This Is Not Civilization Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  1

  2

  3

  II

  4

  5

  III

  6

  7

  8

  9

  IV

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  V

  18

  19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Rosenberg

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-38601-7

  ISBN-10: 0-618-38601-7

  eISBN 978-0-547-56166-0

  v2.0714

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  for Michelle

  Gurbette geçen ömür ömür değildir.

  Time spent in a foreign land

  is not a part of one’s life.

  —Turkish proverb

  I

  1

  THE IDEA OF using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor one. Anarbek Tashtanaliev, the manager of the cheese factory, had been inspired by a Moscow news broadcast. From Russia the television signal crossed the Kazakh steppes, was beamed to Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, and then relayed up and over the Tien Shan range and into desolate pockets of the new nation. If the Central Asian weather was favorable, the forgotten village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka received the world news. As a result, one Wednesday Anarbek discovered that the Chinese had successfully used taped videos of fornicating bears to coax pandas to breed. The possibility of increased productivity based on a regimen of bovine erotica seemed promising. And the scheme had the single merit of all brilliant ideas: it was obvious.

  Anarbek purchased dated Soviet video equipment across the Kazakh border in the Djambul bazaar. He kept factory workers on a twenty-four-hour watch to record, on tape, the next time the bulls went at it. But the workers had no luck that fall. In the spring he sent his employees up the shepherd hill next to the reservoir with an order to film copulating sheep. Thirty days later they had recorded over four and a half hours of tape. The following summer they projected this film each night, in color, onto the factory walls, for the enjoyment of the cows.

  The animals were indifferent to the lusty films, and the scheme cost the failing cheese factory a month’s wages. By the end of the winter only eleven Ala Tau cows and two bony Aleatinsky bulls remained. Production had ceased.

  Anarbek managed the only collective in the mountain village. During the lean years of glasnost and perestroika, and the optimistic but still lean years of independence, Anarbek had watched his veterinarian pack up for Russia, the feed shipments dwindle, the wormwood climb the concrete walls, the electricity fail, the plate coolers rust, the cows die, and his workers use their lunch hour to hawk carrots and cabbage in the village bazaar. The cheese factory no longer produced cheese. Yet every week in the factory’s old sauna, raising a glass of vodka, wearing only a towel wrapped around his bulging stomach, Anarbek told his friends, “We’re still making a profit.”

  He was well aware it was false money. Amid the collapse of Communism, in the extended bureaucratic mess of privatization, the new government continued to support the state-owned collective. A sudden change in the village name had caused the oversight. With a burst of post-independence pride, an official had decreed Soviet Kirovka henceforth be called by its Kyrgyz name, Kyzyl Adyr. Now nobody knew what to call it (Kyzyl Adyr? Kirovka? Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka? Kirovka-Kyzyl Adyr?). The capital could not keep up with such details. The village appeared by different names on scattered government lists, and the factory had yet to be privatized. The machinery had stopped, but the Communist salaries kept coming.

  Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka was a cosmopolitan village isolated in the mountains of northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Anarbek’s neighbors were mostly fair-skinned Kyrgyz, but also included Russians desperate to repatriate, and Kurds, and Uzbeks, and the Koreans whose grandparents Stalin had exiled to Central Asia. Everyone benefited from the government oversight. For Anarbek was generous; he knew the money was neither rightfully his nor the factory’s, so he kept on his original thirteen workers, whose families depended on their continuing salaries. The employees showed up at the factory each morning, sat, chatted, and drank endless cups of chai.

  Everyone in the village understood that the cows were barren and dying and that the cheese factory produced no cheese. But what good would come of reporting it? Money that did not find its way out of Bishkek would sink into the pockets of the minister of finance, an official rumored to drive a Mercedes-Benz at excessive speed through the streets of the capital, weaving between potholes, honking at donkey carts, trying to run over the poor. A Mercedes-Benz! While the people of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka suffered! For the village, money mistakenly sent from the capital was money they deserved. Anarbek, after all, was a modern, educated Soviet man—he had studied management one summer in Moscow—and the village had confidence he could still turn things around.

  On a Wednesday evening, in the heat of the factory sauna, he defended his fertility scheme to six of his neighbors and coworkers. The men nodded in complicit agreement. Only Dushen, the assistant manager of the cheese factory and a man too practical for his own good, broke the spell with a question grounded in reality: “Maybe the quality of projection was bad?”

  The men clicked their tongues and shook their wet heads; two of them leaned over and spit onto the hot stones. The spit sizzled into thin wisps of steam. Anarbek sighed. Independence should have been a time of optimism, yet it seemed that brave ideas for improvement were consistently ruined by such complications.

  Radish, the head doctor of the village hospital, opened the sauna door, and a stiff gust of air, fresh as a cool river, flowed into the room. Entering, the doctor banged the door behind him, turned his bare jellylike chest around, and announced, “News, my friends! News! The minister of education, from Talas, came by this morning.”

  “That son of a bitch,” said Bulut, the town’s appointed mayor, its akim.

