Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  The city’s features begin to blur. I put on music and wait for that surge of airplane emotion that usually compels me to weep during the safety demonstration.

  Urban sprawl slowly gives way to harsh, unbridled nature. I can almost see the paths ancient glaciers ripped through the jagged, rocky peaks below, as they get closer and closer.

  Because the cabin isn’t pressurized, our cruising altitude is capped at 13,700 feet. The distant peaks are suddenly significantly less distant, and then they’re beside us, six inches from my window. It’s strange, and terrifying, to look out of an airplane and see mountains above you.

  On second thought, should I be concerned?

  Three days before all this, I get my first taste of scary flights by flying to Dushanbe on an airline that’s been banned from entering EU airspace.

  At arrivals in Dushanbe, I’m the only unaccompanied woman.

  A tall, gangly young man with rosy cheeks approaches me. “Audrey?” he asks softly.

  I nod.

  He grabs my suitcase. “Okay, let’s go.”

  I put my hand out to stop him. “Wait, who are you?” I ask.

  He stares at me.

  I’m renting an Airbnb apartment from a man named Jafar, who has generously offered to meet me at the airport, take me to buy a SIM card, and to “make sure [I] have a great stay in Dushanbe!” He signs each message, “With optimism, Jafar.”

  For this kindness, I repay him with the utmost cultural insensitivity: each time I read his name, I picture the Disney villain.

  Does Aladdin take place in Tajikistan?

  Well, no. Aladdin takes place in a fictitious, geographically and ethnically ambiguous city called Agrabah. The characters and setting in the Disney film have a Persian feel, but the story actually comes from a French author who heard the tale from a Syrian guy and included it in his French translation of Arabian Nights.

  Aladdin is, however, a good reference point for understanding the biggest way in which Tajikistan differs from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. While the Kyrgyz and Kazakh speak mutually intelligible Turkic languages, Tajiks speak Persian dialects and share cultural similarities with Iranians, from whom they are descended. The Soviets more or less invented the Tajik ethnicity in a campaign overseen by Stalin, a high-school dropout who somehow managed to become the Soviet Union’s ranking expert on the subject of nationality. In perhaps a display of the extent of his cultural awareness, Stalin took the word Tajik, which meant “Persian speaker,” and decided it made an empowering identity for a wide range of people who had anywhere from little to nothing in common.

  Unlike their nomadic neighbors, Tajiks have a long history of being settled. They also have a rich literary tradition and strong cultural influence over some of Uzbekistan’s best-known cities.

  “Jafar?” I ask the guy holding my luggage.

  “Jafar,” he says.

  “Wait, you’re Jafar?”

  He smiles shyly and tells me his English is very bad.

  I figure I’m in one of two scenarios: either this is a random con man who walks up to every Western woman exiting the terminal and tries to guess her name, or this is Jafar. The former would make more sense if he were throwing out characters from popular ’90s sitcoms (“Rachel? Elaine? Sabrina the Teenage Witch?”), and also if there were more Western women exiting the terminal. I decide this must be Jafar.

  “Should we get a SIM card?” I ask, gesturing to a nearby counter.

  He shakes his head. “Airport, no.”

  It’s a long, awkward drive to the apartment. Each time I try to speak to Jafar in Russian, he responds in mangled English, and each time he speaks to me in English, I’m confused. Eventually, we give up and stare out the window. Although it’s mid-September, the air is hot and dry, and a bright sun wanders across a cloudless sky. The men on the streets wear polo shirts, jeans, and flip-flops. The women dress more modestly, in bright, patterned tunics and scarves that cover their hair.

  We pull into a compound of new, hastily constructed high-rises. Jafar parks next to a staircase, which seems to have been mistakenly connected to the second floor. To enter the ground-floor lobby, we have to walk through a tunnel under the staircase.

  Beside the front door, a welder puts finishing touches on a vaulted archway directly above a jungle gym. Children scramble up plastic ladders and catapult down slides, oblivious to the sparks raining down on them.

  Jafar and I get into the elevator, and as soon as the doors close, the power cuts out. Jafar chooses this moment to ask me if I’m single.

