The Railway (24 page)

It was the Jewish Yusuf-Cobbler, as it happened, who was fiercest of all in his denunciation of this new faith, but his rage sprang less from religious than from economic considerations; he thought that the decreasing number of feet would wear out less footwear. Soon, however, he realised that one foot wears out a single shoe in half the time that two feet take to wear out two shoes and so he began to calm down, though he still took the precaution of economising on nails and elastic.

Little by little the adepts of the new faith began to use not only the power of the word but also physical force to recruit to their order those who still lived without meaning or belief. They began by smashing the legs of Raphael, the younger brother of the late Timurkhan – who in the end really had been run over by a train. Then a car with no number plate ran over the legs of Lobar-Beauty, who was in charge of the Culture and Recreation shop, and Gennady Ivanovich Mashin, a local football star and trumpet player, was “swept off his feet” during a friendly game.

It was at this time that Yusuf-Cobbler composed his bleak yet well-known prayer: “O Lord, cut them down to size from both ends. Top them and tail them. May there be no end, O Lord, to your eternal justice…”

Oppok-Lovely, irritated as she always was by any rival concentration of power, let alone one whose effects were so damaging, acted straightforwardly and wisely; she undermined the material base of the new faith by going from town to town and buying up all the cotton sheets – which neophytes and proselytes were required to wrap round their bodies – and then stacking them in the tuberculosis hospital. Bakay responded by calling down curses on her during one of his Monday sermons and declaring a Holy War. The reward for the head of this female Satan and the destruction of her empire would, he promised, be eternal bliss – a blessing that could otherwise be won only through castration and the loss of both legs. And so, on the night of the second Monday after this sermon – the night of a total lunar eclipse – a party of volunteers was dispatched to the house of Oppok-Lovely. Oppok-Lovely, however, was not at home; after going to the City to arrange for pensions to be granted both to Uchmah (“loss of the family breadwinner”) and to Shapik (“incapacity for labour”), she had decided to spend the night there with her younger daughter Shanob.

The vengeful Uchmah had long ago foreseen the storming of Oppok-Lovely's house but she was now – alas! – unable to interfere in the course of events either by speeding up bureaucratic procedures or by making Oppok-Lovely think better of her sudden act of kindness. Alas! And out in Oppok-Lovely's garden the moon began to burn up; along with the moon, the shadows of trees and people began to turn to ashes, twisting up like scorched sheets of paper and curling into nothing; the two-legged turned one-legged, the one-legged became legless and the legless lost their heads as well as their shadows.

And suddenly, as the first of the volunteers were carried by their own momentum against the house door, the light disappeared completely – and every last shadow along with it. Everything became one ghastly darkness. Earth had covered both Sun and Moon with darkness.

“Bloody... Bloody...” Shapik repeated in his lonely bed, and the storming party entered the house.

After turning the house upside down and finding only the naked Shapik, they dragged him out into the yard just as the moon was squeezing her way out through the crooked slit between darkness and darkness. Shadows slipped down onto the earth and thickened; only this naked young ancient seemed unchanged. He scratched his behind, sucked his finger, inconsolably repeated his “Bloody fuck… bloody fuck…” – and suddenly drenched Bakay, who was sitting on his low-wheeled trolley with his back to Shapik, with semen as dense as the light of the moon.

Bakay did not wear trousers, since he had nothing to wear them on, and his tunic had ridden up – and so Shapik's semen trickled slowly and stickily down Bakay's buttocks…

When the moon had reappeared in all her fullness, the crowd wrapped Shapik – who was once again shooting semen into the night garden – in some huge pages from books made of leather and other skins. They glued these pages to him to make up for the absence of cotton sheets and, so bewitched by the moon that they forgot to set fire to the house, set off with this scroll to their sacred mound beside the Salty Canal, intending to carry out a ritual sacrifice.

In the light of the full moon, they rolled him over once, twice, a third time – but not once did Shapik cry out; all they heard was the crackling of dry grass and rushes. Then one of Bakay's two-legged followers, wanting to earn eternal bliss without having to sacrifice his legs, suggested setting fire to the scroll. They tried to do this. But the leather burnt poorly – probably because it was damp from the idiot's secretions or from the ink of countless words.

Another new recruit suggested dousing the scroll with petrol. Yet another ran to the garage beside the level crossing as fast as the legs he didn't want to sacrifice could carry him; he came back with two cans of petrol. The crowd was going crazy. The excitement infected Shapik inside his womb of paper; he moved on from his usual one or two syllables and began abusing the listeners with the nearest he ever got to an entire sentence: “Bloody fuck… bloody fucking… bloody fucking hell…”

Two full moons shone from Bakay's eyes with a dead light as he indicated with a nod of the head that his comrades-in-arms should pour petrol over the scroll. They grew as excited as children preparing to make calcium carbide explode in a puddle.
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Two of the two-legged splashed the petrol over the leather envelope and withdrew, having earned the spiritual credit they needed. And just as a third man was about to toss a match at the scroll, Midat-Clubfoot, a Bashkir who had been lame from birth and who had waited for Bakay all his life with the passion of St John the Baptist waiting for Jesus, used his one good leg to aim a kick at this scroll wrapped round a human being – and it began to roll slowly and heavily down the hill. And at that moment the third man threw his match.

The explosion shook all Gilas. The earth quaked. Dogs hid in their kennels, howling and scratching their stomachs; bees left their hives and flew up towards the moon; the town's nuclear war alarm blasted away like the trumpet of Jericho, not ceasing until the following morning.

Only then did Gilas understand what had happened. Fatkhulla-Frontline – the mind, conscience and honour of Gilas – whose one eye needed only half as much sleep as the two eyes of others, went out as usual at five o'clock to take his seven sheep to graze beside the canal. There he found Hoomer; Hoomer had long been thought dead, but that dawn he had come back to earth to walk naked among scorched bodies and crutches, in scrubland that had been burnt to a cinder, and repeat words that Fatkhulla had heard before only as a young soldier on the Second Ukrainian Front: “Fucking... Bloody fucking… Bloody fucking hell…” This meeting and this Sabbath of the Dead were too much for Fatkhulla-Frontline; he drove his trembling sheep back to Gilas. There he roused Tordybay-Medals, Satiboldi-Buildings and the whole
mahallya
, so they could decide together how to drive away these evil spirits.

When the menfolk of Gilas, armed with hoes, spades and pitchforks, reached the canal, there was no sign of either Hoomer or Shapik, only the relics of this new faith of the one-legged and the legless, a faith that had been consumed within only days of its birth. They buried everyone and everything straight away, in the scorched scrubland; and a few months later it was decided to cover the area with asphalt, so that a new “October” summer cinema could be built there.

In her old age Uchmah worked there as a ticket-seller; she was also the fortunate recipient of both the pensions that the benevolent Oppok-Lovely had gone to such pains to arrange for her.

However much I have put this off, however much I have attempted to conceal, I have no choice in the end but to tell you. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense at all. Or hardly any sense.

In Gilas, just beside the railway line, behind the water tower, there lived a blind old man, half-Tatar and half-Uzbek, by the name of Hoomer. His wife was half-Armenian and half-Jewish; her first name was Nakhshon, and her surname was either Donner or Shtonner. I can't remember. Or I've got confused. Never mind. And so, Hoomer no longer left the house, but Nakhshon – a once beautiful seventy-year-old with eyebrows now thick as a moustache and a large wart just above her upper lip that had once been seen as a beauty spot – used to participate as a volunteer in electoral commissions. On election days she would go round Gilas with a voting urn and call either on Kun-Okhun, who would be too drunk after loading coal all night to walk to the polling station, or on Mefody-Jurisprudence, who was always as good as de-voted by his devotion to principle; last, she would call on her blind husband and spend half an hour with him, perhaps drinking tea and nibbling the sweet cakes she had obtained from the voting commission. And on Sundays in summer she would visit the Kok-Terek Bazaar and sell a first edition of Ozhegov's Russian Dictionary, a pre-Revolutionary Herbert Spencer or perhaps the psychological writings of William James. She was, in short, someone who spread culture and enlightenment wherever she went.

Nakhshon and Hoomer had no children. Occasionally, after a Young Pioneers' parade, the Timur Team from the October School
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would bring them three kilos of potatoes and a piece of the household soap allocated to the team by the administration of the wool factory. This is all that anyone knew about them. And that Nakhshon was a fine cook. So thought Oppok-Lovely, who knew everything about everyone and who, alone of the adult inhabitants of Gilas, used to visit their little room just beside the railway line, behind the water tower.

But now let me tell you what no one at all knew.

Hoomer was, of course, the patriarch of Gilas. No one could say how old he was because even the most ancient old men of Gilas remembered him as having always been old. As a young man, this son of an interpreter for the occupying Tsarist forces had worked as an interpreter for the Russians building the first railway line to Turkestan; he had had to gallop about the steppe on post horses, getting stuck in sandstorms and snowstorms while freedom-loving Kazakhs mutinied or more mercantile Sarts sold sleepers for the foundations of houses – as a result of which both Kazakhs and Sarts had to be tried in court. Hoomer interpreted not only the judges' verdicts but also the instructions of the officers in charge of dispatching the prisoners to Siberia, where there also happened to be a railway under construction, although that one was being built by Buryats and Khakas.

The task of the Sarts was to lay down the rail running north from Tashkent, while the task of the Kirghiz and Kazakhs was to lay down the rail running south from Akmecheti. After the brigade from Tashkent and the brigade from Akmecheti had met and the first rail had been officially joined, each brigade would go on to lay the second rail on the territory of the other. So if the Sarts had laid their first rail as far as Shiili before they met the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs, they would have to lay their second rail only between Shiili and Akmecheti, whereas the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs would have to lay their second rail all the way from Shiili to Tashkent. Is that clear? Crystal clear? To the Kirghiz, the Kazakhs and even the Sarts, it was clear as mud.

At the end of the fourth winter, covered in scabs and filled with a fierce mutual hatred, the two half-frozen hordes of short-lived Asiatics – the original workers had all died long ago, as had their replacements – met beneath a lurid sunset close to a Kazakh camel drivers' shelter outside the town of Turkestan – just as the Russian geographers and engineers had intended. It is probable, however, that this success would not have been achieved but for the mental and physical agility of Hoomer; as he shuttled between courts and executions, he had felt as if he were drawing together two ends of a length of thread, holding one in his right hand and the other in his left.

There, in the light of the steppe sunset, instead of going for one another's throats, the two bands of workers threw down their hammers and pickaxes, leaving their twelve Russian armed guards to hammer in the last “Turkestan Railway Regiment” link of rail while they themselves set off in two separate groups to the town, to offer prayers to Hazrat Hodja Ahmed at his ruined shrine.
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Hoomer-Interpreter did not know what to do: should he remain for the ceremony of the tying together of the two ends of the iron thread that now led from Akmecheti to Tashkent or should he follow those whom he had come to see as tongueless without him?

In the end he plodded off after the workers, his box-calf boots crunching through snowdrifts as he followed a line of his own between the two trodden-down paths, keeping in view these two hordes that seemed like two black eyes against the white snow – like two frozen pupils that had thawed out and fallen onto the ground far ahead of him. Hoomer was not without feeling and, as an educated scion of these same wild tribes, he wept as he followed them, longing in the depth of his heart to be reconciled with them and to regain the innocent and unclouded eyes of his youth; but all of a sudden some troublemaker would turn round and, encouraging the others to join in, would shout and holler and throw things in his direction – pellets of clay from under the snow, balls of snow already black with dirt. Then this troublemaker would fall in again with the purposeful stride of his comrades and they would walk on in silence until someone from the other crowd turned round and caught sight of Hoomer plodding along in his unbuttoned greatcoat. And the same thing would happen again.

