The Railway

by Hamid Ismailov

  “So I’m dead,” the boy thought with a calm sense of doom. And no sooner had he grown used to this thought than the window was flung open and howls and screams came flooding in, and, when he opened his eyes in the other world, he saw Uchmah and Janna and all the same excited faces as before. Someone’s huge hand quickly showed him a tiny ring of skin, which was oozing blood and through which he could see a red lamp, and then Garang-Deafmullah hobbled to the window and threw this useless piece of flesh through the iron grating, and the women all screamed as they fought for this magic ring that would help them bear children...

  And the boy closed his eyes.

  There seemed to be no end to the screaming of the women outside.

  * * *

  153It seems that Nafisa was confused, or that the loudspeaker in the bazaar was indeed unclear. The first man in space – in April 1961 – was Yuri Gagarin. Nafisa may have misheard “Gagarin” as “Lyaganov”; in her confusion, she appears to have added the Russian suffix “ov” to the Uzbek “lyagan,” which means “dish” or “flying saucer.”

  154Circumcisions, though widely practised, were officially disapproved of, and people went through the motions of pretending they didn’t happen. The boy may have heard his grandparents inviting guests to his “name-day.”

  155The loudspeaker in the bazaar, which relayed the main Soviet radio stations, does not appear to have improved during the years since Gagarin/Lyaganov first flew into space. The cosmonaut’s name was in reality neither Kitov nor Bitov, but Titov.

  156An Uzbek saying.

  157It is a traditional Sunni Muslim custom to hold your cupped hands before your mouth as you pray, reciting the prayer as if into your hands and then drawing your hands across your cheeks, as if spreading the prayer into your face. Shiites often perform a similar gesture with just one hand. Central Asian Muslims are mainly Sunni, whereas Persians are mainly Shiite.

  33

  In her youth Zebi-Beauty lived up to her name and never harboured a breath of evil inside her. Once, at a reception to mark the return from the War and the Gulag of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes – Gilas’s Traitor-to-the-Motherland and First Veteran – she bent down to pick up a naan bread and let out a loud fart. The subsequent silence hung in the air. Fortunately, her seven-year-old son Barot was there at hand, and she cursed him, clipped him across the ear, and sent him packing. And the poor mite’s indignant “But what have I done?” hung in the tainted silence.

  But the reception continued…

  34

  How people loved Bahriddin!

  There was probably no one people loved like Bahriddin-Singer. In Mukum-Hunchback’s chaikhana there was a poster that showed this “Sea of Faith” (which is what his Persian name means) emerging from a music box made to look like the Ka’aba – or from a Ka’aba made to look like a black music box filled to the brim with the treasures of the Uzbek nation. All of Gilas kept coming back to gaze at this poster, pretending they needed more of the limp naan bread sold in the chaikhana.

  Oppok-Lovely quite lost her once white but now greying head over Bahriddin. In between stamping documents – each of which earned her twice the monthly pension of her brother Oktam-Humble-Russky, who was now living out his last years in an old people’s home – she tried to think up an excuse, any excuse, perhaps even a splendid Bolshevik funeral for her own brother, for arranging a banquet, so that she could extend an invitation to Bahriddin-Singer and publicly, in front of the whole of Gilas, present him with a gold-embroidered gown, slip his arms into its sleeves and tie the gold-embroidered belt round his waist; for a moment at least, in front of everyone she knew, she would throw her arms round him, hold him in her embrace – and then, then she would die happy. Yes, she would forget her errant husband and die happy.

  But Oktam-Humble-Russky, alas, was too principled a Bolshevik to die before the final victory of Communism; and Oppok-Lovely’s own daughters had quiet “Komsomol-style” weddings in the City, in student dining rooms, without ceremony and without singers; and her son Kuvandyk the garage mechanic even went so far as to marry a Russian girl, having first developed a taste for Russian vodka; and Bahriddin himself proved more than a little elusive.

  And no sooner had Oppok-Lovely found an excuse for a banquet – the elevation of her returnee husband to the position of “Bearer of Dying Languages” in an institute in the City – than she heard terrible news: Bahriddin, her beloved Bahriddin, the “sea of her faith,” had set up a brothel staffed by the female music students of some damned Soginch or Sevinch… The girls had wandered about stark naked, angelically singing the finest songs in their repertory as they went about – or lay about – their business. And then some minister of some kind of internal affairs had turned up just at the wrong moment; the naked angels had been singing at the tops of their voices as he passed by. Anyway, whatever the reason, news came from the City that Bahriddin-Singer had been stripped of everything: titles, laurels, medals, regalia. And he had been sent into cultural exile on the naked shores of the Aral Sea, which was already drying up and shrinking.

