The Railway (4 page)

Oktam-Humble-Russky was one of the first revolutionaries, one of the men who had established Soviet power – first in the City, then in Gilas itself. What, though, do we mean by “established?” In 1916 the sixteen-year-old Oktam – together with the whole of his village, which lay not far from Gilas – was dispatched to form a labour brigade behind the lines in some remote and barren part of Russia; but since Oktam had been born an albino – which was why he was known as Russky – the first frosts almost tore away his skin. Strange scabs spread over his body, as if his platoon had sprayed him with shrapnel, and the battalion doctor, afraid this was some unknown infection, took the first opportunity to send Oktam back to wherever it was he had come from.

But as Oktam, along with some recruiting officers, was about to get on a train, a Tatar came up to him in the station toilet. After satisfying himself that Oktam was a true, circumcised Muslim who squatted down in order to piss, and after waiting for him to finish, he asked him to take a short letter to someone in the railway depot in Tashkent. The accursed Tatar swore by Allah that it was just a message to his relatives but, as the saying goes, “If your friend is a Tatar, keep an axe close beside you!” The letter turned out to be a Revolutionary Proclamation and the unsuspecting Oktam was dragged off to the fortress as soon as the train reached Tashkent.

Oktam had no complaints – it was better, after all, to be in prison in one's homeland than in a trench beneath a foreign sky… And then came the Revolution. The Revolutionary Sailors of Tashkent
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released Oktam, went through his files and leapt eagerly on the evidence of his revolutionary past. At public meetings in the Buz Bazaar
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they displayed the scars from his virulent Russian illness as evidence of the darkness of the past and the true nature of the prison of nations that had been the Tsarist Empire.

Oktam did nothing more than lift his shirt and slightly lower his trousers, but at the All-Region Congress of Bolsheviks he was co-opted onto the Central Committee. In short, it was not long before Oktam had become an important figure, and even his nickname – “Russky” – soon began to sound like a certificate of reliability and political consciousness.

Oktam-Humble-Russky was unable to do anything at all – or rather, all he could do was live in constant fear that someone might be about to expose his incompetence. But his incompetence was of no concern to anyone; on the contrary, it made everyone – builders, weavers, town labourers and farm labourers alike – feel that Oktam was someone they could rely on. No one needed to worry that this splendid Bolshevik might secretly be promoting the interests of some other profession.

Then came industrialisation, followed by collectivisation, followed by cultural revolution. Enemies – and the state seemed to have many of them – were dealt with methodically, one profession at a time. Oktam learned the latest Party slogans at night, syllable by syllable, and slowly came to realise, with his scant mind, that the safest place in a burning house is the yard.

He asked to be transferred to the God-forsaken – and Party-forsaken – town of Gilas. The Party sent him to reinforce the spirit of dialectical materialism in the wool factory; among a group of Tatar women who had been brought there by cattle truck from Orenburg he was to lay down the Party line, a line as clear and undeviating as the railway that cut through Gilas. “Not Tatars again!” Oktam thought confusedly, but then, remembering the end of his first encounter with Tatars, he said to himself, “Oh well, all's well that ends well!” and accepted the post of factory director.

And so he ended up in Gilas, where, in order to have some influence on this collective of women, he had no choice but to marry their team-leader Banat-Pielady, a woman as full of words as a radio and as noisy as a steam-engine… It was not long before they had a daughter, to whom they gave the name of “Oklutsiya” – or October Revolutsiya.

During the Great Patriotic War, in the absence of trucks to fetch the wool, the factory personnel were evacuated to the Sary-Agach steppe, closer to where the Kazakhs grazed their flocks; and in order that these young Tatar women, who were now washing their wool in a muddy river immediately after the sheep had been shorn, should not all end up marrying Kazakh shepherds and then wandering off with them across the steppe, thus multiplying private property, Oktam was ordered to accompany them. In the steppe he exposed the anti-Communist sabotage of shearers who left tufts of unshorn wool around the members of rams and the teats of ewes. By way of a demonstration, he sheared these sheep several times himself, so terrifying both the Kazakh shepherds and the Tatar wool washers that, when the War came to an end, he was able to return to the wool-factory all of its personnel – although he did in addition bring back the three sons that Alfiya bore to Kypchibek the woodcutter, who himself became the factory watchman and remained in this post many years.

