by Tricia Dower
Balancing himself on the big-enough boat, T-Henry stood and held out his arms. “Crawl to the edge. I’ll catch you.” Maw-Maw sat beside him like royalty, her arms spread in welcome.
Matsi was sure the brown girls didn’t understand T-Henry’s words but they scurried to the edge of the roof and began dropping, one at a time, into his arms. One of the brave, strong girls helped Matsi up, helped lower her into the boat. Maw-Maw wrapped the girls in blankets though the day already was hot. She pressed Matsi to her chest.
“My poor li’l dahlin. I tell T-Henry, if dey doan get out, it meant to be. If dey do, Maw-Maw gonna be dere, gonna find nudder place f’dose dahlin, gonna start over.”
As they rode away, Matsi thought about a park near her home with a hill she once loved to climb while her parents watched from below. “Keep going,” they’d call out when she looked around, or “that’s far enough.” They weren’t here now to tell her what to do.
She stared into the whirling, churning water. All sorts of things spun around before speeding on by – a sneaker, a plastic lawn chair, a dead dog poor thing. A girl could be swept away, too, be carried over rooftops and trees before riding a wave into a lagoon where someone looking for someone else would find her and take her home.
Matsi turned to Maw-Maw’s bloated face, studied the eyes that never smiled even when the mouth did. She would not dance for that woman again.
Kesh Kumay
IN A YURT UNDER THE GAZE OF ANCIENT SNOW-TUFTED MOUNTAINS, Kyal huddles beneath a blanket, yearning to escape. Her father, grandmother, and younger sister sleep nearby.
It is quiet on the jailoo, the northern mountain pasture her family inhabits each May to October. She hears only the sheep calling from her uncle’s pen and the occasional whinny from the horses hobbled in a meadow.
The greasy smell of boiled mutton lodges in every mat cushioning the dirt floor, every rug padding the walls, and every needlework bag and harness dangling from the slender birch spines of the yurt. The air reeks of unwashed bodies. It’s tougher for Kyal to stomach, each year, after months away at university where she rents a room with a shower down the hall. She aired out her bedding this afternoon, spreading it over a carpet of wild thyme. She tents her nose with the blanket and breathes in the herb’s sharp scent.
Dawn brings the smell of rice porridge and the rhythmic thump of her grandmother’s wooden spoon against the side of the iron pot. An almost sacred sound Kyal has known since childhood, one that makes her feel guilty about wanting a different life, yet all the more impatient for it. She rolls over to see the woman she calls Ama, as if she were her mother, looking at her with eyes shrunken to slits in her wizened face.
“Oy,” Dimira says, waving a hand in Kyal’s direction. “Is it sloth you learn at school? Wake up to the sun of your ancestors.”
Dimira cooks in a kolomto over an open fire. She could have a more modern stove but, at sixty-seven, she claims, she can’t be changing habits for no good reason. Besides, it’s the old ways the tourists with beeping wristwatches want to see, along with colourful attire. The first tourists of the season will arrive in a few hours. For a few som, Dimira will let them take her picture in her magenta turban, pink sweater, patterned skirt, and tarpaulin boots. She has taken easily to the country’s move from communism to a free market economy. Embraced what the government calls cultural tourism: airplanes, Land Rovers, and convoys of bad-smelling Ladas bringing foreigners who seek a glimpse of a life they thought had disappeared.
Kyal sees her father, her Ata, through the open door flap, a silhouette against the rising light. With his two older brothers and their sons, Usen will round up and saddle the horses for the more adventurous tourists’ four-day trek through a mountain pass. She appraises him as she would a stranger. He’s fine-looking in his quilted jacket, cotton trousers, and black leather knee-high boots. An embroidered white felt kalpak with black flaps sits on his still-black hair. A moustache hangs over his lips like a horseshoe.
Kyal bathes in a river that’s fed by a melting glacier. The shock of the icy water makes her feel superior to her family, more courageous. She braids her heavy dark hair and dresses for the tourists: ruffled black skirt, tight purple vest, and an imitation leather jacket from a bazaar at the Kazakh border. No one else around owns such a jacket.
