Alonya loves Nicholas Sparks and Ivanka Trump. Both were sources of comfort and support instrumental in getting her through her divorce. It’s October 2015, and I’ve barely heard of Ivanka Trump. I tell Alonya this, and she gasps.
“You don’t know her website, Women Who Work?” she asks.
“She works?” I reply.
Alonya nods admiringly. “She believes women can have a career and a family.”
“I believe that, too,” I concede.
People tend to marry younger across the former Soviet Union. Anton and his wife wed when he was twenty-one and she was twenty; they were parents a year later. In Central Asia especially, women who marry while still in school are less likely to finish their education.
Alonya has been galvanized by her divorce. She started taking English lessons and learning about America.
“How is Newark?” she asks me. “I’ve always wanted to go to Newark.”
“You mean New York?” I ask.
“No,” she corrects me. “Newark.” New York is too big and flashy, but Newark seems smaller and more manageable. Then she has another question. “Can Democrats and Republicans get married?”
Of course, I tell her. Her post-divorce English classes were taught by an American man who somehow left the class with the impression that in his country, people on opposite ends of the political spectrum couldn’t marry.
“It’s probably hard,” I acknowledge. “But it’s definitely allowed.”
Alonya shakes her head. “In our country,” she explains, “nationality is a barrier, but not politics.” Her most recent boyfriend was Uzbek. I realize this must have been how that ended, and I feel for her.
Alonya is keeping up this conversation while filling out paperwork for my Belarusian health insurance, which I haven’t had the heart to tell her I’m worried I won’t be able to afford. She continues to insist that I check out Ivanka Trump’s website.
“Before I found it, I had never heard these ideas!” she exclaims. “That it’s also good for women to have jobs—that way we can be strong and independent.” She sighs. “Ivanka Trump is my hero.”
I have probably never felt so conflicted. On the one hand, I want to tell her that Ivanka Trump is a largely irrelevant socialite (oh, would that that were still true!). But maybe it’s best not to shoot Alonya’s messenger if the right message is getting through. (Though perhaps Camilla can start a website for the next Alonya?)
“Sign this,” Alonya declares, pushing paperwork across the table.
I gulp. “How much is health insurance for a week in Belarus?”
Alonya frowns. “Let me check.” She looks up something on her ancient desktop computer and types numbers into a calculator. My heart sinks because I’m sure I already know the answer. It’s going to be $100, $200—some number too large for me to justify going to Belarus.
Alonya turns the calculator screen toward me. “In American money, it will be 5 dollars.”
I blink. “5 . . . U.S. dollars?”
“Yes.”
I’m so giddy I could kiss Alonya. “I’ll take it!” I exclaim. I’m going to Belarus! This must be what it feels like to find out you’re inheriting a small fortune or that you finally mastered contouring. I think of the time I spent with Anton imagining this very moment—having a Belarusian visa on lock—and how much further away it seemed in the years since we split up.
Alonya walks me outside. “I’m so happy you came,” she tells me. “My ex-boyfriend and I used to speak in English, and now . . .”
“I’m happy we met, too,” I tell her. And it’s true: Uzbekistan, I’m realizing, is where dreams come true.
Before I leave, Alonya has one last question. “Your comedy,” she asks, “is it cruel?”
7
Trains, Tombs, and Ovaries (Uzbekistan)
As a tourist in Uzbekistan, you are culturally, aesthetically, and morally obligated to see Samarkand. When you imagine a dreamy Central Asian city rising like an oasis from the desert, you’re picturing Samarkand. It’s filled with blue-tiled domes and jaw-dropping madrasas that you hear look the same today as they did six hundred years ago.
In the 1300s, Samarkand became the capital of an empire founded by a brutal warlord named Timur. He was known for his love of the arts, and his love of ruthlessly murdering his enemies. His citadel, Samarkand, reflects both interests.
The problem, if indeed it is one, is that the oldest parts of the city have been heavily restored.
