by Tricia Dower
“Who can afford such a wedding anymore?” Usen says.
“Emil’s family,” Aigul says. “They have many more horses than we do.”
“Aigul will have to wait ’til I finish university,” Kyal says, returning to her soup.
“You’ve had two years already,” Usen says. “More than anyone in the village. We could better use the money on showers for the tourists and generators to power them.”
Kyal’s cheeks burn as if they’ve been slapped. She swallows hard and meets his impassive gaze. “I need a degree to get a good job.”
“I sent you to find a husband. It’s taking too long. Best you marry now and learn how to be a woman.”
“I don’t need to be a wife to be a woman.”
“Bite your tongue!” Dimira says.
“Emil can’t marry, either,” Aigul says, “until his older brother does, and he isn’t dating anyone.” Her voice comes out in whining notes. She pushes her dish away, delicately, with the tips of her fingers.
“Perhaps the brother would be interested in a match with Kyal,” Usen says.
“Ahyee, Ata, that’s brilliant. The bride price you’ll get for us! I am sure to fetch five horses. Kyal much less, because she’s so bossy.”
In classes, Kyal sits shoulder to shoulder with young men from other lands who don’t expect her to lower her eyes when she speaks with them. Men taller than her father. Future lawyers and software designers who will live in houses with electricity, running water, and flush toilets. If she has to have a husband, she wants one like that. “One day I will go to America and come back with a groom,” she says. “He will not own me for as little as five horses. He will not own me at all.”
“He will be rich and carry a gun, I suppose,” Dimira says. She saw a Hollywood movie once in Bishkek.
“I’ll speak to Emil’s family,” Usen says, his voice unyielding. “I’ll not be left with you on my hands.”
Kyal gnaws her lower lip to stop her eyes from filling.
“Nobody gets to keep a daughter,” Dimira says softly, squeezing Kyal’s hand. “That’s our way.”
Usen strokes his face with both hands. “Oomiyin,” he says, ending the meal.
“Oomiyin,” Aigul and Dimira say.
Kyal cannot summon the word.
“He’s afraid for you,” Dimira says later as Kyal helps her wash the dishes. “Afraid you’ll be like a river that wanders off and gets swallowed up by the desert. He hated giving all his hard work to the collective. Don’t you remember? Our herds fed the entire Soviet Union and still they didn’t respect us. There was a great forgetting those years when factories sprung up like grass. Some of our young people never learned their own language, their mouths full of the crude sound of Russian. Your father wants you to have the life he waited for, a life you reject.”
“I don’t! I’m studying it. But there’s more in the world than this sliver of land.”
“All your studies can do is to prove what we already know is true.” Dimira retrieves a faded and cracked photograph from a chest behind the kolomto and holds it out. Kyal has seen this photo before: Dimira, her two sisters and their mother, standing in long dresses and coats, great gnarled mountains rising behind them.
“We lived on the roof of the world,” Dimira says. “So high all we could raise were yaks. The sky and all that’s in it came to us. Why go anywhere else?”
“That was a long time ago, Ama. Life can’t be as it was then.”
“It can. If there’s only one road, no one gets lost.”
Dimira hauls out tradition when it suits her. If she wanted to be rude, Kyal could point out that, in the past, selling things at market was considered a disgrace. Yet Ata sells horses and the women sell shirdaks. She studies her great-grandmother’s face in the photograph. Gentle but unafraid. Loneliness settles over her like mountain mist. “What was my mother like?” she asks.
Dimira puts the photo away and takes Kyal’s cheeks in her calloused hands. “Restless like you. Harder to hold than a green horse. It wore me out to watch her.”
“Father never speaks of her. Why is that?”
“Because she was cursed. That’s all you need to know.” Dimira flicks her hands in dismissal and walks away.
Superstitious nonsense. A fantastic tale contrived to frighten.
The first batch of tourists leave and the second turns up, along with a young man on a high-stepping grey horse he has to rein in sharply. Kyal is outside grooming Aisulu. The man’s horse is a natural racer, its body pulsing with energy. And oh, the soulful eyes – almond-shaped and hooded. Who chooses a horse so hard to control?
