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Cover of Twelve Kilometres: the title over a dark mountain ridge, with a dashed line and a single white pillar.
Stories Free to read

Twelve Kilometres

On Eki Chakyrym

by Aikokul Tursunbek kyzy · translated from the Iradi by Aidana Mukash kyzy

The agreement signed in Bishkek in September 2007 created, on each side of the Qara-Chik line, a restricted zone twelve kilometres deep. Tanks and guns may not enter it. Everything else may: herds, brides, funerals, walnut traders, priests, children going to school, the post.

Twelve stories and a coda from the years between the Bill of Sale and the marking of the line, told by a translator, a policeman, a refinery family, an actress, a priest, a boy from Semiz, a student, a gendarme, a walnut trader’s daughter, a mapmaker, a rider and an interpreter.

Read the English edition (PDF) Read an excerpt
Iradi edition2015 · 92 pp.
English edition2016 · 97 pp.
Price180 som
Printings3 (Iradi)
Legal depositLD 2016/1174
ISBNNone
Inside the book

Contents

  1. Contingency Papers Talas, 2006–07
  2. Diesel Chu valley, 2007
  3. Kobozev Is Listening Nurzhan, 2007
  4. Signatures Talas, 2007
  5. Mother Leaven Chatkal, 2007
  6. The Aprons Semiz, 2007–08
  7. Bread Cards Talas, 2007
  8. The Armory Talas, 2007
  9. Bazaar Chubar Bazar-Korgon, 2007
  10. One to One Hundred Thousand Bishkek, 2007
  11. Switchyard Toktogul, 2008–09
  12. Pillar Kenkol valley, 2009

Coda: Not for Sale · Bazar-Korgon, 2011

Excerpt

From “Bazaar Chubar”

The sack came down from Arslanbob in the middle of August, on the back of an apricot truck. The driver called from the gate that it was from Kuchkar aka, from the kuda, for the bride, and drove on.

Walnuts. They had fallen a month early and still wore their green coats. Zuhra sat in the shade of the warehouse with a basin and a knife and husked them, as she had done every autumn since she could hold a knife, and laid the pale shells out on the roof to dry. Only when she came down the ladder did she see her hands. Black to the wrist. Walnut juice goes in under the skin and stays for ten days, whatever you do.

Her grandmother saw them from the bench under the vine.

“Six weeks to the toi,” said Kumushay, “and you’ve dipped your hands in Morkhan’s ink.”

She brought a bowl of sour milk and held Zuhra’s wrists down in it and said a prayer in the church words of Örüktü, the hamlet in the hills where she had been born a Christian, before she came down to the bazaar in 1961 to marry a Muslim walnut buyer. The milk did nothing. They both knew it would do nothing. Zuhra kept her hands in it until the sun went off the yard, because her grandmother’s hands on her wrists were warm.

Keep reading

AT

Aikokul Tursunbek kyzy

Author

Born in Talas in 1985. Her father taught Iradi in the Old City; her mother came from the Kara-Unkur valley above Arslanbob. She teaches Iradi and Russian in Talas and has written for the culture pages of the Talas Herald since 2011. On Eki Chakyrym is her first book.

AM

Aidana Mukash kyzy

Translator

Born in Talas in 1980, she grew up there and in Chicago. She returned in 2010 and works as an interpreter and teacher of translation. “I have kept a few words in Iradi because English has nothing that will stand in for them: kuda, kalym, bata, malka, toi.”

“Reading aloud at weddings, memorials and feasts is permitted, and encouraged.”
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