After the War, when matchmakers came to Oktam-Humble-Russky in respect of his daughter Oklutsiya Oktamovna, he was sitting in what he called his office and cursing that thrice-accursed Tatar at that station in Moscow where the track of his life had so suddenly changed direction – and the reason he was cursing this Tatar was that the finance inspector had called the previous day and, having failed once again to obtain payment of the household taxes now due, had begun to make a list of Oktam's possessions: Item: 1 felt blanket; Item: 1 iron bedstead; Item: 1 stove, bourgeois.
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At the sound of the word “bourgeois,” which the inspector pronounced out loud and without abbreviation, Oktam had been seized with fury. He had gone into his office and, using the only telephone in Gilas, asked the young lady to connect him to First Secretary Usman Yusupov. After several minutes of crackling, Usman picked up the receiver; without listening to the imposing voice Usman adopted for the benefit of the telephone, Oktam shouted into the mouthpiece, pointing at the same time to the still obstinate inspector: “Usman, is this what we made a Revolution for?” Without waiting for an answer, he had then thrown the receiver down onto its cradle of two gilded ram's horns.

And as he sat in his office, cursing that thrice-accursed Tatar, his wife Banat came in. Not wasting words for once in her life – she must have expended all her urge for conversation on the matchmakers – she said: “Speak to Usman, old man. After all, we are Uzbeks – how can we give our daughter away without any dowry? We'd never live it down!”

Oktam thought for a moment and agreed: “All right, I'll go and call on him. But tell me about this young man. I take it he's at least a Komsomol member?”
11

Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was the brother of Kuchkar-Cheka. After their father was shot in the 1930s, he felt he had no choice – if he was not to be shot too, along with the rest of the family – but to marry the sister of the Bolshevik Oktam-Humble-Russky, who like her brother was an albino. This marriage had left Mullah-Ulmas with a secret but profound hatred for all Russians and above all for that honorary – though hardly honourable – Russian, Oktam-Humble-Russky.

When Oktam-Humble-Russky, through one of his Bolshevik decrees, instituted Russian-language clubs in all the
mahallyas
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that adjoined, and therefore lived off, the wool factory (some people stole the wool, others bought and sold it; some used to spin it at home, others used to knit with it; some sold the wool that had been spun, knitted and combed, others bought this wool from them, and so on and so on) – when Oktam-Humble-Russky instituted these clubs in order to abuse the unconscious masses more effectively, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes made use of his family connections (after all, he got cursed quite enough by Oktam-Humble-Russky as it was) to opt out of this cultural activity, an act of sabotage that was later to have significant military consequences. Soon after the Fascist invasion, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was sent off to the Front. Apart from the usual curse about a man's mother having been fucked by a cur, he knew no Front-speak at all. Nevertheless, his commander Kozoleyev and his political instructor Polityuk managed to instil in him, for the rest of his life, one entire speech: “Right dress! A-ten-shun! Listen to battle orders! Numerically-superior-fascist-hordes-are-advancing-along-the-front! ButthesplendidsoldiersoftheRedArmyunderthewiseleadershipofthefatherofpeoplesthegreatSTALIN HUR-R-R-AAA-AAAH!”

No sooner had he learned this phrase by heart than he was taken prisoner near Smolensk. Poor Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes defended himself against the questions of the Fascists with this incomprehensible sentence, imagining that he was speaking the language of his questioners and smiling all the time with blissful inanity. Eventually the Germans decided that he must be a Jew – didn't he, after all, have excellent manners? – and after confirming the truth of this hypothesis by examining his indisputably circumcised member, they sent him off in the next goods train bound for the death camps, to await his turn there.

There in Maidanek, among Jews of many nationalities – from Russian to Ethiopian – he became acquainted (as a result of a chance oath while they were stoking the crematorium furnace) with a Bukhara Jew, Pinkhas Shalomay. Shovelling coal as he spoke, Pinkhas explained in Uzbek how things stood and just what it was they were doing.

That night, as he lay on a plank-bed in a camp barrack, Mullah cried with his green eyes and prayed to Allah to save him from a faithless death. “Since it has been your will that I be taken for a Jew, let me become a Jew. I shall learn languages, I shall travel the world, I shall find out about everything and stick my nose into everything. Let me, O Allah, be a Jew, but in life rather than in death!” he sobbed.

His prayer was heard. The following day Pinkhas found in the toilet a soiled scrap of a German newspaper containing an announcement of the formation of a Turkestan Legion.
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“A curse on the arsehole of the Kraut or Yid who wiped himself with this blessed news,” Pinkhas whispered as he held the paper up to the light. That same day Pinkhas wrote a letter to the headquarters of this Legion; the illiterate Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes appended an Arabic-looking scribble and pressed against the page the tip of a thumb smeared with human soot. A week later a uniformed gentleman of either Kazakh or Kirghiz appearance came to the barrack and, towards evening, set off with both the blissful Mullah, who in his delight had rattled off his one and only Russian sentence, and Pinkhas, who had passed himself off as the Tadjik Panzhkhos Salom.

