Saturday, August 05, 2006
For now it was fine...
The thing about Sherzod was that I just didn’t feel strongly enough about him being around me those days. I felt that given a choice, say, between spending time with him or with the foreign correspondents, I would prefer to be with the correspondents. If he came over, for dinner and sex and then left, as he always did, the moment he was out the door, I was on the phone trying to locate the correspondents to join them at some happening noisy club.
Either this was a perfect relationship, or it just the opposite. The beauty of it was that I seemed to have these two parts of my life completely separate and not interfering with each other, and both contradicting each other in their own ways.
With Sherzod, it was the reality of Uzbek life that I got a taste of. The lethargy, the depression, the inactivity. I could understand how people really lived here, their attitudes, the feelings of hopelessness, the lack of opportunity, the not-quite poverty, but certainly not extravagant lifestyle. On the other hand, he had absolutely no consciousness of the world outside of Uzbekistan. Certainly life was tough and why think about what was going on outside, but still, it was so much so that it simply reinforced their isolation. Whenever I switched the TV to the BBC, he switched it back to music videos or entertainment shows.
With the journalists, there was constant awareness and discussion, always full of animation and laughter and often heavy drinking; it almost seemed like a contradiction to the surroundings – a sort of extravagance in the poverty around us, like eating a rich pastry, a profiterole for example, in Uzbekistan, a desert that cost as much as what a street sweeper earned in one month.
It was difficult to be torn between the two worlds and I found myself fortunate, somewhat able to straddle both. Neither world was one that was complete or sustainable. The Uzbek world, I only saw the surface of, and one day I would leave. The journalists would only be here for a short time, that is, until the story for them ended and the next one began.
I never told Sherzod much about my other life, my friends, my work. He’d had a taste of it when I took him to The Café, and though I was sure he was impressed, he never asked to return there. And he didn’t ask about my friends. He felt awkward with this whole part of my life that he didn’t understand, have access to, perhaps feared. I told Henrietta about it and she said that more and more it seemed like the way her husband felt about me. There was no need for him to feel jealous or threatened by a gay man. But I seemed to occupy a place in his wife’s mind that he seemingly couldn’t access or so we supposed; it was like a cultural divide.
At this time, I felt that I needed all the distractions I could have, rather than sit at home and watch CNN and the apocalyptic images and stories about al-Qaeda obtaining crop dusters to spread biological weapons around America, which was something that made me nervous. In this respect, it was better to surround myself with the Uzbeks who didn’t know about what was going on in the world and were fine with it. Even though there was a war just across the border in Afghanistan, they were fine, they continued to hold their weddings, drink on the weekends, go to the bazaars, and show singing and dancing all morning on the television.
I heard from friends at home in New York that even for months after 9/11, and even if they hadn’t lost anyone, they would find themselves spontaneously begin worrying even crying. Relative to that, I felt like I was in the safest pace in the world. The only thing I was afraid of at this time was flying. I couldn’t imagine getting on a plane and I even decided to postpone my month-long home leave, which I was supposed to take in January. I would stay put for a while, I decided. I wasn’t missing home too much at this time. My life, my work, my friends, apartment, were all here for now. At home, while I missed the familiar there, I had a crazy family and I worried that friends might not understand me anymore, that the would turn to strangers by now, as I lived a life I felt was hard to justify, let alone explain, describe.
Sure, initially there were some concerns about the tensions in Afghanistan spilling over into Uzbekistan, and that this would mean that I would be evacuated. Some foreigners had already left, and I wondered whether it would become so dangerous that I would have to leave myself. And each day, I felt I had to cherish the moment as though tomorrow I could be leaving. All I owned could easily be put into 2 suitcases in the event of a quick evacuation. It would be sad if it came down to that.
If I left, I wondered what would become of Sherzod. Would I miss him? I could never bring him with me to the US -- that was a crazy idea. What would he do there? Sit on the sofa and watch TV? That’s all I really ever saw him do here, that, eat, and have sex with me. I would probably wind up having to support him. He wouldn’t understand American life, the work ethic, the culture, the food, that a man doesn’t have a mother or a sister in law to look after him, wash his clothes, cook his meals. He wasn’t ready for America. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t much of a future for us together. But for now it was fine. ¶ 7:11 PM
The thing about Sherzod was that I just didn’t feel strongly enough about him being around me those days. I felt that given a choice, say, between spending time with him or with the foreign correspondents, I would prefer to be with the correspondents. If he came over, for dinner and sex and then left, as he always did, the moment he was out the door, I was on the phone trying to locate the correspondents to join them at some happening noisy club.
