The Dead Lake

^{Part One} Do Before

Yerzhan was born at the Kara-Shagan way station of the East Kazakhstan Railway, into the family of his grandfather, Daulet, a trackman, one of those who tap wheels and brake shoes at night and during the day, following a phone call from a dispatcher, go out to switch the points so that some weary old freight train can wait while an express or passenger special like ours hurtles straight through the junction.

The column for ‘Father’ in his birth certificate had remained blank, except for a thick stroke of the pen, and the only entry, under ‘Mother’, was for Kanyshat, Daulet’s daughter, who also lived at the way station (which everyone called a ‘spot’). The ‘spot’ consisted of two railway houses. In one lived, in addition to Yerzhan, his grandfather and mother, his grandmother, Ulbarsyn, and her younger son, Yerzhan’s uncle, Kepek. The second way-station house was occupied by the family of Grandad Daulet’s late shift partner, Nurpeis: his widow, Granny Sholpan, her son, Shaken, with his city bride, Baichichek, and their daughter, Aisulu. Aisulu was a year younger than Yerzhan. Nurpeis himself had fallen under a non-scheduled train.

And that was the entire population of Kara-Shagan, if you didn’t count the fifty or so sheep, three donkeys, two camels and the horse, Aigyr, all owned between the two families. There was also the dog, Kapty. But he lived with Aisulu most of the time, so Yerzhan didn’t think of him as his own. Just as he didn’t take into account the clutch of dusty chickens with a pair of loud-voiced cocks, since they multiplied and decreased in numbers in such a mysterious fashion that none of the Kara-Shaganites ever knew how many of them there were.

Multiplying in a mysterious fashion is a relevant point here, since in fact no one, except perhaps God, knew how Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat, became pregnant with him and by whom. Cursed by her father from that time on, she never spoke a word about it to her ‘immaculately conceived’ son. And all that Yerzhan knew – from what Granny Ulbarsyn told him – was that at the age of sixteen Kanyshat had run into the steppe after her silk scarf, which had blown off. The steppe wind lured her on, further and deeper, as if teasing her, on and on towards the sunset. And what happened after that was so fantastic that Yerzhan couldn’t make any sense of it. The sun was already sinking when suddenly it soared back up into the sky, glowing brightly. A tremor ran through the earth from the horizon. A whistling wind sprang up out of nowhere, then faded away for an instant, only to reverse its direction with a mighty rush so sudden that the dust of the steppe swirled up to the heavens in a black, hurtling tornado. And when Kanyshat, more dead than alive, discovered that she was at the bottom of a gully, there standing over her scratched and bloody body was a creature who looked like an alien from another planet, wearing a spacesuit.

Three months later, when she began to show, Daulet, foaming with rage, brutally beat and cursed her for ever. If Kepek and Shaken hadn’t pulled the old man away from his half-dead daughter and dragged him to Granny Sholpan’s house, neither Kanyshat nor her son would have been long for this world.

Since that day Kanyshat hadn’t spoken a word.

Although Yerzhan’s mother was silent, the other women, and especially the two grannies, Ulbarsyn and Sholpan, loved to tittle-tattle, as Grandad Daulet called it.

Yerzhan recalled vicious winter nights. Whistling, windswept snow forced its way in through every crack in the window.

‘There in the ninth heaven grows Tengri’s sacred tree, Kayin, and hanging on its branches, like a little leaf, is the kut.’

Yerzhan had climbed into bed with Granny Ulbarsyn under her camel-wool blanket. She scratched his anus, which itched with little squirming worms.

‘What’s a kut?’ asked Yerzhan, still shivering from the cold. He was surprised by the similarity of this word to the word for ‘backside’ – kyot.

‘It’s happiness. It’s when you’re warm and well fed,’ Granny answered, and carried on with her story.

‘When you were going to be born, your kut fell off that tree into our house, down through the chimney. Everything follows the will of Tengri and our mother Umai. The kut fell into your mother’s tummy and in her womb it took the form of a little red worm…’

‘Is it him you’re scratching out of my backside?’

Granny tittered and slapped Yerzhan on his little cheek with the same wrinkled hand that had just scratched his backside.

‘You little chatterbox, sleep, or Mother-Umai will get angry and take away your kut!’

On another night the boy stayed at Granny Sholpan’s house because he wanted to be near little Aisulu, whose ear he had already nibbled so that he would marry her later. And this time Granny Sholpan told him her version of his conception and birth and wove a story about Tengri’s son, Gesar, into it.

‘Tengri sent Gesar to the earth, to a kingdom in the steppe where there was no ruler.’

‘You mean to us?’ Yerzhan immediately butted in. But Granny Sholpan’s fearsome glance cut him short.

‘So that no one would recognize him’ – the old woman pinched Yerzhan’s nose – ‘Gesar came down to earth as a frightful, snotty-nosed little scamp like you!’

Yerzhan started whining. His nose was hurting. And since Granny Sholpan didn’t want to wake up Aisulu, who was asleep in her cot next to them, she let go of his nose before she continued.

‘Only his uncle, Kara-Choton – the same kind of uncle as Kepek is to you – learnt that Gesar wasn’t just an ordinary little boy, but heaven-born, and he started to bully his nephew in order to destroy him before he grew up. But Tengri always saved Gesar from Kara-Choton’s wicked tricks. When Gesar turned twelve, Tengri sent him the fleetest steed on earth, and Gesar won the famous horse race to marry the beautiful Urmai-sulu and conquered the throne of the steppe kingdom.’

‘Kazakhst—’ Yerzhan started to say, but stopped short when he spotted the sharp glint in Granny Sholpan’s eyes again.

She went on: ‘The bold Gesar did not enjoy his happiness and peace for long. A terrible demon, the cannibal Lubsan, attacked his country from the north. But Lubsan’s wife, Tumen Djergalan, fell in love with Gesar and revealed her husband’s secret to him. Gesar used the secret and killed Lubsan. Tumen Djergalan didn’t waste any time and gave Gesar a draught of forgetfulness to drink in order to bind him to her for ever. Gesar drank the draught, forgot about his beloved Urmai-sulu and stayed with Tumen Djergalan.

