Happy new year from The Masters Review! Our first story of 2025 is Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s “A Mirror for the Dead.” While on her way to Bishkek as a visiting student at Kyrgyz National University, our narrator learns of her father’s heart failure, but rather than turn back for the funeral, she continues on to Kyrgyzstan. Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s gorgeously written story traces the ways that grief manifests and haunts us in ways we could never predict.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing in Bishkek, except avoiding the inevitable. I was in Kyrgyzstan, with enough Russian to occasionally have a conversation with someone who was incredibly kind and wouldn’t mind the litany of grammatical errors. I was in Kyrgyzstan alone: a teacup without tea, sun without sky, and the heat. Oven heat. Heat turning the asphalt to tar, sticky on the soles of my sensible Finnish-made sneakers. My father was dead. And I was in Kyrgyzstan because I had no choice, at the end of the day. The stipulations of the grant made it easy to ignore responsibility. I had the State to blame for everything: my sudden departure while my father’s heart failed. And when somewhere over the Bosporus, it gave out: again, the travel, the fact I’d made it that far was a compelling excuse to not return for the funeral.
From Baltimore to Chicago, then to Frankfurt, then to Istanbul, and finally to Bishkek, my phone was livid with messages. I didn’t look beyond the names. Grandma Ellen, Grandpa James. Mama. Older brother. Other older brother. Other other older brother. The only peace was when we lost the WiFi signal somewhere in the clouds, and the blessed quiet came crawling in, punctured only by the whispering of the stewardesses in their blue and white, then their red and black. Honey, can I get you something to drink? Thank you, a coke please. Pasta or chicken? Thank you, pasta please. Honey, would you care if the plane dropped out of the sky? No, it seems a natural conclusion; men are not birds. We shouldn’t know how to fly. At the start of each flight, the pilot seriously intoned, Sit back, relax, and enjoy your time aboard the friendly skies. They were all the same pilot, I was convinced. Or maybe that was just the grief, that black and crawling creature, that made it so.
We touched down at Manas Airport at 4am local time. It was all light and sound—the glass boxes of passport control I sailed gratefully through with a nod from the beleaguered guard. My visa declared me a visiting student at Kyrgyz National University. My visa declared me an important academic presence. I was ostensibly studying poetry, the Kyrgyz oral tradition Manas, on my way to writing a dissertation on poetic movements in former USSR republics. I hauled my bag, heavy with notebooks and clothes, off the carousel and went where I was told by the airport officials, who stood at the end of the hallway that declared that I declared nothing and waved me through. My Russian, halting, took a minute to comprehend, so I stood there, dumb as a babbling toddler, as they gestured impatiently, pantomimed at me until, cheeks burning, I ducked my head low and blundered down the hall.
Arrivals was bustling, men hawking sim cards and flowers, single roses in plastic sleeves, thrusting them at peoples’ hands, turned up and out like they were pushing back. My phone, on the international plan, buzzed. Cutting off to the side, I pushed a button to open my phone, and my screen lit up. A close-up of my older brother, Frederick’s, middle finger. I closed the photo and scrolled through my texts. There were messages from my other brother Emil and other other brother Richard, their names docile, old-fashioned and consoling until you realized you’d opened Pandora’s box via the green icon at the bottom of your screen.
Emil: U bitch, don’t come back.
Richard: Who are you? Not anyone I know.
I sighed, a short sharp huff in dead air. I could already feel the heat on the back of my neck like an awful tongue. A man started my way in an oversize red polo shirt over sagging khakis, brandishing sim cards. I raised my hand, I’m not interested almost in place on my tongue, but the gesture was enough, and he walked away towards his next potential conquest. I swayed, glugged from my water bottle with my American university’s branding and rolled the crick out of my neck with it, pressing the plastic against my nape. I walked towards the exit, watching a German family be swarmed by hawkers. They were handing over fistfuls of som and police stood idly by, watching as more and more men began to circle. Fresh blood. Jaws theme. I knew there would be a moment of calm once everyone had scattered, and then, the discovery of the missing wallets, or bags. The frantic calls they might make with those sim cards, or arguing with the police they couldn’t communicate with and who hadn’t stepped in to intervene. I didn’t hear any Russian, or Kyrgyz. All I saw were hands flexing, arms flapping like clipped birds. I might have warned them once, but as we’ve established, I wasn’t a very good person. So, I turned to the parking lot, hurried already in the early morning, and left them in the bed they’d made.
