On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  I returned to the mud hut in the evening hungry and stiff as wood. Grisha and Vitka were rolling drunk. They had caught a couple of street pigeons earlier that day and had boiled them up for dinner.

  “Everything will be fine! Sit down, lie back, have a vodka, a cup of tea, we will find you a wife … and you can use your horses as a bride-price!” they chanted.

  I capitulated—on account of the vodka, that is—then watched as Grisha and Vitka argued, stumbled, and fought into the early hours. Both had dirt-ingrained skin, rotten yellow teeth, and untamed mustaches that grew animated by the candlelight of the hut. When they tired, they fell together onto a single bed and told of their tragic personal histories. Grisha’s wife was as “honest as they come”—a quality proven by the fact that when she “butchered a man with a carving knife,” she stayed with her victim and called the police. She was due for release from prison in five years. Vitka, on the other hand, had been deeply affected by the death of his only son, who had been hit by a car at age twelve. His daughter had run away to Russia and cut all ties.

  To survive in Akbakai—a town they described to me as “the place that God forgot”—Vitka and Grisha worked odd laboring jobs, including felling saksaul trees on the steppe to sell as firewood.1 The money they earned was spent on vodka.

  When Vitka and Grisha passed out I lay awake listening to the wind, unable to sleep. On the far side of the wall behind me the horses had finished their hay and were standing hungry. When finally the vodka swept me under, I clung to fleeting visions of home and being close to my siblings, mother, and father.

  I had urged the horses on to Akbakai determined to find refuge with a family and a barn full of hay, but come the early hours of December 26—Boxing Day—that vision was in tatters. But things were about to get a lot more difficult.

  My plan had been to stay two or three days in Akbakai, but when I woke to pack, Taskonir was holding his back left leg in the air. It was an abscess in his hoof—most likely the result of a stone bruise suffered during our rushed ride to Akbakai. He could barely walk, and the Australian vet, Sheila, warned via satellite phone that it would be many days before I could expect it to heal. The nearest village west from Akbakai, Ulanbel, was another five days across uninhabited steppe. Carrying on was not an option, yet with no feed for the horses and a precarious refuge with Vitka and Grisha, it was hard to see how I could cope here for any length of time.

  I knew that the next few days were going to be tricky. What I could never have imagined, however, was that the abscess was to be the first of many hold-ups and failed attempts at leaving Akbakai. It would, in fact, be three and a half months before I was able to ride out of there, and while my personal struggle was uppermost in my mind at the beginning of my stay—and became a low point of my journey to Hungary—what emerged over time was that my troubles were merely reflective of circumstances in town immeasurably more difficult than my own. Through the many people I met—both those who helped me and those who hindered me—I came to see a dismal picture of social dislocation, survival, and corruption in this remote gold-mining society in the middle of the “starving steppe.”

  For two days I scrounged for fodder and water, to little avail. Neither the town’s administrator or anyone else I met would so much as invite me past the front door for a cup of tea. When I approached Maksim—who was the owner of the mud hut where Vitka and Grisha lodged—for help, he retorted angrily, “What makes you think anyone should help you! You are better off selling your horses for meat before they are too skinny!” Traditions of nomad hospitality found in auls didn’t widely function in Akbakai—most people simply didn’t have the means.

  Like many others, Maksim had come here lured by the promise of work but found himself unemployed and stranded far from his hometown. He lived in a derelict apartment block where he had rigged up a woodstove in a room on the third floor. To support his wife and two children, he had turned the basement of the building into a makeshift workshop where he made furniture to order out of scrap wood. Without a network of relatives or friends, it was hard to imagine what fallback he had if this venture failed.

  This kind of scenario was unusual in the herding-based auls of modern Kazakhstan and would have been unthinkable for nomads in pre-Soviet times. A tradition called ata-balasy, which means “the joining of grandfather’s sons into one tribe or family,” was the bedrock of nomadic existence, and in many communities it is still only by banding together in wide circles of kin that it is possible to overcome the chaos of post-Soviet Kazakhstan and support those fallen on hard times.

