A Magpie’s Tale: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia

By Anna Odland Portisch

Telling the story of the author's time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. It looks at the position of the  Kazakh over time in relation to Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian rule and influence. These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800737815

Anna Odland Portisch

Anna Odland Portisch has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Brunel University.

Book preview

PART

I

First Introductions

1

Beginnings

There are two views from a winter’s night that I remember particularly clearly. In my printmaking classes I have tried to make prints of them. Etchings with starry skies made of French chalk. The light from a window on the snow painted with stop-out varnish. The darkness of the rough mountainsides rendered in the tiny dots of wax that make up aquatint, and then, like those rugged mountainsides, the plate was deeply bitten and eroded. But the prints lack the depths of the darkness, and they never look cold enough.

That night, we were going to bed as darkness fell. Ainagyl and her mother Elnara were already in bed. Ten-year-old Bakhytbek was brushing his teeth vigorously. The father was sitting on the side of his bed, tuning the radio to catch the evening news in Kazakh. Amanjan, the young uncle, was making up his bed on the floor in the middle of the bedroom between the other beds. I had made my bed next door in the living room. I went outside to go to the toilet. I wore my woolly hat and heavy sheepskin-lined coat against the cold. A few strands of my hair fell out from under the hat.

As I stepped outside the front door, breathing in the night air, little crystals immediately began to form on the loose strands of hair. There was no moon and the air had an opaque, inky feel. I let my head drop back, looked up and was surprised to see a million stars. A thin, cloudy veil of light was stretched across the sky, holding innumerable minuscule sparkling dots just above this little house, above this valley in the Altai Mountains.

Making my way blindly, looking into the darkness but not seeing, I moved towards the makeshift enclosure that had been erected around the hole in the ground that was the toilet. Halfway there, I bumped into something solid yet animate in the darkness. It was the sleeping yak. It had been sitting close to the pen, quite still, probably fast asleep. We both started and the yak raised itself heavily from its sitting position, its hairy body, humped back and sharp horns rising to an unexpected height. I rushed past and whispered my apologies.

A guard dog started barking not far away, setting off others. A chorus of vicious barks lasted a little while but then died out. On my way back to the house, my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I stopped in the now quiet darkness and looked at the house. It was a small mud-brick house. The neighbours’ house lay in darkness behind it. There was a pool of light on the ground beneath the living room window. Inside I knew a candle was burning on the table and the last embers from the coal fire were dying in the stove. A thin streak of smoke drifted quietly from the chimney in the still night air. The ground was covered with a thin layer of snow that reflected the faint light of the starry sky. The mountains on either side of the valley seemed to absorb any light and stood like a great wall of darkness.

The house in its solidness, its little dark compact presence on the grey-white valley floor, with a thin streak of smoke streaming from the chimney, looked like a small steamship forging ahead into the darkness on an arctic sea. As I stood there a little distance away, I felt suddenly moved. I thought of everyone getting ready for bed inside the little house and realized, I love them!

Those are the two views. The Milky Way and the house. It was not yet midwinter.

Perhaps it was a night like that when, a few years later, Ainagyl fled from another house, her new home, in the mountains near the Russian border. The moon must have been out, otherwise it would have been difficult to see and to walk with any confidence. This is how I imagine it might have been: the moon shone on the plain in front of the house. Ainagyl had put on her lambskin-lined waistcoat and wrapped it around her son, Erkin. He was still sleeping in her arms, his head rested on her shoulder, his warm cheek against the hollow of her neck. Over the waistcoat she had put on a winter coat. Twisting her arm back to reach the sleeve and put on the coat with Erkin sleeping in her other arm, she felt momentarily that she couldn’t breathe for the pain in her side where she had been kicked. Her cheek felt swollen around her eye and she had a throbbing feeling at her temple. Erkin had slept most of the evening and had not stirred at the noise.

As she had got Erkin out of bed and dressed him, she had worried that he would wake up and cry. If her mother-in-law woke, she would not be able to leave. If her husband, Älemkhan, woke, he too would stop her from leaving. But Erkin had flopped against her body as she picked him up. She moved slowly and gingerly through the house, partly because of the pain in her chest and head, partly because of the weight of Erkin, who was a big 1-year-old boy. Each step away from the bedroom was small and fragile and tentative. She knew where the floorboards creaked. She passed the sideboard cupboard with the dinner bowls still sitting, stacked up, waiting to be washed. She put a couple of lumps of dried curd in her pocket for Erkin. She was shaking inside. Her hands were shaking. She knew how the front door stuck and then gave. She felt for the handle and gently pushed.

