3

ANARBEK AND NAZIRA had been waiting for the American to arrive since seven o’clock that morning. Anarbek insisted they remain in the house; he wanted to make sure they did not miss their guest, and he needed Nazira to help translate for him. She had busied herself with the final touches, ironing all the curtains for a second time, sweeping out of the cupboards any crumbs that had escaped her many cleanings, folding towels, scouring the bathtub, and counting silverware to make sure there were eight full sets of knives, forks, spoons, and teacups. By mid-evening both she and her father had fallen asleep in the living room. They were awakened by the crashing of a bus over the dirt humps of Karl Marx Street. Anarbek rushed to the door and Nazira hurried to the bathroom to brush her hair. She arrived in the living room just as her father was pulling Dushen and the American into the house.

She had never seen anyone like him. He looked . . . healthy. He had a fleshy face, curly auburn hair that was beginning to creep below his ears, broad shoulders, a thin waist, and a perfectly white, perfectly straight set of teeth. In greeting, his voice was high pitched and uncertain, his Kyrgyz accent comical, but his blue eyes, though tired and reddened by the long trip from the capital, glowed with kindness. He acknowledged her only with a cursory nod—this alone brought the blood rushing to her cheeks. Her father immediately led him over to the Brezhnev-era refrigerator groaning in a corner of the living room, tugged it open, and gestured with a flourish inside. The rusted racks were filled with seventeen blue cans labeled Judah Maccabee.

“These must have cost a fortune,” the foreigner said.

“Americans always have a refrigerator full of beer,” Anarbek announced. “I saw it in the films.”

 

The Peace Corps had placed Jeff in the Kyrgyz village to teach English to rural factory workers. The recent independence of Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a new frontier, and a wave of humanitarian, business, and religious groups had already flooded in. Jeff’s assignment was straightforward: under the English for Specific Purposes program, he would offer basic language classes. After his failure on the reservation, he had grown staunchly motivated. He wanted to be useful in a practical way, in a place that needed him, and he was determined to forget Arizona.

He had spent the summer in Bishkek, completing the three-month Peace Corps orientation program. Each morning he had dropped off letters to his friends in America at the main pochta, then walked to school through an unkempt park with dried-up fountains, ready to face a day of language study and teacher training. The capital was a pleasant Soviet city with wildflowers and marijuana growing amid the sidewalk weeds. Sheep grazed downtown. On a walk one dark evening, staring up at the enormous moon, Jeff fell into an open manhole. He caught himself at the elbows, his feet dangling in the blackness below. He had lost a Birkenstock but was grateful he had not broken his back. When he pulled himself out and staggered to the microregion of his host family (the former manager of a state-run radio program and his frenetic wife), they informed him that manhole covers had become prized substitutes for barbell plates, so he should watch where he was going.

In language classes he struggled along with the other volunteers. They ridiculed each other’s efforts to master the accumulation of Kyrgyz suffixes. One of his friends could perfectly imitate the grammatical rule their teacher kept referring to as “wowel harmony.” Midsummer they went to Lake Issy-Kul in the northeast mountains for a three-week teaching camp. By day the volunteers planned their lessons, taught in a practice school, and observed one another’s classes. By night they flirted and drank. Jeff hung back, more interested in absorbing the scenery than in reliving college life. In order to ward off mosquitoes he ate four cloves of garlic a day and didn’t shower. Thrilled by the sense of remoteness, by the distance from America, he spent a good deal of time walking alone. In the fragrant summer evenings, after his daily teaching evaluation, he would wander over to the pier and dip his feet into Issy-Kul (Hot Lake), stare out at the shadows of the Tien Shan (Mountains of Heaven), and count the shooting stars.

On his return to Bishkek for the final month of training, his host family showed him off to friends and relatives around the capital. For centuries their nomadic ancestors had never turned hungry travelers away from their mountain yurts. Now, despite their poverty, the Kyrgyz welcomed strangers like him into their Soviet-era apartments with traditional zeal. Homemade jams, pickles, round loaves of nan, walnuts, melons, raisins, honey cakes, fried dough, yogurt, and sour cream were spread before him. “When he had eaten his fill, he was told that dinner had not yet begun. Soups, dumplings, and a mound of pilaf were on their way. He finished and thanked the hostess for the fine meal. She assured him the main course would be ready shortly. Shashlyk and beshbarmak (the national dish of greasy noodles and boiled mutton swimming in a broth of onions, eaten with the hands) were served. Vodka and cognac were poured. Singing and dancing were inevitable. And though the average family earned twenty-five dollars a month, to Jeff’s dismay his hosts sometimes killed their only sheep in his honor. He would be asked to carve its boiled head.

As a final exam, the Peace Corps sent trainees on the dreaded Village Visit—an independent weekend excursion meant to test resilience and language ability. Jeff found himself in a Russian dacha two hours west of the city. Over three long days the hosts seemed puzzled by his mispronunciation of the simplest Russian words. The family gave up trying to hold a conversation and instead forced large amounts of vodka on him, fed him mounds of potato pieroshkis, dressed him for comfort in the father’s floral pajamas, and holed him up in a private villa guarded by six dogs, a sow, her piglets, and a coop of noisy chickens. In the middle of the second evening, bursting, he blundered outside in the dark in search of the toilet. The barking dogs pursued him. They woke the hens and swine. Reeling from the stink of the outhouse, he found every light on the street turned on, neighbors rushing around in slippers, lighting candles, trying to discover what on earth had aroused such a tumult in their once peaceful town.

In this way he passed his Village Visit test, and the following week at the Hotel Dostuk the ambassador swore him in. After the ceremony Jeff met his site representative: a man named Dushen, the assistant manager of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka’s cheese collective. Together, they left the capital on a rusted minibus for the journey into the mountains. To get to the Talas Valley, they had to ride west, out of the country, across the lower steppes of Kazakhstan, then wind through a steep mountain pass and enter back into Kyrgyzstan. With independence the borders had changed, but the roads had not.

Twelve hours and six champagne bottles later, the bus deposited them in front of a dark house blanketed by night. Jeff felt a bulge in his throat. He was alone. He could sense the mountains around him, cutting him off from everything familiar. Along an uneven stone path, ducking under the branches of what appeared to be apple trees, Dushen helped drag his bags up to the concrete porch of a townhouse. The lights flickered on from a first-floor room, and a huge man with a pockmarked face, tousled gray hair, and eyes still half-asleep greeted them in the doorway. Dushen introduced Anarbek Tashtanaliev, Jeff’s village host-father. As they shook hands the man’s daughter, pale with scattered dark freckles, appeared behind him. She offered Jeff a gentle, closed-lipped smile while his host-father pulled him over to a refrigerator full of Israeli beer.

