Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

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.

The bold Gesar did not enjoy his happiness and peace for long. A terrible demon, the cannibal Lubsan, attacked his country from the north. But Lubsan’s wife, Tumen Djergalan, fell in love with Gesar and revealed her husband’s secret to him. Gesar used the secret and killed Lubsan. Tumen Djergalan didn’t waste any time and gave Gesar a draught of forgetfulness to drink in order to bind him to her for ever. Gesar drank the draught, forgot about his beloved Urmai-sulu and stayed with Tumen Djergalan.

Meanwhile, in the steppe kingdom, a rebellion arose and Kara-Choton forced Urmai-sulu to marry him. But Tengri did not desert Gesar and freed him of the enchantment on the very shore of the Dead Lake, where Gesar saw the reflection of his own magical steed. He returned on this steed home to the steppe kingdom and killed Kara-Choton, freeing his Urmai-sulu…

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.