He knew that his manner in front of the camera was too tense – and that very knowledge made him tenser still. When he was answering questions he hesitated and tried to speak as little as possible. But that was in keeping with the image of an Orkish soldier with a scorched face who’d had a hard life, so all in all everything went off pretty well.

  Chloe, on the contrary, blossomed in the bright beams of attention, and even her grief for Bernard-Henri proved extremely photogenic. When she was handed the symbolic key to his home and the audience started applauding, even after all the tears she had already shed, she still managed to eke out just one more touching little tear – exactly the right size to be noticeable on a manitou screen.

  Damilola looked tired. He left after promising that the real introduction to the new world would begin in a few days’ time, after the refugees had settled in and had a rest.

  After Alena-Libertina had concluded her introductory chat with Chloe, a polite lady from the reception committee took the young Orks to settle into their new home.

  The journey from the shooting stage to their home took only five minutes. The ease with which they reached it was simply magical – travelling on the metrolift (or, as people here called it, the ‘tube’), a small, cosy cabin with four seats. It was called just like an ordinary lift by pressing a button in the corridor, and after that it set off along any given route. Grim tried to find out from the female attendant how these capsules, upholstered in velour fabric and smelling of violets, managed not to crash into each other as they hurtled along the same pipes – but she confessed that she didn’t know that herself, she only knew how to enter the address required on a manitou.

  To reach Bernard-Henri’s home they only had to walk about twenty metres from the lift. The way in was simply a door in a grey and black wall. No key was required, not even a symbolic one – the door handle had already been re-coded for the palms of Grim and Chloe’s hands. It was a perfectly ordinary door. But behind it …

  It wasn’t that Bernard-Henri’s apartment looked so very huge and chic, but it was so unorkish that to Grim and Chloe it seemed like the dwelling of a magician or a god.

  It had two levels with four small rooms, and downstairs there was a little garden, set out on something like a terrace or wide balcony. The little garden was enclosed by a mossy brick wall – the only thing here that resembled Orkish architecture.

  However, despite the highly convincing patches of damp and the chipped surface, this mossy brickwork immediately aroused Grim’s suspicion. He examined the wall closely and right down at ground level he found a spot where there was something black and matt, protruding from under the bricks. The bricks and the moss were simply an embossed veneer glued onto plastic. Once he realised that, Grim spotted repeated patterns and patches that were the same shape. But the veneer had been made so skilfully that the moss felt alive to the touch.

  The little garden also provoked doubts. No, the flowers and little trees growing out of the earth were real. Well, almost all of them. But the earth that they rose out of … After poking a dry branch into it a few times, Grim realised that there was some kind of socket under his feet, into which modular blocks with plants were set.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ Chloe told him calmly when he informed her about his discovery. ‘Why don’t you just sit in a deckchair and feel glad – There’s my little garden … But now you’ll be thinking it isn’t genuine.’

  ‘You’ll be thinking it isn’t genuine too,’ said Grim.

  ‘No,’ Chloe replied. ‘Am I a total fool, or what? This is what I’ve been heading towards all my life. I’ll be thinking there’s my little garden.’

  ‘But you know it isn’t genuine.’

  ‘And that’s fine,’ said Chloe. ‘I got tired of genuine things when I was still a kid.’

  Bernard-Henri’s home stood on a high spot and the view from the windows was incredible – stretching out in every direction, for as far as the eye could see, were whimsically shaped fields and yellow and green hills overgrown with cypress trees. Old white houses were scattered here and there. Lying in the fields were large cylinders that looked like sawn-up logs but were rolled out of sun-scorched hay. And they could also see a river, blue mountains in the distance, and a sky with giant, serene clouds drifting across it.

  A summer that was only the tiniest bit short of eternity.

  As Grim contemplated this beauty, ideas for poems kept occurring to him, but he felt too lazy to write them down – the world in the window had such an aura of peace about it.

  Despite the traces of agricultural activity, there were no people to be seen anywhere. But there were many details that indicated their presence. For instance, smoke from the chimney of a house standing on a hill, or a windmill – a squat round tower with its latticed vanes, set in a cross and slowly rotating.

  The only thing was, you couldn’t set out for a walk into this fairy-tale expanse. There was no way out there – the only door out of the apartment led into the corridor to the tube. If you leaned down over the parapet of the garden-cum-balcony, you could see bushes growing below that looked very tough and prickly. Theoretically it was possible to jump down. But Grim knew that it wasn’t a good idea – the people in the reception committee had warned him about that on the very first day.

  Of course, no wasteful empty space could be left inside the offglobe. The nature of the view outside the window was the same as that of the picture on a manitou – it was an incredibly convincing three-dimensional illusion. But by now Grim had realised that Chloe was right and there really wasn’t any need to remind oneself about this every other minute.

  There was one thing that wasn’t clear – how far away from the window opening was the equipment that created the mirage? Judging from the faint smell of hot plastic, it was very close, perhaps two or three metres away. Grim was even going to check if a long stick that he had found on the balcony would run into anything if he thrust it out a long way. But then he wisely decided not to test the new world’s solidity – especially since there was undoubtedly more than enough in it that was real.

