When the menfolk of Gilas, armed with hoes, spades and pitchforks, reached the canal, there was no sign of either Hoomer or Shapik, only the relics of this new faith of the one-legged and the legless, a faith that had been consumed within only days of its birth. They buried everyone and everything straight away, in the scorched scrubland; and a few months later it was decided to cover the area with asphalt, so that a new “October” summer cinema could be built there.
In her old age Uchmah worked there as a ticket-seller; she was also the fortunate recipient of both the pensions that the benevolent Oppok-Lovely had gone to such pains to arrange for her.
* * *
131The Nogai Tatars, of whom there are now around 75,000, live mostly in the north-western part of the Russian republic of Dagestan.
132Karaism is a form of Judaism that accepts no scriptures except the Tanach (the Jewish Bible), rejecting later accretions such as Rabbinic Oral Law.
133The Kumyks, of whom there are around 300,000, are an indigenous people of the North Caucasus. They live mainly in the lowlands of north-eastern Dagestan.
134Sa’adi (1207–91) is one of the three most famous Persian poets.
135Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (839–923) was a Muslim scholar and theologian.
136This famous Spanish Civil War slogan (“They shall not pass”) was first spoken in July 1936 by the Spanish Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, also known as La Pasionaria.
137Children in Gilas used to throw calcium carbide in a puddle, place an upside-down can on top of the puddle to collect the acetylene gas released in the ensuing reaction, then drop a match through a small hole in the tin. The gas would explode and the can would shoot up into the air.
30
However much I have put this off, however much I have attempted to conceal, I have no choice in the end but to tell you. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense at all. Or hardly any sense.
In Gilas, just beside the railway line, behind the water tower, there lived a blind old man, half-Tatar and half-Uzbek, by the name of Hoomer. His wife was half-Armenian and half-Jewish; her first name was Nakhshon, and her surname was either Donner or Shtonner. I can’t remember. Or I’ve got confused. Never mind. And so, Hoomer no longer left the house, but Nakhshon – a once beautiful seventy-year-old with eyebrows now thick as a moustache and a large wart just above her upper lip that had once been seen as a beauty spot – used to participate as a volunteer in electoral commissions. On election days she would go round Gilas with a voting urn and call either on Kun-Okhun, who would be too drunk after loading coal all night to walk to the polling station, or on Mefody-Jurisprudence, who was always as good as de-voted by his devotion to principle; last, she would call on her blind husband and spend half an hour with him, perhaps drinking tea and nibbling the sweet cakes she had obtained from the voting commission. And on Sundays in summer she would visit the Kok-Terek Bazaar and sell a first edition of Ozhegov’s Russian Dictionary, a pre-Revolutionary Herbert Spencer or perhaps the psychological writings of William James. She was, in short, someone who spread culture and enlightenment wherever she went.
Nakhshon and Hoomer had no children. Occasionally, after a Young Pioneers’ parade, the Timur Team from the October School138 would bring them three kilos of potatoes and a piece of the household soap allocated to the team by the administration of the wool factory. This is all that anyone knew about them. And that Nakhshon was a fine cook. So thought Oppok-Lovely, who knew everything about everyone and who, alone of the adult inhabitants of Gilas, used to visit their little room just beside the railway line, behind the water tower.
But now let me tell you what no one at all knew.
Hoomer was, of course, the patriarch of Gilas. No one could say how old he was because even the most ancient old men of Gilas remembered him as having always been old. As a young man, this son of an interpreter for the occupying Tsarist forces had worked as an interpreter for the Russians building the first railway line to Turkestan; he had had to gallop about the steppe on post horses, getting stuck in sandstorms and snowstorms while freedom-loving Kazakhs mutinied or more mercantile Sarts sold sleepers for the foundations of houses – as a result of which both Kazakhs and Sarts had to be tried in court. Hoomer interpreted not only the judges’ verdicts but also the instructions of the officers in charge of dispatching the prisoners to Siberia, where there also happened to be a railway under construction, although that one was being built by Buryats and Khakas.
The task of the Sarts was to lay down the rail running north from Tashkent, while the task of the Kirghiz and Kazakhs was to lay down the rail running south from Akmecheti. After the brigade from Tashkent and the brigade from Akmecheti had met and the first rail had been officially joined, each brigade would go on to lay the second rail on the territory of the other. So if the Sarts had laid their first rail as far as Shiili before they met the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs, they would have to lay their second rail only between Shiili and Akmecheti, whereas the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs would have to lay their second rail all the way from Shiili to Tashkent. Is that clear? Crystal clear? To the Kirghiz, the Kazakhs and even the Sarts, it was clear as mud.
At the end of the fourth winter, covered in scabs and filled with a fierce mutual hatred, the two half-frozen hordes of short-lived Asiatics – the original workers had all died long ago, as had their replacements – met beneath a lurid sunset close to a Kazakh camel drivers’ shelter outside the town of Turkestan – just as the Russian geographers and engineers had intended. It is probable, however, that this success would not have been achieved but for the mental and physical agility of Hoomer; as he shuttled between courts and executions, he had felt as if he were drawing together two ends of a length of thread, holding one in his right hand and the other in his left.
