When I was eighteen, I was forced to roll dough every Saturday. A big circle of dough \u2013 thin enough to see the kitchen table\u2019s fine grey cage pattern, or, as they say, \u201cthin enough to be able to read a newspaper through it.\u201d The dough would then be used for beshbarmak (a traditional Kazakh dish), for orama or for manty;\u2014 in that case, it should be slightly thicker, so that only the day\u2019s headlines would be recognizable. I was forced into this traditional female labor by my grandmother because my uncle would come over every Saturday for lunch. My grandmother would wake me up around 9 o\u2019clock in the morning and give me chores. I would probably still be drunk from the night before, after four hours of sleep (if I\u2019m lucky!). My strict and reserved grandmother would never address my red eyes and pale hungover face. Only once would she ask me why I behaved like that. I explained to her that nowadays clubs are the places to find someone. In fact, isn\u2019t she the one insisting that I find me a husband?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started living with her right after my mother\u2019s death. After, my uncle \u2013 while sitting at the head of the family dinner table \u2013 proclaimed that he was sacrificing his ability to continue living with his mother for me, so that I could now have an actual chance to become the real<\/em> Shoshanova. He said it as if \u201cthe royal\u201d Shoshanov family finally recognized the bastard that I was and decided to take in a stranger who just happened to have the same last name. What would that entail? To become someone real in regards to a random surname assigned to them at birth?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, here I was; standing in the kitchen and performing as a perfect \u2019Kazakh girl\u2019 through a hectic dance with a dough roller, as close as I could ever be to what it means to be the real<\/em> Shoshanova. But those were Saturday mornings, on Friday nights, however, one would normally find me at the gay club. At that point Almaty, a rather big vibrant city with typical Soviet architecture mixed up with ugly, newly erected skyscrapers made out of glass and metal, had a single gay club. Plus one lesbian party that happened once a month at the \u2018Art Club\u2018 with a huge portrait of Leonardo da Vinci on the ceiling. The crowd was full of butches and femmes \u2013 the division was present, clear and in a way mandatory. I was hanging somewhere in between, not femme enough in the absence of makeup, long hair and high heels, and not butch enough in the absence of cologne, short hair, and a big wristwatch. The amount of alcohol that was consumed at those parties was dizzying, and there would always be a fistfight by the end of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two years later my grandmother would give up in her fight with the cancer that she was living with for the last ten years. She planned everything. Together we went to \u201cKyzyl Tan\u201d \u2014 one of the oldest trading houses of Almaty, an astonishingly beautiful 19th-century landmark of Russian wood-architectonics \u2014 and bought five meters of white fabric for my grandmother\u2019s burial. She would be wrapped in it, with pieces of cloves between the layers before being put in the traditional Muslim carpet and then sent six feet under. The previous set, prepared a long time ago, was given away to bury her daughter. She planned everything. She called a remote relative to come and be her caregiver. Bakhty: a small, full- bloodied, earthy woman in her fifties with a big, red, weather-beaten face, high cheekbones and thin lips covering uneven teeth \u2013 one of them golden. She would curse in Russian like a sailor and laugh loudly. This would be the first and last time in my life that I would hear such cursing from an elderly Kazakh woman. \u201cWhere were you last night, nahuy blyat?\u201d, she would ask me smiling. Her eyes, two thin lines, sparkling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would watch my grandmother\u2019s gradual fading: not being able to walk, not being able to sit, not being able to eat, not being able to talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around that time I would pick up, or rather let myself be picked up, by a butch-y dyke who was 10 years older than I. It was my first time in giving up on feelings and love, and a start in fucking strangers. She was big, strong and full of life. Our sex was the most heteronormative sex one can imagine: she would shortly go down on me and then finger-fuck me for hours, desperately digging for what science used to call \u201cvaginal orgasms\u201d. She would be disappointed by my \u201cclitoral orgasms\u201d and would never get fully naked, always remaining in her underwear. For a while that didn\u2019t bother me much; I took whatever salvation life would give me to reclaim my body back from the constant feeling of being drowned in the waters of death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember how we brought my grandmother to the bathtub. Bakhty would take her back, while I would secure the legs and hold back the doors. A big, red, full-blooded body with a pale-white skeleton on top. My grandmother would sit in the water like an overgrown wrinkled child, while I would rub her back with a washcloth. She would always instinctively cover her right side with a palm, almost with a fist, where her breast before her mastectomy had been. My little old Amazonian, who survived her father\u2019s raskulachivanie<\/em>, his deportation to Siberia and death at the war; who grew up during this war, married a man-child at age 18, gave birth to three children almost in a row, then at age 24 buried her mother who died of cancer, built a family, lost her husband at 59, went through the fall of the Soviet Union, got cancer at 69, and buried her daughter at 77.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember us, me five years old and my cousin seven, playing in our grandmother\u2019s room, jumping on her bed, while she was undressing and changing into home clothes. We would jump towards her, kiss her and touch her. I would say that her right breast is mine and my cousin would react very fast to claim the ownership of the other one. Breasts always fascinated me: they gave milk, they served as a perfect pillow and occasionally became a toy. In order to play with a breast, one should push on a nipple, count until five and release\u2026 the nipple would harden and the areola would get all wrinkly. Push at it again and it will soften, push once more it will harden. A perfect game to bring oneself to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my friends told me how her mother, while explaining a perfect consistency of a dough, suddenly said: \u201cJust grab your breasts! Do you feel it? That\u2019s how the perfect dough should feel like!\u201d I know how to knead dough. It should be as tight as your grand\/mother\u2019s breasts, as your own breasts, as the breasts of your lover. I know how to roll dough. It should be as thin and as white as your grand\/mother\u2019s burial cloth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout her last night, she screamed a lot into a feverish oblivion. I would enter her bedroom and lay down beside her to calm her down. Bakhty told me to use an old Kazakh saying that will ease her departure: \u201cKyidym seni, kyidym seni, kyidym seni,\u201d which means \u201cI cut you off, I cut you off, I cut you off.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I used it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was eighteen, I was forced to roll dough every Saturday. A big circle of dough \u2013 thin enough to see the kitchen table\u2019s fine grey cage pattern, or, as they say, \u201cthin enough to be able to read a newspaper through it.\u201d The dough would then be used for beshbarmak (a traditional Kazakh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":20472,"template":"","categories":[56,10],"class_list":["post-20625","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-26-issues","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n