Azamat’s family was one of the first in his hometown of Kochkor to participate in a movement called community-based tourism, or CBT, which seeks to help people in rural areas develop sustainable tourism businesses. CBT came to Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s. At the time, the idea must have seemed strange. Historically, Kochkor had been farmland surrounded by grazing pastures, and the economy revolved around agriculture and herding. A pivot to tourism would have felt like telling South Dakotan farmers to start taking strangers camping at Mt. Rushmore.
But Kochkor was surrounded by stunning natural scenery, particularly in the mountains circling the glass-surfaced Song-Köl lake, which made it appealing as a base for nearby tourist excursions.
A decade and a half after Azamat’s parents opened the guesthouse, the family is doing well. Their compound has been expanded into generous quarters that now offer Wi-Fi. Azamat and his wife have lived all over the world, most recently in Australia, where they met and befriended a young Spanish man whose sister, Mireia, is to be my companion on this trip to Song-Köl.
Mireia and I have a long trek ahead of us. The ride to tonight’s campsite will be at least six hours, maybe more, depending on how bad we are at riding horses. It’s now past lunchtime, but no one seems to be in a particular rush to finish tea.
In Kyrgyzstan, tea is served alongside endless plates heaped with bread, cookies, candies, and fruit, while flies circle glass bowls of syrupy homemade jam. I keep throwing back scalding cups of tea in the hopes that someone will see that I’m done and suggest that we leave, but each time my cup approaches empty, Azamat’s mother, an older woman with a soft face perennially lifted in a smile, pours more. This will turn out to be a terrible decision, bladder-wise, in a few hours.
While we wait to head out, I learn Mireia is a proud Catalonian who works for a notary in Barcelona. She studied film in school and dreams of teaching, but the economic climate in Spain has forced many with artistic aspirations to pursue more practical methods of earning a living.
“Mireia is like family,” Azamat informs me. “So while she is here, nothing bad will happen to her.” I pause and wait for him to say nothing bad will happen to me, either. He doesn’t.
At the departure camp, Mireia and I are given a two-minute lesson on how to ride a horse. Unfortunately, it’s in Kyrgyz, a language neither Mireia nor I speak. My only real takeaway is that choo means “giddy-up” in Kyrgyz; it’s up to me, I guess, to figure out how to make the horse stop and how not to fall off. But at last, it seems, we’re off!
Kind of. My horse refuses to move. I kick his flanks and say, “Choo,” but he just stands there, unfazed. He continues to feign indifference as everyone from the yurt camp comes over and starts shouting “Choo!” at him, and finally the guide just shrugs and switches horses with me.
“The horses know who should ride them,” Mireia tells me. If memory serves, she’s backed up by the movie Wild Horses Can’t Be Broken.
This isn’t Mireia’s first horse trek, and it shows. She wears hiking pants and a sturdy fleece jacket, while my attire consists of makeshift outdoor gear and things I don’t mind being ruined: a raincoat over an old college sweatshirt, and a pair of awkwardly baggy designer jeans I bought on a website that didn’t allow returns.
The horses plod us through pristine landscapes. Sheep graze on sloped pastures rolling off of treeless hills whose naked faces reveal each mound and scratch. Wild horses raise their heads as we pass. A stream wraps around a grassy knoll; the first cold snap has left a few leaves blushing. There are no people.
Here’s the thing the guidebooks don’t tell you about horse trekking: it’s really boring.
The writers, too busy scribbling lyrical poetry about a guest yurt’s variety of breakfast foods, neglect to mention the most important detail, which is that the novelty of riding a horse wears off after about thirty minutes, and after that, you’re stuck on top of a smelly animal whose maximum speed rivals that of a moving sidewalk. With nothing to do but think, for two whole days.
