A Village in the Yagnob Valley

Her name is Mavlyuda. She is somewhere between sixty and eighty, by which I mean she will not be drawn on the question. She has three goats, a cow named Sumalak, and a husband called Ne'mat who is currently sleeping under an apricot tree.

She lives in a village whose name I will not write here, because the village does not need any more tourists than the four it gets each summer. Yagnob is the last valley in the world where a language descended from Sogdian is still spoken. Sogdian was the language of the merchants of the Silk Road in the seventh century. It was the language of the trading colonies in Xi'an and Dunhuang. It was, for three hundred years, the working language of half of Asia. And now it is spoken, in a daughter form, by perhaps eight hundred people in this valley.

Mavlyuda does not call it Sogdian. She calls it yaghnobi gap, the Yagnob talk. She speaks Tajik as well, and a small amount of Russian, and the Russian she speaks has the consonants of Soviet primary school in 1962.

She has made qurutob. The bread is the local fatir, broken into a wooden bowl. The qurut, dried yogurt balls, has been dissolved in hot water and poured over. There is onion fried in oil. There are tomatoes from the garden. We eat with our hands.

I ask her, in Tajik, what the word for bread is in the Yagnob talk. She says nan. Then she laughs. She says it the way a teacher laughs at a slow student. Nan, she says again. The same word. The Sogdian word. The Tajik word. The Uzbek word. The Farsi word. The word that has not changed in two thousand five hundred years.

The light is leaving the valley wall. Ne'mat is awake now. He brings the cow in. The cow is named Sumalak because she was born during Navruz, the spring festival, when we cook the sumalak dish through the night. The cow does not know she is named after a sweet pudding. She walks past us with the dignified indifference of all village cows everywhere.

I write this down in the notebook I always carry. I do not know how to end the entry. So I do not end it.