In this state of mind he went to school for another two or three weeks, or perhaps even longer. Every day he witnessed the inevitable but refused to accept it: the children around him were growing by the hour. And his Aisulu was blossoming into a gorgeous beauty before his very eyes. Girls and boys swirled round her like the little stars in the sky round the full moon, and only Yerzhan sat in the corner during breaks, with a face like grey earth, dropping his heavy head on the desk and glancing out from under his brows at the smile on her face or the joyful response to it from some Serik or Berik.
Kill her! Kill myself! The thoughts pounded in time with his heart as it beat faster and faster, and again he plodded away after classes, immersed in his own agonizing doubts, which never led to anything or any place except home.
On one of these days he didn’t go to school, using the excuse that he was ill, and since Uncle Shaken was still on his shift, Uncle Kepek took Aisulu to school on the same tireless donkey. All day long Yerzhan roasted in the flames of his own thoughts and towards evening, at the time when Aisulu usually came home, he walked out of the house. And the first image he became aware of was his own uncle, Kepek, riding on the donkey with Aisulu. She sat in front of him instead of behind, so that his arms were around her youthful body as he was holding the reins, and she was quietly singing one of her tender songs, something like Dean Reed’s ‘Come with Us’…
Yerzhan didn’t greet them. And at night he burnt, not in an imaginary blaze but in the genuine infernal fever of his own boyish hell.
Granny Ulbarsyn took him to the local healer, Keremet-apke. Keremet-apke felt Yerzhan’s pulse, kneaded the bones in his fingers and led him behind a curtain. She tore the curtain material in half, sat next to the boy and appealed to Tengri, and to the prophet Makhambet, and to Makhambet’s angel. She swayed from side to side, working herself up more and more, then grabbed a whip and lashed herself across the knees and lashed the boy gently across his shoulders and back. ‘The devil’s work! The devil’s work!’ Foam poured out of her babbling mouth and she gestured to her daughter, who stood by the door: ‘Bring it!’ And in an instant her daughter had fetched a scorching-hot sheep’s shoulder blade. Keremet-apke cooled it with her saliva and then held it against the boy’s back.
Yerzhan was very quickly cured of his infernal fever. But he didn’t grow a single finger’s breadth.
He hated his granny for believing in all this antediluvian quackery, and most of all for that story of hers about little snot-nosed Gesar that she had told him back in his childhood. He hated her for the way she gossiped about him with Granny Sholpan for days at a time now, pondering over this life and wondering why he had been left a midget…
Aisulu’s father, Shaken, also became angry at the whispering of the two old women and one day in early winter he took Yerzhan to the city for an X-ray. The train travelled through the steppe and they passed the dead city that Uncle Shaken had showed Yerzhan a long time ago. And they passed the Dead Lake. But everything was covered under a fine layer of snow that shifted ceaselessly in the piercing steppe wind, until it gathered in drifts at the railway’s snow barriers.
They reached the city – a welter of people, cars and houses – and travelled through this dizzying, cramped space to a special clinic, where they led Yerzhan into a room and told him to undress and stand between the metal parts of a large device which Uncle Shaken called an X-ray machine. They switched off the light and made clicking noises.
Afterwards, Uncle Shaken and Yerzhan waited in the corridor until a man in a white coat and cap came out and showed Shaken black pages with bright spots on them.
‘Perfectly normal bones,’ the man said. ‘The bones of a child. Only there are no growth zones left…’
From the way that Uncle Shaken first argued with the man, then swore, then shouted at everyone, mentioning America and the Soviet Union all in one go, Yerzhan realized that nobody here would help him either. And he quietly hated these men in their doctor’s coats, and Uncle Shaken too, with his eternal pursuit of America.
Grandad Daulet, too, took his turn at trying to stretch his grandson’s bones. His method was an old folk one. Without telling the grannies or the younger generation, he took Yerzhan out into the steppe. There he wrapped him in a tarpaulin railway cloak, tied his hands carefully with a lasso, put a felt shawl under him, tied the other end of the lasso to his own waist and mounted his horse. He moved off at a trot that became faster and faster until it turned into a gallop across the sandy soil, dragging his grandson behind him, lying stretched out on the ground. Yerzhan’s eyes and mouth filled up with fine sand that still grated on his teeth in the evening and could only be extracted from his nose by sneezing. And his arms ached from the knots of the lasso. But even this procedure didn’t add any height to him.
At night Grandad shouted at Granny Ulbarsyn for everyone to hear because she had produced a good-for-nothing daughter, while the daughter, Yerzhan’s mother, sat in silence in the next room, crying over her son. As Yerzhan fell asleep, gazing up drowsily at his poor, dumb mother, he quietly hated Grandad for his swearing, and for the pointless daily torment, and for the sand that had crept into his crotch and in under his tailbone, and for the salt on his lips.
Even Kepek, who had become Yerzhan’s bitterest enemy ever since he saw his uncle riding on the donkey with Aisulu, tried to help his nephew. He lent Yerzhan the only iron bedstead in the house for a few nights. He tied Yerzhan’s hands to the head frame, tied his feet to the opposite end and left him there, crucified for the night. The boy dreamt that he was flying over the steppe like Gesar on his steed, and the feather grass was swept aside under the hooves, and the sky opened up to meet him. And instead of the sun, Aisulu’s face greeted him.
Yerzhan had abandoned his violin. But that winter he played on his dombra almost all night and day. During the day, when Grandad went to knock the snow off his points and rails, when Kepek took Aisulu to school and the women spun wool, Yerzhan was left alone, and he took the dombra and played the same song over and over again: ‘Aidan aru narsa zhok’ – ‘Nothing is there purer than the moon’. He played it to a thousand different melodies.
To Yerzhan this old song was about him. Every word of it, every sentence that followed another, was telling the story of his life. How sweetly it had all begun, as if the entire world consisted of the pure moon and the pure sun, of his Aisulu and him. But didn’t the song warn him? And how could he forget: the moon shines only at night and the sun shines only during the day. Only once a year do moon and sun appear together at the two sides of the steppe, like two huge, identical circles. Or had he just seen that in a dream?
Who cared about him? Everyone simply pretended, especially those two old grannies. But the others too: look at his grandad – his only real concern was keeping his points lubricated. Or Uncle Shaken, with his work shifts, during which he tried to catch up with and overtake America. Or Kepek and Aisulu, and the donkey as well! Yerzhan was the only one who didn’t belong among them, Yerzhan was the only one who didn’t fit into their lives at all…