Nine Layers of Sky (2 page)

Two

ST. PETERSBURG, 21ST CENTURY

Beyond the open door of the apartment block, the snow breathed a winter cold and lessened the ammonia reek of the stairwell so that Ilya Muromyets could smell his own blood. The hot, meaty odor filled the air as if the whole world were bleeding, rather than just one man. Ilya’s hand fumbled to his side; his shirt was sticky and stiff. He remembered, distantly, that the dealer had knifed him. The situation, so carefully engineered, had gone disastrously wrong.

Think,
he whispered to himself.
You were a bogatyr,
a hero, a Son of the Sun . . . think.
Then the soft clutch of heroin took him, shutting him off from both understanding and pain. Ilya could no longer see clearly, but he could still hear. A confused blur of sound rushed around him: snatches of conversation across the city; the gulls crying over Sakhalin, thousands of miles away; a door shutting in icy Riga with a sudden decisive
thud.
All of these sounds became distilled as Ilya listened, resolving into the steady seep of his blood onto the concrete floor.

Ilya Muromyets’ mouth curled in a rictus grin. The glittering winter light glared through the door of the hallway, sharpening the shadows within. He had to get outside, bolt for what passed as home before the
rusalki
found him, but his feet moved down the stairs with a slowness that suddenly struck him as comical. He leaned back against the wall and shook with mirth, the breath whistling through his punctured lung like a ghost’s laugh. He realized then that someone was watching him. He turned with a start, but it was only an old woman, clutching a bag of withered apples and gaping at him in undisguised horror. He wondered what she saw: a gaunt man with pale hair and paler eyes, like a wounded wolf.

Ilya’s laughter wheezed dry. He wiped the blood from his mouth and murmured, “Oh . . . Good day,
gaspodhara
. Been shopping?”

The old woman edged past him and fled up the stairs. The slam of her steel door echoed through the stairwell. The noise stirred Ilya into motion and he staggered down the stairs and out into the winter afternoon.

He wondered why he was even considering flight.
I don’t have a chance,
Ilya thought, as the sweet haze of the drug started to wear thin and reality, as cold as the day, began to intrude. He had never been able to escape the
rusalki.
His side was beginning to hurt now. His lungs burned and he could see his own fractured breath spilling out into the air.

Clutching his side, Ilya tried to run, but he managed only a few paces before the pain brought him onto his knees in the snow. The world grew dark, then bright again. Ilya began to pant in panic. He looked around. Across the street, sheltered by the wall, stood a man. His gloved hands were folded in front of him; his face was broad and pale beneath a furred hat. His eyes were black, without visible whites, and they glistened like frost in the pasty folds of his face.

“Help me,” Ilya Muromyets tried to say, but the words were a whisper. The snow was searing his hands. He struggled to rise, but out on the Neva the ice splintered like breaking glass. Ilya looked up and saw that it was already too late.

A
rusalka
was rising from the river. Numbly, Ilya watched as she slid over the bank of the Neva and started to comb the ice from her hair with bone-thin fingers. He thought for a moment that she might not have seen him. But his heartbeat was slowing in the impossible cold, echoing through the winter world like a bell, and when he raised his hand to touch his injured side, the blood crackled beneath his fingers. It made almost no sound at all, but the
rusalka
heard it and her head went up like a hound’s. Beneath the glistening frost of her hair, her eyes were the color of water, but then, suddenly, he was seeing through the illusion. He saw a small, pinched face beneath a fluttering flap of skin. Her hands were curled and clawed. She looked nothing like a human woman, but Ilya had learned long ago that the
rusalki
maintained a glamour to hide their true appearance.

The
rusalka
glanced from side to side with exaggerated slowness; she was playing with him.
They hear
everything
, Ilya thought in despair.
If a single feather
drifted down to the snow, she would hear it. She is like me.
Slowly, the
rusalka
smiled with a mouth full of needles.

“No, no,” Ilya heard himself whisper, over and over again, but the
rusalka
rose like a disjointed puppet and stalked toward him. Blood filled his mouth with a rush, and he spat into the snow. The
rusalka,
murmuring, crouched beside him on backwards-bent knees and lifted up his chin so that he could look into her face.

