Mirzaraim-Bey solved the problem of his son’s marriage, but there was another question that his clear and straightforward mind never resolved: had his son Obid-Bey, or had he not, already entered the great and terrible future foretold by the holy old man beneath the waterfall?
Mirzaraim-Bey died without ever knowing. But Obid-Kori himself, after burying a father who in his last years had lost all his sheep and cattle, strode into this future without fear, though not without pain in his heart. In this future he committed to the earth his four mothers – beginning with his eldest mother, Ulkan-Bibi, and ending with his blood mother, Nozik-Poshsho – and began to live a life of poverty with his young and only wife, Oyimcha.
* * *
31Kokand is a city in the Fergana Valley, and the territory of the Kokand Khanate included much of present-day Uzbekistan. Khudoyar was Khan from 1845 until Russia annexed the khanate in 1876.
32According to the Koran, Gabriel came to Mohammed when he was resting in Mecca and brought him the winged steed Buraq, who carried him first to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and then up into the heavens, where he spoke both with the earlier prophets and with Allah. Allah told him to order the Muslims to pray fifty times a day. Moses, however, told Mohammed that this was too much to ask; at his instigation, Mohammed went back to Allah several times to beg for a reduction. In the end it was agreed that Muslims should be required to pray five times a day.
33Nazar, the hero of this poem by Muhammadniyoz Nishoti (born in Khorezm in 1701), is a faithful servant to a king. The king sends him on a long journey to find the water of life needed to save his sick son and heir.
34The suffix “Kori,” attached to a man’s name, indicates that he has memorised the entire Koran.
35An important, mainly Russian city in eastern Uzbekistan, named after the commanding officer of the Russian armies that conquered Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. In 1924 it was renamed Fergana. Oyimcha’s father had evidently built himself a stone house in an attempt to emulate the Europeanised lifestyle of the city’s élite; houses in the small towns and villages were usually built of clay.
36i.e. modern European carriages rather than traditional Central Asian ones.
7
On his return from prison, where he had put on three stone, Umarali-Moneybags laid on a thanksgiving feast. A week beforehand he sent Tolib-Butcher to the City to announce that every tramp, pickpocket, beggar and day-labourer was invited. Tolib-Butcher expended four whole days on this task, wearing out his only pair of boots and all the voice left in his puny body. He then asked Umarali in a hoarse, agitated whisper, “But why only them? Why not get Oktam-Humble-Russky to invite Usman Yusupov and his Party Committee?” Umarali, in his usual way, cursed every part of Tolib from head to toe and said, “You’re a fool, Tolib. This riffraff will tell the whole world about Umarali’s feast. There’ll be no one who doesn’t know. And as for your Usman Yusupov – fuck him! The only gift I’ve ever had from him is prison.”
Later, when Tolib-Butcher was standing beside Umarali-Moneybags, Oktam-Humble-Russky and old blind Hoomer, greeting the rabble that had poured into Gilas like a Tatar horde, he kept worrying that Umarali might refer to this conversation about the thrice-accursed Usman in the presence of Kuchkar-Cheka. Perhaps for this reason, when the parade of guests drew to an end and Kuchkar-Cheka popped up from a neighbouring gateway, Tolib-Butcher promptly stood to attention, like a soldier before a general reviewing his troops. Umarali, on the other hand, giving Kuchkar only the tips of his fingers in greeting, cursed him roundly, then coolly added, “Before greeting you, a man needs to eat either several pounds of honey or a stone of the very best kazy.”37
“What do you mean?” asked Kuchkar, pricking up his ever-attentive ear.
“The mere sight of you, you son of a bitch, is enough to chill a man’s soul.”
Umarali-Moneybags died a slow and difficult death. Many times he seemed about to let go of the reins of life – but each time he would come to with a start, grabbing life by the mane as it slipped away from under his vast carcass… just one more step… one more breath… one more moment… Just as the women were getting ready to weep and keen, he would glimpse a railway line at the end of the War, goods wagons bound for the textile factories of Ivanovo,38 and himself as a young man – directing the stolen cotton on its way to those factories: “One million bales to Ivanovo, one million bales to Orekhovo-Zuyevo… Ay, ay, ay…”
* * *
37A delicacy: horsemeat sausage.
