Fools, fools, fools: one took him to a quack medicine woman, another quartered him alive with horses, and as for the one who was educated – he couldn’t do anything either, even with an X-ray and a reactor!
What could Yerzhan do now? He couldn’t go to school – all those kids were a head taller than him already. They’d laugh in his face. Stay here with this ignorant crowd, where everyone had suddenly forgotten that he had nibbled Aisulu’s ear as his bride-to-be? No, now they would never live together, under the moon or the sun!
He could see it all. And see even more things that he didn’t want to put into words. Images built up inside this petrified body and inside his morbid soul, which was ageing against his will. Did any of it do him any good? Did it make him even the slightest bit taller?
Every time Yerzhan saw Aisulu, Kepek and the donkey in the bluish gloom of the steppe’s winter twilight – through the frame of a doorway, through a window or from behind the wall where he was hiding – he wanted to grab Grandad’s double-barrelled shotgun or Granny’s kitchen knife, or even Kepek’s own railway hammer, the one he used to hammer on the trains’ motionless wheels at night, and dart out to meet them, to shoot, stab and kill all three of them. But each time something in his little body stopped him. What it was, he simply couldn’t make out. He suffered torment all night through until the morning, all day through until the evening, but he couldn’t find the answer. Like a schoolboy who has lost his exercise book and crib sheet.
And once again his rebellion was put off until the next day. If this was the way of things in the world, then weren’t his suffering, his imaginings and threats, all his thoughts, like a flowing stream, like powdered snow, like a swirling blizzard and his life simply a short, sad song?
No, his life wasn’t a song. His life resembled more the chain reaction once demonstrated by Uncle Shaken, where all started from his hatred for Grandad, or for Granny, or for Kepek and the donkey, or for Uncle Shaken or… His life was like a chain reaction, and so was everyone else’s too. And perhaps even through his petrified boy’s body an abrupt adulthood was forcing its way out, as Yerzhan started to see what he hadn’t noticed before. Not only did he notice Kepek sitting on the donkey with his arms around Aisulu’s body (although that was most painful of all), but he also saw Kepek disappearing from home when Shaken was at work and reappearing at city bride Baichichek’s house, moving out Granny Sholpan under various pretexts to her friend Ulbarsyn. Of course, he could simply be fetching salt, or a nail, or be helping to bone meat. But truth to tell, what Kepek got up to over there when Aisulu came running to Yerzhan to tell him what was happening at school and how the boys and girls missed him – no one really dared ask.
Kepek returned from Baichichek’s house all flushed and agitated, as if he had chopped an entire cow to pieces, not just helped bone the meat. Then he grabbed his hammer and left, whistling a tune that only he knew, puffing and panting, not wrapped up against the cold, to replace his father on the points or in the siding.
But one day Aisulu herself confessed in secret that her mother took Kepek soup at night. After all, she said, he had chopped the bones, the poor man was probably freezing and he was as good as a brother in their house.
But was Shaken any better than Kepek? One day, when Grandad Daulet and Uncle Kepek were dealing with an express special, and Granny Ulbarsyn had gone to Granny Sholpan to wash her hair with sour milk, Yerzhan heard cautious tapping at the next window – his mother’s window – followed by a rustle of footsteps in the next room. At first Yerzhan thought it was a bird fluttering against the windowpane in the cold. In order not to frighten it away with his shadow, the boy looked out cautiously through his window at a narrow angle, hiding in the corner of the room. But it wasn’t a bird. It was Uncle Shaken. Why didn’t he knock at the door? Yerzhan heard the door of the next room creak and pressed his back hard against the wall, terrified of being caught spying. Thank God, his mother didn’t look into his room. She slipped out of the house, throwing on her camel-wool shawl as she went.
Yerzhan stood there with his heart pumping hard, pounding its rhythm against the wall – or was that the heavy passenger express that pounded on the rails with a rhythm that pulsed through the ground? Whatever the cause of the pounding, Yerzhan just stood there nailed to the floor, more dead than alive. And once again that same implacable, visceral fear rose up from his trembling knees to his stomach, where it stopped like a hot, heavy, aching lump.
His mother slipped past his window and there, under her window, where he could only see the sheared-off tops of their figures, they talked about something that Yerzhan, who was all ears now, simply couldn’t make out. What they could be talking about out there on the firm, white snow, with wisps of hot steam coming out of their mouths, Yerzhan never found out. And was his dumb mother really speaking, or was it only the steam that Yerzhan took for conversation – who could say? Yerzhan didn’t mention this incident to anyone. Not even to his Aisulu, who wasn’t his any longer.
And then Granny Ulbarsyn, almost falling asleep while Yerzhan was massaging the rheumatic knots on her old woman’s legs, muttered about Grandad – he was to blame for all these bumps on her legs, she said. In her young days, when she had only just come to this ‘spot’, to this Kara-Shagan, Sholpan’s husband, Nurpeis, was summoned to the city for training, and Daulet was left as the only man in charge of both families. That winter Daulet kitted himself out to go to his points, leaving Ulbarsyn strict instructions not to venture out in the cold. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘that’s the jackals howling.’ Then he took his double-barrelled shotgun and his railway hammer and went out into the blizzard.
Ulbarsyn sat alone for a long time, but boredom is worse than fear, after all, and she wanted to see her friend Sholpan, so she wrapped herself in her shawl. She walked up to her friend’s door, where, in the snowy wind, the metal hinge was rattling against the door – tap-tap-tap! Nevertheless Ulbarsyn knocked, but perhaps Sholpan took it for the tapping of the metal hinge. In any case, no one opened the door. Granny Ulbarsyn walked up to the only bright window and glanced in through the gap between the embroidered net curtains. And saw her husband inside. She gasped out loud in fury, gulping in cold, frosty air, and fainted into a snowdrift.
On the way back from his tracks, Daulet found her frozen to the bone and dragged her home, swearing and weeping at the same time. He swore to her by milk and by bread that he had only dropped in to see Sholpan for a moment, to get Nurpeis’s lantern. But even if no scar of distrust was left on Ulbarsyn’s soul, that night had remained with her for ever as the rheumatism in her bones and muscles.
Yerzhan could no longer tell what was true in these words and what was made up. He thought of his confusion bursting out in its full glorious fury from his petrified body. He recalled the ancient song that Grandad had sung to Petko, about hollow straws floating in a stream, striking first against a rock and then against a branch leaning down over the water. That was him, a straw broken off short, hollow on the inside, with his whistling soul driven into a thin, fragile little body. Sometimes he would strike against a stone or a blade of grass. And no matter how his soul whistled and tweeted, the stream still carried it on towards that dead backwater, where there was no living grass, only silt. And nothing remained of this journey except the movement of air through a hollow inner space, like a song almost too faint to hear.
Part Three
Sol Mi Fa
The Salt of the Myth