Silent Girl (5 page)

They sold her to new men who sold her to new men who sold her to house after house, each one farther away from LA, each one guarded by guns and slobbering dogs. You had to feel sorry for the dogs in that heat. Each house was the same until Maw-Maw's, the same boring movie star stuff. After a while you want more to do, when there's nothing to read, no one giving you homework. Maw-Maw's was like skipping a grade, running to catch up on lessons you'd missed, especially the ones about go-go.

The man who won her had rat-like eyes, sharp little teeth, and three tiny jewels in the lobe of one ear. She stood straight as a pole when he dropped his pants. Still as a stone when he circled her waist with his clammy hands and lifted her up as if they were doing Swan Lake. He lifted her high and sat on the chair, spread her legs with his knees and speared her. She was somewhere else at the time, afloat by the door, which as it turned out, was a much better place to watch that poodoo ballet. Not much to see, the swan only screaming, staining the dance floor with drops of red rain.

T-Henry wrapped her in a sheet and carried her to the sleeping room where Maw-Maw waited. “Go back f'Rosie,” she said, taking Matsi from him. “Gonna be awrite, Cherie,” she said, easing Matsi onto a cot, kissing her forehead. She patted a warm, wet cloth between Matsi's legs where pain rose and fell like an ocean wave. Matsi couldn't stop her jaw from shaking. “Hush, Cherie,” Maw-Maw said. “Hush, dahlin.” Maw-Maw diapered her with a thick towel. Lifted and rocked her in her arms.

T-Henry came back with the girl Maw-Maw called Mexicali Rosie. Laid her on the cot next to Matsi. Blood streaked the girl's legs. Rosie cried like a little lamb. Maw-Maw lowered Matsi back onto the cot to tend to Rosie. She went back and forth between them – giving them sips of water, changing their diapers – for what felt like hours before the other girls came in. They stood silent around Rosie and Matsi until Maw-Maw said, “Time to make do-do.” Said it softly, sadly. The girls went to their cots.

T-Henry's voice floated in from the doorway. “Ready, Ma?”

Maw-Maw slowly walked away, doused the light, and locked the door.

Matsi rode her pain for hours, aware only of the occasional vibration of heavy trucks on the street, loudspeakers calling out words she couldn't decipher. Rosie cried off and on. “Hush, Cherie,” Matsi would say, stretching her hand out to touch the girl's cot. She slept for a while, waking to the smack of wind and rain against the room's boarded up windows. She ached for food, almost frantic to hear the click of Maw-Maw's key. Hunger became nausea as the pain returned.

Rain pounded the roof and the walls. It shook the house. Close by, the sound of splashing water. The others must have heard it, too. They were talking excitedly, feeling their way around in the dark.

A loud snap made one of the girls yelp. Matsi pushed herself onto her elbows and strained to see. A chunk of the roof had fallen through the ceiling and onto some cots. Water streamed in, filling the room faster than Matsi thought possible, lifting her cot off the floor, turning it into a raft that soon overturned. She tried to doggy paddle but the diaper dragged her down. She pulled it off and winced as cold water stung her wounded place. She bumped into Rosie who lay on the rising water like a fallen leaf. Rosie looked dead.

Matsi screamed and two older girls swam to her side. One hooked an arm around Rosie's neck and pulled her toward the ceiling. The other took Matsi's hand and did the same, making Matsi ashamed. They were braver than she. Stronger, too. They hoisted themselves onto the roof, pulling Matsi and Rosie behind them.

Matsi clung to shingles as the rain beat her back and her legs and glued her hair to her head. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been outside. The wind sounded like a plane lifting off a runway, perhaps a plane to Vancouver. One by one the brown girls flopped onto the roof and Matsi lay with them like sisters, their bodies a chain, hand locked into hand, those on either side of Rosie gripping her wrists.

As the wind and rain subsided, Matsi raised her head to a world like nothing she'd ever seen. Houses were drowning. Only rooftops poked out as far as she could see, people-shapes sitting or standing on them. The sole lights were tiny ones like fireflies blinking on and off from those rooftops. She heard a yell here, another there. A helicopter flew overhead and one of the girls called out to it. The pilot must not have heard. Her back began itching, then her arms and her legs. The shingles in front of her seemed to move. The brown girls screamed. The roof was thick with bugs – spiders and roaches in search of higher ground. Someone swatted herself, letting go of Rosie who slipped off the roof. They all wailed then, making so much noise they didn't hear the boat. Who knows how long it took them to hear Maw-Maw and T-Henry shouting?

