The Dead Lake

^{Part Two} Do La The Destiny

The train moved on across the steppe like Yerzhan’s story – without stopping, without hesitating, onwards and forwards. It was strange, but in this story there was none of that bitterness reminiscent of the old steam trains, which blew their nasty smoke into the last carriages on the bends. No, the diesel locomotive drew the train along without any strain, smoothly and unfalteringly.

Those childhood years were like a blue-and-yellow happiness, growing between the sky and the earth. But still the fear that something could happen at any moment, pouncing with a sudden roar and tearing the tiles off the roof, stayed with Yerzhan for the next two or three years. Everything seemed to be going as it should: autumns in school were followed by ferocious winters, when their door was piled so high with snow that there was nothing else to do but play on the violin or the dombra. Sometimes the boy had to climb out through the little window at the side of the house to scrape away the snowdrifts with their only railway spade.

After the musical winter came the no less musical spring, when the songs poured out of him. He and Aisulu followed their bidding, riding not off to school on the donkey, but towards the hills, where fields of scarlet tulips blossomed in a blaze of swaying notes.

And after that summer itself started imperceptibly blazing – without any school, thank God, but again with music, and with the herd and a separation in the afternoon. After all, he couldn’t take thin-skinned Aisulu with him in the scorching heat, could he!

And the thing that loomed over him like a visceral fear could happen in the middle of the sweltering summer, when sheep suddenly started bleating as if they were under the knife and went dashing in all directions, cows dug their horns into the ground and the donkey squealed and rolled around in the dust… And a slight rumble would run through the ground, Yerzhan’s legs would start trembling, and then his whole body, and the fear would rise up from his shaking knees to his stomach and freeze there in a heavy ache, until the sky cracked over his head and shattered into pieces, crushing him completely, reducing him to dust, to sand, to scraps of grass and wool. And the black whirlwind hurtled past above him with a wild howl.

It happened in winter, and at night, and in autumn, and in the morning, and in the music, and in a pause in the music – without any regularity or forewarning: it could always happen, at any moment, hanging over his head as implacably as fear itself, as the future.

And it happened when Yerzhan was twelve years old and Aisulu was eleven. It was in the fifth class at school, after the long winter holidays. First the girls and then the boys in their class started to outgrow Yerzhan. But, after all, he was a year older than them, and he had always been taller and stronger. At first the difference wasn’t very noticeable: so what if Serik or Berik had stretched out a bit, that didn’t make them any brighter! But when Aisulu, his little mite Sulu, his slim-winged swallow Sulu, started overtaking Yerzhan, he sensed that something was wrong. The same fear that had always begun with a trembling in his knees and frozen as a heavy ache in his stomach seemed to have risen higher now, right up to his throat – and got stuck there, preventing his body from growing.

In the mornings, Yerzhan did pull-ups on the door frame. He nailed a rusty wheel hoop to the back wall of the house. From television he knew that basketball players grew taller than anyone else and in secret, when no one watched, he jumped up to the hoop for hours, tossing whatever he could find through it – a bundle of rags or a ball of camel wool. And at night he stretched in bed, imagining that he would wake up in the morning as Dean Reed. But he had stopped growing.

Other people noticed it too and wanted to help. Granny Ulbarsyn fed him with the livers of newborn spring lambs, Grandad Daulet ordered carrots from the city through his friend Tolegen, and Uncle Shaken brought disgusting fish oil back from his shift. But that only produced a foul-smelling burp! Yerzhan ate it all. But he had stopped growing.

He gave up music. In any case, Petko had gone back to Bulgaria, where a family member had died. And Yerzhan spent the whole summer hiding away with his herd in the gullies close to the Zone. He lay on the ground naked for withering days on end in the hope that the sun would help. But even the heat made no difference. He had stopped growing.

And one day his faithful and obedient donkey brought him back to the house half-dead from the bite of a camel spider.

On 1 September that year Yerzhan did not go to school. Uncle Shaken took Sulu, all dressed up, on her own. On 2 September the two grannies persuaded the boy to stand in for Shaken, who had had to leave urgently for his shift. ‘At least escort her,’ they said, ‘even if you don’t sit through lessons.’ Grandad Daulet, however, told Yerzhan not to come back home unless he had done his schoolwork. Yerzhan accompanied Aisulu but refused to sit on the donkey with the towering girl and followed the animal at a distance. In the quiet autumn steppe Sulu started singing. It wasn’t Dean Reed. It was the sad song of Abai, who once lived in this steppe:

Yerzhan picked up on only two words in this song: ‘height’ and ‘body’…

He sat through lessons that day, at the desk right at the back, on his own, not going out for any breaks, and pretended to be asleep when Sulu came to the window. After school boys and girls set off back home in pairs. Yerzhan walked in front of the donkey, not glancing round at sad, silent Aisulu. He so badly wanted her assurances that no matter what was wrong and no matter what happened to him, she would still love no one but him and marry no one but him, as she had promised in their childhood. On the other hand, he realized that she was almost half a head taller than him, and if it carried on… He couldn’t think beyond that; he was overwhelmed, not by the usual fear, but by a rage that took its place, rising up from his trembling knees, through his hot stomach, to his heavy, throbbing head: he wanted to kill himself, to kill her, towering up on that bad-tempered, noisy donkey; he wanted to smash this railway, grind it to dust, and this earth, and this sky…

In this state of mind he went to school for another two or three weeks, or perhaps even longer. Every day he witnessed the inevitable but refused to accept it: the children around him were growing by the hour. And his Aisulu was blossoming into a gorgeous beauty before his very eyes. Girls and boys swirled round her like the little stars in the sky round the full moon, and only Yerzhan sat in the corner during breaks, with a face like grey earth, dropping his heavy head on the desk and glancing out from under his brows at the smile on her face or the joyful response to it from some Serik or Berik.

