The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  In the house’s main room two sleeping mats had been rolled out on the carpet alongside the wall. The wall, as in all the older steppe houses, was deliciously heated, and nothing was more comforting than to pass your palm back and forth across the rough pinkish plaster. It was about 1 p.m. Serik and I lay head to head and dozed. Mr. Alenov went back to the party. The scent and sounds of cooking came from the adjoining kitchen. When I woke it was dark outside and the table had been laid.

  With our hands the three of us ate scalding pasta and the tenderest camel meat. The hump, cubed: soft and salty. A bowl of greasy broth. The body isn’t hard to satisfy. There was sweet tea, bread, a bowl of stiff cream, wrapped sweets on a tiered cake-stand. Mr. Alenov explained the Soviet system. The fishing villages, like the farms, had operated as either self-governing collectives, kolkhozes, or as satellites of the regional co-operative, the sovkhoz, of which the largest in the Small Aral region was Aralrybprom, “Aral Fish Industries,” whose escutcheon I’d seen fixed to the boats dry-docked at Aralsk. While the sovkhozes were state-controlled and their directors often outsiders appointed from Moscow, the kolkhozes, such as the one that had existed at Zalanash, were smaller autonomous collectives that elected their own chairmen.

  In 1991 the kolkhozes were superseded by a free-market system that divided the various fishing sites—some of which were now thirty kilometres from the onetime harbours—into a series of ten plots, uchastki, each owned by a “nature-user” like Mr. Alenov, who issued fishing licences and ran the receiving-stations to which each brigade’s daily haul must be delivered for weighing and refrigeration. There were quotas but the fishermen weren’t interested in quotas. If the official monopsonies were honoured and “poaching” prevented entirely, then the people of the Aral’s shores, whose forebears for centuries had fed from the sea, would never taste fresh fish. What mattered were the markets in Europe and Russia and the day’s catch. Since 2005 the fishermen had learned to believe that a small haul today did not mean a small haul tomorrow. It was in that year that a dyke, the Kokaral, had been built across the Berg Strait in order to stall the shrinking of the sea. The sea north of the dyke not only ceased to shrink, Mr. Alenov said, but was slowly refilling. The salt content was levelling off, the old fish species had returned. So long as the market held, the fish-receiving centres—at least those close to the new shoreline—would remain viable. But who was to say that the villages would not one day be left marooned and gasping again? The farmer dreams for the year, the fisherman for the day.

  We finished eating and went outside to smoke in the darkness of the yard. The moon looked enormous. A subdued collective howling carried from far beyond the village boundary, from some steppe-bound camel farm; but otherwise just this tremendous weight of quiet.

  * * *

  —

  ABOARD THE KONSTANTIN in 1848, the food supplies putrefied. “The dried bread became mouldy,” Shevchenko reported; “the fat turned pink; butter was rancid. Only the peas remained wholesome.” Wind from the north-west was near constant and would leave the schooner rocking for hours. On 23 September the crews finally docked for the winter at Kos Aral island. The expedition had been a success, but after Shevchenko’s lonely months at sea, no letters! Not one. Throughout his exile, his longing for Ukraine takes the form of griping about his friends’ failure to write. Not merely exiled, he would come to feel, but abandoned, even by those he loved:

  At one time they swore

  Eternal friendship with me,

  But now they have vanished.

  A quarter of the poetry he produced during his ten years’ banishment was written that winter. There wasn’t much else to occupy him.

  Boredom and autumn

  Surround me in a foreign land.

  Dear God! Where shall I hide?

  What shall I do? I walk along the Aral

  And secretly write verses. I sin,

  And I recall other times

  In my soul and write about them.

  A man in a hut, on an island, in a sea in a foreign desert, asks: Where shall I hide? It seemed absurd until you came here and understood that nowhere were you more exposed. Those cloistered months were otherwise enlivened only by sketching and, in November, the hunt mentioned by Butakov: “Tigers roam constantly in the vicinity of Aralsk,” the commander explained. The creature in question “had recently devoured four cows…two weeks afterwards I heard from the Kirghiz that the same animal had devoured two men and a number of sheep; and on the 21st Nov. the foreman of the fishery reported that this tiger had killed their horse at only 3 versts from our fort.”

