Meat Part II - The Head

The Head
I’d been wondering why I hadn’t gotten my daily constitutional. Plain bread with fatty butter, black tea crunchy with sugar, and potatoes fried in cottonseed oil. It was well after sunset, then I heard the word “Ramazan” (Ramadan).
Curious, I consulted the calendar and realized it started that day. This was a cute notion to me because while nearly every ethnically Kazakh person claims to be Muslim, there couldn’t be less evidence of practice. Especially in the center and north of the country.
I’ve actually answered the question from a local, “What is that building?” “A mosque…” “Oh yeah…”
I had a language teacher in my first month here, a sweet but assertive Kazakh lady who was so cute and small you wanted to pinch her ample round cheeks then make her sit neatly in the corner of your made bed next to the puffy pillows and teddy bears. She was also one of the most religious people I’ve met here. On a visit to the local echoingly empty and unworn mosque she summarized religion in Kazakhstan with a well-worn saying.
“We wouldn’t step on a loaf of bread to reach up for the Koran, but we would step on the Koran to reach up for a loaf of bread.”
Thanks to the oil rich Central Asian version of trickle-down economics, bread is no longer a problem. Especially for the generation too young to remember 7-hour milk lines and winters without heating or electricity. That quote can now be modified as follows:
“We wouldn’t step on our mobile phone ringing with the latest Russian pop song to reach up for the Koran, but we would step on the Koran to reach up for our mobile phone ringing with the latest Russian pop song.”

There was an impatient wrap on the vault-like metal door of the concrete apartment (Every apartment I’ve seen in this country has two thick doors. The solid wooden inner door keeps the apartment warm and the people inside alive. The thick metal outer door keeps residual Soviet paranoia alive.) In the wake of a middle aged Kazakh man came one of my host mom’s drinking buddies, Gulnar (*see Miners Day). Behind them was a dutifully covered wife in the Muslim fashion and an indulged four year old little boy.
If anybody can claim to be a “typical looking” Kazakh man, he can. He has Central Asian features, round in face and stature, with gently bowed legs and a wispy black goatee. His shaved head was covered with a traditional yurt-shaped hat called a “tipee-teka” which was embroidered with the signature Kazakh designs. Slacks, a white button-up shirt and an experienced navy blazer covered the rest of his body. He turned out to be the Mullah in Gulnar’s village, a small huddle of houses elsewhere on the steppe. (And while he commanded a great deal of ceremonial respect on this night. I would imagine I have a larger audience for my daily pontifications at university than he does at his weekly ones in the mosque.)

The showpiece of Kazakh hospitality is a “dostarkhan”, which is a well-set table. This means the table must be bowing under the weight of everything remotely edible in the house. In general, but especially during the 9 months of the year when veggies are scarce, almost every dish features meat of some variety and in various stages of preparation, from salad to desert. The only things meat has yet to be incorporated into is candy and the bread which is customarily scattered over the table to cover any surface left naked by the plates, bowls, platters and glasses.

As we waited and admired the dostarkhan the overwhelming smell of boiled mutton wafted in from the kitchen. It’s a smell I’ve learned to detect from a housing block away as it is the most common meat featured in the Kazakh national dish, “beshbarmak”.

The name “beshbarmak” literally means “five fingers” in Kazakh…which describes not what you eat but how you eat it. It’s a dish from the minimalist school of national cuisine. Beshbarmak involves the following ingredients, or any combination there of: boiled whole potatoes, boiled onions, and boiled meat (goat, sheep, cow or horse are the most common) squatting on a bed of large slimy noodles similar in size and shape to those used for lasagna. The first 20 or 30 times its amusing to gather around a large platter heaped with the aforesaid contents, with strangers of varying levels of sanitary aspirations and shovel it in by the handful. But, after a couple months one learns the art of subterfuge and avoidance, picking your battles of cultural sensitivity and gastrointestinal distress carefully.

