This Is Not Civilization

by Robert Rosenberg

  Every ounce of Jeff’s patience had dried up. Seething, he said to his hosts, “It is good so far?”

  “Very good!” Lola agreed.

  At one in the afternoon, with an uproar, the main performance finally started. Over the heads of the crowd, Jeff could see the hippodrome come to life. For the next thirty minutes a humongous cast of actors from the capital, dressed in bright flowing costumes, reenacted battle scenes from the epic. Acrobats performed on horseback, dancers twirled in lines, rainbows of fire shot over the field, gongs rang out, and banners were unveiled in synchronized patterns—a show worthy of a Superbowl halftime. Jeff was awed by it, and chastened himself for being so cynical.

  Over the loudspeaker he recognized the voice of a manaschi singing the opening notes of the epic. Nazira scooted over excitedly and whispered in his ear, “Do you know what this is?”

  “I can’t understand everything. Can you translate?”

  “He is just beginning. I shall see.” In a sweet low voice, close to his face, she did her best with the lyrics:

  “Oh, oh, oh, the ancient fairy tale,

  It is high time to begin it . . .

  For fearless Manas’s sake . . .

  We will tell you energetically

  For the sake of Manas’s memory . . .

  Innumerable years have passed

  Since dressed in chain armor,

  Running when seeing an enemy,

  Fast like the whirlwind,

  The man ferocious like the tiger has passed.

  Who was it, if not the hero?

  So many people have passed through the centuries!

  Since that time

  The sea got dry

  And turned into a desert.

  The mountain peaks reaching the sky

  Have vanished and turned into a swamp.

  The peoples living on earth are getting less!”

  “It’s wonderful. It’s really wonderful,” Jeff told her. Energized, he straightened his legs and settled down to enjoy the spectacle.

  Anarbek had spotted Baktigul and pointed her out. She was playing a cousin or a niece of Manas—Jeff couldn’t be sure—and riding double on horseback behind one of the principal actresses, who was supposed to be fleeing a wartime burning village. Baktigul held on to the actress’s shoulders as the horse galloped across the field. Anarbek and Lola shouted and waved.

  Jeff began to think this festival might have been worth it. Even if it wasn’t a season, or two weeks, or one week, or three days, or even two full hours, still, for this tiny new country, it was something. The celebration of a new nation meant something. His being here, at this historic moment, meant something.

  Just as the performance was reaching a climax, the electricity and music cut off. The throngs of dancers, actors, and acrobats ignored the problem and continued marching, tumbling, and reenacting battles through the silence. After nearly a minute the loudspeaker coughed back on, and a voice apologized to the diplomats, the nine foreign presidents, the international community, and the Kyrgyz people. The voice directly addressed the performers and asked them to return to their original positions.

  “Excuse us,” the voice said. “We have fixed the music. Please do it again. Our deep regrets. Please start over. Excuse us.”

  Anarbek, Lola, and some of the crowd laughed. Nazira shrugged. A few people hissed and clicked their tongues. On the loudspeaker the manaschi opened the epic again. The music failed twice more during the second performance, but it no longer seemed important. The show continued in spurts. Baktigul fled the burning village a total of three times. Finally the hero Manas saved the Kyrgyz nation. Fireworks shot across the hippodrome. Gunshots, gongs, and the horsemen’s shouting resounded, flags from around the world were unfurled, and a magnificent hot-air balloon, made of brilliant orange taffeta, was inflated and lifted off, rising into the sky like a second sun.

  “It is so beautiful,” Jeff said to Anarbek, sweeping his arm across the crowd, the Talas hills, the Ala Too mountains fringed with snow. Together everyone’s heads turned upward as they followed the path of the balloon.

  Past the stadium the balloon floated, lost altitude, then crashed into a hill. The basket collapsed; the fabric fell, burst, and ripped into shreds.

  Jeff’s heart ripped with it. Around him the Kyrgyz gazed, spellbound, at the balloon’s immolation. They did not appear disappointed. They simply turned away and resumed their chatter. Anarbek was inspecting his kalpak, and Nazira looked serene and content. No, Jeff thought, this was a disaster. As much as he wanted this new nation to develop, to flourish, with or without his help it was going nowhere. He was finished here. Let the hero Manas save the cheese factory.

