The military career of the Jewish Pinkhas Shalomay was considerably more successful than that of the Muslim Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes. The reason for this was simple enough: Pinkhas was able to read and write in both Uzbek and Tadjik and he was equally at home with Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts, the various alphabetical reforms having proved no obstacle to him.14 Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, however, out of a secret hatred for alien letters – a hatred that once again derived from his link to Oktam-Humble-Russky the Bolshevik, even though the latter in fact knew no letters at all – could sign his name only by dashing off a few circles and lines that he thought of as Arabic. Within a month, Panzhkhos had become an influential Tadjik at the Headquarters of the Turkestan Legion, while Mullah – thanks to his irritatingly frequent repetition of his one Russian sentence – had been sent off to herd swine, creatures abhorrent to Allah.
But a vow, above all a vow made to Allah, is a vow, and Mullah took it upon himself, there among the swine, to master his first foreign language. When the owners of the swine cursed him in their native tongue, he remembered his distant brother-in-law Oktam-Humble-Russky and, out of habit, longed to fuck the sisters of his tormentors, just as he had somehow or other fucked his unbearable wife, the albino Oppok-Lovely – and tears would roll from his green eyes and down his long lashes. In time, however, retribution fell upon his ungrateful masters, whom he had mistakenly believed to be Russians and whose convoluted language, with its “Ishch vaishchishch nishcht,” he had reluctantly studied.
Our American allies arrived; Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes realised he had learned the wrong language and, either from joy or by way of a curse, rattled off his Red Army speech. This led to his being sent off to still more distant parts – to France, to graze horses in Fontainebleau. There, in the family of Mademoiselle Countess de Sus, whose great-uncle had brought some great obelisk or other from Egypt and set it up in the Place de la Concorde, Mullah learned to tell one wine from another and to discriminate among cheeses; he also, with the help of this Mademoiselle and her friend, the granddaughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Josephine, he acquired fluency in the most florid and refined of phrases: “I shall unlace your corset!” or “How cruelly a man in love is oppressed by tight pantaloons!”
Once, however, taking a break from love and going to Aven station for a glass or two of Saint-Emilion, he came across a drinking companion of his. This man seemed to have been named after some cognac or other – probably either Napoleon or Camus. He was standing in a corner and pissing upwards, trying to reach a “Vive la Résistance!” poster high on the wall and make his urine flow like tears from the eyes of his French Motherland. Some unconscious force then erupted from Mullah in the form of his Red Army speech, as a result of which this Camus stood rooted to the spot, his stream of urine hanging in mid-air.
Camus took him straight off to Paris, to a friend with the improbable name of Sartre. In actual fact this Sartre was not a Sart15 at all; he had just read too many books and dreamed himself up a new surname. In Gilas no one would have got away with a joke as silly as this: if Mullah had introduced himself as “Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes French,” he might have been taken, even by his own compatriots, for a Jew – but no one would have believed he was French. Anyway, this Sartre made Mullah keep repeating his speech until well after sunrise, and the three of them washed it down each time with a glass of Camus. By dawn the Frenchmen were feeling nauseous – one kept falling to the ground and the other had to prop himself up against the wall – while Mullah himself was so overwhelmed by the startling power of his speech that he began to confuse the two men with his two aristocratic ladies and to whisper in their ears, in the now blinding sunlight: “I shall unlace your corset!” or “How cruelly a man in love is oppressed by tight pantaloons!”
Sartre turned out to be truly a Sart in at least one respect: he proved treacherous. Towards evening, he sent Mullah to Maurice Thorez’s people.16 Maurice Thorez, on account of certain ideological differences, conveyed Mullah through the Black Forest into Switzerland and then across the Alps to Italy. There Mullah twice ate spaghetti bolognese with comrade Palmiro Togliatti17 and, after washing down some strange filth from the sea with a revolting Italian wine whose bouquet was the same as that of the local fish, he blurted out his sacred and eternal speech. He was promptly conveyed to Palermo.