The table looked empty somehow, it lacked the usual topography but I wasn’t able to pinpoint it. After a few minutes of fidgeting, truly awkward conversation, and longing glances at the muted Mexican soap opera blinking in the corner it dawned on me…there was no vodka on the table! It was definitely the first, and almost positively the last, time abundant quantities of stiff alcohol weren’t being used to drown boredom and fill the place of small talk with meandering toasts. It was like a group of friends going to a nude beach for the first time and trying to carry on as if they weren’t naked.
With gusto and pride the main course was paraded in, to applause and fanfare, the short distance from the kitchen to the expanding table set up in the living room. It was a manhole-sized platter of “beshbarmak” crowned with a dark gray boiled sheep head. Eyes tightly shut, hair boiled off along with the lips, leaving a big toothy grin to greet its future consumers.
I thought the small talk beforehand was the definition of awkward table interaction until the head landed on the table and a whole new level of forced enthusiastic insincerity was reached. The praise was lathered on like ketchup on a bad steak, but only out of obligation to the national dish and holiday. Being good citizens of KZ dictates appreciation but even the Mullah seemed to be putting on a performance.
The Mullah then seized the experienced and dull steak knife in his meaty hands and started the sculpting of boiled flesh. Pinching the tip of the ear and pulling it tight, he sawed it off and passed it to his bratty little boy. The ear is customarily given to the kids (boys, of course) to encourage them to listen to their parents, but I was just glad to see him shut-up and get what he deserved. I then got was I deserved for every snide thing I’d said to myself so far that evening, and then some.
He confidently plunged the knife handle-deep into the eye socket. With and aggressive sawing and stabbing technique he went to work removing the boiled shut eyelid and everything even slightly associated with the act of sight. By the time the teeth of the knife were done scraping and grinding against the bone of the eye socket he extracted something resembling, in size and color, a large banana slug wearing a charcoal gray leather helmet. The gelatinous mass had the charming property of being so slippery that master of ceremonies had to cup his hand for fear of it squirting our and sliding off the table.
All eyes, in chorus, focused on me. They eagerly glanced between my face and the outstretched hand hovering in front of me. Not being quick witted in my first language, I stood no chance in the infantile states of my second.
“Take! Take!” they said, “Eat. Eat!” they said.
“Really! Really!?” I said.
The exit being blocked by two sturdy doors and a year’s worth of shame and cultural insensitivity, I had no choice. With slumped shoulders and a sweaty palm I held out my hand to receive the mouthful of optical apparatus that was enthusiastically plopped into it.
I meekly stared at the mass in hand, quivering with each of my restrained gags, while the natives were getting restless. They were itching for a show and letting me know it was time for the curtain to go up in no uncertain terms, judging by the tone of the voices and the fists banging on the table. I'm not religious but I closed my eyes and prayed for an unspeakable natural disaster to occur within the next 3 seconds to save me from what was about to come…or at least kill me relatively quickly. But nothing came, just louder “Eat! Eat!”s.
I screwed what little courage I had to the sticking point, plugged my nose and tossed it toward the back of my throat. The tail end slapped the side of my cheek as it followed the rest into my mouth, then I began the long chew. The leathery eyelid proved impossible to breakdown with the mere force of my jaw while the rest seemed not to cut into smaller pieces but rather squish thinner, increasing the surface area and having the effect of magically expanding. As the war of attrition was waged in my mouth, the audience wasn’t placated. Their impatience was silent now but in a near frenzy, waiting for the big gulp and any possible consequences resulting from it. The eye was winning, I had to surrender before it got bigger and would be too vast to swallow in one piece. So I did. With a boa constrictor-sized gulp I made it disappear and felt it slide all the way down my throat like a drink of cold water on an empty stomach.
A round of “well done” ‘s followed and the Mullah went back to work on the head. I was hoping to see my fellow diners get some choice cuts of cranial cuisine but I was disappointed. I thought maybe he would pry the grin open and dice up the tongue, or flip the head over, jimmy open the skull like a walnut and start handing out lumps of brain. Instead he shaved off modest sized slices of cheek, pinched them between his thumb and the knife blade, then plopped them on everyone’s plate…including mine.
We chewed our rubbery medallions and a few people managed not to choke on the cheek or their words and uttered a “tasty” or “very tasty”. (The Russian language is rich in many ways, notably its foul language which most men will brag about and elaborate on, but when it comes to positive descriptions of taste it is lacking. “Tasty” is about all there is to it. Sure, you can toss a “very” in front of it for variety, but when it comes to practical application it’s a one-size-fits-all situation. I’ve asked many people for other variants and after long contemplation about every 10th person will find another word, which is then brought into question by the nearest native speaker. Sooner or later everyone gives in and agrees they really only use/have one word. While this limits one’s ability to pour on the compliments, it does make it quite easy to lie and patronize…a much more useful tool.)
The head was then swooped off the table by its good ear, winking with its remaining eye as it disappeared into the kitchen. If I was to say it didn’t bother me I was the only one who had to eat the slithery innards of that head, I would by lying. To hell with cultural sensitivity, and being an “honored guest”, I was somewhere between annoyed and pissed off…and much closer to the latter. I wanted to enjoy the spectacle of gagging diners as their eyes watered and the mustered the willpower to swallow the parts of this once grazing beast which should only be eaten by those on television expecting a cash prize and national fame.
Instead we moved on to the multitude of dishes unimaginatively incorporating meat and the end of the meal was signified by us drinking the broth in which the head was cooked. Served in a “piala”, the small bowl out of which tea is traditionally drunk, the table was a cacophony of slurping. I dumped enough pepper in it to float a rock and kill the fleshy taste of the oily brew then joined in.
When the doors clanged shut behind the Mullah a bottle of vodka magically appeared. Quickly and efficiently shots were poured all around, and with the relief of a chain smoker after a transcontinental flight, we took our potato juice medication. In a matter of minutes the common social denominator restored the status quo and we were able to better enjoy each others company…and I was able to kill the memory of my taste buds.

