Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  We crossed the Anzob Pass, passed the turn-off to Panjakent, and drove without stopping through Shahristan. Ahead lay Ura-Tube and Zafarabad on the border with the Syr-Darya region of Uzbekistan. That’s where they got us.

  A lonely car, a Zhiguli, was parked across the empty road, blocking traffic. It was guarded by two Tajiks with Kalashnikovs. The older one, with a large white beard, raised his, and the other one kept his weapon trained on the truck.

  “Gena, red alert. Put everyone on the floor,” Uncle Styopa ordered.

  He had Volodka in the cabin with him; everyone else was in the back.

  Gennady, to give him credit, was instantly transformed, pulled the machine gun from under a mattress, made us all lie down, and stood by the left window. He held the gun low, so that the people on the road could not see it. Uncle Styopa stopped before the car and asked peaceably:

  “What’s the problem, akó ?”

  “Checkpoint, everyone out of the truck.”

  Uncle Styopa floored the gas pedal. The Ural charged ahead, mangled the younger man, and pushed aside the car. The older one managed to jump aside. Four more men rose from the ditch and opened fire. A few bullets flew over our heads; one cracked the windshield. I did not see anything. I was lying on top of Pavlik to keep him down and shield him with my body. They told me later that Gennady shot the leader.

  The Ural raced along the road. Gennady stood by the opened back door until it was completely dark, on the lookout for pursuers, but apparently they were afraid to chase after us.

  We went through Ura-Tube slowly and carefully, as if on parade, in order not to arouse any suspicion, but as soon as we reached the edge of town, Uncle Styopa stepped on the gas again. It was a miracle that neither we nor our truck were harmed—not counting the four holes in the walls of our makeshift home and the cracked windshield. The bandits had not expected any resistance.

  We passed through Zafarabad at night. The police post with its detachment of fresh-faced recruits took a bribe and wished us a safe trip. We left Tajikistan.

  We stopped on the side of the road; Gennady made a fire. The men discussed the fight; Aunt Katya and I cooked and did not take part in their conversation.

  While we were eating, Uncle Styopa, for no apparent reason, said that Gennady’s round blew up the bandit like a rotten watermelon, and added with a smirk, “I can’t imagine how those poor houris in heaven will put his brain together again.”

  Gennady finished his meal quickly and went back to the truck. When I peered in, he was kneeling in prayer, but once he noticed me, he pretended to be digging in his sleeping bag. That night, I lay down next to him, but he either slept or pretended to be sleeping—his breathing was almost too even. For the rest of the trip—nine difficult days—he was taciturn, responded in single words, and maintained his watch by the window, calm, alert, alone with his thoughts.

  Guliston, Baht, Sirdare, Tashkent, the flat Kyrgyz plains—Shymkent, Kyzylorda—the road ran along the shores of the muddy Syr Darya, along fields, orchards, uncultivated wasteland. Dust and sand squeaking on the teeth. Aral, Aktyubinsk, then a downward turn on the map towards Oktyabrsk, Sagiz with its eponymous river fed by melting snows, ferocious and shallow; Guryev, the bridge across the Ural, and the last two hundred and fifty miles to the Russian Kotyaevka.

  Later, I would look at the map and try to recall what happened when on our trip. But days blended together, faded and bled into each other: empty roads, infrequent cars, people, gas stations, carts and tractors, oxen, horses, camels, flocks of sheep, skinny foxes on long legs, watchful prairie dogs standing still near their dens, and the steppe eagles soaring in the sky. Cooking over open fires, water from aluminum canisters—warm with a metallic aftertaste, the shaking floor covered with dirty mattresses, my boys excited and exhausted, taciturn Gennady, Volodya and Uncle Styopa taking turns at the wheel, anxious and dispirited Uncle Kostya and Aunt Katya.

  There is nothing special about the village of Kotyaevka. Having crossed the border, we stopped at the Border Guard post, tumbled out of the truck, and, on impulse, shouted “Hurray!” The local policemen were momentarily taken aback, but once they learned who we were, they laughed with us and wished us good fortune and much happiness. Noah’s Ark moored in Russia.

  . 2 .

