And then Umarali-Moneybags, yawning so luxuriously that the golden sun shone into his huge slobbering mouth, went on, “A six-floor house, thirty rooms in each floor.”
“That makes two hundred rooms less twenty!” Tolib exclaimed after another minute.
“And they could be rented out at… at…”
“That’s an awesome sum!” Kuchkar had been bent double like a folded radio aerial, but a steam-engine whistle had woken him up; once again he was ready to receive information.
It was one more day of the War.
Late that night Umarali-Moneybags entered his yard, hung a six-stone chain over his gate and shook awake his wife, who was sleeping under the vine. “Hey, bitch, have you got anything left to eat?”
“But you’ve only just got back from the chaikhana!” his wife said with a groan. Umarali then cursed every part of her from head to toe until she relented and said, “There’s some leftover meat and lentils on the shelf in the kitchen.”
Umarali wandered into the kitchen in the darkness, groped on the shelf for the bowl and wolfed down the contents.
In the morning his wife got up and looked around the kitchen; she couldn’t find the oilcake she had put to soak for the rams. She cautiously woke her husband. “What did you eat yesterday, husband? There’s no oilcake left.”
And he replied, “You fucking bitch, I thought I’d eaten something I shouldn’t have. I’ve been shitting all night.”
Another day of the Great Patriotic War7 was beginning.
Sometimes Umarali, Tolib and Kuchkar were joined by Sami-Rais, the chairman of the “Fruits of Lenin’s Path” collective farm that surrounded Gilas. Because of the War and the consequent shortage of cadres, the collective farm had been so much enlarged that it took Sami-Rais a week to ride to one corner of his fields, and another week to ride to the next corner. During these journeys he slept in all kinds of places, but most often upon his bay mare, who had acquired a useful skill; she always immediately offered Sami-Rais the shoulder towards which his troubled head was falling. She had also developed an ability to sense if her rider’s weight was diminishing and deliver him at precisely midday to the Gilas chaikhana, which stood at the intersection of all the collective farm roads. By then Umarali, Tolib and Kuchkar, having finished their discussion of the news from the 7:12 “SovietNewsBureau” train, would be sitting together, about to delight in whatever sustenance All-Knowing and All-Merciful Allah had sent them that day.
During his endless journeying through a collective farm manned only by women, and during his visits to the chaikhana, where his family sent him letters with requests for rice and flour from the store, Sami-Rais never once suspected, not even with a single hair of his moustache, that Umarali-Moneybags had imposed a tax on the whole of Gilas, threatening its inhabitants with “labour mobilisation” into a collective space so boundless as to be the equivalent of exile, and that every day at noon either Izaly-Jew – director of the Papanin Tailoring Co-operative – or the half-blind Boikush, or Yusuf-Cobbler, or Chinali, the wealthy director of the huge warehouse, would deliver to the chaikhana whatever the All-Knowing and All-Powerful had chosen that day for Umarali and his fellow-diners.
And when Sami-Rais, unloaded from his horse by Kuchkar-Cheka and Tolib-Butcher, was sitting down, propped against three large mattresses and still rocking in the rhythm of his morning’s ride, and when Umarali handed him a letter from his family, Izaly-Jew would look out through the ventilation pane of his tailoring co-operative. By evening the whole of Gilas would have learned from its women that Kuchkar-Cheka’s list of saboteurs and enemies of the people had been passed on to Sami-Rais by Umarali-Moneybags.
Sami did not smoke opium but, like all chairmen, he liked to drink vodka. Vodka, of course, served everywhere as a test of political reliability – a final examination that Sami always passed with flying colours and much smacking of lips. During the last such examination, after a decision to amalgamate seven collective farms under a single chairman, he had managed without difficulty, in the presence of a strict Russian referee, to drink his two rivals under the table as if they were mere puppies. Let it be known that true Communist cadres are to be found even among simple folk!
Every bottle of State vodka, however, was being sent to the Front, and Umarali ran into difficulties in his attempts to ensure a regular supply for Sami-Rais. For a while, Umarali was saved by Kolya-Konyak, who used to fill the one remaining vodka bottle with his own sultana brandy. Now, however, like everyone else in a country straining every sinew in the decisive struggle with the Fascist enemy, Kolya had run out of both sugar and sultanas; as a result, he had lost all sense of the meaning of life and was no longer afraid even of the prospect of forced labour in the deserted fields of Sami’s collective farm.
