The Dead Lake

by Hamid Ismailov

  Yerzhan looked at his mother. She had always been a kind of ever-present absence for him. He had been raised by the entire ‘spot’, and above all by Grandad and the two grannies. Now that the two women were dead, Grandad had stopped swaggering and putting on airs, and a more distinct image of his mother arose in Yerzhan’s heart.

  His mother never stopped working for a moment. She might be trimming the hair off a goatskin, then sprinkling it with warm water, rolling it up into a tube and setting it close to the stove. Then, while the skin was warming to release the hair roots more easily, she’d start spinning string out of the hair that she had just trimmed off. After finishing that job, she would knead dough. After wrapping the dough to help it rise, she would bring in the fresh milk, pour some into crocks to produce cream, and mix the rest with sour milk, so that by morning the mixture would have turned sour too. Then she would open the rolled-up goat skin and scrape it, and then, after drying it over the flames, immerse it in sour milk and leave it to soak for a few days. Towards evening she would darn torn clothes, boil up soup and make her bed. In short, she never stopped working from morning till night.

  And if Yerzhan’s way of wasting away his life was to do nothing at all, his mother, Kanyshat, on the contrary, seemed to be scouring the life out of her body with incessant work.

  One early summer’s day Yerzhan picked up his violin again. There was no one at home. And perhaps it was the thought of his mother, or the possible misery of Shaken’s family leaving, but most likely it was his longing for Aisulu that drove him back into the arms of music. He poured the immense grief that had been compressed in his puny body for so long into the instrument. But the grieving didn’t end and the music couldn’t hold all his accumulated feelings. When Shaken returned from his shift and found Yerzhan still playing, he remarked joyfully that Petko was back, he’d seen him in the city. Yerzhan decided that he would mount the horse to see his teacher the next day. But the next day his grandad galloped away on the horse about his own business, leaving Yerzhan to mind the phone. And the day after that Shaken galloped off on the horse to the school, to enquire about Aisulu’s examinations. After a few days Yerzhan was tired of waiting for Aigyr, so he mounted the donkey and trudged off in the direction of the Mobile Construction Unit. The violin was slung on his back like a rifle, and even though his shadow in front became shorter and shorter, for a moment or two he felt like a cowboy again.

  While the men keep on dying

  And the women keep on crying,

  The war goes on and on…

  The song kept him going. After about an hour, he reached a concrete structure that resembled a goose sticking up in the steppe like a stone sculpture. Yerzhan stopped for a break in its shade. But before he could dismount, the sky above him, all of a sudden and without any forewarning, turned dark. The bright sunlight flooding the steppe must have exhausted my eyes, he thought. He blinked and the sky turned pitch black, leaving only the sun as a glittering bright circle. And the fear started moving once again from his ankles upwards to root itself in his stomach. Yerzhan was all alone in the immense, wide world – if you didn’t count his frenziedly wailing donkey. But not for long and soon even the wailing of the donkey was lost in the roaring and howling of the wind. The ground shook and thunder roared. Burning clumps of tumbleweed swept across the steppe. And a second sun soared up into the sky. Yerzhan, guided not by reason but by instinct, flung himself into a pit that his donkey had already collapsed into, right in under the concrete. The violin crunched and gave a final squeal, and a ferocious, swirling vortex of air hurtled past, whooping deafeningly as it shaved off everything above them, making way for a grey, dusty light to rise over the world.

  Then a hot drizzle fell.

  Yerzhan lay sprawled in the pit, mingled with the mud, blood and tears. His donkey had instantly gone bald.

  He did reach the Mobile Construction Unit eventually. Or what was left of it. Two shattered and melted tractors and the black ashes of the trailers scattered across the steppe.

  He could hear a solitary wolf howling somewhere as it died, leaving no trace.

