The Railway (25 page)

He did not know his father. Neither his given name, nor his surname, nor his profession. Nor even whether he really was his father. And so a word that for everyone means something near and clearly defined, as perceptible as the sound of someone panting or the hairs coming out of a man's nostrils, was for him only a word. A primordial word: “Father.”

“Mother” was simpler. His mother had died as she gave birth to him and they had wrapped her in a cloth she had been weaving. Her other pieces of cloth had been given to the ritual washers and mourners; a little ladder had been stuck, according to custom, into the sand by her grave;
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and she had been forgotten.

He was brought up by Gulsum-Khalfa,
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a homeless old woman who chanted prayers over the dead. She was lame and half-blind. This had made her late for the funeral, but she had sat out the remaining forty days of mourning and had been the only adult to remain in the empty yurt. For all this she had received not even a handkerchief and so she had appropriated the newborn child, hoping he would come in handy as she grew older still. And she knew that if the worst came to the worst she would be expected to weep for him too – and so have somewhere to live free of charge for another forty days.

But the little boy clung to life. The following spring he was crawling about beneath a wilful goat that Gulsum-Khalfa had earned with her funeral tears, and at the age of five, when Aspandiar's horsemen raided the village,
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he escaped with the goat into the wilderness. He walked with the goat to the end of the world, to the place where water begins, talking to her and drinking her milk. And there he buried her after she had choked to death on too much salt; and there, on her sandy grave, weeping tears perhaps still saltier than the water his goat had drunk, he was found by Russian salt-diggers.

He dug salt with them for seven years, until they all died. When the last of their corpses had been loaded onto a boat, he slipped on board with them, leaving this deserted world and sailing over the sea towards a place whose name he did not know, although he secretly guessed that it would be the same other world that lame, blind old Gulsum-Khalfa had invoked at funerals in order to frighten people.

One night, as he lay among the corpses, which were too salty to decay, there was a crash that split the hold in two. Water rushed in; the corpses were carried in all directions, almost crushing the boy beneath them. But the boy was carried to the surface by a powerful stream of something viscous from far below, and he saw with horror that the sea, split in half by the upended boat, was on fire. “This is hell!” he thought, and a wave of fire swept over him. But it was only the surface of the sea that was burning – down below there were just flashes of lightning, through which corpses, letting out bubbles, were floating up to the surface. Keeping the corpses above his head and taking in through his scorched mouth the air that had collected beneath them, he kicked out with his legs, heading deep into the abyss…

Clinging to the scorched corpse of the man he called Old Ivan, he was washed ashore. The sea went on burning; the flames in the sky vanished, turning into stars. The boy lay in the other world and tried with his young mind to remember what his stepmother had said would happen to him because of all the sins he had committed. But nothing happened at all. The sea went on burning just the same, except that the waves were carrying its waters further and further away. And in the morning, when the soot-blackened moon melted away in a black corner of sky, the hot sea was no longer hell but a mere bonfire, attached to a fragment of some tower that had been overturned in the middle of the sea and that stuck up into the sky like an absurd little ladder, with fragments of the boat hanging down from it.

The boy did not know whether or not people buried their corpses in this other world, but he dug a pit in the black and oily sand just in case. He dragged Old Ivan, whose skin had exuded a white shroud of salt, into this dark pit, then made a crooked ladder out of bits and pieces of the boat, stuck it into this Russian's grave of black sand and recited a short prayer about the One and Only who neither begetteth nor is begotten and there is none like unto Him.

This other world was strangely empty. The boy waited a long time for someone to come for him but, since no one came, he set off along the deserted shore to where he could see dark trees in the distance. That, he thought, was probably paradise. And indeed it was.

