The first kind of gypsies taught Gilas how to make the most of the railway line. Once a year the freight train would make an unauthorised stop beside the level crossing (something unthinkable in the days of Kaganovich)91 and the night would fill with the sounds of impatient prancing and freedom-loving whinnying. And by early morning the Orlov trotters, Turkmen Akhal-Tekes and Vladimir carthorses would have been taken to the Kok-Terek Bazaar and exchanged for Astrakhan wool or ingots of Uzbek gold. The life of the second kind of gypsies – the lyuli – was simpler and richer.
Every Sunday Gilas woke to the whistle of the 7:12 and the sound of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum shouting “Sharra-Barra! Sharra-Barra! Rubbish and scrap!” In spring his donkey-cart would squeal in protest as it struggled, ever more heavily laden with old rags, rare bottles and ancient paraffin lamps, through the deep mud of the sidestreets. Sleepy children would come running after it, clutching bits and pieces they had put aside during the week and were hoping to exchange for something precious from the trunk on top of the driving-box: a bouncy rubber ball, a lollipop, a clay whistle that would start to dissolve in the saliva of a child’s mouth long before Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum’s next squealing visit.
Towards noon – when the last lollipop had been crunched up, when the balls had bounced into scorpion-infested attics, when whistles whose sound filled the mahallya had dropped into filthy ditches and pushed up their levels of fertile silt – another lyuli, Adkham-Kukruz-Popcorn, would appear. His panniers slung across the back of his donkey, he would shout out to the whole of Gilas: “Hot Fresh Kukruz! Hot Fresh Popcorn!”
And the children would again come running, exchanging whatever they had been too sleepy to snatch up in the morning for balls of hot popcorn that looked just like the apricot blossom now coming out all over the town.
Around three in the afternoon Gilas would be deafened by the metallic cries of Asom-Paraff, a half-Uzbek and half-Tadjik as black as any gypsy. After the fripperies of the lyuli, his “Paraffeen! Par-a-ff-e-e-en!” was an irruption of reality that would bring the whole adult population of Gilas out onto the street to queue for another week’s supply for their stoves and lamps.
Around sunset, a few hours after the cart with the pitch-black container of paraffin, old Bahri-Granny-Fortunes would appear and call out in a voice as cracked as her divining mirror, “Fortunes told! Fortunes told to the bold! Let my words bring you gold!” Then she would quietly enter the yard where Khairi-Puchuk sat waiting for her husband, who was languishing in jail or in a distant camp – or she would slip into some other yard, where some other patient wife would then start worrying about whether or not she was obliged to prepare a meal for this Artist of Fortunes who had honoured her with a visit.
No matter where she settled, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes would remain there for several hours – until, it was sometimes said, she had secured her hostess’s last kopek. Whether or not this is true, around the same time as the whistle of the 21:13 Gilas would hear the call of her son Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum, now returned from his wanderings and searching for his mother. “Acha! Hey, Acha-Gar! Hey, Whore of a Mother!” he would call out – and then settle his contented mother on the day’s pile of old clothes. The silver coin of the moon, or perhaps bits of broken bottles collected by her son, shone in her eyes like splinters as he carried her away into a night as black as their life and their faces.
Since there was no muezzin in Gilas, some of the devout old men and women, including Garang-Deafmullah himself, looked on these five Sunday cries as calls to prayer and remembered the precise time they had heard them throughout the following week.
Gilas had no quarrel with the first – European – breed of gypsy, especially after it emerged that, in spite of their centuries of wandering, these gypsies had the same words as Uzbeks to designate the fundamentals of life: dushman and nomus: “enemy” and “conscience.” These gypsies certainly brought no harm to Gilas and if they ever fooled anyone with those skinny old nags they sometimes pumped up with air through their arseholes and tried to pass off as young stallions, it was only the odd dumb Kazakh from the steppe. It’s true that they left a lot of garbage behind them, but the children soon put this to good use; they took the waste paper to school, and they took everything else, the very next Sunday, to Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum. The latter wrinkled his nose a bit at the smell of his nomadic kinsmen, but that didn’t stop him from paying for it with a shiny rubber ball or a faulty whistle that made a sound like a baby with diarrhoea and was a source of endless amusement to the young boys of Gilas.
