Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Nonfiction

The Beskempir

By Zira Naurzbayeva
Translated from Russian by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Zira Naurzbayeva pays homage to an older generation of women struggling to make the transition from village communities to urban living in contemporary Kazakhstan.
Listen to Zira Naurzbayeva reading an excerpt from "The Beskempir" in the original Russian.
 
 

The roar, filled with anger and a hot wrath, changed into a long, sad howl. My horror was quickly replaced by doubt, because that scream had sounded on a sunny summer day in Academgorodok, somewhere among the brand-new, pink seashell–trimmed buildings of the academic institutes and the housing units for the people who worked there.

I came here fairly often after class and during breaks to help my mother fill in her daily data on the ten square yards of peach graph paper that lined one wall, help her plot out every new data point and connect the dots in pencil. This dreary job, which demanded not just precision but also constant strain on the eyes, was too much now for my mother, who was only working a quarter of her former hours. Her sense of responsibility and her pride prevented her from rejecting this hellish burden altogether, and her bosses, all yesterday’s graduates she had nurtured herself, tried not to notice it. That was why I was at the institute and heard that shriek through the open window.

I looked at Mama. But, contrary to her usual habit, she offered no explanation right away. She looked down, guiltily, somehow, and did not speak. The woman who shared her office did not speak, either. The scream came again. Now I knew for sure it was a person screaming. Mama winced so noticeably that I couldn’t ask my question out loud. I went on working on the graph paper, sorting out possible explanations in my mind. A cry of sorrow? The weeping of some alcoholic in the heat of delirium? A domestic quarrel, some scandal or fistfight? Someone who was just plain crazy?

That evening, when it was just the two of us on the way home, Mama finally found the strength to tell me. It turned out it had been a Kazakh woman screaming, in the apartment building across the way.

A woman working in the Institute of Biology had been in line to be assigned an apartment, and in order to get a bigger one, she had registered her mother as living with her, though she actually lived back in the aul. A lot of people did that back then. Just to be safe—in case the committee showed up unexpectedly or someone reported her—she talked the old woman into staying with her there in Almaty for a while. Her elderly mother was in a hurry to get home. She was lonely in the city, she wasn’t used to it. But her daughter talked her out of it, telling her she needed to stay a little while longer. What if one of the neighbors decided to file a complaint? They’d take the apartment away again. After putting up with it for a while, the old woman made her preparations to go home for good. But by then, she had nowhere to go. Her daughter wanted a new lifestyle to go with her new apartment, and on the sly, she sold her parents’ house in the old aul and used the profits to buy some furniture. What was the big deal, she thought? Why should the old woman live in poverty all alone in that distant village, stoking the oven and lugging buckets of water around? Let her live with her daughter in this apartment in the city and enjoy all the comforts and conveniences.

What else could she do? The old woman agreed. Academgorodok was located, back then, in the middle of an uninhabited green space. Below was the Botanical Garden, to the right were the vacant grounds of the Kazakh State University campus. Since the old woman was used to moving around all day, and being closer to the earth, she started to go out for walks. But problems arose. All her life she had lived in one place, in a tiny aul on the steppes, and now, in her old age, she could not possibly learn to get her bearings in a new, unfamiliar location, among these thick groves of trees and multistory buildings, which all looked identical to her. A few times, she got so lost that the whole building went out searching for her. They’d nearly called the police. Finally her walks were restricted to the courtyard of the building.

Then there was a new tragedy. In the far-off aul, where strangers were extremely rare, she had never once locked the door, and that meant that here in the city, too, she was always forgetting to lock up or leaving her key somewhere. Her daughter finally took her key away for good. When the daughter left for work in the morning, the mother walked out into the courtyard with her, sat down on the bench, chatted with people walking by, and kept at it until her daughter came home. The neighbors felt bad for the old woman and invited her in for tea. But the daughter didn’t like it that her mother was going in and out of the neighbors’ places like some homeless beggar, so now when she left for work she left her mother shut up alone in the apartment.

At first the old woman still wandered the courtyard in the evenings, but the new climate and her new way of life had their effects on her health, and she grew weaker and weaker. Climbing the stairs to the fifth floor was becoming too difficult. When winter came, she stopped leaving the building. Her solitary confinement in the stone box clouded her mind. Now, from time to time, she walks out onto the balcony of her apartment, and she stares at the far-off mountains, and the gardens all around her, and the people going about their business below. And she wails.

