The Tractor Is Not Under The Tree

Osh looks, at first glance, like any other city trying to stay upright in November 2008. The mountains had snow on their shoulders this morning, and the streets below them were making the usual wet compromise between mud and exhaust. Men in padded jackets stood by the road near shared taxis, arguing about Bishkek, Moscow, and the price of flour with the deep patience of people who already know arguing will not change the price of flour. The Jayma Bazaar lanes were crowded with sacks of onions, Chinese thermoses, secondhand boots, plastic basins, and radios playing pop songs that had survived the border crossing with more confidence than some of the traders.

The ordinary world was in evidence: Nokia ringtones, diesel smoke, sunflower seed shells underfoot, tea glasses clouded from too many washings. The less ordinary part appeared when I tried to buy bread.

The stallholder, a woman with wrists reddened by cold water and flour dust, took my notes between two fingers as if they were damp rags.

“Karangy som?” she asked.

I had not yet had tea, which is always a tactical error in unfamiliar monetary regimes. My mouth still held the bitter metal aftertaste of the cheap black tea from the station kiosk, though I had swallowed the last of it twenty minutes before. I said, foolishly, “Som is som.”

She looked at me with real pity. Not hostility, not suspicion exactly. Pity. The expression one reserves for a grown person who has stepped into the street with his shirt inside out.

“Som is som at your cousin’s wedding,” she said. “Here, Friday comes.”

Behind her, clipped to a wire above the till, hung little slips of paper like laundry: sabak dalili, lesson proofs, each one creased, stamped, and pinned to a receipt. Some had arithmetic exercises printed on the back. One had a paragraph about late blight in potatoes. Another was from an English reader and included the phrase “The tractor is not under the tree,” which may be the most honest sentence I have seen in any financial instrument.

She pointed at a hand-lettered card: bread, tea, oil—310 in okutulgan akcha; 360 in cash. The extra fifty was not greed. It was danger priced in neat blue ink.

I paid the higher amount because I lacked the purple blessing of a school. She slid the cash into a separate tin beneath a rag and told the boy beside her to write “dark” in the margin. The boy was perhaps ten. He did not play with the coins or admire the foreigner’s clumsiness. He inspected the note’s corner, frowned at a tear repaired with tape, and asked whether I had a slip from a school window. When I shook my head, he folded the receipt corner down sharply, as if marking a page in a textbook. Children here do not learn suspicion late. They learn it between multiplication tables and errands for sunflower oil.

I had come to Jayma to turn a few portable things into acceptable value and perhaps extract a cleaner form of onward money from the frozen machinery of this year. Moscow was coughing; Osh was listening to every cough. Men who had spent the summer plastering apartment blocks outside Moscow were home early or not sending much, and every tea house carried the same report: transfers delayed, banks nervous, cousins apologetic. Yet the school ledgers, which should have been the most comic part of the economy, continued to breathe. It was professionally offensive.

At the money changers’ row, a man in a leather cap tapped his calculator with one thick nail and offered me a rate for cash that had the moral odor of spoiled fish.

“You want clean, go to school,” he said. “You want moving, pay me.”

On the table before him lay stacks of rubles, dollars, soms, and a pile of paperback workbooks in Russian: Soil Nutrition for High-Mountain Orchards, Practical Irrigation Terms, Conversation Russian for Farm Brigades. Their covers were too glossy and too similar, the paper inside gray and pulpy. I picked one up. The first twenty pages were genuine enough, or at least competent. After that, the same diagram of a potato root repeated with different captions.

He let me see the price because he wanted me to know he had the channel: 1,200 som for the workbook, plus his percentage. The kitеп жолу, spoken of in a low voice but displayed in broad daylight, because daylight is sometimes the best disguise. If money cannot travel as money, it puts on a school uniform and goes abroad with a satchel.

I thought about using him. Then I thought about the little boy marking “dark” in a margin, and about the stallholder keeping my questionable cash in a tin separate from the day’s respectable money. I also thought, less nobly, about the brass spring clip in my pocket holding my papers together, its repair a little too clever and too foreign. In several worlds now I have watched a tidy fix attract more attention than a broken thing. The clip has a corner reinforced with glue where the metal strap meets the paperboard cover, and I keep rubbing that corner with my thumb when I am uncertain. By noon the skin at the base of my thumb had a small hot pulse from the habit.

The money changer named a better rate if I would invoice through a language course. I asked whether the OblBilim мөөрү would pass.

He smiled. “Everything passes if it has studied hard.”

A joke, and not only a joke. I left him with his hardworking potato roots and went toward a school.

School No. 14 sat behind a low fence painted green, with half the paint gone from the gate where hands had polished it away. The courtyard smelled of damp wool, coal smoke, and cabbage soup. Children ran in lines and clusters, some carrying exercise books under their coats. Nearly every book was wrapped in oilcloth or plastic. Not decorative wrapping, not parental fussiness. Protective wrapping, corners folded tight, elastic bands biting into the covers. One girl had her family validation book inside a clear plastic bread bag, then inside oilcloth, then under her sweater. When another child teased her, she answered, “Do you want rain flour?” and the teasing stopped.

