‘Because I liked you,’ I said, but my voice sounded sad.
‘But it is good when a present chooses its future owner,’ said Gulya, glancing into the pot of water hanging above the crackling fire.
I didn’t say anything. Her final words had floored me completely. So I was the one who was the present!
I sat on the mat with my eyes fixed on the chameleon who was still frozen on it, apparently pretending to be stuffed.
Gulya brought me a bowl of green tea and offered me several small balls of cheese on her palm. I took one, put it in my mouth and began rolling it around with my tongue, spreading the salty taste out across the roof of my mouth.
Gulya sat down beside me. She looked at me and then, following the direction of my gaze, saw the chameleon.
‘How lovely!’ she exclaimed, leaning forward slightly. I thought I saw the chameleon twitch in fright at the sound of her words and look at her.
I gradually calmed down as I came to terms with what she had said. Perhaps there really was nothing bad or even odd about a present choosing who it wants to belong to . . . For thousands of years, at least, women, who had often been presents, had not had the choice.
The sun was rising higher. We sat beside each other on the striped bed mat and identical bedspread. We drank tea, rolled little balls of cheese around in our mouths, and watched the chameleon, who looked at each of us in turn.
‘I got a bad fright,’ I eventually confessed to Gulya. ‘The camel starting snorting and dragging the rucksack away. I jumped up and you weren’t there.’
‘Khatema started snorting?’ Gulya asked in surprise. She got up. Leaving her tea bowl on the mat, she walked over to the she-camel, stroked her and looked at the track of the rucksack that had been dragged a couple of paces. Then she followed the line of the track further in the opposite direction. She walked about thirty metres and stopped.
‘Kolya!’ she called to me from there. ‘Come here!’ I walked over to her and saw the indentations of tracks on the sand. It was a single pair of tracks. Someone had reached this spot, then stopped, crouched down and stood up again, dawdled on the spot and gone away again.
I immediately recalled the tracks I had seen around myself that morning on the Caspian shoreline. Should I tell Gulya about that? Or would she be frightened?
‘It’s not a Kazakh,’ Gulya said calmly.
‘How do you know?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Kazakhs don’t run on sand, and someone ran away from here.’ We walked back to the camel without speaking. We gathered our things together. Only the bedspread with the chameleon clinging to it was left on the sand. I didn’t know what to do with him.
‘He wants us to take him with us,’ said Gulya.
I sighed. I didn’t feel like picking him up, although I knew that chameleons don’t bite.
‘They say chameleons bring good luck to nomads . . .’ Gulya said pensively.
She crouched down in front of him and stroked him and he took a jerky step and turned his ugly little face, so unlike his motionless nocturnal profile, towards her.
‘That’s why he likes to roam about at night,’ I thought. ‘You should always roam at the time when you look most handsome.’
Gulya folded up the bedspread, and the chameleon stood on the sand beside her, watching her movements.
‘Now we’ll find a place for you,’ Gulya told him. After all the luggage was stowed on the camel, she picked up the chameleon and set him on my blue-and-yellow rucksack. The chameleon gripped the yellow part of the rucksack with his claws and turned yellow, then he moved to the blue part and just as quickly turned blue. He froze there in anticipation of the journey.
I put on my pointed felt hat – the present from Jamshed to the present to his daughter – and we set off. We walked slightly ahead of Khatema, and Gulya held the camel’s rein in her hands. She looked like the mistress of the spreading sands around us, and also of our little caravan and of the hills that were still visible in the distance, but were simply not coming any closer.
29
THE NEXT NIGHT I slept lightly but sweetly. I dreamed that Gulya and I were lying beside each other so that I was enveloped in her warmth, and every now and then I held my breath in order to hear the beating of her heart through her skin. I woke suddenly and easily when I felt a movement on my chest. I opened my eyes and saw a familiar sight – the chameleon was sitting on top of the striped bedspread that covered me, with his handsome profile uplifted towards the sky. He seemed to be on guard, his motionless stance was akin to revolutionary vigilance.
‘Why has he latched on to us?’ I wondered, raising my head to get a better look at him in the blue gloom of the night. ‘Has he taken such a great liking to us, or is he simply lonely in the desert? Well, OK, if he brings good luck it would be stupid to drive him away.’
