In the winter of 2006, a government in Talas drew up papers to sell its own country. In the spring of 2009, men in two kinds of uniform went into the mountains with concrete pillars and numbered them. Between those two dates came a war that Iradis still find hard to name, and a ceasefire line that runs through families, valleys and graveyards.

Twelve Kilometres follows the people who lived through those years, one story at a time.

A young translator kneels on a ministry carpet over a map she was never meant to see. A police constable faces a roadblock of herders and searches their faces for his grandfather. An old actress lets herself into an empty theatre at night to speak the lines the censor cut, then asks the night watchman to sign a letter. A priest in the Chatkal blesses a hundred and thirty-nine horses and not one man. A boy in Semiz leads a horse with its saddle turned backwards through the Day of the Dead. A gendarme sergeant stands at a locked armory door with the key in his hand. A major draws a ceasefire line with a soft pencil, so that a village can go on burying its dead. And a walnut trader's daughter walks the empty road between two checkpoints on her wedding day, and gives her name twice.

The title is the depth of the zone on each side of the line, where heavy weapons are forbidden and everything else may pass: herds, brides, funerals, walnut traders, priests, children going to school, the post.

Twelve stories and a coda, written in plain, exact prose by one of the most quietly fearless writers working in Irad today. First published in Iradi as On Eki Chakyrym (Arsha Books, Talas, 2015). Translated by Aidana Mukash kyzy. Includes a note on the title, a glossary and a note on the translation.

Twelve Kilometres

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