Read Online The Railway by Hamid Ismailov - Free Book Online

water of life needed to save his sick son and heir.
    34 The suffix “Kori,” attached to a man’s name, indicates that he has memorised the entire Koran.
    35 An important, mainly Russian city in eastern Uzbekistan, named after the commanding officer of the Russian armies that conquered Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. In 1924 it was renamed Fergana. Oyimcha’s father had evidently built himself a stone house in an attempt to emulate the Europeanised lifestyle of the city’s élite; houses in the small towns and villages were usually built of clay.
    36 i.e. modern European carriages rather than traditional Central Asian ones.

8
    The post of head of police, which was always held by the sergeant-major – at present, the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder, who had gone blind in his old age after impiously kicking some flatbreads 39 that Rokhbar was selling illegally at the station was passed on from one generation to the next. Let me repeat this more clearly: the post of head of police, now held by Kara-Musayev the Younger – the elder son of Kara-Musayev the Elder was passed on by inheritance. In a word, the post was hereditary. Got it? If not, I’ve been wasting my breath, as Kara-Musayev would have put it, blathering away to a brick wall.
    Everything would have gone well, the life of Kara-Musayev the Younger would have continued swimmingly right up to his retirement, had it not been for the fact that his wife, the daughter of Kuchkar-Cheka, turned out to be barren. There was no one he did not take her to, no one who did not investigate her. Such an army of doctors, healers of every kind and the merely inquisitive examined the poor woman’s reproductive organs that, were the eyes of men endowed with even an ant-sized dose of fertilising power, the unhappy Kumri would quickly have brought forth a whole battalion of potential heirs for the post of head of police – which, as it happens, is just what she eventually did do, except that she bore them all to the wrong husband. Had these children been his, then Kara-Musayev the Younger would have had at least a little more right to the light-blue “Heroine-Mother” medal that he always wore on State Holidays – a medal confiscated from an unfortunate Kazakh girl at the bazaar whom he had once fined for some misdemeanour; it had been tied, along with coins from all over the world, to the end of one of her pigtails. But neither wearing this medal on his uniform, nor any number of non-fertilising male examinations of his wife’s non-conceiving womb were of the least help – and so Kara-Musayev decided to investigate his own role in the matter, to confirm by experimental means his own procreative ability.
    Among the female population of Gilas there were just two idiot-girls whose obedience to Kara-Musayev was unquestioning: one who yielded at home when she was drunk and one who yielded when she was intoxicated by the fresh air out in the maize fields where the young lads had all taken to grazing their cows – but the sergeant-major’s strategic savvy prompted him to decide that an experiment on either of them would hardly prove conclusive; and, in any case, heaven only knows whom or what these idiots might not give birth to. And so Kara-Musayev the Younger waited until the Sunday Kok-Terek Bazaar and then arrested a young Uighur woman for speculating in Indian tea – an activity she was engaging in for the first time, buying the tea from Samarkand Tadjiks and selling it on to Kazakhs from Sary-Agach. Threatening her with exile to Siberia, he ordered her to come to his office after lunch the following day, when even engine driver Akmolin would be asleep inside his diesel shunter.
    The following day, when only the sun was still out on the street, hallucinating in erratic spirals over the white-hot asphalt – into Kara-Musayev’s office came not one young woman but two. At first Kara-Musayev thought