We got carried away by our travellers’ tales and in the meantime evening fell. What words can convey that melancholy yearning of evening in the steppe, with a solitary train travelling through it? How can I explain that extraordinarily faint song of the air passing through a straw? I tried to recall the poem ‘In the Carriage’ – I think it’s by Innokentii Annensky – which expresses these feelings more accurately than anything else:
But the stripes of the sunset, around which everything had frozen, quickly faded away and we were left in darkness, deliberately not switching on the light in the compartment. Yerzhan went out to smoke in the corridor and the old man who occupied the bottom bunk opposite me went off for a wash at the other end of the carriage. He returned, muttering a few words, and immediately stretched out once more, turning his face away to the wall.
Yerzhan finished his smoke and came back in again, but he didn’t want to talk, or so it seemed to me. I was still in a strange lethargic state after the steppe sunset and the poem retrieved from my subconscious.
I went out into the corridor too and stood there for a while, looking at the solid darkness of the open expanse. Then I hastily washed in the toilet and went back to the compartment, to find both of my travelling companions snoring.
I made up my own bed and lay down, but sleep simply wouldn’t come.
The daytime steppe, with its endless poles and wires, rose up before me in a vision of infinite musical staves with bars and notes. I tried to read the music, to understand the meaning. But I couldn’t. Then I imagined how this story might end, keeping the corner of my eye on the upper bunk, where the twenty-seven-year-old boy lay curled up in a tight ball. Well, he hadn’t lied to me, had he? I’d seen his passport, and in the final analysis, even if he was a wunderkind, he couldn’t be a wunderkind in everything – playing the violin like a god, and telling the story of his life like a traditional steppe bard, and deceiving me, like an experienced card sharp or an actor. It was too much to fit in one diminutive body; it couldn’t all be a confidence trick.
So what had taken place in the time between it happening and the present day – or rather, night – in which I simply couldn’t get to sleep?
Like our train following its tracks across the steppe, I tried to trace out the line from what I had heard to what I didn’t know.
Aisulu grew taller and taller. She was already almost the same height as Kepek. And yet she didn’t seem to notice that Yerzhan had stopped growing, that he barely reached up to her shoulder. After school she ran to tell him about her progress, about how today she had played a piece on the violin that Yerzhan used to play three years ago. And the way she ignored what was happening to Yerzhan infuriated him most of all. He didn’t listen to her, he just lay there, staring fixedly at the white ceiling. He didn’t get up off Kepek’s bed, in order not to look ludicrously small beside her – and she didn’t notice. Or she pretended not to.
How could Yerzhan know that she cried at night too, tucked up in bed with her head under the sheets, that she was dreaming of qualifying as a doctor and finding a cure that would stretch out her Yerzhan.
Yerzhan rarely slept at night now, and it wasn’t as if he caught up during the day – no, sleep simply wouldn’t come to his eyes. He tossed and turned from one side to the other, caught in the same circle of burdensome thoughts that were impossible either to control or to accept. A strange, indeterminate music that had lost its bearings between the dombra and the violin was sawing away inside him.
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…
Yerzhan had never forgotten this ancient tale. He of course knew who the Kara-Choton in his life was – Kepek. So at night he tried to guess who resembled the terrible demon Lubsan. Grandad Daulet? But his wife was Granny Ulbarsyn. She couldn’t possibly be in love with Yerzhan. And Petko didn’t fit either, because he didn’t have any wife at all. Uncle Shaken? Could Baichichek be Tumen Djergalan? And then would he have to kill Shaken? The pieces didn’t fit. But Yerzhan was convinced that this story, like those ancient songs he played out in his head, was about him. He had to solve the mystery that had sunk its claws into his body and soul.
‘The Zone! The Zone! That’s the terrible demon Lubsan.’ He suddenly sat up straight in bed. The Zone had taken him captive, the Zone had given him the draught of forgetfulness to drink, and until he reached the Dead Lake – the same Dead Lake in which he had once bathed – he would never be freed from this enchantment. Didn’t the story say that there, by the Dead Lake, Tengri would free him of the enchantment and show him his own reflection and the reflection of the magical steed on which he had galloped throughout his childhood?
Yerzhan made up his mind.
Day after day that late autumn when Aisulu rode to school alone, when Grandad was sleeping after his night shift and Kepek had gone off to replace either Shaken, away from home because of his work, at Baichichek’s house, or his father, Daulet, in the siding, when the old women were warming their bones in front of the house in the last sun, Yerzhan mounted the horse and galloped across the steppe towards the gullies and pastureland where the Zone began. He knew the way. How often had he come this way as a boy with Kepek or Shaken? He followed the dried-up riverbed until he reached the open space of the Zone.
Yerzhan entered the Zone gradually, bit by bit. After all, the fear, that lay in waiting at his hamstrings and could rise up at any moment through the heavy weight in his stomach to his throat, was invincible, it pulsed in his blood, in his very breath. But day after day his determination led him on ever further.
That year the autumn was long and sunny. Yerzhan galloped on and on beyond the Dead City that he had once visited with Uncle Shaken, on along the dry, red riverbed. He discovered gigantic craters of churned-up steppe, as if the moon had decided to observe her own reflection, like him, in order to free herself of an enchantment. He saw strange structures jutting out of the fused earth like limbs of uncanny beings. And still deeper inside the Zone, a concrete wall stood in the middle of the wide expanse, a charred elm tree and black birds imprinted on it. Were they drawings? Or a real tree and real birds stamped into the wall? Yerzhan didn’t stop. He galloped on further and further across this hell on earth.