I have found that the deepest public memory often survives as a schoolyard insult. Here, the old rain queue still does its work. Ink ran once, and now three generations mistrust weather, pencil, and any adult who says a little water never hurt paper.

The Mektep Kassasy window had been installed in what had once been a cloakroom. A square hole cut through the wall, glass scratched cloudy, a shelf worn smooth by elbows. Above it hung a purple padlock on a string, not locking anything, perhaps just a warning or a joke that had become furniture. A queue bent down the corridor past posters of alphabets, hygiene advice, and a diagram showing how to attach sabak dalili to wage slips. Teachers moved through with ledgers hugged to their chests. Every few minutes came the soft thump of mөөр басуу: stamp pressed, page lifted, blotter applied.

The official fee was posted at 3 som in stamps. A saucer beneath the sign held chalk nubs and a few ten-som notes folded small. Nobody mentioned the saucer. Nobody needed to.

Ahead of me stood a thin young man with wet cuffs and the smell of carbolic soap rising from his coat. His fingernails were scrubbed pale, but the half-moons were gray. He held a family account book wrapped carefully in oilcloth, its corners reinforced with strips of brown tape. A repaired corner again. Local, ugly, and therefore trustworthy.

When he reached the window, the cashier said, “Your mother must come. The marriage name is crossed here.”

“She cannot stand in this queue,” he said.

“She can stand to marry, she can stand to correct a stamp.”

His ears reddened first. Then his neck. He looked behind him, saw the corridor listening with the intense politeness of people pretending not to listen, and lowered his voice. I caught only pieces: bathhouse, sister, second household, no bride-price written because there had been nothing to price, old imam, winter room. The cashier’s face did not change, but her fingers paused on the page.

A woman behind me clicked her tongue. Not at him. At the form.

The young man slid something through the window: not money, but a folded slip damp at one edge. “I cleaned the stoves at your cousin’s washhouse during the gas cut,” he said. “You said if we needed—”

The cashier inhaled, sharp and annoyed. Favors dislike daylight even more than forged seals do. She stamped the page, but not over the contested line. She pressed the purple OblBilim mark on a blank transfer space and wrote a note beside it in a hand so cramped it looked like thread. He gave the saucer a ten-som chalk gift, though his pocket made the flat empty sound of a pocket that had expected to keep that note. He gathered the book to his chest and stepped aside quickly, not triumphant, only relieved that whatever humiliation belonged to his mother had not been required in person.

Poor marriages, I am learning, are often better documented in who refuses to make whom appear at a window than in any register. Officials write boxes. Families write detours.

Next came a girl in a white nurse’s cap too large for her head. She had a baby tied to her back and another child by the wrist. The smaller child held a toy truck in one hand and a stamped slip in the other, which seemed brave. The girl placed three payment slips on the shelf.

“Not like that,” she snapped at the man beside her, who had reached past to set down his own book. “Lesson proof on top. Till sheet under. If you make her touch twice, she checks twice.”

The man withdrew his papers with a sheepish cough. Adults here accept correction from children when the child is holding the right paper. This is not sentimental. It is efficient.

The cashier examined the girl’s slips. “Widow benefit?”

“Child-watching hours,” the girl said. “Two houses and the clinic. The widow line is old.”

“Stamp is light.”

“It rained when I crossed the canal, but it is in ink, not pencil. Look at the date.”

She said this with such fierce honesty that everyone in the corridor leaned in a little. The stamp was indeed light, purple fading toward lilac, but the date was legible. The cashier held it near the window. Outside, children were chanting something about clean hands and clean money. A crow landed on the fence, shook itself, and continued being a crow regardless of monetary philosophy.

“Accepted,” the cashier said.

The girl did not thank her. She only turned to the child with the truck. “Now you may speak,” she said.

The child immediately announced he had to urinate. This was treated as a procedural statement, not a comic one. The girl rolled her eyes, hitched the baby higher, and marched him away.

The queue advanced. I had no household learning account, no employer wage slip, no deferment petition, and no local adult to argue on my behalf. I did have a small stamped receipt from elsewhere for nursery salt that was useless here except as a reminder that every society enjoys inventing a way for salt to become paperwork. I also had the ring loaf in my bag, still whole, still accusing me of unresolved obligations whenever I shifted my weight.

At the window, I asked if I could purchase stamps for validation of a temporary account.

The cashier looked past me. Foreigners, like damp paper, create extra work.

“What did you learn?” she asked.

I was prepared for exchange rates, not theology.

“Russian irrigation terms?” I tried, having just studied several fraudulent potato roots.

“Where is the module?”

