The Railway (7 page)

Among the mulberry thickets that stretched between the Korean
mahallya
and the thin line of the first houses of Papanin Street there were also a few fig trees. No one knew about them except Boikush (whom Tolib-Butcher had once led there) and her neighbour Zebi, the beautiful wife of the one-eyed war veteran Fatkhulla-Frontline – the mind, conscience and honour of the
mahallya
. Once, as Boikush and Zebi slipped off into the trees, pretending they needed to relieve themselves when what they really wanted was to enjoy the paradisiacal fruits beneath which Tolib-Butcher had once told Boikush the story of Adam and Eve, they heard a voice calling their names. It was Vera the Korean. Or maybe Lyuba. Or Nadya.

“Damn her! She's been watching us!” Boikush said furiously. And a moment later, in a clear friendly voice, she called out, “Hey! Come and join us! We can have a feast of figs!” Then she looked at Zebi and quietly added, “She was coming anyway…”

Here in the attic, beneath the chaikhana's sloping roof, the boy had a secret place of his own. This was where he slept when he didn't go home; it was here that he would lie awake until late and listen to the never-ending stories, the sometimes enchanting, sometimes tedious stories that drifted up the chimney, the stories the old men used to tell then just as they do now.

Their endless talk was like a lullaby – as otherworldly as the sleepy light that hovered over the paraffin lamp on winter evenings when the family sat down together to tease out the seeds from the cotton and Grandmother would measure the slowly growing heap of cotton wool with a length of cloth and quietly hum:

Gunokhim bora-bora togdin oshdi,
Kiemat kun mani sharmanda kilma...
My sins climb higher than the hills –
On judgment day forgive my guilt...

And this half-whispered song would draw the boy towards a sleep that was softer than cotton wool between slow fingers and quieter than the light from the paraffin lamp he had just cleaned. But now, after the funeral, the boy was afraid of going to sleep; yes, it would be wrong to go to sleep, just as it had been wrong for his family to eat after the funeral, or maybe it would be still more sinful and wrong, because there would be no one to blame but himself... And so he began brushing off the straw that had stuck to his flannelette school uniform
– his jacket or, as his grandad called it, or rather had used to call it, his
kitel
40
– and his grandad had called it a
kitel
because his grandad used to call anything he wore a
kitel
, with the result that once, soon after he first started travelling to Moscow by train, he came back home with what he called a summer
kitel
, and he put it on the following morning– a
kitel
with thin stripes like a mattress – along with a pair of equally stripy trousers, and no matter how much the women tried to dissuade him, he had insisted on setting off to the City, wearing what Uncle Izaly from the Tailoring Co-operative called pyjamas, and wearing them, moreover, tucked into his eternal red canvas boots...

And this flannelette
kitel
, which was no less shameful than Grandad's pyjamas, this shameful
kitel
whose only good point was that you could spill ink on it without it showing, this
kitel
was all the more hateful to the boy for being an award from his school; and the shame he had felt when squint-eyed Annushka had announced at the parade in honour of Lenin's birthday that he was being awarded this uniform in recognition of his excellent schoolwork and exemplary conduct, and when in spite of his having run away from that accursed and shameful parade she had got that idiot Natashka to take this horrible uniform to his home, which had led Granny to go on in front of Natashka about how her own children had never been given anything of the kind – this shame had made him run away from home for the first time.

It had been just before the May holidays – and the mere thought of not having to go to school had made him feel happy, but all of a sudden the boy's heart had filled with aching
toskà
:
41
who would he find to play football with?

Nevertheless, he had been determined not to return home. Instead, he had decided to go and find Grandad – who had also fallen out with Granny and left home: yes, he would live on the streets – he would live anywhere; but he would not go home. What to do about school he could decide later, but after the shame he had felt during the parade... And now, as he sat in his attic and removed the straw that had stuck to the
kitel
, he hated this garment doubly: because of the shame he had felt in front of the entire school and – still more – because, even as he remembered the shame of it first being presented to him, he also hated the way he looked in it now – wearing this charity uniform that was too big for him and had got covered in bits of straw.

Granny had said, “See – the school's looking after you, they've given
you a uniform. It was different for your poor mother – she had to go to school in a dress made from sackcloth. I sewed it for her myself in the co-operative... They sent sacks of wadding for soldiers' jackets, and one of the sacks tore... My poor little daughter...” And she began to cry; or rather her voice began to cry, while she herself went on folding his uniform, smoothing out the flapping sleeves and doing up two of the star-embossed metal buttons.