 

In Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka Jeff received what felt like a hero’s welcome. Over his first few days his neighbors on Karl Marx Street introduced themselves in a continuous wave. Expectations were high; they seemed to believe he could change their lives. The attention was jarring—in Red Cliff he’d always been kept at arm’s length by the community. But here the villagers offered gifts of warm bread, eggplant and cabbage from their family plots, strawberry and cherry compote, boiled mutton, and plastic bags filled with cold triangles of fried dough. They explained just to what length Anarbek had gone to refurbish the old brick townhouse. The previous year the occupants had repatriated to southern Russia. The house had served a six-person family for three decades, so the village deemed it large enough for one American. Anarbek had arranged for its purchase with the village akim. For an entire month he had shown up each day with his wife and two daughters to renovate the home and bring it up to Peace Corps standards. He had installed a Western toilet (the bathroom did not have running water; Anarbek would work on that, they said) and a series of electric radiators (the street’s electricity seemed sporadic; he would work on that). His daughters had hung printed curtains made from bedroom sheets, pounded out the carpets, and scrubbed the several years’ accumulation of Central Asian dust off the floors. From the akirn, Anarbek requisitioned a heavy steel gate for the front door, a strict requirement stipulated by the Peace Corps, but in the neighbors’ opinion an unnecessary precaution. For the previous quarter of a century, Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka had known no crime.

Anarbek had even installed a telephone. It was a red, hollow, plastic device with a single thread of exposed wire that looped out of the top step on the second floor, perfectly situated to trip Jeff and send him flying down the stairs. On his third evening in the village, finished unpacking, he checked the telephone to see if he could reach America. There was no dial tone. When he picked up the receiver, he could hear the strumming of a kumooz and the high-pitched wailing of a Kyrgyz folk song. The telephone picked up radio signals.

Anarbek came by three times a day to see how Jeff was settling in. The round man arrived sweating, his shirt stained in large damp patches beneath his arms. He carried the smell of wet leather into the home. He fingered Jeff’s hiking boots, he fingered his books, his Bic pens, his serrated knife. How had he slept? he asked. What had he eaten for breakfast? Whom had he talked to? Where had he been wandering at eight that morning? (One of the village children had spotted Jeff taking out garbage. Word had spread.) What would he do this evening? Would he come over for dinner?

Jeff accepted dinner each night for the first week. He dined in a sitting room alone with Anarbek, served by his quick-stepping wife, Lola, a slim, fair-skinned woman of his own age. She appeared carrying a new mutton dish each night: mutton dumplings called manti, a mutton and turnip stew called lagman, the mutton kebabs called shashlyk—and what Anarbek claimed was a special delicacy, known as “refrigerator jelly”: a wobbling glob of congealed fat from the previous day’s mutton.

By the end of the first week Jeff decided he would have to learn how to refuse his host-father’s invitations. That Saturday he fumbled an excuse in grammatically poor Russian. Anarbek’s face colored, his eyes dropped, and, head hanging, he left the house, checking the metal gate behind him. Five minutes later a knock on the door sounded. Jeff’s neighbor, Oomar, wanted to know if he would join them for dinner.

In this way two weeks passed. Jeff settled in and began to plan his English lessons. He checked the village pochta every day for his mail. At last, at the end of the second week, he received his first letter, a one-page note from Adam, telling him he’d enrolled at Northern Arizona University. A university grant, combined with his BIA scholarship and tribal land settlement, had amounted to a full ride. Jeff doubted Adam would make it through first semester, but then rebuked himself for his bitterness.

That same afternoon Anarbek drove Jeff to the cheese factory to show him his classroom. At the entrance gate squatted what looked like a tollbooth, with a chipped barrier arm painted in black and white stripes, which a watchman raised by pulling a frayed string. They drove into the complex and parked in a gravel lot. In front of them lay a discolored concrete building—long and low, like a bunker—whose entire left half appeared to be sinking into the earth. Anarbek explained that the foundation had shifted ten years ago in a small earthquake. He laughed, explaining how he had been working that very afternoon in his office, and his desk had slid backward and pinned him against the wall. But nobody had been hurt, only surprised. This sunken building connected to a high warehouse structure with missing windows. Across the lot stood a similar building, backed by a white silo that leaned at an angle, like the Tower of Pisa. Anarbek indicated the cow stables, then pointed to a large square shed in the far corner of the lot and with a smile told Jeff it was the factory sauna. A light shone from the sauna windows, and steam drifted from a pipe on the roof—the only signs of life in the complex.

The bunker’s unlit hallways were strangely quiet, and on most doors hung freshly painted signs with the word OPASNIE!—DANGER! Anarbek hurried Jeff past these, straight to the door of his classroom; but when he triumphantly turned the loose knob to usher Jeff in, he found that the door was locked. This apparently was a surprise. Anarbek cursed, fumbled in his pocket for the keys, and finding none, promptly bashed the door with a thunderous front-thrust kick. It swung open; the knob fell and rattled on the ground. Jeff stepped in and saw that his classroom was a converted closet, with six tables, and milking stools for seats. A warped brown chalkboard had been hung on the back wall, and in front of it, on a flimsy desk, sat a box of Soviet chalk. When he picked up a piece, half of it disintegrated in his fingers. The chalkboard, he found, was ancient and frictionless—he tried to write his name, and the chalk barely left a trace.

His classes would begin on Monday. He glanced back at Anarbek, who was cleaning his ear with his pinky. Jeff smiled. Through the room’s lone, thin window, he could see two snowy mountain peaks reflecting the high Central Asian sun.

“Prekrasna,” he said, his voice resounding in the empty halls of the silent factory. Perfect.

 

Peace Corps trainers had warned Jeff about a debilitating state of mind, common to many volunteers, called the fishbowl effect. With his hooded hemp Baja shirt and his leather sneakers, in his every movement, Jeff stood out in full relief. People stared. When he bought his eggs in the bazaar, all eyes fell on him. The faces of babushkas jostling at the counter in the pochta locked on him a unified, threatening glare. Old men hobbling along Karl Marx Street halted before his gate and watched him gathering fallen apples. On the porch, after dinner, he would look up from an old copy of Newsweek to see an array of children’s eyes poking through the slats in his fence, their hands resting above the posts. He knew no privacy.

On a bright Saturday morning in mid-September, a Soviet army jeep swerved in front of the house, and Anarbek stumbled out. Without explanation he dragged Jeff across the yard and pushed him toward the vehicle. “Just tell me where we are going,” Jeff pleaded, but his host-father waved vaguely at the highest peaks in the distance.

Two fat Kyrgyz men in camouflage suits sat up front, but Jeff was shoved into the back, where he found the director of the Lenin School, his wife, their two children, Anarbek’s daughter Baktigul, a case of vodka, two watermelons, fishing gear, three hunting rifles, and a bucket of sunflower seeds.

Following the course of a swirling river, they bounced through high, dry country along a primitive dirt path into the mountains. The road climbed to a cliff overlooking the water. Anarbek took the treacherous curves at a furious pace and kept turning around to ask questions.

How much money does your father make?

Do Americans believe in God?

How many floors are there in the Empire State Building?

When will you marry a Kyrgyz woman?

