Mother Leaven
The letter from the archeparchy came up the valley on Leaven Thursday, in the saddlebag of the post rider, together with a sack of flour, two tins of lamp oil and a calendar for a year that was already a quarter gone.
Father Yuhanna Kalmurza uulu read it standing in the door of the yurt chapel, with his hands still white from the dough. It was short. It was addressed to all clergy of the archeparchy and the eparchies, and it said that the Church of Irad stood with no faction in the present troubles; that priests were to minister to all the faithful without distinction; and that no priest was to bless arms, banners or armed men, or to permit the holy things to be used to give the colour of the Church to any party. It was signed by the archbishop’s own hand, which Father Yuhanna knew because the signature was crooked. The archbishop had arthritis.
He folded the letter and put it inside his cassock and went back to the dough.
The malka of the upper Chatkal had been in the same pot for as long as anyone could say. It was a wooden pot, walnut, black with age, its lid tied on with a thong, and it lived in a nest of white felt in a corner of the chapel yurt, and when the clan moved to the summer pastures it went on a white horse at the head of the line. The pot was not old. Pots break. Felt rots. Horses die. The leaven was old. Every Leaven Thursday, every Holy Thursday, the priest of the upper valley took a little of the old leaven and worked it into new dough, and let it rise, and kept a piece back, and the new piece became the old piece, and nothing had been lost.
The old women said it went back to Janyl’s bread at the First Church. The Synod said that was a pious custom, not a doctrine. Father Yuhanna said nothing either way. He had been given the pot by the old priest of the valley in 1994, the year he was ordained, the old priest’s hands shaking, and in thirteen years he had never let it go cold.
This year the dough rose slowly. The chapel yurt was cold. Half the men of the valley had gone north.
They had gone in March, after the Front was formed: the young men, and some not so young, on the mountain horses, with the old rifles from under the floors of the winter houses. Some had gone to cut the railway. Some to ring the garrisons on the Talas road. The rest were waiting in the summer camps, not yet summer, for word. The word, when it came, would come from the Talas Alatau, from the Tanıp, from Bektur, who everyone said was a careful man and would not waste them.
They had gone because of the pasture decrees. In January the government in Talas had issued papers that put the Chatkal summer pastures up for lease to companies. Nobody in the valley had heard of the companies. Then in February the other papers came out, from Nurzhan, the treaties, and the Chatkal was on those too, in a colour, under a neighbouring country’s name. After that nobody in the valley needed to be persuaded of anything.
Father Yuhanna’s own nephew had gone. So had the son of the woman who kept the chapel felt clean, and both sons of the man who brought the milk for the Qurbana. On Sundays the chapel was full of women and old men and very small boys, and the singing was thinner, and higher, and he found he could not look at the empty place on the men’s side without losing his line.
On the morning of St. Gewargis the riders came back down.
St. Gewargis rides a white horse on the icons and kills a black dragon that some of the old people still call by another name. On his day, the twenty-third of April, every priest in the mountains blesses the horses before the spring migration. It is the oldest feast in the valley after Janyl’s. The horses are brought to the chapel at dawn, washed, with white ribbons in their manes, and the priest walks down the line with water and milk and juniper smoke, and touches each horse on the forehead, and says its name.
That morning there were more horses than he had seen in years. The camps had emptied. The men who had gone north had sent word that the Front was moving on Talas, and the men who had been waiting had come down out of the camps in the night to be blessed before they went. There were a hundred and forty horses in the meadow below the chapel, and on most of them a man, and across the back of most of the men a rifle.
The headman of the upper valley, Ashyrbek, a cousin of his mother’s, came to the door of the chapel yurt.
“Kashysh,” he said. “We’re ready.”
Father Yuhanna stood in the doorway with the bowl of water in his hands. He could feel the letter inside his cassock, against his chest, folded in four.
“Tell them to get down,” he said.
“Kashysh—”
“Tell them to get down off the horses and take the rifles off their backs and lay them on the ground. Over there, by the wall of the sheepfold. Then I’ll come down.”
