The Railway (10 page)

The boy stood by the canal, uncertain whether or not to jump across, and the canal, gliding snakily along, seemed to be smearing bits of moon over its skin – and these spangles of moonlight shone like coins and for some reason reminded him of silver fish that he couldn't quite fish out of his memory.

Then he remembered. It was in the autumn, when they had all been sent off for a few weeks to pick cotton; his class had picked their quota
before lunch and decided to go to a nearby cemetery in the afternoon to catch snakes. They cut themselves plenty of forked sticks and went past some burial mounds and along the bank of a river, which was thick with reeds, to a cemetery beside the road. However hard they tried, they couldn't find any snakes there, but they came across a holy tree, decked not with leaves but with bits of cloth of every colour, and somebody suggested they look and see if there was anything wrapped in these cloths. The boy had tried to stop them; he had remembered how Granny had once gone to a tree like this and hung on one of its branches a curse against the evil spirits that had entered her aching legs, and the boy had imagined that what she had wrapped in her red cloth was not a curse written on a piece of paper in some strange and incomprehensible script but the evil spirits themselves – and that the evil spirits would fade in the sun and be blown about by the wind, only to escape when the cloth rotted beneath the winter rains and then find their way back into Granny's swollen legs.

All the same, the boys had untied one of the cloths and some coins had fallen out – green from time, sun and damp. Soon they had quite forgotten about the snakes; they had collected nearly a rouble and all they wanted was to get to the little collective-farm shop before it closed. But just as they left the cemetery they heard a loud shout behind them. They all turned round and caught sight of a black horseman, raising a cloud of dust as he tore towards them. The terrified boys rushed into a field. But they could still hear the horse, and the thudding of its hooves was drawing closer. Chest-high cotton cut into their legs and faces; their boots kept sinking into the mud; someone, probably Mofa, stumbled and fell but he just kept going on all fours, not letting go of his stick or falling behind the others, looking like a relay runner crouched down by the start line; at last, galloping to the edge of the field and leaping across a ten-foot-wide drainage canal, they calmed down a little and looked back. There was no one there. Had the horseman been a spirit? Had evil spirits escaped from the cloths?

Breathless but pale, they settled on the bank of this cold and murky canal, leaving Mofa – who was still bent double – to keep watch. They
began teasing one another and making jokes. Then the boy threw his coin into the canal and they all leaped to their feet as it plopped noisily into the water. Once again they laughed nervously – until they caught sight of a colt, walking round in circles in the middle of this clover-filled meadow…

Perhaps wanting to make up for the fright they'd had, someone suggested they try riding the colt. The boy felt alarmed by the silence hanging over the meadow and didn't especially want to exchange their present shelter – even if it was only a few mulberry trees – for the middle of an open field; nevertheless, they all walked towards the colt and the boy followed. Mofa was first to scramble up onto the colt's back; Artyomchik and Pchela followed. They rode about in circles for a long time, sometimes slipping off the colt's neck, sometimes jumping up and landing on his bony croup, until there was a sudden yell from behind them and they rushed off in a panic.

Afraid that it was the black horseman, and that he was going to make them answer for what they had done in the cemetery, the boys ran towards the edge of the field, desperate to get away from the horseman's ever closer cry: “Ushla! Ushla!” Whether the horseman was shouting in Russian that the colt had got away or whether he was shouting in Uzbek, calling “Catch them! Catch them!,” none of them had any idea – but when the boy turned round in hypnotised terror he saw that the colt was galloping towards him; it was angry with him for not having been on its back and the terrible thought that the black horseman was shouting orders to the colt, telling it to catch the boy, made him turn round with a scream and take a great swing with his stick at this snorting monster that wanted to trample him under its hooves.

The colt shied away to one side, but repeated cries of “Ushla! Ushla!” threw the boy into still more of a panic. Finally reaching the reeds by the bank, he sank into the slime and looked round for the last time. The colt was a little spot at the far end of the field, close to the dusty road, and there was no black horseman at all, nor could he see the other boys.

