Authors: Hamid Ismailov
‘We shall not merely catch up with the Americans, but overtake them!’ Shaken called out when he heard
four-year
-old Yerzhan sing this song. And the next time he returned from his shift, he didn’t bring back a glittering metal object but a new type of
dombra
. Only a thousand times shinier. He called it a ‘violin’.
This violin didn’t have three strings, but four. At first Yerzhan tired to play it like a
dombra
. A muted and thin sound emerged. Shaken reached into his briefcase and
pulled out a stick that looked like a whip. He called it a ‘bow’. ‘I’ll show you!’ he said, and began rubbing the stick against the strings. But now they emitted no sound whatsoever. ‘Everything needs grease!’ Grandad Daulet laughed out loud and fetched some wax and coated the instrument and its bow. As the bow touched the strings the instrument began to squeak. ‘Give! Give!’ Yerzhan pulled the violin from his grandfather’s hands. That day he corroded everyone’s ears. Only drunken Uncle Kepek was so touched that he burst into tears and said, ‘I know a Bulgarian violinist! Pedo is his name. And true, he might be a paedo! But tomorrow we’ll go to him!’ In actual fact the Bulgarian violinist was called Petko, but Uncle Kepek didn’t know how to pronounce his name properly.
The next day Kepek seated his nephew on a camel and the two of them set off across the railway line into the steppe. They rode for a long time until they reached a place with cabin trailers, excavators and all sorts of heavy equipment. There was no railway nearby, and metal lay about in heaps. They dismounted from their camel, tethered it to a solitary tamarisk bush and went into one of the trailers. Inside the air was smoky. Men sat around playing a noisy game. Yerzhan started to cough and Kepek told Petko they’d wait outside for him. Petko was a short man with shifty eyes and a bleating voice. Kepek talked to him in a strange language that Yerzhan didn’t
yet understand, but several times his uncle spoke a word that sounded like
talany
, ‘from the steppe’, and pointed to his nephew. Under Kepek’s vigilant gaze, Petko first felt Yerzhan’s hands, his upper arms and his shoulders, as if testing a stallion or a ram, then asked incomprehensible questions. Yerzhan tried to work out what he meant. It sounded like ‘In the sky is the dance of the blind man’. Was this stranger asking after a song? But his uncle came to his rescue. ‘What’s your name?’ Kepek translated Petko’s question. ‘Yerzhan,’ Yerzhan replied. Petko’s own trailer was at the end of the row. There the Bulgarian picked up Yerzhan’s violin, sniffed at it and ran his tongue over the hairs of the bow. He burst into laughter and laughed for a long time while he cleaned the strings and bow with a bitter-smelling substance. Then he fetched wood resin and rubbed it over the bow in large movements and small circles by turn.
When he eventually started playing the violin, the sound was so pure that Yerzhan instantly realized the meaning of Petko’s first comment: even a blind man would have seen the blue sky, the dance of the pure air, the clear sunlight, the snow-white clouds, the joyful birds.
It was his first lesson.
For the next four lessons Petko played his instrument without much explanation. Yerzhan copied the movements and memorized the black and white birds that sat on wires and were called ‘notes’ by Kepek. But Grandad Daulet
soon became jealous. He recognized Yerzhan’s progress on this new instrument. His grandson should learn the
dombra
, not the violin, and he decided to take the boy to Semey to show him the real master bards. They boarded a freight wagon that supplied bread to the stations along the branch line. At each stop, Tolegen, Grandad’s friend, distributed frozen loaves. In the meantime, Daulet and Yerzhan lay on the thick sheepskin coats in the wagon’s depths and stared at the forest of hands reaching for the bread when the train stopped. And when the train moved they stared at the snow-covered steppe whirling around them like a huge millstone sprinkled with flour.
And there, on the railway, where the telegraph poles raced backwards, Grandad and Tolegen waved their hands in the direction of the plain with the barbed wire, and Yerzhan again heard that clangorous, forgotten sound: Zone.
Once more, the buzzing gadfly began to circle above his consciousness. In the night he dreamt about it as a swarm of musical notes. By the morning, however, it had turned into a huge insect, circling above his head, before shamelessly descending upon his nose.
The old men were already drinking their tea with milk powder, dipping the crust of the last unsold loaf in their cups. The train clattered along the frozen rails. The fierce cold of the steppe blew in through the wagon door, which stood slightly ajar. But suddenly the shadows in the wagon shifted abruptly, as if pushed aside by the huge hairy legs of the fly on Yerzhan’s nose. A din louder
than its buzzing, worse than the rumble of the wagon and the empty metal bread boxes followed, penetrating the eardrums of the men and the boy. The wagon began to dance. The bread boxes began to dance. The old men disappeared through the open door. The fly made the ground under Yerzhan’s feet spin. Then it dragged him into a rumbling darkness.
