And death came to Khazaria. Felled multitudes.
Some survived by cleverness; they used the stones to bludgeon the mice, then made fires from the parched weeds, roasted the mice, and ate them.
That’s what too good a harvest year does for you. No, for the poor Khazar, less is more. Just a taste, a splash of gruel in his bowl; leave gluttony to the Murzlas.
The next year it was announced that the Murzlas would save the people and lands from any excess, would take it on themselves. Would haul the surplus grain beyond the hills. Would take non-surplus goods too. All with a covert, sovereign aim: to make the mice multiply in the enemy’s barns, gnaw their bones, sap their strength. And our people would labor and thrive. A clever plan! And the Murzlas would get their just reward: privileges, blue flashers to attach to their mares’ tails, to clear their way on the high road.
If it weren’t for the Murzlas, all would be lost.
And for the Great Khagan too, of course.
Anything can happen. Drought or an excess of rain—both bring woe. Heat will destroy, cold will kill. Misfortune, all.
But worst of all, producing graves, widows, floods of tears, mountains of corpses, the stench of decay . . .
Is war.
Saat lies on his little hill, stares up at the falling star, thinks thoughts. Hoofbeats. He sits up, sees: A secret sotnya of the Khagan’s horsemen gallops by, in full conspiracy, hunched low over their horses’ withers, making not a sound. They swish their whips, gouging the sides of their horses’ bellies with their heels, urging them on, faster, faster. In their hands, torches of burning pitch.
In the morning a fire in Itil. Two villages burned to ashes, with their people.
The wind whirls bitter smoke across the steppe.
Children weep, wives wail. Men teem in the ashes, seeking their loved ones’ bones. Eyes vacant, dead.
There you have it, fruit of the falling star.
But even that fruit is but the seed of a graver woe.
The shamans disemboweled a duck, extracted its liver for fortunetelling. The liver said that those fires had been set by wicked Chechmeks nesting on high cliffs.
The duck’s liver never lies. Just to be sure, they mashed it with greens and ate it.
Sure enough, it was the Chechmeks.
In the morning, in the squares and bazaars the town criers spread the truth to the Khazar people. They recall and retell all the Chechmek wrongdoings of the past, the long enmity with our people. The Khagan’s words go around to all the households: We will not allow this insult to Khazar unity! We will subdue the evil Chechmeks, restore the eternal and proper order of things.
But for that, troops must be dispatched to the Tatar land, to the cliff-side nests where the Chechmeks lurk, boiling up evil in their cauldrons, honing their hatred on rough whetstones.
They even remember Saat, sniff out the overgrown path to his ragged tent. The requisitions man comes to confiscate all of Saat’s mares for military use. He even takes a little colt, tethers him to the back of his cart. The little creature’s legs are fragile, slender as reeds in the stream, they will break.
Saat wails: What do you need him for, what good is he for military transport? You can’t put anything on his tiny back—the thinnest Chinese silk handkerchief, much less a saddle—try it, it’ll weigh the little horse down to the ground! But the officer silences him, waves the scroll with the Khagan’s requisition order in Saat’s face. The man wants a cute little colt for his own children, is all. Such are the ways of war.
Saat sits, weeps. All night long, cursing the falling star. The star is close—any closer and it will singe his beard.
But his grief for the mares passes by morning. For Saat now has to grieve for himself.
A tysiachnik with a smooth round belly comes and mobilizes Saat, all of him, body and soul. Sends him into a slingshot regiment, issues him a sack on a string and a handful of stones—ammunition.
Troops amass in an endless throng.
Flutes whistle at dawn, the army sets off.
They march for a day, and Itil vanishes behind them.
By the roadside only small settlements. They march on through the night.
A light flickers, or there is only darkness. They march another day. The road leading through the steppe, vast, empty land on all sides, grass rustling in waves like the ocean.
No sign of plow, no trace of man, empty expanse, virgin earth!
Again night, a short rest, then back on the march.
Then the road comes to an end. The men march on over grassland, sun at their backs. March on and on.
After that Saat loses count of the days.
