The Dead Lake

by Hamid Ismailov

  Who could he tell about these nocturnal fears? Petko and all the others believed he was a faithful disciple of Leonid Kogan. So with whom could he share his torments about Dean Reed?

  *

  ‘Wunderkind!’ Petko said one day, gazing at Yerzhan with loving eyes, and the nickname stuck firmly. Uncle Kepek adopted it promptly and Shaken exclaimed, ‘Now we will definitely not only catch up with but also overtake America!’ He explained what the word meant in translation from the German. ‘Wunder’ was a miracle and ‘Kinder’ was a child, and so he surmised that it would be more correct to say ‘Wunderkinder’. Grandad Daulet learnt this word too. Only the grannies Kazakhized it, calling their grandson ‘buldur kimdir’ – ‘this someone’. Yerzhan liked his new nickname and flaunted it at every opportunity: when Grandad’s friend Tolegen came on the delivery train, when a passenger train stopped in the siding, when the local militiaman or the district doctor came to see Petko at the Mobile Construction Unit. One of the adults would cry, ‘Wunderkind!’ and Yerzhan would immediately grab his violin and rush to answer the call, playing Paganini’s Caprice or Vivaldi’s Spring.

  ‘A wunderkind!’ they all agreed – the idle passengers in the train, the terrifying militiaman and the doctor, and kind old Uncle Tolegen too.

  ‘We have to show him to the conservatoire!’ Shaken enthused. ‘I’ll take a few days’ leave and go to Almaty with him!’ Yerzhan was terrified. Did they want to conserve him? Is that what they did with a wunderkind – like fruit in jam and cucumbers in brine? Shaken explained what the conservatoire was, but it didn’t calm Yerzhan. He still remembered what had happened last time when Grandad Daulet wanted to take him to the city and the fly started buzzing in his ear and the wagon tumbled over. Luckily, except for Uncle Shaken, everyone else seemed to be on Yerzhan’s side. Grandad dismissed the idea with a shrug: ‘He’ll go to school soon and it will all blow over!’ – as if he was talking about a brief cold. Uncle Kepek shrugged the conservatoire idea off from a different angle: ‘Even if he is a paedo, our Pedo studied with Oistrakh!’ – and he pointed at people playing the violin or the dombra on the television. ‘Look, my little darling nephew plays a hundred times better than any of those blockheads! Give me two strings, put a stick in my hand and I’m the master of the land!’ The comment made Grandad angry, but it didn’t make him change his mind.

  ‘Hey, Wunderkind, come here and give my bumps a rub!’ Granny Ulbarsyn called from the next room. She certainly wouldn’t let her favourite masseur go anywhere.

  Yerzhan went to school when he was seven. ‘Went’ sounds very simple, but the school was in a village eight kilometres from Kara-Shagan, so ‘going to school’ meant walking eight kilometres in one direction and eight kilometres back. On the first day, Grandad insisted that Yerzhan hang the dombra from one shoulder and the violin from the other. At school the pupils gathered in the sports hall and Yerzhan played first one instrument and then the other. Since that day no more coaxing was required for the nickname ‘Wunderkind’ to migrate from Kara-Shagan to school, and his classmates soon started to call Yerzhan ‘Wunda’. And ‘Wunda’ played Kurmangazy and Tchaikovsky by turns whenever the school inspectors came to visit.

  Winter arrived. Howling hungry wolves and jackals loped across the steppe. It was no longer safe for Yerzhan to walk to school and so Grandad took him by horse. The boy warmed up in the classroom, while Grandad Daulet sat in the railway canteen. His patience lasted for two days. Then he informed the director of the school that he would take his grandson home for the rest of the winter. And once again Yerzhan was left alone with his violin, exercise books and pencils.

  Under the dim light of the lamp Granny Ulbarsyn sorted through camel wool while Yerzhan hunched over the table and drew whatever came to his mind. And as the long winter evenings dragged on, he eventually taught his Aisulu to read and write. She started school the following summer and quickly became the best pupil in the class, because she knew in advance what the other untutored children were only just trying to master.

