Thus wrote Hoomer in the Turkestan sunset, in a winter-cold officers’ coach, hiding in his compartment from the crowds of triumphantly drunken Russians.
* * *
143It was a Turkmen custom to place a small ladder beside a grave – so the souls of the deceased can climb up to heaven.
144The word “Khalfa” indicates that she was well educated and that she was allowed to preach to women.
145Aspandiar is an ancient Persian name. And in the 1920s a number of Turkmen tribes chose a leader named Aspandiar as their “king,” in order to put up a unified resistance to the Bolsheviks.
146Two angels (not mentioned in the Koran) who interview the dead in their graves and provide a glimpse of heavenly reward or infernal punishment in the life to come.
147The Yomuds are a Turkmen people, originally nomadic.
148Cf. “The route... included a 150-km stretch over shifting sands. No other railway had been built in these conditions and after the tracks had been buried, swept away, or left hanging in the air each time it was laid, doubts grew about the railway’s feasibility... only the laborious process of elevating the railway on a continuous embankment finally solved the problem.” (J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964, p. 126).
149See note 79.
150A thorny shrub, the main source of firewood in the Central Asian deserts.
151i.e. of activists who were demanding the right to return to the Crimea. And see note 108.
152A prestigious holiday camp for Young Pioneers, in the Crimea. The children sent there were, almost without exception, from the families of the Soviet élite.
31
Once again, I don’t know whether I told the truth about that night. No, no, I don’t mean the truth about the events themselves – everything happened as described in these pages; what I mean is – the truth about who was responsible. The easiest thing is to blame it all on Uchmah; but it has also been suggested that the ageing Oppok-Lovely was driven to extreme measures by her longing for her errant husband; there have been attempts to implicate Nakhshon; and there have been mentions of Musayev and God knows who else. Mefody-Jurisprudence – who had by then been deprived of his sinecure, so that Kun-Okhun had had to go back to peeing on his head outside the station instead of in the apple-orchard behind Oppok-Lovely’s house – came out with all kinds of nonsense about the triune nature of Hoomer, Shapik and I forget who else; but people with more sense were quick to relate this to Mefody’s deep-rooted and profoundly Russian belief that a bottle of vodka should always be shared between three, a belief which, since the death of Timurkhan, had been elevated, in the lawyer’s alcohol-pickled mind, to the status of an article of faith. But no one, no one in Gilas thought about the role of the eldest son of Fatkhulla-Frontline – the war veteran who was the mind, conscience and honour of the mahallya; no one considered a drawing teacher and retired engineer by the name of Rizo-Zero.
Rizo had been born during the War, after the shell-shocked and half-blinded Fatkhulla had been sent back to Gilas in order to mobilise the women to shock labour on behalf of the war effort. This had led to the three-eyed Rizo, later to be known as Rizo-Zero, being born to the beautiful though small-eyed Zebi. I say three-eyed because above the bridge of his nose lay a small pit the size of an almond that looked like a miraculous third eye.
Making the most of his rights as a war veteran, Fatkhulla sent his son off to the railway institute at the age of seventeen, expecting him to return to his native Gilas as one of Kaganovich’s esteemed engineers – but Rizo concerned himself at the institute with matters very different indeed. No, no, not the ones you’re thinking of – he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t seduce women; what he devoted himself to, God knows why, was not the theory of railway construction on loess soil or on sand, but the theory of shadow.
Not only did he read, and write summaries of, everything he could find on this subject in any of the libraries – he also used to sit in the sun for whole Sundays on end, studying the slightest variations in his own shadow on the roof, by the lake, in the student hostel or in the stadium. Any student whose coursework or diploma dissertation touched however tangentially on this problem would find their way to him through an improbable number of intermediaries, and he would gladly compose an essay on “Shadow in Dostoevsky’s Petersburg Novels” for an evening-class student of printing or “The Shadow of Gogol in the Work of Bulgakov” for a girl who had undertaken a correspondence course in the Humanities. His generosity, however, bore fruit that for the main part proved bitter: the printer’s essay was rewarded with a diploma he did not wish to receive, and the correspondence-course student was all but forced to embark on a doctorate. She was courted by three different supervisors, each trying to win her for their department and thus wrest her away from the regular festive rations to which she was entitled by virtue of her position as technical secretary to some Party committee or other.
