The city was bombed in the dark. Only the explosions lit up the streets, and the skeletons of the ruined buildings were horrible to look at.
Gio could understand nothing. There were black circles under his eyes, and he could breathe with difficulty.
At times he even stopped breathing, as if forgetting to take the air in. Then he took in the air in quick succession and his respiration became steady and deep again.
Out of the four operations performed that night two were in vain.
The sound of the exploding shells was heard in the distance, but sometimes it came too close. One of the shells fell so near the hospital that several windows broke at once. The corridors were dimly lit, and it was too silent there. A few young soldiers were standing at the wall, smoking cigarettes. One of them was sitting on the floor, tapping at his cigarette with the index finger nervously every now and then, as if trying to knock the ashes down onto the floor. Their boots and guns were muddy all over.
They hardly spoke at all.
***
“Where is Tolika? I can’t see him anywhere.”
“He’s all right. He stayed behind.”
The tall one, with an unshaven face, put his machine-gun down, took off his bulletproof jacket and sat on the floor with great difficulty.
“I think, they have bitten me all over,” he said.
“It’s not insects, it must be the scabies. You shouldn’t scratch,” his friend adviced.
They heard footsteps at the other end of the corridor. Then there came the clicking sound of the stretcher. Three men were pushing it, accompanied by a tired-looking doctor with the dried up blood stains on his overall. They turned round the corner and disappeared behind the huge, heavy, banging iron door.
***
When the day broke, the bombing ceased. It was very foggy in the city, and it was freezing. The place looked hollow and deserted. A vehicle drove into the hospital yard and stopped near the wall. Two men got out. One of them was lamed. They entered the building. The young soldiers were asleep sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall.
Those two neared the sleeping soldiers. The tall one was first to wake up.
“How is he?”
“Sleeping. Doesn’t feel any pain.”
“We must take him away.”
“How?”
“The ‘Comet’ is leaving in an hour.”
“How are things back there?”
“As usual.”
“Who’s going to attend him?”
“I’m staying here.”
“So am I.”
The sun was rising. The bombing would start again soon.
2005.
SAMDO
Samdo is a village in West Nepal. It’s the last village in the Guri-kandak gorge, near the Tibetan border.
High up in the gorge several villages are inhabited by Tibetans. The gorge is pretty long. It may take six to seven days to walk from one end to the other. There is no transport there at all.
The locals mostly go in for cattle-farming; some of them grow potatoes too. The people are all poor, but there are slight differences as well. My host, Tsowang Yurmi, has a guesthouse. He lives there with his family, and he can take in ten people at a time. His wife, Kumri, is in the kitchen all day long, cooking vegetable dal-bat[7] for her visitors.
Tsowang and Kumri have three daughters. Nevertheless, they have no family yet. According to the local Tibetan tradition, the family should have a son to be considered a real family. So poor Yurmi is not considered to be a real man.
I have visited Samdo for the fourth time already with an interval of two or three years. Every time I arrive here, I stop at Tsowang Yurmi’s nameless guesthouse. The couple are praying for all their spare time; they are extremely worried for not having a son.
“They even don’t invite me to the village authorities’ session, for they don’t consider me to be a real man,” Tsowang complains to me. I try to cheer him up, but I can’t manage it well. It seems, I’ve started to think like Tibetans myself.
“I’m praying nights through, but the Almighty doesn’t take a pity to me,” the poor man says.
“It’s good you are praying,” I say, “But prayers alone won’t help.”
He agrees.
Trip from Samdo to Tibet takes a day’s ride on a horse-back. Tsowang often goes on that trip. He takes there sacks of potatoes and brings back rice and other products.
At the end of the month my wife and I will go to Tibet and walk round the Holy Mount Kailash. We’ll spend there the whole month praying. We shall pray a lot! We’ll leave our girls in Zimtag with my wife’s sisters.
In the morning I say good-buy to the couple and feel that we are not going to meet for the several following years.
***
I have to go back to Samdo only four years later. We arrive in the city of Beshishapar after a tiring seven-day trip across the Larkia range. From there I leave for Samdo and visit my old friend. I’m too tired and need a good rest. I don’t know exactly how long I have been sleeping, when some noise wakes me up. Someone snatches my hat from my head too, and I sit up in my bed swiftly, feeling a bit giddy. In the end, when I come to myself at last, I see two little boys standing in front of me. They look alike and both are wearing Tibetan gowns. They have Tibetan daggers in their belts and are holding wooden swords in their hands. They stand still, smiling at me. One of them is holding my hat in his tiny fingers.
I gesture at them, asking them to come up to my bed, but they shake their heads in refusal and continue to scrutinize me. I search for some sweets in my pockets, find a few and offer them to the boys. They are still hesitant, but in the end they take the sweets and rush out into the yard.
Some time later, Tsowang Yurmi, sitting by the Tibetan fireplace, tells me how happy he is now and how proudly he walks in the village. The Almighty gave him two sons instead of one! He watches his sons running about with the eyes full of affection. His wife, with a kind, round, happy and smiling face, is silently baking something.
The warmth makes me weak again and I fall asleep once more.
It’s four in the morning, and it’s quite dark when I’m leaving the village. I try to go out silently, not to wake up my hosts, but I already hear Tsowang Yurmi’s prayer:
“Ium, mane padme hum.”
- Great is thy name, O Lord!
KARAKUM
Agsar lived in Tezebazaar, in a small, flat-roofed, mud brick house inherited from his grandfather. The house was fenced with a mud brick fence running round a tiny yard. The majority of the houses in Tezebazaar were one-storey buildings, all looking alike. Only a few of them were plastered with the mixture of clay and straw, and had two floors, the first decorated with wooden balconies.
From the mount Karatau, which Agsar frequented in his childhood, one could get a wonderful view of Tezebazaar and Berun. The world view of the local children was limited to these two villages. From the top of the mount they used to see the flat roofs of the square buildings that looked alike. In the distance though, wrapped in the yellow mist, they could also see the Karakum. All of them were terribly afraid even of this word, for they had heard a lot of terrible stories about the desert: nightly storms, enormous burning ball of the sun, hot golden sands, low, dry plants covered with thorns, the hole of Akjakar and the Kara Kurt – a huge deadly spider.
Agsar was fourteen when his grandfather took him to Khiva, the wonder of the Asian architecture, for the first time. There he saw the real mosque with colored minarets, spacious squares full of people, buzzing narrow streets where people could hardly move. But most of all he was impressed by the Khivan bazaar. What not could be seen here: colored fabrics, silk, jewels, horse decorations and saddles, and the stocks of different arms. The piles of fruit were too impressive as well. It was here that he tasted the Asian watermelon of unforgettable taste.