  Uncle Shaken now took them to school on the camel, crammed in between the two humps. But when he disappeared to work his shift catching up with and overtaking the Americans, Grandad Daulet sat them both on the donkey. He handed them each a dry cob of maize to scatter the grains along the route. ‘That way,’ he said, ‘you won’t get lost… And if you do get lost,’ he added slyly, ‘we’ll set the chickens on the trail and they’ll find you.’ Although how could they get lost, when the route ran alongside the railway line the whole time? And in the mornings, on their way to school, the sun shone in their faces from the right all the time and in the afternoon, on their way home, it would shine on their right side again.

  Aisulu held on tight to Yerzhan’s thin shoulders and they galloped, sometimes with the wind, sometimes against it, sometimes through a whirlwind, sometimes through a dust storm. And in the early days they wasted their time vainly scattering grains of maize, which the skylarks and rollers of the steppe religiously pecked up. But soon the sun hid behind the fast-moving autumn clouds.

  Aisulu was still joyfully singing a Dean Reed song right in Yerzhan’s ear when their donkey picked up a cabbage stalk thrown out of a passenger train. The animal swallowed the stalk whole and immediately choked. It lashed out so suddenly that Aisulu tumbled off the donkey’s back in mid-note. Then Yerzhan followed, to the other side. The animal shuddered and wheezed and shook its head from side to side. Yerzhan didn’t lose time and jumped up and flung himself at the donkey in a fury. At first he was going to beat it, but when he saw the foam frothing out of its mouth, he was seriously frightened. The animal wouldn’t let him get close; it kicked out and lashed at him with its tail, baring its teeth and snorting terribly. ‘Hold him!’ Yerzhan shouted, and little Aisulu, dropping her briefcase on the ground, grabbed the reins and pulled the donkey’s head down towards the ground. Without stopping to think, Yerzhan parted its jaws and stuck his arm up to the elbow into its mouth, reaching through the foamy mush. His fingernails touched the stalk and with all his strength the boy jerked it out. The donkey howled and sank its teeth into Yerzhan’s arm. Swearing like a grown-up, Yerzhan shrieked, ‘Fuck your mother!’ But he didn’t let go of the stalk and pulled it out of the donkey’s jaws. He ignored his bleeding arm and smacked the animal between the eyes! The donkey howled in resentful gratitude at the top of its lungs: ‘Ee-yaw! Ee-ee-yaw! Ee-ee-ya-aw!’ Aisulu, too, swore just like Granny Sholpan: ‘A plague on you! Foul beast! Do you hear what I say?’And then without any more lamentations she took the scarf off her head, licked away the blood flowing along Yerzhan’s arm from under the hoisted-up sleeve and bound the wound tightly.

  On that day they missed school.

  Yerzhan and Aisulu shared happy childhood years. Together they plastered the back walls of the two houses with cowpats that were their fuel for the winter. Or they hunted through the goods trains that had stopped on the siding. And sometimes, when a wagon was piled up with coal, they swept out a sack or two of the dust that was stuck along the side frames of the bogies or over the suspension of the wheels. Or they managed to break out a wooden brace that stabilized the platform, to use as firewood or building material. But what they enjoyed most was to take hot water and powdered milk to passenger trains waiting in the siding for an express goods train with important cargo to pass and sell their beverage or play the dombra to earn a little money. And city people from unknown lands, golden-toothed Uzbeks, yellow-haired Russians and red-shirted Gypsies gave them brand-new coins and paper roubles. And sometimes they would even receive a sweet or some city knick-knack. And once someone gave them a bar of chocolate. They shared the sweets half-and-half, but Yerzhan generously let Aisulu have all the knick-knacks, and she accumulated a whole heap of them in boxes and little drawers: lipstick, Komsomol and Young Pioneer badges, one ballpoint pen, a key ring and even a huge pair of sunglasses.

  Of course, it was rare for passenger trains to wait here; mostly they were goods trains, some with ce
ment, some with timber where they could strip the bark, some with sand, some with china clay that they could chew instead of black tar.

  But at least once a week Uncle Tolegen’s wagon, coupled to a goods train, travelled round all these way stations that were called ‘spots’, bringing them railway bread and occasionally flour for round bread rolls, sugar, salt and tea bricks. The grown-ups, however, went out to meet that wagon themselves.

