Free The Railway by Hamid Ismailov

light from the paraffin lamp he had just cleaned. But now, after the funeral, the boy was afraid of going to sleep; yes, it would be wrong to go to sleep, just as it had been wrong for his family to eat after the funeral, or maybe it would be still more sinful and wrong, because there would be no one to blame but himself... And so he began brushing off the straw that had stuck to his flannelette school uniform – his jacket or, as his grandad called it, or rather had used to call it, his kitel 40 – and his grandad had called it a kitel because his grandad used to call anything he wore a kitel , with the result that once, soon after he first started travelling to Moscow by train, he came back home with what he called a summer kitel , and he put it on the following morning– a kitel with thin stripes like a mattress – along with a pair of equally stripy trousers, and no matter how much the women tried to dissuade him, he had insisted on setting off to the City, wearing what Uncle Izaly from the Tailoring Co-operative called pyjamas, and wearing them, moreover, tucked into his eternal red canvas boots...
    And this flannelette kitel , which was no less shameful than Grandad’s pyjamas, this shameful kitel whose only good point was that you could spill ink on it without it showing, this kitel was all the more hateful to the boy for being an award from his school; and the shame he had felt when squint-eyed Annushka had announced at the parade in honour of Lenin’s birthday that he was being awarded this uniform in recognition of his excellent schoolwork and exemplary conduct, and when in spite of his having run away from that accursed and shameful parade she had got that idiot Natashka to take this horrible uniform to his home, which had led Granny to go on in front of Natashka about how her own children had never been given anything of the kind – this shame had made him run away from home for the first time.
    It had been just before the May holidays – and the mere thought of not having to go to school had made him feel happy, but all of a sudden the boy’s heart had filled with aching toskà : 41 who would he find to play football with?
    Nevertheless, he had been determined not to return home. Instead, he had decided to go and find Grandad – who had also fallen out with Granny and left home: yes, he would live on the streets – he would live anywhere; but he would not go home. What to do about school he could decide later, but after the shame he had felt during the parade... And now, as he sat in his attic and removed the straw that had stuck to the kitel , he hated this garment doubly: because of the shame he had felt in front of the entire school and – still more – because, even as he remembered the shame of it first being presented to him, he also hated the way he looked in it now – wearing this charity uniform that was too big for him and had got covered in bits of straw.
    Granny had said, “See – the school’s looking after you, they’ve given you a uniform. It was different for your poor mother – she had to go to school in a dress made from sackcloth. I sewed it for her myself in the co-operative... They sent sacks of wadding for soldiers’ jackets, and one of the sacks tore... My poor little daughter...” And she began to cry; or rather her voice began to cry, while she herself went on folding his uniform, smoothing out the flapping sleeves and doing up two of the star-embossed metal buttons.
    He had refused to put on this wretched handout and Granny had gone on and on at him. At one point she had even brought Grandad into it, saying to the boy’s mother that it was quite impossible to be so persnickety , and so what if Grandad was just as bad, he and the boy weren’t even blood relatives…
    This had been more than the boy could bear, and a kind of whirling inside him – a whirling like the whirling of water being