Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Hasan considers. “In Uzbek language, you can also say a computer is dead,” he concedes. “But in Russian, it would be very rude.”

  I make a note to remember this.

  The chaperone has almost finished getting slowly, quietly drunk in the corner, and before we go to bed, I run through a few more questions with Hasan.

  “What are the benefits of marriage?” I read off the page of his book.

  He considers for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admits. “When people get married, they start to have problems.”

  8

  An Invitation to a Stranger’s Wedding (Uzbekistan)

  I’m flying to Urgench, Uzbekistan, a city of little note except that it happens to have an airport. From Urgench, I will take a taxi to Khiva, another ancient city half-buried in the desert, allegedly given a fresh coat of paint to attract French pensioners.

  While I’m waiting in line at the airport, probably wearing my face in its perpetual mask of Am I lost?, a guy my age in a sharp suit asks me, in English, if I’m flying to Urgench.

  He has a sweet smile, and I tell him I am.

  “You’re in the right line,” he assures me.

  I thank him and turn back around, because I’m old enough to know the dangers of mixing small talk with air travel. Also, my experience with Farhod the tour guide/aspiring guerrilla fertility specialist has made me wary of interacting with the opposite sex.

  This guy doesn’t get the hint.

  “What are you doing in Urgench?” he asks.

  “I’m going to Khiva,” I say, pressing my lips into a tight smile.

  “What are you doing there?” he continues.

  His name is Aziz, and he works as some kind of economic advisor for the government of Uzbekistan. The fact that he works for the state raises flags, because the Uzbekistani government is one step away from having to put up those posters that say, “It’s been __ days since the international community condemned us for something that we think is totally okay and normal!” He lives in Tashkent, but he grew up in Urgench, and he’s flying home to be the best man in his best friend’s wedding.

  “Are you traveling alone?” he asks, inevitably.

  I nod and brace myself for one of three responses: Are you afraid? You must be frightened! And, as of earlier this morning, That must be boring!

  But instead, he smiles and says, “That’s cool.”

  He’s cute, seems nice, and doesn’t appear to be working up the courage to propose to and/or murder me, but I’m still wary. We chat more, and I learn he went to graduate school in Korea and travels all over the world for work. But this, too, seems suspect. What kind of economic advisor travels abroad for his job? Is this just a cover for more sinister work, like, perhaps tracking down Uzbekistani dissidents abroad and bringing them to injustice? Oh, except it’s more like meeting with people about investment opportunities and joint ventures. Sometimes he goes to Shanghai. He describes a bar he went to on his most recent visit, and I recognize it from details he recounts.

  This last reveal makes my heart soar with how small and knowable the world can be, how much more interconnected we all are than we think! I’m so high on this that I’m not prepared for the question he asks me as the bus drops us off at the stair car next to our airplane.

  “Maybe we can ask someone to switch seats, so that we can sit together?”

  I’m horrified.

  Like anyone who constantly feels busy while juggling little to no actual responsibilities, I believe that a flight is my time. Airplanes are sacred for me because they are blissfully free of distraction. No one can call or text or send you a link to a Twitter-feed black hole that will swallow the rest of your workday. The hours that I spend with my devices in airplane mode are my most productive. My ritual for the fourteen-hour flight home from China includes pulling up my notes and interviews for a business report I’ve been avoiding, banging out the article, catching up on some reading, watching a movie, washing an Ambien down with a glass of wine, and then, depending on whether or not I’ve eaten dinner, potentially spilling my guts to the non-English-speaking grandmother beside me.

  But I can’t think of a good excuse fast enough, and so I say sure and pray that our seatmates will be unaccommodating.

  Aziz exchanges a few words with a man in the aisle, and then turns to me and grins. “He says it’s no problem.”

  Great, I think.

  Aziz, like the little girl on the train, has brought NOTHING with which to distract himself on the flight. As we take off, Aziz and I continue to chat about our lives and our work and our travels, and when the conversation peters out, he stares serenely at the seat ahead of him, hands folded in his lap.