But Rizo-Zero did not rest on his laurels. He progressed ever further. When he returned to Gilas with a rather mediocre diploma, the best his father could do for him was to find him a job as assistant to Master-Railwayman Belkov. But by then Rizo-Zero had already learned to annihilate his own shadow. Just before sunset on a summer’s day, while old Alyaapsindu was dragging behind him a shadow as long as his long years, Rizo-Zero was able – by means of some system of mirrors, or through the properties of mysterious objects, or because he had acquired the ability to emit an invisible light through his third eye – to walk behind him down the very same sidestreets with only the tiniest spots of shadow beneath the soles of his feet, as if it were high noon.
After an argument with Ilyusha the Korean (usually known as Ilyusha-Oneandahalf because Rizo’s donkey had long ago bitten off half of one of his ears) Rizo annihilated Alyaapsindu’s shadow as well. The old Korean never again went out of his house; instead he went out of his mind, was overwhelmed by toskà and died.
It was around then that Rizo-Zero was fired by Master-Railwayman Belkov. He found himself a job as a drawing teacher and appeared to lose all interest in shadows.
It was not long, however, before people began seeing Rizo-Zero up on the roof at night with a telescope; and then, during a drinking bout, Ilyusha-Oneandahalf informed the whole of Gilas that Rizo had taken up the study of stars and was especially interested in solar and lunar eclipses. Ilyusha even tried to intimidate Zukhur, who was refusing to sell him vodka, by threatening that Rizo would bring down a terrible eclipse on the town.
Zukhur went straight to the mahallya committee to report this to Fatkhulla-Frontline. Fatkhulla tried to calm Zukhur, as if his power extended not only over his son but also over any eclipses his son might call down. Nevertheless, Fatkhulla thought it better to be safe than sorry; on returning from the chaikhana that evening, he took Rizo aside and approached the subject obliquely: “Your mother and I are ageing, my son. Yes, the old folk of Gilas are quietly dying out. Hoomer, Umarali-Moneybags and now Alyaaps…”
“But that’s not because of me,” Rizo-Zero interrupted anxiously. “I’m not to blame.”
“Of course not. But there’s something else. I’ve heard you’ve taken it into your head to call down an eclipse. Please don’t – why upset people? Especially when Zukhur’s just received a consignment of Russian potatoes. He’s promised us a whole sack.”
“Father, what on earth are you saying? Have you no fear of Allah? Are such things in the power of a mere mortal? Not a hair will fall from your head unless He so decrees.”
“That’s what I’m saying: don’t do bad things. If you’ve got to do something, do something good.”
And Fatkhulla explained what he and his Ukrainian comrade Petro had done in the War to get German prisoners to talk. Rizo-Zero heard him out, holding in his hand a potato that Zukhur had given his father. Onl
y when his father had finished did Rizo, wanting to show at least some loyalty to science, start to demonstrate what brings about an eclipse; the lamp stood for the sun, his father’s face was the earth, and Zukhur’s potato – the moon. Rizo-Zero circled the moon round his father’s face and, at the very moment when its shadow fell on Fatkhulla’s one eye, they heard loud shouts from outside, from somewhere around Oppok-Lovely’s house. Other shadows leaped and coiled their way into the house and began creeping across the wall. Fatkhulla grabbed his soldier’s belt, from which there always hung a crooked Chust knife, and dashed outside. Rizo-Zero dashed after him. Through the dusty vine they saw the moon shrivelling up before their very eyes, like a scrap of paper caught by a flame…
“I told you not to!” the father shouted, and clipped his son on the ear. The son, still holding the potato-moon, said not a word.
The whole of Gilas was pouring out onto the street. Poor Fatkhulla was so ashamed he didn’t know where to look with his single eye.
The following morning, after finding out about the terrible explosion by the canal, Fatkhulla – the mind, conscience and honour of the mahallya – cursed every part of his son Rizo from head to toe and threw him out of the house.
