The Railway (12 page)

Mullah Tusmuhammad-Okhun's teacher had told him that seven generations of his family would live under the protection of Allah, and Oyimcha, poor Oyimcha had believed this as if it were holy writ.

Oyimcha came every week, staying with relatives who lived opposite the prison and bringing sometimes prayer beads, sometimes flatbreads, once a jug for Obid-Kori's ablutions, once a secret note from their children. Her male relatives bribed the prison guards and passed her gifts on to Obid-Kori; there was even one occasion when Oyimcha threw a veil over her face and got as far as the prison gates herself – but a Russian standing there with a rifle drove her away, making the air thick with his swearing and cursing.

What, in any case, did it matter if calumny and the evil eye had fallen on Obid-Kori? Even little Mashrab was already fully grown, already a fine young man – Allah be praised! Mashrab at least had been like a golden chicken, protected from calumny and the evil eye. But Obid-Kori himself had evidently been unworthy to marry a descendant of the Prophet – may he be praised!

Repeated interrogations, repeated prayers, repeated thoughts were beginning to confuse Obid-Kori. Why had life turned out...

One night, when a sudden light fell on the metal grating (those two verticals and six crossbars) and the harsh clanking of cell doors made him rise from his iron bed (the same iron grating, the same two verticals and six horizontals, covered by a mattress Oyimcha had stuffed) Obid-Kori's torments came to an end. The wing of a night bird flashed outside the window and he was led into the prison yard. Seven Black Marias were waiting there, and the guards were leading men out, leading men out.

Obid-Kori took in deep lungfuls of the night mountain air – as relieved to be leaving his cell as Mullah Tusmuhammad-Okhun had been when the snow finally melted.

Val Zukha, val laili iza sadja,
Ma vadda'aka rabbuka va ma kala...

I swear by the bright shining of the day
And by the night, when her darkness is spread wide,
Your Lord never left you, nor is he displeased...

Obid-Kori whispered to himself, and tears rolled down the thin beard on his cheeks.

Oyimcha, Oyimcha was sitting in the middle of the summer courtyard, beating cotton wool, spinning it with long switches… switches… switches… In their broad white linen sleeves her arms were like fluttering wings and the cotton wool clinging to the slow, slow, slow switches flew high into the air, into the air, like celestial clouds… clouds… clouds...

The prisoners were loaded into Black Marias and taken off to the station in Gorchakov. There they were transferred to a goods wagon, with the same small grating as in the prison (two verticals and six crossbars) and taken silently-slowly down the iron road. Through chinks and holes in the floor of the wagon they could see two never-ending metal rails and those same short crossbars, repeated again and again and again, to infinity, and it seemed as if the earth herself had been put behind bars, framed, bound, confined, arrested, or as if they, in their goods wagon with the metal grating, had been separated from the earth for ever.

Why had life… The soul of Obid-Kori was flying over the earth, leaving Oyimcha behind, and the children were running after Oyimcha, Oyimcha, Oyimcha, whose long hair streamed behind her like bunches of grapes… grapes… grapes…

During the campaign after the death of Stalin to recruit new Party members “from the machine-bench,” it emerged that there were no machine-benches at all in Gilas. Or rather there was one – in the Labour workshop of the October School – but no one knew what to do with it. It was looked after by Abubakir-Snuffsniffer, the school caretaker, whose father had been school caretaker in the days of the Tsars, but this Abubakir was already so very old that the Party sensibly enough decided not to recruit him: why should the likes of him be granted the honour of dying a Communist death?

The local Party did, however, manage to respond to the directive: it was decided that new members should be recruited not only from the machine-bench, but also from the hoe, the mop, the broom and the shoe-cleaning brush – in short, from any proletarian walk of life, male or female, in Gilas. Cinema technician Ortik-Picture-Reels quickly decorated a banner with the words “Proletarians from every Quarter of Gilas, Unite in the School Yard!” – and Bolta-Lightning climbed the column in the middle of the square, draped the banner over the loudspeaker and explained over the heads of the entire backward bazaar both the progressive meaning of the slogan and the precise time the proletariat was to unite.

