“Everything that has a beginning has an end too,” Andrei said.
“Right, right,” Izya said impatiently. “But I’m talking about the magnitudes of history, not the magnitudes of the universe. The history of the majority has an end, but the history of the minority will only come to an end together with the universe.”
“You’re a lousy elitist,” Andrei told him lazily, before getting up off his mat and plunking into the pool. He swam for a long time, snorting in the cool water and diving right down to the bottom, where the water was icy cold, greedily gulping it there, like a fish…
No, of course I didn’t gulp it. Now I’d gulp it. My God, how I’d gulp it! I’d gulp down the entire pool, I wouldn’t leave any for Izya—he can go search for his reservoir…
Over on the right, some kind of ruins peeped out from behind the swirling yellowish-gray clouds—a blank, half-collapsed wall, spiky with dust-covered plants, the remains of a clumsy quadrangular tower.
“There now, see,” Andrei said, stopping. “And you say: no one before us…”
“Ah, I never said that, you great lunkhead!” Izya wheezed. “I said—”
“Listen, maybe the reservoir’s here?”
“It very easily could be,” said Izya.
“Let’s go and take a look.”
They both slipped out of their harnesses and trudged over to the ruins.
“Ha!” said Izya. “A Norman fortress! Ninth century…”
“Water, look for water,” said Andrei.
“Ah, to hell with your water!” Izya said angrily. His eyes opened wide and started bulging, and with a long-forgotten gesture he reached under his beard to search for his wart. “Normans…” he muttered. “Well, well… I wonder how they lured them here?”
Catching their tattered rags on prickles, they forced their way through a gap in the wall and found themselves in a calm spot. Standing there in the smooth, quadrangular space was a low building with a collapsed roof.
“The union of the sword and wrath…” Izya muttered, hurrying toward the doorway. “Or maybe I don’t understand a damn thing about what that union is… Where would a sword come from here? How can you make sense of something like that?”
Inside the building the devastation was total, total and ancient. Centuries old. The collapsed roof timbers had mingled with fragments of rotted boards—the remains of a long table that ran the full length of the building. Everything was dusty, crumbling, and decayed, and the wall on the left was lined with equally dusty and decayed benches. Still muttering, Izya waded in to rummage through this heap of decay, and Andrei went out and walked around the building. He very soon came across what had once been a reservoir—an immense round pit lined with stone slabs. The slabs were as dry as the desert now, but there was no doubt that there had been water here at one time: the clay at the edge of the pit was as hard as cement, and it preserved the deep imprints of booted feet and dogs’ paws. Things are looking bad, thought Andrei. The old terror clutched his heart and then immediately released its grip: at the far end of the pit the broad, shaggy leaves of a “ginseng” plant were flattened out on the clay in a star shape. Andrei jogged around the pit toward them, feeling for the knife in his pocket on the way.
For several minutes, panting and streaming with sweat, he scrabbled furiously at the rock-hard clay with his knife and his nails, raked out the crumbs and scrabbled again, and then, grabbing hold of the thick stock of the root with both hands, he pulled hard, but cautiously—God forbid that the root should break off somewhere in the middle.
The root was a big one, about seventy centimeters long and as thick as a fist—white, clean, and glossy. Pressing it against his cheek with both hands, Andrei set off back to Izya, but along the way he gave in, sank his teeth into the succulent, crunchy flesh, and started chewing delightedly, relishing it, trying not to hurry, trying to chew as thoroughly as possible, so as not to lose even a single drop of this delightful minty bitterness that made his mouth and his entire body feel as fresh and cool as a forest in the morning, and cleared his head, so that he no longer feared anything, and he could move mountains…
Then they sat in the doorway of the building, joyfully gnawing and crunching and champing, merrily winking at each other with their mouths full, and the wind howled disappointedly over their heads and couldn’t reach them. They’d deceived it again; they hadn’t allowed it to toy with their bones on the bald clay. Now they could match their strength against it one more time.
They drank two swallows each from a hot canister, harnessed themselves into their carts, and strode on. And it was easy to walk now; Izya didn’t drop behind anymore but stepped out beside Andrei, with the half-detached sole of his shoe slapping.
“By the way, I spotted another little plant there,” Andrei said. “A small one. On the way back…”
“That’s a mistake,” said Izya. “We should have eaten it.”
“Didn’t you get enough?”
“Why let good stuff go to waste?”
“It won’t go to waste,” said Andrei. “It’ll come in useful for the return journey.”
“There’s not going to be any return journey.”
“That’s something no one knows, brother,” said Andrei. “Why don’t you just tell me this: Is there still going to be water?”
Izya threw his head back and looked up at the sun. “At the zenith,” he announced. “Or almost at the zenith. What do you think, Mr. Astronomer?”
“Looks like it.”
“The most interesting part will start soon,” said Izya.
“What could be so interesting about it? So, we pass through the zero point. Then we start walking toward the Anticity…”
“How do you know that?”
“About the Anticity?”
“No. Why do you think we’ll just simply pass through and walk on?”
“I’m not thinking a damned thing about it,” said Andrei. “I’m thinking about water.”
“Oh Lord, give me strength! The zero point is the beginning of the world, do you understand? And he talks about water!”
Andrei didn’t reply. The ascent of yet another hillock had begun; walking had become hard, and the harness was cutting into his shoulders. That “ginseng” is great, he thought. How come we know about it? Did Pak tell us? I think that was it—Ah, no! Skank brought a few roots into camp one day and started eating them, and the soldiers took them away from her and tried them themselves. Yes. They were all strutting and swaggering afterward, and they tumbled Skank all night long… And later Pak said that this “ginseng,” like the real ginseng, is only found very rarely. It grows in places where there used to be water, and it’s really good when your energy’s low. Only it’s impossible to store it—you have to eat it immediately. Because after an hour or even less, the root withers and becomes almost poisonous… There was a lot of this “ginseng” near the Pavilion, a whole truck farm of it… That was where we stuffed ourselves with it, and all Izya’s sores disappeared overnight. It was good at the Pavilion. And all the time there Izya kept pontificating about the edifice of culture…
“All the rest is just the scaffolding around the wall of the temple,” he had said. “All the best things that humankind has invented in a hundred thousand years, all the important things it has understood and achieved through the power of thought, go into that temple. Through all the millennia of its history, howling, starving, lapsing into slavery and rebelling, guzzling and copulating, humanity carries this temple along on the turbid crest of its wave, without even suspecting it. Sometimes it suddenly notices this temple on its back and stumbles, and then it starts either taking the temple apart brick by brick or frenziedly worshipping it, or building a different temple next to it in order to vilify it, but humankind never really understands what it’s dealing with, and after it despairs of making use of the temple in some way or other, it’s soon distracted by its own so-called vital needs. It starts dividing up all over again something that has already been divided up thirty-three times, crucifying somebody, glorifying somebody—but the temple just carries on growing and growing from century to century, from millennium to millennium, and it’s impossible either to destroy it or to ultimately abase it.