The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He slumped back in his chair and smiled as if he was the happiest man in the world. When the waiter brought two small glasses of thin yellow liquid, he drained his glass at once. Burnell took his more slowly.

  “Maybe too much sweet for the British taste, understandably?”

  “So who looks after the local antiquities now? Isn’t there a government department any longer?”

  “Of course, of course. It pulls things down, not up. We can get no money from World Bank for reconstruction. Of course nothing from Moscow. Maybe we walk in the park where we can speak? Is not too hot for you?”

  “Not too hot for British taste, no,” said Burnell with a smile.

  Assaad smiled and winked as he handed a wad of folding money to the waiter. “I like humour. There’s quite a lot, eh?”

  Pushing through the swing-doors into the avenue, they found the dry heat awaiting them. Assaad said in a hurried voice, “You mention the president’s name in there, so you make me nervous. Listeners may consider we plot.”

  The park had been a pleasant place, abutting an immense building which was once the local KGB headquarters. A burnt-out gun-carrier stood among splintered trees, a reminder of the recent coup. Small boys played on it, shooting each other in friendly fashion.

  Old men, bent and solitary, walked among birches. Their woollen clothes were grey with age. Their hands were clasped behind their backs.

  “People listen in cafés,” said Assaad, matching his stride to Burnell’s. “Not many men speak English here, but they are suspicious, unavoidably. All nations in Central Asia search a new cultural identity, rightly. It makes them suspicious.”

  “Your English is good.”

  As they passed a melon-seller, Assaad frowned at the man as if he embodied all the country’s vices.

  “I am among the savages, Mr. Burnell, frankly. It’s a refreshment to hear your English spoken as only an Englishman can. Killing is the local occupation. Turkmeni tribes are peaceful nice people, but when the money and jobs run out, then kill, kill … Ten thousand men were killed here last February in the riots. Still there’s shooting. We have no justice. Criminality on every level—tribal rivalries, once suppressed. Propaganda from the government. The water’s bad. Medicine short. Epidemics rising. And I can nowhere find The Hand of Ethelberta.”

  “Sorry? Who’s Ethelberta?”

  Assaad looked pained. He halted and scrutinized Burnell’s face. “You naturally know The Hand of Ethelberta? By your great novelist Thomas Hardy. It is the one of his best novels, understandably. Here, no such item can be found. Publishers in London and Paris are far distant. Not to be discovered in all the stalls of the grand bazaar. Maybe the mullahs pronounce it blasphemous. Do you say The Hand of Ethelberta is blasphemous? For over three years I have searched it.”

  “You read much English literature, Dr. Assaad?”

  He threw up his hands, as if wishing not to delve deeper into the miseries of life. “Well, it’s the case that we all have hidden agendas in our lives. You also, I believe, Mr. Burnell?” He gave a sideways glance at Burnell.

  Burnell was not as yet willing to confide in his new acquaintance. He was due to meet Murray-Johnson again, and could check on Assaad’s credentials. His answer was evasive.

  After a brief silence, Assaad said with a sigh, “Anyhow, I must assist you if I can do it. That’s the point. That’s my wish, intensely, to make you welcome in this city. Life is not simple here for foreigners.

  “You write from Frankfurt that in the name of Culture you must visit the old mosque, 6 kilometers from here, the mosque of Mustapha Pasha. Is of great historic interest, very very beautiful. The dome of azure rises on parapets. In the front is a porch, supported by six slender marble columns. And on top of the porch, very unusually, is four small cupolas. The mosque is well built of worked sandstone, a rarity hereabouts, and of bricks in double rows. The date is from end fifteenth century and is famous in architecture.

  “I shall drive you to see it in my brother’s car, since he owes me a favour.”

  The offer had come too late. Burnell had hired a taxi and driven out to the mosque the previous day. Hence his annoyance with Dr. Assaad. He had found the mosque much decayed and hideously restored. The old mihrab, from which the Koran was read, proved to be a shoddy new construction. Most of the original interior tilework of the mosque was missing. Nothing remained that his parent organization, World Cultural Heritage, would wish to record. He said as much to Assaad, adding, “It’s not worth a prayer, never mind a visit.”