The Party's call was answered only by Kun-Okhun the Uighur, who, being partially deaf, tried his best to answer every call that he heard; on this occasion, however, he responded because his wife, Djibladjibon-Bonu-Wagtail was convinced that some special goods or other would be on sale at the school, the same as during elections to the Supreme Soviet.

Taking the money she had hidden away in her trunk, she told her soot-black husband, a station freight handler, to clean himself up; then she dressed him in a pair of pyjamas she had bought for him as a summer suit, carefully tucked the trouser legs into his one pair of box-calf boots, which he had inherited from her cattle-dealer father, and sent him off to become a member of the Party, telling him it wouldn't be long before they made him into a man like Oktam-Humble-Russky.

On his way to join the Party, Kun-Okhun bumped into Timurkhan the wall-eyed Tatar, who was resting beside the railway line after intensive love with Murzina-Mordovka.

“Where are you going?” Timurkhan asked idly.

“No, I can't,” answered the deaf Kun-Okhun, assuming that Timurkhan was, as so often, in need of a drinking comrade.

Then Timurkhan looked at him out of his other eye and said with emphasis, “Lend me ten roubles!”

“To the Party!” Kun-Okhun replied proudly.

“Fuck off then!” said Timurkhan, now turning both his divergent eyes back to the horizon. Kun-Okhun's hearing, however, had by then sharpened, and these words were more than he could pardon. More than he could pardon as a station freight handler, and more than he could pardon as a candidate member of the Party. A scuffle ensued – the wall-eyed Timurkhan repeatedly landing blows around Kun-Okhun's eyes and the deaf Kun-Okhun repeatedly boxing the small but agile Timurkhan's ears. The noise brought Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger hurrying towards them with his gun, blazing away within earshot of plenty of people so that he could account for the cartridges he had already sold to Kuzi-Gundog. Kun-Okhun and Timurkhan, locked together like Siamese twins, quickly ran down the railway embankment and dived beneath the first stationary wagon they came to. Kara-Musayev fired a last shot and, pleased that he could now make his records balance, went back to the station to draw up a statement.

Half-blind and half-deaf, the two men ran down a corridor between two sets of wagons until they tripped together over the protruding arse of Nabi-Onearm; he had been stealing his daily quota of cotton seeds from beneath the wagons, intending to sell them as cattle-fodder at three roubles a sack. The terrified Nabi shot up into the air, holding his one hand high above his head both as a sign of surrender and as a reminder of mitigating circumstances – but the sight of the two men rolling over the stones made Nabi-Onearm think that Gilas had already been corrupted, even though Stalin was barely in his grave, by that terrible bourgeois affliction, that plague from the past once known as “play-with-the-beardless” and now called something like paedosexuality or homophilia.

His index finger pointing heavenward, Nabi furiously denounced this shame on the town of Gilas, invoking no less a witness than Allah, whom he had not called upon since he first went to school in 1924, the year of the death of Lenin: “If you feel no shame in my presence, then at least have shame in the presence of Allah! How can you do this? How – at the time of the death of our immortal Leader, our beloved Comrade Stalin – can you sink so low?”

The two men were sitting on the stones beside the track, with no idea why Nabi was arraigning them, when they heard what sounded like the trump of the Last Judgment – Ta-ra! Ta-ra! – but was really the hooter of Akmolin's diesel shunter. The wagons behind the unappeasable Nabi, who was still spitting in denunciatory fury, began to move forward. And as the last wagon passed by, as the fire in Nabi's eyes began to fade at the sight of the deaf Kun-Okhun and the wall-eyed Timurkhan sitting before him like schoolboys waiting for the bell at the end of lessons, whom should they see but Tadji-Murad, jumping down from the footplate of this wagon with his two flags and his one whistle? With a squeal of brakes, the train then came to a stop at precisely the spot that allowed the bags containing Nabi's pickings to emerge from under the last wagon. Nabi desperately shook his head in denial; and his one hand – that sole reminder of his mitigating circumstances – continued to point towards the heavens.