The military career of the Jewish Pinkhas Shalomay was considerably more successful than that of the Muslim Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes. The reason for this was simple enough: Pinkhas was able to read and write in both Uzbek and Tadjik and he was equally at home with Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts, the various alphabetical reforms having proved no obstacle to him.
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Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, however, out of a secret hatred for alien letters – a hatred that once again derived from his link to Oktam-Humble-Russky the Bolshevik, even though the latter in fact knew no letters at all – could sign his name only by dashing off a few circles and lines that he thought of as Arabic. Within a month, Panzhkhos had become an influential Tadjik at the Headquarters of the Turkestan Legion, while Mullah – thanks to his irritatingly frequent repetition of his one Russian sentence – had been sent off to herd swine, creatures abhorrent to Allah.

But a vow, above all a vow made to Allah, is a vow, and Mullah took it upon himself, there among the swine, to master his first foreign language. When the owners of the swine cursed him in their native tongue, he remembered his distant brother-in-law Oktam-Humble-Russky and, out of habit, longed to fuck the sisters of his tormentors, just as he had somehow or other fucked his unbearable wife, the albino Oppok-Lovely – and tears would roll from his green eyes and down his long lashes. In time, however, retribution fell upon his ungrateful masters, whom he had mistakenly believed to be Russians and whose convoluted language, with its “Ishch vaishchishch nishcht,” he had reluctantly studied.

Our American allies arrived; Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes realised he had learned the wrong language and, either from joy or by way of a curse, rattled off his Red Army speech. This led to his being sent off to still more distant parts – to France, to graze horses in Fontainebleau. There, in the family of Mademoiselle Countess de Sus, whose great-uncle had brought some great obelisk or other from Egypt and set it up in the Place de la Concorde, Mullah learned to tell one wine from another and to discriminate among cheeses; he also, with the help of this Mademoiselle and her friend, the granddaughter of Napoleon Bonaparte's Josephine, he acquired fluency in the most florid and refined of phrases: “I shall unlace your corset!” or “How cruelly a man in love is oppressed by tight pantaloons!”

Once, however, taking a break from love and going to Aven station for a glass or two of Saint-Emilion, he came across a drinking companion of his. This man seemed to have been named after some cognac or other – probably either Napoleon or Camus. He was standing in a corner and pissing upwards, trying to reach a “
Vive la Résistance!
” poster high on the wall and make his urine flow like tears from the eyes of his French Motherland. Some unconscious force then erupted from Mullah in the form of his Red Army speech, as a result of which this Camus stood rooted to the spot, his stream of urine hanging in mid-air.

Camus took him straight off to Paris, to a friend with the improbable name of Sartre. In actual fact this Sartre was not a Sart
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at all; he had just read too many books and dreamed himself up a new surname. In Gilas no one would have got away with a joke as silly as this: if Mullah had introduced himself as “Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes French,” he might have been taken, even by his own compatriots, for a Jew – but no one would have believed he was French. Anyway, this Sartre made Mullah keep repeating his speech until well after sunrise, and the three of them washed it down each time with a glass of Camus. By dawn the Frenchmen were feeling nauseous – one kept falling to the ground and the other had to prop himself up against the wall – while Mullah himself was so overwhelmed by the startling power of his speech that he began to confuse the two men with his two aristocratic ladies and to whisper in their ears, in the now blinding sunlight: “I shall unlace your corset!” or “How cruelly a man in love is oppressed by tight pantaloons!”

Sartre turned out to be truly a Sart in at least one respect: he proved treacherous. Towards evening, he sent Mullah to Maurice Thorez's people.
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Maurice Thorez, on account of certain ideological differences, conveyed Mullah through the Black Forest into Switzerland and then across the Alps to Italy. There Mullah twice ate spaghetti bolognese with comrade Palmiro Togliatti
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and, after washing down some strange filth from the sea with a revolting Italian wine whose bouquet was the same as that of the local fish, he blurted out his sacred and eternal speech. He was promptly conveyed to Palermo.

Amid bombs, arguments and gang feuds he escaped in an unseaworthy boat to Greece, together with an up-and-coming young rascal called Toto whose mother had been loved by Mullah as she had never been loved by any Italian. Confused by the word “Sart,” she would whisper to him the words she had learned from American soldiers: “Fack me! Fack me!” Growing more ardent, she would wriggle like an eel in between the words: “Spain me! Greek me! French me! Turk me!” Only at the wildest moment of orgasm would she cry out in a cat-like voice the incomprehensible nationality of this Mullah, “Sart me! Sart me!,” thus inspiring Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes to the highest degree of patriotic ecstasy.