  “Ah, your English humour! ‘Not worth a prayer, never mind a visit…’ ‘Not worth a prayer…’ Very very good. Anyhow, I agree, it’s an ugly structure, entirely. It was built by a Jew.”

  Burnell, always alert for anti-Semitism, bridled at this and rattled off a lecture about the enlightened Rabbi Moshe Gourits, who, to celebrate his cordial relationship with his Muslim neighbors, had financed the building of the mosque in 1491.

  Bringing learning to bear, Assaad asserted, “The Jew built in 1498, excuse me, by the Christian calendar. A bad year. Torquemada died and Savonarola was burnt.”

  “The matter with the mosque,” Burnell said, “is not that it was built by a Jew, but that it has been restored by Communists.”

  Assaad gave him a melancholy look. “I am a Syrian by birth, although many year pass since I see my native land. Forgive my simplicity. Jews and Syrians…” He drew a finger across his throat and hung out his tongue. Then he treated Burnell to a smile of wide and untrustworthy charm.

  Feeling he had been unjust, feeling, as he so often did on his travels, that he would never understand other people, Burnell said, “It is hot. Excuse me. Possibly there is some other memorable structure I should inspect which is not in the Frankfurt files?”

  Assaad winked again, and held aloft a celebratory finger, perhaps as a token that he had won over this stiff and difficult Englishman. “Tomorrow I come early to your hotel in my brother’s car and I take you to inspect the Friendship Bridge.

  “It’s as you would say it, ‘Worth a prayer, never mind a visit.’”

  * * *

  Burnell had procured a vintage postcard of the railway station. On it he wrote a few lines to his ex-wife in California, posting it before Dr. Assaad arrived in an old Volkswagen Golf.

  The nightmares had visited him again during a sleepless night. His leg pained him and he felt feverish.

  Would Stephanie tear up the card, supposing it ever arrived in Los Angeles? Ashkhabad was further from Moscow than Moscow was from London. Even in the new twenty-first-century world, it remained a remote place, one hardly considered by the outside world until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. What would Los Angeles make of it? These cards he sent her from the distant places to which his profession took him had once been mute pleas to Stephanie to think of him, possibly even to love him again. Hope, much like the view of Ashkhabad railway station, had faded with the years. Now his cards were little more than boasts, pathetic even to himself. Dearest Stephanie, Ashkhabad is a pleasant modern city, situated on the world’s longest irrigation canal. Look, I’m here, and enjoying myself. Moderately.

  But there was another reason for his being somewhere east of the Caspian, apart from his quest for buildings which World Cultural Heritage might consider worth recording and preserving.

  This he explained to Dr. Assaad as they drove in the oven of the car away from the hotel.

  * * *

  Burnell’s life had been disrupted, like a plate dropped on a tile floor. He was still trying to put the pieces together.

  Roy Edward Burnell was a specialist in ecclesiastical architecture, just commencing commissioned work in Frankfurt, headquarters of the largely Germanic EC. He had stumbled into the Antonescu Clinic in Budapest. The Clinic had pillaged his memories, only parts of which he had been able to regain. Some of his most private moments had been sold round the world on the black market to the false-memory addicts of Nostovision.

>   “I need your help, Dr. Assaad,” he said. “You see, I believe a fragment of my memory which I vitally need is here—here in Ashkhabad. I have been led to believe that President Diyanizov has it.”

  He started to explain how he had managed to buy back stretches of his memory in Budapest. The parts, if retrieved, could be reinserted in his brain. But Dr. Assaad was not listening. He sounded his horn to drive pedestrians from the middle of the crowded street. The roadway was choked with vehicles, all hooting.