If you’re in Central Asia, this is all you hear about Samarkand. “It’s beautiful,” people will tell you after stepping off a whirlwind bus tour. “But, you know, it’s basically been rebuilt.” They say this as though the decision to not leave ancient structures lying in ruins is an unequivocal moral failing. The most vitriolic offer the most damning condemnation. They lean in and whisper, shuddering, “It’s like Disneyland.”
Samarkand fell into decline along with the empire that built it. Its once mythic buildings crumbled as the landlocked empire was cut out of trade profits as sea routes supplanted the overland Silk Road. The region’s predisposition to earthquakes wasn’t doing architectural preservation any favors. By the twentieth century, the historic quarters were turning to rubble. The Soviets started restoring Samarkand’s historic sites in the 1960s, and conservation work continues today.
Because I want to see this all for myself, I’m taking a train to Samarkand. I’m somewhat dreading this journey because I’m not too crazy about trains. Yes, the views are nice, but trains are slow and we don’t want to know how the bathroom works.
I’ve never understood people who buy Eurail passes or dream of taking the Trans-Siberian Railway. I won’t even watch the thriller Transsiberian, because I’m worried I’d scream at the wrong parts, like when the camera pans to the tiny sleeping berths.
Although as soon as I see my train, I soften slightly. It’s a stately green-and-white-striped Soviet model, with curtained windows and a hammer and sickle on the outside of each carriage.
Like with the subway in Tashkent, stepping onto this train feels like stepping back in time. An attendant in a pillbox hat checks my ticket against my passport before ushering me into a carpeted hallway lined with old-fashioned compartments.
My compartment-mates are four older men in embroidered four-sided hats and a quiet, cherubic six-year-old girl. She wears a pressed checkered dress and spotless white tights; her hair is curled and carefully pinned back. Strangest of all, her grandfather has brought nothing with which to entertain her: no toys or books or paper to draw on. She sits quietly and stares straight ahead.
As the train pulls out of the station, the men pull back the curtains and chat amiably, after a while with me.
“New York!” one exclaims after hearing where I’m from. “There are many Uzbeks living in New York.”
“Really?” I say.
They’re surprised that I didn’t know this. “In Brooklyn,” one adds.
“I lived in Brooklyn!” I exclaim.
“They live near the velodrome,” one says.
Though it’s an English word, I’ve never heard it before, and it takes me a minute to figure out it’s some kind of arena for bicycles. I can think of few things that sound more Soviet. “Oh no, we don’t have that in Brooklyn,” I assure them.
Guess who turns out to know more about what is and is not in Brooklyn? (Hint: it’s the Uzbek grandpas who have never been there.) Although why are all the Uzbeks congregating around the velodrome?
The men start spreading newspapers over the table in our compartment and laying out bread and jam and meats. They insist that I have some. Before we eat, they offer a blessing over the food, and I know how to do the part at the end, where we all run our hands over our faces.
Anton and I take a lot of trains. We live in cities separated by a thirty-minute trip on a high-speed rail, and it feels like one of us is forever on a train, the other waiting for it to arrive.
They are sleek, bullet-nosed engi
nes that tear between cities at speeds displayed in real time on monitors inside the carriage. I watch the number climb beside the familiar blur of scenery: 100 kilometers per hour, city high-rises; 150 kph, factory sprawl; 180, field of power lines; 200, farmland. It always maxes out in the mid-220s, but I stare at the number anyway, willing it to go higher.
Anton saves all of our tickets, sky-blue cards the size of a driver’s license.
After we break up, I throw away all the tickets I hadn’t yet given him, and gradually, everything else that reminds me of him. My pride is wounded and I need to destroy the evidence. Each day I carry a few more things out to the garbage bins behind my apartment. One day the notes, the next the cheap sunglasses he bought glue to fix while I was sleeping. In the end there are, inevitably, the few things I can’t bring myself to discard with kitchen trash: his clothes, Vadik’s drawings, an oversized sweater he’d given me for Christmas. These are stuffed in a bag and shoved into the back of a closet and I tell myself at least I’ll never have to walk around my apartment and see things that make me think of him. It doesn’t help; even without visual reminders, he’s all I can think about.
