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About the Author and Translator
Copyright Page
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I have always thought that we were something more. I believed it.
But now, as we walk through fields of strongly deformed grains stretched like smudges of veil-like clouds on the morning skies, as we navigate cautiously between their boundaries blurred by slips along pyramidal planes, as Bainite needles rise from our bodies just to dissolve with a deafening roar of acoustic emission, now … I’m starting to have doubts.
* * *
In Karshad, everything was somehow strange, unseemly: the ceramic foam heat barriers resembling medieval city walls, hearths of the forges and blast furnaces glowing into the dark like blood-red headlights turned to the skies shrouded in smog. And Bamobah standing beside me in her silvery jumpsuit. Still beautiful, yes, but beautiful in her distant, desert way, so contrasting with the immediate reality of the filth and cough of the steelworks. The barriers surrounding us were overwritten with Middle-Eastern scripts I had never seen before. But seeing the symbol of three forebodingly intertwined dislocation lines above each of them, I knew what they meant. Sahabai metalurgim: The Cloud of Metallurgists.
“Don’t stare, just come.” Bamobah reached her hand out to me, but stopped an inch from mine. “That doesn’t concern us.”
“I know.”
The path was trodden in dust and slag. Somewhere the outlines of stairs, worn smooth, could be glimpsed. Everything was wrong. Settling in Bamobah’s wavy black hair should not be ash, but sand. Reflecting from her dark-brown eyes should not be the glow of searing metal, but beams of the sun setting over a desert.
I shook my head and walked on. We were in Karshad already for four days, but the places we had seen blurred into one in my mind. Waiting rooms, walkways, elevators, off-white floors dirty with dust and ash from the soles of our boots. I waited, while Bamobah lay down on the diagnostic tables, waited, while she was answering psychoanalysts’ questions. And when my waiting was finally over, when she emerged from the padded door in late evening, even paler than before, she only gave me an empty, indecipherable gaze.
“How is it? Everything all right?” I asked.
She nodded briefly. “Yes, of course.”
* * *
When we lived in Piraka, in a tiny flat rented by my editorial office for me, we slept in my uncomfortable creaking bed. Beneath one blanket, in a pleasant contortion of limbs.
Here in Karshad, the steelworks provided a luxury hotel room for us. A room with two single beds. We were filling in heaps of forms Bamobah had brought from her medical examination, in silence. Then we just wished each other good night and switched off the light. The charm of the desert was lost in the silent hum of air conditioning.
Far west, where the sea of sand met the real sea, Piraka was also fast asleep. I imagined its congress center, all soundless in the middle of the night. I had met Bamobah there. I recalled her sitting on a soft chair and absently listening to someone’s speech. Her gaze traveled to me for a moment.
“Before I give you my answer,” she said when I finally dared to talk to her and invite her to dinner, “you must know something about me.”
I was prepared for everything, apart from what she said next: “I’m a metallurgist. I mean right now.”
Bamobah would have understood if I told her a polite goodbye at that moment. If I stopped looking into her eyes and disappeared at the first opportunity.
But instead, I imagined her walking, tall and proud, through the heart of a sizzling ingot, caressing the ribbons of Laves phase with her slender fingers, and her wavy hair overflowing with loops of Frank-Read sources. And I found it enchanting. Alluring. Stirring.
“Which steelworks?”
“Karshad. I’m coming back in six months.”
“Six months is a long enough time,” I said and walked with her to the car.
* * *
The Bamobah I had come to know had a simple, modest lifestyle. That, of course, didn’t say anything about her real income, only the allowance she was receiving during each shift. Before she moved in with me, she had lived in an unobtrusive, but certainly not cheap hotel.
Once, when we were leaving the town for the weekend and passed by the small islands of luxury residential quarters scattered over the hills by the northern edge of Piraka, Bamobah pointed down to the shore. “There’s my house.”
I looked and saw the white shining roof of a large villa surrounded by a tall hedgerow. “What is it like there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Spacious. Modern. I like it and feel good there, I suppose.”
It was fascinating and confusing how Bamobah could speak about both of her personalities in first person in one sentence: her primary consciousness working in the ingot’s microstructure, and the residual consciousness remaining in her human body.
To understand it, I had to first fully understand who’s sitting beside me. Her face, her eyes, her voice, her smile – all of that was just an empty shell and its mind merely a residuum, an imprint left in her brain by the primary when it had left for the ingot. So when