But Umarali’s fine nose for alcohol, sharpened by years of confinement among Russians, did not let him down. Once, as he was walking past the 4:17 pm train and thinking about the fate of his Soviet Fatherland, he suddenly sensed something that vividly reminded him of the sour eructations of Sami-Rais. Following his rat’s nose, he found the source of this smell not far from the engine’s wheels. Surprised in his search by a locomotive driver carrying a revolver, he struggled for some time, summoning all his prison Russian, to explain what it was that he was looking for: “You Ivan, me Umarali. Me give melon, you give vodka!”
He breathed in the vile smell and demonstrated his appreciation of its beauty. And he pointed to where it was coming from.
Confusing the Uzbek name “Umarali” with a similar-sounding Russian word that means “dying” – and unable to make out what on earth was the matter with this apparently dying saboteur – locomotive driver Ivan pointedly began wiping a rag imbued with this same smell over the revolver to which he was entitled by rank. But when Umarali bent down towards the rag – hands clasped behind his back to show he meant no harm – and began gabbling away, the Communist engine driver felt able to adopt an internationalist viewpoint. Deciding that this younger brother to the Russian nation must have run out of brake fluid for the collective-farm tractor (Yes, that must be why he couldn’t stop rattling on!), he even went so far as to refuse point-blank the offer of a collective-farm watermelon.
“There!” he said, handing this agrarian worker a bottle of industrial liquid. “For your socialist tractor!”
“Yes, yes – for socialist traktir!” said Umarali, remembering from his years in prison a Russian word that meant “tavern.”
From that day on, locomotive driver Ivan began to economise on brake fluid for the sake of the triumphant future of the nation’s collective farms; once a week he gave what he had saved to his new protégé, and Umarali diligently transferred these half-litres of fraternal aid from his one and only vodka bottle into the innards of Sami-Rais, who was growing steadily greener.
“All this travelling’s taking it out of poor old Sami,” Umarali would think sadly, as he watched Kuchkar and Tolib hoist Sami-Rais, now well fuelled, well lubricated and well informed as to his family’s requirements, onto the back of his bay mare, who clip-clopped away into the boundless fields of the collective farm, still always offering Sami-Rais the shoulder towards which his great bulk was slewing.
* * *
5The Cheka, or “Special Commission,” was the original name for what was later successively renamed the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB.
6Similar to pilaf.
7The conventional Soviet name for the Second World War.
2
Oktam-Humble-Russky was one of the first revolutionaries, one of the men who had established Soviet power – first in the City, then in Gilas itself. What, though, do we mean by “established?” In 1916 the sixteen-year-old Oktam – together with the whole of his village, which lay not far from Gilas – was dispatched to form a labour brigade behind the lines in some remote and barren part of Russia; but since Oktam had been born
an albino – which was why he was known as Russky – the first frosts almost tore away his skin. Strange scabs spread over his body, as if his platoon had sprayed him with shrapnel, and the battalion doctor, afraid this was some unknown infection, took the first opportunity to send Oktam back to wherever it was he had come from.
But as Oktam, along with some recruiting officers, was about to get on a train, a Tatar came up to him in the station toilet. After satisfying himself that Oktam was a true, circumcised Muslim who squatted down in order to piss, and after waiting for him to finish, he asked him to take a short letter to someone in the railway depot in Tashkent. The accursed Tatar swore by Allah that it was just a message to his relatives but, as the saying goes, “If your friend is a Tatar, keep an axe close beside you!” The letter turned out to be a Revolutionary Proclamation and the unsuspecting Oktam was dragged off to the fortress as soon as the train reached Tashkent.
Oktam had no complaints – it was better, after all, to be in prison in one’s homeland than in a trench beneath a foreign sky… And then came the Revolution. The Revolutionary Sailors of Tashkent8 released Oktam, went through his files and leapt eagerly on the evidence of his revolutionary past. At public meetings in the Buz Bazaar9 they displayed the scars from his virulent Russian illness as evidence of the darkness of the past and the true nature of the prison of nations that had been the Tsarist Empire.