  *

  It wasn’t long before Aisulu started to accompany Yerzhan to his lessons with Petko, with firm instructions from Uncle Kepek not to get separated for a single moment. Unfortunately, Petko’s Mobile Construction Unit lay in a completely different direction from the school: if you drew a triangle connecting home, school and Petko, then Petko was right up at the apex. One afternoon, after Yerzhan had played yet another Mozart march on the violin for the school assembly and they were running late, the children decided not to go home but to head straight to Petko. They wanted to try a new route. Using Grandad Daulet’s method, Yerzhan calculated that if the sun shone into their right eye on the way from home to school, then now, in Kepek’s Russian expression, it should shine ‘right up their arse’.

  The steppe lay all around them, like a wide-open eye, mutely escorting them on their way, and an equally huge, bright eye watched them from above. Ensconced on the donkey, they weren’t frightened – no snake or steppe spider would bite them, no fox or kite would come close. Small black spots of occasional graves jutted up out of the horizon like markers indicating their route.

  But suddenly one of these spots started to move. Yerzhan quickly realized that it was a solitary wolf who had come out on his pre-winter hunt. He was lurking in the steppe waiting for prey. The boy had learnt what to do. He took off his school jumper and wound it round his hand like a flag. He lashed the donkey and waved the flag, whooping at the top of his voice. He didn’t ask Aisulu to follow his example, but she imitated him straight away, whirling her jumper about and lashing the donkey with it, while squealing so shrilly that Yerzhan was almost deafened. The wolf had not expected such a show. Surprised by the ambush, he turned and took to his heels, running ahead in the same direction as the donkey. Inadvertently the children found themselves in pursuit of the animal. They galloped for almost half an hour. Then all at once the wolf disappeared and at long last they saw the trailers and the excavators. They had reached Petko safely.

  They didn’t mention their adventure to the violin teacher and without any delay the lesson began. Petko taught Yerzhan, and Yerzhan almost simultaneously passed on what he had learnt to Aisulu, who didn’t know Russian and couldn’t read music yet, and only annoyed Petko. But as soon as rain started falling outside, the air inside the trailer cleared too. And when the rain turned into a thunderstorm, the teacher and his pupils had to stop playing in order to save the donkey. The animal was so terrified that it had broken free and was now soaked right down to the very last hair on its short tail.

  The rain and the thunder carried on into the evening. There was inky blackness on all sides. And, of course, going home was completely out of the question. That night they missed their indispensable television viewing and stayed in Petko’s trailer.

  *

  Aisulu and Yerzhan shared a bed. The girl soon drifted off. The boy, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. As midnight approached he heard the wind howling and the rain lashing at the little trailer. And then he sensed eyes in the darkness. He looked around frightened and saw Petko standing beside their bed. Although the night was as black as pitch, Yerzhan felt the full force of the man’s gaze and lay very still, more dead than alive, not knowing what to expect and more afraid for Aisulu than for himself. But Petko must have become aware of the boy staring back at him, because he awkwardly busied himself adjusting the blanket that had slipped off. Yerzhan’s heart pounded hollowly and Petko’s keen musical ear caught the echoing rhythm of childish fear. He sat down on the edge of the bed, stroked Yerzhan’s head and said, ‘Sleep. Don’t be afraid, I’m here…’ Then he added, ‘Would you like me to tell you a story about an Eternal Boy?’

  And without waiting for a reply he started whispering: ‘A long, long time ago there was a boy called Wolfgang. Do you know what that name means? Walking wolf.’ Yerzhan shuddered at that – perhaps it was cunning Petko who had sent the wolf into the steppe? ‘This boy was such a talented musician that he could play any instrument with his eyes blindfolded. One night, when Wolfgang couldn’t sleep and picked out notes for his music from among the stars, the silver-faced moon climbed down from the sky and started dancing, enticing him to follow her outside into the street, along the river, to the lake. The music of this dance was so entrancing that the boy followed the moon on and on, unable to gather his wits or resist. The moon walked across the water, luring him ever further with her song. The boy followed her, and where the moon left only a shimmering silvery trail, full of magical sounds, the boy sank deeper and deeper into the water. His weightless soul seemed to be flying after the moon, but his body walked as if it was chained to the earthly paths of the wolf. The music sounded duller and duller, the water grew deeper and deeper above and around him. And then, finally, the silvery thread of music broke off. The eternal silence of silt and the lake bottom filled the boy’s ears and all the spaces of his body, and with his final breath he howled like a wolf…

