Letters home

Since 2013 the archbishop baptises the children at the Feast, on the terrace, hundreds of them in white. This year the line began at six, in the dark. A young mother on our lane, with a baby in a shawl, stood at the front. She had been waiting since five. It is her third child, so the archbishop stands as the godfather. I carried her chair.

Each family gets a letter in his own hand. She showed it to me and could not read it, she was crying too much.

Viktor Ivanovich from Nurzhan, who writes the "Notes of an old refiner", lost his wife. I never met them, but I read his blog for nine years, from Moscow. Today I lit a candle for her in the cathedral, at the icon of St. Janyl. Rest in peace.

Every year for the Feast some pilgrims come from the tribal side. They cross on foot, unarmed, with a paper from the UN people, and they stay in the lanes with their relatives or in the guest houses. This year I had four from the highland valleys. They brought a lamb, which I could not accept, and a bag of dried curd, which I accepted.

One of them, a man of fifty, never said a word at dinner. In the morning he asked to see the old juniper and stood there a long time. Before he left he shook my hand and said "tomorrow we are all just people again." I don't know what he meant. I think I know.

Easter. Before dawn the whole hill goes up with candles, from every lane, and when the first light comes over the Naryn the bells begin. We had five guests this year, a family from Talas with a grandmother in a wheelchair that we carried up the steps together, four men, in turns, in silence.

At the top the grandmother said: "I'm higher than I've been in my life." The archbishop's blessing came from the steps. Nobody spoke on the way down.

The lanes before dawn, Easter, candles on every step.

Breakfast in the courtyard under the walnut.

The first season is over. 118 nights in three rooms, 14 families, a bus of nuns from the south who sang at breakfast, and one old man who sat under the walnut for two days and wrote postcards. The room for two was 90 som with breakfast. Costs were many: sheets, gas, a second kettle.

I made a little money. The best part: mama, at six every morning, in the kitchen, with the whole house smelling of kümöch. She says she has not been so busy and so happy since my father.