The year of my birth was foretold, you may say, with astronomical precision; moreover it will seem strange, almost as the theory of relativity.  A horse, blind in his right eye, was mauled by wolves in that autumn; and later, on the day of the vernal equinox, which separated the Year of the Cow from the year Year of the Leopard, came I into the world. Winter had not let go, spring had not yet arrived. It was was Nauruz[1].

            Only one mystery remained of that day: was the boy born before sunrise or after? If his birth was attributed to the Year of the Cow, then he would come to possess innumerable herds and be content with prosperity. If the Leopard took him under his wing, this is also good. Who dares to attack a Leopard first?

            But this—before sunrise or after—no one remembers. Probably a blizzard raged, and all sat within the pavilion. I don't remember, either. And yet, is astronomy involved here? Yes, it was. And how about relativity? Of course.

            My first day was not marked by any significant event in a small village on the northern fringe of the Kazakh steppe. Not even the dogs would deign to fight over tasty bones. But there are years of scarcity where there are not enough bones to be cast to the dogs.

            If the truth be told, however, none of these things bothered me. I didn't care who the tsar was at that time, or how I lived my life; nor yet for the prophet who foretold the destiny of man—his actions, his joys, his sorrows. I was indifferent as to who was the all-powerful ruler of our parish. I was not concerned whether my parents were rich or poor.

            As I now understand it, nobody was particularly thrilled about me coming into the world. Just another family with many children making room for one more boy. They didn't rack their brains as to naming him. There was Hamit, the oldest. Then there was Sabit. And in consonance the third son was named, Gabit.

            My mother occasionally recalled, “Stubborn, he was...never-cried, even when he was hungry.”

            Grand events bypassed our migratory village, seeming to us as the glib jingling of aloof horse bells. The troikas never turned into our village. Always speeding past on the black sleigh trail to old Torsan's village, situated about a half-hour away on foot. Two of his sons were parish rulers, and the other two were approaching this power.

            But we learned from the stories of the elderly that our village was not always on the outer fringe of great events. The old men condemned the modern way of life, fading eyes lit up and backs straightened when they began to reminisce about the noisy, crowded horsemen fairs. Galloping for rich prizes. About courage and boldness; the horsemen of our lineage who always emerged victorious from the different contests: fighting and jousting. They mourned at the loss of their older nomadic ways of life, when the village migrated many weeks the length and breadth of the Nemeretsaya steppe.

            Even after the jingling horse bells faded into the distance the reminiscing incited by their ringing continued. “Don't wait for anything good to come from the ringing of those bells,” sighed Rakhmet, a shy, taciturn man, whose family was counted big even for this village.

            “Yes,” Kozhak, his younger brother agreed, “slaying and dressing one sheep would not be enough for this visitor.”

            “Oh, Allah!” continued Rakhmet, “I'm afraid he is coming to collect arrears on back taxes! These taxes! If you calculated the taxes from this one parish alone, even a family as big as mine could live and eat well for a hundred years. What more could the tsar and all his household want? Isn't that enough for them?”

            Kojak mockingly squinted, “Oh, my older brother! If only just our parish! But the white tsar has thousands and thousands of such parishes.”

            “Kojak, you must be mistaken,” Dosan expressed doubt. Reckoning anything past a hundred inevitably befuddled his older brother. “There are not that many villages and parishes in the whole world!”

            “Ha! You should travel, my Dosan, and see for yourself.”

            Kojak never tarried in the village very often. He had been working for quite some time in
Kurgan as a loader, his world was much broader than that of those for whom a trip to the nearby village of Presnovka became an event. They hearkened to Kojak, though sometimes tended to be blunt and dramatic.

            The talking broke off just as suddenly as it started. What's the point of complaining if nobody listens to your laments, and even if they hear they don't do anything about it. If Kojak begin holding forth about earthly injustices, either Rakhmet or Dosan gave a familiar nod: that's the way of the world. It's all from God. It's none of their business to understand all of these complexities.

 

            My father cherished a dream, which he had from his youth: to get rich! But in spite of all efforts, his farm was like a ceremonial saddlebag, loaded on a crazy, unbroken horse, wild with trimmed mane, frolicking from side to side; the saddlebag bound to its back bouncing haphazardly, occasionally thrashing to the ground after a particularly savage leap.

            Sometimes we had managed to get closer to prosperity, then father strutted about happy and proud, and even his voice sounded different. But not for long. Something would always interfere: a spectacular early winter thaw when everything melted, then a crushing crust of frost would form on the pastures—jute[2]. Or collection of tax arrears would pop up. Or taxes increased. The father's eyes would became unhinged. He seemed then to be looking off into the distance, trying to ignore the impending poverty.

            It was under such circumstances, when we boys had but one threadbare shirt apiece, the time arrived for our family to perform the rite of circumcision as was determined by the prophet long before my brothers and I were born.

            I was four years or a little more when our pavilion was visited the red-bearded mullah. And his hat was red too, pulled down to his eyebrows perhaps making his face seem sinister. He pulled out a knife and began to busily sharpen it, spitting on the wet-stone.

            His knife, however, was already razor sharp. Why, just last night we saw how the mullah, according to custom at a feast in his honor, casually cut off first one ear of the slaughtered feast ram with one slight motion then likewise the other.

            Under the continual rasping of the knife the three of us fell silent as we anxiously watched the cold gleam of steel worked in the mullah's hands. Our parents vied with each other, boasting about their sons, ostensibly to hire them out as workers. According to his father, according to his mother, it appeared that in all the world there was not such intelligent and obedient, patient and fearless boys. And if Hamit, Sabit and Gabit would not deny receiving this sacrament, each would receive a race horse. Father made this promise probably because he had worked out in his head another sure-fire get rich quick scheme. And mother added, as far as you will be big boys now you will be able to go to mullah's school.

            She fluffed some pillows before arranging them on a quilt which she had laid along a wall. Mullah tested the blade on his finger nail and concluded that it was sharp enough. His red-bearded face became focused, strict. He put the knife next to himself and began the prayer chants.

            I wanted the promised horse. I wanted to go to school. Yet when Hamit winked at us and slipped out of the tent, I surreptitiously followed him.

            A copse protected us from the rain. I was thinking: what race horse could my dad be talking about? Near our tent could be seen only one old roan horse. So, Chalka, could be reward for circumcision to only one of us. So what about the other two? Maybe the circumcision ceremony will be postponed for the other two until we had a herd?

            But as soon as I expressed these thoughts Hamit immediately interrupted, “You don't know how to ride a horse yet.”

            Sabit retorted, “We know how!”

            But the older brother snorted contemptuously, called us stupid calves and was about to instructively box our ears, when suddenly confident and gentle hands curled us up into his arms nose to nose.

            We were laid on the blanket in the tent according to our age: Hamit first from the edge closest to    the tor[3]; next, Sabit in the middle; and last, myself, closest to the tent door.

            From which end will mullah start? If from the door! I will be asked first, “What color is your circumcision horse?” I will immediately answer before I can be interrupted, “Chalka!” Then let my brothers wheedle, even though I am the youngest, and beg to ride on my horse. I will let them, but not very often.

            Sabit realized his circumstance was the most disadvantageous. No matter which end the mullah would start, Sabit would be second. So, playing it safe, he offered to trade places with me but I kicked him so that he would not bother me. He started to pinch me and promised with a vicious whisper to flatten my nose on my face.

            But in vain he sparred with me. Mulla, as expected, began with the eldest.

            “Tell me, my son, the color of your horse you will saddle on this holiday in honor of this ancient ceremonial rite?”

            “Chalka!” Hamit said, his voice joyful but then he commenced howling in unbearable pain.

            Even before Mullah, with his knife hidden in his sleeve, started to approach, Sabit already began to sob. But it turned out not with apprehension of pain. “No! No! I will not get a horse…”

            He convulsively spasmed all over, bawling in a loud voice, and continued to carry on after the mullah finished his task and squatted down beside me.

            And mother wept quietly. She lived through our pain, she sympathized with us, cursed our callous poverty which caused her and our father to involuntarily offend us on such a momentous day. You could, in fact, call a foal a circumcision horse but we didn't even have one of those.

            But I didn't care.

            “I don't have a horse either,” I said and I decided that no matter how much I hurt I would not cry.

            And I didn't cry.

            My father's brother, Uncle Botpie, sitting beside a trunk, sighed sadly. He couldn't help rebuking mullah, “Why did you ask about the horses three times, mallah-ekei[4], when you knew in advance that the answer would be the same?”

            “We didn't make this tradition.” Mullah gave a disgruntled shrug as he put away his knife and walked away.

            Uncle Botpie comforted us, “Don't cry. Don't break everyone's hearts. I'll buy you race horses, the fastest, most nimble in all the steppe. Why should we wait on your worthless father? Will he ever own a herd?”

            We could have been offended by Uncle Botpie's offensive words about our father. But how could we be offended, especially since our father was smiling with us? He was also delighted that our Uncle Botpie would give us horses that would catch the wind.

 

            Two years have passed since the ceremony. Again the birch leaves rustled in the grove near where we always wintered in huts made of turf. The time came for us to migrate to the shore of the large lake Kozhabie. Freed from the ice, its blue waters beguiling in the green of spring steppe.

            We were not the only village that migrated to that area for the summer, we were joined by five or six neighboring villages.

            In the evening all of the village elders decorously sat on a hillside not far from the shore of the lake, greeting each other at length, inquiring about health and invoking prosperity. Finally propriety having been met, the old men would get down to business: how to pay for the mullah, who was invited to teach the children to break the tongue. So-called learning to read and write.

            Mullah's predetermined defrayal: a cow and a calf, established by the laws and customs of religious offerings; this offering also includes funeral services; in addition, every Thursday each student must bring to their mentor weekly wages, according to the prosperity of their parents and the degree of their respect to the mullah—not more than five kopeykas but not less than two. Classes were held, one week to each family. Parents took turns providing the tent for the school and supporting the mullah, as befitting his rank.

            Poverty has its own pride, wanting to discuss everything in advance, so that no grievances and misunderstandings would arise, so that nobody could accuse another of gaining profit at the expense of others.

            I have heard and read how many of the boys tossed and turned through the night before the first day of school, constantly starting awake in fear of oversleeping. But I would not say this about myself. After running all day long, I fell like a log and woke up on the same side that I fell asleep on. Moreover my brothers, I suppose, did not feel any thrill because the following morning they would not be able to run wherever they wanted, they would have to sit quietly and listen to what the Mullah teacher would say and do whatever he commanded.

