Nine Layers of Sky (22 page)

Two

KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

They had decided to leave Karakol that morning, but found that the bus was not due to leave until ten. So Ilya and Elena walked down to the lakeshore road to wait. Elena could not dispel the prickling at the back of her neck; she jumped every time a bird began to sing. The memory of the sword striking flesh was as fresh within her as a new wound. She had not told Ilya this, but she had awoken in the night with it still sharp in her mind: of the sword hitting the bone and the shock running electric up her arm, the sudden stink of blood. The memory had sent her running to the sink, to stand trembling and retching over the basin. Now, in the early morning sunlight, she shivered again. Surely Manas must have been killed when the complex came down . . . but she did not really believe it.

She kept a sharp eye on the hillside, but the land soared up toward the passes in a series of ghostly steps, too shadowed to see properly. The lake itself was very still. Its edges were as pale as glass; she could glimpse the lakebed. A few meters from the shore lay a ridge of rock like the beginning of a wall, vanishing into the deeper water.

“They say it’s a city,” Ilya said. “There’s an old story that it drowned.”

“Did you ever see it?”

He shook his head, watching as a line of ducks veered over the water, hiding the wall beneath a veil of ripples and fractured light. Ilya sat down on a nearby stone and lit a cigarette.

“How are you feeling?” Elena asked. She had told herself to stop badgering him about his health, but it was hard. Women were supposed to be solicitous, caring, concerned, but men seemed to get tired of it after a while. It had always irritated Yuri, as though she was questioning his competence, but she knew that he would have been offended if she’d failed to show an interest. You couldn’t win.

But Ilya smiled up at her.

“Not so bad, thanks. I still want it, you know?” From the shadow that crossed his face, she knew he was referring to the heroin. “But it isn’t so strong.” He looked down at his hands. “I thought it would never let me go.”

“That’s the trouble with we Russians,” Elena said. “We’re a nation of addicts. Not just drugs, but vodka, too. And ideas.”

“I sometimes think we just want our dreams to come true, but we want it too much and we drive them away so that there’s a gap between us and our dreaming, and we need something to fill it. But nothing ever can. I don’t think it’s just Russians, though. I think it’s all of us.”

“The Kyrgyz say Manas is only a little lower than God,” Elena said.

“I wonder if he’s found it as hard as I have, to live up to being a hero. It would seem that he has.”

She wanted to say:
I think you are a hero,
but it would have sounded false, so she said nothing.

“And you, Elena. What are your dreams?”

“Science. Space. The future. At least, those were my dreams. I don’t know anymore.” Now, she realized that her dreams had become more nebulous: a glimpsed, unreal land and a damaged man. But in the next moment, she thought that perhaps this wasn’t entirely true. The hope for the space program had merely gone underground, running through her unconscious like water seeping through rubble. They sat in silence, staring at the vanished world beneath the lake, until the bus rumbled along the road.

The journey was slow and uneventful as far as Kyzyl-Suu, where Elena got off the bus and bought more water and a newspaper, as well as a Russian translation of the
Manaschi
epic that was prominently displayed on the bus-station counter. Evidently the Kyrgyz were losing no time in promoting their national
bogatyr.
It was an odd thought, that the down-at-the-heels man in the battered leather coat, now dozing by her side, fell into the same legendary category.

She read the newspaper, a day-old copy of
Kazakhstanskaya Pravda,
from cover to cover. There was no mention of the murders at the hotel. The front page was filled with news of the earth tremor and subsequent fire that had swept through woodland beneath the slopes of Koktubye Hill. Meteorologists were mystified by the fire, but Elena again remembered that great rift in the air and could not help but wonder.

She finished the newspaper and turned to the epic, reading with care as the bus trundled along the mountain passes, through scattered settlements and the pointed columns of the roadside graveyards.

“Not a space there was between flag and standard;
the range of the Altai could not be seen. . . .
Black plains, grey hills, the face of the earth was
beaten down . . .”

Very Kyrgyz, thought Elena, all earth and struggle and death, very far from her dreams of space and a shining tomorrow. But that was the tension in Russian dreams, too: the love of land and the need to escape from it. That was all
prostor
was, the word held to best express the Russian soul: vastness, expanse, space itself. Who, then, were the heroes? It seemed that they were everyone—a return to the proletarian ideal, in the end.

She looked up. They were passing yet another military installation, part of the buildup of recent years. A man in uniform sat at a guardhouse, dozing over a gun in the spring sunlight. Then a street of low white houses, electrical repair shops, a garage. They had reached Barskoon. She nudged Ilya awake.

