by Li Juan
At that point, I spotted an even taller, darker dune to the east of me. There, an enormous white-winged black bird was perched at the top of the dune, gazing west in complete stillness. So I descended the dune I was on, and with my eyes fixed on the bird, began to approach and climb the dark dune. When I was halfway up, the bird spread its wings and rose to the sky. After making a few circles overhead, it disappeared into the emptiness of the white sky. When I finally reached the top of the dune, I turned in circles to look. And then, suddenly, I saw the graves not far to my east.
What I approached wasn’t a sand dune but a low plateau in the desert. The farther I walked, the more I felt the earth change—the patches of earth poking out of the snow became redder and redder. I realized that this area wasn’t just sand but also dirt! I came to a sudden realization that when we first arrived at the burrow settlement, Cuma and Sister-in-law must have come here with a camel to collect dirt in order to renovate the dilapidated burrow. I also realized why those people from time immemorial would choose this specific location to build their graves, because holes dug in dirt do not collapse easily.
As I walked, the world came to a hush. The closer I got to the graves, the smoother the ground became, unmarked even by footprints. Not only the flock, but even the scattered cattle, sheep, and camel had not trespassed. There were only the occasional tracks of a pair of gazelles or similar wild animals arcing across the land.
It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the graveyard that I could see there weren’t four graves as Kama said, but perhaps seven of them. Some had collapsed, leaving twigs strewn all over the place, which made three grave mounds appear as one. From the looks of them, these graves had been there for a long time.
The two most striking graves were fenced in using short, winding branches from the desert poplar tree. Compared to the grand graves made from thick and straight pine logs found deep in the mountains, these seemed quaint. Yet, in spite of their simplicity, they were grand too—to find this many precious poplar branches in the vast desert, who knows how far the grieving family must have traveled in their wagon! I for one hadn’t see a single tree in the hundreds of miles I had traveled from north to south.
There were also three slightly smaller graves that were surrounded by saxaul branches that had been stuck into the ground to form spiky cones, as if someone was setting up a bonfire. They were so simple that they couldn’t even aspire to be beautiful; the structures simply served as markers: somebody sleeps forever beneath. Though these twig graves looked loose and flimsy, they had to be pretty sturdy. Just think of all the windy days across all seasons! They still huddled tightly together, pointing deep into the earth: somebody sleeps forever beneath.
It was the desert after all, but no matter how deprived or constrained you might be, you should not shortchange the dead. He wore the stars and the moon, walked in the wind and the rain, shuttled across this earthly loom from north to south and back. Then, one day, he died. He never had to move again, never had to migrate with the herd again. He would stay here forever. This was his true home, the home of a lifetime, an eternal resting place … building a final dwelling for this parting soul was the last thing his grieving family could do for him; of course they had to bring their full resources to bear.
Think about it: because of a person’s death, all the thick branches and dry twigs from a hundred-mile radius gathers over his resting place—how grand, how colossal that death must be!
I stood there for a while. Even though the sky was high and the earth vast, I felt a tightness in my chest. I thought about the skeletons deep below the earth, about how they too had followed their horses across this very desert before their eyes had shut, their flesh had withered, their palms and faces had shrunk … and I thought, those in this world who had known them, who had missed them, were perhaps all in the ground too, buried somewhere far away from there. Then I thought about all the names and faces that will one day disappear, about how each of us will come and go without a trace, no different from the plants and the birds … but he really was once alive and walking across this stretch of land!
Why is there always so much peace and quiet in the world? Perhaps it is because too much death has accumulated, and the dead will always outnumber the living.
They had found their peace and quiet, and those who mourn them will gradually find theirs too. The quietest thing in the world isn’t nothingness, or the passage of time, but people … people who will be alone in the end but whose hope can never be silenced.
I turned to go back, aiming straight for the hazy sun slanting to the west. At some point, the western sky had cleared up into a stirring blue and white. Far in the distance, beneath the sky, were ten or so wandering camels.
As I was walking, I suddenly turned as if I had seen a ghost! A white jeep was approaching! I hadn’t heard a thing! While I was still getting over the shock, the car came to a quiet stop next to me. I immediately saw that it was Cuma in the front passenger seat—I didn’t expect Cuma to find a car to bring him back! It had been five days since I last saw the guy. His hair was buzzed and his outfit ironed. He looked real spirited. He seemed especially pleased to see me. I was happy to see him too, even though he was always making noises at night and keeping people up, and incessantly working during the day whether he needed to or not. There was a big wound on his face, likely the result of having fallen when he was drunk.
The driver was a familiar villager who rolled down the window to greet me. I leaned on the window frame to look inside. Nur, my neighbor from Akehara, was there too!
Taking a closer look, oh boy, including the driver, the five-seater sat seven adults and a child. One big fellow, who was curled up in the trunk, grinned at me.
Since my destination was on their way, I squeezed into the car without a word. After the door slammed shut, we were squeezed so tightly that each passenger only had one foot touching the floor.
The driver asked me, “What are you doing walking all this way?”
My answer: “For fun.”
“What’s fun here?”
I smiled but didn’t say anything.
Then he asked, “You walked all the way out here and didn’t say anything to the people down below?”
