Three months later, when she began to show, Daulet, foaming with rage, brutally beat and cursed her for ever. If Kepek and Shaken hadn’t pulled the old man away from his half-dead daughter and dragged him to Granny Sholpan’s house, neither Kanyshat nor her son would have been long for this world.
Since that day Kanyshat hadn’t spoken a word.
Although Yerzhan’s mother was silent, the other women, and especially the two grannies, Ulbarsyn and Sholpan, loved to tittle-tattle, as Grandad Daulet called it.
Yerzhan recalled vicious winter nights. Whistling, windswept snow forced its way in through every crack in the window.
‘There in the ninth heaven grows Tengri’s sacred tree, Kayin, and hanging on its branches, like a little leaf, is the kut.’
Yerzhan had climbed into bed with Granny Ulbarsyn under her camel-wool blanket. She scratched his anus, which itched with little squirming worms.
‘What’s a kut?’ asked Yerzhan, still shivering from the cold. He was surprised by the similarity of this word to the word for ‘backside’ – kyot.
‘It’s happiness. It’s when you’re warm and well fed,’ Granny answered, and carried on with her story.
‘When you were going to be born, your kut fell off that tree into our house, down through the chimney. Everything follows the will of Tengri and our mother Umai. The kut fell into your mother’s tummy and in her womb it took the form of a little red worm…’
‘Is it him you’re scratching out of my backside?’
Granny tittered and slapped Yerzhan on his little cheek with the same wrinkled hand that had just scratched his backside.
‘You little chatterbox, sleep, or Mother-Umai will get angry and take away your kut!’
On another night the boy stayed at Granny Sholpan’s house because he wanted to be near little Aisulu, whose ear he had already nibbled so that he would marry her later. And this time Granny Sholpan told him her version of his conception and birth and wove a story about Tengri’s son, Gesar, into it.
‘Tengri sent Gesar to the earth, to a kingdom in the steppe where there was no ruler.’
‘You mean to us?’ Yerzhan immediately butted in. But Granny Sholpan’s fearsome glance cut him short.
‘So that no one would recognize him’ – the old woman pinched Yerzhan’s nose – ‘Gesar came down to earth as a frightful, snotty-nosed little scamp like you!’
Yerzhan started whining. His nose was hurting. And since Granny Sholpan didn’t want to wake up Aisulu, who was asleep in her cot next to them, she let go of his nose before she continued.
‘Only his uncle, Kara-Choton – the same kind of uncle as Kepek is to you – learnt that Gesar wasn’t just an ordinary little boy, but heaven-born, and he started to bully his nephew in order to destroy him before he grew up. But Tengri always saved Gesar from Kara-Choton’s wicked tricks. When Gesar turned twelve, Tengri sent him the fleetest steed on earth, and Gesar won the famous horse race to marry the beautiful Urmai-sulu and conquered the throne of the steppe kingdom.’
‘Kazakhst—’ Yerzhan started to say, but stopped short when he spotted the sharp glint in Granny Sholpan’s eyes again.
She went on: ‘The bold Gesar did not enjoy his happiness and peace for long. A terrible demon, the cannibal Lubsan, attacked his country from the north. But Lubsan’s wife, Tumen Djergalan, fell in love with Gesar and revealed her husband’s secret to him. Gesar used the secret and killed Lubsan. Tumen Djergalan didn’t waste any time and gave Gesar a draught of forgetfulness to drink in order to bind him to her for ever. Gesar drank the draught, forgot about his beloved Urmai-sulu and stayed with Tumen Djergalan.
‘Meanwhile, in the steppe kingdom, a rebellion arose and Kara-Choton forced Urmai-sulu to marry him. But Tengri did not desert Gesar and freed him of the enchantment on the very shore of the Dead Lake, where Gesar saw the reflection of his own magical steed. He returned on this steed home to the steppe kingdom and killed Kara-Choton, freeing his Urmai-sulu…’
By now Yerzhan had warmed up nicely in Granny Sholpan’s cosy bosom and was fast asleep. In his dream, though, he continued the adventure and rode the steed and freed Urmai-sulu.
Steppe roads, even if they are railroads, are long and monotonous, and the only way you can shorten the journey is with conversation. The way Yerzhan told me about his life was like this road of ours, without any discernible bends or backtracking. His story ran on and on, just as the wires outside the window ran from post to post, accompanied by the beat of the wheels’ hammering. He recalled his distant childhood running back and forth between his house and Aisulu’s house. Not only to look at the still-speechless beauty, whose ear he had nibbled in token of an early engagement, but mostly for the sake of his uncle Shaken’s glittering metal objects. Shaken used to disappear on his work shifts for months at a time. He worked somewhere in the steppe. But more about that later. Just as we shall talk later about Shaken’s television, which he brought back from the city.
But before that… Before that:
‘All women ever want to do is wag their tongues!’ Grandad Daulet said, and tied the young tot on his back with his belt and climbed up on to his piebald grey horse. It was a spring day. Grandad left the railway line in the care of his son, Kepek, and they rode out into the steppe. They galloped in silence over the damp grass and tulips, galloping, so it seemed, for no reason at all. And the wind, still chilly round the edges, scorched Yerzhan’s cracking cheeks.
They galloped as far as a gully with sparse hills scattered beyond it.
‘This is where we found you…’ the old man said.
And there beyond the gully with the noisy spring river at its bottom, on the far side of the wooden suspension bridge, barbed wire extended right across the steppe. Grandad reined in his exhausted steed and waved towards the fence with his whip. ‘The Zone!’ he exclaimed. And at that moment a fly started buzzing in the boy’s ear, a gadfly, the kind that circled above their cows on lazy days – a gadfly that became the droning word: Zone…
And the word began buzzing around in the child’s imagination.
Uncle Shaken worked as a watchman in the Zone.
The old man untied Yerzhan from his back and laid out the belt for both of them to sit on. He unslung his dombra from his shoulder and filled the ravine with the sound of his song:
How could Yerzhan have guessed then that this ancient song – God knows how it had come to Grandad Daulet’s soul – was about him, about his future life?
Gesar’s story had sunk deep into Yerzhan’s heart. And as Granny Ulbarsyn picked out from the boy’s hair the lice which had grown fat over winter, Yerzhan asked her about Gesar’s special features and how he could be recognized.
‘When Gesar was a frightful, snot-nosed little urchin, he didn’t have a willy,’ she replied, and hoped to have stopped her squirming grandson from pestering her further. She needed him to keep still for an hour or so to deal with the lice, and nits too, and then wash his head with sour milk.