The Dead Lake Read Online Free

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 anglesthrough 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’.
    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