by Tim Cope
As the scale of the operation and the complicity at every level dawned on me, I realized it was not possible to make an honest living in Akbakai and prosper. Perhaps, as might have been the case in other monogorods, the contraband economy was merely substituting for the breakdown of Soviet-era social security. At the very least, it was clear that unemployed and disadvantaged locals had little choice but to engage in this business and often had to take out loans at exorbitant rates to pay for bribes. Many of them were on the edge of survival, including one Russian family I came to know who could not feed themselves on their small share of the gold market and were forced to eat dogs to get by. They bred puppies exclusively for this purpose, eating them when they were still young, and leaving just one or two to mature from each litter.
The microcosm of corruption in Akbakai painted a bleak picture for Kazakhstan as a whole. Simple, everyday things such as getting a driver’s license, a university degree, or even a seat on a train routinely involved paying a bribe. For those wanting a loan, the bank would approve the financing only if a cash-in-hand commission, known in Russian as an otkat—usually a percentage of the loan—was agreed upon. Everything, from securing a job to having enemies killed, was possible given the right price. A police officer in southern Kazakhstan later explained that in his region, as long as you didn’t kill someone within your own family, you could pay off the police to have them overlook it, or pay an extra fee and have the police do the murdering themselves.
All of these examples of corruption were trivial in the bigger picture of Kazakhstan, which was ranked by the International Monetary Fund in 2005, the year I was there, as one of the world’s corruption hot spots, alongside Angola, Libya, Bolivia, Kenya, and Pakistan. Among Kazakhs it was widely known that the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and his extended family controlled all of the key sectors of government and the economy, including national security, taxation, the media, and the oil, sugar, alcohol, and entertainment industries. Less well known—since it was hushed up in the Kazakh media—was that Nazarbayev had made headlines around the world when he was implicated in a foreign bribery case involving American merchant banker James H. Giffen. Giffen, who worked on behalf of oil companies vying for access to the vast reserves on the Caspian Sea, was charged with channeling $78 million to Nazarbayev.2 This was heralded as the largest bribery case in history against an American citizen.
Kazakhs were typically cynical when I brought this up. “Seventy-eight million?” one man told me. “That is just kopeks for Nazarbayev!”
Most Kazakhs I met nevertheless had a high opinion of the president and believed it was “those around him” who were “corrupt and conniving.” Even then, Kazakhs who were disillusioned with Nazarbayev often commented: “At least Nazarbayev and his family have done all their stealing and are now giving back to the public. If we vote in a new president, then his family will spend the next ten years stealing for themselves before they start to help us!”
Politics and graft in Kazakhstan were beyond my comprehension and the scope of my journey. Baitak urged me not to even attempt to understand the system. He wanted me to focus on recovering from the flu and protecting my horses. “At this time of year the hunger begins, and one horse can provide food for a family for months. Every year, two or three horses will be stolen from my herd. This is normal. However I am afraid that your horses may be stolen and eaten as well.”
During my illness, Madagol had run out of hay for my horses and had released them into the steppe. There was no other way for them to graze and have a chance at surviving the winter.
Most of my stay in Akbakai was removed from any real experience of traditional steppe life. There were, however, some customs I was lucky to observe under the wing of Baitak.
After we both recovered from the flu, Baitak informed me there was a special occasion I needed to witness before leaving. It was sogym, the winter slaughter of animals—and not just any sogym, but the most sacred of all, the slaughter of a horse.3
On a relatively mild mid-January morning, Abdrakhman, Rosa, and others gathered at Madagol’s hut armed with knives and axes. The horse in question was an eleven-year-old gelding that had been fattened on a diet of wheat, barley, and hay. “The fatter the horse, the better the kazy,” explained Baitak. On many occasions I’d enjoyed kazy, the prized national Kazakh dish of horsemeat sausage made from the meat and yellowy fat that runs down from the spine along the ribs to the stomach. This meat and fat are cut into strips and stuffed into intestines with a mixture of garlic and salt before being boiled.