“I did.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Hello!’”
Everyone in the jeep laughed: “No!”
I asked Cuma, “When are those graves from?”
He said, “Maybe seventy or eighty years ago.”
The driver said, “No, no, at least a hundred years!”
The passenger next to me said, “When my grandfather was a kid, someone told him it was already a hundred years.”
I was skeptical. “How can a few graves made of little tree sticks survive for that long?”
Cuma said, “No, no, there used to be at least twenty graves and more than twenty people buried there! Slowly, year after year, the graves collapsed, faded away.…”
The driver said, “Nonsense! The place has been used for hundreds of years, there’s got to be at least a hundred people down there.”
Whatever the case, what I saw were the last remaining graves. In the wind and sun, they’d melted back into the earth. They were the last traces of a once-large cemetery.
Cuma continued by explaining that that was a different time, not at all like now, when people have cars and can quickly take the deceased back north to the Ulungur where the ancestral graves are. As Muslims, Kazakhs customarily bury the dead as soon as possible, which often means finding some place nearby. But “nearby” could easily be dozens of miles away. As a cart carried the corpse slowly across the land, the family’s grief slowly dragged on.
This was perhaps the only patch of dirt in this whole stretch of desert, and probably the only graveyard. After all this time, how many herders who could no longer march with their flocks had been left there? Now that people no longer used this ancient graveyard, it would be abandoned forever. Cuma said, “All thanks to th
e great improvements in transportation …” But as far as I was concerned, the “improvements” so far had about as much impact as a wooden mallet against an iron beam. Nevertheless, the impact had already shaken this world to its core.
PART
FOUR
Last Things
29.
Year of the Blizzard
CUMA ONCE ASKED ME whether I preferred winter or summer. I thought about the winter’s long nights and short days, about being able to sleep in, and how milk production is low during winter, so there’s no need to make dairy products, no need to break your back every day turning the skimmer machine or whipping yogurt, so I casually answered, “Winter’s better!”
He said, “Then why didn’t you come last winter?”
I was stumped. The previous year, 2009, had seen snowstorms of rare proportions. The region’s livestock production was hit hard. Many flocks were completely wiped out; only the herders had managed to survive. Even I was nearly buried by the snow!
Cuma added, “If the weather was as good as today every day in winter, that would be nice! But when you run into situations like last year, you may survive this winter but it’ll get you the next winter! The whole family kaput! What’s good about winter? Can’t be better than summer!”
* * *
IT’S TRUE—THIS WINTER, the snow came late and, when it came, melted quickly. Though it was a drought year, though we experienced more than a month of extreme cold weather, overall it had been a calm winter.
The weather last year was bad enough as it was, but what made it worse was the fact that Cuma’s family was the only one in this whole pasture. When the snow reached its very worst, the family of three struggled to cope. As soon as they were out of bed, the whole family went into battle, carrying shovels out to clear a path—there needed to be at least one path by which the flock could come in and out the burrow settlement, a way for them to climb over the dune to the snow-covered wilds where they could graze.
Snow wouldn’t stop falling, as if the sky was broken. In Cuma’s words, “Old Man Sky dropped it for two days and rested for one.”
When it wasn’t snowing, the wind blew the dry, powdery snow into the dip that was our burrow settlement, where it compacted and hardened. At that point, a person wouldn’t be able to dig more than a few yards by hand, so Cuma drove the camels and horses through to tread out a path.
But whether dug out or trampled, the path didn’t last for more than a day. The wind was too strong. The path that was cleared in the morning was filled in by the evening, sealing them in.
Every morning, after a path was cleared, Kama herded the flock and Sister-in-law did housework and tended to the cattle as usual, but Cuma led the camels to a distant dirt road to wait for the government’s emergency relief: corn. The relief corn cost one yuan for two pounds, fifty cents cheaper than the market price. Each burlap sack weighed a hundred and seventy-six pounds. But buying relief corn required luck—herders from every corner of the wilderness waited up and down that stretch of road, which was often impassable. Even though plow trucks and bulldozers dispatched by the Livestock Office worked day and night clearing the road, they still couldn’t keep up with the speed of the wind and snow.
Cuma did eventually buy corn a few times. Thanks to two feedings of this supplementary corn, the sheep and larger livestock managed to survive. Yet, even though it was enough to appease their appetites, it wasn’t enough to keep them warm. Fewer than fifty sheep made it through the end of winter.
In total, fifty ewes, eighty big lambs, two cattle, and two calves died.
One day, during a brief moment of leisure in the murky twilight hours before the sky went dark, Kama led me over the eastern sand dune, along a stretch of the ridge to where it sloped down. There, still visible, was a pile of sheepskin half-buried beneath the snow with white bones jutting out. Kama told me that these were the sheep that didn’t make it through the long winter (Muslims don’t eat animals who die of natural causes and hadn’t received the prayer). There were sixteen sheep in this pile. Farther along were several more piles in which I could see the larger bones and skeletons of cattle and horses.
I thought of the piebald cow that lost its child to the cold and adopted the calf that had lost its mother to that same cold. They relied on one another to survive. And the patch-faced cow that survived against all odds, whose three udders had frozen. To this day, those three udders cannot produce milk.