MEAT Part I

Kazakhstan has a fantastically meat-happy culture. I’ve never seen, read of, or heard about a place that loves the consumption of flesh more. After a few months of winter I’ve started to miss vegetables like a long-distance lover…deeply, emotionally, distractingly.

I’ve spoken with every group of my students about vegetarianism throughout the course of my one and a half years here. As a rule, 90% of my students fit in the following demographic profile: female, 17-22 years old, compulsively well-groomed and made up (questionable fashion tastes aside…many young women here seem to derive their standard of “high fashion” from the dancers in the constant barrage of rap videos they gobble-up from the USA), lean, image conscious nearly to extreme, and never more than two feet or four seconds from a mirror of some kind. A group which, in the US and many other countries, would have at least 1 or 2, if not a healthy proportion, of omnivores.

“Is anybody here a vegetarian?” I ask and always receive a condescending chorus of no’s and of-course-not’s.
“Does anybody know a vegetarian?” Without fail there is a short pause for thought then a less condescending but equally confident response of no’s and of-course-not’s.

Usually I am then interrogated on the frequency, merits and rational of vegetarianism, all of my responses being easily dismissed. To the answer “Some people simply don’t like the taste.” they respond about how they cant understand that, they LOVE meat, can’t go a day without eating it, and “besides, you must eat meat and fat in our climate. You need it for the winter.”
When I bring up many people’s moral rational for being vegetarian it inspires a sea of confused looks. While most here love animals for eating above all else, a close second is being able to wear them. The perfect use of a fuzzy mammal would be to eat it for breakfast, lunch and/or dinner then wear it’s fur in the form of an aggressively shaped hat, a long coat or at the very least a liner for a pair of leather boots.
The final and most futile rational I give about health concerns is rarely worth the breath. In a culture where you must eat cubes of fat when you are sick and the “magic” cure for a sore throat involves wrapping one’s neck in a vodka soaked cloth, assertions about scientific evidence or medical studies are dismissed as unbelievable and “yellow journalism” (a very popular phrase here, used to dismiss any dissenting point of view, especially in the political sphere).
Another time, at a biweekly discussion group I do my best to lead, we talked about cuisines. A mildly interesting exchange took place between the 30 or so people until I posed the seemingly simple question, “What is the cuisine of Kazakhstan?” A thoughtful silence followed until a mouthy girl answered quit matter-of-factly “Meat.”
“Well what kind of meat? You know, what spices, how is it usually prepared…?”
“Any meat. Just meat. Usually boiled but it doesn’t matter, just meat.” A circle of 29 heads nodded in agreement.
I have lived with local families in Kazakhstan for 14 months of my life and during that time ate more meat than a tyrannosaurus rex. After two winter months of living with a Kazakhstani family even Jeffrey Dahmer would begging for a garden salad.

(It should be noted that meat and fat are held in the same high regard here. A chunk of meat is not a good chunk of meat unless it is equal part fat. Come the brunt of winter it is widely believed fat is the most important thing one can eat. So if you find yourself being served any food item by your hostess you can count on naked pieces of fat floating, adorning, hiding, squatting or being featured in nearly every portion of anything.)