The ground outside the house was rough and pebbled and however softly she trod, each step made an audible incision in the stillness of the night. The guard dog stirred and sniffed the air and then buried his nose between his forepaws again. She knew the terrain from her daily comings and goings around the house. She had walked far on the plain in search of dried cowpats and horse manure, which they used as fuel in the stove. She had travelled in cars to the village in the valley below, Kök Moinakh, but she had never walked the distance. She knew it was some twenty kilometres.

The landscape ahead of her was entirely still. The moon cast a grey light over the plain and hills beyond. She walked a few steps to get out of the orbit of the house and the front door. The cold air ripped into her lungs when she breathed and made her stop. She stood a little way from the house, with Erkin attached to her under the coat and the unborn child forming a gentle bump that supported Erkin. In the moonlight her silhouette was like a pillar with a softly rounded attachment at the front. For a moment it was uncertain whether the attachment would topple the pillar. This was how the three of them appeared from the bedroom window. Then the curtain fell back into place.

No one came after her. Ainagyl walked through the night. She passed two houses, those of their immediate neighbours some kilometres down the hill. She kept her distance so that she would not attract the attention of the guard dogs. She was scared of the dogs and she worried that if the neighbours saw her, she would be made to stay with them, to wait for morning and be brought back home. She slipped several times in the dark on the pebbled ground and fell with Erkin. He woke and cried but she was surprised how quickly he was calmed and reconciled to being carried.

Her side ached where she had been kicked. It was a spot just above the baby, and the ache seemed to extend down across her stomach in waves. Her hip ached from walking and from carrying Erkin. It normally ached if she walked far or ran. With the first pregnancy, and then the second, her hips ached most days. Now, with each step, the pain seemed to extend and stretch down through her legs.

She walked short distances and then rested. In this way she crossed the moonlit plain and began the descent into the valley below. The mountainsides stretched ahead of her, and in the distance began to slope down towards the valley. She walked in the light of the moon, along the edge of the shadows thrown by the hills. This was the area where her husband Älemkhan hunted. He had brought back foxes and hares, and on one occasion a wolf. The wolfskin hung on their wall next to his bed like a trophy and a testimony to his skill as a hunter.

She knew, too, that these were the hills where Amanjan, her uncle, had encountered a wolf and had fallen from his horse. At the time, he had gone into the mountains in search of the family’s camel, which on a whim had gone off with a herd of wild camels. In his search for the camel, Amanjan had come upon a lone wolf. His horse had taken fright and reared up, throwing him off. Amanjan had only told the family about his encounter days after eventually getting home. He wasn’t proud of having fallen off the horse. He was also puzzled. He had scrambled to his feet to recapture the horse and by the time he had got back in the saddle and looked around, the wolf had disappeared. Perhaps they had each been as startled by the encounter as the other.

Ainagyl knew these hills were also home to jinns and spirits. The spirits of the dead inhabited certain areas, and jinns played tricks on lone travellers and made them lose their way. They made travellers see things that were not there, and they could conjure alien sounds that sent shivers down your spine. Even people who were familiar with the area and had lived there all their lives might be led astray and lose their way. Spirits roamed at dusk and at dawn. Ainagyl knew that at night-time the spirits of the dead came to visit the sleeping. They appeared to them in their dreams, trying to tempt them to come with them. They were lonely. They wanted the company of the living. They missed their parents, their siblings, their children. If you agreed to follow them in your dream, you wouldn’t wake up. To venture out into the night was to venture into the realm of such beings.

Passing below the shadowy hills, Ainagyl thought she heard a horse approach. She crouched in the shadows. Her heart pounded so, she thought it would explode in her chest, and her breathing was so laboured she thought it must be audible for miles around. But the sound of the hooves grew distant and eventually disappeared, and she wasn’t sure if what she had heard had just been her own heart pounding in her chest.

The jinns and the spirits who inhabit the hills above Kök Moinakh helped and guided her, and the stars and moon lit her way. She opened the door to her relatives’ house in Kök Moinakh as they were having their morning tea. She looked half-dead and she was covered in bruises. They sat her down by the stove and put more coal on the fire. They gave her warm tea and started making soup. They rubbed Erkin to warm him up and gave him hot soup. They didn’t rub Ainagyl because of the bruises. She slept after that.

