A moment later he went up to the books. After standing there for a while, Musayev struck another match and opened the first book that caught his eye. The flame lit up the top left-hand corner of the page, and he caught sight of the word: samar. This blood-red word was followed by five explanations. He greedily read three of them (1 – fruit; 2 – result; 3 – harvest), but by then the match had burnt down to his fingers. He tossed it into the darkness and struck another match. This lit up another word, either semiz (fat) or semorg (a mythical bird rather like a phoenix), but he moved the match straight back to the first corner; once again, however, as he was searching for the last two meanings of samar, the match burnt his fingers.
The third time he was holding the match in the right place and so he quickly grasped the word’s last two meanings, but they were followed by a sentence where all he could make out was the word yerga. Musayev lit yet another match, but his fingers were trembling so much that it just flared and went out immediately. His heart had almost stopped beating. He felt he knew this sentence already; his fingers – and time itself – were moving more slowly than his heart and his thoughts. At last he lit another match and feverishly read the words: “samari yerga urdi” – “his fruit fell on the earth.”
Something inside him really did seem to break off and fall – fulfilled or perhaps full of failure – to the ground. In the smoke-bitter darkness of the barn he struck match after match; one new word after another floated up to him, but he was unable to take them in.
That same signal from the stars or the ether was knocking at his heart and beating against his bare, burning feet. “Samari yerga urdi… samari yerga urdi…” What all this meant he could not have explained, although there was a moment when something lit up inside him – not a slogan, but the plywood arch over the entrance to the collective farm, whose name, “The Fruits of Lenin’s Path,” had somehow never been entered into the dictionary – but this was only a momentary illumination, a flash of lightning, a last fragile ark of memories, and then there was another tear, or drop of wax, or match head, falling onto the earth, beneath his burning feet… “Samari yerga urdi… samari yerga urdi…” He himself was now burning on the straw, along with these half-open books whose pages were now being turned not by hands but by fire, and he could see words rising from these books in the shape of flames and their ashy shadow was falling back down beneath his burning bare feet. “Samari yerga urdi,” he whispered for the last time – and these words were the last words to burn in him, their dazzling sweep was the last thing he sensed. Musayev died three days later in the Kok-Terek hospital; Zangi-Bobo had come to the end of his life a day before him, having outlived his own mind. The two men were buried for some reason by Huvron-Barber, although he was not related to either of them. Zangi-Bobo’s relatives did not dare to attend the funeral, since the fire that began that night in his barn had spread to the house of Soli-Stores, the eldest son of Chinali and chief heir to his vast wealth.
That night, banknotes accumulated by Chinali and his son burnt in great sackfuls. Thrown up into the air by the flames, the notes and their ashes fell into neighbours’ yards, onto patches of wasteland, into the Salty Canal and into the hands of onlookers. Stinking water from the canal was poured over Khiva carpets while arms of flame stretched along lengths of gold-embroidered cloth from Bukhara; slates – enough slates to cover the whole of Gilas – were continually cracking and exploding, scaring away the volunteers with their buckets of water; the volunteers themselves were struck not so much by the extent of the fire as by the extent of the wealth left untouched. Soli-Stores was able, just with the money he happened to have in his pyjama pocket, to buy a Pobeda car from the Korean Filip Ligay and send him off to the City in it to bribe the fire service to come.
A caravan of fire engines arrived towards six in the morning, after which they remained registered in Gilas forever. They arrived just as the porcelain was catching fire, after the timber had finished burning and molten glass had poured like water into the Salty Canal. Soli’s wife had just sold seven hundred rolls of satin at knock-down prices; needing somewhere to store what was still undamaged, she used the money to buy half of a house on the opposite side of the road.
The firemen worked fast, and water pumped from the Salty Canal soon formed a pond bounded by Soli’s robust outer walls; sticking up out of the pond were burnt rafters and a metal TV aerial pointing towards Moscow. The firemen also dragged two badly burnt men from the adjacent buildings. As the reader knows, these were the former Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger and Zangi-Bobo, who had clung on dementedly to a two-button wireless, tearing the plug out of the wall along with the socket and surrounding plaster.
