Did I tell you, Isak Abramovich, Pinto said in response, that the Pintos in Sarajevo live up on a hill, so that when it gets warm and muggy in the valley the air is still fresh up there?

  Isak Abramovich must’ve noticed that Pinto spoke as if he still lived in Sarajevo, as if his being there in Tashkent were but an accident easy to rectify.

  In the winter, it sometimes snows up in Bilave, where our house is, while it’s raining down in the valley.

  Let’s go inside, my friend, said Isak Abramovich.

  I’ll be right in, said Pinto, not moving.

  * * *

  And now Isak Abramovich was looking up at the abundant stars above, as were Osman and Pinto, more vodka in their hands. They had spent so many evenings in this garden, there was no need to talk or say anything. May peace be upon you! the wretched souls shouted at the people in the garden.

  My Padri Avram used to say that Heaven is a revolving wheel, Pinto said. Even if you never move from your place, everything around you will change, and the world and all that it holds will be the same and not the same. We could stay right here and just watch the wheel turn. But if we move, if we keep moving, everything will always be only different, and we will never be the same. There had to have been a world where no one was ever at home, where everyone was always going from one place to another. The Lord must’ve destroyed such a world, and with relish too—for what kind of a place would that have been, a world consisting only of strangers? There would’ve been no righteous ones there, nothing and nobody older than a day. The people in that world could never be still long enough to see anything. Everything in such a world would’ve been dimmed by incomprehension.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, Isak Abramovich said, his gaze still stuck to the firmament.

  See what I have to live with? Osman chuckled and kissed Pinto’s forehead.

  Just love each other whatever the world you think you might be in, Isak Abramovich said. There is nothing else you can do. And who knows, maybe all this insanity will produce a better world, where everyone could love whoever they want. Stranger things have happened.

  Pinto spotted a moving shadow in the far corner of the garden, where there was no source of light other than the dim stars, and no shadow should’ve been cast. He stood up carefully, gingerly so as not to startle it. The shadow had the shape of a slouching man and was the color of coal dust smeared on the floor. La gran eskuridad, shaped like a man.

  Did you see that? he asked the other two.

  See what? Osman asked.

  Later, he would wonder why he was not scared at all, why he did not think for an instant that the shadow could harm them. Instead, he simply stood up and moved toward the shadow, which then pressed itself against the wall. Isak Abramovich and Osman stayed behind, baffled, exchanging glances, probably suspecting that Pinto had got ahold of morphine from someone else. But there was no door, no way out for the shadow, and Pinto kept advancing toward it, and it panicked and rushed from one end of the wall to the other, never detaching itself from it. Don’t be scared, Pinto uttered, and in the same turn understood that he did not need to speak for the shadow to hear his voice. But when he got close, the shadow leaped toward him and attached its feet to his feet, and it was now linked to him, and would not leave him as he ran back and forth from one end of the wall to another.

  Rafael Avramovich, you are drunk, what are you doing? Isak Abramovich said, now standing up, his own shadow stretching all the way to Pinto. It’s late, it’s getting cold. It’s time to go inside.

  Pinto was facing the shadow, giving it a chance to leap back onto the wall, and then over it, but instead it stretched itself forth to bend at the foot of the wall.

  Rafo, let’s go inside, Osman said.

  Pinto had no choice but to drag the shadow across the garden toward the house. But it never made it inside, dissolving at the threshold.

  BRICH MULLA, 1920

  MAJOR MOSER-ETHERINGTON surfaced from his excruciating dream and, oblivious to Pinto dabbing his rotting foot with a warm wet rag, spoke as if just continuing the story he had started telling long before.

