The Railway

by Hamid Ismailov

  Read, Reader! Read about how Nikolay Gogolushko traced the Triangle of the Universe on the Party Committee globe and removed from the secret safe of Osman-Anon – after the latter’s mysterious disappearance – the holy Almagest stone that controlled the world. “Look,” Gogolushko would say to Basit, “this stone is the centre of the world’s gravitational field. Turn the stone round and you will feel it become ten times lighter than it is now!” Basit would obediently rotate this stone that Osman-Anon had once used to knock nails back into his boots or to wedge the door shut on a draughty evening, but he felt nothing – although he always responded to unfamiliar instructions with a nod of agreement. The excited Gogolushko would suggest he take the stone in the other hand. Basit would do as he was told and again feel nothing, although he would agree once again that the gravitation exerted by the asymmetrical cobblestone was now nonlinear and multidimensional.

  Alas, although Gogolushko exhausted the simple-souled Basit, who imagined everything in the world to be a manifestation of the cunning subtlety of the Party line, and although Gogolushko made Basit shave off all his hair and accompany him at the Party Committee’s expense on a mission if not to Tibet then at least to the Pamirs, to the Yagnobi people on the Roof of the World, he failed to find the Spring of Life – if only because the Party turned against him and ceased to subsidise the now unbridled aspirations of his soul. Yes, Oppok-Lovely expelled him from the Party after he attempted – exploiting his authority as Second Secretary rather than the powers of the Almagest or of the talisman presented to him in the Pamirs – to appropriate for himself the wide-ranging manuscripts of Hoomer on the grounds that they were ideologically dangerous; in fact, of course, he saw Hoomer’s words as anti-Gogolushkinist heresy.

  This was the time of the correspondence, still famous in Gilas, between Gogolushko and the Party. The closely argued replies of the latter were written by Mefody-Jurisprudence, whom Oppok-Lovely had bribed with an offer of full board and lodging. As for Gogolushko, he penned repentant letters renouncing all he had done during his hours as Secretary of the Party Committee and all he had accumulated as a result of these hours – and calling upon his comrades to follow his example. This apostasy was more than the Gilas Party Committee could pardon; not content with Mefody-Jurisprudence’s crushing philippics about Gogolushko’s betrayal of the Party’s noble ideals, the Committee requested that a meeting of the Party Committee of an important junction station up the line should also be devoted to the case of this turncoat from Communism. And so the expropriator was expropriated and Hoomer’s manuscripts ended up safe in the hands of Oppok-Lovely.

  Oppok-Lovely showed no mercy. It was decreed at the same meeting that, in view of his failure to supervise his subordinate, Buri-Bigwolf should be dismissed from his post and transferred to the medical clinic to assume responsibility for lice and fleas – since this was the only work that such a “parasite,” as Oppok-Lovely put it, might understand. Buri was replaced as First Secretary by Basit-OrgCom – the same Basit who had for so long played the role of Gogolushko’s loyal proselyte and disciple.

  “Every Christ has his Judas!” Gogolushko muttered to himself on his way back from the Junction Station Party Committee to the Junction Station itself. Life was no more than excrement – excrement smeared over the body of life. That was how everything had begun, and that was how it was all ending. Gogolushko was not, however, remembering the call he had long ago heard in his sleep – no, it was just that all the space between the rails was smeared with excrement from passing trains. As was his life. At this point something elusive flashed through his consciousness – as if an electrical contact had sparked and at once been broken. He looked in his briefcase for his pen and notepad. But then his thoughts were thrown into confusion by the 16:48 local, which suddenly appeared from behind him. Gogolushko rushed towards the platform, clutching his half-open briefcase in both hands. Just as he reached the rear of the train, there was a whistle, and he had barely managed to thrust his briefcase into the diminishing space between the automatic doors of the Riga-manufactured coach when the train began to move. Gogolushko skipped after it, trying to squeeze through the door or – failing that – to recover his half-open briefcase. The accursed Latvians, however, had done a good job, and the door was unyielding. Gogolushko reached the end of the platform; he could shout and run no further. There was another whistle – and his briefcase was gone.