  The hunt occupied half of the garrison’s men. The animal was trapped and shot. “It was a real royal tiger, of a beautiful orange colour with broad black stripes, uncommonly fat, and 6 feet 4 inches long from the nose to the beginning of the tail.” In Shevchenko’s painting it is far from regal; it might be snoozing, a fairground toy invoked from the frosted sands. His pen-and-ink sketches of the fort on Kos Aral show a slum of smouldering huts and tents, a few yurts, a black poodlish dog and a stack of firewood; in the distance, ice-trapped, the schooners Konstantin and Nicolas. As winter tightens, the drawings depict not the terrain but interiors: smoky, orange-lit yurts and huts, men and boys gazing heat-drugged into incandescing stoves.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING Serik’s friend came from Tastubek and in his jeep we returned to the Land Cruiser and towed it from the mud. We spent an hour in the village shovelling out its foot wells and sluicing down the mats. After yesterday’s exertion and the cold I felt as if I’d been pushed down a flight of stairs. By noon we were back in Aralsk. I was being educated in the varieties of mud. As the Uighur had many names for sand, and the Rashidi for dune formations, did the people of Kazakhstan, I wondered, have a lexicon of mud? Whisked by spinning tyres, in the streets it had developed a velvety smoothness, like melted ice cream. Only the dogs chanced the wallows, packs filing along the shallower ridges. Everywhere cars were being towed or pushed while men looked on. They went about this as part of their routine; delay was factored in when meetings were arranged, or else—more often—lateness taken for granted. There were ten petrol stations and in winter and at harvest-time supplies ran out and queues formed, further degrading the ground, until even those stations with petrol to sell could only be accessed by the envied, guzzling GAZ utility trucks with their shoulder-high chassis. We crossed the town to the main highway leading south. Our destination was the sea’s current shore. Finally we would see water. At a checkpoint three men marched from a shipping container and asked to see my passport. Hoods pulled over police caps, the army escort cradling his AK-47, they approached as a unit, as if shackled together. The black paint on the gun’s stock was flaking. Your name. Your name. From. They were on the lookout for lorries carrying contraband vegetables to Russia—turnip-smugglers—but I was a novelty, and the senior policeman was enjoying himself. Serik was used to it and smiled, but he was subdued afterwards.

  For eighty kilometres we drove south on the new highway that led to Kyzylorda, so new that its central markings had yet to be painted. On the verge was the night’s reaping of dead dogs and camels, the usual glitter of broken glass. On either side were kilometre upon kilometres of low yellow dunes scattered with saxaul and camelthorn. The camels seemed to have acquired no wariness of vehicles; they crossed the road with impunity and didn’t hurry even in the face of the heaviest lorry. Ahead of us for a couple of kilometres a jogging-pace jalopy, piled six metres high with steppe brush, swayed under a column of black smoke. We left the highway and the silent bitumen continued for a hundred metres before breaking off to potholed grit.

  We passed alongside Lake Kambash, one of the Syr Darya’s delta lakes. At its edge was a holiday camp for Soviet Young Pioneers, long derelict, a cluster of peeling blue cupolas. Until the water vanished thirty years ago, children from across the uni
on had swum here. On dressers in Almaty and Orenburg stood framed sepias of children playing among the dunes. There was a beach—coarse sand dotted with the crinoline skeletons of yurts hireable by the day in summer. And there was water—returned water! The lake was ten kilometres long and two wide, its far shore distance-hazy; but it had not reclaimed its former size. On the horizon, what had once been an island was now a peninsula—and the water, like all the region’s surface water, was a broth of agrochemicals. There were fish here, swarming in the shallows, but the surface stillness was less that of tranquillity than of stagnation. Serik was at ease, and he sat on his haunches and gazed out contentedly. For once he didn’t smoke. Kambash held fond memories for him—he’d come here as a child, he said, and brought his own children—and he thought it a pretty place, in spite of last summer’s litter embedded in the sand.

