Dancer from Khiva, The

by Bibish

  I found the right address, and the right house. The mistress of the house didn’t waste any time being polite—she looked me over from head to toe and said I would do. She asked me to show her my dancing costume. I told her:

  “I don’t have a dancing costume.”

  She reassured me:

  “Don’t worry about that, I have some suitable material, you can have it and take it to a dressmaker.”

  “But I don’t have any money.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’ll earn some, and then we’ll settle up.”

  Apart from me, another four girls were living in the room the mistress put me in, young girls, and they were from different regions too.

  The next day I went to the dressmaker, and soon my dress for performing was ready. It was a very beautiful dress.

  And then the mistress sent me to a wedding with an accompanist for the first time. I should tell you about these musicians who play at weddings. They keep a close eye on the dancers to make sure they don’t hide the money they get, but give it all to the mistress. If they notice that a girl hides part of the money, she’s fired straightaway. And they used to give me so much money, more than I could hold in my hands! I’d never seen so much money in my life. A genuine dancer at weddings has to know how to dance beautifully and flirtatiously, so they’ll give her a lot of money. For the other men not to pester the dancer, the musician will often say that she’s his girlfriend. Sometimes they really did have several wives.

  So anyway, my mistress took more money than usual from the musician because I was new. And she said to me:

  “Keep a journal, write down how much you’ve earned each evening. And I’ll keep a journal too. When you want to leave, I’ll give you all your money.”

  How wonderful, I thought, I’ll have my own money, and I’ll be able to help my father!

  And so there I was at the wedding. Before we went out into the courtyard where the people were sitting, we were fed very tasty food. There was mutton and all sorts of different fruits: pomegranates, apples, pears, apricots, peaches, watermelons, melons—anything we liked, we could eat everything.

  When I went out to dance the first time, I was trembling all over, I was feeling afraid, I suppose. But then, when they started giving me money one after another, I began feeling stronger. And I told myself: Hold on, you came here to earn money, there it is, the money you’ve dreamed about all your life!

  I put this huge amount of money in the instrument case and went back to dance. It went on like that until midnight. Then they fed the dancers again and called us into a room where some kind of bigshots were sitting. And I danced for the bigwigs, and they gave me lots of money too. It was more money than I’d ever dreamed of. Although, at first, until I got used to it, all the dancing made me terribly tired.

  That first day I wrote down how much money I earned in my journal straightaway. And so things went on. When according to my count I’d already earned a lot of money, I wanted to go home as soon as possible, but the season wasn’t over.

  There’s something else that I ought to say. Nowadays in Russia and in the West belly dancing is fashionable. Specially trained young girls dance in a sexy way to the music of Arabian and Turkish dances, without even knowing what they’re about. They’re used to it, they earn good money. It’s just a show to them. Well, of course, people have to live. But it upsets me that they bring shame on the entire East with this. After all, apart from this sexy belly dance, our eastern dances use movements of the arms and the head and facial expressions to tell the story of our lives and our culture: about picking cotton, weaving carpets, about our gardens and our vines . . . These dances express the states of the soul—both joy and sadness. But on television they mostly show girls with bare stomachs jerking their navels about, and that’s all.

  After about a month and a half, I decided I had enough money. According to my notes I could buy a new Zhiguli, that is, an entire car. But the mistress had all the money. And my passport as well. So when I decided to go home I went to the mistress and said to her:

  “Aunty, please give me my money, I’m going to go home.”

  She answered:

  “Don’t be in a hurry. Work a bit more. Why are you in such a rush to go back into poverty?”

  “No, I’ve done enough. I’m tired already, now let the other girls earn money.”

  “But they’re leaving too. All right, wait, I’ll just be a moment.”

  She went into her room and came back a few minutes later:

  “There’s your money and your passport.”

  I took the passport and started counting the money in front of her. My God, I was horrified! There were only thirteen hundred roubles, where was the rest? You see, I’d earned about six thousand Lenin roubles. Everything I’d earned was written down in my journal. Why was there so little? And I said:

  “Aunty, where’s the rest of the money?”

  She answered in a very harsh, brazen voice:

  “What money? That’s it, there isn’t any more money. In the first place, you came here illegally! In the second place, I arranged everything, if it wasn’t for me, you’d have died of hunger! I pay off the militia too. Do you think it’s easy for me to keep you all here? Take what you’re given and get lost!”

  By the end I was shouting. But what could I say to her?

  I had to take the money she gave me. Even that much was my father’s salary for a year. But if I’d got all of my six thousand roubles, it would have been my father’s salary for five years.

  You can’t imagine what a state I was in: What about all my hard work! I’d really sweated for that money. And in the end all I got was a miserly thirteen hundred roubles.

  I had to leave quickly, so the mistress wouldn’t think up some kind of nasty trick. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one the mistress had swindled, she’d done it to everyone who was living with her. She’d stolen from them all in the same way and put it in her own pocket.

