“The Glass that Becomes Us” by Maggie Yang
By Elizabeth Paul
At 3:00 AM I awoke awash in moonlight and straining for air in a bedroom that still held the day’s indomitable heat. Though summer in Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley is not exceptionally hot—temperatures only occasionally climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit—it brings a dry heat that leaches moisture, parching one’s lips and nose, splitting the wood planks of benches and bridges, and powdering the earth with a fine tan dust. The heat permeates and possesses things, including the concrete walls of old Soviet apartment buildings like the one in which I awoke in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.
It was July, and my husband and I were visiting his mother, aunt, and sister in Osh, where I had lived for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. When overcome with heat in the middle of a summer night in this place without air conditioning, I often went to the bathroom sink and splashed cold water on my face. But this time, the balcony adjoining the bedroom beckoned me. I swung open a window, leaned out, and took deep breaths of the night.
A full moon shone over a hushed and dusky settlement of four-story apartment buildings, and low houses huddled behind white-washed walls. In the dark, all the trees were silhouettes, and in the distance, the wild, soft spikes of cypresses rose like husky voices from the western hills. Between those hills and myself ran the Ak-Buura River that I couldn’t see but knew was there, at the heart of the city of Osh. I imagined its waters tumbling quicksilver through the moonlit night under the platinum sky and a tympani of stars. I surveyed the hilltops where specks of red suggested the insentient, strict alertness of radio towers and soft points of yellow glowed like the anchors of sleepers adrift in the dark. Then a declaration of lightning scrawled across the horizon. But there were no storm clouds and no thunder, and the electric script appeared a message just for me.
I was always trying to decipher this city. In Osh I was an explorer, mentally mapping the streets and carefully observing the customs. Linguistically, I was a child, learning Russian from scratch. Culturally, I was a hesitating initiate, wanting to expand myself, yet unsure how much I could change. I sat at the city’s feet with everything to learn.
Now I no longer live in Osh, but memories of the city inhabit my imagination, and I am still compelled to try to understand this place that runs like a river somewhere deep inside me.
Osh is Kyrgyzstan’s “second capital,” the first and official one being Bishkek. Bishkek is in the North, not far from Kazakhstan, while Osh is in the South, bordering Uzbekistan. With a population of about 900,000 to Osh’s 250,000, Bishkek is bigger and also more Russian than Osh—more related to the Soviet city it once was. Originally an oasis on a Silk Road caravan route, Bishkek was first Pishkek, a stronghold of the Kokan Khanate. Then it became a garrison town of the Russian empire and later Frunze—the capital of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Frunze was renamed Bishkek, seeking to become the capital that it suddenly was—the economic, political, and cultural center of a new democracy, the Kyrgyz Republic, or Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyzstan has had three revolutions since the fall of the Soviet Union, each accomplished by protestors storming the White House in Bishkek. In its 25 years, Kyrgyzstan’s volatile government has been courted by the U.S., who opened an air base in Bishkek in 2001, Russia, whose cancellation of a 500-million-dollar debt allegedly prompted the closing of the U.S. air base in 2014, and China, who has invested capital and labor into Kyrgyzstan’s roads and mining industry. Rare metals are Kyrgyzstan’s only natural resource, and the economy of the young republic relies on these foreign sponsors vying for influence in a region with strategic geopolitical value as well as gas and oil. With its post-Soviet independence and international suitors, Bishkek is like a teenager trying to figure out who it is or like a new divorcee attempting to start over.
Osh has no such pressures. Separated from Bishkek by 187 miles of mountains traversed by just one 400-mile road, Osh is far removed from the questions and concerns of statehood thronging the capital. Osh is a city over two thousand years old, with one of the largest and oldest bazaars in Central Asia. If Bishkek is the angsty teenager, Osh is the serene elder. Osh is in no hurry. It goes about the business of being itself. It is too old to care what anyone thinks, to ruminate on its identity, or worry about the future. While the Lenin monument in Bishkek was moved to the back of the history museum, the one in Osh has been left standing in the government square.
A sculpture of Lenin may be less portentous in Osh because the city has a much bigger and more enduring monument than any statue—the 500-foot Sulaiman Mountain (Sulaiman-Too, in Kyrgyz). This limestone spur of the Alay Mountain Range rises abruptly from the valley floor like a notched and broken fin in the center of town. It is said to have been a major sign post of the Silk Road and, with over 100 petroglyphs and several shrines, a sacred site for both Muslims and pre-Islamic Central Asians. It is named for a prophet of the Qur’an thought to be buried on the mountain, and thousands of Muslims make pilgrimages there every year. In 2009, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site “believed to represent the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millennia.”
One can’t be in Osh without being in the presence of this ancient sacred form that seems as impressed upon the surrounding flatness as emerging from it. Its sudden incongruity makes it seem as much a consciously-made creation as a chance geological formation. When I see the mountain from a distance arching against the sky, I can’t help but think of it as some special dispensation, like a name or mission, and feel that I’m in a place somehow ordained.
