The Dead Lake (7 page)

Who cared about him? Everyone simply pretended, especially those two old grannies. But the others too: look at his grandad – his only real concern was keeping his points lubricated. Or Uncle Shaken, with his work shifts, during which he tried to catch up with and
overtake
America. Or Kepek and Aisulu, and the donkey as well! Yerzhan was the only one who didn’t belong among them, Yerzhan was the only one who didn’t fit into their lives at all…

Fools, fools, fools: one took him to a quack medicine woman, another quartered him alive with horses, and as for the one who was educated – he couldn’t do anything either, even with an X-ray and a reactor!

What could Yerzhan do now? He couldn’t go to school – all those kids were a head taller than him already. They’d laugh in his face. Stay here with this ignorant crowd, where everyone had suddenly forgotten that he had
nibbled
Aisulu’s ear as his bride-to-be? No, now they would never live together, under the moon or the sun!

He could see it all. And see even more things that he didn’t want to put into words. Images built up inside this petrified body and inside his morbid soul, which was ageing against his will. Did any of it do him any good? Did it make him even the slightest bit taller?

Every time Yerzhan saw Aisulu, Kepek and the donkey in the bluish gloom of the steppe’s winter twilight – through the frame of a doorway, through a window or from behind the wall where he was hiding – he wanted to grab Grandad’s double-barrelled shotgun or Granny’s kitchen knife, or even Kepek’s own railway hammer, the one he used to hammer on the trains’ motionless wheels at night, and dart out to meet them, to shoot, stab and kill all three of them. But each time something in his little body stopped him. What it was, he simply couldn’t make out. He suffered torment all night through until the morning, all day through until the evening, but he couldn’t find the answer. Like a schoolboy who has lost his exercise book and crib sheet.

And once again his rebellion was put off until the next day. If this was the way of things in the world, then weren’t his suffering, his imaginings and threats, all his thoughts, like a flowing stream, like powdered snow, like a swirling blizzard and his life simply a short, sad song?

No, his life wasn’t a song. His life resembled more the chain reaction once demonstrated by Uncle Shaken, where all started from his hatred for Grandad, or for Granny, or for Kepek and the donkey, or for Uncle Shaken or… His life was like a chain reaction, and so was everyone else’s too. And perhaps even through his petrified boy’s body an abrupt adulthood was forcing its way out, as Yerzhan started to see what he hadn’t noticed before. Not only
did he notice Kepek sitting on the donkey with his arms around Aisulu’s body (although that was most painful of all), but he also saw Kepek disappearing from home when Shaken was at work and reappearing at city bride Baichichek’s house, moving out Granny Sholpan under various pretexts to her friend Ulbarsyn. Of course, he could simply be fetching salt, or a nail, or be helping to bone meat. But truth to tell, what Kepek got up to over there when Aisulu came running to Yerzhan to tell him what was happening at school and how the boys and girls missed him – no one really dared ask.

Kepek returned from Baichichek’s house all flushed and agitated, as if he had chopped an entire cow to pieces, not just helped bone the meat. Then he grabbed his hammer and left, whistling a tune that only he knew, puffing and panting, not wrapped up against the cold, to replace his father on the points or in the siding.

But one day Aisulu herself confessed in secret that her mother took Kepek soup at night. After all, she said, he had chopped the bones, the poor man was probably freezing and he was as good as a brother in their house.

But was Shaken any better than Kepek? One day, when Grandad Daulet and Uncle Kepek were dealing with an express special, and Granny Ulbarsyn had gone to Granny Sholpan to wash her hair with sour milk, Yerzhan heard cautious tapping at the next window – his mother’s
window – followed by a rustle of footsteps in the next room. At first Yerzhan thought it was a bird fluttering against the windowpane in the cold. In order not to frighten it away with his shadow, the boy looked out cautiously through his window at a narrow angle, hiding in the corner of the room. But it wasn’t a bird. It was Uncle Shaken. Why didn’t he knock at the door? Yerzhan heard the door of the next room creak and pressed his back hard against the wall, terrified of being caught spying. Thank God, his mother didn’t look into his room. She slipped out of the house, throwing on her camel-wool shawl as she went.

Yerzhan stood there with his heart pumping hard, pounding its rhythm against the wall – or was that the heavy passenger express that pounded on the rails with a rhythm that pulsed through the ground? Whatever the cause of the pounding, Yerzhan just stood there nailed to the floor, more dead than alive. And once again that same implacable, visceral fear rose up from his trembling knees to his stomach, where it stopped like a hot, heavy, aching lump.