“We’ll have to change buses here.”

At the bus station, she tried to call her family, but there was no reply. She called her sister’s mobile, only to find that it had been switched off. She left a message anyway, not knowing what to say.

The day wore on. The bus came, taking them down to Naryn. They kept passing unfamiliar traffic on the road: military trucks bearing the American flag, probably en route for the Afghan border.

Elena became bored with the
Manaschi
tales. There was something relentless about the epic, which made her feel short of breath. She wished she had something Russian to read—Dostoevsky or Turgenev—something classical, with its reassuring darkness and familiarity. She missed reading, as she would have craved a drug. That thought made her glance at Ilya, but he was still sleeping. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for sleep; she wondered if it was a legacy of the heroin or whether he was simply exhausted. She wondered, too, if they had any kind of future together. A moment later, however, Ilya was pulling her down between the seats.

“What—?”

“Someone’s shooting at us.”

The bus was a sea of confusion; people bundling down into the central aisle, a woman’s voice frantically trying to calm a wailing child.

“Bandits?” Elena mouthed. It was still a problem in Kyrgyzstan, but not usually on these main roads.

“I don’t know.” Ilya’s voice was ragged. “Keep your head down.”

They waited. Gradually, by degrees, the bus fell into a kind of anticipatory hush. There was no more gunfire. Elena fought the urge to look up and see what was happening. She imagined Kyrgyz gunmen, raiders from the Tajik side of the border, about to storm the bus and kill everyone. It had happened before, but it was difficult to imagine it befalling her. She felt as though she had stepped from one nightmare into another. She swallowed hard and stared toward the front of the bus, but nothing happened. The driver got back in his seat and started the engine.

“It’s all right, get up. We’ll be in Naryn in fifteen minutes.”

The passengers rearranged themselves in a storm of questions, but the driver just shrugged.

“Some incident with the Americans. Don’t ask me. I don’t know anything.”

Ilya, leaning across Elena, was trying to look out of the window, but after a moment he shook his head. “Can’t see a thing. It all looks quiet enough.” He squeezed her hand. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” Elena told him, but she was lying. She was certain that the incident had been related to them, that they were the eye of a traveling storm. She did not understand how she knew this, but she was sure of it. She thought again of Manas, falling under the bite of the sword.

Soon after that they reached Naryn: a dismal collection of army barracks and featureless breeze-block housing. The river thundered alongside the road, grey with mud washed down from the mountain slopes. Ilya and Elena left the bus and walked across the weed-strewn central square opposite the administrative Akimyat building. The streets were filled with soldiers: Russian, Kyrgyz, and a detachment of men in foreign uniforms, all wearing sunglasses.

“Americans,” Ilya said, and his mouth turned down.

“You said you were in Afghanistan,” she prompted, diffidently.

“Once in the 1830’s, trying to do something about British spies.” He gave a brief, reminiscent smile. “Very enterprising young men. Very fond of disguises. But I was there again in the seventies, with the Soviet Army.”

“That must have been grim.”

His face was bleak. He caught hold of his wrist. “First introduction.”

“To heroin?”

“They grew so much of it. There were fields of poppies in the mountains above Herat. The flowers were beautiful, like suns in the grass. But the army ran out of medicine, and I was injured—got shot by a sniper—so . . . That’s really where it started. I kicked it when I came back to Russia, but it was always there in the back of my mind, and things got bad after Afghanistan. I think we brought a dark wind blowing in our direction. The Soviet Union started to break down, and then it collapsed and so did I. That’s when I started using again.”

She looked at him. His chin was tucked into his collar, against the wind. His pale eyes were narrowed. He seemed suddenly quintessentially Slavic: closed, stubborn, not quite broken. She tucked her arm in his and walked on.

The only place they could find to stay was a former Pioneer Hostel with dormitory beds. At this time of year, they had the dorm to themselves, but it was drafty and echoing, with too many shadowy corners for comfort. Neither of them felt inclined to stay in it for longer than they had to. They went out to buy shashlik, which was marinated and tough.
Even sheep
must find it a hard life on those high, stony pastures,
Elena thought. When they finished eating, it was still only eight o’clock. In tacit collusion, they went in search of a bar.