Specialists can tell at a glance whether a horse is “one finger,” “two fingers” or “three fingers” fat for the purposes of kazy. I had become accustomed to Kazakhs routinely approaching me and prodding the ribs of my horses, specifically quantifying their fat. Ogonyok was always judged two or three fingers—a reminder that traveling with a fat horse through Kazakhstan was fraught with danger.
After the horse was led out of a corral, things swiftly got under way. At first the gelding’s legs were bound together. When the horse lost balance and fell onto its side, the men hurried to roll it upside down.
Sensing my apprehension, Baitak talked me through it. “We have different horses for riding, racing, milk, and meat. But whatever the case, you won’t find any horse dying of old age in Kazakhstan. It is sacrilege to let such precious meat go to waste—a single horse can keep a family alive for winter. More than that, to let a horse rot provides no dignity for the horse—it is like abandoning your animal, disowning it. And another thing, a horseman here will never slaughter his own favorite mount—it will be symbolically given or sold to someone else for the task. I could never imagine putting the knife to my own horse.”
I stood back and watched the men heave the horse’s head over a chopping block. Madagol cupped his hands in prayer. I focused on the horse.
At first the horse’s eyes were wide. He labored to look back at the men who held him down. His nostrils flared, sending frozen breath shooting into the air. But then he stopped struggling and his eyes panned skyward.
Madagol cut back and forward with a long knife. I wanted to look away but felt cowardly. A gasping sound was followed by gurgling as a fountain of blood surged, filling a specially placed basin. Then it was all over. The unmoving head was flipped backward, hanging on by threads of skin and bone. Blood rushed back to my head and my heartbeat slowed. The men relaxed too, stepping in with knives and axes. The horse had gone.
Before long Madagol’s wife brought a vodka bottle down to the men. Madagol drank first, followed by Baitak, then the others. Within a couple of hours the various cuts of meat were being sorted into hessian sacks. We sat around a table dining on kurdak, a traditional dish made of fried innards, including heart, liver, and kidneys.
Most of the horsemeat would be shared with people less fortunate than Baitak, including Madagol and Baitak’s relations in the city. This was a nomad tradition known as sybaga, when the prosperous wing of a family shares the meat and milk from its herds with less successful kin. Sybaga also requires that the most respected and honored guests be given the best from the table.
At a visceral level, there was no denying I had disagreed with the horse slaughter. I’d grown to love my horses and could not imagine putting them to the knife. And yet as I sat chewing on freshly fried liver and watching the swelling happiness in the eyes of Baitak, Madagol, and others, I was overcome by the miracle of life on the steppe—that the morsels of grass the land offers can be turned into life-giving fat and muscle. Partaking of the flesh of the horse was a crucial part of the horse worship that had sustained nomads from the beginning of time. In full knowledge that their animals were traditionally the only link to survival, these people could appreciate the value of meat more than most of us could conceive of doing.
The celebration continued for two days, after which I prepared to leave. By this stage I had become so much a part of the family that the prospect of departure saddened me. Even Madagol, wh
o seemed to have his reservations about me, had warmed somewhat. This was partly because I had let on that Australia had about half a million wild horses roaming in the outback. He had been dreaming of mustering a herd and bringing them home to sell for meat.
“That Indian Ocean, is it a shallow or deep lake?” he asked one night.
When the day came for my departure, Baitak was furiously opposed to my decision. Madagol, for his part, was angry that I would not cave in to his requests: “What do you need a dog for? Leave him here!” he demanded. Likewise he asked for my horses, ropes, clips and saddles.
Baitak’s gripe with me was because Ulanbel, my next stop five days away, was a village renowned for its criminals. Moreover, this was precisely the time of year when wolves hunted in packs. He was afraid for my safety and concerned that I was rushing and being reckless.