Aigul hurries up to her and whispers, “That’s Jyrgal, Emil’s brother.”
He looks neither like Emil, whose features are too perfect to trust, nor like the American whose wide shoulders and straight teeth made Kyal weak in the knees. This man is skinny as a bishkek with a head so long and narrow, one might think his mother pressed it between two boards the moment he left the womb. The alpine sun has deeply scorched his once fair skin. A herder, Kyal thinks, disappointed.
Usen emerges from the yurt and holds the horse while Jyrgal – in jeans, long-sleeved black shirt, running shoes, and kalpak – dismounts. Usen calls out, “Kyal, I need you here now.” He waits until she stands beside him before spitting on the ground, taking Jyrgal’s two hands in his and asking, “How are your father’s horses, Son?”
Jyrgal leans over to spit. “Strong and swift, praise Allah.” His full voice is startling. Such a head should hold only thin, reedy sounds.
“Are you enjoying a peaceful life with your family?” Usen continues.
“More than I deserve, praise Allah,” Jyrgal replies.
Kyal doubts religion rests any heavier on Jyrgal’s shoulders than it does on Usen’s and hers. “Praise Allah” is the polite thing to say, a ritual display she does not respect. She clears her throat in impatience.
Usen throws a frown her way. “My daughter, Kyal. The one we spoke of when your family welcomed me recently.”
So he’s done it. Sold her like a broodmare to this peasant. Tradition calls for her to bow slightly and cast a meek, virginal look at her suitor’s feet. Instead, she thrusts out a hand to Jyrgal and stares boldly into his face. He’s clean-shaven and smells like witch hazel. His eyes are as blue as a desert sky.
“My daughter likes to pretend she hasn’t been brought up well,” Usen says, pinching his cheek to show his disapproval.
His face solemn, Jyrgal grips Kyal’s hand and pumps it, seemingly unfazed by her immodesty. Pretending. Or spineless. She pulls away from the hot pressure of his rough hands.
Usen leads them into the yurt where Dimira boils water on the kolomto. “My mother and daughter will serve us chai. Be seated. Please.” He indicates the place of honour, the one he usually takes.
While they wait for their tea, the men agree that horses, not sheep, rule the landscape. Their voices recede into a crevice of Kyal’s mind as she sets out cups, spoons jam into a bowl and slices bread Dimira baked that morning. She has signed up for field work the next semester. Travelling to burial grounds in search of ancient Turkic inscriptions. Unlocking secrets about the past. The yurt feels like her burial site as a pall of despair falls over her. Married women don’t go to university. At least not women married to herdsmen. She looks at the straight-backed young man with reddish-brown hair as curly as a sheep’s. Her back twitches in revulsion.
She sits beside Dimira and pours tea as Usen probes Jyrgal. He is twenty-five.
“Four years older than you, Kyal,” her father says as if she can’t subtract.
Dimira says, “Mmm.”
Jyrgal’s family breeds racers. “When I’m not tending the herd,” Jyrgal says, “I train horses for the leaguers who play ulak tartysh in the hippodrome.”
Usen says, “We play, too! My brothers, nephews, and I. You must join us.”
“I will do that.”
“Do you play an instrument?” Usen says. “The komuz, perhaps? Everyone plays the komuz, no?” He points to the three-stringed fretless lute leaning against a wall.
“No.”
“Do you sing?”
“Like a mountain goose.”
Usen forces a laugh. “That’s a good one!”
Kyal steps in to save her father from further disgrace. “What, then?” she says. “You don’t play. You don’t sing. Have you no tricks?”
“I can recite verse,” he says as if announcing he’d discovered a new planet.
“Un hun,” Dimira says.
Usen says, “We would enjoy that.”
Jyrgal stands and closes his eyes as though seeking inspiration. What a bore. Kyal would laugh if she weren’t angry to the bottom of her heart at this charade engineered for her benefit. Ata knows all he wants to about Jyrgal. He has fallen in love with the idea of him. She is expected to do the same.