  From Kotyaevka, passing through Astrakhan, we went to Kharabali, a small town on the Akhtuba River. The head of the fire brigade there was the retired colonel Arkhipov, Uncle Styopa’s friend and brother-in-arms from Afghanistan. He took us under his wing.

  They put us up in a makeshift barrack that already housed other refugee families; we had tiny rooms without a bathroom. There was an outhouse, and on Saturdays one went to the city banya. At night, when everyone had gone to sleep, I would boil a bucket of water in the kitchen and wash, pouring water from one tub to another, in a corner curtained off with a quilt. The availability of hot water in Dushanbe had spoiled me; I could not go to bed dirty.

  Within a week, Uncle Styopa got a job at a local school as a military skills instructor, seduced by a small house that came with the job; woodworking lessons were held in an added room. He took on those as well, happily, fixed up the abandoned house, and now boasts that he never dreamed of living out his old age in his own “mansion.” He planted an apple orchard, built a fireplace in the living room, and traded his Ural for a small jeep. Aunt Katya went to work for the library. Valerka and Volodka got themselves hired at a small business that fixed tires along the side of the highway. On their days off, they were allowed to use the space and tools to repair cars, and got to keep all the earnings. Uncle Kostya took up fishing, and Pavlik liked to help him. The Akhtuba was full of fish, and soon this enterprise became profitable for all of us. Uncle Kostya founded a cooperative, “Three Rivers,” the first in Kharabali. Arkhipov, the fire chief, joined in as a partner and helped them get a loan. They bought a small truck and built a brick house on the shore of the river. The loan was quickly paid off when money was devalued in the monetary reform. But all of this came later, and at first they operated out of an abandoned railcar, delivered fish and fuel for the boat in an ancient Zaporozhets,[1] and paid for an old aluminum boat out of Uncle Kostya’s savings.

  The Akhtuba, Mangut and Kharabalyk were the three rivers that came together at the cape where the co-op’s railcar stood. The Kharabalyk connected the Akhtuba to the Volga. Strong currents stirred the sand on its bottom, forming many deep holes where big fish liked to rest. Some places on that river were truly extraordinary: steep banks and shallow beaches would suddenly trade sides and appear on opposite sides of the river, the sandy beach teasing its brother from across the water with its yellow tongue. The current would carve a deep pool between them, an abyss. Babkin Dip was especially dangerous. The current was restless there, changing directions suddenly, and a motorboat on a still day could easily become trapped in whirlpools spinning the heavy, oily water. The pull of the abyss at once seduced and frightened us. It was here that fish came to winter, to wait out the cold at the bottom. Uncle Kostya told us that fish filled the Dip in layers, sleepy and still. There were catfish weighing more than two hundred pounds, big-headed, monstrous, with live colonies of leeches on their faces. Above them large sazan fluttered their fins and pursed their lips, making them look like the fat cherubs painted on the ceiling of the town’s church. Fanged pikes, always ready to strike, shared the next niche with quick chubs, the fish that comes dancing above the surface on the hottest days.

  From the middle to the end of June, when the water begins to retreat from flooded meadows, the wet grass becomes the breeding ground for gnats. Dark clouds of them fill the air. People have to wear dense clothes and special netting about their faces, but even so there is no relief from the bloodsucking gnats—all you can do is get used to it. First bites itch cruelly and turn into blisters, but soon your body builds up an immunity. The gnats, in God’s great scheme of things, are the fishes’ main food. The short season, when the year’s hatch finds its way from the meadow
s to the river, is the feasting time: newborn fish feed on the gnats and the bigger fish feed on the throngs of hatchlings. Catfish slide into the shallow streams that wash through the muddy meadows and open their maws—the current fills them with prey. In the river itself, saber carp comes alive and instantly the surface boils with their tails and bodies: the fish turn and dive straight down, hunting the fry. Their sides, like silver coins, glisten across the water; their tails beat like a giant steamboat wheel, and above the river seagulls shriek rabidly. That is when the chub come up and circle at the edge of the carps’ feeding frenzy. Here and there, chub begin to dash out of the water, splitting the surface with their speedy bodies; their scales shine in the air as if suspended in a net. Chub pools—an enraptured Pavlik showed me how the fish flex and spin in the water—are very beautiful.

