The fattened black devil with twisted horns crashed into the old woman at full tilt.
And that’s how Granny Ulbarsyn met her death.
They slaughtered the ram that very day – not, as had been expected, to cure old Granny Ulbarsyn, but for her funeral.
In all the fuss and commotion over Granny Ulbarsyn’s sudden death, of course they forgot to rub the warm blood on Yerzhan’s legs, so he remained under the spell. Well, never mind him, he was used to it already, but Grandad, who plunged his arms up to the elbows into the blood of that devil ram with twisted horns, took to his bed on the third day after his wife’s death. ‘I’m worn out!’ he told Shaken and Yerzhan in a meek little voice. So Shaken started taking Yerzhan with him to the railway tracks to check the points or, when their official railway phone rang, to switch them for a train that was waiting.
No, Grandad didn’t die that time. He got up after nine days plus nine, hale and hearty, and went to the old woman’s grave by foot to say a prayer.
The next to die was Granny Sholpan. It was in early spring. Perhaps the long winter, spent indoors, had already bored her to death, or she had pined away for her old friend Ulbarsyn. Anyway, when the snow melted and the green land began drying out, Granny Sholpan started taking long walks along the railway line in both directions. Aisulu accompanied her as often as possible and picked poppies to weave a wreath for herself, or dug up snowdrops and carried them home in her hands, like whitish-yellow candles protruding from soft clay lumps.
The day Granny Sholpan died, Aisulu was at school, Shaken was on his shift, Baichichek and Kanyshat were washing the laundry that had accumulated over the winter, Grandad was sleeping after switching a heavy goods train into the siding, where it had been standing motionless for more than two hours, and Yerzhan was sitting by the official phone, waiting for the express passenger train to pass at last and for Grandad to be told to switch the points to dispatch the goods train. On that sunny morning old Sholpan went for her walk alone. Poppies beat against her legs, but she walked on, in a black jacket and wide green dress, as tall and stately as a poplar tree, with her hands clasped behind her back. ‘That’s who Aisulu takes after!’ Yerzhan thought bitterly as he watched Granny Sholpan’s figure disappear.
And what happened next was this: the black cock, who had been ruffling the chickens’ feathers in the morning, assumed that Granny Sholpan had come out to feed him and ran after her. The unsuspecting old woman was walking along the railway line, when suddenly she saw a piece of bread roll lying by her feet. An unbeliever must have thrown it out of the window of a train – the locals wouldn’t throw bread away. Granny Sholpan bent down, picked up the bread and kissed it three times, then threw it under the stationary goods train, onto the railway embankment, thinking to herself that the train would leave and a bird would peck it up. But the cock, seeing the bread, rushed towards it. The old woman was taken by surprise. She never let her birds go near the railway; she always kept them in the yard behind the house. And now she was frightened that the chickens would follow the cock. So she glanced round at the stationary train, bent over and ducked under it. The cock was so absorbed in his pecking that he only shook his head from side to side and took no notice of her. ‘You’re sitting there like a broody hen with a chick under her wing. Better you should die!’ Granny Sholpan squawked, climbing out from under the wagon onto the embankment. Eventually, she managed to shoo off the cock all right, but just then, whistling and hooting like a blast from the Zone, the passenger express came flying up on the next line. And although there was enough space between the two trains – the one standing still and the one flying past – Granny Sholpan’s wide green satin dress billowed up in the swirling air and a footplate caught its hem.
The poor old woman was dragged along the embankment until the satin shredded into bloodstained tatters.
Strangely enough, only after the two old women were gone was Yerzhan able to tell the other members of the households apart. Until then they had formed one entity: if Granny Sholpan scolded him, then Granny Ulbarsyn slapped him. If his mother, Kanyshat, kneaded the dough, then city bride Baichichek moulded the bread rolls. But suddenly the solid units dissolved. As soon as Granny Sholpan was buried in the newly extended tomb – beside her husband, Nurpeis, and her old friend Ulbarsyn – city bride Baichichek began to persuade her husband, Shaken, to move to the city. After all, it had been his mother who kept him here, Baichichek argued. But now she was gone, so why should they waste their lives at this godforsaken way station? Shaken kept avoiding the conversation with promises that when he came home from his next shift, then they would sit down and talk things over. Or they should mark the anniversary of his mother’s death first and then decide. But according to Aisulu, Baichichek insisted more and more. And that was when Yerzhan realized that these two families had been united by the two old women, Ulbarsyn and Sholpan. And anyway, his mother had stopped going to Baichichek’s house altogether now, hadn’t she!
Yerzhan looked at his mother. She had always been a kind of ever-present absence for him. He had been raised by the entire ‘spot’, and above all by Grandad and the two grannies. Now that the two women were dead, Grandad had stopped swaggering and putting on airs, and a more distinct image of his mother arose in Yerzhan’s heart.
His mother never stopped working for a moment. She might be trimming the hair off a goatskin, then sprinkling it with warm water, rolling it up into a tube and setting it close to the stove. Then, while the skin was warming to release the hair roots more easily, she’d start spinning string out of the hair that she had just trimmed off. After finishing that job, she would knead dough. After wrapping the dough to help it rise, she would bring in the fresh milk, pour some into crocks to produce cream, and mix the rest with sour milk, so that by morning the mixture would have turned sour too. Then she would open the rolled-up goat skin and scrape it, and then, after drying it over the flames, immerse it in sour milk and leave it to soak for a few days. Towards evening she would darn torn clothes, boil up soup and make her bed. In short, she never stopped working from morning till night.
And if Yerzhan’s way of wasting away his life was to do nothing at all, his mother, Kanyshat, on the contrary, seemed to be scouring the life out of her body with incessant work.
One early summer’s day Yerzhan picked up his violin again. There was no one at home. And perhaps it was the thought of his mother, or the possible misery of Shaken’s family leaving, but most likely it was his longing for Aisulu that drove him back into the arms of music. He poured the immense grief that had been compressed in his puny body for so long into the instrument. But the grieving didn’t end and the music couldn’t hold all his accumulated feelings. When Shaken returned from his shift and found Yerzhan still playing, he remarked joyfully that Petko was back, he’d seen him in the city. Yerzhan decided that he would mount the horse to see his teacher the next day. But the next day his grandad galloped away on the horse about his own business, leaving Yerzhan to mind the phone. And the day after that Shaken galloped off on the horse to the school, to enquire about Aisulu’s examinations. After a few days Yerzhan was tired of waiting for Aigyr, so he mounted the donkey and trudged off in the direction of the Mobile Construction Unit. The violin was slung on his back like a rifle, and even though his shadow in front became shorter and shorter, for a moment or two he felt like a cowboy again.