In the Almaty of the 1960s and 70s, the older generation in Kazakh families was represented, almost always, by a sole grandmother, an azhe or apa, widowed by the war. If the husband had survived the war years, then the old folks usually lived out their lives together in the aul. But their grown children tried as hard as they could to get the widowed old women to move to the city, mostly to help raise the grandchildren. Love was also a factor, of course, as was a desire to avoid being accused of leaving an old woman all alone.

It’s only now that I understand how hard it was for our grandmothers to settle in this strange city of stone, where a completely different set of morals is in force, where you needed to stand in a suffocating line of people for hours on end to receive a five-pound bundle of bones wrapped in cellophane, where your grandchildren might not know a single word of your native tongue.

City life itself was more than just unusual to them. It went against their traditional upbringing and their sense of decency. We knew a man who came from my mother’s village. He was a colonel in the KGB, and when his mother came to visit, he used to have to escort her to the bushes, right there in the center of the city, early in the morning and late in the evening, because the idea of handling any physiological needs inside the house was shocking to her. “God forbid my son or my daughter-in-law or my grandchildren hear me making noises!” she would say. It was a comical situation in a way, and just one example, but essentially it was a collision of worldviews.

The psychologist Erik Erikson described how Native American girls educated in boarding schools often developed depression due to the differing concepts of cleanliness in their own families and at school. For Indian mothers, the ritual cleanliness of their daughters was very important, while for the white teachers, the essential thing was sanitation and hygiene. As a result, the teenage girls felt dirty in both places. The native people also believed that excrement needed to be exposed to the cleansing effects of sunlight and wind, and they were horrified by the white people’s habit of burying their filth and letting it rot in one single place. We city-dwellers can easily imagine what the white people thought about the Indians. But the first thing Kazakhs did when it became possible to remodel their urban apartments during perestroika was to change up the bathroom. They tried to move the door to the lav, so that it would open up into the entranceway, rather than into the same little corridor as the kitchen. In newer apartments, the doorway to the guest toilet is often in the line of sight of anyone sitting at the table in the big room off the main hallway. That still bothers people who retain the rudiments of their traditional upbringing.

The colonel’s mother never could get used to the city. She moved in, plunged into depression, and began calling my Azhe, my mother’s mother, and asking her to come visit. My Azhe tried to straighten her out. Sure, this place can turn your stomach, but it’s not as if I can arrange a proper welcome feast for you. Come now, your son’s at work day and night, your daughter-in-law’s in the hospital, think of your grandchildren, let’s at least go to the store and buy some groceries. But the crowds in the store and the need to make the rude saleswomen understand what she wanted in Russian were terribly frightening to my grandmother’s friend. She left, while our Azhe put down roots here in Almaty. But only she herself knew what that cost her.

In the late 1980s, she and I watched a TV show together, about a Turkish village holiday with horse racing and everything. Azhe’s reaction took me by surprise. She sighed, and her only response to what she saw on the screen was, “Look how lucky they are, living on the flats!” She herself, in her younger days, had occasionally given in to her son-in-law, a public instructor in tourism, and went off on hikes in the mountains with us. But the stately beauty of the Alatau turned out to be less than inspiring for a native of the flat steppes.

Deprived of their old way of life and everyone they had known since childhood, our Kazakh grandmothers tried to recreate their world in the city. Children and grandchildren were all well and good, but Kazakhs consider their peers their own people, while later generations are some lesser, stranger tribe who have come to settle in an abandoned camp. An old man who has outlived his friends is a person who has been accidentally left behind after his clan has moved on, forced to live as a guest among these new settlers. This is the constant face of a traditional culture.

Picking up and moving to the city to live with their adult children uprooted these old widows, both socially and psychologically, and they often ended up the hostages of their children, whom city life had turned cruel. Pride prevented them from going back home to the aul and admitting, publicly, that things weren’t too good with their children.

When I was little, and even in my teen years, Azhe was the most important person in my life, so I judged people almost exclusively on the strength of their relationship with my grandmother. I saw how a coddled city teen who caused his parents endless problems could be perfectly happy to squat down to help his azheka put her shoes on and lead her out to the courtyard, and ring her friend’s doorbell, and then bring her back up to the fourth floor, say, and how he could do that every single day. I watched my own Azhe return abashed to our place after trying to express her sympathies to the family when one of her friends had died. She was ashamed because that family was experiencing no grief, and needed no sympathy. But it was the old grandmas themselves, each and every one of them, who were most interesting to me.

