by Atticus Lish
The light turned golden orange and the heat eased. Another truck went chugging by on the road and they both listened to it passing. Her mother took the noodles out to let them cool before they ate them with a green pepper and an onion.
The shadows fell over them and through the gaps in the drift-wood roof, the sky showed. In the doorway, the sun was setting on the mountains and its rays were coming in a straight line to their eyes, passing from rim to rim across the vast blue-shadowed desert basin.
All we had was soup when I was picking cotton, her mother said. That was before you. You were still being carried around in your father’s cotton sack. He asked if I would like to have you. I said I would, and he gave you to me. Come here and take a bite of this—her mother had peaches that she had picked up from the roadside—let’s brush it off. Don’t eat sand. Sit here now. He’ll be home soon, God willing. Now let me tell you something nice. Let me tell you why you should be happy. Do you want to hear? Now, listen.
Did you know that there is a place that is better than any other? Okay, I’ll tell you about it. First of all, it’s out there, past all the bandits and wolves. It’s a long way off out there, a good three months on horseback at least. The officials don’t tell anyone about it because they want it for themselves. Still, people know it’s there. Now, look, everyone there is full of joy. They spend all their lives feasting and singing, so why wouldn’t they be? No one goes without. Everyone has what he needs. Everyone has shoes, clothes, and a fine cap. It’s a place blessed by God in a green valley protected by mountains and rivers. The herds graze and the grapes grow in the vineyards and, in the summer, they ride up to the larch forest, where it’s cool. They hunt as much as they like and then they ride back down where the sun shines on the green grass. You need only put out your hands and blackberries fill your arms. The air is filled with the sweet music of finches in the trees. Everyone gets yogurt, cream, milk, bread, and meat—as much as the heart desires. The fire is singing and the fat is frying and the pots are tipping their lids. To have a whole roast goat is no great thing there. You don’t have to be rich. If somebody wants it, it will be theirs. All they have to do is say I will have bread! and the bread leaps out straight from the oven. That’s how eating works there.
The women are as beautiful as sun and moon, as the saying goes—cheeks red like apples and a brow fair like milk. Arm in arm, sister and cousin, they go picking flowers, while the men gaze after them with longing, hearing them laughing like nightingales. The men cannot stop singing to them, courting them. A girl will only have to throw her comb on the ground and twenty men will fight to pick it up. If she yawns, the men will make shade for her and call the wind over to cool her, saying: here, Breeze, blow! Well, that’s well, but who will peel potatoes for my mother’s supper while I am lying here? she says, and the men will trip over themselves peeling potatoes.
While everyone is eating and having a good time, there’s music and dancing and singing, lifting everyone’s hearts. All day long, the men hold contests of riding, running and wrestling. Any one of the men could be a prince for looks and bravery. They go galloping back and forth on the steppe, making one thundering pass after another, and each time they go by, the people rise up and huzzah with one voice. The steppe is filled with cheering. You have to imagine that great sound coming from thousands of us at one time, how it echoes out around the world. It makes the red and yellow poppies bloom everywhere on the green mountainsides and the rivers melt with admiration and flow from the snowcaps.
If an official demands taxes, you tell him next week! and he’ll take that for an answer and put it in his book. If he doesn’t, you show him a hair on your head and say, not even this will I give you! and he goes away knowing he’s met his match. The prison gates are flung open and the prisoners come out singing and giving thanks, and go back to their families.
Zou Lei’s mother touched her face in the dark.
Are you awake?
She was. They could see the stars through the roof but they couldn’t see each other. At night, the rugs disappeared, the very surface they were resting on. It was easy to imagine they were on a precipice and that it wasn’t wise to move until the sun came back and brought the earth back with it. At night, Zou Lei would wake up and figure out the house was empty and then she’d hear a sound and see a ribbon of the night sky appear and her mother would come back in, having gone out to the roadside, having thought she had heard a truck stopping.
