“You probably won’t. See me, I mean.”
Jeff turned back. The young men were laughing at something. He said, “All right, we’ll say goodbye now.” He reached to shake Levi’s hand, but the gesture wasn’t reciprocated. Jeff’s hand hung there, and slowly he lowered it. He got into the truck, slammed the door, and as the engine roared, he was sure he heard Levi shout, “You bitch!”
Jeff drove through dense night along the unmarked logging paths, back to the main road. Halfway home he realized that he was driving with both hands, digging his fingers into the rubber grip of the steering wheel. He dodged a lame dog and five minutes later was turning onto the school grounds, onto Teacher’s Row, the white man’s housing.
The next day, on the ride to Phoenix, Jeff told Adam, “You can take her for a thousand. We’ll straighten out the title and papers. And make sure you get insurance.”
“What you gonna do now?”
“I’ll crash with some college friends for a few weeks, till I figure it out.” Last year, he explained, before he took the job in Red Cliff, he’d applied to the Peace Corps. He was going to see if he couldn’t reactivate the application and get placed overseas.
“Another country?”
“Yeah, another country.”
“You could just go like that?”
“Well, you go where they send you.”
“You’ll let me know where you are?”
“Why’s that?”
“So I could pay you back. For the truck and all.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
They passed through the mining town of Globe and stopped at the final light on Route 60. A gospel song was playing on the radio, and Adam lowered the volume.
“Hartig,” he said. “I let him borrow the key.”
“I know you did.”
“He said he was just gonna go in and jam to some music. Him and some of our friends.”
“Well, that’s not what they did.”
“It’s fucked up. I trusted him.”
Jeff shook his head, and his tongue felt heavy. He almost wished Adam hadn’t admitted it. The light turned. He pulled the truck forward and raced it past seventy onto the open highway.
Adam stared out the side window and asked, “You’ll still write me?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You write me. I want to show you.”
“Show me what?”
Adam didn’t answer him.
“Show me what, Adam?”
“We could still be friends.”
Jeff fought back the smile. He turned the gospel music back up and Adam threw in a Megadeth cassette. They rode without a word past the last stores of Globe and over the pass to Phoenix. Two hours later, outside his old college roommate’s house in Tempe, Jeff handed over the keys for the Toyota.
“Take care of this thing,” he said to Adam, kicking the truck’s front tire. “It’s an heirloom.”
“Yeah.”
They shook hands but did not say goodbye. There was no Apache word for it.
3
ANARBEK AND NAZIRA had been waiting for the American to arrive since seven o’clock that morning. Anarbek insisted they remain in the house; he wanted to make sure they did not miss their guest, and he needed Nazira to help translate for him. She had busied herself with the final touches, ironing all the curtains for a second time, sweeping out of the cupboards any crumbs that had escaped her many cleanings, folding towels, scouring the bathtub, and counting silverware to make sure there were eight full sets of knives, forks, spoons, and teacups. By mid-evening both she and her father had fallen asleep in the living room. They were awakened by the crashing of a bus over the dirt humps of Karl Marx Street. Anarbek rushed to the door and Nazira hurried to the bathroom to brush her hair. She arrived in the living room just as her father was pulling Dushen and the American into the house.
She had never seen anyone like him. He looked . . . healthy. He had a fleshy face, curly auburn hair that was beginning to creep below his ears, broad shoulders, a thin waist, and a perfectly white, perfectly straight set of teeth. In greeting, his voice was high pitched and uncertain, his Kyrgyz accent comical, but his blue eyes, though tired and reddened by the long trip from the capital, glowed with kindness. He acknowledged her only with a cursory nod—this alone brought the blood rushing to her cheeks. Her father immediately led him over to the Brezhnev-era refrigerator groaning in a corner of the living room, tugged it open, and gestured with a flourish inside. The rusted racks were filled with seventeen blue cans labeled Judah Maccabee.
“These must have cost a fortune,” the foreigner said.
“Americans always have a refrigerator full of beer,” Anarbek announced. “I saw it in the films.”
