Everything you need to write a tragedy: Tokjan’s story

I met Tokjan not quite two years ago in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s capital.  Every last one of the volunteers harbored some sort of misapprehension, because we were about to meet the teachers we would work with for the next two years of our lives.

Would they be stern-faced and Ayapova-bound?  Would they be young and barely able to speak English, freshly printed and dearly paid for diplomas declaring nothing for their abilities to teach or speak English?  Would they be middle aged and barely able to squeeze in time to chat between cows braying to be milked, mother-in-laws snapping for service and husbands pressing them onto their backs?

Or would they be something else entirely?  Something unforeseen.

Tokjan wasn’t plain but wasn’t a classical beauty either.  She has shortly shorn hair, and stands about as high as my shoulders.  Pressed into a neat two piece skirt and jacket, carefully accessorized with dangling, sparkling baubles, she sat primly in her chair in the room with all the other teachers.

The volunteers entered, each of us searching for the woman who held the name of the place we would soon be headed – the name of the place we would call home for the next two years.

Disappointment snagged on my reflection in the back of her eyes when she saw me.  I was too fat, I was too unfashionable, I was too much something, or perhaps not enough of something else, and I caught the look before she could blink it away.

That was alright.  I felt the same way too.

Those first few days at the conference were awkward and forced.  One of the first ‘games’ we had to do was to discover 3 things about each other.  Her English wasn’t very good, my Kazakh was worse- conversing with each other was painful, to put it mildly.

Her three things?  One: Tokjan (TOE-KUH-ZHAN) means contented soul in Kazakh. Two: she was 24 years old (just as I was).  And three: she had just been married two weeks prior, and was a young bride.

I will never, never forget my regional manager’s comment as I reveled this information to the group.

“What a wonderful husband, to let her come to Almaty so soon after being married!”

All the other local women in the room seemed to agree.  I chalked it up as normal.  But a statement could never have been more wrong or more ironic.

A few days later I took the train will all the other volunteers out to our sites.  One by one the volunteers disappeared off of platforms, and the familiar buzz of English became the ominous buzz of languages I didn’t understand.  When my site mate  Chris and I arrived it was 4am, freezing and bleak.

I was also told I would work with another teacher in my school named Aida.  Small next to Tokjan, but literally dwarfed by me, she only had one sentence she’d preprepared:  ”My name is Aida, and I’m thin!”

Bitch, I thought, of course.  Who wouldn’t?  The woman is literally the size of a very thin 14 year old boy.

As I began to adjust to teaching and living in Zhanatas, things began to become more and more strained between my co-teacher and I.  Tokjan wasn’t coming to  lesson plan, and she certainly wasn’t prepared when she did come.  She kept asking me when I would teacher her classes alone, an idea I strongly resisted – I didn’t feel it was my job to teach her classes while she sat back and got paid for my work.

Then she announced her pregnancy, and began not coming to classes at all, or skipping out to go have tea in the school’s hole-in-the-wall cafeteria.

Things came to a head early spring.  I was almost done writing our extensive SPA grant for a Zhanatac summer camp, and the deadline was that day.  I’d brought my laptop in to school to finish the minor details and send it off with the school’s internet connection.  The day was packed, morning to afternoon, and I needed to get to the computer lab while the teacher was still in school.  It isn’t uncommon here for teachers to go home when they don’t have classes, a teacher’s schedule works rather like a university student’s schedule in America.

“Please Tokjan,” I asked, “teach this class.  I need to turn in our grant.”

She refused, complaining of illness.  I found her, not much later, in the cafeteria laughing with other teachers and drinking tea.  When she came back to our room I’d had it.

I reamed her.  In a bastard flurry of two tongues, Kazakh and English, I threw all caution (and grammar)  to the wind.

“How could you?!” I’d said.  ”You don’t come, you don’t work, you don’t want to be here.  So go!  I am not here to do your work! I am not here so you get paid! I am not your vacation!”

She’d yelled back.  ”You can’t understand me!  I am married, I am pregnant!”‘

“In America women work while they are pregnant until their 9th month sometimes!”

“This is not America! You don’t understand you brat!”

It went on like that for sometime.  I was furious, she was equally furious.  Looking back, we’re both an awful lot alike.  Quite stubborn and utterly unwilling to consider we might have been wrong.  A few days later, hours of cooling down and reflection later, I approached her.

“I can’t understand what’s going on if you don’t tell me.  I’ve never been married.  I’ve never been pregnant.  Help me understand you.  Talk to me.”

A month or two later the small swell of her stomach granted her maternity leave.   Slowly, awkwardly, we began again.  She began talking about living with her greedy mother-in-law, puppet father-in-law, and plump, self righteous little sister-in-law.  I began to understand what Key-lin, or bride, means in Kazakh culture.