He had refused to put on this wretched handout and Granny had gone on and on at him. At one point she had even brought Grandad into it, saying to the boy's mother that it was quite impossible to be so
persnickety
, and so what if Grandad was just as bad, he and the boy weren't even blood relatives…

This had been more than the boy could bear, and a kind of whirling inside him – a whirling like the whirling of water being poured fast into a large bottle, a whirling that deafened his ears and caused utterly unexpected tears to splash out from his eyes – snatched him up, whirled him out through the gate and down the little street, past Huvron-Barber's fortress-like walls and all the way to the railway embankment, and then swept him in the direction of the small bazaar by the station and then from sleeper to sleeper of the railway line, up towards the depot. On he walked until he came to a place he did not know at all but where at least there was an end to his tears, an end to the snot he spat out after every ten of those hateful ‘per-nick-et-y's, and where even that awful word no longer seemed as hurtful as it had done before, although there was still a dry bitterness on his tongue and this bitterness was made still more bitter by a wind blowing from somewhere a long way away, from beyond the thickets of Russian olive and the ploughed land by the embankment, from somewhere in the wormwood-filled steppe.

And the boy felt a strange freedom, as if he were alone on this empty and slowly darkening earth, without hurtful words, without shame and fear, without any need for friends who go away with their parents and spend holidays in the City, without even the City itself, where he too used to go with Granny – but only to buy lollipops that they sold as soon as they got back to Gilas; as if he could now do whatever he felt
like, as if he could shout out at the top of his voice, “Mummy, Mummy, I love you!” and be frightened only by his very first shout, which startled a crow into shooting up from behind some clods of ploughed-up earth and cawing crossly as it flew off down the line of telegraph poles; yes, he was able to pick up a stone and throw it at that crow, for no reason at all, simply because he was free to, because he was free to do anything he felt like doing – except that there was nothing to do. The boy was amazed by this emptiness – an emptiness very like the sky's, which was getting lower and lower before his very eyes and which seemed to be bringing together the two sides of the boundless earth just as Granny used to fold together the two sides of her oilskin cloth after the boy had kneaded the dough with his fists – and then she would put the bowl with the dough to one side, so that the boy could cover it with a cloth and a blanket while she folded up her oilskin, tapping it on the underside to make specks of flour sprinkle down from it just as stars would soon sprinkle down on the earth.

The boy was so entranced by the sky that he felt as startled by a sudden hoot as he had been by the crow, and he jumped down off the embankment even before he realised that it was a train – and that the drivers might just have been having a little fun, laughing at him for standing where they had never seen anyone standing before. He was almost certain of this, and still more certain when a light swept over his head and only when he looked back did he realise that this was the sunset reflected by the glass windows of the locomotive cab, but he still didn't feel like climbing out from behind his mound of earth. Only when another hoot, right beside him, made the earth tremble, only when the locomotive thundered past on its heavy wheels did he climb out from his crow's hideaway, meaning to shake his fist at the locomotive just as he had thrown a stone at the departing crow, but then he saw it was a passenger train and didn't know what to do. It was too late to go back and hide, nor did he want to, especially since people were looking out of the windows at the sunset over the fields and it was impossible for him to stand opposite them as they rushed past – impossible not because he was disturbing them but because they were
disturbing him; it was they who had burst into his life, not he into theirs, but as he thought about what he could do to get his own back he saw that there wasn't really anyone at all looking at the sunset and that they were all busy with affairs of their own: a woman was sorting out her berth, unfolding the sheet just as Granny used to unfold her oilcloth; someone was eating; someone was drinking. And in the restaurant car still more people were eating and drinking.

And when the boy had begun to feel quite cross that there was no one for him to revenge himself on, he caught sight of a girl, standing behind an open door at the end of one of the very last coaches and looking out at the sunset. There was no one else for the boy to get his revenge on – everyone else was safely behind a window – and so the boy desperately began wondering what he should do: throw some clay at her, undo his flies, or even pull his trousers right down... As the coach drew level with him, he felt utterly bewildered and, clumsily kissing the ends of his fingers, he threw a kiss in the girl's direction; the girl, taken aback, stood there and smiled and didn't even hold a finger to her temple and rotate it but instead leaned out of the coach, holding on to the handrail and looking in his direction. And this bewildered him still more and even made him blush – and when the train's red tail-light disappeared round a distant bend, the boy's shame was still humming in the rails, which were warm from the red sun that had been warming them all day long, and this hum passed through his flaming cheeks and into his heart, which was beating out its quick beat just as the wheels of the train were doing on the rails.