Jeff coughed a loud nervous laugh, pressed his head to the window, and stared out over the precipice, certain they would plummet over it at any moment. The rough-edged peaks rose high above. Little air circulated inside the crowded jeep. Anarbek leered left and right, swerving the vehicle with each turn of his head. Jeff wondered what his own father would do when he learned of the impending jeep wreck. And why did everyone else seem so calm?

After nearly an hour the Kyrgyz thrashed the transmission from fourth gear to first, jerking them all to a halt. The men hurried from the vehicle, loading their rifles, and shot off a thunderous volley at what appeared to be an empty side of the mountain. Jeff cringed, watching Anarbek dash up the slope across the steady line of fire, then dive behind a boulder.

He reappeared without bullet wounds, swinging four dead pheasants by the feet. The crowd in the jeep applauded the bloody birds, and his host-father laid them as a gift on Jeff’s lap. He forced a smile. Blood dripped out of a pheasant’s mouth onto his sneaker.

They drove higher; the slopes of the mountains swam upward in steep vertiginous angles and jutting overhangs of rock. Occasionally the landscape leveled into a valley or a long brown field of rustling grass. They stopped three times to slaughter more large fowl. After one assault their hosts encouraged Jeff to practice shooting. He missed rocks and closely placed bottles. “Amerikan-yets!” someone laughed from the back of the jeep.

Anarbek informed Jeff that he was not keeping the rifle steady. “The secret of hunting,” he said, “is keeping the hands still.” He provided an immediate solution: vodka toasts.

To friendship.

To peace.

To a full table.

To guests.

Two hours beyond any trace of civilization the jeep bumped over a haphazard wooden bridge and swerved before a mud-brick farmhouse surrounded by horses. A ceremonial nomadic yurt had been set up behind the house, and beyond it a wide field stretched in both directions, cut in half by the tumbling river. The noon sun leaning over the highest ridge cast the mountains half in shadow. Groups of strangers, apparently Anarbek’s relatives, rushed out of the yurt, greeted them with a round of salamatsizbih, and swept them into their fly-infested home.

The nomads crouched around a stained cloth spread on the floor, their chins upturned, eyes wide, examining him. They wore traditional Kyrgyz dress: kalpaks (tall white-felt national headgear, which Jeff could only associate with a dunce cap), high black boots, the men in weathered sports jackets, the women in headscarves and dresses that looked like floral tablecloths. Years of tending sheep in the alpine sun had burned their faces terra-cotta red.

It seemed that everyone had gathered to celebrate the first birthday of Anarbek’s nephew, a gurgling round-faced toddler with flushed cheeks. From a stained bowl Jeff drank ¿‹myss—fermented mare’s milk—and managed to keep it down with shots of chai. The hostess never filled a teacup completely, worried it would be cold before one finished it. Instead there commenced the endless ritual of sipping, slurping, then passing of the cups around the circle back to the samovar. A tablecloth covered the center of the floor, and breads, apples, grapes, raisins, apricots, sauces, candies, jams, nuts, and teacups were spread upon it. The indoor picnic was arranged with a delightful scattered precision, and Jeff reminded himself how little these families had, how generous they were being with their food.

Lola set before him a large mound of pilaf and a full cup of chai. To Jeff’s left knelt an old man, bent over, facing the southwest corner of the room, reciting loud Arabic prayers. Clothed in a long black overcoat, a worn suit jacket, black stockings, and a silver skullcap, he bobbed his bearded face back and forth at the floor. Anarbek told him the man, his first wife’s father, was approaching a hundred years of age. For half an hour the praying figure did not acknowledge the company. Finally, with a slide of his hands over his face—“Omen!”—he finished the ritual, raised his eyes to the center of the room, greeted Jeff with a toothless smile, and joined him at the mound of pilaf.

They ate with their hands, and Jeff tried not to drop any food in his lap. He watched the old man’s withered fingers clenching the moist rice. One hundred years old. What had this man seen? A rise and a fall of an empire. Two world wars. Stalin’s purges, the concentration camps, the gulag? Perhaps he knew nothing of these things. Perhaps he had led only a sheltered village life, ignorant of the trials of the larger world. He looked wise, but could he even read?

“Abdan tattoo,” Jeff said. Very delicious. He broke the silence of intense feasting and lost a handful of rice on his socks.

“Azamat!” Good boy! The old man licked the oil from his wrinkled palm and patted Jeff on the arm.

“Elma,” he said, holding up an apple.

“Bilem,” Jeff told the old man. I know.

“Elma!” he demanded.

“Elma.”

He lifted walnuts, hard candy, a spoonful of sugar, various breads, the dusty raisins. He said the name, Jeff repeated it; he said it a second time with greater force, Jeff repeated it louder. Finally the man reviewed the items, asking one by one, “Bool ne?” Everyone nodded vigorously when Jeff gave the correct answer.

The meat on the pilaf was unusually lean and tasty, not like the greasy mutton he had come to expect. When at last he was invited outside to rest his stomach, he discovered why. Anarbek pulled him into a shed behind the house, where a group of young men squatted in the shadows around a three-foot pile of charred meat. “At!” they pronounced proudly, gesturing like game-show hostesses. Horse.

They cut him more and handed him a raw onion as a side dish. He nibbled politely. Anarbek explained that eating horse was rare in the autumn—it was usually saved for the end of winter, when meat ran low. “Horse meat has many calories,” he said. “It will make you strong.” He pointed to Jeff’s groin, curled his finger, and straightened it rigidly up into the air. Jeff shifted away from him.

When Jeff could stomach no more, he was led outside and seated before another spread of food, laid out on a cloth in the sharp grass. Again the vodka flowed. If he refused to drink, his hosts clicked their tongues in disappointment, lifted the glass, and forced it into his hands. To refuse again would be an insult. “Davai!” the men shouted, glasses raised, vodka spilling. Come on!

Anarbek paced around the circle of family and friends, answering questions about his American. Jeff nibbled triangles of borsok, which, like frybread, he dipped in honey, shocking his hosts. This apparently was not done. He inhaled a long heavy breath, the pressure in his stomach unrelenting. His mind swam through a blurred vision of Central Asia, the mountain pasture, the singsong language, the generosity of these strangers, their laughter, their smiles, their friendly whacks on his back. More vodka was poured. He drained his glass and it was filled; he drained it and it was filled again.

When he could put no more into his body and did not know if he would be able to stand, the athletic events began. Male participation, Anarbek warned, was mandatory. First came the races. The men sprinted across the cow field, and even a crippled uncle, leaning on a walking stick, hobbled along. Slowed by a stomach full of horse organs, Jeff found himself in less than top form. He finished the race fourth, ahead of the crippled uncle, and vomited into a ditch next to a cow.

A ceremonial birthday race came next. To begin, the parents tied a ribbon around the nephew’s bowed legs, and he wobbled in front of the crowd. Then, from across the field the other children raced to him. Anarbek’s daughter Baktigul won the event, and the adults awarded her a pair of scissors. She snipped the child’s ribbon between his legs, a symbolic cutting: the boy, now a year old, was ready to enter the race of life. The toddler took a few uncertain steps and everyone cheered.

“Azamat!” Good boy!

