Наконец-то!

It’s a rainy, stormy day in Kyzyl. Great giant blue clouds surround the city, making the new-burst green leaves shimmer with the wind coming before. The flood waters are rising, the river tall and brown, swollen with melting snow from the distant taiga. Seasons changing , seasons in the life of this city yet to come, that I will not be apart of. Spring has sprung and summer is coming, but for me it’s parting with a tinge (well, maybe more than a tinge:)) of sadness.

Things I will miss about this city, this place, this little home I have found are many. I will miss the image of the mountain Dugeh, the articulated shape I’ve come to known from many angles. Just the image, the form of the great mountain, visible right from my window, I will miss its constant shape.

I will miss the insularity of community, running into people I know on the street three or four times a day, seeing a familiar figure or walk from a bus window--maybe a middle aged plump lawyer with her daughter from my fitness class--and the way this makes me feel connected to the people and the stories of this city.

I will miss my students; the eager faces, the sleepy faces first period, the way all the girls spend breaks between periods intently scrutinizing their nose in their hand mirrors. I will miss the jokes, the company, the family they have become. I will miss their essays, miss reading the stories of their lives and youth in the taiga, in their unique and ever-changing land.

I would like to pause here, just to say there are a few things I won’t miss: sazha (the coal soot in winter), winter cold, the smell of really ripe twice-drunk men on the minibus, and the way people take departmental politics seriously and end up hurting each other. I suppose these things I won’t miss are good things; it means less missing!

I will miss the streets of Kyzyl, the little grid I’ve come to know so well. I’ll miss the corners and nooks I’ve left unexplored--and possibility will never explore. One of my great regrets is that I never made it to the city graveyard… maybe if I hurry there is still time before I go! I have a feeling the graveyard will say a lot about history; about a town that was only founded in 1907, about a republic that was an independent country until 1944, and about a country that collapsed almost twenty years ago, making formerly repressed religions suddenly allowed, and taking away the economic support that had filled this dusty wide-open bowl of the steppe lands with life and activity for so long.

I will miss Russian products; the tastes and flavors I have come to know and love. I will miss milk with 3.4-6% milk fat! I will miss morning tea, midmorning tea, pre-lunch tea, lunch tea, post lunch tea, afternoon tea, pre-dinner tea, dinner tea, post-dinner tea, pre-bedtime tea, bedtime tea, etc. I will miss chewing watermelon orbit gum everywhere I walk around town. I will miss twelve rubles getting me anywhere I need to go.

I will miss the taste of sheep (a very Tuvan thing to say!). I will miss Tuvan soup, Tuvan toast (though French toast may suffice in the meantime), making and eating dumplings, the dream team of soy sauce and mayonnaise drenching any sort of boring dinner. I will miss feeling required to buy chocolates and sweets whenever I go to visit a friend. I will miss cheap pomegranate juice from Azerbaijan.

Some of these tastes and experiences I am sure I will be able to recreate in my new surroundings, but I fear somehow it won’t be the same. So much of what and how this place has meant to me relies on context. It’s like the hot air holding up a hot air balloon. Through all these isolated events, people, places, rituals, products, runs a thread of living experience, of the mosaic of life in Kyzyl that I have lived this year. And I will miss it muchly.

I guess this post is rather grustno (“sad”) but it’s not really. I feel ready to go; I am just observing the fact that I have had a super year in Kyzyl, and am so grateful for the opportunity--the gift--of involving my life in this distant place. I hope to take a little bit of the place with me where ever I go; and I think I will, though people in my family have notoriously bad memories, so that has me worried a bit. What if I forget all about this? Or, more importantly, what if I forget about how this place made me feel, about the new ways of looking at the world and myself I discovered here?

Anyways; clearly, leaving a place where you’ve spent a year of your life is never a simple thing. I didn’t expect it to be, and in a way I have been surprised by the richness of this goodbye; just as I have been pleasantly surprised by the richness of this entire experience. Namdolmaa is having some denial that I’m leaving; every time it comes up, she just says she’s certain I’ll be back very soon. I like hearing the certainty in her voice; it makes me think it’s true as well.

Who knows, what’s next. I can’t say I do really; but this has been a great year; as one of my good friends here likes to tell me “unforgettable.” When ever I hear that I stop worrying about my hereditary bad memory, about the dislocation and forgetting that can occur when a person travels continents. And I too am sure that not too long from now, I’ll be returning.

That’s all for now, Kabanchiki. Hope I didn’t weird you all out with my sentamentalism! I guess I will end this post (and in a sense my blog, though I will try to keep writing in next month--I’ll be traveling around Russia and Eastern Europe) with a favorite piece of poetry, “Thank You, My Land,” by Nabokov. I think the poem pretty well sums up my feelings about this year and about Russia in general. It goes like this:

Thank you, my land,
For your remotest
Most cruel mist
My thanks are due.
By you possessed,
By you unnoticed,
Unto myself I speak of you.
But in these talks
Between somnambules
My inmost being hardly knows;
If it’s my demency that rambles
Or your own melody that grows!