Once that was done, she asked him to take off his underpants. She searched for the nits between the seams and clicked them to death between her fingernails. But Yerzhan could no longer wait. He ran off bare-bottomed to Aisulu behind her house. There they took turns to contemplate his tiny, wrinkly willy and compared it to snot-nosed little Aisulu’s enviable lack of any such item.
The boy also kept a close eye on his lazy uncle, Kepek, just in case he might try to bully his nephew. Kepek, however, spent most of his days sprawled on the only bedstead in the house, while at night-time he took his ageing father’s place at the points or walked round the night trains with the family hammer.
Sometimes Kepek came home in the early morning rip-roaring drunk and turned the whole house upside down without any rhyme or reason, swearing and cursing. Granny Ulbarsyn’s gasping and sighing woke Yerzhan up. And he was prepared for a sly beating from his own flesh and blood. But his uncle just shouted that he was going to leave this place for ever, that he was sick and tired of everything here, fuck this rotten life to hell! And then he leapt up onto his father’s grey horse and galloped off into the vast steppe just as the darkness was dispersing. And Kepek’s voice and his presence and his anger dispersed with it.
Granny Ulbarsyn’s story wasn’t the only thing that had sunk deep into Yerzhan’s heart. Grandad’s dombra-playing stayed with him too. When no one was looking the boy took the instrument down from its nail high up on the wall. And while his grandfather tapped with the hammer on railway carriages, Yerzhan strummed the dombra secretly, imitating the old man’s knitted brows and hoarse voice. It didn’t take long before he picked out a few familiar melodies and then, with the keen eye he used to keep watch on Uncle Kepek’s behaviour, he followed and memorized his grandad’s finger movements. And the next day, when Daulet wasn’t there and Granny Ulbarsyn was visiting Granny Sholpan’s house, the boy zealously repeated the same run of the fingers. Very quickly and inconspicuously he learnt almost all Grandad’s repertoire. But it wasn’t Grandad who caught him at it, and not even Granny Ulbarsyn. It was Kepek, who wandered into the wrong room yet again in a drunken state. How fervently he kissed every one of his little nephew’s fingers, how he slavered over them with his drunken spittle. ‘Ah, sublime dark power! Ah, sublime dark sound!’ he exclaimed, swaying his shaggy head wildly. That evening a slightly more sober Kepek gathered both families in front of the house and called his three-year-old nephew out of the door. The uncle announced that a concert was about to commence. And Yerzhan gave his first ever public performance, sitting in the doorway of his house.
His grandad was so moved that he retuned the dombra on the spot, changing from right tuning to left, from lower to higher, so that the boy could more easily sing along. He also now tutored his grandson every evening, recalling old melodies and ancient songs forgotten since the days of his youth. Within three months Yerzhan mastered everything that his grandad had accumulated in his entire lifetime – both melodies and verses. The little boy imbibed the centuries-old wisdom of the Kazakh, preserved in song, just as the steppe earth soaks up the rains of spring, transforming it into green tamarisk and feather grass, into scarlet poppies and tulips.
‘We shall not merely catch up with the Americans, but overtake them!’ Shaken called out when he heard four-year-old Yerzhan sing this song. And the next time he returned from his shift, he didn’t bring back a glittering metal object but a new type of dombra. Only a thousand times shinier. He called it a ‘violin’.
This violin didn’t have three strings, but four. At first Yerzhan tired to play it like a dombra. A muted and thin sound emerged. Shaken reached into his briefcase and pulled out a stick that looked like a whip. He called it a ‘bow’. ‘I’ll show you!’ he said, and began rubbing the stick against the strings. But now they emitted no sound whatsoever. ‘Everything needs grease!’ Grandad Daulet laughed out loud and fetched some wax and coated the instrument and its bow. As the bow touched the strings the instrument began to squeak. ‘Give! Give!’ Yerzhan pulled the violin from his grandfather’s hands. That day he corroded everyone’s ears. Only drunken Uncle Kepek was so touched that he burst into tears and said, ‘I know a Bulgarian violinist! Pedo is his name. And true, he might be a paedo! But tomorrow we’ll go to him!’ In actual fact the Bulgarian violinist was called Petko, but Uncle Kepek didn’t know how to pronounce his name properly.
The next day Kepek seated his nephew on a camel and the two of them set off across the railway line into the steppe. They rode for a long time until they reached a place with cabin trailers, excavators and all sorts of heavy equipment. There was no railway nearby, and metal lay about in heaps. They dismounted from their camel, tethered it to a solitary tamarisk bush and went into one of the trailers. Inside the air was smoky. Men sat around playing a noisy game. Yerzhan started to cough and Kepek told Petko they’d wait outside for him. Petko was a short man with shifty eyes and a bleating voice. Kepek talked to him in a strange language that Yerzhan didn’t yet understand, but several times his uncle spoke a word that sounded like talany, ‘from the steppe’, and pointed to his nephew. Under Kepek’s vigilant gaze, Petko first felt Yerzhan’s hands, his upper arms and his shoulders, as if testing a stallion or a ram, then asked incomprehensible questions. Yerzhan tried to work out what he meant. It sounded like ‘In the sky is the dance of the blind man’. Was this stranger asking after a song? But his uncle came to his rescue. ‘What’s your name?’ Kepek translated Petko’s question. ‘Yerzhan,’ Yerzhan replied. Petko’s own trailer was at the end of the row. There the Bulgarian picked up Yerzhan’s violin, sniffed at it and ran his tongue over the hairs of the bow. He burst into laughter and laughed for a long time while he cleaned the strings and bow with a bitter-smelling substance. Then he fetched wood resin and rubbed it over the bow in large movements and small circles by turn.
When he eventually started playing the violin, the sound was so pure that Yerzhan instantly realized the meaning of Petko’s first comment: even a blind man would have seen the blue sky, the dance of the pure air, the clear sunlight, the snow-white clouds, the joyful birds.
It was his first lesson.
For the next four lessons Petko played his instrument without much explanation. Yerzhan copied the movements and memorized the black and white birds that sat on wires and were called ‘notes’ by Kepek. But Grandad Daulet soon became jealous. He recognized Yerzhan’s progress on this new instrument. His grandson should learn the dombra, not the violin, and he decided to take the boy to Semey to show him the real master bards. They boarded a freight wagon that supplied bread to the stations along the branch line. At each stop, Tolegen, Grandad’s friend, distributed frozen loaves. In the meantime, Daulet and Yerzhan lay on the thick sheepskin coats in the wagon’s depths and stared at the forest of hands reaching for the bread when the train stopped. And when the train moved they stared at the snow-covered steppe whirling around them like a huge millstone sprinkled with flour.