* * *
In the taxi, there wasn’t any room to breathe. Lanes on the road were vague suggestions. Horns were the soundtrack, a constant, high-pitched thrum. If I hadn’t been so jittery with guilt, I might have been startled. But I was awake. The driver, after two attempts at making conversation, was silent, and we listened to the brassy sounds of Russian rap pumping through the speakers together in the weak light of dawn. My glasses were dirty; a man on the plane to Frankfurt had offered me a rag and a condescending smile, and I had demurred, roughly pressing my shirt to the lenses instead. I did this again now, quicker, and fumbled with my camera to catch the mountains of the Ala-Too range as they loomed out of the dark like strangers, imposing and capped with snow, even in early June. Fog swirled around their base, and the city lights were sparking in the dim. I watched as open pavement and derelict buildings morphed into dense apartment blocks and questionable restaurants proclaiming LUXURY. Pharmacies on every corner, loud with neon. I texted the woman the university had found for me; I had her name and her number: Nina Bakirova. She didn’t speak English, and even the tone of her text messages was clipped. She texted back, directing me towards a faceless apartment complex not far from a strip mall, and the driver deposited me in front of a coal black graffitied door. Before I could stop to think of the buttons, and which one might call up to her apartment, the door swung open. An elderly woman in an open blouse she was pinching shut opened the door, her hair cinched tight in rollers, orthopedic shoes on her feet. Gesturing to me, we rode up to the eighth floor in silence. She pressed a ring of keys into my hand, then told me in grizzled Russian to try opening it. Her blouse fell open to reveal a lacy black bra. I noticed the gap between the cups and her breasts with muted interest: I’d always liked looking at private things. I turned the key to the left, then to the right. She took the keys out of my hand and twisted it in the lock to the left four times, then to the right. You lock it with the right, open with the left. The fat side goes on the left, she said, tracing the long, bar-shaped key. Her nails were bitten into stubs.
* * *
I was put in her granddaughter’s room, the wallpaper embossed with roses in pale pink and yellow, and then left alone with a dish of banana slices and walnuts. I fell into a dark, dreamless sleep, waking in the middle of the night with a headache that I was sure would split my forehead in two. I rocked back and forth, snagged in my sheets, my house slippers splayed out next to the sofa bed Nina Bakirova had given me. I staggered to the window, opened it and the sounds of the city rushed in a blinding torrent of noise. I slammed it shut, tried in vain to die. I fell asleep again clutching my head. I woke sucking my thumb.
The next morning, breakfast was hard-boiled eggs and kasha with butter and sugar, toast with American cheese, and black tea, sharp with notes of lemon. I cleaned my plate, despite the wave of sick that rose as the processed cheese touched the back of my throat, and excused myself, slipping my sandals onto my feet in the tiny anteroom by the door. Nina Bakirova harped on me from the kitchen, telling me to write her if I was going to be late, and to mind my bag, there were pickpockets on the bus. And in the marshrutkas. And in the streets. Men, she said, shaking her hand. Not going to do an honest day’s work if they can help it.
I took the 51 to the Philharmonia and walked the rest of the way to the university, down a long walkway punctuated by flowerbeds. Originality died many years ago; the metaphors are cringing and poetic, however accurate. The sun was a halo in the sky, the roses trumpeting their wide faces open to the world were debutantes, and my feet were wooden blocks leading me to the gallows. There was a KNU sign with which you could take a selfie outside. It was clear: No matter where you went in the world, academia was officially fucked. But of course, I had no room to talk, being married to my various universities, my degrees. My PhD, my albatross, was on cultural memory in poetics and general historiography: what we leave out in favor of leaving in. Staring up at the dusky windows of the yellow building, I couldn’t make myself go inside. There was a coffee shop; I got coffee, a cappuccino so lovely I almost cried, or maybe it was jetlag. Above the barista, a sign: You got this!