Leaving behind them horses, garbage and the foulest of curses, the male gypsies went straight from the Kok-Terek Bazaar to the City, where they exchanged their money for hashish and gold, while their wives – forever with babies in their arms and dark bruises under their eyes – begged or told fortunes in the station or beside the Komsomol Lake, evidently led by some tribal etiquette to leave the fortunes of Gilas itself to be told by their settled kinswoman, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes.
Attending to the needs even of the atheistic Russians, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes had established herself – at least until Uchmah-Prophecies started to gain a reputation – as Gilas’s one and only soothsayer. The old woman’s successful monopolisation of the trade in fate, futures and fortunes was, first and foremost, a consequence of a story involving Janna-Nurse – the daughter, by his first marriage, of the first Russian bigamist in Gilas.
Janna-Nurse worked in the medical commission of the Gilas War Commissariat and therefore had access – to put it baldly – to all the young male members of Gilas. Every girl in Gilas consulted her with regard to the masculine virtues of her chosen one – and she, with honourable impartiality, without exaggeration or belittlement, passed on to her girlfriends and to the friends of her girlfriends and even to the friends of the friends of her girlfriends her knowledge of the physical attributes of the future defenders of the Motherland. At one point Janna-Nurse began to think of herself as Janna-Spy, dropped by the maidens of Gilas into enemy territory, and she often dreamed of herself as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya gritting her teeth under torture or Alexander Morozov throwing himself against enemy mortars.92 One night, after flinging herself in self-sacrificial ardour on top of enemy bunkers and pillboxes, she woke to find her heroic dream flowing between her young thighs in the form of a warm stream of moisture.
Another night she saw herself as Janna d’Arc, being burnt on a pyre for reasons best left unsaid. In a word, Janna was a faithful and self-effacing servant to her contemporaries for many years.
But when the grandson of Tolib-Butcher was called up for military service; when this Nasim, who for some reason had been nicknamed Nasim-Shlagbaum,93 had to stand in the War Commissariat amid a row of other swarthy and scrawny youths; when Ishankul Ilyichevich the surgeon told them all to pull their blue cotton pants down to their knees and bend over with their feet apart to be checked for haemorrhoids; when Janna-Nurse went down the row in her usual way, inspecting the hairy anuses with their little lumps of dried excrement; when she got to the middle of the row… At first Janna couldn’t understand what it was and thought she was being offered a bribe. Yes, just as a long red strip of fillet usually hung from a hook in the shop of Tolib-Butcher, so something unspeakably long was now hanging down, swaying gently and almost touching the floor, between the wide-open legs of Nasim-Shlagbaum. But however dumbstruck this left her, Janna-Nurse’s medical knowledge was enough to tell her that this was no fillet; no, it was what she needed to fill her. Two balls as black as bull’s liver, in a giant scrotum, framed an unbelievable…
Janna-Nurse quite forgot about haemorrhoids – as she honourably admitted a few minutes later to Ishankul Ilyichevich. He for his part, as he was examining Nasim-Shlagbaum, had suddenly burst out, “You bastard, you must have swum to the other side of the Zakh Canal and got yourself infected there by the donkeys. What a tool! How could you grow a tool like that all by yourself? You’ll need to wrap it up carefully in Russia or i
t’ll be whipped off you by the winter winds and frosts!”
Yes, after listening to these words, Janna had come back to herself, taken a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry – I forgot to check him for haemorrhoids.”
The surgeon went off to wash his hands; seeing this monstrosity had utterly destroyed his sense of himself as a man.
Then Janna laid poor Nasim on his side and, barely able to hold back her tears of joy, plunged a shining speculum into the youth’s behind, clutching simultaneously with a trembling and icy hand at his unbelievable…
After that Janna-Nurse knew no peace. For two years, while Nasim-Shlagbaum was freezing his extremities in the Red Army, she dreamed of a shiny steel speculum and the soft, lowered barrier of her chosen one; sensing that nothing else could penetrate her dreams any longer, she slowly grasped the full import of his name. She found out the address of his military unit from his grandfather, Tolib-Butcher – who had at one time been secretly in love with her stepmother, although it has to be said that his professional interest in flesh meant that he had at one time or another been in love with every woman in Gilas – and began writing to dear Nasim. At first she wrote in the name of the trade union committee of soldiers’ mothers and sisters; then she sent advice with regard to the care and strengthening of the body’s extremities in extreme climatic conditions; and in the end their correspondence took on a friendly, or even more than friendly tone. In a word, when Nasim-Shlagbaum’s military service drew to an end, it was clear that he had a girl of his own waiting for him in his hometown.