Soli-Stores abandoned the gutted house and built himself a vast new house, inadvertently sending the price of building materials sky-high and then feeling he had no choice but to keep the prices of the materials he sold retail to others at the same high level. The fire thus continued to afflict Gilas for many years and the swimming pool created in the grounds of the old house was only a partial compensation. Most of the children would just flounder about in it for a few minutes before washing themselves clean in the now glassy-clear Salty Canal. Only the very bravest would take a deep breath and dive down beneath the remains of girders and beams, bobbing back up to the surface with silver Russian teaspoons, translucent Chinese porcelain cups or even a wad of sodden counterfeit banknotes... But not everyone was brave enough – and anyway, what the children found most often were one-inch nails and splinters of slate.
“What about Uchmah?” you will probably ask. Uchmah became pregnant. And only she knew by whom. No one else had any idea who had thrust this child on her: whether it was Huvron-Barber – in revenge for the deaths of Kara-Musayev and Zangi-Bobo; Yusuf-Cobbler – out of gratitude; the spirit of that inveterate womaniser Kara-Musayev; or just some passer-by. All she ever said, when the subject of her baby came up, was “Shafik! Shafik!” – which was how she pronounced the name “Shapik,” the name of the first boy in her matrilinear clan.
Shapik grew, as people say, not by the day but by the hour, but somehow he grew into a thin and gangling idiot who used to scratch his bottom and then suck his dirty index finger. On his seventh birthday, when he looked seventeen yet had the mind of a baby of seven months, Oppok-Lovely gave him both the uniform and the civilian clothes of Sub-Lieutenant Osman-Anon, who had mysteriously disappeared. What Shapik liked most were the khaki breeches and the black kitel with blue shoulder-straps, and he used to wander along the railway line in them, resembling a giant crow and never failing to terrify both Akmolin, who had spent time in the camps in the days of Kaganovich, and Nabi-Onearm, who seldom let a day pass without stealing cotton seeds.
Soon after his eighth birthday deep wrinkles appeared on his face and he began to speak – if what Shapik did with words can be called speech. Once a word had formed on his tongue, it was as if it were glued there, unable to slip, or slide, or leap off it again. And so, as if he had the hiccups, he would go around whispering, shouting or just plain speaking this poor importunate word, until after anything between four and ten days it would disappear of itself and for ever, sometimes yielding to a long and tense silence, sometimes giving birth to another word that would prove equally stubborn and hard to evict.
At the age of ten he looked like a withered-up old man, even though at night he still slept in a communal bed between his grandmother and his great-grandmother, whom he cuddled up against like a baby barely weaned from the breast. And they accepted him as a baby – until the night when, lying between Aisha and Saniya with his left hand on Aisha’s right breast and his right hand on Saniya’s left breast, he drenched them with a copious fountain of semen. The howls of the two elder widows woke the youngest widow, who promptly took her son away to sleep in her own bed. But there is no need for the reader to feel anxiety – nothing happened to the grandmother or the great-grandmother, neither of them gave birth to any strange beast, and e
verything returned to normal except that they each kept secretly looking at Uchmah, wondering in silence if she would soon bear the fruits of incest. But they waited in vain. Shapik did not become his own son and his own father in one person any more than he became his own grandfather, great-grandfather, grandson or great-grandson.
By the age of eleven, however, Shapik had come to look exactly like the late Hoomer, the patriarch of Gilas. And Oppok-Lovely, who had just set up a commission for the preservation of Hoomer’s heritage, decided to take Shapik away from his family, saying she needed him as a model for the writer’s portrait – although what she really wanted was to intimidate the now excessive number of chroniclers in Gilas: the alcoholic Mefody-Jurisprudence, whom she had already appointed to her commission, Nakhshon the town’s human rights activist, who had quite lost her head after the death of her husband, and all those wretched folk storytellers trying to earn twenty-five roubles a page. If any of these chroniclers overstepped the mark, she would release her poor, witless boy from confinement and ensure that they caught sight of “the spirit of the late Hoomer” roaming about the garden. Shapik would, inevitably, be making the most of the few pleasures he had been granted by life. He would scratch his behind and suck his index finger; he would keep stammering one and the same word (usually a fragment of some obscenity – the only protest his feeble soul could manage); or he would spray his seed over the roses and dahlias. All this, linked to the image of the already mythical Hoomer, made Oppok-Lovely’s visitors feel as if doomsday had dawned.
