The Railway (13 page)

The young Mongolian told Mefody, who by then had also grown his hereditary moustache, that he had met three more fellow-researchers in Leningrad, in the Saltykov-Schedrin library. Mefody went there to carry out further inquiries and ascertained that one of them had no moustache at all; his mother had never been a washerwoman; and he was interested in Przhevalsky only because he was studying the spontaneous dissemination of dialectical materialism around the fringes of the Tsarist Empire. This whiskerless youth, however, told Mefody the precise number of the great traveller's illegitimate sons: eight. Mefody knew only of seven: himself, four in Moscow and two in Leningrad. Who then was the eighth?

To this question Mefody devoted all that remained of his studies, and indeed of his life, until the year 1937.
76

Fyokla-Whispertongue returned to her shop and found the two men; glancing from side to side, she asked them the time. Learning that she was half an hour late, she at once began, in her usual whisper, to accuse both the deaf Kun-Okhun and the wall-eyed Timurkhan of being good-for-nothing time-wasters. Only when Kun-Okhun asked for three bottles of vodka in exchange for half the savings from his wife's trunk did she, after glancing once again from side to side, disappear beneath the counter.

They reached Mefody's room just as Mefody, in the delirium of being without a single hair of the dog, was trying to recall, article by article, the Civil-Procedural Code, which he had memorised, immediately after the Corrective-Criminal Code, during his time in the Solovetsky Islands
77
– but for some reason he had faltered twice during the Karaganda Criminal-Procedural Code and had even stumbled in the middle of the Land Code, which he had committed to memory during his time as a free worker in Chita.
78

After one bottle he managed to recall the Civil-Procedural Code not only by articles but even by sub-sections, including the Commentaries.
79
During the second bottle his two visitors kept distracting him; one was asking something about Party membership, the other something about pyjamas. After the third bottle Mefody managed to get a clearer grasp of these two questions and even to see them as two aspects of a single broader question, but just then Timurkhan sent Kun-Okhun “in the name of the Party” to fetch new supplies of vodka. On the way Kun-Okhun was fired upon by Kazakbay-Happytrigger, the caretaker of the wool factory, who had the same concerns as Kara-Musayev about cartridges he had sold illegally to Kuzi-Gundog, and so Kun-Okhun had to return on his belly, executing a flanking manoeuvre around both the wool and the cotton factories that took up a whole hour.

They drank the first two bottles of the second series in silence; a listener might have thought they were mourning the death of their Leader. Mefody-Jurisprudence not only brought together in his consciousness every Law, Code and Commentary he had learned in the camps but also for some reason rummaged in his beloved briefcase – which he used at night as a pillow, in the day as a table, and the rest of the time as a trunk, a home for all the scant property he had accumulated in the course of his life – and took out some battered book or other which he then began to wave in the air, claiming it was the Law of Laws, Code of Codes and Commentary on all Commentaries and telling Timurkhan (who had by then become not only wall-eyed but also deaf) and Kun-Okhun (who had by then become not only deaf but also wall-eyed) that he had at last unveiled the Truth he had always known and that they should now address him not as Mefody but as Benjamin. While he was shouting this crazed gibberish, the book fell from his hands and Timurkhan was impelled by compassion to crawl up to Mefody and read out loud, “T-t-t-omm-masss Mmma-nnn... [he gave a hiccup of excitement] Io-seeff a-and hee-ees brrrothers!”

“Yes!” shouted Mefody-Benjamin. “Precisely!” Then he began telling a broken tale of exiles and betrayals and hunger and kingship, a tale so terrible that neither Timurkhan, when he had returned to being simply and straightforwardly wall-eyed, nor Kun-Okhun, when he had returned to being simply and straightforwardly deaf, ever again dared to recall it – either in solitude, or in the presence of others, or even when it was just the two of them drinking away their hangovers.

All Timurkhan remembered from this tale about Yusuf was that his mother had been a washerwoman and that, for some reason, Mefody seemed more exercised by this simple fact than by everything else put together. “His m-m-mother was a washerwoman, brothers! Don't you understand?” Mefody had kept stammering through his tears – and all Timurkhan had been able to say in response was “Not a fucking thing!”