And the boy shouted, “Girl, I love you,” and this time there wasn't anything he was frightened of, because he knew that in the falling darkness his voice would not carry beyond this ploughed earth, beyond these Russian olives, beyond this emptiness which was by now a personal emptiness that he had himself marked and filled, filled so full that now he wanted to leave it alone, like well-worked dough that has already risen to the top of the bowl; and he began to walk quickly back along the sleepers.

His mother used to tell Mahmud-Hodja
42
that he had been born in the Year of the Dog, in early summer, when the apricots were being harvested all over the province of Andizhan.
43
On the very same day that Mahmud-Hodja was born, their neighbour Suleiman-Haberdasher also had a son, Abdulhamid – who was later to become a poet and end up being shot. And so, growing up together, Mahmud-Hodja and Abdulhamid lived through both the Andizhan uprising and the great earthquake; during the uprising they were locked inside Suleiman-Haberdasher's stone warehouse along with bats that flew out in alarm from cracks in the walls, squeaking and flapping their wings. Then they were sent to study in the first Russian school in Andizhan, where the teachers were all Tatars, small-minded people with a small-minded way of talking. They were sent there on the insistence of the uncle of Mahmud-Hodja – Hodja Mahmud-Hodja the Elder – a man who had travelled through many lands and countries, both to Mecca and in the opposite direction, to the land of Gog and Magog, and who, being an exceptional merchant, couldn't help but notice even during the Hadj
44
that prayer rugs were more expensive in Mecca whereas dates were cheaper there by precisely as much as fur in Russia was cheaper than Bukhara silk rugs in Bulgaria, and who had also insisted on importing into Andizhan the incomprehensible and new-fangled word “Jadid,” which he had no doubt picked up at some distant fair and which he insisted was the best and newest word for everything new.
45

Both in matters of trade and in matters of religion (not that it was always easy to tell these matters apart, given Mahmud-Hodja's way of setting out on the path to Mecca laden with prayer rugs and returning laden with dates) Hodja Mahmud-Hodja the Elder was a great deal more successful than his neighbour Suleiman-Haberdasher, who was so ill-fitted for business that he even started writing poetry; consequently, it was Hodja Mahmud-Hodja the Elder who decided the fate both of his nephew Mahmud-Hodja the Younger and of his neighbour's son Abdulhamid. He made up his mind without hesitation: the children were to study languages, and they were to study according to the newest methods.

Mahmud-Hodja lived halfway between the cities of Andizhan and Osh, so as not to belong to anyone but himself. His eccentric habit of opening new-method schools in this city and that city, under the direction of groups of Tatars he had recruited from Kazan, Orenburg and Bakhchisaray, failed to draw down the wrath of inveterate conservatives for the simple reason that in the whole of Turkestan there was no other Muslim who had so many times completed the Hadj.

And so, every lesser holy day, when the orthodox of Andizhan would go and prostrate themselves before the sacred Mount Suleiman outside the city of Osh – a pilgrimage they referred to somewhat unorthodoxly as a “quarter Hadj”; when Suleiman-Haberdasher would most truly and deeply appreciate the significance of his name and therefore, on the eve of the holy day, order horses to be harnessed to his phaeton – yes, to a genuine phaeton that had been “written off ,” in exchange for twenty bottles of sultana brandy, by the local colonel and district governor in the village called “Soldier,” where a regiment of the Russian army of occupation was stationed; when the little boys had sat down in the early morning of this holy day behind their impressive fathers and the phaeton had set off at an insane speed; when, later in the morning of this holy day, the phaeton had reached the halfway point between Andizhan and Osh, having long since overtaken all the crawling and creaking mule-carts – all of a sudden, about fifty paces from a huge stone house that stood alone by a turn in the road, the panting steeds would be reined in and the phaeton would come to a halt; everyone would dismount and, after allowing the dust to settle, walk slowly up to the house. On the rare occasions when Hodja Mahmud-Hodja the Elder was at home, he would come out to pay his respects, offer everyone a cup of tea – and test the children's knowledge of languages; but more often than not the master of the house would turn out to be away on his religious business and they would have to content themselves with making low bows to his house; only after walking another fifty paces would they climb back into the phaeton and resume their wild rush to Mount Suleiman. In the meantime other people's carts went on squeaking and sending up clouds of dust a mile away from the house, on a special road that Hodja Mahmud-Hodja the Elder had had built for them.

