My comrade-in-arms was still in Slava, in the extraterritorial Green Zone, where all our people live. I think he was involved in some murky political business, with an eye to the next post-war period. They issued a green pass for Chloe, and she spent all the time with him (in order to speed up the procedure, Bernard-Henri adopts his little girlfriends in the Orkish administration – it’s cheap and it only takes a minute at the outside). I occasionally edged Hannelore up to the window of their loft. Bernard-Henri, like all philosophers, instinctively adores lofts – probably because it’s easier to direct aerial strikes from there.

  I was interested in Kaya’s reaction to what she saw. That is, I realised that she wasn’t reacting at all to what was happening, whereas what I had in front of me was only the simulation of a reaction – but Kaya only had to say a few words and before I even noticed it, I was drawn into a conversation.

  ‘But it actually suits her,’ my little darling said, eyeing Chloe. ‘Boots, whip, leather. And best of all, it’s entirely in the spirit of the Orkish national tradition. Pretty authentic. And very agreeable work – I’d take pleasure in whipping that scumbag too – until he bleeds …’

  She really is such a sharp-tongued bitch that it’s a great relief when her snide remarks are redirected at someone else. But this sarcasm of hers is somehow combined with an almost childish naïvety. I was often puzzled by what this was – a gap in her education or part of the game.

  ‘But why does she tie him to the bed?’ she asked with a serious air. ‘So that he won’t run away when she’s whipping him?’

  ‘Where would he run to?’ I laughed.

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Bernard-Henri has an entire programme,’ I replied. ‘The sequence ramps up the action. First he asks his Orkish girlfriend to tie him to a bed somewhere in the Green Zone. It’s safe there, and if necessary he can call for help. If everything goes all right, he asks his girlfriend to take him into the forest and tie him to a tree. Then they hide away, deep in his secret Orkish lair, which he keeps especially for this purpose, and she ties him up there. And what’s more, Bernard-Henri removes all his radio beacons and identification markers. So that no one will know where to look for him.’

  ‘Why does he do that?’

  ‘Danger is arousing. Exactly like with you, sweetie pie …’

  ‘Repulsive, slobbery baboon. No, not him. You.’

  It was only an illusion, of course, but it seemed to me that there were moments when Kaya spoke to me more sincerely than usual.

  ‘And what do they do afterwards?’ she asked. ‘After the lair?’

  ‘Bernard-Henri has a very interesting and unconventional continuation of the plot. But I’ll tell you about that sometime later, sweetheart.’

  On the whole, however, Kaya wasn’t particularly drawn to watching Bernard-Henri and Chloe. Clearly she didn’t want me eyeing that beautiful little Orkish fool for too long. She was far more interested in Grim.

  I think that at first she simulated curiosity about him in order to provoke my jealousy, but when I started showing annoyance, bitchiness got involved in the action. So now I had to hover for long periods in front of the Orkish barracks, peeping at Grim through a chink in the little window – or drifting invisibly through the air behind him when he came outside for a stroll.

  CHAPTER 6

  The army chaplain Goon walked into the barracks and climbed up onto the white dais that had been prepared for him under a banner with the red inscription:

  HØLISHER WØR No. 221

  The entire barracks fell silent – the cleric looked so impressive. It wasn’t even a matter of the brocade robes and the spastika with three cross-pieces, which indicated a colonel’s rank.

  The priest’s greyish-white hair was combed in a special style – the so-called ‘fringe of wisdom’. It entirely covered his face and merged into his beard. In front of his mouth, nose and eyes, there were stains on the hair left by tears, snot and food, and those transformed the fringe of wisdom into a mask that expressed some kind of calm, along with exalted, entirely unOrkish state of the spirit. And although Grim knew that hidden behind this otherworldly visor with its yellow eye blotches, there was an ordinary, coarse Orkish mug with a brass ring in its nose, he still felt a thrill of respect.

  Then the Holy Views were carried through the barracks – these were a pair of standard little pictures, covered with glass to keep the kissing hygienic. First came the icon ‘Manitou in Glory’ (the wonder-working black hole was painted in the meagre ancient manner: a side view of an accretion disk with two fountains of emissions, a pink Eros and a brown Thanatos). That was followed by an image of a canyon filled with candle wax, the place where Manitou the Antichrist was shot: cliffs rendered garishly colourful by the items stuck on them – incense burners and auto-prayers, flowers, paper cranes and the traditional blue biscuits lying on every rock.

  All in all, the start was drearily yawn-worthy.

  The priest spoke for a long time about the Urkaganatum Lossum, which is resurrected from out of the ashes of the centuries; about Urkaine on guard over Spirit and Will; about the sacred sacrifice of the Urk warrior, rescuing the world from self-destruction; about a gang of rabid perverts, once again imposing war on the Urks – all the usual stuff. When he reminded the audience that the Urks were created by Manitou not for philistine idleness, but for the glory of battle and the ecstasy of prayer, Grim suppressed his first yawn. When he started droning on about the true faith (‘What they have, lads, is only Manitouism by name, eviscerated of its very essence, but what you and I have is the primordial azure path …’), Grim started dozing off. And when he started reciting the hour-long Word on the Word, Grim actually fell asleep.