  Maksim’s predicament was symptomatic of the widespread Soviet policy to develop entire towns and cities around a single industry or, in Akbakai’s case, mineral resource. These monogorods, or “monocities,” emerged largely in isolated environs that were unsuitable for agriculture, and drew on migrant workers from across the country. For Kazakhs, monogorods subsequently created even greater displacement from traditional lands and breakdown of traditional kinship structures than did farming collectives.

  During the Soviet era, state-funded social welfare became the backbone of monogorods, substituting for the traditional safety net of family—but this also made them particularly vulnerable to the economic collapse of the 1990s. The failure of the state-run companies that held monopolies in these one-industry towns caused mass unemployment, and residents had neither an alternative economy to turn to nor a network of kin for support.

  Three days after Christmas, Taskonir’s leg was worse, the wind had picked up to gale force, and clouds were marching in from the north and east. Come what may, though, I had decided that anything was better than staying in Akbakai. After saddling up, I went inside the mud hut to say goodbye to Vitka and Grisha. They were sad to see me go and worried what would become of me. It was in the throes of this farewell that my fortunes changed.

  Stumbling into our hovel came a short, squat man wearing thick, crooked glasses that magnified his eyes and pinched his red nose. I took the opportunity to slump back silently in the darkness and study him. From the weathered texture of his face I would have guessed he was in his sixties, but I knew in this harsh environment it probably meant he was a good ten years younger. His voice was deep and husky, and as he spoke, his defrosting mustache wiggled.

  Curiosity eventually got the better of him. “Who is he?” he asked, pointing at me.

  “We have a guest from Australia,” Grisha related. “He came here to us by horse … from Mongolia.”

  The man stepped back, straightened his glasses, then leaned forward into the narrow shaft of light in front of the window. “Come to my home!” he exclaimed. “Why freeze here? I’ll give you a sack of wheat to help you on your way!”

  As I left the hut to take the horses to the man’s home, Grisha and Vitka were excited for me. According to them, Baitak was a “millionaire” and a “king.” I would surely be safe in his hands. Viewed later on with the benefit of a full stomach and grain for the horses, however, their description seemed like a bit of an exaggeration. His house was an underground one-room hut surrounded by a fence made of flattened drums that had once held sodium cyanide. He didn’t own a car, had no washing facilities, and the toilet was a long drop full to the brim with frozen shit and just a tarpaulin to protect one from the elements. His water supplies were trucked in, like everyone else’s, and the much talked-about cafe and bar he owned was a coal-heated hut that was within shouting distance of his house and backed onto a mountain of rubble.

  At the time, though, to me everything about Baitak’s empire shone. My first meal with him was a memorable example—I was presented with a series of fried eggs, and each time I chased the yellow from the plate, it would be replaced with another. Tigon ate buckets of stale bread and milk, until his little belly bulged out to twice its normal size and he sprawled out royally on the floor.

  The true meaning of Baitak’s wealth became clear over the weeks and months to come as my well-being and that of my animals came to gr
avitate around him. As one of the most established people in town—he had been in Akbakai since 1976, when mining operations were in their infancy—he had unique authority and knowledge. Above all, though, I think Baitak’s status as a “king” was a measure of his generous heart, for certainly that is what would ultimately save my life, and those of Tigon and my horses.

  After our meal, Baitak inspected Taskonir and shook his head. He knew I was in trouble, but he also knew what to do. He co-owned a fledgling kstau 6 km out of town—the only of its kind anywhere near Akbakai—where cattle were kept. “You can ride there and stay until your horse heals and the weather improves. Tell the herder there, Madagol, that he can feed your horses with my hay.”

  There were times in my journey when I felt like I was a captain, firmly in command, and steering my caravan on a course of my choosing. There were other times, however, when I simply had to let go of the reins and accept that the journey—or, in this case, Baitak—would guide me.

