The Railway (8 page)

Trembling all the while like a shaman, Maike began to sing in some croaking and fragmentary tongue. This hoarse and strange song continued for two hours. Punctuated by the word “Gilas,” which became a kind of refrain, terrible images followed one upon another – of a river frozen solid out of terror of the final day, of water turning into iron before men's eyes, of silt and rushes changing into wooden cross-beams, of blood that could be washed away only by tears... Blind old men appeared in Maike's visions, followed by murdered boys, all crowding about the bank of this now impassable iron river. Now it was Maike's words that breathed fire – and the river became the bridge of Sirat,
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which was being crossed not by people but by a people-devouring monster. Suddenly Maike's voice shot up, far above the dust, into the heights where the steppe sun was listening entranced. No less suddenly his voice melted into blue smoke. The goats calmed down, the horses stood still, and the men arose from their prayers. Then Maike sang his last song about Gilas – a Gilas that was now a happy and barely attainable dream – and bloody saliva sprayed from his burnt and blackened mouth. And at sunset Maike stopped breathing and fell to the ground.

In the morning of the following day Djebral, Mahmud-Hodja and Alihon-Tura gave Maike the burial of a true believer, washing him in the muddy waters of the Gilas river and sewing him up in the travelling turban of a man who has completed the Hadj. They wept for him and buried him beside an ancient burial mound not far from the Kazakh village of Kaplan-Bek. Djebral settled in the nearest inhabited spot – a small town near where they had first come upon the iron ladder and which turned out, like the river, to be called Gilas – and once again became the keeper of a grave: the unknown grave of the unknown Maike. Mahmud-Hodja and all his family soon moved there too, in order that the grace brought into the world by Maike should increase and blossom. But the iron road, the ladder stretching far across the earth, had already become the path of a new Revolution.

Obid-Kori was now living with his one and only Oyimcha, but he did not know peace. He was tormented by the thought that Oyimcha – this highborn descendant of the Prophet – was only his because of the power of money. He was tormented by the thought that every one of her many relatives looked down on him; however pious or well educated he might be, he was still “only a Kirghiz.” When the first snow fell on the mountains, when the first flakes drifted down onto Mookat, one of Oyimcha's cousins had tucked under Obid-Kori's belt a slip of paper bearing the words:

Men must prepare, should snowy news
Fall in their lap, a splendid feast.
Our Kirghiz brother will not refuse –
He too will prove a gracious host.

According to Sart custom, this “snowy news” obliged Obid-Kori to lay on a huge feast and invite every one of his relatives. And – Allah be praised! – Obid-Kori intended to be as gracious a host as any of them. But what the sly Sart really meant was only too clear: “You may only be a Kirghiz – but you must do as we do!”

Allah alone is omniscient. Had Obid-Kori known that Oyimcha's cousin had slipped a similar note under the belt of every one of his relatives, then he might not have been so upset – but, as the saying goes, any stone can sharpen a knife. And so Obid-Kori went on tormenting himself, constantly searching for evidence that his new relatives despised him.

He resolved to teach only Sart boys – the brothers of girls who had been sent to study with Oyimcha. But the Kirghiz – straightforward men from the mountains who came down every week to the Sunday bazaar – went on bowing to him out of respect for his father Mirzaraim-Bey and did not even notice his attempts to avoid them; as for the smug Sarts, they were too full of themselves and their self-centred valley-dwelling ways to realise how desperately he longed for them to accept him.

Most of the time Obid-Kori sat at home, either deep in his own thoughts or else teaching Sart children Arabic and Persian, poetry and philosophy and the Holy Koran. Apart from the boys passed on to him by his highborn wife, his students were mostly orphans and children of the poor – more and more of them every year. It was wartime and their fathers were being conscripted for trench-digging and other manual labour behind the front line.

