The next morning she rode off to get her head shaved and freshened up, as she put it to her sister. She found our yurt where she had expected it. Mother chided her when she heard that Grandma had all by herself and with some trouble crossed the Homdu, the great and dangerous river. The ice covering was already full of holes and cracks, and Grandma said she had seen deep water in a few places. But of course Mother was also happy that Grandma had come. As for me, who in the meantime had grown and learned to walk, the same happened as before: With a scream I hastened toward her and climbed into her lap, determined never to leave again. I remained there and stayed awake till late in the evening. When I finally went to sleep, Grandma could have kept me at her side all night, but she passed me back to Mother. Grandma had not touched her hair since we had last seen her, and it had grown a lot. This way she always had an excuse ready to come to us.

The storms did not simply continue but grew worse with each passing day even as the sun, their counterforce, inevitably grew stronger as well. The clash of these two natural forces had a destructive influence on half the world, and the rivers’ icy armor grew more brittle by the hour until it cracked and dissolved.

Father, who had abducted Grandma from me while I was asleep, brought her back in the afternoon. I felt as if the joy that had filled me when I saw Grandma for the first time had stayed inside me like some wave or like a breeze of light burning so intensely and radiantly that it blazed a bright trail through the time since I had last seen her. By now the river had become impassable since the cool of the night could no longer weld together for even a few hours the shards of ice that were breaking apart. The icy mass was like softened clay that sank beneath a horse’s hoof. Father had no choice but to call out to one of the Kazakhs who in those days had already settled on the other side of the river to come to the bank, and to ask him to pass the word to Hööshek at Saryg Höl.

Grandma stayed with us until early summer. She was a big help in the household, mostly because she kept an eye on me. But it was more than that: she brought me up. She would not have thought of it that way, though. In those days, nobody in a yurt would have thought that he or she was “bringing up” a child, just as no child would have been aware that it was being “brought up.” The word did not exist in our language.