The Railway (3 page)

O Lord! And you created so perfect a miracle! The elder looked out of the corner of his eye towards where the boy sat bent over the Book, and once again strangely uncontrollable feelings began to run wild in his pure and polished heart. It can happen that, in the middle of intense prayer, the thought of prayer can imperceptibly take the place of prayer and only by prayer itself, only by lifting your voice into a chant and listening to its sound, can this thought be driven out; but the elder (may the Almighty forgive me!) was not granted even this release, although he appeared to have attained not just a momentary illumination – the lot of those who are still struggling – but the light that is even and uninterrupted. I repent a thousand times, O Lord, but the elder was not granted even this release... He had long ago left behind our kingdom of dreams and mirages, but now his thought, although he suspected it sprang from delusion, was quivering like a moth between the Creator and his Creation (forgive us sinners, O Lord!) and once again his pale face turned towards the boy reading the Book.

After offering three hundred prayers of repentance, the old man put aside his now warm prayer beads and absolved himself, leaving everything in the hands of Allah. “A question is the path from the end to the beginning, and doubt, too, is the journey back,” he repeated to himself. In his heart and mind he knew all this – but it made no difference. “Am I longing, in this extreme of disobedience, for childhood – am I longing again for its unbeaten track?” he thought sorrowfully. “Has my flesh risen up at its last breath, untamed and untameable?”

The boy had been brought to him seven days before by Mirza Humayun Ardasher; he was on his way to Balkh, where there had been an uprising. “Amid the sea of vanity and impenitence, you are a pillar of our inviolate faith,” Ardasher had said to the elder. “The boy has no mother and he knows the taste of bitterness – he will value every
minute of peace and obedience under your supervision. Only if he can live here in your sacred dwelling, far from the world's vice and lechery, have I the right to hope. And so may my boy hold firmly to the skirts of your gown and follow you along the straight path of righteousness.”

The elder remembered the warrior's words. Ardasher had found it difficult not to place the boy in front of him on the saddle and take him to Balkh, into dusty and sandy whirlwinds, into a world of battles and wanderings – and the elder had admired the father's act of renunciation. Amid his spirit's settled peace the elder had not resisted a contrary movement of his soul that had been barely perceptible – and now he was ceaselessly repenting before the Supreme One, who had evidently chosen to test him one more never-ending time. But He was free, free to do as He chose.

He stole one more glance at the boy reading the Book – and the boy, as if sensing the gathering weight of the elder's silent gaze, raised his eyes. His eyelashes were like a dark shadow, and this shadow lifted the boy's black clear eyes to meet the eyes of the surprised and embarrassed elder. The elder was no longer used
t
o direct looks from young eyes – his disciples always looked down as they answered him – but the boy's gaze had nothing of the disciple about it, and the elder sensed this clearly in his confused soul. Used as they were now to the even light of the Book, the boy's eyes seemed to linger – as if within them still lingered something of the Book's even and unstoppable light – and the elder's soul, his sinful soul, was tormented in the boy's presence, like a moth that doesn't know what to do with the light.

On the seventh day, when the boy had learned one thirtieth part of the Book, the elder broke with age-old rules and astonished the whole
hanaqa
3
by declaring a
chella
, a forty-day fast. What is more, he declared this fast not for the hanaqa as a whole but for the boy alone, thus exciting long and fruitless self-doubt in the hearts of his disciples and even a certain envy towards a boy judged worthy of initiation after so very short a period of preparation.

Only in the
chellakhona
did no candle burn that night. The chellakhona was given over to nature – although it was protected by a labyrinth of underground walls reflected against which the light of night endlessly mirrored its own reflections. There was no place like it, no other place where thought returns to itself and blood imbued with thought polishes the imperfect heart.

After the midnight prayer the boy, whom the Teacher was leading along the path of perfection of the spirit, tried to master the pillars of the formally simple Ikhlas Surah, about the One and Only who neither begetteth nor is begotten, and there is none like unto Him.
4
The first thousand repetitions remained on the boy's tongue, not peeling away from the flesh; then a handful of raisins sent out sweet shoots between the dry, cracked words, and the Teacher told him that they were in the wilderness where the path begins.

Candles burned behind candles; a moth that had got lost in these underground depths, perhaps having been enticed into them by the smell of raisins – a moth that seemed to value its own life, sensing perhaps that there was little other life in this many-layered and resonant emptiness, kept beating against the light reflected off the stone ceiling, and only on the ninth day did it exhaust itself, fall and burn up in the flame. And even this eternal image, which had always imbued the elder with resolve, at first evoked in him only confusion and panic. Sensing hesitation in the measured rustle of the Teacher's lips, the boy suddenly turned round – and the elder's tired eyelids shook off the dust of countless prayers.

