The Dead Lake

^{Part Three} Sol Mi Fa The Salt of the Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yerzhan made up his mind.

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

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

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

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

Like his mother’s eternal silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yerzhan’s soul felt as light as air, as if his little body had dissolved in this bitter water. He wanted so badly to preserve the feeling, to prevent himself from spilling it, that there was nothing left of him but waiting and listening.

Yerzhan galloped back across the steppe on the horse, and the sun at his back stretched out his shadow, longer and longer, as if the enchantment had fallen away from him and now he would return to the world where slim, stately Aisulu was waiting for him. He galloped across the steppe on the horse, with the gun in his hand, feeling like Dean Reed again in one of his films about Indians, when he played the cowboy Joe. And now he sang out as loud as he could, at the top of his lungs, for the whole steppe to hear, for the whole sky to hear:

On the very point of sunset, when his shadow was flattened so far out across the steppe that he couldn’t see where it ended, the low sun behind him lit up the hills where he was conceived. And in the sunset glow he saw two horses, tied to a tamarisk bush. Yerzhan’s heart started pounding rapidly and his horse, sensing danger, switched to a stealthy trot. As he approached the place of his conception, Dean Reed’s song faded from his lips and his lungs, and that phrase, uluu kaltarys, returned, throbbing in time with his heart, his pulse, his breathing.

And suddenly he saw what he had been afraid of seeing all his life. Down below among the sand and stones of the dried-up riverbed Aisulu lay stretched out, with Kara-Choton – the loathsome Kepek – leaning down towards her over and over again. Yerzhan reined in the horse and dismounted and grabbed Grandad’s shotgun with both hands. He didn’t tether Aigyr, merely waved his hand and hissed. The obedient horse stood still. Running from bush to bush like in a cowboy film, Yerzhan crept to within calling distance.

He took aim and fired the remaining cartridge.

The fear that had lurked within him all his life suddenly stirred, brushing past his stomach, flying up to his throat and bursting out in a frenetic, childish scream. Kepek collapsed onto Aisulu like a limp sack. Yerzhan dashed forward, watching with utter horror as a strip of gauze, as bright red with his uncle’s blood as a streak of sunset, fell out of Kepek’s hands on to Aisulu’s white leg, which was left only half-bandaged.

Aisulu had broken her leg looking for Yerzhan.

No, I didn’t even try to think this story through to the end; it was too terrible for this quiet steppe night with the gentle hammering of the train’s wheels and my heart beating in time with them. The boy on the upper bunk was muttering incomprehensible words in his sleep, the old man opposite me was snoring nervously, like a ram that has just been stuck. What a nightmare! I thought. Blaming my fears on the stale air in the compartment, I stood up and opened the door slightly. A cool draught was blowing from the corridor. I decided to wait a while for the compartment to cool completely, so I didn’t lie down again.

The train ran on tirelessly across the night-time steppe. A rare light, or perhaps a star that had fought its way through the dense darkness, moved slowly round the train. When the compartment had filled up with the chilly night air, I cautiously closed the door, but as if responding to my movement, the train slowed and suddenly, with the usual screech of brake blocks in the night, it stopped. I listened. In the distance steps rustled sporadically across the gravel of the embankment. Whoever it was kept stopping, and then the steps would start again, moving closer and getting clearer. Finally, somewhere underneath us, a lantern glinted for a moment, a hammer clanged against brake blocks and a trembling voice spoke into the darkness in Kazakh: ‘So that’s it! Fuck it…’

I suddenly wanted to shake Yerzhan awake, but I managed to stop myself.

Yerzhan was sleeping uneasily, as usual. They had only just buried Granny Ulbarsyn and the old women from the entire district, led by Keremet-apke, the local healer, were still performing their shamanic rituals and saying their prayers at Granny Sholpan’s house. Having lost his wife, Grandad had borne up manfully all the way through the funeral, but on the third day he had gone limp and taken to his bed. Shaken was left to chop wood alone for the hearth under the immense cauldron, go running to the tracks and back, and slaughter a sheep for the wake.

