It was a crisp April morning in 2010 when the first person in town fell ill. The handful of women who manned the market in Krasnogorsk, a town in northwestern Kazakhstan, were exchanging the usual gossip over morning tea — how everyone had slept, whose children were causing trouble, what was happening with apartment repairs or their lack thereof. Lyubov Belkova, who friends call Lyuba for short, had finished first as usual, and walked back to her stall by the entrance. Someone asked Lyuba a question. When no answer came, the women looked over to notice the plump, middle-aged woman slumped in her seat, head down on her table of socks and hats.



“Lyuba? Lyuba?” They called. No response. Nadezhda, a former nurse, hurried over. She tapped her lightly — nothing. She checked Lyuba’s pulse — it was normal. She checked her pupils — they were dilated. “Call the ambulance,” she commanded. Then she noticed Lyuba was snoring.

When Lyuba woke up four days later, she didn’t remember anything. The nurse told her she’d had a stroke. Lyuba tried to stand. She put her legs down, but it was as if they didn’t exist — there was nothing under her. These legs aren’t mine, she thought. When the nurse finally managed to help Lyuba up, she said that she was amazed Lyuba could walk freely so soon after a stroke, but that was little consolation.

For the next month, Lyuba was emotional, she was weepy. Sometimes her granddaughter told her she had become aggressive. Lyuba complained of dizzy spells. She had headaches. She had to write everything down so as not to forget. Scraps of paper littered her kitchen windowsill: "Turn off water," "Buy milk," "Take medication." Lyuba was confused by all this; then again, at 61, she was getting older, maybe this was normal. Poor Lyuba, the townspeople told each other, but Krasnogorsk had been a Soviet uranium mining town — they’d seen far worse.

A few weeks after Lyuba, Nadezhda, the nurse from the market, went to bed one night, and the next morning her mother couldn’t wake her. She was snoring heavily. When she woke up a few days later, the doctors told her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her, she was probably overworked. She needed to rest more. She thought that made sense. Life had been hard in Krasnogorsk since the Soviet Union collapsed. Nadezhda had been tired for decades. Poor Nadezhda, everyone said, life hadn’t been easy for her.

For the next two years, Lyuba would be in and out of the hospital six more times with the same symptoms. She lived with a packed bag — underwear, robe, slippers — of everything she would need. Lyuba kept all her medical charts in a thick baby-blue folder. Doctors had written all kinds of things she didn’t understand: “signs of postischemic alterations of the basal ganglia,” “ischemic stroke,” “stenocardia,” “cerebral atrophy,” and “substitutive external hydrocephalus.” She had traveled to Russia for more tests. The hospital there did MRIs, EKGs, and body scans; they checked her thyroid. She trudged around for days with a machine the size of a large purse that logged her vitals. In the end, they told her she had second-grade circulatory encephalopathy and cerebral obliterating atherosclerosis, and they didn’t exclude the possibility of epilepsy. Her gait had turned jerky, she complained of headaches, she was always so emotional. She knew people were gossiping that there was something funny about her. Poor Lyuba, they said to each other, so many strokes, how is she still alive?

In March 2013, the townspeople gathered in the neighboring village of Kalachi to celebrate the spring festival of Nauryz. They watched their children perform traditional Kazakh dances, sing songs, and recite poems in the village’s playground. After a few hours, they settled into the bar next door for the evening, drinking into the night. Over the long weekend, three college-age kids and five adults fell ill with the same symptoms. First they would slur their words, as if they were drunk. They would see double, and start swaying, then they would fall asleep and snore heavily. They could be roused, speak, go to the bathroom, even eat food, but then they would fall back asleep. They stayed in this state for days. When they finally woke up, they didn’t remember anything. The villagers didn’t understand what was wrong. Maybe the kids had been doing drugs, they told each other, maybe the adults drank too much. But it didn’t add up.

That’s when the townspeople remembered Lyuba and Nadezhda. They remembered another woman who worked in a shop across the street from the market, who fell ill a few weeks after Nadezhda. She snored and couldn’t be woken for days either. Someone mentioned Bogdan — the high school senior who had come home from school and fallen on the carpet around the same time as Lyuba. Bogdan had been active in his illness, verging on violent. He kept trying to run somewhere and had to be tied down to the hospital bed. He was out for nine days. He didn’t remember anything either. Drugs, the town rumor mill had churned, maybe he drank something. It wouldn’t be the first time homemade brew had gone wrong. Teenagers, they had tutted.

They remembered Julia, a shop attendant who had gone across the street to the bakery in Kalachi a few months before Nauryz. After she came back, she took off her jacket and sat down, but when she tried to stand again, she couldn’t. She tried to speak, but her speech was slurred, as if she’d chugged a bottle of vodka on her morning bread run. She was ill for three days. When she woke up, the doctors told her she had overexerted herself. She needed to rest more. But Julia was 28 and she wasn’t particularly tired. The doctors said there was something wrong with her spine. After that, Julia was fired from her job; the proprietor didn’t want a liability. Poor Julia, people had said at the time.

Just as they were slowly connecting the dots, the residents of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk started getting sick en masse. It came like a biblical plague exacting revenge on all those people who had tutted poor Lyuba, poor Nadezhda, poor Julia. There would be nine waves of sleeping sickness in total — no street would be spared — over 130 people, a quarter of the total population, some multiple times. Everyone would exhibit similar symptoms: the slurred speech, the swaying, and the double vision. When they woke up, they remembered nothing. Everyone was getting the same diagnosis: encephalopathy of unknown origin, basically abnormal brain function of no known cause.

Scientists arrived with sample baggies and metal machines; then came local government officials in suits with clipboards and surveys about relocation. Journalists swarmed. People kept getting sick. No one knew why or what to do about it. And — despite reports this summer that a possible explanation has been discovered — they still don't.