‘Meanwhile, in the steppe kingdom, a rebellion arose and Kara-Choton forced Urmai-sulu to marry him. But Tengri did not desert Gesar and freed him of the enchantment on the very shore of the Dead Lake, where Gesar saw the reflection of his own magical steed. He returned on this steed home to the steppe kingdom and killed Kara-Choton, freeing his Urmai-sulu…’

By now Yerzhan had warmed up nicely in Granny Sholpan’s cosy bosom and was fast asleep. In his dream, though, he continued the adventure and rode the steed and freed Urmai-sulu.

Steppe roads, even if they are railroads, are long and monotonous, and the only way you can shorten the journey is with conversation. The way Yerzhan told me about his life was like this road of ours, without any discernible bends or backtracking. His story ran on and on, just as the wires outside the window ran from post to post, accompanied by the beat of the wheels’ hammering. He recalled his distant childhood running back and forth between his house and Aisulu’s house. Not only to look at the still-speechless beauty, whose ear he had nibbled in token of an early engagement, but mostly for the sake of his uncle Shaken’s glittering metal objects. Shaken used to disappear on his work shifts for months at a time. He worked somewhere in the steppe. But more about that later. Just as we shall talk later about Shaken’s television, which he brought back from the city.

But before that… Before that:

‘All women ever want to do is wag their tongues!’ Grandad Daulet said, and tied the young tot on his back with his belt and climbed up on to his piebald grey horse. It was a spring day. Grandad left the railway line in the care of his son, Kepek, and they rode out into the steppe. They galloped in silence over the damp grass and tulips, galloping, so it seemed, for no reason at all. And the wind, still chilly round the edges, scorched Yerzhan’s cracking cheeks.

They galloped as far as a gully with sparse hills scattered beyond it.

‘This is where we found you…’ the old man said.

And there beyond the gully with the noisy spring river at its bottom, on the far side of the wooden suspension bridge, barbed wire extended right across the steppe. Grandad reined in his exhausted steed and waved towards the fence with his whip. ‘The Zone!’ he exclaimed. And at that moment a fly started buzzing in the boy’s ear, a gadfly, the kind that circled above their cows on lazy days – a gadfly that became the droning word: Zone…

And the word began buzzing around in the child’s imagination.

Uncle Shaken worked as a watchman in the Zone.

The old man untied Yerzhan from his back and laid out the belt for both of them to sit on. He unslung his dombra from his shoulder and filled the ravine with the sound of his song:

How could Yerzhan have guessed then that this ancient song – God knows how it had come to Grandad Daulet’s soul – was about him, about his future life?

Gesar’s story had sunk deep into Yerzhan’s heart. And as Granny Ulbarsyn picked out from the boy’s hair the lice which had grown fat over winter, Yerzhan asked her about Gesar’s special features and how he could be recognized.

‘When Gesar was a frightful, snot-nosed little urchin, he didn’t have a willy,’ she replied, and hoped to have stopped her squirming grandson from pestering her further. She needed him to keep still for an hour or so to deal with the lice, and nits too, and then wash his head with sour milk.

Once that was done, she asked him to take off his underpants. She searched for the nits between the seams and clicked them to death between her fingernails. But Yerzhan could no longer wait. He ran off bare-bottomed to Aisulu behind her house. There they took turns to contemplate his tiny, wrinkly willy and compared it to snot-nosed little Aisulu’s enviable lack of any such item.

The boy also kept a close eye on his lazy uncle, Kepek, just in case he might try to bully his nephew. Kepek, however, spent most of his days sprawled on the only bedstead in the house, while at night-time he took his ageing father’s place at the points or walked round the night trains with the family hammer.

Sometimes Kepek came home in the early morning rip-roaring drunk and turned the whole house upside down without any rhyme or reason, swearing and cursing. Granny Ulbarsyn’s gasping and sighing woke Yerzhan up. And he was prepared for a sly beating from his own flesh and blood. But his uncle just shouted that he was going to leave this place for ever, that he was sick and tired of everything here, fuck this rotten life to hell! And then he leapt up onto his father’s grey horse and galloped off into the vast steppe just as the darkness was dispersing. And Kepek’s voice and his presence and his anger dispersed with it.

Granny Ulbarsyn’s story wasn’t the only thing that had sunk deep into Yerzhan’s heart. Grandad’s dombra-playing stayed with him too. When no one was looking the boy took the instrument down from its nail high up on the wall. And while his grandfather tapped with the hammer on railway carriages, Yerzhan strummed the dombra secretly, imitating the old man’s knitted brows and hoarse voice. It didn’t take long before he picked out a few familiar melodies and then, with the keen eye he used to keep watch on Uncle Kepek’s behaviour, he followed and memorized his grandad’s finger movements. And the next day, when Daulet wasn’t there and Granny Ulbarsyn was visiting Granny Sholpan’s house, the boy zealously repeated the same run of the fingers. Very quickly and inconspicuously he learnt almost all Grandad’s repertoire. But it wasn’t Grandad who caught him at it, and not even Granny Ulbarsyn. It was Kepek, who wandered into the wrong room yet again in a drunken state. How fervently he kissed every one of his little nephew’s fingers, how he slavered over them with his drunken spittle. ‘Ah, sublime dark power! Ah, sublime dark sound!’ he exclaimed, swaying his shaggy head wildly. That evening a slightly more sober Kepek gathered both families in front of the house and called his three-year-old nephew out of the door. The uncle announced that a concert was about to commence. And Yerzhan gave his first ever public performance, sitting in the doorway of his house.

His grandad was so moved that he retuned the dombra on the spot, changing from right tuning to left, from lower to higher, so that the boy could more easily sing along. He also now tutored his grandson every evening, recalling old melodies and ancient songs forgotten since the days of his youth. Within three months Yerzhan mastered everything that his grandad had accumulated in his entire lifetime – both melodies and verses. The little boy imbibed the centuries-old wisdom of the Kazakh, preserved in song, just as the steppe earth soaks up the rains of spring, transforming it into green tamarisk and feather grass, into scarlet poppies and tulips.

‘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.

The first phrases Yerzhan learnt in Russian were Petko’s musical exclamations: ‘Upper bow! Move the bow down! Third finger! Second string! Louder! Smooth movement!’ He dreamt these phrases, together with the sounds of the violin in different-coloured, rounded notes. His dreams had never been so jolly before. The notes walked about like little men. This one was fat and pompous, with a huge pot belly, while these minced along on skinny legs. And they fused together into bright pictures, like what happened when Yerzhan deliberately pressed on his eyes and multicoloured cabbages started blossoming under his fists. During the day he wanted to share these pictures that bloomed in his vision each night with his little girlfriend, Aisulu. So he stole up on her from behind and pressed her eyeballs in really firmly, intoning in a language she didn’t understand, ‘Whatnoteisthat? Sharpersound! Fingersfingersfingers! Where’sthebow? Nearerthebridge!’

