Autumn

To be honest, having sex again was exciting, but the company, though pleasant wasn’t thrilling, not terribly intellectually stimulating. I was learning a bit more about Uzbek culture, though.

I never thought that there was a great future for me and Sherzod. I thought about my relationship with him much like I thought about Uzbekistan: it was interesting to live there, but I knew I wouldn’t live there forever. But for now, it was interesting enough, it was quiet, exotic.

My profession took me to some interesting places -- as a correspondent of a leading news agency, I was supposed to be an expert on the situation in the country, but regardless, the country struck me as opaque and ungraspable. Embassy officials, humanitarian assistance workers, World Bank officers, UN officers, human rights defenders might cozy up to me with various scoops and rumors or insider information, nonetheless, I always felt that I in the dark. No government official would talk to me, take my calls, or return my calls, save for those seeking political asylum overseas and then, whatever they said was likely to be tinged with their vengeful agendas. The country was opaque and it was nearly impossible to make news.

Then September 11th happened. I was in a taxi on my way home from dinner when my phone began ringing off the hook with colleagues and friends, hysterically crying into the phone in incomprehensible Russian about some great catastrophe that happened in New York.

I couldn’t understand a word and my taxi driver, whose car was running out of gas, needed to stop at the gas station and he had no idea, nor did he have a radio in his car. My phone battery running out, I called Henrietta, whose cable TV was on the fritz and all she could see on TV was the State TV station with an endless official three-hour speech by the president which wasn’t being interrupted for any news updates. We agreed to meet at my house and watch the news on CNN. We were crying and had no idea what would happen next, whether we would be evacuated from the country, whether our families were alive and well at home, who we couldn't reach because all the phone lines were tied.

Similarly, friends and family in the US were panicked for my safety. But it was as quiet as ever in Tashkent, though there was a war raging to the south of us. In Tashkent, ordinary citizens, like Sherzod had little concept of what was going on in the world outside, even in neighboring Afghanistan. The local TV stations didn’t give much information and the lucky few with satellite dishes or cable TV watched CNN or the Russian stations and had some idea of the attacks on the US and the US’ military engagement in Afghanistan. But this wasn’t too important to most Uzbeks; they were still poor and struggling to get by, though it seemed that more planes flew overhead. The streets on Sundays were quiet as usual, leaving the town with that desert ghost-town feeling. Sherzod and I saw a bit less of each other since I threw myself into my work to stop myself from thinking too much about the hysterical CNN reports about Al-Qaeda’s plot to use a crop-duster to spray biological weapons over America and other dangers in the world.

It seemed like the world’s attention for a moment was focused on Uzbekistan. The US was going to retaliate against the Taliban by attacking Afghanistan. The Uzbeks agreed to be a part of the US coalition against terrorism after 10 days of intense negotiations with the US and with Russia, and finally gave the US an airbase for search and rescue and humanitarian missions. Soon, the military contractors, the US troops would be coming in and the country opened up ever so slightly.

Whereas at first, no one knew if Uzbekistan would allow the US to use their airbase, and neither the Uzbek nor the US government were forthcoming with information, I and my journalist colleagues would make night-time trips to the Tuzel airbase outside the city to follow up on rumors we’d heard by nearby residents of sightings of US Hercules carriers. Only several days later did the government officially acknowledge this and the US and Uzbekistan were officially partners in a warm relationship that has since disintegrated.

Several weeks later, after the Taliban fell, the entire international press corps descended on Tashkent and then down to the southern border with Afghanistan, waiting for the Uzbek-Afghan bridge to open and give access to journalists covering post-Taliban Northern Afghanistan as well as the humanitarian relief efforts. Now, Uzbek officials were willing to talk and give press conferences to the big press delegations. US officials, Congressional delegations, State Department Delegations would come to town and we’d sit around waiting for the preciously scarce information. We’d make excursions through the country to interview the somewhat-mad human rights defender, to travel to the Fergana Valley, to find the supposed hotbed of radical Islamic activity, to the border town near Afghanistan where veterans spoke of their memories of the war in the 1980’s.

In the end, these were all places and stories I’d covered long before, never of much interest to the world news cycle then, when attentions were turned elsewhere. Nothing these days had changed in the country, but suddenly, the world was interested in this mysterious country that was just being discovered. Journalists wrote of its charms and contradictions – the Muslim country where girls walked around the capital in miniskirts, where men could be quoted for saying they were grateful that they lived in peaceful Uzbekistan rather than war-torn Afghanistan; after all, they would say, here you could drink vodka and commit adultery without the fear of a public stoning.  ¶ 1:21 AM