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.
