The Railway (22 page)

Before the War, during the years of mass executions and Cultural Revolution, it was thought progressive when Aisha, a Nogai
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widow who had been brought to Gilas as a young orphan, gave birth to a fatherless girl by the name of Saniya. But when, during the year after the death of Stalin, Saniya gave birth to yet another fatherless girl, Zumurad-Barrenwomb blurted out, “She'll end up a witch!” Uchmah, the Karaite
132
granddaughter, by Saniya the Kumyk,
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of Aisha the Nogai, did indeed grow up to be a witch. It began harmlessly enough with her predicting who would get what mark for calligraphy from the otherwise unpredictable – given his nocturnal drinking bouts – Golovchenka; when, however, Hemmler the German geography teacher failed all the Korean girls for referring to themselves as White and these Korean girls then used their knowledge of martial arts to punish Uchmah for accurately predicting their collective failure, she stopped going to school. And from then on she foresaw only bad fortune.

The first terrible news she brought to Gilas was the news of the true end of little Hussein, the younger son of Huvron-Barber and grandson of the Persian Djebral. When Hussein disappeared, everyone thought he had died at the hands of the Djukhuds – Bukhara Jews who tempted little boys with sweets and then kidnapped them. It was said that a group of Djukhuds would take a boy to one of their homes, spread out one of the large oilcloths they called
supras
, sprinkle this
supra
with flour and then stand there in a circle round the boy, whom by then they would have stripped naked. One after another they would hold out a sweet, beckon the boy and stick an awl into his flesh. The boy's blood would drip onto the flour, and the Djukhuds would use this flour to bake their Passover matzos.

This web of lies so frightened Yusuf-Cobbler that he not only stopped peeing every evening against the wall of Huvron-Barber's little shop but even went so far as to hang the magic word “STOCKTAKING” on the door of his own shop and disappear for the best part of a week. His disappearance only fanned the flames. Everyone started remembering how Yusuf, now they came to think about it, had always been excessively friendly to children; even the very oldest of the old women began to mumble, “Yesh, he wash alwaysh inviting ush.”

But then Uchmah, playing beneath Djebral's high wall, blurted out, “Water, he's in water – washed by water.” And then, jerking her head and repeating the word as if it had no more meaning than the call of a bird: “Zakh! Zakh! Zakh!”

Representatives of the
mahallya
took her to Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger. That very day Kara-Musayev the Younger arrested the two dark sons of Lyuli-Ibodullo-Mahsum, and on the fourth day the boys confessed that they had drowned Hussein in the Zakh canal. A month later, after Hussein's swollen corpse had been dragged out of the water thirty kilometres from Gilas, near the Kerbel dam, Yusuf-Cobbler came back to Gilas and, without opening his shop or even pissing against the wall of Huvron-Barber's little shop, went straight to the home of Aisha, Saniya and Uchmah. There he not only repaired free of charge all the footwear he could find but also presented the women with a real
supra
made from oxhide, a set of cobbler's awls and ration coupons for flour and sweets.

Bahri-Granny-Fortunes, however, did not forgive Uchmah for depriving her of her two grandsons. For three days and nights she conjured over the scorched head of a ram; in the middle of the third night, the night of the full moon, she tore the ram's tongue out by the roots, ate it and fell asleep.

But she must have miscast or misspelled her spells; it was not Uchmah who died but Bahri-Granny-Fortunes herself, and her death was preceded by hours of continuous vomiting. Ibodullo-Mahsum tried to go as quickly as possible to Huzur, the male nurse who was the son of Dolim-Dealer, but every last backstreet and alley in the
lyuli
quarter had been swamped – so Dolim-Dealer was always telling people during the years that followed – by the vomit of the dying old woman. The children shut themselves up in clay hovels whose walls began to collapse, as if undermined by an avalanche, and Ibodullo's squeaking cart couldn't get through. And the yellowy-blue torrent carried the old woman's body out of her home and through the gap that had once been cleared by the powerful battering ram of the grandson of Tolib-Butcher.