And now, standing by the canal, the boy couldn't make up his mind whether or not to jump across to the other bank and commune with something that was already lying softly on his tongue and quietening the burning pain in his insides. He didn't remember how long he stood there, but the chill slipping into him gradually changed his uncertainty to terror, and more cold darkness was creeping across the canal and a dog was barking in the distance and a frog began croaking somewhere near his feet – but then a night bird settled on one of the tables and, quietly pecking at the buns and the Easter cakes, calmed the boy and gave him new heart. He leapt across the canal and, playing safe by whispering “Christ has risen!,” began to make his way between the graves and crosses to the table where the bird had been sitting until he'd frightened it away with his leap. He called the bird back down from its wrought-iron perch, inviting it to a table where he could see bread and a glass and an onion
…

You will remember that Hadjiya was born while her father, Mahmud-Hodja the Younger, was in Mecca, having set out on the Hadj in order to pray that the sins of the February Revolution be forgiven. But not long after he came back home with Djebral, who was seeking a haven from his own Persian revolution, they were both overtaken by the yet more improbable October Revolution. Improbable because it began like a light cold you think you're going to shake off in no time at all… but then… in the end…

Djebral married the first refugee to come his way from Kokand, which had been sacked by the Bolsheviks and then looted by the Dashnaks;
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probably he was hoping to appease this latest revolution, to pay his dues to it once and for all before building the famous wall behind which not one inhabitant of Gilas ever penetrated – except for members of his household, who were protected from our faithless world by Djebral's unshakeable vow that no revolution of any kind would ever be allowed to enter his own home.

The death of Maike the bringer of fertility led Mahmud-Hodja to switch from rearing livestock to cultivating the land. After selling his countless flocks to the Kirghiz, from whom they were immediately confiscated by men who called themselves the Revolutionary Sailors of the Zailiisky Mountains,
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he bought some large vineyards just outside Gilas and moved there with his family, reckoning that even if the grapes were all confiscated and taken to Russia at least he would still be left with the vines.

The Bolsheviks did indeed confiscate everything they could eat, drink, or wear – and everything they could sell in order to obtain things to eat, drink or wear – but these homeless, kinless, thieving soldiers who had been sent for their sins into the deserts of Turkestan were incapable of doing anything except waving their flags and revolvers in the air and pissing wherever the need came upon them; and so Mahmud-Hodja's vineyards were not chopped down or uprooted and Mahmud-Hodja was even able to steal – that is, carefully store away – what remained of the harvest after the night-searches carried out by Bolsheviks desperate for anything they could make into alcohol.

In the labyrinthine depths of his infinite vineyards he built secluded quarters for his wife and his two daughters, Asolat and Hadjiya, who from then on saw nothing of the outside world at all. In winter they sorted raisins and in summer they bathed where the Khasanbay canal forms a small pond; they prevented the unclean water from getting inside them by holding their fingers to every aperture of their long-haired heads.

Once, as they were bathing – seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing and saying nothing – they were glimpsed by a distant relative. This relative was no mere boy but a fully grown man; his name was Gazi-Hodja and he was helping out in the vineyards of a fellow hodja in order to avoid serving the heathen Bolsheviks. The buttocks of the plump younger sister, rising now and again from the muddy water like white cupolas, deprived him of his reason and made him forget not only what is expected of a hodja but even the foundations of the Sharia itself. From that day he paid ever more frequent visits to his neighbour, pruning his vines, digging the soil and removing dead leaves – especially in the dense thickets penetrated only by the muddy water of the canal.

Regardless of wars or revolutions, autumn was the time for weddings, and this autumn was no different; matchmakers came to speak to Mahmud-Hodja about his younger daughter. Mahmud-Hodja, as obstinate as any true hodja who has eaten a good lunch, was unshakeable: how could he even think of allowing his younger daughter to marry before her sister?

“You can take the elder,” he said guilelessly to the matchmakers – but they, like true hodjas who have eaten a good lunch, got up and left. As they made their way out through the vines, they forgot that Mahmud-Hodja was a relative of theirs and muttered crossly, “Damn you and your daughter!”

Cross words from a hodja can have serious consequences, and it was many years before anyone asked for the hand of Asolat, the elder sister who, in addition to being hidden away behind thickets of vines, was herself as thin and dry as a vine-pole. Hadjiya, meanwhile, grew into so splendid a young woman that even her own father felt shy in her presence – while Gazi-Hodja wept every summer by the source of the muddy Khasanbay, seeing in the reflection of the sun the rounded buttocks of his chosen one and praying for the day when that hateful vine-pole of an elder sister was finally married off. And then one day, wanting to fulfil the will of Allah and not be denied the opportunity to continue to praise Him, he offered up a prayer, went over to the Bolsheviks and became a policeman.

