Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (28 page)

‘They do their job well,’ Arina said approvingly.

‘I like their approach to money-grabbing taxi drivers,’ I said, nodding in agreement.

‘Certainly. Although I should point out that frequently one taxi driver working here in Taipei feeds half of his mountain village. The temptation to rip off a tourist is very great . . . But I agree, it’s not good to abuse tourists. Especially if those tourists are us.’

‘And did you notice that their level of Power was screened?’ I asked. ‘Of course, I didn’t scan them actively . . .’

‘The Light One’s Third-Level,’ Arina replied as she watched out for a car. ‘But the Dark One’s a smart girl: she covered herself well. She had an interesting kind of amulet made of seaweed and fish skin . . . I didn’t get through her defences either. Come on, there’s the taxi stand.’

I’d been wrong about the airport. The serious talk was waiting for us at the hotel.

We took adjacent rooms. (Arina had enough delicacy not to suggest moving in together.) I looked over my room and stood for a minute at the immense French window that covered an entire wall, gazing out at Taipei as it was flooded by the lights of evening. The sight was astounding. And not at all because of the skyscrapers, although right in front of the hotel there was one that simultaneously resembled a Chinese pagoda and some exotic fruit, thrusting its pinnacle up into the sky. There are bigger skyscrapers in New York, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The astounding thing here was the contrast. Taipei was not such a very tall city: on all sides there were entire neighbourhoods of buildings no more than three or four storeys high. The isolated high-rise structures should have looked alien here.

But the contrast was astonishingly harmonious. The old city, huddling down against the ground, looked like undergrowth, with the skyscrapers sprouting up through it. The low, far-from-modern buildings were not in the least ashamed of their appearance – on the contrary, they actually seemed to take pride in the glittering modern structures rising up from among them.

I involuntarily recalled the vociferous protest campaigns that had raged in St Petersburg when there were plans to construct a skyscraper there. All that hysterical howling about the destruction of the cultural environment, the disfigurement of the glorious line of the horizon, the possibility that unique seventeenth-century ruins, or even the camps of primeval human beings, might be buried under the skyscraper . . .

Yes, of course the mentality in St Petersburg is special, cultivated on the swamps by the damp, piercing wind. But I would quite happily have sent all the protesters to live for a month or two in an old Petersburg communal apartment block, with mouldy walls and narrow little windows. And then I would have asked them to vote on whether it was necessary and possible to erect modern buildings in an old city.

After all, love of one’s country doesn’t simply mean that you want to preserve as many tottering old ruins as possible. Otherwise the whole of North America would live in Indian wigwams and the log huts of the first settlers; London would consist entirely of the Victorian and Edwardian buildings so dear to the heart of the tourist, but not so very comfortable on the inside; and as for Africa and Asia – well, enough said . . .

I looked at the soaring skyscrapers and thought that I was beginning to understand the Chinese a little bit better. The ones living on the mainland and the ones on this island.

And I even envied them a little.

I opened my suitcase, took out some clean underclothes and walked into the bathroom. Everything was very stylish. There was even a little television set standing on a shelf beside the sink. An expensive business: all these televisions for bathrooms require insulation against damp and they cost big money. I once wanted to put one like that in our bathroom at home, to watch the news while I was getting washed, shaving and brushing my teeth, but the price put me right off the idea.

I picked up the television – it was absolutely tiny, only twelve inches wide. I could easily lift it with one hand. I turned it round.

At the back I saw microcircuits glittering behind the holes in a standard plastic cover. How come? The guests get washed, splash water about, take hot showers, fill the bathroom with clouds of steam – and there’s a TV set standing here, with no insulation? It’ll blow a circuit! It might last a year, but that circuit will still blow! Why hadn’t they put in an expensive one, a proper one?

Well, for the same reason that they don’t demolish old buildings until they fall down on their own, an inner voice whispered to me. A special TV would cost two thousand dollars. One like this barely costs a hundred. Surely it’s far simpler to change it once every year or so than invest money in technology that rapidly becomes obsolete?