His mother slipped past his window and there, under her window, where he could only see the sheared-off tops of their figures, they talked about something that Yerzhan, who was all ears now, simply couldn’t make out. What they could be talking about out there on the firm, white snow, with wisps of hot steam coming out of their mouths, Yerzhan never found out. And was his dumb mother really speaking, or was it only the steam that Yerzhan took for conversation – who could say? Yerzhan
didn’t mention this incident to anyone. Not even to his Aisulu, who wasn’t his any longer.

And then Granny Ulbarsyn, almost falling asleep while Yerzhan was massaging the rheumatic knots on her old woman’s legs, muttered about Grandad – he was to blame for all these bumps on her legs, she said. In her young days, when she had only just come to this ‘spot’, to this Kara-Shagan, Sholpan’s husband, Nurpeis, was
summoned
to the city for training, and Daulet was left as the only man in charge of both families. That winter Daulet kitted himself out to go to his points, leaving Ulbarsyn strict instructions not to venture out in the cold. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘that’s the jackals howling.’ Then he took his double-barrelled shotgun and his railway hammer and went out into the blizzard.

Ulbarsyn sat alone for a long time, but boredom is worse than fear, after all, and she wanted to see her friend Sholpan, so she wrapped herself in her shawl. She walked up to her friend’s door, where, in the snowy wind, the metal hinge was rattling against the door – tap-tap-tap! Nevertheless Ulbarsyn knocked, but perhaps Sholpan took it for the tapping of the metal hinge. In any case, no one opened the door. Granny Ulbarsyn walked up to the only bright window and glanced in through the gap between the embroidered net curtains. And saw her husband inside. She gasped out loud in fury, gulping in cold, frosty air, and fainted into a snowdrift.

On the way back from his tracks, Daulet found her frozen to the bone and dragged her home, swearing and weeping at the same time. He swore to her by milk and by bread that he had only dropped in to see Sholpan for a moment, to get Nurpeis’s lantern. But even if no scar of distrust was left on Ulbarsyn’s soul, that night had remained with her for ever as the rheumatism in her bones and muscles.

Yerzhan could no longer tell what was true in these words and what was made up. He thought of his confusion
bursting
out in its full glorious fury from his petrified body. He recalled the ancient song that Grandad had sung to Petko, about hollow straws floating in a stream, striking first against a rock and then against a branch leaning down over the water. That was him, a straw broken off short, hollow on the inside, with his whistling soul driven into a thin, fragile little body. Sometimes he would strike against a stone or a blade of grass. And no matter how his soul whistled and tweeted, the stream still carried it on towards that dead backwater, where there was no living grass, only silt. And nothing remained of this journey except the movement of air through a hollow inner space, like a song almost too faint to hear.

We got carried away by our travellers’ tales and in the meantime evening fell. What words can convey that melancholy yearning of evening in the steppe, with a solitary train travelling through it? How can I explain that extraordinarily faint song of the air passing through a straw? I tried to recall the poem ‘In the Carriage’ – I think it’s by Innokentii Annensky – which expresses these feelings more accurately than anything else:

But the stripes of the sunset, around which everything had frozen, quickly faded away and we were left in darkness, deliberately not switching on the light in the compartment. Yerzhan went out to smoke in the corridor and the old man who occupied the bottom bunk opposite me went off for a wash at the other end of the carriage. He returned, muttering a few words, and immediately stretched out once more, turning his face away to the wall.

Yerzhan finished his smoke and came back in again, but he didn’t want to talk, or so it seemed to me. I was still in a strange lethargic state after the steppe sunset and the poem retrieved from my subconscious.

I went out into the corridor too and stood there for a while, looking at the solid darkness of the open expanse. Then I hastily washed in the toilet and went back to the compartment, to find both of my travelling companions snoring.

I made up my own bed and lay down, but sleep simply wouldn’t come.

The daytime steppe, with its endless poles and wires, rose up before me in a vision of infinite musical staves with bars and notes. I tried to read the music, to understand the meaning. But I couldn’t. Then I imagined how this story might end, keeping the corner of my eye on the upper bunk, where the twenty-seven-year-old boy lay curled up in a tight ball. Well, he hadn’t lied to me, had he? I’d seen his passport, and in the final analysis, even if he was a wunderkind, he couldn’t be a wunderkind in everything – playing the violin like a god, and telling the story of his life like a traditional steppe bard, and deceiving me, like an experienced card sharp or an actor. It was too much to fit in one diminutive body; it couldn’t all be a confidence trick.

So what had taken place in the time between
it
happening
and the present day – or rather, night – in which I simply couldn’t get to sleep?

Like our train following its tracks across the steppe, I tried to trace out the line from what I had heard to what I didn’t know.