A few months later I’m moving to New York and Anton comes to Shanghai to say goodbye. I take out the bag and hand it to him. He starts pulling things out, happy at first (“my sweatshirt!”), but when he gets to the sweater, he looks surprised. It’s navy blue with red and orange Charlie Brown stripes. There was a time when I wore it constantly.
“It was a gift,” he says. “You don’t have to give it back.”
“I know,” I reply, “but I wouldn’t want to wear it with the next person . . .”
I’d wanted to say that but pretend it slipped out when his face stiffens and he closes the bag and stuffs it in his backpack. “I’m sorry,” I lie.
“No, you’re right,” he replies, all fake cheerful.
It’s the reaction I wanted, but not the outcome. He goes into the kitchen and starts putting on his shoes.
All day we’ve been waiting for the other to read our mind. I’d headlined my last show in Shanghai the night before, and though we only had plans to meet today, Anton came to Shanghai a night early and slept in a hostel.
“You should have known to call me and tell me to come to your show,” he said earlier. “Then we would have had this whole romantic night together—that was how it was supposed to happen.”
You should have known just to come, I thought.
Back in my kitchen, Anton is texting someone—from his smile, it feels like a woman, but I don’t ask—and anxious to leave. He looks up and glances around the kitchen. “I can’t believe this is the last time I’ll be in this apartment,” he says.
I start crying. “Sorry,” I say. “You remember—I cry really easily, and it looked like you were going to cry.”
“I wasn’t going to cry,” he says, shaking his head. He stands up. “I have to go.”
Is dyslexia with directions a thing? If it is, Anton has this. I have to walk him to the metro station he’s been to a thousand times before, because he never learned the way. I take the least direct route possible. Even he notices.
“Did you take us a really long way on purpose?” he asks. “Because you don’t want me to go?”
“Yes,” I admit.
Later that night he texts me. “There’s a woman on the train wearing the sweater you gave back to me. It’s a sign.”
I write back, “Haha, sign of what?”
He never responds.
In the years that follow, Anton’s picture sometimes pops up on my feed, and I quickly scroll past, because whatever it is, it’s easier not to know.
But a few times something catches my eye and I can’t help myself. I go back and look at the picture more closely. He’s wearing my sweater.
Los Angeles is a city built on the entertainment industry. Washington, DC, exudes power and influence. Modern Samarkand’s vibe is “Welcome, tourists!”
It’s a city ruled by coach buses full of retirees. I actually kind of have to give them credit for coming to Uzbekistan. They are, presumably, aware of Florida.
Still, it’s an unsettling change of pace from the rest of Central Asia, where friendly strangers invite you to their babies’ birthday parties. In Samarkand, the friendly strangers are most likely soliciting bribes to take you up a minaret.
I meet Farhod in the parking lot of the Samarkand train station, where he’s idling his car and blasting his air-conditioning. When I tell him, in terrible Russian, where I want to go, he shoots me a look of disgust.
“Do you speak English?” he asks. “Speak to me in English, okay.”
Like everyone else in Samarkand, Farhod is trying to sell me something, but unlike everyone else, he makes no attempts to be polite, friendly, or likable.
This initially seems like a good thing. While everyone else is asking me where I’m from or trying to lure me into small talk in order to blindside me with a sales pitch, Farhod prefers to insult me.
As soon as I’ve hired him to drive me around Samarkand for the day, he begins offering unsolicited feedback.
First, there’s my choice of guesthouse.
“That place is terrible,” he tells me. He says that a guidebook rebranded an old, dusty accommodation as “cozy” and “charming,” and that he knows a much better place.
I assume that he “knows” the much better place because they “give him a cut of the deal,” but I let him take me to both—first the place I booked, which seems quaint but is, as promised, a little worn and loved, and then Farhod’s place, which is newer and cheaper and more centrally located. I decide that even if Farhod is getting a kickback, I’d rather stay here.
“I’ll take it,” I tell Farhod.
Then, in a move I did not see coming, he turns to the manager and throws a fit.