She told Zou Lei a story about a girl whose father was taken away by a witch and the only way to be reunited with him was to travel west. Zou Lei’s mother shifted, talking with her hands, describing the witch’s long nose like a sausage. Outside, a sandstorm turned the darkness cloudy. In the morning, they would sweep the rug off, shake the sand out of their own hair, go down to the spigot and wash their feet before praying on the rug, hands to face, her mother’s eyes closed, lips moving.
Her mother told her Clever took seven mulberry seeds, one seed to live on in each of the seven deserts she had to walk through. In the dark, Zou Lei saw the gravel hills, the gorges and caves, places like the moon, the river running dry, the scrubland going on forever, the golden desert. The bandits took a liking to her. There was one desert of glass and one of iron, her mother gesticulated. Clever wore out all her shoes. A journey of seven years. The seeds were gone, no more water in the sheep’s bladder. The iron desert tore the soles off her feet until the fresh blood ran out and boiled to steam on the hot iron. But she kept on, believing in God until the sun blinded her. With death coming, she stretched the bladder over her knees to make a drum and chanted I am a ghost now. She drummed for seven days. A bird came out of the blue blue sky and cast his shadow on her. As long as she sang, he flew with her, running above the steppe on wolf’s legs. They came to a pure blue river and she leapt in and when she came out her sight was restored and she beheld the Fergana valley.
Her father came home—no one saw him coming—they heard his voice at the door and there he was—it didn’t seem real. He picked her up and hugged her. Mama dropped her basket, Oh, God! She pulled him inside. He smelled like gasoline. I’ll cook for you. Thanks be to God! She gripped his arm, wiping her eyes with her dirty suntanned fingers.
Don’t cry. Don’t be hard-up. Look! he smiled, taking ration cards from the pocket of his military blouse and giving them to her mother. Flour, oil, potatoes—for us, eh.
He dragged his sack inside and Zou Lei watched his forearm flex.
They did his washing in the ditch next to the orchard. Zou Lei and her mama wrung his dark wet green uniform out.
Her mother gave her a knife and a potato to peel.
Like this, her sunburned Chinese daddy said and showed her how to cut the skin off in one unbroken spiral. He dug a pit out back with his army shovel and killed a goat. Bring me a bowl from mama. He hung the purple chalky meat up high behind the house—always working, even when he was on leave, a cigarette on his lip, the salt drying on his shirt.
It was summer in the Taklamakan. They would let the tea cool in the kettle overnight. In the day, the sky was clear, magnifying the mountains in the distance, the snowcaps that never went away. The speed of evaporation made the desert seem less hot. The grownups sat on wooden squatting stools in front of the door and drank their tea from the day before in the afternoon. A wind came, picking up curtains of dust that moved down the street like giants in dresses.
Zou Lei ran back from playing. It’s kicking up!
Looks like it.
Her father picked up his chair. Come on. They went inside and she helped him shut the door.
It’s a bad one! her mother laughed.
The door banged and her father moved the table in front of it and it still banged. Dim blue night fell as the sandstorm swept against houses. They lit the lantern and moved their dinner away from where the wind was getting in. Her mother tore the bread in three pieces.
Eat so your hands don’t ache.
The bread was warm. Zou Lei lean
ed on her father’s tan arm.
In our army, we say don’t be slow. Slow one cleans the pot.
Are you slow? her mother asked him.
Me? No. What do you think?
I don’t know. I was thinking about my husband cleaning the pot.
Your mama likes to think.
Yes, I like to think. I think all the time.
I don’t think so much myself.
Oh, you’d be the first man who didn’t think so much.
No, I just follow orders.
Oh, you’re the first man of your kind!
