Letters home

Twelve years since I came home. The walnut gave a lot this year; mama makes the jangak pashtet for the fast days and sells jars to the guests. The season was good. Fewer foreigners than before, more from Talas and Nurzhan.

Aigerim's boy is going to Moscow next spring, to the building sites, like his uncle. I told him everything: the bytovki, the minus 26, the police on the metro. He says: "Uncle, now there are apps." OK. Send money through the app, then. And eat soup every day.

Things to do before the first guests: whitewash the courtyard wall (mama will check); new hinge for the gate, it screams like a goose; take the sheets out of the chest and air them; tell the cat the rules again; count the jars; ask the cantor's children not to teach my nephew bad words in Syriac.

Mama has her own list. It has one item: "Everything."

Since October the pages of Kündölük do not open abroad. The Moscow boys cannot read this any more: Mahmud wrote on the phone to say "your Letters no longer come". I told him: I will print them and send. He said, "Don't. I only read the parts about the soup."

I know there were worries in the country in the autumn, and in the cities. In our lane nothing was visible. We lit our candles, we baked bread, we prayed, as always, and perhaps a little more.

Hot, bright, full. 12 nights of guests in a row, three families from Talas, an American writer who asked every day what pashtet is made of. I told her: walnuts and love. She wrote it down.

Mama's table at the Feast: nan, pashtet, the jars.

Mama made forty jars this year. They sold in a week. People take them home to Talas and Chicago. I keep two jars for the winter and one for whoever knocks first.

After the Cross: 168 nights, eight countries. A proper season again, not like before, but proper. Fewer from Europe, more from Talas and Nurzhan, and a group from Chicago who spoke to mama in the English she learned from the missionaries in the 1990s. They said she was "the best-spoken woman on the lane." She said: "Of course."

The cantor next door started a small class for the children of the lane: Syriac letters, on Saturdays, in his kitchen. Aigerim's boy goes. He draws the letters like little fishes.