Liver, Ear & Tongue
On one regrettable day wandering around the cold and crumbling halls of my college I was ambushed with an invitation to drink tea with the director. For some reason the social/professional structure here makes any manager/director/rector/dean (even of a small college with only 350 students) an illogically powerful person who’s orders, no matter how naked of logic and objective, must be obeyed. With nothing better to do I accepted the honorable invitation.
A “tea” always involves food and candy and often involves a few casual rounds of cognac, as on this day. (*a note on procedure: drinking straight vodka/cognac is the universally accepted way of intake here but instead of following the foul taste and gagging burn with a drink of something else, food is used. It can be anything from a chicken dinner to a mayonnaise-based salad to birthday cake, and when times are lean a mouthful of vodka is tamed by simply holding a piece of bread under one’s nose and inhaling.) For my chaser, the director thrust upon me a piece of bread topped with a sizable cross-section of a brown cake-like specimen marbled at regular intervals with thin white wavy strips.
“Home made!” she said with pride.
As much as I dislike warm vodka, I dislike warm cognac significantly more, so I took an assertive bite of that which was waiting in my left hand. Expecting the taste of the usual misguided attempt at dessert I was instead greeted by the pasty texture and rich taste of some sort of internal organ. Not sure if my jaw was tightening and eyes watering from the cognac or the chaser, I kept chewing and taking deep breaths through my nose in hopes of fighting off the lurching dry heaves. I was unable to make a gulping, half-chewed emergency swallow because the white strips I took for some variant of frosting on first glance turned out to have the texture of a latex glove and were impervious to the maximum pressure my still-tightening jaw could exert. My teeth were bouncing off this magical substance which was showing no signs of fatigue so I finally swallowed it with even more difficulty than the cheap cognac.
Panicking and gasping for the sweet taste of tasteless air, I gathered my composure and calmly asked what this delicious thing was.
“Cow liver.” She replied with a smile.
“Ah, interesting. And the white part?”
“Cow ear.”
I raised my eyebrows, stuck out my lower lip a little bit and nodded with a slightly tilted head in an effort to show interest in stead of disgust. Knowing I could never do so sincerely, I didn’t even attempt to pay a further compliment. I needed something strong to swish around and get the cow ear and liver cake off the roof of my mouth and out of the recesses of my teeth and jowls.
“Lets have another drink of cognac.” I poured myself a family sized portion and held up the glass.
“To our health!”

My enjoyment of tongue meat never went farther than poking and gawking at the cellophane wrapped specimens in the supermarkets back in the good ol’ U, S and A. I wanted it to stay this way till the grave but my plan was foiled by a combination of pathetic language skills and a camouflage of mayonnaise. The first known time I gobbled up tongue was at some sort of holiday celebration (it seems as if there is a celebrated holiday every week of the year) when a medley of salads was repeatedly heaped on my plate. When I inquired about the one with an especially intriguing melange of unidentifiable textures, I was educated about the health benefits of tongue and encouraged to eat more.
I can’t justifiably complain about the taste because of the numerous times I have ingested tongue its been disguised in salad, but once I identify its presence in my mouth I have an unstoppable surge of disconcerting thoughts. Firstly, I'm struck with the instant paranoia that I'm chewing on a piece of my own tongue without knowing it. Then wondering if I was to bite off a piece of my own tongue, would it have the same taste and texture when mixed in a mayonnaise salad. Secondly, I'm not sure who is tasting who. Am I tasting the tongue or is the tongue tasting me? Thirdly, I wonder if this is what it might be like to French kiss a barnyard animal.

