Fly-Fishing the 41st (29 page)

We sat on a couch in a little room waiting to pay for our stay. A woman behind a reception desk shuffled papers for fifteen minutes, pretending to be busy, before she spoke to us. We agreed to pay six dollars a night per person for four nights. To compute this, the woman insisted on using her calculator. Then she made meticulous notations with a pencil in a book, sharpening it each time she started a new line, slipping a piece of carbon paper under every sheet so a copy would be made.

An hour passed before the transaction had been made. We put our bags in our rooms and went to the cafeteria, vast and largely vacant, to eat the dinner included in our room rate. As the five of us ate a simple borscht, a young man came over and sat with us.

“My name is Vadim,” he said in good English, and spoke some cordial introduction. “What would you like to do during your stay?”

“We would like to catch trout,” Johannes said.

“Ah, trout,” Vadim said, testing the collar of a stiff, starched white shirt. I saw that his black pants were pleated and his black shoes shined to a mirrorlike polish. “There are many in rivers going into the lake.”

“Yes?” Johannes said.

“Yes. They are beginning to come up out of the lake for spawning.”

“You know a lot,” said Johannes.

“I have an acquaintance who is a fisherman on the lake. It is his profession.”

“Can we catch them too?” I asked.

“I think with Kolya you can.”

“Then we want to meet him.”

After dinner, Vadim walked us to our rooms. On the steps outside the building was another sharply dressed young man, just like
Vadim, except he wore a leather vest. Ida had recognized a clandestine tone to our transactions. “
Il mafioso,
” she whispered to me.

“Marcel,” Vadim said, addressing the young man, “tell my new friends about your friend in Barskoön who is a professional fisherman.”

The young man touched his head in thought, revealing that his hair was set hard like stone with grooming gel. “You can pay him to be your guide,” Marcel said simply, with a high, agitated voice.

“How much?” Johannes said.

“Are you interested?” Vadim asked.

“Of course.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Vadim replied, turning to discuss the price with Marcel. “How about thirty dollars a day.”

“Thirty?” Johannes said, putting his chin in close to his neck and looking disturbed. “How about ten.”

“Twenty,” Marcel said with a greasy smile.

“Fifteen.”

“Eighteen.”

“Okay,” Johannes conceded. “We go with the fisherman.”

“When?” Vadim asked.

“As soon as possible.”

“Let's meet here in the morning and we can work out the details,” Vadim said. “We will talk tonight with the fisherman. And one more thing: All money is to be paid to Marcel.”

The opportunity to observe a man who made his living as a fisherman in Central Asia was exciting to me. It made me feel safe to sleep confidently; I felt somehow that the guide would be good.

The morning was misty through the window of my room and the lake was hidden from view. I could hear a light drizzle falling on the roof when I first awoke. As I prepared my fishing gear it began to rain harder.

“It's good weather for fishing,” Johannes said when we met for breakfast, though we feared the rivers would be too high if the rain
continued. Vadim met us at breakfast in perma-pressed polyester clothes and communicated the plan to us as well as to Isa and Marin. Marcel would arrive shortly with the fisherman and we would go.

I returned to my room, put on my rain jacket and rubber boots, grabbed my rod, and waited for Vadim and Marcel to arrive with the fisherman. After a few minutes, a small bruised sedan pulled up and in the backseat I saw him. The fisherman stepped out of the car and was introduced to us as Kolya.

As he shook Johannes's hand, I noticed how strong he was and how large his hands were. A thick leather jacket hung wet from his broad shoulders—had he been out fishing already?—and baggy canvas pants were tucked into his tall rubber boots. We were now quite the motley expedition team.

When we all piled into the van, I realized how much mass and speed we had accumulated, like a snowball rolling down a hill. We were now eight, bouncing westward along the lakeshore. After a short way, we turned south, up a road along a small river called the Tosorka. We had passed it the day before on our way to Tamga, and I had thought it too swift and muddy to be good for trout fishing.

When I stepped on the banks, wet from the rain and fragrant with sage and lavender, I thought, this could be a trout stream. When I stood beside the high and mad river, I was again discouraged. The fisherman assured us the fishing was good. He told Vadim that a week before he had caught a three-pound trout, and that there were bigger ones to be had.

