The Gray Earth Read online

  Alas, I am not dreaming at all. The earth has caved in. A crater as big as a large yurt turned upside down has opened up. People crowd around it like a shrill swaying wall. Some people, including Brother Dshokonaj, dig with their bare hands where the entrance used to be, screaming the whole time. Dust rises as they scratch the dirt like dogs pawing the ground. All the tools are apparently buried in the rubble. Brother screams the same words over and over. His mouth is half open, and his thin lips bare his teeth, while the tip of his pink tongue pokes out every so often.

  At some point I can make out the teacher’s voice even though I cannot see the man himself. He orders the ten fastest students to run back and get our tools from the ditch. Boys from every class are charging off. Far more than ten have already left, but I take off, too, going full tilt.

  The distance seems endless, and when I finally arrive at the fresh pile of dark stony earth, other students are turning around to run back with empty hands. The tools are gone. Full of shame and fury, I try to run after them, faster than before. My face is soaked with sweat, and burning hot; stinging tears run down my cheeks, over my jaw, and into my collar in big drops, like round bugs of disgrace and misfortune. Panting and groaning, blinded by tears, deafened by the roar and rumble in my ears, and constricted by the drenched clothes that cling heavily to my body, I am still aware of what is going on around me. The caraganas, such a nuisance a moment ago, are falling behind as I make it to the barren tongue of the steppe between the lined-up rocks, only to see more boys pass me.

  I can sense my strength slipping away just as I stumble. I try to catch myself but I lose my balance and fall flat on my face, right on the hot steppe, which lies bright and bare beneath the blazing noon sun.

  Too weak to get up from the hot sand and gravel, I remain on the ground, waiting for someone to come and help me. But no one comes. I start to howl, and then eventually I get up and look around. There is no one around. They all must have passed me and arrived at the disastrous cellar, where the crowd has thickened and a frenzied effort is underway with the tools. The deafening noise is punctuated by the clanking and banging of steel and wood. Dust clouds billow into the sky.

  Back on my feet, I feel dizzy and decide to walk in the opposite direction, to wash the tears and dirt off my face and cool my confused head in the glacier water of the river. And so I trudge across the scree and drag myself through the shrubs. Suddenly the river’s bank is before me. Bending down and looking into the eddying current, I wonder what will happen if I just let myself drop into the water. You will drown, my mind tells me. The thought gives me such a fright that I jolt back and fall on my bottom. Instantly I feel a searing pain—my tailbone must have hit a rock. I can’t help but berate myself inwardly: Cowards like you trip over their own feet, I think. One disgrace after another. You moron!

  Slowly I stretch and wriggle back to the river’s edge. As soon as my head dips into the river, the cold and the power of the current straining at my neck make me scream. But I keep my head in the water, and when I open my eyes, its rocky bottom lies blurry below me. Dark grooves in the rocks look like writhing bodies struggling for air. I quickly pull my head from the water.

  Panting and gasping, I shake myself. Death has come close and touched my skin, cold as ice. I jump to shake it off and scream to free myself, trying to push Death back to where it cannot be seen or felt. And so I rear up and roar: E-eh-eej,

  You earthworm,

  Why is the slit of your mouth tied

  And the pipe of your neck throttled

  A-ah-aaj ...

  I allow myself to cry loudly, but it does nothing to calm me. Gripped by a growing anxiety, I tremble until my whole body twitches, suffocated and overwhelmed by a paralyzing fear.

  Some time later I find myself surrounded by a crowd of people. I remember neither faces nor bodies, only that they seem to grow tall one moment and wide the next. A hand grabs my arm and pulls me away. I recognize it as my sister’s. Then I see her teary twisted face and hear her quivering voice: “A lot of people have been crushed. Brother Dshokonaj will be sent to prison. And so will you if you don’t stop right now. Pull yourself together!”

