Fly-Fishing the 41st (28 page)

It had taken about forty minutes to get to where the river rushed from the narrow canyon. We stood at the edge of a sharp decline that looked down into the Ak-Burra. Anastasiya told the driver to come back in four hours.

“It
is
an angry river,” I said to Anastasiya.

The depth of the canyon was impressive, the mass of exposed rock bewildering, and still it looked as though the carved mountain was straining to hold back the power of the moving water. The only person in sight was a Kyrgyz man walking his goat.

A dry path led down to the water. Anastasiya seemed to know where she was going. When we came to the edge of the river, Anastasiya laid out a green cloth and sat on it. The river stones were small and rounded.

“We can sit here and you can fish behind that boulder where the current is broken.”

“That's all right,” I said.

“You've done fishing already?” she said, laughing. “Is that how you do it?”

“For now, I think,” I said.

She offered me a seat on the green blanket beside her.

“This is my place,” she said, “I come here after exams to calm my spirit. Do you have places like this at home?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have places where I go.”

“No,” she said, “I meant, do you have places like this in your country, with such a river like this one?”

I did not know what to say. We did have rocky canyons and raging rivers in the States, but that's not what she wanted to hear. In my silence, she continued.

“The colors of the rock,” she insisted, “the black lines coming down the red stone, and the yellows there. And look at the distant hills. I'm sure the hills in Kyrgyzstan are the largest in the world.”

“We have such places but not exactly like this,” I said. She seemed impatient with that answer.

“I think people would travel to see this,” she said, “but people think it's dangerous to come here.”

We walked up the river, barefoot in the shallows along a rock wall, until it became difficult because of the steepness of the canyon. Anastasiya was intent on getting out to a rock separated from the wall by a chute of fast water four feet wide.

“I think it's too deep,” I told her, but she kept going. She found herself in the middle of the chute for a split second before turning back toward the wall again.

“A month ago you could walk out to that island,” she said. “Now the water is too high.”

We returned to the green blanket and Anastasiya took some food from her backpack. I had submerged a glass bottle of mineral water in the river some minutes before and now it was halfway out of the river.

“It looks like the river went down,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and joked, “you know it could be the moon. What do you call that when water is moved by the moon?”

“The tide,” I said. The Ak-Burra River never made it to the ocean; it flowed into the Amu Darya and then dessicated in the desert (or barely made it to the Aral Sea). It seemed sad to deprive a river of the ocean.

“The tomatoes were grown in my mother's garden,” Anastasiya said, pulling them out of her backpack. “She picked them this
morning. She also baked this bread. It is Russian bread. It needs a little salt.”

“You have a good mother,” I said.

“Nothing in this world is perfect,” she said, “but my mother is perfect.”

We sliced the tomatoes and ate them on the bread, and when we finished her mother's bread we tore off pieces of nan and ate it with cubes of salted pork fat.

I took a drink of mineral water and then tried fishing with a piece of pork fat for bait. I dunked the pork behind the boulder weighted with some lead. I thought about Johannes back in Osh with Ida. Were he here with us, he would have said something offensive, like, “What! You fish for Muslim fish with pork!” I would have been embarrassed and annoyed.

I lay down in the sun beside Anastasiya until I fell asleep.

She woke me, I'm not sure how long afterward, but she said it was time to hike out to meet our taxi.

I did not notice how hot it was until we left the bank of the river. The heat had a wonderful effect on the smells of the hillside flowers.

“I think you will not find smells like this anywhere else in the world,” Anastasiya said, smiling. “This smell we call
poleen.
” She picked a bouquet for me as we sat on the dry ground waiting for our car and watching grasshoppers. “You can take it with you,” she said, “to remember Kyrgyzstan.”

After a time, we started walking down the hill toward Osh. Some way down we saw our driver washing his car by the river, where it had broken down. His hands were black from tinkering with the engine, but he had somehow managed to preserve his starched white shirt and the pleat of his pants. He told us reluctantly that we should leave him there and hitchhike back.

