I agreed to meet Ibragimovna’s daughter. She was a second-year university student with no background in journalism and no interest in the field. I gave her as much advice as I could muster on a career in retail fashion. I promised to revise her résumé and have it translated into English. She told her mother how helpful I had been and said she wasn’t interested in the manager job after all. The next day, Ibragimovna was able to find a spacious first-floor room with windows for the center.
I then proposed that we draft a job description for the manager, translate it into Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek, distribute it to media outlets, NGOs, and government offices, and run an advertisement in the local newspapers. Ibragimovna seemed surprised. “That’s not the way we do things here,” she said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and pick someone you like? That’s how I choose my staff.” I said that I was dealing with donor funds, and we had to follow the rules—an open search process, with written applications and interviews. With a mild protest, but also with a sense of curiosity, Ibragimovna joined me and a UNESCO representative in interviewing eight of the twelve applicants. The unanimous choice was Renat Khusainov, a twenty-eight-year-old university teacher with a background in journalism and computers, who was fluent in Russian, Kyrgyz, and English. He was a Tatar, a member of an ethnic minority. At the end of the discussion, Ibragimovna looked me straight in the eye. “Is ethnic origin an issue in this appointment?” she asked. “Well, it’s not an issue for me if it’s not one for you,” I shot back. She smiled. “This is a very good day for the library,” she said.
On the Road to the Sacred Mountain
After three nights at the grim Hotel Intourist, I moved into an apartment a few blocks south on Kurmanjan Dakta. The apartment was sparsely furnished but within easy walking distance of the library. Most important, the heating was working. In almost every Soviet city, a central thermal plant supplied heated water to radiators in houses, apartments, businesses, and public buildings. Or at least it was supposed to. Lack of fuel, maintenance, or some combination of the two meant that the system was notoriously unreliable. In winter, parts of Osh were without heat for days because of frozen pipes and equipment breakdowns. Most government officials lived in the city center where the system was better maintained. I was lucky to be in the right neighborhood.
Unfortunately, the heat never came on in the restaurants, where the few diners huddled in overcoats and fur hats. Even though soup and a main course cost as little as $1.50, and it was difficult to pay more than $4, few could afford to eat out. Apart from the occasional wedding reception, the restaurants were almost deserted. At the Ak-Burra Restaurant, a lonely attendant sat by the huge empty cloakroom. The cavernous upstairs dining room probably hadn’t changed much since the Soviet era when the local party brass went out to celebrate—ornate pillars, heavy red drapes, chandeliers, long mirrors, and paintings in fake gold frames. At 8:30 p.m. on Friday, only one other table was occupied. A sad-faced waiter handed me a five-page menu, but when I tried to order he told me that the kitchen could serve only kotelet (ground meat) with noodles, flat lipioshki bread, and green tea. On other nights, there was beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes and garnish and, sometimes soup and funchosa, a cold, spicy noodle salad. Most restaurant patrons came to drink and dance. Almost every restaurant had a stage for a live band, which belted out pop tunes at a decibel level that made conversation almost impossible. Because there was no heat, patrons danced in overcoats, boots, and fur hats. The music was a cross-cultural mix—a soulful Turkish pop ballad segueing into an American oldie, rendered in a thick accent, and usually without the definite articles: “Heavy bo-dee in whole-sale block, wuz dancin’ to jailhuz rock.”
After a week or so, I had learned enough Russian to greet the neighbors, shop for food at the bazaar, and tell a cab driver my destination. In 1995, communication and travel in Osh were daily challenges. The telephone switching system was antiquated and overloaded. You could usually get a local call through on the second or third attempt, but to call another city meant dialing a complex series of digits; making an international call required a trip to the city telephone exchange where you waited in line to book the call. The major challenge was finding the number. The library staff, journalists, and media owners (and anyone else who had to make calls on a regular basis) kept numbers in well-worn pocket organizers. Osh, the second largest city in the country, did not have a telephone directory.
There was also no city map—or at least no one I asked could remember ever having seen one. Even if it had existed, it would have likely featured Soviet-era street names that were fast disappearing as the city authorities dug into history and changed them to the politically correct names of Kyrgyz leaders and literary figures. Ulitsa Pionerskaya (Pioneers’ Street) was renamed for the painter Gapar Aytiev, Ulitsa 25 Oktyabrya (October 25th Street), marking the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the writer Kasym Bayalinov. The main one-way south street, Ulitsa Lenina (Lenin Street) became Kurmanjan Dakta kuchasi, named for the Queen of the South, the tribal chief who ruled the region after her husband was murdered in a palace coup in Khokand in 1862.
Even for fervent Kyrgyz nationalists, the name changes were confusing, and many people continued to use the old Russian names long after they disappeared from the street signs. Lenin was a particular source of confusion. Even though he was usurped by the Queen of the South on the main one-way south street, he simply moved one block east to take over the main one-way north street, pushing aside his one-time Bolshevik comrade-in-arms Yakov Sverdlov, as Ulitsa Sverdlova officially disappeared into street-sign history.
The city buses and marshrutkas (private minibuses) plied both the old and new Lenin Streets, but I did not know the city well enough to know where they would take me, so I took cabs for most trips. In Central Asian cities, the taxi business is still the most visible part of the informal economy. Although there are commercial taxi services, many drivers in private cars pick up passengers on the street. There’s a brief negotiation over the fare, although experienced passengers know the going rate between most points.
Apart from the occasional Mercedes, Audi, or BMW driven by a government official or crime boss, there were few vehicles in Osh in December 1995 that should have been on the road at all. The problem wasn’t just the bare tires and noisy mufflers. It was the streets, which had received little maintenance from a cash-strapped city government since independence. Cold winters and sizzling hot summers had buckled the road surfaces and created huge potholes. To avoid them, vehicles weaved and swerved, statistically increasing the chance of accidents. The Soviet-era Moskvichs, Volgas, and Ladas with their dented doors and shattered windshields looked like casualties of a fender-bender war, and a few were flamboyantly out of alignment. There were few auto repair shops, and parts were in short supply. If you needed a radiator or a distributor, you headed for the bazaar to scour the used parts laid out on tarpaulins and old blankets. A shortage of auto parts can spur innovation, and drivers routinely made repairs with scraps of metal and wire or a part salvaged from a different type of car. In 1995, gasoline cost about the same as in the United States (making it expensive by local standards), but there was no quality control. Because there were few gas stations, most drivers filled up at the roadside from roving tanker trucks called benavoz that sometimes dispensed a mechanically injurious blend of diesel and gasoline.
On days when I had to visit several newspapers or TV stations, I hired a car and driver for about $30 a day. My regular driver Babur, a broad-shouldered grinning Uzbek with a perfect set of gold teeth, fearlessly gunned his Volga through the rutted side streets, dodging pedestrians and farm animals, shouting (in English) “No problem!” It turned out that he was a police driver who took time off work because