We walked across the street to Lucky Strikes with Robert and Gulya. Yulia and I didn’t have a moment alone; I didn’t even have a chance to tell her that I was going home on Monday. At the bar, Lena was waiting for us with her silent, dour Serbian boyfriend and his two Serbian friends, including the older bearded one who led the toasts at Yulia’s birthday, several months earlier. Not yet lubricated by alcohol, he was silent and grim, looking into his beer mug. The greetings were lukewarm and it was clear to me, as always, that Lena didn’t like me at all. It would not be much of a fun evening. The dance floor was empty.

Lena looked at me in such a way as though everything about me was suspect. Several days earlier, I ran into her on the street on my way back from a small street market where I had bought fruits and vegetables. Even before greeting me, she asked me was where I was coming from in such a way as though I was coming back from some evil deed, for example, a tryst with a lover, perhaps a male lover. Perhaps it was just in my head, but regardless, I knew that Lena’s big problem with me was that I was gay and she knew it. Perhaps she had a clearer vision about it than Yulia did – since she wasn’t sleeping with me.

On the other hand, I didn’t even so much as look at men any more; if I did, it was probably much the same way that straight men looked at other women who weren’t their wife or girlfriend. Lena and Yulia were whispering into each others ears. I was wishing I wasn’t there. I was willing to talk to anyone to escape the boredom, but Yulia and Lena and the Serbs seemed grim and cold, but perhaps it was just the residue of the day’s hangover.

But I wasn’t hung over – I found myself really wanting to talk to someone, even James, the loutish Brit, who worked as a teacher at the international school, who drunkenly came up to me at the bar and pulled me aside. It was a subdued, unexciting night at the club, we agreed. Then he said that he’d once had sex with Yulia and that I should be careful with a girl like her and then he disappeared off with a girl called Natasha, before I could ask what he meant. Regardless, it didn’t sit easy with me since I had so many other misgivings about Yulia.

She came looking for me, looking a bit worried. She asked what James had said and I responded, “nothing.” She said she hated him, that he was garbage and said that she would have him killed if he so much as came close to her. Something came over her and I recalled from that moment on and even to this day, that when she said that, she meant business and it frightened me. So many things about her frightened me besides the frightening allure of her sex, but her contact with all kinds of shady characters, like the Serbians, with Denis, the Russian guy we all suspected was involved in trafficking girls overseas under the cover of a “modeling agency,” or her friendship with Irina, whose husband was Vanya, who would say he had a position in the city government working in child welfare services, but was, in fact, the right hand man of a major local mob boss.

These were the people who you met when you went out at night in Tashkent, and everyone in this Europeanized circle seemed to know each other. As someone relatively new to the scene –not even two years in Tashkent, I didn’t really know peoples’ real stories and histories. Apparently, I had just missed the big boom – when money was flooding the country from foreign investors, when the mafia was more active and out of control. Now, the mafia was under the firm hand of the government or was in the government and most of the foreign investors had fled. And I heard stories about a much bigger and wilder nighttime scene in Tashkent. But people had left and few were left and it struck me that maybe many of the people who knew the real stories had left and those who remained were complicit in hushing up whatever compromising stories remained, with naïve arrivals like me.

I felt uncomfortable there and wanted to leave. Yulia sensed my coldness. She asked me to take her home. I would have preferred to go home to my own place to be alone, but I decided to do the honorable thing. I was a bit nervous, though – I’d never been to her home. I didn’t even know how she really lived. And tonight I would see it. When we got into a taxi, I told her that I’d just booked a ticket home and was leaving after the weekend for a few days.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” She asked looking hurt.

“I just decided to do it yesterday,” I said coldly. “There are things that I need to take care of there.”

The taxi took us to a part of the city I’d never seen before, beyond the city airport. Like all soviet apartment complexes outside of the center, they looked the same to me and I could barely distinguish a good neighborhood from a bad one, a safe one from a dangerous one. All appearing to me equally decrepit, untaken-care of, abandoned, save for a few broken people sitting around drinking, barefoot children standing in circles sniffing glue out of plastic bags. It was in Yulia’s neighborhood, it was in my neighborhood – which was considered one of the best neighborhoods in the city. It occurred to me that I didn’t know at all how Yulia really lived – a single young woman, an orphan, in Tashkent – where people were most likely to consider a woman living alone, unmarried, to be a prostitute.

I made a point to not talk to the taxi driver, not to ignite any more of the latent tensions between me and Yulia. Walked up in silence into her apartment, which was large – much larger than mine. It was sparsely furnished, grey, bland; not particularly feminine. “I’m in the middle of redecorating,” she said. Had things not grown so complicated between us, I’d have asked her how it is that she’s redecorating her apartment if she is planning to leave the country. But I decided that it would be best to stay silent, to keep things calm and even between me and Yulia until I boarded that plane to leave.

So I walked around her large apartment where she lived alone and wondered who took care of her. She offered me a drink and I saw that her refrigerator was packed with bowls full of mayonnaise doused Russian salads, a couple of bottles of beer. I wondered who made those salads. It was hard for me to imagine Yulia standing in the kitchen cutting up vegetables or doing other mundane things like going to the market. My most vivid images are of her sitting in the restaurant that time I went to meet her, reading her detective novel and dragging on her cigarette.

In the sparsely furnished living room, in the corner, was her computer and desk, I assumed, where she did all of her work, matching up local girls with the men who would take them overseas to a better life far from here. I walked around, surveyed things as she moved around in the kitchen. On the desk, there was a photograph of her on the beach, probably in Thailand, her hair strawberry blond, she’s running through the waves. In the other room, an open closet with probably 30 pairs of blue jeans hanging from the rack, probably not a single skirt or dress there.

I turned around and caught her watching me looking at her in the kitchen, picking at a salad, picking up a cigarette and taking a slow drag, her head arched so slightly back. I thought that I caught a melancholy, solitary side of her that I’d never seen before, that maybe no one had ever seen before. It touched me and made me felt bad, that I would probably not see her again. I recognized that look of hers in myself – thinking of those meditative moments I had looking out the window in my kitchen, blowing smoke rings at the pane, wanting something more out there. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I went to her bedroom, lay down and fell fast asleep, only to wake up with her beside me, both of us fully dressed.  ¶ 5:31 PM