An Old Story About The Word "Now" In Kazakh. A Chess Player of the First Rank. An Insight into the Nature of Frustration. ...

As far as I know there are no words in Kazakh for "want", "fun", or "now". There's a word that's translated as "now" - "kazir" - but it doesn't mean the same thing. Here's where I learned this. Once in Koktobe Eki, I was trying to figure out when dinner would be. If it was going to be in a couple hours, I would go over to Susan's to eat. If it was going to be right away, I would eat at home. I asked the group of family women sitting on chairs in the yard when we would eat. Right now - "kazir" - they said. This surprised me, because the kitchen was dark, there was no food on the table, and they were all just sitting around talking. "Kazir?" I asked. "Yes, we're cooking it right now," they said. Again, the kitchen was dark and they were sitting around talking. I tried a different tactic. "How much time before we eat?" I asked. "We're eating right now!" they repeated. Wasn't the American listening? I tried to explain my motives. "If we are eating now, I will eat here. If we're eating later, I will eat at Susans." After I said this, I realized that for "now" I only had "kazir" that was shaping up to mean something other than what I wanted it to, and that my sentence wasn't going to help any. And indeed, they responded - maybe now a little exasperated at my inability to understand - "well, we're eating now." Finally, I asked, "after how many hours will we eat? One, two?" "Ah," they answered, "maybe in an hour and a half." I ate at Susan's.

I say this to celebrate the fact that next week I'll finally start meeting with language tutors again. One Kazakh, one Russian.

I was working in my classroom when the school's shop teacher came in. He was a middle-aged Kazakh man, and he was wearing a Kazakh hat, which is rare up here in Imperial Russia. He introduced himself in Kazakh, and we chatted as best I could. He wanted to learn English from me, but didn't know any at all. I was trying to back out - very beginning English is best taught by a non-native speaker or someone with more experience teaching beginners that I have - until he asked, "do you like chess"? "Well, yes." "I am a player of the FIRST RANK," he proudly announced. I told him I was a lousy player but that I wanted to learn, and so we agreed to meet the next day when he would teach me chess and I would teach him English.

I don't know exactly what's meant by the "first rank", but I will say this - he clobbered me. He never thought about a move on his own time until the endgame - as soon as I moved, as fast as he could move his arm, his move was made. His lines were open, mine were cramped, he made me waste time shuffling pawns around while he developed his back row, and I think he promoted a pawn just for fun. It was magnificent. If I can get something out of this guy before I go, I'll be proud of myself. It's time to start learning chess vocabulary in Kazakh.

In Soviet, I never got annoyed at the lack of running water. Here, when there's no running water, I get angry, even though it's no worse than in Soviet. Better, because I can wash in a heated room. But someone's denying me water that I should have. We haven't had more than a trickle all week, so I just didn't get hot showers. This morning, I finally realized that it was only the possibility of hot water and not the absence of hot water that was making me angry and managed to resign myself and cheerfully heat a bucket on the stove. I took it into the bathroom to wash, and lo, the running water had returned. It's like the universe is writing lesson plans.

Everyone, ignore the sunshiny jacket reviews on Life of Pi. They make it sound like a fluffy, happy, uplifting survival tale, and it's not. It's a chillingly nihilistic book that will mess up your brain.