We’re forty-five minutes into our trek, but it feels like it’s been forty-five hours. Two days is going to be a lifetime. The time stretches out before me like an abyss into which my mind gleefully dumps all the things I don’t want to think about: fears, insecurities, the probable caloric value of my breakfast, various bodily irregularities that could be the first signs of a fatal illness, various bodily irregularities that are definitely benign but somehow more distressing (am I getting wrinkles?), conjectures about which ex-boyfriends I could get back together with if I had to, the likelihood that my enemies are suffering more than I am, musings on why I have enemies, realization that my number of enemies has decreased with age, brief burst of pride, fear of aging, fear of death.
Our guide has been singing to himself since we left. At first, I worried this was a sign of insanity, but I now understand this is something he does to keep from going insane.
The first time I meet Anton, he tells me how much he hates when people ask him where Belarus is.
“It’s like, come on, I shouldn’t have to tell you,” he says.
“Yeah, totally,” I reply. “Who doesn’t know Belarus?”
“Lots of people don’t even know it’s in Europe,” he tells me, which is how I learn Belarus is in Europe. “They don’t know anything about it.”
“So crazy,” I say, making a mental note to Google, What is Belarus?
Anton and I fall for each other quickly and intensely. We both love short stories and witty turns of phrase. He has a disarming smile and unwavering faith in his own convictions. When he kisses me I melt.
How do you describe what you love about someone? Maybe that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s also a legitimate question I’ve been wondering. I could say that his face was so smooth and chiseled that I sometimes wished I could carry it around with me and run my fingers over it when I was feeling sad and that spending time with him was like being on the kind of fun drugs they give you for dental surgery. I could say that it instantly felt like I’d known him forever, that we seemed to understand each other so completely that we would sometimes stop and marvel at the fact that we’d come from such different places. But every description falls short of the things we hold most precious.
One summer Sunday early on, I take him to a party at a pool in Shanghai with a swim-up bar and an afternoon DJ. It’s a hot, slow, blue-sky summer day, too perfect to do anything but waste. We sip beers with my friends in the pool bar and talk about nothing and everything. At one point we drift away from the crowd toward the deep end—we say we want to swim, but really it’s just an excuse to be alone together, to hold each other without anyone watching, because it feels so unnatural for our bodies to not be entwined.
“Are you sick of me yet?” he asks. He came over on Friday to help me move and hasn’t left my side since.
I shake my head. “Are you sick of me?”
He shakes his head.
It’s settled.
A few days later, he texts me: I fucking miss you, man.
I write back: I don’t blame you, because I’m a man.
Him: extra words to conceal the emotion
Me: which words are extra?
Him: fucking, man.
We go to see a friend’s play—No Exit, as it happens—in an old wharf on the river. I borrow a friend’s bike for Anton and we ride there. It’s night, but above us the sky glows from the neon lights of skyscrapers and billboards and dumpling restaurants. I think there’s a cut-through in the old city, and we duck into a maze of dark alleys and low gable-roofed houses that have been there for a century. We get so lost we miss the first scene. Stages always seem to suck me in physically; I come to when the lights go up and find myself perched on the lip of my chair, my chin hovering over the shoulder of the stranger in front of me. Afterward, the director teases us. “You were watching the play,” he tells me, “but your boyfriend was watching you.” He’s not my boyfriend yet, but we don’t correct him.
Outsi
de, we discover that someone has stolen my bike while we were watching the play. We’re miles from my house and we need to get my friend’s bike home.
“I don’t know how to ride on the back of a bike,” I tell Anton.
He doesn’t know how to ride with someone on the back. But we eliminate all other options.
“I’m really ticklish,” he warns. Which means I can’t hold his sides to stay on.
We take a different route back, this one beside a highway. We shriek and laugh and almost die a million times because when I slip and grab his waist to catch my balance, he loses his. We keep stopping; I don’t think either of us thinks we’ll make it, but we don’t say that. When we pull up outside the apartment building, it feels like, if we could make it through that—two people who don’t belong on one bicycle—together we can do anything.
