Zhopar Aizhanovna

Zhopar Aizhanovna came into my class at 9:00, turned a pencil case upside down, filled it with yellowish well water from an old coke bottle, and gave me a handful of lilacs, and then fairly skipped out. She’s always like this. I often find myself (and the students seem to, also) impossibly confused after what ought to be a normal exchange. In the beginning, I thought it was a language barrier. No. She mixes Russian, Kazakh, and English with everyone, although almost no one speaks all three.

I had a very Zhopar-ish afternoon. I went to school to get the biology book from her, still extremely groggy from a mid-afternoon nap, and she told me she would walk to the corner with me (she’s the teacher on duty and is supposed to monitor the school), and I realized that she really just wanted to get out. I mentioned that I hadn’t been to the Russian [language] school, and she immediately suggested that we go. I agreed, happily – I’ve been waiting for someone to take me to the other local schools, but no one’s ever taken the hint. We went to the Russian school, and she started peeking into rooms and chuckling, the teachers all came out and asked her how’s life. She always greets in Kazakh plural form and proceeds in Russian and English, regardless of someone’s first language. She knows everyone, the ethnicity of each family in each house and their names, what their children are doing, but she forgets or confuses the details as often as she gets them right. As is usual with her, it’s all there, somewhere.

She is a kop shashatin adam, which kind of translates to “a person who often throws things into disarray” the word “shashau,” is usually for the action when the grandmothers throw treats (candy, usually) to people at various celebrations, but generally throwing things around can take the same word. So, after we talked about the lilac blooming everywhere now, she started down a road that certainly wasn’t leading back to work, and I realized that she was taking me to her house. “We’ll see, they have probably made a house while I have been gone,” she said, cryptically. “Yes, yes!” she said, pointing to a well-settled-in house, “they have built it!” It gradually came to light that she hadn’t walked that way since she stopped working at the Russian school two years ago. But there were other things too. “Here!” she said, with a flourish toward two upside-down, ruined cars on a heap of garbage, “our monument!” and chuckled. The road to her house was deeply rutted and must have been incredibly muddy (shin-deep, at least) a couple days ago. Her garden is far from the usual neatly arranged vegetable beds everyone is planting these days. It’s more like a park, with a place to sit and look at it, which is rare. A few of her fruit trees died this winter, and since she mentioned it several times, I think she was truly grieved. She called her cow in three languages, and Masha came out, nudging two deer-faced brown calves. Then, Zhopar Aizhan banged on a couple windows, went inside her house, and came out again. “They’re not asleep!” she said, “come in! You are welcome!” I came in, leaving my shoes in the first room. “We built it ourselves. You see our shed [kitchen, I don’t know why she calls it a shed]” And, indeed, although most of the house was there when she and her husband bought it, certainly, some rooms bore the distinctive style of Zhopar. They had added a couple small rooms, a pleasant, well-lit kitchen with lots of plants and a vase full of dirty cutlery (if you want to use it, you wash it), and the first room, where you leave your shoes, with the oven and various machines for making dairy products. There were plants everywhere. She told me to sit on the couch beside her son (she was delighted he was at home – she wants us to marry) who was fixing cell phones with wires and Philips-head screwdrivers. She bustled through the house shouting in English and Russian. Quite soon, her husband wandered in, sat beside me, and immediately launched into a monologue in English beginning with “You may have noticed that we Kazakh people resent having our freedom taking away. . . .” I couldn’t follow very well. I had somehow imagined him being the opposite of Zhopar Aizhan, but they are very much alike. And her son, who, at 26, behaves toward his parents as a teenager would, is deep down the same, too. Although Zhopar and Aslan, her son, cannot sit for long periods of time, Zhopar because she wants to run away and Aslan because he has always forgotten something. Zhopar has beautiful hair, which was kind of in a Mohawk today (not deliberate, you can be sure), she did something to make it stand straight up and peak at her scalp, all two and a half inches of it. It’s pure white at the top, and at the bottom it becomes black. She might be the only woman with gray or white hair who doesn’t dye it. Oh, and tea, and photos afterward, of her when she was in her 20s touring the Soviet republics, wearing a backless dress and a Kyrgyz man’s hat, and sandals from India. She pointed out her stylish handbag in a photo of Armenia, which she had gotten by pretending to be foreign. She saw the bags in Moscow and wanted one badly, but there was an enormous line to the cash register. She had ignored the line, walked to the front, grunted and pointed to the one she wanted, gave the salesgirl money, and took the purse. No one said anything.

We finally got a monument in Podstepnoye on May 9. Everyone wondered what it would look like. It looks like two gravestones, and it's right outside the school, since the school is next to the mayor's building. Everyone is scandalized. Yesterday Zhopar and Svetlana were talking about how they should be awarded for their years of teaching. "This will be our monument" said Zhopar Aizhan, "for working so long! They will put two graves outside the school, one for Sveta, and one for me!"