In an empty garden, growing close together, were apricots like yellow suns, cherries like red lamps, and peaches whose cheeks were covered in tender down – as well as figs, which the boy had never eaten before. But what astonished him were the pomegranates. The boy had neither heard of them nor seen anything like them; they looked more like how Gulsum-Khalfa had once described her withered heart – but when, after turning one over in his hands, the boy ventured to take a bite, what spurted out were forty crimson bees that stung his tongue with their sweet-sour poison. “Now I really am dying!” the boy said to himself as he fell asleep. “Now I will see the souls of the dead, a sight never granted to those still living.”

The first man to come to the boy in the other world was a gardener with a moustache and with eyebrows that met in the middle; he spoke a strange and unintelligible language. He took the boy to a house where people washed him for seven days before sending him to a huge kitchen where saucepans hissed like the sea. There the boy ate and ate until his cheeks were red, after which he was taken to the chancellery, where he was taught a few words of their strange language. Then the musicians taught him how to wiggle his belly and bottom in a strange dance. Last of all, they tied his hair into a little pigtail and took him to the palace chambers. “Here I will see God!” the boy thought excitedly, and he looked round the empty bedchamber. But no one entered except a sweet-voiced man in a gown, probably an angel of God; he stroked the boy's pigtail and began questioning him in his unintelligible language.

The boy was astonished at the way half-blind Gulsum-Khalfa had deceived those who lived in the previous world, frightening them with stories of Munkar and Nakir interrogating people after death,
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one holding a hammer, and the other an anvil: “A lie – you'll lie flat as a pancake! Another lie – you'll be beaten to dust!” No, this angel of God spoke in the sweetest of voices, stroking the boy and accompanying each stroke with a tender “M-m-m-m!” Then he languidly took off the boy's clothes. As if feeling for any sins that might still remain in the boy's body, putting one moist hand against the boy's buttocks and another, rougher hand against his willy, he murmured, “A nightingale of the bed-chamber!” From the other room came slow sweet music, the music God's servants had played when they taught the boy how to dance. The angel of God threw off his gown and pressed not wings but a hairy chest against the boy's shoulder blades, whirling him away in an ever quickening dance. The boy's head was whirling too; he did not know what to do. The angel of God untied the last of the cloths round his waist and the boy, seeing what was being thrust towards him, began to whisper in terror his one and only prayer about the One and Only who neither begetteth nor is begotten and there is none like unto Him.

The music had become a one and only drum, pounding into his heart, when the door was suddenly flung open and, in a white dress, in flew – a woman. In naked shame the boy rushed to the window and, cutting his burning skin against splinters of glass, vanished into the garden...

Lying down in the deepest depths of this garden, covering his nakedness with a fig leaf that swelled with the blood from his cuts, he tossed about in delirium and wondered where people go after death in
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world. Back to his stepmother Gulsum-Khalfa?

The crowd was turning nasty, and under this mind-numbing sun the men's tall Astrakhan hats looked like huge black flies. He quickly adjourned the meeting – saying it was time for the Muslims' midday prayers – and hurried to the white tent to speak to the commander of the Cossack railway penal detachment, to warn him of possible trouble.

All through the afternoon and until late in the evening he stood there like the hoopoe and gave flat and monotonous answers to this motley rabble, but there were now thirty mounted Cossacks on guard, half-asleep astride Akhal-Teke horses that continued to prance about even beneath the merciless sun. During the night, with bloodshed seeming as inevitable as that blood-red head in the daytime sky, he was woken by the slightest rustle or movement of sand in the wind, but then everything would go quiet again and only just before dawn was the alarm raised and the Cossack detachment roused: the native railway-workers had all escaped into the desert. On the outskirts of the camp they had stuck two rails into the sand and tied three sleepers between them, to make a small ladder climbing up into the sky.

The Cossacks were sent out in pursuit in parties of twelve, to the four points of the compass and each of the four points in between – and towards noon two of the parties returned, together with thirty half-dead Yomuds.
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The rest of the Cossacks had been slaughtered in the sands; two nights later, God knows how, their sun-and-sand-blackened heads were quietly slipped into the camp. It was decided that the thirty captured fugitives should be given similar treatment, that their thirty heads should be exhibited just as heads are exhibited in the main bazaar of the city of Merv.

