Hamid Ismailov - The Dead Lake

Why had all this happened to him? How had he deserved it? By being too talented? Had Petko persuaded his mysterious Wolfgang to lead Yerzhan’s soul off along his wolfish paths, leaving him only a child’s body for ever? Or had the mother fox, humiliated and insulted in the midst of her native steppe then robbed of her little child, put a curse on him in revenge? Or was it merely a variation, an echo, of what had happened to his own humiliated and insulted mother in the midst of her own steppe? Had his grandad’s dombra and its ancient songs put a spell on the boy, making him turn kaltarys after kaltarys , until that final great turning had reversed time, making it run backwards, in defiance of nature? Or had the chain reaction Shaken was using to catch up with and overtake America in this godforsaken steppe, in this hell on earth that was called the Zone, taken place by mistake not in a reactor but in a boy, exploding like a dwarf star inside him? Or had the old grannies enchanted him with that snotty-nosed scamp Gesar, always waging war against his uncle Kepek-Choton, or against the whole world, or against himself?

And then the bright face of his Aisulu, grown extravagantly tall now, would suddenly appear from behind the wild grass that had shot up in a flash, frightening Yerzhan with an obscure association, like a discordant note or the scraping of stone on glass.

At that time of early, early morning when the steppe is as grey and cool as the sky that has only just begun to brighten, Yerzhan was woken by the stealthy tapping of a stone at a window. At once he sat up, fully conscious. Someone was knocking, with a slight scrape, at the next window. It was his mother’s. For these last few days Yerzhan had slept with his clothes on. He simply tumbled into bed when his thoughts could no longer bear their own incessant weight and slid off into sleep. He glanced out at an angle through his window. It was Shaken, who must have just arrived back from his shift, having hitched a ride on a train that was heading his way. He was carrying his invariable briefcase and something else. He hadn’t been home yet. Yerzhan gazed impassively at what was happening. He couldn’t see his mother – she was on the other side of the wall – but from the lively way that Shaken was gesticulating, he could guess what this sly interaction was about. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had caught Shaken in these intimate exchanges.

Perhaps it was because of the early morning hour, or perhaps for some other reason, but it wasn’t anger or jealousy, merely an idle, abstract curiosity that made Yerzhan swing his window open abruptly and stick his head out. Uncle Shaken was taken aback and he dropped his briefcase, but then he got a grip on himself and, as if he had knocked at Kanyshat’s window by mistake and was really looking for Yerzhan, he flapped his hand at the other window and turned towards Yerzhan. ‘Look what I’ve brought for you…’ he began, then stepped back again towards Kanyshat’s window, waved his hand to her, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, it was a mistake’ – and then opened his little suitcase, rummaged in it and pulled out a newspaper. He unfolded it, stuck one of the pages in through the window and said, ‘Read that!’

Yerzhan started reading out loud:

‘In June sad news reached us from the GDR. The well-known American singer and actor Dean Reed was killed in an accident. As often happens in such cases, this news gave rise to various kinds of insinuations in the West. Right-wing newspapers made play with the provocative theory that the American singer’s death was supposedly connected with “the terrorist activities of the special services of the communist regime of the GDR”.

‘We phoned the American singer’s widow, Renate Blum, in Berlin. Renate told us this: “Any suggestions that my husband was murdered are absolutely outrageous slander. Such speculations only insult Dean’s memory and cause pain to me and our daughter. My husband drowned. He was found dead in a lake. Just recently Dean’s health had deteriorated badly: he suffered from heart problems. As for the supposition that he wanted to go back to the USA, that too is an absolute lie. He was not intending to do anything of the kind. All his thoughts and energies were focused on a new film. He loved our daughter very much. I consider it squalid chicanery to speculate on the death of my husband and hope very much that you will convey my precise words.”’

The world turned dark in front of Yerzhan’s eyes.

Dean Reed too had now been taken away from him. Why did Shaken bring this newspaper from the city? Why had he brought the television? On that television Dean Reed – his Dean Reed, Yerzhan’s Dean Reed – was once called ‘the Red Elvis’. Yerzhan had never heard of Elvis, and later they had shown Elvis himself, and it appeared that Dean Reed was a kind of fake, not the real thing. And now Shaken had taken away even this fake, counterfeit Dean Reed. Just as he had taken away Yerzhan’s height and his future, and his love, and his mother.

For a moment Shaken hesitated, then he set off towards his own house with his little suitcase…

Wait, wait! What if he loved Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat? And what if he had loved her all his life? Hadn’t Yerzhan’s grandad told him how he once tied up Shaken when he came back drunk from his shift at night and tried to climb in through Kanyshat’s window? It had all been put down to drunkenness at the time, but this wasn’t the first time Yerzhan had caught him at his mother’s window, was it? And that was why he simply refused to leave and take his city wife, Baichichek, back to the city she longed for.

Stop! That time by the Dead Lake, in the Zone, at Shaken’s test site, where he was catching up with and overtaking America, when the kids from the school were running about in gas masks, Shaken was the one who appeared in that Armed Forces Protective Suit – like an alien from another world! And hadn’t his granny Ulbarsyn always spoken about an alien when she recalled Yerzhan’s miraculous conception on the very outskirts of the Zone, in that very same area where the river with the dried-out bed lay?

Yerzhan dashed into the next room to his mother. She was sitting on the windowsill, maybe with nothing to do for the very first time, with her face half-turned towards the window, following Shaken with her eyes as he moved away. ‘Do you love him?’ Yerzhan asked, gasping out all his anger and all his confusion. His mother didn’t turn towards her son, but merely ran her finger over the glass. ‘Does he love you?’ Yerzhan blurted out helplessly. His mother unwove the plait on her head, shook her hair out and then wove her plait again, looking at her faint reflection in the windowpane. ‘Is he your husband?’ Yerzhan asked in a shaky voice, continuing his interrogation. His mother folded her arms across her chest. A thick silence filled the room. The naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling quivered. Immediately the fear lurking in Yerzhan’s ankles moved upwards along its usual path to his stomach, paused there as a cold, heavy weight and then slowly crept on up to his throat, and, after choking him for a moment, reached his lips, emerging as something that was neither a whisper, nor a wheeze, nor a convulsion: ‘Is he my father?’ A faint rumbling ran across the floor, the room started trembling and his mother carried on sitting on the windowsill in the way she had been sitting, doing nothing for the first time in her life, merely gazing out of the window towards yet another train or yet another explosion.

Yerzhan ran out of the room. Run, run, run, out into the open steppe, across the Zone and past the horizon, past the edge of the world… Run from this fear, from this truth, from this life… So his Aisulu, growing extravagantly like the wild grass under the windows, his poor, unhappy Aisulu… and suddenly, like the she-fox after the uluu kaltarys – the final, great turn – Yerzhan’s consciousness imploded in exhaustion.