After breakfast, she and Aigul set out in the thin clean air to find brush to supplement the dung Dimira dries for fuel. They follow the sheep road, bordered by edelweiss and dandelions as it was when they were children and more companionable, before the daring leaked out of Aigul. Her favourite possession is a plastic cola bottle a tourist discarded – Britney Spears on the label in traditional warrior queen gear as though she were a Manas scholar. Kyal dedicated a full semester to the Manas epic of struggle and freedom. Aigul studies nothing except Emil, an arrogant boy from another village.
Kyal pulls the wooden cart they will try to fill. Aigul takes short strides in her long, narrow skirt, hurrying to keep up with Kyal’s stronger legs and deeper lungs. Aigul was born too early. Kyal can still see her sister lying in the hollow of their father’s hand, can recall wanting to be small enough to fit there, too. She scarcely remembers her mother, but she remembers that.
“I went to the holy place the Monday before you returned,” Aigul says, breathy already, her mouth wobbling around the words. “Emil took me. We piled up seven stones, ate bread, and said a prayer. I climbed the stairs without touching the rocks with my hands. I looked into the broken heart stone and made my wish.”
“You must have been gone the whole day. How did you escape Ama?”
“It was her idea.”
Amazing that Dimira would release Aigul for so long. She insists the girl spend afternoons helping her and the aunties make shirdaks. The women have a contract to deliver two of the elaborate felt carpets each month to a tourist outlet.
“Your wish is to marry Emil?”
“Yes.”
“You run after that boy like a hungry dog. His head is already as big as a boulder.”
“You could try to like him. Have you met anyone yet?”
There was one boy Kyal fantasized might carry her off to his rich America. But in cultural anthropology class one day he said her country was turning into a tacky theme park. “Yurt World,” he called it and everyone laughed, filling her with shame. “I thought you were a good sport,” he said later when she called him on it.
“I’m in no hurry to be a slave to a mother-in-law,” Kyal says now to Aigul. She plans to be an ambassador, like the woman from Osh who wore a serious blue suit and spoke at the university about her posting to America. In daydreams, Kyal stands behind a podium before a crowd in a far away city, choosing just the right words to inspire respect and admiration for her people, keeping only a bit of the respect and admiration for herself.
“Was our mother a slave?” Aigul asks.
“She must have been. You see how Ama is. But how would I know?” Kyal was only three when their mother died giving birth. Aigul demands so little of the life she received at great cost.
“Emil’s mother is kind,” Aigul says. “We will work well together.”
Kyal can see the married woman her sister will be – weather-roughened cheeks, shoulders rounded from making felt. Maybe it’s the way she’s begun shaping her eyebrows, but already Aigul’s childishly pretty face has a worried look.
“Come to Bishkek with me in September,” Kyal says. “I’ll help you get a job.”
“Selling vodka in a kiosk? I don’t have the same choices as you.”
“Because you won’t take them! Come back with me. Give yourself a chance.”
“I’m bound to Emil. There’s nothing more to say.” Aigul’s wincing smile makes the dimple beside her mouth resemble a tiny incision.
“How will you like it with your in-laws right there, listening to you and Emil
grunt in the dark?”
“Why must you be so rude? It won’t be like that!”
“You think they’ll go deaf when you move in?”
“We’ll be quiet.”
“Ha!” Kyal hates the lack of privacy in the yurt, wondering if the others suspect what she does in the dark, if they hear her quick, urgent breathing. What’s it like with a husband whose breathing you can’t control? How do you survive the humiliation?
“Ata is going to speak to you soon,” Aigul says.
“I didn’t realize he wasn’t speaking to me. Just this morning he called out a list of things for me to do.”
“About something else. Something important.”
Kyal ignores the hint of despair in Aigul’s voice. “Is this a riddle? I love riddles! Guess this one. The more you have, the less you see.”
“If you want to get a husband, Kyal, you will have to sweeten your tongue.”
“I don’t want to ‘get’ a husband just like I don’t want to get tuberculosis.”
“At the holy place, I prayed for you, too.”
Kyal flaps her lips like a horse. “Darkness,” she says. “The answer is darkness.”