  “It was in Budapest … A small nameless square off Fo Street,” Burnell found himself saying. “Next to the Ministry of Light Industry. And to think I went there voluntarily … A new form of mental vandalism…” He pressed a hand to his face, close to where emptiness had its throne.

  “Hang up a moment,” said Assaad. Then more angrily, “Curses!” He stopped the car abruptly. People were jostling past the vehicle, swarming ahead to where a posse of armed police controlled a barricade.

  “Merde,” said Assaad. “I should have drove the other way. Now we’re stuck, obviously. In the main square, the President’s chief general, General Makhkamov, will address the people today. I forgot it … We cannot escape. It would look hostile. We leave the car and go to listen to Makhkamov.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “For us or for the car? Come. Men must listen to lies occasionally. It’s duty.” After parking his brother’s car under a tree, Assaad removed the spark plugs from the engine and locked all the doors.

  A crowd was gathering outside the main mosque. Looking about, Burnell saw a handful of veiled women, standing close together in the shade of a tree. All the rest were men and boys, mostly wearing suits, with keffiyehs slung round their heads.

  Women! The element of Muslim society which Burnell found most dispiriting was their seclusion. When women were to be seen, most went shrouded in chadors from head to foot. He missed their presence in shops, in restaurants, on the street. He had visited a brothel but felt more compassion than lust for the girls imprisoned there. The lean hags of Tartary held little appeal.

  Yesterday, a woman driving a car had waved a greeting to him. He had been too surprised to return the wave. Later he realized she must have been on the staff of a European embassy. He still carried an impression of her smile, her hair blowing free, her naked wrist, unbraceleted.

  “You see,” Assaad said into Burnell’s ear, “President Diyanizov stands for the development of Turkmenistan as a modern secular state after the Turkish pattern. This General Makhkamov supports him. Both men are of the same tribe. But the mullahs wish to follow Iran into a fundamentalist Islamic pattern, which will mean a closed society and many difficulties for us Unbelievers. So the General Makhkamov may say something interesting. We may learn which way the struggle goes, hopefully.”

  He added, “One problem is, here we are closer to Iran than Turkey. And more close still to nowhere…”

  The sun shone. In the main, the crowd stood silent. Burnell could see no foreigners apart from himself. On the outskirts of the gathering stood a more rural kind of man, dark of visage, turbaned, some with dogs and small hairy goats on strings. Beyond them, lining the square, were tanks with their guns pointing inwards. All waited with a patience Burnell tried hard to feel in himself.

  A band played distantly, its notes bleached in the fierce sunlight.

  General Makhkamov was a sturdy man, small of stature, with dark piercing eyes which searched the crowd before he ascended a podium to speak. He was in uniform, shaven, moustached, with a row of medals on his chest and a military strut. Burnell had seen such men before; in his experience they did not last long. But there was an unending supply of them.

  Assaad translated some of Makhkamov’s speech into Burnell’s right ear.

  “‘Those of you who fought in the war against a cruel enemy, you will be rewarded. Those cowards who stayed at home will get nothing when the time comes … Our brave heroes, all those who took up arms, all those prepared to die for our nation, all those who stood fast against an evil foe and trod the path of Allah and legality, all those who bathed themselves in the gore of the invader—they all shall come to high office … We shall see it happen … We shall become a great nation in world affairs, guarding our independence under a just God … Your scars, your medals, your courage, your loyalty, shall gain you power. And we shall be ruled by brave and honourable men…’”

  Assaad turned away in disgust when the speech and prayers were over. He remarked to Burnell as they got back into the car, “Oh, to live in a country where cowards are allowed to rule…”

  “People always rant like that after a war. Nothing ever gets done. So what are the indications? Which will prevail? The secular state or the Islamic one?”

  Flinging the car violently into gear, Assaad backed through the dispersing crowd, hooting continually. “Muddles, Mr. Burnell. Nothing clear. You see, it’s not just the religious question. Also are tribes competing—Ersaris, Yomuds, Goklans, two sort of Tekkes … Not bad people, pretty easy-going, unlike my own countrymen, I’m afraid to say it. What are you to do?”