            We got a young Mullah. To hide his youth, he fiercely agitated his mustache and repeatedly shifted a fresh-cut flexible rod from one place to another. At the same time he handed out leaflets to each student, which displayed all twenty nine letters of the Arabic alphabet.

            I received the leaflet, I was not much interested in these hooks, dashes, chopsticks and curls, but I looked and wondered why the mullah needed the snake's tail rod. Only yesterday I heard him speak of words of love and reconciliation, and how we are to avoid bringing any griefs and troubles to others.

            He sat us according to our age. There was no one younger than myself, at the time I was six years old. Therefore, no matter the tent my unchanging place was at the door, in fellowship with lambs and kids. Often my neighbors turned out to be ancient, decrepit dogs who sighed and looked upon me with teary-eyed sympathy.

            Mullah and taught us by seniority. He beckoned the oldest boy and poked a long finger at the alphabet. I have never before seen such well-groomed fingernails.

            “Alef, Bi, Te…” mullah pronounced with a somewhat unfamiliar voice. “Repeat three times after me. Alef, Bi, Te…. And now go back to your place and study.”

            But that was only the beginning of written wisdom.

            Before our eyes, the same letter would suffer eight or even nine unrecognizable transformations. Because of distraction and lacking repetition we could not immediately assimilate the meaning of these mysterious sounds, and soon no one had any doubt why the mullah needed the whistling rod that he'd cut from a willow by the lake.

            Here is the letter 'A.' At first it was pronounced more softly and called alef, and was depicted as a vertical stick[5]. And yet, it was necessary to memorize that in such a case, we were not to put dashes either above or beneath.

            With the same pedantic voice Mullah instructed us, “There are no dashes in alef, but there is one dot under the letter bi and two over the letter ti.”

            When alef is put next to the same letter alef it has just three pronunciations. “Alifsin-a. Albasin-e. Aliftur-o. And if read shortly, it turns out: a. e. o. And read as one unfamiliar word AEO, that is as independent as the letters, a, and er…. Again! Again! Don't be slothful. You rascals!”

            If we were to use the modern Kazakh alphabet, you would have to write: uli (son or grand) aoguly, ondiris (production), aondyris, on (ten), aon, er (saddle, man, daredevil), aer….

            If only this was the end of it, the squiggling lines subtly inscribed, like vibrating sticks, on our sheets of paper; but faced for the forth time with the sticks swaying in the wind, following mullah's monotonous singsong voice we began to memorize the letters, “Alifki Cousiño-en…Alifki-Cousiño-ene…Alifki kutir-he…An-en-it!”

            The willow switch in mullah's hands inspired zeal but it couldn't increase our understanding, in this case the damned dash became thicker and sounded not soft but hard.

            The teacher sometimes muddled his explanations, puffing his mustache, he would snatch up his switch. At such moments, I didn't regret that I was the youngest, sitting next to the door. In any case, I would never have agreed to switch places with Hamit. My poor brother was always under the mullah's hands.

            It is probably difficult for the modern reader to keep track of the insidious letter 'A.' But if he desired, he may skip this page. How did we feel? If only the 'A'! But twenty-nine letters, each with its eight to nine sounds. That comes out to something like two hundred and thirty options! So we wandered in the wilderness of Arabic letters, and some would never manage to get out of there safely. For instance, my brother Sabit was one of the first to drop out and become a herdsman.

            From time to time the tent was frequented by adults, to hear how the teaching progressed, to see what the tinkling of greenish coppers every Thursday was accomplishing, which coppers taken from old painted chests were in fact rather scarce.

            When any parents were present the teacher requested that we chant loudly and distinctly, “Alifki Cousiño-en, alifki Cousiño-ene, alifki-ku-tier-one! … An-en-it!”

            Our uncle Botpie visited the class more often then the others.

            Though he'd never bought the horses in honor of our circumcision, we still loved him. In the village Botpie was known as a connoisseur and lover of racehorses and birds of prey. But he was especially famous for his ability to handle dombra and kobyz[6], which came alive in his hands.

            Botpie listened, closing his heavy eyelids, and at first we envied the fact that nobody forbade the peaceful naps that he took while we slogged on melodiously.

            But it turned out he was not asleep.

            “What is that word you are pronouncing?” he asked the young mullah not without malice. “Alifki Cousiño-en… Is it really God's words? Huh? … Tell me, I am not learned.”

            Mullah cringed fearfully. Botpie had a reputation of possessing a sharp, imperious temperament, a caustic tongue, and one capable of unexpected things; therefore, one had to deliberate carefully before answering him.

            “Bot-ekie, it's God's wisdom,” mullah cautiously began. “The book was written by the Prophet himself, blessed be his name and his deeds! What is the meaning of these words, known only to the spiritual fathers in Ufa, Kazan. Mere mortals are behooved to repeat them with obedience and humility.”

            While talking to Botpie his mustache never bristled, he became obsequious, cloying. But we were filled with delight, that there was at least one person in the world before whom this formidable and unappeasable teacher started to stammer and grow timid, like a guilty boy.

            The words of obedience and humility fell on deaf ears with Botpie and he admonished Mullah saying, “And this is called the doctrine! Not for nothing do people say: breaking the tongue. They would memorize an-en-on, and that's enough. Why the hell do they need your alifki-Cousiñ! I will come back in a week. If the students are grinding the same nonsense, I'll take my son.”

            A week has passed and another. Of course, we chanted alifki-Cousiñ, alifki kutir and our uncle's son continued to sing with us.

 

            From time to time Batima, Botpie's daughter who had been given in marriage to a man in a nearby village, came to visit her parents.

            She was alluring but not beautiful. No one would call her gorgeous. Even to this day her effusive image is still vivid in my memory. Feminine. Charming. But what seemed most unusual in her was her sense of complete independence, a rarity for a village woman of both the older and more modern generations.

            God withheld his hand from giving her children. I remember how we boys swarmed around her, and she was always involved in our affairs: wiping broken noses, reconciling quarrels, because no one could resist her entreaties and requests; she comforted the offended, reprimanded the guilty.

            Batima's visits broke the monotony of the village, not just because she liked to mess around with the children.

            But once she took up the dombra, the most simple, well-known melodies mysteriously took on new life, as if hearing them for the first time.

            She not only played, but also sang. Even now I can clearly recall her resonant, velvety voice, close my eyes, and find myself on the shores of Lake Kozhabie overgrown with willows and canes; see the broad band of a crimson sunset spilling on the water away from the shore, where the surface was clean, unfettered with growth.

            Batima playing the dombra, and Botpie, kobyz. No one knew of anyone who could play these two instruments as one as well as this father and daughter duet. Batima performed as if she alone was on the bank and not a soul nearby. But numerous folk from all of the villages, that had migrated here to the Xhaylauw[7] near the lake, gathered around her to hear her perform.

            I felt something else: the excitement of the crowd, always amazed by her gift as if heard for the first time, this connection rebounding back to Batima and through her fingers into the dombra's strings. Though the sun had set, and the water was dark, and the canes faintly rustled, the woman was so radiant.

            Now I recall that back then, perhaps, I had to face for the first how sharply another's talent could wound you and how such success could pierce right through you. Among the listeners sat other musicians. Rather, they consider themselves musicians. Dombra, the same dombra in their hands became a dull rattle, causing one irritation. Some of their faces showed disdainful incredulity as they listened. The more honest among them felt small and devastated until the dombra fell silent in Batima's hands.

            Suddenly the silence was broken by somebody's voice, “Ah yes, one can see it, without a doubt, Batima is truly the daughter of Botpie!”

            On such occasions Botpie grandly considered his surroundings.

            His humble tent attracted visitors. The wonderful music of Ahan and Birzhan[8] could be heard, which Batima brought with herself; thoughtful and sad songs were also heard; sometimes boisterous songs that called to the long road; melodies of the Arka[9]. We are obliged to Botpie for another passion. In that day dastans[10] were introduced to Kazan, Ufa and Tashkent, enriching us. It's amazing how books, like people, can provoke diverse sentiments to different people. Some simple-hearted souls could be carried away by the legends of Sal-sal; wherein were praised, with mawkish and bombastic tone, the campaigns of Ali, one of the closest companions to the Prophet. Ali even married into the family of Muhammad, married his daughter. According to the opinions of the those who had written dastans for the broad audience, flowery prose in Ali's honor and ebullient praise of his wisdom and valor, were thought to strengthen faith and dispel doubts of common folk.

            But Uncle Botpie could not be easily deceived. His lasting and deeply honored friends became Kiz-Zhibek, Kozee-Korpesh and Ker-orglie. Committing to memory any other stories he apparently considered an unworthy occupation, a waste of time.

            Potpie could not be called a scholar in the ordinary sense of the word. He recounted these works in his own way. He gave an explanations, assessing the behavior of the characters, and expounded his attitude towards them. I remember as he was reading Korpesh one day, he furiously jumped up and began to swear at the words of Kodar, vilifying his treachery, for the fact that he continually tried to prevent the happiness of the lovers.

            Kiz-Zhibek: in the course of the narration he'd often interrupt and proclaim indignantly, “These are the tracks of the filthy paws of all sorts of ignoramuses…all sorts of mullahs, all sorts of hodjas! And those days, the people were like this; I'll sing to you now….”

            And thus he would introduce amendments to the story. Or deliver preachy digressions.

            Kiz-Zhibek: here is a young woman who suddenly mockingly rejects the custom in which the wife must go into the brother of he who had died. Jibek wasn't even given time to mourn her late Toleguen before his younger brother Sansuizbie immediately solicited her.

            He heard an answer:

                        You poor boy!
                        What makes you crawl under the blanket,
                        That covered your older brother?

            Botpie recited slowly, giving everyone the opportunity to ponder the bitter sense of these words. If among the listeners were such who had taken their deceased younger or older brother's wives then Botpie would interrupt the story and speak directly to them, “It's about you! It's about you, lowly cattle, says our worthy Jibek!”

            They would blush and smile distractedly.

            Now, I wish I could have given an example of such a man who had become ashamed and broken up with his late brother's wife, a woman who still retained the memory of the strong arms of her deceased husband around her. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to give such an example. Botpie finished his story, all left to go home, and everything was as it was.

