The Way of Muri

by Ilya Boyashov

  ‘Hey, what’s he looking for?’ asked one of the soldiers, once they had organised the people into a line. ‘Tell him to come over here with everyone else. We’re going to a refugee camp.’

  Muri immediately let himself be found. ‘Ah, there you are,’ remarked the old man, unsurprised by his sudden appearance. ‘I didn’t think you’d stray too far from the canned supplies!’

  When they arrived at the refugee camp the Sveingers, the Sharums, the Alochas and the others began to relax as they celebrated their salvation. Under the protection of the watchtowers and the sentries each of them saw himself as a hero. Raki and wine were produced out of nowhere, and even the old women let their hair down and joined in the dancing. The authorities allowed the revelry to continue until dawn. Jacob sat with Muri and Shiloh some distance away from the party. Envoys kept coming to his campfire, trying to persuade him to share in the communal joy, but the stubborn old man just sucked on his pipe in silence. Then the envoys would spread their hands and return to the others. ‘God saved us!’ they cried, raising their voices as one. ‘He saved us in our hour of need!’

  While Old Sharum and Leib Shakhnovich read from the Book of Psalms, many of the refugees began to make plans for the future. Some dreamed of Munich, whereas others were more tempted by the Viennese suburbs. The far-sighted Sveingers and Elohim set their sights on the Hudson. Hearing their optimistic intentions, Jacob angrily knocked the ash out of his pipe and turned to Shiloh.

  ‘Your parents seem to like the idea of America. Come here… Let me feel your legs, boy! Stop fidgeting, just stand still.’ After feeling the boy’s calves, evidently satisfied, he announced, ‘You’ve got a good pair of legs on you. Nice and strong. Just what you’ll need!’

  Laying down his most valuable possession for just a moment, he turned to check on Muri, who was dozing on a blanket that had been spread out for him nearby. Snatching up the pipe, Shiloh put it to his lips and inhaled. The pipe crackled in response.

  Jacob exploded. ‘You cheeky little devil! Go back to your father. I don’t want to catch you hanging around me again! Now I see what you’ve been up to all along!’

  The boy ran happily back to the other tents. As he skipped off, the old man muttered to himself, ‘He’s got good legs, that Shiloh! Good strong legs!’

  Jacob’s mood even began to improve a little, but that didn’t stop him reprimanding Baruch and his friend when the pair of them approached him to ask yet again for his forgiveness.

  ‘Baruch, yours was the loudest voice shouting, “God is ours!”’ said Jacob when they reached him. ‘So I wanted to ask you, is He yours and yours alone?’

  ‘How could He belong to anyone else?’ responded Baruch guardedly. ‘We’re the chosen people, aren’t we? You’re always saying so yourself!’

  This response was enough to set the old man off.

  ‘Is it your place, Baruch, to decide whose God He is? Maybe you felt His mercy for the first time yesterday… But if we hadn’t run into those bandits, you wouldn’t even have thought of Him! And what about Elohim, who was ready to kill my cat with a stone – did he suddenly see the light? You didn’t think to pray when you were standing there vulnerable and scared, when you were really in trouble, did you? Yet now you can’t stop boasting about being the chosen ones!’

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ muttered Elohim, through gritted teeth.

  Jacob’s fury flared up.

  ‘You’ve barely recovered from your fear, you snivelling wretches! Do you seriously believe you are in any position to speak about who He is?! Munich and Vienna are nice enough, but only for a little while. Not to set up home, you stupid fools – just until it’s time to move on!’

  That night, once again, Muri alone was privy to Jacob’s mournful thoughts, spoken aloud in the heat of his anger. No one else dared to disturb the crazy old man. Jacob settled down to sleep, convinced that the only one to stay with him through thick and thin would be this strange but intuitive cat.

  A tiny spirit nestling in a wild rose bush saw Muri slip out of the tent at midnight and immediately understood his intentions.

  ‘You’re not going to abandon him just like that, are you?’ called the perspicacious elemental. ‘You ought to show some gratitude!’

  Muri’s eyes instantly sought out the branch where his critic sat, but he remained silent.

