The Railway (21 page)

The Shash Maqam resembles ruby wine,
But what is wine if not the Shash-Maqam?
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Overwhelmed by such beauty of feeling, the Patriarch would moan, put a hand to his heart and take down a
doutar
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hanging from a nail on the wall. He would start to play; the music he played was as thick and dense as a hangover, and now it was Habib-Ulla who would moan, “Look, look – here comes Tamburlaine's magnificent cavalry! Their gowns and their horse-cloths are gold brocade. And here comes the cupbearer, the pourer of wine, the raiser of spirits! O cupbearer, pour wine for us!” Habib-Ulla would start to rave and hallucinate. His spirit, stinking of the night's vodka, would spread its wings until it took up the entire room. “Cupbearer, bring wine!” he would repeat, almost sobbing. The obedient old Patriarch would put down his
doutar
and bring in a bottle he had put aside in case Tamburlaine and his horsemen should appear – and, with their eyes half closed in the dawn light, the two friends would silently do justice to this bottle, in order for the Patriarch to pick up the
doutar
a second time, while Habib-Ulla, like a whirling dervish, let himself be carried away into a slow, dizzyingly blissful dance.

“No one but you, no one but you can understand this music,” the Patriarch would say afterwards, weeping over Habib-Ulla while the latter snored in ecstasy.

Before long the half-Jewish orchestra had drunk their All-Uzbek Patriarch into the grave, leaving the orphaned Habib-Ulla to knock back plain vodka without musical accompaniment. But we have again allowed ourselves to be carried away.

What I wanted to say was that Sevinch felt more deeply orphaned than even Habib-Ulla, the orphaned poet of the Old City. Sevinch had lost not only his music, not only his career, not only what was left of his orchestra – he had lost his memory. And he did not drink; he did not know the saving grace of vodka. He forgot everything. He forgot when he was meant to be at the music school and he forgot how to find his way there alone; every day either some student, in exchange for Sevinch's signature in his course book, would have to accompany him to the outer fence of the school grounds and hand him over there to the care of his secretary – or else Musayev-Slogans, who had lost not his memory but his mind (not to mention the first part of his name), would lead him through dusty and sloganless sidestreets until Sevinch's secretary tracked them down at a crossroads.

It was at this time that Sevinch – who no longer even knew his own name and whom others knew simply as Moses or Musa – became an artist. No longer burdened by memory, he saw everything as if for the first time. And since the language he had mastered in his orphanage, the mother-tongue he had acquired with no mother to help him, was already drifting into oblivion (the curses he had got his tongue round only later in life – those monstrous, magnificent, multi-layered and multi-storied variations on pricks and cunts and mother-fucking curs that he had learned in Fuisk or Kuisk or Fukuisk – had long ago vanished into thin air) Musa was left with only a mute longing, a sense of grey
toskà
that he tried to brighten with cheap watercolours. Little by little he painted over all the writing paper and all the music paper in the music school; after that he began practising murals in the teachers' toilet. Next it was frescoes on the ceiling of the small room he had been allocated for the period of his exile by the good-hearted Oppok-Lovely – who, as a result of her failure to get any passport data out of the music school's nameless director, was able to issue a brand-new passport to yet another would-be émigré. Everyone was following in her husband's footsteps and leaving Gilas for foreign parts. Everything in Gilas was diminishing – everything, that is, except Musa's
toskà
; like water in a fairy-tale well, this grew only deeper and deeper.

Musa's devoted secretary, after shedding silent tears in the teachers' cloakroom, proposed a motion at a meeting of the music school trade union calling for the children to be educated in the spirit of syncretism and a holistic and integral approach to art – and, since no one understood a word of this gobbledegook except that it meant something very serious indeed, the director was allowed to spend his sleepless nights painting over every wall, door, cupboard, desk and pane of glass, and even the solitary, tinkling grand piano – which, in any case was really an upright with a plywood extension tacked onto it by Kozikvay the school carpenter.

