He straightened up and listened, wiping away the sweat with the back of his hand.
"Sirodjiddin! Oy! Sirodjiddi-i-i-in!"
The voice was shrill with fury.
Makushin flung the axe down beside the pile of broken crates and walked unhurriedly to the rear door.
"There he is!" Fat Kasym bawled, shaking his podgy fists. "There he is, the mutton-head. The wrecker! The pilyat! The devil sent you down upon my head!"
"What's all the yelling about?" Makushin asked, involuntarily retreating.
"What's all the yelling about?" Fat Kasym's voice rose to a shriek. "He asks what's all the yelling about! I always said that only the Pamir are bigger idiots than the Russians! Did you or did you not put the can of cooking oil here? I am asking, did you?"
The interior of the pie shop was in semi-darkness — the light bulb had gone long since, and on this rainy morning such light as filtered through the low wide window above the counter through which passers-by bought Fat Kasym's pies made matters little better.
"Did you put it there?" Kasym continued relentlessly. "Did you?"
As his eyes adjusted, Makushin made out a glistening puddle like a dusty mirror on the floor.
"Eight litres! You will pay me for those eight litres! You will pay to the last kopek!"
"You should look where you're going," Makushin answered. "It always stands there, that can. Ask Farkhod if you like."
Farkhod continued imperturbably turning over the pies sizzling in the frying pan.
"I think it doesn't matter where you put that godforsaken can," he pronounced. "I'd just like it out of my sight. The damned thing is always underfoot."
"Bastards," Fat Kasym said in an unexpectedly level tone. "You will be the ruin of me..." From the tray on which Farkhod had just arranged a dozen newly cooked pies he seized one which was still steaming and oozing oil, tossed it from one hand to the other a few times, blowing on his fingers, then quickly stuffed it in his mouth and, predictably, burned himself. He grunted, his bulging eyes rotating like olives rolling on a saucer.
Makushin sighed and went back outside. Fat Kasym was a decidedly nasty piece of work. Not like Farkhod. Nothing rattled Farkhod. Farkhod, for instance, would never complain he was running out of firewood for the stove. Kasym could yell as much as he liked, but Farkhod was coolly professional; he would simply squat down beside the dying brazier and whistle to himself. He was remarkable.
Makushin split another crate, knocking out two of the sides and taking it apart for the slats.
People didn't call him Sergey any more, not even Seryozha, but Sirodjiddin. His surname hadn't changed though — it remained Makushin, but even here the stress, which had been on the second syllable, was now on the last, as if it were a Tajik name. In any case, if you worked in a pie shop in the Putov Bazaar no one was going to need your surname unless you were found dead beside the garbage bins. Until then, nobody gave a damn what you used to be called.
The door creaked and slammed shut.
"Right, that'll do," Fat Kasym said grumpily, chomping on what remained of his pie. "Look what a pile you've got already. Stop doing that. You'd do better slicing onions. Do you hear?"
Makushin shrugged and leaned the axe against the chopping block.
"Right," he said. "Onions it is."
"We need them," Fat Kasym said with a sigh. "Although we've had no customers at all today. It's past eight and nobody's bought a single pie. Eh?"
Makushin shrugged.
"Then they'll come in droves and there won't be any pies!" Kasym added rattily. "Am I right?"
"Absolutely right," he nodded. "We need to keep cooking. Before you know it they'll have bought up a second baking."
"If Faiz looks in, tell him..." Kasym pushed the embroidered tyubeteyka to the back of his head with one finger and scratched his forehead. "Oh, screw him. Don't tell him anything. He can come back another time, it will do him no harm. That's it, I'm off!"
Makushin nodded.
The onions were in a greasy, unreliable-looking cardboard box. He scooped out fifteen or so and began peeling them rapidly, throwing the skins on the clay floor and tossing the peeled onions into a chipped enamel bucket.
"What's this," Farkhod asked insinuatingly. "Again accursed Kasym is making you peel onions?"
"Yes," Makushin sighed, smiling wryly. It was a game they had played many times before.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" Farkhod commiserated, shaking his head. "Why did poor Sirodjiddin come from Moscow. Why did he come to work for Fat Kasym!"
Farkhod supposed he was goading Makushin artfully. Makushin didn't let on that he was immune to these pinpricks, and sometimes he played along.
"Don't go on!" he said, chucking an onion into the bucket. Dong!
"You could be in Moscow now!" Farkhod cheered up visibly, and his voice became firmer, its sing-song intonation more pronounced. "No Fat Kasym to argue with! No damn onions, no damn oil, no damn meat! A Russian wife!" Farkhod rolled his eyes and shook his head, enraptured once again by the images conjured up in his mind's eye. "A Ru-ussian wi-ife! Oooh, dear!" He opened his eyes and murmured in deep perplexity, "Why, why?"
Makushin sighed and chucked another onion in the bucket. Dong!
Why, why? Oddly enough, he hadn't been able to explain that even to his Russian ex-wife.
Two and a half years ago he had come to Hurramabad on a research trip. The plane landed and taxied along for ages with its engines whining before coming to a halt. The engines stopped. They were invited to disembark... How could you explain what happened next? When he stepped down wide-eyed on to that scorching alien concrete he had the distinct impression that everything here was strangely familiar, even the heat which, that first moment, felt like a poultice slapped over the eyes he had screwed up from the unexpectedness of it, and the rectangular sugar-loaf terminal building, the tickly smell of the dust, and the hazy outline of the hills beyond the airfield, their summits blurring into the brown sky. He had thrown back his head and, frowning painfully, glimpsed the merciless disk of a sun which seemed to stand not for life but for death.
Dong!
"Farkhod, how many onions do you need?" Makushin asked.
"I don't know," Farkhod shrugged. "Keep peeling, they'll all get used. I'll finish frying these, then get the dough sorted. There's a long day ahead."
"There may be a long day ahead," Makushin growled, "but we haven't sold a single pie up till now, and it's past eight o'clock."
"They'll get sold!" Farkhod said, winking. "Don't you worry. When those people get hungry they'll come and buy them all! Oh, Moscow, Moscow! Eh, Sirodjiddin?"
He began to sing dolefully:

"You are a birdbrain, Farkhod!" Makushin said, in order not to break the rules.
Dong!
A week later he had returned to Moscow to find that while he had been away his native city had mysteriously faded. Everything that had been vivid and significant had sunk into nondescript triviality and he just couldn't settle back in. A month later somebody from his department was again needed to fly out to Hurramabad. There was a tacit assumption that Makushin would not be sent to such a backwater twice in one year. Levushkin was resigned to going, and had already sighed and cursed and filled in an expenses claim form for the trip when Makushin suddenly blurted out at a departmental meeting that actually it wasn't that big a pain; he didn't mind going a second time, and anyway the second time things should be more straightforward as he would know what he was doing.
And two weeks after his second departure he sent a telegram informing them he had no objection to staying on until the experiments were completed.
"All right, all right, don't take it the wrong way," Farkhod said. "But all the same, let me get this straight. Now you have a Tajik wife, right? And before that you had a Russian wife? No, it's the truth, right?"