A text, from the program coordinator at the university. Where was I? Another ping. The university address. In case I’d forgotten.
Another text, from Emil: u kno ur going to he$$ right
I tapped out a quick message to the coordinator and shut down my phone. I started back towards the yellow buildings and wandered through the halls of the university until I stumbled on the place I needed to be. The reception for the visiting scholars and subsequent orientation was oddly comforting. Orientations were the same wherever you went, the same mediocre beverages, lukewarm water bottles, thin napkins. This one at least boasted miniature khachapuri, but otherwise, I couldn’t find much else to commend.
There were other visiting scholars: a husband and wife from Argentina, studying Eastern European and Central Asian fauna. They were beautiful separately, together, almost disgusting. All the angularity in their faces made them look like Picassos. I was never one for Picasso. There was another American, a nervous geologist from Utah who wore his white button up and tie with the demeanor of a man who schedules intimate time with his partner in his Google calendar. And inexplicably: a creative writer, an essayist whose latest collection had found itself in some celebrity’s handbag and was subsequently lauded as an urgent and necessary voice in The New York Times. She made hopeful, friendly eyes at me. I looked at a spot of mold on the wall. I didn’t want to remember her name, but it came, unbidden: Ariel Hemmings-Yang. She wasn’t all that good a writer, aside from a talent for describing human and situational ennui: a single marigold, crushed under an indifferent boot, for instance. Who knows what she would have to do to actually become interesting.
I don’t remember all what I said, or to whom. After the reception and being shown to our various offices in the university building, we all dispersed: in the case of the terribly beautiful scientist couple to the cafeteria, in the case of Hemmings-Yang to the library, and in mine, back outside. Mormon man I had lost track of immediately, and didn’t care enough to pursue. I could already feel the beginning of a sunburn sting on the back of my neck, and glancing in the phone camera’s reflection, I took in my ruddy face and hair, coiled into a sweaty bun on the top of my head, shook it out so that it fell in damp, frizzy strands around my face. The mascara I’d applied that morning with optimism was two steps away from bleeding down my cheeks, and I blotted it with a used tissue I found in my pocket.
It was then I saw the man. Tall, with a blond buzz cut. His blue button down was somewhat tight on his arms, and I could see a vague Rorschach blot of sweat leaching across his lower back, but his khakis were belted, and he had a suit jacket slung over his arm. His face was turned away from me, I’d only seen it in profile, but there was no mistaking it. He looked like my brother Emil, which meant he looked like my father. I stood up, suddenly aware of myself, my ugly body. I’d always understood that I was the exception to my family’s genetic pool; whereas my brothers were tall and slim, the sort of classic Americana handsome you’d kill for, I was short and frumpy. My mother’s auburn hair, which was so glamourous on her and had silvered beautifully when she turned sixty, seemed stupidly out of place on me. I had my grandmother’s long feet and my arms were flabby. I tried to stay as stationary as possible, but no matter what I did, they moved with me. The only thing I had of my father was his nose, hooked and beaky. Richard, Emil, and Frederick, they shared their beauty. They had skincare routines, like all the men did these days, and they could have passed for men in their early twenties. No one ever guessed I was younger than twenty-eight, and I looked exactly like the worst version of my age.
The man didn’t notice me, this Emil man, this man who looked too much like my father when he was young and not sick and alive. Not-Emil-Not-Dad walked leisurely down the wide walkway, and I found myself following, but slowly, as if passing through water. I quickened my pace, but the man was beyond reach. He had even stopped for ice cream, and now clutched a dripping cone between his fingers, and still I hadn’t reached him. He turned the corner, and then I was running, running past women pushing strollers and Kyrgyz men wearing ak-kalpaks in various colors. I shot past the corner in time to see him enter the International University of Kyrgyzstan building. A professor, I’d wagered. Maybe he taught afternoon classes. I took a few halting steps towards the building, then noticed the statue of Manas watching me. Not-Emil-Not-Dad was not why I was here. I took out my phone, strangely silent for the first time in days.