Eyes closed, Jyrgal recites, “Reaching with my right hand, I grasped the sun for myself.”
Kyal strains to place these words she knows in familiar context.
Slowly, as though time belongs to him, Jyrgal raises his right arm to the roof and snatches at the air. “Reaching with my left hand, I caught the moon for myself. My right hand held the sun. My left hand held the moon.”
He passes one arm in front of the other and Kyal remembers. It was in class. A reading from the Manas that brought her to tears.
“I took the sun and put it in place of the moon. I took the moon and put it in place of the sun. Together with the sun and moon, I flew high into the sky.” He stretches both arms to the side and opens his eyes to a hushed audience.
“How do you know those lines?” Kyal asks, grudgingly impressed.
“My grandfather is a manaschi,” he says, enunciating the words as though she were slow-witted. “I grew up with the Manas.”
“Manaschi,” Dimira whispers in reverence. “In the early Soviet days, before even I was born, manaschi disappeared like rabbits under tractors. Murdered or sent to Siberia. Later, when it wasn’t so easy to make someone vanish without the world complaining, apprentices of the great manaschi came out of hiding. But they had to sing of a different Manas. No longer a warrior, but a working-class hero.”
“My grandfather knows of those days,” Jyrgal says to her.
“Did you meet him?” Dimira asks Usen.
Usen thrusts out his broad, flat chest and says, “I did.” Stands and slaps Jyrgal’s back. “Imagine! The milk of your clan and ours, flowing into the same chanach. Ama, where is the vodka? We must toast to Jyrgal’s and Kyal’s happiness. May they have many children running in front and many horses behind.”
“I have neither received nor accepted a proposal,” Kyal says.
Jyrgal sits beside her on the women’s side of the table and leans into his words. “My brother is eager to wed and I am eager to help him.”
“Do you exist only to serve your brother’s whims?”
He straightens his back. “Helping a brother or sister is not a choice.”
She matches his posture. “It is not yet your place to lecture me.”
He narrows his eyes and says, “I’m reminded of hissing swans at Issyk Kul.” He stands, extends his hands to Usen and nods toward Dimira. “Thank you for your hospitality. I won’t keep you longer.” Picking up his shoes at the entrance, he leaves.
Surprised at Jyrgal’s sudden departure, Kyal doesn’t notice Usen striding angrily toward her until his hand connects with her head.
“He has left the matter with me,” Dimira says later after Usen packs his saddlebags and rides into the mountains. “He’ll be gone a while. He wants a decision from you when he returns.” She whispers because Aigul rests nearby. The reports of Kyal’s recalcitrance have made her faint and nauseous.
“I have a say?”
“He was wrong to hit you. Anger and bitterness are gobbling him like cancer. But you don’t appreciate what your ancestors endured to give you the luxury of speaking your mind.” She grabs a bucket with one hand and beckons Kyal with the other. “Come with me to the river.”
Outside, she says, “Before he left, your father told me you must agree to this match. He said he will not force you.”
She must agree. Kyal mouths the words, imagining Ata’s face as he spoke them. She takes the bucket from her grandmother and swings it wildly. Relief rises up through her body and erupts in laughter. She will not have to sacrifice herself for Aigul. Then she remembers that her father wants to spend her university money on tourists. She walks to the river with her head down, loathing the way her toes turn in.
Jyrgal shows up the next afternoon dressed for ulak tartysh in tank cap, high leather boots, and cushioned jacket. A sheepskin blanket protects his horse.
“Heaven bless you, you didn’t scare him away,” Aigul says.
He looks different to Kyal in the sun’s heat. Almost attractive. But she’d rather make love to his horse. Ha! She is buoyant with audacity. When there wasn’t the opportunity to decide, Jyrgal seemed as undesirable as any other villager. Now, she sees a tolerable possibility: marriage in exchange for a degree. She will convince Usen to forego any other bride price. He will persuade Jyrgal’s family she’ll be much more valuable property, later, when she commands a good salary and brings them prestige. “Our daughter-in-law, the ambassador.” She’ll need to stay in Bishkek during the school year, so there’s her room and meals to cover as well as tuition. If Jyrgal insists, she will visit him weekends provided he doesn’t disturb her study times. She can suffer his body two nights a week.