Rizo-Zero wandered off down the railway line, examining his thoughts. Thoughts structure themselves according to the path one follows; yes, during his years as assistant to Master-Railwayman Belkov, Rizo had learned to resolve even the most stubborn of contradictions between the two rails beneath him. On this occasion, he was thinking: “I’m walking one step at a time, from sleeper to sleeper. My foot rises, then comes down on the sleeper in front. It settles there. My other foot does the same, with the same movement. What then remains on the sleeper behind? Stop! Let’s go through that again. There – my foot is still on the sleeper behind. On the sleeper in front lies only emptiness. And then my foot goes and fills that emptiness, occupying that empty space. But if only a moment ago it was occupying the same form of space on the sleeper behind, doesn’t that mean that this emptiness has moved from the sleeper in front to the sleeper behind? It seems then that I move forward, while my empty shadow does precisely the opposite. And if we consider my movement from the level crossing to the wool-washing shed as a whole, then has this emptiness I occupy not carried out the same movement in reverse, from the wool-washing shed to the level crossing? Let me draw a little diagram.” And Rizo-Zero bent down over the sleeper and began, with a sharp stone from the embankment as his stylus, to draw a diagram on the creosoted sleeper:
“Here we have the presence, the existence of ellipse A, which is to be transposed, as indicated by the arrow pointing to the right, to its present absence: ellipse B. When it reaches ellipse B, its absence, displaced by its presence, will be transposed to ellipse A; that is A and B will exchange places, but their forms, since nothing in nature can be either destroyed or created, will remain identical during this exchange, that is...” – but before Rizo had pursued his thought to a clear conclusion, there was a piercing whistling, a waving of multicoloured flags and Tadji-Murad, calling Rizo-Zero every name in the book and turning the air blue with his curses, was rushing towards him, closely followed by a wagon he had just uncoupled. Rizo-Zero’s thought rushed forward to meet him but, instead of a pure and empty form, it encountered Tadji-Murad’s choicest curses: “What the fuck are you doing with your arse stuck up in the air waiting for some fucker to fuck it? Fuck your fucking arse – these wagons will make one great cunt of you! Rizofucking Zerofucker!”
Flabbergasted at the discrepancy between the pure transcendence of thought and the crude language being flung at him, Rizo barely managed to straighten his stiff back before Tadji-Murad, hurtling through space almost as fast as his whistles and curses, slammed into him like one wagon into another and knocked him out of the path of the wagon that had been sent rolling along the gradient.
As they lay there getting their breath back – one from physical exertion, the other from the sudden disarray of his thoughts – Nabi-Onearm, using the freewheeling wagon as cover, jumped across the track with a sack of stolen cotton seeds, tripped over Rizo’s large thought-bearing shoe and crashed to the ground, scattering seeds over the railway bed.
“You fuckers!” shouted Nabi-Onearm, seizing the high ground, as he always did, by being first to leap to his feet. His index finger was drilling into the sky, but this time he did not get the chance to speak. Kazakbay-Happytrigger, a guard at the wool-washing shed and the owner of the cows Nabi’s seeds were meant to be feeding, suddenly lost his nerve. Afraid that he too might suffer public exposure, he took a potshot at Nabi with his double-barrelled shotgun, cleanly removing the finger with which the one-armed man was pointing at the heavens. Nabi let out a howl and fell to the ground as if dead. Tadji-Murad jumped to his feet to get back to his waving and whistling and inadvertently kicked poor Rizo’s forehead with his heavy railwayman’s shoe. In the blinding light of this blow, Rizo-Zero saw two rails rushing from one horizon to the other in a vain attempt to meet, suddenly noticed the sleepers that locked them so inseparably apart, and, understanding the meaning of everything in an instant, was thrown into a total eclipse of consciousness.
32
That summer, cosmonaut Kitov flew into space; when the loudspeaker in the bazaar announced this, the boy’s aunts were all in the yard, ironing shirts and trousers for his circumcision. The boy was standing beside them, and he was the only one to hear the voice of all the radio stations of the Soviet Union. He was the first to hear the cosmonaut’s surname, Kitov, although the bazaar loudspeaker was interrupted just then by the wheeze of the station loudspeaker, that is, by Ashir-Beanpole wheezing out his eternal, “Attintion, attintion, citizin passingers, thi Sir-Darinsky–Darbaza–Chingildi locil train will bi arrivin’ it plitform three. It will bi stoppin’ fer one minit!”
