to see me walk straight past the entrance to the market. No, of course I was planning to visit it. There was work to do, but I still had to gather some impressions to take away with me.
Only not right now.
And so I elbowed my way out of the noisy crowd outside the entrance to the market, walked past a herd of Japanese (they'd even found their way here!) who all had the usual tiny cameras and video cameras dangling from their necks and their shoulders, then set off to walk round the Bibi-Khanum mosque. It really was impressive. The ceramic tiling of the huge dome glinted a bright azure blue in the sunlight. The doorway was so huge that I thought it looked bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the absence of any bas-relief work on the wall was more than made up for by the intricate patterning of blue glazed bricks.
But the place I was headed for was no glamorous tourist spot.
Every city has streets that were built under an unlucky star. And they don't have to be located in the outskirts, either. Sometimes they run along beside gloomy factory buildings, sometimes along the railway lines or main highways, sometimes even beside a park or ravine that has survived through some oversight by the municipal authorities. People move in there reluctantly, but they don't leave very often either ?they seem to fall under the spell of a strange kind of drowsiness. And life there follows quite difference laws and moves at a quite different pace...
I remember one district in Moscow where a one-way street ran alongside a ravine overgrown with trees. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary dormitory suburb ?but it was under that spell of drowsiness. I found myself there one winter evening on a false alarm ?the witch who was making love potions had a licence. The car drove away, leaving me to draw up a report noting the absence of any complaints on either side, then I went out into the street and tried to stop a car - I didn't want to call a taxi and wait for it in the witch's apartment. Although it wasn't very late, it was already completely dark and there was thick snow falling. There was absolutely no one on the street, everyone took a different way home from the metro station. Almost all the cars had disappeared too, and the ones that did drive by were in no hurry to stop. But right at the edge of the ravine there was a small amusement park, surrounded by a low fence: a little hut for the ticket-seller, two or three roundabouts and a children's railway ?a circle of rails about ten metres in diameter. And in the total silence, under the soft snow falling from the sky, against the back ground of the empty, lifeless blackness, the tiny locomotive was running round the circle, jingling its bell and blinking its little coloured lights as it pulled along two small carriages. Sitting absolutely still in the first one was a boy about five years old, dusted with snow, wearing a large cap with earflaps and clutching a plastic spade in his hand. He was probably the ticket-seller's son and she had no one to leave him with at home ... It didn't seem like anything special, but it gave me such a bad feeling that I made the driver of a passing truck stop and took off to the city centre.
Allowing for the difference between the cities, that was pretty much the kind of street where the Night Watch office was located. I didn't need a map, I could sense where I needed to go. And I only had to walk for ten minutes from the market place, which was right at the centre of town. But I seemed to have entered a different world. Not the bright world of an eastern fairy tale, but a kind of ordinary, average place that you can find in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, and Turkey, and the southern countries of Europe. Half European, half Asian, with far from the best features of both parts of the world. A lot of greenery, but that's the only good part ?the two- or three-storey houses were dusty, dirty and dilapidated. If they'd been less monotonous they might at least have rejoiced the eye of some tourist. But even that variety was lacking here. Everything was dismally standard: paint flaking