Kobozev Is Listening
Valentina Kravchenko had called the city Kobozev for sixty-one years and saw no reason to stop. She had been born in it, in a barracks by the railway sidings, in the winter of 1946, and her father had helped to lay the first pipe from the oil field when the city was only a slogan and a row of tents. In 1992 they renamed it Nurzhan, “light of life”, which Valentina said sounded like a shampoo. She did not say it outside the flat.
The flat was on the fifth floor of a block in the Navbahor microdistrict, which had been called the Twenty-Second Microdistrict when it was built, and the kitchen window looked out over the refinery. At night the flares lit the ceiling orange. Valentina had not slept in a dark room since 1974.
On Sunday afternoon the whole family was in the kitchen because the kitchen had the radio. Her son Sergei sat at the table in his undershirt with his refinery jacket over the back of his chair. His wife Lena stood at the stove. Their daughter Katya, who was sixteen, sat on the windowsill with her knees up, half listening and half typing on her telephone.
The radio was saying that Toktarov would speak at three.
“Who is Toktarov?” said Valentina. She knew perfectly well who Toktarov was. She liked to make them say it.
“Mama. He was Majority Leader of the Senate.”
“Majority of what?”
“Of the Senate, Mama. Under the Americans.”
“Ah,” said Valentina. “The Americans.” She said it the way she said Nurzhan.
At three o’clock there was a long time of crowd noise and then a voice, not a young one, speaking Russian first. A good Russian, Valentina noticed. An officer’s Russian. Not the careful school Russian of the young ones, nor the Russian the Americans’ Iradis spoke, with English stuck in it like bones in fish.
He said he was standing in front of the city council of Nurzhan, by its invitation. He said that he had in his hand documents from the government in Talas. He said he would read from them.
He read.
It took him a long time, because he read everything twice, once in Russian and once in Iradi, and the Iradi was slower. Katya stopped typing. Lena turned the gas off under the pot. Sergei sat with both hands round his cold tea and did not drink it.
He read about the lines on the maps. He read the names of the three neighbouring countries and the pieces of Irad each was to receive. When he came to the Chu, and the oil fields, and the city of Nurzhan, he paused, and read that part a third time.
“To be transferred to the administration of the Republic of Kazakhstan.”
The crowd on the radio made a sound Valentina had heard only once before in her life: in the summer of 1989, in this same city, outside the bread shop on Lenin Street, when the shop girl came out and said there was no bread today and would be none tomorrow.
“They can’t do that,” said Katya, from the windowsill. In Russian. Then, as if she had heard herself, in Iradi: “Alar antip bolboyt.” Then a mixture of both, with an English word in it that Valentina did not catch.
“Speak properly,” said Valentina. “One language at a time.”
“I am speaking properly, Babushka. This is properly. Everyone talks like this.”
“Chala-Irad,” said Sergei, without turning round. Half-Iradi. It was what the boys at the refinery called the young ones who mixed. He said it gently, and Katya threw a clothes peg at him, and nobody laughed.
On the radio Toktarov was saying that it was a bill of sale. A bill of sale for our country. He said that a government which sells its people is no longer a government. He said that from today Irad would be administered as a special economic zone, in trust, until the people could decide. He said there was no longer a sovereign, so there was no one with the right to sell Irad. No one can sell what no one owns.
The crowd roared. Sergei put his tea down.
“Well,” said Valentina, into the silence after the roar. “So now we’re Kazakhs.”
“We’re not Kazakhs, Mama. He’s stopped it. Didn’t you hear? He stopped it.”
“He read a paper. Anybody can read a paper. In 1991 Chernov read a paper. In 1992 Alimbekov read a paper. In 1992 they read a paper in Washington and the Americans came. I have heard a great many papers.”
“Mama—”
“I’m not saying he’s lying,” said Valentina. “I’m saying he’s reading.”
The telephone rang in the hall. Lena went out to answer it and came back almost at once.
“It’s the shift office,” she said to Sergei. “Everybody. All shifts. Now.”
He put on his refinery jacket. The jacket was orange, and the city wore its colour in the same way it wore the light of the flares; nobody saw it anymore. Lena went into the bedroom and came back with his winter boots and a plastic bag with bread and sausage in it. She said nothing, and she did not cry. In this family, Valentina thought, the women never cried in front of a man who was going out the door, because it brought him back worse, and the men never asked why.
“What do they want with you?” said Valentina. “You’re a pump man.”
“They want us at the installations, Mama. At the gates. Bekzatov’s people. In case.” He did up the jacket. “The council’s lending the police. NurGaz is paying. It’ll be a few nights.”
“In case of what?”
Sergei did not answer. He did not know. Nobody in the city knew yet what in case meant. In case Talas sent soldiers. In case Talas had no soldiers to send. In case of the Kazakhs, who were reading the same paper in Astana. In case of anything.
Katya had got down off the windowsill. She stood in the kitchen doorway in her socks, looking at her father’s orange back.
Valentina pushed herself up from the table and went to the drawer under the window where she kept string and buttons and the things that had no other place. She took out a strip of white ribbon, the cheap kind, from a box of Easter candles, and her scissors, and her needle with the white cotton still in it.
“Come here.”
“Mama, I’m late—”
“Come here.”
He came. She sewed the ribbon onto the front of his jacket, on the left side, above the pocket, with four quick stitches. It took a moment. He stood bent over so she could reach, as he had stood when he was eight and she buttoned his school coat.
“What’s that for?” said Katya.
Valentina bit off the thread.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The Iradi women in the next block do it. When the men go out. White is for luck.” She patted the ribbon flat. “I saw them do it in 1992, when the men went out to the barricades, and then most of those men came home.” She looked up at her son. “So.”
Sergei touched the ribbon. Then he kissed his mother on the top of her head, and his wife on the mouth, and his daughter on both cheeks, and went out. They heard him going down the five flights of stairs, two at a time.
The radio went back to music. Lena turned the gas on again under the pot. Katya went back to the windowsill and did not take out her telephone.
From the window you could see the road to the refinery, and on it, already, a line of headlights. Orange jackets were coming out of every block in the microdistrict, walking fast, some running. At the refinery gate the floodlights came on all at once, white, though it was not yet dark.
“Babushka,” said Katya, after a while, still looking out.
“What.”
“What do they call it in Iradi? The ribbon.”
Valentina thought.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never asked.” She turned the radio off. “You ask. You speak it.”
Katya was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, and said, to the window, to the flares, to the lines of men going down the road in the dusk, a word in Iradi that her grandmother did not understand. It was the only word she said, and she did not mix it with anything.