For where were you the night my brother

Came looking for his stolen qumys?

Oh-oh. The brother she mentioned is laughing fit to bust. The kid singing is not so happy.

“This could go on for a while.” Džaqyp Qulan dismounts, and sets about straightening his knee joints. “That’s him, over there.”

A very old aqyn—a wandering Kazakh singer—sits with a cup of qumys, dozing near the fire.

“Are you sure he’ll—”

“He’ll sing about it. He’s ridden right through that country. He’d betray his profession if he didn’t.”

They sit down and are passed cups of the fermented mare’s milk, with a bit of lamb, lepeshka, a few strawberries…. The boy and girl go on battling with their voices—and Tchitcherine understands, abruptly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write some of these down in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame… and this is how they will be lost.

Now and then he glances over at the old aqyn, who only appears to be sleeping. In fact he radiates for the singers a sort of guidance. It is kindness. It can be felt as unmistakably as the heat from the embers.

Slowly, turn by turn, the couple’s insults get gentler, funnier. What might have been a village apocalypse has gone on now into comic cooperation, as between a pair of vaudeville comedians. They are out of themselves, playing it all for the listeners to enjoy. The girl has the last word.

Did I hear you mention a marriage?

Here there has been a marriage—

This warm circle of song,

Boisterous, loud as any marriage….

And I like you, even if there are one or two things— For a little while the feast gathers momentum. Drunks holler and women talk, and the little kids totter in and out of the huts, and the wind has picked up some speed. Then the wandering singer begins to tune his dombra, and the Asian silence comes back.

“Are you going to get it all?” asks Džaqyp Qulan.

“In stenography,” replies Tchitcherine, his g a little glottal.

THE AQYN’S SONG

I have come from the edge of the world.

I have come from the lungs of the wind,

With a thing I have seen so awesome

Even Džambul could not sing it.

With a fear in my heart so sharp

It will cut the strongest of metals.

In the ancient tales it is told

In a time that is older than Qorqyt,

Who took from the wood of šyrghaj

The first qobyz, and the first song—

It is told that a land far distant

Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.

In a place where words are unknown,

And eyes shine like candles at night,

And the face of God is a presence

Behind the mask of the sky—

At the tall black rock in the desert,

In the time of the final days.

If the place were not so distant,

If words were known, and spoken,