Next the secretary made representations to the summer and winter cinemas and – in return for a bottle of Ambassador Vodka and a jar of home-pickled cucumbers – Ortik-Picture-Reels not only gave Musa the free run of his walls but even allowed him to use the brushes and paint he was issued with as an official slogan-painter. This, unfortunately, led to problems: the depth of Musa's
toskà
impelled him to submerge Ortik-Picture-Reels's snow-white screens beneath wave upon wave of indelible patterns, as a result of which film after film, even a comedy like
Operation Y
, evoked from the frustrated inhabitants of Gilas only floods of tears – floods that washed away the last rotting remnants of the strips of carpet that the Party Committee had long ago “written off” in exchange for a few slogans no one except poor old Musayev-Slogans ever bothered to read.

Wanting to avoid a scandal, the music school secretary hurriedly got hold of a couple of pairs of not-quite-matching, not-quite-white sheets. Swallowing down his indignation with pieces of lightly pickled cucumbers, Ortik hung the sheets over the rainbow colours with which the music-school director had tried to paint away his
toskà
.

To his secretary's relief Musa soon came to understand the vanity of his attempts to conquer the flat world of planes – the world of walls, ceilings and asphalt surfaces – and he transferred his attention to his own body. The secretary found this easier – Musa didn't try to paint his face, since he couldn't see it, and what he painted on his wrists and hands could be taken for tattoos from the harsh years of his orphanage childhood.
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It was harder, however, in the heat of summer. Musa would stare languidly out of the window and sweat; the office would fill with different-coloured vapours; and his occasional visitors, allowed through only in cases of extreme necessity – the accountant on pay day, the supplies manager on delivery day, Soginch on days of school orchestra concerts (the secretary was hoping he might revive her boss's memory) – would emerge from this office in shock, their voices shaking as they tried to describe what they had seen there.

Soginch, however, was in shock not because of the vapours but because Sevinch had forgotten him. Sevinch remembered him neither as a friend nor as an enemy and greeted him at each concert as if they were meeting for the first time. For a while Soginch took out his irritation and bewilderment on the orchestra, threatening the lead violin with his stool or hurling his music stand at the percussionist, but after the occasion when he threw his baton at one of the flutes and his musicians responded by mounting a surprise attack on him in the dark, repeating as a diversionary tactic the words, “This'll teach you to paint on the walls, this'll teach you to make a mess of the fizzy-water stall!” – after that evening his behaviour changed. He organised orchestra trips to nearby collective farms; he arranged for those who had suffered at his hand to be awarded Lenin Certificates and for everyone else to be given Lenin Badges. He was, however, obsessed by a thought that allowed him no respite.

It was around this time that Musa came to the end of his Self-Painting Period and entered his Colour-on-Colour Period. With the salary he still received as School Director he began buying entire boxes of watercolours and using colours from one box to paint on colours from another box: blue on red, red on yellow, then purple or orange on green. This so amazed him that he not only stopped going out to work but even gave up leaving his room. And Soginch, sitting in the director's armchair when the secretary was out during her lunch break, finally grasped the utter hopelessness of his orphaned fate: were Sevinch sitting in this chair, his own existence would be endowed with at least an illusion of meaning. But as things stood… And so Soginch decided to act, to put into effect a plan he had been thinking about for a long time.

What you are about to read is a story of complex treachery – and Gilas heard about it only after Soginch had died from a wasting illness the aetiology of which Janna-Nurse had been unable to determine from any available reference book and which she suspected was a sickness of the soul. But you need to know a little more about Musa and his habits if you are to understand this story and the plot that Soginch devised.

Once a week Musa used to walk across the level crossing in order to wash himself in the bathhouse – a habit instilled in him at the orphanage and which remained with him until his dying day. There, during his Self-Painting Period, he had washed the paint off his body in a private cubicle for which he paid fifty kopeks. Since entering his Colour-on-Colour Period he had found it painfully dull to look at the colourless water and his own pale body, but even oil paints would have been easier to wash away than habits instilled in a Soviet orphanage.

