The Railway (16 page)

That very evening, in the goose-fleshed darkness beside the Salty Canal, where the rushes were now yellowing and withering, Janna-Nurse introduced Nasim to Natka. And on the following Saturday, Natka and Nasim set off in search of the home of Bahri-Granny-Fortunes.

This was in the
lyuli
quarter, where a hundred hidden gates and low passages led from one yard to another, where the houses abutted the neighbours' barns, and the barns rubbed up against every kind of animal-shed, hut and privy. No one could find their way through this labyrinth except the
lyuli
children or
lyulchata
– black dirty little brats who bombarded the young couple with questions: where had they come from and who were they looking for and couldn't they spare a kopek or a rouble as a keepsake? Fortunately, Natka-Pothecary had brought some dried haematogen with her;
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she broke off little cubes with her teeth and handed them out as if they were squares of chocolate.

Nasim and Natka lost all sense of direction, but the children led them through one narrow passage after another until they emerged into the yard of Bahri-Granny-Fortunes; there the children entrusted them to the care of some woman from Siberia, either a Chuvash or a Mari,
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who had fetched up there twenty or thirty years before and who had remained ever since, unable to remember the way back to her home. This poor Chuvash or Mari, who over the years had lost her name, her address, the use of her tongue and everything else that goes to make up an individual, spent her days cooking soup and her nights sorting and washing the bottles collected during the day by Ibodullo-Mahsum. Not once during these twenty, or perhaps thirty, years had anyone asked her why she was there; suddenly seeing people from “the mainland,” she had no idea what they might want from her. The children tugged at her long plaits – which fell right down to her ankles, hanging between the knotty varicose veins of her legs just like the thing Janna-Nurse talked about every morning to Natka – and ran off to find the old fortune-teller.

Bahri-Granny-Fortunes was selling sunflower seeds and lollipops at the bus station. The children lured her back with the promise of dried haematogen, and she popped a piece into her mouth the moment Nasim and Natka offered it to her. She found it too soft and sticky; in return, she offered Nasim and Natka some of her own
kurt
or dried yoghurt balls, and they each almost broke a tooth on it.

“Shall I spell you your fortune, child? Shall I tell you your enemy, child? Show me a coin, child, show me a coin that shines – and my mirror will speak its mind,” she said again and again, until the meaning of the words became as much of a mystery as what it was that Bahri-Granny-Fortunes intended to do when these waves of words had receded. The words rolled from her tongue onto her cracked little mirror and, finding no resting place on its empty surface, were at once succeeded by others. The old woman didn't even ask Natka why she had come, and the questions Natka and Janna had prepared in advance were swept away by a torrent that seemed unstoppable – except that now and again there would be an ominous pause after such words as: “You have an enemy, child, and he is not kind. Show me a coin, child, show me a coin that shines – and my mirror will speak its mind.” Natka had only a half-understanding – from her electrician father – of the Uzbek tongue, but she sensed at such moments that she was expected to go back into her handbag, which was now filling up with empty words as quickly as it was being emptied of coins.

When the mirror had done all that was required of it, Bahri-Granny-Fortunes moved on to grains of Khrushchev's Queen of the Fields.
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She scattered the grains on the floor, sketching out the five-year plans of Natka's destiny according to the system approved at the last Plenum of the Central Committee.

After the maize it was the turn of the cotton thread, and by then it was Nasim who was paying.

“Give me your hand, child. Your little finger, circled with thread, is the willy of a man your heart should dread. May my spinning thread bring you balm, may my circling thread chase away all harm!” And Bahri-Granny-Fortunes tied her thread round Natka's plump little finger, which was adorned only by a cheap ring that a neighbour had given her in return for some ichthyol ointment for a boil on his bottom; Natka had not only managed to obtain this vile-smelling paste for her childhood friend but had even smeared it onto his dark arse. As the old woman did away with the willy of Natka's enemy, she also charmed away the ring that encircled it. Then she moved on to Natka's body, looking for spiritual anxiety and weariness of heart somewhere in the area of her necklace.