  “Screw the whole lot of them,” said Dushen.

  “Send them back to Moscow,” Anarbek said. “Who needs them!”

  He and his friends continued abusing government officials until Radish yelled over them. “Listen. A word! A word! He has offered the village an American.”

  “An American?” the men exclaimed in chorus, and burst into laughter.

  “An organization called Korpus Mira.” The glint in the doctor’s eyes quieted Anarbek. “The government of Kyrgyzstan has ordered thirty Americans. They’ll distribute them across the country. To hospitals. Schools. Factories like yours.”

  “What do they want from us?” Anarbek asked.

  “How much do we have to pay them?” Dushen demanded.

  “This is the thing,” Radish explained. “They don’t want any money. It’s a humanitarian organization.”

  The words humanitarian organization, pronounced in Radish’s halting Russian, sounded like fancy foreign machinery. Nobody in the village had ever used words like those before.

  “American spies!” yelled the t
own akim.

  “Thieves,” said Dushen. “They’ll take us over.”

  The men shook their heads in doubt, but Anarbek was intrigued. He mused on the inconceivable idea of America—of William Clinton and his friend Al Gore, of the war in the Persian Gulf, of Steven Seagal breaking necks, of the busty Madonna who sang “Like a Virgin”—this America, their new provider. He stepped down to the rack of hot coals, grabbed a cup of water, and, using the tips of his fingers, splashed the rocks over and over until they hissed. A wave of steam swirled into a choking cloud and raised the temperature in the cramped room. The men stepped down to the lower wooden benches. Bent over, covered in sweat, they rubbed their legs and shoulders, and two of them moaned pleasurably, “Ahy, ahy, ahy,” at the heat.

  In the center of the floor Anarbek crouched on his haunches next to Radish. “Did you accept this American?”

  “I cannot accept,” the doctor explained, snapping his undershorts. “We, our village—all of us must demonstrate our willingness to receive this gift.”

  “Maybe,” joked Dushen, “she will be a beautiful long-legged blonde.” He too squatted on the tar-stained floorboards and hawked a gob of mucus between the wooden beams. “Like Sharon Stone.”

  “There’s a thought,” said the akim. “Or maybe it will be some wealthy man who will marry one of our daughters and take her to America.”

  “Owa!” the men agreed, and some of them repeated, “America.”

  Radish said, “They want you to find a place to house the American. When she gets here, she will work at the factory, teaching us English. Think! The economic journals. Communication with businessmen. From any country. From around the world. New machinery you can order. New products.” He was waving his arms and turning from man to man. “This World Health Organization sends the hospital a new piece for the x-ray, and we cannot even attach it. The instructions on those damn things come in English!”

  Anarbek leaned forward into the steam and belched. “I will find a house for the American.”

  The head doctor smiled at his offer and nodded twice. “But that’s not all,” he added. “We must appoint one of us in town to be the Kyrgyz host family. They will—in a way—adopt her.”

  One by one the men lifted their chins, and the eyes of each, in turn, settled on Anarbek. This was his factory, this was his sauna, they were his guests; they were yielding to his decision. He stood up.

  “I will be the father of the American,” he said, and patted his wet, hairy chest. The ripples of fat absorbed the blow in a slapping sound, a note of confidence.

  “An American,” someone mumbled. The men leaned back, and for the first time any of them could remember, there was silence in the sauna, deep and pure. For two minutes nobody moved. Stomachs rose and fell in the thinning steam.

  Dushen spoke up. “Who could have imagined?”

  “The world is changing,” Anarbek said, thinking of his dying cows, of faulty video equipment, and of fornicating pandas in China.

  The next evening, in the shaded courtyard of his home—flanked by two long buildings, the tea bed, the stone wall, and the high steel fence—Anarbek fanned the flames of his grill, waiting for Lola. The coals had reached the perfect temperature for the shashlyk: the ashes gleamed red when he waved the sheet of cardboard at them.

  “Lola!” he shouted. “Lola, they’re ready!”

  He could not get used to her delays. In twenty-one years of marriage, Baiooz, his first wife, had mastered the art of anticipating his every need. She had always been a step ahead of him. How many times had he asked her to do something, and she had told him, with her feline smile, that it had already been done? Anarbek fanned the coals again, this time more violently, then stopped and swallowed. He still could not believe Baiooz was dead.

  “Lola!”

  It was true what his friends said: no good can come from a beautiful woman. He dropped the cardboard, lifted his heavy frame from a low squat, and stomped toward the kitchen door. Just as he opened his mouth, Lola appeared in the doorway, carrying the silver tray of marinated mutton cubes, speared on metal skewers and covered in slivers of onions.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was slicing more tomatoes,” Lola said. “I thought they were not enough for you. I know how much you eat.”

  He looked at her face, her fresh soft lips: twenty-two years old, less than half his age. An Indian scarf he had bought her covered her dark hair. In the mornings she tied her hair up into a ball and covered it, like this, but at night she brushed it out in long straight strokes. She was tall, as tall as he was, and her lithe body seemed capable of great athleticism. She always smelled of exotic fruit—her shampoo, her soap, perhaps. He hardly knew her.