The way Granny Ulbarsyn had died was strange. In late autumn the lumps on her legs had started swelling up, and no matter how hard Yerzhan rubbed them, they kept getting bigger. ‘Ah, my lumps grow bigger but you haven’t. And you haven’t got any stronger either,’ Granny Ulbarsyn moaned in undisguised reproach.

The city bride Baichichek had tried to persuade her husband, Shaken, to take old Granny Ulbarsyn to the city for an X-ray, but the old woman flatly refused. Instead she persuaded her own husband to take her on a camel to the healer Keremet-apke. Keremet-apke felt Granny’s pulse, kneaded the bones in her fingers and led her behind a curtain. She tore the material of the curtain in half and then sat beside Granny Ulbarsyn and appealed to Tengri, and to the prophet Makhambet, and to the prophet’s angel. She swayed from side to side, working herself up more and more, then grabbed a whip off the wall and first lashed herself across the knees with it, then lashed the old woman’s legs gently. ‘The devil’s work! The devil’s work!’ And when foam started pouring out of her babbling mouth, she gestured to her daughter standing 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 Granny Ulbarsyn’s legs.

‘For nine days plus nine feed a black ram with twisted horns and then slaughter it on Tuesday!’ she ordered. ‘Rub the warm blood on your legs and you’ll skip and hop like a two-year-old gazelle!’

But alas, there wasn’t a black ram with twisted horns in the flock, and on the next market day Grandad galloped off to the cattle yard at the regional centre and brought one back on a lead – not just a ram, but a real devil with horns. The devil kicked out and butted and refused to be held. Grandad and Shaken could barely contain him, and to prevent him from butting the whole flock to death, they had to tie him by the neck and knot his legs.

Although Grandad brought the ram on Sunday, Granny Ulbarsyn calculated that she should only start feeding him on Friday, so that nine days plus nine would fall on a Tuesday. The next Friday she got up out of the bed she had lain in almost all autumn and tottered off, taking small steps, first to the hay and then to the pen, where that devil was tethered, and threw an armful of hay down in front of him. She did this twice a day, and with every day her legs grew stronger and her stride became ever more sure.

The ram grew fatter and fatter, Granny felt better and better and the lumps on her legs shrank day by day. The night before the appointed Tuesday, after feeding the devil that had now become a friend and with whom she had long conversations, Granny came back cheerfully to the house and asked Grandad for advice.

‘Daulet, what do you think? Should we really slaughter that ram tomorrow?’

‘Why do you ask?’ Grandad asked in surprise.

‘Well, I just thought, my legs are working well now, and I’ve got used to having the ram around…’

‘Go to bed,’ said Grandad. ‘I’ve got to go out for the 5.27!’

The next day, despite Granny’s peevish opposition, they decided to slaughter the ram. We’ll rub the warm blood on your legs, and on Yerzhan’s legs too, they said. Who knows, perhaps someone put a spell on the ram. It might do some good. Shaken and Grandad went to tie up the ram, and Granny sat down by the door, preparing her legs for the fresh blood. Yerzhan sat a little distance away and observed the goings-on, more out of idle curiosity than any hope of being cured.

And then, when Shaken took the rope off the ram’s neck and grasped him, ready to throw him over on his side, the devil, grown strong from all his fine feeding, suddenly kicked out with a grunt, knocked Grandad over with a single movement, darted out of the pen and dashed towards Granny as fast as he could. He flew towards her like a terrified child flying to its mother’s embrace, like a tame eagle flying to the hunter’s arm, like a she-fox’s cub flying to its den.

The fattened black devil with twisted horns crashed into the old woman at full tilt.

And that’s how Granny Ulbarsyn met her death.

They slaughtered the ram that very day – not, as had been expected, to cure old Granny Ulbarsyn, but for her funeral.

In all the fuss and commotion over Granny Ulbarsyn’s sudden death, of course they forgot to rub the warm blood on Yerzhan’s legs, so he remained under the spell. Well, never mind him, he was used to it already, but Grandad, who plunged his arms up to the elbows into the blood of that devil ram with twisted horns, took to his bed on the third day after his wife’s death. ‘I’m worn out!’ he told Shaken and Yerzhan in a meek little voice. So Shaken started taking Yerzhan with him to the railway tracks to check the points or, when their official railway phone rang, to switch them for a train that was waiting.