            Despite this, Botpie and Batima helped me to see what great power art has over people. There, on the shores of Lake Kozhabie, or in the village close to Botpie's pavilion people become better, cleaner; and even if the dombra or kobyz couldn't instantly change their ideas about life, yet even two mortal enemies could peacefully sit next to each other and listen.

            You could not compare such power with the brutal power of parish leader, judge or intractable tax collector, who'd come to collect payment and may even wrest the last ram from the tent.

 

            We went to the mullah three summers and two winters, and I became acquainted with all the tricks of Arabic letters, read national folk stories; thus I could compare the texts with how they were retold by Uncle Botpie. Some excerpts I myself was able to recount from memory, but I would never dare.

            Father managed to improve things. The big herd, however, never materialized. But if the circumcision ceremony had happened at this time then each of us three brothers would have gone to the horse show and received a horse to strut around on during the holiday. And new shirts, and we'd give Mullah three kopeykas on Thursdays instead of two to let him know that we are not beggars.

            “What did I tell you?” father swaggered triumphantly, glancing over all around; heavy sighs erupted from mother. She knew from experience what usually replaced such relative contentment. And, unfortunately, her dark forebodings were not deceptions.

            The Year of the Boar rolled upon us. It brought jute. The people said jute was sent to us for our sins.

            “Not for sins, but for laziness, for stupidity!” Shouted Botpie.

            But people made fun of him as he was mowing the reeds, standing waist-deep in the lake water. In the steppe there was no such saying as, he laughs best who laughs last. But it turned out that Botpie was the one who laughed last.

            Looking back on those days, I realize that the dogged preparation of koumiss[11] and beshbarmak[12], to the exclusion of caring for livestock, was the product of the laziness and carelessness of the steppe. We, the poor, following the example of rich relatives, tarried on the summer pastures longer than we should have. But our relatives had hired laborers to mow the hay. And when everyone else migrated to the pre-winter pastures, it turned out, there was nothing for the cattle to feed on. Drought burnt the herbs, grasses turned to dust under the hooves of the cattle wandering in search of food. Autumn was just the beginning, ahead was a long Siberian winter.

            Our schooling was interrupted. We had nothing to pay Mullah. He departed.

            Our family was large, sixteen people. But only four could work. All the rest were either children or elderly.

            Winter came, and three of the adults sought strangers' doorsteps, to hire out as laborers. Sheep and goats, cows and horses died from starvation. And there was nothing we could do, and no one could help!

            Hunger settled among us and became the most prominent guest in our home. To me, the image of hunger is still the image of ourselves, our grandmothers and hungry children.

            Almost half of our mud hut was occupied by the bulky oven. Water boiled constantly in the cast iron pot, bare bones rumbled within. The bones of dead cattle, the fat of such bones that in better times would be used to make soap but now, all went into the pot.

            Hamit with Sabit adapted, and I was not far behind them: when the bone marrow boiled down and drops of fat floated to the surface and gradually gathered to the edge of the pot—twilight invoked by the heavy steam, and in this, we would seize the opportunity, when the adults looked away or went out, and quickly produce spoons, that we'd hidden away in advance, and scoop out the fat. The threat of punishment couldn't deter us. Whenever someone of the household caught us doing this, we were thrashed. But spoon fat was worth the most severe punishment.

            The tea we drank was white and bitter. This was because sage leaves swam in the boiling water. Still, we looked forward to this moment, since fried wheat was expected with the tea. Grandmother parceled out: adults, two spoons, and children only one.

            Our watchful eyes were glued to grandma's hands.

            “Why are you shaking the spoon?”

            “Dig the spoon deeper, deeper!”

            We, the children, tried to sit down close to grandmother, obsequiously looked into her eyes, and in the evenings before going to bed, vying with each other to scratch her back. We learned

            “Geez, when it's my turn, your spoon always skims only the very top…”

            Gnarled old fingers instantly decided: who got half a thimble more, from whose share, in fairness, to shake off a few grains…well that the well-being of our stomachs was totally dependent on her inclinations or disinclinations.

            If grandmother was angry with any of us, grandfather or father would always intercede, and with an ingratiating smile serve grandmother a cup of tea, and admonish us to be careful otherwise the wheat might spill; which if we did as we were told we'd sometimes get ten grains more.

            As the winter stretched out, relationships became increasingly strained during the meals. The eyes of the adults grew dreary, apathetic and the opportunities for us to truckle up to them steadily decreased.

            Sometimes, as one of us would hand tea to a senior, we'd brush, as if by accident, his pile of wheat with our sleeve in the hopeful desire to plunder a few grains.

            “Where? Where are you scraping those?” a vicious shout, and a big hand slapped yours while jealously gathering back all of the grains.

            We sighed and began to divide our shares into seven-eighths, just to prolong the tea party. Marvelous! Truly marvelous! There was always plenty of hot water in the Tula[13] samovar for everybody. Slurp all you like, and nobody would object.

            Where there are a lot of people and little food frequent misunderstandings inevitably occur, and each would believe that he is the only one offended and deprived, shoved aside. Hunger is horrible how it alienates even loved ones.

            It had become cramped and awkward under one roof.

            The uncles decided to break apart. The division between them and my dad was preceded by this anecdotal occurrence. A tea leaf just happened to be in my cup of my white tea. In Kazakh this was a sign that a guest would arrive, an undesirable circumstance during a hungry winter.

            But I, a stupid boy, exclaimed, “The matchmaker Musa is arriving!”

            “No, it's not Musa but Boitan,” my brother Sabit objected. “See, what a shaggy, old malakhai[14] on his head?”

            “No, Musa!”

            “No, Boitan!”

            Musa was the father of the wife of my dad's third brother, I respected him more than Boitan, the father of the wife of my dad's second brother.

            “No one in this house respects my relatives! No one in this house wants them to come!” one of the brothers of my dad intervened in our childish wrangling.

            “I would disown such a father in law with such ever-hungry, greedy eyes!” another brother of my father interjected.

            And then the older brother slammed his fist into the left ear younger brother, who then returned a blow to the right ear of the older.

            Thus the row began. After a lot of mutual accusations, reproaches and bickering the brothers separated from each other. We retained one sheep, a barren cow with a broken horn, and a one-and-a-half-year-old brown bay horse with yellowish markings. All of which were consumed by us before the Spring, except the horse, of course.

            We had no choice, my father sent Hamit to be farmhand, then Sabit went to a stranger’s doorstep.

            A year-and-a-half later, it was my turn.

            That summer, in the year of 1916 the Kazakhs began to be employed on the rear works, and suddenly we received a guest: the brother of my mother.

            He said that he would have to move on too, and that he needed someone to help with the housework. He had two children, still little ones, and his wife could not be away from home. He urged my parents to let me go with him to his village.

            Both mother and father thought about it, that it was a relative's house, not the house of a stranger, and let me go with him to Kustanaisky parish. I had never traveled so far from my native village.

            The villages of that land were situated along the Ubagan River, the low gray wintering huts were the same here as everywhere else, but the way of life among the people here was somewhat different. According to the old memory they migrated to the summer pastures, but only five kilometers, no further. They had long been engaged in agriculture, and crops that required constant supervision.

            I got to my nagashiv[15] just in time for the harvest, and from morning until late evening I spent in the field, learning to knit tight sheaves. I also road horses in a circle while thrashing.

            Finally all of the field work was done, but not the time to rest.

            Fishing was also part of the custom of this clan. Together with the other guys and older men I wove shields of reeds, as long as two human heights. I was shown how to weave: the thick end of the stem enclosing the thin end of another, then reversed and back again, ad infinitum.

            Ice on the river accrued to a thickness of two fingers. We chiseled through it and dammed the river with the shields. In four or five places were left passes, and they arranged traps woven in a figure '8' pattern. These traps in the passes were called Caza (death). Whether the fish swam upstream or down, it could not escape the trap.

            Today I do not know about, but back then there were many fish in the Ubagan. We couldn't pull them out fast enough! Upon the bleak ice the pike, perch, carp, bream, crucian carp plopped desperately, flapping their tails and then dying down. The various nimble carps took a particularly long time to come to terms with their fate. But they eventually calmed down, and in the light of the cold winter sun shone silvery blue, as hardened in the icy waters as Caucasian dagger blades.

            By midwinter there was enough fish caught and stocked up to sell, and then there was a break.

            In the neighboring village was a two-year Russian school. In December, against the rules, a red-nosed teacher accepted me to the first grade. I can not remember his name, it was said that he was from somewhere out of Aktubinsk. But I never forgot the size of the bribe: six rubles—this is four pounds of fish, the same fish that I had collected in the mornings, when the river was smoking from the frost, and the sun rising over the steppe was crimson.

            Presently, the red-nosed teacher was fired. Then I met with Becket Utetleuovy. I can only say that in that distant time rural teachers knew without exception one needed some kind of special luck to fall into the hands of a teacher, who saw their purpose as more than to merely teach the dark and untamed village kids writing and arithmetic.

            After school, he would sometimes tell us different fascinating stories that advanced our understanding of life. From him we first heard the name, Krylov. He translated and read to us Krylov's fables, and we had fun laughing at how a clever fox tricked a crow, flattering her so that the crow croaked so loud that it dropped from its beak a piece of cheese. Becket introduced us to the works of Abai and Altynsarin. We have forgotten some things: we were in fact still of not a lot of years. But some things stuck in our memories.

            “No matter what you start to do, begin with clean hands!” Becket repeated it often enough, for a variety of reasons.

            And we ran to wash our hands almost every break. And the fact that the expression had another more profound meaning I hadn't realized until much later.

            Beckett noticed my passion for folk epos, for dastans, and started giving me books. To start with, he brought his own poems, Zhigan-Terge[16]

            Poems soaked into my soul. I remembered some lines and repeated them to myself. Beckett asked, “And what exactly did you like?” I blushed for quite some time, stammered, but I couldn't really explain, what. I had some thoughts, but not enough words to express them.

            He did not insist and gave me a poem, Shakhmaran, and told me to read and then retell it in my own words. The poem charmed me. I spent several days on the book by refusing to go out running with the guys. One could not avoid being moved by the story of the King of Snakes. I was struck by the high nobility with which he treated a person in distress, and how bitter to be convinced of this person's black ingratitude, of this person's betrayal.

            Beckett was pleased with my retelling. He asked, what yet have I read, and I named to him the dastans, which had fallen into my hands there, at home, when I had gone to study with the mullah.

