At the Bazaar

Over time, during the silences, in my growing sobriety, I got to know Sherzod. I learned a bit more about his family, which was provincial elite, but still, provincial elite from a depressed province, which meant that your children considered the option of working as labor migrants overseas. He lived in the living room of his uncle’s apartment in Chirchik, which was a small industrial town right outside Tashkent. He didn’t have any ambitions of note, no serious plans for the future save for the idea of going to the United Arab Emirates to work. And yet, this lack of ambition, lack of a plan was not terribly uncommon here. People were just trying to get by and dreaming of something else, something better.

The more time I spent around him, I began to drink less and sometimes drank not at all. And I grew more aware of my surroundings, now that there was someone to explain it all. I made an effort to learn the Uzbek language, bought a textbook, memorized survival words and phrases – how to greet people, give directions to a taxi driver, haggle down the price of tomatoes in the bazaar, already so cheap.

I ventured into parts of the city that I’d been scared of before, like the bazaars, full of Uzbeks from the provinces who struck me as wild and rude. They shouted loudly, moved about abruptly, squatted on the side of the streets, loitering spitting sunflower seed shells out of their mouths or chewing nosavoi – opiate laced tobacco. They seemed such a world apart from the refined urban Uzbeks, like Sherzod. This was the place where most Uzbeks made their livelihood. They sold, they farmed, they shuttle-traded, they sold their services at the labor bazaar. There was even word that among the laborers, there were women willing to sell their babies.

“Can you believe that?” I’d ask Sherzod.

“What else are people supposed to do?” he said, throwing up his hands. But wandering through the bazaar, and determined to find those women, we never found them; perhaps it was just a myth out there existing solely to make others like Sherzod complain less and think --you were in pretty good shape if you had a home and weren’t starving and not in the position to have to sell the children.

I would go to the bazaar to do my marketing now, instead of taking all my meals at restaurants. Sherzod would come, helping me buy the raw products I needed to make my favorite foods, foods you wouldn’t find in the supermarkets in Tashkent, or in the restaurants, like pesto sauce, spinach pie, chocolate brownies, lemon-honey chicken breasts... At the bazaar I’d have the chance to practice my Uzbek, when I haggled the prices of the goods. “You don’t bargain well,” Sherzod would say. “They don’t give you good prices because you are an American.” And then after he would tell me that I paid too much, even though the difference would be pennies, and even though, for me, everything was so cheap to begin with. Sometimes he would patronizingly intervene and insist on doing the bargaining himself.

When he did that, it was interesting – a complete transformation in Sherzod from the way he spoke with me in his gentlemanly and measured English, with the way he spoke Uzbek with the sellers. It was crude sounding, much like the way I’d heard Uzbek spoken on the street – with its heavy guttural sounds, harsh intonations and grunting interjections. He was like a completely different person that I felt as though I didn’t know, but was excited by.

At home, I would cook while he watched TV. When I’d put out the meal, he’d eye my unfamiliar creations and move them around silently on his plate. “Just try it. You don’t have to eat it,” I’d say. “We can go to the golubiye kupola down the street for a pilaf.”

In the end, he’d take a little taste, enjoy the meal, scarf it down and then ask for more. The delight I had in that was just more incentive to cook more and become this angel in the house. I didn’t drink with my meals anymore, didn’t smoke in the house, as Sherzod didn’t like the smell of smoke. We didn’t go out much, save to the bazaar sometimes to get the food that I would cook. Mostly, we stayed around the house, keeping our affair pretty quiet and domestic. Only one time when he was over, there was someone knocking at the door. Though I never answered the door, I looked through the peephole and only saw Stanislav, who knew where I lived, and for whom I didn’t open the door.

In bed, I would ask Sherzod to speak to me in Uzbek during sex. He said he didn’t feel comfortable doing it. “But you say things in English,” I said. And he would say these things to me in bed in English, that practically made me laugh out loud, such as “darling,” or “oh my darling,” or “you drive me crazy.”

I begged and pleaded and at first he refused. But I persisted, and finally he agreed. He would moan “jonim,” a term of endearment, during sex and said some other things I didn’t understand at all. Sometimes the tone was rough, like the way the tomato sellers spoke it when you bargained with them. Needless to say, it turned me on so much and I never had to ask him to speak Uzbek to me in bed after that, he just did, because the sex was just so much better. And my vocabulary grew.  ¶ 7:30 AM