One of my lifelong friends told me, recently, that in a lot of ways, I was still a child. “But at the same time,” she said, “you are much older than I am. Sometimes you seem ancient to me, older even than my mother.” That is probably true. I remember that when I was a teenager, I preferred spending time with little kids or ninety-year-old women rather than with my own peers. But there are still things I could tell you about the world that had already begun to disappear. Almost none of those Kazakh azhes now remain.

It’s now been a long time since some scholar or other determined that the Kazakh word kempir—“old woman”—was etymologically derived from the two words kam and pir, where kam means shaman, and pir refers to a spiritual teacher or a supernatural benefactor. Presumably, the word kempir originally meant a benevolent master of the elements and other natural phenomena in the guise of an aged woman. Later the meaning lost its loftier connotations and became what we have today.

Indo-Europeans have their male thunder gods, like Zeus or Thor, but the Turkic peoples have a kempir, what we might call a “thunder grandma” today. Kazakh scholars have noted this sort of matriarchal orientation in Turkic and Prototurkic mythology. The Turks—hunters, herders, and warriors all—bowed down before their mothers. All this means that Beskempir could well be the title for some sort of ancient pantheon of gods.

One basic element of this mythology is the custom of taking newborn babies, born to families where the children frequently die, and passing them between the legs of three or four old women. Now this custom is explained as a way to confuse death. The original idea, though, was to show that the child had been born of these “masters of the elements” and shared their strength. The first Kazakh Olympic champion, Zhaqsylyq Üshkempirov, got his last name from this tradition.

Here in Almaty, our Kazakh azhes did not feel like goddesses, or even first wives or matriarchs, but their fates, at the end of their lives, were inextricably woven into the enormous tapestry of city life. Sometimes it worries me that in the fuss of our everyday routine they might finally be forgotten, and I repeat their names, or actually their nicknames, since they rarely called each other by their true names, in deference to an ancient taboo. Nyanya-apa. Astarkhan sheshe. Sary kempir. Öskemen kempir. Oficerdyn kempiri. There are others we lost earlier than our Azhe, and I remember them only dimly; in their lifetimes, for me, they were just her friends. Those who outlived Azhe, the ones I invited to her wake, lent their warmth and their respect for our grief to help me through the darkest period of my life. When the last of them departed, the quick-witted, boastful Ofitserdyn kempir (by then I had learned her real name: Nurganym), my door to that world closed forever.

 

© Zira Naurzbayeva. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2018 by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. All rights reserved.

English Russian (Original)

The roar, filled with anger and a hot wrath, changed into a long, sad howl. My horror was quickly replaced by doubt, because that scream had sounded on a sunny summer day in Academgorodok, somewhere among the brand-new, pink seashell–trimmed buildings of the academic institutes and the housing units for the people who worked there.

I came here fairly often after class and during breaks to help my mother fill in her daily data on the ten square yards of peach graph paper that lined one wall, help her plot out every new data point and connect the dots in pencil. This dreary job, which demanded not just precision but also constant strain on the eyes, was too much now for my mother, who was only working a quarter of her former hours. Her sense of responsibility and her pride prevented her from rejecting this hellish burden altogether, and her bosses, all yesterday’s graduates she had nurtured herself, tried not to notice it. That was why I was at the institute and heard that shriek through the open window.

I looked at Mama. But, contrary to her usual habit, she offered no explanation right away. She looked down, guiltily, somehow, and did not speak. The woman who shared her office did not speak, either. The scream came again. Now I knew for sure it was a person screaming. Mama winced so noticeably that I couldn’t ask my question out loud. I went on working on the graph paper, sorting out possible explanations in my mind. A cry of sorrow? The weeping of some alcoholic in the heat of delirium? A domestic quarrel, some scandal or fistfight? Someone who was just plain crazy?

That evening, when it was just the two of us on the way home, Mama finally found the strength to tell me. It turned out it had been a Kazakh woman screaming, in the apartment building across the way.