  He shrugged his ample shoulders, smiled, shouted a curse at a cyclist he had just missed.

  “You don’t plan to go back to Syria or to the West?”

  “The West I hate, honestly. Not her books but her ambitions. Is the cause of many troubles. Russia always makes mistakes in looking to the West, in envy or in admiration. But I hate Russia more and more. And Turkmenistan most.” He laughed, removed his hands from the wheel to exclaim, “All men here believe Genghis Khan’s blood runs still in their veins. What a life, is it! And my wife is Goklan tribe, wishing never to eat the bread of a different nation … Syria I don’t like. Do you like your own country, the country of Thomas Hardy?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It’s much changed.”

  They were moving through suburbs now. Pleasant trees grew here and there, mitigating the utilitarian aspect of the streets.

  “Then why you are come to such a place as this?”

  “As I was trying to explain, I believe President Diyanizov has a vital fragment of my memory. I want it restored to me. Can you secure me an audience with him? Frankfurt was unhelpful in that respect.”

  “What you want back your memory for? It makes only trouble. You see this fine little General Makhkamov, who never met a live enemy on the battlefield, he stirs up memory in his people. They hold thousand-year-old grudges against the people in the north. Isn’t that mad, I’d say! Memory is the curse of nations. Best to be free of all memory.”

  “So you can’t help?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Be in no hurry. Old Goklan saying is, ‘Sit on your horse and see the grass grow…’ Today we visit the bridge.”

  Sweating in the heat, Burnell, who hated asking favours, pursued the question. “Dr. Assaad, this fragment of my memory—well, I’ve been informed by a dealer that it was sold to President Diyanizov. One of a very limited number of prints. If I could get hold of it, I could have it reinserted. It’s one of a crucial period of my life. Without it—I can’t explain. I’m a prey to nightmares. I never feel complete.”

  The thin traffic ahead was slowing. They were approaching a crossroads. A motorcyclist roared up and down the road, signalling vehicles to stop. Assaad muttered to himself and wound down his window. Imitating the action, Burnell thrust his head into the heat, tasting the bitter tang of unburnt diesel. A tank was manoeuvring into position ahead in a haze of exhaust, establishing a roadblock. Armed guards unbaled razor wire across the road, directed by an officer, while a guardpost with the national flag was being set up.

  Two soldiers were moving away pedestrians. A woman shouted harshly at them, gesticulating while her child screamed. Cars backed and revved down a side road, directed by a policeman holding an incongruous pink parasol.

  “What’s up?” Burnell asked, thinking even as he did so that the question was foolish. Assaad did not answer. He switched off his engine and sat waiting while an officer on a motorbike
approached the car. The officer thrust his face through the window, looked about suspiciously and demanded their papers. Burnell and Assaad handed them over, the latter conversing in a mild way, his face full of smiles.

  The officer scrutinized Burnell’s EC passport and WCH credentials, returning them with a few courteous-sounding remarks.

  “He says you are not to look so worried,” Assaad translated. “As a foreign visitor from the West, you are welcome here, and will not be harmed. He wishes to announce he follows English football.”

  More conversation passed between Assaad and the officer until Assaad was ordered to turn the car round and head back to town. The officer gave them a salute and a smile as they moved off, before turning to the next vehicle to arrive.

  “I happen to know where he lives,” Assaad remarked, “and once sold his brother some carpets at a good price, financially. We cannot leave the city today. It seems that after we left the main square, Academy Square, some naughty fellow shot at the General Makhkamov whom we listened to. Now they seek this naughty fellow, and have closed the city … It’s just a game these people play.

  “So, it’s tomorrow we must visit the Friendship Bridge.”

  2. The Bullet

  Robert Murray-Johnson was a red-haired man with a square jaw and an air of good humour. Burnell had already discovered that this good humour concealed an agreeable vein of misanthropy, which found ample to feed on in the Turkmeni capital to which Murray-Johnson had been posted.