‘Both of you come here,’ he said.
The militiamen walked meekly towards him - like rabbits towards a boa constrictor. One of the horses whinnied nervously and reared up.
‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid,’ I whispered, ‘he won’t eat you.’
That was actually an assumption on my part: Alexander hadn’t shared his plans with me. When the militiamen got close, he put his gun in its holster and said something in a quiet voice, I thought I heard ‘. . . report on the situation’. First he listened to them, and then he started talking himself. I couldn’t make out any more words, but it was all clear from the gesticulations. First he held out his open right hand, as if he were tossing a small object up and down on his palm. Then he turned it palm-down and made a few circular movements, flattening something invisible. This had the most magical effect on the militiamen - they turned and walked away, forgetting not only about me, but about their horses too.
Alexander looked at me curiously for a few seconds, then walked up and held out the black bundle. It was my dress. There was something wrapped in it. I unfolded it and saw the chicken. It was dead. I felt so sad that tears sprang to my eyes. It wasn’t a question of sentimentality. Not long ago we had been a single whole. And this little death seemed to be half mine.
‘Get dressed,’ said Alexander.
‘Why did you . . .’ I pointed at the chicken.
‘What, was I supposed to let it go?’
I nodded. He spread his arms in bewilderment.
‘Well, in that case I don’t understand anything at all.’
Of course, it was stupid of me to reproach him.
‘No, I’m sorry. Thank you,’ I said. ‘For the dress, and in general.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘don’t ever do that again. Ever.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t take offence, but you don’t look very good. I mean, when you turn into . . . I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not your thing.’
‘Why don’t I look good?’
‘You’re pretty mangy. And you could be three hundred years old at least.’
I felt myself turning red.
‘I see. Like a woman driver, is that it? Every second word you speak betrays the repulsive chauvinism of the male . . .’
‘Let’s not have any of that. I’m telling you the truth. Gender has nothing to do with it.’
I got dressed quickly and even managed to tie the cut shoulder strap in a knot above my shoulder.
‘Will you take the chicken?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Then let’s go. The car will be here in a moment. And tomorrow at twelve hundred hours, be ready to leave. We’re flying up north.’
‘What for?’
‘You showed me the way you hunt. Now you can take a look at the way I do it.’
I’d never flown in any planes like the Gulfstream Jet before. I’d never even seen any - life had never taken me to the special airports for the
upper rat
. I felt nervous because there were so few people in the cabin - as if the safety of a flight depended on the number of passengers.
Maybe that’s true, by the way. After all, everyone has his own guardian angel, and when you get several hundred passengers crammed into an Airbus or a Boeing, if the hordes of invisible winged protectors don’t actually increase the uplift of the plane’s wings, they must at least insure it against falling. Probably that’s why there are more crashes involving the small private flights used by various newsmakers heavily burdened with evil (even if some victims don’t belong to this elite niche, they become newsmakers when they crash).
The passenger cabin was like a smoking room with leather armchairs. Alexander sat beside me. Apart from us, the only person in the cabin was Mikhalich - he’d made himself comfortable in the armchair furthest away and was shuffling through some papers or other. He hardly spoke to Alexander at all - just once he turned to him and asked:
‘Comrade lieutenant general, it says here in a document “Do you know what that means?’
Alexander thought about it.
‘I think that’s from forty kilograms of plastique and upwards. But check it out just to be sure when we get back.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Moscow floated down and away, and then it was hidden by the clouds. Alexander turned away from the window and took out a book.
‘What are you reading?’ I asked. ‘Another detective novel?’
‘No. This time I took a serious, intelligent book, on your advice. Do you want something to read too?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then take a look at this. So you’ll understand what you’re about to see. It’s not exactly the same case, but it’s pretty similar. I brought it especially for you.’
He put a tattered volume on my knees. The title
Russian Fairy Tales
was written in red letters - it was the same book I’d seen on his desk.
‘The page is marked,’ he said.
The bookmark was at the story called ‘Little Khavroshka’. It was a long time since I’d held any Russian children’s books in my hands, and I noticed one strange thing immediately - because the print was so large, I perceived the words quite differently from in adult books. As if everything they denoted was simpler and purer.
The fairy tale turned out to be rather sad. Little Khavroshka was a northern clone of Cinderella, only instead of a fairy god-mother she was helped by a brindled cow. This cow did all the impossible jobs that Khavroshka was given to do by her stepmother. The wicked sisters spied on Khavroshka to see how she managed to keep up with all her work and they told the stepmother about it. The stepmother ordered the brindled cow to be slaughtered. Khavroshka found out and told the cow. The cow asked Khavroshka not to eat her meat and to bury her bones in the garden. Then an apple tree with jingling gold leaves grew out of the bones, and the tree made Khavroshka’s fortune - she managed to pick an apple, and the reward for that was a fiancé . . . I found it interesting that the stepmother and the sisters weren’t punished, they simply didn’t get any apples, and then they were forgotten about.
I had absolutely no desire to analyse this fairy tale from the positions of the asshole-amphetamine discourse or rummage about in its ‘morphology’. I didn’t need to guess what it was really about - my heart understood. It was the eternal Russian story, the final cycle of which I had witnessed only recently, at the end of the last century. As if I personally had known the brindled cow to which children complained about their woes, who worked simple miracles for them and then quietly died under the knife, only to grow out from under the earth as a magical tree - a golden apple for every boy and girl . . .
