When the electricity went out, the village water pump ceased to work. People kept emergency supplies in large metal vats where they had previously stored milk. After a few days without running water Nazira’s vats went dry. She trudged a kilometer down to the creek and waited in line behind the Kurdish girls bearing pots and pans, the old Uzbek women in muddy skirts. One by one they leaned over the dribbling pipe that emptied into the stream. The pipe was the only clean source of water, and it ran, even when the village pump stopped, by gravity. Nazira carried the heavy pails home one at a time, her breath rising in little clouds as she prayed for water to run again the next day.
Back in the time of the hero Manas, she imagined, a village had survived without pipes and electricity. The Kyrgyz had lived in warm felt yurts, not in concrete apartment blocks or cold brick townhouses. Water flowed from clean streams; it was not dammed up in a polluted reservoir at the edge of the village. Her people knew how to make warm coats from sheepskin; they did not journey a half day to Kazakhstan on rusting buses to purchase imitation-leather jackets.
But she always snapped out of her daydreaming. What good was nostalgia?
Their once-developed nation had become the Third World. Her outhouse was clogged; another one needed to be dug. The faucet handle fell off every time she used it and clanked in the sink. Mice attacked her store of carrots, apples, and potatoes in the cellar. When the wheel of her canning press grew loose after six turns, she tightened it with a chipped screwdriver.
Her one retreat from the disorder came now, on these rare days when she had heat, water, electricity—and the television worked. The huge Brezhnev-era machine inhabited a large part of her upstairs living room. A few of its massive color tubes were missing, so after the signal had swept all the way from Russia to Kyrgyzstan and climbed over the mountains, it played only in green. Weeks of brownout caused the circuits to fail, but sometimes, with a proper slap on the side, the television would come back to life.
This evening it blinked on, and—nursing her son—she was able to watch a rerun of the American soap opera Santa Barbara. Across the humming screen lay a world beyond her imagination, a place where a person’s only real problem was love.
Nazira too had known love and had decided it was a danger she had no time for. She had borne her pregnancy and the consequent scorn of the village with a quiet acceptance. Even before Jeff, from the day she had escaped Traktorbek, she had settled into a ruined reputation, and she knew it could get no worse. She refused to reveal to her closest friends the father of the child growing inside of her, hinting that he was a handsome Russian she had met in Talas. If people had other suspicions, let them think what they might.
Many times in those nine months she found herself wondering when Jeff would contact her, until finally she had taken action herself. On a winter morning, late in the pregnancy, she was shambling across the icy winter road to school. As she descended the high embankment of an irrigation ditch packed with snow, she slipped and fell. She would have landed straight on her stomach, but at the last instant she managed to twist around and hit her side instead. The fall jarred her. She shuffled in pain to the Lenin School. There was no heat, few students were attending, and in the freezing classroom, with its cracked windows and warped wooden floors, she experienced a crisis of fear. Before second period she removed the gloves she usually wore while teaching and wrote a long, desperate letter to Jeff, in Idaho, America, telling him she loved him.
The weeks passed, and though the factory workers and her father received letters from Jeff, none included a response to her. Had she placed too much faith in the unreliable Kyrgyz postal system? She mailed off another letter, but still she heard nothing. He had dismissed her, and with the loss of hope she regained her former strength.
Her one solace had been that Lola was also pregnant, carrying the child of Nazira’s father. Anarbek was counting on a son. Lola beamed as her stomach grew, and she bore the weight effortlessly. The women of the village said she would be a natural mother and would not let Anarbek down. The two old friends bathed each other, shared dieting advice, and discussed possible names, if it was a girl, if it was a boy. Lola joked that, without a husband, Nazira had the unique advantage of control over the child’s name.
“The problem with your child,” Nazira would retaliate, “is that he’ll look like my father.”