  I left Srinagar, he said, on Lenin’s birthday, April 22. Seventeen days to Gilgit, first on boats, then on foot. I skied on the slopes of the Tragbal Pass, and then, after a blizzard that nearly killed us all, I arrived at the Burzil Pass five hours ahead of the next man. In the Pamirs, I shot a few chukars and steinbocks. Few things are more beautiful than the sight of a steinbock tumbling hoof over horns down a steep slope. I used the game to feed the coolies who had run out of food, but one of them died anyway. I crossed the Mintaka Pass, beyond which I dismissed the coolies to use yak transport. I found the Chinese border guards filthy and slovenly. By a fire in a yurt, the Chinese commander told me about a detachment of Cossacks roaming in the area, but he was not sure whether they were White or Red, nor what the difference would be. I ran into the vile Cossacks in Tashkurgan, and luckily they were rabidly anti-Bolshevik, their outrageous hatred fueled with copious amounts of vodka. I crossed the Tort Dawan Pass, then the Kashka Su. On the way, I shot a mountain finch, a bunting, a horned lark, a magpie, and a few ugly, ungodly marmots. I reached Yangu Hissar in early June, where I was welcomed with banners and trumpeters and soldiers raising a dust cloud that nearly choked me to death. Six weeks after leaving Srinagar, I reached Kashgar. There I found Sir Charles Northrop, my old Worcester mate, who served there as His Majesty’s Consul. Charlie always called me by my college moniker: Sparky.

  You, however, must not call me Sparky, Major Edgar Moser-Ethering said to Pinto, because that’s only for my Oxford peers. You may call me Moser, and only Moser, because I don’t like the way you murder Ethering with your Balkan pronunciation. Do pronounce Moser like a German word and it should be fine. I am not Jozef Lazar, and will never be Jozef Lazar again, a good name though it was. Just Moser to you.

  We’re going to have to amputate your toes, Pinto said.

  What toes? Moser said, I have no toes. I have skis.

  We’ll take your skis off, then, Pinto said.

  I don’t care, Moser said. The snow is all gone anyway.

  All gone, Pinto said. All of it.

