Read The Railway Online

Authors: Hamid Ismailov

Tags: #FICTION / Literary, #FIC019000, #FICTION / Cultural Heritage, #FIC051000, #FICTION / Historical, #FIC014000, #Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Islam

The Railway (5 page)

BOOK: The Railway
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After this chance meeting Pyotr Mikhailovich Sholokh-Mayev managed to get Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes appointed to a part-time post in his research institute with the title of “Bearer of Dying Languages” and succeeded in organising around him an All-Union Centre for the study and restoration of the languages of Siberia and the Far North.

In the days of the ever more decrepit Brezhnev and his fully developed socialism, when Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes the renowned Veteran and Bearer of Languages used to have to recall his immortal speech almost every day, Jews began to migrate to other lands. Pinkhas Shalomay applied to leave too. For some reason he was refused – perhaps because he was irreplaceable, perhaps because of the emergence of certain troubling details about his heroic wartime past. Pinkhas reminded Mullah of their old friendship and asked him to write on his behalf to Solzhenitsyn, that former teacher and pupil of his who had apparently become a very big fish indeed.

“But what language can I write to him in? I don't know Russian. And he hardly learned any Uzbek at all. Anyway I can't write!” said Mullah. Pinkhas then wrote something himself and Mullah, just as in the old days, dashed off his “Arabic” line and circle signature.

What happened next was exactly as the devious Pinkhas had intended. Whether or not Mullah's letter ever reached Solzhenitsyn is uncertain, but a copy certainly found its way to the security organs. And two weeks later Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes was called to the City, purportedly in order to receive yet another military-service medal and a certificate from the Koryak National Party Committee.
25
In the event, however, both he and Pinkhas Shalomay were expelled from the USSR.

And so, in his old age, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, brother of the late Kuchkar-Cheka and brother-in-law of the late Bolshevik Oktam-Humble-Russky, ended up in Brighton Beach, New York, where, finding no other languages he didn't know, he began studying the Jewish-Odessan dialect
26
of the Greater Russian language, roundly cursing anyone he happened across during his drinking bouts with that all-powerful and indestructible Russian sentence whose meaning he had at last fully grasped.

12
Every Uzbek town is traditionally divided into a number of mahallyas or communities. Gilas contained at least five mahallyas.

13
Recruited from Central Asian prisoners, this Legion probably numbered around 200,000. And the Germans did indeed often mistake Uzbeks for Jews.

14
Until 1928 the Arabic script was used for both Tadjik and Uzbek; in 1928 the Latin script was officially substituted. The official pretext for this “reform” was the assertion that the Arabic script was unable to accommodate the technological demands of the twentieth century; the real reason was the desire of the Soviet government to distance the people of Central Asia from Islam. In 1940, the Soviet authorities decreed another change of script: from Latin to Cyrillic – so as to make it easier for everyone to learn Russian.

15
In 1924, when the Bolsheviks created the republic of Uzbekistan, the Sarts and the Uzbeks were officially declared to be a single ethnic group. Historically, however, they are distinct: the Sarts mainly urban and mercantile, the Uzbeks nomadic and tribal. In the early twentieth century the Sarts outnumbered the Uzbeks; Uzbekistan could equally well have been named Sartistan.

16
Maurice Thorez was the leader of the French Communist Party.

17
Palmiro Togliatti was the leader of the Italian Communist Party.

18
Demosthenes, the famous Athenian orator, is said to have overcome a speech impediment by practising declamation with a mouth full of pebbles.

19
The Inuit people live mainly in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and in the far east of Russia. The Khakass, Buryat, Evenk and Nivkhi are all indigenous peoples of Siberia.

20
Stalin died in 1953. In 1956 Khrushchev denounced his crimes in his famous “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress. This marked the start of a relatively liberal period known as “The Thaw.”

21
Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics as a young man, and he worked as a schoolteacher for several months before the outbreak of the Second World War. After his release from the Gulag, he spent several years in exile in Kazakhstan.

22
The Communist Party's children's movement.

23
A famous Uzbek film from the 1960s, about Uzbek spies in Germany.

24
In the Arctic Ocean.

25
The Koryaks, of whom there are around four thousand, live in the Far East, on the Kamchatka peninsula.

26
Odessa was an important Jewish centre for many years. In 1941, for example, Jews numbered thirty percent of the population.

4

But now I must say a word or two about the red-eyed albino Oppok-Lovely, the wife of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes and sister of Oktam-Humble-Russky the Bolshevik... In the early 1920s, after Oktam-Humble-Russky had scaled the mountain of Marxist-Leninist thinking, matchmakers began to make more frequent appearances in their village. Oppok, still only a girl, would peep out through a crack in the door of the women's quarters and study the Komsomol bosses petitioning for her hand – a hand that would bring with it the Party patronage of her brother. One of them looked crooked, another looked bald, another too thin… In the end her grandmother said something Oppok-Lovely was to remember for the rest of her life: “Wise up, you little brat – take your clothes off and have a look at yourself in the mirror!”