And only Oppok-Lovely’s scribe, the little boy supplied to her by the No. 11 October School, knew the truth; being the same age as Shapik, and having already been entrusted with the task of recording Hoomer’s heritage, he had also been allocated the daily tasks of reading to the young cretin from the writings of the old seer and playing the odd game of nuts with him.
Uchmah, meanwhile, wanted to revenge herself on the woman who had taken her child. For days on end she sat in her empty yard beneath a naked and no less orphaned sun, baking her brains as if to cook up some act of vengeance. Finally she realised what she should do. During the night of the next full moon she transferred all her powers of prophecy to the son of Mukum-Hunchback, a boy known as Bakay-Croc who only a year before had lost both his legs; he had been about to steal a wheelchair from a goods wagon in the middle of the night when the train began to move… The morning after this full moon Bakay-Croc uttered his first prophecies; Uchmah, for her part, ceased to be a witch and never menstruated again in her life.
Bakay-Croc declared that he had seen in a vision that the future belonged to the legless and crippled; whoever lost a leg, he affirmed, would stride into eternity. He was like a motionless monument, like a speaking statue, and he soon acquired a multitude of followers. They gathered at night in the scrubland beside the Salty Canal, wrapped themselves in white cotton sheets and began rolling about until one of them let out a howl as he or she smashed a limb or dislocated a joint and so broke through to enlightenment. Next came a wave of fanatics who, also wrapped in sheets, chose to lie down like their prophet in the paths of oncoming trains. It was this that led to Akmolin’s retirement, after forty-five years in charge of his diesel shunter with no interruption apart from his five years in the camps as a young man. Rif the Tatar, meanwhile, made large sums of money helping Father Ioann at the Russian cemetery, burying unattached legs, irrespective of faith or size, in return for appropriate bribes.
It was the Jewish Yusuf-Cobbler, as it happened, who was fiercest of all in his denunciation of this new faith, but his rage sprang less from religious than from economic considerations; he thought that the decreasing number of feet would wear out less footwear. Soon, however, he realised that one foot wears out a single shoe in half the time that two feet take to wear out two shoes and so he began to calm down, though he still took the precaution of economising on nails and elastic.
Little by little the adepts of the new faith began to use not only the power of the word but also physical force to recruit to their order those who still lived without meaning or belief. They began by smashing the legs of Raphael, the younger brother of the late Timurkhan – who in the end really had been run over by a train. Then a car with no number plate ran over the legs of Lobar-Beauty, who was in charge of the Culture and Recreation shop, and Gennady Ivanovich Mashin, a local football star and trumpet player, was “swept off his feet” during a friendly game.
It was at this time that Yusuf-Cobbler composed his bleak yet well-known prayer: “O Lord, cut them down to size from both ends. Top them and tail them. May there be no end, O Lord, to your eternal justice…”
Oppok-Lovely, irritated as she always was by any rival concentration of power, let alone one whose effects were so damaging, acted straightforwardly and wisely; she undermined the material base of the new faith by going from town to town and buying up all the cotton sheets – which neophytes and proselytes were required to wrap round their bodies – and then stacking them in the tuberculosis hospital. Bakay responded by calling down curses on her during one of his Monday sermons and declaring a Holy War. The reward for the head of this female Satan and the destruction of her empire would, he promised, be eternal bliss – a blessing that could otherwise be won only through castration and the loss of both legs. And so, on the night of the second Monday after this sermon – the night of a total lunar eclipse – a party of volunteers was dispatched to the house of Oppok-Lovely. Oppok-Lovely, however, was not at home; after going to the City to arrange for pensions to be granted both to Uchmah (“loss of the family breadwinner”) and to Shapik (“incapacity for labour”), she had decided to spend the night there with her younger daughter Shanob.
