Manas slept under two blankets on the floor amid a pile of scattered nature magazines. His fingers were in his mouth—a habit she was trying to break him of—and his hair, normally spiked, was tousled.
She rearranged the magazines. “He likes to look at animals.”
“Yes, yes. What child doesn’t like animals?” Yuri whispered. “My boy did too.”
Nazira did not know what to say.
“How lucky you are,” Yuri said, pointing to Manas.
“Lucky? My son has no father. I have no money—I can barely feed him.”
“What is important about that? Look at him. What else is important?”
“I am beginning to think I cannot do it alone. I am beginning to think the boy needs a father.”
Why was she unburdening herself to this old man? Nazira suggested they drink more chai, and while she scooped the leaves from the carton, she observed Yuri scanning her bare room. She lived like a monk. On the wall hung a lone decoration—a single calendar poster from 1993, six years ago, showing the Statue of Liberty. It had been a present from Jeff.
Yuri eyed an industrial-size pack of yeast on the small table and read the label aloud. “A recipe for Russia’s traditional national beverage.”
“What was that?”
“You use this yeast for bread?” Yuri asked.
“Of course,” she said. “The bread you’re eating now.”
“Only for bread?”
Nazira tried to mask her smile. “Yuri Samonov! I use that yeast only for bread.”
“These last months—my business has been getting worse.” He pulled at the frayed cuffs of his pants. “Loyal customers have not been coming. They’ve found another source.”
“I know nothing about it,” Nazira said, and turned her head from his fierce gaze.
“My vodka—I keep it up at thirty percent alcohol. Strong! The people like it strong! Then I hear whispers in the bazaar.” He lowered his voice. “They’ve found a cheaper place, they say. A stronger drink.”
“Did you come here to accuse me of something?”
“You have been brewing samogan and selling it. I know what this yeast is for. And all that sugar I see you buying. Who needs fifteen kilos of sugar a week? A lone mother with a single son? Bootlegging! Nazira Tashtanalieva! Do you know what the police will do when I tell them!”
“You wouldn’t. Yuri Samonov, why would you do such a thing? I’m a teacher. I have no salary. I have two mouths to feed. How is a person supposed to survive? I do it because I must. I never tried to compete with you!”
Yuri fingered the paper sack of yeast. “But they tell me your samogan is better than my vodka. I have no choice but to eliminate the competition.”
“You would not!”
“You have been hurting my business,” Yuri said. “A man does what he must.”
The threat was too much for her. She stared at the Russian in disbelief, and he stared back, wrinkling his forehead, stone serious. She was almost at the point of tears when Yuri’s face broke into a smile, then into full-throated laughter, and then into a roar. It was the first time he had laughed in three months.
“Nazira! Nazira! What would your father think? His daughter brewing alcohol at home. Ha-hah!”
She laughed along with her guest, covering her mouth. “You cannot play with me like that, Yuri. That is not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, my dear. Life’s not fair.” He shook his head. “I didn’t come here to discuss our common business, though.”
“What then did you come to talk about?”
Nazira listened, and what she heard disturbed her more than Yuri’s teasing.
“But Baktigul is only seventeen!” she exclaimed.
Yuri further explained his suspicions. She inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself.
“Did you know this happened to me?” Nazira asked. “Is this why you came?”
“This?”
“I was stolen once myself. But I refused to stay in the house.” In the years that had passed, she had often looked at her fatherless son, wondering how her life might have played itself out differently. She could trace it all back to that first cause, to a moment’s decision: her barefoot flight out of Traktorbek’s apartment. What if she had not run away? Had she simply accepted her fate, her family would have been better off.
Yuri searched her eyes. “Nazira, I’m sorry. I did not know.”
With a wave she forced away the memories and raised herself off the floor. “Nyechevo,” she said. It was nothing.
The following day after a cold rain the village poplars glistened in the afternoon sun. Nazira waited at the bazaar. She pretended to be shopping for sugar and a straw broom, but from the corner of her eye, shielded by a silk headscarf, she spotted her sister, chatting among her herd of friends, all gliding calmly across the earthen lot, their schoolbooks piled in their arms.