A woman working in the Institute of Biology had been in line to be assigned an apartment, and in order to get a bigger one, she had registered her mother as living with her, though she actually lived back in the aul. A lot of people did that back then. Just to be safe—in case the committee showed up unexpectedly or someone reported her—she talked the old woman into staying with her there in Almaty for a while. Her elderly mother was in a hurry to get home. She was lonely in the city, she wasn’t used to it. But her daughter talked her out of it, telling her she needed to stay a little while longer. What if one of the neighbors decided to file a complaint? They’d take the apartment away again. After putting up with it for a while, the old woman made her preparations to go home for good. But by then, she had nowhere to go. Her daughter wanted a new lifestyle to go with her new apartment, and on the sly, she sold her parents’ house in the old aul and used the profits to buy some furniture. What was the big deal, she thought? Why should the old woman live in poverty all alone in that distant village, stoking the oven and lugging buckets of water around? Let her live with her daughter in this apartment in the city and enjoy all the comforts and conveniences.

What else could she do? The old woman agreed. Academgorodok was located, back then, in the middle of an uninhabited green space. Below was the Botanical Garden, to the right were the vacant grounds of the Kazakh State University campus. Since the old woman was used to moving around all day, and being closer to the earth, she started to go out for walks. But problems arose. All her life she had lived in one place, in a tiny aul on the steppes, and now, in her old age, she could not possibly learn to get her bearings in a new, unfamiliar location, among these thick groves of trees and multistory buildings, which all looked identical to her. A few times, she got so lost that the whole building went out searching for her. They’d nearly called the police. Finally her walks were restricted to the courtyard of the building.

Then there was a new tragedy. In the far-off aul, where strangers were extremely rare, she had never once locked the door, and that meant that here in the city, too, she was always forgetting to lock up or leaving her key somewhere. Her daughter finally took her key away for good. When the daughter left for work in the morning, the mother walked out into the courtyard with her, sat down on the bench, chatted with people walking by, and kept at it until her daughter came home. The neighbors felt bad for the old woman and invited her in for tea. But the daughter didn’t like it that her mother was going in and out of the neighbors’ places like some homeless beggar, so now when she left for work she left her mother shut up alone in the apartment.

At first the old woman still wandered the courtyard in the evenings, but the new climate and her new way of life had their effects on her health, and she grew weaker and weaker. Climbing the stairs to the fifth floor was becoming too difficult. When winter came, she stopped leaving the building. Her solitary confinement in the stone box clouded her mind. Now, from time to time, she walks out onto the balcony of her apartment, and she stares at the far-off mountains, and the gardens all around her, and the people going about their business below. And she wails.

In the Almaty of the 1960s and 70s, the older generation in Kazakh families was represented, almost always, by a sole grandmother, an azhe or apa, widowed by the war. If the husband had survived the war years, then the old folks usually lived out their lives together in the aul. But their grown children tried as hard as they could to get the widowed old women to move to the city, mostly to help raise the grandchildren. Love was also a factor, of course, as was a desire to avoid being accused of leaving an old woman all alone.

It’s only now that I understand how hard it was for our grandmothers to settle in this strange city of stone, where a completely different set of morals is in force, where you needed to stand in a suffocating line of people for hours on end to receive a five-pound bundle of bones wrapped in cellophane, where your grandchildren might not know a single word of your native tongue.

City life itself was more than just unusual to them. It went against their traditional upbringing and their sense of decency. We knew a man who came from my mother’s village. He was a colonel in the KGB, and when his mother came to visit, he used to have to escort her to the bushes, right there in the center of the city, early in the morning and late in the evening, because the idea of handling any physiological needs inside the house was shocking to her. “God forbid my son or my daughter-in-law or my grandchildren hear me making noises!” she would say. It was a comical situation in a way, and just one example, but essentially it was a collision of worldviews.

The psychologist Erik Erikson described how Native American girls educated in boarding schools often developed depression due to the differing concepts of cleanliness in their own families and at school. For Indian mothers, the ritual cleanliness of their daughters was very important, while for the white teachers, the essential thing was sanitation and hygiene. As a result, the teenage girls felt dirty in both places. The native people also believed that excrement needed to be exposed to the cleansing effects of sunlight and wind, and they were horrified by the white people’s habit of burying their filth and letting it rot in one single place. We city-dwellers can easily imagine what the white people thought about the Indians. But the first thing Kazakhs did when it became possible to remodel their urban apartments during perestroika was to change up the bathroom. They tried to move the door to the lav, so that it would open up into the entranceway, rather than into the same little corridor as the kitchen. In newer apartments, the doorway to the guest toilet is often in the line of sight of anyone sitting at the table in the big room off the main hallway. That still bothers people who retain the rudiments of their traditional upbringing.