Balancing himself on the big-enough boat, T-Henry stood and held out his arms. “Crawl to the edge. I'll catch you.” Maw-Maw sat beside him like royalty, her arms spread in welcome.

Matsi was sure the brown girls didn't understand T-Henry's words but they scurried to the edge of the roof and began dropping, one at a time, into his arms. One of the brave, strong girls helped Matsi up, helped lower her into the boat. Maw-Maw wrapped the girls in blankets though the day already was hot. She pressed Matsi to her chest.

“My poor li'l dahlin. I tell T-Henry, if dey doan get out, it meant to be. If dey do, Maw-Maw gonna be dere, gonna find nudder place f'dose dahlin, gonna start over.”

As they rode away, Matsi thought about a park near her home with a hill she once loved to climb while her parents watched from below. “Keep going,” they'd call out when she looked around, or “that's far enough.” They weren't here now to tell her what to do.

She stared into the whirling, churning water. All sorts of things spun around before speeding on by – a sneaker, a plastic lawn chair, a dead dog poor thing. A girl could be swept away, too, be carried over rooftops and trees before riding a wave into a lagoon where someone looking for someone else would find her and take her home.

Matsi turned to Maw-Maw's bloated face, studied the eyes that never smiled even when the mouth did. She would not dance for that woman again.

Kesh Kumay

IN A YURT UNDER THE GAZE OF ANCIENT SNOW-TUFTED MOUNTAINS,
Kyal huddles beneath a blanket, yearning to escape. Her father, grandmother, and younger sister sleep nearby.

It is quiet on the
jailoo,
the northern mountain pasture her family inhabits each May to October. She hears only the sheep calling from her uncle's pen and the occasional whinny from the horses hobbled in a meadow.

The greasy smell of boiled mutton lodges in every mat cushioning the dirt floor, every rug padding the walls, and every needlework bag and harness dangling from the slender birch spines of the yurt. The air reeks of unwashed bodies. It's tougher for Kyal to stomach, each year, after months away at university where she rents a room with a shower down the hall. She aired out her bedding this afternoon, spreading it over a carpet of wild thyme. She tents her nose with the blanket and breathes in the herb's sharp scent.

Dawn brings the smell of rice porridge and the rhythmic thump of her grandmother's wooden spoon against the side of the iron pot. An almost sacred sound Kyal has known since childhood, one that makes her feel guilty about wanting a different life, yet all the more impatient for it. She rolls over to see the woman she calls Ama, as if she were her mother, looking at her with eyes shrunken to slits in her wizened face.

“Oy,” Dimira says, waving a hand in Kyal's direction. “Is it sloth you learn at school? Wake up to the sun of your ancestors.”

Dimira cooks in a
kolomto
over an open fire. She could have a more modern stove but, at sixty-seven, she claims, she can't be changing habits for no good reason. Besides, it's the old ways the tourists with beeping wristwatches want to see, along with colourful attire. The first tourists of the season will arrive in a few hours. For a few
som
, Dimira will let them take her picture in her magenta turban, pink sweater, patterned skirt, and tarpaulin boots. She has taken easily to the country's move from communism to a free market economy. Embraced what the government calls cultural tourism: airplanes, Land Rovers, and convoys of bad-smelling Ladas bringing foreigners who seek a glimpse of a life they thought had disappeared.

Kyal sees her father, her Ata, through the open door flap, a silhouette against the rising light. With his two older brothers and their sons, Usen will round up and saddle the horses for the more adventurous tourists' four-day trek through a mountain pass. She appraises him as she would a stranger. He's fine-looking in his quilted jacket, cotton trousers, and black leather knee-high boots. An embroidered white felt
kalpak
with black flaps sits on his still-black hair. A moustache hangs over his lips like a horseshoe.

Kyal bathes in a river that's fed by a melting glacier. The shock of the icy water makes her feel superior to her family, more courageous. She braids her heavy dark hair and dresses for the tourists: ruffled black skirt, tight purple vest, and an imitation leather jacket from a bazaar at the Kazakh border. No one else around owns such a jacket.

