Not for Sale
My mother had not been up the Kara-Unkur valley since the summer of 2007, and she said she did not intend to go again. She said this often, in the tone of a woman explaining the price of something she had decided not to buy. The road was bad. The crossing took all morning. Her brother came down once a year for the holidays, which was enough. Her knees were not what they had been.
In August 2011 the talks at Kara-Oi broke down. You will remember it if you are Iradi. If you are not, I am not the person to explain it. There are better accounts, by people who understand the Joint Liaison Committee. I will say only that for a few weeks that summer it had seemed possible that the line might be talked away. Then the clan delegation walked out of the room over a fraction, and the radio played the same statement from both sides all evening, and it was not possible any more.
In October, on the morning the walnut harvest opened in the forest above Arslanbob, my mother came out of her bedroom in her good coat and her walking shoes, with an empty cloth bag under her arm, and said she was going up for the walnuts.
“Mama. It’s four hundred kilometres. Your knees—”
“My knees,” said my mother, “can sit in a bus.”
We took the night bus from Talas to Tash-Kömür and a marshrutka from Tash-Kömür along the farm belt to Bazar-Korgon. She slept most of the way with her head on my shoulder. I did not. I looked out of the window at the dark and thought about the bridge, which I had crossed every year since 2007 to see my uncle and she had not crossed once.
At the bridge there was a proper building now, with a flag and a computer, and a queue. My mother stood in it without complaining. When we reached the window the gendarme asked her name, and she gave it, the registered one, the one with the Russian ending, the one on her pension book. Then he asked her business.
“Walnuts,” she said.
He looked at her empty bag and let her through.
The four hundred metres of road beyond the building were exactly as I had always found them: grey, empty, the ditch running beside them, walnut leaves on the tarmac. She stopped halfway and stood for a long time.
“My father stood about here,” she said. “In 1974, when I went down to Talas to study. He walked me as far as here and went home.” She looked up the road at the stone hut and the riders at the bend. “It’s nobody’s now. Did you know that? Nobody’s.”
“I know, Mama.”
“I didn’t think you did,” she said, and walked on.
At the bend a young rider with an exercise book asked her name. She gave it in the other form, Japarkul kyzy, her father’s name, which I had never once heard her use in Talas. The rider wrote it down, looked at it, looked at her, and said, “You’re Mamyrbek’s sister.” It was not a question. He got off his horse and walked beside her, leading it, all the way up to the first houses.
She stayed four days in the forest above the village with her brother’s family, on their plot, sleeping in a felt tent under the walnut trees as she had done every autumn until she was twenty. I had to go back to Talas for my classes. When I came back up on the Friday to fetch her she had walnut-black hands to the wrist, the way every child in the valley has them in September, and she had not looked so well in years.
Her brother’s family gave her a sack to take down. Not her cloth bag. A full jute sack, forty kilos, the best of their plot, the thin-shelled kind. It took two of my cousins to carry it to the riders’ post.
“Sell it in the bazaar,” my uncle said. “You’ll get a good price this year. They say the Uzbeks are paying well.”
My mother looked at the sack, and then at him.
“No,” she said.
At the bridge the gendarme on the window was the same one as on Monday. He looked at the sack, and at my mother’s black hands, and at the form, and asked her what she intended to do with forty kilos of walnuts.
“Give them away,” said my mother.
He said that if she intended to sell them in the bazaar there was a form. She said that she did not. He said that if she was giving them away there was no form for that. She said that in that case she would not trouble him with it. He looked at her for a long moment. I think he was trying to decide whether she was mocking him. She was not. Then he stamped the paper and lifted the pole by hand.
She gave him the first handful.
He did not know what to do. He held them in his palm, five walnuts, still with a little black on them from her fingers. Then he put them in his jacket pocket and said, “Thank you, apa,” and went back into his building quickly, as if someone might have seen.
She gave walnuts away all the way through Bazar-Korgon. To the women in the dried-fruit rows. To the old men in front of the chaikhana, who knew her family and asked after her brother and told her she was a fool and took them. To the boys hanging round the marshrutka stand. To a family of Uzbek traders who were buying by the tonne and who laughed and then, when they saw she meant it, stopped laughing and took a handful each and thanked her in Uzbek, and she thanked them back in Uzbek, which I had not known she still spoke.
At the far end of the walnut rows, one trader, an old man with a ledger who was weighing walnuts into paper cones for the Tash-Kömür buses, would not take hers.
“I buy walnuts, apa,” he said. “I don’t take them.”
“These aren’t for sale,” said my mother.
He looked at her for a long time. He was, I learned afterwards, a man called Abdukadyr Yusupov, and his daughter had married up the valley in 2007, and he had not been past the bridge since. Then he nodded slowly, took one walnut from her, only one, and cracked it in his palm against another, the way traders do, and ate it standing there.
“Arslanbob,” he said. “The Kuchkar plots. Or near them.”
“Near them,” said my mother.
He wrapped the rest of her handful, the ones she had held out to him, in a paper cone from his stack, and gave them back to her for the bus. The paper was old and soft and grey. I did not notice until we were on the night bus, somewhere above the Fergana Gateway, with my mother asleep against my shoulder, that it was a photocopy. Part of a map. There were three faded lines on it, green and orange and blue, and across the back, where the bus’s reading light shone through, strips of yellowed tape where pieces of it had once been joined.
I do not know where he got it. I have thought about it since, and I am glad I did not ask.
That is the end of the stories. Twelve kilometres up, twelve down: the line is still there, and the pillars, and the crossings, and the men who write down names on both sides. Nobody has sold Irad. Nobody has bought it. It is not, as far as I can tell, any closer to being whole. I wanted to write something that would end better than that, and I could not.
My mother died in the spring of 2014, at home, in Talas. She asked to be buried in the valley. It took the family nine days to get the papers to bring her up the road, through the bridge at the foot of the hills, past the place where her father had stood, and up through the walnut trees to the old graveyard above the river. She had wanted to go there all along, and had told me, every time, that she never would.
I walked behind her the whole way. At the building I gave them my name, and at the bend I gave them my name again. I did not mind. It was the same name both times.