  The spectacle had ended. It occurred to Lola and Nazira only then, for the first time, that finding ten-year-old Baktigul in a crowd of fifty thousand was going to be a problem. Jeff separated himself from his host family and slouched around the festival grounds, looking for the girl and avoiding invitations to eat beshbarmak. Eventually he met up with Nazira and Lola. They had not yet found Baktigul, but now, together, they were pulled into a yurt by an enthusiastic Kyrgyz family overjoyed to meet an American. Their hosts sat them down, carried in the sheep’s head, and handed the knife to Jeff. Just as he cut into the ear, they proclaimed with unwavering smiles:

  “Wasn’t our Manas celebration perfect?”

  Jeff learned from Anarbek that it was a Kyrgyz tradition to throw oneself a farewell party. He could barely fathom another evening of forced vodka and excessive generosity. He had packing and cleaning to do, and he was busy organizing his belongings to leave for village friends. In an effort to travel as lightly as possible, he had carried most of what he owned up to his bedroom, where he waded through shoes, a tape player, his dubbed blues cassettes, a pocket calculator and his Italian spices. He had always hated goodbyes and had hoped for a quiet, graceful exit. In leaving he was abandoning the factory and the village to a state of uncertainty, and he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  But Anarbek forced him to relent. “I’ll mention the party to a few people,” Jeff said. “Just a few, though.”

  The following morning he cooked leposhka pizzas, using the flat loaves of bread from the bazaar. He boiled down a vat of spicy tomato sauce, chopped up his last precious hunk of imported cheese from the capital, then baked it all in a covered frying pan. He was impressed with the results. For his closest village friends, ten pizzas would suffice: a final taste of America.

  The crowd began arriving at nine-thirty in the morning. Scarved women charged into his home, pointed to his pizzas cooling on the kitchen table, and laughed. They were followed by their husbands and children, who tracked mud inside and hauled Jeff’s furniture out the front door under the apple trees. Before he could object, three enormous tables had been improvised, covered, and set Kyrgyz style—the usual nuts, fruits, candy, and jams spread over them. Jeff heard protesting sheep dragged into the back of his yard, he heard the clanking of bottles as they were set up on the tables, and he braced himself for one final day of submission to traditions beyond his control.

  Village children arrived. Upstairs the kids unpacked all of his bags, then made off with journals, photos, and his ASU sweatshirts (he would not know they were missing until weeks later). By noon Nazira was outside playing the kumooz, Jeff’s tape player was jammed into a window frame, and electric Indian film music blared out into the dusty street; babushkas gossiped under the apple trees, the neighbor’s dogs jumped up on the tables and stole pieces of borsok, and a group of men squatted around a bottle by the raspberry bushes, tore off berries, and swallowed them after each toast. Jeff brought out the pizzas and his guests scarfed them down in a matter of seconds, then complained how lousy American food was. The boiling of the sheep commenced, followed by the cleaning of the offal in the irrigation ditch, and Jeff was pulled inside his living room, where, as a gift, some of his neighbors recorded dedications on cassette; they thanked him for his two years of help and sa
ng mournful farewell songs at ear-piercing volume; then they dragged him outside, where warm champagne was uncorked. Loaves of fresh bread arrived from the bazaar, someone brought homemade yogurt, and his students abandoned the factory and arrived with hunks of butter. A fight broke out between Dushen and Bolot Ismailov (“Former KGB,” whispered Anarbek), and it ended with both men half-drunk, half-beaten, and slumped, hugging each other, on the roots of the plum tree. Late in the afternoon a cow wandered into the yard and lapped up jam from the table while children took turns throwing sticks at it. The villagers gave Jeff presents, more presents than he had planned to give away himself: carved chess sets, a Kyrgyz lute, watercolors of the dried-up reservoir, and, most impressive, an embroidered riding whip, with his factory students warning him, “Always take it with you, wherever you go, and you will never be lost.”

