The bus driver called Uncle Shaken to help him with a punctured tyre. Yerzhan was left in charge of the class. He saw his long shadow reflected on the water’s surface. Dean Reed in the boundless steppe, underneath the limitless sky, above the bottomless water. He briefly took Aisulu’s hand. Then he let go of it and pulled off his T-shirt and trousers and walked calmly into the forbidden water. For a moment he splashed about in it and then, to the admiring and terrified twittering of Aisulu and the others, he walked out of the water, shook himself off as if nothing had happened and dressed again in his canvas trousers and Chinese T-shirt.
Nobody snitched on him. And for a long time afterwards everyone recalled with respectful admiration Wunda’s dramatic escapade.
Part Two
Do La
The Destiny
The train moved on across the steppe like Yerzhan’s story – without stopping, without hesitating, onwards and forwards. It was strange, but in this story there was none of that bitterness reminiscent of the old steam trains, which blew their nasty smoke into the last carriages on the bends. No, the diesel locomotive drew the train along without any strain, smoothly and unfalteringly.
Those childhood years were like a blue-and-yellow happiness, growing between the sky and the earth. But still the fear that something could happen at any moment, pouncing with a sudden roar and tearing the tiles off the roof, stayed with Yerzhan for the next two or three years. Everything seemed to be going as it should: autumns in school were followed by ferocious winters, when their door was piled so high with snow that there was nothing else to do but play on the violin or the dombra. Sometimes the boy had to climb out through the little window at the side of the house to scrape away the snowdrifts with their only railway spade.
After the musical winter came the no less musical spring, when the songs poured out of him. He and Aisulu followed their bidding, riding not off to school on the donkey, but towards the hills, where fields of scarlet tulips blossomed in a blaze of swaying notes.
And after that summer itself started imperceptibly blazing – without any school, thank God, but again with music, and with the herd and a separation in the afternoon. After all, he couldn’t take thin-skinned Aisulu with him in the scorching heat, could he!
And the thing that loomed over him like a visceral fear could happen in the middle of the sweltering summer, when sheep suddenly started bleating as if they were under the knife and went dashing in all directions, cows dug their horns into the ground and the donkey squealed and rolled around in the dust… And a slight rumble would run through the ground, Yerzhan’s legs would start trembling, and then his whole body, and the fear would rise up from his shaking knees to his stomach and freeze there in a heavy ache, until the sky cracked over his head and shattered into pieces, crushing him completely, reducing him to dust, to sand, to scraps of grass and wool. And the black whirlwind hurtled past above him with a wild howl.
It happened in winter, and at night, and in autumn, and in the morning, and in the music, and in a pause in the music – without any regularity or forewarning: it could always happen, at any moment, hanging over his head as implacably as fear itself, as the future.
And it happened when Yerzhan was twelve years old and Aisulu was eleven. It was in the fifth class at school, after the long winter holidays. First the girls and then the boys in their class started to outgrow Yerzhan. But, after all, he was a year older than them, and he had always been taller and stronger. At first the difference wasn’t very noticeable: so what if Serik or Berik had stretched out a bit, that didn’t make them any brighter! But when Aisulu, his little mite Sulu, his slim-winged swallow Sulu, started overtaking Yerzhan, he sensed that something was wrong. The same fear that had always begun with a trembling in his knees and frozen as a heavy ache in his stomach seemed to have risen higher now, right up to his throat – and got stuck there, preventing his body from growing.
In the mornings, Yerzhan did pull-ups on the door frame. He nailed a rusty wheel hoop to the back wall of the house. From television he knew that basketball players grew taller than anyone else and in secret, when no one watched, he jumped up to the hoop for hours, tossing whatever he could find through it – a bundle of rags or a ball of camel wool. And at night he stretched in bed, imagining that he would wake up in the morning as Dean Reed. But he had stopped growing.
Other people noticed it too and wanted to help. Granny Ulbarsyn fed him with the livers of newborn spring lambs, Grandad Daulet ordered carrots from the city through his friend Tolegen, and Uncle Shaken brought disgusting fish oil back from his shift. But that only produced a foul-smelling burp! Yerzhan ate it all. But he had stopped growing.
He gave up music. In any case, Petko had gone back to Bulgaria, where a family member had died. And Yerzhan spent the whole summer hiding away with his herd in the gullies close to the Zone. He lay on the ground naked for withering days on end in the hope that the sun would help. But even the heat made no difference. He had stopped growing.
And one day his faithful and obedient donkey brought him back to the house half-dead from the bite of a camel spider.
On 1 September that year Yerzhan did not go to school. Uncle Shaken took Sulu, all dressed up, on her own. On 2 September the two grannies persuaded the boy to stand in for Shaken, who had had to leave urgently for his shift. ‘At least escort her,’ they said, ‘even if you don’t sit through lessons.’ Grandad Daulet, however, told Yerzhan not to come back home unless he had done his schoolwork. Yerzhan accompanied Aisulu but refused to sit on the donkey with the towering girl and followed the animal at a distance. In the quiet autumn steppe Sulu started singing. It wasn’t Dean Reed. It was the sad song of Abai, who once lived in this steppe:
Yerzhan picked up on only two words in this song: ‘height’ and ‘body’…
He sat through lessons that day, at the desk right at the back, on his own, not going out for any breaks, and pretended to be asleep when Sulu came to the window. After school boys and girls set off back home in pairs. Yerzhan walked in front of the donkey, not glancing round at sad, silent Aisulu. He so badly wanted her assurances that no matter what was wrong and no matter what happened to him, she would still love no one but him and marry no one but him, as she had promised in their childhood. On the other hand, he realized that she was almost half a head taller than him, and if it carried on… He couldn’t think beyond that; he was overwhelmed, not by the usual fear, but by a rage that took its place, rising up from his trembling knees, through his hot stomach, to his heavy, throbbing head: he wanted to kill himself, to kill her, towering up on that bad-tempered, noisy donkey; he wanted to smash this railway, grind it to dust, and this earth, and this sky…