Ashyrbek looked at him for a long time. Then he turned and walked down the meadow, and Father Yuhanna watched him going from man to man, and watched the men turn their heads to look up at the chapel, and he did not move from the doorway.
It took a long time. Some of them argued. One young man from the lower camps rode away altogether, angrily, and did not come back. But in the end they got down, and the rifles went onto the grass by the sheepfold wall in a long untidy heap, like firewood, and the men stood at their horses’ heads with nothing in their hands.
Then Father Yuhanna came down.
He did it as he always did it. Water, then milk, then smoke. He walked down the long line of horses, and dipped the branch of juniper in the bowl and shook it over each horse’s head, and touched each horse on the forehead with his wet hand, and asked its name, and said it. Ak-Boz. Kara-Too. Jeyren. Sur-Kök. He blessed a hundred and thirty-nine horses that morning. He did not bless a single man. The men stood at the heads of their horses with their hands empty and their eyes on the ground, and when the water fell on the horses it fell on the men as well, of course, because water does, and he could not have prevented that if he had wanted to, and he did not try.
He did not look at the heap of rifles.
When he had finished, the men took the rifles back, quietly, each man looking for his own, and mounted, and the line began to move off down the valley toward the north road. Father Yuhanna stood in the meadow with the empty bowl.
The last rider in the line was his nephew Temirbek.
He was nineteen. He had been at the Front’s camps since March and had come down only for the night. He stopped his horse by the priest, and leaned down, and said, very low, so that no one would hear:
“Uncle. Give me some of the malka.”
Father Yuhanna looked up at him.
“For the road,” said Temirbek. “Mother says the leaven goes with a bride, it goes with a priest, it goes with the herd to the summer pastures. She says it goes where the people go. Well.” He looked down the valley at the line of riders. “The people are going.”
The malka is given. It is never sold. It is given to brides, and to new priests, and to the head of each family when the clan divides its herds. To lose it is a bad omen, the worst. It was not on the list in the archbishop’s letter. The archbishop’s letter said arms, banners and armed men. It did not say bread.
Father Yuhanna went back up to the chapel yurt. He lifted the walnut pot out of its nest of white felt, untied the thong, and took out the piece of new leaven, still soft from Thursday’s dough. He broke off a pinch about the size of the top joint of his thumb and wrapped it in a square of clean white felt, and tied the felt with white thread, and carried it down to the meadow.
Temirbek put it inside his shirt, against his skin, where it would stay warm.
“Keep it alive,” said Father Yuhanna. “Feed it flour and water. Don’t let it freeze. When you come home, give it to your mother. Don’t give it to anyone else.”
“And if I don’t come home?”
The priest put his hand on the horse’s forehead, not the boy’s.
“Then it’s in the felt,” he said. “Someone will find it. They’ll know what it is.”
Temirbek rode off after the others. Father Yuhanna stood in the meadow until the last of them had gone over the brow of the hill toward the north road and the sound of the hooves had stopped.
Then he went back up to the chapel, put the walnut pot back into its felt, tied the lid, and took the archbishop’s letter out of his cassock. He smoothed it flat on the little table by the altar, under the lamp, and read it again from beginning to end. He was a careful man and did not wish to have misunderstood anything.
He had not. Arms, banners and armed men.
He folded the letter again and put it away. Then he washed his hands, which were still a little white from the flour, and went to say the morning office, alone, in the cold yurt, for the people who were going.
Temirbek came home in September, after the ceasefire, with a healed wound in his shoulder and a beard. He brought the felt with him. The leaven inside it had been fed on Front camp flour and the water of six rivers, and had gone sour twice and come back, and he gave it to his mother as he had been told. His mother keeps it still, in a pot of her own, in the lower Chatkal, on the tribal side of the line.
The priests of the Chatkal say that there are now two malkas in the upper valley where there was one. They say it in the way they say most things about the leaven, which is half as a joke, and half not.