Forging a Place for Myself under the Kazakh Sun

Saralzhin, the village where I was sent to spend my internal exile, is a Kazakh word for a type of small, thorny bush that miraculously survives in the sandy soil. These bushes are sturdy: you can't just yank them out of the ground. No wonder the whole village was also named after this bush: the village had also entrenched itself firmly in the sand, barely peeking out above it. When I finally jumped off the milk wagon, wearing a jacket and a small backpack, I got the sense that I had landed on a beach.

Bathing (or, rather, splashing myself with water) in a small stream called the Uil, which flowed near the village, truly saved my life that first unbearably hot summer. Saralzhin was fortunate to have this little stream, which doesn't flow into any other river, it just dries up. I was surrounded by the endless desert, which made one of the rules of my internal exile absurd: I was permitted to wander off only in a radius of thirty kilometers from the village. But where could I go? Except for some scattered farms, the nearest town was the regional center, Uil, around fifty kilometers away. Obviously, I needed the permission of the authorities to go there.

The distance from the village to the nearest city, Aktiubinsk, was about two hundred kilometers, but the transport connections were adequate. You could get there by taking two or three regularly scheduled buses, but the route was a dirt road that was frequently washed out during big rainstorms. These transport connections would also frequently be disrupted by summer sandstorms and winter blizzards, which were common in this area.

The time difference with Moscow was the same two hours that I had gotten used to in the Ural region. The only difference was that now I was south of that mountain range. The village of Saralzhin was rather small, anchored by a state-owned animal farm that mainly raised cattle. In addition to the village administration building, there was also a school, a post office, a building materials depot, a grocery and hardware store, a bakery, a cinema, and a small library with mostly Kazakh literature (it only had a few dozen Russianlanguage books in its collection). The public baths were open on weekends. Several sheep farms surrounded the village.