  Songs erupted outside, the dancing began, and the party spilled beyond his fence into Karl Marx Street. Swooning now, Jeff stared across the riot of his front yard, where he had enjoyed so many peaceful evenings reading, writing letters, and contemplating the mountains. In the growing frenzy of song, dance, and drink, it occurred to him that the entire village was there to say goodbye. His temples throbbed: he felt dizzy and sad.

  “Are you okay?” The voice was Nazira’s, his ballast of equilibrium in the insanity of this place. She was standing beside him, and he realized she had been hovering close to him for much of the afternoon.

  “I can’t believe all this.” He gestured to the raucous crowd.

  “The Kyrgyz can make a holiday of any occasion,” she said. “We do not want you to forget us.”

  “How can I forget this!”

  By six in the evening the yard was finally abandoned, the sun setting behind the recently plowed fields. Drunk, exhausted, melancholy, Jeff wandered from room to room of his overturned home, trying to determine how he was going to clean up the mess before he left in the morning. He gave up and passed out on the shag carpet of his living room.

  At midnight a gentle but persistent knocking woke him. He stumbled to the front door and found Nazira.

  “My father has sent me over to check on you. I saw the lights on. I thought you might use my help.”

  She stepped into his house, and with the instincts of a woman trained in the art of perspicacity set to work. At first Jeff followed her from room to room, amazed by the efficiency and confidence of her every movement. But after five minutes he retreated to the bathroom sink. The water, thank God, was running. He splashed his face, rinsed his dry mouth, and realized he was utterly unable to focus.

  He found Nazira sorting effortlessly through the soiled dishes piled in the kitchen. She had begun to boil water; she had emptied three wastebaskets and was now in the process of clearing off plates. Jeff stepped in to help. He dropped the first glass he touched and it shattered on the hard stone floor.

  Nazira smiled. “Why don’t you start cleaning upstairs?”

  Jeff found his bedroom ravaged. He noticed the dusty footprints of the children. They had jumped on his pillows, unpacked his bags, torn out pages of his favorite novels, rifled through his two-year stack of letters, and smudged every single one of his photographs. It had taken him weeks to organize all of his things: what to ship, what to carry home, what to leave for the future Peace Corps volunteers, what to leave for his village friends. His work had been for nothing. Lost in the depths of cloudy judgment, he began stuffing items into any bag they would fit. When he had filled the luggage, half of his belongings remained on the floor. He realized he was getting nowhere, dumped it all out, and went downstairs again.

  Nazira had finished the dishes and had swept the large chunks of mud off the living room carpet. Jeff was thoroughly impressed. Now, at two-thirty in the morning, she was trying to clear the thick brown cobwebs off a corner of the ceiling—a job he had never, in two years, gotten around to. She could not reach the highest webs with the broom handle and dragged over a wobbly chair.

  “Nazira,” he said, “you are a goddess for helping me, but really, it’s late. This isn’t very important right now.”

  She climbed onto the chair and with a smile answered, “These things might not be important to you, but they are important to me. Some person must live here.”

  Jeff secured the shaking chair. She swiped at the cobwebs with her broom, stretching higher, and her leg slipped a few inches. He caught her calf and held her steady by both legs. It took her only a moment to clear the cobwebs, but he found, gripping her soft knees, that he was desperately aroused. She hopped down, and he turned away.

  “How are you doing upstairs?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Let me see.” Nazira marched him up the staircase.

  “Uff! Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.” She clucked at him, observing the mess. She sat down among the T-shirts and sneakers and all of his worldly possessions and began folding clothes. He watched her noble face, her determined eyes, her constellation of freckles, and he opened his mouth in astonishment as she packed a pair of his boxer shorts.

  “Really, enough, Nazira. I’ll take care of all this.” He tried to pull a pair of jeans from her hands. With a teasing smile she refused to let go, and the next thing he knew, they were locked in an embrace, rolling over hard lumps of his stuff, bumping their heads against the floor and the bedposts. Very soon neither had anything on—their clothes and bodies and cries mixed with the great disorganization of the room. She hugged him close and shook beneath him. Her thin legs were strong around his waist, her chest soft and flat; the musky taste of her neck could not have been more foreign, or more familiar, and inside her he thought he might never want to leave.

