Loneliness


My life slowed down. The journalists had all left Tashkent. Henrietta went home to the US for a few weeks. Sherzod had gone missing and he didn’t return…and I couldn’t find him. I didn’t have his last name – in fact, I had never known it. And he didn’t have a telephone. I imagined that only perhaps, in the time of the bible, did things like this happen.

Work was slow and there wasn’t enough of it to bury myself in it. It was just plain dull in Uzbekistan, much like the way I remembered it when I first arrived, when I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t understand the language, and I felt very much like an outsider, so far removed from the rest of the world. I couldn’t call my friends in the US. Morning here was probably dead of night in New York and I didn’t even think to wake someone up from their slumber simply because I needed someone to talk to. Besides, what was there to say? It was impossible to explain what I was doing here, what my life was like, how I felt. I could not explain how I’d literally lost my boyfriend or how it had happened. I was sure that most of my friends had already written me off as mad as it was and that anything I might say would seem like ravings.

And it wasn’t that kind of day that should have inspired this melancholy. It was a day that could have been the first day of spring – winter seemed like it was over, you could go outside without a coat. The sun was shining. The frost had thawed. But the streets were empty. No people. Sometimes a car would pass. I looked out the window to the park below, sitting on the windowsill, blowing smoke rings against the pane, like looking out onto a ghost town.

I would go out, I decided. I would sit on one of the many empty park benches. I would bring a book and I did. I went outside feeling comfortable in just a T-shirt and jeans and brought out the book I was trying to read, but somehow couldn’t get into and I sat and read the words over and over and looked around the park for signs of life. It was a grim park, actually, a little wild with its swaths of gray grasses and the cracked stonework on the ground and the trail of litter by the walkways. In the spring and summer, with the growth and green and the people walking around, you didn’t notice as much the wear and tear and how the park had most likely seen better days, when it was new and taken care of. Probably at that time children ran around this park and played, lovers sat on the benches – they still sometimes did at night in the dark, the lawns were lusher and greener and cleaner and manicured and the stones weren’t cracked and didn’t have bits of garbage in the cracks between them.

Two men showed up and of all the empty park benches in the whole park that they chose to sit at, they came to mine, sitting at the other end. I couldn’t help but glance at them occasionally from my book, from which I registered nothing. The men were two youngish Uzbeks, speaking Uzbek between themselves animatedly. I listened to the coarse sounds and didn’t understand a word. One of them then left, leaving me alone on the park bench with the other, and a plastic bag in front of him that had some bottles in them. I looked over at him and smiled politely. He was not unpleasant looking, dressed neatly, probably in his mid-20’s.

He asked me in Russian for the time. Everyone did. It was the way people determined if I was local or not, Russian speaking or not; or it was the way they tried to see what kind of watch I wore, or to open a conversation, or pick me up randomly off the street. It was already five, I told him and surely, he could detect the American accented Russian.

“You’re not from here” he said. I nodded. “So you speak English?” I nodded and looked back down at my book a little nervous, realizing that I would be engaging with a complete stranger.


“May I ask you a personal question?” he interjected, and I thought how strange it is to ask a perfect stranger off the street if you could ask a personal question. In fact, it seemed vaguely familiar, as though I knew what the question would be. In fact, when Alijon – that was his name, I later learned, asked me his personal question, I was struck by déjà vu. I had heard this question before and it was a common conversation starter in this park with the blue domes. “Do you prefer men or women,” he asked. And I looked at him askew and he struck me as someone with a clear agenda, an agenda that at the moment quite nearly coincided with my own. He wanted sex.

“Was that your boyfriend who you were talking to?” I asked changing the topic.

“No,” he said. I looked at his hand, which had a wedding band.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” Do you have children?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter. She’s three.”

“That’s nice.” I said and there was a silence. We didn’t directly answer any of each others’ questions, but we knew the answers. “Does your wife know about you?” I asked, always wanting to ask this of the men in their wedding bands who I’d seen at the pionerskaya banya.

“No, of course not. Besides, she lives in Andijan in the provinces.”

“And where do you go to find you men? Here? In the park? There’s no one here.” I was curious to know where people went besides this park, this large swatch of the city with only two people sitting in it. I knew there had to be more – this was a city of three million people and from my window, I saw not a soul out on the street. Where was everyone hiding? “Do you go to piyonerskaya banya?”

“No way,” he said. “There’s never anyone nice there. That’s for old men. Old men who have been going there since the Soviet Union. They go out of habit.”

“So where to go?”

“There’s another banya, off Rustavelli, near Piyonerskaya. Now there, you can find nice men. You can even get a nice private cabin with some young soldiers. And it’s clean there and nice.”
It sounded good to me. I wanted to go there. I wanted to find all these hidden places in the city. I wanted to know how people could possibly live a fulfilling life here, surely there was something happening behind the cold and proper exteriors, the empty streets and parks. Often I’d walk past a store or a street and even though it was quiet and dead seeming, I could smell the sweet smoke of marijuana, which I saw growing wild everywhere. But I felt completely left out of it.

“Maybe you can take me there sometime.”

“Sure,” he said, producing beers from his plastic bag and offering me one, opening the caps off with his teeth. It was a Baltika #9. “We could even go today.”

And with the powerful brew and my boredom powerful and my deep seated desire for some adventure, something new in this city which I had suddenly soured, I refrained from any serious judgement. After all, I didn’t know this guy. Perhaps this was the legendary set-up – an undercover security agent out to bait me. But I didn’t even care. I said, “let’s go today. I just need to stop at my apartment right here, to get some money.”

And he followed me up to my apartment, into the doorway of the building, up the elevator and into my apartment. And he said, “you never answered my question.”

“Which question was that?” I asked.

“If you preferred men or women.”

“Why does it matter?” I asked.

“Because I’d like to suck your cock.”

And I undid my belt and unzipped my pants right there, and he got on his knees and closed his eyes and began to suck my dick which was already hard and it felt pretty good. I wished for a moment that it were Sherzod. But I enjoyed it nonetheless, in fact I probably enjoyed more watching him enjoying sucking than the actual sucking itself. And finally, without much fanfare or effort, I came in his mouth and he seemed to have swallowed and from below, on his knees, he looked up at me and said “thank you.” I suppose I was a little confused by that, I thought as I stuffed my hard on back into my jeans, as I probably should have been the one thanking him.  ¶ 8:17 AM