The vengeful Uchmah had long ago foreseen the storming of Oppok-Lovely’s house but she was now – alas! – unable to interfere in the course of events either by speeding up bureaucratic procedures or by making Oppok-Lovely think better of her sudden act of kindness. Alas! And out in Oppok-Lovely’s garden the moon began to burn up; along with the moon, the shadows of trees and people began to turn to ashes, twisting up like scorched sheets of paper and curling into nothing; the two-legged turned one-legged, the one-legged became legless and the legless lost their heads as well as their shadows.
And suddenly, as the first of the volunteers were carried by their own momentum against the house door, the light disappeared completely – and every last shadow along with it. Everything became one ghastly darkness. Earth had covered both Sun and Moon with darkness.
“Bloody... Bloody...” Shapik repeated in his lonely bed, and the storming party entered the house.
After turning the house upside down and finding only the naked Shapik, they dragged him out into the yard just as the moon was squeezing her way out through the crooked slit between darkness and darkness. Shadows slipped down onto the earth and thickened; only this naked young ancient seemed unchanged. He scratched his behind, sucked his finger, inconsolably repeated his “Bloody fuck… bloody fuck…” – and suddenly drenched Bakay, who was sitting on his low-wheeled trolley with his back to Shapik, with semen as dense as the light of the moon.
Bakay did not wear trousers, since he had nothing to wear them on, and his tunic had ridden up – and so Shapik’s semen trickled slowly and stickily down Bakay’s buttocks…
When the moon had reappeared in all her fullness, the crowd wrapped Shapik – who was once again shooting semen into the night garden – in some huge pages from books made of leather and other skins. They glued these pages to him to make up for the absence of cotton sheets and, so bewitched by the moon that they forgot to set fire to the house, set off with this scroll to their sacred mound beside the Salty Canal, intending to carry out a ritual sacrifice.
In the light of the full moon, they rolled him over once, twice, a third time – but not once did Shapik cry out; all they heard was the crackling of dry grass and rushes. Then one of Bakay’s two-legged followers, wanting to ea
rn eternal bliss without having to sacrifice his legs, suggested setting fire to the scroll. They tried to do this. But the leather burnt poorly – probably because it was damp from the idiot’s secretions or from the ink of countless words.
Another new recruit suggested dousing the scroll with petrol. Yet another ran to the garage beside the level crossing as fast as the legs he didn’t want to sacrifice could carry him; he came back with two cans of petrol. The crowd was going crazy. The excitement infected Shapik inside his womb of paper; he moved on from his usual one or two syllables and began abusing the listeners with the nearest he ever got to an entire sentence: “Bloody fuck… bloody fucking… bloody fucking hell…”
Two full moons shone from Bakay’s eyes with a dead light as he indicated with a nod of the head that his comrades-in-arms should pour petrol over the scroll. They grew as excited as children preparing to make calcium carbide explode in a puddle.137 Two of the two-legged splashed the petrol over the leather envelope and withdrew, having earned the spiritual credit they needed. And just as a third man was about to toss a match at the scroll, Midat-Clubfoot, a Bashkir who had been lame from birth and who had waited for Bakay all his life with the passion of St John the Baptist waiting for Jesus, used his one good leg to aim a kick at this scroll wrapped round a human being – and it began to roll slowly and heavily down the hill. And at that moment the third man threw his match.
The explosion shook all Gilas. The earth quaked. Dogs hid in their kennels, howling and scratching their stomachs; bees left their hives and flew up towards the moon; the town’s nuclear war alarm blasted away like the trumpet of Jericho, not ceasing until the following morning.
Only then did Gilas understand what had happened. Fatkhulla-Frontline – the mind, conscience and honour of Gilas – whose one eye needed only half as much sleep as the two eyes of others, went out as usual at five o’clock to take his seven sheep to graze beside the canal. There he found Hoomer; Hoomer had long been thought dead, but that dawn he had come back to earth to walk naked among scorched bodies and crutches, in scrubland that had been burnt to a cinder, and repeat words that Fatkhulla had heard before only as a young soldier on the Second Ukrainian Front: “Fucking... Bloody fucking… Bloody fucking hell…” This meeting and this Sabbath of the Dead were too much for Fatkhulla-Frontline; he drove his trembling sheep back to Gilas. There he roused Tordybay-Medals, Satiboldi-Buildings and the whole mahallya, so they could decide together how to drive away these evil spirits.
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