The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov

Author:Hamid Ismailov [Hamid Ismailov]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781908670199
Publisher: Peirene Press
Published: 2014-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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