And there, on the railway, where the telegraph poles raced backwards, Grandad and Tolegen waved their hands in the direction of the plain with the barbed wire, and Yerzhan again heard that clangorous, forgotten sound: Zone.
Once more, the buzzing gadfly began to circle above his consciousness. In the night he dreamt about it as a swarm of musical notes. By the morning, however, it had turned into a huge insect, circling above his head, before shamelessly descending upon his nose.
The old men were already drinking their tea with milk powder, dipping the crust of the last unsold loaf in their cups. The train clattered along the frozen rails. The fierce cold of the steppe blew in through the wagon door, which stood slightly ajar. But suddenly the shadows in the wagon shifted abruptly, as if pushed aside by the huge hairy legs of the fly on Yerzhan’s nose. A din louder than its buzzing, worse than the rumble of the wagon and the empty metal bread boxes followed, penetrating the eardrums of the men and the boy. The wagon began to dance. The bread boxes began to dance. The old men disappeared through the open door. The fly made the ground under Yerzhan’s feet spin. Then it dragged him into a rumbling darkness.
The Zone! That’s how Yerzhan remembered that day, when the wagons toppled off the track and lay in the steppe. Eventually, a blood-drenched Grandad Daulet and Uncle Tolegen saved Yerzhan from darkness and the hairy fly’s legs. They wrapped him in sheepskin while crying their miserly old men’s tears.
So Yerzhan and his grandfather never made it to Semey. The boy was clearly not meant to learn from the great bard masters. They rode back to Kara-Shagan on a trolley that looked like a small locomotive. The steppe appeared sombre, just like the faces of the people. Leaden clouds swept across the sky without rain or snow. Hollow clouds, neither resounding with thunder nor flashing with lightning. It was strange how quickly these clouds raced across the sky when the air on the ground was so stagnant.
The next day they arrived home empty-handed, without gifts from the city. The people on the trolley gave them a few loaves of railway bread and a bag of Russian potatoes, before heading further into the steppe on their incomprehensible business. Several days passed before the sky brightened. No one went outside, except for Grandad Daulet, who had to attend to a rare passing train. They even peed into a copper bowl, which a swearing and cursing Kepek occasionally emptied out of the window.
Their urine – and especially Yerzhan’s – turned red, as if from shame. The women, as usual, chattered about the end of the world. Grandad Daulet, when he wasn’t asleep, spun the little dial on his radio, catching a squeak, a whistle, a hiss and some strange speech about an explosion.
They sat at home idly and didn’t even let the boy play music. But eventually the two families gathered and Grandad Daulet slaughtered a ram. They cooked it, put on their festive clothes and ate the animal. After the feast, the old man released a mighty burp. He picked up one of the ram’s bones and placed it on the city bride Baichichek’s knees. ‘Now show me,’ he challenged Shaken, ‘that you’re still a bold young fellow!’ Shaken rose from his seat and folded his hands behind his back. The old man tied them with a belt. Shaken walked up to his wife and, keeping his knees locked, bent down and grabbed the bone with his teeth. Everyone whooped with excitement. Afterwards Kepek lifted the bone from the knees of his silent sister, Kanyshat. And finally they placed the bone on the knees of three-year-old Aisulu and forced Yerzhan to bend for it. Both families cheered him on. Yerzhan had eaten a lot of dry meat that day and just as his teeth grabbed the bone, a deafening fart shook the house. Oh, how they laughed!
‘A bomb!’ Grandad Daulet yelled from beneath his wrinkles.
‘Atomic!’ Shaken, the scientist, added. ‘We’ll not only catch up with the Americans, we will surpass them!’
Kepek didn’t pass up his chance for a witticism: ‘The rocket’s ready for take-off!’
And that’s how they handled that explosion.
Yerzhan was a big boy now. And so when the summer came he was allowed to accompany Shaken to graze the herd. They went to the same river course where Grandad had once played the dombra for the boy. There the grass was still green. They tethered the horse to the base of a bush and stretched out on the ground, in the hope of feeling the water’s coolness in the earth. The cattle wandered across the fresh expanse, unscorched by the sun. A moist scent hovered over the wide gully. After the naked sun of the steppe, fierce even in the mornings, the shade of the tamarisk and the saksaul bushes cooled the drops of sticky sweat on Uncle Shaken’s and Yerzhan’s hot faces. The dog, Kapty, ran about with his flame-hot tongue dangling, jostling the scattering herd back into a manageable bunch.
Eventually they left the herd to Kapty’s enthusiastic supervision and mounted the horse and galloped downstream towards the steppe surrounded by barbed wire. Uncle Shaken clearly knew the way, and the gullies and ravines brought them to the Zone that had tormented Yerzhan’s boyish curiosity like a gadfly for all these years. Sitting behind Uncle Shaken, he gazed around eagerly, but the steppe looked just like the steppe: a small sun, as sharp as a nail, in a boundless, weary sky, scorched grassy stubble and stale, motionless air droning between them. Except that the earth here was a bit redder and the layer of dust under the horse’s hooves was a bit thicker than usual.
They galloped for a long time. Shaken didn’t speak, as if he was preoccupied listening to the sounds of the steppe. It wasn’t until the sun appeared behind their backs that he suddenly said, ‘Look, the goose…’ Yerzhan leant out to the side, expecting to see wildlife, and maybe a lake. But ahead of them, stretching its concrete neck up out of the ground, stood a strange building. It looked like the ones Grandad had called ‘elevators’ when they were on Tolegen’s train. In the distance Yerzhan could see other dark shapes.
As they came closer, the ‘goose’ appeared more like a crane, an immense concrete block half-crumpled, as if it had melted and run on one side. The boy gaped wide-eyed, but Uncle Shaken didn’t linger here. He set the horse ambling towards the other structures. And soon Yerzhan could see them clearly: they were ruined houses.
The boy knew the ruins of Kazakh nomad halts and he had also seen graves in the steppe. They were rounded, as if time and nature had taken pity on them, carving away their corners and ledges bit by bit. The buildings here, on the other hand, seemed to have been casually smashed. Frames protruded at random angles through walls, walls jutted through roofs, roofs thrust down onto foundations. Yerzhan was terrified. Granny Ulbarsyn’s end of the world had materialized in front of his eyes.
‘Has Aisulu seen this?’ he asked Uncle Shaken fearfully. The man shook his head. ‘If we don’t simply catch up with the Americans and then overtake them,’ he added in his usual manner, ‘the whole world will look like this!’
In the evenings, Grandad Daulet and Uncle Shaken often discussed the third world war that Shaken prepared for so assiduously at his work, while Yerzhan tried to fall asleep. But Uncle Shaken spoke loudly, broadcasting incomprehensible words to the world as if through a megaphone: ‘The panic of pan-Americanism’, ‘The end of the world is proclaimed in this way’ and ‘Bombs will descend onto the earth, as if the fire of hell is poured forth’.