Either this was a perfect relationship, or it just the opposite. The beauty of it was that I seemed to have these two parts of my life completely separate and not interfering with each other, and both contradicting each other in their own ways.
With Sherzod, it was the reality of Uzbek life that I got a taste of. The lethargy, the depression, the inactivity. I could understand how people really lived here, their attitudes, the feelings of hopelessness, the lack of opportunity, the not-quite poverty, but certainly not extravagant lifestyle. On the other hand, he had absolutely no consciousness of the world outside of Uzbekistan. Certainly life was tough and why think about what was going on outside, but still, it was so much so that it simply reinforced their isolation. Whenever I switched the TV to the BBC, he switched it back to music videos or entertainment shows.
With the journalists, there was constant awareness and discussion, always full of animation and laughter and often heavy drinking; it almost seemed like a contradiction to the surroundings – a sort of extravagance in the poverty around us, like eating a rich pastry, a profiterole for example, in Uzbekistan, a desert that cost as much as what a street sweeper earned in one month.
It was difficult to be torn between the two worlds and I found myself fortunate, somewhat able to straddle both. Neither world was one that was complete or sustainable. The Uzbek world, I only saw the surface of, and one day I would leave. The journalists would only be here for a short time, that is, until the story for them ended and the next one began.
I never told Sherzod much about my other life, my friends, my work. He’d had a taste of it when I took him to The Café, and though I was sure he was impressed, he never asked to return there. And he didn’t ask about my friends. He felt awkward with this whole part of my life that he didn’t understand, have access to, perhaps feared. I told Henrietta about it and she said that more and more it seemed like the way her husband felt about me. There was no need for him to feel jealous or threatened by a gay man. But I seemed to occupy a place in his wife’s mind that he seemingly couldn’t access or so we supposed; it was like a cultural divide.
At this time, I felt that I needed all the distractions I could have, rather than sit at home and watch CNN and the apocalyptic images and stories about al-Qaeda obtaining crop dusters to spread biological weapons around America, which was something that made me nervous. In this respect, it was better to surround myself with the Uzbeks who didn’t know about what was going on in the world and were fine with it. Even though there was a war just across the border in Afghanistan, they were fine, they continued to hold their weddings, drink on the weekends, go to the bazaars, and show singing and dancing all morning on the television.
I heard from friends at home in New York that even for months after 9/11, and even if they hadn’t lost anyone, they would find themselves spontaneously begin worrying even crying. Relative to that, I felt like I was in the safest pace in the world. The only thing I was afraid of at this time was flying. I couldn’t imagine getting on a plane and I even decided to postpone my month-long home leave, which I was supposed to take in January. I would stay put for a while, I decided. I wasn’t missing home too much at this time. My life, my work, my friends, apartment, were all here for now. At home, while I missed the familiar there, I had a crazy family and I worried that friends might not understand me anymore, that the would turn to strangers by now, as I lived a life I felt was hard to justify, let alone explain, describe.
Sure, initially there were some concerns about the tensions in Afghanistan spilling over into Uzbekistan, and that this would mean that I would be evacuated. Some foreigners had already left, and I wondered whether it would become so dangerous that I would have to leave myself. And each day, I felt I had to cherish the moment as though tomorrow I could be leaving. All I owned could easily be put into 2 suitcases in the event of a quick evacuation. It would be sad if it came down to that.
If I left, I wondered what would become of Sherzod. Would I miss him? I could never bring him with me to the US -- that was a crazy idea. What would he do there? Sit on the sofa and watch TV? That’s all I really ever saw him do here, that, eat, and have sex with me. I would probably wind up having to support him. He wouldn’t understand American life, the work ethic, the culture, the food, that a man doesn’t have a mother or a sister in law to look after him, wash his clothes, cook his meals. He wasn’t ready for America. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t much of a future for us together. But for now it was fine. ¶ 7:11 PM
