Or you can try a more humane experiment. Tie a load of about ten kilogrammes, wrapped in a big, soft pillow, to your stomach. Only the load has to be something fragile, and so precious that you would be absolutely distraught if you lost it. Then walk around like that for twenty-four hours. And sleep with this load . . .
Even like that you can’t get the full comparison, but somehow men who have been through that kind of training start jumping to their feet as if they’ve been scalded when they catch sight of a pregnant woman standing in public transport.
Magic, of course, is not given to us from birth (if we don’t count my daughter, that is) and it’s not as priceless as a child. Magic is merely an additional convenience in life. Just like that damned flashing light on an expensive car . . . or a Duma deputy’s ID that makes him ‘uncheckable’, brings traffic cops out in red blotches and makes them salute the offender with black hate in their hearts. So surely I would be able to manage without magic for just twenty-four hours?
Although, of course, it would have been good to leave myself the Sphere of Inattention. As the magical version of the flashing light . . . no, to hell with it!
Mind you, I was very well aware of just why my thoughts kept coming back to that crappy piece of transparent blue plastic that squawked and flashed on the roofs of Mercs and BMWs. I was driving home in the daytime, but I had been rash enough to try it at rush hour (incidentally, after the new mayor of Moscow dedicated a massively broad lane on every major thoroughfare to public transport, rush hour in Moscow had stretched out to fill the whole day and a large part of the night) and the bureaucrats’ cars overtaking me in the oncoming lane had begun to provoke despairing envy and burning hatred simultaneously. I tried to recall if I’d ever seen vehicles with special signals like these in any other country at all – apart, that is, from police cars and ambulances. I could only remember a few odd cases – one in London, one in either Spain or Italy.
But on my right there was an empty lane, separated off by a solid line. For some reason the cars with the flashing lights didn’t enter it, although you’d have thought they had no reason to feel shy. During the half-hour that I spent in a slow-crawling queue, two buses and a couple of cars with black-tinted windows and no number plates drove along the dedicated lane. In one of the cars – a hulking great Lexus SUV – the window on the driver’s side was lowered. The driver was a swarthy young man with a mobile phone in his hand. He was hardly even looking at the road. People like him used to be called ‘individuals of Caucasian nationality’ in the police bulletins, but recently they’d started using the more politically correct expression ‘natives of the Northern Caucasus region’, which in the popular daily vernacular had rapidly been reduced simply to ‘natives’.
It would have been okay if buses and taxis had been driving along the dedicated lane in an unbroken stream, the way they do everywhere else in the world! Then it wouldn’t have been so offensive. It would have been clear that I was paying with my time for the comfort of riding in a car, while people using public transport were granted the right to ride past the traffic jams.
Only there weren’t any buses to be seen. But even so, apart from a few especially self-confident ‘natives’, the drivers didn’t venture into the special lane.
I lit a cigarette. Then I crushed the cigarette into the ashtray and started turning to the right. They weren’t exactly delighted to let me through, but they did it calmly – the jam had given drivers a sense of unity but had not yet driven them berserk. Once I was through the four lines of cars that were driving in three lanes, I turned grimly out onto the dedicated lane and put my foot down.
So what if they have put up speed cameras all over the place now! Let them send me a fine in the post, I don’t give a damn, I’ll just pay it . . . I moved on at a brisk pace, glancing at the speedometer every now and then to avoid exceeding sixty kilometres an hour. The Lexus loomed up ahead in the distance. Along the side of the road ‘natives of Central Asia’ were picking in relaxed style at the asphalt and the hard autumn ground. For every man with a pick there were three or four standing about aimlessly or observing the slow-flowing river of glittering cars with curiosity. The gastarbeiters were finishing stripping the asphalt off the pavement in order to replace it with paving slabs, after the new fashion. Occasional pedestrians manoeuvred between them, skipping from little islands of surviving asphalt to the more even patches of earth. A young mother shoved her baby-buggy forward with dour intensity, as if she didn’t notice the nightmare all around her. I suddenly imagined a young woman just like her, somewhere near here seventy years earlier, pushing a barrow filled with earth from the anti-tank trenches that were being dug around Moscow with the fascists already at the approaches. But while her grinding labour had been a significant feat of heroism, nowadays this heroic feat had become a meaningless torment.
