It was during a Kazakh-language lesson that the classroom windows started to jangle and benches shifted about on the floor. The blackboard crashed down off the wall and trapped their terrified teacher, lame-legged Kymbat. Yerzhan dashed forwards and rescued her. Then he ordered his classmates to crawl underneath their desks. A rumbling ran through the ground again. He broke out a window. His hand bled but he ignored the cut and dragged Aisulu into the open. A humming blast of air zoomed past and the tiles of the school roof came tumbling down.
And then suddenly an appalling silence. No sheep bleating, no dogs barking and no donkeys braying – even the ubiquitous flies had stopped buzzing. There was only Aisulu, lying face down in the dust, whispering her prayers – in the name of Allah, the most Merciful.
*
Later that autumn, as if this terrifying blast had never happened, or perhaps precisely because of it, the school bus headed over potholed, dusty roads towards the atomic workers’ town. Aisulu’s father, Shaken, had organized a school trip for their class to see his place of work. The bus journey took a day. They stayed overnight in the sports hall of the local school and in the morning the children were taken, freshly washed and de-dusted, to the ‘experimental reactor’. In the information room, Yerzhan and Aisulu played a duet for the workers on their instruments. Then they were shown a film about the peaceful use of nuclear power. Some of the children had never watched a film before and the rustling of the sound and the quick scene changes frightened them and they cried. After the film Uncle Shaken, dressed in a white coat and white hat, like all the other workers, appeared and announced that this was the place where they were doing absolutely everything possible not only to catch up with but also to overtake America. He showed them different-coloured balls on a thick wire and set out to explain to them what he called a ‘chain reaction’. There were two sets of balls on either end of the wire. Shaken took a ball from one group and used it to knock another ball just like the first one out of the other group, setting the first ball in the place of the one that had flown out. Yerzhan wanted to laugh out loud. Did they really have to be brought all this way to be taught playing tag with balls? But Aisulu watched wide-eyed, trying as hard as she could to memorize everything her father said. She even asked him questions, talking to him like some stranger, not her father, addressing him as Shaken Nurpeisovich.
A second film followed about an atomic explosion. And then finally the fun started. In the playground they were handed gas masks and chased after each other like aliens. But sadly the fun didn’t last long. Because suddenly a real alien in a big rubber suit broke into their group. And everyone froze. He made a beeline for Aisulu. He grabbed her with his claw gloves. She screamed. And she screamed so loud that even through her gas mask and his gas mask Yerzhan could hear her cry for help. He ran towards her. But before he had reached them, the alien let go of Aisulu and lifted his helmet. It was Uncle Shaken, laughing out loud. Aisulu immediately joined in with her father’s laughter. Only Yerzhan looked at him horrified. A strange tremble had seized him from inside.
Towards evening Uncle Shaken took the children to the Dead Lake. ‘Don’t drink the water and do not touch it,’ he told them. It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud. No movement, no waves, no ripples, no trembling – a bottle-green, glassy surface with only cautious reflections of the boys’ and girls’ faces as they peeped at its bottom by the shore. Could there possibly be some fairy-tale fish or monster of the deep to be found in this static, dense water?
The bus driver called Uncle Shaken to help him with a punctured tyre. Yerzhan was left in charge of the class. He saw his long shadow reflected on the water’s surface. Dean Reed in the boundless steppe, underneath the limitless sky, above the bottomless water. He briefly took Aisulu’s hand. Then he let go of it and pulled off his T-shirt and trousers and walked calmly into the forbidden water. For a moment he splashed about in it and then, to the admiring and terrified twittering of Aisulu and the others, he walked out of the water, shook himself off as if nothing had happened and dressed again in his canvas trousers and Chinese T-shirt.
Nobody snitched on him. And for a long time afterwards everyone recalled with respectful admiration Wunda’s dramatic escapade.