"Right," said Makushin. "I had a Russian wife."
"Well, that's what I just can't understand," Farkhod sighed, plucking the pies that were ready from the smoking pan. "You had it all, you really had it all. Now me, I've got a Tajik wife too, but I never had a Russian one, and I never will either."
"Don't let it get to you," Makushin counselled. "You aren't missing too much."
"You mean," Farkhod said with sudden interest, "what you're saying is that they are all just the same?"
"Well, I wouldn't altogether say that," Makushin weighed the matter. "No, they're not all exactly the same."
Actually, he wasn't too sure.
He chucked another onion in the bucket. Dong!

Makushin had not returned to Moscow when the experiments were completed. By then Moscow no longer existed for him; over the last six months it had steadily receded; everything to do with it had grown dim, had flickered out, become inert and lifeless, until finally Moscow was a mere speck on the horizon, or perhaps in a watering eye.
Moscow no longer existed, and seemed never to have existed, and because of that he felt no regrets. At first, to be sure, he was troubled by dreams and by the letters from his wife. She genuinely did not understand what had happened. He did not reply to them, since he couldn't explain anything to her, or to anyone else. How were you to explain his inexplicable certainty that beneath these skies he had lived an earlier life in which he had spoken a different language and been happy? He hadn't replied to her sixth and last letter either. A year later he did try one time to remember her face, but could not. Dreams still came unbidden sometimes, but by then it was only in these dreams that he still spoke Russian.
"No," Farkhod suddenly said in a different tone of voice. "No, I don't understand! Think about it. Suppose I am a respected man, a scientist, going around with a briefcase... I have a Russian wife so white-skinned, with such blue eyes. And children, yes? Am I going to throw all that away to come and work in Fat Kasym's pie shop?" He banged his wire basket down on the food preparation table. "Am I crazy, or what?"
"So who's crazy?" Makushin asked. "You think I am?"
"How should I know," Farkhod muttered.
Makushin shrugged.
The truth of the matter was that he had not planned on working in Fat Kasym's pie shop. He had intended to work at the Institute. It made sense. He had been coming there on research trips, and one day he would just stay. He really wasn't that bad a researcher. They should have welcomed him.
He had thought for a long time about how best to approach the matter. For some time he hadn't much cared for the Institute's director, Fazliddin Khodjaevich. The man was fairly unprepossessing, although this had not been immediately apparent. In the beginning Makushin had taken his florid courtesy for kindheartedness.
The day before he flew back from his first short research visit he was invited to supper. It was only later he realised what a laughingstock they had made of him. Yet the invitation had been their initiative: there had been no angling on his part. Indeed he had been ill able to afford the time. He was flying back to Moscow the next day, and as always something had gone wrong with the rapid analysis machine for no apparent reason. But no. Fazliddin Khodjaevich had sent the Institute's registrar, Alisher, round to invite him, and Alisher had piled on the pressure. It was Fazliddin Khodjaevich himself who was inviting him. Fazliddin Khodjaevich wanted to give expression to... Fazliddin Khodjaevich wanted to strengthen the links... It would be quite wrong to refuse! Makushin capitulated. He supposed he would be taken out to a restaurant or possibly to the director's home, but for some reason it was to Alisher's house that they went, where everything was in place.
Apparently, there is in this world a sophisticated pleasure to be derived from making a fool of a man, and knowing that not only is he unaware of what you are up to, but is actually under the impression that your derision is the height of hospitality. If Makushin had not later stayed in Tajikistan, if he had not insisted on squeezing himself into a foreign skin which rankled to this day, he would have remained in blissful ignorance of how they had crucified him, their drunk and happy guest, at the table of hospitality. He was a foreigner, an outsider, he didn't belong. He failed to register even ten percent of the overtones with which their words resonated; he saw only what was on the surface. They played their game with him as if he were an insect blindly crawling over a puzzling glass surface which others could see through.
When he fell back on his cushion, glutted after enjoying an exotic lesson on how to eat plov without the aid of a knife and fork and aware that the intake of even one more grain of rice would cause him to burst, Fazliddin Khodjaevich had smiled sardonically, blinked his tortoise eyelids, and said disapprovingly,
"Eat, Sergey Alexandrovich, eat. Why are you not eating?"
As if setting an example, he reached out to the plov. He kneaded a plug of rice, rolling it to right and left along the side of the plate, engaged a small piece of meat, airily threw back his head and with a practised movement of his thumb deftly transferred the package so meticulously prepared into his mouth.
Makushin gulped involuntarily. A smirking Alisher covered his mouth with his fist as if afraid he might burst out laughing. He too gestured invitingly:
"Eat!"
"No, thank you," said Makushin, suppressing a belch. "Hmm, I am completely full."
"We have a custom," said Fazliddin Khodjaevich, chewing away as he fingered the food again. Oil oozed from the rice as he squeezed down, kneading it into a cake. "It is called oshi tu..."
"Yes, yes!" Alisher nodded and, unable to restrain himself any longer, did burst out laughing.
Makushin leaned towards the table again — he wanted to hear more about this custom.
"Oshotu?" he repeated.
"Oshi tu," Alisher corrected him. Fazliddin Khodjaevich nodded gravely while shoving a further portion of rice down his gullet. "It means, 'Your food'. Osh means food, do you understand?"
"Of course, of course!" Makushin confirmed hurriedly. Fazliddin Khodjaevich kneaded the greasy plov so enticingly that he too felt like eating some more. "A custom! I love traditions!"
"Our custom is," Alisher drawled, "not to leave food. If it has been cooked, it must be eaten. In the days before refrigerators there was of course nowhere to keep it fresh."
"I see," Makushin nodded, wriggling with inebriate delight.
"And this applied particularly to plov," said Fazliddin Khodjaevich, breathing heavily. "It is not permissible to throw plov away. It absolutely must all be eaten up. We don't throw away even bread. We put bread up somewhere high, so the birds may eat it."
"And for this reason, when all have eaten their fill," Alisher chimed in and, again unable to restrain himself, covered his mouth with his fist, "the most senior person at the table begins to do oshi tu for all the others in turn. He takes the plov in his hand like this, yes?" (Makushin nodded, hypnotised, watching as Fazliddin Khodjaevich, as if following the instructions of his academic secretary, did indeed lower his hand into the greasy mound of rice.) "He would roll it a little like that, yes?" the secretary continued hurriedly. "In olden times, they say, at the feasts of the beks, there was one special little sheep's bone they put in here for guests they did not approve of... Clever people say God created it specially for such a purpose... Do you see how? Yes, they would place a little, tiny bone so that the guest would surely choke and die... Oh, things like that the beks would surely do! So... the guests all open their mouths in turn..." Fazliddin Khodjaevich turned the stare of his cold tortoise eyes on Makushin, drawing back his arm as if he were about to fling what he held in his hand in his guest's face. Makushin, still with an enchanted smile on his face, obediently opened his mouth and — whoosh!