  ‘You’ll break the old man’s heart!’ the spirit continued reproachfully. ‘He may be accustomed to human duplicity, but if there’s one thing he thinks he can count on, you unscrupulous creature, it’s your devotion.’

  ‘The human heart is no concern of mine,’ answered Muri, sniffing the wind.

  ‘He’ll be devastated!’

  ‘Why should I care?’

  ‘I’m amazed you’ve managed to get this far without anyone wringing your neck!’ exclaimed the spirit, distressed by such blatant cynicism. ‘How do you get away with that kind of attitude?’

  At this point a growl rose in Muri’s throat, silencing the resident of the wild rose bush. The cat proceeded to summarize his rationale.

  ‘I’m on a mission!’ he informed the ignorant spirit, in a tone of scornful reproach. ‘It’s my prerogative.’

  The cat’s path took him from Zenica to Banja Luka, and from there to Prijedor, across the River Sava and onwards to the city of Kranj in Slovenia. Winter fell as Muri was making his way over the Julian Alps.

  It’s time for us to take a short break from our travellers’ tales and return to Pete Stout, the biologist we met earlier. Fate chose to smile upon Dr Stout that winter. Amongst the animals belonging to the circus in the provincial town of Uryupinsk was a goose named Timosha, who had made a career out of performing simple arithmetic calculations in public. His success to date had been facilitated largely by the timely and discreet supply of dried biscuits, but one day Timosha shot to fame on the strength of his own abilities. During an otherwise run-of-the-mill performance (featuring the usual dancing elephants, giant mice and psychic boa constrictors, as advertised on the poster) the bird astonished his trainer by honking twice, without any prompting, when a particularly sceptical audience member asked him to divide four by two. The man refused to believe it and tried to catch the goose out with another question, but again Timosha responded with the right number of honks. Each and every one of the ensuing barrage of questions was answered correctly. There was a sense of hysteria backstage. Timosha’s trainer, an experienced old hand who had worked with dozens of rabbits and cockerels in his time, wiped the cold sweat from his brow. Meanwhile the goose proceeded to add, subtract, multiply and divide three-digit numbers, setting record after record. The entire circus was in a state of complete shock. The city authorities were stupefied. Rumours began to circulate, and people flocked to Uryupinsk to witness the spectacle for themselves. A team of local cameramen was about to make a film about Timosha when the authorities intervened, categorically prohibiting any exposure before the bird’s remarkable talent had been officially documented by a special delegation. They couldn’t stop photographs of Timosha appearing on the Internet, though, giving Fatherland’s supporters cause to rejoice.

  The arrival of the delegation saw a flurry of activity around the cage occupied by Timosha and his two female companions. In addition to Pete Stout and his entourage – namely, two journalists and a photographer from a tabloid newspaper plus Stout’s most loyal follower, the microbiologist Charles Lancer, who followed him everywhere – several representatives from the Chelyabinsk School of Parapsychology and three hereditary witches were also clamouring for access. The authorities kept a police officer on duty by the cage at all times, just to be on the safe side. Stout heard that the goose and his trainer had already been subjected to tests by an even more authoritative delegation consisting of various luminaries from the fields of zoology and psychology. These professors had witnessed the phenomenon but could not find any rational explanation for it, so they came to the unanimous conclusion that the trainer must be using some kind o
f new trick that had simply not yet been discovered. The delegates remained unconvinced despite the fact that Timosha had been examined a number of times and continued to excel in his arithmetic calculations even when his trainer was not present.

  Exhausted, Timosha reluctantly demonstrated his abilities once again by dividing four hundred and forty-four by two. The assembled company painstakingly counted every honk and agreed that they had heard exactly two hundred and twenty-two.

  The emotion was almost too much for Stout.

  ‘E fructu arbor cognoscitur, Timosha!’6 he muttered, in a state of extreme agitation. ‘We will remove the final barrier! I must arrange for you to attend the conference in Stockholm. This will be the final, crippling blow for Belanger and his cronies!’ Stout kept repeating himself deliriously, unable to tear himself away from the bars of the cage.