Neck or Tail-
Soup is the gastrointestinal equivalent of diving into murky waters of unknown depths. If the initial plunge leaves you in a state of non-critical health, only half the battle is won, for underneath there can be any matter of beast waiting to eat you (…or waiting for you to eat it, if you’ve abandoned the limp metaphor). This is true everywhere soup is served but soup-roulette in Kazakhstan keeps your sense of adventure limber. Whether it be brown, orange or pink one never knows what the cottonseed oil slick on top is concealing.
I'm fully confident I’ve eaten many more unknown disgusting things than known disgusting things in my soup, and I aspire to maintain this level of ignorance. However, there is one mystery I was forced to confront and it remains partly unresolved.
One memorable winter day I sat on my stool at the kitchen table next to the window crystallized with ice and waited with a spoon in my mittened hand for anything hot to warm me up. A large deep bowl was set in front of me. But periscoping out of the soup was a brown rubbery column. Resembling a pier of many tightly stretched rubber bands in-between evenly spaced bulges I took for joints, I couldn’t (and still can’t) determine it if was the neck of a large bird of the tail of a large animal.
Hungry and cold, I tried to ignore it by eating around it, letting it lay in repose. One end staying warm in the mysterious broth, the other lounging and peaking over the brim of the bowl. I hoped, in vain, it was some sort of flavor enhancer not meant to be eaten, like bay leaves or a cinnamon stick. No such luck.
When I had emptied 2/3 of my bowl it was noticed I hadn’t yet feasted on the coveted body part I’d been given. Strongly encouraged to do so, I picked it up with two fingers like it was a dirty diaper and tried to quickly figure out the best approach to eating it. At best it looked like it had already been eaten by man or beast as there was nothing one would describe as “meat” on it. At worst it looked like it had been eaten AND digested.
I nibbled and tore off what I could, making juicy sounds to satisfy the cook but I didn’t last long. After a minute or so I abandoned whatever it was, finished the rest of the soup and lived to fight another day. Unfortunately that day came more than a few times…but I never got any closer to resolving if it was a neck of a tail.

Giddy Up!
The Kazakhstani affinity for horsemeat is as well documented as anything in this relatively under documented country. On the steppe you can see horses being herded and grazing like cattle, often time with the cattle. But unlike beef, which is incorporated into nearly every facet of food preparation, horsemeat is a delicacy saved only for special occasions or the rich.

HOOFS n’ ALL-
Its common for a relatively wealthy family in Kazakhstan to buy an entire horse or cow after the season’s first freeze. This will be their primary meat supply for the long winter. It’s purchased after the first freeze because nobody owns a freezer big enough for such a mountain of meat. Therefore, in the villages it’s stored outside in the shed, but in the cities the piles of frozen flesh are kept on the balcony. This neatly suits the “unannounced visitor” aspect of the culture because a king’s spread for even the most honored guest is just outside the window.

A colleague of mine saved for nearly two years to buy an entire horse to celebrate her 50th jubilee (as 5th and 10th year birthdays are called here). I was a little confused when she first said this to me, I thought she was fulfilling her girlhood dream of having a pony. Not the case. She bought it dripping-fresh from the butcher for about $1000, served it to her guests and watched it all disappear in one night.

At one of my standing Thursday banya engagements, the elder statesman of the collective plunked a bowling ball sized hunk of meat on the table of the post-steam commradary. As he was slicing off and distributing ½ pound portions of the brownish-gray boiled meat, he explained how it was a gift for his 70th birthday. Being a pillar of what’s left of the community, his friends pitched in and bought him a full horse. I asked how it was presented to him but through the mumbling and revelry I wasn’t able to catch if it was alive or dead.
My preferred vision of events is the butcher walked it through the middle of the party on a rope with a bow on it’s head. People admired and appreciated the present they had collectively bought, then as with most animals butchered in the villages here, they took it behind the barn and with a sharp knife sliced its throat for a good long bleed. An hour or so after the sounds of screeching and desperate kicking in the barn were over the butcher strutted back out the party with parts for cooking.

THE RIB-
The second family which whom I lived wasn’t horse-on-the-balcony wealthy, but they weren’t poor either. They could be considered the Kazakhstani version of middle-class. When the mom was feeling decadent she would return from the Sunday meat bazaar with a special treat.
(The Shakhtinsk meat market is a sight to be seen, but only if one doesn’t plan to eat meat from there. It’s a gym sized cinderblock structure with a large, waist high concrete counter forming a rectangle in the center. Lit by Edison-era light bulbs suspended on bare wires from the ceiling, the locals lay out the bloody fruits of their slaughter on the counter to sell and smell. In the center of the rectangle a butcher is on hand to customize orders upon request. Manning his gruesomely experienced chopping block with nothing more than a large, razor sharp axe, he looks more like a bloodthirsty lumberjack in a horror film than anything else.)
She would strut triumphantly into the little kitchen, where we were slurping tea and gnawing on bread, with a large bowed white thing standing half it’s length out of a plastic shopping bag. Unveiling the other half with magician-like gusto she would hold up the long length of bone and declare it a horse rib. I didn’t share the frenzied enthusiasm of the family because there appeared to be nothing edible on it, just a few clusters of fat clinging to the bone which may or may not have been covering even smaller pieces of meat.

