CAT AND DOG

HAMID ISMAILOV
TRANSLATED BY SHELLEY FAIRWEATHER-VEGA

In the dawn darkness, Grandpa Islom came home from a trip to far-off Qongirot. He worked as a security guard on long-distance trains, and so the children, waiting for presents and gifts, awoke at the squeaking of the gate, and out they ran, bare of foot and body, to meet their Grandpa Islom. One of them must have stepped on the old blind cat stretched out across the doorstep on his way. The unseeing creature let out a howl and disappeared inside.

That howl was met with a curse from Mayrambu, the lady of the house. “May your head be always underneath you! Can’t you take a look around you, idiot?!”

And that cursing was met head-on by the swearing of Grandpa Islom, coming through the gate now. “Hey, you little whores, is my dick on fire to make you run like that? Why aren’t you lying down, you little faggots?!” But do words ever reach the ears of children expecting presents?

This time Grandpa Islom didn’t have any fancily wrapped gifts, just something like a long cardboard shoebox, from which a tiny puppy, eyes only half-open, was peering. Then the real ruckus began.

“A bulldog, it’s a bulldog!” shouted one of the children.

“Is it really??” another one asked his father.

“No idea. Got it off the fucking Kazakhs!” the old man answered, and leaving the puppy with the children, still muttering under his breath, he went inside.

2.

That day the children fed the puppy milk, and one of them chewed up some bread to give him. Another one of them thought to bring the old cat with no name to meet the dog, but when he placed the dog and cat side by side the blind cat hissed and his fur stood straight up, and the puppy started to growl. They pulled the puppy this way and dragged him that way, and when the day was half done, the biggest of the boys snuck in under the vines, shushed them with a finger to his lips, and nodded in the direction of the house.

He was the first to go in through the unlocked veranda door, and to draw near to the second, windowed door into the interior of the house. He peered in through the window, and then noiselessly moved aside, making room for his younger brother. As the boys took turns at the window, they could see Mayrambu lying face up on the bed to the right, while Grandpa Islom shook the iron bed frame with a steady, hollow knocking noise. The very youngest boy was straining to look through the glass when Mayrambu shouted from where she lay, “Hey! Get lost, midget!” And at that he stopped staring, and the little boy stepped backward, and on the doorstep he trod on the tail of the blind cat lying there – and the cat howled again.

From inside, it was Grandpa Islom’s turn. “Fuck your mother!” he screamed, in Russian this time.

3.

That afternoon, when his grandmother had stretched out on her low supa to have a rest, the boy thought he’d do something to make it up to her, and he found the long cardboard box that Grandpa Islom had used to carry the Kazakh puppy that morning, and he dragged it over to her like a toy car, and he told his grandmother, “Look, Grandma, your old tits would fit just perfect in this.”

“Sure, and may the earth swallow you whole, smartass!” said his grandmother, turning over to her other side. “Hey, come over here and give my back a good rub.” The boy should never have trusted his tongue.

4.

Later that afternoon Grandpa Islom came back home, maybe from out on the street, maybe from the teahouse. Perhaps he had shaved his beard, or perhaps he had been drinking, but whatever the case, he looked younger, somehow, and the children were afraid.

“Hey, curse-the-fruit-of-your-womb, what are you doing lying there like a pig?” he set in at Mayrambu. “Can’t you put these rascals to work, rather than lying around with your ass in the air?”

And the children disappeared – one ran off to the cowshed, another to the hayshed, and the third slunk off to the lavatory.

Mayrambu shot back from where she lay, “His mouth has opened again! May he drop dead!”

When he heard that, Grandpa Islom really raised the roof off the house. “You can fuck that vanity right off that tongue of yours, whore! Now you’re talking back? I’ll string you up by the tits and fuck you in the mouth!” And again came the curses piled on curses.

5.

Grandpa Islom finally swore himself out, and he went inside to have a rest. Mayrambu took her revenge on the children. She had set one to work setting the fire in the oven, and one peeling onions, and one sweeping up the house, when their neighbor Auntie Toshoy stuck her head in the door and split the air in two with her loud ringing voice.

“Kozim! Hey, Kozim, are you the kind to beg for your own burial shroud? Would it kill you to tie up that ram of yours in the grass? It’s tearing up my only poplar with its horn.”

To which Mayrambu replied from her kitchen, “May his horn go far up your ass, you nasty old woman.” But she said it in a whisper.

Then she continued out loud, “Yes, neighbor, won’t you come in? Is everything all right?” And she moved toward the door.

