Legends

Hamlet Achba could be heard ranting incoherently as the four surviving prisoners and Martin and Almagul made their way along the track that ran through the dunes to the beached boat. At one point Martin stopped to look back at Hamlet. He was about to start up the dunes toward the warlord when he heard Dante’s wild Irish cackle in his ear. Don’t you know the bible instructs victims how to survive emotionally? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning, laddie. When Martin hesitated, Dante sighed in despair. Aye, you’re a weak-kneed excuse for a man. Martin had to agree. Nodding grimly, he turned and stumbled down the hill to join the others on the beach. The men rinsed the blood off their bodies in the sea and tugged the boat off the sand and climbed aboard. Almagul started the outboard, sending the white flamingoes scattering into the air. She backed the boat until the water was deep enough to swing it around and head at full throttle toward the mainland. While Almagul distributed watermelon and goat cheese from the hamper, Martin gazed back at the ghost town of Kantubek, growing smaller and smaller until it finally vanished into the tulle-like haze that thickened as the sun stepped higher in the east.

The solemn timeserver behind the counter at the central post office in Nukus had never before placed a call out of the country and needed to read the appropriate chapter in a manual before she could figure out the various codes and how to charge for the communication. On the third attempt she finally got through to a place she had never heard of—the borough of Brooklyn—and punched the chess timer that she used to measure the duration of calls.

“Stella, that you?” Martin called into the phone in the open booth while the half dozen people queuing for pension checks looked on in wonderment at someone dispatching his voice across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America and receiving an answer within a fraction of a second.

“Did you catch up with Samat?”

“I missed him but it couldn’t have been by much. The basketball court was blackened by exhaust.”

“You okay, Martin?”

“I am now. It was touch and go for a while.”

“What does a basketball court have to do with Samat?”

“It had a white circle painted on it, which means it’d been turned into a helicopter pad. Unlike me, Samat travels first class. I come chugging after him in open boats with outboard motors. How you making out with your new front tooth?”

“I decided you were right about the old chipped tooth—it had a certain charm even if it did make me look breakable. I don’t recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.”

“You can always chip the new tooth.”

“Very funny. Martin, don’t get angry but you are tracking down Samat, aren’t you?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. The fact is I hardly know you—I don’t think you’re a serial killer or anything like that, but you could be a serial liar. You could be phoning me from Hoboken and making the rest up.”

“I’m phoning you from a post office in Uzbekistan. The woman who put the call through had never called out of the country before.”

“I want to believe you. I really do. But the people you used to work for—you know whom I mean—sent a lady psychiatrist around yesterday. Her name was Bernice Treffler. She said she’d treated you after you were laid off.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said—oh, Martin …”

“Spit it out.”

“She said you were off your rocker. Are you? Off your rocker, Martin?”

“Yes and no.”

Stella exploded. “What kind of an answer is that, for God’s sake? Either you are or you aren’t. There’s no middle ground.”

“It’s more complicated than you think. There is a middle ground. I’m not insane, but there are things I can’t remember.”

“What kind of things?”

The timeserver watching the chess clock muttered something to Almagul, who came over to tug at Martin’s sleeve. “She says this is going to cost you the wages of a year.”

Martin waved the girl away. “Somewhere along the way,” he told Stella, “I lost track of which of the several skins I lived in was the real me.”

He could hear Stella groan into the phone. “Oh, God, I should have known it was too good to be true.”

“Stella, listen. What I have wrong with me isn’t fatal, either for me or for us.”

“Us?”

“Us is what we’re both worried about, isn’t it?”

“Wow! I admit there are moments when you sound as if you could be off your rocker. Then there are other moments when you sound perfectly sane to me.”

“I am imperfectly sane.”

Stella started laughing. “I can live with imperfection—”

Suddenly the line went dead in Martin’s ear. “Stella? Stella, are you still there?” He called to Almagul, “Tell her the line’s been cut.”