SAUSAGE-
There is a mountain of clichés about one not wanting to see sausage being made and I never gave them much thought until I witnessed it in the Almaty bazaar for the first time. There is no better single reason to embrace vegetarianism than seeing the production of horse sausage.
In the peak of summer I was wandering around the multilevel, sprawling maze of the Green Bazaar in the center of Almaty. A place that fits the definition of a modern bazaar, it has a shop, stand or stool selling everything China can fashion out of plastic to Caspian caviar and everything conceivably in-between. A dizzying concentration of exotic spices, sounds and smells. Each corner and alley has the potential to surprise you with something you’d never expect…with one notable exception, the meat section. The hot air wafts the smell of meat and fish to announce its availability long before it can be seen.
The meat section is a vast two-story room filled with the sound of buzzing flies and the dense scent of flesh and bones. It was in the horse meat section I witnessed the origin of all the clichés. The delicacy that is Kazakhstani horse sausage is created by stuffing the horsemeat, along with a healthy element of horse fat, into the horse rectum.
At first glance I thought I saw an aproned woman shoulder deep in the leg of her pantyhose digging out a broken toenail. It was when she removed her arm from the opaque sleeve, grabbed a handful of meat from the pile on her counter and stuffed it in the sleeve, that I realized what was happening.
I can’t say I decided to swear off meat at that exact moment, but there was an internal debate and finally a compromise never to eat horse sausage. So it was with fear and loathing a few weeks later when I was sat down at a party in front of a large platter displaying something that resembled an eel sliced into many ½ inch medallions. However, the uneasy memory of the bazaar and the sight of the boiled sausage were easily ignored once I had my first bite. Aside from the fat, the actual meat is rich and tasty, a lot like venison. There is a reason horsemeat is a delicacy here, it tastes good.

The Explosion

IN Shifts we sat in the café/disco, busloads of friends and family of the deceased miners. Flat, depressing, gray light leaked through the small windows on the cloudy late afternoon four days after the explosion in the Lenin Mine which killed 41 people.
Before eating we passed around a custard dish of rice pudding and each took our first bite of the meal from it. A large room full of round tables and people dressed in dark clothes ate in silence, took shots of vodka in silence and remembered their loved ones in silence. As the meal was paid for by Mittal Steel, the owner of the coal mine and the focal point of blame for the accident, the mourners filled pockets, purses and plastic bags with all the food and drink they could not consume. An action meant to show contempt for the company that had just taken so much from them.

EARLIER that day I stood outside a 5 story concrete Soviet apartment building, the variety that fill up the city limits of Shakhtinsk and are called “Khrushchevkies” (named after the Soviet Premier who oversaw the time period when this version of socialist living quarters propagated like a sexually liberated rabbit all over the empire.) This particular block housed the apartment of Boris, a friend of mine and father of my good friend, who had perished when his crew got in the way of a methane gas explosion 600 meters below the surface of the steppe.
As 1:00 p.m. approached hundreds of us stood quietly outside the doorway waiting for his coffin and his family to descend from the 4th floor. When they did, our large and dark procession filled the once grand, but now simply wide and neglected, boulevard down the center of town to the cars and dilapidated Soviet busses waiting to take us to the cemetery.

