It turned out that Bathsheba had got herself nailed by a jackass. Her huge rimed eyes simpered at me. She laid her head against my ribs and when I declined to scratch her poll or tug her bandy ears, snortled deeply in her throat and butted me. She'd have carried me alright. Donkeys didn't come gamer than Bathsheba. But I couldn't hold myself responsible. She was like a balloon, and the Orient is full of narrow doorways. What if I lost my temper and kicked her because she couldn't get through one, or because she'd been overtaken by some whim of motherhood that I hadn't comprehended?
So I said goodbye to her. First Goetz, then Bathsheba.
The skin-dealer went off into the Pamirs for the early crop of skins. Thus I became without friends, and that in a city where women were tricky.
Moreover, I found that my work was no longer so compelling without Goetz. The shambling old pedant! What a fuss he'd made about the simplest thing! But I missed him and the exactness of his methods and the gruff airing of his knowledge of an evening. Had I ever called him Hartwig? I didn't think so. We'd been Doig and Goetz to each other from the moment we'd met, in the library at the Darwin Club. I began to dwell on this. An opportunity had been lost—but for what? I grew listless and easily found reasons to stay in Samarkand, where I at least had some sort of company.
Neither last nor the least painful: I was kicked by a horse while walking through the registan or marketplace and suffered a fracture to my right tibia. I thought wrongly, This caps everything. I was so sorry for myself. Even when the Russian doctor came to see me at the Civilians Club and said, "If you think you're in a bad way, you should see how our soldiers are compelled to fight," I was convinced I'd had it for all practical purposes.
I longed for Elizaveta, to hold and consult. Letters were futile. She'd sent me only one, from the Pink House. My good and trusted friend, Kobulov the stationmaster, who was acting as my postman, had steamed it open and read it, probably aloud to his family. In it she told me how Nicholas, her half-brother, was thinning out the attic lodgers so as to reduce costs. Times were bad. He knew he wasn't acting honourably. Only two of them remained. One had made a pass at her. How should she respond?
"Why do women write such stuff?" I'd asked Goetz. "She's twenty-six and never been short of an answer. Why ask me? What's she after?"
He wriggled coyly, delighted that I'd taken him into my confidence. "She's lonely, just her brother with her and some servants . . . Oh yes, the hospital work, that has to be taken into account ... I don't know. She may want you to think she's lonely."
So I wrote back and told her to stab him to death. Rip, shoot, drain off his lust somehow, that was my advice.
At the time I'd thought, I should get over to Smolensk and bind her unto me. But my contract with the Academy of Sciences had a year and more to run. I believed it could wait.
Twenty
You know how people like to say frightening things solely in order to test how frightened they are themselves. One day the Club's outside porter said as he handed me my crutch, "Men who've been on the railway of late call themselves not travellers but survivors. Everything's collapsing. Even the pigs'll want to get out by the time this war is over. There'll be nothing left to show we were ever here. Mark my words, sir, not even an old sow wiping the mud with her tits."
Well, I thought, You're just a windy old man blowing off, and hopped round the corner to the Imperial Bank in Chernaevski Prospekt. This is what an invalid does in a cosmopolitan place like Samarkand when he's out of sorts. He goes to check on his money and have an agreeable conversation. The day has to be lived.
The bank was a pleasant villa with high, airy ceilings. The manager, a plump flowery gentleman from Odessa whose name was Simeonidis, did his business on the ground floor and lived with his family on the next.
He rose as I was shown in. We had some talk. But it was less casual than before. There was a lot of white round his eyes, which were as tight as buttons. I smelt bad news—but for whom? He started up again about the war. I cut him short. "Stop beating about the bush and tell me the worst." Sighing he pulled out of his desk a letter from the Academy.
"See, they actually bothered to write. They are honourable people. The money will be sent—but later. If they'd wanted to abscond, would they have written?"
That was how I heard that the Academy had stopped paying its collectors.
