The Railway

by Hamid Ismailov

  The first man to come to the boy in the other world was a gardener with a moustache and with eyebrows that met in the middle; he spoke a strange and unintelligible language. He took the boy to a house where people washed him for seven days before sending him to a huge kitchen where saucepans hissed like the sea. There the boy ate and ate until his cheeks were red, after which he was taken to the chancellery, where he was taught a few words of their strange language. Then the musicians taught him how to wiggle his belly and bottom in a strange dance. Last of all, they tied his hair into a little pigtail and took him to the palace chambers. “Here I will see God!” the boy thought excitedly, and he looked round the empty bedchamber. But no one entered except a sweet-voiced man in a gown, probably an angel of God; he stroked the boy’s pigtail and began questioning him in his unintelligible language.

  The boy was astonished at the way half-blind Gulsum-Khalfa had deceived those who lived in the previous world, frightening them with stories of Munkar and Nakir interrogating people after death,146 one holding a hammer, and the other an anvil: “A lie – you’ll lie flat as a pancake! Another lie – you’ll be beaten to dust!” No, this angel of God spoke in the sweetest of voices, stroking the boy and accompanying each stroke with a tender “M-m-m-m!” Then he languidly took off the boy’s clothes. As if feeling for any sins that might still remain in the boy’s body, putting one moist hand against the boy’s buttocks and another, rougher hand against his willy, he murmured, “A nightingale of the bed-chamber!” From the other room came slow sweet music, the music God’s servants had played when they taught the boy how to dance. The angel of God threw off his gown and pressed not wings but a hairy chest against the boy’s shoulder blades, whirling him away in an ever quickening dance. The boy’s head was whirling too; he did not know what to do. The angel of God untied the last of the cloths round his waist and the boy, seeing what was being thrust towards him, began to whisper in terror his one and only prayer about the One and Only who neither begetteth nor is begotten and there is none like unto Him.

  The music had become a one and only drum, pounding into his heart, when the door was suddenly flung open and, in a white dress, in flew – a woman. In naked shame the boy rushed to the window and, cutting his burning skin against splinters of glass, vanished into the garden...

  Lying down in the deepest depths of this garden, covering his nakedness with a fig leaf that swelled with the blood from his cuts, he tossed about in delirium and wondered where people go after death in this world. Back to his stepmother Gulsum-Khalfa?

  2.

  The crowd was turning nasty, and under this mind-numbing sun the men’s tall Astrakhan hats looked like huge black flies. He quickly adjourned the meeting – saying it was time for the Muslims’ midday prayers – and hurried to the white tent to speak to the commander of the Cossack railway penal detachment, to warn him of possible trouble.

  All through the afternoon and until late in the evening he stood there like the hoopoe and gave flat and monotonous answers to this motley rabble, but there were now thirty mounted Cossacks on guard, half-asleep astride Akhal-Teke horses that continued to prance about even beneath the merciless sun. During the night, with bloodshed seeming as inevitable as that blood-red head in the daytime sky, he was woken by the slightest rustle or movement of sand in the wind, but then everything would go quiet again and only just before dawn was the alarm raised and the Cossack detachment roused: the native railway-workers had all escaped into the desert. On the outskirts of the camp they had stuck two rails into the sand and tied three sleepers between them, to make a small ladder climbing up into the sky.

  The Cossacks were sent out in pursuit in parties of twelve, to the four points of the compass and each of the four points in between – and towards noon two of the parties returned, together with thirty half-dead Yomuds.147 The rest of the Cossacks had been slaughtered in the sands; two nights later, God knows how, their sun-and-sand-blackened heads were quietly slipped into the camp. It was decided that the thirty captured fugitives should be given similar treatment, that their thirty heads should be exhibited just as heads are exhibited in the main bazaar of the city of Merv.

  But his Tarot cards told him that these thirty fugitives, these thirty condemned men, must themselves lay down the track that leads to their death and that their brothers, fathers and sons would all come and work beside them – whereas their immediate execution would lead only to another cycle of deaths… Anyway, a severed head in Bairam-Ali is as good as a severed head in Merv…What mattered was that the State should grow greater and mightier.

  This last argument convinced the Cossack commander. He was afraid, however, that these damned Asiatics might take it into their heads that they were building a ladder to help them run away into the distance and so he gave orders that, until they reached Bairam-Ali, they should lay down only a single rail; he knew in any case that his opposite number in Chardzhou had already taken the same decision.

  For three months, under a mindless sun, the thirty condemned men dug through sands; when they reached solid ground they covered it with gravel as white as the rays of the desert sun in order to build an embankment five feet high.148 During the night the shifting sands would slip down into the half-filled trench, mix with the gravel and so reinforce the embankment’s foundations. Sun, sand and wind raged together, as if in alliance, but the embankment was eventually made ready, the first link of rail was laid by the Cossacks, the first curve was laid by the Yomuds – and then, in the middle of the night, as he was thinking about his non-existent father, he heard some kind of rustling, some kind of stirring.