How had Baktigul grown up so quickly? Recently Nazira had come to realize that, with each passing year, Baktigul had begun to look like a female version of their father. She had Anarbek’s round cheeks—vibrantly red, so red they looked stained at times by jam—she had his heavy lips and flat nose. She was slightly shorter than Nazira, but her bosom was already fuller; she wore her hair long (she had refused to have it cut since she was fourteen), and often in a braid.
Baktigul reminded Nazira of her father in other ways as well. Once she took up even the most ridiculous notion, it was impossible to convince her to change her mind. Nazira could remember a period when, as a young girl, her sister had refused to eat anything white. She would not drink milk or swallow radishes or cheese; she refused even yogurt, a delicacy, and the more Nazira pressed, the longer she held out. Lola had to convince Nazira to stop bothering Baktigul about it; eventually she would come around on her own. And that was what happened: one day after school they had caught her eating a vanilla ice cream behind the house. Nazira always remembered the lesson, and it was how she dealt with her sister through her early teens: tell the hardheaded girl the right thing to do and then back away. This summer she had had plenty of practice. Baktigul was studying for her university entrance exams, and Nazira had tried to convince her to pursue acceptance into a technical college, whereby she could earn a steady salary—perhaps in secretarial work or computers. But Baktigul had come across a Russian translation of Colette and had decided she was going to study French. French! As if she would ever be able to earn a living speaking French—she could not even teach it in the village schools. But Baktigul’s course was set. She was going to apply to Bishkek International University and study French. Nazira, following Lola’s advice, had backed off.
Yet wasting four years studying French was infinitely more desirable than what lay before her now.
Baktigul slowed down by the light-bulb table and cast a shy glance back at a group of squatting men, blinking her almond eyes. Nazira studied the men. From a distance she saw the leader of the group abuse the others. He ordered one to fetch him manti, rose and circled them like a sultan, and occasionally kicked them. Even across the bazaar she recognized him. Traktorbek.
Her sister’s classmates had walked ahead. Nazira wrung her hands. Traktorbek swaggered up to Baktigul and she looked demurely away, but Nazira knew her well enough to see the flirtation in her manner. The drunken man wrenched Baktigul’s arm and began to pull her around the watch repair kiosk. She leaned away from him, as if to struggle, but her feet stepped forward in a reluctant dance. The crowd of bread sellers cleared a path for them; it was a scene they had witnessed before.
Removing her scarf, Nazira charged after them in fright.
Behind the shadows of the kiosk Traktorbek had already taken out a bottle. His arm was snaked around Baktigul’s waist and, with her bright teeth and high-pitched voice, she was giggling.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” Nazira screamed.
Baktigul looked up and shouted, then jumped back in surprise.
Nazira raised her hand to slap the teenager, but realized she,
of all people, had no right. “Get home! Get home before you make our own mother cry in her grave!”
A hot blush colored Baktigul’s ears. She hesitated and opened her mouth as if to defend herself, but Nazira glared. Her sister cried out furiously, lifted her books off the ground, and shuffling around the kiosk, disappeared.
Nazira faced Traktorbek. Alone with him, she could feel her courage seeping away. She stepped backward. In the seven years since the abduction, Traktorbek had changed. He had grown larger and wider, his hair was already thinning, above a brown mustache his face seemed older and more cunning, and there was menace in his sneer. He cocked his head to the left with a knowing smile.
“Eje!” he said, his mustache curling upward with his grin, “I’ve been wondering where you were.”
“After all these years, you have not moved on.” Her voice was cracking.
Traktorbek shrugged. “I have moved on. I’ve found a better woman than you.”
The poplar trees were closing them in, the leaves dripping from the morning rain. Behind her she bumped into the corroded wall of the kiosk. She began edging her way around the metal siding. “Keep your hands off her. If you touch Baktigul!”