Me: There’s no way you’re in Bishkek, is there?
The reply was instantaneous and as mean as I deserved.
Emil: are u stoned ? fuck you
* * *
The men on the stoop started to call us the Ninas, Nina Bakirova and me. But that was in between catcalls: Krasavitsa! Krasotka! Mozho poznakomitsya? There was no telling them my name was anything different, or that I wasn’t interested in getting to know them, but in truth I didn’t mind. I just walked past them towards the bus stop, back on the 51, back towards the Philharmonia. There’s something to letting others determine your identity I found strangely comforting. Everyone has their own perception of you; you might as well help them along rather than trying to convince them you’re anything other than a figment of their imagination. Men didn’t like me, except to tease me. My brothers, sitting on me as a child. Emil, putting worms in my hair.
I spent a week ignoring my responsibilities and not getting enough sleep, eating stuffed peppers shiny with onion broth and laghman and plov, borsok with sour cream and enough tea to drown the world, and I took to haunting the benches outside of the International University of Kyrgyzstan, hoping to encounter Not-Emil-Not-Dad again. But if he was there, he was a ghost passing through, and perhaps I just didn’t see him. A migraine pulsed behind my temples, on the verge of becoming a problem. I had decided I was going to stop telling Nina Bakirova when I had headaches; she had told me that morning that headaches were curable so long as you let God into your heart, that you chant God loves you, bog lyobit tebya, and there was no need for pills. The best medicine, she said each morning, is in there, and each time, she smoothed a hand down the front of my blouse over my breasts, lingering above my nipple, before sending me out the door.
* * *
The second time I saw Not-Emil-Not-Dad was a rainy Monday sometime in July. It’d been raining for days. Bishkek was partial to thunderstorms, extremely temperamental and extremely short. Add heat to that, never-ending heat, and you always had a miserable low-grade fever, an icky, hot wetness between your thighs you’d blot with baby powder and Aquafor. Nights I’d spend topless in my room, taking notes about Manas, the continuation of the Epic of Kyrgyzstan’s national hero, Manas, by bards, or manaschi. Oral traditions of poetry had always interested me, the tendency in the US to shove your heart onto stage and then impale it on metaphor via slam poetry, to recitation, then performance, especially in Eastern Europe, and now in Central Asia. Poetry traveled all over the world, and Kyrgyzstan was interesting. I had cobbled together my grant application off a random Wikipedia article I’d read about Manas. It had captured my attention, and you might have called me lazy, but at least, I knew it had the potential to be lucrative. My research exists at the intersection of ethnic and cultural indigeneity in Central Asian and Eastern European poetics. Lyric complicity. Diasporic onanism. Give me enough money, and I’ll make something entirely new. Manas was established tradition, continuing into the modern century. Yes, it was objectively interesting. But to fulfill the requirement of my degree, I’d have to compare it to another established tradition, maybe another Central Asian country, but that itself reminded me too much of a high school English essay. Here you go, Ms. McCarthy, this is how the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks differ and isn’t that so interesting? It had to be interesting. And so far, I couldn’t make it more than what it was: a country trying desperately to hold onto its itself: the younger generation cannibalizing the elder every day.
* * *
My father had been a poet, and not a very good one. But he dutifully turned out villanelle after villanelle, pantoum after pantoum, even a few technically correct ghazals about nothing that went nowhere. I admired him for it. I think he knew himself that he would never be a great writer, and that took the pressure off to be good. He was a man who delighted in mediocrity except in his children.
* * *
I saw Not-Emil-Not-Dad that Monday. It was lunchtime. I’d gotten myself a croissant and hunkered down, as was my habit now, outside the International University building. If anyone would’ve asked, I had my answer prepared. I had diplomatic cover to be in the room. It might’ve been because I was researching there, did anyone think of that? But even that was a tenuous excuse. He exited the building close to 1 pm, close to when I was about to pack up my things and head, defeated, towards my obligations. This time his shirt was a dark, heathered gray with a black tie. Different back sweat blotch. I felt salt beading on my lip. Black blazer. Smart pants. A faculty meeting? He walked past me, tapping intently on his smartphone, and before I had time to gather my thoughts, he was gone. I saw his form as it stepped onto the bus and pulled away from the curb. I put up my hand and waved, but no one noticed except a man, thinking I waved at him. He started towards me with the same leer of every other man who’d yelled at me on the street. I saw his mouth forming around the words: krasavitsa! Krasotka! Mozho poznakomitsya? I was so tired of myself, it was all I could do to trudge back towards KNU. And that was when it started to storm in earnest.