With a serpent-like lunge Fazliddin Khodjaevich clapped the hand over his mouth. It seemed to Makushin that a stake had been driven into his gullet, the solid gag of rice, carrot and bits of meat left him feeling as if he had been struck over the head with a cooking pot: he rocked back, shut his eyes, screwed up his face and mooed like a cow, making convulsive panic-stricken swallowing movements, then brought up his hands and started flicking his cheeks as if he was trying to brush off snowflakes or drops of water. Although he never admitted it to a soul, at that moment he had felt as if the wretched rice was spilling out of his ears and he didn't want to appear a sloppy eater.
Almost a year passed after that ill-starred dinner. He had wanted to stay and work at the Institute, and the deciding of his fate lay wholly with Fazliddin Khodjaevich. He remembered only too well walking down the dusty corridor, stopping outside the door of his office, taking a deep breath, assuming a politely apologetic smile, knocking, and cautiously pressing down on the door handle.
"A-a-ah!" Fazliddin Khodjaevich had drawled. "Do come in, do come in! What brings you to me today? Some new holdup? The wretched reagent again?"
"How are you?" Makushin enquired. His blue eyes shone from his bronzed face. "How are things at home? Is everything well with you? Everything peaceful?"
Fazliddin Khodjaevich had puffy eyelids, and the gaze which came from beneath them was never direct, always at a tangent. Smiling at Makushin with that air of preoccupied bonhomie found in representations of the pharaohs, he murmured reciprocal greetings.
"How are you? Is everything well? Is everything peaceful? Your health?"
"Thank you, thank you," Makushin replied warmly, pressing his hands to his breast. "I have come to seek your advice, Teacher."
Fazliddin Khodjaevich emitted an approving squeak and offered him a small piala of tea.
"You see, Teacher..." Makushin began carefully. He had long ago assimilated the local manner of conducting serious conversations. "Your works in the sphere of pressurised polymerisation," he spoke the first words which came to mind, "have demonstrated to the scientific community the sheer intellectual power... of the Institute which you direct... er, er... and junior researchers also..." Makushin tossed his head and blurted out, "Not to mention polyhydrolchloride! Quite apart from polyhydrolchloride!..."
Fazliddin Khodjaevich nodded understandingly, and no one could have read from the expression on his flabby face that he wouldn't have staked a single hair from his balding pate on the truth of that assertion. He gave every appearance of understanding what Makushin was talking about.
"Another piala of tea?" he asked courteously but insistently, playing for time.
"What I wanted to say is," Makushin blundered on, taking the piala, and not forgetting in doing so to respond with a moment's ritual murmuring to an equivalent murmuring from his host, "As a specialist I can assure you that any scholar would be privileged to work within the walls of this Institute!" He gestured towards the greenish whitewash of the office walls. In a corner stood a crippled rubber plant in its dried out flowerpot. The grey curtains looked as if they had been manufactured from peasant leg wrappings. "And under your leadership, Fazliddin Khodjaevich."
Neither of them was saying what was on his mind. Although Makushin had a definite purpose, like a woman quarrelling with her beloved he put no meaning in his words. Just as she follows her lover's reactions solely in order to reassure herself once again that he is not indifferent to her, so Makushin, trotting out his sonorous phrases about the characteristics of saturated hydrocarbons which were no longer of the slightest interest to him, was really longing for the answer to just one question: whether this old bore recognised that he, Makushin, belonged in this land.
Fazliddin Khodjaevich, however, did not see him as belonging. More than that, Makushin would have been mortified if he could have detected the extent of the alarm which the director was currently experiencing in relation to this foreigner.
Needless to say he did not, for a start, believe a word Makushin was saying. And who would have? It was ridiculous for him to be saying, "I want to stay and work under your leadership!" Pshaw! What did he mean — stay? He wasn't a student on a field trip. He was a family man with a career. Was he going to give up an apartment in Moscow to live here? A likely story. Not one of them stayed here a day longer than they had to.
The thought flashed through the director's agitated mind that this passing research visitor might have suffered sunstroke, but something else had been making him much more uneasy. Fazliddin Khodjaevich suddenly registered with alarm that this Russian asking him for a job could speak his language. The swine! From laughable half-successful attempts to link two words together, meeting with the noisy approval of the other participants in inconsequential conversations, he had acquired the ability in a few months to speak not just coherently, but fluently! Not just fluently, but even with a certain panache!
Fazliddin Khodjaevich tensed and prepared for battle. Before him sat not just a foreigner He had seen off any number of foreigners without difficulty, because foreigners were completely indifferent towards everything that he really cared about or understood, everything that could bring him joy or real dismay — just as he himself was completely indifferent to their stupid, pompous and ill-mannered world. But right now he was confronted by someone who was not simply a foreigner. The bastards!
He looked at Makushin and could not believe that the smile-wreathed and merciless battle between the Kulyab and Khodjent clans which was the everyday reality of his institute had entered a new phase. Now those bastards had started blatantly exploiting foreigners coming on business trips from Moscow for local purposes.
Alas, this testified not only to their long familiar shamelessness, but also to a new level of contacts and opportunities. Oh, the animals! Truly was it said of them that they would pull an ass's hide over their faces and know no shame! Bismilloi rakhmonu rakhim! In the Name of God the All-Merciful!
He wanted to grind his teeth and hurl the teapot to the floor, but he only sighed, feeling a chill run down his back and, distraught, smiled hospitably and proffered Makushin another piala on the bottom of which a sip of cooling tea was still steaming a little.
"Please, do take some more! We like to say, only tea makes life tolerable. Perhaps you know our saying?"
Makushin nodded smilingly, accepted the cup and murmured his gratitude, even while taking in: "Only tea makes life tolerable — we like to say".
His initiative was, of course, doomed. Within a week he was being discreetly seen off the premises, courteously, smilingly, regretfully, with a shaking of balding heads and the utterance of mollifying promises.

3.

Dong!
"Right, that's it for now," said Makushin, wiping his hands on his apron. His eyes were watering. "Do you know an Italian word Russians use? Basta!"
"No," Farkhod shook his head, "I do not know it, Sirodjiddin. Do you see, I went to a Tajik school. They explained Russian badly to us there. Well, I can still talk it... only some words I don't remember too well. Any Tajik who was in the army, they speak Russian well. But I wasn't... Anyway, I've told you all about that before."
"Hey, brother, brother!" The man standing by the window looked not to have shaved for a long time. He had on a greasy robe and the tyubeteyka on his head looked as though several helpings of lagman had just been eaten out of it. "Brother! Sell me one pie, will you? I am just a little bit short of the price."
He held out his hand and laid several crumpled banknotes on the steel surface of the counter. From the anxious expression on his face it was not difficult to conclude that he didn't rate his chances very highly.
"Aha!" said Makushin. "The first customer of the day!"
He counted the money, looked pensively over to Farkhod and advised him of the total. Farkhod shrugged.
"All right, I suppose it's a start," Makushin drawled. "Here!"
"You should take your pies to the square," the man said joyfully, cautiously nibbling the crisp edge. "You would sell out before you could blink! That's where the trade is! So-oo many people! And all of them so hungry they're in a foul mood." He shook his head, tentatively poking his tongue into a crack in the pie from which scalding gravy was beginning to ooze. He squinted towards the bridge of his nose and his words became indistinct. "It is a sacred thing they are doing."
