The Zahir

been up to scratch? My heart is still pounding, but I present a calm front. I thank them for everything, for the efficient way in which the event was run.

Half an hour of conversation and a lot of vodka later, I can see that Mikhail is beginning to relax. He isn't the center of attention anymore, he doesn't need to say very much, he just has to endure it for a little while longer and then he can go. I know he wasn't lying about the Armenian restaurant, so at least now I have a clue. My wife must still be in Paris! I must pretend to be friendly, try to win his confidence, the initial tensions have all disappeared.

An hour passes. Mikhail looks at his watch and I can see that he is about to leave. I must do something--now. Every time I look at him, I feel more and more insignificant and understand less and less how Esther could have exchanged me for someone who seems so unworldly (she mentioned that he had "magical" powers). However difficult it might be to pretend that I feel perfectly at ease talking to someone who is my enemy, I must do something.

"Let's find out a bit more about our reader," I say, and there is an immediate silence. "Here he is, about to leave at any moment, and he's hardly said a word about his life. What do you do?"

Despite the number of vodkas he has drunk, Mikhail seems suddenly to recover his sobriety.

"I organize meetings at the Armenian restaurant."

"What does that involve?"

"I stand on stage and tell stories. And I let the people in the audience tell their stories too."

"I do the same thing in my books."

"I know, that's how I first met..."

He's going to say who he is!

"Were you born here?" asks Marie, thus preventing him from finishing his sentence.

"I was born in the Kazakhstan steppes."

Kazakhstan. Who's going to be brave enough to ask where Kazakhstan is?

"Where's Kazakhstan?" asks the sales representative.

Blessed are those who are not afraid to admit that they don't know something.

"I was waiting for someone to ask that," and there is an almost gleeful look in Mikhail's eyes now. "Whenever I say where I was born, about ten minutes later people are saying that I'm from Pakistan or Afghanistan.... My country is in Central Asia. It has barely fourteen million inhabitants in an area far larger than France with its population of sixty million."

"So it's a place where no one can complain about the lack of space, then," says my publisher, laughing.

"It's a place where, during the last century, no one had the right to complain about anything, even if they wanted to. When the Communist regime abolished private ownership, the livestock were simply abandoned and 48.6 percent of the population died. Do you understand what that means? Nearly half the population of my country died of hunger between 1932 and 1933."

Silence falls. After all, tragedies get in the way of celebrations, and one of the people present tries to change the subject. However, I insist that my "reader" tells us more about his country.

"What are the steppes like?" I ask.

"They're vast plains with barely any vegetation, as I'm sure you know."

I do know, but it had been my turn to ask a question, to keep the conversation going.

"I've just remembered something about Kazakhstan," says my publisher. "Some time ago, I was sent a typescript by a writer who lives there, describing the atomic tests that were carried out on the steppes."

"Our country has blood in its soil and in its soul. Those tests changed what cannot be changed, and we will be paying the price for many generations to come. We even made an entire sea disappear."

It is Marie's turn to speak.

"No one can make a sea disappear."

"I'm twenty-five years old, and that is all the time it took, just one generation, for the water that had been there for millennia to be transformed into dust. Those in charge of the Communist regime decided to divert two rivers, Amu Darya and Syr Darya, so that they could irrigate some cotton plantations. They failed, but by then it was too late--the sea had ceased to exist, and the cultivated land became a desert.

"The lack of water affected the whole climate. Nowadays, vast sandstorms scatter 150,000 tons of salt and dust every year. Fifty million people in five countries were affected by the Soviet bureaucrats' irresponsible--and irreversible--decision. The little water that was left is polluted and is the source of all kinds of diseases."

I made a mental note of what he was saying. It could be useful in one of my lectures. Mikhail went on, and his tone of voice was no longer technical, but tragic.