Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

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.

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.