The Railway (14 page)

In the end Garang-Deafmullah was the only mullah left in Gilas.

Though nowhere near as talented, he had been a diligent student of Zokhor Alam from the Alam Shakhid district of the Old City. When the heathens from the security organs had arrested his Teacher, they had classified Garang-Deafmullah as an under-age assistant, oppressed by a representative of the dying classes and clergy. Garang was indeed still unable to “strike letter against letter,” that is, to read out loud a sentence written in Arabic, although he had learned by heart much of what he had heard from his Teacher's lips.

It was this very slow-wittedness that had once led his father to box him on the ear. The future deafmullah, unfortunately, happened to have hidden in that ear some Russian tobacco from the bazaar, and this filth burst his eardrum and so earned him the nickname that would stay with him until his dying day.

When those damned heathens arrested Zokhor Alam, Garang saw the way things were going and decided to stop practising all religious rites except that of circumcision, which he continued to carry out in and around Gilas in order to provide for his family. He was as competent at this as one of today's surgeons; ever since he was a child, after all, he had been pruning vines for Mahmud-Hodja, who was a friend of his father. Yes, Garang-Deafmullah was a true professional; wrapped in singed cotton wool, the circumcised members of the local boys were fully healed within a couple of weeks.

Large numbers of baby boys were born in the years before the War, as if people foresaw the need to provide themselves with plenty of male descendants, and Garang enjoyed a stable income. Drying in the sun among his apricots and tomatoes were whole garlands of rings of skin, waiting to serve as charms during the long childless years when the men were all serving as soldiers. Nevertheless, Garang-Deafmullah did not know peace of mind. The security organs were rumoured to be turning their attention to circumcision, and colleagues in Chakichmon, Allon, Akhun-Guzar and Takhtapul had already been arrested for “sabotage of members”; Garang-Deafmullah's primal fear of these organs gave him no rest until the day he looked at his own adult yet still uncircumcised son – he hadn't dared abandon the boy to the knife of his rival Chilchil, but the thought of cutting into his own flesh and blood was still more frightening – and happened to recall a precept of his late teacher Zokhor Alam (Allah's blessing upon him!): “When Allah sends retribution, one must hurry to Him with a sacrifice.”

And so he decided to follow the example of Abraham (May Allah grant peace to him and all his descendants!) and sacrifice his own son.

Yes, Garang-Deafmullah recommended his son to Umarali-Moneybags, who recommended him to Oktam-Humble-Russky, who recommended him to First Secretary Akmal-Ikrom,
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who recommended him for work in the security organs.

For eighteen months Garang-Deafmullah's son participated as a “witness” in night searches. For two years he escorted prisoners in Black Marias. And at the end of his fourth year, when even most of the NKVD officers themselves were in prisons or camps, a shortage of reliable cadres led to his sudden elevation to the position of Gilas's senior NKVD investigator.

Garang-Deafmullah quietly went on carrying out circumcisions. He even got his son to have Chilchil – whose members, after being bandaged with a dressing of mouldy maize flour, had started healing in only a week – sentenced to several years' exile in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

But the War began and a secret directive was issued to the security organs with regard to “sabotage of members during military operations launched by the victorious Red Army against the German-Fascist invader.” And so the son, intensifying his activist zeal in order to escape being sent to the Front, conducted a house interrogation – in the presence of his mother and little sister – of his own father. He gathered evidence from around the house – the split reed into which foreskins were inserted, a cut-throat razor, a strap for sharpening this razor, cotton wool, matches and even five dried rings of skin which he discovered among his mother's dried tomatoes and which he identified as “cuttings from the penises of males between the ages of seven and ten.” All this ended with the son sentencing the father to house arrest and then retiring to his room to write up his records.

Disgraced in front of his women by this drop of his own sperm that was now standing forth as an open adversary,
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Garang-Deafmullah took the dried rings of skin, said a prayer over them before burying them in the yard, and crept silently into the office of the Senior Investigator for Gilas and its environs.

Yes, like Abraham, Garang-Deafmullah had resolved to kill his own son.

His son was sleeping, over the third line of his account of the interrogation.