            One evening, guests gathered for the teacher. He called me and made to speak. I was terribly shy at first. It seemed that I couldn't remember a word. But the first line popped up, led to another, and a third; these were excerpts of, Kiz-Jibek.

            Guests unanimously praised the art of the young reader. For illiterate people, anyone who knows how to spice up dumb words written in a book is considered a scholar, a respected man.

            For me, after two years at the mullah's school, the lessons in the first grade seemed easy. I grasped things much faster than my classmates, for whom learning was new. And there is nothing that spoils more than a feeling of superiority. Moreover, I could see that the new teacher was inclined toward me. Abusing the teacher's good graces, in less than a month I said to Becket, “Mugalim,[17] I want to tell you that I have already finished the first grade. Now I am studying the second grade books.”

            Becket was taken aback by such an arrogant presumption. But he'd never been rude to us. “How is it that you are finished?” He asked, astonished.

            “Yes, you may prove me. I know all of the Primer. Any numbers I should add or subtract one from the other, I am able to do all of these things, too. You may test me if in doubt.”

            There was some truth to my words. Imitating teacher's handwriting, I began to write well and distinctly. And the Primer I had learned from cover to cover, not worse than the Dastan.

            Beckett is frowned fiercely. But who among us didn't know that he didn't know how to get really angry.

            “You talk as if the student Gabit, is me and the teacher Becket, is you. I think it would be fairer that you would not be the one to keep me informed of your success but that I would be the one to praise you. Huh? What do you think?”

            I'm was left thoughtless. Slowly, I burned with shame. Beckett gave me time to deal with my unfeigned embarrassment, and then said, “You really learn very well, I can not argue. But if you want to become a man, never be satisfied with himself. Always say to yourself, I could've done more than I've done. ”

            I silently endured my shame.

            Beckett added, as if nothing had happened, “The day after tomorrow the inspector will come to us. He will examine how the school runs. He asked me to show him not only the intermediate but also the best students. You prepare. I'll call you on the arithmetic.”

            I would have preferred to read something, for I had already memorized a few Russian poems. Well okay, if it's arithmetic, it'll be arithmetic. Though I had to think, I could have done more than I have done, but my pride was pleasantly tickled that he considered me among the best.

            We knew that the inspector was a superior in the parish, and maybe even higher. He was dressed as a supervisor, in a dark blue uniform with gold embroidery, a mustache and pointed goatee.

            When he walked into the classroom and greeted us politely, I was surprised. In my native village I was accustomed to: if a supervisor visited, there would be a lot of loud shouting, demanding things and threatening with a whip. But this one was somewhat different.

            On a wall in heavy gilt frames hung portraits of the tsar and queen themselves. The inspector, as expected, asked, did we know who is depicted on them?

            In response, we raised our hands.

            “Well, you tell me,” asked the inspector of Musatiy, who even stood up as he raised his hand because of impatience, his whole appearance indicating that this was something that he could answer better than all others, if he was asked.

            But long passages of someone else's unfamiliar language quickly fly out of the memory when memorized without delving into the meaning. Therefore, all that Musatiy could do was jump up and stand in the aisle and slap his hands to his sides; his own courage had brought him to confusion. He swallowed his spit noisily and muttered with a country accent, “I dunno…”

            The inspector looked askance at our teacher, and he blushed like a boy.

            “What would you say?” the inspector spoke to the biggest guy among us, twenty-year-old Zhakip, who barely fit into the last desk.

            With difficulty he pulled himself out of his desk and stretched, not sure what to do with his huge hands. “Heeeiis…” Zhakip began with the same local accent and sighed.

            “Not heeeiis but his” the inspector corrected him. Overwhelmed, Zhakip became confused and finally fell silent.

            Our poor teacher completely lost heart, his eyes slowly wandered from desk to desk, where those whom he could count on were sitting. Perceiving this I and diligently raised my hand not any less assiduously than had Musatiy.

            “Okay. I'll ask you,” the inspector turned to me and with a nod of his head indicated the woman who looked down from on high onto a bumbling Kazakh boy, as I was at that time.

            I was only in the first grade, but almost fourteen. And my tongue, like all late starting students, remained awkward. For me, her was a particularly difficult word, which was the first word in the exceedingly long title of Empress of All Russia. Heeir. Or Heeer. It came out differently every time but always wrong. So I tried to quickly gloss over that unfortunate word. This I managed to do, then blurted out the rest in one breath.

            It was evident that the inspector was satisfied. He nodded to Becket and called me to the board. I knew the multiplication table, and never answered incorrectly; how much is four times eight, five times nine, eight times seven. I carried out the two tasks he'd asked.

            Becket gradually came to his senses and suggested to the inspector that he ask me to recite passages from Russian literature. The inspector thought about it and then commanded me to read a fable. So, what have I read? Siskin and a Dove or Monkey and Glasses?

 

            Siskin was snatched into the villain's snare:

            Poor thing savagely struggled to soar free

            And an adolescent dove scoffed him…

 

            Since today I am able to recite this particular fable to the end, I reckon that this was the fable I had recited at that time.

            There were five girls in our class. Three of them, for fear of the inspector, did not come to school that day. But one of the two girls, who was bolder, also read some verse. The inspector rewarded me with a collection Lermontov, and the girl, a volume of Pushkin. Coming out of the class after school, the girl hit me with Pushkin, and responded with Lermontov.

            I read Lermontov, and even memorized some verses. But their meanings were not always clear to me.

            What does emperor, or sail, or captain mean? And then the poem: Terek. Terek, in Kazakh language means: aspen; and I could not comprehend what it signified—Terek howling, wild and malicious, between giant rocky cliffs. Wind, or what? Becket, thanks to him, explicated: Terek is a river in the Caucasus, flowing in the mountains, and thus tempestuous.

            Fables are completely different. There are so much more understandable. The authors themselves explained their morals. Therein beasts acted, which could be found in our steppe or in the pages of dastans; everything was ordered in its place: who was a good, bad; whom to condemn, who to laugh at, whom to sympathize with.

            Just four days after the departure of the inspector, one event occurred which defined our lives, our fortunes forever.

            “Freedom! Freedom!” Riders screamed rushing through the streets, galloping from village to village. “The King is gone! Freedom!” and the riders demanded suyunshi[18].

            But whether there was a tsar or not, the next morning we were all back in class. The first thing that caught my eye was that the teacher had been quick to take down the royal family from the wall and lean them against the table. It turned out that their portraits were painted with oils on sheets of tin. And the luxurious gilded moldings were also made out of thin sheets of tin.

            “Today, no classes!” Becket told us, beaming. A red bow, like a flower, was on his jacket. “Since all are free, you children are free too. But as for these two,” he flicked his finger on one of the portraits. “These you may drag around the village, dragging them on the ground. So that by this evening nobody will be able to recognize them! And shout, shout at the top of your lungs, the tsar is gone, now we are free! Shouting, in my opinion, is one thing you do very well.”

            Yes, we knew how to shout. We quickly found bits of rope and dragged behind us the tsar and queen, we ran through the streets until evening, visiting neighboring villages. Our noisy gang was heard from afar. People came out to meet us. Some silently watched everything going on, never expressing their orientation. They say their is no tsar. But if he will suddenly take power into his hands once again, then what will happen to those who had reviled against him in various ways before all the people.

            Others did not hide their feelings. They shouted, rejoicing, and invited us into their homes and treated us with whatever they had.

            I remember one elderly woman, Kazakh, who had never seen the tsar's portrait, wondered, “What a muzzle he has! He is Satan, with all his follies, he also is squint-eyed.”

            She had no idea that Zhakip had scraped paint from the portrait.

            Finally, we got sick of dragging the portraits. We tossed them into an ice hole in the Ubagan river.

 

            Summer arrived.

            That summer was a turning point in my life. Becket Utetleuov wrote a petition to the Presnogorkovska School. He spoke very highly about my abilities and insisted that I needed to continue my studies in a Russian school.

            I will digress a little from my story again, as I should say a few words about Becket.

            He was one of the few Kazakhs, who managed to get an education in a teacher's seminary. He could have remained in the city, but did not. If I could use one word to define the complexity and uniqueness of his personality, I would say that he was an enlightener. So he was in those first years when I, as a little boy, first met him. So was he known to all future generations of students. For many years Becket Utetleuov taught literature at one of the schools in Kustanai. He never gave up writing poetry, but maintained little enthusiasm about its caliber, a perfectionist attitude to his creativity. For his entire life (Beckett passed away a few years ago) he considered only one of his collections worth publishing, which stood the test of time and shortly before his death was reissued.

            Now, it's not possible for me to talk in detail about Becket, not in as much detail as his life deserved. But I have to admit that, for me, the word teacher always remained connected with his name; let him rest in peace, a good old time adage, and let his work continue in the lives of his many students!

            Now let's go back to the year nineteen hundred eighteenth.

            Entrance exams in Presnogorkovka brought me a landslide five on arithmetic and brilliant failure of the Russian language. And yet I was accepted. Obviously, they had believed Becket's word.

            In autumn of the same year there was a fair in the neighboring village, I do not remember what the occasion was.

            I pulled on new leather boots, dense felt stockings peeked over the tops of the boots. This type of boots were called saptama. I pulled an imitation gray astrakhan[19] fur oushanka[20] over my eyebrows. My coat gave me the most grief. A Kazakh female acquaintance altered it from a soldier's uniform. She altered in almost for nothing, she was a kind woman, but, as I recall how I appeared back then, kindness has little to do with the art of tailoring. The coats made me look like a hunch back, which I was not, and my arms seemed longer than they actually were.

            I was even surprised that I was recognized and hailed at the fair by my friend, a fellow countryman. Sabit, Sabit Muhammadan spoke to me, somewhat embarrassed. Either my image brought him to bewilderment, or my natural reticence subdued even such an easy going person as he was. After a little getting used to each other, we laugh. And shared our intentions for the future.

            Sabit was on his way to Omsk for teacher training courses. Surprising that the rumor reached him, that at a fair the previous spring I had written out dostobireny, that is, certificates authorizing horse sales, for my fellow countrymen. Illiterate people, older than myself, respectfully referred to me as the clerk, and I got perhaps my first payment, a total of three rubles. At that time, this was a lot of money.

            Anticipating that he too may have to earn a living at a large fall fair, Sabit asked me for a sample. I gave him a sample for a dark gray horse. I warned him that he needed to specify the color, and write down one column for the Kazakh color, and opposite of each the Russian color: burl – roan; zheiren – red; kula – dun; sary – light brown, with black mane and tail; kara – crow color; shubar – piebald; tori – bay. Also, I found it necessary to write any possible unique markings: such as, the trademark brand.

