Against the Day (146 page)

So he crossed the Caspian Sea, among
Bnito oil tankers and sturgeon fleets, boarding at Krasnovodsk the TransCaspian
Railroad, which took him along the edge of the Qara Qum opening vastly,
incomprehensibly to the left, while to the right, like a parable, irrigation
ditches and cotton fields spread up toward the mountains, with folks selling
melons at the water stops. What he found memorable as he proceeded was less the
scenery than a sort of railroadmetaphysics, as he stood between carriages, out
in the wind, facing first one side, then the other, two radically different
pieces of country. Plains flowed by right to left, mountains left to right, two
opposite flows, each borne by the unimaginable mass of the entire visible
world, each flowing at

the speed of the train, an ongoing
collision in silence, the vectorial nature of whose currents was clear enough,
though not the roles of time and his own observing consciousness with its
leftand righthandedness. The effect of rotating ninety degrees from a moving
timeline, as expected, was delivery into a space containing imaginary
axes—the journey seemed to be unfolding in three dimensions, but there
were the added elements. Time could not, somehow, be taken for granted. It sped
up and slowed down, like a variable that was dependent on something else, something
so far, at least, undetectable.

At Merv the tracks swung leftward
into the desert, open as weatherless sky, herds of gazelles darting like flocks
of birds across it. The structure out here was revealed
immediately—desert punctuated by oases in a geography of cruelty,
barkhans or traveling sanddunes a hundred feet high, which might or might not
possess consciousness, cloaked and hooded, not earthly projections of the angel
of death, exactly, for species here had gained a reputation for their ability to
hold on even under the worst conditions—the predators tended to be
skyborne, the prey to live beneath the surface, with the surface itself,
defining them one to another, a region of blankness, a field within which the
deadly transactions were to be performed. Oases, or distant smoky blurs of
saksaul trees, appeared like moments of remission in lives of
misfortune—rumored, hallucinated, prayed for, not always where they were
supposed to be.

From his briefing by Lionel Swome,
Kit gathered that the TransCaspian, as well as the TransSiberian and other
lines, had been of the essence of the 1905 revolution, and there was still
plenty of postrevolutionary evidence as they rolled along—sheds burned to
charcoal crosshatching, abandoned freight cars, groups of riders in the
distance moving too swiftly and coherently to be camel caravans.

“Last year it was worth your life to
spend much time out here. You had to be armed and travel in numbers. Banditry
pure and simple.”

Kit had fallen into conversation with
a footplate man who was deadheading back out to Samarkand, where he lived with
his wife and children.

“But since Namaz Premulkoff broke out
of prison last year in Samarkand, that has begun to change. Namaz is a great
hero in these parts. He brought fifty men out of jail with him, and in no time
at all they had become a bit more than mortal. The exploits were remarkable
enough, but practically speaking Namaz also brought a discipline to the great
anger and discontent out here and, most importantly, revealed the Russians to
be the true enemy.” He nodded out the window at a purposeful dustcloud in the
distance. “These are no longer bands of peasants uprooted from their
land—they are now or

ganized units of resistance, their
target is the Russian occupation, and the people support them widely and
absolutely.”

   
“And
Namaz still leads them?”

“The
Russians say they killed him back in June, but no one believes it.” He fell
silent, till he noticed Kit’s inquiring look. “Namaz is not dead. How many of
the people have ever seen him in person? He is everywhere. Physically present
or not—they believe. Let the Russians try to kill that.”

The principal crossing from world to
world was over the wood bridge at Charjui across the wide yellow AmuDarya,
known in ancient times as the Oxus.

They stopped not at Bukhara but ten
miles outside it, because the Mahommedan community there believed the railroad
to be an instrument of Satan. So here instead was the new city of Kagan, with
its smokestacks and mills and local dignitaries grown suddenly rich on
realestate chicanery—the waste expelled from holy Bukhara, which lay out
there ten miles away as if under a magical proscription, invisible but felt.

Stops at Samarkand, Khokand, at last
to the end of the line at Andizhan, from which Kit had to proceed by dirt roads
to Osh, and finally over the mountains to behold at last the huge fertile
marketoasis of Kashgar, unbelievably green as a garden in a vision, and beyond
it the appalling emptiness of the Taklamakan.