After breakfast, she and Aigul set out in the thin clean air to find brush to supplement the dung Dimira dries for fuel. They follow the sheep road, bordered by edelweiss and dandelions as it was when they were children and more companionable, before the daring leaked out of Aigul. Her favourite possession is a plastic cola bottle a tourist discarded – Britney Spears on the label in traditional warrior queen gear as though she were a Manas scholar. Kyal dedicated a full semester to the Manas epic of struggle and freedom. Aigul studies nothing except Emil, an arrogant boy from another village.

Kyal pulls the wooden cart they will try to fill. Aigul takes short strides in her long, narrow skirt, hurrying to keep up with Kyal's stronger legs and deeper lungs. Aigul was born too early. Kyal can still see her sister lying in the hollow of their father's hand, can recall wanting to be small enough to fit there, too. She scarcely remembers her mother, but she remembers that.

“I went to the holy place the Monday before you returned,” Aigul says, breathy already, her mouth wobbling around the words. “Emil took me. We piled up seven stones, ate bread, and said a prayer. I climbed the stairs without touching the rocks with my hands. I looked into the broken heart stone and made my wish.”

“You must have been gone the whole day. How did you escape Ama?”

“It was her idea.”

Amazing that Dimira would release Aigul for so long. She insists the girl spend afternoons helping her and the aunties make
shirdaks.
The women have a contract to deliver two of the elaborate felt carpets each month to a tourist outlet.

“Your wish is to marry Emil?”

“Yes.”

“You run after that boy like a hungry dog. His head is already as big as a boulder.”

“You could try to like him. Have you met anyone yet?”

There was one boy Kyal fantasized might carry her off to his rich America. But in cultural anthropology class one day he said her country was turning into a tacky theme park. “Yurt World,” he called it and everyone laughed, filling her with shame. “I thought you were a good sport,” he said later when she called him on it.

“I'm in no hurry to be a slave to a mother-in-law,” Kyal says now to Aigul. She plans to be an ambassador, like the woman from Osh who wore a serious blue suit and spoke at the university about her posting to America. In daydreams, Kyal stands behind a podium before a crowd in a far away city, choosing just the right words to inspire respect and admiration for her people, keeping only a bit of the respect and admiration for herself.

“Was our mother a slave?” Aigul asks.

“She must have been. You see how Ama is. But how would I know?” Kyal was only three when their mother died giving birth. Aigul demands so little of the life she received at great cost.

“Emil's mother is kind,” Aigul says. “We will work well together.”

Kyal can see the married woman her sister will be – weather-roughened cheeks, shoulders rounded from making felt. Maybe it's the way she's begun shaping her eyebrows, but already Aigul's childishly pretty face has a worried look.

“Come to Bishkek with me in September,” Kyal says. “I'll help you get a job.”

“Selling vodka in a kiosk? I don't have the same choices as you.”

“Because you won't take them! Come back with me. Give yourself a chance.”

“I'm bound to Emil. There's nothing more to say.” Aigul's wincing smile makes the dimple beside her mouth resemble a tiny incision.

“How will you like it with your in-laws right there, listening to you and Emil grunt in the dark?”

“Why must you be so rude? It won't be like that!”

“You think they'll go deaf when you move in?”

“We'll be quiet.”

“Ha!” Kyal hates the lack of privacy in the yurt, wondering if the others suspect what she does in the dark, if they hear her quick, urgent breathing. What's it like with a husband whose breathing you can't control? How do you survive the humiliation?

“Ata is going to speak to you soon,” Aigul says.

“I didn't realize he wasn't speaking to me. Just this morning he called out a list of things for me to do.”

“About something else. Something important.”

Kyal ignores the hint of despair in Aigul's voice. “Is this a riddle? I love riddles! Guess this one. The more you have, the less you see.”

“If you want to get a husband, Kyal, you will have to sweeten your tongue.”

“I don't want to ‘get' a husband just like I don't want to get tuberculosis.”

“At the holy place, I prayed for you, too.”

Kyal flaps her lips like a horse. “Darkness,” she says. “The answer is darkness.”

“Ata will speak to you.”

“Long noses” from the West arrive, laughing about how their van got stuck in the mud crossing a stream and they had to get out and push, the road the worst they'd ever seen with huge stones blocking the way. The trekkers, half a dozen punctual-looking Brits in riding gear, are anxious to be off, to see poppies on the mountains and, perhaps, a snow leopard. They're too late for the poppies and more likely to see a statue of a snow leopard than the real thing, but Kyal doesn't spoil their dream. Anything is possible. Usen brings out half a dozen sure-footed horses. Mindful of the clocks in foreign brains, he has his mounts ready to go on schedule.