Kill her! Kill myself! The thoughts pounded in time with his heart as it beat faster and faster, and again he plodded away after classes, immersed in his own agonizing doubts, which never led to anything or any place except home.

On one of these days he didn’t go to school, using the excuse that he was ill, and since Uncle Shaken was still on his shift, Uncle Kepek took Aisulu to school on the same tireless donkey. All day long Yerzhan roasted in the flames of his own thoughts and towards evening, at the time when Aisulu usually came home, he walked out of the house. And the first image he became aware of was his own uncle, Kepek, riding on the donkey with Aisulu. She sat in front of him instead of behind, so that his arms were around her youthful body as he was holding the reins, and she was quietly singing one of her tender songs, something like Dean Reed’s ‘Come with Us’…

Yerzhan didn’t greet them. And at night he burnt, not in an imaginary blaze but in the genuine infernal fever of his own boyish hell.

Granny Ulbarsyn took him to the local healer, Keremet-apke. Keremet-apke felt Yerzhan’s pulse, kneaded the bones in his fingers and led him behind a curtain. She tore the curtain material in half, sat next to the boy and appealed to Tengri, and to the prophet Makhambet, and to Makhambet’s angel. She swayed from side to side, working herself up more and more, then grabbed a whip and lashed herself across the knees and lashed the boy gently across his shoulders and back. ‘The devil’s work! The devil’s work!’ Foam poured out of her babbling mouth and she gestured to her daughter, who stood by the door: ‘Bring it!’ And in an instant her daughter had fetched a scorching-hot sheep’s shoulder blade. Keremet-apke cooled it with her saliva and then held it against the boy’s back.

Yerzhan was very quickly cured of his infernal fever. But he didn’t grow a single finger’s breadth.

He hated his granny for believing in all this antediluvian quackery, and most of all for that story of hers about little snot-nosed Gesar that she had told him back in his childhood. He hated her for the way she gossiped about him with Granny Sholpan for days at a time now, pondering over this life and wondering why he had been left a midget…

Aisulu’s father, Shaken, also became angry at the whispering of the two old women and one day in early winter he took Yerzhan to the city for an X-ray. The train travelled through the steppe and they passed the dead city that Uncle Shaken had showed Yerzhan a long time ago. And they passed the Dead Lake. But everything was covered under a fine layer of snow that shifted ceaselessly in the piercing steppe wind, until it gathered in drifts at the railway’s snow barriers.

They reached the city – a welter of people, cars and houses – and travelled through this dizzying, cramped space to a special clinic, where they led Yerzhan into a room and told him to undress and stand between the metal parts of a large device which Uncle Shaken called an X-ray machine. They switched off the light and made clicking noises.

Afterwards, Uncle Shaken and Yerzhan waited in the corridor until a man in a white coat and cap came out and showed Shaken black pages with bright spots on them.

‘Perfectly normal bones,’ the man said. ‘The bones of a child. Only there are no growth zones left…’

From the way that Uncle Shaken first argued with the man, then swore, then shouted at everyone, mentioning America and the Soviet Union all in one go, Yerzhan realized that nobody here would help him either. And he quietly hated these men in their doctor’s coats, and Uncle Shaken too, with his eternal pursuit of America.

Grandad Daulet, too, took his turn at trying to stretch his grandson’s bones. His method was an old folk one. Without telling the grannies or the younger generation, he took Yerzhan out into the steppe. There he wrapped him in a tarpaulin railway cloak, tied his hands carefully with a lasso, put a felt shawl under him, tied the other end of the lasso to his own waist and mounted his horse. He moved off at a trot that became faster and faster until it turned into a gallop across the sandy soil, dragging his grandson behind him, lying stretched out on the ground. Yerzhan’s eyes and mouth filled up with fine sand that still grated on his teeth in the evening and could only be extracted from his nose by sneezing. And his arms ached from the knots of the lasso. But even this procedure didn’t add any height to him.

At night Grandad shouted at Granny Ulbarsyn for everyone to hear because she had produced a good-for-nothing daughter, while the daughter, Yerzhan’s mother, sat in silence in the next room, crying over her son. As Yerzhan fell asleep, gazing up drowsily at his poor, dumb mother, he quietly hated Grandad for his swearing, and for the pointless daily torment, and for the sand that had crept into his crotch and in under his tailbone, and for the salt on his lips.

Even Kepek, who had become Yerzhan’s bitterest enemy ever since he saw his uncle riding on the donkey with Aisulu, tried to help his nephew. He lent Yerzhan the only iron bedstead in the house for a few nights. He tied Yerzhan’s hands to the head frame, tied his feet to the opposite end and left him there, crucified for the night. The boy dreamt that he was flying over the steppe like Gesar on his steed, and the feather grass was swept aside under the hooves, and the sky opened up to meet him. And instead of the sun, Aisulu’s face greeted him.

Yerzhan had abandoned his violin. But that winter he played on his dombra almost all night and day. During the day, when Grandad went to knock the snow off his points and rails, when Kepek took Aisulu to school and the women spun wool, Yerzhan was left alone, and he took the dombra and played the same song over and over again: ‘Aidan aru narsa zhok’ – ‘Nothing is there purer than the moon’. He played it to a thousand different melodies.

To Yerzhan this old song was about him. Every word of it, every sentence that followed another, was telling the story of his life. How sweetly it had all begun, as if the entire world consisted of the pure moon and the pure sun, of his Aisulu and him. But didn’t the song warn him? And how could he forget: the moon shines only at night and the sun shines only during the day. Only once a year do moon and sun appear together at the two sides of the steppe, like two huge, identical circles. Or had he just seen that in a dream?

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.