Amid bombs, arguments and gang feuds he escaped in an unseaworthy boat to Greece, together with an up-and-coming young rascal called Toto whose mother had been loved by Mullah as she had never been loved by any Italian. Confused by the word “Sart,” she would whisper to him the words she had learned from American soldiers: “Fack me! Fack me!” Growing more ardent, she would wriggle like an eel in between the words: “Spain me! Greek me! French me! Turk me!” Only at the wildest moment of orgasm would she cry out in a cat-like voice the incomprehensible nationality of this Mullah, “Sart me! Sart me!,” thus inspiring Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes to the highest degree of patriotic ecstasy.
In Greece, on the seashore, people filled Mullah’s mouth with stones in order to teach him Greek declamation.18 In Turkey, where the language was almost the same as his own, the main burden fell on his legs. Momentarily entranced as he danced the dances of the Mevlevi order of whirling Dervishes, Mullah came out with his usual sentence – heathen words abhorrent to God. This led to his being taken through Thrace to Bosnia, and from there to Serbia. In Serbia he took lessons from the leader of the Southern Slavs in the language then known as Serbo-Croat.
Once, however, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes reeled off his sentence over some plum brandy; there was, alas, no wise Pinkhas Shalomay beside him to explain that Yugoslav-Soviet relations had entered a period of tension. Josip Broz Tito did not forgive Mullah. He was conveyed to the Soviet Union via eight intermediary countries – whose languages he innocently mastered one after another – and handed over to Stalin.
As a traitor to the Motherland, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was sent to the Gulag. Four years of terrible Siberian camps and transit prisons imprinted themselves on the speech organs of the doggedly surviving Mullah in the guise of Khakass, Buryat, Evenk, Nivkhi, Inuit,19 and one other language whose name was known to no one at all.
During his wanderings Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had seen so many countries and places that when, along with a few million other political prisoners, he was rehabilitated at the time of Khrushchev’s Thaw20 and asked where he had been born, so that he could be returned there by train, he could no longer remember the name “Gilas.” For two days and three nights after his release he lay on the bed-boards of his barrack and tried, without success, to recall the name of his birthplace. But he did for some reason manage to recall the name Kok-Terek, where his brother Kuchkar-Cheka had sold sheep on Sundays – and where his wife Oppok-Lovely had been in charge of the bazaar!
He was sent to Kok-Terek. But he had the misfortune to be sent not to the Kok-Terek he knew, which lay two kilometres from Gilas, but to a Kok-Terek in Kazakhstan where a teacher at the local evening school with the surname Solzhenitsyn,21 who had also done time in the camps, ended up giving Mullah mathematics lessons in German. This Solzhenitsyn refused point-blank to speak Russian to Mullah or to instruct him in the expansive Russian language; the reason for this intransigence was that Mullah, while downing some Kazakh moonshine to celebrate his arrival in Kok-Terek, had fired off his entire Red Army speech.
After an unbroken eight-year correspondence encompassing the entire Soviet Union, the Young Pioneers22 of Gilas finally managed to track down the native of Gilas who had served as their very first front-line soldier – Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes. Yes, there were indeed many veterans more deserving of honour than the former swineherd Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, but none of them had been born in Gilas. One-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline had been born in the half-Uzbek, half-Tadjik village of Chust; while as for First Secretary Tordybay-Medals, the retired colonel whose chest was decorated with medals from all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe whose languages
Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had absorbed with such remarkable ease – he had only a blank space in his passport under “place of birth,” having acquired his name, surname and nationality at the age of eleven, in a Soviet orphanage.
The mathematics teacher was almost in tears as he said goodbye to Mullah; after Greater Serbian, Mullah had been going to teach him the basics of Albanian, Uzbek and Yiddish – but Fate decreed otherwise.
