The next day I woke around 8:30 and expected they would all be off in the fields already, but they were pushing the tractor out of the gate. I hung around to help carry moxim to the tractor and send them off with well wishes. Come to find out at breakfast, I am not the first girl to go out in the fields. Gorzada (Bek’s older sister by 2 years and Alisher’s mother) went one day and came back with blisters all over her hands. Nora looked at my raw but blister-less hands with approval but giggled good-naturedly at my pain when I said my shoulders were sore. We all had a good chuckle about that. I don’t think anyone understood why a girl wanted to do a man’s work for a day. Nora and Siuta had apparently woken up at 5:00 am in order to get all of the food ready for their picnic lunch, and to start cooking for the myriad tourists who would descend like locusts: they swarm; they eat; they leave. First there were three Kyrgyz people that came for tea, a ride, and then lunch. Then there were six people that came for a ride and lunch. Then there were four tourists with a driver (the same one that took me to Kizil-Oi!) and a translator plus two Swiss girls that showed up out of nowhere. That’s a total of 17 people to feed tea, lunch and/or dinner. Nora was running around like a mad woman because the six tourists insisted on eating lunch in the yurt (which is way less convenient since it’s further from the kitchen) and I was actually stressed out trying to help. I’d carry plates of food out to the yurt and fill up their tea. I’d run back to the street to check on the French tourists that were getting on the horses. I sliced apricots and took out the pits, picked the stems off black currants, and smashed the pits open with Siuta to get the edible seed inside (which was a lot of fun as we watched the pits zing away if we hit them at the wrong angle with the stones; I took one to the neck and Siuta screamed).
I taught Bek the word “cousin” once again in reference to Siuta but now he intentionally mispronounces it to “kazan” which in Kyrgyz means a cooking pot. He thinks it’s hilarious and she frumps around, unhappy with the new nickname. He also pegged her with a small apple that was growing and she yelped so loudly that I furiously yelled at him in English to pick on somebody his own size. She appreciated the sentiment even if neither of them understood what I was saying. Now that we have spent time using rocks (“tash” in Kyrgyz) to smash apricot pits open together, Siuta and I have a playful relationship based on teasing and very short English sentences. She is only a few inches shorter than me and our hands are, remarkably, the same size. She struts around when we are walking the same way so as to appear taller, pokes me when I’m not looking, and says “I am woman; you are man” which is the most insulting phrase she can come up with in English and really just makes me giggle. She’s said it so often the past few days that I looked at her as she stood behind her aunt and saw she was dancing to herself and mouthing the words in an obvious sing-song manner. It is all in good fun, but that means I have built up a healthy desire to find a way to get back at her. I recently saw her walking into my part of the house from outside where I knew it was darker, and she had her head down. I stood still behind the lacy curtains in the doorway until she was right in front of me and lunged forth crying, “BOOOOOO!” McKenna 1, Kazan 0. Later that day she called me “super kilin” and when I asked Bek to explain he said, “super. Like, super. Do you know Super Man?” I just got schooled on super heroes by a Kyrgyz Justin Bieber (a nickname which first prompted an irritated “I am NOT Justin Bieber! I am Kyrgyz!”) and called “super wife” by a 13 year old girl. So it has come to this!
I think it took three hours to pick off all of the stems of the several kilos of black currants. Luckily the translator, Darajan, traveling with the two Dutch families decided to sit down and help me for two hours while her charges were off horse riding. She and I got along very well. She said she enjoys funny people like me and she wanted me to teach her new English words. I think we settled on “stem” and “stone” for today (which I said is the England English word for pit; she enjoyed the sentence “I hit the stones with the stones” immensely). I asked her to teach me how to say “little brother” so that I can call Bek that. It sounds kind of like “eeny” but I can never get the accent right and there is a super soft sneaky “m” at the end. As soon as he arrived back from the ride he bumped into my shoulder playfully and I was able to say, “see what I mean?!” to Dara. She thought it was so funny that she also started calling me kilin.
At dinner, Nora said in Kyrgyz and Dara translated that she wants Bek to marry me. I pulled out a photo of Chris with pink hair and said that’s the kind of guy I like, but perhaps I’d consider it if Bek was willing to dye his hair pink. Mercifully he was not present at this dinner. His uncle and father were also there and they agreed on the match. The driver also chipped in and said to dump Chris and marry Bek. I hid my blushing face in my jacket and that caused everyone to laugh uproariously. I think everyone called me kilin that night but Dara is maybe 90-100 pounds (she later said “40-45 kilos so that’s what I’m going on) and I can’t jab her in the ribs with my elbow the same way I can Bek. When dinner was over I walked out of the dining room door and glanced to my right to find Jekshen at least five feet in the air. Knowing jumpy ole McKenna (and “jumpy” is one of Bek’s vocab words for obvious reasons), you will not be surprised, dear reader, to hear that this elicited a shriek and a few stumbling steps away from the madness in the air. Luckily it wasn’t so funny a sight that Jekshen was in any danger of falling off the ladder. All is well with the world.
Bek has been saying for ages that we should drink a bottle of beer together so we did split some that night. I was able to ask questions about horses since we were sitting around with no other obvious task or conversation easily at hand. For one, I have been burning to know how many horses they have. If you have a large amount of livestock, it is impolite in Kyrgyz culture to say how many. People know how much horses/cattle/sheep cost and if you know how many someone has it’s basically like bragging about how much money they make. This is similar to the idea that houses are meant to be humble on the outside and polished on the inside. So since day one, I have been asking about their horses, and Bek has been cagey. When we were in the field they day before, I elicited an accurate yet unspecific “more than 10.” The night of beer though, I got a specific answer! I was so proud until a few days later, Nora told some tourists the right number and I was flabbergasted. I wonder if Bek knows….
Anyway, regardless of how secret the information is, he said that his 10 mares had 5 babies (culun in Kyrgyz) but two of them died. I said “in America, we would cry about that.” And he said “really? Really. Really?” It was a situation that he could not compute. His mares don’t have names and he thinks the two that lost the babies (within the first two weeks or so) were young mothers. So it’s just a fact of life for him and not an emotional toll. He said “every year my animals die.” So I asked if he would cry if Adrenaline died (his personal horse) and he said “oh no! I will not talk about this.” It was too painful of an idea to discuss and possibly bad luck since he shot it down so quickly. It was exactly the kind of conversation I imagined having when I planned this whole Watson thing. Except I had no idea what he would be saying. We looked up at the stars and I was excited to see my friend the Big Dipper (aka the only constellation I know) staring back at me, still in the same place even though I’ve traveled so far.