The Peace Corps had placed Jeff in the Kyrgyz village to teach English to rural factory workers. The recent independence of Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a new frontier, and a wave of humanitarian, business, and religious groups had already flooded in. Jeff’s assignment was straightforward: under the English for Specific Purposes program, he would offer basic language classes. After his failure on the reservation, he had grown staunchly motivated. He wanted to be useful in a practical way, in a place that needed him, and he was determined to forget Arizona.
He had spent the summer in Bishkek, completing the three-month Peace Corps orientation program. Each morning he had dropped off letters to his friends in America at the main pochta, then walked to school through an unkempt park with dried-up fountains, ready to face a day of language study and teacher training. The capital was a pleasant Soviet city with wildflowers and marijuana growing amid the sidewalk weeds. Sheep grazed downtown. On a walk one dark evening, staring up at the enormous moon, Jeff fell into an open manhole. He caught himself at the elbows, his feet dangling in the blackness below. He had lost a Birkenstock but was grateful he had not broken his back. When he pulled himself out and staggered to the microregion of his host family (the former manager of a state-run radio program and his frenetic wife), they informed him that manhole covers had become prized substitutes for barbell plates, so he should watch where he was going.
In language classes he struggled along with the other volunteers. They ridiculed each other’s efforts to master the accumulation of Kyrgyz suffixes. One of his friends could perfectly imitate the grammatical rule their teacher kept referring to as “wowel harmony.” Midsummer they went to Lake Issy-Kul in the northeast mountains for a three-week teaching camp. By day the volunteers planned their lessons, taught in a practice school, and observed one another’s classes. By night they flirted and drank. Jeff hung back, more interested in absorbing the scenery than in reliving college life. In order to ward off mosquitoes he ate four cloves of garlic a day and didn’t shower. Thrilled by the sense of remoteness, by the distance from America, he spent a good deal of time walking alone. In the fragrant summer evenings, after his daily teaching evaluation, he would wander over to the pier and dip his feet into Issy-Kul (Hot Lake), stare out at the shadows of the Tien Shan (Mountains of Heaven), and count the shooting stars.
On his return to Bishkek for the final month of training, his host family showed him off to friends and relatives around the capital. For centuries their nomadic ancestors had never turned hungry travelers away from their mountain yurts. Now, despite their poverty, the Kyrgyz welcomed strangers like him into their Soviet-era apartments with traditional zeal. Homemade jams, pickles, round loaves of nan, walnuts, melons, raisins, honey cakes, fried dough, yogurt, and sour cream were spread before him. “When he had eaten his fill, he was told that dinner had not yet begun. Soups, dumplings, and a mound of pilaf were on their way. He finished and thanked the hostess for the fine meal. She assured him the main course would be ready shortly. Shashlyk and beshbarmak (the national dish of greasy noodles and boiled mutton swimming in a broth of onions, eaten with the hands) were served. Vodka and cognac were poured. Singing and dancing were inevitable. And though the aver
age family earned twenty-five dollars a month, to Jeff’s dismay his hosts sometimes killed their only sheep in his honor. He would be asked to carve its boiled head.
As a final exam, the Peace Corps sent trainees on the dreaded Village Visit—an independent weekend excursion meant to test resilience and language ability. Jeff found himself in a Russian dacha two hours west of the city. Over three long days the hosts seemed puzzled by his mispronunciation of the simplest Russian words. The family gave up trying to hold a conversation and instead forced large amounts of vodka on him, fed him mounds of potato pieroshkis, dressed him for comfort in the father’s floral pajamas, and holed him up in a private villa guarded by six dogs, a sow, her piglets, and a coop of noisy chickens. In the middle of the second evening, bursting, he blundered outside in the dark in search of the toilet. The barking dogs pursued him. They woke the hens and swine. Reeling from the stink of the outhouse, he found every light on the street turned on, neighbors rushing around in slippers, lighting candles, trying to discover what on earth had aroused such a tumult in their once peaceful town.