Aisulu grew taller and taller. She was already almost the same height as Kepek. And yet she didn’t seem to notice that Yerzhan had stopped growing, that he barely reached up to her shoulder. After school she ran to tell him about her progress, about how today she had played a piece on the violin that Yerzhan used to play three years ago. And the way she ignored what was happening to
Yerzhan infuriated him most of all. He didn’t listen to her, he just lay there, staring fixedly at the white ceiling. He didn’t get up off Kepek’s bed, in order not to look ludicrously small beside her – and she didn’t notice. Or she pretended not to.

How could Yerzhan know that she cried at night too, tucked up in bed with her head under the sheets, that she was dreaming of qualifying as a doctor and finding a cure that would stretch out her Yerzhan.

Yerzhan rarely slept at night now, and it wasn’t as if he caught up during the day – no, sleep simply wouldn’t come to his eyes. He tossed and turned from one side to the other, caught in the same circle of burdensome thoughts that were impossible either to control or to accept. A strange, indeterminate music that had lost its bearings between the
dombra
and the violin was sawing away inside him.

Yerzhan had never forgotten this ancient tale. He of course knew who the Kara-Choton in his life was – Kepek. So at night he tried to guess who resembled the terrible demon Lubsan. Grandad Daulet? But his wife was Granny Ulbarsyn. She couldn’t possibly be in love with Yerzhan. And Petko didn’t fit either, because he didn’t have any wife at all. Uncle Shaken? Could Baichichek be Tumen Djergalan? And then would he have to kill Shaken? The pieces didn’t fit. But Yerzhan was convinced that this story, like those ancient songs he played out in his head, was about him. He had to solve the mystery that had sunk its claws into his body and soul.

‘The Zone! The Zone! That’s the terrible demon Lubsan.’ He suddenly sat up straight in bed. The Zone had taken him captive, the Zone had given him the draught of
forgetfulness
to drink, and until he reached the Dead Lake – the
same Dead Lake in which he had once bathed – he would never be freed from this enchantment. Didn’t the story say that there, by the Dead Lake, Tengri would free him of the enchantment and show him his own reflection and the reflection of the magical steed on which he had galloped throughout his childhood?

Yerzhan made up his mind.

Day after day that late autumn when Aisulu rode to school alone, when Grandad was sleeping after his night shift and Kepek had gone off to replace either Shaken, away from home because of his work, at Baichichek’s house, or his father, Daulet, in the siding, when the old women were warming their bones in front of the house in the last sun, Yerzhan mounted the horse and galloped across the steppe towards the gullies and pastureland where the Zone began. He knew the way. How often had he come this way as a boy with Kepek or Shaken? He followed the dried-up riverbed until he reached the open space of the Zone.

Yerzhan entered the Zone gradually, bit by bit. After all, the fear, that lay in waiting at his hamstrings and could rise up at any moment through the heavy weight in his stomach to his throat, was invincible, it pulsed in his blood, in his very breath. But day after day his determination led him on ever further.

That year the autumn was long and sunny. Yerzhan galloped on and on beyond the Dead City that he had once visited with Uncle Shaken, on along the dry, red riverbed. He discovered gigantic craters of churned-up steppe, as
if the moon had decided to observe her own reflection, like him, in order to free herself of an enchantment. He saw strange structures jutting out of the fused earth like limbs of uncanny beings. And still deeper inside the Zone, a concrete wall stood in the middle of the wide expanse, a charred elm tree and black birds imprinted on it. Were they drawings? Or a real tree and real birds stamped into the wall? Yerzhan didn’t stop. He galloped on further and further across this hell on earth.

Returning home in the evening, the boy sneaked to his room and lay on his bed without touching either the long-forgotten
dombra
or the violin gathering dust in a niche in the wall. Here, amid the constant chatter of the old women and the rumbling noises of passing trains, the distant radio and television sounds, he suddenly became aware how quiet the Zone was. So quiet that it set his ears ringing.

Like his mother’s eternal silence.

Perhaps his unspeaking mother, Kanyshat, held the key to the mystery that controlled his life and body. Perhaps he shouldn’t search for any Dead Lake. Perhaps he should free his mother from her enchantment? Perhaps if words could leave her mouth, then the spell would fall away from his puny body? And the steed of his childhood would gallop once again to rescue his Aisulu.

But his mother didn’t speak. She walked into the room like a shadow and brought him his supper and collected
his laundry for washing. And sometimes at night she stood by her sleeping son’s bedside, choking on silent tears.

