Virgin Lands

by Brianna Avenia-Tapper

Before I left for Kazakhstan, I bought a hot pink vibrator and packed it in a sock. They say that there is no sex in the USSR. In my experience there are actually no vibrator batteries. The thing ended up on my nightstand, inert and neglected beside my copy of The Second Sex. I would grapple there for my glasses in the mornings and then look out at the Tien Shan mountains looming in my bedroom windows, snowcapped and stern-browed, dwarfing the Soviet cinder block structures at their feet. 

The Tien Shan began forming when giant sections of the earth’s crust crashed into one another, crumpling the edges of what has become China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The collision continues even now. Each day the unstable earth below strains against itself; each morning the mountains are the tiniest bit taller than the day before.

My life under the Tien Shan was the widest it had ever been. I woke up and looked out the long window at those mountains and spread my arms and legs like a starfish in the king-sized bed. I had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom—all for me. A front hall! A washing machine! In that apartment, in Almaty, I was rich. I was rich in rooms and money, in time and space. Now, years later, I am sharing a home with my mother-in-law, my daughter, and my husband, sharing my body with my heavy unborn son. I remember the lightness of my life in Almaty, and I miss that stretched-out time. I miss how often I could sleep exactly when I wanted.

On Valentine’s Day, Ace of Base staged a reunion concert in Almaty, and our troop of expats all got tickets. I arrived late and scurried through the dark theater past the sharp shoulders of Kazakh men in suits, the fur-trimmed necklines of Kazakhstani women in diamonds. I peered around for my familiar foreigners, naked-faced and dirty-sneakered, our genders nearly indistinguishable within the excess flesh and saggy jeans. “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, which I think must also be true for men. In Kazakhstan, I imagined I was slowly becoming a sort of man, learning to spread into the open space around me.

  When the concert was over, we turned against the human tide and pushed inward toward the stage. With my Canadian friend Cathy in the lead, we marched down the aisle slope, up to the stage, up to the solid Kazakh security guard. Cathy hoisted her little green purse farther up her shoulder and mounted the stairs, walking right past the man and his headset and his grimace and his giant, meaty arms. Up she went; what could we do but follow her?

“Ostanavitye!” barked the guard. “Ostanavitye ne meddleno!” Our Russian was imperfect, but we knew ostanavitye. Stop was a word foreigners learned quickly but often chose not to hear. We heard stop! and we kept walking anyway, pretending we didn’t understand and pretending that meant we didn’t have to follow the rules. We marched like that, up the stairs and across a stage as distant and untouchable as if it were outer space. We parted the heavy velvet curtains with our hands. In the wings we found the band, smelling of grease and hairspray, packed tightly into clothes with too many zippers. A bleached-out Ulf asked me to name my favorite song. After we scored our signatures, we left the theater and went into the winter night and drank.

One of the other expat teachers told me he thought Almaty was “like Moscow without the good parts,” and I enthusiastically agreed. I didn’t know why. I knew that it felt like we were living in a Soviet colony. I didn’t question it. Such is privilege, that state where you are granted the luxury of not understanding because everyone else will organize themselves around your misconceptions. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes that men describe the world “from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” Like American expats. We like to slap our disapproving labels on anything we might not understand. 

Now, back home in the country of my birth and very pregnant, the reality of multiple perspectives is kicking me from inside. “The body is not a thing, it is a situation,” wrote Beauvoir, “it is our grasp on the world.” My current body is made of two. Two minds, two mouths, two hearts, two stomachs. My grasp on the world is complicated by this bifurcation. I am different than I was in Almaty. More female now than ever, I find I want to know the Kazakhstan I couldn’t see before. I’m curious. As I wait for the son whom I am growing, I begin to ask the questions I didn’t ask while I was there. I peel back the covers of Steve Sabol’s The Touch of Civilization, dig deep into Sarah Cameron’s The Hungry Steppe. In my search for answers, I read about the men who reshaped the Kazakh steppe in the Soviet image. They described the nomadic life they observed as rife with poverty and social disease. I learn that from the Soviet’s view, certainly confused with absolute truth, the Kazakh nomads were a slow and stunted people, starving on frozen grassland, too ignorant to give up their nomadic practices. 

Marx mapped humanity’s upward trek toward perfection, and Soviet minds allowed no alternate routes. It could not simply be that the cyclical wandering of Central Asian nomads was a prudent adaptation to a land so harsh it tolerated nothing else. It could not be that the optimal number of sheep per herd varied depending on the weather or the time of year. Or that the slaughter of those sheep might be connected to the timing of the winter’s first hard frost. The world had to be mapped, scheduled, counted. This way it could be predicted and controlled. But how do you map a people defined by transience?

Two months into my time in Kazakhstan, Cathy and I learned that someone’s husband had trekked into the Tien Shan, to Issyk-Kul, the mountain lake. The trail was hard, we heard, and sometimes trolled by bandits. The danger only made it more appealing. We wanted to see that lake. We wanted bragging rights. I dug out my backpack and stuffed Beauvoir in first. My vibrator, I threw out. Without batteries, it was no good to me. 

We hired a grizzled Kazakhstani mountaineer named Victor to be our guide. He tied his bandana around his neck like a Soviet boy scout and labeled us mattrasniki, meaning wimps. Over our school break in October, Victor drove us away from Almaty, through poorer and poorer towns of blue and white buildings. In one, children ran alongside our car shouting. We watched them through our windows, saw them shrink behind us like movie extras fading into the background. 