* * *
My father had a list of Russian-esque idioms as long as his arm he purported were all Lenin, and they meshed together in my mind in a swarm of malaphors: When a man’s lips start flapping, you fuck crawfish style. Never forget, a wet bird never flies when a wolf smiles at you. I’d even had one tattooed in small font on my arm. At the time, I thought it was cute, kitschy, a fun anecdote to talk about at parties, proof I loved my father enough.
My mother forgot to bring his books when he went into the hospital. I was in transit, preparing for the trip, ignoring everything else. He’d always had three on retainer: one slim volume of poetry, a book of short stories or nonfiction, depending on his mood, and then a novel, fat and well-thumbed, rife with sticky notes and pen marks in the margins. She didn’t bring a single one. I thought I would’ve done better, and maybe I would have, if I had cared. But he died alone, and he died without his words, and what was I supposed to do with that?
* * *
Weeks passed, meaningless and blurry. I bought boxes of cigarettes from the convenience store around the corner and blew the smoke out of my window. I watched it disappear, vaporous and instantaneous. Nina Bakirova brought me plates of fruit, left them on the desk next to my computer, and I in turn let them rot. I hadn’t seen her with her shirt on in weeks. You need to eat, she said, shaking her head and pushing yogurt drinks into my hands. The coordinator was worried. I wasn’t following regulations. Not doing what I was supposed to be doing. I thought about Not-Emil-Not-Dad. I texted my brother, Emil-Not-Dad.
Me: You looked weird in that shirt. Who wears gray and black in 90 degree weather, you were sweating all over the place. If you wanted to come visit me, you should’ve just told me so. I’d have told you how things are here.
Emil: wat are u smoking
Emil: wen r u coming home
* * *
The second time I tried to kill myself, my father didn’t come to the hospital. Said it was horrible enough, seeing me there the one time, let alone the second. I’d tried the easiest way out, with a bottle of my mother’s valium gone down the hatch and had woken to the sound of screaming. Emil, shaking me so hard my head snapped back and forth on my neck, a door hinge. Then his fingers, dirty and coarse, plunging down my throat. He’d come in from the garden and found me there, foaming at the mouth, partially dissolved pills making my mouth gritty.
Death, I discovered, might have been romantic. But living? The act of it? It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Where is he? I asked my mother in a very small and sad voice, a voice adrift in a sea of bedsheets. She looked at the spot behind my head. Where is he? She didn’t speak. Mommy, please. She left the room.
* * *
The last time I saw Not-Emil-Not-Dad was at the history museum, on a group tour KNU had scheduled, and my program coordinator had perp-walked me to from my apartment. I had nothing to show the grant committee. I had nothing to show my chair. But I had to admit the museum was gorgeous. The museum was a tall, marbled, imposing things, at the head of a stately plaza next to Dubovoi Park. Skateboarders littered the immediate grounds, doing tricks next to ancient statues and fountains pissing water. You could see the mountains on a clear day, but that week was nothing but clouds. Our small group of visiting scholars walked around. Som were exchanged for museum tickets at the austere front desk: For x amount, you too can witness history! The husband-and-wife couple asked very serious questions in very serious, academic Russian. Mormon man we left behind in the Paleolithic exhibit, next to a case of arrowheads. Ariel Hemmings-Yang was jotting down notes on her phone. And there I was, scanning the floors for anything familiar, anything I could use. And then, a mirage: the flash of a salmon-colored shirt, a black blazer and tie. What was he doing here? I felt my feet carrying me towards him, towards the staircases. No one in my group said anything, but then again, they were being good students. I slipped away.
