“Eger guich bilen... eger guich bilen,” he kept whispering, as if Barchinoy’s love for another were an illness, a plague, a pestilence that had infected him.
In the evening, when the Yomuds returned, he was transferred from the lock-up to the quartermaster’s yurt. To stop him running away, they gave him another thrashing. And this was a good thing, since it quietened, at least for a while, the ache in his abandoned heart, a heart that no one in the world needed. But towards midnight his sense of toskà grew unbearable; like a shadow, he left the tent, dragging his bloodstained body behind him.
It had not occurred to the Cossacks to beat up his young accomplice; already corrupted by a taste of nocturnal freedom, the colt offered him its back. He clambered on and guided the colt towards Barchinoy’s grave.
They found him early the next morning, half-buried in sand. As a warning to everyone else, he was left lashed to the ladder for the entire day. His lips cracked; dry salt came out of his eyes; but not even the desert sun could burn away his toskà. Towards evening a passing fox sniffed at him and licked the blood off his feet; and a vulture that had been baked red-brown circled above him, then flew away to invite his family to a nocturnal feast.
“They can lick and drink my blood – but what do I have to lick and drink?” he repeated to himself as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The sun turned into a red-brown fox – or perhaps it had been a red-brown fox all along – and disappeared beneath the edge of the desert.
Because of the ache in his heart he begged God for a quick death, but God rejected him as an unbeliever, abandoning him as black night overtook the desert. With the last of his strength the crucified man called on Satan for help, but towards midnight, when he sensed something troubling the still air, when he heard a creak from the topmost rung of the ladder, he realised that this was not Satan but Azrael, black as a night raven, blinding his tired eyes with the flapping of black wings. And no sooner had Azrael, without asking a single question, pierced his heart and his liver in order to suck out his soul, than a crescent-feathered arrow passed with a whistle in between his head and his shoulder and plunged into the wooden sleeper. And Azrael, changed into a night vulture, was flapping his wounded wings up in the sky, while his hangers-on flew after him.
3.
An old man was chanting over him the words: “And in this valley a name is untied from its bearer – as if the letters of the alphabet should abandon a book or a path should lose its direction. But what are you without a name, without books and without a path?” asked the blinded one. “Speak if you can!
“Time in this valley is released from its traces, sand does not make up deserts, stars do not indicate darkness. But what are you without day, without reckoning and without light? Speak if you can!
“There you will be deprived of questions, there you will be deprived of deprivation, there and not there you will be not you. And what will then be left? Speak, if you can!”
Here the first dozen pages of Hoomer’s notes break off. There is a gap, and then the manuscript continues. But while you have been reading it, I have realised that there is something else you need to know. I will begin, I think, from the very end.
On the day of calamities, when the earth quaked and a goods train going through Gilas was derailed, when the shock of the train hitting a pillar beside the station caused five cans of petrol to explode and the explosion brought down the water tower – on this day of calamities a torrent of water and flaming petrol swept away the white clay hut where Hoomer was then living alone, since his wife was taking part in some trial of Crimean Tatars,151 and carried reams of burning and half-burnt and singed and occasionally unsinged sheets of paper through the town. After the seven days of the flood, the old women began drying the pages in the innocent sun; then they screwed them up and used them to light fires in their hearths. Zangi-Bobo used them, along with pages from Peryoshkin’s Fifth-Year Physics Course, to make cornets for sunflower seeds and kurt; Mefody-Jurisprudence used them to make cigarette papers.
But it was the ever alert and erudite Mefody who first discovered what had been written on these pages – what blind Hoomer had dictated and Nakhshon had written down in her fine hand. Mefody discovered this in the presence of Kun-Okhun, as they were smoking home-grown tobacco along with a little hashish that Kun-Okhun had obtained from Dolim-Dealer in exchange for a sack of stolen coal. Realising that the smoke was curling into the shapes of letters, they read, letter by letter, the words: “Yusuf and his brother…” Frightened almost to death, Mefody stared at Kun-Okhun; Kun-Okhun, lumpen and uneducated as he was, swallowed the wisps of letters that were still hanging in the air yet somehow failed to take in anything at all. Mefody, however, having been trained long ago to deduce cause from effect, was appalled to discover that there was indeed still part of a slobbered-over letter “s” on the end of the roll-up. What they had seen in the air was a title; what followed was a compactly written text about how the illegitimate son of a great Russian explorer and a local washerwoman was sent by the Turkestan Geographical Society to study in Petersburg.