The boy began to jump about in unaccustomed joy, perhaps because he was proud of understanding what “to fly into space” really meant – unlike the time before, when it had been his aunt Nafisa, throwing her briefcase up into the sky, who had called out, “Lyaganov has flown into space, Lyaganov has flown into space!”153 That time the boy had felt scared: someone had gone and flown into the sky, with no wings, with no equipment, with nothing at all. Either he’d quarrelled with his wife or else he was wanting to spite someone: he’d just gone and flown up into the sky like Nafisa’s briefcase – out of which exercise books, text-books and fountain pens had come raining down.
No, this time it was the boy who had been first to hear the news: “Kitov has flown into space, Kitov has flown into space!” Only the boy had nothing to hurl into the sky; it was the school holidays, and tomorrow would be his circumcision and the yard had been carefully tidied and sprinkled with water.
He felt as happy as if the colt he had been promised a month ago had already been brought into the yard. Tomorrow he would have to sit on the colt and ride round and round the fire till he felt drunk, so that it wouldn’t hurt afterwards. He leapt over the patches of sunlight that fell through the thick dusty curtain of the vine and onto the damp, shadowy earth, just as the colt would prance and gallop if it understood what it meant to fly into space. “Kitov has flown into space! Kitov has flown into space!”
Nobody reined the boy back – neither the various “aunties” who lived nearby, nor his granny coming out of the dark house. He knew that tomorrow would be his special day, and so he leapt about until he felt exhausted, until his grandad – or rather step-grandad, since the boy did not have a grandfather of his own, or, for that matter, a father – came in through the gate. Grandad went straight into the dark house, followed by Granny, by Aunt Nafisa and Great-Aunt Asolat and even by Robiya, who was helping them. She was the aunt of Kobil-Melonhead, who was now outside Huvron-Barber’s window, playing nuts underneath the cherry trees with Kutr, Hussein, and Sabir and Sabit, the two lyuli boys. Kobil-Melonhead, of course, didn’t know a thing either about Kitov or about outer space.
The boy longed to go and tell them the news he had been first to hear, but he didn’t want to lose his name-day specialness154 by leaving the house, and so, not quite knowing what to do with himself, he wandered inside after the women, into the dark house, so that he could at least show off about Kitov to Grandad.
But he had barely crossed the threshold before he heard Grandad say in a hopeless tone, “It was a lot of money. I didn’t have enough.”
Granny gave a long sigh; one of his aunts began to cry.
Grandad had clearly been talking about the colt. The boy’s eyes filled with tears and he stood rooted to the spot. The aunts wandered out of the inner room and stumbled into the boy in the half-dark. They were crying quite openly – goodness knows why – until Granny came and sent them into the yard, saying it was a sin to cry on the eve of a holiday. She didn’t see the boy.
All this made the boy angry. He wiped away his tears and went out onto the street, having quite forgotten about Kitov and even about his own specialness.
No, he did not find Kobil outside Huvron-Barber’s window – the only boys playing nuts were Kutr and the two lyuli boys, Sabir and Sabit. Hussein was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of his house. It was clear that he had already lost and was looking not at the nuts but at the tall figure of Shapik, who was picking his nose beneath the cherry trees.
Old Alyaapsindu was walking down the noon alley, dragging his short shadow behind him. Just as the boy reached the players, Kobil-Melonhead came running up behind the old man, shouting, “Bitov’s in space! Bitov’s flown into space!” Neither the boy, nor old Alyaapsindu, who went on dragging his shadow along without a backward glance, bothered to point out to Kobil-Melonhead that it was not Bitov but Kitov who had flown into space;155 nor did the boy feel like saying that it was he who had been first to know, that it was he who had told Kobil’s Aunt Robiya. No, the boy no longer wanted anything under the sun.
The Railway Page 29