The lazier, fatter tourists – a husband and wife from America and two Swiss sisters – will stay in separate guest yurts on which Dimira has posted hand-lettered “
B&B
” signs. Kyal's family gets 100 of the 150
som
per night the tour company charges for each yurt. Most of it goes for university, so it's Kyal's job to tend to the yurts and entertain the tourists. She's done it for three summers and each year more visitors turn up. Able to speak four languages, she can usually decipher their requests. They come to depend on her, confiding when they find the food too fatty or the
koumiss
sour. As if she's one of them. She likes that.

Usen rides out with the trekkers a while, to be sure the horses behave. Kyal watches him get smaller, wondering if he'll keep his promise to be back for her first
kesh kumay
of the summer. He often stays away for days, returning inside a moat of sadness. She never asks why. So much goes unsaid between them.

In charge of the tourists left behind, she orchestrates the day to play to them, presenting her family as a tableau. First up: the making of
koumiss,
done several times a day while the mares are nursing. A cruel custom, a betrayal of the creatures Kyal loves. But not to serve
koumiss
is sacrilege, so she narrates while her uncles remove foals from their pen and tie them to stakes in the ground. Pulling against the ropes, the foals let out high-pitched
eee-ows
and
yeeks
that sound almost human. Their dams hear the racket and come down from the hills where they've been grazing. The tourists gasp at the frenzied mares heading towards them and turn to Kyal with panicky eyes. “They're not interested in you,” she says.

The men allow the foals to nurse briefly before pushing them aside to milk the mares. In sheepskin
chanachs
, female cousins mix new milk with part of yesterday's fermenting in the warmth of the yurts. For the rest of the day, they will take turns whipping it constantly with a
bishkek,
the wooden stick the capital city is named after, until their arms and shoulders cry out in protest. Dimira gives the tourists cups of an already fermented batch. One of the sisters, her skin as white as dry river-bed stones, gags.

“Kyrgyz moonshine,” the American man says and his wife laughs. Kyal laughs, too, as if she knows what moonshine is.

She never learns the tourists' names. Doesn't want to get so familiar they dismiss her as another of the simple herdspeople whose world they come to inhale. Let them report back that she is professional – sophisticated, even – in the leather jacket as black as a starless night. It will take time to become ambassador. She'll need different jobs along the way. If she makes a good impression, a tour company might hire her as a guide or an interpreter.

The afternoon is for horse games. Usen returns as if on cue, shimmering in the sun as he crosses the plateau. That he didn't forget fills Kyal's stomach with mortifying gratitude. He joins his brothers and nephews in
ulak tartysh
. Kyal describes it to the tourists as polo with a difference. The ball is a gutted, legless, decapitated sheep, weighted down with wet dirt. Each man attempts to scoop it up and keep it firmly atop his horse while charging to the goal line. It's a free-for-all that makes the tourists shout and gasp at the noise and the dust and the horsemen's skill. The danger is what excites Kyal. What she loves about riding. About living.

Next: her turn to make the tourists gasp and Usen look at her with pride. Time for
kesh kumay
. She fetches the sole white mare in the herd, hers since her sixteenth birthday. Aisulu. Beautiful Moon. The horse lifts her legs up and down in a nervous dance. Kyal closes her eyes and sucks in a breath before massaging Aisulu's shoulders and back. She takes her time. Lets the tourists wonder what is so daring that both girl and horse need calming. When Aisulu lowers her head and releases a deep fluttering breath through her nostrils, she is ready for the saddle.

Kesh kumay
requires a young man. Kyal's cousin Almaz has been drafted for the part the past two summers. As family he's unsuitable, but family is all Kyal has. Striding the herd's black stallion, Almaz rides out with her to where Usen waits – some distance from the tourists but not too far to be seen. When Kyal and Almaz are in position, Usen shouts, “Go!” Knowing he'll give her a fifteen-second head start, Kyal takes off, whip in hand, leather boots straining against the stirrups, legs burning with ambition. The wind she stirs lifts the braids off her neck. Almaz whoops like a barbarian behind her. She imagines her father awhirl in her dust, lost in admiration: “My daughter; no one can catch her.”