Two Stops Past Siberia

Some days are just so good, it’s hard to keep them to myself.

My dad told me last night that he was going to the mountains, and offered to take me with. This morning, around nine or so he came into my room to get a vest and ask me if I still wanted to go. So I dressed quickly and we ate breakfast, then Ulan, the cousin who lives nearby, Ryspek and I all got in the car to head out.

It was then that I learned we weren’t going to the mountains, but to the nearby market town of At Bashy, or Horse Head. So we first attached a trailer to the car and then headed for the central bus station/taxi stand. Here we found to people to fill our vacant seats, and then set out.

First in At Bashy, we pulled over on the road that bordered the giant Bazaar. Here my dad met some people, talked to them for a bit, and then we crossed the bridge going out of town. There we stopped, and the people came over with most of a cow. The legs were chopped off at the knees, it had been gutted, and was resting peacefully in three parts.

Then we headed down the road a ways until we entered a small town of little cottages and dusty streets – just like most towns you see around here. We came to an intersection and found five men, all in their forties, about. One was little and squirrely, and the leader looked kind of like the guy Butch Cassidy has to duel to keep control of his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The squirrely fella sat in the car with us and directed us to where the meat was we were there to buy.

The squirrely guy got out and pulled aside a stick-supported barbed-wire fence and directed us to drive down the little strip between their house and the next. He showed us space were we could turn around with our trailer with a smile, and just otherwise bounded around like an excited little frog. The four other older, more sober seeming guys followed us in.

In this moment, I had the first real flash of foreignness I’ve had since coming to country. I only seem to get them in general when I am doing something totally foreign to me, like buying meat to butcher, i.e. something I’ve never done in the States. I just thought to myself, “this is how business is done here. There is nothing weird about it. It feels like those men cornering us and laughing at us in Guatemala, but I am with my Dad here, this is his job. He knows what is going on.” It’s amazing how gut feelings in some ways are oddly right some times.

So, we pull the car in, and get out. The men then go to a spot in the yard, and pull a large tarp off of an oddly contorted horse, and two large bowls of its entrails. I think my Dad made a sound, and Ulan laughed audibly.

My Dad only seems to eat mutton, and only sells beef. So I imagine the fact that this was a horse somehow caught him off guard. I mean, it also looked real strange, gutted, throat slit, front legs cut off just above the hooves. Was it supposed to be a cow? Were they supposed to wait for him to kill it? Were all these men necessary to seal the deal? Somehow, the least strange thing about the whole event was that it was a dead, gutted horse laying next to a tarp in someone’s back yard, and we were buying it, presumably, for sale in the Bishkek meat markets. That, it seems, was just understood.

Immediately, some of the men went to lift it into the trailer, but my Dad called them off. Then we sat around, stood around, and otherwise spent some time together, talking about things I couldn’t understand, walking around the carcass, sometimes the leader man saying things that made everyone laugh. After things began to feel more comfortable, my Dad and the leader man shook hands.

Then a guy stepped forward with a very sharp, but curiously small knife for the job. He had on a white fedora, an old black and white knit sweater, Adidas running pants and black loafers. He had come on horseback, with a child. He cut all of the legs off at the knees, and then cut off the horse’s head. That little knife did a great job on the joints, but he still had to break them in the end. After everyone got together to lift the body into the trailer, the fedora man and Ulan lifted some of the entrails, liver and heart, I think, into a plastic bag, put it in the trailer, and then we backed out of the yard.

So we drove back out to the street corner, and the men helped us secure our tarp with rocks and string over the trailer, we paid the leader man, and headed back home.

But just outside of At Bashy, we stopped for the second part of the trip: to buy Kymys, or lightly fermented mare’s milk, the national drink. We pulled into a little compound of houses off the side of the road a little ways, got out and headed into a little building. Inside there was a young girl grinding away on some kind of machine. The machine had a large tub type thing on top with a cloth over it. But they kept pouring milk onto the cloth, which I imagine worked as some kind of filter.

And this girl just sat in front of it grinding away. On one side came a lot of a regular liquid, and the other small drips of a very thick one. They pulled some well boiled lamb out of a pot for us, and we ate it with knives off the bone.

Then we walked out of place and headed towards the hills. There were mares here and fouls, and we were going to watch them milk the horses. So Ryspek and I sat around with 9 people from this family and watched as one woman milked the mare. We drank some of the milk right there, it was warm and sweet, and otherwise just sat around. Everyone wanted to know who I was, and Ryspek told them all.

Sometimes it seems right for me to talk, and sometimes I just let other people do the talking. In this situation, it was him telling them about his friend, and it seemed unnecessary for me to come in. I supposed I could have offered my language, and in some way improved it, fielded their questions, perhaps deepened my experienced, perhaps strained it. But often times I am content just to be in a place, just to absorb, to try my best to fit in.

Originally Written June 14th, 2009