  “That’s All!” said the same voice as before, and he felt overcome by the extraordinary fullness of this “All” – an All in which the whole of Nikolay Gogolushko, so tiny in comparison, was subsumed. For a long time he stood at the end of the platform, staring blankly at the receding local train and the rails left trailing behind it…

  No, he didn’t lose his mind – he had done that long ago – nor did he throw himself under the next train. Far more prosaically, he boarded the next train and travelled on it to the next station. And from there he went by the following train to the following station. And so to Gilas, which he reached only long after midnight. His briefcase had not been handed in anywhere.

  After sleeping on the station bench to the sound of Akmolin’s hoots and Tadji-Murad’s squeals until the arrival of the dawn express from Moscow, he set off back up the line on foot, like one of the illuminati. On Gogolushko went, from sleeper to sleeper, gazing glumly at every bit of garbage, every bit of soaked and wind-dried paper; every now and then, or maybe less often still – every half-kilometre, or maybe only every kilometre – he would pick something up and, standing there on the bed of the iron road, read slowly through it. Where was he going, Nikolay Gogolushko the dervish? In search of his briefcase, in search of his bag, of his beggar’s pouch.

  * * *

  85“Marlen” is an amalgamation of “Marx” and “Lenin”; “Marleon” is an amalgamation of “Marx” and “Leonid” – the first name of General Secretary Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982.

  86A sixteenth-century Sufi treatise.

  87A seventeenth-century Uzbek Sufi poet.

  22

  Granny Hadjiya’s house had two rooms; it had a tiled roof, and the walls were made from unbaked bricks. The house had been built soon after the War, along with all the other buildings to the right-hand side of the railway; until then the area had been scrubland, stretching as far as the Salty Canal, the Zakh Canal and a nameless black river.

  Granny’s house was thirty yards from the railway line, twenty yards from the chaikhana and ten yards from Gilas’s only tailor’s: the “Papanin Tailoring Co-operative” or, as it was called later – after Izaly-Jew had replaced Moisey-Master as director – the “Individual Cut Co-operative.”

  One room had two windows with gratings and an earth floor covered by a single piece of plain felt; this was where they received guests. A trunk stood in one corner, and on top of the trunk was a stack of flowery cotton blankets. The trunk was the most mysterious place in Granny’s house: it was where Granny stored her best china, which was only taken out when Great-Grandad Mahmud-Hodja from Balasagun was visiting; and it was where she kept the special sweets they ate only on Mavlyud (the Prophet’s Birthday), Kurban-Khait (the Feast of the Sacrifice)88 and the First of May (International Workers’ Day). There were also three photographs, showing Granny with each of her first three husbands – all of whom had died – and a newspaper that her present husband (the boy’s grandad, or rather step-grandad) used to take out if it was an important occasion and he had run out of things to boast about. It was like in the fairy-tales that the boy used to read to Granny as she lay there groaning because of her rheumatism: just as the water of life would bubble up to heal a wound, just as a magic tablecloth would conjure up instantaneous meals, just as a magic club would appear at the darkest moment of a battle and flatten the panic-stricken enemy, so Grandad would take out this newspaper if he was at a loss for words and could think of no other way to salvage his self-respect – if, for exa
mple, Nuruddin and Imraan, the Chechens from the Zyryanovsk gold mine, had been throwing their weight about. Nuruddin and Imraan were so rich that they carried whole ingots of gold around with them, and they had once bought ten thousand roubles’ worth of goatskin coats and astrakhan hats in a day – enough money to buy two Volga cars or for Granny to live on for the rest of her life and still leave something behind.

  And so Grandad would take from the trunk a copy of the March 6, 1953 issue of Pravda with the TASS89 report of the death of comrade Stalin. To the boy, Stalin’s was a mysterious name. The adults whom the boy obeyed seemed themselves to look up to only two figures: God, who was invisible, and Stalin, who was dead. Confronted with this copy of Pravda, the Chechens would fall silent – from fear, from hate, or simply not knowing what to say.