In this way he passed his Village Visit test, and the following week at the Hotel Dostuk the ambassador swore him in. After the ceremony Jeff met his site representative: a man named Dushen, the assistant manager of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka’s cheese collective. Together, they left the capital on a rusted minibus for the journey into the mountains. To get to the Talas Valley, they had to ride west, out of the country, across the lower steppes of Kazakhstan, then wind through a steep mountain pass and enter back into Kyrgyzstan. With independence the borders had changed, but the roads had not.
Twelve hours and six champagne bottles later, the bus deposited them in front of a dark house blanketed by night. Jeff felt a bulge in his throat. He was alone. He could sense the mountains around him, cutting him off from everything familiar. Along an uneven stone path, ducking under the branches of what appeared to be apple trees, Dushen helped drag his bags up to the concrete porch of a townhouse. The lights flickered on from a first-floor room, and a huge man with a pockmarked face, tousled gray hair, and eyes still half-asleep greeted them in the doorway. Dushen introduced Anarbek Tashtanaliev, Jeff’s village host-father. As they shook hands the man’s daughter, pale with scattered dark freckles, appeared behind him. She offered Jeff a gentle, closed-lipped smile while his host-father pulled him over to a refrigerator full of Israeli beer.
In Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka Jeff received what felt like a hero’s welcome. Over his first few days his neighbors on Karl Marx Street introduced themselves in a continuous wave. Expectations were high; they seemed to believe he could change their lives. The attention was jarring—in Red Cliff he’d always been kept at arm’s length by the community. But here the villagers offered gifts of warm bread, eggplant and cabbage from their family plots, strawberry and cherry compote, boiled mutton, and plastic bags filled with cold triangles of fried dough. They explained just to what length Anarbek had gone to refurbish the old brick townhouse. The previous year the occupants had repatriated to southern Russia. The house had served a six-person family for three decades, so the village deemed it large enough for one American. Anarbek had arranged for its purchase with the village akim. For an entire month he had shown up each day with his wife and two daughters to renovate the home and bring it up to Peace Corps standards. He had installed a Western toilet (the bathroom did not have running water; Anarbek would work on that, they said) and a series of electric radiators (the street’s electricity seemed sporadic; he would work on that). His daughters had hung printed curtains made from bedroom sheets, pounded out the carpets, and scrubbed the several years’ accumulation of Central Asian dust off the floors. From the akirn, Anarbek requisitioned a heavy steel gate for the front door, a strict requirement stipulated by the Peace Corps, but in the neighbors’ opinion an unnecessary precaution. For the previous quarter of a century, Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka had known no crime.
Anarbek had even installed a telephone. It was a red, hollow, plastic device with a single thread of exposed wire that looped out of the top step on the second floor, perfectly situated to trip Jeff and send him flying down the stairs. On his third evening in the village, finished unpacking, he checked the telephone to see if he could reach America. There was no dial tone. When he picked up the receiver, he could hear the strumming of a kumooz and the high-pitched wailing of a Kyrgyz folk song. The telephone picked up radio signals.
Anarbek came by three times a day to see how Jeff was settling in. The round man arrived sweating, his shirt stained in large damp patches beneath his arms. He carried the smell of wet leather into the home. He fingered Jeff’s hiking boots, he fingered his books, his Bic pens, his serrated knife. How had he slept? he asked. What had he eaten for breakfast? Whom had he talked to? Where had he been wandering at eight that morning? (One of the village children had spotted Jeff taking out garbage. Word had spread.) What would he do this evening? Would he come over for dinner?
Jeff accepted dinner each night for the first week. He dined in a sitting room alone with Anarbek, served by his quick-stepping wife, Lola, a slim, fair-skinned woman of his own age. She appeared carrying a new mutton dish each night: mutton dumplings called manti, a mutton and turnip stew called lagman, the mutton kebabs called shashlyk—and what Anarbek claimed was a special delicacy, known as “refrigerator jelly”: a wobbling glob of congealed fat from the previous day’s mutton.