Kolya stepped out of the car and took out his rod. It was a sturdy blue telescoping pole that extended to about nine feet. The blue of the rod was peeling and revealed an ochre-colored fiberglass. At the butt of the pole a small reel was attached, silver with a black patina. It was not a casting reel; the bait was dropped or lobbed, and Kolya wound the line by turning the spool of the reel with his finger. The line on the reel was thick, about the diameter of angel-hair pasta, and at the end was tied a hook with a chunk of lead above it and a Styrofoam float.

In his jacket pocket the fisherman carried an aluminum can with worms. He threaded a worm on the hook and dropped the rig in the eddy behind a rock and in the slower currents near the bank. He fished each possible spot carefully, holding the line in his left hand and the rod in his right. Sometimes he waited for minutes with his line in the water, circling in the eddies. He approached the better-looking holes like a cat, low to the water and slowly, not bothering to wipe the rain dripping down his face. He fished one large pool for a long time and eventually, with both hands on the pole, Kolya heaved a large silvery fish onto the bank.

It was a gorgeous trout with violet cheeks and huge black leopardlike spots, streamlined and elegant like an Atlantic salmon. Johannes and I were beside ourselves, laughing excitedly at the sight of this magnificent fish, patting the shoulder of Kolya's leather jacket. He smiled like a child. I took the fish, cleaned it off in the river, sketched it, and photographed it. It looked, as we had expected, precisely like the fish we had seen from Lake Sevan, but was a more exquisitely formed specimen.

I lay the trout on a large boulder of pink granite beside a bouquet of wildflowers that Ida had picked.

 

We all had a drink that night at the bar in the old military camp. Kolya drank modestly and smiled shyly, his hair, though dry, still matted down from fishing in the rain. Isa on the other hand drank furiously. He spoke loudly with his face so close to my ear that I could feel his spit on my cheek. When he wasn't speaking boisterously, he looked about the room like a nervous rabbit, his big Dagestani nose sniffing the air. I was relieved when his acute olfactory sense led him to the nearest available hooker, and he disappeared.

When Isa had gone, a calm descended on the bar and I could study and befriend our fisherman, Kolya. He had only three fingers on his left hand and with those he held his glass of vodka. More ladies came into the bar and I danced under the tall ceilings of the room.

We were so pleased with Kolya that we arranged to fish with him the next day. He arrived in the morning at the front of our residence, with several friends who wished to follow us up a mountain pass to fish for a small chublike fish called osman. Isa arrived at the van with the woman he had found the night before, but Johannes objected to her coming along. She stayed. The rain had gone and the air was dry and cool.

Isa drove away from the camp in silence, east, toward the border with China, and then south up a good gravel road along the Batshkan River. The higher we climbed, the cooler the air became, and snow still held in large masses on the hills of brittle rock. Wild poppies, orange and yellow, grew wherever there was a patch of soil. They fluttered amidst the seeps and trickles from the melting snow that cut trails and rivulets in the rock. Their petals were like delicate veined paper and they quaked in the breeze and bruised when touched.

As we neared the pass we saw higher peaks with fresh snow that looked like powdered sugar. Kolya told us through Vadim that the mountains had wild goats and that there were a few leopards. Not far from the pass, he said, he had a friend who lived in a cave for part of the year and hunted wolves and lynx with a trained eagle.

We stopped at a small bridge to fish in a milky gray pool of water. We caught many of the osman, a fish with irregular black spots, olive yellow sides, a white belly, and small whiskers, like a cross between a trout and a catfish.

It was cold enough on the pass that I needed to put on a wool hat and a sweater. Kolya's friends came over to where Johannes and I were fishing to invite us to partake of the lunch they had spread out among their catch. They had brought boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, a container with salt, and vodka. I was handed a cup of vodka and a potato. Johannes and I toasted with them. Ida missed lunch, as she was out on a walk photographing wildflowers.