Anton wants us both to be great, but first we have to be better. From the start, we see in each other the things we could be. We’ve both been waiting our whole lives to fall in love with someone else who dreams of writing a passable short story and understands they still have a long way to go. We set deadlines and send each other pieces for feedback. We both have day jobs we fantasize of one day putting behind us, and we make each other believe that our passions are possible. We push each other to take them more seriously.
In a lot of ways, it’s a typical start to a brand of passionate relationship between a twenty-five-year-old and a twenty-seven-year-old, but in one very notable way it’s not, which is that Anton is married.
Well, kind of. It’s complicated: he and his wife, Elena, are no longer in a romantic relationship, but they’re still married, for visa reasons, and living together, out of financial considerations and also because it’s the easiest way to coparent their five-year-old son, Vadik. Anton tells me all of this the first time I meet him.
I meet Elena and Vadik a few weeks after I meet Anton. They live in a city twenty-five minutes outside of Shanghai. I go out there on weekends and stay with them. I sleep in Elena’s bed, she sleeps with Vadik, and Anton takes the couch. I know, by the reaction I get when I explain this, that it should feel so strange and awkward, and sometimes it does, but mostly it doesn’t. Elena tells Anton that I seem frightened by her, which is kind of true. But I like her, and I fall in love with Vadik almost as quickly as I do with Anton. We cook dinners and go grocery shopping and take Vadik to karate. I’m trying on a domestic routine and responsibilities that are still years away for me. I’m twenty-five.
The whole time, Belarus floats in the ether. It’s where Elena goes to visit her fiancé when the school where she teaches piano has holidays. It’s a place Vadik knows, but not as home, and the homeland Anton is always trying to put behind him. Sometimes Elena cooks blinis and they tell me stories. For Anton, Belarus is poverty, despair, loneliness; for Elena, it’s snow, forests, family.
Sometimes I stay with Vadik while Elena is out of town and Anton is at work. We color, read, and use Chinese when there’s a word one of us doesn’t know in the other’s language. I wonder what it would be like to do this, not in China, but in Minsk.
“You have to see it,” Anton tells me. We’ll go.
“How old are you?” the guide asks me suddenly in Russian, interrupting my daydreams.
I’ve gotten this question a lot so far in Central Asia; I’m starting to sense it’s the local small talk.
“I’m twenty-eight,” I tell him. “How old are you?”
He tells me he’s thirty-two and then gestures to Mireia. “How old is she?” he asks.
I stammer. “Um, Mireia, the guide wants to know . . . how old you are.”
She looks taken aback. “Thirty-four,” she says, after a brief pause.
“I’m twenty-eight and he’s thirty-two!” I blurt out before translating her answer back to the guide. He nods, and doesn’t speak to us again for hours.
Anton and I break up, partially because it gets tiring to commute between cities to see each other, and partially for the reason everyone said we would, which I hate. I hated the way people would say, “Oh, he’s married?” and assume they knew everything. Elena and Vadik are supposed to move back to Belarus a year after Anton and I meet, after which Anton would come to Shanghai, but then Elena gets cold feet and I can’t fathom another year of us catching trains on Fridays and Sundays.
The breakup floors me like nothing has before. This surprises me, because I never pictured things with Anton lasting forever. But it feels like they ended too soon.
I miss him in a way that’s terrifyingly novel and all-encompassing. I move through the world and see only reminders of someone I desperately want to talk to, but can’t. The fact that I’ve never felt this before makes me fear that I’ll never not miss him. People say it takes time, but when the emptiness doesn’t fade, after the first weeks, then months, your fate starts to seem sealed.
I mean, in some ways, it does get better. Everyone says that, too, and while it’s true, that’s not the point. Sure, I stop crying and I no longer have to fight the urge to call him when I see something and go, “Dude, do you remember . . .” But I still think about him constantly, and there remains a dullness to everything, a lingering longing even in moments where my thoughts do manage to turn to something else. The fact that this counts as progress isn’t comforting.
Anton and I used to make crazy pacts: write five new minutes of material each week, work on a play, write a song. It worked because we spent so much time apart; when we were together, the hours disappeared.