The colonel’s mother never could get used to the city. She moved in, plunged into depression, and began calling my Azhe, my mother’s mother, and asking her to come visit. My Azhe tried to straighten her out. Sure, this place can turn your stomach, but it’s not as if I can arrange a proper welcome feast for you. Come now, your son’s at work day and night, your daughter-in-law’s in the hospital, think of your grandchildren, let’s at least go to the store and buy some groceries. But the crowds in the store and the need to make the rude saleswomen understand what she wanted in Russian were terribly frightening to my grandmother’s friend. She left, while our Azhe put down roots here in Almaty. But only she herself knew what that cost her.

In the late 1980s, she and I watched a TV show together, about a Turkish village holiday with horse racing and everything. Azhe’s reaction took me by surprise. She sighed, and her only response to what she saw on the screen was, “Look how lucky they are, living on the flats!” She herself, in her younger days, had occasionally given in to her son-in-law, a public instructor in tourism, and went off on hikes in the mountains with us. But the stately beauty of the Alatau turned out to be less than inspiring for a native of the flat steppes.

Deprived of their old way of life and everyone they had known since childhood, our Kazakh grandmothers tried to recreate their world in the city. Children and grandchildren were all well and good, but Kazakhs consider their peers their own people, while later generations are some lesser, stranger tribe who have come to settle in an abandoned camp. An old man who has outlived his friends is a person who has been accidentally left behind after his clan has moved on, forced to live as a guest among these new settlers. This is the constant face of a traditional culture.

Picking up and moving to the city to live with their adult children uprooted these old widows, both socially and psychologically, and they often ended up the hostages of their children, whom city life had turned cruel. Pride prevented them from going back home to the aul and admitting, publicly, that things weren’t too good with their children.

When I was little, and even in my teen years, Azhe was the most important person in my life, so I judged people almost exclusively on the strength of their relationship with my grandmother. I saw how a coddled city teen who caused his parents endless problems could be perfectly happy to squat down to help his azheka put her shoes on and lead her out to the courtyard, and ring her friend’s doorbell, and then bring her back up to the fourth floor, say, and how he could do that every single day. I watched my own Azhe return abashed to our place after trying to express her sympathies to the family when one of her friends had died. She was ashamed because that family was experiencing no grief, and needed no sympathy. But it was the old grandmas themselves, each and every one of them, who were most interesting to me.

One of my lifelong friends told me, recently, that in a lot of ways, I was still a child. “But at the same time,” she said, “you are much older than I am. Sometimes you seem ancient to me, older even than my mother.” That is probably true. I remember that when I was a teenager, I preferred spending time with little kids or ninety-year-old women rather than with my own peers. But there are still things I could tell you about the world that had already begun to disappear. Almost none of those Kazakh azhes now remain.

It’s now been a long time since some scholar or other determined that the Kazakh word kempir—“old woman”—was etymologically derived from the two words kam and pir, where kam means shaman, and pir refers to a spiritual teacher or a supernatural benefactor. Presumably, the word kempir originally meant a benevolent master of the elements and other natural phenomena in the guise of an aged woman. Later the meaning lost its loftier connotations and became what we have today.

Indo-Europeans have their male thunder gods, like Zeus or Thor, but the Turkic peoples have a kempir, what we might call a “thunder grandma” today. Kazakh scholars have noted this sort of matriarchal orientation in Turkic and Prototurkic mythology. The Turks—hunters, herders, and warriors all—bowed down before their mothers. All this means that Beskempir could well be the title for some sort of ancient pantheon of gods.

One basic element of this mythology is the custom of taking newborn babies, born to families where the children frequently die, and passing them between the legs of three or four old women. Now this custom is explained as a way to confuse death. The original idea, though, was to show that the child had been born of these “masters of the elements” and shared their strength. The first Kazakh Olympic champion, Zhaqsylyq Üshkempirov, got his last name from this tradition.

