Semyon and I occupied the large loggia on the second floor. It was cosy in there, it let the wind through better and it had wicker furniture – perfect for hot weather.
‘Number one,’ said Semyon, taking a bottle of Smirnovskaya vodka out of a plastic bag with an advert for Danone kids’ yoghurt on the side.
‘Is that good?’ I asked doubtfully. I don’t regard myself as a vodka expert.
‘I’ve been drinking it for more than a hundred years. And it used to be far worse than it is now, believe me.’
The bottle was followed out of the bag by two plain glasses, a two-litre jar with pickles floating in brine under its flat tin lid and a large cellophane bag of sauerkraut.
‘What about something to drink with it?’ I asked.
‘You don’t drink anything else with vodka, my boy,’ said Semyon, shaking his head. ‘Only with the fake stuff.’
‘There’s always something new to learn.’
‘You’ll learn this lesson soon enough. And there’s no need to worry about the vodka, Chernogolovka village is in the territory I patrol. I know this wizard who works in the distillery there, small fry, not particularly nasty. He gets me the right stuff.’
‘An exchange of petty favours,’ I commented.
‘No exchange. I pay him money, all honest and above board. It’s our private business, nothing to do with the Watches.’
Semyon deftly twisted the cap off the bottle and poured us half a glass each. His bag had been standing on the veranda all day, but the vodka was still cold.
‘To good health?’ I suggested.
‘Too soon for that. To us.’
When he’d sobered me up that afternoon, he must have done a thorough job and not just removed the alcohol from my bloodstream, but all the metabolic side-products as well. I drank the half-glass without even shuddering, and was amazed to discover that vodka could taste good after the heat of a summer day, not only after a winter frost.
‘Well now,’ said Semyon with a grunt of satisfaction, settling down more comfortably. ‘We should drop a hint to Tiger Cub that a pair of rocking chairs would be good up here.’
He took out his appalling Yavas and lit up. When he spotted the annoyance on my face he said:
‘I’m going to carry on smoking them anyway. I’m a patriot, I love my country.’
‘I’m a patriot too, I love my health,’ I retorted.
Semyon chuckled.
‘There was one time this foreigner I knew invited me to go round to his place,’ he began.
‘A long time ago?’ I asked, playing along.
‘Not really, last year. He invited me round so I could teach him how to drink Russian-style. He was staying in the Penta hotel. So I picked up a girlfriend of mine and her brother – he was just back from prison camp, with nowhere to go – and off we went.’
I imagined what the group must have looked like and shook my head.
‘And they let you in?’
‘Yes.’
‘You used magic?’
‘No, my foreign friend used money. He’d laid in plenty of vodka and snacks, we started drinking on the thirtieth of April and finished on the second of May. We didn’t let the maids in and we never turned the television off.’
Looking at Semyon in his crumpled, Russian-made check shirt, scruffy Turkish jeans and battered Czech sandals, I could easily picture him drinking beer poured out of a three-litre metal keg. But it was hard to imagine him in the Penta.
‘You reprobates,’ I said, appalled.
‘Why? My friend was very pleased. He said now he understood what real Russian drunkenness was all about.’
‘What is it about?’
‘It’s about waking up in the morning with everything around you looking grey. Grey sky, grey sun, grey city, grey people, grey thoughts. And the only way out is to have another drink. Then you feel better. Then the colours come back.’
‘That was an interesting foreigner you found yourself.’
‘Sure was!’
Semyon poured the vodka again – this time not filling the glasses so full. Then he thought twice and filled them right up to the top.
‘Let’s drink, my man. Here’s to not having to drink in order to see the blue sky the yellow sun and all the colours of the city. Let’s drink to that. We go in and out of the Twilight and we see that the other side of the world isn’t what everyone else thinks it is. But then, there’s probably more than one other side. Here’s to bright colours!’
I downed half my glass, dumbfounded.
‘Don’t wimp out, kid,’ Semyon said without changing his tone.
I drained my glass and followed the vodka with a handful of the sweet-and-sour cabbage.
I asked him:
‘Semyon, why do you behave like this? Why do you need to shock people with this image of yours?’
‘Those are very clever words, I don’t understand them.’
‘But really?’
‘It’s easier this way, Antosha. Everyone looks after himself the best way he can. This is my way.’
‘What should I do, Semyon?’ I asked, without explaining what I meant.
‘Do what you ought to do.’
‘And what if I don’t want to do what I ought to do? If our bright, radiant truth and our watchman’s oath and our wonderful good intentions stick in my throat?’
‘There’s one thing you’ve got to understand, Anton,’ said the magician, crunching a pickle. ‘You ought to have realised it ages ago, but you’ve been tucked away with those machines of yours. Our Light truth may be big and bright, but it’s made up of lots and lots of little truths. And Gesar may have a forehead a yard wide and the kind of experience you could never even dream of. But he also has haemorrhoids that have been healed by magic, an Oedipus complex and a habit of rejigging old schemes that worked before to make them look new. That’s just for the sake of example, I don’t really know what his oddities are, he’s the boss after all.’
He took out another cigarette and this time I didn’t try to object.
‘Anton, I’ll tell you what the problem is. You’re a young guy, you join the Watch and you’re delighted with yourself. At last the whole world is divided up into black and white! Your dream for humanity has come true, now you can tell who’s good and who’s bad. So get this. That’s not the way it is. Not at all. Once we all used to be together. The Dark Ones and the Light Ones. We used to sit round the campfire in our cave and look through the Twilight to see where was the nearest pasture with a grazing mammoth, sing and dance, shooting sparks from our fingers, zap the other tribes with fireballs. And as an example, just to be entirely clear, let’s say there were two brothers, both Others. Maybe when the first one went into the Twilight he was feeling well fed, maybe he’d just had sex for the first time. But for the other one it was different. Some green bamboo had given given him stomach-ache, his woman had turned him down because she said she had a headache and she was tired from scraping animal skins. And that’s how it started. One leads everyone to the mammoth and he’s satisfied. The other demands a piece of the trunk and the chief’s daughter into the bargain. That’s how we became Dark Ones and Light Ones, Good and Evil. Pretty basic stuff, isn’t it? It’s what we teach all the Other children. But whoever told you it had all stopped?’
Semyon leaned towards me so abruptly that his chair cracked.
‘That’s the way it was, it still is and it always will be. For ever, Antosha. There isn’t any end to it. Today if anyone runs riot and sets off through a crowd, doing Good without authorisation, we dematerialise him. Into the Twilight with him, he’s a hysterical psychopath, he’s disturbing the balance, into the Twilight. But what’s going to happen tomorrow? In a hundred years? In a thousand? Who can see that far? You, me, Gesar?’