It was the last thing he wanted to do. He could see through the
rusalka
’s eyes: all the way to the back of the north wind; all the way to the end of the world. The
rusalka
bent her head so that the cold curtain of her hair fell across his face, and kissed him, freezing the blood on his lips and breathing arctic air into his mouth. He could feel the thin spine of her split tongue, traveling down his throat, scouring it clean of blood and sealing the vent in the wall of his chest.

His lungs gave a convulsive heave. He knelt, gasping. The
rusalka
scooped up a handful of bloody snow and tasted it as though it were ice cream. A curious expression, of mingled greed and regret, crossed her face and then she sidled away, her image drawing the sunlight into itself until she was no more than a vivid shadow against the snow, and then she was gone.

Ilya raised his head and cried aloud, because she had healed him and he would live, and this was the last thing he wanted to do.

Some time after the
rusalka
had vanished, Ilya rose and brushed the snow from his frozen hands. When he looked across to the apartments, he saw that the stranger had gone. Uneasily, Ilya drew his coat closer about him and began to wander along the Neva, beside the eroded concrete fortresses of the tower blocks. A storm was whistling up out of the north. Ilya could hear the wind singing deep in the forests around the Beloye More, beyond the Arctic Circle. Patiently, he walked on, waiting for the storm to break. He felt as light and empty as air.

The last time he had been so close to death had been ten years ago, up in the Altai, and that had been the last time, too, that he had seen a
rusalka.
He had been shot during a deliberately clumsy and obvious escape from an internment camp, and he really thought, then, he had been successful in trying to die. His enemies, however, were eternally vigilant. He had watched with his dying sight as the
rusalka
slipped down out of the trees to whisper healing into his mouth, her fingers water-soft against his skin, and a new moon rising through the bones of the birches. He had pleaded with her to have pity, but she had only smiled a cold, drowned smile and made him live.

Since then the world had changed and Ilya had lost his way within it. He did not understand these new times: a day when there were no more heroes, but only the will of ordinary people. He had made and lost a fortune. If he wanted money these days, he had to work for it on the building sites or scaffolds of the city. It seemed to him that all heroes came to dust or blood or this half-life of his: enduring, like radiation. Yet he still could not resist taking advantage of the advances of this scientific age: medicine to ease sickness, drugs to ease the soul. He would have to seek out another dealer soon, to seek heroin this time, rather than a further futile attempt at death. He would go to find one of the runners who hung around Centralniye Station, and perhaps for a while he could continue pretending that he was nothing more than another casualty of the late twentieth century and not the last of the
bogatyri.

There were no heroes anymore. Men born in the twelfth century were not supposed to see the dawn of the twenty-first. Nor were there supposed to be supernatural creatures that fed off love and blood, though sometimes Ilya watched the fanciful programs on the television and wondered whether such ideas might be gaining in strength, whether there might be a clue in this now long-standing rationalism to his own plight. Genetic modification or black magic? Behind their glamour, it sometimes seemed to him, the
rusalki
did not look so very unlike the small grey aliens that had become so popular nowadays. If one was to believe the TV, everyone in America seemed to be seeing them, and the thought made Ilya shudder.

He walked on through St. Petersburg, up the wide channel of Nogorny Prospekt. He could hear the storm now, sweeping down from the north, veering out over the Gulf of Finland. He stood still, listening with unnatural acuteness as the first wave of the storm drenched the city in a veil of ice. Thunder rolled overhead, cracking the frozen Neva with a sound like gunfire. Ilya stood quite still and let the storm break around him. Its passing left him deafened and cold, but still unmercifully alive. Doubtless it had been a warning from the forest’s drowned witch-children, and when it was over Ilya sighed, then began trudging up toward the station.

The aftermath of the storm had left the city silent and deserted. The skies cleared to a pale haze and Ilya could see a crimson smear of sun far away to the west.
Time to get off the streets,
he thought.
Time to get drunk.
There was a bar off Nogorny Prospekt that he sometimes frequented. Entering its dark environs, Ilya ordered a double vodka and felt it warm him all the way down to his heart. He put his hand inside his damp clothes, feeling furtively for the wound, but there was nothing. The storm had almost washed his clothes clean of blood. The
rusalki
were fastidious; they did not like to see the signs of a life lived hard.