The elder at that moment got the better of his desires; he had long known that the Path is only the Path in so far as – whether you have set out on it intentionally or by chance – you accept that you are doomed to allowing yourself to be led by the Path, even to be used by the Path. Submission to the inevitability of this truth had always brought him peace; now, however, no effort of will could eclipse his sense that the Path is not what begins with the first day of the anxiety that is left behind and yet still pierces your spine, nor is it what people consider achievement – not even the fortieth day that glimmers ahead of you
and that you anticipate as early as the nineteenth day. No, the elder now understood that the Path was the distance dividing him from the boy – two sideways steps between two kneeling figures, two short steps that must never be taken.

On the twenty-seventh day the boy was seized by a fever. Even Hafez Safautdin Sheikh, as he came silently to them that morning with warm water for their ablutions and to take away the pots with their rare excretions, now devoid of all smell – even Hafez Safautdin Sheikh noticed that the stone shelf in the wall was less cold than usual. The boy was shaking, and at first the elder thought that he had reached the Valley of Terrors that is governed by djinns; the elder was frightened, however, by a strange sense that he himself was not so much leading as being led, and so he hurried in spirit into the midst of these terrors and hallucinations, where djinns dance like tongues of fire, where every dance ends in copulation, where demons like newborn babies slip inside you and use your face as a mask, taking over your body to give free rein to their corrupt natures. With a superhuman effort of will the old man formed out of tongues of fire the single word “Allah,” like a spell, like a talisman, like salvation for both him and the boy, and when the fires died down, quivering their last unruly little tongues, the old man saw that the boy was not whispering a prayer glorifying the name of the Benevolent and Merciful One, but calling to his mother, whose name he did not even know because it was so long since she had died. Sweat was streaming off the boy, mingling below his damp turban with cloudy tears... “What makes a child's tears so cloudy?” the old man wondered in bewilderment; it was, after all, the thirtieth day, and by this time all the functions of our frail bodies usually become pure and insensible, while the body, the body itself, begins to shine with a pale light… From where, from what unreachable depths, were these cloudy drops drawn?

Lack of sleep and the demands of the fast had turned the old man's soul into a tangle of strings – yes, he could not shake off this sense that his soul was a tangle of strings that had become knotted together yet were somehow still able to sound; every movement of the boy's inner being echoed long and resonantly in this tangle, but for the first time in many years of enlightenment the elder was bewildered, unable to understand what the sounds meant.

The boy regained full consciousness only after a week.

After the midnight prayer, the old man was laying the boy down on his felt mat and, having covered him with a prayer rug, was wiping his burning face with the end of his own fine turban. Why had he not, at the first sign of weakness, sent the boy back up above? No, even before that, why had he led this young and frail soul underground? Why had he set him on this long path of loneliness and renunciation? What pride had made him lead a child along a path that belongs to Allah alone?

Face to face with these questions, the old man hid for a long time behind a shield of prayers, but not even they could revive his exhausted spirit; the never-ending prayers, which had lost all meaning, were now tearing his soul to shreds…

On the fortieth day the boy opened his eyes at dawn. The old man knew it was dawn from the gentle touch of a breeze on his back. There was a flicker of light, reflected through the labyrinth of stone walls. A faint scent of henna from the beard of the hunchbacked Abu-al-Malik, whose turn it must have been to bring them their water and the usual handful of dried raisins and ground nuts, carried into their solitude a memory of the life that goes on outside.

And the boy opened his eyes.

Every summer the chaikhana was moved outside and set up beneath the huge silver poplars that the railway had headed for when, fifty years before, it had first made its way to Gilas. It had been the same during the year the Fascists invaded; the five low wooden platforms were set up beneath the poplars. There were fewer and fewer people, however, to sit on them; the previous tea-drinkers had gone to the Front, and a new Gilas had yet to emerge from the influx of evacuees and the wounded. Really there was only Umarali-Moneybags, whose insatiable greed had led him to be pronounced fit for prison, where he had gained another three stone before the War, but had also made him so fat that he had been pronounced unfit to fight; and Tolib-Butcher, who, as if to spite Umarali, was so thin that he had been entrusted – on the grounds that he could hardly be keeping anything back for himself – with the allocation of the occasional meat rations, although the half-blind Boikush slanderously questioned how on earth Tolib could feed others when he was unable to feed himself; and then there was Kuchkar-Cheka,
5
whom Oppok-Lovely had once struck so hard that he had gone deaf in one ear. As a result he had had to found his career on making the other ear work overtime.

These three would sit down at dawn on three separate platforms so that no one could think they were conspiring together; each would put a black pellet of opium under his tongue, close his swollen eyelids and greet either the dawn or his dreams, or else the 7:12 train – Gilas's counterpart to the SovietNewsBureau bulletin.