On the long journey to the lessons, Yerzhan often asked his uncle, who had served in the Soviet Army, about this word or that in Russian, learning it off by heart, just in case. ‘You’re farting out of your arse!’ Kepek taught the boy when he warmed up by practising his scales. And when he spotted in Yerzhan’s pocket the metal box of rosin that Petko had put down just before they left, he asked, ‘Why did you fucking nick that?’ And so Yerzhan explained to Petko, ‘I fucking nicked this,’ as he returned the rosin and exclaimed, ‘You’re just farting out of your arse,’ as he was asked to start the lesson with scales. Petko gazed at the boy admiringly, choking on his laughter as he repeated, ‘You really take the biscuit, kid!’

Needless to say, the phrase was etched into Yerzhan’s mind as the highest and most cheerful praise possible, and he patted his Aisulu on the back in exactly the same way: ‘You really take the biscuit, kid!’

‘Petko’s no fool,’ Shaken told the family after supper. He had taken Yerzhan to his violin lesson that day. After all, it was him who had bought the boy the violin, not Kepek. But instead of a lesson, Yerzhan was told to go away while Shaken chatted with Petko for over three hours. ‘Petko graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire’ – yet another incomprehensible word for Yerzhan’s Russian musical vocabulary – Shaken continued to explain, ‘where he studied with Oistrakh himself.’ ‘Oi, strakh!’ – ‘Oh, terror!’ in Russian – was what the city bride Baichichek cried out whenever she was frightened, and now too she seized the chance to spit and exclaim, ‘Oi, strakh!’ ‘He’s no hotchpotch!’ Shaken repeated, although he hadn’t discovered how Petko had come to work at a Mobile Construction Unit just seven kilometres away from Kara-Shagan.

On their next trip to the lesson, Kepek merely gestured dismissively: ‘Shaken knows fuck all!’ Then he added, ‘I, on the other hand, do know!’ But then he fell silent and didn’t reveal how Petko, whose name he couldn’t even say properly, calling him ‘Pedo, Pedo’ all the time, had ended up here, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe.

One thing the Mobile Construction Unit had, however, and that was a shower. Even Grandad Daulet, who was secretly still peeved with the boy for betraying the dombra for the violin, decided to make the journey to a music lesson when he heard about the shower. Sweat flowed down his wrinkled neck and he gave off a sour smell as he rode towards the unit in the sweltering sun. Yerzhan sat behind him on the horse. Petko greeted them. He had combed his hair. He had tidied the trailer. The old man disappeared with his grandson behind the tarpaulin curtain. There Grandad massaged his own head with so much water and soap that it splashed everywhere and into Yerzhan’s eyes too. But despite that, suddenly the boy saw the brown, wrinkled sac of Grandad’s testicles peep out of the drawers which the old man had not taken off, even in the shower. ‘Grandad, why have you got two balls?’ Embarrassed, Daulet swiftly rearranged his clothing. ‘Well, you see…’ For a moment he hesitated, thinking about the question, then he said, ‘I’ve got two children, that’s why I’ve got two balls.’

‘So has Shaken only got one, then?’ the boy exclaimed in surprise. ‘And does that mean Kepek hasn’t got any?’

To these questions, however, Grandad couldn’t think of a reply, so he merely shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

Grandad Daulet took a shine to Petko and in the early autumn he asked Kepek to invite the Bulgarian to join them on a fox hunt. Before Yerzhan was born, Daulet had raised a golden eagle for hunting. It died after Yerzhan’s arrival and the hunting had stopped. Perhaps the old man felt that a new little eagle had hatched in his family and that the annual hunt in the reeds where Yerzhan was conceived had come to its natural end. Grandad Daulet now called his grandson a little eagle.

And so, in honour of the little eagle and his teacher, Grandad had decided to take the entire male population of Kara-Shagan out on a fox hunt. Uncle Kepek told Yerzhan how easily they used to hunt with the dog and the eagle. Kapty drove the fox out of its den and the eagle grabbed it from the air. But this time Grandad wanted to take the fox alive – the old-fashioned way. The arrangement was this: as soon as Kapty sniffed out a she-fox and drove it from its den, and the animal ran off in any direction, cunningly trying to confuse its tracks to distract the dog from its still-weak cubs, Grandad Daulet, Petko and Yerzhan would start driving the fox across the steppe with the low sun at their backs.

Uncle Shaken would be waiting for them just within shouting distance, and as soon as he spotted the animal he would dart out from the side and turn the direction of pursuit abruptly away from the sun: that is, he would force a kaltarys – a ninety-degree turn – on the fox. Then Uncle Kepek, also just within shouting distance, would take over. As soon as he spotted the fox, he would dart out on horseback from the side and turn the direction of Kapty’s pursuit of the fox through another ninety degrees, so that the sun would be shining straight into the cunning she-fox’s eyes. Meanwhile Grandad, Petko and the eagle-eyed Yerzhan, hallooing and whooping, would advance on their quarry, not from the side this time, but straight on, face to face, and… Yerzhan gave Grandad’s double-barrelled shotgun a respectful glance.

Everything happened just as Grandad had planned. Kapty growled as he scrabbled the fox out of its den. The animal darted out, dashing off towards the sun, but Grandad started whooping so loudly that it stopped for a moment, then gathered its wits and dashed back past Kapty in the opposite direction – and the chase was on. Kapty galloped at full speed, with no breath left even to bark, but Grandad hallooed loud enough for the whole steppe to hear. Fortunately for Yerzhan, he was sitting behind Grandad’s broad back, tied on with his belt, or he would certainly have gone deaf. Petko whooped too, sitting on a borrowed horse. This went on for about five minutes, until Grandad reined in his horse, and Yerzhan not only heard but actually saw Uncle Shaken give the fox that kaltarys, and it hurtled past to the side of them. Kapty stopped for a moment, but Grandad shouted to him, ‘Crush it!’ and Kapty finally barked at the top of his lungs and set off in the new direction.

