Natasha Continues Talking....

I put on my headsets to try and watch the movie that they had just begun to show. But it seemed that nonetheless, Natasha continued to carry on her conversation with me. “I don’t believe you that there are such men in the capital that can take care of themselves, as you say. Our men, they all drink. They run around.”

Sure there were stereotypes that the men drank. Perhaps this was what Natasha was programmed to say. I’d seen it on the mail order bride sites why the local beauties prefer foreign men as husbands, because foreign men didn’t drink and whore like the local men. Yes, there were such stereotypes. Like all stereotypes, there was some truth to them. But I recalled in my head how little my friends and colleagues drank.

“You know, maybe where you are from they drink, but in the capital, many men don’t drink. They take care of themselves. Most of my friends don’t drink much,” I said. “Some not at all.”

“You are being a stupid, naïve American,” she said to me condescendingly. “They all drink. The ones you know, who don’t drink, don’t drink because they have been through the hypnosis.”

“The hypnosis?” I asked.

“Yes, “she said confidently. “They had the hypnosis, but they won’t tell you about it, because it is a very shameful thing.”

Perhaps there was such a thing. In all the time I’d been in Uzbekistan, with all the people I had spoken to or met, I had heard of many crazy things, like using urine to cure sprains and how cold water gives you a sore throat or how a yeast infection was like the vagina having a cold, or how you needed sex because it provided vitamins and other such things. But never had I heard of the hypnosis to cure alcoholism.

She continued rambling on about Uzbekistan as being full of bad and silly people, of Uzbeks being wild, primitive people, of the Russians who hadn’t managed to leave yet were either losers or sitting on their suitcases, ready to leave, and with their departure, the country was certain to have no future. Though I couldn’t keep up with her ramblings, I got the gist that she felt that people had no taste, didn’t know what was good, real, quality. And when I started to nod off to sleep, she began a story that she couldn’t seem to tell, interrupted by fits of laughter, about how several years ago, when a group of American missionary children came to visit her small town – and they were greeted by one of the richest families in the town, the family of the mob boss, in their piss-fancy refurbished apartment, done in a cheap formika “European style.” The gracious, earnest Americans, not realizing that what they were seeing was the absolute best that the town had to offer, the pride of its mob boss, the mob boss not realizing how shabby it might have looked to a foreigner…they said “we understand, we were poor once too. But don’t worry, you won’t be poor forever.”

I closed my eyes trying to shut her out. Perhaps she was right. There were a lot of things I had seen that struck me as petty or silly or venal, but I couldn’t understand it all –I didn’t grow up in this culture, under the Soviet system. To look down on it all would be very superior, snobbish.
Maybe this was a terrible country. There were times where I thought it, too. I didn’t understand peoples’ obsession with material goods, with America’s consumer culture, which for me was so refreshing to be so far away from. But then again, I hadn’t experienced what these people had experienced – poor and deprived of goods for so long, subject to economic crisis after crisis.

For the most part, I liked it here. I didn’t know why. I felt comfortable here, no pressure to be anything more than a simple person, living in a simple apartment, wearing simple clothes. No pressures to live up to the expectations of family and friends at home. In fact, a feeling of very ittle expected of me besides doing my job, and perhaps waking myself up in the morning and feeding myself. Strangely, in this country which straightjacketed me by its conservative culture, forced me to behave in ways that were not immediately natural to me, I felt a certain kind of freedom inside, a calm, a quiet, but really this was only when I was in the privacy of my home, or in the privacy of my own thoughts. Perhaps it was just the way living here allowed me to easily forget myself, the way it was easy to lose yourself in another language, in the alien culture, in the massive soviet architecture, in the intense heat of the summer. I could forget myself and really begin living my life; or I felt I could.

But Natasha continued talking, now about her town’s new supermarket, which her friends just showed her. It was a new kind, a tawdry imitation of American style supermarkets…not the old soviet kinds, where everything is behind glass and you have to ask for it. “Everything was out on open shelves,” she said and laughed. “But they don’t sell anything there…just vodka, cooking oil and condiments, rows and rows of the same. No choices.” Her friends were so proud of their pathetic supermarket. But Natasha explained that the supermarket was dehumanizing, there was always someone following you, watching you suspiciously. “You don’t even feel like a person,” she said. “And my friends, they just don’t understand this at all. Can you imagine how I felt the first time I walked into a Wal-Mart in the US – a store where they have everything you can possibly imagine in the world, a whole aisle is just of food for your pets. And you just put whatever you want into your basket, as you wish, no one follows you around, watches you. In America, you feel like a person.”

I could somehow understand Natasha’s idea of feeling like a person, of having a respite from the powers that follow you, watch you observe you, tell you what to do. Perhaps that was her idea of freedom. Mine was being away from my family – in fact, I realized that being around my family was often downright degrading, even dehumanizing, in its own way, as dehumanizing as living in an erratic dictatorship where the rules of the game kept changing. I remembered my anxiousness about seeing family members in particular. I wondered about things back home possibly all changing. I wondered about the things that were bad before I left, were they worse?

So, I finally fell asleep, while Natasha was talking. It was no use arguing with her, as she had a lovely fixed idea in her head that she was now in a better place than the place she had just left. It was likely true, and I didn’t want to shatter her idyllic happiness. Peoples’ happiness should be respected, be it a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, a nice supermarket. So long as it helps you feel like a person. Natasha started a new life for herself and had no doubts that she had made a good choice, a correct choice. Her return visits to her homeland only confirmed this for her.  ¶ 12:24 AM