Like it or not, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, armed with his Red-Army sentence (a sentence that had protected him over the years more effectively than any conceivable spell or act of sorcery and that now met the needs of the time more precisely than ever) became the First Veteran of Gilas and the adjoining collective farms. His wife Oppok-Lovely, who had by that time taken Gilas well and truly in hand, spared no effort to make sure that her poor husband was granted all appropriate honours. And then one day, during an All-Republic Congress of Veterans of War and Labour, he wandered into the toilet and bumped, as one might say, penis to penis into whom do you think? None other than Pinkhas Shalomay, who turned out to have transformed himself from Panzhkhos Salom to Pyotr Mikhailovich Sholokh-Mayev, to have completed a doctoral thesis on the crucial role played by Uzbek spies behind the lines of the German-Fascist enemy, and to have produced a film, The Exploits of Farkhad,23 based on this thesis, which was to be shown immediately after the Congress. Sholokh-Mayev was now head of the translation and interpretation department of an important research institute, his chief responsibility being to liaise between two mutually uncomprehending groups: the three or four learned Russians with no knowledge of Uzbek who were employed to edit dissertations and theses about to be submitted to the Higher Dissertations Commission in Moscow, and the thirty-seven Uzbek professors, doctors and post-graduates who somehow produced these dissertations but whose grasp of the complexities of Russian declensions and conjugations was, alas, alarmingly shaky. There in the toilet, to the amazement of more simple-minded veterans, who found themselves unable to go on pissing, these two switched casually between Sudeten, Alsatian and Catalan. But when Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, who was used to old-fashioned buttons, caught his penis in the zip of his new trousers and burst out swearing in the language of a fisherman whom a sharp-toothed walrus had bitten in the same place on the shores of the Laptev Brothers Sea,24 even Pinkhas Shalomay could understand fuck all.
After this chance meeting Pyotr Mikhailovich Sholokh-Mayev managed to get Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes appointed to a part-time post in his research institute with the title of “Bearer of Dying Languages” and succeeded in organising around him an All-Union Centre for the study and restoration of the languages of Siberia and the Far North.
In the days of the ever more decrepit Brezhnev and his fully developed socialism, when Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes the renowned Veteran and Bearer of Languages used to have to recall his immortal speech almost every day, Jews began to migrate to other lands. Pinkhas Shalomay applied to leave too. For some reason he was refused – perhaps because he was irreplaceable, perhaps because of the emergence of certain troubling details about his heroic wartime past. Pinkhas reminded Mullah of their old friendship and asked him to write on his behalf to Solzhenitsyn, that former teacher and pupil of his who had apparently become a very big fish indeed.
“But what language can I write to him in? I don’t know Russian. And he hardly learned any Uzbek at all. Anyway I can’t write!” said Mullah. Pinkhas then wrote something himself and Mullah, just as in the old days, dashed off his “Arabic” line and circle signature.
What happened next was exactly as the devious Pinkhas had intended. Whether or not Mullah’s letter ever reached Solzhenitsyn is uncertain, but a copy certainly found its way to the security organs. And two weeks later Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was called to the City, purportedly in order to receive yet another military-service medal and a certificate from the Koryak National Party Committee.25 In the event, however, both he and Pinkhas Shalomay were expelled from the USSR.
And so, in his old age, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, brother of the late Kuchkar-Cheka and brother-in-law of the late Bolshevik Oktam-Humble-Russky, ended up in Brighton Beach, New York, where, finding no other languages he didn’t know, he began studying the Jewish-Odessan dialect26 of the Greater Russian language, roundly cursing anyone he happened across during his drinking bouts with that all-powerful and indestructible Russian sentence whose meaning he had at last fully grasped.
* * *
12Every Uzbek town is traditionally divided into a number of mahallyas or communities. Gilas contained at least five mahallyas.
13Recruited from Central Asian prisoners, this Legion probably numbered around 200,000. And the Germans did indeed often mistake Uzbeks for Jews.