O how vast the Khazar lands! Walk your legs off to the hips, you’ll still not reach the end.
And nothing there. Emptiness. Pustota.
Saat stamps, jiggles his ammunition bag, thinks.
His body is strong but his head is sick. Too much thinking. Thoughts bubble up in his head, like gas in the stomach. Swell up more and more. His eyes bug out and his ears emit clouds of steam. God forbid he blurt something out—things are bad enough already.
Wondrous! In Itil you can’t squeeze through edgewise. Houses press right up against one another. Take turns breathing, there’s not enough oxygen to go around. Here, though, nothing.
Pustosh. Void.
Days on end, no human habitation. Woods, fields, steppe, ravines.
An animal might lope by, a bird in the distant sky.
Not a single Khazar soul, nothing human in sight.
What do we need all this land for? Take some. So much of it, all empty. Pustaya. Empty.
At last the vast horde reaches the cliffside nests of the Chechmeks, at the very edge of the Khazar world.
And the fighting begins.
The time has come. The Chechmeks must pay for their evil deeds. Their dwellings are made of clay and straw like the nests of little birds. The Khazars pulverize the nests with their stones and arrows. The heroic warriors clamber up the cliffs, build fires, and sling Chechmek children into the flames by their hands and feet. You will not forget, O seed of the enemy, the fires of Itil!
They eat meat, drink wine, mark their victory with a raucous celebration, and sink into slumber.
And the Chechmeks creep out of the cliff-side crevasses with their stone knives, slaughter the sentries, and hack off the heads of the sleeping Khazars. By morning the blood runs knee-deep.
Again they take the cliffs, send clouds of smoke into the cliff-side crevasses. The Chechmeks come out shrieking and biting like animals. Arrows soar through the air, spears crackle, corpses pile up in huge heaps. Ten Khazars fall on every square cubit of cliffside, but they take back the Chechmek heights.
But in the night the Chechmeks creep out again with their knives.
Where do they all come from? Do they dwell inside the very stone?
On and on they fight, two springs come and go.
Half the army lies in the earth, but they finally subdue the Chechmeks.
Defend the integrity of the Khazar land.
They choose the meanest Chechmek of all and make him chief, and he kisses the Khagan’s ring.
And then they start off for home. Bearing news to the new Khazar widows and orphans. Even the survivors aren’t whole, some missing an arm or leg. How can they live and provide for a family, crippled like that? Grief, pain, fear, surely the Khagan will care for these brave warriors.
But Saat survives, and with all his parts. Just an injury due to some friendly fire: a stone from a fellow Khazar sling that hit him on the head. Even before that his head hadn’t been all that perfect. It’s just a little worse now, that’s all. And he had had them before, those harmful thoughts. Living in his head like tapeworms in his ass.
Only now they’ve started to expand, gotten a little full of themselves.
Indulging themselves, in fact.
Saat drags himself along through Khazaria and there’s a scraping, a nagging between his ears.
And what did we expect to gain mucking around in all that Chechmek crap anyway? Like we needed their shitty cliff-sides when we have our own vast, rich, fertile land—as much as we could ever want, as much as God has gingerbread. Head out just a little ways from Itil, a verst’s walk, and it will unfold before you, all you could ever possibly need, open lands across all of Khazaria! Plows to lift, horses to ride, womenfolk to screw, and not enough men to do the job! But we went and laid down our bones among the stones of other lands. Poured out our blood, fertilized their earth with our flesh.
Is it devils luring us to our ruin,
or radiant God leading us to the throne of paradise?
Tell me, O Mother—O steppe grasslands, what will become of my Khazaria when a thousand springs have come and gone?
PART II
Samandar
THE DUTCH VISITORS
At six thirty in the morning in a semi-vacant, meagerly furnished cage of a room, an efficiency apartment on the seventh floor of a big prefab building on Dybenko Street, in Vseyoly—such being the name of this bedroom suburb of the Venice of the North, the Northern Palmira, Athens, Babylon, and Itil all rolled together—whose windows look out on an identical prefab building with walls that had once been sky blue in color like the Cabriolet in the movie Knocking on Heaven’s Door, but are now faded and peeling, at six thirty A.M., when all is silent except for the loud cawing of crows, and people still have that preoccupied and sullen morning look about them, the air suddenly fills with music.
