A Note on the Title

The agreement signed in Bishkek in September 2007 created, on each side of the Qara-Chik line, a restricted zone twelve kilometres deep. No tanks, no artillery and no combat aircraft may enter it. Everything else may: herds, brides, funerals, walnut traders, priests, children going to school, the post. Twelve kilometres up and twelve kilometres down, a strip twenty-four kilometres wide and nearly two thousand long, a country inside the country, where the only things forbidden are the large ones.

I was twenty-two that autumn. I read the full text of the agreement in the Talas Herald, folded small, on a bus. I remember thinking that twelve kilometres was a great distance. It is about as far as you can see from a pass on a clear day. It is a day’s walk with a loaded donkey. It is, near enough, the distance from my mother’s village in the Kara-Unkur valley down to the bridge at the foot of the hills, where the Gendarmerie put their pole across the road.

It took me some years to understand that the distance that mattered was not twelve kilometres, but the four hundred metres of empty road between the two posts, and that most families in Irad have a road like that somewhere, whether they cross it or not.

These stories are about the years between the Bill of Sale and the marking of the line: from the winter of 2006, when a government in Talas prepared to sell the country, to the spring of 2009, when men in two kinds of uniform went into the mountains with concrete pillars and numbered them. I have tried to keep to what is known about those years and to invent only the people. Where a story touches a public event — a speech, a letter, a mine — I have followed the record as it was printed at the time. A few people whose names you will know pass through these pages. I have tried to give them nothing to do that they did not do.

The last piece is not a story. I have put it at the end because my mother asked to be in this book, and that is where she would have wanted to sit: by the door, where she could see who was coming.

A. T. k.
Talas, 2015