The room they’ve offered me is on the ground floor, and for this, Farhod wants a steep discount. I wonder if this is part of the charade, but then the shouting continues and he bargains them down so low that he would presumably eat up much of any potential kickback.
He finally nods and tells me I can move my stuff in. The manager glares at Farhod until he understands that he should wait outside.
I’m beginning to see why Farhod has to find clients outside of the train station.
Next we go to lunch. “Putin’s birthday was yesterday,” Farhod tells me, in an attempt at small talk.
“Oh,” I say.
“When’s Obama’s birthday?” he asks.
I tell him I have no idea.
“You don’t know your own president’s birthday?” He shakes his head.
I want to point out that Putin isn’t his president, either, but instead I ask about the history of Uzbekistan. It turns out he’s much more interested in telling me about prison tattoos and pointing out how great it is that you can buy guns in America.
“So who built Samarkand?” I ask.
“One of our great heroes, Timur,” he says. Then he glances furtively around the restaurant. “I was just looking for prison tattoos,” he confides.
Prison tattoos became prevalent in the Stalinist era and served as a way of distinguishing political criminals from “common law” convicts. I ask Farhod how he knows this, hoping there’s some interesting story behind his fascination. “Wikipedia,” he tells me.
As Farhod and I work our way through plov, a tasty, oily staple of Central Asian cuisine made from rice, meat, and spices, I glean a few details about Farhod’s life.
Like many people from Samarkand, Farhod’s ancestors are a mix of Afghan, Uzbek, and Tajik. Ancient cities famed for being centers of trade and learning remain, unsurprisingly, culturally diverse today.
Samarkand is part of modern-day Uzbekistan, but its citizens are predominantly ethnic Tajiks. They carry Uzbekistani passports but tend to identify, culturally, as Tajik, and they speak Tajik, not Uzbek, at home.
Samarkand has a long history of being ethnically Tajik and administratively something e
lse, having been ruled by, among others, Alexander the Great, the Turks, Genghis Khan, the Timurids, some emirs, the Russians, the Soviets, and now the Uzbeks. Some Tajik nationalists call for Samarkand and the nearby predominantly Tajik city of Bukhara to be “reunited” with Tajikistan, but it’s complicated, and perhaps a little like Xi Jinping trying to reincorporate Chinatown into regular China.
Farhod spent a few years in Korea in his early twenties. When I ask him what he did there, he tells me he built a house for Jackie Chan. Farhod says it was fun and free, and then gazes wistfully at the artwork above my head, which happens to depict two mermaids in the throes of copulation. I decide to ask no further questions about that.
Farhod moved back to Uzbekistan to settle down and start a family. His wife just had their fourth child. He tells me it’s important to have a family, especially for women. I want to say that it sounds a lot like he would rather be back in Korea.
“I hope you don’t like girls,” he says. “My last client was a Finnish novelist, and she was also a lesbian.”
At this point, Farhod is driving. He takes out his phone, without pulling over, and starts scrolling through pictures to show me what she looked like.
“I don’t mind!” he insists, showing me pictures of the Finnish woman, smiling, in a gun range in the desert. “I was just shocked!”
I’m starting to realize I mind Farhod.
Farhod claims to be the only guide in Samarkand with a Wi-Fi hot spot in his car. He does not see why people visiting a five-hundred-year-old city might not care about Wi-Fi. Farhod wears a Bluetooth headset and is messaging someone on WhatsApp, the free intentional communication app, whenever he’s not talking and occasionally while he’s driving.
He takes me to the Ulugh Beg Observatory, which was built atop a giant, curved ramp that looks like the kind of thing you’d roll a metal ball down in a science museum. Farhod delivers a lively, engaging lecture on the history of Samarkand, its most famous ruler, Timur, and his grandson Ulugh Beg, a terrible ruler but decent astronomer whose greatest achievements include allowing his empire to crumble and building this ramp and an adjacent observatory in the 1420s. The observatory was promptly destroyed by religious fanatics, and the ramp, which is all that has survived, was rediscovered by a Russian archaeologist in 1908.
Open Mic Night in Moscow Page 14