Oktam did nothing more than lift his shirt and slightly lower his trousers, but at the All-Region Congress of Bolsheviks he was co-opted onto the Central Committee. In short, it was not long before Oktam had become an important figure, and even his nickname – “Russky” – soon began to sound like a certificate of reliability and political consciousness.
Oktam-Humble-Russky was unable to do anything at all – or rather, all he could do was live in constant fear that someone might be about to expose his incompetence. But his incompetence was of no concern to anyone; on the contrary, it made everyone – builders, weavers, town labourers and farm labourers alike – feel that Oktam was someone they could rely on. No one needed to worry that this splendid Bolshevik might secretly be promoting the interests of some other profession.
Then came industrialisation, followed by collectivisation, followed by cultural revolution. Enemies – and the state seemed to have many of them – were dealt with methodically, one profession at a time. Oktam learned the latest Party slogans at night, syllable by syllable, and slowly came to realise, with his scant mind, that the safest place in a burning house is the yard.
He asked to be transferred to the God-forsaken – and Party-forsaken – town of Gilas. The Party sent him to reinforce the spirit of dialectical materialism in the wool factory; among a group of Tatar women who had been brought there by cattle truck from Orenburg he was to lay down the Party line, a line as clear and undeviating as the railway that cut through Gilas. “Not Tatars again!” Oktam thought confusedly, but then, remembering the end of his first encounter with Tatars, he said to himself, “Oh well, all’s well that ends well!” and accepted the post of factory director.
And so he ended up in Gilas, where, in order to have some influence on this collective of women, he had no choice but to marry their team-leader Banat-Pielady, a woman as full of words as a radio and as noisy as a steam-engine… It was not long before they had a daughter, to whom they gave the name of “Oklutsiya” – or October Revolutsiya.
During the Great Patriotic War, in the absence of trucks to fetch the wool, the factory personnel were evacuated to the Sary-Agach steppe, closer to where the Kazakhs grazed their flocks; and in order that these young Tatar women, who were now washing their wool in a muddy river immediately after the sheep had been shorn, should not all end up marrying Kazakh shepherds and then wandering off with them across the steppe, thus multiplying private property, Oktam was ordered to accompany them. In the steppe he exposed the anti-Communist sabotage of shearers who left tufts of unshorn wool around the members of rams and the teats of ewes. By way of a demonstration, he sheared these sheep several times himself, so terrifying both the Kazakh shepherds and the Tatar wool washers that, when the War came to an end, he was able to return to the wool-factory all of its personnel – although he did in addition bring back the three sons that Alfiya bore to Kypchibek the woodcutter, who himself became the factory watchman and remained in this post many years.
After the War, when matchmakers came to Oktam-Humble-Russky in respect of his daughter Oklutsiya Oktamovna, he was sitting in what he called his office and cursing that thrice-accursed Tatar at that station in Moscow where the track of his life had so suddenly changed direction – and the reason he was cursing this Tatar was that the finance inspector had called the previous day and, having failed once again to obtain payment of the household taxes now due, had begun to make a list of Oktam’s possessions: Item: 1 felt blanket; Item: 1 iron bedstead; Item: 1 stove, bourgeois.10 At the sound of the word “bourgeois,” which the inspector pronounced out loud and without abbreviation, Oktam had been seized with fury. He had gone into his office and, using the only telephone in Gilas, asked the young lady to connect him to First Secretary Usman Yusupov. After several minutes of crackling, Usman picked up the receiver; without listening to the imposing voice Usman adopted for the benefit of the telephone, Oktam shouted into the mouthpiece, pointing at the same time to the still obstinate inspector: “Usman, is this what we made a Revolution for?” Without waiting for an answer, he had then thrown the receiver down onto its cradle of two gilded ram’s horns.
And as he sat in his office, cursing that thrice-accursed Tatar, his wife Banat came in. Not wasting words for once in her life – she must have expended all her urge for conversation on the matchmakers – she said: “Speak to Usman, old man. After all, we are Uzbeks – how can we give our daughter away without any dowry? We’d never live it down!”