The door had stopped banging. It got later at night. The lantern kept up its glow, red through the hanging curtain. Her father looked like a tiger with his crewcut and muscled limbs, talking about his job to both of them. In the mountains, it was flat and strange, a tarn. His regiment had camped where the Yellow River ended. We carry rifles, but we carry shovels too. The pipeline work is like mining and, though it’s dangerous, we’re committed to it, because we want to make the country go forward. A Kazak wanted to give him his horse for settling a dispute over livestock, but her father, a soldier, couldn’t take it. We’re here to serve the people. He didn’t know he was part of us, but he is. The people includes everyone. So then he brought out his daughter in a pretty dress, and all the boys laughed at my embarrassment. Was she very pretty? Zou Lei asked. Her father put her on his lap and she listened to his voice through his chest. Her mother half-lay on her side, listening to him, the flowers on her skirt becoming birds on the rug beneath her.
Zou Lei jogged with him—she was running, her pink sandals slapping—he turned around and jogged backwards downhill, serious about teaching her. The land panned out, past the lot where the bus came in.
Her father balanced on the parallel bars, swinging his legs, holding them out straight, pressing himself up and down. He jumped down. She remembered the sound of his boots landing. Everything he did was correct and simple. He brushed his hands off, helped her up on the bars.
She was lifted. His sunburned face, his crewcut, the smell of his cigarettes, his sweat dried by the desert—a white crystal salt in the center of his chest. One of her pink sandals fell off. She looked down and saw her dirty feet waving. Don’t look down, he said, steadying her. She was scared, but she could hold herself with his help. Her headscarf fell off. Use your arms. He lifted her up and down—she pressed herself. Ha! she laughed. You did it. He lifted her down. Hopping to keep her bare foot off the hot concrete, holding onto daddy. He put her sandal on her little dirty foot. Good soldier work, he said. He went and picked her scarf up off the ground.
Things are coming along, he said. Little by little. Her mother’s hands were covered in flour, baking bread in a clay oven, which her father had wrestled in front of their house singlehandedly.
Melons, peaches, apples, almonds, dates, Uighurs waiting in the shade, waiting for jobs, waiting for a drink of water, minarets above the rooftops. A hot wind blew across the highway. Zou Lei squinted. She had a plastic bag with bread in it. The bus came in and the cloud of dust drifted away. Sunburned women climbed down in headscarves, holding their money in their hands. How much for bread? Zou Lei put the fractions of a dollar in her pocket.
She saw the red banners getting hung across the medieval street and the army drive through and the shoeless children come back out when they were gone. Chinese cadres in glasses and worker’s hats and black plastic shoes posed in the desert with their hands behind their backs, having their pictures taken by other men who looked just like them and nothing like her father, as proof that they had been here and that everything was a success.
The loudspeakers said, Strike down backwardism! and played triumphant music. She saw a fight over livestock. A man hit his neighbor and threw a sheep into a truck and the other sheep jumped up after it bleating. The smell of wood fire blew across the road from the lamb kawap. Her mouth watered. She broke her sandals kicking a soccer ball and mama hit her.
Russia’s that way, her father pointed. Those are the Muslim countries. The other way is China. He lit a cigarette. The Russian soldiers are good, they have advanced equipment. To protect this frontier from the Russians, that’s why we are here. The Muslims have backward conditions. They don’t make good soldiers because they are too independent. In the middle of the war, they’ll decide to leave and go tend the herd. America has the best equipment, the richest country. In America, a private owns a car. Here, only the general has a car. We have equipment in the middle range, but it is not very advanced. What we have is the size of the population. Conditions will slowly, slowly improve. Everything has to be balanced to win. It’s just like wrestling. If I’m too weak, you push me over. If I’m too strong, I push myself over. You have to be in the middle. China is in the middle, which is just right. In thirty, forty years, we will be able to beat America or Russia.
The buses brought Uighurs from the west, some of them from Fergana. A barber put a chair out on the roadside. Zou Lei watched the open razor moving up the back of a man’s head, fluffs of hair dropping, drifting against the stone curb when the breeze came. The men were sitting in a circle. They raised their sunburned forearms and held out coins to her. You are from the land of milk and honey, she said. They were wearing skullcaps, staring off, clean-shaven, eating her mother’s bread. Who told you that? All of us pick cotton in Fergana. They make us. Now go and tell your mother that.
How far can you run, Dad? she asked her father.