            Later, the next spring fair, I learned that Sabit had taken my sample too literally.

            In his description, all of the horses had become the same: dark gray color, black and bay. All horses had torn right ears, under all saddles a scratch, and all had manes on both sides. The same certificate he wrote for the horses, he also wrote for cattle and sheep.

            But what a wonderful fiasco fell to the owners who were to sell animals with such a sertifykate! Shrewd fair guards quickly discovered a way to profit from this. They accused the Kazakh villagers of being in possession of stolen horses, scaring them to death but letting them go after a good bribe.

            This happened to many. And neither did the author of these sertifykates escape this fiasco.

 

            Father agreed to my studies in Presnogorkovka, because back then the bag was firmly held onto the back of the horse, that is, back then we had money. But not quite enough to rent an apartment from Russians.

            I settled on the outskirts of a large Kazakh village, in the house Sagandik. He herded cattle, which belonged to the local Cossacks. His family had long taken root in Presnogorkovka. The women sewed sheepskin coats to sale. He was a shoemaker, also delivered the wood and hay in the winter and cleaned fishing ice-holes.

            All of them spoke Russian pretty well but for a long time I hesitated to speak this language in their presence because my pronunciation was so dreadfully awful. I made friends with the younger brother of Sagindik. His name was Syzdik. As a child, he attended a Russian school, and at that time he wrote the Kazakh poem Kiz-Jibek with Russian letters.

            But if I felt comfortable with Syzdik, I felt particularly shy around Salima and Shayzat. They were fourteen and thirteen years old, and by the standards of that day were considered adults girls. They found pleasure in teasing me, and making the village lad who'd just arrived at the big non-migratory village feel awkward.

            I decided, once I had become an adult, and so well-read that the noble Becket himself spoke well of me, that I should try to overcome my natural shyness. Will they beat me, or what? The first step was to show these two razor-tongued sisters that I am no different from those who grew up and lived in Presnogorkovka.

            The opportunity for this soon presented itself. I was coming home from school. The road led past the bazaar. An elderly Russian woman vigorously shouted, “Apples! Apples! Who wants apples…”

            From the Russian-Kazakh dictionary to which I looked, I knew that apples were called Alma,  a juicy, tasty and sweet fruit that grows on trees. Because I knew the meaning of the word but had never seen an apple, obviously I stopped beside her. Apples did not grow in our corner of the world.

            “For two kopeykas a piece,” she replied to my question: how much do they cost. “They are sweet and delicious, pure honey.”

            I bought ten. The fruits were ripe, ready to explode at the slightest touch. I didn't have anything to put them in, I had to shove them into the pockets my jacket and trousers.

            I walked carefully, like a man unaccustomed to the saddle and had ridden a horse a long way. Almost home, I already felt dampness in my pockets.

            Unfortunately there were guests in the tent.

            Salima and Shayzat, posing as important hosts, were sitting on either side of the samovar serving tea. Overriding all of my objections, Sagindykov sat me down at the dastarhan[21]. Guests, sitting in loose lotus positions, made room and I sat down on the felt mat next to them.

            Before I had reached out for a bowl, my trouser pockets went from damp to wet. Telltale dark spots were visible. And those apples that I had put in my jacket pockets were crushed by my neighbors. The dastarhan was crowded, we were sitting elbow to elbow.

            The tea party lasted a long time. First, we needed to tell all the news to each other; and secondly, village Kazakhs are very fond of sour dough bread, and the young hospitable hostesses served loaf after loaf.

            Finally all sated their thirst and appetite. The girls removed samovar and went to collect fuel. I slipped behind them. I had an agreement with Sagindik that I would help with the housework.

            As we stepped away from the house, I gathered my courage and gave the girls my presents.

            “Here, apples, I bought for you. For you, Salima and for you, Shayzat,” I muttered.

            Salima tentatively picked up a considerably crumpled apple. She looked at my wet pants and couldn't help but burst out laughing. Shayzat, impetuous, spoiled by her position as the youngest, the favorite, knocked the red fruit out of my hands, then picked them up and ran back, shouting on her way, “Mama! Mama!” She exploded into a merry laugh. “Look what goodies Sabit bought for us at the bazaar! Apples, he says, but these are tomatoes! Tomatoes!”

            Salima, infected by her merriment, was overcome with laughter and fell to the grass.

            Thus ingloriously ended my first (but not last) attempt to woo the girls. How was I to know that in Presnogorkovka and generally those locals in the regions round about called tomatoes: apples.

            Four years in the Presnogorkovska school. Back in those days I found, that before lessons all students, regardless of their faiths, stood in the hall for prayer. In front of us, in an elegant silk robe stood a teacher of the law of God, the priest Malinowski. Next to him, stood the principle Mikhailov, then a deacon and the teachers. We invariably began: “Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…” He, You, Good God: were pronounced with capital letters, and in a spacious room on the second floor, a hollow echo reverberated repeatedly around us.

            Malinowski's bass voice was so loud that, when he was in full form, windows rattled. He was echoed by the Deacon, who was the soul of the church and the secular student choirs. Deacon was a young, handsome, and our girls were willing to sing in his choirs. Like any artist, he appreciated their attentions. The deacon paid no attention to the boys during the music and singing lessons. It seemed that he was only teaching the girls.

            The greatest benefit of attending Presnogorkovska school, was its increased attention to the Russian language and belles-lettres, an archaic term for the teaching of literature. Obviously, our teachers believed, and rightly, that only literature would help their proteges deal with the complexities of life. How much of their souls they'd invested and how much effort they'd spent to smooth out the rough cloth of my tongue, to teach me to delve into the meaning of the words I articulate. One thing, for example, that was need was patience, for two years they tirelessly corrected me: “not suppyks but suffix. Plex, is not incorrect, it is necessary to say, flexion.”

            The school taught us to think about not only of high matters but also of our earthly future. Those who were so inclined could learn the craft of carpentry, shoe-making; there were also masons and seamstresses.

            By 1921 the Kolchak resistance had long since been disbanded. Yet there were those who were hoping to bring back the past. A revolt flared up against the Soviet power in the Spring, and nine of us who were overage thus able to bear arms, joined the squad: The Southern Group of Irregulars of Akmola Province. It was commanded by Dmitri Kovalev, originally from Hannovka, a poor peasant village.

            The white bandit resistance was quickly suppressed. We went back to school after three months and, apparently for our involvement in the martial feats, final exams were cancel for us. But instead we were to write an essay on any subject.

            Russian language and literature was taught by Sylvia Mikhaelovna, either Latvian or Polish. A young, beautiful woman. Many secretly sighed after her, such lively eyes, vibrant, deep as the lake Kozhabie, near where my family spends their summers. And such a beautiful voice, especially when she laughed, silvery, like bells on the troika teams. Pleasant to listen to, even, as now, when she calls out the topics of the essays. And my entire destiny was determine by them.

            “Choose your own topics,” Sylvia Mikhaelovna said. “You may write about how today's farmers in our area sow bread. Bread! Do not forget those starving in the Volga region. Adults in many cities still get a one-eight ration of bread each. Yet, some of our barns are bursting here in this village. Bread! Maybe this could be one of the themes of your essays. Then the Spring Fair opened here. It is also a possible topic. Some of you have participated in the elimination of a dangerous gang. They, truly, have a story to tell after that excursion.

            I proudly squared my shoulders when she spoke about those who went with the Kovalev irregulars, but I still chose a different theme: Presnogorkovska Spring Fair 1921. So it was written on the blackboard by Sylvia Mikhaelovna's hand, and this title I put down in my notebook.

            Just yesterday I had gone to the fair and watched how in many cases things both sad and funny had gone on side by side, and it was not clear whether I should be happy or sad.

            There are no fairs without people who bargain. When selling the price is more expensive and when buying the price is, of course, cheaper. For those who don't understand each other's language, there were common signs: rubles were shown with the extended fingers, fifty kopeykas were shown with half a finger, and fifty rubles were shown on the joints.

            “Twenty!” Said Russian peasant, twice balling fists before the seller.

            “Zhiyrma!” one Kazakh also insisted in his own language, twice balling both fists, but shaking his head in disagreement.

            “What more do you want?” said a perplexed buyer. The Kazakh was silent, disapproving, stroking the neck of his bull; he would not part with the bull if he had the money to buy matches, kerosene, calico for shirts and dresses, and especially the tea!

            “Okay, it's a deal,” the Russian decided, something had come to his mind. “I will add yet five rubles,” he signaled again with his fingers.

            “Bes? Joc, Joc,” the seller disagreed in his own language, but insisted. “Bir buot Un,” which meant: “Add a pound of flour.”

            The Kazakh could not explain what he wanted, the Russian couldn't understand the Kazakh, and unfortunately, there was no interpreter handy. The Kazakh acted out someone chewing bread.

            “A roll? Do you want a loaf?” Anger was heard in the buyer's voice.

            But the seller could not portray the flour. Neither his face nor his hands could help him here, so the deal fell through. The Russian swore in Kazakh, and the Kazakh in Russian, and they went their own ways. The Russian dismissed with a wave of his hand, and the Kazakh spat.

            Not far from them were a few visitors from the village trying not to show admiration, as they watched a gypsy in a bright red shirt tightly rein in prancing dappled gray horse. The gypsy spouted seven hundred words for every seventy that the seven villagers were saying together.

            His whip whistled crisply through the air. From time to time he dismounted while offering to anyone the opportunity to ride on his horse, suggesting that any who would ride the gray would not want to get off it. He would then spring into the saddle and bound off, feigning despair at the pigheadedness of the customers, who obviously could not see a good deal when it was right in front of them.

            “I give it for a steal! For nothing!” the gypsy cried. “You check its stride, darling! Climb on and check its gait. I would ride it myself but I need the money…”

            Three horsemen, skeptical expressions set on their faces, alternately rode the handsome stallion, then walked away, consulted, then one of them counted out greasy rubles in fives, threes, and ones. The gypsy shook the new owner's hand, the reins changed hands, and he dissolved into the crowd of the fair.

            The continuation of this tale I found in the house Sagindykov; the buyer happened to be the acquaintance friend.

            By evening, the horse went lame on one front hoof, and by the morning he was laid out on the ground. They took him to the vet. The vet examined it, shrugged, and said that the vodka that was poured into the horse last night has worn off, and anytime you want to ride it, you have fill it full of vodka every time.