"Of course!" Farkhod agreed cheerfully. "I'll just drop everything right now and head over to the square. Which one do you think is best? Freedom Square or Martyrs' Square? Or does it make no difference? I'll set myself down on a cardboard box, tuck my robe under me, and just sit there. And yell, of course. 'Gimme this! Gimme that!' Eh?"
"Why talk that way, brother?" the man said, lowering his voice disapprovingly. "Don't go to Freedom Square. You're right about that, you don't want to go there, it's full of Kulyabs. Have you been there?" he suddenly asked, glancing at Makushin.
"No," Makushin replied. "No, I haven't."
"Right," the customer gesticulated, shoving what was left of the pie into his mouth before asking in puzzlement, "Are you a Tatar, then?" Shifting his anxious gaze back to Farkhod and mainly addressing him he continued with his mouth full, "They've got completely out of hand, those damned Kulyabs! With their horses! And their fodder! It's the way they got ready for war in the times of the Khans! With their cooking pots! They've made their mess all over the square!" he gesticulated again, wiped his hand on his robe, drew it closer around himself, hunched his shoulders and moved away.
A moment later he turned back and yelled with a broad grin, "So what are you waiting for? Bring your pies! Only not to the Kulyabs. To Martyrs' Square. We've taken over there!"
"Yes, yes," Farkhod sighed. "This very minute, I don't think. It's better for you to come to us."
"How do you like that!" Makushin grumbled with a shrug. "A Tatar indeed."
He shook his head, looking after the departing loudmouth.
Nobody any longer took him for a Russian. If he admitted it himself nobody believed him. They would exclaim in amazement, almost touching and prodding him to convince themselves. A couple of times the whole thing had become quite ridiculous, with him having to wave his passport at them to prove his nationality. That led Fat Kasym, the dog, to try making a bit out of him by the expedient of betting passing customers they couldn't guess where he came from. When, however, one of the losers took out his frustration by trampling the unfortunate passport underfoot, and then came at Makushin with fists flying, Makushin flatly refused to participate in the scam any more. In any case, the passport was becoming ever less convincing as evidence, as the doe-eyed, smooth-cheeked twenty-five-year-old Muscovite in the photograph had little in common with this wizened, coarse featured native of Hurramabad knocking forty, his skin blackened by the Asian sun and his lowly work in the bazaar.
On the other hand, while nobody would accept that he was a Russian, they all insisted on seeing him as an Uzbek or a Kazakh, or even a Meskhetian Turk. Anything, in short, except a Tajik.
"That man's a stray dog," Farkhod decided. "Although the Devil only knows. He might be from some village. They've swarmed in like locusts," he muttered. "People can't think of anything better to do with their time than search for Truth. They'd be better working, the dogs!"
Makushin got up, moved the bench nearer to the counter to get more light, and took a chopping board down from the wall. It was a good, pine board which he had made himself. He ran his hand over it and laid it on the bench. He put his foot on an aluminium basin, which clattered obediently and rose up to the required position for the onions to be chopped straight into it. Whistling, he checked out several knives lying to the right of Farkhod and chose one with a white handle. He took the hone off the shelf, spat on it and started whetting. He tested the blade on his fingernail, approved, and returned the hone to its place.
"Right then, let's go!" he announced, although to whom precisely wasn't clear.
He sighed, straddled the bench, took the first onion and sliced it in half with a practised movement.
"Oh, Farkhod, my soul! How are things? How is your work? How is your family?"
The purple face pushed in at the window belonged to Nuri the Fair, thus named because his face had been disfigured by boils in his youth.
"O-ooh! Sirodjiddin! How are you getting on? Be a good boy, and you shall have pie, eh? Is that how it is?"
Looking through the small window he could see only the gleam of starched shirtcuffs peeping out beneath the sleeves of a silk jacket, but Makushin had no doubt that if he stuck his head out he would see also the mud spattered anthracite gleam of patent leather shoes.
To be perfectly honest, he didn't much care for Nuri the Fair. He found him just a little too familiar with his "good boys" and his pies.
He shrugged and murmured a perfunctory greeting.
"And greetings to you, Nuri," Farkhod said stiffly, flipping a lump of dough over on the table. "Through your prayers. Want a pie?"
"Oh, I so much do, Farkhod," Nuri intoned, grinning. Nearly all his teeth were gold. "But what I want even more is shurpa! You can't imagine with what pleasure I would sip a bowl of sweet mutton shurpa right now! Mmm! But what chance is there of that?" He spread his arms in dismay. "In the whole bazaar only Fat Kasym is open! And those oafs with the cucumbers are sitting there... Yokels, they are. Everything is shut, can you imagine it?"
"Good!" Farkhod replied, swiftly slapping the dough around. "We'll get all the trade. How many do you want?"
Nuri the Fair frowned.
"A hundred? No, two hundred. No, Farkhod, no. Give me three hundred of your pies. Three hundred pies with meat and onion, fried in..." Nuri sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose, " in your thrice infidel cotton oil in which you have already thirty-three times fried who knows what crap. Ass's offal, is it, that you have fried in it?" he asked theatrically.
"Go get your shurpa, Nuri," Farkhod advised him, flattening the dough with a knife. "Shurpa's what you need... I can smell your breath from here. Mind nobody brings a lighted match near you!"
Nuri the Fair snorted.
"Was it you that wined me, beetle of the bazaar, eh?" He shook his head reprovingly. "What do you know about these things? Wine and women — that's what can bring real joy to the heart of a good Muslim! Do you know what sieving the flour means, Farkhod, eh?" Nuri wagged his finger. "Poor sod, you have never in your life found a woman who can really sieve the flour! Why do you have life, Farkhod? To shape those infidel pies? Sieving! Do you understand — sieving! Last night I slept with a woman who sieves the flour like..." he shut his eyes tight and emitted a sound as if he had just been scalded, "like a demented cement mixer she sieves the flour, that's how!"
"How many?" Farkhod asked prosaically.
"What do you mean, how many?" Nuri asked in surprise, opening his eyes.
"How many pies, I want to know? If you want three hundred you'll have to wait a bit."
"What would I do with three hundred pies?" Nuri gestured dismissively. "A couple is plenty. If I eat a couple I'll be fine. But first I need a drink! You surely know, Farkhod, that Abu-ali Ibn Sina taught that we should drink wine only before eating. There is a certain book, Al-Konun. Have you by chance not read it?" he enquired, using an elaborately polite formulation of the question, and with an expression on his face which contrived to suggest that the answer was not already obvious.
"I cannot read," Farkhod smiled self-deprecatingly.
"Aaah," Nuri drawled like a chastising schoolteacher, pulling out an already started bottle of vodka from an inner pocket of his jacket. "There, you see? Many people follow his advice. Watermelon and canteloupe too, they are good only before food; otherwise, they are a poison rather than something good for you. Tea should also be drunk only before food, not after, or it's very bad for you." He shook his head and pursed his lips, evidently appalled at the thought of people crazy enough to drink tea after a meal. "And give me a glass of some kind, would you? Have you any black radish?"