The hashish they were smoking was the kind known as “Death.” Suspecting that it might be inducing hallucinations – Kun-Okhun had taken it into his head that he was a Party member and was now somehow managing to sing the Internationale with neither words nor melody – Mefody rushed to his briefcase, where the stack of dried pages of Hoomer, ready to be used for cigarette papers, lay beside Thomas Mann’s novel and his March 6, 1953 copy of Pravda. He began reading at random: about the death of Umarali-Moneybags, about some old fellow called Obid-Kori and… about the insane future of Sergeant Kara-Musayev the Younger (at that time still the Gilas head of police), who was doing his best to have Mefody sentenced for parasitism in accord with Article 108 of the Criminal Code because then there would be no one left in Gilas who knew anything about the Law…
Mefody read many strange things in these pages but, when he got to the end of them and came to his March 6, 1953 copy of Pravda, he started rambling on in his usual way about Yusufs, exiles and betrayals, and this, as always, ended with Kun-Okhun peeing on the bald head of the unfortunate lawyer, although this time Timurkhan, having died beneath the wheels of a train, was unable to be present as a witness.
But somehow these precious pages, like the original tobacco smoke, vanished into thin air. Mefody blamed Kun-Okhun: after peeing on Mefody’s bald patch, he had disappeared for what he referred to as “a big job.” Kun-Okhun, however, could remember nothing; he just kept repeating that he was a freight handler and that he was not a member of the Party. Mefody then began prophesying to small groups of friends – in return, of course, for bottles of Portwein no. 53 – about what lay in store for Oppok-Lovely and, above all, for the soon-to-go-insane Kara-Musayev the Younger. When everything happened just as he had said it would, when Kara-Musayev’s mind was taken over by slogans and Oppok-Lovely began renaming half the inhabitants of Gilas, everyone who had heard Mefody’s prophecies began to suspect that Kara-Musayev had been framed, that the whole story of him and the young Uighur girls had been a fabrication of Oppok-Lovely’s.
Wishing to gain control not only of Gilas’s past and present but also of its future, Oppok-Lovely announced a public investigation into the matter of these manuscripts. We cannot be sure who first told her about Hoomer’s chronicles – it might have been Osman-Anon, although at that time he still had an ordinary surname and was not yet a full-time employee of the KGB – but we can be sure of one thing: that Oppok-Lovely offered to pay twenty-five new roubles for every page that was brought to her, even if the page had been soiled.
Oppok-Lovely’s next decision was to buy Mefody-Jurisprudence – lock, stock and barrel, with all his eccentricities. Mefody was allowed to keep his beloved briefcase; Kun-Okhun was allowed to pee – in the apple orchard behind Oppok-Lovely’s house instead of outside the station – on Mefody’s head of hair, which was now flourishing from an abundance
of phosphorus; Oppok-Lovely guaranteed Mefody full board and lodging – including supplies of vodka and pickled cucumber; and in return Mefody had only to remember and retell everything he had read on that ill-starred and smoke-filled day.
Mefody’s words were written down by a young boy who had lost his parents; Imomaliev, the director of the October School, had recommended the boy to Oppok-Lovely, saying he was intelligent and had good handwriting, at a time when he needed Oppok-Lovely’s patronage to arrange for some repairs to the school building. Oppok-Lovely had not only enabled him to get the roof mended but had even sent Imomaliev, with trade union authorisation, to the Artek pioneer camp152 – so that he could educate Artek riffraff in Uzbek ways.