            The confused villagers wandered around the fair, asking, if anyone saw a black bearded man with a whip in a red satin shirt and black vest.

            It was from such images that my graduation essay was penned, it filled ten pages in my student notebook.

            It is from these images that my graduate essay was written; it filled ten pages in my school notebook.

            A day or two later our entire class was crowded in the hallway at the closed door of the teachers' lounge. We were summoned in one by one. Of the nine of us who were overage, as I mentioned earlier, eight crossed the threshold and came back out with a paper in their hands: the certificate of graduation.

            I listened warily. There was a dispute in the teachers' lounge. Sylvia Mikhaelovna's usually bright voice at this time was subdued, angry and offended. She was insisting on something and obviously in a disagreement. Only once I was able to make out her vehement words, “And I say to all of you!...”

            My comrades were holding their certificates in their hands, as if afraid to lose or wrinkle them in their pockets. They kept looking at me sympathetically, and then left when it became clear that the matter would be protracted.

            I spent an hour and a half alone. Finally, the door swung open, and Sylvia Mikhaelovna, all flushed and excited, invited me into the teachers' lounge. I entered feeling neither alive nor dead. The principle frowned as he flipped through the notebook containing my essay. He looked at me reproachfully. You see? Was the expression in his eyes.

            Yeah, I saw…my blue lines completely covered with red ink, corrections made by Sylvia Mikhaelovna, as if there was a bloody battle, no living words left. My uncoordinated declensions and conjugations, participles and gerunds resembling peasant carts facing every which way at a fair.

            “One hundred and fifty!” the principle exclaimed. “In ten pages there are one hundred and fifty mistakes!”

            I was completely deflated. What should I do now? Stay another year in school? Or give up and leave? But then suddenly the director showed me the last page.

            Incredibly, in the same red ink was written the highest grade, the number: 5, prominently underlined with two bold lines. I closed my eyes and opened them again.

            The principle was no longer frowning. He was smiling. “No, it's not your imagination,” he said in a kindly voice. “Say a great thanks to Sylvia Mikhaelovna. It was she, she alone against all of us. She convinced us. She says that you will become a writer.”

            Sylvia Mikhaelovna was sitting at the table. She smiled triumphantly to the principle; and to me with reassurance and kindness. Thus I first heard about what my future had in store. Of course, I had never thought back then about becoming a writer. I rushed home to put everything in order in my village and parish. According to rumors, the wealthy ranch owners deftly adapted to the new political conditions.

 

            The fellow who returned to his native village in the summer of 1921, was not the lad that had left that same village so long ago. He'd grown into manhood? Yes, and seen a lot? Yes, you've seen a lot. Thus I was talking to myself, sitting on the shore of the lake and looking at my reflection in the calm water along the bank.

            I really had changed. This point was driven home by the fact that the Soviet teacher Esym Dosbolov had spoken to me as an equal. If someone had watched us from a distance they would have thought: these two are about to come to blows. We'd jumped out of our seats, waving our arms and shouting at each other.

            In fact, we had demonstrated complete unanimity and were just trying to convince each other that the prevailing conditions could not be tolerated any longer. The Parish Council and the Village Councils were still in the hands of the rich ranch owners. They acted like they were indifferent to the councils, taking no positions personally in the councils but worked through puppets within who were completely dependent on, and obedient to, the rich ranch owners' wills. Lzhebelsendy, such puppets were called in the newspapers. False assets. Essentially the rich ranch owners' henchmen.

            On day Esym and I, and another three activists who thought the same way as we, went in the morning to a village where a new government had been established, the revolutionary committee.

            Its chairman was the son of one of these rich ranch owners, and the entire structure of this revolutionary committee consisted of representatives from the various dominant families.

            With a new language, laced with hidden threats, in a manner quite unheard of before, we demanded convocation of the Parish Council to discuss the affairs of everyone in the parish.

            The chairman of the revolutionary committee nodded and left, after promising to return soon.

            And what if they did not want to give up? Esym had addressed to himself thoughtfully.

            How could they not want to give up! My nineteen-year-old passion swirled within me. We will explain everything to the people and they will force the council to submit! Let us not forget that I was born in the Year of Leopard! I belligerently looked at my Berdan military rifle, then looked around fiercely to see if anybody nearby might want to resist us.

            The chairman returned. “Gather the people, this will take a lot of time,” he said. “Some are in the summer pasture and some are still in the wintering places. Each has many affairs. Maybe it would be better to do this by ourselves. If you want to remove us from the work, your welcome! Do it yourselves, and run these affairs. And we're leaving voluntarily.”

            Apparently, the leaders did not want to discuss the affairs before people, to argue among themselves until they got hoarse just to refute the charges. They didn't want any hassles.

            So for half an hour our parish indiscriminately displaced the revolutionary committee chairman, the secretary, military commissar, head of the Department of Education, and the head of the Land Department. We began to distribute the responsibilities among ourselves.

            After that campaign with the partisans I began to harbor a particular fondness for weapons. Saber on my belt, a rifle over my shoulder, and even better, a revolver in a holster, I don't need anything more!

            Given my combat experience, they unanimously decided to appoint me as the military commissar.

            Very strange, but in the higher provincial center we were not denounced for our illegal procedures or for our arbitrariness, but they actually approved our new posts. Approved our first decision: to move the capital to another parish to another village. Esym convincingly substantiated this decision with the argument that the former village owners had too many minions, and that in it would be easier to come to terms with the people in another village, a poorer village.

            But the old village stodgily resisted this innovation. I remember my talks with an elderly man from a neighboring village, his name was Omar.

            “Which family are you from, young man? Who from?” He asked, not recognizing me, even after the twentieth meeting.

            After listened carefully to the answer, he continued questioning, “Ah, of course! So that is who you are. I recognize you. Are you still in the same place?”

            “Yes, Omar-ekei, the same.”

            “And who is your sheriff now?” He was referring to the main person in the parish.

            “The same young horse man.”

            “Well, glory be to Allah! And who is the buyer of the collective?” He was referring to the chairman of the consumers' interest, who is considered the second most influential man in the parish.
            “You know him, Omar-ekei. The tall one.”

            “So, everything is still in its place. Well, glory be to Allah, glory be to Allah.”

            And we parted until the next time, when all these questions would be repeated in the same order, I have never heard him ask any other questions. He knew one thing: the sheriff is power. The head of the buying collective is the market. Better to stay well away from power, and closer to the market. It was good that the people remained in these positions whom he knew already and had gotten used to.

            I was genuinely upset when, after nine months in the parishes, the post of military commissar was abolished and I lost my weapon. Who knows that if this had not happened, I might have become a general, and not remained an ordinary soldier my whole life.

            Back then, I could not bear the thought that I had to part with my weapon: therefore, I went to work in the police, deputy chief, and in the villagers began to call me Gabit Orynbasar[22].

            But as time pressed on, I'd often recall conversations I'd had with Becket Utetleuov, his advice and guidance. I remembered the prophecy of Sylvia Mikhaelovna. But instead of poems and short stories I was so far writing police records: a bay stolen from Mukhammedzhan who lives in the village Alday; found in Presnovka but her new owner, Tuleu, denies that he stole it but claims that he bought it.

            I started an investigation but I had already realized that I could not continue with this work forever, not for much longer, that new roads were waiting for me.

 

            Sabit Mukanov came home one leave and we met. It was the height of summer, 1923.

            It turned out that by the time Sabit had long since wondered to Orenburg, to attend an adult workers' school. What is an adult workers' school? It is a school for working adults for whom the road to higher education was previously denied.

            To tell the truth, I was envious of Sabit. After all, as early as his eighteenth year he was living in the big cities and his scope was much broader than mine. He spoke freely and easily about the situation in the nation, the future of Kazakhstan, on international relations. He knew these things not by hearsay but firsthand from Orenburg[23]. He lived with the Chairman of the Council of the National Commissars, a revolutionary poet named Sakien Seifullin who supported promising, creative young people. This was understandable: after all, the chairman of the People's Commissars of the republic, Sakien Seyfullin, was one of the founders of modern Kazakh literature, a great poet, whose poetry spread to the edges of our steppe, perhaps faster than his signed decrees.

            “Let's go!” Sabit said, “Why do you want to sit here? While in Orenburg we have, you know…”

            And started to talk about his dating, meetings, about his poems.

            His words fell into fertile soil. I mentally pictured myself out there in the big city among the students. Surprising them with my stories, about what I have seen, my knowledge of life….

            “You say, let's go? And I say – let's go!” I said Thabit one day.

            Thus the tents of my native village were left behind. I turned around in the saddle from time to time until finally the tents had disappeared from my sight. My horse, realizing that the road would not be short, that it's not just a trip to the neighboring village, stopped being stubborn, became frolicsome and picked up its pace.

            Finally got to Petropavlovsk, and there had to say goodbye to my faithful mount, which had saved me from death at least three times. I remember like it was yesterday: in Petropavlovsk leaving the stable yard, how he looked after me, as if realizing that our separation was permanent.

            My horse was red, with a white star on his forehead, one hind leg in a white stocking.

            In Orenburg, Sabit took me from the train station to the Seifullin's apartment. The poet chairman was surrounded by so many young poets, singers, composers, that the appearance of two more couldn't surprise him. Two more? Okay, two more….

            Of truth, we almost never saw Sakien. When he would return to Orenburg from his various trips he would spend from morning until late at night in meetings with the People's Commissars. Moreover, he held the post of editor of the newspaper Enbekshi Kazakh, the only paper issued in the Kazakh language. (Now a republican newspaper, Sotsialistik Kazakhstan.)

            He was always away but his poems were with left with us. His poems: a magnificent horse which competes with the wind, a thoughtful dombra that knows the most intimate motions of the human soul, and the steam locomotive recklessly and uncontrollably streaking through the ancient steppe, devouring the distance: all these images became a symbols of revolution.

            We read these verse in a tiny room in the Seifullin's apartment.

            The only window looked out onto the veranda. It was dim, but this was convenient for us. We could not see well enough that it mattered. It was not necessarily sweep the floor, not to mention scrubbing it. I was careless by nature and neither could you consider Sabit a model of order and organization.

            Hand rolled cigarette butts littered the corners. We intentionally refrained from sweeping them out. When we ran out of temeke at night we wouldn't worry about tobacco until the morning, we'd pick up the butts. I realized back then that disorder in other cases reaped undeniable benefits.