Tolib-Butcher, however, was now honourably approaching the age of retirement and – just in case any other passport data ever needed changing – he had sent a matchmaker on Nasim’s behalf to ask for the hand of the eldest granddaughter of Oppok-Lovely. And so, when dear Nasim returned to everyday life after the obligatory week of alcoholic oblivion following his release from the army, he found he was on the threshold of bigamy. Tormented in her dreams by a secret she had not yet revealed to anyone, Janna was waiting for him with patient determination – while Tolib-Butcher made it clear to his grandson that he was in no hurry to die, that he wanted no more difficulties with documents and that if Nasim didn’t marry the right woman he’d get out his butcher’s cleaver and start sharpening it there and then on Nasim’s tool.
And so, in the daytime Nasim walked quietly around the town – the future grandson of the all-powerful Oppok-Lovely. But in the evenings, when everyone was flocking to see the Indian films put on by Ortik-Picture-Reels in his outdoor theatre, Nasim-Shlagbaum would meet Janna-Nurse – who now called him by the more decorous name of Nasim-Shokolad – among the rushes beside the Salty Canal. In the duck-filled darkness they repeated to one another the contents of their letters while the moon, shining down at them from the clear sky and up at them from the cloudy water, gleamed in Janna’s eyes like that same shameful speculum.
Towards the end of the summer film season, when they had got through all their letters and the evenings were turning chilly, they began to kiss – and Janna-Nurse, for the first time in all her years of tormenting dreams, divulged her secret. Yes, thinking she might need to take prophylactic measures, she confessed everything to Natka-Pothecary, the daughter of Vera-Virgo the prostitute and Bolta-Lightning the electrician. After that, Janna-Nurse took to visiting the chemist’s every morning; she would say that she needed to go and collect prescriptions, new surgical gloves or purgatives for the recruits, but what she really wanted was to talk to Natka about her evenings by the canal.
There were problems. Ortik-Picture-Reels had already moved to his winter quarters in the “Sputnik” building, but something was wrong with Nasim. In the words of Janna-Nurse to Natka: “His… er… you know… his… it won’t stand up.” Natka had been well informed about such matters since childhood, having kept her eyes and ears open when her father was clambering up poles in order to electrify the town’s darkness and strangers used to take advantage of this to come and visit her mother. Her advice to Janna was to touch him as if without meaning to, to lean on him as if inadvertently, to reach out a hand unexpectedly…
Nothing, alas, made any difference. It might have been the terrible Russian frosts, the same frosts that had at one time or another destroyed the military might of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler; it might have been his grandfather’s impassioned threats or it might have been a memory of a speculum being stuck up a rectum – but in any case, whatever the reason, Nasim was himself as bewildered and tormented as Janna-Nurse, who kept touching him without meaning to, leaning on him inadvertently, reaching out a hand unexpectedly…
It was then that Natka-Pothecary suggested taking Nasim-Shokolad to Bahri-Granny-Fortunes – Gilas’s healer, diviner and sorceress. Since it was unacceptable for someone with Janna-Nurse’s medical education to visit a mere quack, it was decided that Natka-Pothecary should take Nasim to the old woman; and since Bahri-Granny-Fortunes only told fortunes to women and the girls didn’t want to make Nasim suspicious, it was Natka’s fortune they would ask her to tell.
That very evening, in the goose-fleshed darkness beside the Salty Canal, where the rushes were now yellowing and withering, Janna-Nurse introduced Nasim to Natka. And on the following Saturday, Natka and Nasim set off in search of the home of Bahri-Granny-Fortunes.
This was in the lyuli quarter, where a hundred hidden gates and low passages led from one yard to another, where the houses abutted the neighbours’ barns, and the barns rubbed up against every kind of animal-shed, hut and privy. No one could find their way through this labyrinth except the lyuli children or lyulchata – black dirty little brats who bombarded the young couple with questions: where had they come from and who were they looking for and couldn’t they spare a kopek or a rouble as a keepsake? Fortunately, Natka-Pothecary had brought some dried haematogen with her;94 she broke off little cubes with her teeth and handed them out as if they were squares of chocolate.
