Diesel
The herders came in from the Moiynkum on the morning of the sixteenth, about three hundred of them, on horseback and in old trucks and on tractors pulling trailers full of their sons. They stopped where the Chu road crosses the main canal east of Nurzhan, turned the tractors sideways across both lanes, and lit fires in oil drums. They had come because diesel had gone from forty-one som a litre to sixty-eight in five weeks, and a herder who cannot buy diesel cannot get hay to his winter camp, and a herder who cannot get hay to his winter camp in January is going to lose his sheep.
Erkin Kurmanov was twenty years old and had been a police constable of the Chu District for seven months. He knew all this because his grandfather had told him the same thing on the telephone the night before, at length, with figures.
“Sixty-eight,” his grandfather had said. “Do you know what sixty-eight is, in sheep?”
“Ata, I’m on duty tomorrow.”
“I know you’re on duty. That’s why I’m telling you.”
His grandfather wintered on the Moiynkum with the Boztorgoy, as the family had always done, and came into Nurzhan only to see the doctor and to complain about the price of things. His father had left the steppe in 1979 for the refinery, married a Nurzhan girl, and registered his son in a hospital in Nurzhan under a surname with a Russian ending. Erkin had been to the winter camp perhaps ten times in his life. He could ride, a little. He spoke the steppe dialect badly enough to be laughed at.
There were forty police at the junction by ten o’clock, in two buses, with helmets and plastic shields that the Americans had left behind and that no one had ever used. The lieutenant was a man from Talas named Ibraev. He walked up and down the line telling them to stand still and look calm, and he did not look calm himself.
Across thirty metres of frozen road the herders stood round their fires. Some of them had brought sheep in the trailers, to show, Erkin supposed, what was at stake. The sheep stood packed together with frost on their backs and looked at the police.
At eleven a man from the district administration came out from Nurzhan in a Toyota, walked halfway across the thirty metres, read something from a sheet of paper that nobody could hear over the wind, and walked back. The herders jeered. A boy threw a frozen horse dropping, which hit a shield with a sound like a stone.
Erkin was looking for his grandfather.
He had not said he was coming. Old men with bad knees do not ride two days through the snow to stand at a roadblock. But Erkin looked anyway, at every fur hat, every grey beard, every old man in a sheepskin coat sitting on a tractor seat with his hands under his armpits. There were a great many old men in sheepskin coats.
At half past twelve he found him. Not his grandfather. His grandfather’s brother, Kalmat, whom he had last seen at a memorial feast four years before, standing by the nearest oil drum with a stick in one hand and a bowl of tea in the other. Kalmat was looking straight at him across the thirty metres. He did not wave. He raised the bowl a little, as you raise a bowl to someone at the far end of a feast, and drank.
Erkin did not know what to do with his face. In the end he nodded, very slightly, inside his helmet.
At two o’clock a second bus arrived, from Talas, from the ministry, not police. Men in black, without shields. Their officer walked down the police line without speaking to Lieutenant Ibraev and stopped in the middle of the road and lifted a loudhailer.
He said that this was an illegal obstruction of a state highway. He said that the government had taken note of the herders’ concerns. He said that they had ten minutes.
The herders did not move. Nobody really believed it. In Irad, in January 2007, nobody yet believed that anything was going to happen to anybody. The state had been born six weeks before in a snowstorm. It did not yet know what it was. You did not imagine it firing at its own grandfathers.
After ten minutes the men in black walked forward.
Afterwards, at the inquiry, which sat for one day in March and whose report was never published, there were many versions of who fired first and why. A shot from among the herders, said the men in black. A tractor driven at the line, said the district administration. A warning shot into the air that came down in the wrong place, said Lieutenant Ibraev, who resigned in April and went back to Talas.
What Erkin remembered was the sheep.
The men in black had reached the first fire. There was shoving and shouting, and an oil drum went over and scattered burning wood across the road, and the sheep in the nearest trailer began to scream. If you have never heard a trailer of sheep scream, you will not believe the sound. A boy jumped up onto the trailer to calm them, and someone fired, and then many people fired.
Erkin did not fire. He had a pistol, and he did not draw it. He was not brave. He had simply forgotten he had it. He stood in the road with his shield in front of him, as he had been told to, and watched the herders run, and the horses break loose, and the sheep come pouring out of the trailer and run in every direction across the frozen fields, grey on white, with the boy who had jumped up to calm them lying on the trailer bed among the straw.
He did not see Kalmat. He looked, and Kalmat was not there.
Seven people were taken to hospital in Nurzhan, by the official count. The official count did not mention the boy on the trailer, because he was taken not to Nurzhan but back to the Moiynkum, wrapped in a felt, in the back of the same trailer. His people did not want the city doctors to have him.
Erkin went home at midnight. His mother had kept his supper warm. She put it in front of him without a word and sat down across the table, and then the telephone rang in the hall.
It was his grandfather. Erkin could hear him from the kitchen, though his mother held the receiver against her chest.
“Is he there? Put him on.”
His mother looked at Erkin. Erkin shook his head.
“He’s asleep, Ata,” his mother said.
There was a silence on the line. Then the old man said something in the steppe dialect, with the sh where Nurzhan people say ch, that his mother did not repeat. She listened for a long time. Then she said, “Yes. Yes, Ata. I’ll tell him,” and put the receiver down very gently and came back into the kitchen.
“What did he say?” said Erkin.
His mother sat down again.
“He said Kalmat got home. He said the sheep are lost, most of them, they ran onto the canal ice and it broke.” She folded her hands on the oilcloth. “He said he wants to know if you shot anybody.”
“I didn’t.”
“I told him you didn’t.”
“Did he believe you?”
His mother did not answer. She got up and took his plate, though he had not eaten, and scraped it into the bin, and stood at the sink with her back to him. Outside, the refinery flares lit the snow orange all the way to the edge of the steppe.
In March the clans formed the Front, and the herders of the Moiynkum rode north to join it. Erkin was not on duty at the canal bridge again. In April he handed in his badge and went to work at the refinery with his father, guarding pipe.
His grandfather never telephoned again. When he died, in 2011, Erkin drove out to the Moiynkum for the funeral and stood at the back. Kalmat, who was very old by then, came and stood next to him and said nothing for a long time.
Then he said, in the steppe dialect, slowly, so that Erkin would understand: “You had a gun. I saw it. You didn’t take it out.”
“No.”
“Good,” said Kalmat. “Good.” And he put his hand flat on Erkin’s back, between the shoulder blades, as you put your hand on a horse to let it know where you are, and left it there until the prayers were finished.