  The rooms had elegant furniture in them, the kind that you could only see in Slava in the Urkagan’s residence. Oil paintings on the walls depicted bright-coloured splotches that looked like something between fireworks or the flashes you got from bad durian – down below, things like that could only be found in the art section of the Museum of the Ancestors.

  But there were a lot of things that didn’t exist down below at all.

  The mattresses were made out of some strange sponge-like material. Not only did they feel soft and warm, they kind of enveloped your body, remembering its shape and maintaining the right temperature – Grim went to sleep and woke up in the same position, without having turned over in the night even once.

  There was no need to cook food. You could choose it on the kitchen manitou – in practically the same way as setting the route of a journey in the tube. A few minutes later the order appeared in a brightly-lit little window under the kitchen table – it was called a ‘pneumoship’. Grim had never eaten anything that tasted so good.

  They could throw their dirty clothes into a different window in the kitchen. They slithered off downwards and soon came back, clean and dry. And best of all, everywhere – the bedrooms, the kitchen and the happiness room – was always clean and fresh, as if the floor and the walls washed themselves. Sooner or later, any dirty stain disappeared – all that was left was a subtle scent of violets, like in the velour-upholstered cabin of the metrolift.

  Grim was slightly disappointed by the manitous in the apartment. He had heard that people had three-dimensional ones, but Bernard-Henri only had several large flat screens, almost exactly the same as in the public offices in Urkaine. Grim didn’t even know how to switch them on.

  The people from the reception committee had taken away all of Bernard-Henri’s personal things, leaving as mementoes only his book (a thick brick entitled Les Feuilles Mortes) and a large black-and-white photograph of the former owner in an expensive frame of extinct birch wood. Grim didn’t try to read the book, because it was in Old French, and he turned the discoursemonger’s photograph face down. But after three days of actively settling into the new space, Chloe discovered other traces of the former owner.

  Her attention was caught by one of the pictures hanging on the wall. It was a canvas about one metre high and two wide. The image on it was rather strange: something like a milky-white ocean, with a red and brown whirlpool swirling down into it. The words ‘mon souvenir’ had been crudely painted in black straight across the ocean, and were also being sucked into the whirlpool. Most likely in some ancient language they meant the same as the Church English phrase ‘my memory’ on the little tag attached to the frame.

  The picture differed from the others by being attached very firmly to the wall. Chloe pressed against the side of the frame several times, trying to understand how it was fixed to the wall, and suddenly the picture swung out gently, turning into a door concealing a secret cupboard.

  ‘Grim!’ Chloe called out in fright.

  The moment the picture-door opened, the manitou standing beside it came on, music started playing and a pleasant male voice began to sing in an unfamiliar language. But Grim and Chloe didn’t even look at the screen, they were so astounded by what they had already seen.

  Inside, it was like a picture in a picture – something like an installation of various items in the shallow niche. The longer Grim and Chloe peered at it, the harder it was to believe that their eyes weren’t deceiving them.

  It looked most of all like an ancient grave – the way they’re shown in articles on archaeology. The grave was brightly lit by lamps at the sides. In the upper section there were two skulls attached to the wall. In the lower section there were two tambourines, a red one and a blue one, both adorned with little bells. All the rest of the surface was lined with fallen leaves, glued to the walls with transparent lacquer.

  The skulls had been painstakingly polished and also covered with lacquer – and set into the bone on the forehead of each of them was a precious crystal, glinting brightly and splitting the light into a host of tiny little rainbows.

  ‘Diamonds,’ Chloe whispered.

  However, Grim was stunned by something else.

  There was woman’s skin stretched over the tambourines. The fact that it was precisely woman’s skin was made clear by the place from which (or rather, together with which) it had been flayed off. Even the hairs had been preserved – on the red tambourine they were a neatly trimmed ginger triangle, and on the blue one an amorphous dark-chestnut mop. These intimate scalps had clearly been treated with some kind of preservative compound, because the skin looked fresh, without even the slightest sign of decay.

  Plaits of woman’s hair were attached to the skulls: a ginger one hung down onto the red tambourine, and a dark one onto the blue tambourine. The plaits ended in paper labels – ‘Une Autre No. 1’ and ‘Une Autre No. 3’.

  ‘But where’s number two?’ Grim asked, simply in order to say something.

  ‘Number two is me,’ said Chloe.

  Grim realised that she was right – just enough space had been left between the two skulls, and another tambourine could have fitted in below it. Lying at that spot now was a plump paper bundle.

  Grim unwrapped it and saw a sheaf of tattered photos. They all showed practically the same thing – a table, with several people sitting at it. They included policemen, doctors and priests – and they were all looking at Grim as if just a moment ago he had done something very bad. The images differed in the shape of the table, the colour of the tablecloth, the number of people in the group, the way they were dressed and – most important of all – the expressions on their faces, which ranged from squeamish and bored to dumbfounded and furious: there were as many gradations as there were snapshots. There were even several black-and-white photographs, treated with sepia.