After this came feats of strength: pushup contests, a tug of war, and most exciting of all, the wrestling on horseback. Two men lined up their horses side by side, facing opposite directions, and with embroidered leather whips they urged the animals into a slow spin. Gathering momentum, whipping the stomping horses still faster, each rider grabbed the other’s shoulder, then tried to dismount the opponent by tearing at his shirt, hair, and flailing limbs. The relatives shouted while in a display of wild acrobatics the riders sweated and the horses grew dizzy, tossing their heads until one man fell.

As Jeff watched, applauding, Anarbek’s older daughter, Nazira, sat beside him. She slanted her feet below her skirt, offered him a piece of fresh bread, then gestured to the horse wrestling and proclaimed in hesitant English, “It is an excellent sport for watching. But more exciting, to my mind, to play.” She turned to him and asked, “Would you like to attempt?”

Jeff simply laughed. “How do you speak such wonderful English?”

Nazira had long, straight black hair. She giggled and her mouth opened slightly, like the budding of a rose. He caught a glimpse of two gold molars before she covered her mouth quickly with her hand. “I studied in university,” she said. “And now I am the teacher.”

The next match had begun and they watched it together. Anarbek sneaked up behind them; his shadow spread across the food. He leaned down and spoke in Jeff’s ear. “I see, Jeff, you are talking to my daughter.” With his dirty fingers he lined up three glasses and filled each from an open vodka bottle.

Nazira told him, “You must not drink if you do not want. But it is our way.”

Jeff smiled. “I thought you were Muslim. This drinking is not, well—very religious.”

Nazira laughed again. “We are very bad Muslims, Jeff Hartig. Very bad. But you must remember—the Russians brought this.” She tapped the empty bottle with her fingernail.

It was time for the traditional wrestling. The competitors tied pieces of cloth around their waists to use as a grip. Jeff mentioned he had wrestled in high school; after much arguing he consented to take on a young cousin of Anarbek’s. Nazira helped tie a belt around his waist. When he turned, though, he saw two men had locked arms over piles of fresh horse manure. The men flipped each other, the dung flew, the crowd cheered. It seemed the Kyrgyz drew little distinction between shit and dirt. Jeff untied his belt and sat down.

A few minutes later the relatives called for the women to wrestle.

“They are joking, aren’t they?” he asked Anarbek.

But to everyone’s laughter, the modest, soft-spoken Kyrgyz women paired up, grabbed each other around the neck, yanked each other’s scarves, and in elaborate knotted holds pummeled each other into the filth. The men wagered vodka shots on wives and sisters and groaned when they lost a bet.

In the final match, in a show of enormous strength, with a grunt and a twist, Nazira herself flipped a great-aunt onto the pungent ground. She raised her arms in victory, her stained skirt whipping in the breeze. In Jeff’s life, the event was memorable for more than its hilarity. Even covered in horseshit this woman was stunning. She was slight and strong, with gentle Asian eyes, dark freckles, and a grace and modesty in her playfulness. Jeff lay back on his elbows in the grass, staring at her.

 

Nazira watched the sun begin to set beyond the mountains. A row of haystacks gleamed orange across the field. Groups of her intrepid aunts stirred meat in woks over fires and rolled flour and water into long noodles. Large Russian samovars boiled chai for the guests. One of her uncles had set up a unique contraption: gasoline dripped out of a plugged vodka bottle, ran down a long ramp, and fueled a fire under a metal vat, boiling water for the dishes.

She crouched with Jeff near the fire and watched a circle of men playing durag. The card players waited for their opponents to throw their hands, grumbled, and smoked cigarettes rolled from homegrown tobacco and last year’s newspapers. She observed with fascination how patiently Jeff answered their questions, but she was embarrassed when one of the players asked if he would marry a Kyrgyz woman, and why it was taking him so long.

At dinner she guided him into the fly-infested farmhouse with fourteen other men and sat down to administer the samovar. Jeff was given the most important seat, farthest from the door. A young nephew, circling the room with a kettle and basin, poured steaming water on each person’s hands, then the women carried in the plates of beshbarmak. As the guest of honor Jeff was given a sheep’s head to carve. Nazira hid her smile when he could not negotiate slicing through a nostril with any degree of grace. She asked one of her cousins, a powerful man to Jeff’s left, to help him. He directed Jeff to the eyes of the sheep. The foreigner grabbed one with his slippery fingers and tried to dislodge it, but the thin red veins kept it well attached, stretching like bands of rubber with each pull. At last her cousin helped Jeff, jabbing the knife between his fingers until the eye was free.

Tradition dictated that Jeff give the eyeball to someone he wished to see again soon, but it was too much to hope he might offer it to her. He passed it instead to her grandfather, who had spent the evening in prayer in the corner of the room. Her cousin dislodged the second eye and with a bow of the head offered it to Jeff himself to swallow.

The American held the eyeball in his palm for an unusually long time, his Adam’s apple lurching up and down his throat. Slowly he placed the eyeball into his mouth, seeming to curl his tongue around it. On his first swallow his throat failed him. Nazira leaned forward. He tried again and again and finally squeezed it down, then chased it with a nearby apricot.

“Azamat!” she cried out, and everyone around her drew a collective breath.

She joined her father and the family in the packed vehicle for the twilight ride home. As the jeep jostled them through the mountains, she sat crunched between Jeff’s hip and the three squirming children. The men’s conversation centered on him.

How do you like our Kyrgyzstan?

How much does this knife cost in America?

And bread?

And a house?

Do you have apples in America?

What do you think of our privatization?

Perhaps you will stay longer than two years?

His Kyrgyz answers were growing mildly comprehensible, and he was relying less on Russian, which pleased Nazira. Through much evasive language, the American was able to explain something called carjacking and something else called money laundering. He informed them that in New York City an apartment the size of two of those jeeps cost one thousand dollars to rent.

“A year?” Anarbek asked.

“A month!”

In the front seat, the eyes of the men opened in wonder.

When there was at last a lull in the conversation, Nazira’s father bellowed, “Sing!”

Anarbek possessed a powerful voice and a deep Kyrgyz love of song. Inspired by the alpine air and the bottles of vodka, he and the school director pretended to woo Jeff with a resounding love serenade. In turn Nazira sang a solo ballad in her soft soprano voice. It was the first song her mother had ever taught her, about the beauty of the mountains—how the snow leaves in the summer and one might think it gone forever, but every winter it returns. Shy, she did not look at the American, but her voice quavered when she felt her shoulder press into his.

Finally it was Jeff’s turn. He claimed he had never performed for an audience before, but Anarbek would not accept such a flimsy excuse. In the end he appeased them with a song called “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Everyone in the swerving jeep picked up on the words, and Nazira would never forget the American’s strong voice leading the chorus, the swaying men in the front seat, her scarved aunts and the children piled in back, in heavy Central Asian accents, all counting bottles of beer on the wall. It was the first time since escaping Traktorbek that she could see the possibility of a new and better life before her.