A six-piece audio system, complete with subwoofer and surround sound, screeches and lets out a howl that rends the silence of the morning like a burglar’s penknife slicing through an old woman’s soiled mattress in quest of family heirlooms and cash set aside from her pension to pay for her funeral; yes, a mighty chorus erupts, emitting a great gush of vocal sound:
Arise, ye branded with a curse,
Enslaved and starving rabble,
At last our reason seethes and stirs,
And arms itself for battle!*
In a corner of the room, on the cold north side, on ancient lumpy linoleum that bears the traces not only of the passage of time but the effects of the unique non-Euclidean geometry of the epoch of advanced Socialism, is strewn a disorderly pile of blankets, on which a man lies sprawled like some Parisian bum. He stirs, rolls over, and leaps abruptly to his feet.
Leaps to his feet and immediately doubles over, clutching his aching side with one hand; with the other hand he rubs his face, blotchy from sleep, its features blurred and indistinct, physiognomy dubious at best. Hunched over, bowlegged, he totters with uneven, splayed steps out of his room into the minuscule foyer, whose entire square footage is taken up with two pairs of shoes, proceeds into the bathroom, stops in front of the dim mirror, and straightens up, relatively speaking.
Behold Maximus Semipyatnitsky, leading import specialist, microchip in the great mainframe processor of economic globalization, irresponsible tenant and debtor, signatory of loan number 17593876/LD-8367, and also of loan number 84989874-XXVI, and also of loan number GHM02057585485433498, though, as concerns the latter, already long since in arrears. Also, too, holder of a bank account containing a measly one thousand rubles, longing in vain for a royalty transfer from Portugal, an honorarium payment from the journal Eurasian Literature, and a disbursement from the Denis Davydov Prize Committee; writer, novice in perpetuity, forever young, of whose youth, however, his own bones and joints (not to mention his worn-out internal organs, first and foremost, his liver, et cetera) are unfortunately unaware.
“Aina me,” thought Semipyatnitsky. “Aina me tulm bylat sheikel rastan. Karan du khalim chovichi duon sakhyz patalakon gydy, chevataro mukham khyn dez laol, kemam du kan terekat. Faran kulguz etu, faran bumolchi khotamor. Serkel. Buvakhi posturanzhi paiteli, vongaa du karam serkel.”
Semipyatnitsky turned the blue-handled faucet, filled his cupped palms with water, and, snorting like a horse, splashed his flat face. The cold water rinsed off the remains of sleep, and Semipyatnitsky instantly forgot the language in which he had just been thinking.
“What the devil?” Semipyatnitsky opined.
The abracadabra still remained, in the form of a jumble of sounds rattling around in his head, but their sense had evaporated. All Maximus could recall, or maybe he knew it from somewhere already, was that serkel meant “white house.” What house had he recalled that morning, why it was white, and what any of it had to do with Maximus Semipyatnitsky, leading import specialist, and all the rest of it, see above, remained a mystery.
The moon was waxing. During the time of the waning moon, Maximus’s facial hair grew slowly and reluctantly. He could shave every other day. But the moon was waxing, and the bristle had sprouted overnight and was prickling his palms as they washed his face. Any other morning he could yield to sloth and skip shaving; he could just scrape off the one longish strand of hair that sprouted out of a papilloma on his left cheek, but leave the stubble on for a Bruce Willis look. Cold Plus was not all that picky about how the staff in the Import Department looked; they really didn’t care. But today Maximus was supposed to meet the Dutch partners, and he needed to make an effort.
Maximus turned the red faucet, filled the sink with hot water, lathered his face with shaving cream, and mowed even rows into his chin and cheeks with a plastic disposable razor. When he was finished, he brushed his teeth meticulously, turned on the water in the shower, slipped off his boxers and tossed them directly into the basket under the sink, then stepped into the shower, sliding the plastic curtain closed behind him to protect the floor from spatters.