  He wasn’t the only one. Everyone had heard Word on the Word many times, starting from their preschool days. Many of them knew it by heart – and there was nothing they could do about their sleep-reflex response.

  Grim knew how to doze off without offending against the social proprieties, and he even managed to register the familiar patterns of sounds through his sleep. Although the ancient words meant nothing to him, he could tell from them how far off the end was, as if they were surveyor’s markers.

  However, this time the markers let him down. Grim fell more deeply asleep than he wanted, and only opened his eyes when the army divination for which he had stayed in the barracks had already begun.

  By that moment the priest Goon had practically lost his face from working so long with his mouth, and now his tangled mask of hair didn’t look so exalted: one of its eyes had narrowed, as if the sage was winking furtively.

  Grim wanted to have his fortune told too. He raised his hand. Thank Manitou, so far there were only two eager soldiers ahead of him – a village lad who looked like a boar with sideburns, and another, as skinny as a rake, who belonged to a traditional military dynasty – which could easily be seen from the tattoos on his naked torso.

  The priest was holding an old divinatory book with a spine of iridescent blue fabric. Grim was sitting close enough to make out the small polished ivory plaques on the cover and the name written in letters reminiscent of a noble ancient age:

  THE BOOK OF ØRKASMS

  Most of the young Orks only remembered about the divinatory book before a war, when the soldiers decided whether to ask about the future. They were afraid of the divination. Many believed that it could call down the wrath of fate, so it was regarded as one of the most terrifying of army rituals. Those who decided to do it were either daredevils or simply fools. But Grim thought that for an orderly everything might turn out not so very terribly.

  Just then the priest Goon was divining for the village lad. He shook three little sticks with numbers on them out of a little cup, looked at them, then tossed out a fourth and a fifth, and started counting something, bending down his fingers as he went. Working out the number was a complicated procedure that had almost nothing to do with the law of probability: certain predictions came up very often and others almost never.

  Goon finally determined the answer. He lifted the book up so that his audience could see the numbered column of angular letters on paper that was yellowed with age. Then he started reading out loud.

  Fifty-Six. On Flies.

  How can I condemn flies for fucking? However, when it is on my head, it infuriates me. Likewise it is with queerasts. When they perform that which is the inclination of their hearts in quiet solitude, who shall object? But they hold torch-lit parades and chain themselves to lamp posts on the embankment, tooting tin whistles and shouting aloud, so that all might know of their disposition – that they do lash it into the orifice and hammer it up the backside. In truth, they are worse than flies, for flies only rarely sin on my head, while the queerasts do strive from day to day to copulate at its very centre. The flies out of folly, but the queerasts with cool deliberation.

  And through this do I perceive that they do not wish to shaft each other, but everyone, and moreover, do it by force, and their mutual sodomus is for them merely a pretext and a pretence.

  Now the entire barracks was looking at the village lad, and he was batting his eyelids in bewilderment.

  It was a bad prediction. The very worst possible. It was believed that if Manitou ‘handed you a queer’ in the divination before battle, it signified certain death. Even the word ‘fly’ boded no good.

  The tattooed scion of military men was still stretching his hand up into the air, and the priest turned towards him. The procedure with the little sticks was repeated. Then Goon showed the audience the column of text and read it out.

  One Hundred and Eight. On Music.

  Those who have dwelt for a long time among queerasts say that they are secretly ashamed of their sin and strive to astound with all kinds of tricks. Thus do they think to themselves: ‘Yes, I am a queerast … It has just turned out that way, what can be done about it now … But perhaps I am a queerast of genius? What if I write incredible music! Will they really dare to speak badly of a brilliant musician …?’ And therefore they strive constantly to think up new music, in order not to feel ashamed of carrying on shagging each other in the hole. And if they did it quietly, in a special place lined with cork, then everyone would care as little about it as they do for their shafting of the ass. But we are obliged to listen to their music every day, for it is played everywhere. And therefore we hear neither the wind, nor the sea, nor the rustling of the leaves, nor the singing of the birds. But only one and the same mechanical dead sound with which they seek to amaze, launching it into the sky at various angles.

  There are times, it is true, when the queer music machine breaks down. At such moments, make haste to listen to the silence.

  The hereditary military man turned pale. And it wasn’t just his face, but his entire body – which made his tattoo (depicting a tank battle at Orkish Glory) stand out incredibly clearly, right down to the last spastika on the banners. But a cold smile continued to play on his face as before – his soldier’s breeding showed.

  Deafening silence descended in the barracks hall.

  Now they were all looking at Grim. When the priest turned towards him, Grim was seriously tempted to lower his hand. But it was already too late – Goon cast the little sticks with numbers onto the floor in front of him.

  After completing the divination, he read out:

  Forty-Eight. Where Everything Comes From.

  Out of yourself. And I shall prove this very simply. What is all this? It is what you see, hear, feel and think at this moment, and nothing more. Only you, and no one else, could have created this, for it is your eyes that see, your ears that hear, your body that feels and your head that thinks. Others will see something different, for their eyes will be in a different place. And even if they should glimpse the same thing, a different head will think about it, and in that head everything is different.