The Komsomol bosses, however, soon stopped visiting; some married Tatars, some married Kazakhs and the most zealous careerists of all married Russians. At her brother's insistence, Oppok-Lovely the albino then publicly cast off her yashmak – and even the leaders of the veil-burning movement took fright, confusedly crossing themselves as they realised how easily, but for the grace of God, they might have married her themselves. And no one ever again came to the village to ask for her hand.

And so she would have passed her whole life in Communist solitude and socially important labour, had not the mass executions of the 1930s impelled Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes to marry the woman who had by then become First Secretary of the Gilas Komsomol Committee.

During their first night, Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes, afraid of face to face contact and constantly adjusting his pillow, lay on the First Secretary and wondered if divorce and execution might not be preferable, while she herself cried out “More! More!” with Komsomol indefatigability and went on demanding the contributions due to a Komsomol bride.
27

She bore three children before the War; and after the War had begun, she gave birth on her own to four more male and female defenders of the Motherland, all of whom were given the patronymic Ulmasovich – a mistake Oppok-Lovely would never have made had she thought that her husband might one day be discovered to have been a traitor. The demands of being a single mother forced Oppok-Lovely to leave the Komsomol Committee and become Head of the Kok-Terek Bazaar. This led Oktam-Humble-Russky, as a true Bolshevik who made no compromises with capitalism, to sever relations with her.

Oppok-Lovely bided her time but eventually responded to Oktam-Humble-Russky in kind, saying farewell to her Bolshevik brother not at the threshold of the edifice of Communism but at the threshold of a run-down old people's home. As for her own life, she quickly grasped the fundamental rule of the bazaar – “You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours!” – and it was as if her wallet sucked in money. She got her children accepted to study in various institutes and, on the eve of the introduction of universal internal passports,
28
bought herself a position – that of Gilas passport officer – which allowed her to delete their unfortunate patronymics. Being a passport officer was, in any case, a great deal more comfortable and secure than patrolling a bazaar.

The position of passport officer also proved a thousand times more profitable than Oppok-Lovely, who had paid out four hundred roubles in old money, could have ever imagined. Glamorous women would pay her to erase their column – or rather columns – of marriages and divorces; new Party members would pay for the deletion of their old criminal records. But she received the largest sum of all from Ali-Shapak, Tolib-Butcher's youngest brother; he was the public weigher at the Kok-Terek Bazaar and it was to him that she bequeathed her position as Head of the Bazaar. She also agreed to change just one figure in his year of birth, with a stroke of her pen making him several years older than his elder brother. As a result, Ali-Shapak was soon receiving his pension, while Tolib-Butcher wailed in fury at the prospect of having to toil five more years on behalf of the State that was treating his brother with such undeserved generosity. By then the introduction of passports had brought untold riches to Oppok-Lovely the wife of Mullah-Ulmas-Greeneyes – that Traitor to the Motherland and First Local War Veteran whom she was already summoning back home with the help of her Young Pioneers.

Meanwhile, Tolib-Butcher lived out his life in shame, reduced in old age, because of his own niggardliness, to the position of younger brother to his own kid brother Ali-Shapak.

27
Every Komsomol member was required to pay a monthly contribution to the organisation.

28
Soviet citizens needed passports in order to travel around the country. Internal passports were introduced in some parts of the Soviet Union in 1933; in Gilas, however, they were evidently introduced only in the late 1960s.

5

The women in the yard went on crying for ever and ever.

It seemed to the boy that there would never be an end to the many-voiced wailing that met each new old woman as she darted in through the gate and past one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline and the two other men who were standing there, waiting for anyone who wanted to come but above all for Garang-Deafmullah, the father of the man who taught history to the senior classes and who had gone out to look for the boy in the wasteland behind the school; at first the boy had felt frightened – not because he guessed what had happened but simply because a teacher had found him messing about on his own – and he had felt still more frightened by the excessively kind voice with which the teacher called to him, standing there by the canal and not crossing over, and the teacher had gone on standing there after telling the boy, he'd gone on waiting while the boy ran back to fetch the satchel he'd left on the ground, and the boy was still feeling frightened even when he looked back round the corner of the school building, somehow thinking that all this might be a punishment for his not being at lessons – even though lessons had ended long ago – and then the still more awful thought that lessons had indeed ended long ago and that he should have been back home long ago for the funeral made the boy stop on the other side of the road, without going into his home at all – and he just stood there and listened to the endless wailing of the old women who kept darting like little mice past the old men at the gates and who then seemed to want to make the most of this opportunity to wail and gossip. Each woman would wail together with the woman who had first greeted her, then gossip with her for a while, and then, yielding her place to someone else, greet a new arrival and wail and gossip with her; it seemed this would go on for ever...

The boy stood behind the cherry trees opposite his home, beneath Huvron-Barber's windows, and looked at the belt that one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline had left for the boy on an empty bench beside the wide-open gates.
29

Now the lamentations were coming not from the yard, but from the house itself.

