День, когда рухнул мир - [14]

We returned home late at night and my son, tired out from the day, sweetly slept in my arms, mumbling from time to time, „Grandfather… little hare… Grandfather… little hare, isn’t it?“ I gathered that this was a snatch of his unfinished conversation with his grandfather.

Eleven years later, my son and I would stand at the graveside of Kant in the centre of the town previously known as Konigsberg, on whose streets a paratrooper, my father, had been wounded. And now his grandson, my son, is serving as a frontier guard in a Baltic Military District.

It was a cold, damp day and drizzling drearily. We stood by Kant’s grave and my son suddenly said, „Dad, do you remember when I was in my first year at school and there was a huge underground explosion?“

„When you saved us?“ I said smiling.

„Yes, I remember how I ran from school and was afraid I’d be too late. I thought I wouldn’t make it and you would all be killed and the house would be destroyed. Yes, I remember. I dragged Markhaba down the stairs. She was little then, terrified, and she kept mumbling, ‘Mum, Mum’…“

„What made him remember that?“ I thought when we were passing the monument to Schiller near the drama theatre’. The monument… it had been spared although the city had been bombed so much that nothing had been left standing. A war is a war. I suppose it has its own laws…

„Yes, and that day when we went to see grandfather he took me to see his old friend! They had both fought at Konigsberg and for some reason, they started to talk about it, recalling the battle. Grandfather was an excellent raconteur. He described Konigsberg so perfectly that I was overwhelmed when I arrived here because his description was so exact. And did you know that he lay near the cathedral by Kant’s grave for half a day? That’s when he was wounded and heavily concussed. Thanks for bringing me here.“

My son’s words perturbed me considerably.

„I’m glad that we could be here together,“ I said.

And then I remembered that while he was alive, my father often dreamt of showing us Konigsberg, or Kaliningrad as it is now called. „You’ll see the kind of city it is,“ he would say. „Those castles which have miraculously survived are a real wonder! People have settled there for centuries. They knew how to build, how to live. It’s enviable how well they do many things. Let’s take cows for example. Do you know how much milk the Germans manage to get from their cows? We must go, we certainly must go there. You’ll see the places where I spilled my blood.“

His dream never came true. At fifty-eight he died from an extensive heart attack.

And here we are, his grandson and his son, wandering around the town, over those stones where my father’s tarpaulin boots had stepped, the grandfather of my son.

The memory of three generations of Kazakhs has flowed into one in a strange European city, far from our Asian steppes and mountains.

In the evening of the fourth of August I was to fly to Semipalatinsk. All the matters I had to have settled by the fourth were done and on my desk calendar, opposite each item, was a thick, red tick.

I automatically turned over the page and gasped.

5th AUGUST. FRIDAY.

Twenty-five years ago (1963) in Moscow, the representatives of the Government of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain signed a Treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in space and under water. More than one hundred governments were party to this treaty.

To my mind, this was an extraordinary anniversary, perhaps the most important date to be commemorated this year, an event of universal magnitude, a reminder that on that day men could feel like human beings instead of murderers. The Treaty was worthy of people and people were worthy of the Treaty.

5th AUGUST. COMMEMORATION OF MY FATHER.

In the morning when I arrived in Semipalatinsk, the first thing I did was to rush to a newspaper kiosk where I bought up many local and national papers.

„The city centre,“ I told the taxi driver, and settling down in the back seat of the Volga, I began to look through the papers bursting with curiosity to find out as quickly as possible how the world commemorates the long-awaited day of the celebration of human reason.

I carefully looked through the Pravda, leafed through the Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Izvestia, and my hands began to shake. „It can’t be!“ I thought, opening up the Trud, but here too there was not even a word on the twenty-five-year-old Treaty. I put my last hopes on the local the Semei Tani, but even this paper filled with articles from TASS and KazTAG was also silent about the Treaty. I lost my temper. Are there no independent ideas in this town, doesn’t it have its own voice? Is it possible that narrow-minded self-conceit is flourishing in my native land, that very conceit for which the great Abai reproached my countrymen? I was also angry with myself for not thinking of writing about this anniversary. Something inside me crumbled. Pitiful and irresolute, I was disgusted with myself.

„Brother, if you have time, take me to the cemetery. I want to visit my father’s grave,“ I asked the taxi driver. We stopped in front of the park. I gave the whole bundle of papers, which had only annoyed me, to the flower-sellers. I bought a bunch of deep-red carnations, my father’s favourite flowers.