“
Like damned Stanley and Livingstone
all over again,” Kit was heard to
mutter more than once in the next few days. “The man is not lost, and there was
never any question of ‘rescue.
’ ”
Somebody had been telling Yashmeen stories, likely to scare her, it seemed to
Kit, into venturing outside the T.W.I.T. sphere of safety. Which would account
for why they had spirited her away from Göttingen.

Indeed, far from “lost” or “in
danger,” Auberon Halfcourt was quite comfortably settled into a highEuropean
mode of residence at the palatial Hotel Tarim, Indian cigars ready for the
cutter each morning with his newspaper, fresh flowers in his sittingroom, a
sinful profligacy of fountains and dripping deep foliage just past the French
doors, concerts at the hour for tea, gazelleeyed young women arriving and
departing on a variety of errands, often done up in actual
houri outfits
of
fabrics woven by a workshopful of European craftsfolk, originally brought out
here as slaves, who had chosen, over their generations, to remain, far from
their homes, under some dark system of indenture, passing on the secrets of how
to rig the looms for these

imponderable yarns of infinitesimal
diameter, producing not so much lengths of cloth as surfaces of shadow, to be
dyed in infusions of herbs native only to, and gathered, generally at great
risk, from the allbutinaccessible stretches of the waste country beyond this
oasis.

Except for a detail or two,
comparable luxuries were being enjoyed just across the courtyard by his Russian
opposite number, Colonel Yevgeny Prokladka. The hired musicians—rabab,
hand drums, and
ghärawnay,
or Chinese flute—had learned “Kalinka”
and “Ochi Chorniya,” the girls, though having, many of them, some idea of what
animal fur was, had never actually worn it until now, much less taken advantage
of the claims it appeared to have on the Colonel’s attention—while the
cuisine was resolutely Russian, based on the huge classic cookbook
A Gift to
Young Housewives,
by E. N. Molokhovets, which the Colonel had had installed
in its own cabinet in the hotel kitchen on his arrival. When he wished to make
a public impression, he rode a splendid gray Orloff, which besides towering
over most other horses in the streets, had an inclination to the adventuresome,
which the Colonel suspected was only bad judgment but was taken usually by the
locals here for bravery.

At the moment, voices from the
British side of the courtyard, raised in dispute, could be heard all over the
establishment—one of the routine weekly rows between Halfcourt and
Mushtaq, his colleague of many years, whose ferocity in combat was by now
legendary, at least among those who, misled by the abbreviation of his stature,
had dared and somehow survived its effects. “Nonsense Mushtaq, here, you need
to
relax, man,
better have a drink, oh so sorry your religion, devoutly
dry aren’t you people, slipped my mind of course—”

“Spare your longsuffering and far
better informed coadjutor this staffcollege twaddle, sir. Time, as it seems I
must again point out, grows short. Having broken off its idle mischief in the foothills
of the Tian Shan, the
Bol’shaia Igra
is now reported over the west
Taklamakan, where its mission is obvious to the lowest camelthief.”

“Oh do let’s bring the Gatling out
then! yes, and hope that
evil balloon
happens to sail just overhead!
perhaps we shall get off a lucky shot or two! Unless of course you’d recommend
wiring down to Simla for a regiment or two? Our options Mushtaq are dashedly
few and not one of them practicable— but I say, your teeth—didn’t
used to be that color, did they?”

“Events of late have forced me to
resume the use of betel, sir. Far more beneficial to one’s health, may I add,
than alcohol.”

   
“It’s
the spitting part I could never quite get the hang of.”

   
“Much
like vomiting, actually, though perhaps more discreet.” The two

glared at each other, while from
Colonel Prokladka’s establishment could be heard the sound of massed local
instruments, and a laughter whose loudness and constancy did not quite make up
for an allbutcomplete absence of merriment.