What happened next is uncertain – although it is rumoured that Garang's daughter Robiya-Baker once talked to Banat-Pielady, who passed on her words in secret to Zumurad, Fatkhulla-Frontline's beautiful but barren daughter, who in turn spoke to Uchmah-Prophecies. What Uchmah recounted is that Garang-Deafmullah silently removed a TT revolver from his son's trousers. Bending down over the sleeping investigator, he numbly mumbled a prayer. The investigator heard nothing. Garang-Deafmullah twice kissed the terrible instrument of Providence and held it to his son's temples, first one side and then the other. One of his own tears then happened to fall onto the revolver. Using both hands, Garang-Deafmullah pulled on the stiff trigger; nothing happened. Then Garang-Deafmullah called up all his strength, which somehow made him stand up on tiptoe. The trigger yielded. There was a terrible report and Garang-Deafmullah fell to the ground, as if dead.

What had happened was improbable: as the father bent over his son and pressed on the trigger, the teardrop had made his fingers slip and he had lost his aim. And so Garang-Deafmullah shot off the tip of his own manly pride and joy, together with the nail phalanx of his right big toe. Startled by the sudden report, the son jumped to his feet and, seeing blood pouring over his father's trousers and slippers, had been about to send him to hospital when he realised that this was out of the question: his father had carried out the purest act of sabotage against a fully developed male member. The son then resorted to the sacred method employed by his father for many a year; he took from the table the cotton wool and box of matches he had just gathered as evidence, singed the cotton wool and wrapped it round the bleeding source of his own life.

The father was back on his feet only towards the end of the fourth week; his age, and the loss of his right big toe, slowed the process of healing. He then went deaf in his other ear, so as not to hear the gossip.

Witty anecdotes, embellished versions of stories told by certain women with one-track minds, duly found their way to the ears that are always listening. For “concealment of the sabotage of members on a significant scale, considering the age and social standing of Garang-Deafmullah,” his son was dismissed from the security organs and sent straight to a penal battalion on the front line, from which he returned at the end of the war as a Hero of the Soviet Union. He was immediately accepted by the Pedagogical Institute, which even waived the requirement that he sit the entrance exam, and he soon became history teacher to the senior classes of the Gilas school.

During the mid-1950s, when the illegally repressed were being belatedly rehabilitated, Garang-Deafmullah's now middle-aged but still uncircumcised son sent a petition to a Party Congress, begging to be pardoned before the Court of History in view of his heroism both as a citizen and as a soldier. Six months later the Congress replied that he had been reinstated in the ranks of the NKVD as a retired sub-lieutenant, and at the next school parade he was elected Honorary Chekist, in the place of poor Kuchkar-Cheka, who was drinking himself to death.

Garang-Deafmullah had given up carrying out circumcisions in the face of competition from Chilchil, who had also been rehabilitated, but he had begun practising other religious rites. And when he heard that Muslims were now being allowed to perform the Hadj, he went to the Kok-Terek Bazaar and sold a yearling bullock along with its mother, intending to use the money to travel to Mecca and so redeem a life spent in vain.

A month later, as was the custom, he was summoned to the now more decorously behaved security organs for a prophylactic conversation. Gogolushko, who at the time was still Second Secretary of the Party Committee and whose daughter Garang-Deafmullah had once publicly denounced as a prostitute, had inquired in the politest of tones: “Tell us now, what if the mullahs of Mecca and Medina were to ask you, Garang-Deafmullah, to stay with them and pray for them too in their holy places? Would you agree to stay with them?” Dear Garang-Deafmullah, his simple soul sensing not a trap but a confident faith in his own orthodoxy, replied without a moment's hesitation, “Inshallah!” At the end of this conversation, the representatives of the Party and the security organs took it in turns to shake hands with him and asked him to go back home and wait. And so Garang-Deafmullah began to wait.

His documents were now far away, floating about in higher realms. And while he waited, every one of his contemporaries passed away. People prayed to Allah for Garang-Deafmullah to live a long life – otherwise there would be no one left to sing prayers over the dying. But not a word was said about his application. The cemetery had by then grown so full that the dead were being buried on the periphery of the “Fruits of Lenin's Path” collective farm. As a result of this interminable waiting, Garang-Deafmullah at last made peace with his ageing son. But at a banquet of the teachers' collective the Party organiser let slip something about “the impossibility of allowing the potential defector Deafmullah-Garang Mir-Gaidar Afat-Ullaev to travel beyond the borders of our Motherland and the urgent need for an intensification of politico-educational work among the collective of the cattle-trading section of the Kok-Terek Bazaar, which has allowed...”

