Michailopol’s demise had been as turbulent as its rise. There had been sixteen churches once — Orthodox and Catholic — and two synagogues as well. The services at the Armenian Orthodox church had attracted boys from far and near, like flies to honey, for there were no prettier girls than the Armenian ones.
Beg recalled the fistfights outside the church — fathers and brothers against the country bumpkins who were after their daughters and sisters.
The Armenian church, too, had disappeared long ago.
He parked in front of Tina’s Bazooka Bar and went in.
‘Pontus, darling,’ Tina said as he settled down at the bar. Ah, Tina Bazooka — sacred icons began to sweat when she was around. She caressed the back of Beg’s hand. Brothel manners never faded.
She had just come back from visiting her son, who lived with his grandmother in the south of the country. Tina put a plate of meatloaf in the microwave and tapped a beer for him. Switching on her mobile phone, she showed him pictures of the boy.
‘Amazing, how fast he’s grown,’ Beg said.
‘Next year he’s coming to live with me.’
Beg slid the phone back across the bar. Heart-shaped plastic charms dangled from its fuzzy fluorescent skin.
‘Sure, why not,’ he said. ‘We have everything here. Schools …’
‘Yeah, and besides that?’ she asked sardonically.
‘A swimming pool.’
‘Closed.’
‘Oh?’
‘We used to go swimming there with the girls. But not anymore.’
Beg searched his memory for another facility suitable for children. ‘Valentine Park,’ he said. ‘He can …’
‘Get chased through the woods by a rapist? Ha-ha.’
‘They’ve got a playground.’
‘He’s thirteen.’
‘So he can play soccer,’ Beg said, feeling acquitted.
Tina turned brusquely and walked to the far end of the bar. Beg realised he’d said something wrong, and then remembered — too late, jerk that he was — the boy’s foot. Tina had always blamed the deformity on the nuclear rain; her native village lay next to a notorious testing site. Her attempts to get the boy benefits for the victims of atomic testing had proven fruitless. Even today, outright monsters were being born, mutants; a clubfoot was nothing by comparison. It didn’t help either that the child had been born at Michailopol hospital, and probably conceived at the Morris Club.
Beg ate his meatloaf and drank his beer. He looked at Tina out of the corner of his eye. How did they grow them like that? A heavy gold cross wobbled on her bosom. Tina had left the business; like everyone else at the bar, Beg was consumed by regret.
The joke was one her customers passed on. ‘Take this bread, it is my body,’ Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples at the Last Supper. ‘Take this body, it’s how I earn my bread,’ Tina Bazooka told her customers.
When she opened the bar, most of those customers had followed her. Everyone thought her meatloaf was excellent, but her body would have pleased them a thousand times more.
It took some getting used to at first, but they all did their best.
In fact, Beg thought, the transition had been remarkably serene. No one made a fuss, maybe because they’d all had their piece of her.
CHAPTER FOUR. The abandoned village
They spread out silently among the houses. They ransack rooms, kitchens, and pantries, and call out to each other from darkened cellars. The tall man falls through a rotten wooden staircase. Nothing edible has been left behind; nothing to check their hunger. Cursing, Vitaly breaks off a table leg and smashes a room to bits. He swings the wood around savagely, until at last he breaks out in a cold sweat and shivers like a man in a fever. He falls to the floor, waves of nausea racking his body.
In an overgrown garden, the woman finds potato plants that have bolted. With her hands, she digs a few wrinkled little spuds out of the wet soil. Most of them are rotten, and the stinking juice stains her fingers black.
When they find a pair of apple trees at the edge of the village, they fetch the boy. The birds and insects haven’t eaten all the apples yet; there are still quite a few on the tree. Some of them are brown and flecked with mould; others, only wizened.
The boy tosses them down, and they eat old, spoiled apples until they can eat no more. The juice foams at their lips. The boy looks out over the rolling plains from that height, rips big bites from an apple, and laughs through his tears.
Later, one by one, they return from their forays. In a courtyard, they build a fire. The sky is dense and grey; the day is cold. The boy looks at his fellow travellers — dirty, starved apparitions — as though he is seeing them for the first time.
The tall man has found a huge iron lid; it will serve as his shelter at night. On his head he wears a helmet of thin ribs and fine netting. Once it was used to keep vegetables and fruit free of gnats.
The poacher hasn’t come back yet. They feed the fire with handfuls of dusty straw and planking from the high, dark shed in the courtyard. Once a low fire is burning well, they fill a dented pan with water and toss in the paltry potatoes. It takes an eternity before the first wisps of steam rise from the water’s surface. After a while, the woman whips the potatoes out of the pan, and the others watch as she divides them among them. They blow and let the potatoes dance across their fingertips, then gobble them up with skin and all, and burn their mouths.
The woman wants to stay in the village — one day’s rest, one dry night beside a fire — but the day is still young, and Vitaly, the poacher, and the tall man decide that they will move on. The man from Ashkhabad rinses his sore mouth with cold water.
They toss burning pieces of wood into the buildings. Before long, columns of smoke break through the roofs of sheds and houses, veined with dark-red flames. With their backs to the inferno, they leave the village.
They are already past the last houses when the boy turns and sees the smoke rising up against the sky. A bonfire — tongues of flame climbing above the rooftops. He grins. His insides cheer. The euphoria of destruction. To hell with all that rubbish.
In his pocket he finds the empty cigarette package. He tosses it on the ground and grinds it into the sand.
‘Dead,’ he whispers. ‘Dead.’
The others are almost out of sight by then; he can’t remain standing any longer. He turns his back on the burning village.
Out in front of him goes a hallucination: a raggle-taggle crew of oddballs hung with strange objects seized during their raids — the negro with a red rag around his head, the woman with the pan bobbing at her back, the tall man with the lid lashed to his own back, the plastic-screen helmet wobbling on his head. In his hand he holds a gnarled broomstick.
Despite the bitter disappointment, the village has given them new courage; they seem to be walking faster than before. This can’t be the only settlement in the surroundings. Communities are never that isolated. The next village becomes the focal point of their thoughts. They see tractors in the fields, smoking chimneys, cattle. The friendly beehives at the edge of town … All they have to do is walk there …
Above their heads, banks of cloud slide slowly together. Mother-of-pearl light glimmers through the cracks between. A gentle rain begins. The tall man holds the lid over his head.
Night falls before they can find the village of their dreams. They have seen the delicious mirage vanish step-by-step. Disheartened, they sit in the sand at twilight. The poacher is gone, out setting his traps. The boy is sensitive to the heaviness between them, to the coming storm; he looks at the faces one by one. Someone must bleed.
He takes an apple from his pocket and runs his fingers over the wrinkled skin. An apple: what a luxury that had seemed to them yesterday; what a meagre reward it is today.