  Granny was not a practising Muslim, although she was of true Muslim lineage. Each time one of her husbands had died, she had married again – so that her children wouldn’t have to grow up without fathers. But she seemed to have decided – like a true Muslim! – that four marriages were enough, and she had been determined not to allow the boy’s last grandad to die or disappear. Although Grandad did sometimes leave the house after one of their quarrels – and then Granny would leave her room with its trunk and its iron bed and the little hanging rug with a picture of three deer at a watering hole and would sleep with the boy and her three sons.

  When Granny moved into this other little room, with its brick stove and its wooden sleeping boards, about two feet off the ground, that took up nearly half the room (once a year, when the boy was told to clean out all the rubbish from the space beneath the boards, he would crawl through the half-dark, wrapping himself in cobwebs, and discover not only the corpses of flies and scorpions but also everything that anyone in the family had lost that year, from Granny’s thimble to Grandad’s whetstone or Rafim-Jaan’s violin bow [the story of Rafim-Jaan’s violin is almost a book on its own. Rafim-Jaan, like all children who eat their own excrement when they are little, had once found a large sum of money – 1,962 roubles, in fact – that had fallen, along with the belt of someone who must have been very important, out of some celebrating passing train. Granny had taken the 1,962 roubles to Temir-Iul-Longline, who had kept the money for two days and then given a quarter of it back to Rafim-Jaan, saying that this was what he was entitled to by law as a finder of treasure. What Temir-Iul did with the other three quarters – whether he returned it to some grateful collective-farm chairman or whether he donated it to the State – I do not know. What I do know, however, is that a large part of Rafim-Jaan’s 490 roubles and 50 kopeks were immediately spent on a “Record” television which put the Saimulins – with their microscopic “KVN” television – to shame, at least until, a year or two later, they acquired the first fridge in the mahallya. After the purchase of the television, and after he had gone to Lobar-Beauty’s Culture and Recreation shop and bought a bicycle (also the first in the mahallya) Rafim-Jaan managed to hang on for a long time to his last nineteen roubles and sixty-two kopeks – a hundredth part of the treasure he had found and that had so quickly run through his hands, diverted to Temir-Iul’s safe, Granny’s trunk and the family’s various purchases. But in the end Rafim-Jaan went back to Lobar-Beauty’s and bought something unheard of, something no one had ever thought of buying before him; yes, people had bought ties that cost eight roubles each, they had bought exercise books for two kopeks each, they had bought two pens for one rouble, and once someone had even bought a drum for the October School, on the school account – but never had anyone thought of buying the violin that had been on display ever since the shop first opened. But Rafim-Jaan did precisely that – he bought this violin, along with its bow.

  During the first day he didn’t allow anyone to touch it except Natka, the daughter of Vera-Virgo – and that was only because Natka let him kiss her under the willow tree in between their yards; all the rest of the day he struggled with the violin on his own but failed to coax so much as a note out of it. He slept with the violin that night, took it out onto the street in the morning and was at once surrounded by the other boys from the mahallya, all of them offering advice. One boy told him to “press harder with the hairy bit of wood.” “There’s only one hairy bit of wood round here,” interjected Yurka, “and that’s you!” What Rafim-Jaan was holding, Yurka asserted, was not a “hairy bit of wood” but a violin bow – and he knew this from a book he had read. Rafim-Jaan handed the violin and bow to Yurka. Disorientated by this display of trust, Yurka moved the bow up and down the strings, but to no effect – the only sound he could elicit from them was a quiet rustle. Ismet the Crimean Tatar told him to press the strings down with his fingers, and Rafim-Jaan passed the violin to Ismet; once again it just rustled and wheezed a little. And then, later on in the day, towards evening, it began to split.