14Until 1928 the Arabic script was used for both Tadjik and Uzbek; in 1928 the Latin script was officially substituted. The official pretext for this “reform” was the assertion that the Arabic script was unable to accommodate the technological demands of the twentieth century; the real reason was the desire of the Soviet government to distance the people of Central Asia from Islam. In 1940, the Soviet authorities decreed another change of script: from Latin to Cyrillic – so as to make it easier for everyone to learn Russian.
15In 1924, when the Bolsheviks created the republic of Uzbekistan, the Sarts and the Uzbeks were officially declared to be a single ethnic group. Historically, however, they are distinct: the Sarts mainly urban and mercantile, the Uzbeks nomadic and tribal. In the early twentieth century the Sarts outnumbered the Uzbeks; Uzbekistan could equally well have been named Sartistan.
16Maurice Thorez was the leader of the French Communist Party.
17Palmiro Togliatti was the leader of the Italian Communist Party.
18Demosthenes, the famous Athenian orator, is said to have overcome a speech impediment by practising declamation with a mouth full of pebbles.
19The Inuit people live mainly in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and in the far east of Russia. The Khakass, Buryat, Evenk and Nivkhi are all indigenous peoples of Siberia.
20Stalin died in 1953. In 1956 Khrushchev denounced his crimes in his famous “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress. This marked the start of a relatively liberal period known as “The Thaw.”
21Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics as a young man, and he worked as a schoolteacher for several months before the outbreak of the Second World War. After his release from the Gulag, he spent several years in exile in Kazakhstan.
22The Communist Party’s children’s movement.
23A famous Uzbek film from the 1960s, about Uzbek spies in Germany.
24In the Arctic Ocean.
25The Koryaks, of whom there are around four thousand, live in the Far East, on the Kamchatka peninsula.
26Odessa was an important Jewish centre for many years. In 1941, for example, Jews numbered thirty percent of the population.
4
But now I must say a word or two about the red-eyed albino Oppok-Lovely, the wife of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes and sister of Oktam-Humble-Russky the Bolshevik... In the early 1920s, after Oktam-Humble-Russky had scaled the mountain of Marxist-Leninist thinking, matchmakers began to make more frequent appearances in their village. Oppok, still only a girl, would peep out through a crack in the door of the women’s quarters and study the Komsomol bosses petitioning for her hand – a hand that would bring with it the Party patronage of her brother. One of them looked crooked, another looked bald, another too thin… In the end her grandmother said something Oppok-Lovely was to remember for the rest of her life: “Wise up, you little brat – take your clothes off and have a look at yourself in the mirror!”
The Komsomol bosses, however, soon stopped visiting; some married Tatars, some married Kazakhs and the most zealous careerists of all married Russians. At her brother’s insistence, Oppok-Lovely the albino then publicly
cast off her yashmak – and even the leaders of the veil-burning movement took fright, confusedly crossing themselves as they realised how easily, but for the grace of God, they might have married her themselves. And no one ever again came to the village to ask for her hand.
And so she would have passed her whole life in Communist solitude and socially important labour, had not the mass executions of the 1930s impelled Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes to marry the woman who had by then become First Secretary of the Gilas Komsomol Committee.
During their first night, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, afraid of face to face contact and constantly adjusting his pillow, lay on the First Secretary and wondered if divorce and execution might not be preferable, while she herself cried out “More! More!” with Komsomol indefatigability and went on demanding the contributions due to a Komsomol bride.27
She bore three children before the War; and after the War had begun, she gave birth on her own to four more male and female defenders of the Motherland, all of whom were given the patronymic Ulmasovich – a mistake Oppok-Lovely would never have made had she thought that her husband might one day be discovered to have been a traitor. The demands of being a single mother forced Oppok-Lovely to leave the Komsomol Committee and become Head of the Kok-Terek Bazaar. This led Oktam-Humble-Russky, as a true Bolshevik who made no compromises with capitalism, to sever relations with her.
The Railway Page 5