Even the wizened gristle that was Kyrgy Carl not but a few months ago knew little of the saw of the Last Big Candy. But I have grown with age and with experience, and today, my deep and dear friends, I will tell this story to you.
See, in my humble dwelling on our backstreet of Sunny Naryn, whether it be in the grey days of springtime or the wrapped in the grim tentacles of winter cold, candy in the bread basket is ever present. Sometimes, while there may lay nothing but stale and gnawed rinds of flat bread, or the hard, oily remains of borsok; candy, inevitably, rests among the scrum.
This candy is seldom bought; instead, it comes in thin plastic bags; the sweets collected along with boiled meat and fried dough, brought home from parties, the modern update of the Kyrgyz tradition of ustukan.
Our plastic China-made bread-basket is the candy’s last stop, originally from Ukrainian factories that cater to our spot on the globe. They come as hard candies, chocolates of various fillings, wafers, and the assorted soft fruities.
When these bags first arrive, often in the hours long after the sun has set, a frenzy sets in. As everyone is called in to glean tempting delights from amongst the goodies, knives appear to cut apart fatty hunks of mutton, and tea to wash it all down.
As for the candy, it is the largest pieces that attract attention first. Caught like a bird’s eye to their shiny wrappers, members of the table quickly become experts to their various flavors: the fillings of the chocolates, and the coatings on the wafers. Curiously, however, in the waning moments of this delirium, food always remains, sometimes out of simple preference and sometimes out of politeness for those who’ve yet to share.
But these quaint pleasantries can mask a horrible, and inevitable truth: some of this food remains because, plainly, it is horrible.
That’s right, folks, I said it. Now, it’s not the meat that is horrible, nor the fried bread. The mornings and afternoons that I find these last bits of ustukan left on the table, it is the crime of politeness that inevitably does me in. I’ll taste the end of the mutton, and thank my host-family for their consideration. I’ll chew through still soft nuggets of fried dough, the stalwart borsok, and sing praises to their names. And then I’ll look to the few candies remaining. That, my friends, is when I’ll see the Last Big Candy, and thank my lucky stars. “Still!” I’ll say, “there is one last grand piece, left by satiated desires!”
But this, folks, is never the case, and that is the law of the Last Big Candy. This final morsel is, and always will be, a horror. It was left because it tasted bad, and everyone knew it. It was confectioner’s Frankenstein, a creation he marveled in, but knew no one would want. While some poor sap was tricked into buying it, only this last one had to eat it. And that last man, invariably, has been me.
I asked my host sisters about this phenomenon recently, and they just laughed. “Oh, if there is just one piece left, it’s always bad. Sometimes mom will leave good candy there,” they said, “just because she knows we’ll never eat it.”
A day older and a day wiser. Here folks, happily, sharing it all with you.