  I wait for these pauses to grow long enough that I can politely switch on my Kindle, but each time we approach that critical moment, Aziz turns to me with another question.

  I hear more about his work for the government, his trips to China. We chat about the differences between Central Asian cultures, and I ask him why the country shut down for a day in honor of a national teachers’ holiday. “Teachers are very important to us,” he says solemnly.

  Aziz keeps bringing up Urgench, casually, almost shyly, suggesting I should visit, hinting that he’ll show me around, and I feign a blissful obliviousness to protect myself from being murdered in a city whose Wikitravel page has a long, robust “Getting In” section, and nothing under “See,” “Do,” “Buy,” “Eat,” or “Drink.”

  Aziz tells me about Uzbekistan and I tell him about my trip, and at some point a flight attendant comes by with sandwiches that have the wrong bread-to-mayo ratio, which if you’re even measuring in rations, you have a problem. I pick at mine politely while Aziz inhales his. After the food has been cleared, I’m staring at the clouds through the window, trying to finagle a way to turn on my Kindle, when Aziz turns to me.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks.

  I know where this is going and try desperately to deflect. “You know, like, looking around Khiva, and, um . . .” I trail off, defeated.

  “You should come to the wedding with me.”

  Should I?

  Arguments in favor: When the flight attendant announces we’re about to land, I’m surprised. It feels like we just took off. Somehow, my conversation with Aziz made the flight zip by. I suddenly realize how handsome he is.

  Arguments against: At baggage claim, Aziz turns into a different person. In the air, he’d been zen and demure, hands folded like a Buddhist monk, but on the ground, he’s glued to his cell phone. He’s distracted. He keeps cutting me off.

  This frazzled, phone-addled Aziz is kind of making me hope that he’s forgotten about this whole wedding invitation thing, but no, no, he wants me to come back to Urgench tomorrow so that he can show me around and then take me to his friend’s wedding.

  Outside the train station, there’s a driver waiting with my name on a sign. I’m embarrassed by how ostentatious this seems, and also because the sign says “Mr. Audrey Murray.”

  “Your surname is Murray?” Aziz laughs. I tell him it is. I don’t ask why it’s funny. I promise to see him tomorrow, though I’m kind of hoping I won’t. Although, crap, now he knows my full name.

  By the next morning, I’m full of indecision over whether I want to go to the wedding. On the one hand, weddings are fun, and I’m eager to disprove the taxi driver from the airport who insinuated that I have no friends, and therefore no life. On the other hand, I can’t shake the feeling that inviting a stranger on an airplane to a wedding feels like something only a murderer would do. A polite murderer. But still.

  I decide to check out Khiva in case I have to meet Aziz for a tour of this stupid city Urgench, whose main tourist attraction Aziz has described as a statue of a book.

  The guidebook swears that Khiva is best viewed at dawn from a high vantage. It suggests that I watch the sunrise from atop the Islom Hoja Minaret, letting the majestic splendor of the ancient mudstone buildings wash over me and inspire me to p
aint or write poetry or leap to my death. Instead, I climb to the roof of my guesthouse, where I catch the last pink twinges of sunrise hovering over the patchwork of flat roofs, punctuated by turquoise cupolas. I am awash in feelings of coldness, and also hunger.

  After breakfast, I call Aziz to see where he wants to meet and what he meant by “afternoon.” He doesn’t answer.

  Unfazed, I head out to explore Khiva.

  I wander into an old temple with matchstick pillars burrowed under the street. Inside, it’s cold and dark, save from light streaming in through a skylight, and empty, except for a woman selling knitted shoes.

  Climbing the dark, winding stairs of the adjacent tower, I pass a young Uzbek couple passionately making out, oblivious to the American tourist awkwardly trying to step around them while suddenly realizing why Uzbekistan might have so many towers.

  From the top, the city is a swath of buildings as brown as the sand that birthed them. At the bottom, I call Aziz again. No answer. I send him a text message. My screen darkens with the heaviness of an unanswered question.