Ilya drank in silence, for he had learned long ago to seal his tongue against the secrets that might otherwise be spilled. The bar was crowded. He thought, once, that he glimpsed the pasty-faced, black-eyed stranger who had been watching him by the river, but when he looked more closely, no one was there.

He stayed in the bar until midnight, drinking hard, until the memory of who and what he had been had become numbed, and he could stumble back to his meager rooms, to sleep and dream.

Three

KAZAKHSTAN/UZBEKISTAN BORDER, 21ST CENTURY

Atyrom pawned the teeth as soon as they reached Tashkent, but by this time both Elena and Gulnara were too weary and disgusted to make further protests. They watched as Atyrom carefully counted his bounty out onto the pawnbroker’s table. The teeth glittered as they fell, like the mockery of a smile. Atyrom glanced sourly at Elena and his sister, clearly expecting another barrage of criticism, but Elena, at least, had already decided that she had said everything she was going to say.

“It’ll pay for the damage to the van,” Atyrom said for the twentieth time, as though reasoning with children. Gulnara muttered something sour and looked away. Elena thrust her hands farther into the pockets of her overcoat and tucked her chin into her collar, though the room was stuffy in contrast to the bitter cold outside. The pawnbroker’s office smelled of paraffin and despair, making Elena wrinkle her nose. Inside her pocket, her fingers curled around the small, hard sphere. It felt hot and smooth and Elena tucked it into her palm until her hand grew comfortingly warm. The thing seemed to beat with a pulse of its own, or perhaps it was only echoing her own agitated heart.

She had no reason to feel guilty, Elena told herself again. Atyrom had acted before either Elena or his sister had been able to stop him; it was not their fault. Then the pawnbroker gave a voracious grin at the sight of a fake Rolex watch and Elena’s guilt flooded back, hot and fresh as blood across the snow.

Atyrom had emptied his pockets now and had begun an earnest conversation with the pawnbroker. They were speaking Uzbek, which Elena was unable to follow. A woman wearing a
shalwar kameez
came in with a tray and three little glasses of sweet tea, then disappeared. Elena stared around the room, noting the detritus of lives: old shoes gathering dust, the entrails of a radio scattered across a crumpled newspaper. She tilted her head to read the headline:

UZBEKISTAN REGAINS GLORY!

It read in Russian, with a pride that was now old, and wholly misplaced.

Elena’s hand left the sphere and stole beneath her coat to the inner pocket where she still kept her Party card. She fingered the square of laminated plastic, thinking with a familiar, distant astonishment of the events that had brought her here to a pawnbroker’s back room. She’d studied philosophy at university, along with astrophysics, and a memory of the
rektor
flashed briefly before her mind’s eye: face flushed with enthusiasm before a blackboard, as he explained the differences between the Aristotelian notions of primary and efficient cause.

Elena allowed herself a brief, wry smile. The efficient cause of her presence here was a simple need for money—the only reason to accompany her friend Gulnara and a man she didn’t like, a thousand kilometers south before the end of winter, with a vanload full of black-market clothes from the Emirates and a handful of Western videos. She was hoping for a hundred dollars: enough to pay the rent for another month and put the bulk of it into the box under the mattress.

Every
tenge
they could spare went into that box: Anna’s waitressing wages, Elena’s cleaning money, their mother’s pension, and the results of occasional forays such as this one. The fund was growing too slowly, but if they were careful and no disasters such as illness occurred, they should have enough by the spring. The familiar thoughts crowded into her head.
And then we’re
out of here. Moscow first, and then Canada. Yuri told me it
was crazy. What chance will I have of ever working in a
space program again if I leave the country? But what’s left
for me here? I’d rather wait tables in Montreal than pine for
an opportunity that might never come.

Money was a good enough reason to do anything these days, Elena thought, then corrected herself as she watched Atyrom haggle with the pawnbroker.
But not
good enough to trade tragedy for a few miserable dollars.
She wondered briefly how much the gold would fetch, and how a person would extract it from the teeth in the first place. Meditating on Aristotle seemed preferable.