* * *
LIKE FINDING A HOLE in the roof on a rainy night, the mount had to choose this of all moments to go missing.
Cuma said, “It was three months before we got it back!”
I was shocked. “Three months! What did it eat for three months?”
Before he could reply, I quickly realized the answer: “Of course, grass.” Horses eat grass. They’re not like people, who’d starve out there in the wilderness after a day or two.
Cuma found it hilarious and translated my question for Sister-in-law, who laughed too.
In theory, horses don’t get lost, which was why Cuma wasn’t worried at first. But the family’s one remaining mount had been whittled down to nothing but skin and bones. Even a modest journey left it teetering. On the coldest days, it was so weak that no amount of whipping could get the horse to move. As a result, after having received the relief corn, Cuma decided to go look for the missing horse on foot.
The first time he went out, he walked east for ten days. The second time, he walked west for half a month. Along the way, he asked for information and followed the clues. Whenever he found a burrow, he asked for lodging … like that, a month went by without success.
For Sister-in-law and Kama, who stayed home, it was a difficult time as well. In the morning, there were only two women to clear snow. Without the horse, Kama had to herd through the deep snow on foot. The snow buried the desert, growing ever thicker and harder. The sheep could no longer dig through the snow to find grass. All the scratching only bloodied their hooves. But they were too hungry, so they kept digging.… By that point, much of the flock had already perished, and of the cattle, only two pairs of mother and calf survived.
Finally, Cuma bit the bullet and offered a three-hundred-yuan bounty. It worked. Two months later, someone rode the horse back from more than two hundred kilometers away. It had somehow run all the way to Red Flag Commune! (Yup, we were still using place-names left from the Cultural Revolution like Eternal Red Commune, Happiness Commune, Peak Commune …). The family that found the horse knew that sooner or later, the owner would arrive at their door, so they might as well return it right away. But during those months, the pitiful horse was poorly fed. It continued to serve as a mount without any extra nutritional supplements, reducing it to a haggard state.
Because the snow was too thick and melted too slowly, and the flock was too weak, a long journey became impossible. In the spring of that year, Cuma’s family wasn’t able to migrate back north until the end of April, a month later than usual! Normally, by the end of April, the herders were already done lambing in the spring pastures north of the Ulungur River and were preparing to enter the summer pastures in the Altai Mountains.
Last year, the snow in the mountains melted slowly as well. At the end of May and beginning of June, the mountain passes were still frozen shut. The entire livestock industry was stuck in the foothills, unable to advance. Once the grass there had been consumed, some of the herders had no choice but to retreat south again to the banks of the Irtysh River and the Ulungur River basin to graze. This had rarely happened before.
But thanks to the excess of snow that winter, the next spring had an abundance of water. As soon as the grasses were eaten, they grew right back up. What was typically rocky desert scrub was suddenly transformed into a lush prairie! Never-before-seen grasses appeared. They were so unfamiliar that not even the cattle and sheep dared to eat them—it was uncanny (my good friend Erjiao thought they were planted by aliens).
Even though that winter was long behind us,
the very mention of it still drew heavy sighs from Cuma, followed by repeated complaints: “So much snow, so much …”
* * *
AS FOR ME, I had spent all that winter at home by myself in Akehara, where I often stared out the window in a trance: an all-engulfing storm where the flakes didn’t drift down but came shooting down like bullets. Especially during the first two storms, the clumps of wet and heavy snow the size of pigeon eggs could leave a painful bruise on your face.
At the end of that December, after a whole night of snow, my windows were halfway buried, and the door was completely blocked.
Actually, not being able to go outside wasn’t such a big deal. The house where I lived was once a rabbit hutch, a hundred sixty-five feet long and plenty wide. Stored inside were several tons of sunflower seeds, over two hundred pounds of dregs from pressing sunflower oil, a sack of cracked wheat, and three sacks of wheat bran. The chickens, ducks, cats, dogs, and rabbits were in no danger of going hungry. As for me, though there were no vegetables, I had a sack of flour, a sack of rice, and plenty of salt, so I wasn’t going to go hungry. The coal had already been moved inside. There was more than a ton of it, enough to burn for over a month. Water came from a well pump directly into the room. It would run as long as there was electricity. And the number of days without power weren’t many. If I hadn’t the need to use the toilet, I could have stayed inside that building until spring.
But how can you not use the toilet! Besides, as soon as the snow stopped, you had to figure out a way to get outside, or else, with the wind blowing and the snow settling and hardening, that door will never open again! So, in the morning, as soon as the snow stopped, I threw myself into battle. First, push as hard as you can against the door (it opened outward) until it opened wide enough to stick a finger through. Then, stick the iron poker for the stove through the crack and jiggle it around until the snow around the crack loosens. Then push again until the crack is as wide as a palm. Then, I used the small shovel for scraping ash to dig at the snow, then pushed again until the opening was six inches wide. Finally, I could reach out to shovel.… When the door was open a little more than a foot wide it was enough for me to squeeze out.… Throughout this whole process, I took regular breaks to warm myself up by the stove.