THE cemetery, like the town itself, appeared out of the imagination of the central planners in Moscow in the early 1960’s. A socialist SIMM-City. A prefabricated industrial town born of a formulaic plan and composition with the intention of fulfilling the communist dream while pulling vast amounts of coal out from under the steppe. The 30 years of Socialism in Shakhtinsk brought it prosperity (at least of the corrupt and inefficient Soviet variety) and as the result of a difficult life in harsh environmental, social, political and working conditions it also has an impressively sprawling graveyard. But since the collapse of the USSR the cemetery and it’s town haven’t shared a common fate. In an exodus that peaked in 1996 Shakhtinsk lost 85% of it’s population while the cemetery has continued to grow thanks to the economic collapse, negligent infrastructure policies, a brutal environment and a criminal apathy to the working conditions of it’s reason for existence, the mines.
On this day the cemetery grew by 13, the previous day it was 24. The remaining four victims were to be buried in the following 2 days due to the difficulty in identifying remains. The violence of the explosion left nothing but bits and pieces of the miners. In the days following the explosion Boris’ son and the other unlucky but emotionally capable members of the families were forced to go to the morgue to identify what parts of limbs, body and head they could. (Almost 3 weeks after the explosion they are still finding body parts in the mine. Families are confused as to who/what was in the caskets they buried and there is much debate as to what to do with what has been found and what has been buried.)
On an evening leading up to the day of the funeral I sat in Boris’ cold, dimly lit apartment with the members of the family and other friends lending their support when a representative of the mine called. A part of a face with a gray mustache had been found. There was a whispered deliberation in the corner of the room until it was laid to rest by Vital, my good friend and miner who barely escaped being discussed in a similar way.
“Was it thick and big?” The answer came back as yes. “Then it was Alexander.” And with that the funeral was delayed another day until there was enough to put in the casket, which would have to be sealed shut anyway.

RAVENS represent the only visible wildlife on the Karaghanda steppe, their nests stuffed in the trees planted by the gulag prisoners, are visible the 9 months of the year when the trees stand naked. On this day the ravens justified the poetic cliché of symbolizing death as hundreds of them were perched on the tombstones, wiry trees and wooden Russian Orthodox crosses of the cemetery taking refuge from the high wind.
We walked past a train of gaping rectangle holes in the sandy soil. A site almost to sad to bear as each and every one of them was waiting to be filled with a father, son, brother, friend or cousin before the day was through.
The coffin we were following, covered in maroon and black velvet and wearing a gold colored Russian Orthodox cross, was lowered into its deep resting place by 6 fellow miners using long lengths of sturdy white cloth. Before the brief service was over we were surrounded on three sides by hundreds of mourners listening to three different eulogies fighting to be heard over the hissing wind, weeping attendees and each other. As we stood around the grave and tried to listen to the speeches given in Boris’ honor before they were whisked away by the wind, we were blasted by the dirt and sand being picked up off the mound of waiting dirt and thrown at us by the aggressive gusts. The right side of our faces and bodies had already received a first coat as the procession walked by the dozen-plus graves-in-waiting but as the eulogies and ceremony continued we endured it head on. Our dark clothing was dusted light brown and our faces were pelted by and became gritty from the chain of hills waiting to cover the velvet caskets on the way.
After words were spoken, one by one starting with the family everyone took three handfuls of soil and dropped it on the coffin before the men with shovels covered it for good. It’s a touching and somber process made endearingly chaotic by the people’s ingrained aversion to standing in an orderly line. Everyone understands there is no rush to carry out such a fundamentally final action, but the idea of actually waiting for the person in front of you caused much subtle unrest. I observed people fighting with themselves not to elbow out of the way the person standing 6 inches ahead of them. Many successfully fought the urge with the aid of determination and by stuffing their hands in their pockets. Others satisfied the urge by slyly sliding in front of someone else. Once we’d baby-stepped our way to the grave we were required to squat down to deposit our dusty handfuls of soil, reaching below the lip of the grave to keep the wind from blowing it away as it left our hand.

WHEN all attendees had done their 3-fistful share of work we stood as four men feverishly filled up the rest of the grave with crude and rusty shovels. Behind us walked a procession with two tubas and a trumpet which looked as if they had survived the explosion also. They played a solemn and out of tune piece as they followed the coffin to it’s designated hole. In lifting my head to see the men making the deep, fitting noise I saw a mine in the distance. Massive, gray and square. Next to it was a pile as large as the building made up of soil, carbon, and whatever else they take out of the ground to make room for the mineshafts. The pile looked hot and steaming as the wind took off the top layer in a hazy gray and tan cloud. The symbolism not lost on me, I looked to the horizon in all directions and saw it speckled at intermittent distances with the same rectangular concrete buildings resembling tombstones, each with a mountain of earth snuggling up to it. These huge graves waiting for the funerals to be over so these men can go back to work for their $250 a month salary.
Even after the death of the their friends, co-workers and community members these men have no choice but to go back to work in the same place and under the same conditions. Their fathers and grandfathers were forced to move their families to this inhospitable part of the steppe starting 45+ years ago because the Soviet Union decided it wanted a colony of mines here. It was the only job in town during the Soviet times, not that there was a choice in vocation, and now that “freedom” has come it is still the only job in town. The only way to put potatoes and meat in the kitchen of the concrete box in which they were given to live.
Everyone is scared. The miners and their families not knowing when the next explosion will happen (the last was less than two years ago) and their husband, friend, dad, son, brother or neighbor won’t ride the lift out of the mine in one piece.

