The Railway (15 page)

Granny Hadjiya's house had two rooms; it had a tiled roof, and the walls were made from unbaked bricks. The house had been built soon after the War, along with all the other buildings to the right-hand side of the railway; until then the area had been scrubland, stretching as far as the Salty Canal, the Zakh Canal and a nameless black river.

Granny's house was thirty yards from the railway line, twenty yards from the chaikhana and ten yards from Gilas's only tailor's: the “Papanin Tailoring Co-operative” or, as it was called later – after Izaly-Jew had replaced Moisey-Master as director – the “Individual Cut Co-operative.”

One room had two windows with gratings and an earth floor covered by a single piece of plain felt; this was where they received guests. A trunk stood in one corner, and on top of the trunk was a stack of flowery cotton blankets. The trunk was the most mysterious place in Granny's house: it was where Granny stored her best china, which was only taken out when Great-Grandad Mahmud-Hodja from Balasagun was visiting; and it was where she kept the special sweets they ate only on Mavlyud (the Prophet's Birthday), Kurban-Khait (the Feast of the Sacrifice)
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and the First of May (International Workers' Day). There were also three photographs, showing Granny with each of her first three husbands – all of whom had died – and a newspaper that her present husband (the boy's grandad, or rather step-grandad) used to take out if it was an important occasion and he had run out of things to boast about. It was like in the fairy-tales that the boy used to read to Granny as she lay there groaning because of her rheumatism: just as the water of life would bubble up to heal a wound, just as a magic tablecloth would conjure up instantaneous meals, just as a magic club would appear at the darkest moment of a battle and flatten the panic-stricken enemy, so Grandad would take out this newspaper if he was at a loss for words and could think of no other way
to salvage his self-respect – if, for example, Nuruddin and Imraan, the Chechens from the Zyryanovsk gold mine, had been throwing their weight about. Nuruddin and Imraan were so rich that they carried whole ingots of gold around with them, and they had once bought ten thousand roubles' worth of goatskin coats and astrakhan hats in a day – enough money to buy two Volga cars or for Granny to live on for the rest of her life and still leave something behind.

And so Grandad would take from the trunk a copy of the March 6, 1953
issue of
Pravda
with the TASS
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report of the death of comrade Stalin. To the boy, Stalin's was a mysterious name. The adults whom the boy obeyed seemed themselves to look up to only two figures: God, who was invisible, and Stalin, who was dead. Confronted with this copy of
Pravda
, the Chechens would fall silent – from fear, from hate, or simply not knowing what to say.

Granny was not a practising Muslim, although she was of true Muslim lineage. Each time one of her husbands had died, she had married again – so that her children wouldn't have to grow up without fathers. But she seemed to have decided – like a true Muslim! – that four marriages were enough, and she had been determined not to allow the boy's last grandad to die or disappear. Although Grandad did sometimes leave the house after one of their quarrels – and then Granny would leave her room with its trunk and its iron bed and the little hanging rug with a picture of three deer at a watering hole and would sleep with the boy and her three sons.

When Granny moved into this other little room, with its brick stove and its wooden sleeping boards, about two feet off the ground, that took up nearly half the room (once a year, when the boy was told to clean out all the rubbish from the space beneath the boards, he would crawl through the half-dark, wrapping himself in cobwebs, and discover not only the corpses of flies and scorpions but also everything that anyone in the family had lost that year, from Granny's thimble to Grandad's whetstone or Rafim-Jaan's violin bow [the story of Rafim-Jaan's violin is almost a book on its own. Rafim-Jaan, like all children who eat their own excrement when they are little, had once found a large sum of money – 1,962 roubles, in fact – that had fallen, along with the belt of someone who must have been very important, out of some celebrating passing train. Granny had taken the 1,962 roubles to Temir-Iul-Longline, who had kept the money for two days and then given a quarter of it back to Rafim-Jaan, saying that this was what he was entitled to by law as a finder of treasure. What Temir-Iul did with the other three quarters – whether he returned it to some grateful collective-farm chairman or whether he donated it to the State – I do not know. What I do know, however, is that a large part of Rafim-Jaan's
490 roubles and 50 kopeks were immediately spent on a “Record” television which put the Saimulins – with their microscopic “KVN” television – to shame, at least until, a year or two later, they acquired the first fridge in the
mahallya
. After the purchase of the television, and after he had gone to Lobar-Beauty's Culture and Recreation shop and bought a bicycle (also the first in the
mahallya
) Rafim-Jaan managed to hang on for a long time to his last nineteen roubles and sixty-two kopeks – a hundredth part of the treasure he had found and that had so quickly run through his hands, diverted to Temir-Iul's safe, Granny's trunk and the family's various purchases. But in the end Rafim-Jaan went back to Lobar-Beauty's and bought something unheard of, something no one had ever thought of buying before him; yes, people had bought ties that cost eight roubles each, they had bought exercise books for two kopeks each, they had bought two pens for one rouble, and once someone had even bought a drum for the October School, on the school account – but never had anyone thought of buying the violin that had been on display ever since the shop first opened. But Rafim-Jaan did precisely that – he bought this violin, along with its bow.