At first the boy wrote on oxhide parchment, but when Oppok-Lovely discovered that Tolib-Butcher was palming off the hide of Korean dogs on her instead she spat in his face and began using A4 paper from Finland. The next problem was that Mefody, wanting to prolong his sinecure, began making things up, fabricating absurd stories of his own which later researchers, recommended to Oppok-Lovely by the eminent Pinkhas Shalomay, soon recognised as forgeries. The story of Hoomer and the railway line, for example, turned out to be the purest invention, and researchers also cast doubt on the story of Kun-Okhun and the Party recruitment drive after Stalin’s death and heaven knows what else. Not every forgery, however, was the work of Mefody. On hearing that you could earn twenty-five roubles a page, everyone in Gilas had begun scribbling down stories, but after a while people became more cunning. “Yes,” they would say, “we used to light our stove with pages of Hoomer. Our boy seems to have read a few pages – and the little rascal never forgets a thing. Listen now…”
At first Mefody simply ground people down with his cross-examinations and then dictated his summary of their stories to the boy from the October School, but then Oppok-Lovely appointed Nakhshon to the heritage commission – even though she had aged with grief and lost her memory, which had been kept alive only by her husband. Nakhshon, however, had lost none of her intransigence; many people, in fact, thought that her eyes protruded not because of Graves’ disease but because of the peculiar corrosiveness of her soul.
After the appointment of Nakhshon the flood of stories began to dry up – but only as far as Oppok-Lovely’s heritage commission was concerned. People did not stop talking to one another. Ortik-Picture-Reels told the story of Gopal and Radkha to the secretary of the music school over a bottle of vodka and some pickled cucumber she was treating him to in exchange for more brushes and paint; Nabi-Onearm, caught red-handed plundering socialist property, managed to get Kuzi-Gundog to put down his shotgun by telling him the story of how Garang-Deafmullah had shot away the end of his cock; Garang-Deafmullah, no longer alive, appeared to Tolib-Butcher in a dream and frightened him by foretelling the story of his grandson Nasim-Shlagbaum.
Self-taught chroniclers even appeared at the Kok-Terek Bazaar, attempting at least twice to sell little samizdat booklets they had compiled, but Oppok-Lovely got to hear about this and promptly removed Kun-Okhun from his duties as a freight handler and provider of hair-fertiliser and entrusted him with a new responsibility – that of beating up revisionists and pretenders. After two or three exemplary beatings, these pseudo-chroniclers disappeared from the town, although one of the railway guards who traded in tea said he had come across similar manuscripts somewhere or other in the Kazakh steppes.
This, however, does not concern us, just as it did not concern Oppok-Lovely. And so, when Pinkhas Shalomay’s experts had finished separating the wheat from the chaff – although it was not always easy to tell which was which – Oppok-Lovely had the final manuscripts carefully bound: one in deerskin, one in sealskin, one in crocodile, and another – which had clearly never belonged to Hoomer and which might equally well have been an early forgery of Nakhshon’s, a late invention of Mefody’s or simply a faithfully recorded popular legend – in the kind of leatherette used for upholstering doors. She then put the volumes away in her most distant and hidden room, where she kept her one letter from her errant husband, locked the door and sewed the key into an amulet she had worn round her neck ever since she was a young girl in the Komsomol.
We can now return to our pages, which begin as abruptly, after a passage that has been devoured by fire, as they break off.
…near him. Nogira had been run over two years before by the very first train to come down the line; she had lost part of her mind and all the fingers of her right hand except the ring finger, on which she wore a little glass ring. And he developed a passion for taking this lanky twelve-year-old back to his home. On scorching summer days, as the whole district slept and Nogira sat by her gate, drawing lines in the dust with her ring finger, he would pass by as if on his way to the well; as if on the spur of the moment, in a voice that disgusted him, he would say, “Nogira, I’ve got some lollipops. Would you like one?”
“Yes,” she would reply, jumping up eagerly.
“Run along then. And you can bring some stale bread for the animals. I won’t be a moment.”
