The Railway (20 page)

Democritis leaped on Sohrab, threw him to the ground, rolled him over a rail and onto the stones of the embankment and harshly, brutally, raped him.

No, the portrait of the old Greek Communist did not – like the portrait of the old Indian Teacher in the cemetery – look down on this scene from the embankment; the only onlooker was Nabi-Onearm, who was on his way to the bathhouse to wash away the tears from the film – or so he said later. In actual fact, he was making the most of everyone being out of the way and was about to start stealing his quota of cotton seeds. Fired with eloquence by what he witnessed that evening, he chose to testify at the subsequent trial, which ended with Democritis the son of the late Greek Communist being exiled to the land of the Fascist Colonels, without right of return, and Sohrab-Sharpie the son of the Station Supervisor being exiled to the All-Union State Cinema Institute in Moscow and leaving the courtroom singing, in his touchingly girlish voice, that immortal Indian song: “
O pyari, pyari, tumsa…
.”

None of the children gave much thought to the question of where the Koreans had come from and when they had first appeared in Gilas.
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Some of the brighter boys – Fazi the grandson of old Boikush, for example – thought of them as Uzbeks who happened to speak a different language. Another boy, who had seen not only Koreans but also Dungans,
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doubted the truth of this but decided to keep silent – probably because Boikush was selling
kurt
at the time and so Fazi's pockets were always full of incontrovertible arguments.

At school it was thought for a long time – both in the classes for Russian-speakers and, still more, in the classes for Uzbek-speakers – that the Koreans were a particular breed of Russians. Instead of names like Sasha, Yura or Katya, they bore names that the boys considered still more Russian: Vitold, Izolda, Artaxerxes or Klim. Although it has to be said that the parents of these boys all had names like Sasha, Yura or Katya.

But no one saw much of these parents, although the grannies and grandads appeared on the street more often. The grandparents' names, however, were a mystery – except that there was one old man the children all called Alyaapsindu. Alyaapsindu did not have a son called Petya or even a granddaughter called Lyutsia, and he used to wander about all day between the station and the end house on the street by the Salty Canal. In his straw hat, and with a bamboo staff in his hand, he would go out even in the most scorching heat, stooping a little, as if he were trying to tread on his compact shadow, and repeating his “Alyaapsindu!” (the Korean for “Greetings!”) to every adult, child or dog that he met.

Then he would return – and somehow it looked as if he were trying to get away from a shadow that had lengthened during the hours he had been walking. He might have been smiling into his thin, whitish moustache as the children followed behind him and called out “Alyaapsindu!,” uncertain if they were pleasing or irritating an old man who seemed as indifferent to them as a pendulum.

The children's parents would appear late in the autumn, after they had finished work in the rice and onion fields. All Gilas would suddenly be filled with their strange and festive-sounding speech and with crowds of men sauntering to and from the cinema, turning their feet out as they walked, jackets flung casually over their bony, protruding shoulders.

The men would take over the Gilas chaikhanas; they now seemed like a particular breed of Uzbeks – more Uzbek than the Uzbeks themselves, who seemed somehow lost amid the sea of light blue Korean shirts and their ever-changing fans of cards. Their wives, meanwhile, remained at home, hulling rice or hanging up onions to dry beneath awnings; those who had already completed these tasks passed the time in little huts by the bank of the Salty Canal, looking after their two or three pigs, and anyone playing football near the canal would smell a mixture of fresh sawdust, salted and peppered cabbage, stagnant water and bitter onion which reminded them that Koreans could never really be anything but Koreans.

The Koreans never worked the fields near Gilas. They travelled to regions known only to elder brothers and sisters who had done geography at school and that sounded strangely exotic to everyone else: Kuban and Kuilok, Samarasi and PolitDept, Shavat and Sverdlov. No one in Gilas ever saw them working; the town knew them only as conquerors.

The Koreans didn't even trade in the Gilas bazaar. During the winter, while Korean men with names like Boris, Vasily and Gennady were walking around the streets or enjoying the chaikhanas, old Uzbek women would take the opportunity to dart down Papanin Street and clinch deals with Korean women with names like Vera (or Faith), Nadya (or Hope), and Lyuba (or Love). The Uzbek women would then spend the rest of the winter at the bazaar, selling back to the Koreans the rice, onions and peppers they had bought from them only a few months before.