During the first day he didn't allow anyone to touch it except Natka, the daughter of Vera-Virgo – and that was only because Natka let him kiss her under the willow tree in between their yards; all the rest of the day he struggled with the violin on his own but failed to coax so much as a note out of it. He slept with the violin that night, took it out onto the street in the morning and was at once surrounded by the other boys from the
mahallya
, all of them offering advice. One boy told him to “press harder with the hairy bit of wood.” “There's only one hairy bit of wood round here,” interjected Yurka, “and that's you!” What Rafim-Jaan was holding, Yurka asserted, was not a “hairy bit of wood” but a violin bow – and he knew this from a book he had read. Rafim-Jaan handed the violin and bow to Yurka. Disorientated by this display of trust, Yurka moved the bow up and down the strings, but to no effect – the only sound he could elicit from them was a quiet rustle. Ismet the Crimean Tatar told him to press the strings down with his fingers, and Rafim-Jaan passed the violin to Ismet; once again it just rustled and wheezed a little. And then, later on in the day, towards evening, it began to split.

A week went by and the violin was put away in the loft, without its bow, which had disappeared. Nearly a year later the boy came across the bow under the sleeping boards; by then he had learned that you need to smear it with rosin, but Lobar-Beauty had no rosin anywhere in her shop. Nevertheless, they brought the violin back down from the loft. For a long time – its split body held together only by its strong, silent strings – it just lay around and got under everyone's feet. Sometimes someone would trip on it, pick it up in fury and try to throw it away – but the violin had a mind of its own. Whichever bit you picked up would fly through the air as far as the tension of the strings allowed, then snap back under your feet to the accompaniment of a kind of cross murmur or grumbling hum as the strings shook off their coating of brown dust. In the end, the violin disappeared for good; either the mice had taken it apart and dragged it off bit by bit, or an envious neighbour had slipped in at night, or heaven knows what…] and so, in a word, there under the sleeping boards the boy would find everything from Rafim-Jaan's violin bow to his own punctured football and even the seventh volume of the
Thousand and One Nights
. Granny especially loved listening to the
Thousand and One Nights
on days when the boy had cleaned out the stove, his shovel ringing like a bell against the stove wall as he removed ashes as
light as air, and then gone out into the yard to fetch some logs and a bucket of coal, which was in fact not coal but coal dust and the only way you could get it to burn was to sprinkle water onto it, mix it into a thick paste and then smear it with the shovel onto logs that were already flaming, smoking and crackling), yes, when Granny moved into this little room, she would lie down in her traditional place on top of the stove and the boy would set to work on her rheumatic legs, first trying to send any sluggish blood back to the heart and then looking for the little nodules that used to appear in one place or another and massaging them away to the accompaniment of Granny's satisfied and suffering-filled groans. And then the boy would begin reading from the
Thousand and One Nights
– that book that was as endless as life itself, as endless as those endless winter days that began and ended here, in this little room where there was a stove, and Granny, and three uncles young enough to be the boy's brothers, and a step-grandad who used to disappear when Granny upset him. And, in between all of this: long hours at the No. 11
“October” School.