  Upon his return to the way station, he immediately noticed that Kapty’s fur had come off and everywhere – from the railway tracks as far as the house – the grass had grown thick and tall in just a day… He alone hadn’t grown…

  I didn’t continue with this idea. Outside the carriage window the night was so black that I suddenly experienced a fear which I thought must be similar to that of Yerzhan, who was now slumbering peacefully on the upper bunk of our compartment. Where this fear came from, I did not know, but the feeling of something inevitable yet hidden, that could be here, just round the next bend, had lodged in my belly as a chilly knot. I couldn’t think of anything better to do than turn over on my stomach and bury my face in the skimpy railway pillow. I tried to force myself to think about something bright and cheerful.

  Yerzhan had aged in his mind at a stroke. He now looked at beautiful Aisulu, who had grown a head taller than her father, without any bitterness, simply in admiration. The fact that she acted as if nothing had happened to him or to her no longer offended him. Truth to tell, he was glad. After all, she could have despised him. Fate plays mean tricks on everyone, he thought. People live out their lives at different speeds. Take Grandad Daulet: after reaching the age of almost eighty, he lost everything he had – his wife, his daughter, his grandson, his friend and now his friend’s family too. Or Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat: she’d lost everything she had too – her virginity, the chance of a husband, her happiness, her father, her brother, her mother and her son… Why should he, Yerzhan, be any different from them? However, because he was so talented, it had all happened to him much faster. Maybe in a single mushel – twelve short years – he had already lived out the life granted to him. After all, he had already lived through everything that is given to a man – the warmth of family, the happiness of love, the infatuation of hopes, the bitterness of disappointments, the music of the soul and the fear of oblivion. And now, like his grandad and his mother, he had lost everything. Perhaps the entire meaning of life was only this and nothing more. Lived out, worn out, exhausted.

  Why had all this happened to him? How had he deserved it? By being too talented? Had Petko persuaded his mysterious Wolfgang to lead Yerzhan’s soul off along his wolfish paths, leaving him only a child’s body for ever? Or had the mother fox, humiliated and insulted in the midst of her native steppe then robbed of her little child, put a curse on him in revenge? Or was it merely a variation, an echo, of what had happened to his own humiliated and insulted mother in the midst of her own steppe? Had his grandad’s dombra and its ancient songs put a spell on the boy, making him turn kaltarys after kaltarys, until that final great turning had reversed time, making it run backwards, in defiance of nature? Or had the chain reaction Shaken was using to catch up with and overtake America in this godforsaken steppe, in this hell on earth that was called the Zone, taken place by mistake not in a reactor but in a boy, exploding like a dwarf star inside him? Or had the old grannies enchanted him with that snotty-nosed scamp Gesar, always waging war against his uncle Kepek-Choton, or against the whole world, or against himself?

  And then the bright face of his Aisulu, grown extravagantly tall now, would suddenly appear from behind the wild grass that had shot up in a flash, frightening Yerzhan with an obscure association, like a discordant note or the scraping of stone on glass.

  *

  At that time of early, early morning when the steppe is as grey and cool as the sky that has only just begun to brighten, Yerzhan was woken by the stealthy tapping of a stone at a window. At once he sat up, fully conscious. Someone was knocking, with a slight scrape, at the next window. It was his mother’s. For these last few days Yerzhan had slept with his clothes on. He simply tumbled into bed when his thoughts could no longer bear their own incessant weight and slid off into sleep. He glanced out at an angle through his window. It was Shaken, who must have just arrived back from h
is shift, having hitched a ride on a train that was heading his way. He was carrying his invariable briefcase and something else. He hadn’t been home yet. Yerzhan gazed impassively at what was happening. He couldn’t see his mother – she was on the other side of the wall – but from the lively way that Shaken was gesticulating, he could guess what this sly interaction was about. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had caught Shaken in these intimate exchanges.

  Perhaps it was because of the early morning hour, or perhaps for some other reason, but it wasn’t anger or jealousy, merely an idle, abstract curiosity that made Yerzhan swing his window open abruptly and stick his head out. Uncle Shaken was taken aback and he dropped his briefcase, but then he got a grip on himself and, as if he had knocked at Kanyshat’s window by mistake and was really looking for Yerzhan, he flapped his hand at the other window and turned towards Yerzhan. ‘Look what I’ve brought for you…’ he began, then stepped back again towards Kanyshat’s window, waved his hand to her, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, it was a mistake’ – and then opened his little suitcase, rummaged in it and pulled out a newspaper. He unfolded it, stuck one of the pages in through the window and said, ‘Read that!’

