leather tanner and prepared an official text to be engraved on the plinth: ‘Melden Zheldibayev, the founder of leather tanning in Kazakhstan’. Ashten Zheldibayev, a living descendant of his distant relative, turned out to be a plumber in house management office number two. He described in detail what Melden looked like, sketched his height, face, his whole appearance – all according to the words of his father, who remembered the old tanner well. When his grandson finally produced a portrait of Melden on paper, he bore a close resemblance to the narrator, Ashten. The artists, or sculptors, themselves sat for a long time in astonishment, looking silently at the portrait and back at Ashten. ‘So your distant kinsman is your exact copy?’ the two beards marvelled. ‘Yes, according to those who saw my grandfather, he looked like me, as if he had been skinned and stuffed.’ ‘I’m sorry, maybe it’s you who looks like him, not him who looks like you? After all, he is somewhat older than you…’ ‘Yes,’ laughed the plumber, ‘Maybe so.’ In short, they decided to make a sculptural portrait of Melden directly from Ashten. They measured his height, thickness and even the length of his fingers and got down to business. Ashten started coming to the House of Culture every evening after work. He came to the room where the two sculptors had set up their studio. He lifted the hide of a Yolbayev ram high above his head with both hands and stared at it lovingly for hours. And the two artists, who were also sculptors, made sketches of it from both sides. So some twenty sketches had already been made of Ashten holding the skin over his head. The sculptors had to, on arrival back in Alma-Ata, make a sample statue of the one they liked best, mould it in clay, and then do the same in plaster. The unknown Ashten, who until then had been quietly drinking his red wine in the cellars of houses, suddenly became one of the most famous people in the village. A number of people were honoured to say hello to the model for the statue of the first tanner, and some were happy to walk down the street to the liquor shop with him and buy him a bottle. Some even took pride in standing in line with him. All this could not help but

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