            At night both of us slept on a single iron bed. The mesh had been torn long ago and we covered the bed with sheets of plywood taken from tea crates.

            We often heard a thunderous boom in the middle of the night, accompanied with muffled expletives, and we found ourselves suddenly testing the stability of the floor with our sides. Like it or not, we had to get up and hastily reconstruct the bed. Sabit would immediately fall asleep again, not heeding any suspicious rattling or rustling.

            Of course, it would have been easier to replace the broken plywood with new. But Sabit figured I should do this, and I figured that he should. We lived in that small room for almost half a year, and all the while accompanied by these monotonous night incidents.

            Sabit obsessively wrote poetry and he had neither desire, energy nor time for anything else. He rejoiced with each successfully found rhyme and made me to rejoice with him. And I looked at him over the top of my textbook and cautiously thought: was it a good thing that Sylvia Mikhaelovna, a nice woman, had predicted that I was a future writer? Is this truly my destiny: to agonize over one word as if I was struggling under the weight of a huge sack and about to collapse under it.

            But if it were not for Sabit's literary exercises, that Orenburg winter would have been very difficult for me, especially at first. Sabit published his poems in a newspaper and magazines, and received payments. He tried to convince me to write. But I still couldn't make up my mind, and he began to bring from the editorial board various regulations, guidelines and reports for translation, which in those days were numerous.

            Official documents were sometimes translated so loosely and with such bombastic bureaucratic language that government people, to whom these documents were addressed to in the first place, were unlikely to understand them at all.

            I must admit that I made an all out contribution to this cause. But one way or the other, the translator got paid. Sabit's fees, and my earnings for the unintentional distortion of official materials, would have been quite enough for a comfortable living. But we didn't know how to budget our money; therefore, we sometimes eked out a miserable half-starved existence.

            Sabit enrolled at the technical school a year before me; he was then a sophomore and I was taking pre-freshman classes. But in the middle of winter, we came together as freshmen. I was moved ahead of time for success. But Sabit had a few tails,[24] (that's when I first learned the words, well-known to students of all generations) and was sent back.

            He was not very upset. “Bolsheviks didn't lose heart and don't back down in face of difficulties,” he said to me and continued to write poetry. And in the spring, when the exams were already grabbing us by the throat, he suddenly packed up and left.

            Left alone, I sat over over textbooks and exercise books with diminished diligence. I was more often distracted away from formulas and dates. I knew what was happening to me: carried away to another world, in the midst of some events, known only to you, timid and sensitive images surround you, crowd in upon you. At such times, it seems, you can forget about everything: about tails, about how today you didn't have a breakfast and didn't have supper yesterday, about the date made with, not a fantasy girl, but, a very real girl…

            Leafing through a volume of Pushkin, I suddenly found confirmation of these new sensations:

 

                        Those moments that the poet has,

                        When he finds serenity supreme,

                        And the gift warmed by the solemn flame,

                        Will lift up out of worldly vanity.

                        Then the verses easily fall into place

                        And flow as a living stream,

                        And inspired thought deeply takes

                        Possession of all his soul.

 

            Doubt, shyness, self-doubt, these blocked any inspired thoughts from deeply possessing my soul.

            But instead at the Workers' School I became a diligent reader. Literature teacher Karl Karlovich Bezin, a Russified German, contrary to popular belief, that Germans are a people punctual, was able to interrupt a lecture mid-sentence and read, read sequentially: Byron, Beranger, Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, Goethe, Schiller, Heine. I do not know whether all the classmates shared his ardent impulses. As for myself, I appreciated them.

            Karl Karlovich instilled within me a love not just for poetry. Gogol, Gorky, and Jack London: I was never separated from their books. Cunning, suave Chichikov; rowdy Nozdrev; Tchelkache, a motionless boy from The Mania of Mordaste; Smok Belliew, with his faithful friend, the kid: all of them became to me as real people, as real as my fellow countryman, Omar; constantly asking the same questions as Becket Utetleuov, Sylvia Mikhaelovna, as Batima, daughter of my uncle Botpie.

            I saw: the life that had surrounded me from my youth, which I knew to the smallest detail, and that all the shades of these details may become the substance of literature, if there was found a writer who knew these things as well as we, the steppe people. And I, with the arrogance of youth, decided that I should try my hand and have my say!

            And having thus decided I hastily put aside my quill pen. Put aside for an indefinite period. It would be to bitter to be convinced of my impotence in front of a blank sheet of paper.

            However, it was time to do something, not just jump from side to side, like a horse frightened of its own shadow. I kept saying, Why should I write, I wouldn't be any good. But I was just deceiving myself. On the penultimate year of the Workers' School, I decided to drop in to see the Editor of Enbekshi Kazakh, not just to ask for more translation jobs.

            That day, I carefully buffed my box calf boots which rattled with every step, put on my riding breeches—I have kept a fondness for this style of breeches since my commissar days—ironed my smock, such smocks were the popular fashion of the day.

            I do not know, maybe my appearance made an impression, the editor's office staff branded me: activist, and gave me a literacy test. That's when my childhood training came in handy: alifsin-a-, albasin-e, aliftur-o…. The newspaper was published in the Arabic alphabet, there was no others at that time.

            The Technical Secretary, while handing me a copy of the order on my enrollment, gave me some friendly advice, “Proofreader.  A proofreader is good. But among the staff here it would be better to call yourself a Literary Collaborator. It sounds more imposing, more impressive.”

            The Secretary was not very far ahead of me in age, and I willingly followed his advice. Among my acquaintances I was considered a Literary Collaborator, without having written even a single notable line.

            Yet to be called as such obliged me. In was in the editor's office that I was first confronted with the fact that writing is a professional necessity. Here before my face were those more experienced, more mature, people who had already achieved something. First among them was, Beimbet Maylin.

            His name is now bound, unconditionally and forever, with the first experiments in realistic Kazakh prose. After all, if our poetry was behind in rich tradition, the prose had to start almost from scratch. Maylin's first story Monument of Sludge was published two years before the revolution. The story was a success, well read and debated about.

            Maylin was Executive Secretary in our editorial office. In those years, the new chief editor, who succeeded Seifullin as chairman, constantly attended meetings and conferences, then would leave for long business trips. Beimbet almost ran the newspaper.

            Sympathetic, kind, open to the people, he was particularly attentive to beginners. But what he could not tolerated and could provoke a vehement attack of anger was carelessness, laziness, irresponsibility.

            Late one night (I remember it well, though it's hard to believe that more than forty years have passed since), after the latest issue had been signed off, Maylin gathered the entire editorial staff in his office.

            The Executive Secretary was meticulously scrutinizing the issues for the month. He was very unhappy with the editorial work: poorly written, lacking critical issues. Department heads and literary collaborators also fell under his wrath.

            He thoroughly tore apart the materials from the departments of criticism and bibliography: articles and reviews; almost all of them were written based on the indisputable, but monotonous, assertion that we cannot even think about the growth of our literature, until we surmount this lack of criticism. The outcome of this diatribe produced something like a competition: who could scourge a writer most effectively. If a writer was, let's say well-read and educated he'd be accused, without evidence, of having origins from rich feudal-ranch owners. If, however, it was felt that the author had not studied much he, without bothering to explain, would be branded: ignorant.

            I started out relatively calm. Because my job as proofreader, no specific errors slipped through that mouth.

            Maylin said, “And one more thing, you probably get tired of hearing it, but I get even more tired of saying it! Quality of translations. Here, I'll read to you…”

            Lost in my own thoughts I didn't listened attentively at first. And once I listened more closely, I immediately wanted to shrink and become invisible. Beimbet read one of the two translations that I, and nobody else, had done: Resolutions.

            “Did you understand anything?” he asked, laying the sheet of newspaper back on the table.

            There was no answer, because it really was hard to understand, including to myself, the translator.

            “How will those in the villages be able to understand? Or are we producing newspapers to use as cigarette rolling paper?”

            The briefing lasted almost until three o'clock in the morning; Maylin handed out to the literary collaborators a pile of typescripts. “These are to be processed. I'll give you two days. Return them ready for printing.”

            Everyone began to disperse, and I hovered in the doorway. I decided that Maylin would never assign anything to me: an illiterate person, unscrupulous, one who is out of place in the editorial office. I'll probably get fired. Or at best, be transferred to messengers, to carry the originals to the printing house, and bring the proofs and strips back from the typeset galleys. Needless to say, a glorious birthday gift!

            “Wait,” he stopped me. I was prepared to listen to a long lecture but I was again mistaken. Maylin just looked very expressively at me, sighed, and handed me a manuscript in the Kazakh language. “Correct this. And bring it back to me. The terms are the for everybody. Go.”

            All of this happened on the eve of the eighth of March, and the article was devoted to women's issues. I didn't attend my classes for two days, but sat in the hostel, preparing an article for publication. I wrote, crossed out, rewrote, made inserts.

            At the appointed time I crossed the threshold of Maylin's office.

            Beimbet pulled his eyes away from a proof laying on his desk, and his large gray eyes watched as I put the manuscript in front of him. “Did you bring it?”

            “I brought.”

            “Sit down.”

            He read carefully, sometimes returning to previous paragraphs. At one point, made a note in red pencil. “And where did you get this from?”

            “From the Pravda. ”

            The question referred to one of my inserts. The idea was that in Great Britain, a country of high and old civilization, in 1918 women won the right to vote in elections, and our Kazakh women, a year earlier, in 1917. As an erudite student, I tried to explain the well known Leninist doctrine on previously oppressed peoples who take the path of socialistic development, bypassing the stage of capitalism.

            Maylin rejoiced after his manner in another's good fortune, even if this fortune was just a comparison that arose from the logical course of arguments taken from an ordinary article.

            “Good for you! Have you tried writing?”

            “No.” I could not say yes, I was thinking of the composition that I would not let cross the threshold Presnogorkovska school.

            “Maybe you should try?”

            A few days later I showed him a small sketch, it was called, When Edeguey is Good, and When He is Bad. I tried to briefly describe a type of relationship familiar to me, the relationship between ranch hand, Edeguey, and ranch owner. When he drove the herd in the pasture, he was good, went for fuel, good. But the same Edeguey could be bad, what was he worth when he just sat down to rest and started babbling about how it would be nice for someone to buy him a new pair of boots.

            In the next issue of the newspaper my work took twenty one lines. For the first time, under my own name.