There, in the light of the steppe sunset, instead of going for one another’s throats, the two bands of workers threw down their hammers and pickaxes, leaving their twelve Russian armed guards to hammer in the last “Turkestan Railway Regiment” link of rail while they themselves set off in two separate groups to the town, to offer prayers to Hazrat Hodja Ahmed at his ruined shrine.139 Hoomer-Interpreter did not know what to do: should he remain for the ceremony of the tying together of the two ends of the iron thread that now led from Akmecheti to Tashkent or should he follow those whom he had come to see as tongueless without him?
In the end he plodded off after the workers, his box-calf boots crunching through snowdrifts as he followed a line of his own between the two trodden-down paths, keeping in view these two hordes that seemed like two black eyes against the white snow – like two frozen pupils that had thawed out and fallen onto the ground far ahead of him. Hoomer was not without feeling and, as an educated scion of these same wild tribes, he wept as he followed them, longing in the depth of his heart to be reconciled with them and to regain the innocent and unclouded eyes of his youth; but all of a sudden some troublemaker would turn round and, encouraging the others to join in, would shout and holler and throw things in his direction – pellets of clay from under the snow, balls of snow already black with dirt. Then this troublemaker would fall in again with the purposeful stride of his comrades and they would walk on in silence until someone from the other crowd turned round and caught sight of Hoomer plodding along in his unbuttoned greatcoat. And the same thing would happen again.
As they approached the shrine, the two crowds merged into one; Hoomer lost sight of them as they entered the mausoleum, and he was left on his own in the steppe. By the time he got there himself, the men were already at prayer, having taken their places before and behind and on each side of the shrine. Hoomer found himself a place at the back and, never having prayed in his life, resolved to copy the movements of the men standing in front of him. They bowed to the ground; Hoomer bowed to the ground too. They straightened up; and before Hoomer had fully straightened u
p himself, they were back down on their knees again. Hoomer struggled to keep up. Kneeling down and putting his forehead to the ground, he suddenly felt the ineffable absurdity of what he was doing. But this absurdity was so full and complete, so remarkable, that when, after straightening up for a moment, the believers bowed down again before the Almighty, Hoomer lowered his head to the ground with the sensuality of a man who is discovering sensations he has never felt before. It would have been difficult, so Hoomer thought, to conceive of anything more absurd than this pose – your bottom in the air and your nose down by someone else’s feet – but in its humiliating absurdity, in this humiliation that had nothing to do with either another man’s bottom sticking up in front of you, nor with your own bottom sticking up behind you, nor even with having your face covered in snow that someone else has been standing on, in this shared humiliation before something higher Hoomer found a sensuality both sweet and astringent and as he stood there with dirty snow and snowy dirt flowing slowly down his face and as he silently moved his lips in a prayer he had been taught by his Tatar grandmother from Orenburg, he found himself waiting impatiently for the man standing on the platform with his back to them all to shout out “Allahu Akbar!”140 and bow down so they could all bow down and become part of the earth once more.
That night, lying with his fellow-believers beside the saint’s grave, Hoomer tossed and turned beneath his Russian army greatcoat. He dreamed of a man coming to do his ablutions and carefully washing his legs, his feet, each of his toes and the gaps between them, then winding calico foot-cloths round his feet and ankles – all in order that, after a little while, a second man should lift him up, all clean and prepared, and carry him about the world just as one might carry some carcass. But the man Hoomer found himself thinking about was the man compelled to carry the washed man through the world, the man sentenced to carry another man on his shoulders, just as one carries the clothes on one’s body, just as one wears a beard or a pair of spectacles or one’s own name…
Disturbed by this dream, he woke up. Night was staring down into the ruined buildings and its bright stars seemed sharp and protruding. Falling back into sleep, he dreamed of two dogs snarling at one another as they approached him – only they weren’t dogs but tame wolves, a pair that had lost a cub, and the she-wolf went on howling for her cub all night long.141 The wolves began walking all over him and suddenly he felt that, instead of biting his hand, the male was touching his soft forearm with its naked member – like a dog about to wet him with its seed. He stayed flat on the ground. The mating season was beginning and it was time for the male to run wild; the she-wolf would just go back to her kennel and howl.
Still flat on the ground, Hoomer woke up, looked at the stars – now linked with one another into a single thread – and slipped back into his dreams. The iron road had become an iron thread, but he couldn’t make it out clearly; he couldn’t tell if it was black or white.
Then he heard the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful and obedient to their early morning prayers, at the hour when you cannot tell a white thread from a black thread; and later that day, in a covered wagon, Hoomer took an official notebook with a lace tie and began to write the first page of unofficial text he had ever written – a page that marked the beginning of his career as a writer.
Now that you know about this day and this night, it is easier to explain and understand many things in his subsequent life. I saw those first pages of his awkward – and therefore over-literary, excessively stylised – text142 only once, and at a time when they were covered with water, but they were bright, probably as bright as Hoomer’s face that day he prayed in the snow… This text, I remember, was called:
* * *
138See note 109.