The Zone! That’s how Yerzhan remembered that day, when the wagons toppled off the track and lay in the steppe. Eventually, a blood-drenched Grandad Daulet and Uncle Tolegen saved Yerzhan from darkness and the hairy fly’s legs. They wrapped him in sheepskin while crying their miserly old men’s tears.
So Yerzhan and his grandfather never made it to Semey. The boy was clearly not meant to learn from the great bard masters. They rode back to Kara-Shagan on a trolley that looked like a small locomotive. The steppe appeared sombre, just like the faces of the people. Leaden clouds swept across the sky without rain or snow. Hollow clouds, neither resounding with thunder nor flashing with lightning. It was strange how quickly these clouds raced across the sky when the air on the ground was so stagnant.
The next day they arrived home empty-handed,
without
gifts from the city. The people on the trolley gave them a few loaves of railway bread and a bag of Russian potatoes, before heading further into the steppe on their incomprehensible business. Several days passed before the sky brightened. No one went outside, except for Grandad Daulet, who had to attend to a rare passing train. They
even peed into a copper bowl, which a swearing and cursing Kepek occasionally emptied out of the window.
Their urine – and especially Yerzhan’s – turned red, as if from shame. The women, as usual, chattered about the end of the world. Grandad Daulet, when he wasn’t asleep, spun the little dial on his radio, catching a squeak, a whistle, a hiss and some strange speech about an explosion.
They sat at home idly and didn’t even let the boy play music. But eventually the two families gathered and Grandad Daulet slaughtered a ram. They cooked it, put on their festive clothes and ate the animal. After the feast, the old man released a mighty burp. He picked up one of the ram’s bones and placed it on the city bride Baichichek’s knees. ‘Now show me,’ he challenged Shaken, ‘that you’re still a bold young fellow!’ Shaken rose from his seat and folded his hands behind his back. The old man tied them with a belt. Shaken walked up to his wife and, keeping his knees locked, bent down and grabbed the bone with his teeth. Everyone whooped with excitement. Afterwards Kepek lifted the bone from the knees of his silent sister, Kanyshat. And finally they placed the bone on the knees of three-year-old Aisulu and forced Yerzhan to bend for it. Both families cheered him on. Yerzhan had eaten a lot of dry meat that day and just as his teeth grabbed the bone, a deafening fart shook the house. Oh, how they laughed!
‘A bomb!’ Grandad Daulet yelled from beneath his wrinkles.
‘Atomic!’ Shaken, the scientist, added. ‘We’ll not only catch up with the Americans, we will surpass them!’
Kepek didn’t pass up his chance for a witticism: ‘The rocket’s ready for take-off!’
And that’s how they handled that explosion.
Yerzhan was a big boy now. And so when the summer came he was allowed to accompany Shaken to graze the herd. They went to the same river course where Grandad had once played the
dombra
for the boy. There the grass was still green. They tethered the horse to the base of a bush and stretched out on the ground, in the hope of feeling the water’s coolness in the earth. The cattle wandered across the fresh expanse, unscorched by the sun. A moist scent hovered over the wide gully. After the naked sun of the steppe, fierce even in the mornings, the shade of the tamarisk and the saksaul bushes cooled the drops of sticky sweat on Uncle Shaken’s and Yerzhan’s hot faces. The dog, Kapty, ran about with his flame-hot tongue dangling, jostling the scattering herd back into a manageable bunch.
Eventually they left the herd to Kapty’s enthusiastic supervision and mounted the horse and galloped
downstream
towards the steppe surrounded by barbed wire. Uncle Shaken clearly knew the way, and the gullies and ravines brought them to the Zone that had tormented Yerzhan’s boyish curiosity like a gadfly for all these years. Sitting behind Uncle Shaken, he gazed around eagerly,
but the steppe looked just like the steppe: a small sun, as sharp as a nail, in a boundless, weary sky, scorched grassy stubble and stale, motionless air droning between them. Except that the earth here was a bit redder and the layer of dust under the horse’s hooves was a bit thicker than usual.
