The Railway (6 page)

Once upon a time there lived Mirzaraim-Bey, ruler of all the mountains and mountain pastures around Mookat and head of the Kirghiz “Wolf” tribe that was the mother of every Turk. He had four wives, and the two he loved most were the eldest and the youngest. He loved Ulkan-Bibi because she had been like a second mother to him; Aichiryok, the beautiful girl from the mountains who was his blood mother, had died when he was only seven, and a year after her death his father had found him a wife: the half-Uzbek Ulkan-Bibi. After a magnificent feast in the high meadows of Ak-Tengri, Ulkan-Bibi had carried her sleeping eight-year-old husband away in her arms. And so she took the place of his mother, carrying him on her back – which was like a strong slim poplar – until he started to become a man.

And Mirzaraim-Bey loved his youngest wife, Nozik-Poshsho, the Princess from Margilan, because she bore him his first son – Obid-Bey.

His first-born son grew not by the day but by the hour; by the hot-blooded age of sixteen he was, at a gallop, slashing off the heads of visitors as they made their way up the mountainside. All this amused Mirzaraim-Bey and filled him with pride, until one day Obid-Turk, as his companions now called him, decapitated the ambassador of Khudoyar, the Khan of Kokand,
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and Mirzaraim-Bey was faced with the threat of years of war. After his gift of sixty head of large-horned cattle and two hundred sheep and goats was accepted in compensation for the ambassador's hairless, moustache-less and even eyebrow-less head, Mirzaraim-Bey decided it was time to regulate his son's boyish amusements. Like an avalanche, he swept down on the plains of Osh and, in the course of an hour, seized a crowd of Sart mullahs and sages and carried them off to his mountain headquarters. There, in his royal yurt, he held a council to decide what should be done with his son.

The mullahs, as is their way, spoke so eloquently and intricately that the straightforward Mirzaraim-Bey regretted his hasty foray and wished he had left them in Osh. More than that, he found himself longing to unleash his son on them at full gallop; yes, Obid-Turk would slice off their heads as easily as if they were cabbages and Mirzaraim-Bey would be relieved of the obligation to present them with gifts of sheep in reward for their wise counsel.

Then one of these Osh theologians, perhaps sensing the rustle of the wings of Azrael the angel of death over the yurt, and over the six folds of his own turban, exclaimed, “O revered ruler of mountains as lofty and eternal as your own power…”

“Get to the point!” interrupted Mirzaraim-Bey.

“O rectifier of speech, whose own speech is sharp as the point of a sword…”

“I said,
Get to the point
!”

“Here, in the mountains that bow down before you, in the Ali-Shakhid valley, is a holy sage who knows the flow of life and how it turns the wheel of human destiny.”

Mirzaraim-Bey commanded a sheep to be given to each of the mullahs and, with his son and his warriors behind him, moved like an avalanche towards the Ali-Shakhid valley.

The sage had been sitting beneath a waterfall for sixty-six years, beside the mark left by the Prophet's horse on the night of his Ascension to Heaven.
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Countless prayers had made his soul as transparent as the mountain stream beside him, and his face was as smooth as a stone that its waters had polished. After the briefest of glances at Obid, he said, “My son, the Lord has made you pregnant with knowledge!”

Obid-Turk, this wild and unruly young warrior, was at once quietened by these quiet words that sounded louder than the thunder of the waterfall.

“What must I do, wise father?” Obid asked, dismounting from his horse.

“Your own father will tell you. You have a great and terrible future. Let your father say who you should be.”

Mirzaraim-Bey thought. He knew only two ways of life: that of the Kirghiz up in the mountains and that of the Sarts down on the plains. If his son chose the life of a Kirghiz, he would carry on galloping down from the mountains and slicing off the heads of strangers. And Mirzaraim-Bey would have neither the cattle nor the sheep to pay compensation.

And were his son to take after his mother, he would turn out like those Sart mullahs; instead of a head, he would end up with nothing but swathes of turban on top of his neck. Mirzaraim-Bey made up his mind: “May my son be like you!”

The old man called out “Allah Akbar – Great is Allah!” and disappeared into the thundering waterfall.

From that day, Obid-Turk's soul grew quiet, like a mountain wind that has fallen silent. His mother gave him
Beauty and the Heart
, a work of wisdom by an ancient poet,
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and the now silent and reflective Obid-Bey read this book day and night.

And Mirzaraim-Bey bought his son forty cells in the Kokand madrasah. There, supporting himself by renting out cells to the other students, Obid-Bey learned Arabic, Persian and elementary theology and memorised the entire Koran. Seven years later his father sent him to the noble city of Bukhara; now known by the name Obid-Kori,
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he studied there for another twenty-three years.

He was in his late forties by the time he returned home, full of wisdom and sorrow, to his native Mookat.

Oyimcha, one of the daughters of Said-Kasum-Kadi, the Sart district judge, had by then herself reached the unruly age of sixteen. A descendant of the Prophet, from a family whose men were so heavy that they had only to sit on a horse to twist or even break its spine, she was as slim as a poplar from the valley, as light as the breath of the mountains.

Once, as she and her little sister were washing clothes in the pool of spring water behind the white stone house her father had built after a trip to Skobelev,
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her little sister jumped up and sang out like a small bird alarmed by some animal, “Sister, dear sister, you must hide. An accursed man is approaching. We mustn't be seen by him.”

She was ten years old, and so she fulfilled the obligations of a grown-up woman with a great deal more enthusiasm than she moulded the clay flatbreads with which a ten-year-old girl was supposed to amuse herself.

The sister looked up, saw a rider approaching and, not pausing in her work, said in a loud voice, “Why should we hide? It's only a Kirghiz.”

And so the half-Sart and half-Kirghiz Obid-Kori, who had studied in the best Sart madrasahs with the best Sart mullahs and theologians of his time, quite lost his head – over a sixteen-year-old girl whose existence required no evidence, proof or justification.

The now ageing Mirzaraim-Bey paid dearly for this – still more dearly than he had paid for the loss of the head of the ambassador of Khudoyar, the Khan of Kokand. Month after month he sent rams and goats to two Jewish financiers whose names even the cultivated Obid-Kori was unable to pronounce. Only after two years did Said-Kasum-Kadi yield to the persuasive power of the eighty mountain steers, two hundred fat-buttocked rams and hundreds of curly-horned goats that constituted all the remaining wealth of the once powerful Mirzaraim-Bey. Entangled in lawsuits, mired in debt and bewildered by the dawning age of bills of exchange and shares, European phaetons
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and railway lines, Said-Kasum-Kadi gave his eighteen-year-old Oyimcha in marriage to a Kirghiz of nearly fifty. The unhappy girl was sent high into the mountains that stood over Mookat.

Mirzaraim-Bey solved the problem of his son's marriage, but there was another question that his clear and straightforward mind never resolved: had his son Obid-Bey, or had he not, already entered the great and terrible future foretold by the holy old man beneath the waterfall?

Mirzaraim-Bey died without ever knowing. But Obid-Kori himself, after burying a father who in his last years had lost all his sheep and cattle, strode into this future without fear, though not without pain in his heart. In this future he committed to the earth his four mothers – beginning with his eldest mother, Ulkan-Bibi, and ending with his blood mother, Nozik-Poshsho – and began to live a life of poverty with his young and only wife, Oyimcha.

On his return from prison, where he had put on three stone, Umarali-Moneybags laid on a thanksgiving feast. A week beforehand he sent Tolib-Butcher to the City to announce that every tramp, pickpocket, beggar and day-labourer was invited. Tolib-Butcher expended four whole days on this task, wearing out his only pair of boots and all the voice left in his puny body. He then asked Umarali in a hoarse, agitated whisper, “But why only them? Why not get Oktam-Humble-Russky to invite Usman Yusupov and his Party Committee?” Umarali, in his usual way, cursed every part of Tolib from head to toe and said, “You're a fool, Tolib. This riffraff will tell the whole world about Umarali's feast. There'll be no one who doesn't know. And as for your Usman Yusupov – fuck him! The only gift I've ever had from him is prison.”

