Early in the morning of 22 November, as soon as Grandad returned from the night round of the tracks, without bothering to wait for sleepy Kepek or cheerful Aisulu to appear, Yerzhan slipped out of the house and jumped onto the horse that was still warm from carrying the old man. Perhaps because of the abrupt change from a heavy rider to the light body of a boy, or perhaps because of the early-morning hour, Aigyr galloped lightly, as if the wind was not flying in his face but pushed him on from behind. Yerzhan was so intoxicated by the speed, the flight, that he was already inside the Zone before he suddenly discovered his Grandad’s double-barrelled shotgun, forgotten between the saddle girth and the stirrup strap. But it was too late to go back. The boy galloped on into the Zone like a genuine spirit, feeling the metal of the barrel with his calves.
He remembered the fox hunt. The thought occurred to him that it had happened because they had taken away the fox’s little cub. For an instant he felt as if the horse was slipping out from under him. He forced himself to stay in the saddle, as ‘kaltarys!’– the word that indicated a ninety-degree turn – came crashing into his awareness. Yes, his entire life had been kaltarys after kaltarys, until that uluu kaltarys had arrived – that large, great turning – and now he was sprawled out like a carcass yet to be shot, hemmed in on all sides.
His feverish thoughts kept time with the galloping horse. He soon realized that even the non-existent, dried-up river swung from side to side, following those same kaltarys. Its course ran from the ground of its conception all the way to the Dead Town, then turned abruptly and ran on until it reached the lunar craters. There it took another oblique turn and ran on again until it reached that crooked concrete wall with the scorched steppe elm and imprinted birds. In his ardent excitement Yerzhan was now certain that the next turn would mean his final turn, and he galloped faster and faster, lashing Aigyr on with the whip…
*
And as the sun fell behind in its pursuit of him, he suddenly spotted a small outcrop in the middle of the open steppe. A solitary dog or fox or wolf. The galloping horse drew closer. A wolf. Yerzhan didn’t slow Aigyr. He pulled out Grandad’s shotgun from under the saddle girth at full speed and, without bothering to aim, just to frighten the creature, fired into the air with one barrel. The wolf flew off in the same direction as Aigyr and Yerzhan. And once again Yerzhan found himself in pursuit of a wolf, like so many years ago with Aisulu on the donkey. He whooped at the top of his lungs and the wolf ran without a backward glance. Because of the shot, fervent Aigyr strove even harder, forcing on the incessant movement of his hooves.
Then all of a sudden the wolf disappeared into the ground.
What was it? A mirage that had sprung from the boy’s overheated and inflamed imagination? Salt, glittering in the bright autumn sun? A stretch of stagnant water, lying here since the summer? The shore of the Dead Lake? Yerzhan arrived at the spot where the wolf had disappeared. Right in front of him was a cliff. Reining in Aigyr, he stopped where the slope down to the shore was shallow. He didn’t let the horse approach the water, even though it must have been thirsty after the non-stop run. Instead he tied the reins firmly, with a double knot, to a fused metal rail sticking up out of the earth. He walked to the water, the shotgun loaded with its second cartridge firmly in his hand. No sight of the wolf. It had disappeared, as if drowned.
The water was dark blue, its own blueness added to the blueness of the sky. Yerzhan saw his reflection as a vague blob. His eyes had grown tired from the uninterrupted galloping, with nothing but the yellow steppe flowing into them. At first he wanted to drink his fill of the thick water, but then he decided not to waste time. Without getting undressed, he slid into the lake awkwardly off the bank, fully clothed, with the shotgun in his hands, feet first. The coolness seared his body, and just as he expected to sink completely underwater, a strange force suddenly pushed him out and he found himself lying on his back on the surface, like a boat. What kind of force was this? It surely wasn’t the shotgun that was keeping him afloat! Yerzhan had read that in the Dead Sea, between Jordan and Palestine, it was impossible to drown, because the water was so salty. He tried tasting the water, but his parched tongue couldn’t identify the taste of salt. So he lay there, unable to comprehend if this experience was real or a dream. And slowly his swaying body began to melt. And it began to stretch. Longer and longer: the same way the bow of his violin tensed up before he played, the same way the strings stretched out when he tuned them. And now the bow would touch the strings and the music would sound.