Oktam thought for a moment and agreed: “All right, I’ll go and call on him. But tell me about this young man. I take it he’s at least a Komsomol member?”11
* * *
8The Tsarist authorities often exiled both soldiers and sailors to Central Asia for infringements of discipline. Such titles as this were not uncommon.
9The bazaar most frequented by Russians, as the name perhaps implies.
10A bourgeois stove was the normal term for a stove that was small, round and made of cast iron. It was thought to be greedy for fuel yet to give out little heat – hence the name.
11The Communist Youth Organization.
3
Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was the brother of Kuchkar-Cheka. After their father was shot in the 1930s, he felt he had no choice – if he was not to be shot too, along with the rest of the family – but to marry the sister of the Bolshevik Oktam-Humble-Russky, who like her brother was an albino. This marriage had left Mullah-Ulmas with a secret but profound hatred for all Russians and above all for that honorary – though hardly honourable – Russian, Oktam-Humble-Russky.
When Oktam-Humble-Russky, through one of his Bolshevik decrees, instituted Russian-language clubs in all the mahallyas12 that adjoined, and therefore lived off, the wool factory (some people stole the wool, others bought and sold it; some used to spin it at home, others used to knit with it; some sold the wool that had been spun, knitted and combed, others bought this wool from them, and so on and so on) – when Oktam-Humble-Russky instituted these clubs in order to abuse the unconscious masses more effectively, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes made use of his family connections (after all, he got cursed quite enough by Oktam-Humble-Russky as it was) to opt out of this cultural activity, an act of sabotage that was later to have significant military consequences. Soon after the Fascist invasion, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was sent off to the Front. Apart from the usual curse about a man’s mother having been fucked by a cur, he knew no Front-speak at all. Nevertheless, his commander Kozoleyev and his political instructor Polityuk managed to instil in him, for the rest of
his life, one entire speech: “Right dress! A-ten-shun! Listen to battle orders! Numerically-superior-fascist-hordes-are-advancing-along-the-front! ButthesplendidsoldiersoftheRedArmyunderthewiseleadershipofthefatherofpeoplesthegreatSTALIN HUR-R-R-AAA-AAAH!”
No sooner had he learned this phrase by heart than he was taken prisoner near Smolensk. Poor Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes defended himself against the questions of the Fascists with this incomprehensible sentence, imagining that he was speaking the language of his questioners and smiling all the time with blissful inanity. Eventually the Germans decided that he must be a Jew – didn’t he, after all, have excellent manners? – and after confirming the truth of this hypothesis by examining his indisputably circumcised member, they sent him off in the next goods train bound for the death camps, to await his turn there.
There in Maidanek, among Jews of many nationalities – from Russian to Ethiopian – he became acquainted (as a result of a chance oath while they were stoking the crematorium furnace) with a Bukhara Jew, Pinkhas Shalomay. Shovelling coal as he spoke, Pinkhas explained in Uzbek how things stood and just what it was they were doing.
That night, as he lay on a plank-bed in a camp barrack, Mullah cried with his green eyes and prayed to Allah to save him from a faithless death. “Since it has been your will that I be taken for a Jew, let me become a Jew. I shall learn languages, I shall travel the world, I shall find out about everything and stick my nose into everything. Let me, O Allah, be a Jew, but in life rather than in death!” he sobbed.
His prayer was heard. The following day Pinkhas found in the toilet a soiled scrap of a German newspaper containing an announcement of the formation of a Turkestan Legion.13 “A curse on the arsehole of the Kraut or Yid who wiped himself with this blessed news,” Pinkhas whispered as he held the paper up to the light. That same day Pinkhas wrote a letter to the headquarters of this Legion; the illiterate Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes appended an Arabic-looking scribble and pressed against the page the tip of a thumb smeared with human soot. A week later a uniformed gentleman of either Kazakh or Kirghiz appearance came to the barrack and, towards evening, set off with both the blissful Mullah, who in his delight had rattled off his one and only Russian sentence, and Pinkhas, who had passed himself off as the Tadjik Panzhkhos Salom.
The Railway Page 4