Bazaar Chubar
The sack came down from Arslanbob in the middle of August, on the back of an apricot truck. The driver called from the gate that it was from Kuchkar aka, from the kuda, for the bride, and drove on.
Walnuts. They had fallen a month early and still wore their green coats. Zuhra sat in the shade of the warehouse with a basin and a knife and husked them, as she had done every autumn since she could hold a knife, and laid the pale shells out on the roof to dry. Only when she came down the ladder did she see her hands. Black to the wrist. Walnut juice goes in under the skin and stays for ten days, whatever you do.
Her grandmother saw them from the bench under the vine.
“Six weeks to the toi,” said Kumushay, “and you’ve dipped your hands in Morkhan’s ink.”
She brought a bowl of sour milk and held Zuhra’s wrists down in it and said a prayer in the church words of Örüktü, the hamlet in the hills where she had been born a Christian, before she came down to the bazaar in 1961 to marry a Muslim walnut buyer. The milk did nothing. They both knew it would do nothing. Zuhra kept her hands in it until the sun went off the yard, because her grandmother’s hands on her wrists were warm.
The kuda had been made in May, with the walnut trees in flower. Her father had driven them up the valley road past the old police post at the bridge, where one bored policeman had sat since Soviet times, and in Kuchkar’s yard, under a walnut tree so old its trunk was bound with an iron band, the men had settled the kalym: a grey riding mare, eleven sheep, four hundred dollars. Kuchkar’s son Alisher had walked her to the falls, his little sister following a few steps behind and watching the birds.
“Your father buys our walnuts for half what they’re worth,” he had said, not looking at her.
“Two-thirds,” she had said.
He had laughed then, and looked at her. “Well. Now it’s in the family.”
That was in May. In May everyone on the valley road, high and low, cursed Orozbekov and his ministers, who had tried to sell the Fergana rim to Tashkent on a piece of paper. In May it was one valley.
The elders met on the third Sunday of August, market day, in the room above the chaikhana at the head of the walnut rows. Her father told her to carry the tea up. He said it in a voice she had not heard from him before, and she understood that he wanted her in the room and did not want to say why.
Abdumalik Mamadaliev spoke first, because he always did. The Front had gone back to the hills, he said, as the clans always do: they come down, break what needs breaking, and go home. Good. But the Front was not at the bridge. The Uzbek frontier was four kilometres away, and the men on the other side had read the same papers as everyone else. In Tash-Kömür there was now a government, the one that had read the papers out and stopped the sale, and it had a Gendarmerie, and trucks, and a road. They would come if they were asked.
“Asked by whom?” said Rahmatulla the honey seller, who had a brother in Kyzyl-Unkur.
“By this room.”
“This room is half the clan.”
“This room,” said Mamadaliev, “is the half that lives here.”
They talked for three hours, as it is done. At the end Rahmatulla said, “They’ll call us bazaar Chubar up there. The ones who sold the hills for a road.”
“Let them,” said Mamadaliev. “They’ll still bring their walnuts down to sell to us.”
Nobody laughed, because it was true.
Elders don’t vote. Mamadaliev went round the room for the sense of it. Each man said yes, or said nothing, which counted as yes. Rahmatulla said no. When it came to her father, Abdukadyr, who on the shop sign and in the ledgers was Yusupov and on the felt in Kuchkar’s house was Yusup uulu, he lifted his eyes from the carpet and looked at his daughter kneeling by the samovar.
She was filling an old man’s bowl. She did not look up.
“Yes,” said her father.
The trucks came on the Thursday, six of them, olive-drab, along the foot of the hills from Tash-Kömür. Some people clapped. A woman from the dried-fruit rows held up a round of bread to a gendarme in the back of a truck, and he touched it to his forehead. Zuhra watched from the warehouse roof with her grandmother, who had climbed the ladder in spite of her hip.
“Jandarm,” said Kumushay, as you would name a disease.
“They came because we asked them.”
“Yes,” said her grandmother. “That’s the worst way for them to come.”
By the end of the week there was a barrier at the bridge, a painted pole on an oil drum, and a hut of sandbags, and young men from Talas writing down the names of every man who went up the valley. Above the bridge, at the bend where the orchards began, riders from the upper valley sat under a walnut tree with rifles across their backs. Between the pole and the bend lay four hundred metres of empty road.
The highland elders met at the shrine of Arslanbob-Ata and refused. Alisher said so on the telephone, from the only place on his roof where the signal reached. They had sent a message with the refusal: The lowland always sold the hills’ walnuts. Now it has sold the hills.