Anarbek, for his part, hardly seemed concerned with his daughter’s state, as if he wanted to ignore the scandal. But in the eighth month, he had reminded her that Jeff’s old townhouse on Karl Marx Street was still vacant. She took this as no subtle hint: after the child was born, he wanted her to move out. Such face-saving punishment hardly bothered her. The possibility of living alone with the baby suited her independence, and the house was only a short walk away.
Her father had disappeared for two straight evenings when her water finally broke. Lola sent Baktigul out searching—to the factory, to the bazaar, to his friends, but Anarbek was nowhere to be found. In a rush of panic Lola telephoned the hospital. It took three attempts to connect. She begged Radish, the head doctor, to send the ambulance quickly. “We’d love to help,” he yelled back through the rough connection, “but our ambulance is out of benzene.” So with the aid of an old, senile neighbor, Nazira had delivered her son in the same home where she herself had been born. As the labor progressed, the old woman kept calling her by the wrong names, but even in her senility she retained her midwife instincts.
“How wonderful!” she kept repeating. “To be having a baby in the house! It’s just like old times! How wonderful!”
Nazira’s screams roused the village. A group of women gathered in the street in front of the tall blue steel gate, clicked their tongues, and complained about the lack of discretion. In the end Baktigul rushed out of the house and announced that her sister had given birth to a boy and that his name would be Manas. The village women murmured, thrilled by the new scandal. When Anarbek returned late that evening, he refused to hold the baby.
The following month Lola also gave birth to a son, Oolan. The two childhood friends, who had once shared dolls and pieces of bubblegum, who had attended music lessons together, now, in their growing poverty, were united by the trials of motherhood.
Tonight the strong wind was whistling through the window cracks, and the television screen fell into static. Nazira lay Manas on a blanket and slapped the TV’s side. The Santa Barbara signal wavered, then came back again stronger. She lifted Manas to her swollen chest, and he sucked hungrily. As Nazira could follow the episode, the character C.C., with the help of Santana, had caught Mason in bed with Gina. When Mason found out he took revenge and told C.C. that Channing was gay. This information (equally shocking to Nazira) had sent C.C. into a coma for months. The evil Gina, knowing C.C. would disinherit her if he recovered, was now scheming to pull the plug on C.C.’s life-support system—but she wanted to make it look as though Eden had done it.
Nazira feared Eden would be unjustly blamed.
In the summer of 1998, leaving Manas with Lola, Nazira traveled by bus to Bishkek to visit her cousin, Cholpon, a business student at the Technical University. Cholpon had written to tell her about a new business venture she had discovered, one she promised would supplement Nazira’s low teacher’s salary.
The rest stop outside of Djambul, an elevated teahouse and a row of five smoking shashlyk stands, marked the halfway point of the eight-hour journey. Hungry from the long bus ride, Nazira chose the least vile skewer from one man’s grill. The vendor pulled the mutton off the skewers, sprinkled vinegar and raw onions on top, and served the meat to her, along with a doughy hunk of leposhka, on a yellowed page ripped from a hardbound copy of Tolstoy’s What Is Art?
Her hunger turned to nausea after the second rancid piece. She tossed the rest of the meat to a group of well-fed feral dogs and soothed her stomach with a few bites of the bread. The nausea brought on a pressing need for the toilet. Behind the tea stall, a mud path led to a cement outhouse: men to t
he left, women to the right. She waited in line, reeling from the stink. One by one the women from her bus rushed out of the cavelike hole, gasping for air. In turn she entered the foul chamber. The floor was wet with mud, urine, and blood. Lifting her skirt to squat, she saw that a pile of shit rose out from the stuffed hole in the ground, and she noticed, on top of it, the collective squirming of maggots. She fled the toilet, crying out in disgust.
In the bus her stomach churned at the smell lingering on her clothes and the taste of the rancid meat. The bus continued on; it would take four more hours to reach the capital. Nazira rejected self-pity. She should not pity herself; she should pity her people, all the women who had used the outhouse, silently suffering the everyday hell of their lives. During the rest of the ride she tried to relax by daydreaming of Santa Barbara, speculating on whom Eden would marry.