Nasim and Natka lost all sense of direction, but the children led them through one narrow passage after another until they emerged into the yard of Bahri-Granny-Fortunes; there the children entrusted them to the care of some woman from Siberia, either a Chuvash or a Mari,95 who had fetched up there twenty or thirty years before and who had remained ever since, unable to remember the way back to her home. This poor Chuvash or Mari, who over the years had lost her name, her address, the use of her tongue and everything else that goes to make up an individual, spent her days cooking soup and her nights sorting and washing the bottles collected during the day by Ibodullo-Mahsum. Not once during these twenty, or perhaps thirty, years had anyone asked her why she was there; suddenly seeing people from “the mainland,” she had no idea what they might want from her. The children tugged at her long plaits – which fell right down to her ankles, hanging between the knotty varicose veins of her legs just like the thing Janna-Nurse talked about every morning to Natka – and ran off to find the old fortune-teller.
Bahri-Granny-Fortunes was selling sunflower seeds and lollipops at the bus station. The children lured her back with the promise of dried haematogen, and she popped a piece into her mouth the moment Nasim and Natka offered it to her. She found it too soft and sticky; in return, she offered Nasim and Natka some of her own kurt or dried yoghurt balls, and they each almost broke a tooth on it.
“Shall I spell you your fortune, child? Shall I tell you your enemy, child? Show me a coin, child, show me a coin that shines – and my mirror will speak its mind,” she said again and again, until the meaning of the words became as much of a mystery as what it was that Bahri-Granny-Fortunes intended to do when these waves of words had receded. The words rolled from her tongue onto her cracked little mirror and, finding no resting place on its empty surface, were at once succeeded by others. The old woman didn’t even ask Natka why she had come, and the questions Natka and Janna had prepared in advance were swept away by a torrent that seemed unstoppable – except that now and again there
would be an ominous pause after such words as: “You have an enemy, child, and he is not kind. Show me a coin, child, show me a coin that shines – and my mirror will speak its mind.” Natka had only a half-understanding – from her electrician father – of the Uzbek tongue, but she sensed at such moments that she was expected to go back into her handbag, which was now filling up with empty words as quickly as it was being emptied of coins.
When the mirror had done all that was required of it, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes moved on to grains of Khrushchev’s Queen of the Fields.96 She scattered the grains on the floor, sketching out the five-year plans of Natka’s destiny according to the system approved at the last Plenum of the Central Committee.
After the maize it was the turn of the cotton thread, and by then it was Nasim who was paying.
“Give me your hand, child. Your little finger, circled with thread, is the willy of a man your heart should dread. May my spinning thread bring you balm, may my circling thread chase away all harm!” And Bahri-Granny-Fortunes tied her thread round Natka’s plump little finger, which was adorned only by a cheap ring that a neighbour had given her in return for some ichthyol ointment for a boil on his bottom; Natka had not only managed to obtain this vile-smelling paste for her childhood friend but had even smeared it onto his dark arse. As the old woman did away with the willy of Natka’s enemy, she also charmed away the ring that encircled it. Then she moved on to Natka’s body, looking for spiritual anxiety and weariness of heart somewhere in the area of her necklace.
Overwhelming Natka with yet more words, she swept away her jumper; the girl was wearing nothing beneath it except her mother’s bra, already splitting from the pressure of her young breasts. In the swirl of words, Natka forgot both shame and Nasim. She was already pulling her flared skirt over her head when something happened that took away Bahri-Granny-Fortune’s power of speech for years to come, leaving her unable to do anything except sell seeds or tell mute fortunes to the Russians, simply by nodding or shaking her head. A crack of thunder from a pair of dacron trousers – made with a double lining by Izaly-Jew, who had been brought to the tailoring cooperative by Moisey-Master – revealed a male member that at once made Khaira the Chuvash remember that she had been born in Sterlitamak on the Street of the Just Sabre of Salavat Yulayev97 on the fourth Wednesday of the Month of Nisan of the Year of the Bull (old-style calendar).98
The Railway Page 17