  The nine o’clock sun slanted through the open curtains and Jeff awoke, alone, to a brilliant headache. He stood and tried to retrieve fuzzy lost pieces of the day before. What he could remember did not square with what he found. His clothes were perfectly folded in the room, all of his belongings packed and zipped in bags. He walked naked past the open bedroom windows; the air was cool and scented with wildflowers of the early alpine summer. Still naked, he crept down the groaning steps and found that the living room furniture had been brought in from the yard. The dishes had been cleaned, dried, and piled in neat rows; the kitchen table had been wiped to a shine, and on it two flat loaves of leposhka had been left for him. He lifted one warm loaf, and as it gradually cooled in his hands he thought, What have I done?

  That morning he said goodbye to his students, to Altin Eje at the post office, to the fat Russian telegraph operator, and, with a great hug, to Anarbek. At the bazaar he said goodbye to the Kurdish milkmaids. He left all of his National Geographics with Yuri Samonov. He bid silent farewell to the drunks sleeping under the poplar trees by the statue of Lenin. He waved to the cheeseless cheese factory and left the village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka, hitching a ride with his three oversize canvas duffle bags to Djambul, where he found a bus to the capital. The real world came rushing back to him, and the farther from the village he got, the more he dreaded America, massive wealthy modern America, waiting resolutely for his return.

  II

  6

  IT SEEMED NOTHING new had arrived in Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka in a decade. Everything in Jeff’s old townhouse—the furniture, the appliances, the wallpaper—dated back to the days of Communism. As the excitement of the initial years of independence faded, Nazira and the people of the village grew increasingly nostalgic for a time when their world had been fresh.

  This bleak February evening her key did not work in her front door. She usually forced the key in and leaned against the door to slide the bolt open, the metal scraping metal. But on frozen winter days, negotiating the lock was impossible. She carried her two-year-old son around to the other side of the house and jiggled the wooden back door, up and down, up and down, until it slid open. Any thief could get into her house—but what would he steal? He was welcome to her poverty.

  She plugged in the cement hot plate, put the soup on to heat, and turned on t
he television, praying it would work.

  With each of the past three winters, the electricity had become increasingly sporadic. One year ago, in January 1996, it had gone out for a month and she had to move back to her father’s home. The family had used the bread oven to heat the kitchen, and slept there, huddled on red tushuks. By the end of the week their dry wood had run out, they could no longer keep a fire going, and they resorted to vodka. Since then each household in the village hoarded mounds of coal in its garden for winter emergencies. These stockpiles were guarded with ferocity. Nobody could afford to share.

  The concrete hot plates—little stone tables with a network of slight depressions through which an electric coil was threaded—that heated homes had become the predominant cause of failing electricity. When one was plugged in, the hazardous coil burned like a thin trail of lava, and the house lights dimmed. In an hour a single hot plate could warm a well-sealed room, but if too many were lit at the same time the main street fuse blew. Nazira’s intrepid neighbors, Oomar and Alex, then crunched through the ice past the kindergarten, past the frozen bull shaking itself in the snow, to the fuse house at the end of the street. From her frosted windows Nazira could see sparks flying out of the shed and hear Russian and Kyrgyz curses, meaning one of the men had shocked himself. Occasionally Oomar and Alex fixed the problem and the people of Karl Marx Street promised they would be less frivolous with the heating coils. But if the neighbors failed to rewire the fuse house, Nazira camped under thin covers, trying to keep her son warm. She shivered through the night, and the next morning would find her dishes filmed with ice in the kitchen sink.

  The people on the street would have to send for the Russian electrician in Pekrovka village, thirty kilometers away. In past years they’d managed to pay him with a single bottle of Stolichnaya. With each ensuing winter, however, the fuses went out more frequently, and the price went up to two, then three bottles. The Russian fiddled with the wires, drank, and grumbled. Since independence he had insisted he was leaving this damned country and returning to Russia. Kyrgyzstan, he said, no longer welcomed his kind; there was nothing left for him here.