But not kimchi. Kimchi! This explosion that turned an Uzbek boy's tongue inside out, this fusion of every Korean smell, this peppery fire that warmed the breath of the Korean women calling out their wares in the winter bazaar, this bitter Korean cabbage with veins as tight and white as violin strings, circled by a girdle of blazing-hot peppers just where the white of the stalk changes to the green of the leaves – how could this kimchi
that was the symbol, emblem and nickname of every Korean be sold by a mere Russian or Uzbek, by a Tatar or a Bukhara Jew? Each knows his own: Akmolin has his shunter, Kuchkar-Cheka keeps a seat warm in a chaikhana, Zakiya-Nogaika washes and combs wool, Yusuf-Cobbler resoles shoes, and even Ozoda, with the encouragement of her aunt Oppok-Lovely, keeps an eye on the traders in the small Gilas bazaar – while kimchi
is sold by Koreans: by Vera (or Faith), Nadya (or Hope), and Lyuba (or Love).

They did this, however, only when their husbands had stopped going out onto the street. January and early February – a bleak time of year in Gilas – was a kind of dead season for the men. It was a time when they sat in their homes; the previous year's debts had been paid back, and the money left over had been spent in the chaikhanas and on some new item of consumer goods; one year this would be televisions, another year mopeds, and a third year refrigerators. It was a time when they sat and watched television, or else cleaned their mopeds, or slammed the doors of their new fridges – although the now-orphaned old Uzbeks in the chaikhanas sometimes made out that this dead time was when the Koreans did their wildest gambling, that they met every night at Gennady's, or Vladimir's, or Mikhail's and that the lights always burnt until dawn.

And this was the season when the Koreans killed their pigs. The flames of their blowtorches glimmered against the frozen yellow grass by the Salty Canal and vied with the frozen yellow sunset over the fields.

It was said that the Koreans ate dogs, that this helped to prevent them catching TB – an illness to which they would otherwise be especially vulnerable because they spent their working lives up to their knees in water; it was said that in February, before leaving for the fields of Kuban or Kuilok, of Shavat or Samarasi, they borrowed money from Tolib-Butcher, from Satiboldi-Buildings or, more often, from Oppok-Lovely – to be repaid the following autumn; yes, all kinds of things were said of them, but every spring, all of a sudden, they would disappear, leaving as hostages their strangely named children – their Lavrentys and Emmas, their Violas and Ruslans, their Artyomchiks and Ophelias.

The director of the Gilas music school was called Sevinch; the conductor of the Gilas Pioneer-and-Trade-Union Wind Orchestra – or brass band – was called Soginch. By a whim of nature one of the two was deaf in his right ear, while the other was deaf in his left ear. Both, however, had been brought up in the same orphanage – in Samarasi – where they had been taken as small children during the years when fathers were being unmasked as kulaks and mothers were being liberated from their veils,
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leaving no one to take care of small children except the State that was already taking such absolute care of their parents. The State gave Sevinch and Soginch their brassy names – which meant, respectively, “Joy” and “Desire” – and imbued them for the rest of their lives with a love of martial music. So strong was this love that, many years later, when the chamber orchestra of the Gilas music school took nine minutes to get through a Beethoven quartet, Sevinch frowned. “Languid,” he said crossly, “and far too drawn-out. I want the same again – but this time in three minutes!”

But that was towards the end of Sevinch's life, which we shall come to in due course. And it is not very important anyway. What was important, what really mattered, was that Sevinch's and Soginch's lives, ever since the orphanage in Samarasi, had been like the two rails of a single track, tied inseparably together and running in close parallel. And this orphanage had also instilled in each of them the need to come first in whatever he did; there was, after all, only one of anything – one pot of food in the dining room, one textbook in the library, one hole in the squat-toilet – and so the children had to learn to be quick off the mark. Either by “tramping along stony paths,” as Marx had written on the wall of the corridor, or by “trampling one's comrades underfoot,” as someone had written in the toilet.
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And so it was Sevinch who collected the most red paper stars in an envelope – one for each time his work was marked “Excellent” – and who ended up with more of these red stars than there are stars in the sky; but it was Soginch who won the gold medal in their last year at school – for a version of Lermontov's “The Novice” in which the hero was Stalin himself. Soginch adapted the poem so skilfully that the leopard Stalin wrestled in the night brought to mind not only Hitler, but also, in turn, Bukharin, Radek, Trotsky
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and even that only recently unmasked enemy of the people Akmal-Ikrom.
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There was no counting the tears shed by plump Auntie Tonya the Cook, whom the trade union had invited to join the examination board, when she read how Stalin confessed to Lenin, and through Lenin to the immortal Karl Marx himself:

I would have died, I've often thought,
Had you not lived, had you not taught.

But when they were both sent to the Higher School of Music and Arts in the City, as part of the post-war Komsomol intake of the era of rebirth and reconstruction, it was Sevinch who was appointed the conductors' course-leader; he had donated to the State all the red paper stars he had been awarded during his ten years at the orphanage.