By the end of the first week Jeff decided he would have to learn how to refuse his host-father’s invitations. That Saturday he fumbled an excuse in grammatically poor Russian. Anarbek’s face colored, his eyes dropped, and, head hanging, he left the house, checking the metal gate behind him. Five minutes later a knock on the door sounded. Jeff’s neighbor, Oomar, wanted to know if he would join them for dinner.
In this way two weeks passed. Jeff settled in and began to plan his English lessons. He checked the village pochta every day for his mail. At last, at the end of the second week, he received his first letter, a one-page note from Adam, telling him he’d enrolled at Northern Arizona University. A university grant, combined with his BIA scholarship and tribal land settlement, had amounted to a full ride. Jeff doubted Adam would make it through first semester, but then rebuked himself for his bitterness.
That same afternoon Anarbek drove Jeff to the cheese factory to show him his classroom. At the entrance gate squatted what looked like a tollbooth, with a chipped barrier arm painted in black and white stripes, which a watchman raised by pulling a frayed string. They drove into the complex and parked in a gravel lot. In front of them lay a discolored concrete building—long and low, like a bunker—whose entire left half appeared to be sinking into the earth. Anarbek explained that the foundation had shifted ten years ago in a small earthquake. He laughed, explaining how he had been working that very afternoon in his office, and his desk had slid backward and pinned him against the wall. But nobody had been hurt, only surprised. This sunken building connected to a high warehouse structure with missing windows. Across the lot stood a similar building, backed by a white silo that leaned at an angle, like the Tower of Pisa. Anarbek indicated the cow stables, then pointed to a large square shed in the far corner of the lot and with a smile told Jeff it was the factory sauna. A light shone from the sauna windows, and steam drifted from a pipe on the roof—the only signs of life in the complex.
The bunker’s unlit hallways were strangely quiet, and on most doors hung freshly painted signs with the word OPASNIE!—DANGER! Anarbek hurried Jeff past these, straight to the door of his classroom; but when he triumphantly turned the loose knob to usher Jeff in, he found that the door was locked. This apparently was a surprise. Anarbek cursed, fumbled in his pocket for the keys, and finding none, promptly bashed the door with a thunderous front-thrust kick. It swung open; the knob fell and rattled on the ground. Jeff stepped in and saw that his classroom was a converted closet, with six tables, and milking stools for seats. A warped brown chalkboard had been hung on the back wall, and in front
of it, on a flimsy desk, sat a box of Soviet chalk. When he picked up a piece, half of it disintegrated in his fingers. The chalkboard, he found, was ancient and frictionless—he tried to write his name, and the chalk barely left a trace.
His classes would begin on Monday. He glanced back at Anarbek, who was cleaning his ear with his pinky. Jeff smiled. Through the room’s lone, thin window, he could see two snowy mountain peaks reflecting the high Central Asian sun.
“Prekrasna,” he said, his voice resounding in the empty halls of the silent factory. Perfect.
Peace Corps trainers had warned Jeff about a debilitating state of mind, common to many volunteers, called the fishbowl effect. With his hooded hemp Baja shirt and his leather sneakers, in his every movement, Jeff stood out in full relief. People stared. When he bought his eggs in the bazaar, all eyes fell on him. The faces of babushkas jostling at the counter in the pochta locked on him a unified, threatening glare. Old men hobbling along Karl Marx Street halted before his gate and watched him gathering fallen apples. On the porch, after dinner, he would look up from an old copy of Newsweek to see an array of children’s eyes poking through the slats in his fence, their hands resting above the posts. He knew no privacy.
On a bright Saturday morning in mid-September, a Soviet army jeep swerved in front of the house, and Anarbek stumbled out. Without explanation he dragged Jeff across the yard and pushed him toward the vehicle. “Just tell me where we are going,” Jeff pleaded, but his host-father waved vaguely at the highest peaks in the distance.
Two fat Kyrgyz men in camouflage suits sat up front, but Jeff was shoved into the back, where he found the director of the Lenin School, his wife, their two children, Anarbek’s daughter Baktigul, a case of vodka, two watermelons, fishing gear, three hunting rifles, and a bucket of sunflower seeds.
This Is Not Civilization Page 5