The Railway (29 page)

Party First Secretary Buri-Bigwolf brought Gilas's First Veteran, who had only recently been released from the Gulag; this, of course, was Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes – the husband of Oppok-Lovely and brother-in-law of the late Oktam-Humble-Russky, the town's First Bolshevik. Vying with Buri-Bigwolf, Tordybay-Medals brought Gilas's Senior Inhabitant, blind old Hoomer. Hoomer fussed about for a while and asked confusedly to be introduced to the culprit. When the boy went up to him, the frail and transparent old man put his calico bag to one side, whispered something in the boy's ear and, patting him on the head, gave him some kind of amulet – earth from under Gilas's first railway sleeper, or a sliver of the first brick from the cotton factory, or maybe a bit of paper sewn into a black velvet triangle – and pronounced a blessing. Hoomer, however, gave off a smell of chloroform and valerian; the boy was quick to move away from him, and the old man – thank God – was taken off to eat
plov
with Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, who was smiling the stupid smile of a man who is never quite sure what language he will be addressed in.

At eleven o'clock it was the turn of the women to eat; they were served the remains of the
plov
and a freshly cooked pea soup. But by then the boy no longer knew who was coming and who was going. He had to go next door to Aisha-Nogaika, to wash in a tub before the ritual. It was bad enough to have to bathe in a tub under the supervision of Auntie Aisha and of Janna-Nurse, who poured water over him and rubbed him down with a loofah – but what he hated still more was the way all three widows kept darting about, one bringing him a little jug, another a little towel, another some more warm water, each of them considering it their duty to wash his willy – which had wrinkled up out of embarrassment – and to crack some joke at its expense. And then, after he had been washed and dried all over, Auntie Uchmah turned away to blow her nose and then touched his willy again with snotty fingers – as if his willy were a handkerchief! Ugh! And then her snot dried over his foreskin and even after he had been dressed up in his holiday finery the boy kept trying to wipe away this crust with the help of his satin trousers, but they just slid over it, making his willy swell and somehow expanding Uchmah's revolting trail.

As he came out of Aisha's house, he saw that the other boys were all playing nuts under Huvron-Barber's cherry trees: Kutr, Shapik and Hussein, Sabir and Sabit, Kobil-Melonhead, Kara and Borat… Just before one o'clock, when he was feeling hungry and sleepy, someone gave him a small cup of vile, bitter cognac, saying it was medicine. Then he was given a handful of raisins and placed on the back of Uncle Sherzod, who was going to take the place of the colt and whirl him around the bonfire.

The memory of his brief dream stung the boy's heart and he put his arms round Sherzod's strong neck. They went out into the yard. The fire was not yet burning properly. Someone hurried off to fetch a stack of papers they remembered seeing in a bag on the floor; but the papers wouldn't burn. Bakay said they should throw paraffin on the fire, but there wasn't any; children were sent to get some petrol off Murzin or Saimulin, but the two drivers had already left; in the end someone ran to the garage by the level crossing and came back with not a can of petrol but a whole drum. They threw some on and there was a burst of flame, giving off the same sickening heat that the boy could already feel building up inside him; then he and Sherzod began circling the bonfire.

The fire burnt. The flames seized sheets of paper and carried them up into the air. All the children except Hussein and the two
lyuli
came running to watch Kakhramon Dadayev – whom Oppok-Lovely had hired in the City – playing five tambourines at once.

The fire burnt. As he passed by, old Alyaapsindu saw that his shadow was dancing even though his body was barely moving; but for the help of Rizo-Zero, he would have fallen to the ground in shock.

The fire burnt. Sabir and Sabit led Hussein towards the Zakh Canal, while Hussein's father, Huvron-Barber, sharpened Garang-Deafmullah's razor for the circumcision.

The fire burnt. Blind Hoomer returned to his musty home and felt a sharp pain in his chest as he discovered that he had left behind the calico bag of papers that he never allowed himself to be parted from. But there was no one to help: Nakhshon had gone away to take part in some trial of Crimean Tatars, and the Young Pioneers were all on holiday.

The fire burnt. The staring, whirling faces made the boy feel more and more sick: Uchmah, who had covered his willy with snot; Janna-Nurse, who hadn't wiped off this snot; Tolib-Butcher, who was pressing up, in the dense crowd, against the plump bottom of the half-blind Boikush; Tadji-Murad, Boikush's son, who still had his whistle round his neck and who chose not to notice what was going on because Tolib-Butcher set aside two kilos of boneless meat for him every week (the boy's granny got the bones from this portion).