The chameleon’s appearance had focused my thoughts on him, and I started thinking we ought to give him name, since he had joined us. I began running through names in my mind, but human names and dogs’ names didn’t suit him. I had to find some kind of human prototype. But as the chameleon-like political leaders lined up inside my head, I began feeling embarrassed for the poor reptile: why should I want to name him in honour of people unworthy of either love or trust? And so, in order to make amends, I decided to name him in honour of my grandad – Petrovich. The patronymic without a given name sounded far m
ore respectable and at the same time more homely than a name without a patronymic.
‘Well then, Petrovich,’ I whispered to him, ‘how do you like Gulya?’
Petrovich didn’t answer. He continued his motionless posing, without even shifting his ball-and-socket eyes.
I sighed and looked at Gulya, sleeping peacefully on her side, with her face turned towards me.
‘That’s a good sign,’ I thought. ‘Last night she slept on her back . . .’
I moved closer to Gulya, trying not to disturb her sleep. I moved in to the distance of her breath and glanced into her beautiful face. I looked at it for a long time, until my eyes, completely accommodated to the blue gloom, forgot that it was night.
Displeased by my movement, Petrovich moved across on to Gulya and froze on her thigh, apparently believing that this was the highest point of the desert, from which he could maintain his watch.
And then I fell into a sweet sleep so sound that in the morning I couldn’t remember anything I had dreamed about during the night.
30
THE WHITE HILLS were gradually drawing closer. We had been walking for four days already and I had told her in more detail about the reasons that had obliged me to make my present journey and about its goal. And thanks to that we had got to know each other. She listened attentively, but she didn’t ask any questions – on the contrary, she demonstrated a mystifying, lofty kind of respect for what I said. But I wanted so much for her to ask about something, to take a personal interest in some details of my story. I thought that would be a fairly good sign that she was interested in me. But she kept silent and listened, without filling in the pauses that arose, and I saw this as simply the traditional respect for a man when he is speaking, rather than anything more. Even so, walking along and telling her about my life was so enjoyable and amusing that at one point I suddenly noticed I was exaggerating a little bit, adding tragic details to certain events and elements of pathos or humour to others. But I could see from her eyes that she found it interesting to listen to me, and I carried on. Not until my mouth was completely dried out from talking did I fall silent and reach out my hands for the canister of water dangling from the camel’s side.
We stopped. I drank.
The sun was already high in the sky and, without knowing what time it was, I instinctively estimated the length of the dotted line of its remaining journey to sunset. It turned out that the lamp of heaven’s working day was due to end in about five hours.
‘Are we going to climb the mountains, then?’ I asked Gulya when we set off again.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘We’ll go as far as Besmanchak, then we’ll let Khatema go back, and walk round the hills on the sand.’
I nodded. Naturally, the idea that soon I would have to carry all my luggage on my own shoulders was not a very cheerful one. We spent the night on some kind of salt crust instead of sand. The cracked, white ground looked as if it had been sprinkled with crystalline powder and felt hard after walking on the sand. This surface had risen from under the sand and abutted the gently ascending hills, acting as a kind of foundation for them, forming a narrow strip – about a hundred or a hundred and fifty metres wide – that stretched along the foot of the hills, trying to follow the line of their curves. But nature’s geometry was rather poor, and so in some places the strip of salt crust disappeared altogether, allowing the sand to reach right up to the very base of the hills.
As we settled down for the night, we spread out some additional throws from Gulya’s double bundle on the salt crust, and then put the two little pillows that smelled of camel and the striped mats or covers on top of them.
It was cool under the hills, and when the sun had finally seeped all the way down behind the horizon, the chill seemed to pierce right through me. Somehow it just happened that, as we lay down to sleep, we found ourselves closer to each other than ever before and I put my arm round Gulya. She was lying on her side with her face towards me, but her eyes were already closed.
Perhaps she was already asleep and she simply didn’t feel my hand, or perhaps she was pretending. I lay like that for a long time, probably about half an hour. I lay with my eyes open, admiring her, and at one point I moved my lips close to hers and froze like that, feeling her warmth and her breath on the skin of my face. I didn’t kiss her that night. I don’t know why. I wanted to kiss her terribly, I wanted a lot more than that. But can a present kiss its owner without first asking permission? What nonsense! Those ideas had got stuck in my head! It made just as much sense to think that Jamshed had given her to me. After all, I had chosen her! If not for that conversation, that was what I would have believed. But a peculiar mixture of tradition and democratic feeling had introduced such confusion into the situation that I couldn’t even think about it without getting annoyed.