And then, towards the end of one winter, the Russian Tsar suffered yet more troubles; this time his troubles were called a Revolution. The news, admittedly, only reached Mookat around the beginning of summer, when a mullah accompanied by three Russian soldiers arrived from Skobelev in order to mobilise the benighted population towards Enlightenment and the creation of political parties. The local Sarts were at best indifferent to these appeals, which offered no prospects of better trading in naan bread, potatoes or dried apricots; the warlike Kirghiz, however, were so entranced by the Russians' promise of firearms that they missed the Sunday bazaar two weeks running, leaving the Sarts' bread to go stale and their apricots to rot while they rode from one high pasture to another to spread the good news.

Obid-Kori himself had stuffed both proclamations – the one from the mullah and the one from the Russians – up his sleeve, and he had forgotten all about them while he taught his lessons. As he was washing before his evening prayers, the papers fell out of the rolled-up sleeve of his gown and he put them to one side so they wouldn't get wet; only as he was getting ready to go to bed and Oyimcha was wrapping their first-born Abdulhamidjan in his swaddling clothes did he remember them. By the light of a feeble, shaded lamp, clad in white underwear that made him look like a gawky stork, he unfolded the proclamations, read them one after the other, then tucked the one written in Persian by the Kokand “Holy Mullahs”
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into his handkerchief and threw the other one, which was printed in Russian, into a niche from which it was removed the following day by Oyimcha, who looked on anything written in the Russian script as profane.

One proclamation told Obid-Kori how the mullahs of Turkestan had decided to create an Islamic state free of distinctions of tribe and birth; the other told him, in Russian, about some “classless society” in which everyone would be equal. Obid-Kori pondered all this for a long time. The two documents seemed to be talking about one and the same thing, so what was the difference between them? However many wise books Obid-Kori read, he found that they were always devoted to the same question: how can everyone be made equally happy just like that? But if the Almighty had chosen to make people different, was it in man's power to change this? And then wasn't this the very same problem that had tormented Obid-Kori – who had left the Kirghiz but never quite managed to join the Sarts – for so many years? Wasn't it this that had caused him so much suffering – torn as he was between valley and mountain, between horse and book?

Whatever the truth of all this, Obid-Kori rode later that summer to Skobelev and Kokand, where he met both reformist mullahs and extremist soldiers, both deputies from the list of progressives and progressives from the list of deputies, and where he even took part in a regional congress. Beside him at this meeting sat the chairman of some Peasant Progressive-Nationalist Party for Labour and Peace, a Russian who appeared not to know the difference between a bull and a cow (speaking to some soldiers, he referred to the latter as “a bull with a cunt”) but who showed a passionate interest in what he referred to as “the situation in the lower depths.” Heavens above! What on earth did he mean by this? The secret parts of a woman? Did the man have no fear of God?

Then this Russian took from his trouser pocket some ungodly scrap of paper – like the paper non-believers wipe themselves with – and held it out to Obid-Kori. “I couldn't sleep at night,” he said, “so I drew up this document. Now I'd like your advice. I can see you're an educated man who knows the world. This is a list I made during the night – I'm sure you will appreciate its importance and understand its necessity. It's the men I've chosen as ministers.”

“Heavens above!” thought Obid-Kori. “The half-Shah in Tashkent
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hasn't even packed his bags yet, and here's this man...”

“So,” the man began, “the prime minister will be Al-Misakkidin Sarymsak-Oglu.”

“Excuse me. Just how old is he now?”

“Eighty-seven. And what of it?”

“Well, he's certainly not too young for the job.”

“What do you mean? He's full of mind – every bit of him, from head to toe. And anyway, he can always consult us. Now, the Minister for the Indigenous Population – he's the one on the platform now.”

“God forgive me! You don't mean that Russian, do you?”

“He's no Russian, God bless you! It's just that he studied in Petersburg.”

“He'll need a good interpreter – the locals won't be able to understand a word he says!”

“Really? Do you think so?” Taken aback, the man put a large question mark against the name of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. “Now, the Minister for Village Affairs,” he continued, “is your humble servant.”