 

Jeff awoke each day sick from the previous night’s food, but he appreciated the luxury of his own indoor toilet (which he flushed with a bucket of water). First thing in the morning he stared out at the mountains; the snow crept lower across them each day. Now in the November dawn frost appeared on the ground. Horses grazed on the remains of his garden, and crows called from the apple trees that blocked his view of the kindergarten across the street.

Each weekend Jeff left the village and took the three-hour bus ride to Talas to shop at the larger bazaar there. In good weather he hiked into the mountains or camped next to the glacial Talas River. On a routine visit the Peace Corps country director complimented him, saying he had proved himself a tough-minded volunteer dedicated to his job, able to suffer the most difficult privations with grace and resilience. The director appreciated how he had persevered in his village work at the Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka cheese collective.

Jeff understood that this typical overblown Peace Corps flattery meant only that he didn’t complain about the failing water supply or the lack of heat in his home. The Peace Corps office knew absolutely nothing about his factory students, their constant need to review material, their expectation of attaining instant knowledge (without, apparently, any studying), their mumbled incoherencies, their reluctant classroom participation, their intense doubt and refusal to accept the fundamentals of English grammar. For weeks at a time Jeff struggled to help the factory electrician, engineer, accountant, and dairy maids memorize the conjugation of the verb to be.

In the evenings he graded homework and responded to his students’ weekly journals. On Friday afternoons he organized a volleyball club. After months of persistent wrangling with the state bureaucracy, he managed to open the English Resource Center in a room adjoining the pochta, where twice a week he taught classes to adults from neighboring villages and on Sunday afternoons offered karate workshops to eager crowds of village children.

To help Anarbek, Jeff translated the cheese factory’s machinery inventories and production reports and edited applications for capital grants and agricultural exchange programs. The figures all sounded pretty good, and only in November did it occur to him that he had never seen any cheese. There was none for sale in the bazaar, none in the village’s near-empty store. Anarbek answered Jeff’s inquiries evasively: the factory was adjusting to changes in the market. They were reassessing production capabilities. Business was fully expected to pick up next year. There was no need to draw attention to the problem.

“If the cows are unproductive, perhaps you should consider a change in product,” Jeff suggested. “Report your troubles to the government. See if you can get some money together for a joint venture. You can make leather boots or wool scarves. You can build on what you have.”

“This is a dairy factory, Jeff. I’ve been running it for over thirty years. It’s what I was trained to do. We don’t make scarves here.”

Jeff pointed to an inventory he had translated. “But you’re reporting to Bishkek eight hundred kilograms of cheese for each eight-hour shift. That’s not true.”

Anarbek chastised him. “This is Kyrgyzstan you’re talking about, my friend. Much you don’t see is true.”

Sometimes, in the evenings, Jeff fooled himself into believing that his townhouse home would grant him respite from the fishbowl effect. But the village kept track of his every move. No sooner had he returned from a long day of teaching at the factory than the knocking would begin. At the door the neighbor’s children offered him kumyss. An old mother knocked, dragged her daughter into his home, and asked him to teach the girl English, there and then, in one try. Sometimes the pounding on the door was Anarbek, armed with shanks of mutton and bottles of vodka. Or it was Nazira, offering him fresh bread. She alone declined his obligatory invitation to come inside.

He came to live in a state of dread and started pretending he wasn’t home. The village was not fooled.

One rainy December afternoon the door shook for a full thirty minutes. Jeff was resolute; he would not answer it. Through his window he heard an unfamiliar voice speaking to the neighbors’ children.

“Is the foreigner home?”

One of the kids answered, “The eenostranyets got home one hour ago. The eenostranyets was carrying a bag of carrots and a jar of milk. The eenostranyets was wearing that bright green rain jacket that looks so funny. He has not shaved in weeks. He gave me two lollipops yesterday. Just keep knocking. The eenostranyets usually answers.”

Jeff opened the front door and gate and found, standing on his porch, an elderly Russian man. The veins on his red nose protruded in blue lines; thin gray hair was slathered across his forehead. His stained army overcoat was soaked, and a torn leather rucksack was slung across his shoulder. “Zdrastvooitye, Jeff Hartig!”

“Zdras. Come in.”

As the stranger entered, Jeff noticed the dark clouds on the tips of the mountains begin to break. The rain had stopped, and a chorus of drops from the eaves of his house pattered to the earth. Once inside the man removed his boots and extended a quivering hand. “Yuri Samonov! It’s a pleasure to meet you. A pleasure.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Jeff repeated in Russian. “I apologize about the door. In the rain—and I was sleeping—”

“Nyechevo! I understand, Jeff Hartig.” There was a sparkle of intelligence in his eyes, an ironic expression on his weathered face. Jeff invited him upstairs to dry off while he prepared the chai and warmed yesterday’s bread. When Jeff returned to the living room, the man was thumbing through a stack of old National Geographics that Jeff’s aunt had recently shipped.

The Russian’s hands shook as he held one out and opened it. “This is the greatest magazine in the world,” he said. “My favorite.” He turned a page. “My favorite.” He slammed his palm on the pink plastic tablecloth, startling Jeff.

“You can take a copy or two, if you like.”

Yuri was quiet for a moment, mouthing the words of one of the captions under a close-up photo of a bat with its wings spread. He finished and looked up with bright eyes. “I wrote for this magazine,” he said.

Jeff assumed the man was drunk, but he insisted that he had written two articles, in 1972 and 1977. Over tea Yuri explained how he had worked as a geologist and mountaineer in Bishkek for most of his life. He had climbed the three tallest peaks in the Tien Shan, some of the highest on the planet. But after independence he could no longer make a living as a geologist. With his Kyrgyz wife and teenage son he had moved to the village. Here they could feed themselves from a private crop grown on land owned by his wife’s family and raise money by selling vodka and cognac at a table in the bazaar. He had been watching Jeff these past three months. As an intellectual he felt it was his duty to come and introduce himself.

He glanced again at the National Geographic. “They translated my Russian poorly. I will bring you copies of my articles. But you must let me borrow this one. This is the greatest magazine in the world. I have not seen it in years. Decades.”

“You can have that one. Take two. Really.”

“Two! Two! I couldn’t. Two?”

“Please.”

Jeff’s aunt had sent twelve copies, dating from the mid-1980s. Yuri Samonov was silent as he selected two of the golden issues carefully, as if choosing his fate. When he had made his decision, he said, “Thank you, friend. Thank you.”

The light was fading. Jeff stood to turn on a lamp, but Yuri told him to wait a moment and pulled him by the shoulder toward the window. The silhouette of the mountains rose over the kindergarten across the street, breaking through a gray line of clouds. To the southwest the shrinking edge of day shone pale yellow with an outline of pink as it fell through the crags of the peaks.

“You have landed in the middle of nowhere, haven’t you?” Yuri whispered conspiratorially.

“I know it.”

“Moscow is halfway across the continent. Here, your America exists only in our imagination. This is not civilization. They drink horse milk. This is not civilization.” Yuri turned to Jeff. The blue veins across his nose stood out more prominently than before. “Are you lonely here?” he asked.