  ‘That human being was completely out of his mind,’ the goose observed to his lady friends, once Pete and his companions had finally left. ‘He kept going on about a “barrier”… What on earth was he talking about?’

  Both female geese wisely chose to remain silent. They were there for one reason and one reason only: to indulge the gentleman. So they were not obliged to give the matter any further consideration.

  To Stout’s unconcealed chagrin, his efforts were in vain – he wasn’t allowed to take Timosha. Word had reached Moscow, and someone in the government had decided that such a talented goose was vital to the operations of the Ministry of Defence. Shortly after Stout’s visit, Timosha was conveyed to a secret scientific research institute in the capital, effectively vanishing into thin air and thereby frustrating not only Fatherland’s supporters but also the CIA. The Pentagon’s interest was hardly surprising, considering the disastrous results of recent experiments in the large-scale deployment of cockroaches at a military testing ground in Nevada.

  Following his defeat in Russia, Stout began associating with experts at the Chicago dolphinarium. Whilst tirelessly subjecting his charges to all kinds of experiments and without even getting out of the pool, the oceanographer John Lilly promised him the breakthrough he had been waiting for.

  The opponents of the indefatigable Pete had no less cause for celebration that winter. Their attention was also drawn towards distant Muscovy, where Belanger’s supporters had finally completed their research into a certain Russian sect known as the ‘runners’. The Hanoverian recluse learned that these ‘runners’, like the representatives of the school of Qin and the star lovers, spent their entire lives wandering from city to city, from village to village. Sect members had established a nationwide network of houses and overnight shelters for the benefit of like-minded wanderers. Until quite recently, these shelters had been equipped with secret hiding-places. Rural shelters, typically on the outskirts of villages, were connected to the nearest wood by underground tunnels of up to several hundred feet in length. Three hundred years previously the ‘runners’ had been motivated by the search for a legendary country by the name of Belovodye; following a philosophical reinterpretation of this hazy notion contemporary adherents were searching for their own ‘internal’ Shambhala. They were able to comprehend the secrets of their closed doctrine only gradually, ascending its steps one at a time like Masonic initiates, even though they knew from the outset that they would never reach their ‘Promised Land’ because it is impossible to attain perfection.

  ‘Ex oriente lux!’7 exclaimed the professor. ‘Magna est veritas, et praevalebit!’8

  Meanwhile the cat kept running…

  Not long before the civil war broke out, an observatory had been built on one of the snowy summits of the Julian Alps. The dazzling, ice-covered steps leading to the telescope tower were like Jacob’s Ladder. Any attempt to ascend or descend these steps invariably became a Sisyphean task, and for this reason a rope had been stretched from the door of the wooden hut all the way up to the top. It was grasped every day by a well-known agitator of scientific peace – the eccentric astronomer Petko Patić, from Zagreb.

  Patić’s life had arguably been an uphill struggle for some time now. Seven years previously, this forward-thinking senior lecturer had shared with the academic council his discovery of the regularity of supernova explosions in galaxies E130-M and N-115 and in the spiral galaxy D104-2, which had recently been detected by Zilbert and Kate. According to Patić’s calculations, the interval between explosions was exactly 1,324 years. Keen to share his discovery with the experts, he set forth his theory in detail at a meeting of the Yugoslavian astronomical community. Unfortunately, his irrepressible enthusiasm was not reciprocated. They listened to what Patić had to say, but his prediction of a supernova explosion in galaxy D104-2 in 1991 was met with understandable scepticism. During the hour-long debate that followed, Patić lost every shred of his former authority. His zealous approach and the ensuing exchange of insults led, predictably enough, to professional ostracism.

  In 1991, when the promised event failed to materialize, Patić reviewed his chart and admitted that he had made an error in his original calculations, albeit only by a few months. The astronomical community responded once again with derision, but he had no intention of capitulating. In 1992, that fateful year for Croats and Serbs, the disgraced dreamer sought refuge in the observatory, which was operated by his former classmates. They were now burdened with families and earthly concerns and not remotely interested in his insights and breakthroughs. Patić wasn’t invited to join in their routine observations, but as he had no interest in commonplace phenomena this didn’t bother him in the slightest. While he was living there as an outcast, perfecting his chart, significant changes began to occur in the world around him. War broke out, and his sympathetic friends immediately dispersed. Patić remained alone with an Albanian technician who wouldn’t leave the mountain for fear of the raging inferno below.