  A few years later, Oppok-Lovely, who had remained loyal to her idol amid the sea of other mature and maturing voices, heard from Pinkhas Shalomay’s nephew, who was a student of Bahriddin’s and who often sang at weddings instead of him, that Bahriddin was returning from exile. Oppok-Lovely at once sent off a messenger to tell him that she would be glad to arrange the same “most angelical singing and other rites” for him in her hometown of Gilas. With the help of her protégé Ali-Shapak – formerly the public weigher and now the Head of the Kok-Terek Bazaar – she took over the weighing hall, furnishing and decorating it so that the director of the medical institute could send an entire course of female students there to extend and deepen their knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Alas, Bahriddin turned out to have abandoned angelic young women and turned his attention to dogs.

  After disappearing for a week, Oppok-Lovely’s special messenger spent the next two weeks telling the inhabitants of Gilas about how Bahriddin, that sea of faith that would never dry up or disappear, had bought some land from some Kazakhs. Yes, he had bought four hills and a valley between Chernyaevka and Sharabkhona. Bahriddin and his dog would sit on one hill; the opposing dog would be placed on the opposite hill; judges, seconds and fans would occupy the other two hills – and then the dogs would battle it out in the valley below.

  Within a few years Bahriddin’s Labon was the undisputed champion of fighting dogs from the Urals to the Aral Sea, from the Pamirs to the Pacific. Bahriddin then sacrificed his invincible Labon, burying him in the valley between the four hills, and the First Secretary of those parts – who had been enabled by the influx of fans not only to balance his budget but even to build factories and a whole new regional infrastructure – cordoned off the whole area and put up signs saying: “Stop! Danger! Danger Zone!”

  After listening to her idol on the radio as he sang, in a voice crimson with toskà, a line of Babur, “I’m your dog – tie me tight to the chain of your hair,”158 Oppok-Lovely took it into her head to summon the best dog-breeders among the local Koreans, so as to pay tribute at least through the most refined canine cuisine to the King of Dogs sacrificed by her King of Song. Once again she sent a messenger to the City – only to discover that Bahriddin had withdrawn from the world. He received no one at all; all day and all night he read the classical texts he had once sung at weddings for roubles: for roubles promised him by the master of the wedding feast; for roubles thrust into his pockets, under his belt, under his embroidered skullcap and even – as if into the slit of a postbox – into the resonating chamber of his one-stringed tar;159 for roubles hurled at him by his countless devotees of every sex.

  This rock of faith was now reading ancient texts and trying to lay bare their most secret meaning – a meaning that was opening his eyes to his own true nature... For three years and three months he read the volum
es he had slowly gathered from villages of both plain and mountain. And when he knew these volumes better than all the musical academies and institutes of philology in the country, when the depth of his knowledge had turned his hair grey, he resolved to communicate this knowledge to the people.

  A new institute, it is said, was founded to house the manuscripts he had gathered, while he himself dressed their meaning in the simple clothing of his wisdom-filled voice. His decision to return to his public coincided with the departure of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes to the United States, thanks to Pinkhas Shalomay (and with the help of a reference from his former mathematics teacher, Alexander Solzhenitsyn). Enraged and distressed by the scheming of that vile Pinkhas, who had taken away her husband just as she was being given back her beloved Bahriddin (who had now, apparently, dyed his hair black again) – yes, enraged and distressed as she was, the ageing but still determined Oppok-Lovely, who was about to retire from her position as Gilas passport officer, decided to kill two birds with one stone; in order to lament the loss of both her youth and her husband, she dispatched a messenger once again to Bahriddin-Teacher, offering him gold jewellery that the wife of the last Emir of Bukhara had sold as she lived out her last poverty-stricken days in the small town of Kermina and that Oppok-Lovely had obtained in exchange for issuing Pinkhas Shalomay – or rather Pyotr Sholokh-Mayev – with his very last Soviet passport.

  Quick as lightning, urgent as the whistle of one of Kaganovich’s steam-engines, the news flashed through Gilas: Bahriddin, that ocean of Oppok-Lovely’s faith, was coming to Gilas! Large-denomination banknotes were quickly exchanged for smaller denominations, so that their possessor could make more frequent approaches to the idol with tokens of grateful appreciation.

  Oppok-Lovely brought a brigade of young Tatar women from the wool factory to spread paint and whitewash over buildings, fences and trees. The brigade leader, Zakiya-Nogaika (her father had been an eminent member of the Jadid movement160 in the Crimea, and she herself had first come to these parts to instruct the local women in reading, writing and the new life but had ended up as a wool-washer in a shed by the Zakh canal) happened to mention an occasion when Domla Halim, the most famous singer at the court of the Emir of Bukhara, had come to visit her father in the Crimea: her father had bought a piano in his honour and Domla Halim had liked the instrument, putting his stick between the pedals, placing his spectacles and his prayer beads on the music stand and laying his turban and gown on the flat lid. Inspired by this story, Oppok-Lovely released a brigade of Georgians and Ossetians from their duties at the cotton factory and got the Korean Chen-Duk – whom she had once transformed with a stroke of her pen into the Kazakh Chendukbayev and who was now the director of a pig farm up in the mountains – to sell her the “Roenisch 1911” grand piano that he had inherited, along with the directorship of the pig farm, from a local Volga German who had been deported after the War to the homeland of his distant ancestors.161

  While the Georgians and Ossetians were transporting the piano – and bringing a large billiard table from the Gilas library to fill the space left behind in Chendukbayev’s office – a new inscription appeared beside the words Roenisch 1911: Hatsunay 1964, scratched by a crooked Ossetian knife. Zakiya-Nogaika, however, painted out both these inscriptions, covering the entire piano, including all sixty-four keys, with snow-white paint intended for the bodies of cars. She was especially diligent in her treatment of the little protruding black keys, on which it was so strangely easy to pick out the simple Tatar songs of her far-distant and enlightened youth.

