For the entirety of the fall semester, I will be tucked away in the (surprisingly temperate) mountains of Kazakhstan, learning Russian in the nation’s cultural capital: Almaty. In Kazakh, Almaty means “full of apples,” a fitting name for an area that first contained the distant ancestor of the modern apple. Long before “The Big Apple” in New York, there were many big apples in Central Asia, and, during the course of my time here, I’m hoping to cut right to the city’s core and share whatever sweet fruit I find along the way. Every two weeks, I will publish juicy vignettes about life in Almaty — some may connect, and some may not…
A desperate red streak against the endless white snow, the fox scrambled upward, glancing to either side at the feathered form flying beside it. At intervals, the golden eagle swooped down, catching the fox as it ran until it wrestled away to resume its escape. The two appeared intertwined as they ascended, haphazardly climbing in violent fits. As I watched the animals dance, I saw the fox was losing speed, and now the eagle seemed to have him in a hold.
This battle for life was one I had never seen before, and one I likely never would see again. It was a scene from a picture book on traditional Kazakh hunting techniques, which I had idly flipped through at the Kazakh embassy in Washington, D.C. Then, Almaty had been confined to picture books and photographs — a city constructed from my imagination.
Less than a week later, I laid in a dark, humid room, in the center of a very real city. I woke up with that brief moment of panic and disorientation that follows an extraordinarily long nap. Staring at the ceiling, I had no way to place myself. The beginnings of morning twilight filtered in through my window, but I could see nothing familiar, except the feeling of a bed and pillow. I thought that I had woken back at home, but the hum of traffic increased in volume as the sun rose, and I realized that I was hearing the sounds of an entirely foreign city. I was displaced, a minuscule dot in an endless white steppe. And, with the glare of the morning sun, I couldn’t yet see whether I was the fox or the eagle.
As I do every morning, I drank a cup of black tea immediately after waking up. It’s a bitter way to start the day — and likely not very hydrating — yet I quickly found myself cognizant enough to speak Russian. Through the windows in my homestay, I had an amazing view of Almaty. The apartment complexes, megamalls, and high-rises dotting the city’s dense carpet of trees seemed entirely unaware of the awesome mountains rising into the clouds surrounding them, watching the city with a haughty ignorance of the sleeping giants right behind their backs.
After breakfast, my host dad walked me to the university for the first time, orienting me by the names of buildings we passed along the way: SmartMed, the library, I’m Cafe (a very obvious rebrand of McDonald’s that began after the Russian invasion of Ukraine). I noticed a host of birds ruling Almaty’s many tree-lined walking paths: hooded crows, magpies, blackbirds, and pigeons. Feeling the conversation lapse and my Russian falter once again, I asked my host dad the names of the various birds in Almaty. Some I already knew, but the word “golub” I did not. He struggled to explain the word to me in Russian — or, really, I struggled to understand the explanation — so he eventually just said “the bird of peace.”
“Dove?” I replied, to an affirmative response. Yet, as we continued to walk, I couldn’t spot a single dove among the many birds crowding the sidewalk and the air above. Maybe, I thought, they were hidden somewhere in the mountains.
Much later in the day, given a break from the arduous orientation process, I sought to begin the physical orientation of bringing the city from an echo of past imagination to living substance. I walked to a park next to the university, finding an empty park bench beneath a well-manicured colonnade of trees. I began to read, but quickly found my eyes drawn away from the pages of my book and towards a small creature hopping around beneath the slats of the bench: a pigeon (the city was full of them), and also, I realized, a dove.
The city I had been shepherded through, half delirious from lack of sleep, had just revealed its first secrets: Almaty is teeming with doves (and there is no distinction between pigeons and doves in Russian). During that initial chaotic day in Almaty, I had never realized that peace was all around me — and nibbling on my shoelaces.