  “I’m engaged,” I snap. “And my fiancé is coming to Dushanbe tomorrow.”

  This has been my go-to defense against unwanted advances in many shared taxis, restaurants, and, in one case, a print shop where I went to get my passport Xeroxed.

  “So beautiful, and not married?” asked the man making the copies.

  “I’m engaged,” I replied hastily.

  “When is your wedding?” he asked.

  I hadn’t anticipated this question, so I blurted out the first date I could think of. “April 27.”

  He looked down at my passport, where my date of birth is listed as April 27.

  “We’re doing it on my birthday,” I stammered, “so that we only have to do one party.”

  “Congratulations,” he replied without smiling.

  Sometimes, I feel guilty about lying. Most people who ask if I’m married aren’t planning to get down on one knee to ask me to make them the happiest men in Tajikistan. In cultures that place such strong emphasis on family, it’s a natural topic of conversation. I show strangers pictures of my parents, they tell me about their wives, and boom, we’re friends! But I’m always wary of seeming flirtatious—sometimes for good reason. A taxi driver taking me from a monument to a restaurant recently repeatedly asked me for the name of my hotel, which seemed irrelevant until he revealed that he would be glad to meet me there later.

  This time, I’ve prepared a less incriminating, but equally readily recalled wedding date—July 4—but Jafar doesn’t ask me that. He simply moves on to the next subject.

  “How old are you?”

  In Central Asia, guests are treated with such magnanimity that guidebooks warn travelers about inadvertently burdening people who might be graciously offering more than they can spare. Friends at restaurants fight over who gets to pay the bill. Taxi drivers and fruit vendors sometimes refuse my money after learning that I’ve come from so far away.

  This level of hospitality is so startling at first that, as in Kyrgyzstan, I mistake people trying to help me for people trying to scam me.

  Dushanbe reminds me of China, because that’s where everything but the buildings appears to come from. The manhole covers, traffic cones, and recycling bins were all made in China, and I know this because all the writing is in Chinese.

  The Chinese goods both make sense and don’t. Tajikistan is one of the poorest Central Asian republics: it has the second-lowest GDP per capita, and almost half of its GDP comes from migrant workers sending money back home. The landscape can be unforgiving. Over 90 percent of the country is mountainous, and droughts and famines still affect some of the more remote regions. China, with its heaps of cheap consumer goods, is just across the Pamir Mountains, and a Chinese trucking route runs straight through Tajikistan. But some products seem out of place, like the manhole covers that only say “power line” in Chinese.

  I’m getting a tour of all the Chinese products, because Jafar and I are trudging all over the city, trying to find a place that will sell me a SIM card, which I need to buy every time I get to a new place to have basic phone service and navigation.

  Everything Jafar does increasingly irks me, which then makes me annoyed with myself because he’s being so nice. When we get to his brand-new, meticulously wallpapered apartment, I ask him for the Wi-Fi password. He looks confused. “No Wi-Fi,” he tells me.

  What kind of Airbnb doesn’t have Wi-Fi? I fume to myself. My face must betray this aggrava
tion, because Jafar immediately offers to go get a USB stick with Internet and bring it back. When he returns, forty-five minutes later, it doesn’t work. He offers to take me to get a SIM card instead.

  Why didn’t we just get one at the airport? I want to politely scream. But instead, I follow him back outside, assuming there’s a store around the corner.

  It turns out to be around more like fifteen corners, necessitating a twenty-minute walk in awkward silence. When we get to the store, Jafar strides in and shakes hands with the guy behind the counter. The handshake is a gesture I recognize—it’s how men greet one another, even strangers, in Central Asia—but the cell phone guy gives Jafar a weird look. Then he says that he can’t sell a SIM card to a foreigner. Chastised, Jafar scurries out of the store. Why don’t you just buy the SIM card for me and say it’s for you?! I seethe.