  Yerzhan started reading out loud:

  ‘In June sad news reached us from the GDR. The well-known American singer and actor Dean Reed was killed in an accident. As often happens in such cases, this news gave rise to various kinds of insinuations in the West. Right-wing newspapers made play with the provocative theory that the American singer’s death was supposedly connected with “the terrorist activities of the special services of the communist regime of the GDR”.

  ‘We phoned the American singer’s widow, Renate Blum, in Berlin. Renate told us this: “Any suggestions that my husband was murdered are absolutely outrageous slander. Such speculations only insult Dean’s memory and cause pain to me and our daughter. My husband drowned. He was found dead in a lake. Just recently Dean’s health had deteriorated badly: he suffered from heart problems. As for the supposition that he wanted to go back to the USA, that too is an absolute lie. He was not intending to do anything of the kind. All his thoughts and energies were focused on a new film. He loved our daughter very much. I consider it squalid chicanery to speculate on the death of my husband and hope very much that you will convey my precise words.”’

  The world turned dark in front of Yerzhan’s eyes.

  Dean Reed too had now been taken away from him. Why did Shaken bring this newspaper from the city? Why had he brought the television? On that television Dean Reed – his Dean Reed, Yerzhan’s Dean Reed – was once called ‘the Red Elvis’. Yerzhan had never heard of Elvis, and later they had shown Elvis himself, and it appeared that Dean Reed was a kind of fake, not the real thing. And now Shaken had taken away even this fake, counterfeit Dean Reed. Just as he had taken away Yerzhan’s height and his future, and his love, and his mother.

  For a moment Shaken hesitated, then he set off towards his own house with his little suitcase…

  Wait, wait! What if he loved Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat? And what if he had loved her all his life? Hadn’t Yerzhan’s grandad told him how he once tied up Shaken when he came back drunk from his shift at night and tried to climb in through Kanyshat’s window? It had all been put down to drunkenness at the time, but this wasn’t the first time Yerzhan had caught him at his mother’s window, was it? And that was why he simply refused to leave and take his city wife, Baichichek, back to the city she longed for.

  Stop! That time by the Dead Lake, in the Zone, at Shaken’s test site, where he was catching up with and overtaking America, when the kids from the school were running about in gas masks, Shaken was the one who appeared in that Armed Forces Protective Suit – like an alien from another world! And hadn’t his granny Ulbarsyn always spoken about an alien when she recalled Yerzhan’s miraculous conception on the very outskirts of the Zone, in that very same area where the river with the dried-out bed lay?

  Yerzhan dashed into the next room to his mother. She was sitting on the windowsill, maybe with nothing to do for the very first time, with her face half-turned towards the window, following Shaken with her eyes as he moved away. ‘Do you love him?’ Yerzhan asked, gasping out all his anger and all his confusion. His mother didn’t turn towards her son, but merely ran her finger over the glass. ‘Does he love you?’ Yerzhan blurted out helplessly. His mother unwove the plait on her head, shook her hair out and then wove her plait again, looking at her faint reflection in the windowpane. ‘Is he your husband?’ Yerzhan asked in a shaky voice, continuing his interrogation. His mother folded her arms across her chest. A thick silence filled the room. The naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling quivered. Immediately the fear lurking in Yerzhan’s ankles moved upwards along its usual path to his stomach, paused there as a cold, heavy weight and then slowly crept on up to his throat, and, after choking him for a moment, reached his lips, emerging as something that was neither a whisper, nor a wheeze, nor a convulsion: ‘Is he my father?’ A faint rumbling ran across the floor, the room started trembling and his mother carried on sitting on the windowsill in the way she had been sitting, doing nothing for the first time in her life, merely gazing out of the window towards yet another train or yet another explosion.