  After this happened I couldn’t bear even to hear the word “dance,” and I didn’t dance again for a long time, because I kept remembering that woman. Even if I’d wanted to dance somewhere else in some other region, where could I go, who could I turn to? I couldn’t go back to the same swindler again.

  If it happened to me all over again now and I was still eighteen years old, I don’t know what I would do.

  But one thing I do know: people have to do what they can do well. And before that I was always ordered about by my brothers and other relatives, who forbade me to dance and sing and meet boys and go to the movies . . . I had no life of my own before. My brothers always told me what I should do and what I shouldn’t. They were terribly afraid of gossip. But I was simply a little girl who wanted to dance. And no one understood me. Let me tell you, when you feel out of place, it’s frustrating. But when they won’t let you find your own place, it’s far worse.

  In our village they didn’t even allow people to sing, let alone dance. Of course, I can’t sing, I have no voice. But I can dance—to any music. When I was young I could have earned huge money with my talent, but my relatives were afraid of the disgrace. According to them, it was better to live in poverty than allow me to dance at weddings and parties. But even when I was asleep I used to invent different movements and expressions, I made up entire productions. Then in the morning, I got up—and what could I do? Who would have let me bring my ideas to life?

  Perhaps I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time, I don’t know. But that’s what my life was like: not really my own.

  THE LEGEND OF GRIEF

  One day God decided to test the strength of grief. First he sent grief to the sea, he wanted to test the sea. The sea dried up. Then he inflicted grief on the mountains. The mountains collapsed and crumbled into little stones. He sent grief to the desert. A sandstorm blew up in the desert and scattered all the sand, and nothing was left of the desert. God didn’t know what to do next. “All right now,” he thought, “I’ll test grief on man.
Let’s see what happens to him.” And he sent grief to man. But man did not dry up, like the sea. He did not collapse, like the mountains. He did not disappear, like the desert. Man suffered terrible torment from grief, but he carried on living. Because he knew how to suffer, but he also knew how to rejoice. God realized that only man could bear grief, and he left it with people.

  Without joy it is impossible to live. Without joy you grow old straightaway. The longer I live, the more I want to give joy to people, to distract them from the vain hustle and bustle of life so that they can forget their worries and relax for at least a little while. After all, some fine day we’re all going to die. It’s better to bring people joy than cause them terrible pain.

  Those are the thoughts I live with now. But it’s not always possible to bring people joy. Sometimes you want to do something nice for someone, and for some reason they reject you or belittle you. It happens. I used to get offended, but I’m more resilient now. I can put up with it—what can you do, that’s the way life is.

  Now the time has come to tell you about my marriage. You already know that in the East, if you’re not a virgin anymore, they punish you for it. You are like spoiled goods. And they pay kalym, a bride price, for you, they hold a wedding, and so the bridegroom’s family spends a lot of money. If they find out that you weren’t a virgin when you got married, they can take back the kalym, and they’ll sit you backward on a donkey and ride you around the entire district like that. I always suffered because I thought no one would marry me the way I was.

  And so, after my adventures in Leningrad, I went back to Uzbekistan, to my native kishlak. I took a job where my father worked, in the school, as an elementary class teacher. For the summer vacation I decided to go to my mother’s uncle. He lived with his family in Turkmenia, in the town of Tashauz (it’s called Dashhowuz now), and I had a girlfriend who lived in that town.

  And so I went to visit them. I was given a warm welcome at my uncle’s house and at my girlfriend’s, after all we didn’t see each other very often: it was such a long way, and it was a different republic too.

  One day my girlfriend and I were strolling round the town. We met three boys beside the movie theater. One of them took a fancy to my friend, and I took a fancy to him. That boy was my future husband. My friend always dressed well, in beautiful things. But what did I have, apart from my long braids? I was plain and ordinary, poorly dressed . . . In other words, homely, a freak.

  The boys invited us to the movies, but we refused, it was time for us to go home. But we arranged to meet them three days later. On the way home my friend told me those boys lived nearby and she’d often seen them. It turned out the first one was called Marsel, the second was Ikram, but she didn’t know the third one’s name. They were from rich families. They were boys who didn’t go short of anything. I said:

  “It’s all right for them, with rich parents, they eat what they like and wear what they like.”

  But my friend said:

  “It just seems that way. Everyone has his own life. Little people have little problems, big people have big problems, so it’s better not to envy anyone.”

  For three days the only thing I thought about was when we would meet them. I “rented out” a dress from my friend. But alas, the meeting never took place. My friend’s mother was irritable, she wouldn’t let us go. I was so upset, I thought that now I’d never see Ikram again.

  But I was wrong. A week later I met him by chance, only it didn’t come to anything. He’d obviously taken a fancy to my friend, and she wasn’t with me. So we just said good-bye.