In 1905 the Russian Tsar suffered a revolution and Mahmud-Hodja the Elder got stuck with his goods somewhere on the road between Petersburg and Moscow; a Bukhara Jew who found his way back from those parts said that all-out anarchy had already erupted and that revolutionary railway soldiers had shot the merchant and appropriated his goods. Whatever the truth of all this, the disturbances slowly spread further and the Tatar teachers, who were no longer receiving their pay, all disappeared – some to become revolutionaries, others to become journalists, and yet others to become mullahs. It was then quickly agreed that it would be best for the boys to go and study in the same school as their fathers and grandads before them – the Kokand madrasah. But even the madrasah was no longer what it had been; staffed half by Tatar mullahs who had been thrown out of new-method schools and half by migrant Turks, even madrasahs now sowed seeds of sedition in the souls of the young. It was therefore not long before Abdulhamid ran off to the City, intending to become a famous poet and spread the Revolution further. His father was surprisingly quick to forgive him his poetic ambition, after venting his initial rage in verse – and in time he even forgave him his political ambition, deciding reasonably enough that his son was in any case never going to learn anything more, or anything better, from this medley of half-baked mullahs.

The father of Mahmud-Hodja the Younger died soon afterwards, unable to get over the disappearance of his brother, and the young man, deprived by this accursed revolution of his uncle, his best friend and his father, gave up his studies and became a merchant. After his first trip to Khodzhent, his mother died too; when the year of mourning was over, Mahmud-Hodja the Younger married off his sisters, sold the now empty house, bought a flock of sheep from the Kirghiz of Mookat and, together with a cousin by the name of Alihon-Tura, drove this flock over the mountains into Merke and Pishpek.
46

It was summer, but high in the mountains they were caught by a snowfall that killed half the flock. There and then they roasted the sheep over a fire, eating as much meat as would fit in their manly stomachs and leaving what remained to a Kirghiz called Maike whose home was somewhere nearby. In the course of the next three days Maike put away an improbable amount of this meat and then, big-bellied and rosy-cheeked, hurried off in search of the mountain onions he needed to accompany it. By the upper reaches of the Naryn river he caught up with Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura; after eating an entire sack of Asakin onions, he drank the icy mountain stream almost dry – yes, in those days men were men.

Then Maike led Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura through secret ravines and hollows along the southern slopes of the mountains, where the grass grew furiously and the sheep grew fatter even as they walked. Soon the sheep began to multiply, and by the end of summer, when they came down along the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul towards the holy city of Balasagun,
47
the flock – in spite of Maike's insatiable need for meat – was almost as large as when they had left Andizhan.

After selling half the flock to local Dungans,
48
they bought two houses in the Dungan part of the city. Soon afterwards Mahmud-Hodja the Younger married the beautiful Zamira-Bonu from Sairam, who had been staying in the city with relatives of Alihon-Tura.

For several years life went well, but then there were more revolutionary events; this time it was Alihon-Tura who got stuck with all his goods, somewhere on the road between Tashkent and Djizak. Sensing the beginning of a new round of misfortunes, Mahmud-Hodja the Younger hurried to perform a propitiatory rite – a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. In exchange for Chinese gold he sold one quarter of his flock, which had continued to multiply, to the Dungans; he left another quarter of the flock for the upkeep of his family and then – together with Maike and Alihon-Tura, who had just managed to get back to Balasagun – drove the remaining sheep along the spurs of the Tien Shan Mountains and the Pamirs towards Khorasan. During their passage across the high mountains Maike consumed half of this half-flock but, by the time they came down into the valley of the blessed Euphrates, the flock had miraculously doubled again. Maike drank from the upper reaches of the Euphrates just as he had once drunk from the Naryn, while the sheep waded to the other bank through waters growing shallower by the minute.

On the Arabian Peninsula they were more than once buried in sand, and Maike was able to eat only half of what he had eaten before – there was not a drop of water, and certainly no onions, so he washed down the sheep he ate with the blood of those being sacrificed. In the deserts of Hidjaz they left whole sand dunes over the countless sheep that had died of hunger. When they drew near the sacred mountain of Arafat, Maike abruptly refused to go any further. He stayed behind to help the flock multiply, while Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura went on to worship.