I put the television back down, switched on the BBC and stepped into the shower, realising that, for all my lack of sophistication, I had managed to grasp an intriguing point that was very far from our Russian mentality. Back home there either wouldn’t be a TV in the bathroom or there would be an insanely expensive one, and the price of the room would rocket by fifty per cent. We don’t like disposable items. We can still remember how to mend nylon tights, wash plastic bags and go to fetch the milk in a can. We can find a multitude of uses for an empty yogurt carton – from growing seedlings to storing small change.

To some extent Russia has unexpectedly found itself marching in step with the countries of the West and their obsession with ecology, economising resources and recycling. Not because the green movement is popular here, but because of this centuries-old habit of economising. Only, as often happens in Russia, we take everything to absurd extremes – in both directions: the same people who darn their tights also buy hugely expensive cars and domestic appliances . . .

I wonder if that’s a plus or a minus for us, I thought as I sluiced myself down under the shower head. Take this shower, for instance. The head’s not cheap, probably quite expensive, in fact, with its tiny little holes for the water and valve for sucking in air. Self-indulgence? Not exactly. A shower like this uses about half as much water as mine in Moscow does. But we’ve only just realised that water costs money – and a lot of it! No one really appreciates what they have in abundance, so we Russians have never really valued or cared for our forests, rivers and natural environment – or even ourselves, basically. The attitude in that old one-liner ‘Shall we wash these children or have new ones?’ is still around, only nowadays we Russians take care of the children . . . but not of ourselves. What has to happen to us before we understand that we have to take good care of everything we have, of every tree in our boundless forests, every little stream that isn’t even marked on the maps, every village with only five households, every soldier drafted into the army, every man in the street toiling under his dreary daily burden? What will it take to change us? Communism didn’t change us – it valued people in words, but even then not all of them, and only as cogwheels in a single, integrated mechanism. Democracy didn’t change us: on the contrary, it gave us all the freedom to hate each other. What is it that we want? Maybe, like the Jews thousands of years ago, only pain and death, to lose our state and be scattered throughout the world, despised and oppressed by other nations – maybe only that will allow the Russian nation to come to its senses and recover its unity. To unite, but not as it has united in the past – without counting the losses or acknowledging the cost of victory – but on some other level? All great peoples have to suffer catastrophes sooner or later, to pass through their own national holocausts: this is a lesson known by China, which was once dying of opium addiction and has been torn apart, and by Germany, which suffered defeat in two wars and the disgrace of Nazism. And it should also be remembered by Russia, which has suffered fratricidal revolutions and bloody wars . . .

But for some reason it isn’t.

I turned off the water and looked at the murmuring television.

One inclination we Russians are always ready to indulge at the slightest nonsensical excuse – such as a cheap TV or a shower head – is to meditate on the fate and fortunes of our Homeland and the Universe. We’re always good at that.

I towelled myself down, put on a bathrobe and walked out of the bathroom. And that was when the doorbell rang quietly.

Somehow I was certain it wasn’t Arina.

And I had no intention of playing the fool and asking who had come visiting.

‘Come on in, gentlemen.’

There were two gentlemen – a young one and an elderly one. And there was also a middle-aged lady.

All three of them were Others, and all Light Ones. They had politely not masked their auras. The elderly man was a Fourth-Level Magician. The young man was a Second-Level Magician. The woman was a First-Level Clairvoyant. Oho. I didn’t think the Taiwan Watch could exactly be packed full of First-and Second-Level Power. So my unofficial visit had been taken with all due seriousness and appropriate respect.

‘Will you allow us to enter, Anton Sergeevich?’ the young man enquired politely. And then, without waiting for my permission, he continued: ‘You may call my male companion Esteemed Mr Pasha, my female companion Esteemed Miss Lena and me – simply Petya.’

‘Come in, Pasha, come in, Lena, and you come in too, Petya,’ I replied and stepped aside. Naturally the Russian names were a gesture of traditional Chinese courtesy – they would have introduced themselves to an American as John, Jim and Jill, for example. ‘Please forgive my bathrobe. I took a shower after the journey.’

‘That is very good,’ Petya said approvingly while his companions came in and seated themselves in the armchairs. It was only then that I realised there were obviously too many chairs in the room – four of them. I could even see that two of them were a slightly different colour from the others and were standing in rather inconvenient spots in the passage. ‘A healthy mind in a healthy body,’ Petya concluded.