That evening the son tried to explain everything to the father in the presence of both his mother and his younger sister. The details of this conversation are unknown – unknown even to Banat-Pielady, Zumurad-Barrenwomb, Guloyim-Pedlar and even to Uchmah herself. But that night, bereft of his dream of Mecca and Medina, Garang-Deafmullah died of a broken heart. The following morning his son took him to the Kok-Terek Cemetery, not far from the Cattle Bazaar.

Thus the organs took their revenge on Garang-Deafmullah.

When the War began, no one was happier than the barefoot and bareheaded Tadji-Murad, the son of the half-blind Boikush. He ran up and down Papanin Street, shouting so loudly that the whole street could hear, “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Now they'll be showing new films! Even better than
The Mannerheim Line
!
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Gilas Party Committee Second Secretary Gogolushko once heard a voice. In the middle of the night this voice said, “Shit, Nikolay – we'll clean everything up ourselves!” – and Gogolushko for the first time in his life, with no sense of tightness in his guts and without holding anything back, expelled everything that had accumulated inside him. In the morning Gogolushko was woken by his wife, who had a sharp sense of smell, and he discovered with horror that, only two hours before a meeting of the Party Committee, he was smeared from head to foot with his own excrement. Nevertheless, what he felt in his heart was joy – and he threw back the quilted blanket. His wife fell silent and then burst into lamentations, as if he had passed away, and then, as if he really had passed away, began spraying the bed with eau de Cologne – again and again, a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time. And Gogolushko, lying in the middle of the foul-smelling bed, remained immersed in what lay far beyond the understanding of his poor fool of a wife.

Only one thing troubled Gogolushko: the fact that They had not cleaned up as They promised. Still, only the weak in spirit measure their lives by such trifles – trifles that can be put right by any cleaner or washerwoman like Auntie Lina the Greek Communist – and from that day, or rather from that night, Gogolushko was a man with a calling.

For two years, exploiting his authority as Second Secretary, he went into the local bakery every night; at first, he simply smeared his bureaucratic hands with the dough of honest labour, but then a mixture of idleness and some obscure urge led him to start moulding all kinds of little devils. After a while, the Deputy Secretary of the Party Cell at the Bakery appointed himself Gogolushko's production technician and started baking these devils in the oven. Gradually a whole workshop came into being and Zukhur's grocery store began to sell Gogolushko's handcrafted little witches and devils. Misshapen and swollen but well-baked, these were at first bought only by Djibladjibon-Bonu-Wagtail, who fed them to her hens, but as soon as people realised that these evil spirits were baked from first-grade flour, a quarter of the cattle-owners of Gilas turned their backs on Nabi-Onearm, who had until then supplied them with stolen cotton and sesame seeds, and began instead to make use of the artistic productions of the Second Secretary. Around the same time, two solo exhibitions of the work of this self-taught primitivist sculptor were opened with considerable pomp and ceremony: at the Gilas Party Propaganda Institute and – thanks to the patronage of an influential friend of Gilas, Academician Pyotr Mikhailovich Sholokh-Mayev – in some other town in the region.

When, however – as an example of an approved Party initiative – the whole devilish enterprise was automated, Gogolushko fell into the grip of
toskà
. Once and for all, he took to the bottle. This marked the beginning of his second life. He had always drunk deep, but the burden of being chosen made him drink deeper still. No fewer than thirteen times he was attacked by the heeby-jeebies: his own baked devils came to visit him, dancing round him like giant figures out of Matisse and asking why he had thrust them into that burning hell of a bakery oven. It was then, in despair, that he began to look with contempt at run-of-the-mill drunkards who ate while they drank – and above all at that half-baked, half-drunk, half-witted, half-educated fool by the name of Mefody. Gogolushko's wife deserted him, as did his comrade Master-Railwayman Belkov, his faith in Communism destroyed by Gogolushko's embittered decline. The Party, however, did not desert him.