After lunch, I took a walk across the treeless landscape. At every step I encountered a different type of wildflower. I picked some and
pressed their delicate petals in the pages of my sketchbook. By the time I had returned to the fishing spot the Russians had gathered up their piles of osman in burlap sacks and were ready to leave.

 

Johannes, Ida, and I had dinner at the cafeteria in the old military compound, and afterward we sat and watched Kolya and his friends play backgammon, which they played very quickly. When the gaming was over we all went to the bar to celebrate the beautiful day.

That night there was an energy among our comrades and the drinking was aggressive. We danced as the bar filled up with people. Isa invited people to drink with us. A young woman took me by the hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. Her hair was bleached blond and she had cool dark eyes. I don't remember returning to my room, just that I ended up there, my head spinning on my pillow. I remember that I kissed her and wondered why she was not with me.

 

We paid Marcel,
il mafioso,
the next morning at breakfast.

“Here's my number in Bishkek if you need anything before you leave,” said Vadim. “I should be back in town tomorrow, that's where I live most of the time. And let me take your address. If I find out any more about Kyrgyz trout I will write you.”

We were headed away from Tamga before most of the town had awakened.

 

Marin was driving and Isa was passed out in the passenger seat. We stopped at a beach on the lake so we could skin dive. Isa took off his shirt and spread himself out in the sand to quiet his hangover. The water was warm enough that Johannes and I could swim and dive comfortably without wet suits.

Visibility in the lake was good, maybe ten meters, but Johannes and I saw few fish. I was happy to float on the surface staring at the bottom to quiet my own hangover, watching the geometric patterns the light made on the wavelets of sand. When we came out of the
water we sat on the hot beach to dry off. I looked at Johannes beside me and saw him shaking his head.

“What?” I said, but I thought I knew.

“I think we should have given the fisherman some money.”

“I was thinking the same thing, I bet he doesn't get any.”

“Shit.”

“Shit's right,” I said, looking off across the vast lake; you could not see the other side.

“Not much we can do,” he said.

 

Later that afternoon, on our return to Bishkek, we arrived at Issyk Ata, the last river we would fish in Kyrgyzstan before departing for Mongolia. Several boys were standing on a bridge fishing for trout. The current was very fast and they needed a lot of lead weight on their lines to keep the bait near the bottom. They had a forked stick with several dead trout strung on it.

“These are genetically pure
Salmo oxianus,
” Johannes said, lifting one of the fish, “but they are not native to this river, they were introduced by the Russians in the seventies from tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su, where we have been in the southwest.”

Isa had a friend who lived in an apartment building by the river in the village of Issyk Ata and arranged lodging for us there, in a top-floor room. Another boarder, a man from the Ukraine, spoke some German.

“Where can we get a cold
kleines Bier?
” Johannes asked him.

“I'll show you,” he said.

On our way to the bar across the river, Johannes asked the man if he would talk to the boys we'd seen about selling us some of their catch. The trout they had caught were bigger than the ones we had caught in the southwest, and Johannes wanted one to take back to Austria and stuff for the wall of his library. One boy sold us two, freshly caught and beautiful. He pulled them off the forked willow
stick on which they had been strung and wrapped them in a pair of large ferns, carefully, like a Parisian florist might wrap a dozen tulips.

“Our work is done here,” Johannes said. “I am satisfied that we have specimens, we don't need to catch them ourselves.” I disagreed; I wanted to fish the river, but I didn't argue because the river was too swift for fly-fishing.

We drank several beers, cheerfully, with the Ukrainian man and then returned to the apartment for some dinner.

“We have caught and seen the trout of the Amu Darya River,” Johannes said over a plate of vegetarian lagman. “It is the easternmost native brown trout.” He was a little drunk and preaching. “Beyond here there are only other species of salmonid fish: taimen, char, and lenok; and grayling of course, I am very interested in the grayling.”

When I painted a watercolor of the trout that night, unwrapped and lying on their bed of ferns, the act seemed to complete and satisfy an urge to collect and record. “Issyk Ata River,” I wrote beside the sketch. “Headwaters of the Syr Darya River. Introduced here in the early seventies from tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su in the Amu Darya drainage.”