His arms snapped up and he grabbed her. With one callused hand he held her around the elbow. “What will you do? Tell me, what will you do? If you weren’t such a whore, I would take you again. Only someone else beat me to it.” With the other hand he stroked her hair between his fingers. Nazira swatted the hand from her head, but he snatched her opposite elbow, and she stood, caught, in his double grasp.
He stared hard into her; the wolfish sneer violated her all over again. Suddenly, strangely, his expression softened, and his eyes glazed over. He glanced left, then right, let go of her, and stuck his hand deep in his pants, tucking his brown canvas shirt into his gut. He shook his head and lowered his voice. “You ruined me, you know. I’ve never stopped hearing of it.” Nazira grit her teeth and cast her gaze to the ground, listening. He said she had destroyed his life, his plans. He had become the laughingstock of the meat bazaar, had been forced to leave, to support his mother by grilling at a shashlyk stand instead of selling whole shanks of beef and mutton. It was no way to live. His family had been permanently disgraced. But the Tashtanalievs would make up for it now.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“I might want your sister. Maybe Baktigul will be a luckier woman than you.”
“My father will never allow it.”
“Your father made that mistake once, but he won’t this time.”
“Leave her alone, Traktorbek. She’s a bright girl. She has a future. She doesn’t want this.”
“That’s not what Baktigul tells me.”
Nazira could hardly believe this was happening. She turned, gasping, and jogged off into the bazaar, in search of her sister.
Three more days she waited, helpless, for news of her father’s return. Baktigul’s stupidity infuriated her, and the thought of her absent father angered her further. She needed him to return and put her sister in her place. In the telegraph office she phoned her cousin Cholpon in Bishkek—the last person in the family to have seen her father—and learned that Anarbek had purchased only a one-way ticket. Nazira was sick with worry and could think of nothing else. She asked her sister again and again if she understood what kind of man Traktorbek was, but the mulish teenager answered with quiet nods meant simply to appease her. Baktigul claimed Nazira was merely jealous. “You’ve spoiled your own life, Nazira. I am not going to let you ruin mine. And how am I to help it if a man falls in love with me?”
Sunday afternoon, in her backyard catching up on chores, Nazira had not yet decided what to do. It was a mild gray day, and she had just finished pounding the house rugs over the fence with a metal spatula. Now, to make a spicy paste, she cut in half the tomatoes she had picked, pushing them through the meat grinder with her red fingers and catching the liquid in a plastic rice basin. All the time she kept an eye on Manas. He was playing in the brown grass, watching ravens poke at the hoed earth of her vegetable garden. Usually observing him at play gave her the greatest reassurance—whatever she lacked, whatever mistakes she had made, she had this boy and he was enough. But now, watching him jog after a bird on his slightly bowed legs, his tanned skin patched with dirt, she was overcome with anxiety. He stopped suddenly and looked up at the sound of determined footsteps coming around the house.
Lola strode into the backyard with Oolan in her arms. Her old friend—long-boned, wide-breasted—had a melancholy look on her face that marred her haughty beauty. She deposited Oolan in the grass next to his four-year-old nephew. The boys whined little greetings, then ignored each other as they scurried around on the damp earth. Avoiding what was truly on their minds, the mothers spoke for a while until Nazira went inside to put water on to boil and carried out a plate of leposhka covered with a cloth napkin, followed by bowls of raspberry jam. They ate the bread in silence. Nazira served the chai and Lola dipped two chunks of bread into her steaming cup, carried them over to the garden, and fed the boys the soggy pieces. Finally she squatted in the grass next to Manas and said, “He’s been gone almost three weeks. I need him back.”
Nazira’s heart sank. She gazed at the figures in the grass, and it occurred to her she was responsible for each of them. She had condemned Manas to a life without a father. Oolan was also now left without a father. And Lola, a woman at the peak of her loveliness, had been left without a husband. Nazira had done everything she could to make her family happy, and this disaster was the result.
“I’m sure he will be back soon,” she said. “Any day now. What could he be doing in Istanbul, really?”
“You know that’s not right. He will not be back. He left with no intention of returning.”