"Why would I have that?" Farkhod replied. "This isn't a wine shop."
"Fine, fine," Nuri gesticulated. "Wine shop or not, what difference does it make? You should stock radish anyway. The whole world, Farkhod, is one big wine shop, don't you find?"
Farkhod silently passed him a less than transparent tumbler, and pushed over a salt cellar full of large crystals of yellow salt.
"I'm quite sure you don't eat pork, Nuri," Makushin interjected in a playful tone, while demolishing another onion. He was still smarting from being called a Tatar, and felt the need to score at least a small victory. "And yet what is written? What does the Sharia say? The Sharia says to you, a Muslim, that if ten pieces of bread are lying one on top of the other, like this," he abandoned the onion and knife and clapped his hands together, "and a piece of pork is put on the top one, then that top piece should be thrown away, but you can eat the others. But if on that top piece of bread even a single drop of wine has fallen," he paused dramatically before bringing the knife down on the chopping board, "All ten must be thrown away!"
"Oh, dear!" Nuri said with mock concern. "Watch out Sirodjiddin, that you don't get made into a judge! You interpret the Sharia better than my late grandfather, and he studied six months in a madrasah."
"All right, all right," Farkhod intervened, waving a ladle from which drops of black oil flew in every direction. "You just listen, listen to him! Sirodjiddin will not teach you wrong things. Sirodjiddin talks wisely! Sirodjiddin knows what he is saying. Sirodjiddin, do you see, really will be made a judge soon!" He winked roguishly to Makushin. "A good Muslim does not drink wine! In the past Muslims drank no wine at all!"
"They did so," Nuri muttered, looking sideways at his tumbler with that look of distaste peculiar to a man who is reflecting on whether to pour himself a bit more or rest content with what is already there. "They drank wine, and vodka... only now people distil vodka, where before they lowered a little empty clay jug into the wine on a string, hermetically sealed. They would tie a stone to it, like they did to a criminal to make him sink, and seep-seep-seep! Yes? Only the spirit passed into the jug from the wine — and not a drop of water! Well, and gradually, hour by hour, day by day, the jug filled with pure spirit! You just had to dilute it and drink it!" He paused for a moment before asking pityingly, "Have you ever drunk anything like that, Farkhod, eh?"
A gesture conveyed his lack of expectation, and adjusting his frown he added crushingly,
"As for what people say about Muslims, well, what can you know about Muslims, Sirodjiddin? What are you? What can you, you, Sirodjiddin, tell me about Muslims, eh?"
His lip curled in a sneer, Nuri the Fair sighed and concluded,
"Well, my friends, may we all be well."

4.

When Makushin first wandered into the bazaar two and a half years before, he felt he had become a child again. He had again been put on a carousel horse by his father, and that was why everything around him was so noisy, barely to be glimpsed as it rushed by in a blur of different coloured stripes.
Stunned, he jostled his way through the crowd, listening to the commotion from the sellers of bread and the vendors of sour milk. Many years before he had fallen off the horizontal bar at school and broken a tooth. He was reminded of that now. Just as he had then probed the painful, jagged fragment with his tongue, trying to understand what had happened, so now his attention was focused on something which was suddenly, painfully piercing his soul. The answer he found was simple but strange. It seemed to him that this foreign language, obscure and indeed impenetrable as it might be, was nonetheless close to his heart, as if in an earlier life he had himself spoken these guttural words fluently, with a clear understanding of the meaning of each one of them.
The music of this carousel was deafening, a breeze cooled his sweaty neck, somewhere not far off mules brayed without respite; the sun melted the violet flesh of figs, the pink flesh of peaches; wasps circled over glycerine piles of smoke-coloured grapes so slowly that it seemed their wildest dreams had come true and their wings were beating not in air but in honey. Makushin moved along the rows of stalls like a sleep-walker, serenely declining invitations to buy heaps of fresh coriander, carrots and lilac-coloured Gharm potatoes.
Then he heard the shrill voices of two old traders at neighbouring counters and, coming closer, halted in amazement. To his ear it seemed that, however improbably, they were furiously reciting poetry, trading menacing, singsong lines from some infinite epic. Listening as carefully as he could, Makushin finally made out that this verse dialogue revolved around something called piez. He decided, upon reflection, that this must be the dawn, the beloved, a nightingale or some such entity. He had heard a lot about the beauty of oriental poetry. On the other hand, given the way those present periodically burst out laughing and slapped their knees, the poem might be of a humorous nature. When the recital finally began to pall, he sought clarification from a stocky greengrocer who, smiling courteously, explained that Shavkat and Fotekh were simply swearing at each other, piez being an onion. Fotekh was railing at Shavkat for selling his pathetic Reghar onions at the same price Fotekh was charging for his fine Danghara onions.
"But why are they arguing in rhyme?" Makushin asked in perplexity.
Judging from the greengrocer's expression he had no idea what rhyme was, but was not about to admit that to a stranger.
"It's just the language, I suppose," he said, losing any further interest in the topic. "Do you want some radishes? Look what radishes I have, brother. Sugar sweet!"
He took a firmer grip of his basket and looked around for customers.
Makushin knew many people by sight nowadays. One or two would tear themselves for a moment from their ceaseless trading at the bazaar to press their hands fleetingly to their breasts and nod to him, Sirodjiddin, the stoker in Fat Kasym's pie shop, as he made his way past the stalls with a basket in his hand.
The bazaar was fairly empty today. It was drizzling. Beneath the awning of the teashop where usually at this time voices were raised and boys were running around distributing teapots, an ugly-looking, dark-faced, balding man in a leather jacket was lethargically crumbling bread into the tea in his piala, and there, dozing on his trestle bed, was old Rakhmatullo who once a month looked in at the pie shop to caulk the cracks in the stoves with yellow clay; at the doors of the covered market two fat women selling paper carrier bags called out disconsolately; the bread sellers extolled their wares without real hope.
The ranks of traders, usually so dense, had yawning gaps in them; behind the plank counters, where impassioned territorial disputes were apt to break out, the idiot turtle-doves wandered back and forth pecking out trash from the crevices.
He loved all this, but right now he just wanted to finish his shopping as quickly as possible and get out of it. He threw back his head and screwed up his eyes. The sun was as dull behind the clouds as a five kopek piece polished with mercury, and tiny raindrops sparkled like Christmas tinsel as they fell.
He had had every right to be considered a local man for a long time now. He knew the language and customs better than many of these people did. His wife was a local woman and, without any shadow of doubt, his son belonged here too. To be sure, from time to time when people were talking, or in a turn of events, a word would crop up or a situation would arise which he wasn't familiar with and had to ask about. But even in this he was no different from the rest of them. A man from Kanibadama might equally sometimes fail to understand someone from Karatega, or someone from Gharm a Khodjent, but still they all regarded themselves as local, as people who truly belonged here.
"Good day, Saud," said Makushin, pausing beside a cabbage seller he knew. "How much are you asking today?"