They galloped for a long time. Shaken didn’t speak, as if he was preoccupied listening to the sounds of the steppe. It wasn’t until the sun appeared behind their backs that he suddenly said, ‘Look, the goose…’ Yerzhan leant out to the side, expecting to see wildlife, and maybe a lake. But ahead of them, stretching its concrete neck up out of the ground, stood a strange building. It looked like the ones Grandad had called ‘elevators’ when they were on Tolegen’s train. In the distance Yerzhan could see other dark shapes.
As they came closer, the ‘goose’ appeared more like a crane, an immense concrete block half-crumpled, as if it had melted and run on one side. The boy gaped wide-eyed, but Uncle Shaken didn’t linger here. He set the horse ambling towards the other structures. And soon Yerzhan could see them clearly: they were ruined houses.
The boy knew the ruins of Kazakh nomad halts and he had also seen graves in the steppe. They were rounded, as if time and nature had taken pity on them, carving away their corners and ledges bit by bit. The buildings here, on the other hand, seemed to have been casually smashed. Frames protruded at random angles
through walls, walls jutted through roofs, roofs thrust down onto foundations. Yerzhan was terrified. Granny Ulbarsyn’s end of the world had materialized in front of his eyes.
‘Has Aisulu seen this?’ he asked Uncle Shaken fearfully. The man shook his head. ‘If we don’t simply catch up with the Americans and then overtake them,’ he added in his usual manner, ‘the whole world will look like this!’
In the evenings, Grandad Daulet and Uncle Shaken often discussed the third world war that Shaken prepared for so assiduously at his work, while Yerzhan tried to fall asleep. But Uncle Shaken spoke loudly, broadcasting
incomprehensible
words to the world as if through a megaphone: ‘The panic of pan-Americanism’, ‘The end of the world is proclaimed in this way’ and ‘Bombs will descend onto the earth, as if the fire of hell is poured forth’.
Perhaps it was these conversations, or perhaps it was Yerzhan’s persistent fear of the Zone, or perhaps the sight of the dead town was the trigger, but from the day Yerzhan saw the goose and the ruins in the steppe, he dreamt about the imminent third world war over and over again. It usually happened out of the blue. Little planes appeared in a calm sky and attacked an American bomber. Or sometimes there was a night sky and stars chased around in all directions. But at the end the sky had always turned leaden-grey. A loud boom swept across the land, the cattle howled and a bright light lit up the world.
When it dispersed, a giant poisonous mushroom loomed over the earth like a djinn.
Shaken carried on like the radio: ‘And the earth is the only thing we don’t have to fear – there is no deception. As black as a mother in mourning, she will embrace everyone and take them into her barren and inflamed womb, which gave birth to them…’
‘We are travellers, and the sky above us is full of enemy planes.’
As Yerzhan sank into sleep, he realized that Grandad Daulet and Uncle Shaken still hadn’t finished discussing the imminent arrival of the third world war.
The train continued on across the endless Kazakh steppe, and the wires with their kestrels and jays, larks and
rollers
, and God only knows what other kinds of airborne wildlife, drifted after it from pole to pole, from pole to pole, like the notes of transcendental music shifting from beat to beat, from beat to beat. In a talkative mood now, my new companion had abandoned his commercial responsibilities and reached an understanding with the conductor that he was allowed to travel with me to his distant Semey. Life in the train and the carriage carried on as usual, with more and more new vendors, all of them women, selling camel wool, dried fish or simply pellets of dried sour milk. And in addition, they now
occasionally
offered picture postcards of naked, busty girls and bottles of the local beer, warm and frothy like urine. The
old Kazakh in my compartment woke up but didn’t turn towards us; he carried on grunting and wheezing, lying on his side, obviously listening with half an ear to what Yerzhan told me about his life.
We drank a glass of railway tea each – a favour from the conductor, who had acquired an extra cash-in-hand passenger. Then Yerzhan carried on with his story.
The boy progressed rapidly in his studies, not by the day, but by the hour, and not only in music, playing études by Kreutzer, Mazas and Rode before summer came, but also in the Russian language, albeit with a certain Bulgarian flavour, which had stayed with him to the present. Every now and then he would put in ‘What do you think?’, as if he were testing his listener’s response. Although Kepek had noticed that Petko and Yerzhan could now manage perfectly well without his irrelevant and erratic translation, the uncle still contrived to interfere here and there. He held out his snotty handkerchief to his nephew and told him to put it under his chin – ‘Pedo taught you to do that, didn’t he?’ – and grabbed the bow out of Yerzhan’s hands during a break and tore off a snapped hair with special zeal. In any case, he never left his nephew alone with Petko in the trailer of the steppe Mobile Construction Unit.