Cousin Sambyy, on the other hand, had already attended school the previous year and bragged: “You think you can scare me with school? Forget about it. School’s great. You don’t have to herd sheep or gather dung, and the way they put you up is so neat too—when you crap, you squat on two planks. Learning is no big deal. What stays in your head stays; what doesn’t, doesn’t. You simply prove to the teacher you’re too dumb for school. If you can manage that, you’ll graduate after four years.”

Cousin Gökbasch did not want to hear about school. “You’ll see!” she said, her lips pressed together. “I simply won’t go. I’ll say I have the freedom, everybody’s got the freedom, it’s the new era. The era of Pidilism is over. People can no longer be forced to do what they don’t want to do.”

Gökbasch kept her word. Instead of being forced to go to school, she married and did so of her own free will. The groom was a darga from the aimag. He did not speak Tuvan, and she had not mastered Mongolian. But she wanted to learn his language, and she succeeded because she lived with her darga in the aimag center. Sometimes gifts arrived from her, sweets, but not just lumps of sugar, oh no, they were fragrant, colorful candies wrapped in crackling paper, always two of them. Did the dear cousin, the elegant darga wife in the aimag, remember me? Or was it really Aunt Buja, who must have had a guilty conscience toward her brother? But the story ended badly for the one who had risen to be a darga wife. She died giving birth to her first child.

Uncle Sargaj, too, never had a chance to enjoy fully the fruits of the new era that pleased him so much. He died the following winter from appendicitis.

From that day onward, all the ail’s hustle and bustle changed. The relatives avoided our yurt. Out in the hürde, there were no longer any intimate conversations between Mother and the aunts, nor the peals of laughter that used to accompany them. Uncle Sargaj’s and Uncle Sama’s remarks got more pointed. They stung Father and the children alike—even me. For example: “Hey, little one! D’you want to claw your way up to a salary, too?” I had no idea what a salary was or what it had to do with me, but I felt the scorn in the remark.