While Shaken’s voice and image shrank away, they galloped parallel with him, to take up their starting position for the uluu kaltarys – ‘the main turn’. With his young eagle eyes, Yerzhan saw Shaken and Kepek intersect as two points off to the side. Then the picture vanished: Grandad Daulet had turned the horse. The noise of the chase approached a crescendo. ‘Grandpa, let me see!’ Yerzhan cried with all his might. Without taking off his belt, the old man swung the boy around and sat him on the saddle’s front arch. He gently pulled the reins and the horse bent its head to one side, giving Yerzhan a full view of the steppe. And not without pride, the boy thought: This is probably how he treated his golden eagle.

Yerzhan could see no fox, but he saw Uncle Kepek, whooping as he rode along, and slightly ahead of him, he noticed the dog, Kapty, a faded fur ball. Closer and closer and closer… And suddenly Yerzhan became aware of a dusty point rushing towards them. ‘Grandpa, look!’ His heart pounded, caught between fervour and pity. Now Grandad would reach between stirrup leather and saddle girth, take out the gun and… But the old man froze, and then in the next moment whipped his horse, letting out a deafening ululation that merged with the whooping of Petko and Kepek. Grandad Daulet and Yerzhan now flew on their horse across the plain to meet the fox head on. It is rushing straight for us, fearing for its life, Yerzhan thought. But no. The fox, harried and confused, dropped in a dead faint on the ground and rolled head over heels, impelled by its own momentum. And before Kapty could gnaw through the animal’s throat, Grandad Daulet cast his net and caught it. He did it so skilfully and accurately that the fox, still rolling, turned over twice and curled up in the net.

They had caught the fox alive – as men used to do in the olden days. Yerzhan saw the animal’s defeated eyes full of anguish and despair. How had people managed to close off the free steppe on every side? And if it hadn’t been for Petko, who refused Daulet’s offer of a winter coat and begged him not to skin the animal, Kapty would have dug out her cubs too. The true goal isn’t the goal, but the path to that goal, Petko said wisely. The old man had no choice but to agree with his guest. He sent the dog home with Uncle Kepek, waved his hand in frustration and released the bewildered fox back into the steppe.

Shaken had disappeared from sight as soon as the hunt was finished. Now he came riding towards them from the direction of the fox hole. Something was tucked under his sheepskin coat. When he reached the men he pulled out a fox cub. He said he’d caught it in the desert. It had probably run out in terror after its mother. Aisulu and Yerzhan can have a kitten! Yerzhan saw Petko’s reproachful glance, but then he remembered how much Aisulu would like to have a fox cub, and he pretended not to have noticed Petko’s glance.

Later that day, however, despite Petko’s love of living creatures, Grandad Daulet slaughtered a ram in honour of their guest. He skinned it and cooked the head in a dish of noodles. Petko struggled to eat the meal with his hands. Under old Daulet’s gaze, the violinist’s delicate fingers were as limp as noodles themselves. After the hearty supper, Daulet picked up his dombra and sang one of his ancient songs for their guest, explaining to Petko that here, as in the fox hunt, the listener is forced to follow the singer’s twists and turns until he falls, like the fox, into the performer’s snares.

‘Let’s turn ninety degrees,’ the old man interjected, then continued:

‘And another ninety-degree turn,’ exclaimed the old man, and waved his hand at Petko.

‘And now the final turn,’ the old man roared, and finished his song in a hushed voice:

As they sang, the fox cub, which had brought such joy to Aisulu, quietly slipped out of the house and was mauled to death by Kapty. They shed many tears as Uncle Kepek buried the furry little body off in the distance. From that evening on, each night, Yerzhan would hear a howl when the mother fox came to their door and begged for her cub. Kapty never barked when she came. Instead he would whine, as he did before an atomic blast.

That autumn an entire new window into the world opened up for the two-family population of Kara-Shagan. The city bride Baichichek insisted that Shaken went into town to buy a new radio with a gramophone attached. This was a genuine radiogram – nothing at all like Grandad’s hoarse, husky old Strela. From now on the days were structured. In the mornings Shaken exercised, encouraged by the trainer Gordeev and the pianist Potapov for everyone to hear. Then it was Grandad Daulet’s turn as he and the freshly exercised Shaken listened to the latest news that came after the Soviet anthem and Shaken’s unvarying credo: ‘We will not merely catch up with America, but overtake it!’ And when Grandad Daulet had to tend his tracks, the women listened to the radio dramas on the second Kazakhstan channel. And when the women went to milk the cows and collect brushwood in the steppe, Kepek nestled up against the radiogram. He stuck various wires into it and tuned in to demoniacal music that set him shaking and twitching even without any drink.

Kind-hearted Petko gave Yerzhan two records: Lendik Kogam – Leonid Kogan – and Dinrit – Dean Reed. Lendik Kogam played the violin so beautifully, as if Petko had decided not to get distracted by any more pupils and simply play on his own. And Dinrit sang songs that sounded just like the ones Kepek fished for with his wires, only they possessed the same purity and exceptional joy as Lendik Kogam. Yerzhan and Aisulu played these two records over and over again, until the grown-ups showed up and put the records back on the shelves and the children to bed.

For anyone who has never lived in the steppe, it is hard to understand how it is possible to exist surrounded by this wilderness on all sides. But those who have lived here since time out of mind know how rich and variable the steppe is. How multicoloured the sky above. How fluid the air all around. How varied the plants. How innumerable the animals in it and above it. A dust storm can spring up out of nowhere. A yellow whirlwind can suddenly start twirling round the air in the distance in the same way that women spin camel wool into twine. The entire, imponderable weight of that immense, heavy sky can suddenly whistle across the becalmed, submissive land…

As he grew, Yerzhan noticed all the subtle shades and gradations of the road they followed to Petko’s music lessons. And that road seemed like music to him: it was just as fluent, the sounds were just as varied. The notes of the wind swayed on the little tamarisk and saltwort shrubs. Shrews and ground squirrels sang the second and third voices.

At home, Grandad’s severe, wrinkled face seemed to the boy like the Bach violin concerto that he was learning to play. Shaken’s tedious cheerfulness was like Kreisler’s Miniature Viennese March, which they had decided not to bother learning at all. Kepek’s dumb behaviour was like Gaviniès’s endless études. And his Aisulu’s pink-cheeked little face was Vivaldi’s Winter, which the Bulgarian Petko played with ecstatic gusto during the late Kazakh summer.

And only the women, including the city bride Baichichek, did Yerzhan still associate with the monotonous sounds of the old-fashioned dombra.