As they approached the shrine, the two crowds merged into one; Hoomer lost sight of them as they entered the mausoleum, and he was left on his own in the steppe. By the time he got there himself, the men were already at prayer, having taken their places before and behind and on each side of the shrine. Hoomer found himself a place at the back and, never having prayed in his life, resolved to copy the movements of the men standing in front of him. They bowed to the ground; Hoomer bowed to the ground too. They straightened up; and before Hoomer had fully straightened up himself, they were back down on their knees again. Hoomer struggled to keep up. Kneeling down and putting his forehead to the ground, he suddenly felt the ineffable absurdity of what he was doing. But this absurdity was so full and complete, so remarkable, that when, after straightening up for a moment, the believers bowed down again before the Almighty, Hoomer lowered his head to the ground with the sensuality of a man who is discovering sensations he has never felt before. It would have been difficult, so Hoomer thought, to conceive of anything more absurd than this pose – your bottom in the air and your nose down by someone else's feet – but in its humiliating absurdity, in this humiliation that had nothing to do with either another man's bottom sticking up in front of you, nor with your own bottom sticking up behind you, nor even with having your face covered in snow that someone else has been standing on, in this shared humiliation before something higher Hoomer found a sensuality both sweet and astringent and as he stood there with dirty snow and snowy dirt flowing slowly down his face and as he silently moved his lips in a prayer he had been taught by his Tatar grandmother from Orenburg, he found himself waiting impatiently for the man standing on the platform with his back to them all to shout out “
Allahu Akbar!
”
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and bow down so they could all bow down and become part of the earth once more.

That night, lying with his fellow-believers beside the saint's grave, Hoomer tossed and turned beneath his Russian army greatcoat. He dreamed of a man coming to do his ablutions and carefully washing his legs, his feet, each of his toes and the gaps between them, then winding calico foot-cloths round his feet and ankles – all in order that, after a little while, a second man should lift him up, all clean and prepared, and carry him about the world just as one might carry some carcass. But the man Hoomer found himself thinking about was the man compelled to carry the washed man through the world, the man sentenced to carry another man on his shoulders, just as one carries the clothes on one's body, just as one wears a beard or a pair of spectacles or one's own name…

Disturbed by this dream, he woke up. Night was staring down into the ruined buildings and its bright stars seemed sharp and protruding. Falling back into sleep, he dreamed of two dogs snarling at one another as they approached him – only they weren't dogs but tame wolves, a pair that had lost a cub, and the she-wolf went on howling for her cub all night long.
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The wolves began walking all over him and suddenly he felt that, instead of biting his hand, the male was touching his soft forearm with its naked member – like a dog about to wet him with its seed. He stayed flat on the ground. The mating season was beginning and it was time for the male to run wild; the she-wolf would just go back to her kennel and howl.

Still flat on the ground, Hoomer woke up, looked at the stars – now linked with one another into a single thread – and slipped back into his dreams. The iron road had become an iron thread, but he couldn't make it out clearly; he couldn't tell if it was black or white.

Then he heard the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful and obedient to their early morning prayers, at the hour when you cannot tell a white thread from a black thread; and later that day, in a covered wagon, Hoomer took an official notebook with a lace tie and began to write the first page of unofficial text he had ever written – a page that marked the beginning of his career as a writer.

Now that you know about this day and this night, it is easier to explain and understand many things in his subsequent life. I saw those first pages of his awkward – and therefore over-literary, excessively stylised – text
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only once, and at a time when they were covered with water, but they were bright, probably as bright as Hoomer's face that day he prayed in the snow… This text, I remember, was called: