Dancer from Khiva, The

by Bibish

  The taxi driver dropped me off in front of a beautiful house, like the ones that belonged to the Soviet elite. I found the right entrance, and the floor and the apartment.

  They were really happy to see me, as if it was the first time. They’d been at our house in Turkmenia, it’s true, but that was a long time ago. Ravil’s wife, Galya, said:

  “Bibish, we want to tell you that tomorrow we’re all going to Voronezh.”

  I asked:

  “But why?”

  “The thing is that Katya, my eldest daughter, is marrying a young man from Voronezh. They’re going to have the wedding at the groom’s house. If you like, you can come with us.”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  I had no smart clothes to wear for a wedding. And Galya wore size 60–62, two Bibishes would have fit in her clothes.

  Early in the morning they went away. I stayed in their three-room apartment. It was true, everything there really was great: the layout of the rooms, and the European-style renovation.

  I stayed there on my own, watching the television all day long—cable television, which we didn’t have. It was interesting. But at night I was afraid of my own shadow. In a strange town, in a strange apartment . . . I was afraid to go even as far as the toilet and I waited until the morning. I ate everything there was in the refrigerator, I only went to the shop for bread, milk, and kefir.

  A week later they came back from Voronezh with their son-in-law. It turned out that he’d moved in with them. Of course, I congratulated them and wished them all the best.

  Now Ravil and Galya started asking me how it was I happened to be in Russia. I explained to them that I wanted my children to study, get married, and live in Russia, and I’d come in advance to reconnoiter. I was looking for a place where we could stay.

  And then Galya started saying:

  “Oh, life is bad in Russia now, everything’s expensive, there’s no work, the pay’s low, it’s impossible to live,” and so on.

  Ravil joined in too:

  “Well, you’ve got here—and now what? You ought to have come sooner. If you’d come ten years ago, you’d have found a job and bought an apartment already. But what can you buy now? In some parts the apartments are too cheap, there’s no point in selling. For that money you won’t buy anything here in Russia. And renting an apartment is very expensive, and anyway no one’s likely to take newcomers with children.”

  In short, they tried to dissuade me, as if I’d come to stay with them forever and was never going to go away. But I didn’t give way to their arguments, I said:

  “Even so, I’m going to try to stay here, especially since Moscow is so close.”

  Ravil asked:

  “And what kind of work are you going to do?”

  “I’ll become a trader.”

  “Oh,” said Galya, “for trading you need a license, and you have to have a place at the market, and they ask for your medical record too. And you have to have all the immunizations that we had when we were children . . .” and so on.

  Both of them went on without stopping, and I really did wonder if it was all so unrealistic.

  In the morning I got up early. They decided to help me. Galya went off to the market to talk to the manager there, she found me an empty stand and paid the woman who owned the stand for the place.

  Then we went to Moscow together. We rode to the market in Cherkizovo in a private commercial bus, we had tickets there and back. Galya showed me everything I needed and I bought it all. We got back home safely. In the morning I went to the market and started trading without any papers and without a license.

  In the meantime Ravil registered me in his apartment. After the market I brought home black bread, white bread, long loaves, kefir, milk, and eggs. But that wasn’t enough for the day, because they had a lot of people at home: Ravil, Galya, Katya, her husband, the second daughter, and me. We were all grown-ups, we ate a lot. So no sooner did I bring the bread home than it was gone.

  I should say that Ravil and Galya were always arguing. Sometimes the arguments went on until the morning. I thought it was because of me. I was upset and so I said to Ravil:

  “I’d like to leave the apartment, will you help me find an apartment?”

  He started getting nervous and said, “No, let the newlyweds leave, I’m not keeping them here. They can look for an apartment for themselves. I told that little fool a hundred times: Katya, don’t be in a rush, Katya, make a career, study, work. You can always get married. She didn’t listen to me, she found herself some moron from a collective farm, and now they’re both going to hang round my neck!”

  “But why don’t they go to Voronezh? You said yourself that he lives in Voronezh.”

  “Voronezh is no good! It’s his father who lives in Voronezh, a miserable lush. He and his wife are divorced. And his son lived in the country with his grandmother, because they couldn’t feed him. An aunt took one child and this one—my so-called son-in-law—stayed in the village. I arranged the wedding for them, on my own money. I bought a wedding dress for two thousand roubles and spent a whole lot of money beside that. Well, she put that dress on. We went to their village registry office. The door there was broken. I thought maybe we had to go to some other place. No, that ruin really was the registry office. We went back to the house and saw five or six old grandmothers with only one ninety-year-old granddad between them, sitting round the table, and that was all. There weren’t any young people at all. I wondered why I’d spent my money, why I’d gone and bought a wedding dress for two thousand roubles, if the registry office had no doors and no one was at the table except old women and a ninety-year-old man. Katya’s a lawyer by education, she went to college. Now because of this no-account jerk, she’s thrown it all away—how do you like that!”

  I thought this story was so funny, I could hardly stop myself laughing. Although, on the other hand, there was nothing funny about it, it was actually a very sad story.