Soginch then wrote a denunciation, stating that Sevinch and countless others were rootless cosmopolitans
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– snakes who had sloughed off their surnames and so camouflaged their true nationality. And so Sevinch and half of the course were deported across the Kazakh steppe and into deepest Siberia, to some Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk or other.

And Sevinch became known as Moses, and he and Soginch were separated.

In this Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk, like a cat taken far from its home, Sevinch discovered that he possessed a phenomenal memory: he needed only to glance at a score by Stravinsky – who was banned – or Bach – who was permitted – or at an account in
Pravda
of Beria's trial
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or Khrushchev's Secret Speech – and the whole of it would be superimposed, phrase by phrase, on the rhythmic pattern beaten out by the names of the stations through which he had passed along the iron road to Siberia. Inexorable
toskà
had etched these names deep into Sevinch's soul: Salar, Gidra, RadioStation, Shumilov, Gilas, Kirpichny, Sanitornaya, Sari-Agach, Djilga, Darbaza, Chengeldy, Arys, and so on, up till the final chord or sentence, now linked inseparably to his present Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk.

A few years later, however, Khrushchev's Thaw set in, and Sevinch's People's Symphony Orchestra went on an extended tour not only of the Soviet Union but even of Western Europe, demonstrating to the world that our provincial musicians were at home with Mahler, Hindemith, Berg and even – to the surprise of many – Karlheinz Stockhausen. The day they arrived in Paris, after the Orchestra had been awarded a First Prize in Milan for their performance of an anonymous masterpiece that had been languishing in the Italian National Archive before being embraced by Sevinch's capacious memory, Sevinch was invited by one of his violinists, Joseph Levi-Sprauss, to accompany him to the house of a distant relative – a certain Claude Lévi-Strauss who turned out to be studying the myths of some Irokoiz or Karakez or other. When Sevinch, who was engaged in his usual mental activity – this time he was fitting one of the symphonies of his beloved Beethoven (the one with the famous knocking of Fate –
Ta-ta-ta ta-a! Ta-ta-ta ta-a!
) to the names of his Siberian railway stations, starting from Salar; when Sevinch suddenly remarked
à propos
of nothing that only between Chelkar and Emba did myth part company from music, the startled Lévi-Strauss carefully noted down his words – and published them three years later as if they represented a world-shaking discovery. And even Levi-Sprauss's unsophisticated tastes – the way he eschewed raw oysters in order to chew on cooked meat and potatoes – were exploited by this relative of his and used in the title of another of his controversial books.
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Lévi-Strauss, alas, had tapped only the most superficial layer of Sevinch's phenomenal memory. Had he been more attentive during that evening in Paris, or had he gone once or twice to visit his relative in that Siberian Fuisk or Kuisk, he would have been able to classify the entire world into isomorphic structures. After all, the Sermon on the Mount was connected to the Ya-Sin Sura or “Heart of the Koran”; Pushkin's and Alisher Navoi's analyses of the tangled net of human passions were part of the same intricate web; and even within the confines of Gilas one could hear the development both of a famous theme of Shostakovich and the endless whirling of Solzhenitsyn's
The Red Wheel
… But I must not allow myself to be carried away.

While Sevinch was in Siberia, preparing to enrich world scholarship, Soginch had been making tea for the Head of what was by then called the Department of Reconstructed Popular Instruments. Then the Head of Department had died and Soginch had conducted the orchestra in a performance of Chopin's “Funeral March” ornamented with a few delightfully Uzbek grace notes. There was a shortage of qualified cadres during those years, and so Soginch, in spite of his youth, became the new Head of Department.

Soginch would have gone on serving tea, first to the Deputy Head of the Higher School of Music and Arts, then to the Head and then to someone still higher, conducting requiems as long as his age allowed – had it not been for the onset of Khrushchev's Thaw and the return from exile (they travelled, as we have seen, via Vienna, Milan and Paris) of Sevinch's People's Symphony Orchestra. These two events happened to coincide with the sudden death of the Deputy Head, and so Sevinch was appointed Deputy Head in his place. His appointment was announced at a general Party meeting, with eight representatives of the City Party Committee – from the General Secretary to the woman whose role was to offer the speaker a glass of kefir
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– sitting on the presidium, as well as a now grim-looking Soginch and a now jovial-looking Sevinch. While the Head held forth about mistaken and repressive policies in regard to culture and art (policies he had zealously enforced during the preceding five years) the colour of Soginch's face changed from white to green, while Sevinch's face glowed ever more vividly.

