The Railway (26 page)

“
Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!
” (If I'm not taken by force, I shan't yield!), she kept repeating. He didn't understand what she meant by this, but her ardent tone inflamed his young blood. He took her hand. She did not resist.

“What do you want?” he asked again. But this time it was as if he were demanding payment for the risk he was already taking – holding her hand within shouting distance of both the Cossack guards and the horde of her fellow Yomuds. She understood him and pointed into the distance, to where he had just come from on his colt.

“It's forty days today.
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And you're a Muslim. Tonight we can ride
there
!” Speaking the words as if she had learned them by heart, she disappeared beneath the awning of the kitchen yurt.

Like the sun, he was on fire until evening, remembering and trying to interpret her every word and gesture. It seemed as if the sun would never set, as if it were a head that had been severed and wouldn't let itself be buried in the earth, but finally a first white star came out in the green sky, as white as her hand coming out of her green sleeve. A little later he let his colt drink the remaining water and walked off on his own to wait for night beside the slowly cooling rail that had just been laid.

He sat down beside the lame track. He tried to think about the railway: they were going to lay the second rail after all, though without fully nailing it down, so that the new recruits could use a handcar instead of a wheelbarrow to transport the rails and gravel – but his thoughts quickly slipped away to the seventeen-year-old beauty. Her words were a torment to him: “If I'm not taken by force, I shan't yield!”

“
Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!
” he said over and over, wondering if she was referring to Cossack abuse of her maidenly purity or whether this was her way of asking him to act passionately and decisively. Whatever the truth, all he could see was her lips whispering these words; they blotted out everything in front of him.

Night came. There was a breath of what passed in those parts for cool air, and the moon rose obediently to light up the whispering dunes that seemed to be counting their pale grains of sand. Snakes slid out of their holes. A desert owl gave a solitary hoot. He went up to the quartermaster's yurt and, more excited than ever, began to wait. It was as if everything had been a delirium of the sun, a fruit of the heat haze of his consciousness. If she hadn't come yet, she would never come – and perhaps it was all just a trick she had been put up to by the Cossack commander, who was now watching from his white tent. A hundred such thoughts went through his head, and he didn't hear her creep up from behind to touch his elbow. As if stung, he spun round and seized her hands.

“Over there!” she said. Understanding that everything would happen
over there
, he led her out of the camp and into the patch of camel-thorn where his colt was languidly sniffing out scarce blades of grass. They jumped up onto the colt's still warm back; the girl put her arms round his waist and they rode off. His eyes were scanning the ground ahead but his heart was beating behind him – below his shoulder blades, against her springy breasts. The moon galloped after them, her mane of stars flowing in the wind. And when the moon had climbed up into the sky and was hanging over the little ladder of rails and sleepers, as if meaning to slip down onto the mound of sand where the trench had been, the girl gently slipped down from the colt's back and walked towards the grave, letting the bright moon of her face shine out freely. He slipped down after her. The colt neighed and, when he started to pull it in, asked to be set free. He released the colt and followed the girl with uncertain steps. Her scarf, which had remained in place during their wild gallop, was blown off by the light of the moon; the girl had thrown it off along with her cloak, releasing the shining, sinuous curls of her hair. He walked after her, not knowing what would happen next but trusting to the mystery of this night. Just by the ladder, she flung open her arms, which shone in the moonlight, and threw herself down onto the mound. He rushed towards her and was almost on top of her when he heard her resonant sobs; they were like claps of thunder from a clear, starry sky. She was weeping, repeating her incomprehensible “
Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!
”

He stopped, like a reined-back colt, but only for a second. Then he was kissing her hair, which was full of tears and sand, kissing her back, which was trembling from her sobs, kissing her arms which lay stretched out to either side by the base of the two iron rails pointing towards the shameless moon. His body was an unbroken colt and it longed to drown in this desert night. He went on kissing her, greedily, until he suddenly recognised that she was somewhere a long way away. It was as if she didn't see him, didn't sense him, didn't remember him or even know that he was there; she was writhing on top of this grave of sand in a kind of numb oblivion, as if she wanted to scatter the sand into the starry sky above her or else bring the stars down over her grief like grains of sand.

He moved away from her, still lying on his side on the grave. His revolver in its holster was sticking into him and he realised soberly how useless and irrelevant he was in the presence of her deathly-bitter love. He squatted down awkwardly and, feeling sudden pity for this unfortunate creature of God, began to stroke her head, her hot temples and her tangled hair.

Slowly she turned her tear-stained face away from the dark sand and laid her head on his knee. He cautiously kissed her on the temple and then, lifting aside her heavy hair, on the neck. She did not resist. He felt awkward and ashamed and she seemed aloof, but his desire overcame everything. Once again he lay down beside her, and once again his revolver was in the way and he took off his belt and holster and threw them down by the base of the absurd little ladder and just as it seemed that nothing could stop him he saw the girl slowly point the revolver's gleaming barrel straight at him. Instead of seizing hold of it or striking it out of her hands, he jumped up in surprise; and while he stood there in the middle of the desert, paralysed with shame at the thought of being shot with his trousers half-down, Barchinoy shot herself through the heart. Birds that had settled for the short night on tamarisk bushes or stumps of
saksaul
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flapped their sleepy wings; a carpet viper that had sensed their love and crept up towards them rustled back into the night, and a little stream of blood coiled down the trail it left in the sand.

Before dawn he buried her in that same trench, under that same ladder that tore open the sky. Taking his colt by the bridle, he set off along the railway line back to the camp.

On his return he was arrested, and the Cossack commander opened an inquiry. In the lock-up, from which the Yomuds had been sent out to work but which still harboured their dense and heavy smell, Lieutenant Lemekh interrogated him about the events of the night. His replies were by no means the whole truth, but then how could he be understood by a man who only wanted to know one thing: had he or hadn't he fucked the bitch after she'd snuffed it? How could a man like Lemekh understand his simultaneously confused and enlightened heart? Getting no clear answer to his impatient questions, Lemekh lost interest and passed the case on to a sub-lieutenant. The sub-lieutenant turned out to be army intelligentsia, full of questions about what had motivated both him and the girl, but, since the sub-lieutenant had no clear idea of the motives underlying the interrogation itself, he too lost interest and found some excuse to pass the case on to a sergeant. The sergeant simply gave the young man a good beating for “trampling on the honour of the Empire with your uncontrolled cock.” The beating was painful but uncomplicated. Deep inside him, however, nothing shifted, nothing changed. In the afternoon they poured a little newly delivered water over his bloodstained face; he was then passed on to the quartermaster, to help bring in the supplies. The quartermaster's only complaint was that the young man hadn't kept him better informed: together they could have given it to her good and proper – mane and tail.

The quartermaster was followed by several more Cossacks of lower and lower rank, but the only one he remembered was the one-eyed Bulba, a filicide, who suddenly bared his member and climbed on top of him. As the thirty-stone Cossack hung over him the young man felt that once this was over he would have no choice but to take his own life, but he somehow managed to free himself. Without understanding why, he found himself hissing, “
Eger guich bilen alaymasalar, ozum-a bermerin!
”

He grabbed hold of the water bucket and swung it with all his might at Bulba's one eye, but the bucket just buckled against his forehead. Bulba knocked him angrily to the ground, spat at him as he pulled up his trousers and then left him for dead, meaning to come back later and remove the body.

But he did not die. With his dim and confused consciousness he could still see the same interminable light that had wedged itself between the previous night and everything that had happened since; this light was like a gap, an abyss, a breach that nothing from the everyday world could bridge.

“
Eger guich bilen... eger guich bilen
,” he kept whispering, as if Barchinoy's love for another were an illness, a plague, a pestilence that had infected him.

In the evening, when the Yomuds returned, he was transferred from the lock-up to the quartermaster's yurt. To stop him running away, they gave him another thrashing. And this was a good thing, since it quietened, at least for a while, the ache in his abandoned heart, a heart that no one in the world needed. But towards midnight his sense of
toskà
grew unbearable; like a shadow, he left the tent, dragging his bloodstained body behind him.