Now and again the morning rustle of leaves being warmed by the sun would be interrupted by the matured reflections of Umarali-Moneybags. “They say the Germans aren't far away,” Umarali might begin, his fleshy head resting on a fist as big as a prize-boxer's glove. “Yesterday Oktam-Humble-Russky said that one has been seen in Chengeldy.”

After several minutes of the rustling of leaves, Tolib-Butcher, over whose sunny face two newly-awoken flies would now be crawling, might respond, “If they're coming from Kazakhstan, then there's no way to come but the railway line.”

Silence would hang over them once again. After processing all the information he had taken in through his one ear, Kuchkar-Cheka, his face as wrinkled as a dried prune, would say, “If they reach Gilas, they'll have to come through the chaikhana – sure as sure can be.”

There was another long and fruitless silence. Then the creak of wooden sleepers or thickset poplars would seem to them like a harbinger of either an approaching train or advancing Germans.

“Parpi-Sneakysnake's no ordinary man. He isn't going to let them through without paying for a dish of
plov
,
6
is he?” said Umarali-Moneybags, and licked his weighty moustache.

The wind blew. The minutes passed.

“
Plov
with meat,” added the skinny Tolib-Butcher.

As startled as if a distant steam-engine whistle were the command “A-ten-shun!” Kuchkar-Cheka concluded. “Yes, the rascal will fleece the Germans all right. He'll give them some food, talk them into the ground and fleece them. He'll take all their money and all their gold.” And his eyes burned with indignation like the sun, or like the sun's reflection on the cab-window of a panting steam engine.

The following morning it was Kuchkar who began the conversation. “Have you heard? Jews are being sent here from Odessa.”

In the opium-filled silence his companions sifted through the news they had heard the previous day, but neither Tolib-Butcher (who had yet to become a fully fledged butcher) nor Umarali-Moneybags (by then, alas, anything but a Moneybags) was able to find any tiniest scrap of news about Odessa Jews in any corner of his mind or body.

Then Kuchkar-Cheka – and heaven knows where he had got hold of this information – went on cautiously, “Now if our dear… if our First Secretary of the Central Committee, Usman Yusupov, were to build a house for the Jews on the bank of the Ankhor…”

The others meditated for a long time on Kuchkar's loyal, even obsequious words; nobody, after all, had provoked him by saying anything untoward. Then Umarali, a dissident before dissidents were thought to exist, had been overwhelmed by the nihilism born of his years in prison. “Usman won't fucking well build anything. It'll just be the usual fuck-up,” he said at the end of the fifth minute, by which time Tolib-Butcher had forgotten about Usman Yusupov, although he hadn't forgotten the Jews.

“Mister Umarali could build the house,” said Tolib-Butcher, finally remembering what all this was about.

Kuchkar's silence lasted so long that the others began to wonder whether his one whole and zealous ear might also have been damaged.

And then Umarali-Moneybags, yawning so luxuriously that the golden sun shone into his huge slobbering mouth, went on, “A six-floor house, thirty rooms in each floor.”

“That makes two hundred rooms less twenty!” Tolib exclaimed after another minute.

“And they could be rented out at… at…”

“That's an awesome sum!” Kuchkar had been bent double like a folded radio aerial, but a steam-engine whistle had woken him up; once again he was ready to receive information.

It was one more day of the War.

Late that night Umarali-Moneybags entered his yard, hung a six-stone chain over his gate and shook awake his wife, who was sleeping under the vine. “Hey, bitch, have you got anything left to eat?”

“But you've only just got back from the chaikhana!” his wife said with a groan. Umarali then cursed every part of her from head to toe until she relented and said, “There's some leftover meat and lentils on the shelf in the kitchen.”

Umarali wandered into the kitchen in the darkness, groped on the shelf for the bowl and wolfed down the contents.

In the morning his wife got up and looked around the kitchen; she couldn't find the oilcake she had put to soak for the rams. She cautiously woke her husband. “What did you eat yesterday, husband? There's no oilcake left.”

And he replied, “You fucking bitch, I thought I'd eaten something I shouldn't have. I've been shitting all night.”

Another day of the Great Patriotic War
7
was beginning.

Sometimes Umarali, Tolib and Kuchkar were joined by Sami-Rais, the chairman of the “Fruits of Lenin's Path” collective farm that surrounded Gilas. Because of the War and the consequent shortage of cadres, the collective farm had been so much enlarged that it took Sami-Rais a week to ride to one corner of his fields, and another week to ride to the next corner. During these journeys he slept in all kinds of places, but most often upon his bay mare, who had acquired a useful skill; she always immediately offered Sami-Rais the shoulder towards which his troubled head was falling. She had also developed an ability to sense if her rider's weight was diminishing and deliver him at precisely midday to the Gilas chaikhana, which stood at the intersection of all the collective farm roads. By then Umarali, Tolib and Kuchkar, having finished their discussion of the news from the 7:12 “SovietNewsBureau” train, would be sitting together, about to delight in whatever sustenance All-Knowing and All-Merciful Allah had sent them that day.