And what the simple-hearted Kun-Okhun remembered made no sense at all: the Party, Stalin, a beautiful but adulterous wife and then, for some reason, this Yusuf, who not only used to rule but still does rule and for some reason will always continue to rule. Did he mean Yusuf-Cobbler? But then what did Comrade Stalin have to do with it? And so Kun-Okhun had repeated after Timurkhan, “Not a fucking thing!”

“You don't believe me? You don't believe me?” How could Mefody ever convince the wall-eyed and the deaf? All of a sudden he cried out, “Pee on my head then, if you don't believe me! Pee on my head in front of the whole town!”

Soon after the three of them went out onto the street, Kun-Okhun had felt a sudden, burning stab – a stab of pain occasioned not, as he first thought, by a fear that he too was being betrayed, that his beloved Djibladjibon-Bonu was seeing too much of Yusuf-Cobbler, but by the impact of a bullet. After saying goodbye to the savings from his wife's trunk and his dream of a career in the Party, Kun-Okhun had passed within range of those whose duty it was to guard the station and its freight trains.

And then, outside Huvron-Barber's little shop, in the presence of Huvron-Barber and Yusuf-Cobbler, poor Mefody's request was answered: Timurkhan executed civil punishment on this drunkard of an intellectual, this brother of his many unfortunate brothers. Yes, he made Kun-Okhun, who was on fire from both physical and emotional wounds, take off his pair of summer pyjamas, the ends of which were still neatly tucked into his box-calf boots, climb up onto one of Huvron's chairs, and piss out all his hatred for the discord-fomenting intelligentsia onto the thin-haired, broad-browed head of this son of a washerwoman and a traveller.

“I'm Benjamin, I'm Benjie,”
80
Mefody cried pathetically when the careful Yusuf-Cobbler, who normally pissed against the wall of Huvron's small shop where no one could see him, decided to take advantage of this opportunity and expend a whole day's worth of urine beside that of Kun-Okhun. “And he's Yusuf,” Mefody wept – and his tears mingled with the two streams of urine as he pointed somewhere up above, perhaps at Yusuf, perhaps somewhere higher still in the heavens.

No one understood anything at the time. Nor did anyone remember anything afterwards. What, after all, was there to remember? A stain from some evaporated urine? At the time of the death of Yosif Stalin!

In any case, whatever it was that happened, there was certainly no new intake of Party members in Gilas after the death of the Father of Nations.

As he fell asleep, the boy quite forgot whether he was in the cemetery or in his attic in the chaikhana. Everywhere hung the same darkness, full of silence and sleep, and he dreamed of a life he had long forgotten, of a village lying in a hollow in the mountains. From the pass you could see Mookat as clearly as if it rested in the hollow of your hand: every line of its streets and buildings, and the tall, triangular poplars he used to walk under on his way to the house where he had been born.

It was as if someone invisible were walking beside him and saying: “Tell me what this is! And this!” And with the ease with which you talk about your first home, about where you were born and where you lived your first years, he chatted away to this invisible figure. Here was the park where he had run about with the other nursery-school children, where they had played “Swans and Geese” while the teacher played on her squeeze-box and sang about the stars and about the word that bound the boy and little Nadya: love. The poplars here were tall and full of air, and the air was deep blue in summer but in autumn it became a transparent yellow and it whirled around together with the slow smooth leaves, like the water around the little fish in the aquarium.

And here was the barn. They were taken to this barn after lessons, and here they sat in a circle on aprons or sackcloth piled high with newly picked tobacco leaves. The leaves were warm and sticky; the children used needles as big as kebab skewers to thread the leaves onto strings, and their hands would become as sticky and fragrant as the leaves themselves. When the teacher could no longer bear the dirt smeared over their faces, the boys went off and washed and then crept beneath the long, long row of leaves that had been hung up to dry, and there they lay, in this dizzying space of drying tobacco, living earth and warm sun, until the next class came to take their place. After that it would be the turn of the girls.