Naryn, all too clearly, was not known for its nightlife. There was a bar not far from the Pioneer Hostel, filled with soldiers and local prostitutes. Elena attracted stares from both sexes: hostile wariness from the women, frank interest from the men. Ilya’s mouth tightened. They found a rickety table in the back and ordered a bottle of vodka. Kyrgyz pop blared from the speakers. It was too noisy to have a conversation. They held hands on the beer-stained tabletop and drank in silence. A group of Americans came in to sit behind Elena. She listened, idly, but they spoke fast and her English was rusty. A single snatch of conversation managed to catch her attention.

“Man, when that guy in your truck started shooting, I thought you were going to go nuts.”

“I thought I
was
going nuts. One minute he was asking for a light, the next, he was firing into the fucking air. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing—and then there it was, real quick.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like a shadow—a little, dark thing. Probably an animal. Marmoset or something. Only saw it for a second, then it just disappeared.”

“What are they talking about?” Ilya murmured.

“I don’t know. I think they’re talking about the shooting on the road. One of the men thinks there was something strange about it.” She thought of the thing they had seen on the slopes of Koktubye; the thing that Ilya had called a ghoul.

Ilya knocked back a shot of vodka in evident disgust. “That’s the way it’s been all along. Something strange. Shadows in the darkness, old ghosts. I want to deal with something real. Let’s go back to the hostel and get some sleep.”

His mood seemed to have changed for the worse. He was silent on the way back.

At last she ventured to ask. “Ilya? What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

She did not press the question, but he must have taken her silence as a reproach, for he said, “Those Americans. You had your back to them, but I could see how they were looking at you.”

“They didn’t mean any harm, Ilya. They’d have looked at anything female.”

“But I kept thinking: What’s she doing with
me
?”

Mythical forces were one thing, old-fashioned male jealousy was another. It was almost good to have something normal to confront.

She said, “I didn’t notice them. I was looking at you. I’m falling in love with you, Ilya.” She hadn’t meant to say that, either. It seemed to echo around the main square. He kissed her, on the windblown steps of the Akimyat, and for once she did not care who or what might be watching.

Three

KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

They had an uneasy wait at the bus station the next morning. If there were not enough passengers, the driver told them, the bus would not run. The wind was still whipping down from the slopes, freezing the skin. Ilya pulled the collar of his coat closer and turned to Elena.

“I don’t want to hire a car,” he said in an undertone. “I don’t trust these people.”

There were no Russian faces in sight, only Kyrgyz and Tungan, and Ilya caught no more than fragmented snatches of conversation. He did not hold anything against the locals, but this was not his country. They were less than a day’s drive from the Chinese border.

“If the bus goes, we could be in Uzbekistan by tomorrow,” Elena said.

“Do you know how long it will take?”

“Andjian’s only two hundred kilometers from here, but it depends on the weather. I spoke to the driver. He says the Naryn road is reasonable, but then it heads up into the passes on the border and it can take ages. He told me to buy food.” She held up a parcel.

“Thank you. I’ll give you the money.”

She shook her head. “We’ll sort something out.” She chafed her hands. “It’s still so cold. I won’t deny it, Ilya, I’ll be happy when we get farther south.”

Ilya agreed with her, partly at the thought of sunlight and spring thaw, but partly just to keep the peace.
I am a Northerner,
he thought,
and I like a colder light, a
paler day.
It was well enough in these high passes, but he disliked the prospect of Uzbekistan; its subtleties, its proximity to the countries that had once formed the Persian empire. He admired its people, even though they had matched the Russians, cruelty for cruelty, over the years, but the region had brought him nothing but unhappiness. Tamerlane still cast a long shadow over anyone Russian.

Elena nudged him. “Ilya? Come on. The bus is going.” A family had appeared, enough people to make the journey worthwhile. Ilya watched them as they boarded the bus before him. They were Uzbeks, going home. A man in a shabby suit, two women in patterned floral frocks and slippers, a slender girl of ten who gazed at Ilya with a somber hostility that dismayed him. He wondered if she looked at all Russians in that way. The women, chattering like birds, herded the child onto the bus and vanished into its depths.

Ilya and Elena took a seat near the front, away from the petrol fumes. For once there was plenty of room, but there was little to see: only the mud-colored road ahead of them, with occasional glimpses of the rushing Naryn River. The road followed it, snaking around the hills. The monotony was broken only by small settlements, a herd of goats roaming along the road, an occasional herdsman on horseback.

To alleviate the boredom, Ilya began to question Elena about her time on the space program. It seemed as magical a dream as any he had ever come across. He listened to her stories about Mir with as much wonder as a child listening to fairy tales.