  An hour later we reached the Syr Darya, and looking down on its slow surface I recalled those paintings of Shevchenko’s when he first arrived at the fort on this river, when the world was lovable again after those weeks of blinding desert—the richness of his pigments, the charge of his line. And now before me, 150 years later, the waters of all Kazakhstan’s steppes rendered into this broad grey procession channelled between cliffs of pale mud. What I took at first for ducks turned out to be floating vodka bottles. But the river wasn’t, actually, lifeless. Rounding the corner, against the flow, a two-man skiff was puttering, laying nets: “Poachers!” said Serik approvingly. They looked up at us and one of them raised a hand. We waved back. There were penalties, and the fisheries inspectorate in Aralsk occasionally patrolled the river, but enforcement was light, and even the “nature-users,” who owned the fishing rights, were indulgent when it came to a man feeding his family from ancestral waters.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS TO the fishermen of the village of Bogun, thirty kilometres away, that Lenin’s 1921 letter was addressed: “Russian and Muslim, nomad and settler—all are equally faced with cruel death unless help comes from their comrades…”

  The village was a scattering of low earthen houses concealed behind hoardings. At the centre of each circle of four or five compounds were a shared camel pen, stacks of straw, heaps of steppe-wood for the hearth, and an outhouse. We would be staying with a fishing family, friends of Serik’s. The younger two of the three Dilzhanov brothers, Maksat and Mukhtar, were rangy and red-faced, a head taller than me. They walked with a swagger, their potency unspent, their legs given an oedemic appearance by trousers doubled against the cold. They were fearless, imperious, and thought nothing of having a foreign stranger in their home. Zeinolla, the older brother—“Zikon,” he was nicknamed—carried a pot belly of natal roundness, an attribute that was conferred upon every village man to mark the birth of his first child.

  Maksat was spading sand over the septic tank buried outside the family compound before it got dark. Nearby were two green GAZ six-wheeler trucks stacked with empty fish crates. All three brothers drank continuously while they worked, from two-litre bottles of Coke—this, it seemed to me, was the national drink, more so than vodka (they drank vodka too, though I’d been instructed by Serik to conceal from their father the bottles I’d brought as gifts). I rarely saw anyone drink water. The cold was coming, said Maksat, you could feel it on the air. Fog attended each morning—sea fog, though the sea was twenty-five kilometres away—and did not disperse till noon or later. If the septic tank wasn’t given this extra blanket of sand its contents would freeze solid when the snow came, and then you had a pleasant job.

  * * *

  —

  NEXT MORNING Serik and I followed the track that went along the top of the dyke built in 2005. The ridge was only eight metres high, but it had been enough to cause the level of the Small Aral to rise, and the waters that had withdrawn as far as a hundred kilometres from Aralsk were now just twelve kilometres away. In the year it was built, 695 tonnes of fish had been taken from the Small Aral; nine years later the figure was 5,595 tonnes. A reversal had been engineered, but only in the Small Aral. Surplus water was dispensed into the Large Aral. The volume passing through the sluice, when we stopped alongside, was enormous—tens of thousands of cubic metres per second. We had to shout to be heard. A huge river—as voluminous as the Syr Darya itself, it seemed. And yet within a few kilometres it vanished into the desert to the south, soaking into the ground or evaporating. All that power, dissipated. Unless the Syr’s contribution was one day matched by the Amu’s to the south, the Large Aral would remain a desert. Uzbekistan, in whose territory much of the Large Aral lies, has shown no willingness to desist from diverting the Amu Darya for cotton. In 2006 the government signed a production-sharing agreement with a consortium of oil and gas firms from China, Korea and Russia. Prospection of the former seabed was under way. And when the oil and gas were gone? Then means would be found to exhaust the sun and the wind, and empty the tides of their energy.

  Next to the sluice was a helicopter pad and a wooden-decked viewing point under a white awning. Both had been installed for a presidential visit years before. For some reason (nobody knew why) Nazarbayev had cancelled and the facilities were never used. Next to a white guardhouse by the dyke lay the carcase of a camel, still partially swaddled in its skin. Its teeth were as white as a newscaster’s, its eyes as lightless. It would make a punchy photo, grainy black-and-white, the sky filtered to a gradated grey. But the Aral Sea was not a graveyard. Granted, to our left, south, there was the Aralkum—for five hundred kilometres little but sand and saxaul until you reached the defunct Uzbek port at Muynak. But then, to our right, thickets of bulrushes clamorous with waterfowl.