Behind his back everyone called him Crooked Saud. Crooked Saud was perfectly sound of limb, but allowed himself to speak and behave in ways which were fundamentally at variance with the bazaar's accepted code of honour. The Putov was a good-natured bazaar; at the Green Bazaar they would cut your throat as soon as look at you, but here you only got laughed at behind your back. In Saud's case people restricted themselves to a wry, "Crooked Saud's at it again, the fool."
Oddly enough, unlike everyone else who sat from morning till night at one of the counters, or jostled through the crowd at the bazaar in the hope of bringing a buyer and a seller together in return for a modest commission, Makushin, who had exactly the same status as the rest of them, had never been given a nickname. It hadn't bothered him before. He could have expected to be known as Russian Sirodjiddin, but no, there already was a Russian Mirzo in the bazaar, although all that was Russian about him was that he had been imprisoned for several years in the Usolsk labour camp. Makushin, however, they stubbornly called just plain Sirodjiddin.
"Ah, well now, I don't even know where to begin," Crooked Saud replied with a crafty smile as he scratched his stubbly chin. "You are going to tell me that there are no customers in the bazaar so the price should come down. Am I right? And I am going to say that you are quite right, Sirodjiddin! Come down they surely should. Am I right?"
"They should," Makushin nodded with a frown. "So how much are you asking?"
"Look!" said Saud, selecting a fine round cabbage. "Look! We have reached a point of no return, as a certain great leader once said as he slipped his hand up... well, let's not say where he was putting it. They should — but they are not coming down."
"Really?" Makushin feigned amazement while keeping Saud's juggling under constant surveillance. If your attention wandered for an instant he would substitute a different cabbage, not actually rotten, of course, just...
"Of course," Saud exclaimed, tossing the cabbage in the air. "Sixty the price was, and sixty it has remained. It is not coming down. Ask anyone you please! After all, why are there so few people here? Because some of the people are holding meetings in the squares, and some are staying in their homes and waiting for the ones holding meetings to start pissing on each other, and then even those who now are afraid to go out to the bazaar will most surely get it in the neck themselves. Is it not true?"
"I am afraid you may be right, Saud," Makushin sighed. "But to get back to the cabbage."
"How can we get back to it," asked Saud indignantly. "There they are right before you, head to head and white as snow, eh, Sirodjiddin? Round as the snowballs we made as children. Why should the price come down for cabbage like that, I ask you! Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow everything will settle down again, those hungry people will leave the squares and come running back to the bazaar. They will run back here and say, oh what a wonderful cabbage! There it will be lying, yearning, waiting, waiting just for them. Eh, Sirodjiddin?"
"I'll give you no more than forty," Makushin cut him off. "You sing sweetly, Saud, but money rustles sweetly too. By the way, why aren't you at the square yourself?"
"Look! Hold it, feel it," Saud insistently pressed the cabbage on him. "Can you feel that? It is like stone! Solid! Not a wrinkle out of place. Eh? But that is not in fact so, Sirodjiddin! It is not solid, this cabbage. When you take it home and carefully, just here..." — Saud deftly drew his finger down in illustration — just here cut through the stump, then... mmm! It will fall apart into thin leaves! Into white, pure leaves on which you will find not a single spot! These leaves are like fine writing paper. You could write government decrees on them, Sirodjiddin." Saud snatched the tyubeteyka from his head, "but if you don't write decrees on them but instead wrap inside each wonderful leaf a little piece of meat, or if you just chop it up and put it in shurpa... mmm, Sirodjiddin!"
"Fine, I'll just look around some more," Makushin said in a bored voice.
"And the stump!" Saud persisted. "You think you will have to throw it away because it is yellow and tastes like an overripe radish? Oh, no, no, no. Fifty — and it's yours. It already cost me that when I picked it in the field, Sirodjiddin! Have you no fear of God?"
Looking around enquiringly, Makushin moved a short step away.
"Forty-five!" Saud yelled, clutching his sleeve. "You are ruining me, but I will let you have it for forty-five."
"All the same," Makushin asked with a wry, preoccupied smile as he lowered the cabbage into his basket, "Why aren't you at the square yourself, Saud?"

5.

He went inside, set down the cabbage, carrots, and a bundle of black herbs on the table, pulled the chopping board over and began shredding the cabbage. He was in a hurry, and more often than not the knife struck the board.
When he had chopped everything up, Makushin glanced into the cooking pot and cursed. He took half a ladle of boiling water, hastily ran a rag over the greasy sides of the pot, and threw the dirty water out into the yard. He eyed the pot critically and shrugged. The cooking pot in Fat Kasym's pie shop was never cleaned out properly. The firewood was already crackling in the little stove by the fence. He tossed in the chopped vegetables and greens, poured in some water, put it on the fire, and covered it with the lid.
"Farkhod, hey, Farkhod!" he said, wiping his sooty hands on a cloth. "Listen, I just met one of my neighbours. She says Mukhiba has fallen sick. I might just nip back home. I may need to call the doctor. I've put the soup on. Just put some salt in when it boils."
"Your wife is a townie," Farkhod remarked, and set aside a bowl he was using to sprinkle flour from a sack over the table. "Nobody told you while there was still time, Sirodjiddin. You should have had a village wife, a countrywoman."
"What do you mean she's a townie?" Makushin snorted, shifting from one foot to the other by the bin. He might have been on his way by now, but here he was having to chop logic with Farkhod. "She's from the countryside, only from a part that's near the town. Come on, you know perfectly well, she's from Kharangon."
"No, that's not the same at all," Farkhod sighed. "I'm telling you the truth. I've got just the same sort of fancy lady myself. One minute one thing's aching, the next it's something else. Oh!" He gestured in exasperation. "The good thing about kishlak women is that they don't fall sick! They are iron women. They wouldn't dent if you battered them against the road."
"You're a bit late telling me that now," Makushin said with an awkward chuckle. "Unless I get a second one, and I can't afford to feed two."
"You're right there," Farkhod conceded. "You won't grow fat on what Kasym pays." He spat unhappily. "He grudges you every last kopek, the parasite."
"I'll be off, then," Makushin added, hurrying now, pulling on his robe. "Tell Kasym anything you like. Tell him I'll be back soon. In any case, we haven't got any customers. We've only sold two pans' worth all day, and look how much firewood we've used."
"Farkhod shrugged noncommittally and returned his attention to the bowl.

6.

Looking straight ahead, Makushin again passed through the noise and riotous colours of the bazaar, went through the gate and turned left, in the opposite direction from his home.
The thunderclouds had thinned and were splitting open. Blue sky showed through the gaps, and the sun peeped out briefly, spilling like gold over the leaves and wet asphalt. He kept up a brisk pace, so brisk that his forehead was soon damp beneath his tyubeteyka.
A policeman was patrolling outside the entrance of the Badakhshon Hotel and the shashlyk restaurant was closed: not one of the braziers was smoking.
Makushin went quickly by, turned on to the avenue, looking round several times. It seemed odd for the little square in front of the fountain to be empty of people. The policeman peered after him suspiciously.