The boy heard his uncles being called to say farewell to their father and he wanted to rush in there, even though he was still carrying his satchel, which was now cutting into his shoulders and urging him on by drumming against his back; but a force still stronger than what was really the drum-drum-drumming of his heart was making him press more desperately than ever against the wall of this mute house where the children of Huvron-Barber lived; and he stood there stock still while they carried out the stretcher, which was covered by a plain black gown, and while his belted uncles went out ahead through the wide-open gates, followed by one-eyed Fatkhulla-Frontline, and Oppok-Lovely's son Kuvandyk, and that drunkard Mefody-Jurisprudence, and Nabi-Onearm, and blind old Hoomer, and Kuchkar-Cheka's successor – Osman-Anon, and Tolib-Butcher, and Sergeant-Major Kara-Musayev the Younger, and Kun-Okhun and everyone else, and they all disappeared behind the corner of Huvron's house.

He ran to the other corner and then to the end of the next sidestreet, and he caught up with the procession again by the railway line. The men walked on, taking turns bearing the stretcher, and even Akmolin stopped his diesel shunter, leaned his head out of the window and watched as the procession crossed the tracks and the men waiting on the platform rushed to join it, each taking his turn beneath the stretcher and then yielding his place to someone else so he could return to the platform. Finally, not daring to leave his shunter but wanting to make his presence felt, Akmolin gave a long hoarse hoot that startled the boy and made him stumble against a rail. The boy ran on at a distance from the procession, his satchel thumping against his back as he jumped across the rails; eventually the procession emerged onto the road and went quickly past the school, and the boy looked again at the wasteland behind the row of poplars. He felt as if he would see the history teacher there, standing by the canal, but there was no one – only the barely audible, heart-rending voice of some well-known singer…

The boy lingered for a moment, but the procession was moving fast. Cars coming the other way were stopping and their drivers were getting out, bearing the stretcher for a dozen strides, then returning to their cars and quietly driving – almost floating – away, while the procession hurried on. They had to move fast – soon the sun would be setting.
30
The sun jumped from one gap in the high house walls to another, then between gaps in the mulberry trees, then again from one yard to another; and at last the procession turned into the cemetery.

But for the satchel the boy would have been able to creep into the cemetery on all fours, but with it there on his back he had to go round behind the low half-ruined wall to the deep canal on the other side. From the canal and its willows the crowd was only a stone's throw away.

By then, the procession was already squatting down and Garang-Deafmullah was reciting his monotonous prayer. The incomprehensibility of its words made the prayer seem still more melancholy – as dismal as a breath of wind over dry grass, or as a lone ant trying endlessly to climb a dry, dusty, prickly grass-blade.

Everyone left and went back to their homes. The boy sat on the grave and observed the ant trail that had appeared beside the little mound, almost beneath his feet – the ants were going round his shoes, sniffing them, exchanging greetings at every step with those coming the other way and disappearing from sight behind other graves. The boy was looking towards these graves, leaning over so far that his satchel slipped forward over his head, and then he remembered Fatkhulla again and his sense of shame grew as unbearable as if Fatkhulla had been watching him all the time, just as he himself was watching the ants, and then, swallowing down his snot, he began to remember the words of a prayer his grandmother had taught him and he began to say it out loud and, listening to himself, he sensed all the hurried unnaturalness of the words raining down on the ants and pins and needles were pricking his legs and it was as if these same ants were crawling all over him.

The sun was a red spot rolling down from the tall, distant poplars that stood in a row in front of the first yard beyond the cemetery; when the boy looked that way, the black mounds and the long shadows of the wrought-iron railings appeared to move slightly, as if they were settling down for the night, and then, from just above these mounds and fences, from just above the poplars, came a momentary breath of the freshness with which you wake up refreshed after weeping for a long time in a dream, when you wake up well and truly, as if all of a sudden you are being born adult, ready to understand everything – and the boy set off without fear in the direction old one-eyed Fatkhulla had gone.

The door was still open from all the day's visitors, and Fatkhulla was the first person the boy saw as he went in. The yard had been swept and sprinkled with water, and it was quiet and empty there except for Fatkhulla, who was sitting on the wooden platform, opposite the boy's huge granny, chanting a prayer in his monotonous voice. The boy went towards this voice, which seemed to be coming out of the twilight.

He stood behind Fatkhulla's dark back, out of sight of his granny. Now he had even less idea what to do; Fatkhulla's awkward prayer was the only safe and warm refuge he had, and, for the first time in his life, he could feel every one of its incomprehensible Arabic words deep in his chilled heart, and he held the words there devoutly. And when Fatkhulla said “Amen!” the boy tremblingly lifted his cupped hands and sensed the dry heat in his palms as he brushed them over his face and cheeks. And at that moment, as if able to look straight through Fatkhulla, Granny said, “So he's come back, has he?”

Without turning round to look at the boy, Fatkhulla said, “He's been with us all the time” and the boy felt the same shame he had felt at the cemetery when his satchel flew over his head, and now, standing behind the old man, he felt as if he himself were a kind of satchel, attached to Fatkhulla's broad back. If the old man were to turn round or bend forward…

29
It is customary at a Muslim funeral for every direct male descendant to wear a belt.

30
Islam encourages burial as soon as possible, preferably before sunset on the day of death.

BOOK: The Railway
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