Chapter One
Ordinary Life
"Mum! Where's my other sock?"
"Same place as the first one," Malusk answered, without turning from the stove. "Only somewhere else."
"That's not even an answer!"
"It's philosophy, Fuhty. Look under the sofa."
From the hallway came a rustling, a dull thud and an offended sniff. Then Fuhty herself appeared in the kitchen doorway: one sock on, a plait half done, and a plush snow leopard tucked under her arm.
"There's only dust under the sofa. And Barsik's ear. The one Dar pulled off."
"I didn't pull it off!" Dar shouted from the bathroom. "It came unglued by itself when we were testing whether Barsik could fly!"
"Barsik can't fly because he's a snow leopard, not a drone," said Fixik, squeezing past her sister to the fridge. Her headphones hung round her neck; she had her phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. "Mum, your hairdryer was sparking again. I've taken it apart. Don't switch it on for now."
Malusk turned round at last.
"Fixik, it's twenty past seven in the morning. When did you have time to take the hairdryer apart?"
"While Dar was in the bathroom for forty minutes."
"Twenty!" came from the bathroom.
"Forty. I timed it."
The coffee in the cezve rose in a foamy cap at the exact second Malusk looked away, as it did every morning, as though it had been waiting for her on purpose. She got the cezve off the flame in time, poured the coffee into a cup and for a moment looked out of the window.
Above the roofs of the neighbouring buildings, above the poplars already touched with autumn yellow, above the tower cranes that in recent years had been growing in Bishkek faster than the trees, stood the mountains. Early in the morning, before the city had had a chance to breathe its dust and smoke over them, they seemed very close, close enough to reach out and touch. Overnight the first snow had fallen on the highest peaks, and now they glowed against the pale blue sky as though someone had carefully outlined them in white pencil.
"Bolshoy," she called. "Have you seen? The snow's settled."
Bolshoy was standing by the balcony door with a cup in one hand and his phone in the other. The phone was buzzing nonstop, like a fly beating against a windowpane.
"I have," he said. "Beautiful. It's release day."
"What's that got to do with it?"
"Nothing. It's just release day." He took a sip, glanced at the screen and sighed. "Seven minutes. In seven minutes everyone's in the car. Anyone who isn't in the car walks."
"It's twenty-five minutes to school on foot!" Fuhty gasped.
"Exactly," said Bolshoy. "So find that sock faster."
"And if I don't find it?"
"Then you'll wear odd ones," said Fixik, without looking up from her phone. "It's fashionable now."
"Really?"
"No idea. But if you wear them, it will be."
Fuhty considered this, as seriously as only nine-year-old people can consider things, and went off to the children's room. A minute later came a triumphant "Found it! It was in my rucksack!" and nobody in the family was the least bit surprised. You could find anything in Fuhty's rucksack: socks, sweet wrappers, pebbles, a dried chestnut, a note from a friend, a half-eaten apple, and once a live lizard she had brought in from the school yard "because it was cold out there".
Dar finally came out of the bathroom, damp, combed and very pleased with himself.
"Thirty-one minutes," he told his sister. "I timed it too."
"So you admit it wasn't twenty."
Dar opened his mouth, shut it again and went to get his rucksack. Arguing with Fixik in the mornings was pointless. So, for that matter, was arguing with her at any other time.
Seven minutes later, as might have been expected, there was nobody in the car.
That was how almost every morning began in the ninth-floor flat in a new building on the south side of Bishkek. Noisy, chaotic, cheerful and, if we are being honest, exactly the way they all liked it.
Malusk woke at three forty-seven.
Afterwards, remembering that night, she could never work out what had woken her. Not a sound: there were no sounds. Not a light: it was dark. Not her phone: it lay face down on the bedside table, silent. She simply opened her eyes, at once and completely, without any sleepy haze, as though someone had called her by name, and looked at the green numbers of the digital clock on the chest of drawers. 03:47.
And then the first tremor came.
It was not like the earthquakes she remembered, when the building shivers like a railway carriage and the light fitting begins to sway. This was a single blow. Dull, heavy, from below, as though someone enormous right under the building had banged on the floor with his fist. The bed jumped. The wardrobe door creaked and swung ajar by itself. In the kitchen the glasses chimed thinly, plaintively.
Bolshoy woke instantly, the way he woke when work rang him in the night, and sat up in bed.
And at once, before he had time to think anything, out of the long habit of a man who has spent his whole life measuring things, he began to count. Silently. One. Two. Three. Four. Five…
The second tremor.
Exactly the same. The same force. The same dull blow from below. The glasses chimed again. The wardrobe creaked again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five…
The third.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five…
The fourth.
Bolshoy went on counting, without noticing that he was counting out loud, in a whisper. Six. Seven. Eight. Ten. Twenty.
