The saltiness of her skin tasted sweet now, words became meaningless, leaving untouched those feelings and sensations that every man longs for and tries to cling to for as long as possible once he has found them.
32
THE SHE-CAMEL Khatema walked away from us slowly, stopping every now and then to look back.
‘Will she go back on her own?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Gulya. ‘It’s time for us to go too.’
I packed the things, hoisted the rucksack on to my shoulders and picked up the canister of water. Then I glanced at the double bundle.
The bundle looked heavier than the rucksack to me, and I stepped towards it to check.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Gulya, getting there before me.
She effortlessly slung the bundle’s connecting belt across her shoulder and looked at me expectantly.
We walked along the strip of salt crust skirting the elevations of the hills, leaving Besmanchak and the grave of the murdered dervish behind us.
In this place the sun was not as hot as in the desert, although it seemed to hang at the centre of the sky, as if it was deliberately trying to maintain an equal distance from all horizons on every side. I thought how, when you look at the horizon, whatever direction, you never perceive it as the boundary line of a circle, although in simple logic it cannot be anything else. ‘Evidently the Earth itself is not sufficiently round,’ I decided and left it at that.
We walked beside each other. I kept glancing at Gulya, but she walked along without speaking, also absorbed in thoughts about something or other. And I didn’t want to disturb her. After all, it was far more agreeable to make conversation in the evening, sitting on the bed mat, when I could not just talk, but also embrace her and kiss her again.
This time I wasn’t going to ask permission, in order not to feel stupid. My complicated status seemed to have been defined, the i’s had apparently all been dotted and the t’s had all been crossed, and that allowed me to feel a bit more confident. It didn’t matter whether a husband had been given as a gift, been chosen or had chosen for himself, he was still the head of the family, and at least the equal of his other half.
As evening approached we slowed down. The coolness descending from the sky mellowed the fatigue of the journey and the inertial effect on our fading energy allowed us to walk on for at least a kilometre before we halted in the small ‘v’ of a pseudo-ravine, like a miniaturised copy of the ravine with the dervish’s grave. Shrugging off the rucksack and setting the already half-empty canister at my feet, I suddenly felt more cheerful again. Or perhaps it was simply that I had straightened up my shoulders once they were free of the weight of the rucksack.
Gulya also set down her double bundle, and immediately pulled out the bed mats. I watched her and caught myself not simply watching, but already admiring her with a feeling of either quiet boastfulness or pride: ‘Look, if I have a wife like that, I can’t be all that bad myself!’
And there was no one else around, apart from the chameleon Petrovich, frozen on the highest hump of a bundle that hadn’t been emptied out yet.
That evening we ate the last can of Caspian Herring for supper.
Under the bewildered gaze of Gulya’s brown eyes, I carefully inspected the contents of the open can and only then set it between us. The can was rapidly emptied, and after washing down our modest supper with water, we both began gathering the dry stalks of some plant or other and light, tumbled clumps of feather grass, camel’s thorn and saltwort. Then we started a fire and began waiting for the water in the pot to come to the boil.
While the water was heating, the sun sank lower and lower, becoming darker and cosier. Then, as the steam rose from two tea bowls, I tried to make out its colour, for some reason thinking at that moment that the steam rising from green tea ought to be green too. Then a ball of cheese, rolled around my mouth, filled my mood with tart saltiness, and once again I was energised by thoughts and desires, this time as I watched Gulya slowly and gracefully lifting her tea bowl to her mouth. She was wearing a purple shirt-dress with her white trousers. ‘When did she manage to get changed?’ I thought, remembering that earlier in the day she had been wearing a lettuce-green shirt-dress with patterns that I had seen somewhere before on carpets.
The evening sheltered us in darkness and when we finished our tea we started settling down for the night.
The fire had extinguished itself and the final sparks were running along the smouldering stalks. Total silence fell, and as I covered myself with the striped bedcover, I cast a glance at our chameleon – he was still sitting on the bundle.
That night I was bolder and after several kisses I hugged Gulya against me energetically. I kissed her neck, untied her hair and immediately felt helpless in the face of her oriental clothing, which she did not remove for the night.
‘Do you want me to get undressed?’ she suddenly asked me in a half-whisper.
‘Yes,’ I answered, also in a half-whisper.
‘Then I will have to rinse myself with water . . .’ Gulya said, gazing at me in tender enquiry.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Then we will have no drinking water tomorrow.’
‘Never mind.’
She got up and moved away a few steps. She undressed slowly – I followed her gentle, unhurried movements, which expressed her entire character. In the darkness, to which my eyes had already grown accustomed, Gulya stood there naked between the stars and the cracked salt crust, like a vision from the Arabian Nights.
She stood there without moving for a while, either listening to the silence or breathing in the air of that night with her body that had been liberated from clothes. Then she leaned down and picked up the canister of water. She unscrewed the lid, lifted the canister above her head and began gradually tilting it. I couldn’t see the stream of water, but I heard it murmuring as it fell on to her shoulders and ran down over her body. She turned, and the full profile of her body made me think, ironically, of the beauties who pose for the various men’s magazines. The water kept on babbling and flowing, and I envied it as it ran across her body, momentarily halting on the pointed nipples of her beautiful breasts before it fell, streaming down her smooth back, across her thighs, along her legs.