The fire burnt. Sabir and Sabit led Hussein to the deserted bank of the Zakh canal, dived into the water and called to Hussein to come in after them. Hussein, forbidden to swim by the strict beliefs of his Shiite family, stripped naked and stepped cautiously into the water. First out of mischievousness, then out of intoxication with their own power, Sabit and Sabir began pushing Hussein under. Hussein cried out. “Shut up or I'll fuck you!” shouted little Sabir; his elder brother, already tormented by wet dreams at night and a constant need to masturbate during the day, shuddered from the rush of blood to his head and his cock and said, “Now we can bugger him!” Hussein was crying; they pushed him back under.

Exhausted, Hussein said he didn't mind what they did – as long as they took him out of this icy water that was already filling his innards and making him want to vomit. On the bare bank, pushing his face into the thick hot dust and spreading him out “like a crayfish,” Sabit burnt Hussein's aching and pulsating arse with his quick ejaculate, after which Sabir wriggled about on top of him while Sabit knelt on the ground, gripping Hussein's head between his knees and pinning his arms as he howled and vomited; Hussein's face was covered with saliva, tears and snotty semen.

When the still semen-less Sabir finally got off him, Hussein's battered arse let out a stream of diarrhoea and pressurised gas. Enraged by this, the two brothers tied the boy's hands behind his back with his T-shirt and tied his trousers round his ankles.

“I'll kill you! I'm still going to kill you!” Hussein howled. Sabir and Sabit caught sight of old Zangi-Bobo in the distance, gathering mint to enrich the
nasvoy
he made from tobacco and chicken droppings; they took fright and tried to stuff Hussein's shirt into his mouth. Hussein bit Sabir's hand till it bled, but Sabit kicked him hard in the eye and, while Hussein was recovering, succeeded in gagging him. Hussein could hardly breathe for snot and blood, and his whole body was in convulsions.

“Careful, he's dying,” said Sabir in fright, “Let's throw him into the water!” shouted his elder brother.

They tried to lift Hussein but only managed to remove the tie from his legs. In the end they just rolled him along the bank and pushed him, covered in dust and blood, into the water.

Hussein struggled still more convulsively and the gag came out of his mouth. He gasped in air and let out a wild cry.

“Throw a stone at him!” squeaked Sabir, seeing Zangi-Bobo jumping about in the distance. Sabit began looking for stones to throw at Hussein's choking head. The first stone turned out to be earth; on hitting the head, it spread into a dirty stain on the slowly moving water. The second stone missed, but the third was well aimed; there were no more shouts or gurgles, and the head disappeared beneath the water. And it was not long before the bloody puddle on the surface of the Zakh canal had faded away.

Sabit was still holding a stone in his hand. Sabir was trembling. “Are you going to dive in too?” Sabit asked him. Sabir trembled still more and shouted, “Dive in yourself, you bastard!” Then he began to run along the bank, afraid that Sabit had decided to kill him too. Sabit, afraid that Sabir would tell everyone what had happened, ran off after his brother. And only Zangi-Bobo saw the two boys, who were letting out blood-curdling cries as they tore along the steeply gullied bank.

The boy vomited onto Sherzod's back. There were shouts and squeals all round, competing with Kakhramon Dadayev's five tambourines. Someone screamed; someone rushed up to the boy; someone hurried to put the fire out. There was general mayhem. The boy was carried out of the circle, but he went on vomiting. Even when he seemed to have vomited up every drop of cognac and every last raisin, he went on vomiting yellow, bitter bile.

“Now! Now!” someone shouted – and he was carried under the trees and into the house. On the way, his hands were tied tight – as were his ankles, now released from their boots. Then he was thrown half-unconscious onto a soggy bed and someone huge and merciless pulled down his trousers. With his last gasp of vision the boy saw faces pressed against the window – Janna-Nurse and her niece Natashka, and Shapik's mother Uchmah, and Kobil-Melonhead and Kutr and… a sharp pain, like the crest of a wave of shame, lifted him high, high, high above the ceiling, high above the blue sky and the dazzling yellow sun, right into the darkness into which Kitov had flown.

“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.

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…

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 volumes 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 movement
160
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.