“No, not yet.” In four busy months Jeff had not much considered loneliness, or what, if anything, he missed about America. But the question gave him pause. “Sometimes,” he said.

“Have you saved Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka’s famous cheese factory yet?”

“The factory’s in trouble. I’m trying to get Anarbek to face the truth.”

He chuckled. “You Americans love truth, no? You have come here to serve us, but see what you are up against? Nobody can help this place.”

“It’s your new country, and you’ve already given up on it?”

“It’s not my country,” Yuri said, indicating the mountains. “We built this place up, every centimeter of every road, every phone line, and now they are kicking us out.”

“Well, we will see. Perhaps I can help.”

“You will help! Ha! You’re far from home, Jeff Hartig. When you write a letter and tell your friends where you are, they cannot understand. They do not know where Kyrgyzstan is located, and if they do, they do not know where our Talas Valley lies. History has forgotten us. Your letters might be from outer space. Here.” The Russian picked up a letter Jeff had begun writing to Adam the night before. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, as if to smudge the ink. “Feel this.”

Jeff reached for the rough tan paper, the only kind available in the region. It seemed unremarkable.

“It’s paper,” Yuri whispered.

“Yes. Paper. Shto?”

“Look out the window. You are in the middle of nowhere. Do you see the mountains here, to the south, and the smaller range to the north, that parallels it? And you have seen the winding Talas River, which our road follows.” Yuri stretched his arms and crossed them at the wrists. “Past the source of the river these ranges intersect. It makes crossing the mountains difficult in summer, impossible other seasons. There is only one way out of our valley. That is there.” He raised one finger and pointed west.

Jeff said, “I know this. We travel through Kazakhstan to get to the capital.”

“You don’t know! Here is the important thing. In the year 751”—Yuri lifted a pen and scribbled the number on the corner of Jeff’s letter. He went on to describe how the Chinese Tang dynasty had conquered all of Central Asia and then kept moving steadily west. Here, along the Talas River, they had come across an army of Arabs, Turks, and Tibetans and were driven deep into the valley. “You see through this window, there is no escape. In its history, it was the greatest loss for the Tang Chinese.” The Russian clapped his hands. “It stopped them cold! And with the victory of Arabs and Turks, Islam came to dominate the region.”

Jeff tried to grasp the point. “So in the history of religion, this valley is an important place. Is that what you are telling me?”

“Nyet! Not only the history of religions. Not only the history of Central Asia. The history of the world.”

“You’re exaggerating now, Yuri.”

“Listen. With the Chinese defeat, the Arabs took prisoners. These prisoners knew important Chinese secrets.”

“Silk. Of course.”

“Yes, silk making was one. The Arabs brought this knowledge back with them to Middle Eastern cities, across Africa and into Europe. It made them rich. But a second art was more important still.” Yuri lifted the letter again and ran his fingernails along the edge, back and forth, producing a sound like the gasp of a throat.

“Boomaga,” he whispered. “When they were brought to the Arab cities, the Chinese prisoners revealed the art of paper. With the Arabs, papermaking spread to Europe, then, as you know, around the world. Without paper, how would your technology, your philosophy, your money, your literature exist? A person could argue your civilization owes much to these mountains, to this very place, in the middle of nowhere.”

“Boomaga?” Jeff repeated, taking back his letter.

“Boomaga!” Yuri stretched each of his arms through the sleeves of his musty overcoat and took up his copies of National Geographic. “Paper! This very place. Thank you for the tea, Jeff Hartig, and your company. You are very generous. I will return these to you.”

 

In a letter that took eight weeks to reach him, Jeff had learned that Adam had begun school at NAU and that in September he had slept with his first white woman. She was a free spirit from New Orleans who hunted him down in the dormitories, followed him into the library, kept popping up behind him in the bookstore, and finally appeared one night at his dorm room. Adam wrote that, riding him backward, “She called out louder than any of the Apache girls I ever slept with. Do they all do that?” And then he was let down: the next time he saw her, she pretended not to know him.

What was Adam doing, writing him this stuff? Did he want some help? Advice? Jeff decided coarseness was his best response. “You bastard,” he wrote in reply. “I wish I could reciprocate with details of my own sordid lifestyle. Unfortunately, I’m living a monastic existence at the moment. Neither my Russian or Kyrgyz is strong enough to impress a woman with my usual wit and charm. I sound like a four-year-old when I speak.”

Jeff had imagined he might stop hearing from Adam once he got caught up in college life, but over the next months he found that, among old roommates and ex-girlfriends who sent scattered letters and the aunts and uncles who scribbled proud notes and birthday cards, it was Adam who wrote with unmatched regularity. This surprised Jeff because of the Apache’s staunch guardedness. In their letters back and forth neither mentioned the teen center, or even Jeff’s time in Red Cliff. More than anything Adam seemed to want Jeff’s approval; but the letters disturbed Jeff, too, each a nagging reminder of his failure on the reservation, and they had the effect of temporarily disorienting him.

Adam detailed in short, single-page notes the classes he had enrolled in, his midterm grades, and that he’d made the NAU basketball team. Jeff responded with something akin to the pride of an older brother. His own letters were filled with exaggerated details of his hard work, making his teaching schedule sound more demanding than it really was.

“I’m both optimistic and frustrated with the lessons,” he wrote. “Before I came, I had visions of introducing Shakespeare to the shepherds of Kyrgyzstan, but my students are just getting confident with the alphabet. I’ve been reviewing for this verb-tense exam I’ll give at the end of the week, and the factory workers have forgotten 99 percent of what I’ve taught them. They don’t study. How can I blame them? Getting food for the winter is more a priority than mastering the present progressive.”

As the correspondence continued, Jeff found he was revealing more than he wanted to of himself—his uncertainties about what he might accomplish in Kyrgyzstan, memories of his own troubled relationship with his father. He wrote how the man had cheated on his mother throughout the years that she was sick, and how his mother had known but put up with it. Jeff had never understood the reasons. Lately he had come to believe she endured the marriage only for his sake, to keep the family together; and Jeff confessed to Adam he often felt that half the choices he made in life reflected a desire to prove himself a better man than his father.

Eventually Jeff came to depend on these monthly letters simply to vent. He had grown tired of communicating only in basic Russian and Kyrgyz, conversations that mostly rode on the surface of things. Yet he never knew how to sign off to Adam. Sincerely was too formal, Love too bizarre, Take care too blank, Your friend ridiculous. Adam, for his part, didn’t even sign his letters; they ended, usually, with a simple question, such as What kind of gun did that guy shoot the pheasants with? or You think I should take Intro to World Lit pass/fail? The lack of a signature gave the note an informal immediacy, as if he and Adam were chatting on the porch of the Red Cliff Trading Post, not sending letters that took months to cross the oceans.

 

Anarbek grew visibly worried about Jeff’s first winter in the village. As temperatures plummeted and snow mounted, the town’s electricity went out more frequently. This was followed by the failure of the pumps and the loss of running water. When water was not restored, Jeff was invited to thaw out and cleanse himself with the village elders in their Wednesday evening sauna at the factory.