Chipped ancient glass the color of vomit. Giant stoic jugs squatting over the floor like sentries. There were broken jade vases stuck back together with gold lacquer, containers for oil-based perfume. An unoriginal thought: the museum was a living thing, an entity whose entire economy was based entirely in transit. People, objects, centuries between them all mingling. Soft mouth sounds of soles quietly squeaking. Issyk-Kul was the eye of God peering out from the map depicting movement among the Turkic tribes. Instruments suspended in the air behind a glass case. And me, in the center of it all: a strange woman, following a strange man into a strange black room, and a strange country rising up all around me in museum placards.
Carpets called shyrdak, made by ethnic Kyrgyz to commemorate special occasions, rife with symbolism and inhumanly beautiful were in the black room, their colors aggressive. I was so close I could have reached out and touched him. And despite societal convention, despite everything shouting in me that I shouldn’t engage, I found myself reaching out a hand towards him when he stopped short and whirled around, catching my wrist in an iron grip. The pain was the realest thing in my life; it all crystallized into one brilliant prism of light, a single sharp moment. It was delicious and valid, and the venom in his eyes surprised me. He spoke in snarling, offended Russian:
“Follow me again and I’ll have you arrested. Go. Away.”
After a moment of hesitation, he repeated what I assumed was the same threat in Kyrgyz. Then in English. And then Not-Emil-Not-Dad let go of my wrist and walked away.
There’s something sad in getting exactly what it is you want. Yes, this was it: the moment of meeting. And the man wasn’t Emil. And it couldn’t have ever been my father. He couldn’t have been, and he wasn’t even close. His eyes were too close together, and he had a cowlick that should’ve been a widows peak. Freckles were smashed across his nose, and he wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t my brother, much less my father. Of course, I’d never seen him head-on. Imagine the apparition as what it was: a pathetic exercise. My brother was handsome. And my father had been handsome too.
Up close, you see all the things you’ve been avoiding about a person. Their unibrow, their snaggletooth. It’s a miracle we find anything about each other to like, much less love. I thought of Emil, the wide pan of his face, his square shoulders. My father came to me in fragments: then crows feet around his eyes, the sag of his ass above the toilet bowl in the hospital room, the clench of his hand on my hand, the press of his fingers. I thought of lilies and urine. I watched the red imprint of Never-Emil-Never-Dad’s hand fade, and I looked up to discover, with a sort of shock, that I was once again alone. I wondered who would ever hold me again.
* * *
Weeks before he died, my father and I had lunch. Stale club sandwiches from the café next door to his complex. He looked ashen, and he shook slightly when maneuvering his walker. When confronted with your own inadequacy, how can you acknowledge it? I averted my eyes as he settled in the chair with a short, choking sound. It was all about preserving his dignity, I’d learned.
* * *
You look sick, Nina Bakirova said, coming over and putting her hand down firmly on my forehead. I shoved it off with a sudden, violent meanness. We looked at each other. A long, still moment passed between us, a gulf widening. God loves you, she finally said, and closed the door behind her.
* * *
Preserving his dignity is such an easy lie. See? I’m still telling it now.
* * *
Finally, in the first week of August, a text from my mother.
Mom: It’s okay you didn’t come home for Dad. But come home.
* * *
There’s no ending other than the end. This means my feet were on the ledge. And it was all so beautiful: Bishkek in the August morning, sun hanging heavy over the old Soviet apartment blocks, the laundry lines precariously jutting out from the building sides, worn blue dresses fluttering from them like streamers. I heard voices calling to each other at the bus stop far below me, the bus stops with their lime green overhangs and KFC advertisements. I heard voices; I heard the birds.
And then I thought I heard a noise. The familiar sound of my phone ringing, or maybe it was my father in the hospital room, settling back into his blankets. I thought I heard a noise, a question called from below. He must have asked her. He had to have asked my mother, where is she? Where is my little girl?
And my mother must have answered him.
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the poetry collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. Her fiction has been published/is forthcoming in Giving Room Magazine and The Masters Review. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at New York University.