The joy of the steppe, the joy of music and the joy of childhood always coexisted in Yerzhan with the anticipation of that inescapable, terrible, abominable thing that came as a rumbling and a trembling, and then a swirling, sweeping tornado from the Zone. At such times Uncle Shaken was usually away on his work shift. But on the rare occasions when he was at home, he, Grandad Daulet and Uncle Kepek argued non-stop while they were locked inside with the families for several days. Shaken, who was blamed for everything that was happening, lit up like the steppe itself when there was a blast. He preached to the others that it was more than just an atom bomb. It was our Soviet response to the arms race, without which we would all have been gone a long time ago. But the blasts were necessary for peaceful purposes too. In order to build communism! ‘It is our absolute duty not merely to catch up with, but to overtake the Americans! In case there’s a third world war!’ he concluded with his hallmark phrase. ‘Stop giving us the propaganda line!’ Grandad replied, equally heated. He had fought in both world wars: in the first he dug trenches in the rear and in the second he had reached the Elbe on foot, and fraternized with the Americans there. ‘There’s nothing in the world worth fighting a war for! I understand the railway, it transports people and cargo – that’s good for everyone! But what good does your atom-schmatom do? You’ve turned the entire steppe into a desert! You never see a gerbil or a fox!’

‘And the menfolk can’t get it up any more!’ Kepek intervened with an incomprehensible assertion of his own, which made Shaken look away shamefacedly.

One day in late autumn, after one of these periods of incarceration with long arguments, Shaken went to the city and brought a television back home. ‘If I can’t do it, let this educate you!’ he announced.

With the arrival of the television in Uncle Shaken’s house, the radiogram spontaneously migrated to Grandad Daulet’s, and now Dean Reed, backed up by red-cheeked Aisulu’s ‘Liza, Liza, Liza, Lizabet’, sang out fearlessly for Yerzhan alone. Moreover, Yerzhan’s and Aisulu’s days were now clearly divided into daytime and evening. The daytime, which had to be survived – with the music, with Dean Reed, with running around the steppe, with forays to the wagons on the siding, with absolutely anything. And the evening time, which had to be reached in order to immerse oneself, like sinking into sleep, in that little television, with its alluring blue glow in the early autumn or winter darkness. Cartoons, concerts, films, the television news and especially the music which started the main news. Shaken called the news music ‘Forward, Time!’ as proudly as if he had composed it himself. Yerzhan and Aisulu never missed a single programme until they fell asleep, exhausted, right there in front of the television, collapsing on the felt rug.

And then on New Year’s Eve Dean Reed himself appeared on the ‘Blue Light’ programme. He looked exactly like he did on the sleeve of his record – tall, slim and handsome. And what’s more, as if he knew Aisulu’s secret request, he started singing her favourite song, ‘Liza, Liza, Liza, Lizabet’. After that, whenever Yerzhan started playing his violin, picking out either Kogan or Dean Reed, he tied his mother’s black silk scarf round his neck as his bow tie. Like Dean Reed.

He knew for certain who he was going to look like when he grew up.

How Yerzhan yearned to look like Dean Reed! In his dreams he saw himself with the same kind of handsome features and long hair. But not only in his dreams! Even when he was wide awake he imagined that he was this good-looking American man. Especially when he watched his own lengthening shadow. He held his violin like a guitar and twirled round so that his shadow squirmed about on the ground. ‘We’ve got to keep searching, searching, she’ll be by my side, follow the sun…’ He got so used to his image that when he happened to glance by chance into his mother’s mirror, he was dumbfounded at the sight of his own face, expecting to see the face printed on the sleeve of the LP.

Thanks to Grandad Daulet, Yerzhan had learnt to play the dombra; thanks to Uncle Shaken he had encountered the violin; thanks to Uncle Kepek he had acquired his teacher, Petko; thanks to Petko he had learnt music and Russian and even acquired Dean Reed. And thanks to Dean Reed he had learnt to read, since he wanted to find out everything about this tall, handsome, happy man. Now Uncle Shaken would often bring back newspapers and magazines from the city for him, Rovesnik – My Age – or Krugozor – Outlook. And from them Yerzhan learnt, letter by letter, about the life of his idol. ‘Maria, Maria, Maria,’ Yerzhan chirped on his camel. ‘Bam bam bamba’ Petko heard the boy sing, and filled in the gaps in Yerzhan’s knowledge about Dean Reed, whom he had seen once in a Moscow television studio. Yerzhan was enraptured by these stories, but he didn’t show it. After all, he already knew how jealous Grandad was of his violin. So if Petko ever found out from Uncle Kepek that Yerzhan at home dropped his bow and grabbed his violin like a guitar to make his lengthening shadow look like Dean Reed, how jealous would the teacher be!

Not much troubled Yerzhan in those days. There were of course the explosions in the Zone, which the boy never called by their proper name out of visceral fear. But besides that he had only one other worry: which side in the third world war would Dean Reed be on? With his head full of the constant arguments between Shaken and Grandad Daulet about the imminent third world war and his nightmares of little silver planes suddenly turning into iron eagles and diving at him as if he were a fox cub, running across the steppe, unable to find a burrow or any kind of refuge from the rumbling, or the darkening sky, or the new sun rising in the black sky, or the mushroom hanging over the steppe, Yerzhan would wake soaked in sweat, curled up tight like a fox cub, and think in horror, afraid to move: Which side was Dean Reed on?

Who could he tell about these nocturnal fears? Petko and all the others believed he was a faithful disciple of Leonid Kogan. So with whom could he share his torments about Dean Reed?

‘Wunderkind!’ Petko said one day, gazing at Yerzhan with loving eyes, and the nickname stuck firmly. Uncle Kepek adopted it promptly and Shaken exclaimed, ‘Now we will definitely not only catch up with but also overtake America!’ He explained what the word meant in translation from the German. ‘Wunder’ was a miracle and ‘Kinder’ was a child, and so he surmised that it would be more correct to say ‘Wunderkinder’. Grandad Daulet learnt this word too. Only the grannies Kazakhized it, calling their grandson ‘buldur kimdir’ – ‘this someone’. Yerzhan liked his new nickname and flaunted it at every opportunity: when Grandad’s friend Tolegen came on the delivery train, when a passenger train stopped in the siding, when the local militiaman or the district doctor came to see Petko at the Mobile Construction Unit. One of the adults would cry, ‘Wunderkind!’ and Yerzhan would immediately grab his violin and rush to answer the call, playing Paganini’s Caprice or Vivaldi’s Spring.

