In 1997, the capital of Qazaqstan was moved from Almaty, where I am studying, to the city of Astana (“capital” in Qazaq), far in the north. Out there in the middle of the steppe, the only geographical feature of note is a wide, shallow, swampy river, which neither starts nor ends near any major bodies of water. To keep the water level constant, a pipeline and canal move water from the Irtysh river, six hundred kilometers away. I think the only ones who appreciate this are the mosquitoes who live there, because it’s still too shallow for boats.
The name of this river is the Ishim, named after Khan Kuchum Ishim, who somehow managed to drown in it. I have a more positive interpretation of the name, though. It sounds like the first-person plural form of the Russian verb ‘to search’: ищем (ishchyem, we search). Who is searching? What are they searching for? Our little group of Russian students got on the sleeper train in Almaty and set off to find out.
After fifteen hours of idle contemplation of the steppe rushing by the window, drunken debates over Ukraine, eating copious quantities of snacks, and getting what sleep we could, we rolled into the Nur-Sultan-1 station. I was expecting to see the city I had read about, designed by Western and Japanese architects, barely twenty years old, covered in skyscrapers and embassies. So I was a bit surprised when I got off the train and it looked like I had barely moved. The same cream-colored five-floor buildings that are across the street from me in Almaty were there to greet me.
What it looked like outside of the train station
We hopped on the bus and headed towards our hostel. As I looked out the window, I could see the city was changing in front of my eyes. It was just a thirty-minute ride, but it felt like it took me as far as the fifteen-hour train journey. When we arrived, the buildings, the streets, the sidewalks and the stores around me weren’t just different from those before the bus ride, they were different from anywhere else I’ve seen in the country. It was like I had crossed a line separating worlds.
The left bank. Yes, that is a four-story staircase going nowhere
The line in question was the Ishim river. It divides the city into the right bank, where the older Soviet part is, and the left bank, where the new capital has grown. As Talgat Dairov, a Qazaq writer, put it: “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” (from “The Border,” published in The Illustrated Guide to the Meaning of Almaty). Standing above this river whose name says ‘we search,’ I get the feeling that the river means to say the city is searching for an answer: should we step forward or back?
In his essay, Talgat Dairov chose to step backwards, and looking around me, I understood why. Behind me was the comfortable, human-sized right bank, just like Almaty. In front of me was the monumental left bank. Our walking tour took us by a vast pyramid of glass (the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation), the largest complete spherical structure in the world (the Expo 2017 building), a large bowl-shaped building (the Qazaq National University of Arts), one of the city mosques (second-largest in Central Asia), and the Ritz-Carlton tower (tallest in Central Asia). The city was wide beyond belief. Everything seemed stretched out to fill the space: the people were scattered, the plazas flat and empty, even the clouds above seemed to be spread thin. 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. There were no fences, bushes or little Doner Kebab shops like in Almaty to offer us shelter.
We finished our tour and went back to the hostel. We managed to get in one more day of tours and museums, but the next morning the wind blew in snow clouds. Charlie and I left the hostel to get breakfast, and it felt like a dream as we moved through wide-open, empty streets in between looming skyscrapers, barely visible behind the sheets of white. The few people we saw walked backwards to save themselves the stinging pain of facing the wind.
Snow in the capital
Unable to drive to a labor camp like we had planned, we bought tickets for the next train back to Almaty and hopped on it later that evening. We had been defeated by the wind.
You’d think I would learn my lesson, and write here that the city should stop searching for an answer as to which direction it should go, because this forward thing clearly isn’t working. Perhaps they should go search for some buildings to stop the wind instead. But I have hope. I met young, smart students at Nazarbayev University who talked about Russian classics with me, and at our hostel I found one of the most interesting characters in my life, Anton, a young construction worker who had fled the Russian far east, who drew our portraits with startling accuracy, singing songs we could not hear and cursing in German when we beat him at cards. The city has a burgeoning literature scene thanks to poets like Anuar Duisenbinov, and people have started to give nicknames to the buildings, humanizing them. The city feels like they took the steppe and paved concrete over it, and now they are planting buildings and people instead of grass. There is life there, and life will grow.