“Excuse me,” said the man sitting behind them, “but I don't think you've got a Minister for the Affairs of Doctors and Healers.”

“No, there was someone, I'm quite certain of it,” said this Minister for Village Affairs – peering at his list, then giving up in despair. “But what makes you ask?”

“Well, I've got an uncle who's a healer. He heals just by looking at people. I wanted to suggest...”

“Is he a Party member?”

While their neighbour wondered how best to explain away this shortcoming, the Minister leant over towards Obid-Kori and said, “Listen – you wouldn't like to be appointed our representative for Osh District, would you? Or you could be Minister for Enlightenment and Madrasahs? Yes, that particular position happens to be still vacant.”

“O Allah! O Allah! What evil spirits you place in our path!” thought Obid-Kori, escaping from this regional congress during a break. “Give me the strength to ignore these whisperings of Satan and tricks of the Devil! Do not abandon me in their presence!”

Back in Mookat, Obid-Kori fell ill for the first time in his life. But Oyimcha healed him with honey and herbs and he soon returned to his usual measured routine and began to prepare for the advent of another winter.

As he approached old age, Master-Railwayman Belkov was appointed caretaker of the local PartCom building.
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Belkov had his own point of view, a strictly Party point of view, on every event in Gilas. It seemed to him that what he was guarding was more than just the building where the PartCom was located – the eight windows, four walls and tiled roof that had come the way of the Party after the expropriation of Mirzokul-Tailor, the original owner of the cotton factory; yes, it seemed to Belkov that he was guarding the very edifice of Communism.

And when he saw the slogans that Ortik-Picture-Reels had written in his crooked hand in exchange for a bottle of Russian vodka – slogans like “Let Communism be Constructed by 1980!” or “Long Live our Splendid Nation, the Splendid Builder of Splendid Communism!” – caretaker Belkov would laugh with his toothless mouth, knowing that the building of Communism had already been built and that he himself, ex-Master-Railwayman Belkov, had been appointed to guard it every third night.

“What matters most in Communism?” he would ask to the bewilderment of Froska, his plump and lovely wife, who sold fizzy water in the station and was pined after by the entire male population of Gilas. And then he would answer his own question with the words: “Communism is human sympathy and the current of life.”

Now and again Froska would try to argue with him; once, after attending a seminar for sellers of fizzy water, she tried to insist that Communism was “Soviet Power plus the Gasification of the Entire Country!”
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But Belkov interrupted her current of thought by scratching himself in an unmentionable place – and Froska did not forgive him.

Soon afterwards Froska left Belkov for the station's other seller of fizzy water, Uncle Yashka, a Jew who came by train every day from the City. And so Belkov lost an obedient wife – who had never before inflicted any worse punishment on him than rolling over and turning her irresistible buttocks to the wall – and his life was drained, once and for all, of every last drop of the current of human sympathy.

Master-Railwayman Belkov begged for an extra shift as caretaker in order to share his bitter fate with the Party he loved. But Second Secretary Gogolushko not only reprimanded him for exploiting the Party for personal ends but also injected him with a hefty dose of the elemental anti-Semitism that was gradually becoming the Party's almost-official policy. More precisely, Gogolushko opened Belkov's eyes to the underlying economic causes of the cartelisation and monopolisation of the fizzy-water trade in Gilas.

Belkov had managed to accommodate all life's complexities in his simple sentence about human sympathy and the current of life; after losing his wife, however, he not only ceased to believe in himself and his lapidary formula but also – after his conversation with Gogolushko – became an out-and-out anti-Semite. It has to be said, however, that this out-and-out anti-Semitism was directed exclusively against Yashka, and, since Belkov went on selling the leather of the PartCom armchairs to the Jewish Yusuf-Cobbler, it could perhaps better be named anti-Yashkism. And anyway, one could hardly suspect a veteran of Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich's
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railways of holding views that contradicted his whole life as a railwayman.

