Contingency Papers
Dinara Abdieva had come home from Chicago with two suitcases, a master’s degree in public policy and a winter coat that was wrong for Talas. The coat was too thin for the wind that comes off the Alatau in January and too smart for the corridors of the old Party building on Toktogul Street, where the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been given the third floor.
She did not mind the coat. She minded nothing that winter. The Americans had gone on the third of December. On the seventh the Supreme Court ruled that their going made Irad independent, and on the ninth Prime Minister Orozbekov proclaimed the Democratic Republic from the steps of Legislative Hall in a snowstorm. Dinara stood in the crowd with snow in her hair and sang the anthem with people she did not know, and she thought, We are building it. Us. Now. She was twenty-nine. Her scholarship contract required two years of public service, and she would have done twenty for nothing.
They gave her a desk by the radiator, which was either very hot or dead cold, and a title, Translator (Russian, English), Department of Neighbouring States, and on the eleventh of December a folder.
“Border consultations,” said her head of section, Mr. Seitkaziev, a tidy man who had worked for the territorial administration and wore the same green tie every day. “Technical annexes. Water quotas, grazing rights, that sort of thing. The other side drafts in Russian. We need clean English for the lawyers in Washington.” He smiled. “Our lawyers in Washington. We have lawyers in Washington now.”
“What’s the timeline?”
“Yesterday,” he said, the way they said it in Chicago. He had never been to Chicago.
The first annex was about water. She knew water. Everyone in Irad knows water. The Toktogul reservoir, the summer releases, the cubic metres per second at the Uch-Kurgan gauge. The Russian was heavy, Soviet-ministerial, full of in accordance with and on the basis of, and she made it light and plain and was pleased with herself.
The second annex was about grazing. It listed pastures by their Soviet survey numbers, and beside each number it gave a column headed Party responsible for administration from the date of entry into force. In that column, against the summer pastures of the Karatau, stood the word Kazakhstan.
She read it twice. She assumed the column meant joint administration, or shared transit, the kind of thing two states agree when herds cross a frontier. She translated it exactly and wrote a query in the margin in pencil: Responsible for administration: confirm meaning?
The folder came back the next day without her query. Someone had rubbed it out.
The third annex was maps.
They arrived in a cardboard tube on the twentieth of January: Soviet 1:200,000 sheets with lines drawn over them in coloured felt pen, the kind schoolchildren use. Green, orange and blue. She was to translate the legends.
She spread the sheets out on the floor of the empty meeting room at the end of the corridor, because there was nowhere else big enough, and knelt on the carpet in her stockings and looked at them.
The green line ran around the Talas valley and down to Jalal-Abad. The blue line ran around the Chu and the steppe and the Karatau. The orange line ran around the Fergana rim, the farm belt and the hills above it as far as Arslanbob. Between them there was nothing left. No white paper at all. The lines met each other everywhere and enclosed everything, and the legend in the corner said, in Russian, Proposed lines of administrative responsibility following dissolution of the Party of the First Part.
The Party of the First Part was Irad.
She sat back on her heels. In the corridor somebody was laughing on the telephone. The radiator ticked. She found she was looking at the small black dot on the blue side of the blue line that was Nurzhan, where her mother lived, and then at the dot on the green side that was Talas, where she was kneeling, and she was trying to work out, very calmly, as if it were a question in an exam, which country she would be translating for in a year.
She rolled the maps up and put them back in the tube and translated the legends, accurately, into clean English. It took her the afternoon. Dissolution she wrote as dissolution. There is no lighter word.
She did not sleep much in February. She went to work and translated what she was given. The escrow clauses came in the second week: compensation payable to the Party of the First Part into accounts in Zurich, and concession shares in the NurGaz fields, the antimony works at Sary-Bulak and the Toktogul cascade, to be allotted to companies whose names were only initials. She translated the initials.
At lunch she sat in the canteen with the other young ones, the returnees, the ones who had come back from Washington and Boston and Chicago with their degrees to build the state, and they talked about salaries and flats and the new Kazakh restaurant on Manas Avenue. Twice she opened her mouth to say something, and twice she said something about the restaurant instead.
Once she asked Mr. Seitkaziev, in the corridor, very lightly: “The orange line on the maps. Is that a negotiating position?”
He looked at her for a moment, kindly, she thought afterwards. Almost kindly.
“They are contingency papers,” he said. “Every government has contingency papers. You plan for everything. You plan for the earthquake. It doesn’t mean you want the earthquake.”
“No,” she said.
“Clean English,” he said, and patted her arm, and went into his office.
On the night of the twenty-second of February she stayed late. The building emptied by seven. By nine there was only the watchman, who sat on the ground floor with a small television and a large thermos and did not come upstairs.
The photocopier was in an alcove by the stairs. It was an American machine, a gift of the territorial administration, with a plaque on it saying so, and it was slow and very loud. Every page sounded like a door slamming in an empty house.
She had the folder. All of it: the water, the grazing, the escrow, the initials, and the maps, which she had to copy a quarter at a time and tape together. She stood at the machine for two hours. She had decided nothing. She had come to the alcove with the folder under her arm, as if she were carrying it somewhere, and she had lifted the lid and put the first page face down on the glass and pressed the green button, and the machine had slammed its door, and after that each page simply came after the one before.
When she had finished there were three copies and the original. She sat on the floor of the alcove with her back against the warm side of the machine and looked at them.
Three. She did not know why she had made three. One for whom? There were people she could think of. A cousin of her mother’s on the Nurzhan city council. A man she had met at a reception who wrote for the Talas Herald. A DPI deputy who had once been to dinner at her parents’ flat and who was said to be furious with the Prime Minister about something. She did not know any of them well. She did not know which of them would burn the papers and which would burn her.
She put the original back in the folder and the folder back in the safe, and locked it with the key she was not supposed to have kept. She put the three copies in three plastic bags from the bazaar, and the three bags in her thin Chicago coat, and walked home through the snow past Legislative Hall, where the flag was up and lit and stiff in the wind.
On the twenty-fifth of February, a Sunday, she was at her parents’ flat in Nurzhan for her father’s birthday. The television was on in the corner with the sound down, and the family was at the table, and her uncle was making the toast, when her mother said, “Look,” and turned the sound up.
It was Toktarov, in front of a crowd outside the Nurzhan city hall. He had papers in his hand and was reading from them.
He read the legend of the maps. He read it in Russian first and then in Iradi, slowly, so that people could follow. Proposed lines of administrative responsibility following dissolution. He held up a map. The camera could not get close enough to show the colours.
“It is a bill of sale,” Toktarov said. “A bill of sale for our country.”
Her mother had both hands over her mouth. Her father had stood up. Her uncle was still holding his glass in the air. Dinara sat very still and looked at the paper in Toktarov’s hand, trying to see whether there were strips of tape across the back, where the quarters of a map had been joined.
She could not see. The camera was too far away. It might have been her copy. It might have been anyone’s. There would have been other copies; there are always other copies, in other safes, in other ministries, in other capitals. Nobody ever told her, and she never asked.
The next morning she did not go back to Talas. Her two years of public service were never completed, and in the spring a letter came from the scholarship board asking her to repay the cost of her degree, which she has been doing ever since, at four hundred som a month.
The thin coat is still in her mother’s wardrobe in Nurzhan. She has never worn it again. There is a bazaar bag in the inside pocket, empty, folded small. She does not know what happened to the other two.