I was shocked. If I could be treated in this way by the Academy of Sciences no less, where would the rot halt? What other institutions might cease payment? The Empire itself—what would happen if Russia ran out of money? I searched for information in the banker's eyes. They were as black as boot polish and showed only my own reflection. I looked round his clever face for a clue. There was more going on there than I'd heard about so far. I thought, That letter's a smoke-screen. Then suddenly, You're about to jump ship. You've heard something on the bankers' grapevine. Kobulov gets one sort of news first, from the railway telegraph. But you, my friend, are first with the most vital news of all: what people are doing with their money. Perhaps, I thought, the Academy was not the only one to have stopped payment . . .
I considered his wife, whom I could hear playing the piano in the room above. Did she know what he's planning? Or is he going alone?
Out of the whole idea, that was what stuck: that he'd fixed something up with an Afghan trader and in a month would have become Mr. Michelis passing through Peshawar—looking for business opportunities, sir.
I closed on him. I picked a thread off his lapel and I said, "You're going to make a run for it. You know something I don't."
He looked at me blandly. The pudgy, manicured hand that held the letter was steady. His dark hair gleamed with an oily lotion. I took the letter from him. He bowed slightly.
Twenty-one
Mother said to me on the train carrying us into our English exile, "Come, I want to eat chocolates, and I need to be among my people."
She slipped her vanity case into the pocket of her stole, picked up the bag with her magazines and Einem chocolates, and set off down the palpitating corridor to the restaurant car. The carpet was green, a worn patch outside each door. Boltikov was airing himself in his doorway, taking effete puffs from his Northern Lights cigarette. He shrank his millionaire's stomach to let us pass; offered Mother a bow, inclining his head and no more. His lips crinkled to open a conversation—with regard to our charming party, I've no doubt—but Mother walked on, flapping away the perfumed odour of his tobacco.
Putting her hands behind her back, she waggled her jewelled fingers at me. I slipped my hand into hers, manoeuvring my palm until it was snug.
The candle shades were scalloped in rose. Our chairs were the same green as the corridor and had black piping. Mother straightened one of the shades and considered the menu in its silver frame.
Thinking of Boltikov, I said, "How do fat men bow correctly, to the Tsar, for instance?"
Absent-mindedly, poking through the chocolates on their yellow paper boatlets, she replied, "The very fat, the very old and the arthritic have special dispensations. Also those who've been wounded. When they extend the left leg, they're permitted to lean on it with their left arm. Sometimes they grip the left wrist with the right hand, as a support. I enjoy watching men bow. You can tell which are the arrogant and which the humble. Do they also abase their eyes? That's another point."
"What about left-handed men? Do they bow differently?"
She took out her tweezers and deftly pinched off the almonds and the caps of purple sugar and laid them out on the tablecloth in two ranks. She didn't stop doing this as she said, "But why should they? Ils ne sont pas frappes d'incapacite.'"
And then, "Boltikov is such a completely odious man, so irredeemably snobi ... If you ever have to bow, bow low. Always remember that. Make it good. Bow as if you yearned to kiss the soil upon which the man's standing, and do it slowly."
Seeing Simeonidis's paltry bow, which Mother would have deemed an insult, I recalled that railway scene in its entirety. He co
uld say anything he wanted but I knew he was far off. He'd reached the point of no longer caring what I thought of him.
I said, "I'll take Goetz's money as well as my own. Don't forget the interest at the new rate." Giving him no time to interrupt, I went on to specify the currencies I wanted it in and the denominations.
He smiled, which I took as acknowledgement that I'd been right. "Don't take the twenty-dinar note, the purple one. There are too many around. Traders are getting nervous. How would you like your monies, sir? Some people going on a journey sprinkle the larger notes through a sack of rag cotton. The shape of the sack is not associated with wealth. Or I can put them in a wrapping of canvas from the market, which is easier to carry—but is recognisable."
Then his lips went all smooth like marzipan and he said, "I'm told there's a white swallow nesting on the mosque of Ulug Beg. My instinct tells me that would be a great rarity, Mister Doig, sir. A man who was busy catching it would have less time to observe the follies of their fellow humans . . . Well worth the, er, effort ... of a keen naturalist ..." His voice fell away as a maid came in with two demi-tasses of sweet coffee.
