The Dead Lake Read Online Free Page B

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.
     
    Grandad Daulet took a shine to Petko and in the early autumn he asked Kepek to invite the Bulgarian to join them on a fox hunt. Before Yerzhan was born, Daulet hadraised a golden eagle for hunting. It died after Yerzhan’s arrival and the hunting had stopped. Perhaps the old man felt that a new little eagle had hatched in his family and that the annual hunt in the reeds where Yerzhan was conceived had come to its natural end. Grandad Daulet now called his grandson a little eagle.
    And so, in honour of the little eagle and his teacher, Grandad had decided to take the entire male population of Kara-Shagan out on a fox hunt. Uncle Kepek told Yerzhan how easily they used to hunt with the dog and the eagle. Kapty drove the fox out of its den and the eagle grabbed it from the air. But this time Grandad wanted to take the fox alive – the old-fashioned way. The arrangement was this: as soon as Kapty sniffed out a she-fox and drove it from its den, and the animal ran off in any direction, cunningly trying to confuse its tracks to distract the dog from its still-weak cubs, Grandad Daulet, Petko and Yerzhan would start