The Railway

by Hamid Ismailov

  Oppok-Lovely bided her time but eventually responded to Oktam-Humble-Russky in kind, saying farewell to her Bolshevik brother not at the threshold of the edifice of Communism but at the threshold of a run-down old people’s home. As for her own life, she quickly grasped the fundamental rule of the bazaar – “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!” – and it was as if her wallet sucked in money. She got her children accepted to study in various institutes and, on the eve of the introduction of universal internal passports,28 bought herself a position – that of Gilas passport officer – which allowed her to delete their unfortunate patronymics. Being a passport officer was, in any case, a great deal more comfortable and secure than patrolling a bazaar.

  The position of passport officer also proved a thousand times more profitable than Oppok-Lovely, who had paid out four hundred roubles in old money, could have ever imagined. Glamorous women would pay her to erase their column – or rather columns – of marriages and divorces; new Party members would pay for the deletion of their old criminal records. But she received the largest sum of all from Ali-Shapak, Tolib-Butcher’s youngest brother; he was the public weigher at the Kok-Terek Bazaar and it was to him that she bequeathed her position as Head of the Bazaar. She also agreed to change just one figure in his year of birth, with a stroke of her pen making him several years older than his elder brother. As a result, Ali-Shapak was soon receiving his pension, while Tolib-Butcher wailed in fury at the prospect of having to toil five more years on behalf of the State that was treating his brother with such undeserved generosity. By then the introduction of passports had brought untold riches to Oppok-Lovely the wife of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes – that Traitor to the Motherland and First Local War Veteran whom she was already summoning back home with the help of her Young Pioneers.

  Meanwhile, Tolib-Butcher lived out his life in shame, reduced in old age, because of his own niggardliness, to the position of younger brother to his own kid brother Ali-Shapak.

  * * *

  27Every Komsomol member was required to pay a monthly contribution to the organisation.

  28Soviet citizens needed passports in order to travel around the country. Internal passports were introduced in some parts of the Soviet Union in 1933; in Gilas, however, they were evidently introduced only in the late 1960s.

  5

  The women in the yard went on crying for ever and ever.

  It seemed to the boy that there would never be an end to the many-voiced wailing that met each new old woman as she darted in through the gate and past one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline and the two other men who were standing there, waiting for anyone who wanted to come but above all for Garang-Deafmullah, the father of the man who taught history to the senior classes and who had gone out to look for the boy in the wasteland behind the school; at first the boy had felt frightened – not because he guessed what had happened but simply because a teacher had found him messing about on his own – and he had felt still more frightened by the excessively kind voice with which the teacher called to him, standing there by the canal and not crossing over, and the teacher had gone on standing there after telling the boy, he’d gone on waiting while the boy ran back to fetch the satchel he’d left on the ground, and the boy was still feeling frightened even when he looked back round the corner of the school building, somehow thinking that all this might be a punishment for his not being at lessons – even though lessons had ended long ago – and then the still more awful thought that lessons had indeed ended long ago and that he should have been back home long ago for the funeral made the boy stop on the other side of the road, without going into his home at all – and he just stood there and listened to the endless wailing of the old women who kept darting like little mice past the old men at the gates and who then seemed to want to make the most of this opportunity to wail and gossip. Each woman would wail together with the woman who had first greeted her, then gossip with her for a while, and then, yielding her place to someone else, greet a new arrival and wail and gossip with her; it seemed this would go on for ever...

  The boy stood behind the cherry trees opposite his home, beneath Huvron-Barber’s windows, and looked at the belt that one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline had left for the boy on an empty bench beside the wide-open gates.29

  Now the lamentations were coming not from the yard, but from the house itself.