There was no fifth.
And then came the silence.
Later Malusk tried to explain what had been wrong with that silence, and could not. A city is always quiet at night, but it is not real silence: somewhere a car hums on the main road, somewhere a dog barks, the lift whirs, a tap drips, a clock ticks, the fridge breathes, someone on the floor above flushes the toilet. This silence was different. Dense, like cotton wool. No dogs barked, and in Bishkek dogs bark at every earthquake, at every passing lorry and for no reason at all. Not a single car alarm went off in the courtyard, though usually they started wailing at the slightest bang. Not a single door slammed, nobody cried out, not one child cried in the huge sixteen-storey building, where at least a thousand people must have lived. The city lay in the darkness, silent, as though it were holding its breath and listening for the knocking to start again.
Malusk realised that she was not breathing either.
Then bare feet slapped along the hallway, the bedroom door flew open, and Fuhty burst into the room, clutching Barsik, her eyes enormous. Without a word she climbed onto the bed between her parents and burrowed under the duvet, head and all. Next Dar appeared in the doorway, tousled, in his rocket pyjamas, not in the least sleepy and, judging by his face, perfectly happy.
"Was that an earthquake?!" he shouted in a whisper. "A real one? How strong? Dad, how strong?"
The silence burst. Somewhere far, far away, at the other end of the city, a dog barked, once, briefly, and fell quiet.
"I don't know," said Bolshoy. "Not very. Come here."
Last came Fixik, phone in hand. The screen lit her face from below with a blue glow.
"There are already sixty messages in the building chat," she reported, and began reading aloud in the even voice of a newsreader: "'Did it shake?' 'Yes!!!' 'Our light was swinging.' 'A vase fell off our shelf.' 'Does anyone know how strong it was?' 'Four times! Did you count? Four!' 'Why four?' 'Do we need to go outside?' 'No need, it's over.' 'How do you know it's over?' 'Amanbek-baike from forty-seven is already standing in the courtyard in his pyjamas.' 'Amanbek-baike, go home, you'll catch cold.' 'I won't.'"
Dar giggled. Fuhty giggled from under the duvet. Malusk felt something inside her slowly unclench.
Bolshoy picked up his phone from the bedside table and opened the official channels: the seismological service, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the news. Nothing. It was too early: messages like that appear ten or fifteen minutes later, once the stations have processed the data. He refreshed the page again and again. After twenty minutes a short message appeared: a weak earthquake had been recorded, there was no damage, the parameters were being clarified. Nothing more.
"Weak," he said out loud. "No damage."
"Dad," said Dar. "Why four times?"
Bolshoy did not answer straight away.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "It usually goes differently. First one strong tremor, then several weaker and weaker ones; they're called aftershocks. Or everything shakes in one long stretch. But this…" He paused. "Four identical ones. The same strength. And the same gaps between them. I counted. Like a metronome."
"As if someone was knocking," Malusk said quietly.
Nobody said anything. They all suddenly pictured it at the same moment, knock, knock, knock, knock, and the bedroom went very quiet.
"Maybe someone's knocking underground?" Dar whispered.
"Yeah," said Fixik. "Gnomes. With a hammer drill. They're doing up their flat. At four in the morning, like all normal neighbours."
Dar snorted. Fuhty crawled out from under the duvet to see what everyone was laughing at. Bolshoy laughed too, a little louder than it was funny, and said that was that, the earthquake was over, the gnomes had gone to bed, and it was time for everyone else to go too.
Dar and Fuhty stayed to sleep in their parents' bed: Fuhty refused to let go of Mum's hand, and Dar announced that he would "keep watch". Ten minutes later he was "keeping watch" with his mouth open, snuffling softly. Fixik went back to her room, but she left her door open. She had never done that before.
Bolshoy and Malusk lay in the dark between the sleeping children and looked at the ceiling.
"Maybe we shouldn't go tomorrow?" Malusk whispered.
"Why?"
"I don't know. Mountains. An earthquake. Rockfalls, landslides… You never know."
"It was weak," said Bolshoy. "You saw: not even the dishes fell. We get quakes every week. If we stayed at home because of every earthquake, we'd never go anywhere at all."
"The dishes didn't fall," Malusk agreed. "But it was… strange."
Bolshoy was silent for a while.
"Strange," he agreed.
He turned his head to the window. Beyond the glass it was dark, and the mountains could not be seen, only the black sky, the stars and a few small lights high on the slope, where the dachas were. But he knew the mountains were there. Huge, dark, silent. He lay and listened. Little by little the silence outside became ordinary again: a car drove along the main road, somewhere the door of a stairwell banged, a lift whirred. The city breathed out.
Bolshoy fell asleep at about five.
Malusk did not sleep until dawn.