Atticus Lish: Preparation for the Next Life

Russia’s that way, her father pointed. Those are the Muslim countries. The other way is China. He lit a cigarette. The Russian soldiers are good, they have advanced equipment. To protect this frontier from the Russians, that’s why we are here. The Muslims have backward conditions. They don’t make good soldiers because they are too independent. In the middle of the war, they’ll decide to leave and go tend the herd. America has the best equipment, the richest country. In America, a private owns a car. Here, only the general has a car. We have equipment in the middle range, but it is not very advanced. What we have is the size of the population. Conditions will slowly, slowly improve. Everything has to be balanced to win. It’s just like wrestling. If I’m too weak, you push me over. If I’m too strong, I push myself over. You have to be in the middle. China is in the middle, which is just right. In thirty, forty years, we will be able to beat America or Russia.

The buses brought Uighurs from the west, some of them from Fergana. A barber put a chair out on the roadside. Zou Lei watched the open razor moving up the back of a man’s head, fluffs of hair dropping, drifting against the stone curb when the breeze came. The men were sitting in a circle. They raised their sunburned forearms and held out coins to her. You are from the land of milk and honey, she said. They were wearing skullcaps, staring off, clean-shaven, eating her mother’s bread. Who told you that? All of us pick cotton in Fergana. They make us. Now go and tell your mother that.

How far can you run, Dad? she asked her father.

Run or jog? he said. It makes a difference.

Well, to those mountains.

Not running, you mean, but could I get there on foot?

Could you get there? Could anyone get there?

I think so. With determination, yes. And enough water.

The decade ended and, all of a sudden, there were crowds in the streets. Their neighbors disappeared. Alani didn’t come to school. Soccer was considered fundamentalist, so they stopped playing it. They tossed it through the basketball hoop. Her father was mobilized and left them.

Take this, her mother said and handed her the plov to carry out front where their customers were eating.

In the back streets, the boys tried to wrestle each other down. Tyson! they yelled. Arabic graffiti carved in the mud brick. I am Rambo!

A girl threw rocks at her. Your mother is married to a filthy pig-eater.

Truck drivers came in from Gilmet talking about what they had seen. They ordered cold noodles and beer. A Karamlik bit the bottlecap off with his teeth. Smugglers get decapitated over there. Opium paste hidden in bread ovens, usually. On this side, they just put you in the gulag, nothing more than that. Gang members and separatists. Imagine not being allowed to talk for five years. Haven’t you seen the oil-drilling in the desert? I saw them hauling a piece of pipe out there big enough to live in. They have the army camped all around out there. They have everything they want. They get village girls. There’s a tent for them and a doctor to keep them healthy.

She brought them out more beer. A sandstorm hit and they went inside and sat on the rugs. They called for yogurt, vodka. They called her mother over.

How old is she?

Get in the kitchen and stay there.

When they received a notice from the regiment, they waited in the sun from 11:20 to 14:40, which was the official rest time for post office employees, while the Chinese woman and her coworkers in nurse’s hats ate dumplings and fanned themselves and chatted behind a gated window. Her mother sat on the curb holding her head. When the gate lifted, they went inside. The woman in the nurse’s hat said the notice meant that someone had died in the regiment.

But it doesn’t have a name, miss. Maybe it’s not him.

Maybe nothing. It’s the name of whoever you have in the regiment, the woman yelled. If you have somebody else in the regiment, then it’s them.

Her mother began crying out.

The notice had to be stamped, they were told.

Where do I get it stamped?

The woman snatched the paper away, pounded it with her stamp, and took it.

Why aren’t you giving it back to me? her mother cried.

What are you going to do with it?

But her mother banged and shook the bars and yelled until the woman gave it back. On the street, someone told them to go to such and such an office. No one told them how her father died. It was a seventeen-hour bus ride to the provincial capital. There, they found out that the notice was essential to collect the death benefit, a little pile of pink banknotes with heroic profiles on them, some of them ethnic minorities. Her mother rolled them up and put them in her stocking, while Zou Lei hung her head.

Now they lived in a big western city, the truckstop gone, failed, they had not made a go of it, her father gone. The banknotes flew away. She was fifteen, sixteen, and she was hungry. She wrote to him. She cut her hair like him to remember him by. A soldier in everything I do. No more school. There were no ration cards unless you bought them from kids in tracksuits, orphans who dealt hashish. She sold things on a blanket. Cassette tapes. A tarnished horn from someone’s Tajik wedding. The street was wired with lights to keep the market going after dark. You could smell the whole roast goat at another one of the tables. There were more Chinese here. Do you like disco? She was into soccer whenever she could play it. The American president was Clinton. On a garbage-strewn field behind the market, she picked up a broken knife and threw it as far as she could.

Sunburned, red-cheeked, her face peeling, she was seventeen years old. They were all sunburned, playing soccer at the extreme end of Liberation Road, dust getting knocked out of their army castoff clothes. Tariq had the ball and she ran way out in an arc, as if something very thin were keeping her here. He kicked it and she curved in to meet the ball. She never stopped moving. She had her elbow in a boy’s face, the two of them fighting for the ball like praying mantises with their legs. The sun was a bright, purifying sun coming out of winter. Everything smelled like leather, a sourness, charcoal dust and manure. This was the end of the city. The wall was four hundred years old and beyond it was the desert.

There was a wild woman in the small shade beneath a juniper tree, her baby on the curb, a tiny filthy boy digging his fingers between the crumbling blue hexagons, trying to prize one up and find a scorpion.

The road began from nowhere, out of the desert, built so that tanks could roll down it four abreast. Now she traveled down it, dribbling a ball. Things were being built or broken down and the stones they were made of lay in piles, huge wedges of concrete with rebar coming out, a tooth extracted from the earth, excavations in the dust. The edges of the road were crumbling. A highway went overhead and stopped in midair. In a vast ditch was a sea of tires and a man climbing through them, examining the treads.

The spaces were wide and long, extending to the busy part of the city by the train station, a carnival of tan buses where the tunnel ended, the signs in Uighur and Chinese, migrants seeking work, sleeping wherever there was shade. In among the old adobe houses was the public security building and detention house made of tile, like a bathroom turned inside out. The sun sparked off the spire of a mosque above the construction sites. The dome was down below, but you could sense it, a bubble rising.

They were going to move again, this time to the interior, to one of the factories that always needed migrants, in Shenzhen. A subsidy would be promised, an incentive for Uighur women. They would be told it was a fruit juice plant, but very little would be as advertised. The humidity of the rice-growing land south of the Yangtze River would be their first inkling of a mistake. A different heat from what they were used to in the desert. Haze everywhere, no horizon, the dull fields smudged into the sky. The factory produced polyethylene derivatives, without safety equipment except for surgical masks. If you put your head up, the Taiwanese bosses would make sure your head got pushed back down again. He did not have to pay you. You were an illegal immigrant in your own country, you found out. That’s how big China was.