            “Did you see?” Maylin asked me when we met. “I corrected only four words. Keep writing.”

 

            Keep writing.

            These words haunted me, they gave me no peace. They put an end to my doubts. I have not slept for four nights. I was writing a story, In Raging Waves. I really liked the title.

            I diligently rewrote the story, three times I brought the manuscript to the editorial office, and three times I brought it back: did not dare to show it to Maylin, I was not brave enough to make him dive into my raging waves. The upshot was that the story was pinned up on our workers' school bulletin board; all sheets pinned side by side took up a length of two meters twenty centimeters.

            Some people criticized me, while others praised, some were silent. After a few days the story began to be forgotten, though the sheets were still hanging near the Komsomol Committee[25] room.

            In the afternoon during a break between lectures I lingered in the classroom, when suddenly my classmate burst into the room, “Why are you sitting here? Run quickly! Maylin is reading your story!”

            Shoving people out of my path, I slid down the banister. But I didn't find Maylin in the lobby. From a conversation with my comrades I found out that Maylin had just come today from visiting a nearby college. The writers of the older generation, as I now understand, were concerned about their successors, and were looking for new prospects in the schools, among the youth.

            In the evening, four of us, in our dorm room, were preparing for tomorrow's seminar. There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” one of us called out.

            The door opened and in walked Maylin.

            We jumped, and four stools were simultaneously offered to the guest.

            “Am I so fat? One would be sufficient for me,” he laughed. “Phew…you really fumigate this place with your tobacco!”

            He treated us with fat cigarettes, which at that time were considered a rarity and luxury. He found out what the seminar's topic was going to be and if we were afraid of failure. We replied that we were afraid, how can we not be afraid, but we hoped to have time to read everything.

            Maylin turned to me, “How are you doing, horseman?”

            I replied that I'm doing well, and that I was at home today because it was not my turn to be on duty at the newspaper, so that he would not think anything amiss about me.

            “I don't think anything amiss. I didn't come to check on anything. This afternoon I read your story on the bulletin board. You and I will will have a detailed conversation, a special talk, but for now I will just say: not bad, not bad at all. Why didn't you show it to me?”

            My heart was pounding raggedly in my chest. Maylin says, not bad….

            It took years and years for me to realize, that in my helpless story Maylin was attracted primarily with the fact that a young man was suddenly writing stories, and not just poems which are written here by every other young man. But how elated I felt by that approval, not bad. So, is this a beginning?

            The fact that this was a beginning, I became even more sure of when my first short story became cluttered with details, events, and when more and more characters found a home within the story. The story gradually turned into a novel. I could not think of a more suitable title, and thus it remains, Tulagan Tolkynda, 'In Raging Waves.'

            In the evenings I sat for extended periods of time at a table, lit from the edge with a dim oil lamp; and a white sheet, written from right to left, as is customary in the Arabic writing, was covered with the pattern of words. I remained alone. But it was not solitude. And how my little room became home for all of them; military friends from the squad of Dmitry Kovalev, and many of those whom I met at various times in the villages: rich ranch owners; the poor; the politically Red; the punitive White insurgents, blind in their hatred of the new order.

            There was a love story: Birzhan Fisher could not accept the fact that his beloved, his Shayza, was to be sold to the old, rich ranch owner Ospan! She would have entered his house as the youngest living wife. And what kind of life would such have! She would have no rest at night because of her husband and during the day because of the older wives, who out of jealousy would be ready to tear her apart. In times past, she wouldn't have been able to avoid this fate. But Birzhan and Shayza fled from the village to the city, which had become Red, and there they found happiness.

            While I described what was happening before my eyes, including the events I took part in, everything went easily and, as it seemed to me, quite well. But then there came a point in the manuscript when I had to unravel knots but no matter how hard I struggled, nothing worked. Unable to find a better way, I had to become like one resolute hero from antiquity, and daringly hack out the knots!

            But what had been colorful and convincing in mythology, turned out to be a distressing failure when dealing with a specific modern plot. In a dastan the hero performed feat after feat for the simple reason that he was the hero, and thus fulfilling his heroic status.

            The novel, in the end, turned out to be crumpled, inauthentic, rash. It wasn't laziness that prevented me from rewriting it again and again, but I didn't know how, I didn't see yet what to redo therein.

            Even now I can only envy Leo Tolstoy, who rewrote Hadja Murat uncounted times. It had nothing to do with his tendency of working hard, perseverance, patience, perfectionism. I am amazed by his wonderful, inexplicable, eagle vigilance: in every sentence, every turn of events, in every movement of thought, he understood exactly what he was not satisfied with, he knew exactly how to achieve the needed nuance, and how yet to improve the text which seemed already perfect.

            One way or the other, the story In Raging Waves, my first work, saw the light of day and landed before the readers tribunal. In truth, as subsequent events of my life showed, this was neither the impetus toward constant literary work, nor the push beyond occasional work.

            After many years it's hard for me to say: was what happened bad or good? I didn't gain much skill, methodically sitting at a desk (for it is only at the desk, after endless drafts that are dropped and re-written, phrase by phrase, version after version, that skill is born). Instead, I lived, I accumulated a stock of life observations, pondered about what I had seen…without which there could be no literature.

            Now, I am not writing a novel of my life, but rather leaf through some of its pages.

            I was the son of the steppe, which fed and nurtured me, and I'd realized how it needed people who had scientific knowledge in agriculture. Maybe because I still vividly remember that devastating jute of the Year of the Boar, I chose to attend the Omsk Agricultural Institute—back then it was then called Seebach (Siberian Academy). But after the first year I was mobilized for a year, to work in the villages. Then the mobilization period was extended for two years, which permanently tore me out of continuing with the structure of my university studies.

            Work in agriculture, as well as military and police activities, did not become the contents of my entire life. I was still attracted to the virgin whiteness of a sheet of paper, it forced me to relive the events in which I participated, and forced me to think and remember what I saw and what I know and what I must say. After all, no one else ever will do it for me.

            It turns out that in forty years I have written not so much. Two novels, about a ten novellas and plays, forty short stories. Quality is Better than Quantity, I tried to stick to this rule, but I am not going to impose this on everyone. I've lived enough in the world and understand that what's good for me is not necessarily good for everyone. (Unfortunately, writing less is much easier, rather the better.)

            The story In Raging Waves was written in 1928. Some of my stories written at different times were linked to it: about big social changes in the steppe, about how the people of the steppe themselves prepared changes in their fate. Here I would like to add to this group the drama Amangeldi, which is about the leader of the national uprising on the eve of the revolution.

            Shortly before the war, I was attracted by the fate of our outstanding poet and composer. His name was Achan-sery. He was a mullah, and held a prominent position in society; he threw it all away and pursued the arts, which at the end of nineteenth century was not quite considered a respectable occupation, but rather unreliable, unstable, and, most of all, for the mullahs, sinful. The mullah had an old bone to pick with God, and Achan was perhaps the first outspoken rebel in Kazakh poetry; vacillating between speaking mockingly then angrily against the unshakable foundations of religion. Individual episodes of his stormy biography expressly demanded to be made into a play, and I thought I should write it. It ran in many drama theaters under the names Achan-sery and Aktokty.

            The chain of events in the fates of generations never seemed dividable to me. But, in drawing upon the past, without which the present could not come, some short-sighted or overly far-sighted critics, for the sake of precocious fashion, declaimed to be a departure from reality, as if the writer can hide himself somewhere from his time!

            I considered it necessary to give details of how, even throughout the reign of the tsars, ancestral nomads found new ways in their steppe, and became workers in copper ore and coal mines in the area, which area was heavily overgrown with karagan[26], hence its name, Karaganda. Their uneasy destiny, their place under the the sun, all this formed the basis of the novel, The Awakened Land.

            I must confess that I was never able to completely focus on one topic, in spite of the prevailing trend toward specialization. That's why I returned in my books either to the descendants of a noble kind of Kazakh from the village of Zhanbyrshi, or to the steppe that was overwhelmed by the fires of civil war, or I appealed to the memory of the poet, the first Kazakh poet, who became the laureate of the revolution. I would jump from a funny story that happened on the train, on to an ancient legend, preserved in the Naiman family, and then I'd began a story of my Japanese impressions after visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki….

            It may seem that I gave in to excessive wandering, and not only in my choice of material of life. In fact, and I wrote prose, essays and editorials in the newspaper, and plays, scripts for documentaries and feature films; I translated, acted as a literary and theater critic. But the reason I did this was neither frivolous nor in self-indulgence. National writers of my generation (and not only in Kazakh, but also Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik) had to wear not just three hats, but many hats.

            Called from the newspaper, “You've become a writer. We need a sketch and a review for a new book.” I met the director of the theater, and he rebuked me, “You're a writer. We want a play, our own.” Then came composers, “What do you think of a libretto, libretto for an opera?”

            The libretto for an opera? At any time, I could imagine the lush shores Kozhabie, hear the voice of my uncle Potpie and his daughter, Batima. They are the first to introduced me to the art; and throughout my entire life I have retained an indelible impression of folk dastans: Kyz-Jibek and Kozi-Korpesh and Bayan-Sulu. Based on these, I tried to create stage shows.

            The music for Kyz-Jibek was composed by Eugene Brusilovy. The opera is still running to this day (as I write this). Not so long ago, in the Kazakh opera house, I attended the thousandth performance, and many of the first performers took their parts in it. (The Journeys of Jibek did not end on the opera stage. A motion picture based on this dastan was made at the studio Kazakhfilm.)

            My desire to present the historical path of the people from all sides could not allow me to not fully utilize vital modernity. And not just in the stories. The novel, Soldier of Kazakhstan, a story of my peer, about his life before the war, about his wartime deeds, he became for me the most extensive embodiment of this large and complex topic.

 

 

Sometimes people ask me:

            “Why did you become a writer?” I have a long answer ready:

            “Because Sylvia Mikhaelovna, my teacher in Presnogorkovska, ordered me. I couldn't disobey her.”

            But seriously, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to explain why you suddenly started to be intrigued by different stories of people's lives. And at such moments you want to talk about the shifts in the fate of your people who gave you life, gave you language to express your thoughts, your feelings.

            Why did I start writing?

            I can not answer, just as if I were to ask, why was I and not someone else, born on the night of Nauruz, the year when the Cow was replaced by a Leopard.

 

 

(Translated by Elena and Damian Stich – 2013)