“Ata will speak to you.”
“Long noses” from the West arrive, laughing about how their van got stuck in the mud crossing a stream and they had to get out and push, the road the worst they’d ever seen with huge stones blocking the way. The trekkers, half a dozen punctual-looking Brits in riding gear, are anxious to be off, to see poppies on the mountains and, perhaps, a snow leopard. They’re too late for the poppies and more likely to see a statue of a snow leopard than the real thing, but Kyal doesn’t spoil their dream. Anything is possible. Usen brings out half a dozen sure-footed horses. Mindful of the clocks in foreign brains, he has his mounts ready to go on schedule.
The lazier, fatter tourists – a husband and wife from America and two Swiss sisters – will stay in separate guest yurts on which Dimira has posted hand-lettered “B&B” signs. Kyal’s family gets 100 of the 150 som per night the tour company charges for each yurt. Most of it goes for university, so it’s Kyal’s job to tend to the yurts and entertain the tourists. She’s done it for three summers and each year more visitors turn up. Able to speak four languages, she can usually decipher their requests. They come to depend on her, confiding when they find the food too fatty or the koumiss sour. As if she’s one of them. She likes that.
Usen rides out with the trekkers a while, to be sure the horses behave. Kyal watches him get smaller, wondering if he’ll keep his promise to be back for her first kesh kumay of the summer. He often stays away for days, returning inside a moat of sadness. She never asks why. So much goes unsaid between them.
In charge of the tourists left behind, she orchestrates the day to play to them, presenting her family as a tableau. First up: the making of koumiss, done several times a day while the mares are nursing. A cruel custom, a betrayal of the creatures Kyal loves. But not to serve koumiss is sacrilege, so she narrates while her uncles remove foals from their pen and tie them to stakes in the ground. Pulling against the ropes, the foals let out high-pitched eee-ows and yeeks that sound almost human. Their dams hear the racket and come down from the hills where they’ve been grazing. The tourists gasp at the frenzied mares heading towards them and turn to Kyal with panicky eyes. “They’re not interested in you,” she says.
The men allow the foals to nurse briefly before pushing them aside to milk the mares. In sheepskin chanachs, female cousins mix new milk with part of yesterday’s fermenting in the warmth of the yurts. For the rest of the day, they will take turns whipping it constantly with a bishkek, the wooden stick the capital city is named after, until their arms and shoulders cry out in protest. Dimira gives the tourists cups of an already fermented batch. One of the sisters, her skin as white as dry river-bed stones, gags.
“Kyrgyz moonshine,” the American man says and his wife laughs. Kyal laughs, too, as if she knows what moonshine is.
She never learns the tourists’ names. Doesn’t want to get so familiar they dismiss her as another of the simple herdspeople whose world they come to inhale. Let them report back that she is professional – sophisticated, even – in the leather jacket as black as a starless night. It will take time to become ambassador. She’ll need different jobs along the way. If she makes a good impression, a tour company might hire her as a guide or an interpreter.
The afternoon is for horse games. Usen returns as if on cue, shimmering in the sun as he crosses the plateau. That he didn’t forget fills Kyal’s stomach with mortifying gratitude. He joins his brothers and nephews in ulak tartysh. Kyal describes it to the tourists as polo with a difference. The ball is a gutted, legless, decapitated sheep, weighted down with wet dirt. Each man attempts to scoop it up and keep it firmly atop his horse while charging to the goal line. It’s a free-for-all that makes the tourists shout and gasp at the noise and the dust and the horsemen’s skill. The danger is what excites Kyal. What she loves about riding. About living.
Next: her turn to make the tourists gasp and Usen look at her with pride. Time for kesh kumay. She fetches the sole white mare in the herd, hers since her sixteenth birthday. Aisulu. Beautiful Moon. The horse lifts her legs up and down in a nervous dance. Kyal closes her eyes and sucks in a breath before massaging Aisulu’s shoulders and back. She takes her time. Lets the tourists wonder what is so daring that both girl and horse need calming. When Aisulu lowers her head and releases a deep fluttering breath through her nostrils, she is ready for the saddle.
