– After… Do you want to become my man?
– I dream of it!
– And can you act like a fly?
– I can, teacher!
– In the head?
– Wherever you say!…
– And… when I say… Remember: initiative is punishable…
– I don't know what that is, teacher.
– Do nothing without orders…
– As you say, so it will be.
– As it will be, so I will say…
The old spider looked at the young man searchingly: "His jaws are still weak, but they will become steel, and I will forge them," he thought. "My clan needs fresh blood, and he's ready for anything… Everyone beneath him is mere flies!"
Aman-Jalil gazed at Ahmed with devotion and determination. "Here's the center of the web, where he will strive, where all threads are held and all signals known, and the main prey to him, the center," he thought, but in his eyes read: "I am loyal, like your hand, foot, so loyal that—if I'm gone, it'll hurt you as much as if your hand or foot were amputated"… He knew a few more foreign words: condom, impotent, pederast, gonorrhea, syphilis, cosmopolitan, agent, spy, career, boss, chief, head honcho, beefsteak, stuffed cabbage, kasha Guryevskaya… "Maybe I should throw in something else for Ahmed," Aman-Jalil pondered. "He'll understand right away that I didn't just arrive from the village yesterday"…
– Listen and remember, no need to write anything down: take a car with a driver, head to the Kalanvale district-vilayet, where my enemy rules everything, writes about me to Iosif Besarionis himself in the capital, estranges my father from the entire world, all nations and peoples, the leader and teacher from historical deeds. The great commander, whose toenail all the Caesars and Napoleons combined are not worthy to stand near, is forced to waste precious time not thinking about how to defeat all enemies, but on dirty accusations, where there's no more truth than hydrogen in the air…
Ahmed fell silent, staring intensely at Aman-Jalil, pondering: "Does the Messiah find it interesting, having descended upon our sinful, shit-stained planet, that I ordered the spring wheat planting a month earlier, and the cotton planting half a month later, that my own sheep graze alongside the state's, and if my sheep perish, they are forever listed in the state's records… Does the Universe care to know that each position has its own tariff? Of course, you fool, don't know that word. Must I give away a lucrative position just for pretty eyes? Yet for pretty eyes, I award positions. My seventy-eighth wife received a country estate in the reserve, and her brother became the chief forester. True, he sells timber, exterminates game, young when he strolls, but are such trivialities not for the ears of the pillar of the universe…"