‘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…’
Yerzhan’s soul felt as light as air, as if his little body had dissolved in this bitter water. He wanted so badly to preserve the feeling, to prevent himself from spilling it, that there was nothing left of him but waiting and listening.
Yerzhan galloped back across the steppe on the horse, and the sun at his back stretched out his shadow, longer and longer, as if the enchantment had fallen away from him and now he would return to the world where slim, stately Aisulu was waiting for him. He galloped across the steppe on the horse, with the gun in his hand, feeling like Dean Reed again in one of his films about Indians, when he played the cowboy Joe. And now he sang out as loud as he could, at the top of his lungs, for the whole steppe to hear, for the whole sky to hear:
My love is tall, as tall as mountains,
My love is deep, as deep as a sea…
On the very point of sunset, when his shadow was flattened so far out across the steppe that he couldn’t see where it ended, the low sun behind him lit up the hills where he was conceived. And in the sunset glow he saw two horses, tied to a tamarisk bush. Yerzhan’s heart started pounding rapidly and his horse, sensing danger, switched to a stealthy trot. As he approached the place of his conception, Dean Reed’s song faded from his lips and his lungs, and that phrase, uluu kaltarys, returned, throbbing in time with his heart, his pulse, his breathing.
And suddenly he saw what he had been afraid of seeing all his life. Down below among the sand and stones of the dried-up riverbed Aisulu lay stretched out, with Kara-Choton – the loathsome Kepek – leaning down towards her over and over again. Yerzhan reined in the horse and dismounted and grabbed Grandad’s shotgun with both hands. He didn’t tether Aigyr, merely waved his hand and hissed. The obedient horse stood still. Running from bush to bush like in a cowboy film, Yerzhan crept to within calling distance.
He took aim and fired the remaining cartridge.
The fear that had lurked within him all his life suddenly stirred, brushing past his stomach, flying up to his throat and bursting out in a frenetic, childish scream. Kepek collapsed onto Aisulu like a limp sack. Yerzhan dashed forward, watching with utter horror as a strip of gauze, as bright red with his uncle’s blood as a streak of sunset, fell out of Kepek’s hands on to Aisulu’s white leg, which was left only half-bandaged.
Aisulu had broken her leg looking for Yerzhan.
No, I didn’t even try to think this story through to the end; it was too terrible for this quiet steppe night with the gentle hammering of the train’s wheels and my heart beating in time with them. The boy on the upper bunk was muttering incomprehensible words in his sleep, the old man opposite me was snoring nervously, like a ram that has just been stuck. What a nightmare! I thought. Blaming my fears on the stale air in the compartment, I stood up and opened the door slightly. A cool draught was blowing from the corridor. I decided to wait a while for the compartment to cool completely, so I didn’t lie down again.
The train ran on tirelessly across the night-time steppe. A rare light, or perhaps a star that had fought its way through the dense darkness, moved slowly round the train. When the compartment had filled up with the chilly night air, I cautiously closed the door, but as i
f responding to my movement, the train slowed and suddenly, with the usual screech of brake blocks in the night, it stopped. I listened. In the distance steps rustled sporadically across the gravel of the embankment. Whoever it was kept stopping, and then the steps would start again, moving closer and getting clearer. Finally, somewhere underneath us, a lantern glinted for a moment, a hammer clanged against brake blocks and a trembling voice spoke into the darkness in Kazakh: ‘So that’s it! Fuck it…’
I suddenly wanted to shake Yerzhan awake, but I managed to stop myself.
Yerzhan was sleeping uneasily, as usual. They had only just buried Granny Ulbarsyn and the old women from the entire district, led by Keremet-apke, the local healer, were still performing their shamanic rituals and saying their prayers at Granny Sholpan’s house. Having lost his wife, Grandad had borne up manfully all the way through the funeral, but on the third day he had gone limp and taken to his bed. Shaken was left to chop wood alone for the hearth under the immense cauldron, go running to the tracks and back, and slaughter a sheep for the wake.
