Switchyard
From the El-Choro post on the crest of the dam you could see three things: the reservoir behind, the gorge in front, and the switchyard below.
The reservoir was a long grey lake between brown mountains, and that winter it was lower than anyone had ever seen it. The water had gone down and down all through the dry autumn, leaving a wide bare shore of mud and stones the colour of ash. Under the water, and now under the mud, lay the old floor of the Toktogul valley, where the Kökjal had kept their winter camps until 1974. Asylbek Jumagul uulu’s grandfather had been born down there. When the water dropped, the old people of Ozgörüsh walked out across the mud to look for the foundations of their houses, and some of them found them.
The gorge went down from the dam toward the Fergana valley, narrow, very deep, with the river at the bottom white even in January.
And at the foot of the dam, on a ledge blasted out of the gorge wall, was the switchyard: a fenced field of steel towers, transformers, insulators and humming wire, where the power from the turbines was gathered up and sent away down the lines to the cities. The Gendarmerie held the switchyard. The El-Choro held the dam. The ceasefire agreement, which Asylbek had never read, apparently said that this was a temporary arrangement under international supervision. It had been temporary for sixteen months.
There were six riders at the post on the crest, two at a time in eight-hour watches, with a yurt for sleeping and a concrete hut that had been an inspection office. Asylbek had the night watch in January and February because he was twenty-six and unmarried and his name had been drawn. He did not mind the dark. He minded the cold, which came up off the reservoir ice at night and went through felt and sheepskin as if they were paper.
Below, in the switchyard, the Gendarmerie had a post too: a white cabin by the gate, with a light in the window and a stovepipe, and a searchlight on a pole that they turned on and off at intervals for no reason he could understand. At night there were usually two of them.
One of them watched him.
Asylbek did not know his name. He was young, thin, with a Russian fur hat with the flaps down, and he had binoculars, and every night at some point he came out of the cabin and stood by the fence and raised the binoculars and looked up the face of the dam at the El-Choro post. For a long time. Then he went back in.
The first time, Asylbek put his hand on his rifle. The third time, he raised his own binoculars, an old Soviet pair that had been his uncle’s, and looked back. He could see the boy quite clearly in the light from the cabin: a long nose, red with cold; a cigarette; a face that was bored, and young, and very tired.
They looked at each other through the binoculars for perhaps a minute. Then the boy lowered his, and lifted a hand, and went inside.
The power cuts began in the cities in December. Asylbek heard about them on the radio, on the Talas stations that still came through at night: rationing in Talas, four hours a day; rationing in Nurzhan; schools closed; old people dying in the cold in the blocks. The radio said it was the tribal side’s fault, because the tribal side held the dam and was stealing the water. The radio from the other side, from the camps, said it was the cities’ fault, because they had drained the reservoir all summer selling power to Kazakhstan and now there was none left. The UN engineers who came up once a month in a white Land Cruiser said it was the drought, and the glaciers, and the old turbines, and a great many other things, and that they would put it in their report.
Asylbek knew only that the water was low and the boy in the switchyard was cold.
In the second week of January the boy’s cabin lost its power.
It was a joke, in a way. He was sitting in the middle of one of the biggest switchyards in Central Asia, among wires carrying enough electricity for half a country, and his own cabin had no light. Something to do with the rationing, or a fuse, or an order from somebody in Tash-Kömür. The window went dark. The searchlight stopped. The stovepipe kept smoking, so they still had wood, but the cabin was black at night, a black box at the foot of the white dam, and the boy no longer came out with his binoculars.
On the third night Asylbek took the paraffin lamp from the inspection hut, lit it, and set it on the parapet of the dam, at the place directly above the cabin, where it could be seen from below.
He did not know why he did it. He told the others afterwards that it was so that the gendarmes could see the El-Choro were watching. This was partly true.
At about two in the morning the cabin door opened. The boy came out and stood by the fence and looked up at the lamp for a long time. Then he raised his hand.
After that the lamp went on the parapet every night, and every night, at some point, the boy came out and raised his hand.
In February the boy left something by the fence. Asylbek saw him do it through the binoculars: a small packet, wedged into the wire mesh at the corner of the switchyard where the service track came up to the foot of the dam. The track was in neither side’s ground, or both. Asylbek walked down it at dawn, slowly, with his rifle slung behind him and his hands where they could be seen. In the packet was a carton of cigarettes, American, the good kind they sold on the air base, and nothing else. No note.
He took it. The next night he left something in the same place: a round of kurut, the hard dried yoghurt his mother made, wrapped in a cloth, and a handful of dried apricots from Ozgörüsh.
They never spoke. They never came down to the fence at the same time. They left things in the wire, at dawn, at dusk, for six weeks: cigarettes, kurut, a tin of Russian condensed milk, a pair of wool socks from the Ozgörüsh market, a newspaper from Talas so old it was nearly history, a sheepskin hat with flaps, better than the Russian fur one; in the last week, from the boy, the Russian fur hat itself, as if in exchange; and once a bar of Mexican chocolate with chilli in it that Asylbek did not like at all and ate anyway.
In March a horse came down the gorge.
It was an El-Choro horse, a young grey mare belonging to a Kökjal family camped in the hills above the reservoir. She had broken her tether in a storm and wandered for two days and come down the service track in the night, and in the morning she was inside the switchyard. She had got in through a gap in the fence where the snow had brought down a post, and she was standing among the transformers, eating the dry grass between the concrete footings, with forty thousand volts over her head.
From the crest of the dam Asylbek watched the gendarmes come out of the cabin. There were three of them that morning. One of them had a rifle and raised it, not at the mare, at the dam, at the El-Choro post, because a horse from the tribal side was inside the switchyard and nobody had a rule for that. Asylbek’s partner on the watch put his own rifle up. For a moment everything on the face of the dam was very still.
Then the thin boy pushed the gendarme’s rifle down with the flat of his hand.
He said something. He went back into the cabin, came out with a length of rope, and walked slowly through the transformers to the grey mare, talking to her. Asylbek could not hear the words. He could see the boy’s breath. The mare lifted her head and looked at him and did not run. He put the rope round her neck and led her, at a walk, back out through the gap in the fence and up the service track to the corner where they left the packets. There he tied the rope to the wire, loosely, with a bow, the way you tie a horse you mean somebody else to untie. He went back to the cabin without looking up.
Asylbek walked down and untied her. She was cold and frightened and not hurt. He led her up the track, across the crest of the dam, and up into the hills, and gave her back to the family, and told them she had come back on her own.
In July the Kurultai on the Aksay Plateau approved the Toktogul protocol. The Kökjal stood aside: they would not lay the whip against it, but they would not give their consent to it either, because it did not give them back their valley. The line moved. The dam, the reservoir, the town of Toktogul and the gorge passed to the Special Economic Zone. The El-Choro rode away from the crest of the dam on the morning of the twentieth of July, in a column, with the old men of Ozgörüsh standing at the roadside, and a Gendarmerie company drove up from Tash-Kömür the same afternoon and took over the inspection hut.
Asylbek left the paraffin lamp on the parapet when he went. It was not lit. He left it at the place directly above the cabin.
He never knew the boy’s name. He has thought of finding out, since. He could ask; there are people at the crossings who know people. But he has thought about it and decided that if he knew the name he would have to know other things too: where the boy was from, and what he thought about the Kökjal and the valley under the water, and whether he was the one who wrote in the Gendarmerie logbook for those six weeks, every night, nothing to report.
He would rather not. He has a Russian fur hat with the flaps worn thin that a gendarme left in the wire at the foot of the Toktogul dam in the winter of 2009. It is worse than any hat he could buy. He wears it every winter in the hills above the reservoir, when he goes out across the ice to his family’s old ground in the years the water is low.