  Sometimes people prattle, saying that there is a ‘world in general’, which is the same for all. I shall reply, ‘The world in general’ is a thought, and each head thinks it differently. And so in any case, everything comes from ourselves.

  But surely it cannot be that I have created this torment for myself? From this I conclude that all this cerebration is merely the venomous sting of the mind, and the mind itself is like a wild beast guarding me, and is only mine in the sense that it has been set to guard me. Human reasoning can never pass beyond this.

  They say that one should contemplate darkness with lights until the looker and the observed mingle together. Then the wild beast will cease to understand where you are and will itself be visible from its slightest movement. And afterwards the path to the Light of Manitou will be opened, but I myself have not been there.

  Grim caught his breath. He’d never heard this fragment, but he remembered that drawing the ‘wild beast’ together with ‘light’ was considered a sign of a fortunate destiny. This combination was only encountered very rarely – in the hall they started whispering and someone slapped Grim on the back approvingly. Immediately there were more soldiers keen to have a reading – lots of hands went flying up.

  The strain of the last few minutes had been too much, and Grim felt short of air. He got to his feet and set off towards the door, brushing against the soldiers sitting on quilted jackets and straw mattresses.

  In the corridor he discovered that the main door was locked. It was a greeting from his childhood – for as long as Grim could remember they always did that so that the youngsters wouldn’t scamper off while the priest was reading Word on the Word. Fortunately there was an open window close by – the soldiers climbed through it to have a smoke. Grim clambered over the windowsill and found himself in the inner yard: on the other side of the fence there was a mud-covered wasteland in front of a pig farm.

  Standing beside the window was a large red barrel with the word ‘Sand’ on it. For all that, there wasn’t any sand inside. Instead there was some stinking slurry composed of soaked cigarette ends – the water probably hadn’t been changed since the times of the previous dynasty. Orks drafted at the same time as him were standing around, excitedly jabbing their fingers up at the sky, where the black spots of two Byzantine cameras were suspended in the air.

  Grim listened to the conversation for a minute or two. The new recruits believed that the people were holding a pre-war air show – to put psychological pressure on the soldiers. But an experienced sergeant laughed as he explained that nobody was interested in them (he expressed himself more succinctly and colourfully).

  Novice pilots hovered here every day to get a panoramic shot of shit and pigs for the news. The pilots loved this spot because there were several pig farms together outside the fence, and also a mass grave from the time of Loss Solid that had been rooted up, so the pigs often ended up in shot together with human skulls. And the pilots disengaged their camouflage to avoid draining the batteries.

  Grim shifted his gaze to the camouflage cloud concealing Big Byz. Today the offglobe couldn’t be seen from the city, above which it hung, but the cloud seemed to have absorbed all of its weight – it looked as if it was made out of a twisted spiral of lead.

  From the spot where Grim was standing the city seemed to ascend in terraces towards the cloud – both the market square and the gigantic ring of the Circus were over there. In the other direction there was a panoramic view of Slava.

  The Green Zone, with its business centre’s green split sphere, glowed with bright, pure colours. Spread out alongside it was the Yellow Zone with its neat Orktivist Town and the canary-yellow pavilions of the assembly lines (that was where it had got its name from). And tacked on behind them, stretching as far as the eye could see were the nondescript concrete burrows of the Orks’ housing.

  Here and there little patches of green could be seen, pleasantly enlivening the landscape – the Partisans’ Gardens, the alleys of parks, thickets of hemp and sage in the estates of rich Ganjaberserks. His gaze lingered on the turquoise domes of the Matriarchate, which, if the official poetry could be believed, resembled the breasts of Manitou. But overall, the Orkish capital coalesced into an endless yellowish-brown swamp with the black bald spots of vacant lots at the sites of recent fires or bombing.

  Grim walked round the barracks. There was no one at the gates. He sneaked out into a little street with fast food joints that exuded stench and music, and set off towards the centre.

  The signboards of little shops squinted at him from all sides. The daubs of cheerful faces probably were there to induce in the passer-by a feeling of elation and the desire to buy a salted watermelon or spice cake, but in truth evoked only an agonising fear of life – and shame for the fact that life could evoke such fear.

  After walking for half an hour he was in the centre. Despite the crush, it was possible to get close to the Gates of Victory – Grim got all the way to the fence, where the turds were sauntering about in their black cloaks. Now he was as close to Big Byz, hidden behind its cloud, as it was possible to get on earth.

  The gates to Orkish Glory (Ürkisher Gordynka in Upper Mid-Siberian or, in simple language, the Big Circus) were the only way through the cyclopean ancient wall around which the city had accumulated – at other points it wasn’t even permitted to come close to it. No one lived in Orkish Glory. They only went there to die, and all the countless Orks who had died on the other side of the wall had once passed through these high red doors. The thought of it suddenly made Grim feel uneasy. He was also destined to pass through these gates and – if Manitou was merciful – to come back again.

  The gates held his attention like a magnet. They were made of thick wood, clad with iron sheeting in the form of spastikas, and they looked like a grating in which not only the bars but also the space between them had been painted red.