While he was still one block away, even before he reached the Post Office, he heard a low rumbling periodically interrupted by bursts of metallic rasping. A voice, amplified by loudspeakers sounded like thunder rumbling over an iron roof. It was impossible to make out a single word.
When he came one or two hundred metres closer, a group of some thirty men broke away from the already clearly visible dark outline of a crowd and started rushing in his direction. Makushin stood stock-still, staring at them. The young men were identically dressed in green robes girdled with white scarves and with narrow white turbans on their heads. Whooping and egging each other on, they were running towards him full pelt and a suffocating fear gripped him. Why were they running? Were they coming at him? Should he be running too? He froze, flattening himself against the wall in the expectation of an inescapable catastrophe. The pounding of sixty feet came nearer, now they were upon him, and the next instant they had stampeded past without paying him the least attention. Their noisy breathing enveloped him like the breath of a huge frenzied animal, they thundered to the crossroads, turned abruptly and disappeared round the corner.
He moved forward uncertainly. On his right was a planked apology for a horse tethering post, and several unsaddled horses were standing with their heads drooping almost to the asphalt. Ahead, by the granite steps of the colonnade of the old Soviet Council of Ministers building, was a truck with its sides lowered. Here and there green flags fluttered over people's heads. Above the truck another green flag was unfurled, and beside it a white one. The truck appeared to be sailing, borne by the crowd. On this platform covered with carpets (they hung over the sides of the truck, their dense woollen pile gleaming metallically in the rays of the sun) stood a greybeard all in white, shouting at the top of his voice into a microphone. In response to his words arms rose like a forest. The further the distance from the orator the sparser was the forest.
"He's worked himself up into a right state," muttered a dumpy man in a robe which had white tufts of cotton lining sticking out of it making it look like a salvo of fireworks on a cloudless night. "He should try talking sense. He's no less a bastard than the rest of them!"
Makushin unintentionally caught his piercing glance and shrugged.
"Who can tell?" he said. "He seems to be speaking wisely."
The dumpy man spat and turned away.
The figure on the truck raised his hands towards heaven and began wailing. The centre of the crowd spilled over, and those surrounding the truck sank to their knees.
"In the name of God the Great the All-Merciful," intoned the greybeard.
Hastily retreating, Makushin headed for a clear space and stopped beside the remains of a recently torched kiosk. There was a choking smell of soot, and the stench started him shaking from head to foot.
"Aaaaah, aaaaah, aaaaah!" the rasping, metallic, indecipherable words from the truck reached him, and the crowd responded to each of them with a deep sigh, a stirring of all its organs. Something in it was tightening as if preparing to strike, but then, receiving no command, it relaxed again for the time being.
He cursed helplessly and went back: there was no way of getting to Freedom Square now other than by making a detour of several blocks.
Rapidly covering the distance from there to the corner, he turned on to Nizami Street and hastened on his way. It was very peaceful here. The fresh leaves of the plane trees with which the little street was completely overgrown rustled, and if it had not been for the front doors and ground floor windows boarded up here and there, it would have looked just as it used to. Inclining his head stubbornly and squaring his jaw, Makushin strode onwards with the hard, springy step of a man late for a rendezvous on which his whole life depends. His shaking subsided, and he was irritated now not to have been able to overcome the fear which had gripped him at the sight of people kneeling for megaphone mediated prayer. His face burned with shame. If only he had not taken fright, if only he had not been so scared he could have merged with that crowd. He felt this might have been the last step, the overcoming of the last obstacle to his truly belonging here.
Ten minutes later he emerged on to the square from a side street leading towards the Summer Theatre, from a sordid little square littered with paper and the milky white skins of condoms, and involuntarily stopped short when he glimpsed through the green leaves of jasmine and legustra the still distant but already recognisable shape of a crowd.
Here were loudspeakers rasping in just the same way, only the speaker's platform had been raised not on a truck covered with carpets but on a squat, green, angular armoured personnel carrier.
"The Fact that the Opposition! Is Plotting to Disperse Parliament!" The orator's words with their emphatic pauses fell like rocks and rolled across the square. The speaker himself was fused in a convulsive kiss to the black head of the microphone. "Become Obvious! After the Declaration! Made by the Leaders! Of the Opposition!"
A gust of warm humid wind blew in and made the speaker's colourful tie flutter gaily. He restrained it with his hand and shouted out his next phrase. He was shouting as loudly as was humanly possible, firing out two or three hoarse words before pausing briefly to suck in a whistling new lungful of air; the crowd responded to each pause with a baleful roar of approval.
"The People's Duty! At this Time! Of Trial for Order and Democracy! When the Shadow of the Past! Again Hangs over our Future!" (The crowd roared, fists were raised and shaken.) "Support the Legitimate Government! And the Parliament! Lawfully Elected by the People!"
Makushin suppressed his horror and yelled along with all the others, grimacing and raising a clenched fist towards the sky. Immediately an intoxicating surge of emotion raced from his pounding heart through the rest of his body.
"A-aah!" he shouted, waving his fist in time to the chanting. "Par-lia-ment! Par-lia-ment! Par-lia-ment!"
"By Personal Order of the President!" the orator threw back his head, his teeth gleaming in the sun; the square fell unexpectedly silent, and for a moment the wind and the shuffling of thousands of feet could be heard, "Ratified by a Session of Parliament! Mobilisation is to Commence! Of Volunteer Units!"
A rustling, a rushing, like a wave running up a beach; a muffled booming, coming nearer, an outburst of shouting.
"The President calls upon you! All who have served in the army! All who can handle a gun! May be issued with a weapon! On production of their passport! We must defend! Law and Order!"
The north gates of the former Communist Party Central Committee building began to open. The gates, against which several downtrodden-looking conscripts were heaving, moved reluctantly, their rusty hinges creaking. A few seconds later the massive rear of a second armoured personnel carrier backed out through the gap from an inner courtyard.
The crowd swayed, pushing forward to the gates. Makushin pushed forward too, choking, gasping, fighting his way closer.
He was in luck; the whirlpool brought him out to the wall, he floundered as the wave drew back, and was immediately crushed by more bodies, but this time the crush brought him right up against the side of the vehicle.
Crates were being brought out from the yard. Before throwing them up two sturdy corporals broke off the lids.
"Passport!" a police colonel standing on the truck next to one of the crates was yelling. Beside him a civilian of some description was checking passports. The colonel was not letting go of a rifle which someone's hands were already grasping at. "I said, where's your passport?"
Makushin also stretched forward to get a gun, but was still too far away. Agitated, he reckoned his chances and concluded that at least three or four others would get their weapons before him. Fighting for breath he shoved his hand into his pocket feeling for his passport.
"I am Faizulloev," whipping the tyubeteyka from his bald head, a dumpy man with luxuriant whiskers shouted at the colonel. "So I haven't got my passport on me right now. You mean, if I haven't got a passport I can't defend the President? Everybody here knows me. Ask any of them. Look, ask him," he pointed furiously at Makushin. "Or him! Give me it I say. Give me it!"
"Give him it" Makushin yelled intoxicated. "Give him it!"