THE men shoveled, we waited. To the left was another funeral, this one attended by more than one fellow who hadn’t shied away from drink in the past few days. If their 80 proof cologne didn’t give them away, their struggle to stay upright in the wind and walk forward in a straight line did. This particular service consisted of a furious eulogy by a man who was stopped by gentle bear hugs that took him away as he repeatedly yelled, “For what?! For what?! For what?!”
My attention now focused on the neighboring plot, I watched their burial ceremony. One has a hard time passing judgement about how a person in close proximity to such a tragedy deals with the grief, especially considering the regional affinity for alcohol consumption at the most benign of times. However, there was one 50’s-ish man I took a particular, but neutral, interest in as he lurched his way toward the grave. I was unable to tell if he was a seriously grieving brother or another perpetually drunken local with a distant affiliation to the deceased. I kept my eyes on his pink leathered face and glazed light blue eyes as they struggled to judge the distance of the person in front of him. He often miscalculated, bumped into the person in front of him, apologized belligerently, and then smoothed his dirty, stringy concrete colored hair from it’s side part over. In the course of 5 or 6 minutes he managed to receive a bad look and/or tisk from everyone within two-meters.
I can’t say I was hoping for what happened next but as soon as I saw him lining up I would have started taking bets had I been in the right kind of company. The wind was gusting violently, but no more so then it had been all day. And due to the graves being dug so closely and surrounded by so many people there was but a small place to stand between the mound of dirt and the hole when bending down to drop in the fistfuls. As he neared the front of what passed for a line and the approached the lip of the grave, I watched with an increased sense of anticipation (and proportional sense of guilt for that anticipation). I glanced around to the people in my party but no one seemed to be paying attention to what was about to happen.
As the person in front of him reached down for the third handful I licked my index finger, held it up to the gusting wind and decided the conditions looked favorable. There was a prolonged gust as he unsteadily stooped over to get the dirt and pivoted to the rectangular void. The toes of his pointy once-black dress shoes nearly hanging over the edge, he made an attempt to simultaneously squat and bend at the waist. His closed fist hovered over the hole for a second or two as he fought his compromised sense of balance. Then, as if an invisible hand grabbed his wrist, without a peep he timbered half forward, half sideways into pit. Even above the fierce wind there as a loud, simultaneous thud and crack of wood. What followed in the next minute or two was a dueling chorus of hysterically weeping women and an enraged exhibition of adult Russian vocabulary from the men. After what seemed a lifetime, a swollen and dirty pair of pink hands clung to the lip of the grave followed into sight by the top of the gray, parted and now sandy head of hair.
Four big arms yanked him out, he flopped like a fish on the ground for a moment then was dragged away in dramatic disgrace and no doubt beaten silly just out of sight of the grieving family.
Of course, none of this happened anywhere other than in my dark and wandering imagination. The inebriated fellow mentioned did lurch of to the grave, but save a few sways managed to safely complete the task…and I'm 94% glad that he did.

AS is standard, a bright blue metal fence was erected around the now completed grave. A temporary Formica headstone was placed on one end of the coffin-sized mound of dirt as it was covered with real flowers and plastic wreathes. We left the cemetery in unison as two more funeral processions entered, us standing on the edge of the dirt road as they passed.

NINE days after the explosion we again gathered at the restaurant to quietly remember those who perished. This will happen again 40 days after the day of death and on the one-year anniversary, although only family members will attend these events.
It’s now been over three weeks since the catastrophe in the Lenin Mine and the miners just ended their strike for better working conditions, new equipment and better salaries. Promises were made all around but what I’ve observed in the 16 months I’ve lived here inspires cynicism, not optimism, in the ability of workers to affect change in this system.


Link to a BBC Article on the explosion: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5366202.stm