And a few minutes later, I already felt that the water and the entire world must envy me. I dried Gulya’s tender skin, cool and moist, with my own body, I warmed her body with kisses, feeling the burning heat of my lips. The two of us warmed up together, and the palms of her hands, pressed into my back, felt very hot, but that heat was not enough for me, and we carried on heating each other until we reached that boiling point of passion beyond which there lies only death. Then we cooled down, listening to each other’s breathing, seeing the desert dawn our through half-closed eyes. The morning that descended with the cool breeze from the hills into the small, irregular triangle of our shallow gorge felt like the earliest morning in the whole of my life. I wanted to prolong it, delay it, slow it down. And while the sun was clumsily scrambling up over the line of the horizon that was hidden from us by the uplift of the hills, that morning lasted, it endured almost for eternity, frozen motionless, like the hands of my watch. And I was glad of it.
33
DESPITE OUR SLEEPLESS night, we found it quite easy to rise and set out on our way. Although my dry lips were begging for water, I said nothing. I carried the unusually light plastic canister in one hand and Gulya walked beside me. Although she had the strap of the double bundle across her right shoulder, she walked lightly, as if the law of terrestrial gravity didn’t apply to her. Our little chameleon sat on her left shoulder. Now he was pretending to be an extension of her emerald-green shirt-dress.
The sun was rising higher. I wanted green tea. I wanted to hear Gulya’s voice, but my mouth was so dry, it felt as if any word I spoke could leave bloody scratches on my tongue or my gums.
At one point I noticed Gulya glancing sideways at me in a playful manner. I turned to look at her as we wa
lked on. Our glances and our smiles met.
‘There will be a well soon,’ said Gulya, as if she had read my thoughts.
‘And what if there isn’t?’
‘I’m used to it, but it will be hard for you.’
I nodded and immediately felt ashamed of my question. The blaze of desire should not depend on the presence or absence of a well. And thank God that the evening before I had not enquired about the nearest one.
The slopes of the hills that we were walking round grew steeper and steeper. Occasionally I raised my head and looked at these white ribbed monoliths tempered by the sun and the winds. What were they here for? What purpose did they serve? If nature was the basis of life, then these huge rocks had nothing to do with nature. Perhaps they were like immense weights, balancing some cordillera or other on the far side of the world. What did the existence of these huge rocks mean? Or was it pointless to seek for any meaning?
We walked without stopping for about six hours, until we saw the well, surrounded by a crudely built circle of large stones. When we reached it, I noticed that the salt crust round the well was somehow sleek and smooth, there were no cracks in it. But the well itself was unexpectedly shallow – no more than half a metre deep. And there wasn’t much water in it – when I immersed my hand vertically, it went in only as far as my wrist until the tips of my fingers hit the slippery clay bottom. Lying there in the water was a large one-litre mug.
We filled up the canister. Then we got washed, sluicing each other down from the mug.
After that I was alarmed to notice that there was no water left in the well. I looked up in bewilderment at Gulya and saw a condescending smile on her face.
‘It will fill up again while we brew the tea,’ she said with a nod at the well.
There was enough material in this place to get a fire going. Soon we were drinking green tea.
We talked and I began feeling sleepy. Gulya noticed this and took one of the bed mats out of her bundle. I lay down on it and fell asleep instantly. When I woke up it was already late evening. The white tops of the hills were illuminated by the sun that was invisible from here below, but the light was climbing higher and higher as the sun slowly disappeared. After pausing on the very peak of the hill closest to us, it retreated higher still, dissolving into the sky.
I looked around and saw Gulya sitting on the stone rim of the well. And then I saw her shirt-dresses spread out on the stone slope of the monolith: red, lettuce green, emerald green, blue and another two, in colours that were hard to make out in the advancing darkness. While I was sleeping, Gulya had washed her clothes.
I ran my hands over my jeans and looked at my T-shirt. I started thinking.
‘Not sleeping any more?’ Gulya asked, turning towards me.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Tonight the sky will be very beautiful.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The sunset was very intense,’ Gulya explained. I was no longer tired, and although night was advancing, my body felt rested and full of energy.
‘All right, we’ll watch the sky,’ I said, and Gulya laughed briefly in reply.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing . . .’
I got up and walked over to her.
‘I’m so happy today . . .’ Gulya said, looking up at me when I stopped in front of her. ‘I want to be this happy always . . .’
I leaned down to her face and kissed her lips. Words seemed inappropriate, and so I said nothing.
‘Look, look!’ Gulya whispered abruptly, pointing upwards.
I followed the direction of her gesture and saw a comet with a fiery tail.
The comet drifted sluggishly towards the horizon, but disappeared from view before ever reaching it.
That night I stretched out my arms and the warm sand that my hands touched felt soft and downy.
34
THE DREAM THAT came to me just before morning left my body feeling invigorated, as if it had only now become mature enough for real life.