Every year, at the end of winter, they repainted these two little dark rooms. First they prepared the whitewash, to which they added a few drops of a green iodine-like substance, and then – using a brush that left the odd thin streak of green – they painted the walls an uneven white, stopping only at the ceiling, which had long ago been coated once and for all with a varnish grown brown from time and soot. A cable for electrical light, put there by Bolta-Lightning the Gilas electrician, coiled across the ceiling like a snake. Before the installation of electrical light Grandad had conjured every night over his paraffin lamp – blowing on the glass, rubbing it with a special fluffy cloth till it shone, trimming the overgrown wick with a pair of little scissors just as he used to trim his own moustache…

And then light would appear, first shrouding the lamp with steam and then – as Grandad lengthened the wick – slowly driving the steam away. Grandad would stand the lamp in the middle of the low rectangular table that was the same height as their cat – she used to rub against the table so often that her back was going bald – and they would all sit down round the lamp, and round the food laid out on the table, and eat an evening meal which always ended with the words, “Adam boy busin, pullari kup busin, uiimiz yorug busin, amin!”
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There were gypsies in Gilas. Some were the kind you see everywhere, the kind that are said to have wandered across from Europe, in the season when mating camels run wild in the Kazakh steppe and the apricot and the lilac come into blossom in the gardens of Uzbekistan. But Gilas also had gypsies of its own, who were already blending in with the darkest of the Uzbeks – the ones known in Gilas as black cow-pats – and these unforgettable
lyuli
had come not from some far-away Europe but from Achaobod, their very own quarter of the Old City.

The first kind of gypsies taught Gilas how to make the most of the railway line. Once a year the freight train would make an unauthorised stop beside the level crossing (something unthinkable in the days of Kaganovich)
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and the night would fill with the sounds of impatient prancing and freedom-loving whinnying. And by early morning the Orlov trotters, Turkmen Akhal-Tekes and Vladimir carthorses would have been taken to the Kok-Terek Bazaar and exchanged for Astrakhan wool or ingots of Uzbek gold. The life of the second kind of gypsies – the
lyuli
– was simpler and richer.

Every Sunday Gilas woke to the whistle of the 7:12 and the sound of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum shouting “
Sharra-Barra! Sharra-Barra!
Rubbish and scrap!” In spring his donkey-cart would squeal in protest as it struggled, ever more heavily laden with old rags, rare bottles and ancient paraffin lamps, through the deep mud of the sidestreets. Sleepy children would come running after it, clutching bits and pieces they had put aside during the week and were hoping to exchange for something precious from the trunk on top of the driving-box: a bouncy rubber ball, a lollipop, a clay whistle that would start to dissolve in the saliva of a child's mouth long before Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum's next squealing visit.

Towards noon – when the last lollipop had been crunched up, when the balls had bounced into scorpion-infested attics, when whistles whose sound filled the
mahallya
had dropped into filthy ditches and pushed up their levels of fertile silt – another
lyuli
, Adkham-Kukruz-Popcorn, would appear. His panniers slung across the back of his donkey, he would shout out to the whole of Gilas: “Hot Fresh Kukruz! Hot Fresh Popcorn!”

And the children would again come running, exchanging whatever they had been too sleepy to snatch up in the morning for balls of hot popcorn that looked just like the apricot blossom now coming out all over the town.

Around three in the afternoon Gilas would be deafened by the metallic cries of Asom-Paraff, a half-Uzbek and half-Tadjik as black as any gypsy. After the fripperies of the
lyuli
, his “Paraffeen! Par-a-ff-e-e-en!” was an irruption of reality that would bring the whole adult population of Gilas out onto the street to queue for another week's supply for their stoves and lamps.

Around sunset, a few hours after the cart with the pitch-black container of paraffin, old Bahri-Granny-Fortunes would appear and call out in a voice as cracked as her divining mirror, “Fortunes told! Fortunes told to the bold! Let my words bring you gold!” Then she would quietly enter the yard where Khairi-Puchuk sat waiting for her husband, who was languishing in jail or in a distant camp – or she would slip into some other yard, where some other patient wife would then start worrying about whether or not she was obliged to prepare a meal for this Artist of Fortunes who had honoured her with a visit.

No matter where she settled, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes would remain there for several hours – until, it was sometimes said, she had secured her hostess's last kopek. Whether or not this is true, around the same time as the whistle of the 21:13 Gilas would hear the call of her son Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum, now returned from his wanderings and searching for his mother. “Acha! Hey, Acha-Gar! Hey, Whore of a Mother!” he would call out – and then settle his contented mother on the day's pile of old clothes. The silver coin of the moon, or perhaps bits of broken bottles collected by her son, shone in her eyes like splinters as he carried her away into a night as black as their life and their faces.

Since there was no muezzin in Gilas, some of the devout old men and women, including Garang-Deafmullah himself, looked on these five Sunday cries as calls to prayer and remembered the precise time they had heard them throughout the following week.

