The Dead Lake

by Hamid Ismailov

  And although I knew in my mind that the test site had been closed for a long time already, the same feeling that Yerzhan had repeatedly described to me – that fear lurking in the ankles – rose slowly up through my hollow insides to my stomach, then higher, and higher…

  The strapping Kazakh woman knocked on the window and waved her newspaper containing a hot-smoked fish or a piece of bread, or pellets of dried sour milk. Yerzhan leant across, grabbed the two window catches with his strong musician’s fingers and opened it, asking, ‘What do you want?’

  The rasping of the window as it opened and the sound of conversation set the old Kazakh below us stirring and he turned over from one side onto the other – to face us. Yerzhan hung down from his bunk, looking round at the noise, cast a quick glance at the man from his handsomely slanted squirrel’s or fox’s eyes and suddenly howled out, ‘Shaken!’ like an eagle screeching at a fox – and flung himself straight at him.

  I was seriously frightened. My brain feverishly attempted to complete its line of steppe wires, its music on this stave, its chain reaction, its pursuit of a wolf or a she-fox. He’ll strangle him, he’ll strangle him, his hands are strong enough to do it – the thought suddenly exploded inside me – and while I was still soaring upwards on the blast wave of this explosion, Yerzhan and the old man were already embracing each other. The old man wept mute tears and the Kazakh woman outside the window froze just as she was, puzzled by what was going on in this carriage, in this compartment, and I didn’t understand much of it myself, except that an immense feeling of relief at not having witnessed a quarrel, or a murder, or any other kind of catastrophe, instantly filled me with its eternal, inexpressible, ineffable mystery, like the bright blue sky above the steppe.

  An hour later our train halted for a break at an empty way station. Yerzhan and Shaken were still talking to each other in Kazakh, mostly sorrowfully, sighing and mentioning one name over and over again – Aisulu – and from the way they suddenly darted out of the compartment with all their belongings, including a violin slung over a shoulder, I realized that we were standing at Kara-Shagan. I glanced out of the window. Although from the two abandoned Soviet railway houses I could tell that it really was Kara-Shagan, there were no signs of life to be seen – no chickens running around under the single elm some distance away, no old man with a little flag, no hay laid in for the winter, not even a single little cowpat anywhere. Only two figures – one a stooped old man, the other an impetuous boy – moving away past these abandoned, uninhabited houses into the depths of the open plain.

  And lit by the sun I could see five graves.

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  About the Author and Translator

  AUTHOR

  Born in 1954 in Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He writes in both Russian and Uzbek, and his novels and poetry have been translated into many European languages, including German, French and Spanish. In 1994 he was forced to flee to the UK because of his ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’. He now works for the BBC World Service. His first novel to be published in English, The Railway, appeared in 2006, followed by A Poet and Bin-Laden in 2012. His work is still banned in Uzbekistan today.

  TRANSLATOR

  Andrew Bromfield’s career of more than twenty years as a translator of Russian literature had its beginnings in Moscow during the perestroika period. In 1991 he was a founding edito
r of the journal Glas: New Russian Writing. He has translated works by Boris Akunin, Vladimir Voinovich and Irina Denezhkina, among other writers.

  Copyright

  First published in English in 2014

  by Peirene Press, 17 Cheverton Road, London, N19 3BB

  www.peirenepress.com

  This ebook edition first published in 2014.

  Originally published in under the original Russian Language title by Druzbha Narodov, 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Hamid Ismailov

  This translation © Andrew Bromfield, 2014

  Hamid Ismailov asserts his moral right to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–908670–19–9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Designed by Sacha Davison-Lunt.

  This translation was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Funding TRANSCRIPT to Support Translations of Russian Literature.