I suspended my face in front of hers again but then, still not having kissed her lips, I lowered my head on to the pillow and gazed at the sky, with the satellite-tractor creeping across it once again, intent on its own business. Then I felt the chameleon Petrovich climb up on to my chest and thrust his profile into the starry sky once again.
‘Everything’s fine,’ I told myself. ‘The nightwatch is at its post. I can go to sleep . . .’
31
THE FOLLOWING DAY we reached Besmanchak. This was the name of a beautiful spot at which two shallow spurs of the hills formed a regular triangular gorge, open on one side. At the centre of the triangle of salt crust there was an old grave – a slab of stone that had either sunk deep into the ground or had been set into it sometime. Rising up out of one side of the slab was a narrow stone column the height of a man, with a green kerchief tied around its top. I had never seen any graves like it before, and my curiosity encouraged me to go closer. I made out Arabic cursive script on the narrow column.
Gulya came up to me from behind.
‘A wandering dervish is buried here,’ she said. ‘He was killed by Kirghiz nomads.’
‘Why?’
‘The daughter of one of them fell in love with the dervish and said she would stay with him until he died. Her father killed the dervish and took her home. Then he came back with his brothers and they buried him here.’
‘But why didn’t he let her go with him?’ I asked, thinking that this story bore a distant resemblance to my own.
‘A dervish cannot have a home and so he is not supposed to have a wife,’ Gulya replied.
‘Well, thank God I’m not a dervish,’ I thought. ‘After all, I do have a home in Kiev.’
Right there beside the dervish’s grave, we took the luggage off the camel, sat down to rest on a striped bed mat and had something to eat. Then Gulya gathered up an armful of the dry stalks and branches of plants that had attempted unsuccessfully to survive on the salt crust in this place, started a fire and set the tripod with the cooking pot over it. Soon we were drinking green tea, holding it in our mouths and rinsing salty balls of cheese about in it.
Having told Gulya practically everything about my life during our journey together, I was feeling more comfortable with her now, despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about her own life. The peace and quiet of this place encouraged conversation.
‘Gulya,’ I asked, ‘have you always lived in the yurt with your father?’
‘No, not always . . . I went to Alma-Ata to study, for six years . . .’
‘And where did you study?’
‘I graduated from medical college,’ she said, lowering her eyes modestly.
‘And then you came straight back to your father?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a nod. ‘If I had married there, I would have stayed . . .’
‘But why didn’t you marry?’ I asked.
Gulya shrugged. ‘There were a lot of boys there with rich parents, who wouldn’t have let them marry me . . . But I didn’t want to anyway . . . Have you ever been married?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I lived with one woman for two years – she was from another city. Then she wanted to
bring her mother to live us, and I realised it was time to put an end to our cohabitation . . . It was a small apartment, and our relationship was already on the wane, so the arrival of her mother was unlikely to add any romance to it. Then I decided to live on my own, and I found I liked it. And I’ve already told you what came after that.’
Gulya nodded.
‘Do you like me?’ I asked her. We looked into each other’s eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said in a quiet voice.
I felt good. The warm, slightly salty air caressed my face. Sitting there facing me was a beautiful woman who had just admitted that she was attracted to me. What more did I want? Nothing really, apart from to search for something that Taras Shevchenko had buried in the sand. And to be honest, even searching for something buried in the sand by Taras Shevchenko seemed a rather pointless, petty waste of time, not much like the goal of a great adventure. I didn’t even know what he had buried there, or if he had really buried anything at all. Perhaps it was just the usual sort of false denunciation, made simply to stir up trouble for a detested Little Russian. It felt absurd even to think about Shevchenko at that moment, but then I immediately recalled the deceased Gershovich’s notes about how Shevchenko adored woman more than anything else in the world.
I got up and sat down beside Gulya. I turned to face her and looked into her brown eyes.
‘May I kiss you?’ I asked awkwardly.
‘A husband should not ask his wife’s permission . . .’ These words killed my feelings of exalted romance once again. But even so I took them as a simple ‘yes’ and leaned down towards her face, and our lips touched. What I feared most of all at that moment was that her lips would be still and passive, but fortunately I was wrong to have been afraid.
We kissed for several minutes. The kiss was sweet and salty. Its saltiness came either from the little balls of cheese that we had just been rolling about in our mouths until they dissolved, or from the very air surrounding us. I embraced Gulya and pressed her against myself. My hands felt her warmth. I kissed her neck, with my nose nuzzling in the silk of her hair.
The Good Angel of Death Page 11