While Mahmud-Hodja was worshipping, a daughter was born to him in far-off Balasagun; she had been conceived the day he set out on the Hadj and for this reason, without consultation with her father, was given the name Hadjiya. Mahmud-Hodja learned this when he met up again with Maike; while Mahmud-Hodja was praying in Mecca and casting stones at the evil spirit that had flooded the world with sedition and revolution, Maike had been granted a vision. A voice had ordered him to sell the entire flock. But there was nothing to be bought with the gold he acquired other than these same sheep – or their butchered meat – and so Mahmud-Hodja and his fellow-pilgrims found the simple-hearted Maike sitting on a bag of gold; he had eaten nothing for over a week.

Maike had eaten nothing, but his every thought was full of light. Towards morning, when the first of the travellers awoke, Maike began to sing. He sang about all he could see, and all he could see became song: poppies on the slopes of the mountain, curly clouds in the blue ash of the sky, curly sheep – sheep he had himself sold – on the burnt-out ash of the hillsides, sunset over the desert, stars close to the horizon. He sang about human fate at the mercy of Providence and about the journey he and his companions had made over the sands. His songs were strange and wonderful; terrifying evocations of fire and dishevelled mountains suddenly resolved into images of fruitful palms and rivers flowing gently between low foothills.
49

It cost Maike nothing to compose hundreds of lines about a horseman who galloped past or a little hamster whistling in the Iraqi desert, but what inspired him most were the mountains of Anatolia and Akhal-Teke horses; the poems he composed about these splendid steeds were later incorporated verbatim in
Manas
, the Kirghiz national epic.
50

Strangest of all was the way the sands of the desert no longer swept over them, nor the snows of the mountains, nor the dust of the steppe. And since Maike was almost constantly playing a kobuz
51
– one made from Mazendaran mulberry by the Turkmen of Khorasan – he almost stopped eating and drinking again. Swollen by the rains that Maike sang down from the skies, dried-up rivers would turn to raging floods as he and Alihon-Tura stepped onto the far bank, and mountains rose up behind them like an unbroken stone wall, hiding the gorges through which they had passed.

In Herat, before the burial vault of the great vizir and poet Mir Alisher Navoi,
52
the uneducated Maike began to recite ghazals in Persian; Djebral-Semavi, the Persian keeper of this burial vault, was so struck by the wild magnificence of Maike's poetry that he invited him and Mahmud-Hodja to be his guests, even though he himself was a Shiite and they were both Sunnis.

During theological discussion it emerged that Djebral had escaped the previous year from revolution in Iran, just as Mahmud-Hodja had escaped from revolution in Russia. Maike then sang to them about the falcon of righteousness and the snake of sedition. Moved to tears, Djebral insisted that they stay another seven days and presented the singer with a small flock of fine-haired Kandahar goats. All those seven days Djebral, Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura ate, prayed and talked of a promised land where there was no sedition and everyone was like Maike. On the eighth day, as they were taking their leave of one another, the unschooled Maike sang in Arabic a farewell elegy to the extinguished hearth, an elegy that the retentive Persian immediately wrote down, although it was subsequently classified as a pre-Islamic
muallaka
and ascribed to Imr-Ul-Kais.
53

As they travelled on, Maike once again began to sing in Kirghiz – that way the flock grazed and multiplied better; and after they had passed Mazari-Sharif, as they drew close to the upper reaches of the Vakhsh and the Margi Mor mountain, they were overtaken by Djebral-Semavi, who had disposed of all his property in order that, like the happy Mahmud-Hodja, he might see the promised land which had brought forth such prodigies as the incomparable Maike.

Together they passed Gissar and Zerafshan, Djizak and Khodzhent and then, in the steppe near Tashkent, not far from the Gilas river, they came upon a never-ending ladder with wooden rungs and iron rails that lay stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon. As Maike, struck dumb in the middle of his singing, was looking despondently at his feet, he heard a high-pitched whistle in the distance; this whistle, similar at first to that of a hamster in the Iraqi sands, grew louder and deeper and suddenly acquired a fire-spitting face, which filled Maike with terror. Bleating like uncastrated kids, the goats scattered about the steppe; the horses stumbled amid the sheep; Djebral, Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura wheezed and trembled and prayed towards Mecca. And then, whistling and thundering, a snake-like wonder hurtled past them, packed both on the inside and on top with infidels shouting and waving their hands. “The End of the World!” thought both Mahmud-Hodja the Sunni and Djebral the Shiite.