The colonel swore and roughly shoved the rifle, butt first, in the direction of the man with the moustache. Clutching the greasy AKS to his bosom, the recipient hastily made his way out of the crush.
"Me!" Makushin yelled along with all the others, "Me-ee!"
"Good heavens above," the civilian suddenly said in Russian, leaning towards him. "I don't believe it! Can it really be you, Sergey Alexandrovich?"
Makushin recognised him too. He shuddered. It was Alisher, the Institute's registrar.
His heart began pounding.
He wasn't in the least perplexed that a registrar was distributing arms. But where the hell had he popped up from? This was a splinter from his long forgotten past life which had been replaced by a different, real life. He wanted nothing to do with Alisher. He wanted just to stay here, in this crowd, he wanted to go on being a local man.
"Gimme!" he yelled with a sinking feeling of despair, realising that his only chance of remaining unrecognised was under no circumstances to switch to speaking Russian. Let Alisher think he'd got it wrong. How could he possibly recognise him anyway? He should give no hint that he knew him, not so much as a blink or a frown. And no Russian. Forget he ever knew Russian. That bit was easy. He had not used Russian for a long time. "Give one here! Me-ee!"
Alisher stood bolt upright, and for a moment or two stared straight at Makushin in astonishment. His expression changed more than once in that short time, but then he sneered contemptuously and said something to the colonel which the stricken Makushin could not make out over the yelling of the crowd.

7.

"And do you know," he said, blinking drunkenly. "Do you know what? They chucked me out, and that, that slug Alisher shouted after me, do you know what he shouted after me?"
Farkhod shook his head.
"I'll tell you what he shouted after me," Makushin declared tragically. "You Russian bastard! That's what he shouted after me. Piss off, you Russian bastard! That's what he shouted after me, eh? He shouted that it was the Russians had made all this happen, eh? As if it was me. Ouch!"
Makushin had clenched his fist and brought it down too forcefully on the steel covering of the kitchen table.
Darkness had fallen; the pie shop was closed; the oil was cooling in the pan; the fire had gone out; the embers were smouldering their last, lighting up the walls of the open stove; the light from a street lamp fell through the open door.
On the table stood a bottle of vodka, and cold pies lay in a battered aluminium bowl.
"Well, you know, Sirodjiddin," Farkhod said gently. "You come across all sorts. Just forget it. So what? If a man is bad it doesn't matter if you make him an academician, he will still be a bad man. Forget it. Why upset yourself?"
"How can I not upset myself," Makushin began dully, but cut himself off in mid-sentence, because the words he was about to say had been re-played two or three times today already; he said no more and shrugged. "All right, pour another and then we'll be off."
"How you weren't afraid I don't understand," Farkhod said quietly, carefully decanting vodka from the bottle into a piala. "You must be completely crazy. You have a wife, a child, and you go to that square! You queue for a rifle. It's just so stupid. Do you think that the People had gathered there to decide their destiny?"
He poured what was left into a second piala and put the empty bottle on the floor.
"Do you know what was really going on there?"
"Well?" Makushin asked. "What?"
"Oh, Sirodjiddin!" Farkhod chided, cradling the piala in his hand. "You are a child, my brother. They were sharing out our flesh. Do you understand?"
Makushin was silent.
"They were butchering the people like a dead sheep — cutting it up into pieces. This thigh is for me, that one is for you, and the head is for that petty boss over there. Is everybody satisfied with their pieces? Does everybody have enough for shurpa, for plov? Nobody feels left out? And if the sheep will never again go out to graze the grass, well, that's just what happens to sheep! Do you understand?"
"I don't know," Makushin mumbled. "You speak in riddles, Farkhod."
"Never mind," Farkhod smiled indulgently. "Some day you will understand. It's not simple. There are a lot of local complications..."
He poured the vodka down his throat, put the piala on the table, made a movement with his hands as if washing his face, and said,
"Amen."
"Amen," Makushin said identically, feeling a strange sense of desolation.
They locked the door of the pie shop and closed the side gate behind them. The bazaar was dark and empty. Only alongside two Kamaz trucks which had driven in that evening were there signs of life. A blowlamp was roaring away, its blue flame engulfing the side of a black saucepan. There was the sound of voices, and light was on in the cabs.
"Potatoes," Farkhod commented, suppressing a yawn. "From Djirgital. It will keep us going for another couple of weeks."
They came to the gate.
"Okay. See you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow," Makushin replied.
A little unsteadily, he made his way down the side street and the events of the day, now rendered into cloudy watercolour, danced endlessly before his eyes above bushes, clay walls and houses indistinguishable in the darkness. From time to time he would mutter to himself some phrase which was firmly attached to one of these scenes, and his own voice seemed foreign to him.
Someone hailed him at the crossroads.
"What?" Makushin asked, halting.
He peered unseeing into the darkness. He wasn't sure, something appeared to glint.
"Wait, brother!" the voice repeated ingratiatingly.
Two or three shadows detached themselves from a low clay wall, and soundlessly floating out into a spectral light, more imagined than real, from the street lamp hanging from a post two blocks away, the shadows turned into alert, wary people.
"Kulyab?" one asked in an inquisitive whisper. A rifle hung from his shoulder as if he were a hunter, its muzzle pointing downwards.
Taking a step backwards, Makushin mutely shook his head. Everything about them, from the glinting steel of their teeth to the gleam of the varnished rifle butt instilled a terror which caught at his throat.
"Me? No, of course not. No way."
"Brother," the one with the teeth said affectionately, moving in on him. "Don't be frightened, brother! Just repeat after me, just say, 'Farukh sits high on the back of a sheep.' Do it! Say it, you shit!"
His voice changed suddenly into a hiss, and he made an abrupt movement towards Makushin as if snapping a thread.
"Farukh sits high," Makushin said hoarsely, not yet understanding what they wanted from him. His legs were trembling, preparing to run for it.
"Say it!"
"Farukh sits high on the back of a," he whispered hoarsely, his brain working feverishly, but understanding the secret meaning of this test only as his tongue was pronouncing the last word in the way he was accustomed to hearing it. Mukhiba often lisped this song over their son's cradle: "Farukh sits high on the back of a seep. Bright sine the stars in the dark sky so deep."
So that was their game. They were making him recite this nursery rhyme in order to test his pronunciation. A Kulyab from the countryside would invariably come to grief on the sibilants in "sheep" and "shine".
He gave a loud shout and made a dash for the darkness, and perhaps he might have given them the slip, for he knew all these side streets around the bazaar like the back of his hand. But a third man, standing to the left, managed to trip him up and Makushin collapsed in the dirt, hitting his elbow painfully on a stone.
Somebody fell upon him, panting furiously. Makushin jerked, rearing backwards, and it was then that the broad black blade of the Ura-Tyube knife sliced through his liver.
His grip relaxed and he clutched at his stomach, hearing mud squelching under hurrying feet.
"Farukh sits high on the back of a seep," he murmured, stretching himself out, scraping the black clay with the toecaps of his boots. "Bright sine the stars in the dark sky so deep."
For a moment he felt hard done by, but he died happy nevertheless, accepted finally as a local man.