  But chub dance only in this short period of time nature gives them. For the better part of the year, the water does not share its secrets with the air but keeps its world safely separate. Only the fishermen know what goes on in the river’s depths. Close to the surface float sleepy zander and perch. They roam the river even in winter—in quick raids like warring Tatars and Kalmyks of long ago—and devour everything they can find before returning to their pools to doze in the deep, below the whirls that guard their sleep better than the thick concrete of a bomb shelter. If the flooded meadows are the spawning and birth sites, the deep pools are the fish’s shelter, its winter quarters, although the massive catfish enjoy them just as much in the heat of the summer. On moonlit nights, the catfish come to the surface: the slime on their backs glistens in the silvery light, and the water pushes up each behemoth with a sound resembling a rueful sigh. The fish pauses at the surface for a bit, floating above the abyss, and then—a slap of a flat tail, and all that remains are circles spreading across the water. I caught a glimpse of this when Pavlik and I went out to check the nets. He stopped the engine and we were drowned in the pre-dawn mist. At the shore, facing our boat, a bearded face appeared from the bushes: a camel had escaped his pen at the Kazakh farm and was nibbling on wet willow leaves. He stilled and watched the spreading circles on the water with the same delight in his big round eyes as I felt, having never seen anything like this before.

  When I could get away to spend the weekend with the fishermen, I preferred to sleep less and to go out with them to the nets, learning to set seines and thirstily breathing in the air saturated with river vapors. To me, born and raised in Tajikistan, this abundance of water seemed like paradise.

  Those rare weekends on the river were holidays; in the meantime I took every job I could—cleaning the Culture Center at night, selling trinkets out of a kiosk, selling the fish we caught door-to-door. That year, Kharabali took in thirty or forty refugee families; jobs were scarce, and people kept coming.

  “Where are you all coming from?” we heard more than once. The locals were inclined to give us a cold shoulder, did not welcome us, and if not for Uncle Styopa’s Afghan ties, it would have been even worse. Kharabali’s Russians were different: they never made soup and kutya[2] for wakes, said “carret” instead of “carrot,” “yesteryear” instead of “last year,” and “taters” instead of “potatoes”—this was even true of the kindergarten teachers.

  I never went to church in Panjakent or in Dushanbe; Aunt Katya, on the other hand, became pious in her old age, perhaps in spite of her communist past. Her grandfather was a priest, and had been executed sometime in the twenties; her mother observed church traditions and the calendar her entire life, and even though Aunt Katya became a party member as a young woman, it turned out she remembered quite a few old ways. Now she set about educating the locals in the proper observances—her training as a Komsomol organizer was not in vain. In Kharabali, it was customary to visit the cemetery and remember the dead on Easter, but according to the holy books and church rules, the correct day is the ninth day after Christ’s Resurrection, Radunitsa. Naturally, Aunt Katya was at first treated with suspicion. The priest, Father Andrei, supported her; on every church holiday he mounted large posters with descriptions and explanations of the day’s meaning, but no one ever read them, preferring to live according to old habits.

  Of course, we were stunned by the drunkenness. In Dushanbe, very few people allowed themselves to drink as much as Gennady did when he left the slaughterhouse at the end of the day. Deep, constant drinking was considered a great shame. Here it was accepted as a normal part of life.

  Strangely, some even envied the refugees and accused us of taking work away from the locals by agreeing to do menial jobs. I always responded by saying, “Who’s keeping you from working? Go ahead, wash floors at night and man a kiosk for three kopeks a week.” Who did I think was listening? What I did not like was their philosophy of “God, please kill my neighbor’s cow, then mine can die, too.” Of course, not everyone felt that way, but the envy was palpable and irritating.

  The newcomers worked like bees and drank little. Gennady, it seemed, had seen the light: he smoked fish from morning till night and gathered firewood. It did not bother me that he spoke little with me, I was used to it. We knew we had to put down roots and earn the locals’ respect. In ten years they would get used to us, but first we had to survive for ten years.