No, Grandad didn’t die that time. He got up after nine days plus nine, hale and hearty, and went to the old woman’s grave by foot to say a prayer.

The next to die was Granny Sholpan. It was in early spring. Perhaps the long winter, spent indoors, had already bored her to death, or she had pined away for her old friend Ulbarsyn. Anyway, when the snow melted and the green land began drying out, Granny Sholpan started taking long walks along the railway line in both directions. Aisulu accompanied her as often as possible and picked poppies to weave a wreath for herself, or dug up snowdrops and carried them home in her hands, like whitish-yellow candles protruding from soft clay lumps.

The day Granny Sholpan died, Aisulu was at school, Shaken was on his shift, Baichichek and Kanyshat were washing the laundry that had accumulated over the winter, Grandad was sleeping after switching a heavy goods train into the siding, where it had been standing motionless for more than two hours, and Yerzhan was sitting by the official phone, waiting for the express passenger train to pass at last and for Grandad to be told to switch the points to dispatch the goods train. On that sunny morning old Sholpan went for her walk alone. Poppies beat against her legs, but she walked on, in a black jacket and wide green dress, as tall and stately as a poplar tree, with her hands clasped behind her back. ‘That’s who Aisulu takes after!’ Yerzhan thought bitterly as he watched Granny Sholpan’s figure disappear.

And what happened next was this: the black cock, who had been ruffling the chickens’ feathers in the morning, assumed that Granny Sholpan had come out to feed him and ran after her. The unsuspecting old woman was walking along the railway line, when suddenly she saw a piece of bread roll lying by her feet. An unbeliever must have thrown it out of the window of a train – the locals wouldn’t throw bread away. Granny Sholpan bent down, picked up the bread and kissed it three times, then threw it under the stationary goods train, onto the railway embankment, thinking to herself that the train would leave and a bird would peck it up. But the cock, seeing the bread, rushed towards it. The old woman was taken by surprise. She never let her birds go near the railway; she always kept them in the yard behind the house. And now she was frightened that the chickens would follow the cock. So she glanced round at the stationary train, bent over and ducked under it. The cock was so absorbed in his pecking that he only shook his head from side to side and took no notice of her. ‘You’re sitting there like a broody hen with a chick under her wing. Better you should die!’ Granny Sholpan squawked, climbing out from under the wagon onto the embankment. Eventually, she managed to shoo off the cock all right, but just then, whistling and hooting like a blast from the Zone, the passenger express came flying up on the next line. And although there was enough space between the two trains – the one standing still and the one flying past – Granny Sholpan’s wide green satin dress billowed up in the swirling air and a footplate caught its hem.

The poor old woman was dragged along the embankment until the satin shredded into bloodstained tatters.

Strangely enough, only after the two old women were gone was Yerzhan able to tell the other members of the households apart. Until then they had formed one entity: if Granny Sholpan scolded him, then Granny Ulbarsyn slapped him. If his mother, Kanyshat, kneaded the dough, then city bride Baichichek moulded the bread rolls. But suddenly the solid units dissolved. As soon as Granny Sholpan was buried in the newly extended tomb – beside her husband, Nurpeis, and her old friend Ulbarsyn – city bride Baichichek began to persuade her husband, Shaken, to move to the city. After all, it had been his mother who kept him here, Baichichek argued. But now she was gone, so why should they waste their lives at this godforsaken way station? Shaken kept avoiding the conversation with promises that when he came home from his next shift, then they would sit down and talk things over. Or they should mark the anniversary of his mother’s death first and then decide. But according to Aisulu, Baichichek insisted more and more. And that was when Yerzhan realized that these two families had been united by the two old women, Ulbarsyn and Sholpan. And anyway, his mother had stopped going to Baichichek’s house altogether now, hadn’t she!

Yerzhan looked at his mother. She had always been a kind of ever-present absence for him. He had been raised by the entire ‘spot’, and above all by Grandad and the two grannies. Now that the two women were dead, Grandad had stopped swaggering and putting on airs, and a more distinct image of his mother arose in Yerzhan’s heart.

