What had I discovered for myself through his fate? What unpredictable and crooked experiment had I glanced and seen in him – this wunderkind Yerzhan, imprinted as a crumpled shadow alongside the grass, the trees and the birds in the concrete wall of the Zone, jutting out of the steppe?
And although I knew in my mind that the test site had been closed for a long time already, the same feeling that Yerzhan had repeatedly described to me – that fear lurking in the ankles – rose slowly up through my hollow insides to my stomach, then higher, and higher…
The strapping Kazakh woman knocked on the window and waved her newspaper containing a hot-smoked fish or a piece of bread, or pellets of dried sour milk. Yerzhan leant across, grabbed the two window catches with his strong musician’s fingers and opened it, asking, ‘What do you want?’
The rasping of the window as it opened and the sound of conversation set the old Kazakh below us stirring and he turned over from one side onto the other – to face us. Yerzhan hung down from his bunk, looking round at the noise, cast a quick glance at the man from his handsomely slanted squirrel’s or fox’s eyes and suddenly howled out, ‘Shaken!’ like an eagle screeching at a fox – and flung himself straight at him.
I was seriously frightened. My brain feverishly attempted to complete its line of steppe wires, its music on this stave, its chain reaction, its pursuit of a wolf or a she-fox. He’ll strangle him, he’ll strangle him, his hands are strong enough to do it – the thought suddenly exploded inside me – and while I was still soaring upwards on the blast wave of this explosion, Yerzhan and the old man were already embracing each other. The old man wept mute tears and the Kazakh woman outside the window froze just as she was, puzzled by what was going on in this carriage, in this compartment, and I didn’t understand much of it myself, except that an immense feeling of relief at not having witnessed a quarrel, or a murder, or any other kind of catastrophe, instantly filled me with its eternal, inexpressible, ineffable mystery, like the bright blue sky above the steppe.
An hour later our train halted for a break at an empty way station. Yerzhan and Shaken were still talking to each other in Kazakh, mostly sorrowfully, sighing and mentioning one name over and over again – Aisulu – and from the way they suddenly darted out of the compartment with all their belongings, including a violin slung over a shoulder, I realized that we were standing at Kara-Shagan. I glanced out of the window. Although from the two abandoned Soviet railway houses I could tell that it really was Kara-Shagan, there were no signs of life to be seen – no chickens running around under the single elm some distance away, no old man with a little flag, no hay laid in for the winter, not even a single little cowpat anywhere. Only two figures – one a stooped old man, the other an impetuous boy – moving away past these abandoned, uninhabited houses into the depths of the open plain.
And lit by the sun I could see five graves.
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NO 1
Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
‘It should be read.’ GUARDIAN
NO 2
Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal
Translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell
‘Understated power.’ FINANCIAL TIMES
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Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
‘A small masterpiece.’ TLS ………..
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Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
‘Inventive and deeply affecting.’ INDEPENDENT
NO 5
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Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson
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Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig
Translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis
‘Weird, creepy and ambiguous.’ GUARDIAN
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The Brothers by Asko Sahlberg
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
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The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul
Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
‘A brilliantly drawn character.’ TLS
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Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe
Translated from the Swiss German by Jamie Bulloch
‘Delicate and moving.’ INDEPENDENT ………..
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The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
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Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
‘Something miraculous.’ GUARDIAN
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Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall
Translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm
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The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
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The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik
Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin
‘One of the most important writers in Nordic contemporary literature.’ MORGENBLADET
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Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter