For the second time in my life I had the privilege of seeing the miracle of Issyk-Kul. Once again, I gazed in astonishment at the “precious aquamarine in the silver setting of snowy mountains,” as the famous Russian explorer of Asian mysteries, Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, wrote about the lake. A participant in a conference devoted to integration processes in Central Asia, I was thinking that the choice of the place for such a discussion was just right. The shores of Issyk-Kul are home to the spirit of Chinghiz Aitmatov, the explorer of the world’s spiritual values, the wise man who dreamed of connecting all of the humankind’s Babylonian parts with the threads of his thoughts.

…I saw Chinghiz Aitmatov during the last winter of his life. It was at a news conference at RIA Novosti that was devoted to fighting drug trafficking. The author of The Scaffold, the flesh of which is jagged with this horrible problem, Aitmatov was an active participant in the work of international anti-drug organizations.

The magnetism of the great persona kept drawing my eyes to Aitmatov. After the news conference, he came up to me, “Your face seems familiar. Would you remind me where we met?” I said that I had once visited Cholpon-Ata, his family’s country house; it was at the time when The Scaffold was being written. “Of course,” he nodded and then smiled. “I remember now what happened: my pranksters of children tied your hair to a bench so tightly that we had to use scissors. This mischief was actually a compliment to you: they didn’t want you to leave too soon…” We joked recalling the details of the sweet episode that still lived in our memory.

…Then, in Cholpon-Ata, we talked in a beautiful little garden smelling of roses on the shore of Issyk-Kul, listening to the murmur of tea poured in tea bowls and with unbelievable lightness of soul, created by concordant human auras and suggested by the nature. The lake was breathing primeval purity, its waves lazily picking pebbles on the shore. At a distance, the sapphire blue water rocked a huge fleet of all kinds of boats and steamers under self-made white sails. It seemed that heavenly birds had come down to drink the pure Issyk-Kul water…

That summer, the lake area was hosting a unique international experiment, Issyk-Kul – Batavia. Researchers and students from several universities went out on boats and motorboats every day, led by internationally renowned physicists (Noble Prize winner Peter Kocer, Professor Sergei Lebedev, etc.). They were getting ready to launch neutrino through the thickness of pure Issyk-Kul water (the test white disc is seen here even from a depth of 20 meters). American physicists were to pick up the neutrino at the other end of the Earth, in Batavia. The particles, having passed through the earth, were expected to bring information about its mantle and core.

Aitmatov showed lively interest in the event and pondered how this could give him material for a new novel… After all, he had taken up cosmogenesis when writing The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, so why not going down inside the earth? Unfortunately, this creative dream was not to come true. And the experiment could not be completed: the Soviet Union was withering away financially and morally, on its way to breakup.

Aitmatov was eager to discuss anything, but did not say a word about his new book that, word by word, was being extracted from the “world’s air” like a statue from stone. There were rumors that it was going to be something grand. I managed to get only one statement from him, “One of the main characters of the new novel will be a blue-eyed she-wolf that mountainous shepherds once told me about…” Later, I learned that he was working on The Scaffold at the time. The master wrote in absolute secrecy, giving the completed parts to his wife Maria for typing and editing.

Journalists often asked Aitmatov why he wrote his best works in Russian. I remember him telling a story of how he, six years old at the time, acted as an interpreter from Kyrgyz into Russian. His mother had taken him to his grandmother’s village in the mountains for the summer. The wife of a “public enemy” (Chinghiz’s father, a party official, was shot during the repressions), she had difficulty raising her son, lived as a pariah and relied on her relatives for support. That year, the village was losing lots of cattle to some disease. A veterinary doctor was called in from town, but he was Russian and villagers didn’t understand him. Then the shepherds brought the six-year Chinghiz, who spoke both Russian and Kyrgyz. The young interpreter succeeded in making the parties understand each other.

“I believe the feeling of bilingualism entered my subconscious at that time,” Aitmatov told me. “Knowing your language is wealth, but making a foreign language your native is doubling that wealth. The Russian language opened for me a huge part of the world; it was a big river that took me to the world ocean. So I synthesized the two mentalities, the two cultures, the fates of the two people in my writing.”

Aitmatov is a wise man among writers. He discovers reality, which is in fact fantastic, brimmed with magic and wrapped in a tragic shadow. His word is like a “cast of eternity.” But his power is not only in strong emotions that fill all of his books, but also in his deep foresight, in the moral “feeling of guilt and responsibility” that he defined. He had this right, since he had a deep understanding of what was happening to people.

His creative retreat was the Kyrgyz village whose life suggested a lot of his characters. “I cannot say what exactly I write about,” the classic would confess. “Separating the idea, the message of a book from the book itself is the same as trying to separate water and flour from baked bread.” However, his idea is transparent: it is unprecedented belief in man, a motif inherent for Aitmatov’s aesthetics, the fundamental message of all of his works, written both in the era of one great country and in the post-Soviet time.

Sovereign Kyrgyzstan sent Chinghiz Aitmatov (as the country’s immaculate image) to Brussels as its ambassador extraordinary to Benelux. Yet his office of a diplomat also was that of a writer. His last books, Cassandra’s Brand and Genghis Khan’s White Cloud were written with the same economical and stylistically succinct pen. The world of Aitmatov’s books was always created to a special recipe, a personally suffered aesthetic law.

Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novels and stories have numerous bird characters. There is the white mythical bird Donenbai (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years…), the mystic polar owl Aguluk that shows the way to the earth (Spotted Dog Running On Seashore), the story titled Cranes Fly Early, mountainous birds in the story Farewell Gulsary! “A bird flying high in the sky connects the past, the present and the future, the sea and the earth; moreover, it is also a point of view that allows you to have a broader view of life and its events,” the writer explained his love of birds.

Yedigei, the character of one of Aitmatov’s best known novels, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, says to God, “If it is true that the soul goes somewhere after death… I would like to become a white-tailed kite, so that I would fly and look at my land for as long as I can.”

The writer’s spirit has found its height. Like peasant Tananbai, who dreamed of becoming a white eagle after death to spend hours floating high admiring the earth, Aitmatov rose above his native Kyrgyzstan, and his great spirit embraced the entire world…

…I have a book in my home library signed by Aitmatov, and the key words of the inscription are “In the memory of Issyk-Kul.” Of course, I remember. The strong birds in the sky, whose flight I admired standing on the lakeshore, tied together the past, the present and the future.