Ainagyl stayed with her relatives in Kök Moinakh for a few days. Then she and Erkin got a ride for the forty or so kilometres down the Soghakh Valley to her parents’ house. Altynai, her younger sister, said Ainagyl’s arms were blue and black when she got there. Her rib was broken, her face was swollen. Elnara nursed her daughter and cooked for her and they all told her she could stay with them from now on, she need not go back, she must not in fact. Ainagyl would not be any trouble to them. Altynai pleaded over the telephone with the eldest sister, Kharlyghash, then living abroad, to persuade their parents not to allow Ainagyl to go back to her husband.

Ainagyl’s husband Älemkhan came to Ulaankhus a week or so later. He went to the police to report an incident. He stated that his cousin had paid them a visit, had got drunk, shot his horse and beaten Ainagyl. After reporting this to the police, Älemkhan went to collect his wife.

2

Relations

Ainagyl was one of seven or eight siblings, depending on how you look at it. There is a photo of most of them that I really like. It is a black and white photo and is a little blurry. I don’t know who took it. It is from the late 1980s or early 1990s. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure who everyone is.

The children are not all there, and there are some extra family members. Elnara sits in the middle, with a scarf over her hair. Adilbek sits on the left-hand side in a dark coat, with short cropped hair. There is not a grey hair on his head. Ainagyl stands next to her mother, on the right. She is maybe 9 or 10 years old. She is smiling. Her face is oval and her eyes are like her mother’s almond-shaped eyes. I think it must be Jibek, Ainagyl’s little sister, on her mother’s lap. Altynai, Ainagyl’s younger sister by one year, is pushing in from behind her father, and behind her is Bauyrjan, their younger brother. Erjan, a tall teenager, stands at the back on the right. You can see that he looks like his mother and father. And he looks like his older sister Kharlyghash. They have the same eyes, the same eyebrows. Kharlyghash, the eldest daughter, is perhaps not there. I can’t work out if it is her in the white hat, behind her father. Or perhaps she was away at college at the time when the photo was taken. Amanjan is not there. Then there are some aunts and cousins, an uncle. It looks a little like Erbol, a cousin of Adilbek’s, who was their neighbour in Soghakh, on the right, in his younger days, but I may be wrong. I’m most certainly wrong about a few of them.

Behind them all, you can see a large photo frame in several sections hanging on the wall. The frame probably holds more than a hundred family photos. Photos of parents and grandparents, children, cousins, uncles, aunts. The photos you can see are just the top layer. Underneath this top layer are just as many, if not more, that cannot be seen. When new photos came to the family, the frame would be taken down from the wall and the photos would be rearranged, new ones added and old ones tucked behind others. Like this one, my favourite photo of the family gathering. I first saw the photo some ten or fifteen years after it had been taken, displayed in the same frame, which was by then reduced to three sections – a triptych of family photos. I asked Kharlyghash, ‘Who is that in the white hat?’ ‘And who is that waving?’ and so on. She patiently explained who was who to me, and now I have promptly forgotten and can only recognize some of them. I have forgotten some things, and, sitting here in London years later and scrutinizing the photos, I have found new things that I didn’t see or understand the first time I saw them.

Writing these snippets of what I understood and often misunderstood of this family that I came to love is a little like entering a big, old house. Standing before the task, I think of its rooms as discrete and easy to identify. Here is the front room, here are the bedrooms, the attic and so on. Each room has its own story attached to it. But as I enter the hallway, I hear something; I turn and go through a door and stand, silently, in an empty room with echoes resonating, some loud and some faint. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I start to see that there is a pattern in the wallpaper, or that there is in fact a door in the corner that I never noticed before, which leads to another room I never knew existed.

I am alone in this house, after all these years, because they have all left, of course. Ainagyl and Kharlyghash, Erjan, Amanjan, Bauyrjan, Jibek, Altynai, Bakhytbek and their parents Elnara and Adilbek. They have carried on with their lives and live in different houses, having studied, travelled, married, had children, grown older. They’re not sitting around dwelling on the past. Some of them have left altogether, and they sometimes seem to me to inhabit this house more so than the living.

These are stories about Ainagyl and her family: her siblings, her parents, a few cousins, some uncles and aunts, and what I have heard about her grandparents and great-grandparents. Some of them are based on my experiences and some on what I was told. Stories as someone else remembered them or related them. This happened, then this. They are all of them my reconstructions in some way, of course. And it is this intertwined mesh of people and lives and events that forms these stories. These are relations that somehow also came to involve me, and came to affect all of our future paths.

