“Hey, Titch! Aren’t you scared?” “The forest is still and dense. I am of no interest to the Lake. All the mice are gone and will not return. I am not afraid.” “Hey, but Titch, you’ve been left all alone.” “I have the forest, I have the mountains, and soon the moon will rise and be reflected in the water, lighting up the icy peaks. Beneath a black sky there is the Earth, on it, like a tumulus, there is my tent, and inside it there is me, the only thing for miles around that can call this forest a forest. In the town there are millions like me, but that does not make me happier there.”
“Titch, you are lame and have little to eat. You’re not good at lighting fires and don’t know the way back. What will you do tomorrow when the sun comes up? Hush, listen. A raven is cawing on the rocky mountain.” “Yes. That is my kind Cara not forgetting me even here.”
I must have dozed off or been dreaming. The frenzied girl shaman is dancing round the fire with a tambourine, now raising it to the skies, now lowering it to the ground. I hear drumming and singing, and muttering, sometimes soft, then louder, and seem even to hear the ceaseless rhythms of a mouth harp. She leaps and spins, and scraps of cloth and the ribbons of her complicated costume fly about her in the wind. I watch enchanted. I watch in a daze, trying to make out her facial features contorted in ecstasy. It is She, our Chachkan, come to life out of the stone. She jumps over to me in a single leap, leans over my injured foot and tugs something out of it or from nearby. I clearly see a small black serpent writhing in her hand, but only for a moment before she jumps over to the fire and casts this black thing into it. I lower my eyes to my ankle and cannot help laughing. A dozen tailless mice are dancing on their hind legs next to me in time to the music of this frenzied ritual.
I laugh and wake up. Through the walls of the tent I can see the campfire burning in our clearing. I look out and see Grand sitting there and he actually is quietly playing a mouth harp. A pot is suspended over the fire. I had forgotten food could smell like that. A pot of boiled potatoes and stew. I go to him but somehow instead of words of joy there comes from me an outburst of hysteria. “How could you leave me? How could you just abandon me? You’re all traitors! All of you! The lot of you!”
“Titch, what are you on about?” He stands up and impulsively wants to put his arm round my shoulders. I don’t want that and, ashamed of my tears, tear myself away, turn aside and wail.
“I told those mountaineers we were staying and why, and they invited me to go with them to their base for food. It was a couple of hours to the base and they’ve got a bathhouse. I told you, the road will help us. When you’re better we’ll go down there and have a good wash.” “A wash…” I murmur dreamily, as if hearing the word for the first time.
I sit looking into the pot, and from just the sight and smell of his stomach-filling stew and the heat of the fire I stop feeling hungry. The fire crackles. Stars shine through the great paws of the cedars. The breeze is still and it is very quiet.
“Why have you gathered so much firewood? Are you planning to spend the winter here?” “I was going to commune with the spirits but as I was walking back from the base everything felt so good and peaceful. I didn’t want to go hunting them. The world around us is enormous, Titch, and we are so small, puny and alone. We’re all trying to go somewhere in this world, but if you look to the heart of things, you see that none of this is real.”
“What do you mean it isn’t real?”
“It just isn’t. There is a boundless dark sea all around, and that gives you a sense of awe. Imagine, Titch: it’s summer, it’s hot, it’s evening. There’s a pool of yellow light on the veranda and a smell, the smell of the heated earth which is cooling as night closes in.
“Standing in the lamplight on the veranda, with the soft rustle of the wings of moths, you peer out into the garden and it seems as if it doesn’t exist. What is around you is a dark sea, and the garden isn’t there. Nothing else exists, only you, snatched from the darkness by a circle of dim lamplight. ‘What sparks are those I see flickering?’ you will ask. ‘Fireflies or stars?’ Stars,’ I reply. ‘Fireflies.’”
“Yes. I understand,” I say, nodding my head, and for the first time I really do understand him.
Everything was like a dream, only it wasn’t a dream. The nearby Lake was still and the glaciers were reflected in its bottomless depths. The sky was cold and black but we felt no chill and forgot the food. We sat and soaked up all the emptiness, and the good spirits of that place, my good brothers, surrounded us and were almost tangible.
We went to the tent and for the first time slept holding each other tight, and we were warm.
We left two days later. My foot was better and walking was easy. At the base we met a new group of climbers gazing mournfully at the glacial precipices in the hope of seeing dark clouds bringing snow. “Without snow there’s no point in going up to the pass,” they grumbled. We were in a hurry and didn’t wash.
We moved on and it seemed to me that the road was familiar. We spent the night in the forest, next to a flooded meadow. We crossed it swiftly, following the path closest to the trees which grew round its edge.
We crossed streams and descended an almost sheer track. Our next overnight stop was by a river and, as we discovered in the morning, a bare hundred metres away from the site with the table under cover.
The place was deserted when we reached it. The dark planks of the bench and table, with rusty bruises around the nail heads, looked forlorn, a dull echo of the civilisation we had left behind and to which we were now returning. Near the site of the fire we found the plastic container with the incompatible grains which our friends had abandoned. We sat for a time before going on, down into the valley.
Mars, The Red Star
The Russian steppe, night time, and we are being driven at speed in a red car with rounded contours. It is a right-hand drive Japanese Daewoo and if I peep round the back of the driver’s seat I can see the illuminated speedometer on the dashboard, only it’s better not to. I really won’t do that again. May God and all his messengers of light protect us. We are travelling so fast we seem to be flying. It would be good to have something to hold on to, but there is nothing.
“Why aren’t you talking, Sergey?” the driver demands of Grand. “Let’s sing! ‘Moans my heart… moans my heart…!’” he bursts forth with a voice so powerful I am pressed down in the back seat from where, as if peering up from the bottom of the sea, I can observe only a scrap of black sky through the rear window and a large red star suspended in it.
God forbid that you should find yourself hitchhiking in the night with a drunk at the wheel. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We accepted the lift so now we must stick it out to the end because, in any case, we have no choice.
We didn’t immediately see the situation. We were even pleased because we really needed a lift. Night was falling and we had gone barely any distance away from Novosibirsk. We hadn’t made 50 kilometres and found ourselves in steppe so desolate there wasn’t a birch tree to be seen. Far away on the horizon huge green radar dishes, which looked like eviscerated tortoise shells were rotating. It was a creepy place to be and we had no wish to be stuck there overnight. We had just decided to walk on a bit and start thumbing when suddenly this little car as red as a Christmas tree bauble and with tinted windows shot out of the filling station and screeched to a halt for us. The driver lowered his window, looked at Grand and laughed. Grand looked at him and laughed too, as if they were two old friends, as I thought they were. I laughed too.