The line of gastarbeiters came to an end, giving way to dug-up pavement with stacks of sombre grey concrete slabs standing along it like columns. I wondered what had prevented them from laying the slabs along this section of pavement first, and then starting to break up the next one.
There was no answer to that question. But at the end of the mutilated pavement, where it was a bit less muddy, there was a traffic-police patrol car parked, and two young guys in mouse-grey greatcoats waved their striped batons at me gleefully.
I squeezed in close to the kerb, braked to a halt and lowered the window.
‘Senior Sergeant Roman Tarasov!’ the young, ruddy-faced policeman who walked over announced briskly.
‘Common driver Gorodetsky!’ I replied, for some reason just as briskly and even playfully, holding out the documents for the car and my licence.
‘We’re infringing the rules!’ the sergeant said, grinning.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed, not attempting to deny it. ‘I couldn’t bear sitting in that traffic jam any longer.’
‘This lane is the lane for public transport!’ the policeman explained to me, as if he was talking to a child. ‘Can’t you see that, then?’
‘I can,’ I admitted. ‘But I can also see a Lexus that just drove past you. And I haven’t seen a single bus for the last quarter of an hour.’
The sergeant lost a bit of his joie de vivre, but he carried on smiling.
‘A Lexus – that’s a big car, almost like a bus . . .’ Apparently that was an attempt at a joke. ‘But even if there are no buses, that’s no excuse for infringing the rules!’
‘Agreed, that’s no excuse,’ I said, nodding. ‘But, just the same, why didn’t you stop the Lexus?’
The sergeant looked at me as if I was an idiot.
‘You mean you didn’t see his number plates?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘But then, there weren’t any to see! By the way, that’s another infringement . . . and the windows were tinted darker than the standards allow. A whole bunch of infringements.’
‘A whole bunch . . .’ said the sergeant, wincing as if he had toothache. ‘The lads stopped one of those “bunches” once – and they got thrown out on their ear, lucky not to get taken to court! And do you know how I got this job?’
‘How?’ I asked, beginning to feel rather surprised.
The policeman’s face assumed the expression of mixed caution and squeamishness with which normal people regard someone who’s got a few screws loose.
‘Driving onto the lane for public transport traffic,’ he said drily. ‘Fine: three thousand roubles.’
‘I accept that,’ I agreed again. ‘Write out a receipt.’
This time he looked at me really warily.
‘I think you were in a hurry, driver Gorodetsky . . .’
‘I was.’
‘And your car . . . isn’t a Lexus,’ he remarked in a flash of brilliant insight.
‘A correct observation!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s a Ford!’
‘We could try to resolve the situation – for half,’ the policeman said in a very low voice. ‘And writing out a receipt takes so long .
. .’
I could feel the laugher welling up inside me. He was so very hungry. Of course, for the last seventeen years I hadn’t lived the way other people did. But, even so, I did remember a thing or two.
They hadn’t changed at all since my first meeting with Pastukhov at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements metro station. ‘I tell you what, Roman, write me out the fine,’ I said. ‘I’d really like to save a bit of money and not waste time. Only it makes me feel sick. Do you understand?’
His face seemed to shudder.
‘Do you think it doesn’t make me feel sick?’ Roman asked in a quiet voice. ‘Don’t dare stop some of them . . . And then there’s others that wave their fancy IDs at you . . . and they’ve closed down all the factories in my parents’ town, and you can’t buy anything on a pension . . . and I . . .’ He faltered, waved his hand through the air and looked at me. He held out my documents. ‘Drive on.’
‘What about the fine?’ I asked.