  To reach the kstau, which was hidden in a valley between two knobby ridges, took two hours, by which time Taskonir was reluctant to move at all. In the midst of a windstorm I was greeted by Madagol—a gruff, wiry old fellow with tightly coiled graying hair and heavy, callused hands. He invited me in with a fusillade of curses regarding the weather.

  “Wind is the worst thing in Akbakai! When it blows on the third day, you know it will blow for seven, and when it blows on the eighth day, it will blow for fourteen … after that it will blow for a month. It’s not like that where we come from!”

  Madagol was from Moiynkum—a regional center 250 km south of Akbakai—and had come with his wife to work as a chaban. Their new home was a shabbily constructed hut with such thin brick walls that despite a coal stove that burned 24/7 it was still below freezing indoors. When I entered I removed my coat and hat, but hurriedly I put them back on. Curled up on a bed under a mountain of blankets, Madagol’s wife sat looking frail and utterly miserable.

  Later I came to appreciate how terribly isolating it must have been for Madagol’s wife. Although the town was not far away, few braved the weather to visit in winter. The main contact she enjoyed with the outside world was when Madagol rode a horse into town to sell milk and buy bread every second or third day. When the blizzards set in, there were some periods when they were completely cut off.

  For me, the shortcomings of the hut were nevertheless a mere detail, and in fact the isolation was a godsend. The vet, Sheila, had suggested the abscess would pass within a week. All I had to do was sit tight.

  It was, of course, wishful thinking to believe my journey was back on track.

  After my first night in Madagol’s hut, a man known as Abdrakhman—a friend of Baitak who owned shares in the kstau—came barreling down in his old Russian four-wheel-drive vehicle and hauled me back to Akbakai, exclaiming, “My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow night. You will be an honored guest! We are chaining you to our home until the new year!”

  Abdrakhman was a relative newcomer to Akbakai, and my presence was a drawing card for strengthening his network of friends. As the guest of honor, I was expected to raise a toast to the stream of guests visiting his home. In the coming days I fell into a whirlwind of feasts and drinking, culminating with a New Year’s Eve dance in the snow to Kazakh, Russian, and Uzbek music, while Chinese firecrackers flew around like rockets, rebounding dangerously off the walls of the house. For me, as for the other revelers—including explosives experts, traders in contraband gold, and miners—it was a fleeting opportunity to forget about the realities of Akbakai.

  The celebration was brought to an end by the onset of severe frost, and come New Year’s morning there was a price to pay. I woke in a cold sweat and by afternoon was lapsing in and out of fever. Abdrakhman was exhausted and bedridden. He decided it was high time for me to leave.

  In this way I once again found myself derailed and taking refuge with Baitak. He took me in without question and for three days insisted I sleep on the only bed in his home while he, his wife, and their son slept on the floor.

  I intended to stay for one night, but as the flu took hold, this drew out to two weeks. In the beginning I was conscious of losing precious time, and concerned about how Madagol was coping with my horses and Tigon. At Baitak’s insistence, though, I surrendered to the inevitable, and spent days lying disoriented while his wife, Rosa, fussed over me. As I lay there hour after hour, the underground hut felt like a ship berth. Far above there was the faint raking of wind. Only on rare excursions into the elements to relieve myself did I become aware the weather was closing in. A blizzard was gathering, and as the town battened down, visitors to Baitak’s home dried up. Such was the isolating effect of the cold and snow that although Abdrakhman’s house was only five minutes’ walk away, as were Vitka and Grisha’s hut and the lone apartment block, I never saw the alcoholics or Maksim ever again, and only met with Abdrakhman long after I had recovered. I could only begin to imagine what it was like for Madagol and his wife in the drafty hut at the kstau.

  About a week into my sickness, Baitak too fell ill, and from that point on we lay side by side in our sickbeds, waited on by Rosa. We spent hours discussing politics, the contrasting realities of the Western world and Kazakhstan, all things nomad- and horse-related, and of course life in Akbakai. It was challenging to relate to Baitak and Rosa how I lived in Australia. Given that I had three horses and didn’t appear to have a job, they assumed I was so comfortably rich that money was not an issue.