“And then, of course, they had the fire—one of the guys, Lazutkhin, lit an oxygen candle and instead of just releasing the stuff, it went up like a little volcano. The trouble they had putting it out—he said he thought they were all done for. And then there was the crash. One of the docking modules came in too fast and the commander couldn’t bring it in properly.”

“It hit the station?” He remembered reading something of the sort in the newspaper, but it was still so hard to know what was true and what wasn’t.

“It nudged it, which was enough to do damage, of course. It was an awful day. Everyone going around with long faces . . .”

“They must have been afraid for the cosmonauts.”

“Yes, naturally—but they also thought the Americans would pull out, you see. Because NASA was always so worried about safety—as though you could put men into space without risk.”

“The Americans never want to make sacrifices,” Ilya said.

“No, they don’t. Although sometimes I think they might have a point. Americans—Westerners—value life in a way that we don’t anymore. I sometimes think we’ve stopped caring, become too hard. Ilya, I wouldn’t say this if we weren’t in a half-empty bus in the middle of nowhere, but I got the impression that Star City would rather have someone die than be found out. They were running a whole set of experiments up there that the Americans didn’t know about, and it wasn’t really safe at all. Ground control took some crazy risks with those cosmonauts. When the crash happened, NASA wanted to know why they brought the docking modules in so quickly, why they didn’t steer them in slowly so that they could control the speed. But Yuri told me that if you brought the thing in too slowly, the docking mechanism malfunctioned—it made all sorts of compensations that would put the module even farther off course. Whereas if they brought the modules in quickly, they didn’t have time for it to go wrong.” She paused and took a drag on her cigarette. “It’s amazing no one died.”

As casually as he could, Ilya asked, “Who’s Yuri?”

“One of the cosmonauts.” She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on the side of the seat. “Actually, I went out with him for a bit. He was my last boyfriend. It wasn’t serious.” But her glance flickered and he knew that this was another of her white lies, the kind women told so easily to men. He could not blame her. “He broke it off. He was going back to Moscow. I think he had someone else there. They usually do.”

“He was a fool,” Ilya said, and was rewarded with her smile. But he could not stop himself from asking, “And others?”

“Other men, you mean? I was married for a short time. He was an engineering student. We were nineteen—much too young, but everyone did it then. They’d say you were left on the shelf if you weren’t engaged by twenty-two.”

“It was much the same in my day,” Ilya told her.
Whenever that had been.

“It’s different now. The divorce rate’s so high, they’re waiting longer. Some girls don’t get married at all; imagine that.”

Ilya did not want to get drawn into a conversation about social customs, though he knew that he should let the matter drop. How old did you have to be before you started taking note of all these lessons?

“Why did your marriage end?”

“I left him. He drank, of course, everyone does, but it was getting ridiculous. What can you do? And he wanted to end it, anyway.” She was staring out through the grimy windscreen of the bus. “We couldn’t have kids. I mean—
I
couldn’t. Something wrong with me . . . But it’s the same with so many girls round here, and anyway, you can’t be sure how they’ll turn out. When I was little, the Chinese were still doing atmospheric testing at Lop Nur—you heard about that? And we were doing nuclear tests as well, so . . . It’s bad in the north of the country. Children born without eyes, without proper bones. It’s probably just as well.” She sounded matter-of-fact. He could not tell from her voice whether she really believed it, or whether it was simply too old a pain. He squeezed her hand. After a moment, she said, “And you?”

“What about me?”

“With women.”

“Well, I got married in sixteen hundred and thirty-two and she was killed eight years later, by the Tartars. I have no children that I know of.” And that had been a perpetual surprise, given the number of women he had slept with. The refrain echoed in his head:
not human.

Elena looked perfectly blank. She said, “I’ll say this for you, Ilya, it’s not like any relationship I’ve ever been in before. Just tell me: there’s no
babushka
somewhere, wizened like an apple, who’s still cherishing fond memories?”

“God, I hope not. I’ve always tried not to get too involved. Except once.”

“What did she look like? Your wife?”

“I barely remember,” Ilya said, and was disconcerted to realize that it was true. She had died in the days before photographs, and memory grew as faint and distant as a faded icon if there was nothing to refresh it. He was about to say, “I think she looked like you,” but instinct told him that this would not be well-received. He took Elena’s face between his hands and kissed her instead, long and slow. The driver gave a reproving cough. The bus trundled on.