  “Sand in the trench again,” he thought bitterly. Waking up before anyone else, he left his tent at dawn. O God! Where the rail came to an end, a second ladder was sticking up into the sky. It too was made of bits of rail with three sleepers tied between them; and a dead man, an old Yomud, had been thrown against it, feet on the bottom rung and head hanging back over the top rung. Pulling on his jacket, he walked up to the dead man. Thick blood was oozing from his throat, dripping onto his beard, down onto the sleepers and onto the sand. In a trench below the iron ladder, he saw – half-buried in bloody sand – the green-eyed youth who appeared to have sent his father up into the heavens. A hand with a knife smeared with congealed blood was sticking out, as were his legs, which seemed to be still trembling…

  There was no understanding these crazed Yomuds; it looked as if they had freely chosen to die. The whole scene was like a giant playing card, as he said later to the Cossack commander: the top half a King, the bottom half a Knave. The commander ordered both father and son to be buried in the trench and the last three links of track to be taken up and re-laid so that the line would pass at a distance from these two madmen in their trench and their ladder sticking up into the desert sky.

  But there is no bad without good. A dozen relatives of the dead father and son appeared out of the desert, as if they had heard the news from the wind or the sand or the blind desert sun. They were allowed to weep over the graves – and were then sentenced to continue building the railway. The three women in chadors were to cook their scanty rations as they all headed further and deeper into the desert.

  Using the rail that had already been laid, one third of the prisoners used railway wheelbarrows to fetch fresh gravel and new lengths of rail while the others dug a trench in the burning sand, leaning to one side as they dug so as to make the most of shade no wider than a man’s hand.

  One day, after he had galloped the length of this rail – riding the Akhal-Teke colt that had been given to him, along with a revolver, on the day the new recruits had arrived; after he had quickly overtaken the wheelbarrow-pushers, who seemed to be moving as slowly across the earth as the sun through the sky; after the week’s rations (a freshly killed sheep and a sack of Russian potatoes) had been taken to the quartermaster’s yurt – he felt the touch of a hot hand on his sweaty elbow. As if burnt, as if stung by a carpet
viper, he trembled and spun round on his heels. In front of him, half-opening her chador and whispering impassionedly, stood a seventeen-year-old beauty – one of the cooks.

  “What do you want?” he asked her.

  She repeated her whisper, but either because the air in the yurt was on fire or because he himself was on fire and drops of sweat had run into his ears, he heard nothing and saw only the beckoning movement of her hand as it disappeared into the flowery folds of her chador. She turned and went outside. He knew that the Cossack guards might catch sight of them any moment, but curiosity and a force stronger than caution or fear led him after her.

  “Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!” (If I’m not taken by force, I shan’t yield!), she kept repeating. He didn’t understand what she meant by this, but her ardent tone inflamed his young blood. He took her hand. She did not resist.

  “What do you want?” he asked again. But this time it was as if he were demanding payment for the risk he was already taking – holding her hand within shouting distance of both the Cossack guards and the horde of her fellow Yomuds. She understood him and pointed into the distance, to where he had just come from on his colt.

  “It’s forty days today.149 And you’re a Muslim. Tonight we can ride there!” Speaking the words as if she had learned them by heart, she disappeared beneath the awning of the kitchen yurt.

  Like the sun, he was on fire until evening, remembering and trying to interpret her every word and gesture. It seemed as if the sun would never set, as if it were a head that had been severed and wouldn’t let itself be buried in the earth, but finally a first white star came out in the green sky, as white as her hand coming out of her green sleeve. A little later he let his colt drink the remaining water and walked off on his own to wait for night beside the slowly cooling rail that had just been laid.

  He sat down beside the lame track. He tried to think about the railway: they were going to lay the second rail after all, though without fully nailing it down, so that the new recruits could use a handcar instead of a wheelbarrow to transport the rails and gravel – but his thoughts quickly slipped away to the seventeen-year-old beauty. Her words were a torment to him: “If I’m not taken by force, I shan’t yield!”

  “Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!” he said over and over, wondering if she was referring to Cossack abuse of her maidenly purity or whether this was her way of asking him to act passionately and decisively. Whatever the truth, all he could see was her lips whispering these words; they blotted out everything in front of him.

  Night came. There was a breath of what passed in those parts for cool air, and the moon rose obediently to light up the whispering dunes that seemed to be counting their pale grains of sand. Snakes slid out of their holes. A desert owl gave a solitary hoot. He went up to the quartermaster’s yurt and, more excited than ever, began to wait. It was as if everything had been a delirium of the sun, a fruit of the heat haze of his consciousness. If she hadn’t come yet, she would never come – and perhaps it was all just a trick she had been put up to by the Cossack commander, who was now watching from his white tent. A hundred such thoughts went through his head, and he didn’t hear her creep up from behind to touch his elbow. As if stung, he spun round and seized her hands.