Run or jog? he said. It makes a difference.
Well, to those mountains.
Not running, you mean, but could I get there on foot?
Could you get there? Could anyone get there?
I think so. With determination, yes. And enough water.
The decade ended and, all of a sudden, there were crowds in the streets. Their neighbors disappeared. Alani didn’t come to school. Soccer was considered fundamentalist, so they stopped playing it. They tossed it through the basketball hoop. Her father was mobilized and left them.
Take this, her mother said and handed her the plov to carry out front where their customers were eating.
In the back streets, the boys tried to wrestle each other down. Tyson! they yelled. Arabic graffiti carved in the mud brick. I am Rambo!
A girl threw rocks at her. Your mother is married to a filthy pig-eater.
Truck drivers came in from Gilmet talking about what they had seen. They ordered cold noodles and beer. A Karamlik bit the bottlecap off with his teeth. Smugglers get decapitated over there. Opium paste hidden in bread ovens, usually. On this side, they just put you in the gulag, nothing more than that. Gang members and separatists. Imagine not being allowed to talk for five years. Haven’t you seen the oil-drilling in the desert? I saw them hauling a piece of pipe out there big enough to live in. They have the army camped all around out there. They have everything they want. They get village girls. There’s a tent for them and a doctor to keep them healthy.
She brought them out more beer. A sandstorm hit and they went inside and sat on the rugs. They called for yogurt, vodka. They called her mother over.
How old is she?
Get in the kitchen and stay there.
When they received a notice from the regiment, they waited in the sun from 11:20 to 14:40, which was the official rest time for post office employees, while the Chinese woman and her coworkers in nurse’s hats ate dumplings and fanned themselves and chatted behind a gated window. Her mother sat on the curb holding her head. When the gate lifted, they went inside. The woman in the nurse’s hat said the notice meant that someone had died in the regiment.
But it doesn’t have a name, miss. Maybe it’s not him.
Maybe nothing. It’s the name of whoever you have in the regiment, the woman yelled. If you have somebody else in the regiment, then it’s them.
Her mother began crying out.
The notice had to be stamped, they were told.
Where do I get it stamped?
The woman snatched the pa
per away, pounded it with her stamp, and took it.
Why aren’t you giving it back to me? her mother cried.
What are you going to do with it?
But her mother banged and shook the bars and yelled until the woman gave it back. On the street, someone told them to go to such and such an office. No one told them how her father died. It was a seventeen-hour bus ride to the provincial capital. There, they found out that the notice was essential to collect the death benefit, a little pile of pink banknotes with heroic profiles on them, some of them ethnic minorities. Her mother rolled them up and put them in her stocking, while Zou Lei hung her head.
Now they lived in a big western city, the truckstop gone, failed, they had not made a go of it, her father gone. The banknotes flew away. She was fifteen, sixteen, and she was hungry. She wrote to him. She cut her hair like him to remember him by. A soldier in everything I do. No more school. There were no ration cards unless you bought them from kids in tracksuits, orphans who dealt hashish. She sold things on a blanket. Cassette tapes. A tarnished horn from someone’s Tajik wedding. The street was wired with lights to keep the market going after dark. You could smell the whole roast goat at another one of the tables. There were more Chinese here. Do you like disco? She was into soccer whenever she could play it. The American president was Clinton. On a garbage-strewn field behind the market, she picked up a broken knife and threw it as far as she could.
Sunburned, red-cheeked, her face peeling, she was seventeen years old. They were all sunburned, playing soccer at the extreme end of Liberation Road, dust getting knocked out of their army castoff clothes. Tariq had the ball and she ran way out in an arc, as if something very thin were keeping her here. He kicked it and she curved in to meet the ball. She never stopped moving. She had her elbow in a boy’s face, the two of them fighting for the ball like praying mantises with their legs. The sun was a bright, purifying sun coming out of winter. Everything smelled like leather, a sourness, charcoal dust and manure. This was the end of the city. The wall was four hundred years old and beyond it was the desert.
