Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

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.

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.