Free Silent Girl by Tricia Dower

disapproval.
    His face solemn, Jyrgal grips Kyal’s hand and pumps it, seemingly unfazed by her immodesty. Pretending. Or spineless. She pulls away from the hot pressure of his rough hands.
    Usen leads them into the yurt where Dimira boils water on the kolomto . “My mother and daughter will serve us chai. Be seated. Please.” He indicates the place of honour, the one he usually takes.
    While they wait for their tea, the men agree that horses, not sheep, rule the landscape. Their voices recede into a crevice of Kyal’s mind as she sets out cups, spoons jam into a bowl and slices bread Dimira baked that morning. She has signed up for field work the next semester. Travelling to burial grounds in search of ancient Turkic inscriptions. Unlocking secrets about the past. The yurt feels like her burial site as a pall of despair falls over her. Married women don’t go to university. At least not women married to herdsmen. She looks at the straight-backed young man with reddish-brown hair as curly as a sheep’s. Her back twitches in revulsion.
    She sits beside Dimira and pours tea as Usen probes Jyrgal. He is twenty-five.
    â€œFour years older than you, Kyal,” her father says as if she can’t subtract.
    Dimira says, “Mmm.”
    Jyrgal’s family breeds racers. “When I’m not tending the herd,” Jyrgal says, “I train horses for the leaguers who play ulak tartysh in the hippodrome.”
    Dimira says, “Aah.”
    Usen says, “We play, too! My brothers, nephews, and I. You must join us.”
    â€œI will do that.”
    â€œDo you play an instrument?” Usen says. “The komuz, perhaps? Everyone plays the komuz, no?” He points to the three-stringed fretless lute leaning against a wall.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDo you sing?”
    â€œLike a mountain goose.”
    Usen forces a laugh. “That’s a good one!”
    Kyal steps in to save her father from further disgrace. “What, then?” she says. “You don’t play. You don’t sing. Have you no tricks?”
    â€œI can recite verse,” he says as if announcing he’d discovered a new planet.
    â€œUn hun,” Dimira says.
    Usen says, “We would enjoy that.”
    Jyrgal stands and closes his eyes as though seeking inspiration. What a bore. Kyal would laugh if she weren’t angry to the bottom of her heart at this charade engineered for her benefit. Ata knows all he wants to about Jyrgal. He has fallen in love with the idea of him. She is expected to do the same.
    Eyes closed, Jyrgal recites, “Reaching with my right hand, I grasped the sun for myself.”
    Kyal strains to place these words she knows in familiar context.
    Slowly, as though time belongs to him, Jyrgal raises his right arm to the roof and snatches at the air. “Reaching with my left hand, I caught the moon for myself. My right hand held the sun. My left hand held the moon.”
    He passes one arm in front of the other and Kyal remembers. It was in class. A reading from the Manas that brought her to tears.
    â€œI took the sun and put it in place of the moon. I took the moon and put it in place of the sun. Together with the sun and moon, I flew high into the sky.” He stretches both arms to the side and opens his eyes to a hushed audience.
    â€œHow do you know those lines?” Kyal asks, grudgingly impressed.
    â€œMy grandfather is a manaschi, ” he says, enunciating the words as though she were slow-witted. “I grew up with the Manas.”
    â€œ Manaschi, ” Dimira whispers in reverence. “In the early Soviet days, before even I was born, manaschi disappeared like rabbits under tractors. Murdered or sent to Siberia. Later, when it wasn’t so easy to make someone vanish without the world complaining, apprentices of the great manaschi came out of hiding. But they had to sing of a different Manas. No longer a warrior, but a working-class