  At last, after everyone had changed their money and those who were not very well off had had their trouser pockets made so deep that they could dig about in them all evening, pretending that they were searching for a wad of notes as they muttered, “No, Bahriddin’s not quite himself today. Pity we can’t lock him up with a tape recorder first thing tomorrow morning!” – yes, after the paint on the fences, benches and ceilings of the 2.375 adult inhabitants of Gilas had dried, after even the snow-white paint on the Roenisch-Hatsunay piano had finished drying, there appeared for the first time in the history of Gilas a messenger from Bahriddin. He came in a brand-new car, drew up outside Mukum-Hunchback’s chaikhana and asked the way to the house of Oppok-Lovely, a building familiar to every adult, child and animal in Gilas. And within a couple of hours the whole of Gilas knew that Oppok-Lovely had suffered a stroke.

  What happened to Oppok-Lovely during the following years belongs to another story. All I can say now is that this stroke left her half-paralysed and, when she was a very old woman – an old woman who had neither been reunited with her husband Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes nor been granted a chance to embrace her elusive Bahriddin – she was often to be seen in a small pram, being wheeled around Gilas by the devoted Zakiya-Nogaika, who had succeeded with the help of Oppok-Lovely in posthumously rehabilitating the name of her Jadid father and who therefore received a special pension along with a monthly delivery of macaroni, canned meat and black pepper. Zakiya-Nogaika used to wheel Oppok-Lovely up and down the town; on Sundays they would go as far as the Kok-Terek Bazaar, where Oppok-Lovely, who was festooned with little cloths, ribbons and handkerchiefs, would untie these home-made purses and give money to plump Froska, the fizzy-water seller who had once been pined after by the entire male population of Gilas – or to Tolib-Butcher, who had never forgiven Oppok-Lovely for enabling his younger brother to retire before him and had revenged himself by slipping large bones into her parcels of top-quality meat – or to Yusuf-Cobbler, who had gone on pissing against the wall of Huvron-Barber’s little shop until he watched the film Shri 420 by which time the wall was blanketed with moss and ivy; and so Zakiya-Nogaika and Oppok-Lovely would pass through the bazaar, with Oppok-Lovely untying one cloth purse after another, settling her accounts with the world and growing ever lighter like the holy tree the boys had once found in the cemetery, and then returning in the same pram, letting herself be pushed by Zakiya-Nogaika across the railway line and down crooked sidestreets, and then, back at home, still sitting in her pram, taking into her hands first the one and only letter and photograph she had ever received from her errant husband, who had been condemned to eternal study of the mighty Greater-Russian language in Brighton Beach, and then her own one and only passport, with its photograph of a woman whose hair was snow-white from birth rather than from old age; and her dry eyes would shed tears as Zakiya-Nogaika – who suffered from Parkinson’s disease – sat by the piano, her trembling yet rigid fingers picking out the simple Tatar songs of her far-distant, enlightened youth on stumpy keys that time had once again made black.

  * * *

  158Zahir-Ud-Din Mohammad Babur (1483–1530), born in Andijan in the Fergana Valley, was the founder of the Mughal Empire in Northern India.

  159A single-stringed instrument related to the two-stringed doutar.

  160See note 43.

  161Between 1763 and 1772 around 30,000 Germans were encouraged by Catherine the Great to settle in the Volga steppe. By 1897 the Volga Germans numbered nearly 1,800,000. Around a third of the population died in the famine of 1921, and in 1941 they were nearly all either drafted into the army or deported to Siberia or Central Asia.

  About the Author and Translator

  Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for the United Kingdom, where he now works for the BBC World Service. His works are still banned in Uzbekistan. His writing has been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish, English, and other languages. He is the author of many novels, including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, Hostage to Celestial Turks, Googling for Soul, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden, and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry including Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. He has translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics int
o Russian and several Western languages.

  Robert Chandler graduated with a BA in Russian and English Literature from Leeds University. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes both in the UK and in the USA. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of Alexander Pushkin (in the Hesperus ‘Brief Lives’ series). He has also translated selections of the poetry of Sappho and of Apollinaire.

  Colophon

  Copyright © Hamid Ismailov 1997

  English translation copyright © Robert Chandler 2006

  Digital edition published by Restless Books, 2015

  First published in Russian as Zheleznaya doroga by Voskresen’ye, Moscow, 1997

  Published in English by Harvill Secker, London, 2006

  ISBN: 978-1-63206-0-181

  Cover design by Jonathan Yamakami

  All rights reserved.

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