Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

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.