3

Ölgii Town

Icame to Bayan-Ölgii, the westernmost province of Mongolia, in August. There was beautiful sunshine every day. On first impressions, the small province capital of Ölgii was dusty and dry, sunny and empty. Strangely quiet. For a few days I stayed with relatives of some friends, who were kind enough to take me in. Within a few days, a friend from Kazakhstan, who was at university with me in London, knocked on the door. Nazgyl had arrived via another route, directly from Kazakhstan. We had arranged to find each other and she knew I would be there before her, but I was surprised that she had been able to find me without so much as emailing or calling me to find out where I was staying. On arrival, she had simply asked around and found out where the foreign or yellow-haired girl was staying. She had arranged through an acquaintance in Kazakhstan for us to stay in an office building belonging to the Red Cross on the outskirts of Ölgii. The building was vacant for the summer and we could stay in one of the offices on the condition that we watered the plants.

The Red Cross building was a square concrete two-storey structure dating from the 1990s. It sat on the southern perimeter of Ölgii, looking out over the mountains. A few steps led up to the heavy double door and you entered the building into a large entrance hall. The space was cool and dark, the only source of light being a single window where the light filtered through a net curtain. The light was faintly reflected in a large artwork in hammered metal celebrating International Women’s Day. The metal surface showed two women in flowing Kazakh-style dresses framed by the sun and floating over a lotus flower, holding up a bouncing, healthy baby.

A small, pleasant, sunny kitchen on the ground floor looked out over grey and brown backyards surrounded by mud-brick walls, and in the distance were the open market and the hospital. Also on the ground floor were a toilet and adjoining shower cubicle, which I’m ashamed to admit I still took for granted. At night a friendly caretaker slept on a felt carpet on the floor in the entrance hall. He came in the evening after having dinner with his family at home, but during the day he was usually out and about. The building felt strangely hollow. Upstairs were the offices. The windows were south-facing and the sun shone full on windowsills brimming with potted geraniums, succulents, and other big and small plants.

Illustration 3.1. Street in Ölgii, 2005. © Anna Portisch.

I found Ölgii disorientating despite the fact that the town centre was not big and the streets were laid out in a perfectly square urban grid, with the main streets converging and extending from the central square. The Red Cross building was on the perimeter of this grid, beyond which were the steppe and the mountains. A growing, more organically shaped neighbourhood extended from this grid and was composed of small streets or dirt tracks lined by residential mud-brick and log houses. This area was almost impossible for me to find my way around.

The central square was flanked by the local government building, a large single-storey building fronted by flower beds and two busts, one of Lenin and one of Sühbaatar (1893–1923), Mongolia’s socialist revolutionary hero, popularly cast in the West as ‘Mongolia’s Lenin’. At the top of the square sat the white, gleaming ‘BU Palace’, with mock Doric columns topped by a triangular pediment (‘BU’ standing for Bayan-Ulgii, as spelled in one variant of Kazakh–English transliteration). Opposite the government building stood the museum, a large modern grey cube decorated with large white-painted geometric patterns, with windows on the ground floor only, making it resemble a mix between a wartime bunker and a cake with elaborate icing. The general post office sat on the south side of the square. All the important buildings were gathered in one central location, like stocky elderly gentlemen sitting around a table, discussing this and that, watching life go by.

There weren’t many shop signs, and at first glance the dusty dirt tracks and streets seemed empty and strangely quiet. A solitary Lada would make its way down a street, a motorcycle perhaps, on an errand. It was August, and as I was to find out, most people who were able to left town during the summer months for the countryside. Statistical censuses are taken in the depths of winter in Mongolia. There is a considerable difference between a town’s population in summer and winter.

On one of my first days in Ölgii, as I was crossing the square, I was joined by a friendly-looking lady, who introduced herself as Maya. We managed to understand each other by a combination of gestures, laughs and our combined Kazakh and German. Did I know Lottie? The Swiss girl. ‘Yes, Lottie! You must know her.’ No, I lived in London, in another country. But I wanted to learn about felt carpets? Well, so had she! She had come to Bayan-Ölgii to learn about textiles. Even if I didn’t know Lottie, I ought to. Did I want to practise making felt carpets?! So had Lottie! Maya was genuinely surprised. She offered to bring me a small piece of felt that I could practise on. Maya herself made felt and embroidered crafts to sell in the museum shop. ‘Just over there’. She pointed to the museum building. ‘Come and see me any time.’ She would bring a piece of felt in the next few days.