In this Gazi-Hodja demonstrated not only spiritual wisdom but also worldly good sense: hodjas unconverted to Bolshevism were already being threatened with exile, and Gazi-Hodja was hoping to save Mahmud-Hodja's family and so win Hadjiya even if her elder sister should remain unmarried.

On the Day of the Death of the Leader of the World Proletariat, when police were sent to the bazaars and chaikhanas to round people up so that they could express their elemental feelings of grief at the mass meetings that had sprung up spontaneously all over the country, Gazi-Hodja was assigned the task of finding praise-singers to console the orphaned soul of the nation. Why, oh why, had Allah taken Vladimir Ilyich to Himself without first deciding in whose hands to leave the World Revolution and the Labouring Poor? The whole of Gilas, the whole of the City, the whole of the Soviet nation had been brought to its knees. And during this terrible hour, while comrades in Moscow were laying out the body of the man in honour of whom the local Kazakhs were obliged to call their inopportunely born children “Elesh” – since they could no more distort their steppe tongue to form the word “Ilyich” than they could push these children back into the womb to wait for a happier day – a certain Pochamir-Hodja from Bukhara was escorted to the police station. A stranger to these parts, Pochamir had taken it into his head that Allah, not waiting for the end of the world, had begun his Last Judgment, and so, there in the bazaar, amid the jars of grocers from whom he had bought a little opium and lapis lazuli as a remedy against toothache, he had hurried to clear his conscience by telling Allah what he truly thought of the Bolsheviks; since he was abusing the Bolsheviks and their lamented leader in a Bukhara dialect beyond the comprehension of anyone in Gilas, the authorities had thought he must be wailing about some pogrom or other, and, in case the exploitative English should seize on this pogrom for the purposes of anti-Bolshevik propaganda,
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they had decided to isolate this panic-mongerer of a Bukhara Jew in the lock-up. And there Gazi-Hodja, searching for a singer to bring consolation to the orphaned soul of the nation, had found him.

“I call on the spirit of comrade Lenin as a witness,” Pochamir-Hodja swore in his Bukhara dialect, “that I am here in this magnificent town of yours for the first time and I have no idea what is going on here. I implore you in the name of the Communist International and International Solidarity to leave a poor old fool alone in peace.”

“You become comrade Leninandtrotsky – then we'll leave you in peace!” said a warder, a newly Bolshevik new recruit.

The last time Pochamir had been in jail – at the time of the Bukhara Revolution,
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which he had also interpreted as the end of the world – it had been for over six months, and towards the end of the first month he had grown so bored that he began repairing his cellmates' boots, using waxed thread from his own belt. Noticing this, one of the guards, a Bukhara Jew by the name of Elias, thought of asking the prisoner to repair his own down-at-heel boots. One thing led to another and it wasn't long before Pochamir had repaired the shoes of every one of Elias's relatives; only then did Elias mention Pochamir to his colleagues and to the director of the prison. Then, however, he had a second idea: the boots Pochamir repaired looked as good as new – what if they supplied him with materials and opened a workshop? This might also prove to be a way for Elias to secure an apprenticeship for his son; Yusuf had often taken leather from old boots to make catapults, but only the other day Elias had noticed him using leather from an old catapult to repair a boot that had somehow never been taken to Pochamir.

And so, drawing on generations of cunning and mother-wit, old Elias agreed with Pochamir that they should set up a prison workshop: Elias would supply Pochamir with black leather from the jackets of Chekists who had fallen into disfavour and been shot, Pochamir would make this leather into boots, and Yusuf would sell these boots in the Toki Sarrofon Bazaar. Elias asked for only one thing when he prayed to his Jewish God – for Pochamir to stay in prison for a long time and be forgotten by the authorities – but then the uncircumcised Kalinin
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had come to Bukhara. As if there were no other places where an old revolutionary could feel at home, he visited all the chaikhanas and prisons and published an indignant article about Pochamir and his boots in the Bolshevik
Local Pravda
. The investigation lasted for several months, during the course of which Elias went on buying up the leather from the jackets of disgraced Party bosses and Yusuf went on trading the boots Pochamir made while he waited for his fate to be decided. But this was not all that Elias accomplished during those months; he also made his son Yusuf sit down by a paraffin lamp and study the seams and insoles of Pochamir's boots so that, when Pochamir was set free, the bullet-riddled jackets of executed Bolsheviks and Chekists would not be left to rot away in graves.