“They’re not used to seeing women driving,” Victor explained as we cruised by, crushing soft dirt beneath our tire treads. And I wondered whether those children would have even called us women, had they known how we were rolling across that steppe on holiday, with our fat wallets and flat-soled shoes, our hours unconstrained by husbands and babies. 

To set the confused Kazakhs on the straight and narrow, Stalin sent a man named Goloshchekin to Kazakhstan in the 1920s. Goloshchekin sounds like golodny, the Russian word for hungry. Goloshchekin, fresh from slaughtering czars in Leningrad, was tasked with bringing maternity wards and newspapers and all the rest of modern civilization to the wild steppe. He was to convert the Kazakh nomads to a settled way of life, to exile the wealthiest, to confiscate their livestock, and to increase food production for the Soviet republic. Under Goloshchekin, fields of animals were destroyed, families were torn apart, farms mismanaged. The inevitable drought came, and food started to disappear. Much of the little grain and meat remaining was sent to Moscow. The Kazakhs began to starve. Desperate people cannibalized the dead. Children ate their furniture. They cooked the wool and leather from their beds. Millions died. During the two years I lived in Kazakhstan, this famine was not mentioned once. 

I did learn of smaller, fresher wounds. I heard how the Soviets had used Kazakh territory to test their nuclear weapons. Now, I research this tragedy too, shielding my growing belly with one hand as I read. I learn of orphanages full of deformed children who roll instead of walk, gag instead of cry. Children whose DNA has been disfigured by their parents’ radiation exposure.

“Congratulations!” exclaimed a man I know, when he first glimpsed my massive pregnant belly, waistband sliding down the curve of my expanding center. Then he added, “and my condolences.” I was grateful for the ambiguity. Because who is to say which platitude is more appropriate? For me it is both what I want and what I don’t, depending on the week, the day, the minute. My son is both my child and myself, he’s a hip, a rib, a fleshy body part of mine, but also a little gremlin who can give me indigestion. At first he was a microscopic blastocyst and a confusing headache. Now he’s taking potshots at my cervix. Soon he’ll be in the world, no pulsing cord connecting his insides and mine. But he’ll eat from my body still, and I will ache when he’s too far from me. 

The problem with Cuvier’s catastrophes is that discrete events imply discrete non-events. They imply that there is a space between catastrophes when nothing changes. As though in a single moment of childbirth our life implodes, and no slow and incremental adaptation precedes or follows. 

On our expedition to Issyk-Kul, Cathy and Victor and I drove past the towns and then far out into the Kazakh steppe, the road we traveled barely distinguishable from the bumpy, barren land through which it curved. Victor told us, “Now there will be a tree and then there will be nothing.” 

“Nothing?” We laughed. How could there be nothing? But that’s exactly how it was. A tree. A single pathetic tree like a sullen adolescent, slumped in defiant isolation, bare but for the tiny pieces of white plastic bag tied to its scrawny branches. Beyond the tree: nothing. Empty, flat, brown nothing stretched for miles. More nothing than I had ever seen—nothing that went on for longer than I had ever tried to look. We looked out of the car window at a land made for running across, for nomads, for hordes of horses, for yurts and kumiz.

When the sky went sallow, Victor told us just to stop on the side of the road. We set up camp right there, in the middle of the nothing. Cathy and I lit my tiny camp stove, put a pot of water on its flame. I had no top for the pot and used my copy of The Second Sex as a lid to keep the water from evaporating away. That night, I opened the book’s damp covers and read with my chin tucked up against my chest, my headlamp pointing down at the small words. I fell asleep dreaming of what Beauvoir had written, how it isn’t enough for women to simply take on men’s power, “since that wouldn’t change anything about the world.” The part where she writes, “It's a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”

As I prepare for my son’s birth, I think about the sort of man he will become. The kind of power he might wield. The other day at an ultrasound, I got to see my son cuddled up inside me on the muddy screen. “Definitely a boy!” The tech exclaimed with admiration and asked us if we wanted a picture, which seemed weird. What exactly would we do with a photo of our child’s genitals? But the point is, there’s a boy inside me. I sometimes think there always was.

We stopped on the second day in a pasture on the outside of the village of Sati. Cathy and I were both restless, eager to stride up between the dark green conifers, to scale the Tien Shan, to stick our toes in the edge of Issyk-Kul. We had a mountain to summit.

“It’s too late,” Victor told us. “We can’t possibly start now.” We looked at him, confused.

“But if we don’t start now, we won’t make it to the lake.” 

He shrugged, unconcerned.

“But!” we protested. “This was the plan! This was what we wanted! This is what we hired you for!” Victor shrugged again and looked beyond us, our desires unimportant in the rugged foreign mountains on which he was an expert.

“You are too slow,” he said. “You are not strong enough.” Cathy slammed the car door. I took off in a huff to hike alone on a distant ridge. Later we decided that Victor had never planned to take us to Issyk-Kul, but wanted our money anyway, or didn’t think the destination mattered. Now I read we were a month past the time of year when that path is considered passable.

After a sullen night, we drove to the head of the trail we had planned to complete. We turned around sometime after lunch, somewhere along the way, underneath some trees that were just like all the others. Not at a summit or a vista or even a clearing. We just walked in for a while and then out. The next day we drove all the way back through the nothing in one long, leg-aching stretch. We were warm but silent in the car, Victor sitting stiff-backed and resolute in his rightness, Cathy and I wishing still for the thing we thought we deserved and didn’t get. 

Published December 12th, 2021