  “The grill’s ready. The coals are red. We have to cook now, before we lose the heat.”

  She answered him with her haughty silence but brought the tray of skewers over to the tea bed. Their floppy-eared mutt, Sharyk, rose from his guard position next to the gate and scuttled toward the meat. Lola bent and smacked him on the behind. “Git!” The dog sprawled out, his head between his paws.

  “Make sure he doesn’t eat these,” she warned.

  Even in warning her voice was soft, so much softer than Baiooz’s had been. But he missed his first wife’s flutter of activity—her noise, her endless haranguing, her stubbornness. Lola listened to everything he said, did everything he demanded. What kind of wife was that?

  He placed the first six skewers on the grill, one by one, reminding himself how well Lola took care of Baktigul, his younger daughter. That was the important thing. And he was lucky to have a wife so soon. He leaned over the grill and closed his eyes in the smoke, shaking his head. As hard as he tried, six months into the marriage he could not reconcile this life with the last.

  Lola was his older daughter’s best friend. She and Nazira had grown up together. Anarbek could remember the two girls at Nazira’s eight-year name-day celebration. The family had picnicked on kielbasa and melons near the Kirovka River, cooling the fruit in the glacial water. He remembered one May Day festival when he had bought them both ice cream and had paid the village photographer to take their picture in the square by the statue of Lenin. They still had that photo: the two girls in flowery cotton dresses, ice cream running down their arms, Lenin’s hand extended above them saluting the mountains. Anarbek remembered a later summer, when he had worked at the Kara Boora region’s Young Pioneer Camp, in the foothills halfway to Talas. He had taught the girls how to ride horses. Nazira had climbed on readily, but Lola, at that time so short, so timid, could not get onto her horse. He had helped her, lifting her from behind, and she felt no heavier than a housecat.

  He opened his eyes and turned the shashlyk.

  When Baiooz had died last year, just after independence, the village mourned with him. But how long could a man with an eight-year-old daughter manage alone without a wife? By October a feverish search began for someone to replace her. With the news of her mother’s death Nazira returned from university in Naryn and took over the management of the house, displaying a maturity and expertise beyond her twenty years. She looked after Baktigul and did much to console Anarbek, but he had remained unsettled. He felt an urgency to give his daughter her own life. She must marry soon enough; she could not take care of them forever.

  Six months after Baiooz’s death, Nazira herself had proposed the solution: Anarbek should marry her oldest friend. Lola was twenty-one and had never left Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka; she was waiting to become a wife and mother. In an emotional plea, Nazira convinced Lola. They were almost related anyway, and what could be better than marrying the wealthiest man in the village? When Nazira informed Anarbek that Lola was willing, he was shocked. He could hardly tolerate his own daughter playing his matchmaker. He refused and, two weeks later, refused again more forcefully. By November, though, his loneliness, combined with Lola’s youthful beauty and Nazira’s stubborn insistence, changed his mind.

  “Why don’t you steal her?” Nazir
a had asked playfully.

  He had considered. Once their nomadic ancestors—the ancient Kyrgyz horsemen—had rampaged villages and stolen women. If the bride spent a night in a captor’s yurt, she belonged to him and could not return to her home. After the fall of Communism and with the rise of Kyrgyz nationalism, the tradition of wife stealing was resurfacing.

  “But those are old traditions,” he had finally told his daughter. “We’re a modern nation now. We did away with those ideas seventy years ago.”

  “It’s not a silly tradition,” argued Nazira. “It’s our heritage. Many people are doing it. Also, Ata, it’s romantic.”

  So Anarbek had followed his daughter’s advice. One wintry afternoon he spotted Lola walking back from the bazaar, carrying two kilograms of potatoes in a plastic sack. He pulled up to her in his tan Lada and cut the loud engine. She wore a long brown skirt that hugged her slim waist and a striped polyester blouse that showed off her broad shoulders. Without a word he grabbed her elbow and pulled her into the back seat of the car. She struggled. It occurred to him to let her go, but he reminded himself she was supposed to fight, that this was a sign of her honor. Before he slammed the door, he heard her gasp. His heart sank. But when he climbed into the front seat, he was uplifted by her muffled giggles, by the way she folded her arms across her chest and stared with calm resignation out the window. He promised himself he would treat her well. He brought her back along the dirt road, half a kilometer, to the house, avoiding the potholes hidden in the mud, driving as slowly as possible, as if the young woman were a delicate tea set he might break with a bump. At home he led her to the bedroom, where Nazira had prepared a meal of manti, a bottle of champagne, and the silk platok.

  Lola wore the scarf and spent the night. From then on she belonged to Anarbek: his captured virgin bride, his prize, his consolation. He offered her family a two-thousand-dollar kalytn—his ten-year savings—more than enough to uphold his reputation in the village.