This Is Not Civilization

Robert Rosenberg

Description

Hopscotching from Arizona to Central Asia to Istanbul, this inspired debut novel is “a vibrant mix of the serious and the absurd” (Publishers Weekly).
 
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Anarbek Tashtanaliev singlehandedly supports his small village in Kyrgyzstan, despite struggles at his cheese factory and a ruthless blackmailer. In the canyons of Arizona, Adam Dale’s basketball prowess represents the hope of his entire Apache tribe, but his personal life is filled with poverty and the struggle to break free from his tyrannical tribal councilman father. In Turkey, American Jeff Hartig works as a refugee resettlement officer—until Anarbek and Adam, men he knew during his stint as an aid worker, suddenly reappear in his life.
 
Sharing a small apartment in the magical, sprawling city of Istanbul, the three men form an unlikely bond, filled with confusion, compassion, hope, and friendship. But when tragedy strikes the city, each will have to examine his own journey and his capacity to endure.
 
Hailed as “journalistic, humane, and heart-wrenching” by the New York Times Book Review, This Is Not Civilization is “an ambitious, bighearted debut . . . intelligent, earnest, and highly readable” (Kirkus Reviews).

Sujets

• Arizona
• Istanbul
• Noir
• Voyages
• Crossroads
• Fortune
• Complex
• Society
• Democracy
• Family
• Dráma
• Mystery
• Bildungsroman
• Central Asia
• Family saga
• Career
• Blackmail
• Domestic
• Happy Endings
• Lively
• Against the Odds
• Realism
• Friendship
• Page Turner

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780547561660
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I
1
2
3
II
4
5
III
6
7
8
9
IV
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
V
18
19
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2004 by Robert Rosenberg
 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
 
www.hmhco.com
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN -13: 978-0-618-38601-7 ISBN -10: 0-618-38601-7
 
e ISBN 978-0-547-56166-0 v2.0714
 
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
 
 
 
 
for Michelle
 
 
 
 
Gurbette geçen ömür ömür değildir.
 
Time spent in a foreign land                     is not a part of one’s life.
 
—Turkish proverb
 
 
 