During his endless journeying through a collective farm manned only by women, and during his visits to the chaikhana, where his family sent him letters with requests for rice and flour from the store, Sami-Rais never once suspected, not even with a single hair of his moustache, that Umarali-Moneybags had imposed a tax on the whole of Gilas, threatening its inhabitants with “labour mobilisation” into a collective space so boundless as to be the equivalent of exile, and that every day at noon either Izaly-Jew – director of the Papanin Tailoring Co-operative – or the half-blind Boikush, or Yusuf-Cobbler, or Chinali, the wealthy director of the huge warehouse, would deliver to the chaikhana whatever the All-Knowing and All-Powerful had chosen that day for Umarali and his fellow-diners.

And when Sami-Rais, unloaded from his horse by Kuchkar-Cheka and Tolib-Butcher, was sitting down, propped against three large mattresses and still rocking in the rhythm of his morning's ride, and when Umarali handed him a letter from his family, Izaly-Jew would look out through the ventilation pane of his tailoring co-operative. By evening the whole of Gilas would have learned from its women that Kuchkar-Cheka's list of saboteurs and enemies of the people had been passed on to Sami-Rais by Umarali-Moneybags.

Sami did not smoke opium but, like all chairmen, he liked to drink vodka. Vodka, of course, served everywhere as a test of political reliability – a final examination that Sami always passed with flying colours and much smacking of lips. During the last such examination, after a decision to amalgamate seven collective farms under a single chairman, he had managed without difficulty, in the presence of a strict Russian referee, to drink his two rivals under the table as if they were mere puppies. Let it be known that true Communist cadres are to be found even among simple folk!

Every bottle of State vodka, however, was being sent to the Front, and Umarali ran into difficulties in his attempts to ensure a regular supply for Sami-Rais. For a while, Umarali was saved by Kolya-Konyak, who used to fill the one remaining vodka bottle with his own sultana brandy. Now, however, like everyone else in a country straining every sinew in the decisive struggle with the Fascist enemy, Kolya had run out of both sugar and sultanas; as a result, he had lost all sense of the meaning of life and was no longer afraid even of the prospect of forced labour in the deserted fields of Sami's collective farm.

But Umarali's fine nose for alcohol, sharpened by years of confinement among Russians, did not let him down. Once, as he was walking past the 4:17
pm
train and thinking about the fate of his Soviet Fatherland, he suddenly sensed something that vividly reminded him of the sour eructations of Sami-Rais. Following his rat's nose, he found the source of this smell not far from the engine's wheels. Surprised in his search by a locomotive driver carrying a revolver, he struggled for some time, summoning all his prison Russian, to explain what it was that he was looking for: “You Ivan, me Umarali. Me give melon, you give vodka!”

He breathed in the vile smell and demonstrated his appreciation of its beauty. And he pointed to where it was coming from.

Confusing the Uzbek name “Umarali” with a similar-sounding Russian word that means “dying” – and unable to make out what on earth was the matter with this apparently dying saboteur – locomotive driver Ivan pointedly began wiping a rag imbued with this same smell over the revolver to which he was entitled by rank. But when Umarali bent down towards the rag – hands clasped behind his back to show he meant no harm – and began gabbling away, the Communist engine driver felt able to adopt an internationalist viewpoint. Deciding that this younger brother to the Russian nation must have run out of brake fluid for the collective-farm tractor (Yes, that must be why he couldn't stop rattling on!), he even went so far as to refuse point-blank the offer of a collective-farm watermelon.

“There!” he said, handing this agrarian worker a bottle of industrial liquid. “For your socialist tractor!”

“Yes, yes – for socialist
traktir
!” said Umarali, remembering from his years in prison a Russian word that meant “tavern.”

From that day on, locomotive driver Ivan began to economise on brake fluid for the sake of the triumphant future of the nation's collective farms; once a week he gave what he had saved to his new protégé, and Umarali diligently transferred these half-litres of fraternal aid from his one and only vodka bottle into the innards of Sami-Rais, who was growing steadily greener.

“All this travelling's taking it out of poor old Sami,” Umarali would think sadly, as he watched Kuchkar and Tolib hoist Sami-Rais, now well fuelled, well lubricated and well informed as to his family's requirements, onto the back of his bay mare, who clip-clopped away into the boundless fields of the collective farm, still always offering Sami-Rais the shoulder towards which his great bulk was slewing.