  But even so I asked Ravil to find me an apartment again.

  That evening I wrote out several copies of an announcement: “Single woman seeks apartment. Phone . . .”

  Ravil and I stuck this announcement up on lampposts, on a special board for announcements, on the bus and trolley stops, everywhere.

  Then we started waiting for a call. Two days later a woman called and offered to let me live with her. Galya spoke to her and said we’d go take a look that evening.

  And so we went to look at the apartment. The house turned out to be very close, just one stop away. The door was opened by an elderly woman, she was the one who’d called us. Galya settled all the arrangements and showed me to her. She agreed. We went for my things and came straight back. My landlady was called Nina Sergeevna, or just Aunty Nina.

  But when I was living with them, Galya borrowed money from me—six hundred roubles—she said she’d give it back.

  I began living with Aunty Nina, I got to know the neighbors: Aunty Lida, Aunty Masha, and lots of others.

  After the market, in the evening, everybody used to gather at Aunty Nina’s and play lotto, and they taught me how to play too. It was fun. Only things went very badly at the market, because it was January, one holiday after another—trade wasn’t moving.

  I phoned Turkmenia from Aunty Nina’s place, reassured my husband, and said everything was all right with me. My mother-in-law took the phone and said:

  “If it’s very hard for you, come back, don’t torment yourself.” But until I’d found out about residence permits, registration, work, trade, school, college studies, and all the other things we would come up against in our life, I didn’t want to go back. I walked all round the town and tried to find out about everything. Eventually, when things were more or less clear, I decided to go home and bought a ticket for the train. I agreed with Aunty Nina that if I came back with my children and husband, she would take us in.

  Before I left, I phoned Galya and asked her to bring me the money, the six hundred roubles she had borrowed from m
e. There were two hours left until the train, it was time for me to leave, and she still hadn’t come. Aunty Nina and her neighbor Aunty Lida decided to see me all the way to Moscow. Then Galya arrived and as she paid back her debt, she said rudely:

  “There, take it! I’ve been all round the yard collecting that money!”

  I thought it wasn’t my fault, it was my money, wasn’t it? I’d helped her and I’d suffered for it. But I didn’t say anything out loud, I said good-bye to her and went to Moscow with Aunty Nina and Aunty Lida. They saw me to the Kazan Station and put me on the train. I promised to phone them and rode away, and then this is what happened to them, the poor things.

  They took some money with them to buy a few things in Moscow. They saw me off and as they were walking away from the station, a crowd of gypsy women came toward them. The gypsies surrounded them and tricked them out of two thousand roubles each! My poor aunties, they lost so much money because of me, and they were pensioners!

  I went home, taking presents to my children. It was horrible the way the soldiers at the station in Tashauz and on the border checked me! I couldn’t even get home in peace. And they were insolent too, they spoke rudely to me. That kind of treatment immediately spoiled my mood. But I comforted myself: Be patient, Bibish, there’s not much longer left. You’ll never come back here again.

  At home they were happy to see me. The children had missed me especially.

  My husband and I spoke until late, discussing out future life. In short, we decided to move to Russia in the summer. We’d just received the papers for immigrant status. Now we could go without worrying. We sold off everything we had at home. There was nothing left. We didn’t send off a container because the duty was very expensive, and we had no place of our own to put the things in.

  I collected my children’s documents from the school. We bought tickets for the train to Moscow. We said good-bye to the people we knew, our friends and relatives. I went to Uzbekistan to say good-bye to my parents. I said I wasn’t likely to come back for the next five years, because the journey was very expensive, the trains weren’t running, there was only a plane to Ashkhabad, and flying there and back cost about fifteen thousand roubles.

  I bought a lot of melons and walnuts to treat Aunty Nina and her friends, and bought Iranian socks as a present for them. On the way, it’s true, five of the melons went bad, they turned to liquid in the heat, and we threw them away. We didn’t feel bad, we’d eaten lots of them during the summer.

  Finally all our family arrived at Aunty Nina’s place. She and the neighbor welcomed us warmly. Now every day in the morning my husband and I got up and went looking for work. But nobody took us on, because we hadn’t deregistered from Turkmenia and we didn’t have a permanent residence permit. We walked round the whole town. Where a job could be had, the pay was low, not even enough to pay the rent for the apartment. That was the situation we and the children were left in.

  We had no money for a place of our own. For all the things we sold when we were leaving, we’d raised a thousand dollars. Even with that money it was impossible to buy anything—I mean a place to live.

  They wouldn’t give us a job without being registered. We began trying to persuade Aunty Nina to register us in her apartment, so that we could find work somewhere. But she had never had to deal with things like that before, and so she was afraid that if we were registered with her, we’d try to claim her flat. Of course, old people are afraid of everything. We had to explain for a long time that the registration was only a piece of paper, it would be valid for a certain time and there was no threat to her. But she wouldn’t listen. Ten days went by. We still didn’t have any work. It was a good thing Aunty Lida took our side:

  “You lured the girl here, you said come, and I’ll take you in, and now you’re being difficult, surely you can see they’re not getting anywhere. Registration’s nothing to be afraid of. Register them, it won’t kill you, and don’t think they’ll try to claim your apartment. If you don’t believe me, go to a lawyer and ask, he’ll give you the same answer. And don’t put it off, go to the passport office with them.”