I produced the least suspicious object I had acquired that morning: a small booklet on household vegetable storage, bought from a kiosk because the cover had a solid corner reinforced with tape, and I trusted the repair more than the printing. The booklet was dog-eared at a page on keeping onions dry. Someone had folded the corner down so often that it had become soft as cloth.

The cashier inspected it, then me, then the booklet again. “This is for grade seven farm instruction.”

“I am a slow man,” I said.

The woman behind me laughed once, a short bark. The cashier did not. But she took the three som in stamps, ignored the saucer, and made me copy a sentence about ventilation into a ledger. My handwriting in Cyrillic resembled a goat crossing ice. She stamped the page anyway and gave me a temporary slip worth just enough respectability to buy food without making a stallholder hide my payment in the shame tin.

For this small mercy, I felt absurdly grateful. Also absurdly irritated. I had crossed centuries with fewer obstacles than one encounters here attempting to convert breakfast into lunch.

Outside, near the fence, an adolescent in a knitted cap was arguing with a younger boy over a stack of thin boards. The older one had a child on one hip, though “older” is a generous word; the face under the cap was still soft, the mouth caught between defiance and embarrassment. A tool belt hung low from one shoulder. The boards were for repairing a stall roof, I gathered, and the argument concerned whether payment could be accepted before the mөөр басуу was current.

“I will stamp Friday,” the cap-wearer said.

“Friday is inspection,” the younger boy answered. He might have been twelve and spoke with the clean cruelty of exact knowledge. “If Bazar Tekşerüüçü sees the board money without proof, my uncle pays. You want my uncle fined because your baby has no patience?”

The baby, wrongly accused, slept open-mouthed against the builder’s coat.

The older one flushed and looked around, ashamed not of the child but of needing advice from someone whose voice had not settled. “It is only for nails,” came the mutter.

“Then file ak ay uzartуу,” the boy said. “Say repair crew. Named repair crew. Not whole moon.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t. You wrote pasture last time.”

The cap-wearer’s hand tightened on the boards. For a moment I thought pride would win. Then, very quietly, came the words: “Kara-Suu rain.”

The boy stopped smirking. That old wet ink again, summoned like a saint of administrative disaster. He took the paper, scratched out the wrong line, and showed where to write “roof repair, Jayma north lane.” The older one watched, jaw tight. A parent learning from a child how not to endanger grocery credit is a scene both comic and indecent. Here it passed as Tuesday’s cousin, though it was Friday.

I went back to the bazaar with my temporary slip tucked into my papers under the brass clip. The repaired corner of the clip had begun to rub a shiny mark on the booklet. Local legitimacy by abrasion; I may patent the method if I ever find a jurisdiction foolish enough to grant patents across time.

At the bread stall, the woman accepted my payment without pity this time. She clipped my sabak dalili to her till sheet, beneath the boy’s careful notation. He examined the stamp and said, “Light, but not rain.”

“Thank you, inspector,” she said.

He stood straighter, pleased and embarrassed. On the ground nearby, four smaller children were playing market. One offered a leaf. Another demanded a lesson proof. A third, wearing a cap far too large, announced a fine for ignorant money and confiscated two pebbles. The punished child protested that the moon was bright and the family had gone to repair an irrigation ditch. The inspector-child asked whether the deferment had been filed before departure. They collapsed into shouting. It was a game, but not a pretend one. Childhood here is rehearsal with dirt under its nails.

In the late afternoon, the real Bazar Tekşerüüçü came through. He was not theatrical. No grand raid, no shaking down stalls with villainous pleasure. He carried a folder, a pencil tied to it with string, and a thermos that leaked tea into the side pocket. Stallholders handed over their clipped sheets. He checked stamps, dates, and attached lesson proofs while traffic kept moving around him: women buying carrots, boys pushing carts, a man unloading crates of mandarins whose skins perfumed the air each time one split. The inspector fined one stall for a missing slip but reduced it when the owner produced an oilcloth-wrapped validation book from beneath a sack of rice. The crowd approved of both the fine and the reduction. Rules with visible exits are easier to forgive.

That, more than anything, marks this place’s balance. The burden is everywhere, but it is not hidden. People grumble openly about chalk gifts, purple stamps, and queues. They know who can argue, who must send a child, and when a deferment has to be filed before the donkey leaves for the upper pasture. The system wastes time in democratic handfuls. It gives teachers too much petty power and then surrounds that power with jokes, saucers, witnesses, oilcloth, and remembered rain. Even the money changer, parasite though he is, cannot quite detach himself from the schoolroom morality he exploits. His fake workbooks must at least pretend to teach potatoes.

I had intended to move value, and I moved almost none. A few notes became bread, tea, oil, and a temporary respectability based on onion ventilation. The larger conversion remains unsolved. Yet the day’s true lesson, for which I suppose I have now paid, is that this economy has made ignorance expensive in order to make trust cheap. It is an absurd bargain. It may also be less absurd than trusting banks that vanish behind polished glass and return speaking only in quarterly reports.