“My father says a daughter-in-law comes up,” Alisher said. “The bazaar stays down.”
“And you?”
“I say it’s the same road. It was the same road last month.”
The line went dead.
No walnuts came down that September. The loads stopped at the riders’ bend. In Bishkek the two sides signed a ceasefire, and the radio read out the terms: a demarcation line, and a zone twelve kilometres deep on each side where no one could bring a tank or a cannon. In the south, the newsreader said, the line would follow the foot of the hills.
“Then this house is in it,” said Kumushay, counting on her fingers. “And Kuchkar’s house. So nobody can bring a cannon to the wedding.”
Her mother laughed and covered her mouth. Her father did not laugh.
The wedding was set for the fifth of October.
Kuchkar came down once, on his horse, in daylight. The gendarmes kept him at the pole for three hours while they radioed Tash-Kömür about his expired Soviet passport. Her father went down, and was not allowed through either, so the two men stood with the pole between them and talked in the heat. Let the toi be held below, said her father. My son is not a bazaar man, said Kuchkar. Then their voices rose, and the boy from Talas put a hand on his rifle strap, not knowing what else to do with it, and both old men fell silent.
At last Kuchkar said that the grey mare was his father’s horse’s granddaughter, and he hoped she was being fed.
“Better than any of us,” said her father.
Kuchkar rode back up the empty road, and that was all.
That night Zuhra found her father in the warehouse among the half-empty sacks, the ledger open on his knee and nothing written in it.
“You looked at me,” she said. “In the chaikhana. Before you said yes.”
“I was asking you.”
“You didn’t ask anything.”
“I asked with my face. You were filling the teapot.”
“What would you have done if I’d looked up?”
He was quiet for a long time. “The same. I wanted you to see me say it.” He closed the ledger. “If you go up, I can’t come. Not to the toi. Not after. They have my name at the pole, and up there I’m the man who said yes. I won’t stand at the edge of my daughter’s wedding like a debt collector.”
“Then I won’t go.”
“You’ll go. I chose for the bazaar. I won’t choose for you.” He stood up, and his knees cracked. “Your grandmother’s father walked her as far as the bridge, because that’s where his land ended. Now it’s where mine ends. So I’ll walk you to the bridge. Every family has its bridge.”
On the morning of the fifth it rained before dawn and then cleared, and the hills above the bridge came out so sharp you could count the yellow walnut trees on the slopes. Her hands were almost clean. A shadow of brown remained in the creases of her knuckles. Her grandmother turned them over, said nothing, and kissed the back of each.
Half the bazaar was at the bridge. Mamadaliev put his heavy hand on her head for a moment, said the bata — may your hearth be warm, may your road be open — and stepped back before anyone could see his face.
The gendarme captain was polite and had a clipboard. He asked her name and wrote it the way the forms from Tash-Kömür told him to: Yusupova, Zuhra Abdukadyrovna. He turned the clipboard round so she could check the spelling. It was the name on her school certificates and in the shop ledger, and she had never once said it aloud.
“That’s right,” she said.
He lifted the pole himself. Her mother went under it with the bread, then her grandmother with her stick, then the cousins carrying the chest and the rolled felts of the dowry. Her father stood beside the sandbag hut in his grey suit and did not come forward. On the far side of the pole Zuhra turned. He nodded once, as a trader nods across the walnut rows when the price is agreed and there is nothing more to say. She nodded back the same way, because she had learned it from him.
Halfway up the empty road her grandmother stopped.
“About here,” said Kumushay. “This is where my father stood.” She looked back at the pole, and up at the riders. “Now it’s nobody’s. That’s new.”
At the bend a grey-bearded man, one of Kuchkar’s brothers, had a school exercise book open on a stone. If the Gendarmerie wrote down names, the elders had decided, then so would the riders. He did not ask her name. He wrote it in round Latin letters, Zuhra Abdukadyr kyzy, and turned the book round so she could check it.
“That’s right,” she said.
Alisher stood holding a white horse hung with red and white tassels. They lifted her onto it, the women began the song that goes up the valley ahead of a bride, and Alisher took the bridle.
A bride does not look back at the house she is leaving, or she will be homesick all her life.
She looked back. Her father was still beside the pole, small and grey, the bazaar behind him and somewhere beyond the haze the Uzbek frontier. He would not move until the bend took her out of sight. Then he would cross the bridge and open the shop, because a few walnuts were coming down at night by the paths below Kyzyl-Unkur, and someone had to buy them.
Twelve kilometres up, twelve kilometres down, the agreement said. It had sounded like a great distance.
It was four hundred metres. She could still see his face.