  We were granted refugee status as soon as we got Russian citizenship, exactly three months after we filed the paperwork. Uncle Styopa was in charge of this for all of us; the local administration respected his military past. He and Aunt Katya were the first to settle and find some stability in their lives; they lived simply but with dignity. They were paid their small salaries regularly, albeit late. They also received pensions. I gradually began to sell fish full-time: I took it to the railway station and sold it to the passengers in passing trains, not the easiest job in the world. At night, I washed floors. This went on for almost a year, until Uncle Kostya could increase his catch and replace Pavlik, who had to go to school, with two boys from Kazakhstan. We added drying to our smoking operation, in order to handle more fish; it was more work for everyone, but we could sell it to dealers wholesale.

  In September, Pavlik entered ninth grade. He had always been a good student, and here, trying to earn some respect, he tried even harder and never got any poor grades. The spring and summer on the river had made him stronger, but he had no intention of fishing for the rest of his life. He had only one choice: to get good grades and go to college. Valerka, on the other hand, never graduated from high school. He loved cars from the bottom of his heart and was certain that his life had to center on them. When the fall enlistment came, we sent him off to the army.[3] They packed him off to Chechnya, to war, from where he sent us short letters every two months. He became an armored vehicle driver, and, silly me, I thought I could worry less because the armor would protect him. Later, when he came back, he told us that those vehicles burn like candles, but during his entire tour of duty, he was never close enough to the fighting to get a scratch, thank God. He has always been the lucky one.

  Gennady and I worked, and Pavlik helped us as much as he could. We went on living, or rather, carving out a living from the Astrakhan steppe, like many others. With time, I realized that piecemeal jobs—at a kiosk or washing floors—were not the answer; they only slowly sank us deeper into poverty. It seemed we lived like everyone else, and yet, we were worse off. Containers with our things traveled to Volochok, where Gennady’s mother received them and piled everything at her dacha; we had neither the money nor the energy to go get the stuff. Should we part ways with the rest of the clan and move on? It seemed we were constantly busy, but money evaporated despite all my efforts to save; the only purchases we had made were an old fridge and a TV set.

  Gennady held up well, did not drink, but was still reserved and taciturn. He slept on a daybed in his tiny room and prayed a lot. He went to church often, too, and spoke at length with Father Andrei. A new era had begun in our lives. Any time I brought up one of his old pronouncements, he would raise his hard eyes and look at me in a way that m
ade me genuinely frightened. At the local hospital, all the nurses’ positions were filled; to work as a nurse’s assistant meant, basically, working for free, since the wage would last only for four or five days. We smoked fish and pinched pennies. We ate fish, bread and potatoes that year.

  Those of us who bet on a free apartment and sold themselves into debt for the sake of having a place to live—those who went to work as milkmaids, machine operators or fitters—lost in the long run. The winners were the ones who saved up their pennies to open a little business or fought for a well-paid job. Had we stayed in Kharabali for longer than a year, my Valerka would have done something like that. Volodya owns his own repair garage now; it’s small, but it feeds him. He left his old boss a long time ago, took out a loan at the right time, and has already built a house for himself. He found himself a jolly Kazakh woman, Zulia, a trim orphan who nonetheless put herself through technical school and got a degree in accounting. Zulia has a mouth full of golden teeth, two wonderful little boys, and they live with Vovka like peas and carrots. Our wandering tribe that roams from land to land is used to marrying non-Russians; above all we value loyalty and an easy-going nature and we do not worry too much about the children being half-bloods: the more different genes they have in them, the tougher and smarter they are.

  Uncle Kostya’s co-op fell apart under pressure from taxes and harassment by local racketeers. When he had enough of fishing, he went to work as a manager at a new fishing hotel opened on an island by some visiting Muscovites. He became an administrator and manages the rest of the staff; he is happy with this life and does not complain about his pay. He met a widow, Aunt Olya, but didn’t move in with her, instead putting her up at the hotel where he hired her as a cook. On weekends she bakes outstanding fish pies—they have become the signature dish at Three Rivers—and Uncle Kostya washes them down with beer; he doesn’t care for anything stronger. I’m happy for him; I envy him, in fact, with well-meaning envy: I would never be able to recover from poverty so easily.