Later, when Tolib-Butcher was standing beside Umarali-Moneybags, Oktam-Humble-Russky and old blind Hoomer, greeting the rabble that had poured into Gilas like a Tatar horde, he kept worrying that Umarali might refer to this conversation about the thrice-accursed Usman in the presence of Kuchkar-Cheka. Perhaps for this reason, when the parade of guests drew to an end and Kuchkar-Cheka popped up from a neighbouring gateway, Tolib-Butcher promptly stood to attention, like a soldier before a general reviewing his troops. Umarali, on the other hand, giving Kuchkar only the tips of his fingers in greeting, cursed him roundly, then coolly added, “Before greeting you, a man needs to eat either several pounds of honey or a stone of the very best
kazy
.”
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“What do you mean?” asked Kuchkar, pricking up his ever-attentive ear.

“The mere sight of you, you son of a bitch, is enough to chill a man's soul.”

Umarali-Moneybags died a slow and difficult death. Many times he seemed about to let go of the reins of life – but each time he would come to with a start, grabbing life by the mane as it slipped away from under his vast carcass… just one more step… one more breath… one more moment… Just as the women were getting ready to weep and keen, he would glimpse a railway line at the end of the War, goods wagons bound for the textile factories of Ivanovo,
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and himself as a young man – directing the stolen cotton on its way to those factories: “One million bales to Ivanovo, one million bales to Orekhovo-Zuyevo… Ay, ay, ay…”

The post of head of police, which was always held by the sergeant-major – at present, the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder, who had gone blind in his old age after impiously kicking some flatbreads
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that Rokhbar was selling illegally at the station was passed on from one generation to the next. Let me repeat this more clearly: the post of head of police, now held by Kara-Musayev the Younger – the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder was passed on by inheritance. In a word, the post was hereditary. Got it? If not, I've been wasting my breath, as Kara-Musayev would have put it, blathering away to a brick wall.

Everything would have gone well, the life of Kara-Musayev the Younger would have continued swimmingly right up to his retirement, had it not been for the fact that his wife, the daughter of Kuchkar-Cheka, turned out to be barren. There was no one he did not take her to, no one who did not investigate her. Such an army of doctors, healers of every kind and the merely inquisitive examined the poor woman's reproductive organs that, were the eyes of men endowed with even an ant-sized dose of fertilising power, the unhappy Kumri would quickly have brought forth a whole battalion of potential heirs for the post of head of police – which, as it happens, is just what she eventually did do, except that she bore them all to the wrong husband. Had these children been his, then Kara-Musayev the Younger would have had at least a little more right to the light-blue “Heroine-Mother” medal that he always wore on State Holidays – a medal confiscated from an unfortunate Kazakh girl at the bazaar whom he had once fined for some misdemeanour; it had been tied, along with coins from all over the world, to the end of one of her pigtails. But neither wearing this medal on his uniform, nor any number of non-fertilising male examinations of his wife's non-conceiving womb were of the least help – and so Kara-Musayev decided to investigate his own role in the matter, to confirm by experimental means his own procreative ability.

Among the female population of Gilas there were just two idiot-girls whose obedience to Kara-Musayev was unquestioning: one who yielded at home when she was drunk and one who yielded when she was intoxicated by the fresh air out in the maize fields where the young lads had all taken to grazing their cows – but the sergeant-major's strategic savvy prompted him to decide that an experiment on either of them would hardly prove conclusive; and, in any case, heaven only knows whom or what these idiots might not give birth to. And so Kara-Musayev the Younger waited until the Sunday Kok-Terek Bazaar and then arrested a young Uighur woman for speculating in Indian tea – an activity she was engaging in for the first time, buying the tea from Samarkand Tadjiks and selling it on to Kazakhs from Sary-Agach. Threatening her with exile to Siberia, he ordered her to come to his office after lunch the following day, when even engine driver Akmolin would be asleep inside his diesel shunter.

The following day, when only the sun was still out on the street, hallucinating in erratic spirals over the white-hot asphalt – into Kara-Musayev's office came not one young woman but two. At first Kara-Musayev thought that he too was hallucinating. It was only when one of the women begged him to pardon her sister, throwing herself at his feet beneath the office desk, that he understood they were identical twins.

A moment later, when he found on his knees a packet of second-grade Indian tea stuffed with three-rouble notes – the usual tariff for speculators – the sergeant's strategic savvy prompted him to an unusual response: he seized the bribe-giver by one hand, called on her sister as a witness and accused her of a far more serious crime. Threatening her with forced labour in the uranium mines, he accused her of attempting to bribe an official in the course of carrying out his official duties.