His mother never stopped working for a moment. She might be trimming the hair off a goatskin, then sprinkling it with warm water, rolling it up into a tube and setting it close to the stove. Then, while the skin was warming to release the hair roots more easily, she’d start spinning string out of the hair that she had just trimmed off. After finishing that job, she would knead dough. After wrapping the dough to help it rise, she would bring in the fresh milk, pour some into crocks to produce cream, and mix the rest with sour milk, so that by morning the mixture would have turned sour too. Then she would open the rolled-up goat skin and scrape it, and then, after drying it over the flames, immerse it in sour milk and leave it to soak for a few days. Towards evening she would darn torn clothes, boil up soup and make her bed. In short, she never stopped working from morning till night.

And if Yerzhan’s way of wasting away his life was to do nothing at all, his mother, Kanyshat, on the contrary, seemed to be scouring the life out of her body with incessant work.

One early summer’s day Yerzhan picked up his violin again. There was no one at home. And perhaps it was the thought of his mother, or the possible misery of Shaken’s family leaving, but most likely it was his longing for Aisulu that drove him back into the arms of music. He poured the immense grief that had been compressed in his puny body for so long into the instrument. But the grieving didn’t end and the music couldn’t hold all his accumulated feelings. When Shaken returned from his shift and found Yerzhan still playing, he remarked joyfully that Petko was back, he’d seen him in the city. Yerzhan decided that he would mount the horse to see his teacher the next day. But the next day his grandad galloped away on the horse about his own business, leaving Yerzhan to mind the phone. And the day after that Shaken galloped off on the horse to the school, to enquire about Aisulu’s examinations. After a few days Yerzhan was tired of waiting for Aigyr, so he mounted the donkey and trudged off in the direction of the Mobile Construction Unit. The violin was slung on his back like a rifle, and even though his shadow in front became shorter and shorter, for a moment or two he felt like a cowboy again.

The song kept him going. After about an hour, he reached a concrete structure that resembled a goose sticking up in the steppe like a stone sculpture. Yerzhan stopped for a break in its shade. But before he could dismount, the sky above him, all of a sudden and without any forewarning, turned dark. The bright sunlight flooding the steppe must have exhausted my eyes, he thought. He blinked and the sky turned pitch black, leaving only the sun as a glittering bright circle. And the fear started moving once again from his ankles upwards to root itself in his stomach. Yerzhan was all alone in the immense, wide world – if you didn’t count his frenziedly wailing donkey. But not for long and soon even the wailing of the donkey was lost in the roaring and howling of the wind. The ground shook and thunder roared. Burning clumps of tumbleweed swept across the steppe. And a second sun soared up into the sky. Yerzhan, guided not by reason but by instinct, flung himself into a pit that his donkey had already collapsed into, right in under the concrete. The violin crunched and gave a final squeal, and a ferocious, swirling vortex of air hurtled past, whooping deafeningly as it shaved off everything above them, making way for a grey, dusty light to rise over the world.

Then a hot drizzle fell.

Yerzhan lay sprawled in the pit, mingled with the mud, blood and tears. His donkey had instantly gone bald.

He did reach the Mobile Construction Unit eventually. Or what was left of it. Two shattered and melted tractors and the black ashes of the trailers scattered across the steppe.

He could hear a solitary wolf howling somewhere as it died, leaving no trace.

Upon his return to the way station, he immediately noticed that Kapty’s fur had come off and everywhere – from the railway tracks as far as the house – the grass had grown thick and tall in just a day… He alone hadn’t grown…

I didn’t continue with this idea. Outside the carriage window the night was so black that I suddenly experienced a fear which I thought must be similar to that of Yerzhan, who was now slumbering peacefully on the upper bunk of our compartment. Where this fear came from, I did not know, but the feeling of something inevitable yet hidden, that could be here, just round the next bend, had lodged in my belly as a chilly knot. I couldn’t think of anything better to do than turn over on my stomach and bury my face in the skimpy railway pillow. I tried to force myself to think about something bright and cheerful.