And to the little boy standing there open-mouthed, amazed by this transformation of hers, the grandmother said, “Go and look after your dog. Is my ass wide open that you’re staring like that?” And she chased him off.

Aunty Toshoy, still shouting, went back to her own house and her poplar tree. Mayrambu wasn’t finished. “May that poplar grow straight up your ass, you nosey old woman,” she said, and chased Kozim outside.

6.

A little later the little boy’s stepfather Hokim the Drainpipe came weaving through the door. “Daddy, Daddy, Grandpa brought us a bulldog!” shouted the little boy to his half-drunk father.

“Well, well!” said Hokim, grabbing the boy for an embrace, smearing his face with a messy kiss.

The little boy wiggled his way out of his stepfather’s arms and leapt over a big, low bucket full of dirty washwater, behind which the little puppy had taken refuge. “Here he is!” The father tried stepping over the bucket full of washwater too, but he knocked into it, and the washwater splashed everywhere, and the puppy squealed and tried to run away, but Hokim the Drainpipe fell to the ground and landed on top of it.

“Fucking bumpkins!” Hokim yelled, standing up again, and he grabbed the whimpering pup in one hand. “Its ears are too long. Let’s make us a German shepherd!” he said, and he took a razor wrapped in paper out of his pocket, and there in front of the boy he slashed away at the puppy’s ears, one after the other, till the blood flowed. The little dog cried and cried, and his blood soaked into Hokim’s wet clothes…

7.

The puppy’s unbearable noise brought the children together around the bucket full of washwater and blood, and now from inside came Grandpa Islom, tying up his belt. He took one look at the poor puppy with its two floppy ears streaming with blood, and he grabbed the ladder standing under the ivy against the wall, and he swung it at Hokim the Drainpipe and hit him. Hokim sank immediately to the ground. “What the fuck is with those ears, crippledick?” shouted Grandpa Islom in a rage. “You want me to fuck you like I fucked your mother? You want me to fuck you in the ass?” By this time there was no stopping Grandpa Islom, and he stood there raising hell in the courtyard, and he took the rope off his trousers, yanked his son-in-law Hokim’s hands behind his back, and tied them there to the ladder.

Hokim the Drainpipe was muttering in Russian, “That old dog! That filthy mutt!” And while he muttered, Grandpa Islom held up his beltless trousers with one hand, and picked up the washwater basin with the other, with all its forgotten dirty laundry inside, and dumped it out over the ladder and Hokim the Drainpipe, swearing all the time, and went inside again.

And from the doorstep came the twin sounds of the blind cat howling and Grandpa Islom swearing some more. “You blind bastard!”

8.

One of the kids called another one a calf-for-the-slaughter, and they fought and fought till someone had a bloody nose, and finally the youngest boy’s mother came home from work, and when she saw the state her new husband was in she shouted in alarm, and defying her own father and mother she dragged her sodden husband home, back to their own house. Mayrambu issued her curses, Grandpa Islom swore his way to the teahouse and back, they cursed their bitch of a daughter in absentia, and with that, evening fell.

That night the little boy came outside to relieve himself before going to bed, and for once he did not trip over any bleary-eyed old cat on the doorstep. He went outside into the courtyard and looked around, and there in the doorway of the hayshed, under a moon like a pan full of milk, the blind cat sat licking and licking at the puppy’s bloodied ears, and the little pup was nudging and nudging his own food dish toward the blind old cat, looking for all the world like he was begging the cat, please, to eat his fill.

Hamid Ismailov was born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of Mullahs and Khodjas living in Kyrgyzstan, many of whom had lost their lives during the Stalin era persecution. Yet he had received an exemplary Soviet education, graduating with distinction from both his secondary school and military college, as well as attaining university degrees in a number of disciplines. Though he could have become a high-flying Soviet or post-Soviet apparatchik, instead his fate led him to become a dissident writer and poet residing in the West. He was the BBC World Service first Writer in Residence. Critics have compared his books to the best of Russian classics, Sufi parables and works of Western post-modernism. While his writing reflects all of these and many other strands, it is his unique intercultural experience that excites and draws the reader into his world.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional Russian to English translator and an enthusiastic Uzbek to English translator in Seattle, Washington. She loves solving puzzles (including those not related to translation) and is especially interested in examining the puzzling intersections between culture and politics. Shelley is currently the president of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society and a co-founder of the Northwest Literary Translators. Visit her online at http://www.fairvega.com/.