Bread Cards
The student had been writing about a dead language when the roads closed.
It was a dialect really, not a language. The professors were firm on this. Keñsuu, from a valley on the north slope of the Alatau, whose speakers had nearly all gone over the passes into China in 1916 and not come back. The last woman who spoke it properly had been recorded in 1959, and was long dead. What remained was a page and a half in the appendix of Abakirova’s Dialect Atlas, a wax cylinder from 1928 of a man singing, and a word in the refrain of his song that nobody could translate.
The student’s thesis was going to translate it. She had been sure of this in March.
In April she put the thesis in a drawer, because on the twenty-second the Popular Front rode down out of the mountains and closed the roads round Talas, and on the twenty-fourth the bakeries ran out of flour, and on the twenty-sixth Father Martin of St. Tomas opened the parish hall as a bread kitchen and asked for volunteers who could count.
The bread cards were her idea. She was proud of that, and later ashamed of being proud.
At first they had simply handed the bread out at the side door of the parish hall to whoever was in the queue. By the third day the queue went round the block and down Kyzyl-Too Street to the tram depot, and the bread ran out by nine in the morning, and a man was knocked down and broke his wrist. So the student sat up one night at her mother’s kitchen table with a ruler, a pair of scissors and a ream of yellow paper from the university’s philology department, and made cards. One card per household, with the address written on it, and thirty-one squares, one for each day of May. A square was crossed out each time a loaf was given. She signed each card with her initials, because there was no stamp.
Father Martin looked at the first one for a long time.
“Ration cards,” he said.
“Bread cards,” said the student.
“My grandmother had ration cards. In the war. Leningrad.” He was a Latin priest, an American, Polish on his father’s side, who had come in 1996 to build the church with the American money and had stayed after the money stopped. He spoke Iradi with Polish vowels. “She kept one. In her Bible. After.”
“These are only until the roads open.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what they said in Leningrad,” and he took the scissors and began to help her cut.
May was very beautiful. It is always beautiful in Talas in May. The poplars came out along the canals, and the apricots in the Old City gardens, and the snow went back up the Alatau day by day, and from the parish hall roof you could see the whole of it, very clear, the mountains so close in the cold mornings that you could make out the dark patches of the juniper. And on the foothills, below the juniper, the smoke of the Front’s fires.
She did not think about the fires during the day. During the day there was the bread. It came at five in the morning from the two bakeries still working, in the back of the parish van, which ran on diesel that Father Martin did not explain. There were three hundred and sixty loaves on a good day and two hundred on a bad one, and four hundred and eighty cards. The student did arithmetic. She did it on the backs of the cards and in the margins of a hymnbook and once, when there was nothing else, on her arm. Four hundred and eighty households. Two hundred loaves. Half a loaf per house, then, and the old and the families with babies first, and the young men last, and the young men did not like it, and said so.
She learned more about Talas that month than in twenty-two years of living there. She learned which families had money and were queuing anyway, and which had none and were too proud to queue, so that someone had to take their bread to the door after dark. She learned that the Russian woman on the third floor of number 14 was feeding a Kyrgyz family of seven in her flat. She learned that the Old City had a smell when it was hungry, and that it was not the smell of bread.
At night there was nothing to do, and that was worse.
The curfew began at nine. Her mother went to bed early and lay awake. The student lay awake too, in the narrow room that had been her brother’s, with the window open, and listened to the city.
In a city under siege it is never quiet. There were dogs, more of them every week, because people let their dogs go when they could no longer feed them. There were generators. There were the police trucks, and later, toward the end, fewer police trucks. There was a radio, somewhere across the courtyard, playing the same Mor-Wave tape every night until the batteries ran down, and then nothing, and then, a week later, the same tape again; someone had found batteries.
And, very late, when everything else had stopped, there was a sound from the hills that she could not at first identify. A low, uneven sound, like the sea, if the sea were made of something softer than water. It came and went with the wind.
It was horses. Thousands of them, in the foothill camps, moving in the dark, shifting their feet, blowing, the way horses do all night when there are many of them together. She had heard it before only once, on the Aksay Plateau as a child, at a summer gathering her uncle had taken her to, lying in a yurt in the middle of the camp with the felt wall a hand’s width from her face.
Her uncle was out there now. Her mother’s brother, Mamyrbek, from the Kara-Unkur valley above Arslanbob, who had ridden north in March with the Chubar. Her mother had had a message from him in April, by a road no one would name. Tell my sister I am well. Tell her to keep bread in the house. Since then, nothing.
The student lay in the dark and listened to the horses, and thought: one of those is his.
Toward the end of May the bread got worse. There was chaff in it, and something else, maize flour or worse. Fewer people came to the side door, and those who came were thinner. A boy of ten came with a card that had been altered, the squares rubbed out and redrawn with a pencil, badly. The student saw it at once. She held it for a moment. Then she gave him the bread and crossed out a square and said nothing, and the next day she drew him a new card, with all the squares fresh, and signed it with her initials, and wrote his address on it from memory.
Father Martin saw her do it. He did not say anything either.
That night, the thirty-first, the last night of the squares, she did not go home at nine. She stayed in the parish hall because there was a meeting about June, about what would happen when the cards ran out, and the meeting went on until after the curfew. It was safer to sleep there. She lay on the floor of the hall on a pile of empty flour sacks, with the smell of flour and the dust of flour on everything, and she could not sleep.
She took out the thesis.
She had brought it from the drawer that week without knowing why. She turned the pages in the light from the street. Keñsuu. The song. The refrain word, jümlöli, which no one could translate. The man in 1928 singing it into the horn of a phonograph for a Russian ethnographer, twelve years after nearly everyone who had ever sung it with him had gone over the passes into China.
She had had theories, in March. It was a borrowing from Sogdian. It was an old word for a kind of bird. It was a nonsense syllable to fill the rhythm, as in the Russian ai-lyuli. She had cited three authorities for each theory and ruled out two of them.
Now she lay on the flour sacks and listened to the horses on the hills, the long soft sound like the sea, coming and going, and the thought came to her quite plainly, without authorities, that the singer had perhaps not known what the word meant either. That it was simply what you sang when you were waiting, on a cold night, for people who were out in the dark, and did not know if they would come back. That you did not need to know what it meant. You only needed to know the tune.
She did not write this down. It was not a thing you could put in a thesis.
She slept a little, toward morning. When she woke it was the first of June, and there were no more squares on the cards.
Father Martin was standing at the side door of the hall, looking out at the street. There was already a queue. He had a new ream of yellow paper under his arm.
“June,” he said, not turning round. “Thirty squares.”
“Thirty,” said the student. She got up off the sacks and brushed the flour off her skirt and went to find the scissors.
Three days later the Front came into the city. On that morning she was at the side door with the bread when the riders came down Kyzyl-Too Street, and she looked at every face that went by, every one, the whole length of the column. She did not see her uncle.
He came to her mother’s door a week later, very thin, with a horse that was not his own. He did not want to talk about it. He sat in the kitchen and ate, slowly, a whole loaf of the bad bread with the chaff in it, and when he had finished he gathered up the crumbs from the table with the side of his hand and ate those too.
The student still has the yellow cards. She kept one of each month, May and June, in the back of her copy of the Dialect Atlas, at the page with the song.