When she'd gone he didn't return to the white swallow but began to tell me about the party that he and Mrs. Simeonidis were going to have to celebrate her name day. Everyone in Samarkand above the rank of lower captain was going to be invited. The governor and his staff, the important policemen, the jeweller . . . Vodka would be served in a separate room. For those who couldn't get their nerve up to break the law, the place would be swimming with champanski and the sweet, fiery white wine that was made by his friend Mr. Filatov.
"Shall I remind them that the vines responsible for their enjoyment came originally from the Rhine, from Germany? I think not. I want this party to be talked about favourably."
Above our heads Mrs. Simeonidis ceased playing. She let the piano lid fall with a thud. The floor creaked as she walked to the window.
Simeonidis coughed into his fist. "Actually I think our party will be talked of in Samarkand forever."
I thanked him for the information about the bird. He tried to pass me my crutch but I refused it, saying I'd sit where I was and watch him parcel my money.
Twenty-two
A train of Bactrian camels swayed down the long expanse of the marketplace, pushing to one side the traffic in donkeys, horses and small hooded carts. On one horse sat three men, the father having the saddle and thus guarding the four dead chickens that hung by their yellow feet from the pommel. Beneath the mosque walls were the barbers' stalls. A little apart were the fortune-tellers—then some musicians—then a man selling shawls, and cloth for turbans—then the birdcages containing the fighting quail, the canaries, and by itself a goshawk belled with silver that glared insanely at me as I passed. Amid the dusty heat and vendors of almond and pistachio cakes and the hadjis in green turbans and the multicoloured throng I advanced awkwardly to my favourite tea-house.
On the table was an earthenware pot holding a lilac tulip from which a hoverfly had just turned away. Before me rose the vast green and turquoise mosque of Ulug Beg. Mosses and flowery tuffets and stunted oleanders sprouted on its dilapidated wings. The flap of the tea-house awning cut off the top of its dome from my view.
My bad leg was resting on a chair. The flies were darting at me to drink from my sweat. From behind came the hum of chess games, the clack of dominoes, quarrels, theories and histories. Women went past in their long grey parandjas, faces obscured by veils of black horsehair. Their trencher-fed hips swayed lusciously and maddeningly.
I poured my tea from a pot stamped "Made in Benares." Sipping it, I wondered if the departure of Simeonidis would depend on the moon. Probably, if he was going to ride out. He didn't have the figure for a horseman. But how else was he to get to Peshawar? What a squawking there'd be that morning when Mrs. S. awoke alone . . .
Then I saw it. Not a swallow but a swift, Apus melba.
It was flying low and straight down the gay marketplace, as white as a snowflake, as fast as a bullet, its muscular angled wings drilling a tunnel through the air. It veered a point or two. It was flying directly at me. My heart awoke with a bang. The power! The beauty! O unspeakable God—on it flew, this albino, this priceless fluke, speeding at my eye, a blur of white against the turquoise of the tiles. It banked to avoid the awning and went screaming over my head, literally so, for this chee-chee-chee, a saw-edged scream, is the only language of the swift. A whiffle of windswept feathers, a flash of its purplish shanks tucked up against its belly—and it was gone, its wings curved like scimitars as it disappeared down the black throat of the covered bazaar.
That lightning should strike twice . . . my beetle and then this . . . but how was I to capture it? I beat the crutch against the table leg in my frustration.
A shadow took my light and stayed there. I looked up.
He was about twenty-five, one would have said a Mongolian. Square-faced, stocky, unsmiling. Brown, granular skin with a clump of long dark hairs on his chin. He was dressed in Russian working clothes: leather sandals, blue trousers and blouse, a loose cotton jacket. He had thick dark rolling hair, and eyes that fell away at the side. They were the knackiest eyes I'd seen in a man.
He appraised my leg. "You want that bird." No question mark.
I nodded. I was crazed for the albino. There couldn't be more than one in the world.
"Alive is not possible."
