The Dead Lake

Reading Sample

Yerzhan was born at the Kara-Shagan way station of the
East Kazakhstan Railway, into the family of his grandfather, Daulet, a trackman, one of those who tap wheels and brake shoes at night and during the day, following a phone call from a dispatcher, go out to switch the points so that some weary old freight train can wait while an express or passenger special like ours hurtles straight through the junction.
The column for ‘Father’ in his birth certificate had
remained blank, except for a thick stroke of the pen, and
the only entry, under ‘Mother’, was for Kanyshat, Daulet’s
daughter, who also lived at the way station (which everyone called a ‘spot’). The ‘spot’ consisted of two railway houses.
In one lived, in addition to Yerzhan, his grandfather and
mother, his grandmother, Ulbarsyn, and her younger son,
Yerzhan’s uncle, Kepek. The second way-station house
was occupied by the family of Grandad Daulet’s late
shift partner, Nurpeis: his widow, Granny Sholpan, her
son, Shaken, with his city bride, Baichichek, and their
daughter, Aisulu. Aisulu was a year younger than Yerzhan.
Nurpeis himself had fallen under a non-scheduled train.
And that was the entire population of Kara-Shagan,
if you didn’t count the fifty or so sheep, three donkeys,
two camels and the horse, Aigyr, all owned between the
two families. There was also the dog, Kapty. But he lived
with Aisulu most of the time, so Yerzhan didn’t think of
him as his own. Just as he didn’t take into account the
clutch of dusty chickens with a pair of loud-voiced cocks,
since they multiplied and decreased in numbers in such
a mysterious fashion that none of the Kara-Shaganites
ever knew how many of them there were.
Multiplying in a mysterious fashion is a relevant point
here, since in fact no one, except perhaps God, knew how
Yerzhan’s mother, Kanyshat, became pregnant with him
and by whom. Cursed by her father from that time on,
she never spoke a word about it to her ‘immaculately
conceived’ son. And all that Yerzhan knew – from what
Granny Ulbarsyn told him – was that at the age of sixteen
Kanyshat had run into the steppe after her silk scarf, which
had blown off. The steppe wind lured her on, further and
deeper, as if teasing her, on and on towards the sunset. And
what happened after that was so fantastic that Yerzhan
couldn’t make any sense of it. The sun was already sinking
when suddenly it soared back up into the sky, glowing
brightly. A tremor ran through the earth from the horizon.
A whistling wind sprang up out of nowhere, then faded
away for an instant, only to reverse its direction with a
mighty rush so sudden that the dust of the steppe swirled
up to the heavens in a black, hurtling tornado. And when
Kanyshat, more dead than alive, discovered that she was
at the bottom of a gully, there standing over her scratched
and bloody body was a creature who looked like an alien
from another planet, wearing a spacesuit.

Three months later, when she began to show, Daulet,
foaming with rage, brutally beat and cursed her for ever.
If Kepek and Shaken hadn’t pulled the old man away
from his half-dead daughter and dragged him to Granny
Sholpan’s house, neither Kanyshat nor her son would
have been long for this world.
Since that day Kanyshat hadn’t spoken a word.