It was nevertheless a relief to be alone again when I rode out from Madagol’s kstau. I made good progress following little gullies and valleys, picking out features on the horizon and setting new bearings from there. By the time I made camp the mountains surrounding Akbakai were a blip on the horizon. But then came another blow. The seal on my fuel bottle split, and before I could begin cooking, the gas had all leaked out onto the snow. Furthermore, upon unsaddling I discovered that the sore spot on Taskonir’s withers had once again swollen to the size it had been three weeks earlier. By morning a blizzard had come in, and the abscess in Taskonir’s foot was back with a vengeance.
I packed up and turned back east, knowing it was the end of winter riding.
Upon my return to Akbakai I resolved to travel back to Oskemen, in eastern Kazakhstan, where I intended to pick up my second Canadian packsaddle—which had been mailed from Mongolia—and tackle visa registration issues before returning better prepared. Madagol was over the moon to receive advance pay to look after my horses, and Baitak was relieved to hear of my new plan. Within a couple of days I was on my way in a taxi, loaded up with 50 kg of raw horsemeat that I was to deliver to Baitak’s relatives in Almaty before heading on to Oskemen.
I planned to be away from Akbakai for two weeks, but things became complicated. In Oskemen, where I was staying with Evegeniy Yurchenkov and his family (who had given me invaluable support on my arrival in Kazakhstan), I was summoned by the local immigration service for not registering my visa. They were aghast that I had traveled through so much territory—much of it close to sensitive border and military zones. I was either to be fined or deported, they decided (though this was eventually avoided with the help of a national TV correspondent who ran a story about me).
When I finally returned to Akbakai, toward the end of February, I found that winter had taken a heavy toll. The temperature there had stayed around −30°C for a month. It had, in fact, been one of the coldest winters in living memory, with a low of −52°C recorded near Oskemen, far to the northeast. In southern Kazakhstan there had been unusually high snowfall, and as Aset had predicted for times of zud, there were reports of horses that were practically naked after surviving the winter by eating their own hair.
Although I had arranged for wheat to be taxied out to Akbakai from the town of Chu, my horses had largely gone without fodder or shelter, fending for themselves on the steppe. Baitak and Madagol had lost track of the horses at one stage, and only after a week of searching discovered them in a gully sheltering from the wind. It wasn’t long after this episode that Madagol had fallen off the roof of his animal shelter and snapped his leg in several places. His son had since taken over responsibility of the kstau. Madagol lay in traction in a hospital in Moiynkum.
Something I had already sensed from Oskemen was that the winter had not been kind to Tigon. One night I had been haunted by a dream in which Tigon was looking at me with big sad eyes. He was covered in grease and muck, trapped in a dark place, looking frightened. Upon my arrival Baitak and Rosa relayed the bad news. While on a visit with Madagol into town, Tigon had vanished for some time, and was feared eaten. One of the mines had gone bankrupt, and some of the hungry, unemployed workers were known to be hunting dogs. While Baitak searched for Tigon, his own pet dog had disappeared without trace. Eventually Baitak had heard a rumor that Tigon was being held by a Russian dog-eater named Petrovich.
“If that Australian’s dog doesn’t come back, I’ll know it was you. Don’t you dare eat him!” Baitak had told him. Seven days later Tigon had been found locked away in an old mining shed. He had been badly beaten and was covered in grease and muck.
“No one thought he would survive, so I arranged immediately for him to spend several hours in a sauna, then fed him raw eggs and vodka,” Baitak told me. When I was reunited with Tigon he was all skin and bone and barely moving.
It took another three weeks before Tigon could walk, and during this time I was invited by CuChullaine O’Reilly of the Long Riders Guild to join what he described as an unprecedented international gathering of equestrian explorers in London. There I was to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.4 Although I was initially opposed to the idea of going, I couldn’t go back out on the steppe while Tigon was still sick, and my great-uncle and -aunt, John and Alison Kearney, offered financial support to buy tickets. I decided it was an opportunity I shouldn’t refuse, particularly because I would have the chance to see Kathrin for a couple of days.
