Perhaps it was these conversations, or perhaps it was Yerzhan’s persistent fear of the Zone, or perhaps the sight of the dead town was the trigger, but from the day Yerzhan saw the goose and the ruins in the steppe, he dreamt about the imminent third world war over and over again. It usually happened out of the blue. Little planes appeared in a calm sky and attacked an American bomber. Or sometimes there was a night sky and stars chased around in all directions. But at the end the sky had always turned leaden-grey. A loud boom swept across the land, the cattle howled and a bright light lit up the world. When it dispersed, a giant poisonous mushroom loomed over the earth like a djinn.
Shaken carried on like the radio: ‘And the earth is the only thing we don’t have to fear – there is no deception. As black as a mother in mourning, she will embrace everyone and take them into her barren and inflamed womb, which gave birth to them…’
‘We are travellers, and the sky above us is full of enemy planes.’
As Yerzhan sank into sleep, he realized that Grandad Daulet and Uncle Shaken still hadn’t finished discussing the imminent arrival of the third world war.
The train continued on across the endless Kazakh steppe, and the wires with their kestrels and jays, larks and rollers, and God only knows what other kinds of airborne wildlife, drifted after it from pole to pole, from pole to pole, like the notes of transcendental music shifting from beat to beat, from beat to beat. In a talkative mood now, my new companion had abandoned his commercial responsibilities and reached an understanding with the conductor that he was allowed to travel with me to his distant Semey. Life in the train and the carriage carried on as usual, with more and more new vendors, all of them women, selling camel wool, dried fish or simply pellets of dried sour milk. And in addition, they now occasionally offered picture postcards of naked, busty girls and bottles of the local beer, warm and frothy like urine. The old Kazakh in my compartment woke up but didn’t turn towards us; he carried on grunting and wheezing, lying on his side, obviously listening with half an ear to what Yerzhan told me about his life.
We drank a glass of railway tea each – a favour from the conductor, who had acquired an extra cash-in-hand passenger. Then Yerzhan carried on with his story.
The boy progressed rapidly in his studies, not by the day, but by the hour, and not only in music, playing études by Kreutzer, Mazas and Rode before summer came, but also in the Russian language, albeit with a certain Bulgarian flavour, which had stayed with him to the present. Every now and then he would put in ‘What do you think?’, as if he were testing his listener’s response. Although Kepek had noticed that Petko and Yerzhan could now manage perfectly well without his irrelevant and erratic translation, the uncle still contrived to interfere here and there. He held out his snotty handkerchief to his nephew and told him to put it under his chin – ‘Pedo taught you to do that, didn’t he?’ – and grabbed the bow out of Yerzhan’s hands during a break and tore off a snapped hair with special zeal. In any case, he never left his nephew alone with Petko in the trailer of the steppe Mobile Construction Unit.
The first phrases Yerzhan learnt in Russian were Petko’s musical exclamations: ‘Upper bow! Move the bow down! Third finger! Second string! Louder! Smooth movement!’ He dreamt these phrases, together with the sounds of the violin in different-coloured, rounded notes. His dreams had never been so jolly before. The notes walked about like little men. This one was fat and pompous, with a huge pot belly, while these minced along on skinny legs. And they fused together into bright pictures, like what happened when Yerzhan deliberately pressed on his eyes and multicoloured cabbages started blossoming under his fists. During the day he wanted to share these pictures that bloomed in his vision each night with his little girlfriend, Aisulu. So he stole up on her from behind and pressed her eyeballs in really firmly, intoning in a language she didn’t understand, ‘Whatnoteisthat? Sharpersound! Fingersfingersfingers! Where’sthebow? Nearerthebridge!’
On the long journey to the lessons, Yerzhan often asked his uncle, who had served in the Soviet Army, about this word or that in Russian, learning it off by heart, just in case. ‘You’re farting out of your arse!’ Kepek taught the boy when he warmed up by practising his scales. And when he spotted in Yerzhan’s pocket the metal box of rosin that Petko had put down just before they left, he asked, ‘Why did you fucking nick that?’ And so Yerzhan explained to Petko, ‘I fucking nicked this,’ as he returned the rosin and exclaimed, ‘You’re just farting out of your arse,’ as he was asked to start the lesson with scales. Petko gazed at the boy admiringly, choking on his laughter as he repeated, ‘You really take the biscuit, kid!’
Needless to say, the phrase was etched into Yerzhan’s mind as the highest and most cheerful praise possible, and he patted his Aisulu on the back in exactly the same way: ‘You really take the biscuit, kid!’
‘Petko’s no fool,’ Shaken told the family after supper. He had taken Yerzhan to his violin lesson that day. After all, it was him who had bought the boy the violin, not Kepek. But instead of a lesson, Yerzhan was told to go away while Shaken chatted with Petko for over three hours. ‘Petko graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire’ – yet another incomprehensible word for Yerzhan’s Russian musical vocabulary – Shaken continued to explain, ‘where he studied with Oistrakh himself.’ ‘Oi, strakh!’ – ‘Oh, terror!’ in Russian – was what the city bride Baichichek cried out whenever she was frightened, and now too she seized the chance to spit and exclaim, ‘Oi, strakh!’ ‘He’s no hotchpotch!’ Shaken repeated, although he hadn’t discovered how Petko had come to work at a Mobile Construction Unit just seven kilometres away from Kara-Shagan.
On their next trip to the lesson, Kepek merely gestured dismissively: ‘Shaken knows fuck all!’ Then he added, ‘I, on the other hand, do know!’ But then he fell silent and didn’t reveal how Petko, whose name he couldn’t even say properly, calling him ‘Pedo, Pedo’ all the time, had ended up here, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe.
One thing the Mobile Construction Unit had, however, and that was a shower. Even Grandad Daulet, who was secretly still peeved with the boy for betraying the dombra for the violin, decided to make the journey to a music lesson when he heard about the shower. Sweat flowed down his wrinkled neck and he gave off a sour smell as he rode towards the unit in the sweltering sun. Yerzhan sat behind him on the horse. Petko greeted them. He had combed his hair. He had tidied the trailer. The old man disappeared with his grandson behind the tarpaulin curtain. There Grandad massaged his own head with so much water and soap that it splashed everywhere and into Yerzhan’s eyes too. But despite that, suddenly the boy saw the brown, wrinkled sac of Grandad’s testicles peep out of the drawers which the old man had not taken off, even in the shower. ‘Grandad, why have you got two balls?’ Embarrassed, Daulet swiftly rearranged his clothing. ‘Well, you see…’ For a moment he hesitated, thinking about the question, then he said, ‘I’ve got two children, that’s why I’ve got two balls.’
‘So has Shaken only got one, then?’ the boy exclaimed in surprise. ‘And does that mean Kepek hasn’t got any?’
To these questions, however, Grandad couldn’t think of a reply, so he merely shrugged his shoulders and grinned.