38A town not far from Moscow that was famous for its textile factories.
8
The post of head of police, which was always held by the sergeant-major – at present, the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder, who had gone blind in his old age after impiously kicking some flatbreads39 that Rokhbar was selling illegally at the station was passed on from one generation to the next. Let me repeat this more clearly: the post of head of police, now held by Kara-Musayev the Younger – the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder was passed on by inheritance. In a word, the post was hereditary. Got it? If not, I’ve been wasting my breath, as Kara-Musayev would have put it, blathering away to a brick wall.
Everything would have gone well, the life of Kara-Musayev the Younger would have continued swimmingly right up to his retirement, had it not been for the fact that his wife, the daughter of Kuchkar-Cheka, turned out to be barren. There was no one he did not take her to, no one who did not investigate her. Such an army of doctors, healers of every kind and the merely inquisitive examined the poor woman’s reproductive organs that, were the eyes of men endowed with even an ant-sized dose of fertilising power, the unhappy Kumri would quickly have brought forth a whole battalion of potential heirs for the post of head of police – which, as it happens, is just what she eventually did do, except that she bore them all to the wrong husband. Had these children been his, then Kara-Musayev the Younger would have had at least a little more right to the light-blue “Heroine-Mother” medal that he always wore on State Holidays – a medal confiscated from an unfortunate Kazakh girl at the bazaar whom he had once fined for some misdemeanour; it had been tied, along with coins from all over the world, to the end of one of her pigtails. But neither wearing this medal on his uniform, nor any number of non-fertilising male examinations of his wife’s non-conceiving womb were of the least help – and so Kara-Musayev decided to investigate his own role in the matter, to confirm by experimental means his own procreative ability.
Among the female population of Gilas there were just two idiot-girls whose obedience to Kara-Musayev was unquestioning: one who yielded at home when she was drunk and one who yielded when she was intoxicated by the fresh air out in the maize fields where the young lads had all taken to grazing their cows – but the sergeant-major’s strategic savvy prompted him to decide that an experiment on either of them would hardly prove conclusive; and, in any case, heaven only knows whom or what these idiots might not give birth to. And so Kara-Musayev the Younger waited until the Sunday Kok-Terek Bazaar and then arrested a young Uighur woman for speculating in Indian tea – an activity she was engaging in for the first time, buying the tea from Samarkand Tadjiks and selling it on to Kazakhs from Sary-Agach. Threatening her with exile to Siberia, he ordered her to come to his office after lunch the following day, when even engine driver Akmolin would be asleep inside his diesel shunter.
The following day, when only the sun was still out on the street, hallucinating in erratic spirals over the white-hot asphalt – into Kara-Musayev’s office came not one young woman but two. At first Kara-Musayev thought that he too was hallucinating. It was only when one of the women begged him to pardon her sister, throwing herself at his feet beneath the office desk, that he understood they were identical twins.
A moment later, when he found on his knees a packet of second-grade Indian tea stuffed with three-rouble notes – t
he usual tariff for speculators – the sergeant’s strategic savvy prompted him to an unusual response: he seized the bribe-giver by one hand, called on her sister as a witness and accused her of a far more serious crime. Threatening her with forced labour in the uranium mines, he accused her of attempting to bribe an official in the course of carrying out his official duties.
The Uighur girls wept in repentance, but Kara-Musayev showed no mercy. Having indicted the sisters upon separate articles, he led them to separate cells and subjected them to separate personal interrogations that concluded in one and the same fashion – with both twins choosing dishonour rather than prison. True, he did assure each of them, upon his honour as a police sergeant-major, that her sister, released on bail, would never know the physical price that had been paid for her freedom.
Who would have guessed that these two young women, Fatima and Zukhra, would both fall pregnant? And that the first person to know this would be Kumri, whose demand for an immediate divorce quickly led to Kara-Musayev’s demotion from sergeant-major to sergeant and from full member of the Party to candidate member? His bosses, however, did not yet know the reason for this divorce, and fear of this being made public led Sergeant Kara-Musayev the Younger, candidate member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to propose marriage, on separate occasions, to each of the twins. Now, however, it was the turn of the twins to be merciless. In the course of a second meeting in Kara-Musayev’s office during the afternoon hour when even Akmolin is asleep in his shunter, they discovered the potential bigamy of the divorced Kara-Musayev – a crime which, unlike divorce, was punishable by the criminal law that it was the job of the dumbstruck sergeant to enforce – and the latter’s now uncertain strategic savvy prompted him (it seemed better to divorce one sister and face demotion to the rank of constable and the loss of his Party membership than to be charged with bigamy complicated by divorce and end up being sent to Siberia or to the uranium mines of Kazakhstan) to say to the Uighur twins, “I shall marry whichever of you is first to give birth!”
And that was the beginning of a socialist competition between the Uighur twins, both of whom – to prevent any compromising rumours circulating in Gilas – Kara-Musayev quickly installed high in the mountains, in separate rooms of the Alcoholism Prevention and Treatment Centre on the resort bank of the Aksay river.
Zukhra was first to give birth and so Kara-Musayev married Fatima, as had been agreed, in order to divorce Fatima straight away and then marry Zukhra – but this was more than the jealous and perhaps also brainless Zukhra could bear, so what did the girl do but wait until the next Kok-Terek Sunday Bazaar and then – carrying in her arms a baby whose Musayevan yells were a clear indication of his right to inherit the post of Gilas head of police – proclaim to everyone present the full details of how disgracefully she had been treated?
A court was convened in the chaikhana to pass comradely judgment on Kara-Musayev’s conduct and, no one being able to suggest any way of further demoting a non-Party-member rank-and-file policeman, it was decided to remove from his surname the prefix Kara and to dismiss him from the police force – and so Kara-Musayev was pensioned off with the decapitated surname Musayev, whereupon he somehow lost his reason.
What remained of his life he for no known reason devoted to reading every poster and slogan he came across – on walls or roofs, in a bus or at the bazaar – hoping to penetrate its esoteric meaning and impart this to others. “The Five Year Plan is the Law; Fulfilment of the Plan – Our Debt and Our Duty; Over-fulfilment of the Plan – Our Honour,” he would read in Russian on the squeaking cart of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum. He would then start to philosophise out loud in Uzbek: “Plan means law. But what is law? The plan. What then is the plan? Once, I remember, there was a plan for fulfilling the law, er, I mean, a law for fulfilling the plan… What did Sami-Rais do in my father’s day? He appointed my father to subordinate everyone to the law – and what do you think happened to anyone who didn’t fulfil the plan? They were lawfully destroyed by the full force of the law!
“And as for overfulfilment – that’s as clear as daylight even to the tail of a dog! What does overfulfilment mean? Our debt and our duty. A debt means that someone has borrowed money. And if you’ve borrowed money, then you’d damn well better return it, you bastard – in accordance with the law. Otherwise? Otherwise it’s against all lawful law! But what do the police think they’re doing? Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes borrowed twenty roubles from my father, and we haven’t had sight nor sound of those roubles for twenty years. There hasn’t even been a police search. Gunpowder up his arse – that’s what he needs!
“And what’s this here at the end? Overfulfilment – Our Honour. This is beyond the understanding of reason. This is well and truly super-complex! Yes, comrade!
“‘Study, study, study – Lenin.’ I couldn’t agree more! Let him study the same as we do! Think of all those works I’ve worked through in my day! That’s right. Study, study, study – Lenin!”
* * *
39Uzbeks look on bread as sacred. Even treading on it accidentally is sinful.