  I begin to wonder if I’ve been uninvited from the wedding.

  “So, I can wear anything to a wedding?” It’s still unconfirmed whether I’ll be going, but I’m soliciting wardrobe advice from my guesthouse manager, Jaloladdin, who, if I’m being honest, is starting to freak me out a little. His tendency to speak without facial expression is coupled with a habit of appearing in rooms suddenly, without noise or warning. He’s already made me yelp twice, and not in the I have very strong opinions about this bakery sense.

  “Yes.” He nods. He looks at my jeans and turquoise Windbreaker. “This is fine to wear to the wedding.”

  I’m horrified. “No, no,” I say. I hold the black dress I’ve brought down from my room to show him. “I have this dress,” I explain. “But I’m not sure if it’s bad to wear black to a wedding in Uzbekistan?”

  “It’s not a problem,” he insists.

  I’m suspicious of any sartorial tips from someone who suggested I wear outdoor gear to a wedding, so I ask Jaloladdin to check with his non-English-speaking sisters in the back room. Jaloladdin emerges from a “discussion” thirty seconds later and assures me that they agree.

  At the very least, I suspect it would be inappropriate for me to expose my bare legs, so I head to a market just inside the gates of the old town. It’s the type of Central Asian one-stop shop where you can buy everything from knockoff DVDs to a freshly slaughtered goat. The one thing that turns out to be difficult to find is tights.

  I wander the aisles of fruit and Chinese electronics and underwear, casually striking up conversations with vendors who might be able to give me fashion tips.

  “My friend is getting married,” I say. “In Uzbekistan, wedding, black?”

  The more I fear my invitation has been rescinded, the greater my need to run the potential story by strangers, gauge their reactions, and see what I might be missing. I check my phone: still no response from Aziz.

  I finally find a woman selling tights. The only pair for sale is loose-fitting and slouchy, with a control top that offers no control and is covered in butterflies.

  “I’m going to my friend’s wedding,” I say.

  She smiles and nods.

  I stare at my phone, as though I can will the black screen to light up with an incoming message.

  I visit an ancient palace filled with elegantly tiled courtyards and a pop-up store that sells PVC piping.

  “Women in Khorezm are famous for special dancing,” Aziz told me on the plane, which makes me even sadder for what could have been, dance floor–wise. I’ve mastered the sacred wedding party rituals that are the Macarena and the Cotton-Eyed Joe, and I can usually even fake my way through the Electric Slide.

  Finally, at the hostel, I call one last time, reasoning that, if I keep this up, Aziz will have just cause for filing a restraining order. This time, someone picks up, and after a long breath, I hear, “Hello?”

  Now that the wedding attending is back on, so are my concerns that I might be out of place, or severely underdressed, or at risk of being murdered.

  But while there are plenty of people I can pester about wearing black, I don’t have anyone to whom I can say, Is this weird? I can’t ask Jaloladdin, because I’ve insinuated, via repeated insistence, that the person getting married is a friend, and it seems a little late to clarify that when I said friend, I meant stranger.

  I put on my dress and my butterfly control-top tights and stare at myself in the mirror. I decide that I will be brave. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll do what people do when they’re uncomfortable at weddings the world over: get drunk.

  The driver chauffeuring me to Urgench flashes a thumbs-up to each car we pass. At first, I assume he’s having an unusually great day, or that he finds the sight of the purple twilight creeping up over the fallow cotton fields as moving as I do, but just to check I ask him.

  “It means there are no police,” he tells me.

  Oh, great. So he’s scouting for murder locations, too.

  The driver drops me off outside of a hair salon where Aziz is getting a trim. Aziz rushes out with a towel still draped around his shoulders. There’s an awkward second where we’re unsure how to greet each other, but then he reaches out and shakes my hand, and, in this moment, I know I’ll be okay. I know Aziz won’t try to murder or sacrifice or embarrass me. He apologizes for not being ready, then shows me to his car and rushes inside to finish his haircut.