"What would I do with it alive? Put it in a cage—in prison?" His face was unreadable. He said, "If you want it you must pay me one hundred roubles in cash."
I said it was too much. How would we stand if he spoiled the plumage? But he'd been spying on me and had seen my expression as the swift went scorching over my head. He knew all about Goetz and myself, that we killed birds for museums.
He'd been to the library and discovered the correct Latin name for this swift. To rub it in, he told me the name in Hindi as well—badi ababee!. He said it was one hundred roubles regardless. There was only one price. He'd bring it to me in such a condition that I'd believe it to be still sleeping.
"You pay me now," he said. "By hand, not on the table."
I asked him his name. "Kobi." He'd been brought up by missionaries and so spoke excellent Russian.
"Without a past?" I said, feeling a kinship.
"My parents—dead. My past also. Only the future is left to me.
He refused my offer of tea and took the money. Then he left as noiselessly as he'd arrived, a matter of the disposition of shadows. I watched him thread a path down the marketplace, oozing through the crowd and the animals as water does between particles of soil. He spoke to no one; a solitary man, a killer making his way was the thought that reached me.
Twenty-three
Of course he got it. Shinned up onto the mosque roof and nabbed it on its nest. We cleaned and packed it together. Kobi had slender, agile fingers. He knocked up a little box for it—calling it a coffin with sly humour slipping from the corners of his liquorice eyes.
"What do you want now?" he said in his forthright way.
And I did have another requirement.
The Academy had abandoned me. My father's death had ceased to be a scourge. I had reached the end of my inherited momentum. Goetz had gone one way, Simeonidis was going another. I had a broken leg. During my bad hours I'd looked inside myself for additional stores of knowledge and found that in the matters of tranquillity and contentment, and love and friendship, I was destitute. All around me there was warfare, repression, and edginess. I was insufficient alone. It was time to get out of Samarkand and join my Russian family.
"I want to be your assistant," Kobi said. "I like that work."
I couldn't explain my feelings to him. We were too new to each other. I said that I was going to Smolensk, that I had kin there. "It's my home," I said, trying the word out. I thought of my childhood; of Elizaveta, of my cousins Nicholas and Viktor and of the Pink House. "Yes," I said with greater confidence, "I'm going home."
He didn't ask if he could come with me. What he said was that he'd need an hour to gather his belongings.
"Wait," I said, "I can only pay you when I have money."
"How else could it be?"
"So why would you come with me?"
"I'm young, call that my reason."
He returned with a bedroll containing clothing and a few more essentials. At his belt was a sheath knife. He showed it to me straight off—Sheffield steel, the best. His missionaries had given it to him when he left them. What for? He didn't yet know, but in saying it his eyes again gave me a squirt of humour and cruelty combined. Then we went to the station to see what was doing.
Trains were scarce. Passenger trains in particular had almost ceased to exist. We had my two ponies, my gun, some bits of baggage, and the last case of specimens for the Academy. My Imperial travelling papers proved useful, also the contact with Pavel Kobulov. On the basis of these we got passage on a military train, leaving Turkestan by Orenburg rather than the southern route. We found ourselves space in the horse wagons with the grooms.
The locomotive crept over the interminable steppe, panting not chugging, for which it was left with inadequate strength by the oppressive sun. We rolled back the sliding wooden doors on both sides of the wagon. It was an improvement, but we still fried. Soldiers would get off and walk beside the metals to give themselves something to do. We stopped frequently, God knows why, perhaps because the engine was boiling over. Then the men would catch up and climb aboard and recount what they'd seen and whom they'd spoken to, as if they'd been off on a month-long patrol. Whenever we crossed a river we'd halt to let the grooms form a line and fill their heavy wooden buckets with water for the horses. The heat distressed them terribly. They had to stand for the whole of those two weeks. Their ribs heaved metrically, while from their drooping miserable heads strings of dribble swung to the motion of the train, lengthened and eventually fell. We shovelled their dung over the side but as there was no bedding, their urine was absorbed by the planks. No amount of swabbing could remove the acrid stink. They drank prodigious quantities of water whenever we offered it to them, and developed sores.
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