There was no need at all for deception. That was what was so disgusting – the way he always began with this absurd deceit, as if someone were listening.
She knew, as if by instinct, how to dart through his gate unnoticed. Then he would enter the yard himself, glancing from side to side. He would put the lid on the water-bucket and prepare the bread – as if he were about to feed the animals. Then he would walk towards the bread-oven shed – knowing that the idiot girl would be waiting for him there, quiet as a mouse.
He would go inside, close the crooked door behind him, walk through the sharp strips of dusty light, lay the girl down on the cotton hulls, pull off her trousers and begin pushing his huge red cock against her fleshy, still hairless crotch. “Do you know what this is?” he would whisper, swallowing down his saliva.
“Cock.”
“And what am I doing with it?”
“Fucking.”
These words would further inflame him, and he would begin to push a little harder than he should. She would groan, as if the cyclops pushing against her flesh really had penetrated deep inside her. Then he would place it between her legs and let himself go – and she would groan because of the weight of his body. The cotton hulls under her legs tickled and rubbed his cock and he would shoot his load. Then she would lie there with him, only after a long time asking, “Where’s my lollipop?”
He would wipe himself clean with cotton hulls and sit on a rung of the little ladder that stood pointing towards the chimney. She would stand up to pull her trousers on, and the sight of her reddened crotch would excite him again. He would beckon her closer and say, “The lollipop’s in my pocket. Take it yourself.”
She would slip her left hand into one pocket – and find only a thick and swelling emptiness. Then she would put her damaged hand into the other pocket; pushing the stumps of her missing fingers against a stump with no fingers at all, she would use her one whole finger to pluck out a lollipop that had stuck to the damp cotton.
Then he would pull out his shame, which was aching with tension, and she, sucking the lollipop she had earned, would move her ring finger up and down it in shameless gratitude, tracing the same incomprehensible letters that she would be tracing tomorrow, and every day, in the burning noon dust of the vill...
This is followed by some burnt passages that I can make neither head nor tail of, and then by some complete and coherent pages, evidently not in the handwriting of Nakhshon.
…did not want to recall how he had to run away from the village. When he next saw the iron road, beside which the Cossack detachment had eventually shot the thirty Yomuds and Tekes, and along which they had been unable to run a train for an entire year because, every time they checked the line with a handcar, they came upon a section of dismantled track with ladders sticking up into the sky over the trenches where the dead had been buried and they would have to repair the t
rack again during the day only for it to be dismantled again in the night until in the end they decided to abandon this section of track that kept climbing up into the sky and lay down a parallel section seven miles clear of this ill-starred place of either justice or vengeance – but I have lost track of my thought. Let me start again, let me return to where this fraught and fractured sentence began… When he next saw the iron road (that is, the original section of track, which climbed steeply up into the sky at both ends – above where the father and son and Barchinoy were buried, and above where the thirty Yomuds and Tekes were buried) he understood that the four hills at the corners of the desert horizon were his childhood’s four points of the compass, his own four corners of the world which he had been carrying inside him all these years, always subordinating the daily path of the sun to this line from the “double-humped hill” through the “bald hill” above which the sun stood at noon and on to the “grave hill.” Yes, this was the site of his childhood home, now buried beneath the sands and traversed by this absurd railway line that kept climbing up into the sky; it was here that he had pastured the goat that had fed him and Gulsum-Khalfa, and it was through the gap between the “sandy hill” and the “grave hill” that he and the goat had escaped from the horsemen of the cut-throat Aspandiyar.
Sitting on the bottom rung of the ladder, he unwound the rag, stiff with dried blood and sweat, from around the bullet-wound on his shin, and thought about how he had returned to these parts in search of his father but in the end had just had to run away. A spider was spinning its eternal thread over his head, and the thirty warriors he had destroyed, thirty young men beloved of women, thirty young men who had never become husbands or fathers, lay beneath his feet, while the sun cast its light down upon them.
The Railway Page 28