I called it “Shakharbanu’s Curse.” It accompanied me all through my childhood, and when I came of age, it bore witness to my agony of trying to fit in with those around me. A good title determines the fate of a story, and while I would never get tired of scribbling things down, I faltered like a hobbled horse over the title of this tale. I found myself gazing with pity at my story and throwing on it, like a halter, a random phrase that sprang to mind. Then an angel whispered in my ear: “Shakharbanu’s Curse.” I rejoiced as if I’d found a piece of gold the size of a horse’s head, which reminds me of what I haven’t told you yet: it was indeed made of gold.

In the end, my early conjecture that its delicately spun lattice was the handiwork of a Chinese jeweler had come to nothing; my later assumption that it might be a treasure from a Kazakh-Uzbek market had too slipped from my grasp; although I recognized the local copper-tinted gold, the design of the ornament was unfamiliar. There was no resemblance to the peculiar motifs familiar from fairy tales: it didn’t carry the imprint of a Russian goldsmith. It was unlike any other buckle, chain, or necklace. A filigree of miniature golden cages filled with pearls, it was three fingers wide. I had convinced myself that the pearls had come to these desert lands through the bustling Silk Road, but my theory failed to explain why this piece of jewelry had lain hidden for over a century in my great-grandmother Kokqasqa’s trunk instead of being safeguarded in some museum or royal vault.

As a child, I had only sensed what I came to know as an adult: that in her century-long life, the tall, surly Kokqasqa had only cared about one person—my grandmother, her firstborn—whom she had conceived after wearing a lamb tether around her neck, at once a symbol of submission to God’s will and a plea for fertility. This infatuation with her own infant seized Kokqasqa the moment she gave birth to it. When her sapling of a girl came of age and married, Kokqasqa wailed loudly at the wedding; when grandchildren arrived, she nearly burst from rage; when a flock of great-grandchildren followed, she sizzled with hatred toward them for stealing her darling’s attention. Her bouts of jealousy only grew worse with time; later, using loneliness as an excuse, she moved into her daughter’s house, where she finally found some peace of mind.

Aside from her daughter, Kokqasqa guarded—like a dog keeping an eye on a piece of fat meat—a small red box the size of a brick. Inside the box were a handspan-long shashbau ribbon adorned with coins that bore the image of the white tsar, a two-finger sterling silver ring worn by mothers-in-law, a pair of crescent-shaped golden earrings, and the choker with pearls set in tiny golden cages. Kokqasqa’s days of flaunting extravagant earrings and ornate shashbaus were long gone, and she tried to press the jewelry on the apple of her eye, but my grandmother, who by then had neared the prophet’s age, was not enticed, and it was clear that Kokqasqa would never give her treasures to me.

Gold has a way of tempting a thief, so when two men collecting artifacts for a city museum knocked at our gate, Kokqasqa opened her red box and sold off its entire contents save for the necklace, earning a handful of money, which she convinced my grandmother to accept—use this for my burial, you’ll need a penny or two to put me in the ground, this family won’t care if I was left to rot—while passionately berating some unspecified individuals. I vaguely remember the story of the necklace she told us that day.

“Although I’m dependent on my son-in-law now, my own family and the family I married into were noble folk, my father was a Datqa worshipped by his people, my father-in-law was in charge of an uyezd, and my husband was a volost chief,” said Kokqasqa proudly, later adding, “She died before I was born—my oldest sister, Shakharbanu—she fell ill when she arrived at her bridegroom’s aul and passed away a week later. This necklace was hers.” Then she sat for a while, quiet and somber.

When we began to sense a mystery behind the death of the young bride whose fluttering white saukele veil had never turned into the shawl of a newly married woman, Kokqaska continued:

“Our father had arranged her marriage, and when the time came for her to start the journey to her in-laws’ aul, this necklace, made by the goldsmith who they said was my sister’s beloved, was brought to her, wrapped in a piece of cloth, by a handmaid who carried messages between the two. When Shakharbanu died, bitter and brokenhearted, her saukele and this necklace were brought back and left at the threshold of our house, which she herself had crossed before going away. They later became mine.”

She had barely finished speaking when the two museum workers, shrugging off the tale of Shakharbanu, who had wilted without ever blossoming, began begging Kokqasqa to sell them the necklace. The old woman refused. Please, give it to us, we’ll pay for it, you’ll be rolling in money, I don’t need money, thank heavens, my belly is full, instead of locking it up in that box, let people admire it at the museum, I don’t want to part with the only keepsake left from my mother and sister, you’ll be given honorary papers for enriching the regional museum’s collection, enough of you, you are wasting your time by sticking a knife into a tendon, please, Grandma, we are not asking for ourselves, this is for the sake of history, hey, show me the soles of your feet already, will you? The negotiation, which began in the afternoon and lasted till dusk, ended with the museum workers walking sullenly out of the gate. The necklace was returned to the small, embellished pinewood box stained with henna.

