Blobadjian comes to see that the New Turkic Alphabet is only one version of a process really much older—and less unaware of itself—than he has ever had cause to dream. By and by, the frantic competition between and G has faded away to trivial childhood memories. Dim anecdotes. He has gone beyond—once a sour bureaucrat with an upper lip as clearly demarcated as a chimpanzee’s, now he is an adventurer, well off on a passage of his own, by underground current, without any anxiety over where it may be taking him. He has even lost, an indefinite distance upstream, his pride in feeling once a little sorry for Vaslav Tchitcherine, destined never to see the things Blobadjian is seeing….

And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running down the rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Džaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs….

But right about now, here come Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan riding up over some low hills and down into the village they’ve been looking for. The people are gathered in a circle: there’s been a feast all day. Fires are smoldering. In the middle of the crowd a small space has been cleared, and two young voices can be heard even at this distance.

It is an ajtys—a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there’s-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance—kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked. The people laugh at the good lines. You have to be on your toes for this: you trade four-line stanzas, first, second, and last lines all have to rhyme though the lines don’t have to be any special length, just breathable. Still, it’s tricky. It gets insulting too. There are villages where some partners haven’t spoken to each other for years after an ajtys. As Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan ride in, the girl is making fun of her opponent’s horse, who is just a little—nothing serious, but kind of heavy-set… well, fat, really. Really fat. And it’s getting to the kid. He’s annoyed. He zips back a fast one about bringing all his friends around and demolishing her and her family too. Everybody sort of goes hmm. No laughs. She smiles, tightly, and sings:

You’ve been drinking a lot of qumys,

I must be hearing the words of qumys—