  So Charlie arranged a dinner in my honor, Moser went on, inviting not only Chinese officials, but also the Russian Consul-General—a bearded man in a long Sart khalat and his French-speaking wife, who under the table pressed her hip against mine then placed her hand on my knee. Later, gramophone records with Russian dances were played. I had to dance with the wife, who rambled into my ear about the tediousness of Kashgar, a city more distant from the ocean than any other city on earth, did you know that? The Russians’ favorite antidote to the revolution, and to death, and to boredom, and to women, she whispered to me, was vodka, vodka, nothing but vodka. Russian men would rather weep or pass out drunk in each other’s arms than touch a woman. Even here in the asshole of the world—she said: le trou du cul du monde, in her derelict Russian accent—even here in the asshole of the world, it is clear that everything will soon end. There’s an Irish priest, Father Hendricks, she said, who had one congregant, an Italian, whom he then banned from attending mass, so that he could do it all alone, no sinners present, only God. But I know there is no God in Kashgar, she said. I tried to talk to God, I called God, but there was no response, only mockery, she said, and twirled out of my arms to dance with Charlie. Charlie is not a good dancer, his feet are far too big, and he stepped all over hers. The following day, I got up before she awoke, and shot two doves, a large lark, a ringed plover, a tern, a carrion crow, a stork, and a starling—it was my best day of hunting in a long while. Dead animals, birds or steinbock, always look shocked when you shoot them. You and I can at least expect the oncoming end, but animals suddenly stop being alive, and are always surprised by it. I find that rather amusing; I love seeing that shock. Anyhow, before a game of polo I took part in, I saw the Consul-General’s wife—Natalia was her name, I think. No, Natasha!—well, either Natalia or Natasha was glaring angrily at me, and I didn’t even bother to nod at her. A woman is a bundle of trouble, my father always says, and he’d know. My father and I, we both prefer hunting to women. In any case, in the middle of the night I woke up Bagrutani, my young Armenian guide, embellished with nature’s pride and richest furniture, as the poet said. We hopped on a Triumph motorbike and left Kashgar. We sped like a dream and reached Mingyol in three and a half hours. We crossed the Kizil Dawan, Bagrutani holding on tight to my waist, a very strong grip that man had. We stopped so I could shoot a gazelle, but we could not take it with us, so we left it for the vultures, a flock of which followed us thereafter across the desert. In the Alai mountains, we stayed with a Kyrgyz family and got dreadfully drunk on kumis. Bagrutani snored like a camel. Near Shorbulak, we squeezed through a marble gorge so narrow its walls were polished to a shine. We stopped at the Chinese garrison in Ulugchat in search of gasoline and bought a couple of exorbitantly expensive canisters. The following day, we were in Irkeshtam, where the Russian customs officers entertained us with card playing and homemade vodka. They showed me the skin of a freshly killed bear, still dripping with blood. They also showed me their prized Bolshevik prisoner and offered to let me break him with a mallet. They had nothing to do there, so the Bolshevik was going to be strung up as soon as all of his limbs were thoroughly shattered. Their kindled wrath had to be quenched with blood. When I saw him, they were busy breaking his ankles. I’d heard many men screaming, but those screams were different altogether. Anyway, we crossed the Terek Dawan, where there was thick snow on the ground, and bones of countless animals and men piled high enough on the sides of the road to be visible above the snow. The natives said you could hear the ancestral voices there, prophesying war, whereas I thought that it was the wind whistling through the hollowed-out bones. We came upon some farms at Gulcha: empty barracks, a ditch full of dead children, a snapped telegraph line, a shredded flag on a leaning pole. It was like a painting: the still, sad music of humanity. The vultures were having a ball. I shot a few, and also a stork, and a hedgehog. In Andjian we stayed at a bathless hotel where there was no food; it was not really a hotel, just a building with a roof and straw mats. The town was full of released, desperate Austrian prisoners, none of whom were actually Austrian. Orchestras of Hungarians and Bohemians played in teahouses, Poles and Croats worked as blacksmiths and water carriers, while even the guards outside the Bolshevik command post wore the Imperial uniforms, minus the insignia, minus the German language they refused to speak. There were no Bosnians among them, but then I don’t know how I’d have been able to distinguish a Bosnian from any other cube-headed Slav. Did you know that the word slave comes from Slav? It’s most obvious, if you’ve ever met a single Slav, or a single slave—and I’ve come upon both. I always thought that jewelry comes from Jew. You’re a Jew, not a Slav, I know that. You are tawny. You have a scarred face. I will never be able to tell all of those cube-headed people apart, but I know a Jew when I see one. You go about and poison wells, as the poet says. Who doesn’t? It is what it is. Anyhow, I spent a few days there, and took Bagrutani to the movie theater to see a film called Father Sergius. Bagrutani loved the story of the handsome officer who became a monk; he grabbed my hand when the hero for some reason chopped off his own finger. Bagrutani had very hairy knuckles, and his lofty brows in folds did figure death, and in their smoothness amity and life. I love Marlowe, the old sodomite. But Bagrutani was arrested on the street, and so I got to talk to a Bolshevik Komisar for the first time in my life. The Komisar slammed his Nagant down on his desk with such an exaggerated drama that it was clear he must’ve seen Father Sergius more than once. A man cut off from all his kind he was, as the poet says, and more than half detached from his own nature. Also, horribly ugly, missing a few teeth, his nose bent to the side from some beating he had received, no doubt deservedly. I offered him the Triumph for Bagrutani, but there was nothing that could be done, the Komisar said, as Bagrutani was judged to be a well-known bandit and an enemy of the people. I waited at the station for days before boarding the train, which was then delayed by a sandstorm—tebbad they call it around here. It took a couple of weeks to reach Tashkent. I would’ve gotten there faster on a camel, but all the camels were requisitioned by the Bolsheviks to be slaughtered for meat. In Tashkent, I disembarked into total chaos. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was out of their minds, as though of hemlock they had drunk. Nothing but fear and fatal steel and flags, my Jewish friend. It was the end of time, all over again, the American Consul-General told me. All he did was pray for a miracle of salvation. He also drank a lot. Americans are muttonheads; they are the recrement of humanity. I ran into another American passing through with a troupe of performing elephants; he had a pet white tiger he fed with camel meat; he also kept a tiny, starved Tibetan man in a cage, because he was supposed to be able to levitate, but the Tibetan was so emaciated and weak that he could not sit up, let alone levitate. I was accosted by a couple of beggars heading east, apparently ecstatic that the world was coming to an end. They carried with them a portrait of Christ and explained to me that the way for the soul to be released from the sorrows of this world and join the sphere of unbegotten God was to make the body that imprisons it pass through every possible condition of earthly life. You should do everything you can down here, they said, commit every sin and crime on earth, and then go to Heaven, the realm of sinlessness, liberated from your mortal body, left behind on earth like a discarded snakeskin. Their patron saint was the young naked man Jesus was with in Gethsemane when he was arrested, I forgot the name. They claimed he was Jesus’s lover. Ragged as they were, they offered themselves to me to advance my salvation. Imagine that. Imagine that, my misbegotten god! I am sure that a few Bolshevik bullets have by now released them from their mortal bodies.