Here in Almaty, our Kazakh azhes did not feel like goddesses, or even first wives or matriarchs, but their fates, at the end of their lives, were inextricably woven into the enormous tapestry of city life. Sometimes it worries me that in the fuss of our everyday routine they might finally be forgotten, and I repeat their names, or actually their nicknames, since they rarely called each other by their true names, in deference to an ancient taboo. Nyanya-apa. Astarkhan sheshe. Sary kempir. Öskemen kempir. Oficerdyn kempiri. There are others we lost earlier than our Azhe, and I remember them only dimly; in their lifetimes, for me, they were just her friends. Those who outlived Azhe, the ones I invited to her wake, lent their warmth and their respect for our grief to help me through the darkest period of my life. When the last of them departed, the quick-witted, boastful Ofitserdyn kempir (by then I had learned her real name: Nurganym), my door to that world closed forever.

 

© Zira Naurzbayeva. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2018 by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. All rights reserved.

Бескемпир

Рев, наполненный гневом и яростью, перешел в долгий тоскливый вой.  Ужас мой  быстро сменился недоумением, потому что этот крик прозвучал летним солнечным днем на территории Академгородка среди новеньких, отделанных розовым ракушечником зданий  научных институтов и домов для их сотрудников.

Я довольно часто приезжала сюда после уроков и на  каникулах, чтобы помочь маме  заполнить десять квадратных метров розово-оранжевой миллиметровки на стене, продолжить полсотни изломанных линий из сливающихся карандашных точек. Муторная, требующая не только дотошности, но и постоянного напряжения зрения  канитель была уже не под силу маме, работавшей на четверть ставки. Ответственность и гордость мешали ей отказаться от адской нагрузки, а начальство, выпестованные ею вчерашние выпускники, старались не замечать этого. Поэтому-то я оказалась в институте и из раскрытого окна услышала крик…

Я смотрела на маму. Но она, против своего обыкновения, не торопилась ничего объяснять. Как-то виновато она смотрела вниз и молчала. Молчали и ее соседки по кабинету. Крик повторился. Теперь я уже отчетливо поняла, что  кричит человек. Мама настолько сжалась, что я не смогла задать свой вопрос вслух. Я продолжала работать над графиком, мысленно  перебирая возможные объяснения. Крик горя? Вопли алкоголика в белой горячке? Семейная ссора, скандал, побои? Сумасшедший?..

Вечером, когда по дороге домой мы остались вдвоем, мама, наконец, нашла в себе силы объяснить. Оказалось, это кричала казахская бабушка из жилого дома напротив.

Одна из сотрудниц Института биологии должна была получить квартиру и, чтобы квартира была побольше, прописала к себе проживавшую в  ауле маму. Так многие делали тогда. Для надежности – вдруг комиссия нагрянет или кто донесет – она уговорила старушку  какое-то время пожить с ней в Алма-Ате. Старуха торопилась домой – скучно ей в городе, непривычно,  дочь отговорила: для подстраховки надо бы пожить еще какое-то время с ней, кто-то из соседей может заявление написать, тогда квартиру отберут. Потерпев еще сколько-то, старуха  собралась домой окончательно. Но оказалось, что ехать ей некуда. Дочери в новой квартире хотелось новой обстановки, поэтому она втихую продала родительский дом и на вырученные деньги купила мебель. Ничего страшного: чем старухе куковать одной в ауле, топить печь и таскать воду, пусть поживет с дочерью в городской квартире со всеми удобствами.

Что было делать? Старуха согласилась.  Академгородок тогда находился в пустынном зеленом массиве. Ниже – Ботанический сад, справа – пустующая территория КазГУграда. Привыкшая целый день двигаться, быть ближе к земле, старуха начала, было, выходить на прогулки.  Но тут начались проблемы. Она, всю жизнь прожив на одном месте, в маленьком степном ауле, на старости никак не могла научиться  ориентироваться на новой, незнакомой местности, среди густых зарослей деревьев и неразличимых, на ее взгляд, многоэтажных домов. Она несколько раз заблудилась так, что  искали ее всем домом, чуть ли не милицию вызывали. Пришлось ограничить прогулки одним двором.