And here, in the bogs by the Kakyr-Say, where you only had to run a few yards and a cold dirty slime would ooze up between your toes, they used to play football…

But this was not what he wanted to talk about. What he wanted to talk about was his granny. No, not granny Hadjiya whom he had run away from, but his other granny – the one to whom he was taking his invisible companion, telling him what an astonishing granny she was. She was very tall indeed, and thin. And, to be honest, rather like a vulture. Granny Oyimcha had not a nose but a beak, and her eyes were equally sharp. But that didn't matter, although there had been a time in his childhood when he had been as frightened of her as of a bird of prey…

One winter's day he had been standing in the Gilas bazaar selling his naan breads when Ozoda – Oppok-Lovely's niece – told him that a visitor had arrived. Everyone there had heard about Ruzi-Crazi's crazy letter, and so they had all laughed. And then, before the boy had had time to think, he saw not Ruzi-Crazi but Granny Oyimcha, all in black, tall and frightening, walking through the snow with her arms tucked crosswise into her sleeves. It really was as if a mountain bird had swooped down on their little dump of a town. Quite without meaning to, remembering what his mother had once said about Granny Oyimcha, the boy had shrunk into himself like a mouse, unable to forget an image that was imprinted in him as if in the long-ago frame of that long-ago window with the double panes and the glittery cotton wool in between them that looked like fresh-fallen snow.

As for Ruzi-Crazi, the stupid woman had taken it into her head to come all the way from Mookat – nearly a thousand kilometres – and had turned up at the bazaar with no warning at all. She had laid down her baby and, in front of everyone, had rushed at the boy, calling him a poor little orphan as she covered him with slobbery kisses and wailed about the death of his mother. Why did she need to wail if it was neither forty days nor a year since his mother's death?
81
And she
had brought the whole
mahallya
running into their yard when, on meeting Granny Hadjiya, she started up a second time, howling about the poor orphan and calling him a piece of her own liver, a piece of her own spleen, a precious drop of her own heart's blood.

And then she had begun living with them. At the depot that month they were loading pumpkins onto lorries, and the children were coming back almost every day with two or three misshapen pumpkins they had been given by way of wages, and so Granny Hadjiya kept cooking either pumpkin in ravioli or pumpkin in milk, or just plain pumpkin soup. Ruzi-Crazi sat most of the time in the yard, feeding her baby and chewing pumpkin seeds. And so the days had passed – and Granny had ended up cross-questioning her grandson, evidently unable to find out from her own long conversations with Ruzi-Crazi what on earth the woman was up to.

The boy knew she was called Ruzi-Crazi, but he didn't know why. He didn't mind her being there because the only way they could feed an extra mouth was by getting pumpkins straight from the depot, and so Granny allowed him to work there instead of insisting he go to the bazaar to sell naan breads. Ruzi-Crazi did, admittedly, often lull her baby to sleep by saying – probably more for Granny Hadjiya's ears than the baby's – that there was nothing more important in the world than kindness and, since they had come to this house to be kind, the best thing the baby could do was to keep growing. The baby would duly fall asleep, but Granny would toss and turn, groaning as if her rheumatism was playing up.

After a while they almost stopped talking in the evenings; Granny was sleeping badly and so she usually went to bed immediately after their pumpkin supper. In the daytime she too started going to the bazaar, with a bowl of hurriedly roasted pumpkin seeds. On one such day – so the other boys told him afterwards – a lame man with a moustache had come to their house and Ruzi-Crazi had once again let out a howl that had brought the whole
mahallya
straight to their door. It turned out that her husband had spent all his month's pension searching for this half-wit daughter of half-wit parents who for some
reason or other was feeling badly treated – and since the accepted way for an Uzbek woman to let the world know how disgracefully she had been treated was to go and stay with her parents, or with some other relatives, the kinless Ruzi had had no choice but to travel a thousand kilometres to Gilas, even though Granny Hadjiya wasn't really related to her at all. And so her lame husband with a moustache had given her a good hammering with his fists and one of his crutches and then led her back to their little mountain village as if she were a stray cow.

And a month later she had sent a letter that the boy had read out loud to all the old women in the
mahallya
. In it, word for word, was what Ruzi-Crazi used to say at night to her baby; it was as if she had written the letter in the middle of the night, while her baby cried and her lame husband slept. This seemed all the more probable in view of the fact that her words about kindness were interrupted by a crazy postscript addressed to Granny: “All day and night you stuff yourself with pumpkin and you've turned into a great fat pumpkin yourself!” These words had such a powerful effect that for a moment Granny's bloated and helpless face really did look like a misshapen pumpkin.

It was because of this letter that everyone in the bazaar had laughed when Ozoda told the boy that a visitor had arrived at his home. But when they saw tall, black Granny Oyimcha walking through the white snow, they fell silent. Or was it that the boy went deaf? All he could remember was glimpsing out of the corner of one eye how everyone slipped back behind their tables and began fiddling about with their weights.