  We go back to the apartment, where I’m horrified to find that Jafar’s mother has been waiting this whole time in an un-air-conditioned car. “I’m so sorry,” I try to say, but his mother has stepped out of the car and is enveloping me in a warm hug. I feel even worse. Jafar wants to drive me to a cell phone company’s headquarters, where it’s not clear if SIM cards are even sold or if it’s open on Sunday, and at this point I would rather permanently sever any potential connection to the Internet than spend any more time with Jafar, who has no business running an Airbnb business, which I would tell him if I could figure out how to pantomime it. I somehow convince Jafar and his mother to leave, but not before they call his sister Nilofar to translate the message that Jafar will return with an Internet-enabled laptop tomorrow morning.

  I finally wander out onto the main street in the last rays of sunlight. It’s a long avenue that traverses the entire city, with block after block of beautiful, perfectly preserved Soviet neoclassical buildings. It’s odd: the countries I’m visiting have retained progressively less of their ethnic Russian populations, and progressively more of their buildings. Kazakhstan had tons of Russians and few Soviet relics mixed in with contemporary high-rises, Kyrgyzstan had a well-preserved downtown and a handful of Russians, and now Dushanbe is a veritable time capsule left behind by a population that is no longer there.

  I eat dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant that has Wi-Fi. When I get online, I see that Jafar has sent me a bunch of messages.

  “My younger brother Sayed will pick you up at the airport,” the first reads. “Looking forward to hosting you! With optimism, Jafar.”

  Oh no. The guy who has been helping me all day isn’t some bumbling, incompetent technophobe trying to start an Airbnb business. He’s a kid helping his older brother.

  I put down my fork. I feel so terrible. How had I missed that?

  It would be easy to blame the language barrier. Sayed and I couldn’t communicate, and so he couldn’t tell me that he was Jafar’s younger brother, and I couldn’t pick up on verbal cues that might have outed him as the twenty-year-old I will later learn he is. But I don’t think that’s it. If I’d spent just two minutes trying to understand, or even just paying attention, I would have seen a teenager still adjusting to the new feel of certain adult rituals. There was the awkward, timid way he drove the car. Whatever faux pas he made with the handshake. The look that he wore all day: a deer-in-the-headlights-fear of being exposed as a teenager. I was annoyed when he didn’t pretend to buy the SIM for himself and then give it to me, but maybe he hasn’t yet mastered the essential adult skill of lying.

  I realize, with great shame, that what made me miss all these clues is the fact that, because money is exchanging hands, I had seen our relationship as a commercial transaction.

  Airbnb is somewhere hazy between putting a stranger up on your couch and opening a hotel. You’re inviting a random person to sleep in your house, but he’s paying a modest rate to be there.

  In Central Asia, it gets even hazier, because guests are so venerated.

  Because I’m paying Jafar to stay at his apartment, I had seen myself as the customer, and Sayed as the person whose job it was to make sure I got what I paid for. And because, in my mind, every Airbnb should have Internet, I expected Sayed to do anything up to and including personally laying transpacific fiber-optic cables to make that happen.

  While I’m sure Jafar, Nilofar, and Sayed set up the apartment to bring in a little extra money, that didn’t stop them from still seeing me as their houseguest. All of Jafar’s e-mails have indicated as much. “I hope you like the apartment.” “Good night Audrey :)”

  A quick Google search reveals that most homes in Tajikistan don’t have Internet because monthly subscription costs exceed average wages. Oh great: I am a spoiled Westerner, even more so because that thought had never crossed my mind. And if Internet in the apartment isn’t a given, Sayed going back and forth to the apartment with potential SIM cards and tomorrow’s computer went above and beyond the call of duty adhered to by typical Airbnb hosts, who like to provide their guests with a “chill” vibe by responding to questions like, “How do I get to your house?” days after your scheduled visit. (“Oh, sorry! Looks like you found it after placing frantic, expensive international calls to Airbnb customer support! It was great meeting you!”)

  What makes the whole thing even worse, I realize, is that I was so quick to forgive my own mistakes, and so unforgiving when someone didn’t provide me with a service I felt I’d paid for.

  I walk into the first cellphone store I see the next day and buy a SIM card with no problems.

  In the course of this transaction, I learn that text messaging is currently down in Tajikistan.

  “Oh, no, I want a SIM card that can send and receive SMS,” I tell the saleswoman, assuming I misunderstood.

  “No, no,” she replies. “For one week, all of Tajikistan, no SMS.”

  My mission in Dushanbe is to book a flight to Khorog, a city in Tajikistan’s southeastern tip that’s within walking distance of Afghanistan. From there, I want to travel along the border through the fertile Wakhan valley and then up into the moonscaped Pamir Mountains. The problem is, I need to find someone to do it with.

  If I link up with other travelers, we can all split the cost of hiring a guide with a Jeep for the entire ten-day journey. If I can’t, I’ll have to hitchhike along the Afghan border, which does not seem like the best mode of transport for a woman traveling alone with an eighty-pound suitcase.

  It does concern me that e-mailing strangers on message boards is my “safer” alternative, but I’ve only been able to find one person whose dates come anywhere close to matching my own. An enigmatic user named V has posted on multiple forums looking for someone to join a trip that leaves the exact day I want to. I’ve been e-mailing him daily, but so far he hasn’t responded to any of my messages.

  The more he ignores me, the more I become convinced that his trip is perfect, and the more desperate I am to join him. He’s starting in Dushanbe and ending in Kyrgyzstan, taking the exact route I’d picked out in between. His dates coincide with mine so perfectly that I’ve made sure to stay in Dushanbe until the day he leaves, on the off chance that he gets back to me. But that’s now only two days away, and the chances of hearing from V seem slim.

  Tajikistan is a small country shaped like a cowboy riding a bucking bull while waving a ten-gallon hat. The Wakhan valley is a lush, green strip along the bull’s hind hoof. It straddles the Panj River and butts up against the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan and the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan.

  If V doesn’t get back to me, my last chance to avoid hitchhiking is to fly from Dushanbe to Khorog, the biggest city in the Wakhan, and try to arrange something from there.

  The flight is rumored to be harrowing. It’s supposedly the only commercial flight for which Soviet pilots received hazard pay.

  Demand for a seat, however, is through the roof. To get a ticket, you have to go to the airport two days in advance and put your name on a list. If you’re one of the first fourteen names on the list, you go back the next day and get in the ticketing line, whic
h is subject to the whims of the airline staff. If either of the two previous days’ flights were grounded, those passengers get the next day’s seats, and you have to come back and try again the day after.

  It’s an awfully long shot, I think, for a journey that could leave me stranded sans travel companions in a remote corner of Tajikistan.

  The Tajik Air ticketing office has set up shop in the back of an apartment complex. To get there, I take something called a “3 taxi.” Named for the 3-somoni fixed price of each ride and identifiable by the 3 affixed to their windshields, 3 taxis are unlicensed cabs that run along fixed routes like public buses. They’re privately owned vehicles that travel up and down the main boulevards, picking up passengers who flag them down and dropping them off at predetermined points along the way.

  “When they see the police, they hide the sign and pretend not to be a taxi,” Nilofar tells me. “But you don’t worry!”

  When I arrive in midafternoon, the Tajik Air office is still closed for lunch. A foreign couple is waiting in a rare patch of shade, and we eye each other suspiciously. She has blonde hair and colorful patchwork sneakers; he has dark curly hair, light eyes, and a sturdy-looking backpack.

  A young Tajik Air employee in a bright patterned dress eventually shuffles up to the door with keys. We pour in behind her: me, the foreign couple, and a crowd of Tajik men. We rush for the counter. There’s fifteen minutes of yelling and fist-banging, after which the Tajik Air woman apparently decides she’s had enough. She announces she’s closing up shop for an hour. The foreign couple and I wearily make for a set of couches, which are, at least, out of the heat. But no, no, she wants to literally lock up, and until she gets back, we have to wait outside.

  This is how I formally meet the couple, Joanne and Maarten.

  Joanne and Maarten are from Holland. They live in a small city where she coordinates volunteer opportunities for the municipal government, and he does odd jobs. They’re on a three-week Central Asian jaunt: they’ve just come from Uzbekistan, where, they warn me, border security is so strict that they open your laptop and go through all your pictures.