  ‘The boy was saved – maybe by people, maybe by water nymphs, maybe by elves. His body continued to live and grew, but his soul stayed there in that night, at that lake, enchanted for ever by the moon and her silvery trail, full of music and dancing… And you remind me of that eternal boy,’ Petko finished, or perhaps Yerzhan was already dreaming and it wasn’t Petko’s words, but the rustling of the silvery rain outside the window bringing this sweet and terrible tale to an end.

  The next morning the thunderstorm had ceased, but the rain kept on and on. And the steppe was so wet and muddy that no donkey could have gone even two steps. Petko’s work had also been brought to a standstill by the weather, so after eating breakfast they took up the violin again and worked on Bohm and Handel by turns.

  The day passed and evening came, but the rain didn’t stop. How could they know that all this time Grandad Daulet, who had left his son Kepek on the tracks, and Shaken, who was out of his mind with worry over his only daughter, were galloping – one on a horse and one on a camel – round the houses of Yerzhan’s and Aisulu’s classmates, and couldn’t find them anywhere.

  Yerzhan and Aisulu returned home on the third day in the guilty sunshine on the cheerful donkey that had caught up on its sleep. The girl was greeted with fervent hugs, while Yerzhan encountered the whip. And Uncle Kepek pestered both of them with strange questions.

  They continued to skip classes on especially blizzardy days. Yerzhan taught Aisulu music and counting and writing at home. And after the second school winter he decided that he should stay back in the second class for a year, so that Aisulu could catch up with him, and then they would sit at the same desk for the rest of their lives. And although Yerzhan not only played music better than all the others but also read and counted and drew better than everyone else in his class, when spring came he suddenly forgot his textbooks at home, or didn’t remember his homework, blaming it on the music, or simply drew blots in his exercise book.

  The teachers tried to summon his parents to school, but Yerzhan didn’t pass on their messages. He knew the teachers wouldn’t travel eight kilometres there and eight back to complain about his poor progress. And so he was kept back in the second school year. When Grandad found out, he wanted to whip his grandson again, but Granny Ulbarsyn interceded. She blamed the music. The music had completely worn the poor boy out. But to be on the safe side, she nevertheless sent Yerzhan to stay with Granny Sholpan for a few days. Granny Sholpan was delighted and said that while her son-in-law Shaken was at his shift, Yerzhan would be the man of the house.

  And so, in the torrid heat Yerzhan drove the herd to the distant river meadow in the gullies, to
the river that had dried up for the summer. There, among the stones and the sand, the herd sought out rare wisps of steppe grass and turned over boulders with their horns to lick the residual moisture off the undersides.

  The naked sun beat down pitilessly on the boy’s head and neither the scorched, lifeless tamarisk bushes nor the crooked-armed saksaul offered any shelter. Yerzhan tied his T-shirt round his head. But the rest of his body burnt in the ferocious sun. Eventually the heat became unbearable and he cautiously rinsed off his skin with heated water from Shaken’s army flask. Then he let a blissful sheep lick the moisture off his skin. The animal’s rough tongue soothed the midday itch.

  In the evening he returned sunburnt to Granny Sholpan’s house. The old woman and her granddaughter smeared sour milk over the boy’s back and chest. And life returned to Yerzhan’s body under Aisulu’s soft little palms.

  *

  Yerzhan started the second class for the second time. This time, however, he shared a desk with Aisulu. They competed for As in their studies and the teachers were overjoyed, as they believed that Aisulu’s mentorship of the failing student had worked. How could any of them know that at home it was Yerzhan who took control of the lessons? He produced two copies of all the drawings, and gave the good ones to Aisulu and kept the rough drafts for himself. He solved the difficult maths problems and told her the right spellings in dictation. Since he was taller and stronger than all these small fries by a whole year, he also stood up for Aisulu and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.