In the makeshift bar adjoining the sauna, the wooden walls were smattered with the calendars of smooth-skinned Chinese and Kyrgyz models, calendars Anarbek had collected over the years on his various trips to the capital. On Jeff’s first visit, the manager ordered Dushen to fill a kettle with water for tea. Anarbek’s friends arrived and greeted them with handshakes. Bakyt, the Lenin School director, carried in boiled legs of mutton wrapped in newspaper and a jar of pickles. The akim entered with a hunk of butter and three greasy tails of homemade kielbasa. Radish, the doctor, came straight from the region’s hospital, swaggering through the door with a bottle of vodka in each hand, his towel folded under his arm.

From the bar another door led to the changing room, where two showers (the only showers in Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka, Anarbek bragged) worked at high pressure when the water was running. In this room the men undressed and then entered the sauna, some naked, some in grimy underpants. Jeff stripped hesitantly to his plaid boxers, and Anarbek reminded him to take off his watch so the metal would not burn his arm. Inside the sauna, as the room grew hotter, the men stared at the sweat dripping off Jeff’s head down into the curly beard that now grew from his face. Anarbek pointed to his bony chest and visible ribs and announced, “That is not healthy!” When it was obvious Jeff could no longer stand the temperature and was about to pass out, they directed him to squat on the ground where it was cooler. Around him the other men sweated and moaned, and slapped each other’s backs in elaborate massages. Finally the heat became too much even for them, and Anarbek gave the nod. Dushen swung open the door, and they ran, one by one, out of the steam, grabbed their towels in the changing room, and sprang to a room adjoining the bar, where a large in-ground tub had been filled with freezing green water. The men hopped in and shrieked, “Oh! Oh! Sohhhk!” Cold!

They tried to push Jeff into the tub, but he resisted. “In America,” he called over their moaning, “we think you could die of shock doing this.”

“What do Americans know?” the head doctor retorted, splashing him. “It makes your body stronger. You’ll handle the winter better. Now get in!”

On emerging from the ice water the wrinkled men dried themselves and returned to the bar. Anarbek started the rounds of vodka toasts, offering Jeff spoonfuls of butter and slices of kielbasa as chasers.

To guests.

To health.

To a full table.

The chai was poured and slurped. The men, shifting on their seats, unleashed a pestilential torrent of gas.

“Time again!” Anarbek announced. The ritual continued: burning sauna, freezing tub, shots of vodka.

At the end of the evening Anarbek slumped next to Jeff on a cushioned bench in the bar, beneath a wall calendar of a grinning Kyrgyz model. He took an exaggerated breath, sighed, and asked, “So, is there progress?”

Jeff was holding a full glass of vodka and shivering. “Progress?”

“With my factory workers? How is their English?”

Around the bar the village elders focused on him, intent on his answer. Jeff hesitated, his mouth hanging open. “So much progress,” he finally said. “The students are eager, and I think they are learning quickly. Soon they will be able to write advertisements. They’ll sell your cheese to any nation in the world.”

The akim turned to Dushen. “You’ve been taking his classes. What can you say?”

Dushen cleared his voice. “Whad—is—yaw—nem?” He pointed to a red towel and said, “Red.” He pointed to the mutton and said, “Ship.” He pointed to Jeff and said, “My teycher!”

The elders murmured in approval. Anarbek stuck out his chest and gave Jeff a swift, hard pound on the back.

Jeff hated his own duplicity. There was no progress. In a country whose guiding principles seemed based on the art of deception, he was as guilty as the next of saying one thing when the opposite was true.

“You know,” the akim said, nodding at Jeff, “Anarbek’s daughter teaches English too.”

“Yes, I have met her.”

“She is a beauty,” one of the workers murmured, and Anarbek squinted at him until he lowered his head. “Too beautiful for me!”

“She is not married yet,” Dushen said.

“What about you, Jeff Hartig? Will you stay with us here? Will you marry a Kyrgyz woman?”

Jeff glanced at a calendar model through the corner of his eye. A bit of her white neck was just visible beneath the high collar of her blouse. It occurred to him that Nazira was more striking than this woman, and he wondered what it would be like to live with her, to be a Kyrgyz man, to remain here. What would it be like to stay in this village for fifty years, to live the rest of his days surrounded by the highest mountains in the world, to measure time by the rise and fall of the snow on the peaks, to have her cook bread for him, to raise children with her, to forget the dreary realities of car-insurance rates and commuter traffic? For long moments he entertained the fantasy of settling in the village and giving up the more complicated world.

Jeff smiled and answered the question with one of his stock Russian phrases. “Posmotrim.” We will see.

Anarbek patted Jeff’s knee and laughed heartily. “I will see. Don’t you worry, my friend. I will see.” His hand clenched Jeff’s bare kneecap, now covered in goose bumps. “Our guest is freezing!” He grabbed a towel from a far seat and draped it over Jeff’s shoulders.

Radish stood and brought over his kalpak. “Put this on. Do you know what is so special about the kalpak ?”

“Tell me.”

“In the winter, it traps the heat and keeps your head warm. In the summer, the air inside stays cold and keeps your head cool. It is the only hat in the world with this kind of microclimate.”

Jeff sat back on the cushioned bench, the tall kalpak on his head. He adjusted the towel, wrapped like a cape over his shoulders. He sipped his chai, belched, then slurped the last drops. He had never felt more Kyrgyz.

 

The organization that was overseeing privatization, USAID, had just opened its first satellite office in Talas. Jeff was on his way to pick up his monthly salary at the bank when he passed it for the first time. The office had taken over the abandoned hall of sports, next to the boarded-up cinema. There was a carnival atmosphere around the building; a crowd of hundreds had gathered on the street, vendors were selling potato pieroshki, and volunteers were handing out limonad—an undrinkable carbonated imitation of soda. Ten wide stone steps, shaded by an immense concrete overhang, ascended to the entrance, where two hefty speakers were blasting a Kyrgyz rap song—“Amerikan Girl”—out over the square. A banner proclaiming MENCHEEKTESHTEEROO, the recently invented Kyrgyz word for privatization, was draped above the doorways, and out of every window hung posters proclaiming PRIVATIZATSIA in Cyrillic block letters.

Anarbek had been railing against privatization that very morning, saying it would certainly mean the end for the village. A system of auctions was to be held in the coming months, and coupons would be distributed to all state workers, based on salary and years of service. The public could use the coupons to purchase shares in private enterprises or could sell them as stock on the newly opened exchange in Bishkek. Nobody believed any of this would work. Jeff had asked Anarbek what he expected to do if the factory oversight was discovered, if they lost the wages. Anarbek told him they always had their fields to farm. Potatoes and beans: that’s what they would resort to.

Around the square, volunteers were distributing plastic buttons and T-shirts decorated with the emblem of the new nation’s flag—a rising red sun—and the word MENCHEEKTESHTEEROO. Handful by handful they threw the gifts into the crowd. The children who caught the shirts put them on and immediately drew jeers. The shirts came in only one size—extra large—and reached their ankles.

