The babies on the buses don’t cry. The roads are bad- terrible even- the bump, thump, rattle jostling heads and knees and elbows into collisions with windows and neighbors. The pale brown earth stretches on and on and every direction, the road two thin lines pressed persistently into the dust. On the radio some boy-man takes the pop solo, he couldn’t have been a star in any place but this.
And the babies don’t cry. They don’t cry, they peer about as though drugged, as though we are the fishbowl. The half-lidded orbs are wet and shiny, critical of our every movement. We want to cry, our knees pressed into the encroaching seat backs, our heads flopping, the bags of produce cradled gingerly on our laps.
There’s a refrigerator wedged into the second stairwell of bus, and large posters gingerly slid between the seats and the walls. Huge bails of cotton, wrapped tightly with plastic bags and twine clog the aisles.
But the babies don’t cry. Their heads bob in rhythm with their mothers’ heads, their bulbous fingers twitching in the air as though they could sense something we can’t. If one dares to cough it’s mother presses a cloth to it’s lip, forcing the sound in and down, erasing it from existence.
No, the babies don’t cry on the buses in Kazakhstan, and yet I find myself wishing that they would.