‘Forget it!’ He swung round and walked back to his partner.
I watched him go. Sometimes remoralisation doesn’t require magic. It was just a pity that this kind of wizardry didn’t work for long – and it didn’t always work . . . not on everybody.
As I drove slowly back into the lane on the right, I heard the sergeant’s partner exclaim: ‘You what?’
‘Well, you know – he’s a popular actor, in theatre and films . . .’ Tarasov lied clumsily. ‘Let him go.’
I raised the window, squeezed in between a dusty Nissan and a battered old Volga, blinked my emergency lights to thank them for letting me in. And looked at my watch.
Not bad: I’d be home in an hour and a half.
From here it was about twenty minutes on foot by the direct route, through the side streets and courtyards . . .
In actual fact I drove up to the building a quarter of an hour later – some switch or other had tripped in the mysterious mechanism of Moscow traffic jams and the pace of the cars became almost lively. I stopped in front of the building, in my usual spot, and recalled that a long time ago I’d cast a spell on this convenient patch of asphalt to prevent other people from parking there. Should I stick consistently to my principles and move the car? That would be stupid – no one else would park on this spot anyway.
So I decided not to count magic employed previously as a breach of terms, climbed out of the car and locked it. Now I would go home, and I wouldn’t need my abilities as an Other there either . . .
My mobile jingled. I looked at the screen.
‘Dearest, buy some black and white bread, vegetable oil, ten eggs, sausages. And the toilet paper’s running out.’
Sveta always writes texts with capital letters and punctuation marks. It amuses some people and makes other angry, for some reason. I like it.
I shrugged and set off towards the nearest supermarket, the Crossroads. As everyone knows, since ancient times crossroads have been regarded as the meeting places of evil forces, vampires and dark sorcerers – no wonder that was where they preferred to bury them, after first hammering an aspen stake through their chests with texts from Holy Writ attached to it, just to make sure. That was probably how the first road signs had appeared . . .
The modern-day supermarkets that had incautiously taken this name were not particularly well respected in Moscow, owing to a certain lack of chic and the low-income range of their clientele. But I always felt more comfortable there than in upmarket places with sparser crowds like Alphabet of Taste, Gourmet Globe or Seventh Continent.
I didn’t have far to walk – it only took five minutes. But even so I had time to think with bitter sarcasm that today, having abjured the use of magic, I was bound to get into some kind of scrape. The young checkout girl would short-change me and give me lip. An old pensioner at the checkout would count the change in her hand and sob bitterly as she took the chicken thighs and millet off the conveyor belt and put them back in the basket. A beardless youth would try to buy cheap vodka or fortified wine, and the checkout girl (the same one who was going to short-change me) would pretend that she didn’t notice his age.
Basically, something unpleasant was bound to happen, something on which, in normal circumstances, I could use the weak remoralisation spells available to me because of my rank – Reproach, Crying Shame, or even Disgrace – in order to restore justice and punish vice.
But even now I had no intention of giving in. I was going to show everyone, and in the first place myself, that I was capable of living like an ordinary human being while preserving my dignity and making the life around me better. I would shame the checkout girl (dammit, how had I got landed with this girl I’d never even seen?), pay for the old woman, who would bless me as I walked away, and lecture the youth sternly on the harmfulness of consuming alcohol in adolescence. Basically, I was going to do everything that I always did, only without magic.
It had worked with the traffic police!
So when I grasped a basket and set out on my journey round the shop (right, oil – there it is . . . the eggs are close by) I was ready for anything. Sausages . . . bread . . . the toilet paper’s near the entrance, I’ll pick it up there . . .
Standing in the queue for the checkout, I automatically picked up a round lollipop and a chocolate egg with a surprise in it off the counter. I thought about how for the last few months these traditional treats had no longer roused the same childish delight in Nadya that they once had.
What could be done about it? Children grow up faster than we can grasp what’s happening.