Overwhelming Natka with yet more words, she swept away her jumper; the girl was wearing nothing beneath it except her mother's bra, already splitting from the pressure of her young breasts. In the swirl of words, Natka forgot both shame and Nasim. She was already pulling her flared skirt over her head when something happened that took away Bahri-Granny-Fortune's power of speech for years to come, leaving her unable to do anything except sell seeds or tell mute fortunes to the Russians, simply by nodding or shaking her head. A crack of thunder from a pair of dacron trousers – made with a double lining by Izaly-Jew, who had been brought to the tailoring cooperative by Moisey-Master – revealed a male member that at once made Khaira the Chuvash remember that she had been born in Sterlitamak on the Street of the Just Sabre of Salavat Yulayev
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on the fourth Wednesday of the Month of Nisan of the Year of the Bull (old-style calendar).
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When Ibodullo-Mahsum came home in the evening on a clanking cart full of empty bottles; when he found his mother lying there half-conscious; when the
lyulchata
told him how three people, two of them naked and the third veiled by her long hair, had torn through the neighbourhood, sweeping away gates, awnings, shutters and walls with some kind of battering ram (clearing the path for what would later become the branch line to Toitepa) and finally disappearing into the rushes beside the Salty Canal – when Ibodullo-Mahsum came home, all he could do was to pick up the dacron trousers – made with a double lining by Izaly-Jew, who had been brought to the tailoring co-operative by Moisey-Master – and add them to his heap of rags. They had, in any case, come his way for free.

Khaira Gavrilovna Huzangay – born in the Year of the Bull (old-style calendar), a native of the town of Sterlitamak, whose domicile was the first building on the right after the well, on the Street of the Just Sabre of Salavat Yulayev – was invited by Natka-Pothecary and Nasim-the-Handsome, known to some as Shlagbaum-Shokolad, to witness their wedding; they had fled with her to her birthplace in order to escape from the unjust axe of Tolib-Butcher, whose embitterment with life was now absolute, from the inadvertent and fruitless touches of Janna-Nurse and from the now wrecked and unrecognisable labyrinths of the Gilas
lyuli
.

And every night since then Natka-Pothecary has cursed and yelled in far-off Sterlitamak – on her own behalf and on Janna's – as loudly as if she were giving birth to a child head last or feet first.

Some years after Fate took him to Brighton Beach and left him with no alternative but to study the Jewish-Odessan dialect of the mighty Russian language, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was sitting in a dirty bar beside the ocean, listening to the shouts and curses of the other drinkers as they argued about who had informed on whom for the KGB, when he saw an aristocratic-looking young Moroccan in the company of a young woman who might have been from Thailand or the Philippines. When the Moroccan disappeared for a moment – no doubt to perform his ablutions – Mullah addressed the girl, taking a long shot, in Laotian. When the girl muttered under her breath, in the purest Uzbek, “Bloody green-eyes, one foot in the grave but he still thinks he's a charmer!,” he fell off his high stool and quite forgot the words of Thai that had been on the tip of his tongue. But when Mullah picked himself up off the floor and groaned in an equally pure Uzbek – “Ay, ay, my poor bones! Ay, ay, my poor back!” – it was the girl's turn to fall off her stool. The noble Moroccan, however, had by then completed his ablutions, and he returned just in time to catch her.

In the course of the next few hours Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes learned that the young man, Vamek ben Hasan, was from the Moroccan royal family and that his betrothed was the daughter of an electrician by the name of Said Alihon-Tura, who had been born in the Fergana Valley, in the village of Mookat, and who had escaped from the heathen Bolsheviks by crossing the mountains.

Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had heard of this family. In exile in Chita he had met a son of some Mullah Obid-Kori who came from this same Mookat and who must have been related to Said Alihon-Tura, and in a transit prison in Solikamsk he had spoken to Said Alihon-Tura's brother, who had briefly been a Soviet millionaire.

Learning from Mullah-Ulmas about her numerous relatives, the poor girl – who had always thought she had no family at all except for an electrician father and a cleaner mother – was filled with a burning desire to go to Mookat. For his part, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes (whose eminent friend and colleague Pete Shelley May – yes, our old friend Pinkhas Shalomay – was a big fish in some human rights organisation or other) offered to obtain them free tourist visas as long as they promised to travel to a small town called Gilas and visit his wife Oppok-Oyim – whom the reader knows as Oppok-Lovely – and take her some important papers he had acquired during his wanderings. And the young couple also, of course, agreed to take letters and invitations to the countless relatives of Pete Shelley May.

Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes managed to obtain for the young couple not only a tourist visa for the region (something almost unheard-of at that time) but also a map showing how to get by train from Gilas to Gorchakov – the nearest station to Mookat. And so the young couple set off on their trans-oceanic – and trans-oxianic – travels.

They were met at the airport by Oppok-Lovely and the Gilas KGB. KGB Sub-Lieutenant Osman-Anon, however, was so dependent on Oppok-Lovely (who, among other things, changed his passport for him once a month to preserve his anonymity) that everyone took him for her bodyguard, while she just introduced him with a wave of the hand and the words, “And this is, er, what's his name…” Once, of course, Osman-Anon had had a surname all of his own, but he had never had much of a family – only an officer father who went missing during the War and a singer mother who was always on tour and who died young, leaving him to be brought up by some second-cousin-once-removed who insisted he call her by the unfamiliar name of “Mummy.” So it will not be surprising – certainly not to anyone who has given any thought to the psychological consequences of orphanhood – that Osman-Anon ended up fighting on the invisible battlefields of the secret Front.