We walked until the sun was near the horizon. I asked Anastasiya if she'd like to join us for dinner. “We may not be back
until later than that,” she said. “No, I think I'm going home. If you are around tomorrow, though, we can do something else.”

We walked into the starry night. Finally a car passed us and picked us up.

T
HE
Y
ELLOW
V
OLGA
,
TO
B
ISHKEK AND
L
AKE
I
SSYK
K
UL

T
he next morning out of my hotel window I saw Johannes in the street talking with several drivers beside their cars, inspecting the trunk spaces and the tires. I dressed and walked downstairs.

“What's going on?” I said. I felt healthy and at home; I was thinking of Anastasiya.

“We're not waiting here any longer,” Johannes said, “we have too much to see, Ida is feeling better. I think we should go overland back to Bishkek instead of waiting for our plane.” He paused. “How was the time with your girlfriend?”

“It was fun,” I said, though I was a little bitter.

“I think we will leave in an hour,” he said.

I didn't argue. I called Anastasiya and she met us at the hotel to say good-bye. We said we would write to each other.

Johannes and I settled on a lemon-yellow Russian sedan called a Volga, driven by a small good-looking Kyrgyz man. His car looked best suited for the journey and so did he. He also gave us the best price.

 

About thirty kilometers outside of Osh we had our first flat tire. The driver took all our luggage out of the trunk and was searching at the
bottom for his wrench and jack. The spare tire, from what we could see, was scarcely better than the old one. All of them were bald as river stones.

Once we were on the road again we stopped at the first tire-repair stand, a phenomenon of Central Asian highways. We waited in the heat, no trees in sight to find relief from the sun, while our old tire was mended and the inner tube patched.

The day was hell hot coming out of what is called the Ferghana Valley. On the steppes the wheat was weeping and even the sunflowers could not bear to face the fierce sun. Turkish music played dizzily from the car radio. We drank warm Sprite as sweat beaded up on our arms and dripped from our foreheads into our eyes. Anastasiya had warned that it was hot out on the highway between cities. I had not realized how hot.

Once the tire was fixed we traveled on, stopping to rest the car at a restaurant beyond an orchard of plums that stretched up toward the distant mountains. The restaurant was just some tables under a makeshift tent with a small brook gurgling by.

Our driver asked for some melon, which was cut into slices and set on a blue-and-white dish on a cloth of pink and white stripes. The melon had the taste of onion from the knife they cut it with, which disturbed the taste, just as the dust cloud from a passing car fogged the view of a small girl naked in the brook, splashing herself with water from a two-handled urn.

The dry heat, I thought, drained one of all superfluities.

In Jalalabad we skirted the border with Uzbekistan. Scrubby purple flowers bloomed on the roadsides. Heading north into the valley of the Naryn River as the sun set, the smooth hills were sometimes green gray and sometimes beige blue. I remembered Anastasiya telling me there were no hills as high as the hills in Kyrgyzstan. Now I believed her and no longer thought of her as a girl who had never seen the sea.

The Naryn River itself was a blue-green color. The farther up the
canyon we crawled the more the river resembled a lake where it had been dammed to form the Toktogul Reservoir.

Along the edge of the reservoir the road went through a series of long tunnels with no lights in them. Many of the cars that pass through have no lights either, which makes passage dangerous. We traveled through the tunnels very slowly, having only one working headlight, and we passed other vehicles whose drivers held flashlights out their windows. Screeching trucks echoed in the tunnels like whales singing across a deep ocean. When night came it was even more dangerous outside of the tunnels as the roads were narrow and skirted the edges of cliffs.

We pulled off with our second flat tire at twilight, just beyond where a grain truck had turned over. The driver sat beside his spilled cargo smoking a cigarette. When the sun was finally down there seemed to be four times as many travelers on the bumpy road. The moon was full and lit up the water on the vast reservoir between the canyon walls. I crawled in the car when the tire was fixed and fell asleep.