  A week went by and the violin was put away in the loft, without its bow, which had disappeared. Nearly a year later the boy came across the bow under the sleeping boards; by then he had learned that you need to smear it with rosin, but Lobar-Beauty had no rosin anywhere in her shop. Nevertheless, they brought the violin back down from the loft. For a long time – its split body held together only by its strong, silent strings – it just lay around and got under everyone’s feet. Sometimes someone would trip on it, pick it up in fury and try to throw it away – but the violin had a mind of its own. Whichever bit you picked up would fly through the air as far as the tension of the strings allowed, then snap back under your feet to the accompaniment of a kind of cross murmur or grumbling hum as the strings shook off their coating of brown dust. In the end, the violin disappeared for good; either the mice had taken it apart and dragged it off bit by bit, or an envious neighbour had slipped in at night, or heaven knows what…] and so, in a word, there under the sleeping boards the boy would find everything from Rafim-Jaan’s violin bow to his own punctured football and even the seventh volume of the Thousand and One Nights. Granny especially loved listening to the Thousand and One Nights on days when the boy had cleaned out the stove, his shovel ringing like a bell against the stove wall as he removed ashes as light as air, and then gone out into the yard to fetch some logs and a bucket of coal, which was in fact not coal but coal dust and the only way you could get it to burn was to sprinkle water onto it, mix it into a thick paste and then smear it with the shovel onto logs that were already flaming, smoking and crackling), yes, when Granny moved into this little room, she would lie down in her traditional place on top of the stove and the boy would set to work on her rheumatic legs, first trying to send any sluggish blood back to the heart and then looking for the little nodules that used to appear in one place or another and massaging them away to the accompaniment of Granny’s satisfied and suffering-filled groans. And then the boy would begin reading from the Thousand and One Nights – that book that was as endless as life itself, as endless as those endless winter days that began and ended here, in this little room where there was a stove, and Granny, and three uncles young enough to be the boy’s brothers, and a step-grandad who used to disappear when Granny upset him. And, in between all of this: long hours at the No. 11 “October” School.

  Every year, at the end of winter, they repainted these two little dark rooms. First they prepared the whitewash, to which they added a few drops of a green iodine-like substance, and then – using a brush that left the odd thin streak of green – they painted the walls an uneven white, stopping only at the ceiling, which had long ago been coated once and for all with a varnish grown brown from time and soot. A cable for electrical light, put there by Bolta-Lightning the Gilas electrician, coiled across the ceiling like a snake. Before the installation of electrical light Grandad had conjured every night over his paraffin lamp – blowing on the glass, rubbing it with a special fluffy cloth till it shone, trimming the overgrown wick with a pair of little scissors just as he used to trim his own moustache…

  And then light would appear, first shrouding the lamp with st
eam and then – as Grandad lengthened the wick – slowly driving the steam away. Grandad would stand the lamp in the middle of the low rectangular table that was the same height as their cat – she used to rub against the table so often that her back was going bald – and they would all sit down round the lamp, and round the food laid out on the table, and eat an evening meal which always ended with the words, “Adam boy busin, pullari kup busin, uiimiz yorug busin, amin!” 90

  * * *

  88Kurban-Khait or Kurban-Bayram is a commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram instead of his son Isaac. Families who can afford to sacrifice an animal will do so, and there is a complex code stipulating how the carcass should be distributed among friends, family and charitable concerns.

  89The main Soviet news agency.

  90“May your father be rich, may he have lots of money, may our house always be full of light, Amen!”

  23

  There were gypsies in Gilas. Some were the kind you see everywhere, the kind that are said to have wandered across from Europe, in the season when mating camels run wild in the Kazakh steppe and the apricot and the lilac come into blossom in the gardens of Uzbekistan. But Gilas also had gypsies of its own, who were already blending in with the darkest of the Uzbeks – the ones known in Gilas as black cow-pats – and these unforgettable lyuli had come not from some far-away Europe but from Achaobod, their very own quarter of the Old City.