So I was more removed from my journey than ever by the time I arrived back in Akbakai at the end of March. What had begun as a two-day stopover for Christmas had become more than three months, and with the misery of midwinter fresh in my mind, I doubted I could pull through to Hungary. Even if I could, I wondered whether I would ever find a trace of the nomad spirit again.
Baitak, however—to whom, in hindsight, I owe my life, or at the very least the lives of Tigon and my horses—says he never once doubted that I would make it to Hungary.
13
OTAMAL
By the end of March, as the days began to draw long, there were signs winter had capitulated. Across northeast Kazakhstan the frost was broken by slush and rain, and in the south the snow was retreating to the high slopes of the Tien Shan. Some brave girls in Almaty were baring their legs, which, a Russian once told me, explained the high incidence of car crashes by male drivers near bus stops in spring.
The repressive hold that winter had on political life had also been broken. Neighboring Kyrgyzstan had just erupted in what would become known as the Tulip Revolution, making world headlines. The deposed president, Askar Akayev, accused of corruption and electoral fraud, had fled to exile in Moscow. To many Russians, and Russian-leaning Kazakhs in particular, this seemed to be part of a grand conspiracy of “color” revolutions that they assumed had been funded by America following the Orange Revolution that had swept Ukraine in the autumn and winter months and the Rose Revolution in Georgia a year earlier. It was all the talk on the street, at the markets, and on buses in the city, especially among pensioners who reveled in any whiff of news that could lift them from the drudgery of winter. The spring air seemed to be brimming with possibilities. What would happen next? Was this the beginning of a greater rebellion across Central Asia? It was an election year in Kazakhstan, and Nazarbayev was reportedly paranoid about the sentiment of discontent spilling across the border. Word was that as soon as the Tulip Revolution had begun in Bishkek, Nazarbayev had ordered security forces to move south and be ready to quash any unrest. Spring was a dangerous time, as people no longer had to concentrate on surviving winter and their fervor was yet to be snuffed out by the heat of summer.
When I arrived back in Akbakai, people were emerging from their homes, pale, gaunt, and broken-looking, counting the costs of winter. In the wake of the snowmelt, the surrounding steppe had become a morass of impenetrable swampland, although I was told it would soon rise in a sea of red and yellow tulips.
I spent several days tweaking my equipment, gathering my animals from Madagol, and preparing them for travel, and during this time the steppe dried out enough to be navigable. With a new
packsaddle, a healthy-looking Tigon, and a little extra weight on my own frame, I figured my window of opportunity had arrived.
It was with a sense of disbelief, then, on April 4—the day earmarked for my fourth attempt to depart Akbakai—that I stumbled out of Baitak’s hut into a predawn blizzard. The thermometer read −15°C and by the time I had watered the horses I was chilled to the bone. So confident that I had seen the last of the cold, I had left my winter clothing behind in the city.
I didn’t bother saddling the horses, and instead decided to return to bed. Baitak saw me come back in. “So Akbakai is still holding you here? It is you we blame for this weather. Only that man in the sky knows what is best for you, and he is keeping you in Akbakai for a reason. You have done the right thing.”
Baitak had warned me about this seasonal phenomena, known by nomads as otamal. It was a period of sudden cold that usually occurred in mid-March, just as it appeared the weather had turned the corner. Animals that had grown thin through winter could be polished off, and many people were known to perish, too, if caught unawares.1 Spring, Baitak told me, was the season of greatest weakness and vulnerability for all living things.
For me there was a larger message in all of this, summed up in a saying often repeated to me by Baitak and others: “If you ever have to rush in life, rush slowly.” On the steppe, time was measured by the seasons, the weather, the availability of grass, and, most important, the condition of one’s animals. To think I could hurry the seasons was as foolish as rushing with horses.
Two days after the failed departure attempt, the sky had been blown clean and the sun glinted off the frozen streets of Akbakai. After a meal of horsehead, Baitak, Rosa, and Abdrakhman escorted me out of town for a departure ceremony. Baitak’s farewell toast was simple: “I suggest you stay away from young people, and stick close to the elders.”