  The technician, whose name was Mirko, continued to oil the mechanisms and look after the generator, for which they still had several canisters of fuel. But Patić’s mind was elsewhere. He bit all his fingernails to the quick in anticipation of triumph. When his computer broke, the astronomer continued his calculations with pen and paper. His concentration was as intense as that of Newton, who once famously boiled his watch instead of an egg.

  Latterly, the conversations between the two men left on the mountain had become more like a random exchange of words than genuine communication. Without listening to the other, each of them held forth at length on his own obsession. The technician complained endlessly about the old generator, while Patić kept insisting that he would show those Belgrade intellectuals – it was just a matter of time.

  Meanwhile their food started running out. Finally, one evening, they shared the last spoonful of coffee. There was still some barley drink left, though not much.

  ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Patić. ‘You’ll see! The explosion will be visible from here.’

  ‘They’re all laughing at us,’ said the technician, who wasn’t one for mincing his words. ‘You just don’t want to admit it. I don’t give a damn about your stupid fantasy! We’re lucky, you know – no one’s thought of searching up here yet. But sooner or later they will, and how will your delusions help us then? You’re Catholic, and I’m Muslim. You’re Croatian, I’m Albanian. There’s an explosive mix for you! Do you think the Zagreb Muslims will show any mercy to a Catholic? Your lot won’t waste any time laying into me, either, and the Serbs will hack both of us to pieces… Anyway,’ the technician pointed out miserably, ‘I seem to remember you predicting the same thing this time last year. So where is it, this miracle of yours?’

  ‘Let me tell you the story of Robinson Crusoe,’ answered the astronomer. ‘This poor, shipwrecked sailor spent ten years building a boat from the strongest wood he could find. He worked on it day and night, dreaming that he would finally be able to leave the island he had come to hate.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less about your shipwrecked sailor!’ exclaimed Mirko.

  ‘Just listen,’ Patić replied s
olemnly. He was preparing for his next shift, pulling on his sheepskin coat and fur boots. ‘When Robinson had finished building his boat, he discovered that he’d built it too far from the shore. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would be too heavy for him to drag to the ocean alone!’

  ‘You and he have a lot in common,’ declared the technician.

  ‘So Robinson began to roll about on the sand, throwing handfuls of it over himself. He pulled all his hair out in despair, crying, “Why, Lord?” He had experienced the greatest shock imaginable, the equivalent of Job’s despair!’

  ‘Yes, and we both know the moral of the story,’ interrupted the technician. ‘You must have told me a thousand times.’

  ‘Finally Robinson grew tired of weeping,’ continued Patić, ignoring the jibe. ‘He grew tired of weeping, tired of seeking explanations, tired of pouring sand over himself, tired of appealing to God… He even grew tired of his own misfortune, and trust me, that’s the final stage of despair!’

  ‘So he started to build a new boat,’ the technician continued despondently. ‘Out of wood that was growing close to the shore.’

  ‘Yes! Then he built a new boat!’ declared Patić, at sufficient volume to set the plates and bowls rattling on their shelf. Then he opened the door and almost stepped on an unexpected, and rather bedraggled, guest.

  Muri had sensed the imminent drop in temperature that morning, as he made his way along the snowy mountain pass. The wooden hut of the observatory could not have been more opportunely placed. Petko Patić immediately let the cat into the warmth, just as Jacob had done. Once inside, Muri devoured a portion of stewed meat, miaowing in gratitude. Then he padded over and rubbed himself against the astronomer’s bed, but instead of jumping up onto it he curled up on the floor near the stove, determined to enjoy its heat. Patić lingered, keen to make sure their guest was settled, in spite of his excitement at the starry night, the falling temperature and the frost that had already begun to decorate the windows.