This time, however, it was not Kalinin but a rank-and-file policeman who came to visit Pochamir-Hodja in his cell. But the policeman turned out to be a hodja himself, and, after talking for a long time about Vladimir Ilyich and his soul's inevitable flight into the inescapable nets of Allah, he suddenly proposed that Pochamir, instead of weeping for the Leader whose death had brought such misfortunes down on his head, should marry the daughter of another of the local hodjas.

It was after lunch – may that hour when hodjas go mad be for ever accursed – and Pochamir agreed to take on a wife and live near the City in exchange for being granted his freedom. He would have done better to wait for a visit from comrade Kalinin; as it was, married to a scrawny vine-pole of a woman who had not only taken him away from Holy Bukhara and its speech and its newspapers and even his own family but even insisted on changing his plebeian name to the more dignified Pasha-Amir, he came to know despair many times. He had nothing against new names – a new life had, after all, begun and yesterday's chaikhana had been renamed a reading-hut
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– but it was, like it or not, rather awkward to sell lollipops at the end of their little street on weekdays, and in the Kok-Terek Bazaar on Sundays, if one had a name that meant “Amir to the Padishah.”

And so Gazi-Hodja was able to marry Hadjiya. After his marriage, he had himself transferred to the Party apparatus, to live a life that was a little poorer but also a little less dangerous – given that by then the “indigenisation” of the security organs had already begun. Gazi-Hodja never managed to grasp that this alien word was supposed to mean the replacement of Russian apparatchiks by local apparatchiks, but he understood very well that it entailed the exile or execution of every other man in the security organs. He would gladly have gone back to working in his father-in-law's vineyards, but the same exiles and executions were taking place there too, in the name not of “indigenisation” but of the no less mysterious “collectivisation of agriculture”; and so he had had no choice but to transfer to the Party apparatus and try to save the lives of his wife's family even at the price of their vineyards.

At first everything went well. Children were born to Gazi-Hodja and Hadjiya; and Mahmud-Hodja, fearing more revolutions, stayed at home for years on end – hidden within labyrinths of vineyards that had somehow escaped destruction. After a few years, however, the First Secretary turned his attention to economic matters; the slogan “Let Village Life be our Focus!” had, after all, been replaced by “All Eyes on Economics!” And so, in cahoots with the local public prosecutor and the mullah from the mosque in the Old City, the First Secretary imposed on the population a “K-M” (Kommunist-Muslim, Kapital-Marx and Koran-Muhammad) tax which allowed him to collect 1,931 head of large-horned cattle, five times that number of sheep and goats and an entire “Rosa Luxemburg Poultry Farm” of chickens and hens. A third of the carcasses were distributed among their superiors and a third were dispatched to the still starving Volga peasants,
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but the question of how to divide the remaining third gave rise to factional struggles: the public prosecutor opened criminal proceedings against the mullah, charging him with everything from homosexuality to basmach leanings;
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the mullah exploited his Friday prayers to impose a fatwah on the godless First Secretary, cursing him as a blasphemer and persecutor of the faith; and the First Secretary attacked simultaneously on both fronts, accusing the mullah of rightist-monarchist leanings at the same time as he charged the public prosecutor with leftist-Trotskyist-deviationary tendencies. The very incomprehensibility of the First Secretary's accusations lent them added power; and when Gazi-Hodja and an honourable Jewish Bolshevik by the name of Umansky tried together to make him see reason, the First Secretary made a second two-pronged attack, arranging for Umansky to be packed off to Birobidzhan
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at the same time as he invited the trustful Gazi-Hodja round for a friendly chat and a dish of
plov
. The First Secretary added opium to the
plov
and, when Gazi-Hodja was fast asleep, he poured into his ear a poison he had obtained from the mullah during their period of Kommunist-Muslim cooperation.