Yerzhan had aged in his mind at a stroke. He now looked at beautiful Aisulu, who had grown a head taller than her father, without any bitterness, simply in admiration. The fact that she acted as if nothing had happened to him or to her no longer offended him. Truth to tell, he was glad. After all, she could have despised him. Fate plays mean tricks on everyone, he thought. People live out their lives at different speeds. Take Grandad Daulet: after reaching the age of almost eighty, he lost everything he had – his wife, his daughter, his grandson, his friend and now his friend’s family too. Or Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat: she’d lost everything she had too – her virginity, the chance of a husband, her happiness, her father, her brother, her mother and her son… Why should he, Yerzhan, be any different from them? However, because he was so talented, it had all happened to him much faster. Maybe in a single mushel – twelve short years – he had already lived out the life granted to him. After all, he had already lived through everything that is given to a man – the warmth of family, the happiness of love, the infatuation of hopes, the bitterness of disappointments, the music of the soul and the fear of oblivion. And now, like his grandad and his mother, he had lost everything. Perhaps the entire meaning of life was only this and nothing more. Lived out, worn out, exhausted.

Why had all this happened to him? How had he deserved it? By being too talented? Had Petko persuaded his mysterious Wolfgang to lead Yerzhan’s soul off along his wolfish paths, leaving him only a child’s body for ever? Or had the mother fox, humiliated and insulted in the midst of her native steppe then robbed of her little child, put a curse on him in revenge? Or was it merely a variation, an echo, of what had happened to his own humiliated and insulted mother in the midst of her own steppe? Had his grandad’s dombra and its ancient songs put a spell on the boy, making him turn kaltarys after kaltarys, until that final great turning had reversed time, making it run backwards, in defiance of nature? Or had the chain reaction Shaken was using to catch up with and overtake America in this godforsaken steppe, in this hell on earth that was called the Zone, taken place by mistake not in a reactor but in a boy, exploding like a dwarf star inside him? Or had the old grannies enchanted him with that snotty-nosed scamp Gesar, always waging war against his uncle Kepek-Choton, or against the whole world, or against himself?

And then the bright face of his Aisulu, grown extravagantly tall now, would suddenly appear from behind the wild grass that had shot up in a flash, frightening Yerzhan with an obscure association, like a discordant note or the scraping of stone on glass.

At that time of early, early morning when the steppe is as grey and cool as the sky that has only just begun to brighten, Yerzhan was woken by the stealthy tapping of a stone at a window. At once he sat up, fully conscious. Someone was knocking, with a slight scrape, at the next window. It was his mother’s. For these last few days Yerzhan had slept with his clothes on. He simply tumbled into bed when his thoughts could no longer bear their own incessant weight and slid off into sleep. He glanced out at an angle through his window. It was Shaken, who must have just arrived back from his shift, having hitched a ride on a train that was heading his way. He was carrying his invariable briefcase and something else. He hadn’t been home yet. Yerzhan gazed impassively at what was happening. He couldn’t see his mother – she was on the other side of the wall – but from the lively way that Shaken was gesticulating, he could guess what this sly interaction was about. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had caught Shaken in these intimate exchanges.

Perhaps it was because of the early morning hour, or perhaps for some other reason, but it wasn’t anger or jealousy, merely an idle, abstract curiosity that made Yerzhan swing his window open abruptly and stick his head out. Uncle Shaken was taken aback and he dropped his briefcase, but then he got a grip on himself and, as if he had knocked at Kanyshat’s window by mistake and was really looking for Yerzhan, he flapped his hand at the other window and turned towards Yerzhan. ‘Look what I’ve brought for you…’ he began, then stepped back again towards Kanyshat’s window, waved his hand to her, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, it was a mistake’ – and then opened his little suitcase, rummaged in it and pulled out a newspaper. He unfolded it, stuck one of the pages in through the window and said, ‘Read that!’

Yerzhan started reading out loud:

The world turned dark in front of Yerzhan’s eyes.

Dean Reed too had now been taken away from him. Why did Shaken bring this newspaper from the city? Why had he brought the television? On that television Dean Reed – his Dean Reed, Yerzhan’s Dean Reed – was once called ‘the Red Elvis’. Yerzhan had never heard of Elvis, and later they had shown Elvis himself, and it appeared that Dean Reed was a kind of fake, not the real thing. And now Shaken had taken away even this fake, counterfeit Dean Reed. Just as he had taken away Yerzhan’s height and his future, and his love, and his mother.