On another day, to be honest, Tadji-Murad might have turned a blind eye – Nabi-Onearm, after all, took every fifth bag to Tadji-Murad's mother, the half-blind Boikush – but now that socialist property was being plundered by an entire collective, and at a time of such universal grief, Tadji-Murad could hardly remain silent. In the intervals between whistles so ear-splitting that even the deaf Kun-Okhun trembled and flag-waving so frenzied that not even Timurkhan's wall eyes could move fast enough, Tadji-Murad began to accuse them of a crime more terrible still. “Dear Comrade Stalin's ashes have not grown cold,” he cried out to the horizons, “and already you have created an international bandit-Trotskyist organisation to appropriate and plunder – yes, to loot and plunder – the wealth and property of our socialist Fatherland!”

Nabi's missing arm had rendered him unfit for military service and so he had never had Russian comrades to teach him their Greater Russian language. Tadji-Murad, however, had only recently returned from military service and so could curse and denounce the others in the most expansive of languages; this somehow made the prospect of long years in Siberia seem all the more real.

“You fucker, we should have gone for a drink like I said!” Timurkhan whispered in the ear of the deaf Kun-Okhun. “Now Murzinka will get to hear of it.”

This thought caused him such sorrow that a tear fell from each of his autonomous eyes. Timurkhan could remember only too well what had happened after judgment was passed on some damned Shistakovich or other and the whole of Gilas – everyone from Tolib-Butcher, who had never held anything in his hand other than his cleaver and his own member, to the half-blind Boikush, who had also once handled Tolib's member – had signed an official condemnation of the anti-Soviet music of this unknown Shistakovich; yes, Timurkhan could remember only too well how his beloved Murzina-Mordovka, his Carmen-with-Eyes-Round-as-Cherries, had made herself unavailable, keeping her distance from him for years on end because of his reactionary individualism and petty-bourgeois mentality – and all merely because, afraid of being looked down on by Mefody-Jurisprudence, he had said he knew no Russian songs except “Kalinka” and refused to add his name to this expression of collective indignation.

Year after year, in the gloom of lonely nights and lavatories, Timurkhan had cursed that shit of a Shistakovich. And then, at last, he had returned to Murzina's favour…

And now... now he might just as well lie down in front of a train!

As if hearing this despairing thought, the other train gave a loud hiss and inched forward, wheels squealing. Timurkhan sprang up, ran the length of one wagon in the direction the train was moving and laid his head on the rail. Nabi was so shocked that his already numb arm dropped to his side; Kun-Okhun froze. The wheels continued to move towards Timurkhan; Timurkhan lay still, one eye looking at the wheels and the other looking at the men doomed to remain guiltily in this world. Unable to bear a scream he could already hear all too clearly, Kun-Okhun leapt to his feet and was beside Timurkhan in eight strides; snatching him from under the approaching wheels, he threw him to one side like a sack of onions. Wheezing in some kind of death-ecstasy, Timurkhan tried to slip back beneath the oncoming wheels. Kun-Okhun got on top of him but, realising that he too was now in the path of these wheels and that this was no way to become a Party member, he quickly drew himself up to his full height – as erect as “The Commissar” on the wall of Tordybay-Medals's office. And then, Allah alone knows how, Kun-Okhun was suddenly kneeling on the ballast beside the line, his right knee on Timurkhan's throat. And Timurkhan was no longer struggling; his tears were washing the foam from his lips and his whole body was quivering in time to the knocking of the wheels of the last wagons.

“Now your fucking Death will want its revenge. It'll be my turn next!” shouted Kun-Okhun, letting go of the puny Tatar.