The bus broke down only once, an hour outside of Bishkek, just over the Kazakh border. Passengers emptied out and watched the driver and conductor argue over how to fix a broken pipe. It was getting late.
In the capital, just before they reached the Bishkek otovakzal, Nazira read a brightly lit new billboard, on the right side of the road, painted in both Kyrgyz and Russian. It showed a heart in the top left corner, a globe in the bottom right corner, and the silhouette of a couple embracing beneath a telephone number.
American/European men want to marry you!
Call 53-76-7943
At the station five minutes later, Nazira was repeating the number softly to herself as the bus screeched to a halt. Around her the passengers scrambled to be the first to escape.
She stayed with Cholpon in her fourth-floor apartment one block from the history museum. Her cousin revealed the secret details of her infallible business venture: the brewing of homemade vodka. It was a simple, inexpensive recipe, involving primarily sugar and yeast, and one could easily control the strength of the alcohol or create special flavors with various fruits and peppers.
“This is what you’re learning in business school these days?” Nazira asked, laughing. But she became an eager student. Money was short, her salary was often delayed, and she had too much pride to ask her father for help.
In exchange for the lessons, Nazira shared the number on the billboard she had read, and at the end of the week the cousins placed marriage ads. Cholpon dressed Nazira in her best blouse—lightweight, short-sleeved, printed blue muslin—and a pair of blue jeans, unlike anything Nazira had ever worn. In the cramped studio on Prospect Chui, next to the telegraph station, they filled out questionnaires and applications. The Russian photographer took their measurements and added them to their forms. For Nazira’s shot he undid her top button—she squirmed at his touch—forced her head to a tilt, and snapped her photo twice. The picture captured her seriousness and charm; her chin was raised, and her wide eyes appeared bright and searching. The photographer explained he would publish the classified ads in an international magazine distributed to wealthy businessmen in Europe and America.
“But would someone want to marry a woman like me, with a child?” Nazira asked, beginning to doubt herself.
“A woman as radiant as you?” the photographer said. “Absolutely! See, we have women with more than one child advertising with us. Many Western men are looking for a family.” He showed them last fall’s glossy magazine, filled with color photographs. In the information boxes, a number of the women from Bishkek, Tashkent, and Alma-Ata revealed that they were divorced, and at least one on each page claimed to have a child—some had two or three. “It doesn’t make a difference,” the photographer said. “They see your face, they fall in love. I guarantee it.”
He would send a copy of the new magazine to her village. They just had to wait to hear from someone interested in marriage. He promised responses. Nazira and Cholpon exchanged a glance and paid two hundred som each for the service: a month’s wage.
Nazira returned to Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka and began brewing vodka, which she sold secretly to her neighbors. In the months that followed she never saw the magazine, and she never received any marriage proposals. She punished herself for trying to change her fate. Nothing would ever come of it.
7
THE SPRING OF Adam’s senior year the NAU basketball team won its division title and earned an automatic bid in the NCAA tournament. The reservation was a pocket of excitement. Crowds jammed around televisions in the HUD houses, watching on DirecTV satellite. During time-outs, applause erupted from Red Cliff homes whenever the camera caught Adam at the edge of the huddle. The women laughed and pointed at him. It was comic: the short white coach shouting his fierce directions, the dark NAU players circled around him like a fence. When Adam patted his teammates’ butts, the Apaches jeered louder still. They made fun of his extra-long shorts, which Lorena Dale worried would fall down on national television. She said she would have tightened the waistband if Adam had been back recently. Larson told her to shut up and watch the game.