For a moment Shaken hesitated, then he set off towards his own house with his little suitcase…

Wait, wait! What if he loved Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat? And what if he had loved her all his life? Hadn’t Yerzhan’s grandad told him how he once tied up Shaken when he came back drunk from his shift at night and tried to climb in through Kanyshat’s window? It had all been put down to drunkenness at the time, but this wasn’t the first time Yerzhan had caught him at his mother’s window, was it? And that was why he simply refused to leave and take his city wife, Baichichek, back to the city she longed for.

Stop! That time by the Dead Lake, in the Zone, at Shaken’s test site, where he was catching up with and overtaking America, when the kids from the school were running about in gas masks, Shaken was the one who appeared in that Armed Forces Protective Suit – like an alien from another world! And hadn’t his granny Ulbarsyn always spoken about an alien when she recalled Yerzhan’s miraculous conception on the very outskirts of the Zone, in that very same area where the river with the dried-out bed lay?

Yerzhan dashed into the next room to his mother. She was sitting on the windowsill, maybe with nothing to do for the very first time, with her face half-turned towards the window, following Shaken with her eyes as he moved away. ‘Do you love him?’ Yerzhan asked, gasping out all his anger and all his confusion. His mother didn’t turn towards her son, but merely ran her finger over the glass. ‘Does he love you?’ Yerzhan blurted out helplessly. His mother unwove the plait on her head, shook her hair out and then wove her plait again, looking at her faint reflection in the windowpane. ‘Is he your husband?’ Yerzhan asked in a shaky voice, continuing his interrogation. His mother folded her arms across her chest. A thick silence filled the room. The naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling quivered. Immediately the fear lurking in Yerzhan’s ankles moved upwards along its usual path to his stomach, paused there as a cold, heavy weight and then slowly crept on up to his throat, and, after choking him for a moment, reached his lips, emerging as something that was neither a whisper, nor a wheeze, nor a convulsion: ‘Is he my father?’ A faint rumbling ran across the floor, the room started trembling and his mother carried on sitting on the windowsill in the way she had been sitting, doing nothing for the first time in her life, merely gazing out of the window towards yet another train or yet another explosion.

Yerzhan ran out of the room. Run, run, run, out into the open steppe, across the Zone and past the horizon, past the edge of the world… Run from this fear, from this truth, from this life… So his Aisulu, growing extravagantly like the wild grass under the windows, his poor, unhappy Aisulu… and suddenly, like the she-fox after the uluu kaltarys – the final, great turn – Yerzhan’s consciousness imploded in exhaustion.

Aisulu was dying alone in a ward in the municipal hospital. Her father had brought her here and then had immediately been called to the testing ground. Her mother had stayed with her for the first few days, but had just left to see her aged parents, who lived in Semey. Aisulu lay there alone in the ward with the white ceiling. But she didn’t see the white ceiling. She saw the steppe and the road from Kara-Shagan to school and back. There she was, riding on the donkey with her Yerzhan, who had disappeared now, and the donkey suddenly picked up a cabbage stalk that someone had thrown out of a passenger train. The donkey had swallowed it whole and choked and lashed out. And first Aisulu and then Yerzhan tumbled off. Yerzhan shouted at Aisulu and Aisulu grabbed the reins and Yerzhan put his arm up to the elbow into the donkey’s foaming mouth and pulled out the stalk. And then she took the scarf off her head, licked away the blood flowing along Yerzhan’s arm and bound the wound tightly.

A stalk, a huge stalk, had now got stuck inside Aisulu’s body and her organs were swelling, growing extravagantly, like the rest of her body.

She had admired Yerzhan, the way he played the violin, the way he studied and drew and sang Dean Reed, the way he walked into the Dead Lake, the way he was so protective of her… She had wanted to be his wife, to give him children as talented, brave and devoted as he was, but why had it happened to him and not to her? But what was this it? Hadn’t it happened to her as well? She was lying here, growing extravagantly on the outside and on the inside too, like the wild grass after the blasts, pregnant with her own incurable sickness, all alone in the entire, empty world.

Aisulu looked up again at the ceiling, which was turning bluish just as the last yellow ray of sunlight fell across it like a fox’s tail, and the fox cub that had brought her so much joy appeared before her eyes, the one that had crept out of their house unnoticed so many years ago. And Kapty bit it to death. How much weeping and wailing there had been that evening while Kepek buried the fluffy little body, only the size of a kitten. And each night that the mother fox could be heard howling for her dead baby, Kapty howled too, like he did before an atomic explosion.

