Saturday, March 11, 2006

pisken bas

I have been called a pisken bas (cooked head) two times in two days. It makes one wonder . . . When they slaughter an animal here, they boil the head. The fur comes off, and the lips pull back from the teeth so that it has a macabre smile.
The second time I heard it was today, when Bolat took a photo of the women from my church, but could only fit me from the neck up, smiling broadly at the way he said, “say cheese.” He said “Sorry, Susan, but you’ll look like a cooked head.”

Women's Day


I came home by taxi at about 9:30, after waiting 30 minutes for a bus. I wasn’t thinking about how things might have changed in a day – the firm-packed snow had turned into sludge, and we fishtailed at about 10k/h through my neighborhood. I came into the house, where Kanipa Apa was very, um, cheerful, doing something on the kitchen table that involved dirt, half-boiled noodles, and an old apron (over the noodles and under a pile of dirt.) I came in with one boot on and one boot off, because the zip of the boot zipper had broken off. “What’s wrong?” she asked, in a sing-song voice. “Your zipper?” “Yes,” I said. “It’s broken.” “It’s broken,” she repeated as if it were a nursery rhyme. She wobblingly knelt down in front of me and began to try to rip the zipper by main strength. “No, I need something for this little hole,” I said, and showed her the pin-sized hole where the zip used to be. “A knife!” she said, with relish. I quickly hopped away from her and found a safety pin, but my haste was unnecessary as she had moved on to other things. I have a feeling she’ll sleep well tonight. I hope the seeds she planted in the apron make it, too.
As the people I was celebrating with were running between Mahabbat and Bolat’s apartment and Aitgul’s upstairs apartment, I came across a neighbor standing in the doorway in a fur coat and a hat that didn’t match at all (people don’t worry about matching their clothes, but you can bet that their hats, coats and boots will coordinate). I mistakenly thought she was trying to speak to me. I wished her a happy Women’s Day, but then it became clear that she was singing something. She shuffled out the door, giggling a little, and walked down the steps like a cowboy.
Today (March 8) was Women’s Day, a big holiday which is probably not celebrated the way a feminist would wish: women are mostly praised for their beauty, given pink cards with wishes for health and love, watch Titanic at 10:00 (this year, at least,) and get very drunk both alone and in groups. The men get drunk, too. A student told me that men get drunker on Women’s Day than on Men’s Day (and how on Earth would they measure that?). Which is something to think about.