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ROBERT ROSENBERG held an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a master's in education. He lived in Kyrgyzstan, Istanbul, and Cibecue, a small Apache village. 

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This Is Not Civilization

By Robert Rosenberg

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2005 Robert Rosenberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618562060
1
The idea of using porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor
one. Anarbek Tashtanaliev, the manager of the cheese factory, had been
inspired by a Moscow news broadcast. From Russia the television signal
crossed the Kazakh steppes, was beamed to Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital,
and then relayed up and over the Tien Shan range and into desolate pockets
of the new nation. If the Central Asian weather was favorable, the forgotten
village of Kyzyl Adyr–Kirovka received the world news. As a result, one
Wednesday Anarbek discovered that the Chinese had successfully used
taped videos of fornicating bears to coax pandas to breed. The possibility of
increased productivity based on a regimen of bovine erotica seemed
promising. And the scheme had the single merit of all brilliant ideas: it was
obvious.
Anarbek purchased dated Soviet video equipment across the
Kazakh border in the Djambul bazaar. He kept factory workers on a twenty-
four-hour watch to record, on tape, the next time the bulls went at it. But the
workers had no luck that fall. In the spring he sent his employees up the
shepherd hill next to the reservoir with an order to film copulating sheep.
Thirty days later they had recorded over four and a half hours of tape. The
following summer they projected this film each night, in color, onto the
factory walls, for the enjoyment of the cows.
The animals were indifferent to the lusty films, and the scheme
cost the failing cheese factory a month"s wages. By the end of the winter
only eleven Ala Tau cows and two bony Aleatinsky bulls remained.
Production had ceased.
Anarbek managed the only collective in the mountain village.
During the lean years of glasnost and perestroika, and the optimistic but still
lean years of independence, Anarbek had watched his veterinarian pack up
for Russia, the feed shipments dwindle, the wormwood climb the concrete
walls, the electricity fail, the plate coolers rust, the cows die, and his workers
use their lunch hour to hawk carrots and cabbage in the village bazaar. The
cheese factory no longer produced cheese. Yet every week in the factory"s
old sauna, raising a glass of vodka, wearing only a towel wrapped around his
bulging stomach, Anarbek told his friends, "We"re still making a profit."
He was well aware it was false money. Amid the collapse of
Communism, in the extended bureaucratic mess of privatization, the new
government continued to support the state-owned collective. A sudden
change in the village name had caused the oversight. With a burst of post-
independence pride, an official had decreed Soviet Kirovka henceforth be
called by its Kyrgyz name, Kyzyl Adyr. Now nobody knew what to call it
(Kyzyl Adyr? Kirovka? Kyzyl Adyr–Kirovka? Kirovka–Kyzyl Adyr?). The
capital could not keep up with such details. The village appeared by different
names on scattered government lists, and the factory had yet to be
privatized. The machinery had stopped, but the Communist salaries kept
coming.
Kyzyl Adyr–Kirovka was a cosmopolitan village isolated in the
mountains of northwestern Kyrgyzstan. Anarbek"s neighbors were mostly fair-
skinned Kyrgyz, but also included Russians desperate to repatriate, and
Kurds, and Uzbeks, and the Koreans whose grandparents Stalin had exiled
to Central Asia. Everyone benefited from the government oversight. For
Anarbek was generous; he knew the money was neither rightfully his nor the
factory"s, so he kept on his original thirteen workers, whose families
depended on their continuing salaries. The employees showed up at the
factory each morning, sat, chatted, and drank endless cups of chai.
Everyone in the village understood that the cows were barren and
dying and that the cheese factory produced no cheese. But what good would
come of reporting it? Money that did not find its way out of Bishkek would
sink into the pockets of the minister of finance, an official rumored to drive a
Mercedes-Benz at excessive speed through the streets of the capital,
weaving between potholes, honking at donkey carts, trying to run over the
poor. A Mercedes- Benz! While the people of Kyzyl Adyr–Kirovka suffered!
For the village, money mistakenly sent from the capital was money they
deserved. Anarbek, after all, was a modern, educated Soviet man— he had
studied management one summer in Moscow—and the village had
confidence he could still turn things around.
On a Wednesday evening, in the heat of the factory sauna, he
defended his fertility scheme to six of his neighbors and coworkers. The men
nodded in complicit agreement. Only Dushen, the assistant manager of the
cheese factory and a man too practical for his own good, broke the spell with
a question grounded in reality: "Maybe the quality of projection was bad?"
The men clicked their tongues and shook their wet heads; two of
them leaned over and spit onto the hot stones. The spit sizzled into thin
wisps of steam. Anarbek sighed. Independence should have been a time of
optimism, yet it seemed that brave ideas for improvement were consistently
ruined by such complications.
Radish, the head doctor of the village hospital, opened the sauna
door, and a stiff gust of air, fresh as a cool river, flowed into the room.
Entering, the doctor banged the door behind him, turned his bare jellylike
chest around, and announced, "News, my friends! News! The minister of
education, from Talas, came by this morning."
"That son of a bitch," said Bulut, the town"s appointed mayor, its
akim.
"Screw the whole lot of them," said Dushen.
"Send them back to Moscow," Anarbek said. "Who needs them!"
He and his friends continued abusing government officials until
Radish yelled over them. "Listen. A word! A word! He has offered the village
an American."
"An American?" the men exclaimed in chorus, and burst into
laughter.
"An organization called Korpus Mira." The glint in the doctor"s
eyes quieted Anarbek. "The government of Kyrgyzstan has ordered thirty
Americans. They"ll distribute them across the country. To hospitals. Schools.
Factories like yours."
"What do they want from us?" Anarbek asked.
"How much do we have to pay them?" Dushen demanded.
"This is the thing," Radish explained. "They don"t want any money.
It"s a humanitarian organization."
The words humanitarian organization, pronounced in Radish"s
halting Russian, sounded like fancy foreign machinery. Nobody in the village
had ever used words like those before.
"American spies!" yelled the town akim.
"Thieves," said Dushen. "They"ll take us over."
The men shook their heads in doubt, but Anarbek was intrigued.
He mused on the inconceivable idea of America—of William Clinton and his
friend Al Gore, of the war in the Persian Gulf, of Steven Seagal breaking
necks, of the busty Madonna who sang "Like a Virgin"—this America, their
new provider. He stepped down to the rack of hot coals, grabbed a cup of
water, and, using the tips of...