Kesh kumay requires a young man. Kyal’s cousin Almaz has been drafted for the part the past two summers. As family he’s unsuitable, but family is all Kyal has. Striding the herd’s black stallion, Almaz rides out with her to where Usen waits – some distance from the tourists but not too far to be seen. When Kyal and Almaz are in position, Usen shouts, “Go!” Knowing he’ll give her a fifteen-second head start, Kyal takes off, whip in hand, leather boots straining against the stirrups, legs burning with ambition. The wind she stirs lifts the braids off her neck. Almaz whoops like a barbarian behind her. She imagines her father awhirl in her dust, lost in admiration: “My daughter; no one can catch her.”
Tradition says if the boy can catch and kiss the girl, she is bound to fall in love with him. If he loses, she can whip him. Kyal was born to the saddle and has trained Aisulu to cover ground quickly. That her cousin might steal a kiss is revolting. She wins, as always, and declines to whip him. The tourists applaud her magnanimity. It’s just a game but a deeply satisfying one.
After the race, the American woman says she heard most Kyrgyz brides are kidnapped. Kyal laughs. “No, no, no. Ala kachuu has been illegal since the Soviets took over. We’re independent now, but it’s still against the law.” She doesn’t mention that everyone whispers of someone who was taken against her will and that the police are too corrupt to enforce the law. Ambassadors aren’t expected to reveal everything they know.
Later, as she helps with dinner, Kyal relates what the woman said. “Tell her to come to campfire tonight,” Dimira says. “I will speak of ala kachuu.”
Kyal can’t remember a time Dimira didn’t tell of the days when emirs and khans prevailed and people believed in flying camels. The stories are windows to Dimira’s heart, the way she warns and protects and reveals what she sees inside others, the way she passes along lessons she fears have been lost. When Aigul and Kyal were little, Dimira fed Aigul tales of poor peasants submissive to Fate. Kyal preferred the ones about brave young women even though they rarely had happy endings.
This night, Dimira starts with a tale about a fox that learns there is no gratitude in the world. Then, fixing her eyes on the American woman, she tells of an old khan so cruel he killed one peasant each day. So lecherous he sent a gang to kidnap a poor peasant girl who lived with her father in a small village in a valley in the mountains. The girl
was of indescribable beauty as all girls in Dimira’s stories are. In a clear voice younger than her years, Dimira recites: “‘I love another,’ the girl cried. ‘I shall not be yours.’ She threw herself from a window in the Khan’s towering fortress. From where she fell, caves opened up and pure, clean, crystal clear water flowed from them, forming the mountain lake the people call Issyk Kul. Only there do jagged peaks rise sheer from the water on all sides. Only there do hawks ride the wind and chase the clouds away.”
Since Independence, Dimira has spoken only Kyrgyz. Kyal translates Dimira’s words into English, trying to match her grandmother’s facial expressions and gestures. English is better for getting to the point than for telling tales. Kyal has to be careful not to be done too soon or the tourists will think she’s holding something back.
Two days pass before Usen speaks to Kyal as Aigul said he would. The family sits cross-legged on cushions, a kerosene lamp casting light on the meal before them. Kyal is blowing on her noodle soup when Usen clears his throat and speaks her name.
“Emil has asked permission to marry Aigul and I have said yes.”
“What happy news,” Kyal says. “Who would have guessed?”
Usen folds his arms across his chest. A nerve in his left eyelid twitches. “I told him my approval is conditional on you. As the oldest, you must marry first.”
“Erf!” Kyal shoots back. “That’s the old way, unnecessary.”
“Don’t scorn the old ways,” Usen says. “We owe them our living.”
“Some things aren’t worth keeping.” It astounds her that so many people believe Kyrgyz independence means bringing back the past.
“The Soviets mocked our ways,” Dimira says. “They claimed we were backward. My mother was the last in her village to have a traditional wedding. It was beautiful, she said, everyone weeping rivers of tears. She drank from that memory as she dug irrigation ditches and waited for my father. He never returned from the war. I was five.” Dimira wipes her eyes. She relates this story often and it never fails to move her.