So what was the primary cause of her present circumstances? Mikhail Gorbachev deciding years ago to drop his trousers and bend over in the direction of America? Mikhail Gorbachev being born? Elena felt, deep within her bones, that the architect of
Perestroika
was the single reason why she was here now, sipping treacly tea in a dingy room in the back streets of Tashkent, when she should have been sitting in her office at Baikonur, watching rockets reach the bright skies above the Soviet Union. She should have been what she had trained to be: an astrophysicist. Or something other than a dealer in black-market goods. At least Atyrom’s videos weren’t pornographic. It wasn’t hard to see the funny side to the whole thing, but then, she’d always had a black sense of humor; she was Russian, after all.

At last, the pawnbroker passed over a handful of greasy dollars with a great show of reluctance, and they were shown out into the fierce white light of the afternoon. The apartment blocks of modern Tashkent were rendered into inoffensive minimalism by the snow: raw angles softened, grey concrete dimmed to the colors of a pigeon’s wing. Through the bare branches of the park, the bronze figure of Tamerlane was partially visible astride a prancing horse, his mouth open in a cry of defiance against the centuries. Snow capped his pointed helmet; he resembled a savage Saint Nicholas. Elena looked up at the statue with something approaching dread, remembering old childhood threats.

Tamerlane will come for you if you don’t behave.

The greatest khan of Central Asia: a ruthless, relentless fourteenth-century killing machine, riding at the head of his hordes. He had scourged the land from Baghdad to Moscow.
If anyone summed up the nature of
the region—its harshness, its power—that person would be
Tamerlane,
Elena thought. He was buried now in Samarkand, not so far from Tashkent. She turned away.

“Come on,” Atyrom said. “Let’s celebrate, eh?” The money had restored his brutal good humor; he hugged Elena and his sister around the shoulders. Elena’s diatribe at the border had, it seemed, been forgotten or forgiven. “I’ll call my cousin.”

Elena and Gulnara shivered outside a nearby
chaikhana
while Atyrom phoned. He seemed to be having trouble getting through. At one point, Elena could see him banging the receiver against the wall. The telephone system was a mess. Even on a good day, half of Tashkent couldn’t talk to the other half.

Elena gazed around her. At a cursory glance, Tashkent looked exactly like her hometown of Almaty: the same wide streets, the same monolithically identical apartment blocks. But Tashkent, too, was changing, rising out of the ashes of the Soviet legacy as an Islamic republic. Not quite a phoenix, more like some ravaged old vulture. Elena gave a sudden shiver. The
madrasas
were reopening; Tamerlane replaced Lenin on pedestals throughout the city. The Russians had been leaving these southern capitals in droves during the last years of the twentieth century.
Perhaps they were right,
Elena thought.
Perhaps we don’t belong here anymore.

Her own sister had been talking about going back to Russia, staring theatrically out of the window like a Chekhovian heroine. “What do you mean,
back
?” Elena had asked, bewildered. “You were born here. Your grandmother was born here. This is where we’re
from.
”

Now she watched as a bearded seminary student, a Koran tucked beneath his arm, picked his way carefully through the snow.
Maybe we had no right to be here
in the first place.
But Elena didn’t feel like a colonist, somehow. She’d only been to Moscow twice, and then only for university conferences. Russia itself was even more of a mess, and there would still be snow all winter. Canada, that was the answer. Just as cold, but thirty times as wealthy. She sighed, wondering whether Atyrom was ever going to stop talking. At last he came away from the phone.

“That’s that, then. I’ve called my cousin; we’ll go round now.”

They made their slow progress back to the Sherpa. Atyrom’s face grew sour as they approached; the dent made by the ambulance was very large, and very obvious.

“Never mind,” Elena echoed wearily, with just a hint of irony. “The money you made from the teeth will pay for it.”

“Yes, that was lucky, wasn’t it?” Atyrom said, brightening. Gulnara snorted. The engine coughed in the cold air. Atyrom drove erratically, avoiding the potholes that occasionally gaped through the slush. Elena gazed out at the passing vista of Tashkent. They drove through the jumble of buildings that constituted the old town, then out past the blue plastic dome of the market. Clearly, the market was supposed to harken back to the glorious Uzbek heritage and the azure domes of Samarkand, but it looked more as though a flying saucer had landed. She thought again of Tamerlane, buried in Samarkand beneath his black jade tomb at the fabled heart of Central Asia, and felt strangely cold. Some distance past the market, Atyrom turned into a narrow side street and parked outside a corrugated iron wall.

“Our cousin’s place.”