  I buck and fight wildly. Through my tears I cry: “Oh Mother Earth, how we have wounded and humiliated you. I heard you groan with pain and I felt you shake with rage. I knew the quake was coming, yet I kept quiet. I am such an ass, such a tiny fart. Oh, oh, oh, why did I keep quiet? Because I was afraid of the people!”

  Then I sense Brother Galkaan close by as well. Brother and Sister both try to pull me away. Their efforts double my resistance—I tear myself away from their grip and scream for all I am worth: “Leave my big brother alone. He meant well and had no idea. The person responsible for the disaster is this one here!” I hammer my own chest with my fist. “Report him. Send him to prison. Have him shot. Where is Hollow Nose, Höjük Dshanggy’s son-of-a-bitch bloodthirsty son? Now he can drink blood. But if there’s going to be blood, it’s not because someone has a shaman inside pushing to come out. Nor is it because someone is dabbling with the spirits. Oh no. That’s no cause for blood. But that someone stayed silent instead of passing on the message from the spirits—that is cause for blood. He should have run and shouted, ‘All of you, come out quick, Mother Earth is angry and wants to quake!’ But he did not do that, and so he deserves a terrible death!”

  Later I find myself in the arms of the doctor. He is strong and he holds me so tight to his chest that I can barely breathe. He lets go only after he has forced me to sit on my bottom down in the dirt, and only then do I stop bucking. A piece of gauze is held under my nose. It smells sharp and good. I inhale and feel calm. Then I hear the clanking and banging and people’s voices again, but they no longer cry and scream. Later I see the crowd again, but they have moved into the distance, where they bustle beneath a cloud of dust as pale and light as a feather. I am overcome with exhaustion.

  “Lie down if you like,” says the doctor. It feels good to obey. Everything around me blurs and darkens. Where there used to be the sky, there is nothing ... a day without sky, I think before drifting away, only to come around in the hospital the following day.

  A STOVE GOES OUT

  “What is it?”

  “Severe shock to the nervous system.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “No.”

  It is Dügüj who asks and the doctor who answers. Breathing deeply and noisily, I pretend to be asleep. Big Brother must have sent her. The thought of Brother stabs my heart. What did things look like under the earth?

  Then it is the doctor’s turn to ask a few questions. Judging by Dügüj’s replies, it was not Brother who sent her. The disappointment hurts and terrifies me. What will become of my brother and me?

  Later the doctor comes in alone, looking stern with his white coat, his even more brilliant white cap, and the listening thing dangling on his chest. He tells me to eat and sleep a lot. And before he leaves, he adds, “If you feel like screaming, go right ahead. But pull the blanket over your head first.”

  After morning tea with butter-and-sugar flatbread, Sister Torlaa comes to visit. I am sitting up in my bed, holding the rubber ball the nurse brought earlier for me to play with. I have not played with it but I have enjoyed feeling the round soft ball against the tips of my fingers while I try to focus on one thought and one thought only: May Mother Earth be gentle with her children.

  Sister Torlaa creeps in on soft soles, sniffs the top of my head, and strokes my neck and back. I look at her questioningly, and she tries to look me in the eye but fails. Still, she manages to ask if I am the only one in here.

  “It looks like it.”

  “Have you been awake for long?”

  “Yes. I woke up when Dügüj and the doctor came in.”

  “Dügüj was here?!” Sister looks straight at me.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she want from you?”

  “I pretended to be asleep.”

  “What did she say to t
he doctor?”

  “She wanted to know if I was talking.”

  Sister’s anxiety is catching my attention. Quickly I ask the most important question: “What happened?”

  Torlaa starts, falters, stutters. Once she gets going, though, she can’t be stopped. Brother Galkaan is safe and sound, and so is everyone else related to us. Things could have been much, much worse. At times the whole fourth grade class was inside. If it had happened during one of those times . . .

  “How many were inside?” I press her. “Tell me.”

  “Four,” she says almost inaudibly.

  “Are they all injured?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No one’s injured? Are they all . . . ?” I am close to screaming.