In the simplest terms, Sulaiman-Too is something where there could have been nothing, and that provokes big questions: Why are we here? Where does life come from? Why would we be alone in the universe? The mountain is history and prehistory, the sediment of years unimaginable. To try to wrap one’s mind around millennia—that is living in Osh. The mountain is making sense of existence on the earth’s surprising surface. It is faith in something higher, and it is that something higher. It is paths for pilgrim feet and accomplice in utterance with human hands. How can one not be contemplative in the presence of this mountain or at least feel humbled and small?
There is a paved trail that leads up Sulaiman-Too to a railed overlook where the flag of Kyrgyzstan snaps its red and gold spirit against the sky across from a small mosque named Babur’s House after the fourteen-year-old, 15th-century emperor who commissioned it. The mosque’s façade is a rectangle of pale brick inlaid with an arabesque in white plaster. It frames a domed and recessed space before which men leave their shoes at the door. As a woman, I’m not allowed to enter. I walk past a vendor with a freezer of refreshments, stand at the white, scrolled railing, and look out over a city whose size and sprawl are unfamiliar. It’s not that I can’t pick out the city’s landmarks—the white monolith of the library, the factories’ smokestacks, the slanted roof of Kyrgyz Telecom. It’s just that Osh feels so much smaller and self-contained from the ground. But the improvised, pacific spread of low buildings feels familiar in its unassuming and easy manner.
From the mountaintop, you see how big the city is and you see how small it is, how it lays in the valley like a pool of salt on a tablecloth. You realize that Osh is a swatch of valley as much as a city—a point on the globe where winds meet, where winter ends in March, and what a luxury that is in a country covered in the steely peaks you see in the distance. Osh is oasis, temperance, abundance. It is a place to be grateful for sun, soil, and harvest, for the succession of strawberries, peaches, raspberries, and persimmons. The serenity of Osh is the assurance of summer.
The last time I was on Sulaiman Mountain, I sat on the ridge behind Babur’s House and watched people at a holy site—a natural slide in the rocks worn slick and shiny by believers in its ability to cure back pain. Children clambered up the rocks, slid down, and started over again. Then a couple arrived. They were probably in their sixties. She wore a long, rose-colored dress with elbow-length sleeves and a matching head scarf. He wore gray pants, a white, short-sleeve, button-down shirt, and a kalpak—the traditional Kyrgyz black and white felt hat that sits tall atop the head. The wife went first. Her husband pushed her rear end from behind to help her to the top of the slide. Then she sat down and stretched herself out. She had removed her sandals, and her pointed feet glowed in white ankle socks. She leaned back, pushed off with her hands, slid down about a foot, and stopped. She was stuck. She struggled to sit up, to scoot herself forward, to move at all, and in her awkward efforts she started laughing, and her husband laughed at the sight of her. They laughed at their age and extra pounds and the sudden appearance of the children they carry inside. They stood outside themselves and laughed heartily at what they saw, and I admired that. I hoped that I might have as much grace and good humor.
I don’t know if the couple were pilgrims or if they were seeking a cure for back pain, but I love the idea that such a serious mission could include so much laughter. And it may seem obscene, but I love that someone is selling sodas and ice cream bars just a few yards from Babur’s House. Part of me even loves the way people drop their ice cream wrappers on the ground and leave their empty bottles behind on this UNESCO site and sacred mountain. I admire the ability to not take things too seriously, and that’s what the silver sparkle of sticky ice cream wrappers glittering in the sun on this holy mountain means to me.
Perhaps there would be no Osh without this mountain at its center. The curious rise of rock must have drawn people like a vortex through the millennia. And the proximity of the Ak-Buura River must have made it a practical place to settle. I see the tributary over centuries as in time-lapse photography, first a meandering line in an open valley, wiggling oddly in its variations—tiny movements relative to its roughly constant course. Then structures appear alongside it—first yurts, then adobe dwellings, then concrete houses and apartment buildings. People keep coming because it is a good place to live. The settlement swells into a city.
Though Sulaiman Mountain is the landmark of Osh, its silhouette synonymous with the city, it is the Ak-Buura River that I keep coming back to, that I imagine when I’m looking out at Osh from a balcony or remembering Osh from halfway around the world. This river isn’t remarkable. It isn’t wide in its passage through the city—maybe thirty feet. It isn’t long. It isn’t particularly good for fishing. As far as I know, no one’s ever written songs about it. Its name means white camel, and in early summer when it rushes down from the mountains, its white-crested waters roll like camels’ backs. Other times it is slow and calm and blue. When it rains in the mountains, it is tan and foamy or dark brown and turbulent. In its delineated flow, it is a balance of continuity and variation, consistency and flexibility, containment and motion. It has a calm liveliness or a lively calmness.