9
Among the mulberry thickets that stretched between the Korean mahallya and the thin line of the first houses of Papanin Street there were also a few fig trees. No one knew about them except Boikush (whom Tolib-Butcher had once led there) and her neighbour Zebi, the beautiful wife of the one-eyed war veteran Fatkhulla-Frontline – the mind, conscience and honour of the mahallya. Once, as Boikush and Zebi slipped off into the trees, pretending they needed to relieve themselves when what they really wanted was to enjoy the paradisiacal fruits beneath which Tolib-Butcher had once told Boikush the story of Adam and Eve, they heard a voice calling their names. It was Vera the Korean. Or maybe Lyuba. Or Nadya.
“Damn her! She’s been watching us!” Boikush said furiously. And a moment later, in a clear friendly voice, she called out, “Hey! Come and join us! We can have a feast of figs!” Then she looked at Zebi and quietly added, “She was coming anyway…”
10
Here in the attic, beneath the chaikhana’s sloping roof, the boy had a secret place of his own. This was where he slept when he didn’t go home; it was here that he would lie awake until late and listen to the never-ending stories, the sometimes enchanting, sometimes tedious stories that drifted up the chimney, the stories the old men used to tell then just as they do now.
Their endless talk was like a lullaby – as otherworldly as the sleepy light that hovered over the paraffin lamp on winter evenings when the family sat down together to tease out the seeds from the cotton and Grandmother would measure the slowly growing heap of cotton wool with a length of cloth and quietly hum:
Gunokhim bora-bora togdin oshdi,
Kiemat kun mani sharmanda kilma...
My sins climb higher than the hills –
On judgment day forgive my guilt...
And this half-whispered song would draw the boy towards a sleep that was softer than cotton wool between slow fingers and quieter than the light from the paraffin lamp he had just cleaned. But now, after the funeral, the boy was afraid of going to sleep; yes, it would be wrong to go to sleep, just as it had been wrong for his family to eat after the funeral, or maybe it would be still more sinful and wrong, because there would be no one to blame but himself... And so he began brushing off the straw that had stuck to his flannelette school uniform – his jacket or, as his grandad called it, or rather had used to call it, his kitel40 – and his grandad had called it a kitel because his grandad used to call anything he wore a kitel, with the result that once, soon after he first started travelling to Moscow by train, he came back home with what he called a summer kitel, and he put it on the following morning– a kitel with thin stripes like a mattress – along with a pair of equally stripy trousers, and no matter how much the women tried to dissuade him, he had insisted on setting off to the City, wearing what Uncle Izaly from the Tailoring Co-operative called pyjamas, and
wearing them, moreover, tucked into his eternal red canvas boots...
And this flannelette kitel, which was no less shameful than Grandad’s pyjamas, this shameful kitel whose only good point was that you could spill ink on it without it showing, this kitel was all the more hateful to the boy for being an award from his school; and the shame he had felt when squint-eyed Annushka had announced at the parade in honour of Lenin’s birthday that he was being awarded this uniform in recognition of his excellent schoolwork and exemplary conduct, and when in spite of his having run away from that accursed and shameful parade she had got that idiot Natashka to take this horrible uniform to his home, which had led Granny to go on in front of Natashka about how her own children had never been given anything of the kind – this shame had made him run away from home for the first time.
It had been just before the May holidays – and the mere thought of not having to go to school had made him feel happy, but all of a sudden the boy’s heart had filled with aching toskà:41 who would he find to play football with?
Nevertheless, he had been determined not to return home. Instead, he had decided to go and find Grandad – who had also fallen out with Granny and left home: yes, he would live on the streets – he would live anywhere; but he would not go home. What to do about school he could decide later, but after the shame he had felt during the parade... And now, as he sat in his attic and removed the straw that had stuck to the kitel, he hated this garment doubly: because of the shame he had felt in front of the entire school and – still more – because, even as he remembered the shame of it first being presented to him, he also hated the way he looked in it now – wearing this charity uniform that was too big for him and had got covered in bits of straw.
The Railway Page 7