She watches him wrestle her uncles and cousins for the sheep’s torso. Usen should be there to see it. Jyrgal brings the others’ play to a new level. She rides past him as she heads out with Almaz for kesh kumay. Soon he’ll know that no woman rides as well as she. He’ll appreciate it, too, as the scornful American student never could.
An uncle officiates at the starting line. Kyal gives Aisulu an extra spur and leans forward until her chin is on the mare’s neck. She’s conscious of the sun lighting her jacket and the wind lifting her skirt above her thighs, of Jyrgal’s eyes on her as she leaves Almaz pitifully behind, his war cries feeble in the distance. Conscious seconds later of the sound of hooves and the panting of another horse and rider at her flank. She turns her head to see Jyrgal no farther away than the length of her whip.
“What are you doing?” she shouts.
He draws up, blows her a kiss, turns sharply away and rides back to the laughing, cheering camp.
“I’ll never agree to marry that horse’s ass,” she tells Aigul and Dimira later.
Aigul stamps her foot. “Selfish, selfish! Ama, what will I do?”
“Calm yourself, child,” Dimira says. “You can’t afford to get sick.” She touches Aigul’s head with an intimacy that pains Kyal. She no longer belongs to the world they so comfortably inhabit. Everything they do feels like a rebuke.
Dimira turns to her. “Before you make your decision, you will meet Jyrgal’s family. We have been invited.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Then find a way to be. The grandfather will be there. You will accompany me to the manaschi’s camp. I will not let you lose this opportunity.”
In a rusty pick-up that transports their yurts from pasture to pasture, Usen’s oldest brother drives Kyal and Dimira for several hours to reach Jyrgal’s jailoo. It has only a few yurts, each made of white felt, not the humbler grey that suffices for Kyal’s family. Satellite dishes rest on the ground. Here is a family of means, they shout.
Emil and Jyrgal stand outside in pres
sed slacks and sports jackets. Two men next to them wear ceremonial vests and kalpaks. One, an older version of Emil, must be the father; the other, with Jyrgal’s long and narrow face, the manaschi. A white beard puffing like smoke from his chin makes him look mad. Was he initiated into his calling through a vision as it is said true manaschi must be? Kyal doesn’t believe in divine intervention, but, sometimes, it scares her to think her destiny is in her hands alone.
As Dimira and Kyal step from the truck, half a dozen women surround them and hustle them past the men to the largest yurt where a well-fed, ruddy-faced woman waits between richly embroidered doorway flaps. She bows to Dimira and says in a voice as smooth as yak butter, “Welcome, Mother. I am Batigul,” drawing out the last syllable as though her tongue is stuck. Taking Kyal’s hand, she says, “Come, Daughter.” Daughter? The other women follow them into the yurt where Aigul, a white scarf on her head, sits bent over on a carpeted platform, looking like a thief caught stealing the last of the winter hay. She does not raise her head when Kyal calls out to her in surprise. Spread on the floor in front of Aigul is a large cloth with loaves of round and layered bread, sour cream, dried fruits, and sweets Kyal has seen only on festival days. The strong, sweet smell of the bread makes her hungry. Is Jyrgal’s family so wealthy they can go to this expense for all visitors? Batigul introduces Jyrgal’s aunts and female cousins. “They’ve been baking and cooking for days,” she says. “The men slaughtered a mare for the feast.” She hands Dimira a white scarf like the one Aigul wears. “As we have no grandmother in our camp,” she says, “the honour is yours.”
Dimira spreads the scarf with her fingers and drapes it over Kyal’s head. She kisses Kyal on both cheeks, but doesn’t look in her eyes.
“Sounds of joy want to leap from my throat!” Batigul says. “Has anyone else ever been blessed with two beautiful new daughters on the same day?”