Part Two
Do La
The Destiny
The train moved on across the steppe like Yerzhan’s story – without stopping, without hesitating, onwards and forwards. It was strange, but in this story there was none of that bitterness reminiscent of the old steam trains, which blew their nasty smoke into the last carriages on the bends. No, the diesel locomotive drew the train along without any strain, smoothly and unfalteringly.
Those childhood years were like a blue-and-yellow happiness, growing between the sky and the earth. But still the fear that something could happen at any moment, pouncing with a sudden roar and tearing the tiles off the roof, stayed with Yerzhan for the next two or three years. Everything seemed to be going as it should: autumns in school were followed by ferocious winters, when their door was piled so high with snow that there was nothing else to do but play on the violin or the dombra. Sometimes the boy had to climb out through the little window at the side of the house to scrape away the snowdrifts with their only railway spade.
After the musical winter came the no less musical spring, when the songs poured out of him. He and Aisulu followed their bidding, riding not off to school on the donkey, but towards the hills, where fields of scarlet tulips blossomed in a blaze of swaying notes.
And after that summer itself started imperceptibly blazing – without any school, thank God, but again with music, and with the herd and a separation in the afternoon. After all, he couldn’t take thin-skinned Aisulu with him in the scorching heat, could he!
And the thing that loomed over him like a visceral fear could happen in the middle of the sweltering summer, when sheep suddenly started bleating as if they were under the knife and went dashing in all directions, cows dug their horns into the ground and the donkey squealed and rolled around in the dust… And a slight rumble would run through the ground, Yerzhan’s legs would start trembling, and then his whole body, and the fear would rise up from his shaking knees to his stomach and freeze there in a heavy ache, until the sky cracked over his head and shattered into pieces, crushing him completely, reducing him to dust, to sand, to scraps of grass and wool. And the black whirlwind hurtled past above him with a wild howl.
It happened in winter, and at night, and in autumn, and in the morning, and in the music, and in a pause in the music – without any regularity or forewarning: it could always happen, at any moment, hanging over his head as implacably as fear itself, as the future.
*
And it happened when Yerzhan was twelve years old and Aisulu was eleven. It was in the fifth class at school, after the long winter holidays. First the girls and then the boys in their class started to outgrow Yerzhan. But, after all, he was a year older than them, and he had always been taller and stronger. At first the difference wasn’t very noticeable: so what if Serik or Berik had stretched out a bit, that didn’t make them any brighter! But when Aisulu, his little mite Sulu, his slim-winged swallow Sulu, started overtaking Yerzhan, he sensed that something was wrong. The same fear that had always begun with a trembling in his knees and frozen as a heavy ache in his stomach seemed to have risen higher now, right up to his throat – and got stuck there, preventing his body from growing.
In the mornings, Yerzhan did pull-ups on the door frame. He nailed a rusty wheel hoop to the back wall of the house. From television he knew that basketball players grew taller than anyone else and in secret, when no one watched, he jumped up to the hoop for hours, tossing whatever he could find through it – a bundle of rags or a ball of camel wool. And at night he stretched in bed, imagining that he would wake up in the morning as Dean Reed. But he
had stopped growing.
Other people noticed it too and wanted to help. Granny Ulbarsyn fed him with the livers of newborn spring lambs, Grandad Daulet ordered carrots from the city through his friend Tolegen, and Uncle Shaken brought disgusting fish oil back from his shift. But that only produced a foul-smelling burp! Yerzhan ate it all. But he had stopped growing.
He gave up music. In any case, Petko had gone back to Bulgaria, where a family member had died. And Yerzhan spent the whole summer hiding away with his herd in the gullies close to the Zone. He lay on the ground naked for withering days on end in the hope that the sun would help. But even the heat made no difference. He had stopped growing.
And one day his faithful and obedient donkey brought him back to the house half-dead from the bite of a camel spider.
