Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

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.