  On the back of the photos they saw blurred letters: ‘F’, ‘T’, ‘B’, ‘A’, ‘J’ and others – sometimes grouped in twos or threes.

  ‘What kind of markings are those?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Grim.

  He rolled the photos impregnated with human fat and sweat back up in the paper and put the bundle back in its place.

  The song that the door had switched on as it opened played to the end and immediately started again. Grim finally looked at the manitou.

  It was showing a black-and-white clip from the Age of the Ancient Films – so old that the monochrome shot might not be due to the director’s caprice, but the technical limitations of the period.

  The clip had no special gimmicks – a young man in a jacket was walking across a dark stage and singing something unintelligible, every now and then casting at the viewers the meaningful glance of a cockatoo hypnotising his mate. The text of the song, translated into Church English, was drifting across the lower part of the screen. According to the subtitles the singer was called Serge Gainsbourg and the song was called ‘La Chanson de Prévert’.

  Grim peered at the running line of text for a while.

  ‘And day after day my dead lovers just keep on dying,’ he said. ‘And at the end he sings about how on a certain day they’ll finally stop. But it’s a strange song altogether.’

  ‘Why?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘It’s about another song. He probably crammed The Word on the Word as a kid too.’

  ‘And what’s the other song about?’

  ‘It’s about dead leaves. If I understand it right.’

  Chloe sighed and looked at the scalps stretched over the tambourines again.

  ‘So that’s why he was sorry my hairs are so short. And then he said, “Never mind, you’ll be the other Other.” I thought he’d just pigged out on that garbage of his …’

  She closed the picture door quietly. The manitou immediately went blank and the music stopped.

  ‘What will we do with this?’ asked Grim. ‘Are we going to tell anyone?’

  Chloe shook her head.

  ‘The people have already given us a break,’ she said. ‘Why should we put them in an awkward position? We’ll just forget about it, that’s all.’

  ‘You’ll be able to forget about that?’ Grim asked in disbelief.

  ‘Of course,’ said Chloe.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I just will. Like the pots on the balcony.’

  But a day later even Grim had forgotten about the skulls in the secret cupboard. It happened when Bernard-Henri’s manitou went online.

  Chloe immediately worked out how to buy clothes and everything else straight from the terminal – and she set about fervently spending the settling-in allowance issued by the committee. The pneumoship started spitting identical black packages of all sorts of girlie clothes, one after another, straight out of the wall, while Chloe carried on ordering more without even opening them – and soon her new things were scattered all over the apartment. There was only one way she could stop – by starting to choose clothes for Grim.

  She bought an especially large number of different bras – because the Orkish bras gave her calluses, and bras were the hardest thing of all to find down below. Chloe didn’t really need one – she had small, firm breasts that could easily have managed without a harness, but she explained to Grim that sexual morality required a woman to be kitted out like this. But then, after studying the catalogue, she came to the conclusion that this norm didn’t apply up here.

  ‘It looks like the fashionable girls here walk about without anything,’ she said disconcertedly. ‘And, would you believe it, they dress like Orkish hookers. But I’d better take a look around first.’

  It turned out that clothes and food weren’t the only things you could order for delivery, you could even order a hairstyle. Grim didn’t believe this was possible at first. But right there in front of him Chloe chose a cut and colour for her hair from the catalogue on the manitou and pressed the ‘confirm purchase’ button – and soon afterwards a jaunty little package tumbled out of the wall.

  Chloe took out a broad plastic ribbon and wrapped it round her wet hair, as the instructions required. The ribbon swelled up with a fearsome hissing sound, as if it was melting, and quickly expanded into a large porous sphere. A few minutes later Chloe pulled it off her head, revealing that her hair was already trimmed, dyed and arranged in a complicated style. Grim simply couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible.

  Then Alena-Libertina made contact and Chloe went to her place for a casting audition, from which she didn’t return for two days and nights. Left alone, Grim gradually started finding his bearings online.

  There was everything there.

  Even divination with The Book of Orkasms.

  Now he didn’t have to worry that the book the priest had given him had been left down below. Of course, it wasn’t clear if it was right to tell fortunes through a manitou. What if the book’s attendant spirits took umbrage?

  Grim decided to check this by giving it a try – and he started wondering what to ask about. He ran his eyes round the room several times and remembered Chloe.

  This was hardly surprising, because her things were lying around everywhere. They were distributed evenly through the surrounding space in such large numbers that they gave the impression of an attempt to stake a claim to the entire territory at once – even more blatantly than by the ancient custom of wolves.

  He counted three bras alone. One was hanging on the back of a chair. Another was lying beside the sofa. The third, neatly folded, was delicately poised – for the time being – on the mantelpiece, between the volume of Les Feuilles Mortes and the discoursemonger’s inverted photograph. But Grim already had enough military experience to recognise a bridgehead for invasion at first glance.