Through sheer consistency Adam had advanced to the fourth forward on the team and was occasionally awarded playing time when games were no longer close. The Lumberjacks were a strong regional squad, but they could not compete with giant programs from major conferences like the Pac-10 or Big East. The tournament had awarded them a fifteenth seed in the first-round game in Phoenix, against St. John’s, the powerhouse out of New York City. But despite their status as eleven-point underdogs, the Lumberjacks still entered the game believing they had a chance.
Adam watched the first half from the bench, occasionally clapping, then bending low between his knees when the team fell quickly into a seventeen-point deficit. But near the end of the half, they settled down and played strong defense, extending each possession with strings of consecutive passes, and managed to cut St. John’s to only a ten-point lead by the buzzer.
Through the second half the Lumberjack players hustled, dove for loose balls, and fouled hard to prevent easy baskets. A team with nothing to lose, they stayed in the game through utter determination; but time was growing short, and the entire starting lineup fell into foul trouble. The clock ticked down to three minutes, they were still behind by eight, and their two best players had fouled out.
A late-game surge carried the Lumberjacks into striking distance—consecutive fast breaks, a three-pointer, and they were only two points down. But on the next possession an overzealous power forward hacked a St. John’s player dribbling past him—his last foul as well. NAU’s coach fell into hysterics, paced up and down the sideline, then crouched in a dramatic pose, his face in his hands.
Lacking options, he sent Adam into the game.
The Apaches watched Adam on television walking onto the court, pulling up his shorts. He wiped the bottom of his sneakers with his palms, and an unsettled silence blanketed the reservation. But for the next forty seconds he did not touch the ball. The St. John’s players ran the clock to just under ten seconds, and Adam, hopping around the court as if stepping on hot coals, was finally able to foul.
“First time kid plays on TV,” Larson Dale said, “only thing he does is foul.”
St. John’s missed both free throws, and with eight seconds left the Lumberjacks used their final time-out. The coach drew up a long pass play to their center at half-court. It called for him to dish it to the dashing guard, who would get a chance at a three-pointer for the upset.
The center was slow to the point. The inbounding forward looked up, saw it would be a mistake to toss it to him, and hurled the ball instead to a surprised Adam open in the corner. He was quickly marked. For an eternal five seconds he drove up the floor, through three defenders, once dribbling behind his back. Past half-court, just as the clock was about to expire, he pumped a fake, drew the careful St. John’s guard away from him, and then heaved the basketball from his chest. Hurtling without an arc, it spiked off the backboard glass and banked in.
The packed Phoenix Arena erupted. On television the ESPN announcers screamed themselves hoarse; they replayed the shot seven consecutive tim
es. The entire population of fifteen thousand Apache Indians on the Red Mountain Reservation leapt from secondhand couches, spilled buckets of potato chips, kee-ahh-ed, and rolled on the floor in hysterics.
Adam raised his fists and his teammates ran to embrace him; then they remembered there was a final second left on the clock, and they scrambled back to defend the inbound pass. The long throw overshot the St. John’s player at midcourt, and the upset belonged to the Lumberjacks and the state of Arizona.
On the reservation the Apaches watched television in tears. It was their finest moment, and suddenly it got better. The ESPN announcer, Shannon Silverstein, was interviewing Adam about the shot. “Adam Dale, when your coach put you in, he never expected you would bring this kind of last-minute luck to your team.” She swung the microphone to his mouth.
“Luck! I’ve practiced that shot my whole life.” He was panting, covered in sweat, and hardly thinking about what he was saying. He had never known this kind of euphoria.
She brushed back her golden bangs. “I just mean it was a very long shot.” Her mouth closed, her enormous smile faded, and her lips curled in confusion. Lumberjack players swirled behind her, and large hands shot across the television screen to touch Adam and rustle his hair.
“I knew it was going in,” he said. He was much taller than the pretty white announcer, and looked down at her. “You ever shot a basketball?”
She put one finger in her ear and gasped, “I’m having trouble hearing you. Congratulations again! Adam Dale, the last-second hero of the game. Now back to you, Jim.”
This Is Not Civilization Page 13