Belkov's forgetfulness, and his resulting habit of repeating himself, soon acquired improbable dimensions. During his long monologues, while he tried to fit thoughts disarrayed by life into his forgotten formula about the current of life and human sympathy, unsympathetic candidates for Party membership found time not only to repeat the Programme and Statutes of the Party but also the whole of the impressive curricula vitae that Mefody-Jurisprudence, Gilas's solitary member of the intelligentsia, would recently have composed for them. And during the time he took to answer the question “Where's the Office of the Party Committee?” – or, more often, “Where's the toilet?” – candidates from the local population were able to repeat to themselves the midday prayer, the longest of the five daily prayers. It was thus with Allah behind them that they entered the Office and began to live the life of a Communist.

During the last census Master-Railwayman Belkov had declared that he knew only the language of the Soviet people; he did, however, once have a go at learning modern Vietnamese. During one of the evenings that Belkov was on duty, a certain Nguyen Dyn Hok, who had accidentally been left behind by his “Friendship” train, wandered into the building of Communism; he turned out to be searching for a shop where he could buy a metal teapot. By morning, this middle-aged man – lying on a divan the leather cover of which Belkov had already sold to Yusuf-Carpenter, and somnolently embracing Belkov's generous present of the office metal teapot – had not only acquired quite a decent understanding of the mighty Russian language but was also marvelling at the supple expressiveness of his own still developing language as developed by the master-railwayman: “Ho-Chi-Minh – Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Sai-gon – No! Ha-noi – Hoo-Rah! John-son – No, No, No! Ho-Chi-Minh, Fam-Vam-Dong, Den-Ben-Fu – Hoo-Rah! Sai-gon, Mee-kong – Hoo-Rah, Hoo-Rah! Yan-kee – No! Yan-kee – No, No, No! John-son – No!”

Master-Railwayman Belkov accompanied Nguyen Dyn Hok to the station in time to catch the 7:12 train, and, in reply to Belkov's last Communist invocations of “Ho-Chi-Minh, Fam-Vam-Dong, Den-Ben-Fu!” Nguyen Dyn Hok called out with no less passion, “Co-mu-nee-sum-ees-cu-llent-of-rife-and-hoo-man-seem-pat-ee!” Belkov, alas, failed to take in this distillation of his own words that the Vietnamese, now on his way back to his motherland with the Gilas Party Committee teapot, had so quickly committed to memory. Had he understood, he might perhaps have found release from his militant tediousness and been able to rest once again within the sympathetic embrace of his all-embracing formula.

As things were, however, the life of the Master-Railwayman was without any current of human sympathy at all, and his ability to bore others was matched only by his ability to forget. These two abilities were, in fact, not unconnected. Trying to forget Froska behind a veil of words, ex-Master-Railwayman Belkov succeeded in forgetting everything except her act of betrayal; losing his whole life to oblivion, he struggled to recapture it in a web of words. But his webs and veils were in vain; his verbal virtuosity was to no avail. At the beginning of his night watch poor Belkov would forget in which pocket he had put his cigarette case with the inscription: “To Esteemed Master-Railwayman Belkov from his Comrades and Fellow-Railwaymen who will Remember him for Ever”; looking for his cigarette case, he would forget where he had put his nightwatchman's pullover; during his search for the pullover, he would lose his double-barrelled shotgun; searching for the shotgun, he would drop his round-lensed spectacles; without his spectacles he lost all sense of what on earth he was looking for. He lost so much that he lost all count of his losses. Towards the end of his night's watch the vigilant Gogolushko would hand him his cigarette case; the Party chauffeur would remove the pullover he had been lying on as he repaired the Party Committee car; poor Auntie Lina the Greek Communist would be found carrying his gun around in a bucket along with her mop; and his spectacles would drop out of his trousers as he hitched them up before leaving the building.

But there was one thing Belkov never lost: the certainty that he was guarding the building of Communism.