The way Granny Ulbarsyn had died was strange. In late autumn the lumps on her legs had started swelling up, and no matter how hard Yerzhan rubbed them, they kept getting bigger. ‘Ah, my lumps grow bigger but you haven’t. And you haven’t got any stronger either,’ Granny Ulbarsyn moaned in undisguised reproach.
The city bride Baichichek had tried to persuade her husband, Shaken, to take old Granny Ulbarsyn to the city for an X-ray, but the old woman flatly refused. Instead she persuaded her own husband to take her on a camel to the healer Keremet-apke. Keremet-apke felt Granny’s pulse, kneaded the bones in her fingers and led her behind a curtain. She tore the material of the curtain in half and then sat beside Granny Ulbarsyn and appealed to Tengri, and to the prophet Makhambet, and to the prophet’s angel. She swayed from side to side, working herself up more and more, then grabbed a whip off the wall and first lashed herself across the knees with it, then lashed the old woman’s legs gently. ‘The devil’s work! The devil’s work!’ And when foam started pouring out of her babbling mouth, she gestured to her daughter standing 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 Granny Ulbarsyn’s legs.
‘For nine days plus nine feed a black ram with twisted horns and then slaughter it on Tuesday!’ she ordered. ‘Rub the warm blood on your legs and you’ll skip and hop like a two-year-old gazelle!’
But alas, there wasn’t a black ram with twisted horns in the flock, and on the next market day Grandad galloped off to the cattle yard at the regional centre and brought one back on a lead – not just a ram, but a real devil with horns. The devil kicked out and butted and refused to be held. Grandad and Shaken could barely contain him, and to prevent him from butting the whole flock to death, they had to tie him by the neck and knot his legs.
Although Grandad brought the ram on Sunday, Granny Ulbarsyn calculated that she should only start feeding him on Friday, so that nine days plus nine would fall on a Tuesday. The next Friday she got up out of the bed she had lain in almost all autumn and tottered off, taking small steps, first to the hay and then to the pen, where that devil was tethered, and threw an armful of hay down in front of him. She did this twice a day, and with every day her legs grew stronger and her stride became ever more sure.
The ram grew fatter and fatter, Granny felt better and better and the lumps on her legs shrank day by day. The night before the appointed Tuesday, after feeding the devil that had now become a friend and with whom she had long conversations, Granny came back cheerfully to the house and asked Grandad for advice.
‘Daulet, what do you think? Should we really slaughter that ram tomorrow?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Grandad asked in surprise.
‘Well, I just thought, my legs are working well now, and I’ve got used to having the ram around…’
‘Go to bed,’ said Grandad. ‘I’ve got to go out for the 5.27!’
The next day, despite Granny’s peevish opposition, they decided to slaughter the ram. We’ll rub the warm blood on your legs, and on Yerzhan’s legs too, they said. Who knows, perhaps someone put a spell on the ram. It might do some good. Shaken and Grandad went to tie up the ram, and Granny sat down by the door, preparing her legs for the fresh blood. Yerzhan sat a little distance away and observed the goings-on, more out of idle curiosity than any hope of being cured.
And then, when Shaken took the rope off the ram’s neck and grasped him, ready to throw him over on his side, the devil, grown strong from all his fine feeding, suddenly kicked out with a grunt, knocked Grandad over with a single movement, darted out of the pen and dashed towards Granny as fast as he could. He flew towards her like a terrified child flying to its mother’s embrace, like a tame eagle flying to the hunter’s arm, like a she-fox’s cub flying to its den.
The fattened black devil with twisted horns crashed into the old woman at full tilt.
And that’s how Granny Ulbarsyn met her death.
They slaughtered the ram that very day – not, as had been expected, to cure old Granny Ulbarsyn, but for her funeral.