But his Tarot cards told him that these thirty fugitives, these thirty condemned men, must themselves lay down the track that leads to their death and that their brothers, fathers and sons would all come and work beside them – whereas their immediate execution would lead only to another cycle of deaths… Anyway, a severed head in Bairam-Ali is as good as a severed head in Merv…What mattered was that the State should grow greater and mightier.

This last argument convinced the Cossack commander. He was afraid, however, that these damned Asiatics might take it into their heads that they were building a ladder to help them run away into the distance and so he gave orders that, until they reached Bairam-Ali, they should lay down only a single rail; he knew in any case that his opposite number in Chardzhou had already taken the same decision.

For three months, under a mindless sun, the thirty condemned men dug through sands; when they reached solid ground they covered it with gravel as white as the rays of the desert sun in order to build an embankment five feet high.
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During the night the shifting sands would slip down into the half-filled trench, mix with the gravel and so reinforce the embankment's foundations. Sun, sand and wind raged together, as if in alliance, but the embankment was eventually made ready, the first link of rail was laid by the Cossacks, the first curve was laid by the Yomuds – and then, in the middle of the night, as he was thinking about his non-existent father, he heard some kind of rustling, some kind of stirring.

“Sand in the trench again,” he thought bitterly. Waking up before anyone else, he left his tent at dawn. O God! Where the rail came to an end, a second ladder was sticking up into the sky. It too was made of bits of rail with three sleepers tied between them; and a dead man, an old Yomud, had been thrown against it, feet on the bottom rung and head hanging back over the top rung. Pulling on his jacket, he walked up to the dead man. Thick blood was oozing from his throat, dripping onto his beard, down onto the sleepers and onto the sand. In a trench below the iron ladder, he saw – half-buried in bloody sand – the green-eyed youth who appeared to have sent his father up into the heavens. A hand with a knife smeared with congealed blood was sticking out, as were his legs, which seemed to be still trembling…

There was no understanding these crazed Yomuds; it looked as if they had freely chosen to die. The whole scene was like a giant playing card, as he said later to the Cossack commander: the top half a King, the bottom half a Knave. The commander ordered both father and son to be buried in the trench and the last three links of track to be taken up and re-laid so that the line would pass at a distance from these two madmen in their trench and their ladder sticking up into the desert sky.

But there is no bad without good. A dozen relatives of the dead father and son appeared out of the desert, as if they had heard the news from the wind or the sand or the blind desert sun. They were allowed to weep over the graves – and were then sentenced to continue building the railway. The three women in chadors were to cook their scanty rations as they all headed further and deeper into the desert.

Using the rail that had already been laid, one third of the prisoners used railway wheelbarrows to fetch fresh gravel and new lengths of rail while the others dug a trench in the burning sand, leaning to one side as they dug so as to make the most of shade no wider than a man's hand.

One day, after he had galloped the length of this rail – riding the Akhal-Teke colt that had been given to him, along with a revolver, on the day the new recruits had arrived; after he had quickly overtaken the wheelbarrow-pushers, who seemed to be moving as slowly across the earth as the sun through the sky; after the week's rations (a freshly killed sheep and a sack of Russian potatoes) had been taken to the quartermaster's yurt – he felt the touch of a hot hand on his sweaty elbow. As if burnt, as if stung by a carpet viper, he trembled and spun round on his heels. In front of him, half-opening her chador and whispering impassionedly, stood a seventeen-year-old beauty – one of the cooks.

“What do you want?” he asked her.

She repeated her whisper, but either because the air in the yurt was on fire or because he himself was on fire and drops of sweat had run into his ears, he heard nothing and saw only the beckoning movement of her hand as it disappeared into the flowery folds of her chador. She turned and went outside. He knew that the Cossack guards might catch sight of them any moment, but curiosity and a force stronger than caution or fear led him after her.