As the richest man’s first-born son, my father must have entered adulthood as a powerful man. His most glorious stories dated back to those years. But then times changed, and anybody who had fat floating on top of the broth in his kettle was declared a kulak and thus an enemy of the people. Overnight, outsiders renamed my grandfather’s many foster children his laborers. Kulak, from Russian, originally meant ‘fist,’ but carried the contemporary political meaning of ‘wealthy landowner.’ This punishing label was given to a herder-nomad who lived outside the contemporary world and its sense of time, and understood neither Russian nor politics. In this new world, a man, who some time earlier had been rejected by my grandfather because he had beaten a horse to death, now ran alongside omnipotent foreign revolutionaries and exposed people right and left with his two pricking and poking index fingers. Now this man was allowed to beat to death not only horses, but also people. Or shoot them. The phony little revolutionary soon carried a gun on his belt and used it extensively. But he never got the daamal. The daamal, already humiliated and frightened enough by what he had heard, escaped from him by dying just before the other showed up at his yurt to drive him, together with others, to their place of execution.

This is the setting of The Blue Sky. It was the time of greatest scarcity for our tribe and for nomads in general. The Thirties with their many arrests and executions still vividly gnawed at people’s memory. The Forties, with the great World War and its wounds and consequences, were still with them—never before had people lived in such poverty and desperate straits as in those years. My father had donated the last remnants of his once large herd of horses to the front. It had turned a wealthy man into a poor one, but this gesture had given him some peace of mind. No longer could he be suspiciously eyed as a kulak. Yet his name retained the disastrous baj. Once he tried to drop the ending, but the newly powerful would have none of it: “Surely you aren’t trying to cover over the tracks of your disgrace?” they shouted, and then: “These tracks will continue to give away who you are, who your children are, and then your children’s children!” This referred to the fact that anybody who went to a government office with some request had to provide in writing his life story as well as his father’s and grandfather’s. Today—more than a decade and a half after the rule of terror ended—this infamous description of three life stories is still a requirement in any transactions with the government. Thus it was a given that I would have to thread my way painfully through accelerated times and different worlds.