In American culture we picture young women with bright eyes and glowing cheeks, dressed in white.  The idea is carefree and light- the happiest day of your life, when you begin an adventure with one other person, when the two of you strike off on your own to make your way.  There’s a party and music and you’re surround, just utterly mashed together with people who love the two of you.

In Kazakhstan to be a bride means something entirely different.  You live with your husband’s family and you become the lowest member of their individual hierarchy.  You cook all the meals, you alone clean the house.  You are not permitted to visit friends or have friends visit you.  It is shameful to see your real family, the family you were born into, more than once every few months.  They must not visit.

If you are bride napped, as Tokjan was, you are literally snatched up from wherever you might be and driven to your proposed husband’s house.  Propriety says you must have met once before.  After that, any man can take you.   When you enter the house there’s a huge hullabaloo.  Tokjan told me it’s normal, as her husband’s family did, to bribe the bride.

‘You’ll be happy here.’

‘You’ll never want for anything.’

‘Look, my son, he already loves you!  Look in his eyes!’

And, the trump card of course, where the older women of the family lay down in front of the doorway.  If the bride wants to leave she’ll have to step on assorted mothers and grandmothers.  Sometimes they also put bread in the doorway- starvation is a recent memory in this culture, and bread is sacred.

That’s only part of the problem though.  After being bride-napped  the local culture assumes a woman no longer is a virgin.  She is no longer clean, and should she leave her husband-to-bes home she brings shame not only to herself but to her family.  She may never find someone willing to risk marrying a ‘non-virgin.’

Suddenly, I was beginning to have a lot more appreciation for poor Tokjan.  Yes, she was  quick to anger, equally quick to mope and didn’t seem to want to work.  Classic signs of depression.

Wouldn’t you be depressed?

On top of it all, she told me she’d been dating a guy at the post office- a guy I’d  met and actually liked (in this place it’s rare for me to meet a man that doesn’t make my internal creep meter go off).  The man had promised that next summer, when he had enough money for their own home, he would marry Tokjan.  She thought she loved him, but all that was over now.

Not working with her because she was on maternity leave helped our relationship a lot.  She would call meand sneak out of her house in the early evening, claiming the doctor told her that walking was important for the baby.  We’d meet and talk.  Every time we’d met there was some sort of horror story about her family.

Once, her mother-in-law screamed at her in a fit of rage over the clothes not being dry that she wanted to wear.  ”You’ll give birth to a useless girl, you lazy, stupid cow!”  Tojkan just took the abuse, her hands resting on the globe of her stomach.

Tokjan began to talk about moving out of the house.  Since her husband wasn’t the youngest male child, he wasn’t bound to live with his parents forever (take not readers, do not marry the youngest Kazakh boy, unless you fancy those living arrangements).  She cajoled and sweet-talked her husband (who, she admitted, she didn’t love).  Then one day we met for a walk and she exploded into furious tears.

“My mother-in-law says she will have me divorced from her son, before her son will leave her house. I can’t live with them anymore!  I can’t!”  Literally weeks from her due-date, the baby thumped vigorously in her stomach, strange quick bulges visible beneath the thin summer house dress she wore.  I shuddered a little bit.  ”He won’t listen!  He only bows his head and nods to his mother!  He swears he loves me, but he can’t understand me!”

I couldn’t give advice.  What can a western-raised female say to someone so embroiled in such a mess?  Nothing.

She gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl not much later, and managed to stay put about 5 weeks after the birth, until one day her mother-in-law simply kicked Tokjan and her newborn child out.

The shame of being used woman horrified her into her paternal family’s home.  She had no means to support herself or her tiny infant child.  Her mother and father were shamed.  The weight of what had been done hangs heavily around them, even now.

Tojkan now lives with her mother and father in the house and in the village where she grew up.  It’s not far from Zhanatas –  a 15 minute taxi ride – and so I sometimes go out to visit her.  I went out this week for two days.  I wish I could say she’s happier now.  It’s clear that playing with Elveera makes her happy, that the gurgling sound of baby laughter helps some.  We talked over making samasa and belini, about how her husband bribed the judge and won’t have to pay child support.  Tokjan shrugged that off as though it didn’t matter.  It’s when she talks about how her husband doesn’t call, even just to ask about the baby is doing, that hurt glints in her eyes. She understands he doesn’t love her now, but how can he not love his own child?

I said I didn’t know, and I just gave her a hug.  And things seemed fine for awhile.

But when we laid there together in the dark waiting for sleep, sonorous sounds vibrating from the chest of the infant between us, she cried.