And now Kapty had started howling in her immense, empty body.

A leaf struck against the hospital window and the sun fell behind the steppe.

A knock at the window woke me from my nightmares to the grey steppe morning. We stood at a way station. An inordinately tall Kazakh woman waved outside the window. She held a little parcel wrapped in newspaper. Yerzhan looked down at her, dangling his short legs. I was so delighted to see him alive and unhurt, as if something irreparable could have happened to him on the line along which the train of my thoughts had been running. But then, hadn’t it already happened? What had happened, though? I tried to link what he had told me with the images of my nightmares. I felt as confused as that she-fox out in the open steppe, unable to tell what was truth and what was invention. Where was the inescapable life in all this and where was the inexplicable eternity? Where was what he had lived through and where was what I had invented? Like a train in the steppe, like the consciousness of a Kazakh, like a revolutionary country’s impulsive surge into some kind of future, my story only kept hurtling on, further and further. Where was the invisible, virtual wall into which the fox pursued by Kazakh hunters crashes, to collapse in a helpless heap?

There he sat in front of me, a twenty-seven-year-old boy, stuck at the age of twelve, stuck in his twelve-year-old body. What was this all about? Was it time, an entire era of it, that had congealed in him, to be related to me through him, in a single gulp? What was he about, this little man from a big country that no longer existed, that had already lived out its time in an impossible pursuit of America?

What had I discovered for myself through his fate? What unpredictable and crooked experiment had I glanced and seen in him – this wunderkind Yerzhan, imprinted as a crumpled shadow alongside the grass, the trees and the birds in the concrete wall of the Zone, jutting out of the steppe?

And although I knew in my mind that the test site had been closed for a long time already, the same feeling that Yerzhan had repeatedly described to me – that fear lurking in the ankles – rose slowly up through my hollow insides to my stomach, then higher, and higher…

The strapping Kazakh woman knocked on the window and waved her newspaper containing a hot-smoked fish or a piece of bread, or pellets of dried sour milk. Yerzhan leant across, grabbed the two window catches with his strong musician’s fingers and opened it, asking, ‘What do you want?’

The rasping of the window as it opened and the sound of conversation set the old Kazakh below us stirring and he turned over from one side onto the other – to face us. Yerzhan hung down from his bunk, looking round at the noise, cast a quick glance at the man from his handsomely slanted squirrel’s or fox’s eyes and suddenly howled out, ‘Shaken!’ like an eagle screeching at a fox – and flung himself straight at him.

I was seriously frightened. My brain feverishly attempted to complete its line of steppe wires, its music on this stave, its chain reaction, its pursuit of a wolf or a she-fox. He’ll strangle him, he’ll strangle him, his hands are strong enough to do it – the thought suddenly exploded inside me – and while I was still soaring upwards on the blast wave of this explosion, Yerzhan and the old man were already embracing each other. The old man wept mute tears and the Kazakh woman outside the window froze just as she was, puzzled by what was going on in this carriage, in this compartment, and I didn’t understand much of it myself, except that an immense feeling of relief at not having witnessed a quarrel, or a murder, or any other kind of catastrophe, instantly filled me with its eternal, inexpressible, ineffable mystery, like the bright blue sky above the steppe.

An hour later our train halted for a break at an empty way station. Yerzhan and Shaken were still talking to each other in Kazakh, mostly sorrowfully, sighing and mentioning one name over and over again – Aisulu – and from the way they suddenly darted out of the compartment with all their belongings, including a violin slung over a shoulder, I realized that we were standing at Kara-Shagan. I glanced out of the window. Although from the two abandoned Soviet railway houses I could tell that it really was Kara-Shagan, there were no signs of life to be seen – no chickens running around under the single elm some distance away, no old man with a little flag, no hay laid in for the winter, not even a single little cowpat anywhere. Only two figures – one a stooped old man, the other an impetuous boy – moving away past these abandoned, uninhabited houses into the depths of the open plain.

And lit by the sun I could see five graves.