Soginch then did as he had done for many years, and began making tea for the new Deputy Head of the School. Serving the tea, however, proved harder than making it. Sevinch's secretary made Soginch wait while her boss spoke to the financial director and the accountant, and it was several hours before the Head of Department was allowed to go in and congratulate the new Deputy Head; he did not, of course, proffer the pot of now cold tea. This humiliating tea ceremony was repeated day in day out. After wasting four packets of top-grade tea, which he had been given by a student who managed a food shop, the Head of the Department of Reconstructed Popular Instruments resolved to visit the Deputy Head of the Higher School of Music and Arts only when summoned.

Khrushchev crowned maize “Queen of the Fields,” Sputnik flew off into Space and Khrushchev's “Cosmic” Seven-Year Plan came and went. The Department of Reconstructed Popular Instruments was reconstructed to include a national choir – and the post of Deputy Head of the School was abolished. Once again Soginch was Tsar.

And so now it was merely as an ordinary lecturer and the conductor of an orchestra from some Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk that Sevinch would sit in Soginch's lobby, waiting while Soginch ran a finger over a lady student's eyebrow or brushed up a few lines of his dissertation about the reconstruction of the traditional plectrum.

From time to time – so people said – the two of them would curse one another for all they were worth, each trying to channel his curses into the other's good ear while advancing his own deaf ear… And so their closely bound lives would have gone on – but for the scandal that for many years deprived the distraught Oppok-Lovely of her beloved singer, Bahriddin. It was discovered – alas! – that the reconstructed department had been supplying Bahriddin with female trainees outside working hours.

Once again they saw eight representatives of the City Party Committee – from the General Secretary to the woman whose job was to offer a glass of kefir to the speaker, although this was now someone new, her predecessor having been promoted to the office of supplying kefir to the Provincial Committee. Once again the General Secretary, adorned with all his medals, raged and fumed – this time about a terrible epidemic, a morass of amorality blighting socialist-realist art. And so the department was closed and all the members of staff, including Soginch and Sevinch, were deported to Gilas.

This new place of exile was not far away, and the brief train journey through an area of wasteland, with nothing to remember but two long curves and one level crossing with a horizontal
shlagbaum
, had an effect that no one could have predicted: Sevinch's photographic memory, charged up in readiness for new and astonishing feats, went as blank as a film exposed to bright light; it burst, faded, dissolved, was carried away, reduced to nothing, leaving only a monotonous yellowy-brown and the black and white flickering of the solitary
shlagbaum
.

It was at this time that Soginch first became known as Aaron and that Sevinch met a writer by the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, who was composing something to do with a railway line across the steppe. It would be truer, however, to say that this was when Aitmatov met Sevinch, who had been recommended to him by Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jacobson, Chomsky, Derrida and another seven or eight luminaries of world culture. Moved to the depths of his heart, Aitmatov immortalised this meeting through his terrible story about a man named Mankurt whose memory has melted away.
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Mankurt's name, however, derives from a misunderstanding; Aitmatov had failed to grasp that Sevinch, lamenting his lost memory, had somehow managed to come up with the French word
manquer
. Yes, writers get things wrong and make things up. The sad but simple truth is that Moses Sevinch had forgotten the names of the stations he had passed through during his journey to Siberia and – as an inevitable consequence – everything that he had linked to these names during his years as a conductor in his Siberian Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk. And the years before his exile contained nothing memorable at all: only an anonymous orphanage childhood and its brass band. But since he kept singing Dunayevsky's marches
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under his breath, he was appointed head of the music school.

And so Soginch would have to hang about in the corridor, waiting for Sevinch to remember, at last, that his secretary had summoned Soginch in order for them to fix up a meeting – a meeting that, like so many previous appointments they had arranged, Sevinch would at once completely forget about.

Around this time half of the orchestra followed Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes into emigration, some going to Brighton Beach and others to Israel, while those who were refused visas went to the Old City to join the new Shash-Maqam ensemble that had been set up to play the music of the Bukhara court.
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Putting on an embroidered skullcap, exchanging one's violin for a
gidjak
and well-tempered polyphony for wailing monody was simpler, after all, than changing one's country.

The Patriarch who was setting up this ensemble loved vodka and flattery. So said the poet Habib-Ulla – who, after drinking till dawn, would often find himself sitting in some doorway or other. In his loneliness he would take out two kopeks and a list of telephone numbers from a hidden trouser-pocket, go to a public telephone and begin ringing the numbers in alphabetical order. The Patriarch of traditional music was, as a rule, the only man who picked up the phone; more often than not he turned out to be meditating on the theme of wine in Classical Persian poetry. Habib-Ulla would tell him that a new interpretation of this mystery had come to him in a dream, and, half an hour later, he would be sitting beside the Patriarch, reciting something oddly familiar along the lines of: