To help Anarbek, Jeff translated the cheese factory’s machinery inventories and production reports and edited applications for capital grants and agricultural exchange programs. The figures all sounded pretty good, and only in November did it occur to him that he had never seen any cheese. There was none for sale in the bazaar, none in the village’s near-empty store. Anarbek answered Jeff’s inquiries evasively: the factory was adjusting to changes in the market. They were reassessing production capabilities. Business was fully expected to pick up next year. There was no need to draw attention to the problem.
“If the cows are unproductive, perhaps you should consider a change in product,” Jeff suggested. “Report your troubles to the government. See if you can get some money together for a joint venture. You can make leather boots or wool scarves. You can build on what you have.”
“This is a dairy factory, Jeff. I’ve been running it for over thirty years. It’s what I was trained to do. We don’t make scarves here.”
Jeff pointed to an inventory he had translated. “But you’re reporting to Bishkek eight hundred kilograms of cheese for each eight-hour shift. That’s not true.”
Anarbek chastised him. “This is Kyrgyzstan you’re talking about, my friend. Much you don’t see is true.”
Sometimes, in the evenings, Jeff fooled himself into believing that his townhouse home would grant him respite from the fishbowl effect. But the village kept track of his every move. No sooner had he returned from a long day of teaching at the factory than the knocking would begin. At the door the neighbor’s children offered him kumyss. An old mother knocked, dragged her daughter into his home, and asked him to teach the girl English, there and then, in one try. Sometimes the pounding on the door was Anarbek, armed with shanks of mutton and bottles of vodka. Or it was Nazira, offering him fresh bread. She alone declined his obligatory invitation to come inside.
He came to live in a state of dread and started pretending he wasn’t home. The village was not fooled.
One rainy December afternoon the door shook for a full thirty minutes. Jeff was resolute; he would not answer it. Through his window he heard an unfamiliar voice speaking to the neighbors’ children.
“Is the foreigner home?”
One of the kids answered, “The eenostranyets got home one hour ago. The eenostranyets was carrying a bag of carrots and a jar of milk. The eenostranyets was wearing that bright green rain jacket that looks so funny. He has not shaved in weeks. He gave me two lollipops yesterday. Just keep knocking. The eenostranyets usually answers.”
Jeff opened the front door and gate and found, standing on his porch, an elderly Russian man. The veins on his red nose protruded in blue lines; thin gray hair was slathered across his forehead. His stained army overcoat was soaked, and a torn leather rucksack was slung across his shoulder. “Zdrastvooitye, Jeff Hartig!”
“Zdras. Come in.”
As the stranger entered, Jeff noticed the dark clouds on the tips of the mountains begin to break. The rain had stopped, and a chorus of drops from the eaves of his house pattered to the earth. Once inside the man removed his boots and extended a quivering hand. “Yuri Samonov! It’s a pleasure to meet you. A pleasure.”
“It’s a pleasure,” Jeff repeated in Russian. “I apologize about the door. In the rain—and I was sleeping—”
“Nyechevo! I understand, Jeff Hartig.” There was a sparkle of intelligence in his eyes, an ironic expression on his weathered face. Jeff invited him upstairs to dry off while he prepared the chai and warmed yesterday’s bread. When Jeff returned to the living room, the man was thumbing through a stack of old National Geographics that Jeff’s aunt had recently shipped.
The Russian’s hands shook as he held one out and opened it. “This is the greatest magazine in the world,” he said. “My favorite.” He turned a page. “My favorite.” He slammed his palm on the pink plastic tablecloth, startling Jeff.
“You can take a copy or two, if you like.”
Yuri was quiet for a moment, mouthing the words of one of the captions under a close-up photo of a bat with its wings spread. He finished and looked up with bright eyes. “I wrote for this magazine,” he said.
Jeff assumed the man was drunk, but he insisted that he had written two articles, in 1972 and 1977. Over tea Yuri explained how he had worked as a geologist and mountaineer in Bishkek for most of his life. He had climbed the three tallest peaks in the Tien Shan, some of the highest on the planet. But after independence he could no longer make a living as a geologist. With his Kyrgyz wife and teenage son he had moved to the village. Here they could feed themselves from a private crop grown on land owned by his wife’s family and raise money by selling vodka and cognac at a table in the bazaar. He had been watching Jeff these past three months. As an intellectual he felt it was his duty to come and introduce himself.
He glanced again at the National Geographic. “They translated my Russian poorly. I will bring you copies of my articles. But you must let me borrow this one. This is the greatest magazine in the world. I have not seen it in years. Decades.”
“You can have that one. Take two. Really.”
“Two! Two! I couldn’t. Two?”
“Please.”
Jeff’s aunt had sent twelve copies, dating from the mid-1980s. Yuri Samonov was silent as he selected two of the golden issues carefully, as if choosing his fate. When he had made his decision, he said, “Thank you, friend. Thank you.”
The light was fading. Jeff stood to turn on a lamp, but Yuri told him to wait a moment and pulled him by the shoulder toward the window. The silhouette of the mountains rose over the kindergarten across the street, breaking through a gray line of clouds. To the southwest the shrinking edge of day shone pale yellow with an outline of pink as it fell through the crags of the peaks.
“You have landed in the middle of nowhere, haven’t you?” Yuri whispered conspiratorially.
“I know it.”
“Moscow is halfway across the continent. Here, your America exists only in our imagination. This is not civilization. They drink horse milk. This is not civilization.” Yuri turned to Jeff. The blue veins across his nose stood out more prominently than before. “Are you lonely here?” he asked.
“No, not yet.” In four busy months Jeff had not much considered loneliness, or what, if anything, he missed about America. But the question gave him pause. “Sometimes,” he said.
“Have you saved Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka’s famous cheese factory yet?”
“The factory’s in trouble. I’m trying to get Anarbek to face the truth.”
He chuckled. “You Americans love truth, no? You have come here to serve us, but see what you are up against? Nobody can help this place.”
“It’s your new country, and you’ve already given up on it?”
“It’s not my country,” Yuri said, indicating the mountains. “We built this place up, every centimeter of every road, every phone line, and now they are kicking us out.”
“Well, we will see. Perhaps I can help.”
“You will help! Ha! You’re far from home, Jeff Hartig. When you write a letter and tell your friends where you are, they cannot understand. They do not know where Kyrgyzstan is located, and if they do, they do not know where our Talas Valley lies. History has forgotten us. Your letters might be from outer space. Here.” The Russian picked up a letter Jeff had begun writing to Adam the night before. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, as if to smudge the ink. “Feel this.”
Jeff reached for the rough tan paper, the only kind available in the region. It seemed unremarkable.
“It’s paper,” Yuri whispered.
“Yes. Paper. Shto?”
“Look out the window. You are in the middle of nowhere. Do you see the mountains here, to the south, and the smaller range to the north, that parallels it? And you have seen the winding Talas River, which our road follows.” Yuri stretched his arms and crossed them at the wrists. “Past the source of the river these ranges intersect. It makes cross
ing the mountains difficult in summer, impossible other seasons. There is only one way out of our valley. That is there.” He raised one finger and pointed west.
Jeff said, “I know this. We travel through Kazakhstan to get to the capital.”
“You don’t know! Here is the important thing. In the year 751”—Yuri lifted a pen and scribbled the number on the corner of Jeff’s letter. He went on to describe how the Chinese Tang dynasty had conquered all of Central Asia and then kept moving steadily west. Here, along the Talas River, they had come across an army of Arabs, Turks, and Tibetans and were driven deep into the valley. “You see through this window, there is no escape. In its history, it was the greatest loss for the Tang Chinese.” The Russian clapped his hands. “It stopped them cold! And with the victory of Arabs and Turks, Islam came to dominate the region.”
Jeff tried to grasp the point. “So in the history of religion, this valley is an important place. Is that what you are telling me?”
“Nyet! Not only the history of religions. Not only the history of Central Asia. The history of the world.”
“You’re exaggerating now, Yuri.”
“Listen. With the Chinese defeat, the Arabs took prisoners. These prisoners knew important Chinese secrets.”
“Silk. Of course.”
“Yes, silk making was one. The Arabs brought this knowledge back with them to Middle Eastern cities, across Africa and into Europe. It made them rich. But a second art was more important still.” Yuri lifted the letter again and ran his fingernails along the edge, back and forth, producing a sound like the gasp of a throat.
“Boomaga,” he whispered. “When they were brought to the Arab cities, the Chinese prisoners revealed the art of paper. With the Arabs, papermaking spread to Europe, then, as you know, around the world. Without paper, how would your technology, your philosophy, your money, your literature exist? A person could argue your civilization owes much to these mountains, to this very place, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Boomaga?” Jeff repeated, taking back his letter.
“Boomaga!” Yuri stretched each of his arms through the sleeves of his musty overcoat and took up his copies of National Geographic. “Paper! This very place. Thank you for the tea, Jeff Hartig, and your company. You are very generous. I will return these to you.”
In a letter that took eight weeks to reach him, Jeff had learned that Adam had begun school at NAU and that in September he had slept with his first white woman. She was a free spirit from New Orleans who hunted him down in the dormitories, followed him into the library, kept popping up behind him in the bookstore, and finally appeared one night at his dorm room. Adam wrote that, riding him backward, “She called out louder than any of the Apache girls I ever slept with. Do they all do that?” And then he was let down: the next time he saw her, she pretended not to know him.
What was Adam doing, writing him this stuff? Did he want some help? Advice? Jeff decided coarseness was his best response. “You bastard,” he wrote in reply. “I wish I could reciprocate with details of my own sordid lifestyle. Unfortunately, I’m living a monastic existence at the moment. Neither my Russian or Kyrgyz is strong enough to impress a woman with my usual wit and charm. I sound like a four-year-old when I speak.”
Jeff had imagined he might stop hearing from Adam once he got caught up in college life, but over the next months he found that, among old roommates and ex-girlfriends who sent scattered letters and the aunts and uncles who scribbled proud notes and birthday cards, it was Adam who wrote with unmatched regularity. This surprised Jeff because of the Apache’s staunch guardedness. In their letters back and forth neither mentioned the teen center, or even Jeff’s time in Red Cliff. More than anything Adam seemed to want Jeff’s approval; but the letters disturbed Jeff, too, each a nagging reminder of his failure on the reservation, and they had the effect of temporarily disorienting him.
Adam detailed in short, single-page notes the classes he had enrolled in, his midterm grades, and that he’d made the NAU basketball team. Jeff responded with something akin to the pride of an older brother. His own letters were filled with exaggerated details of his hard work, making his teaching schedule sound more demanding than it really was.
“I’m both optimistic and frustrated with the lessons,” he wrote. “Before I came, I had visions of introducing Shakespeare to the shepherds of Kyrgyzstan, but my students are just getting confident with the alphabet. I’ve been reviewing for this verb-tense exam I’ll give at the end of the week, and the factory workers have forgotten 99 percent of what I’ve taught them. They don’t study. How can I blame them? Getting food for the winter is more a priority than mastering the present progressive.”
As the correspondence continued, Jeff found he was revealing more than he wanted to of himself—his uncertainties about what he might accomplish in Kyrgyzstan, memories of his own troubled relationship with his father. He wrote how the man had cheated on his mother throughout the years that she was sick, and how his mother had known but put up with it. Jeff had never understood the reasons. Lately he had come to believe she endured the marriage only for his sake, to keep the family together; and Jeff confessed to Adam he often felt that half the choices he made in life reflected a desire to prove himself a better man than his father.
Eventually Jeff came to depend on these monthly letters simply to vent. He had grown tired of communicating only in basic Russian and Kyrgyz, conversations that mostly rode on the surface of things. Yet he never knew how to sign off to Adam. Sincerely was too formal, Love too bizarre, Take care too blank, Your friend ridiculous. Adam, for his part, didn’t even sign his letters; they ended, usually, with a simple question, such as What kind of gun did that guy shoot the pheasants with? or You think I should take Intro to World Lit pass/fail? The lack of a signature gave the note an informal immediacy, as if he and Adam were chatting on the porch of the Red Cliff Trading Post, not sending letters that took months to cross the oceans.
Anarbek grew visibly worried about Jeff’s first winter in the village. As temperatures plummeted and snow mounted, the town’s electricity went out more frequently. This was followed by the failure of the pumps and the loss of running water. When water was not restored, Jeff was invited to thaw out and cleanse himself with the village elders in their Wednesday evening sauna at the factory.
In the makeshift bar adjoining the sauna, the wooden walls were smattered with the calendars of smooth-skinned Chinese and Kyrgyz models, calendars Anarbek had collected over the years on his various trips to the capital. On Jeff’s first visit, the manager ordered Dushen to fill a kettle with water for tea. Anarbek’s friends arrived and greeted them with handshakes. Bakyt, the Lenin School director, carried in boiled legs of mutton wrapped in newspaper and a jar of pickles. The akim entered with a hunk of butter and three greasy tails of homemade kielbasa. Radish, the doctor, came straight from the region’s hospital, swaggering through the door with a bottle of vodka in each hand, his towel folded under his arm.
From the bar another door led to the changing room, where two showers (the only showers in Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka, Anarbek bragged) worked at high pressure when the water was running. In this room the men undressed and then entered the sauna, some naked, some in grimy underpants. Jeff stripped hesitantly to his plaid boxers, and Anarbek reminded him to take off his watch so the metal would not burn his arm. Inside the sauna, as the room grew hotter, the men stared at the sweat dripping off Jeff’s head down into the curly beard that now grew from his face. Anarbek pointed to his bony chest and visible ribs and announced, “That is not healthy!” When it was obvious Jeff could no longer stand the temperature and was about to pass out, they directed him to squat on the ground where it was cooler. Around him the other men sweated and moaned, and slapped each other’s backs in elaborate massages. Finally the heat became too much even for them, and Anarbek gave the nod. Dushen swung open the door, and they ran, one by one, out of the steam, grabbed their towels in the changing room, and sprang to a room ad
joining the bar, where a large in-ground tub had been filled with freezing green water. The men hopped in and shrieked, “Oh! Oh! Sohhhk!” Cold!
They tried to push Jeff into the tub, but he resisted. “In America,” he called over their moaning, “we think you could die of shock doing this.”
“What do Americans know?” the head doctor retorted, splashing him. “It makes your body stronger. You’ll handle the winter better. Now get in!”
On emerging from the ice water the wrinkled men dried themselves and returned to the bar. Anarbek started the rounds of vodka toasts, offering Jeff spoonfuls of butter and slices of kielbasa as chasers.
To guests.
To health.
To a full table.
The chai was poured and slurped. The men, shifting on their seats, unleashed a pestilential torrent of gas.
“Time again!” Anarbek announced. The ritual continued: burning sauna, freezing tub, shots of vodka.
At the end of the evening Anarbek slumped next to Jeff on a cushioned bench in the bar, beneath a wall calendar of a grinning Kyrgyz model. He took an exaggerated breath, sighed, and asked, “So, is there progress?”
Jeff was holding a full glass of vodka and shivering. “Progress?”
“With my factory workers? How is their English?”
Around the bar the village elders focused on him, intent on his answer. Jeff hesitated, his mouth hanging open. “So much progress,” he finally said. “The students are eager, and I think they are learning quickly. Soon they will be able to write advertisements. They’ll sell your cheese to any nation in the world.”
The akim turned to Dushen. “You’ve been taking his classes. What can you say?”
Dushen cleared his voice. “Whad—is—yaw—nem?” He pointed to a red towel and said, “Red.” He pointed to the mutton and said, “Ship.” He pointed to Jeff and said, “My teycher!”
This Is Not Civilization Page 7