Yerzhan soon realized that he couldn’t reach the Dead Lake within a day’s horse ride. It was too far away. But
nonetheless
something stronger than fear and keener than hope drew him back, day after day, along that dried-up river, into the Zone, which became ever more familiar, ever more like home. An enchantment had indeed seized his entire being, a forgetfulness. Not only had he forgotten the
dombra
and the violin, not only Grandad, Petko and Dean Reed, but even Aisulu: the way she grew ever taller, the way she came back from school, what she said and how she laughed. The road to the Dead Lake along the bed of the dried-up river, the road to the very heart of this mute Zone, now beat to the monotonous, naked rhythm of his galloping steed, and his pounding heart, and his pulsing temple. And there was no space in this rhythm for any music.

Early in the morning of 22 November, as soon as Grandad returned from the night round of the tracks, without bothering to wait for sleepy Kepek or cheerful Aisulu to appear, Yerzhan slipped out of the house and jumped onto the horse that was still warm from carrying the old man. Perhaps because of the abrupt change from a heavy rider to the light body of a boy, or perhaps because of the early-morning hour, Aigyr galloped lightly, as if the wind was not flying in his face but pushed him on from behind. Yerzhan was so intoxicated by the speed,
the flight, that he was already inside the Zone before he suddenly discovered his Grandad’s double-barrelled shotgun, forgotten between the saddle girth and the stirrup strap. But it was too late to go back. The boy galloped on into the Zone like a genuine spirit, feeling the metal of the barrel with his calves.

He remembered the fox hunt. The thought occurred to him that
it
had happened because they had taken away the fox’s little cub. For an instant he felt as if the horse was slipping out from under him. He forced himself to stay in the saddle, as ‘
kaltarys!
’– the word that indicated a ninety-degree turn – came crashing into his awareness. Yes, his entire life had been
kaltarys
after
kaltarys
, until that
uluu kaltarys
had arrived – that large, great
turning
– and now he was sprawled out like a carcass yet to be shot, hemmed in on all sides.

His feverish thoughts kept time with the galloping horse. He soon realized that even the non-existent, dried-up river swung from side to side, following those same
kaltarys
. Its course ran from the ground of its conception all the way to the Dead Town, then turned abruptly and ran on until it reached the lunar craters. There it took another oblique turn and ran on again until it reached that crooked concrete wall with the scorched steppe elm and imprinted birds. In his ardent excitement Yerzhan was now certain that the next turn would mean his final turn, and he
galloped
faster and faster, lashing Aigyr on with the whip…

And as the sun fell behind in its pursuit of him, he suddenly spotted a small outcrop in the middle of the open steppe. A solitary dog or fox or wolf. The galloping horse drew closer. A wolf. Yerzhan didn’t slow Aigyr. He pulled out Grandad’s shotgun from under the saddle girth at full speed and, without bothering to aim, just to frighten the creature, fired into the air with one barrel. The wolf flew off in the same direction as Aigyr and Yerzhan. And once again Yerzhan found himself in pursuit of a wolf, like so many years ago with Aisulu on the donkey. He whooped at the top of his lungs and the wolf ran without a backward glance. Because of the shot, fervent Aigyr strove even harder, forcing on the incessant movement of his hooves.

Then all of a sudden the wolf disappeared into the ground.

What was it? A mirage that had sprung from the boy’s overheated and inflamed imagination? Salt, glittering in the bright autumn sun? A stretch of stagnant water, lying here since the summer? The shore of the Dead Lake? Yerzhan arrived at the spot where the wolf had disappeared. Right in front of him was a cliff. Reining in Aigyr, he stopped where the slope down to the shore was shallow. He didn’t let the horse approach the water, even though it must have been thirsty after the non-stop run. Instead he tied the reins firmly, with a double knot, to a fused metal rail sticking up out of the earth. He walked to the water, the shotgun loaded with its second cartridge firmly in his hand. No sight of the wolf. It had disappeared, as if drowned.

The water was dark blue, its own blueness added to the blueness of the sky. Yerzhan saw his reflection as a vague blob. His eyes had grown tired from the uninterrupted galloping, with nothing but the yellow steppe flowing into them. At first he wanted to drink his fill of the thick water, but then he decided not to waste time. Without getting undressed, he slid into the lake awkwardly off the bank, fully clothed, with the shotgun in his hands, feet first. The coolness seared his body, and just as he expected to sink completely underwater, a strange force suddenly pushed him out and he found himself lying on his back on the surface, like a boat. What kind of force was this? It surely wasn’t the shotgun that was keeping him afloat! Yerzhan had read that in the Dead Sea, between Jordan and Palestine, it was impossible to drown, because the water was so salty. He tried tasting the water, but his parched tongue couldn’t identify the taste of salt. So he lay there, unable to comprehend if this experience was real or a dream. And slowly his swaying body began to melt. And it began to stretch. Longer and longer: the same way the bow of his violin tensed up before he played, the same way the strings stretched out when he tuned them. And now the bow would touch the strings and the music would sound.