  The boy heard his uncles being called to say farewell to their father and he wanted to rush in there, even though he was still carrying his satchel, which was now cutting into his shoulders and urging him on by drumming against his back; but a force still stronger than what was really the drum-drum-drumming of his heart was making him press more desperately than ever against the wall of this mute house where the children of Huvron-Barber lived; and he stood there stock still while they carried out the stretcher, which was covered by a plain black gown, and while his belted uncles went out ahead through the wide-open gates, followed by one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline, and Oppok-Lovely’s son Kuvandyk, and that drunkard Mefody-Jurisprudence, and Nabi-Onearm, and blind old Hoomer, and Kuchkar-Cheka’s successor – Osman-Anon, and Tolib-Butcher, and Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger, and Kun-Okhun and everyone else, and they all disappeared behind the corner of Huvron’s house.

  He ran to the other corner and then to the end of the next sidestreet, and he caught up with the procession again by the railway line. The men walked on, taking turns bearing the stretcher, and even Akmolin stopped his diesel shunter, leaned his head out of the window and watched as the procession crossed the tracks and the men waiting on the platform rushed to join it, each taking his turn beneath the stretcher and then yielding his place to someone else so he could return to the platform. Finally, not daring to leave his shunter but wanting to make his presence felt, Akmolin gave a long hoarse hoot that startled the boy and made him stumble against a rail. The boy ran on at a distance from the procession, his satchel thumping against his back as he jumped across the rails; eventually the procession emerged onto the road and went quickly past the school, and the boy looked again at the wasteland behind the row of poplars. He felt as if he would see the history teacher there, standing by the canal, but there was no one – only the barely audible, heart-rending voice of some well-known singer…

  The boy lingered for a moment, but the procession was moving fast. Cars coming the other way were stopping and their drivers were getting out, bearing the stretcher for a dozen strides, then returning to their cars and quietly driving – almost floating – away, while the procession hurried on. They had to move fast – soon the sun would be setting.30 The sun jumped from one gap in the high house walls to another, then between gaps in the mulberry trees, then again from one yard to another; and at last the procession turned into the cemetery.

  But for the satchel the boy would have been able to creep into the cemetery on all fours, but with it there on his back he had to go round behind the low half-ruined wall to the deep canal on the other side. From the canal and its willows the crowd was only a stone’s throw away.

  By then, the procession was already squatting down and Garang-Deafmullah was reciting his monotonous prayer. The incomprehensibility of its words made the prayer seem still more melancholy – as dismal as a breath of wind over dry grass, or as a lone ant trying endlessly to climb a dry, dusty, prickly grass-blade.

  Everyone left and went back to their homes. The boy sat on the grave and observed the ant trail that had appeared beside the little mound, almost beneath his feet – the ants were going round his shoes, sniffing them, exchanging greetings at every step with those coming the other way and disappearing from sight behind other graves. The boy was looking towards these graves, leaning over so far that his satchel slipped forward over his head, and then he remembered Fatkhulla again and his sense of shame grew as unbearable as if Fatkhulla had been watching him all the time, just as he himself was watching the ants, and then, swallowing down his snot, he began to remem
ber the words of a prayer his grandmother had taught him and he began to say it out loud and, listening to himself, he sensed all the hurried unnaturalness of the words raining down on the ants and pins and needles were pricking his legs and it was as if these same ants were crawling all over him.

  The sun was a red spot rolling down from the tall, distant poplars that stood in a row in front of the first yard beyond the cemetery; when the boy looked that way, the black mounds and the long shadows of the wrought-iron railings appeared to move slightly, as if they were settling down for the night, and then, from just above these mounds and fences, from just above the poplars, came a momentary breath of the freshness with which you wake up refreshed after weeping for a long time in a dream, when you wake up well and truly, as if all of a sudden you are being born adult, ready to understand everything – and the boy set off without fear in the direction old one-eyed Fatkhulla had gone.

  The door was still open from all the day’s visitors, and Fatkhulla was the first person the boy saw as he went in. The yard had been swept and sprinkled with water, and it was quiet and empty there except for Fatkhulla, who was sitting on the wooden platform, opposite the boy’s huge granny, chanting a prayer in his monotonous voice. The boy went towards this voice, which seemed to be coming out of the twilight.

