He recalled how, a week before he left, he had carved out a few hours, taken Heiger’s limousine with the bulletproof windows, and hit the road to Uncle Yura’s place. And what a time they had, drinking together in the large village house that was clean and bright, with a delicious scent of mint, smoke from the hearth, and freshly baked bread. They drank moonshine, snacked on piglet in aspic and crunchy home pickles of a kind that Andrei hadn’t eaten in God only knew how long, they gnawed on lamb ribs, dipping the pieces in a sauce suffused with the scent of garlic, and then Uncle Yura’s wife, Marthe, a buxom Dutch woman, who was pregnant for the third time already, brought in a whistling samovar that Uncle Yura had bought for a cartload of grain and a cartload of potatoes, and they spent a long time staunchly and substantially drinking tea with some amazing kind of jam—they sweated and panted, wiped their wet faces with embroidered towels, and Uncle Yura kept mumbling, “Things are fine, guys, life’s pretty tolerable now. Every day they march five parasites from the camp over here to me, I reeducate them with labor, and I don’t spare the effort, you know… If need be, I just poke them in the teeth, but they stuff their bellies full here, they eat the same as I do, I’m not some kind of blood-sucking exploiter…” And when they were saying good-bye, as Andrei was already getting into the car, Uncle Yura squeezed Andrei’s hand in his huge paws that seemed to have turned into two great callouses and tried to catch Andrei’s eyes as he said, “You’ll forgive me, Andrei, I know you will… I’d abandon everything, I’d abandon my woman… But I can’t abandon those guys—that’s something I can’t allow myself to do,” and he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb in the direction of two white-haired little boys with no more than a year between them, who were pummeling away at each other behind the porch—but quietly, so that no one would hear…
Andrei looked back. He couldn’t see the camp anymore; the heat haze had hidden it. The stuttering of the motor only faintly reached him—as if it were coming through cotton wool. Izya was walking alongside Pak, waving the map under his nose and shouting something about scale. Pak wasn’t actually arguing. He just smiled, and when Izya tried to stop, in order to unfold the map and demonstrate what he was thinking, Pak delicately took him by the elbow and led him on. A serious man, no doubt about it. Other things being equal, he could definitely be relied on. I wonder what his beef is with Heiger? They’re completely different people, that much at least is clear…
Pak had studied at Cambridge and he had a PhD. On returning to South Korea, he took part in some kind of student protests against the regime, and Syngman Rhee clapped him in jail. He was released by the Korean army in 1950, and the newspapers wrote about him as a genuine son of the Korean people, who hated Syngman Rhee’s clique and the American imperialists. He became a deputy president of the university, and a month later he was clapped in jail again, where he was held without any charges being brought until the landing at Chemulpo, when the jail came under fire from the First Cavalry Division, which was pushing hard toward the northeast. Seoul was sheer hell on Earth, and Pak didn’t expect to survive—and then he was offered the chance to participate in the Experiment.
He had arrived in the City a long time before Andrei, run through twenty different professions, and of course found himself in conflict with the mayor and joined an underground organization of intellectuals that supported Heiger at the time. Something happened between him and Heiger. For some reason or other, the large group of underground oppositionists left the City two years before the Turning Point and moved away to the north. They were lucky: 350 kilometers from the City they discovered a “time capsule” in the ruins—a huge metal tank, packed to overflowing with all sorts of cultural artifacts and examples of technology. It was a good spot, with water and fertile soil, right beside the Wall—so they settled there.
They knew nothing about what had happened in the City, and when the expedition’s armor-plated tractors arrived, they thought they had come for them. Fortunately only one man was killed in the furious, brief, and absurd skirmish. Pak recognized Izya, an old friend of his, and realized the fighting was a mistake… And afterward he asked to join up with Andrei. He said that his motivation was curiosity, that he had been planning a trek to the north for a long time but the emigrants didn’t have the resources for it. Andrei didn’t entirely trust him, but he took him along. He thought Pak’s knowledge would come in handy, and Pak really had been useful to him. He had assisted the expedition in every way he could and had always been friendly and obliging with Andrei—and even more so with Izya, his old friend—but it was impossible to get him to speak frankly. Not even Izya, let alone Andrei, could discover where Pak had obtained so much mythical and real-world information about the road ahead, why he had tagged along with the expedition, and what he thought in general—about Heiger, about the City, about the Experiment… Pak never made conversation on abstract subjects.
Andrei stopped, waited for his rear guard to catch up, and asked, “Well, have you agreed what exactly we’re interested in?”
“What exactly?” said Izya, finally unfolding his map. “Look…” and he started pointing with his black-edged fingernail. “Right now, we’re here. That means… one, two… in six city blocks there should be a square. There’s a big building of some kind there, probably something to do with government. We definitely have to get in there. Well, and if something interesting turns up along the way… Ah yes! It would be interesting to get here too. It’s quite a long way, but the scale here’s not worth a damn, so we can’t tell—maybe it’s all pretty close… See, it says ‘Pantheon.’ I just love pantheons.”
“Well now…” said Andrei, adjusting his automatic. “We can do it like that, of course… So we’re not going to look for water today, then?”
“It’s a long way to water,” Pak said in a low voice.
“Yes, brother,” Izya put in. “The water’s a long way off… See what they show here—a water tower… Is it here?” he asked Pak.
Pak shrugged. “I don’t know, but if there is any water left in this neighborhood, it can only be there.”
“Uh-huh,” Izya drawled. “It’s a pretty long way, about thirty kilometers; we can’t get there and back in one day… Of course, there’s the scale… Listen, why do you want water right now? We can go for the water tomorrow, the way we agreed… we’ll drive there, right?”
“All right,” said Andrei. “Let’s go.”
They walked side by side now, and no one said anything for a while. Izya kept twisting his head around and seemed to be sniffing at the air, but nothing of any interest turned up, either on the left or the right. Three- or four-story houses, sometimes rather beautiful. Broken-out window panes. Some windows boarded up with warped sheets of plywood, and half-ruined flower boxes on balconies. Lots of houses entwined in coarse, dusty ivy. A large store, with huge display windows that had somehow survived, too dusty to see through, although the doors had been smashed in… Izya darted away at a jog, glanced inside, and came back again.
“Empty,” he announced. “All smashed to hell.”
Some kind of public building—maybe a playhouse, maybe a concert hall, or maybe a movie theater. Then another store—with the display window cracked right across—and yet another store across the street… Izya suddenly stopped, drew his breath in noisily through his nose, and raised a dirty finger.