The Russian colonel had surrounded
himself with a cadre of disreputables, each with a tale of abrupt dismissal
from duties west of the Urals and reassignment out here, and who by now, among
them, controlled every imaginable form of vice in the town, as well as some not
yet available anywhere else—his own A.D.C, or
lichnyi adiutant,
Klopski,
for example having imported from Shanghai and installed a number
of
 
peculiar machines,
steamdriven and lit by naphtha lamps
brighter and more modern than any to be found in Europe, which projected, so as
entirely to surround an operator seated at the control panel, in varied though
not strictly natural colors, a panorama presenting a series of socalled Chinese
Enigmata, so compelling in its mimickry of alternate worlds that any impulses
toward innocent play had become soon enough degraded into uncontrollable habit,
with souls uncounted now as willingly in bondage to these contraptions as any
opiumsmoker to his pipe. “Where is the harm?” shrugged Klopski. “One miserable
kopeck per go—it isn’t gambling, at least not as gambling has been known
up till now.”

   
“But
your kiosks,” protested Zipyagin. “Especially the ones in the bazaar—”

“Ever
the village scold, Grigori Nikolaevitch. It isn’t doing
y
our
sector any
harm, not from what your girls tell me.”

“The
ones
you
visit?
Yob tvoyu mat’,
I wouldn’t believe too much of
what
they
say.” Social grimaces resembling smiles passed among them.
They were gathered in seedy
zastolye
for this nightly moral exercise at
a highly illegal drinkingroom out past the edge of town, almost monopolizing
the place except for a handful of furtively boozing local folk.

“Nor any slackening in the opium
trade, none at all. Everyone profits from these ‘Chinese’ units of yours,
Klopski, including imams without number.”

   
“They’re
entitled to a percentage, I should think.”

   
“They’ll
convert you, it’s so certain nobody will bet on it anymore.”

   
“Actually
I did experiment with Islam briefly
. . . .
”

“Vanya,
I thought we all knew each other. When was this? Did you go out into the desert
and
begin to spin?
your mind proceeding to flee in all directions at
once?”

“It was just after Feodora’s letter.
And then that cavalry rogue Putyanin who said he’d had her in St. Petersburg
just before we shipped out—”

   
“So
as I recall you went after him with a handgrenade—

   
“He
had drawn his pistol.”

   
“It
was aimed at his own head, Vanya.”

   
“
Poshol
ty na khuy,
how
would you know? You were the first one out the door.”

The chief item
of
concern in this paradise of the dishonorable was a prophet known locally as
“the Doosra,” operating somewhere north of here, who had been
driven—according to those, naturally, with the feeblest grasp of the
concept—“mad” by the desert. As often happened out here, he had changed
into a living fragment of the desert, cruel, chaste, unstained by reflection.
It was uncertain how this had come about—hereditary madness, operatives
from over one of the horizons, shamanic influence closer to home—one day,
somehow, though never having ventured out of the Taklamakan, he announced, as if
having been conducted to a height nowhere on earth obtainable, a sharply
detailed vision of north Eurasia, a flood of light sweeping in a single mighty
arc from Manchuria west to Hungary, an immensity which must all be
redeemed—from Islam, from Buddhism, from SocialDemocracy and
Christianity—and brought together under a single Shamanist
ruler—not himself but “One who comes.”

The Doosra’s discovery of the Mark IV
Maxim gun, as LieutenantColonel Halfcourt duly wired Whitehall (in clear, much
to its annoyance), was “hardly among the more promising developments visàvis
PanTuranian hopes.” Remote lamaseries, caravans on the move, telegraph stations
at significant wells, began to fall before the implacable shockwave of a
revelation which few to date, if any, had shared, and many simply blamed on the
Doosra’s known enthusiasms for opium, ganja, and any number of local fusel
oils, singly or combined, named and nameless. The interests of England, Russia,
Japan, and China out here, not to mention those of Germany and Islam, were
already, for many, woven too intricately to keep track of. Now with yet another
player joining the Great Game—AllTurkic, for pity’s sake— the level
of complication, for many of the old Inner Asia hands, grew far too harrowing,
mental damage within Colonel Prokladka’s shop being perhaps the most
spectacular, with its midnight explosions, mysterious cases of hallucination,
actual invisibility, and unannounced howling exits out through mud archways and
into the windruled wastes forever.