  The reason for my journey was a topic on which Baitak and I could understand each other better. Baitak had grown up in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains near Almaty. He reminisced about how he and his friends used to catch the collective farm’s horses from the herd and gallop bareback until they fell off. Although he no longer rode, he owned a herd of thirty horses that roamed the steppe around Akbakai. This was a source of great pride, and once every two weeks he set off by motorcycle to look for them. Later, when we had recovered from the flu, he pulled out two old saddles from a rusty trunk. “Not to have a saddle would mean becoming an orphan in my own land. Not to own horses would death,” he said.

  His respect for the nomad past and his understanding of my predicament delineated a significant difference between him and the majority in Akbakai who were severed from the land and more focused on trying to make money. Over time I decided that some of Baitak’s wisdom must have been inherited from his father, who had been born in 1893, married a girl thirty-one years his junior, and survived the era of collectivization as a simple shepherd.

  When Baitak and I finally were on the road to recovery, we regularly dined in his cafe. As breakfast, lunch, and dinner drifted into one another, it gave me a valuable opportunity to gather a broader picture of life in Akbakai.

  Judging from the clientele, there were two types of locals. The first were pale, beaten-looking men who would arrive to eat and drink vodka after their grueling work in the mines. These were professional miners, some of whom were bused in from afar for fifteen-day shifts. Their work, by Western standards, was poorly paid and dangerous. Twelve people had apparently died in the mine shafts this year—a “very good” result, according to Baitak. Then there were those people, largely the permanent residents, who either had been established long before the Soviet era came crashing down or, like modern-day prospectors, had come seeking riches.

  When I related my thoughts to Baitak, he described Akbakai residents somewhat differently. “There are two kinds of thieves in Akbakai: those aboveground, and those below.”

  It hadn’t been obvious to me initially, but I came to see that there was an altogether “other” economy in Akbakai. Many of the “aboveground” thieves were workers in the processing plant who stole ore from the production line and sold it to locals to supplement their poor wages. It was standard practice for them to pay off their bosses and the security guards to get the material out of the plant. People who didn’t work at the plant could also get ore and tailing debris b
y paying off security guards at night, and for this reason there was a raft of unemployed people from faraway regions who had come to try their luck.

  Baitak pointed out that the real profits were being made not aboveground but by men who risked their lives below. Within the ranks of residents in Akbakai were a breed of men willing to rappel as far down as 400 m into disused shafts. According to Baitak, there were whole teams of skilled workers who put down the ropes and ladders and set up living quarters in the shafts. They had beds, kitchens, and even entire slaughtered cows down there, he said. Later on in the winter evidence of this came to light when twenty-eight illegal miners were discovered by police in a single shaft. One, it was said, fell to his death upon seeing the police near the exit.

  Over the course of my stay I came to realize that almost everybody I met—except Madagol, Vitka, and Grisha—was involved in stealing ore and tailings in one way or another and processing it in crude backyard labs. I once walked in on Abdrakhman refining gold amalgam in a frying pan—a poisonous method involving the use of mercury, but one commonly used in most households in town. Abdrakhman was hoping to make a fortune before retiring to his hometown, Moiynkum. Several times in Madagol’s cattle shelter I also encountered young men pulverizing ore in a metal tube and mixing it with sodium cyanide. It was part of what they called “secret business.” At the end of the supply chain were traders who bought contraband gold for 1,000 tenge (about $8) per gram and then took it to Kyrgyzstan to sell on the black market.

  Baitak estimated that 50 percent of the residents—most likely including himself—were actively involved in the contraband economy. Despite this, there was good reason to keep the activities hidden. Being caught by the police meant paying large bribes to avoid jail. The twenty-eight miners arrested that winter reportedly paid a collective $20,000 so that they could return to work. This made the post of police chief in Akbakai a very profitable one, and it was rumored that getting the job involved paying $10,000 to regional superiors for a two-to-three-year term.