Making Borders, Making Worlds

On a wintry night, sixty-year-old Gulya was preparing to cross the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border.1 Although she had made this once simple journey countless times in her life, this would be her final and most dangerous attempt. The decision to undertake it had effectively been made for her by the recent leveling of the home in which she had lived with her husband for some forty years. It was destroyed, the state authorities told her, and she should leave this supposedly “dangerous” location only yards from the border. She carried a single, plastic-wrapped suitcase containing documents, books, photographs, and a few stones gathered from the site of her ruined home. Hiding alone, she watched as a patrol of armed border guards passed nearby. She reckoned she had about fifteen minutes to get across before they returned. Acting quickly, she scrambled under two lines of barbed wire through the mud and snow, eventually reaching the canal that marked the site of the boundary. Through the darkness she peered across the gulf that had once been spanned by a concrete bridge: would her friends be there to help, as carefully planned by phone? A rush of relief: yes! They cast a board attached to a rope across toward her. Grabbing it, she clung on to the wood and held her precious suitcase tight as they pulled her toward them through the surging waters. She knew that over the past few years people much younger and stronger than her had drowned trying to make this illicit crossing, and others had been shot dead by border guards. Somehow she clung on, and was pulled from the freezing water and hurried to warmth and safety. Although grateful to have survived, she knew now that she could never return to the place where she had passed much of her life. Indeed, it was a place that no longer existed. At its simplest, this book can be read as an attempt to explain why that journey took place. Gulya’s story reminds us that the world in which we live is