The Dead Lake

The world turned dark in front of Yerzhan’s eyes.

Dean Reed too had now been taken away from him. Why did Shaken bring this newspaper from the city? Why had he brought the television? On that television Dean Reed – his Dean Reed, Yerzhan’s Dean Reed – was once called ‘the Red Elvis’. Yerzhan had never heard of Elvis, and later they had shown Elvis himself, and it appeared that Dean Reed was a kind of fake, not the real thing. And now Shaken had taken away even this fake, counterfeit Dean Reed. Just as he had taken away Yerzhan’s height and his future, and his love, and his mother.

For a moment Shaken hesitated, then he set off towards his own house with his little suitcase…

Wait, wait! What if he loved Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat? And what if he had loved her all his life? Hadn’t Yerzhan’s grandad told him how he once tied up Shaken when he came back drunk from his shift at night and tried to climb in through Kanyshat’s window? It had all been put down to drunkenness at the time, but this wasn’t the first time Yerzhan had caught him at his mother’s window, was it? And that was why he simply refused to leave and take his city wife, Baichichek, back to the city she longed for.

Stop! That time by the Dead Lake, in the Zone, at Shaken’s test site, where he was catching up with and overtaking America, when the kids from the school were running about in gas masks, Shaken was the one who appeared in that Armed Forces Protective Suit – like an alien from another world! And hadn’t his granny Ulbarsyn always spoken about an alien when she recalled Yerzhan’s miraculous conception on the very outskirts of the Zone, in that very same area where the river with the dried-out bed lay?

Yerzhan dashed into the next room to his mother. She was sitting on the windowsill, maybe with nothing to do for the very first time, with her face half-turned towards the window, following Shaken with her eyes as he moved away. ‘Do you love him?’ Yerzhan asked, gasping out all his anger and all his confusion. His mother didn’t turn towards her son, but merely ran her finger over the glass. ‘Does he love you?’ Yerzhan blurted out helplessly. His mother unwove the plait on her head, shook her hair out and then wove her plait again, looking at her faint reflection in the windowpane. ‘Is he your husband?’ Yerzhan asked in a shaky voice, continuing his interrogation. His mother folded her arms across her chest. A thick silence filled the room. The naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling quivered. Immediately the fear lurking in Yerzhan’s ankles moved upwards along its usual path to his stomach, paused there as a cold, heavy weight and then slowly crept on up to his throat, and, after choking him for a moment, reached his lips, emerging as something that was neither a whisper, nor a wheeze, nor a convulsion: ‘Is he my father?’ A faint rumbling ran across the floor, the room started trembling and his mother carried on sitting on the windowsill in the way she had been sitting, doing nothing for the first time in her life, merely gazing out of the window towards yet another train or yet another explosion.

Yerzhan ran out of the room. Run, run, run, out into the open steppe, across the Zone and past the horizon, past the edge of the world… Run from this fear, from this truth, from this life… So his Aisulu, growing extravagantly like the wild grass under the windows, his poor, unhappy Aisulu… and suddenly, like the she-fox after the uluu kaltarys – the final, great turn – Yerzhan’s consciousness imploded in exhaustion.

Aisulu was dying alone in a ward in the municipal hospital. Her father had brought her here and then had immediately been called to the testing ground. Her mother had stayed with her for the first few days, but had just left to see her aged parents, who lived in Semey. Aisulu lay there alone in the ward with the white ceiling. But she didn’t see the white ceiling. She saw the steppe and the road from Kara-Shagan to school and back. There she was, riding on the donkey with her Yerzhan, who had disappeared now, and the donkey suddenly picked up a cabbage stalk that someone had thrown out of a passenger train. The donkey had swallowed it whole and choked and lashed out. And first Aisulu and then Yerzhan tumbled off. Yerzhan shouted at Aisulu and Aisulu grabbed the reins and Yerzhan put his arm up to the elbow into the donkey’s foaming mouth and pulled out the stalk. And then she took the scarf off her head, licked away the blood flowing along Yerzhan’s arm and bound the wound tightly.

A stalk, a huge stalk, had now got stuck inside Aisulu’s body and her organs were swelling, growing extravagantly, like the rest of her body.

She had admired Yerzhan, the way he played the violin, the way he studied and drew and sang Dean Reed, the way he walked into the Dead Lake, the way he was so protective of her… She had wanted to be his wife, to give him children as talented, brave and devoted as he was, but why had it happened to him and not to her? But what was this it? Hadn’t it happened to her as well? She was lying here, growing extravagantly on the outside and on the inside too, like the wild grass after the blasts, pregnant with her own incurable sickness, all alone in the entire, empty world.

Aisulu looked up again at the ceiling, which was turning bluish just as the last yellow ray of sunlight fell across it like a fox’s tail, and the fox cub that had brought her so much joy appeared before her eyes, the one that had crept out of their house unnoticed so many years ago. And Kapty bit it to death. How much weeping and wailing there had been that evening while Kepek buried the fluffy little body, only the size of a kitten. And each night that the mother fox could be heard howling for her dead baby, Kapty howled too, like he did before an atomic explosion.

And now Kapty had started howling in her immense, empty body.

A leaf struck against the hospital window and the sun fell behind the steppe.

A knock at the window woke me from my nightmares to the grey steppe morning. We stood at a way station. An inordinately tall Kazakh woman waved outside the window. She held a little parcel wrapped in newspaper. Yerzhan looked down at her, dangling his short legs. I was so delighted to see him alive and unhurt, as if something irreparable could have happened to him on the line along which the train of my thoughts had been running. But then, hadn’t it already happened? What had happened, though? I tried to link what he had told me with the images of my nightmares. I felt as confused as that she-fox out in the open steppe, unable to tell what was truth and what was invention. Where was the inescapable life in all this and where was the inexplicable eternity? Where was what he had lived through and where was what I had invented? Like a train in the steppe, like the consciousness of a Kazakh, like a revolutionary country’s impulsive surge into some kind of future, my story only kept hurtling on, further and further. Where was the invisible, virtual wall into which the fox pursued by Kazakh hunters crashes, to collapse in a helpless heap?

There he sat in front of me, a twenty-seven-year-old boy, stuck at the age of twelve, stuck in his twelve-year-old body. What was this all about? Was it time, an entire era of it, that had congealed in him, to be related to me through him, in a single gulp? What was he about, this little man from a big country that no longer existed, that had already lived out its time in an impossible pursuit of America?