Osman-Anon felt nervous before his meeting with these capitalist-imperialist agents who had come to spy on his Motherland. The night before their arrival he single-handedly drew up, approved and countersigned a forty-seven-page operational plan, codenamed “The rooks have arrived.”
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This included every conceivable measure – ambushes, listening devices, incriminating encounters with the alcoholic Kun-Okhun and Vera-Virgo the prostitute – and it ended with the enemy agents being caught red-handed and then exchanged, on the Kok-Terek Bridge, for the Soviet spy Mullah-Ulmas – and with early promotion for Sub-Lieutenant Osman-Anon.

But let us, at least for the time being, leave Osman-Anon listening, watching and taking notes as he stands at his eternal post on the front line of a secret war – and let us enter the home of Oppok-Lovely, who has laid on a splendid feast to celebrate the arrival of these foreigners bearing news of her errant husband: Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, Gilas's First Dissident and Betrayer of the Motherland. Young Pioneers, who have removed their red ties so as not to inflame ideological passions, are serving cups of tea to the guests as they arrive; Nabi-Onearm and Tadji-Murad, on the other hand, have put on ties for the first time in their lives – at Oppok-Lovely's request – and are ushering the guests to their seats. The number of these guests is growing by the minute.

Oppok-Lovely, like a true Uzbek hostess, is directing proceedings from behind a screen. Cognac is to be taken to Temir-Iul-Longline; vodka (in a teapot) to Tolib-Butcher (even though the swine doesn't deserve so much as a cupful); cheap “Chashma” Portwein to Kun-Okhun (who'll soon be under the table anyway); tea with sugar to Akmolin (it would be all the same to him if she gave him diesel fuel but he is, after all, her guest).

And in all the hustle and bustle the honoured guests from over the waves got somehow forgotten. After they had sat for some time in a special room set aside for them, Muzayana suggested to Vamek ben Hasan that they go out into the courtyard to see what was going on out there. As they watched Olma the dancer from Khorezm languidly circling her hips and convulsively shaking her shoulders, Tadji-Murad – or it might have been Nabi-Onearm – barged drunkenly into them and began swearing at Vamek ben Hasan, “Don't just stand there like some great dick! Take some cups of tea round to the other fucking guests!” The noble Moroccan did not understand a single word, but Muzayana took her fiancé by the hand and led him into the shadows beneath a tree.

And as Kabir Mavsumov, the finest public reciter in the whole republic, was reading out the letter Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes had composed for his wife (“The sun of my devotion shines as brightly as ever in the sky of my love…”) – although it has to be said that Kabir Mavsumov was illiterate and so was able to declaim each ringing phrase only after Garang-Deafmullah had first muttered it to him under his breath; yes, as Kabir Mavsumov was declaiming this letter and as Muzayana and her fiancé were moving into the shadows beneath the tree, Kun-Okhun wandered out into these same shadows to have a piss. Having been lying under the table, he had been unable to admire Olma the languid dancer; glimpsing Muzayana and mistaking her for Olma, he staggered up to her and thrust some money – a ten-rouble note he had only with difficulty managed to hide from his wife Djibladjibon-Bonu-Wagtail – into the sleeve of her dress. Vamek ben Hasan's response to this was a punch on the jaw that knocked his fellow-Muslim to the ground, where he went straight to sleep. Osman-Anon, however, was not sleeping; a KGB agent – as everyone knows – never sleeps. “Quick! Enemy attack!” he yelled. And Muzayana, who must have inherited something of her parents' instinct for evading trouble, seized her Moroccan by the hand and made off with him into the night. Osman-Anon followed.

All roads in Gilas lead to the railway station, and that was where the young couple ended up. Osman-Anon did everything as he had been taught at KGB school, sprinting past the wool factory (where the nightwatchmen, resentful at being excluded from the feast, fired salt bullets at him)
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and reaching the ticket window just before the young couple. Wanting to avoid recognition, he had put on the spectacles he had once confiscated from Master-Railwayman Belkov for fraternising with foreigners, but Tanya-Tickets was not easily fooled. “Not foreign spies again!” she called out.

Osman-Anon scowled ferociously, his scowl somehow gathering together all his incompatible feelings: from irritation with Tanya to Love for the Socialist Motherland and his desperate need for a piss (though not, of course, until he had unmasked these spying foreigners). Auntie Tanya understood all this and asked simply, “Where do we want tickets to?”