  The whole scene shimmered with a shifting, elastic light. A stork wheeled overhead, and it was this, not the dead camel, that I photographed, a speck against the steely sky. This was the Aral Sea that Butakov and Shevchenko recorded; the shores a busy community, frenzied almost, frenzied as life before man; the habitat of “immense quantities of pelicans, cormorants, sea-gulls and sea-swallows.”

  Finally, on 22 April 1849, an audible cracking from the sea. Two weeks later, Butakov’s second exploratory voyage set sail. An unshackling for the men: all the fresh fish you could eat, the sun glinting off the blue chop. But they found themselves released to another kind of prison. For two weeks storms trapped the Konstantin far from shore and the men were forced to draw water from the sea, with its taste of the Gulf of Finland. Kos Aral’s bedbugs and boils were replaced by scurvy, vomiting and what Butakov termed “a strong diarrhoea.” Peas and pike; pike and peas. Barbel and snakehead and bastard sturgeon. So despairing did Shevchenko become during the voyage that when, in calmer weather, he was despatched with a party to survey a minor island, he wandered off alone in an attempt to get “lost.” Naturally he was found. There’d be no getting lost, no “hiding.”

  Finally, in late summer, the schooners returned to the Russian fort at Raim. As they sailed back to the Syr Darya, Shevchenko dispensed an ambivalent farewell to the island that had been his prison: “I grant / Neither praise nor blame for your desert.”

  But as this phase of his exile ended, he could not see the Karakum as anything better than a “wasted wilderness, forsaken by God.” Still he would not be permitted to return to Ukraine; only when he was dead was he repatriated. Then he could go home.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE RETURNED to Bogun the sky was red. In a dark tool-shed Zhaksilik and four other men were gathered, the older men of the village, as they always gathered at this time, in a circle, sitting on a log positioned for the purpose or squatting around pages of newspaper spread out on the ground. Lumps of salt fish were passed from man to man, a shred torn off, the raw guts pinched out and flicked onto the newspaper, cigarettes doused in the gore. A plastic beaker was filled and refilled with cold vodka. “Schnapps,” they called it; and I said “schnapps”; and from outside a passing woman, the wife of one of them, overhearing, said
witheringly: “Schnapps…” We laughed at her contempt. They would not allow me to leave without a second, a third beaker of vodka, and more fish. The fish was delicious in its saltiness; delicious, somehow, in its disgustingness.

  * * *

  —

  Bogun had been a waterside village; old Zhaksilik had been born to the sound of lapping waves, he said, and he had watched as year by year the water withdrew, further and further, until the shore was two days’ walk away, and the water when you got there all but dead. All hope had been lost, said another man, rolling a cigarette in bloody fingers. A depression had settled on the land when the first dykes failed, he went on; but then the new dyke had been built, and though it had seemed impossible, the water had begun to return, and with it the fish, and fathers had reason once more to teach their sons how and where and when to fix nets.

  When I left the shed, I did not feel drunk. I took a walk around the village. It was deserted apart from the dogs and the camels; and quiet save for the roar of an open standpipe, which fed a narrow lagoon whose surface was broken by the ribs of old boats. On the village’s northern edge was a three-storey building, shiplapped and whitewashed. Abutting one wall, buttressing it just below the second-storey windows, was a sand-dune, its spine stretching away to the horizon. The building, now abandoned, had been the village school. The Karakum advanced to occupy the ground quitted by the sea, and in time—any day—the dune’s oncoming weight would bulldoze the building. A replacement school had been built on the other side of the village, but while efforts had been made to slow the dunes’ progress—geotextile netting, stabilising planting—it was understood that, in time, once it had flooded the classrooms and corridors of the old school, the wall of sand would move across the village, house by house, nudging the settlement ever southward towards the sea.