  He stood behind Fatkhulla’s dark back, out of sight of his granny. Now he had even less idea what to do; Fatkhulla’s awkward prayer was the only safe and warm refuge he had, and, for the first time in his life, he could feel every one of its incomprehensible Arabic words deep in his chilled heart, and he held the words there devoutly. And when Fatkhulla said “Amen!” the boy tremblingly lifted his cupped hands and sensed the dry heat in his palms as he brushed them over his face and cheeks. And at that moment, as if able to look straight through Fatkhulla, Granny said, “So he’s come back, has he?”

  Without turning round to look at the boy, Fatkhulla said, “He’s been with us all the time” and the boy felt the same shame he had felt at the cemetery when his satchel flew over his head, and now, standing behind the old man, he felt as if he himself were a kind of satchel, attached to Fatkhulla’s broad back. If the old man were to turn round or bend forward…

  * * *

  29It is customary at a Muslim funeral for every direct male descendant to wear a belt.

  30Islam encourages burial as soon as possible, preferably before sunset on the day of death.

  5

  Once upon a time there lived Mirzaraim-Bey, ruler of all the mountains and mountain pastures around Mookat and head of the Kirghiz “Wolf” tribe that was the mother of every Turk. He had four wives, and the two he loved most were the eldest and the youngest. He loved Ulkan-Bibi because she had been like a second mother to him; Aichiryok, the beautiful girl from the mountains who was his blood mother, had died when he was only seven, and a year after her death his father had found him a wife: the half-Uzbek Ulkan-Bibi. After a magnificent feast in the high meadows of Ak-Tengri, Ulkan-Bibi had carried her sleeping eight-year-old husband away in her arms. And so she took the place of his mother, carrying him on her back – which was like a strong slim poplar – until he started to become a man.

  And Mirzaraim-Bey loved his youngest wife, Nozik-Poshsho, the Princess from Margilan, because she bore him his first son – Obid-Bey.

  His first-born son grew not by the day but by the hour; by the hot-blooded age of sixteen he was, at a gallop, slashing off the heads of visitors as they made their way up the mountainside. All this amused Mirzaraim-Bey and filled him with pride, until one day Obid-Turk, as his companions now called him, decapitated the ambassador of Khudoyar, the Khan of Kokand,31 and Mirzaraim-Bey was faced with the threat of years of war. After his gift of sixty head of large-horned cattle and two hundred sheep and goats was accepted in compensation for the ambassador’s hairless, moustache-less and even eyebrow-less head, Mirzaraim-Bey decided it was time to regulate his son’s boyish amusements. Like an avalanche, he swept down on the plains of Osh and, in the course of an hour, seized a crowd of Sart mullahs and sages and carried them off to his mountain headquarters. There, in his royal yurt, he held a council to decide what should be done with his son.

  The mullahs, as is their way, spoke so eloquently and intricately that the straightforward Mirzaraim-Bey regretted his hasty foray and wished he had left them in Osh. More than that, he found himself longing to unleash his son on them at full gallop; yes, Obid-Turk would slice off their heads as easily as if they were cabbages and Mirzaraim-Bey would be relieved of the obligation to present them with gifts of sheep in reward for their wise counsel.

  Then one of these Osh theologians, perhaps sensing the rustle of the wings of Azrael the angel of death over the yurt, and over the six folds of his own turban, exclaimed, “O revered ruler of mountains as lofty and eternal as your own power…”

  “Get to the point!” interrupted Mirzaraim-Bey.

  “O rectifier of speech, whose own speech is sharp as the point of a sword…”

  “I said, Get to the point!”

  “Here, in the mountains that bow down before you, in the Ali-Shakhid valley, is a holy sage who knows the flow of life and how it turns the wheel of human destiny.”

  Mirzaraim-Bey commanded a sheep to be given to each of the mullahs and, with his son and his warriors behind him, moved like an avalanche towards the Ali-Shakhid valley.