  She goes pale and says nothing. A little later she nods softly, as if to herself. All of a sudden I feel strangely calm. The unbearable ache I felt only moments earlier in my chest and my veins has vanished.

  “Where is Brother Dshokonaj?”

  “People are hiding him.”

  “Where? And why?”

  Sister hesitates. Then she whispers: “In the cellar under the school. But don’t tell anyone. They are afraid of the crushed students’ families.”

  “What about Arganak?”

  “Don’t say his name! He was in there too.”

  That bit of news surprises me and I think, well, at least ... Sister notices and interrupts: “It’s bad luck for Brother that the man who hatched the whole plot is gone.”

  “Will Brother have to go to prison?”

  “Probably. He has asked the District Administration to arrest him. But the dargas want to wait for the militia. The militia should be here sometime soon.”

  Sister has to leave when the nurse returns. While shooting fear into my heart and a blood-red, stinging liquid into my body, the nurse gives me details that Sister Torlaa kept from me. “Be grateful you’re not lying behind that wall,” she says, angrily knocking aside the fingers I have spread against her in my panic.

  “Do you prick those people behind the wall with an even bigger needle?” I ask once we have made peace.

  “Sure I do,” she says, full of importance. “Just earlier, I pumped the contents of a bottle this long and this big into each of their bellies.”

  “Into their bellies?” I am shocked. “Won’t that kill them?”

  “It probably would if they were alive. But they’ve been lying there stone cold and crushed black and blue like clobbered and skinned marmots.” She laughs out of a crooked mouth. Later she adds indifferently, “I hope the militia gets here before they turn green and start to stink.”

  I feel nauseous and decide never to let the woman give me another injection. Gone is the calm that had begun to spread inside me like a sunny autumn day or a view of the steppe. Instead I am hot with fever as I lie there trying to avert my eyes from the wall behind, which is a picture of horror. Death lies in ambush for me, coming closer and closer with his rattling breath.

  I remind myself of the verse Mother taught us to combat fear. Om dere düd dere düd suuhaa! From the bottom of my heart I whisper it three, seven, twenty-one times, and each time I reach twenty-one, I blow at the area around my heart. This seems to help.

  “Dshenggej!” I say first. And then, “Pürwü! Come and stand by me. I am scared.” My voice sounds depressingly thin and shaky. But it helps.

  Dsher dsherni eeleen

  Dshedi gök börüm

  Next I try to invoke the Seven Gray Wolves who roam different parts of the world. I am not sure how and why I know of them, but I sense that they exist. I know that if they were to show up, the evil spirit terrifying me would take to its heels. This also helps.

  The fear reaching for me is so powerful that I feel compelled to call upon more and more powerful beings to fight it. As I am doing so, the door opens and Brother Galkaan slips in. At this moment he is no longer the quiet slight boy who is barely half a head taller than me and only a tiny bit stronger. He now embodies the powerful good spirit I have been trying to invoke; he is the savior I was calling for. I pour my heart out to him.

  Quietly he listens and then he says, “Nonsense. The room behind the wall is the doctor’s office. There’s nothing in there. The dead bodies are kept in the vet’s camel shed, where Gök was hiding.”

  This is a relief. But then I hear something that cancels out the relief and weighs heavily on my soul. The fathers and other relatives of the crushed students have arrived and are looking for the principal.

  At that moment we hear a droning. “A car!” we shout as if with one voice and dash to the window. A truck that looks like nothing we have ever seen is arriving. A doctor is squatting next to some bundled-up person on its flatbed. Later we will learn that the truck is a half-ton, and that the bundled-up man is a higher-up doctor. That he would come for the dead later gives everyone much to think about. The truck pulls up to the shed and stops close to the door where it emits two, three, four thunderous blasts from the front end and surging clouds of blue-black smoke from the rear end before falling silent. The passenger door opens, and a militiaman emerges in a uniform decorated with red piping and yellow stripes. Bellowing and waving his hands, he stops the people who come running from all sides. Then two men jump off the back of his truck and disappear into the camel shed. The militiaman follows along behind them, after yelling vague threats in loud haphazard Mongolian at all the onlookers around him.

