Two Stops Past Siberia

A more accurate translation of my host-brother’s comment is probably, “I no longer have an uncircumcised wiener,” but coming from a three-year-old in a swaddling fleece blanket and sporting a very grim countenance, this kind of statement is a tough sell.

See, what he had used the work chochok. This word specifically refers to a young boy’s uncircumcised penis. By Kyrgyz custom, a boy is snipped at age three. Of all the things he could have told me in that moment, this was the one I already knew.

It was sweet, really, in it’s vulnerability. I’d been gently getting in between him and his cartoons, some anime in Russian that he surely couldn’t understand. He turned to me, so quietly, and just said, “I have no chochok,” perhaps his first coherent utterance of value in our year together. “My dad’s friend cut it.”

Then, with a pure, child like desire for sympathy in shared experience, he asked me simply, “is yours like this too?”

I felt like the big brother he didn’t have. Just someone to tell him that he’d been through it himself, and it would be okay. I couldn’t tell him in America we do it right after birth, that there was no way I could sympathize with his pain. But to his soft little face, squinting through a perpetual wince; waiting; there was only one thing to say.

“Yeah,” I answered, “mine’s like that too.” And then he went back to his cartoons.

Of course, this isn’t how the evening ended. This is a big event out here, the cutting of the wiener. Normally there is a party, but my host-dad said we were in no hurry for that. Instead, we just invited over a few relatives, and made a nice dinner. Not of course, that my little host-brother cared one way or the other. He was more interested in sitting in one place and not moving at all.

He was also getting wise to a particular cruelty of the standard selection of drinks around the house: from mare’s milk to weak tea, everything is either vaguely fermented or lightly caffeinated. This means we can only provide him with diarrhetics, and urination is something he most definitely wants to avoid.

(He only did that once while I was home. I was digging for garlic in the garden, trying desperately to remember the word for worm, while he, already an accomplished screamer, was yelling at the top of his little three-year-old lungs.)

When the first of the guests came over, an aunt from the other side of town, she was warned, “don’t ask the little guy how he’s feeling, and definitely don’t mention the cut. He’s not in a very good mood.”

An understatement, to say the least.