The next day, when I came out of the Red Cross building I noticed a dusting of snow on the peaks of the mountains to the south-west of Ölgii. When I bumped into Maya in the square again, it was the first thing she commented on: ‘It has snowed! Already. Have you seen?’ She pointed to the mountains. I was silently jubilant that I could understand what she was telling me. I smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’ She gave me a piece of felt to practise on and explained briefly what to do. I took it home and sat stitching in the sunlight in the quiet Red Cross building with the August snow glinting on the distant mountaintops.

That evening there was a power outage. We were prepared for this to happen, and Nazgyl had stocked up on candles from the market. She was out for the evening attending a performance. As it was getting dark, I was sorting through my things. I had brought a small album of photographs to Mongolia, on the advice of a senior anthropologist, who had explained that it was nice to show the people you met a part of your life, your family, your home. That evening, in the empty, quiet building I took out the photo of my mother. I leaned it against the wall on a shelf and put a candle in front of it. As I struck the match to light the candle, the lights went out. The candle flared and lit up my mother’s smiling face in the surrounding darkness. I went to the window and looked out over the quiet, dark neighbourhood.

There were two internet cafes in town, one on the avenue leading from the south side of Ölgii to the central square and a second one inside the general post office building. The post office building had its own generator, and was mostly open even if there was a power outage. People would bring their chargers to the post office and charge their mobile phones while they were sorting out other things. One morning, as I sat in the post office internet cafe writing to a friend, someone next to me asked, in English, if I was new to Ölgii and what I was doing there. I looked up and saw a tall, bearded young man. He introduced himself as John. He was an American Peace Corps worker stationed in the village of Buyant to the south of Ölgii. He was in Ölgii for the summer, as it was livelier, more connected. I was struck by this. ‘Livelier’?

A few days later, John invited me to his flat to meet a young Kazakh woman who he had been working with. When she arrived, Kharlyghash seemed somewhat annoyed. She had come several times to meet John but he had not been in, she said in perfect English. She was staying with an aunt, who lived a good long walk away. As if impervious, or perhaps used to it, John ignored this and explained that the two of them had been working on a research project on local ‘environmental ethics’. As part of this project, they had collected people’s stories and tales about animals and nature. Kharlyghash had helped with this project and translated all the stories.

In an attempt to strike up a conversation and show interest, I asked her what sort of stories they were. Kharlyghash seemed ever more annoyed. Then she reeled off one of the stories. It was about the creation of the first human by the gods: a long, long time ago, before there were humans, two gods set out to create the first human, but they could not agree what humans should be like. One wanted to make humans in the image of a black raven. The other objected. Humans would be evil through and through. That would not do. He wanted to make humans in the image of a white swan. Beautiful and good. But the first god objected. Being only good, humans would soon perish. They argued over this for some time. In the end, they settled on this: they made humans in the image of the magpie. Both black and white, capable of good and evil.

Kharlyghash looked at me intently. I said, ‘What a great story. I didn’t know that story.’ As I said this I thought, ‘Of course, how obvious, how could I have!’ I really did like the story, but Kharlyghash seemed ever more unimpressed. I wanted to say something that would interest her, and so I kept chattering without knowing what I should say, wanting to make a good impression. ‘I had a magpie when I was little’, I carried on, thinking all the while that this was totally irrelevant. ‘My father found it one day when it had fallen out of the nest and the cats were about to get it. We tamed it and I used to play with it. It used to follow my mother around the house because she was the one who fed it. She stuffed food down its throat with her little finger. It left droppings on the floor as it followed her around.’ I rattled on. Kharlyghash looked at me seriously.

John eventually intervened and explained that I was hoping to live with a Kazakh family and that apparently I wanted to learn about the textiles they made for the yurt. ‘Fairy tales, felt carpets. Whatever next?’ I imagine Kharlyghash thinking. John introduced the idea that I might visit Kharlyghash’s family. He had stayed with them for a few weeks in their summertime yurt and had loved it. And so it came about that I was to visit the family. Kharlyghash said, ‘Sure, come and see me in Ulaankhus’, the village where she lived and worked at the local school as an English teacher. From there she would take me to the village of Soghakh, where her parents lived.

4

Drive to Soghakh

Ulaankhus was some forty kilometres away, across the mountains north-west of Ölgii, or a three to four-hour drive. This would be my first trip alone in a ‘public transport’ car. On the agreed day, I went to the open market in Ölgii. In a dusty corner was the ‘bus station’, if