  They take a long time. Slowly but inexorably people inch closer. They reach the truck and the shed just as the three men reappear. The crowd—by now it numbers several dozen, mostly students—seem prepared to retreat, but they stay where they are when the militiaman ignores them.

  The truck leaves then, only to return some time later. When it does, I am alone, but glued to the window. Galkaan has left to find out how things are going with Brother Dshokonaj. This time the flatbed is covered with people. They unload four longish, light-colored wooden boxes, one of them considerably longer than the other three. As soon as I see them, I feel in my bones what they are for, in spite of the fact that I have never heard of dead people being put into boxes instead of bags.

  Terrified, I watch what is happening only a gunshot away. I can’t take my eyes off the boxes. They stand in a row, their lids open like maws craving human flesh, hair, and bones. The fear that Brother Galkaan’s protective presence had quelled momentarily returns to life with full force. I struggle feverishly but in vain to find support wherever my gaze happens to land. But soon I am engaged in a bitter fight with what feels like claws throttling my throat.

  In each of my pores

  A gnarly, hungry bird of prey

  Is nesting and watching for lost souls.

  Seizing, hacking, devouring

  Any that dare appear.

  One by one, the boxes disappear into the shed. When they reappear, they are visibly heavier. Men load them back on the truck and jump off.

  The driver has a hard time breathing life into his truck. He gets out from behind the wheel and jabs a bent iron rod into the mouth of the boxy creature. Finally, provoked back to life, the truck bursts into a furious roar. It exhales an oily leaden smoke that hangs in the air like a filthy curtain and takes a long time to dissipate. By then the shed has been deserted, and stands out tall and lonely against the steppe amid resounding silence and the warmth of early summer.

  Meanwhile, I have been rummaging inside me for words that would fit my mouth and could be hurled like rocks at those beings that, like wind or light, cannot be seen but can be felt and heard; those beings that are lying in ambush for me.

  Go away, go away

  You dreadful creatures.

  Follow the path

  Of the dust and the roar,

  Of the bodies you belong to.

  I stretch and turn myself inside out while I continue to listen and wait. Now all that is left to me is a mild breeze with both the fragrance and the stench of this late-summer afternoon. The souls that have left the
dead bodies; the flickering lights that have accompanied the souls; and perhaps also the pinching, burning winds; all seem to hurry along behind the cloud of red-hot dust that disappears with the truck beyond the Sholuk steppe. For now they seem to have left me. Then a numbing tiredness spreads to the tips of my hands and toes, and I burrow into my bed.

  A heavy sleep overwhelms me so much so that I am almost relieved to be awakened. The nurse is bending over me. When I realize she is holding the syringe, I am struck with panic. In the dim light of the setting sun the syringe looks as long as a spear and as thick as an arm, and seems to have a blood-red glass belly. Screaming, crying, and sweating, I take up another battle.

  First the woman tries to break my resistance with force. But when she sees how determined I am to defend myself, she gives up tormenting me and says she will report me to the doctor. Just as she is about to leave me, shadows glide across the window and I hear voices. She opens the door, and I can see more clearly and hear the shuffle of feet.

  Instantly I feel alarmed, and my heart pounds in my throat. Will they take me away? If so, they must have already put Brother Dshokonaj in the truck. Have they restrained him? Will they restrain me? Samdar said when he got arrested, they put around his wrists and ankles metal chains that were so tight they would have cut into his flesh if he had tried to break free. Ürenek, on the other hand, was taken away without being restrained.

  Later I tell myself that if the militiaman had been among the shadows, he first would have had to return with his truck, and I never heard that. And then he almost surely would have marched in and snatched me the way a hawk snatches a sparrow. But where is my big brother, and what is happening to him? Has he been taken away already, or is he still in hiding in the school prison, terrified that he will be shot, beaten, or stabbed to death? Why have Torlaa and Galkaan not returned? They have been gone a long time.