The town’s big bazaar is really two bazaars:
Verkhnii, the oldest, a sentinel on the hill
since the days of Stalin, some say,
all the way back to the ’30s, when Kazakhstanis died
by the millions in a land of plenty,
forced to farm what they had wandered
since before the Silk Road.
The newer, lower bazaar is called Ozero—Lake—
for until a few years ago, shallow water stood
where rusty tin roofs and blue and white tarpaulins
stretch now in a defiant but futile attempt
to provide shade from the Shymkent sun.
Nothing should grow in this semi-arid desert
except wormwood and shepherd’s bag and camel’s thorn,
but it’s hard to sell those at market.
The Syr Darya was called Yaksart centuries ago
when it was first plumbed, primed, and pumped
to feed the canals that fed the fields,
but the Soviets wanted more than to feed
the people. They wanted cheap clothes.
Now the thirsty mouths of cotton
suck the Celestial Mountains’ glaciers dry
while hundreds of kilometers downstream
the Aral Sea is vanishing before everybody’s eyes.
It’s no trick. It’s simple science
and poetry: ships now ride the sand
hours from the rapidly receding shore.
There’s hardly enough left to fish for metaphors.
But in Shymkent you can buy anything:
chess sets for playing the old men in Central Park,
cut-rate pornography, automotive parts,
pots, pans, boxes of jars for canning,
chains of keys without locks,
rugs (even the region’s famous ones),
fur hats that would keep you warm in Siberia
and cheaper ones made of dog,
candles for when your electricity cuts out,
laundry detergent (Barf is your favorite),
and racks of cheap clothing, most of it
made of polyester in China.
Much of what you can buy comes from China—
tea cups, clocks, radios, shoes
that could never withstand the pothole-
filled streets but which keep
the rows of shoe repairmen busy.
The essentials. They’re cheap
both in price and quality, but much needed
in a country with little industry
of its own.
Anyone older than independence
complains that these
new products aren’t like the old Soviet ones,
though the steep, crooked, and uneven
steps leading to Verkhnii
make you wonder about their nostalgia
for workmanship done under the hammer
and sickle.
But there’s one thing you can buy
reminiscent of the good ol’ days
of collectivism and its bounty: food.
For literally pennies you fill bags
with potatoes, onions, carrots, peppers, eggplant,
a meal that could make anyone forget
they’re selling their lives for pennies.
Since it’s the last of the hot autumn
days before the final chill, babe leto—
Indian summer—you want
the season’s last fruit.
In Ozero, where honking busses swim
through clouds of people, you can find
islands of raspberries, strawberries, a dozen varieties
of apples, apricots, the season’s last grapes.
Walk up the crumbling stone steps to Verkhnii
for more raisins, walnuts, dried apricots,
the region’s famous tomatoes, melons, watermelons.
These are the best, grown here,
not in Uzbekistan. Who knows
what they do to them there?
These pears are the best—try one.
How much do they cost? you ask.
How much do you want? they answer.
Pol kilo? Oy, nemnozhko—a trifle!
Buy a full kilo, or two.
They flash their gold teeth.
You buy more than you want.
Everything is so cheap, you can hardly believe
when the old babushkas talk
of how it was so much better before
perestroika, the death of an empire,
the birth of an independent nation.
Their pensioner husbands lament,
“We used to be able
to house, clothe, and feed our families
on five rubles a day,
to buy chocolates for our daughters
every day. Now we can hardly pay
for eggplant and potatoes,
and bread only because we fought
during the Great Patriotic War. Our sons
and our sons’ sons can’t find work anymore.
At least Stalin was a strong leader.”
You look into their eyes but don’t nod
either yes or no. You know
fifty factories are now five,
the price of capitalism and cleaner air.
Times will be better after the transition
you’re helping to bring. You want to tell that
to the babushka with pop-bottle glasses
at the corner, shivering in the sun,
but when you press a few tenge into her palm,
she mumbles thanks but doesn’t look into your eyes.
A drowning man would never be seen here.
Your arms full, you fight
the flow of people like water running downhill:
chaotic yet inevitable,
pulled by the path of least resistance.
You are nearly helpless in the swirl,
drinking in the sights, the sounds,
but always keeping your head above the crowd
and both hands on your wallet.
The smells form currents:
of sweat and dust and fish in buckets,
of bread and samsas and fetid puddles,
of cigarettes, always cigarettes,
of shashlyk riding clouds of ash
and pans of pungent herbs
the gypsy women burn for a few coins
to prevent a cold or flu
or, perhaps, the evil eye.
You’d buy a whole smokehouse
if it could cure diarrhea.
It could have been anything,
perhaps the raspberries you bought
from the babushka with unwashed hands
or the undercooked pork shashlyk.
It could have been the flies, mookhee,
a funny word if they weren’t so dirty,
commuting from dung to dish.
You think of Sydney Greenstreet
swatting flies in Casablanca—
this bazaar could be in Casablanca
or an Indiana Jones film
or National Geographic.
But it’s not. It’s where you buy dinner.
The locals don’t understand. Why
would you write a poem about that,
about this place, about us?
You wonder, Why would they
build a bazaar on a lake?
Perhaps because here where they have so little,
food is the cheapest way to remember
the past, enjoy the present,
show hospitality, and maintain some sense
of dignity.
Break bread. It brings
people together.
Pour more vodka, beer, or wine.
Make long toasts to everyone’s health,
their beauty, their children and future children.
Don’t drink to forget. Drink because
the past will soon be gone, dried up,
because the future is in your future
children, and tonight, poised between
two cultures, the low desert and the high
mountains, there’s nothing sweeter than the two
pears you have eaten—you were
able to eat—and the kilo and a half
quickly rotting in this Indian summer,
the memory of flashing gold teeth,
the knowledge that you purchased at least two suppers
and didn’t have to walk on water.
Originally published in Permafrost
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