  The sage had been sitting beneath a waterfall for sixty-six years, beside the mark left by the Prophet’s horse on the night of his Ascension to Heaven.32 Countless prayers had made his soul as transparent as the mountain stream beside him, and his face was as smooth as a stone that its waters had polished. After the briefest of glances at Obid, he said, “My son, the Lord has made you pregnant with knowledge!”

  Obid-Turk, this wild and unruly young warrior, was at once quietened by these quiet words that sounded louder than the thunder of the waterfall.

  “What must I do, wise father?” Obid asked, dismounting from his horse.

  “Your own father will tell you. You have a great and terrible future. Let your father say who you should be.”

  Mirzaraim-Bey thought. He knew only two ways of life: that of the Kirghiz up in the mountains and that of the Sarts down on the plains. If his son chose the life of a Kirghiz, he would carry on galloping down from the mountains and slicing off the heads of strangers. And Mirzaraim-Bey would have neither the cattle nor the sheep to pay compensation.

  And were his son to take after his mother, he would turn out like those Sart mullahs; instead of a head, he would end up with nothing but swathes of turban on top of his neck. Mirzaraim-Bey made up his mind: “May my son be like you!”

  The old man called out “Allah Akbar – Great is Allah!” and disappeared into the thundering waterfall.

  From that day, Obid-Turk’s soul grew quiet, like a mountain wind that has fallen silent. His mother gave him Beauty and the Heart, a work of wisdom by an ancient poet,33 and the now silent and reflective Obid-Bey read this book day and night.

  And Mirzaraim-Bey bought his son forty cells in the Kokand madrasah. There, supporting himself by renting out cells to the other students, Obid-Bey learned Arabic, Persian and elementary theology and memorised the entire Koran. Seven years later his father sent him to the noble city of Bukhara; now known by the name Obid-Kori,34 he studied there for another twenty-three years.

  He was in his late forties by the time he returned home, full of wisdom and sorrow, to his native Mookat.

  Oyimcha, one of the daughters of Said-Kasum-Kadi, the Sart district judge, had by then herself reached the unruly age of sixteen. A descendant of the Prophet, from a family whose men were so heavy that they had only to sit on a horse to twist or even break its spine, she was as slim as a poplar from the valley, as light as the breath of the mountains.

  Once, as she and her little sister were washing clothes in the pool of spring water beh
ind the white stone house her father had built after a trip to Skobelev,35 her little sister jumped up and sang out like a small bird alarmed by some animal, “Sister, dear sister, you must hide. An accursed man is approaching. We mustn’t be seen by him.”

  She was ten years old, and so she fulfilled the obligations of a grown-up woman with a great deal more enthusiasm than she moulded the clay flatbreads with which a ten-year-old girl was supposed to amuse herself.

  The sister looked up, saw a rider approaching and, not pausing in her work, said in a loud voice, “Why should we hide? It’s only a Kirghiz.”

  And so the half-Sart and half-Kirghiz Obid-Kori, who had studied in the best Sart madrasahs with the best Sart mullahs and theologians of his time, quite lost his head – over a sixteen-year-old girl whose existence required no evidence, proof or justification.

  The now ageing Mirzaraim-Bey paid dearly for this – still more dearly than he had paid for the loss of the head of the ambassador of Khudoyar, the Khan of Kokand. Month after month he sent rams and goats to two Jewish financiers whose names even the cultivated Obid-Kori was unable to pronounce. Only after two years did Said-Kasum-Kadi yield to the persuasive power of the eighty mountain steers, two hundred fat-buttocked rams and hundreds of curly-horned goats that constituted all the remaining wealth of the once powerful Mirzaraim-Bey. Entangled in lawsuits, mired in debt and bewildered by the dawning age of bills of exchange and shares, European phaetons36 and railway lines, Said-Kasum-Kadi gave his eighteen-year-old Oyimcha in marriage to a Kirghiz of nearly fifty. The unhappy girl was sent high into the mountains that stood over Mookat.