“Stations unlimited,” the KGB agent answered impassively, as if repeating a password. Grasping that he needed a ticket for all possible destinations and time zones within the USSR, Auntie Tanya took a blank ticket, carefully wrote on it, “Believe the Bearer!” and pressed her stamp down on top of it.

“To be returned on return!” she ordered, not wanting to appear slapdash, and turned to the next of her midnight travellers.

“Where to?” she asked.

A nice young woman tried to explain something in very strange Uzbek, then pushed a map through the window and indicated that they wished to travel to Gorchakov. Tanya asked how many tickets she wanted. The nice young woman mumbled something still more incomprehensible and pushed some pieces of paper through the window.

“What's that?” asked Tanya.

“Dallars, dallars!” said the young woman.

“We don't want any of your dallars here,” said Tanya sternly. “Payment must be proffered in roubles.”

The Moroccan prince removed a royal ring from his little finger and pushed it through the window. The cramped little office became twice as bright. Two sharp rays of light pierced Tanya's narrow eyes. “I'm sorry, I haven't quite got enough change,” she said. “Just wait a moment while I nip across to the buffet and get some off Froska.” And she hurried off on her stumpy legs, the royal ring lighting her path through the darkness.

At four in the morning, accompanied by KGB agent Osman-Anon, the young couple left Gilas station on the Frunze-Djalalabad train; they were carrying two plastic bags full of Soviet roubles, and all the women who worked at the station, from Minigyul the Tatar cleaner to Chinigyul the Tatar cook, were there on the platform to wave them goodbye. And for several years all kinds of heirlooms from the family of the Moroccan prince – gold rings, silver rings, copper and bronze rings, even one ivory ring – were accepted in Gilas as a means of exchange, until the rings grew weary of circulating and, one by one, came to rest where they belonged: in the home of Oppok-Lovely, in a small casket underneath the lid of a white piano that bore the elegiac, if enigmatic, inscription:
Roenisch 1911 Hatsunay 1964
. But let us return to the young couple. It was with complex feelings that Muzayana made the journey to Mookat. Imagine a young woman who had travelled the world with her parents and then settled in Brooklyn, where everyone would always think of her as a stranger. Why, anyway, should anyone think of her at all – with a father who attended to light bulbs and a mother whose job was to remove people's garbage? And Muzayana was not without pride; any number of market-traders and shopkeepers, all of them raking in money just as they had done in the Buz Bazaar in Tashkent, had asked for her hand – and she had turned down all her suitors until the day this prince had flown to New York after seeing a family tree in Saudi Arabia which showed that he and she sprang from the same root.

And now Muzayana was on her way to where the leaves of this tree still rustled – just like the silver leaves of the great poplars guarding the entrance to the little side valley that sheltered her village, the Mookat she was about to see for the first time. But how can a mere road take you into your dreams, into your visions, into your longings? Can you enter something that does not exist? Her father had called this his home, because he had been born here, but why did her own heart stir as these mountains drew steadily nearer? Why were their blue stones, red sand and white snow not simply a landscape like any other? Why did all this enter deep inside her, making her ache with
toskà
?

Crooked clay walls, with yellow-eyed apricot trees looking over them; flowers covered in dust; dust covered in oblivion; now and again a veiled woman, or a man on a donkey-cart. What was all this after Manhattan, Brooklyn or Queens? Where had it all come from and why? There was a lump in Muzayana's throat, and Vamek's questions seemed silly, trivial, out of place.

Why, why, why had her father left this village? Why had he not let her be born here, where no iron road had penetrated, warping the earth and its people, twisting lives out of shape?

Muzayana and Vamek were put up by her father's brother, Nurmat-Tura – who turned out to have led a modest yet dignified life, making boots and bringing up his many children, all of whom had already married. As soon as news of Muzayana's arrival got around, visitors began to appear: her uncle's uncle, the nephew of her uncle's brother-in-law, the sister-in-law of her father's nephew, the wife of the sister of the father-in-law of her uncle's niece…

Muzayana soon ran out of presents, but the visitors kept on coming. Whole queues of relatives would be waiting for Muzayana and Vamek ben Hasan when they got back from a walk through land that had once belonged to her great-grandfather, Said-Kasum-Kadi, or from the high ravine where Obid-Kori had said farewell to her father and entrusted him to Kirghiz tribesmen who even now remembered that day of exodus. Muzayana began giving presents of ordinary Soviet roubles – the contents of the two bags they had brought from Gilas. Glad to discover that American money was no different from their own, the visitors were overwhelmed with curiosity: what can one buy in America for these three roubles? And what if they add the rouble Muzayana has just given to Abdusamat, or the five roubles she has given to Ruzvan-Bibi, who isn't a relative at all but who has cured Muzayana of the nausea induced either by the change of climate or the number of visitors?