  Then Aunty Nina went to the passport office with us and registered us for six months.

  Early in the morning I went to the local authority offices, waited my turn in line, and went into the office where they gave out licenses for trading. The woman sitting in the office said:

  “We don’t give licenses on a temporary registration.”

  I showed her the certificate saying I was a Russian citizen, but a newcomer, I had dual citizenship. She said:

  “Your registration’s only for six months, if it was for a year, I’d have given you a license.”

  I went back home and we begged Aunty Nina to register us again, this time for a year, because they hadn’t given us a license. She didn’t want to hear any more about it:

  “No more, I’ve registered you for six months, and I’m not going round any more militia stations, I’ve got things of my own to do, the market garden. I told my son on the phone that I’d registered you, and he was so angry with me he hung up.”

  We could see that all our efforts were pointless. But we had to do something, not just sit there with our arms folded. In the morning I went off to a little town nearby and went into their municipal offices. I found out that they did give out licenses on a temporary registration, but in the regional center they didn’t! I came back home and started thinking—maybe they did things differently in other regions? Before the children started school, maybe I could go to a different region and try to get registered, get a license, and find a job?

  I left the children to my husband and set off on the bus to the town of Murom. In Murom I got in a train to Mukhtolov—that’s already in the Gorki region—and then I ended up in the Kulebak district. Just see how far my idea took me! I walked round the buildings in the district, looking for a place to register, and in the end I didn’t find anything. Lots of people wanted to let me live in their apartments, but no one wanted to register me there. I arrived back at the bus station tired and hungry. It was already late. The station was deserted. I went up to the ticket office and asked:

  “Aren’t there any buses?”

  The woman in the ticket office answered:

  “Where do you think you are, haven’t you ever taken a bus before? The buses here follow the timetable, there aren’t any more runs today. I’m afraid you’re too late, sweetheart!”

  “And what can I do now?” I started feeling nervous, it would soon be night.

  “There’ll be a bus in a minute, but it’s going to the garage, that is to the bus park. I’ll tell the driver to take you as far as the central highway. Wait there, all right? You can stop a car going your way.”

  The driver dropped me off on the highway and turned in the opposite direction. I stood in the road and kept holding my hand up all the time, but nobody stopped. There was forest all around. A little further along the road I saw a gas station. Almost all the vehicles were turning in there to fill up and then turning back. It was already dark and cold, and all I had on was a thin dress—when I set out from home I hadn’t counted on being left on a highway at night in the middle of a forest.

  Most of the vehicles driving past were trucks. They had space in their cabs, but I didn’t try to stop them, because the drivers traveled with partners, and I was afraid. I stopped a few when I thought the driver was traveling alone: but when I opened the door of the cab, there was his partner sleeping. And the cars didn’t stop.

  Then it got completely dark. I was tired of standing and I was very afraid. I walked down off the road into the forest and dozed for a while under a birch tree. In the morning it started to rain and I was all wet, frozen, afraid, but I sat under the birch tree with my eyes closed the whole time so as not to feel my fear. Early in the morning I went back to the bus park and straightaway took the first bus to the railroad station. I reached Murom, then went home on a bus.

  In short, my trip was a painful failure, I
simply threw the money away.

  I came back home on the same day they were showing the sinking of the atomic submarine Kursk on the television. The children and I were all upset, we hoped at least one of them would survive! But alas, it ended very sadly, and I felt terribly sorry for them. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time, I was tormented by insomnia and I was very upset.

  Autumn was getting close. The children had to go to school.

  I went to the nearest school, one that Aunty Nina had shown me—her children had gone there once as well. When I handed in the documents, they took them and said:

  “Your children have been accepted for the school, but they have to be tested, and then we’ll decide what grade they’ll go into.”

  The first of September came, my children’s long-awaited first day at school—their first in Russia. They were tested. My older son, Aibek, was accepted into a class where the students were weak, or had some kind of disability, or had no mother or father.

  I asked:

  “Why put him there?”

  They told me:

  “He was slow in solving the problems and the math questions during the testing.”

  But my second son, Nadirbek, was accepted into a very good class. Aunty Nina brought some beautiful flowers from her dacha. Then we dressed the children up smartly and sent them to school with flowers for the teachers. I went with them, they were really happy.

  My husband and I decided to go to the migration center. We had the document about our immigrant status. We went into the office where they processed newcomers from the former USSR.

  In the office a thin man with a mustache looked at us in surprise and said:

  “But why did you come here anyway?”

  I answered:

  “For the sake of the children.”

  “We can’t do anything to help you, you have Russian citizenship, you have to do everything for yourselves.”