 
I
 
1
T HE IDEA OF using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor one. Anarbek Tashtanaliev, the manager of the cheese factory, had been inspired by a Moscow news broadcast. From Russia the television signal crossed the Kazakh steppes, was beamed to Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, and then relayed up and over the Tien Shan range and into desolate pockets of the new nation. If the Central Asian weather was favorable, the forgotten village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka received the world news. As a result, one Wednesday Anarbek discovered that the Chinese had successfully used taped videos of fornicating bears to coax pandas to breed. The possibility of increased productivity based on a regimen of bovine erotica seemed promising. And the scheme had the single merit of all brilliant ideas: it was obvious.
Anarbek purchased dated Soviet video equipment across the Kazakh border in the Djambul bazaar. He kept factory workers on a twenty-four-hour watch to record, on tape, the next time the bulls went at it. But the workers had no luck that fall. In the spring he sent his employees up the shepherd hill next to the reservoir with an order to film copulating sheep. Thirty days later they had recorded over four and a half hours of tape. The following summer they projected this film each night, in color, onto the factory walls, for the enjoyment of the cows.
The animals were indifferent to the lusty films, and the scheme cost the failing cheese factory a month’s wages. By the end of the winter only eleven Ala Tau cows and two bony Aleatinsky bulls remained. Production had ceased.
Anarbek managed the only collective in the mountain village. During the lean years of glasnost and perestroika, and the optimistic but still lean years of independence, Anarbek had watched his veterinarian pack up for Russia, the feed shipments dwindle, the wormwood climb the concrete walls, the electricity fail, the plate coolers rust, the cows die, and his workers use their lunch hour to hawk carrots and cabbage in the village bazaar. The cheese factory no longer produced cheese. Yet every week in the factory’s old sauna, raising a glass of vodka, wearing only a towel wrapped around his bulging stomach, Anarbek told his friends, “We’re still making a profit.”
He was well aware it was false money. Amid the collapse of Communism, in the extended bureaucratic mess of privatization, the new government continued to support the state-owned collective. A sudden change in the village name had caused the oversight. With a burst of post-independence pride, an official had decreed Soviet Kirovka henceforth be called by its Kyrgyz name, Kyzyl Adyr. Now nobody knew what to call it (Kyzyl Adyr? Kirovka? Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka? Kirovka-Kyzyl Adyr?). The capital could not keep up with such details. The village appeared by different names on scattered government lists, and the factory had yet to be privatized. The machinery had stopped, but the Communist salaries kept coming.
Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka was a cosmopolitan village isolated in the mountains of northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Anarbek’s neighbors were mostly fair-skinned Kyrgyz, but also included Russians desperate to repatriate, and Kurds, and Uzbeks, and the Koreans whose grandparents Stalin had exiled to Central Asia. Everyone benefited from the government oversight. For Anarbek was generous; he knew the money was neither rightfully his nor the factory’s, so he kept on his original thirteen workers, whose families depended on their continuing salaries. The employees showed up at the factory each morning, sat, chatted, and drank endless cups of chai.
Everyone in the village understood that the cows were barren and dying and that the cheese factory produced no cheese. But what good would come of reporting it? Money that did not find its way out of Bishkek would sink into the pockets of the minister of finance, an official rumored to drive a Mercedes-Benz at excessive speed through the streets of the capital, weaving between potholes, honking at donkey carts, trying to run over the poor. A Mercedes-Benz! While the people of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka suffered! For the village, money mistakenly sent from the capital was money they deserved. Anarbek, after all, was a modern, educated Soviet man—he had studied management one summer in Moscow—and the village had confidence he could still turn things around.
On a Wednesday evening, in the heat of the factory sauna, he defended his fertility scheme to six of his neighbors and coworkers. The men nodded in complicit agreement. Only Dushen, the assistant manager of the cheese factory and a man too practical for his own good, broke the spell with a question grounded in reality: “Maybe the quality of projection was bad?”
The men clicked their tongues and shook their wet heads; two of them leaned over and spit onto the hot stones. The spit sizzled into thin wisps of steam. Anarbek sighed. Independence should have been a time of optimism, yet it seemed that brave ideas for improvement were consistently ruined by such complications.
Radish, the head doctor of the village hospital, opened the sauna door, and a stiff gust of air, fresh as a cool river, flowed into the room. Entering, the doctor banged the door behind him, turned his bare jellylike chest around, and announced, “News, my friends! News! The minister of education, from Talas, came by this morning.”
“That son of a bitch,” said Bulut, the town’s appointed mayor, its akim.
“Screw the whole lot of them,” said Dushen.
“Send them back to Moscow,” Anarbek said. “Who needs them!”
He and his friends continued abusing government officials until Radish yelled over them. “Listen. A word! A word! He has offered the village an American.”
“An American?” the men exclaimed in chorus, and burst into laughter.
“An organization called Korpus Mira.” The glint in the doctor’s eyes quieted Anarbek. “The government of Kyrgyzstan has ordered thirty Americans. They’ll distribute them across the country. To hospitals. Schools. Factories like yours.”
“What do they want from us?” Anarbek asked.
“How much do we have to pay them?” Dushen demanded.
“This is the thing,” Radish explained. “They don’t want any money. It’s a humanitarian organization.”
The words humanitarian organization, pronounced in Radish’s halting Russian, sounded like fancy foreign machinery. Nobody in the village had ever used words like those before.
“American spies!” yelled the town akim.
“Thieves,” said Dushen. “They’ll take us over.”
The men shook their heads in doubt, but Anarbek was intrigued. He mused on the inconceivable idea of America—of William Clinton and his friend Al Gore, of the war in the Persian Gulf, of Steven Seagal breaking necks, of the busty Madonna who sang “Like a Virgin”—this America, their new provider. He stepped down to the rack of hot coals, grabbed a cup of water, and, using the tips of his fingers, splashed the rocks over and over until they hissed. A wave of steam swirled into a choking cloud and raised the temperature in the cramped room. The men stepped down to the lower wooden benches. Bent over, covered in sweat, they rubbed their legs and shoulders, and two of them moaned pleasurably, “Ahy, ahy, ahy,” at the heat.
In the center of the floor Anarbek crouched on his haunches next to Radish. “Did you accept this American?”
“I cannot accept,” the doctor explained, snapping his undershorts. “We, our village—all of us must demonstrate our willingness to receive this gift.”
“Maybe,” joked Dushen, “she will be a beautiful long-legged blonde.” He too squatted on the tar-stained floorboards and hawked a gob of mucus between the wooden beams. “Like Sharon Stone.”
“There’s a thought,” said the akim. “Or maybe it will be some wealthy man who will marry one of our daughters and take her to America.”
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