The soviet TV

Buildings here had the habit of looking old even when they were new. You could never quite tell driving past a shell of a house if it was in the process of going up or coming down, and this particular one was exemplary.

            “I like this house,” Ash’s host-father said, skipping up the first few steps. A rough looking guard dog clamored to the end of its chain and offered a few unconvincing growls before slinking back into its ramshackle doghouse. A chain must take all the fun out of being a guard dog, Ash thought.

            It was a three story house with a walkout basement, or would be anyway if they had left room for a door. Homes here were fashioned from a baffling set of architectural rules, completely unknown to Ash’s American eye. It seemed they went up a room at a time, and no thought was given to the next until a door was built in the former. Take the TV workshop for example. The entrance was through a door that hung two feet off the ground. The step up was awkward enough with a hundred pound knock-off SONY, but the step down a foot and a half later into a three-foot square foyer made the transaction quite the workout. How a business managed to keep its customers was an incredible trick of culture and science – they would be on their way with a newly functioning TV for six dollars and forty-five minutes of their time.

            The shop was a mess. For lack of any clearly defined workspace, Janybek had spread his tools on one of the piles of dusty TV parts. It was a miracle that he could find the screws to put one back together again, Ash thought, and as would be confirmed in a minute not all the same screws went back in a disassembled TV. There just happened to be a large enough collection lying about to finish any one job.

            As Janybek worked he chatted about the “good ol’ days” of the Soviet Union. “Things were good back then. The streets were paved; schools were well taken care of. I studied in Moscow and my parents never worried about me being up there all alone. It was safe to travel – and cheap. You could get a bus ticket from Bishkek for 3 som, forty tyiyn.”

            Ash asked how much a monthly salary was.

            “Sixty som for the very poorest. But teachers were paid well. They made a hundred and fifty.”

            “I heard it cost seven som for a flight from Bishkek to Osh,” added Ash.

            “Yes, if you were a student. A normal ticket was fifteen. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country just went to pot – young people got all these crazy ideas from movies and gangs – people were spray painting schools, tossing their trash in the road – nobody took care of things anymore.”

            The irony of the room they sat huddled in suddenly shouted in Ash’s ear but seemed to fall short of the gentleman with the monologue.

            “Those were good days. Now we have skinheads up in Moscow. Not safe for a Kyrgyz student.” Janybek worked with incredible skill, unsoldering little pieces off the green and dusty circuit boards from the back without checking to see what was on the other side. He had studied electronics at university and had kept up with the changing technology, though a lot of the stuff people brought in were from a dead and buried technological age.

            “I built a light-bulb when I was in eighth-grade. A radio in seventh. The telephone switchboards were this big.” He motioned with his hands.

            Janybek had four daughters, the youngest being a senior in high school. Her name was Aisezim and somewhere in the back of Ash’s mind the name flipped a little switch. The signal hadn’t made its way up to the front yet when she walked through the door.

            “Aisezim! Ah – how are you?” Ash extended his hello in English. She had called him for a week straight to ask about English clubs a couple months ago. “Where were you this past Saturday?”

            “Oh, I was, busy. Yes, well, ah, good to see you.”

            Her preparations weren’t going as well as hoped, though her father had big plans. “She’ll study at Manas University; work overseas,” said her father. It was a heady and practical dream – in one and the same moment – for any parent, especially one with the means.

Trough

He reached up from navy depths, racing the rush of bubbles to the surface. Being this far underwater always gave him that feeling--you know--the one that starts around the edges of your heart and spiders outward to your limbs making them thrash for lighter space. It wasn't panic, per se, it was...it was like sitting on the edge of a cloud without a parachute. You got the sense of unknowable depth below you and could almost feel the monsters of the deep rushing for your ankles, your torso, just a taste of skin, just a toe here, a finger there.

He pushed wide arcs through the loosening wall and broke on the edge of a swell. Sliding quickly down he waited for the bite that wouldn't come. It was easy to imagine this point teeming with life. Every aquarium he had ever been to was crawling with life to twenty feet and back. But not here. Here, he was truly alone.

Pushed and run along

Making his way down to the stadium he pulled a cigarette, nestled up against its neighbors, wantonly from the shelter of the pack. Bypassing the locked gates he climbed the dirt hill settled against the stadium wall and hopped the cement barrier. They had dropped four dozen or so truckloads of fresh earth in pyramid precision on the football turf, but this had been weeks ago. The stadium stood unused.

He eased himself onto a flat section of the crumbling cement and gazed past the far end of the stadium. There, past the trees, past the fields sewn with potatoes and barley, thick, slate colored mountains heaved up out of the valley, stabbing at the sky. It was August but a thin dusting of snow lay hidden in the fissures in the rocks. He took a drag and held it against the panorama. As his shoulders dropped he watched it be coated in a rising cloud of breath and disturbed air, the dust now mixing with smoke.

It was a sizable park that circled the stadium, wrapping around it like a horseshoe settled on its spike. He had paced it the week before, laying out potential golf holes, dreaming of a perfectly shaped shot cutting the gaps and running the pin. An altruistic farmer had seeded the ground with crops for the government, growing vegetables and animal feed on public land. The caretaker of the property told him it would be impossible to play here and why don't you go play over in the stadium there? Next time he'd come with a few discs and show her how far they could fly. But now he was just kicking at little clumps of dirt, nicking at the little knobs of yet eroded soil, pushing out a hundred micro landslides, watching the crumbs tumble and shake and quiver along ancient river beds carved into the hill below.