  Afterward I found out from my friend exactly where he lived and every day I lay in wait for when he would come out. And when he came out of the house and went either straight on, or left, or right, I immediately walked round the houses, the road, and the sidewalk and ended up walking toward him as if nothing was going on and it was a chance meeting. But in fact I was already head over heels in love with him. And then one day he did ask me to go for a walk with him, and I was so glad I agreed straightaway. After the walk he saw me home to my friend’s house.

  We met each other like that for a whole week. One day Ikram invited me out into the country, we walked through a mulberry grove, sat on the grass, looked at the sky, and gazed at the stars. We hugged and kissed each other. Anyway, that evening everything happened . . .

  Then Ikram asked:

  “How come, when you’re from a rural area, where their ways are so strict, you’re not a virgin anymore?” And he kept asking how it had happened.

  I didn’t tell him how it had really happened, I simply answered:

  “A bastard raped me and didn’t marry me, he just abandoned me!”

  I didn’t want to tell him my real story, it was too horrible to remember it.

  Ikram said:

  “Never mind, you can go to Baku or Tashkent, they’ll sew you up, and you’ll be a virgin again, like before. Lots of girls do that now. Then you’ll make a good marriage.”

  I nodded in reply, but my heart felt heavy. He carried on comforting me, then he asked:

  “Do you want to go to university? My uncle’s the dean of the history faculty in Tashkent University. Let me give you his address.”

  “No thanks, I’ll do it myself.”

  It was very late already, and he walked me home to my friend’s house. On the way neither of us said anything. In front of the house he stopped me and said his telephone number out loud so that I would remember it, and he repeated it a few times. That was how we parted.

  What could I hope for? He was handsome and high-spirited with gray eyes and a white face, not like mine. He spoke Uzbek badly because he’d graduated from a Russian school and his mother was half Russian. I found out his father also spoke Russian, in other words they were a cultured family. And I could hardly speak a single word of Russian. There was a big distance between us.

  But no one, no one, had ever kissed me so tenderly, and in general no one had ever treated me the way he did. I went to my friend and told her everything (not absolutely everything, of course). She listened to me closely and told me:

  “He’ll never marry you. He was probably just toying with you. He can see you’re an ignorant country girl from a collective farm, so he wanted to try his luck. Don’t you trust him, he has heaps more like you in the town.”

  After that I went home in despair. I was suffering so much for my love, and what was the point? I decided to leave my job in the school and go to a college. I took all my documents and went away to Tashkent. My father had begun building a new house, and he scolded me for not helping him. But he could tell that I was going to run away anyway and do what I wanted. I’m a Capricorn—as stubborn as a goat.

  A day later I was in Tashkent. Straightaway I started looking for the pedagogical institute. I found it and looked at the announcements that listed the exams for each faculty. My God, you had to take math for almost every faculty, and math was always my weak subject!

  I walked out of the pedagogical institute and found an apartment not far away. Then I went to the theatrical institute—it was hopeless, there were lots of applicants for every place, I had almost no chance at all, so what point was there in even risking it?

  I set out to wander the city. I found the Institute of Culture and looked at the announcements there too—to see what the exams were. For the directing faculty you had to recite a monologue, for the methodology you had to write a script, and for the choreography faculty you had to dance.

  I thought: That’s good, I’ll dance once and get in. And I handed in my documents to apply for the choreography faculty. When the consultations began before the exams I turned out to be one of the front-runners, an outstanding student: after all, I’d graduated from the pedagogical college, and all the others had graduated from only the ten-year school. And so I joined the Institute of Culture.

  After the entrance exams, I went home until classes began in September. I thought it would make my parents happy that now I was a s
tudent in a higher educational institution. But they weren’t happy at all, on the contrary, they abused me, because it was the choreography faculty and not the pedagogical institute. My brother wanted to beat me.

  “I’ll kill you, you’re not going anywhere, it isn’t enough for you to bring shame on us with your dancing, now you want to lead a dance group as well, is that it?” he shouted.

  I had to calm them down and say that after a year I’d transfer to an external course in a different faculty, to study methodology and administration.

  Only three days were left until the first of September, and I went back to Tashkent. Ahead of me there were classes, obstacles to overcome, tests, exams.

  One day I decided to call Ikram, the boy I met in Turkmenia, but they didn’t put me through, because no one answered. I’d been given a place in the student hostel: I was sharing a room with a Tajiki girl called Matlyuba. She was good and kind. Then I went with the students to the cotton fields. They took us to the Djizak steppes, where we picked the cotton. There were watermelon fields nearby, and the students ate watermelons all day long. It was great fun.

  We came back to Tashkent three months later. Classes began. One day I went to the long-distance public telephone booth and called Ikram again. The exchange connected me and a woman answered. It was my future mother-in-law, Aunty Raya. I said:

  “Hello, can I speak to Ikram?”

  She called him.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, do you remember me? It’s Bibish, from Khiva.”

  “Of course I remember you, hello, how are things, where are you calling from?”

  “I’m calling from Tashkent.”

  “Yes? How did you get there?”

  “I joined an institute, I’m a student now.”