As Jeff watched, a young official stepped onto the street and handed him a button. The man wore a thin gray suit that made him look absolutely official, from the tips of his shining brown loafers to his combed fox-hair shapka, and he possessed in common with other government officials the stoutness of a mule, a grating voice, and the brusque manners of a high school football coach. Jeff introduced himself, and the man was especially impressed to hear he worked in the tiny village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka. “I am certainly honored to meet you,” he said, “someone who has worked so hard to help improve our country.” He gripped Jeff’s shoulder. “My name is Bolot Ismailov. You will join us for lunch and sit beside me.”

Jeff twisted free of Bolot’s firm grip, apologizing and explaining he had to hurry to the bank, before it closed, in order to get his salary. The official seemed only mildly insulted. Jeff stuffed the button in his pocket, reminded himself to hide it from Anarbek, and continued on. He sloshed his way through the mud in the park, past the memorial statues and the Ferris wheel, up to the bank—a one-story stucco building with corroded metal gates attached to the front door. Each month he had collected his living allowance here. The Peace Corps claimed to pay volunteers roughly the average salary of the local population, but Jeff was uncomfortably aware that he made ten times what the villagers earned each month. Inside, after a thirty-minute wait for service at the wooden counter, he filled out forms in triplicate, presented his passport and work visa, and received a receipt for his full salary, stamped four times in blue. This he carried to the single window in an adjoining room, where customers jostled in a rugby scrum for position, then barked at the overwrought cashier.

Earlier in the year Jeff had been timid, and it had taken most of the afternoon to receive his cash. He had also been embarrassed when the pensioners around him watched the cashier’s fingers double-check his enormous salary. But by now he had become a veteran customer. He elbowed his way past an elderly woman and two young men and received his money with hardly any wait at all. As the teller counted the stack of bills to herself, one man to Jeff’s right—a thick-necked youth in a gray sweater—counted each bill out loud. When Jeff pocketed his money, the man turned and announced the American’s salary to the crowded room.

Outside it was growing dark. In the park Jeff noticed the man from the bank, accompanied by two tall friends, following him. At the memorial statue he prepared to smile, nod, and let them pass. But they beckoned him, and he knew he was in trouble as they approached more quickly. He could tell from their swollen eyes they had been drinking. All three wore MENCHEEKTESHTEEROO buttons.

“American?” one asked in English, a puff of breath swirling from his mouth.

“Gooddayhowareyousir?” another said.

The third, the one who had counted aloud in the bank, rubbed his red fingers together and said, “Excuse me money.”

His heart racing, Jeff hesitated, turned, and started off in a sprint. He had not made it five yards before he slipped in the mud and they were on him. They tackled him to the ground, kicked him in the knee and the groin, then raked his face against the stone walk. They turned him over so the memorial statue loomed above: the colonial Russian on horseback, waving his sword. The thick-necked man leaned over his face and pounded him with a fist, once against each eye. He pulled Jeff’s long hair, jerking his head back, while his friends tugged off his ski jacket, groping for the stack of bills in the inside pocket. They emptied his pants pockets as well; one of them shouted, “Traktorbek, speshi!” and their footsteps faded off into the park.

Jeff stood uneasily, drew on his torn jacket, then stumbled to the road. They had stolen his identification card and wallet, and he didn’t even have enough for the bus back to the village. He staggered through the park.

The young privatization official, standing alone outside the former hall of sports, spotted Jeff and gasped. “What has happened, Meester Hartig?”

“They took my money. Can you help me? Can you find me a police officer?” He touched a welt rising on his forehead and checked the blood caked on his fingers.

The official clicked his tongue. “I am not sure that is a good idea—it may have been the police. Here, my friend, come inside the bathroom, let us clean you off.” Bolot Ismailov led him to the old locker room, but the water was not running. He swiped at Jeff’s bloody face with a dirty rag, chafing the skin under his eyes. Jeff winced and told him he was making it worse. He said he simply wanted to get home and asked if Bolot could lend him the fare. The privatization officer insisted on driving him instead.

Along the road through the valley Bolot’s Lada seemed to nail each and every pothole. Jeff’s head pounded. Bolot inserted a cassette into the ancient stereo and a fuzzy version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller blared from a single speaker. Jeff passed out for the second half of the ride and came to only as they turned in at the village otovakzal. They sped by the sign for the cheese collective, and suddenly Bolot slowed the vehicle, turned down the music, and said, “I didn’t know there was a collective here.”

Jeff panicked, but bit his lip.

“That’s a cheese factory back there?” Bolot asked, craning his neck.

“No, there’s no collective. I teach at the Lenin School.”

“I saw the sign.”

“Well, there certainly is no cheese factory here. I . . . I should know. I have to travel to Kazakhstan to buy cheese if I want it.”

“Perhaps I’m wrong,” Bolot said and shrugged.

“Yes, I’m sure you were mistaken.”

“It’s happened before.”

Jeff directed him to Karl Marx Street, and when the Lada swerved to a halt in front of his fence, he thanked Bolot profusely for the ride and asked how he could repay him.

“It was no trouble,” Bolot said. He looked straight ahead, the slightest smile on his lips.

 

Nazira heard Baktigul scream, “Jeff agai!” and saw the foreigner stumble into the gate of their lighted courtyard. She and Lola quickly ran to him, grasped his arms, and escorted him inside the house to the couch.

Jeff was out of breath. “I need to talk to your father. Please get him.”

“Yes, yes, Jeff,” she said. “But first let us take care of you.” She ordered Baktigul to find their father and Lola to bring him water to clean the blood off his face. Nazira rubbed a spoonful of her homemade yogurt under his eyes, explaining it would act as a balm.

“Jeff, I am very embarrassed this has happened to you,” she said as she finished. She screwed the lid back onto the jar, then wiped a drop of excess yogurt off his upper beard. “You come to help, and do you see how our people repay you?”

As she and Lola adjusted some pillows behind his neck, she heard her father bang into the house. He appeared with a cold bottle of Chinese beer, which he ordered Nazira to hold against the swelling of one of Jeff’s cheekbones.

“Who?” her father thundered. “Who did this to you?”

“There were three of them, but I didn’t get a good look.”

Nazira pressed the beer bottle into his face, and Jeff winced. She had never seen him vulnerable and beaten down like this. Month by month he had been growing steadily more impressive in her estimation. To have given up the comforts of America! To have volunteered to help in the struggles of their new nation! He had brought with him the knowledge of the West—New York, California, Washington—places where real history happened. He had brought the outside world in and opened their eyes. For this fact alone he seemed more durable, more vital, than anyone she knew. An American’s life, she thought, was of more consequence than their own small village lives.

Jeff was shifting out of her grasp. “I’m fine. Just forget it,” he said. “Forget it ever happened.”

“That is best,” Nazira whispered in English. “That is what I always do.”

Jeff turned to her father and spoke in Russian: “Anarbek, I have something to say.”

“What is it? What has happened?”

“The factory. I think they might know.”