‘A wunderkind!’ they all agreed – the idle passengers in the train, the terrifying militiaman and the doctor, and kind old Uncle Tolegen too.

‘We have to show him to the conservatoire!’ Shaken enthused. ‘I’ll take a few days’ leave and go to Almaty with him!’ Yerzhan was terrified. Did they want to conserve him? Is that what they did with a wunderkind – like fruit in jam and cucumbers in brine? Shaken explained what the conservatoire was, but it didn’t calm Yerzhan. He still remembered what had happened last time when Grandad Daulet wanted to take him to the city and the fly started buzzing in his ear and the wagon tumbled over. Luckily, except for Uncle Shaken, everyone else seemed to be on Yerzhan’s side. Grandad dismissed the idea with a shrug: ‘He’ll go to school soon and it will all blow over!’ – as if he was talking about a brief cold. Uncle Kepek shrugged the conservatoire idea off from a different angle: ‘Even if he is a paedo, our Pedo studied with Oistrakh!’ – and he pointed at people playing the violin or the dombra on the television. ‘Look, my little darling nephew plays a hundred times better than any of those blockheads! Give me two strings, put a stick in my hand and I’m the master of the land!’ The comment made Grandad angry, but it didn’t make him change his mind.

‘Hey, Wunderkind, come here and give my bumps a rub!’ Granny Ulbarsyn called from the next room. She certainly wouldn’t let her favourite masseur go anywhere.

Yerzhan went to school when he was seven. ‘Went’ sounds very simple, but the school was in a village eight kilometres from Kara-Shagan, so ‘going to school’ meant walking eight kilometres in one direction and eight kilometres back. On the first day, Grandad insisted that Yerzhan hang the dombra from one shoulder and the violin from the other. At school the pupils gathered in the sports hall and Yerzhan played first one instrument and then the other. Since that day no more coaxing was required for the nickname ‘Wunderkind’ to migrate from Kara-Shagan to school, and his classmates soon started to call Yerzhan ‘Wunda’. And ‘Wunda’ played Kurmangazy and Tchaikovsky by turns whenever the school inspectors came to visit.

Winter arrived. Howling hungry wolves and jackals loped across the steppe. It was no longer safe for Yerzhan to walk to school and so Grandad took him by horse. The boy warmed up in the classroom, while Grandad Daulet sat in the railway canteen. His patience lasted for two days. Then he informed the director of the school that he would take his grandson home for the rest of the winter. And once again Yerzhan was left alone with his violin, exercise books and pencils.

Under the dim light of the lamp Granny Ulbarsyn sorted through camel wool while Yerzhan hunched over the table and drew whatever came to his mind. And as the long winter evenings dragged on, he eventually taught his Aisulu to read and write. She started school the following summer and quickly became the best pupil in the class, because she knew in advance what the other untutored children were only just trying to master.

Uncle Shaken now took them to school on the camel, crammed in between the two humps. But when he disappeared to work his shift catching up with and overtaking the Americans, Grandad Daulet sat them both on the donkey. He handed them each a dry cob of maize to scatter the grains along the route. ‘That way,’ he said, ‘you won’t get lost… And if you do get lost,’ he added slyly, ‘we’ll set the chickens on the trail and they’ll find you.’ Although how could they get lost, when the route ran alongside the railway line the whole time? And in the mornings, on their way to school, the sun shone in their faces from the right all the time and in the afternoon, on their way home, it would shine on their right side again.

Aisulu held on tight to Yerzhan’s thin shoulders and they galloped, sometimes with the wind, sometimes against it, sometimes through a whirlwind, sometimes through a dust storm. And in the early days they wasted their time vainly scattering grains of maize, which the skylarks and rollers of the steppe religiously pecked up. But soon the sun hid behind the fast-moving autumn clouds.

Aisulu was still joyfully singing a Dean Reed song right in Yerzhan’s ear when their donkey picked up a cabbage stalk thrown out of a passenger train. The animal swallowed the stalk whole and immediately choked. It lashed out so suddenly that Aisulu tumbled off the donkey’s back in mid-note. Then Yerzhan followed, to the other side. The animal shuddered and wheezed and shook its head from side to side. Yerzhan didn’t lose time and jumped up and flung himself at the donkey in a fury. At first he was going to beat it, but when he saw the foam frothing out of its mouth, he was seriously frightened. The animal wouldn’t let him get close; it kicked out and lashed at him with its tail, baring its teeth and snorting terribly. ‘Hold him!’ Yerzhan shouted, and little Aisulu, dropping her briefcase on the ground, grabbed the reins and pulled the donkey’s head down towards the ground. Without stopping to think, Yerzhan parted its jaws and stuck his arm up to the elbow into its mouth, reaching through the foamy mush. His fingernails touched the stalk and with all his strength the boy jerked it out. The donkey howled and sank its teeth into Yerzhan’s arm. Swearing like a grown-up, Yerzhan shrieked, ‘Fuck your mother!’ But he didn’t let go of the stalk and pulled it out of the donkey’s jaws. He ignored his bleeding arm and smacked the animal between the eyes! The donkey howled in resentful gratitude at the top of its lungs: ‘Ee-yaw! Ee-ee-yaw! Ee-ee-ya-aw!’ Aisulu, too, swore just like Granny Sholpan: ‘A plague on you! Foul beast! Do you hear what I say?’And then without any more lamentations she took the scarf off her head, licked away the blood flowing along Yerzhan’s arm from under the hoisted-up sleeve and bound the wound tightly.

On that day they missed school.

Yerzhan and Aisulu shared happy childhood years. Together they plastered the back walls of the two houses with cowpats that were their fuel for the winter. Or they hunted through the goods trains that had stopped on the siding. And sometimes, when a wagon was piled up with coal, they swept out a sack or two of the dust that was stuck along the side frames of the bogies or over the suspension of the wheels. Or they managed to break out a wooden brace that stabilized the platform, to use as firewood or building material. But what they enjoyed most was to take hot water and powdered milk to passenger trains waiting in the siding for an express goods train with important cargo to pass and sell their beverage or play the dombra to earn a little money. And city people from unknown lands, golden-toothed Uzbeks, yellow-haired Russians and red-shirted Gypsies gave them brand-new coins and paper roubles. And sometimes they would even receive a sweet or some city knick-knack. And once someone gave them a bar of chocolate. They shared the sweets half-and-half, but Yerzhan generously let Aisulu have all the knick-knacks, and she accumulated a whole heap of them in boxes and little drawers: lipstick, Komsomol and Young Pioneer badges, one ballpoint pen, a key ring and even a huge pair of sunglasses.