We Kazakhs describe people’s complexions as “rosy red,” “bay black,” and “swan-white.” Kokqasqa’s skin tone was grayish brown, the dull color of dry desert soil. Whenever I think of the old woman, I remember her not as my great-grandmother but as the first person I learned to loathe.

“Get out of here, you spoiled little scamp, go play somewhere else!”

“This curlyhead’s cheek is begging for a slap!”

“Quit clinging to my daughter’s skirt! Off with you and your shadow!” she hissed at me.

On her deathbed, the venom-spewing old woman bemoaned parting not with her life but with her beloved daughter. Kokqasqa’s jealous spirit lingered in the house even after her passing; it tried to shield my grandmother from this world until finally spiriting her away, not even a year later, into the mysterious realm it inhabited.

For many years after that the pearl choker, whose cold shimmer reminded me of the bitter old woman, lay untouched in a drawer beside my hairpins and skeins of embroidery thread. I sensed Kokqasqa’s ire emanating from it. When I picked it up, I could feel her piercing gaze on the back of my head. Though I knew this was only a residue of my childhood feelings of fear and resentment, I decided one day to get rid of the cursed necklace and arranged to sell it through a friend who had gotten hold of a few of Sergey Kalmykov’s paintings from his Almaty years and was planning to auction them off; he agreed to sell the necklace if it was determined to be a rare artifact.

The first thing I saw when I stepped over the threshold of the spacious auction hall was a white-and-gold grand piano. A lovely girl, barely in her twenties, sat at the instrument, playing the deaf composer’s fourteenth sonata with great skill. Her motions and manner made it clear she had spent many years practicing music, but I realized that even if she devoted her entire life to it, she would never learn to play with passion. My desire to listen to the moving piece inspired by Beethoven’s love for Julietta disappeared. As I glared at the lavishly dressed people sitting nearby, I noticed a woman whose shapeless body was clumsily draped in an expensive shawl made by a well-known gay duo from Europe. Darling, when you buy a piece of clothing, take a minute to listen to its whisper, I advised her silently, it may be begging you to leave it alone because it knows it won’t look good on you, or it may be pleading with you to pick it up because it happens to be a rag made just for you.

Just then, the auction for this white-bone crowd began with the sale of a teapot whose starting price could have easily fed our entire aul for a decade. I am not ashamed of this stark analogy; the crooked streets of my native aul, overgrown with saksaul and tamarisk and blanketed with sand blown in from the desert, are where all my aspirations and dreams come from. So staggering was the price of the teapot that one would think Aladdin’s jinn was hiding inside it, but after listening to the auctioneer I learned that it was fifteenth-century earthenware made for a Golden Horde princess, its substance sand, elemental dust. After the teapot came a dress worn to some charity ball by the British royal family’s daughter-in-law who had died under mysterious circumstances, then an assortment of gold spoons, and finally, several paintings with lengthy stories behind them. At the end of the auction, a golden pearl necklace, which had at various times inhabited the henna-stained pinewood box, a cherrywood cabinet drawer, a small reed basket, and a large black bag with books and pens, took its rightful place at the center of the stage, dazzling the audience with its splendor.

“This necklace is the work of an anonymous Kazakh goldsmith who lived in the early eighteenth century. He made it for his beloved, who was forced to marry another man,” said the auctioneer, eager to make the prepared speech as appealing as possible as he crossed his long legs and darted glances that betrayed a desperate desire to impress the wealthy young buyers, who immediately began shouting out their bids.

A vague sense of fear had always stopped me from calling the necklace mine; Kokqasqa said nothing about my inheriting it, nor did my grandmother bequeath it to me. The necklace itself had never exuded warmth toward me. Looking at it from a distance, I told myself that I would be rid of it today. It was then that I was struck by the chilling thought that it had not accepted and would never accept me as its master, that it had always been waiting for someone else to come and claim it. At that moment it, too, became aware of my epiphany. Then, arrogant and triumphant, it shone ever more brightly.

When I turned my attention to the audience, I found that the only people left bidding were an old Russian man with a gray beard and a beautiful young woman with thick braids. I won’t use old-fashioned metaphors like “a swan’s neck” or “egg-white skin” in this modern-day story, but I couldn’t help thinking how becoming the necklace would look on the woman. Soon, the man dropped out of the bidding, and the woman took possession of the choker with the pearls in tiny golden cages which contained the sorrows and dreams of a woman who was related to me by blood. As people rose from their seats, the young woman—the new master of the heirloom guarded by Kokqasqa’s menacing spirit—quickly left the auction hall. Later in the evening, when most of the people were gone, I looked in the sales register for the identity of the young woman with the braids. She had left only her first name: Shakharbanu.