The Red Banner Chorus, which served as his standard wake-up call, continued to roar in the other room, their song now punctuated by the thumps of the neighbors banging angrily on the hot water pipes. Shower over, Maximus wrapped the towel around his dripping waist, went back into his room, and turned off the music. The whole building was awake now.
Maximus had gotten up earlier than usual so that he could pick up the Dutch visitors and get them to the office on time. Yesterday he’d been told that there were three of them and that they had checked into the Corinthia Nevsky Palace Hotel. Maximus immediately objected: He could fit three people in his car, but where was he supposed to put their luggage? The trunk could hold only one suitcase. But he had no choice; no one else could do the job. He’d have to figure something out when he got there.
Maximus dressed and boiled some water in the electric teapot, mixed a cup of instant coffee in his thermos, added some sugar and twisted on the lid, checked the contents of his briefcase, and crammed the coffee in along with everything else. Finally he slipped on his shoes, set the burglar alarm, and went out, locking both doors behind him.
The elevator arrived immediately. Maximus rode down to the first floor and stepped outside. The fresh air energized him, bringing on a light, celebratory mood. Such is the effect of morning sometimes: All that has come before remains in the past, out there beyond the dark Styx of the night, a million light years away, beyond the galaxy of sleep. A new day has arrived; everything will be different now. Yesterday’s failures will be successes today; whatever caused the sorrows of the past will no longer stand in your way. Quite the opposite: What you’ve been waiting for so long will finally come to pass, roaring in on an express train from the Province of Joy, tumbling exuberantly into your life with an armload of red roses and fistfuls of greenbacks.
Such is the effect, sometimes, of a new day.
Or could it be the effect of the pink pill that Maximus had swallowed just after brushing his teeth?
In his inspired state of mind Maximus cranked up the radio, pulled out of the parking lot, and started off in the direction of the hotel, periodically lifting the thermos of coffee from the cupholder between the two front seats to take a sip.
If you’ve ever stayed in the Nevsky Palace Hotel in Petersburg you know that it’s located right on Nevsky Prospect, just before it crosses Liteyny. It was too early for there to be much traf
fic, and Maximus made it to the hotel in under thirty minutes. But there were no parking spots left on Nevsky. As he passed the hotel on the opposite side of the street, Maximus spotted an open space right in front of the entrance, but by the time he U-turned at the stoplight and wheeled back, it had been already taken by a long, sleek white limousine.
“What the devil?” For the second time that morning Maximus blurted out the name of the unclean spirit, and slipped his automobile in between the limousine and a bus stop. He waited ten minutes, until it was precisely the time he’d agreed to meet the Dutch visitors, then clicked on his hazards, got out, locked the car, and made his way into the hotel lobby.
They weren’t down yet. Maximus paced back and forth by the glass doors, checking at the end of each lap to be sure his car was all right. A bus could come along and crush his tiny vehicle at any moment. Or else the demonic hordes of the traffic police could summon their hellish tow truck, every driver’s nightmare, and drag his darling off to the impoundment lot . . . from which it would be about as difficult to retrieve as to extract a soul from Hades after it had made its descent.
At last three thin, young-looking men appeared at the front desk and began to check out. Maximus recognized them immediately and tried to catch their eye, smiling, moving closer, holding out his right hand:
“Good morning!” he said in his best English. “My name is Maximus, I’m taking you from here to our office.”
“Oh, great! Hello, I’m Peter. You wrote me several e-mails.”
“Yeah, nice to meet you, Peter.”
“Nice to meet you too, Maximus. Here are my two colleagues, Nick and Joseph.”
“Hello, Nick! Nice to meet you, Joseph.”
The two silent Dutch colleagues smiled broadly at him, baring their glistening white metal-and-ceramic-capped teeth.
“My car is right here, near the entrance. The only problem is your luggage. I’m afraid my car is too small for three big suitcases, if you have any.”
The Maya Pill Page 9