First Party Secretary Buri-Bigwolf was not, as it happened, in the least put out by Gogolushko's drinking bouts. On the contrary, he made the most of the freedom they allowed him; Buri's friends and relatives, and even the friends and relatives of his friends and relatives, soon began to reap the benefits of Party membership. Gloom-dogged Gogolushko was dragged along once a week to Committee Meetings, during which he would silently raise a hand or hiccup his agreement. Buri-Bigwolf supplied him with a weekly special delivery of food, and Marleon – a former Party official at the Gilas Bakery who had been enabled by Oppok-Lovely to change his name from Marlen to Marleon
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and who now had his eye on the post of Third Party Secretary – succeeded in arranging for Gogolushko to be registered as an in-patient at the clinic set up by Janna-Nurse in connection with a new Party initiative to test the resilience of the human organism with regard to certain toxic liquids.

The evening after being told this at the Committee Meeting following his thirteenth encounter with the heeby-jeebies, as he lay on his hospital bed after downing a bottle of ethanol and despairingly nibbling a chunk of plaster off someone's leg, Gogolushko heard the same voice as before say, “Nikolay, the Word!” This sounded like a command to read, but the only reading material Gogolushko could find was some indecipherable text whose letters blurred together with those of the
Instructions in Case of Fire
on the non-flammable metal cupboard.

Gogolushko got up early, while it was still dark, and tried to respond to this call, but he had no idea what he should read. There had been such power, however, in the call's unadorned simplicity that he decided he must read whatever he could get his hands on: from the slogans of Kara-Musayev to the chants of blind Hoomer and from Osman-Anon's
Soviet Sport
to the gibberish of Mefody-Jurisprudence. And he began to buy, or rather requisition, everything from
Fundamentals of Explosive Making
to Shabistari's
Rosary of the Mysteries
.
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But it was, in the end, mysticism that got the upper hand. Gogolushko not only gave up drinking but also began exchanging worldly goods for words of wisdom: four volumes of Simenon from the Party Committee Bookstall for
Gems of Masonic Philosophy
, or three still serviceable Party Committee leather chairs for Yusuf-Cobbler's family heirloom – a book in Aramaic about the Kaballah. Basit-OrgCom brought him Olloyar the Sufi
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in place of the Party dues that his friend Faiz-Ulla-FAS had so far failed to pay; Huvron-Barber brought him the poetry of Rumi in exchange for ensuring that his wife-murdering son ended up in a labour camp not far from Gilas, to work there as a barber.

Alas, alas, alas, Gogolushko proved unable to read anything of what he had struggled so doggedly to obtain. The books merely accumulated on his shelves like so many dead souls, his sense of mission grew only stronger for being so entirely unfulfilled – and then, one night, overwhelmed by a profound gloom not befitting a member of the Party, Nikolay Gogolushko began to write.

He read the first ten books of his Writings into the Unknown to Basit-OrgCom, who, in his devotion to the Party, not only listened to every word of this balderdash during an official inspection tour of Party cells in the villages but even remarked, “Yes, very interesting!” Basit's praise may have been sincere, but Gogolushko's writings soon ceased to hold the interest of Gogolushko himself – new and deeper mysteries were already knocking at the door of his mind. Once, after extending an invitation via Kara-Musayev the Younger to Zangi-Bobo the great collector of words, he rashly showed the latter some of his manuscripts, including some unbound pages about the soul's journey through the world in search of the Spring of Life. In the halting Russian that was at that time spoken by over a hundred million people, Zangi-Bobo read these pages out loud. And that night Gogolushko at last understood the true nature of his calling.

Read, Reader! Read about how Nikolay Gogolushko traced the Triangle of the Universe on the Party Committee globe and removed from the secret safe of Osman-Anon – after the latter's mysterious disappearance – the holy Almagest stone that controlled the world. “Look,” Gogolushko would say to Basit, “this stone is the centre of the world's gravitational field. Turn the stone round and you will feel it become ten times lighter than it is now!” Basit would obediently rotate this stone that Osman-Anon had once used to knock nails back into his boots or to wedge the door shut on a draughty evening, but he felt nothing – although he always responded to unfamiliar instructions with a nod of agreement. The excited Gogolushko would suggest he take the stone in the other hand. Basit would do as he was told and again feel nothing, although he would agree once again that the gravitation exerted by the asymmetrical cobblestone was now nonlinear and multidimensional.