Soginch was also fated by his years in the orphanage to go once a week to the bathhouse – although he went to the main room rather than to a private cubicle, since he had never been one for self-painting and no soap in the world could ever wash off his two orphanage tattoos: “I'll Never Forget Dear Mother” and a portrait of Stalin with his moustache brushing against Lenin's beard.

Relying on Musa's orphanage ways, Soginch decided to act. Having bribed his percussionist by promising to make him not only a Shock Worker of Communist Labour but also his personal assistant, he threatened the lead violin, grabbed his bow, hit the viola player on one ear with it and stuffed the viola player's handkerchief up the trombone. After Soginch had left, the percussionist did as instructed and persuaded the orchestra – composed by then, after numerous departures to Israel, of the purest riffraff from Gilas – to mount another revenge attack. It was decided that this should take place as Soginch (Soginch had intended his place to be taken by Sevinch, but the percussionist, alas, turned out to have ideas of his own) returned from the bathhouse and was crossing the deserted railway line, at a time when even Akmolin would have left his shunter on one of the sidings and be making his way, together with his current apprentice, to enjoy some home-grown tobacco and home-distilled vodka in Fyokla-Whispertongue's shop.

All that day Musa had felt a certain malaise. It was as if a bell were about to ring in his head and something special were about to happen – something along the lines of the Last Day at the orphanage, the First Day of that vast and terrible thing called Real Life. In the early afternoon, when he took up his brush and the usual two boxes of paint, he felt a deadly boredom; after dipping his brush in carmine red, he held it suspended for a moment, then put it back into the same carmine red. He cleaned his brush, dipped it in methyl-orange, then put it back into the methyl-orange. A drop fell from the brush, kept its form for a moment, then dissolved back into what it had come from. Musa washed his brush again and did the same with the ultramarine, with the cinnabar red and with a pale yellowy-brown. Now he was sweating with excitement. His penis began to swell with blood just as it had done in his small orphanage bed. Frenziedly opening box after box, he repeated the same process with one colour after another. The glass he used for washing his brush became a turbid brown. After the forty-eighth box he threw down his brush and gulped down this brown liquid that by then smelt of every one of earth's smells.

In the bathhouse he vomited, but the brown liquid he had poured down his throat had for some reason turned a poisonous green. His need to study this surprising change, and the feeling of burning in his now spent and shrunken penis, led to his leaving the bathhouse ten minutes later than usual.

It was during those ten minutes that everything happened. After arranging for the attack on Musa, Soginch was unable to resist the temptation to go and watch. Leaving the bathhouse just before the appointed time, he walked along the Salty Canal and past the little whirlpool it forms after running beneath the road close to the level crossing; he intended to continue, hidden behind a truck full of cabbages due to be unloaded the following day, to the place of execution. But the bribed percussionist proved to be the basest of traitors; after shadowing not Sevinch but Soginch, he led the orchestra in a savage assault on its own conductor – an assault spiced by such pre-rehearsed divertimentos as “This'll teach you to threaten the violin!” and “And that's for gagging the trombone!”

Ten minutes later, there on the railway embankment, Moisey or Musa Sevinch tripped over Soginch, who was lying there half dead. He recovered his balance, then bent down over Soginch and passed a clean hand over his bloody face. Soginch opened his eyes and, seeing Sevinch's face above him, sank his teeth into Sevinch's hands. Sevinch let out a howl, which blended with the howl of a diesel engine coming towards them out of the darkness. In the light of its headlamps, Sevinch saw how the blood spurting from the stump of his bitten-off finger was blending with Soginch's blood both on Soginch's face and on his own hands – and he understood the meaning of everything. The sight of blood dissolving into blood made him stagger backwards as he let out a cry that was swallowed up by the howl of the advancing locomotive.

The first Gilas knew of all this was the following morning. A clot of blood was found on the level crossing; a crow was trying with its sharp crooked claws to bury this blood.
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