She sensed the possibility of truth in Lola’s words. Manas began to cry, and Lola lifted him off the ground and supported him on her hip. “Why are you crying? Tinch. Hush. Hush, my child.” She looked at Nazira. “I can watch him for you.”
What was she suggesting? Nazira’s mind raced, trying to imagine her father in a foreign land, on a mission to get money from the vanished American. If he had found the money to appease Bolot, he would have been back by now. She looked at her son perched in Lola’s strong arms, at his wet nose, his sea-blue eyes, his bristling hair.
Lola said, “You can go and get him. You can bring him back.” She bounced the boy in her embrace, and he whined in a screechy voice. “I will watch Manas,” Lola said. “You go find your father.”
“How can I go? I don’t have that kind of money. I can’t leave Manas with you for so long. He needs me.”
“I would go, Nazira, but I’ve never been away. You have been to the capital, you have been to university. I don’t know how to travel like you. We can borrow money from my parents. I’ve already asked them.”
“You haven’t.”
“Yes. Please find him, Nazira. Remind him that he’s left us behind.” In an afterthought she added, “His son misses him.”
Nazira imagined herself on the bus ride out of Central Asia. A foreign city! And Jeff! What could she possibly say to him? She looked at Lola and murmured, “It’s too far. Could you imagine being away from Oolan that long?”
“You won’t even be gone a week. I watch Manas nearly every day as it is. He’ll hardly know you’ve left. Please. Do this for me.”
Lola set Manas down, sat beside her, and placed her hand on Nazira’s knee. Nazira looked out across the sky, following a single drifting cloud as it approached the brown edges of the mountains. She glanced down at Manas, who was holding his arms out for her to lift him. It seemed she did not have a choice. “I’ll go, Lola. I’ll bring him back.”
That week she moved her son into her old house and packed a sports bag for the journey. She warned Baktigul, in no uncertain terms, to keep away from the bazaar. She said goodbye to all of them at the otovakzal, blowing kisses to Manas from the bus window. It took three attempts for the driv
er to start the bus, but finally, backfiring, it rumbled out of the lot, and Nazira left the village to find the fathers.
13
THE ISTANBUL bus station, a sprawling monstrosity, seemed a hundred times the size of Bishkek’s otovakzal. Lines of buses stood parked along the three spiraling levels of the concrete building, and dense, incomprehensible timetables littered the windows. Everywhere Nazira stepped the touts circled her and bellowed names of destinations. “Bursa! Buuuursa!” “Adana! Adana! Adaaana!” It was all she could do—hurrying with her heavy black bag—to cross the roads without getting crushed by the speeding buses. They swung around blind corners and unleashed their horns at her.
It had been an exhausting journey so far, and this place offered no rest. She had ridden the village bus twelve hours into Uzbekistan and had not managed a night’s sleep since. From Tashkent she found a train to Ashgabat, and then on to Turkmenbashi, where she had to kill an entire day at the dreary port, waiting for the ferry to Baku. Another two days of buses (they were awful; one entire evening a man behind her fondled her arm) had brought her over the Caucasus into Turkey. The delays at the border crossings had been interminable, yet her old Soviet passport and quiet pleas to the officials saw her through. She took a hotel room near Trabzon’s police station, but frightened by the sirens, she had been unable to close her eyes. The nights away from Manas were punishing: she felt hobbled, only half able to give herself over to the urgency of this trip. On the final, bucking overnight bus to Istanbul, she drifted in and out of a hazy half-consciousness, which only tired her more; and late morning at last she had exited, delirious, into the riot of Istanbul.
An elderly tout found her a service van to Üsküdar. The journey through traffic and the sprawling environs of the city took her over the Bosphorus Bridge. Through the window she spotted the currents of the straits running, strangely, both north and south. From the waterfront she had no problem finding Jeff’s apartment: she simply sought help. She asked everyone she saw, “Nerede?” and pointed to the address her father had left her. Women watching from balconies directed her all the way up a street of stairs toward an orange building. She was dizzy with fatigue, and the dread she felt at seeing Jeff again was overshadowed by the thought of actually sitting down and resting.
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