Afraid of being caught up in yet more trouble, Tadji-Murad and Nabi-Onearm had by then silently slipped away; Akmolin gave a hoot to indicate that it was time to break off for lunch; and then Timurkhan, having wept his fill, stared with his wall eyes at Kun-Okhun's torn clothing and asked in the most sober of voices, “What are you doing in pyjamas?”

In his usual random way Kun-Okhun answered, “Mefody-Jurisprudence will know!”

Rather than tell him to fuck off a second time and so start another chain of disasters, Timurkhan gave a feeble shrug of the shoulders and agreed.

“Let's go and see him,” said Kun-Okhun. Leaning on one another for support, the two of them set off in the direction of the cotton factory and Mefody-Jurisprudence, Gilas's Number One Intellectual. Kun-Okhun had in fact imagined that Timurkhan had said something like, “What on earth will they do to us now?” Knowing that no one except Mefody could possibly answer such a question, Kun-Okhun had suggested going to see him, and Timurkhan had agreed, knowing that no one even thought of calling on Mefody without first getting hold of a bottle or two. Yes, all Gilas knew that a bottle of “tongue-loosener” poured into Mefody could be guaranteed to flow out of him again in the form of a free consultation about any branch of law whatsoever: Collective-Farm, Family or even Roman.

And so, while Kun-Okhun and Timurkhan wait in the midday sun as they wait for Fyokla-Whispertongue to return to the cotton factory shop from her lunch break, and while Fyokla-Whispertongue enjoys herself inside the cab of the diesel shunter with one of Akmolin's apprentices, we have time for a few words about Mefody, who is lying in his room behind the depot, still hung over from the previous day's consultations.

Mefody was, apparently, the last illegitimate son of the great Russian traveller Mikhail Przhevalsky, who had journeyed through all the vast spaces between the Caucasus and the Taklamakan desert.
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Mefody's mother, a widow from the first generation of the colonisers of Turkestan, had been laundering the gentleman's clothes as he rode towards Mongolia to discover his remarkable horse; as she hitched up her skirt to do the rinsing, the great traveller had taken her from behind. It was not until after the Glorious October Revolution, however, that she confessed all this to her family. Przhevalsky, as everyone knows, had the misfortune to die before the Revolution, and so it was only in the Rumyantsev Library that Mefody – who had been sent to study in Moscow by what had once been the Turkestan Geographic Society – first had the chance to acquaint himself with his father's deeds and achievements. He also found out that there were other researchers into the researches of Przhevalsky – and that the most valuable letters and diaries of all had been reserved by the Kremlin.

Who in the Kremlin was studying the heritage of the moustached traveller Mefody was unable to discover,
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but he succeeded in tracking down three of the other researchers. In spite of differences of race, nationality and age, they all wore similar moustaches and gave off not the colourless and sickly air of scholarship, like everyone else in the library, but something vital and untameable; like colts, they were alive with the power of the steppe! For three months and three days Mefody studied their movements and their preferred spots for feeding and sleeping – and this detective work inspired him with an interest in jurisprudence which led to his transferring eagerly and without difficulty from the Geography Faculty to the Law Faculty. Why without difficulty? Because in those years the Geography Faculty was more popular than the Law Faculty, since it enabled its graduates to take off in a hurry to out-of-the-way places other than the Gulag – the only destination available to graduates of the Law Faculty. But Mefody had failed to grasp this. He merely plodded on, though now according to the discipline of Jurisprudence, along one and the same line of inquiry.

Through organising a centenary colloquium on the theme “Methods of Capture in the Steppe and Reproduction in Captivity of the Przhevalsky Horse,” he met a fourth researcher – a Mongolian with a thin moustache who played an animated part in the discussions. And Mefody discovered with horror, as he got to know the other researchers, that every one of their mothers, including an anonymous Arab and a Mongolian by the name of Gumdjadain Bangamtsaray, had laundered the Russian gentleman's shirts and trousers as he travelled in pursuit of his horse.