Now I feel like I don’t know how to move onto the next step without him pushing me there.
Months after we break up, I e-mail Anton, and he comes to Shanghai to meet me for dinner. He asks me if I still think of him, and I say no, because in tough times, I always find comfort in the wisdom of Why Men Love Bitches. Then I ask him if he still thinks of me and he says all the time. “Sometimes I think, What was I doing a year ago today? And the answer is always: I was with you.”
Here I should mention that I have problems with altitude. I was given doctor’s orders to stop climbing mountains after I had an episode of high-altitude cerebral edema and tried to take a nap on a glacier at nineteen thousand feet. I pretended to find this diagnosis disappointing, but in truth, I was relieved. Clearly, many people enjoy ascending a mountain by climbing it, but if it’s an option, I’d just as gladly drive.
I was told never to go above an altitude of fifteen thousand feet: any higher than that and, I assume, I’m supposed to stop, drop, and roll my way down to safety.
Song-Köl is at an elevation of ten thousand feet, which I decide will be fine. I really want to see Song-Köl. I may not enjoy outdoor activities like hiking, waterskiing, and doing trust falls with coworkers, but I do like nature. Or I want to like it.
As the afternoon fades into evening, I start to feel woozy and spacey. I know this is a bad sign, but I glimpse a circle of yurts in the distance. It’s just over this combination hill/field, which I’m sure has some beautiful poetic or geographical term, but I can’t think of it because I’m too busy not vomiting. I fix my eyes on the yurts and will myself to stay upright by envisioning all of the wonderfully satisfying ways in which I can murder my horse.
Why is riding a horse so exhausting? The only thing I have to do is not fall off a slightly larger animal tasked with carrying me and all my luggage over countless mountains, while refraining from eating his favorite food, which literally grows at his feet, and I’m somehow the more fatigued. The valley that stands between us is probably turning pink and purple as the light fades, but all I can focus on is the fact that these goddamned yurts have grown only slightly larger, because, again, we’re inching along at the pace of an energy-efficient escalator. Although I have a few survival instincts, including an impeccable sense of direction, one that I don’t have is the will to persevere in the face of physical discomfort. I start feeling worse. The world spins; I don’t; a nap would be nice; I would like to vomit.
I yell something
like “Time-out!” as I gracelessly tumble off the horse. The guide and Mireia rush over.
I don’t want to get back on the horse. The ground feels safe and familiar, like a couch that got you through a dark period. “I’ll just walk,” I say weakly, first in English, and then kind of in Russian. “I’ll meet you guys there.”
The look on their faces says this is not an option. Which, fair enough, I was just going to try to roll the rest of the way.
Mireia smiles and gets down from her horse. “How about we walk together for a while, and if you feel better, you can get back on the horse?” she offers.
“I’m never getting back on,” I whisper hoarsely.
She nods. “Okay.”
We walk through the meadow holding our horses’ bridles; Mireia tries to distract me by asking about my life, my trip, my family. I shake my head. “Tell me everything about Franco’s Spain,” I croak. I know that there is a thing called Franco’s Spain, and I have a general sense that it was bad and that’s about it. Now seems as good a time as any to get informed.
Soon I’m so busy asking questions I can only get away with because I’m ill (“How were the Catalonians repressed?”) that I don’t even notice that I’m swinging my leg back over the horse. Well, technically, I’m not really doing the swinging: the guide is holding my torso up with one hand and swinging my leg over with the other. But the point is, I’m back on the horse.
I think about how, of all the jobs I’d be bad at, horse guide probably tops the list. How does our guide stare at mountains all day without going mad? What does he know that I don’t?
The sun finally slips behind the mountains, rimming the horizon in a soft pink glow. We pull into a small yurt encampment on a gentle slope. Next to a hitching post, two horses nuzzle each other. It’s quiet and still, and I finally feel something approaching contentment. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t check my cell phone to see if the yurt camp had service. (It doesn’t.)
Open Mic Night in Moscow Page 5
