I was certain he had seen through me and that by now I was playing by his rules. I felt like putting a stop to it, but I also felt, what the hell. “Nastya,” I blurted out, and Grand’s face flickered and changed in a barely perceptible way, like when a stripe runs down the TV screen: the picture stays the same, but something has changed nevertheless. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere.
“Mmm, yes, that I do remember. She came over, held out her hand and said, ‘Hello, my name is Nastya’.”
Grand put down his mug and left the tent. I could have cried with frustration. Two days later, though, I discovered he had simply had nothing to add. She was called Nastya.
She was called Nastya, and she was tall, neither thin nor fat, and had small steel-rimmed spectacles which made her look like a laboratory assistant in a Natural Science department. Her hair was long and of a colour so common in Russia it doesn’t have a name. Just dark. A person with thin, almost honed, features, cheekbones, eyebrows, the slant of her eyes, nose, lips; they lay symmetrically in ribbon-like lines and stretched when she smiled, not changing their shape. In those first days I was amazed that her body language seemed barely to reflect her emotions. I found her face inscrutable, as inscrutable as Asian faces are said to be to Europeans.
Hurtling along above the speed limit, viewing the world as an endlessly repeated gift, we burst into the city, and found it unwelcoming and grim. “A witch lives in this town,” Grand said. “She is gifted but I think you will be able to help her in a number of ways.” “It would have been good if you had told me beforehand. What will I need to do?” “Nothing. Just be the way you are.”
The way I am. Me, Titch, with a rucksack on my back and tattered sneakers on my feet. I am walking through a new town, glancing into the faces of passersby, wearing my inconstant, crazy hitchhiking smile, so what am I going to be able to reveal to your witch, friend, other than how to brew tea over a campfire till it’s just the way you like it?
We stood across from Moskovsky train station under the awning of a large hotel with dark walls which reflected us. It was hot and the busy street, full of traffic, flowed past us like lava. We stood in the shade but nobody walked in this cool, inviting space. They steered clear of these two odd, dusty strangers.
We burst into this city and our hearts were pounding as fast as our progress, almost four thousand kilometres in four days. We burst into the city, bringing with us all the same gifts we had given in each car: love of life, freedom from care and an enormous smile — but had suddenly to stop as we realised we had to wait. We waited, we took it easy, and my excitement, which had reached the level of hysterical palpitations, deflated and was expelled like air when you exhale deeply and are left empty and ready to take in a new breath. Those were Grand’s words when he was teaching me to understand the art of breathing, and now I understood them.
I was empty, turned round, and saw Her. Grand had not spotted her yet and was staring vacantly ahead although she had already come round the corner. She was coming towards us but still he didn’t see, or didn’t recognise her. I knew that was Her and got up from our bags. She approached in a stiff, almost business-like manner and my self-confidence grew steadier and firmer with every step she took. There was nothing about her to justify all my anguish these last days. There was nothing about her I needed to fear.
An instant before she approached, holding out her hand, I knew what she was going to say. “Hello, my name is Nastya.” Then she’d turn to Grand as if I were no longer there.
How hard the climbing was at first! It was hard for me because I wasn’t used to it and I lagged behind. Nastya was up in front, with Grand following her. Sasha was miles back down the path. Nastya viewed the two of us with a sense of superiority. I could feel every blister on my feet and didn’t give a damn about anything else.
Then suddenly everything changed. The open hills, the sloping meadows turned gradually into dense taiga forest. Bizarrely shaped boulders began to peep from beneath the moss. It was a forest of dark pines and larch trees. Now Nastya started falling behind while Sasha and I ran on ahead. We put our best foot forward and the trail seemed no more than a Sunday stroll.
On the third day it became obvious we were lost. Nobody said as much, but we all knew it. We hiked on, but our mood was less buoyant. Grand said nothing either, but started cutting back on the rations. “We can always scrounge food off somebody else,” Sasha said nonchalantly, but nobody replied. We hadn’t seen a soul during our trek.
Sasha was looking like a wood-goblin. A faraway smile appeared on his face as he dug about in the grass, smacking his lips with satisfaction. In behind his glasses his eyes were spotting things the rest of us overlooked: wild strawberries and allium, cranberries hidden deep in the shade; honeysuckle on bushes, and occasionally gooseberries and a variety of mushrooms. He would pop up to one side of us, in front of us, be catching us up from the rear, festooned with leaves and twigs, bearing the fruits of the forest before him in a plastic bag. When we stopped he would brew herbal teas and braise mushrooms in their own juice in the pot lid. I clambered through the bushes with him.
We gnawed the fibrous white alliums. They were sweet, but with salt and dried bread they were delicious. Sasha could conjure food out of the ground. “Sasha, how come we were so hungry at the lakes?” “Because it was spring, of course, Titch. May.”
Sasha and I went far ahead of the others, gathering things to eat. Nastya looked on as if to say, “This is just what I expected. It’s all you are capable of. Now let’s see you get us out of this mess.” She didn’t eat our mushrooms and grumbled that, if we were going to stop at every bush, we would never get anywhere. Grand was more and more unsmiling and had ever less to say. He began taking a serious interest in the extent to which these gifts were a real alternative and supplement to our rations. He trusted our instinct in respect of unfamiliar mushrooms, but did cut some open himself. If they didn’t darken he would know they were poisonous. Sasha and I hadn’t a care in the world. We gathered honeysuckle. It was delicious if you added it to porridge made with dried milk.
“What do you think, Sasha, are we going to get anywhere?” “Who cares, Titch. Look what a great time we’re having.”
Forest-covered mountains, boulders combining different colours nestling among moss-covered tree trunks. There were unexpected expanses: we might emerge to find ourselves on the edge of a precipice and hold our breath at the height and the noise of a river raging down below in the gorge, or come across fields covered with strawberries. More forests, streams with the hoof-prints of unshod horses on their banks. Every time I gazed ahead I expected to see our lake shining mirror-like in the distance.
“Grand, where are we going?” “The only direction worth travelling is towards infinity.”
Grand is an experimenter. He plays games as if compiling chess problems. He puts the pieces on the board and watches to see how they behave. He changes the disposition and looks again. He adds new pieces and looks again, evaluating, as if seeking the optimal progression — or is it just that he likes experimenting?
Right now, however, he is in a muddle. Something in his chess game is not working out. He doesn’t know what, but it is already too late to change the configuration and looks as if someone other than he is moving the pieces. This someone else seems always to get the calculations right, even though they don’t agree with Grand’s.
He is at a loss. He doesn’t know what to do next and doesn’t notice that he is himself on the chessboard now, along with us, his chess pieces.
You took me on a walk through Chelyabinsk one night and taught me only to look at the shadows. The shadows of trees, of branches in leaf. Thin, knotted, light, obedient to the breeze, they came alive and spoke of the town, the warm night and the dusty air. Shadows of fences, benches and posts were patterns on the asphalt, the monumental memory of the town. Shadows of the infrequent passersby blurred and disappeared. They possessed sound, colour and mood. Shadows revealed the world to me.