The fairy tale contained a strange truth about the very saddest and most mysterious side of Russian life. How many times that brindled cow had been slaughtered. And how many times it had returned, either as a magic apple tree or an entire cherry orchard. Only where had all the apples gone? You couldn’t find them anywhere. Except maybe by calling the office of United Fruit . . . But no, that was nonsense. ‘United Fruit’ was last century, but now any call you made would get lost in the wires on its way to some company in Gibraltar that belonged to a firm from the Falkland Islands that was managed by a lawyer in Amsterdam in the interests of a trust with an unnamed beneficiary owner. Who, of course, is known to every dog on the Rublyovskoe Highway where the
upper rat
lives.
I closed the book and looked at Alexander. He was asleep. I carefully took the
serious, intelligent book
from his knees and opened it:
No, the Money Tree looks different from the way certain frivolous writers of the last century thought of it. It doesn’t fruit with
gold ducats in the Field of Miracles, as they assumed. It sprouts through the icy crust of the permafrost in a blazing fountain of oil, a burning bush like the one that spoke with Moses. But although there are many a Moses crowding round the Money Tree today, the Lord remains significantly silent . . . The reason for his silence must be that he knows the tree will not be allowed to flutter its smoky flames in freedom for long. Calculating men will haul a slaking apparatus on to the crown of fire and force the Tree’s black trunk to grow into a cold steel pipe stretching right across the Country of Fools to the port terminals, to various Chinas and Japans - so far that soon the Tree will be unable to recall its own roots . . .
After I’d read a few more paragraphs in the same fussy, obscure style, I began to feel sleepy. I closed the book and put it back on Alexander’s knees. Then I slept through the rest of the flight.
I slept through the landing as well. When I opened my eyes, there was the snow-covered airport terminal building, looking more like a railway station, drifting past outside the window of the Gulfstream as it taxied along the runway. There was a long poster hanging on the building: ‘Welcome to Nefteperegonievsck!’ There was snow everywhere, as far as the eye could see.
At the bottom of the steps we were met by several military men in winter kit without any badges of rank. They greeted Mikhalich and Alexander like old friends, but they glanced at me, or at least I thought they did, in bewilderment. Nonetheless, when Mikhalich and Alexander each received an officer’s greatcoat, I was also issued with warm clothing - a military padded jacket with a light-blue collar of synthetic fur and a cap with ear-flaps. The jacket was too big, and I literally drowned in it.
Three cars had come to meet us. They were black Geländewagens, just like the ones in Moscow, except that they were driven by soldiers. There was hardly any conversation at all when we were met: the men limited themselves to greetings and a brief discussion of the weather. It seemed like the local men knew all about why their visitors from Moscow were there.
The town that started immediately outside the airport had a rather phantasmagorical appearance. The buildings in it reminded me of cottages for the middle class outside Moscow. There was only one difference - these cottages were raised above the ground in an absurd fashion, on stilts that were like the hut’s chicken legs in the fairy tale. That was the precise association evoked by the combination of the piles hammered into the permafrost and the red crests of the tiled roofs, and it was impossible to free myself of it: the houses became rows of chickens with their hindquarters raised high to display the black openings of the doors. Evidently I was still under the impression of the previous day’s hunt and the resultant shock.
In between the ‘eurohuts’ I could see figures of street traders selling something from pieces of oilcloth spread out directly on the snow beside their Buran snowmobiles.
‘What’s that they’re selling?’ I asked Alexander.
‘Reindeer meat. They bring it from the tundra.’
‘Don’t they ship supplies up here?’
‘Yes, of course they do. It’s just that reindeer meat’s in fashion. It’s stylish. And then, it’s an environmentally clean product.’
I was very impressed by the Calvin Klein boutique, located in one of the cottages on piles. Its very presence in this place was impressive - it was probably the most northerly outpost of lesser Calvinism in the world. And apart from that, the sign over its door fulfilled several functions at once - shop name, geographical reference point and advertising concept:
I couldn’t help noticing a large children’s playground crowded with structures that looked like the frameworks of tents - the children hanging on them, swaddled in warm clothing, were like fat little sloths. The playground reminded me of an ancient hunters’ camping ground preserved amongst the snow. The entrance arch was painted with snowflakes, baby animals and red-nosed clowns, and above them there was a jolly inscription:
It was hard to understand what this was:
1. a nonsense rhyme intended to put the children in a good mood.
2. a list of sponsors.
3. a protest in Aesopian language (are we coming back to that so soon?) against the oppressive tyranny of the authorities.
Everything in Russian life had shifted around so much that it was hard to reach any final conclusion. And I didn’t have the time: we didn’t slow down anywhere and soon this tapestry of the north had dissolved in the white dust behind us. The snowy expanses of evening closed in on us from all sides.
‘Put on my favourite,’ Alexander said to the driver.
He looked sullen and intense, and I thought it best not to distract him by making conversation.
An old song by Shocking Blue came on:
I’ll follow the sun
That’s what I’m gonna do,
Trying to forget all about you . . .
I couldn’t help thinking that ‘trying to forget all about you’ referred to me - the female psyche does that sort of thing automatically without bothering to consult its owner. But I thought the oath to follow the sun, confirmed by the words ‘that’s what I’m gonna do’, in the manner of the ancient Vikings, had a certain exalted beauty to it.