Новая беда: в отдаленном ауле, где почти не было приезжих,  она никогда в жизни не запирала дом на замок, а потому и в городе то забывала закрыть дверь на ключ, то оставляла его где-нибудь. Дочь  совсем перестала давать ей ключи. Когда дочь утром отправлялась на работу, мать выходила вместе с ней во двор, сидела на скамеечке, разговаривала с прохожими, и так до возвращения дочери с работы. Соседи, жалея старуху, приглашали ее к себе попить чаю. Но дочери не нравилось, что  мать, как бездомная побирушка, ходит по соседям, и, уходя на работу, она стала закрывать ее дома одну.

Вначале бабушка еще выбиралась во двор по вечерам, но смена климата и привычного образа жизни  сказались на ее здоровье, она все больше слабела. Подниматься на пятый этаж  становилось все труднее. С наступлением зимы она перестала  выходить из дома. Одиночное заключение  в каменной коробке привело к помутнению сознания. Теперь она время от времени выбирается на балкон, смотрит на горы вдали, на сады вокруг, на спешащих по своим делам  людей внизу. И кричит…

В Алма-Ате 60-70-х старшее поколение в казахских семьях было представлено почти всегда лишь аже или апа – военными вдовами. Если  шал не погиб во время войны, то старики обычно вместе доживали свой век в ауле. А вот овдовевших пожилых женщин их дети всеми силами пытались уговорить переехать в город – нянчить внуков, прежде всего. Была, конечно, и любовь, и стремление избежать укоров «бросили старуху одну».

Лишь теперь понимаю, как трудно было нашим аже прижиться в каменном чужом городе, где царили совсем другие нравы, где за двухкилограммовый, завернутый в целлофан, сверток костей надо было отстоять в душной очереди несколько часов, где  внуки часто не знали ни слова на родном языке.

Сам городской быт был для них не просто непривычен, он вступал в противоречие с традиционным воспитанием и чувством благопристойности. Земляк моей мамы, подполковник КГБ, когда его навещала мать, был вынужден в центре города рано утром и поздно вечером выводить старушку в кусты, потому что мысль справлять физиологические потребности в доме ее шокировала. «Не дай Бог, сын, невестка или внуки услышат журчанье!» Комичная, вроде бы, ситуация, частный факт, но  ведь сшибка менталитетов, на самом деле.

Американский психолог Эрик Эриксон пишет, что у индейских девочек, воспитывавшихся в интернатах,  часто начиналась депрессия из-за разного понимания чистоты в родной семье и в интернате. Для индейских матерей была важна ритуальная чистота дочерей, а для белых воспитателей – санитарно-гигиенические правила. В результате девочки-подростки чувствовали себя грязными и там, и тут. К тому же индейцы считали, что экскременты должны подвергнуться очищающему воздействию солнечных лучей и ветра, ужасались  обычаю белых скапливать и гноить нечистоты в одном месте. Что думали белые по поводу индейцев, нам – горожанам – ясно без слов. Но первые перепланировки в городских квартирах казахов, когда это стало возможно во время перестройки, касались именно туалета. Дверь туалета, выходившую в один коридорчик с кухней, старались переставить, вывести в прихожую. В современно спланированных квартирах вход в гостевой санузел часто попадает в поле зрения сидящих за столом в объединенной с холлом большой комнате, что по-прежнему смущает тех, кто сохранил рудименты традиционного воспитания.

Мать подполковника так и не смогла привыкнуть к городу: приезжала, впадала в депрессию, звонила нашей бабушке по маме – нашей Әже, просила приехать в гости. Әже пыталась «вправить мозги» землячке: да, здесь тошно, но той с байгой  для тебя я организовать не смогу, приди в себя, сын днем и ночью на работе, невестка в больнице, подумай о внуках,  давай хоть в магазин за продуктами сходим. Но подругу магазинная толчея и необходимость объясняться по-русски с хамовитыми продавщицами страшно пугали. Она уехала, наша Әже прижилась в Алматы. Но чего ей это стоило, знала лишь она сама.

В конце 80-х мы как-то смотрели с ней по ТВ передачу о турецком сельском празднике со скачками и прочим. Реакция Әже была совершенно неожиданной для меня. Она со вздохом подытожила увиденное: счастливые, на равнине живут… А ведь она, когда была помоложе, уступив напору зятя – общественного инструктора по туризму,  пару раз вместе с нами сходила в горный поход. Но торжественная красота Алатау, как оказалось, совсем  не воодушевляла степнячку.

