One to One Hundred Thousand
The maps had been printed in 1983 by the Main Administration of Geodesy and Cartography of the USSR Council of Ministers, and stamped secret in the top right-hand corner, and then, at some point in the 1990s, stamped again declassified in a different ink. They were the best maps anyone had. They were the only maps both sides would accept, because they had been made by neither.
Major Daniyar Kudashev had forty-one sheets to get through. On the morning of the ninth of September he was on sheet thirty-four, and it had taken three days.
The talks were held in a conference hotel on the southern edge of Bishkek, among apple orchards, with a view of the Ala-Too. The political delegations met upstairs, in the large hall with the flags. Bektur Zhumabek uulu sat at one end of the long table for the Front, and the man from Toktarov’s office sat at the other, and the Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz observers sat along the sides and wrote everything down and said almost nothing, each one careful, every morning, to put on the record that his presence did not affect his government’s claim. The UN mediators went up and down the room like waiters.
The military track met downstairs, in a room that had been a restaurant. The tables had been pushed together into one long table and covered with green baize, and on the baize lay the maps.
There were four of them on each side. Kudashev for the administration, with a captain from the Gendarmerie and two men from the new State Defence Corps who did not know how to read a contour line. For the Front, three clan commanders and a man named Kaimbek Ashyraly uulu, who had been a lieutenant of engineers in the territorial defence force until March of that year and had then gone up into the mountains with his whole company and his whole company’s trucks.
In 1992 Kudashev and Kaimbek had dug trenches together in the snow outside Kobozev, under the same captain, eating from the same pot. Neither of them mentioned this on the first day. On the second day Kaimbek said, as they sat down, “Your hands still shake,” and Kudashev said, “Yours still don’t,” and that was the only time either of them mentioned it.
The rule was simple, and the UN man had written it on a whiteboard on the first morning: The line shall follow the positions held by the forces of each party at 00:00 hours on 1 September 2007. Each side had brought its own record of where its men had been at midnight on the first. Where the records agreed, a line was drawn. Where they disagreed, the two sides argued, and then a line was drawn.
It was drawn with a pencil. A Koh-i-Noor, grade 4H, very hard, sharpened to a point with a razor blade. The UN man had insisted on the hardest pencil in Bishkek, so that the line would be fine and leave no room for argument.
On the first day Kudashev had done the arithmetic, because he was an engineer by training and could not help it. At one to one hundred thousand, one millimetre on the map is one hundred metres on the ground. The finest 4H line, drawn carefully on good paper, is about a fifth of a millimetre wide.
Twenty metres. Every line they drew was twenty metres wide on the ground, and nobody would ever know which side of those twenty metres it ran.
On the second day he redid the arithmetic, because the pencil was blunter than he had thought. Forty metres.
Sheet thirty-four covered a stretch of the Talas valley foothills where the plain runs up into the first folds of the Alatau, on the Kenkol fan. It showed a scatter of winter houses, a stream, two tracks, and a hamlet with eleven buildings marked in black, named on the map in Russian letters Dzhar-Bash. Jar-Bash. Head of the gully.
The records agreed about almost all of it. The Gendarmerie had held the plain. The Front had held the hills. Between them, at midnight on the first of September, there had been about a kilometre of ground that nobody had held, and the line would run through the middle of it. Kudashev drew it, lightly, in pencil, and Kaimbek watched him draw it and nodded, and the UN man initialled the corner of the sheet.
Then Kaimbek put his finger on the map, a little above the line, and said: “That’s a spring.”
There was a blue circle on the map, very small, with a blue thread running down from it to the stream. Beside it, in the tiny italic of Soviet cartographers, it said rodn. For rodnik. Spring.
“It’s on your side,” said Kudashev.
“It’s on our side,” Kaimbek agreed. “And that”—he moved his finger, a millimetre, below the line—”is the graveyard.”
Kudashev looked. Below the line, on the administration’s side, was a small rectangle with a cross-hatch in it, the Soviet sign for a cemetery. It was perhaps three hundred metres from the spring.
