Pillar
Vera Kim spoke four languages, and in the Kenkol valley in March 2009 she was paid to speak all of them at once.
Russian to the Gendarmerie surveyor, Captain Lukin, who spoke nothing else. Iradi to the two men from the tribal side, an old herder named Kalnazar and his grandson, who were there to see that the line went where the map said and no further. English to the two United Nations officers, a Uruguayan major and a Bangladeshi captain, who were there to see that everybody saw. And Korean to nobody, under her breath, to her grandmother, who had been dead for six years and who was the only person she had ever told the truth to without translating it first.
She was twenty-eight. She had a degree in philology from Talas State University and a job with the UN mission at Kara-Oi that paid in dollars. Her mother said it was the best job any Kim had ever had. Her grandmother would have said that it was a strange job for a Korean, standing in a field telling Iradis where Irad ended, and then would have laughed her short, dry laugh, and gone on peeling potatoes.
The pillars were concrete. They came up the valley road from Talas on a flatbed truck, lying down in rows like the dead after a battle. Each was a metre and a half tall, square, painted white, with a black number stencilled on two faces, and a steel pin set in the top that marked the exact point. The survey team set one wherever the line crossed a road, a track or a stream, and wherever it changed direction. Between the pillars, in the valleys, it ran straight. On the ridges above, where no truck could go, they built cairns of stones instead.
Vera found the pillars sad. She could not have said why. They were only concrete.
On the fourth day, the eleventh of March, they set pillar 1,147 at a bend in the Kenkol stream, a little above the Kara-Bulak crossing, on a flat of grey gravel. Captain Lukin took his readings and argued with the map, and the UN major checked his readings and argued with Lukin, and Vera translated the argument back and forth, slowly, until it ran out. The grandson and the Gendarmerie driver dug the hole together and set the pillar in it with concrete from a bag, and they all stood round and looked at it.
Then old Kalnazar went down to the stream.
He came back with water in his cupped hands, a little, carefully, the way you carry water for a horse that has been ill. He walked round the pillar once, sunwise, and poured the water at its foot. Then from his coat he took a twist of paper with dried juniper in it, and a box of matches, and his grandson took off his hat and held it to shelter the match from the wind. The juniper caught and smoked. The old man carried it round the pillar, once more, sunwise, and stood in front of it with the smoke going up from his hand into the cold air, and began to speak.
The UN major looked at Vera.
“What is he doing?”
Captain Lukin was looking at her too, in a different way. Lukin was from Nurzhan. He had a lot of opinions about the tribal side, and he had given her some of them in the truck. He did not need the old man translated. He could see what he was doing. He wanted to see what she would do.
Vera listened.
It was a bata, a blessing. She had heard a hundred of them, at weddings, at funerals, at the feasts of her Iradi neighbours in Nurzhan. She knew the shape of them, the way they began with the sky and the earth and came down to the particular thing, the house, the child, the horse. This one began with the sky and the earth. Then it came down to the stone, and the line.
She could translate it in two ways. She knew that at once, standing on the gravel with the juniper smoke in her nose. She could give the major a sentence, He is saying a traditional blessing, which was true, and polite, and would go in the major’s notebook and stay there. Or she could give him the words.
The words were not polite.
Her grandmother had come to the Chu valley in the autumn of 1937, in a cattle wagon from Vladivostok, at the age of nine.
She had told Vera about it only once, near the end, when she was in the hospital in Nurzhan and had stopped speaking Russian and spoke only Korean, an old Korean that Vera understood about half of. The wagon took thirty-two days. Her little brother died on the way and was put out beside the track somewhere in Kazakhstan, with the others who had died, because the train did not stop long. At the end of the line they were let out onto the steppe in the Chu valley in October, with nothing, and told to build a collective farm.
They dug holes in the ground and lived in them. The first winter, half the people from the wagon died.
Her grandmother did not die because an Iradi woman from the nearest village, a widow with five children of her own, came every week to the edge of the dugouts with a sack. In the sack was bread. Sometimes there was only a little. Sometimes, near the end of the winter, it was mostly bran. The Iradi woman never said anything. She left the sack and went away and came back the next week. Her grandmother never learned her name.
“So you will be good to them,” her grandmother had said in the hospital, in the old Korean, holding Vera’s wrist hard. “Always. Whatever they do. They are the people who brought the bread.”
Vera translated the bata word for word.
She said it in English, plainly, a little behind the old man, and did not soften anything.
Stone, you did not ask to be put here. Men put you here. Men with papers. Remember that it was men. The water of this stream has run here since before the first horse. It will run here after you have fallen down. Stone, when the papers are forgotten, and the men who wrote them are forgotten, the water will still be here. Do not think you are a mountain. You are a stone with a number on it. Let the herds go past you. Let the brides go past you. Let the dead go past you. Stand here if you must, but do not stand in anyone’s way.
The UN major wrote it in his notebook. The Bangladeshi captain did not write anything. He looked at the old man for a long time with an expression Vera could not read, and then, to everyone’s surprise, he bowed his head.
Captain Lukin said, in Russian, to her and not to anyone else: “You didn’t have to give them all of that.”
“He said all of that,” said Vera.
“You could have given them less.”
“Yes,” said Vera. “I could have.”
Lukin looked at her. Then he looked at the old man, who had finished and was putting his matches away. Then he looked at the pillar. After a moment he did a thing she had not expected. He took off his own cap, the Gendarmerie cap with the badge, and held it at his side until the last of the smoke had gone.
The next morning the survey team was to go higher, up the military road toward the Kenkol Pass, to look at the line where it left the valley and climbed toward the crest. The road was still under snow in places. They had two vehicles: the Gendarmerie truck and the white UN Land Cruiser. Vera was assigned to the Land Cruiser, as she had been every day.
At seven in the morning, as they were loading, Kalnazar’s grandson came down from the tribal side’s camp with a message. His grandfather was ill in the night. The cold, his chest. He wanted the interpreter. He wanted to say something to her, he said, in his own language, before the team went up.
The UN major looked at his watch. Then he said she should go, and catch them up with the truck. The truck was going later anyway.
So Vera walked up to the tribal camp with the grandson, and found the old man sitting up in his felt in the yurt, coughing, and perfectly cheerful, and not very ill at all.
“I wanted to give you something,” he said. “For yesterday.”
He gave her a twist of juniper in paper, like the one he had burned at the pillar.
“For your house,” he said. “You are from Nurzhan. In Nurzhan they have forgotten how to do this. Do it for your house.”
She did not know what to say. She said thank you. She sat with him and drank tea, because you cannot refuse tea, and it took an hour, because it always takes an hour.
She was still in the yurt when they heard it: one heavy, flat sound from higher up the valley, toward the pass. It rolled down between the mountains and came back from the other side, and then there was nothing, not even birds.
The anti-tank mine had been in the road since 1992, or since 2007; the reports could never agree. It was under the snow, at a place where the road had been cleared and checked the autumn before, and checked again, and found clean. The Land Cruiser was the first vehicle to pass that spring.
The Uruguayan major and the Bangladeshi captain were killed at once. Their names are on a stone at Kara-Oi, by the gate of the mission headquarters. Vera goes there every March, on the twelfth, and stands for a while, and goes back to work.
She still works for the mission. She has translated, by her own count, some hundreds of meetings of the Joint Liaison Committee and its sub-committees, and some hundreds of blessings, and one wedding across a line. She keeps the twist of juniper from Kalnazar on a shelf in her flat in Nurzhan, by her grandmother’s photograph. She has never burned it. She does not know the right words for it, in any of her languages.
Pillar 1,147 is still standing at the bend of the Kenkol stream. The herds go past it in May and October. The paint is coming off, and the number on the upstream face is almost gone. Someone, she does not know who, ties a white ribbon round its top every spring.