It had not occurred to the Cossacks to beat up his young accomplice; already corrupted by a taste of nocturnal freedom, the colt offered him its back. He clambered on and guided the colt towards Barchinoy's grave.

They found him early the next morning, half-buried in sand. As a warning to everyone else, he was left lashed to the ladder for the entire day. His lips cracked; dry salt came out of his eyes; but not even the desert sun could burn away his
toskà.
Towards evening a passing fox sniffed at him and licked the blood off his feet; and a vulture that had been baked red-brown circled above him, then flew away to invite his family to a nocturnal feast.

“They can lick and drink my blood – but what do
I
have to lick and drink?” he repeated to himself as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The sun turned into a red-brown fox – or perhaps it had been a red-brown fox all along – and disappeared beneath the edge of the desert.

Because of the ache in his heart he begged God for a quick death, but God rejected him as an unbeliever, abandoning him as black night overtook the desert. With the last of his strength the crucified man called on Satan for help, but towards midnight, when he sensed something troubling the still air, when he heard a creak from the topmost rung of the ladder, he realised that this was not Satan but Azrael, black as a night raven, blinding his tired eyes with the flapping of black wings. And no sooner had Azrael, without asking a single question, pierced his heart and his liver in order to suck out his soul, than a crescent-feathered arrow passed with a whistle in between his head and his shoulder and plunged into the wooden sleeper. And Azrael, changed into a night vulture, was flapping his wounded wings up in the sky, while his hangers-on flew after him.

An old man was chanting over him the words: “And in this valley a name is untied from its bearer – as if the letters of the alphabet should abandon a book or a path should lose its direction. But what are you without a name, without books and without a path?” asked the blinded one. “Speak if you can!

“Time in this valley is released from its traces, sand does not make up deserts, stars do not indicate darkness. But what are you without day, without reckoning and without light? Speak if you can!

“There you will be deprived of questions, there you will be deprived of deprivation, there and not there you will be not you. And what will then be left? Speak, if you can!”

Here the first dozen pages of Hoomer's notes break off. There is a gap, and then the manuscript continues. But while you have been reading it, I have realised that there is something else you need to know. I will begin, I think, from the very end.

On the day of calamities, when the earth quaked and a goods train going through Gilas was derailed, when the shock of the train hitting a pillar beside the station caused five cans of petrol to explode and the explosion brought down the water tower – on this day of calamities a torrent of water and flaming petrol swept away the white clay hut where Hoomer was then living alone, since his wife was taking part in some trial of Crimean Tatars,
151
and carried reams of burning and half-burnt and singed and occasionally unsinged sheets of paper through the town. After the seven days of the flood, the old women began drying the pages in the innocent sun; then they screwed them up and used them to light fires in their hearths. Zangi-Bobo used them, along with pages from Peryoshkin's Fifth-Year Physics Course, to make cornets for sunflower seeds and
kurt
; Mefody-Jurisprudence used them to make cigarette papers.

But it was the ever alert and erudite Mefody who first discovered what had been written on these pages – what blind Hoomer had dictated and Nakhshon had written down in her fine hand. Mefody discovered this in the presence of Kun-Okhun, as they were smoking home-grown tobacco along with a little hashish that Kun-Okhun had obtained from Dolim-Dealer in exchange for a sack of stolen coal. Realising that the smoke was curling into the shapes of letters, they read, letter by letter, the words: “Yusuf and his brother…” Frightened almost to death, Mefody stared at Kun-Okhun; Kun-Okhun, lumpen and uneducated as he was, swallowed the wisps of letters that were still hanging in the air yet somehow failed to take in anything at all. Mefody, however, having been trained long ago to deduce cause from effect, was appalled to discover that there was indeed still part of a slobbered-over letter “s” on the end of the roll-up. What they had seen in the air was a title; what followed was a compactly written text about how the illegitimate son of a great Russian explorer and a local washerwoman was sent by the Turkestan Geographical Society to study in Petersburg.