The Uighur girls wept in repentance, but Kara-Musayev showed no mercy. Having indicted the sisters upon separate articles, he led them to separate cells and subjected them to separate personal interrogations that concluded in one and the same fashion – with both twins choosing dishonour rather than prison. True, he did assure each of them, upon his honour as a police sergeant-major, that her sister, released on bail, would never know the physical price that had been paid for her freedom.

Who would have guessed that these two young women, Fatima and Zukhra, would both fall pregnant? And that the first person to know this would be Kumri, whose demand for an immediate divorce quickly led to Kara-Musayev's demotion from sergeant-major to sergeant and from full member of the Party to candidate member? His bosses, however, did not yet know the reason for this divorce, and fear of this being made public led Sergeant Kara-Musayev the Younger, candidate member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to propose marriage, on separate occasions, to each of the twins. Now, however, it was the turn of the twins to be merciless. In the course of a second meeting in Kara-Musayev's office during the afternoon hour when even Akmolin is asleep in his shunter, they discovered the potential bigamy of the divorced Kara-Musayev – a crime which, unlike divorce, was punishable by the criminal law that it was the job of the dumbstruck sergeant to enforce – and the latter's now uncertain strategic savvy prompted him (it seemed better to divorce one sister and face demotion to the rank of constable and the loss of his Party membership than to be charged with bigamy complicated by divorce and end up being sent to Siberia or to the uranium mines of Kazakhstan) to say to the Uighur twins, “I shall marry whichever of you is first to give birth!”

And that was the beginning of a socialist competition between the Uighur twins, both of whom – to prevent any compromising rumours circulating in Gilas – Kara-Musayev quickly installed high in the mountains, in separate rooms of the Alcoholism Prevention and Treatment Centre on the resort bank of the Aksay river.

Zukhra was first to give birth and so Kara-Musayev married Fatima, as had been agreed, in order to divorce Fatima straight away and then marry Zukhra – but this was more than the jealous and perhaps also brainless Zukhra could bear, so what did the girl do but wait until the next Kok-Terek Sunday Bazaar and then – carrying in her arms a baby whose Musayevan yells were a clear indication of his right to inherit the post of Gilas head of police – proclaim to everyone present the full details of how disgracefully she had been treated?

A court was convened in the chaikhana to pass comradely judgment on Kara-Musayev's conduct and, no one being able to suggest any way of further demoting a non-Party-member rank-and-file policeman, it was decided to remove from his surname the prefix Kara and to dismiss him from the police force – and so Kara-Musayev was pensioned off with the decapitated surname Musayev, whereupon he somehow lost his reason.

What remained of his life he for no known reason devoted to reading every poster and slogan he came across – on walls or roofs, in a bus or at the bazaar – hoping to penetrate its esoteric meaning and impart this to others. “The Five Year Plan is the Law; Fulfilment of the Plan – Our Debt and Our Duty; Over-fulfilment of the Plan – Our Honour,” he would read in Russian on the squeaking cart of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum. He would then start to philosophise out loud in Uzbek: “Plan means law. But what is law? The plan. What then is the plan? Once, I remember, there was a plan for fulfilling the law, er, I mean, a law for fulfilling the plan… What did Sami-Rais do in my father's day? He appointed my father to subordinate everyone to the law – and what do you think happened to anyone who didn't fulfil the plan? They were lawfully destroyed by the full force of the law!

“And as for overfulfilment – that's as clear as daylight even to the tail of a dog! What does overfulfilment mean? Our debt and our duty. A debt means that someone has borrowed money. And if you've borrowed money, then you'd damn well better return it, you bastard – in accordance with the law. Otherwise? Otherwise it's against all lawful law! But what do the police think they're doing? Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes borrowed twenty roubles from my father, and we haven't had sight nor sound of those roubles for twenty years. There hasn't even been a police search. Gunpowder up his arse – that's what he needs!

“And what's this here at the end? Overfulfilment – Our Honour. This is beyond the understanding of reason. This is well and truly super-complex! Yes, comrade!

“‘Study, study, study – Lenin.' I couldn't agree more! Let him study the same as we do! Think of all those works I've worked through in my day! That's right. Study, study, study – Lenin!”