A week after my last conversation with Little Bird, I saw him again in the stairwell.
"Rauan!" he said. "How lucky I ran into you! I'm leaving tomorrow! Let's go get a drink! M-----f---, I have a hangover. Do you have anything for a hangover?"
"Sorry, man."
"But I'm leaving tomorrow, we have to have a drink."
"You're not leaving, Little Bird. You've told me a hundred times that you're leaving, and you never do."
"No, man, f--- me, we were supposed to leave this morning, but there was a problem with the money. Tomorrow the bank'll give us the money and we're f------- leaving."
"Look, today something happened, and tomorrow something'll happen too, and the next day."
(A minute of good-natured swearing followed, which I won't try to render. Then:)
"Look, Little Bird, I'll see you when I go through Russia this summer."
"Really? You'll go through Omsk?"
"Yeah, probably."
"Well, I'll be in Omsk!"
"How will I find you?"
We stare at each other. Finally, I say,
"F--- it, man, we'll run into each other."
"Yeah, of course!" he cried, and slapped me on the shoulder. "Whatever, we'll find each other!"
The next day I was walking back to my apartment, and as I was thinking about what Little Bird had said and how I could make a story out of it for my blog, I rounded the corner and saw a moving truck in front of my stairwell. Cursing and shouting came from inside it, voices I thought I recognized, and coming around the truck I saw that it was, in fact, Little Bird's older brother inside.
"Rauan! This is it, we're leaving," he said. "Um...we'll see each other somehow," I said, thinking of Little Bird's friendly, nonsensical response the night before. "What the f--- do you mean? We're leaving," he said, and turned back to pushing furniture around inside the truck. That's not a very story-worthy thing to say, I thought as I walked into the building. Passing through the entrance I saw some girls I recognized vaguely as the Little Bird's friends. One of them asked me if I wasn't hot in my fur coat. “Yeah,” I said, “But all my other coats' zippers are broken.” "All the other coats' zippers are broken," one of them repeated, and I said, “Yeah,” and went upstairs.
Coming to my floor, I heard loud voices upstairs. Little Bird was probably up there, having a last drink with all his friends. I had had classes until 7pm, and I was tired. I didn't really want to go drink and struggle to understand emotional jargon. I don't like saying goodbyes under the best of circumstances. "And anyway, he's more of a story to me than a person," I said to myself, and opened my apartment door.
There are natural limits, of course, to the relationship you can have with a person when your interactions are mostly trying to avoid drinking with them and you understand only thirty percent of what they say. But I shocked myself with my own coldness – “more of a story than a person”. It was true – I perceived my relationship with him was more like a spectator to a movie, or an author to a vignette, than one man to another. By relating to him like this, by writing about him, he became comic, not tragic. His drunkenness, his exuberance, and his absurdity were all easy to take if he was just a character.
I changed clothes and went out to find him, but the truck had left.
In the last few years I’ve become aware that I often try to live like I’m writing a story. I imagine more than a few other volunteers are like this too. This might play a large part in why we choose to join Peace Corps. Who doesn’t get a little thrill imagining themselves as an old man or woman, beginning a story to their great-grandchildren, “Well, when I was in Kazakhstan…”? Many of us have blogs, and many of us have experienced the thrill of being found interesting by total strangers. Writing helps us deal with our frustrations by distancing us from them, by making them into abstractions. When our frustrations are people, we can turn them into characters, and this allows us to grin at them rather than feel helpless or angry.
But this is a terrible way to relate to people we care about. Other than say goodbye, I don’t think I really would have done anything differently with Little Bird if I had had the chance. But when I realized my attitude towards him that evening, it frightened me. If I am treating Peace Corps like a story, do I – even a little bit – look at my counterpart this way? My host family? My students? Of course, I have more closer relationships with them, I have strong feelings for them as people, I know the nuances of their personalities, but soon enough – in less then two months, as I write this – all that will be left of many of the people I know here will be the memories I have about them, the stories I can tell about them.
Similarly, we will also shortly become stories. Volunteers are remembered, but by most people only as characters, even caricatures. Ask townspeople about former volunteers, and they will all produce the same sort of coarse details, good and bad – D_____, who spoke Kazakh, S_____ who never came to class, R_____ who started Girls Club, B_____ who drank.
That we all become stories to one another is a natural consequence of living in a relatively remote country. Many of us may never visit again, and even those who do will not find the same place they left. Flesh and blood Kazakhstan will become for us an idea and a memory; physical separation will bring with it cognitive separation, and the people we love will become characters. What’s more, people at home won’t even be as interested in hearing our stories as we would like. Not until we have great-grandchildren, anyway.
In the last few months, most of us are working on our legacies – passing on our projects, making our last lessons memorable, and giving presents for people to remember us by. In one sense, we’re patching up the stories about us that will be left behind. But in the bustle of my last months, Little Bird reminded me of this – we will have stories for the rest of our lives, but we won’t have the real thing for much longer.
Knowing this, I, for one, am going to make sure to spend quality non-narrative-worthy time with the people I care about. That means long teas with my counterpart, leisurely breakfasts with my host mother, chatting in the hallway with my students, and lazy arguments about pop music with my host brother. This is what I’m losing, and even though I may have come into the Peace Corps to collect stories, it’s these mundane moments that I’ll miss.
