White White Black Stork, Again

I wondered if a relationship with Sherzod was like a marriage of convenience. Here I was about as desperate for something as I had ever been since adolescence. And there he was, very attractive, sweet, kind, gentle; and yet there was something substantively missing. We didn’t have very much to talk about and he truly was a world apart from me. He even lived in that part of Tashkent, in what they called the "Old City" -- the traditional district that for me felt like looking through the glass of the displays at the Museum of Natural History. I could see the costumes, the furniture, the ritual, but I could never truly understand what was going on inside.

I knew that there was something to Sherzod, experiences, feelings, as there are in all of us. But I had no idea how to access them. His face truly was like a mask, only sometimes betraying a feeling that I could understand. Perhaps I just didn't read the signals correctly. Sometimes though, I felt that I did, but it was accidental and paltry, leaving me dissatisfied and hoping for a bit more. I knew that there might be a whole landscape in there for me to discover, but he didn’t seem to let me get very close.

My friend Ariel happened to be passing through Tashkent that week. Now, it is not often that people “pass through” Tashkent and none of my friends from home ever came to visit me. They had almost no concept of where I was, and few had even left the island of Manhattan in the last decade. Ariel was an exception, a documentary filmmaker, who had just spent a month in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban and covering the emerging music scene there. He decided that he’d drop in on me, see what my life was like, since he was in the neighborhood.

When he came, he was surprised that Tashkent had cars and high rise buildings and girls in miniskirts and disco music blaring on the promenades, alcohol available everywhere. It was no backwater like Afghanistan, it was no cosmopolitan city like New York – it was neither, but a bit of both, something unexplainable and in-between. like the streets riddled by the occasional donkey cart riding alongside our taxi in rush-hour traffic. For him, it was fascinating and after Afghanistan, significantly more comfortable. Now he would blow my cover to my friends back home, shatter the myth that I traveled to work by camel through sandy desert paths, covered in a yashmak. However, he did understand one of the hardships of Tashkent -- what we called Tamerlane's revenge -- intestinal distress.

I decided to take him out to see my favorite play “White White Black Stork” at the theater, which I had seen so many times, but never tired of watching. The actor who played the hero was someone who I had drank with at Lucky's, a handsome, dreamy boy like the character he played, whom I at one time had a crush on.

Sherzod happened to call me that evening, asking if I was free, and I invited him to join us at the theater. I suppose it was like a first date for us; had I his phone number, perhaps I would have organized things differently.

He met us at the theater, and though he was bashful before and friendly to Ariel, I could notice him eyeing him suspiciously. Ariel saw him as fascinating as he did everything in Tashkent, and handsome too, which he said. But he did not say, but I did observe it that he was puzzled by the golden teeth.

I translated the play for Ariel, though it wasn’t entirely necessary. The play was so universal and switched between Russian and Uzbek languages, that though I didn’t even understand every Uzbek word, like anyone else watching, I could feel everything that was happening on the stage.

During the intermission, we went to the bar and Ariel and I utilized the free moment, as we had with all the free moments we saw each other in Tashkent to catch up intensely, to gossip about people in New York, including my ex-boyfriend who had gained a lot of weight, to tell me about his trip in Afghanistan, or the developments in his private life. Sherzod sat with us the whole time, and I sensed that either he didn’t catch everything we were saying, as we spoke a fast and slangy English, and about things so remote or far from his life.

When Ariel went to the rest room, he mentioned that Ariel was very handsome. “Is he your boyfriend?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. I even added, “Ariel is straight.”

“Is he staying at your apartment?”

“Yes,” I told him. He remained silent, moody.

After the intermission, we watched unforld the story of the scandalized boy, forced into marriage, unable to consummate his marriage on the wedding night and the three following nights, as the elderly women of the family sat outside the door of the marital bedroom, waiting to inspect the sheets. We watched the family of the bride, later going to the Russian occupation’s court house, taking back their daughter from the defective groom and insistin they keep the dowry and damages, for the shame the groom and his family brought upon them. And we watched the groom returning back to his beloved tree, to find it burned down and his poems and drawings hidden in its branches, ashes, save for the verses of his poem of the white white black stork.

We sat in our seats for a little while in silence as the lights went up. Ariel went to the bathroom again. Sherzod and I sat alone in the theater for a moment. He looked as though he was fighting a tear from falling from his eye. I could only imagine that the play had hit close to home for him. I had seen the play so many times that I was no longer as teary at the end as I had been the first time. “Did you enjoy it?” I asked.

"Yes, very much," he said.

“The same thing happens today, no?”

And with a knowing look in his eye, he nodded. And then his face returned into that stony mask.

For a moment, I did feel like I saw a little more of him, a little bit more of what it was like to be him, to be an Uzbek gay man from the provinces who lived somewhere in the old city among the traditional Uzbeks.  ¶ 8:00 AM