Of course, it was rare for passenger trains to wait here; mostly they were goods trains, some with cement, some with timber where they could strip the bark, some with sand, some with china clay that they could chew instead of black tar.

But at least once a week Uncle Tolegen’s wagon, coupled to a goods train, travelled round all these way stations that were called ‘spots’, bringing them railway bread and occasionally flour for round bread rolls, sugar, salt and tea bricks. The grown-ups, however, went out to meet that wagon themselves.

It wasn’t long before Aisulu started to accompany Yerzhan to his lessons with Petko, with firm instructions from Uncle Kepek not to get separated for a single moment. Unfortunately, Petko’s Mobile Construction Unit lay in a completely different direction from the school: if you drew a triangle connecting home, school and Petko, then Petko was right up at the apex. One afternoon, after Yerzhan had played yet another Mozart march on the violin for the school assembly and they were running late, the children decided not to go home but to head straight to Petko. They wanted to try a new route. Using Grandad Daulet’s method, Yerzhan calculated that if the sun shone into their right eye on the way from home to school, then now, in Kepek’s Russian expression, it should shine ‘right up their arse’.

The steppe lay all around them, like a wide-open eye, mutely escorting them on their way, and an equally huge, bright eye watched them from above. Ensconced on the donkey, they weren’t frightened – no snake or steppe spider would bite them, no fox or kite would come close. Small black spots of occasional graves jutted up out of the horizon like markers indicating their route.

But suddenly one of these spots started to move. Yerzhan quickly realized that it was a solitary wolf who had come out on his pre-winter hunt. He was lurking in the steppe waiting for prey. The boy had learnt what to do. He took off his school jumper and wound it round his hand like a flag. He lashed the donkey and waved the flag, whooping at the top of his voice. He didn’t ask Aisulu to follow his example, but she imitated him straight away, whirling her jumper about and lashing the donkey with it, while squealing so shrilly that Yerzhan was almost deafened. The wolf had not expected such a show. Surprised by the ambush, he turned and took to his heels, running ahead in the same direction as the donkey. Inadvertently the children found themselves in pursuit of the animal. They galloped for almost half an hour. Then all at once the wolf disappeared and at long last they saw the trailers and the excavators. They had reached Petko safely.

They didn’t mention their adventure to the violin teacher and without any delay the lesson began. Petko taught Yerzhan, and Yerzhan almost simultaneously passed on what he had learnt to Aisulu, who didn’t know Russian and couldn’t read music yet, and only annoyed Petko. But as soon as rain started falling outside, the air inside the trailer cleared too. And when the rain turned into a thunderstorm, the teacher and his pupils had to stop playing in order to save the donkey. The animal was so terrified that it had broken free and was now soaked right down to the very last hair on its short tail.

The rain and the thunder carried on into the evening. There was inky blackness on all sides. And, of course, going home was completely out of the question. That night they missed their indispensable television viewing and stayed in Petko’s trailer.

Aisulu and Yerzhan shared a bed. The girl soon drifted off. The boy, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. As midnight approached he heard the wind howling and the rain lashing at the little trailer. And then he sensed eyes in the darkness. He looked around frightened and saw Petko standing beside their bed. Although the night was as black as pitch, Yerzhan felt the full force of the man’s gaze and lay very still, more dead than alive, not knowing what to expect and more afraid for Aisulu than for himself. But Petko must have become aware of the boy staring back at him, because he awkwardly busied himself adjusting the blanket that had slipped off. Yerzhan’s heart pounded hollowly and Petko’s keen musical ear caught the echoing rhythm of childish fear. He sat down on the edge of the bed, stroked Yerzhan’s head and said, ‘Sleep. Don’t be afraid, I’m here…’ Then he added, ‘Would you like me to tell you a story about an Eternal Boy?’

And without waiting for a reply he started whispering: ‘A long, long time ago there was a boy called Wolfgang. Do you know what that name means? Walking wolf.’ Yerzhan shuddered at that – perhaps it was cunning Petko who had sent the wolf into the steppe? ‘This boy was such a talented musician that he could play any instrument with his eyes blindfolded. One night, when Wolfgang couldn’t sleep and picked out notes for his music from among the stars, the silver-faced moon climbed down from the sky and started dancing, enticing him to follow her outside into the street, along the river, to the lake. The music of this dance was so entrancing that the boy followed the moon on and on, unable to gather his wits or resist. The moon walked across the water, luring him ever further with her song. The boy followed her, and where the moon left only a shimmering silvery trail, full of magical sounds, the boy sank deeper and deeper into the water. His weightless soul seemed to be flying after the moon, but his body walked as if it was chained to the earthly paths of the wolf. The music sounded duller and duller, the water grew deeper and deeper above and around him. And then, finally, the silvery thread of music broke off. The eternal silence of silt and the lake bottom filled the boy’s ears and all the spaces of his body, and with his final breath he howled like a wolf…

‘The boy was saved – maybe by people, maybe by water nymphs, maybe by elves. His body continued to live and grew, but his soul stayed there in that night, at that lake, enchanted for ever by the moon and her silvery trail, full of music and dancing… And you remind me of that eternal boy,’ Petko finished, or perhaps Yerzhan was already dreaming and it wasn’t Petko’s words, but the rustling of the silvery rain outside the window bringing this sweet and terrible tale to an end.

The next morning the thunderstorm had ceased, but the rain kept on and on. And the steppe was so wet and muddy that no donkey could have gone even two steps. Petko’s work had also been brought to a standstill by the weather, so after eating breakfast they took up the violin again and worked on Bohm and Handel by turns.

The day passed and evening came, but the rain didn’t stop. How could they know that all this time Grandad Daulet, who had left his son Kepek on the tracks, and Shaken, who was out of his mind with worry over his only daughter, were galloping – one on a horse and one on a camel – round the houses of Yerzhan’s and Aisulu’s classmates, and couldn’t find them anywhere.