Elena quickly lost track of the number of people who seemed to be living in the house, and she never quite managed to grasp who was married to whom. There seemed to be an inordinate number of children. She drank tea, sitting on cushions around the low table, then thick syrupy brandy from the Caucasus, then more tea. The room filled with cigarette smoke. Someone stoked up the stove. Bottles of wine appeared, then food. A phrase coined by a visiting American astronomer swam into Elena’s mind:
trial by
hospitality.

Rising with difficulty, she excused herself and went out into the backyard, where she stood taking deep breaths of arctic air until she started to cough. At the end of the yard stood an outhouse, and she took refuge in it, crouching by the drain in the chilly dark and listening to the sudden, unnerving silence.

The black ball was still weighing down the pocket of her coat. Elena opened the door a crack so that she could see, then examined the ball. It seemed quite solid. Experimentally, she let it drop. It did not bounce, but dropped to the concrete floor of the outhouse with a resounding
thud
and lay still. Elena picked it up and saw with alarm that a crack had appeared in the concrete. The delicate, curved surface of the sphere was unmarked, but the thing felt warmer, as if energized by its momentary flight. Elena could make no sense of it. She hoped the warmth and the heaviness were not indicators of something sinister, something radioactive. But the sphere was too smooth to be a fragment of waste, too much as though it had been made, and she could think of no analogous component of a nuclear system.

Returning it to her pocket, she went back into the chaos of the house.

The next morning, Elena awoke with a head like a block of wood and a mouth that tasted as though mice had been nesting in it. She blinked, trying to work out where she was. A damp-mottled square of ceiling was illuminated by the brightness of snowlight, but the room was stiflingly hot. She could smell woodsmoke, the burnt, meaty odor of mutton shashlik, and stale wine. Craning her head, she looked down. A half-empty glass rested on the floor, inches from her face. Elena closed her eyes in fleeting pain. Across the room, two bodies stretched like beached whales beneath faded counterpanes: Gulnara and someone else, probably a cousin.

Cautiously, Elena sat up. Her head pounded with the rhythmic tempo of a thunderstorm. She winced as someone pulled aside the curtain that hid the entrance and light flooded in. One of Atyrom’s relations entered: a girl, wearing a long
shalwar kameez
and carrying a tea tray. Elena greeted her with relief. She cupped the glass that the girl handed her and took a sip of strong, sweet tea.

“You’ve saved my life.”

The girl smiled and bobbed her head. “There’s more if you want it. From the look of you, you’ll need it,” she added tartly.

Half an hour later, fueled by tea and bread, Elena had reached a state that almost approached normality; only a nagging headache remained. Passing the open door of the adjoining room, she saw that Atyrom had also woken up, and now sat on the edge of the bed in his thermals, rubbing his head with his hands. He was back to his usual grumpy self, Elena was pleased to see. Atyrom drunk and cheerful (and singing) was a spectacle that she preferred to forget.

“Morning,” Elena said. “Someone phoned for you, apparently. Left a message. I think it’s about the clothes and the videos.”

Atyrom grunted. “About time. I tried calling my friend for half of last night, but he wasn’t in, the bastard. Never mind. Did he say when he was coming?”

“He said something about ten o’clock,” Elena said, adding with a piousness not her own,
“Imsh’Allah.”

“Imsh’Allah,”
Atyrom echoed. He scratched moodily at one ankle, then began pulling on his socks. “Let me do the talking, all right? I know you brought the clothes, but I’ve done this before. I know about this sort of thing; I know what my friend’s like. He won’t want a woman butting in.”

“All right,” Elena said patiently, knowing better than to argue. This was Atyrom’s home territory, after all. Anyway, she needed to buy cigarettes. “I’m going to find a kiosk,” she said. “I won’t be long.”

“All right. I’ll see you later.”

Elena retrieved her coat from the back of the door and stepped outside. It was a beautiful day. The high, pale heavens reflected the snow, shimmering into a fierce blue at the summit of the sky. A starling rocketed across the street and into a tree, sending a shower of icicles from the branches. The day after tomorrow would be March first, Elena remembered—almost spring. She stuck her hands into her pockets and her gloved fingers met something hard. She pulled out the little ball, turning it over in her fingers. After a moment she wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it into her handbag, then went in search of a kiosk.