Bahri-Granny-Fortunes' curses may, nevertheless, have occasioned Uchmah at least slight inconvenience. Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger charged Uchmah with being an accessory after the fact, for failing to pass on information she possessed about the terrible murder of little Hussein. Kara-Musayev, however, only opened the case after being bribed by Ibodullo-Mahsum, and he never brought it to a conclusion; nor indeed did he ever have the opportunity to press another criminal charge. He was already about to lose everything, about to become mere Musayev-Slogans.

Many years later, as Musayev-Slogans sat in Huvron's chair, visibly suffering as he struggled to reconcile the meanings of two slogans up above the mirror, one in Uzbek and the other in Russian, about how citizens must keep their eyes and ploughs well peeled and work to purge weeds from every field, Huvron-Barber suggested he call on Uchmah and perhaps even ask her forgiveness. If Musayev liked, they could go together; it was, in any case, time for Huvron's lunch break.

And so Musayev, half-shaven and still struggling with the riddle of the slogans, and Huvron, still wearing his white gown, set out together to call on Uchmah. They found her sitting outside casting pebbles on the ground. When Musayev began to look around, as he always did, for a slogan to divert his mind, Huvron quickly asked her to forgive the ex-sergeant for the criminal charge he had long ago brought against her and never formally dropped. In reply, Uchmah deftly removed Huvron's razor from his pocket, made a small cut in her ring finger and let two drops of blood fall on the pebbles. The first made a rustling sound; the second rang out like a bell and bounced back up. “Zangi-Bobo, Zangi-Bobo,” she said without hesitation.

Just then Aisha rushed in; she had retired from her job as a wool-washer and now worked part-time as a postwoman. She had learned about the uninvited guests from Ibodullo-Mahsum, to whom she had just delivered two dirty envelopes from the Gulag, and had rushed back to protect her granddaughter; uninvited guests had never brought her anything but suffering.

Still holding her undelivered newspapers, in which Musayev-Slogans had quickly found solace for a mind worn out by inactivity, Aisha saw the razor in Huvron's hands and took fright, imagining he was either going to follow the example of his elder son and murder someone or else – in return for some service of Uchmah's – was about to shave the whole family free of charge, just as Yusuf-Cobbler had once repaired all their shoes to repay them for some other small service. “
Kit-shi! Kit!
Away! Go away!” she hissed at him.

The following day it was Huvron-Barber's turn to hang up his STOCKTAKING sign. He then set off with Musayev-Slogans to call on Zangi-Bobo, an old man who had spent his entire life sitting by the entrance to the Kok-Terek Bazaar and selling
nasvoy
– snuff spiced with chicken droppings and a little mint. It was Huvron-Barber's hope that Zangi-Bobo would free Musayev from the affliction of slogans. Zangi-Bobo had, after all, devoted his life not so much to trading
nasvoy
as to gathering words. Every word he had heard or seen, every word directed at him or let drop in his presence, every imported, impossible, indecent or indecipherable word – in a word, every word Zangi-Bobo had ever encountered, even if only once in his life, was immediately noted down on a piece of paper and then transferred in the evening to one of thirty-two large books each of which corresponded to a letter of the Russian alphabet. In actual fact, there were thirty-five books; he had had to begin supplementary volumes for three of the letters. Zangi-Bobo's one remaining uncertainty was the question of what to do with various enigmatic Russian words he had encountered over the years. Mefody-Jurisprudence, the town intellectual, was unable to explain these words except when alcohol loosened his tongue – and even then he could explain them only by a string of other words that sounded colourful but were, if such a thing is possible, yet more incomprehensible. And so the number of enigmatic words in the dictionary seemed destined to go on multiplying for ever, and Zangi-Bobo was torn between a wish to purge his dictionary of this suspect vocabulary and a sense of scholarly duty that kept sending him back to Mefody's barrack.

Zangi-Bobo was fond of Huvron-Barber, and he welcomed him with open arms. He led his guests into the courtyard, where they found a large rug covered with dog-eared pages from ancient books, in the shade of a vine. Bringing out a tablecloth, the old man explained, “I've stopped hiding the books in the toilet. I don't think anyone's going to arrest me because of them now.”

“Certainly not when I've brought you the man who did the arresting,” said Huvron, nodding towards Musayev-Slogans.