“Jar-Bash buries its dead below the spring,” said Kaimbek. “It always has. They carry the body down from the village, past the spring, and they stop at the spring and wash their hands, and then they go down to the graves. Then they come back up past the spring and wash again. That’s how it’s done there.” He took his finger off the map. “With your line, the spring is ours and the graves are yours. So now a family from Jar-Bash will wash their hands on our side, and cross your checkpoint with the body, and bury their father in the Special Economic Zone, and cross back, and wash again on our side. And at your checkpoint someone will want to see the dead man’s passport.”
One of the Defence Corps men laughed. Nobody else did.
They argued about it for most of the morning. Not angrily. Kudashev had been in angry rooms, and this was not one. It was more like two old carpenters arguing about a joint.
If they moved the line down, below the graveyard, the administration lost a strip of pasture and a track that its patrols used. If they moved it up, above the spring, the Front lost the spring, and the village would have to come down to the administration’s side for water. They could make a loop. The line could bend down around the graveyard like a finger, and leave it on the Front’s side. But then it would be a salient, and salients have to be watched, and a salient around a graveyard would be watched by two sets of men with rifles, all the time, over the dead.
At twelve they broke for lunch. Kudashev did not eat. He went out into the hotel orchard and smoked, which he had stopped doing in 1995, with a cigarette bummed from the Kazakh observer’s driver. The apples were ripe. Wasps were working the fallen ones in the long grass.
Kaimbek came out after a while and stood next to him and did not smoke.
“You know Jar-Bash?” said Kudashev.
“My wife’s mother is buried there.”
Kudashev nodded. He had thought it would be something like that.
“In 1992,” said Kaimbek, looking at the mountains, “outside Kobozev, there was that boy from Talas. The one with the accordion. You remember?”
“Erik.”
“Erik.” Kaimbek nodded. “We buried him where he fell. There was no time. We marked it with his rifle. Afterwards, when it was over, his mother came out from Talas to find him, and nobody could find the place. The ground was all dug over. All the snow had melted.” He was quiet for a moment. “She walked up and down that field for three days.”
Kudashev finished the cigarette.
“I’m not moving the line,” he said. “I can’t. I have instructions. Every metre is a metre.”
“I know.”
“But I’m an engineer. I can draw badly.”
Kaimbek turned his head and looked at him.
After lunch they went back to sheet thirty-four. Kudashev took the 4H pencil from the UN man’s tray, looked at it, and put it back. He took his own pencil out of his breast pocket instead, an ordinary HB from a stationery stall in the Osh bazaar, a soft one, with a worn point, and he redrew the line through the kilometre of no man’s land below Jar-Bash.
He drew it carefully, the way he had been taught at the institute in 1988, with the pencil held upright and the paper turned to meet it. Where the line passed between the spring and the graveyard it went soft and grey and a little thick, as soft pencil does on paper, about as wide as the blue thread of the stream.
The UN man leaned over and looked at it for a long time.
“That’s not very precise, Major,” he said.
“No,” said Kudashev. “Soviet paper. It takes the graphite badly.”
The UN man looked at Kaimbek. Kaimbek looked at the map. Then the UN man shrugged, the shrug of a man with seven more sheets to get through before the political delegations met at five, and initialled the corner.
On the ground, a soft HB line at one to one hundred thousand is about a hundred metres wide. It is wide enough for a spring, a path and a graveyard, and for a family carrying a body down from a village to walk the whole way without coming out of the line at either side.
When the joint survey teams came to mark the line on the ground, in the summer of 2009, they reached sheet thirty-four in July. They found the pencil line on the map, soft and grey between the spring and the graves, and argued about it for a day, and in the end set no pillar there at all, and wrote in their report Line indeterminate on source map, to be referred to the Joint Liaison Committee. The Joint Liaison Committee meets monthly at Kara-Oi. It has not yet reached Jar-Bash.
Kudashev retired from the State Defence Corps in 2013 as a lieutenant colonel. Kaimbek Ashyraly uulu still lives in the hills above the Talas valley, and is said to be a judge of the clan court there. They have not met again.
The families of Jar-Bash still bury their dead below the spring, and wash their hands on the way down, and wash them again on the way back, and nobody asks them for any passports at all.