Alas, although Gogolushko exhausted the simple-souled Basit, who imagined everything in the world to be a manifestation of the cunning subtlety of the Party line, and although Gogolushko made Basit shave off all his hair and accompany him at the Party Committee's expense on a mission if not to Tibet then at least to the Pamirs, to the Yagnobi people on the Roof of the World, he failed to find the Spring of Life – if only because the Party turned against him and ceased to subsidise the now unbridled aspirations of his soul. Yes, Oppok-Lovely expelled him from the Party after he attempted – exploiting his authority as Second Secretary rather than the powers of the Almagest or of the talisman presented to him in the Pamirs – to appropriate for himself the wide-ranging manuscripts of Hoomer on the grounds that they were ideologically dangerous; in fact, of course, he saw Hoomer's words as anti-Gogolushkinist heresy.

This was the time of the correspondence, still famous in Gilas, between Gogolushko and the Party. The closely argued replies of the latter were written by Mefody-Jurisprudence, whom Oppok-Lovely had bribed with an offer of full board and lodging. As for Gogolushko, he penned repentant letters renouncing all he had done during his hours as Secretary of the Party Committee and all he had accumulated as a result of these hours – and calling upon his comrades to follow his example. This apostasy was more than the Gilas Party Committee could pardon; not content with Mefody-Jurisprudence's crushing philippics about Gogolushko's betrayal of the Party's noble ideals, the Committee requested that a meeting of the Party Committee of an important junction station up the line should also be devoted to the case of this turncoat from Communism. And so the expropriator was expropriated and Hoomer's manuscripts ended up safe in the hands of Oppok-Lovely.

Oppok-Lovely showed no mercy. It was decreed at the same meeting that, in view of his failure to supervise his subordinate, Buri-Bigwolf should be dismissed from his post and transferred to the medical clinic to assume responsibility for lice and fleas – since this was the only work that such a “parasite,” as Oppok-Lovely put it, might understand. Buri was replaced as First Secretary by Basit-OrgCom – the same Basit who had for so long played the role of Gogolushko's loyal proselyte and disciple.

“Every Christ has his Judas!” Gogolushko muttered to himself on his way back from the Junction Station Party Committee to the Junction Station itself. Life was no more than excrement – excrement smeared over the body of life. That was how everything had begun, and that was how it was all ending. Gogolushko was not, however, remembering the call he had long ago heard in his sleep – no, it was just that all the space between the rails was smeared with excrement from passing trains. As was his life. At this point something elusive flashed through his consciousness – as if an electrical contact had sparked and at once been broken. He looked in his briefcase for his pen and notepad. But then his thoughts were thrown into confusion by the 16:48 local, which suddenly appeared from behind him. Gogolushko rushed towards the platform, clutching his half-open briefcase in both hands. Just as he reached the rear of the train, there was a whistle, and he had barely managed to thrust his briefcase into the diminishing space between the automatic doors of the Riga-manufactured coach when the train began to move. Gogolushko skipped after it, trying to squeeze through the door or – failing that – to recover his half-open briefcase. The accursed Latvians, however, had done a good job, and the door was unyielding. Gogolushko reached the end of the platform; he could shout and run no further. There was another whistle – and his briefcase was gone.

“That's All!” said the same voice as before, and he felt overcome by the extraordinary fullness of this “All” – an All in which the whole of Nikolay Gogolushko, so tiny in comparison, was subsumed. For a long time he stood at the end of the platform, staring blankly at the receding local train and the rails left trailing behind it…

No, he didn't lose his mind – he had done that long ago – nor did he throw himself under the next train. Far more prosaically, he boarded the next train and travelled on it to the next station. And from there he went by the following train to the following station. And so to Gilas, which he reached only long after midnight. His briefcase had not been handed in anywhere.

After sleeping on the station bench to the sound of Akmolin's hoots and Tadji-Murad's squeals until the arrival of the dawn express from Moscow, he set off back up the line on foot, like one of the
illuminati
. On Gogolushko went, from sleeper to sleeper, gazing glumly at every bit of garbage, every bit of soaked and wind-dried paper; every now and then, or maybe less often still – every half-kilometre, or maybe only every kilometre – he would pick something up and, standing there on the bed of the iron road, read slowly through it. Where was he going, Nikolay Gogolushko the dervish? In search of his briefcase, in search of his bag, of his beggar's pouch.