‘As they say in Russian: “You have to choose one or the other”,’ I joked sourly.

‘They are mistaken,’ said Petya, waiting for me to sit down. I sat down and swore under my breath – I felt like striking an affectedly casual pose by crossing my legs, but in the bathrobe that was impossible.

Which was what they had been counting on.

Okay, I’d have to put up with it. No point in getting fancy and changing the bathrobe into a suit, or teleporting my own clothes onto myself. That would just be too affected altogether.

Once he was sure we were all seated, Petya himself perched on the edge of an armchair, looked at Pasha and asked me: ‘Did you have a good flight? Did you have any problems on the way? Did you like our airport? Have you had a chance to enjoy the architecture and atmosphere of Taipei?’

‘Yes, no, yes, no,’ I replied. ‘Are my respected visitors in good health? Have the consequences of the latest typhoon been liquidated?’ (To be honest, I didn’t know when there had last been a typhoon here and how strong it was, but they happen all the time in Taiwan.) ‘Are the Dark Ones up to their mischief?’

The elderly man suddenly smiled.

‘And the views of the rice and tea harvest are good here, too,’ he said, with a nod. ‘All right, Anton, let’s stop the fencing. A visit by such a powerful member of the Russian Watch is a conspicuous event on our quiet little island. We would like to enquire what has brought you here – and with such a surprising companion.’

I didn’t reply immediately.

For some reason Arina and I had never discussed this situation at all, even though we realised that our arrival would not go unnoticed.

‘This isn’t a business trip,’ I said. ‘It’s a private visit.’

The elderly man nodded and looked at me, waiting.

‘Certain events took place in Moscow . . . some time ago . . .’ I went on cautiously.

‘We know,’ said the woman. But she didn’t clarify.

‘Since I was personally involved in the events, I took what happened very much to heart,’ I continued, finding myself constructing the phrase in an almost Asian style. ‘When the esteemed Witch Arina and I met in London, I was informed by her that, as often happens, the same thing had already happened somewhere else . . . and that the highly esteemed Mr Fan Wen-yan, who works in the Gugun Imperial Museum – the Gugun National Imperial Museum’ – I corrected myself – ‘can cast some light on that old story . . .’

The Taiwanese exchanged glances.

‘Your companion is wanted by the Inquisition and by your own Watch,’ said Pasha. ‘Does that not perturb you?’

‘As a Higher Other of the Night Watch I have the right to choose my own tactics and decide how to act,’ I said cautiously. ‘And in addition, at the present moment her interests and my own coincide. And as for the Inquisition . . . unfortunately, I am not able to guarantee the detention of the Witch Arina. She is in possession of a Minoan Sphere and at any moment she can disappear to absolutely anywhere at all. Teleportation with the assistance of this artefact cannot be intercepted or traced,’ I added, to make things perfectly clear.

‘We are aware of that,’ Pasha said, nodding. ‘We acknowledge your right to make this visit.’

‘And your right to choose your own tactics,’ added Lena.

‘And to speak to Mr Fan Wen-yan,’ said Petya, putting in his own kopeck’s worth.

‘But any unsanctioned use of magic against the Others and people of Taiwan will be punished with the full severity of the law,’ Pasha continued.

‘Even if you are provoked, in danger or only indirectly responsible,’ Lena advised me.

‘Mr Fan Wen-yan will decide for himself whether or not to have dealings with you. You must not badger him,’ added Petya.

All right, fair enough. Honesty had proved better than politics.

I paused and then nodded: ‘Thank you, dear colleagues. I had not dared to hope for or expect such a cordial reception and magnanimous conditions. Naturally, it is not our intention either to violate your customs and traditions or to inconvenience in any way the Others and ordinary citizens of Taiwan.’

Pasha smiled.

‘We are all citizens of Taiwan, Mr Gorodetsky, including the Others, both Light and Dark. Allow me once again to welcome you to our island and . . . I can sense several artefacts in your bag, and I find one of them especially interesting. May I take a look at it?’