  As we drive to the groom’s house for some kind of prewedding festivity, I find out why Aziz wasn’t answering my calls this morning.

  “There was a lot of vodka last night,” he admits.

  So he wasn’t debating rescinding my invitation; he was hungover.

  “Do you know about these houses?” Aziz asks, gesturing to a row of identical one-story yellow houses that keep reappearing between fallow fields. He tells me they’re part of a rural housing initiative. In Uzbekistan, poverty is concentrated in the countryside, where, according to government statistics, 70 percent of the country’s poor reside. An underdeveloped mortgage market makes it difficult for people to buy real estate with anything but cash; the housing initiative built homes and provided would-be home buyers with access to loans to buy them.

  We pull into one of these developments, where the groom’s parents live. Aziz leaves the car running as we head inside.

  The house is small, but a fairly open-plan interior creates a sense of spaciousness. The floors are carpeted, and flies buzz lazily above the copious spread of fruits and candies, perhaps because the open windows have no screens.

  The groom and his father wear identical tracksuits and seem unhurried in their preparations for the impending wedding.

  Aziz says something to the groom, who turns to me and says hello in Chinese.

  I blink. “Why do you speak Chinese?” I blurt out.

  “I studied in China,” he tells me. “And I go back every year for work.”

  Chinese feels stiff and ungainly in my mouth as I work to untangle it from the Russian I’ve spent a month leaning on for survival. The human brain has an annoying tendency not to distinguish between foreign languages, and mine has shelved French, Chinese, and Russian together on a rack labeled, “Languages you should not try to use in a medical emergency.” I can say much more in Chinese than I can in Russian, but I find Russian words slipping into my Chinese. It’s annoyingly simple words, too—things I’ve known how to say in Chinese for years. Perhaps you were looking for the Russian word for work? my brain offers. Even though that constitutes a solid 10 percent of your total Russian vocabulary?

  The groom’s mother fusses over us, making comments I don’t understand.

  “She’s curious if you drink Coke,” Aziz translates.

  “Coke is American!” I exclaim, before realizing this answer makes no sense. “I am American,” I add meekly.

  Aziz announces it’s time to go, and outside, I realize that his car has been i
dling for the past thirty minutes.

  The wedding takes place in a cavernous reception hall the size of a small cruise ship. The ceilings are thirty feet high and dripping with chandeliers. The other guests are dressed in a wide array of attire. Most men wear suits, but some wear jeans, as do a few of the women. Most of the older women wear traditional tunics; the younger, modest dresses. It turns out Jaloladdin wasn’t steering me wrong: I probably could have worn my Windbreaker.

  Aziz drops me off at an empty table and, with an apologetic smile, abandons me to perform his best-manly duties. A bowl of fruit, loaves of bread, and two liters of vodka with mixers are spread out on the table.

  I feel awkward sitting by myself, a sensation I remedy by taking four unnecessary trips to the bathroom.

  I come back from one to find my table filled with fifteen guys who went to school with the groom and Aziz. They wear Western suits, sans ties, and the youthful grins of a reunion.

  “We call him Titanic,” one says, gesturing to a handsome man blushing on the other side of the table.

  “Huh?”

  “He looks like Leonardo DiCaprio, no?”

  I consider. I suppose Titanic does resemble Leonardo DiCaprio, in that both men are incredibly good-looking and otherwise look nothing alike. “Oh, yeah,” I say.

  Everyone at the table speaks English because the boys attended a rigorous boarding school that they tested into but paid no money to attend. I feel a growing sense of commonality with my tablemates, who, like me, are twenty-eight, and speak English, and have traveled abroad.

  And then there are ways in which we differ.

  “How do you motivate your students?” Ruslan asks.

  I’m sitting between Ruslan, an affable guy whose shirt stretches tight to reach across his belly, and his business partner Tim, who has a thin build and even thinner smile. Tim recently left his job at Coca-Cola to start a TOEFL training center with Ruslan because he wanted to be his own boss, which I guess means millennials also exist in Uzbekistan.