I rose from the mat with remarkable ease. Looking about, I saw the same beautiful coloured patches of Gulya’s clothing laid out on the rising incline of the monolith. Gulya herself was not around, but her absence seemed natural, like part of the ritual of the morning, which started two hours earlier for her.
In about fifteen minutes, she would appear, carrying an airy, voluminous bundle of desert brushwood, on which our morning tea would be made. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d returned with a hunting gun in one hand and a dead deer or young saiga in the other. Although, of course, that vision transformed me into a member of the third sex, a weak child in need of protection and care from both men and women.
My energy naturally sought an outlet and I set my feet apart at the width of my shoulders (following an instinctive response acquired long ago from the morning exercises on the radio) and started swinging my arms about. Then for a long time I did squats, leaning in different directions. And all with only a single goal in mind – to make myself feel at least a little bit tired. But it was no good. I seemed to have more energy after every swing of my arms. I stopped exercising and looked around again. And I saw Gulya, who had just emerged from behind one of the ridges that sloped down into the ground.
She was carrying brushwood. She was wearing her lettuce-green shirt-dress. She was walking slowly.
That light, airy clump of dry twigs and stalks looked like the frame for the bottom sphere of a snowman. And in the background the overlapping stone tongues of the rocky outcrops, retreating behind each other until they disappeared, looked like the ingenious stage setting for this clearly ancient epic poem. An epic performance in which everything remains immutable: the mountains and the sky and the sand and the beautiful Kazakh woman in the bright clothes. And only the traveller towards whom she is walking is in any way impermanent, or inconstant, like the electricity supply in the country. Beauty is immutable and eternal.
It is only those who fight for it, to possess it, who die, disappear and are lost in the sands. My own presence in this production rendered it somewhat modernistic. I had not the fight to possess beauty. I had not fought at all. I had been saved by the she-camel Khatema and then been given as a present, without my permission. I had been given to the beautiful Gulya, as if from now on I would be a prize ornament.
I thought to myself that I liked all this – this eternal epic – very much. I even wanted it to be really eternal. I wanted the world in which we presently found ourselves, on the way to a goal that was probably more imaginary than real, to remain my world, beautiful, austere and in some ways cruel. I didn’t want this world to release me.
The brushwood with the pot hanging over it blazed up from the match. Gulya rolled up her dry shirt-dresses and put them into the bundle. The sun rose over the mountains. The little chameleon Petrovich climbed on to the bundle and froze with his neck extended towards the sky.
After drinking tea and rolling a couple of salty cheese balls around on our tongues, we set off further along the winding track that followed the crooked line of stone tongues running down into the ground.
We walked for a long time, only once making a halt to drink our fill from the canister of water.
The sun was already sinking, but there was still no end to the mountain spurs.
And again the night was spent in a narrow ravine between two tongues of rock. The night was quiet and starry. But when morning came it was not good. While I was still asleep my arms started aching, as if they were constrained at the wrists. And when I woke up I realised that my hands really were tied behind my back. And I was lying on my stomach with my nose stuck into Gulya’s small pillow embroidered with diamond shapes. I turned my head, not yet feeling fear. I was only surprised and puzzled.
Shifting on to my side, I gathered myself and sat up with an effort, like a wobbly toy – my legs were tied together too. I looked around. Gulya was not there again, but I could see a lot of human tracks in the sand around the mat.
‘Could Gulya have tied me up, then?’ – the crazy thought flashed through my mind. ‘She just got fed up of me and decided to leave, and to stop me chasing her, she tied –’
Before I could finish the thought, I heard the sound of two voices, a man and a woman.
They were unclear at first, but as they move closer, it became possible to make out the words and, to my amazement, I heard pure Ukrainian speech . . .
‘Why didn’t you catch her, you fool, eh?’ asked the woman.
‘And what about you? Well? Why didn’t you run after her? I have to do everything!’ the man replied.
The couple emerged so suddenly from behind a nearby spur that I started. I gave a chesty, frightened gasp that was almost a groan – I recognised those faces. But before I realised where I had seen them before, they stopped two or three metres away and looked at me in a hostile, thoughtful way, as if at that very moment they were deciding my fate.
That pause lasted for several minutes. Then the young guy with the dark complexion and the pointy nose leaned down over me – I thought he was going to peck me, because it was his nose that reached out towards me, but all he did was sniff.
‘Hey!’ he said, turning towards his girlfriend. ‘His body smells of cinnamon, and one hand smells of caviar. He must have touched Russian capitalism with that hand!’
His dark-haired companion laughed.
‘What do you want from me?’ I asked, trying to slacken the stiff rope restraining my wrists behind my back.
‘Oh, nothing, don’t get all hot and bothered,’ the guy laughed. ‘We’ll have a talk, maybe we’ll come up with something that’s good for the homeland . . .’
Now I clearly remembered the moments in the past when we had not exactly run into, but noticed each other. Or rather, now I understood that they had been following me. They were the couple who had turned up on St Sophia’s Square during the rally and later on when I was getting closer to home. But how had they turned up here, in the Kazakh desert? Was it their tracks that had accompanied my journey since the moment I disembarked from the schooner Old Comrade on to the Caspian shore?
The Good Angel of Death Page 12
