Looking for August 1964

The reader card costs forty som and wants a photograph three by four, which I did not have, so the morning began in a booth on Abdrakhmanov Street rather than in the reading room. The library keeps the newspapers of the republic because it has to. Every printed thing in this country gets deposited here. The doors open at nine and close at six, every day of the week except the last Friday of the month, and admission stops half an hour before the end. I wanted August 1964.

The gorge has a monument and that part is solid: Valentin Barskov, a decorator from the sanatorium at Tamga, began it in 1989 and finished it at the end of August 1990, after tourists had scribbled over a stone he had lettered years before. What the monument commemorates is a different question. I read until the print began to swim and the columns stopped being sentences. What I did not find was him.

Nobody is lying about this. The story is everywhere and always the same story, told by travel pages and news sites and everyone I asked in the valley. That is not proof: it is affection. I will keep it in the book as a thing people remember rather than a thing a document says. My notebook has one line for the day.