  Yerzhan ran out of the room. Run, run, run, out into the open steppe, across the Zone and past the horizon, past the edge of the world… Run from this fear, from this truth, from this life… So his Aisulu, growing extravagantly like the wild grass under the windows, his poor, unhappy Aisulu… and suddenly, like the she-fox after the uluu kaltarys – the final, great turn – Yerzhan’s consciousness imploded in exhaustion.

  Aisulu was dying alone in a ward in the municipal hospital. Her father had brought her here and then had immediately been called to the testing ground. Her mother had stayed with her for the first few days, but had just left to see her aged parents, who lived in Semey. Aisulu lay there alone in the ward with the white ceiling. But she didn’t see the white ceiling. She saw the steppe and the road from Kara-Shagan to school and back. There she was, riding on the donkey with her Yerzhan, who had disappeared now, and the donkey suddenly picked up a cabbage stalk that someone had thrown out of a passenger train. The donkey had swallowed it whole and choked and lashed out. And first Aisulu and then Yerzhan tumbled off. Yerzhan shouted at Aisulu and Aisulu grabbed the reins and Yerzhan put his arm up to the elbow into the donkey’s foaming mouth and pulled out the stalk. And then she took the scarf off her head, licked away the blood flowing along Yerzhan’s arm and bound the wound tightly.

  A stalk, a huge stalk, had now got stuck inside Aisulu’s body and her organs were swelling, growing extravagantly, like the rest of her body.

  She had admired Yerzhan, the way he played the violin, the way he studied and drew and sang Dean Reed, the way he walked into the Dead Lake, the way he was so protective of her… She had wanted to be his wife, to give him children as talented, brave and devoted as he was, but why had it happened to him and not to her? But what was this it? Hadn’t it happened to her as well? She was lying here, growing extravagantly on the outside and on the inside too, like the wild grass after the blasts, pregnant with her own incurable sickness, all alone in the entire, empty world.

  Aisulu looked up again at the ceiling, which was turning bluish just as the last yellow ray of sunlight fell across it like a fox’s tail, and the fox cub that had brought her so much joy appeared before her eyes, the one that had crept out of their house unnoticed so many years ago. And Kapty bit it to death. How much weeping and wailing there had been that evening while Kepek buried the fluffy little body, only the size of a kitten. And each night that the mother fox could be heard howling for her dead baby, Kapty howled too, like he did before an atomic explosion.

  And now Kapty had started howling in her immense, empty body.

  A leaf struck against the hospital window and the sun fell behind the steppe.

  A knock at the window woke me from my nightmares to the grey steppe
morning. We stood at a way station. An inordinately tall Kazakh woman waved outside the window. She held a little parcel wrapped in newspaper. Yerzhan looked down at her, dangling his short legs. I was so delighted to see him alive and unhurt, as if something irreparable could have happened to him on the line along which the train of my thoughts had been running. But then, hadn’t it already happened? What had happened, though? I tried to link what he had told me with the images of my nightmares. I felt as confused as that she-fox out in the open steppe, unable to tell what was truth and what was invention. Where was the inescapable life in all this and where was the inexplicable eternity? Where was what he had lived through and where was what I had invented? Like a train in the steppe, like the consciousness of a Kazakh, like a revolutionary country’s impulsive surge into some kind of future, my story only kept hurtling on, further and further. Where was the invisible, virtual wall into which the fox pursued by Kazakh hunters crashes, to collapse in a helpless heap?

  There he sat in front of me, a twenty-seven-year-old boy, stuck at the age of twelve, stuck in his twelve-year-old body. What was this all about? Was it time, an entire era of it, that had congealed in him, to be related to me through him, in a single gulp? What was he about, this little man from a big country that no longer existed, that had already lived out its time in an impossible pursuit of America?

  What had I discovered for myself through his fate? What unpredictable and crooked experiment had I glanced and seen in him – this wunderkind Yerzhan, imprinted as a crumpled shadow alongside the grass, the trees and the birds in the concrete wall of the Zone, jutting out of the steppe?