Yerzhan and Aisulu returned home on the third day in the guilty sunshine on the cheerful donkey that had caught up on its sleep. The girl was greeted with fervent hugs, while Yerzhan encountered the whip. And Uncle Kepek pestered both of them with strange questions.

They continued to skip classes on especially blizzardy days. Yerzhan taught Aisulu music and counting and writing at home. And after the second school winter he decided that he should stay back in the second class for a year, so that Aisulu could catch up with him, and then they would sit at the same desk for the rest of their lives. And although Yerzhan not only played music better than all the others but also read and counted and drew better than everyone else in his class, when spring came he suddenly forgot his textbooks at home, or didn’t remember his homework, blaming it on the music, or simply drew blots in his exercise book.

The teachers tried to summon his parents to school, but Yerzhan didn’t pass on their messages. He knew the teachers wouldn’t travel eight kilometres there and eight back to complain about his poor progress. And so he was kept back in the second school year. When Grandad found out, he wanted to whip his grandson again, but Granny Ulbarsyn interceded. She blamed the music. The music had completely worn the poor boy out. But to be on the safe side, she nevertheless sent Yerzhan to stay with Granny Sholpan for a few days. Granny Sholpan was delighted and said that while her son-in-law Shaken was at his shift, Yerzhan would be the man of the house.

And so, in the torrid heat Yerzhan drove the herd to the distant river meadow in the gullies, to the river that had dried up for the summer. There, among the stones and the sand, the herd sought out rare wisps of steppe grass and turned over boulders with their horns to lick the residual moisture off the undersides.

The naked sun beat down pitilessly on the boy’s head and neither the scorched, lifeless tamarisk bushes nor the crooked-armed saksaul offered any shelter. Yerzhan tied his T-shirt round his head. But the rest of his body burnt in the ferocious sun. Eventually the heat became unbearable and he cautiously rinsed off his skin with heated water from Shaken’s army flask. Then he let a blissful sheep lick the moisture off his skin. The animal’s rough tongue soothed the midday itch.

In the evening he returned sunburnt to Granny Sholpan’s house. The old woman and her granddaughter smeared sour milk over the boy’s back and chest. And life returned to Yerzhan’s body under Aisulu’s soft little palms.

Yerzhan started the second class for the second time. This time, however, he shared a desk with Aisulu. They competed for As in their studies and the teachers were overjoyed, as they believed that Aisulu’s mentorship of the failing student had worked. How could any of them know that at home it was Yerzhan who took control of the lessons? He produced two copies of all the drawings, and gave the good ones to Aisulu and kept the rough drafts for himself. He solved the difficult maths problems and told her the right spellings in dictation. Since he was taller and stronger than all these small fries by a whole year, he also stood up for Aisulu and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.

It was during a Kazakh-language lesson that the classroom windows started to jangle and benches shifted about on the floor. The blackboard crashed down off the wall and trapped their terrified teacher, lame-legged Kymbat. Yerzhan dashed forwards and rescued her. Then he ordered his classmates to crawl underneath their desks. A rumbling ran through the ground again. He broke out a window. His hand bled but he ignored the cut and dragged Aisulu into the open. A humming blast of air zoomed past and the tiles of the school roof came tumbling down.

And then suddenly an appalling silence. No sheep bleating, no dogs barking and no donkeys braying – even the ubiquitous flies had stopped buzzing. There was only Aisulu, lying face down in the dust, whispering her prayers – in the name of Allah, the most Merciful.

Later that autumn, as if this terrifying blast had never happened, or perhaps precisely because of it, the school bus headed over potholed, dusty roads towards the atomic workers’ town. Aisulu’s father, Shaken, had organized a school trip for their class to see his place of work. The bus journey took a day. They stayed overnight in the sports hall of the local school and in the morning the children were taken, freshly washed and de-dusted, to the ‘experimental reactor’. In the information room, Yerzhan and Aisulu played a duet for the workers on their instruments. Then they were shown a film about the peaceful use of nuclear power. Some of the children had never watched a film before and the rustling of the sound and the quick scene changes frightened them and they cried. After the film Uncle Shaken, dressed in a white coat and white hat, like all the other workers, appeared and announced that this was the place where they were doing absolutely everything possible not only to catch up with but also to overtake America. He showed them different-coloured balls on a thick wire and set out to explain to them what he called a ‘chain reaction’. There were two sets of balls on either end of the wire. Shaken took a ball from one group and used it to knock another ball just like the first one out of the other group, setting the first ball in the place of the one that had flown out. Yerzhan wanted to laugh out loud. Did they really have to be brought all this way to be taught playing tag with balls? But Aisulu watched wide-eyed, trying as hard as she could to memorize everything her father said. She even asked him questions, talking to him like some stranger, not her father, addressing him as Shaken Nurpeisovich.

A second film followed about an atomic explosion. And then finally the fun started. In the playground they were handed gas masks and chased after each other like aliens. But sadly the fun didn’t last long. Because suddenly a real alien in a big rubber suit broke into their group. And everyone froze. He made a beeline for Aisulu. He grabbed her with his claw gloves. She screamed. And she screamed so loud that even through her gas mask and his gas mask Yerzhan could hear her cry for help. He ran towards her. But before he had reached them, the alien let go of Aisulu and lifted his helmet. It was Uncle Shaken, laughing out loud. Aisulu immediately joined in with her father’s laughter. Only Yerzhan looked at him horrified. A strange tremble had seized him from inside.

Towards evening Uncle Shaken took the children to the Dead Lake. ‘Don’t drink the water and do not touch it,’ he told them. It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud. No movement, no waves, no ripples, no trembling – a bottle-green, glassy surface with only cautious reflections of the boys’ and girls’ faces as they peeped at its bottom by the shore. Could there possibly be some fairy-tale fish or monster of the deep to be found in this static, dense water?

The bus driver called Uncle Shaken to help him with a punctured tyre. Yerzhan was left in charge of the class. He saw his long shadow reflected on the water’s surface. Dean Reed in the boundless steppe, underneath the limitless sky, above the bottomless water. He briefly took Aisulu’s hand. Then he let go of it and pulled off his T-shirt and trousers and walked calmly into the forbidden water. For a moment he splashed about in it and then, to the admiring and terrified twittering of Aisulu and the others, he walked out of the water, shook himself off as if nothing had happened and dressed again in his canvas trousers and Chinese T-shirt.

Nobody snitched on him. And for a long time afterwards everyone recalled with respectful admiration Wunda’s dramatic escapade.