The old man fell silent for a moment, recognising the former sergeant-major. Musayev's father, the scourge of Gilas, had once been in the habit of trampling Zangi-Bobo's
nasvoy
into the ground beside the gates of the Kok-Terek Bazaar, at least until the day – O merciful Allah! – that he went blind.

Musayev understood little of the subsequent conversation, devoid as it was of the clear good sense embodied in slogans, and so he was just looking around in his usual way when he gave a start of delight; he had spotted an upside-down tin railwayman's badge on the crooked wall of the toilet. Bending his head so he could see better, he read out syllable by syllable, “A min-ute of play can des-troy your life.”

“A min-ute of play can des-troy your life,” he repeated out loud, then began to think about what this might mean. While he was thinking, Huvron managed to explain to Zangi-Bobo why he had brought Musayev along; Huvron did not know how Zangi-Bobo could help, but he trusted Uchmah's intuitions. Zangi-Bobo, however, had no idea how to respond. And so the three men sat over their cooling tea – the slogan-reader and the word-gatherer wrestling with insoluble riddles, while the barber sat in silence between them. Suddenly Musayev said, “‘A min-ute of play can des-troy your life.' Literally, this means, ‘If you play for a minute, you will annihilate your life,' or more clearly, ‘You will expend your life in vain,' or ‘Your life will be wasted.' What does this mean? Sheikh Muslihiddin Sa'adi
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says, ‘If you're drowning in the ocean, what difference does the rain make?'”

Huvron-Barber was himself a descendant of Sa'adi and he froze, astonished to be hearing such wisdom from the lips of a former policeman whom the whole town considered an idiot.

While the barber listened, Musayev drew on at-Tabari
135
to expound the meaning of the first half of Sa'adi's sentence before making a subtle philosophical leap which allowed him to relate the meaning of the second half of the sentence to the slogan on a banner by the entrance to Mukum-Hunchback's chaikhana: “A Chatterbox is a Gift to Spies.” It was said that Mukum had received this banner in exchange for a dirty tablecloth which had served as the standard of a Red Army unit during the long years of basmach rebellion and which the Museum of Military Glory had therefore required as an exhibit. How this old tablecloth had first come into the possession of Mukum-Hunchback was a mystery – although it was suspected that his father, who had died as a true Communist, had at one time been an important basmach leader and had captured it himself. Mukum-Hunchback, in any case, kept his counsel, in accordance with the advice on the banner whose meaning Musayev-Slogans was at that moment trying to interpret.

Meanwhile Zangi-Bobo remained pointedly silent, since the words pouring from Musayev's mouth had all long ago been entered in his thirty-five books. But when Musayev, growing ever more excited, like water nearing the centre of a vortex, began to behave as if he were addressing thousands of people in a stadium, and when his voice began to gurgle in his throat, like Uchmah's during her prophetic frenzies – then Zangi-Bobo pricked up his ears, while Huvron-Barber couldn't help but feel a professional anxiety occasioned by the sudden leaps of Musayev's Adam's apple. Musayev rolled his eyes; his brain gave a dry rattle like that of the last two coins left in a money box; then he flung out his arms triumphantly and, his mouth foaming, pronounced the words, “
No pasaran
!”
136

Huvron-Barber went back home in the evening, but Musayev-Slogans stayed behind in order to absorb the truth of words straight from the pages of the thirty-five books; as for Zangi-Bobo himself, he just lay down as usual on his mattress beside the window. On the windowsill, as always, was his Arrow wireless, with its two knobs and a needle that enabled him to drift across the world, encountering first a Chinaman who seemed to be casting raindrops on water, then an Indian whose sharp voice cut into Zangi-Bobo's soul, and then the thundering prayers of an Arab. What he listened to longest, however, was Persian, with its chains of trailing adjectives that twirled into infinity like the motifs on a carpet; a familiar word would make Zangi-Bobo tremble with joy, but then he would drift away again on the short waves of his Arrow, carried by the tide of languages streaming across the night sky of summer. His hearing grew sharper and sharper until, after a wheeze and a rattle from the wireless, a Uighur began a simple little song:

Bu sozni eshitken zaman chetki akh,
Bolup chekhrasi ul zaman misli kakh,
Ketip khoshidin erga khamvar olup,
Bu sozler kongul ichra azar olup...