In all the fuss and commotion over Granny Ulbarsyn’s sudden death, of course they forgot to rub the warm blood on Yerzhan’s legs, so he remained under the spell. Well, never mind him, he was used to it already, but Grandad, who plunged his arms up to the elbows into the blood of that devil ram with twisted horns, took to his bed on the third day after his wife’s death. ‘I’m worn out!’ he told Shaken and Yerzhan in a meek little voice. So Shaken started taking Yerzhan with him to the railway tracks to check the points or, when their official railway phone rang, to switch them for a train that was waiting.
No, Grandad didn’t die that time. He got up after nine days plus nine, hale and hearty, and went to the old woman’s grave by foot to say a prayer.
The next to die was Granny Sholpan. It was in early spring. Perhaps the long winter, spent indoors, had already bored her to death, or she had pined away for her old friend Ulbarsyn. Anyway, when the snow melted and the green land began drying out, Granny Sholpan started taking long walks along the railway line in both directions. Aisulu accompanied her as often as possible and picked poppies to weave a wreath for herself, or dug up snowdrops and carried them home in her hands, like whitish-yellow candles protruding from soft clay lumps.
The day Granny Sholpan died, Aisulu was at school, Shaken was on his shift, Baichichek and Kanyshat were washing the laundry that had accumulated over the winter, Grandad was sleeping after switching a heavy goods train into the siding, where it had been standing motionless for more than two hours, and Yerzhan was sitting by the official phone, waiting for the express passenger train to pass at last and for Grandad to be told to switch the points to dispatch the goods train. On that sunny morning old Sholpan went for her walk alone. Poppies beat against her legs, but she walked on, in a black jacket and wide green dress, as tall and stately as a poplar tree, with her hands clasped behind her back. ‘That’s who Aisulu takes after!’ Yerzhan thought bitterly as he watched Granny Sholpan’s figure disappear.
And what happened next was this: the black cock, who had been ruffling the chickens’ feathers in the morning, assumed that Granny Sholpan had come out to feed him and ran after her. The unsuspecting old woman was walking along the railway line, when suddenly she saw a piece of bread roll lying by her feet. An unbeliever must have thrown it out of the window of a train – the locals wouldn’t throw bread away. Granny Sholpan bent down, picked up the bread and kissed it three times, then threw it under the stationary goods train, onto the railway embankment, thinking to herself that the train would leave and a bird would peck it up. But the cock, seeing the bread, rushed towards it. The old woman was taken by surprise. She never let her birds go near the railway; she always kept them in the yard behind the house. And now she was frightened that the chickens would follow the cock. So she glanced round at the stationary t
rain, bent over and ducked under it. The cock was so absorbed in his pecking that he only shook his head from side to side and took no notice of her. ‘You’re sitting there like a broody hen with a chick under her wing. Better you should die!’ Granny Sholpan squawked, climbing out from under the wagon onto the embankment. Eventually, she managed to shoo off the cock all right, but just then, whistling and hooting like a blast from the Zone, the passenger express came flying up on the next line. And although there was enough space between the two trains – the one standing still and the one flying past – Granny Sholpan’s wide green satin dress billowed up in the swirling air and a footplate caught its hem.
The poor old woman was dragged along the embankment until the satin shredded into bloodstained tatters.
Strangely enough, only after the two old women were gone was Yerzhan able to tell the other members of the households apart. Until then they had formed one entity: if Granny Sholpan scolded him, then Granny Ulbarsyn slapped him. If his mother, Kanyshat, kneaded the dough, then city bride Baichichek moulded the bread rolls. But suddenly the solid units dissolved. As soon as Granny Sholpan was buried in the newly extended tomb – beside her husband, Nurpeis, and her old friend Ulbarsyn – city bride Baichichek began to persuade her husband, Shaken, to move to the city. After all, it had been his mother who kept him here, Baichichek argued. But now she was gone, so why should they waste their lives at this godforsaken way station? Shaken kept avoiding the conversation with promises that when he came home from his next shift, then they would sit down and talk things over. Or they should mark the anniversary of his mother’s death first and then decide. But according to Aisulu, Baichichek insisted more and more. And that was when Yerzhan realized that these two families had been united by the two old women, Ulbarsyn and Sholpan. And anyway, his mother had stopped going to Baichichek’s house altogether now, hadn’t she!
The Dead Lake Page 7