On 1 September that year Yerzhan did not go to school. Uncle Shaken took Sulu, all dressed up, on her own. On 2 September the two grannies persuaded the boy to stand in for Shaken, who had had to leave urgently for his shift. ‘At least escort her,’ they said, ‘even if you don’t sit through lessons.’ Grandad Daulet, however, told Yerzhan not to come back home unless he had done his schoolwork. Yerzhan accompanied Aisulu but refused to sit on the donkey with the towering girl and followed the animal at a distance. In the quiet autumn steppe Sulu started singing. It wasn’t Dean Reed. It was the sad song of Abai, who once lived in this steppe:
Entering into my ears, flooding through my full height,
The harmonious sound and sweet refrain
Awaken many feelings in my heart.
If you would love, then love as I…
The world does grow in secret from a thought,
And I nourish myself with hopes.
Now my sly soul understands
And my heart throbs inside my body…
Yerzhan picked up on only two words in this song: ‘height’ and ‘body’…
He sat through lessons that day, at the desk right at the back, on his own, not going out for any breaks, and pretended to be asleep when Sulu came to the window. After school boys and girls set off back home in pairs. Yerzhan walked in front of the donkey, not glancing round at sad, silent Aisulu. He so badly wanted her assurances that no matter what was wrong and no matter what happened to him, she would still love no one but him and marry no one but him, as she had promised in their childhood. On the other hand, he realized that she was almost half a head taller than him, and if it carried on… He couldn’t think beyond that; he was overwhelmed, not by the usual fear, but by a rage that took its place, rising up from his trembling knees, through his hot stomach, to his heavy, throbbing head: he wanted to kill himself, to kill her, towering up on that bad-tempered, noisy donkey; he wanted to smash this railway, grind it to dust, and this earth, and this sky…
*
In this state of mind he went to school for another two or three weeks, or perhaps even longer. Every day he witnessed the inevitable but refused to accept it: the children around him were growing by the hour. And his Aisulu was blossoming into a gorgeous beauty before his very eyes. Girls and boys swirled round her like the little stars in the sky round the full moon, and only Yerzhan sat in the corner during breaks, with a face like grey earth, dropping his heavy head on the desk and glancing out from under his brows at the smile on her face or the joyful response to it from some Serik or Berik.
Kill her! Kill myself! The thoughts pounded in time with his heart as it beat faster and faster, and again he plodded away after classes, immersed in his own agonizing doubts, which never led to anything or any place except home.
On one of these days he didn’t go to school, using the excuse that he was ill, and since Uncle Shaken was still on his shift, Uncle Kepek took Aisulu to school on the same tireless donkey. All day long Yerzhan roasted in the flames of his own thoughts and towards evening, at the time when Aisulu usually came home, he walked out of the house. And the first image he became aware of was his own uncle, Kepek, riding on the donkey with Aisulu. She sat in front of him instead of behind, so that his arms were around her youthful body as he was holding the reins, and she was quietly singing one of her tender songs, something like Dean Reed’s ‘Come with Us’…
Yerzhan didn’t greet them. And at night he burnt, not in an imaginary blaze but in the genuine infernal fever of his own boyish hell.
Granny Ulbarsyn took him to the local healer, Keremet-apke. Keremet-apke felt Yerzhan’s pulse, kneaded the bones in his fingers and led him behind a curtain. She tore the curtain material in half, sat next to the boy and appealed to Tengri, and to the prophet Makhambet, and to Makhambet’s angel. She swayed from side to side, working herself up more and more, then grabbed a whip and lashed herself across the knees and lashed the boy gently across his shoulders and back. ‘The devil’s work! The devil’s work!’ Foam poured out of her babbling mouth and she gestured to her daughter, who stood by the door: ‘Bring it!’ And in an instant her daughter had fetched a scorching-hot sheep’s shoulder blade. Keremet-apke cooled it with her saliva and then held it against the boy’s back.
Yerzhan was very quickly cured of his infernal fever. But he didn’t grow a single finger’s breadth.