Gilas had no quarrel with the first – European – breed of gypsy, especially after it emerged that, in spite of their centuries of wandering, these gypsies had the same words as Uzbeks to designate the fundamentals of life:
dushman
and
nomus
: “enemy” and “conscience.” These gypsies certainly brought no harm to Gilas and if they ever fooled anyone with those skinny old nags they sometimes pumped up with air through their arseholes and tried to pass off as young stallions, it was only the odd dumb Kazakh from the steppe. It's true that they left a lot of garbage behind them, but the children soon put this to good use; they took the waste paper to school, and they took everything else, the very next Sunday, to Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum. The latter wrinkled his nose a bit at the smell of his nomadic kinsmen, but that didn't stop him from paying for it with a shiny rubber ball or a faulty whistle that made a sound like a baby with diarrhoea and was a source of endless amusement to the young boys of Gilas.

Leaving behind them horses, garbage and the foulest of curses, the male gypsies went straight from the Kok-Terek Bazaar to the City, where they exchanged their money for hashish and gold, while their wives – forever with babies in their arms and dark bruises under their eyes – begged or told fortunes in the station or beside the Komsomol Lake, evidently led by some tribal etiquette to leave the fortunes of Gilas itself to be told by their settled kinswoman, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes.

Attending to the needs even of the atheistic Russians, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes had established herself – at least until Uchmah-Prophecies started to gain a reputation – as Gilas's one and only soothsayer. The old woman's successful monopolisation of the trade in fate, futures and fortunes was, first and foremost, a consequence of a story involving Janna-Nurse – the daughter, by his first marriage, of the first Russian bigamist in Gilas.

Janna-Nurse worked in the medical commission of the Gilas War Commissariat and therefore had access – to put it baldly – to all the young male members of Gilas. Every girl in Gilas consulted her with regard to the masculine virtues of her chosen one – and she, with honourable impartiality, without exaggeration or belittlement, passed on to her girlfriends and to the friends of her girlfriends and even to the friends of the friends of her girlfriends her knowledge of the physical attributes of the future defenders of the Motherland. At one point Janna-Nurse began to think of herself as Janna-Spy, dropped by the maidens of Gilas into enemy territory, and she often dreamed of herself as Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya gritting her teeth under torture or Alexander Morozov throwing himself against enemy mortars.
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One night, after flinging herself in self-sacrificial ardour on top of enemy bunkers and pillboxes, she woke to find her heroic dream flowing between her young thighs in the form of a warm stream of moisture.

Another night she saw herself as Janna d'Arc, being burnt on a pyre for reasons best left unsaid. In a word, Janna was a faithful and self-effacing servant to her contemporaries for many years.

But when the grandson of Tolib-Butcher was called up for military service; when this Nasim, who for some reason had been nicknamed Nasim-Shlagbaum,
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had to stand in the War Commissariat amid a row of other swarthy and scrawny youths; when Ishankul Ilyichevich the surgeon told them all to pull their blue cotton pants down to their knees and bend over with their feet apart to be checked for haemorrhoids; when Janna-Nurse went down the row in her usual way, inspecting the hairy anuses with their little lumps of dried excrement; when she got to the middle of the row… At first Janna couldn't understand what it was and thought she was being offered a bribe. Yes, just as a long red strip of fillet usually hung from a hook in the shop of Tolib-Butcher, so something unspeakably long was now hanging down, swaying gently and almost touching the floor, between the wide-open legs of Nasim-Shlagbaum. But however dumbstruck this left her, Janna-Nurse's medical knowledge was enough to tell her that this was no fillet; no, it was what she needed to fill her. Two balls as black as bull's liver, in a giant scrotum, framed an unbelievable…

Janna-Nurse quite forgot about haemorrhoids – as she honourably admitted a few minutes later to Ishankul Ilyichevich. He for his part, as he was examining Nasim-Shlagbaum, had suddenly burst out, “You bastard, you must have swum to the other side of the Zakh Canal and got yourself infected there by the donkeys. What a tool! How could you grow a tool like that all by yourself? You'll need to wrap it up carefully in Russia or it'll be whipped off you by the winter winds and frosts!”

Yes, after listening to these words, Janna had come back to herself, taken a deep breath and said, “I'm sorry – I forgot to check him for haemorrhoids.”

The surgeon went off to wash his hands; seeing this monstrosity had utterly destroyed his sense of himself as a man.