I marveled at what the people of Osh made of the Ak-Buura River. In the summer they swam in it. Boys in their underwear played on its islands of rocks. All day long they swarmed the footbridge near the Karl Marx School, jumping into the current and riding downstream. Some girls swam too, in proper swimsuits, or stood on the grass talking, playing, and looking after siblings. In the evening adults came with blankets, waded in the water, and smoked cigarettes on the riverbank—relaxing along the cool tributary to cope with the valley heat. Children in charge of livestock drove their cows along the Ak-Buura. Men parked their cars on its shoulder, cleaning them with buckets of river water. Occasionally I saw someone fishing, washing clothes, bathing babies on its margins, or submerging watermelons or bottles of beer to keep them cold. And when the city shut the water off, people walked to the river with their buckets for the essence they couldn’t live without.
Water isn’t taken for granted in Osh, where nothing flows from the faucet for days at a time. So the river speaks the simplicity of life—how it’s a primal matter of survival, not the calendar of countless activities we try to manage but something clear-cut and imperative like the waterway that slices through the crust of the earth with a pushing, pulsing force of its own. We may understand its susceptibility to human impact and its origin in spring or glacier, but a river incarnates independence—volition, momentum, and direction—something self-existent and certain. It is a timeless vitality and seamless teeming. The city’s three main streets run parallel to the Ak-Buura, one on the right bank and two on the left, so that the city seems the river’s reverberation, a ripple of its restrained perpetual energy. The river is the sound, and the city its resonance. The river is the branch and Osh its blossom.
In Osh, the spirit of the river is everywhere. You see its calm liveliness in the glittering Ikat patterns of Uzbek clothing and the orderly curled waves on the perimeters of Kyrgyz rugs. It is in the spacious tea houses where people sit cross-legged at low tables sipping from shallow cups. It is in the old men’s chess games in the park and people strolling the sidewalks arm in arm. It is in the small mountains of watermelons on summer street corners and the circular loaves of bread imprinted with circular patterns. It is in the daily round of the call to prayer and in prayer itself—that calm liveliness or lively calmness.
I have heard Westerners say that the serenity of Osh is due to its large Uzbek population. Uzbeks are stricter Muslims than Kyrygz, abstaining from alcohol and observing prayers more faithfully. And while the Kyrgyz are traditionally nomadic, Uzbeks have been settled farmers and merchants for centuries. Kyrgyz and Uzbeks have shared the land of present-day Kyrgyzstan since the end of the Mongol empire in the 13th century. The Kyrgyz rode their horses or donkeys from mountain pastures into silk-road cities to trade their livestock, wool, and animal skins for the Uzbeks’ textiles and metal ware. But often the city-dwelling Uzbeks considered the nomadic Kyrgyz lazy and wild, while the Kyrgyz saw the merchant-class Uzbeks as swindlers—so I’ve read. And since the end of the Soviet Union, these sometimes rivals have competed for increasingly fewer economic opportunities. Thus, the large Uzbek population in Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city is also commonly cited as a cause of tension.
Osh is one of the easternmost settlements of the Ferghana Valley, and with its large Uzbek population, Osh is connected culturally as well as economically to the rest of the valley’s inhabitants, who are citizens of Uzbekistan. That Osh ended up as part of Kyrgyzstan is credited to Stalin, who is said to have drawn up the bizarre borders of the Central Asian Soviet Republics to promote ethnic rivalry and prevent nationalistic revolt. Sadly, Osh has seen enough ethnic conflict to suggest the efficacy of this totalitarian tactic. In 1990, a land dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks escalated into three days of violence, with official death tolls ranging from 300 to over 600. And in 2010, several weeks after Kyrgyzstan’s second revolution, ethnic fighting swept Southern Kyrgyzstan for a week. There are different theories about what sparked the widespread violence, but local sources say anywhere from 1,500 to over 2,000 people died in and around Osh. Over 400,000 people fled their homes, and nearly 3,000 properties were damaged and destroyed. When I was on Sulaiman-Too in 2012, the city below glimmered with new metal roofs where, in 2010, whole mahallyas—Uzbek neighborhoods—had been torched.
Pogroms, rape, and torture—this isn’t the Osh I know. But it’s the Osh I read about now, back in the U.S.—a city of “the restless valley,” a “tinderbox for violence.” These are apt names for a place where—as Western sources like to point out—the threat of violence is always just beneath the surface like the seismic faults that agitate Osh with earthquakes. It’s important to know this. And I don’t want to downplay the serious long-standing ethnic tensions in Central Asia, but this is not the only version of Osh. It is true that Osh is not really removed from the problems of nationhood, but the serenity of this city is not mere surface. It runs deep.
Elizabeth Paul’s work has appeared in such places as Cold Mountain Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Briar Cliff Review. Her chapbook Reading Girl explores the art of Henri Matisse. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and currently teaches writing at George Mason University. Her website is elizabethsgpaul.com.