In Greece, on the seashore, people filled Mullah's mouth with stones in order to teach him Greek declamation.
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In Turkey, where the language was almost the same as his own, the main burden fell on his legs. Momentarily entranced as he danced the dances of the Mevlevi order of whirling Dervishes, Mullah came out with his usual sentence – heathen words abhorrent to God. This led to his being taken through Thrace to Bosnia, and from there to Serbia. In Serbia he took lessons from the leader of the Southern Slavs in the language then known as Serbo-Croat.

Once, however, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes reeled off his sentence over some plum brandy; there was, alas, no wise Pinkhas Shalomay beside him to explain that Yugoslav-Soviet relations had entered a period of tension. Josip Broz Tito did not forgive Mullah. He was conveyed to the Soviet Union via eight intermediary countries – whose languages he innocently mastered one after another – and handed over to Stalin.

As a traitor to the Motherland, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was sent to the Gulag. Four years of terrible Siberian camps and transit prisons imprinted themselves on the speech organs of the doggedly surviving Mullah in the guise of Khakass, Buryat, Evenk, Nivkhi, Inuit,
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and one other language whose name was known to no one at all.

During his wanderings Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had seen so many countries and places that when, along with a few million other political prisoners, he was rehabilitated at the time of Khrushchev's Thaw
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and asked where he had been born, so that he could be returned there by train, he could no longer remember the name “Gilas.” For two days and three nights after his release he lay on the bed-boards of his barrack and tried, without success, to recall the name of his birthplace. But he did for some reason manage to recall the name Kok-Terek, where his brother Kuchkar-Cheka had sold sheep on Sundays – and where his wife Oppok-Lovely had been in charge of the bazaar!

He was sent to Kok-Terek. But he had the misfortune to be sent not to the Kok-Terek he knew, which lay two kilometres from Gilas, but to a Kok-Terek in Kazakhstan where a teacher at the local evening school with the surname Solzhenitsyn,
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who had also done time in the camps, ended up giving Mullah mathematics lessons in German. This Solzhenitsyn refused point-blank to speak Russian to Mullah or to instruct him in the expansive Russian language; the reason for this intransigence was that Mullah, while downing some Kazakh moonshine to celebrate his arrival in Kok-Terek, had fired off his entire Red Army speech.

After an unbroken eight-year correspondence encompassing the entire Soviet Union, the Young Pioneers
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of Gilas finally managed to track down the native of Gilas who had served as their very first front-line soldier – Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes. Yes, there were indeed many veterans more deserving of honour than the former swineherd Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, but none of them had been born in Gilas. One-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline had been born in the half-Uzbek, half-Tadjik village of Chust; while as for First Secretary Tordybay-Medals, the retired colonel whose chest was decorated with medals from all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe whose languages Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had absorbed with such remarkable ease – he had only a blank space in his passport under “place of birth,” having acquired his name, surname and nationality at the age of eleven, in a Soviet orphanage.

The mathematics teacher was almost in tears as he said goodbye to Mullah; after Greater Serbian, Mullah had been going to teach him the basics of Albanian, Uzbek and Yiddish – but Fate decreed otherwise.

Like it or not, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, armed with his Red-Army sentence (a sentence that had protected him over the years more effectively than any conceivable spell or act of sorcery and that now met the needs of the time more precisely than ever) became the First Veteran of Gilas and the adjoining collective farms. His wife Oppok-Lovely, who had by that time taken Gilas well and truly in hand, spared no effort to make sure that her poor husband was granted all appropriate honours. And then one day, during an All-Republic Congress of Veterans of War and Labour, he wandered into the toilet and bumped, as one might say, penis to penis into whom do you think? None other than Pinkhas Shalomay, who turned out to have transformed himself from Panzhkhos Salom to Pyotr Mikhailovich Sholokh-Mayev, to have completed a doctoral thesis on the crucial role played by Uzbek spies behind the lines of the German-Fascist enemy, and to have produced a film,
The Exploits of Farkhad
,
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based on this thesis, which was to be shown immediately after the Congress. Sholokh-Mayev was now head of the translation and interpretation department of an important research institute, his chief responsibility being to liaise between two mutually uncomprehending groups: the three or four learned Russians with no knowledge of Uzbek who were employed to edit dissertations and theses about to be submitted to the Higher Dissertations Commission in Moscow, and the thirty-seven Uzbek professors, doctors and post-graduates who somehow produced these dissertations but whose grasp of the complexities of Russian declensions and conjugations was, alas, alarmingly shaky. There in the toilet, to the amazement of more simple-minded veterans, who found themselves unable to go on pissing, these two switched casually between Sudeten, Alsatian and Catalan. But when Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, who was used to old-fashioned buttons, caught his penis in the zip of his new trousers and burst out swearing in the language of a fisherman whom a sharp-toothed walrus had bitten in the same place on the shores of the Laptev Brothers Sea,
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even Pinkhas Shalomay could understand fuck all.