He hated his granny for believing in all this antediluvian quackery, and most of all for that story of hers about little snot-nosed Gesar that she had told him back in his childhood. He hated her for the way she gossiped about him with Granny Sholpan for days at a time now, pondering over this life and wondering why he had been left a midget…
Aisulu’s father, Shaken, also became angry at the whispering of the two old women and one day in early winter he took Yerzhan to the city for an X-ray. The train travelled through the steppe and they passed the dead city that Uncle Shaken had showed Yerzhan a long time ago. And they passed the Dead Lake. But everything was covered under a fine layer of snow that shifted ceaselessly in the piercing steppe wind, until it gathered in drifts at the railway’s snow barriers.
They reached the city – a welter of people, cars and houses – and travelled through this dizzying, cramped space to a special clinic, where they led Yerzhan into a room and told him to undress and stand between the metal parts of a large device which Uncle Shaken called an X-ray machine. They switched off the light and made clicking noises.
Afterwards, Uncle Shaken and Yerzhan waited in the corridor until a man in a white coat and cap came out and showed Shaken black pages with bright spots on them.
‘Perfectly normal bones,’ the man said. ‘The bones of a child. Only there are no growth zones left…’
From the way that Uncle Shaken first argued with the man, then swore, then shouted at everyone, mentioning America and the Soviet Union all in one go, Yerzhan realized that nobody here would help him either. And he quietly hated these men in their doctor’s coats, and Uncle Shaken too, with his eternal pursuit of America.
*
Grandad Daulet, too, took his turn at trying to stretch his grandson’s bones. His method was an old folk one. Without telling the grannies or the younger generation, he took Yerzhan out into the steppe. There he wrapped him in a tarpaulin railway cloak, tied his hands carefully with a lasso, put a felt shawl under him, tied the other end of the lasso to his own waist and mounted his horse. He moved off at a trot that became faster and faster until it turned into a gallop across the sandy soil, dragging his grandson behind him, lying stretched out on the ground. Yerzhan’s eyes and mouth filled up with fine sand that still grated on his teeth in the evening and could only be extracted from his nose by sneezing. And his arms ached from the knots of the lasso. But even this procedure didn’t add any height to him.
At night Grandad shouted at Granny Ulbarsyn for everyone to hear because she had produced a good-for-nothing daughter, while the daughter, Yerzhan’s mother, sat in silence in the next room, crying over her son. As Yerzhan fell asleep, gazing up drowsily at his poor, dumb mother, he quietly hated Grandad for his swearing, and for the pointless daily torment, and for the sand that had crept into his crotch and in under his
tailbone, and for the salt on his lips.
Even Kepek, who had become Yerzhan’s bitterest enemy ever since he saw his uncle riding on the donkey with Aisulu, tried to help his nephew. He lent Yerzhan the only iron bedstead in the house for a few nights. He tied Yerzhan’s hands to the head frame, tied his feet to the opposite end and left him there, crucified for the night. The boy dreamt that he was flying over the steppe like Gesar on his steed, and the feather grass was swept aside under the hooves, and the sky opened up to meet him. And instead of the sun, Aisulu’s face greeted him.
Yerzhan had abandoned his violin. But that winter he played on his dombra almost all night and day. During the day, when Grandad went to knock the snow off his points and rails, when Kepek took Aisulu to school and the women spun wool, Yerzhan was left alone, and he took the dombra and played the same song over and over again: ‘Aidan aru narsa zhok’ – ‘Nothing is there purer than the moon’. He played it to a thousand different melodies.
Nothing is there purer than the moon,
But it abides by night, and not by day.
Nothing is there purer than the sun,
But it abides by day and not by night.
True Islam abides not in anyone –
They have it on their tongues, not in their hearts.
To Yerzhan this old song was about him. Every word of it, every sentence that followed another, was telling the story of his life. How sweetly it had all begun, as if the entire world consisted of the pure moon and the pure sun, of his Aisulu and him. But didn’t the song warn him? And how could he forget: the moon shines only at night and the sun shines only during the day. Only once a year do moon and sun appear together at the two sides of the steppe, like two huge, identical circles. Or had he just seen that in a dream?
The Dead Lake Page 5