Then Janna laid poor Nasim on his side and, barely able to hold back her tears of joy, plunged a shining speculum into the youth's behind, clutching simultaneously with a trembling and icy hand at his unbelievable…

After that Janna-Nurse knew no peace. For two years, while Nasim-Shlagbaum was freezing his extremities in the Red Army, she dreamed of a shiny steel speculum and the soft, lowered barrier of her chosen one; sensing that nothing else could penetrate her dreams any longer, she slowly grasped the full import of his name. She found out the address of his military unit from his grandfather, Tolib-Butcher – who had at one time been secretly in love with her stepmother, although it has to be said that his professional interest in flesh meant that he had at one time or another been in love with every woman in Gilas – and began writing to dear Nasim. At first she wrote in the name of the trade union committee of soldiers' mothers and sisters; then she sent advice with regard to the care and strengthening of the body's extremities in extreme climatic conditions; and in the end their correspondence took on a friendly, or even more than friendly tone. In a word, when Nasim-Shlagbaum's military service drew to an end, it was clear that he had a girl of his own waiting for him in his hometown.

Tolib-Butcher, however, was now honourably approaching the age of retirement and – just in case any other passport data ever needed changing – he had sent a matchmaker on Nasim's behalf to ask for the hand of the eldest granddaughter of Oppok-Lovely. And so, when dear Nasim returned to everyday life after the obligatory week of alcoholic oblivion following his release from the army, he found he was on the threshold of bigamy. Tormented in her dreams by a secret she had not yet revealed to anyone, Janna was waiting for him with patient determination – while Tolib-Butcher made it clear to his grandson that he was in no hurry to die, that he wanted no more difficulties with documents and that if Nasim didn't marry the right woman he'd get out his butcher's cleaver and start sharpening it there and then on Nasim's tool.

And so, in the daytime Nasim walked quietly around the town – the future grandson of the all-powerful Oppok-Lovely. But in the evenings, when everyone was flocking to see the Indian films put on by Ortik-Picture-Reels in his outdoor theatre, Nasim-Shlagbaum would meet Janna-Nurse – who now called him by the more decorous name of Nasim-Shokolad – among the rushes beside the Salty Canal. In the duck-filled darkness they repeated to one another the contents of their letters while the moon, shining down at them from the clear sky and up at them from the cloudy water, gleamed in Janna's eyes like that same shameful speculum.

Towards the end of the summer film season, when they had got through all their letters and the evenings were turning chilly, they began to kiss – and Janna-Nurse, for the first time in all her years of tormenting dreams, divulged her secret. Yes, thinking she might need to take prophylactic measures, she confessed everything to Natka-Pothecary, the daughter of Vera-Virgo the prostitute and Bolta-Lightning the electrician. After that, Janna-Nurse took to visiting the chemist's every morning; she would say that she needed to go and collect prescriptions, new surgical gloves or purgatives for the recruits, but what she really wanted was to talk to Natka about her evenings by the canal.

There were problems. Ortik-Picture-Reels had already moved to his winter quarters in the “Sputnik” building, but something was wrong with Nasim. In the words of Janna-Nurse to Natka: “His… er… you know… his… it won't stand up.” Natka had been well informed about such matters since childhood, having kept her eyes and ears open when her father was clambering up poles in order to electrify the town's darkness and strangers used to take advantage of this to come and visit her mother. Her advice to Janna was to touch him as if without meaning to, to lean on him as if inadvertently, to reach out a hand unexpectedly…

Nothing, alas, made any difference. It might have been the terrible Russian frosts, the same frosts that had at one time or another destroyed the military might of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler; it might have been his grandfather's impassioned threats or it might have been a memory of a speculum being stuck up a rectum – but in any case, whatever the reason, Nasim was himself as bewildered and tormented as Janna-Nurse, who kept touching him without meaning to, leaning on him inadvertently, reaching out a hand unexpectedly…

It was then that Natka-Pothecary suggested taking Nasim-Shokolad to Bahri-Granny-Fortunes – Gilas's healer, diviner and sorceress. Since it was unacceptable for someone with Janna-Nurse's medical education to visit a mere quack, it was decided that Natka-Pothecary should take Nasim to the old woman; and since Bahri-Granny-Fortunes only told fortunes to women and the girls didn't want to make Nasim suspicious, it was Natka's fortune they would ask her to tell.