139Hodja Ahmed Yasawi was a Sufi poet and philosopher. He died in 1166 or 1167 (or possibly 1146), and was buried in a small shrine that attracted many pilgrims. In the fourteenth century Timur the Great erected an immense mausoleum complex over the shrine; on his death in 1405, the buildings were left unfinished.
140“Allah is great!”
141The wolf is a symbol of Turkish identity; there are many myths of Turkic tribes or their leaders being descended from wolves.
142Hoomer does indeed allude to numerous works of literature. These include: The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid-Ud-Din Attar; the Turkish oral tales collected in The Book of Dede Korkut; Nikolay Gogol’s Taras Bulba; and Andrey Platonov’s Soul.
The Railway
(a traveller’s notes)
1.
He did not know his father. Neither his given name, nor his surname, nor his profession. Nor even whether he really was his father. And so a word that for everyone means something near and clearly defined, as perceptible as the sound of someone panting or the hairs coming out of a man’s nostrils, was for him only a word. A primordial word: “Father.”
“Mother” was simpler. His mother had died as she gave birth to him and they had wrapped her in a cloth she had been weaving. Her other pieces of cloth had been given to the ritual washers and mourners; a little ladder had been stuck, according to custom, into the sand by her grave;143 and she had been forgotten.
He was brought up by Gulsum-Khalfa,144 a homeless old woman who chanted prayers over the dead. She was lame and half-blind. This had made her late for the funeral, but she had sat out the remaining forty days of mourning and had been the only adult to remain in the empty yurt. For all this she had received not even a handkerchief and so she had appropriated the newborn child, hoping he would come in handy as she grew older still. And she knew that if the worst came to the worst she would be expected to weep for him too – and so have somewhere to live free of charge for another forty days.
But the little boy clung to life. The following spring he was crawling about beneath a wilful goat that Gulsum-Khalfa had earned with her funeral tears, and at the age of five, when Aspandiar’s horsemen raided the village,145 he escaped with the goat into the wilderness. He walked with the goat to the end of the world, to the place where water begins, talking to her and drinking her milk. And there he buried her after she had choked to death on too much salt; and there, on her sandy grave, weeping tears perhaps still saltier than the water his goat had drunk, he was found by Russian salt-diggers.
He dug salt with them for seven years, until they all died. When the last of their corpses had been loaded onto a boat, he slipped on board with them, leaving this deserted world and sailing over the sea towards a place whose name he did not know, although he secretly guessed that it would be the same other world that lame, blind old Gulsum-Khalfa had invoked at funerals in order to frighten people.
One night, as he lay among the corpses, which were too salty to decay, there was a crash that split the hold in two. Water rushed in; the corpses were carried in all directions, almost crushing the boy beneath them. But the boy was carried to the surface by a powerful stream of something viscous from far below, and he saw with horror that the sea, split in half by the upended boat, was on fire. “This is hell!” he thought, and a wave of fire swept over him. But it was only the surface of the sea that was burning – down below there were just flashes of lightning, through which corpses, letting out bubbles, were floating up to the surface. Keeping the corpses above his head and taking in through his scorched mouth the air that had collected beneath them, he kicked out with his legs, heading deep into the abyss…
Clinging to the scorched corpse of the man he called Old Ivan, he was washed ashore. The sea went on burning; the flames in the sky vanished, turning into stars. The boy lay in the other world and tried with his young mind to remember what his stepmother had said would happen to him because of all the sins he had committed. But nothing happened at all. The sea went on burning just the same, except that the waves were carrying its waters further and further away. And in the morning, when the soot-blackened moon melted away in a black co
rner of sky, the hot sea was no longer hell but a mere bonfire, attached to a fragment of some tower that had been overturned in the middle of the sea and that stuck up into the sky like an absurd little ladder, with fragments of the boat hanging down from it.
The boy did not know whether or not people buried their corpses in this other world, but he dug a pit in the black and oily sand just in case. He dragged Old Ivan, whose skin had exuded a white shroud of salt, into this dark pit, then made a crooked ladder out of bits and pieces of the boat, stuck it into this Russian’s grave of black sand and recited a short prayer about the One and Only who neither begetteth nor is begotten and there is none like unto Him.
This other world was strangely empty. The boy waited a long time for someone to come for him but, since no one came, he set off along the deserted shore to where he could see dark trees in the distance. That, he thought, was probably paradise. And indeed it was.
In an empty garden, growing close together, were apricots like yellow suns, cherries like red lamps, and peaches whose cheeks were covered in tender down – as well as figs, which the boy had never eaten before. But what astonished him were the pomegranates. The boy had neither heard of them nor seen anything like them; they looked more like how Gulsum-Khalfa had once described her withered heart – but when, after turning one over in his hands, the boy ventured to take a bite, what spurted out were forty crimson bees that stung his tongue with their sweet-sour poison. “Now I really am dying!” the boy said to himself as he fell asleep. “Now I will see the souls of the dead, a sight never granted to those still living.”
The Railway Page 26