Лишенные привычного образа жизни и родственного коллектива, казахские бабушки пытались воссоздать  свой мир в городе. Дети и внуки – это прекрасно, но казахи сверстников называют «своим народом», последующие же поколения –  это «племя младое, незнакомое», поселившееся на опустевшем стойбище.  Переживший ровесников старик – это человек, случайно отставший от своего кочевья и потому гостящий у новых поселенцев. Таков постоянный образ традиционной культуры.

Перебравшиеся в город к взрослым детям старые вдовы были уязвимы социально и психологически,  часто оказываясь заложниками вдруг ожесточившихся от городской жизни детей. Гордость мешала им вернуться к родне в аул, публично признать, что с их детьми что-то не так.

В детстве и юности Әже была для меня главным человеком, а потому отношение к бабушкам было для меня чуть ли не  основным критерием оценки людей. Я видела, как избалованный городской подросток, доставлявший немало проблем своим родителям, привычно садился на корточки, чтобы обуть свою ажеку, на спине выносил ее во двор, звонил в двери ее подруг, а потом заносил обратно на  какой-нибудь четвертый этаж, и так – каждый день. Я  видела, как пристыжено возвращается наша Әже после попытки выразить соболезнования  в связи со смертью подруги ее семье, потому что семья никакого горя не испытывает и в соболезнованиях не нуждается. Но больше всего  были интересны мне сами бабушки, каждая из них.

Одна  моя старшая подруга недавно сказала мне: ты во многом еще ребенок, и в тоже время ты намного старше меня, иногда ты мне кажешься такой древней, старше моей мамы. Наверное, это действительно так. Еще подростком  мне было интереснее с малышами или девяностолетними старухами, чем со своими сверстниками. Но зато я могу кое-что рассказать о мире, уже ушедшем в небытие. Сейчас таких казахских аже почти не осталось.

Я назвала этот цикл зарисовок «Бескемпир» («Пять старух»), потому что это распространенное в казахском фольклоре и топонимике понятие. Дело в том, что (обоснованная уже очень давно,  не то академиком А. Маргуланом, не то академиком  А. Коныратбаевым) этимология казахского слова «кемпір» – «кам пір», где слово «кам»  означает «шаман», а  «пір» – это «духовный наставник, сверхъестественный покровитель» и т.д. Предполагается, что изначально слово «кемпір» означало покровителей-владык природных стихий и явлений в облике пожилой женщины. А уж потом смысл его профанизировался, стал таким, какой мы знаем.

Если у индоевропейцев, например, громовержец – это бог-мужчина Зевс или Тор, то у тюрков это «кемпір», «бабушка-громовница», как принято сейчас формулировать. Такова особенность прототюркской и тюркской мифологии, матриархальный характер которой прекрасно показал С. Кондыбай. Тюрки – охотники, скотоводы и воины – поклонялись своим матерям. Таким образом, Бескемпир – это название некоего древнего пантеона божеств.

Рудиментом этой мифологии является обычай проносить новорожденного из семьи, где дети часто умирают, между ног трех или пяти старух. Сейчас этот обычай объясняют стремлением запутать смерть. Изначальный смысл  – в том, что ребенок рождается от «владычиц стихий»,  наделяется их силой. Отсюда фамилия первого казахского олимпийского чемпиона Жаксылыка Ушкемпирова.

Казахские аже не чувствовали себя богинями или хотя бы байбише-матриархами в  Алма-Ате, но судьбы их под конец их дней оказались вплетены в огромное полотнище городской жизни. Иногда мне становится страшно, что в суете они будут окончательно забыты, и я повторяю их имена, точнее, прозвища, так как они редко называли друг друга по именам – отголосок древнего табу. Астархан шеше, Сары кемпір, Өскемен кемпір, Офицердің кемпірі… Других – ушедших раньше нашей Әже – я помню плохо, при жизни они были для меня лишь ее подругами. Те же, кто пережил Әже, кого я приглашала на ее поминки, своим уважением к  нашему горю и своим теплом помогли  пройти через самый темный период моей жизни. Когда ушла последняя из них – шустрая и хвастливая Офицердің кемпірі (я даже успела узнать ее настоящее имя – Нурганым), – дверь в этот мир для меня закрылась…

Read Next

Three wooden boats float in a foggy green pool of water