  “Over there!” she said. Understanding that everything would happen over there, he led her out of the camp and into the patch of camel-thorn where his colt was languidly sniffing out scarce blades of grass. They jumped up onto the colt’s still warm back; the girl put her arms round his waist and they rode off. His eyes were scanning the ground ahead but his heart was beating behind him – below his shoulder blades, against her springy breasts. The moon galloped after them, her mane of stars flowing in the wind. And when the moon had climbed up into the sky and was hanging over the little ladder of rails and sleepers, as if meaning to slip down onto the mound of sand where the trench had been, the girl gently slipped down from the colt’s back and walked towards the grave, letting the bright moon of her face shine out freely. He slipped down after her. The colt neighed and, when he started to pull it in, asked to be set free. He released the colt and followed the girl with uncertain steps. Her scarf, which had remained in place during their wild gallop, was blown off by the light of the moon; the girl had thrown it off along with her cloak, releasing the shining, sinuous curls of her hair. He walked after her, not knowing what would happen next but trusting to the mystery of this night. Just by the ladder, she flung open her arms, which shone in the moonlight, and threw herself down onto the mound. He rushed towards her and was almost on top of her when he heard her resonant sobs; they were like claps of thunder from a clear, starry sky. She was weeping, repeating her incomprehensible “Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!”

  He stopped, like a reined-back colt, but only for a second. Then he was kissing her hair, which was full of tears and sand, kissing her back, which was trembling from her sobs, kissing her arms which lay stretched out to either side by the base of the two iron rails pointing towards the shameless moon. His body was an unbroken colt and it longed to drown in this desert night. He went on kissing her, greedily, until he suddenly recognised that she was somewhere a long way away. It was as if she didn’t see him, didn’t sense him, didn’t remember him or even know that he was there; she was writhing on top of this grave of sand in a kind of numb oblivion, as if she wanted to scatter the sand into the starry sky above her or else bring the stars down over her grief like grains of sand.

  He moved away from her, still lying on his side on the grave. His revolver in its holster was sticking into him and he realised soberly how useless and irrelevant he was in the presence of her deathly-bitter love. He squatted down awkwardly and, feeling sudden pity for this unfortunate creature of God, began to stroke her head, her hot temples and her tangled hair.

  Slowly she turned her tear-stained face away from the dark sand and laid her head on his knee. He cautiously kissed her on the temple and then, lifting aside her heavy hair, on the neck. She did not resist. He felt awkward and ashamed and she seemed aloof, but his desire overcame everything. Once again he lay down beside her, and once again his revolver was in the way and he took off his belt and holster and threw them down by the base of the absurd little ladder and just as it seemed that nothing could stop him he saw the girl slowly point the revolver’s gleaming barrel straight at him. Instead of seizing hold of it or striking it out of her hands, he jumped up in surprise; and while he stood there in the middle of the desert, paralysed with shame at the thought of being shot with his trousers half-down, Barchinoy shot herself through the heart. Birds that had settled for the short night on tamarisk bushes or stumps of saksaul150 flapped their sleepy wings; a carpet viper that had sensed their love and crept up towards them rustled back into the night, and a little stream of blood coiled down the trail it left in the sand.

  Before dawn he buried her in that same trench, under that same ladder that tore open the sky. Taking his colt by the bridle, he set off along the railway line back to the camp.

  On his return he was arrested, and the Cossack commander opened an inquiry. In the lock-up, from which the Yomuds had been sent out to work but which still harboured their dense and heavy smell, Lieutenant Lemekh interrogated him about the events of the night. His replies were by no means the whole truth, but then how could he be understood by a man who only wanted to know one thing: had he or hadn’t he fucked the bitch after she’d snuffed it? How could a man like Lemekh understand his simultaneously confused and enlightened heart? Getting no clear answer to his impatient questions, Lemekh lost interest and passed the case on to a sub-lieutenant. The sub-lieutenant turned out to be army intelligentsia, full of questions about what had motivated both him and the girl, but, since the sub-lieutenant had no clear idea of the motives underlying the interrogation itself, he too lost interest and found some excuse to pass the case on to a sergeant. The sergeant simply gave the young man a good
beating for “trampling on the honour of the Empire with your uncontrolled cock.” The beating was painful but uncomplicated. Deep inside him, however, nothing shifted, nothing changed. In the afternoon they poured a little newly delivered water over his bloodstained face; he was then passed on to the quartermaster, to help bring in the supplies. The quartermaster’s only complaint was that the young man hadn’t kept him better informed: together they could have given it to her good and proper – mane and tail.

  The quartermaster was followed by several more Cossacks of lower and lower rank, but the only one he remembered was the one-eyed Bulba, a filicide, who suddenly bared his member and climbed on top of him. As the thirty-stone Cossack hung over him the young man felt that once this was over he would have no choice but to take his own life, but he somehow managed to free himself. Without understanding why, he found himself hissing, “Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!”

  He grabbed hold of the water bucket and swung it with all his might at Bulba’s one eye, but the bucket just buckled against his forehead. Bulba knocked him angrily to the ground, spat at him as he pulled up his trousers and then left him for dead, meaning to come back later and remove the body.

  But he did not die. With his dim and confused consciousness he could still see the same interminable light that had wedged itself between the previous night and everything that had happened since; this light was like a gap, an abyss, a breach that nothing from the everyday world could bridge.