There was an old woman in the queue. And a youth with some kind of bottle. And the checkout girl was young and lippy-looking, with a piercing in her nose.
I braced myself inwardly.
The old woman set out on the conveyor belt a chicken, a bag of grain (what was this, did my clairvoyant abilities still work, even when my magic was blocked?) and, rather unexpectedly, a bottle of Crimean Cahors wine. And then a plastic card appeared from her little old purse.
‘My terminal’s not working, only cash,’ the checkout girl began.
‘Am I supposed to know the terminal’s not working?’ asked the old woman, instantly joining battle.
‘I put up a sign,’ said the checkout girl. Then she deftly raked together the old woman’s purchases, got up and carried them to the next conveyor belt. ‘Leila, let the granny through ahead of the queue.’
The old woman moved to the next checkout, muttering something indignantly, although she did growl ‘Thank you’ to the girl with the pierced nose. The queues waited patiently. The youth fidgeted nervously, looking at his watch, but he stayed where he was. I studied the sign: Sorry, we are temporarily unable to accept bank cards.
A man who looked like a building labourer bought two packs of two-minute noodles and a can of strong beer, and then set off towards the chemist’s stand with a confident stride. I had no doubt that he was going to buy either ‘antiseptic liquid, 96 per cent ethyl alcohol’ or ‘tincture of hawthorn’, which possessed the additional advantage of having a pleasant smell. And then the youth who came after him didn’t buy any alcohol at all, but some kind of vitaminised lemonade ‘made with natural ingredients’. Maybe he was intending to mix this lemonade with tincture of hawthorn too, of course. But I decided not to think badly of people. Otherwise I would start thinking of them as inferior too.
The girl quickly rang up my purchases and even treated me to a weary workaday smile before she turned to the next customer. I walked thoughtfully towards the doors.
On the one hand, Las was wrong: I could live without magic, no problem. But on the other, it turned out that I really had lost the habit, if a simple trek to the shop had become a reason for me to anticipate heroics . . .
And incidentally, what was that Las had said about our bank cards from the Watch?
I walked towards the ATMs. Took out my card and twirled it in my hands. It had been issued by some bank I’d never heard of called the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which seemed basi
cally rather strange. Didn’t Russia have enough of its own banks or branches of well-known foreign ones? I stuck the card in the slot and entered the pin code. Right, let’s try it . . . Balance request. No information. Naturally, the ATM belonged to Raiffeisen, and I’d never seen any ATMs belonging to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Russia. I probably ought to look for them in Australia. And I thought I’d seen their logo in Taiwan, too . . . But I’d never even thought of checking my balance.
I wondered what the point was of the Night Watch providing its staff members with cards from a bank that didn’t conduct any business or have any offices in Russia.
Well . . . for instance, so that they couldn’t check their balance.
But then, what was the point of that?
I selected Withdraw cash on the menu. Then Another amount. I smiled at the pun. Another amount for an Other . . . The usual limit for a single withdrawal of cash was thirty thousand roubles.
I punched in 30 500 and pressed Enter.
The ATM thought for a second and started rustling banknotes.
I entered the pin code again. Went to withdraw cash. Selected the dollar menu. Paused before I entered the sum.
No, this was raving lunacy.
25 000. Enter.
No way could an ATM issue me two hundred and fifty hundred-dollar notes!
Something inside the machine started chirring. A stack of hundred-dollar notes slid halfway out. I pulled it out and stuck it in my pocket, as if I was dreaming. The ATM didn’t ask for the pin code again – it started counting out more notes. I stood there, trying to hide the slot with the money in it from curious eyes – the European tact in such matters hadn’t yet caught on in Russia.
Another stack of money.
The rustling of notes as another portion was counted out . . .
What was I going to do with twenty-five thousand greenbacks? I could buy a new car with that, but what did I need it for?
And the answer was basically this:
Light Others aren’t ascetics or saints who have renounced money. We like to dress in beautiful clothes and eat good food. We won’t say no to a new TV. Or to a new car.