It’s evening, before the sun has gone down. I’m lying in my bed in Forum Hostel, Astana and suddenly the entire city disappears. I fall five feet to the ground and hit soft grass. The first thing I notice is that the wind is blowing hard, making waves in the short green blades, surging past me. I stand up and look around, and in the distance I can see a black river snaking under the gray sky. There is nothing else on the horizon.
What were people ever doing here, I wonder? One hundred miles to the south is Karaganda. At least there, the coal miners can work. Almaty has some beautiful mountains, and used to have many apple trees too. But there’s nothing here besides this river.
The wind buffets me, I can almost lean into it, but it makes me bitterly cold. I think it’s snowing because I can feel the tiny flakes pricking my cheeks and forehead. I take some steps but it’s pointless under such a vast sky. So I stop, and close my eyes, and try to remember why I’m here.
It was fifteen hours on the train through the steppe, feeling the carriage wheels scream over the iron rails like hoofbeats, two at a time in a rocking rhythm that helped me fall asleep. We arrived at Nur-Sultan-1, excitingly named after the (now-outdated) city name plus a number like every other big Soviet station I’ve been to in this country. I stepped out of the building into a clear blue day and a harsh sun overhead. A pleasant-looking array of cream-colored, five-story buildings greeted me, and I thought to myself, “this isn’t so different from Almaty at all!”
What it looked like outside of the train station
We hopped on the bus (also crowded, like Almaty) and crossed the river to the left bank, and everything changed:
The left bank
I felt like the thirty-minute ride had taken me just as far as the fifteen-hour rail journey. The right bank is where the small Soviet town named Tselinograd was, before they decided to make this the Astana (“capital” in Qazaq). The left bank is where this capital has grown, a clean, modern, cold city. I had crossed over a line separating worlds, the kind that Talgat Dairov talks about in his essay “The Border”: “a step forward – and you are one of the lucky heirs, a step back – and you’re at the point where you reluctantly escaped in the late 90s”. We had escaped into a ten-lane highway, which, had we continued along its whole length, might have taken us by a vast pyramid of glass, the largest complete spherical structure in the world, or the Qazaq National University of Arts, which was a bowl-shaped building that seemed devoid of people. The most striking thing, though, was not these monumental structures themselves but the space in between them.
We spent hours moving through the empty plazas and boulevards between the mosque (largest in Central Asia), Bayterek Tower (photogenic symbol of the city), the Mega Silk Way mall, and the Ritz-Carlton building (tallest in Central Asia). Buses and taxis were available but somehow it felt right to go on foot, it helped our minds to understand the distances. The clouds in the sky were stretched as if they too were having trouble filling this much space. And as we walked, we felt the wind. The avenues that asymptotically converged on the horizon were like wind tunnels, we were either utterly exposed or desperately hugging the side of a 30-story building for protection–no trees or fences or little Doner Kebab shops like in Almaty to offer us shelter. Anuar Duisenbinov’s verse comes to mind:
“i just walk through the city
through my luminous and windy capital
and i think only this wind will remain eternally”
“Mangilik Jel” (“eternal wind” in Qazaq)
The title is a play on words, referencing the Mangilik El (“eternal state” in Qazaq) guiding doctrine developed by The First President Of The Nation™, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Snow in the capital
Despite the presence of his quotes, handprints and statues everywhere around the city, it was the mangilik jel that seemed to have the upper hand during our time there. On Saturday morning it blew in snow clouds. I left the hostel to get breakfast, and it felt like a dream as I moved through wide-open, empty streets in between looming skyscrapers, barely visible behind the sheets of white. Flakes blew hard and fast in my face, and eddies swirled along the pavement like little snow spirits, only to die and leave white dusty trails behind. The few people we saw walked backwards to save themselves the stinging pain of facing the wind.
This thought jolts me back to my situation, because it is the same pain that I feel now, alone on the empty steppe with no city around me. I crack my eyes open, look into the wind and snow, and for a moment the black river in the distance looks like an empty ten-lane highway. And then it seems to me that the storm clouds in the distance look like a clump of skyscrapers. And then I really open my eyes and I’m still in my bed in the Forum hostel.
But perhaps my dream wasn’t so far from the truth. I think that, while this city doesn’t have apples or mountains or coal deposits, what it does have in abundance is sheer empty space, a big sky, and wind. It is the steppe in city form.