  Moser finally stopped talking because his fever fully took over; his eyes were aflame, his febrile nostrils pulsating. In the corners of his dry mouth spittle gathered, soaking the edges of his mustache. Tucked inside his face was his ever-moving mouth, like something struggling to escape his thick mosslike beard. He looked nothing like Jozef Lazar, not even close, as if this man here hatched out of the shell of Lazar and then discarded it.

  Sahar brought a wooden bowl of melted snow and put it to Moser’s lips, and he drank greedily, the water evaporating as soon as it reached his throat. His foot was rotting, a dark red patch moving up from his toes. Pinto pointed at the melted snow and then at the stove to tell her to start boiling the water for the amputation, and she understood. Pinto wondered what Osman was doing at this time. Talking to the Cheka recruits about the Mohammedan religion? Riding into the desert to meet the head of a family that could be bribed away from Irgash? Darning his socks, patching his pants? Sleeping in their bed, dreaming of Pinto? Or keeping company to Klara Isakovna?

  Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, Moser continued after Sahar wiped his mouth and picked qurut bits out of his beard. Many goodly states and kingdoms I have seen, but never such madness and mayhem as in Tashkent. It all soon turned crazier and bloodier, and then it got much worse. Can you even begin to imagine what it was like? Do you have any idea? Do you? And who are you anyway? Why are you here? Am I going to die? Am I going to ascend to the realm of sinlessness and leave behind the wondrous architecture of this world? What do you think? What is churning up in your Jewish mind?

  Sahar put a pot of water on the stove, added some sticks and sheep turd to the fire, which briefly lit her face with its mazes of wrinkles. There was no way of knowing how old she was. Moser had asked Pinto how old he was and, for a moment, Pinto couldn’t remember. He had lived so much life, decades accruing in mere months, years in weeks. Sahar brought another bowl of water and poured it into Moser’s mouth, not quenching his thirst. Most of the time Moser spoke in educated German, but then in his delirium would abruptly switch to English, or gibberish French that still sounded like a different kind of English. Sahar did not even look up when he railed; to her, those European languages must’ve all sounded like febrile gobbledygook.

  She will not remember us, Pinto thought. There is nothing about us that matters to her in her life. We’re just foreigners carried through by some force, like strange birds dumped by a wind from a distant land. She was helping them because she could not let them die, not because they had any meaning in her life. She would do the same for a wounded bird, or a lamb. Perhaps she was helping because she was afraid that some future punishment by the Europeans would come upon her if she didn’t help them. Or it could be because Eshan ordered her to do what he thought ought to be done. But she will never think about the strangers, the two of us, once we are out of her house. And neither she should. Daleko im lijepa kuća, Bosnians say. May their pretty house be far away. If Manuči were hiding strangers, she would be in the kitchen performing duties requested by their presence. If Pinto knew the Tajik language, he could tell Sahar that she didn’t need to do what she was doing but that he was grateful. She still would not remember him after he was gone.