Twenty-five hours after we left Osh we arrived in Bishkek (by air the distance is only about six hundred kilometers). Not once had our driver stopped to sleep and the condition of his yellow Volga sedan was not suitable for returning to Osh. He would have to either spend the money we gave him to fix the car, or sell what was left of it and take a bus home.

We checked into the Hotel Bishkek, a cement-and-steel sore on Erkindek Prospektisi. We rested in our own rooms, but just for a short while. Soon Johannes came and knocked, waking me from a deep sleep.

“We must make arrangements to travel to our next destination,” he said.

This was Lake Issyk Kul in the eastern part of Kyrgyzstan near the Chinese border. The tourist agency that encouraged us to go called it “the second largest alpine lake in the world after Titicaca.”
Issyk
kul
in Kyrgyz means “warm lake”—because it is slightly saline and does not freeze in winter.

The same tourist agency that promised us the second largest alpine lake also found us a driver. Isa was his name, and he came by the hotel, allowing us to approve his vehicle before the trip. It was a van in good condition and we agreed to his fair price. Then he asked if he might take a friend along to keep him company on the road. Johannes hesitated in the negotiation. “Okay,” he said. The van was big.

The next morning we were picked up in front of the Bishkek hotel by Isa's friend, an Uighur (from Xinjiang, China) named Marin. He spoke no English but indicated to us to come. After ten minutes we stopped by a row of apartment buildings. Isa walked toward the car, so hungover he could hardly stay on his feet.

“Wodka drink Isa,” he said, sitting in the passenger seat. “Oh my head, oh mine God.”

“Okay,” Johannes said, shrugging his shoulders, “so what's new, our driver is drunk.” I think Johannes found Isa's state was not so much disturbing as endearing. Marin drove east out of town to a straight dirt highway.

Two hours later when he had gained consciousness, Isa was friendly, sharing photos of his family. He was from Dagestan. His father named him Isa after an Italian friend, Isangeli. When he turned, you could see the profile of his large chiseled nose shaped like an eagle's beak.

Johannes instructed our pair of guides, by pointing on the map, that we wished to stay on the south shore of the lake. That shore dropped off quickly and would be good for diving. Johannes had read that there was a fishing village called Balykchy where sometimes giant trout rumored to be thirty kilos were caught. These trout were not native but had been introduced from Lake Sevan in Armenia. Since we had observed the same trout in its native habitat
we were eager to see if it retained its original markings after seventy years in a new environment.

 

The road to Lake Issyk Kul followed the Chu River. Many men and boys were fishing for whitefish using slender long poles baited with yellow caterpillars. As many women stood on the side of the road selling the fish dried or smoked, strung through the eyes with wire. We stopped to buy some from a lady fishmonger. She heard us speaking English.

“Do you need a translator for your trip?” she said to us.

“A translator?” asked Johannes, looking at me. “Why? We can hardly understand each other.”

 

The sun broke through a deep layer of clouds as we caught our first glimpse of Lake Issyk Kul. Behind the far shore off in the distance were smooth ochre hills and high peaks of the Tian Shan range.

On the road to Tamga, the village where we had agreed to stay, we passed over six or seven rivers flowing north into the lake from melting snowfields in the mountains. Some were clear and others were opaque and milky, and all of them were raging.

Tamga was a village of homes once occupied seasonally by prosperous Russians. Now they were occupied year-round. Each had a garden plot with plum, peach, and cherry trees and a dog barking behind an iron gate. The area once attracted summer tourist traffic, its spas sourced by hot springs, beaches, and restaurants renowned throughout Russia. The resorts on the lake were abandoned, weeds growing through the tennis courts, rusted jungle gyms engulfed by untrimmed hedges, unkempt perennial borders revealed by an occasional bloom.

At the heart of the village, through a pair of tall metal gates, Marin drove us into an endless circuit of roads that wove around concrete buildings. In its first life, this place had been a recreation
site for the Russian military, built by German POWs in World War II; in its second it had been a resort. Now it was hardly attended, a few people occupying rooms, eating prepared meals in the central dining hall, taking hikes to the lake and in the mountains.